Episoder
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An analytical exploration of an observed phenomenon where creative professionals experience a significant decline in the quality of their work after gender transition, examining case studies of the Wachowski sisters (Matrix series) and Dragon Age: Veilguard. This video explores potential biological, psychological, and social factors behind this pattern, including hormonal changes, creative adaptations, and social dynamics.
[00:00:00]
Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I am excited today to be talking to you about a phenomenon.
that I call the Wachowski effect, because it is something I have noticed in media. And we will be using two prominent examples of this. One is the Matrix series and the other is the Dragon Age series and, and Veilguard specifically as a particularly prominent example of this. In which a previously really talented creative or writer becomes really, really terrible after undergoing a gender transition into a woman.
And when I say they become really, really terrible, I don't mean conservatives start hating their work. I mean Like, everyone starts hating their work. And I want to explore both the timelines of this, so people can see, like, okay, so for example, with Veilguard, oh my god, I [00:01:00] was just watching some scenes from it, and it is so painful.
But we will go through them. You don't even know, like, it's not bad. It actively hurts to consume where, like, I'm not even going to play the clips because if I play full clips of these scenes in this episode, People will stop watching this show just because of the pain it's delivering to you, the viewer.
Speaker: Oh, um. Ah, s**t. They, they're still holding it. Sorry. What are you doing? Pulling a barv. Oh, okay. A barv? There's not always time for big, drawn out apologies. So, when one of us screws up and we know we've screwed up, we do a quick ten to put it right. Pulling above.
Speaker 6: It is a reminder that through struggle you find what you are. And you have never done so. Evatash has. They Are stronger than you will [00:02:00] ever be!
Simone Collins: Yeah, like even, even an ally would find this painful and not something they want to watch. Yes and to
Malcolm Collins: understand the effects of this, because we've seen a lot of woke games fail this year. This isn't quite as bad as something like, oh, what was the last one that we talked about?
Concord But like just a horrible failure that we talked about.
But it, it was bad and people knew it was going to be woke and this was a successful franchise before. So we've got different estimates of sales for this.
Microphone (2- ATR2100x-USB Microphone): Since recording this, we've gotten more accurate numbers in,
Microphone (2- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-1: It looks like it's pulled in about 63 million in earnings or about one fifth of what it needs to break even.
Malcolm Collins: it's it's current player count for peak daily is around 36, 000 players. There, so. Only, like, three episodes. Honestly, based
Simone Collins: on the footage you shared with me, even just the character design, which honestly super yucks my yum, but just the, I, it's impressive that people [00:03:00] can work through that.
Speaker 2: So, I'm non binary.
What does that mean?
Huh, I have big fingers. That
Speaker: means I don't feel like a man or a woman. If you are neither a man nor a woman, then what are you?
Speaker 2: Non binary. I just said, and I'm going to use they instead of she from now
Microphone (2- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-2: Just a note here. Okay, this is a mistake I had made throughout the recording. I assumed that this individual, from the way that they looked was a non passing trans woman, but they are actually a non passing , non-binary individual that looks and codes male.
Microphone (2- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-3: But was born a woman.
Microphone (2- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-2: , I suspect the reason for this is that the writers of this are non passing trans women and they identifying more with a biological woman who is non passing nonbinary.
So they are basically attempting to write themselves into the story as if they had been born a woman.
Simone Collins: Like they're [00:04:00] really trying this feels like I there was that year when I just had norovirus like three times in a row and I was just constantly at food poisoning, but I'm the kind of person who just eats through food poisoning. So I don't not eat and just like that feeling of, like, you're incredibly sick.
You are constantly vomiting, but you keep eating the food. That is what I imagine playing this game is like, like, you, you are like, you're still. It
Malcolm Collins: is eating vomits level appetizer. Yeah, actually it is worse than Concord or even Dustborn.
When I was watching it, because I, I watched like video playthroughs of Dustborn and I found it cringe in like a funny way occasionally and like the main character was super hateable and manipulated all her friends and everything. And that's another thing about. The characters in this is the characters that are supposed to be woke representations are genuinely awful, awful, awful.
Yeah. What is this? [00:05:00] I will play like a bit of a scene here so you can understand how disconnected these people are from reality. Where the character that's supposed to be trans representation her mother tries really hard to be accepting of her and she's just a complete b***h about it.
Speaker: Under the Qun, the term for one whose gender does not match the one given to them at birth was a Qunothloc. Perhaps you are like that. Why do you have to keep picking at it? Why can't you just be happy for me? Ebra. So I'm supposed to struggle with who I am? Even if I don't feel like I fit?
Speaker 2: Even if I feel wrong?
Speaker: No. You've misunderstood.
Speaker 2: Then say it better! Why am I never enough for you
Malcolm Collins: And then, After her mother dies, she takes her mother's horn.
So like part of her bones and wears it as like a thing, even though she knows her mother would disapprove of this. And this is one of the things that her mother really hated was her adopting these practices that were of [00:06:00] a people in a culture she did not identify with.
Speaker 8: You're her mother's horn.
You wear it as jewelry, like the Rivaini do.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Ravaini, where are their stories?
Speaker 8: She would
Speaker 2: like it. She'd be so pissed. She would.
Simone Collins: Well, and didn't one of the clips that you'd sent to me, perhaps my memory deceives me?
But the player selected the option of just don't say anything. And yet the character then came on to someone else in a really aggressive, creepy way.
Malcolm Collins: Oh no. Yeah. So if you're like a female character, this is actually like, to me, it shows how blind. So I think for a lot of lesbian women, the absolute horror.
Is some non passing Six five woman pressing them against the wall and putting them in a situation where they feel super threatened and this woman doesn't realize this person is not recognizing them as a woman at [00:07:00] all that they look like a giant man to them. And there is a Scene in the game where she's supposed to be hitting on someone and she puts what can be a, a petite woman in this scenario really aggressively without them actively consenting.
Speaker 12: Are you trying to have sex with me? Wow, you know, in my daydreams this is where you lean over me and slap the wall. Quick think about us having sex.
Speaker 13: So now we need to figure out if it's cash lock or tomlock Tomlock is serious. Like you want to grab that and taste its neck right by the collarbone
Simone Collins: No, but specifically in the gameplay. And if memory serves, the players like recording this demo selected the option of say nothing, like basically don't escalate this further. Yeah. And then the character nevertheless, like despite the players non consent escalates the situation further. And you're like, no,
Malcolm Collins: no, no, no, no.
Everything about this is written by [00:08:00] somebody who seems to have no idea how flirting works. So there's another scene where they're like, Oh You gave me this gift and they're like, yeah, I like, really like you for like your talents and your other talents and you smell really good. Like, I love that's
Speaker 33: We had a request for the defense to the Joe Biden hair snip. So, if you have some creepy dude, it doesn't have to be Joe Biden, alright? If you have some creepy dude who comes up behind you and it's like, you know, making you feel really awkward touching in a way you don't really think is cool and kind of sniffing your hair, it's kind of weird, right?
It's a little weird. okay? So, what we're gonna do is, well, one thing you could do is you could just, boom, headbutt him, right?
Simone Collins: The scene I'm talking about where the to say, don't say anything more.
And then it selects that option. And she says more and it's like,
Speaker 3: I got you a thing.
Speaker 5: Oh, [00:09:00] Tosh. It's gorgeous. The stitching.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because I appreciate your skills. At archery.
Speaker 5: Thank you, Tosh. That's really sweet.
Speaker 2: You're really nice. And, um, you smell good. Oh. Thank you? Really good.
Speaker 5: Hey, Tosh. Do you wanna come with me to break this in?
Speaker 2: Yeah. Like Now?
Speaker 6: Of course, now. Oh, good. Let's go.
Malcolm Collins: Oh, and then, and then keep it on. We say, she, this is a non passing trans person. So it looks like a giant, like, I
Simone Collins: don't know. If I were asked as someone, I would, I would just say that it was a very ugly woman, like an [00:10:00] extremely ugly female, but I just think that their entire kind is extremely ugly.
So, but like, I don't know. But anyway, no,
Malcolm Collins: no, no. So what I love in that scene is she's then rewarded with the other person who she's flirting with being like, yeah, let's have sex right now. Yeah. What? This is not, and, and, and here people can be like, oh, this is just a bad writer. And this is where the Wachowski effect becomes really important.
Because what other games did this person wrote? Was it, was a writer on? They were a writer on Mass Effect. They're a writer on Dragon Age Origins. They're a writer on Mass Effect 2. I think one of the best written games I've ever played. Mass Effect 2, Layer of the Shadow Broker. They're a writer.
They're the senior writer on Mass Effect 3. Okay, so we have every expectation that they should
Simone Collins: be amazing.
Malcolm Collins: Okay Mass Effect 3, From the Ashes, they were a writer. Mass Effect 3, Leviathan, they were a writer. Mass Effect 3, Citadel, they were a writer. Dragon Age Inquisition, they were a writer. Dragon Age Inquisition, Jaws of Hakkon, they were a writer.
Dragon Age Inquisition, Trespasser, they were the lead writer. And then they were the lead writer on [00:11:00] Veilguard. And somebody can be like, Do you know when they transitioned? Do know when they transitioned, because we can find pictures of them, and I'll put one on screen here but specifically this individual, hold on transitioned they transitioned in 2020, so after their last other writing and before Veilguard, if you're looking for when the witch house came out, So, for people who don't know, the people who wrote the original matrix Malcolm,
Simone Collins: Wachowski sisters, Jesus.
Malcolm Collins: Sorry, the Wachowski sisters. They were originally called the Wachowski brothers when they wrote the first matrix, and that's what I know them as, but the Wachowski sisters now wrote the Sorry, if it was Dragon Age, I'd have to do push ups.
So whenever you upset this particular Very physically imposing character. They force you to do push ups, basically and at first they the person accepts it like sort of willingly where one person is like, oh, I accidentally misgendered you so i'll do push ups and they have a total two minute cut scene on very very uncomfortable cut scene on accidentally misgendering somebody and [00:12:00] then
Simone Collins: I don't know.
I kind of like this. You get buff and they get lame. Whatever.
Malcolm Collins: Well, no, because they are physically and intimidating you into a physical act of submission. That
Simone Collins: is
Malcolm Collins: the
Simone Collins: heart. You are prostrate on the
Malcolm Collins: floor. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. This is what a trans woman who wrote this thought was an appropriate thing to force women into a submissive position to them and prostrate themselves to them as a, as a like, this is very like a sexual play thing.
It's really messed up. And then there's another instance where a girl simply accidentally ate all the food and she pressures her into doing this.
Speaker 7: Who ate the last breaded cheese wand? Oh no, I'm sorry. I guess I thought, well, I don't know what.
Speaker 2: It's fine.
Speaker 7: No, no.
They're your favorite.
Speaker 6: Say you're sorry some more. That'll fix it.
Speaker 7: No, you're right. I'm pulling a barb. [00:13:00] One
Speaker 6: two Three
Malcolm Collins: And this is again, a, a woman who is physically very petite compared to her, who she very clearly physically dominates. But anyway, so if we're talking about like.
The Matrix series getting bad, it actually correlates with the transitions as well. So if you look at Lana Wachowski, formerly Larry she began her transition in 2000, 2003 was the beginning of the Matrix sequels. So if you look at the first thing of Matrix sequels, they got worse, but they weren't like dog, Duty quality like the sisters later work.
If you then look at when the second one transitioned, it was before cloud atlas. And then the next matrix trilogy which I think everyone basically agrees that everything from that point on that they did was just an absolute failure. And nobody was like, this isn't me saying like, it's bad.
Nobody watched any of this stuff. Like it objectively [00:14:00] bombed at a critical level.
Simone Collins: Yeah, I, so this is what I find very perplexing about this because I think Wachowski syndrome or the Wachowski effect is very real. But what also confuses me is that. One, there are plenty of female writers in history who have done great work that a lot of people of all genders have appreciated.
So it's not just that being female makes you terrible, although one could argue that women are better at certain types of writing. And then two, when, when there have been studies that look at differences in female performance, Based on where they are in their cycle, women who are experiencing surges of estrogen have a boost in intelligence.
Per, per my memory, I can try to dig up the research. So you can put it in the links. But my understanding is that more estrogen. Also correlates with more intelligence [00:15:00] in, in like across women's cycles. So within subjects, so that, so I'm like, well, then why why should a man who's getting more doses of estrogen, like, is it also like the, the additional drop in testosterone service?
So, for example, and I'm saying this just as a. Like personally, but we recently had my blood worked on like a really detailed blood panel and my testosterone is super low, like even for a woman. And we asked our doctor for some analysis on this and he pointed out that if you're taking exogenous estrogen, which I am I take similar doses that a trans woman would take because I'm screwed up for other reasons.
You, you may also see. A drop in your other endogenously produced hormones, including testosterone, because your body's like, oh, we're doing this externally now. Sweet. I'm going to take a vacation. See you later. And so maybe what's happening is that, okay, while they are getting a boost in estrogen, they're also not just seeing, like, [00:16:00] An easing up of testosterone, but like that plummeting and that can just screw up their brain in totally different ways in a way that like a normal woman who's having normal endogenous estrogen isn't seeing like a woman who's getting her own natural estrogen production probably also isn't going to have unusually low testosterone.
So I wonder if there's been any research on. Trans women on hormones.
Malcolm Collins: You've invalidated this theory already.
Simone Collins: I have? Okay.
Malcolm Collins: , so what you said that you may not have noticed you said is you have an unusually low level of testosterone. And yet you are peak performance in terms of, I've interacted with a lot of women, I've interacted with few women as smart and creative as you.
Simone Collins: So Well, no, no, no, but what we're also, what we're talking about, Matt, what I'm, what I'm trying to say is what may be happening. The point I'm making is that in addition to being on Exogenous estrogen, their levels of their former levels of testosterone may have plummeted in a way that damages them.
And my point also is that typically men who transition [00:17:00] to women when they're in the creative profession. They're still creating the same kind of content. It's not like once, then once they transition to women, they're like switched to writing romance novels and like soft stuff. Like they're staying in action films and video games and things like that.
And men are just better at writing that just like men are funnier. Like men are better in comedy, I would argue. Like maybe the problem is that with a lot of these creative people, they're not realizing that what they used to be good at. is going to be different now that they're on a different hormonal profile.
Malcolm Collins: And I, I think that this is the right answer. So, and I, and I think, well, it's not, it's, it's part of the right answer. I think there is a few right answers to this. So we're going to be uniquely charitable to trans people. I think the actual answer that we're looking at here is if you look at like Mass Effect 2, remember I said Mass Effect 2, I loved Mass Effect 2, writing.
Yeah. What makes Mass Effect 2 so good is it has very good lore. It has very good background lore, who the species are, how they interact, the background of the universe, what happened when humans first met [00:18:00] them, what are their, like, biology, everything like that. This is the type of stuff that a male brain specializes at writing.
This isn't interpersonal interactions, this isn't any of that stuff, right? Like, this isn't, when I think, like, what do females specialize at writing, I'm thinking, like, Slash fan fiction type stuff and then expand it, you know, your your 50 shades of gray type stuff your interview with a vampire type stuff they are not universes that are great because of their lore They are universes that are great because of their emotional pulls and characters
Simone Collins: I mean, I think of jk rowling and harry potter, which is one of the most popular fan universes That is a good lore universe.
I'll agree. Yeah But then you know, I also think like I struggle with this because i've been thinking about this as we've talked about it You Think about people like Ayn Rand, whose work comes across as pretty masculine to me. But then I also think about Ayn Rand's lifestyle. And I feel like she was probably a very high testosterone woman.
When you, when you look at how she lived her life, like wasn't she polyamorous too? It's a point
Malcolm Collins: Simone, that these [00:19:00] individuals rose to fame and prominence and honed their skill to optimize their brain as it existed before transition. No,
Simone Collins: exactly. And then transitioning, they don't realize that like. They don't have the hormonal profile for that anymore.
It's
Malcolm Collins: not just that they don't have the hormonal profile. They spent their entire adolescence, university career, and everything like that honing one instrument. And then somebody took that instrument away and gave them another instrument. They think that basically they spent their entire life learning to become a guitar expert.
And then somebody gave them like a, a mandolin and they're trying to play it like they're playing a guitar. And they, and they need to learn a completely new instrument. And the reality is, is that an individual who undergoes a gender transition may never be as good at creative tasks as somebody born into that gender because they just didn't undergo adolescence as that gender.
They didn't. Learn how to use that instrument the way somebody of that [00:20:00] gender would have over their entire lives Learn to use that instrument and this is even taking a transgender's person's perspective on this saying Yes, when you gender transition your brain actually transitions to be more like the brain of a female That being the case.
That means you're not going to know how to use it. Like you're just not going to have the expertise and so when I look at the mistakes I see Both in the matrix later matrix series and veil guard they are mistakes in the things that women are typically really good at which is interpersonal relationship stuff they are interpersonal relationship scenes that are done by women Terrifically poorly.
Like, like almost inhumanly poorly. Like, you wouldn't expect even a child to think it was a good idea to release this.
Simone Collins: Right.
Malcolm Collins: So that could be an explanation. What do you think of that theory?
Simone Collins: I don't see how you're making the connection, because you're arguing that you, you've gone from [00:21:00] as a trans woman, to being a trans woman.
A very masculine mindset to now a feminized mindset. And yet you're still trying to write masculine scenes. And theoretically they'd be better at that. Cause now they're on all this. That's not what I'm saying. That's not what I'm
Malcolm Collins: saying. Consider the analogy I just use. It's like you have a new instrument.
Okay. They learned how to use a masculine brain to do what a masculine brain was good at doing. They now have a feminine brain. They need to. Completely learn writing from scratch. It's like they are now it's, it's not like they, they
Simone Collins: understand where the instrument like play out the instrument analogy, like they learned how to play violin now they're given a piano and they suck at playing piano.
Is that all you're saying?
Malcolm Collins: They spent 30 years of their life learning to play violin. Okay. Now they are a piano player. A piano was put in front of them. And they have to learn to play that piano as well as a world expert who has been training on the piano [00:22:00] for 30 years. You're just
Simone Collins: saying that like they lack the practice and that's why they suck.
It's not
Malcolm Collins: that they lack the practice. the practice. It's that they built expertise to become a world class player was a completely different instrument and then had the arrogance to assume that when they switched out that instrument, they would still be in a world class league and they just aren't. In fact, they're not just at not a world class league.
They're at a league that a five year old girl would be at because they've had a girl brain for five years and a five year old girl has had a girl brain for five years.
Simone Collins: So this reminds me a little bit of that similar phenomenon where you will have a Nobel Prize winner in physics or something, decide that they're going to enter nutrition influencing, and then they just like give the worst advice in the entire world and people believe them because they won a Nobel Prize and you're saying like, yeah, you know, the Wachowski sister is like amazing films and then people are like, okay.
Well, but now they're women. I [00:23:00] mean, it's not exactly the same situation, but yeah, essentially it's this, you, you assume that you're going to be able to do well in this new life because you're, you've, you've hit it out of the park so far and how you can't do wrong. And I guess you are looking at, in these cases that we're looking at with this video game and with Wachowski films.
People who may have gotten into their heads that and been surrounded by people who believe they can do no wrong because they've really done great work. And maybe that's also an issue. And maybe you don't see this at the level of. everyday people who are transitioning because they haven't been told that they walk on water and they aren't just assuming that everything they touch turns to gold.
So maybe they're not so Well, I
Malcolm Collins: don't know. So I've actually seen this with and it's, it's, it's a really distinct thing you see. Cause I, I have a lot of, you know, trans friends who have transitioned and people would be like, Oh my God, you know, you say critical things about like gender transition and trans people in sports.
You can't possibly have trans friends. And it's like, not all trans people are that brainwashed. There's like some [00:24:00] real. Trans people out there who are normal, non creepy people and I think that when I look at the posts and when I look at the content that they make, one common complaint they have is everyone around them, especially if they're coders, begins to act as if they don't know what they're talking about anymore.
And their understanding of this is, They all think, and all the trans women I know, when I talk to them, they're like, Oh, everyone thinks I don't know how to code anymore. They think that this is a sign of discrimination against women. When it really might be that they're just becoming shittier coders.
And they are, and I think that similar with Veil Guard, something about this happening makes these individuals. Unable to see that criticism may be justified. So when you look at Veilguard and you look at these interpersonal interactions, you're like, Oh my God, these are painful.
Speaker 14: You've got no problem fighting other Qunari. I'm from Ravaine. Not like I follow the Qun. You've got the arm ropes? [00:25:00] Sure. I wear a lot of stuff. You don't get to tell me who I am
Speaker 16: Still a stupid name. Dragon King. Dragons wouldn't have kings. They'd have queens.
Malcolm Collins: Well, if these individuals think that this is normal interaction, if they think that this is normal hitting on someone, if they think that this is normal flirting if they were a coder, would they not?
In the same way, not realize in intersocial interactions that they may not be in the right. And I think that this is a separate problem that happens with the trans community is they end up in their social environments. We're being validated and not being told that they have overstepped social boundaries, which is really normal because they can.
Okay.
Simone Collins: Yeah. So basically leftist culture. Has done the same thing to even normal, mediocre people in like their everyday careers. What fame and fortune has done to the Wachowski sisters where they're like, you can do no wrong. You're amazing. So brave. And then they just [00:26:00] also still assume that they're fine.
Well, yeah, they're being.
Malcolm Collins: Leftist culture is about validating people when they use specific arguments. Not all the time. Yeah, like to the point
Simone Collins: of gaslighting. Gaslighting people about their competence and success, as long as they're leaning into the approved progressive culture.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and it can cause them, I think, think to not realize when their skills are slipping when contrasted with their coworkers.
And the arguments that I hear from them is I've been in this industry for X many years. Therefore I know better than these other people, but that's a very feminine argument. Like men don't argue like that. They don't say I've been in this industry for longer than you have. Therefore I know better. It's I did X thing recently, therefore I know better.
Like here, look, this is where you're practically wrong on this. And I think that there's a secondary phenomenon here, which I actually think is what causes more of the Wachowski effect. So far I've been very generous. [00:27:00]
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: However, as I have said, well, I do believe that some individuals are like, if I believe that.
Human body is gender dimorphic, which it is, and the human brain is gender dimorphic, which it is. Are there rare instances where somebody is born with a brain that is gender dimorphic in a different way? I mean, yeah, it must happen in some rare set of circumstances.
Simone Collins: No, no, no, but like, I think that's also actually shown in some studies where people who identified, at least before this whole trans thing was big, as gay tended to show certain thought patterns and fMRIs or something like that.
Yeah, but
Malcolm Collins: you didn't see this as trans individuals. Yeah,
Simone Collins: but they were more similar to, but yeah, but these days now especially with natal women, they're like, Oh, you're into women. You must be trans. So like, I don't know.
Malcolm Collins: So now what we have is a phenomenon where. And I think anyone who's being honest knows this.
You can look at our heads. Trans identity been used by a cult to grow. There is a self [00:28:00] replicating mimetic virus that has used the protections that trans identity offers. And when I say the protections that it offers, it's that there is at least certain communities you can go to. And once you've been infected with the virus, it.
Directs you to coat yourself in these communities that will prevent the virus from ever being questioned or threatened That only cares about self replication It doesn't care about making individuals lives better. It doesn't care about efficacy It is like a memetic cordyceps virus that infects an individual's brain and people don't know the cordyceps virus
Spores from a parasitic fungus called cordyceps have infiltrated their bodies and their minds.
Its infected brain directs this ant upwards. Those afflicted, that are discovered by the workers, are quickly taken away and dumped far away from the colony. It seems extreme. But this is the reason why. Like something out of science fiction, the fruiting body of the cordyceps erupts [00:29:00] from the ant's head. And when finished, the deadly spores will burst from its tip.
The fungus is so virulent, it can wipe out whole colonies of ants. And it's not just ants that fall victim to this killer. The more numerous a species becomes, the more likely it'll be attacked
Malcolm Collins: A lot of people who are trans these days, I think are really just infected with a self replicating memetic virus, which cares nothing about them.
In many of them, it leads to, I mean, as we know, the unaliving attempt rate within the trans community is around 50%. Incredibly high. Wait, is
Simone Collins: it that, is it really that high? I thought it was 35%,
Malcolm Collins: yeah.
Simone Collins: Gosh. Okay.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it is. It is people who are like, Oh, gender transition solves this. It's like, well, the data is actually not as strong as you would think there.
And they're like, well, it at least lowers it. And it's like, well, we know from when the Travis dot clinic was being dismantled, they had internal data that they hadn't shared publicly that showed that when somebody goes on purity blockers, their unaliving rate goes up [00:30:00] significantly. That's disturbing
Simone Collins: because so many parents, proceeded with youth gender transition being told that their children would end themselves if they didn't support it.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, this is the problem with the virus, right? The virus kills individuals. And we know from the, um, no normal psychological field. Would you tell somebody, Oh, you have X problem. And if you don't do X, then you're going to, Unalive yourself because of course it's going to lead to a higher rate of unaliving oneself is an incredibly sticky thing.
It's in fact such a sticky thing that it used to be like when you would go to journalism school, you had to go to specific classes about never publishing stories when somebody did this, etc. Because it was so contagious as a concept. And yet it is built in as a concept here. People are like, Oh, well, what about kids who get this?
Look at this, the, the study the 2023 study gender discontentedness and nonconforming use. It shows that of 11 year olds who don't identify with their birth gender more than nine out of 10 to [00:31:00] them completely identify was it by the time that you reached 23. And when you're looking at these really high unaliving rates, of course, like you're like, Oh yeah, this.
this should not be promoted in these age ranges. But what I'm saying here, you know, separately than this, because here we're talking about the Wachowski effect is if it is this sort of cordyceps virus that begins to eat more and more of their throats, Thoughts and it becomes the only thing they can focus on.
It also explains why they add it in so many places throughout the game. Like, if I'm a man, I don't in my games, add a bunch of like women being degraded just automatically, or if I'm a woman, I don't add a bunch of like 50 shades of gays, gray stuff to every game.
Simone Collins: Please tell me that this is a game porn video because it needs to be.
Malcolm Collins: I am a no, no, but if I have like a fetish, right? Like I don't add that to everything if I'm a gay guy, like a lot of gay guys can write a game without adding like really uncomfortable gay [00:32:00] scenes throughout the game. They would be like, oh, yeah, if I force like the main character, so there's like a scene where you can like practically be forced to identify as trans accidentally in this game.
Speaker 9: Here we go. Take a long hard look at in it, kid. It'll always show the face of a hero who can get it done. Establishes transgender identity. I love who I am. It feels good to see the real me.
I mean, every single option makes me transgender. I, I, there's no option not to be transgender.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): Nope. There is actually a back button here for anybody who is listening to this on podcast. , he is pretending not to notice it for comedic effect or maybe he doesn't notice it. , but every option within this particular sub menu does force you to be trans.
, so a person might get forced into this.
If they were playing in a style where they didn't go back on any choices they made.
Speaker 9: It's a, this is, makes me trans, this one does, and this one does. I don't know why I have to be trans, This is what Donald Trump was talking about!
I'm [00:33:00] getting there! It feels good to see the real me!
Speaker 10: It took a while for me to figure out why the face staring back from the mirror felt wrong. But once I was able to be honest with myself, It was a relief to figure out I was trans. And it's worth it to look in the mirror today and see the man I am staring back.
Speaker 9: Can I, can I do it again? Uh,
well,
alright.
Malcolm Collins: If I force a character to be gay in this game, like the protagonist, people aren't going to like it. And this is a project that people spent 10 years of their life on. And a company spent a quarter billion dollars on, I should not be putting this into a game. And if you're gay, like normal gay people are going to be like, yeah, that makes sense.
Even [00:34:00] like non normal gay people that are like, yeah, that makes sense. also, I
Simone Collins: feel the really weird thing about all this too, is that, you know, it's a trope, but I think tropes and stereotypes come from a place of truth because patterns emerge, et cetera. Right. Not always, but frequently. Gay people are kind of famously good creatively.
Like trans people, you just think that like, because if they're all part of the LGBTQ, whatever community that like, Hmm, like things would get a little better.
Speaker 25: All civilization was just an effort to impress the opposite sex. And sometimes the same sex.
Malcolm Collins: But yeah I agree with you on that.
Well, I think that this is, this is part of it is I think a lot of the people. And I know that this is super offensive who undergo gender transition are just homophobic gay people. And they undergo gender transition because it's for them an easier way to deal. And there's some cultures where this is just [00:35:00] obviously true.
This is why in a lot of these ultra conservative cultures like Iran and stuff like that, due to transition is how you deal with same sex attraction. You know, I, I can totally understand. And I think that anyone who looks honestly, you can be like, are some people who transition here. I'm not saying everyone here.
I'm not saying most. Are some people who gender transition homophobic gay people. Yeah, like of course some home. Yeah, you're gonna
Simone Collins: get some you're gonna get some yeah
Malcolm Collins: and so would Mr. Garrison Right, like, that's the he represents that but yeah
Speaker 28: I've Forgiven you for walking out on me after I had my sex change.
And, uh, and I'm ready to take you back,
Speaker 27: there's something you should know.
Al and I are getting married.
Speaker 28: You can't get married, you're f*****s! Oh, Jesus Christ, Mr. Slave. I am legally a woman. Now, if you wanna get married, you have to marry me.
Speaker 27: Colorado is about to pass a bill, which allows same sex marriage. We'll just see about this, you fudge packin fags! I'll stop that gay marriage law! [00:36:00] Oh my god, you're just saying that because you're jealous! Jealous of what? I'm
Speaker 28: doing this out of principle! To protect the sanctity of marriage!
Malcolm Collins: So for some of these individuals they might have been drawn to the creative industry originally because they had that gay super creative ability.
But I think that the whole gaze being really good with the creative arts also shows you don't need to insert gender identity and sexuality into everything that you're doing. And for whatever reason these individuals do.
Simone Collins: Well, and I, I'm still so curious because this seems to be a consistent trend.
What that reason is part of me also then turns to the conservative Christian community, at least in the U S which is like, birth control is terrible for you. Like exogenous hormones at all are a really bad idea. And then when you take someone who is transitioning, that's that on steroids, like just that level of medical intervention is going to mess with you anyway.
Like someone who's recovering from a major surgery, someone who's coming off a lot of drugs, like they also were probably going to [00:37:00] be. not in the best creative place. Could this also just be an issue of too much medical intervention? People recovering from surgery, people going through. I mean, also, I don't think
Malcolm Collins: it is.
I think I think it's an obsession. I think that the way that the virus works is that turns it into a personal obsession for an individual. When an individual is heavily infected with this particular memetic virus, it becomes a huge chunk. Of what they think about every day. Now me, for example, I think about my gender, probably 0.
00001 percent in terms of anything I do, it just does not occupy much of my thoughts throughout the day. I get the impression from this sort of content and people can be like, Oh, maybe this content is being villainized because people hate trans content. Right. And that's just not true. Baldur's Gate three was one of the most celebrated games of the year.
And you could have your you know, a female looking character [00:38:00] have a penis or your male looking character have a vagina. You could do whatever you wanted in this game, right? Well, but
Simone Collins: also, is this a bad toupee problem? Do we just not, there are lots of really amazing trans writers that No,
Malcolm Collins: there were not any trans writers in Baldur's Gate 3 to my knowledge.
Yeah,
Simone Collins: but do you know also like, there, there are plenty of people Who are trans in passing and like you just don't know like it's just a hot woman I I mean, I don't know.
Malcolm Collins: I think it's actually very specifically not a bad toupee problem Because what we have are instances of an individual before transition being world class at something Same individual after transition being worse than a teenage girl.
So the question is is why? And also, like, why is it all so grapey? I, that's the other thing, like, is this just a systemic problem for people? And I, and I actually think it is a systemic problem. And I don't even think that this is their fault, but they don't realize and they lack self reflection around it.
Individuals who [00:39:00] learn how to hit on someone as a guy, if you try to reapply that to being a lesbian, you are going to come off as aggressive and grapey.
Speaker 12: Quick think about us having sex.
Malcolm Collins: , Whereas a guy, you learned how to do that in an, like a different sexual environment. And so when I see the types of scenes where, like the scene where the girl's being pinned against a wall and she hasn't really consented to this this scene is If it, if it was a cis guy who was doing this, I don't think that that many women would be as terrified because they'd be like, Oh, well, no, they would be as terrified.
But like, it's just guy would know better. I think the problem is, is that they learned that they need to be aggressive while they were a guy and then they transitioned and they. The, the, the restrictions on their aggression fell off because they begin to categorize every woman who [00:40:00] resisted their aggression as transphobic.
And so they, they had the aggression and dominance you would expect from somebody who grew up engaging people as a male, but you didn't have the common sense of, If the girl looks scared or intimidated, I need to back off immediately.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. I, I could see that. And
Malcolm Collins: it could be that all these defense mechanisms that they've built up around this leads to them being like, like just barreling through a lot of guards.
Yeah.
Simone Collins: How'd you like to wind this one up?
Malcolm Collins: I love you. Like, I think with all of this is it's an interesting phenomenon because I'm trying to come at this phenomenon. Without any particular like, yeah, I'm the type of person who thinks that the trans community oversteps a lot, whether it is gender transition in youth or whether it is trans people in sports, but I also don't think trans people should feel uncomfortable jobs, for example.
However, I do think that we need to be realistic [00:41:00] about how this seems to be a real thing, that people who are world class in a space seem to start sucking after they transition if it's, In a creative industry.
Simone Collins: And we don't want that to happen too. So like, even if you care about trans people thriving, you don't want their careers to bomb after they transition.
You want them to thrive after they transition. I
Malcolm Collins: didn't want the matrixes to start sucking, you know, like, I, you the matrices ma, whatever. The point being is like, we don't want this, this is not like a us you know, it's a. This is a fascinating phenomenon that I'd love to understand better, but I know that we're not allowed to concede it exists.
Yeah, I, I find this phenomenon fascinating, I want to maybe, maybe even a trans individual could understand it better when they're like, yeah, I realized after I transitioned, I started to suck at things I was previously really good at. And like, would that, is that not in a way gender affirming? I mean, women [00:42:00] aren't funny.
Like, is it not gender affirming?
Simone Collins: I don't know. I mean, I don't know when, when I'm, when I go through pregnancy and, or other interventions with hormones and stuff, it can screw me up, you know, it, it can mess with me or, and there's even been times when you've been like, Simone, you're, you're really, really mean.
And I'm like, no, I'm not. And I can't see it. No, you're hard to, you're not.
Malcolm Collins: Never. I say that you're mean, and it's a hormonal thing. You're always like, yes, I am, and I'll work on it. But understand that it, you know, I, I don't, there's only so much
Simone Collins: I can do when I have like, very
Malcolm Collins: perspective on this stuff.
Simone Collins: But don't you remember that one time, the last time I got Overstimulate ovarian sorry. Ovarian hyperstimulation. And my estrogen was like really off the charts. Like, you guys should be worried about this off the charts. And you were like, Simone.
Malcolm Collins: You're so mean.
Simone Collins: I do
Malcolm Collins: remember saying that you're being unusual.
I was kind of
Simone Collins: denying it at that time. You weren't denying
Malcolm Collins: it at all. You were like, look, I have X hormone levels right now. I'm trying my best to [00:43:00] handle it. Please work around. And I'm like, yeah, sure.
Simone Collins: It wasn't working. Anyway I, I still I have fascination with this from a more medical perspective.
Like, I think that there are chemical things that are going on. And I think it's important to understand, especially if you're considering a medical transition for yourself. And even if you're not, because like from a nootropic standpoint, from all these other standpoints, your hormonal composition affects you, and it's really cool, I mean, we have a big natural experiment in trans people, and I wish that more longitudinal research was being done, because here we're seeing the effect that totally voluntarily taken exogenous hormones have on people and maybe they're not all negative.
Like, I'd like to see where it's helping people. So, anyway, this is a fascinating subject and I'm glad that you discussed it. But unfortunately, the Wachowski effect is not to describe something going well. [00:44:00]
Malcolm Collins: Well, no, but it is to describe something that's gender affirming.
Simone Collins: Yes. It's not
Malcolm Collins: gender affirming that when a person transitions to a woman that they suck at writing.
Speaker 29: Say something funny, Wendy. We can't wait. I'm not funny. Hey, girls are funny, Wendy, okay? Get over it. Just do women's comedy stuff, you know, talk about how fat you are and how you want to have sex with guys and then say, My vagina a lot. I don't feel like being funny right now. And that's just the kind of sexist bullcrap that's going to keep you in the kitchen.
Sit your ass down. This isn't a joke, you guys. Girls are funny.
Simone Collins: No, there are amazing female writers and creatives that do amazing works. I just don't think it's like, well, women just suck at this stuff. Maybe it's There are certain types of writing women suck at. Yeah, like there aren't very many female sci fi writers. And, and yet there are lots of fantasy writers that are very successful.
Obviously women dominate in romance. So yeah, I mean there, there are certainly places that are dominated by certain, certain genders. All
Malcolm Collins: right. Love you to death, Simone. Love you too. [00:45:00] Have a spectacular day. Bye.
Simone Collins: I was speaking or texting with that mother that I really admire that I keep telling you and I realized when talking with her about her process, because obviously she's 7 kids soon, 8, that when you become a parent of a really large family. It's not what people think it is. I think they think just like, it's like being in the Weasley household, you know, everything's crazy, but really everything you do just is done on a commercial scale.
You become a commercial restaurant. You become a commercial clothing warehouse. You become, and you're doing all these things the way that a business would do it or that a caterer would do it. And it's not actually harder. To make a meal for 100 people, I would argue, you know, 50 people it's just a different process.
But once you get that process down, it's quite doable. And I feel really grateful that when I grew up, I worked well, sort of volunteered with my, my parents when they were doing [00:46:00] whitewater raft. Stuff because all the river guides also did all the cooking, all the cleaning up after dinner. Like they did like all the catering, everything, they packed all the lunches.
So I got really used to like industrial scale, baking, cooking and cleaning. And it just, when you think about parenting a large family from that perspective, it becomes so much more feasible and you just have, you just have to think about it differently, but it's not like children times. 567. It's more either you have two or three or four Children or you have.
Big family. There's not this like incremental increase in work. It's just
Malcolm Collins: Why once you get to like, a few kids it gets so easy and it's easier from the beginning If you plan to have a lot of kids, yeah, because you're doing it
Simone Collins: industrial style Everything is purchased in bulk meals are made in bulk washing is done in bulk, but like purchasing is done Like on industrial [00:47:00] scale, it's just, it's great.
Malcolm Collins: Well, and it forces a degree of frugality and practicality in all your decisions. You can't be like, Oh, Timmy would like this toy. It's more like, is this toy going to work for four generations of kids? Yeah. Like this
Simone Collins: mother has this really organized system for drink cups, for example, because it's not like every kid can have their little weird drink cup.
Everyone has. One cup and they all have different colors. So everyone knows where their cup is. Like the cups all go in the same, like stacked shelf. They all are the same style. So they fit together and they go in, like, that makes so much more sense. Also, it's so much less stressful than like, Oh, well for my, my youngest daughter, he, she has this cup.
And then my older daughter, she has this cup and like, you have to, you know, you're losing it all the time and it's a problem and this just, yeah. There's in so many ways, it's way lower stress. Like, honestly. I would rather cook a meal for 50 people than for like two persnickety people. From a [00:48:00] chef perspective, it's just a lot easier and the food's not worse.
Sometimes it's, it's easier to screw up a two person meal than it is to screw up a 50 person meal. So yeah, I just, it changed the way I looked at parenting and I love that she constantly blows my mind with that. All right. Let's do it.
Speaker 31: What you doing, buddy? You don't
like phonics? That's phonics, buddy. Shimmy, what else does your Chromebook do?
Do you like it? Do you like [00:49:00] school?
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
Tactical Mastery: How Mossad's Ingenious Pagers Dismantled Hezbollah In this episode, the hosts delve into the meticulous and strategic operations of Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency, that led to a significant strike on Hezbollah. They explore the sophisticated tactics used, including the installation of explosive devices in pager batteries and walkie-talkies, which effectively maimed Hezbollah operatives and disrupted their communication network. Through an in-depth analysis of these events, the conversation sheds light on the precision and ingenuity behind Mossad's actions, while intentionally setting aside the moral debates to focus purely on their tactical execution. Additionally, the hosts draw parallels between these intelligence strategies and modern marketing techniques, discussing relevance in business and non-profit advocacy. The conversation is rounded off with broader reflections on conflict resolution strategies and the responsibilities of leadership in making tough decisions.
[00:00:00]
Malcolm Collins: Hello simone today. We are going to be talking about an interesting topic, which actually Is transformed the way that we personally think about things like looking for jobs, attracting press and attracting donors, which was how Mossad, that's Israel's intelligence agency, pulled off the major strike on the On Hezbollah and a lot more information has come out about this over time.
So I'm going to try to paint a full picture, including a lot of things that I'm pretty sure that even you didn't know, Simone, here's, for example, an interesting one. I didn't know. Did you know about the security feature? A thing on this where to decode a message with the pager that they had sold to Hezbollah.
You needed to have both hands on the device.
Simone Collins: Oh, interesting.
Malcolm Collins: Wow. The way it worked is they built a security feature where you could only decode it encoded [00:01:00] Hezbollah message. If you had both of your hands on the device, like holding it in different locations, which ensured. When they send out the initial thing to make the devices explode it only exploded when people were answering this specific coded message.
So they had to have both of their hands on the device when it exploded, which ensured that bunch of their
Simone Collins: proximity, like someone didn't have a pager sitting on their nightstand and so
Malcolm Collins: there were two different instances of the explosion. The first instance was they sent out a coded message. And then anybody who hadn't answered that message, their pagers then later exploded like the next day or something all at once.
But the important thing about the message is it removed these people from fighter capabilities. If you don't have your two hands, whatever other injuries you have, you can't shoot a gun. And so the goal there was to remove them from fighter capabilities. There's all sorts of cool stuff like that, that you will learn.
And I just like to As we go [00:02:00] into this, I am not going to give my standard Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah rant this time. So just I'm sort of leaving morality at the door. What
Simone Collins: we're talking about here is the tactical that went into Mossad's actions, which for those who have been living in a cave. They managed to get that is to say, Mossad, Israel's intelligence apparatus, managed to get a hostile entity, Mossad to purchase a bunch of pagers that it had created that were, that had embedded bombs that were used for monitoring and this was done for years.
And then recently, this year, they detonated them, maiming quite a few people. Basically a huge devastating attack, not just in terms of one sort of violent strike that took place on one day, but also sort of dismantling their communication infrastructure. So this was a very impressive feat.
We're [00:03:00] not talking about what was right or wrong morally. What we're talking about is how they got to do this and what, in terms of operating tactically as humans. Businesses, non profits, advocates.
Malcolm Collins: So, again, just leaving all of the morality out of this, all of the, well, they killed this many people. Well, they killed this many people. That's not the point of this particular talk.
And if you want to see us go on and on about Israel, Palestine, the moral weight of the equation, we do that in plenty of other episodes. In this particular episode, we are going to focus on how this was all accomplished. So the gist,
the pagers went off around 3. 30 p. m. All in all, this particular attack injured around 3, 000 individuals. And keep in mind that for most of those individuals, it was losing both their hands. So it disabled them in terms of being fighters. Did it
Simone Collins: like completely lose their hands? Like, I just, I never really heard that much about what actually happened.
Like, how bad
Malcolm Collins: hands. As I said, they had to have both hands on it for it to go off. Wow. [00:04:00] Well, I mean, but that,
Simone Collins: like, were their hands just burned or were they literally blown off?
Malcolm Collins: Blown off.
Simone Collins: Wow. Okay.
Malcolm Collins: 30. Now, now, some of them were in the second round of the attack, but it seems like the vast majority were in this initial round because they, it went around.
Don't touch them after that. Get them away from you. So, 37 died in total, and that included at least, if we are to believe the governments that were in league with Hezbollah two children, one 8 year old and one 11 year old.
Sad, but again, I'm always a little skeptical of the governments that are involved in this stuff.
So, let's go and talk through how the plan actually worked. But, the fir And I will notice actually kind of remarkable how targeted this attack was when you consider broad attack operations that it didn't just mostly target individuals just in Hezbollah, but specifically high level command and operation individuals who would have had access to these.
And then it was [00:05:00] followed up almost immediately afterwards, a few days afterwards with. An explosion of a second booby trap device that many of them had, which was their walkie talkies, which had actually not just been booby trapped, but booby trapped in a completely separate instance of booby trapping, which we'll get to.
And I'd been transmitting everything Hezbollah had been saying over them to Masaad for the past 10 years. This is like
Simone Collins: a level of spycraft that I feel is, is, is cinematic. It is. Yeah. Unbelievable. In the sophistication
Malcolm Collins: specifically with the walkie talkies. The first part of this involved rigging the walkie talkies was oversized batteries that concealed explosives, allowing massage to ease drop on Hezbollah communications for nearly a decade.
The walkie talkies were distributed as early as 2015, giving Israel full access to Hezbollah's communication network while lying dormant as potential bombs ready to be detonated at a moment's notice. One interesting fact that we can now ferret [00:06:00] out is that it does appear that Hamas did keep the January 7th attacks secret from Hezbollah, because if Hezbollah had known Israel would have done
Simone Collins: right.
And you've kept saying, like, how could it possibly be that Mossad had this level of infiltration of Hezbollah when Hamas was planning all this and they didn't know that Hamas was planning for October 7th, but theoretically, it could be really nailing it in, you know, You know, he statistics and just bomb history like it.
It happens, right? So,
Malcolm Collins: yeah. So, in 2022, a new opportunity arose leading Hamas to focus on a more innovative device. The AR 924 pager. Now I will note actually with the walkie talkie device. One of the things that was actually in a lot of people consider this pretty bad form that this was done is because they went off so soon after the first device, many of them ended up going off at the [00:07:00] funerals of the first round of victims which is generally considered very bad form in conflict, but it was incredibly effective.
And we'll get to this at the end here, but Hezbollah has basically been almost entirely dismantled at its core. Network level and upper levels to the extent that people are calling this the best both intelligence and counter terrorism or operation run in the past century. And that it was like, like better than anything that was done during World War II, better than anything that was done during the Cold War in terms of its effectiveness and just completely taking this down.
And there's been Because they were also
Simone Collins: preying upon, basically, well, you can't Use email, you can't use cell phones, you can't use any modern form of technology because other intelligence forces, including facade are monitoring those. And so ultimately, it's the facade through it's it's. So many levels pushed, pushed Hezbollah to these devices.
It's [00:08:00] not like they want to just use pagers and walkie talkies. They were doing that because already Mossad's prowess in cyber warfare was so strong. So there's like attacks on all sides.
Malcolm Collins: Yes. And one of my favorite memes that came out of this with the Babylon Bee article, Rashib Taleb uninjured after her pager mysteriously explodes.
This is a very pro Palestine American politician. But anyway, to continue here, let's start with the construction of the pagers themselves. The explosive component, pentelthritol, tetrine, otherwise known as ketamine, P. E. T. N. Did the most damage. Massad technicians found a way to insert a very thin square sheet of P.
E. T. N. between two battery cells and a strip of highly flammable material to act as the detonator. The entire package was placed in a plastic sleeve, which was encapsulated in a metal case, roughly the size of a matchbox when the command was given, the flammable strip generated a spark to light the detonator and trigger [00:09:00] the PNTN to explode.
The explosives took away some of the battery's power, which Hezbollah noticed when the battery would drain faster than expected. However, they never put 2 and 2 together and continued use of the device. Now, This is really fascinating because it meant that these devices could not be detected in an x ray and they could not be detected even if the devices were dismantled because they did not use the things that you're typically searching for, which is traditional explosives or a wick.
So there wasn't anything to look for, which is kind of a bad thing because it means if any of them didn't explode now Hezbollah has plans for a device that can easily get through airport security, which they almost certainly did when they got these devices. They almost certainly scan them through x rays, dismantled them, look through them.
You would not have been able to turn this even as an explosive expert. And I note here that the point of putting it between the two batteries wasn't just to hide it, but it was also to [00:10:00] amplify the explosion using the power of the batteries.
Simone Collins: Oh, that makes sense. Because I was thinking, how could you possibly have something as small as a pager blow off someone's hands when the explosive device is such a thin film of material, but that makes sense.
Because there are plenty of concerns. I mean, anyone who's flown recently has been asked if they're checking luggage, if there are any batteries in their bag, because batteries can be explosive. So now it's okay. Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: we're very large, oversized batteries that were meant to last a month.
Simone Collins: Right. And this was a selling point of the pagers, just how quote unquote rugged they were.
And so there would be this oversized battery.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. How they explained that these had a unique battery that were non standard in other models.
Simone Collins: Yes.
Malcolm Collins: So the cover story was particularly interested here and this gets to like where we can learn personally from this.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: The PETN battery pack that Mossad constructed had a label on it.
L. I. B. T. 7 8 3. This was an issue because that specific battery did not [00:11:00] exist. Massad started by creating a custom model for the entire pager. A. R. 9 to 4. They approached a renowned Taiwanese brand, Gold Apollo, to add it to their catalogue. Huizhi the chairman of Gold Apollo, was approached by a former employee and her new boss, named Tom, to inquire about adding the model.
Qingquan said that While he wasn't impressed with the AR 924 when he saw it, he agreed to grant a license under the brand and add photos and description of the product to his company's website, thus unknowingly establishing the legitimacy of the Mossad pager. Oh, by the way, I should note here, I am reading an unrolled tweet here, and I'll add in post who it's by.
Microphone (2- ATR2100x-USB Microphone): Raelynn to givens.
Malcolm Collins: In September 2023, a website came online with the A. R. 924 listed as a product. This site was tied to a Hong Kong based company. Apollo Systems. H. K. of which no record exists today. In [00:12:00] late 2023 two additional. Stapes came online with the LIBT783 battery listed in their product list, amongst other legitimate units.
The sales pitch came from a trusted source, a marketing official with links to the Apollo brand. This individual, a former Middle Eastern sale representative of the Taiwanese company that manufactured the pagers, had Massad's involvement. She established her own company, Obtained a license to sell products and unknowingly facilitated the sale to Hezbollah, according to Israeli officials familiar with the operation.
She convinced Hezbollah leaders that the AR 924 pager was perfect for their needs. Quote, she was the one in touch with Hezbollah and explained to them why the bigger pager with a larger battery was better than the original model, end quote, said an Israeli official. So this is the thing that's really interesting about HALT.
All of this was laid out. They had no one implanted within Hezbollah in order to get them to [00:13:00] buy these. They didn't. In other words,
Simone Collins: they, they enabled, they set the gears in place for Hezbollah to independently decide that this was the best decision. So it's. There's a scene in, in my big fat Greek wedding where the, the, the protagonist's mother talks about how you, you have to, as, as a, a wife, get your husband to come to, to decide that it was all his idea in the beginning.
And she just lays the ideas and, and he sort of incepts his mind with ultimately the right course of action, but it all has to be his decision in the end
Speaker 3: We must let Costa think this was his idea that he came up with. Alright, now he's gonna figure it out. Don't you worry. I know what to do.
Speaker 4: I have your answer. Tula will go to the travel agency, and you send Nikki here to work for us. Oh,
Speaker: I can't believe that.
Speaker 4: Wonderful.
Speaker: Wonderful! [00:14:00] You see, a man You're so smart! Gus! Gus! Oh, Gus!
Simone Collins: is exactly what it like, is Israel or Mossad in this case, Greek mothered. Hezbollah into deciding for itself that it was going to purchase these pagers.
Good people? They're Greeks, and Greeks are just Jews without money.
Simone Collins: It was a total inception moment, and I find that really fascinating. And I also think that it's, it's a very relevant way for things to happen. In an age in which we have a new ways, I think of deciding whether something is true, whether a product is worth buying, right? Like we don't these days, I mean, okay.
A lot of people are really gullible and they just like buy something immediately on Tik Tok shop. But I think when most people are seriously deciding on a product, they're not going to believe ads. They're not going to believe what's website copy. [00:15:00] We're going to like Google around, look at forums, see what people are saying on Reddit.
And based on the breadcrumbs that they find online through sources, they trust through sources they think are legitimate because they don't look polished or they don't look promotional. Then they're going to buy it. And that is what's so interesting to me. What makes me think, okay, well, if we want people to make bets on us or to decide that we are good partners or friends or sources of help because we do want to be helpful to people.
How can we show up in places where people trust this isn't people used to invest in things like publicists and PR agencies and things like that. So that the New York Times would write about you. But now our times is shilling about someone. No one's gonna like that means nothing. You know, it just means that you played a particular pool or spent a certain amount of money with someone.
So this is fascinating.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it is [00:16:00] fascinating. And it's something where we personally, you know, before we go further with this. Think for yourself. How can you turn yourself into the page you're here? How can you ensure that you AstroTurf an online environment so that an intent driven buyer, whether it's an employer, like in our case, like maybe the Trump administration, when they are looking for a specific type of thing, they will find us.
And this is something we've been paying a lot of attention to recently. How do we get our, Because right now, the way a lot of people do searches is A. I. How do we get our content into A. I. Training data? And I actually had a big breakthrough on that today. Simone, you'll be quite exciting. Okay. We got to wait for a bit more follow up, but yeah, we might get into the core AI training data that's used in most AI models these days.
Yeah. All, all of our podcasts and books when they wouldn't have been otherwise, which I'm excited about.
Yeah, it's like, we want to be where the chatbots are. We want to see, want to see them search and [00:17:00] around. What's that word again? Deeds.
Simone Collins: We, we really like, but that's the point that, right, is, is you have to go where people are and you have to go where now AI chat like bots are searching.
And if you aren't there, I think this is something, I think it happens very slowly. Like, oh, indeed. For example there was a sort of a revelation maybe five to seven years ago that traditional ads just weren't working. And a lot of companies. Just turned off their marketing budgets and discovered, lo and behold, their sales were unchanged.
They just happened
Malcolm Collins: with Uber. They turned off, they, they shut down their entire marketing department, which was however many million dollars a year. And it had like a 0 percent effect on sales.
Simone Collins: Yeah. And, and a lot of companies followed suit. And I think this played a big role in the end. It's like. The New York times and a bunch of magazines making money from, for example, print ads.
And I think that also played a big [00:18:00] role in the fall of TV ads where now most of these platforms are making money from subscribers, not from ad revenue in this used to because audiences have shifted to new places. Now YouTube is making all that kind of ad revenue, but even that's kind of it. And it's really interesting.
And, And the problem is that when a lot of people are looking at things, and I see this, for example, with more junior employees at our business when they think like, we're going to promote something, they're like, let's buy ads. They're like, let's post something on Facebook. And that's just not, it may have worked like a long, long time ago, but it doesn't work now.
And the, the, the question now isn't even how are people finding things today, but how will people be finding things? And to your point, importantly, how will I be finding things in six months to a year?
Malcolm Collins: You know, not only was this a feat of engineering that was quite exceptional, it was a feat of [00:19:00] marketing that was quite exceptional.
Marketing to a specific end buyer through a third party that didn't know they were acting on behalf of, has Masaad, which
Simone Collins: is absolutely. I think this, this sure of both. Synthetic data, you know, these companies and these forum posts from people who probably weren't legitimate, you know, that was made up sort of synthetic data combined with legitimate data where they got that one business to list the product in its catalog and combining that because it's a lot harder to get that one.
Like that was a big get for them. I'm sure when they got that, that company's a list in the catalog. And then they knew that if they supplemented that with, with the other thing, that would be enough. Subtle proof points is enough astroturfing to convince the Hezbollah procurement leaders to make that decision and think this is legit.
This looks fine. So that's, I think that's really interesting too, is how do you combine stuff that you post with something else? I think another, another interesting and important factor going forward [00:20:00] is going to be costly signaling from third parties. Like to what extent is someone else willing to.
Invest their reputation and endorsing you in a way that, you know, you, you couldn't get yourself, which is why people are, for example, constantly trying to get on like Rogan podcast because that is a very costly signal on his part. And if we're going to Rogan endorses you. That means something to a bunch of people, but that can be done on a micro scale, a very meaningful way with micro influencers, or even just with very specific people and very specific industries.
Like, my dad works in the ophthalmic industry and he knows that if very specific surgeons. Are willing to be like, oh yeah, I've tried the cannula insertion system. Like it's it's it's legit You're you're good. And if you were to combine that with some synthetic endorsements from other people online, you've got a product So let's
Malcolm Collins: history let's talk about what what they actually ended up doing.
So Users of two [00:21:00] online forums discussing batteries even made posts about LIBT783 and the AR924 praising its quote great performance end quote and ruggedness for field use when Hezbollah searched for a new pager their procurement manager chose the AR924 so they keyword stuffed the astroturfing that they were doing probably on sites like reddit and other tech forums With the word rugged and long battery life which is the two things that they expected that Hezbollah would be looking for.
One of the key selling points was the oversized battery, which I said, which lasted, oh, sorry, not a month, months without needing to be recharged. But what's interesting here, Is this actually served both parties? It served Hezbollah because they could use it for people in remote regions, but it served the Israeli intelligence agency because it added more explosive to the device.
The salesperson who brokered the deal offered a quote very [00:22:00] inexpensive proposition in quote and continued reducing the price until the Hezbollah manager agreed. This is the person who they were selling through.
Simone Collins: No, I mean, I, I think that's also smart and it shouldn't be understated just how much you can leverage both. Just the, the general principle of conservation energy. And that is in the form of like, can you save people mental processing power money? Okay. That's an advantage that you should be leveraging.
And so there's, they're like, well, we're just going to make this an offer. You can't refuse by making these very, very inexpensive.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, also a thing to note here when we talk about how severely Israel was able to damage Hezbollah here, and I think that this is something that hasn't really been picked up by anyone officially yet but I suspect that this is a big thing that happened is Israel looked at who after the explosions like they used the explosions the trip build.
And the trip build. And locate Hezbollah members because immediately after the chain of explosions, they ended up [00:23:00] targeting a number of high level leaders within Hezbollah. Basically wiping out their entire leadership. And what I was mentioning earlier is there was a British spy who had worked. On Afghanistan.
It was like, how did they achieve this so quickly when we were unable to achieve this in a decade in Afghanistan? Bye bye. Bye. And specifically here the, the Hezbollah launched an internal probe of what went wrong. However, the senior official leading the investigation, Nabil Kwak, was himself killed in an Israeli airstrike just 11 days after the Patriots went off.
The internal investigation is supposedly still in progress, but The organization is mostly defunct now, at least from a high, high level position which is absolutely wild. And when I say defunct, I'm not talking about the political side of Hezbollah, I'm talking about the military side of Hezbollah here.
Also, an interesting thing to note here when you're talking at least about the walkie talkies is when Netanyahu came into office, they were already distributed to individuals. So he was just brought in on this project. [00:24:00] He was not the coordinator of it, although he was sort of, I think, in charge of the pager specific project.
And another thing to talk about here, if you're not broadly familiar with it,
on September 27th, they dropped a bunker buster missile on an operation beneath Beirut. It was personally authorized by Netanyahu. And it ended up killing the, I think the number one guy at Hezbollah who was Hassan Nasarallah, which everyone thought was basically untouchable. So, here, I'll also talk about because I did a deep dive into, like, why specifically Israel has been so much more effective than our own intelligence agencies.
And it appears to be 2 things. 1 is less concerned with civilian casualties. And so the guy who was doing this contrasted, for example, what happened in Beirut was what happened with Osama bin Laden. And he's like, we were fairly certainly knew where Osama bin Laden was.
So we went in with helicopters. [00:25:00] You know, protected even individuals on Osama bin Laden's compound and tried to just take out Osama bin Laden and anyone who is offering active resistance. Whereas when they targeted a group, they're like, yeah, I'll just drop a missile bunker buster all the way down.
Anyone who's in the surrounding buildings, whatever. And it's dramatically easier. And I should also point out that there was a, a, a nuance here, which is when Osama bin Laden was in a ally of ours country. Or at least a country that was pretending to be our ally. So there was a bit more of nuance to making absolutely sure that like, we really were getting Osama bin Laden and that we weren't causing an, I get that, but I do think that this is a big difference.
We see our head enemy and we go in and we land helicopters and we risk lives and we try to whereas Israel was just like, let's take out this entire, just whatever. We have him here for this day. Just take it all out. And I think that we, as we enter a new world, which, [00:26:00] which is what we're entering, it's a world where the U.
S. isn't so, what's the word here? Like unilaterally overpowered within conflicts. When we do get into conflicts where individuals are attacking the safety of our sovereign citizens we need, I think, to take more of an Israel mindset to this because it's the only, it leads to less suffering overall in that it ends conflicts.
Whereas, and people can be like, how could you say that when you look at how bad things are in this region, and this region that Israel's involved in? And I'm like, yeah, but they were worse in, Is the U. S. In Afghanistan, we ended up pulling out in the Taliban took control like we everyone who collaborated with us ended up likely having their families killed, likely ended up having their like we betrayed the people who trusted our intention to bring any form of real democracy to the region by not being harsh enough or strict enough in creating a long term peace in the region, which [00:27:00] we haven't done.
How do we have to do more like this on potential?
Simone Collins: Yeah, I think this is where military tactics and politicians being involved gets because how do you get reelected by people who have feelings and care about violence? And also, you know, make tradeoffs that involve short atrocities, essentially, short term violence, short term losses, because people don't hear in the news, like, many people have, you know, this many people have been starved in a famine, many people have been, you know, systematically Copyright 2020, killed as, as, as political dissidents in this is
Malcolm Collins: something that you don't hear.
You don't hear about the civilians of Gaza that Hamas was mass murdering. You don't hear about the people that Hezbollah killed within their own country. You don't hear about the dissenters who said, hey, maybe we shouldn't go total war against Israel on this stuff. You, you do not [00:28:00] hear this stuff because it is not in the interest of the narrative.
And I think that you're absolutely right about this. And I think it involves people. And a lot of people don't, they don't have like the level of incredulity. They don't, I think, well,
Simone Collins: this is also a classic trolley problem, right? That, that most people when asked like, well, if you. If there's a trolley and it's headed toward you know, five people and you could save those five people and you change its direction on the tracks and by then you're going to kill one person.
Yeah, most people are like, I'm not going to do that. I don't want to be responsible for killing one person. And this is a classic example of the trolley problem where, like, in this case, people were violently. Dismembered in some cases, or, well, dismembered, right? That's like, you lose your hand. And, and, you know, according to reports, some children were killed.
Like, this is, you know, an unforgivable atrocity, right? Like, no one, no one would want to do that. No one wants to pull the lever and do something that could kill children, or that could really hurt people in their [00:29:00] homes. You know, this is, this is horrifying. But at the same time, no one's looking at the other side of the tracks yet.
They're not looking at what is happening in the counterfactual, and it's just a typical situation. But yeah, I mean, like, gosh, girl,
Malcolm Collins: what's wrong? Hey.
Well, this is actually something I wanted to do a whole episode on, and I'll post a scene from Trigun here.
Speaker 6: That was the easiest way to stop him. You wanted to save the butterfly, right? I didn't want to kill the spider. I wanted to save them both. Unless the spider caught the butterfly, it would die of starvation anyway. You can't save both, don't you know that?
Speaker 5: It's not right to make that choice so easily.
Both of them are living creatures, Knives. But
Speaker 6: I'm not wrong about this, Rem. If you just keep saving the butterflies, the spiders will die. Yes, but Wanting to save both is just a naive contradiction. And what would you have rather had us do, just stand and think about it? [00:30:00] In the meantime, while we do that, the spider eats the butterfly
Speaker 5: What's
Speaker 6: wrong with
Speaker 7: you, Knives?!
Don't you understand?! I wanted to save both of them, you idiot!
Speaker 6: Don't make any sense, Bash.
Speaker 7: I don't think so, Knives! You're the one who doesn't make any sense!
Malcolm Collins: You have to make a choice here.
You can't always say that you're going to save both. And I think that the responsibility of a leader is accepting the moral weight of the trolley problem decision is to say I as a leader will make this choice. And I think that this is actually something that, you know, and I can trust, for example, Biden and Trump in their foreign policy.
The Trump did exceptionally well over and over and over again is he was willing to send the random missile onto like pseudo friendly territory. He was willing to like, whenever somebody would cross a line, he would swap them in the face. And [00:31:00] Biden was unwilling to do that. He was unwilling to send the targeted missiles into the caravans of countries, leaders, and stuff like that, because that required Accepting moral culpability for potentially lowering further escalation.
And that is a really scary thing.
Simone Collins: Well, and what's funny is I actually feel like these days there is more widespread moral interest, like moral openness to this kind of Behavior.
There's this really popular fantasy romance series out now called, I think like a court of thorn and roses. I think that's the first one.
The protagonist in it named Farah, spoiler, spoiler alert by the way, at the end of the first book to essentially save all the berries of this land. Decides to violently murder three innocent people, well, fairies in this case, like, stab them to death in front of a bunch of people and, and she does it, like, she, she could have chosen to to sort of surrender and let these fairies [00:32:00] continue to be enslaved by this evil regime, but instead she chose to murder these people.
As they were begging, you know, making eye contact and begging, like, please don't kill me. And she stabbed them to death, or slit their throats, or whatever it is she did. And then had to live with that for the rest of her life. And they frame her as a hero. I kind of hate her character. She's a terrible, whiny, mean, b****y person, but she's seen as a hero.
She's seen as curse breaker in the land after that point. And here you have this really popular female protagonist in a very popular series, right? Because, right, like the only thing that women or people in general are reading is like fantasy romance novels, right? Who did this, you know, who did, who pulled the lever in the trolley problem.
So I feel like humans are capable of having this like intellectual debate. And making these decisions. It's just maybe politicians don't realize that or they don't know quite how to message it. But I do think that there is a way to thread this [00:33:00] needle and make people capable of recognizing the value of making very, very heartbreaking decisions in the name Of a better future to prevent overall fewer heartbreaking things from happening.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah No, I I think that you're absolutely right and I think that The goal and this is one of the things that you mentioned one of our friends who's mad at us for a recent israel video And you're like, yeah, but we were talking about hamas being a problem and hamas is a problem It's a problem for israel, and it's a problem for gaza and it's the same with hezbollah.
Hezbollah is a problem not just for israel But in the regions in which it operates if you are, for example, gay you know, it's not just the Jewish people have to worry about this. Or for example, somebody who thinks that maybe they shouldn't be as extreme with Israel. You are putting your life at risk.
You are putting your kids lives at risk.
Microphone (2- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-1: And I think this is a big problem for people who try to draw parallels between what Israel is doing and what Hamas is doing. And it's real. On the, , seventh attacks. [00:34:00] One of the big events that was hit was a protest. Against.
The way the Israeli government was relating to the people of. Gaza. If someone in Gaza, protested pro Jewish pro the state of Israel, they would be killed and their family would be killed. It's a huge difference in Israel. People say that the government's wrong all the time.
Microphone (2- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-2: Regardless of your thoughts of how evil Israel is Hamas and Hezbollah. Are definitely a net negative for the world. And even the people that they rule over would be better off if they were completely eliminated. That cannot be said of the state of Israel right now, whether you're talking about the Muslims who live within the state of Israel right now, or the Jews who live within the state of Israel right now, because there is a very large Muslim population that lives in Israel and quite well. That is not true of Jews living in say Gaza or Palestine, or really any of the Arab majority countries.
Malcolm Collins: And or if you're just not a state bureaucrat, you know, if you're a Hamas bureaucrat, you know, you're getting [00:35:00] food, you're, you're diverting aid payments to go to, for example, we know is Hamas go to tunnel that was supposed to go to aid payments. I'm supposed to feed children.
And so by destroying these organizations, you make people bet things better, not just for the people of Israel, but the people of these individual regions. And so if you can get a mostly targeted attack like you had with the pager situation, you are almost certainly saving more than two children's lives.
In terms of redirected aid payment and stuff like that. But this is something that just is really hard to communicate to people. Especially when you have this sort of latent anti semitism, which I think twists everything that's tied to this region for a lot of people. Or, I think more than the latent anti semitism, it's a belief that you get within the urban monoculture that the weaker party must be the more just party.
Or the less competent party must be the more just party. In the same way that in the U. S. you have this thing where it's like, oh, somebody robbed someone, well they must have been poor, or they must have been desperate. Oh, you fought back against a [00:36:00] OU monster.
Speaker 8: No! How could this happen? Where did society go wrong? How could the system fail this poor man? If only he'd had a better stool! Do you want some hot cocoa?
Speaker 11: Seems to be socio economics. Most likely an underfunded library.
Speaker 8: That's it! Ah! Ah! You shot this beautiful man for no reason! She's evil incarnate!
Speaker 10: He was stabbing Murderer! Murderer! He was
Speaker 8: expressing himself!
Malcolm Collins: And this is just a framing that we see over and over and over again now, but when it's applied at the country level, it becomes quite monstrous
Microphone (2- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-3: And I note that this don't retaliate mindset. In the same way that [00:37:00] when it's held towards criminals, it's held by wealthy people who live in nice neighborhoods without a lot of crime. When it's held at the country level, it's mostly countries that don't have antagonistic countries next to them constantly saying they want to kill them. Which is why, if you look recently, one of Israel's recent really, really tight alliances it's been building is with South Korea. And I think it's because South Korea gets quote, get fit much more than a country.
Like the U S where, you know, we can say, oh, there should be norms about, you know, your neighbors. , that.
That are very much like a, you know, a wealthy person who lives in a wealthy gated community and says, well, you know, I never fight back when I'm attacked. Why would this person who lives in a very dangerous neighborhood need him? Concealed carry or something like that.
Microphone (2- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-4: And this also reminds me a bit of, , an individual like this, where they're like, well, yeah, he lived in a dangerous neighborhood and now he's concealed carrying and he's defending himself, but he's doing that because he was part of a gang and his gang attack this other person's gang. And therefore [00:38:00] that other gang is justified to attack him, which is very, again, similar with what's going on with Israel right now.
All of these countries in this surrounded region are constantly at war with other countries in this region, , or having cous or having other sorts of bloodshed that we just don't need to deal with. If you're in Europe or America, And so you don't think about it, but when we're recording all this, and when we're talking about all this, we over-focus, I think on the points that involve Israel instead of the other country than the region, because there isn't a well, A narrative reason to focus on those, you know, I mean, I think the real reason is, is Israel has Jews. And the other countries don't have Jews.
And a lot of people don't like Jews. For religious or whatever reasons. , and so some people downstream of that who get their information from sources that they don't know are controlled by like Qatar, for example. , they think that Israel has been uniquely belligerent in this region.
, because the people who are feeding them information have no need to tell them.
Actually, every [00:39:00] country in the region had a grudge against every other country in the region for X, Y, and Z reason.
Malcolm Collins: And this is just a framing that we see over and over and over again now, but when it's applied at the country level, it becomes quite monstrous and I think that, you
Simone Collins: know, this comes back to one of the original sort of selling points of effective altruism is this recognition that human intuition doesn't always correlate with.
with the optimal choice or with the most altruistic outcomes for intervention.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I have absolutely loved talking with you today, Simone. I am excited for dinner tonight. She is going to cook down the pumpkin soup she made to create a curry that's going to go on top of rice. So, Which I am so excited to eat, it looks really yummy.
It was so yummy, yes, it was one of the best soups I've ever had. And I have had a great time talking with you, Simone.
Simone Collins: Now. Now it's happening.
Malcolm Collins: I realize to keep the scene visually interesting. I need something in that other corner.
Simone Collins: Yes, you do. Yeah. Why did that sword go away? You weren't letting the [00:40:00] kids play with it, were you? I was
Malcolm Collins: playing with it.
Simone Collins: Oh no. Yeah. It's time for you to play with it. I'm just, you know,
Malcolm Collins: well and the kids were playing with it a little bit.
Simone Collins: Oh boy. Okay. I guess it's good strength training for them Nothing is heavy
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and it's also good endurance testing You see this I learned this from marwan back in the day. You just get hit with a weak weapon over and over again It's just unfortunately we started our kids with a great sword. So there were a few injuries All right.
Speaker 13: March, March, March, March, March, March, March, March, March, March, March, March.
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Holy s**t as if on que: https://www.ynetnews.com/article/h1atr7kgke
In this episode, the host delves into the recent political turmoil in Germany sparked by the collapse of its left-wing government coalition and the subsequent surge in popularity of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AFD) party. The discussion covers the controversial motion to ban the AFD, drawing parallels to historical and current political climates both in Germany and the United States. The host also examines the increasing public sentiment against immigration and the socio-economic impact on Germany. The episode further contextualizes these events within the framework of broader European and American political landscapes, offering a critical perspective on cultural and political dynamics.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
In this video, the discussion revolves around Trump's newly proposed policies aimed at dismantling the current online censorship regime. The proposed measures include reforming Section 230 to enforce transparency and prevent arbitrary restriction of lawful speech, holding federal departments accountable for colluding with digital platforms, and instituting a 'Digital Bill of Rights' to safeguard free speech on the internet. The video also explores the broader implications for free speech, the potential positive impact on online discourse, and the transformative effects these policies could have on digital platforms and everyday lives. The hosts share their excitement over these changes and criticize current censorship practices while reflecting on the broader political and social issues connected to this agenda.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
In this episode, the hosts discuss a groundbreaking initiative aimed at providing top-tier, free online education to every American citizen. They delve into the potential impact of this initiative, comparing it to existing university systems and highlighting its ambition to eliminate college debt from the start. Additionally, the discussion covers recent political developments, critiques of the current higher education landscape, and the need for systemic changes. The episode also touches on broader societal and political implications, including shifts in voter demographics and media irrelevance.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
In this engaging discussion, Simone and Malcolm tackle the pressing issue of how the Democrats can reverse their electoral fortunes. Despite losing support across various demographics, they delve into potential strategies and changes the Democratic party can implement. The conversation covers topics such as the extremist influence within both major parties, the impact of Donald Trump's policies, and the shifts in voter demographics. They also discuss the necessity for the left to distance itself from 'woke' extremism to regain broader appeal. The episode ends with a hopeful note on rebuilding the Democratic party after significant defeats.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone! Today, we are going to come up with a hypothesis for how the Democrats can win the next election cycle, how they can fix the downward spiral, because they are losing in every demographic. They are losing in women. They are losing in black men and women. They are losing in Every younger generation, both men and women, is voting more conservatively every generation at this point.
It is bad for Dems. They are losing hard in the Hispanic population. Kamala did worse than Biden in literally every state. And I think one of the key things is, is that both parties have an extremist problem.
On the right, there were some people, or extremists is the wrong way to put it. Some people who embody the negative stereotype that the other party paints that party as having. So in the right, we paint the left as being these crazy wokers and on the left they paint us as being crazy racist. Yeah. As we pointed out in the last video, the crazy racists all left the right, denounce Trump and want nothing to do with him and say [00:01:00] they feel uncomfortable at right wing rallies now.
Yay for us, we sucked out the venom, spit it in a toilet.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): If you didn't watch that video in it, we know that almost every prominent. Racist anti-Semitic or homophobic. Mainstream right-wing voice denounced Trump and asked their followers not to vote for him leading up to the election. And for people who think that this is a femoral or just something that's happening among the. Influencer class here. We actually see this in the data. If you look between the first time Trump was elected and this time Trump was elected, he did worse among white men. Where he exploded in support. Whitten contrasting between these election cycles. Is. Blacks and Hispanics. Specifically Hispanic men. And it is because we, as a country have reached a place where Hispanic men who actually care more about the immigration crisis, then white men [00:02:00] do,
I've come to realize that the Republican party is not racist, but that's something that was only possible because the Republican party. Expelled its racist element. So we can talk about things like the immigration crisis outside of a racialist lens.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: And if you look at the counties where the difference in voting was the most, this election cycle.
They are the counties that were overwhelmingly Hispanic. The dims thought this demographics is destiny thing. We can just increase the number of minorities in this country and we'll win forever. And they, they thought that this plan would work for them. In the meantime, Trump has been building his support within the very communities the Democrats thought they had on lock.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-2: With things like the Hispanic community moving in a direction where they might become a majority Republican voting block in the near future. This is an existential crisis for Democrats.
Which have largely just become a party of college brainwashed elites.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-3: This is something that was only possible because Trump took the.
Republican [00:03:00] parties version of the woke population, the extremists who represent the negative stereotype, that the other party paints of the Republican party and made the. party unpalatable to them. The left hasn't been able to do this with their woke extremists.
Malcolm Collins: The left, they've got a problem. Because they have platform. These people, these people own their rallies. These people own the soldiers of their events. Meanwhile, we got rid of any like racist foot soldiers. We had any homophobic foot soldiers we have in who did we replace them with wholesome paragons of humanity like Scott Pressler, right?
So let's talk about. One, I think this is really interesting. I'm gonna play a piece here from the New York Times podcast, and it's gonna go over their analysis of what they did wrong their analysis of what they need to change. And I think it shows how bad things are. So the 1st thing they're going to go over here is they're going to say, [00:04:00] we need to make this about class struggle again, while remembering that the lower classes.
Are only black people and women and black women mostly.
Speaker 7: So what happens now to the Democratic coalition? Where, where do we go from here? . You know, does depolarization by race and by class and by gender and by geography, does that create opportunities?
Thank you for putting
Speaker 8: it that way. I think one of the challenges that the Democratic Party has is that they are going to have to rediscover the language of class and not what class meant in the 1960s. Yeah, but the understanding that really the working class today are women and women of color. And so, yeah, building a new factory actually is not responding to their economic needs.
Malcolm Collins: Sorry, I want to hear your reaction to this because this is insane.
Simone Collins: How? Wait, so the whole hillbilly, elegy, forgotten American class is not considered poor even if they're dying from deaths of despair and they're losing jobs and their [00:05:00] communities are crumbling.
They don't know the woman
Malcolm Collins: who said this should have been said, like, if, if the left was operating the way the right did now,
Simone Collins: the
Malcolm Collins: other person on the show, because this woman was a black person arguing for her own self interest. You are a bigot, you are a racist, , and you need to, like, address whether or not your beliefs are based in ethno supremacy or any sort of tie to reality. Because it sounds like you're arguing from a position of ethno supremacy, only your people matter. Cause this is a black woman saying this.
When in reality, the reason they lost is because of this form of racism that they, and bigotry that they, and so they'll say, Oh, it's not racism. Well, it's bigotry at least. That anyone could think that in America, class was a race based thing when you know that this woman got major benefits in her life.
Simone Collins: And this
Malcolm Collins: is one of these things, people are like, , Camilla wasn't woke, why didn't she win? This is like an important question the left needs to engage [00:06:00] with. Why didn't Camilla win despite being not woke? Because she didn't attack. the systemic and racist system that woke ism set up,
Simone Collins: right?
Malcolm Collins: Pamela should have gone on stage and said, I know that I achieved this position of the nomination due to a systemically unfair system. If I was white, Or I was a man. I would not have this position that in my throughout my entire life. I have had advantages that other people in this country can only dream up.
And that is why I have this position of power. And I am Humble in the face of all of the systemic pressures that gave me an advantage over people who are working. But she,
Simone Collins: she would not have been able to argue that without drawing serious attack because her behavior in the past has shown her willingness to exercise her privilege [00:07:00] while throwing systemically underprivileged people like jailed populations under the bus.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and I need to point out here when I say that. Black people have systemic privilege. I'm talking about black middle class and upper class people. Black lower class people are still pretty fucked in this country. And by people like Kamala, who by the way, left a huge population in prison, black population in prison.
She knew the crime lab had been compromised but she wanted to win an election cycle. She didn't care about them because the black middle class and upper class in this country sees the black lower class as scum. As inhuman, she doesn't care about leaving them in jail. She doesn't care about them being shot on the street.
She doesn't care about their businesses being burned down. You know, her you know, like it was Her running
Simone Collins: mate's wife opening her windows to smell the smoke. Yeah, being
Malcolm Collins: burned and being like, well, at least they're, they're having this little celebration the BLM celebration. It's disgusting. They don't care about the damage that they do to these communities because they don't see them as mattering [00:08:00] because All of the systemic privileges that they have fought for are only accrued by middle and upper class black individuals.
And I think that most of the black world has f*****g figured this out by now. And then even if you are a hardworking middle or upper class black individual, that these systems end up backfiring for you. Because they make everyone think that you got everything you did. based on privilege. And people who are like, Oh, Kamala isn't the DEI candidate.
Biden literally said, I will only hire a woman POC for this position. That means that she was given not just a massive systemic advantage, but a systemic advantage of the level of Irish need not apply. like huge, huge, huge. Now the next thing you hear. So I'm gonna play more from the New York Times here.
So now they're going to talk about how she's a professor and she goes and she tries to brainwash her students and she herself was brainwashed by a professor of hers into believing that [00:09:00] what they need to fight for and what the Democrats need to fight for is things like reparations.
Speaker 7: So we're going to have a lot of people listening to this who are really down in the dumps, disappointed by the results and wondering where to go next. I mean, I'm curious, like, what are you going to tell your students are going to ask you this, right? Yeah,
Speaker 8: yeah. What are you going to
Speaker 7: tell them? And what would you tell, tell our listeners and readers?
Speaker 8: I think maybe I would tell them both the same thing, because I think in moments like this, we're all kind of students in the sense that we are looking for someone to help us make sense of the world and what I have said to them before and what I will say to them in class on Tuesday, if they are listening is, you know how to do this.
You may not believe you know how, right? But you actually have already done this. We have lived through this once before. That is not to say that there is not a great existential threat and danger. I think there is, and I've always thought there was. But I always think it's important to remember something my mentor told me years ago, when I would be despondent about like, you know, reparations programs or [00:10:00] something.
And I'd go, you know, this thing is never going to happen, right? And he said to me, yeah. That's what they once said about ending slavery, Tressie, you know, the thing is, you don't know your moment in history until it's long gone. So you can't treat things like, you know, your moment in history. You really do have to operate as if tomorrow is happening.
Totally. So if you want to feel empowered to do something, know that history actually is only written after the things are settled and it is our job to settle them.
Malcolm Collins: So
Simone Collins: the New York Times journalist is also a professor and she's arguing that they didn't fight enough
Malcolm Collins: for things like reparations.
Yes, they need to one day reparations will be a reality. No, we know reparations
Simone Collins: don't help people.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we know now from the UBI study where they gave people 1, 000 a month for three years and they were at the end of it 30, 000 poorer than the people who didn't get this giving people big cash payments.
Yeah. Hurts them it hurts their communities. It permanently disables their communities
Speaker 34: . If you're just [00:11:00] joining us, black people got their reparations checks today, and in short, all hell is broken loose.
Speaker 35: I think what everyone wants to know now is what are you going to do with all this money? Uh,
Speaker 33: uh, I'm going to reinvest my money into the community.
Speaker 35: Oh, that's a very nice gesture. What were you saying? Tight!
Speaker 33: Is that your son? No, no, I just bought this baby Cash.
Malcolm Collins: But it's it's absolutely accurate to sketch as everybody knows If you give a big cash handout to the current like communities, like it's a cultural problem that needs to be fixed it's not a they don't have enough money problem.
There are other people came to the US had no money were historically disenfranchised. Like let's say the Chinese, for example or the Japanese who recently had literally everything much more recently than the black people. And starting from scratch after the period of internment during world war two have built back a strong culture.
That's not the cause of the difference. The cause of the difference is. Internal to the culture, which can be [00:12:00] seen if you go to our video about the zombification of black culture black culture didn't used to be like this. You go to the 1960s blacks had half the rate of white people, kids outside of whether
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-2: To be more specific, only 5% of black children are born out of wedlock. Well, 10% of white children were born out of wedlock. Today, the number is around 70% of black children are born out of wedlock. Progressive's destroyed black culture, ripped it apart. And what we see now is the shreds of it. And it is always gross to me.
When I see somebody like BLM being like, well, nuclear families, that's not a black thing. That's a white thing. I'm like, no, it used to be.
Twice as black a thing as it is a white thing. Historically speaking.
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-3: This changed when a Marxist group took over the civil rights movement. , see our video is courtesy Arvin for an explanation of how that happened.
Malcolm Collins: there were
Simone Collins: essentially black culture was showing better metrics in terms of how we judge culture, which is imparting fitness, you know, creating resilient, successful people who have kids and raise those kids to be resilient and successful.
It was doing better. [00:13:00] Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: And, and the woke ism that targeted black culture first, cause it took ownership of it. And unfortunately and I'll admit at the beginning, I think that the, the, there, there might have been truth to Democrats really supporting black culture more for a period in American history, that is definitely no longer.
Simone Collins: I mean, I sometimes question this. I feel like a lot of the big thing now, the, the more that I look at it, it seems to be. Well intentioned people who just weren't part of the culture decided to, in a very white saviory kind of way, take ownership of, I'm going to help this disenfranchised disadvantaged group that was already helping itself.
And then it like, it kind of like when you introduce exogenous hormones to a body. That body will stop its own internal production. And it can really throw everything off. And that's, that's not great. And I think that that, that might be kind of what happened is they're like, let's introduce hormone therapy.
Well, I don't know, I actually
Malcolm Collins: see a level [00:14:00] of malevolence even during that period. Oh, really? So you have a surrounder of Well, I guess, yeah, the
Simone Collins: Planned Parenthood thing, but I think
Malcolm Collins: Hold on, hold on, hold on. So for people who don't know this story, we've done another video on it, but I'll just quickly go over it.
Planned Parenthood was started by somebody with strong ties to the KKK with an explicit plan to wipe out black people in the United States, well, low genetic quality people, and she thought black people were disproportionately in this category. This is admitted on the Planned Parenthood website. This is not something of controversy.
Right now, this is also not a point of controversy. There is the black population of the United States would be a quarter larger than it is if Planned Parenthood didn't exist. Yeah, it's genocide
Simone Collins: that no one talks about.
Malcolm Collins: 83 percent of Planned Parenthood clinics are still in majority black neighborhoods.
So black shouldn't laugh. Actually, it's
Simone Collins: not. It's really not
Malcolm Collins: funny when they started rolling this out, didn't want this. And so she went to black democratic community leaders to get them to vote. to talk to their communities and staff these clinics with majority black workers to try to get more black people in.[00:15:00]
And this was done. The sterilization and genocide of their own communities was done by what's the nice way to put this house? Isn't the nice way to put this? But there, I, I think a, Class of this like black middle class and upper class that camila belongs to and the black community talks about is like the ruling Whatever trying to keep all other black people down and like I don't think they're wrong about this impression I mean, it's not like 10 super rich black people who have sold out but it like basically is there is a a black community that has completely sold out the black underclass and I think the That's why 25%, by the way, it was 25 percent of black men voted for Trump in this election cycle from like 8 percent of previous cycles.
Like they're awake, they know what's up now, but anyway, so I'll keep playing it.
Speaker 8: I think Donald Trump is, not the last gasp of the GOP's descent into chaos and madness, but he is a sign that the only strategy they have, they only [00:16:00] have one tool.
If there's an upside today is that, yeah, the tool worked this time, but they only have one, right? There's plenty of opportunity here to build more and better tools. And that's our job right
Speaker 7: now. Yeah, no, I totally
Speaker 8: agree.
Trusty.
Malcolm Collins: So then the next thing she goes on about it, she goes on and she says, Republicans are only winning because of one thing, which doesn't specify what it is, which is really. Yeah. So I come up with a few hypotheses. She might be thinking it's racism.
The problem is that more black people are voting for Republicans. Well,
Simone Collins: no, she, no, she could believe that because she could believe, and this was something that came up near the end of the election cycle, that the black men and Latino men, et cetera, were racist. And they were voting out of racism. No, no, no.
The, these accusations came up. Absolutely. I mean, the whole Obama thing is you're misogynist. And all these other, no, no, no. I really think that they may think it is racist.[00:17:00]
Go ahead.
Malcolm Collins: Oh, no. You have something to say. I was going to,
Simone Collins: I think I've seen enough coverage of the whole post mortem. The, the leftist post mortem election, but they genuinely believe that the nonwhite groups,
Malcolm Collins: they believe this. What I'm saying is it's just obviously factually inaccurate.
Simone Collins: Oh no, yeah, no, obviously it's, it's not accurate, but it's what they believe.
Malcolm Collins: All of the mainstream racists hate Trump now. All of the minority ethnic groups are voting more for Republicans than they ever have. Yeah, no, no, it's, it's not true, but I think that's what she was thinking. Because I can't imagine what else she was thinking. The next thing she thinks is it could be feminism.
Like, like, oh, we hate women. We don't want a woman president. Except more women voted for Trump. For Trump in this election than they did when he was running against Biden.
Simone Collins: It was definitely not that. And also that just never came up in the election. It just was never discussed. And in common, she didn't even really, she never played up her femininity really.
So yeah, I definitely don't see that.
Malcolm Collins: The last thing it could be is she means it's the economy, but like, if it's the [00:18:00] economy, it just shows how disconnected this democratic elite is. It's like all the people care about is they can't afford food for their families. Like How selfish be they not vote for our ideological agenda?
Just because they can't vote for That would be the most
Simone Collins: non evil assumption on her part though. I hope that's what she believed because that's, that's factual. When the economy does poorly the, the ruling administration is more likely to be voted out. That is, and, and, and so I, that would be the most realistic thing, I think for her to say.
I
Malcolm Collins: should also point out, and I think this is really interesting, that like, If, if, if, if, She's like, Oh, they're only winning on one thing. And they're just running the same thing over and over again. Like she's acting like when Trump is gone, that the party is going to be easier to beat. And I'm like, no, you nut jobs.
When the party is gone, we've got JD Vance and effing Scott Presler in the wings here. When, when Trump is gone, you've got. Nothing except for one person who I'm going to bring up at the end of this and I think could clinch it for the [00:19:00] Democrats. Michelle
Simone Collins: Obama? She'd never know.
Malcolm Collins: You're not thinking of them and as soon as I mention who Dwayne The Rock
Simone Collins: Johnson.
Malcolm Collins: As soon as I mention you're gonna be like, oh my god, this would be the perfect person. Okay, I'm excited.
Simone Collins: He would win. He would win. In the comments, weigh in, don't cheat, place your bets.
Malcolm Collins: Okay. So, I'll see if I give it away in the title card or something like that. But what, what, what I, what I, what I'm pointing out is that Simone, you had to talk about the thing you did with GPT, where you're trying to figure out like, who's going to be the next democratic front runner for the next election cycle.
Simone Collins: You must be thinking of someone else.
Malcolm Collins: So you were like, I asked it, who's going to be good to win the next election cycle. And you're inventing,
Simone Collins: or sometimes you talk to other people and you think that you're talking to me in your memories. I've known that I did not do this.
Malcolm Collins: Okay. Well, whoever I was talking to said they went on AI and they're like, who's gonna be the next person to run for Democratic office?
Okay. And it gave a list of people. Mm-Hmm. . And then I asked ai, I said, [00:20:00] I've never heard of any of these people before. They seem like small players. Okay. And the AI said in response, yeah, the Democrats have a problem
Simone Collins: really . That's great. AI that's on purpose. They do have a problem. Whereas we
Malcolm Collins: are spoiled for choice.
And I think due to Trump's incredibly sure choice of J. D. Vance, this is running mate. Now what I want to point out here to, to understand. The Democrats lost. I think this is a key thing and why it's going to be so hard for them going forwards is they were not running on policy positions. They weren't even really running on vibes.
They were running on an alternate fictional reality. And by this, what I mean is Kamala's two core talking points. And this is what I get from democratic analysis, who are like analysts who were looking at this and saying, okay, how is she doing? What'd she do wrong? What'd she do? Think of like, she really only had [00:21:00] two points.
If you examine all of her speeches, one is Trump is going to force abortion restrictions on everyone in this country.
Simone Collins: Oh yeah. All your rights will be taken away.
Malcolm Collins: But Trump said he'd veto any national abortion restriction. Like he's literally pro choice. He did that in his last term and he overturned Roe versus Wade.
But Roe versus Wade isn't even about like abortion restrictions. It's about a weird thing the Supreme Court did that was like, obviously illegal constitutionally speaking. And anyone who knows law knows it was illegal. The Supreme Court should have been able to make this decision and they did it and it could.
You know what I'm talking about, right? Like Roe versus Wade was basically being made by the Supreme Court, and that's not the way our constitution was set up. You're supposed to pass this He's correcting a
Simone Collins: bug in the code or grammatical inaccuracy. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah this wasn't I don't even see it as an abortion issue, I just see it as a basic like
Simone Collins: Yeah, like, you didn't do this right.
Like, if you want to do this, there's a way to do it, and you didn't do it right.
Malcolm Collins: And so Trump, you know, so, so [00:22:00] one, this is a fiction, but then the, the bigger fiction is that Trump is going to like all black people are going to wake up as slaves. All everyone who's not like a cis white male is going to end up without any rights that women are going to be forced to
the Mar a Lago breeding pens. And. Like this is just not reality and I think we have seen such negative consequences from the democratic framing here you know, not only do we have the trump assassination attempts, but you don't know about this simone And I know you'll be unhappy to learn about there was
Simone Collins: another iranian plot that was thwarted too
Malcolm Collins: Well, you know, iran has a right to be afraid of a trump presidency, but yes so There was a guy who killed his wife his ex wife.
Oh, I
Simone Collins: saw that In the UK though? Well, in the UK? I thought it was in the UK. Maybe it was just I read it in the Daily Mail or something.
Malcolm Collins: No, I think it was Minnesota. Minnesota. So, and he said, quote, My mental health and the world can no longer peacefully coexist, and a lot of the reason is religion.
I am terrified of the religious zealots inflicting their misguided beliefs on me and my family. for having [00:23:00] me. I have intrusive thoughts of being burned at the stake as a witch or crucified on a burning cross. So he thought the religious commu And, and this is the thing, I tried to find this story in the U.
S. I could only find it in U. K. and Indian newspapers. Okay, so
Simone Collins: that's why I thought it, sorry, that's why
Malcolm Collins: I was I, I, I found accounts of it happening in the U. S. They were like, Crazy guy kills his family. They did not say it was because the left convinced him that his family wouldn't be safe. That it was
Simone Collins: Trump derangement syndrome.
It
Malcolm Collins: reminds me so much of that scene in downfall. Excellent movie, by the way, you should watch it about the downfall of the Nazi regime, where as soon as they realize they're not in power one woman kills her family because like, you haven't seen downfall.
Simone Collins: I'm not watching people kill their families.
No,
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone): By the way. Not putting. I looked at the clip and I was like, oh, I mentioning a clip. I should probably add it. Like I do what I put, it mentioned other clips and I watched it and I was like, I know. Nobody wants to see this right now. Like if you want to feel terrible, you can go look up the clip
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-1: But I think it's just more proof of the left is just Nazis. [00:24:00] They just act like Nazis.
They think like Nazis. It's getting insane and the people who don't see it yet, my God.
Wait until they come for you. That's what I guess I have to say, actually, the wait till they Humphrey, you think has been a major thing for me recently, where a lot of people have come to me. And they're like, I didn't know that this could get me canceled and ruined my career. And now it's happened to me and all of the people who I went and I talked to about what I thought was a fairly normal thing. They won't even listen to me.
They're like, well, I haven't been canceled yet, so I'm fine.
Um, and you're like, well, cancellation is nothing like, you know, putting you in a concentration camp and it's like, yeah, well maybe, but, , having your only means of income taken away when you've got like a family of five kids. That's a pretty big. Nene deal.
And they do it so flippantly and with so much joy..
Speaker 13: Uh, a
Speaker 14: bear?
Speaker 13: I didn't know what else to paint! FasTer! [00:25:00] Ha! People of all colors agree to hold hands
Speaker 15: beneath a rainbow!
Speaker 14: That wasn't so hard, was it? Now do it again!
Malcolm Collins: Very powerful movie. I suggested I'm going to make it. I can't
Simone Collins: even watch like the one the one clip where his like hands are shaking and he adjusts his glasses.
Malcolm Collins: Oh, that's such a great clip. So many good take take. But there's some movies that kids just need to watch. Downfall is one kid. I think very good education.
Fievel is, I think the classic American cartoon. All kids, all kids need to see an American tale. And then Fievel goes West.
Speaker 38: Pardon. But did you say, never? So young, and you have lost hope? Ah, this is America! The place to find hope! Hope for the best, work for the rest. And never say never [00:26:00] again.
Take my little friend to immigration. Everyone goes through immigration.
Malcolm Collins: Absolutely top tier cinema. Great at, I think, building American pride. Showing that we are a nation of national clans working together and cultural clans working together. Against the oligarchs, which controlled the democratic party.
One of the crazy things I've seen as an outcome of this is they're like, Elon gave Trump all of this money and now he's going to control Trump because billionaires. And I was like, b***h, Kamala raised three times what Trump raised. Yeah, seriously. You live in an alternate fictional reality. And I think that that's one of the problems that they have is they are arguing.
Not based on policy, but that we live in this alternate world where Trump is a fascist. And one of those things I pointed out, which is so insane, is, is now they're going through all this stuff about how Trump is gonna like, have like these frivolous lawsuits against his opponents and arrest them. And meanwhile they'll say the felon Trump.
Simone Collins: Yeah. [00:27:00] Who they actively and, and carry. And I'm like, successfully, why is he
Malcolm Collins: a felon? No, no, no. Wait, hold on. Why is he a felon? And they go. Because he didn't label his prostitute hush money payments as prostitute hush money payments, and I'm like, yeah, obviously he didn't do that. Obviously. You're supposed to, Malcolm, you're supposed to label them.
It's the law. Don't you understand? I bet Campbell's husband didn't label them when he was paying off the nanny that he knocked up. I, which by the way, those are child care payments,
Simone Collins: Malcolm. They're a tax write off. Shut your mouth.
Malcolm Collins: Completely covered up that story. You know, he was told by his lawyer to do this.
And it wasn't even, it was only a felony because it was supposed to be a misdemeanor. They said it was to cover up another crime. What was the other crime? Like chose one.
Simone Collins: It was a choose your own adventure kind of court case, which was the best kind.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So, Now I want to go over what I think might be causing this and allowing the left to do this, to create this alternate reality, and why it's losing so hard.
It's that there is a [00:28:00] movement right now to disconnect yourself from reality. It's not
Simone Collins: a movement. It is, it is a, a next step in human civilization that's a part of our, Downfall. So if you've seen or read Ready Player One, there, you're sort of looking at this universe in which people are living in these, like, stacked apartments and really urbanized zones, like, even stacked trailer parks, just spending all of their day on the internet, working online and, and, and socializing online.
And there's no real connection with reality. There's no strong connection with your community. And it seems so sci fi dystopian. And yet that's, that happened this summer. That the tipping point was this summer. And we're able to live in these weird delusional siloed worlds because we're literally like a huge swath of the population is not leaving their house.
So it's totally possible. To live in this fantasy to come to believe these things because you're not, you're not literally transacting within society. You're door dashing. You're getting everything delivered via Amazon. You're, you're, you're, you're not having kids. You're not [00:29:00] forced to interact with people.
In that, in that environment, are the kids playing outside on the driveway?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And he went to stop some people who are walking by our house to have a conversation with him. Of
Simone Collins: course he does. But yeah, so you're not interacting with the community and, and, and that will cause you to be capable of falling into deeper and deeper delusions.
Well, no, I mean, this,
Malcolm Collins: this crazy cult, which has had such an easy time creating this alternate reality for people because they're not engaging. So I'm gonna go over some like tweets here. Right. So like, okay, here's a Reddit post. I am in a committed relationship with my bed. It understands me, supports my Netflix habits, and never argues about who finished the last of the ice cream or another person.
Here, people ask what my hobbies are and I say rotting in bed with my shows and minding my business. And then another person said, great, mind think alike. And then here is another post where somebody's like, I'm kind of tired of all this. To be honest, Brad summer is just about watching rich people have fun.
It is a picture. It was the
Simone Collins: first parasocial party burnout summer [00:30:00] where no one actually could afford to party or go out or like, had the desire to go out and hit the club. It was more like, whatever it is that young people do when they're having a rough cash, a kind of. Evening and morning. But it was, yeah, it was the first time when that was entirely parasocial, but people were still trying to get the social cachet of it.
And, and that parasocial burnout of like, I'm a wreck wasn't from partying hard. It was from literally not being able to take care of yourself and not get out of bed.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So how do you win? How do you win as a leftist, right? Okay, and how do
Simone Collins: you win?
Malcolm Collins: The way that you win, and this is what all the left are getting wrong, they're like, we need to go harder into identity politics, everything like that.
You need to do what the right did to our races. You need to turn the wokes against you.
Simone Collins: You need to
Malcolm Collins: go out with a crucifix and scare the vampires from the room. You need to call out The Wokies on their b******t when they lie, you need to say, and this is how [00:31:00] Trump want, like, if you're like the right, didn't have to do this.
Trump's first election cycle. He was like, Oh yeah, the Iraq war. That was dumb as hell. Like. Meanwhile, like Kamala's like buddying up with like Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney, right? You know, taking them on campaign trail with her saying they were great public servants and, and Trump's like, yeah, that was a, that was a cluster.
Like, why did we do that? I said at the time, I just love
Simone Collins: the way he looks at international politics from the perspective of like, was this a good deal or was this a bad deal? Like he's looking at like, were we, were we paying too much for this? It's called like
Malcolm Collins: mainstream Republicans week. He's like, you guys are being manipulated like this.
So. And people could be like, but a mainstream leftist figure could not survive if they did this.
I disagree. Okay. How? I'm gonna see if you can think of the person I am thinking of is not in politics. They are mainstream leftist [00:32:00] media comedian, and they are a male.
Simone Collins: Jon
Malcolm Collins: Stewart. Jon Stewart.
Simone Collins: Oh, and he even looks presidential. Could Jon
Malcolm Collins: Stewart not clean an election cycle? Clock.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Actually,
Malcolm Collins: so I'm gonna put a clip on screen of him right now.
Mm-Hmm. Of John Stewart calling out leftist media for b**********g people. Yeah. About like Trump panic and stuff like that.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Speaker 24: that was so disturbing, so dark, even the news couldn't handle it. In our editorial discussions this morning, we were asked not to show the image from this video
Speaker 26: Video which we are intentionally choosing not to show you. We're not going to show because of how disturbing it is.
I was extremely disturbed to see this. Horrible, horrible image.
Speaker 25: Violent imagery,
Speaker 26: violent and dehumanizing imagery. We're only going to show you a clip of this briefly. All right, that's enough. Let's take it down.
Speaker 24: News channels show images from Ukraine, from Gaza, [00:33:00] from natural disasters. They get through them dispassionately. I can't imagine. How devastating this footage must be.
Speaker 28: Former President Donald Trump shared a video, this one, on his Truth Social account featuring an image of President Joe Biden hogtied on the back of a pickup truck.
Speaker 24: That's what was so disturbing and dehumanizing. You wouldn't show it on television. An airbrushed Biden decal on the back of a truck? Aren't you the same networks that show reruns of 9 11 every year?
Malcolm Collins: And now, hold on. Now I'm wanna put out one where he was on Stephen Colbert when the Wuhan Lab League thing was going on. Oh no. And this when all the left was still like dogmatically, like, oh, Wuhan lab leak.
And he was like, this is f*****g. Obviously, it was a lab leak. Like, what are you talking about? They even call it, like, COVID
Simone Collins: labs. So he could bring the sanity back to [00:34:00] the left.
Speaker 23: the suffering of this pandemic which was more than likely caused by science.
, no,
Speaker 22: no, no, no,
Speaker 23: no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, not listen, listen.
But what
Speaker 22: do you, what what, what, what do you mean by that? Do you mean like, perhaps there's, there's a chance that this was created in a lab. I'd love to hear.
Speaker 23: A novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China. What do we do? Oh, you know who we could ask? The Wuhan Novel Respiratory Coronavirus Lab. The disease is the same name as the lab.
And then they ask the scientists, wait a minute. You work at the Wuhan Respiratory Coronavirus Lab. How did this happen? And they're like, Mmm, a pangolin kissed a turtle. And you're like, No! If you look at the name,
show me your business card. Oh, I work at the Coronavirus lab in [00:35:00] Wuhan. Oh, because there's a coronavirus loose in Wuhan. How did that happen? Maybe a bat flew into the cloaca of a turkey and now we all have coronavirus. Like, come on.
Okay, okay. Wait a second. Wait a second. What about this? What about this? Listen to this. Wait a second. All right. John. Oh my god. Oh my god. There's been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? Like, oh, I don't know, maybe something. Maybe it's a cocoa bean or it's the f ing chocolate factory.
Maybe that's it.
Speaker 22: That could that could very well be and Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins and NIH have said like it should definitely be investigated.
Speaker 23: Stop with the. Logic and people and things. The name
Speaker 22: of the disease Wait a second, wait a second Is all over the building Wait a second, but it could be possible, you could be right It could be possible that they have The lab in [00:36:00] Wuhan To study the novel coronavirus Diseases because of the bat population there.
Sure, no. I understand.
Speaker 23: It's the only place to find bats oh, wait. Austin, Texas has thousands of them that fly out of a cave every night. . Is there a coronavirus, an Austin coronavirus?
No, it doesn't seem to be an Austin coronavirus.
Simone Collins: Yeah. And
Malcolm Collins: and john Stewart's like call out here of like, obviously it was the lab leak. It is aged so well because now there's a report that the three people was the earliest cases of covid were gain of function researchers at the Wuhan in November specifically.
In 2019, Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yanzu. So we basically now know it was a lab leak. And John Stewart called it when the left grabbed it. And you can see like how uncomfortable Stephen Colbert is, like when he's doing this. Stephen Colbert's like, this is all script! Go back to the script! And do you, hold on, do you, what do you think?
John Stewart ran. Could he [00:37:00] be? Basically
Simone Collins: Yes. No, he, he would clean up. He would do incredibly well. Yeah, he would, he would catch the center back. And he's just so relatable yet. He's the, he's the ultimate centrist vote and that's what a president needs.
Malcolm Collins: He did a video recently for like, Apple TV about like pro child transition.
Like what really? Whoa. Okay. Yeah. He's pretty captured by woke, but he at least fights back.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Well, I don't know though, if he's for youth transition, here's the thing is I was, I was listening to some people talking about this and they're like, You know how, you know, how come so many centrists were, you know, voting for the left and a realization that they had was that a lot of parents are seeing just how much at the level of their own local schools, youth gender transition is, is taking place and they're like,
Malcolm Collins: sorry, you said voting for the left.
Simone Collins: [00:38:00] Well, they would otherwise have voted for the left, but then they're like, I just don't want my kid to go through youth gender transition. So this has gone too far. And there aren't enough people who care about trans rights enough to put their kids at risk when they don't think their kids really are trans, but are going to be forced essentially to transition through social pressure.
To, and so like it just went too far. So I do think that if he was into youth gender transition, that would be a step too far, because I think that's one of the key things that pushed people to the right,
Malcolm Collins: aggressively
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-4: To be clear. I am not saying I think it would be a good thing if John Stewart was running on the left, I think it would be a bad thing because he would be such a good candidate, but he is not actually. Like fully sane. , he, again like the youth gender transition stuff, which again, for people who don't know why we're so against us, if you look at this study from 2023, , gender discontentedness and non-conforming use what you see is of 11 year olds who are, do not [00:39:00] identify with their birth gender. , over nine out of 10 of them were not given gender affirming care.
End up affirming totally with their birth gender by the age of 23. Um, so it's just like a bad idea, especially when you consider that 50% of people who transition are 45%, depending on the study, you're looking at Attempt to analyze themselves. So it's, it's, it's one of those things where it's like, Horrifying that anyone could promote this. If they have actually looked at the data and I feel like he has, I feel like what John Stewart does. Is, he looks at the issues that he knows are going to be overturned in the near future and then steaks out on front of that.
Like the Wu Han lab league story and stuff like that. , and so I think that.
He's sort of the perfect poison pill to the right right now. , and to me. That scares me about Jon Stewart candidacy.
But if I'm just out here giving like honest advice to the left, this is what you need to do. You need to do somebody who clamps back occasionally.
Simone Collins: written out. Then Dwayne, the rock Johnson is mine.
Malcolm Collins: Jonathan, [00:40:00] I don't think Jon Stewart would do better.
I think that he could moderate his positions on things. And I think he would, if he was running. He could run and
Simone Collins: he could come out to be like, I was wrong. I didn't know about the, the WPath files. I didn't know about this and that, like I'm willing, cause he's the kind of person who has the ability to draw the narrative of changing his mind without looking like a flip flopper.
Yeah, and I think that this is the fun part of it. It's
Malcolm Collins: like, oh, J. D. Vance, you can't trust J. D. Vance because he changed his mind when he's presented with new evidence. I
Simone Collins: think people like that, and I'm glad that we've come to a point in In human civilization where we start to respect people for changing their mind when presented with new information
Malcolm Collins: Wow I was taken in by the urban monoculture for a while.
I believe their b******t for a while. Okay. Yeah, it's totally same Just as jd vance did I do not besmirch him for You know, if he's a wealthy VC in Silicon Valley in the, you know, early two [00:41:00] thousands, of course, yes. Whoops. Whoops. He made a mistake. I made a mistake. Okay. So you guys realize this s**t before I did now.
And
Simone Collins: so whatever, right? Yeah. Don't, don't hate me for being wrong. And that was one thing that when I was running for office, I got the most appreciation for was, was that I had grown up with one ideology and I saw what was wrong with it. And I changed my mind. I wasn't questioned for it. I wasn't called a rhino for it.
I was, I was, I mean, maybe people hated me behind my back, but at least to my face, I was given the impression that people appreciated that. What I cared about was my community and that I, I believed that something was for the best. And when proven that it wasn't, I changed my mind.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So, next here the other big thing, and when people are like, how bad has wokeism gotten and how much it's a pushback now, because I think that people don't understand.
the systemic privileges that some [00:42:00] people are getting in our society, that we really are living in a racist society where some ethnicities and subgroups are treated as having more human dignity than others, but the tide is beginning to turn. So prominent theoretical physicist Lawrence M. Cross spoke about the notorious DEI practice.
He said, quote, Get the DEI out of science funding, Elon, exclamation mark, end quote. In a national post article.
Simone Collins: Mm.
Malcolm Collins: So we are now seeing mainstream physicists. So here's a classics. Professor Jake, and I thought that this was a really interesting tweet that I read. He said, I am 53 years old, the last four years amount to the most repressive, totalitarian era I have ever lived through.
Ooh.. Quote, if the general atmosphere of fear we live in as a people who want to speak and live freely, if all of that change in American society had the fingerprints of a particular leader on it, that leader would be fascist. End quote. And that was from Nam Durham. But it was not a particular.
It was left. I think what he's talking here is this memetic virus that we've talked about, that is wokeism, the urban [00:43:00] monoculture, which the left needs to distance itself from if it's going to win. It needs to quarantine. It needs to call out as being bigoted, which is what it is. But he goes on to say, it was not a fascist leader, but a society wide culture of totalitarian intolerance that made me watch my words like a hawk for half a decade.
It was fear of retaliation, From the left that made me lay awake at night, terrified that a student might have misinterpreted something I said in class and initiated a cancellation campaign against me. And this is something we've seen historically. If you look at the pogroms against Jews and stuff like that, they don't know if they've triggered some like, oh, now they're going to use this to argue against my community.
Oh, now they're going to, you know, then he goes on to say it was not a fascist leader, but a left wing culture of retribution in the face, which tenured faculty and college administrators coward. No, in the face of which tenured faculty and college administrators coward wielded by 18 year olds that ended the career of a colleague of mine because she read out loud a word in a [00:44:00] anti racist comic book.
Oh boy.
Simone Collins: A
Malcolm Collins: Student was a completely tired college statuist coward who fear was nonetheless rational, actually ended her career for reading an anti racist comic book. It was not a fascist leader, but a left wing culture of fear that generated countless whispers among faculty in the halls of my college and others.
Every professor afraid to tell but their most trusted colleagues about how students had stood up in class and accused them of quote unquote traumatizing or quote unquote harming them for teaching basic facts or for failing to teach the subject from the now mandatory ideological perspective of Afro pessimism or teaching material Unobjectionable just a few years ago, that was now quote unquote white supremacist.
So Afro pessimism, I had to look this up, is the belief that basically all of Western civilization should be understood from the perspective of oppressing black people or that
Simone Collins: just doesn't sound fun [00:45:00] for anyone.
Malcolm Collins: I personally know artists whose careers and businesses, the mob attempted to destroy because they did not post a black square on Facebook in 2020.
I personally know musicians who lost their bands and music career. merely for revealing that they were reading a book that had been effectively, quote unquote, banned by the left. And it's like, you can't even read books. If you have touched anything that may be a threat to the memetic virus, they isolate you, they quarantine you.
The only way to fight back is to quarantine the people who are doing this. They need to be treated the way the right has treated racists because they are just as bigoted. But if not more so, honestly, because I've talked to the left wokies and I've talked to the right. Where is this? Who like we have quarantined and I'm like if there's an innocent person being victimized here, . It's much more on the right. Because a lot of these, these people who sometimes get caught up in this are often. Pretty innocent of a lot of the charges that they're accused of but on the left, they're not, they, they do wish to dehumanize other people. They do wish to ruin people's [00:46:00] careers like fascist would like, you know, if you read something like the red scarf girl, like the Chinese use would during the red revolution.
Then he goes on to say, I know of accomplished leaders in the world and arts and culture who lost their careers because of this. The statement of solidarity with BLM that they wrote was not vociferous enough. I know of physicians who lost important positions were subjected to star chamber proceedings and whose words were scrubbed from the internet merely from suggesting the socioeconomic conditions and not the phony construct of quote unquote, implicit bias were responsible for racial health disparities. I know of a liberal, gay Canadian educator who had served children selflessly for decades, who was driven to suicide, after being derided as a racist in front of an audience of all her peers by A DEI trainer. in a COVID era zoom call.
And you know this stuff is real. Anyone who's seen this knows this stuff is real. [00:47:00] They're driving people to suicide. They're driving families to kill themselves. They are evil in the extreme. They need to be treated like people with swastikas tattooed on their foreheads because that's what they are when they spout this stuff, when they try to isolate people for this stuff.
None of this repressiveness, this intolerance, this insistence that only a single view was acceptable on. along with the fear that it all generated was imposed by a fascist leader. It was imposed through the distributed channels of individual agents converging on an ideology and a set of practices to enforce it.
It was imposed by all the individuals and institutions who rational self interested fear made them turn their eyes away, allowing it all to happen, and tacitly endorsing it. And I cannot but include myself in this indictment. All of us, like Peter Thrice, denying the Jesus of our colleagues, friends, And family in order to save our own skins from the mod by [00:48:00] falsifying Every last one of our preferences There was an entire class of people who genuinely never felt a moment of fear from their neighbors students colleagues or acquaintances Who sincerely never did notice episodes of retribution and cancellation such as i've described here My theory is that these people's own ideology so mirrored that of the dominant social configuration That they simply never experienced a moment of friction and it's not for the most part You That they previously arrived at a quote unquote woke ideology independently and then merely recognize fellow travelers in other wokers.
Rather, their minds were such as to instantly and uncritically conform themselves to whatever it was that they were supposed to believe or endorses this week from abolishing slave patrol policing in America to mass graves of Indians in Canada To human biology, having no bearing on a person's sex or gender, they were and remain in the grip of a mass delusion.
This is by and large the same class of people you will see commenting [00:49:00] here and telling me that none of this ever happened or that I have fallen for a right wing lie. Some of these people will make a faulty inference from this and assume that I am a hardcore right winger. In a classical case of what aboutism fallacy, they'll say, well, what about Republicans?
And they'll accuse me of carrying water for the right wing and supposedly far more repressive of any leftist or democrat than I aspire to be. And we all know this is true, right? When people do not, leftists don't get fired from their views from their jobs. They don't get fired for their views from their university.
They don't have to live in fear. Well,
Simone Collins: I think what you're pointing out though is that they do, that nothing's enough.
Malcolm Collins: Well, they do admit that nothing's enough, but they, they, they definitely, it is not the right that controls society. The left is the fascist faction controlling society right now. They are fascist in the truest sense of the word.
They are a fascist mob that is interested only in upholding its ideological purity spiral. But to continue, even dumber, they'll [00:50:00] say that my supposed experience of intolerance is exactly what bigots should expect. If I have views that were impossible to express on campus over the past years, that's just as good for entails that my views must have been beyond the pale and no campus is obliged to platform or tolerate Nazis and their ilk.
And here's what I point out with Jon Stewart going against all this because he had the platform to do it. You wouldn't be platform for saying, oh, We actually do need masks, or oh, we actually don't need masks at various different times. As happened, you would have been deplatformed for saying actually these COVID restrictions are hurting minority communities disproportionately, as happened to the person who was runner up to be the CEO at Levi's him saying stuff like the lab leak thing had people's careers ended who weren't far enough left.
We all saw this. It's not that they were fighting for truth and justice. They were fighting for ideological conformity. They were fighting for the march step. They were fighting for their North Korea like dictatorship. These inferences and accusations [00:51:00] are all false. I can be angry about left wing repressiveness and still be plenty alarmed by right wing repressiveness.
And indeed I am. But the right wing have done nothing. He's just signaling here. I have spoken out on this platform against florida's stop woke act, for example, against the crushing of pro palestinian speech on some campuses. And just this morning I shared my well granted fear that That Trump will end up invoking the Insurrection Act.
Simone Collins: Why? That's so
Malcolm Collins: pathetic. But there is simply no equivalency between the impact on my quote unquote, lived experience, and they will deny all of these people's lived experiences, of the daily grinding paranoia and fear. fear that the leftist culture of repression has created for me that I have seen it create in countless students and colleagues and my more abstract and theoretical concerns about repressiveness or right that is in any event more local to Florida, Texas, etc.
Not nearly as global as a society wide leftist culture that I describe here [00:52:00] and I will not be gaslit. And this is the reality that so many people are experiencing. And if you as a leftist can't read this and say, I need to stop the bigots who have taken control of my culture, who have taken control of my party, and are using it to advance their agenda in the same way the right wing party did.
See our video about why the racists turned on Trump, why the homophobes turned on Trump, why the anti Semitic people turn on Trump because they all did. They all denounced him in this last election cycle. They all said he doesn't stand for us anymore. They all said, anyone who follows me, stop voting for him.
You need to do the same on the left. And if you can't do the same, you will keep losing and you will become an increasingly irrelevant part of America. Even if you control the boards at these large companies, cause nobody's going to buy these video games anymore. We're seeing this. And these companies will collapse.
Nobody's gonna buy your products anymore and we'll get better at organizing and we'll get better at identifying any organization you have your hooks in. And here [00:53:00] I'd point out, we're going to start a website and a company called anti bigot dot com. And I want people who are interested in their companies and they go, I want you guys to come in.
Like a D. E. I. Remediation force like sweet anti sweet baby ink and clear up all of this and then talk to your friends and right wing media. Make sure everybody knows like when Harley Davidson has a problem, they can come to us and we can clear it all up for them. Clear all this out and then make sure that through the real media channels, the channels that people actually watch here, I'll put a thing of the top 10 podcasts right now.
Nobody actually watches left link media anymore. They're shouting into a decade chamber. Yeah, they control quote unquote the parts of the old bureaucracy, but nobody consumes that. Nobody plays those games. Nobody Nobody listens to that media. As we point out that Simone and I individually, I guess together our podcasts in terms of watch hours per month, we get the same amount of watch hours as 14 New York times journalists.
If you watch her, nobody goes to the mainstream media anymore. Stop it for each of us. That's what we're worst in terms of our pundency. That's getting insane. [00:54:00] Anyway, so Simone,
Simone Collins: I don't have anything to add.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, am I right? It's like, are you seeing this? Do you think that like this is what people's lived experiences?
Simone Collins: I think that there is a small and very vocal online group of people that has successfully lived under this delusion that has been reinforced by what we describe as the mainstream media that shares that delusion and lives in that isolated sphere. Yeah. And that the rest of the world and people who are interacting with reality more just don't see it.
And that's why the left lost. And you can see this in the audience numbers, as you point out that this group is, is very much in an echo chamber and they all kind of consume their own stuff, but the rest of the world isn't consuming it and increasingly [00:55:00] alarming numbers, right? The attrition is really high because as they're consuming it, they're seeing.
This is not reflected in my reality.
Malcolm Collins: This is a great point. I want to add here. You don't move in the other direction. And remember when I predicted Trump would win by a large margin in this life cycle and everyone's like, you're insane for saying that. I know people who've moved from the left to the right in the last election cycle.
I can think of nobody but Dick Cheney who has moved from the right to the left.
Simone Collins: That's because yeah, the, the, the leftist takes now increasingly don't reflect reality. And after a while you have to draw a line and say, this no longer Represents my understanding and I'm getting the fact that I'm being lied to And gaslit and I don't want in on this anymore
Malcolm Collins: Is it the left controls people through years of indoctrination?
Through building fear in them and their families and their companies and everything like that All the right needs to do is at one moment. Oh the right's really not going to take away all my rights Oh trump isn't an anti abortion candidate. Oh, you know like uh, he's not gonna force me to like breed He's not going [00:56:00] to re enslaved black people.
He's not going to take away gay rights. He's not gonna like the moment you realize all of this, you're like, wait, I was brainwashed into attacking somebody who was my greatest ally.
Simone Collins: And
Malcolm Collins: I think now you have a reality and an anti reality party. And, and actually this has created a really interesting phenomenon on the right where the right has moderated on tons of issues because they're no longer interested in promoting any sort of policy or anything like that agenda.
They're just interested in governing the country. As sanely as possible. And at the individual level, living people live their lives the way they want to and I think that's what things like J. D. Vance represent. And I think that's what people like the new right represent. It's this collection of clans all working together.
And I think that I really like this new right, which is only allowed by the leftist delusion on the other side. [00:57:00]
Simone Collins: I do too, but what you've given me hope about today is that because the left has been so resoundingly destroyed and trounced in this latest election, that at least in the U. S., there is a chance of rebuilding fresh.
In a much more moderated and reasonable fashion, like devoid of this caricature of the far left that they had previously elevated. And I've
Malcolm Collins: seen a lot of left willing influencers say this, they go, I was actually, I found myself relieved when Kamala lost by a huge margin.
Simone Collins: Well, it's a chance to rebuild.
And I think that there's some, it would be great to see that happen. And, and I think we felt at various times excitement about the prospect of the Republican party rebuilding. And that's part of the reason I think why the Republican party won so resoundingly is that the rebuilding has begun and people like what they're seeing as the new future.
GOP Inc wasn't selling. Now the new right is selling people are [00:58:00] excited about it and the left can do something similar, obviously in its own way, but it can do it. So I like that. And now we have to make dinner for the kids. Would you like me to make you those vegetable wontons that you liked me making last week?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that'd be a great dinner. I'm not that hungry tonight. I'm like a three or four.
Simone Collins: You'll eat a lot more than those because they're, they're quite small, but I'll make you those. Would you get the kids now? I'm going to change Indy's diaper and then I'll go down and start dinner and you can take a break while I watch them.
Sound good?
Malcolm Collins: You're very special and I love you and you do so much for this family.
Simone Collins: I love
Malcolm Collins: you too, Mom. What else are you going to make me to those? What else are you gonna make me? You say I'll make you a lot more than those.
Simone Collins: No, no. I'm just gonna make you, you said you wanted three, but they're like minuscule in size.
No, no. I would do three out of ten. Oh, your hunger is a three out of ten. Okay, understood. Love you. No problem. I love you, too. All right, you're gonna get them now, right?
It's not here. I just hit record the other that I respect and adore me. How most kids sports these days, you [00:59:00] can't really Get kids to just play in them dabbling. Like you kind of almost have to go professional to be involved, even just with soccer, AKA football. That everything sort of gets escalated to a semi professional level where you have to take them to tournaments and it's a whole family traveling, you need to buy all this equipment.
And I think it's so indicative of the way that we raise kids in developed wealthy nations, especially the U S. Where there's this expectation of overinvestment and because parents have so few kids and kind of feel like they have to spend way too much money on them
Malcolm Collins: Yeah,
Simone Collins: like well like they're Because they keep buying it the industries then keep building out this professionalization, which isn't going anywhere But then parents start to think well, but if it's built out this way Then I guess it's important for getting them to college or something and then I think it's this system that they they buy it and then So it gets built out more and then because it's built out more, they buy more and then it just sort of keeps echo chambering into this [01:00:00] completely ridiculous, overblown youth sports industry that makes it unsustainable for any parent of a large family to ultimately get their kids into sports because they can't afford
Malcolm Collins: to.
And we won't be doing it with our kids. I'll have my kids compete against my brother's kids. They've got a big family. We've got a big, we'll have enough for a sports team on both sides.
Simone Collins: Well, no, no, no. I, I, I honestly, really I, I just want, oh, Indy. We're across the street from an amazing gun and archery range. I'm just going to get our kids super into archery and they can go as far as they want with, with shooting. Yeah. Well, you have to be above a certain age and I want to start our kids early, so Oh, okay. So archery at starting at like age six, I think is their lowest age or something.
And then just, and obviously they can start younger at our house. And then like, I think that that's kind of what's like hunting, fishing,
Malcolm Collins: shooting. We have a property that could create a good archery range for the kids.
Simone Collins: They can use the monster wall. They can just shoot the wall. We can put targets on it, [01:01:00] so we should do that as soon as they're old.
Malcolm Collins: Anyway.
Speaker 39: I don't know. Can I play dummy? It's a Kit Kat bar. Oh, Kit Kat bar. Do you like Kit Kat bars? Yeah.
You have like a weird candy mustache, buddy. You look very Grown up. Orange. Whoa! Is this orange or red? That's red. Red? Yeah. Yeah. Do you want to pick out some candy for Titan? You don't want candy? Do you want to pick out some candy for your sister?
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
An in-depth analysis of the recent trend of far-right influencers like Nick Fuentes, Richard Spencer, and David Duke turning against Trump and the Republican Party. Learn why this exodus is actually strengthening the conservative movement and creating a more inclusive, successful political coalition.
We examine how these influencers' personal failures contradict their ideological positions, why their vision of conservatism is based on progressive stereotypes rather than historical reality, and how their departure is making room for more effective leaders like Scott Pressler. This video explores:
* The difference between healthy cultural pride and toxic ethno-nationalism
* Why pluralistic societies historically outperform homogeneous ones
* The importance of family success in validating political philosophy
* How the Republican Party is becoming a "united network of clans"
* Why competitive cooperation between different groups strengthens America
* The contrast between building up versus tearing down other cultures
A fascinating look at how the Republican Party is evolving and why its rejection of extremist elements is a sign of strength, not weakness.
[00:00:00]
Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. Today we are going to be talking about an interesting. Phenomenon, which is that individuals who have racist tendencies or who are skeptical about Jewish or gay people have been turning against Trump in droves recently.
What is going on there? Yeah, it does seem like this trend. And and very aggressively. So it used to be that in every election cycle, your famous racist would have these moments where they might, you know, tongue in cheek, support a Democratic candidate to try to make them look bad.
And so people couldn't say that they were supporting the Republicans. That is not what is happening anymore. They hate Trump and they are actively attempting to get their fan bases to vote against him.
Simone Collins: Really? Because I was mostly assuming that these were tongue in cheek harmful.
Malcolm Collins: No, and I'll, I'll provide a contrasting example here that is still tongue in cheek, which is Curtis Yarvin.
But if you look at Nick Fuentes, [00:01:00] Richard Spencer, David Duke or Leather Apron Club, they have all done aggressively anti Trump messages before the election asking their followers not to vote. The gist of why they're doing this is they have this perception of , if this party cannot be actively and aggressively anti Jewish, racist and homophobic, then I'm just going to go home.
And they don't like how far it's moved on those issues. Whereas, you know, we basically respond with.
Speaker 11: I'm leaving.
Speaker 10: Okay then, that was always allowed.
Malcolm Collins: So, we're gonna go through every one of these individuals, what they've said about Trump recently go through some of the arguments that they've used for why they're leaving, and we're also going to discuss the effects of this on the Republican Party, largely really positive.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: Very, very positive. If the left could achieve this with their toxic, racist, [00:02:00] bigoted faction,
that far rookies they would be able to win mainstream elections. So that's, that's one thing to note here. The second thing that we're going to talk about is all of these individuals who have this weird, I'd almost say sort of aesthetic cargo cult idea of what it means to be a conservative.
None of them are above repopulation rate and none of them seem to have a happy marriage.
Speaker 16: Jerry, marriage is a lot of work. We have to plan for a house, plan for a baby. Babies cost a lot of money.
Speaker 15: What? Babies don't cost money, they make money. Especially those little white ones.
Speaker 16: Look, you have to get serious about this.
Speaker 15: Or what, huh? You gonna hit me? No, I'm not gonna hit
Speaker 16: you, Jerry.
Speaker 15: You don't wanna beat me or screw me? What kind of marriage is this? Bring a book.
Malcolm Collins: And this is something I really want to focus on because these are not individuals. If they're coming to you and saying, I have this version of what America used to be and how America used to be great, that you can follow and learn from what I would point out is.
Just from the evidence, you can see [00:03:00] they're wrong. Whatever they're selling you doesn't work and is short for this world. All right, so let's get it through. First, I would start with the counter example, Curtis Yarvin. Curtis Yarvin did do a don't vote for Trump piece. But what he really said was, You should, whoever we're voting for should be made dictator, and I'd take a Biden dictatorship over a Trump presidency.
Ah, yeah. And he's like, look, I'm a monarchist, and I'm a radical monarchist. He doesn't hate the
Simone Collins: player, he hates the game.
Malcolm Collins: He doesn't hate the player, he hates the game. And you know what? Whatever. Like, that's a fun based point. I like Curtis a lot. And I think that he is a solid and truly independent intellectual that disagrees with us on tons of stuff.
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-3: Y Curtis works as a good counter example. Here is while he is someone who, if a presidential candidate was seen as being endorsed by him, their reputation could be hurt. He doesn't have an ounce of genuine. anti-gay bias. , [00:04:00] anti-Semitic bias or. Racial bias in any of his works, despite what some people would tell you.
Simone Collins: He's
Malcolm Collins: awesome. So that's, that's him. We're, technically he's saying I would actually prefer Trump, but like, I'm not going to put that in writing, given how it would, it could hurt his, his candidacy. Next, we have Nick Fuentes. Who is extremely anti immigrant, he's a Catholic integralist, he wants the United States to operate, basically he wants a globalist Catholic monarchy.
To rule the world or a Catholic government of some sort, theocracy. You know, following the syllabus of errors written by Pope Pius IX. I don't want to go too into theology here. I find the integralist movement pretty interesting. Mostly I find it silly that you could want a globalist Catholic monarchy to rule the world, but then think our country can't survive with a mostly Catholic immigrant population which is what the Hispanic immigrants are, you're like, no, no, no, we can't survive with them.
And it's like, well, They are the group that you say, like, you want ruling everything. If your internal divisions are so great already, I don't think your ultimate vision [00:05:00] is going to play out very well. But anyway, he said, I'm not a Republican and I don't care that much. And I'm not going to turn out. He said this on his, his live stream on rumble after the RNC event concluded, he said, I don't even really care.
I'm not energetic. I'm not enthusiastic. I'm not leaving my house to vote, vote for what for JD Vance and Usher. I'm not voting for this. I'm not lending my credibility to this. He added. As a real conservative, as a real right wing individual, you could not force me to care about this. You could not bribe me to care about this.
I don't care. I don't want to look at it anymore. So this is not like a like Curtis is saying, which is like veiled support, but like knowing this is him, like actually being pissed off at the Republicans. Let's go with Richard Spencer. I deeply regret voting and promoting Donald Trump in 2016. Wow.
Now here we can begin to get into why these people hate him. And I think, Oh, [00:06:00] Oh, this is a really common thing you'll see across this. He says to the people of Iran, there are millions of Americans who do not want war. We do not hate you and we respect your nation and its history. After our traitorous elite is brought to justice, we hope to achieve peace, reconciliation, and forgiveness.
Basically, they want the state of Israel destroyed. And they support anyone who's attempting to do that, whether it's Iran or Gaza or anything like that. And as such, they do not like that the main and Trump is As pro Israel as you get when I was in Israel, this is right after he moved the embassy there when everyone was like, Oh my God, you can't move the embassy to a Jerusalem.
Like that's horrible. And it's going to cause all sorts of pain. And he's like, Yolo. He does it and Israel loves it. They're like broadcasting his face on everything. So, you know, obviously he doesn't give a flying F what these people take. And the new right generally does it. Most of the new right is fairly pro.
Israel. We could get into why later in this. [00:07:00] Now, what did David Duke have to say? Well, David Duke said, I'm sorry, when I say pro Israel, I mean pro Jewish. A lot of people are like, oh, no, it's only Zionists. It's not being anti Jewish to be anti Israel. And then I point out, depending on the poll you're looking at, it's between 85 and 95 percent of Jews would be categorized as Zionists.
And so if you're saying, Oh, I don't hate the Jews, I just hate 95 percent of Jews or like, I don't hate the Christians. I just hate the ones who think that Jesus Christ was the son of God or something like that. It's like, well, I mean, that's a pretty close to a perfect circle. And if you know Jewish history, you can understand why they might not feel comfortable in a state where they're a minority.
But anyway the next here we have David Duke. So David Duke said, David Duke
Simone Collins: is the KKK guy,
Malcolm Collins: right? The guy who runs the KKK. Yeah.
Simone Collins: Okay. Just want to make sure I I'm not, here's the, the other thing is, is. As, as people who are frequently accused of being adjacent to such people. I mean, I think Trump experiences too.
They're often [00:08:00] insinuations that were related to people and I have no idea who they are, or I have no idea what this phrase means. They're like,
Malcolm Collins: say you hate this person. I'm like, I don't know who this person is or what. Or they're like, this
Simone Collins: sounds an awful like, like what this is, for example, when Trump was campaigning and he.
Planned to have a speech at Madison, Madison Square Garden. Okay. Like really major venue. Okay. And we're like many people and, and suddenly the media is like, he's trying to recreate a, you know, what an easy, I rally that was in Madison Square Garden in 1940, it's like, How do you know this much obscure lore from pre World War II?
Like this, and because you know,
Malcolm Collins: at their house, there's like a an unregarded reporter's house. There's a secret room they open and it's full of Nazi memorabilia. I mean, yeah, like,
Simone Collins: it just seems like the biggest aficionados of, of, of history and memory and like collectors of memorabilia and, and you know, aficionados of obscure facts are progressive people who use it for witch hunting purposes, or perhaps because they're [00:09:00] Racist ones.
I don't know, but it's just so frustrating. So that's why I asked because honestly
Malcolm Collins: Is these are people who are accused of being racist, I don't know if they're actually racist I haven't done time to think right because that's yeah I
Simone Collins: mean a lot of people accuse us of being racist and here we are. So
Malcolm Collins: I
Simone Collins: don't know
Malcolm Collins: adjacency to Trump was used as justification to argue Trump is racist,
Simone Collins: right?
Malcolm Collins: And these are people who I believe if they had been at an event or something like that might be the type of people who would make say black people or gay people or Jewish people going to that event feel uncomfortable.
Simone Collins: And I
Malcolm Collins: This is part of the key, and it's what we'll get to later, is this is the right woke, like the wokeism is the left mirror of this audience.
If you go to an event, and you're a cis white male, these people will make you feel uncomfortable, they will harass you, they have really, really bad intentions. Good ties within the administration and can get into the administration and actually can make [00:10:00] laws and stuff like that. The right has taken this toxic faction, sucked out the venom and spit it in a toilet.
Simone Collins: Like,
Malcolm Collins: they themselves now feel uncomfortable going to right wing rallies. And that's why if you look at this last cycle where Kamala was trying to argue Trump's racist, Trump's all this, when black people went to his rallies, when gay people went to his rallies, they're like, wait a second, I f*****g love being here.
Simone Collins: And
Malcolm Collins: not only that, one of the, the lies that you will hear from this audience about themselves is that they are the foot soldiers and like Trump needs to like appeal to them to win election cycles. Right? Like there's people actually that's not true. Who is our foot soldiers? Who's no, who's, who's our real foot soldiers? Scott Pressler,
He said he'd come back and today he did last time
Malcolm Collins: Scott Pressler, the gay is our real foot soldier.
Simone Collins: Scott Pressler. Knocking with the Amish. Yeah. Just like a bunch of really cool doers. Yeah. And I just, [00:11:00] I, I genuinely, no, I did, I did once have a conversation with someone who turned out to, no, two people, I can think of two people in my entire life.
Who I've spoken, no three, because there was one childhood girl who was like in the fifth grade who like actually were definitely racist. But also I'm like, where are these racists? Like most people are, it's just weird to me. They're just
Malcolm Collins: incredibly rare. They don't. And you can see this like they're out
Simone Collins: there in droves and they're everywhere.
And they're like,
Malcolm Collins: no, this is actually a really important point. They do not. And you can see this in the data exist. In the republican voting base at a differential level than within the democratic voting. Yes. Yes. And here I'm talking about mainstream old school. I hate blacks racist. Not like a redefinition of racism around wokeism, which I also believe is accurate, but I'm just saying like the, I hate blacks type racist.
The, I hate Jews type racist. The, I hate gates type. They actually vote for Democrats at the same rate as they vote for Trump. And [00:12:00] you can see this in the data. So I will note here that what you're seeing is one They're incredibly rare in reality in the same way that actual far rookies are where they're rare in reality But the Democratic Party has made their rallies their events their protests like, like honey to a fly for these incredibly rare rope variety humans, whereas Trump rallies have become very, very toxic to these types of people, and they don't want to be there.
They don't want to have anything to do with it anymore. They see him as a traitor. And that is. Why I think in large part he's been so successful at breaking this Democrat narrative that he's a racist , because like, for example, the Republicans have this narrative like Kamala's woke, Kamala's not woke, and we'll be talking about this in a future episode, but she has not scared away the wokes yet.
She hasn't put out, you know, the The onion to the vampires to get them out of the building yet. Trump did [00:13:00] that was the racist. And we'll be talking about how he did that so successfully. So David Duke, head of the KKK said. I endorse for President of the United States Green Party candidate, Dr. Jill Stein.
Although Dr. Jill and I obviously have our differences on important issues, she is the only candidate who speaks clearly against the war in the Middle East. He acknowledged that his endorsement of a far left candidate would, quote unquote, shock some of his supporters, but said his decision is based on, quote, what is good for white European people as well as all of humanity, end quote.
So, I mean, these are not, like, Roundabout endorsements. These are who these
People want to win, and it is for one reason. They want the Jewish state gone. So, and this has actually hurt a lot of them now that the Republicans have become the pro Israel party, and Dems have become the anti Israel party. Even though the Dem leadership didn't get this particular memo.
They'd do a lot better in the polls if they did, but I think they're afraid of their donor class. And so, But here I'd [00:14:00] add another person here who's really interested in this Ann Coulter. So, Ann Coulter is not, like, people will be like, Oh, she's a racist because she said this stuff about Mexicans.
She almost married a black guy. Like, she's not a racist in a generic term, right? But she also falls into this category of having, I, I, I guess I'd call it an ethno nationalist bent. To some of her talking points around Hispanics.
Speaker 4: Are there any suggestions how we might help? How about we get rid of all the Mexicans?
Malcolm Collins: And I think that things start to fall into place when we study Ann Coulter's mindset as to why these people don't have families.
But we'll get to that in just a second. Going to shelve that for just a second. But she has says about Trump that she sees him as an awful, awful person and that she can't trust him as far as she can throw him. Now, the person who I think does the best in terms of calmly explaining all of this is Leather Apron Club.
Leather Apron Club has [00:15:00] a anti semitic and anti gay, I'd say, bias to a lot of the stuff he puts out there. But I should be clear, when a lot of people say those words, they mean them negatively. And I mean those words no more negatively than I would say that Simone and I have a bias, a pro Jewish bias in our stuff and a pro normal gay bias in our stuff.
And just as that leads to some bias in the way that he interprets things, it leads to bias in the way we interpret things, but it is because of that separate perspective that he has. That is so divorced from my own, that I have actually gained a lot of insight into the world by watching his videos.
Cause he just He sees the world so differently than I do and I generally respect him as an intellectual.
Speaker 17: Now I need a volunteer. Oh, come on. Anyone will do.
Speaker 18: Ah! [00:16:00] My eyes! It's burning! You fool! Never set yourself apart from the crowd. Don't you know there's a cult out there? Drag him away and put him with the others.
Malcolm Collins: But while I respect him as an intellectual, I also am not sad to see him leave the Republican party. And I am not sad to see people like him leave the Republican party because it is with the exit of him that we get the entrance of genuine.
Human stars like Scott Presley you know, cleaning up cities that are trashy, just getting out there and fixing things, getting out the Amish vote, likely winning Pennsylvania for Trump could have been critical in winning the election. And if we adopt these types of people's ideology, which you'll see, you know, he wants us to be harsher on gay people and stuff like that, not support gay marriage.
It just wouldn't work. 70 percent of Americans now support gay marriage. same sex marriage. And of young republicans, 18 to 29, 64 percent say they support same sex marriage. So like his perspective couldn't even win was like next generation's republicans. [00:17:00] We are not losing anything as these people leave the room.
I'm sorry about that, but we're not. And, and it's not just that, I note here, it's also that these people are just like much less pleasant than Scott Pressler and the normal gays. As they exit and the normal gays enter and the ext The party
Simone Collins: becomes a lot more fun. Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: it's a more fun party.
I'm sorry guys, like, you were cool, I kind of enjoyed our intellectual debates but as you leave the room, like, things are getting better. Scott Presler, frankly, is a more decent human being than people like Nick Fuentes. And, and a lot of these other people who we see, you know, they're not going out cleaning up cities.
They're not getting out doing the ground game.
Simone Collins: So I think, yeah, I think now also we are entering an age in which hopefully, hopefully there's interest in building up rather than tearing down. And I'm being selective in what I say here, because obviously there's a huge interest in [00:18:00] tearing down the rotten old building.
Broken elements of our society, government and businesses, but then that a lot of that interest in tearing down what doesn't work is driven by a very deep and optimistic desire to build up. And it's so much more fun talking with these people who are interested. In the the post apocalypse rebuild rather than just the it's the apocalypse.
Everything is terrible I hate everyone these people. So
Malcolm Collins: they're they're fighting for an aesthetic vision. It's basically a cargo cult They had this idea of what conservatism used to be maybe because they were like raised by like a single mother And they never met a real conservative and they never had a real man there to tell them like actually, you know This is what conservatism in america is and a splinter faction of the conservative movement took over some of the party's policy for a while.
And it was a splinter faction. People can be like, no, the theocrats were always the mainstream. They were not with what authority do I say this with the authority that [00:19:00] my grandfather was a long serving conservative congressman that my dad was a finalist. One of the final two candidates for two senior positions within the Reagan administration specifically being the, the guy who did connections between the state department and the defense department.
And when he was running for that, the guy who kept him out became the no name person at the time,
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone): Pat Buchanan.
Malcolm Collins: and he didn't like my dad because my dad had more nuanced opinions on things like abortion and he wanted a strict line when that wasn't even a mainstream conservative issue yet. And I think that he, you know, that sort of shows how they took over for a period.
When the, you know, average conservative voter was never about all of that and they took over for a bit and now they've been kicked out, but they're acting like, and these people who grew up without strong conservative influences in our life we've talked about this in some of our videos on
Andrew Tate, where Andrew Tate is someone who has never had a masculine influence in their life. Idea of what a masculine influence looks like and because of that they end up following if you think of the movie gladiator, I think a good differentiation here [00:20:00] is are you the emperor or are you maximus?
Are you the person who is okay? Was diversity was in their ranks who people want to follow because they're going out on the street Um like scott presler who's absolutely a maximus character going out and saying There's trash on the streets. I'm going to clean it up because if not me, who does, or are you the person who spends your day on YouTube
Simone Collins: gatekeeping?
Are you, are you tearing down or are you building up?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, like we've tried to build with the Collins Institute, an alternate school system. We try to build things with the EA stuff. We've been funneling money to lots of organizations doing really cool research. We have been building up. Where a lot of these individuals just focus on gatekeeping and basically just masturbating this conservative aesthetic basically in a corner.
And so I think as people like us come into the movement, people like Scott Presley come into the movement, they're leaving the movement. What we've seen is one, we can win with this alliance and win big. We're better off without them.
Simone Collins: Oh yeah,
Malcolm Collins: and [00:21:00] people can be like, well, what about the Bible? And I'm like, bro, have you even like read the Bible?
Like the Bible is actually pretty clear that it is not about Sharia law. That's like, these people want like Muslim nonsense. Okay, the Bible says render under Caesar what is Caesar's. Okay, it is explicitly argues for a separation of church and state and no legislating morality at the state level. The state is not supposed to do that if you're a real Christian.
And if you want to give up Christianity, just do what Tate did and become a Muslim and whatever. At least you're being honest then. But anyway, I'm gonna play the Leather Apron Club clip here. And I think he makes a really strong argument from his perspective.
Speaker: Don't vote. And no, right off the bat, this is not a satire video. I'm earnestly telling you that it may not be in your best interest to vote this election cycle. I'm mostly talking to conservatives and right wingers here, but to vote for a candidate is to ascent to their platform, to signal to those running their campaign that you approve of the messaging that they have put out.
Speaker 2: Our message to gay Americans tonight is this. [00:22:00] You're free to marry who you want, if you want, without the government standing in your way. And I think that, frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if me and Trump won just the normal gay guy vote. Oh, sure. Because, again, they just wanted to be left the hell alone.
Speaker: But what should you do if, like so many other conservatives, you see the Republican Party shifting ever further away from real conservative values? It's not at all an original thought to say that modern day conservatives are the liberals of ten years ago, and for good reason. What about if you're an anti war conservative?
Trump has repeatedly signaled his undying support for Israel at a time when tensions are close to boiling over in the region.
Simone Collins: Okay, and what exactly is, what's the gist of his argument?
Malcolm Collins: The gist of his argument is he can't support a party that supports things like gay rights and that has normal gays in leading positions was in it, and that has somebody like J. D. Vance who says that normal gay men will vote for Trump. So he's like,
Simone Collins: he's against the Catholic Church too? I mean
Malcolm Collins: He's against, look, he has this [00:23:00] vision of what a conservative is that is based on what progressives think a conservative is and not what conservatives think.
Isn't
Simone Collins: that funny? Yeah. Yeah. There is a group of people, like you say, the cargo cult phenomenon, who believe conservatism is the stereotype presented. By progressives of conservatives, and I would say that there are progressives who exist on the opposite end of that, who are the woke pantomime that That the right demonizes I
Malcolm Collins: absolutely agree But the difference is is that in the progressive party and we'll be talking about this in the next video they Have taken the reins of power and are the people at all the events in the yeah, right, right, right
Simone Collins: They they they turn it into a caricature And they completely lean into the point of absurdity and then they're rewarded and given a promotion whereas when that's turned into a pantomime and taken to a place of absurdity by the right You It, it falls off a cliff and is no longer a part of the right.
[00:24:00] It's not on the landmass anymore.
Malcolm Collins: They're like, wait, this isn't what I thought I was. I thought I was joining what my single mom. Yeah, like where,
Simone Collins: where are the tiki torches? Why aren't you handing out the tiki torches in the khaki pants? And we're like, well, we don't have them. This was never real. And then they leave and then we're fine.
And so that's great.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I think that there was a while where Trump didn't understand how to burn these people so hard. And in this election, he's done a very good job of surrounding himself with like Scott Presler surrounding himself with people who are like, Hey, you guys need to knock this s**t the f**k off.
People like us or, or, or rising parts of the new right. Who are like, yeah, we're not playing any of this nonsense. People like Elon, who the right will be like, did you know that he's banning people for antisemitic stuff? And like he says free speech and it's like, yeah, well, I mean, we mean free speech with You know, in [00:25:00] reason, and you guys have passed out of reason, and so f**k off.
We don't want to play, like, we don't want to play this game with you.
Simone Collins: You're not
Malcolm Collins: useful to us. You're not useful to passing an agenda when humanity is dealing with very short timelines. Civilization is crumbling, and you're in the corner masturbating with something that can't win because 70 percent of the electorate hates the idea.
Like, like, what are you thinking? You don't even care about winning anymore. It's just about feeling cool yourself. And I think that that's the core thing that everyone got sick of these people for is they were pushing ideas that can't win elections.
Now I also want to talk about them going extinct. Because that's the other thing about these people is is they tell people, well, fertility rates are falling civilizations falling apart. Here is something that used to work. And so I'm going to do that. Now, I point out to them as a student of history. No, what you're doing isn't something that used to work.
It was never a thing. It's a weird cargo cult that you have created off of what Hollywood said, conservative culture was in the 1950s, even though it [00:26:00] never was that
Simone Collins: my
Malcolm Collins: granddad was conservative culture in the 1950s. Excuse me. I think I know what conservatives represented in the 1950s. And my granddad, I even remember.
What he told me about Jewish people growing up.
Simone Collins: Okay. What did he tell you?
Malcolm Collins: Oh, he goes, you know, there's some people in my church, cause he was a very strict Baptist who say that Jews are going to hell and he's like, but one of my best friends is Jewish and I know Jewish people and Jewish people are good people.
And I don't believe that a good God sends good people to hell.
And This, this was a devout Baptist. Okay. And so that might've influenced some of my beliefs around Jewish people. Like I, I believe in multiple true religions, like strict followings of both Christian and Jewish faith. Yeah. Accurate.
But you got to commit,
Simone Collins: but there are many ways you can commit and, and, and, and different commitments work better or best for different people.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I, and I think [00:27:00] that they think that this was, this wasn't what conservatives were back then. And it was what conservatives were back then. They just been lied to by the media.
And they're like, well, what about the Klan? Well, the Klan was never a conservative movement. The Klan was a democratic movement. It was supported the Democrats and they're like, what about the party flip? The party's never fully flipped. There was a slight flip within one era, but there was never a full party flip the party flip that people talk about around the Klan and stuff like that.
That was no bigger than the party flip that happened with the trump election. So you could even say, okay, well, then they flipped back since then. Because trump is flipped with the parties fight for but what I also want to point out here is is if you follow these people this rotten deviation of of the perfect Christian lifestyle that they claim to be pitching doesn't work.
Okay, this rotten idea. Of white ethno nationalism in the United States. Now I'm actually okay with ethno [00:28:00] nationalism in like European countries. Cause like, whatever, like that's actually their country. But in the United States, no f**k off. But, but the cultures that they're pushing for that don't seem to work.
So you look at something like Richard Spencer, right? Two kids divorced. Okay. Nick Fuentes. He's a pretend virgin.
Speaker 20: Virginity. Remember, a virgin body has the morning sheen of an unopened flower. And the freshness of secret springs. It's your choice, ladies. Hold on to your glorious ripe fruit, or
Comprende?
Malcolm Collins: By that, what I mean is he's one of these like reclaimed his virginity virgins.
Speaker 20: Maybe I shouldn't coach, Wolf. Jerry, if you're worried about your past, don't. This is a great opportunity to start fresh. Even though this morning I thumbed a ride and made a little lunch money? Jerry, I'm giving you a chance to reclaim your virginity.
Speaker 21: Don't think about sex, don't think about sex, don't think about sex.
Hey, Jerry. [00:29:00] Lou! I was wondering. Wondering what? Hmm? If you could get me behind the dumpster, hike up my skirt and pound home. Well, I'm a virgin now, and this is one blushing rose you are not gonna deflower.
Malcolm Collins: Now, he doesn't say this publicly, but I have a pretty good authority that he's not actually a virgin and that he was conceived with IVF.
So he's Catholic ish.
Simone Collins: So just for the record, I've met actually at this point, several pretty devout Catholics who weren't informed that they were conceived via IVF until he was born. Way later in their lives. Their parents just didn't tell them. So it doesn't surprise me if that would be true. It's not at all unusual.
Malcolm Collins: It's a weird new Catholic thing, as we point out. The Catholic Church came up with this 200 years ago. , Pope Pius IX wrote the Syllabus of Errors, added this. He's the guy who did the ripping the penises off all the statues. None of the great Catholic leaders in history thought this.
Augustus of Hippo didn't think this. St. Thomas Aquinas didn't think this. It's, it's this weird new thing that, you know, It's gonna die out when 60 percent of [00:30:00] the population in the developed world is infertile by 2060, which is what we already see in the data. Anyway, so Nick Fuentes, yeah, okay, Nick Fuentes, if your way of living works so well, where's your wife?
You know, why did
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.
Malcolm Collins: okay, next, David Duke divorced two daughters. So below repopulation rate denounced him. Couldn't find anything on Alex. Well, that's what he goes by the leather napkin club guy. But he's never mentioned a wife and kids. It doesn't I don't know. You know, you can tell a lot of about a person just looking at their face.
He does not scream dad to me. He screams kid. Oh, and people often undergo physiological changes when they become a
Simone Collins: hormonal profile change that dudes go through when they become dads is it's real, it's real. Dad bod is real. Dad face is real.
Malcolm Collins: Well, well, dad face is real because you're, you're [00:31:00] changing, you know, and I, I, I would probably be able to tell dad faces was like an 80 percent circuit.
This likelihood.
Simone Collins: I got to say, by the way, Malcolm, Fatherhood looks really good on you. Like when I compare pictures of you from when I first met you, when I, I already thought you were banging hot, but like now you're more chiseled.
Malcolm Collins: What is going on? It's the opposite of what I expected. Well, I mean, that happens to dads.
This is very dad phase.
Simone Collins: Well, normally the stereotype of dad bod is beer guts. It's softer. And I don't like, I don't like who guts are softer, as you know. Well, I know.
Malcolm Collins: I agree. I agree. But I think that there is. A softness to the face of people who aren't fathers that you don't see in fathers, which you will see in pictures before and after I became a dad.
And I think that people actually sort of like instinctually know this difference. They will look at online influencers who are dads versus ones who aren't dads. And the ones who aren't dads come off as, even if they're older, like a Nick Fuentes or [00:32:00] something like that, as like plucky youngsters. But the dads, you see them and you're like, Oh, that's a dad.
Like they bring like a, a something to the room. That's a little different. And I don't know what it is. I actually think it comes off as a, not an authority, but almost sort of a stodgy acceptance of reality. Which is best represented in something like the person you expect to tell a dad joke. The world is not as edgy to them anymore.
And they're not interested in being edgy, they're interested in what works. And I think this is why the Bible, and I'll put the exact quote here in editing
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-1: The saying is trustworthy. If anyone aspires to the office of an overseer. He desires a noble task. This is an overseer of the church, like a Bishop or a church leader or a preacher. Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband to one wife, a sober-minded self-controlled and respectable and hospitable person able to teach.
So you [00:33:00] must be the husband to one wife. That's it. It's not vague. I love it. When I go to Catholic things on this, they go, it was. It was a metaphor. The f*****g metaphor. No, it wasn't a f*****g metaphor. You guys just ignore the Bible.
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-2: Or it'll say, well, it says a husband to one wife. What it means by this is that you can't have more than one wife, but it's totally okay to have no wives. What it definitely doesn't give mean is that everyone in a church leadership position should have no wives. Right. That's that's super obvious. And this is why, when I look at the various Christian denominations, I think that something like Catholicism is much less Christian than something like Mormonism, because at least Mormons have like a good reason for why they ignore parts of the Bible.
They can be like, well, I got some new scripture here. , I might disagree with that new scripture.
But at least they got a reason.
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-4: I would note here just because I expect some people to bring this up. They're like, well, what about Corinthian feminine? Where it says, well, in some ways a single person might be better at preaching than a non single person. And I would point out [00:34:00] here that the line from Timothy I was laying out there is . About requirement's requirement's for a role now what's the preface to the part in Corinthians.
It says now as a concession, not a command, I say this.
So. What here he's saying is well, in some ways it might be okay to be single in these narrow circumstances. Not that this is a thing that a leadership position was in the church should have.
Malcolm Collins: Says very explicitly unmarried men should not be allowed to be preachers in the church now a lot of people might wonder how catholics square that I don't f**k whatever you want to say But this is in the bible unmarried men are not supposed to be people you take advice from by the way, I went to look look at more of this because I heard when I was looking up.
I think it was david duke his wife divorced him and went for the guy who founded storm front a friend of his sad as well. So this was Steven Donald black. So I was like, okay, fun guy about it. Stormfront one kid has denounced him. Then you look at and culture, for example, no kids. Not only no kids, but she was engaged 10 [00:35:00] times.
Apparently I'm like, that's a culture. That's
Simone Collins: wrong. Yeah. When it's one of those things when, if you call everyone else an a*****e, it probably means you're the a*****e. You know, yeah, I'm not right there
Malcolm Collins: here. What I'd say. And my take away from all of this is, is that the reason why these people have resorted to this.
More, I guess I'd say like ethnic centric philosophies in response to what they see as like low white fertility rates because they don't have a cultural solution to fix that. And so all they can do is do things like close the borders to try to maintain the purity of their region in the same way, like the South Koreans did, but like, clearly, it's not working out well for the South Koreans.
If, for example, like let's say, suppose Ann Coulter is like, , I am concerned. about this American culture going extinct, right? And so I want to keep out Hispanic people from entering this culture. The [00:36:00] problem is, is that if she's not having kids, it's not the Mexicans who made her have no kids.
Like the number of Hispanic people in this country had nothing to do with the fact that none of her engagements worked out, had nothing to do with the fact that she hasn't even been able to like, Use a sperm donor to get pregnant has nothing to do with the fact that she hasn't even adopted, you know these are all choices that she has made or The result of the culture that she has adopted being a non functioning I
Simone Collins: I want to I want to talk about the line between Toxic ethno nationalism that's just destructive and pointless and hateful versus cultural pride breeding friendly competition.
So one of the reasons we talk about, for example, Israel having such a great birth rate, despite being modern and gender egalitarian and prosperous and highly educated is that they have this feeling of otherness. They have this strong sense of cultural pride. Now they're [00:37:00] not trying to shove out others.
They're not, I wouldn't say they hate on others, but they're definitely proud of who they are. And I'm sure that internally they will laugh at point out and criticize others. And where's, where's the line between what I would call sportsman like rivalry, where you're not hateful towards someone, you just dunk on them the same way that you would dunk on a rival football team.
Versus that kind of hateful. Oh, no, I'm not dunking on them. I want a final solution to them. Like what, where's the line? Because I think that you need to have that healthy competition and that internal pride for a group, be it cultural, Or or even industrial or, you know, nationalistic and, and then, you know, and pronatalism.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I think the line is, is, is clear and bold. So the modern conservative movement is a united network of clans. That is what America is now. It's the united clans. And that's what America always [00:38:00] was. That's what the different states were. It was a , United group of different cultures working to our common cause that competed against each other And I think one of the things that the left gets wrong is they think you can't have pride in your clan while still Ultimately being part of a united clan based network and a sci fi universe.
I think does a very good job of this because I've been playing a game in this universe recently. You guys should check it out. If you like video games, I've been loving it is mech warrior clans. Which is about the clans who would come back and attack the inner sphere and everything like this. And this is a sci fi world far in the future where every one of the clans that makes up the clan system.
Is very distinct. They have their own cultural practices. They have their own cultural identity. They have some level of own internal governance system. They kill each other. Occasionally they get into fights occasionally, but there is a system of rules that all of them obey in these conflicts and you can say, Oh, well, [00:39:00] I mean, this is like some new American thing.
No, in it. Every period that Western civilization has thrived. We have relied on this mechanism. Look at the ancient Greek city states. You had the clans, which were the city states, you know, Athens, Florida, Thebes, et cetera, who would compete against each other. Sometimes it's sort of ritualized competitions like the Olympics, sometimes in direct conflict.
But they always knew the true enemy was the barbarians, the outsiders, the people outside of the clan network. You look at. The great period of European history, the clans, the Crusader kings they would fight amongst each other, they would have ritualized combat things, they'd have other ritualized, formalized ways of competing, but when a crusade was called, they all knew what the other was.
It was the same with the Muslim . Kingdoms during their great period this system of united clans is the way that any of you can watch our one civilization video The one civilization works best [00:40:00] We work best when you have people with different philosophies i. e hypotheses about how to live but being able to have pride in those hypotheses and competing against others.
You can look at our ribbing of stuff like Catholic philosophy on this, right? Like we rib on Catholics all the time, but there is not like a genuine animosity in that ribbing. I wouldn't say that we should keep Catholics out of the country or that, you know, like, like anything like that. And we actually take the exact opposite perspective of that when we talk about it.
And I think we as a world need to get back to a perspective where I can say, I have pride in who I am. And I, as I hypothesis think that my culture is better than yours, but that is only proven. By how many kids I have and how many of those kids stay in that culture and how much money I make. When I say how much money I make, I mean my ability to contribute to the economy, right?
I wouldn't consider clans that live off the state to have any value to the system.
Simone Collins: So you're, you're open to the potentiality that you're wrong. [00:41:00]
Malcolm Collins: Yes, I'm open to the potentiality. I'm wrong. And these people aren't when they close the borders. It's in a way saying, and I do think that we should close the borders to low skilled immigrants.
I think that's just like a no duffing. As my grandfather said, he said, you can't have it. Heavy social services and porous borders. You have to choose one. I believe that this, this has nothing to do with Hispanic people or anything like that. It's just in common sense. And since we can't get rid of all the social services our country offers, we have to close the borders.
It's the only solution.
Otherwise, we're going to disproportionately draw low skilled people in who want to live off of the social services that we have that are disproportionately higher than those in their birth country. So, okay, like that's a normal thing to want, but these people know, they're afraid of the way our culture may change.
And the reason they're afraid of that is they recognize, and I think rightfully so, that their iterations of our culture are unable to motivate fertility. And we'll talk about this in a future video, because I want to do a whole video on this, but [00:42:00] pluralistic cultures Are intrinsically strong cultures.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So I guess the other losing element of this is in response to encountering hardship and low fertility, their response is tear down other cultures and not fix yourself from within, which is one reason why one, we're really skeptical of. Of groups that are trying to impose their will on other groups and like grow that way, basically grow by forcing conversion versus groups that are breaking off on their own, innovating and creative ways and finding ways to just internally be great and just do better.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. When this is, I think, a core difference between people with these two mindsets, how they look at other groups. So, somebody with one of these mindsets, they might look at a group like the Jews and be like, Oh, Jews are doing uniquely well on tests. They are making a uniquely high amounts of money.
They [00:43:00] are you know, winning a unique amount of Nobel Prizes. We should cut them down. Like we need to, we need to stop this from happening because it's not our people succeeding. Prevent them from
Simone Collins: being promoted, make it harder for them to get into good schools. Yes.
Malcolm Collins: Yes. Whereas you have people like us who see this and we're like, Oh, what are the Jews doing?
Right. What can we learn from? You could look at this was like, it's so funny that these people who would degrade things like the BLM movement aren't able to see their own similarity there where the BLM movement is like, well, if white people are earning more money or achieving more, they must be stealing it from us instead of being like, well, you know, maybe you have some cultural problems you can work on and you can look at some aspects of quote unquote white culture and try to adopt it to do better yourselves.
You know, even when you control, for example, for wells, like we're just talking about, like, Problems. For example, even if you control for wealth, homicide rates are higher in black communities. Like, so that's a cultural thing. Well, it's either that or it's a genetic thing. And [00:44:00] I'm not even going to take like, I don't think it is.
I think it's a cultural
Simone Collins: thing,
Malcolm Collins: right? Those are like the two real explanations there. And or you could say maybe it's a there's not a police enough police presence in those areas saying and then it's like, oh, so you want more police in black neighborhoods? Basically, there's no answer to this that works well for progressives.
And so it's one of these inconvenient facts. But, but I think that, that we can learn from people who are doing things right. And Jews, Jews aren't just out competing us, they're also outbreeding us. They have more kids. Even secular Jews are above their population rate. Fertility in Israel. Like, obviously, this is something I should be learning from, but if I'm in this tear down instead of, and this is what I mean, like, strengths leads to pluralism, if you believe that you understand where anyone's out competing, you're like, okay, I understand they're out competing because of this, this, and this, which is like what this channel is about, and I'm going to steal those parts of their cultural technology, and I actually think that their cultural technology is flawed here, here, here, and here, and I can beat them [00:45:00] It is my belief in my cultural superiority, the culture that I'm building for this family, that leads me to be pluralistic because I know that in an open and fair competition, we will win or at least be one of the major competitors.
That's also what leads me to a lot of people can be like, why are you so filial semantic? Because they're winning.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Like you're
Simone Collins: interested in those who have winning strategies.
Malcolm Collins: Yes, they're going to matter in the future. It's useful to build Klan alliances with them. Bill, don't be like the Nazis and kick out all your smart scientists because you know what those, sorry, your Jewish scientists, this is a bit like that Biden line there because you know what happens, they're going to build a big ass f*****g bomb and drop it on your face one day.
So don't do that. Work with the people who are different from you and find ways to work together because that is when I think it's one thing that [00:46:00] makes the Jews like really good, persistent allies for any cultural group is they religiously don't have a dogma to convert your kids.
Whereas the wokes do a lot of these like Catholic integralists do their highlandering it.
They're telling me I'll come for your kids one day. We can never really be allies. And so every alliance is like a Fairweather Friend Alliance and it's not what works well for western civilization as we have seen the period of western civilization where we had one of the lowest advancements like of our golden ages was the Roman period because it's too homogenous.
Simone Collins: Yeah, well, and here's what I've noticed most about the super high fertility Catholics, which are not really represented by the Pope with the central bureaucracy. They're converting incredibly well, and they have a very high birth rate. So they have the perfect combo. But the only way they're doing that is by having incredible communities and cultural amenities that make it a no brainer for anyone who believes in having kids and and [00:47:00] being there in the future to join them because they're great.
They love them. You know, they have the best networks and referrals and support groups and just other families to hang out with. So you convert because they're better. And that's, that is the way to go is you attract people and you boost your own birth rate just by converting. Imparting fitness, which is exactly what culture is supposed to do.
Malcolm Collins: Exactly. Well, and I, and I, I do love this vision of the new right. It's a United clans. When we show up, you know, you've got your Hasidic Jews, you've got your Mormons, you've got your Catholics, you've got your weirdos like us or Elon who have these weird, like, technophilic beliefs. And we all look different.
We all have slightly different takes on things. And what we agree on is we want freedom of thought. We want our kids to be safe. We want a basically functional government. And we want the freedom to be different from each other. And that's something the left can't [00:48:00] offer. When you go to their events, it is one way of being.
You are allowed to have a different skin color and that's it. You go to our events. Hasidic Jews think nothing like us. Catholics think nothing like us. We, we rib on them all the time, you know. We rib on Hasidic Jews. I've called Hasidic Jews witches before. Not all Hasidic Jews, specifically the, the group that I am less favorable to is the Habad group, but that's a big portion of the Hasidic Jews who would be watching this. That video, yeah, you know. I got some calls after that one. And, but they know when I say that, I'm not saying like I, Hate them or anything like that. I'm saying, look, I've read the same text you do, and I have a different interpretation of
Simone Collins: them,
Malcolm Collins: Even within a Jewish context, even within a Jewish theological context.
I have a different interpretation, and that's fine. An active theological discussion is what makes. strong.
All
Simone Collins: right.
Malcolm Collins: Love you, Simone. [00:49:00] I, I absolutely love, and we were so lucky that all of these individuals signaled that all of the racists and all of the anti Semites and all the homophobes came out and said, we aren't voting for Trump and our followers aren't voting for Trump. And so we got to see what happened when they didn't vote for Trump when they didn't come out to the rallies when they weren't excited.
And you know what happened? We did better than ever. Thanks guys. Yeah. Thanks. I'm happy with you. Go join the Democrats. They're more like you anyway. Yeah. They've got their own ethnic hierarchy. Pretty racist. Yeah. Yeah. So, deal with it. You'll
Speaker 5: When me and Brad first met, I didn't think we'd get along, but turns out we kind of agree on everything. Your racial identity is the most important thing! Everything should be looked at through the lens of race! Jinx, you owe me a coke. We both think minorities are a united group who think the same and act the same. And vote the same. You don't want to lose your black card. Sorry, I don't know, I just think we should Roll back discrimination law so we can hire Basie and race against Jinx!
Now you owe me a Coke. Hey, tell him what you told me yesterday. White actors should only do voices for white cartoon characters. I've been saying that for years.
Simone Collins: feel
Malcolm Collins: [00:50:00] fantastic there.
Simone Collins: You'll get on like bread and butter.
Malcolm Collins: Mmm.
Speaker 5: Black people should only shop at black businesses. I guess the only thing we really disagree about is I think white people are the root of all evil.
But what did I tell you, though? If we can narrow that down to a certain group of tiny headed white people, I think we can come to an understanding. Technically, I don't consider Jewish people white because Neither do I. But
Simone Collins: All right. I love you.
Malcolm Collins: I love you too. And this is the game I'm talking about kids, family, wife, love these people never ever ever take an influencer seriously. Who's giving you life advice that doesn't have a good relationship with their spouse and kids.
Simone Collins: If you care about having a spouse and kids.
Malcolm Collins: I believe this very strongly. Like, that's your goal of your goal is to have a surviving culture. You could, yeah. Then you have
Simone Collins: to, you have to look at life advisors who you can look at somebody like
Malcolm Collins: Steven Crowder, right? Like, okay. He has a lot of good ideas about culture. I think he's, I thought he was a competent person, but if he [00:51:00] fails at his marriage, then I can't trust anything.
He says about the way that women should be treated about the way. Oh yeah. No, no,
Simone Collins: no, no. Yeah, no, he's completely, he failed. Yeah,
Speaker 15: You don't wanna beat me or screw me? What kind of marriage is this? Bring a book.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, he failed um and and We need to admit that whatever he thought about, you know The way you source a partner the way you date the way we should act sexually the way we should act around pornography the way We should act about all that I can throw out the door because like clearly he doesn't know what he's talking from a functionalist perspective and some people are from like non functionalist cultures.
So this isn't gonna land with him They're like, but I like his aesthetics. I'm like, okay. Well I I my belief is you will go extinct You I might be wrong, but the data says I'm right. So bye bye. Bye bye, Nick Fuentes at The World. It was cute while you were here. This little thing you put on, it was cute. But it's over for you.
And it's over for people like you.
Simone Collins: No, it was cute, but it was wrong.
Speaker 6: Heh, heh. Isn't that cute? But [00:52:00] it's wrong!
Malcolm Collins: Isn't that cute? But it's wrong!
Simone Collins: I love you. Love you, Malcolm. We're
Speaker 8: I'm telling you, do a video of it, okay? Okay, tell me about Trick or Treat then. Trick or Treat is the part where you eat it. You tell Trick or Treat, Trick or Treat, smell my feet. I want mac and cheese. You want mac and cheese? Okay, it's Trick or Treat, smell my feet, tell me something good to eat.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
In this episode, Curtis Yarvin, a prominent political thinker, dives into the hidden connections between the Communist Party USA and the civil rights movement, particularly through the lens of Stanley Levinson's influence on Martin Luther King Jr. Yarvin also examines the intertwining of Marxism with various political figures and movements, including Hillary Clinton and progressive politics. The conversation explores controversial figures like Jim Jones and connects historical political philosophies to modern-day dynamics, providing a historical context for today's political landscape.
Curtis Yarvin: [00:00:00] Stanley Levinson leaves the Communist Party formally. He founds the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which is Martin Luther King's organization.
He recruits King. He writes King's speeches. He manages King's organization.
And basically starts the civil rights movement, it is just a rebranding of the Communist Party USA.
if you're graphing the social networks of the CPUSA, you will always find these like hereditary aristocrats on top. Jessica Medford's she's really the social queen of American communism. She marries is a guy named Bob Truhoft. And runs labor law firm.
So when Hillary Clinton graduates from Yale law school, where did she go to work first? Oh, no. , and it's like Barack Obama's connection to billiards. It's just like, yeah, sure. Let's talk about how many degrees of separation connect vice president Kamala Harris to Jim Jones.
Malcolm Collins: The guy who killed all those people in South America.
Jonestown
Curtis Yarvin: Jonestown.
Simone Collins: And we also
Curtis Yarvin: are not told that Jim Jones was such a huge [00:01:00] booster of the Soviet Union the letter That harvey milk wrote to .
Jimmy carter defending Jim Jones right to take this child who was claimed by his mother from his father and taken to Jonestown who later died in Jonestown.
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of people don't realize this.
Curtis Yarvin: boyfriend who he raped and then, you know, killed himself
Would you like to know more?
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-1: I tried. I really tried to find a good place to intro the script here, but the stuff said at the beginning keeps getting referenced later on. So you are going to get a stream of Curtis Jarvin thought in this, and it is. A fantastic episode. I think one of our better episodes. , just from an entertainment and informational perspective, if you don't know who Curtis Jarvin is, he's probably one of the most famous living political thinkers. , you might also know him as much as mobile.
He came up with the idea of the cathedral. He founded Herbet. Eddie. He's also a [00:02:00] fervent monarchist.
Curtis Yarvin: With the assistance of 11, with the assistance of 11 labs, you can actually make me say things that I didn't, which is opens up a really large new set of possibilities. And I need to do that absolutely.
Absolutely. Absolutely. You can, you can just catch in things and sound almost like the person results. This is just, it's a useful use of AI and you just make them say what they should have said. You know, cut out those, those Tourette's moments, all those N words, you know, and No,
Malcolm Collins: I'm adding all of those.
That's the point, right? We're going to have you talk like a gangster in
Curtis Yarvin: this entire interview. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. You do the whole cut. And then the person is, the poor person is forced to claim, you know, this ridiculous claim that these nice people you know, edited Dan word into his track and it's really, it's just a patently false claim.
It's just like, my account was hacked, you know, [00:03:00] right? Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You were hacked into the AI. You know, like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm actually
Malcolm Collins: so glad that AI is getting this good because I, when, when people catch me doing actually like horrifying stuff, I'm just going to be like, oh, that was AI.
Curtis Yarvin: I know. I know. And actually what people don't understand is that in the long run, it actually is a privacy technology. It creates more privacy because the result is basically, you know, seeing a video of someone now in the future is just going to be treated like you can you know, it's like someone showing someone a text file and saying they wrote this text file.
Simone Collins: Exactly. Yeah. So he's like, maybe they didn't, maybe they
Curtis Yarvin: didn't write, you know?
Malcolm Collins: So the baby feast, I thought that that was like our major, like under the cover thing of it. Get live that we feasted on babies on the you know, the black moon, but no baby feasts all in. Nobody will believe it.
Curtis Yarvin: The whole proto natalism thing is just, just because the babies are born doesn't mean you need to raise them. I mean, [00:04:00] have you ever seen a zucchini that's full grown? It's disgusting, right? Actually, the zucchinis we buy, those are baby zucchinis, right?
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Curtis Yarvin: You know, do you know what a white coat is?
Malcolm Collins: No. A
Curtis Yarvin: white coat.
It's a baby harp seal. It's a baby harp seal, which is actually in its lanugo. No. Which is the hair, it grows within the womb and it is beautiful, fluffy, fluffy, fluffy white stuff that works great in a coat and it only lasts for
Simone Collins: like a couple
Curtis Yarvin: of weeks. Well they used to club, there's like a, you know, there's, there's a There's, there's, there's a resistance apparently to clubbing them at the moment because they have these cute melting eyes and they look up at you, you know, when they're on the ice before you, before you clubbed them with these cute melting eyes, right?
You know, and of course, you
Simone Collins: know, the men
Curtis Yarvin: who, I mean, and the men who clubbed them, these are the crudest of men. These are French Canadians. These are like, you know, people that. Even the French would reject, right? You know, and they're clubbing these cute baby animals to [00:05:00] death. Very desensitizing. Like, you can't trust a man like this in civilization ever again.
You know, they need to be kept out on the ice. You know, and, and so in any case, you used to be able to buy these fluffy seal skin coats made from baby seal. Obviously suitable only for women. Apparently seal fur is suitable for men as well. So at some, you know, at some point, you know, when I have actual money, I should try and go and buy an antique antique used, used old fur is surprisingly cheap, right?
So maybe you can find like white coat, baby harp seal, you know, which no one has to be harmed for because it's vintage, right? The seal has already been clubbed you know, and, and, you know, no one is harmed by this and it's, and you have this beautiful white fluffy coat.
Simone Collins: Yeah, no one wants furs. It's also like, they smell weird after a while, and it's just not great.
Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Curtis Yarvin: yeah, well, I'm sure they can use the material. You can use this material. On the seals, you can use the seals. No, all
Malcolm Collins: of this material is going to be [00:06:00] used. I'm going to be talking about,
it's actually primarily a video podcast. We do a lot of like your
Simone Collins: hair looks really good. I don't know what you're doing.
Curtis Yarvin: I had a supporter you know, paid for me to get a very expensive haircut in, in New York and I've since maintained it. So it's just the right, the right look.
It's the right. Yeah. Do you want me to play the old hits? Should I talk about Irvett? Should I? No, no, I know
Malcolm Collins: exactly what we're going to talk about. I want that whole speech about how Marxism is actually like, this, how it became the culture of the ultra affluent in the United States.
And how it took over that culture. And you, you had this conversation over breakfast and I was just like, this is brilliant.
Curtis Yarvin: The first thing you have to understand about Marx is that Marx is an English gentleman. Okay, he's born in Germany. He is a Jew. He is part of the European world of the early [00:07:00] 19th century, which is a profoundly Anglophile world, and it is a profoundly Anglophile world, both Because English speaking culture is beautiful and amazing, and so many great things have been created under English speaking culture, but also because of the battle of Waterloo.
Otherwise, we would all be speaking French, right? You know, we thought we beat Hitler so that we would not have to speak this hard language, German. Actually, the defeat of Napoleon was the defeat of the sensitive, important language of French. So, you know, essentially You know, the sort of the prehistory of the 20th century is the 19th century and like, you know, it's really, it's a relatively short amount of time.
You may not know. Do you know about the Tyler's?
Simone Collins: No.
Curtis Yarvin: So, the, I believe 13th president, John Tyler who later I believe became a confederate senator. It used to be two, now only one, one of his grandchildren [00:08:00] is alive today.
Malcolm Collins: Wow. Okay. And
Curtis Yarvin: so, you know, this is a guy born in the 18th century who was the 13th president of the U.
S. One of his grandchildren was, is alive today. Now that is some serious longitudinal pronatalism right there because it takes a couple of you know, late in life childbearing experiences. Anyway. So, you know, my point is this country ain't so old at all. Right. And when you look back at kind of the 19th century, which really starts with the American and French revolutions, the rest of the 18th century is a very foreign to us, but it sort of comes into focus more for us.
And it's easier to explain in modern terms, of course, as it goes into the 19th, which is the era of s**t lib revolution. Excuse me, liberal revolutions. And that's another one of these cases where you added 11 labs had had something to do with that. I didn't say that you know, and, and in [00:09:00] any case the, the, so because of, you know, we can't ignore the role of Anglo Saxon.
In the French Revolution, it's huge. It's absolutely the thing. You have like the revolution society in London, which is doing exactly the same thing as like the Soviet sims in 1930 or the Ukraine sims now, you know, they love that s**t. It never dies, right? And hugely romantic because you have this energy of like, it's this telescopic philanthropy that Dickens talks about where you care more about the people far from you.
Remember the heat map, you know, the heat map the meme of the heat map. It's such a good meme. No, explain this meme.
Malcolm Collins: I'm gonna find this meme.
Curtis Yarvin: The heat map is something you see posted on certain areas of Twitter. I think I did a lot of, to popularize it, but it's actually from Nature. And it's basically a publication which shows that when you basically [00:10:00] compare the level of, of, of familial the level of, like, concern for others that people have.
And conservative concern for others, where like liberals,
Malcolm Collins: like love rocks and like conservatives
Curtis Yarvin: love their more than they love rocks more than grandma. Right. You know? And of course their love for rocks is an affectation and not real love. Nobody can really love a rock. Right. You know, probably easier in some ways for a woman.
Nevermind. But, you know, our children are
Malcolm Collins: terrifically autistic. You might be surprised how much they love rocks. Yeah. Yeah,
Curtis Yarvin: yeah, yeah, yeah. The thing I say about my
Malcolm Collins: kid road, love trains. Yeah.
Curtis Yarvin: Yeah. The thing is, the thing that I say about my, my almost two year old is that when you give it an object he hasn't seen before, you always feel like he's observing it to see if it belonged to the previous Dalai [00:11:00] Lama.
You probably know that vibe, right? You know, yes. Funny
Malcolm Collins: way to say it. Yeah.
Curtis Yarvin: In any case, we go back to not actually believing in reincarnation. Let's get back to Marx. So the thing is after, after the battle of Waterloo, basically, in which is the first point in which England, you know, the, the unipolar order begins with the battle of Waterloo, right?
And because then England becomes kind of. Clearly, we're all primus inter paris, at least on the seas, right? And that creates, you know, because of you know, there was an Arab, Arab philosopher who's, oh Osama bin Laden, who said, you know, by nature, when we see a strong horse and a weak horse, we like the strong.
So basically, there's a couple of different ways in which, let's call that Osama's rule, right, you know, and there's a couple of different ways in which Osama's law really, you know, [00:12:00] kind of is relevant to the existence of the, like, the shitlib and those, like, original shitlib that Marx
Malcolm Collins: was saying.
Curtis Yarvin: And, and, and, and, you know, cause I cannot speak sensitively about the great Arab philosophers.
And you know, the, the, the, that's. So in any case, in any case, Marxism, so basically Marxism comes out of this world that Dickens is caricaturing with the telescopic philanthropy, specifically what Dickens is talking about, you know, in his little cameo of Mrs. Jelly Bee in Bleak House who She cares much more about liberating the natives of Boreal Boola Gah you know, than her own children in her house, which she leaves unclean, is that she's characterizing a particular piece of kind of, shitlib colonialism, or missionary colonialism, as I say, one of my [00:13:00] voices not being faked by Eleven Labs.
And, and, and this missionary colonialism is what rules the Earth today, basically. It's the spirit of the United f*****g Nations. Which is also, you know, it's ultimately a Kantian spirit. It's like this sort of Europeanization of basically originally British modes of thought that we can trace all the way back to the late 18th century.
And so what happens is that sort of anglophilic thought becomes you know, deracinated, it becomes separated from its roots in Christianity, and it basically becomes this kind of, but, but it still very much is rooted in, in not just Christianity, but like English mainline Protestantism, dissenter Protestantism is sort of its deepest roots, you know, going back, you know, To the 17th and even the 16th century but, you know, it first becomes really [00:14:00] visible in this kind of like in this sort of poisonous spirit of marks.
And I think that marks is real. Innovation was to basically kind of take. So, if you look at the way the founders, right, for example, about political parties, which they call factions, or even the way they use the word democracy. You know, the idea that say, you know, all rationalists, I bet you have a lot of rationalists out there.
They all know about Duverger's law, which says that most political systems favor a two party kind of structure. And if you told the people that wrote the constitution that the U. S. would have a two party structure for its entire operating period as a constitution, they would basically be like, wow, the constitution has actually been inside its operating engineering envelope.
for its entire time because it's basically, you know, it's expecting like questions to actually be solved by like debate among statesmen in the Senate, right? It's like operating in a completely different universe than, you know, than it is today, right? And so there's no [00:15:00] debate in the Senate. What the hell?
Right. You know, the House of Representatives, which is supposed to be the voice of the mob of the people of the turbulent orders has a 99 percent an 88 percent incumbency rate. The Senate is 90 percent and plus an insane seniority system that is nowhere mentioned in any f*****g constitution.
Right. It was like it was written down by God. Right.
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone): Given that around half of the people who watch our show are outside of America. , I'm going to need to provide some context here. I think so the founding fathers of America, when they were building the constitution, one thing that they were very concerned about was that a.
Party system may end up forming in our country.
And so they built the constitution to prevent that. Now, if you are familiar with American politics, you'd be like, but doesn't America have a very strong two-party system and it's yes, it does. And it had one from almost the very first elections we held. So the American constitution failed within the lifetime of the founding fathers and it has been operating outside.
Its. , [00:16:00] meant to operate boundaries for a very, very long time. In addition to that things like the Senate were supposed to be where smart people would go up and debate and compromise and come up with plans for things. We do not have like real debates. , where people are being swayed by other people's words on the Senate floor anymore.
That is not the way the Senate function. So again, operating outside its parameters, And in our book, the pragmatists guide to governance or that pizza's the guardian did on our city state one, we point this out. But the other thing that we point out is sometimes the form that a thing collapsed into is more stable. Then the state it was designed to operate within.
I am reminded here of a collapsed cathedral where I went to college in St. Andrews. , and the Seadrill was in its collapsed state much longer than it was ever in its built state. , and that's because the forms that things collapse into are often self reinforcing. If the [00:17:00] building is still standing for like a hundred, 200 years. , and I think that that's sort of what happened with the U S government. ,
Curtis Yarvin: and so, you know, but I digress. . What Marx's innovation was, you know, that he was basically, he kind of looked at the violence and the conflict and the dysfunction that's inherent in these Republican forms of government and said, no, this is not a bug.
This is a feature, or rather it's kind of this like class war stage is something we have to go through. And so he's kind of goes from this kind of benevolent. Telescopic philanthropy to this kind of violent telescopic philanthropy, where he basically, he goes from wanting to civilize the nation, you know, the peoples of Borea Bulaga.
Again, this is based on, I'm sorry, I digress. This was based on the Niger expedition. This that's spelled N I G E R. Yeah, right. Okay. You know the word and you change the [00:18:00] expedition. Thank you. 11 labs for for you know, fixing, fixing that. And the expedition total failure. They were going to basically civilize the, the natives of the lower delta and teach them to grow cotton.
In like the 1830s, 1840s, I forget the moment, total disaster, ridiculous, you know, cartoon third world shitshow of an experience, right? And so, you know, Marx goes from this sort of benevolent missionary imperialism to this kind of violent missionary imperialism, where you start to see people, like, getting actually excited.
By these kinds of barbarities that they sponsor and getting excited by the class war that they sponsor. It's the sort of extremely refined pleasure, which is so it's sort of it starts to become this kind of psychopathic thing. You know, if you basically supported Stalin in America in the thirties, [00:19:00] right?
You basically all you always had this edge of like, I'm so much more real for you because then you because I understand the need to kill people and you don't
Malcolm Collins: and like, I
Curtis Yarvin: understand that you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. I understand.
Malcolm Collins: In the follow ups to this election cycle is a lot of leftists are like, we need to go back to being a party of the working class, but the working class is trans people, you know, like, I'm like, they were never, they were
Curtis Yarvin: never, they were never a part of the working class.
So the thing is, the idea that go back to is a complete illusion. They were always a party of the aristocrats and going all the way back to Marx and his f*****g sugar daddy f*****g Engels, you know, who, you know, ran a factory and supported this very, you know, profligate you know, person in his sterile intellectual career.
Marx was a great writer to [00:20:00] be fair, really amazing writer, you know, and the but like, you know, sort of reaching the barrier to that evil and like saying no, this thing that you've called evil is actually both inevitable and in its own way. Good. And of course, Marx would have loved to play this game where he's like.
I'm not really saying this is good. I'm not really excited by, you know, the, the, you know, talk of like, you know, gouging your eyes out and jacking off all of your corpse. It's just a metaphor, you know, that I'm like saying, you know, and like, like, like the, you know, he's like the creepy, you know, kid who writes the creepy short, short stories in the high school, you know, English class.
Right. You know, and so, so he's doing this shooter
Malcolm Collins: vibe.
Curtis Yarvin: Yeah, school shooter vibes, right? And so the thing is, you have these school shooter vibes that, like, extend all the way down to, like, Frantz Fanon, right? Who's just, like, you know, wants to kill, like, colonialists, right? And gets a substantial amount of that work [00:21:00] done.
And you know,
Malcolm Collins: sorry, people won't know this other character you named. What is he famous for?
Curtis Yarvin: Who is Frantz Fanon? Frantz Fanon is he was supported by the CIA. He was a communist. But I repeat myself. He was a He was an anti colonialist, sort of early, basically woke thinker from the 1950s.
This is early sort of No some kind of Europe, you know, international European. Huh. You know, the funny thing about Frantz Fanon is his name is not spelled F R A N Z. It's spelled F R A N Z. F R A N
Malcolm Collins: T Z,
Curtis Yarvin: But it so happens that misspelling it Frans without the T is an error we find in both Barack Obama and Bill Ayers.
Erda, we're excredited to both of those authors. So, yeah, Frantz Fanon is like universally, he's an early anti colonialist thinker, like, he's absolutely completely orthodox. [00:22:00] And he's basically like, you know, kill the colonialist babies and rip them from their mothers wombs or whatever, I don't know what he says exactly, but like, there's like, heavy, bloodthirsty energy there.
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-4: For some examples of exact quotes we have. Violent to the cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair in inaction, it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect. For the native life can only spring again, out of the rotting corpse of the settler. At a level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force.
He also argued that anyone who was a colonized person could enact any form of violence. They wanted against people who he deemed as colonizers without any moral repercussions or moral downsides.
Curtis Yarvin: And
Malcolm Collins: Obama is supporting him and Bill Maher is supporting him?
Curtis Yarvin: Bill Ayers. Ayers. Bill
Malcolm Collins: Ayers. Okay, whatever. The weather
Curtis Yarvin: underground guy. The weather underground guy. According to many reliable, yes, reports was Obama's mentor and wrote his books. Right. And [00:23:00] so we sort of, we see this trace of like this kind of sweet tooth for blood that appears in these people again and again.
And it's like they have a sweet tooth for blood. For power at first, they want to be matter. They want to be listened to. They want to have an impact. They want to change the world in a good way. You give them more and more power here. They like their, their, their results are worse and worse. And eventually they're kind of sweet tooth for power turns into a real sweet tooth for blood, right?
You know, and, and the thing is.
Malcolm Collins: Connect here. Sorry, before you go further, because I want to make sure this is the only episode where the guest talks more than me. I love this. I'm going to get so much.
Simone Collins: This is how it should be, Malcolm. This is how it's supposed to be.
Malcolm Collins: I, but I, yeah, but hold on. I want to make a bridge here.
I want you to talk about this because you're doing a very good job of connecting modern political figures with communists of the past and over this breakfast, when you were talking, you did a really good job of connecting Hillary Clinton [00:24:00] in Marxism, as well as this, like, actor family in the 50s who were supposed to be Marxist and then everyone thought they weren't Marxist.
Oh yeah,
Curtis Yarvin: yeah, yeah, I was so a couple of, couple of different things there. So, so, the thing is that, you know, the separation between, like, you know, Do you know the biological theory of cladistics? It's like the way you classify No! What are
Malcolm Collins: cladistics?
Curtis Yarvin: Cladistics is a concept in evolutionary biology
Malcolm Collins: that
Curtis Yarvin: basically says here is the only way to do categories in things that are descended in what's broadly called a genetic way, as both genes and languages are.
Simone Collins: Okay,
Curtis Yarvin: so, for example, in both genes and languages, it is a classification error to have the classifications that are purely based on, for example, if you have a category of [00:25:00] animal that flies and you call it a bird bat bug, a bird bat bug is a false category.
Simone Collins: Huh.
Curtis Yarvin: Similarly, if you have a language, if you have a category that is a negative predicate, things that are not birds, that is also a false category.
Actually, if you're really looking at the evolutionary structure, you realize that birds should be grouped with dinosaurs and not with bats.
Simone Collins: Right.
Curtis Yarvin: Okay. But any kind of naive thinking makes you confuse them with bats. Now, the thing is when we're looking at, so that's one way of looking when we use words like Marxist or liberal or whatever, that's one way of looking at what are the distinctions here.
Another way of looking at, say, how do we use these words. Is saying, okay, let's look at the social graphs. So let's, for example, compare, say, the social graph of Democrats to the social graph of [00:26:00] of Republicans. In general, what we would see is that Democrats are tolerated at a Republican event, but Republicans are not tolerated at a Democratic event.
Yes. Right. Okay, that is a, that is an arrow. We would see the same relationship with respect to Republicans and white nationalists. They would love to recruit some mainstream figures from the GOP. They'd love it, you know, let's say you know, Kevin McCarthy showed up at a Klan rally. He would be accepted.
But if David Duke showed up at a GOP meeting, he would not be accepted. They would, let's say Kevin McCarthy comes, he's in his like hood thing, you know, like it's a big secret, right? You know, former house leader, actually also grand wizard. Now it's time to unmask himself. He's, he's been working for the organization all along.
Right. You know, you can see it, right. You know, so the thing is, When we establish that relationship between liberals and communists, what do we see? Do we [00:27:00] see any social exclusion there? Maybe some situations in which the communists exclude the liberals. There's no situation where you're, you're just too much of a leftist.
Come to my party. Your Maoism is totally acceptable. You do not realize that Mao killed 30 million people and you're wearing a Mao shirt? No, we can't have you at this party. Okay, that does not happen.
Simone Collins: Yeah, you can't realize that Che
Curtis Yarvin: Guevara was a murderer. You can't comment on a Che shirt. I have a Che shirt.
Nobody complains,
Malcolm Collins: okay,
Curtis Yarvin: so, so, so, you know, so what you're seeing is that those net, that concept doesn't exclude, like, that's not a meaningful differentiation. Now, the idea that you can't distinguish between a liberal and a communist, that there's no fundamental distinction. Places you to the right of the whole Republican Party since the early 1950s.
Malcolm Collins: Because in
Curtis Yarvin: fact, it even places you to the right of Joe McCarthy. Because Joe McCarthy, of course, you know, insisted that you could tell the difference between a liberal and a [00:28:00] communist. Joe McCarthy was not out to purge the government of liberals. If he had been, he would have realized that he had a much harder problem and he was not actually solving the real problem that he was supposed to be solving.
Let me give you a, let me give you a very specific, here's what you were fishing for. Let me give you a very specific example of this. Did I or did I not talk at this breakfast about the name Stanley Leveson?
Malcolm Collins: I don't know if you did.
Curtis Yarvin: I might have mentioned the name Stanley Leveson.
Malcolm Collins: I don't have a good memory, okay?
You're going so fast here, I couldn't keep it all down. That's why you need me on the show.
Curtis Yarvin: It's all the drugs you did back in the 60s. You know, in any case, in any case, you know, Stanley Levinson. So, you know, one of the things that in order to maintain the separation between communists and liberals, you have to airbrush out of American history.
Is that America also has a civil rights movement in the 20s and the 30s and that civil rights movement is unequivocally part [00:29:00] of the Communist Party USA, which is at its high point in those periods. Self determination and the Black Belt. Oh, I
Malcolm Collins: remember that. This is the guy who ran all these organizations.
Okay, continue. This was really cool. The National
Curtis Yarvin: Negro Congress, you know. Huh. You know, the thing is, basically, the Highlander Where they were communist? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, they were communists, right? The CPUSA was a huge thing. I
Malcolm Collins: looked all this up afterwards. Yes,
Curtis Yarvin: yes, yes. They were communists, right? So, so, the thing is, like, after the US You know, the U.
S. has a very different relationship with the Soviet Union in the 1930s than in the 1950s. Okay, in between is the 1940s when there are beloved brothers in saving the world from Hitler. Then suddenly we go to war with them right after the war. What the f**k? The Korean War, we're fighting our old friends.
Like, what happened? This is super weird. This is basically what Orwell is talking about in the end of 1984, [00:30:00] right? You know, somehow people just like retconned this stuff and weren't like, wow, it is super weird that we were allied with Stalin and now Stalin is Hitler. That's super strange, and you read the newspapers from 1944, and they have to totally change their frickin line, right?
So, you know, let me give you a, another interesting fact. This is the fact of Stanley Levison. Stanley Levison who might well have met my grandparents as a Jewish communist in New York in the 40s and 50s.
Stanley Levison has is a person who had two lives. So, and this is all, you know, extremely well, this is not controversial in the slightest. Okay. This is all things that all historians agree on. They just don't really want you to talk about it. Until 1956 he is essentially the CFO of the Communist Party USA.
He's running its treasury. You know, and then in 1956, so the party has several steps in its decline. One of them is the Molotov Ribbentrop pact
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-5: This was the non-aggression pact between the [00:31:00] Nazis and the communists or between Nazi, Germany and communist Soviet union.
Curtis Yarvin: sort of recovers from that, not quite as well as it should have. That's 39, of course, then the start of the Cold War damages it again and the Korean War damages it.
And the final blow. That really renders it a totally fringe organization of no real relevance is 56 in the Hungarian Revolution and Khrushchev's secret speech in which he denounces Stalin. Okay, leaves it really hard to be super faithful after that. Somehow my grandparents managed, many did not. In any case, in 1956, Stanley Levinson decides time for a new gig.
So he leaves the Communist Party formally. It's not like he goes before McCarthy and tells the Senate everything. Oh, no. He does something else. He starts the civil rights movement. To be exact, he founds the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which is Martin Luther King's organization. He recruits King.
[00:32:00] He recruits King. He writes all of King's speeches. He manages King's organization.
Malcolm Collins: He's the speechwriter. Whoa, you said that he's making up
Curtis Yarvin: stuff. It's not something, it's like some wild s**t I'm making up. This is just f*****g history, man. He so he creates King. He finds this basically black dude who's gotten a PhD in plagiarism and has a rich, compelling, preacherly, oratorical voice.
And basically starts the civil rights movement, and essentially Americans are never told that it is just literally a rebranding of the Communist Party USA. They try to keep, there's other, you know, other leading figures are also leading communists. You know, and you know, So essentially, you know, a few years after what the Red Star does is it's essentially like removing your prostate when you have prostate cancer.
Okay. Well, actually, no, it [00:33:00] wasn't. You're removing the prospect. We're just going to like jab at 40 or 50 times with a toothpick. And you know what that's going to do is that's going to result in basically spreading cancer cells around your body and only by detailed G. N. A. Examination. Can you see that this like pain you feel one day in your shoulder, which is actually a tumor growing in the marrow that's going to crack your bone open?
You know, like you're reading ribs. Is actually something that came from your prostate and that's what that's result of the red scare not going far enough
Malcolm Collins: Hold on quick side note because when I was researching this the way that you really convinced me is you're like look up the The the web the wikipedia article.
Yeah, i'll tell
Curtis Yarvin: it look at the look up the wikipedia for stanley leveson It tells you that he created the southern christian leaders christian leadership council Look up the wikipedia page for the southern christian leadership council
Malcolm Collins: Control
Curtis Yarvin: f stanley leveson, you won't find it Oh,
Malcolm Collins: that's like one
Curtis Yarvin: of your like, do you know when like truman and the truman show [00:34:00] sees that like there's like The edge of the world is actually like made of like pieces of canvas and they're like stitches in the canvas Right.
How do you stitch that one up? How do you stitch that one up? Right? You know, the thing is so here's another fact that you may not be aware of Wait,
Malcolm Collins: wait, wait, hold on.
Curtis Yarvin: Yeah, I don't even remember what I said.
Malcolm Collins: I forgot.
Curtis Yarvin: No, no, i'm just gonna i'm gonna inflict this on you malcolm. You're gonna yeah, you're just gonna deal with it So you have you ever heard the word progressive?
Well, you know, the thing is what's funny is my my Parents who I know only through my parents were actual card carrying members of the Communist Party USA for 50 years. I'm not sure what happened to the cards, but I'm sure they had actual cards.
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-6: I should clarify that he means this literally communists during this period, you had to buy and pay a subscription for membership to the party. , and you were not considered a member if you were not paying. And it was an incredibly clandestine thing. It was very, very secretive.
And you could have your card taken away if you got in [00:35:00] trouble with the party.
And this could, if you were in some industries, like in Hollywood, absolutely destroy your career.
Curtis Yarvin: The word that they always used, they always used two words.
They used the word communist and they used the word progressive. The word progressive was used universally to avoid outing people for any member or supporter of the party. This is the way the word has been used
Malcolm Collins: and has
Curtis Yarvin: been since about 1930. Before then you have like Teddy Roosevelt, who's actually kind of more of a fascist, right?
One thing you can go back and read to convince yourself of this is two wonderful publications. One of them is the new masses,
Malcolm Collins: beautifully
Curtis Yarvin: archived on marxists. org since we're on a Marx kick today.
Malcolm Collins: Beautifully
Curtis Yarvin: archived on marxists.
org. And and it's basically the New Yorker, but for communists in the 1930s, which is to say the New Yorker, basically, but a little more doctrinally orthodox you know, and the other is the communist, which is the journal of the Communist Party, USA, and you can look at those [00:36:00] and you can see the way they use the word progressive and you can see the way that is basically a term for like one of us.
It basically means slash our guys. If you've seen the term,
Malcolm Collins: it
Curtis Yarvin: means slash our guys for Marxists. When they had to be a little bit in the closet, only a little bit in the thirties. Right. And so essentially as the old left, which is a centralized organization under the CPU, I say, because the anarchy anarchic metastatic.
Decentralized universal new left, which becomes wokeism or as some call it, progressivism like appears. It's like you can trace this route back to the twenties and thirties. It's literally a hundred years old. Moreover, if you've heard of the practice, if you've heard of the practice. So let me just finish, because I'm just, I'm really trying to blow your minds as hard as I can at this point.
Just to finish, this practice of cancelling people is actually a communist party practice. [00:37:00] And so, for example, oh yes, so for example, in 1946, 46 I think, Stalin Because the Cold War is starting breaks with the American leadership of the Communist Party USA, which is under a man named Earl
Malcolm Collins: Browder.
Curtis Yarvin: Amazing guy.
Earl Browder has this wonderful line which he says communism is as American as apple pie, which I believe to be true. In any case in any case you know, Browder is running basically the popular front line, which is part of the alliance with FDR. That line says line has to break. The easiest way to break it is to fire the head of the CPU is a from Moscow.
This is highly disturbing to Americans, but unless it gets done, Browder has to be fired. He has to be accused of something and his people have to be accused of something. And one of his people is this woman named Bella Dodd. Who, unlike Stanley Levison, actually really does break with the party. Goes, you know, to the FBI, et cetera, tells everything she knows.
Writes a book called School of [00:38:00] Darkness, very interesting book. And in School of Dark
Malcolm Collins: I'll be back soon.
Well, I told you this would be an entertaining topic.
Simone Collins: Holy
Malcolm Collins: smokes. I mean, I was,
Simone Collins: I've been wondering why, like, cause it's still like, I couldn't get like, wait, why?
Why is Black Lives Matter so Marxist? Why is, like, civil rights communism? Why did they put black
Malcolm Collins: culture first, you know? Like, this shouldn't be related, and
Simone Collins: it's like, oh no, the guy who was the communist guy is then just decided to do, like, civil rights.
Malcolm Collins: What?! Is that black culture? used to be, if you go back to the 60s it had half the number of out of marriage births as white culture.
Now 70 percent of black kids are born with that. Right. And it's, it's just because like a
Simone Collins: bunch of communists were like, we now own civil rights. Like we're going to do civil rights now. And like, that's what that is because
Malcolm Collins: Martin Luther King sold out the black culture by acting as a mouthpiece for this guy.
That
Simone Collins: So
Malcolm Collins: the [00:39:00] guy who used to be the treasurer of the American communist party then just did all this speech writing and you go, Oh
Simone Collins: my gosh. That is like, wow. But it explains so much. It explains so much.
Malcolm Collins: So Curtis Yervin, he's not like the other guests we've had on. I'm not a dude. What a dude. Dominating Curtis Jarvin.
It's like us setting back and he's like having a rant He did but they're good
Simone Collins: rants Malcolm.
Malcolm Collins: They are a good way to
Simone Collins: roar top drawer Damn. But yeah, I actually, but like, I just didn't know. I didn't know how deep it was. Like, just how deep the communism goes. It's like communism all the way down what is going on?
What is our country? Oh,
Malcolm Collins: you haven't heard his connections with Hillary Clinton yet? It's bad. I
Simone Collins: wanna hear, I hope he gets a cord. He needs to go to court.
Malcolm Collins: But no, so it gets crazier. So like, I love that, like Curtis Jarvin, you know, he comes on, he, we're like trying to prep him to like, do like an intro.
[00:40:00] Like, okay, this is what does well on YouTube. He's like, f**k it. I'm just starting. Like, I don't get a chance to introduce him. I don't get a chance to promote anything. I'm f*****g starting this.
Simone Collins: He's just, no, he just has to like drop truth bomb after truth bomb. And we've been Dresden like, I don't even know.
And are you, are you Dresden with my reality is burning. She's on fire.
Malcolm Collins: That is a good thing. I like that. And I like you. You are amazing.
Simone Collins: I love you too, but I'm, I'm, I'm a little shook. Malcolm. That was your reality. It was dressed in
Malcolm Collins: bombs.
Simone Collins: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Malcolm Collins: You see, I was like recording. I was like, Oh, I could do a good episode on this. I could do a good episode.
Yeah. But
Simone Collins: you're like, there were so many receipts. You had no more room in like your
Malcolm Collins: note.
Simone Collins: Yeah. I was like, I did too many names.
Malcolm Collins: By the way, if you don't know Curtis Yarbon is a friend of ours. We, we talk with him a lot. I, well, we were [00:41:00] at conferences and stuff. Like every time we're at a conference, like it started, we're like cold acquaintances where we're like, Oh, I know who you are and you know who I am.
But I think we've been at enough conferences. I feel very comfortable calling him a friend now.
Curtis Yarvin: Back! He's coming back! Return. I have returned. All right. So I was telling the story of Bella Dodd, right? You got the Bella Dodd content. So Bella Dodd is on the Politburo and she's one of Browder's people. And gotta go, you know, sometimes, sometimes you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, right?
And what's interesting is how they get rid of her, though. Because They basically prior in front of a kangaroo court for racism. They didn't even use word racism. It was racial chauvinism or white chauvinism, maybe, but basically she was accused of being racist to her. Who did this, the Congress or the communist party?
So basically there was one place where you could be canceled for racism, you know, And it was with the Communist Party in 1948. And it was, it was being [00:42:00] in the poll Bureau of the Communist party, USA.
Malcolm Collins: They did it first.
Curtis Yarvin: Yeah. And so, you know, you can go and find, basically it's just like people write these f*****g books, like the Origin of Woke or whatever.
Yeah. You know, which starred in like 2012 or even 1965 or something. Right? Yeah. You know, as if you couldn't find, there's this insane book that WB, WEB Du Bois dub wrote.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Curtis Yarvin: Du Bois, not DUIs,
Simone Collins: really.
Curtis Yarvin: No. And, and the the, the like, and, you know, which is called Dark Princess, and it's this insane like anti colonialist, like, you know, fantasy, like, oh, it sounds like a vsm.
Simone Collins: Chicklet. Yeah. Yeah. And
Curtis Yarvin: it has, it has that element to it. Right. I think. And, and, and, and, you know, it's like, it's kind of pulpy, you know, and it's not, it's not, it's not good, you know, which is why. So who's,
Malcolm Collins: who's referenced this book? What's the [00:43:00] relevance?
Curtis Yarvin: This was a review. I only found this book in a review by, I believe, Wyndham Lewis from the 1930s.
You know, Wyndham Lewis is very I gotta find the quotes
Malcolm Collins: from this. By the way, Simone described this when you were gone, because we kept recording. She goes, she's been what is it? Firebomb like Dresden with truce bombs, right, right, right, right. And so, yeah, and so,
Curtis Yarvin: and so, yeah, it drives you, it drives you, you know, like, yeah, you have to, you have to struggle a little to keep your sanity, right, you know, and, and the thing is, you know, basically, you know, the truth about history is that basically.
Like, QAnon is right in spirit, okay? It's wrong about everything, but like, in spirit, like, you know, understanding, understanding that, that like, this is not like your mother, like, this is a demonic organism from outer space. Like, that's the thing to really understand. You know, it's like, I was, I was seeing someone writing about like early, you know, [00:44:00] sort of the weirdness of 2020 and like the whole, like, rupture with reality.
Simone Collins: Yeah,
Curtis Yarvin: that I think a lot of, you know, smart liberals, you know, like certainly including, for example, my ex like got into, we're just like, well, the way I saw one person describing it is it's basically like, imagine like you're living, you're like a kid, right? You know, you're doing your like kid thing. And then your mother like unzips her skin and she's a robot.
And then your best friend's, you know, mother unzips her skin, and she's also a robot. It actually turns out that all the moms are robots, and everyone just sort of keeps carrying on like, like, that's normal, right? Okay, everybody's mom is a robot. No, that was
Malcolm Collins: so 20, that was so
Curtis Yarvin: COVID. Yeah. Like, it was like, oh, we're
Malcolm Collins: just like lying.
This is real life now. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Curtis Yarvin: Right, I mean, the thing that I love is actually no one knows where the six feet thing came from. Really? And, and it seems to be some suggestion that it was actually So social distancing just like [00:45:00] came out there? Came up with this number, right? And there seems to be some evidence, I heard somewhere that it was part of some like 11th grade science fair project that came up with this number for like social distancing.
Checks out. Right, you know?
Simone Collins: That totally sounds weird. And
Curtis Yarvin: then, and then they like completely lied about this whole concept of like droplets versus airborne for like a year, or like the way year and a half. Remember how COVID wasn't airborne, it was spread only by droplets? And you're just like, what, what is the you know, what is the difference?
And it turned out to like, make no sense. And actually there's no difference. It was just some like shitty research from the 1960s. You know, or how actually, you know, a part of the resistance to declaring it airborne seems to date all the way back to a reaction in medical culture against miasma theory.
And because miasma theory, you know, the idea that right, was like smells and bad odors and right. And the idea that things could be spread in an airborne way, like, you know, this is obviously the case for so many things, like sort of, [00:46:00] it was just weird. It was just like weird internal biases in the medical system.
Like, Oh, what do you want me to get a
Simone Collins: plague mask, starting with the insane idea
Curtis Yarvin: that it's It's really important to protect us from bat viruses by going to southern China and collecting all the bat viruses and modifying to them to see if we can make them more dangerous, right? Which is the US government was funding, right?
It seems like a great idea, right? You know, and like, imagine like trying to get that past, like a venture capitalists, like say Mark Andreessen, like Mark is suddenly in charge of funding science. Right. And you're just like, well, I think what we need to do is go and collect all the bat viruses and see if we can make them more dangerous in a lab in China.
Speaker 22: what do you mean by that? Do you mean like, perhaps there's, there's a chance that this was created in a lab there's
Speaker 23: a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China. What do we do? Oh, you know who we could ask? The Wuhan Novel Respiratory Coronavirus Lab. The disease is the same name as the lab.
That's just, that's just a little too weird. Don't you think? [00:47:00] And then they ask the scientists, they're like you work at the Wuhan Respiratory Coronavirus Lab. How did this happen? And they're like, Mmm, a pangolin kissed a turtle. And you're like, No! If you look at the name, look at the name.
Can I, let me see your business card. Show me your business card. Oh, I work at the Coronavirus lab in Wuhan. Oh, because there's a coronavirus loose in Wuhan. How did that happen? Maybe a bat flew into the cloaca of a turkey and then it's dead. I sneezed into my chili, and now we all have coronavirus. Like, come on.
Okay, okay.
Curtis Yarvin: And you know,
Malcolm Collins: I think thought that was a good idea. I guess, like, conceptually, I don't get why anyone thought that was a good idea.
Curtis Yarvin: Because you have to basically be zoomed in really, really closely. Because what actually happened in terms of the history of that event is, [00:48:00] first of all, SARS 1 happens. And SARS 1 is a completely legitimate zoonosis that and actually you can, you can watch this wonderful Steven Soderbergh film, Contagion, which you probably saw at some point.
It's about COVID, but it was made before COVID was released. Which is super fun and it, Like, is completely it the virus in contagion is a bat coronavirus. Yes That goes into a zoonosis because what happens is the sars 1 which actually gets into humans kills like 100 people But isn't really contagious enough to spread that well, although it's very dangerous creates is a problem, right?
There's clearly a problem. We've got bat coronaviruses mutating to affect people
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it's
Curtis Yarvin: a thing. It happens because it's a real problem. Guess what? You can get a grant to study it. And so that creates this huge imagine if you've been researching in this broad area. Here's his minor curiosity. [00:49:00] It f*****g explodes.
It's like your startup took off. It's incredible. Right. And so because of that incredible thing, you have this boom mentality. Suddenly this thing that you happen to specialize in because you're like advisor had some kind of like furry bat fetish or something, and you're the world's biggest expert in bat Corona viruses because of this weirdo.
Right. And you're just like, f**k my life. And then suddenly it's a huge thing, which killed a hundred people and could have killed a hundred thousand. And you're like, this is a serious thing. Right. And so we need to defend the world against these viruses. And actually, the funniest thing about this story is that you know, the main company, I use that word advisedly, the main contractor behind it was this group, Echo Health Associates, and Echo Health run by the notorious Peter Daszak was actually,
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Why?
Curtis Yarvin: Because he was there, ran Echo Health, and he was the one who sponsored all of this research and funded the PREDICT study which the lab in Wuhan was working [00:50:00] from. Ah. Okay. This was all, this was not Chinese research. This was American research being done. In China. Largely to save money, but also because there were many Chinese grad students who needed work in China.
Simone Collins: Interesting.
Curtis Yarvin: Right. And the funniest thing is, do you know the name,
Simone Collins: We don't know any names.
Curtis Yarvin: He was, if you, I grew up in the, like, reading a lot of Commonwealth books. He was huge in the Commonwealth recently. There was a an HBO show about the Durrells in Corfu or something. His brother is Lawrence Durrell.
I love these Gerald Durrell books because. As a kid, because he basically went around collecting animals from like the decaying British Empire and taking them to fuzzy little animals like little lemurs and things and taking them back to his zoo in Jersey, not New Jersey, but Jersey to, to like breed and like restore save these populations, which were all about to be invite for Bushmeat.
As you know, Frantz Fanon rips the British Empire apart, right? And so, so, you know, [00:51:00] he saves them. And so saving cute little animals is something that old ladies will contribute to. We found an organization called the Wildlife Trust, which specializes in these ecological expeditions to save cute little animals.
Well, a young wildlife biologist named Peter Daszak realizes, while working at the Wildlife Trust, that actually, you know, while people love to give money to save cute baby animals, you know, governments love to give serious amounts of money. to stave off important public health problems, such as bat coronaviruses.
So it goes from basically finding, just due to the incentives of the situation, this one organization goes from saving the cute baby lemurs to collecting all the bat coronaviruses.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah.
Curtis Yarvin: Okay, because they could be a threat, so we have to predict their emergence. But why do they
Malcolm Collins: make them
Simone Collins: more dangerous?
The monetary incentive is there's very, very
Curtis Yarvin: simple. Okay. So basically you want to show the point of your papers to show that this is a problem. So the [00:52:00] government will give you more money. Well, in order to, these are bad viruses, right? They don't naturally affect humans and just sitting there doing the things, you know, every bat has like ton of these f*****g viruses, right?
Which fucked up all our lives for two years, killed millions of people. Right. But they don't naturally do that. Because they naturally infect bats. But the thing is, they can mutate. They can mutate, they change around, they become different things, right? You know, and that happens So he was
Malcolm Collins: just trying to show how they could be
Curtis Yarvin: dangerous?
It takes a long time. It takes a long time for them to do this accidentally. But the thing is, If we do it on purpose, we can show how it could happen accidentally. And that basically helps us understand how to like, I don't know, something, something, something, you know, it's like, imagine you have like a child, you have a number of children, imagine your oldest child, you come home and you find him and he's set in fire for the kitchen curtains.
And you're just like, and you're like, Henry, what are you doing? [00:53:00] And you're, and he's like, well, statistics show that, you know, many kitchen fires, many fires, how domestic fires start in the kitchen. So, you know, what would we do, for example, if those curtains caught fire?
Simone Collins: Yeah. Let's figure out a plan. Could we get
Curtis Yarvin: out?
Put the dog, get out, right? You know, and you know, when you're, when you're at like the dog, get out, you know, you realize that like just the teenage years of raising this organism are going to be like anything you ever considered experiencing, right? You know,
Malcolm Collins: we're all ready and we need to talk about Kevin Chertory.
We're running out of time and I need to get to the end of this. I need to get to one, this famous actor couple who turned out to be real communists and everyone thought were pretend communists. And then two, Hillary Clinton's connections to all this.
Curtis Yarvin: Oh, Hillary Clinton's connection to all this. So, Hillary Clinton's connection to all of this is very simple.
So, I'm not sure if you mean which actor couple you mean, because, you know, they were all common. There were the famous actor couple
Malcolm Collins: that were jailed in,
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-7: Sorry, what I was getting wrong is they weren't actors. I was thinking of, because he had told me about this, that I didn't know. , Julius and Ethel [00:54:00] Rosenberg. Do you know, third of the faces of communist hysteria, who ended up being executed for being communist synthesizers. And we're the only people in the United States ex. Executed for being communist synthesizers. Uh, and they maintain their innocence throughout the entire trial.
And it was this huge scandal. And now we know from declassified documents that, , they weren't just coming to synthesizers. They were actively spying for the Soviet union and actively spying on the Manhattan project for the Soviet union. So they were traders to the country in a way that could have gotten, , innumerous Americans killed.
Malcolm Collins: Well,
Curtis Yarvin: the Hollywood 10, for example, which might be part of what you're talking about.
Those were, there were more screenwriters and they were actually the leaders of the Communist Party in Hollywood, which had basically been, which had been a CPUSA, basically CPUSA had been acting as a closed shop union for all the screenwriters of all the films that all Americans watched for 20 f*****g years.
So if you want to talk about like, you know, propaganda or like programming people. [00:55:00] Right. You know, and, and they wouldn't, they would only do things that were basically you know, within the Overton window, their business was pushing the Overton window. You might've, if you saw the great Coen brothers movie, hail Caesar.
You might you might've seen that, that vibe.
Malcolm Collins: Go over Hillary.
Curtis Yarvin: Very simple. So, The doyen of the CPUSA, because she had this incredible English aristo vibe, was Jessica Mitford, known as Deca Mitford. And Deca Mitford comes over to the U. S. shortly before the war, and then her husband, Esmond Romilly, is killed in the Battle of Britain.
And so she's a very popular woman about town being. Being, being, being, being single. You know, and so very, if you're doing it sort of graphing the social networks of the CPUSA, you know, you will always find these like hereditary aristocrats on top. I mean, I can't imagine, [00:56:00] you know, what Jessica Medford's accent was like, you know, and, and you know, her sister's duchess, right, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So she's the, she's really the social queen of American communism. The second husband who she marries is a guy named Bob Truhoft. And Bob Truhoft means, runs the leading west coast labor law firm. Which means basically, runs the leading communist law firm. Yeah, power couple.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Curtis Yarvin: Runs the leading communist law firm on the west coast.
So when Hillary Clinton graduates from Yale law school, where did she go to work first? Oh, no. Why for Rob Truhoff's firm?
Simone Collins: Oh, she had
Curtis Yarvin: no idea. Having written her senior thesis at Weldley on Sololinsky. Either she had no idea or, you know, it's just like this stuff is so completely blatant and out in the open.
Right. You know, and it's like Barack Obama's connection to billiards. It's just like, yeah, sure. [00:57:00] You know, and, and so imagine if like, imagine if like George W. Bush was like this connected to like Nazis. Oh, there's another fun fact that you don't also, maybe I didn't mention. Let's talk about how many degrees of separation connect vice president Kamala Harris to the Reverend Jim Jones.
How many degrees of separation would you expect there?
Malcolm Collins: Three, three. Give how little, what? Okay, go further.
Curtis Yarvin: Definitely not three.
Malcolm Collins: Two. No, come on, give it, give it, give it. Jim Jones
Curtis Yarvin: has been, has been written out of you know, his actual history. He's been described as this sort of weird, lone nut. Actually, he's a pillar of the 1970s San Francisco democratic party, which is Amelia out of which, of course, he's
Malcolm Collins: the guy who [00:58:00] killed all those people in South America.
Jonestown
Curtis Yarvin: Jonestown. So Jones, Jim Jones ran a progressive interracial church. It was genuinely interracial in which that consisted of basically ignorant, poor black people and like rich socialites. And a match made in heaven as they made you a match made in heaven, and it went to heaven, by the way, it was not Kool-Aid.
It was Flavor Aid. Most people don't know this. Oh, but no, that's
Simone Collins: extra insulting. No. And we also
Curtis Yarvin: are not told that Jim Jones was such a huge booster of the Soviet Union that his plan was always to escape to the Soviet Union and he actually had the People's Temple Treasury donated to the USSR in his will.
What?
Simone Collins: Believe it
Curtis Yarvin: or not. But also, he was a pillar of the San Francisco Democratic Party, who he used to do, like, vote harvesting type things for.
Simone Collins: And there's actually a
Curtis Yarvin: quote from Kamala Harris's mentor, Willie Brown,
Malcolm Collins: You know, you might say,
Curtis Yarvin: you might say, you [00:59:00] might say she came up under Willie, as they say, and I
Malcolm Collins: just need to point that out.
Okay. And,
Curtis Yarvin: and, and I, I, yeah, I don't have any problem with age gap relationships obviously, but you know, the, the the, the, you know, There's a great quote from willie brown about jim jones who you work closely with and that quote is I forget the order of these you'll find all these is great city journal article that you'll find all these Yeah, willie brown said when I think of jim jones, I think of a combination of I think the names were albert einstein martin luther king jr Mouncey tongue and angela davis.
Oh my possibly not in that order. There's not a great list of names You think of those you know, and, and, and, and like even better, you ever, you ever been in San Francisco town, it's midway in California and sometimes when you ever find a terminal one, it's the Harvey milk terminal. Oh yeah. [01:00:00] Okay. What the document that I want to see like like a five by eight feet blown up on the wall I don't even want to change the name in project 2025 You know, I want to like that's my you know I just want the picture on the wall full image of the letter That harvey milk wrote to jim.
Jimmy carter Defending jim jones. Oh hell. Yeah No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you will find this image and actually he's not just defending Jim Jones. He's defending Jim Jones right to basically take away this child who was basically claimed by his mother from his father and taken to Jonestown who later died in Jonestown.
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of people don't realize this.
Curtis Yarvin: boyfriend who he raped and then, you know, killed himself. You know, and, and,
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-8: So I was a [01:01:00] surprised by this and I wanted to dig into it to see if this is some conspiracy or some sort of like far right in sanity. , or is this like a mainstream fact? That's pretty accepted by everyone. , and so Harvey milk, if you don't know, there's been a movie made about him. There's a terminal named after him at the San Francisco airport.
He is considered a very famous figure. And it is also very, very well known that when he was 33, He was in a relationship with Jake McKinney, who at the time was 16 years old. , the core defense of this that I have seen from leftist is, well in many us states, age of consent is 16. So this is okay. , but it wasn't 16 in California where they were, it was 18. , It does appear that his accusations, , grape are overblown, unless you're just talking about statutory rape, which I don't really consider grape.
And then the second thing here is, , did the guy end up aligning himself over this relationship? , yes, he did. He ended up, , jumping off a. [01:02:00] Ledge.
At 1980, February 14th. So, yes, it is true. That Harvey milk was a PDA file. , was this 16 year old who later ended up. , jumping. As a result of this.
Curtis Yarvin: and, I don't know, like, you know, like, like, you know, here's the thing, here's the thing, in Chinese history, Okay. In Chinese history, whenever you have a regime change in, in Chinese history, that's a, that's a change of dynasty.
Malcolm Collins: And
Curtis Yarvin: there was a sort of, that happened enough that there's sort of a kind of meta dynasties regime in a way sprung up in China where they were like, this was how you handled that. Every dynasty was supposed to be eternal, of course, but this is how you handled that. And the way you handle that is the first thing that every new regime, every new dynasty does.
Okay. It's higher, basically more historians than God in order to write the history of the previous dinosaur.
Simone Collins: Yes, of course. Which of
Curtis Yarvin: course is born gloriously and finishes and born neutrally, really, like [01:03:00] you can praise it, you can, but it finishes in like complete ignominy. Okay. And right, you know, the point is that when it comes time for the future to describe the present.
It ain't gonna be hard. You know, it ain't gonna be hard.
Malcolm Collins: I mean, we win. I can look at who's having kids and I can be like, I know what the history books are going to say about the president. It's going to be non charitable in the extreme about the people who
Curtis Yarvin: yeah, it's going to basically say it's going to be like very simple.
Like there were, you know, white people build big ruin, all gone big ruin, you know, Well, I'm full of decaying bats. And, and, you know, then, you know,
Malcolm Collins: over there,
Curtis Yarvin: Amish country, bad, no go, you know, I, I
Malcolm Collins: think [01:04:00] that the locusts in the urban monoculture are going to be treated in history the same way that the Germans are treated in Roman history.
It's like yeah, there were these people who kept attacking us randomly, but they're basically savages write them out of history
Curtis Yarvin: Well, no, actually if you look at the way tacitus treats the germans, it's actually somewhat different from that because tacitus is actually recognizing as well as the barbarity of the germans who's recognizing their superiority And he's basically sees like wow, these germans are faithful to their wives The way we Romans used to be.
Wow, they actually remind us a lot about the way legend tells us we Romans were in like 600 BC. Right? Actually, modern anthropology has basically figured out that this is true, and this is because the Romans in 600 BC were basically f*****g Yamnaya, six foot six blonde gods from the steppes, right? Like the Germans of his day.
And, you know, they just got diluted by , what the Nordic people's called the thrall cast. Right. [01:05:00] And, and so, you know, actually, when you look at basically who fits that description today, you know, what sort of. foreign and like deeply alien people do we see today that are in some ways superior to us?
How could we write a kind of new Cassidus? And then I'm like, Well, I can always start talking about the Moscow Metro, you know,
I have no idea what the Moscow Metro is a clean subway in Moscow, which is a place in Russia. Okay. It is a clean, attractive subway.
Simone Collins: He's referring to the actual Moscow Metro. It's not like a euphemism. It's just I
Curtis Yarvin: would basically be like, you know, Wow, these people are really kind of barbaric in some ways, but you know, in other ways, they, they actually kind of seem superior.
Simone Collins: Dude, anything compared to Bart, I'm sorry, is going to look like you can eat off [01:06:00] the floors. I just don't know what to say.
Curtis Yarvin: Well, you've been to New York, right? I'm sorry, but you've been to New York, you can't eat off the floors in New York. Okay, okay, touche, touche. But even in Paris, you know, it's like you even compare the Paris metro to the Moscow metro and you know, I'm, I'm hardly setting foreign policy for the new Trump administration that will obviously be, be set by checks phone Marco Rubio.
You know, however you know, if I was you know, somehow appointed as secretary of state, which seems quite unlikely at this point you know, I think I have a somewhat tacit it's inspired. Maybe it's inspired more by Charles Morass. I don't know. But you know, my, my foreign policy is very simple toward Russia.
I believe that we should draw a red line in the sand. It's actually, it's a very strong policy. People have accused me of being a Russia simp. This is not true at all. Okay. I believe that we need that the president, the incoming president needs to make a strong statement to Vladimir Putin. He needs to say, [01:07:00] we've drawn a line in the sand and beyond this line, Mr.
Putin, no, no aggression will stand. We
Malcolm Collins: said that to Saddam
Curtis Yarvin: Hussein, by the way, do you want to be in a spider hole like Saddam? Didn't think so. Right. So beyond this line, no aggression will stand. And you know, and when I say that line, it reminds me of a number, another great line in American history by another great president, also very charismatic man, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
And I, in 1937, something like that, he said this thing to reporters, which he later denied, but he definitely did say it. He said, America's frontier is on the rise. How does that sound? America's frontier is on the line. So, so we're doing it by rivers. So we're doing it, we're doing it by rivers or at least bodies of water here.
So, you know, if you look at kind of the current policy, the policy of my predecessor, we might say, America's frontiers on the Dnieper, or excuse me, Dnipro. You know, so you could, you could go that far. Okay but you know, that's even farther than Iran. [01:08:00] Now, you know, my view is farther east. Now, my view is, you know, times have changed.
It's a different world. It's not 1945 anymore. And I think I know where America has to draw her red line against Russian aggression. That's an English channel. Okay, and when I say the English channel, like, I mean the English channel, you know, for example,
Simone Collins: Oh my god.
Curtis Yarvin: Hitler crossed that line. Hitler, most people don't know that Hitler took Jersey.
Not New Jersey, but Sark. Okay, so, the thing is, when I say the channel, I mean the channel. Hands off Sark, Mr. Putin. Okay, if one, one Russian No Sark. You draw the line at Sark. I draw the line at Sark, the airspace at Sark, we will shoot it down. We will shoot it down, Mr. Putin. But the thing is, do you want to clean up Paris?
Malcolm Collins: Ehhhhh. Ehhhhh. I mean, you're
gonna get, Malcolm's gonna have to agree. He's not a big fan of the show. How anti German we are and how anti French we are. And I'm like, but why would we save them? [01:09:00] Like, what have they given us in the past 50
years? And
they're like, well, the German people have a great, and I'm like, yeah, and the great ones left.
Curtis Yarvin: No, no, no, no, no. I totally disagree with that. I think two things, cars and wine. Okay. And also the space program. Let's not forget, let not forget wine. You know, when American, an American set foot on the moon. That's true. He was an American although he was a white man, but you know, it was a Nazi space program looked at on the moon, you know, directed by the same direct of One Brown, you know, and so like basically directed by, they say, wait
Malcolm Collins: is the same people?
Curtis Yarvin: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. The army tried to have a program of their own, but their first rocket crashed and they were just like, we're going to park a couple of hundred Nazi rocket scientists and Allah f*****g Bama, you know, and not give them access to any Jews or anything. And they're going to put a man on the moon.
An American on the moon, you know, but like a very blonde, you know, like, like not looking [01:10:00] American.
The American space program, the Apollo program, it was directed by Venovan Brown. That's like, you know, the Tom Lehrer lyrics, like, you know, as the rockets go up, who knows where they come down. It's not my debauchment. It was literally the director of both the V2 program and the Apollo program.
Simone Collins: Oh, there you go.
Malcolm. That and Givers Treminer. Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: there you go. That and Givers Treminer, right? You know, you have too many. You are.
Curtis Yarvin: All this stuff is on Wikipedia. Right. You know,
Simone Collins: he brings receipts. Malcolm. That's the problem. I show you the receipts. The
Curtis Yarvin: receipts are real. It's just nobody sort of thinks about it.
Like, you know, nobody thinks that basically like, you know, Oh, in the sixties, what is the sixties? The Apollo program and the civil rights. Okay. Realizing that the Apollo program is actually Nazi and the civil rights is literally Nazi. And the civil [01:11:00] rights movement is literally communist. It's just like beyond anyone's ken when they process this period and yet it's literally true It's two clicks away in wikipedia.
I can't right there communists and fascists in different senses true, but like, you know like, as you know, so so it's The
Malcolm Collins: past
Curtis Yarvin: isn't dead it isn't even past
Malcolm Collins: I'm talking to an actual thought criminal here. Yeah. I wanna, I wanna be clear that we don't endorse any, absolutely not, absolutely not anything. You can research yourself.
Curtis Yarvin: You're just, you just have, you know, respectable, clean that's us. I mean, not you know, the thing is, you know, there's no.
There's no, can we say the word, there's no such thing as eugenics. Okay. Eugenics is just an absence of dysgenics. It's not a belief. It's the absence of the belief. You know, and, and, and this is another thing from cladistics. It's called the negative [01:12:00] predicate. Basically you don't want to say, Oh, this is a type of animal that doesn't fly.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Curtis Yarvin: We're not,
Malcolm Collins: not birds. We're humans. We're not,
Curtis Yarvin: not birds. We're humans, right? We're not genetically
Malcolm Collins: retarded. We're genetically not retarded.
Curtis Yarvin: Well indeed. Indeed. And as you know, let me, let me leave you with a couple of different observations. Maybe I've shared this one. Okay. Maybe this is an observation that you've heard before, but you know, as you know, a lot of people believe this old American idea that all all men are, are created equal.
Right? Yeah. Yeah. And I'm just like, what if that's not well, you know, what if it's like true in a sense, but we could make it truer
Malcolm Collins: and I came
Curtis Yarvin: up with a way to make it truer. Okay. And that is we could instead we could say all identical twins are created equal. Isn't that true? That's really, really true.
It is so good. Again, it's not on the margins, there's some differences, right? You can tell them apart. Let me leave you with something else, which is, since we've talked about [01:13:00] history, this is a very short haiku written about 30 years ago on the internet by some friends of mine. I forget who wrote it. I didn't write it.
And like all haiku, It needs to start with the essential first line of a haiku, which is the most cliched line possible, which is, Fairy Blossoms Fall. Of course. Of course. So let me leave you with a short, yet resonant haiku that you'll probably not forget.
Cherry blossoms fall, three shots, 6. 9 seconds, rains in Jackie's lap.
Simone Collins: Oh my god. Oh!
Malcolm Collins: I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
Curtis Yarvin: We need
Malcolm Collins: to, we need to go. I need to get the kid. Simone, stop laughing. I know you're enjoying that Curtis on the show. You are a friend of the family. Your
Curtis Yarvin: kids are awesome. Alright, alright, alright. And it's so
Malcolm Collins: weird that [01:14:00] we haven't had you on yet.
And we'll be, Hey, we're gonna be, you know, CNN only got 500 10, 000 viewers on election
day.
So, you know, getting 10, 000 viewers per episode ain't so bad.
That's bad. All right. All right.
Speaker: Take this one. Yeah, it's okay. We'll get it open for you. Look. I see mommy eggs. Do you see any eggs? Ah, we have one, two new eggs. Yeah. One, two, two new eggs. Okay. No, that's not a real egg. This is a real egg though. And then you want to hold it. You promised to not drop it. Okay. You have to hold very careful. Two hands, two hands. Here you go, buddy. Alright, hold it with two hands and take it inside.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
In this episode, the hosts delve into the story of Peanut the squirrel, a pet squirrel euthanized by government authorities. They explore the circumstances surrounding Peanut's demise, issue of government misuse of power, and the broader implications of such actions. The narrative includes discussions about bureaucracy, personal anecdotes, and wider political ramifications, ultimately emphasizing the need for systemic reform.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone.
I'm excited today. I'm going to be talking to you about Peanut the squirrel, the unsung American hero.
We've done full episodes on topics where I'm like, this is something I want to know more about. I want to know the full story. I want to know, like, unbiasedly what happened. Or was the right bias.
Speaker: I can feel it oh lord I've been
Malcolm Collins: for people who don't know, the broad story of Peanuts the Squirrel is, Peanuts the Squirrel was a pet squirrel that was euthanized by heavy handed government practices.
We are going to go into how this happened, why this happened, and I'd also say this isn't necessarily a rare phenomenon. So, people are gonna be like, what do you mean not necessarily a rare phenomenon? this is somebody saying, what radicalized you? And it's a black woman, Caitlin Greenidge. She goes, when we lived in public housing, my mom started a community garden to grow food, to save money, and to occupy the kids that lived there. And the public housing authority came and [00:01:00] pulled out all the plants and poured bleach on the ground to destroy it because gardens weren't allowed.
Simone Collins: Oh my gosh.
I mean, Victory Gardens were the most patriotic American government supported thing in World War II. What is this?
Malcolm Collins: I, I just gonna say progressives are evil. But anyway, we'll get into this more like, it, it, it gets more evil than you could conceivably imagine with peanuts, squirrel. It gets into the level of you're like, would they genocide my people?
And then you'll read this and you'll be like, oh yeah, they would, and they wouldn't even think of it as a thing. So
Simone Collins: as a squirrel going to reveal this, I, I'm out of the loop, actually. Oh, okay. All right. I'm glad you're airing this then, because the election kind of. drove right over the election,
Malcolm Collins: hid how severe the peanut, the squirrel story is.
And I think it really shows the true evil that the bureaucracy represents and why we need to fight it [00:02:00] and burn it and rip it from every state and every County in every country, because it is evil in the extreme, but. Peanut's story began seven years ago, when Mark Longo found him as an orphaned baby squirrel in New York City after his mother was hit by a car.
Longo took Peanut home, where he nurtured him back to health due to a severe injury that caused Peanut to lose half his tail. He was deemed unable to survive in the wild. Consequently, Longo decided to keep him as a pet, sharing their adventures on social media platforms. Like Instagram, where Peanut grew up to 720, 000 followers.
Simone Collins: Okay, so this was a celebrity squirrel.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, this is why it matters as well. It was a celebrity squirrel, and it may have played a part in handing Trump this election. What? Oh,
Simone Collins: wow. The plot thickens. Sign me up for this. This is good. Okay.
Malcolm Collins: On October 30, 2024, so right before this election, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, [00:03:00] DEC, executed a raid on Longo's home in Pine County following an anonymous complaint about illegally keeping of wildlife.
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone): There was rumors that somebody named Monica Keithley. had admitted to it in a Tik TOK video. And then everybody went and attacked somebody else called moniker Kessler, but then they attacked Monica Keesler. And it has since come out for a freedom of information requests that she was not the person who did it, or at least there is no proof that she was the person who did it.
So I'm. Just trying to clear this up, but basically the evidence seems to cite to our turn, not being the person who did it. But a lot of people think it was her.
Malcolm Collins: So, this is very similar to like how haters about us will say something like, Oh, you know, let's raid their house with the Child Protective Services, which we've had called on us twice by haters. It's
Simone Collins: similar to swatting. So people used to just, I think now swatting is more rare because it was abused so much.
But now people call CPS or they call animal, some kind of like [00:04:00] animal humane service. Remember the llama farm had, had the, had like some kind of department called on them a bunch of times. The trans llama farm.
Malcolm Collins: But but it during this raid and you'll see how completely unjustified this was in a second during this raid authority seized both peanut And Fred, a raccoon that Longo had recently rescued.
The DEC reported that Peanut had allegedly bit an officer during the inspection, which led to both animals being euthanized for rabies testing. Both animals, the raccoon bit nobody. They euthanized both animals. The decision sparked outrage. Hold on, hold
Simone Collins: on, hold on. Because you and I, we had a rabies scare this summer and we were, it was, there was a bat that was dead in our yard and we actually did have to send it in.
It was still alive. And what happens is if, if there is potential exposure, you know, maybe someone like a child was bit by an animal, you are supposed to send it in for testing so that you can tell. This
animal couldn't [00:05:00] have conceivably had rabies.
Yeah, that's the thing is, is squirrels don't. For my understanding, squirrels don't carry rabies.
Rodents don't carry rabies.
It doesn't matter if the squirrel bit them. The squirrel was not rabid. And also, if the squirrel was rabid, this guy would know because it was in his house and he would know that the squirrel was lethargic and then aggressive. But that's just
Malcolm Collins: by another animal. How was it bit by another animal?
It was in his house and they knew.
Simone Collins: Yes. Yeah, the raccoon could have been rabid though, but the raccoon didn't bite, right? Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: so, and it gets, so, so just, you know, how overreaction this was in terms of like wasteful government spending, six to eight New York Department of Environmental Conservation officers arrived at the house.
They spent hours inside the farmhouse searching every part of the home. He described it as quote We weren't allowed to move. We were police escorted to use the bathroom end quote
Speaker 2: Arms of the angel From [00:06:00] You find some comfort here.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): There has been some recent speculation that this may have been over an only fans account that he and his wife ran because they also do babysitting. Sometimes the reason he suspected this might be the case. Is because the first question that was asked of them is, do they have any. Cameras in their house. However, I kind of doubt that because we know the agency, these individuals came from, they came from the animal protection agency.
And because of that, you can't have animal protection agency. People do an investigation into. Porn that just makes no sense.
Like they, I don't think cross departments to do things like that. So I think that this is just him freaking out. And the reason they were probably asking about cameras is they wanted to make sure no footage leaked of them doing this because it would have made them look bad.
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-1: Also side note, apparently they made $800,000 a month on only fans and they bought a [00:07:00] 358. Acre property with this money and. What should I be doing? I did not know. You could make that much money on only fans that's in the scene. $800,000 a month.
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-2: I mean. Look. I may have some misgivings around pornography, but they are not $800,000 a month misgivings. I can, I can get around any scruples I have for that kind of money. So should Simone and I be starting an only fans account in the comments, by the way, this is a joke. I would never actually do that even for $800,000 a month.
Malcolm Collins: They had a search warrant which they used to seize a quote unquote unlawfully possessed gray squirrel and raccoon And any other, well, no other unlawfully possessed wildlife, that's all he had.
And they begin to aggressively question his wife, Diana, about potentially being an illegal immigrant. Which, by the way, people are like, Republicans do this? No, [00:08:00] Democrats do this. The Democrats, and we saw this in our election video for anyone who wants to see this, the moment they don't think that somebody's supporting their cause, they will not only deport you, they will sterilize you, they will kill you because that is who they are as human beings.
They use you because they think they own your identity, not because they give a flying f**k who you are.
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-3: How cavalierly the Democrats weaponize political institutions against their opponents. It's just wild to me. They do it so frequently. Now they don't even notice that they're doing it. , so they'll say something like, oh my gosh. Now that the Bellin Trump is elected. He will hit his opponents with frivolous lawsuits.
And I'm like, you. You understand that felon isn't like a slur. It's a sign that he was targeted by a frivolous lawsuit by his political opponents. It's wild that Trump hasn't done this to his political opponents and yet his political opponents [00:09:00] regularly do it to him. And his supporters, you know, like Elon Musk was pointing out the, , oh, we can't let you launch a rocket because it may hit a whale. When it, when it enters the ocean, like. What and. To give you an idea of how delusional they have gotten around this is despite the fact that everybody knows, and they constantly remind us this whole, every time you mentioned that Trump's a felon.
All, I think it's oh yeah. You weaponized politics to hit him with a frivolous lawsuit and they're like, no, it was, , I'm like, why is he a felon? They're like, um, he, um, do you want me to remind you why he's a felon? He's a felon because his lawyer told him that the way that he should make hush payments to a prostitute was to give the lawyer money and then the lawyer would make the payments.
And then New York said, no, he needed to label those payments. Hush money to prostitute. , which of course no one's going to f*****g do. , and Andy, his lawyer told him this was an okay thing to do, and it seems like something that would be okay. ,
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-4: And then you're like, well, you know, he shouldn't have paid hush money to a prostitute that kind of textual impropriety union [00:10:00] of itself makes him unfit to be president. And I'm like, oh, you know, who else was paying hush money? Uh, yeah, Campbell, his husband who knocked up the maid and then paid her hush money to keep her quiet about it.
Or how about Kamilah when she was in her twenties and was sleeping with a 60 year old to get a political appointment. Yeah. That happened to. Oh, you didn't know about those things while they're pretty well documented. If you don't know about them, it's because the media you're listening to is actively hiding it from you.
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-3: and this was only supposed to be a misdemeanor, but then they said, oh, he was doing this to cover up another crime.
What crime. They didn't mention. Cause he obviously wasn't. , so very clearly just a politically motivated thing. It is wild to me that they will make these accusations.
With so much confidence that this is something that Trump would do. When they just did it to him in a reminding you, they did it to him.
Speaker 8: Controversial new ad from the Trump campaign rolled out this week depicting a montage of all the people the former president says he'll kill if he's elected in November. The largely [00:11:00] silent commercial, which openly promises the murder of various political rivals, celebrities, and even a handful of ordinary citizens,
Speaker 9: I think Trump is putting forward a clear and forceful vision of vengeful bloodshed, decapitating Pete Buttigieg on day one, ending the lives of Kim Kardashian, Jake Tapper, the Golden State Warriors.
This is the kind of thing that has proven to be successful with firing up his base, and the campaign believes it's a winning message.
But I think it's worth pointing out that the ad is not entirely partisan. Don Jr. appears in there several times,
Speaker 8: thanks for joining me, Mark. As someone who is featured prominently in the ad, I'll be keeping a close eye on this story as it develops.
Malcolm Collins: This is, this is just so wild to me that this happened, and I can think of nothing as a better message for why it's important that the entire Democletic establishment, whether you're in New York or Pennsylvania, we need to [00:12:00] start fire Bye. Bye. Torching the bureaucracy because it's evil.
Malcolm Collins: It doesn't. And do you not see that Simone and I'm like this, these are people who would like callously kill someone for no reason.
There is no reason for them to do this.
What are your thoughts?
Simone Collins: There's
this issue when, when you, and I think pretty much everyone can identify with this when you get caught in a bureaucracy and something is obviously wrong and you're obviously not being treated well, you're like, well, there's nothing I can do, you know, policy dictates that I have to do this. And you're like, well, yeah, but someone could die.
And they're like, well, I don't know what to tell you. Like, I can't help you. This happened. For example, when we have the rabies scare with our family, right? Like the County was able to give us you know, a thing saying, you know, this family has been exposed. You know, we recommend that they get [00:13:00] rabies shots, but no one was willing to provide them to us unless we went to an emergency room and paid 10, 000 for emergency room admittance.
Yeah. And then rabies shots, which we couldn't afford to pay. So it was just like, well, then I guess you're gonna die, but there's nothing I can do because we don't have a policy of you know, prescribing rabies shots. The policy!
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. They're like, literally, and I'll, I'll try to put some things here of like
Speaker 3: People of Earth, this is Prosthetic Vogan Jelts of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council. As you are probably aware, plans involve the building of a hyperspace express route through your star system. And your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition.
There's
no point asking all surprised about it. The plans and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning office in Alpha Centauri for the 50 millionth years.
Simone Collins: I think that's really real, you know, and it's scary because I think people are experiencing this more in Canada where like euthanasia is the option. They're just like, well, like, Oh [00:14:00] my God, let's
Malcolm Collins: talk about the euthanasia thing in Canada where somebody was like, Oh, you know, it's been a few years and you guys were supposed to install this thing in my house so I can get to the top floor of my house.
And I haven't been able to go up there in years. And they're like, well, have you thought about killing yourself?
Simone Collins: Yeah, it's pretty hilarious, but yeah, I think this goes to show that. And people accuse very common conservatives of being evil mustache uniform people from Germany, but really, in the end, you know, this dehumanization and willingness to just kind of let people fall by the wayside, take things from people.
It can happen in any bureaucracy. Especially when it becomes large and people just sort of blindly follow rules and the amount that the number of atrocities that someone can commit. I think we don't normalize just how quickly humans can do that. And you just assume that that can't happen unless someone's like actively evil and ha ha ha, cackle, cackle.
And that's [00:15:00] not at all. Bureaucracies
Malcolm Collins: are actively evil and we don't categorize them as the true form of villain that they are. I mean, consider the people who called CPS on our family. Right. They're like, they're not living the way I want them to in the same way, the people who called, you know, the environmental protection service on this individual.
Simone Collins: Let's be clear. These are people who vouched online to not stop fighting until our children were taken away from us. They, this, it's the same kind of thing of like. I want your squirrel taken away from you. I want your children taken away from you. Like whatever it is, the people who are triggering these raids and these visitations really want these people to lose their livelihood, to lose their families, to lose, you know, the, the, the, the animals and people that they love most and even their careers.
I mean, if this girl had that many followers, maybe he also was making money from like ad revenue and stuff. So like, he probably also lost income. And yeah, I just it's. It is scary. It is scary.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I [00:16:00] mean, not most, but what I see is that the same action that somebody, it took this guy to a million followers before somebody decided to do this to him.
But these people are just vile. They just want to see other people suffer because these people are not like them. And bureaucracies give them power because they listen to them. Things like swatting should not even be possible in any sort of a normal society. It's scary. Things like this shouldn't, they could have six to eight members of an administration like paid for a full day searching his house.
And then one of them gets bitten because they were rough handling his animals. Like did they even get bitten or were they just like convinced like we're going to go in there and murder everyone? You know, like that's, that's sort of the thing, right? Like this comes off as dystopian and evil to an extent that I almost cannot conceive.
And I am just so shocked [00:17:00] that we live in an environment that's so close to this and yet anyone can still vote Democrat. Even a single human can still vote Democrat knowing that we live in this world.
Simone Collins: And it's scary. So what, well, what happened after this? Like, was there backlash? Were there ramifications? Were people questioned? No,
Malcolm Collins: people freaked out, but you know, New York being so Democrat, they're not going to be able to shut down this department. You know, in, in. If we get into the administration, this is one of the things I may want to see is, is promoting bills to dissolve these sorts of departments at the state level.
They're like, oh my god, how could you do that? Well, they shouldn't have had the right to do this.
Simone Collins: So I feel torn because, you know, a lot of animal control departments and in human safety departments do really, really, really important work. Like I don't believe that
Speaker 5: Welcome to Animal Control. Let me show you around. Those are some chairs. That's a cat or a possum. , this is a nApkin where I wrote down a cool name for a dog. Bark [00:18:00] Obama.
Oh, yo, yeah, we found this bird outside. We tried to turn it into a work whistle, like in the beginning of The Flintstones.
Tougher than it looked, though.
Malcolm Collins: Animal control famously does very little of meaning.
Speaker 6: It does seem to be very poorly run, but we've only been here for two minutes. There's more than one way to skin a cat.
Speaker 5: Four. There's four ways to skin a cat. Ow!
Speaker 6: Ow! What is this?
Speaker 5: Coyote
Speaker 6: trap, dude.
Speaker 5: You're fired. You're fired. The whole department is fired.
Malcolm Collins: And I feel like that's probably what we were looking at was in this circumstance, is an animal control that was mostly a self masturbatory effort. There's even recently been an entire show done about animal control, about how feckless they are. A reality TV show or reality TV show. It's supposed to be like a, because they don't want to do cops anymore because they see the medievals.
So now they're doing animal control. It, I think it was done by the people who did, or, or in relation to, because they had some of the same actors who did that, a cop show. What was it called? It was Brooklyn nine, [00:19:00] nine. Oh
Speaker 7: Should I be concerned? They are violent and have famously bad temperaments. It's starting to feel extremely targeted! This
Malcolm Collins: and they did an animal control show because many people in the last season of Berkeley nine nine were like, Oh, I feel so uncomfortable.
The actors because we're promoting cops and like suddenly they were supernatural b******s.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And so they couldn't even
Malcolm Collins: humanize cops. They were like, that's evil. So while humanize you know, murderers of little peanuts,
Simone Collins: I, yeah, I, I feel more conflicted than you. I, I, I think I'm the one who interacts more with government.
related officials and employees on my part. And pretty much everyone I've interacted with has been pretty great. Hardworking, well meaning.
Malcolm Collins: Who would authorize this? It's not just like there were at least six people in this guy's house.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [00:20:00] Yeah. None
Malcolm Collins: of them stood up against this decision.
None of them said, what are you doing? You psycho.
Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, clearly there are bad actors here. Clearly, clearly there are toxic policies. I mean, I could see this play out in a way where these people were just doing what they, they were following standard operating procedure. They, they don't deviate because they don't care.
And they've dealt with so many at this point, like, Just random squirrels and, and random animals. But you want
Malcolm Collins: to know, rodents don't carry rabies!
Simone Collins: Yeah, but I'm sure that there's some kind of policy where they're like, Well, an animal bit me, like, we have the right to just take it and euthanize it and test it anyway, because, you know, whatever, like,
Malcolm Collins: I don't, I don't buy that.
I think they went in there with the intention of killing these animals.
Simone Collins: Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: probably. But why? Like, why were they that cruel? Why were they that messed up? Why did [00:21:00] five to nine people, they, this is what I read of this situation. The, the fact that like five to eight people went in there to me says one, They looked at this guy beforehand, they saw that he was famous and two, they wanted to send a message about how much control they had and how much power they had over people who were more publicly famous than they are.
Simone Collins: This could be, and there could have also been a meeting behind closed doors about this person promoting squirrel ownership and that being a thing that they didn't want to start dealing with because then people would start owning, you know, all sorts of like possums and raccoons that they found on the road.
And the girls are not
Malcolm Collins: positive in raccoons. They are rodents and they
Simone Collins: get it, but you could see that this, them having this meeting in this government building where they're like, Hey, this guy's making people think that they can just find, you know, find roadkill and adopt it. And that that's okay. And we can't have, you know, we already deal with people who have raccoons and their addicts and all these other things.
And, you know, children, children, like there have been, [00:22:00] so there have been people, just, let's, let me still mean this. There have been cases, actual real cases of couples who decide that I'm going to adopt a raccoon and then they go out and they leave their sleeping baby in their house with a raccoon and the raccoon eats the baby's face off.
Like literally. This is
Malcolm Collins: so much less than pit bulls. Why don't they go out and kill pit bulls?
Simone Collins: Well, but you understand that like encouraging people to own wild animals is not a good idea. And I think that they probably wanted to show a very prominent case of like, here's what we're going to do to you if you try to do this.
Cause it's not. And now here's the problem is this guy was a wildlife expert. He knew what he was doing. He was not at your average Jack off. Like, and he, he clearly was responsibly owning this animal. And you're absolutely right as well. The pit bulls hurt a lot more babies and other people's pets and adults than we Random raccoons, because most people are sensible enough to not put raccoons in their house.
And pit bulls are also way more [00:23:00] likely to, you know, get aggressive and do terrible things. We literally bred to kill children. Well, and well, yeah, like sort of small, small males. So yeah, whereas raccoons just get hungry sometimes, I guess. But like my point here. Is that I, I think that it's important to be aware of how these things actually happen.
And what you're doing is wrong because what you're saying, you're, you're just strawmanning these people and saying, Oh, they're just evil. They just want to do evil. And what's happening here instead, you have to understand the bureaucratic processes that lead this to happen. If you want to actually dismantle it, if you want to actually burn it down.
Way
Malcolm Collins: more evil than you're giving them credit for. I don't think you believe it in human. Evil and human evil is always downstream of bureaucracy.
Simone Collins: No, I know. I know for a fact, I believe this very deeply within me that everyone is doing the very best they can with the information they have. I agree are possessed, we'll say
Malcolm Collins: by evil information.
Simone, I agree with what you're saying. I agree with what you're saying. I do not think that there are individuals out there in the way that progressives frame conservatives, [00:24:00] individuals out there who are like. I'm going to get these people. Oh, I'm so excited to get these people. That doesn't exist.
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-5: Outside of bureaucracies the core time when people do evil or are convinced in mass to do evil, if they get lied to and convinced that a group wants to get them. So you very rarely have a group of people. That's like, Ooh, I can't wait to get X people, but what you often have with a group of people that sakes. Oh, X people are victimizing me. So I should in retaliation, get them.
This is how the Nazis got people to target the Jews. They said, well, the Jews are privileged. The Jews have power that Jews have taken your money. , And they used that to get them to target the Jews. This is how the works get all of these people. If you watch these, Progressive's freaking out about losing the election, they believed that they had the right to commit any sort of evil they wanted to against Republicans to hit Trump was frivolous lawsuits because they had been convinced that these people were out to get them even when this is very clearly not true.
Just like [00:25:00] the Nazis.
Did it, Kamel is running the same playbook.
Malcolm Collins: But people who will follow up, there are
Simone Collins: people who are excited to get those people that, but that's because they think that those people are evil.
They think, or they think that humans are, you know, a scab upon the earth that needs to be scratched off and healed. You know what I mean? Not
Malcolm Collins: what conservatives think is what progressive things, but what I will say is there is a category of people who sees their entire life about exercising power over those they see as weaker than themselves.
That's their entire goal. Everything is about how do I exercise power as cruelly as I can upon others? And how can I use the bureaucracy to accomplish this? This is what Cairns are, this is what the Cairn Crusade is about, and this is what led to this. I do not believe that anyone involved in any stage of this was genuinely like, how do I make the world a better place?
Speaker 10: Karen, you're back. I'm here to see the manager. You, you, you can't be here. Oh can't I? No, no. The [00:26:00] Consumer Rights Act says that I can now get me the manager. I demand that you listen. Listen to everything that I say. You are a useless employee.
Look at you. I don't know where he is. You've got the slightest idea of what is going on here. . Look at you now! Is this what you call customer service? Is that what it's become? I'm sorry! Where is the manager?
Speaker 11: There
Speaker 10: you are.
Speaker 11: What is
Speaker 10: this? This is your undoing.
Speaker 11: No, this is impossible.
Speaker 10: Call yourself a manager. No, no, no. We are going to tell everyone about this.
I want to complain about the state of the store, and the horrible service that we have had to deal with. Your hair disgusts
Speaker 11: me. You have far too much makeup on. That Louis Vuitton is a fake.
Speaker 10: How dare you! You take that back!
Her hair is fabulous! Yuck, yuck, yuck. Adam, Rowan,
Speaker 11: I have them in [00:27:00] a temporary rage paralysis. We must surround
Simone Collins: sorry, I'm trying to get a word in edgewise, but like, she's not letting me.
Malcolm Collins: Girl, girl, I've given you so many opportunities to fall asleep.
Simone Collins: You've resisted. Okay. I disagree. I think that this was them kind of like how Martha Stewart was used to this prominent. I'm going to make an example of you because you're famous and we're going to use this to show you that, you know, like no, one's above the law and to get everyone to pay attention to our rules, which we want more people to be aware of.
And they also do not promote wild animal ownership among people. And this was a prominent, you know, with, with a lot of followers person. Who is making it look really cool to own things like squirrels and probably, I bet the raccoon featured in some of this content as well. And that, that is dangerous.
It's not, it's not a good idea unless you really know what you're doing. And he really knew what he was doing, but he was also kind of influencing people who don't know what they're doing.
Malcolm Collins: Squirrels are not dangerous to own. That's the thing.
Simone Collins: Yes, squirrels, I imagine are quite fine. I [00:28:00] mean, people own all sorts of animals, do things to hurt family members and other animals and their owners.
But I'm just, I'm trying to say how I think this could happen with well meaning people. I do think the person who called this on him, well, again, you know, the people who call CPS on us, Do care about children. Do think we're hurting our children. No, they're wrong.
Malcolm Collins: They care about enforcing their cultural value system, and they have deluded themselves into thinking that equates to caring about children.
Simone Collins: Oh yeah, but I mean, like, your own mother was like, Oh, if you don't spend a million dollars a year on them, you're mistreating your children. And like, Simone,
Malcolm Collins: come on. You understand that that's an unrealistic expectation. I do, but I'm just saying that those people don't realize,
Simone Collins: those people don't realize that.
Those people just genuinely believe that these unrealistic standards are, must be met or that children are being brutalized.
Malcolm Collins: You know what I mean? All I'm saying is that everyone involved in the Peanuts and Squirrel Massacre needs to be rounded up. They need to be arrested, and they need to be [00:29:00] court martialed.
That is something that I think the next Trump administration needs to handle. People need to understand, you cannot, you cannot do this BS.
Simone Collins: I will say that what they did was messed up, and I don't
Malcolm Collins: It's not messed up, it's evil in the extreme, and it's evil in any reasonable person would have known it was evil.
Simone Collins: Yeah, that many people to raid someone's house, you know, it's one thing to be like, hey, dude, like I don't know. Do you know what the rules are?
Like, what rule was this man supposedly violating? No rule. No rule. So you're allowed to own?
Malcolm Collins: So what? Yeah, you're allowed to own squirrels. You're allowed to own raccoons. These aren't illegal to own.
Simone Collins: Then, then can he sue? Like, on what grounds could they go in and do that?
Malcolm Collins: Somebody said this guy was being naughty. This is about authoritarianism overriding the rights of the individual.
Simone Collins: Yeah, well I think that's another reason to [00:30:00] keep the state on both a national and local level as small as possible, because it can be abused as soon as it's too big.
And that's just not, not okay. The more, the more that the state or any bureaucracy could be used as a cudgel against people, the, the worst things get, Oh my God, give up and fall asleep. You know, you want to, Oh, you know,
you want
to,
you're resisting it so much. Oh, she's the worst. I love her so much.
I love her
Malcolm Collins: children.
Don't worry. I'll come and beat her for you.
Simone Collins: People will think that you're not kidding. I, this is, and then we'll have CPS called on us again.
Malcolm Collins: It's time for dinner. I'm excited for dinner. I'm excited to be married to you. I'm excited to live a life with you. Oh, by the way, don't forget to cut up the long hot pepper I got from the grocery store for the fried rice.
Simone Collins: Okay. So you want me to redo the fried rice with the long hot?
Malcolm Collins: [00:31:00] Not redo. I mean, you're reheating it anyway. Yeah, I'm, yeah, I'm
Simone Collins: reheating. Well, I'm going to do a small batch for the kids. I have to do two pans then because there's going to be the non spicy pan for the kids. Ignore it then.
Malcolm Collins: Just do it however you want.
Whatever is easiest. I love you.
Simone Collins: What if I, what if I made a ramekin full of the spiced up long hot, but it wasn't so good? So what I
Malcolm Collins: do is take about a quarter of the long hot, cut it into very small pieces. Okay. Very small. And then we can dust it on top of my part of the fried rice at the end.
Simone Collins: Okay. Just one quarter of it.
Malcolm Collins: Yes.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: Oh, now she's looking for something that spicy. You're not even going to get that much, you know, by the way, the story of peanut, is it worse than you thought from what you had heard?
Simone Collins: No, I'd heard all of those things. I will. The one thing I hadn't heard. It was how many people were involved. And that is insane.
Also just like, even if you don't care about peanut, even if you don't care about this guy, even if you don't just the, the, the government [00:32:00] waste our tax dollars and we will New Yorkers tax dollars, but still being in New York, when you consider now you fall asleep, the struggle session of these podcasts with irritable Indy who needs to take a nap and the very fricking end.
She's out.
Malcolm Collins: That's sweet, by the way. Oh,
Simone Collins: I mean, and now I don't want to get up because now she's all snuggled. What these children are.
Malcolm Collins: So I'm sorry. Our children are a constant pain in your life.
Simone Collins: Oh, she's so
Malcolm Collins: sweet.
Simone Collins: Oh my God.
Okay. But yeah, that you have to consider, you know, these people are getting pensions.
These people like government workers are actually quite expensive because they typically have full benefits. They have pensions. They, they have insurance, like all it just. And probably they have some kind of car that they're driving around in, like, this is just a huge waste of money. So it's even [00:33:00] egregious in that perspective.
And it really bothers me. We do with our, our, the business that we run, that's our only paying day job that we're about to voluntarily leave, which good luck to us. Right. We do these RFPs, we respond to requests from various types of governments and government funded entities to do their travel management and our business response to them saying, here are our prices.
Here are our services. And. We'll have these calls where it's just like really simple questions that they, they want to ask us and like eight people will be on the call and we'll have to go whole like hour to talk about it. And seven out of the eight people are doing absolutely nothing. And I'm just thinking about just, okay.
I'm like counting up like, well, Kate's probably costing them an average of 50 per hour per person. Like this call cost. You know, let's, you know, seven [00:34:00] times a 50, like, why are you doing this? Like this, the amount of money that was just wasted for something that you could have emailed me about is so yeah, that, that stuff keeps me up at night just as much as tragic squirrel stories for sure.
But I will. I
Malcolm Collins: love
Simone Collins: you too. Final piece of advice. Maybe I could ask you to share is. Okay, if people are using the government as a cudgel to hurt families, they're calling CPS on families. They're calling, you know, animal services on, on families. You know, this is the new swatting. What should people be preemptively doing to protect themselves?
If raids are now the, a weapon being used
Malcolm Collins: just so little you can do and what you haven't seen is that we have been protected because we are, you know, like a heterosexual married couple. That is, if you're like a single guy, the [00:35:00] first time you get CPS called on you, the kids get taken away
Simone Collins: and 37
Malcolm Collins: percent of American kids have had CPS called on them.
Simone Collins: Well, then maybe. I kind of feel like a disaster preparedness fan, a plan that people need to have.
Malcolm Collins: I know, and this is what I've done recently is say, I'm not taking my kids in public parks anymore. I'm not putting them around public people anymore. It is too dangerous.
Simone Collins: Well, but also like, have a lawyer that you are ready to call who knows who you are.
But also know your rights in your state and be prepared to say like, You are not allowed to do this because I think a lot of what's happening is, is people are letting groups into their house, not knowing what's going on.
Malcolm Collins: That's not true, Simone. In the case of Peanut, they had a search warrant. They had a search warrant.
You are, you are misunderstanding how powerful these I'm just, well, I'm just, I'm trying to think of what, you know, like All you can do is prevent them from seeing you if you don't have the power to resist. [00:36:00]
Simone Collins: So you're just saying people need to be secretive and hidden.
Malcolm Collins: With us, we are only comfortable doing this because we have the power to resist the people who may attack us.
You
Simone Collins: mean all the guns? That's not going to help if it's the government. No,
Malcolm Collins: not the guns, I mean the public profile, the number of impactful and successful friends who could influence government policy. If somebody attempts to take one of our kids from us, if CPS comes here and they say, Oh, we're going to take X kid or Y kid, we would win them back within a few
Simone Collins: weeks.
It
Malcolm Collins: would be, we know the press to contact, we know how to make a story go viral. Your average person doesn't know that. If they take their kids, their kids are taken.
Simone Collins: We'll do
Malcolm Collins: a separate episode on this because they love taking children from people. This is like a mainstream thing at this point.
Simone Collins: Yeah, which is, it's extra disturbing [00:37:00] because The people who work for Child Protective Services or, you know, whatever child services entity there is, these are people who genuinely care about children and we work with some what I'm saying Malcolm is the ones that I've met and we've worked with them both as service providers and as people like the people who come to our house.
These are people who really care about the wellbeing of children. And these are groups that like, for example, child protective services in our area, primarily is just distributing food and clothing and diaper aid to families of limited needs. Oh my
Malcolm Collins: God, Simone, you buy into their BS. It takes one totalitarian bad apple to start taking children for people.
It's true. But what I'm saying
Simone Collins: is. When people are doing that, they're also taking resources away from families that it could actually benefit from the services. I
Malcolm Collins: don't disagree with that, but you just need to be much stricter about these organizations and you need to clean them out, like taking a. a flamethrower to them.
You can't have [00:38:00] any disregard people like, Oh, I've been with this organization for 25 years. F**k you. How many kids have you taken compared to other people's count? This should be easy to count. Same with this.
People are not fully considering this because there's people like you who say, Oh, many people at these organizations are doing this right. I, the people at these organizations are doing this right, are looking forward to the flamethrower day.
Simone Collins: That's fair. And I, I think that that's something that we see when we bring up this message.
I think it's the same for like effective altruism. Is it when we talk about effective altruism, needing a really big reckoning, pretty much everyone we know who's a real effective altruist is like, I 100 percent agree. We need to clean house. By
Malcolm Collins: the way, check it out.
Simone Collins: Yeah. That's the same with many of these organizations [00:39:00] where, you know, People come in same with teaching schools, right?
Like we know a lot of really amazing teachers who are like, burn it down. Like I came here wanting to help kids and I'm prevented from doing so every single day. And that's I think that's the message is I just I don't want people to come away thinking that we hate. government workers, or that we think that they're bad people, I think that they're in systems that have become inherently corrupted, and I think that they know better than everyone else what needs to be done to clean them up, but they're kind of prevented from doing so.
Oh, you're so understanding,
Malcolm Collins: Simone. This is why everyone wants you to be president and not me. Everyone knows that you would never go crazy with power.
Simone Collins: I'm too autistic for that.
Malcolm Collins: I love
Simone Collins: you. I love you. Have good day. You too. Good day, sir. I Good day, man. I said good day.
Malcolm Collins: No, I said,
Simone Collins: I
said, I
said,
Malcolm Collins: I said I Little sun toast.
He does.
Simone Collins: I said, I said, I said
Malcolm Collins: I love you. Yes. [00:40:00] I love you a great deal, by the way. I
Simone Collins: love you too, Malcolm. I'm glad we get some normal life for a few days going forward.
Malcolm Collins: A few days.
Simone Collins: I just want a
Malcolm Collins: documentary living with us for a while We were at hereticon before that we're leaving our jobs. I don't know what to do. I just want to sleep
Simone Collins: I'm not sleep for like But you can't sleep because then there's the kids like I really probably would sleep for like a good 24 hours If there weren't like
Malcolm Collins: How about this?
This weekend, can I take the kids for you and let you sleep for 24 hours at any point? No, because
Simone Collins: then I'm going to spend 24 hours awake cleaning the house to deal with the aftermath. But I would love extra support this weekend.
I'm just really tired, but I love you so much. And obviously everyone knows you got the better. I got the better end of that.
The deal, the pretty one you are, you are, you are irreplaceable. You could buy with money. Every single thing that I do.
Malcolm Collins: Somebody explain this to me. I actually think my wife is pretty hot. Like, but we get mails. [00:41:00] Like she, she has a face that can sink a thousand ships.
Simone Collins: Malformed. Yeah. All of those things
Malcolm Collins: are genetically defective.
And they're only talk about you in this way.
Simone Collins: Yep. Nope. They're like Malcolm's.
Malcolm Collins: They're like, Malcolm, yeah sure, whatever, Malcolm, but Simone, the malformed, genetically defective woman who can sink a thousand ships with her disgusting face, pseudo face. Pseudo, yeah, oh
Simone Collins: my god. You seem normal to me. Well, thank goodness, right?
I don't like the way I look. That's, that's why it hurts, you know, if I were like stunning and I'd be like, Oh, you know, that doesn't offend me. But I look in the mirror and I cringe, you know, I'm like, well, God, like, why do you have to complain? I'm, I have to look in the mirror every day. This is not fair.
But anyway, you don't want me talking myself down. So I'm the best. Everyone knows that
Malcolm Collins: you're, you're great. You're great. No, I mean, I, I don't like it [00:42:00] when you talk yourself down in terms of your prominence. I, you know, if you're talking about your looks or something like that.
Simone Collins: Well, here, here's the thing I, here's what I'm going to put down.
I think that the way that I look is going to actually be at a premium in a post AI world, because in a post AI world, and especially with filters and everything else now. There is going to be value put on clearly real human forms that are flawed because you know that they're genuine and also they're the only thing that you're going to see like this sort of homogenization.
Of faces. You can already see it when you have like AI create images of humans. They all kind of look the same when you see, like, when I scroll through Instagram, everyone kind of looks the same and people who look weird are going to stand out and it is the standing out that makes you memorable. I don't even
Malcolm Collins: think you look that weird as
Simone Collins: a 40 year old woman.
Who's had, I'm not, Oh my God. Ouch. I'm 37. I'm almost [00:43:00] 37 as a mid thirties woman.
I mean, you've made your own point, Malcolm. Okay. I just, I don't know what else to say. As a mid
Malcolm Collins: thirties woman who's had four kids. I think that you look spectacular. And honestly, the only two odd things about your face.
Simone Collins: If
Malcolm Collins: I'm going to be honest here, it's your nose a little big.
I think by a lot of people's standards, they'd be like, Oh, that's a Jewish nose. And it's like, yeah, very Jewy. And the other is your mouse. Like mine is gigantic. Thanks. I'll tell you a funny thing. No. So a lot of people don't realize how much people's mouths change in size.
Speaker 14: What is he up to? He's bringing him out. He's bringing him out.
Speaker 13: So what is Torsten doing right now?
Speaker 14: Torsten [00:44:00] is Completely naked.
Speaker 15: Except for two yellow boots. Out in the 30 degree weather. Filling a bucket of rocks from his rock garden. Died to look a baby deer.
We told that to Tyson because there actually is a deer in the background. But she just looked at naked Dorstan. That's just Torsten. I
Speaker 14: don't see it. You don't see it? Okay, let's, let's help her.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
This video tells the story of Scott Pressler, a gay man and conservative political activist who played a significant role in registering first-time Amish voters, contributing to Trump’s victory in Pennsylvania during the election cycle. The video explores Pressler’s activism since 2016, his efforts in organizing community events, and his involvement with the Republican Party. Pressler’s work has garnered attention and praise for its impact, highlighting the misconceptions about the relationship between the LGBT community and the Republican Party. The discussion extends to broader political narratives, the role of grassroots efforts in political campaigns, and the significance of individuals who make substantial contributions to the political landscape.
Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Today, we are going to be telling the story of the gay man who convinced the Amish to vote for Trump and likely won him this election cycle. You're like, Oh no, he couldn't have possibly won the election for Trump.
Trump won Pennsylvania by 200, 000 votes. 180, 000 Amish first time voters were registered by him.
Malcolm Collins: Whoa.
Simone Collins: Okay,
Malcolm Collins: wow.
Simone Collins: So a mainstream Republican like Staffer for Trump, Jan Halper Hayes, said if Trump wins Pennsylvania, we owe it to this man.
Malcolm Collins: Trump
Simone Collins: won Pennsylvania by 200, 000 votes. This guy registered 180, 000 first time Amish voters, and he didn't just register them.
He also registered other people.
Malcolm Collins: Damn. Wow.
Simone Collins: So let's go to the story of Scott Pressler. What I think it also shows, gays are not just now [00:01:00] embraced by the Republican Party. It's not just that Trump was the first
presidential candidate in U. S. history that supported gay marriage when he was elected. Obama did not, by the way. It's that this is a two way love story between real gays, not fake gays. Not this fake BS b******t. Where it's like, oh, I can identify as whatever I feel like. Real gays and Trump. People who didn't have a choice Of who they were attracted to.
And again, I'm not saying I don't think it's anti biblical. I'm just thinking it's not particularly more anti biblical than something like you know, prostitution or masturbating to women other than your wife or any number of things that are fairly normal in our world today. But let's, let's talk about this guy.
It's the story of Scott Presley. Scott Pressler has been a conservative political activist since 2016 when he served as a regional field director for the Republican Party of Virginia. He is openly gay and co founded the [00:02:00] LGBT coalition Gays for Trump the same year. He also became a volunteer for Act for America, an anti Muslim advocacy group the following year, he organized march against Sharia events.
Additionally, he has been organized. being cleanup events of Baltimore and Los Angeles where scores of volunteer remove trash from the streets and we'll get into the second. The vigilant Fox said you were the most impactful non billionaire this election cycle. Well done, Scott, you helped us save America.
Speaker 3: Today was tweets we saw on social media from our president, and we were just tired of people doing so much talking, but not enough. actually rolling up your sleeves, putting on your boots and getting dirty. That's why we're out here today.
And the coolest thing is, you know, Mr. King on the corner, he owns a shop over here. He came over to help. We have Mr. Williams owns a funeral home. He came over. He said, the next time you go out here in the community, you let us know.
Simone Collins: And if you're looking at what the RNC chair said about this individual, he [00:03:00] said, quote, Scott Pressler has single handedly registered more voters for the Republican Party than any other human being alive today.
Oh my
Malcolm Collins: gosh.
Simone Collins: This guy's prolific and a closer. Oh, he's great. He's so great. No, you, if you watch videos of him, he just so clearly cares.
Speaker: I don't people put American citizens first, but illegal immigrants get everything. And I hope you post this. I want this to go viral. Because I give a damn and I care about my community. My dad is a retired Navy Captain. He served our country honorably. My grandfather is a retired Navy Captain. And I'm doing my part to help our country.
Because I give a damn. And I'm going to fight for it. And I am 100 percent voting for Donald Trump on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2020. The Democrat Party does not put our people first. They put sanctuary cities first. They put illegal aliens first. They tax us. They tax our water. You can't even do laundry and shower on the same day.
While Nancy Pelosi is getting hundreds of [00:04:00] thousands of dollars, robbing our pockets, not doing anything for our people, not passing legislation, passing out pens like they're candy. Meanwhile, President Trump is signing the United States Mexico Canada Agreement, and he's signing trade deals, and he's cutting our taxes, and he's securing the border, and he's putting our veterans first.
I am proud of President Trump, and I am voting for him because he's putting the American people first. Period.
Simone Collins: He wants none of the, the, He did this without pay at the beginning. He was, what he did for a living was walking dogs. He was just out there trying to fix things. That was it.
That was all he cared about was trying to fix things. So he entered into politics. In 2019, when President Trump said of Baltimore it's a disgusting and rodent infested mess. And what liberals did when they heard that. As they said, how dare he called [00:05:00] Baltimore a disgusting, rotten, infested mess.
Malcolm Collins: Meanwhile, everyone in Baltimore, I mean, everyone
Simone Collins: in Baltimore was like and what Scott Pressler said, if not me, then who? So it was in six days of Trump's tweet, Pressler organized over 170 volunteers to clean up West Baltimore. They first rounded up 12 tons of trash in 12 hours.
And he has done this in other cities. Specifically, he did similar efforts in Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Portland. So,
Malcolm Collins: again And is this all like Is this well campaigning or is this just no, just after
Simone Collins: Trump did that that year, his first thing wasn't even to get into politics.
Malcolm Collins: What
Simone Collins: it was just to be like, f**k it. I'm going to fix this. If, if, if these cities are like filled with trash, if they're [00:06:00] disgusting, well then we need to make them not disgusted.
Malcolm Collins: This guy's actually working to make America great again. Yeah. Is that not like the
Simone Collins: whole
Malcolm Collins: thing?
Simone Collins: I actually, if he runs and I f*****g hope he runs. If he runs in the next presidential election cycle, I think he would clean up. If you watch any video on him, he is the most wholesome, dedicated motherfucker I have ever seen in my life.
He said he'd come back and today he did last time
Simone Collins: He is 100%. He, when Democrats were like, no, these cities aren't disgusting. He's like, oh yeah, America's major cities have fallen into being wrecks. Like 12 tons of trash. Oh
Malcolm Collins: my gosh.
Simone Collins: Like actually contextualize that. So then, you know what he did in 2021? [00:07:00] He moves to Pennsylvania. Buys property here so he can vote here.
No. And he did it in an attempt to try to get people to vote. And one of the core communities he targeted were the Amish. Because Amish historically don't vote. So. She did door to door canvassing using public records to identify likely Amish households. He set up a stall at the green dragon market and Amish fair in Lancaster County to interact with the community regularly.
He offered rides to polling stations and assistance was absentee ballot registration. And I also will note here that a lot of people don't know this, but actually Kennedy was really close with the Amish community. He had been campaigning in the community here for. Ages apparently when the Democrats stabbed Kennedy in the back, not letting him really run as a real third party candidate in any of the important States.
Kennedy then went with Trump right now, by the way, he is involved with Trump's transition team. He's one of [00:08:00] the people we're going to be reaching out to in terms of training at transition spots. And Kennedy you know, he, when he moved to the Trump team, a lot of the Amish people, in addition with Scott Pressler's work, by the way, a gay man, people who think, people think that like so many Republicans are like, Oh, you're gay.
I hate you. Even the Amish who are like. You could not be possibly more heterosexually normative than the Amish. They're like, yeah, but if you're telling us, like, reasonable things, let's listen and talk through this, right?
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): I've been thinking more about Kamala Harris has lost recently, and I think it's going to be uniquely hard. For Democrats to win these individuals back because it's no longer become a fight over policy. When I look at the, like our politics sub Reddit right now, or on Twitter right now, and the lefties that are freaking out, they're all like, oh, you know, if you're black Republicans are going to enslave you, if you're gay, Republicans are going to kill you. If you're a woman, Republicans are going to forcibly impregnate you.
, and. The things just like factually [00:09:00] aren't true. And the key thing that I think moves people from the left to the right is breaking out of this illusion, just like looking at reality and being like, oh, a gay person was one of the key players in getting Trump elected. A polyamorous guy was one of Trump's key funders, Ilan. , he is VP was. Found for him a by another gay man, Peter teal, like this, obviously isn't a party that is either antagonistic to, or on bad terms with the gay community.
And.
How do you win one of these people back when they found out that you lied to them about somebody. Convinced them to unjustly attack and dehumanize this other group. And then they learned that everything that you told them about this other group was a lie. Like they go to a Trump rally as an out openly gay person and they realize everyone is nicer to them than at a camel rally or as a black person, or either they, you just can't win them back. Once the, , the veil is revealed
Speaker 5: So, now that [00:10:00] the orange turd has won, we should now rename America Hell. Because it is going to be hell on earth once they strip everyone's rights away that is no straight white cis man. So buckle up! Hope you frickin republicans are happy! I'm outta here.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): because you have turned this from a policy battle. Into a, what is true about reality battle? Will Republicans go and try to take away their rights? Will Republicans try to enslave them or kill them? , and when the answer is not just no, but so in phatic, No, it's almost comical. , and the Republicans are actually maybe their only real allies left who will protect them, you know, like lesbians, for example, from cismen pretending to be trans and getting on dating apps and aggressively harassing them. Or beating them up at bars or.
Associating the gay movement with the ridiculousness of things [00:11:00] like trans women in sports. , which obviously makes the gay movement look bad. And so the Democrats are like, oh, this is an LGBT issue. And the Republicans are saying greatly, no, it's not. It's a weird sex pest issue. , and it should not negatively reflect on the gay community. And let's call them the normal gates because there are normal gays and normal gays.
And I know a lot of normal gays. I know a lot of weird gates. , the normal gays are like, Overwhelmingly Republican. I'd also point out they'd almost sort of be these for me, the modern stereotype. Of the wholesome dad, Republican meme. , which I think might surprise people who don't have that many friends in the gay community.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: So, how do dims win given that this is the case? Will. It's not about running a non-woven candidate. Even the woke ism is the problem because Camelot was a non-well candidate and Biden was a non-work candidate. They need to run an antiwar candidate, a candidate who calls out, woke b******t on the regular. And demeans [00:12:00] it. And I'd say, how do we, as Republicans keep up this when, what you need to call out the individuals who would, B smirch our new and growing set of allies, like the normal gay males.
, and so when an individual is out there in a Republican circle, calling out them for, I don't know whether they'd sinful for the Bible. It's a perspective be like, are they actually living a sinless life? No. Are they doing more to help the Republican party than people like Scott Presler no. Well then they can f**k right off. You get to make these sorts of accusations when you live that way, when you aren't living that way. This is for you and yourself to deal with.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-2: And because of this Republicans are going to keep winning, because I know that Republicans can do this. They can actually police the extremists within their own community and they have been. Whereas Democrats can't do this. , you will not have a mod on our politics, [00:13:00] banning someone for some ridiculous. Oh, I don't feel safe because I'm gay and Republicans ran post, but. You will get people on conservative message boards, banning people for. Aggressively homophobic rhetoric. And that's why Republicans are going to win because we deal with our own extremism while the left is too cowardly to do it.
And you also see this from Trump in his support of the gay community.
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone): And I actually think we can see the success of this just by looking online at YouTube videos and stuff like that. You look at someone like leather apron, clubs channel, and he did a video saying don't vote for Trump. Don't vote for the Republicans. This party no longer stands for us. I feel ostracized when I say antisemitic things, I feel ostracized when I say. Anti-gay things.
Um, I don't like the word homophobic. It's stupid, but, but anti-gay things basically. He's like what I say that, you know, being gay, is it right? I feel ostracized in this community. , and the community in, and he acted as if this is going to keep Trump from winning. This is going to keep Republicans who are winning when the truth is, [00:14:00] is we don't want people like that in our community anymore.
Speaker 11: I'm leaving.
Speaker 10: Okay then, that was always allowed.
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-1: This is America. We don't outlaw something just because it's a sin. We don't want to live under your version of Sharia law.
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone): We are winning because we have ostracized people like that. And . If Democrats are gonna win. Ever. Again, Is, they need to ostracize their own people who are equally. , Exclusionary , when somebody goes online, Or at an event and says something like I promoted someone because they're black.
I promoted someone because they're a woman. They shouldn't feel comfortable. They shouldn't feel safe at that a bit. If somebody goes around as a non passing individual and is using women's restrooms,
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-2: And otherwise intimidating women just so that they can feel validated.
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone): they should be treated like somebody walking around with a swastika tattooed on their forehead. You need to treat this stuff for what [00:15:00] it is when somebody who obviously has the body of a man and it's competing in women's sports, they need to be treated like somebody with a swastika tattooed on their head. Because they are a symbol of oppression, hatred and bigotry.
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-3: They are utilizing a systemically unfair system that allows them to compete against individuals. They obviously shouldn't be competing against, to beat up on people who are weaker than themselves.
Microphone (4- ATR2100x-USB Microphone): When somebody goes around and says something like,
Black people can't be racist. They need to be treated like somebody who just said the N word. Would be at a Trump rally. Which, which is very harshly. But the woke are just not willing to do that yet. And until they get to that point. They're going to keep losing.
Obviously, not this next primary and the primary after an election cycle, it always reverts.
I'm talking long term. And just to understand what you guys are going to be fighting. Long-term next election cycle. It's JD Vance. You're going to need to bring real big guns to beat him. This guy is cogent [00:16:00] young, intelligent, and appeals to half your audience.
Simone Collins: And I also think what was really interesting is the way he got the Amish on board.
So he emphasized a recent incident where straight authorities branded an Amish farmer as gay. selling milk without a permit, framing it as government overreach, which it was by the way. And Susie Weiss, friend of the show, one of my favorite human beings alive has written on this extensively. He stressed Trump stamps on religious liberty, which aligns with Amish values.
And he emphasized protection of agricultural practices, traditional lifestyles, and educational choice. All of those are things that we care about and Amish care about. culture because they have no kids could only survive by taking children from demographically healthy cultural groups. And they begun, they have begun to overreach into the Amish community and the Amish are like, do not touch my children.
And what was said to the Amish, and I actually believe this really strongly. And I, I, I love that the Amish got this message, which is if you're not voting, [00:17:00] Nobody's going to care about you. Politically speaking, they're not going to care about overreaching. They're not going to care about shutting down your farms.
And it got to them. No, let's talk about his background. Okay. So we're going to be Scott Pressler was born in 1988 and Jacksonville, Florida. He. He grew up in a military family as his father was a United Navy captain. He later earned degrees in criminal justice from George Mason university. His political career began in earnest in the 2016 election cycle.
Prior to this, he did a stint as a Republican party organizer of Virginia. His political activism took a significant turn became a volunteer and later an employee for Act for America, an anti Muslim advocacy group. Pressler gained prominence as the co coordinator of March Against Sharia. He came out in June, 2016. So right as he began organizing as a Republican, he also came out and that was what motivated him to organize the Republican and what motivated him to do this was actually the nightclub shooting in [00:18:00] Orlando, Florida, where a Muslim shot up a gay nightclub where he's like, the Republicans are the only people who are really willing to protect us.
He also. And I'll put a graph on screen here, but what I'll say is stop the steal, which he also helped made him a horrible person. Stop steal is evil. The Republicans clearly were not, you know, like the Democrats had nothing to do with any of this
pressler has focused on voter registration drives, particularly in swing States like Pennsylvania. And He now has 1. 5 million followers on Twitter. And he has been called things like a crazy conspiracy theorist. And it would, which of course all Republicans have, I mean, we have. And yeah, that's the story of this guy.
So what are your thoughts, Simone?
Malcolm Collins: He sounds like an incredible person and yeah, I think anyone also, it's, it's very easy for people who only read mainstream media to think that people who are on the ground seeing [00:19:00] real things happen are conspiracy theorists, but those are the people who are actually, I trust what he sees on the road so much more than I would trust what someone is reading in the media.
And the things that you see out door knocking, the things that you see out talking with people really can change like a lot. It, it is pretty crazy what's actually going on on the ground. So even the whole trash collection thing, just everything he's done just is so cool. Yeah, and that he never
Simone Collins: seemed to have any, he's born to a military family.
He never seems to have done anything for personal pride. It was always just like, here's a problem. Can somebody fix it?
Malcolm Collins: All American goodness. This is, this is that can do attitude that makes our country so awesome. And wow, I love what he represents. We had
Simone Collins: a reporter with us recently. And when I was 13, I started a biology camp for underprivileged kids.
Right. So I set it up in like a poor neighborhood and we did a biology camp because I knew that like rich [00:20:00] kids did that. And she's like, why did you do that? And I go, well, I liked biology. And she's like, why did you do that? And I was like, I don't, I answered that. I thought it was fun to study this subject.
I wanted to share what I liked with other people. And. So many people, they like something or they care about something and they're like, oh, but actually like starting something, come on, I'm not going to do that. And I think that that you're right. That is what makes America great. Oh, yeah. Baltimore is a f ing dumpster right now.
Maybe I should try to clean it up. Because no one else is gonna do it.
Malcolm Collins: Well, America was formed by people who didn't like what they had. So they came here, and they built something better. And that happened in, in over a series of, of decades and now centuries. And I think it's produced a really great country.
And the only way that we are going to stave off complete and terrible civilizational collapse is if we manage to maintain that spirit and don't lean into the [00:21:00] indolence that we're starting to grow.
Simone Collins: Well, and I think here also, another thing is, You know, the Republican movement is right now, I think the only real friend, the gay and the lesbian movements have and when I say the gay and the lesbian movements, I mean, the real gay and lesbian people, the lesbian people who are like I like the female form.
And so if you have like a penis and are like 6'2 and are on a lesbian dating app and look nothing like a woman, like that's a problem for me or One of the things that always got to me was the woman who was beaten at a gay bar for suggesting not to a trans individual, but to another lesbian woman that she wasn't interested in dating trans women and so to trans women beat her.
And on like Reddi. People were cheering this in the lesbian form people were cheering this and I think what it shows Is that well reddit's an overwhelmingly male site and what we were actually seeing here was trans women You know, who considered themselves [00:22:00] lesbians like some of the people in these posts who want to arm themselves and attack people That who?
Makes up the majority of these sorts of communities now and has excluded real women who prefer female bodies. And with gay men, like, why would you want to associate yourself with this obviously predatory group? And when you talk about obvious predators, you know, I was talking about recently. PDA files being part of what is causing a lot of young people to become trans.
And the reporter I was talking to was like, Oh, that can't possibly be the case. And I'm like, she's like, that sounds like a conspiracy. And I was like, okay, do you agree that some gay men are PDA files just in the same way? Some treatment are, I mean, look at the Catholic church, right? Like this is clearly a phenomenon.
And she's like, yes, I agree. Some gay men are PDA files. And I was like, well, with that being the case, Do you not agree that if you can convince somebody to start taking puberty blockers at the age of [00:23:00] 15, that when the age when they reach legally the age of consent that they are going to look a certain way and she had this moment of realization, which is like, oh, I was like, yeah and gay men.
are wholesome and like, like, and this is what somebody is like, like with Republican support non gay men and keep in mind that the Scott Pressler, he came out at the same time he joined the Republican movement. It's not like he was a Republican and then he came out. He did these two things at the same time and received so much support that he was like, yes, I want to continue to support these individuals.
And I think that this just goes so against progressive narratives, which just gaslight people into believing that the Republican movement is anti gay or anti lesbian, when in truce, it's the only real friend they have left. But do you have further thoughts, Simone, or? [00:24:00]
Malcolm Collins: No, I, I really agree with you, and I think it's Telling how much violence actually is coming from the progressive movement, both in threats and in action.
I'm not saying that conservatives don't also commit violent acts, but the assumption is that progressives never do. And I think they are doing so at an equal, if not higher level.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and I think that the other thing I take away from this is just a level of like, just if you care about something in the world, go and do it.
And that's what earns our respect. It's not, you know, people are always calling us elitist. Right. And then they're surprised when they meet our friends and they have like face tattoos and like just got out of prison and they're like, what? Like, but I thought you were like elitist elitist. And I'm like, well, I'm elitist in that.
I believe that some people's lives matter and other people's lives don't. But whether your life ends up mattering or not is based on your own. Goals for the [00:25:00] future your willingness to work for those goals. It's not based on You know how much money you have or how many people are paying attention to you and I think the person who is like scott presler mattered more than any billionaire in this election cycle is one probably right Because he didn't just focus on the amish.
He also focused a lot on hunters He also focused a lot on like various other categories that he knew would likely vote republican basically just
Malcolm Collins: low propensity You People in Pennsylvania, like he swings.
Simone Collins: Well, it's not just that you see lots of things with him preaching on the street when he's doing street cleanups.
When I say preaching, I mean, preaching the Republican message where he's like, Democrats just don't care anymore. Like they're putting us in jail. When Nancy Pelosi is like earning hundreds of thousands of year, like it is a party that is holistically in support of the oligarchs.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, and again, it's, it's understated just how much any person can do.
And I think a lot of people look at, we point [00:26:00] to Elon Musk as an example of someone who sees a problem and fixes it. And it's very easy for someone to say, well, yeah, if I were a billionaire, I would just fix problems too. Here is a guy who is not a billionaire, who made a very, very, very significant difference in the trajectory of.
And keep in mind, like Elon Musk had a lot of efforts in Pennsylvania, so did this guy. And he made a huge difference without giving away, you know, millions of dollars without making big efforts like that, without giving big rallies that could draw out, you know, tons of people. And I really think that.
If you don't make the change that you want to see in the world, it's on you. Like you don't get to have nice things. If you don't fight for those nice things. And this, I think ties in a lot with how there's this complete misunderstanding where people now are like, the American dream is dead. There it's no more.
possible because they somehow think the American dream is, Oh, I'm entitled to a house and a car and all these other luxuries [00:27:00] in life without basically working for them. Whereas the American dream has always been about merely having the option to Do that if you're lucky, it was never guaranteed. If you work hard, it was never even guaranteed.
If, if you don't work, it was just like, this is a place where it's possible. And people were coming from many places where it simply wasn't. And there are still many places in the world where the American dream is impossible. The American dream remains alive and well, and people like this guy represent.
that, which is cool.
Simone Collins: Well, and I, you know what, we should take this moment to be like, this guy is not unique. There are other individuals like him that are out there flipping districts to actually make America a better place. So can we stand Joe Rittenhouse for a while? Because he flipped Monaco for Trump.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, there, yeah. So Joe Rittenhouse is. He was the local Trump operative in our County in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, a [00:28:00] key swing district in the key swing state. And yeah, no, no one in the news is talking about him. But he is a local dude, a parent, a husband, and someone beloved in our community who just really
Simone Collins: hard use data driven methods.
The local Republican, like the GOP, the RNC did nothing. Nothing to help him, completely abandoned his part of the campaign. And when he's talking to us, he's like, look, I need to build all of this from scratch because everything that's here right now is corrupt and it's in service of this dead ROC that doesn't actually care about getting Trump elected.
And I need to build this up from scratch and he did, he moved the needle so much. So you can say, okay, like this got, you know, Scott got Trump elected, but Joe Rittenhouse did as well. Yeah. If Joe Rittenhouse wasn't here, if, if [00:29:00] Monaco hadn't moved for Trump, which it did, by the way. Maybe if you weren't here, I mean, you were constantly working in the selection cycle.
People are like, oh, Simone, you didn't win. And it's like, yeah, but she did better than last time. Well,
Malcolm Collins: and all of my get out the vote efforts were just Republican get out the vote efforts. I didn't use my name. I didn't promote myself. And I, I mean, broadly, I just wanted to test out the efficacy that I had on Republican voter turnout and especially low propensity voter Republican turnout.
But yeah, I mean, they're also, again, like there, there are so many people who go unnamed. Another person that I really respect in this election cycle who worked in our area is Fletcher Carper who is. Has been kind of like, Scott, someone who for many, many elections has just been out there on the ground.
I mean, when I was, when I had my first longer conversation with him, he talked about how, you know, he's been driving at night in snow storms while door knocking and then wrecked his car, you know, because it's just so dangerous, but he was out there door knocking anyways. We do anything it [00:30:00] takes to just try to get out the vote.
He was insanely efficient. He helped me with petition collection before he started doing general door knocking for the Republican for Republican voter turnout in Pennsylvania. And I could not believe how many signatures he got in a short period of time. Somehow he just like. Managed to close people.
And, I mean you know as a, as a, as a male knocking on people's doors. It is not People
Simone Collins: yelling at you. People hate you, you know.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So, I just, yeah. So, people like Doug Whitman House, people like Fletcher Carper, people like Scott, I'm just, I'm just I'm so glad they exist. We're so lucky that they exist.
And I, you know, I hope that, for example, Joe Rittenhouse gets a place in Trump's administration. They would be so dumb to pass up an opportunity. And now we need to have this people
Simone Collins: like scene from Starship Troopers. Where it's like, people like X, you know, get But it's so true. I, I, I really, [00:31:00] I think that going forwards, what's going to determine if we save this country, it's the people who are staffing Trump's administration.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. No, yeah. Now that the wind is complete, the key element is follow through and the initial momentum.
Simone Collins: Do not trust the deep state. They don't care about you. They don't like you. They don't want you to succeed.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah.
Simone Collins: When I say deep state, that means deep state Republicans. Well, if they work for a think tank, do not trust them unless you verify.
Malcolm Collins: No, there are a lot of really great people who work for think tanks. And I mean, think tanks exist because there is so much deep state now. I mean, there's only so much deep state that you can eliminate. So you have to figure out even if you're going through the process of dismantling it, you have to have people who know how to dismantle it.
And people within think tanks are the only ones who know that. So there are
Simone Collins: things like heritage foundation. I'd love to connect heritage foundation with the [00:32:00] department of efficiency. And I know that the heritage foundation did some naughty things. I don't agree with everything they did there, but their lawyers, project
Malcolm Collins: 20, 25 was also.
pretty misrepresented in many ways.
Simone Collins: Yeah, but they are the only people with the lawyer team that's needed to protect competent individuals firing people. It is very hard to fire people within the national government and project 2025. Has what we need to handle those firings.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I think going forward, it's about getting the right mix of DC insiders who know how to dismantle the machine and then like, get it done operators who are really good at getting things executed.
And if you combine those two groups with sort of the dismantling experts and then the redesign experts, you could see immensely positive change just in terms of eliminating entirely redundant and unnecessary bureaucratic bloat. That is eating up tax dollars. This is a non [00:33:00] partisan issue. This is just about getting things to run.
Well, and more efficiently.
Simone Collins: No, I, I completely agree with you and I really hope, you know, actually like, okay, here's what I love and we might do another episode on this is if you personally know an individual where you have some information on them that has done a lot to make this country a better place and isn't getting a proper shout out I want to do those shutouts.
I want people like Rittenhouse and Fletcher to have the air that they need because it's not, I mean, look, Scott caught the tailwinds, right? And he did a lot and I appreciate that, but I don't think he's the only person like him out there right now. There's a lot think he'd be the first
Malcolm Collins: person to say that.
You know, the media has caught on his story because it's a great story and he did make a very material and real difference, but you're absolutely right, he's not alone in this. This is a team effort
Simone Collins: and we need to be, [00:34:00] and I think everyone like locally Republican, they know the guy who's like, Oh my God, this guy was like way above and beyond of what anyone would expect.
And you know, what's funny, everyone thinks that these individuals are like crazy religious cultists. They never are. You know who they are almost always. They are young, new right men. That's who's carrying this election. Every single one of these guys is like a tech forward, like fairly, like on like gay rights, for example, they're like f*****g whatever, like, let's just stop molesting children and all this weird transportation.
They're, they're, they're, they are sane humans. It is no longer the base, the, the foot soldiers of the Republican. Party is no longer you know, extremist prayer. Peacehood. Peter Priesthood types. It is now your average, sane, like, base camp watcher. [00:35:00] That's who's carrying the elections for our party now.
Malcolm Collins: It makes me feel good about the future of the United States.
Simone Collins: It, yeah, it makes me feel good as well. And it does better at telling those individuals, and this is very different than the average person who's carrying it for the Democrats. These people actually are woke extremists.
And I think that When we, when we accept this, when we accept how extreme the Democrats have gone, how extreme the people leading their party have gone and how non extreme and mainstream and accepting the Republican party is now, I think that we have a possibility of entering an era of one party leadership in a way that could be good.
Malcolm Collins: What would be the coolest is if essentially the Republican Party becomes one party of leadership because the Republican Party now basically is both the old, like sort of conservative [00:36:00] values, lifestyle party, and also this super socially progressive, like libertarian party. So I feel like what we're seeing is the new right could eventually just become.
Everything, and then split into, into factions, which then compete, and I'm all for that competition. I want there to be variety. But this does seem like, because it is so pluralistic and multifaceted, I could see the new rites splitting into new factions eventually, but I'm okay with that, and it does represent a lot of good things.
And I like the competition of tradition versus accelerationism. I like the competition of, sorry about the noises, but yeah, I
Simone Collins: know what I also like, you know, with Scott being like, Oh, Muslims want me dead. Like I, I love how much of the like LGBT movement like pretends not to notice that Muslims want them dead.
Not all muslims, mind you, but definitely a portion of them. [00:37:00] And sharia law is not something that they should work To be fair, Malcolm,
Malcolm Collins: they want themselves dead too. They're, they're sterilizing themselves. They're threatening to end themselves. They're, you know, they're, they're the anti nati They're the anti human party.
They kind of want all humans dead. So if it's so hypocritical that they also want, you know, gay humans dead, no, because they want all future humans dead. They want to make themselves dead. They want to make everyone, everyone gone, undue,
Simone Collins: bad human. Well, I love you to death Simone. This conversation has been illuminating and I hope you had fun learning about the gay Republican who won this election for Trump.
Malcolm Collins: I did. And I love you.
Simone Collins: I love you too. And,
Malcolm Collins: I'm making for you for dinner, fried rice plus the Chicken leftovers? I
Simone Collins: would even make fried rice. You've got a lot in the fridge that needs to know that I
Malcolm Collins: left over fried rice and I'm having leftover manicotti. Does that [00:38:00] sound good? You're so
Simone Collins: perfect.
Malcolm Collins: Waste not, want not.
And Val, that was nice of her to like draw by manicotti. Hey, we live in the type of neighborhood
Simone Collins: where people drop off food for us. Maybe you should drop off more eggs for the neighborhood. Just become the egg of her. Well,
Malcolm Collins: she's getting more eggs for that. For sure. I need to leave a, remind me, we need to leave a basket for her.
But yeah,
Simone Collins: I love you a great deal.
Malcolm Collins: I told you about the college student that. I saw at the polls on Tuesday. No. Tell
Simone Collins: me about this college student.
Malcolm Collins: It was like Republicans are the conservative ones, right? Like that's a conservative party. . Yes.
Simone Collins: Is the right am I on the right side?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. This is supposed to, we were on the wrong side the last time.
They will be mad, but
Simone Collins: I'm sorry. I, this is what we get for having an autistic audience. I love that. He's like, are Republicans the conservative ones? Yeah, they, what you should have said is, no, not really.
Malcolm Collins: Well, no, [00:39:00] but he wanted to vote conservative, but I mean, yeah, not really. He was
Simone Collins: at college, the college.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. He was a college kid and somehow he made it through this entire election cycle, not knowing which political party was the conservative one, which is impressive. And I kind of want to live in his world because wherever that is, it's different.
Speaker 8: It's too late.
Speaker 9: Is it too late? Is it gonna work?
Speaker 8: Oh nO.
Speaker 9: They're not falling? Oh, but the car is moving, you guys. The
Speaker 8: car is moving.
Speaker 9: He's doing it! Yeah, he's
Speaker 8: doing [00:40:00] it!
Speaker 9: Oh no, here comes the T Rex, you guys! Oh no!
Speaker 8: Mommy, I got a T Rex! Oh! What are they doing? Well, they're about to
Speaker 9: Now, this is why we don't wander off into the woods, right, Toasty?
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Because there's animals out there.
Octavian, this is why you can't wander off, right?
Speaker 8: That's because I'm
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
Speaker 37: [00:00:00] Liberal women are already fantasizing about how they'll be, quote unquote, reduced to breeding machines under the glorious Trump Reich.
This seems like a fetish. They're into this. I don't know what to do. I might wake up tomorrow to no rights
Speaker 40: reduced to a berating machine.
Speaker 37: Oh, I hope a Republican strong man doesn't come and take me to the breeding pen.
Speaker 39: Yeah, it's
Simone Collins: they want it. They want it so fricking bad. And I wouldn't say that if I didn't vehemently believe that that was the case, but I read. D*****s romance novels. I know what women are into
Would you like to know more?
Speaker 37: Hello, Simone. Today, I'm excited to be bringing you amazing news. I am so sorry that we have been absent since the election, but I was taking a mental health day due to the state of ecstasy I was in when we won the Senate. We won the popular vote. We probably won the house.
Speaker 45: [00:01:00] I'd like to make a noise complaint. You're so fine, you're so fine,
Speaker 37: And
I have just been all day today watching videos of progressives crying about losing
Speaker 36: I go from hysterically crying one minute over the pain of this situation. Oh my god! Oh my god! Yes! Yes! Oh, let me taste your tears, Scott. Mmm, your tears are so yummy and sweet.
Speaker 38: now hE's f*****g president.
Speaker 41: Oh my god!
Speaker 28: Off.
I can't
Speaker 26: believe
Speaker 42: believe Trump's actually
Speaker 41: gonna win this f ing day! Oh Jesus Christ! I'm so pissed off! F F F Goddamn! No! No! No! Why?! Why?! Why?! Oh, the tears of unfathomable sadness! Mmm, yummy![00:02:00]
Speaker 36: Yummy again! I'm sorry!
Speaker 42: I'm sorry! I'm sorry! Hope your day gets better.
Speaker 41: Shut
Speaker 38: Positive energy.
Speaker 41: What's up? You do not understand English!
Speaker 37: because look, we had people's like when you were out working at election day get people to key our car on both sides, by the way, Simone, in, in, in multiple areas, they're just like, yeah, we're going to like, and I love that I know this person is right now writhing in pain
but what we are going to take this episode to do is go through not just the videos of progressives crying about this that particular form of pornography, I guess I'd call it. One of my favorite was one and one progressive was like, I'm going to kill myself if Trump
and then somebody else goes, we'll make sure to post it. So I have something to goon to. Basically that means masturbate [00:03:00] too. But we'll be going over other memes. I mean we can start by talking about like this video here
Speaker: This is all a prank, right? Like, like we're just gonna wake up tomorrow morning and everything's gonna go back to the way it like it'll all it'll be a psych it'll be like a really bad dream and none of this will ever happen, right? Like it'll be like the first time and then we're all gonna pull through fine in four years.
Correct? Please? Someone tell me? I can
Speaker 2: tell you one thing right now, marriage is the farthest thing from on the table, currently. So, they really, they screwed the pooch on that one. If they thought that any of this was gonna actually help with the whole family and kids department, and, and lowering birth rates, because that, nah.
Nuh not even. Any semblance of thoughts I had, or hope for that, is completely gonna be a no thanks from me, love. You think I would ever even dare bring a child into this country now? It was rough before, now? No. That's cute. And the men, don't even give No, don't even get me [00:04:00] started about dating. But think, I was still entertaining a few moderates here and there, sometimes.
No, honey, no. Not even close. That's never Goodbye.
Simone Collins: Oh because they were going to do that otherwise.
Speaker 37: Yeah, it's like, yeah, we're, we don't want you. I, I, this is one of the things where like, progressives are like, ha, ha, ha, we had a vasectomy van outside of our own DNC event this year. And I'm like,
Simone Collins: ha, ha, ha, we're genociding our own people. Ha ha
Speaker 37: ha. Imagine if some other group drove that out to like a, let's say like a native American tribal council and somebody drew of effect to me, ban to give to me is to anyone who wants, you'd be like, Oh, that's horrifying.
Why would you do that? But you are cheering, doing it to your own people. Okay. But don't expect me to care. You know, this is the, you seem vile. You have saved a man. Oh my God. I have to play the video here of the woman who is just like randomly screaming at her boyfriend because it's the New York girl and she found out her [00:05:00] boyfriend voted for Trump.
Speaker 39: Oh,
Speaker 37: and everyone's like, oh my God, this guy saved his life by not staying with this woman.
Speaker 33: STUPID F*****G W***E! SO I'LL JUST SHUT THE I'LL JUST SHUT THE F**K UP FOR GOOD NOW, HUH? YEAH, YOU F*****G WANT THAT? YEAH? WE ARE F*****G OVER! YOU F*****G D*****S! I HOPE THAT YOU CHOKE ON A PIECE OF CONCRETE AND LITERALLY GO TO HELL. I will see you in f*****g hell, you f*****g a*****e, you f*****g liar, you f*****g manipulator, you goddamn wish you would've played your cards right with me, you F*****G A*****E!
Speaker 35: Yeah.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Bullet dodged. I think the problem though, is many stays, especially young men are struggling to find. Young women who
Speaker 37: I don't think that's true. You were [00:06:00] progressive when I met you and you basically immediately capitulated on all those views when they were put to sunlight.
A lot of women do that. They don't hold. I
Simone Collins: guess that's to a young man with social skills. So that's a, you know, big, if it's difficult. Here's what I want to say though, on election day, on election day, one of the polling places where I stayed for a while was on a college campus. Okay. And it was the best place to be.
It was, there were so many young people voting Republican or just voting open mindedly. It was amazing. Like older adults. Yeah. Because they're at pretty much every polling station in our district, there's a Democrat table and there's a Republican table and they're handing out sample ballots in there to talk with anyone who wants to talk.
And it was really. Not fun in a Democrat dominated district to stand at these Republican tables in most of the polling places. And [00:07:00] yeah, my, our car was keyed at one of them because people are so hostile toward Republicans. On this college campus, students are walking up, they're talking, they're happy that they're not looking at you like you're a dehumanized monster.
It was amazing. And it gave me so much hope because even, yeah, like to your point, young It was definitely mostly young men who were coming up to the Republican table. I'm not going to lie. But everyone seemed a lot more open minded and it gave me hope that at least younger generations aren't as politically ossified and polarized as we might be led to believe.
Speaker 37: Well, one of the things that we're going to be talking about is, is every younger generation recently, it's gotten more and more conservative. The, the, the young people, America is moving more conservative. And not only that. Even young women? Yeah, even young women. If you look at this election cycle versus last election cycle,
Speaker 25: So you asked, are there any places that the vice president is overperforming Joe Biden in 2020? So we could show you that as well. We just bring that out here. Harris overperforming 2020. [00:08:00] Holy smokes. There you go. So let this go away and see if there's anything on the east side there. Literally nothing, literally nothing, literally not one county.
Speaker 37: Emily did not do better than Biden in a single state.
In fact, she only did better in, I think it was 36 counties in the entire country,, so in every single domain, they are doing worse than they did historically. But let's go to the memes. And one of the first ones that I think you'll notice here is why, like a lot of people, like, Oh my God, there's been a 25 point change in Hispanic voting and a lot of, and we did an episode on why minorities are leaving the Democrats.
And I think we immediately see what we've always seen. said is that the Democrats were always the party of racism. They just hold themselves and somehow brainwashed a few idiots that they weren't. And if you look at the way that they're responding to the fact that they still have the majority of the vote in a lot of these communities, but they don't have a super majority of the vote.
So how do they [00:09:00] react? Okay here is a
rUnethicalLifeTips post on Reddit that got 7. 5 thousand upvotes. Okay, so this isn't like a, a controversial Dems are like, yeah, this is a good idea. It was two thousand comments on how this can be done. So the person said, I have a neighbor who's a huge MAGA fan, he's a Mexican American, and his two parents are here illegally, and I live with him.
How could I go about reporting him and having him deported? I'm in Florida. You know, oh, oh, here's another one by Greg Hartfield with all the the flags, around his profile. F**k Latinos and Arabs, by the way, Arabs voted majority for Trump. There, I said it. I hope you all get deported and banned.
Basically they're saying that we were just using you to win elections, but I hate you and I think you should be a second class citizen. Well, that's what I've really come to hate about the Democrat party is I'm realizing more and more as we look into the [00:10:00] history and their actual policies and what they're saying and doing.
Simone Collins: Is they never really did try to help these groups. They basically just said, we speak for you. We are your party. They sort of tried to own them, but they did nothing to help them. What a great point. Yeah.
Speaker 37: This is why everyone says you're the smart one, Simone.
Simone Collins: No, this is just the conclusions of our podcast conversation.
So not. Doing anything novel, but I'm loving these memes you share.
Speaker 28: What the hell? You cannot be serious. How did I wake up to this garbage as my president? That's right, garbage.
I went to bed last night and she was ahead. I woke up to this mess. Freakin nightmare! These
freaks of nature that call themselves Trump supporters. I can't believe people of color, people of color, actually voted for him. How does that happen? What, does he pay them? I'll give you some money if you [00:11:00] vote against your own people.
Who does that?
Simone Collins: I'll go over this series of tweets.
Speaker 37: Man, f**k you all. I ain't defending you all no more. If you're Hispanic and you voted for Trump, I hope your illegal family members get deported. That cousin needing to escape Mexico and South A, I hope they can't run away from danger they're trying to escape from.
Basically, I hope your cousin dies. Yeah. Wow. And you voted for Trump, I hope you get pulled over, because they're gonna kill you, and get away with it.
And poor people who voted for Trump, I hope you go homeless, and get beaten up by police, and they'll get away with it. And women who vote voted for Trump. I hope your baby dies in your womb.
Simone Collins: This sounds so much like the general hate mail that we get personally, that I'm realizing there's just this.
Round of default attacks that a lot of progressives can't even be creative in the way that they express their hate
Speaker 37: Well, no, they just have so much hatred for [00:12:00] minority and women's so much And it comes through the moment. They think they cannot adopt these people's identity and use them to maintain control over others
Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah.
Yeah
Speaker 37: Well, here's a great another one here, right? So, this one here got tons of retweets You What if we rounded up all the suspected white domestic supremacist terrorists and took their kids with them and put them in camps and molested them and starved them. Just curious.
Simone Collins: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Just curious.
Speaker 37: Whole anti Latino thing is like actually really big. So here's just a series of reddit posts on this. I know this is going to sound racist, but Latinos f*****g disgust me Latino men. And this is a separate one Latino men and their f*****g machismo. Next one. Latinos aren't immune from becoming f*****g idiots.
Next f*****g Latino men. LOL. Next one. I'm going to f*****g laugh at all Latinos who voted for Trump when he starts mass deportation and separating families. Next one, bro. Latinos don't give a [00:13:00] f**k. Once they get their documents. Also, they are religious, heavily against abortion and drugs. The mask is off.
It is so
Simone Collins: clear. Wow. Just, the funny thing is, I just don't see conservatives doing this. Conservatives
Speaker 37: just don't. They don't turn on anyone when they get elected or lose an election. They don't do that.
Simone Collins: Well, they, you know, have they lost the election? I think they'd be really concerned about election integrity and they'd be talking about the deep state.
Oh, really?
Speaker 37: Hold on. I got to share with you a little graph. Okay. You guys can look it in and draw inferences.
Simone Collins: Oh.
Speaker 40: Ha.
Speaker 37: Ha. Ha. Ha. Is right. Now you can read these tweets from Dems about it.
Ha. Ha. Right? Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.
Simone Collins: But anyway, we'll just say preemptive preventative action taken.
Speaker 37: People put on a condom this time, let's put it that way.
Simone Collins: Yes, they use protection.
Speaker 37: Right, so now I'm going to talk about a separate [00:14:00] phenomenon.
So the first phenomenon we're talking about is how quickly the Dems became super racist. The next phenomenon we're talking about is Democratic women keeping Democratic men from sleeping with them over this election result. Which one is effing insane. The Trump has no choice. He even said he would veto if it was passed a national abortion ban.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and the, for, for progressives, the silver lining of this election was that something like seven States enshrined protections for abortion and their constitution. So abortion is now, as of this election. More enshrined and safe in the United States than it was before the election. So what are you complaining about people?
You have a president who promised to not enact a national abortion ban. And you have basically a broad voter support for abortion rights.
Speaker 37: And a video for one of the progressives whining about losing where she's like, well, and you have [00:15:00] taken away women's rights. And what she means from the perspective, I think most sane people is the right to kill children because they want these super late stage abortions.
Simone Collins: That's what really gets me is it. I do actually feel pretty uncomfortable about some of the Like a sort of free, get out of jail, free abortion cards being handed out. Because again, I mean, at the very least there has to be legislation about pain management. You are euthanizing humans in this case. And, and, Oh,
Speaker 37: well, the fact that they use pain management when they plan the baby to come to term, but when they're going to abort them, they don't show
Simone Collins: really gets me.
They're just like,
Speaker 37: and this is normal was in these two categories, right? We're going to save the baby after what is it? 15 weeks, 12 to 15
Simone Collins: weeks. Yeah.
Speaker 37: You typically use pain management, but they don't use it for abortion is absolutely horrifying. It's monstrous. Yeah. But then you have these individuals who are like, oh, you've taken away my rights to kill children.
[00:16:00] What I really get the vibe that they don't realize they're giving off is a Southerner who during the slave owning period that just had a law passed. It was like, you can't beat your slave. It's like, they've taken away my right to beat my slaves.
Speaker 40: You're my property. What?
What? You're stepping on my right. Don't tread on me, my slaves, my property, I can
Speaker 37: do
Speaker 40: what I want.
Speaker 43: To kill my mom. She's my mom. I can do whatever I want with her. It's more important I live the way I want. She isn't an object you can own, she's a human being. . Ow! Heya! Ow, she's making you suffer! Eh, maybe all these changes are good for me. Maybe the world doesn't revolve around me.
Maybe the world doesn't revolve around me.
Speaker 44: Blegh, blegh, blegh, blegh. The, the, the Where does it revolve around me?
Speaker 37: And they don't realize [00:17:00] how f ing horrifying this comes off to people who are like, Bro, but you know slaves are human. Like, you know that, like, fetuses that have, like, full neural development are definitely human, right?
Like, you're mad that we're not letting you kill human, right? You get that. We're on the same page here?
Okay, good. Alright, but let's talk about them denying sex to their own kind, which I effing love.
Speaker 9: If you are a man, I will not be talking to you. I am going to be promoting the ForB movement. I
F**k you! Women, f*****g stop dating men, stop having sex with men, stop talking to men. Divorce your husband, leave your f*****g boyfriends, leave them. They don't give a s**t about you. And I promise you, come over to this side, I will bake cookies, I will shave your head if you want me to,
Speaker 37: Okay, so. Here's the Reddit thread right here. I'm not even sure I'm gonna have sex with my left leaning husband after this [00:18:00] election.
Just in case. Yep, my boyfriend isn't getting any for a while and he's left leaning as they get. This is a men's issue and men failed us again. Yeah,
Oh, here's another one. Not even just conservative men. If they can't explain in detail, all caps, their exact understanding of less leaning policies and how they agree it, then cut them out of your life entirely. What?
Speaker 27: I'm done. I'm done. This is a message to anyone who follows me.
If you voted for Trump, unfollow me and block me. If you didn't vote, unfollow me and block me.
Speaker 37: How toxic are these people? Exactly this. If they don't have disgust on their face when you mention conservative politicians, they support them. At this point, any men, they don't deserve the all women do for them. It's really times like these, I'm glad I'm a lesbian.
Simone Collins: To a certain extent. [00:19:00] Again, this is one of those situations of, okay, you go do you these these just are thoroughly unpleasant people who send hateful messages and seem deeply unhappy and
Speaker 37: this is the thing about men who like pretend to be progressive to get pussy, right? Like, It's, it's, it's not good. It
Simone Collins: is, it
Speaker 37: is, it is strange.
Let's say the strange is strange. You are locking yourself in for a miserable experience. It is not worth it. You do not want to breed with these women. You do not want to have kids with them. You do not want to. And speaking of breeding, I love this one from zero HP Lovecraft, by the way. I hope we get him on the show sometime if anyone knows him, tell them to reach out to us, because I want to chat with him. But anyway, one person tweets, Women need to stop dating and having sex with men immediately.
And I'm not even joking or being dramatic in the slightest. And then he says, Time's up, Foyd. Feminist Noid, that [00:20:00] means. Report to the Mar a Lago breeding pens by 7am on November 8th with proof of fertility. Failure to comply will result in immediate deportation to Haiti.
Speaker 40: Can we, can we do the Mar a Lago breeding pens, Simone?
Speaker 37: What? Oh god. I really want that to be a thing, like when you're, when you're on the streets and somebody's like attacking you for being a Republican, you can be like, report to the Mar a Lago breeding pens by 7am November
Speaker 39: 8th. Oh boy.
Speaker 37: That, I mean, that's really what they're acting like is going to happen.
Oh, here's another one. Time for four years of celibacy. This is on two X chromosomes, ladies get off the dating apps, no more sex, no more pregnancies. The val of celibacy starts now. Drop your partner if they can't respect your celibacy. They're
Simone Collins: acting as though they were having sex before. I'm not, this is so bizarre.
Here's the thing. In the end, we're seeing a lot of freak out, [00:21:00] right? But we have given a lot of progressives exactly the gift that they need for four years, because they cannot really be their full selves if they're not a victim, if they don't have an enemy. And I think that the past four years have been a big struggle for them because when you have a Democrat in the white house and you have a Democrat majority anywhere, like in the house or Senate statewide or national.
You know, it's really hard to pretend that you're the victim, you know, then it's just, you know, there's, there's not enough drama and I think we've given them the gift of finally being a victim again, they get to indulge with their therapists more, there's more material. We've done a great service
Speaker 37: for the therapy community.
I wish we had invested in therapy apps right before this election. Here's another great one. Going to have a conversation with my husband tonight. No sex until he's sterilized. I can't risk pregnancy and death for at least the next four years. I have two [00:22:00] daughters to take care of. Implying here that the daughters aren't his.
By the way, she doesn't seem to have two daughters.
Simone Collins: People seem to think pregnancy is deadly.
Speaker 37: Like, what's going on here? I don't know what age they're living in. And I love all of this when Trump is literally pro choice, literally said he would veto any abortion ban.
Speaker 39: Yeah.
Speaker 37: They're, they're living in fantasy world, but here's, here's another great one where I think throughout this, you see progressives turning on their own at a really high level.
So this really is saying, and I think that this is probably comedic. I. Don't think that this is real, but we'll see it because it reminds me of the Tendi scene. I'm so mad. My mom brought me a plate of cookies and I just smacked them out of her hands. She started crying. I don't know what came over me.
This is already taking such a toll on my mental health. I can't believe actual fascists are going to be president.
Simone Collins: Tendi's. Yeah, that's, that can't be, that can't be true. [00:23:00] I mean, and who brings cookies to their kid's room? I mean. They will make crumbs there
Speaker 37: somebody who's emasculating their child, I suppose.
I mean, not that these children have masculinity. Sorry. I should mean by the way, you're a great mother, Simone. I really just don't compliment you on that enough.
Speaker 39: Thanks for saying that.
Speaker 37: All right. So with this next one, I think this, this one really gets me. So we're going to do a collection of like random ones before we get back to theme.
Now, this is a meme where they say, If you don't understand why your gay friend is scared right now, then you don't have a gay friend. You simply happen to know a gay person. And I'm like I, and I think that this is true. Like somebody else posted, like, if you are surprised about the shift in the Latin American voting patterns of the United States, you don't actually have any Hispanic friends.
And I think that this is also true is the gay voting patterns. If you are surprised that gay people have turned against Democrats, 45 percent to like 38%, depending on what you're looking at. [00:24:00] And it's increasing every year. Well, I mean, real gay people, not like opt in LGBT identity people. I'm talking about like gay and lesbian women.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 37: Because if you could just say, Oh, I'm non binary and, and now because you're dating me, like Fundie Fridays, right? Like they're a, a woman by any normal
Simone Collins: queer.
Speaker 37: But they always think they're queer because the guy identifies as not a guy even though he looks like a guy and he acts like a guy and he has a male role in their relationship and he has a penis but he identifies I don't
Simone Collins: think, I don't, he's not non binary is he?
That's
Speaker 37: why she considers herself gay.
Simone Collins: Oh.
Speaker 37: Or not gay, but queer. Queer. He considers herself queer because he's a they them, and she now is queer because she sleeps with a they them. And it shows you get this opt in sexual identity, which of course to the gay community is effing horrifying, because they've been fighting for their rights, and now anyone can just identify and take whatever they have fought for from them, right?
Like, it's horrifying. I [00:25:00] can understand why the gays are so antagonistic to this group. And I would not be surprised if by the next presidential election cycle, the majority of gay men are voting Republican.
Speaker 39: Yeah. Good for the Lincoln Republicans.
Speaker 37: We've been to their events at Mar a Lago. I love them. And yeah, and Trump, keep in mind, was the first presidential candidate who, when he was elected, supported gay marriage.
Obama didn't. Trump is the most pro actual, like, sane gay people. And the person who helped Trump win the cycle, and we're going to have a separate video on this, is the gay man who got the Amish vote out and literally won Trump Pennsylvania. It's not just Trump likes gay people. It's the gay people are helping Trump and to any Republicans who are still like, well, I don't know gay men where, f**k off.
Look, it, it, it may be sinful, but we all do sinful things. Okay. I [00:26:00] mean,
Simone Collins: you think non procreative sex is sinful. So
Speaker 37: yeah, all non procreative sex is sinful. You can go to our track series about that. Cause some people are like, Oh, the Bible justifies it here, here and here. And I'm like, well, not really. You have to take a pretty liberal reading of it for that.
But anyway, basically, just, you know, what the Bible actually says is anything you don't do for the glory of God is sinful. If you think getting yourself off is for the glory of God, fine. I just take a stricter interpretation of that than you do. But here's a great meme here where it's kids jumping into this like college machine and their creativity and intelligence is drained from them.
And now they're just like, you know, Angry Redditors, which I think is so true. Oh, and here's the welcome to Canada meme you love with all the fat blue haired women going to Canada. That's an amazing image. Canada for all the people who leave our country and go to yours over this election cycle. I think Canada is going to go far right by the way, in the near future.
Simone Collins: Hmm. Well, I've already been, I mean, I've watched a lot of [00:27:00] YouTube based response to the election outcome and already there are YouTubers that Who were talking about how they would move to Europe or Canada based on the election results not going their way, but now they're already backpedaling saying, I mean, I.
I might stay here. No one ever goes. I've never actually
Speaker 37: heard of someone who moved out. So Canada, by the way, I think Canada might be saved. Germany, Germany is effed. Like I actually, I wanted to have you do a tweet on this, but all the that come into our country illegally and that are just like non producing and you know, whatever.
I don't think we should send them back to their own countries. I think we need to deport them to germany because germany will be like, oh They'll feel like good people. They'll be like, oh, we're protecting all of these immigrants, you know Uh, the immigrants will get more social services than they'd even get here and we can eventually erase the german people which I think would be a net good for [00:28:00] humanity or sorry, I should say what's left of the german people
This is one thing where we had you know What was it? Jolly heretic come to our house. And he's like, we're going to have to censor some things from the documentary we're making, but you guys said about the German people because we have some choice words with the German people. I, and again, I don't think this is like an ethnic German thing.
I think that the Germans who left their country a long time ago, or who would leaving it today have a lot of good. I just think that their society was so poisoned. Okay. After World War II uh, that it has just become this woke menace, you know, shutting down nuclear reactors, listening to people like Greta Thunberg capitulating monoculture pushes on them.
If they can't fight back and they, they can't like, they don't even have close to a majority. It would be like if Massachusetts was a country. So why not just send the world's immigrants there to bleed them dry quicker? I'm sorry. Is that too mean?[00:29:00]
Speaker 39: I really, really like Germany. I love, I love the language. I, the people aren't very friendly. He colonized
Speaker 37: it after the people who replaced them failed to maintain , their food supplies and die out. Here's a really interesting map that I found as a meme, really powerful. This is a polymarket forecast on October 25th.
And this is the actual election results. And it's a meme of Corporate needs you to find the difference between this picture and this picture. And then somebody says, there's the same picture and they are the same picture. So why was poly market so accurate? This is actually a totally different thing that you might not know about.
There was like this random whale that nobody understood who is betting on poly market.
Speaker 39: Yes.
Speaker 37: We actually know what happened with that now. Okay. Tell me. It wasn't some Republican sympathizer. It was somebody who thought they could make a lot of money based on bad data. So I'll read an excerpt here.
As Theo celebrated the [00:30:00] returns on election night, he disclosed another piece of analysis behind a successful wager. In the email he told the journal that he had commissioned his own surveys to measure neighborhood effect , using a major pollster whom he declined to name. The results he wrote were quote unquote mind blowing for Trump.
Theo declined to share the surveys, saying his agreement with the pollster required him to keep the results private. But he argued that US pollsters should use the neighborhood message in future surveys to avoid embarrassing misses. Quote, public opinion would have been better prepared if the latest poll had measured the neighborhood effect, end quote, Theo said. Neighborhood polls that ask respondents which candidates they expect their neighbors to support. The idea is that people might not want to reveal their own preferences but will indirectly reveal them when asked to guess who their neighbors plan to vote for.
CEO cited a handful of publicly released polls conducted in September using the neighborhood method alongside the traditional method. These polls showed support with several percentage points lower than respondents When respondents were asked who their neighbors would vote for, compared [00:31:00] was the results that came from directly asking which candidate they supported.
So basically a French dude just had a thesis about how polls could be done better, ran it, and then. Saw an overwhelming majority and was like, I can make a few million pretty easy on this and he effing did.
Simone Collins: That is so cool. Aren't people amazing. I mean, most people are horrible, but then there are just some who are, you know, this dude, the, the guy who got PA for Trump and Caitlyn Jenner right now, they are.
They're awesome.
Speaker 37: I, I'm, I'm just really, really, really impressed with this guy. I'm like genuinely what a baller thing to do. And I hope he put some of this money to good look, good use. Even we had to just, maybe it was Elon acting under a disguise. No, it was nothing like that. And this shows why betting markets are so important to get alternate ideas out there.
The betting market was right about every single state. [00:32:00]
Speaker 39: Amazing.
Speaker 37: But now I want to talk quickly about a really dumb bet, ultra progressive price, which was a main. . So remember that person in the Olympics who identified as a woman, but like super man ish it. Yeah. Well, one of my favorite things that came out of this particular poll was a tweet by Caitlyn Jenner, which said, I haven't seen a man beat a woman this hard since the Olympics. So even like trans people are like, oh, this is ridiculous. But now a photo has come out of his dad who's like, oh, he's just a trans person. And we can see him as a kid.
being 100 percent a boy, identifying as a boy. We can see him at early interviews. I was going to do an episode on this. I'm gonna see if I can find that clip again, where he uses male pronouns for himself and he identifies as a male and he's X, Y, this isn't a person with a chromosomal disorder. This isn't a person with a developmental disorder.
This is just a generic trans individual. With, well, they may have had internal testes, we'll see, [00:33:00] but it seems like it may have just been a generic trans individual, but the left can't ever back down from anything. And we talk about how much they hate Men by the way, here's a great one. So somebody tweeted girls.
We lost margot Robbie has welcomed her first child a boy people reports and here are some of the comments under this Can't believe she became a boy mom tragedy Boy, mom is more of a mindset beyond being a mother of a boy, even though I would abort but it's simply not fair That a male gets to grow and say his mother is barbie Like, he's not going to appreciate that in the way a girl would.
It's such a waste. This is the person who played Barbie in the Barbie movie. By
Speaker 39: the way,
Speaker 37: people should check, check out our video on the Barbie movie and why it's actually super base because it is. But wow. That also, this implies
Simone Collins: that there are people who believe that if you, if you realize that you have a pregnancy with a boy,
You should [00:34:00] abort that.
Speaker 37: Look, you know 70 percent of gender choices in the United States was, was embryos that were of females? Oh, and here's another one. True, we aren't sure how she necessarily feels about being a mother of a boy. I would say she could try again for a girl, but I would never want to subject a little girl to an older brother.
Simone Collins: What? I, Oh my gosh. I, I, I can't
Speaker 37: really, by the way, enjoy all of the people in self care right now. They here's a tweet. A colleague of mine just shared an email from a major university public policy school, which is planning a quote unquote self care suite for students the day after the election featuring Legos, coloring, and milking cookies.
Simone Collins: Bill, because they're little children. Yeah. I'm not going to name him. But he was talking about as a professor when Trump won in 2016 he was seen as very odd for holding class the following day, the day following the election,
yeah, but he wouldn't care about you sharing that.[00:35:00]
No, I, he's very sensitive right now about what's published about him. So I think it's crazy that a university would just expect that all professors would naturally cancel their classes following an election that didn't have an outcome that would, it's bizarre to me. When
Speaker 37: you know, if anybody went to like a Trump, they would be, they would find it absurd that you would want a Trump lost mental health day.
Simone Collins: No, no, of course not. No, that would be a day of celebration. That would be a day of. You know, you have to have class so everyone can go and gloat together. But then he said
Speaker 37: at the end of the tweet, folks, he said that Funny Anymore is disturbing to treat adults like fragile children, and he is absolutely right.
Simone Collins: Yes.
Speaker 37: So here's a shift in voting, by the way, that I think you'd find pretty interesting in 2018, the women won this Democrats won this 33%. points for women, 19 points for men in 2020. So two years later, they won women in this age demographic, 32 points, men, 15 points. So a lot less in 2022, it was [00:36:00] moved pretty far. Again, women, they run 21 points.
Men, they run one points in this election cycle. Women, they won by 18 points. Men, they lost by 14 points. So, it's both men and women that are moving right.
Simone Collins: Wow, that's representative of what I saw on that college campus. How refreshing.
Speaker 37: How cool is that? And what I think we're going to continue to see this in America, Democrats have lost permanently because they're not having kids and they relied on parasitizing healthy cultural groups for their children and it's not working anymore.
Here's a fun one from CBN, which is report their spells against Trump. Aren't working. He has a shield. And this is where I'll post the Shinzo Abe mean Shinzo Abe got us this election. He protected Trump from the witches. And I know he did in my heart of hearts and my belief of beliefs. I know he did. Now we're going to talk about the suicide claims because this has been a [00:37:00] major thing.
If Trump wins, I'll commit suicide. And I think it's really effed up that it shows that they think that they'll be lauded for this position or it's become so normalized within their worldview. Well, that's a trope for abusive girlfriends and boyfriends. That is what's abusive. That is what abusive.
Yeah. If you don't do what I tell you to, I'll commit suicide.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Speaker 37: That's really what they're doing to the country. And they don't realize that we don't,
Simone Collins: well, they don't realize that we, we see right through it and we see right through it as an abusive tactic of someone who is exploitative and manipulative.
And Machiavellian.
Speaker 37: But let's look at our suicide watch. Okay. So here's some posts recently considering suicide of Trump wins the election or a rebellion. I'm trans. I need a good reason to not kill myself. If Trump wins, if Trump wins, I might not make it past this year. Trump wins. I will most likely actually attempt to kill myself.
The idea that Trump wins the elections and the suicide, if Trump wins the election, I might kill [00:38:00] myself. The world is hell is. No longer if, but when, why can't someone try to shoot me dead? Like Trump politics are probably going to kill me anyways. So why wait? And so these individuals, right.
A and we'll go into more of this. Like clearly they think that this is one going to be persuasive to other individuals or it's like an appropriate reaction to a candidate who 50 over 50 percent because he won the popular vote over 50 percent of the country supports is worth the 50 percent of Americans need to be disenfranchised for you to continue living.
That is so f'ed up. You're like, I just will not live in a world where I, the minority, am able to impose my will on the majority of people. It's dark. Here's another fun one by Zero HP Lovecraft. Liberal women are already fantasizing about how they'll be, quote unquote, reduced to breeding machines under the glorious Trump Reich.
This seems like a fetish. They're into this. [00:39:00] No, no, it's a fetish. Let's go. Let's go for this fetish. They go, I mean. Trump is very likely to win right now. I can't kill myself because of the bunnies. I can't leave the country. I've looked through Canada's immigration pathways and I don't meet any of the requirements.
I don't think there's many airlines that would let me take my rabbits overseas. I don't know what to do. I might wake up tomorrow to no rights
Speaker 40: reduced to a berating machine. I don't know what to do. Like, to think these women are like, Oh, don't take me to the breeding pens. I don't want to be forcibly bred.
Well, she's too lazy to
Simone Collins: do her due diligence. You know, Catherine Zarella, the fashion writer, she flies with her bunnies, her posh bunnies. Like, this is ridiculous. She's just making up
Speaker 37: excuses. She's too lazy to leave the country. And I'll put Ayla's, we're going to do another episode with Ayla's [00:40:00] polls here, but women actually disproportionately, if you're looking at women and men and the things they masturbate to and by the way, people can be like, Oh no, these, these polls are effed up because the women who masturbate are weird and the women who don't are normal, except Actually, when you include like narrative, erotic material, like romance things and fan fictions and stuff like that, women, difference in men is only about like 8%.
But anyway, the point being here is that women hugely disproportionately prefer scenarios in which they are forcibly bred, in which they have or are otherwise disempowered. This is Definitely a fantasy for a subsection of girls and we argue in some of our other stuff for girls who sleep around more because their brain from an evolutionary perspective the only reason you'd be sleeping with like I don't know, like 10 different guys a year is if you were basically being passed around because your tribe had been raided and you had been captured.
This isn't going to happen in most like scenarios in which, you know, you have a guy who's dedicated [00:41:00] to you and the kids because of the increasing number of kids you have. And so these women are optimized for this. And I, I actually think that this is kind of a sex thing.
Simone Collins: Well, and also just the fact that either when they're, protesting anti abortion policies or they're protesting pronatalist policies, women just jump at the chance to dress up in Handmaid's Tale cosplay. They just, they want, they want to play that fantasy. I swear to you. And they can't, they can't just literally
Speaker 37: play the game.
Oh, I hope a Republican strong man doesn't come and take me to the breeding pen.
Speaker 39: Yeah, it's
Simone Collins: they want it. They want it so fricking bad. And I wouldn't say that if I didn't vehemently believe that that was the case, but I read. D*****s romance novels. I know what women are into and that is, it's, is our house, the breeding pens.
It's so funny. Cause people accused us of [00:42:00] that all the time. And yet none of our children were produced with sex.
Speaker 37: This is the thing that always gets me when people are like, don't you want to ban porn to increase the number of kids? And it's like, people who have kids accidentally because they didn't have porn is not who we're trying to get to have more kids. It's people who want their culture and cultural identity and they, they care about their children to exist in the future.
I want people to have kids for kids, not because they couldn't find porn on a particular day. But anyway, keep going. Here's one on the trans thing. Okay. The transsexual lesbian. Okay. So a man who likes women, a transsexual lesbian.
Speaker 39: Okay. Okay.
Speaker 37: If he buys a gun, I'm suggesting you do too. Protect yourselves, my sisters.
And by the way, you should watch our episode on the pandemic of trans and gender nonconforming mass shooters, because there's been a huge, there are more trans mass shooters. I think it was in the past six years. Then there have been female mass shooters since the [00:43:00] 1980s. But anyway, somebody goes in, I can't afford a gun and have been far too suicidal for it to be safe for me to own one.
And then another goes, no, if I have a gun, I'm going to blow my brains out. You gun people need to understand. And a lot of people are like, oh, most guns are going to be owned by leftists in the future. And it's like, no, but whatever. And this one right wing cope, which was a. Twitter account made to make fun of right people, and this had 3.
5 million views by the way, said, this is unironically worse than 9 11. Unironically? Unironically, yes. This is one that I'm pretty sure is fake because it was deleted from Suicide Watch, but I think it's pretty funny. Farewell Reddit, and farewell to my wife and her boyfriend.
Speaker 39: That's a funny joke.
Speaker 37: Here I'm doing a little meme that says, it's the fairy godmother and she says, remember no matter [00:44:00] how much you cry like a little b***h, Trump will still be your president. And here's one on Elon Musk. My God, you people who want to s**t on Elon Musk. He's so based. I'm so excited for doge.
Simone Collins: I'm so excited for doge. It's going to happen. It better happen. If that promise is broken, you mean the government of efficiency, the department of government, government efficiency. Doge. But
Speaker 37: anyway, look, here's a great tweet by Elon, right? So, Thierry Breton did this long email, it was like a formal letter to Elon Musk, and it said, With great audience comes great responsibility, hashtag DSA, as there is a risk of amplification of potentially harmful content in a European flag.
In connection with the events, with major audience around the world, I sent this letter to Elon Musk. It was basically this letter begging Elon Musk to be more [00:45:00] of a b***h. And Elon Musk tweets, To be honest, I really wanted to respond with this Tropic Thunder meme, but I would never do something so rude and irresponsible.
And the Tropic Thunder meme is, Take a big step back and literally f**k your own face.
Speaker 40: Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Oh,
Speaker 39: these are the leaders that we both need and deserve.
Speaker 37: This is the mandate I'm here for. Here's, here's the type of thing I would say, like, If I did know Elon, I would say he is one of the most fun people you could spend time with.
He's a great guy, and I am so frustrated by this drive to just s**t on anyone who's achieved anything with their lives. Look at what he's saying, look at what he's [00:46:00] doing, and don't believe the people who build their entire lives on pulling down people who have done more than them. But anyway to go further here's a great meme of Trump as the rising sun over a flower a field of screaming progressive flowers, which I absolutely love.
Here's another one here, dehumanizing the alternate. It's a woman. PhD. She has this in her name card on Twitter. She says there's a reason why educated people vote blue. What we're seeing is the uneducated population of America holding the rest of the country hostage. This is why there's such a push to weaken education, ban books and outlaw the teaching of black history by the Republican party.
And I'm like, didn't you guys ban effing? What was it? Dr. Seuss, we banned like literal pornography you were giving to children about like how to give b******s to guys. Like, yeah, I can see watch our banned books video on this because we go over the actual reality of banned books, but yeah, oh, [00:47:00] here's a fun one here.
It's a duck. Chasing a guy, or not a duck, a goose, because goose are the ones who chase people. Then it goes, if he's Hitler, why didn't he do Hitler things in his first term? And they're running away, dropping their hat, and he goes, Why didn't he do Hitler things before? And I think this is really why they lost, is because they went with this Hitler narrative, and everyone's like, But you know, he's been president before.
We know what he does and we saw what your guy did. Look at our video on how the economy fared under the two things. Here's a post, Redditors be coping. So that on Reddit, it says, this doesn't matter. Raskins has said he will not certify and Kamala is the VP. So she has the power to as well. Trump gets sentenced within two weeks.
He will be in jail. And no matter how many fascist idiots in this country vote for Trump, Kamala will be president when all is said is done. And no matter the results of the election. So this is an individual who is planning how to just ignore the election and stay in power. [00:48:00] That's kind of horrifying that Dems are at that position.
They just think that they have a right to govern no matter what. Here's a an article in a major magazine that said, relax, a Trump comeback in 2024 is not going to happen. We've seen this president's type before. They always fade away. So again, just lying here, right? And this one I thought was uniquely telling.
So this is the individual who says, Tonight is the death of my empathy as a white male fighting oppression my whole adult life and keep in mind how much they just ignored anyone who is not white and is like, sorry, I'm not about this. I think this is the death of my empathy. How can I care about school shootings when the youth showed up to vote against gun control?
How can I care about cops killing black people when black people showed up to vote for the cops? Kamala Harris said she was top cop, by the way, and kept black people in prison, even when she knew they should have been released and used them for labor. Even when I would have been cheaper to just pay them, even when the Supreme Court said this is inhospitable,
but anyway, [00:49:00] how can I care about young girls being denied healthcare for pregnancy gone wrong when her own mother voted against her rights? How can I care about immigrants in cages when Hispanics voted for mass deportations? How can I care about genocide when Muslims voted for Zionists? How can I care about the Jewish people when they vote for fascists?
No one is coming for me. They never were. I was fighting for you, but f**k, I guess I won't bother anymore. And this is an R self. By the way, this is a fun one, I think, with the joke. I didn't think he'd win. My pussy is so soaked. My rights are so in danger. I can't stop f*****g rubbing. Lost to Superior Magga
Speaker 40: Cogs.
Simone Collins: Oh, my goodness. It's we've, this timeline is so much better. So much better than if Kamala won. And honestly, it's better for the progressives who want to be victims and who want to be, [00:50:00] to feel so persecuted and have their little, Fetishes about being bred all like everyone gets their thing.
Speaker 37: I mean, can we breed like a few progressives?
Simone Collins: No, because no, you I mean, we tried, we wanted, we wanted pronatalism to be for everyone. We didn't want it to be a partisan issue. They repeatedly threw us under the bus. The, the, the hate mail, the, the accusations that, and then keying our car, like I'm done. Like Bye, guys. Thanks.
Speaker 37: But, here's what I'd say.
If you are an unmarried, non urban monoculture woman, and you'd like the breeding pens, Okay? We can set up this fantasy for you. You let us know. I am, I am sure we can make this, this, this particular fantasy work. I love your face right there.
Simone, you don't, you don't want to set up the breeding pens outside our house?
Simone Collins: The thing [00:51:00] is, I honestly bet it. That a lot of people, if this were like a clear thing, many, many, many, many women would sign up just to like go to some farm where they would get pregnant and have kids and just sit around and do that, really.
Speaker 37: You're actually right. I think and even by the data and we'll be doing another episode on this in the future. Like you're like, like by the data. Correct. Okay. And that's really f ed up. That's the reality we live in.
Simone Collins: It's gross. It's not my fetish. It's not my fetish. I, I, I don't know what to say. Like.
But, to each their own. You know, as we write in the Pregnantist Guide to Sexuality, you don't get to choose what your arousal pathways are. I, I shouldn't judge. I, I may think it's gross, but that doesn't mean they're immoral.
Speaker 37: Yeah, there's weird things [00:52:00] you're into.
Simone Collins: Yes, there are.
Speaker 37: Yes, there are.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Speaker 40: Hmm.
Speaker 37: One thing I think that is uniquely damning of progressives is that whenever they see us, they're like, Oh, they're subjecting us to their weird breeding fetish. It's like, it's so weird that they think the only reason you'd have kids is because of a fetish.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Yes. Oh, that is so creepy. Yeah. Hmm. I don't like that.
I, cause then, then, yes, sorry. I just have, there's so many things that are wrong with that. Okay.
Speaker 37: Okay. Well, I love you to decimum. I love you too. I am so glad for where we are as a country right now. God bless
Simone Collins: America. Huge thanks to everyone who got Now the
Speaker 37: core thing is that the Trump administration does not allow themselves to be staffed with legacy GOP because they are antagonistic to Trump and his agenda.
We have seen this. You need [00:53:00] to stay away from these people. They will sabotage you and your administration. They will. They just want the deep state to be a slut with red food dye.
Simone Collins: That is what scared us. Yeah, that we met. We met GOP Inc operatives this year who basically said, no, we like the deep state. We just want it to be run by our people.
And that is not what the new right is about at all. So I'm not going
Speaker 37: to say who it was who said that, but they were someone who I know actually has a in to staffing the Republican administration. I would say to. Not heritage foundation, by the way heritage foundation has actually been really cool.
They've been one of the, the, the most like willing to reform their ideas as soon as they've realized a new right existed, whereas other orgs have been much more dangerous.
Simone Collins: Yeah, I've met at heritage, honestly, extremely intelligent, extremely competent, extremely open minded and the way that they've been framed in the media by [00:54:00] progressives, like even their, their policies around abortion and stuff are not what they're being framed as.
So. I'm actually a heritage stand now. I'm a heritage stand. I won't say who I'm against because we may need to work with them. But what I will say is that anyone who is in any way tied to the administration right now, please, please, please give us connections. We have connections already that we're going to be pulling on, but we want to
help.
We
Speaker 37: want to help.
We'll be announcing this to our board. Well, today. And but they already know this is just like the formal announcement. But I want to work in a Trump administration and I want to see Trump's actual agenda carried out with efficacy and ruthlessness because it needs to be for this country to survive.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Trump was elected. Now we need to get, we need to get it done. The fall of. Simone.
Speaker 37: Graduate degree from Cambridge in technology policy. Me, Stanford MBA. Both of us [00:55:00] have run large things before, both of us have written five bestselling books. We are qualified by any stretch of the imagination. Let us know.
And we're going to be relentless
Simone Collins: and hardworking and, and we have a good network. We can make referrals. We can do all sorts of exactly. But yeah, I love you and I love America.
Speaker 37: I love America too.
Simone Collins: Yeah, no, I saw the, I mean, there were some that were repeated, but the one that takes the cake for me is the, the fat women with blue hair standing at the Canada border. That was everything for me. Oh, okay. Sorry. Let me hold her before we get started. I thought she'd be fine whirling around in her crib, but I
Speaker 37: mean, the one that really gets me was the one that Donald Trump jr sent out earlier, which is Hamas calls for immediate into war after, after Trump election win.
And then somebody says. [00:56:00] When Hamas, Ukraine and Russia all start asking about peace talks within 48 hours, dad's home, don't make him take the belt off. How is this not newsworthy? And then somebody under that commented, women are declaring celibacy, which means fewer abortions. He's already changing the world.
Gosh. Or the one that you and I thought was the best was Caitlyn Jenner tweeting I haven't seen a man beat a woman this bad since the olympics and for those who don't know Caitlyn Jenner is a trans woman Everybody who's like broadly sane knows how insane this trans people in sports thing is like it is not No, no decent human being like genuinely no decent human being who at all cares about the well being of women is for this
Simone Collins: Even trans women, to be quite honest.
Yeah, even
Speaker 37: trans women. They're like, yeah, this is being ridiculous. Why are Well, if you
Simone Collins: want trans women to be broadly [00:57:00] accepted, don't make bad actors the ones who sort of ruin the fun for other people, you know?
Speaker 37: Well, and, and, and this election was likely, and we'll have a separate episode on this, maybe single handedly won by one gay man.
Specifically Scott Pressler's efforts. But we will go over that different in a, in a different episode. But the point being is that the, the, the Trumpist party and the Trump is iteration of Republicans and the new Republicans are not in any way anti gay, we are anti creeps who want to sleep with children and who want to convince children to do, we
Simone Collins: are against creeps.
Who want to sleep with children you need to reword that because it sounds like you're saying that you're anti creeps And you also want to sleep with children
Speaker 37: And well people can word that however, they want.
Speaker 46: How much more should we cut? [00:58:00] A hundred hairs?
Speaker 47: Are you sure, buddy? I don't know. I feel like we, we trimmed most of it. We look pretty good today. It's not perfect, but, you know, you're neat and tidy now. What do you think? I think I look like a five footed. I think you look dapper. Don't you think you look dapper? Yeah. Like a gentleman? Yeah. Good. Alright, high five, buddy.
Speaker 49: Yeah.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
In this episode, we are delighted to have Megan Daum, a prolific author, journalist, and podcast host. The discussion dives into Megan's extensive work, including her podcasts 'The Unspeakable' and 'A Special Place in Hell,' as well as her new series of retreats called 'The Unspeakeasy.' These retreats, mostly for women, offer a unique space to discuss topics like gender issues, COVID-19 policies, and the impact of feminism across generations. We explore the motivations behind these retreats and the valuable conversations they foster. Additionally, Megan talks about her thoughts on anti-natalism and her book 'Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed,' which presents various perspectives on the decision not to have children.
Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. I am so excited today because we're joined by Megan Dom, someone who I admire on so many different fronts. She is a prolific author. She's written six books or written or edited six books. She is been also prolific journalist, very respected by many of our friends.
She now is on Substack. Plus she hosts a special place in hell with Sarah Hader, also a friend of the podcast. And before that she had the Unspeakeasy podcast, which I listened to with really great interviews with heterodox. She's kind of like the Alex Kishida of like a different sort of segment of the internet.
And more recently Megan has launched a series of retreats, which I kind of wanted to dig into now. They're it's called the unspeak easy, kind of inspired by one of her books, which is titled unspeakable. And it is a place they're mostly, sometimes they're mixed gender, but they're mostly. Female only retreats pretty small, like very, like, sort of, you, you can have a real conversation with everyone who goes, maybe 16 people or fewer negative, maybe sometimes 20, right?
Yeah. And behind closed doors, these, [00:01:00] you know, mostly all women finally get to sort of discuss what they. Want whatever that's what we want to get to is what do professional educated, you know, probably more affluent women in the United States think and say and worry about and discuss behind closed doors because I think there's this, this perception that the educated women of America are largely this progressive monolith.
They all kind of think the same thing. Like they're not very interesting. You know, then you have some like far right, you know, crazy women and like, you know, whatever, like cam girls and cat girls or whatever. Like, but then there's like just this. There's nothing, a big question mark. So we, we wanted to, you know, we might, we might get into a little bit of a, an anti natalist discussion at the end of this, but we wanted to get into what's going on behind closed doors with all these women.
Meghan Daum: Well, if I, I couldn't tell you, right. If it was really behind closed doors, I wouldn't be able to tell you. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I love talking about all these. All these topics. And I will just say I, [00:02:00] I've got my hand in so many things that it gets confusing what I'm doing. So I still host the unspeakable podcast.
So I actually have two podcasts. I do a special place in hell with Sarah Hader. And I know you've, you've been on our podcast and she's been here. I, I do the unspeakable podcast, which is Sort of my flagship podcast. And that's an interview, it's a weekly interview show started it four years ago, summer of 2020 when all, when every podcast started and so, right.
So I've been doing that and yeah, so the speakeasy is it's an enterprise that has sort of, you know, arisen out of a lot of my work including. the podcast, my books, my teaching as well. I've been a teacher of writing for a really long time. So yeah, I guess, well, I guess the easiest way to kind of launch into what the unspeak easy is about is to tell you the origins of it.
And you know, that is, I've been, I've been journalists for a long time. I was Los Angeles times columnist for 12 years on the opinion page, written a bunch of books, written for every magazine, was like, you know, an [00:03:00] acceptable, celebrated arguably celebrated member of the literary community.
Simone Collins: I looked at the number of reviews your books have gotten.
Yeah. Yeah. And they used to be really
Meghan Daum: positive. Yeah.
And you know, I've always been allergic to b******t. Like that's my thing. I've never been really particularly political. I mean, obviously as a journalist, you have to write about what's going on in the news and the culture, but I just never liked virtue signaling.
Even before there was a term for that, I just got it everywhere and I was very sensitive to it and I was very. interested in why it was happening. So that's always been a theme of my work. And I've always tried to sort of look at the places, you know, in the culture and politics where like what people saying, what people were saying about the world or themselves was not matching up with.
What was actually true about the world and themselves. So, so people, you know, knew that about my work and I started doing the podcast and I would have people like [00:04:00] Sam Harris and, you know, all the sort of the heterodox, you know, I've had hundreds and hundreds of guests by now, but people sort of trying to pick apart these issues, nuanced discussions, right?
So nuanced AF is is what the merch says, right? Here's the Yes, nuanced AF. Okay, so So people would listen to the podcast. I was talking about things like gender, you know, pretty early on Sasha Iod, who's, you know, wonderful is now the co host of gender wider lens was like my fifth guest. And you know, I had Peter Moskos on really early talking about policing.
I had now John McWhorter, all, you know, all, all these sorts of people. And also a lot of literary people. Cause that that's my world. And, But I also teach writing. So I just teach, you know, personal essay, memoir, opinion, writing, that kind of thing. And I've always, I've taught at Columbia and elsewhere, but I teach private workshops.
So, you know, around, you know, 2021 or so, I [00:05:00] started noticing that the people who were coming into my workshops, many of them, women, not, not all by any means, but a lot of the women in particular We're like, not necessarily wanting to write, like they didn't necessarily want their stuff workshopped. They just wanted a place to talk about things.
And they knew that I talked about this stuff on my podcast and I wrote about it. And I had a certain approach that wasn't like, particularly partisan and that appealed to them. And they, they just wanted a place to talk about this and they would come in and say, I can't talk about this with my friends.
I've gotten kicked out of my book club. I can't talk about this with. With my, you know, I have lost relationships, families are being torn apart over politics and over, you know, wokeness, Trumpism, whatever it is. And I feel like I'm losing my mind and I feel so lonely and they were silencing themselves in a way that was.
A little bit different from the way men were silencing themselves. I mean, obviously they were having a lot of the same problems at work. [00:06:00] Like everybody wants to protect their, you know, their paycheck and their situation at work. But women were really talking about relationships a lot more and talking about how they had a lot to say and they weren't speaking up because they didn't want to get excommunicated by the group and they didn't want to hurt people's feelings.
I, so I was seeing this on like this micro level. Like people were talking about how this played out in their personal lives, normal people out in the world. And these were all kinds of women. These were women with big careers. These were stay at home moms. These were women in their twenties into their sixties, seventies, eighties.
It was like so many all over the country, all over the world. Yeah. These were not like necessarily girl bosses. These were all kinds of women. And. I was seeing this and then I was also noticing that like in our sort of podcasting content creator space, a lot of the people who are speaking up about culture war issues are men, not all by any means, but it's a very male dominated [00:07:00] space.
And I started to think, well, why is that? And the listener communities were like all men, like, you know, I went to a persuasion hangout for instance. And there was one other woman there and we were like, Whoa, what is going on? And so I said, you know, I really, need to start a heterodox women's community.
Like somebody needs to do that. And it's hilarious because I'm the last person who ever would start a woman's anything. I hate it. But I thought, you know, something is really wrong here because women are, are, are left out of the conversation in the public arena and in their private lives. And they're, they're leaving themselves out.
And I want to try to fix that and so
Malcolm Collins: I want to dive into you said the women have these conversations that they are afraid to have in public or they've gotten in trouble. What are these conversations? Like, what are the topics that you see come up again and again in this environment?
Meghan Daum: Yeah. So, gender is a big one.
School lockdown, COVID policies is another big one. It's no accident that this started to [00:08:00] emerge around COVID. You had a lot of people who were nice, normal liberals and remain so, still identify as liberals. And they were suddenly like dealing With school closures that didn't make any sense in many cases.
And then the kids were at home and then they could hear what the kids were learning on the zoom school. Like all of a sudden they knew what was like, they didn't know what was going on in the classroom and all of a sudden they're hearing it, the huge mental health crisis among kids during these years.
And they're like, what is going on here? And a lot of the gender stuff started coming up. And these are a lot of people, a lot of parents, a lot of moms who were, you know, very liberal. If my kid is gay, fine. Fantastic. No problem. Even if my kid is trans, whatever that means. Well, that must just be like gay 2.
0. Okay, fine. Like let's, that's, we're, we're liberal in this house. We believe, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then they, you know, this whole movement started to, you know, kind of mushroom before our eyes and they're [00:09:00] like, what is going on here? And if they questioned, you know, something like gender affirmation or something like that, the neighbors would say, what are you a bigot?
What are you a transphobe? You know, you can't, you can't do that. And so, you know, they were, they were really feeling like they were losing their minds. And I'm really careful about the way I talk about this stuff. And I think they, they appreciated it. So, so those are two examples, but we talk about.
Everything in the unspeak easy, like everything.
Malcolm Collins: Well, no, are there others? I mean, so this is really interesting because I think one, you're sort of charting where Republicans can win white educated women. It is, that's, that's our
Meghan Daum: motto.
Malcolm Collins: That
Meghan Daum: is not our
Malcolm Collins: motto, but yes, you're right.
Meghan Daum: Yes. This is like,
Malcolm Collins: like, where did you win?
This, this, this demographic and what I'm peeling here is one I think is, is, is, is focus on. I think gender transition and children, very easy fight. And for some reason, the liberals always take it. And then two is bureaucratic overreach during [00:10:00] COVID. I think Republicans need to live in the past a little with this.
That was a good opportunity. Be like Dems will try this again. Dems will try this again. Very much the way Dems do it's like January 6th. keep going back to the COVID stuff. And, and what was happening at schools. And I also think school choice, it's like an also really easy thing, but what else are you seeing like personal life wise?
Like how did these, I guess here's the question I have, is there regret about Feminism and sort of the way it changed the expectations that were had of them. We talk about
Meghan Daum: that a lot. That's really complicated, right? Because what it's like, how are we defining feminism? What era of feminism are we talking about?
Second wave feminism, third wave, fourth wave, digital feminism, online feminism, me too. Like, what are we talking about? And again, like we have a range of ages. So we had women who were in their seventies or eighties and they came of age in the sixties and seventies and benefited enormously from, from second wave [00:11:00] feminism.
And then we have women who were in their twenties and thirties who were saying, Oh my God, like nobody told me that there's such a thing as a biological clock. And I, and I mean, you know, I'm a Gen Xer. So I grew up. You know, with every single women's magazine constantly being like, Tick tock, ladies, there's a biological clock.
So, you know, at some point along the way that, you know, being told that fertility was limited somehow became like a, you know, misogynist or something. So they stopped talking about it that way.
Simone Collins: That's so interesting. Yeah. It reminds me of like, I, when I, I grew up in like the, the, the period of feminism where we denied that there were like unspoken dating norms.
Like if, if if a guy invited you back to his hotel room that he probably expected something and literally did not believe that. So like, it's interesting to see like
Malcolm Collins: situations. Yeah.
Simone Collins: It's, it's worse than like biological clocks. Not even like being a warning sign. Maybe don't go down an alleyway at two in the morning.
The dangerous [00:12:00] neighborhood defense, you know,
Meghan Daum: right. Right. Yeah. I mean, I talk so much about this in my book, the problem with everything. I mean, this, it's like, you know, just because we wish something was true doesn't mean it is true. Yes. We wish you could get blackout drunk and pass out in an alley with your clothes half off and have nothing happen to you.
Yeah. We wish. We're true. It'd be so nice. And in a just world, it would be true, but we live in the real world. And if you're not equipping people with, with the facts about reality, then you're doing them a huge disservice. So these are the kinds of distinctions that we, that we talk about a lot. And, and yeah, but I mean, the thing with the unspeak easy is it's so, It's all about the nuanced discussions.
It's, it's not partisan. I mean, we have women who are like Bernie Sanders voters and we have women, you know, who are Trump voters. I don't think you actually
Simone Collins: show
Meghan Daum: up. What's that? Yeah, we do. But I mean, I would say it's, I mean, it's changing all the time, but I [00:13:00] mean, I would say it's mostly people who voted for Obama, people who are really excited about Obama, and then are sort of being like, wait a second, something is off here but, but having a really kind of existential crisis about it.
Malcolm Collins: One of the things that you mentioned that I'd love you to dig deeper into, because this is something we've noticed with our own fans of our podcast is. The generational change in terms of what's being hidden from people and the expectations people have. One example from our podcast is somebody was like, It's really weird to hear you guys talk about gays as a discriminated group when you were growing up.
Because in our school, like, they're the group that's not allowed to be punished. Like, there's a, they were talking about like a gay kid on their campus that like, sold weed and he wasn't punished because the school didn't want to be seen punishing a gay kid. And, and, and, and he's like, All the drug
Meghan Daum: dealers are gay now.
Malcolm Collins: I've heard this. Yeah, I've heard that this is because you just get away with it apparently. And I'm, and I'm interested in like other, like, what are the big, like, shocks to you in terms of generational change?
Meghan Daum: [00:14:00] Well, I mean, one of the things that really animated me to get, you know, much more overtly involved in culture war discourse was what I saw around like online feminism.
I mean, even before me too. So around 2012, 13, 14, there was all this stuff online that was, you know, You know, it's never been a worse time to be a woman, you know, toxic masculinity, like, you know, obsessing about being cat called on the street. You know, it's, it's so terrible. We live in a rape culture, like all, all these ideas and I was seeing it.
And in the meantime, like, it's like, actually women are doing better than. Ever before in the history of human civilization, it's never been a better time to be a woman, you know, in the West anyway. And I, it just wasn't making sense to me. And I was like, where's this coming from? Because I grew up in the seventies.
I just thought that was being a girl was great. And being a tomboy was great. Like being a girly girl was not cool. And so I really started to think a lot about [00:15:00] maybe why these changes occurred. And I actually, you know, I was I kind of had my nose outta joint, you know, I, I was rolling my eyes a lot at like, a lot of the, the, the, you know, the, the Jezebel stuff.
I mean, Jezebel used to be a man, hilarious. I remember Jezebel. Wow. It was so great. They would like, actually, you know, this was back, you know, they would like take him. Oh, magazine, yeah. JE lot. Yeah. Anna Holmes, the brilliant Anna Holmes started Jezebel and you know, sort of the early, the mid two thousands, it was like they would.
Do all these things where they showed the airbrushing and and magazine spreads and they would show like what actually happened and it was great and it was very snarky and sarcastic and very empowered and not victim y at all and just very funny. And somewhere along the lines, it really changed and it was like absolute preoccupation with, you know, male tears and it got
Simone Collins: angry.
Meghan Daum: It got, it got angry and it got just very just, just stripped of, of its agency somehow. Wow. Wow. And I used to roll my eyes at it a lot and I still do, but [00:16:00] I think that, you know, we cannot forget that the nineties came along, you know, there was still this like riot girl kind of grunge aesthetic for, for women, but then you get into like the late nineties, early 2000s.
First of all, you've got the Disney princess culture. You've got this hyper girliness that little girls are exposed to. Everybody's a princess, princess dress, glitter, fairy wings everywhere, which is fun and fine, but like very different from the seventies when everybody was really just like gender neutral.
And then you've got this ranch culture. You've got girls gone wild. You've got spring break bikini, you know, just absolute. Debauchery. And you've got, you know, pornography goes online. Pornhub comes along. We're just absolutely inundated with these hyper sexualized, very degrading images around sex and around womanhood.
It makes sense, doesn't it? That like women would resist that and be [00:17:00] very angry about it.
Simone Collins: And, and I never thought of like maybe a correlation being between honestly internet porn and, and women getting like feminism becoming angry, taking totally,
Meghan Daum: I mean, I, I wouldn't be. And I mean, cause I missed that stuff, right?
Like in my time, yeah, I don't, I, and also like. You know, the way that men think about sex and what they expect from a date or sexual encounter. I mean, you know, like women younger than me talk. I mean, Sarah and I talk about this all the time. People were obsessed. People say we're obsessed with like choking.
Okay. Like the, like the choking thing. And, you know,
Malcolm Collins: Okay. No, this is something where I have to go on a tangent. Cause we actually wanted to do like Mary Harrington also complains about this all the time. Yes. I wanted to do like Mary Harrington versus reality, because if you look at the statistics on choking.
The guys are choking the girls because all of the other girls are asking for it, right? Yeah, that's the problem. Choking is much prefer Yeah, but why are they asking for it? Girls are by being choked than guys [00:18:00] are by choking girls. Cause it's a big turn on, unfortunately. At a rate of like 2 to 1.
Meghan Daum: But is it a turn on or do they think I think it's supposed to be a turn on.
No, it's, it's, it's enough of
Simone Collins: a turn on where like auto asphyxiation is a really major, like a safety problem. Yeah. This came up in our sexuality research when we, when, when Malcolm wrote the pragmatist guide to sexuality and we had to put in all these warnings, we're like, okay, this is a big turn on for people.
Guys, don't do this. We
Malcolm Collins: need to get into our sexual theory because I think I know why you might find this weird. So we actually argue that there are the people act like the kinks and the things that turn somebody on are random. And I don't think that they are totally random. I think that there's specific polygenic sexual patterns that emerge based on the social environment.
Evolutionarily, our biology thinks that we're it. Now, if a woman In a historic context, with sleeping with tons of men. That historically basically only happened if [00:19:00] your tribe had been raided and you were a sex slave and you were doing everything you can to stay alive. I think that there is a correlation between women liking this incredibly demeaning sex and women who sleep around a ton.
I think that what's happening here is their bodies have shifted to a Oh, I'm a sex slave desperately trying to prevent my captors from killing me and I will like anything that keeps them from killing me. And so when I think a woman maybe like you or a woman who is more chaste or more like sexually reasonable engages with this, they're like, what?
I would never want that. And, and, and, or Mary Harrington or something like that. And I think that that's where there's this, this unintentional is we don't tell girls that sleeping with tons of people is going to change the type of things they find arousing.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Like in other words, Malcolm saying that he thinks that that our behaviors sexually, like especially number of different partners will trigger different like arousal pathways as a sort [00:20:00] of adaptive evolved mechanism.
I, I think there could be some truth to that. I mean, I don't, yeah,
Meghan Daum: I, I'm, no, I'm not going to, because otherwise it is
Simone Collins: really weird, especially, I mean, we don't know. I mean,
Meghan Daum: sexuality is so mysterious, right? We don't know like where these things come from. I mean, where does like autogynephilia come from? Like there's, you know, so many fetishes and, and I have a hypothesis where autogynephilia
Malcolm Collins: comes from.
I haven't gotten into the episode yet, so I'm going to drop it right here. Okay. And we'll do a full episode on it, but I actually think autogynephilia It comes from a misunderstanding of human sexuality. So in our book of human sexuality, we point out that sexuality should actually be thought of a spectrum of arousal to disgust and not stopping at zero.
A lot of people are like, sex is arousal or you're not aroused. And it's like, no it's, it's arousal to disgust anything, 10 to negative 10. If you when you're aroused, what happens? Your pupils dilate, you breathe in, you look at something longer. When you're disgusted, what do you do? You look away, your eyes contract, and you hold your nose.
They're likely using the same system and we even see evidence of this from the fact that anything that arouses a large portion of the [00:21:00] population is going to disgust a small portion. Anything that disgusts a small portion is going to arouse a portion. People can be like, well, no, that's just everything.
It's like, no, you don't see this random effect in everything else. So you can look at something like fire. Fire does not like randomly arouse a portion of the population. But like, insects do. Poo does. Like, why is that? Okay, it's a mis arousal to discuss system. Well, autogynephilia, I think it's actually a misinterpretation from a lot of men which is to say that a lot of men have a very strong, much stronger than women have to female genitalia Disgust response to primary male sex characteristics.
So, specifically other male penises, other male forms, etc. It causes, like, a visceral reaction in them. I'm one of these men. I, like, find this disgusting. But do you think that's socially constructed?
Meghan Daum: Or do you think that's, like, inherent? It's probably more of, I mean, we would think it's an
Simone Collins: evolved, like, Try to screw the thing that will produce kids.
Right. Exactly. No, it's an adaptive trait.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. You're a woman historically [00:22:00] you know, there were periods in history you look around the agricultural revolution for every 17 women having kids, only one male was having kids. So that means that you had long evolutionarily relevant periods where women were expected to be in relationships with lots of other women.
So it is not surprising to me that women tolerance of other female sexuality was something that was selected for. However, historically speaking, if a man let other men sleep with a woman who he was pair bonded with, or just any other woman in the community, that's a net loss to him because, you know, that's the other guy.
No, I get that. No, I get that. I get that a lot of pressures here. My guess is that what's happening with these guys is Is there like, Oh, well, when I like playing video games, I really like playing as female characters because any other male character or avatar causes this disgust reaction in them. When I like dressing up as other characters, I like always being a female and they don't realize what's driving.
This is not an arousal reaction, but a disgust reaction to other males. And then they begin to identify. They're like, well, if I always like, whenever I'm in a [00:23:00] role playing game or whenever I'm in a video game or whenever I'm a Furry playing a female character that must be because I secretly want to be a female, but it's not.
Anyway, that's my, okay,
Meghan Daum: no, I'm, I'm, I'm in no position to, to argue that getting back to the feminism and what the different, the generational differences. Yeah. I, I do think that I do think that people men and women have plenty of reason to be angry and frustrated these days. Thanks. I think that I think that women have reason and I think men have reason.
I mean, you know, I, a lot of the the, the, the ironic misandry of that digital age, you know, making fun of men you know, and I, I have a whole theory as to why that was sort of, you know, Sanction is an okay thing to do. Like, you know, all that sort of like, you know, men are toxic. What we now see with this like red pill, right wing misogyny online.
Like that is, that is a mimetic inversion, right? It is the same thing. I mean, it is absolutely mirroring it. So as much as I [00:24:00] hate to see that stuff online, it's like, well, guess what, fourth wave feminists, you created this, you made this. And now you're stuck with it or it's going to have to correct itself.
Correct. What's your, what's your
Malcolm Collins: theory?
Meghan Daum: Well, I mean, if you go around telling men that they're garbage. No, no,
Malcolm Collins: no, no, not that. But you said, I have a theory as to why this. Oh,
Meghan Daum: well. So, I mean, the thing is that around that time you started seeing this, you know, 2014 or so. Like they would, they would be horrible to men.
And I think the idea was that because men have power, you're punching up. It's okay to say terrible things to men, no matter, no matter what, no matter what like class level you are, or they are. No matter like any kind of power differential, it doesn't matter because by definition, by virtue of being men, it was assumed that they automatically have more power.
So it's okay to be terrible to them. And my thing was like, why are you assuming that? Like that is so unfeminist to just like you, you bite by assuming that you [00:25:00] are effectively handing men power that they don't necessarily have. You are putting them on a pedestal in order to punch them. Well, how about realizing that women are doing so much better than men chances are.
Any given man and any given woman, that woman is going to have a higher level of education, have more friends, better connections, just her wellbeing is going to be at a higher level across any number of metrics than any given man. So like, be careful who you're, you know, calling a piece of garbage, you know, it's, it's really lame.
And anyway, so this is what started this. And I, I was very outspoken about these things around, you know, my, my book, The Problem with Everything came out in 2019, which was all about this and, and it was really about, you know, being, it was, it was a self interrogation, like looking at the different generations, like, well, how come me, how come I, as a Gen X er, Felt empowered in a way that these millennials and Gen Zers apparently don't.
Like, what is this about? And why am I so frustrated? And why do I hate this stuff? And why am I rolling [00:26:00] my eyes and why are they mad at me and calling me an anti feminist? And you know, it's all this kind of vortex of stuff. And people got really mad at me for it. Like they just thought, Oh no, she's to the right.
She swung over to the right. Megan. And, and the funny thing is like, this is nothing different than I had said, I've been talking this way for my whole career. Yeah. The
Simone Collins: Overton window has shifted. Right. Yeah.
Meghan Daum: Suddenly it was not allowed. And so here we all are in the whatever I'll turn around, clown world, where we have be clowned ourselves.
Simone Collins: Okay. I'm dying to see how you approach this because this is something you mentioned in the origins of these retreats. And now. It's, it's kind of at the core of what I'm thinking about the, what we call like woke culture, progressive culture, we, we call it the urban monoculture. And we, we argue that its main value proposition is I will remove in the moment suffering or pain.
That's kind of like the big, like, you cannot break that rule. And it sort of connects to everything that can be [00:27:00] very damaging about the movement because, you know, it causes a lot of. Bad downturn, like downstream effects. You mentioned that many of the women who are joining on speakeasy retreats are doing it because they don't want to hurt their friends feelings.
And they're, they're, they're very much part of this. And I think it's, it's a very female on average, it skews female, that general desire to not cause conflict, to not hurt feelings. And yet I think. For a lot of these women to deal with the cognitive dissonance they're facing or to work through these problems.
Especially because you have so many differing opinions showing up at these retreats. You know, you've got the Trump voter, you've got the Bernie voter, you've got, you know, this, this varying range, there are going to be feelings that are hurt. How do you manage that? Especially among like groups of women, because I'm used to doing this and like retreats that are like primarily men.
But how do you manage it for women who. Are going there because they know it's a problem, but they also are of that culture of like, I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings.
Meghan Daum: I mean, I, I am always aware of it. And I mean, I think we've been pretty lucky so far. So I started [00:28:00] doing the retreats and it's 2022.
We've probably done 12 by now or something. I mean, we did so many, we have done eight this year. Wow. So I try to keep it very Ideas based and concept based. So it's like, we don't have it. So, so the way the structure of the retreats, it varies. I mean, most of them, you know, they're overnights, we go out to a beautiful place and spend like three nights overnight.
Sometimes they're just like for a weekend daytime only, but you know, we'll have like, I will make a schedule and we're going to talk, you know, for 90 minutes about like, you know, why can't we talk about gender without losing our minds? Like that will be the framing of the talk as opposed to these people are horrible and crazy.
It's more like, why do we feel crazy? How, why do I feel crazy? What led to it? And I'm going to talk about my experience. I mean, I cannot say that there haven't been hurt feelings. I'm sure that there have been. And [00:29:00] we also have an online community. I mean, you know, we have a really thriving private membership based online community.
That is, you know, very affordable and, and we have. All kinds of things Is there like book clubs and guest speakers and all kinds of things. And I know that there have been blowups, I mean there have been, there are little satellite groups and people are actually forming. They're also, they're also forming, no, not satellite groups like gang up people, you know, subgroups.
There's a politics discuss, you know, there's a sort of left-leaning politics discussion group and a more center right discussion. Oh, interesting. There's a snitch and b***h one that's over there, they knit and they talk about politics. The knitting world is very, very fraught. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And I've watched and reported and it's done
Simone Collins: some great, yeah, knitting world drama.
I can't control that,
Meghan Daum: but so I, you know, most of the conflict I have just stayed out of, but I think that They're really, really good, especially on the retreats. I think everybody knows we're out somewhere. We want to have a good time. [00:30:00] They've, you know, they have invested a certain amount of resources and time to come and do this.
They have, we have enough downtime that they form friendships. I mean, they have come to these places because they are lonely and they want connection. So the last thing you're going to do is, you know, deliberately get into a bad. a bad dynamic with somebody. It's, it's just not, it's not worth it. I'm not saying it never happens, but we've been really lucky.
And frankly, the fact that we're all women really makes it so that any kind of political differences that we have are just transcended by the fact that we all have this thing in common. Like it really is a, it's an incredibly effective container for all kinds of points of view. And, and, and walks of life and backgrounds and experiences.
I mean, it's, it's pretty magical actually.
Simone Collins: That sounds awesome. And I, I'm also sort of getting the impression that like going in with it being normative to disagree and like, it's okay to disagree, [00:31:00] Is just like the mere fact that that's a premise of the events probably helps. Is there's alcohol, the morning
Meghan Daum: or anything.
Sure. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: But I, so I want to move to the second topic here. The the anti natalism. So why shouldn't women be obligated to have children?
Meghan Daum: Well, some people are terrible parents and make terrible parents. So if you're going to be a terrible parent, please do not force that person to to be, to become one.
Malcolm Collins: I mean, should they learn to be better? No, you can't learn that.
Meghan Daum: I mean, can you learn to be yes. I mean, the thing is, it is normative to try to learn to be a better parent. They're everything in the culture. I mean, maybe you see this differently, but again, this might be a generational thing. I mean, I.
grew up. I assumed I would have kids. It was assumed that everybody was going to have kids that everybody wanted them and that everybody would be a good parent, that it would just come naturally to you. Even if you thought you didn't want kids, the minute it's your own, it'll, everything will be different.
And the fact is that most people do want kids. I like [00:32:00] people who don't want them are outliers and I'm an outlier. But I just It's just never something that I, I wanted to do. Oh my God. I really love that. Her age of a baby. I have to say like, if I could just have that age, I know.
Malcolm Collins: Were you a single kid yourself?
No, I have a brother. He doesn't have
Meghan Daum: kids either. Okay. I mean, yeah, it's definitely, I mean, there's people, people choose not to have kids for all kinds of reasons.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, tell us about this book that you worked on about not having kids. Yeah.
Meghan Daum: Right. So the book is called Selfish, Shallow, and Self Absorbed, 16 Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids.
So I wanted to do this project for a long time because it's like a pro
Malcolm Collins: natalist book, by the way, it's ironic. Yeah,
Meghan Daum: he came out in 2015 back when irony was still alive. Yeah. Those are
Simone Collins: good days. Right,
Meghan Daum: right. Before everything, everything changed. But I always thought [00:33:00] that people, you know, the sort of childless by choice, child free crowd had really bad PR because.
Instead of just saying like, Oh, I just don't want to have kids. It's not for me. They would always be like, Oh, I don't have kids because I want to have a fabulous life and take expensive vacations. Or like my child has four legs and drinks out of a bowl on the floor. Ha ha ha. My fur baby. Or my child is that boat in my driveway.
And it's like so ridiculous because. Nobody decided not to have kids so they could have a boat or expensive shoes. Like if they, if, if any, if, if, if anybody is that, that way I, I don't wanna know that person. Like, that's, oh
Malcolm Collins: my God, I love it. Absurd.
Meghan Daum: That's absurd. I can think of several people. It was, it was always amazing to me that there was such a taboo, taboo against saying, this just isn't for me.
Mm. That people would like. present themselves as selfish a******s, because [00:34:00] this was somehow better as materialistic, shallow pleasure seekers, because it was just not okay to say, Hey, I think parenthood is really important and it should only be done by people who want to do it. I mean, my position is like people who think hard about this and choose not to have kids.
They are paying the ultimate respect to parents because they're saying that this job is really hard and it should only be done by people who really want to do it.
Simone Collins: That's it. I like that. Oh, well, I, this is, it's so confusing to me though. The, the bad PR and maybe this is, it's a generational thing. I'm not sure.
I never plan on having kids. And I would tell people that. And they'd always gonna be like, F for you. And I don't know if that's like, Me personally, like, They're just like, yeah, she'd be a terrible mother. Like, my mom was definitely in that camp. I thought she was saying that about me. No, no, no, she'd look at you and she'd be like, Oh, you're gonna be such a great dad.
And then she'd look at me and she'd be like, F it. And then she kind of looked back at Malcolm. But yeah, I, I, I don't know. [00:35:00] I know that some people really feel that, and I'm so intrigued by this that like a lot of people feel that shame and feel like it's you know, whereas I, I grew up in like, you know, with the environment you know, it was the, the, the proper decision to not have kids.
And
Meghan Daum: yeah, that, you
Simone Collins: know, a lot of people were gonna be shitty parents like me, of course. Whoops. And then rat, Simone, rat Row. Oh no. What have I done? And yeah, I, I'm, I'm curious if you, if you've have come across people who celebrated or support it more normatively, or if, or maybe it's just like, if you don't want to have kids, well, where did you grow
Meghan Daum: up?
Yeah. Like, I don't know. I mean, I grew up, I grew up like, you know, my family's a little bit unusual, but I mean, I grew up in, in, you know, outside of New York city, mostly we kind of moved around a lot. I grew up in Texas and in New Jersey, but more traditional then. But yeah, I mean, I mean, look, I grew up in, I was a teenager in the eighties.
And, you know, families were way more normative than, yeah, they were normal. And then, you know, but you were also like, if you were kind of educated classes, then that the whole sort of like [00:36:00] yuppie baby boom, like women is going to go, you know, put her power suit and her running shoes on and go to the office and achieve and then like marry her equal.
And then they were going to, you know, then they would have kids and like, do it all, do it all. Like, that was the fantasy. Yeah. And I definitely thought. That was what I would do. I didn't really question it, but I always was sort of like, well, I don't really want kids, but I will want them. I'm sure like something will happen.
One day I'll wake up and you know, the biological alarm clock will have gone off and, and it just really could never get there and in an authentic way. But no, I think you're right. Because I think that You know, for the millennials, the climate stuff did affect people. I mean, I used to say that anybody who said, I mean, I probably said this like 20 years ago, that anybody who says that they didn't have kids because of, because of the environment, as they used to call it is, is lying because they're just using that as an excuse
Malcolm Collins: to say, but I
Meghan Daum: don't know now, but that was [00:37:00] before this like absolute hysteria and.
Fear of God was put into a whole generation. So, so
Malcolm Collins: I don't know. I mean, it's, it's a religious thing at this point to me, to me, when I look at some people, I mean, they do seem to be a little cult like in regards to like, they don't seem to logically be thinking about the environment in any way that I would, I guess, think about the environment.
Meghan Daum: Look, people run on emotion. decouple. Their personal experience from data, really hard for people to, to decouple their, their feelings from, from facts, sorry, facts versus feelings. And you know, it takes a certain kind of person to do that. And, you know, you guys are like that and I'm like that and Sarah's like that, but like, we're kind of abnormal, you know,
Simone Collins: were there any arguments in the essays?
In the book that surprised you, like, you know, that this, you know, that's an argument that makes me feel really good about being child free.
Meghan Daum: I mean, [00:38:00] it really ranged. I mean, a lot of people spoke about their, you know, sort of trauma in their families growing up and how they didn't want to repeat that. But, you know, I have to say that.
You know, one response to traumatic upbringing is to not want to have kids, not repeated, but an even more common response is to have kids and so that you can correct it. Like, because of what happened, I want to do this, I want to, I want to do over, right? So I don't think we can, we can generalize and say like, you know, this particular kind of household causes people to feel one way or the other.
I mean, everybody's wired so differently, you know, there was a lot of, so the book came out in 2015 and. One of the criticisms, I mean, it did people were, it did so well. That's a hilarious thing. It was like, I had been pitching this idea for years and everyone in publishing was like, that's a terrible idea.
Nobody will buy that. There's no five
Simone Collins: stars, 794 reviews on Amazon
Meghan Daum: bestseller list in the, in the child care and parenting category. Cause I kept [00:39:00] saying like, no, parents are going to be fascinated by this. This isn't just like childless. People are going to buy this. Yeah. Because it's really about, it's, it's about the way we live our lives.
It's not even about like this particular decision. Like ultimately it's just sort of about what you want your, your life to be.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Meghan Daum: But there was one of the criticisms of the book and I think it's a fair one was that a lot of the writers were kind of apologizing for the way they felt. There was a lot of, well, I love kids.
But I don't hate children or anything. Oh. But wrong
Simone Collins: approach. And however, I hated kids before I had kids. Yeah.
Meghan Daum: Well, I kind of hate kids now, to be honest with you. You kids are, they're gross. I, I dunno what to say. Yeah. I hate being a kid. And I, yeah, so, so there was a lot of that. I will say, however, that in 2015 that throat clearing was probably necessary in order to make the book palatable.
I don't think we would need it now, obviously, but, I think that for whatever reason, people needed to hear [00:40:00] that because there was still a lot of like, Oh, you must, you must just hate children. If you have made the decision. I think a lot of people were like, no, I really like kids. And in fact, you know, there were people who talked about working with children and they talked about feeling really important as like an aunt or an uncle.
There were three men in the book. There were, it was 13 women and three men, because I really wanted to include some male perspectives. Cause I think men get overlooked in this discussion a lot.
Malcolm Collins: Totally. Totally. Well, that's really cool. Anyway, I, I've had a great time talking to you. You know, come on your podcast again sometime.
I you think you guys work is fantastic. And yeah.
Simone Collins: And everyone please, you can learn more about everything that Megan does at megan dom.com. That's M-E-G-H-A-M-D-A-U-M com. Yeah. And
Meghan Daum: actually a better place to go is to the outspeak easy.com or my substack. Yeah. Actually I haven't, I'm, I'm one of those people with too many websites and megan dom do.com has so much not been updated.
You go to my substack?
Simone Collins: Yeah. Megan dom.substack.com.
Meghan Daum: Yes. [00:41:00] Yeah. Or the unspeakable with, megan and Dom, you can look that up.
Malcolm Collins: I will say you are one of the only guests that we've had where I actually recreationally watch your content. Not all of it, but some of it. Oh, the show with Sarah? A lot of the time I don't.
You know, I'll have on guests where I'm like I know we're ideologically aligned but I don't actually watch their stuff.
Simone Collins: Malcolm's a fan. Malcolm's a fan. Thank you. Of both of us. But yeah. It's the usual for Malcolm. If the audience is
Malcolm Collins: wondering what to think, it's very good like urban monoculture looking at itself.
I think it's, it's, it's a good thing. No, I mean, it's like, what do you know, educated you know, successful women think of their own culture?
Meghan Daum: Yeah. Well, and we have a big age difference. I mean, we're 20 years apart. So I guess you get those different perspectives. Yeah.
Simone Collins: I love it. Oh, it's so fun. Yeah.
Especially when you want like a, like a conversational chatty show, like a lot of podcasts, like just don't have that charisma. You've got, you guys have the, as the kids say, you have the Riz,
Meghan Daum: the Riz, the Riz. The Riz is the Riz. I I am too old
Simone Collins: for
Meghan Daum: this. [00:42:00] I know. I love it. I've heard of the Riz. Yeah. Well, thank you so much.
Thanks for having me. Have a spectacular day.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. We hope to have you back soon. All right. Bye
Simone Collins: Megan. Bye. All right. Ending recording.
Speaker: And that's how Rubik's Cubes work? Yeah. Okay, so, what are you going to do with your Rubik's Cube once it's solved? Are you going to break it again? No. No? Well, I mean No, I'm just going to solve it. You're just going to solve it? Okay, well Hi, Toasty! You just want what, buddy? You want a Mickey Mouse bicycle?
It's not the bicycle we have, alright? You want one that has Mickey Mouse on it? You want some Mickey Mouse bicycles? We need new bikes for the kids when they're taking dogs. Oh. We just want to give them our bikes. Cause right [00:43:00] now they have two bikes, so two of them can ride down the hill. And they were doing that for an hour, but Octavian got worried, and of course he got a new dog.
Oh, that's, that's fair.
Speaker 2: So, either more fancy, because right now they're using cheap bikes at their house, so we can get them either more cheap bikes or fancy bikes. Okay, fried rice is almost done, buddy. I think we're good to go. Okay. Okay, okay.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
This episode dives deep into a radical new governance model, proposing a system where an individual's civic value and vote are gauged by their economic contributions. The discussed model incorporates AI as citizens, utilizes blockchain for transparent governance, and aims to attract cutting-edge industries. It further addresses demographic challenges, proposes a tiered society, and introduces tribal-like social structures for enhanced social services. The session also critiques current democratic systems and emphasizes the need for innovative governance to handle future societal complexities.
Simone Collins: [00:00:00] existing governing systems assume that every citizen has equal value when they objectively do not. Our system assumes an individual's value is correlated with their utility to the state
Malcolm Collin: Well, if your vote is based on the amount that you're paying in taxes, now there's a huge disincentive to using tax loopholes.
Simone Collins: Is the core of governance design as it should be approached by everyone going forward.
What will incentivize people to do a thing that is good for everyone? It is about aligning incentives, period. Don't look at what was done in the past.
Would you like to know more?
Malcolm Collin: Hello, Simone. Our country is dealing with the aftermath of the election, and yet we filmed this before the election. With that being the case, I need to say that democracy doesn't work. It is a terrible system. One person, one vote.
Speaker 12: This year we explored the failure of democracy, how the social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos.
Malcolm Collin: The guardian. Caught us saying this and did a piece on us recently where they aired for us [00:01:00] on our behalf, our plan for a new governance system for a charter city.
Thanks guardian. I love it. The guardian has been our biggest supporter. I feel so much when I watched them trying to deal with our raise in fame as being very much like
Speaker 2: Four! I mean five! I mean fire!
It's
typical. Why has it done that?
I'll just put this over here with the rest of the file. 0
Malcolm Collin: . And all they can think to do to attack us is more and more articles that get our message to more and more people. And nobody like, you know, they'll do an article, like here's their horrifying system of government that they developed.
And then [00:02:00] they, they put the whole slide deck there, which shows that they're just being misleading, and it's actually a pretty nuanced and neat system of government, which is fundamentally, like, what, what is this system fundamentally elitist communism, you could call it. And I actually think when we talk about the Haven State Network that I think society is going to descend into, so a quick, Note on why charter cities are important and the direction I think society is going.
So with rapid fertility collapse, you're going to have two phenomenons. One phenomenon is many countries are going to have depopulated regions and regions that are experiencing massive brain drains, especially if there are smaller country, like the aisle of man, which is where we were gonna pitch this.
Or you know, think of something like Greece or so many countries around the world that are in otherwise relatively stable areas. But as soon as somebody gets educated, they leave, right? Like there's no reason to stay and they've got beautiful landscapes, beautiful areas that people could set up shop.
But. It [00:03:00] is. It is really hard to keep people and the best way to do that. The best way to draw educated people back is to get the types of businesses that employ educated people back. And that means the types of companies doing like cutting edge genetic research or crypto or AI. And so I created a governance model That was designed to draw all of those types of companies into the country.
One where AI can have citizenship, where cutting edge genetic research can be done, where the governance model was baked into a DAO, which is a type of a blockchain ledger, basically. Every aspect of it was designed to be as friendly to like cutting edge economic stuff as possible and as adaptable to changing things as possible.
But that's that's why I was like, okay, so I'm going to pitch this to these to these regions, but at the same time, the second effect of fertility collapse is going to be that right now, you know, you have like one elderly person for every, [00:04:00] let's say three working age people, we will reach an age where every working age person is going to be supporting like three elderly individuals.
And in addition to that. Elderly individuals will make up the majority of the electorate, and they will be able to vote more and more resources to themselves. And so, even though it's not like a viable system they're not gonna say one day, oh, we should cut Social Security. I mean, we've already seen that they're unwilling to do that.
And so, what ends up happening then? Well Um, taxes go up on the few economically productive individuals that are left. And as we pointed out, it's the economically productive regions of countries that typically have the lowest fertility rates. So if you look like was in the United States, and it would be so great if kids from poor family had just as much of a chance of being economically productive as somebody from an economically productive family.
However, that's just not true. That is not a nut that societally we have figured out how to even come close to cash. Cracking, which means in the next generation, dramatically fewer people are going to be economically productive than was in this generation, [00:05:00] which means the taxes on those individuals need to be astronomically higher.
Well, here's the problem. Things aren't region locked in the way that they used to be. to be in terms of economic models. It used to be that if I was a big CEO, I'd have a skyscraper and tons of people and hundreds of thousands of employees or I'd have oil fields that I needed to protect. And so a country could tax me and I couldn't just like leave.
They're like, Oh, well, then we'll just see the assets or the oil fields or the human talent. Right. Now with AI, this is really flipped on his head to an extent. And we've seen this with the new startups, but we've also seen this in the way that big companies are going. We're like, they're just hiring a lot fewer people and like programming and stuff like that because they just don't need it, which concentrates the wealth in fewer and fewer people, which means these smaller and smaller groups of economically productive individuals.
When the state goes after them for their money, they're just going to say, F it, I'm leaving. Especially if charter cities exist as an alternative and these charter cities are nice, Fun places with a lot of interesting people. And you're like, well, how can [00:06:00] you do that? How do you sort of work your way into it?
Well, you can start with them being vacation spots by that. What I mean is you build like yearly conferences. They're like, maybe the next iteration of like a hereticon or something like that is always happening at one charter city. So everybody goes,
Simone Collins: you also can create it as a place where people take research sabbaticals.
So some early city states have reduced regulation on biomedical research, and that's something we would certainly propose for any city state. We were involved with is like, a no holds barred, though, always with informed consent medical research area. So, then, in that case, you would create a temporary market of medical companies and researchers who will come and take a sabbatical in this area to run.
Clinical trials on something or to run a Ph. D. You know, thesis like on some experimental treatment or thing that would be really cumbersome from a regulatory standpoint to study or research or vets or validate [00:07:00] in some other country.
Malcolm Collin: And these are what we call the Haven state network. And so we'll go over a governance model for one proposed of these.
But before we get into that, I will note. Okay. Ironically, I think one of the most common governance types within the Haven State Network is likely going to be communists. And people can be like, what? Aren't these like hyper capitalists and elitists? And it's like, well, communism actually kind of works when you can kick out nonproductive individuals.
And given the level of post scarcity that these may have, like you go to something like heretic on, we don't pay for anything at heretic on because the individuals who are running it just have so, so, so much money that they're like, Oh, if I have interesting people there, that's fine. You know, people will have new ideas.
I'll get to meet new people. That's, that's what I'm there for. The people running these havens might have so much money that it's just like, Oh, you know, I, I, I pay for all the daily expenses of individuals so long as they are economically productive.
Simone Collins: [00:08:00] Yeah.
Malcolm Collin: And I think that this is where the guardian, when they were talking to me about the Haven model I set up, they were like, yeah, but what about people who aren't economically productive?
And I was like, well, my state's not really for them. I'm so sad they didn't publish that. I was like, there's plenty of other countries that can take people like that. And right now we just haven't really done that globally speaking, but I think that more states need to be like, Oh, the economically productive people who need the state to support them.
Yeah. Maybe somebody else can take care of them. When you were talking
Simone Collins: about this last night, you simply cannot have in any sustainable fashion. a country or city state that both has porous borders and generous social programs. You can have one or the other, period.
Malcolm Collin: And this is a quote from my grandfather that somebody on Twitter tried to get us to denounce him for and I was like, because he uses an
Simone Collins: out of date, not flattering, possibly slur term to refer to immigrants.
Speaker 10: And some goddamn f*****g goo [00:09:00] bags!
Malcolm Collin: But I don't think the term was considered that offensive back in his day. They're like, denounce your grandpa for saying something racist in a really poignant, forethoughtful economic point that most mainstream politicians of today still don't understand.
It's a really good point. When you hugely restrict who can come into a country and who can stay in a country, you can be incredibly socially generous. But when you are completely free for anyone to enter then you have to be incredibly socially restrictive. Eventually, any system that is socially generous and has open borders will, like osmosis, equalize with the outside environment for individuals who are not economically productive in training the state until the state is offering nothing more, and then it's just no reason to live there.
So. Let's get into the actual plan we put out here. The slide deck was titled, The Next [00:10:00] Empire. Really, really catchy there. So, on page one, and I'm actually going to read it and then we'll discuss each page. Is it possible to create a region with a high economic output and a high fertility rate?
Fertility rates are falling in every developed nation across the world, especially in technologically engaged regions with high economic output. This yields a unique opportunity to create a charter city poised to become a dominant world power in the near future. Almost every nation in the world is based on a failed experiment. Two and a half centuries ago, an ancestor of one of this project's founders, George Washington, so that's one of Simone's she is descended from He's
Simone Collins: a great, great, great, great something uncle.
Malcolm Collin: Yeah, and he didn't have any kids himself, so that would make her the closest related living pathway. Worked with a diverse team of visionaries to create a new model government. Unfortunately, the model failed to match their vision almost immediately with safeguards against things like political party formation, failing within their [00:11:00] lifetimes.
Despite this, almost every nation on the planet today has based their governing structure on the outline of the failed compromise. This group tentatively created. When creating a new governing system under which large populations will live, it makes sense to go with systems that seem relatively safe and functional while distributing as much power to stakeholders as possible to lower the odds of revolt.
Never to lest if we were to craft a world power de novo with an opt in population, they would almost certainly build something very different. These systems were built not just for computers,
But for an agriculturally focused subsistence society without trains and planes, imagine how a system intentionally designed from the ground up could fare.
And, and I do think a lot of people forget that, that the model that the founders created was both a compromised and a failed compromise within their own lifetimes. And yet almost every democracy since then has been based on it. Yeah, it made [00:12:00] sense to do because you don't want to make up a new system if you just fought a revolution and you can't really risk that.
And you have, you know, hundreds of thousands of millions of people living under it and you don't want to risk something falling apart. Right. But if you were creating something de novo, of course, you would want to create a completely new system.
Simone Collins: Why would an existing country secede land to this kind of experiment with rapidly collapsing and aging populations across the developed world, especially in rural areas, many countries are desperate to save their faltering economies. Why would a young person who has left a decaying rural area for college return once they are educated when almost all of our world's economic opportunities are clustered in one of a handful of dense population centers around the world?
Our project will allow us to transform a region on a downward trajectory into one of the world's future tech hubs, a center for dynamism, investment and growth. , why won't existing charter cities succeed? For a charter city to succeed, it must be appealing to the host country, generate revenue, e. g. attract companies [00:13:00] and generate citizens, e.
g. attract immigrants. Most extant charter cities are primarily concerned with realizing an ideological vision. While ideological vision can attract a small number of immigrants, it will always be fundamentally less sustainable than a persistent and obvious economic opportunity not available. Anywhere else in the world to bring the smartest, most economically productive people in the world to a place that places opportunities must be economically attractive and meaningful in a global context.
And this is what we're getting at when a lot of city states are focused on just being vacation areas. You really have to have a reason to go because there are. There's an endless number of amazing vacation areas. I'm not going to say there's a ton
Malcolm Collin: of vacation areas. They make a few big mistakes. They try to attract ideological extremists.
They're like, you agree with our ideology so much more than your host country's ideology, or wherever you were born's ideology, that you will move to where we are.
Simone Collins: Well, at a risk of [00:14:00] making it like a social club, and framing it as such like a society is well, then it's attractive to people who really care about social ties.
And what you're proposing to them is essentially socially isolating them. You're taking them away from major international cities. And you're putting them in a city state. That is the opposite. So it's like trying to select for people who are the least likely to buy into this. If they were going to take that approach, you would need to select for religious extremists who want to go off and make a compound.
Which is what we tried
Malcolm Collin: to do in the way that we structured this. Exactly. Yes, but religious extremists have multiple religious factions and you'll see how we do that. But in addition to that I will note that one that Patrick Friedman, who has been on the show before talking about charter cities, he finally got fed up and decided to just start his own.
And I really like the charter city that he's starting as a model, which is, it's in Africa and instead of focused on trying to get like white people from the United States to move there who already have like great jobs and live in a fairly stable country, it's focused on just being [00:15:00] marginally better than the other countries in Africa and focused on disproportionately getting economically productive people from the other African countries to move there.
Simone Collins: Can we actually just create Wakanda? That would be so cool.
Malcolm Collin: Oh, I don't think so. It's just supposed to be like marginally safer, marginally economically more productive marginally. And I'm like, that's great that I mean, yeah, that does sound
Simone Collins: good. And it would it would attract talent. It bothers me so much that I've met while traveling, you know, sitting around in airports or in cars, so many people who have immigrated from African countries that are unstable, who are very smart, very educated, and then they go to a country like the UK or the U.
S. and they are Uber drivers, they're cooks. What? Like, this is totally wasted talent. If they could just move to a country, In Africa, that allows them to be what they have trained to be what they're educated to be. I mean, I see the same with Venezuelan immigrants as well. And we saw this all the time in Peru.
Some guy would deliver groceries to us and be [00:16:00] like, so, like, what's your background? And they'd be like, well, actually, I'm from Venezuela. And, you know, I used to be a biomedical researcher. And here I am delivering your groceries. And I just. Hate that so much. So I love this concept, but I also wish it was so cool.
Malcolm Collin: If you look at the way that we structured this going forward, what you're going to realize is that a lot of charter cities are built to try to attract people. And we are building this to try to attract dollars which is very different. Well, and beyond that, to
Simone Collins: it, to attract intelligence.
So not just intelligent. Agentic people, but intelligent agentic AIs who can count as citizens in this city state.
Malcolm Collin: Right. But, but the larger point being is that do not think when you're building a city state, how do I get people to move here? Think how do I get cash producing assets to move here? Whether it's companies or AIs or anything
Simone Collins: else.
Well, because if there is cash there, people will show up.
Malcolm Collin: Yeah, people come when there's cash. [00:17:00] People don't necessarily bring cash, especially if they're ideological extremists.
I signed a permit allowing them to have their concert here. Their little festival should pump some money into our economy. They're hippies! They don't have any money!
Simone Collins: Yeah. Like with the EA movement, when suddenly daddy crypto box, Sam Bingman freed showed up and was like doling out those, those grants.
Everyone was an effective altruist all of a sudden. So how, how the city state will attract and create economic demand. So one, and this is probably my favorite part, although I love AI citizenship too, but number one, no holds barred medical research. Enshrine into the constitution That the only medical research not allowed is that which lacks informed consent.
This attracts both extant and cutting age businesses to develop therapies and innovations, including artificial wombs and human genetic modification that are high in demand, but nearly impossible to develop in a heavily regulated environment. This will also create a medical tourism industry. So [00:18:00] you get the vacationers coming in for the cancer treatment that the FDA won't approve, and you get the researchers who are doing their fellowships.
But, okay, AI citizenship is also super cool here. Enshrine into the Constitution citizen rights for synthetic intelligences. As AI develops, much of the world's economic opportunity will be generated by AIs themselves. However, restrictions on AI owning property or capital will make most nations difficult places to host these centers of economic production.
So I love being a safe haven for them. And then Dow operation, writing the government into blockchain allows us to make the city state's currency, literal tokens within the government. This will make the region attractive for cutting edge web three projects.
Malcolm Collin: So I think that this is, and this is the interesting thing.
is if you're thinking right now, how could you make AI a citizen? Right? Because if you go as a one person, one vote system, making AI a citizen doesn't make any sense because an AI could just clone itself and then [00:19:00] have tons and tons of votes. And you don't know, like what have an AI? It's not a well, well programmed AI and it's dramatically less competent than the average person.
You can't have AI be a citizen in that respect. So many people may hate that we have moved away from a one person, one vote system, but in a way we've actually made the system more inclusive by doing that because now we can have AI politically participate, whereas it's impossible for AI to politically participate in the one person, one vote system.
Simone Collins: Yeah, I like that. So, to move on, most importantly, the government must incentivize the creation of highly productive economic actors. To your point, Malcolm, our model achieves this by 1 creating reproductive technology due to the conditionally enshrined protection for medical innovation, which allows for the possibility of mass production of genetically selected humans and to providing an incentive systems that grant more voting power to the creators of economically productive agents, including [00:20:00] A.
I. S. And corporations. You're most excited about the governing structure, aren't you? What? You're most excited about the governing structure, aren't you? Do you want to
Malcolm Collin: talk more about it? Yeah, you can go straight to the governing structure. The, the mass production of what we should mean is what we meant by that, is government subsidized.
Genetic selection. Not that like people would be forced into genetic selection. Obviously nothing in the system causes that,
Simone Collins: but I think that becomes apparent when you look at the sort of tribal, religious, tribal based system of distributing, yeah, but we'll get to that in a second. First, let's go
Malcolm Collin: over the overall governance structure.
Simone Collins: The proposed government is run by a single executor, basically a dictator, who has full control of the government's laws and operational structure during their tenure, though, to be clear, and I'm adding this, it's not in the deck, they can't just nullify this system, for example, you know, you can't like, wish for more wishes when you get a three wish genie.
This maximizes efficiency and flexibility, while also allowing for the [00:21:00] Judicious and timely removal of an inefficient executor or one who exploits their position for personal gain. Note, executors can be AIs, and honestly, I imagine most of them will be. Once every four years, an executor must be unanimously selected by three wards.
At any time, an executor can be immediately recalled and replaced if ever two wards decide so. Executors are therefore given much more power than the head of any existing government structure. However, they are also easier and faster to recall.
So there are the three wards. that are selecting the words.
Malcolm Collin: I want to talk about the executor model and why I chose it. So it allows for like, if you look at problems in the U. S. Government right now with all the bureaucracy that's been building up and everything like that, this would allow, for example, a president to immediately just clear it all out if they wanted to.
If that was the will. Of the voters, you can completely restructure the way the state structures in between electoral cycles. You could flip [00:22:00] between a capitalist system and a communist system. You could flip between a currency based on a Dow to a currency backed by gold. You could flip from. You know, a like one type of medical system to a completely different type of medical system.
It allows for radical, radical and fast changes to happen within the government. But because you have the system where if two wards ever turn against you, you are immediately removed. You have a reason to do it. To be paying attention to what the voters actually think of the various voting bodies and you can't just run rex, you know, through everything, right?
You need to pay a lot of attention to what the actual voters are thinking of the things that you're doing because the voters have a much more direct. Lens to sort of touch you. I'd also note here that it also provides the break between the voters and who is actually running things, the executor, [00:23:00] that the founders tried to create with our governance system, with our electoral governance system.
So what the founders thought is, well, Your average citizen isn't really smart enough to know how to vote for, but they'll like know who's smart locally, so they'll vote on an elector and the elector who will be better educated because they were like a popular, smart, local person will then vote on, you know, who's the president, for example.
But the problem is, is because we ended up with so, so, so many of those. It doesn't really make sense to vote on them anymore. Now you just vote on the president directly. So you know who's going to be for people who don't know that that's how the U. S. System works. That's how the U. S. System works. I even think it's legally enshrined in some areas that they have to vote for whoever, like, I don't even know, I think in most states who I'm really voting for is my elector to vote for me for Donald Trump.
But that's the way it works. Now. This system rebuilds what the founders were trying to do is that system because there's only three words and because there is [00:24:00] three words, that means it's the discussion between the three words as to who they chooses the executor. And so it wouldn't necessarily make sense if you're running for award.
To run and say, I want this particular candidate to be the executor because then if another ward who was running on a different candidate ends up the executor, then the executor just then gets chosen by the third world, which is basically an unelected ward. We'll get to how they work. But the point being is, that would be a very bad way.
to run. It makes it so that you would never do that. So you're always actually going to be voting on a ward, not voting on the executor themselves. And because you're always voting on a ward, and it'll make sense why you would only want to vote on the ward in just a second, the wards themselves, when they get in a room and they're saying, okay, Who's the most competent person to run the country right now in line with what I told the voters that I was going to achieve for them.
They're actually having that conversation in a meaningful way and in a way that [00:25:00] the founders wanted us to have as a country, but we've never really had. So continue.
Simone Collins: So how are these words selected? Remember that companies, programs, AIs, and any other productive member of the economy counts as a citizen.
We have the word of the present, the voting power of citizens in this election is determined by their local tax contribution to the governing system, minus the amount the governing system has spent on them to determine their net utility to the state. Any salary paid to a government employee is treated the same as payouts like welfare.
If an individual If an individual wants to pay more than their share for of taxes for additional voting power title privileges They can't.
Malcolm Collin: So this is this is the first ward is elected basically by how much you pay in taxes net how much you take home and an individual could could say, well, why don't govern it workers?
Because basically, this would mean they'd be very hard to get any vote within this particular system. If you are, say, [00:26:00] a teacher paid by the government. or a doctor paid by the government if the government ends up subsidizing doctors. And this goes to something that we argue in our governance book, which is to say wards of the state should never have a vote.
If you can vote to just increase your own salary, basically, if that's one of the things that you may want, then you shouldn't have any voting power. Obviously you should be. Given a salary based on the, the desires of the people who are actually paying you, which are the reflective
Simone Collins: of the utility you offer to the state.
Malcolm Collin: Well, no, it's not reflective of the utility totally because a teacher or a police officer still has utility to the state, but in the same way, like, if you look at the United States and people are like, oh, people in D. C. don't have a vote in presidential elections. Because they can influence what's happening in Washington just through like socially what's happening in DC, which is absolutely a true thing.
It's sort of the same thing. A police officer or a teacher or a anyone who's working [00:27:00] on behalf of the government administration. Intrinsically touches and affects that administration and that administration's policies, and as such, they don't need an additional vote to have their voice heard their voices already being disproportionately heard within the governance system.
So that's the other thing here. One is, is you don't want to create the negative incentives by giving words of the state of vote. And the other is, is to say they're, they already have an ability to outsize impact the voters, but the 2nd note I'd make here with these sorts of individuals is I find it really perverse and I was, you know, telling this to the Guardian article that one person could pay like 50, 000 times as much of another person as taxes gives the state 50, 000 times as much as another person and they don't get one iota more say in how that money is spent or what's the best way to spend that money like that seems to me ridiculous and deeply unfair.
Simone Collins: I wonder if it's a cultural thing because I definitely with everything in my life. Have [00:28:00] this intuition of, well, if someone paid for it, then they get to call the shot. Like if someone paid for my vacation, then they get to decide what we do every day. If someone is paying me to do work, then they get to decide how I do that work.
And I think this should be the same way with government. I mean, if someone's paying for government, then they get to decide how the government works, right? It seems, but is that a cultural thing? Because this seems to be so foreign to other people.
Malcolm Collin: I well, whether it's a cultural thing or not, this system is sure to draw economically productive agents, whether they are.
And you see how this breaks the AI problem. No longer do you have the problem of like AI is being able to spam themselves. If an AI is being economically productive and contributing to the state, then it should have a say in what the state is doing correlatory to how much they're contributing to the state, at least within this branch of the government.
If a company is paying a bunch of taxes. That company gets a vote, and there's other places where companies get votes, by the [00:29:00] way. In London, companies get votes and companies get votes in Hong Kong. So that's not a particularly novel concept, but the vote being correlatory to how much they're paying into the state is.
Same with individual human actors. If I'm an individual with a ton of money, I can come into the state. And now, in addition to this, I am actively punishing myself by cheating my taxes or by finding tax loopholes. Because I have a lower vote, the more I take advantage of tax loopholes. So this has the additional model of sort of forcing taxes onto the table.
Simone Collins: Mm hmm. The ward of the future, a citizen's voting power in this election is determined by the net utility to the state of all citizens they have brought to the state, either by having and raising citizens, coding them in the case of AI or founding them in the case of corporations, plus half the net utility of any secondary recruits of their direct recruits brought, for example, grandchildren or spinoff AIs or companies.
Malcolm Collin: So this system is essentially meant to increase the number of people that exist within the [00:30:00] state. And you could think of it as a bit of a pyramid scheme, but that's the way society really needs to be structured population wise for people to have more people. And as you can see here, it means that me as an agent was in the state, you know, the guardian obviously wanted to frame this as the more kids you have, the more votes you have, but that's very explicitly not what it says.
If I bring an economically productive immigrant into the state, because when you immigrate to the state, you always say this person was my benefactor who brought me in that person's taxes, any taxes they end up paying, ends up contributing to this portion of my vote. However, if I bring an immigrant into the state and that immigrant is a net drain on the state, but I have like economically productive children, that immigrant's economic weight to the state ends up subtracting from the economic benefit that I produce through my children.
All right. So, I, I really love this as a system. It also means that people who found successful companies are going to have an outsized impact within this part of the system. And if you have, you know, grandchildren or an AI, you write, then creates another thing or a company you create, then creates [00:31:00] another company or creates an AI.
You also receive some benefit from that. So there's a, a, a huge reason to look into the future within this particular board.
Simone Collins: Exactly. Then, finally, there's the word of the past, and I find this uniquely fascinating because It provides a sense of continuity, but I never would have thought of it, and I think it's brilliant that you did.
And this is something you first started discussing in the Pragmatist Guide to Governance. So it's the ward of the past. This ward is elected by a vote from all past living executors. This lowers the influence of party politics and enables those with the most knowledge of being an executor to have say in who gets the job.
Actually, you know where this is also? It's in Asimov's Foundation series. Oh, he has this? Yeah, because the, the empire, although it's not a great example, because the empire is like crumbling and poorly governed, but it's, it's run by this clone of just the same person always. But there's like the old retired version of the clone.
There is the active middle aged [00:32:00] governing version of the clone. And then there's the young kid clone who's like apprenticing and learning under like the grandfather and the dad, and then like the young one. And it's kind of an interesting, I mean, it sort of creates a sense of
Malcolm Collin: how, how are there any correlation between these two systems?
Simone Collins: Well, because you have the previous ruler of the empire. Advising the current ruler of the empire in the
Malcolm Collin: system. It doesn't function that way. We talked about a system like that in the governance book, but this system explicitly isn't that
Simone Collins: they're voting. So this
Malcolm Collin: system, I'll explain it in different words and it might make more sense to you.
Okay. This system is like having a council of presidents. Mm-Hmm. , being one of the bodies that is important for electing the next president. Oh
Simone Collins: yeah. Sorry. No, no, no. Take off this, take out this whole thing. I was. I'm very sleep deprived. I was thinking of something. Yeah, this is, yeah. It's like having all past presidents choose who they're voting for, but they're not influencing this person.
They can't take them out. Well, kind of. Working with the word of the
Malcolm Collin: [00:33:00] future or the word of the present, yes. The word of the past is why you would never have party politics for. So, I'll explain why. If there are party politics that differentiate between the two words, like somebody is much more likely to win one word than the other word the two voted words, this is the word of the present and the word of the future I suspect that it will be pretty broadcast from the perspective of the ward of the past if they are going to vote for one of these two parties.
And because of that, it doesn't really make sense to do that. I. e. you would basically know whoever the ward of the past was going to support is going to be the person who wins the moment party politics ends up developing. Which is why you need party politics to not end up developing. The word of the past also has a huge benefit.
If you look in like the U S it, one of the things that's always talked about is like past presidents are usually very friendly with each other. And they always like to go golfing together and a lot of the animosity between them dissolves really quickly because [00:34:00] you know, they've experienced something unique and now they're interested in the future of the state.
Well also they have more knowledge about the job than anyone else. Right. You know, they're going to be very good at potentially choosing somebody. But in addition to all of that it means that you aren't going to have the NASA problem where you have a wild party swings where one person, because the executor can do so much to overhaul society, right?
Like just say, well, okay. We're going to build like a totally different system for our governance structure. This makes it much harder to do that unless most past presidents also think that's a good idea. Yeah. Which is a really good system to prevent radical changes. And the only case in which you could do that, in which most past presidents don't agree to it is when the general population, or at least the economically productive population vastly agrees with it.
Anyway, continue.
Simone Collins: So, why not one vote, one person? Because apparently people think this is absolutely crazy. Like, here's what I was just thinking this morning. I [00:35:00] was like, oh yeah, I mean, Because the United States started out as one man, one vote. We didn't find that to work forever because we found that there were actually other contributing members to society that maybe also deserve to say like, like maybe not white people, like maybe women.
Like there's no, why would we assume that the voting system we have today is perfect? It wasn't perfect when the founding fathers started the United States and it's not perfect now. I'm not saying that our system is applicable to the United States at all anyway, but I'm just saying like, it's funny that people are so.
Insistent that our current voting system is unimpeded. So anyway, why not one vote, one person? Our system recognized that competence is not evenly distributed among a population and rewards individuals with more control over governing decisions when they have demonstrated proven measurable competence.
Our system furthermore lowers the voice of those who have, already work within the government or receive government support [00:36:00] as they are adversely incentivized to protect their own positions and privileges. Productivity is not the only contributory factor that warrants governing power. The system must also reward those who raise or build productive elements in a society while punishing those who bring citizens into the system that are net drains on resources.
Finally, the influence of past leaders on present leadership is designed to allow for more continuity than existing systems of government, dampening the NASA problem, as you say Malcolm, in which particularly large, long term projects are severely undermined with every administrative change. But I think here's where it's even more spicy, like, because some people are like, well, well, well, maybe I can get with one, like, different kinds of voting, but this is where I think it's so fun, because why not?
Yes. And this, right? So a tiered society, existing governing systems assume that every citizen has equal value when they objectively do not. [00:37:00] Our system assumes an individual's value is correlated with their utility to the state and optimizes around these individuals with the most utility to
the state all to ensure the competent operation of a state that attracts productive immigrants. To this end, not all citizens are equal within the state. Individuals can be rewarded with titles and additional privileges determined by the executor by opting into lump sum payments or higher tax schemes.
This is akin to paying for a premium membership, but at the state level, I love that premium membership in a government
Malcolm Collin: pay for like a Lord title or a knight title that gives you access. Honestly,
Simone Collins: honestly
Malcolm Collin: though. What were
Simone Collins: lords? It original work like lords, but premium members, that's what they were. It was a premium membership.
Yeah. We just need to bring things back to a natural or buy it often. That's how it was. Yeah. That's what, what do people think Lords were? What do people think barons were? And, and I think what's funny is that we we've lost this utility in society. By getting rid of classes. And I mean, titles now are only [00:38:00] a name.
They're only inherited. There's they're, they're functionless. They aren't real anymore. A real title is one that's bought. That's it. If you are not buying your way into a title, you don't really have a title because it doesn't do anything. Anyway, the set of laws an individual has to follow is determined by their title.
EG, a person opting into paying more taxes may have a different speed limit that applies to them and have reserved parking spaces. I love this. I love this so much. I mean, obviously from a certain perspective, it's incredibly dystopian because you're thinking about this from the perspective of some comedic movie in which some loser in society can't even park to go for a job interview because he's not
Malcolm Collin: Here's what you're not thinking about is when you can create opt in mechanisms for the ultra wealthy to pay more than their fair share and be happy and excited to do so, that's a tax burden that's not going to the middle class and poor.
Simone Collins: Yeah, I mean, yeah, the flip side of that scene in which this guy is getting frustrated about not being able to park. Well, [00:39:00] yeah, but this guy also isn't paying very much in taxes. You know,
Malcolm Collin: the way I put it this way is. Am I okay with wealthy people in society having it a bit easier if they're paying like billions extra in tax dollars that I don't need to pay?
Yeah, of course. It seems dystopia until you think about it for five seconds and you realize it's perfectly rational.
Simone Collins: Well, and again, that's, that's us on the, okay, that's at least me on airplanes. You know how I am with business class. I always wish I could fly business class everywhere. But then whenever it comes to it, cause I obviously have my own discretionary income, I could spend my money on that because I, but I don't, cause it's dumb.
I don't, I don't want to, right. It doesn't matter to me. So every time I walk by business classes, I board a plane. I'm like, yeah, you know, they're sitting there and I wish I were sitting there, but also like, I don't want to pay for that. So they deserve to be here. Yeah. They're subsidizing my flight. Like that's fine.
I, this is a choice that I've made. And I think that that's what this comes down to is that. As long as people are framing things logically instead of being like, Oh, I deserve to be in business class, but I mean, I don't, I don't want to pay for it, but I [00:40:00] still deserve to be here. Well, that's not a plane that works.
That's not a plane that exists. Okay. You can either pay for business class or you can sit with the chickens. And Simone begrudgingly. And that's how it is. Anyway, I'll continue reading your slide. Words of the state. Individuals with net negative contribution scores, who are not state workers, are always treated as a separate class.
The consequences of this status are determined by the current executor. This system is designed to encourage productive immigration while also pressuring non productive citizens to leave the country. It works.
Malcolm Collin: It's a great system.
Simone Collins: If you don't want to sit in basic economy, fly on the plane. Don't fly on the plane.
Social structure for a person or entity to become a citizen. They must either start a new tribe or be accepted by an existing tribe. This is where we're getting into describing what Curtis Yarvin was the first person who was like, yeah, this sounds like the millet system. And you're like, yeah, tribes are associated with cultures and [00:41:00] cultural norms, e.
g. Catholics, Mormons, et cetera. That's where we're An individual's tribe is responsible for social services, medical care, schooling, social safety nets, et cetera. And can demand independent taxes that are collected by the state and distributed to the tribal group. An individual can switch tribes if they choose to, but only after both paying a fine and paying back their tribal group for all services rendered to them, net their tax or voluntary contributions to the group.
For example, if an individual joined the Catholic group for their good medical care, they would not be able to deconvert immediately after the medical issue was dealt with unless they paid for the tribe's net tax loss on their medical expenses. Individuals moving out of the group. from their parents homes, as well as individuals marrying for the first time, are exempt from this rule.
Tribal groups can apply any restrictions they want on joining, and can impose additional laws on their members. For example, a tribe may enforce monogamy, but are responsible for internally policing them. [00:42:00] This works well for me.
Malcolm Collin: If people struggle to understand, like, why this is so valuable is it makes it much easier for religious extremists to protect their culture and individuals with unique cultures to protect their culture, which is to say, when you move into the state, a portion of your social services and a portion of your taxes are going to your tribal group.
So when the state collects your taxes, it collects an additional amount of taxes, which can almost be thought of as like. in the United States, you have your federal taxes and your state taxes. And this, you would have your federal taxes and your, basically your religion taxes. But it might not be religion.
It might be like the urban monoculture. It might be like the hippie group. It might be like the atheist group, whatever group it is. It's like your religion slash cultural group taxes.
Simone Collins: I'm trying to think. So how would things be different for the Amish, for example, who already lived in a, In a very isolated state and sort of provide their own services to their own community.
How would it be different for them if they operated within this city state governing system versus what they [00:43:00] already operate with right
Malcolm Collin: now? The Amish. So, so in the United States, when I am choosing which state taxes I want to pay, I am. Choose which I want to live in. Okay. And then that determines which state taxes I'm going to pay.
So if I'm an Amish person, I'm paying for like the public school system, even though I'm not using the public school system, I'm paying for Medicaid and medical costs, even though I'm not using any of that, like it's very unfair to the Amish. I Anywhere in the United States, I'm often paying for things that are not things that I may culturally use.
So, for example, I may be Catholic, and I'm paying into government funded abortions, or government funded prep for gay orgies. You know, I, well, you should see our episode on that. It's absolutely wild what's happening. But in this system, I move there and instead of choosing like which state I want to be to wherever I live within the system I choose which tribe I am affiliating with which is basically like a religion And then that determines an additional part in addition to like my federal my state taxes [00:44:00] an additional tax I'm going to pay which is determined by the tribe, but The tribe also gets to distribute things like medical care, things like education, things like all sorts of different social services that might be like free psychologists, free counseling, free you know, all sorts of stuff like that that might be very valuable to me.
And so if I'm something like the Mormon church and I'm coming here, basically the 10 percent tithe would be automatically added to the taxes and then distributed to the Mormon church and the Mormon church would distribute their They're services to members, you know, whether it's billing systems, et cetera.
And this is a really great system because it means that now me as a cultural group, I need to, on a per cost basis, also appeal to people. And the reason we have the system where a person cannot opt into a group and then opt out is it prevents scamming these groups. So I couldn't, for example, join the Mormon group in name only just to get access to their like medical care and then nope out the moment my medical bills were paid, you [00:45:00] know, I'd have to pay that back.
And somebody is like, well, that could cause abusive situations, but we noted that and we allowed for loopholes for the two most likely abusive situations. Yeah, this is your,
Simone Collins: your, this is as far as you can go with porous borders and a heavy social state.
Malcolm Collin: Yeah. One is when you're married, you can pop out whenever you want, which is great.
You can pop into a new tribe whenever you want. You don't need to pay back stuff. And two is, and then this is only for first marriages. And two is. When you leave your parents household, you can pop out of any religion you want. So you're not stuck in your birth culture. Now, this is assuming another culture will have you keep in mind because you will be a burden to these cultures and you may be a burden to these cultures in terms of caring for you.
They may just say, eh, we don't want you because you're not a productive member. You don't seem sincere. You don't seem whatever. And I suspect that we're going to see a much more exclusionary view of who can join their membership. By religions that are in this system
Simone Collins: and when you even saw this when the puritans Went to the [00:46:00] colonies.
There would be all these discussions on Can you bring this servant? I don't know. Well, are they like a solid person? Are they productive? I don't know When they
Malcolm Collin: leave the indentured servant, do we actually want them being a puritan? Yeah
Simone Collins: there was there was yeah these were exclusive communities and people were very selective about who they brought in because they also knew that they were They were going to be largely dependent on each other and they couldn't afford a world in which there were deadweights.
All right, continue.
Individual bonds. This is largely inspired by Robin Hanson, right? Yeah. So hat to Robin Hanson. We love you. Every individual AI or company registered in the state, for example, every politically relevant unit. Pays two tax streams. One is paid to the state like normal taxes, while the other consisting of 25 percent of whatever the state is paid is paid to their bond holders.
The initial owner of an individual's bond is the individual's creators. For example, the child's bond would be split 50 percent [00:47:00] between their parents. Some tribes may demand a portion of this bond in exchange for membership. For example, the Mormon community may own 50 percent of this bond for every child born within their community.
The system is designed for three purposes. One, it yields a direct and large cash benefit for having a child and raising them well. This cash benefit exactly scales with the presumed economic productivity of the child. As parents can sell their children's shares, shares that will be worth less if parents do not raise the child to be economically productive.
Two, it provides an economic incentive for those with capital to invest in those without it. For example, those born into disadvantaged families. For example, if an otherwise smart kid was born into a disadvantaged family and their parents traded or sold their shares at a discount to another educational institution, that institution would be financially incentivized to educate the child and help them in any way it can.
We imagine most of the time these shares will be sold to educational institutions [00:48:00] or other types of companies that specialize in improving people's economic status is that will be in the best interest of both parents and children. Three, it provides a large economic incentive for companies, educational centers, and cultural groups to study methods for raising economically productive individuals.
This is a super fun idea.
Malcolm Collin: Yeah. So, for people who don't understand, it'd be like if Simone and I had a kid. And then that kid, 25 percent of all the federal taxes they paid, end up going to ever hold the bond on them. And so, suppose like, polygenic screening costs a lot of money, but the companies that are offering it have a really high degree of confidence that it will help these people be more productive members of society, then the polygenic screening companies can say, okay, for 10 percent of any child we creates bond, we will do the polygenic selection for free.
Or an educational institution, and this is the problem with existing educational institutions, is they have no reason to actually care about a child's outcome. And I suspect that many services, like educational institutions and polygenic screening companies, [00:49:00] will Only be able to sell for bonds because me as a parent, if one educational institution is like, I'm going to charge you X many hundred thousand dollars a year and another is like, Oh, I just want the bond.
I'm like, okay, well, one of these is actually motivated to improve the kid's economic outcomes while the other is just motivated to take my money. Obviously I'm going to choose the bond holder. So there's so many society externalities to this or like a company like Google, if they're like really convinced that we can make X.
Type of people more productive. They could go into like a whole poor community and then just buy all the bonds in that community and then increase the value of those bonds by improving the quality of life of that community. Yeah, this
Simone Collins: is the core of governance design as it should be approached by everyone going forward.
So in the past governance design was created, but based on, well, this is how we do it, maybe if I tweak it a little bit, it might be less shitty. Whereas what you really need to look at is. What will incentivize people to do a thing that is good [00:50:00] for everyone? It is about aligning incentives, period. Don't look at what was done in the past.
Don't think that that, and people hear this, this concept that we first heard of from Robin Hanson and they're like, Oh, that sounds weird. I don't know. Like selling a bond. Are you like selling that person? Just stop, stop thinking about that and think about incentives. This is brilliant.
Malcolm Collin: Yeah. But as I was saying with Google, so like, suppose.
Google does something. It makes predatory actions beneficial. So let's talk about a predatory action. Google goes into a ghetto and they buy up all of the kids bonds in that ghetto and people be like, Oh, this is so predatory. Well now what does Google have an incentive to do? It has an incentive to renovate all the playgrounds.
To renovate all the school systems, to make sure all the houses get renovations and all the lead is tested. To give
Simone Collins: scholarships to all the children, to give them tutors. That's how it maximizes
Malcolm Collin: its earnings from these bond holdings. Like that is the key to making a state. It reminds me of this scene in Dune when they're like, [00:51:00] Oh, well, the smugglers operate underground.
We can't know what they're doing. And he goes, well, then why don't we just tax the smugglers, but make it legal? And they're like, wait, I hadn't considered doing that. And it's like, yeah, if it's legal, but tax now, there's a benefit to them being above board with us, but we can also better monitor what's happening.
And this is what we mean with things like, Well, if your vote is based on the amount that you're paying in taxes, now there's a huge disincentive to using tax loopholes. And it's the same with bondholders. Now there's a huge incentive for predatory actions, which aren't predatory at all, but benefit everyone involved. All right. Well, I am so excited that we got a chance to go over this. We've been meaning to do something on this deck forever. I am so glad the Guardian published this for us. Thank you. Thank you. And their outrage.
Of
Simone Collins: the, they thought we were harboring in this or, or trying to bring in this dystopian revolution and Patrick, I loved, I loved Patrick's tweet of, he like just shared this image of this beautiful sci fi utopia and [00:52:00] he's like, this is the world that the guardian doesn't want you to bring in. This is
Malcolm Collin: the dystopian they're afraid of, our like solar fun future.
How horrible. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh, no. He has the best
Simone Collins: comments, by the way. Patrick, you got it, man. I read YouTube comments just to find yours.
Malcolm Collin: Simone, were the comments weighted towards negative or positive on this one?
Simone Collins: The Guardian? People don't go to Twitter to post positive stuff. They don't, they don't go to, to X and pat you on the back and say, good job.
Malcolm Collin: People actually think that this governing system would work. What are the flaws that we haven't thought of? What are the negative externalities we haven't thought of? And yeah, I'd be very interested to hear all of that. I am honestly, I think it's a brilliant governing system. I'd be really excited to see it implemented.
And Simone and I, even this morning, we're talking about going into the Charter City business. I was saying, you know, we should really [00:53:00] look at pitching this to a few countries, see if we can get this off the ground. I think people get really excited. Let's get a few ultra religious groups in on this. I mean, I think that that's what you really need to make this happen.
And in a few. Like incredibly tech forward organizations. And then we can build the first of the future charter cities or the first of the future Haven networks.
Simone Collins: No, on a less bright note. And this is something that I'm just really coming to terms with because most countries are not willing to, or politically unable to come to terms with the fact that you cannot have both porous borders and generous social services.
They will fall apart. Yeah. And we need, we need somewhere. I'm sure most people want somewhere they can flee to. That is okay. And I think most people are going to be willing to work for it. They're going to be willing to be productive members of society. And I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that even most people who are heavily dependent on social services and handouts would much prefer to be independent.
citizens. It's just that once you get [00:54:00] stuck on this stuff, you get stuck in a loop and it's really hard to get out. And I think that creating this and many other haven states that have similar systems, it's not just something of like, this could be a solution. We need this because we are going to end up between this, this, this social services and poorest borders dynamic and demographic collapse.
We are heading toward civilizational collapse and we need it. We need that techno feudal system of little cities upon a hill, little city States that survived this. So yeah, maybe we do need to get into this because. There has to be something left for people to flee to.
Malcolm Collin: Well, yeah, that we do. We do.
There has to be something for people to flee to because I
Simone Collins: don't like this. I don't like thinking you think through things. I'm like the rest of society. I don't think through things. This, this is fine. I like [00:55:00] thinking this is fine. And you just showing me the flames all around us.
Malcolm Collin: If we have any ultra wealthy people who watch this and want something like this set up let us know.
We're actually competent enough to put this together, but I want to see some bites before we do because the last time we tried to do this, we got a lot of interest from people who wanted to buy into the project. This was project Eureka, but we didn't have connections with capital that was interested and we didn't have
Simone Collins: the property.
Malcolm Collin: Yeah, we had the property. We could have done the whole thing for like 10 have been so inexpensive. I was very disappointed. And this would have been right outside Manhattan, which was so frustrating. Such a good property was an old convent. But they're completely different model than the model we're describing here.
But, and I don't want to go into that model right now. That's for a different episode. But for the model we're describing here, If you buy into this early, you could end up making an astronomical amount of money if things play out the way that we predict they will play out. But you would need to buy in enough to get this off the ground.
So [00:56:00] let us know if you're interested. This is one of the things that hard EA, if we end up getting a lot of money is going to maneuver to make realistic. And I just love you to decimum.
Simone Collins: Yeah, I love you too. And I love everyone else who's working on City States because the more people working on this, the better.
I mean, we want to get involved, but that's not just s**t on the people who are trying. I admire everyone who's trying. And obviously people have done a ton of groundwork. The fact that Prospera has people living there. I mean, this is happening. It's incredible
Malcolm Collin: that Prospera is off the ground.
Simone Collins: I just can't believe what you've done.
mover in this space. I have such massive respect to all the first movers. This is to me, it just, it's so impossible to, I mean, it can be done and it has been done, but anyway, huge respect. I love you. I love them. I love that we have a shot at the future, but I'm also so scared. I'm so scared. I'm so scared.
Love you to decimum. I love you too. It's scared.
Malcolm Collin: Oh, escalators.
Speaker 5: [00:57:00] You need the sign? Let me get the sign. The sign's right here, buddy.
Speaker 6: Can I take this sign home with us? I don't know, buddy. We'll have to ask them. Okay. Come on, Mommy. Do you Know what they say right on top here? Not on the bottom.
Speaker 7: What do you think it says?
Speaker 6: You, you do it.
Speaker 7: It says Trump Vance. And
Speaker 6: what does
Speaker 7: this say?
Speaker 6: And what does this whole
Speaker 7: word say, this
Speaker 6: long word? And what, and,
Speaker 7: and, and what does these
Speaker 6: numbers make? 2024?[00:58:00]
I sold a car. So, What? We gotta put up this sign? So, so, because they gotta vote. Everybody vote! Hey, come on,
Mommy! Let's go.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
Join the discussion as we delve into the economic realities of the US under Biden and Trump. Breaking down fact-checking articles, inflation rates, wage changes, and the real cost of living, we offer a comprehensive analysis of the current state and future outlook, revealing the stark differences between recent administrations. From gas prices to rent, grocery costs to home ownership, we uncover the underlying trends and dissect the implications for everyday Americans. Don't miss this deep dive into the numbers that impact your life and the upcoming election.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today is election day in the United States. You're running for office and so is Trump.
So you all get out there, vote or die
Vote or die, what the hell does that even mean? What you think it means, b***h.
Malcolm Collins: because this last four years has begun to feel. Like that scene from Oliver Twist,
Good Lord, it's good. Don't care what he looks like.
Malcolm Collins: where I just, in my mind, I wish the ad that the Trump campaign had played is what I'm putting on screen here, which is just Kamala laughing in the background, and it says, remember when your family could afford food.
Because we have seen like the Democrats will be like, oh, the economy is great under Biden and Kamala. And Kamala has said that she's not going to change much. So I wanted to go through the real inflation numbers, the real price of things under [00:01:00] the two administrations and not the, because there have been some inflation numbers that Republicans have sent around that are really massaged to look good for Trump.
Which. I think undersell things because then you're looking at them, you know, they're massaged. So, you know, this is as good as they could honestly make them look for Trump. So I'm going to start this by going over fact checker with an article titled viral posts, site misleading economic data to compare Biden and Trump presidencies.
To be taking down those ones that make Trump look really good.
Simone Collins: Right.
Malcolm Collins: And we'll go into the numbers that they give for Biden in the various areas, because I think through seeing the most rosy possible numbers that somebody could give Biden,
Simone Collins: right,
Malcolm Collins: you would be horrified for another four years of this.
Simone Collins: Okay. Wow. More so than
Malcolm Collins: you probably think. All right. We identified the national average price of regular gasoline at the pump 2.
48 [00:02:00] under Trump.
And overall, the national gas price increased by 2. 3 percent over the course of Trump's presidency. So under Trump for gas, 2. 48 average, 2. 3 percent increase.
Simone Collins: Right off the bat, this is insane to me because I'm hearing that and I'm like, No gas in the U. S. Was never that inexpensive.
Malcolm Collins: That's impossible.
Hold on. And, and, and keep in mind, they're massaging the numbers for Biden here. , the average price of gasoline under Biden was three 50 and under Biden's presidency, they increased 46. 2%. Well, yeah, we've been paying 4 at the pump. Like recently, I know they increased 46. 2 percent and the average was three 50.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: So the, the, at the end of the cycle, it's going to be higher, obviously. Yes, yes. The highest recorded price under the Biden's administration was at $5 in 1 cents. Yeah, that sounds about right. . So they went from 2 48 under Trump to $5 under [00:03:00] Biden and under Trump, they increased. 2. 3%. Under Biden, they increased 46.
2%. And keep in mind, that was a full four years of a Trump's presidency. And this is like three and a half years of a Biden presidency. All right, let's look at home ownership. All right. So if you look at Zillow's rent index for changes in Single family homes. They identified the average home rent price under the Trump administration as $1,488 as compared was $1,884 under Biden.
According to Zillow's Index, home rent prices for single bedroom houses increased 50 percent under Trump administration and 30 percent under the Biden administration. Like how do people afford this when it's increasing that much? Hold on. It's all going to get worse when we go to pay increases under the two administrations.
I think a lot of people have in the back of their heads. Well, yeah, but pay probably increased more. What pay [00:04:00] increases though? Oh my gosh. Okay. Now let's look at a different way of looking at this. The BLS also track, rent prices increased by 13. 6 percent over the entire Trump administration and by 21. 5 percent over the first three years of the Biden administration. So again, almost double there. Now let's, let's look at the NASDAQ, the stock market aggregated on a daily basis. The NASDAQ increased about 0.
14 percent per day under Trump and 0. 04 percent under Biden. So terrible terrible under biden. Okay, let's keep going here To measure grocery prices. Under trump grocery increased in price by 6. 5 Under biden by 20. 9
Simone Collins: Okay, that makes a lot of sense now I feel a lot less gaslit based on these numbers because i'm hearing a lot of discussion now Especially leading up to the election that prices aren't that different, but I keep thinking, no, I, they're
Malcolm Collins: [00:05:00] just lying to people.
It's so bad.
Simone Collins: Yeah,
Speaker 11: Democrats act like this is the nineties and they're working under the old rules. The new rules are these attack, lie, don't get caught. Machiavelli wrote the Prince for the rulers.
Well, we're rewriting it for us.
Malcolm Collins: But yeah, they're just lying, lying,
Simone Collins: lying. That is. Insane, but also I didn't realize just how bad it was because I know things cost more, but I think I'd forgotten at this point. I've even successfully been gas lit to the extent where when you said that gas prices were on average about 2.
5 dollars in the US under Trump. I was like, I couldn't believe it grocery prices too, but now I feel like less of an idiot because every time you and I go to a restaurant, for example, or to a grocery store, I think I can't afford this, or this, this used to be the price of a. Michelin star restaurant in the heart of Manhattan.[00:06:00]
But we are out in the boonies in Pennsylvania at like a wing bucket. You know what I mean? Like this is not.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. No, no, no. Seriously. They'll be like, Oh, this is like 25 for an entree at like a medium restaurant. And it's like, this was literally what Michelin star restaurants used to charge. I'd say a
Simone Collins: 25 entree was, I think I remember seeing those prices at restaurants like log runway, which was one of the most.
expensive, fancy restaurants in all of New York City that we've ever eaten that was like such a thing you dress up to go is a big deal. And what makes me so concerned about this too, is Well, you and I basically since the pandemic have stopped eating out period unless it's for a business dinner that we have to go to and we have to meet at a restaurant because otherwise we just have people come to our house and we inflict our food upon them.
We. We don't see that same change in the average American. The average American is still eating out with their [00:07:00] family on a semi regular basis, if not on a very regular basis. When I hear quote, unquote, normal people talking about their lives, they're door dashing, they're Uber eatsing. They are, so they're getting delivered restaurant food.
So not only restaurant food, but restaurant food that they're paying delivery fees for. Well,
Malcolm Collins: and it shows you how entitled people are. There was a campaign a while ago. We're after the pandemic, people were saying that DoorDash should be like a human, right? This is progressives saying that the government should pay for our DoorDash.
Because they didn't like to like that. They could get triggered if they go out in public or they could, you know,
Speaker: A few weeks back, this retard showed up with this take, comparing food delivery to vaccines and medicines, as in her view, they are all the fruits of progress that should be considered essential, despite not existing in previous eras, because times and standards have changed. , if you're against them being made into a human right, you're ableist. The discourse culminated with this furry claiming that he [00:08:00] orders DoorDash because his polycule is food insecure and too disabled to cook for themselves, even though DoorDash is really expensive, and food insecurity refers to people who are so poor they can't consistently afford food.
So this is all guy replies, some types of food are basic staples, see rice, pasta, veg, fruit, etc. Some types of food are more luxury items. Both can exist. No one has an automatic human right to be able to shop at Waitrose. It's a basic human right to afford all food. You can't pick and choose what people deserve.
The f**k is wrong with Oh my god. Listen
Malcolm Collins: people forget just how luxurious our lives are,
Simone Collins: that you, you could not get food delivered to you. There, there were certainly local pizza stores. That might do delivery rounds in a limited area, or sometimes Chinese food did delivery, but that was offered on a restaurant by restaurant basis by restaurant staff.
This was not a pervasive service available to everyone. It certainly wasn't affordable or, you know, cheap by any means. [00:09:00] Now nowadays you can literally get a TV door dash to you. You can have someone buy large electronic devices, which by the way, those are the things that have gotten less expensive, and I'm assuming.
That this is why a lot of people are able to massage the numbers and say, listen, overall, on the whole prices aren't higher. And that's because many big ticket objects, appliances, TVs that used to be 2, now are 300. There's so much less expensive. The thing is, I'm not buying a TV every week. I'm buying groceries every week.
I'm buying gas every week.
Malcolm Collins: Well, let's go over the specifics here. We so if you look at Since Biden was elected president bacon prices are 13 percent higher. Cereal and baked goods are 25. 6 percent higher.
Simone Collins: Cereal is such a scam. When you think about what you pay per calorie for cereal, it is a complete scam, by the way.
I can't afford it. There's no one can afford cereal. That's, that's [00:10:00] insane.
Malcolm Collins: Ever since
Simone Collins: college, I quit cereal when I realized how much it actually costs per calorie. It's ridiculous.
Does anyone else think that it's upsetting that food is currently considered a luxury item? That we're being told to just eat cereal on frozen dinners? I'm feeling O type away about it.
Malcolm Collins: So, non alcoholic beverages increased 21. 4%. Meat, poultry, fish, and eggs collectively increased 20. 2%. And Let's look at electricity prices here.
So under the Trump administration, electricity increased 4 percent in price. Under the Biden administration, it increased 28. 3 percent in price.
Simone Collins: Oh, and we're seeing scary things like in some states people. Being obligated, essentially, to pay for other people's electricity. Oh, yeah.
Malcolm Collins: This was in Connecticut, where now you are obligated to pay for anyone who makes under a certain price as electricity, and their electricity cost is just averaged out throughout everyone who's, like, middle class or above.
Simone Collins: Yeah, so in other words, people of [00:11:00] greater means are expected to subsidize the electricity for those of less means, but that means they
Malcolm Collins: just pay for it. And so their, their prices have jumped like a 3rd in some areas.
Simone Collins: Yeah, they get searches and then they're what they used to expect in budget for in their electricity bills are now it's just completely out of whack.
Malcolm Collins: And I also think people are like, oh, this is going to end soon.
Kamala isn't as bad as Biden. Excuse me. Kamala is the one who wanted to do price fixing on grocery store foods. You think that this isn't going to spiral further out of control? She isn't just going to continue what Biden is doing. She wants to make it work. Like you get that, right? Like you're not stupid, right?
Like, can you actually afford this? Like meaningfully, can you?
He's courting and serviloys, what makes it a question?
Malcolm Collins: But let's let's keep going here.
Simone Collins: I think what I think, though, the mindset is, and we touched on this in our last episode discussing single [00:12:00] women for Kamala, is that where the Democrat Party is moving is toward a socialist state where the government provides all of your services.
This also came out in recent job numbers where the vast majority of recent job growth has been in government jobs. And also government associated jobs. So a lot of the other job growth, it was not in explicitly government jobs was I think in healthcare, which is largely subsidized by things like Medicare and Medicaid in the U S which is our socialized version of, of Medit Medit Medit.
Like we haven't had a
Malcolm Collins: real job growth under Biden. It's just been an expansion.
Simone Collins: Yeah. It's been an expansion of government jobs and services. So in other words, the government is becoming the thing that employs us. The thing that provides us our services. And there's this expectation that, okay, well, yeah, we can't afford anything, but the government is just going to provide that to us.
And that is, that is why inflation is okay. I think there's also this, this sort of collective declaring of declaration of bankruptcy among Americans [00:13:00] who are continuing to eat out on a regular basis, are continuing to door dash, are continuing to buy electronics and put it on debt and finance it with the assumption that they're never going to pay it off, but that for some reason, they're still able to do it.
So why would they stop doing it
Malcolm Collins: right here? The difference in wages during this period, by the way, important to note when you're considering all this gross, you're like, well, you know, maybe it's because of like, price, inflation of labor. It's like, a lot of people say, well, labor costs more than it used to in the Biden administration.
Earnings increased by 1.9% under the Trump administration earnings increased by 6.8%.
Simone Collins: Wow.
Malcolm Collins: So like, four times as much. I think at least like that's absolutely wild. 400% more than they did under Biden.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, I think here's the dynamic, I think as at play here during the pandemic. A lot of organizations realized that didn't need to employ as many people as they needed to employ.
And a lot of organizations [00:14:00] are now trying to offload employees very heavily. And one of the easiest ways to do so without having to pay severance packages or deal with legal issues, especially among really large companies that are subject to these risks is to just become increasingly hostile and unattractive to the employees.
So this is the equivalent of wanting to break up with your girlfriend, but not being direct with her and instead just being an a*****e to her for a long time. So that's why we're not getting raises. That's why people are expected to return to the office. Because this is a really great way to clean out your ranks and reduce your staff size without announcing layoffs, without firing people.
And so I think that that's one reason why wages are stagnant. It's not necessarily that there isn't a pressure. In terms of raising wages. And I actually think that a lot of new jobs and in hard to fill positions for skills that are rare now are paying a tons more, but that [00:15:00] most roles are kind of redundant now in the age of AI, most companies need to get rid of them.
And the reason why those rages are stagnant is because the companies are quiet, quitting on the employees. The companies are trying to get rid of them, and we should be considering ourselves lucky that these jobs even exist. I mean, we're lucky to have stagnant wages at this point and that we, we live in a legal environment that is annoyingly persnickety when it comes to firing people.
Malcolm Collins: I think a lot of people might be hearing all this and they might be thinking, well, I mean, how does this compare to previous presidents? You know, maybe these are just outliers or this is normal fluctuation between presidents. So here, I'm going to put a chart on screen that compares Biden to Trump, to Obama, to Bush, to Clinton, to first Bush, to Reagan, to Carter.
So we're getting a big thing here. And what you're going to find is consistently. Trump is one of the best and Biden is one of the worst.
In fact, [00:16:00] the only one who seems even to really tie Biden for worst is Carter. So if we look at overall inflation Biden is the single worst except for Carter. If we look at food inflation, Biden is the single worst, except for Carter.
If we look at energy inflation Biden is the worst, even worse than Carter. If we look at rent inflation Biden narrowly loses to Carter, but worse than literally every other president. I. e. Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan. All right, now let's go to Trump. How does Trump compare? Overall, he's the single lowest of every one of the presidents I just mentioned in terms of inflation.
Single lowest.
Simone Collins: They used to call it, they used to call the U. S. dollar during Jimmy Carter's reign, the Jimmy Carter peso. I guess we should call it the Biden s**t coin. That's what the U. S. dollar is. The Biden s**t
Malcolm Collins: coin? It's literally worse than the Jimmy Carter peso. Like, [00:17:00] that is wild to me. So, so, for food.
Trump, Obama was less than Trump. But Trump, Trump was the second lowest inflation. For energy Clinton was less than Trump, but Trump was the second lowest. For rent Obama, Clinton, Obama and Clinton were both better than Trump, but Trump was the third lowest, but overall Trump did best because like, for example, Obama had terrible energy inflation, 29.
9%. Not, not as bad as Biden, 37. 2%, but still bad. So I think that people can see here, that this isn't like comparing like to like or like two bad options as people often put it.
Speaker 3: Did you just say that voting is ridiculous? No, I think voting is great, but if I have to choose between a douche and a turd, I just don't see the point. You don't see the point! Oh, you young people just make me sick!
Malcolm Collins: It's comparing a genuinely exceptional option to a genuinely terrible [00:18:00] option. Well,
Simone Collins: here's, here's where things make it controversial.
You may actually want to cut this whole part out. But we'll see, because I think this inflationary period, but also the way that Americans spend money. Has come to a tipping point where I think we just need to fundamentally as a nation rethink how we spend money and get sober, essentially, we need to get sober.
We need to stop consuming like we're consuming. We need to tighten our belts. Now, 1 of our
Malcolm Collins: 1
Simone Collins: of our local friends had texted us me recently. He's like, what's all this about a trump tax? What, what, what, what's going on? And this is related to the way that Democrats are framing the tariffs that Trump proposes, which are mostly on China, but also on all imports, which would, to be fair, if enacted, raise prices on many foreign produced goods, especially those like electronics
Malcolm Collins: that are now incredibly cheap.
Keep [00:19:00] in mind, Trump put in tariffs in its first administration and achieved tremendous wage growth.
Simone Collins: Yeah, it did. It did achieve wage growth. And I think it's really important. If you look at Peter's eye hands, the end of the world is just the beginning. It's important that we start investing now more in domestic production and definitely quitting China.
I think the faster we quit China, not only because China is hostile towards us, not only because China is actively trying to Ruin us with bad TikTok algorithms and other things. But also because China is about to undergo immense instability due to demographic collapse, like we should not be, even if we loved China, it's kind of like, you know, loving a friend who's about to, you know, go through a terrible divorce and go bankrupt.
Like don't depend on them for anything, you know, that's not a safe bet. So I'm very much in favor of that, but I do think that it could increase some prices. And I think that. And a responsible voter has to be aware that voting for Trump just doesn't mean everything's suddenly going to get less expensive because it's not.
But I think that when we look at the other side and you look at what Democrats are proposing to do [00:20:00] instead.
Malcolm Collins: In Trump's first administration, okay where all those tariffs were enacted, he had the lowest inflation rate of any president since Carter and likely before that. So, everyone who's like, prices are gonna go up when he implements all these tariffs, well, he did it the first time and they didn't.
Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, I, I don't think it's going to be terribly bad. It can, it can cause some prices to increase. And I just, I want to be realistic about that. And I don't think that there's any way going forward where our lives aren't more expensive and where we, as, as Americans collectively have to rethink our spending.
But I also think that if we instead take the, if we dig in deeper to the Democrat approach, which is more government jobs and more government dependency. We are going to end up in a food line situation. We are going to end up in a When politicians are talking about fixing
Malcolm Collins: grocery store prices, they're preparing us for a food line.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: I would note here [00:21:00] that like, here's another great, you know, I've done videos where I complain about how much it costs to build infrastructure in the United States. So here's a graph right here, a manufacturing construction between Biden and Trump and under the Trump administration, you can see it's just a perfectly flat line.
And under the Biden administration, right on up. Now. We're going to talk about, I'll put a graph on screen of inflation under Trump and Biden and people can be like, Oh, Biden's kind of getting it back under control.
Oh yeah. Right. Before he needs to run for a second election, he. Kind of starts to get it back under control, but let's look at how ridiculous the things and when we say back under control, keep in mind that a graph like this, what you're looking at is incremental increase every year. It's not like he's reversed it because the line is going down now.
Simone Collins: Listening passively to media. If I didn't have additional context in the world from you and from other sources, I'd be like, wait, I'm hearing broadly that inflation is down to 3%. Everything's [00:22:00] fine. for listening. But that doesn't, it's worded in a way of it's all undone. Everything's fine now, but one that doesn't change the fact that now we have permanently higher prices.
Yeah. And, and lower wages. Yeah. That's it. It's, it's very annoying to me that there's this argument being made, but then again, there is this. Everyone in our nation, pretty much, on at least one average, who is voting Democrat is firmly under the impression that the economy has done great under Biden. I mean, the funny thing is with the Green New Deal, aka the Inflation Reduction Act, which was this giant spending bill that led to a lot of investment in green energy infrastructure.
A lot of that did end up going to Republicans who were like very happily, like making a ton of money from the, like, I guess, subsidies that they got our tax breaks or something that they got from this program. Well at the same time, shitting on the government for wasting all [00:23:00] their money. But I mean, at least someone's making money from this.
Malcolm Collins: So I, I, I note here everything I've gone over so far was from that fact checking article or, or most of what I went over. Okay. Yeah. So
Simone Collins: from a hostile source.
Malcolm Collins: Trump. And that's how good it made Trump look. Okay. So keep that in mind. Now we're going to go into just how much they attempt to manipulate data here.
Okay. So Biden said quote, but no presidents had the run we've had in creating jobs and bringing down inflation It was nine percent when I came into office nine percent But here's the problem simone. It wasn't close to that it was actually when, when Biden came into office, 1.
4% that was January 2021. And in fact, if we even go like months back, we can be like, well, maybe he got the months wrong or something like that. Okay. October 20th, it was 1. 2%. November 20th, it was [00:24:00] 1. 3%. December 20th, it was 1. 5%. January 21st, it was 1. 4%. Then when did it hit 9%? It didn't. He just lied. It hit 9 percent in his administration.
It hit 9 percent in June 2022. It's highest level in about five years. 40 years. And from here, the annual reach trended down for a year, reaching 3 percent in June 2023, but it has since remained above 3 and with 3. 5 percent for the 12 months ending in March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
And so I'll put a graph on screen here. So no, it did not. He just lied. And if we take a look at it, it, this was 18 months later when it hit the 9.1%, 18 months into his administration.
Simone Collins: Okay. So it may have had something to do with that, that
Malcolm Collins: may
Simone Collins: not have been, especially when you consider
Malcolm Collins: that under the last four months of the Trump administration, it was around 1.2 to 1.4%.
Mm-Hmm. like
Simone Collins: in the midst of
Malcolm Collins: the
Simone Collins: pandemic too.
Malcolm Collins: [00:25:00] Yeah. And then you could say, okay, okay, okay. Well, what about other numbers here? All right. So, now let's look at interest rates. The mortgage rates were 2. 9 percent when Trump left office. The mortgage interest rate right now is roughly 7%. So more than twice as high.
That means that the higher interest rates in the inflation and rents and housing prices mean that the mortgage payment on a median value home now is twice as high under Biden as it was under Trump. How about interest rates on federal borrowing? During Trump's last year in office, the 10 year Treasury bill was 0.
9 percent after 3. 5% years of Biden. Interest rates are at 4. 3%. So a four X higher, more, more than four X higher. And when we take the two COVID years, 2020 and 2021 out of Trump spending, because I think that's pretty fair. We find the average deficits under Trump were [00:26:00] roughly 750 billion which is bad.
But under Biden, it was 1. 5 trillion per year. Even adjusting for Bidenflation, deficits have been at least 50 percent higher under Biden than Trump. I'm bored. So, when you hear all of that in context, if you haven't gone out to vote yet today, and you're like, Eh, can you afford not to? Can you afford, and I guess this is the video where we, I don't know if it's, Been up in the air, whether or not we're endorsing Trump.
Everyone's doing an endorsement thing these days. Like, you know, the one that's not the newspapers we need to do, we do. We need to do a real endorsement where we say I'll get my endorsement sword to the, to the, to the polls. You gotta do the, the, go to the polls, kabla,
Speaker 5: And dying in your beds, many [00:27:00] years from now, would you be willing To trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies they'll never take our freedom!
AVADA
Malcolm Collins: Kabla!
Simone Collins: Freedom! No, he doesn't say that at a very opportune time though. Yeah. That's
Malcolm Collins: always been my family's a battle cry since we saw Braveheart. Is the, the Kala.
Good Lord. Kala. Oh boy. Anyway, I love you to decimal. Do you have final thoughts on this?
Simone Collins: I don't know what to think anymore. I feel like I've been lied to so much and told that everything's okay when everything's not okay. And it's not just the US. Government or operatives saying, no, there's no inflation. It's fine. [00:28:00] 3%. What are you complaining about? No, things aren't more expensive. Can't you look at this report?
But also, no, there's no demographic collapse. Everything's going to be fine. I just feel like all these lies are going to come
Malcolm Collins: out ahead. The real rates of demographic collapse in all these countries and then the UN's predicted demography for these countries going forward every year.
Simone Collins: Gary is coming into the pandemic.
We, we came to this period of, Oh, this, this little virus looks kind of bad. We need to shut things down for just a little bit. Everyone's like, it's going to blow over. It's going to be fine. And I
Malcolm Collins: told you going into the pandemic, I was like, just biologically, there's no way that this blows over. You called it.
Simone Collins: And that's the thing is you are the Harbinger of Of, of dooms and apocalypses. And that's why I'm concerned. What's scary is with the pandemic, people weren't, there was no agenda. To like, I know that this is happening and it's bad, but I'm going to lie to people about it, like very, very intentional. I mean, there was a little bit of lying, I think about [00:29:00] masks maybe because they wanted to keep masks for medical professionals, but what's different about now is there is an active interest.
Sort of, and it's very related, you know, in terms of the, the operatives who want there to be an increasingly socialized state to the operatives who don't want us to believe that de demo demographic collapse is real. There is a, a very powerful and very motivated contingent that wants us to just not see this coming so that they can get the outcome they desire.
And the problem is that global economic cost have the ability. To execute the outcome they desire with success. So they are, they're very effective in brokering in this transition towards socialism and toward degrowth that they want, but I don't, they don't realize how bad degrowth really is because they have, they're in this myopic.
Utopian modern bubble of the world. Now they don't realize what it's [00:30:00] like when you don't have enough food. Is not, is not, they don't know what they're signing up for. And that's what scares me is they're very well, they're going to get their way. One way or another, Malcolm. And we have to figure out how to survive in small contingencies despite that fact at this point.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I, I think that you're absolutely right. They, they will get their way. So you can look at something like the UN right now. And a lot of people are like, oh, they couldn't possibly be manipulating the data this much, or like, here they couldn't possibly, like their goal. Is a global economic collapse and the intention behind the goal is that they can shift the world to a system where they and the other oligarchs like the intelligentsia, deep state, whatever you want to call it essentially runs everything through a communist or socialist system.
And I know here when people hear communist or socialist. If they're dumb they think that that means sharing all the resources [00:31:00] equally. When what it actually means and what like the people working at the UN think it means is a system where they control every aspect of your life. It's the same with like the people on the Kamala Harris team and stuff like that.
And we've seen her repeatedly. What I think Communists would think of as like on the ground. Communists think of as like fascist instincts. They think that they're going to be running things or less power would go to the oligarchs of our society. Absolutely not. What we are seeing here is that transition to remove power from the everyday citizen and consolidate all the power in our society was the oligarch.
And
Simone Collins: to be fair, cause I think when people hear you say things like that, they think you're making a straw man argument because it sounds like a It's, it's very, it sounds exaggerated, but these people are doing it from a place of, I think this is they genuinely believe this is what's best for humanity.
And this comes from a place of them, knowing from their perspective that they know better and that the [00:32:00] common average person. Simply can't manage these things on their own and they need to be directed to live a certain way and they need to receive services a certain way because they can't handle it.
They're too dumb and too stupid and too ignorant. And I will just make sure that they live their lives this way and I'll give them their services this way. And I'll take away their pain this way and I'll medicate them this way and it will be fine. And they're doing this from a place. of love and empathy.
They've been taken over by the urban monoculture, the, the woke mind virus, whatever you want to talk about it or however you want to describe it, where they are completely mimetically overtaken by a viral stream that says we must take away all in the moment suffering. So these people are, they're, they believe they're saving the world.
They're very motivated to save the world. They think they're doing the right thing. And they're, they're brokering this in very well. This is not us making up some [00:33:00] fake supervillain. And this isn't, we look like supervillains to them. This isn't, these aren't people who think they're doing a bad thing.
Malcolm Collins: And they've been completely brainwashed. There's no, yeah,
Simone Collins: but there's no Doctor Evil cacophony. Cackling behind, you know, inside a volcano. And I think these are people running the UN. These are people who are trying. They're like, we have to save the starving children. We have to, they, they care and they think they're saving the world.
And there are people that we know and love who fallen into this.
Malcolm Collins: Who are, I think that what's happening at the individual level here. And I think that this is really important for people to note is I think individuals can be like. They don't actually want the global economy to collapse, to bring in the new world order, socialism, or whatever you want to call it.
Kind of, because they
Simone Collins: think the global economy causes harm and doesn't take care of people.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they, on an individual level, they see capitalism as creating things like homelessness. And they see like, like starvation, all the failing people, they're like, well,
Simone Collins: [00:34:00] capitalism has failed to save these people on the
Malcolm Collins: street.
Capitalism caused these people to opioids. And when they are thinking about, okay, what does society look like after this? Right. They are thinking about it in terms of a modern political fight. Like Trump winning versus Harris winning, not because they've been living in a capitalist system. They've been living with the luxury provided by capitalism.
And because of that, they are completely unaware of how catastrophic changes in economic systems are for people on the ground. Well, they don't know the counterfactual because it's kind of bad.
Simone Collins: The vast majority of these people. Did not grow up in anything but a hyper capitalist system or in a very wealthy socialist company country like the Nordic countries where just tons of oil revenue basically subsidized everyone's life.
And we don't have that in the entire world to depend. Yeah. And
Malcolm Collins: I think that one of the reasons why we might be more sensitive to this is because we have a lot of Latin American friends and we've lived a lot in Latin America. And I think if you have, you're not going to be [00:35:00] jumping at the idea to try to switch to a.
Socialist model or a communist model because you know just how bad it is I was saying it's it's it's stepping over your friend's bodies on the way to the grocery store type bad. It's not It's it's hoping your children don't starve to death type bad And I think that we for so long haven't lived in those systems where people are starving to death and stuff like that That we don't see that as a realistic possibility Even though it absolutely is
Simone Collins: I worry.
I don't like that. Anyway,
Malcolm Collins: love you to decimone. This was a wonderful video. Very informative, I hope. Please vote. Yeah. Vote or die. Motherfucker. Motherfucker. Vote or die. You better vote or I'll stick a knife in your eye. Thank you. That was beautiful. It's a great song. They're so great. Why should I vote if it's between a douche and a turd, you know?
Speaker 6: VOTE OR DIE MOTHERFUCKER, MOTHERFUCKER VOTE OR DIE [00:36:00] Rock the vote or else I'm gonna stick a knife through your eye Democracy is founded on one simple rule Get out there and vote or I will m***********g kill you I like it when you vote, b***h Shake them titties when you vote, b***h VOTE OR DIE MOTHERFUCKER, MOTHERFUCKER VOTE OR DIE You can't run from a 38, go ahead and drive Let your opinion be heard, you gotta make a choice
Simone Collins: Stone and Parker for president, I would be so scared. I really wish they
Malcolm Collins: would run.
Simone Collins: Right? They
Malcolm Collins: would be. They'd win in such a landslide, I think.
Simone Collins: Yeah, but we don't deserve them. You know, Curtis Yarvin made joke that, you know, we don't deserve Trump. I, I, I genuinely feel like we don't deserve Stone and Parker.
They are too good for us. I love the American people, but we have a lot of work to do before we deserve them. I love you.
Malcolm Collins: I love you too.
Simone Collins: Oh god, that has me so depressed. I'll end this recording.
[00:37:00]
Speaker 8: We are gonna go closer.
Speaker 9: Closer to the
Speaker 8: bad
Speaker 9: deer. We gonna kill
Speaker 10: the bad
Speaker 9: deer. Yeah.
Speaker 10: Kill the
deer.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
In this episode, we delve into the increasing political alignment of single women with the Democratic Party and contrast it with the trends observed among married women. The discussion highlights how single women are becoming a significant voter demographic for Democrats, and explores various social aspects, including government services dependency and the evolving perception of women's roles in society. The hosts also analyze historical voting patterns, particularly in relation to Kamala Harris' rising popularity amongst single women, and ponder the societal implications of this demographic shift.
Malcolm Collins: . [00:00:00] Over 70 percent of single women identify as Democrat compared to only 45 percent of married women. The number of single women in the U S has increased 55 percent since 2000.
Simone Collins: Whoa, whoa, hold on. Okay. Reaching
Malcolm Collins: 2023.
Simone Collins: That is, that is huge.
Malcolm Collins: women in society historically they would rely on a partner to help care for them and to help care for their kids. Oh, and now it's the state. Yeah. And when you disintermediate the family unit, you can use the state both to decrease the BATNA of a woman to not have a partner.
Well, also acting as the caregiver, like these women are sort of like nuns to the state. They're basically married to the state.
Simone Collins: Wow. Yeah, that's a great way of putting it. Nuns to the state. That is.
Malcolm Collins: And I, and I also know that this trend could explain, for example, why black females overwhelmingly vote Democrats so much, because when you look at the number of single women, 47 percent of black adults are single compared to [00:01:00] 28 percent of not white adults and 27 percent of Hispanic adults
Simone Collins: I wish we could see information on the extent to which single women are getting government services
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: The number was larger than I thought 90% of welfare recipients are single women.
Would you like to know more?
Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I am excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be talking about why single cat ladies are overwhelmingly voted for Kamala Harris.
Simone Collins: But they're not all cat ladies, are they?
She'll become a crazy cat lady. She only has one cat. Give her time.
Malcolm Collins: I think it is easy to underestimate one, how heavily Kamala is leading with single women. And two, how much Democrats have worked to increase the number of single women and how much that number has increased.
Over the last few election cycles to give them better margins towards victory.
Simone Collins: Wait, just with single women. So even now more single [00:02:00] women than before are voting for Democrats.
Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, no. They have created new single women. People are worried about them shipping in voters. They are creating a demographic of voters by making a portion of women intolerable to date, which It's very smart.
So we'll go over this whole thing. Single women are actually the only major demographic where Kamala and Democrats are still actually winning, which is what's really interesting. If you look at yeah, it's wild now.
Simone Collins: So this whole turning immigrants into. Leftist voters conspiracy theory has nothing on the single.
No, no, no. I mean, if you, if you
Malcolm Collins: look at married men, if you look at unmarried men, if you look at single women, if you look at married women, the only category where Kamala wins is single women.
Simone Collins: Wow.
Malcolm Collins: So let's go into this. Now obviously a lot of this was started with JD Vance's cat lady comment, which is why I joked on that to begin with [00:03:00] specifically.
He said a bunch of childless cat ladies, who are miserable at their own lives, want to make the rest of the country miserable too. And a lot of people took that really negatively, because a lot of women framed that as personal attacks against themselves.
Speaker 6: ThEy call her the Cat Lady. People say she's crazy just because she has a few dozen cats. But can anyone who loves animals that much really be crazy?
Speaker 7: Don't let me hurt you!
Malcolm Collins: Whereas, I understand his sentiment here, obviously what he means by this is, If you don't have a personal stake in the future of the country, you are going to make decisions which don't consider the future of the country, which is something we've repeatedly seen about the exploding amount of debt, the way people are handling things like social security in obviously unsustainable manners, nothing about the way the government is run right now.
And I'd say both parties are to blame for this to an [00:04:00] extent. Has the long term future of the country in mind anymore?
Simone Collins: Yes, the government is excessively short termist.
Malcolm Collins: But I thought it was also interesting how, like, Democrat mainstays reacted to J. D. Vance's comment. Specifically Taylor Swift attempted to flip the language on the head, signing off her endorsement of Kamala Harris with quote unquote childless cat lady.
Besides a photo of Swift and her cat, here, cat's name is Benjamin Button. Megan Cain, said in a social media post that the comment displayed an, quote, insensitivity and cruelty to women, end quote. Would you say that that comment was in any way cruel to women, or?
I mean, the cruelty is to women, and we'll do a whole other episode on this, who use cats to masturbate their parenting instinct. When I say masturbate, I mean that in a very literal sense, in the same way that sex is designed to attempt to get us to procreate and rear the next generation Women also have these instincts [00:05:00] that are designed to want babies so that they want the next generation, and they masturbate these instincts through, instead of childbirth, caring for small pets, which satiates them enough that they do not, I mean, satiates them temporarily.
We all know that's why they keep getting more, because that, that's the way this works is you, you think that you have satiated this instinct, but you haven't. So you get more and more and more until you've got 20 cats and you're sad and alone and fall asleep to the sound of your own scream.
Speaker: I want to be a lawyer and a doctor, because a woman can do anything. At 24, Eleanor had graduated from Harvard Medical and Yale Law.
Speaker 4: I'm a little burnt out. So, sometimes, don't shoot me, I have a glass of wine with Buster here.
He's a real comfort. I might even get a second cap.
Malcolm Collins: Any thoughts before I go further, Simone?
Simone Collins: It is insulting to insinuate that all childless cat [00:06:00] women are miserable with their lives because not all are. I don't think Taylor Swift is miserable.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): I'm guessing it, Simone made this assumption that thinking that if she was as wealthy and famous and respected as Taylor swift. Did she would not be unhappy, but if you actually look at Taylor swift songs, first, many of them are pining after having a guy who loves and cares for her. , which she doesn't, and that's part of what her sadness comes from.
But also you can look at her songs. It's specifically talk about it like this song, antihero, which has some lines. When my depression works, the graveyard shift, talking about well being depressed. , and she in the song labyrinth talks about how her breakups triggered depressive episodes. And if you look at public statements in interviews like miss Americana, the 20, 20 Netflix documentary. She alludes to fame, making her fundamentally unhappy, which it doesn't need to.
I mean, Simone and I have gathered a great deal of fame just today. Another article in the guardian came out about us. And I guess it's presumably [00:07:00] attacking us, but they also published a.
Slide deck we did on how to make new forms of government, which got me really excited. And I guess you can choose how you react to the things around you and single cat ladies choose to react to that.
And self-indulgent ways like Taylor swift does.
Simone Collins: For example, I don't think some of our friends who Our childless and cat owners are miserable, but in general, if I were childless and I owned cats, I wouldn't be by this.
It's a joke.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think it also shows sort of a victim culture on the left of like, you know, he made fun of childless cat ladies. Therefore, although, you know, They call
Simone Collins: parents breeders. I mean, just
Malcolm Collins: If you have a huge amount of cognit Yeah, I've never taken offense to that, but like, it's like, It's an attempt to dehumanize your opponents, and I get that, But like, Childless Cat Ladies is a bit different, It's not like really dehumanization, It's characterization along a stereotype, Oh, it's not dehumanization because
Simone Collins: he talks about how they're miserable with their lives, Which I think [00:08:00] many of them would argue.
Is important because mental health is a major interest also of many single cat ladies. So I think many of them would tell their therapists that they're miserable with their lives It's not an inaccurate characterization even
Malcolm Collins: yeah. All right. So let's go over the stats Single women now make up 25 percent of the electorate.
In recent polls, Harris was leading among single women by nearly 40 points. Over 70 percent of single women identify as Democrat or lean Democrat, compared to only 45 percent of married women.
Simone Collins: To what extent do you think this is because they just identify with her? A fellow tech, biologically childless career woman.
This
Malcolm Collins: was the lawyer Jackson true when Biden was running. So it's not, it's gotten more extreme recently, but no, it's the Democrats have always disproportionately appealed to the single vote.
, I really want to highlight this. Cause I think it's a, it's a critical thing to note. 45%, [00:09:00] only 45%. of married women support Democrats. 70 percent of single women do.
Simone Collins: That's, yeah, that's, and you can say, well,
Malcolm Collins: maybe it's the Democrats don't get married, but actually you typically see a change in women after they get married.
And this brings me to something that you brought up earlier that I thought was really powerful is that a lot of older people are like, Oh, well, my daughter is young. And so she's still a Democrat, but when she gets older, she'll become a Republican. And you were pointing out, no, she won't like that used to be the case.
But your daughter isn't married. And it's like, when did you become a Republican, you know, to the women who say this? And it's like, well, after I got married and it's like, yeah, well, your daughter isn't getting married and has no ability to get married right now, given the way that she views the world and the way she views the opposite gender,
Simone Collins: even just given the way that relationship markets look work, there are so many single women we know who want to be married and just can't be married because they're high achieving women.
And it's very, very difficult for them to find. [00:10:00] Uncoupled, non completely weird and ruined in some way, single men who are higher achieving than them.
Malcolm Collins: Hypothesis question, Simone. Why do you believe that when women get married, they become more Republican? I mean, you did.
Simone Collins: To a great extent, you, you allowed me to To understand that I was permitted to have non hyper progressive beliefs.
And I did basically grow up in a cultural cult where I just thought that there were certain things you weren't allowed to think or believe.
Malcolm Collins: So basically you're saying it's communalism.
Simone Collins: It could be that. And I think there's also some element of when you become very close with your partner, you start to identify with them and see the world through them.
And I think that seeing, especially in this modern environment, seeing the world through a man's eyes. Can cause you to become pretty blackmailed to progressivism in general.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah Well, I think that the the the movement [00:11:00] and I I think this is probably the bigger thing Is that typically when people are married they begin to see themselves as the combined identity?
And also many of these women once they're married have sons And I think when you see how genuinely cruel and sadistic the existing urban monoculture and progressive party is to men And how much it dehumanizes men As we pointed out in our bears video, right? Where if you said this about any other group, when women were like, Oh my God, like, I'd rather be in the woods with a bear than a man. And I, and I then put into it like a black man. I'd rather be in the woods with a bear than a random black man. And you're like, Oh my God, that is super racist. Like, how could you you know,
black
Man is scary. Um, with a bear. What I've heard about bears, they don't always attack you, right? So maybe a bear.
Probably a bear. 100 percent a bear, which is like, terrifying to say, but Definitely a bear. Some
Malcolm Collins: black
men are very scary out there. I bet. Even some men are saying bear, although we could predict that [00:12:00] this man's opinion will be whatever makes women approve of him. If I were alone in the woods, would you rather me encounter a bear or a
Malcolm Collins: black
man?
I feel more like bear. I don't know, cause I feel like I would know what the outcome would be with a bear.
Malcolm Collins: but the, the things that you're saying, you're like, Oh my God, this is an incredible level of prejudice, that if it was under any other guys, you would see it, and I think that women, until they identify seriously as a man, to some extent They don't see how anti male and how bigoted the mainstream progressive forces are.
And I think that once they have a son or something like that, they wake up and they're like, Oh my God, like all his real opportunities in life are taken away. He's going to have trouble, you know, getting a job. He's going to have trouble.
Simone Collins: And it's just a lot easier to dehumanize men in general, when you don't relate to them much at all in life.
Malcolm Collins: No, I think you're absolutely right about this. And I think it's, it's also that when people get married, they form a combined identity to an extent. And they stop, for example, for me, I don't identify as my own [00:13:00] gender that much anymore. And I think that this is actually really similar to, you know, if you go back to, let's say the 60s or 70s where sometimes men would get married and then they'd be like, now I see how harshly our society has been treating women.
And they'd become more interested in women's issues. I think we're seeing the opposite now because I think anyone who is actually neutral on this sees that overwhelmingly our society is anti male at this point.
Simone Collins: Yes.
Malcolm Collins: So I'm going to go further with stats here. The number of single women in the U S has increased 55 percent since 2000.
Simone Collins: Whoa, whoa, hold on. Okay. Reaching
Malcolm Collins: 2023.
Simone Collins: That is, that is huge. But I guess that's just another angle of all the dismal dating and sex stats we've seen.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, 55 percent growth that they've, that they've, you know, grown by more than half since 2000. I don't think, I think something that we, we can forget is that in the same way the [00:14:00] left might be motivated for immigrants to come into specific districts to vote there would be even more motivated.
So to be clear among single women, they get a larger share of the vote than they do among recent immigrants, like first generation immigrants. They. Do better off to break women up and I will note single men also vote more democratically, which we'll get to in a second.
Simone Collins: You know what? This makes a lot of sense to me too, because in general, when it comes to government handouts, which typically come to be more supported or more widespread under democratic leadership.
Women are the biggest beneficiaries by far, single women, especially they're the ones who get the most in terms of food stamps and payouts and services and health care. When you look at what social services are provided on a state or federal level. So that also kind of makes sense because in terms of like, even more than immigrants, it's single women who get the most.
Malcolm Collins: Well, one theory [00:15:00] that I have heard bantered about is that women in society historically they would rely on a partner to help care for them and to help care for their kids. Oh, and now it's the state. Yeah. And when you disintermediate the family unit, you can use the state both to make it lower costs, like decrease the BATNA of a woman to not have a partner.
Well, also acting as the caregiver, like these women are sort of like nuns to the state. They're basically married to the state.
Simone Collins: Wow. Yeah, that's a great way of putting it. Nuns to the state. That is.
Malcolm Collins: And I, and I also know that this trend could explain, for example, why black females overwhelmingly vote Democrats so much, because when you look at the number of single women, 47 percent of black adults are single compared to 28 percent of not white adults and 27 percent of Hispanic adults.
And here, I wouldn't know if you're talking about like, oh, you know, born out of wedlock and everything like that. Hispanics have a higher marriage rate than whites. If you're like, yeah. Yeah. Well, it's more
Simone Collins: conservative. [00:16:00] Culture, especially when it comes to things like marriage and having kids. I would
Malcolm Collins: just say more because they have stronger family units right now.
Sure. Yeah, that too. So, Wow.
Simone Collins: Another
Malcolm Collins: fun thing you can see, I think part of this is, progressivism has made women undateable and unmarriable, like the modern iteration of it.
You know, if you watch that video about, like, the woman who is in the Star Wars show, twerking about how oppressed she is, like, who, like, Who would want to marry that? As we've talked about in our video about black men and how hard it is for them to find partners, this is a zombification of black culture video where they used to be an even more conservative culture than white culture in terms of like family values, where they had half the number of Children born out of wedlock as white culture.
And this was as recently as the sixties. And now obviously it's astronomically more, but if we talk about like, where is this degradation coming from? And we'll get some, like, actually in this episode, some better understanding of how they corrupted black culture, which I think is really interesting.
But the number [00:17:00] of women in gender studies degrees has increased 300 percent since the 1990s. Oh, who needs that? Where is the
Simone Collins: demand for this? Where is the gender studies industry? Do they go to the gender studies factory to produce gender studies?
Malcolm Collins: Well, here's the thing, I, I, I imagine, no, they go work for these bureaucracies, which hire them to, like, be the thought police at companies, and that's literally what they're getting a degree in, is thought policing.
Oh,
Simone Collins: boy.
Malcolm Collins: And a lot of companies, as we pointed out, the way companies end up going woke, is they Are like, okay, we need to put a few token, whatever's in our company. Let's put them somewhere where they don't need to actually do anything. So they can't damage stuff. And then they put them in HR. And then they end up filtering for everyone else and they end up corrupting the entire company super quickly.
And this has been a repeated phenomenon in companies that if you're going to clean up a company, you have to start with HR HR could be completely unwoked. Anyone, anyone who is there other than on merit needs to be removed. And this is measurable merit [00:18:00] in terms of who they're hiring the output.
Those people are showing etc now in an analysis last year from pew research center Found that one quarter of all 40 year olds in 2021 had never been married
all right single women. So let's talk about single women at the demographic single women are Older, more educated and more financially independent than they were a generation earlier, and they are more motivated to vote. In 2000, 48 percent of single women reported voting. In 2020, that jumped to 61%.
According to the data from Catalyst, single women now make up one quarter of the electorate. Single men, on the other hand, make up only 19%. So single men voted dramatically lower rates than single women. So not only are there more single women, but they're voting at a higher rate. 48 percent in 2000 to 61 percent in 2020.
Simone Collins: Wow.
Malcolm Collins: And here I'm gonna put on the screen a graph here that shows this over time. So you can see the proportion of eligible single woman and single male voters who showed up.
Simone Collins: Oh, so [00:19:00] civic engagement for single women is going up. Yes. I wish we could see information on, I don't know how to, how I would measure this, the extent to which single women in the U.
S. are also getting government services, like, or benefiting.
Malcolm Collins: I'll look it up in post.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: The number was larger than I thought 90% of welfare recipients are single women.
Malcolm Collins: That's an interesting thing. And I'd also point out here that I think that this partially, when you think about these women as fundamentally being married to the state this one explains the increase in civil engagement, but it also explains the freak out when somebody like Trump is elected.
Simone Collins: Mm. Mm. Yes. Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: to them. Now this thing that was like their source of like care and like their essentially partner has been
Simone Collins: hostile.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It was something that they see as fundamentally hostile to them.
Simone Collins: That's fascinating.
Malcolm Collins: Now here's a really interesting poll that I'll go over, but also put on the screen here.
When Harris took over the ticket, her support among [00:20:00] single women swelled in June before she became the democratic nominee, less than half of single women in a YouGov poll reported a favorable impact. By September, this jumped to nearly two thirds, and her support is growing. A recent Ipsos survey found Harris leading among single women voters by nearly 40 points.
So she went from less than half supporting her to 70 percent supporting her.
Simone Collins: Gotta thank Charlie SDX for at least 30 percent of that shift, I would say. Who is Charlie? She was made cool.
Malcolm Collins: The Brat Summer one? Yeah, maybe. I mean, single women are very vibes based voters. You know, they are not exactly. Here's another interesting stat that was shown here among married women only.
So remember less than half, 45 percent of single women supported Camilla when she, before she was on the ticket, 35 percent of married women had a favorable impression of her. So very low. And then [00:21:00] at the peak of married women having a favorable opinion of her, that was August and it was still well below 40%.
Simone Collins: Wow. Okay. That's very interesting. So suddenly single women started really identifying with Kamala and yet married women.
Malcolm Collins: And when it was married women, it's now since August into September, it's gone down again. So she only has you know, hovering around maybe like 36, 37 percent compared to what was around 34 percent before she was running.
So this whole Camilla remediation campaign to like remediate her public image. It seems to have been incredibly effective among single women, basically fizzled among married women. Their impression of her now is not that different than their impression of her before she ran. I find it really fascinating.
Simone Collins: Yes. Wow. There's definitely something there. I need to think more about what that could be because the funny thing is Camilla is married. Kamala has [00:22:00] stepchildren. It's not like she should be some single woman icon, but definitely the Bratz Summer Association is more of a, an unhinged, messy, single woman mood.
And single women certainly appreciate more the sorts of Government handouts and services that I think.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I also think that they're more likely to vote with the crowd because they feel less protected than married women. I think the communalist instinct in women might be louder when they feel that they don't have a caregiver.
Because in those instances are more.
Simone Collins: There aren't. There is not another very, very strong attenuating influence in their lives that might temper their thoughts on things. So when they see something in the news or media or someone they admire, say something, there isn't some partner or friend next to them being like, I don't know, like poking holes in the arguments, [00:23:00] essentially.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. All right. Well, here is another poll. Single women overwhelmingly support Kamala Harris. And this is showing Trump Harris refused. So when you have married women, it's 46 to 46 in this particular poll. So exactly equal married men. It's 55 percent Trump to 42 percent Kamala. Never married women.
It is 65 percent Harris, 28 percent Trump. And in this particular poll, never married men actually support Harris more than Trump, 51 percent to 41%, but I've seen the opposite in other polls. So this is fascinating. So Democrats hugely benefit from breaking up marriages hugely
now. We're going to talk about some other interesting things here. So, in a Gallup 2020 survey, 21 percent of single women said they could not support a candidate who did not share their views on abortion. This year, that jumped to 35%. The [00:24:00] General Social Survey has found that Americans across the board have become increasingly supportive of access to abortion in any circumstance.
But, the shift among single women has been especially dramatic. In its 2022 survey, two thirds of single women said that abortion should be available for any reason, a view held by less than half of single women a decade earlier. So our country is becoming more pro abortion. And I think that this is one of those things where you, you have not seen this same insane rise in Europe.
And I think that a lot of this is downstream as we've talked about in other episodes. Of the view that life begins at conception, which, by the way, is not a biblical view. The Bible very clearly says life begins before conception is something that the Catholic church made up about 200 years ago with Pope Pius IX and then was chosen by the Republican Party.
The Republican Party used to be actually the pro choice party in the 70s, the Republican National Convention. They were more pro choice and anti choice, but they choose to accept it to try to bring Catholics over and it didn't even work. Catholics still vote overwhelmingly Democrats. So I don't [00:25:00] know why we keep it as a position.
It's it's. It's not a Protestant position. It's not a Christian position. It's not a, it's a one that the, the Pope who did the great castration came up with, you know, I
Simone Collins: get the impression that many American Protestants are anti abortion now, mostly because the Republican party went anti abortion. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: I, I, I see that.
Like they, they are unaware, like they think it's a Christian thing or like an ancient Catholic thing. And it's like, like, as we point out, St. Augustus didn't think this Thomas Aquinas didn't think this, like no great Catholic thinker in history have thought this.
Simone Collins: Yeah. I definitely get that because we've met quite a few Protestants who are very suspicious of abortion even hormonal birth control.
And
Malcolm Collins: before a nervous system has developed, which to me is just, but it's ended up destroying, I think the, the Republican's ability to earn ground share on this and things are moving further and further in the opposite direction, which is leading to more and more abortions, which is like, you're functionally like, do you want to?
Like, when do you want to lower the amount of abortions, or are you [00:26:00] okay with, so that you can masturbate to this aesthetic view towards abortion, continue losing? Yeah,
Simone Collins: this purist view of life begins exactly at conception, instead of a more moderated view of, hey, you know, it looks like, you know, you're looking at killing a human regardless, but we see it as killing a human when you decide not to have kids, so, you know, where you start is arbitrary.
I think What when it really matters that you're killing a human is when you start killing humans, that is, that will feel pain as you kill them, and then you need to look at it very differently. And that's it. If we started looking at it at 12 to 15 weeks is, hey, let's put severe controls on this. So many abortions.
could be managed very differently. And we could probably have far fewer abortions as you point out.
Malcolm Collins: Well, and you've pointed this out with people calling you, like Republicans will call you and be like, I want you to have a you know, life being at the conception stance. And you're like, well, my stance would dramatically one is more likely to pass.
Two, it would lower the number of abortions when contrasted with [00:27:00] my the person I'm running against. So they're like, no, if you won't take this stance, I'm voting for your opponent.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Meaning that they're voting for. Yeah. It's just, I think that demonstrates how illogical and And virtue signaling for
Malcolm Collins: them, they don't actually care about the children or they would do apparently
Simone Collins: not.
Yeah, because if you did, you would be very focused on anything that gets you marginally closer just to your preferences. And even if your preferences are absolutely 0 abortions ever. You would still want to vote for me, even though I only care about controls after week 12.
Malcolm Collins: Now I also know and this is important to note around all this when people are like, well, you know trump and his abortion trump has said that if elected he would veto a national abortion ban Veto, not, not, not support.
He would veto one.
So to go further here with stats for most of the, the past two decades, women felt largely content with their treatment in the U S that all [00:28:00] changed after Trump's election and the hashtag me to movement. Less than half of women in 2021, his Gallup survey said they felt satisfied about the way they were treated in American society, historic low single women were the least satisfied.
And I will,
Simone Collins: isn't that so funny that. After supposed corrections to, you know, maltreatment against women, women started feeling worse when before, when supposedly these, this mistreatment was happening unrecognized and unpunished that women were happier.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, this is something you see across the board as women get rights.
They become less happy. I'll put a graph here that shows that in the mid 1970s, women were significantly more happy than men. And that women's happiness went down, went down, went down over time as they got more right through the eighties into the nineties. And then by the early nineties, women net were unhappy with their lives.
I think this is
Simone Collins: largely what Phyllis Schlafly was famous for arguing. Basically saying, [00:29:00] why are you making us work? We don't want to work. We have, we have a good here.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I know these women are, are, well, keep in mind, even in the seventies the majority of women works Simone or when this, this trend started, I don't think that that's what this is in relation to.
I think it's in relation to a vested interest among Democrats for women to be unhappy and feel like they are victims and I think
Simone Collins: same thing they did with black culture.
Malcolm Collins: Yes. And so you actually see here you know, by the 2000s and mid nineties, women were net less happy with their lives than men.
And that's been persistent since then. And it went up again, dramatically, or I guess you should say down again, dramatically with me too, and has stayed down since then. Where women, especially single women just feel very disempowered, even if it is functionally not true.
Simone Collins: Right.
Malcolm Collins: And here I want to talk about more recent statistics.
So one statistic I found really interesting was the anxiety. What was it? U. S. based mental health days for female and male differential [00:30:00] 1993 to 2021. And you can just see it shooting up specifically after 2019. After 2019, women's mental health absolutely explodes.
Simone Collins: Hmm. What do you think happened in 2019?
Malcolm Collins: I think that this is when wokeism really began to take over mainstream culture and many women began to identify with like, this is when the wokes basically won. I mean, and I think that the black lives matter thing was like the victory lap. I
Simone Collins: think there's something more subtle too. I think this is when you saw much more pervasive use of remote therapy services.
Both through programs like better health, but also which is private pay. And through healthcare sorry, health insurance providers. So you don't administer our family's health insurance. You don't see this. But starting in [00:31:00] 2019, our health insurance provider started offering free mental health counseling as part of its benefit.
And it's not just our mental health. It's not just our health insurance provider, which is UnitedHealthcare. Aetna, which I also was on for a period in 2020 did the same or 2021. And I had never seen that before. And it was interesting to see that just as part of your default. Coverage that you'd be getting mental health services.
So I think another issue is that more people than ever we're getting therapy. And as we've discussed in countless other episodes, therapists who managed to stay in business to a great extent are those which seem to help people magnify their problems and not resolve them because of course, those are the ones that keep.
So don't lose their clients. And I think that may have something to do with it as well. I
Malcolm Collins: think we might be onto something here. I think that these could be incredibly toxic because it's
Simone Collins: an industry shift. Like it's about this availability of a product [00:32:00] that is quite toxic,
Malcolm Collins: but talk about the idea of therapists being the missionaries monoculture.
That's true. Yeah. Yeah. They are vectors that spread it. So they
Simone Collins: go hand in hand. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: So like, if you're a Catholic and you send, you know, you go to your priest, right? Whereas if you are dealing with something as a far progressive or urban monoculture devotee, you go to your therapist and you go, Oh, you know, I have, I have had this sinful thought.
You know, repeat, whatever. How do I indulge further is basically not how do, how do I repent? How do I indulge even more in this sinful thought without feeling bad about it? That's really what you go to a you know, so many of these, when I see people go to their therapist, they're like, I've done this horrible thing.
Can you help me not feel bad about it?
Simone Collins: Yeah. Or, or can you help me build a narrative about it? That helps me identify with it personally. Like this was something that happened to me when I was a child, I was traumatized. Now I'm going to live my entire life as this hero's journey narrative attempting to overcome this great [00:33:00] slight done to me as a child by my parents.
Malcolm Collins: I disagree. I think that this is put on them by the therapist because what they're really going to do these mental health sessions for is for somebody to tell them it's not their fault.
Speaker 5: Oh, forgive me, Tyrael, please. It wasn't my fault. Not your fault? Tell me, Malleus, how was it not your fault?
Simone Collins: No, but that's what I'm saying is it is put on them by the therapist, but the therapist is helping them weave a narrative that turns their mental problem into their identity.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that's what I mean, but they don't go to a therapist saying this horrible thing happened to me in childhood. No, no, no, the therapist makes that up. The
Simone Collins: therapist is like, let's now talk about your childhood.
Malcolm Collins: They go to the therapist and say, Here's this horrible thing I did to my friends or here's this horrible thing I did to my kids or here's this horrible thing I did to whoever why is it not my fault?
You know that that's that is the role that therapists have taken on Instead of help me repent. I've done this [00:34:00] horrible thing which is a very compelling it to to convert into because it removes a lot of personal responsibility I'd also note here that you know, we we would be remiss to not point out You that the possibility of electing the first female president is important to 60 percent of single women voters was interesting.
It's not that important to married women voters.
Simone Collins: Yeah, well, that makes sense. Because again, as we discussed earlier, married women aren't necessarily just defining themselves as me woman anymore. It's me family at that point, or at least me and my husband.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Have we had a female vice president yet? I feel.
Oh yeah. Camilla.
Simone Collins: No. Oh yeah.
Malcolm Collins: I guess I just don't think of her as a woman. Like that's one of the weird things about it. She doesn't like really give feminine energy. She gives more like mindless bureaucratic drone energy.
Simone Collins: I feel that way about all of us. Most politicians, so I don't [00:35:00] know, I mean, they're appealing and really came off as feminine.
Who else? What are other female? Yeah, there are plenty of female candidates who come off as feminine. So never mind.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I mean, even Hillary, she came off as, as pitchy and conniving, but she came off as feminine nonetheless.
Simone Collins: She had mom energy having mom energy. She had mom energy.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I, I'd say a OC comes off as pretty feminine.
Yeah. I'd say most of the other, but Kamala just doesn't have an ounce of femininity in terms of her energy. And I think it's because she, I don't know. But the laugh,
Simone Collins: the, the, the smiling, the evasive answers all feel very feminine to me.
Malcolm Collins: I love you're relying on negative stereotypes of women to build this caricature.
Simone Collins: What? Smiling is not negative. Smiling and laughing is not negative. It's joy.
It was the
one thing that got Kamala a huge surge in polling was this whole, just the, the first [00:36:00] attempt at just vibes and no substance, which was all joy and laughter and happiness. Those are great attributes for her and it certainly helped her.
It's the one thing that has helped her.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, it reminds me of Camilla's laugh at the, the ad that we've done, remember where you could buy food when you could buy food and it's Camilla laughing. By the way, Simone, I was actually really confused by the Scott Alexander promotion of Camilla because it looked genuine when, when I read it.
And yet, he cited, like, David Duke supporting her, and, like, Curtis Yarvin, when Curtis Yarvin was clearly doing it as a joke, and David Duke was obviously doing it so other people wouldn't support her, like, I wonder if he was signaling that he meant it as a joke? Because David Duke, he must know, David Duke isn't actually supporting Kamala.
He's doing it to try to taint her reputation.
Simone Collins: I don't know. I really don't know. I don't know. [00:37:00] I think it was an earnest and an earnest endorsement of Kamala Harris.
Malcolm Collins: That's what I read. I will cite the people who he cited. Hold on really quickly.
Simone Collins: Yeah. And Nick Fuentes, he cited yeah, no, he, he cited, I think Nick Fuentes, I don't know if Nick Fuentes is earnestly endorsing Kamala.
I really don't know, but While that paragraph was a little bit confusing, and maybe a little bit of a flippant joke, I do think the rest of his Arguments were very earnest.
Malcolm Collins: So he said, Richard Spencer, David Duke, Nick Fuentes, and Curtis Yarvin. Now I know Curtis Yarvin cause I was just talking with him two days ago about this was joking.
Sorry, we just got back from hereticon and had a lot of fun with Curtis is actually a really fun guy. I consider him a friend. By the way, he's looking pretty fit these days. Looking very good. Yeah. Did you notice like he used to be bigger, right? Like it's not just me.
Simone Collins: I'm not really good [00:38:00] at remembering or noticing these things, but he, he looked great at Hereticon.
Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It looks great. But so Curtis Jarvis, I don't know, I don't know, Nick Fuentes, Richards. I actually beef with Nick Fuentes and some of the things I've written. So like, I, I strongly disagree with well specifically I very obviously given my push turds, pluralism have a problem with, um, what's it called?
Catholic integralism which is Nick Fuentes like, core political And he's
Simone Collins: also anti immigration, right? And you're super pro immig I'm pro skilled Skilled immigration.
Malcolm Collins: Anti unskilled immigration. Richard Spencer, obviously, I don't know Come on, he must He can't, he can't say heterodox thinkers like Curtis Yarvin, Nick Fuentes, Richard Spencer, David Duke.
Does he think that they really support her? It
Simone Collins: could be, you know, I don't get the impression. And I think he even read about this in his post that he's not very politically involved and he doesn't really like writing about this, but he feels a need, a civic responsibility [00:39:00] to make comments and to use his platform for good.
And he genuinely doesn't think that Donald Trump is the best candidate for some valid reasons. He has, he's some valid concerns, especially if you don't know. A lot of the background. Yeah. There, there's additional No, no, no. I have no problem. I think if he did know he, he would be more in favor of Trump.
But given how skewed most information people have available about Trump is, I don't blame him. Especially if he's not interested in this stuff and he's not super tapped in. And also keep in mind, he lives in the heart of a very, very progressive area. So he, yeah. His availability to anything that isn't super biased is like.
No, sorry.
Malcolm Collins: I'm not saying I don't have any problem with this. This is, I would expect him to support Camelot. Like that would be like, what's he going to do? Right? Like he basically got a gun to his head from all directions given where he lives.
Speaker 13: Uh, a bear? I didn't know what [00:40:00] else to paint! FasTer! Ha! People of all colors agree to hold hands
Speaker 15: beneath a rainbow!
Speaker 14: That wasn't so hard, was it? Now do it again!
Malcolm Collins: He doesn't, he doesn't exactly have a choice in the matter. But
Simone Collins: yeah,
Malcolm Collins: but the, the thing I found interesting was how he does it.
Like I can't tell if he's trying to underhandedly signal, no, I don't actually support her, but I'm going to make No,
Simone Collins: because there's arguments or two. And even his counterarguments where he's like, here's one. Like my best man,
Malcolm Collins: like it was all the arguments and counterarguments and then he's like, like Curtis Jarvin, David Duke.
I know. I know that
Simone Collins: I'm just assuming that he doesn't read deeply on that.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that's, that's actually almost like endearingly cute that like he sees this and he's like, yeah, they all genuinely [00:41:00] support her and aren't doing it to try to poison her by attaching their known toxic reputations to her. Anyway, I found that really fun.
So, any final thoughts, Simone?
Simone Collins: I, you have fundamentally shifted once again. I just, I love you so much. I love our conversations. You fundamentally shifted the way that I view married women in the United States. They are Like nuns, but married to the state and the state, like a partner would provides them when they need it with food, with health care, with safety, even with housing with child care support, it basically does everything a husband would do and it's stepping in to do more and more of that.
While further isolating them from any form of community or relationship that would give that to them. And this is just so indicative of what the urban monoculture does, which is atomized humans, [00:42:00] disintermediate strong communities and strong social ties that people used to rely on for help and replace that.
With government and private services that will do it instead. And while if you'd asked me before I learned more, if that's a problem, I'd be like, no, it's better, whatever market competition, you know, this, this parses everything apart from corrupted religions, but now, I mean, I've, I've seen how childcare fails.
I've seen how these services are not enough and they're not producing flourishing humans. And so it's, it's. It's very sad and toxic what's happening.
Malcolm Collins: Well, and I would say my core takeaway from this, and, you know, previously I said, if Trump comes into office, one thing I'd really like to help run for the department or work on for the department is helping clean up the size of government, you know, cut it down for Republicans to win longterm, one of the most efficacious efforts they could focus on, it would be akin to them, to the unrestricted immigration that [00:43:00] Democrats are focused on.
is getting people married.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: It would be good for pronatalism. It would be good for the state and it would increase their odds of winning.
Simone Collins: Yeah. So you need to do what Tokyo is doing with that dating app, but way better, way more effective. Well, I mean, I think that they can get back to my gosh. This is, so there's been all these Bridgerton balls that are failed social media scams, but people keep going to them because they just want there to be the London, really people don't know what the London season is, but they want the London season again.
They want Debbie top balls. They want to like find their man. And there actually have been, I think in Utah for a while, the governor actually organized big parties. I think in the government governor's mansion. Bringing people together, sometimes singles, but I think sometimes just old people do whatever, like all sorts of people.
But if just on a wide scale, we brought back Debbie tot balls, you would like debut to the president, you know, and then you, you bow and you get dressed and you do this whole thing and you'd be on the dating market. [00:44:00] People would fricking love that the Instagram opportunities. I actually
Malcolm Collins: think that you're right about that.
Like I hadn't considered this, but bringing back the concept of the debutante ball, people love parties.
Simone Collins: People want to dress up for stuff and people don't get to dress up for
Malcolm Collins: anything. And that is an aristocracy again, but something that they can participate in. Not
Simone Collins: just Like just having an opportunity to take photos of something and dress up for something, ready for something.
In fact, there's even this weird gen alpha trend where they're like, Oh my gosh, it's so cute. You get to put on little outfits and everything where they're like talking about how novel and cute it is to go to an office because they just get to go and like dress up and look pretty for something. We need this.
Okay. So. There's my little dream.
Malcolm Collins: I love those. And imagine in a few generations, they might be a romanticization of the days when people worked from offices. Yeah. And like
Simone Collins: power lunch and stuff like, Oh my gosh, how cute. Like, Oh my
Malcolm Collins: gosh, how quaint and historic. People
Simone Collins: can afford to eat at restaurants.
And yeah, I mean, it just, yeah. But I, I've, I [00:45:00] feel like things like that are so underrated and they'd be so inexpensive to execute. And, and yet. It's wasted all these governor's mansions, the White House, all these event spaces are wasted and now used for stupid salesforce gatherings. You know, it's just so sad that they're all just for corporate retreats now and marketing events when they could be for bringing people together.
That's what these old spaces were originally meant for ballrooms. When are ballrooms used for balls anymore? Right. I was thinking about this the other day when we were looking at hotel ballrooms and various like spaces and walking around. And I was like, there are no balls anymore. Why are you calling it a ballroom?
Like call it an event space. Give up, stop. You're embarrassing yourself. This is sad.
Malcolm Collins: Well, at, at Hereticon, we were, we were, we were at like the nicest, like, like club thing. It was insane. You know, it was like a,
Simone Collins: it was like a museum. It was like a Bond film party. No, I wasn't [00:46:00] there were ambient
Malcolm Collins: dancers where they had like people on stilts and like skimpy outfits and everything Other it's like just waving their arms yes, yes, and I Walked around and they had like, you know like figures holding like glow glowing orbs and stuff and like multiple areas where you could like look at other people dancing from like Upstairs and everything.
Simone Collins: It was
Malcolm Collins: wild but I also said it was interesting how much I took in of this is I am so appreciative that this is not my life that I am not in this like daily Silicon Valley aristocracy, which I was for a while. And they do parties like this constantly. Do you remember back in like Silicon Valley when we had to go to like all of the VC parties and stuff like that?
Cause we were like raising and it's like a thing.
Simone Collins: It's a thing. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: And I think that it's just important to, to like gut check. And I, I feel so bad that so many people don't get the opportunity to do [00:47:00] this. How much you would actually be unhappy if you were living this, like whatever lifestyle.
Simone Collins: I think it could be fun if it were about finding a partner.
Because then it's all about planning a partnership, it's
romance, it's planning with your friends, it's thinking about what your future could be. Which
Malcolm Collins: is funny because at like, okay, so like at Hereticon, you and I, I think we're friends, like good friends with all of the most eligible single girls, and like we're trying to find them partners.
And like striking out.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, guys expectations are unreasonable. And that's one of the biggest issues. And it's also really hard to find guys who are good enough for high achieving women. But that's something we've beaten on until it's.
Malcolm Collins: Or willing to settle. High achieving guys just aren't willing to settle.
Simone Collins: No, not at all. Yeah. So they're going to live alone forever.
Malcolm Collins: I love you to death, Simone. You are my absolute favorite. I gotta show you. She has fallen asleep and it is really cute.
Simone Collins: [00:48:00] She was
Malcolm Collins: just out. Oh, she was freaking out before.
Simone Collins: Well, she always gets a little fussy before she falls asleep, but then once she's out, she's out, so
Malcolm Collins: I love you.
You're amazing.
Speaker 16: You gotta see if you're tall enough. Come on over here. Yes, come on, come on. Come on! Wait.
Speaker 18: Am I tall enough? Come, come closer to me. You've got chocolate all over your face. Am I tall enough? Yes, you're too tall. I'm too tall? Okay. Yes, you're too tall. Ouch, ouch, ouch.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
The video explores whether 'love at first sight' truly exists, examining historical references and scientific studies. It touches on selective memory bias, medieval concepts of love, and modern research on oxytocin and dopamine. The hosts also discuss how physical attraction plays a vital role in these instant romantic connections, the role of cultural attractors, and how AI could predict romantic compatibility. The conversation digs into the biochemical pathways involved in love and lust, historical perspectives, and culminates with reflections on genetic predispositions and societal norms regarding relationships.
[00:00:00]
Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! I've got a question for you. Do you believe in love at first sight?
Simone Collins: I believe in lust at first sight.
Malcolm Collins: Well, around 52 to 66 percent of people in the U. S. claim to have experienced love at first sight. However, this belief may be bolstered by a selective memory bias where individuals romanticize their initial encounters over time.
Simone Collins: Hmm.
Malcolm Collins: However, what I would say is we have actually seen the concept of love at first sight discussed All the way back in history. We see it in Greek stories. Oh, so you see it in like Ovid metamorphosis, the story of Pygmalion depicts a sculptor falling in love with a statue he created at first light.
Site or the greek myth of narcissus who falls in love with his own reflection Also embodies a form of instant love And they even had a mechanism of action for it in the medieval period where The eyes of the lady [00:01:00] when encountered by those of her future lover thus generated And conveyed , a bright light from her eyes to his
Simone Collins: laser.
Malcolm Collins: So, yeah, no, they thought that, like, love was something that, like, woman generated inside of them and then, like, shot at men with their eyes. This is terrifying. This is just Captured his heart. But they might've been right about that. We'll get into in a little bit, but I want to hear, well, your lust at first sight comment is really astute when they look at the data.
And we'll get into this in a second, but what they found is yes. It appears that there does. appear to be this emotional thing that people call love at first sight. But it only occurs to people you find physically attractive. People aren't falling in love at first sight with their chubby whatever husband, they are falling in love at first sight with people who are generically [00:02:00] attractive.
And when people say they love someone at first sight who is not well, arousing to them or more generically attractive. They're typically lying in a supposed fact saying Or they were
Simone Collins: looking at their Bugatti instead. They just happened to be inside it.
Malcolm Collins: Yes. One of my favorite is that medieval texts also would, would compare the gaze of a beautiful woman to the sight of a basilisk.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: You've got Medusa as well that turned men to stone with her beautiful gaze. Oh, they made
Simone Collins: them rock hard. Yes. This is what
Malcolm Collins: happens. Made them rock hard, right? Yeah. This is what
Simone Collins: really, there was just something was lost in translation and we thought, Oh, you mean they, they turned into a stone.
They're like, nah, kind of. So one thing I will say that I think is interesting is that even now When I have our podcast on or something and I, I freeze it and. [00:03:00] I walk by our computer screen and I see your figure, but I don't realize it's our podcast. It's on the screen. I'm like, Oh, who's that? And then also when we're in airports and you and I are separate or you're out walking by yourself and I'm just gazing across a crowd.
And I see you and I don't know it's you. I'm all like, who's this? Who's this? And I think that that's what people are describing as love at first sight is that you're just so much my type that even when I don't realize it's you, my body is just like, Yeah, we
Malcolm Collins: definitely had that reaction when we first met where you're like, and I still
Simone Collins: have it.
I still have it when I don't realize it to you. I have a different reaction when I know it's you because it's more like my person. But when I don't know, it's you. I definitely feel this like. Spark and I can totally understand what [00:04:00] these whatever medieval writers were talking about in terms of this, like, like lasers.
So, but again, I, I, I think that's entirely physical lust. And not well, and I mean, it would
Malcolm Collins: logically have to be so I'd also like to walk back here where people act like the concept of love at first sight is a romantic concept when really I see it as an anti romantic concept. Oh, yeah, because you don't know anything about the person yet.
You don't know anything about them.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. You would have to believe that In magic or the soul and that love is somehow capturing these systems Except we we understand love very well at like a psychological level. And it is not magic. It is not fairy dust uh Well, i'll read a quote here anthropologist Helen fisher who studied the brain activity of people madly in love with each other through mri scans says that romantic It says here through MRI scans, but it's wrong.[00:05:00]
It must have been through fMRI scans. But anyway says that romantic love takes a very quote unquote primitive pathway through the brain. The good feelings we experience when falling in love is driven by dopamine, the brain chemical behind our motivation to find food, water, and everything else we need for survival, and also some oxytocin, which we'll get into in a second.
It's just like the other survival mechanisms, like fear, for example, it can be triggered instantly. So, what we mean is, because we understand what love is, fundamentally, in the brain then the concept of, can it be triggered instantly, is just a concept of, Are some humans born abnormal? And yeah, of course, you know, even, even though we might be coded for like men to find women attractive and women to find men attractive, you're going to get some percentage of the population where that's not the case.
It's the same with a system like love. It was coded to only form after long periods of time. time it's going to accidentally fire sometimes when like the lust system is supposed to be firing or something like that. Well, and
Simone Collins: I think it's you're wrong to [00:06:00] use the word love when you say that yes, love at first sight exists because there are very different things that are happening hormonally between lust and love.
And also Let's say you see someone and you feel that spark and you're very attracted to them, but then you discover that they were war criminal and they have a habit of torturing people and you know that you're probably not going to love them. You know that they may be hot, but they're really bad. I disagree.
Do you know how many? Sorry, I should have. Okay. Okay. I need to use a better example for you. It turns out they're French. Okay. And then you're just like, Oh my God. Yeah. So nevermind. I'm just saying, The loving a person is very different. It involves knowing who they are, how they think. Although I will, I guess you have to add, there's this additional complication in Alexander cruel.
I think I sent you a link to this on what's up today. And we should probably include it in the description has 1 page. He put together of just all of the studies that show what AI and [00:07:00] or researchers. Can infer from just an image of someone's face so you can infer anything from mental health problems to various genetic conditions to whether they are liberal or conservative to are they happy or depressed?
And I guess against my own argument and judgment, I could argue that based on just someone's appearance alone. You could make a lot of inferences about them and perhaps know them better than the average person would like to suggest. Yeah, that might be a
Malcolm Collins: big part of this, actually. And this is something, you know, obviously the progressives don't want to talk about, or the urban monoculture people don't want to talk about, because it's like, Oh, if you can tell something by somebody's face, what you're really looking at is genetic correlates there.
And we build enough patterns to recognize, like, you can judge with a really high probability whether someone's conservative or progressive.
Simone Collins: Even criminals look different. Like even on average, people who commit crimes, they're, they're, they're amalgamated faces look [00:08:00] quite different. AI
Malcolm Collins: is going to get really good at making these sorts of judgments, which I I'm very interested to see if we can work this into the criminal system or hiring systems and stuff like that.
Cause I imagine that facial judgments made by AIs are probably going to be more accurate to personality than these big, long, like, Surveys that people fill out for like, if
Simone Collins: already AI is 60 to 70 percent accurate and judging things ranging from mental health conditions to political affiliation, it's going to only get worse.
And you're right, but I think most people, when they discover this are not going to say, oh, how great that is. They're going to say, oh, my gosh, this is, this is minority report. We're going to be arrested just because our face implies that we're going to become an ax murderer. That's not well,
Malcolm Collins: we can do a little minority report, but you know, actually, I was
Simone Collins: just looking at another study actually that was looking at sex crimes and it found that there was a really high genetic correlate.
In other words, if if your brother commits a [00:09:00] sex crime. You are much more likely like your odds of also committing one of those crimes is as much higher. And the researchers who looked into this were arguing that, you know, this is a strong basis for perhaps engaging in preventative interventions related to siblings of people who are convicted of these crimes.
Because if you do that preemptively, You could probably keep
Malcolm Collins: in mind. I mean, for the blank Slater's who are like, Oh, keep the baby when you're great. I'm not in favor of that.
Simone Collins: Right.
Malcolm Collins: I think not abortion in the attachment to the kid because they raised the kid, but I'm just saying, like, there are.
Externalities involved here for other people that you might not be thinking about because you're
Simone Collins: choosing to also pass on the behavioral traits of a criminal who committed who committed a crime creating that human who is innocent and guilty. I mean complicated.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but I will [00:10:00] also say here before we go further into the science to go over our theory of love, which we talked about in either the pragmatist guided relationships or the pragmatist guided sexuality which would actually preclude love at first sight.
So when I was looking at the concept of love, my general assumption is that love probably first evolved in mammals. And in the book, we go over a lot of evidence for this to keep us from competing, whiz, killing, eating our offspring. It was something that we needed to be able to develop so that we, you know, when we looked at an offspring where we're like, Oh yes, bonded with this.
I am going to I love this thing. Yeah. And we always say evolution is a cheap programmer. So evolution will pick up an emotional state that was created within one scenario to use in a different scenario, but it becomes highly useful. Love is very different from lust. Yeah. In that it is longer term, it leads to caring for the thing, not just wanting to pay more attention to it, and it [00:11:00] leads to admiration and veneration for the thing.
And all of these are very useful in the way you treat a spouse if we were beginning to develop as a monogamous species. As such, the love system needed to learn to trigger for spouses. Here's the problem. We don't have anything that is unique to a spouse. In terms of our daily interactions. Like, is it the person you interact with the most?
Is it the person you admire the most? Is it the person you, you know, there's just not a really, so, okay. What collection of things did it begin to collect as this is a spouse? So I will generate love emotions for them. And. It's a bit like if I'm going to word it this way, the way we can determine what the love system is measuring is by looking at when the love system breaks.
So when do we experience love when we shouldn't be experiencing [00:12:00] love? And it's a bit like was Indiana Jones. It's like, okay, this. Stone is triggered by weight, so yes, it could be triggered by a golden idol, a spouse, but it could also be, you know, triggered by a bag of sand.
Simone Collins: And if you get it
Malcolm Collins: wrong, you know, then the ball starts rolling, right?
You know, so you gotta say, okay. What is, what is the actual mechanism of action here? And when I look at when I've experienced love, other than interacting with a partner or child, it is when thinking about or meditating on really big, expansive concepts examples here would be. The vastness of the universe and how small I am in relation to it.
Or the ways that various like really complicated sciences interact with each other, like the vastness of how like neurons actually work and the brain actually works and everything like that, or. When I think about my relation to [00:13:00] something like a deity that does a very good job of that, but specifically when I am thinking about incomprehensible aspects of the deity from my own perspective, it could be things that are designed to be incomprehensible, like the trinity or a cone by the way, a cone is one of those things in Buddhist philosophy where they're like a tree fell in the woods, but then when they're, P O A N.
Simone Collins: Right? Not. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: And you're like, well, I mean, it created a reverberation, whether anyone picked that up with their auditory, they slapped you. They're like, that's not what it means. And it's like, well, I mean, then you're just like gaslighting me. Like you're trying to show me that you are, are, are superior to me.
When really you asked a fairly simple question. Do you mean, did it create a vibration or was there anyone there to hear the vibration? That we interpret as sound. And because you are from a simple backwards culture, you don't think of it that way. You think of it as, as some intractable question, which maintains this hierarchy.
I am not a fan of cones. I think that they are a form of [00:14:00] abuse and within any other world, we would call them gaslighting. But anyway I'm sorry, it's just a horror meant to systemically disempower people from asking questions or trusting their own judgment. But let's not get into that. They do, they do create this love emotion.
And so when I look at that, I'm like, okay, so then what's really creating the love emotion? I think it is
anything that you think about frequently. So it's not looking at how often you interact with a person. It seems to be measuring how much you are thinking about a person or a concept. The second thing is, The vastness of that concept, like how deep is your thought about this concept, right? And this can be triggered with something that is arbitrarily incomprehensible to a human mind, like the Trinity or it can be something that is genuinely complex and deep, like the vastness of reality.
And then it looks at, do you find this thing to be comforting and safe? And if you hit all of those things, you're going to experience this love output. And I [00:15:00] think that these things aren't experienced in this love at first sight, which is really, I think, a lust output for most people, except people was like, really like broken systems.
But let's go into the research on this so we can see what's actually here. But do you have any thoughts before I go further?
Simone Collins: You had said to me just the other day that you weren't sure if you ever really felt the feeling of love or that you, you said that you don't really know what love feels like.
And I kind of agree with you on that. So that's where I, I can generate
Malcolm Collins: a feeling that appears to be the feeling that other people are calling love by meditating on complex topics. And
Simone Collins: like that doesn't resonate for, I mean, but also I don't know if this is an autistic thing. Like maybe I can't figure it out.
Remember
Malcolm Collins: my mom said that autistic people can't love. Yeah, there's like a wife who truly loves you because she's autistic.
Simone Collins: Yeah, she's so great. I love her so much. I miss her. I,
Malcolm Collins: I honestly, I prefer a wife who is infatuated with me than one who loves [00:16:00] me. That is, that is.
Simone Collins: Yeah, but I mean, so there's this, I hope you can find this clip.
There's this famous clip with. I've told you about it when Prince Charles and Princess Diana were engaged and a journalist asks Diana and Charles, are you in love? And Diana says something like, yes. And he's like, whatever that means, obviously the worst thing to ever say. And that has come back to bite him a billion times, but I don't disagree, right?
Like what even is love?
Speaker: I suppose in love. Of course. Whatever in love means.
Simone Collins: Like, what are you asking me? What is this? And. It's such a kludgy thing. And another point that we make in the pragmatist guide to relationships is that Love is not useful to anyone. Abusive people love their partners. That doesn't help them. You know, creeps stalkers, murderers often love [00:17:00] their victims a lot.
So much that they just want to eat their faces, you know. Just like, love is not useful to the recipient. And there is a correlation to your point about evolution being a cheap programmer and perhaps it hijacking the love of a parent that's very, you know, hormonal for, you know, the love of a child.
And there are many correlates that are also then, I think, highly associated with last year, there's oxytocin and there's dopamine and there's serotonin, you know, all these things kind of factor in. And there, so there's like the hormonal elements of love and lust, which are all kind of. You know, they're, they're correlated, but they're not directly together.
And then there's these more complex concepts that you describe, like when you're thinking about the complexity of the universe or God or cones, and then there's this whole, like, you know, your mind gets just kind of fuzzed up and you're like, I don't know, love. So,
Malcolm Collins: well, I mean, I suspect that that love is like, if we're describing it in like a neurochemical sense, yes.
A combination of dopamine [00:18:00] and oxytocin release that forces a bond with another individual. And I say this because we know, remember I said, I think that it originally evolved for our children, post childbirth women, for example, are flooded with oxytocin, huge
Simone Collins: surge. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: But you also experience it.
Women get a higher dose of oxytocin if they haven't slept with as many men and they sleep with a man, which causes a bonding.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Where we talk about and the studies on this have all been like scraped from the internet. It's really weird because it used to be, I could find it. And like I went back and tried to Google it and I couldn't find it.
But women who have had sex with lots of partners reduce, release less oxytocin every time they have sex. I'm like, that makes perfect sense because that would mean in an ancestral sense, they were probably a. slave, basically. And that, that if you were in a monogamous situation, ancestrally, yeah, it would make sense to fall in love with the first person you're having sex with.
So, you know, of course the systems would function this way. But I, you know, we see a lot of, okay, you're getting this oxytocin release. It causes you to bond to a person. Here's my question for you. You're like, I don't know if I've ever experienced love. [00:19:00] Well, what's the emotion that bonds you to the kids?
Like they haven't like, okay, little, Indie there, right? She hasn't said anything, done anything, and yet you feel a fondness for her that is undeniable. I mean, I watch the way you set her on the table when you're working and everything like that and get so excited when she's being cute. What is that emotion that you're feeling?
That is the love emotion.
Simone Collins: I mean, I, I, I feel that feeling when I look at Rain on glass, you know, when it, when it hits a window, I feel that feeling when I see autumn leaves shimmering in the sun, like, is that, that, that it's, it's not, I don't think calling that love is, is accurate,
Malcolm Collins: right? No. Okay. What you are describing here is, and I think that this is a component of love is you were describing a set of environmental stimuli that Correlates
Simone Collins: with the feeling of bliss and contentment.
Malcolm Collins: That correlate with the feeling of bliss and [00:20:00] contentment, which you feel when looking at infants that are yours. So then my question to you is, do you ever feel that feeling of bliss and contentment when looking at, say, me? Yeah, so that's especially
Simone Collins: when you oh my god when you eat and I hear the sound of like you chewing or something.
I just like
Malcolm Collins: Other women are so like
my husband likes Maxine's food. You're like, I love listening to him munch Yes, makes me so happy. Oh god.
Simone Collins: Okay for you Yeah, I I don't know. So then is is love Oh, this person or thing correlates with a feeling of contentment and bliss for me. Like that also just seems so shallow.
Malcolm Collins: And because most humans do not correlate with that for you. You don't look at most human bodies and get a feeling of blissfulness and content. You wouldn't feel that way. If a stranger at a restaurant was eating and you overheard them, you'd [00:21:00] probably be like, ew, gross.
Simone Collins: Yeah, but if, if that, if that. If other things like rain on, on glass or the pitter patter of rain on a roof, you know, can, can trigger that.
Like how does love for a human, how would love for a human be special? You know,
Malcolm Collins: what do you, what do you, what do you mean? I mean, there are other things,
Simone Collins: there are other elements in life that are non organic that can also trigger in a human. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: So what you're saying is it activates the bliss and content system and not the lust system.
It's a completely different category of, of thing that is
Simone Collins: elevating
Malcolm Collins: and that's actually interesting that you are looking at an attractive man and instead of feeling a lust, you are feeling blissful contentment which is clear that you were meant to feel for children.
Simone Collins: No, that's, yeah. So that's true because we were talking about that going, when I see you in an airport, I don't realize it's you.
And then there's the separate like, [00:22:00] but I feel when I. Are you eating
Malcolm Collins: food? So I love the description of it going.
Yeah. So that's the difference here.
Simone Collins: Lust versus love. Okay.
Malcolm Collins: But, but let's go further. You know, in the first few months of a relationship, your serotonin level dropped, causing cortisol, the stress hormone, to flood your body. This is why your heart beats faster and your pupils dilate, and maybe you start feeling quote unquote butterflies in your stomach.
Lower serotonin levels might also be why you are suddenly obsessed over the new person, unable to think about anything other than them. So it is a rise in cortisol and a drop in serotonin. Your body odor may play a role. part in how attractive you are to someone. Some studies have shown that during ovulation phase of the cycle, women may be more attracted to musk like pheromones that men excrete.
By the way, I don't know if you've seen this study, but there was a study where people like wore dirty t shirts and then put them in a pile and men could pick out the shirts of women who are ovulating and women could pick out the shirts of attractive men. I [00:23:00] haven't gotten a 1995 sweaty t shirt study.
Where it, it showed that women sniff t shirts that had been worn by men. No cologne, no deodorant, all natural. Results showed that they preferred the odor of men with major histone compatibility complex MHC genes that were different from their own. This would produce offspring with a stronger immune system.
Oh yeah. Okay. I've heard of this. The general like fitness and stuff. Another interesting thing is a 2019 study found that when women were in love with someone, their immune system was bolstered. Now this is the study I found most interesting.
One study found that 60 people who had never met before and found that prolonged eye contact between two people increased the romantic attraction they felt for each other. Blood pressure skyrocketed and the participants wanted to be paired with the same people again in the future. They wanted to know more about the other person.
These effects were even stronger when people allowed quote unquote mutual touch despite the fancy wording that meant holding hands. And we know that holding hands causes oxytocin [00:24:00] release. We know that long eye contact causes oxytocin release. I think that yeah, that's, that's what we're seeing here.
That's really interesting to me
One of my favorite studies on this was done by Arthur something or another and it showed that you could basically force people to fall in love. We had this idea of I like sit two people down and they look into each other's eyes and they ask a series of questions of each other that they'll fall in love and people who were in the study as random participants even ended up getting married.
That is how good it did at creating this emotion, which is to say that love systems can be hacked. And this is one of the things that really scared me away from like the early effective altruism community and early singularity community is they would do a lot of these sorts of events where you'd like sit down and stare someone in the eyes.
And I'm like, this is what cults do to brainwash people. It's also what touchy feely did at Stanford, which is a hijacks the love system.
Here's the final bit here that I found really interesting. First and foremost, they found that love at first sight didn't exist without a strong physical attraction.
Looks did matter. Also probably [00:25:00] unsurprisingly, people in long term relationships scored higher on quote unquote love tests than people who had met for the first time, but reported love at first sight. So. Yeah, it doesn't appear that's that easy to accidentally motivate the love system, but what are your thoughts and think about them and I'm gonna get a
Don't think about them too much. You are a woman. I'm gonna have to put the women
Speaker: An ordinary dinner party, the sort of occasion we all enjoy. The men are exchanging witty stories, and look at the women, aren't they pretty? But now the conversation turns to more serious matters.
Speaker 2: I wonder if the government should return to the gold standard. I think it should. Good, then we're all
Speaker: agreed. But oh dear, what's this? One of the women is about to embarrass us all.
Speaker 3: I think the government should stay off the gold standard so that the pound can reach a level that will keep our exports competitive.
Speaker: The lady has foolishly attempted to join the conversation with a wild and dangerous opinion of her own. What [00:26:00] heartbreak drivel. See how the men look at her with utter contempt.
Women, know your limits.
Malcolm Collins: The important
Simone Collins: thing is To I think understand the underpinnings and mechanics of love as well as one possibly can. Same goes for sex so that you don't pedestalize it to your detriment and trying to find a well matched partner.
Speaker: Look at the effect of education on a man and a woman's mind. Education passes into the mind of a man. See how the information is evenly and tidily stored. Now see the same thing on a woman. At first we see a similar result. But now look. Still at a reasonably low level of education, her brain suddenly overloads.
She cannot take in complicated information.
Simone Collins: And that's, I think one of the bigger problems. This is certainly not the heart of problems for forming relationships these days. There are so many other big factors that are a like the fact that [00:27:00] women want higher status men than them. But most middle class women are going to struggle to find men who can thrive more in a middle class, like bureaucratic job system than they do.
So they can't find partners and people are all waiting to have to get married until after they're completely set up with their lives. Whereas they really should be getting married as they begin building their lives. So they're obviously bigger fish to fry in the relationship world. It is nevertheless, a big problem that we still see.
And even people who understand that they need to get married early, and even people who understand all of the weird asymmetries that need to be in place to make a relationship work, they still pedestalize love and sex in a way that is incredibly stupid. And they're like, well, I have to feel this spark and I have to feel this.
Oh,
Malcolm Collins: absolutely. And, and, you know, you see this with arranged marriages, right? I'm like people like, well, shouldn't I have like the chemistry as a person? Like, no, it doesn't really matter. And, and arranged marriages after 10 years of marriage, people have the same love [00:28:00] rates. As people in, with chosen partners, but here's the thing that's not accounted for.
Arranged marriages have a dramatically lower divorce rate than non arranged marriages. So it means when you account for survivorship bias, you are actually more likely to be in love with someone in 10 years if they are chosen by people who know you well without you having much input. Then you are, if you choose someone who you already love in the moment, which just shows what a bad compass love is.
And I think we see this in the history of love. Remember all those early stories of love? Love was always seen negatively. Especially love at first sight was seen negatively in a historic context. This was understood to be a negative thing, a form of madness, depending on what culture you're looking at.
Simone Collins: Like,
Malcolm Collins: In, in, in some cultures it was just seen as like an intrinsically immoral thing, no different from lust. And I think that that's really the healthiest way to look at it.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and, or it was, it was supposed to be something that was uncoupled from your marriage. So if [00:29:00] you, if you wanted to pursue love, it would be in the form of a dalliance or it would be in the form of a mistress.
It wouldn't be in the form of Marrying someone, it can even be some kind of platonic like Dante and Beatrix. Sorry, not Beatrix, Beatrice like Dante and Beatrice in the divine comedy. So there were all sorts of forms of love that were very passionate, but when they worked out, they weren't done within the capacity of.
Attempting to marry and trying to make that work was deadly like in Romeo and Juliet. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you're killing your kids by not arranged marriage by letting them just marry whoever they want like like like animals like What is this you you that's that's not the way this works No, I I really appreciate what you're saying there and I think it's a very important concept to elevate and I think that Really the only culture that [00:30:00] I'm aware of in a historical context that elevated the idea that you should marry the people you love.
This comes down to Western culture but it's not a historic component of Western culture. It certainly wasn't around in the Roman Empire. It was something that came downstream of and for people who are wondering how things worked in Rome, you had strict monogamy in Rome, i. e. you only had one real wife, but you would hook up with other people, right?
You know, and here I could, I can put the clip of Octavian reprimanding Marcus. , for sleeping with people who weren't, weren't his wife.
Speaker 9: Remember, colleague, you are talking to my wife. Your wife in name only. Still mother that performs the wifely function, is it not? Well, Octavia does the same for my good friend Agrippa. That's very convenient for all involved. DO
Speaker 10: you deny it? So What? What if it is true, eh? What are you going to do about it?
Speaker 9: I shall have this sad story told in the forum. I will have it posted in every city in [00:31:00] Italy. And you know the people are not so liberal with their wives as you are.
They will say you wear cuckold's horns. They will say your wife betrayed you with a low born pleb on my staff. You will be a figure of fun. The proles will laugh at you in the street. Your soldiers will mock you behind your back.
Malcolm Collins: But it, it, it came through the courtly love culture that was largely created by people who don't know, like they hear courtly love and they think courtesans were writing these books.
Courtesans were not writing the book. You're
Simone Collins: using the wrong word. Courtiers? Maybe you're Courtiers,
Malcolm Collins: whatever. Not, yeah, sorry. Courtiers. Court People in the royal court. It wasn't written by people in the royal court. They were predominantly written by monks. Or as we might call them today, nerdy incels.
They were writing their version of sexual fantasy comic books. There begin to become a, a, a culture of this. And this [00:32:00] is, this is what was being made fun of in stuff like Don Quixote, right? They were like, these, these, these people are ridiculous idiots. Like, this isn't the way any of this would ever actually play out.
You know, they're living these fantasy lives in order to, well, fulfill their own fantasies. You know, that's, that's the way this stuff works. And as a result of that It goes on, it goes on, it goes on. Still these incel monks are writing this, but they end up creating some genuinely amazing literature eventually.
Think of it a bit like fanfiction communities. Yeah, I mean, fanfiction is like raunchy and smutty, but eventually some of it's really good. There, there's some good fanfiction out there that I think is better than some of the best books I've read.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: And as a result, when people were creating the early literary canon in the West, they relied on the tropes from these, well, basically infel comic books.
And that had the problem of creating early [00:33:00] Disney. I think is where a lot of this entered
Simone Collins: the mainstream.
Malcolm Collins: Is the idea of love at first sight and needing to love someone to marry them. I think was largely disseminated in modern Western culture into the mainstream by Disney and normalized by Disney.
And I think that that is where the rock comes from. So it's interesting that Disney rotting our culture isn't a new thing. It's, it's, it's, it's been happening since its inception in its borrowing themes from the quarterly love culture. That weren't necessarily common in American culture before this.
Simone Collins: This isn't to say that I don't think you should be. well matched with your partner. I think that what you saw, for example, in Puritan and even Quaker early colonial communities, where there were times when youth could get to know each other and, you know, they would choose to marry and they could choose to not marry.
And they, I love
Malcolm Collins: the Puritan thing of like being in [00:34:00] the bed was the person and they would tie you up in a sack.
Simone Collins: Yeah, or there was, you could be in the company of a bunch of chaperones, essentially, but they would give you a tube or a hollowed out log to talk between so you could talk privately. We should, we should,
Malcolm Collins: They actually have a scene where that's done in the Patriots. They
Simone Collins: do, and they joke about how they would. I
Malcolm Collins: hope you tie the knots better than my father did or something like that.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
But I, so yeah, I think you should be really stoked to marry whoever it is that you marry, but you should be looking at it as a lifelong business partner and not.
A lifelong yeah, like a lifelong entertainer, a lifelong professional friend or entourage member, or quite honestly, mother or a father. That's
Malcolm Collins: actually such a good point. And, and, and a watcher of the podcast once asked me they were thinking about bringing an additional person into their relationship and they were like, okay, you know, this is somebody who I find attractive.
My partner finds [00:35:00] attractive. Should we bring them into the relationship? And I was like, well, I mean, the first thing you want to ask is how efficient are they, how much how good are they at work? And I think that this is the thing they were thinking. Like, I like being around this person because I like having sex with them.
I like spending time with them. And what they weren't thinking was is this somebody I would want to start a business with? And that should be the first thing that you think and vet when you're choosing someone to marry or spend your life with or have kids with.
Simone Collins: Yeah, well, and there's this whole trope on social media of what do they call them?
Like single, single married women who just feel like their entire lives. Is taking care of their husbands. They're just doing their laundry. Like that, just their husbands kind of just married someone that they expected to do the same thing that a mother would do for a child. And that's lame. And then there's all these women who just want sugar daddies.
Like they just want a new daddy. Who's going to spoil them and pay for everything and buy them things and send them on vacations. And they just sit around and do nothing and [00:36:00] expect to be pampered. And that's equally toxic. Perhaps even a little more disgusting because I don't know. I just really hate that.
I find it gross. So. You know, both of those are really bad. So yeah, but what you're looking for again is a business partner and anything else should be seen as purely recreational on your own time with your discretionary income and nothing else,
Malcolm Collins: Your discretionary income. I don't know. I think you know, Like if I was, was, was going to hook up with someone other than you and I use my discretionary income on that, that would be quite a violation of our marriage.
Simone Collins: No, it wouldn't. Our discretionary income. That's, that's your money that you get to spend on whatever you want.
Malcolm Collins: Well, let's thank God. Neither of us have any particular makes it, it makes it very easy. That was the, the, the unfortunate thing on the, are we monogamous episode that we did ages ago where like, the core thing is like.
You have rules against sleeping with other people. I don't. I just don't see a reason to like, it's so much effort. It's so much effort. This, [00:37:00] this fantasy of, Oh, I'm going to sleep with all of these people. It's like, yeah, but what you're not thinking about is the work and the risk and the grossness and the, like, why would you?
It's so much effort and ickiness and it just makes life harder. Like I don't, I get the desire, but like, if it slows down the speed at which you actually marry someone and start having kids, like what's the point of all that, right? Like,
Simone Collins: or if it puts an existing marriage at risk, which is, I'm even in poly relationships, there's just always this very real risk that.
Yes, it goes fine until it doesn't. It goes fine until something falls apart and that that's difficult. So,
Malcolm Collins: yeah, yeah, no, I hear that. And well, and this is because systems that may have been designed for a monogamous relationship end up firing in the wrong way, you know, they're like, Oh, [00:38:00] now, now this person is attached.
And keep in mind, even historically, when you had a societies that practice a polygyny where they had multiple wives. There was genetic competition between the wives. I mean, the wives not only wanted to have the maximum number of kids of the wives in, in a marriage but they wanted the kids to get more resources than the other wives, kids like that was the goal from a genetic standpoint here, I'm, I'm saying and that this was ever harmonious, I think is a, a fantasy.
There's just a strong incentive where actually women within cultures that are intergenerationally polygynous, i. e. having multiple wives, would likely be, I'd say, more spiteful and cunning towards other women than women in cultures that aren't polygynous. Because they would have been genetically rewarded for that intergenerationally speaking,
Simone Collins: Much
Malcolm Collins: more than women in cultures who aren't polygynous, like monogamous cultures, where women generally get, get [00:39:00] genetically rewarded for cooperating.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: An interesting point I hadn't considered before. I'd love to look at the data on that to see if there's data supporting that hypothesis.
Simone Collins: Yeah. The
Malcolm Collins: women from societies like in Muslim societies are women more backstabby than in two other women. I mean, than in you know, like Christian societies, like, is that a thing?
I don't know.
Simone Collins: The research I've seen of women being backstabby are in Western societies and there's no positive backstabbing. What I
Malcolm Collins: say is women are backstabby in Western societies. Yes. Like very well studied. Two other women, I mean, like women are very intersexually competitive in a way that men are not.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Like the famous research that found that. If, if a woman was more attractive than her hairstylist, the hairstyle was more likely to, for example, cut her hair a little shorter than she asked.
Malcolm Collins: I like the study that was looking at bosses and like almost no woman in the study preferred a female [00:40:00] boss to a male boss.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Like this idea that like women are better off cause we're promoting where women is not true. Women are much worse off for it
Simone Collins: on
Malcolm Collins: the whole.
Simone Collins: Unfortunate.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it is unfortunate. It would be great if we could genetically modify this trait out of women, which maybe we'll be able to do soon.
It's called
Simone Collins: autism, Malcolm. That's why.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it's called autism. Just give all of my female
Simone Collins: friends are a little more, a little more autistic than your average there. That's
Malcolm Collins: true though. You have so many autistic female friends
Simone Collins: and you think the increase in mental health diagnosis is a bad thing.
Malcolm Collins: Hmm.
Simone Collins: I don't know.
Malcolm Collins: Anyway I love you to death Simone, you're quite a special woman and I'm really, really lucky to be married to you. And I actually wonder because you said you'd never found anyone attractive before me. What was the like emotion you felt when you first saw me? Is it not something you had felt before?
Was it something you had felt at different
Simone Collins: levels? No, I mean, I, I found people attractive before. [00:41:00] I just. Like, there was never this, this combination of like being attracted to someone and then also finding them like to be such as a person, an attractive person as well, like both physically and everything else attractive.
But no, I mean, I certainly found other people attractive before. Okay. You just happened to be very
Malcolm Collins: much my type. So it was the first time that you had both found somebody attractive and really like jived with them at like, I guess a cultural level. And then again, culturally we're very similar. People often joke that we're twins.
Apparently we're called the Cromwell twins and in fundie circles, which I'm okay with.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: I love you, Simone.
Simone Collins: I love you too. Oh, am I not making you dinner tonight?
Malcolm Collins: No, I didn't end up going out. I didn't have time. I had too much to do. What would you like? Grilled cheese with tomato soup. Would you like? Oh my God. Yes. Yes. Okay. Do we have any
meat left by
the way, song, [00:42:00] or
Simone Collins: I can take more out.
Do you want something with me? No, I can do more of the slow cooker
Malcolm Collins: cheese and tomato soup.
Simone Collins: Oh, okay. So that's okay.
Malcolm Collins: You don't want to have a, yeah, no, two girls. She has those
Simone Collins: kebabs. I can make you an addition to the girl cheese. You're going to two kebabs, like from trader one kebab, one kebab, a bowl of grilled, sorry, a bowl of tomato soup and a girl cheese sandwich.
Two girl cheeses, two girl cheeses. Consider it done, sir.
Malcolm Collins: I love you, my beautiful, beautiful wife. I love too. You are so Cutty, kitty, kitty, kitty, and I'm just so lucky to be married to you. . What?
Simone Collins: We're intolerable. I, I hate people who are in love, you know, they're, they're gross. And I, I feel bad inflicting ourselves upon other people.
Yeah, I do. I hate
Malcolm Collins: people who are in love too, and I'm, yeah. One of the interesting things about love is a desire to signal it publicly and loudly, which of course makes it, but no one wants to
Simone Collins: see it. No one wants to see that. It's like.
Malcolm Collins: Well, right, [00:43:00] because I'm basically saying, okay, this mate is mine, just so everyone knows, like, competition will ensue if you try to compete.
I think
Simone Collins: it's more like screaming. You know, when you scream, it doesn't hurt, but when someone else screams, it hurts.
Malcolm Collins: Is, is people will say in, in like high school, in my high school, I mean, maybe people have matured out of this because they've gotten better at like how bad this looks, but early on when they'd be dating, Oh, I love X person.
I love X person. We're so in love, love, love. Why are you so perfect? They just needed to shout it to the stars. And I think like shouting it from the roof, which is a sentiment you hear historically is one of the biological reactions to the love emotion.
Simone Collins: Yeah, but I do think it's interesting that this whole and then they, they got, they married and they lived happily ever after.
And there just aren't really, you don't see a whole lot of media in which people really love each other. And if you do, it's that they love each other, but for some reason they're kept apart because I think there's something about people who love each other and are successfully just in love and not having [00:44:00] problems.
People just hate it. It's just intolerable, like nails on a chalkboard. I don't want to watch it. No
Malcolm Collins: famous influencers who like actually care about each other and love each other.
Simone Collins: Well, yeah. Where they have to like make up drama or something. Yeah. Maybe because people just don't want to see it. It's gross.
It's terrible. And so they have to make something either. They have to make up something wrong about them. And make up separate drama about how they're evil and not really what they say they are. Well, you're the puppet
Malcolm Collins: master. That's what I've heard. Yeah. You control me. I've seen other people comment on us and they say that I am this dull, witless puppet of a man who's being controlled by the cruel puppet master Simone, who seduced someone out of her league is what they said.
You, you saw this video.
Simone Collins: Well, you are out of my league. I, and I guess technically I seduced you through my work ethic. And you discovered that you couldn't do better than me in terms of. You know, sheer, I, I, I basically left you with no choice. Yeah. This was not something where you really [00:45:00] had a lot of choice in the matter because I, well, how did I not have choice in the matter?
Yeah. I
Malcolm Collins: mean, yeah, I guess I didn't have choice because Yeah, you didn't have a choice. Nobody seduce you.
Simone Collins: Yeah. I, I, I, so I did seduce you, but with work ethic. 'cause I'm obviously way below your league. So from a, an aesthetic perspective, just fortunately. You are not as sensitive to aesthetics as other men are.
You're like Mormon polygamist men, you know. I don't think that's true. Well,
Malcolm Collins: okay, so you got to do the Mormon polygamist quote here. Can you pull it up?
Simone Collins: Yeah. Mark Twain. Went when he was young to Salt Lake City at the time. I think when Brigham Young was still alive. He was vehemently against this concept of polygamy and he had a change of heart.
And here's what he wrote up after his experience in Salt Lake City. He writes, quote, I had the will to do it. With the gushing self sufficiency of youth, I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve great reform here. Until I saw the Mormon woman, then I was [00:46:00] touched. My heart was wiser than my head.
It warms toward these poor, ungainly, and pathetically homely creatures. And as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, No, the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity, which entitles To the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure.
And the man that marries 60 of them has done a deed of open handed generosity. So sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.
Malcolm Collins: I love this. So this is so, but I did notice something because you were actually talking about this where I was talking to one of our Mormon fans and we were going over pictures because, you know, we were trying to identify traits, you know, that are common in the people who are having kids who aren't having kids, etc.
And at one point it was like, oh, you know, the hot one. Right. And I realized that his [00:47:00] perception of which of the hot one I go, Oh, you mean this one? And he goes, no, the hot one is this one. And I realized that, and I think you actually see this like genetically was in subpopulations. What? Is considered attractive can be radically different than what another group considers attractive.
And this is why people often naturally end up going for their own cultural group. So for like somebody like Simone and I, people are like, you guys look like twins or siblings or something like that. It's like, yeah, she's part of my esoteric cultural group. Like of course I would have found her more attractive than competing people, especially at the arbitrage level.
I either degree to which I value her type of attraction. is much higher than, for example, a random Mormon man would have valued her iteration of attractiveness. And the degree to which I would value, you know, the average Mormon woman would be much lower than the degree to which a Mormon man would value a Mormon woman.
And I think between cultures, sometimes it's differentiates a bit more. [00:48:00] Like I, I, I notice that I think what I find attractive overlaps with. Maybe surprisingly to the audience what Catholics find attractive. Like, I find often whatever the Irish are selecting foreign girls very attractive.
When I was younger, I, I loved Irish girls. So maybe, or yeah, this is another thing where I noticed where different communities have different things that they find attractive. And I don't know if I can like build a whole video on this, but it's something I mentioned in an episode that hasn't gone live yet.
So for example, with me, the women who I pursued in disproportionately had relationships with when contrasted with their percent of the population, heavily Jewish, first of all, I'd say a good 40 percent of the women I've ever dated have been Jewish. In, in ancestry, at least Irish. I found Irish women disproportionately attractive.
Outside of that, like freckles and stuff like that, like that's my thing. But again, our kids, we've [00:49:00] got like redhead and freckles. So clearly, like we're still in this tradition. So my ancestors must have felt that way too. And your ancestors must have felt that way too. The one category that I've always found surprising is the group that disproportionately pursued me the most.
Was Romani women or gypsy women like really people of that descent group up here to find whatever I'm bringing to the table like disproportionately attractive. And I remember Simone was like, well, there's almost none of them. And I'm like, and that's why it's weird that I have hooked up with so many of them.
I don't know what it is. It might be a cultural thing or it could be a genetic thing. I really don't know within these different groups that leads to these cultural pairings. Any thoughts.
Simone Collins: No, no. I mean, I just think they're, they're probably more likely to be broadly. You know, genetically close ish to you. I mean, there's a, there's a lot of travelers in the UK, tons and tons, and you were super UK, so I don't know. Yeah, but I don't find
Malcolm Collins: Scottish women attractive.
Simone Collins: In modern
Malcolm Collins: Scottish women, [00:50:00] but yeah.
Modern Scottish women look like dysgenic selection. When, but keep
Simone Collins: in mind, like a lot of the most you could argue like bit adventurous entrepreneurial, you know, capable of getting out of really dire situations. Ancestors moved to, you know, it's hate. So they're here. You wouldn't necessarily realize
Malcolm Collins: that's also true.
So you, you, you are partially Scottish descent as well. So yeah, I guess I do like Scottish women, just the ones who immigrated. It's the same with Irish women. I like the ones who, who, emigrated, e emigrated, i. e. left I don't know, I don't remember walking around Ireland and thinking people were uniquely attractive.
It was more I lived for a long time in Massachusetts and the, maybe that disproportionately colored how many Irish girls I was encountering. For people who don't know, that's for the large Irish population settled.
Simone Collins: Well, I've got to go make dinner because I've got that campaign tonight and I want to make dinner and shower the kids.
So you have it fairly easy tonight after I leave. So [00:51:00] let's get her done. I love you too. And I'll start your sandwiches, your Sammies. Love you, Malcolm.
Malcolm Collins: She makes the best grilled cheeses.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): To anyone who's like Malcolm, your voice has been shot in terms of recent episodes, you are feeling horribly sick or something. No. , this past week Simone and I were on vacation. So everything you thought this past week was like really prerecorded. And I was just adding those bits and final editing. , because we were at Heredic on, , where we were giving a speech. , which is such a cool experience, but every night there, they would have these parties up until like two or 3:00 AM. And, you know, Two things about me.
One, I am not the type of person who knows how to party or go to parties or nightclubs or whatever, but I'm also not the type of person who would ever turn down an opportunity to network. If it could be used to help the larger cause that we're working on. And the people at these events are so high value.
I couldn't turn it down. So I just had to stay up like yelling, to talk to people at nightclubs at like one or 2:00 AM. And I do not know how the rest of the world handles this. [00:52:00] But fortunately, we were able to make it back in time to take our kids out trick or treating and hear the video of my. You know, very obviously. What's the appropriate word here.
Neurally diverse children. , sorting their trick or treat candy. I love these kids so much with one of them. , wanting to watch us eat his candy or tried parts of it, but him not wanting to eat it himself. It is so sweet.
Speaker 14: Do
Speaker 15: you want to try it? Here, do you want me to open it for you?
Try it.
Speaker 14: Okay,
Speaker 15: well I'll see if I can find it. I think I know where that
Speaker 14: is.
Speaker 15: Here, do you want to eat it? It's very yummy.
Speaker 14: Hm. What? I follow you. Try it.
Speaker 15: I'll try it, babe. I try it. You have to promise to eat the rest, okay? Mm. I can. Here. I don't wanna, this whole thing is been here. Daddy, try it. I tried to buy it and now he won't eat it.
And then [00:53:00] I tried this. And now he won't eat it.
Speaker 16: Toasty, eat your candy! No!
Speaker 14: Eat
Speaker 16: your candy!
Speaker 14: I can't!
Speaker 16: Eat your candy! I don't want to! But it's candy, Toasty! But
Speaker 14: I want to eat food!
Speaker 16: Candy's a type of food. Try a bite.
Speaker 14: Um, hey!
Speaker 17: Toasty, what do you want to eat? I've
Speaker 14: been, I've been,
Speaker 17: I've been stopping to
Speaker 14: eat this, and this one.
Yeah, but
Speaker 17: are you going to eat it?
Speaker 14: No.
Speaker 17: You wanted a flat chocolate, Octavian, you
Speaker 14: said? Uh. Can
Speaker 17: you help me open
Speaker 14: this? Help me open
Speaker 17: this. But Toasty, you don't even want to eat it.
Speaker 15: I think you'll like this, Octavian.
Speaker 17: Why do you want to open it if you don't want to eat it?
Speaker 14: It's got a chocolate bar so you can't. Do you see it?
Let me open this by myself. Let
Speaker 15: me see, what is it? Do you know what that is? That's gum.
Speaker 14: Gum? Do you want to
Speaker 15: eat
Speaker 14: it? Um, no thanks. I want to eat gum! [00:54:00] You want to eat gum! I can't! I want gum! I want gum! Where's the
Speaker 15: gum? This is the strangest Halloween I've ever seen. This is his first year doing a real Halloween.
Speaker 14: I can't! I want gum! See, I like them
Speaker 17: on the top.
Speaker 14: I like stuff
Speaker 15: in there. Let me
Speaker 14: open it.
Speaker 15: Okay, here, do you want me
Speaker 14: to open it for you? Yes, please. I got this for you. It must be
Speaker 15: stuff. It must be stuff. Okay, let's put this in. Here, I'm going to open this for you. Oh, look, here it is. It's food. It's food? Yeah, it's food.
Let me,
Speaker 17: let me. Are you going to eat that food? What?
Speaker 15: What? Here, Torsten, look, it's food. Do you want to eat it?
Speaker 17: We're not [00:55:00] going to have you open this. It's just
Speaker 14: solid.
Speaker 17: Toasty! You better eat your Halloween candy. You better eat it until
Speaker 15: you're sick. Torsten, Daddy will take a bite to test it to make sure it's safe. I want to eat
Speaker 14: it!
Speaker 15: Do you want me to test it? You
Speaker 14: can't eat it! Well,
Speaker 17: gum is for chewing. It's such yummy food!
Speaker 14: No! Uh, you better put that back.
Simone Collins: Yes. You have to look visible and beautiful. You need it for reasons.
Malcolm Collins: I don't know why I married you.
Simone Collins: Yeah, you do though. Yeah. Yeah. It worked out well. It worked out well. I had to fight for it, but man, I got what I came for and then some. Did you
Malcolm Collins: want marriage when you first found me?
Simone Collins: No. No. You, you know what I wanted.
Malcolm Collins: When you just wanted sex you were like
Simone Collins: I didn't know I didn't want [00:56:00] I wanted to fall in love and have my heart broken and live alone forever. You know exactly what I wanted. I was so clear about it. And sex was a part of that. Sex was a part of it. Yes. Yes, and yes, you are very much my type. So,
Malcolm Collins: you were Which is actually something I want to get into in this episode.
So, I'll get started with that.
Simone Collins: Dive in.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
In today's episode, we delve into recent revelations about China's drastically inflated population numbers, which have significant implications for global demographics and economic stability. Our discussion covers the impact of China's misrepresented fertility rates on stock markets and global population estimates, drawing comparisons with similar issues in Nigeria. We explore independent research on China's population, including discrepancies in birth statistics, Lunar New Year travel patterns, and salt consumption analysis. Additionally, we theorize potential dystopian solutions for China's demographic challenges and discuss parallels with historical and current geopolitical situations. Join us as we unpack these complex issues and their broader global significance.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone! I am excited to be talking to you today. Today we are going to be talking about China and recent information that has come out through multiple angles.
that leads people to believe that China's total population, a lot of people know that, their fertility rate was lower than the official figure said it was, so they did all of this. Oh, we got it wrong. We're readjusting our population numbers. We're readjusting our fertility rate numbers. Turns out that their total population is still being represented as dramatically higher than it really is.
And this has major implications because it means that one, their entire stock market might be vastly overvalued right now, even given how fragile it is. And two for people who are thinking about global population numbers right now, they might be way lower than we think they are. And this isn't just a China problem.
I'm also mentioned a lot recently. It's a [00:01:00] Nigeria problem, which is another very populated country. A lot of people don't know, but Nigeria. Gives out oil money dollars to different provinces based on their reported Population
and
There's nobody overseeing the populations that the individual provinces are reporting So there is always a huge incentive to lie in the extreme and I mean it's africa, right?
How corrupt are these numbers going to be? So
Simone Collins: this is very similar to the blue zone scandal which came out whereby they found that All these supposedly very old people that lived in countries were not actually alive. It was their family members collecting their pensions and lying about them being alive.
And here's just another issue of incentives being misaligned. People are lying about their populations because they get more money when they say that these people are there, aren't there. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: And I think that globally speaking, we may have to do a re ledgering. That's going to have people realize that the total global population is dramatically lower than anyone thinks it is.
Especially if you're looking at UN numbers, there was a case recently where somebody sent an email to the UN saying Brazil's own [00:02:00] tabulation of their population shows it's 10 million less than yours. And the UN in response, they go, why don't you update it? And they go we don't want to alarm anyone.
I'm like, and that's over a double digit off from where their fertility population actually is. Percentage, double digit percentage off. So the UN is just lying through their teeth at this point to try to hide this.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: So it turns out after recording this, this situation was astronomically worse than anyone anticipated. And this first series of graphs I'm showing you. The red line is the actual fertility rate of these countries. The blue lines is UN repeated projections of the fertility rate of these countries was interesting year.
As you can see with some like Columbia, it never even was really attached to the real fertility rate with others like Korea every year. They just expect it to stop going down anymore. Which is just well negligence. They're lying to people. If we go to this next set here, you can see what's happening throughout Latin America. The red [00:03:00] line is the real fertility rate.
And all of the other lines are UN every year saying, stop worrying about this.
This is why the world's not panicking. If the world saw these red lines projected forwards by any reasonable equation. They would be shitting themselves right now. Look at this, even in Africa.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-2: And the middle east
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: So here you have Tunisia and Turkey. The same thing is happening and it's not just the UN you also have
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: and I H M E every major organization is attempting to Gaslight people about the severity of this. We're going to have a different episode where we go over this, but wow. I am shocked to see this coming out in a mainstream newspaper.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-2: No, here. Like you to take a moment to think, okay. If the UN is lying about all these other countries, fertility rates. And these countries own governments are like, Hey, actually, you are hugely overrepresented. Our fertility rates. , imagine what's going on with China right now. When their government doesn't want [00:04:00] people to know how bad things are. And has been famously able to push around the UN.
Malcolm Collins: All so specifically China doesn't have a 1. 4 billion person population. Their population is probably below 1 billion people and fell below 1 billion people a while ago.
Speaker: See, out of all the places, this is the place that I'm worried about the most. Why? Just, the way they live, they're different. What, Chinese people? They just wreck everything, they make everything weird. That's what I'm worried about. To you? To you? Everything. Chicken. Why is it orange in Chinatown?. The way they write, the letters are weird. Their alphabet's not like ours.
Theirs is like, like someone testing out a biro. Everything's There's no logic to anything that they do. There is! Of course there's a logic to it! The way they read a book, it's all the other way round. From back to front, instead of from front to back, and up and down, and Everything that we've done, they've gone, Right, we're gonna do it weirder.
Malcolm Collins: But let's talk about this. A [00:05:00] lot of this episode, and I always want to give credit when a lot of it comes from somebody else's research, came from a show called Lei's Real Talk. Or Lee's Real Talk. Anyway, pretty decent China watcher show. It's certainly not as good for me as like China's Fat Chasers.
But she does real solid work and she sometimes breaks stories and it's definitely a source that I think people should have in their back pocket if they are doing China stuff.
But everything that she's talking about here is data that can be independently checked. So first there's an argument that China's birth statistics are inflated as evidence by the discrepancy between reported births and the number of deaths. Of bcg vaccinations administered logic in china. The bcg vaccine is mandatory and given to newborns within 24 hours of birth Therefore the number of bcg vaccines should closely match the number of births A chinese researcher conducted a study comparing the official birth data to BCG Vaccine Administration records from 2008 to 2021.
The [00:06:00] study found each bottle of BCG Vaccine can vaccinate between 1 to 5 babies with an average of 1. 35 babies per bottle. Using this average, the calculated number of births based on BCG Vaccine usage was consistently lower than official birth statistics. Over the 14 year period from 2008 to 2021, the discrepancy totaled 58 million births.
Extrapolating this trend back to the 1980s when China's economic reforms began, the total overestimate could be as high as 178 million people. This research argues that this discrepancy suggests systematic over reporting. And I will have a link to this study in the description. It's in Mandarin.
So be aware of that. Wow. Then there's data from the Lunar New Year travel study. A significant decrease in Lunar New Year travel between 2019 and 2023 suggests a potential population decline, particularly among lower income groups. Logic. Lunar New Year is [00:07:00] the peak travel period in China with almost everyone traveling to visit family.
A large decrease in travel numbers, especially among lower income groups, could indicate population decline. Data and source official data from Zeonoon News Agency shows in 2019 2. 984 billion person trips during the 40 Day Lunar New Year period in 2023 1. 556 billion. Trips during the same period, which represents a 47 percent decrease overall.
So these might be representing very large population drafts breaking down. The data air and rail travel is typically used by more affluent travelers decreased by only 15 percent bus and road travel. Typically used by lower income groups. So the largest decrease calculation, assuming 422 million people, 30 percent of the official 1.
4 billion population didn't travel due to poverty or old age In 2019, 986 million people made 2.984 billion trips an average of three trips per [00:08:00] person in 2023, assuming 2.5 trips per person due to economic factors. This suggests a potential population decrease of 556 million people who didn't travel in 2023.
Now this something ain't right. Yeah, I'll explain what would cause this. And she's actually done a different piece where she goes into this in a lot more detail, but she argues that this unexplained decrease is due to unreported population decline. due to COVID 19 fatalities. So not only is the overall population less than they're reporting, but they're hiding a huge chunk of the population that died during COVID 19.
She has a different episode where she goes into kindergarten closures because there was a sudden increase in kindergarten closures were 20 percent closed year over year this last year. And she says, this indicates. that a lot of people were either died during COVID or something like that or etc. And they decrease in specific regions at really high levels, specifically smaller towns.
And we don't have the rural data. But she argues that the country could have lost more than 20 percent of its [00:09:00] population in COVID. And from someone simply from death. deaths from death. And some of the CCP's behavior indicates that this is the case. By that, what I mean is right now they've had a mandate to destroy records of deaths during the COVID period.
In a lot of hospitals and we'll go into more data that the COVID deaths may have been dramatically higher than they're reporting. But so not only is their overall population lower because they were lying about some stuff, but their overall population is higher. lower because of people dying and keep in mind for the flight thing.
It was the low in middle class numbers that dropped this huge amount, not the upper class numbers that didn't drop that much at all. And people
Simone Collins: who. We're uniquely hurt in a disease outbreak would be those who can't go to a private hospital, for example and get better treatment. So that could be the play.
I see.
Malcolm Collins: Or we're more likely just to be shipped to 1 of the I forgot what they call them. Not
Simone Collins: really. Yeah. Scary isolation [00:10:00] zones where you just went to a cell.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Really bad situation there. And the next is the salt consumption analysis. This was an analysis of regional salt consumption data, which suggests China's population is significantly lower than official figures.
Salt consumption per capita is relatively stable by analyzing regional salt sales data and known per capita levels. consumption rates, one can estimate the population. A Chinese researcher conducted a comprehensive study of salt consumption data from 2000 to 2022. The methodology involved collecting regional salt consumption data from various news reports over 20 years using known daily salt intake figures for different regions ranging from 8.
5 grams to 11. 5 grams per person per day. They calculated the estimated population based on salt consumption data and compared it to official census data. Findings from 2000 to 2014, calculated population was 19.29% lower than the official data in 2015 to 2022, calculated population was approximately [00:11:00] 31% lower than official data.
So again, the huge chunk disappeared there so that they've been over reporting for a while, but now they're not even reporting what happened with Covid. Applying the 31 percent discrepancy to the official 2022 population figure of 1. 4 billion yields an estimated population of 986 million. The full study will be linked to in the description.
Was interesting here is the arguments are supporting from multiple directions. So it's not just one study. They're all showing this huge like 31 percent lower number. And then she ran a different set of math just for another set of math. You can run here where she looked at the reported fertility rate of China versus India and starting populations of the two countries.
And then showed that China showed a much higher growth than it should have an overall population when contrasting with India. And then people can be like that might be because they have better medical care. And so then what she did is she looked at, okay, what was the lifespan [00:12:00] increase between China and India during those periods?
And India had a larger lifespan increase over that period than China had. Which implied that the numbers should have favored India further, which implied we are seeing systematically wrong numbers here. Wow.
Simone Collins: What good sleuthing on her part. This just sounds, these are such amazing questions. I'd be so proud of one of our kids.
If they looked at a problem from this many different angles, I really respect her.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I really respect her as well.
Yeah. There was also a Russian and a Japanese study that put their population at around 800 million.
This specifically the Russian experts name. Was Victor McCove, and he concluded China's population is not the official, the number that's nearing 1. 5 billion.
Simone Collins: This seems like a classic China problem in terms of the way that rewards or funding is dealt out to different regions, causing.
Major problems. I recall this being [00:13:00] an issue in like the height of early communist China
Malcolm Collins: with this is really interesting. So Russians gathered Chinese urban populations, added them up, and then arrived at a total urban population at 280 million
and
assuming the rural urban populations have a one to one ratio, then China's actual population should be around 500 million.
Simone Collins: Why should they be run to one? That doesn't make sense to me.
Malcolm Collins: But if total rural. population carries a higher weight. It may not be one to one. But they said that China's total population should not exceed 800 million, but I'd expect their urban population to be higher than their rural population, China's recent push on this.
Simone Collins: Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: that is fascinating. So we've got more stuff here. Here's an article. And so just, in terms of like China having a lower population than it otherwise might have had. 1 here for people are wondering how big this difference is. It could be. So they did 2 different [00:14:00] calculations here.
So what you might have is a real population. Population of, oh yeah, so this was just a 944 million and priority set. Okay. Now in terms of who is saying that more people died during covid than official numbers This is not an urban monoculture cover up. There was an article by the cdc on this topic And there was an article in nature on this topic and the Atlantic did a piece called, can a million Chinese people die?
And nobody know official statistics on COVID can't be trusted because they share Beijing's political interests. Making the dead disappear is only part of it. And then evidence of underreporting satellite imagery revealed heightened activity at crematorium centers during the outbreak , domestic footage of overwhelmed hospital wards circulated on Chinese social media before being censored.
A morning and funeral index based on online search volume for related terms indicated 712,000 excess mortalities, so nearly a million excess mortalities from December, 2022 to [00:15:00] February, 2023.
Simone Collins: Oh that's recent. That's after after the pandemic. 2022 to 2023 is. When the pandemic is very quote unquote old over.
That's
Malcolm Collins: whatever the case may be over a million more people died So basically they're just hiding their deaths. They're Fudging their births the whole chinese situation is not only a paper tiger It's a Potomkin village. It's fake. It isn't an actual economic superpower in the way that we believe that it is.
And I think that right now, another thing that she's been arguing in her recent videos, and I actually think she's right about this is when we ask, why is Xi Jinping not doing logical things to protect his economy or his people right now, given how bad things are. The answer could be that he's trying to transition into a wartime economy, and a wartime economy is not going to be driven by consumer demand.
It's going to be driven by [00:16:00] centralized production queues.
Simone Collins: Do you, are there signs that they are centralizing their production?
Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Keep in mind, all the billionaires have been like disappearing. They've been centralizing all their major industries. Remember when what's his face?
Alibaba guy disappeared, right? Yeah, that's very much a move to a, how
Simone Collins: does that have to do with what does that have to do with centralizing production?
Malcolm Collins: Okay. Remember how we have defined in other videos the difference between a socialist state and a fascist state? Yes Whereas a socialist state puts the state industry like the economic means of production Under the state for the purposes of distributing wealth as equally as possible Whereas a fascist state Puts the means of production under a state for the purpose of spreading a particular ideology or worldview in keeping existing oligarchs in power, i.
e. what the Democrats are doing. That's why the Democrats are fundamentally a fascist party. A lot of people don't understand this. They think I'm like exaggerating when I say that. Anyway that's what China is doing right now. It's they're transitioning. [00:17:00] To a fascist economic system where they are putting the means of production under the authority of the existing power structure to heighten the power of the existing oligarchical structure because I think that they know that an economic collapse is impossible.
Basically, the entire economy there has been. More of a Ponzi scheme than the rest of the world's economy for a while. It's like foreign investors come in, foreign investors come in, your money will always grow, look at how many people we have imagined how big this could be. And I think that, very similar to what happened in Japan in the eighties but about a thousand times worse.
Simone Collins: What are the implications of this?
If they're
transitioning to a wartime economy, do we have good reason to believe therefore that they are going to come for Taiwan faster?
Malcolm Collins: Oh, I think they meant to go for Taiwan by now, but Russia's F up in Ukraine has significantly lowered their desire for [00:18:00] that particular conflict.
That's my read of it. Like all of this, I think started Before they saw what happened in Ukraine and right now there's like an ongoing conversation. Do we do it? Do we not?
Simone Collins: So I thought it's more of just a siege scenario and taiwan from an energy independent standpoint Is so screwed that all you have to do is just besiege them
Malcolm Collins: Do you know how much our gpus that we've been buying up?
Simone and I have been buying up gpus are going to be worth if taiwan gets sieged
Simone Collins: How you will look pretty good to get
Malcolm Collins: a very good resale value on those. By the way one of the things we're looking for right now is a CTO for the companies, if anyone's like a GP, GPU specialist, or a, running data center specialists, let us know we'd really be interested in, in, in working with you or has a good technical resume otherwise For a position at a startup, but yeah, so the implication could be that they're going for taiwan I don't know.
It's just such a dumb decision if they do but it could be with the goal of securing the existing administration Knowing that [00:19:00] an economic collapse of the region is not going to happen but already underway
Simone Collins: Golly. Okay. Yeah. I was reading in totally outside of, let's say someone wants to write all this off as conspiracy theorizing and they choose to not believe any of the stats presented.
I was just reading that China's getting to the point that for every child born, six people are dying. It's that bad. Wait, is that
Malcolm Collins: bad now? That's horrifying.
Simone Collins: Yeah, it, let me make sure I have that right. Okay, here we go.
Demographer warns that if China's fertility rate remains on its downward trajectory, eventually six people will die for every newborn. This was from an article called China's pro birth policy is not yet enough to counter demographic crisis. Expert warns published in the South China Morning Post. So that's mainstream.
Not question people talking about, just how bad things are, how their fertility rate dropped to 1. [00:20:00] 09 in 2022. But that's likely highly overstated. We don't have numbers for 2023 officially. And to your point about this, anything they do send to us may be very highly overstated. Even in China's, Best possible, most enthusiastic and optimistic number presentation, we're still looking at an extremely dire scenario if things are even worse and as bad as you describe and as bad as people are seeing through things like baby vaccinations and salt intake and vacation travel and morning, it's bad.
It's also very concerning that apparently excess deaths are so much higher, even between 2022 and 2023. It implies.
Malcolm Collins: Gets me on this. And I think that a lot of people, what were you going to say? It implies.
Simone Collins: It implies that it's not just a COVID thing and it's not just people being hopeless and not having kids anymore thing that [00:21:00] people that the country may also be deeply unwell in other ways that we aren't fully aware of when they're, I
Malcolm Collins: guess my takeaway from a lot of this is one.
India is likely a bigger player in the global future than we think. China has long Basically what this means is India's population is higher than China's population, and going forward for the rest of human history we can project right now will continue to be higher. But in addition to that, it just means that China is when people are predicting future events, do not over-index China's role in those events?
I guess I would say when I talk to a lot of people, I would say this is one of the, in terms of smart people who I talk to, like really smart people, consistent mistakes that they make in the single most consistent mistake I see they make. Is believing too much that China has a future seeing them trying to play out the roles and the moves that they make, 50 years from now, 100 [00:22:00] years from now, thinking that they are going to find a way to fix this quickly when.
They should have already done that. Like it's basically too late for them at this point, even if they start going on a forced birth campaign or something like that, I just wouldn't expect that much benefit from it, given that it would need to admit things that mainstream training officials just aren't admitting right now.
Keep in mind, they were one of the first countries to. Jail someone who is doing gene editing in humans. Very publicly, right? Like they made it clear. We don't do genetics here We don't believe in genetics here all humans exactly the same and that's going to make any sort of a campaign they do to try to increase fertility rate Likely create an adverse outcome.
So I just don't I do. And it also means that their existing power on the world stage might be being overstated. And a lot of China's existing power, people misunderstand that like their existing power is due to what they produce. And I'm like, [00:23:00] that is not true. Their existing power is due to the amount of money American and European investors have poured into China.
That is where their valuation comes from. Obviously, China.
Simone Collins: So you mean people buying.
Malcolm Collins: Companies putting companies in buying stock, investing in, et cetera, investing in China is why China has a high valuation. Like, when you're looking at like Chinese GDP or like the share of the global market and blah, blah, blah, a lot of this is like basically fudged numbers due to the people who have put money into that.
And that's also why. You don't get this counter narrative of actually China is not that relevant, politically speaking, because nobody benefits from this. The wealthy oligarchs who run our society, they have tons of money invested in this that they can't quickly get out. And so they're not gonna want it widely disseminated that actually China is already over.
So they don't publish it in their newspapers. [00:24:00] They don't talk about it. They don't promote people who are talking about it. It's the same with the political apparatuses in neither serves the conservatives, nor the Democrats well to say China is not particularly relevant as a power player.
Because, people want to focus on what do we do if Taiwan gets attacked?
And as I've always said, what we do if Taiwan gets attacked is nothing. Because Taiwan won't exist in 100 years at their current fertility rate. We are not saving a thing of persistent value by saving Taiwan at this point. If Taiwan can get their fertility rate up, I would commit American force to help them.
But at their current fertility rate, you are just delaying their death by a century. There is no point. This very seriously. A country with a fertility rate that's hovering around 1, halving their population every generation, why would I have our either capital or actual human beings dying to defend that?
That's insane.
Simone Collins: [00:25:00] Yeah but by that logic, are you trying to argue that we should only fight for countries with high birth rates? So if someone invades a high birth rate African country ah, defend them.
Malcolm Collins: No, it's not just based on the birth rate. It's based on their relevance in a future Earth scenario.
That's
Simone Collins: Africa. They're the ones who are going to decline last.
Malcolm Collins: I don't think that you are actually really helping that much in terms of the future trajectory of Earth by committing tons of resources to preventing random groups in Africa from attacking each other whether or not, it just all comes out in the wash there because the infrastructure and the economic infrastructure in that region is so poorly developed that you're just really not getting much of a, an outcome from that.
But if somebody was to say. Okay. Oh, would you care? Like where would you care about defending if they were attacked? What's a country where you're like, this country is going to have an outsized, a level of impact in the future. When I look at current India, no Israel.
Simone Collins: Oh,
Malcolm Collins: Israel's the big example here.
[00:26:00] Technologically, they're going to matter in 50 to a hundred years fertility white wise. They're going to matter in a 50 or a hundred years. In terms of Who is it worth investing to protect? Israel is who it's worth investing to protect. Taiwan is not particularly worth investing to protect. In terms of the Ukraine, I thought that it was worth it to just show that Russia couldn't push people around in the beginning.
I no longer think it's worth it. Now they're just fighting over land, and neither country's gonna matter much in the future either, and Russia has already expended all of their military power.
Simone Collins: Yeah, I guess if this were like an elimination based reality TV show and you're trying to decide to who to ally yourself with if there's someone who's just clearly tanking they lack the charisma or physical prowess or whatever the show's based on, cooking ability.
To hang in there. Yes. You really need to look at someone's ability to be there in the future. And it's not just whether you like them or whether
Malcolm Collins: I like Taiwan a lot.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: I they're a
Simone Collins: [00:27:00] contender. Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: they're just not a contender. It's the same with China. So keep in mind, like China and Taiwan are enemies.
I am very pro Taiwan. I am very anti CCP, but I admit that they both are dealing with this population problem and there really isn't an out for them at this point that I can see. And so when people are like, Oh, what do you think the, China's going to be doing in X many, I'm like, they're not going to be doing anything that matters.
Now this does have impacts on like semiconductor production and everything like that, but I think we'll be able to offshore Taiwan's semiconductor production at least the relevant parts before things go tits up. Keep in mind that because we've hit a Moore's law sort of ceiling now we are Entering optimal semiconductor world at this point.
Do you understand what I mean by that Simone? So historically if one company was like really ahead of other companies in semiconductor production it didn't really make sense to try to compete with them because it's you've got You, you want to try [00:28:00] to catch up with this company, but every year they're improving so much.
They're like 30 percent better every year. So even if I figure out how they're making the semiconductors they're making this year, I'm not going to be able to compete with them economically by the time I get that up because by the time I get that Fab up by the time I get all that up, it's going to be 5, 10 years from now.
And they're going to be like a generation, not one generation, like 10 generations ahead of me, right? Like I will be able to make very simple semiconductors, but nothing particularly impressive. But now the advancement in semiconductor production has lowered dramatically. You are getting very small increment because we reached the edges of what physics can do.
And so this gives other companies and countries a long time to catch up with this. And I think the next major advancement in semiconductors that we should focus on from a human civilizational perspective is how can we, one, Lateralize semiconductor production. Right now, it takes 40 different [00:29:00] countries all developing.
The lasers are developed in Norway and the plans are developed in California and the end products developed in Taiwan. How can we lateralize this process? And how can we microtize this process, i. e. I think we're going to need to focus on more modular and smaller semiconductors as global supply chains begin to break down even if they are slightly slower it's going to be equally useful given the way that cloud networks work in the way that you can just chain like GPUs together.
Simone Collins: If you were living in China right now let's say in a place like Shanghai where the birth rate is so low. Where would you move? If Shanghai's fertility, by the way, is 0. 6 as of 2023. So not even this year. Lower than I get out. I
Malcolm Collins: don't think that there is a way to to, [00:30:00] I think that China is internally burning itself.
I think that the situation in China is going to get astronomically worse than it is today. You
Simone Collins: think they're going to start blocking emigration though? I feel like they already.
Malcolm Collins: Stopped they stopped it like five years ago. They put major bans and restrictions on people out migrating. Yeah,
Simone Collins: so then that's not a realistic you're just saying figure out how to figure
Malcolm Collins: out figure out like you're running from a holocaust that's about to happen like Figure out like you don't get how bad things are going to get.
That's my read of China right now. You do not know, you cannot comprehend you. If you want to know how bad things are going to get in China in the future, ask your grandparents about the great famine. Okay. That's the scale things are going to in China right now.
Simone Collins: Yeah. What does worry me is.
Again, those excess deaths between 2022 and 2023, like we're not in the middle of the pandemic anymore. And to my knowledge, there have been no [00:31:00] immense natural disasters in China, though, okay, I'm not following the news that closely. I do wonder, especially after all these stories of people being like buildings collapses or infrastructure, not really working well.
And I guess it's just so hard to trust what you're hearing, because then when you hear from anyone who is in any way proud of China, and I think there's a lot to be proud of in China, I think the Chinese people are awesome. And I've traveled through China in a decent amount, not an amazing amount, but I've been to like Zhangjiajie and Changsha and not like your typical just Beijing and Hong Kong and Shanghai, though I've done those too.
It's an amazing place. But when you talk with anyone who has pride in China, then it's just propaganda talking points. So I don't know who to consult, right?
Malcolm Collins: This is the thing also about out migrating from China, historic. And real Chinese [00:32:00] culture is better preserved in the immigrant communities than it is preserved within CCP China.
If you like, if you're like, I want to get in touch with my Chinese traditional roots, you are better off living in one of the American Chinese immigrant communities than you are under CCP China because they often were founded by individuals from before the Cultural Revolution, and they maintain more true uninterrupted through lines.
To traditional Chinese culture.
Simone Collins: I do think that's really interesting that when in some countries you get these selective pressures where people with a certain fidelity to a certain culture, just leave on mass and then anyone who stays basically gets completely changed through those same selective pressures.
And then the original country. Is somewhere else now. And you can even see this and not necessarily in holistic cultural sets or cultural mimetic religious, whatever [00:33:00] sets, but even just an accents like I've ever argued that the true British accent of will say before the American Revolution may be more alive in some versions of American speech in like the 1900s than even the modern British accent.
Which is an interesting, yeah. Because like certain groups migrate and like things evolve, it's not like after a point of great migration, do things stay the same in the original home country? No things change. In fact, often when there is a great migration, it's because there's significant change in the home country.
So I'd like that point about cultural fidelity, maybe not even being in China. And if you really love China and if you believe in China, you maybe need to rebuild that somewhere else.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I like that way of looking at it. It can be rebuilt, but I don't think it can be rebuilt in China. Not so long as Xi Jinping is in charge.
Now, he have, and this is one area where I realize I have a [00:34:00] big difference between my friends who believe that China has a future in me, is they're like Xi Jinping, he won't be in charge for long. He's got replacements in the wing. As soon as he Fs up enough, they're gonna replace him. And my belief is, The opposite of that.
I don't think they have real replacements lined up for him. I have looked into these people's, they've said, oh, this guy is competent. I'm, I don't see it. I don't see it. I don't think that they have a good replacement for him. And if I were
Simone Collins: him, I would not want to take, or if I were anyone else, I would not want to take his place.
I would be terrified to take his place.
Malcolm Collins: I don't think that they I think that he's for a long time purged everyone competent who might take his position. I don't think that there is somebody who can competently take his position. I think when Xi Jinping falls, a lot of people think, oh, this is when things begin to fix themselves.
No, I think that's when warlords begin to take over. I think that's when things begin to fracture or they go incredibly stupid, a la Venezuela, like a bus driver taking over. I [00:35:00] think that as much as Xi Jinping is a problem, he's also the bulwark against complete idiocy. And I have intense fear around what happens when he does fall because I think people think some competent bureaucrat is going to take over and that's not the tea leaves I'm reading.
The tea leaves I'm reading is. Some idiots going to take over who, we would never have assigned power was intention. And if I'm wrong about this if the system is still working, if they still can get a competent person in there and they can get rid of Xi Jinping, China has a chance, but it's got no chance under Xi Jinping.
Or the Dowager Empress, as I call him.
Simone Collins: The Dowager Empress.
Malcolm Collins: He reminds me of the Dowager Empress in the last fall of China.
Simone Collins: The scary dragon lady. I guess everyone calls Dowager Empresses or any mean woman dragon lady. But yeah, the one with the really young son who just killed a bunch of people, that one.
Malcolm Collins: In fact, if I [00:36:00] was in office I would always call him the Dowager Empress. Because I think people need to draw this connection more to one, understand just how much he's hurting the country into two through a historic parallel into to understand just how long within the Chinese bureaucracy, somebody who is that toxic to the country's long term best interest can stay in power.
If people don't take care of them.
Simone Collins: If you were, let's say someone incredibly competent, the right person for China were suddenly installed and given autocratic power. What would you have them do? What would you encourage them to do? If they came to you and ask you
Malcolm Collins: for something you need to do is become completely transparent about all of their records their economy, their population, their part of me
Simone Collins: wonder.
So what if Xi Jinping doesn't even know the gravity of this and can't because There are so many adverse incentives at play where a province is not going to tell you because then they won't get their tax [00:37:00] revenue. I feel like there's a crisis of reality
Malcolm Collins: in place, independent departments, independent branches of government using things like AI and satellite images, all the stuff that foreigners are using.
And then they get, or commendations and wealth for finding areas where people are fudging things. All right. So let's
Simone Collins: say first thing you established the department of, and they go out and their job is to just find out what's going on.
Malcolm Collins: Department of transparency. Then you need to re institute goodwill among investors that if they invest in something, they will be able to get their money into and out of the country easily.
That's one of the big things that's going to drive down investment right now, right? As people are terrified that if they put money into China, that the money's never going to be able to come out of China. And because that's true right now, China's basically realized like it's excessive.
You need to suddenly you do that. And all of the money, a lot of the money, this is all going to cause short term pain. All that you're saying was in China's autocratic system that apparently can think long term, even though it [00:38:00] definitely can't. No,
Simone Collins: You are a long termist autocrat. You need
Malcolm Collins: to, you need to, basically all of this is around developing investor confidence.
You need to develop investor confidence, long term investor confidence with foreign investors. That is the. First core thing you need to do. So all, everything involved in that, not jailing making things. If somebody achieves a certain level of wealth, you're not just going to go after them.
You're not going to, all of that stuff. So investor competence is thing. Number one thing. Number two is fertility collapse is a national security issue right now. And I may even put it under the purview of the military focusing on artificial wombs in the lake.
Simone Collins: Oh, so just invest heavily in science.
Heavily
Malcolm Collins: in science and genetics.
Simone Collins: Right, but what good will artificial wombs do you if no one wants to have kids anyway, whether or not they get pregnant?
Malcolm Collins: You have the state raise them.
Simone Collins: Huh. So you would encourage the first ever government [00:39:00] funded human production
Malcolm Collins: plan. I think if you do those two things simultaneously and big enough.
I guess
Simone Collins: you could, would you, this is very dystopian, but would you Offer to pay women a a living wage to carry pregnancies to term. And then if they don't want to raise those children, No, but I
Malcolm Collins: wouldn't disallow anyone from a high level government position with less than four kids.
Simone Collins: So to say, I know the anti cat lady tenure policy.
I think
Malcolm Collins: you need to create,
Simone Collins: and you might need to create But that's nobody, because no one has been allowed to have a lot of kids. No, there,
Malcolm Collins: It's been long enough under the three child policy and loosen one child restrictions. What?
Simone Collins: Come on, when was the three child policy, No, when was
Malcolm Collins: one child policy loosened?
Simone Collins: No. Because it was still culturally so discouraged. They're basically no. The policy was formally passed into [00:40:00] law by the National People's Congress, the National Legislature of China on August 20th, 2021. With this one child
Malcolm Collins: policy. Simone, the one child policy was loosened in 2016. Loosened!
Simone Collins: Loosened!
Malcolm Collins: You could say this is the thing and this is where everybody gets things wrong.
They always blame us on the one child policy, but the problem is that fertility rate now in China is lower than it ever was under the one child policy. And that's a culture problem. I just, I'm not
Simone Collins: going to listen. You shouldn't penalize people for not having a lot of kids. You under Xi Jinping in China during COVID in China, would you be having kids?
No, you would be shouting. We are the last generation along with everybody else. Yes, and those people need
Malcolm Collins: to be penalized. That's the exact point I'm making, Simone. You need to penalize people who are investing in your career. No, you shouldn't penalize
Simone Collins: people who are making smart and logical decisions.
Malcolm Collins: I disagree strongly.
That's the only way you create a cultural change. In fact, I would go further. I may disallow [00:41:00] salaries above a certain amount to people who have less than a certain number of kids. I would tap your max possible salary To the number of Children you have, which will quickly create the perception that more kids means more wealth.
Simone Collins: No, I would that's a fun That's a fun concept to reconnect from just from a policy perspective in general, because the thing in the past and why people would have a lot of kids aside from, other cultural reasons was the more kids you had, the more wealthy you were. And if we just reconnect those in some way.
Either, of course, through progressive tax breaks for the more kids you have, but also just through other means. Yeah, the more kids you have, the more money you're allowed to earn or something. It's just the level of dystopian control that you have to have over a people to do that. It's too much. Aren't we too libertarian for that?
You and I
Malcolm Collins: No, but you're It's different from what I want for America. China is [00:42:00] culturally different from America. Okay
Simone Collins: so yeah, you're trying to come up with a solution that certainly doesn't fit with our cultural values, that is more coercive, that is more I'm not gonna say evil. That is just Creepy because you're like, this is going to work for them.
Yes.
Malcolm Collins: You're saying if I was in China, what would I do? Like the person who's I'd started democracy is an idiot. That is not what you would do. You need to fix the problem in a Chinese way. What's actually going to work.
Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. I could see a kind of China making human production army thing with artificial worms.
They could pull off the look. I feel mean saying that I, again, respect China, I was really, I was on like a five. Did I tell you about my five hour bus ride to. Zhang Xiaojie from Changsha, it's about five hours, like some [00:43:00] guy had this cell phone that constantly kept ringing and it was just children's choirs singing Christmas songs in English.
And they were chewing this thing that smelled incredibly strong, like throughout this bus that just made me want to vomit the whole time. And we're on these twisting roads. So I'm just hearing children's choirs singing Christmas songs and smelling this putrid smell of whatever it is people are chewing and spitting out on the bus.
Malcolm Collins: It's Betelgeuse, probably.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): Badal nuts are an addictive stimulant that's chewed in parts of China. Particularly the Southern provinces, such as a non. A high nine
Simone Collins: yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Yes. Betelgeuse
Simone Collins: did not smell good. So they were, I've had good moments and I've had bad moments. But like good moment just before that bus drive, the taxi driver or the taxi cab driver who took me to the bus station where I took that bus was so [00:44:00] concerned about me that he got in to the bus station and helped me buy a ticket and told me where to sit because he was like, girl, what are you doing?
This is not safe. So they're really they're awesome, cool, bro people who help out total nonsense, idiot foreigners who are kind and hardworking and enterprising and creative. And it makes me so sad to think that they're under this level of threat. Damn. But I don't know. I wish there were a less dystopian way to do this.
Malcolm Collins: There are less dystopian ways to do this. But you've got to I think that the less dystopian ways of handling this are going to be handled in the immigrant communities. You can't find a new, like in the U. S. I'm like, experiment with new ways of having your family culture work, new traditions, new holidays, new ways of relating to things.
What can China do? This doesn't work in China.
Simone Collins: What can China do right [00:45:00] now that other countries can't do? So if suddenly you become transparent and you're like, okay, guys. Now I'm in charge. We're figuring out our population situation. We're going to be financially transparent. You can leave and enter the country as desired.
We'd love to welcome immigrants. We'd love to welcome industry. What would you do? Peter Zion talks about their natural resources being not great. Like they're not that energy independent. Then I'm not having that food independent. What are you going to make them like a nuclear hotspot?
Fast, like that was
Malcolm Collins: the thing I was talking about was transparency and everything like that and taking a short term hit. The big problem China has now is they got so used to that period where they were a growing power instead of a weakening power that they built this idea of will always be bigger tomorrow.
And therefore let's believe the neighboring countries, let's believe the people around us. They need to understand that they are in a position of short lived power right now and they need to be doing. Everything they can right now to build goodwill [00:46:00] among their neighbors. That nine dot line that they've drawn, that's not going to hold for 50 years.
And when it stops holding the people who they were bullying are going to be awfully mad at them. Meaningful walk back all of this stuff they've been doing to the local region. Okay.
Simone Collins: So start playing nice with others, but then, what will a Admittedly smaller going forward. China do. To build prosperity and.
They
Malcolm Collins: need to, as I said one, forcing competent people to have more kids, culturally speaking, through the way that you influence them. Okay, incentivizing,
Simone Collins: not forcing, incentivizing through cultural means.
Malcolm Collins: The state raised kids, state produced kids, that could be an option that they have access to that we don't really have access to.
And they, I think right now is something that is being understated in the investment world is how much of a problem it is that nobody trusts Chinese stock market or wants to put money onto [00:47:00] it. And it's not just because they're shrinking. It's because the government has basically said, okay, now you've put the money in, now we're going to keep it from going out.
Like we tricked
Simone Collins: you. Here's
Malcolm Collins: an interesting idea.
Simone Collins: If you create state created humans, and state raised humans, maybe China, because China also has an international reputation, I think of producing very smart, competent, hardworking people. To with your army of government creative people, like be as though we are the intellectual mercenaries of the world.
You want to hire Chinese people. You want we will build the best factories we will build and then they just start investing in all of the type of human infrastructure that will matter in a post AI world because the rest of the world is too indolent, probably to raise the sort of disciplined, smart person, practical person not hedonic [00:48:00] person.
To thrive in a post AI society and still matter in a post AI society. So maybe if China did that and they continued with the same Oh, America, you suck with your titty attainment. Like you go and enjoy your hedonism and we're going to produce our competent, hardworking, tight lipped people who we will produce and train, then maybe they can just be like the one non idiocracy.
No, that would really be cool if they could do that.
Malcolm Collins: And I'd also say that one of the core things that people get wrong when they're predicting future world events and stuff like that is how cheesed America is from so many perspectives. We are not moving into a multipolar world. We are moving into a world in which America is dramatically more dominant than it is today.
And
Simone Collins: I think a good book to start if you're interested in the subject is Peter Zeihan's book. book, the end of the world is just the beginning. He talks through in a very sort of guns, germs, and steel kind of way. Just why America has the [00:49:00] tailwinds that will give it a huge advantage in the instance of a world in which there is no more.
support for international trade.
Malcolm Collins: So one is as globalization and global economic systems begin to break down. Yes. That is part of why America will be strong is we are the most self sufficient country in the world by a dramatic margin, whether it's energy or food or any of the things that civilization needs to survive.
But in addition to that we also have A weirdly high fertility rate for our level of prosperity and output. And it's because America has what it turns out is the greatest resource any country can have in the 21st century, which is we have religion. And a lot of it, a lot more than any other developed country.
And it turns out that a lot of these countries, when they were modernizing and got rid of their religions, did a great harm to themselves. And when I look to the future, when people are like future world polarity wise, where are you looking at world [00:50:00] power centers? One, people are hugely sleeping on how much power America is going to have.
The other area that they're hugely sleeping on. Is Israel like, no matter how positive you could be about Israel, you need to be 10 X more positive than that.
Simone Collins: Yeah. I guess if we were to look at any country that actually was producing some kind of hyper competent workforce, it does, that is, famous for going out and getting a lot of things done.
And it doesn't focus on hedonism over everything else. It was so weird how in your class at Stanford's graduate school of business, One of the most difficult schools to get into in the entire world. There were so many Israeli students. So many Israelis. And not only that, but So many Israelis. And they weren't just Oh, they were all having kids.
They were all having kids. They all had businesses and they were going through school. They were like so much more on top of their lives than anyone else. And even though they worked harder and even [00:51:00] though they were incredibly conscientious, they all just, they just seemed very happy. Like they didn't, they were the tortured souls at your school, but they weren't a
Malcolm Collins: lot of the American Jews were among the tortured soul category that you're talking about reform.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: And actually Simone, we have an invitation to go to Israel and meet with, and live with some of these variety families for a bit. I'd like to take it up at some point.
Simone Collins: It's a really cool invitation.
Malcolm Collins: We It would involve being around people. Has invited us to stay with some of the Haraiti families in Brooklyn in the next couple of weeks because he's going to be there and he's going to be That's
Simone Collins: so cool.
I
Malcolm Collins: was like, I don't think we have time. I was like, Now the
Simone Collins: timing is not amazing, alas.
Malcolm Collins: In future years, I really want to, but not right now, unfortunately. But the yeah, people are they do not understand how much fertility rates in technophilic regions matter.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's the cool things that China has the building blocks.[00:52:00]
China has the technophilia. China has this I just love how modern so many of the things there are
Malcolm Collins: another big advantage, which is they don't have the bureaucratic bloat of other regions.
Simone Collins: Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: it would seem,
Simone Collins: I don't know. Like October 7th seems to have been largely a product of the government not having time to do
Malcolm Collins: an episode on this, but we can just briefly mention in this now.
I have looked at their competence since October 7th in terms of essentially wiping out all of
Hezbollah In Palestine,
Simone Collins: but keep in mind those, that groundwork was laid well before October 7th.
Malcolm Collins: Exactly. And the problem is Simone, which you might not be considering that groundwork was weighed. Before October 7th, they wouldn't have been able to execute on that groundwork if October 7th hadn't happened.
Why were they making plans for how they going to take out Hezbollah? Like that they obviously from a geopolitical standpoint, couldn't [00:53:00] execute on unless I, I used to think October 7th, I was like, Must have some level of impossible stupidity.
Here I am now leaning towards the, oh my God, this was all planned from the beginning.
Simone Collins: I'm leaning toward, they put so many resources into embedding devices with Hezbollah and getting intel from Hezbollah that they snoozed on Hamas. Just being like, you guys are so incompetent. Do you think
Malcolm Collins: they could have had if Hezbollah wasn't attacking 'em as aggressively as they are right now, do you think they could have had all those things explode?
Simone Collins: Oh, you mean just from a diplomatic standpoint, because there's so much hate on it. I think it was an insurance policy because keep in mind, they weren't just incendiary devices or explosive devices. They were also Intel gathering devices. So it was, I think it was about optionality to have that there.
And who knows? They knew. That Iran was probably going to get more resources at some point, Obama had started that trajectory and that's [00:54:00] about when they started doing this. So I think they knew it was going to be rising threat. I don't think they, they could have anticipated or even encouraged October 7th.
I think. I think it's more of a, just, they thought that they knew what they were doing or the, I just, it seems plausible to me that just what Hamas did was so out of.
Malcolm Collins: I'll tell you what British intelligence, they looked at this. There was an ex British intelligence guy and he was saying, I, it is shocking that Israel accomplished more.
In a year and a half that we accomplished during the entire war on terror against the Taliban. He's if we could have dismantled Taliban, the Taliban to the level that Israel dismantled Hezbollah. This would have been, this is like 99 percent more than what we did. Like it was a stunning that they were able to accomplish.
Simone Collins: Here's what we need to do. We need to get like spy novel [00:55:00] writers. In the same room as like government officials or like sci fi writers and just be like, figure it out guys, get creative, man, get drunk and then just start making
Malcolm Collins: plans. Is it was all of this in context, we should consider ourselves very fortunate of the Secret Service agencies that apparently are actively attacking us now, which is the British one that it's not.
Yeah, we should be glad that of the ones most likely to support us. It would be the competent,
Simone Collins: but here's the thing about massage. You won't know that they're out to get you until you're dead. that effective. So who knows? But yeah I guess we just did a surprise attack. We're going to talk about China.
Here's where we dunk on China. Oh, ha. We
Malcolm Collins: love Israel.
Simone Collins: Another one of those episodes.
Malcolm Collins: It's like when I'm thinking about like world players who matter.
Simone Collins: Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: it's literally like in my future calculations of geopolitics matters [00:56:00] to X what China matters.
Simone Collins: Yeah, the other kind of in the potential to have outsized influence, very similar in my mindscape to.
The UK or Britain, before the they became the British imperial empire. They were this sleepy backwater. Rome didn't even want to hold on to them, right? They sucked. They were gross. It was cold. No one took them seriously. They were a bunch of barbarians. Like you, you said in that other episode on our one civil, your one civilization theory.
I'm just, I identify too much with you, Malcolm, but I'm not trying to take credit for it. It's a really good theory. No, it's ours! Yeah, Royal We. Nobody really
Malcolm Collins: helped inspire it by telling me that I should think more of ancient Chinese civilization. That was really the thing that got me investigating and then I was like, no, actually they suck.
Simone Collins: Oh my god. So Poor China. I'm trying to point out things that I love about China. Szechuan food people in Szechuan province. I love Chinese
Malcolm Collins: food. I eat Chinese food almost every week. I love it. Also
Simone Collins: people in Szechuan province are [00:57:00] just genuine, genuinely awesome people and really cool.
Malcolm Collins: No, I have a lot of Chinese friends.
I think that the whole, like a lot of the Chinese people I know are some of the smartest people I know.
Simone Collins: They're crazy smart. Anyway, so yeah, we love China but I can't remember where I was going. It doesn't matter because we need to make dinner. But I'm sorry to anyone who came here just wanting to hear about China.
And there we go. It's real again, but no, no. Yeah. Great. Yeah. So yeah, no one thought, yeah, Britain was backwater. No one cared about it. Relatively small population. And yet so much influence. In the entire world. And I think it's, yeah, it's easy for people to write off Israel to be like, it is a tiny postage stamp of land within a hostile area.
They, why would they matter? Why are we trying to help them? I don't know before the rise of the British imperial empire, I would have wanted to, Now, what was going on with these guys, see how I could work with them. So I guess I see your point in that we have to look to the future and [00:58:00] look for their potential.
So yeah,
Malcolm Collins: Don't make big sacrifices to make alliances with the Ottomans. Yeah, exactly. Right now is the Ottoman. They're
Simone Collins: the Ottomans. Yeah, sadly. But I think what also gives me hope at the end of this, and I want to end with this, because it's where there's hope for China, Is that China isn't in China anymore, just like Venezuela is not in Venezuela anymore.
Yeah, I agree.
Malcolm Collins: We know through
Simone Collins: our travel agency, which works with a ton of Venezuelans, that all the Venezuelans are in Spain, they're in Peru, they're in Doral, they're in
Malcolm Collins: I should say.
Simone Collins: Yeah because they left. It was Cuban, like all
Malcolm Collins: the good Cubans, I'm sorry, not good Cubans.
Simone Collins: We are going to hell so many times over, Malcolm.
Real Cuba's in Florida. Yeah, though. And that is a theory that gives me a lot of hope. Because when I hear about new news with China's demographic collapse. I just think I weep for China and it makes me very sad and scared. But then I think about, yeah, all these amazing Chinese immigrant [00:59:00] communities throughout the world.
And you've got stuff, so yeah, people can move, populations can move and build something even better. And as we've talked about in other episodes, the more, That you evolve and move around and play jazz with other cultures and take the best from them and do it better yourself. The more you will thrive and own the future.
And
Malcolm Collins: I will say that China is not the most effed world power right now. Germany is. Germany is. And Latin
Simone Collins: America is just vaporizing and no, but
Malcolm Collins: the thing is that Latin America has cultural enclaves in other countries that have decent fertility rates. Germany has no backup plan. If I was a German that wanted to maintain German culture, there's nothing left.
Simone Collins: Gosh. Yeah. We're there. There are no, I guess you could say that Amish people are,
Malcolm Collins: but now, Oh my God, you should hear their stuff on Trump. We watched the video of them, like them talking about Trump. They are so based.
Simone Collins: Yeah. They're so based. Love the phone. I'll let you go. Bye. Okay. Ciao. Ciao. [01:00:00] Oh,
Malcolm Collins: are you going to do the
Simone Collins: Just get the kids, you get the kids, I'll stir taquitos.
And then if you just drop them off, I'll play with them while I cook food and you can wrap up work for the day. Yeah? Yeah. You ready for that?
Malcolm Collins: And let me know what we're getting for replies on this. This is a long and spicy thread with lime and stuff. Oh
Simone Collins: no.
Malcolm Collins: Have you even checked it?
Simone Collins: No, I'm just going to ignore it.
I'm very bad with Twitter. Remember, I thought that someone had closed, somehow closed their tweet to replies and I just didn't know I was blocked because I'm so old.
Malcolm Collins: Other people said then they were blocked. I don't know. But yeah they, weird.
Simone Collins: Yeah I don't understand Twitter, x. Sorry.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we're definitely at an age now where there's things that I don't understand and things I make a real hard focus on staying on top of. AI. AI is something I'm like, I gotta be up to date. Love you.
Simone Collins: I love you, too. You're seeing the thousandth time. [01:01:00] Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: so today antinatalism documentary, which I actually loved. I haven't seen it at all.
Simone Collins: That was so well done. It was the best. So well done. This guy is a true
Malcolm Collins: star. Yeah, Tim came out. I hope it does incredibly well.
Yeah. So people haven't seen it. This is the guy who's done some other like really big documentaries.
I want to, I haven't watched it all yet. I only watched the beginning. I was like, Oh my God, this is. His
Simone Collins: storytelling is top drawer like the way he, but the problem is that it includes stories of. Conditions that cause babies to die terrible deaths I, and then so of course I'm crying first thing in the morning while watching this frickin thing.
Malcolm Collins: I'm so sorry. And then the limestone thing happened today.
Simone Collins: Limestone Claymore. So yeah, that was, oh, it was so much reading. It was so much reading.
Malcolm Collins: So much reading and so much, I don't know, felt like disingenuousness he posted the thing. He's like, why are they attacking me out of nowhere? This is a guy who runs the Institute of Family Studies thing.
And we're like, he does the whole, whoa,
Simone Collins: hold on in his whole, you haven't even read the he's I don't run the Institute for Family Studies. This is just 10 percent of their [01:02:00] spending that I'm involved with. So he takes umbrage.
Malcolm Collins: He just, out of the blue he's they just attacked me out of the blue and I'm like it may have been that article that you wrote on us that was really long and compared us to Nazis and eugenicists and said that you should be running the pronatalist movement and not us and that we shouldn't even be considered pronatalists and tried to throw a that might've been, and mischaracterized everything we've ever done.
He's they're, I don't know. communitarians. Like they only care about people in their community. They're not about trying to help everyone. I'm about trying to help everyone. I'm all about freedom and I'm gonna give everyone freedom. And not only is my movement about freedom, but how dare their movement allow people to use surrogates or do genetic testing.
And I'm like, You're like contradicting yourself here MMMMMM, seething! But I'm not gonna attack him anymore, because I said I'd stop attacking him after this if he doesn't try to [01:03:00] undermine the big tent pronatalist movement again to try to take it over. We honestly could have been a lot worse to him.
I had a much meaner episode planned about him, but we ended up just talking about it in the episode where we were talking about what was it? When it is not true, because this is something he believes that more wealth doesn't lead to lower fertility rates, and I'm like, that belief continually arguing that, which he does persistently throughout all his work and he's like, why are they telling reporters not to talk to me?
I'm like, that's like an environmentalist arguing that it's an environmentalist. Like industrial logging doesn't hurt the rainforest because one person is like planting trees or like they can find this one study like broadly everyone who's saying and knows that industrial logging hurts the rainforest and other environmentalists aren't going to send reporters to talk to you like obviously if you're the pronatalist version of a flat earther, When a reporter comes to me, I'm like, yeah, don't talk to the guy who doesn't think that wealth causes lower fertility rates.
That's pretty [01:04:00] insane position when you can just Google any graph on this and you will see it as a very strong trend. But yeah, I don't want to go too deep on, on that particular thing. So what would the other thing you said? There was something else that came out today that was stressful. You read this one.
It wasn't
Simone Collins: stressful. It's more of a Swedish piece. They were so mean to us. The Swedish place that I think it was a translation, but it was like, they said the parents who beat their children. Yeah. The parents who beat their children and want everyone to have children. And then we live in a dank farmhouse.
They said we live in a dingy farmhouse. Dingy, that was the word, dingy. Oh, I wonder if there's a like, more diplomatic way that this is written in Swedish, or did they, she just like flat out call her home dingy? Was this somebody who came to
Malcolm Collins: her house, or were they writing about somebody else? Yeah, she,
Simone Collins: yeah, she's the woman who came to her house.
Her picture's at the very end of the article. Remember, she wore the bright shirt.
Malcolm Collins: Oh I like that. They included a lot of our full arguments in that piece. That's always nice. When somebody does that, we always
Simone Collins: ask someone to come at us. We're always like, be [01:05:00] controversial, but it must as villains.
And she's I'm glad she did it because it made the article more interesting. But yeah, it's always stressful reading those being like, wait, my house is dingy. I try to clean up before you. I
Malcolm Collins: broadly, I thought it was a good article. It is the type of article that I would want written.
But it's always,
Simone Collins: it's always stressful to, for anyone to talk about, like to read anything about you. It's just as stressful if it's positive. So I'm just ready to de stress. Let's talk about China as a dumpster fire. It's going to make me feel so much better. Okay. Let's do it.
Malcolm Collins: Okay.
Do I have any debris on me or anything like that? Ooh,
Simone Collins: yeah, let me, not that I can see, not that I can see. Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: this right here.
Simone Collins: I can't, is wiping your nose on it going to make it go away? I'm trying to lick it off, but it's not that scary.[01:06:00]
Just give me the shirt to wash. I, we have a, I brought a bunch of
Malcolm Collins: shirts and pants down for you to wash.
Simone Collins: I hope you didn't put them in the clean laundry basket. I need to make things more. We need a better hamper system. We will work this out.
Malcolm Collins: I'll just change my shirt.
Simone Collins: What do you want for dinner, by the way?
Malcolm Collins: You know what would be really cool if you learned how to make, if you learned how to make taquitos.
Simone Collins: That can't be hard to do, but I would need oh my God, wait a second. No. I can use, hold on. What if I tried this? I will make corn tortilla taquitos using your slow cooker beef and keep in mind that is prime beef, the Christmas beef.
I will
try it. I don't know exactly how they're properly cooked. I'm just going to First, lightly fry corn tortillas in butter, then I'm going to roll them in the meat, which I will saute ahead of time with some pumpkin. Would you like put some of it or not? Yeah, that's a
Malcolm Collins: great idea. And [01:07:00] then
Simone Collins: I will cook them further in the air fryer.
Malcolm Collins: That's exactly what I would have suggested.
Simone Collins: All right, let's see with maybe some melted cheese on top. I don't know. I haven't gotten there yet, but we're going to see how that goes. No, no melted cheese. We're going to try dry. You can dip them in sauces. We're going to see how this works. I'm excited for it.
Okay.
Malcolm Collins: By the way, the episode we did today on the spy, it got demonetized. And I think it's because we were talking about things that we aren't allowed to talk about. So just don't, no, even saying we aren't allowed to talk about something. You can't say that.
Simone Collins: Okay. Okay. Deleted
Malcolm Collins: everything else. So that must've been what flagged it.
That is so creepy. That's really dystopian. Yeah.
We live here. Have fun. The deep state is spying on us. And
Simone Collins: we can't say that.
Malcolm Collins: One of the comments that somebody had that got to me as they were like they did arrest like random women who nobody follows for questioning their school board. Do you think was your guys platform? They're not going to attack you. [01:08:00] And I was like, That makes sense.
Simone Collins: Touche. Creepy.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
In this episode, we dive into the controversial topic of hereditarianism in dogs and why many progressives acknowledge it in pets but not in humans. The discussion covers the pit bull debate, including the moral implications of neutering the breed to prevent attacks on other pets and humans. We also explore the historical and societal roles dogs and cats have played, arguing for their special status and potential future alongside humanity, even in space. The script wraps up with an exploration of online backlash against the hosts and their defense of hereditarian views, followed by a personal conversation about dinner plans.
[00:00:00] Most progressives do believe in hereditarianism and dogs. And the question is why did they believe it there and not in humans?
And it is because they have raised and interacted with dogs. It is very hard to miss hereditarianism if you have actually been around young people . So what you're saying also is this is a product of the fact that they don't have human children.
I think the previous thing is what everyone's gonna freak out about in the comments. He wants to genetically modify dogs to be smarter? How dare he? But this is where things get spicy. The pit bull debate yeah. I do not think that there is a huge moral negative to neutering the pit bull population humans who love dogs, neuter dogs all the time.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-5: Pit bulls in the United States kill an average of 8,730 dogs per year in 2,904 cats per year. That means that if you neutered the entire us pit [00:01:00] bull population,
You would be saving one cat or dogs, a life that is somebody else's pet for every 3.8, six pit bulls. You neutered.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-3: Over the next hundred years.
And I will tell you the best argument for not neutering pitbulls. And then I will tell you why it doesn't even work.
Would you like to know more?
Hello Simone, I'm excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be doing an episode that was inspired by somebody who was criticizing us. It was an article that was actually not so bad. Where was the article published? It was like The LA Review of Books. Yeah, and what's really interesting in it is when you went to look up The the writer of the article to learn more about her and her perspectives.
She was in the middle of a fight on the internet based on this article because she called out us and a few of our friends like Johnny Anomaly and diana Fleishman podcast. Yes. And so she calls out a few of our friends. And so, you know, obviously they've got supporters as well online and she's getting trashed in, [00:02:00] in Twitter.
Which is actually interesting that it happened this way because Often when people attack us. Enough of a Twitter spasmob forms, like whenever we go viral, that we are on the minority side, but when they fail to go viral, the only people who notice are the supporters of the various people who are being attacked and they end up getting s**t all over.
So, she was getting having to be defensive and somebody found and she ended up defending this position, a post where she claimed anti hereditarianism in dog breeds. So specifically. Not only does she not believe that none of a human's personality is heritable, but she doesn't believe that any of a dog's personality is heritable.
Right. So like on, on, on Twitter, I can read a bit like how some of this conversation played out because this is a very common conversation we see again and again, which is really weird. With Emily Merchant, the author of this article representing [00:03:00] the, the kind of person who is very well educated and very well meaning but also very progressive and just will not believe, will refuse to believe that, that behavioral traits, including intelligence are heritable.
So Stegosauro Benedet writes, I can't help thinking I should really be screening for the gene that makes otherwise apparently intelligent people fall for pseudoscientific nonsense like eugenics. And then. Conchabar responds, I haven't read the essay yet, but the claim that we can't select for specific traits in a population is utterly wrong.
We've been doing it with animals for millennia. To which Emily Merchant, the author of this article responds, it's much easier with animals, but a project by behavior geneticists in the 1950s to 1960s to breed an dog failed utterly. And she links to this, this study. And , someone reads it and [00:04:00] then includes a screenshot of the study saying, just skimming this, they seem to suggest that.
That it can be successful with dogs. Emily merchant responds. No, they're saying that differences between dog breeds are small, especially under similar living conditions. She continues. Scott was a member of the American eugenics society in the 1960s, and he expressed extreme skepticism about the possibility of breeding intelligence and humans on the basis of his experience, trying to do it with dogs.
So she's trying to argue that, you know, this, this dog breeder. Okay. So first of all, I should note. The other study that she's citing here, because this is going to be important in a lot of progressives who do believe like anti hereditarianism in dogs is real, will cite this it was a recent study, actually, used a giant sample size.
Showed only about a 9 percent personality difference between breeds. What they won't tell you, this reminds me of the spanking studies where huge sample sizes did not control at all in the way they were collecting data, is the personality of the dogs is based on owner's self reports. Yeah. [00:05:00] Here's the problem with that.
The owner's self report of a dog personality is going to have more to do with the owner's personality than with the dog's personality. How many owners speak of their pit bull? They're just the sweetest little things, you know, because they use their dog to augment their own self perception, which is of course, you're not going to get much correlation there.
Man, you can just look at like, just to go into pit bull statistics so people can understand how absolutely insane this position is. Pit bulls make up 5. 8 to 6. 6, nice around. Let's say 6 percent of the total dog population in the United States, okay, but they're responsible for 69 percent of fatal dog attacks.
Okay. From 2005 to 2019, they killed 346 Americans, which is 6. 5 X higher than the next closest breed. So. 650 percent higher than the next closest dog breed.
Which only killed 51 people. And [00:06:00] pit bulls inflict nearly half of 48% of all fatal attacks on infants. Those are babies under 1-year-old, not okay. And from 2015 to 2019, 76% of the fatal attacks on children under nine years old were from pit bulls. Keep in mind, they only make up 66% of the doll population.
Mm-Hmm. So you like, well, that's the people who maybe buy pit bulls and blah, blah, blah, blah. Like what? Like, it's very obvious to me. And if you've owned a dog, and this is the other thing that gets really interesting to me in regards to this. When you were talking to this lady, you were like, or you mentioned with somebody who was like, well, try to teach a non Well, yeah, I'll read it.
I mean, first someone, James Dog on Twitter Made a very good point saying, if you're concerned that EA, cause she also writes about effective altruism is a crude measure. Perhaps you should be campaigning for researchers to be permitted to access vast existing IQ linked databases, which is something that's being quite restricted right now.
But then he continues, alternatively, try teaching a Greyhound to memorize over 1000 distinct commands [00:07:00] and use it to herd sheep. And then Kanchabar comes back in with, OP should, should prove how intelligent these, these breed variations are by raising a pack of Basset hounds and putting them through IPO.
She'd lose her mind trying to get them to IPO, probably like a, maybe like an assistance dog training. I don't know. She'd lose her mind just trying to get them to stop sniffing, let alone competing against breeds specifically bred for it. I mean, the thing It's so clear with dog braids. Wait, here I need to talk about like herding dogs, for example.
So we, I've always believed that the core difference between dogs is what they're bred for. So I think that dog personalities predominantly, if you're like, what type of dog should I get? You're looking are, are you a ratting dog, a herding dog, a hunting dog, or A fighting dog. I mean, pit bulls are fighting dogs.
Let's, Oh yeah, fighting dogs. Like, is it a dog meant to kill other dogs? Yeah. The, the typically in my experience for like what my family [00:08:00] likes, I always go herding dogs and I find herding dogs are fairly similar across herding dogs, but if you've ever had a herding dog, it will be clear to you just how much of their behavior is genetic.
So a great example is I grew up with an Australian shepherd. Today we use corgis, which are another type of herding dog. But for, for our family's primary dog. We adopt Corgis. We don't use them. Yes. Australian Shepherds, they it, when it rained when I was a kid because they need to get the sheep to high ground whenever it rains.
So they didn't drown. And clearly we didn't teach it to do this. It would nip at all of the family's heels to try to get us upstairs. That is really sweet. And also, yeah, really weird. If you don't believe things are inherited because no one taught this dog to do that. Yeah, no one taught the dog to nip at our feet to try to get us to go upstairs.
So where did it get this really specific behavior pattern tied to hurting? And, and you see this yeah, just sort of like across, it's, it's, it's, I mean, it's so wild to me that someone could [00:09:00] think this, but then it gave me this realization, which was something I hadn't realized before, which is that most progressives, I mean, you've got a few crazy ladies like this lady here who are like dog breed differences.
Aren't heritable. I mean, she's not crazy. She's the weird thing is that she's. Very sane and reasoned and tempered in most of her analysis. I don't think so. I think you need to basically be an occult to believe this, or have never interacted with dogs. But this is what they I know. Here's the way that I look at it.
Like, if we were to frame this from a perspectives point of view, there are lots of Otherwise sane reasoned people who believe in scientific inquiry, but also believe that the earth is flat and the non hereditary and people, the blank slightest, I think are similar. You know, they can, they can engage. I don't think that's true.
I think you always want to see the best in people. I think that. A lot of the people who think the earth is flat are generally stupid. I think that people who believe on hereditarianism in dogs are generally just brainwashed [00:10:00] cultists. They are not. Well, and I think the other thing that's notable of course, is that most even blank slate as progressives who insist that no traits behavioral are heritable.
Or like, Oh yeah, I'm like, of course you've got a border Collie. They're going to behave this way. I was about to make, which is to say, it made me realize that most progressives do believe in hereditarianism and dogs. Most monoculture does. And the question is why did they believe it there and not in humans?
And it is because they have raised and interacted with dogs. It is very hard to miss hereditarianism if you have actually been around young people of a specific species. So what you're saying also is this is a product of the fact that they don't have human children. And I think that's a really good point.
I was listening to a podcast called The BCC Club, which is broadly about internet drama when, you know, I run through all my blocked and reported episodes and still need some kind of [00:11:00] Gossip, please. People recommend something better than that. That's about internet gossip that I can listen to as a podcast, but basically the BCC club is two very, very progressive lesbians who talk about internet stuff.
And there was one episode where they talk about buying pets online. They talk a lot about dog breeds and behavior and dog DNA. And then, you know, they also frequently talk in their podcasts about the amounts of money that they paid for medical care for their pets and things like that. And they, 100%.
Understand and empathize with each other and talk about the, the, the grief that they feel upon losing an animal. And then they, they like literally can't empathize the same way with what it would feel like to lose a human child. And I think really seeing it, I'm seeing exactly what you're talking about here where they can't understand.
They can't, they can't even really put it on the same level of their dog, their dog parenting, which is really interesting to me. That, that, that humans wouldn't be as lovable to them as dogs. Because. Well, I think they've still [00:12:00] disconnected from their natural instincts at that point. I mean, they're not sleeping with men.
They're not, you know, engaging with people who are interested in like rational discourse more broadly. They have artificially constructed a lifestyle. That masturbates, I think mostly status for them. That seems to be the core thing that they're focused on is individual status was in the urban monoculture, which is achieved through adopting more fringe and modern lifestyle choices which leads to them no longer, I think really identifying, and I'd say they don't really identify as human anymore, but what I really mean by that is it's, they don't identify most human behavior as human anymore.
They think they're still human, but when they look at like your average rural American to them, that individual is an animal. And that's what they are thinking about when they are trying to model kids and stuff like that. I don't think that's quite it. I think they're not thinking I just I just don't think they they have that like empathetic basis to work [00:13:00] with they don't their world is their cats and their, their partners, and it's not kids, so they just can't empathize.
If you see this in people all the time who have lots of kids, is one of the things I've noticed, like, that most, when I hear people's stories where they became hereditarians and they weren't formerly hereditarians, Yeah. Is after having kids. Yeah. Like, that's the biggest debate in their life. I had kids, and then I realized, eugh.
Well, both you and I were, I think, just intuitively from our upbringing, because I think, blank slate theory, if you go through a public school system, or a mainstream private school system, Is, is going to be more or less what's tacitly hammered into you. You can learn about genetics in school, but you're still kind of raised with blank slate theory, I think subconsciously.
And so I think you and I came into parenting kind of with a blank slate mindset, and then we're blindsided. By the traits of our children They're just very obviously hereditary. Yeah, even when it's stuff that we've never shown them never [00:14:00] demonstrated They're not picking this up from us. Like we've hid it from them.
And still well And the studies on this are incredibly compelling that look at babies. For example young infant Girls, for example, if you're talking about differences between males and females, they will look at an adult much longer like I think like 10 X longer, like dramatically, dramatically longer.
They crave social attention than male babies. But if you look between for example, ethnic groups there was a study in like the 1940s on we mentioned it in a different episode, but it looked at Caucasian babies versus East Asian children younger than six months. And if you put a blanket over their heads the Caucasian ones like freak out and we'll rip it off.
Where the East Asian ones will just clear a path for themselves to breathe. And it's a very different reaction to this negative stimuli and that you can see this reliably in infants shows that there are some clustered sociological differences. But I mean, again, I think that progressives in the [00:15:00] fact that they have to deny that this is true when it is so obviously true.
End up discrediting the claim that they make that their system that they are creating for the world that this urban monoculture can actually be fair if there is any degree of genetic differences between individuals. And this is something that's really made clear to us by one individual who is like.
Well, yeah, but if you intergenerationally select for IQ in your kids, and it does work, I mean, what happens if in a few generations, they're much smarter than other people? And it was clear that she didn't have a world framework where humans that are born differently from other humans can safely coexist with other humans.
It's like, well, if one group ever did show genuine superiority to another group, they would have like a moral mandate to erase that other group. Or the other group would have a moral mandate to erase it. Like that is genuinely what the urban monoculture believes. because they don't have a system for dealing with genuine diversity.
And that is really horrifying. Yikes. [00:16:00] Yeah. Another thing to go into here is the pit bull debate because we got to go into the pit bull debate. Yeah. Here is my thing on pit bulls. Okay. I believe that humanity does have a moral obligation to dogs and cats. Actually, this is. Before I get into the pivotal thing, I need to make one thing clear.
We have a moral obligation to dogs and cats that we do not have to other species. Somebody's gonna be like, why would you think that we have a moral obligation to dogs and cats that we don't have to other species? And it's because the partnership that humanity formed with dogs and cats was not a partnership of subjugation.
Most of the other species that we have, where we have domesticated them, it was us capturing them and forcing them, they're not, like, cows don't serve us because they wanted to serve us, because at some point, some cow in distant history made the choice to work with humans. That is [00:17:00] not the case for dogs and cats.
So we can start with cats, which were actually the later domestication event, and made human civilization possible, period. Okay, why did cats make human civilization possible? Because before cats we couldn't do long term grain storage, which was critical to To the types of bureaucratic infrastructures, it was the distribution and collection of long term grains, i.
e. early taxation that allowed, specifically in the Nile in Egypt, that allowed for the first real major civilization to start, which was Egypt. But you couldn't long term maintain grain in these primitive silos because they'd get rat and mice infestations. And so the introduction of cats, which were an obligate carnivore and wouldn't eat the grain, but would eat anything else.
There is a reason that the Egyptians worshipped cats. There is a reason they had cat gods, and they mummified cats, and they because cats made their lifestyle and civilization possible in a way that people today do not appreciate. And these cats were [00:18:00] not captured cats. These cats were cats that came and made themselves at home within these grain silos.
Okay. And then some Egyptians began to live with cats. But another important thing to note about cats as well is that cats were never fully domesticated. They do not in many categories of domestication count as a fully domesticated animal. Often when cats are living with humans, it is because to an extent they have chosen to live with humans.
Now dogs are a different, and I think an animal that we have even more responsibility to than cats. So what I mean by that is if you look at the early domestication events from what we could see about the way that dogs were likely domesticated, is it appears that some canines began to lose the instinct to basically attack and kill humans or fight humans whenever they see them.
You know, before they were a social animal and their tribe would be their tribe and our tribe would be our tribe and we would fight and kill each other and hunt each other and we were enemies. But the. The group that made the first [00:19:00] Overture was the dogs, it appears. What they did is some dogs began to hang out around the refuge piles of early humans, and then over time they began to become less afraid of humans, and humans began to integrate dogs, which already had a pre coded, you know, social clan structure in them, into our societies.
And it's important to note that our current concept of dogs as pets is likely not the way that they integrated into these groups. They likely integrated as a separate sort of cast, but as an independent cast. And we can see this in some primitive African communities when anthropologists have gone to learn about them.
There's this story that I found really interesting where one anthropologist was walking around a settlement and she was talking to a person about their dog. She goes, Oh, your dog. And they go, what do you mean my dog?
And they're like your dog. And they're like, I don't know what you mean my dog. And the person was like, well, the dog that sleeps in your house. And they go, Oh, well, yeah, I mean, it sleeps in our house because it chooses to, it could sleep in any house that wanted [00:20:00] to. It's not my dog. And this is likely the way that early Humans to animals, and we even see this in modern times where you will have a town dog or a town cat.
When I was in St. Andrews, we had a few of these. Did you have any where you grew up, Simone? Yeah. I mean, I think even in houses where people have domesticated cats, sometimes people like neighbors will start feeding one of those cats and the cats sort of two times families, you know what I mean? And we'll like sleep over at the other person's house and hang out in the other person's house.
And. I think animals do that in general. I certainly saw it a lot when I was in Mexico that there would be definitely like ownerless dogs that would just be beach dogs that everyone would feed and kind of take care of and the dogs would sleep wherever, and they were healthy dogs, but no one owned them in particular, but I do find it notable that even in scenarios where humans.
own cats where, you know, you can have cats more freely move between houses. If they're outdoor cats, you still see [00:21:00] this, this phenomenon. Well, and it's important to understand why dogs were such a useful partner to our early species. Dogs can help in terms of like their capacity to sense the environment around them.
They have like, I think like 15, 000 times our sense of smell. And, and like, I think like 15 X are hearing. So they make humans, they're the first bionic add on to humans. Yes. They were humans first bionic add on. And I'd also note here, another thing that we mentioned when we write about dogs, but people should note this.
Is because dogs have been selected for their love of humans. That is one of the things we breed them for. They likely experience an emotion towards us, which is a louder form of love than any love a human is capable of experiencing. Hundred percent. And we've always said, if you really actually, if you want one unconditional love, don't find a partner.
Don't just find a dog. Get a kid. Yeah. No, you're only ever going to get unconditional love from a dog. No human can give that to you or should be expected to give it to you, [00:22:00] you know, but with all of this being the case was dogs being a voluntary and useful partner to humanity. I think as we start encountering other species out there in the universe.
Or we start building our own other sentient species, and we begin to have to form what is our relationship going to look like with species that are strictly more intelligent than us? And when do we decide, like, where these relationship boundaries go? It's gonna be important to us that we have some voluntary relation with another species that we do not factory farm, et cetera, right?
That we treat with a dignity level that is To an extent comparable to human dignity and that is something that I think we should do with dogs. And I also think that we have a moral obligation to, if not have dogs on the spaceships we use to colonize the galaxy, bring their genetics so that they can be recreated when we get to these environments.
and potentially even to genetically uplift dogs. It wouldn't be that [00:23:00] hard to do. For example, even with our existing technology, you could give a dog like pox to, and it would likely be able to understand and respond to human speech, not with speech, but with other things much higher than dogs do today from the other experiments that we've seen.
I don't know. I feel like this, this may just be social media hokum, but there are definitely people on social media who set up buttons for their dogs that actually seem to be fairly effective. Yeah, but Now the question is, what do I think of pitbulls given how much I think of dogs, right? Okay, yes, yeah, now get into the controversial stuff that lost a ton of followers.
I think the previous thing is what everyone's gonna freak out about in the comments. He wants to genetically modify dogs to be smarter? How dare he? No, I'm not saying today, I'm saying eventually, okay? But the, the, this is, this is where things get spicy. I do not think that there is a huge moral negative to neutering the pit bull population for three reasons.
One is, [00:24:00] is humans neuter dogs all the time these days? Yeah. Humans who love dogs, neuter dogs all the time. Now humans, humans, neuter humans all the time. Humans neuter themselves all the time. Yeah. But I'm talking about the neutering of another being. Yeah. The non consensual humans should be able to sterilize another human.
I don't believe that's morally okay. But should a human be able to sterilize a dog? Absolutely. It's something we do all the time as to why. There shouldn't be a moral problem with humans neutering dogs. If people are wondering, like, why do I have such a different belief around this than humans, it's because dogs breed uncontrollably, which can lead to big problems in regions where they are not neutered.
They lead to more aggregate suffering of canines and humans. And so it's strictly and obviously a good thing to do. If humans bred like that then it might make sense to consider sterilizing humans, but humans don't breed like that. So that's not [00:25:00] Well, they don't breed like that anymore. You could argue that there was a time when they did.
No, I think it was always an illusion. But the point being is You're probably right, actually. If we lived in a world where if you didn't sterilize humans, humans would exhaust their food supply and eventually start killing each other that changes the moral equation around sterilization. Even and we do live in a world and we've seen this because a lot of cultural groups like well My cultural group lauds dogs.
You want to see more about this year episode? Why don't jews own guns? It's one of our best episodes we've ever done. But some groups like jews and muslims for example are pretty anti canine historically and in a modern context and just do not historically own dogs and they're What do these cultures have in common?
They were typically urban focused cultures in the middle ages Yeah, what did the fiddler on the roof do? Playwright writer say about dogs if a man owns a dog either that dog is no dog or that Jew is no Jew So [00:26:00] so if people don't know this has been a lot of papers like I sometimes mentioned to like Jewish friends I'm like, you know Jews don't own dogs and they're like What do you mean Jews don't own dogs?
I've seen Jewish people with dogs. I'm like, look at the literature. Jews don't own dogs. . And if you look at, and we know this goes back to early settlements because we can look at settlements to the ancient, ancient Israeli period and see that dogs appear very rarely in the Jewish cemeteries.
So we can actually see exactly when this cultural practice came about. As to why the practice came about, it was because if you're an urban based population, typically. Like urban specialist cultures are typically very wary of dogs because dogs can become major problems like stray dogs in cities and you don't really need them for anything.
Why, if I'm in an urban environment, do I need to be able to hear 15 times, you know, my range and smell 15, 000 percent stronger? If you are a rural person, dogs are critical to your way of life. So rural cultures usually have a much closer relationship with dogs. If you want to get a feeling of, is your family from an urban or rural background?
Think, what was your parents perspectives on dogs? [00:27:00] That's the core answer, right? Like, are they seen as a moral necessity, or are they seen as a moral negative and just a waste? But anyway where was I going with this? The pitbull scenario. Okay, so one, neutering. There doesn't appear to be any moral negative to neutering dogs, at least within our society.
And I, I, I could see the involuntary neutering of an animal as a moral negative. If there wasn't the sort of gun to our head of, but dogs will just keep breeding until they become a problem to other dogs. Right. So that's one problem. The second problem is, is then why am I okay with neutering pit bulls specifically the, the infant murder machines that they are right.
Like again, you've got to keep in mind, dog murder machines, even if you don't like humans, that is where it gets. It gets for me and I just see no way to defend this. Pit bulls were selectively bred for their tendency to kill other dogs. Not for their love of humans, not even for their ability to kill humans.
If you love [00:28:00] dogs, you should hate pit bulls. Because even today when we talk about all of the human deaths that result from pit bulls, it is Nothing. It is a drop in the bucket when contrasted with the pet dog deaths that are due to pitbulls.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: Pit bulls kill an average of, and this is just in the United States, 8,730 dogs per year. 2,904 cats per year. And 10,250 other pets and livestock per year.
In total pit bolts are estimated to kill around 21,886 pets and livestock per year. Pit bulls were responsible for 81% of the animals killed by dogs in a documented attacks over a 10-year period.
For attacks on other dogs, specifically 90% were carried out by pit bulls.
All you need to do to top. This is neuter pitbulls. If you just neuter pit bulls. You could, within a few years save the lives of around 9,000 dogs per year, 3000 cats per year. The people who [00:29:00] don't do this are genuinely sociopath's.
Given how flippantly we neuter dogs for just about anything else.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): Well, what if you're not a dog lover and you're just an animal lover in general. This report here shows that pit bulls killed 30 times more animals than human crime dead. In fact, it found that pit bulls were 500 times more deadly to other animals and humans. Then all other dog breeds combined.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-2: In fact pit bulls that are rehomed by shelters and rescuers killed more animals than persecuted Setas. Eve you are one of those people who's like, but my dog is so nice to me. And so sweet looking, you come off, like one of those parents of a serial killer, who was like, well, my kid was nice at home.
It's like, it doesn't matter. A dog can be the sweetest dog in the world. You know, Every hour of a year, but one where it murders a toddler. That dog was still better off, not existing that year. That's the problem. [00:30:00] If you are not weighing the statistics against your emotional connection with a specific dog.
And this statistics are reality.
Yeah. In fact, I'd go so far and say that you are probably saving one dog life for every probably hundred pitbulls that are neutered.
That seems like a safe bet. Just considering the number of people, I think if you know dog owners, you will probably know. You know, someone who at least knows someone or someone who themselves has had their dog attacked by, not necessarily killed, but attacked by, for sure, a pit bull. Yeah
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-3: so the breed is survey 2019 more puppies, yet fewer homes for pit bulls shows that there are around 4.5 million pit bulls in the United States. If that number is accurate. And if the above numbers are accurate, that means for every 3.86 pit bulls, you neutered, you would save the life of one cat or dog over the next hundred years. So it is neutering. [00:31:00] Less than four pit bulls for the life of every cat or dog you are saving. I just can't understand the moral equation of not neutering for dogs to save the life of one other.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-4: That dog who is going to die has kids who care about it. A family who cares about it. People who love it, just as much as you love your pit bull. And they're not even asking you to put down your pit bull, they're just asking you to neuter it. That is insane. The moral equation at play.
and this then gets really interesting, because, well, some pit bull owners will be like, well, But when pit bulls are well raised, they don't do this, and I'm like, then we still need to ban the breed.
And people are like, wait, why would you say we still need to ban the breed if it's a problem with the people who are buying them? I'm like, those people shouldn't be buying dogs then! So we need to ban the breed, whatever the desire is that's causing these people to go out and raise them so poorly. And you shouldn't have a breed that when it's raised poorly, Horribly murders other small, innocent dogs.[00:32:00]
Okay. I think another problem too is the, one of the big elements of this controversy is the bully XL, which sounds like a uniquely terrifying version of pit bulls, but at least as marketed in some corners as a breed of pit bull that is actually much more docile and friendly. The problem is that even though it looks really, really tough is that, you know, breeding is not an incredibly well regulated.
Realm. It's, it's a little kludgy. And so you don't necessarily know if you are getting a docile version, someone could tell you that this pit bull that they're selling to you for between one and 5, 000 or more is a bully XL and is docile and will be super nice to your kids and won't hurt a fly. But you really can't know that for sure.
It's not safe. There's a reason that of under one year olds, 48 percent of them that were killed by a dog were killed by a pit bull. You know, that's mostly the dog owner's own children. Or children that they are [00:33:00] babysitting. Like, that is horrifying that we are allowing this to happen. These are infant Murder machines.
These are toddler killing machines. That is what they do. And again, I should note here that even if the owners, and this is what really gets me with the pitbull owners, they'll go out and when people are like, look, we really shouldn't allow, like we need to, and I'm not saying we should kill pitbulls, just saying we should neuter pitbulls.
When they're like, Oh, Presumably make their sale and breeding illegal. Yeah. How dare you do this because we, we like pit bulls because they're so sweet and kind. And it's like, yeah, but I can look at the ads of the pit bull breeders and I can see that functionally that's not the case. The high value pit bulls are being sold because of their adjacency to savagery.
And some of like pit bull ads here.
They're like, This is, this is like King Cyrus, the murder machine. He can murder 10 infants in a day. No, they won't. They won't, obviously they don't mention the infant murder, but they just, you know, mention how tough and strong and savage they are [00:34:00] because individuals who buy them are using them to modify their own self image often.
That is why they will buy dogs. And this is where I'm like, okay, well maybe these people are actually of this category of it's the. It's the owner's fault because they are buying a dog. They want to make them appear like a savage, tough individual. And so they are training it to be savage and tough.
Fine. Doesn't change the fact that we shouldn't have this breed. Right. When you consider that you are literally like how many dog neuters is a human child not being horribly savaged worth, right? Like I just don't understand the moral equivalency here when you could get another kind of dog. Yeah, and that's the thing is there are so many amazing dog breeds out there and dog breeds that are super tough, too.
Yeah. You just, there are lots of hunting dogs out there. There are lion killers. You could get a Rhodesian Ridgeback. You could get all sorts of very interesting and, and tough and [00:35:00] protective, but also sweet dogs. This is not going to be a challenge for you. It just seems so unambiguous that pit bulls are a step too far.
Yeah. Very polarizing. We're definitely going to lose followers. I think this is a lot like, Korean K pop stans and Taylor Swift fans. No, no, no, no. Here, if we have somebody who disagrees with us on this, I, I need them to answer a question. Okay? So, let's, let's deal with it. Let's bring the numbers down a bit.
Yeah. So that they can understand, would they neuter one Pitbull if it saved the life of one child? And from being horribly, horribly murdered, a toddler, a three year old, horribly murdered. And then I say, okay, they're like, well, of course I neuter one pitbull if it did that. People neuter pitbulls all the time, right?
You know, for different reasons. I say, well, would you neuter ten pitbulls? To save the life of one child, one toddler. I'm like, what number, what's the number that's too high for you? What's the number of pit bulls to save the life of a three year [00:36:00] old that is too high for you? Because categorically by the data, you can save a lot of individual toddler lives by doing this and other dog lives, right?
Like at what, what, what about another dog? So I want two numbers here. How many pit bulls need to be neutered for the life of another dog that was horribly. Mutilated. Yeah. And how many for a toddler? And if you're just like, not, I wouldn't even neuter one pit bull for one child. Then we don't want you as a follower.
I guess that's Yeah, like, you, you're, there's seriously something wrong in your ethical equations of reality, given that people neuter pit bulls all the time. Get out of my pocket! It's general population control. You can see the door, walk through it. Okay, I get you. And that's, that's entirely fair. Because I, I, I need to know how they are internally constructing this argument.
Because what they do is they do, do redirect the argument. They're like, well, it's not the dog's fault. It's the owner's fault. Yeah. Or, or, well, then you should accept bully, bullies [00:37:00] XL because. They, they're docile. But then, you know, how do you differentiate? But then the question is, is then why aren't you campaigning?
If you want the bully excels to be the thing, then you need a better system for determining which ones are the bully excels and you need to work on a breeding program to make them more docile and you more than anyone should want to get rid of these other pit bulls that are giving the bully excels a bad name.
But you don't do this. I don't see the people defending Bully xls saying, but of course we need to neuter the other pit bulls. They're just, they, they're just trying to redirect attention. It's like, well, we need to neuter pit bulls. And they're like, well, but what about Bully xls? Yeah. Or it's, well, what about the bad owners?
Or this whole thing is, I think. More largely, it reminds me of arguments around abortion. It reminds me of arguments around immigration. I think that, that we have as a society become at all. Really? No, I know. Hear me out here. I think people have come to a way of dealing with ideas where it's [00:38:00] no longer about the facts.
It's about once you've established your side. Your goal is to defend your mind from any ideas that are offensive to it. And that is an outcropping of progressives. Really? Okay, why? I think that that is something that happens, however, I think that if you are talking about immigration, or you are talking about abortion, abortion, there are genuine, well intentioned people with logically sound structures for arguing on both sides of these topics.
I have my own positions on these topics. But I think that there are individuals who seriously listen to all the evidence and have seriously thought through like different positions who genuinely fall on either side of this issue. I do not believe there is a single well intentioned person who has really thought through All of the arguments on the we should not neuter pitbull side of this argument.
I do not think that there is a logical structure when you consider how [00:39:00] lightly neutering is treated in our society for not neutering pitbulls. And I will tell you the best argument for not neutering pitbulls. And then I will tell you why it doesn't even work. The single best argument that you can create for not neutering pitbulls is the don't take my gun argument.
That is to say, Well, yes, I agree that I want a pit bull instead of another dog because of the effect that the pit bull has on my personal self identity. Right? Mm-Hmm. . Like I'm, I, I need it to be who I am is a deadly weapon. Yeah. And it may be a deadly weapon, but Americans are, should be allowed to own deadly weapons.
Mm-Hmm. , right? Mm-Hmm. . And we argue that. Here's the problem. Okay? A pit bull is closer to an autonomous AI with guns set up on it. That is, that is trained to, in some instances, kill people. Do you think humans should be allowed to own kill bo, like kill drones? That. And, and I actually, I'd [00:40:00] even go so far as to say humans should be allowed to own kill drones.
But I don't think they should be allowed to own kill drones that are constantly circling their house and sometimes randomly shoot people. That's where I'd be like, obviously a human should not be allowed to own that. Are you insane? Well, or, or kill drones with any any track record. of being a public safety threat, which is to say if a kill drone were to attack civilians or civilians fill a pets, obviously those would be considered extremely dangerous and unpredictable pieces of technology that would be immediately banned.
And yet, when this happens with dogs, for some reason, it's not banned with, you know, intensity. You're absolutely right. Yeah. And this is a, but there's the secondary reason, which is to say, I don't defend people's right to keep guns because of how guns positively augment their self image. I defend that right for two core reasons, one is that in certain parts of America, [00:41:00] guns are necessary for self defense.
If you were in an extremely rural area where it takes 30 minutes for the cops to get to your house or an hour for the cops to get to your house, you need guns. I'm sorry. Well, but also, you know, guns are sort of what prevent. Takeovers of, but that's the other core reason is that guns are a part of our checks and balances system in the United States.
And people are like, no, do, do guns really help in like a drone fight? Do guns really help? Like if the U S military wanted to take over and it's like, absolutely. Yes. We, we, if you even look at like, Hamas's raid in Israel, if more of these families had been armed and the families that were armed had a very easy time fighting them off.
The, the core reason they got hit so bad was just the Jewish cultural predilection to not own guns at high rates. Another really interesting thing about these raids that a lot of people don't know is the settlements that really got brutalized were not the conservative religious settlements. They were mostly spared.
It was the loosey goosey. Kibbutzes that were sort of like [00:42:00] hippie nonsense. Like, let's get along with them. It was like the peace concert that ended up getting absolutely massacred where nobody had guns. It was not the groups that were like, Hey, we need to be worried about these people.
We really need to, you know, be harsher in these scenarios that had to deal with, with that much bloodshed because they understood the risk and they were armed. So that's important to note as well. There are externalities to guns that don't exist with pitbulls. If you can explain to me an externality that can be resolved by a pitbull that either makes you safer as a citizen.
Okay. Or that makes us safer from like a democratic standpoint. I will take that argument as well. I just haven't heard one. A pit bull is genuinely differentially not better in a military context than a Rottweiler, which already exists. Like why are you using a pit bull and not a Rottweiler if you're using it for fighting humans?
Pit bulls are just toddler murder machines. They're not really useful for [00:43:00] anything else. They're useful for that in killing dogs. Horribly. Horrifically. Anyway, any other thoughts?
Nope. We like dogs. We'll take dogs to space. But, yeah. We, we, we only, I think, you know what? Actually, this is very similar to our cultural viewpoint. Which is that we We ultimately support pluralism and human groups that play nice with other human groups. And if you can't play nice then we have no interest.
That's actually a really good point is people wonder why we're both so pluralistic, but so quick to turn our back on any group that just attacks another group and say, okay, they lost their right to exist. But that's the way that we play more broadly. Yeah, I am okay with pluralism, but if you run out and attack your neighbors the pluralistic protection that I culturally believe that every human has a right to is immediately revoked from your group.
We support human flourishing insofar as you do, you [00:44:00] are not a net drag on human flourishing.
And we promote dog flourishing insofar as it is not a net drag on dog flourishing. And it would seem that pit bulls. are broadly a net drag on canine flourishing, so. Love you to death, Simone. You are so special and amazing.
I love you so much. I just got a call from George. Can you call him back to see what he wanted? I'll call him. Would you mind getting the kids? Yes, and I'll bring my food down and make you some fried rice tonight with oyster sauce. Will do. An egg or no egg? Egg, please. We've got chicken for a reason. Spring onions, but no vegetables?
I'd actually love it if you put in some other vegetables. I got like a frozen vegetable pack that could be good for a stir fry that would go pretty well with fried rice. Okay, I'll see what I can do there. That's what I got it for. You know, it's got like baby corn and yeah. All right, we'll give it a try.
Love you. Love you, too. I'll call him.
Speaker: What? It's impossible. [00:45:00] Yes. Oh my gosh, it's a heart. Wow. You can come sit with me. That was the best thing ever. Yay! Bye!
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
Join us as we delve into a provocative theory that reshapes how we view the history of human civilization. Discover the 'One Civilization Theory,' which posits that the vast majority of civilizational achievements stem from a single cultural lineage. Through an engaging discussion, we explore the advancements and contributions of this 'one civilization,' its potential to transform regions it touches, and the comparative historical advancements of different cultures across the globe. This episode promises to challenge mainstream historical narratives and offer a new perspective on our shared cultural ancestry and the factors driving civilizational success.
[00:00:00]
Hello, Simone! This episode is definitely going to go in the best of category for Basecamp, because it is a theory that I came to, which completely transforms how I see the history of humanity, and it is probably the single most offensive theory that we will air on this channel, if it becomes a mainstream theory, It will almost certainly always appear.
Any video that shows it will have a little explanation at the bottom by like the UN or something about how this theory isn't accurate. So historically I had this view that I think most people have is that human civilization. basically emerged in a few different regions, and that you would have these periods of growth where sometimes one region would be ahead.
Other times, another region would be ahead. Totally. Yeah, like, oh, China's the most cutting edge right now. And, and now [00:01:00] it's Japan and now it's, you know, It's, it's Egypt and whatever, yes, totally agree.
This theory posits that that view of history is mostly downstream of what I can only call the deification of the historical narrative. And that. The vast majority of feats of civilization were created by one civilization.
Oh no. And now I'm worried. Yes. Awkward. And it came to me when I was studying ancient Rome and ancient Greece recently, because I've been on a kick watching a number of videos on ancient Rome and Greece, and one thing really hit me as I was studying these periods, whenever Rome would retreat from a region.
And the Roman Empire would fall temporarily in a region that region would fall [00:02:00] back into a period of people essentially fighting over who had the nicest mud hut. Like very little was happening in those regions during that period. And this includes the region that my ancestors were only when we were older.
under Roman colonization during the period of the Roman Empire. Did we really do anything meaningful, civilizationally speaking? Okay. So to be fair, you're not arguing that it's your own ancestors who were somehow superior from a culture. Yes. Not my own ancestors. My ancestors were mud hut people.
For example, I am pretty much British, Irish, Scottish English The British Islands. You might say, well, come on, your ancestors must have produced something. Aren't there any great ruins in ancient British Isles? I was like, well, you know, there's Unga Bunga, like Stonehenge, I wouldn't call that a great ruin.
And they go, come on, there must be some great architecture in the British Isles. And I would say, actually, there is! In the [00:03:00] seventies, eighties, there was this beautiful bath complex built in Bath . And they're like, ah, you've seen the British can do something. I go, well, unfortunately, the Romans built that.
And it was in a, a, a nowhere backwater of the Roman Empire. And Britain didn't build anything comparable for literally thousands of years. This was their equivalent of like a district like sub-district that nobody cared about. But now you might be going through your head. What led me to this thought?
So I was studying the Roman Empire, thinking of all these ruins, and I started thinking, okay, okay, okay. But what about like the other civilizations of Earth during this period, right? Like, I've traveled all over the world. I've been to something, I think it's over a hundred countries. Like done a lot, a lot of travel.
And so I started thinking, okay, what were the other major civilizations? I was like, okay, you have Mesoamerica. Mesoamerica had great ruins, right?
You know, you've got your, your Machu Picchu, for example. Um, and ancient Mayan and Aztec ruins are extremely impressive. Right, [00:04:00] but as anyone broadly knows those ruins are fairly recent like Machu Picchu was built in the 15th century and so but I gave them a i'm like, okay, that doesn't really count.
You know, they got their civilization started later but there's also like india and china In japan, right? Like they're all ancient civilizations and i've i've been to these countries before and I was like, okay, so When I was in japan I must have seen some ruins that had any sort of equivalency to even, like, Roman backwaters in, like, Spain and stuff.
I started thinking about it and I was like, what? Okay. Okay. China. I've, I've seen some hint that there was a civilization there. And then I was like, no. Oh, oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I have seen an East Asian ruin impressive at the Roman ruins. There was Angkor Wat and in India there was Hampi. And then I look up the dates of those ruins, the 15th and the 14th century.
Those ruins were built. [00:05:00] Anchor Watt was built when King's College Chapel was being built in Cambridge. In 1446. Like, they were built incredibly recently. And so then I was like, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. But egypt. I consider Egypt to be the ancestor of Greek civilization.
So it's one line of civilization. The Greeks considered Egypt to be the ancestor of their civilization. Do they really? In Greek literature, they would say, oh, we got our civilization from Egypt. Yeah, they're always borrowing from Egypt. So, basically the, the single line of civilization that I can track goes Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Greece really takes over the flame from Egypt, and then Rome takes over the flame from Greece, and then Charlemagne takes over the flame from, , Rome, and then Charlemagne's kingdom splits into the various distinct sort of warring kingdoms that take over the flame from that, and then the flame is taken over by the British Empire and then it's sort of seeded around the world.
But [00:06:00] to get back to the story here, I was like, okay, but works of literature. Right? I have heard about all of these great works of literature by totally disconnected cultures. Like, for example, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Or the Journey to the West. Did you know when these were written? Romance of the Three Kingdoms was written in the 14th century. Journey to the West was written in the 16th century. I was like, okay, well, what about like, Water Martyr, Martyrs, also known as Outlaws of the Marsh, or Dream of the Red Chamber, right?
I've never heard of these. The 14th and the 18th century, respectively. To give you an idea of how late these were written to works of literature that I can clear, consider just like, As somebody who has read translated works of literature, and I'm just like, this one grabs me, these two don't. Dante's mind comedy was, started writing it in 1308, and he finished writing it in 1320.
Hundreds of years before any of these works. How about the Tales of Genji? The Tales of [00:07:00] Genji. That's Japan, and that was I think even written by a woman
the 11th century, Simone. So that was written only 200 years before Dante's Divine Comedy. Did you read the Tale of Gingy? Have you read the Aeneid? Yeah, and, okay, that's a lot better. Okay, so when was the Aeneid written? Yeah, okay, admittedly, way, way, way before the Tale of Genshi. The Aeneid was written in 29 or 19 B. C. The Tales of Genshi were written literally 1, 000 years later, and were literarily less sophisticated and complex.
That's fair, yeah. It's not like it's ancient. Even close. And this is like, when I started having this, I just started going through, I was like, Oh God, this can't be real. And again, I'm not saying that there was like no Japanese civilization, that they didn't produce any art, that there was no Chinese civilization, that there was no Indian civilization.
But what I'm saying is, and you'll actually see this, is that these civilizations advanced [00:08:00] artistically, literarily, at about the speed of my own ancestors, which were the British, until the British met the Romans. And then after the British were fully colonized the British began, like as civilization spread out from Charlemagne again, they began to do some, you know, more sophisticated things.
But what I'm saying is just it's. Civilizationally, along almost every metric, they were dramatically behind the one civilization. Yeah. So there's basically what you're arguing is there is one civilizational lineage that has ever actually kicked ass. It started with Egypt. went through Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, et cetera, and sort of into Europe broadly.
And there's just kind of nothing that competes with it. And, and, and no one has spontaneously figured it out the way that this has. So everyone who is most competitive now is standing on the shoulders of that one giant. There is only one giant. There is only one giant. And every time it, Touches [00:09:00] another region, right?
Usually first they rebel, it leaves, it spins into savagery again, then they come back they, they try to set something up, And by the time they set up any sort of permanent civilizational infrastructure in the region Then that region undergoes a rapid increase in prosperity in the amount of artistic works they're producing, in the amount of industry they're producing, in the amount of science they're producing.
So it's not that it only works for one people. My people can invent this. Insofar as a culture is willing to adopt it and build upon it, they can thrive. Yes. And they can build their own iterations of it, but that no one has independently captured this civilizational dynamo. I guess you can kind of look at how Japan just started killing it after World War II, when it started embracing elements of Western culture and how they took many elements of Western culture, did it so much better.
And then the sort of unique Japanese way. So yeah, like doing jazz on it, like putting your own spin on it and being additive with it can give you a lot of power, but it is definitely [00:10:00] pulling from that one derivative. Yeah. And the other big change that has happened in my understanding of world history is my opinion of the Mesoamerican civilizations has gone up dramatically because of the one civilization theory.
Which is to say that historically, my take on Mesoamerica is Mesoamerica was largely backwards compared to most of the world, but that was only because they got a late start. Yeah, it took people a long time to get down there. Compare. India, China, and Japan and ignored the one civilization to what was happening in Mesoamerica.
Mesoamerica kind of was schooling them at various parts in its history. Fair point. And that was the other thing that really got me when I was thinking of like great ruins I visited and stuff like that. So to give you an idea of what I mean here, Simone, I want you to compare Two ruins. Now keep in mind Roman ruins, you've seen Roman ruins.
You know, most of the Roman ruins you've seen are either a hundred years pre like they're either like [00:11:00] 50 AD or 50 bc, like the Roman bass, right? Were built in 70 AD in the backwater, and also just everything in Rome itself. It is so impressive. I mean, even just. The building material that everything is made of, because, you know, Rome sort of was torn down to create what now is Rome, you know, is impressive.
Just the very building blocks of the city. Yeah, so I'm going to send you some pictures so when I was looking for ruins in Japan that were from around the period of say, which was from the 4th to the 10th century. So, you see Tikal? That's the first picture of Mesoamerican ruins there.
Gorgeous. So, when Tikal was built, that's when Japan was building what is now the Hizmura Temple ruins from the 11th to 12th century BC. So, first of all, you can see it's pretty trivial compared to what they were doing in Mesoamerica at the same time period. Yeah. Not only that, it's trivial compared to, like, Anything Rome ever did in their [00:12:00] history, it's trivial compared to the bath that were built literally , 000 years before.
So wait, what's, what is special about Hiraizumi? It's one of the only old ruins I could find in Japan. It's like one of the oldest buildings or something? Yeah, we'll go over some other buildings in Japan that are older than this, but most of them are just going to look destroyed mud huts or completely reconstructed buildings.
I feel like I visited some really old ones in Kamakura, but maybe We'll go over them. Like, there's a palace complex, but it's fairly small when contrasted with something like Tikal. Yeah, I guess the argument is they're all just very handsome wooden buildings. And your point is that when it comes to monumental architecture or stuff that really shows A level of sophistication.
Yeah. I mean, like these are, these are exquisitely built buildings, but we're still talking Lincoln logs versus like carving stone and achieving Lincoln logs versus like grand huge projects that [00:13:00] require hundreds of thousands of people, cooperation, infrastructure if giant economies so don't get us wrong because we love Japan.
We're, we're, we're, we're big Sinophiles. Okay. Yes. Weebs, as you would say in low culture. But I was disappointed and we'll go over like actual Japanese literature and compare contemporary Japanese literature to, to other literature in different parts of the world. But it's not impressive in comparison.
I'm conceding that. Okay, the next temple series you have here is Chichen Itza in Mexico. This was built in the 6th to 13th century. So again, like, that's actually really impressive for Mesoamerica. That's like Roman level stuff there, where it's like genuinely You unique in, in sort of shocking art. Now we're going to get a hostile environment.
China must've had something in the, in that period. This is the closest major ruin site I could find to like a Roman ruin site in China. [00:14:00] This was built in the 14th century. It's Guan Chang. What about that underground complex with rivers made of mercury? That seemed really impressive. We'll get to that, but that we'll get to that in the art section, because I go over that one in the art section, and it is not as impressive as you'd think.
But when contrasted was what Rome was doing and so, I asked AI this, cause I was like, this cannot be true, all right? So I was like, okay like where are the Roman like ruins in Japan, right? Like, and they're like, well, Japan has some ancient ruins. They're generally not as extensive or monumental.
It's all found in Rome, Angkor or Mesoamerica. However, Japan does have several significant historical sites that offer glimpses into its ancient past. So this is what, what AI came up with. So we had something called Nara, which was built 710. to 784. Nara's beautiful. You want to look up what the Nara ruins look like.
I've been. So consider what you're looking at [00:15:00] here. Like, consider this compared to any Roman ruin site you have ever been to. And we'll do a Yeah, we're still talking Lincoln Logs versus This is 700 years after Rome and it's Lincoln Logs. Yeah, like versus transporting obelisks. It's just This is cute.
Let's take it and move it. Okay,
then you're like, okay, okay, okay. So there's got to be other stuff. Well, this is the
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: 1000 at 300.
year old Buddhist temple, the Gongjing temple. So the Gongjing temple, I'm like, okay, okay, that's cool. This is just a building. This is not like a grand complex or anything like that. And it's like, okay. Okay.
Okay. Okay. So here's one. I found one that's 14, 000 to 300 BCE. It's called the Sina Majuri Mayana site. Okay. What about it? What does it look like?
Oh, this is mud huts. Okay, this is like similar to what I'm talking about, like Norwegian mud huts. Like it, it literally, I wouldn't know if this was in, my ancestors had built this in the UK before they met the [00:16:00] Romans or not. You know, like it is, it is mud hut style. And again, we're not just, people can be like, oh, well maybe the ground here wasn't good enough for building, right?
Like maybe it was too many natural disasters. Maybe they only had trees, right? And I'm like, yeah. Then how come nobody else did it? Okay, I can see that explaining Japan alone. Okay, it can't explain Japan, Korea, China, every, Africa, no, but that's not even an excuse because I, the point I was going to make about Mayans and Aztecs, for example, is that they're dealing in incredibly hostile jungle environments where you are fighting An aggressive environment, and they still managed to build a ton.
So I just don't feel like you have that much of a legitimate excuse when it comes to Well, same with the Romans. It's not like the Romans did big architecture when the weather was nice. Well, and they're right by corrosive oceans and waters and stuff. Yeah, mm mm. Pretty much every part of their empire had giant [00:17:00] works in it, whether it was a backwater like Britain or, you know, the, the Antioch, or in their African colonies.
Like, if you go to Tunisia, you can see giant Things like it's it wasn't like a sometimes they did it. Sometimes they didn't thing. So that excuse doesn't really hold So, okay. Now we're gonna go to China because of course China must China China Yes, and China is all about being like we're the OG civilization.
We did all this first. We invented electricity. We invented Aerial combat, it's we're gonna get to the Chinese claims of inventing a bunch of things as well because they were also less That face, that was a cute face. I, look, I don't like this is true. Like I always try to take the most pluralist understanding.
And the only way I can even say this theory is knowing that I come from a mud hut people. Okay? I am only comfortable disseminating this theory or even having these thoughts because my [00:18:00] ancestors had nothing to do with Rome or Greece and they were flinging poo at each other. Whatever. When, when they were gifted civilization through calling, yeah, your ancestors were literally the barbarians that Romans couldn't even bother to hang on to.
Cause they're like, you know what? There's really nothing much. So I'm mostly they literally just like built a wall and keep them out. This was the first wall, build a wall. Build a wall. Yeah. But by the way, by the way, literally
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-2: About a thousand
years before China builds the Great Wall, but we'll get to that in a second.
Speaker: It was heavily restored in both the 1950s and 1980s.
I didn't know that. Not even old bricks. Am I missing something here? So the old stuff's gone, hasn't it, really? And then it doesn't count. It shouldn't be a wonder then. You can't just build something on it and still, get all the tourists in when it's not what it says on the tin. What I'm looking at is basically a wimpy home. Bears in [00:19:00] here? What's this all about though? It's almost like they know that the wall isn't that good. It's like, what else can we give them? We've charged them like seven quid to get in to see an old wall. Well, it's not an old wall, it's from the 1980s. I've got a mate who's got some bears. Have you heard?
Stick them down at the bottom. This is the original wall, isn't it? Or is it? I don't know. Is it just badly done? This is pretty s**t, isn't it?
Are you having a laugh?
This isn't the Great Wall, is it? You kidding me? I mean, I like the way there's no tourists and that.
But then why would there be?
Okay. So the Sunning's two ruins, I was going to do pictures of it, but it's from 4, 800 years ago and it's believed to be the remnants of the Shu Kingdom. It's yielded many bronze artifacts. Basically you just see piles of artifacts and otherwise it's a fairly flat area. There's not even anything really to show you.
Then I have the Yingzhou ruins. So this is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Henan Province. Yingzhou was the ancient capital of [00:20:00] the Shang Dynasty, 16th to 11th century BC. So this was the capital of their entire civilization.
Oh, oh, sweeties. Oh, dear. Hmm. Yeah, it's very much a, oh, sweeties, that is not a civilizational capital. Crap. And I feel like, you know, as we go through this, what you're really gonna get is a It was just so convenient from like an everybody getting along standpoint that we pretended and we kept matching, I think, things that were happening thousands of years later in other parts of the world to things that like the ancient Greeks were doing.
And through not, like, putting dates on them, we were able to, in our head, have this idea that, like, different civilizations were developing sort of parallel to each other, when this just wasn't happening. Yeah, fair point. Yeah, there's just sort of the ancient [00:21:00] Japanese, and the ancient Greeks, and the ancient Chinese, and the, yeah, and the, I never thought about comparing time by time, and, I've never seen a history class do that, which is quite interesting.
So, yeah, well, and it also breaks a lot of the things because people be like, well, you should look at like, you know, why the West is winning for now. That like shows that this is all due to like geography and like accidents. And it's like, yeah, well then explain to me why, when Rome fell, the West went back to a bunch of mud hut people until somebody reignited the torch of civilization, specifically why, why is it that every time Rome left a region like Spain?
Like Spain was able to produce great art when Rome was there. They were able to produce great buildings. They had a great economy. Rome leaves. They go back to mud hut people. It's not like, no, sorry, but it's not, it's not like. Europe, it's not like it was anything special with Europe. Mm-Hmm. In fact, it didn't even start in Europe.
It really started with Egypt and Mesopotamia. Yeah. So I don't think that, like when you look at Mesopotamian ruins, which we'll get to in a second, like some of the very oldest civilizational ruins or [00:22:00] Egyptian ruins, and then you compare it to like capital of China from , it's like they're not even in the same league.
And this is now of thousands of years earlier. Yeah. So now we're gonna go to the Lru Architectural Ruins.
And note, this is an AI being exhaustive for its mate, trying to find all of the best ruins it could to impress me. .
So this is One only dating back 5, 300 years. So, you know, this is like, around when like, a little bit before Dante's Inferno was being written, and, and look at it. Well, based on what you've been saying about findings, it seems that these are people who've been more interested in clothing and accessories, and not so much grand architecture.
Well, apparently they also weren't interested in art, which we'll get to in just a second, but you can see here. The, the, the site, it's just like a flat site, like there's nothing there, it's like a few outlines of previous foundations, and that's it. Yeah, no, this looks like the beginning of a housing development that's [00:23:00] weirdly faced.
I don't know how else to describe it, but that's what I'm getting from this. It gives housing development. Yeah, and people can be like, well, you know, it was all wood or they used more wood and stuff like that. But again, like these Roman things are there, even things that used wood. And that's the really interesting thing.
You can go and look at like one civilizational areas. You can walk around. Their old buildings and in the very old churches and everything like that, you'll see wood, you'll see blah, blah, blah, you know, like you'll see stuff that is supposedly why this other stuff isn't there anymore, right? Yeah, but also I think that you should get points as a civilization for demonstrating long termist thoughts and building to last.
So when, when, when you look at ancient Mayan and Aztec I guess not that ancient, but when you look at that and, and you see these stone artifices and you see what people built, even Stonehenge, you got to admire it more because these are people who [00:24:00] are like, this has to last for thousands of years.
I'm going to build this to last instead of short term thinking. So the, the one thing that the Chinese built that was actually you know, potentially, like, equivalent in impressiveness is the Emperor Jingzong's Mausoleum, which is where the Terracotta Army is. However, the only thing that really makes it impressive is how many terracottic figurines there were.
Nothing else about the site is particularly impressive. The Rivers of Mercury were not impressive to you?
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-3: No, the rivers of mercury thing, we don't know if this is real. It's not like archeologists when they were excavating this area of found rivers of mercury. , a guy writing a hundred years after the tomb was constructed, created a mythologized account that there was these giant rivers of mercury sort of set up in the tomb. , but, , and, and we have detected that there is some mercury in the tomb, but it's not like we found it or anything.
So we don't know. It [00:25:00] could be a myth, could be a fairly modest thing.
I don't know. Like, so, so let me explain to you what I mean, like the terracotta army, like logistically speaking. It may be a lot of people, and we're going to go into the artistic merit of it later, to compare it with the equivalent Greek statues or, or other statues that were made around the same time period.
That, one, it artistically wasn't very sophisticated compared to what was going on in the Mediterranean region at that time period. Again, I'm not Mediterranean And it also was architecturally not particularly like it was something like it was a lot more than the later Chinese stuff. I'll give it like, I mean, the, the statues themselves had unique facial features from around 200 BC as well.
So, you know, pretty impressive. But again, and so now we're going to get to the last major architectural ruin site that it was able to find for me in China. And this was the Jihon Ruins and I will send this to you. Oh, that was the ones that we went over, like the well The housing development.
So, these [00:26:00] ruins in China yeah, they were the ones along the Silk Road, we went over them earlier, just not very impressive. Okay, so then people are like, well, what about the Great Wall? Right?
A great wall. I think other than the terracotta army, that's the one thing in East Asia I may give some credit to, but it was from the 7th century AD.
Well, and also No, sorry, 7th century Compare the To 17th century AD, I'm sorry I didn't make that clear. No, if you compare the Great Wall, which is a wall, I've walked the Great Wall, it is, it's a wall. It's, and it's not that big.
Speaker: This is pretty s**t, isn't it?
Are you having a laugh?
To the Roman aqueducts, they, they built walls that were water. Significantly before the Great Wall.
We'll be looking at it when we go over the Roman stuff. They had heated floors! They had heated floors in bathhouses! I mean, like, there's [00:27:00] It's just, there's no comparison. There's no comparison.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-4: And I remind you that the, , great wall was started 700 years after the Roman aqueducts were built and it wasn't finished until 1700 years after the Roman aqueducts were built. It's just not a comparable thing. Then you have been always talking with a friend about this and they're like, give this, this can't be true.
What about.
The Sui dynasties, grand canal. That was a huge things. And since. It's from a 581 to 618 a. The problem is , it was big. It was big. It wasn't one of the things that AI primary was, and it probably should have been because it's actually fairly impressive. , in terms of, , just this. The sheer size of it. The problem is, is that the sheer size of it? , or the complexity of it, it's pretty, not big compared with the Roman road network.
, again, 500 years before this. And, uh, you know, what they're doing with the canals is they're digging pits. , [00:28:00] and then they are, , lining them and putting various buffers on them so that water can flow through them. , the problem is that the Roman roads, which were much, much, much more extensive, , did the same thing you needed to dig about, , three to five feet down and then put multiple different types of layers of rock and stone down. To create these ultra durable roads, which still exist today.
, so again, civilizationally, we're just talking about a different scale here.
Okay. So. And the people are like, but what about Africa? You can't forget Africa. Africa did some things. What about Great Zimbabwe?
Okay, okay, okay. Let's look at Great Zimbabwe. I'm not familiar with Great Zimbabwe. I'm excited for this. Okay. Ooh, I like the rounded, the rounded towers. It's interesting architecturally but it's not like particularly impressive.
It looks like a No, it looks like a fortification. Yeah, it looks like a fortification, really. But it doesn't Not a particularly large [00:29:00] fortification, I'd say it's about the size of like a starfort. Yeah, if that. It looks pretty small. Yeah, it looks pretty small. And that that's like, that's called Great Zimbabwe.
That's the one thing they got there. It is not particularly impressive. Now, again, people are like, are you saying that there was no great monumental architecture or art produced in Africa? Oh, this is a medieval city. So this is not, this is,
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-5: The city began to construction in the 11th century and it was abandoned in the 15th century. So yeah, she's right. Medieval. , a thousand years after Rome was doing it stuff and it's. Nothing.
Compared to a Roman thing.
I'm like, no, I'm not saying that at all. I can go to Tunisia and see amazing architecture.
The problem is it was built while they were Roman colony. I can, I can, I can go and read great writings from Alexandria. The problem is that that's a descendant of Egypt and a lot of things for Britain during Greek or [00:30:00] Roman colonization. And people are like, What do you mean Greek or Roman colonization?
There's so many great Egyptian figures that aren't from the period of Greek colonization like Cleopatra The Ptolemaic Greek princess. Oh, yeah. Greek lady. That's the other thing about the way that the civilizational system works is it appears to sort of pass the torch on To sort of the next iterator on it.
Yes. Yeah. Yeah I mean you have argued to me many times and i'm obsessed with aegypt in various periods, right? I go through that great courses lecture and i'm like, oh, this is amazing. But You point out quite fairly that they do stagnate. They kind of just, they get really good at just keeping things the same.
And that's why I think your point about passing the torch and the collective iteration upon this one line is meaningful.
I know I'm going to show you the one exception to the one civilization theory. [00:31:00] And this is a few things in extra ancient India, specifically right now for architecture. And we're also going to go into literature because extra ancient India did compete with the one civilization in literature. Okay. It's almost like it almost had a civilizational explosion and then didn't.
So this is the Anjati and Elor caves. Those look amazing. BC. 10th century, second to 10th century BC. Okay, really old. We got it. We got a contender here. Absolutely. It may not compete with most Roman things, but it definitely competes with the Greeks who they were contemporaries of. If you've been to ancient Athens that is impressive.
And we'll keep seeing this in India. The most impressive monuments are often the oldest which is a little weird and we'll go over what might have happened there. It's the same with their literature. If you go to their like BCE literature, and this is sort of going to be a giveaway, you will find a flourishing of literature that definitely competes with the Greek literature of the time [00:32:00] period.
But if you then go 500 years, 10, 000 years in the future and you compare it with what's coming out of the one civilization it's just Like Popol Vuh stuff sorry, I don't mean to be, it's like, this animal did this, and this animal did this, and then there was the, you know, this, and it's like, oh, come on, you guys can do better than this, you guys wrote so many great works 10, 000 years ago, like, what is this?
Yeah, there seems to be absolutely nothing that will prevent a great culture from entering a dark age. If the selective pressures necessary to keep the torch bright aren't there.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-6: I will note though, that the differences between India's great works. , when contrasted with a time gait aid, great works in Europe. In the one civilization or even time lag. Great works in the, when civilization do not fall as far behind as those of China or Japan. So here, , I have on screen here, two temples, , each built [00:33:00] in.
, 12,000 CE. , and while they aren't the sorts of large complexes that were being built in Meso-America at the time or the giant giant cities and ruined structures of Rome that were built. Uh, well, 1,200 years before this, they are at least. Interesting and impressive to a degree.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-7: Generally speaking this one, civilization theory, new perspective I have has dramatically risen my view of ancient Indian civilization and ancient Mesopotamian civilization. And dramatically lowered my view of ancient east Asian civilization. Particularly China, which just sunk to almost nothing, in my opinion. , specifically. Because I used to think of them as like an equivalent to what was going on in Rome and stuff like that. And they just like factually weren't and people will be like, well, what about their economy?
What about their economy? Like whether their economy so big it's like, this is when [00:34:00] people act like Masa, Mussa represented some giant civilization happening in Africa at the time. , and yeah, I mean, there was a people and a culture there, but they weren't producing things equivalent to like what the ancient Greeks or Romans were producing.
Just having a lot of wealth doesn't translate into cultural production. And I think that this is in a way more damning that a culture with all this wealth, wasn't able to turn it into the types of things like, you know, the aqueducts or the Rome road network or the ruins. Everywhere you go, or the art or the literature.
This is a Mesopotamian ruin site that I'm sending you here. Okay. To give you an idea, to just contrast everything that we've been looking at right now this is the Mohenjar Dara. This is from 2, 500 BCE. Well, what we're looking at seems to be some kind of city complex. A [00:35:00] massive city complex. Yeah. Why doesn't China have a single one of these?
Why doesn't Japan have a single one of these? When we have one from an inhospitable region made with mud from 2500 BCE from the one culture. Well, it's not just mud, it's proper bricks, but yeah. Yeah. But what I mean is you can't just say we didn't have stones. Yeah. Yes. Right. To carve, et cetera. Yeah. This is an incredibly impressive site, but okay.
Let's also look at some other things just so you can remember for people who might've forgotten what Rome was doing and when were they doing it? The Colosseum of Rome. Consider that many of these that we've been looking at, were around the 10th century, right? Was made in 72 AD the Colosseum of Rome.
Like nothing that we have looked at to me comes at like one 10th, even close the Colosseum. Well, and, and most people are accustomed to seeing the Colosseum ruins and not thinking about how it was with [00:36:00] mechanical floors. You know, this, this big, underground complex, like the Colosseum literally had naval battles in the center of it, right?
Yeah, we don't presently have even stadiums that do the same level of crazy s**t that the Coliseum did. So there may be cruise ships are pretty impressive. I, I, I know they're, they're seen as so trashy, but I'm just so impressed by cruise ships. There's like these amazing spaceships. So now what I'm sending you here, this is from 80 to 212.
Okay. This is the Baths of Karkala. Okay, yeah, we've got towers, we've got complex buildings, this is an archways, yeah. Unique architectural elements, this is a buried building, yeah, alright.
So this is an aqueduct from 1 AD in an outer territory in France, okay? Point de Garde, France. This is dramatically [00:37:00] more impressive than, like, The Great Wall, for example. Yeah, huh, yes. And it's literally hundreds of years earlier, many hundreds of years earlier.
Speaker: This is the original wall, isn't it? Or is it? I don't know. Is it just badly done? This is pretty s**t, isn't it?
Are you having a laugh?
This isn't the Great Wall, is it? You kidding me?
So, now we're gonna look at Pola Arena, and this is in Croatia, 27 BC. , but it basically looks like the Colosseum. And, okay, we're like, what about distant? Because people kept hearing me talk about Tunisia, right? Like, what was Tunisia like, okay?
This is Tunisia in 238 AD. So, like, distant colony, right? This is what Rome was putting up in Africa. Backwater. Whoa, what? It's just another, whoa! Okay, sorry, this is, it's very, it's a very impressive [00:38:00] coliseum building. Yeah, it is an impressive Coliseum building. That is so wild. And it was 238, which is way before any of the other sites that we're looking at.
Now, we haven't gotten to the art or, or, or, or literature yet, okay? But so far, because when I first brought this theory up to you, you were like, that cannot possibly be true. Yes. Are you beginning to be like, oh, this is a bit bigger than I thought it was, in terms of the scale of differences? I'm, I'm kind of already sold.
I, I'm concerned about this now, because it's going to make me. Look really bad at parties if I bring this up. Thank goodness. I don't go to parties anymore
Those were all built later in the one civilization, let's go to the Athenian temple ruins. Okay, so these were built in 432 BC
Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I always hear. It's literally better than a single set of ruins I was able to find anywhere in Japan or China. Yeah, massive columns still standing after [00:39:00] so many years. No, actually, I think the columns fell down at one point and it was rebuilt. Oh, okay. Okay. But that was recently that they fell down.
I think it was due to like bombing and like the Napoleonic campaign.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-8: It was 1687 and it was an explosion caused by Venetian bombardment that severely damaged the temple causing many of the columns to fall. So they stayed up till 1687.
I don't know. I'll have to find it. But yeah, they stood for a very, very, very, very long time. The same was Egypt. Like nothing in any of these other places comes close to Egypt. Really the only place you get close again is super ancient India and then nothing from up into modern times.
Wow. Okay. Yeah. Okay, and I'll put on screen here some pictures of, like, Roman settlements in Turkey and Spain. So you can see this isn't like an isolated thing. It's like, literally, I can't find a single thing from these other civilizations, and yet everywhere the Romans go, they're building something. So if I'm anticipating what listeners are thinking, it's, okay, fine.
Your point is made about [00:40:00] architecture. I'll believe in the one great culture or civilization theory of architecture, maybe literature, which you brought up. But, I don't know, like, the art, who cares, like, I've, I've been to so many, I don't know, like, you know, Asian art museums to, refute this, and Yes, and the reason why that refutation works in your head is because you haven't compared cross time when the Asian art you're looking at was made versus when the Greek art was made.
Okay, I'll go straight to art instead of literature. I was gonna read a bunch of literature texts, but no. We'll go straight to art, alright? So I just decided to do
so, a random search for Greek art, and this was the first picture that came up. You know, there's lots of beautiful Greek statues, ancient Greek statues. Oh, yeah. This picture came up, and this is 440 BC. Okay. 440 BC. Okay. Wow. You're looking at the statue, right? So it's so [00:41:00] realistic. For those who are only listening, we're looking at a classic Greek statue, but it's a very highly polished polished marble of a nude male with, you know, extremely realistic detail.
This could just be. A human who is painted and is naked, but you know, very small penis for whatever reason. And yeah, that's the only part of it that doesn't seem realistic. Yeah. And I had this moment where I asked Google, I go, okay, give me examples of Japanese art from 440 BC. Like, first I said statues because I wanted to compare like was like, yeah, there are no Japanese statues from 440 BC and I was like, wait, this can't be real.
So I managed to find some piece of Japanese art from this time period. Oh, dear. Oh I don't know what this is, but stylistically, but this could just be that we're biased, you know? We're looking at very dis No! No human in history, if you showed, I guarantee you, if you showed that Greek [00:42:00] statue to somebody from most of Japanese history and you prefer this or this Japanese art, they'd be that effing statue.
I know, I know. Yeah, you show that to like a Japanese person, like, and you know, I guess if you delivered that Greek statue. To someone in that same period of Japan, they would be extremely, they would prefer to have the Greek statue for sure. Yes. You want to know what my ancestors were doing during this period?
Yeah, I'm sure nothing that impressive, right? You're gonna get a kill it with fire moment here oh, what? No! That is literally the best my ancestors were able to do when the Greek were, were putting on this like Perfect physique of humanity and then the, the, the my ancestors are like
Speaker 2: Welcome [00:43:00] to Jurassic Park.
yeah, I'm getting that meme where like they begin to play John Williams, Jurassic park theme.
And then it goes to like a recorder playing it terribly. Oh yeah. The recorder playing one. Oh no, it's terrible. Oh, I need to not look at that. I need to look at the statue again, the papylic cleanser, even though it has a micro penis. Okay, okay. What about the Chinese? What did they have? Well, again, with the Chinese, I ran into one of these problems.
I was like, give me statues that the Chinese made around 440 BC. And they were like, Chinese didn't make any statues around 440 BC. And I was like, okay, so what were they making? [00:44:00] It goes, well, they were very skilled bronze crafters. So I will show you a bronze bell, and they also carved jade well. I like bells.
And a green pendant from China during this period. And you've got to click on it to open it. Pendants? Okay. Okay. I mean, yeah. It looks like it was made by a kindergartner. Yeah, it's not very impressive. The bell's fairly impressive. I mean, that requires metal forging. That requires technology. And so I admire that.
The bronze is not a difficult metal to forge, Simone. We're in the Bronze Age here. The, the, the Okay, anyway. But, but Again, like, just nothing really there, and so you can be like, Okay, the Terracotta Army, alright? Yes. It must compete with that Greek statue we looked at. No. There's two little problems here.
One, the Terracotta Army is literally 200 years after that. And two, you might not have looked at the Terracotta Army up close. No, I, yeah, no, it doesn't come, it doesn't come close. The, the, the Terracotta Army is impressive [00:45:00] in its mass customization and its scale. It is not impressive because the statues themselves are really You might forget just how unimpressive it is compared to that Greek statue.
I just sent it to you so you can compare it. No, I, I, I have a pretty good, let's see if, if memory is accurate here yeah. Yeah. That's exactly what I pictured. But okay now we're gonna get to and you always find ancient ancient india that's where you get things that come pretty close. This is india a few hundred years after those greek statues Okay. Okay. It's, it's nowhere close, but it is like in the realm of contention. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and, and they're, they're going for fan service here in a way I would argue kind of matches the fan serviceness of the Greek statue.
So, yeah, we've got polished stone, you know, very, very, very skilled stone work. So, yeah, this is, this is good. [00:46:00] Yeah. And you could argue Malcolm that the lack of. We'll say photorealistic accuracy is a stylistic choice here. So yeah, I'm gonna give this credit. Yeah, I'll give it credit. But again, this falls into my thing is something seemed to be happening in India, but it seemed to have died out.
And this will be more clear when we talk about literature and stuff like that. But yeah Now people will go like, ah, but China, they had so many great inventions. And so I was like, yeah, I had remembered this. I was like gunpowder. And then as I started going back to it, I was like gunpowder's doing an awful lot of heavy lifting in my brain right here.
When I'm trying to think of Chinese invention. I'm thinking flaming lanterns that have explosives. Am I getting this wrong? Gunpowder again. Gunpowder is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. So when you look at the things that China invented that the West did not invent, you do have some impressive things.
You have papermaking, second century A. D. [00:47:00] Awesome. I will point out, though, that 3000 B. C. E. papyrus was invented. Now, paper is cheaper to make, lasts longer and, and easier to, to, like, store. So just, like, strictly better. Yeah. So you got papermaking. Okay. Definitely gonna give them that. Yes. You got woodblock printing.
This is in the 6th and 7th century. And that's good. That's great. Gunpowder the 9th century. That's a good one. Okay. Then you got the compass in the 11th to 12th century That's a good one. That's awesome. Yes. Yeah. But here's the problem. When I started trying to, to, to investigate this, it's not really an invention.
That's a by product of an insect, but yeah, no, come on. Okay. So we'll count silk. So we have paper making. Printing, gunpowder, the compass, and silk, and the one civilization, you know what they invented? Literally everything else. That's the problem. Okay, whoops, [00:48:00] yeah, that's Gunpowder, and all of the things you see here are not things that require civilizational infrastructure to invent.
They're not actually particularly complex inventions, they're more like discoveries of like chemical phenomenon. Right? That's the problem with this, okay? Or, or a unique process for making something, right? I'm not saying that these regions never had, like, great individuals who would come up with these interesting ideas.
I'm just saying that whatever this civilizational infrastructure that seems to have spread through the one in civilization did, is it gave these people the ability To crank out tons, tons, tons more stuff Then you would get an equivalent great mind in one of these other civilizations And so we need to figure out why but I need to continue to go with proving my point because i'm not done with proving My point yet specifically what I mean is like if a [00:49:00] leonardo da vinci had been born in japan For whatever reason he wouldn't have had the infrastructure To be as voluminous and diverse in the things he was producing You But, sorry, I need to go to literature because you, yeah, you got me off the ball when we got to literature.
Okay,
literature. Well, as you remember, a lot of the literature that we think of as being like the definitive works of China are actually pretty late, like The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and The Journey to the West, 14th and 16th century respectively, well after something like The Divine Comedy. You do which was written in the 13th century.
You do get some, and I don't think of, the reason I'm using the Divine Comedy here is because I think of the Divine Comedy as being a fairly modern work within the tradition of the once signatory. You know, I'm not going back to something like the Aeneid or the Odyssey for great works here. Yeah, the Divine Comedy honestly reads like fanfiction.
It reads like fanfiction, but the reason I'm using it as my benchmark [00:50:00] is, in my mind, the Divine Comedy is a modern work. And so, when I say that these works are hundreds of years after the Divine Comedy, I'm saying they are very, very modern works. Well, and there's also, like, Machiavelli's The Prince, which I think is probably a better piece of literature to refer to, because it's more product of, like, It's less derivative
that was written 1513. Okay, so that would have been written at around the same time as you know, well, a bit before the journey to the West and a bit after romance of the three kingdoms. Yeah, and I would say, as somebody who's read excerpts from all of those and actually spent a significant amount of time studying the prince, the prince.
blows their pants off in terms of its complexity and depth. It still has good advice for people today where you're like, dang, that's a good point. Where I don't, you know, read Journey to the West and I'm like, wow, that's a good point. That really changes my perspective. And how I interact with people.
Yeah, you're taking it and acting differently after reading it. That's fair. [00:51:00] But yeah, well, because it's, it's just at a level of sophistication that's like not even remotely touched in these, these other regions but okay, come on, let's, let's keep going here. So, we got the book of songs, which is ancient Chinese poetry, again, poetry, which is like fine.
Like I've read a little bit of it. It's fine. is the 11th century to 7th century BCE, which is like good, but it's like, like generic old stuff.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-9: For an example, here is a poem from it called FishHawk. The fish Hawk calls high above the water. It flies. I long for my beloved, who is far away from my side.
It doesn't really, you know, I'm not particularly impressed with it when I compare it to something like the Iliad. Right. And, you know, then you got the records of the grand historian.
This is the first century BCE, a comprehensive history of China written by Sima Quan, which is like, cool that they had historians, but like. The One Civilization doesn't have, like, the one historian. It's got, like, hundreds of historians that we rely on. Just, like, the [00:52:00] rate it produced historians was also way, way, way higher.
And then people can be like, Well, you know, what about the art of war? 5th century China.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-23: BCE.
First of all, have you read The Art of War? I've read parts of The Art of War. It's not a Yuri impressive work.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-10: If you haven't read the art of war, here's an example of some quotes from it that AI thought were particularly poignant. The quality of a decision is like a well-timed swoop of a Falcon, which enables it to strike and destroy its victim. Or. If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
Secondly, the reason why, I'm like, do you happen to know if a similar canon was had in The One Civilization?
And they're like, you know, I never really looked into that. And I'm like, why haven't you looked into that? And I'm like, well, because I guess it would be totally unimpressive if one did exist. I would [00:53:00] sort of expect the ancient Greeks or Romans to have a book on how to do war. And they did. They, they had who wrote it was Aeneas Tacticus.
That's where the word tactics comes from. In fact, He had a whole series of them. He had such a comprehensive series of these books that only one survives today, and it's on specifically how to survive long sieges, and it goes into detailed stuff, like how you build things in the harbors to prevent the boats from entering.. So just dramatically more detailed and practical than the art of war. And it was like a whole encyclopedia on how to do war. And it was considered so. Unimpressive within the time period when contrasted with the other works. No, they couldn't be bothered to save it.
Wow. Didn't click save. Yeah. Read it and didn't bookmark it. Whoops. Didn't bookmark it, but we can tell from the one book that it was basically an entire encyclopedia on the [00:54:00] practicalities of how to do war within that time period. Wow. That is, I mean, yeah, and you're right. It's not at all surprising that something like that would have existed.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-11: Th this is not to say that he doesn't have the short little piffy quotes similar to the art of war. So we just go through a few of these that. AI thought were relevant. And I think the judges see that the quality of them is much higher and there they come off as more profound to me. , so these are from tacticals. In war events of great importance are often the result of trivial causes.
A bad piece is even worse than a war.
The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.
It belongs to human nature to hate those who you have injured. That last one, I just think is really profound. It is human nature. To decide to hate someone that you have injured. And it's something I see so often. And that's like, actually even like in a modern time, like a profound quote, that's not like a live, laugh, love sort of a quote, which unfortunately a lot of the [00:55:00] divorce stuff kind of is.
So, you got me on the literature, too. Okay, hold on. No, no, no, no, no. We're gonna give every civilization their fair shot. Oh, are you gonna dunk on Beowulf again? Because I feel like on every single episode we've done recently, you find some obscure opportunity to dunk on Beowulf. Oh, Beowulf is gonna get dunked on.
Beowulf is I don't, well, I dug on it because it's my ancestors. It's your ancestors. It was, it was written you know, so, so, so long. It's like Gilgamesh quality, right? People are like, it has themes. It has narrative through lines. It has themes. It was slightly coherent. I'm like, oh my god, just, sweetheart, you know, that it is not a product of a civilization.
It is a product of people who flung poo at each other. It is, it is not complicated. When contrasted with contemporary works produced by the one civilization before they deemed to uplift my people. But let's go to Japan here. So. Okay, okay, [00:56:00] okay. We got a good one here. We got Manayushi, the collection of 10, 000 leaves, compiled around 759.
A magnificent anthology of poetry containing around 4, 500 poems, mostly Takana and some Choka. And so I was like, oh, oh, this is great. Okay. Well, so what sort of poems were they? One of the most well known is an attribute to kantemoto A prominent poet from the 7th to early 8th sailed it. I'm just loving the pronunciation of these names Okay, the pop express is longing for a loved one and uses imagery of nature to convey emotion and I want to while we will be shitting on japanese art right now My favorite artistic production in the world is done by japan I predominantly watch anime and read manga.
I think that this is not an ethnic thing against the Japanese. I think that they produce some of the best artistic work in the world. And I said that I think the Koreans produce the best drama in the world out of the drama I've seen. [00:57:00] This is not saying that they can't produce this stuff. It's just saying that they Once they're touched by the one civilization as my ancestors needed to be, then they became able to produce this stuff.
So, the poem expresses a longing for a loved one and uses imagery of nature to convey the emotion. It's like, that is a very simplistic thing, and it's from the 7th to 8th century. Okay so, and then in another one, in this Tanaka, Hidemoto compares his feelings of longing to the rising smoke from Mount Fuji.
The imagery of smoke rising endlessly into the sky parallels the depths and persistence of the poet's emotions. I didn't know Mount Fuji was an active volcano for that long. Another famous poem from the Monoyoshi is Yamba no Ashitiko, which describes the beauty of Mount Fuji covered in snow. This poem uses vivid natural imagery to create a striking visual scene.
Hmm. Now, that is just that. I'm sorry, like, you can be like, oh, it's really touching. No, saying mountain is beautiful is not an [00:58:00] impressive feat. It's really touching, but that's, that's, that's 700 years after the Aeneid, you know, that is, that is just not particularly impressive when I look at the complexity of something like the Aeneid.
And even when the Aeneid is not like, this is the thing, when I'm looking for like Japanese work, like, it'll bring up like these, like five, like, these are the great things. In Rome, like you forget about tons of work because they just had to So many, many, many awesome things or the Greek plays that like, we don't even have any more.
Cause they were like, Oh yeah, that was a great play that was like as good as this other play we still have. But like, yeah. But like, haven't you heard of season five? It's so much better. Yeah. Okay. So the tale of Genji, which you went on about that's from the 11th century. All right. So let's, let's go into the tale of Genji here.
So keep in mind 11. over , 000 years after the Aeneid. One famous example is the Yugao chapter, which describes Genji's romance with a mysterious woman of lower rank. In this chapter, Genji disguises himself as a hunter to visit [00:59:00] Yugao in secret. The story creates a dreamlike atmosphere. It portrays their clandestine meeting and budding relationship.
What? That's like just, that's like something you would see in the Iliad. Yeah, well, yeah, and also talking about sex and relationships is not interesting. I think what also makes the Iliad really interesting, and the Odyssey as well, is that it takes the fact that men and women can be attracted to each other for granted and then talks about the way that these basal human instincts conflict with civilizational needs.
You know, it talks about a deeper theme and yeah, like, oh, you know, Paris's attraction to Helen ultimately was extremely damaging. And here's what happens when you succumb to those basal needs. And then also you elevate the, the wife of Odysseus, who, despite having every reason to believe that her husband was dead.
used her wiles and used her intelligence to [01:00:00] stave off a bunch of suitors who are basically sieging her home. And just for context here, the stories she's talking about are from 725 to 675 BCE. Yeah, yeah.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-12: The tale of dingy to contrast with written in the early 11th century. Consider how long it took them to not even surpass the one civilization in terms of what they're writing. And if you want an example of like short quotes from the tale of Genji, they're supposed to be like, Piffy regulatory things.
You can sort of connect them with what we went over from tactical. Or what we went over from Shenzhou , here are some quotes. Real things in the darkness seem no realer than dreams. There are as many sorts of women as there are women. No art or learning is to be pursued halfheartedly. And any art worth of learning will certainly reward more or less generously the effort made to study it. The world.
No it not, but you autumn. I confess it. You're wind at night, fall [01:01:00] stabs deep into my heart. Life is full of uncertainties. Perhaps one day some unforeseen circumstance would bring her into this life once more.
Just as a reminder for like the type of things that you're getting from tacticals who you probably haven't even heard of because these routine is just like, Mundane within his period. , it belongs to human nature to hate those. You have injured.
And keep in mind, tacticals was writing about 1000 years before the tale of Genji was written.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-13: And I'd like to point out that if you are from one of these cultural groups and you feel deeply offended that I'm saying all of the things. Keep in mind. I am saying them from the perspective of my own culture. Did nothing until it was touched by the one true culture.
My ancestors produced nothing. They produced less than even what your ancestors produced.
I have the humility to admit this, and I think. Accepting the one civilizations theory. It's a lot about just having the humility to [01:02:00] admit that cultures that you might have personally identified ways in some way, whether it was because you lived there for awhile or whether it was because you married someone from that culture or whether it's because they represent your own ancestors, that they may not actually be. That. As impressive as you thought they were.
And that may be, we can all admit that we are children of one culture, and it's not a culture that I. Have any ownership of myself.
So I think that's really interesting. And also the fact that, Another through line through, especially in the Iliad, this obsession with lineage, you know, son of so and so, son of so and so.
There is again, this focus on long termism of this interest of anyone in their role in an unbroken chain of history, rather than their feelings in the moment, which, you know, looking at a mountain and thinking it's pretty is all about your feelings in the moment, or like being caught up in a relationship or romance.
This is about short term. [01:03:00] Hindbrain thinking and you see that like, when you look at literature of ancient Greece ancient Rome or the stories and plays, it is all about the battle between the prefrontal cortex and the hindbrain, which I see to be the height of humanity. I agree. So well, let's go to another one.
So the another piece of famous Japanese literature the pillow book, this was written around sounds so Japanese, the pillow book. So Daki Makura, early, a collection of observation essays by Sae Shagon. So this is from 10,000 years at least. They had a thing for pillows for a long time. Yeah. We may be about a thousand years after Rome. Okay. We may be about a thousand years after things like the India, but, but surely this was an incredibly sophisticated book. Let's go over some of, like, I asked for one of the most famous ones in it, right?
So you gave me an example. Or I might have just looked at it and then just chose in the first example I found, but anyway, this is what it is. A white coat worn over a violet waistcoat, duck eggs, shaved ice, [01:04:00] mixed linoleum soup, and put in a silver bowl, a rosary rock crystal, wisteria blossoms, plum blossoms covered with snow, a pretty child eating strawberries.
That, that's it. That's one of their great pieces of literature from that period. That was AI trying to impress me with the very best Was that an excerpt? Or was it trying to summarize interesting visual elements? No, it was an excerpt. That's the way it's written. It's just interesting things that somebody saw.
Isn't that interesting though, how that shows up in anime? Where like, anime just doesn't Throws in like random moments of like cherry, like blossoms falling or like a bowl and beautiful life. I'm not going to say that they didn't capture things. It just doesn't. I find it really interesting that like this still exists as this like element of the Japanese people where they like can't stop obsessing about the beauty of small moments.
I'm not saying that it doesn't have artistic merit. What I'm saying is. No, it doesn't. I'm just. And I'm not arguing that. That it's lacking either. I'm also not arguing that it's sophisticated. I just think it's really interesting that they haven't shaken this like ability [01:05:00] to appreciate in some kind of profound way.
The beauty of mundane situations, but it's not sophisticated, complex or multilayered. No. And again, it's not about this. It's not long term. It's not about the interplay between. The prefrontal cortex and the hindbrain it is it is a sort of different aesthetic thing, but it's not yeah Okay, so let's look at famous Japanese work from around the divine comedy So I can use that as a benchmark of like broadly modern stuff But before they were really interacted with by the West.
Okay. So here you have something called tether giga and there's a famous line in it. So this is an example of like what we're dealing with in terms of intellectualism and everything, no matter what it may be, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting and gives one feeling that there is room for growth.
I'm like, okay, like middle school or notebook thoughts. And again like it's, it's, it's competent, but you, you would have expected something like this from the Greeks. Like 000 years earlier, you would have not only [01:06:00] that early invasion like this, I feel like you would have been made fun of by anybody. So, if you're talking about, like, anything written in my people's area All you really have is King Alfred's reign, where they did some histories, and this was in 871 to 899, so like basically nothing, like one history and everybody seems to have a history down here or there, and then you've got like effing Beowulf 975, 975.
To 1025. So, Beowulf and again, is at, at a quality of literature level, like sophistication level equivalent to Gilgamesh, which was written 2,100 BC to 1,200 bc. Like, you cannot say that these two civilizations were anything alike. And then if you compare Beowulf with contemporary, like even like the Aeneid, it's, it's child like in comparison.
My ancestors [01:07:00] were unbebugging until the, the the one civilization touched them. So here is where you get the really interesting side here, which is India. Okay. Now I've, I've read some of these, so I'm familiar with their quality. I'd say that they are I'd put them in between, in terms of sophistication, Gilgamesh and the Odyssey.
They're not quite at the Odyssey level, like, their stories don't have as strong of narrative throughlines, or as strong of theming, and they're frankly not as entertaining to read. But they are definitely slightly more sophisticated than something like Gilgamesh. So this is when you're going to ancient India.
Specifically, you have the Vedas. Yes. 1500 to 500 BCE. So ex civilizationally, I think above where like Gilgamesh was during that time period.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-14: If you would like an example of text from each that could help you because I think some people could be like, well, that's like a, a judgment, right? Like that's not like an objective fact that this is sort of in between Gilgamesh and the Elliott. And I'm like, well, you think that maybe because you haven't read it in a while, or you are mythologizing what you have read. [01:08:00] So here's an example of texts from the Vedas. Ooma appeared to the gods and said, It is Brahman who. Has won this victory.
And in this victory of Brahman, you have become elated. Indra approached her and asked, who are you? She replied. I am Ooma the daughter of him event No, that it was Brahman who gave you victory in the battles you have won. It is through the power of Brahman that you have become great.
It was from her that Indra learned that the being they had encountered was indeed Brahman. Then Andrew approached Angie and Vajra and said you two seem to have known this being closely. Can you tell me more about it? They replied,
what is there to know, we too are puzzled Indra then said to them, let us all go to Brahman to gain knowledge. Now , the, this is just a random, I just asked, find a section from the Vedas to an AI. , where, , people are interacting with each other.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-15: So here's a S D a I that gave me that one. I said, find a similar section from the [01:09:00] Iliad. Achilles you coward you greedy heart. How can archaea and the soldier obey you gladly either to go on a mission or to fight in battle with all his strengths. I didn't come here to fight because of a quarrel with Trojans.
They've never done me any harm, but you mighty shameless, man. We followed you to please you to an honor from the Trojans for you, you dog face and for mentalis,
you don't look at that. You don't think about it. And now you threatened to seize my prize in person something. I worked hard for a gift from a Keon sons, Agamemnon by all means flee. If that's your heart's desire, I'm not begging you to stay on my account. I have others here who will respect me, especially all wise. Zeus. Of all God fostering Kings your, the man.
I hate the most. You always love to fight and war. So what if you're strong? That's just a gift from God.
You have the AADs, this is 800 to 200 BC [01:10:00] aad. You had AP May, which is 500 to 100 bbc. You have Mahata. This is 400 BC to 400 ce. And then you've got the bga.
Gita, this is 200 BC to 200 CE. The problem is we're going to pronunciation hall. I think I'm going to pronunciation hell. I can't do this. The problem is, is you just can't get much after that. Like, like this is all like all this BC stuff, like similar to when the Greeks were doing all this and then it just disappears and you go further and you're getting stuff.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-16: So I want to make note here that I'm not saying that in India, they stopped producing works of literature during this period. , what I'm saying is the works of literature stopped advancing in their complexity significantly. , and multilayered illness. This narrative ability to convey characters. So as an example here, if you're looking as much as I like the Iliad, the Elliot is still fairly primitive.
If you compare it to something like the Aeneid, which is just orders of [01:11:00] magnitude more sophisticated and interesting. And. , an easier fun read. , now if we go to India, And you look at something like.
We can go to the sweat Putin us. But, banana in a dream by Basa. And this is the second to fourth century. Ady and I read a quote from that. , oh, yeah. Done. What will you do? Bhagavata I shall be king of a right-size chamber man with a skill in hairdressing. Ooh, God. And what will drop high?
I do. Vasavada. I'll call myself Sarah Hedy. and again, this is just randomly chosen by an AI. So this isn't me like trying to pick something that's like boring or simplistic.
Okay, let's keep going. Let's look at the slip. Kira the story of anklet, , written in the fifth and sixth century 80. So again, I asked AI for a quote from this one.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-16: who are you? Nobel ones. Where are you headed on this difficult paths? Kaia Niki. I am Kaia Niki. Nikki. And this is my husband Cova lawn. We're traveling to . My Duryea to [01:12:00] start a new COVID line. Respected aesthetic. We seek your blessing for our, our journey. Covata the pass ahead is treacherous filled with wild bees and bandits. Are you prepared for such hardships, Kaia Niki. We have each other and our love will give us drinks.
Please guide us. Why is one.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-16: very well. I shall accompany you to the outskirts of Madara, but remember, virtue is your true protector in this world.
So I asked the same AI, right after asking you to generate the, to pick a line from the India. So keep in mind that the need would have been. What 500 years before that last one I read in 200 years before the one before that.
Dido distraught. It says imminent departure confronts him. Dido where you hoping to slip away in secret cruel one. Did you think you could leave this land and me without a word death? Her love me, nothing to you, nor the pledge we made. Do you not see my tears? And he is torn between his feelings for Dido and his divine mission [01:13:00] responds. My queen. I will never deny what you deserve, nor will I ever regret the time we shared. I did not mean to leave in secret, but the gods command me to go to Italy.
This is not my choice, but my duty. Dido. Unconvinced and heartbroken replies. Neither goddess was your mother. Nor Darius the founder of your line, you trader no, you were born of the harsh, Caucasian rocks and nursed by hurricane tigers.
So. Again, I just, there's no comparison. , and it's very interesting to me, the level of that, the level of sophistication of literature with higher in very early India. , but didn't advance. At the same rate that it was within the one culture.
Like it's, it's really shocking that you don't get this same development from here. And then if we're comparing like just time periods here, Homer's Iliad, eighth century BC, Homer Odyssey, eighth century BC. If you're looking at tragedies here, so keep in mind, it's not just like the [01:14:00] Iliad that we're going to here.
You got opiates, Rex 429 BC, you got, uh, 531 BCE. You got Ashkali's Australia Trilogy 458 BCE. And when I'm talking about like Greek tragedy again, I don't feel like the Indian stuff really compares. If you're being honest with yourself and you've read both, it just doesn't have the same narrative through lines or multi layered stories.
And then, okay, let's go to philosophy. You got Plato's Republic, 380 BCE and Aristotle's Poetics, 335 BCE. Now I want you to compare something like Aristotle's work or something like that with just to get an idea of like the civilizational distance here in terms of complexity with something like the art of war.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-17: So these would have been approximate contemporaries. If we go for the art of war, you would have all warfare is based on deception hints. When able to attack, [01:15:00] we must seem unable when using our forces, we must seem inactive.
When we are near, we must make the enemy. Believe we are far away. When far away we must make him believe we are near hold out Bates to entice the enemy. Feign disorder and crush him. Good advice, but also fairly obvious. , now let's go to Aristotle and this is on Essex. Virtue then it's a state of character concerned with choice. Lying in a mean, I eat the mean relative to us. This being determined by irrational principle and by the principle, by which man of practical wisdom would determine it.
Now it is mean between two vices. That which depends on excess and that which depends on defect. And again, it is a mean because the vices respectively fall short or of, or exceed what is right in both passions and actions while virtue, both finds and chooses that, which is immediate.
Now again, you can't be like, oh, this is because one's a translation and one's not a translation because they're both translations and bows from culture is [01:16:00] very different from my own.
But just the level of sophistication between the two cultures is quite distant.
So, contrast something like Plato's Republic with Shenzhou's Art of War, if you're familiar with both of them.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-18: Plato's Republic and Arctic. We're also contemporaries. If you're wondering how they can be contemporary yet, you know, It needs to be. Cause we don't know exactly when the art of war was written. It was written between a period and that period covers both when Aristotle was writing. And when played out with writing. Anyway. So another quote from the art of warm. Therefore just as water retains, no constant shape. So in warfare, there are no constant conditions. He who can modify his tactics in relation to his opponent and thereby succeed in winning may be called a heaven born captain. And then here is Plato's Republic.
Just consider the depth of thought difference between these two. and this is a fairly famous one from Plato's Republic, which is, I guess, why the AI chose it. Not again, not me picking and choosing. Imagine human beings living in an underground dim which has a mouse open towards the light and reaching all along the [01:17:00] den. Here they have been from their childhood. And have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move and can only see before them being prevented by the chains from turning around their heads. Above and behind them, a fire is blazing at a distance in between the fire and the prisoners.
There is.
A raised way. And you will see if you look a low wall built along the way, like a screen, which marionette players have in front of them over which they showed the puppets.
And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall, carrying all sorts of vessels and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials. Which appear over the wall. Some of them are talking. They're silent. You have shown me a strange image and they are strange prisoners like ourselves.
I replied and they see only their own shadows or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave. True. He said, how could they see anything? But the shadows, if they were never allowed to move their heads [01:18:00] and of the objects, which are being carried and in a like, manner,
they would only see the shadows. Yes. He said, And if they were able to converse with another,
would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them? Very true.
Yeah, that's embarrassing. Yeah, the Sun Tzu's Art of War is genuinely like at a fill us up, like vague, fairly obvious advice. And Plato's Republic is like, how do we build the perfect civilization? We could do X, but that might not work. So what if we did Y, crazy thing? And what if we do like, you know, Z, crazy thing? Like, it's just Not at the same level. And then you're like, well, you know, they must've stopped as well.
No, we'll go to like ancient Roman literature. As we go to 19 BCE. It was Virgil's Aeneids. You go to Horace's Odes, 23 You go to Ovid's Metamorphoses, that's 8 CE. You go to Marcus Aurelius Meditations, 170 BCE. to 180 CE. And again, like Marcus Aurelius's meditations, compare that to like art of war, compare [01:19:00] that to a lot of this stuff that we're seeing come out of Japan, like 800 years later.
It just isn't comparable. Now I want to show you again that this is a specifically this one chain of civilization thing. Okay.
This has, and I want to be clear here, absolutely nothing to do with Europe, European people, or European genetics. It is a specific memetic cluster. And that is made very clear by this chart. So this chart chosen notable philosophers and scholars in Europe from the 7th century BC to the 14th century AD.
Whoa. And you will note, Rome fell in the 5th century and Charlemagne rose in the 9th century. And between those two periods, they are basically mud hut people producing nothing. Wow. And I think this also shows just the height of ancient Greek civilization in terms of the sophistication of that civilization.
So, so, this is, this is just what I say here. So, what do you need for this, right? And we [01:20:00] talked for a lot about this, and we came up with some ideas. Now, I think something that tries to look at this from a, well, the climate was different, doesn't really work. Yes, you do not like the guns, germs, and steel.
Answer to this question. Yeah, because it doesn't explain why everything goes back to mud huts. When Rome goes away, it does. It does not explain that. Well, why is it that Britain can become a like civilized area when Rome is there? But when Rome goes away, they go back to hitting each other with clubs.
What, why they go back to murdering children and then bury them under bridges to is like witch spells and stuff like that. Hmm. Why, why, why, why, why, why. This is and, and, and I also, the reason why people are drawn in by these environmental explanations is. They remove the need to ask hard questions.
Okay. And I don't think that you can get a genetic answer to this, like, because clearly it worked wherever [01:21:00] Rome was. It worked when Rome was in Africa. It worked when the civilization spread to the Mesopotamian river Valley. It worked in my Unga Bunga caveman ancestors in Britain, right? Like it worked everywhere.
It was applied. That's the thing about this. It's not like a. Oh, environmental thing. So what we came to is that you need an environment where lazy rich people want to do science and, and explore the nature of reality. If you look at, it's not, so you need two things, right? You need enough civilizational infrastructure.
Like you need a meme company that can create enough civilizational infrastructure where you have trade and you have people who are like, you need, you need enough affluence to create. some opportunity for leisure. But then in that leisure time, you have to want to explore the true nature of reality and the way things actually functionally work.
And we came to the conclusion that to get to [01:22:00] that place, you need to have a certain element of varied pluralism, because if you don't have that, there will be not that much. There will be an absence of competitive forces that encourage, that enable those who are somehow correct, more correct about reality to win.
So why we think this didn't happen, for example, in Imperial China or Feudal Japan is because there was too much uniformity, meaning that there wasn't, like, competing and being really, really different. And, and more correct about reality wasn't how you were going to win. You would win through brute force by getting enough resources by Yeah, so I like the way that you, when you were explaining it to me, I thought you had a slightly more eloquent way of putting it.
Which is you need a pluralistic yet unified people proud of their differences, but they see themselves as one [01:23:00] unit against some external existential threat that they see as wholly different from them. So examples, and it appears that the one civilization does best whenever it's in those environments.
So for example, it did really well in the Greek city states where the Greek city states. Also, each other is like radically different. And, and it, but the outsiders, they were something wholly other, right? But they were also totally separate from each other and competing, or it did really well during the period of European city states competing with each other.
Yeah. You know, after the age of Charlemagne, it did really well. It did really, but all those groups, you know, they would fight each other, but when a crusade would happen, it's like, okay, everyone come together. Let's, let's go. It did really well in the Muslim, the Islamic empire, but the Islamic empire was also like that.
It was very fracturous in the way that it's different parts functioned. It did very well in the Roman empire. But again, anyone who's actually studied Roman history, the Roman empire was always dividing and then recombining and dividing and [01:24:00] recombining with a lot of factions with a lot of factions that had a degree of ideological diversity, where you would argue against.
Someone else
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-19: I will note that the one civilization. Appears to be dramatically less intellectually, , and more broadly, I guess I'd say civilizationally productive in terms of its advancement, whenever it is being housed within a more homogenous empire. So yes, Rome was fractured, but it was hardly as ideal a situation as the ancient Greek city states or the later competing European countries.
, and I think that that is why in Rome, you had a slow. Slow down of the advancement, which you can see very clearly on this graph. Yes. There was still advancement. Yes. There was still civilization, but it was much slower than under the Greek city state period or in the later multi-country multi-site plural, European.
System.
And I think that this is also why in the [01:25:00] last, I'd say 50 years or so we have seen human advancement in terms of, , artistic production and stuff like that. Really grind to a Holt, , because of the urban monoculture, removing the differences between the groups that had been seated with the one culture.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-20: So Rome can almost be thought of as this weird moment in history where the one culture solidified into a mostly uniform unit, which gave it the power needed to spread out and touch lots of parts of earth and get them ready and seated. However, , He didn't advance within that culture itself. That culture was more of a vector for its spread.
and I think that you could actually see why this leads to better philosophical outcomes and I'll note here, right? So people are like well Japanese people they were interested in like exploring the nature of reality was like a consequentialist Like this will work mindset when they got rich.
I'm like, no They weren't like if you study like actual Japanese or Chinese history What the wealthy people [01:26:00] with leisure time did is they? Measured the quality of their work by its aesthetic value over its or, or realistic. So they would sit around and write stories that were meant to be beautiful, but they weren't meant to be Functional or convey particularly deeper or more sophisticated meanings often Lee and an argument that I was also positing when we were talking about this earlier is there seems to be some kind of a benefit that you get from having a complex political system that is complex enough where there's either a very strong nobility and some form of parliament or some form of representative democracy, because in those systems actually being correct and actually being right.
gives you an edge or a benefit. So that I think has a halo effect where then you get people who are also interested in science and physics and a whole bunch of other things as, as sort of an emergent property [01:27:00] of people who are right. From a more like political strategic perspective have an edge and therefore get to rule that society and you get a lot of pushback as well.
So you get the like, you need the gentleman scientist, basically. I mean, in the Victorian period, it's called the gentleman scientist in the medieval period. It was called like, the maybe monk or something. Or in the, you know, the, the period of the Greek city states, it was your, your random thinker, right?
So like, and we're going to talk about like how Greeks figured some early stuff. Like, I think that they're the people who really collated this culture for the first thing. I think its predecessors existed in the Egypt, right? And then it went to Mesopotamia where it continued to grow slightly, but I still think it was very nascent and it was supercharged when the Greeks got it.
Like they exploded it. They were the reactor that made it something. And I think that you can see for the exploration of the Greeks, exploration of the nature of reality, sort of how it builds on itself and why this would lead to such civilizational advancement so quickly. So you'll have something like sales.
Thales of Miletus proposing that water was the [01:28:00] fundamental substance underlying all reality. He sought a single unifying principle to explain the nature of the world. So this is around what you get in terms of sophistication of other cultures. You get the first guy who asks what's the nature of the world, right?
In Greek society, it didn't stop first guy to ask what the nature of the world. Somebody else with access to his work, then you get an axomander, who argued for an indefinite boundless substance called a porian as the source of all things. This was an early attempt to conceptualize an abstract principle underlying physical reality.
Then Heraclitus taught that everything is in constant flux, famously stating, Pansa re, everything flows. He saw reality as a unity of opposites in constant tension and change. Thank you very much. Parademus took the opposite view, arguing that change is impossible, and that reality is a single, eternal, and unchanging whole.
This sparked debates about the nature of being, and non being, that influenced later metaphysics. Then all of those people came down to Plato, who's now, you know, going against [01:29:00] what all of them are saying, and he goes, He proposed the theory of forms,
which held that there exists a realm of, Of perfect unchanging forms or ideas separate from the physical world The physical world we perceive is merely an imperfect reflection of these forms True knowledge and reality are found in the realm of forms not in the ever changing physical world Now this is an idea that while I don't agree with it could conceptually make sense to even a modern person today Like this is the beginning of what you could call like Truly modern physics or philosophy whereas the other people were just giving him enough of a people arguing that he could come in and have, I guess I'd call it like a real and sophisticated idea.
Whereas these other environments just didn't have this debate happening and, and wouldn't have a debate like this arise. And this spills over then into things like the arts. I mean, we'll explain why that happens in a second, but then you have something like Aristotle, right? So then Aristotle, he comes in and he rejects Plato's separate form.
[01:30:00] Instead, arguing that form and matter are united in individual substances. Aristotle developed the concepts of substance, essence, and accident to explain the nature of things. Clearly, this is a world. He explored causality, identifying four types of causes. Material, formal, effective, and final. So, like, He basically figured out how reality actually works, like, well, it's just a world where clearly they were rewarded in some way, like socially, or even if no one gave them a reward for it, they were raised in a culture or society that enabled them to have emotional intrinsic rewards for doing something like this.
And that I think is created, it's just, when I think about the unifying elements of. The cultures that I'm aware of that first generated this is there are varied sub tribes that are very they have a lot of internal pride and they like to s**t on the outsiders. [01:31:00] And. You even saw this in ancient Egypt, you know, it's like, Oh, those people in Alexandria.
Oh, those people in Cairo, like there, there were significant cultural differences but there was a lot of trade and interchange as well. So there was comparison. So I feel that what's the word like a certain amount of xenophobia combined with pluralism and then another sort of big bad on the outside that enables them to all say.
Okay. Hey, this is us. And we are different from those. You mean literally like the Haven Network that I want to recreate for a post fertility collapse world? Oddly convenient, but I mean, it, I feel like we see the value. I know, but that's, I think I know. And what I'm saying is it's, it seems conveniently flattering that what we're trying to design is.
Oddly reminiscent of a system that seems to have given birth to the modernization specifically designed after it. Yeah, well, I know, but I just, I think it's, it's interesting that we intuited [01:32:00] something that now when we're looking at this unified, civilization. Well, I hadn't looked at how big the differences were when you controlled for time.
But now I want to get to, to make a comparison here. So we're going to go to China. Like what was their understanding of reality? Right. So you get to Laozi and Zhangzi. They were believed to have lived between the sixth century BCE. Although some scholars state them to the fourth century BCE. So this would be around when all these Greek authors were writing.
They're credited as the authors of the Tao Te Ching. The Tao Te Ching. The foundational text of Daoism it, which included concepts of Dao the way as the source of all being, Wu Wei, non action or effortless action, the interplay of yin and yang , and simplicity and naturalness as ideals.
That's childlike when contrasted with what was going on in Greece at the same time. And I think it, but, but it, I think shows. Why Greece was able to sort of explore here. You have like two guys who sat down and they're like, [01:33:00] this is the way things are. And then you have like one other guy who pushes back like Mosey.
So this is where you get the will of heaven, the idea that the universe has a moral structure. The Heaven's Intentions provide a standard for ethics. He believed in consequentialism, so slightly better, right? Like, judging the morality of actions based on their outcomes. He believed in universalism advocating for universal love, Jiayi Ai, that does not discriminate between people rationalism and a lot of his, and Moanism, and some other things, and a lot of his stuff.
was sort of, suppressed as Confucianism grew. So, hold on. But the point being is that when you read this stuff, or when you read Confucianism, because I'm sure you guys have read some Confucianism you just, like, anyone who's being honest can tell it's not as intellectually sophisticated as something like Aristotle's work or Plato's work, which was, you know, It shows the difference between a culture where you have a bunch of people furiously arguing with each other and who in other areas of their life, whether it's economics [01:34:00] or war, actually have to know how to beat an opponent and actually have to have their ideas work.
And I think you can see this in terms of like Greek warfare, for example, like Alexander, the great figures out like a formation. That's really good in Greek warfare, . And then he applies it. to anyone other than the Greek city states that were very hard for him to unify, and it's like, free money cheat, just moving knife through butter all the way to India, where his troops are like, why are we still fighting anymore?
This is getting pointless. I mean, I think what made him really cool Was the way that he used geography to his advantage, yeah. But the point is, is that these things all bleed into each other.
It's not just the philosophy was hundreds of years ahead. It's the philosophy, and the art, and the infrastructure, and the buildings, and the everything! Everything! Ahead of my ancestors! Well, what's more interesting to me, again, is just how the incentives are aligned to do that. And you need [01:35:00] to have a pluralistic culture.
You need to have something that forces competition and and ingenuity, and I, and I think that you can see throughout history, too, and this would require a whole lot more investigation that we don't have time for right now. But I think if we looked at when civilizations collapsed, I would imagine that there's a high level of correlation between that competition falling apart and the fall of a civilization that when you no longer have this pluralistic competition, but trade and exchange.
Where you're forcing people to sort of steal from each other, iterate off each other and compete with each other, but also stay united and strong together against a larger exogenous threat or enemy or big bad, then that's when civilization starts to decline. So, maybe we should be concerned that perhaps big bads.
Like Russia and China, you know, sort of like that, these, these tensions internationally [01:36:00] will soon subside due to demographic collapse. Well, I think it's why the urban monoculture is often also stolen so much of the vitality of human civilization because it is homogenized culture. Yes. Yeah. In a, in a more perfect world, we would have these cultures riffing and doing their own thing like anime, like anime required Japan be touched by civilization to create their concepts of like video games, like Mario and stuff like that.
There are some of the greatest works of art in our lifetime. And I think in the future will be remembered that way are, are coming out, but it's out of this industrial process that married some of their ancestral traditions. And I think that this is where you get the, This mistake, right? The mistake that countries make is we can go back to our old ways and, and just update them for modern civilization and say, no, what we need to do is we need to take this one culture and put little spins on it, but not try to go back to the way things used to be.
So an example of this would be something like even China today. So this is not me as an [01:37:00] outsider, but merging China, when China says we need to go back to like Chinese science and Chinese medicine, like the Chinese government. We'll say when we're doing Chinese medicine, it's like random like herbs and stuff that like everybody knows don't work like, like they, they functionally don't work because that was the nature of that previous system in, in the, in the system of the one civilization, things actually have to work like if a natural remedy works, it will say, okay, how do I distill the chemical in it?
Oh, cool. Cool. Gnawing on that bark lowers your amount of pain. Okay, what chemical is causing that? Okay, let's mass produce that chemical. Okay, now we have aspirin. And we, we, we run into a risk of doing this in the West as well.
I mean, the urban monoculture, because of its love of weakness, you can see our video on that particular topic. It tries to venerate it, their own ancestors, the witches, the druids, the pagans. You know, you get that I'm queer, you should not venerate that. [01:38:00] Right? These people were monstrous.
They sacrificed children. They were not civilized man. They, they needed to be uplifted. Thank God that the Romans colonized. My ancestors and saved them from the depravity that they were living in.
Speaker 17: What makes me special?
Speaker 18: Do you know, do you know what makes me special? I'm a queer. What?!
Speaker 22: She looks angry. Yeah.
Speaker 23: A face like that, I'd be angry too.
You
Speaker 25: shut up.
And I think that, and this is the thing, and I think that, that, that [01:39:00] civilized man, wherever he is whatever he looks like, whatever ethnicity he is, the cool thing about this theory is it's kind of unifying.
Because the truth is Is it the originators of this civilization? One, they never hold the torch for long. They often pass it on, you know, whether it's Egypt to Mesopotamia to Greece to Rome. But they also mostly don't exist anymore as an ethnic group. Like the ancient Greeks, I can look at ancient Greek statues.
They don't look like modern Greek people. Like that ethnic group isn't my ethnic group, but it's also, you know, when you're talking about it. And I think that, that Italians and the Greek people. Do undersell themselves when they say they're not they're probably like 80 percent related to them would be my guess there's probably like a few immigration waves, but like I think that they deserve some credit for that But they're not the groups that are on top of the world right now, you know So it doesn't argue for this idea of a dominant cultural group what it argues for is an idea of a global shared cultural history That none of us really own.
That [01:40:00] we all are beneficiaries of whatever our backgrounds are. And we all deserve you know, when I look back to my history, when I named my kids, like Octavian, one of the names that we're looking for for one of our next years, it's going to be Constantine. You know, I am looking to the great figures of Rome.
And. One show that I would really recommend people watch if you haven't watched it you, you absolutely must watch it. It's called Rome, an unbiased history. I would watch it chronologically. If you like this show, you are going to love Roman unbiased history. It's by Dabba Hadi. He is, I think.
Like, one of the great creators of our age, in terms of like, memefied content. I don't think he has nearly as many subscribers as he could, but it's just because he hasn't done enough videos. But he does a thorough memefied history of Rome, from the perspective of being ultra, I'd say like, jingoistic.
Like, when he's describing my [01:41:00] ancestors, he'll always have them come on ahead with like the, you know, the meme of the guy with the head that's caved in, and like the face paint on them, and just you know, unable to do anything, or they'll have like sharp teeth whenever they're coming on stage, and I just love it!
Speaker 11: All that there would be, even though, there was so much we didn't know yet. Fighting under the sun. , my skin is glistening from sweat dripping down as time will pass,
I love it! Because it's, it's I think the way that the chads from around the world are able to look at history and not look at the witches and see their ancestors, but all together look to the shared cultural ancestry and say, that's the fire that left human civilization. And I don't need to have an ethnic.
Claim to that, to admire it and to learn from it and to build on it. I think that's really fair. Yeah,
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-21: [01:42:00] And I note that all our cultures had their witches. You know, it's not just that the Celts who had witches, who, some people today delusional. , rise up despite them being child murderers. , but you had them in the African cultures, you had them in ancient China. You had them in a.
Ancient Scandinavia and the ancient roofs had them. All around the world, we had our witches. So the question is, are you able to, with humility, swallow, the pride you have in either the culture that is your own genetically or the one that you have drawn, some sort of weird Weebo attachment to. And admit that we all, our greatness all comes from the descendants of. One culture. And a culture that's not yours.
And that is a culture that brought us. It's a Judeo-Christian tree of religions that helped save us from our witches.
Speaker 6: Your [01:43:00] move, time to d d d
Speaker 7: d d
d d
and I think the difficult thing is that normally when people are advocating for a culture, it's their own and it helps that this isn't ours. I'm so relieved. I'm so relieved that we do not have Greek or Roman ancestry.
Yeah, otherwise this would be such a bad look, but I, I think that and I also argue that this is what created the modern Jew and Christian in another episode, which is to say when the one true religion crashed with civilization, it like a particle collider [01:44:00] exploded and created the civilized religions, whether that's post second temple Judaism.
And as we argue in track eight, I do not think. Pre Second Temple Judaism was one of the civilized religions. They were ripping apart animals. They were doing blood sacrifices. They were doing blood magic. They were worshiping multiple gods in the temple. I think that it was through the destruction of that, that they were freed from this.
And if you look at their art from those previous periods, it's nothing special. Their civilization, nothing particularly special. Even the parts of the Bible that were written before that period, while I think they're divinely inspired, they're certainly not. Particularly sophisticated when contrasted with like ancient greek work.
And actually some individuals argue that the bible is particularly the moses stories are actually downstream of hellenistic works and there's some compelling evidence there that we can get to that. They were heavily influenced post fact by those.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-22: Specifically, the argument that I found most compelling is just the theme of the story. A group of people being kicked out of a Homeland, then looking for a new Homeland, [01:45:00] then founding a city. Then having that city grow into a great city. , it feels very much like, you know, the founding story of Rome or like many ancient Greek myths have this. , theming.
, whereas it's basically unheard of in the, , Mesopotamian region.
But we, we won't get into that too much in this particular episode.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-24: Something I note about this theory that I want to develop further is the idea that the one civilization, when it blooms within a region appears to exhaust that region after a golden age, making it hard for civilization to appear there again, and they then fall into what I can only describe as.
Sort of a non-violent slumber. , that where they don't produce much in terms of artistic output or civilizational advancement was the only, , counter example to this being the Italian Renaissance. After the period of the Roman empire was over. , so what I mean by this is it [01:46:00] starts in Egypt. Then Egypt never really rises again.
Then it goes to Mesopotamia, the NEF. They retain me as sort of becomes irrelevant and it goes to Greece and Greece sort of become the relevant. Then it goes to Rome. Then Rome sort of becomes irrelevant. Then it, you know, breathe, digging in France. , through the Charlotte minium empire, and then that sort of becomes irrelevant.
And then it goes into England. , which has increasingly become irrelevant. , and so the question is, , how can you create a sustainable version of this culture in why does it burn these populations and make them if beat and bureaucratic after a while? , and that is a theory that we will explore later. But it also means, interestingly, that it's especially hard for any group to claim themselves special because they carried the torch of civilization for a period because the church of civilization seems to always burn the group that carries it and make them lesser than the people around them, rather than more than the people around them.
Gotta get the kids now, but hold on the point of all this is. Is that we [01:47:00] have a shared cultural ancestry that none of us have ownership over and that cultural ancestry, the height of it is when you have collaborative pluralism and that's what we should be fighting for. That's the greatness that was Rome.
Oh, and by the way, if you also haven't seen it and I've recommended it in another show and you still need to watch it is the Rome mini series. From HBO again, haven't seen that must watch it and we haven't seen the first gladiator again, a must watch. Well, and also I want to emphasize not just collaborative pluralism, but collaborative competitive pluralism.
Exactly. There is a healthy, friendly trash talking the other side element of this. And I think a lot of Our critics or people who want to frame us as enemies misread that when we're like, yeah, like, you know, on the
other side, but you should also be allying and working with the other side. You should both compete. I mean, that is the [01:48:00] beauty of sports teams. Anyone who can understand baseball fans who can, who can trash talk each other about their teams, but then, you know, bond over the sport. Is like, they get it, this should not be a complex subject, but I, I do feel that we get heat for this because people try to make that out about like, oh, you're about hate.
You're about, you know, you trash talk this other group. Therefore you're a supremacist for your own group. Like, you're, you're totally missing the point and you are smart enough to know that that is not true. So cool. All right, let's go get love. You have a good day. Bye bye bye. Ciao ciao. You're amazing. You know, Maxine Lott, who we are fans of he, on his sub stack ran, I think he's running guests posts, giving a a rational argument for why people should vote for Kamala Harris. And there's another one for why people should vote for Donald Trump.
And I'm still [01:49:00] reading the Kamala Harris one, but there's this one part of it where the person. argues that the economy is doing well and look at GDP and look at unemployment rates and how Kamala Harris has a plan to make things even better. But then they write, many Americans have the mistaken perception that the economy is not doing well in part because of the cost of groceries, housing, consumer goods and services and energy are all higher than four years ago and wage growth has not offset these high costs.
Like, I'm sorry. So you're arguing that the economy is doing well. And then we're just complaining that it, we're not happy because our lives are materially worse and economically speaking, but the economy is doing well, so we should vote for it. I love that so much. This like, I mean, so the costs that matter to normal people are.
Are [01:50:00] up. And I mean, their wages haven't improved in line with that, but I mean, the economy is doing well, you know, you, you, you mentioned to me that like people will always say the economy is doing well when their parties in office. What he's really just saying is my party's in office. And therefore I can find some numbers to indicate that the economy is in shambles, but my party is in office.
Therefore, things are good. Okay? Shut up. I just thought that was very entertaining.
Speaker 12: There was a dream that was real. It shall be realized. These are the wishes of Marcus Aurelius.
Speaker 8: [01:51:00] Torsten, out of the way! Out of the way!
Speaker 9: What are you doing? You nutjob!
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com -
Join us as we delve into the multifaceted legacy of Shinzo Abe, Japan's longest-serving Prime Minister. This video explores Abe's significant political impact through his pronatalist policies, military reforms, and deep ties to the Unification Church. We'll analyze his efforts to foster women's participation in the workforce, reinterpret Japan's pacifist constitution, and strengthen alliances through the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. Additionally, we discuss Abe's influence on Japanese media and culture, including anime. The video also covers Abe's relationship with Donald Trump, the complex history with the Unification Church, and the circumstances surrounding his assassination. Engaging and insightful, this is a comprehensive look at Shinzo Abe's celebrated and criticized legacy.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone! Today occasionally I will go down a rabbit hole and I'll be like, this is something I really wish I could find a good succinct video on because now it's a topic that interests me.
And this topic is The Harambee of pronatalism, Shinzo Abe. I have just seen so many pronatalist Shinzo Abe memes of him trying to promote fertility. And then after the recent thing happened, which we'll go into where people in Japan became convinced that Shinzo Abe from the dead had told Trump to move to avoid being assassinated.
And it's just amazing. So first I'm going to bring the audience along with me. On a journey through some memes about Shinzo Abe. Then we're going to go into who he actually was, like what did he accomplish in his life? How pronatalist was he really? And then we're going to go into the assassination.
And then we're going to go into the, what [00:01:00] led to the assassination.
Simone Collins: All right,
Malcolm Collins: then. So we're starting with meme number one of Shinzo Abe here, which is him holding a gun out. And what does it say, Simone?
Simone Collins: . It says, stop watching VTubers, you stinky neets. Do your duty, have sex. I'm no longer asking. I
Malcolm Collins: love this.
The next one I love, and this is something that as I first started, like, going into Shinzo Abe, I really realized how well liked he was within like, meme community. So here's one that's a political compass that shows a former Former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe shot dead, and it shows people on all sides of the political compass sad about this, but then the next political compass one, which I think is more true, shows everybody horrified except for the authoritarian lefties who are Hooray, death to Japan.
I'm coming. It says, and it shows from China News, like from one of their main sources. And all of the, you know, far, far [00:02:00] commies, they're being like you know, don't be stunned, celebrate stuff like that. So horrified. But I think what this shows is that the only people who were really happy that he died were the Was the crazy like pro china people which again if you're not pro china should make you love him even more And this was something that a lot of people were saying the analysis of him that made me want to learn more about him Is that one longest serving pm in the history?
I think of japan so very very popular person and people were like they don't understand like Japan losing him and some of the analysis I saw they said could significantly hurt the country because he was so effective at everything he did. For the next meme here this takes place in the friend universe.
And it starts with the character saying
Elves may live a long time. Oh, that's good! But across the board, we lack romantic feelings and reproductive instincts.
Wait, hold on.
We're quietly going extinct.
Huh?
Last time [00:03:00] I met a fellow elf was more than 400 years ago.
Sigh.
Perhaps we're closer to the end than I thought.
We're too late this time. You doing a girl voice, by the way, is so out of character for you. Here, do the next meme.
Simone Collins: Well, I read that a boy and a girl can create new life by joining their bodies together. Can create new life by joining their bodies together
Malcolm Collins: She's
Simone Collins: like
yes It's
Malcolm Collins: korobo and mitsubo are having their fourth and then it shows senzuabe My job here is done. And then this is one of my favorite where this was after the assassination and it shows a picture of like the scenery of Japan with Shinzo Abe's face fading out.
And it just says have sex in big letters. And then on the, the, the bottom, right. It says see you space cowboy,
Simone Collins: which was the outro from cowboy bebop.
Malcolm Collins: Yes, which was really got to [00:04:00] me So now I'm going to talk a bit about the the really funny thing that happened. Well, not funny, but I guess touching and there's memes about like women, like I cry at the Titanic men don't cry over anything.
And it shows the band like crying over memes of Shinzo Abe protecting Trump from the assassination. But this makes sense. They were, they did have a very, very strong relationship and we'll get into why this was the case in just a second.
Simone Collins: I
Malcolm Collins: don't know. But here in a Japanese Twitter post, it says during his speech, Trump heard Shinzo Abe's voice calling him to attention in his ear.
When he tilted his head to listen to the voice, he heard the sound of a bullet cutting through the air and the bullet penetrated Trump's right ear. And he heard a gunshot. If Trump had not tried to listen to Abe's voice, he would have been killed by the bullet. And for people who are like, wait, why would a lot of people in Japan actually believe this?
Well, a big group of that liked Shinzo Abe was extremist Christians, specifically the Unification Church, specifically the Moonies, who would have believed something like this was possible. And people were memeing about this in the [00:05:00] West, and they thought it was serious. Well, apparently that was
Simone Collins: why Shinzo Abe was shot, right?
It was this, the guy who shot him was Yeah, it was the Unification Church. It was against the church. And I
Malcolm Collins: mean, in light of all these memes, you can think, Oh, these memes are so silly, etc. One of my favorites has always been the what I watched, which it shows Franks and it goes what I expected, which is Gurren Lagann and then it's a gif of what I got.
It's Shinzo Abe's face pointing at the screen and occasionally it flashes, have sex.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: My very favorite Shinzo, Abe meme. I found after we recorded this episode.
It shows a post from our Reddit, which is verse the patriarchy,
some other witches have mentioned that doing spells directly against Trump are not as effective as we might hope. And he seems to have some kind of protection around him. And then they brought quote, unquote, some kind of protection around him and it shows Cynthia Bobby's face in the background.
Malcolm Collins: And here's a great one, which is a political compass one, which shows why Shinzo Abe was so well liked [00:06:00] show. It shows you know, people being shocked at his death and it shows people at every side of the political compass sad, but shows why they're sad.
So the authoritarian left, he oversaw 15 percent real increase in minimum wage while dropping unemployment to under 3%. That was left the authoritarian. righty authoritarian. He worked to ensure Japan could stand with America and protect democracy in Taiwan when the day comes. And then because he rebuilt Japan's military and then at the libertarian right, it just shows the economy going up under his leadership.
And then in the Libertarian left. It shows his policies open the door to ensure millions of women were able to join the workforce. And I just think that that's really cool. This, this guy who is so universally liked and I wanted to understand, and I will say that when I dug on him deeper, I didn't necessarily come away universally liking him.
Interesting. Well,
Simone Collins: that's what I was just going to ask you. Was he universally liked because he was shot because he was assassinated? No,
Malcolm Collins: it was universally liked before that, [00:07:00] but unfortunately his reputation took a hit in the investigation of the person who shot him. Because the person who shot him had, he didn't have no point.
He should, he
Simone Collins: should have written a sternly worded letter, you're saying, maybe a
Malcolm Collins: sternly worded letter, but Shinzo Abe may have facilitated a cult that destroyed a lot of people's lives and used the cult to stay in power, really. Yes. Now whether you consider it a cult or a religion, I mean, it could be like people saying, well, you guys do the same with like, I don't know, you know, being overly positive about Mormons, people who are like really anti Mormon and think of it as a cult,
and I'd be like, one, I don't think we're that overly positive Mormon, but like if they became like a major voting block for us and we were running and then they blamed us, like I could see, I don't know. Because I don't think the, the unification church is a much more culty cult than the, the Mormons, but we'll get into them in a second.
Simone Collins: Yeah, well then it would have to be if Tom Cruise was president, but then someone assassinated him because, you know, [00:08:00]
Malcolm Collins: Well, he wasn't in the unification church.
Simone Collins: I know. Oh, he wasn't. Oh, okay. The
Malcolm Collins: unification church. Okay. So I'll go quickly into this right now,
Simone Collins: please. Yes. I don't know this before
Malcolm Collins: he was ever in his party, actually during the age of his dad who helped the unification church a lot, get established in Japan.
They began South Korean, right? Yeah. Which is a South Korean. cult or religion. They began to help the party a lot with local organizational stuff. And when he took over the party, he didn't like clear them out of the party and they still had a big role in helping with, you know, like flyers and door knocking and all of that in a very, very big way.
And people think that the party wouldn't have as much power as they had if they didn't have this free resource of human
Simone Collins: labor. Hmm.
Malcolm Collins: Okay. So his pronatalist initiatives. So womanomics in 2013, Abe called for a society in which all women can shine, setting a target that 30 percent of leadership positions should be held by women by [00:09:00] 2020.
This was a conservative, by the way. This policy aimed to increase women's participation in the workforce, which Abe believed could potentially improve both Japan's GDP and fertility rate. And so, right away, when we've gone into other countries fertility rates, and we've, like, laughed at their, like, extended maternity leave and stuff like that.
And he's like, get them to work! This is the first time I've heard one where I'm, like, one, counterintuitive, and two, probably right. And I will note, what is Shinzo Abe's legacy? The by far highest fertility rate in the region is Japan. So I mean, he was kind of right. Yeah. Women working does help fertility rates.
Childcare expansion, Abe planned to spend 2 trillion yen, approximately 17. 6 billion on education and child care. This included promises of free preschool for children aged 3 to 5, free child care for children aged 2 and younger from low income households. He did labor reforms.
He attempted to break down Japan's two tier employment system, which often excluded temporary workers [00:10:00] from the regular workforce. These reforms were aimed at creating a more flexible labor market that could better accommodate working parents. And then Abenomics and Abenomics 2. 0 in September, 2015. The first one is called Abenomics.
This is Abenomics 2. 0. ABE announced an updated platform that centered on raising the birth rate and expanding social security. This included creating new cabinet positions dedicated to reversing Japanese demographic decline
Simone Collins: Abe, huh?
Malcolm Collins: Now, a lot of people think that he sponsored anime that had pronatalist themes. Right. And I have
Simone Collins: wondered that, when we've watched recently released anime, I don't know if you only watch pronatalist anime shows? No, I mean, the studio
Malcolm Collins: that did, for example, Frank's, which is seen as having hugely pronatalist message,
Speaker: Yeah, I'm gonna find another female partner. Fine then! What?! You think in the real world your perfect girl will just come falling out of the sky Hey, you. Wanna help me bang this robot? You mean pilot this robot? I know what I said.
Speaker 2: Never! Time to fight [00:11:00] some monsters! So no one besides me thinks this control scheme's a bit weird. Why would anything about this be weird? Now spank me hard and I'll shout out Daddy to get the engine started. Does anyone not have a partner to ride? Fair enough. You see, I've always thought of you as a brother.
You mean like the normal kind or the anime kind? The anime kind. Aw, eww, eww! Don't you have anyone else that likes you anyway? Well, now that you mention it I do! I wanna make a baby! Uh, how do we do the That was amazing! Yeah! What's child support? I'd like to declare that we're getting married! BAKAKAKAKAKA
Malcolm Collins: is also the studio that did Gurren Lagann, which came out a long time before anyone was freaking out about demographic collapse.
And Gurren Lagann's very antinatalist. Or at least an anti But,
Simone Collins: wasn't, I mean, Gurren
Malcolm Collins: Lagann was Well, that was Gurren Lagann talking about it with the same team.
Simone Collins: Yeah, well, no, yeah, Gurren Lagann is, yeah, but no, sorry, but they were [00:12:00] also sorry, they were also Evangelion, which is Antinatalist, and Evangelion was pre Abe.
I think Gurren Lagann, did that overlap with Shinzo Abe? That was pre Abe.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): So I was rolling on this one, Shinzo RV. First served as prime minister of Japan in 2006 to 2007. Then again from 2012 to 2020, well, his 2006 to 2007 run, that is when Garan log-in was released. Garan log-in was released in 2007. Not that there is any chance that he influenced its development, but,
Yes, the motor was right on this one, weirdly.
Malcolm Collins: Gurren Lagann is old and then they did a, um, like other, you know, pronatalist anime that I've shown on here, like the one about old people and stuff like that. It's not that the Japanese government never sponsors anime or manga, but they're typically one off projects and not full series.
And it was doing that before Abe and it doesn't appear that there's any documented evidence of like super pronatalist stuff being pushed. It appears that most of the pronatalist anime was just created because people love their country and love [00:13:00] their culture. And I think that that shows in part why Japan has been more resistant to fertility collapse than other countries in the region.
Is that there's just much more pride in the Japanese identity than there is, um You know, and ask somebody who spent time in Japan and Korea, for example, there is simply more pride in the Japanese identity than there is in the Korean identity. And I suspect it's you know, people just pushing this into their own media in an attempt to save their culture.
And I think it's sad that we don't see more of this in U. S. Media. But I think it's because in U. S. Media there's Very few actual conservatives because the far left in the urban monoculture sort of acts as a cabal, keeping them out of positions, whereas in Japan you don't have the same extent of conservatives just not appearing in media, which didn't used to be as extreme in the U.
S. as it is today. Now let's talk about other big things he did. Constitutional reinterpretation in 2014, Abe's government reinterpreted Article 9 of Japan's pacifist [00:14:00] constitution to allow for collectivist self defense, enabling Japan to come to the aid of its allies under attack. Now, this is really big.
He really, really began to turn Japan into a military power again, to put it on a military footing. And I think that as an American, this is something I am really glad that he did because he also pretty much unilaterally rebuilt quad or the quadrilateral, quadrilateral. Security dialogue which is an alliance between Japan, U.
S. India and Australia. And if you're wondering who would those four countries be allied against specifically, this would be against China. They really only kick into action against China, but it would be incredibly damaging to China. Especially if you had the U. S. and Japan plus Australia and India involved in any sort of a boycott because China imports around.
I think it last I checked was 83 percent of their energy needs and something like 86 percent of that is coming through the Strait of [00:15:00] Malacca, which basically means past India. So like there's very little they could do. They could take it into the deep ocean, but then they need to go all the way around Australia.
But if you go all the way around Australia well now you need to get through the island chain that Japan and the U. S. control. So there's really no way to supply China by water if there was ever a blockade and the Quadrilateral Alliance was at play. And he increased military spending to one to 2 percent of GDP.
And he also pushed through controversial security laws that allowed the Japanese self defense force to deploy overseas and engage in combat to defend allies when it used to be defense only. And the ally in contest here is very obviously Taiwan. Any thoughts before I go further? Simone, will you like this guy so far, or he's sounding.
Simone Collins: I mean, for any elected politician, he sounds pretty solid. And also, just the fact that he made some pretty meaningful changes, too.
Malcolm Collins: Mm
Simone Collins: hmm.
Malcolm Collins: No, he's a I mean, in terms of He's a man of action. Yeah, he's one of those characters where, like, the way he got elected may have been [00:16:00] shady. But as a politician, he was God tier and really only did good.
A good example of this in the United States would be Nixon. And Nixon is generally considered one of the best presidents in American history by people who like know their presidential history stuff. Building our current relationship with China and building. Globalization was really important in securing peace and making America as prosperous today as it is,
However you know, he did cheat intellectual cycle.
Well, basically cheated. And to give you an idea of how well like Nixon is in the U. S. Stephen Colbert, you know, far lefty Stephen Colbert. He said that out of all American presidents, Nixon is his favorite. So that should show you that he really does appeal across the aisle. So another thing to note here is he did a very good job building a relationship with Trump.
And he had a close personal friendship with Trump from what we've seen, you know, with Trump saying after he died, something along the lines of, No one will ever [00:17:00] understand how much Japan has lost, you know, with Abe's passing. You know, like, he knew more from his position to know just how important he was, which is probably true.
From the position of President of the U. S., you have more information than other people have.
Simone Collins: Well, but I think Abe also demonstrated the first time Trump Flew out to have a major meeting with him, just how much he wanted to invest in a good relationship with Trump. And that, what did they do? First thing after they land, go golfing.
What did they do? They eat American beef burgers. They, he had special hats made, played on the make America great again, slogan, but it had something to do with like their partnership. Yes.
Malcolm Collins: And he gave Trump a golf cart. That was the gift that he gave to him. And he was the first person to call Trump of world leaders.
And I'll, I'll be a parent to genuinely like golfing as well. So, you know, Trump always loves just golfing all the time.
Simone Collins: Like Trump really works well for the Japanese mindset. [00:18:00] Cause he's a larger than life character and they really like characters that, that ham, you know, what's that? What, how do you use the term?
Oh,
Malcolm Collins: I love it. He also gave Trump a gold colored driver. That's perfect. Let's see. He gets
Simone Collins: it. It's Trump. And he, he, he spoke with Trump and Trump words. And that is.
Malcolm Collins: And he kept the meetings private, which was another thing that he did to build. People were always trying to like Trump's foreign policy team was always trying to protect him from forming too close a personal relationship with people because that's what he would always go for.
He'd get their personal phone numbers. He just called them up. Yeah. Yeah. And H. R.
Simone Collins: McMaster's biography or autobiography keeps talking about how Trump would say things like, stop by the White House and everyone's freaking out like, no, no, no, that doesn't mean you've just received an official foreign like visit invite.
And he'd be like, here's my number. Like he'd just give people his cell phone number and they'd stop by. Freak out about that too, because they needed to monitor all the calls or something.
Malcolm Collins: He also didn't, one of the interesting things is, you know, how Trump loved trying to play like hard mall with these deals [00:19:00] that he would make with countries.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Japan didn't really push back and basically took one of Trump's like fairly one sided deals to flatter his ego, which was probably the right thing to do. It's also so
Simone Collins: Japanese. Like it is the proper thing to do at this point, you know, out of courtesy, we will do this.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, I think it showed an understanding of Japan's relation with the United States today and the importance on having it be incredibly strong.
And that is what he was able to accomplish.
Now the downside was Trump is one of Shinzo Abe's things was the TPP and Trump did still torpedo that. So he wasn't like always going along with what Abe wanted, but broadly speaking, Oh, by the way, for people who don't know my thoughts on the TPP. I actually think Trump's torpedoing the TPP turned out for the best, and a lot of people are very surprised by this.
Because they're like, oh no, it was an Obama era thing that could have like, built this great relationship and caused us to be an economic superpower [00:20:00] in the region. But it was very, very, very heavy handed. It was just
Simone Collins: bloated regulation or something. And what was it? Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: IP regulations. A lot of it was like Hollywood lobbying to try to make the IP regulations super strong around pirated stuff and things like that.
And it led to something that could have, so let's. See, because we do know what happened to post TPP blowing up and we can talk about what ended up happening in the region post TTPP blowing up China at first looked like they had gained all of the strings. They started really forming a tight relationship with the Philippines.
They started really forming fixing relationships with Vietnam. They started. Really expanding their influence. Well, then what happened? Because the U. S. wasn't there to act as a counter influence, China immediately began to overplay their hand massively and began to really push this nine dot line thing.
Basically just claiming huge, huge swaths of territory from like the Philippines and [00:21:00] Vietnam. And All of the people who they had just made friends with and then began to basically threaten Taiwan. Well, what did this do? Is it basically pissed off that basically because we didn't have this economic fenced in area in the region, China immediately overplayed their hand and turned, the Philippines right now has an extremely pro US head, who grew up in Hawaii.
You know, Vietnam is becoming increasingly pro us to the point where both countries, I guess you could say are basically in our pocket at this point. Same was the only country they've really made any headway was this maybe South Korea, but not even really there in Japan has become increasingly pro us because they don't like the moves that China is making around Taiwan.
Basically, It ended up making the entire geopolitical region extremely strong allies of the United States from goading China into overplaying their hand with economic sanctions and land grabs. [00:22:00] But I, I think that here you see like with the Trump thing, just an incredible amount of strategy and charisma in terms of building the relations he needed to build.
Now let's talk about the assassination because this is something, anything you want to talk about before we get to the assassination.
Simone Collins: No, let's dive into it.
Malcolm Collins: Shinzo Abe was shot twice from behind with a homemade shotgun while giving a campaign speech near Yamato Saidaijya Station, Nara, Japan. The attack occurred around 11.
30, hitting Abe in the chest and neck. Despite being rushed to a local hospital, Abe was pronounced dead at five, five o'clock, just five hours after the shooting. So the gun that was used was like a homemade thing that somebody, he learned to put together actually from YouTube videos. And people said even somebody without a lot of knowledge could learn to make one of these.
It used a battery for the ignition and some wires attached to the battery. And then 2 tubes for the barrels and likely some sort of. bought propellant [00:23:00] in the region or something like that. It was all over the table, showing the factlessness of laws against guns and, and the complacency it can cause.
The suspect, the shooter identified as Tetsu Yamanagi was immediately arrested at the scene. Yamanagi is a 41 year old former member of the Maritime Self Defense Force, admitted to shooting after his arrest. He was formally charged with the murder, violating gun control laws. And motive his motive was that his mom had donated tons of money to the Moonies or the Unification Church.
And this led to his family being in poverty and his brothers unaliving himself. He blamed all this. Well, I mean, cults could do this. They can be incredibly like, we're going to take all your money. We're going to take everything you own. We don't care about you at all. Sure. The moonies as a community are kind of known for that in the United States, by the way, if you don't know who the moonies are, if you've ever seen a cult in like a 70s movie or stereotype where everybody went to work at a plantation [00:24:00] and then was like tricked and kept hostage.
Those were moonies. That was what the moonies were famous for. was these big plantations were like yuppie college kids would go thinking like, Oh, I'm going to learn to live off the land. And then they'd spend a extremely long hours working fields. They would be sleep deprived and when they were doing that, they were exposed to constant messaging.
Wow. Are you, are you familiar with these cults? Like, did you hear about them or?
Simone Collins: I'm not, I think in media I've seen references to creepy cults that involve agricultural work, but I didn't know that was a Mooney's thing. So yeah,
Malcolm Collins: they don't do that as much anymore. They do other things now, but there is still an incredibly high demand religion.
The unification church's relationship with the Japanese conservative politicians dates back to the 1960s when Abe's grandfather, sorry, I said, dad, grandfather, former prime minister Naboke Kisha helped the church establish itself in Japan. This connection was based on shared anti communist ideologies during the cold war.
The Unification Church provided [00:25:00] valuable political support to LDP politicians, this was the party of Abe, dispatching believers to volunteer in election campaigns, mediating organizational votes for LDP candidates, and providing a volunteer army of campaign workers. In return, many LDP lawmakers, including Abe, gave speeches at church meetings and related organizations, effectively acting as promoters of the church.
The scale of the church's influence in Japanese politics was revealed on a After Abe's assassination, almost half of the LDP's 379 diet members, Congress members basically, admitted to some form of contact with the Unification Church. At least 180 of 379 LDP lawmakers in Japan's national diet were found to have ties with the church.
23 of 54 members appointed as vice ministers and parliamentary secretaries in second Kishida cabinet had connections to the church. So 23 out of 53.
So,
Yamaniga alluded to the assassination before the incident posting on his blog, [00:26:00] Mr. Abe was one of the most influential unification church sympathizers.
And yeah. Now, what about Abe's role? Abe was alleged to have overseen LDP's relationship with the Unification Church, using it to help the party win office and yeah.
Simone Collins: That just sounds like they were a major donor block and he treated them like he would treat any other major donor block.
What's shady here? That's
Malcolm Collins: basically, I don't feel like he did anything wrong. Like, even as a politician, would I have done that? If a religion, like, suppose, like, Jehovah's Witnesses. I think Jehovah's Witnesses do some shady things, but like, if I became the presidential candidate for like the US Republican Party and the Jehovah's Witnesses were like always behind me a hundred percent, am I going to advocate for their policy positions?
Yeah. I mean, that's called a democracy, right?
Simone Collins: Well, but yeah, that's what happens with politicians and unions, with politicians and corporations, with politicians and any big supporter. That's,
Malcolm Collins: Absolutely. Yeah. And people think that they might be influencing the [00:27:00] policy that his government did, specifically that Japanese still hasn't legalized same sex marriage could be downstream of this church.
But I mean, come on, the Mormons have pushed for that in the U. S. for a long time, right? Like, And I don't think that somebody deserves to be assassinated over that. And the church's name change to the family federation for world peace and unification in 2015 was approved by the government during Abe's tenure.
And this is why, by the way, it was our name
Simone Collins: change. Wait, why is that notable?
Malcolm Collins: Oh, I think a normal government would have said, we're not going to call you the organization for world peace and unification. But I think that also when people look at our religious, beliefs in the unique religion we're creating.
One of the things I really appreciate about it is that it isn't pro unification, unification which sounds really nice on paper, world peace and unification, you know, the Baha'is are also about this and they think that like we have similarities to them. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
Simone Collins: no, no, no, no, no no, I just think of unity from freaking Morty unification is not.
Malcolm Collins: [00:28:00] It's not a good
Simone Collins: thing.
Speaker 8: Where I was better able to focus on my passion for unification. You mean stealing people's bodies? Summer, rude. , this world will be invited into the Galactic Federation. . From there I'll have access to countless planets and species. One by one, I will unify them.
And I will be what the single minded once called a god. Oh, that's pretty sexy. Where can we get a drink around here? Recreational substances were phased out here. There's no need for escape from the self when your world is one. Unity, unity, who am I talking to?
Simone Collins: No, it's not. It's a creepy thing. It's a pod person thing. It's a homogenizing thing. We do not want. But,
Malcolm Collins: but I will say that also if I get myself in the mind of the, the Moonies acid, right? So think about him, you know, you grow up, your brother has unalives themselves, your family grew up in poverty.
You feel like they were scammed out of everything. And who do you blame the most? You know that the Unification [00:29:00] Church played a large role in this. You can ask, well, who has done the most to aid the Unification Church's agenda in the country?
Simone Collins: Hardly, though, no.
Malcolm Collins: He needs to
Simone Collins: blame the members of the church who give the church the money, who donate to political campaigns.
No, this is in the hands of the, of the church itself.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I would agree with that. He
Simone Collins: made a wrong, he shot the wrong guy. Abe should be with us here today.
Malcolm Collins: Very sad very much Harambe situation of pronatalism. I really like that he has been seen as sort of the face of pronatalism because the, the memes are really sweet, I would say, like, they do a good job of conveying a positive sentiment in a way where, like, suppose we became the meme face of pronatalism.
We're known as, like, the pronatalist people who speak on the topic all the time, but we've never had many memes of us. around perinatalism. And I really appreciate that because [00:30:00] I think they'd come off like the Eliezer memes around AI apocalypticism. Are there
Simone Collins: Eliezer memes around?
Malcolm Collins: They just make the movement look like deranged to like a bunch of fat neckbeards.
Whereas Abe comes across as very sincere and worried about his people.
Simone Collins: That's how they chose to frame them. They could have framed him very differently, but they chose to frame him that way.
Malcolm Collins: Any final thoughts Simone?
Simone Collins: Japan is great, isn't it great? I love Japan. People
Malcolm Collins: who don't know, she was born in Japan and her middle name is Haruko because she was named after well, being born in Japan.
So
Simone Collins: named after being Yeah, we don't want to go into why, why Haruko's my name.
Malcolm Collins: Hey, there's a lot of great anime characters with the name Haruko.
Simone Collins: Just from Fooly Cooly, wait, who else's name Hutter Girl?
Malcolm Collins: The character from the show where, I'm pretty sure it's this one, where the main character is a god.
It's a really interesting [00:31:00] show, actually. So, the main character is a female girl who is a god. And she doesn't know she's a god. But she creates the world around her in the world that everyone is in. Oh, no. So it's so she's
Simone Collins: living in the simulation.
Malcolm Collins: She's living in a simulation that she's creating around herself of being a high school character.
What's interesting about the show is that her best friends who are created as members of the simulation begin to realize this as the show goes on and they begin to realize how dangerous their situation is. Like, If she gets on to some conspiracy, that conspiracy will start happening. Like if she thinks, gets into anime girls and anime girls start appearing, if she thinks that there's like robots replacing people, robots start replacing people.
And so like one of her friends will turn out to be a robot or something like [00:32:00] that. And so her friends have to constantly guard this girl who is otherwise. Very much. I almost want to say like a manic pixie dream girl type character, like change her hair color every day. Like really wants to believe all these crazy things they have to constantly be trying to ground her because if they don't, it fundamentally breaks the nature of their reality.
Speaker 4: Maybe this isn't the old world anymore. Maybe this world is a new one that Haruhi created. And if that's the case, how would I go about confirming it?
Simone Collins: That's man. Why are anime plots? I don't
Malcolm Collins: like it, but it's a classic.
Simone Collins: I feel like with anime and manga, they nail the premise, they nail the aesthetics and then execution is 25 to 30 percent of the time. Okay. 7 percent of the time, God tier, but the rest,
Malcolm Collins: I'm actually gonna maybe be controversial here, but I think with [00:33:00] anime, what I've noticed is almost always when the theme and ideas are interesting, the execution is mid When the theme and ideas are boring, the execution is really good.
Okay. Let's play this out.
Well, here's examples. No food wars,
Simone Collins: food wars, which is one of our favorites. Pretty lame concept.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Excellent. Yeah.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Something like darling with Franks, which I think is a really interesting concept of mid execution. Dears, which I've mentioned before is a really interesting anime mid execution.
Like. Yeah, usually when the ideas are good, the exit goblin slayer, right? Actually kind of a boring concept. What about the one that you really
Simone Collins: like? That's depressing. With the, that everyone's very smart,
Malcolm Collins: grandma and grandpa turned young again, again, very, very boring, but great execution. The one that you're thinking of is code.
Yes. Code. Yes. Might be one of the rare instances [00:34:00] of, well, okay. I'd say could Geass is. Interesting, very interesting ideas. Okay, execution, but I wouldn't say it's like in terms of like execution and flow of a show one of the better shows I've seen where I just like love all the characters or anything like that.
If anything, it just like holds me kind of. Oh, here's another example. God to your execution would be high school of the dead. Very mid theme. Generic zombie world.
Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah, you would think, what's, what's the point? Okay, well then, so in, you, you kind of get Japanese culture. You've traveled a little bit there, and you've watched a lot of anime.
Malcolm Collins: I've met with a lot of heads of companies there, and I've met Yeah, if
Simone Collins: you, if you were working with the Japanese government on pronatalist policy, Where would you take things? Because I would say the solution that works best for the United States, say, or France or Germany, [00:35:00] very different from what I think would work in Japan.
Oh, I've
Malcolm Collins: got a solution for Japan. I've got a solution. I think what Japan needs to do is if you look at like latent parts of Japanese culture, which make it unique when contrasted with other culture,
Simone Collins: pronatalist
Malcolm Collins: animes do well in Japan. In Japan, a lot of people act like spy wars has been like pushed by the Japanese government.
No, not spy wars. What's the word I'm saying? Spy. Spy family. Grandpa
Simone Collins: and Oh, spy Family. Yeah. Spy What? Grandpa and grandma turned young Again. That just felt,
Malcolm Collins: no, that's a good anime, but it's not like super famous, like Spy Family is like one piece level famous now in Japan. Oh wow. That's good. Like on every billboard, it's like I go to Walmart in the US and it's a quarter of the manga.
And it's a very pronatalist. It's like about the joys of being a family basically. And then it tries to spice it up a little, but that's, that's the core idea of it, wholesome family. I think that the market in Japan loves wholesome family. The other thing that goes really popular in Japan is.
Is [00:36:00] animes that are about how awesome the Japanese military is God, a great one. I want to say is something portal. I'll put a clip from it here, but I love it as well, where they open a portal to the like a fantasy world in the middle of Tokyo and then the Japanese military goes in and starts, like, Cleaning up dragons and stuff like that, you know, cause of course they would.
Speaker 5: Do your best and fight! If you don't want to do it, then
Malcolm Collins: And they get to like nerd out about all the weapons. And I don't feel that Japan has ever lost its order focused, imperialist focused identity at its core among my like Japanese friends who are really patriotic. I think that Japan needs to combine the wholesomeness that it has at the core of its culture with the militarism and imperialism that it [00:37:00] had historically to build, I'd say, almost a militarized iteration of pronatalism.
Maybe something like units that are dedicated to cultural Basically build an infrastructure for cultural warriors
Simone Collins: to
Malcolm Collins: protect the culture, to meet with other people, to dress in little uniforms. These are things that Japanese people love to have their kids dress in. You know, uniforms go to events, maybe create like scouts, but make it a bit more military, make it a bit more ordered, get the parents more involved and more focused on the number of kids you can have getting you specific badges, military awards for parents who have a certain number of kids.
I think that's the direction Japan needs to go. If it's going to hyper ignite the existing Japanese cultural core and people like me, like, well, that's not going to work for [00:38:00] everyone in Japan. Yeah, but it'll work for the most Japanese people in Japan, and I think it would do a good job of creating One of the unique cultural solutions that might make it through the valley of the lotus eaters But what is your thought simone?
Simone Collins: No, I could I am actually doing that a lot
Yeah, I I think I think going I I would say a part of it culturally speaking would be to Make it feel like They're going back to tradition, but really they're switching out an improved version of tradition with the context of modern technology and greater gender equality. But make it seem very traditional.
Well, kind of like putting it to my Yorkism
Malcolm Collins: not focus on it being tradition, but to focus on it being pro Japanese.
Simone Collins: And I think that sort of, yeah, well, but what I'm saying is I'm thinking about, for example, office culture in Japan. I'm thinking about how marriages treated in Japan. And there is a much more [00:39:00] the, the, the, the.
Issues that are dealing with are not as toxic as the, the inter gender issues that we're seeing in South Korea, for example, but there are, there is some mismatch and there's, there are different expectations between men and women that. I don't think you can just say, okay, well now we're going to completely ignore them and they don't exist anymore.
La la la la la. Instead you have to lean into them, but redirect in a way that makes it. Is
Malcolm Collins: you make it something like a man's, like in one of these units, duty. To treat women with I'd say honor, not IE, I'm going to be like a simp for women, like Western feminism, but like an extremified version of manners in terms of women in the workplace and bringing women into the workplace.
And I think that this in the same way that Abe was like, Oh, well, You know, it is actually conservative to want to promote women because, you know, it helps Japan. It helps our economy. It [00:40:00] helps our nation, right to have these organizations not focused on old ways. And Japan has actually been very good at modernizing historically and while maintaining its unique identity.
I mean, look at anime, right? Like is anything more modernized, but culturally unique. And so one of the things that I think that they need to fight against is the stoji. We have to keep things the way they were people, I. E. Whether it's gender roles or things like in Japan now, they still do like whale meat in school because people are like, it's our culture.
It's our culture. You can't take it out. Which is just horrible. Like they should not be doing this. And so I think that fighting against inefficiencies for the goal of preserving into, or until we become an intergalactic civilization, Japanese culture to ensure that they are one of the cultures that are part of this alliance.
And I also think turning Japanese culture, if you want to make this easier to fight for into. [00:41:00] A unique cultural avatar was in the ecosystem we're going into, but a cultural avatar that is pluralistic. I think that that when I say pluralistic, what I mean is they are fighting to preserve an advanced Japan, i.
e. for Japanese people in the Japanese island, and no one else was in that environment, but alongside people like the Americans, alongside people like the Koreans, when they can. build into their honor system, protecting global pluralism as one of their duties, which is something that America did a fairly good job of historically.
It's not like it doesn't work. I think that that can do a very good job in terms of this redirection.
Simone Collins: Yeah, that's interesting. I do have this hopeful feeling that Japan can pull through. But I don't know how delusional that is.
Malcolm Collins: I think of the East Asian countries, it's by far the most likely to pull through because they have the best fertility rates right now.
And this all happened to it earlier. Like it basically went into the collapse that China hasn't even gone [00:42:00] into yet. You know, a few decades ago and it got to deal with that before things got as bad as they are right now. So that's one reason why Japan's in a really strong position. The other reason is that they've been a very, very successful cultural exporter.
Which is in the grand scheme of thing going to earn them a lot of friends that want them to pull through and friends in high places specifically their cultural exports So this is what makes japan as a cultural exporter very different from korea as a cultural exporter So korea has been as successful as japan as a cultural exporter.
Yeah, korea has disproportionately hit Well, basically dumb commie high school girls in the U. S. And it's disproportionately hit countries where American media is partially banned, like Pakistan, like a lot of countries in Africa, like a lot of the Middle East. I think Ibrahim has a lot of Korean stuff.
Really?
Simone Collins: Interesting.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. Korea does really well in Islamic countries that partially ban US media. So they've done really well in [00:43:00] these environments, but none of these people really matter. Japan, on the other hand if you, for example, were to take a polling of the people who work to develop things like open AI's model and topics model and ask how many of them are big anime fans, I bet the number is 90.
Maybe even like 95%? Oh,
Simone Collins: nah, no, there's, there's a lot of bro ish people in Silicon Valley now, but it's high. It's higher. Yeah, if you look
Malcolm Collins: at those companies You have friends who work at these companies, right? Like you remember from the events, like these are not Silicon Valley bro people. These are Silicon Valley nerd people.
Simone Collins: Thank goodness. Thank goodness.
Malcolm Collins: Anyway, I love you to decimone. This has been a fun conversation. And I think Japan can pull through. We've actually looking at holding a conference in Japan, tied to perinatalism that's going to focus on like the U S Japanese and maybe the rest of the quad Alliance.
In, in, in the ways that they are fighting [00:44:00] fertility collapse, mostly just to dunk on China because I think it can create a lot of good press and China will get very angry when we talk about, okay, what are we going to do with China when they're no longer here? You know, maybe have a picture on the screen was like a divided map of a depopulated China.
Like the, the Paris Accord. What, what, you think that's too much? It could cause
Simone Collins: major diplomatic incidents, like, so much for us hosting that
Malcolm Collins: conference. That's my goal. That's my goal to get, get people free. Cause I think that would get a lot of Americans excited. When you could turn this into a national defense issue and a patriotic issue.
I think that's when a lot of people are like, hell yeah. Hell yeah.
Simone Collins: I could see it. Yeah. Well, you know, I honestly could see pronatalism becoming the new space race. Once demographic collapse really starts to hit in. It's kind of the, the national signal of
Malcolm Collins: vitality [00:45:00] on this, the pronatal space race.
Simone Collins: There's something there because I know how much the space race and especially this whole Russia us thing really captured the public imagination. And I feel like this is one of those things that would be even more powerful because every individual family could be involved. It's a whole, I doing, I'm doing my part thing.
Could be pretty great.
Malcolm Collins: I love that, and I love you. Have a good day, Simone.
Simone Collins: Bye bye. By the way, am I making you pizza
Malcolm Collins: tonight, or what? Oh, yo, do I have any meat left? I guess pizza.
Simone Collins: I, so I can get from the freezer and quickly thaw out. One smaller packet
Malcolm Collins: of actually kind of in the mood for pizza
Simone Collins: No, I feel like the kids are in the mood for pizza.
So pizza it is pizza friday. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah All
Malcolm Collins: right. Oh, yeah I don't have any pernatal [00:46:00] Hold on, I'm sending you some stuff on WhatsApp.
Simone Collins: Looks like, oh, you have a bunch of your curtains down, don't you?
Let's see if I do Alexa, first plug on. Does that help? Maybe a little.
Maybe if I
It's a little chilly, you see. Sorry, you feel that way? Oh, are you kidding me? The cold, our children. I love the cold. So when I, when I make her shower warm, not hot, mind you warm, she says too hot, and then she insists that I give her like what I would consider cold shower, cold
Malcolm Collins: shower. Yeah. All of our kids.
And I love the news. It's like, they [00:47:00] deprive them of even the warmth in the, I'm like, no. And this is why I'm about to go to a sci fi podcast. So to talk about sci fi, Frostpunk. Is the genre, is the, the, the post collapse world I most want to wake up in.
Simone Collins: As long as you're well dressed. As one of our friends would say to us, there's no such thing as being cold.
There's just being poorly dressed. So, bundle up, I guess. Speaking of, of being dressed. Everyone makes one of our glasses, Malcolm. Cutler and Gross, who makes these glasses, they had two actors in the Kingsman Secret Service wearing Cutler and Gross glasses.
Malcolm Collins: Oh, they did?
Simone Collins: Yeah, Colin Firth's character, and then also Samuel L.
Jackson's character were wearing Cutler and Gross glasses, because they're awesome.
Malcolm Collins: So, we are going to start with go down to the [00:48:00] first of the,
Simone Collins: Sorry, I just saw, like, the latest meme thing. You just sent me, like, a wall of
Malcolm Collins: memes.
Speaker 9: I'm gonna go. I don't like it! I don't like it! It's a battle! It's a battle! Ahhh! Here you go! And then I push it against them real deep! Get me! Get me! I feel! I [00:49:00] feel! I can't get them. I can't get them! I can't get them!
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