The podcast episode from Based Camp with Malcolm and Simone Collins dives into alarming CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) data on youth mental health and suicide ideation (euphemistically called “youth in Asia,” “joining the euthanasia,” or “speed running life” to skirt filters). They discuss 2023 statistics showing persistently high rates of persistent sadness/hopelessness (especially among girls at ~53%), serious consideration of suicide (~27% for girls, ~14% for boys overall), planning, and attempts—rates that barely declined post-COVID lockdowns and remain shockingly elevated.

The hosts argue modern school culture, urban monoculture, social contagion, affluence/leisure, and lack of hardship (e.g., small families vs. large ones creating built-in resilience) contribute to this crisis. They critique mainstream parenting/schooling as dangerously “normal” and advocate for pronatalist, counter-cultural family strategies—like large families for forced hardship, framing your family as discriminated against by dominant culture, or custom holidays to instill gratitude and purpose.

They touch on related topics: higher rates in affluent/elite environments, comparisons to communities like trans or furries, gender differences (girls more ideation/plans, boys more completion when attempting), dystopian cravings in female psychology, nihilism’s social appeal, and the need for meaning beyond pleasure/validation.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are gonna be talking about. The

Simone Collins: in Asia

Malcolm Collins: youth joining the youth in Asia. And we have to find creative ways to say this stuff so that we don’t get in too much trouble here

Speaker 15: You need to take a cold, hard look at your stance on youth in Asia.

Speaker 17: Oh, I don’t care about them. They’re conformists and they’re communists.

Who? The youth in Asia.

Simone Collins: to people who opt into the afterlife early.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Speed running life.

Simone Collins: Yes.

Malcolm Collins: The speed running generation. So we had done an episode previously on CDC statistics that were so shocking that they showed that the. 24%. So about one in four young women created a plan to join the euthanasia, not over the course of their childhood, but in any given 12 month period.

Simone Collins: It’s insane. That’s [00:01:00] insane.

Malcolm Collins: Insane. And this is CD, C, right? Like they have a reason to underplay this, right? So, I did that episode, and when we did that episode, the data that we had access to, that the public had access to was from 2021. And everyone was like, well, that was during the COVID Lockdowns.

Mm-hmm. And being during the COV lockdowns, I can understand why you might have higher rates. Right. So. Let’s go at the later numbers that have been released since then, and the latest we have is 2023 data. What is the rate for girls now doing that?

Simone Collins: Hmm,

Malcolm Collins: 21%, only a 3% decline. And still well over one in five young girls.

Makes a plan to join the euthanasia every 12 months period, not over the course of her childhood in any given 12 months period.

Simone Collins: That actually [00:02:00] surprises me. I would’ve honestly expected that it would be higher because I remember looking at some statistics around the pandemic that showed that people’s rates of severe.

Ideation of, of bad types increased right before school started, or like as school started and actually went down over the summer and during breaks, they were like just less stressed and they were not in the school system is a torture chamber for children. I do not. Yeah. So I’m actually surprised that now that people are now forcibly back in school at higher rates, that they’re actually doing a little better mentally.

That, that’s interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: But I, I think there’s also the effect of contagion when it comes to, you know, harmful social behaviors that include various forms of hurting yourself. Not just the ultimate form, but I. I, I think that that might have been a thing during the pandemic, just ‘cause a lot of people were talking about it, that maybe that was what pushed it over the edge and made it higher than normal because a lot of people were just being overtly dramatic online ‘cause they had [00:03:00] nothing else to do.

And now people are a little bit more busy doing other things like actually going to school.

Malcolm Collins: Well, we can talk about it. We can look at the differential rates.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: We which we will explore, we’ll see where there have been actual drops in the data. Mm-hmm. And I wanna talk about all this in the context of like, do you understand, you know, we have a you know, people filming about us and reporting crews here all the time.

They’re like, why are you guys so weird? Like, why do you do this in a weird way? Why don’t you punish your kids the way everyone else is punishing their kids? Why don’t you just send your kids to school like everyone else is sending their kids to school? Mm-hmm. Why do you do X and Y and Z that are also weird and different?

And it’s like if you knew that there was a. Cultural group.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And there was a or, or a type of school system right, like around you and everyone was like, well, did you know that one in five more than one in five [00:04:00] girls in that school system is making a plan to join the youth in Asia?

Simone Collins: Or if they thought it was like a.

An online social network or a social club. You know, if someone was like, oh, well, you know, one in five girls who joins the Girl Scouts wants to do this, people would be like, oh my gosh, it’s a Satanic cult. You know?

Malcolm Collins: I think that they’d say, I’m definitely, like above all else, my child is not going into the Girl Scouts.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Or if it were like a, a, a school district, right. They’d be like, oh, I’m moving out of there. Like, whatever it takes to save my girl. You know, th this is, this is huge

Malcolm Collins: above

Simone Collins: all. And then people are, they don’t bat an eye

Malcolm Collins: above all else. If there is a, there is a school around us that when kids go to it, one in five girls wants to end it on any given year.

Right. That school is every school.

Simone Collins: That

Malcolm Collins: is the culture that we are in right now.

Simone Collins: That school is called school.

Malcolm Collins: Cool. And I would point out that these rates are. Higher CR episode on this. ‘cause people can [00:05:00] be like, well, you know, this is for poor people or whatever. And it’s like, no, no, actually use in Asia ideation among young girls is higher for young girls who grew up in higher income suburb mm-hmm.

Environments than those who grow up in, urban environments. And,

Simone Collins: and this isn’t just again about literally trying to enter the afterlife early. This is also you see rates of spoons, which are people who often believe they have very serious medical conditions that they don’t actually have, but that ultimately lead them to have very real, symptoms that are torturous and awful. Those are, that is very much a, a, a new form of affluent. You don’t really see it happening with impoverished young girls that are resource strapped and watching their younger siblings and just trying to get by. You see it in middle class or upper middle class bougie girls who have too much time on their hands.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And, and I, I’d go further you know, as somebody who grew up adjacent to like the you know, sort of elite boarding school scene and everything like that.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Oh, those were [00:06:00] the girls who, you know, did stuff. And,

Malcolm Collins: and unlive. I, I’d, I bet if you could get the real statistics from a school like Andover or something like that.

Oh gosh, gosh. They’d probably be like twice the rate of your, your local public school. Awesome. And it, it, it’s just the culture in these places. Anybody who goes or was in those networks knew you, always heard about people unliving themselves. So sad in these sort of wider elite culture networks.

And so when a lot of parents, they think, oh, I’m not, I’m, I’m doing the, the premium version, therefore my kid is safe. And I’m like, you must have not been at the previous premium version when you were a kid. Yeah. That’s, that’s where all the cocaine is. Right? You know,

Simone Collins: for real though.

Malcolm Collins: No, I think it, I think it’s really dangerous.

I think it’s really dangerous. And if one of our kids wants to, you know, try to get a scholarship to go to one of those, I’ll be like, you, you, you can try. But,

Simone Collins: well, even, even on a more micro level. So, in, in, in the little, the island city where I grew up in the Bay Area called Alameda, there were two high schools.

There was Sen...