Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

Based Camp is a podcast focused on how humans process the world around them and the future of our species. That means we go into everything from human sexuality, to weird sub-cultures, dating markets, philosophy, and politics. Malcolm and Simone are a husband wife team of a neuroscientist and marketer turned entrepreneurs and authors. With graduate degrees from Stanford and Cambridge under their belts as well as five bestselling books, one of which topped out the WSJs nonfiction list, they are widely known (if infamous) intellectuals / provocateurs. If you want to dig into their ideas further or check citations on points they bring up check out their book series. Note: They all sell for a dollar or so and the money made from them goes to charity. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08FMWMFTG basedcamppodcast.substack.com

  1. hace 23 h

    Lindsey Clancy is Not the Problem; Women Are (We Did Not Want to Make this Episode)

    This episode examines the Lindsay Clancy case in detail, including why it does not align with postpartum psychosis based on clinical insights from a trauma nurse. It explores historical and cross-cultural patterns of infanticide, legal responses in various societies, and the role of cultural and religious frameworks in shaping attitudes toward child protection. The discussion also covers the mother-baby dyad concept in modern medicine and its potential influence on perceptions of maternal responsibility. Listeners will gain a deeper understanding of anthropological data on neonaticide and infanticide rates, comparisons across hunter-gatherer groups and historical societies, and proposals for building stronger cultural safeguards. The conversation emphasizes evidence-based analysis while addressing broader societal implications for preventing such tragedies. Episode Transcript Malcolm Collins:. Hello, Simone. I know this is gonna be a hard episode to you for you. as our watchers know, we have avoided talking about the topic of the Lindsay child I can’t handle it. Because it emotionally affects my wife so much. Simone Collins:I can’t log on the Internet. I just want all the kids to be okay. Malcolm Collins:I recently wanted to go into two parts of this in detail that I haven’t seen other people talk about a lot. And they were brought up by a fan outreach to us because I originally was of the opinion, and I know this is going to piss off our fans, that I thought that it was plausible, perhaps even very likely Simone Collins:That Lindsay Clancy had postpartum psychosis. Malcolm Collins:however, I received new, breakdown of the what it’s like when a woman is in that from one of our fans who is a nurse and works regularly with women in postpartum psychosis that convinced me that this was not a case of postpartum psychosis. The second thing that I wanted to explore is why do women kill their babies at such high rates? And this is something that I was unaware of both in terms of our culture and in terms of other cultures. If you look over the course of a child’s entire lifetime, the rates are about equal for husband and and wives. But if you look at infancy, the rates are overwhelming for wives. Simone Collins:Well, that’s because they’re overwhelmingly around the women and not the dads. Malcolm Collins:Well, it’s also true if you look at cross cultural infanticide. So, there’s Simone Collins:Why does that change? The women have the boobs. The there’s been some Malcolm Collins:studies on this. If you look at, bird cell, estimated systematic infanticide in hunter forager groups, it was at between 1550% depending on the groups. Simone Collins:Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. Malcolm Collins:The rate sits around 41%. If we look at the Aceh in Paraguay, the homicide rate and this is before the age of 10, so they they kill much later, which is unusual, is between ten and fourteen percent. If we look at the and this is one of these things when people talk about, like, uncontacted groups, and we need to preserve their lifestyle. Simone Collins:Not. No. I’m I’m like, man. Malcolm Collins:No. Eraticate their lifestyle. What are you talking about? Simone Collins:It out. End it. Malcolm Collins:This reminds me of this African story that I had to read in school about, like, how colonialism was so bad. And in it, they talk about leaving one twin always to die in the woods, and and they talk about this is, like, this horrible thing that, like, colonizers were ending this practice. And I was like, what are you talking? Colonize out of these people. Yes. Bend them over a log and colonize this. Because, clearly, they aren’t handling things on their own. Okay? Speaker 4:It’s the book Things Fall Apart where this is described, which was assigned reading in my school because they thought it made the Christians look bad. Malcolm Collins:Mhmm. If we look at the Inuit people, this was a a Ramessen 1931. Of the ‘96 births recalled by parents, thirty eight girls were killed. That is forty percent of them. If we look at Australian aboriginal groups in the nineteenth century, this is Kelsaw Yongenden, they put rates at between fifteen and thirty percent. And so I wanna understand why this happens. Why do you get these incredibly high rates of mothers killing their offspring? What does the science say? What do other sources say? And I also sat Simone Collins:with Wait. Wait. Wait. So what you’re saying basically is, like, without strong cultural or statutory or both guardrails, women just be killing their babies? Malcolm Collins:In fact, it is so common, and the nurse goes over this, which we’ll get to later in this piece. Simone Collins:Yeah. Shout out to you, by the way. We, like, really love and respect you, so thanks for running in. In many countries You’re the only reason why we’re doing this, and it’s your fault that I’m not gonna sleep tonight, but I love you anyway. Malcolm Collins:In many countries outside The United States, it is it is until fairly recently in legal history, it was legal for moms to kill their their kids. Simone Collins:Well, I mean, she pointed out that even in was it Brazil? Like, the maximum sentence is three years Speaker 6:So I decided to look up the case of Brazil, and it’s not that the maximum sentence is three years. It’s just that that’s around what mothers often get. For some recent cases, there was the Bella Horizonte case where the baby was left in a dumpster, and this she only got two years and nine months for. Then there was the Baluma case where a baby was stabbed with scissors, and she only got two years, two months, and twenty days. Malcolm Collins:or some other It was Brazil and Japan and China. Simone Collins:Very licenses. You did it, and you admitted you did it. Now please serve your three years in jail for kill. And this is, like, one of the worst crimes I could imagine. No. You don’t get three months. This is an innocent child. Like, it’s one thing if, like, oh, you you killed an adult. Like, they had a good run. Okay? But, like, a child, an infant, this Malcolm Collins:is Well, I mean, Simone, you gotta keep in mind, you talk about other cultures is doing this. As it’s, like, horrifying thing when we know this was common and normalized in ancient Rome until they became Christian. Simone Collins:Always thought until today that this was, like, men or even, like, external people to the family resting sick, nonviable babies from, you know, screaming mothers who were too weak in their postpartum state to fight back. Malcolm Collins:No. It’s almost always the mothers. And in fact, it’s even almost always the mothers. So I was reading cross cultural analysis. Simone Collins:The most cruel and sick thing in the world. Like, the a baby the the only safe place you have is a kid. Like, that’s supposed to be the final safe refuge. I know you killed by that. Malcolm Collins:So what’s important to note is, when mothers do it, because the, Lindsey Clancy case actually does not match the anthropological record. K. The anthropological record, the normal time to do this is before you start nursing the baby. With the the hormonal chemicals that create the bonding to the infant, that process happens with weaning, and that makes it much harder for the mother to kill the infant. Whereas in many cultures, what happens is they go into the woods. Basically, they have the kid with the other women, and then they, without the husband having any input at all, they get to decide if they wanna keep the baby or not. This is the way that it works in many hunter gatherer societies. Basically, the wife and the other women who are involved in the birthing process. Simone Collins:No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Malcolm Collins:And and and in forty percent of cases, they decided they didn’t want them. So I want to no. Simone Collins:Mean, Maybe we need to rethink this whole prenatalism thing. I don’t think we’re Malcolm Collins:Not for everyone, Simone. Not for all cultures. And I think that this is something that we’re increasingly understanding. Simone Collins:Culture until the eighties didn’t give anesthesia to infants they were operating on. They just gave them paralytics. Malcolm Collins:We’re I understand. And we have to move and create a new techno puritan society that helps everyone else stay in line where I I mean, I I think that’s the only option. Right? But I think what what I wanted to before I go into the Lindsey, Kancy, and the nurse stuff is to highlight for people is I think in our existing culture, both the pro choice and the pro life movement, I think, has trivialized the life of children. And I I don’t wanna say that again. I think the pro life movement has trivialized the life of children. Because if you look cross culturally outside of Christian and Jewish communities, killing babies was historically the norm. We’ve pointed out that, like, in Rome, Tacticus, who were retaining one of our future kids after complained that the Jews didn’t kill babies. He thought it was like a weird vegan thing. He’s like, why why are they doing this? It’s annoying. Right? Like, it’s something every every other society in human history understands that sometimes you just expose babies when it’s they’re inconvenient for you or whatever. Simone Collins:Maybe we need to rethink that name. Malcolm Collins:He he was cool in most other respects, and it was from the pre Christian period. Okay? But the I’m getting the angry look for my wife. but to continue here, I wanna go over this argument from the nurse because I found this really compelling. So she said, not sure if this is something you plan to touch at all, but in the discourse around Lindsay Calancey, seems very surface level, and I think there are a lot of things we can glean for both the crime and the reaction at large, especially if we try to look at the historic parallels. I

    Lindsey Clancy is Not the Problem; Women Are (We Did Not Want to Make this Episode)

  2. hace 1 día

    Over 300 Plants Found Controlling Media: Our Old Friend Group Went Rouge & Wants to Destroy AI

    Malcolm and Simone break down new reporting from effort.news exposing how effective altruism organizations spent tens of millions funding anti-AI narratives across journalism, YouTube explainer channels, and religious groups. They discuss the circular donor ecosystem, undisclosed grants, and the impact on public discourse. The conversation covers specific examples from The Guardian, Time Magazine, Kurzgesagt, and multiple faith organizations, along with personal context from their own grant history with the Survival and Flourishing Fund. They also address the mental health effects of doomer messaging and why the arguments fail under scrutiny. Shout out to Matthew Seagren / @MatchewXD who created the wasp clip! Show Notes The Media Astroturfing Brian covered this on Effort.News in an article titled: How Effective Altruism Bought the Media. They found “Potemkin articles, in which claims are fabricated, corroborated, and published as journalism by members of an insular donor ecosystem” They explore the issue through a guardian article that six people collaborated to publish, all of whom were paid for by three megadonors. The Guardian did NOT disclose these sources of funds, and, as Brian’s article puts it: “In a fundraising statement attached to the article, the Guardian proclaims its “fierce independence.”” The payments: * The Guardian: Paid over $3M by Coefficient Giving * The reporter, Aisha Down, paid $60-$110K through the Coefficient Giving’s Tarbell Fellowship, which pays her salary * The quoted experts were all recipients of funds from either SFF, Coefficient, or the Effective Ventures Foundation. The reporter does not justify her reasoning behind calling these people “experts” despite these “experts” publicly admitting their predictions were off by years, if not decades. * Henry Papadatos paid $620,000 * Malcolm Murray, paid $129,376 plus $47.1M to affiliated institutions * Andrea Castagna, paid $30,000 and the recipient of two undisclosed grants * The subjects of the story Daniel Kokotajlo, paid $2,851,166 * Given $400K by Coefficient * Given a $2M grant by the Survival and Flourishing Fund (which also was the biggest ever grant-giver to the Pragmatist Foundation—$500K!) As Brian puts it: “All six belong to a circular ecosystem known as “AI Safety,” united around the belief that AI will end the human race. What Down promotes as ‘expertise’ is not merely unrigorous or exaggerated — it is a work of cultlike fiction which openly promotes their vision of the AI apocalypse. This belief underwrites millions spent annually on promoting a firehose of anti-AI narratives with the goal of banning AI outright — the price of preventing the apocalypse.” “This ecosystem is bankrolled by three megadonors — Dustin Moskovitz’s Open Philanthropy, Sam Bankman-Fried’s Center for Effective Altruism (CEA), and Jaan Tallinn’s Survival and Flourishing Fund. The media arm of this empire has over $40 million in donations and includes paid journalists, influencers, and religious groups.” Apparently the Center for Effective Altruism rebranded to the Effective Ventures Foundation after the SBF fallout and Open Philanthropy rebranded to Coefficient Giving after distancing itself from SBF. $17.9M has gone to print $13.9M to video content $4.87M to political advocacy $2.66 film and fiction $1.81M to religious NGOs $1.35M to other The Tarbell Fellowship program is how Coefficient Giving influences media coverage; it uses it to pay the salaries of over 20 journalists at major news outlets. TIME is their biggest fellowship Recipient; Brian found that 58/100 of the TIME 100 profiles were written by Tarbell-paid journalists. He also shared leaked emails showing how AI safety orgs sponsor anti-AI content on YouTube and showed channels that have been funded by these orgs, including: * Kurzgesagt ($5.83M) * Rational Animations ($2.53M) * A Primer ($300K) * A Happier World ($150K) * Space Science Guy ($24K) And he points out how the AI-doomerism-sponsored videos perform between 12% and 89% worse than these channels’ normal videos. Related to this, Sabine posted about her experience being contacted by these orgs. What Sabine covers in her YouTube video: * She says an organization asked her to make an AI-risk video with prescribed sentences and references, * So it’s clear the messaging can go beyond simple sponsorship. * She also points out that it’s not just anti-AI orgs reaching out to content creators, Taylor Lorenz being offered $5,000 to make a tiktok video about the USA’s need to outcompete China with AI by Build American AI * My god did they ever make a stupid choice on who to contact * She points out these organizations would be dumb to NOT try to sponsor content, but she doesn’t like that political lobbying is flooding into science and tech reporting * BTW, her sponsor for that episode was Ground News, which another YouTuber hilariously attempted to claim was some sort of right-wing psyop ‘because what’s the point of showing both sides of an argument when one side of the political spectrum is just wrong’ The Religious Astroturfing Brian & Co. reported on this under: AI Safety Donors Paid Religious NGOs $3.3M for Statements on AI on Effort.News They find it rich that largely atheistic EAs are trying to get religious people to believe that AI will bring the end times. As it’s put in the article: “The AI Safety movement descends from rationalist and new atheist roots. Its core belief — that AI will literally end all human life — often draws comparisons to doomsday cults like Heaven’s Gate. Yet with enough funding, some churches are willing to square that belief with the Book of Revelation.” They observed that “AI Safety’s largest donors — Dustin Moskovitz and the now-convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried — were among Biden’s largest donors.” and yet when he lost the 2024 election, they were on the outs, which led them to turn to religious NGOs. “Since 2025, AI Safety donors put $3.3 million into churches, seminaries, faith networks and religious-affinity groups. It paid for pronouncements: declarations, red lines, and a “Magna Carta of AI.”” “The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America took $105,000 from [the Future of Life Institute] FLI. They credit their “red lines on AI” to “a grant from the Future of Life Institute.”2 The Gospel Coalition received $200,000 for a podcast called “Silicon Spiritualities,” without disclosing their sponsor. They later barred their writers from using AI to research, write, or edit. The World Council of Churches took $100,000 to write its “red lines.” The Mormon nonprofit Faith Matters took $299,000 for a “Magna Carta of AI.”” Their reporting shows that: * Multi-faith AI media got the most funding: $574,721 * Buddhist media came in second: $555,000 * Faith-adjacent: 550,000 “FLI, an AI Safety megadonor, runs a full-time religions program with a “Religions lead,” Will Jones, and a “U.S. Faith Liaison,” Brian J. A. Boyd. The program lists the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Vatican’s Fratelli Tutti Foundation among its partners. FLI’s grantees make up the overwhelming majority of religious signatories on statements produced by FLI and its allies.” Not all the religious astroturfing is going well: “Of FLI’s recipients, only two disclosed their donations on their project pages. Two more disclosed their donations, but only on LinkedIn. Four more made no public project-related disclosures. FLI’s other religious outreach is not progressing as smoothly. They paid a Muslim NGO for a declaration of Islamic principles and Impact Academy for a Hindu consensus statement. Neither has been delivered.” Catholic Stuff: “In September 2025, a Vatican working group chaired by papal adviser Fr. Paolo Benanti handed Pope Leo XIV an appeal for a prohibition on superintelligence “until there is broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably,” plus an IAEA-style inspectorate for AI labs.6 By November, FLI sat on the Vatican’s Builders AI Forum. In May 2026, it put $200,000 into two Catholic projects: a post-liberal magazine in Steubenville, Ohio, and a Slovenian faculty educating Catholic leaders on AI. FLI is using its newfound connections to support the business disputes of Anthropic, an AI-safety-linked company. In March, Boyd co-signed a Catholic theologians’ brief backing Anthropic in its dispute with the Department of War. Anthropic brought him to the company’s two-day summit with fifteen Christian thinkers.7 Then, on 25 May, Pope Leo XIV presented Magnifica Humanitas, the first encyclical devoted to artificial intelligence, and the lay speaker beside two cardinals in the Synod Hall was Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic.” “The AI Safety movement spends more brazenly and deceptively than almost any other political cause. This affects not just the AI debate, but theology broadly. As Nirit Weiss-Blatt puts it, “AI doomerism fills a ‘religious-shaped hole.’ For people who left religious upbringing but retain a hunger for a mission-driven community, the AI-risk subculture offers a replacement meaning system.”” Episode Transcript Simone Collins:. Hello, Malcolm. I’m very glad to be speaking with you because sweet satisfaction is at hand. We have known since the height of Sam Benjamin Fried that effective altruists have been pouring millions of dollars into AI doomerism propaganda or AI safety content as they would put it, but we didn’t have definitive receipts. And that was until two former Basecamp guests delivered them last week with Brian Chow and his effort.news revealing how effective altruism bought the media, basically. It’s it’s actually worse than you would think, Malcolm. And also how AI safety donors have paid religious NGOs 3,300,000 to make statements on AI. Then also, Sabina Hoffenfelder, who was on our

    Over 300 Plants Found Controlling Media: Our Old Friend Group Went Rouge & Wants to Destroy AI

  3. hace 2 días

    Aztecs Worshiped Cosmic Horror (Make HP Lovecraft Look Like Dr. Suess)

    Today on Based Camp, we dip our toes into the Aztec civilization through a review of Inga Clendinnen’s Aztecs: An Interpretation by John Psmith of Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, exploring how their religion, cosmology, and social structures centered on ritual human sacrifice at an industrial scale. The review examines their gods, warrior culture, child-rearing practices, and the inversion of pleasure-seeking societies into ones obsessed with pain and cosmic dread. We quickly came to understand why this society felt like Lovecraftian horror made real, how ideas and religion shaped every aspect of life, and why neighboring groups allied with the Spanish against them. The conversation contrasts Aztec culture with other historical civilizations and reflects on the role of moral frameworks in preventing such extremes. We heartily recommend reading John Psmith’s full review (their entire substack is great, especially for parents and people uniquely interested in culture). Take a moment to thank your lucky stars that YOU WEREN’T BORN IN MEXICO AT THE HEIGHT OF THE AZTEC EMPIRE. Episode Transcript Malcolm Collins:it almost reminds me of the urban monoculture, which is an entire society obsessed with pleasure. They’re an inversion of that. How much pain can you assert within your own life and those Simone Collins:around you? Bouquets of flowers were to be sniffed only at the outer edges, the swooning sweetness at the center belonged Malcolm Collins:not to that. Even allowed to be happier experience any pleasure not even smelling a flower. Simone Collins:Not even smelling a bouquet of freaking flowers. the will of tea was also made manifest in the brutal public torture and execution of a warrior or priest who stumbled. Quote, his warrior regalia stripped from him, his scalp locked shorn, his heart excised, his empty body broken into its parts and dispersed to be eaten to eaten. Okay. I didn’t get to them. Malcolm Collins:The what I this is just like your well, one of your your friends accidentally stumbles in a parade ceremony or something. Mhmm. And it’s not like a, well, he’s in a better place. It’s like, well, of course, we had to tear him apart and eat him. Simone Collins:human sacrifice was not an occasional or incidental religious custom like an extra spicy church service for the people who only show up on Christmas or Easter. No. The mass butchery of wailing, pleading captives of both sexes and all ages was the core activity around which their entire civilization and society revolved. Their art, their music, their poetry, their approach to warfare, their entire economic system, Malcolm Collins:Wait. Every day they had to make personal sacrifices of blood? Really feel like the worshipers of one of the dark gods from HP Lovecraft He nails it. Somehow achieved civilizational scale. Simone Collins:Hello, Malcolm. I am excited to be speaking with you today because I would like to talk about my favorite [bleep], my favorite is extinguishment of of a people because I’m done. Malcolm Collins:We shouldn’t be talking about favorite [bleep]. Simone Collins:That’s that’s a You know what? Speaker 4:Your space king drove my race to near extinction once. Okay. Awesome. Simone Collins:For real. And I think that you’re going to agree with me after you read. And we’re not so there’s this book that was that was created called Aztecs, an interpretation by Inga Klendin clan Klendinen from Cambridge University Press published in 1991. This is not new news, but it’s new news to me because And it’s Malcolm Collins:not disputed news, I would tell you. Simone Collins:It’s not. Malcolm Collins:No. No. No. Major historical scholar disputes how evil the Aztecs were. Simone Collins:Yeah. That that is because, yeah, that there is abundant evidence. They were not, like, shy about how they went about things and why they did them and all these things. But I genuinely did not know how bad it was, and the only reason I know now is that John Smith of mister and missus Smith’s bookshelf, which is one of my favorite substacks, wrote a book review about this 1991 book because of Why are you reading Malcolm Collins:book reviews? Is this something you do recreationally? Simone Collins:So there is this couple. Okay? They go on Substack by mister and missus Smith, but p p s m I t h. So, like, the the p is silent. Okay? They’re they write Malcolm Collins:So it’s like a gay version of Smith? Simone Collins:I don’t know. Okay. But here’s the thing, is they they have a bunch of kids, like a lot of kids, and they’re pretty, like, based about the way that they raise them. Okay. They have this, like, weird idyllic life where the way it seems from their substack is they just sit around with their kids and just read a whole bunch of intellectual books and talk about them. And to me, it’s like this idyllic cozy life of, like, what you would do with unlimited money. and it Malcolm Collins:sounds fun. Do we do with our unlimited cozy life? Simone Collins:Well, we talk about low culture, and perhaps that is a lot more fun. I do So put bikers Malcolm Collins:girls and VTubers and are lollies okay? Simone Collins:The the high the highbrow version of our aspirational life is mister and miss Smith, and I love their subs deck. And so here I am sitting in the lobby of of our fertility clinic waiting for post what’s the word? Post miscarriage blood work with the documentary team filming me in my moment of of humiliation. And I decide to read this because I’m like, this will distract me. Oh, look. A new book review. This will this will cheer me up. I love reading their book reviews. They’re always inspiring and intellectual. And then I just come away, like, just shook. Just totally shook. So I’m just gonna I’m just gonna start reading, and you’re gonna tell me just how good you feel about these people having left the the planet, that they’re gone, that there may be some diaspora left, but they’ve been conquered fully by the Spanish and, more importantly, by just infectious disease, which is I’ve never been Malcolm Collins:so No. No. The Aztecs were more conquered by the Spanish than infectious disease. Simone Collins:Oh, no. They were more conquered by infectious disease. Malcolm Collins:Oh, really? Continue. Speaker 6:So I double checked my memory on this, and Simone is wrong on this one. the Aztecs were, one, if you’re gonna say what was the number one thing that led to their downfall, it was all of the groups that hated them and ended up supporting the Spanish, then the Spanish, and a third disease. Disease did come at the wrong time for them and made their military forces weaker, but it wasn’t the instrumental piece of their downfall as it was for many other native groups. Octavian Collins:Mhmm. Simone Collins:Yeah. And when when just like yeah. Anyway, it was more of that plus, like, they were already kind of hoisted by their own petard as well. Malcolm Collins:Because it turns out everyone around them, Inga hated them. For real. Like, the Spanish came in, and they were like, so we’re gonna, like, eradicate your ruling dynasty. And people were like, oh, I am so about that. I am so about that. Don’t let me stop you, sir. Don’t let me what happened on my own troops here? Would you like them as well? Simone Collins:Yeah. For real, and you’re gonna understand why. So I’m just okay. Here we go. Right? Here he writes. Mister Pismith writes, when Hernan Cortes landed in the new world, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan was one of the greatest cities anywhere on Earth. It had more than twice the population of civil what? Sevi Seviye? Seviye. Whatever. Malcolm Collins:Stop pronouncing foreign words correctly, Spiro. Simone Collins:I’m so I I didn’t Malcolm Collins:do it. Shot on these disgusting un American words. Simone Collins:People don’t know you’re talking about. I didn’t do it right. Anyway, and was, as my grade school history textbooks, always nervously assured me, cleaner, more orderly, more magnificent than any contemporarious European city. Its ochre towers and pyramids rose like a dream from the shimmering waters of Lake Texaco Texcoco. Unlike the Malcolm Collins:organic Coco. Tex Simone Collins:is was this an a lake you know about? Malcolm Collins:Yeah. I went there all the time as a I’ve been to the ruins multiple times. Had to study them as a kid because my family always made me study any civilization that we were going to go see. This is so true. Simone Collins:Okay. Fine. Texacoaco. Unlike the organic maze of alleyways that characterized most Spanish cities, Tenochtitlan’s public gardens and temple districts and the grand professional processional ways were a product of the sort of high modernist urban planning that Europe wouldn’t really see until Hussmann’s Paris in the nineteenth century. The walls of the city shone with lime and were decorated with paintings, so it glimmered like a bobble in the Mexican sun. The soldiers who followed Cortes on on one of them on one hand described it as so ethereal, it seemed the three causeways joining it to the mainland were anchors without which it might float away. But on the other hand, we’re overawed by the towering height and hallucinatory bulk of the Great Pyramid topped with its twin temples of and in addition to being an architectural miracle, the city and empire, which fed it, were also an economic and social miracle. The Valley Of Mexico had a dangerously irregular growing season, lacks crucial minerals, and is frequently subject to earthquakes, volcanoes, drought, and destructive floods. Despite such circumstances hostile to any sort of economic surplus or capital accumulation, the Aztecs, or more properly as they called themselves, the Mexica, managed to create and maintain a complex social order, which astonished the Spaniards with its state run economic guilds, fine gradations of social hierarchy, and car

    Aztecs Worshiped Cosmic Horror (Make HP Lovecraft Look Like Dr. Suess)

  4. hace 3 días

    Youth Flee Burning Man: "A Retirement Home in the Desert"

    Discussion of recent data on Burning Man attendance trends, including a New York Post article and Black Rock City census figures showing a decline in younger participants and a rise in attendees in their forties and fifties. The conversation covers historical context from past events, personal experiences at the festival, and comparisons to other gatherings. Additional analysis explores organizational challenges, succession planning, and broader cultural shifts affecting participation. The episode also touches on related events and movements that have evolved over time. Episode Transcript Malcolm Collins:Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. You, as somebody who had gone to Burning Man in the past, we’re gonna be going over an article and some new statistics. and the article is titled, Burning Man has become a wrinkled sausage fest for aging millennial men data shows. And the data is extreme. This article is, by the way, from the New York Post, and we’ll be going through it, commenting on it, and bringing in additional data. Right. Burning Man, the nine day celebration of art, music, and anarchistic hijinks in the Nevada Desert has been steadily shrinking since its 2019 peak. But the share of people in their forties and fifties is on the rise, data shows. The number of free loving revelers flocking to the playa I love they put it in quotation marks like you got Simone Collins:Oh, New York Post. Come on. Malcolm Collins:Where each year a city is built on bare sand and razed after a week of drug fueled closing optional partying. No. One of the, posts I found, on Twitter, because I was looking at analysis on this, was a guy who had regularly gone to Burning Man who said the number of attractive naked women has dropped 95% over Simone Collins:the years. 95. That’s a statistic for you. No. No. Malcolm Collins:It dipped to about 70,000 last year after peaking at close to 80,000 according to last year’s census of Black Rock City, the ad hoc municipality that hosts the burn. But the oldies are proving that they have more stamina than the kids in 2014. Oh. Burners under 30 made up thirty percent of the playa. The number plunged by more than half to 14 in 2025. Simone Collins:Oh my god. That’s actually quite That’s remarkable. Yeah. That’s Malcolm Collins:Oh, and and that’s an old age. We’re not talking under, like, 20 or 25. Under 30. 30 is less than 14% now. Simone Collins:That’s really different from how I remember it. Malcolm Collins:When you went, you said it was would be the majority. Right? Simone Collins:Yeah. I I was very so as a young lady who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, I was accustomed to events where people were naked, and I was also very accustomed to all the people who were naked, obviously, being boomers, being my parents’ age, and being really gross looking. And then what really shocked me about Burning Man, which I attended, I think, as a junior in high school in 2005, was that the naked people were actually hot. Like, I I wasn’t, repulsed when I saw them. I was like, okay. Like, these are attractive naked people. I thought only ugly people walked around naked because that’s kind of the normal San Francisco Bay Area. [Correction—it was 2006] Malcolm Collins:It is the normal San Francisco Bay White people. Who lived in Simone Collins:San Francisco. About, you know, like, being naked. They actually had one of the things that happened at Burning Man was a thing called critical tits. I think it happened outside Burning Man too. But there there was this thing where just, like, all the women would ride their bikes with their shirts off in big flocks. It was, like, it was a one once every time, but, like, it was delightful. Yeah. So many things like that. But I guess now, it’d just be like saggy flapjacks on a bunch of bikes instead. Malcolm Collins:Did you ever walk around Burning Man naked? Or Simone Collins:I did not take my clothes off. No. I did not take my clothes Malcolm Collins:so it’s Simone Collins:I was I was underage. That probably I mean, I there were, like, a bunch of naked feral children running around, but, like, I I guess I guess it would have been fine. I Our Malcolm Collins:house is full of naked feral children Simone Collins:to Have you tried to get yes. You have. Look. Getting our children dressed is harder than dressing a a rabid raccoon. They will scratch. They will hiss. They will bite. I’m not dealing with that. It’s like, if I don’t have to. Jeez. I feel like if we could just spray paint clothing on them, we would. Just anyway. Wow. That’s what we’ll Malcolm Collins:be doing going forward. So that is that is the future. Spray paint clothing on in the morning. You have a you have a machine that, like, grabs your kids. They’re squirming and spray paint Simone Collins:them down. Genuinely. Genuinely. I should actually, like, try to watch YouTube channels of pet influencers who, like, make their poor over medicated animals wear clothing. Malcolm Collins:So, like, we’ve got, like, a dog washing sink. We should be using that for the kids. I had then I’d have to Simone Collins:lift them into it. See, I can just kind of push them into the bath after I drag them because I literally you know what? Every time with Titan, I have to drag her. She’s smiling the whole way. Good. She loved it. Malcolm Collins:A little too much. Speaker 3:I’m gonna be honest. Simone Collins:A little too much. Catch me, daddy. Catch me. It’s not good. It’s not good, Titan. Anyway yeah. So wow. So it’s older now. Because it it was notably young, and there were a lot of hot people there when I when I went. Yeah. And I yeah. It’s yeah. Malcolm Collins:And they were naked. Apparently, there’s just not many topless women at all anymore. Simone Collins:That is also shocking. I mean, now to be clear, like, critical tits wouldn’t have been a thing at Burning Man if women were always walking around topless. So it wasn’t, like perpetual nudity wasn’t so much a thing. One of the reasons being that you’re in a pretty extreme weather environment. Like, you’re you have to wear goggles and you have to have a mask with you constantly because the dust storms come, and you actually need to cover, like, all the things or else I mean, dust is gonna get everywhere anyway. But, also, it gets super cold at night. You can’t walk around naked because it’s, like, 40 degrees and windy and cold. So, you know, as you know from being in that troubled team camp on the desert, like, it gets super freaking cold at night, and you you need to try to survive. Malcolm Collins:So to continue Yes. Adriel Knight 41 attended in 2023 when a rainstorm flooded camps and turned the exit routes into an impassable muddy mess. Famous. She recalls one young influencer saying, this is not like Coachella at all. Simone Collins:First off, who’s going to Coachella? Second off, who’s going to and that was that like, there’s a I Malcolm Collins:had classmates. When I was getting my MBA at Stanford business school Of course. There was, like, a big group of them that went to Coachella, and I were are you sizable enough. And I was like, what are you f*****s doing? Simone Collins:I know. It seems so insanely miserable. Insanely miserable. I mean, I would say, actually, burning burning man is legit cool. very, very like, I wouldn’t go again, but I’m glad I went. However, Coachella? Absolutely not. No. No way at all. but that year is is quite famous. Nothing like this had happened at Burning Man before. And what happens with the Playa, this desert, is when it rains hard, and it rained hard for several days. You cannot move a car out of it. You they there were there were pregnant people there. There were sick people there. There were people who couldn’t walk, who who were separated from their meds. It was a genuine serious emergency. And when this played out, you had the government saying, like, hey. Should we send in a rescue crew? And the Burning Man organization being, oh my god. Please don’t. Like, we can’t have this on our record, basically. I actually think they made a bad call. Not So Malcolm Collins:they ended up dying, Simone Collins:by the way. Someone died in that? Malcolm Collins:Of drugs, though. Simone Collins:Oh, well, yeah. It was oh, sorry. Yeah. I do remember that. Yeah. But that’s that doesn’t count, because, you know, that happens. But that was a really, really bad year. It they had such a rough run of it after 2019 that it makes sense why there are fewer people because it’s just kind of scary. But that Malcolm Collins:was in 2023. Simone Collins:That was in 2023. Yeah. Malcolm Collins:And it that year, apparently, like, Chris Rock and Diplo I don’t know who Diplo is. They ended up having to, like, walk five, six miles in the mud to, like, the road and and hitchhike out. Simone Collins:Yeah. No. Some people escaped that way, but then the other burners, like, shamed them for it. You know, they’re like, coward. It was just just horrible, like, the way it all played out. And this is also the Malcolm Collins:Kimball Musk was there that year. Simone Collins:He’s yeah. He’s I didn’t realize how how much he got into Burning Man until I saw the man must burn, a documentary about Burning Man on HBO, which has multiple episodes. It’s a really good documentary. But then I see this, like, weird guy talking who, like, looks sort of familiar, and then I’m like, oh my god. And it just turns out he’s trying to get involved in, like, the governance of it, the succession planning with the organization, like, trying to get people together. And it very much actually ties in with your theme of today, which is this organization needs succession planning. This organization Well, I mean, it’s the same Malcolm Collins:with the Behemothian Grove. Like, the Behemothian Grove is falling apart because everyone’s super old now. Like, there

    Youth Flee Burning Man: "A Retirement Home in the Desert"

  5. hace 6 días

    Why Do 10/10 Top VTubers Look Like Children?

    This episode examines popular VTuber avatar designs and how they influence audience engagement. The conversation covers community reactions to recent viral moments, perceptions of age representation in virtual content, and comparisons with trends in other regions. The discussion also reviews data on viewer sentiment, patterns in top-performing models, and broader questions about norms for online personas as technology evolves. Emphasis is placed on protecting real-world audiences while understanding market-driven preferences. Episode Transcript Malcolm Collins:Hello, Simone. Today, we are going to be talking about an interesting case that has had some virality within our community, which is TechTone found out to his horror that one of the VTubers he was crushing on was not a minor. What? Speaker 3:I swear, man, she said she was 13. Speaker 21:What the I feel like I just saw something illegal. I told the Internet Iron Mouse had a kid, and they’re 19, and Iron Mouse is 40? Speaker 20:Imagine how visibly shaken Iron Mouse is now. I was visibly shaken. Normies finding out VTubers are adult women, Malcolm Collins:And we need to talk about this because it’s a very there’s a this is deeper. And so I had an AI do an analysis on the top 10 VTubers to find out by looking at their models, plausibly, what what percent of them were not minors? And it said one of the 10. Simone Collins:Wait. Which one of the 10 doesn’t look like a minor? We’ll get to that. Okay. Malcolm Collins:We’ll get to that. We’ll look at them up. Scroll around Simone Collins:and find it. I need to see. Speaker 4:We ended up, looking up this individual, I do not agree with the AI and neither does Simone. We think she looks high school. May maybe plausibly barely legal. Malcolm Collins:And we’ll be going through the mage. But this is this is an interesting phenomenon because this isn’t necessarily that these women are choosing this. If you look at Yukiyaru, who we had on our stream recently Mhmm. She discussed the phenomenon where when she first went on, she planned to do Lutubing. She had a model with big jiggly boobs. She was like, okay. I’ll go out there. I’ll get all these guys. Simone Collins:Because she figured that was what people wanted, which is understandable. Malcolm Collins:As time went on, she moved to smaller and smaller breasts and both less sexualized and more overtly a minor model. Yes. and as she made that transition, her audience got bigger. Now she probably would have moved in the other direction had she not seen this. We probably wouldn’t see this many VTubers be doing this if this wasn’t what the audience apparently wanted. So the question becomes, why does the audience want this when there are not that many PDA files or maybe there are? Simone Collins:Allegedly. Another question Malcolm Collins:we’ll get to. Simone Collins:I don’t Malcolm Collins:know. And the second question, the question is, well, first, let’s just focus on the tech tone thing because I’ve I’ve I’ve found this whole thing interesting, and it’s worth talking about. Simone Collins:Right? Like, mid thirties? Malcolm Collins:So what he found out is he found out an old clip for her where she admitted to having a daughter who was at least 10 years old. And her own exactly 10 at that clip, and the clip was nine years ago. So it means that now she has a 19 year old daughter, which he took to mean she’s at least in her forties, which I would agree with. She’s probably at least in her forties. Simone Collins:Fair enough. And he’s 32 years old. Yeah. Okay. Malcolm Collins:Well and and he was scandalized by this. I mean, his clip, he he acted scandalized. I I will note here that I suspect that his scandalization was meant as a joke. Sure. Didn’t think through the meta of this. I don’t think that he actually really he’s not an idiot. He didn’t actually think that she was, a 10 year old, like, Simone Collins:a model. It’s just weird when there’s a disconnect between the public face and the voice behind it. That’s all. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 18:So the tech tone thing, it’s just a gag. We don’t really think that he thought that. it’s just funny the way this is playing out, and congratulations to him on the kid he has on the way. Malcolm Collins:And so I don’t I don’t really I I wanna be very clear here. I am not No. No. No. Tectonic the predator or something like that. I I’m I’m saying he did a bit, but I think the bit uncovers something much deeper, which is this inversion of the trope of, you know, the guy comes to your house from date line. He’s like, sit down. Sit down. Like and they’re like, I swear, I thought she was older. And here it’s like, I I I swear. I thought it was a 10 year old. I had no idea that was a 40 year old woman with children. And the Internet has been mostly sane about this. So I decided to do a sentiment analysis. So in case people are wondering, like, okay. I know this has been going viral. What percent of people? 55%, 45 to 55% are saying this is a complete nothing burger. Why are you caring about this? 25 to 35% are actively mad at the people who are doing any who are angry about this. Right? Like so a big chunk of the flashback has been, like, why are you shaming a woman for having children? Simone Collins:Oh. Right? Okay. Malcolm Collins:And only 20 to 30% actually treat this as any sort of a scandal. And first, I wanna note, I find this to be an incredibly healthy response from the wider community. I think it’s an incredibly good response to see from the wider community. And the the reason I say that is because the v tubing community in The United States grew out of the idol worship community in Japan and South Korea. And those communities in regards to stars having children or getting old is brutal and abusive, frankly. It’s it’s a really disgusting, community. It it promotes antinatalism in these countries because these stars aren’t allowed to have kids because everybody treats them like they’re married to them. Simone Collins:Right. Malcolm Collins:I know you’re gonna go into later in this piece where the same thing happened with a bunch of old ladies and a younger man, and then they they did freak out because he ended up sleeping with one of them. So we’ll talk about that. But, we we imported this from Japan, but we didn’t import the toxicity as much. Right? You know? And and and when this is flared up, we’ve pushed back, which I appreciate. But one of the things that we did import from Japan was the useful figures because this was a part of this culture in Japan as well when they were fictionalized. Yeah. So, I decided to go over top 10, just so we can talk through, this this wider phenomenon of the incredibly young looking VTuber model topping the charts. So top one here, you actually know this one because she’s in a titans shark princess song. This is Oh my god. Oh. Simone Collins:The the the reason why our daughter identifies as a shark princess. Yeah. Malcolm Collins:Because she saw a music video with Garugaru in it, and she said, that’s me. Simone Collins:Yeah. This is the video about me. Malcolm Collins:No. This is the video about me. It’s a very cute video. But, anyway, she she looks like a child. You you’d agree with that. Right? Like, Simone Collins:And I yes. I think, you know, kinda confirmed when a, you know, four year old girl thinks that it’s about her. So, yeah, if a four year old girl sees your video and is like, that’s me, I think something might be going on there. Malcolm Collins:Then we have Hoshima Marine, a a young face. I I looked up her big eyes, very young looking. Okay. Definitely not past 18. Hoshima Sushi, sushi or something. I I can’t pronounce any of these. Again, young face here. Usadako Pekaro was the next one. Kobo Canaro, she Kuma, Fubikino, Mori Callaloop, Sakura Miko, and then Unico, Corom. and and the smallest of these is at 2,280,000. and then you could add additional ones in there, like the one we’re talking about today, Iron Mouse, very clearly childlike. Fillion, quite big. I don’t know if you’ve seen Fillion, but very, very childlike in the way that both she presents acts and it it it’s shown on screen . In fact, of the ones that, like, I watch, the only ones that look, there’s some that look like teenagers, okay, that are popular in our community. Like, I’d say, Keirsha and Smuggalana. Mhmm. And the only one I know who actively presents as an adult is ChaCha. And that’s because ChaCha often talks about how many kids she’s had, and it’s it’s hard to not see her. So she takes on, like, the mommy role. Simone Collins:She’s like, 40. Any of the really busty ones are just obviously adults. Malcolm Collins:So of these, the ones that came off as clearly, like, child child Yeah. Would be Goro and Kobo. Okay. Then young teen to high school, you have Susi, Pekuro, Fubiko, Miko, and Koron. Okay. Young face, sexier body is Marine. And then close to adult is Callie. So let’s look at Callie because you said you wanted to see the one that Yeah. K. That’s Mori Callilope. Simone Collins:K. Malcolm Collins:Let’s see what she looks like to see if I agree with the AI. Because the AI actually looked up images of them. Simone Collins:Oh. Yeah. Malcolm Collins:She’s she’s plausibly I mean, I’d say barely legal. But Simone Collins:Yeah. I’m Malcolm Collins:No. This is a high schooler. Simone Collins:This is a high schooler. This is not an adult. She’s not of drinking age. Yeah. She’s adorable. But that’s the problem. She’s adorable. Maybe they saw any images of her with larger chesticles and therefore assumed that she was an adult. But all the other ones show her with a modest chest. So I don’t know. I don’t know what to make it. Malcolm Collins:Yeah. I’m looking at something. Let’s see. It’s cdeco pickerel. Wait. What is this one? I’m just spot checking thi

    Why Do 10/10 Top VTubers Look Like Children?

  6. 3 sep

    Why Actors Were Social Outcasts Until Recently

    For most of Western history, acting was a low-status profession often linked with vagrancy, moral suspicion, and limited respectability. This episode traces how that reputation formed—from Restoration England and Victorian theater culture through early Hollywood—and why the public association between performers and social stigma lasted far longer than most people realize. Drawing on historical research and primary accounts, the discussion covers when women first appeared on the English stage, how limited career options shaped public judgment, the slow professionalization of theater after the Civil War, and the modern shift that turned entertainers into trusted public voices. Key turning points include late-night television’s studio-era promotion machine and the legitimizing effect of a former actor reaching the highest political office. The conversation closes with a practical takeaway: how to choose role models and sources of life advice more carefully. Episode Transcript Malcolm Collins:Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be talking about another part of history that has been hidden from people, which is that until very, very recently, actors and actresses were seen as the same kind of a thing as smex workers. Simone Collins:Yeah. Yes. It shows up a lot in my regency era romances. Malcolm Collins:It comes up a lot? Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. They don’t they’re like, how could you be with an actor? No. Simone Collins:Well, they yeah. They’re basically roughly the same thing. Like, you you kind of understand, you know, if she’s an actress. That’s Malcolm Collins:what she does. And what I will be going into in this particular episode is the reasons why this connection was made, but also tracking that the reasons why people originally well, let’s put it this way. The reason why one of the big reasons why is because actors were, one, literally selling their bodies, which they do to an even greater extent today. They often appear on stage naked on Yeah. Major movies Simone Collins:and Kissing people for pay. For pay. Yes. Romantically interested in. Malcolm Collins:And in addition to that, it was well understood that most of them would sleep with theater directors and stuff like that for their roles, which, you know, going till today is still something they do. but look at the Harvey Weinstein case. and you also see this was males as well. Matthew Lawrence described being sent to a hotel room where an Oscar winning director in a robe asked him to dress for Polaroids and applied compliance would get him a major role. He declared Male or female? Lost his agency. This is Matthew Lawrence, a male actor. Simone Collins:And and the director. I’m asking if the director Male director. Oh, okay. Well, yeah, sure, I guess. Mhmm. Malcolm Collins:So, yeah, this is this happens on both sides of the fence in in Hollywood, and people in Hollywood selling their bodies. They are still sleeping with directors for roles. And so the question is, if they’re acting like prostitutes, why did we as a society start respecting them? Why did we as a society start taking political and life advice from what is essentially high pay prostitutes? Simone Collins:Yeah. Because I guess now it’s it’s there’s a there’s the actor to influencer lifestyle product purveyor pipeline. Yeah. Or the assumption is, ah, yes. We must we must listen to them and buy what they buy for they know better than we do, which is so funny. Because I guess, yeah, even with going all the way back to, Greek plays, all the men played women. And then same with Shakespearean plays. There weren’t female actresses. The men played women. So, yeah, when did women start acting in the first place? When were women allowed to start acting in the first place? I don’t know how this was with Kabuki in Japan. I admittedly don’t know if that was Malcolm Collins:That is one of the things that we will be talking about. Simone Collins:Oh, good. I want to know. Oh. Malcolm Collins:So just some this was a hard episode to put together because, again, there was so much academic research on this. Simone Collins:No kidding. Malcolm Collins:Very well studied phenomenon. Yeah. In one piece titled actresses and prostitutes in Victorian London, I I’ll quote a bit from the abstract here. The popular association between actresses and prostitutes and belief in actresses inappropriate sexual conduct endured through the nineteenth century. In The United States, religious fundamentalism accounts for much of the prejudice, but in Great Britain, where puritanical influence was not as influential on the theater, other factors helped to preserve the derogatory view of actresses. In certain times and places, actresses did have links with the women the oldest of all women’s professions. male actors were not high status either until the nineteenth century. They were often viewed as little better than vagrants or circus people. The first actor united in Britain was Henry Irving in 1895. In The United States, the census and contemporary accounts show a rapidly growing but still socially ambiguous profession, after the civil war. By 1912, there were tens of thousands of people working in theater and popular entertainment, but they were still seen very poorly. In fact, even though we had famous actors and actresses before the period, they were not really normalized until the nineteen eighties as something that should be respected. The eighties? That late? No. No. Because you had before that actresses like Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe and Katherine Hepburn. Your beloved Hold on. Let’s take a step back here. Okay. What did people actually think of characters like Marilyn Monroe But Audrey Hepburn. We’ll Please. We’ll focus on one that you said because I think that she’s a great example that this came to your head. People thought of Marilyn Monroe as basically a famous prostitute. She was known for sleeping with married men. She was known for showing her body, showing her legs, the whole great scene thing. She was known as a glorified prostitute. In fact, I think people would have seen only a thin line between her work and what was going on in Playboy was in the same period. Simone Collins:She was monogamously married twice or three times twice. Malcolm Collins:Was the one who hooked up with Kennedy. Right? Yes. But Simone, mister happy birthday. Simone Collins:Well, that was after the second marriage, I think. It she was single again then. But it Malcolm Collins:He was married. Simone Collins:Yes. He was married. Yeah. That was bad. That was bad. But, I mean, like, famous people do things like that. Malcolm Collins:Yes. But it doesn’t get scandalized to the extent that she did. Everyone was like, of course, she did it. She’s an actress. Simone Collins:Look. There were many other actresses at that time that did not have that same kind of reputation. But, yes, I I I I see your point broadly. I’m just kind of shocked that you would say not until the eighties was it considered. I mean but even then, it had sorted Malcolm Collins:And I’d point out to you. Even if you look at Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn, we actually don’t have the same sort of phenomenon of even major famous actors that you still respect today like them going on other TV shows and giving life or political advice. They just didn’t do it. Simone Collins:Yeah. Audrey Hepburn engaged in charity work, but in a way similar to how you’d expect a royal to engage in charity work where she, yeah, doesn’t seem to engage in a whole lot of, like, political opining, which is not what you see these days. Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Point made. Alright. Let’s get into it. Simone Collins:Alright. Malcolm Collins:So so you know I’m not putting a conservative slant on this. The piece that I ended up using as the main piece we’ll be reading from was from Jezebel Oh. Where they interviewed a bunch of historians and anthropologists from this period. Long before the advent of recording technology, theaters were assumed to be basically brussels, it and was taken for granted that the women working in them were sexually available. Quote, there is a very long history of a kind of literal quid pro quo, but also simply women subject to harassment or attacks and abuse of other actors, directors, managers, or wealthy audience members. Looking back on earlier centuries, Kirsten Pullen, head of the theater department in the University of Illinois, then author of Actresses and On Stage and in Society, told Jezebel. Women first appeared on stage in England in around the sixteen sixties. Theater had been banned by the Puritan government in 1647 and restarted under the restoration, the glittery, brawdy reign of Charles the second. Shortly after he was put on the stone, he decreed that women could work on the stage. Among his many mistresses was a beautiful and talented actress, Nell Gwyn, who supposedly was raised in a brothel. So you asked why did women why did women, get in in in theater? The answer is that England had a moral Puritan government, and then, of course, came in Charles the second, who did convert to Catholicism on his deathbed. And the first thing he wants to do is hook up one of his mistresses who wanted to be in acting with a job, and that’s how it got started. One of the women he was sleeping with on the side thought it’d be fun to act in front of people, so he decided to make it public. This is why Simone Collins:for okay. Malcolm Collins:Yeah. He made it legal. Simone Collins:That was what year? Like, around Malcolm Collins:That was 06/06 sometime after 1647, so maybe, like, 1650. Simone Collins:Okay. Yeah. Because I’m I’m trying to, like, piece together in my mind when I know that small plays became okay. I know that, for example, Marie Antoinette and her social set would have private stage plays, like, among their friends. Like, you’d put o

    Why Actors Were Social Outcasts Until Recently

  7. 2 sep

    Dating Is New & Was Considered Worse than Wh****g

    Historically, what we now call dating was treated as lower-status than prostitution. The word “date” itself once meant visiting a prostitute. Then working-class “charity girls” undercut professional sex workers by trading companionship and intimacy for dinners, tickets, clothes, and nights out — a practice contemporaries called treating. In this Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins walk through the late-19th / early-20th century shift: cheap urban leisure (nickelodeons, dance halls, Coney Island), taxi dancers as proto-host clubs, shop girls hunting rich bosses, the rebrand of face-painting into “makeup,” the invention of “personality” and the It Girl, and 1920s petting parties. They argue modern dating is not an ancient institution that suddenly broke. It is a recent, low-commitment market that was controversial when it appeared — and that older courtship systems (family-supervised seasons, explicit marriage-seeking) may be more honest than ambiguous long-term dating. Also discussed: why they treat dating as wife-hunting rather than “seeing where it goes,” why they want paying-for-dates destigmatized as traditional, and how RFAB can generate period-accurate 1920s stories. Episode Transcript [00:00:00] Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I am right off learning a historical fact that blew my mind, which is that historically what we today call dating was seen as lower than prostitution- [00:00:16] Simone Collins: Wait ... [00:00:16] Malcolm Collins: until incredibly recently, up until the 1920s. Even our word date Historically meant visiting a prostitute. [00:00:30] Simone Collins: I thought it was like an, an assignation or a something else. That’s great. An [00:00:35] Malcolm Collins: assignation? [00:00:36] Simone Collins: Like, a rendezvous. [00:00:38] Malcolm Collins: No, it did mean that. But you would never use it for a romantic rendezvous. You used it for business rendezvous. And then it began to be used to mean seeing a prostitute, and then it began to become applied way later during this period where dating had this bad reputation, to seeing what was called a charity woman. [00:00:59] Simone Collins: A charity- So, and- A cha- what’s a charity woman? [00:01:02] Malcolm Collins: W- it’s what today we would call a woman. Okay. So, [00:01:06] Simone Collins: What, what... Oh, okay. Okay. Just, yeah. Okay. I’ll, I’ll say the main thing- What, spell this out for me. [00:01:09] Malcolm Collins: This, [00:01:09] Simone Collins: I’m [00:01:10] Malcolm Collins: so confused ... differentiated a charity woman, okay? [00:01:12] Simone Collins: Okay. [00:01:12] Malcolm Collins: So a charity woman would expect a man to pay for food or an activity. [00:01:20] Simone Collins: Okay. [00:01:20] Malcolm Collins: And she would often court multiple men before getting married. Now, today this sounds like a woman. So we’re gonna go- Yes ... into what alerted me to this. We’re gonna go into the Wikipedia article on this. And even though, the the reason I cite this is even something as lefty as Wikipedia was like, “Oh yeah, this was considered a super, a bad thing to do.” We’re gonna go into the campaigns- Oh ... to arrest these women. We’ll go into what prostitutes were saying about these women, ‘cause they absolutely hated these women. They completely disrupted the way prostitution worked. And we’ll go into why this transformation happened. And I think it’s important to keep this in mind when we live in a world today and people say dating markets are no longer functioning, and they act like something that has existed since the beginning of time just collapsed all of a sudden. Instead of something that’s existed for less than a century collapsed, and what we should do is go back to older mechanisms of dating, like arranged marriage and dating markets like the season, which we are attempting to rebuild. So fun stuff here. Let’s go right into it. So what alerted me to this is the RFab dev, like the only other human who works on it other than Simone and I Bruno reached out with this concept where he wanted us to go into the history of dating. Specifically the claim that dating came from prostitution or was even frowned on by prostitutes. Specifically because it took business from them And it goes on. The term dating did emerge from prostitution and so did the general practice in the early 20th century. Charity girls were deemed competitors who undercut the wages of prostitutes. Basically, easy girls who weren’t formal prostitutes figured out that they could blur the lines by getting dinners or so on paid for. Now, what’s really fascinating is the invention of dating as we understand it and think of it as like this wholesome 1950s practice today would have in its time been seen as extremely or eerily parallel to OnlyFansing today E.g., getting m- multiple men to pay for stuff for you while being an informal sex worker. I- i- in just a new way using new technologies. [00:03:48] Simone Collins: I guess that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. People sort of, like, being angry because someone’s coming in and undercutting them professionally. When they’re like, “What? I work for this,” and then there’s a bunch of tourists who [00:04:00] don’t actually need the money but just want a free dinner. [00:04:02] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay And who are like, “Well, I didn’t know I could just put nudes of myself online and people-” “... would give me money. Let’s, let’s do this.” [00:04:08] Simone Collins: Oh, no. [00:04:10] Malcolm Collins: I hear this one theory that OnlyFans was, like, predominantly paid for by dads to see their daughter’s friends. And I was like, “That is telling on yourself, buddy.” [00:04:23] Simone Collins: That... Mm. Mm. [00:04:25] Malcolm Collins: But maybe. I mean, I’ve, I’ve seen the movie, You still haven’t seen it. What, what’s it called? Beauty, beauty something. Oh. [00:04:31] Simone Collins: American Beauty? [00:04:32] Malcolm Collins: American Beauty, yeah. [00:04:34] Simone Collins: Seems depressing. I don’t like depressing movies. [00:04:36] Malcolm Collins: It’s not that depressing- [00:04:39] Simone Collins: Mm ... [00:04:40] Malcolm Collins: if I’m gonna be honest. Mostly because all of the characters are so pathetic and unlikable- Girl, [00:04:45] Simone Collins: that sounds- that you [00:04:45] Malcolm Collins: don’t really feel bad for them. [00:04:47] Simone Collins: I don’t wanna watch something about pathetic, unlikel- I’m, I’m really struggling- It’s, it’s a movie about- ... with TV and movies right now ... the birth of the urban [00:04:52] Malcolm Collins: monoculture, if you, if you wanna call it anything. [00:04:55] Simone Collins: Why would I want to watch that? [00:04:56] Malcolm Collins: And how it destroys people’s lives. [00:04:58] Simone Collins: I wanna watch attractive, competent people who are good at their jobs. Is this so hard to do? Is this so difficult? [00:05:05] Malcolm Collins: But to continue here. Modern people don’t fully realize, but paying for a date isn’t providing, it’s confirmation that you can provide. Mm. It isn’t trad, it’s low-grade prostitution and always has been. Dating is paying for companionship with sex as an unspoken bonus. The old criticism that men would expect sex if they took out a woman was fair, but it ignores the truth that the reason men expected this wasn’t because they were jerks or sexist, but because that is what dating was about. What’s really fun is, so when I dove into this, and, and this is one of these topics where I’m just not gonna be able to read all the primary sources I wanted to read on this, ‘cause there was just so much evidence on this. But there was one academic research that cited a guy from the 1920s, I think it was, like, 1925, talking about how he paid, like, $1.50 for a girl, and she didn’t even let him do any heavy petting. Oh, dear. And that was the expectation, and he was quite upset about this [00:06:08] Simone Collins: Huh, $1.50 [00:06:11] Malcolm Collins: That is how it went back then. But basically all of this is confirmed, and it’s dramatically worse than you think, exactly like yesterday when somebody reached out to you. Today, we treat long-term dating as a precursor to marriage, but it’s not. The difference is in the commitment. If two people act as fully committed, then they’re married regardless of paperwork. Modern dating, though, is long-term persistent companionship without commitment. It’s harsh, but long-term low-commitment dating is just prostitution, always has been. I’d agree with this. If you treat dating in the conventional format, it’s very unlikely to lead to marriage. If you look at the way that Simone and I dated I sat her down first date, what’d I say? [00:06:51] Simone Collins: Not looking to date. I’m looking to find a wife. That is what you said. Yeah. You really, I guess, weren’t dating. You were wife hunting. [00:06:59] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. [00:07:01] Simone Collins: Wow. Okay. Yeah. [00:07:05] Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm. And it meant that everything was structured very differently. [00:07:08] Simone Collins: It did. [00:07:09] Malcolm Collins: And the way you thought about every step was very different because it was, we are waiting to see if you clear being good enough to be a wife for me. Mm-hmm. [00:07:19] Simone Collins: Mm. [00:07:20] Malcolm Collins: But let’s dig in In the social context of dating this is by the way Wikipedia I am reading, lefty coded Wikipedia- Okay brainwashed Wikipedia here. Dating, treating is the practice of com- providing companionship and intimate activity in exchange for entertainment, outing, gifts, and other items of monetary value. The activity was prevalent in large areas of the United States from the 1890s to the 1940s, and was commonly engaged in by young working class women. As treating became mor

    Dating Is New & Was Considered Worse than Wh****g

  8. 1 sep

    Fake Diagnosis Invented to Harvest Organs from Living Patients

    Simone woke up to a 5am text thread claiming brain death was invented to harvest organs — and the more she dug, the worse it got. This episode walks through the TJ Hoover case (a man wheeled toward organ recovery who was crying, thrashing, and later survived), the 1968 Harvard “irreversible coma” paper that built the modern framework, the Lazarus sign, the apnea test, paralytics used during recovery, hospital reimbursement incentives, and a New Jersey case where an organ procurement group treated donor registration like a lifetime contract the family had to fight in court. If you only do one thing after watching: check your license and the actual donor registry. Taking the heart off the card is not always enough. Tell the people who would show up at the hospital. Put a revocation in your advance directive.Not medical or legal advice. Organ transplants save lives. The question is whether the current definition, incentives, and paperwork are honest enough to trust. Show Notes The Case of TJ Hoover SIMONE’S SOURCE: It’s not real, lots of people survive incurable brain death, most famously and most recently TJ Hoover According to some reports, A person who has actually met a complete, correctly performed formal determination of brain death/death by neurologic criteria (BD/DNC) does not recover. * By definition, the determination requires permanent loss of function of the brain as a whole, including the brainstem * A later recovery means the person was not, in fact, brain-dead under the applicable standard, or that the diagnosis/process was incomplete or erroneous. * THE PROBLEM IS THAT IT DOESN’T SEEM PEOPLE ARE CORRECTLY DIAGNOSING, because TJ Hoover was one of those people. Anthony Thomas “TJ” Hoover II was hospitalized in Richmond, Kentucky, in October 2021 after a drug overdose and cardiac arrest, according to reporting based on family and former-organ-procurement-worker accounts. He was severely neurologically impaired and entered an organ-donation pathway. His family says they were told he was brain-dead or dead The reported sequence is alarming: * While he was being moved toward the operating room, Hoover’s sister said she saw him open his eyes and look around; she was reportedly told this was a reflex. * During a cardiac catheterization intended to evaluate his heart for potential transplantation, former staff members said Hoover woke or thrashed and was then sedated. * When he reached the operating room for planned organ recovery, a preservation worker described him as moving, thrashing, and visibly crying. Two physicians reportedly refused to take part, and the organ-recovery surgery was stopped. * Hoover survived. Reporting describes ongoing impairments in memory, walking, and speech, and says he lives with his sister, who is his legal guardian. The allegations prompted review by Kentucky authorities and a federal investigation by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), according to NPR’s 2024 reporting So what on earth happened??? * Did Hoover survive? Yes * Did family members understand that he was “brain-dead” or “dead”? Yes. * Was there a completed, valid, documented formal BD/DNC declaration?: Disputed There are also cases of people recovering from formal brain-death declarations The strongest published case that can plausibly be described as survival after a formal brain-death declaration involves a baby girl: * A female infant born at 35 weeks’ gestation suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. * She was declared brain-dead between approximately 40 and 120 hours after birth. * The report stated that apparent confounders were absent. * Instead of deteriorating, she gradually regained neurologic function and was reported healthy at one-year follow-up. But it’s complicated: Current neurological guidance does not endorse determining brain death in infants born before 37 weeks’ gestation because the neonatal examination and diagnostic evidence have not been sufficiently validated in that population. The 2024 review expressly treats the case as a historical misdiagnosis under standards that should not now be used for that patient. The 1968 Harvard Paper on Brain Death SIMONE’S SOURCE:…it is impossible to harvest transplantable organs from an actual dead person IMPOSSIBLE Go get the original Harvard 1968 paper on brain death Their very clear. There will be no public support for killing people for their organs Therefore, we need a new category of death To create public support for organ donation THE PAPER I looked up this paper, and indeed: * It was pivotal to modern brain-dead standards * It explicitly considered organ transplant implications * It enabled procurement of organs from living people The Harvard Medical School Ad Hoc Committee’s August 1968 JAMA report, “A Definition of Irreversible Coma,” set out clinical criteria for a patient whose brain function was believed to have irreversibly ceased. Its criteria included: * Complete unresponsiveness * No spontaneous breathing * No spontaneous movement * Absence of reflexes * A flat EEG as confirmatory evidence * Repeat testing after 24 hours, with exclusions for confounders such as hypothermia or sedating drugs It did not use the contemporary statutory formulation “whole-brain death” in the way later laws did, but it was foundational to the modern brain-death framework. Later U.S. law adopted a formulation under which a person may be declared dead after the irreversible cessation of circulatory/respiratory function or all functions of the entire brain, including the brainstem. The report was allegedly meant to respond to two intertwined problems created by intensive-care technology: * Ventilators could preserve circulation and a heartbeat in patients with catastrophic, irreversible brain injury. * Doctors and families needed a way to determine when continued life support was no longer appropriate—and when death had occurred—even though the heart had not stopped. HOWEVER, Organ transplantation was also plainly part of the context. The committee stated that “obsolete criteria” for death could create controversy in transplantation, because organs deteriorate rapidly after circulation stops. Declaring death based on irreversible loss of brain function made it possible to recover organs while oxygenated circulation was still being mechanically maintained Earlier neurologic descriptions of a state like “brain dead” existed, including the 1959 French description of coma dépassé—a state resembling what would later be called brain death. The 1968 Harvard committee’s distinctive contribution was to move from describing profound, apparently irreversible coma to treating it as a criterion of death in U.S. medical practice and, eventually, law. The Downstream Consequence of This * Under prevailing U.S. medical and legal standards, a properly determined brain-dead patient is dead—not a living patient—despite a ventilator-maintained heartbeat, warm skin, and circulation. Brain-death determination is treated as a death determination, not a prognosis or a consent to withdraw care. * Biologically, such bodies can retain some integrated functions with intensive support: circulation, gas exchange via ventilation, wound healing, hormonal activity, and in rare cases gestation. Those facts are why critics argue that brain death does not always match ordinary intuitions about a dead body. How “Brain Dead” Patients are Treated Differently if Organ Donors SIMONE’S SOURCE: Donors are given paralytics So they don’t move during harvest They feel everything Research findings: * Yes, paralytics (aka neuromuscular blocking drug) are used about 90% of the time * Paralytics do NOT provide pain relief or sedation or anesthetization * No, patients are not always medicated for pain, just for organ preservation and to suppress spinal reflexes and stabilize physiology: Per standard procedure, they are not required to prevent conscious suffering because consciousness and pain perception are considered absent. * A review of one center’s cases found that about one-third of brain-dead donors received an opioid, most often fentanyl; about 63% received an inhaled anesthetic such as sevoflurane or isoflurane; and 90% received a neuromuscular blocker. * There are no universally binding national or international intraoperative anesthesia guidelines for brain-dead donor recovery, and protocols vary among hospitals and organ-procurement systems. The review specifically notes limited and conflicting outcome evidence. The Lazarus Sign SIMONE’S SOURCE: Oh look up the “Lazarus reflex” This is when the supposedly dead person tries to fight off the surgeon The Lazarus sign is a pattern of movement sometimes observed in people declared brain-dead who remain on a ventilator. The person may: * Flex both arms at the elbows. * Raise their arms upward. * Bring the hands toward the neck, chin, chest, or endotracheal tube. * Cross the arms over the chest. * Occasionally lift or arch the upper body. The standard explanation is that the movement is generated by neural circuits in the spinal cord below the brainstem, without input from the cerebral cortex or brainstem. * There is no sound basis to describe it as a conscious defensive act if the brain-death diagnosis was correctly made. * IF THE DIAGNOSIS WAS CORRECTLY MADE Because the arms may appear to reach toward the face or tube, people sometimes describe it as “trying to pull out the tube,” “sitting up,” or “fighting the surgeon.” It can be deeply unsettling to see and it deserves a clear explanation before family members witness withdrawal of ventilation or donor surgery. NOTE: The paper I referenced for some descriptions of this reports on two brain-dead patients who survived for over 100 days after being declared brain dead, who both showed these signs. The paper says organ donation was recommended to both families, but both families refused. The Apn

    Fake Diagnosis Invented to Harvest Organs from Living Patients
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Based Camp is a podcast focused on how humans process the world around them and the future of our species. That means we go into everything from human sexuality, to weird sub-cultures, dating markets, philosophy, and politics. Malcolm and Simone are a husband wife team of a neuroscientist and marketer turned entrepreneurs and authors. With graduate degrees from Stanford and Cambridge under their belts as well as five bestselling books, one of which topped out the WSJs nonfiction list, they are widely known (if infamous) intellectuals / provocateurs. If you want to dig into their ideas further or check citations on points they bring up check out their book series. Note: They all sell for a dollar or so and the money made from them goes to charity. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08FMWMFTG basedcamppodcast.substack.com

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    Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins
  • Años de actividad
    2023 - 2026
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    865
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    © Simone & Malcolm Collins
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