The Ballerina Farms Controversy & The Tradwife Cargo Cult

 https://discord.gg/EGFRjwwS92

In this in-depth analysis, Malcolm and Simone Collins dissect the recent New York Times article about Hannah and Daniel Neeleman of Ballerina Farms, exploring the controversy surrounding their "trad wife" lifestyle. The video offers unique insights into media manipulation, the complexities of modern conservative influencers, and the tensions between progressive journalists and traditional families. Drawing from their own experiences with media coverage, the Collins couple provides a nuanced perspective on the Ballerina Farms story, discussing everything from Mormon culture to the economics of influencer farming.

Key topics covered:

* Analysis of the New York Times article on Ballerina Farms

* The "trad wife" phenomenon and its cultural implications

* Media manipulation tactics and influencer strategies

* Mormon culture and its influence on the Neelemans' lifestyle

* The economics of influencer farming and social media success

* Comparisons between Ballerina Farms and other conservative influencers

* The role of the LDS Church in shaping the Neelemans' public image

* Critiques of modern parenting and societal expectations

Whether you're interested in social media culture, conservative lifestyles, or media analysis, this video offers a thought-provoking look at one of the internet's most talked-about families.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] I actually think that this narrative was intentionally crafted in order to make the other scandal impossible. You

Simone Collins: think this is a 4D chess situation?

Malcolm Collins: There was something that happened in the piece that made me think that this was definitely a 4D chess situation.

Simone Collins: You really think she was baiting the reporter with this?

Malcolm Collins: I do think she was baiting the reporter with this. I think that they actually wanted to create this narrative that's being created right now.

It's the type of thing you and I have done with

Simone Collins: Oh, tell me more.

Malcolm Collins: I have a secret theory on what the trip to Greece faux pas was all about. And I'm going to get into it in this video because I do not think it's what you think it is.

I don't think she was saying that to her husband. I think she was saying that to somebody else entirely, but who could it be?

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: So Malcolm, I was

Malcolm Collins: actually Simone. I need to speak here. I don't, I don't think any of your opinions matter on this, but here we had to prep for that. Anyway, go ahead.

Simone Collins: Straight. The trad wife dynamic. I was cruising YouTube as is my want, and I found that three of [00:01:00] my favorite YouTubers all had done. In the span of the last few days, Ballerina Farms analyses, and I thought, Oh my gosh, what is going on for those not in the know, Ballerina Farms is a very popular.

We're talking like 9 million followers Trad wife, influencer, Instagram. They don't refer to themselves as a tra wife or a trad couple. And I say they because we're talking about sorry, Hannah and Daniel Neman. They are two Mormons married couple with. Eight kids living on a beautiful property outside Park City in Utah running a farm with dairy cows and chickens and pigs.

An

Malcolm Collins: experience recently that was very similar to an experience that we went through. Right. So yeah,

Simone Collins: these three YouTubers were all doing an analysis of an article that came out in the Times, which involved a reporter coming to visit them who then spent the day with the family. And then. Published what many people are calling a hit piece.

[00:02:00] And what's really interesting is that we're sort of looking at this from people who have seen the exact same formula. British journalist wants to cover a, an alt right adjacent subculture targets of family. goes to spend time with them, probably comes with an existing agenda, or at least their existing cultural baggage, is probably, you know, a pretty progressive, you know, female journalist, and then subsequently writes an article that is beautifully written, you know, you know, interesting, florid, whatever, you know, very evocative.

But it, you know, frames the target family in a controversial right and the target movement in a controversial right. And, and perennialism and tradwives, they're very, they're like cousin trends, if you know what I mean. You know, they're, they're a lot of, they rhyme. There's not a lot of intermixing. But they are, there kind of is, and I would say like any, any sort of progressive journalist that's like trying to explore and possibly criticize rising [00:03:00] conservative movements that are sort of, rebutting progressive ideals is going to look at both pronatalism and treadwifery.

So what, what had happened to that very similar to what had happened to us in various hit pitch pieces that have been written about our pronatalist advocacy and our family in general. So it's like, I feel like we have insights into what's happened with the Neelman's that other people don't have because they haven't had the experience of a journalist embedding with their family for a day.

Asking them questions, seeing the full range of the experience the journalist had that day, but then seeing how the journalist chose to frame that experience later. Because what people aren't seeing is everything that that journalist chose to not write about.

Malcolm Collins: Well, not just that, but I want to, I want to Make one a clarification here.

So there was one instance in which she was asked her and her husband were asked, but she was the one who was directly asked. And then her husband butted in and answered first does she consider herself a trad wife? The husband said, well, the term came up after we started doing what [00:04:00] we were doing.

So it's not like we were aiming to be trad wives, but I guess we sort of are now. And then she clarified further that she didn't fully agree or identify with the title. So. You are a trad wife as much as she is a trad wife. Two way progressive, you would be a trad wife, but we have mentioned many times on the show we should do a full episode on this concept that, that the trad wife movement as it exists now is a bit of a cargo cult.

So for people who aren't familiar with what cargo cults are, this is like, In these islands during World War II, they would there were like natives who weren't really familiar with Europe or Europeans cultural value system or anything like that, but all of a sudden these bases were set up with food and supplies and everything like that, and they'd be airdropped supplies regularly or planes would fly in and drop supplies.

And so, after the Europeans left, they sort of like built religions around them to try to bring back the prosperity of those times, like making Runways out of like [00:05:00] stones and stuff like that are trying to recreate some of the European rituals that they remembered from that period and I think But but all of it was sort of a mock of a time that they didn't fully understand or know And it is all the modern image of what that time was

Simone Collins: Yeah, and that's similar to sympathetic magic like, you know, I want to fly so i'm gonna eat a bird You know something like that of like well, like let's try to bring that back.

Like oh Just by doing things that are kind of similar, let's,

Malcolm Collins: let's try to bring back the, the, the wholesomeness and the prosperity where you could genuinely have, you know, your average American family and the whole family could survive off of the husband's income and like, And a lot of people think that we are fully against stay at home moms.

I'm not. I just don't like elevating this image because I don't think it's attainable for the average person. And I think it leads people to make very poor financial decisions. Well, in career decisions, there's

Simone Collins: a lot of risks with stay at home parenting, which is that like sort of the dynamics that can be built among a couple.

[00:06:00] Especially when there's one breadwinner and then one homemaker, there can be a lot of like misunderstanding of the roles that each person is playing. Then a lot of resentment building, like you don't understand how much work I put into this family, either as the breadwinner or as the homemaker. And then later after the homemaker partner becomes an empty nester, suddenly the value that they brought to the table.

Is sort of lost and their career is lost and they're a little bit aimless. Like the dynamics are just super screwed up. So it's just, we're concerned about adverse incentives. We're concerned about unsustainable relationship dynamics. And that's another concern. But not everybody

Malcolm Collins: has that. Some people don't have, what I'm saying is we don't actually, like some people have been on our discord, like, well, you know, you probably disapprove of I'm doing this.

And I'm like, no, like if you can make it work, it works. Yeah. One, the lottery. Right. Yeah. And especially. Especially we'll get into her situation, but I think she's really gone above and beyond in terms of like moms that have my respect, the ballerina farm lady, like, Oh my God,

Simone Collins: Neilman is insanely awesome.

And she doesn't, she doesn't use

Malcolm Collins: nannies by the way. She's his nannies once a week. [00:07:00] She has eight kids. She doesn't live like around their parents or around anyone. She can fob the kids off onto, but it's not like, even if she did live

Simone Collins: right by her parents, no one's going to take eight kids. So they're on their own,

Malcolm Collins: you know?

Well, and, and she helps with the farms operation. So, you know, she's, she's doing the whole package. But what I was going to say here is while I think that the modern trad wide movement is a bit of a cargo cult, that doesn't mean that there aren't valuable things that can be taken from earlier traditions that are social technologies that we have lost over time are discarded that now I think there is a broad understanding that the feminist movement still throughout a bunch of stuff that was actually really useful for women's mental health.

I mean, as we can see by the terrible mental health statistics in progressive women with over 50 percent of progressive white women under 30 having , a serious mental health issue.

Simone Collins: Well, I think that's, that's where this is, this becomes a really interesting interplay, is, I think there's this tension, between progressive women and more traditional women [00:08:00] where they're flirting with this idea of tradwifery.

They're flirting with the performative dream of tradwifery, which is why other tradwife influencers like Nara Smith and also Mormon, but not as like hard on the Mormon part are very popular. There's, it's the same kind of fantasy that Martha Stewart in her time popularized, which is taking the concept of homemaking and making it impossibly aspirational, where people used to, when they did Martha Stewart parodies, they would like, you know, joke, just like people joke about Nara Smith now of like, well, first I'm going to grind the wheat to make my bread, which I will then, you know, everything's made like impossibly from like scratch which is something that Hannah Nielman and I think it's this, this, this fantasy it's drawing in progressive women who know that things aren't working, but those progressive women at the same time feel a lot of tension around this concept of having a partner who might speak for both of you, which shows up in this article again and again.

The journalist brings up how David. Keeps, [00:09:00] hold on, hold on, hold

Malcolm Collins: on. Before we go to this I wanted to briefly bring up an anecdote from your life. So Simone, you know, she tries to do, you know, when we have time, because we're both not opening together and do the podcast, we don't have time for all of the traditional trad wifey stuff, but you know, she likes to try to make her own bread at home and stuff like that with the kids is a fun activity on weekends.

And you had somebody come to you and they go, well, did you mill the wheat? Like, how did, how did this go?

Simone Collins: They, yeah, they commented on an Instagram post I made where I had a picture of the kids making bread or something like that. And she was like, well, you should really consider, you know, milling your own wheat because the nutritional value is lost and in three days, I've been just thinking to myself, like, I just, I don't know where I'm going to get like the, where does one get wheat?

I, I think I even asked her this because I'm just, yeah, like, do I pick the wheat? Like where is it? And how, like, is there like a KitchenAid website? Mixer add on that like I do have like a kitchen and mixer meat grinder Like we could make our own hamburger meat if we wanted to but I don't know how I would mill my own [00:10:00] wheat

Malcolm Collins: Before we go further what I really want to do is go into the specific controversies that were created by this piece And try to dissect what was really happening in these moments even from the writing of the piece because I think Similar to the pieces that covered us, it was clear if you are reading them with a critical mind that the journalist never specifically outright lies, they just cover things in a way that will lead you to misinterpret what's happening.

Simone Collins: Well, and she, she, she highlights and observes things in a way that, that has her interpreting them. Even though they're like very subtle things like she at one point highlights how Hannah repeats something that her husband, Daniel says, and she highlights that and she doesn't add any commentary.

It's very like show. Don't tell it's it's well written. But that's, these are all things that she selectively chooses to present in a way that's like, look at that. You know what I think that means instead of just actually the really funny thing is the, the YouTubers that we talked about in another [00:11:00] podcast Jordan and McKay were talking about this and they were talking about that exact sentence and they're like, oh, you see, and a lot of Mormon mothers do that and.

The, the wife actually repeated something that the husband said, like, he said something like, yeah, a lot of Mormons do that. And she said, yeah, a lot of Mormons do that completely unironically. Like there was no wink to it. It's just something humans do. But because this was highlighted as such in the article that it was presented as this thing of like, oh, she's this brainwashed wife who, you know, is being completely controlled by her husband when.

I don't think that's the case. Go

Malcolm Collins: over the arguments they use for her being controlled by her husband.

Simone Collins: Yeah. So in, as this journalist visits, she becomes increasingly frustrated as she's going throughout the day. And in, in many cases, it's Daniel answering questions that she is asking while making eye contact or like looking directly at Hannah.

It's Daniel who, while Hannah is making lunch for the kids is driving through the city. This journalist around the property to show, to [00:12:00] show her irrigation ditch as much to her great frustration. It's often the kids who are answering for them. So, she gets really frustrated by that. And she also notes multiple times in the article how he appears to have gotten his way with things with the way that they chose.

Malcolm Collins: Before we go into that, I, I can also understand the, the journalist's perspective here, which is to say she went out to talk to the trad wife, the female influencer, of course. Yes. Right. And then her husband cuts in and is one answering questions directly being asked of the influencer and two drives the journalist all around the property.

Simone Collins: So she becomes yes, so she becomes increasingly frustrated because she just want to talk with this male influencer and the way that she interprets it is this is a controlling husband.

This is actually a serious trad wife situation where women are being disempowered. And when I, as I'm reading this, I'm thinking about what it's like when we have journalists visit us as people who are also like part of their, let's [00:13:00] explore the lives of conservatives journey as journalists and what they must be thinking.

And often what happens is Malcolm is answering a lot of the questions and I disappear for a while to take care of our infant while Malcolm, you know, takes a journalist out for lunch. That's like a common format that we use when they're visiting. Why is that the case? Because I want to get some fricking work done.

And also because I don't really like talking with, with journalists or being around people at all. I want to be alone for a little bit of the day. And often journalists are visiting all day. So always, inevitably the night before a journalist comes to visit, I tell Malcolm, Oh my gosh, I'm so stressed out.

I don't want to be around this person all day. I just need to get work done. I have this, this, and this to do. And Malcolm's like, don't worry. I will run interference. I I will give you the time that you need to get your stuff done. And we'll still make sure that you have plenty of time to talk with them.

But I know you don't really want to do this. I'm happy to step in. And so probably what's happening is a lot of these journalists are thinking, Oh, you know, how, you know, how dare he, you know, hide her away or something. And this may happen with Hannah. I could totally see Hannah being an introvert. I could totally see Hannah [00:14:00] also being like.

I just want to feed my kids lunch without a journalist breathing down my neck or criticizing me for the way that I'm feeding my kids, you know, or, or seeing the way that I feed my kids and then writing about that. Like, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of criticism that could come from that. And I

Malcolm Collins: was, I was going to talk about how.

If you look at the actual incidents that she uses to try to make it look like Hannah is being controlled they are things like, you know, the husband saying, well, she does, I guess we're trad, she's a trad wife, given this new term that's come up and her saying, I'm not a trad wife as indicating that the husband wants her to be more traditional than she is.

But

Simone Collins: it

Malcolm Collins: really could just be the husband is just like, I guess she's a trad wife. Like he's a busy guy running a thing. And she's like, Yeah, but you know, I don't really fully identify with it. Very similar to us where it's like, I guess to you, she is a trad wife, but she doesn't like aspire to [00:15:00] be a trad wife.

And then you have other instances in which she's talking about how, like, and she writes in the piece how they both talk about how they gave up something. To start this that he gave up a career in finance and she gave up a career as a ballerina and she keeps trying to frame it as like, look at everything she lost with this career as a ballerina.

And I find this like uniquely insane. This is like, so for people who don't know the lifestyle of a ballerina, this is like, you know, a little boy when he's young, he wants to be a soldier and fight on the front lines, but oh no, he married a billionaire heiress. And now has to live in a farm. He doesn't get to fight on the front lines of war.

 Like, people [00:16:00] aspiration, like, it's not even like a long term career, you were telling me. Well, it

Simone Collins: can't be. I mean, yeah, you basically have to be young to be a ballet dancer. primarily because after a while you accumulate so many injuries that you can no longer dance. And also it is one of the most kind of similar to cheerleading, you know, you think it's all fluffy and pretty and it turns out to be like the most dangerous sport, like probably worse than football for head injuries and probably not as worse.

The stats, I don't know, we have to look at the stats for cheerleading versus football, but they're both extremely dangerous.

So I looked this up in post in belly injuries are around comparable to football injuries.

Malcolm Collins: I'm pretty sure being a ballerina is harder on your body than being an MMA as a man.

Again, I looked this up in post and well, the rate of injuries per hour, fighting slash dancing is higher in MMA. You do more hours dancing in a average ballerina career. So when you calculate from that, the rate of injury is higher in ballet than MMA. For the average amount of [00:17:00] hours you are going to do have one of them per day.

Simone Collins: It's, it's, it's terrible. I mean, so, something that always stuck with me. me was Michelle Yeoh who is a very famous actress now who first, I think, hit American mindshare with her role in, in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a ballet dancer in her youth until she sustained a serious spinal injury.

So then when she go to like acting in martial arts films, cause doing all that stunt work was way lighter on her body. Yeah, and she said that literally having the s**t kicked out of you is easier than being a ballet dancer. So, yeah, that's, it's punishing, and it's a lot like modeling too, where like a lot of the, the, the cachet that you can bring to the table, you know, is your youth.

And that's only going to last for so long. So her days were numbered from the very beginning. And the fact that she instead, you know, has been able to have an insanely influential career as an influencer, in addition to having a pretty picturesque life. You know, on this, on this gorgeous ranch. I want to

Malcolm Collins: elevate [00:18:00] this, this as well.

Why does a little girl want to be a ballerina? In the same way, like, why does a little boy want to be a soldier, right? Like, it's because they see it as, as, as beautiful and elegant and aspirational, and everyone looks up to them. And yeah,

Simone Collins: like, how many ballerinas can you name? How many ballerinas do little girls look at now and think, I want to be like her?

No, their own freaking instincts. Instagram. She's living the dream.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and I think how non committed to this ballerina lifestyle actually slips across in the piece. So she mentions in one part that she was going to, they had this barn set aside to be her ballet studio.

But then she's like, yeah, but then it got converted into a, the place where we educate our kids and and partially

Simone Collins: a gym

Malcolm Collins: and the, the journalist was sitting there like, Oh.

You know, this is a monument to like the horror of her life, that the one little part of a thing that she could have had to herself Yeah, the one

Simone Collins: barn that was supposed to be dedicated to becoming her ballet studio host, become a [00:19:00] school for their children, and now a gym for Daniel, which by the way, they, they share. The gym has tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment in it. If they wanted to put in mirrors and a bar for ballet exercises, they would have done so like it, this is clearly just a lot of prior.

Malcolm Collins: They have hundreds of acres of property and, and they have to have at least a billion dollars.

And I'll talk about why I believe they have at least a billion dollars in a second. He actually was committed. To building herself a ballet studio, like this was more than a passing fancy when she's just like, eh, I guess I don't have time between teaching the kids and doing the other stuff. She, it would be trivial for her to do this.

, she has intentionally decided to not build this ballet studio.

Simone Collins: Yeah, ballet studios, of all the types of studios you might design, are extremely low maintenance. All you need is a bar and some mirrors, like, and a good floor. That's it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so I just, I think what it is, is she just doesn't care that much, [00:20:00] especially given the public attention that she is already getting.

Now I want to talk a bit about them dating and their background. So I actually have a personal connection to this. And you may not know this. Did you know that we pitched to her, to the guy's father? When we were raising money for our search fund, he was a guy in Salt Lake

Simone Collins: city. No, I'm looking up.

Okay. I'm checking our CRM. I need to see if this is actually true.

Malcolm Collins: So, so the, her, his dad was one of the founders of jet blue. And not only that, he was one of my teachers at Stanford business school. And so he then, and, and what this guy did, so I can go into a bit of the career trajectory, because a lot of people don't understand why he might've been working in Brazil, because this is what they did early in their relationship.

They went to work in Brazil to run a company that his dad had founded, or I suspect actually purchased, and the news is just misreporting it is his core business now. So first he funded JetBlue, and now he invests in search funds, which is the industry that you and I were in. And so what his son was doing was acting as a search fund operator.

[00:21:00] Now this to me signals something quite different than it would to a general population. I'm actually like, if I have one complaint about the ballerina farms couple, it's when the son, when she was like, well, I gave up my dreams of being a ballerina. And he's like, well, you know, and I had to give up my job too.

And I was like, You didn't really though. You could have kept him in your career.

Simone Collins: After they got engaged, he said he wanted to be a pig farmer. So this actually was

Malcolm Collins: his dream. Yeah. He, this is him using his billions of dollars to start the type of company that somebody else couldn't start. He should like, I just, as somebody who comes from like a similar background to him and didn't end up using my family's money to cheese, you know, my early life or my existing career.

I Like he should be doing more in the world than just this one job. Yes, he has a big footprint, but like really he could be doing a lot more than he, he is right now to try to fix the world, whether it's politics or, you know, it's not just the podcast that we run. We also operate a search fund right now.

We also operate [00:22:00] a daily podcast. We also have Simone running for office right now. We're also have written five bestselling books. Like

Don't you get a job?

Get a goddamn job, Al. You got a negative attitude. That's what's stopping you. You gotta get your act together.

Simone Collins: I'm going to push back on that. Can I do it now or should I do it later?

Malcolm Collins: Okay.

Simone Collins: So, one of the theories that's going on in the Reddit snark dedicated to ballerina farms, because of course there has to be snark about this is that the Mormon church has assigned to Hannah and And Daniel their like calling of being influencers for the Mormon church for the LDS church.

Oh, that would

Malcolm Collins: make sense.

Simone Collins: And they have a huge plot. They have 9 million followers. This is a huge number of people. The vast, vast, vast majority here, not even remotely. I mean, the first time I heard about them was from one of our gay friends who lives in California and has nothing to do with any of this.

Right. You know, like totally not Mormon. [00:23:00] And the, the theory. That actually was first posted in the, in the subreddit from an ex LDS church PR person is that the church has assigned this as their calling. And the church actually does actively work with a bunch of Mormon influencers, actually like coordinating on like, I would like you to send this message.

I would like you to do this. And it would make, it would be dumb if the church didn't do this with people. Yeah, I

Malcolm Collins: don't see this as a theory. This is confirmed for me. It would be insane for the church not to do this. It is weird that he isn't still doing something in the search fund industry. Because that was, it seemed to be where he was working.

And so the question is, or as an operator for a private equity firm, like he can do that stuff remotely. So like, why isn't he doing that stuff? He's in

Simone Collins: a position. Yeah, this is, this is something that very few other people can do very high barriers to entry getting this kind of following is very difficult and they put in their posts and their content.

They talk a lot about the Mormon religion. They talk about the church. They talk about you know, that [00:24:00] he talks about how like the barn they had was inspired by the architecture of the barns of original Mormon settlers. Like, this is definitely something that's worked into. their work in a way that also implies that this is just that they happen to be Mormon.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So we need to talk about the dating and also the Mormon ness of their early relationship because it horrified the journalist, but it's actually very normal for Mormons. Yeah. So, the first part is the dating, right? Can you talk about the dating story?

Simone Collins: Yeah. So, and they, they, in the article, the journalist covers how Daniel had met Hannah, they, they met at a basketball game and he asked to go on a date with her, but she was kind of busy with school.

She was at Juilliard in New York at the time he was 23, she was 21. So for six months he wouldn't go on she wouldn't go on a date with him. Finally, he learns that she's going to take a five hour flight from home in Utah, back to New York for school. And he decides to get on the same day.

JetBlueFlight pulls some strings with this family to make sure that he is in the seat right next to her for those five hours, and that was their first date.

There's, [00:25:00] there's

Malcolm Collins: some things I want to note with this. He admitted to it immediately on this date that he had done this. He's like, I pulled some strings.

She didn't know. So, here's also an interesting thing in their courtship. When he was trying to date her and she wasn't saying yes to him, that six months period, She didn't know he was the son of a billionaire. She didn't know about his JetBlue connections. She didn't know how fabulously wealthy this guy was.

And I suspect the reason why things changed so quickly after that was she found out, Oh shi Um, not only that, He's a handsome looking normal. His family, like I know his dad's reputation on campus and everything like that, he is seen as like a wholesome, upstanding, very,

Simone Collins: very respected, very good, very

Malcolm Collins: respected.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: And she also in a separate social media post unmoored from this article made a long time ago, talked about how at the airport, I think in Salt Lake City, she happened upon some family who was like, Oh, you do not want to let [00:26:00] this guy slip away. I think maybe that was the point at which she was informed that he like, do you, you know who he is,

Malcolm Collins: this guy is in addition to this, you've got to think about this act he did for her.

So, so often, you know, when you have these billionaire non billionaire relationships, you get this idea that the non billionaire was like chasing them to try to like take their money or something like that, where there's always this, this fear in the background. One of the most romantic things anyone can do for you is a huge, like, act like this.

Like, like, all these women are pretending like, oh, how gross, that he basically went on a non consensual date with her, right? But you sit next to people That doesn't count as a first date. She could have chosen not to talk to him if she wanted to on the airplane. It could have just been an awkward flight.

No I, I really think any, any of these reporters or any of these people online who are acting horrified about this, it's like, [00:27:00] So you really are mortified that an attractive, wholesome, well mannered billionaire's son who is well respected in their community, does this huge act to try to be close to you and show you, then and forever, that he desperately wanted you, you specifically, and I actually think that you know how we say, like, when you are doing stuff with media relations, sometimes you need to lean in the opposite direction and create a scandal that makes the more natural scandal impossible?

The natural scandal of their relationship. is she was a gold digger. But they have, through this narrative, made that natural scandal impossible. And so I actually think that this narrative was intentionally crafted in order to make the other scandal impossible. You

Simone Collins: think this is a 4D chess situation?

Malcolm Collins: There was something that happened in the piece that made me think that this was definitely a 4D chess situation.

Simone Collins: Oh, tell me [00:28:00] more.

Malcolm Collins: So, this is when she was sitting with the woman and the woman was like, well, so you gave birth without pain medication, right? Which you tried to do the first time you went into like women choose to do this on their own.

Totally. I, did I pressure you to try that the first time you wanted to have kids? You were devastated as I remember. I was devastated.

Simone Collins: You did not pressure me. Yeah, she was, I,

Malcolm Collins: I had to make the final call to be like, you need to get an epidural and you need to get a c-section because the baby's life is at risk.

And then after that, there just wasn't really a reason not to do it because, well then the second pregnancy was complicated, so we had to get a C-section, and after that to it would be not to do a c-section. So, with us, we didn't really have a choice, but you wanted to tank it because like, and you're not even like a Christian, whatever, you're just like, well, I fully, I don't know what the effects are of it.

Why did you wanna do it without payment?

Simone Collins: So I was concerned about the, you know, what we'd read about, you know, how much the epidural can accumulate in the baby, especially if [00:29:00] you're doing a vaginal birth and not just a quick C section. So that's for a long period of time, potentially, and epidurals can slow down.

birth, making it take longer. Plus, I was afraid of actually just getting a needle in my spine. You know, I'd never done it before and it seemed scary at the time. It's not a big deal, by the way.

Malcolm Collins: But then there was also the instance of her so So

Simone Collins: she did unmedicated births and then she talked about this one time where she was where she did get an epidural and it was kind of great, she said.

Malcolm Collins: And she apparently whispered this to the reporter while the husband was in another room on the call. Now either the reporter is lying or she was baiting the reporter with this.

Simone Collins: You really think she was baiting the reporter with this?

Malcolm Collins: I do think she was baiting the reporter with this. I think that they actually wanted to create this narrative that's being created right now.

It's the type of thing you and I have done with journalists. Like once you get good at journalism when I say journalism, I don't mean being a journalist, but like catching and writing press. Manipulating

Simone Collins: the media. Well, and I mean, already they've shown [00:30:00] themselves to be extremely good at at least at this point in their careers.

Now there are slip ups that they've made on social media before and even possibly We'll talk

Malcolm Collins: about one

Simone Collins: slip up that wasn't actually a big deal. They're known among their critics for being incredibly press savvy and incredibly controlled with their image. They have engaged with the media a lot. So this is possible and, and we, they may have learned what we've learned, which is that Courting controversy is how you get things to spread a lot.

There's also another reason why they might want to have courted controversy and been framed as like creepy conservatives, because to a normal conservative audience, every criticism in this article is completely like. issue. Like, what are you talking about? Nothing here is weird. They're being completely normal.

And here's what just happened. They opened a dairy and they're going to be selling raw milk to Utah. How else are you going to reach and resonate with the conservative Utah audience aside from being attacked by a bunch of progressive nuts online?

Malcolm Collins: Well, and, and, and people aren't familiar with like what we're talking about here.

We did a [00:31:00] video on it called the art of media baiting. This is perfectly played, perfectly played to go along with a brand launch. The one big mistake I think they made, because I just think that maybe they thought this was normal, is she mentioned that she occasionally gets so sick, she can't leave her bed for a week.

So exhausted. Yeah. Well, that's not normal. That's not normal. That sounds like a medical issue. And I would guess that either she has some undiagnosed disease or maybe you shouldn't be drinking raw milk. People have also noted sores around their mouths that look kind of like herpes sores, which can be caused potentially by raw milk as well.

Simone Collins: And they're really big on, well, now they have to kind of dig into it because they're going to be trying to sell it. So

Malcolm Collins: yeah, I should put some skit here about like disgusting raw foods that people drink because it's that short by that.

Simone Collins: There's this, that short that I shared with you that was like

okay. Well, we'll, we'll do that one.

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Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But yeah, we are not about that type of stuff. I don't eat disgusting stuff just because it's like, like we do natural eggs and stuff like that, but that's because

Simone Collins: I don't think raw milk is inherently disgusting. I just think that it, there's a, there's a bacterial [00:33:00] risk.

You know, it's just one of those things where like, we love, we love our eggs from our coop, but we also do not, we, we do not have them raw because the risk of salmonella is high. Like we, it's just one of those things, you know, we pasteurize and we cook for a reason.

Malcolm Collins: But I, I, well, and if Simone, if you ever told me I'm so exhausted, I can't work for a week, I'd be like, I'd have serious issues with that.

Oh,

Simone Collins: even when I was on death's door with Pneumonia. I still did podcast recordings from my death bed.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and this is another thing like with them that I love, right? Like, yeah, you were really, really sick then is you typically go back to work the day after you give birth. And you even, you know, we're doing like sales calls through contractions with, with some of her bursts and stuff like that.

So she, Simone's an absolute monster with that stuff. And so Isabella in a farms lady, you know, she one of the quote unquote controversies is she went to a pageant, a beauty pageant, and got through the first round immediately after having one of

Simone Collins: your pregnancy. Yeah, good for her. And,

Malcolm Collins: That, what was it, two days or two weeks?

Two weeks. That's not even that bad. Yeah, I mean,

Simone Collins: that's, two weeks after my [00:34:00] most recent delivery of, of Indy, I was at the primary at the polls. Yeah. And

Malcolm Collins: the French news crew

Simone Collins: was there filming us.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So like, you do the main thing, like, once you make fertility a yearly thing, it's not really a big deal.

Yeah. And this

Simone Collins: was her eighth kid, you know, and it was a home birth. So she probably had a lot less swelling cause she wasn't on an IV, which is big. So it's rough, but I mean, it's still super

Malcolm Collins: doable. And I think it's important to normalize this. We shouldn't be making pregnancy out to be this big, horrendous thing.

I think that's one of the reasons why people have so much trepidation about going into pregnancy, because basically society lies to them about how hard it is. And like, nobody has like a vested interest in being like, well, I mean, you know, people used to do this every year. It used to be part of the natural yearly cycle of a woman's life.

Like, what are you guys on? You know, That's what makes

Simone Collins: the controversy so interesting around this, is that it shows, it lays bare the tension in society. Between this [00:35:00] aspiration and realization of you can do it. You can be in a beauty pageant two weeks after delivering. You can look young and beautiful and still be a mother of eight kids.

You know, this is possible parenting and, and pregnancy don't have to be unsustainable, but then there's also this desire among those who feel like they can't, or don't really want to push through that cognitive dissonance or even try. To say, no, it's not possible. She has had help or she isn't okay. And there's, you know, I think that's part of what the journalist was trying to do was to demonstrate, no, she's not.

Okay. No, she's secretly crying for help.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, she threw acts like that is basically hitting the journalist on the head with a bong stick in being like, you know, in society. And it hurts. It hurts them when they realize that these lies that they've brought into are just that. They are lies. And they are lies that have, have cumulatively built up in society because, you know, no woman ever historically had a reason to be like, well, it's really not that big a deal, you know?

Because you know, you, you [00:36:00] get all this sympathy, you get all this. So why not lean into it? And if you go more progressive, then you get all these insane lies like, oh, well, like you can't be pregnant without getting fat afterwards. Like it just naturally happens. And it's like, no, it doesn't just naturally happen.

It happens because you created that standard for yourself and you realize now that, well, you don't have to worry about your husband leaving you. So you don't need to hold yourself to any sacrificial standards anymore. Because you don't respect your relationship in the way people like her respect her relationship and her husband.

And I'd also note here that Here you have the, the, the issue of them freaking out about how quickly they got married, how quickly they started dating and everything. Oh, and

Simone Collins: that's just a Mormon thing. You know, that's, that's not, yeah, that's not a weird thing. Yeah, that also gets framed in the articles.

Like those

Malcolm Collins: kind of But I don't even think it's a Mormon thing. Like you and I decided to get married within a few months of dating, at least.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but we waited for your brother and sister because we're nice.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but that wasn't like, we would have gotten married earlier, but we specifically, so people who don't know this, we waited about a year to get [00:37:00] married.

I think more than

Simone Collins: that, we were, we were engaged. In 2013 and then we didn't get married until 2015 because we wait. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So, and for people who don't know is my brother wife had told him because they had been dating since their first day of college. That she would be upset if I got married before them because, you know, I would have met you years after they met.

I would have started dating you years after they started dating, but she was unable to get married while they were at Stanford business school together because She was on a scholarship. And so if they got married and they combined their finances, she would no longer qualify for the scholarship anymore.

And so as an act of sort of solidarity with them, I decided to wait until one day they had gotten married for us to get married. So we got married the day after them. But yeah, it was a day in

Simone Collins: between, but yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, there was a day in between. So two days after them, we had a lot of respect. Yeah.

Good 48 hours. I wasn't going to wait any longer than that. [00:38:00] But I, I we could have gotten married much earlier. I actually think that this is just like, these people don't know what it feels like to really care about somebody and want to live life together. Or, or

Simone Collins: to even date to marry. And I think that's also very different is, is people don't realize that there, there is this life you can choose to live in which you.

You date partners because you were trying to find a spouse and trying to start a family. And once, you know, you found the right person, it's a bad idea to wait because fertility only gets worse. You know, you only lose your optionality as time goes on.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and, and this is another thing that she did, which I have immense respect for.

So when the husband was thinking about marrying for her, she made one condition for him. Which is we have to work together

Simone Collins: because her parents did that.

Malcolm Collins: She saw her parents do it similar to what Simone and I push. You know, we run our companies together. We do the podcast together. We basically have a similar condition and I think it works amazingly [00:39:00] well.

I think it's much more sustainable than other forms of trad wifery. And I think that. She really embodies this. And this is another thing I respect about her, is her and her husband, while they do live this sort of idealized lifestyle due to their wealth, they are not doing things in terms of how they are raising their family that leans into the wealth overly.

By that, what I mean is they still have the job running the farm, which seems like it takes a lot of work. Same with the posting, that takes a lot of work. In addition to that, she doesn't hire nannies except for once a week. That needs kids. It was eight kids. Yeah. And no school, it's homeschooling. Right.

So like,

Simone Collins: no, there is a, a fellow Mormon who comes in a couple of days a week to do some homeschooling for them. So there's,

Malcolm Collins: Oh, there's that. Even so it's all very financially sustainable for like a normal Mormon family. Um, Working together with your husband and hiring a tutor for a couple of days a week.

Tutors don't cost that much because well, [00:40:00] and also it's

Simone Collins: like, it's, it's, it's Mormon. It's Mormon tutors. So like often that, like they're. You know, other people commenting on this have pointed out that, you know, when they babysat for fellow Mormons as a teen, they'd get paid like, you know, 20 bucks for like five hours, you know, it's like within Mormon community service provision is often at a high discount.

Elements of their lives are very sustainable. I would argue that they're often criticized for living a sort of petite Trinon lifestyle. This is in reference to the way that Marie Antoinette made her little farmhouse and lived her little life pretending to be a peasant farmer. And they are totally doing that.

But I would also argue that they are totally not hiding the fact that they're living a, they're cosplaying as homesteaders. I think Hannah even uses wording around that, like, you know, like pretending to be a homesteader or like, you know, trying to be a homesteader and they're not hiding the fact, like she talks about the fact that they insulated the outside of their house.

She shares pictures of their renovations and she cooks in front of a 10, 000 [00:41:00] Stove the Aga, like this, like the Rolls Royce of of stoves. And, and, you know, she doesn't hide the fact it's, it's very clear that they're wealthy, it's very clear that she, you know, is, is it the highest echelons of social class?

And I think the fact that there isn't that, that that lack of transparency that there's no criticism and keep in mind, okay, just as, and this is a time honor tradition of wealthy people. Cosplaying as poor people, but keep in mind that poor people constantly cosplay as wealthy people, which is why we've had sumptuary laws, which is why food trends have constantly changed.

Just explain what a

Malcolm Collins: sumptuary

Simone Collins: sumptuary law is saying poor people can't wear purple because dammit, we need to have something that they can't copy eventually. And food trends. Constantly fluctuate if you look throughout history between very like weird like gastronomic gross food That's all weird and abstracted to like down home country loaf Because as soon as poor people are able to somewhat copy what what wealthy people are eating [00:42:00] suddenly wealth people like that's disgusting poor food I must eat the opposite.

So there's always this game of cat and mouse You know, we cannot we can no sooner criticize wealthy people for cosplaying as poor people We can criticize the poor people who are buying food Fake Louis Vuitton bags and like wearing like knockoff luxury stuff or even real luxury stuff. Everyone's doing the other thing.

You know what I mean? I'm going to

Malcolm Collins: argue against you here. I don't think they are cosplaying as poor people. I think that these journalists, Oh yeah, no, they are actually cosplaying as wealthy

Simone Collins: people. Wealthy

Malcolm Collins: culture right now. Yeah. The, a key thing was in wealthy culture right now is this aesthetic, this homesteading aesthetic.

I mean, look at us. Like, look, it's a flex. No, it's a flex. It's a hardcore flex to have a farm and chickens and live in the countryside now. Also, cause

Simone Collins: you're not a wage slave. You don't have to go into your office. You're not obligated to go into these meetings like, because you have that much wealth. And everyone's pointed out who's an actual rancher.

They're like these people, you know, every, every like real like dairy farmer or person who has a farm like this, they're [00:43:00] financing it. They can barely make ends meet. These people are buying it in cash. They have all the most expensive high end farm equipment. This is very clearly a luxury endeavor and it's probably not cash positive.

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, I'm sure their channel is cash positive. Sure. The

Simone Collins: content is cash positive, but their farm, I don't know. I

Malcolm Collins: wouldn't be surprised if it's not cash positive, but probably about breaks neutral, but that's not the point of the farm. The point of the farm is the content. And that's very successful.

Well, and the lifestyle and the flex they, they are, well, and again, this is

Simone Collins: a calling. I really think that the key career here. is that they believe from an ideological standpoint that what their work is spreading the word of the Mormon church, showing the wholesomeness and attractiveness of that lifestyle, which is drawing people in, which is why this controversy is here in the first place.

Malcolm Collins: But I, I would, I would note here that as a society, so if people wonder why wealthy people are doing this, like why wealthy culture, as Simone has mentioned, historically, what you have is wealthy people, Go more and more and more out there with their [00:44:00] tastes as poor people try to catch up with them.

And then you get this reset where then wealthy people then go extremely simplistic and back to the countryside. Like the reason why like treat triumph or whatever she's talking about. It was a thing was because that was the height of wealth was to pretend to be a poor shepherd. But with all of the nicest stuff, this is like some new part of wealthy culture.

It's a cycle that we go through and you see historically where, you know, the wealthy people are going to like, Oh, escargot or like crazy stuff. And then they go back to meatloaf. Because now, now all the poor people are eating and you see this in society now, now that like. Brands like Louis Vuitton and, and, and Prada and like a lot of these like fancy brands have moved down market, down market, down market is how, how do you show your wealth when you do the things that poor people can't do, you know, you see all this was like tanning for a long time it was that having, A, a, a tan was considered very lower class because you had to go out on the fields and work.

And so the wealthy people had parasols. And, and they, and even masks, have you seen [00:45:00] the creepy writing masks? Very pale all the time, but then office work started and only the wealthy people could go outside. So then all the wealthy people started and going, these, getting these ridiculous tans, like growing up, we had like a tanning booth in my house and stuff like that.

And then The poor people figured out, Oh, we want to be like the wealthy people and be tanned. So they started to do like spray on tans and tanning booths themselves. And then all the wealthy people were like, Oh, being tan, we can't do that anymore. Now we need to go back to being pale again. And so you had, you have this little cat and mouse game and that's what they're seeing.

They're not pretending to be poor. They're just not up to date with what is considered a chic in wealthy culture right now. And the way that they're acting is very chic. Now, I want to talk about the one really bad incident where I'm like, this was actually a big mess.

Simone Collins: Right. So they posted, and this is definitely something that both of them decided to do.

A little video short. of Hannah receiving a birthday gift from her husband, Daniel, who's shooting this as it's [00:46:00] happening. It, it was a package that he didn't bother to wrap. And she's like, Oh, like, what is it? Could it be tickets to Greece? Like she just says multiple times, like she's starting to rip it open.

There's fabric. She's like, Oh, it's a hat for our trip to Greece. Like she very clearly wants it. A trip to Greece for her birthday. And then she opens it up and it is you know, fresh out of the box from Ukraine. A really cute egg apron. It's a little apron with a lot of little holes for eggs in it.

But people are like, how very dare he? Because after she like, you know, tries to look cheerful, like she's clearly disappointed. She tries to look cheerful. She kind of like does a little jig with it, you know, holding it to her body. And he says you're welcome. And in the sort of like passive aggressive smug way, which just comes across horribly.

And now it's this meme. I was just looking through Hannah's ballerina farms, Instagram account and now on like a bunch of her most recent posts. There are just people who are like, where is her [00:47:00] stage? Where is her trip to Greece? Just like give this woman her trip to Greece. Like, they're just like justice for Hannah.

You know, they're just, they're freaking out that this woman hasn't been given her trip to Greece. And it is weird that like, one, She very clearly kept, it's like, if, if I, for some reason would not let die, that hopefully dead horse of me constantly being like, I wish you could fly business class everywhere, which we can't because it's too expensive.

And you being like, you know, giving me like a vacuum and being like, you're welcome. You know, like that it just, I don't know why they would post something like that. It's not. So I have a theory on this. Okay. What's going on?

Malcolm Collins: All right. So first, something that the audience should know, I've checked, they do not appear to have ever done this trip to Greece, right?

This apron is a trivial gift for them, right? Like it's not an expensive thing. They are almost certainly billionaires. That being the case, a trip to Greece would be a trivial expense for them. So the question is, is why, if she really wants to do this, [00:48:00] why haven't they done the trip to Greece? Because they

Simone Collins: have gone to like Paris with their kids.

This isn't an impossible thing.

Malcolm Collins: My guess is it might actually be part of their calling to try to, I suspect maybe after the trip to Paris or something, the church says you can't do things that aren't financially sustainable for the average Mormon family. So while they can live the very best of lifestyle, it's supposed to be attainable.

And I suspect that that is what is going on here. She's

Simone Collins: not throwing shade at her husband, she's She's throwing shade at the LDS church. She's throwing shade at her handlers. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Because the husband, what, like, he's not like an idiot, right? Like, he knows, you know, if she wanted to have an off stage conversation with him about, Hey, the cryptography is actually really important to me.

They would have that conversation off air.

Simone Collins: Especially because they are media savvy. They're not idiots. That's why this was so confusing to me.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so she [00:49:00] definitely knew how this would come off. He who filmed this definitely knew who this would come off. So who are they talking to in this video?

They are talking to somebody who is not their fan base and not themselves. I bet it's their LDS handlers.

Simone Collins: Oh, that's so interesting.

That is

Malcolm Collins: my bet as to what the trip to Greece situation was really about. So yeah, yeah I, I, yeah, they can't be, they could have been that stupid, right?

Like, no, no, it's like with us in the bop, people are like, oh, he, he lost. Yeah. How could he have, how could he have slipped? Yeah. But you read the piece and it's very clearly like it was intentional. I did not lose control of my anger and I, knew what I was doing in the moment. And you did it

Simone Collins: in public surrounded by people.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I could have, I could have done so many different things if I didn't want that to be in the piece. I wanted that to be in the piece. And actually a lot of people can be like, Oh, this was firmly a negative thing for them. You've got to keep in mind. The [00:50:00] type of people who are going to freak out about something like that are the type of people who are not going to support us anyway, given that it's something the majority of Americans do.

And the research now says it's the right thing to do. And most conservative people do it. So we had to look at how we were signaling to a conservative audience. Keep in mind, we're always constantly signaling to two audiences, the progressives who are interested at potentially getting into the conservatism and doing this transition.

But then also the conservatives who Are so hard line that they are costing the party votes and preventing us from winning elections. And they need to understand, like, a softer approach. Right? And so, a number of those people who previously were like, I don't know if we can really trust them.

I don't know they. After that happened, we're like, okay, I trust them a lot more now. They're, they're actually Even

Simone Collins: Limestone was like, well, there's one thing I can agree with you on. Limestone being a demographer who in the Prenatalist space absolutely hates us and everything we stand for. Yeah, he's like a

Malcolm Collins: socialist Christian.

So I guess he's like the one The one area where he's like, well, at least I'm a social conservative. He has, he has like far, far left. Yeah. But [00:51:00] at

Simone Collins: least he, he agrees that, you know, white corporal punishment is correct, you know, for sustainable parenting. Speaking of which, you know, another really common theme in the ballerina farm snark subreddit is, you know, a child endangerment essentially.

And, you know, it was very common. Top hits is look at what they've done with their children. Now look at their children close to a hotspot. Look at their Children chopping food in their home. Look at their Children getting injured. You know, look at the all these things, you know, Oh, don't they have any idea of how many farm accidents take place every year?

And I think this just comes down to again, anytime someone sees a family with more than two Children and no helicopter parents immediately, They're like, this is child endangerment, call Child Protective Services, which to your point, what's the stat of how many, how many families have had CPS called on them in the United States?

37%.

Malcolm Collins: 37 percent of children in the United States have CPS called on them