Birth Rates Are Low. Can A “Fertility President” Fix That?

Summary

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Smart Girl Dumb Questions: "Birth Rates Are Low. Can A 'Fertility President' Fix That?"

Podcast: Smart Girl Dumb Questions
Host: Nayeema Raza
Guests: Malcolm & Simone Collins
Release Date: July 21, 2026

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Episode Overview

This lively, at times combative, and deeply reflective episode dives into the controversial and rapidly evolving world of "pronatalism"—the movement that aims to address low birth rates. Host Nayeema Raza sits down with Malcolm and Simone Collins, high-profile advocates for pronatalism with both personal and political ties to the issue, for a conversation about parenting, politics, gender, controversial advocacy methods, and the culture wars that shape public debate.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Introduction to the Collinses & Pronatalism

• Background:
  • Malcolm and Simone are leading figures in pronatalism, each hoping for a large family (currently five children, "hopefully soon six"; aiming for 12+).
  • “Six is just getting started.” – Malcolm Collins (01:24)
  • The pair are known for radical tactics and media-savvy advocacy, including pitching executive orders on fertility to the Trump administration.
• Names of Their Children:
  • Octavian George, Torsten Savage, Titan Invictus, Industry Americus, Textamycin (01:33)
• Relationship with Elon Musk:
  • Confirm they know him, as reported by the New York Times, but remain secretive (02:40).

2. Performance, Authenticity & Culture War Tactics

• Ragebaiting & Signaling:
  • The Collinses embrace “ragebaiting” as a tactic to draw attention—exaggerating or flaunting provocative stances to outrage critics and mobilize their base.
  • "Our house is designed to be like a horror show for journalists." – Malcolm (03:20)
  • A distinction is drawn between being both “authentic and subversive”—and intentionally provocative.
  • Simone: “You can be joking and totally serious all at the same time… you could call it performative vice signaling… but also sharing what you think is an important message.” (05:05)
• Dress, Persona & Media Literacy:
  • Collinses lean into eccentric costumes and over-the-top messaging—both as performance and as real belief.

3. Personal Stories & Gender Roles

• Their Love Story/Philosophy:
  • Initially, Simone aimed for a childfree life, but Malcolm persuaded her by vowing that children wouldn’t end her career or identity.
  • “If any parent was gonna be on the front lines of raising kids, it would be Malcolm… That would be Malcolm.” – Simone (11:26)
  • Reversal of traditional gender roles; Malcolm willing to be the primary caregiver if needed: “Being a stay-at-home D is kind of a fun job. Right? Like, so if push come to shove, that's my worst-case scenario in life. I’m happy with that.” (12:04)
• Parenting Philosophy:
  • Downplay “intensive parenting”—believe kids should mostly raise themselves in a pack (12:41).

4. Pronatalism: Ethics, Policy & Movements

• Mainstreaming the Movement:
  • Collinses have drafted pro-birth policies for the Trump White House; favor medals for mothers of six or more kids (19:22).
  • Simone: “Obviously a medal is not gonna move the needle. But you have to throw in your rage bait… they fell for it.” (19:23)
  • Historical context—host draws links to Nazi and Stalinist pronatalist awards; guests embrace the controversy as proof of “cross-spectrum” appeal (20:07).
• Policy Evaluation:
  • Both praise the Trump administration for lowering IVF costs, but Nayeema pushes back, pointing to more fundamental, unstudied policies like universal basic income for caregivers (18:35).
• Movement Diversity:
  • Pronatalism is uniting conservatives, techies, religious communities, some “edgelords,” and lifestyle influencers—contradictory but with a common goal (14:23–14:51).

5. Criticisms, Fears & Media Tactics

• Clickbait Headlines & Algorithm Wars:
  • Nayeema challenges the Collinses about their inflammatory podcast titles (e.g., “It’s now illegal to murder whites…”, “We need more sins”), accusing them of stoking division for attention (40:01).
  • Malcolm and Simone defend this as a cheap, effective way to reach more people: “The cheapest way that we can get PR and… our message out… is by rage baiting.” – Simone (41:17)
• Fact-Checking & Accuracy:
  • Host critiques frequent factual errors on their podcast; Simone and Malcolm argue that substance wins out over perfection when attention is scarce (59:31).
• Movement Boundaries:
  • Simone insists a bright line exists: supporting group pride and reproduction is fine, but advocating for curtailing others’ rights crosses into extremism:
    “There’s a line and it’s cultural sovereignty. It’s when people start trying to legislate or dictate or curtail… the lives or cultures of other groups. You’ve crossed the line and you’re not part of our movement anymore.” (39:39)

6. Eugenics & Genetic Testing

• Embryo Screening & Selection:
  • The Collinses use advanced embryo screening (for traits like height, IQ, autism risk), but resist the eugenics label.
  • Malcolm: “A eugenicist is somebody who believes that certain people based on their genes, don’t have the right to exist. Because we want to eventually get into genetic engineering… when somebody says that they don’t believe a genetically engineered child has the right to exist, they're being a eugenicist…” (27:51)

7. Demographic Collapse & Culture

• Diverse Groups at Risk:
  • Collinses challenge the narrative that only “whites” are at risk—argue that, globally, numerous minorities (Koreans, South Asians, Black Americans) face critical fertility drops (28:33; 29:05).
• Cultural Pride vs. Racism:
  • Emphasize that sustainable fertility requires group pride, not racism, and call out internalized cultural shame (37:41) as a driver of low birth rates in urban modernity.

8. Controversy, Financial Support, and Motivation

• Funding & Nonprofit Activities:
  • The Collinses run a nonprofit and online education platform; received a ~$500k grant from a tech billionaire, but insist they are not making personal profit (53:17).
• Desire for Influence:
  • Both admit they want to be influential and use controversy to amplify the “alarm” around fertility collapse:
    “Any influential person wanted to be influential before… It takes time and effort to build up a podcast, right? And you’re going to have failed attempts.” – Malcolm (55:48)
• Host’s Critique:
  • Nayeema pushes them to reckon with the ethics and effectiveness of “fighting the culture war with memes” rather than measured, fact-based public messaging.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Ragebaiting:

  • “Our house is designed to be like a horror show for journalists.” – Malcolm (03:20)
  • “We try to get people to freak out about things that are either perfectly normal things to say… or that are funny to see someone rage out about.” – Malcolm (03:20)

• On Cultural Pride vs. Racism:

  • “There’s a line, and it’s cultural sovereignty. It’s when people start trying to legislate or dictate or curtail the lives or cultures of other groups. You’ve crossed the line and you’re not part of our movement anymore.” – Simone (39:39)

• On the Limits of Policy:

  • “A medal is not gonna move the needle, but you have to throw in your rage bait… [the White House] fell for it.” – Simone (19:23)
  • Host, on deeper causes:
    “I think a lot of people desire to have family, and a lot of people feel like family’s out of reach for them.” – Nayeema (21:14)

• On Parenting & Gender:

  • “The whole stay at home wife scheme is a bit of a scam. Cause it’s a lot of fun caring for the kids.” – Malcolm (12:04)
  • On why women aren’t having kids:
    “Where you see the most rapid declines in birth rates… is in countries that have caught up the least in terms of gender egalitarian nature.” – Simone (15:00)

• On Motivation:

  • “I want to have impact… the direction that we influence the public narrative… is: let's build this alliance of diverse cultural groups and take to the stars and conquer the universe.” – Malcolm (55:48)
  • “Someone needs to raise the alarm bells about demographic collapse. No one was doing it. We really care about it.” – Simone (57:05)

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Important Timestamps

• [01:22] – Introduction of guests, number of children, background
• [03:00]–[05:44] – Ragebaiting, media tactics, and authenticity
• [06:25]–[13:09] – Simone & Malcolm’s personal journey on marriage, kids, gender roles
• [14:23]–[16:10] – Diversity and politics within the pronatalist movement
• [18:35] – Policy debate: IVF, medals, and real family support
• [19:23]–[21:06] – The “medals for mothers” controversy, international context
• [27:51]–[28:57] – Genetic testing, eugenics, embryo screening
• [29:20]–[31:34] – Demographic risks for minorities, reference to “Idiocracy”
• [39:39] – Drawing the line between pride and racism
• [40:01]–[43:55] – Clickbait critique, fact checking, algorithm gaming
• [51:22]–[53:32] – Parenting controversy & media narrative, “bop” incident
• [53:17]–[55:07] – Finances, nonprofit funding, business model
• [55:48]–[57:20] – On influence, movement success, and broader mission
• [58:26]–[59:37] – Inclusion, identity, the risk of radicalization

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Conclusion

Tone:
Combative, irreverent, deeply performative, but also revealing and (at times) candid. Both guests and host oscillate between earnest debate, social criticism, and meta-commentary on their own roles in the culture wars.

This episode provides insight into a movement that fuses genuine demographic concerns with internet-age media warfare, and grapples with how to balance alarmism, performative provocation, and the need for actual policy change. If you want to understand why birth rates have become a political football, and how activists are gaming the discourse in real time, it’s essential—and often eyebrow-raising—listening.

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Note:
This summary omits advertisements and non-content segments as requested. For further context or specific topic tracking, refer to timestamps above.

Transcript

[Malcolm Collins]

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[Naeem Araza]

Most of us are one good deal away from finally replacing that worn out rug, fixing up the backyard, or getting the bedroom we actually want.

[Simone Collins]

Good news.

[Naeem Araza]

That deal's almost here. Wayfair's Black Friday in July sale. Get up to 80% off area rugs and up to 60% off outdoor and bedroom furniture. Shop Wayfair's huge selection of styles and find the piece to fit your style, budget and space, plus free shipping. Black Friday in July ends July 27th. Shop [e-mail] Wayfair Every style, every home. What's up with pronatalists? These people who want to make America procreate again? I'm Naeem Araza. This is Smart Girl, Dumb questions. And today I'm sitting down with Malcolm and Simone Collins. They're major and controversial players in the pronatalist movement. They have pitched executive orders to the Trump White House, done media tours about the demographic collapse, and they're doing their very best to help address it. Having how many kids of your own now?

[Simone Collins]

Five, hopefully soon. Six.

[Malcolm Collins]

Oh, we hope for 12. Six is just getting started.

[Simone Collins]

I will not stop after 12 if I still have a uterus, but we'll see how long that lasts.

[Naeem Araza]

And what are their names? Malcolm.

[Malcolm Collins]

Oh, gosh. Okay, so we've got Octavian George. We've got Torsten Savage. We've got Titan Invictus. We have Industry Americus, and we have Textamycin.

[Naeem Araza]

Smart Girl, dumb Questions. This is gonna be a wild ride for people who are listening. But last time I saw you, because we know each other a little bit. Malcolm and I went to graduate school.

[Malcolm Collins]

He went to graduate school together, and we went on a trip together.

[Naeem Araza]

At graduate school.

[Simone Collins]

Yeah.

[Naeem Araza]

Don't make it sound romantic. No, no, it does very clear. We went to business school together at Stanford. They made us all do these trips where we had a global experience.

[Malcolm Collins]

Yeah. And we were in. We learned about a different country and it was South Korea.

[Naeem Araza]

Yeah, but you guys live in Pennsylvania. You live in rural Pennsylvania. And the last time I saw you, you had one baby and like, maybe like 30 something embryos. Elon. I think back when we probably saw each other had like five babies. He's gone from five to 14 that we know of. The world's first trillionaire talks and tweets extensively about the danger of population collapsing. Do you guys know Elon?

[Malcolm Collins]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's been disclosed by the New York Times. We didn't. We didn't leak that, but now that the New York Times has said it, I can say, yeah.

[Naeem Araza]

You guys, like, chat. Are you on a promo?

[Malcolm Collins]

I can't say anything else than that. The New York Times has reported that we know Elon.

[Naeem Araza]

Can you not say anything because you've signed an NDA with Elon?

[Simone Collins]

No, we've not signed any NDA. We're not. We don't want to talk about other people.

[Naeem Araza]

Okay, but is there a pronatalist group chat?

[Malcolm Collins]

There is. I don't think he's on it.

[Naeem Araza]

And would you guys call yourself, like, Elon, like, techno optimist and also quite right wing?

[Malcolm Collins]

Yeah, I mean, we're definitely thought leaders within the New Right movement. And that's when we think about, like, the philosophy that we do and the advocacy we do. It is more about promoting the New Right and growing the New Right tent than it is about pure pronatalism.

[Naeem Araza]

You said this before you came here and you said, you know, you love to rage bait.

[Malcolm Collins]

Yeah, well, so it's not normal rage baiting. What we try to do is we try to get people to freak out about things that are either perfectly normal things to say in any other context. So, like, the audience sees them raging out about it and they're like, wait, why are they raging out about them? Just saying they want kids or something like that. Right. Or that are funny to see somebody rage out about. So our house is designed to be like a horror show for journalists. Like, we have a live Laugh Love poster. You know, one of those. But it says, we will replace you on, like, one of the live Laugh Love wooden signs that the reporter stomach

[Naeem Araza]

seems to be alarmist. And if people are just listening right now and they're not watching. Simone, you're dressed like, I don't even know what is this? Like, what is this style?

[Simone Collins]

I'm wearing a Viking apron over. 17th century stays in a chemise.

[Naeem Araza]

I know that you look at media as this, like, way to be rage baity and whatever, but I really want in this conversation for you guys to, like, be as, like, actually authentic, non performative, whatever this is. All right? I wouldn't say we're friends because we're not in touch all the time, but we've known each other for a while. Is this who you guys are or is this contrived?

[Malcolm Collins]

I think it's both. I've always, I mean, even. Even back at the GSB and everything like that. I was somebody who was very, as

[Naeem Araza]

a graduate school business at Stanford.

[Malcolm Collins]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was very into like the cutting edge of like philosophy and ideas and everything like that. And one of the things that is really core to the new right movement and new right intellectuals. So you see this not just like in us, but in people like Elon and stuff like that is being sort of subversive in the way that you message so that you can sort of authenticate yourself for the audience so they know that you're not trying to like status signal or something like that.

[Naeem Araza]

You want to be on the same level. You don't want to seem like elite or.

[Malcolm Collins]

Yeah, we don't want to seem like elitist.

[Naeem Araza]

You want to be authentic. But if you want to be authentic, are you authentic?

[Simone Collins]

No. Yeah. This is what people really fail to understand about the right is that you can be joking and totally serious all at the same time. And that's something that's super common on the right. You could call it performative vice signaling where you're studiously not professional looking, you're studiously not serious, you're studiously rage baiting, but you're also sharing what you think is important message.

[Malcolm Collins]

So when you see Trump walking down an all gold stairwell, he's being authentically Trump, but he's also sort of rage baiting. When you see Elon make some subversive joke about building cat girls for the future of humanity, he's rage baiting, but he's also being kind of serious. Right?

[Naeem Araza]

You know, like, yeah, he's into cat girls apparently. I find it a little exhausting, the whole like performative, authentic culture. I don't even know like the signaling and the race baiting and the operating. I listened to a little bit of you guys podcast and there like there was some stuff in there that really alarmed me. So I want to talk about those things. But I want to start with you guys because you've both also spoken openly about being on the spectrum.

[Malcolm Collins]

I'm not on the spectrum. She's on the spectrum.

[Simone Collins]

He's got brain wiggles of some kind, but we don't know what they are.

[Malcolm Collins]

I don't think wrong with me, but it's not autism.

[Naeem Araza]

Your guys love story, like it reads a little like love on the spectrum.

[Simone Collins]

Like love on the spectrum.

[Naeem Araza]

Yeah. Before there was Netflix's Love on the Spectrum. So tell people you're Meet cute.

[Simone Collins]

Well, I turned, oh, let's see, 24. And I decided, having never dated or had sex before, that I was going to fall in love and have my heart broken in one year. And I met him on my campaign.

[Naeem Araza]

Wait, why fall in love and have your heart broken in one year?

[Simone Collins]

So I could live alone forever and never have kids and live happily. That was your goal. That was my plan. But of course people would look down on me saying, you've never experienced love. You're missing out. How could you?

[Naeem Araza]

You know, and you wanted this because if I remember, your mom was. Well, your mom is in like a polyamorous relationship.

[Simone Collins]

Well, so they got married after my mom tired of being a secondary in a poly relationship involving my father. And I sit across from Malcolm on our first date and he's like, well, I'm not looking to date. I'm looking to find a wife. And I'm going to find her this fall at Stanford where there's a large pool of pre vetted candidates. And I was like, this is perfect. Right? He would go off and find his wife at Stanford and I would go off and live my life alone forever. And we would both have a fantastic summer in the meantime.

[Naeem Araza]

Okay, so, Malcolm, did you really say this?

[Malcolm Collins]

Yes, this is all true. She wasn't as quick with the whole story about why she was doing this, but yeah, I mean, I definitely remember the moment where, you know, she's like, well, you know, I need you to promise to break up with me. And I was like, well, you know, Simone, I can't promise to break up with you or not form long term feelings for you. And she goes, malcolm, like, I'll have sex with you right now if you promise. Okay, yeah, sure, I can promise that. And so like that early in our relationship. And so I'm like, okay. And I did break up with her. I held to the promise.

[Naeem Araza]

Yeah.

[Simone Collins]

July 31st, we had a breakup date.

[Naeem Araza]

So you show up at Stanford. You did not. You were not dating Simone when you showed up at Stanford. Or were you?

[Malcolm Collins]

When I first started, it was during our breakup and then we started dating again within like a month or two of Stanford starting.

[Naeem Araza]

Simone, you used to wear like fascinators.

[Malcolm Collins]

Yeah, These big long.

[Naeem Araza]

And Malcolm were like suspenders and bow tie.

[Simone Collins]

There was always a vest and a tie and his jeans, his Texas tux.

[Naeem Araza]

It was like anthropological for me to see you guys. Okay, as an anecdote here, what I'll say is that when we were on the South Korea trip and there had been a. Of me taken somewhere where I was wearing a trench coat, like, wearing a hard hat. Because maybe we're at, like. I don't know. Yeah, we do factory tours and stuff. Yeah, we do factory toys or something. And I'm, like, looking over this big machine and my friend Nader says, oh, it looks like you're trying to dominate the world. And I was like, yes, he's Lebanese. And I said, yeah, you know, world domination. Like, wouldn't you want to start it in South Korea? We're joking. We're having this kind of jokey conversation. And Malcolm, who's in the row in front of us, turns around and says, you know, I have many plans for world domination.

[Simone Collins]

That sounds about right.

[Naeem Araza]

And you were not joking.

[Malcolm Collins]

No, absolutely. I'm always surprised when people don't have a plan for world domination. I mean, if you're here, you should try to win. I mean, that's the ultimate win state of humanity.

[Naeem Araza]

Do you think of the world as a video game?

[Simone Collins]

Kind of, isn't it not? I mean, like.

[Malcolm Collins]

Yeah, you choose your objectives and then you try to maximize those objectives, which is similar to any sort of, you know, play as you go video game, like the Sims or something like that. And the maximalist objective you could choose is world domination. Especially considering no one's done it yet. To be the first person to dominate the Earth.

[Naeem Araza]

Yeah, people have tried.

[Malcolm Collins]

Yeah. Yeah. But they failed.

[Naeem Araza]

So do you think you have, like, a Napoleon complex?

[Malcolm Collins]

Oh, gosh, not a. I. No, I think it's a practical thing for a person to want to do with their life. I don't think it's a complex because I just think it's natural. Like, if you're here on Earth, why not have a. What do you call that? Like an edge goal? Well, what do you call those?

[Simone Collins]

A stretch goal.

[Malcolm Collins]

Stretch goal.

[Naeem Araza]

I know you didn't dominate the world, Malcolm. I don't think you've achieved world domination. I actually. I don't. I don't think you will.

[Simone Collins]

Give it eight generations.

[Malcolm Collins]

Give it a few generations. I'm trying to set up a power structure that can eventually dominate the world. I don't need to do it in my lifetime.

[Naeem Araza]

But you did change Simone's mind about something important. So you went from not wanting to have kids to wanting to keep having kids till your uterus, as you told me, quote, falls out.

[Simone Collins]

Yes.

[Naeem Araza]

How were you persuaded?

[Simone Collins]

So, actually, I was sitting on a roof in Redwood City with Malcolm on our second date. And this was of Course, you know, I still had my original plan.

[Naeem Araza]

Yeah, but he was your plan to stay single. He was planning to dominate the world. Okay, no, no, no.

[Simone Collins]

Look, when he found, from my, like, college days, this book I made on world domination, he was like, whoa, man. Like, we're the same.

[Malcolm Collins]

We talked about it on the first date.

[Simone Collins]

Well, we. We talked about your methods. Yeah. And then we got to mine later. But, like, we're definitely on the same mindset wavelength there. But, yeah. So he was talking about how he wanted to have a big family. I was talking enthusiastically about how I didn't want to have any. He asked me why, and I said I did. Never wanted to put my career on the back burner. And I'd seen so many people, mothers of my friends, put their entire personalities and lives on the back burner to raise their kids and lose themselves in that and then have extremely depressing later lives because their kids leave home and who are they anymore? And Malcolm basically just said, what if that wasn't the case? What if you never had to, like, lose that career? And I'd be like, of course. Then I would have infinite kids. Like, that's the limiting factor for me. And I don't know if we explicitly really discussed it much after that point, but after we got back together, the understanding was that if any parent was gonna be on the front lines of raising kids, it would be Malcolm. It would not be me. If ever there was someone who had to like, oh, wait, you know, we've run out of money. One of us has to work, the other one has to stay home with the kids. Cause we can't afford childcare. That would be Malcolm. And now still, like, whenever there's a doctor appointment, whenever there's something, you know, you have to take the kids for a passport photo. Guess who's taking them? It's Malcolm.

[Naeem Araza]

Seriously, it's like Love on the Spectrum before Love on the Spectrum because it's your second fucking date and you're having this conversation on a rooftop. And Malcolm, were you prepared when you said that to Simone? Were you really thinking that you would be like, I don't know, the trad wife of the marriage or.

[Malcolm Collins]

Yeah, I was looking for. I didn't see it as a bad thing at all.

[Naeem Araza]

No, I'm not saying it's a bad thing.

[Malcolm Collins]

No, no, what I mean is, like, she's basically telling me, like, I'll always make sure we have money. That's what I heard from that conversation. Right. Like, if push comes to shove, I'm in charge of Providing for the family. And I'm like, okay, yeah, I'll take that deal. Because of being a stay at home D is kind of a fun job. Right? Like, so if push come to shove, that's my worst case scenario in life. I'm happy with that. I think that, you know, this whole stay at home wife scheme is a bit of a scam. Cause it's a lot of fun caring for the kids.

[Naeem Araza]

Okay, and is that. And is that what you're primarily doing?

[Malcolm Collins]

No, no, it's not what I'm primarily doing. Because we barely do that at all. I mean, that's one of the things

[Naeem Araza]

you barely parent at all.

[Malcolm Collins]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's one of the things we promote a lot. One of the big problems with parenting today, and I think the reason people don't want to have a lot of kids is because they want to put too much effort into it. They think it's this like, huge effort thing. But kids, especially when get a large group of kids, they just basically form a pack and handle themselves.

[Naeem Araza]

I recently read that you'd like to. I think the quote was something like, hold people accountable for every life they don't bring into the world.

[Malcolm Collins]

That's a good line there. Yeah.

[Naeem Araza]

Did you say that or did you say something?

[Simone Collins]

Well, people are accountable for that. Yeah. I mean, but is that.

[Naeem Araza]

What is that? Is that like pro life plus plus? Like, what is that? Because you're not. You're pro choice. Right. You ran for office and you're a pro choice candidate, I believe.

[Simone Collins]

Yeah, we're pro choice, though. I've now heard things about misoprostol that have really, like, radicalized me. But yeah, we're pro choice till like, last week. Yeah. Yeah.

[Naeem Araza]

Okay.

[Simone Collins]

No, I mean, we. We what pronatalism is really about. And like, our flavor of pronatalism is if you don't want kids, don't have kids. Right. We only want wanted kids, you know, in the world. Because we love first. If you really love kids, that's what you want for them. Yeah, but we also hold people accountable, including, we'll say conservative Christians who, like, let's say you're a Catholic and you could have kids if you did ivf, but you're like, ooh, IVF is evil. So I'm not going to do it. That is a decision that led to those souls not entering the world. That's on them. So that's our kind of flavor of it is this.

[Naeem Araza]

But you say that's on them. What do you mean? Of course it's on them.

[Simone Collins]

They've chosen to not bring lives into the world because they could.

[Naeem Araza]

But are you judging them? Are you judging them? Like what are you saying?

[Malcolm Collins]

Which means they bear the moral limit.

[Naeem Araza]

Well, I let her say what she believes, Malcolm.

[Simone Collins]

I mean, I do, but what is my judgment worth? They're answerable to their God, we're answerable to ours.

[Naeem Araza]

Who is your God? In the simulation theory?

[Simone Collins]

Our God is far future descendants. We're techno puritans. And so our God is whatever humanity becomes in millions of years.

[Naeem Araza]

Okay. Emma Goldberg, writing for the New York Times last year, wrote describing the Natal conference in Austin. There were churchgoing conservatives and Silicon Valley technologists, parents of five and parents of nine, edgelords in leather jackets and women in le Pulitzer, all sharing a common concern how to convince Americans, namely American women to have more babies. Fair. Fair description of the event.

[Simone Collins]

Not really, no. It was more about giving a community to people who do have kids. Prenatal is.

[Naeem Araza]

There are a lot of single people there looking for quote unquote breeders.

[Malcolm Collins]

Yeah. They want their partner.

[Simone Collins]

Yeah. Like Matchmak is a really big part of that. And in fact.

[Naeem Araza]

And they were disappointed by the lack of women that were there.

[Simone Collins]

Well, and you can see this divergence in both interest in having children and in political affiliation between young men and women. Yeah. With. With men putting in many polls, having kids as one of their top priorities and having kids, having a family. They're also leaning more politically conservative. Meanwhile, women are leaning increasingly progressive and very interested in their careers, but not so much in having kids.

[Naeem Araza]

Do you think many of those men who are responding that they want to have more kids want to do what Malcolm said that he would do for you and be the primary caregiver?

[Simone Collins]

Yeah. A lot of men have not yet been willing to step up in the same way that Malcolm has. And I think if men did that more systematically, they would. You actually see this where, where you see the most rapid declines in. In birth rates in post industrial societies especially they get wealthy is in countries that have caught up the least in terms of gender egalitarian nature. So when you look at household chore studies or like household maintenance studies, and there's the biggest divergence between men and women, like in Japan, like in South K, where women are still really saddled with most of child rearing and care for kids, that is where you see the fastest decline in birth rates. In more like the Nordic countries like Sweden and et cetera, they have much higher birth rates.

[Malcolm Collins]

So ironically, it's a very feminist movement

[Naeem Araza]

yeah, it's a feminist movement. If you can get all those dudes to step up to be the plate to do the thing washed out of the gene pool.

[Simone Collins]

Yeah, exactly.

[Naeem Araza]

The snake heels. I want to get into the demographic reality and like these numbers and the imperative and why people aren't having kids, like the whole culture around this in a moment. But I just want to first understand the movement a little bit and you guys role in it, because it was also reported that you have drafted executive orders that have been sent to the White House.

[Malcolm Collins]

And we've gone to the White House

[Naeem Araza]

to talk with them, to talk to Donald Trump directly.

[Malcolm Collins]

I can't say who we've talked to, but I can say that we've talked because, you know, the NDAs and blah, blah, blah.

[Simone Collins]

We asked them would it be chill if we mentioned this?

[Naeem Araza]

And they're like, that doesn't sound like an NDA.

[Malcolm Collins]

We want to be nice. We don't want to burn people. Yeah, you don't know somebody.

[Naeem Araza]

Okay. So can you say what level of people you were meeting with?

[Simone Collins]

It would be thought of as a dick move. We would.

[Naeem Araza]

How can we know that you're not overstating your access to the White House?

[Simone Collins]

You don't.

[Malcolm Collins]

Okay, yeah, we could be. But I think people who just like, know the Trump administration know they're the type of people who would reach out to people like us.

[Naeem Araza]

And your brother Malcolm is working at Doge. Or was working at Doge.

[Malcolm Collins]

Or was working at Doge.

[Naeem Araza]

He's working at Doge.

[Malcolm Collins]

Yeah.

[Naeem Araza]

And he's also pronatalist.

[Malcolm Collins]

I can't say anything to his views.

[Naeem Araza]

Okay. President Trump has said that he wants to be the, quote, fertilization president. Not necessarily my favorite image, but of anything. I mean, fertilizer sounds concerning. Or he said he's talked about wanting to make IVF free. Do you guys think these are good ideas?

[Simone Collins]

So with Trump Rx, he has made some of the most expensive IVF medications way more affordable. I've only cried once during ivf and I've done seven rounds. It's when I found out that I was not going to use a full round of medications that they just made me buy that I couldn't return. That cost like $2,000. And I just sat there in the office and cried.

[Malcolm Collins]

You ended up driving all the way to D.C. to give it to somebody?

[Simone Collins]

Oh, yeah, we, we. I mean, you donated at that point. But it's just, it's heartbreakingly expensive.

[Naeem Araza]

It is extremely expensive. I mean, I froze my eggs, I froze my bags Good for you.

[Simone Collins]

That's excellent.

[Naeem Araza]

And so I'm not going to have 12 kids, but I might have like one or two.

[Simone Collins]

There we go.

[Naeem Araza]

Give the President a grade on his overall procreation policy.

[Simone Collins]

I think he's done an amazing job. The administration also signals a very family friendly policy. I mean, like when you look at the actual participants, the members of the administration, they have a lot of kids, they love kids. Their kids are all around them and they are doing everything they can within the breaches of. Of policy being very difficult to manage.

[Naeem Araza]

This idea that they're doing everything they can. I think one of the major policy moves could actually be something like universal basic income for caretakers. Whether you're taking care of a kid,

[Simone Collins]

you're taking care, who's going to pay for that?

[Naeem Araza]

I don't think that those theories or like those policies have even been studied, including by like quote unquote UBI boosters who have been, who have had access in this administration. So I think like this idea that like they've done everything they can, I think it's like an over statement. I just want to reflect. I'm not like, I'm not saying they haven't done anything. And I agree with you that the fertility drugs have come way down. I mean, that's factual statement huge. But one of the controversial ideas that the White House has reportedly considered is your draft. An idea that apparently came from you for medals to mothers of six and more. Yeah. Way to make a category that you could enter, Simone.

[Simone Collins]

I mean, I need a stretch goal.

[Naeem Araza]

Is this really linked to you guys?

[Simone Collins]

Yeah, that came from us.

[Naeem Araza]

That came. Okay.

[Simone Collins]

Yeah, well, so we actually sent quite a few substantive. Because obviously a medal is not gonna move the needle. But you have to throw in your rage bait and you if. I mean, they fell for it.

[Naeem Araza]

So was that rage bait like a Trojan horse?

[Simone Collins]

But it's like Lucy with the football.

[Naeem Araza]

So here's the thing I want to say. Those medals were handed out to.

[Simone Collins]

Well, first in France.

[Naeem Araza]

Oh, yeah, in France. Yes, first in France and then later on in Stalin or later on in Hitler.

[Simone Collins]

Don't forget Nazi Germany in Nazi yachts

[Naeem Araza]

and where they gave.

[Simone Collins]

Also in Mongolia. But who cares about Mongolia? We never talk about Mongolia.

[Naeem Araza]

They gave gold, silver and bronze medals that did like create a lot of people linking you. Like it's like you suggesting this, this has been applied in societies including Nazi Germany. Therefore you guys are Nazis.

[Simone Collins]

Hitler also had the arguments.

[Malcolm Collins]

I'm not about, as Nazis, we are pro Stalin.

[Naeem Araza]

Right. Like, it's like you Know, like, which is how much?

[Malcolm Collins]

Not at all.

[Naeem Araza]

I mean, you're into world domination, so we have to check.

[Malcolm Collins]

Yeah, true, true, true. No, but what I mean is, if governments as widely differentiated as Stalin's and Hitler's and democratic France, even today, gives out methods of motherhood. Thought this was a good idea. It seems to be a good idea across every extreme of the political spectrum.

[Simone Collins]

It's just saying, hey, you know, I mean, think about that. So we have. We have presidential medals for people who've dedicated their careers at great personal expense to science, to technology, to. To, like, military honors. But, oh, screw people who decide to step back from their careers and raise a lot of children. It's a lot of work. They don't get any reward for that, any recognition.

[Naeem Araza]

I think this idea of, like, giving people carrots for having kids. Okay, interesting. Hasn't really succeeded in finance.

[Simone Collins]

Again, it's not gonna move. It doesn't break.

[Naeem Araza]

But I think the thing is, like, the real problem is that people feel like right now there are sticks to having kids.

[Simone Collins]

Yeah. And it's culture, because culture. Everyone's like, oh, I can't afford my mortgage because I'm buying blueberries for my children. Who said your children needed blueberries to survive?

[Naeem Araza]

I don't think that everybody who is struggling with affordability is struggling because they're trying to buy organic produce and a home.

[Simone Collins]

Do you be surprised?

[Naeem Araza]

As a woman who hasn't yet had kids but wants to aspires to? I think that there's, like, kind of three things. The first thing to, for me is, like, social stability. To have a child that I would, as a person who's, like, moved around a lot, be in one place, that I would have a partner, that I would have an infrastructure around me that would help me, like, care for the kids. Also financial security. Right. For, like, providing for those kids. The third thing is, like, optimism about the future for a lot of women. That's what they're looking at, like, feminism has given women a choice about whether or not they want to have kids. I think that choice is a lot for people to bear, and I don't want to, like, cast it aside as, like, blueberries in a mortgage, because it's really a real thing. I think a lot of people desire to have family, and a lot of people feel like family's out of reach for them.

[Simone Collins]

Yeah. Because it is in our culture. So basically, you have to, like, go off the grid to actually have kids in a way that is sustainable and not stressful. So a lot of people who do ultimately make it work in the end are making it work in an inherently unsustainable way. That's really stressful because you're trying to be a dink who also happens to

[Naeem Araza]

have dual income, no kids.

[Simone Collins]

And it's very stressful to make that work because it was never meant to work.

[Naeem Araza]

I think as a generation, we're living through a massive cultural shift. Absorbing feminism, absorbing modern capitalism, absorbing affordability, changing technology. I think there's also this sense of like, do I need to have kids? It's like having kids a propagation of the economic system. So it's like I gotta pay into someone else's Social Security. I think people have a little bit of reticence or reluctance around, like buying into the idea that everybody needs to have a kid in society, even though at a micro level, they may or may not want to have a kid for themselves.

[Malcolm Collins]

Yeah, I think something that everyone could agree with, whether they're a leftist or a rightist or maybe not everyone, but I think most sane people agree with this, that whatever the mainstream way of living is right now, whatever our culture has culminated in doesn't seem to be working anymore. Everybody understands the current structure of marriage is broken. And what prenatalism is is us radically trying to fix it by inventing new cultures. And I think that other people try to fix it in different ways. Some people try to fix it politically with new political movements or radically different political movements. But what we do is we try to fix it at the level of ourselves and the level of our families.

[Naeem Araza]

We'll be right back after the break. Who cares about your poops?

[Simone Collins]

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[Naeem Araza]

l l y.com these statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

[Simone Collins]

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[Naeem Araza]

Pronatalism as a movement. Where does this get going? Like, where does this all because I remember when I was doing this show with Kara Swisher, I remember bringing up pronatalism, and she was like, what? She didn't know what it was. It was like 2022, I want to say it hadn't yet busted into the culture in 2024-2023-2024-2025, there's been a lot of coverage of first learned about it, I think, through you guys. Maybe just like before the pandemic.

[Malcolm Collins]

Yeah, that's when we first started obsessing about it.

[Naeem Araza]

That's when you started. And was there already a world of pronatalism that existed outside of these religious societies?

[Malcolm Collins]

No, the world of pronatalism really grew around us. Like the first pronatalist conferences, we were the headliners. We were bringing people together. We've been organizing all the thought leaders. One of the things that I really care about in this movement, because I was, like, involved in the effective altruist movement before this, is I didn't want us to become a bunch of infighting, sex scandals and all of this, because when pronatalism is growing, you gotta keep in mind, we've got tradcasts, we have ultra orthodox Jews, we have people like us, tradcats, trad Catholics, traditional Catholics. You have people like us who are using ivf. You know, presumably we have a lot of surface level differences in our ideologies. And it was really important to us to grow a movement where, despite those, we wouldn't see this petty infighting, we wouldn't see these rifts. And I think, in large part, we've been able to achieve that. And I take a lot of pride in that.

[Naeem Araza]

And you wanted to bring. To make having kids cool again? Kind of, yeah.

[Malcolm Collins]

I mean, that was the goal back then. Obviously, the goal has transformed since we first started the movement to what? So when we started the movement, we thought there might be some way to build this into a nonpartisan movement where people broadly understood the scale of the threat and what was downstream of it. As things began to move, we basically entered reality. One is, is that we're never gonna be able to fix fertility collapse in a timeframe. That's going to release the pressure on things like Social Security before those systems start to collapse. And even if we could, AI might serve as an alternative. When AI is increasingly replacing the jobs that people can take, the whole economic question around needing humans to produce a tax base ends up changing. So that was the first thing we realized. The second thing we realized is that we're never Going to win the mainstream leftists over to the pronatalist movement. One of the things that scared me the most when I started this movement is that more broadly, the urban monocultural lifestyle, the progressive lifestyle, is going to go extinct. Right. Like, if it can't motivate its own replacement, which happens to be the dominant culture on earth right now. What we call the urban monoculture has basically, and we've never seen this in human civilization before, just decided to like, pass the baton on to whoever grabs it.

[Naeem Araza]

You wanted to have kids, naturally, you ended up doing everything through ivf. And also you started genetically testing.

[Simone Collins]

We did.

[Naeem Araza]

So, like, there are companies like Orchid that provide this service and stuff. And this is also quite controversial. Is it controversial now? I feel like I lost people to that.

[Simone Collins]

I mean, so they try to. People try to play it off as controversial. We use herasite, and I think sometimes that can be controversial because we started using genomic prediction. They don't share things like height and iq. Heracyte does among, of course, all the important health stuff as well.

[Naeem Araza]

So you have this testing where you can kind of see various genetic traits of your child.

[Simone Collins]

Yeah. Height, externalizing, schizophrenia and iq. Iq? Well, yeah.

[Naeem Araza]

I mean, you can test embryos for iq. I feel like I want to fact check that.

[Simone Collins]

They're looking at.

[Malcolm Collins]

Yeah, I mean, IQ is highly heritable.

[Simone Collins]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Collins]

It's actually one of the most heritable traits that humans have.

[Naeem Araza]

But you guys do not consider yourselves eugenics.

[Malcolm Collins]

No, because a eugenicist is somebody who believes that certain people based on their genes, don't have the right to exist. Because we want to eventually get into genetic engineering. When somebody says that they don't believe a genetically engineered child has the right to exist, they're being a eugenicist because they're saying a certain class of human beings doesn't have a right to exist simply because of their genes.

[Naeem Araza]

There's a lot of concern about the overlap between, like, pronatalism and racial replacement theory and like, concern about becoming a majority minority country or all of these things. And so there's this sense of like, okay, if you're white, you really need to breed. If you're intelligent, you really need to breed. If you're an elite, you really need to breed. Whatever it is, there's all these theories on that end. Are you guys part. Do you guys subscribe to that world?

[Simone Collins]

So stupid. Yeah, because usually when you hear them brought up, it's, oh, white people are disappearing. When, like, that's the one group that's super fine. Like, white conservative Christians and Jews are doing super fine in terms of birth rates. Like, they are going to inherit the future. It's all these other groups. It's Emiratis, Jane, South Koreans. All these other groups are just vaporizing in front of us. And no one's talking about it because we're too busy talking about it.

[Naeem Araza]

We're only talking about it. All you read about is the demographic crisis, right?

[Simone Collins]

But we're not talking about the fact that South Koreans are disappearing. We're talking about, like, oh, I might not get all of my Social Security

[Malcolm Collins]

in the United States, for example, the. The black fertility rate is below the white fertility rate. The native black fertility rate is only maybe 1.3 right now, which is desperately low. To the extent that, like, when we're talking about groups that could go extinct, that's one of them, right?

[Simone Collins]

Like, no one talks about them.

[Malcolm Collins]

Nobody talks about that.

[Simone Collins]

Except for us, apparently.

[Malcolm Collins]

Except for us, apparently, yeah. Because there's a lot of groups where people can point to a country and be, this country has really good fertility rates. And it's like, no, they're just really poor. Like, everyone has good fertility rates when they're in desperate poverty. But groups that are able to maintain high fertility rates, in part because their countries are in poverty or whatever, they're not going to be necessarily relevant geopolitically or economically a few generations from now.

[Naeem Araza]

I think some of this language is alarming, like, relevant geopolitically as, like, what's. Which human life is relevant or not? So are you guys having more kids because you want to who have world domination? Or are you guys having more kids because you are concerned about the future of society?

[Simone Collins]

I have more kids. That's why we're having more kids.

[Malcolm Collins]

It can be both, right? Because there's an easy way to get your fertility rate up. And lots of groups have convergently evolved in this. If you adopt an incredibly xenophobic attitude towards outsiders, if you ban your often women from becoming educated, if you ban your group from interacting much with outsiders, if you start to treat women like slaves, you can get your fertility rate way up. And this is not one group that's done this. There's been Jewish groups that's done this. There's been Muslim groups that's done this. There's been Christian groups that's done this. This is a really easy hack to get super high fertility rates. But unfortunately, it means that you become less geopolitically and economically relevant. Like, the Amish may have a ton of kids, but the Amish are never going to be like the. A major geopolitical voice because they can't exercise geopolitical force because they don't have the technology to. Which is one of the. So if you could be one of the groups that doesn't adopt this strategy, but it's still high fertility, that, that is pluralistic. In high fertility, the future sort of handed to you.

[Naeem Araza]

Have you guys seen the movie Idiocracy?

[Simone Collins]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Collins]

Yeah. Oh, that's happening.

[Naeem Araza]

The first scene of that film. Can you describe it?

[Simone Collins]

A very nerdy, studious, thoughtful looking couple is interviewed periodically throughout periods of their adulthood talking about what they need to do before they can be ready to have kids. And they ultimately just never have kids.

[Naeem Araza]

And then meanwhile, cut to. There's a trailer park.

[Malcolm Collins]

There's a trailer park and like, everybody's like running around, you know, cheating on their parts, roughhousing, doing all sorts of stuff that we associate with white trash in America, excuse the term. And they're having tons and tons of kids. And I think what the movie Idiocracy shows is that this is not a

[Naeem Araza]

documentary, this is a feature film,

[Malcolm Collins]

is the heritability of IQ is not a racial issue. You know, it's an issue within ethnic groups, within any ethnic group on earth right now. The less intelligent people have more kids.

[Naeem Araza]

So is that a motivating factor for you guys, that smart people should have more kids? More kids?

[Malcolm Collins]

Absolutely.

[Naeem Araza]

Well, I would say I think there's a difference between you two in this.

[Simone Collins]

I feel like there, there is no such thing as a universally good or bad trait. Like, if, if smartness is causing a lack of fitness, then the smart ones will die out and there will be no smart ones left. Like, clearly smart's not working for people anymore. I worry about that because I don't want to end up with some like, you know, idiocracy style civilization where they're like, I don't know how the machine works. Like, it just feeds me. Right? Like, that's not good. Good. But I also think, you know, who are we to judge what is a good or bad trait? This is why we are, are very much in favor of understanding genes and traits and, and getting each family to choose. And obviously every family that chooses to have kids is practicing some form of genetic selection by choosing their partner or choosing a sperm or egg donor. Like, keep in mind we are not eliminating autism from our children. Even though a lot of parents would just only want to get polygenic risk score selection to eliminate the odds that they would get autism. And we think that it's their right to decide that. We think that every family should have the freedom to decide what trait they think will be fit in the future and what will not.

[Naeem Araza]

I mean, this is a. It's interesting to see this tension between you. Cause it seems like I just said it poorly. Yes.

[Malcolm Collins]

No, no.

[Simone Collins]

I think she flattered me.

[Malcolm Collins]

She said it better than I did. I meant whatever she said. What I meant by like, we want smart people is what we mean is that we, as in Simone and I, our culture values this. That's our hypothesis. But we don't demand that from other people.

[Naeem Araza]

Should we be worried about demographic collapse when, like we see the population growing? I'm not talking about an individual country by country level, but I'm saying, like, I think the projection is that we're going to have something like, is it 9.7 billion people in the world by 2050 and over 10, like nearing 11 billion people in the world by 2100. And so let's listen to de.

[Malcolm Collins]

Racialize the question. Let's look at.

[Naeem Araza]

Just deracialize.

[Malcolm Collins]

Well, I think many people, when they hear this.

[Naeem Araza]

I didn't racialize the question. I just wanted to.

[Malcolm Collins]

No, no. But some. Okay, let's just. Was in the context of the United States. Okay, somebody in. Because the real problem, at least originally was with falling fertility rates was things like Social Security, the tax system, et cetera. That's what people were really worried about. They weren't worried about people, they were worried about taxpayers. And so they wanted more high tax paying individuals. Where the fertility rate has fallen fastest in the United States is in cities like Manhattan and San Francisco. Now, a kid born to one of the families in Manhattan and San Francisco is likely going to be. Be a higher taxpayer than a kid being born in rural Alabama. It would be great if we had a world where every kid born, no matter what family they were born to, no matter what culture their family was, had exactly the same outcomes as every other kid. But we've been trying to create that world for about the past 150 years and we haven't even gotten close. And so when we're talking about pronatalism at the level of the taxpayer, right, like the tax system, what we're really talking about is taxpayers within countries, at which point the aggregate world population growing becomes irrelevant. If we're talking about pronatalism at the level of certain cultural and ethnic groups going extinct, like, say South Koreans going extinct, Italians going extinct, at that point, it also doesn't matter that people are having Kids in another country. Because I can't just turn somebody who's not an Italian into who an Italian without erasing their culture, which is cultural genocide. Right.

[Naeem Araza]

Is where like, the stuff gets very like. And I think you saying to de. Racialize the question when I didn't racialize the question was interesting because this is where it gets into this. And I remember seeing a quote that Emma had in that piece, and she said, this is actually Austin. Working the crowd at the NATO conference were some academics, economists, demographers, concerned about alliances that the pronatalist movement had forged in pursuit of reach and influence. And they're talking about, I think, particularly characters who have been involved in what you call the really dark, dumb replacement theory, like, people who are more on the white nationalist supremacist side of things. And why did you guys invite them to your conference?

[Malcolm Collins]

One, we didn't invite them. They just came. It was. Anybody who paid for a ticket could go. This was to the first conference and the second conference. We didn't really have anyone who was particularly far on. If you look at the actual.

[Naeem Araza]

I think this was the second conference. They were talking about 2025.

[Malcolm Collins]

Yeah, there was. If you look at the actual white nationalists in the United States, they generally hate us in our movement.

[Naeem Araza]

Okay, speak about the conference. I don't want to talk about the general. Like, who brought these people? Do you feel like for this pronatalist movement to work, you have to make some alliances?

[Simone Collins]

Some pronatalists advocates are going to be more focused on their own cultural group. That is kind of how pronatalism is going to have to work going forward. It's that you have a culture or a religion or a group, and they love themselves and they want to see more of themselves, and they love their kids. Think about it like sports teams, right?

[Malcolm Collins]

Like, are you.

[Naeem Araza]

I mean, it's hard to think about, like, sports scenes because it's about people. Do you think it's problematic?

[Simone Collins]

It is about it. No, no, no, it's not. No, it's not problematic at all. Like, imagine if, like, you had the Oakland Raiders and the.

[Naeem Araza]

I mean, don't imagine it. Like, speak about the specifics, Simone.

[Malcolm Collins]

It's easier to talk about this in terms of, like, Koreans. Right? Like Koreans. Very low fertility right now to get a group of Koreans a culture within Korea that is high fertility. I need to convince some Koreans to love Korean culture and identity and want to perpetuate it.

[Simone Collins]

Yeah. So there are people who show up to Natal Khan. Western civilization is being threatened. Like, it's like someone on a footbeat. Like, we're being pummeled out there. Like, come on, like, let's go, let's go.

[Naeem Araza]

And you think that's fine?

[Simone Collins]

Yeah.

[Naeem Araza]

Earlier you said to me that that's so stupid. There's no, like, risk.

[Simone Collins]

Well, because it's stupid. It's not true. You know, it's like the Yankees being

[Malcolm Collins]

like, we've never won anything ever.

[Simone Collins]

We gotta win this now. And it's like, come on, guys. Like, we know you're doing fine.

[Malcolm Collins]

Right. But the point being is that it's gonna be very hard to convince anyone to want to have kids if they don't have pride and a civilizational identity. Yeah, they're.

[Simone Collins]

And I think people are seeing that. They're like, this is racism. When like. No, this is. It is a necessary element. One of the big reasons why we see urban progressives not having kids is that there's a deep sense of hatred of their. Of themselves and their culture. And we. Oh, like, we're hurting the environment.

[Naeem Araza]

And those reasons are rarely true when you actually probe at them. It's like, rarely. That climate change, the reason there's like

[Simone Collins]

a level of self hatred in modern progressive culture that is, I think, causing a lot of dampening on birth rates.

[Naeem Araza]

So, like, you know, you. You consider yourselves like such Silicon Valley people. Very rationalist, very based in data. You have Excel sheets running for you guys to like, to make these, like, sweeping claims about a generational society.

[Malcolm Collins]

Because the way I put it is you can't convince a Mexican to have more kids if they don't have pride in their identity as a Mexican. In Mexican culture.

[Naeem Araza]

I'm sure there are people who have more kids who are not prideful of their culture. And I'm sure that there are people who are prideful of their culture who do not have kids.

[Simone Collins]

No, no, no, I disagree.

[Naeem Araza]

I'm for sure, like, all of these totally exist.

[Simone Collins]

Very strongly disagree. Because if someone has a lot of kids and they're not PR their birth culture, they are prideful of a new culture they've created, and they're excited to raise kids within it.

[Naeem Araza]

It's just like, it's like a very abstract conversation. Like, for me, I'm like, people have kids, it's not like, I'm gonna have kids. Cause I'm like, so excited to have Pakistani kids, though. I love Pakistan. I love the food. I love so many things about my culture.

[Simone Collins]

So you're proud of it?

[Naeem Araza]

I'm proud of it, but I also am not proud of it. At the expense of other people. I think the thing is, I'm not like, my kids are.

[Simone Collins]

No one ever said it. What they're not saying is adults like,

[Malcolm Collins]

we gotta take out.

[Simone Collins]

No one said that.

[Naeem Araza]

No one was talking about genocide. Some of these people, it is like a football team in a sense. I'm not saying it's genocide, but I'm saying there people who are like, we have to outperform. We have to out populate the earth.

[Simone Collins]

That's not zero sum. That is expansionist.

[Naeem Araza]

So this is what I'm asking. The question I'm asking you is, do you think there is a line that you would want to draw in, like, kind of how far you expect? There is absolutely a line of these people that you would not want to include, like white supremacists who are in. Who have an interest in propagating, you know, white babies and limiting the number of other babies.

[Simone Collins]

There's a line in its cultural sovereignty. It's when people start trying to legislate or dictate or curtail in some. The lives or cultures of other groups. You've crossed a line and you're not part of our movement anymore.

[Naeem Araza]

I've known you guys for a long time, and when I went to look at your podcast, I was like, kind of like. I was like, what the fuck? Okay, I want to read you.

[Simone Collins]

That is exactly what we're going for. I hope it offended you.

[Naeem Araza]

So I want to read you some of your titles for your recent podcast episodes. Okay, go. It's now illegal to murder whites. Blacks and Sikhs. Don't know how they'll survive. Survive this. Another one is we need more sins.

[Malcolm Collins]

Do you want to talk about that title?

[Naeem Araza]

No. No, I want to go through them all and then we're going to go back and talk about it. We need more sins. Sins. Equal rules that make your life better. Third one. How a gay Jew rewrote core Catholic doctrine in the 1960s. That one was wild D number four. Researching a gang bang radicalized my wife against early stage abortion.

[Simone Collins]

Told you about that.

[Naeem Araza]

We were wrong in parentheses. Okay, the fifth one. How the world turned against gays. Only 60% of Dems are pro trans now.

[Simone Collins]

Yeah, have you seen the graphs?

[Naeem Araza]

And then how Legos taught the world to hate Mormons again.

[Simone Collins]

It's like, you're too professional.

[Naeem Araza]

What offends me about it is not like, I'm like, what the fuck? It's just. It's clickbait. I don't know what it means. I'm just like, what? What is this clickbait hellhole. Are you guys just like trying to win an algorithm or is this like, are these things.

[Simone Collins]

Yeah, you kind of. I mean, look, is that what you're doing here? We are coming at this with extreme, like no funding. We don't get like paid for this.

[Naeem Araza]

That's what I mean.

[Simone Collins]

Figure out how to out.

[Naeem Araza]

I'm also an independent podcaster, Simone. I don't have this kind of.

[Simone Collins]

So the cheapest way that we can get PR and we can get more views and we can get our message out, which is actually fairly substantive, I would hope, is by rage baiting.

[Naeem Araza]

So what I'm hearing you say is like, okay, you have a line. Your line is that you don't want to be bedfellows with people who want to expand their propagation at the expense of other people's propagation. You don't want to be.

[Simone Collins]

I don't know, you're saying that I'm. Ok. People convincing changing minds.

[Naeem Araza]

You are willing to co opt some of the like, vernacular and like the culture around that group to pull people into your.

[Simone Collins]

I mean like, oh, I'm never ever going to like a racism bait. Like, if you ever want to change a genuine racist's mind, oh, I will never talk to them or ever engage with them in any way.

[Malcolm Collins]

We actually have a common thing is, yeah, they've been like, I was a racist when I started watching you guys and I'm not a racist anymore. But people have come and been like, I used to think that Latin Americans were really different from people in America. And I don't think that anymore after watching your podcast. If you wanna change minds, if you wanna fight the culture war against Nick Fuentes, you need to be getting in front of the same audience that he's getting in front of.

[Naeem Araza]

I went and listened to your show, so I'm not just like judging you on headlines. And I listened to the one about it's now illegal to kill white people.

[Malcolm Collins]

Yeah, that was wild stuff that's going on there.

[Naeem Araza]

Well, you talked about the killing in Belfast, which has been a lightning round and Elon Musk has himself gotten involved and it's led to a. Led to protests, led to violence all over where this immigrant had been involved in this killing. And then you also talked about when I heard another story in Germany. And then what I hear in your show is like, Malcolm, sometimes you'll say some like wild shit and sometimes you'll say some extremely inaccurate stuff. I'll just say like, it's like you go back and sometimes you guys are Correcting or whatever. And Simone, you're often pushing back. You'll be like, well, so Malcolm will say they killed these people, they killed this guy and all they got was community service and now they're picking up the trash. And then Simone's like, well, you know, they were teenagers and there's probably different laws regarding teenage people.

[Malcolm Collins]

Be allowed to rape someone just because you're a teenager.

[Naeem Araza]

I'm not saying. I don't think that that's what the law says.

[Malcolm Collins]

Well then the law wasn't being applied and that's concerning. And it makes a bunch of people feel like the law isn't being applied evenly.

[Naeem Araza]

No, I think that what it's what in that case, it's like you think that the punishment for the law is not sufficiently strong for the crime. And that's your critique, baby. But you weren't saying that, you were saying something else. You were saying the crime.

[Malcolm Collins]

No, I believed that the law was being plott differently along ethnic lines, for ethnic reasons. And I think that that's wrong.

[Naeem Araza]

But just take your face value of this dumb headline. It is now illegal to murder whites. Don't you think it's illegal to murder whites?

[Malcolm Collins]

Well, look at the reaction to the Anthony trial that just happened. A bunch of people you're talking about unseen. What am I going to tell my kids? What am I going to tell my five boys? Tell them not to murder people. Because this was a clear case of somebody just murdering someone. So why are people freaking out about this? We all have the facts of this case. We all know that he was asked to leave that tent multiple times and all the kid was attempt to forcibly remove him from the tent and he killed him. And then everybody's freaking when people protest that. When people protest him being sentenced for murder for committing murder, it shows that they had an expectation that they wouldn't be tried for committing murder if they did it like this. And that to me is not okay. It's not okay that we have normalized this within parts of our society and we're trying to elevate this.

[Naeem Araza]

I wanna stop you right now. Cause you were getting very angry and now you're smiling and happy and I'm wondering when you just did that, are you performing or, or is this, are you angry? Okay, so here I want to speak to you about this. So there are like across the board and I haven't looked at the facts of the Carmel Anthony case which has taken off. But there are throughout society Malcolm Edge cases of things that are like, I cannot believe that this horrific thing happened. The law, like, whatever. And I don't, I'm not even commenting on this case, I don't know this case. But I'm just saying there are always examples like, and that's what led to blm.

[Malcolm Collins]

People should be able to get mad because of edge cases. BLM can be justified even if it's based on edge cases.

[Naeem Araza]

Well, I don't think that BLM was about. I mean when you look at the data about racial violence and when you

[Malcolm Collins]

look at, when you look at the rate gain data, when you look at the. Yeah, we are using edge cases to motivate anger around something that is a wider statistical phenomenon.

[Naeem Araza]

And to what end are you motivating that anger?

[Malcolm Collins]

What end are we motivating the anger? In the very episode that we had that on, we had a large section of like, do not make people of different ethnicities feel uncomfortable in our spaces. Make sure that this is a movement that is inclusive of people regardless of their skin color. But that doesn't mean that we should be okay with the people who are cheering after, you know, the October, October 11th attacks, October 7th attacks. When we have parties in US campuses before the IDF did anything because of those attacks, that means that this is a normalized culture that people think that they feel safely partying in a university campus cuz people are being raped at a music festival.

[Naeem Araza]

You're making an argument there that I think is a bit like of a slippery slope, which is to say I think that there are people who were protesting Israel's actions throughout. There were people who went out, celebrated the Oct. 7 attack. There are people who went out and protested that in advance, like prophylactically any Israeli action against Gaza because they knew it was coming on the basis of history. If you look at the retaliation of the IDF and Israel, Israeli government for attacks and the fallout of that retaliation. Right. Because it's often not the perpetrators of the attack who get punished. It's often the kids, women, other. It's like whole society, they were partying

[Malcolm Collins]

and this goes on.

[Naeem Araza]

Look at Claude Gay.

[Malcolm Collins]

I mean, she runs harder.

[Naeem Araza]

Here's the thing, you're just saying words like you're like now vomiting words of the culture wars. And I'm trying to have a conversation with you. Okay. There continue to be protests in the summer. Well after. At that point, I would say the Israeli response was quite significant. Yes, you would agree. In Gaza. So there are kids that continue to protest. There are people who would like to lean into this kind of headline where you kind of try to make everyone who's a protester appear as if they're quote, anti Semitic or quote. Like there's all these ways that this can spin up into the culture wars. I think there's a way to like paint people in the worst possible light in order to drive, click and drive rage. It's for me, like, I think that's where I'm like, I don't, I don't recognize you guys in that. Do you ever worry about, like, do you ever worry, and I'm asking you, Simone first, Do you ever worry about this, like falling into like this world of that's actually completely irrational, completely like interested in morphing anecdotal cases to drive and rage bait and anger people and motivate them into like becoming memes of themselves?

[Simone Collins]

No, I really don't worry about that. I mean it would be like someone who makes fishing lures, like, worried about like, well, I only ever just make. I guess there are people who just only make fish.

[Naeem Araza]

Is the fact that you don't worry about it, like, worrisome in and of itself? Like, you have guard rails of like how you think about your content and what you want to put in the world?

[Simone Collins]

Yeah, I mean, we are continuously focused on whatever it is that maximizes human flourishing.

[Naeem Araza]

That is what we want and clicks.

[Simone Collins]

I mean, well, that is part of the ideology that drives our effort. Right. So you have your long term goal and then you have, all right, here are my resources, right? Here's the hand I've been dealt, here's how much money we have to spend on this. Here's, here's the other obligations we have in life. Here's how much time we have, how do we get help? You know, start to build a community, raise awareness about demographic collapse, raise awareness about a bunch of other societal issues and how do we get to there? And that clickbait, that rage bait element of our strategy is one of those ideologies on, by the way, after we tried many more polished and more responsible and professional pathways, the thing that ultimately got traction, the thing that ultimately has product market fit and that ultimately engages people. And so, all right, well, this is what works and this is what we can afford. And this is actually making a very positive impact for everything we can measure. So we're going to keep doing it.

[Naeem Araza]

Leaning into the algorithm of the identity bait. For me, I'm like, I think that's fighting like a ghost that doesn't exist. I think most people, like, even the COVID stuff, like a lot of people will be like, Getting out there. And I've interviewed Fauci and I've interviewed Jay Bhattacharya, and I've been like, you know, I've been through this, the gambit, I've covered this stuff. And now people will hark back to that. I don't think there's a lot of people right now who would say, like, yeah, you know, closing schools was a great idea, and if we were to do it all again, we would do it again. And people, like, dine out on that historical mistake to animate people about a world that doesn't. Like a yesteryear that doesn't exist so that they can continue to be mad and then move to whatever.

[Simone Collins]

Yeah, so.

[Naeem Araza]

So they are interested to move them

[Malcolm Collins]

to is I think that this war, this Internet low culture war that a lot of people think is below them, the war that happened when we were younger between Tumblr and 4chan. Yeah, right. Like, people thought that was, like, weird weirdos online, but that was what was downstream of the modern Trump administration and the modern, you know, xeno pronoun side of the progressive movement. Right. Like this war that we're having, it's this underground culture war happening online that determines the future of human civilization. Nobody reads the newspapers anymore. You know, the conversation that's happening by the elite in the ivory towers is no longer the conversation that ends up shaping policy in 10 years.

[Naeem Araza]

It's so interesting. Cause it's like, I'm having this conversation with you guys, and it's like, a little slippery because, like, you want to say, like, okay, yes, like, we are not white supremacists and we will. But yet if white supremacists want to increase their number of people and they're prideful of their culture, like, that's okay for. It's like you're kind of like trying to be like a equal opportunity happy. Go lucky.

[Simone Collins]

We drew where a line was, and it's with cultural sovereignty not curtailing the rights or liberties of other people. Like, I don't see what you think about it.

[Naeem Araza]

Like, I'm just interested to understand, like, how you were thinking about it. Because at the end of the day, it's a business, right. It's also a media business. But there was a Guardian did a profile about. And in there, there's a scene where Malcolm, you guys go out to. You guys are out at lunch with your son, and I think I'll come in. He's over here, and he did something with his foot and it, like, topples the table.

[Malcolm Collins]

Our younger kid Torson.

[Naeem Araza]

But yeah, yeah, okay, Torson.

[Malcolm Collins]

And I gave him a bop. I lightly slapped him across the face.

[Naeem Araza]

Yeah, you described it as giving him a bop. The author said that she was shocked and, like, very much, you know, didn't classify it as a bop.

[Malcolm Collins]

Well, she said that within 30 seconds he was laughing. So clearly he wasn't like, injured or something.

[Naeem Araza]

I'm not here to litigate your parenting. What I was shocked by on it. There's a story about your husband where it basically, it's like, you know, you're portraying him as someone who's like, okay, this is how Malcolm disciplines his child.

[Malcolm Collins]

Yeah.

[Naeem Araza]

And in a way that's like, shocked this journalist. Then, Simone, you said Jenny Kleeman, quote, did your nonprofit advocacy a huge favor from that story. Were you joking or is that the actual business model?

[Simone Collins]

She came to our house. She's a lovely woman. We still can't.

[Naeem Araza]

She came to your house like an amusement park to, like, inflamed journalists?

[Simone Collins]

Yeah, she entered the fun house. Okay. The mirrors are there. She's freaking out what you called it. But, like, listen, you're not gonna get really good reach with the story unless it has something really controversial in it.

[Naeem Araza]

Do you think this conversation is gonna be controversial? And, like, I hope he doesn't give you any flack.

[Malcolm Collins]

Hey, I just want the audience to know that she doesn't agree with anything. She hates everything we say. We're monsters of her. She brought us out here to highlight how bad we are.

[Naeem Araza]

That's not what I. That's not why I brought you out here. I brought you out here. Cause I wanna understand. First of all, there's this whole culture war story about how elite universities across America are only breeding a single type of individual. And I think if you look at these two graduates of the Stanford Class of 2014, you will see that it's a very.

[Simone Collins]

We made it.

[Naeem Araza]

You guys have five kids hoping for 50, and I'm. Got some eggs in a freezer figuring out what I'm doing.

[Malcolm Collins]

You look like the white trash couple in idiocracy to a lot of people.

[Simone Collins]

That's exactly what I was thinking.

[Malcolm Collins]

The white trash just do whatever, like. Yeah, but you know what I mean, I do want to make a point that, like, we did win. Like, we went out there with these crazy tactics, and now everyone's talking about

[Simone Collins]

falling fertility rates with extremely little funding or support. Like, the thing is, people put billions of dollars into anti AI.

[Naeem Araza]

So let's talk about, like, your funding and support because I'm so interested in this, where I want to end is like your business model, because that. So you guys have this nonprofit and

[Simone Collins]

you received, what was it, like a $500,000 grant.

[Naeem Araza]

So the Skype co founder, the Estonian billionaire, gave you guys like near half

[Simone Collins]

a million dollars through a donor advised fund. This was not his decision. He did not. He has nothing to.

[Naeem Araza]

I love that you, like, don't want to implicate anyone in your extremism.

[Simone Collins]

We know. Look, when you make yourself toxic, you don't want to pull anyone down with you.

[Naeem Araza]

You also have the Collins Institute for Gifted Youth, your online school. How many kids are enrolled in that?

[Simone Collins]

Oh, it's not an active enrollment school. It's a Socratic tutoring.

[Malcolm Collins]

Yeah, not a ton, you know, maybe a dozen.

[Naeem Araza]

And you guys homeschool your own kids, right?

[Malcolm Collins]

I mean, our. Our platform is doing really well as RFAB AI, which we've built to replace workers.

[Simone Collins]

Right. Like they actively tutors. Like that tutors our son as much as the Collins Institute platform does.

[Malcolm Collins]

We've never taken a dime in salary from any of this. We have only ever worked off of our savings or day jobs or investments because we've donated a lot of money to our foundation.

[Naeem Araza]

And what does the foundation money go to?

[Malcolm Collins]

The foundation money goes to building things like less expensive educational models that people can use instead of college, because that's one of the biggest costs.

[Naeem Araza]

Does that mean that you use the money for. From the nonprofit institute to build the Collins Institute? So isn't. So you're reinvesting the money in your own properties?

[Simone Collins]

Well, no, it belongs to the nonprofit.

[Naeem Araza]

Okay. You wrote these books and you said the proceeds go to charity, presumably your own charity. So I think some people could be listening to this and be like, are these guys like cult leaders? Are they like grifters?

[Simone Collins]

We think it's a grift. We don't make any money from the nonprofit. Like that's not paying us. Like none of. I mean, it's lovely when people donate, but like that's not gonna put on table. I mean, we're largely living off our savings right now.

[Malcolm Collins]

Yeah.

[Simone Collins]

So hopefully he's trying to build like

[Malcolm Collins]

an AI companion company that, you know, beginning to build income. That's our fab AI. So it's basically like AI sex bots and stuff like that.

[Naeem Araza]

And you have this travel company still or no more?

[Malcolm Collins]

No, mostly separated from that.

[Simone Collins]

Yeah.

[Naeem Araza]

You're separated from that. Was that controversial?

[Malcolm Collins]

Well, we're separated. We stepped down because we didn't want any of our advocacy to impact the employees at that company.

[Naeem Araza]

I mean, Simone, when you guys started this partnership, you said there were always going to be money. It sounds like there's not a lot of money. What are you going to do?

[Simone Collins]

But we find this work really meaningful. I never wanted to put my career on the back burner. It was never I wanted to put money on the back burner. It was, I never want to. To lose my identity in parenting and no longer do work that I found intellectually stimulating and meaningful. And I have that more now than I ever have before that I could ever get from a job, because we really believe in this work.

[Naeem Araza]

Do you guys want to be famous?

[Malcolm Collins]

Absolutely. I want to have impact. I think a lot of people, they look at us and they go, hahaha, look at these people. There's proof that they wanted to be influential for a long time before they were influential. And I'm like, any influential person wanted to be influential before they like. It takes time and effort to build up a podcast, right? And you're going to have failed attempts. First, I wanted to influence the public narrative and the direction that we influence the public narrative, like the core thesis of our podcast is like, let's build this alliance of diverse cultural groups and take to the stars and conquer the universe. Take our manifest destiny in space. Right? And I love that. That is something that, you know, you look at the other influences our space and they're beginning to pick up this idea as well. You know, you look like leaflet who's a popular conservative influencer now, and she's all into stellar humanism, conquer the stars. And I. And I, because. Because when I was younger, I didn't have any movement that felt like this, that had this intense excitement about the future of humanity and our.

[Naeem Araza]

Well, one has it. And like, she's a friend of mine and has been on the show, Cleo Abram, huge, if true. She's been extremely successful.

[Simone Collins]

She's so great.

[Naeem Araza]

She's so great. And she's all about bringing people into the world and she talks about questions about kids and declining birth rates. She talks about all these things and she does it without any of the headlines that I gave you.

[Simone Collins]

I know, because she's so talented. She has raised.

[Naeem Araza]

But if you guys aren't talented at this, maybe you shouldn't do this particular thing.

[Simone Collins]

Someone needs to raise the alarm bells about demographic collapse. Look, no, no one was doing it. No one was doing it. We're like really concerned about it. We really care about it. Would you prefer to do it another way?

[Naeem Araza]

Now if.

[Simone Collins]

No, I Mean, this is fine. It works when it works.

[Malcolm Collins]

I'm having a. Like, the online. Right. Which is the space that we're in right now that has all of this, you know, sort of performative edginess is really, like, culturally to me. I have never been in a culture that was so accepting and kind. It's really fun, especially.

[Naeem Araza]

Do you think they would be as accepting and kind of.

[Malcolm Collins]

Me? Absolutely.

[Naeem Araza]

Do you think they would be as accepting? Kind of. Kind of somebody who is, you know, influential in the BLM movement?

[Malcolm Collins]

A lot of people, like. Okay, you mean like Candace Owens?

[Naeem Araza]

You're saying a lot because Candace Owens

[Malcolm Collins]

used to be a, you know, a pro. So, yeah, she was a progressive influencer. She came to the right.

[Naeem Araza]

What I heard in your very clear response of yes to me, but no, but like, a long, long answer to

[Simone Collins]

that was, so the problem is, if someone's very active in the BLM movement, they, like, basically an environmentalist, whatever. If they're very abrasive and not to, like, talk and chat, then, like, they're not gonna be.

[Malcolm Collins]

I was active in the environmentalist movement.

[Simone Collins]

I was.

[Malcolm Collins]

Simone worked for, you know, the Earth Day Network. She was writing the little pamphlets.

[Naeem Araza]

This. I think that there's a lot of room in the middle to reach people with, like, concrete and important messages that we don't need to just go to the ends of the fringes of the ecosystem to try to bait them in.

[Malcolm Collins]

Let's just look at the influencers in our movement that we've interviewed recently on our show. Like, we've had leaflet on who's a Japanese American. We've had NUX on who is an orthodox Jewish American. Soon we're gonna have Kirscha on who has a furry. A fox girl avatar Vtuber. Right? And all of these people are widely accepted in the movement, and we're accepted with open eyes.

[Naeem Araza]

I love your, like, podcast version of I have black friends, but, yes.

[Malcolm Collins]

No, no, no, this isn't my friends.

[Naeem Araza]

These are people who are wildly sensual.

[Simone Collins]

Yeah.

[Naeem Araza]

Yes.

[Malcolm Collins]

Among this audience. It's not just that we have friends like this. It's that we listen to these people as intellectual authorities.

[Naeem Araza]

It's just more like it could misinform people and radicalize them in unintended ways.

[Simone Collins]

Right. I mean, and there's a very similar argument made about, like, Silicon Valley startups, Right? Like, how dare you move fast and break things? Because what if you, you know, like, hurt someone in doing this? Right? But, like, we wouldn't have this level of innovation if people don't sometimes Take a risky approach. That said, again, the whole reason we're in this is we want as many different groups taking as many different approaches to the world's biggest problems as possible. And down demographic collapse fundamentally threatens this. We are very happy that you disapprove of our approach.

[Naeem Araza]

I don't.

[Simone Collins]

Super happy.

[Naeem Araza]

I'm not saying I dis. Well, I mean, I kind of do. Yeah, I kind of do. I kind of disapprove of your approach.

[Simone Collins]

I'm really glad.

[Naeem Araza]

No, I disapprove of your approach because I think it's, like, full of factual errors that are misinforming people. I do. I think. And Malcolm, you are the guiltiest of this between the two of you, but you both have it in you. And I think it would take you, like, a little bit of time to. Cause you have this, like, ostensible fact check, but it's not really a fact check. Maybe it would cost you some points in your influence.

[Malcolm Collins]

Daily episodes.

[Simone Collins]

Yeah, maybe. Maybe.

[Naeem Araza]

Guys, I think I'll be okay.

[Malcolm Collins]

I like, daily. A lot of people rely on us in their daily routines.

[Naeem Araza]

Yes, that. That worries me all the more. But anyways, I'm gonna, like. Speaking of daily routines, I'm gonna let you guys get back to it. We had every episode of Smart Girl Dumb Questions. Asking our guests a question that they don't know the answer to. It's hard to ask the people who podcast about everything, including things they don't

[Simone Collins]

have the answer to. The last Malcolm was with, you know, sex dolls, like, for real dolls. Like, how do men get over the plastic smell when they buy them?

[Malcolm Collins]

And I said, men don't care about stuff like that.

[Simone Collins]

Yeah. So that was my last.

[Naeem Araza]

Okay.

[Simone Collins]

Yeah, there you go. You're welcome.

[Naeem Araza]

Great. That is actually a great way to end this. All right, that was wild. And I want to know what you think. It was a really strange episode for me because of the way that Simone and Malcolm talked about media. It was like this very maximalist interpretation of all press is good press. And as a journalist, I never want to be part of anyone's, like, kind of press tour or propaganda machine. But I hope that that back and forth was interesting and. And revealing, not just about pronatalism or whatever business the Collins may be running right now, but also about the culture wars and how it's fed this kind of media environment and what it rewards and what it creates. And most of all, I want to hear what you think of this episode. You can drop comments in there. You can DM us. Smart Girl Dumb Questions. Anywhere on Social and you can also email me directly at [e-mail]. this episode was produced with Sanjay Nigam, Andrea Lopez Crusado and Melissa Lee. It was edited by Davey Chin. It was shot and produced with Desta Wonderad and Aisha Jordan at Wonder Studios. And I'm your host, Na Raza. I'll see you next time for an all new Smart girl Dumb questions no 12 children right here.

[Malcolm Collins]

When the going gets tough, get after it with NOS energy. Keep your foot flat to the floor and never let off thunder. From top gear to no fear. Never back down, never slow down. Your body is machine with 800 horses coursing through its veins. So go hard, go fast. Go on, grab a can of NOS energy and get after it.