In this episode, Simone and Malcolm explore the intriguing phenomenon of the 4:00 AM Club—a group of Democrats convinced that Donald Trump's election caused a split from the 'real' timeline, where Kamala Harris is President. Diving into the social media reach and belief systems of this community, they draw comparisons to the QAnon movement and investigate the role of mysticism, conspiracy thinking, and societal reactions to political realities. From discussions on progressive mysticism to personal anecdotes and r...
In this episode, Simone and Malcolm explore the intriguing phenomenon of the 4:00 AM Club—a group of Democrats convinced that Donald Trump's election caused a split from the 'real' timeline, where Kamala Harris is President. Diving into the social media reach and belief systems of this community, they draw comparisons to the QAnon movement and investigate the role of mysticism, conspiracy thinking, and societal reactions to political realities. From discussions on progressive mysticism to personal anecdotes and reflections, this episode is an in-depth look at how some people are coping with political disillusionment by creating alternative spiritual narratives.
Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today we are gonna be talking about the 4:00 AM Club, which is a group of Democrats that believe that when the election of Trump happened, our timeline split from the real timeline. We are in the, the, the fake or like corrupted timeline. And in this real timeline, Kamala won.
They are trying to merge these two timelines. And you have the impression when I brought this up with you, that this was a small movement. When you look at their tiktoks, they get millions of views. They, they, they, they regularly get millions of views. Well, are they hate views though? No, I hate viewership is very rare in real life.
Like people assume, like our channel gets hate viewership, and yet we get like an average of like 95% up votes. Like actual hate viewership is just not that big, unless you're talking about like a literal, like lull cow, like Chris Chan or something like that. Okay. And even then a lot of people end up liking him after a while.
So I don't know, Simone, I don't, I don't think it's, it's hate views. Okay. Okay. The, and well, it's a big community and as we go into this, the reason why we're gonna explore this is one, it's a bit like you saying, oh, qan on must be a small thing because it sounds weird. Or discordant with social norms. I mean, yet QAN on was not a small thing.
That's a good point.
Simone Collins: Yeah, you're right. Yeah. It used
Malcolm Collins: to be almost people have said it's like progressive QAN on Whoa. But. It, it, it's, it's very interesting to explore because it handles the conspiracy vibe of, oh, Trump didn't really win in a way that is so soaked in progressive mysticism. That it is very like, unique and I think it will be fun to talk about how this.
It's structured differently than Q Anon and why. Yeah. And then it's really interesting to understand like what actually goes on in the minds of those most deeply affected with the urban monoculture. Those who are you know, this deeply cultural imperialistic. They want everyone to think like them, everyone to act like them.
What, what goes on? In, in terms of how their minds broke around this second Trump election. And you mentioned something to me yesterday that I thought was really telling about all this, where you said Trump derangement syndrome, this time seems so much worse than it did the first time. Like, people's breaks from reality are more severe than you have seen Historic.
And I think the reason for this is because after Trump was elected for the first time, they were living in a world of, see now everyone who is saying sees how bad this is, this is never going to happen again. And when it happened again, was a majority vote. It sort of said to them. Wait, what? That world I've been living in for the past four or five years is a construction.
Like it's not real. Like, and, and people didn't think he had done a bad job. Like there's a huge percent of America that likes and, and worse. It's a larger percent now of minorities. It's over 50% of Hispanic males. It was huge gains made within the Muslim community. I think it might have been a majority of Muslims in sub communities, but I can't remember what the stats were there.
He's growing in popularity among young people. Everyone, even the progressives have sort of turned on mainstream news like. It, it's been, I think, sort of reality shattering for people who overinvested in this particular reality framework. Thoughts. Mm-hmm.
Simone Collins: Let me, let me get this straight. I just is basically the 4:00 AM club, a version of Trump derangement syndrome where they just can't allow for a reality in which Trump won so badly that they're just like, I'm just gonna believe.
That Trump didn't win so hard that maybe I'll manifest that timeline.
Malcolm Collins: Sort of, yeah. We'll get into it, but yes. I need to know more. I need to know more. I mean, I can, I can post a video from a 4:00 AM club member who is mad that Fox News made fun of them. And she's explaining why they're not crazy.
Oh. Okay.
Speaker: Last night, Fox News aired clips of my TikTok video about the 4:00 AM Club on the Laura Ingram show.
Some will mock it, but mocking it doesn't invalidate it. It may, in fact confirm its power
the human eye can detect only 0.0035% of the electromagnetic spectrum. Our nervous system is not built to perceive total reality. So when people scoff and say, well, I don't see it, it means nothing. Of course they don't. What I and thousands of other four amers experienced is called timeline bleed. Those of us who are sensitive can sometimes momentarily tune into a parallel possibility.
Simone Collins: Wow. Yeah, so this is very much, is this like a manifesting thing? Like I just Well,
Malcolm Collins: no. What she argues is she goes, well, multiple timelines likely do exist. We can see from quantum physics. I mean that's fair. Sure. Electrons doing funny things that might suggest other and therefore. But what's funny about this is she says something that is otherwise, like, I actually do believe that timelines do split occasionally.
Totally. I think there would be evidence that we have actually does suggest this.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: But the evidence that we have also suggests there is no way you could cross one of these barriers once this has happened. You're basically just in a different part of the equation. Once this has happened and there is no con connecting, contacting, anything like that.
So she says something that is reasonable without understanding why everyone else is like, yes. But you think you get messages from this other timeline and can reunite the two? Well, because I think it's, it's quite
Simone Collins: popular in fiction. The whole historic materials series was on switching between.
Essentially different timelines or, or universes. Right. You know, this is something
Malcolm Collins: I've noticed a lot recently. Like with the Slenderman murders, right? Where the girls were gonna murder their friend to, to call out Slender Man. Yeah. A lot of women, white women, particularly, let's, let me call it like I see it seem to read.
Online narratives and then think that they can summon them into reality or things that they want to exist into reality through ju drastic action. Mm-hmm. And, and I mean, again, if people were like, why are you, why are you calling it white? I saw who the Snape wives were. These were women who thought that they were married to Snape in real life and right.
It's a, we could do a whole episode on that actually. That'd be, I think we might have at one point.
Simone Collins: I think we might have, yeah, I think we did. Maybe we combine snake wives with Etsy spells or something, but I'm pretty sure we did it.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Anyway, look, look us up in Snake Wives and you'll probably find on Google, YouTube has a worst search algorithm.
But anyway the, the, the, snape wives phenomenon. Yeah, so it's, it appears to affect mostly middle-aged white women and that's all I'm seeing freaking out about this with the 4:00 AM Club as well. So we'll get to that as well. Actually, this brings me to an interesting thing, so I'm just gonna go.
A one of our active Discord members is a black woman. And she was noting from, you know, being a black woman and seeing her own family and her own American community. This is an American black woman, not like a African immigrant or something, as far as I know. I think, anyway she mentioned the, the types of mystical beliefs.
That are held by black women are very different from the types of mystical beliefs that are held by white women. Oh, interesting. Specifically noting that astrology was way bigger among black female communities than it is among. And I, I, I mean, I would at least say that astrology has sort of died out as a fad.
When we were kids, it was like really, really big.
Simone Collins: Really. I was just listening to the Red Scare podcast and Dasha and Ana were talking about how like, well. You know, because I'm an earth sign, I just have a lot more trouble dealing with it in this way. Like they just like, it's, how are they Republican influencers?
Can somebody do this to me? I'm just telling you, I, I guess I've, I very much associate astrology with being a white person thing, or at least in every person thing. Now, when you look at like the Google search volume of astrology, vis-a-vis other. Major philosophical. Bens, it just trounces them all because that's the world we live in now.
I, you know, so I don't know. I wouldn't say astrology's like a black person thing. It's, well,
Malcolm Collins: it definitely is an Indian thing. We're get, we did an episode on witchcraft in Africa and we'll do an episode on, on astrology in India if we get enough people interested in it because they use it for like major decisions and everything like that.
And it's, it's actually pretty interesting.
Simone Collins: Yeah, it seems like if you're, if you're gonna be like serious about astrology. You should be into, what is it called? Ayurvedic astrology.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but they're not here. Anyway. Yeah,
Simone Collins: yeah. 'cause they're Dantes, they don't actually, again, this is soft culture. It's, I'm not gonna do the work.
I'm not actually gonna try, I'm just gonna dabble and do whatever feels good and make my own interpretations, whatever.
Malcolm Collins: So we're gonna be reading from the Susie Weiss piece, who we've had on the podcast before. I consider she my friend. I really this is Barry Weiss's little sister who runs the Free Press.
And Susie Weiss is the only writer who I consider somebody just to watch for their writing. She's the only like journalist who I actually think is worth trying to read most of their pieces because it's so interesting. But she did a piece recently on the 4:00 AM Club. And so that's the piece that we're gonna be using to explore this particular movement.
And it's titled She's Great in
Simone Collins: general at covering online Trends and Cultural Trends. So she's got her finger on the pulse. She's on this stuff.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it, it, it is called if Kamala Harris, weather President, it's called the 4:00 AM Club. It isn't about getting up before the sun to go out and run or to get a headstart on work, but rather a confederation of spiritually inclined women who all claim.
To have woken up suddenly around 4:00 AM on November 6th with a sinking feeling that Donald Trump had won the election, checking their phones, their feminine intuitions were confirmed. What's funny is there, these are all people who had this feeling like he was probably gonna win. And then I remember going to sleep that night and we went to sleep before the polls did anything or anything like that.
I was certain he was gonna win. I, I, I said many times leading up to the election, you were, all the signs that I have seen point to Donald Trump winning handedly 100%. And you're being gas lit by the news stations because I couldn't think of anyone other than was it Dick Cheney who had moved from right to left over the last election cycle.
And I mean, anyone, you know, there were a lot of people who were moved from the first Trump election cycle, but the second Trump election cycle, that just didn't make sense. Yeah. And I knew a lot of people who had moved from left to right. So this is where I was like, come on, but okay. So they had an intuition that reality was reality despite what their social circle was telling them.
Except they didn't really believe that he won Stick was me here. Okay. Believe that really we might be living in an alternate reality where Trump is president at 4:00 AM on November 6th, 2024, is when the timelines quote unquote split, and it's only a matter of time before we all realize it. And can go back to the quote unquote correct timeline where Trump failed and Harris took her rightful place as chief executive.
Now here, I wanna note, this is actually pretty sociopathic. So what are we doing murdering the people in the other timeline? Like are, are we, like they exist, they have split from us for a. Quite a long time at this point. Why, why would we merge with, why would that be a good thing to merge with that?
Just so your president, the, your chosen president can, can be in office? It's so weird. But anyway. Quote, I have been steadfast, so rock solid in my belief that she won and it was only a matter of time Before we go back to that timeline, quote said one member at Kelly Daring who posts on TikTok quote, my friends have looked at me like I'm crazy and told me I'm delusional.
In quote, I mean, do say we're in an alternate timeline that we can then merge and. I guess murder everyone in the other timeline, they're just like, oh no, we'll have both. Are we gonna have both sets of memories? Is that, is that what's gonna happen? Then your, you know, they, I would rather be two separate people with two separate sets of memory than merge into one person.
Simone Collins: Honestly, I think they, yeah, maybe they just would rather not exist if, oh,
Malcolm Collins: they and everything they've done since the election. I can see that. Yeah. Okay. Undo. Yeah. And then she found others just like her. Those of us in the 4:00 AM Club viscerally experienced that timeline split. This is the vision.
This is the light that we've been holding. So I
Simone Collins: wonder what this feels like to them. What, what, what, what are their, what lived experiences of having experienced this timeline split, do you think?
Malcolm Collins: I can really understand how they would get this feeling. So they're in a world, remember the progressive?
You can watch many progressive like YouTubers basically having a breakdown as the numbers come in and Trump is winning where everyone tells them, everybody hates Trump. Everyone knows Trump is a bad guy. You're on the good guy side. Trump's gonna get trounced. We've got a black woman running for president.
This is gonna be so easy. Kail is the greatest and best candidate ever. She hasn't made any mistakes on the campaign trail. You know, this one's in the bag. And so they have all of the things around them, right? You know, this, this is the world they live in. And then reality comes and it knocks on the door and it says, Hey.
What your world has been telling you is incorrect. You've been being gaslit by these people for the past four years. And the reality is that it turns out that actually more minority voters than ever, like the Republican party and increasingly minorities like Trump and increasingly young people like Trump and increasingly poor people like Trump and increasingly.
And it, it, you know, Hispanics who you say Trump is attacking. Why, why, why is it they like Trump? And so they, they get all of this evidence and they can choose to be like, oh, my entire world scape of information is wrong. Okay. Which is what somebody with intellectual integrity would do. And I think that's actually what drove a lot of people to the Republican party.
It's one of the things that began to break me for the Republican party is when I realized it was the first sort of Clinton thing, right? Where I realized that all of the media leading up to the election had been lying about her poll numbers. Oh, Hillary Clinton. Okay. Yes. And they tried to like. Can like 5 38 to win, tried to be like canceled and blacklist one of the most mainstream pollsters for saying that Trump actually had a decent chance of winning.
Not even that he probabilistically would win. He said Clinton still had the higher probability, but even just saying that he had a chance, they considered this. And then I was like, wait a second. I am being gaslit here. Right? Like. All of you said this was in the bag and it wasn't remotely in the bag. I need to start looking for alternate sources information and you even see mainstream, like, you know, when a OC was like, Hey, where are you guys getting your information from? Because you know, clearly where I'm getting it from is not where you guys are getting it from. Right? And so, you, you, you're in this information bubble, then information comes that shatters that. And I think for a lot of people, especially people with extremely mystical thought patterns, and we always talk about why mystical thought patterns are so dangerous, it is easier to believe that it is reality that is broken and not their.
Prejudices.
Simone Collins: Hmm. And this is sounds like, do they think, do, do you imagine they feel like they're living in a dream or like,
Malcolm Collins: no. For them everything is sort of dreamlike, you know? Mm-hmm. Because when you engage in mystical thinking, we've always talked about why mystical thinking is so dangerous, and you know, we have our episode, if you wanna go into this more, why we can't let witches on spaceships.
You know, basically arguing that actually the intuition to have a really strong stance against mystical interaction. That is core to traditional Christian teaching is beneficial to humanity. And that you know, within our own family and teachings within techno puritan, and then we go back to it and it's because what mystical thinkings fundamentally do is they draw understandings of truth from personal subjective experiences with in corrupted mental states, like on drugs or spinning or.
Just trying to get yourself to hallucinate by thinking without the bounds of constraint. And then say, ah, these experiences I've had are more true than things that are objective within reality and testable and logical. And then what that means is the definition of truth becomes a popularity contest.
Where truth is defined by the mystic with the most followers or the most authority within a particular community and that the one it, it often causes themm to go crazy because now they have no bounds on how they logically sort of constrain their thoughts or tie their thoughts together. Which appears to be not the way humans are designed to work.
And so people when they do this, go a bit nutter Butters, as you often see, you find people who go full mystic. But in addition to that they, they also sort of stamp out dissenting thought within these communities because truce is defined by the subjective experiences of the corrupted mental states, of the individuals in this community who have the highest level of authority, and this is how cults start and stuff like that.
So it's actually pretty standard for a cult.
Simone Collins: Hmm.
Malcolm Collins: There were hundreds of videos with millions of views on the 4:00 AM Club videos on TikTok and additional chatter on left wing Reddit, and their popularity was only grown since Trump's inauguration.
A lot of them are made by self-proclaimed witches, mystics, mediums, clairvoyance, intuitives, and the like. Many it seems are nurses with autoimmune disorders. Okay. First I need to unpack this because I actually think there is more to that particular point. Please. When you're in, why did they go into this to begin with?
There's a lot of mystics and people who have mystical thoughts that have a high level of following already. So, you know, on TikTok and stuff like that, especially among. This, this urban monoculture brain woman class. And so of course they would have a mystical interpretation of Trump's election, right?
And it, it went against their, their prejudices. They're going to go with their prejudices because they're, what mysticism is fundamentally is thought unconstrained by the boundaries of subjective evidence, right?
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Second is what's happening with nurses with autoimmune disorders. So the autoimmune disorders, I suspect in most cases these are imagined, and what we're really looking at is spoons and people who are looking for methods of self victimization.
And I have known girls like this where it's pretty clear that they just like being ill all the time, and that they don't actually have an autoimmune disorder. And autoimmune disorders are really great if you want to pretend to be ill all the time. And some of them aren't particularly well testable. Right. So
Simone Collins: if you wanna pretend that you're very sick and make it almost impossible for doctors to exactly tell what's going on, then say you have an autoimmune disorder. Yeah. Or believe it.
Malcolm Collins: Genuinely believe it. Genuinely believe it. Yeah. Yeah. And you can go to our Spoony episode or episode down two.
One was with Susie Weiss. But the other thing I wanted to discuss is a nurses thing. What's, what's a nurse? Right. A nurse is if you're going through the education system in the United States, but you're not particularly smart, so you wanna go for, you know, you're not gonna get into the top doctor programs or anything like that.
But you want to do the standard educational pathway. You want a bureaucratic job that is relatively safe, but decently paying nurse is a standard outcome. It is the standard. It's.
Simone Collins: Expensive. I mean, keep in mind, I think a lot of people who understand that there's like high job demand and they don't want to put in the time that you have to put in and the money you have to put in.
Malcolm Collins: Right, but what I'm saying is if, if you're talking about the woman, woman job, like the womany woman, woman job for Karen's no, I mean it's, it's, it's a bureau, an educated, elite bureaucracy that's not for the very, very top performance. Well, I'm, yeah,
Simone Collins: to be fair, not that educated because I've been in the hospital and.
Had like asked nurses questions about things that are slightly outside the very specific domain of like the wing of the hospital in which they're operating and they start talking to me about completely medically unfounded stuff that they read in. You have an example, I
Malcolm Collins: remember you got very mad about this at one point.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Like, like a nurse was like, well, I'd read in this Facebook group this, this, and this, and I'm like.
Didn't you go to some kind of medical school to like become a nurse? It was just very, it was very. Disconcerting. So, yeah, I, I hear you on that.
Malcolm Collins: Anyway, to continue here, basically the 4:00 AM club is Q Anon, but for left wing women on TikTok who believe they are receiving messages from God in the passenger seat of their Toyota Si Sinai, just as Qan on believed the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, the 4:00 AM Club believes it was stolen from Harris in 2024 boast movement.
See it as their job to alert the rest of the country to what's happening right under their noses. According to the 4:00 AM Club doctrine, it's just a simple matter of collapsing the timelines so that we enter the correct one where Harris is president. In other words, we are the divine feminine wins it quote there.
The
Simone Collins: divine feminine
Malcolm Collins: quote, it's more than just waking up in the morning. In quote says one 4:00 AM Clubber. Quote, it's about a great awakening in quote, whereas the most exciting thing Q Anon world is getting, quote, unquote drops from Q, the supposedly high ranking, but anonymous government official who released predictions about the deep state on eight chan.
Four Amers get quote unquote downloads from quote unquote spirit as in Gaia quote. Messages from the spirit and the spiritual purpose of what's happening was ice in quote. I love how they attribute a spiritual purpose to what's they're like. We're getting this, this out of I was watching some of their videos and they were like, we're getting the, the war karma out of the world system right now.
Speaker 2: what I was shown and what I, what was communicated to me through this vision is that this is a very, very uncomfortable time for people who have been refusing to see.
Any argument, any perspective other than their own, particularly when it comes to immigration policy. That's what this glass in this dome signifies. It's never truly been hidden. It's always been there, but now the lid has been pulled off. So not only is it on full display, no excuses, we can all see it. But I was also shown this image almost of a flood.
Emanating from now that this has been lifted off, this flood is coming. Now, what I mean by flood is an avalanche of information to make. People who have refused to look at this, refuse to look at this issue, ignored it, stuck stubbornly to their ideals and their principles. Those people are going to be hit with a flood of.
News articles, information truths that will be impossible for them to ignore. What's happening through this manufactured ice crisis is it is breaking open people's hearts now. Just seven days ago I did a video where I talked about the overall spiritual purpose and what's happening with ice.
Malcolm Collins: In this timeline or something, sometimes four. AMRs refer to multiple spirit guides, which shows them visions of Harris's victory. For example, she wore a pinstriped purple pants suit, or telling them which members of Trump's administration will eventually be persecuted. They by the way, think it's gonna be Pam Bondi, Marco Robio, and Kirsten Noam,
Simone Collins: Marco Rubio.
Malcolm Collins: It's like when Q foresaw mass arrests of Democrats who would be sent to Guantanamo Bay and imprisoned for their crimes. I don't think you're going to find a 4:00 AM club scaling the side of the capitol building anytime soon since they believe they can bring down the federal government from their lineas.
In one video, Gaia ins. Quote, we're toppling of a regime via spiritual awakening quote. And this is another reason why mysticism is so bad, because it allows you to feel like you are doing something productive when you are doing nothing productive at all. When, when you, when your actions and thoughts are not bounded by empirical evidence, you can believe that actions that are actually quite lazy and self-indulgent are making a positive difference in the world.
Which in addition to being a grade crazy is incredibly convenient While they claim to be horrified by the political situation and feeling energy shifts that they have never felt before. The 4:00 AM club's, members want to feel purposeful without having to go outside. I think Susie's exactly right about this.
They want permission to believe that their feelings are proof of a deeper truth, and they just, by believing them, they are going to save the world. Take for instance, Gaia in her pajamas, in her bed with her dog, or sitting in her car talking about the recent download she's gotten from Spirit and telling her followers that together they're quote unquote, changing the course of history.
4AMer: What we're doing is changing the course of history. Not just because we're gonna change what happens going forward, but because we are changing what has already happened. That's what Karma is. As we're looping through old cycles to say, we're not gonna do that anymore. We will not accept this ever again.
We are not what he says we are. We are not gonna do what he wants us to do. We are going to stand together. We're going to say no, and we're going to do it with love. I have been crying all morning, crying all morning with these videos that you're tagging me in. You know, it was a pretty bold statement in March in my psychic preview session to say that we are going to clear the karma of war.
That's a lot, but that's what Spirit said. That's what they showed me, and that's what I've been saying. And now that we're seeing this. It's easy to see now that, yeah, that is exactly what we're doing.
Malcolm Collins: What happens if they don't and what happens if their followers really listen to them? This toxic blend of new age spirituality and conspiratorial thinking might lead you to, to say that you're receiving messages through tarot cards. The president is really dead and that the government has put a body double in his place which are other things that they have claimed.
The truth is Kamala Harris is hanging out with her nieces and sipping champagne at the Harmon Huma a Biden Alexa Soros wedding. But loads of women are having visions of the quote unquote Lotus Queen. Madam President is waiting in the wings for her time to come out in quote each time. Well, you can do
Simone Collins: both.
I mean, Hoba, Aberdeen, marrying Alex Soros and, and Kamala Harris going to the Hamptons wasn't exactly something that would be discordant with this. But yeah, I mean, like, I guess they're, they're assuming she's in some bunker planning and she's just. Chilling in the Hamptons at a fancy social meeting. I
Malcolm Collins: think part of this is and this is a second part of this movement which I plan to go into around the time of the inauguration.
We just never really got timely down to filming it. But it was a really fascinating movement among Democrats leading up to the inauguration that they thought that. Kamala had actually won this was popular on TikTok, was millions of views. And that the only reason they were letting the Republicans think that they had won or stolen the election was that they were trying to get as much evidence of them as they could so that right before the inauguration happened, they would come up and start arresting all the, you know, Trump and everyone else.
And they, and they thought that Kamala was giving people hints of this. Through various speeches she gave where she would say things like, well, there's more to come. Like, and, and even after this didn't happen, many of them doubled down and said, oh, no, no, no, no. They're just letting them get this, this feeling like they have power, like they actually won the election.
Like they're moving into the White House. So, you know, they can get them all in one place and so that they can and this is really popular, so I know you, you look so confused.
Simone Collins: Yeah. I, although, I mean QAN on also had some delusional views and when you are reading some of this, and I think about what QAN on was doing as much as QAN on pretended to be more in reality, and that these drops are coming from a real person, there was also a lot of coping and reasoning that was akin to mysticism and its flexibility.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I think you can catch something really big there, which is sort of key to modern conservatism versus key to modern far left culture. Mm. Is both of these movements, I think, represent elements of the same thing. It was not wanting to believe what had happened, had happened and that were people you know, with.
Power in some way. Like maybe it's mystical power or maybe it's power within the government who are sympathetic to your beliefs. And I actually know the guy in the Trump administration who was sort of like the core guy who was involved with four chan related stuff. Not q but he was the senior official who actually engaged with four chan culture.
And obviously like new right culture. And, and yeah, this stuff wasn't coming from, was in the administration. I mean, he found it entertaining and liked engaging with it as much as we do. But it's been really fascinating to me because Q Anon, while it framed all this stuff without necessarily falsifiability, it framed it very much as here are some breadcrumbs, go research the rest yourself.
And through research you will discover what is true. Mm-hmm. Right. So it, it pushed the agency onto the individual much more. Yeah. And it said, this is all true, this is all real, but it's a conspiracy by people in. Well, positions of power who are against you, right? But you've got people on your side.
And what's more important about Q Anon is Q Anon believed that it had people on its side who were doing things, who were setting things up, right? Like who were taking action. Whereas Ian Club is very different from that. It's, this information comes from a mystical realm. It comes from mystical leaders.
And while they are doing stuff, they are doing stuff in a spiritual sense. So if you watch their videos when they're talking about, okay, everything right now is going along the right path which is what they'll say, you know, when you watch them, because I, I've gone through these videos, they're like, everything's good.
They, everything's gonna work out. This is all exactly according to my predictions. So when you watch these individuals you get this perspective that, the things are being done, but the people who are doing them, you know, they're not storming the capitol, they're not doing it. They're just zoning out basically in front of their computer, in their pajamas.
Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. Also this unwillingness to accept reality for what it is. So just deciding to make up your own reality.
Malcolm Collins: Not, and I think Great. The final big takeaway I have from this. Is one thing we must always remember. 'cause every time I go to see my car mm-hmm. On election day when we were out campaigning, we got somebody get keyed our car and we still have that there.
So every time I see it, I'm just like, ugh, I hope this person's life is so bad now because we beat them, they're lazy b*****d. Who, who act with such malice and prejudice. Which they do, you know. But the, these individuals, are truly cooked, like brain cooked, like they are not happy, their lives are not good.
They are crazy cat ladies. You know? And the deeper you dig within the existential horror that their existence is, and I'm not just talking about like the poor, you know, crash house or anything like that. I'm talking about their influencer class. I'm talking about their wealthy, the elites. Yeah. Because I've seen, like if you talk about their influencer class and you're like, oh, things, things must be going well for them, there's a reason why, and this is actually an interesting thing. If you, if you watch online spaces, conservative influencers typically stay active for, I'd argue about twice as long as progressive influencers, or maybe three times as long as progressive influencers.
Simone Collins: Hmm.
Malcolm Collins: Whereas progressive influencers typically spin out as they get more famous, they start posting less and less.
And it is often because their mental health de declined more and more.
Simone Collins: More. Yeah. Okay. I see what you're talking about. I can think of some examples here.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, everyone can think of examples here. The, the progressives who I used to watch, like I can't, none of them post anymore. Yeah. Whereas I watched back in the day, they're all still pretty active.
And. I think that this is downstream of the mental toxicity of this perspective, especially when it's a perspective that can only justify its colonialist and imperialistic tactics of cultural erasure by framing itself as the victim. When, you know, as soon as you realize, oh, we've been the big bad the entire time, the elites are on our side.
I love it when they're like, oh, Trump was bought by elites because of like Elon. I'm like, bro. Like one, Trump said he was gonna work with Elon. Like when we voted, we knew that like, this isn't a surprise. That's not being bought by the elites. That's signaling your action. Campbell raised three times as much money as Trump.
Right. Like that. Where do you think she got that from? Right. You know. So I think that, that there is tacit. Realization from people who have any sort of connection to subjective reality that they have been on the side of the oppressive factions. Mm-hmm. And the, and they've been on the side of the imperialistic factions.
And the factions that were aligned with the elites was in our existing system. And as that facade cracks, one of the easiest ways to not. You know, take accountability for your past actions, which is something I, you know, have had to do. I've had to say, look, I should have woken up sooner than I did.
Right? I should have been you know, way more on the ball with this and, and even intellectually honest with myself than I was. You know, an example of this is something like the trans stuff, right? For the longest time. I was just like, I, I, I believe there probably is some real sort of a trans phenomenon.
And that what is bad is gender transition of children and that the, the adult trans movement is like completely legitimate and everything like that. And it took a while before I realized no, it's probably a culture bound illness and this isn't the best way to treat it. And, and people can look at me and they can say.
Well, you know, a lot of people in your position, you know, you have a lot of trans friends, you have a lot of friends within these communities. You could get attacked a lot for saying this, and this is a, a belief that changed while we were doing this podcast. And I can be like, yeah, but, you know, for example, Scott Alexander admitted this back in his, you know, member stealing witches post like a year before I did.
And he's definitely more in that environment than I am. He's definitely around way more leftist and trans individuals than I am. So why was he able to come out about it? You know, half a year before I was able to come out about it? And people are always like, oh, why are you so obsessed with this?
And I'm like, children are being systematically mutilated. You know, we, we are, we are. How is this not a problem, right? Like, if, if it has the unli rate that it have, and they target children like mine, children with autism, and my wife had gender dis not gender dysphoria, but dysphoria as a child with, with what's the word?
Anorexia. You know, why should I not expect it? From our kids, right? Like, why, why would this not be something that's ever present within my mind that this could be something that's done to them? And it is something that has been done to when people think. You know, if you don't have a lot of like, friends who are in sort of elitist culture, you might think of this as like being a far off phenomenon.
But it has personally happened to two of our friends' kids, like without their knowledge. Like they go to a psychiatrist and they're given without the parents' knowledge drugs while they're minors. And so, this is like. I, I think a much more close to home thing where I was like, did I participate in that by not you know, as, as a quote unquote influencer, like raising my, my flag on this earlier.
And so I, I need to take responsibility for that. And I think a lot of people do, right? Like we to be like, I was wrong even with the evidence I had at hand.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Agreed. Coming to terms with the reality, even if it's. Kind of uncomfortable is important, and that's why we like the idea of being offended so much because you aren't offended by things if they're not a genuine threat to your worldview.
And if you aren't really plausibly wrong about what you believe, 'cause then there's nothing uncomfortable about it, you just know it's not true. When you are offended by something, it means that there's an inkling in you that suggests you might be wrong about this thing. That, that the thing that someone's asserting is maybe true.
And if so, that's your sign to dig in, even if it's not comfortable. And I'm glad that we have a policy of digging into anything that might offend us, but. Not a whole lot offends me these days.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we sort of dug all of those holes and now there's not really a lot left.
Simone Collins: We still get excited when we find opposing views though, so we still just dig into stuff, even if it doesn't threaten us.
So hopefully we'll still find those unknown unknowns. I love you to death, Simone. I love you too, Malcolm. Fat Chance book publishers go so slowly. So I just don't think, I don't think you expect anything interesting there.
Malcolm Collins: Oh my gosh, I love you so much. I have been, you're like, oh, I'm sorry for being late, and yet I'm addicted to my romance manga. Which Chicago. See here I am paying our, paying our
Simone Collins: bills.
Handling our work.
Malcolm Collins: Sure. Shove it. Shove it. Simone Romance novels. The only reason this happened is because all of the storytelling ais have started to suck, and that's why I'm having to build my own which is really so weird to within my lifetime, see a technology degrade so quickly.
Simone Collins: Oh, right. Like it started out so great.
And then suddenly, like the only
Malcolm Collins: adventuring, like interactive models used to be really high quality, really addictive, really enjoyable and they degraded in quality really quickly. And so we're trying to build alternatives, but this store
Simone Collins: remains like unconfirmed as to why their quality has degraded.
Right? No,
Malcolm Collins: I, I told you why they're quality degraded. It's, it's fairly obvious. The two core models that were really good mm-hmm. Were try spell bound ai and then the other was GPT flow. Try spell bound. Somehow lost access to their model. They must have been outsourcing part of the model and they lost access to whatever was making it good.
And then that's a mystery. Whatever it's making it good is a mystery. No, it's a model that's making it good. They still have access to the token layer. What they lost access to was the literal model that somebody else trained and they were white labeling. That's, that's very clearly what they meant by lost access as to why they lost access.
I'm going to assume it's because people were doing not safer work scenarios on something that had raised VC money, which often causes them to close off. And the reason I just wonder what the good model got bad is because they retrained their model on too much horny stuff and now it can only do horny scenarios.
And it can't do like a good zaki plot or, or anything like that.
Simone Collins: Yeah, that
Malcolm Collins: is, that is why the systems have gotten so bad. And then for the other ones, they got, they, they, they get bad because they get money from VCs and then they will no longer do anything offensive. Which is just not fun to play.
You know, you, you can't have a post apocalypse without slavery. You can't have. A fantasy world without elf racism, you can't have, you know, all of these things that freak outis. Which is why I'm excited to see Elon take grok in the direction that he is having it be not safe for we're capable. 'cause we'll be able to plug that into our system and potentially spice it up quite a bit into something quite interesting favorable.
And what else did I learn that I was gonna be like, oh, you'll find this interesting. I dunno, but I, I really appreciate the work that you've done today, Simone. It's fantastic. Thank you, Malcolm.
Octavian Collins: And you would get away. Go on little one. Oh, there she goes. Just follow little Teddy turn to follow little teddy
Simone Collins: and can hear here. I love for.
Oh, good. Go for it. Andy. Go, go, go, go, go for there.
You did it. Come here now. Um, head
we'll move her toy box. Yeah. I. Yeah, because he can trip on them, right? Oh, well. As much as a crawling person can trip, for sure. He got it. You did it in Indeed. He got the connection. Yeah. You saying hello to Mr. Bear, he really likes it. Yeah. Well, everyone likes Mr. Bear. He's the most popular person in this house, isn't he?
Octavian Collins: Dad makes this up. Yes. Yeah, yeah. He got the He got the connected. Yeah, she made it through out of her baby tunnel. Very exciting little one.
Simone Collins: Yeah, we all like it. Yeah. She loves Mr. Bear. Got got the connection right now. Yeah. Now you get some tickles. You're getting to go.
Octavian Collins: You. Get you got connection. Oh no. Tickle tickles. Oh no. It's the tickle monster you really like. He likes more. Tickle and the tick. Monster. Catch. Yeah.
You really want, oh yeah. Yeah.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe
