#305 | Simone Collins; Raising Geniuses, Modern Dating, and Finding Cultural Identity

Simone Collins [00:00:00] We for our kids, want a school that will prepare them for the world as it is now to prepare them to thrive. Not just professionally, not just financially, but also mentally and spiritually and, and in terms of bodily health and our current school system. Totally failing on that. This is Joseph Ring. I'm a cattle feed lot operator in Northern Illinois, and you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:28] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we have Simone Collins on. Simone is the wife of Malcolm, who was a huge hit on the podcast just a couple of weeks ago. I invited her on because two listeners of the podcast, who I'm very close with, the Compston family, said, Hey, I think you should have Simone on and ask her about her schools. How does it work? How does the curriculum set up? So we set up a podcast, and as soon as Simone started talking, I realized we have so much more to talk about than just this school that she has set up. So we talk about how do you raise geniuses? What is the school system doing that's breaking down? What about culture and what is dating like in the modern age? This is a fun conversation that gets abruptly ended when Simone's five month old baby starts crying and she has to handle it. But no big deal. It was a great conversation. I'm so glad you're here. We're gonna get to the interview in just a moment. But many of you know that we've been doing remote podcasts because we've been expanding the legacy interview studios. That's because people have been inviting their mom and dad to be interviewed by me to record their life stories so they can be passed down to future generations. We had so many of them, in fact, that we had to create our own waiting room and area to have lunch. If you would like your parents to have a full day experience where they join me here in the studio, we sit down with dad, then we sit down with mom, and then we have lunch together, and then we sit down with dad and mom together to talk about all the stories that are accumulated through the experiences that they had, and they wanna make sure get passed down.

Vance Crowe [00:02:05] Then go to Legacy Interviews dot com to find out more There. You can book a full day interview with your parents and me, and we will have an experience for them, and then we can transfer those experiences, not just to a video, but to a leather bound book where we get to record those stories to be passed down to future generations. So for more information, go to Legacy Interviews dot com. All right, without further ado, let's head to the interview with Simone Collins. Simone Collins, welcome to the podcast.

Simone Collins [00:02:37] Thank you. I'm so excited to be speaking with you. I love listening to your conversations with people.

Vance Crowe [00:02:42] Well, you are married to Malcolm Collins who blew the doors off of the podcast we did a couple weeks ago. So I guess to start off, why did you marry Malcolm?

Simone Collins [00:02:53] That's such a good question because I really didn't wanna marry anyone. I wanted to live alone forever. So yeah, he had to have something going on. But I think he has what any in our estimation perfect relationship has, which is an alignment with my values and with my goals in life. And we love working together. And I think when you have that, you, you really have the strong foundation of a relationship. And the kind of relationship we have is one in which each of us is committed to making the other person the best version of them that they could possibly be. And we even committed to that in our, in our marriage vows. We said something around like, oh, I don't, I don't promise to love you, but I do promise to push you to be a better person always. Which is not typically, you know, people are like, oh, he loves me for who I am, but like we're the opposite of that. He loves me for who I have the potential to become, and he helps me become that person, and I do the same for him. And there's something about that kind of relationship that's extra special in my view. And that made for me marriage worth it. 'cause I'm a very introverted, private, wants to be alone and control everything kind of person. And of course, marriage and especially having kids means giving all that up to a great extent.

Vance Crowe [00:04:11] It's a weird thing, right? Like when, when I do these Legacy Interviews where I ask people about their life stories and their wisdom, and when I ask people that are over the age of 60, like, what did you wanna be when you grew up? There were a lot of women that were like, oh, I just wanted to be a mom. Like, oh, I always knew I was going to be a wife. But to hear you say it like it's totally natural for me to hear, oh, I was gonna be alone. What do you think happened along the way that, that either, are you an anomaly or do you think you are a representative of your culture?

Simone Collins [00:04:39] I think I'm representative of my culture, very much so. And I grew up in Silicon Valley in like the heart of high tech urban culture. And I do think that the pervasive thing is not to get married, not to have kids. And I actually remember for me, the first time I met someone who wanted to be a mother, I was, I think 13 or 16 years old. I was a teenager by that point. And I met a young woman who was around my same age who was like, oh, you know, really I, I'm just, I can't wait to be a mother and have kids. And I'm like, oh my God, like what? This is, this is a thing. No one else I knew no one had any interest in having kids or getting married. And actually many of my childhood friends are still single. And they, they focus in on their careers for the most part. And, and not, not many of them have kids. It is not the norm.

Vance Crowe [00:05:35] Yeah. Right. Now, if I interview somebody that's in their forties or fifties and they're doing this kind of retrospective on their life, when I get to the When did you decide that this is what you wanted to do with your career was be a mom? They all have this. Like, well, I, I mean, I, I wanted to have a career, but I decided to do this other thing. And, you know, they love being a mom. They're sitting there thi you know, talking all about how much they love their children and you know how much this has brought meaning to their life. But they're embarrassed because they know culturally that this is not something that their counterparts are willing to say.

Simone Collins [00:06:09] Yeah. And this is a big problem, right? Because becoming a parent, getting married, all of these things are typically dampeners in so many of the, the status oriented things that exist in our society. Getting married makes you worse. Having kids makes you worse. You know, it's harder to travel, which makes you look really fancy. It's harder to, you know, spend all your money on cool clothes and doing whatever you want whenever you want. You have to start compromising on how you schedule your time. Yeah, it's, I I think it's a really big problem. And as you know, we're really worried about demographic collapse. We're worried about broken relationship markets and culturing a culture that doesn't, that doesn't idolize married life or family life is to a great extent to blame here.

Vance Crowe [00:06:57] So aside from being Malcolm Collins' wife, you are a person totally and completely. Who, so who are you and what is it that you spend your time doing?

Simone Collins [00:07:06] That's so funny because Malcolm and I are much less of a, an individual person and more like two faces of the same entity, which is also so the opposite of what culture would encourage these days, you know, it's all about, well, who am I? Like, well, I am a business woman. I am on my own. And typically the, the modern stereotype of a wife of a powerful husband is like this woman who kind of rolls her eyes at him and like pulls him back down to earth and is like, well, he is not all that smart. I'm like, picturing Melinda Gates or something. And I, oh, I hate that, I hate that so much. Everything I do is with Malcolm. So I'm also a CEO of a travel business. We run it together. I'm also a co-author of our books. Let's be honest though, Malcolm comes up with all the good ideas and I edit them, which, I mean, I make them legible. I, I do a lot of work, but I don't come up with the ideas. But like, we do it all completely in concert. And, and even with ideas, like just yesterday I asked him what his theory was on why, why animals have males at in higher proportions, whereas plants don't. And he bounced a theory to me, and then I said it back to him, but misunderstood what he was saying. And he's like, oh, that. But it was a completely new idea. So that's kind of how our entire marriage is, which is life gets thrown at us. He punts something to me, I punt something totally different back to him, and then we get something that neither of us could have put together. And that's how we work together. And that's what we do. We do that with books, we do that with the travel business that we run Travel Max, and we do that with our prenatal list advocacy and with our school, the Collins Institute.

Vance Crowe [00:08:43] When people think about the life that they wanna have, they imagine, I would love to have this with my spouse. But I think in practice it was so little modeled in their world that they don't have it. Like there's this very Simpson esque thing where men are these like big dumb oaths and they're just barely bumbling through the world and without their wives doing what you described rolling their eyes, like how, how would they ever survive? And I didn't see that model. Like in my and my parents' relationship, there were definitely roles that they played. My dad played a very dad role, my mom played a very mom role, but they didn't resent the roles that they played. And I feel like today you're kind of taught, like if you're given one of those roles, this is like being lost in some ancient folly that people wish they could get out of.

Simone Collins [00:09:35] Yeah. Like, you feel embarrassed about it. Or like, I feel that so many women who are, in many cases homemakers feel like they have to performatively have a career. Like, no, I'm really an author. No, I'm really, I have a business. Or like, whatever it is, you know, or I consult people or I'm a life coach, or I sell jewelry. Like whatever it is. And it may not be an actual, you know, if we're saying like, it wouldn't sustain the family, like if, if suddenly like the, the sole bread or another, the primary breadwinner lost their job, but they still feel like they have to say it. 'cause like otherwise it would be, you know, a bad thing. But, you know, we also think Malcolm posited, and I very much agree that the nuclear family, as we know it, where dad goes out to work, moms days home with the kids, is sort of this short-term aberration in the history of humanity. That really what, what the natural state of a family has been is what's known by some as the corporate family, where you have the mother and the father typically working in their home, in the family business, often their kids get involved. Often there's, you know, other people who are living in and around their house helping out with childcare, helping out with whatever it is the family business, or businesses are who may be related, who may not be related. And that is, I think, a much more natural model. And I find it very heartening that we're moving back to that in many ways and with some very modern adaptations. But we're still going back to it.

Simone Collins [00:11:06] And I think it's a lot more sustainable. And that is a world in which to become married to become a parent doesn't mean for one parent giving up a career or giving up prestige or like impact on the broader outside world in, in the current time period. It also doesn't mean putting, you know, all of your eggs in one basket with one partner going out and bringing in all the income. The amount of pressure that puts on families, and especially men who typically get shunted into that role is huge. Like, I don't, I don't want, I don't want that part either. And I feel like, you know, families that work more dynamically in these, these extended groups are much more robust, resilient, and able to take care of each other and also thrive individually.

Vance Crowe [00:11:49] Just the very act of describing a family as the nuclear family feels really natural to an American. But if you talk to an Asian culture, they describe it as, oh, the, the, the Westerners talk about the nuclear family. They have actually gone as far down as they can Yeah.

Simone Collins [00:12:06] To

Vance Crowe [00:12:06] Differentiate themselves from the wider fabric. And you think about that and you're like, I didn't even realize there was a family that was outside of the nuclear family. And in their language to be able to describe something as the nuclear family is like a little bit, I think like us saying a single parent family, right? Yeah. It's,

Simone Collins [00:12:23] It's

Vance Crowe [00:12:23] Stripped out of all of the connective tissue that makes a family able to thrive and, and, you know, really exist in a, in a world that is not designed to keep you alive.

Simone Collins [00:12:35] Absolutely. Yeah. It's wild. Well, and people now are talking a lot about, just even further the atomization of society things, you know, becoming now there isn't even a nuclear family. It's just, it's just you and your computer screen or your phone by yourself. That's, you're on your own now.

Vance Crowe [00:12:51] So you guys have started a school, and one of the reasons I wanted to talk with you is a couple that I really trust and love the Compton living out in the western part of the country said, Hey, why don't you have Simone on, we've started reading their books and talk to her about the curriculum they've set up. Why are they doing a school and, you know, how are they going to even know that it's successful because they're doing something so different?

Simone Collins [00:13:14] Those are such good questions. I, I mean, we first and foremost, very selfishly decided to start a school because we don't trust the existing educational system with our own children, and therefore we need to build one ourselves. Most families address this from just the homeschooling front. Like, okay, well let's just do this for our own family, take care of our own kids. But we also feel like in terms of impact on society, education is one of those things that can make such a profound impact. And if there was a way to enable many, many, many more young people to have an an actually functional education, why would we not take a shot at that? Is it a moonshot? Maybe, but we actually think it's approachable. So stop me at any point to like divert this or ask questions. But I can sort of give you an overview of, of why we think education is bankrupt today. 'cause I think that explains so much of our school and our approach to education. So in general, what we understand is education, you know, like kids going to school, sitting in a classroom, you know, facing someone up front that really saw its rise with the industrial revolution. And, and to a great extent it existed to educate and create interchangeable parts in the British imperial Empire. So you could take one bureaucrat, switch them out for another, if they all went through the same education system, you knew they had the same basic skills and like some kind of interchangeable cog, you could just switch them out.

Simone Collins [00:14:46] It was really useful for that. It wasn't about getting people to excel, it wasn't about teaching excellence. It was about basically curating bureaucrats for a system. And that worked for that. It also worked for the lifelong corporate job where people were going into these really large companies. And, you know, again, being interchangeable and having this predictability and performance, even if it was all mediocre, was good. Of course, now we're seeing the death of the lifelong corporate job. There isn't that job security. And we're also seeing with the rise of ai, basically anything that, that is based on, you know, common sense general competency, you know, being just good enough and copying and pasting, essentially. Like that's not a, that's not a skill that's gonna get you employed anymore, period. So we need a school system that, that does more than that. That generates lumpy, weird, unexpected, unpredictable, but excellent and, and very bright people who have very, you know, who are just world class in one or two things and who are capable of functioning and everything else. But you know, you don't have to be like, you know, we don't have to have the same mediocre emphasis.

Vance Crowe [00:15:58] I love that concept of lumpy and weird because it is the anomalies that will create things. And but one of the really weird things that you just said there was, we want kids to have one or two deep competencies and then be o you know, okay. At the rest of them. Because in truth, that's all the human mind can handle, right? Yeah. You really can't be good at all things. A renaissance person is a rare, extreme example, but it would make somebody a lot better if they had one or two deep skills and then didn't focus on trying to be adequate at everything else. But how do you set that up as an education system?

Simone Collins [00:16:35] Yeah, that's a good question. So first I wanna say like renaissance man, the a really interesting thing though about the concept of the Renaissance man, and we wouldn't drop it, is, is that we think that many forms of genius come from interdisciplinary thinking. And, and you actually notice that many of these Renaissance men will use like their knowledge of biology to innovate in the field of physics or something else. Like, there's a lot of really interesting ways that I think a good strong interdisciplinary knowledge will help you innovate in certain fields that you never would be able to if you just like only did maths, or only did science, or only did writing. So, you know, we very much support that. So the way that we cultivate that and, and encourage it is first we just totally dismantle the education system as it is. You know, don't think classrooms, don't think teachers, let's look at every element of genius, every element of high achievement, and look at the best way on an a la carte basis to build that up. And, and we say that because when you look at the education system as it is today, it is not just the education system, it's sort of become like this huge bureaucratic lump of a lot of essential services that are not, like very few of them actually have anything to do with student achievement or outcomes. Like, think about it, like one of the big concerns when the pandemic hit was, was food service, like literally food aid to children in need. The question came, how are we gonna deliver food to all of these children who are dependent on school breakfasts and lunches?

Simone Collins [00:18:08] Also, there's the, the element of childcare, you know, who's, I have to, I have to go to work who's gonna watch my kid and make sure they don't like, you know, eat a can of glue or something? I don't know, like, so, you know, these are two elements that have nothing to do with education. You know, they have to do with childcare. They have to do with a safe place for a child to be throughout the day. They have to do with giving the child food. So we remove that from the equation because people that are optimized to do that are not the same people who are optimized to make your child a genius. The way the school itself is set up is designed to be something that works both in person but also remotely. So if you are in, you know, a very remote part of the world, you can do this, you know, with your family while they're traveling or while they're, you know, wherever they are off the grid. Or you can do this with, you know, in the middle of a city with, with other kids. You know, all in a community center together with other people watching you who aren't your parents. And the way it works is every child has, every student has an account with our school, and it looks like, are you, do you play video games or like, do, are you familiar with skill trees or tech trees?

Vance Crowe [00:19:19] I am familiar with tech trees here. So this is the concept of as you're going along in a video game, you have to choose, do we wanna do writing or do we wanna do pottery? Because if we do pottery, this means we're gonna be able to move along the technology development in a different way than if we had developed writing. If we do writing, we might get to currency because we can do accounting and bookkeeping. If we do pottery, we might get to gunpowder faster because we can collect materials. And so depending on which path you go, your society builds up in a different way.

Simone Collins [00:19:50] Exactly. And, and that's, that's exactly the way our school works. So as a student, you, you log in, you look at your skill tree and you can decide, you know, am I going to move along the branching pathways of math today? Or of science or of history or of life skills or of sales or like, we have all these different, like we, and also we combine traditional academic subjects with things like, you know, psychological development, like with, you know, how to build friendships, how to build a career, financial management. 'cause these, these things also kind of matter for thriving. And the way that we cultivate excellence is we motivate, well, basically we, we don't impose extrinsic rewards on students. So we don't make things unfun by rewarding them, which is a common thing is as soon as you pay someone to do their hobby, they stop liking it. You know? So we don't, we don't reward with grades, we don't reward with incentives or, or, or badges we reward with more. So if you really like writing, then by every, every time you basically master a particular more foundational skill, additional nos in your skill tree will open up with more advanced skills within that domain. And by the time you get very advanced in any particular domain, we further reward your advancement by introducing you to world class players in that domain and encouraging you to pitch real world projects with them.

Simone Collins [00:21:22] So let's say that you find yourself really, really into ology. You're obsessed with mushrooms, you think they're fascinating, you know, and you've, you've basically maxed out all of our curriculum on ecology. You're, you're past like a post grad level. Then we're like, Hey, why don't you Google the top my college in the world? All right, how about, you know, we're, we're gonna work with you on building a pitch for a peer reviewed paper on this weird obs weird obscure, you know, Colombian mushroom that you really wanna study and let's you know, we will work with you to give you a shot at pitching to them. No promises, but we will get you in front of them and we will help you make a pitch. And maybe you can, you know, we'll help you raise the grant money to go out and study that with them. So again, it's rewarding with more and it's encouraging not just advanced learning in any particular domain where a student's really picking up and really becoming a genius, but also kick kick starting their career. You know, starting what in the past would be known as apprenticeship, where you're really doing impactful real world work. And so that's, that's key. Now, a lot of this sounds, I'm sure to many people who either homeschool or unschool their kids like unschooling and unschooling is basically homeschooling, but with like zero guide rails. So basically you do, you kid no tests. I'm not gonna tell you what to read. Like you just explore whatever it is you want, which has by some research, and there's not a ton of research on unschooling, but it has shown very impressive outcomes, especially vis-a-vis traditional school.

Simone Collins [00:22:56] Some of that no doubt has to do with the families who allow their children to unschool. They're probably people who give them really great intellectual resources. Nevertheless, there's something to be said for giving children that freedom to explore what they find intellectually interesting. The one problem with unschooling is that those who go through that typically develop pretty severe test anxiety if they decide to enter the university system. 'cause suddenly, like, I don't know how to deal with SATs. You know, like there's no prep for that. So that's not ideal. And they also tend to be very, very, very underpowered in certain domains. Often math, because there aren't as many materials that really teach math the way it, it should be taught where, you know, it's really about this creative imaginary endeavor or imaginative en endeavor, and it's not taught that way. So people just don't do it. And then of course they have like zero math. So the way that we do,

Vance Crowe [00:23:45] And there lies the, the challenge of

Simone Collins [00:23:47] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:23:48] Of trying a new system. So yeah, My wife and I were exploring, we have a 2-year-old and a seven month old. We're like trying to figure out what are we gonna do for education? And we've come across the Waldorf system, which I think is like a really interesting outdoors. It's very much in the domain of creativity. Yeah. And building skills. I interviewed a couple of Waldorf teachers here in the studio, but one of the hesitations my wife has is she's an aerospace engineer. And the level of math that she had to be at by the time she went to college was not insignificant. And she often talks about how her math skills were plenty good. She was able to take pre-calc, but in her or calculus classes in her high school. But when she got to college, her computer programming skills weren't up to snuff. Oh. And so there she was like struggling to keep up. So when you do these programs, the challenge that I think I see with them is if you go too far away from the norm, then if your kids want to do something that needs to be mainstreamed, you have to have an engineering degree in order to be able to get this job. How do you make sure you haven't gone across the river? That means that they, they can't get back or the, the, the distance to get back isn't too far.

Simone Collins [00:25:00] Yeah. That's, so that's totally something we think about. 'cause we, we don't wanna have that, right? We, we don't have the unschool unschooling outcome. So to stay, basically to stay in this school, to, to maintain this level of freedom and have all the fun that our school theoretically offers, hopefully offers, is you have to get a certain number of points in each week. And the points shift dynamic dynamically in weight. Meaning that if you are very, very advanced in a particular field, you're getting like, you know, 0.5 points for each, each node you complete, each skill you master in that field, right? So the, the rewards or essentially what you're earning, like the essential things that you're earning are diminishing. Whereas let's say like, I'm super, super advanced in history and I have like nothing on math, it's gonna get to the point where I'm getting point, you know, one five points for every history node that I complete going forward. And I'm getting 10 points for every math, math node, and I have to complete a hundred points every week. So the only way in the end that I'm gonna be able to stay in this school is by doing some math. Like I'm just gonna have to do the math. So we do provide extrinsic rewards where intrinsic rewards are absent, which is to say, you know, we do start to really reward with points essentially, you know, grades or whatever it is that requires you to stay in school. The things that are hard for people to do. We also though, you know, we, we don't wanna be punishing about the way that we provide education. I think a lot of people don't like math because math is really poorly taught. There's this amazing essay that completely changed the way that I looked at math called a Mathematician's Lament.

Simone Collins [00:26:39] That I really encourage anyone listening to this who grew up hating math like I did to read. And our goal with this school is to provide with every single node, every single skill that someone can master with in our massive skill tree that we're building right now. Absolutely the best resources ever. Which is to say that we, we've created, do you know, like the website Reddit, or any basic forum where like things get uploaded and down voted. So rather than every node being like, okay, now read this book and learn the thing before you get an assessment, we say, here is, you know, it's basically like a forum thread or a Reddit thread of like, here all these different ways you can learn this skill. Here is a course by the teaching company slash wondery. Here's a YouTube video, here's a Wikipedia thing, here's an interactive mobile game, like all these things, or here's an exercise you can go do outside. And then students over time will upvote and downvote the resources that they like or dislike. You know, the things that help them and didn't. They can also add resources. So if there's something that they found really effective, they add it. So we're hoping that over time, you know, even if, okay crap, I have to take some math, I'm gonna get 10 points for every math node because I'm like so behind at this point when I do go to those math nodes of the skill tree, I'm gonna find something that is probably gonna work for me because it's worked for a bunch of other students so far.

Vance Crowe [00:28:01] So tell me about how far you've taken students through this. 'cause you and Malcolm are both pretty young. When did you start the school and how, how far have students progressed so far?

Simone Collins [00:28:10] Yeah, so unfortunately we only started the school at the end of 2021. Yes. At the end of 2021. So we are only just started and, and up until this January we were 100 per self. Sorry, 100% self-funded. So we are going very slowly, we'd hoped to launch our first like, full-time academic class last fall. Now we're aiming for this fall. But what we do have is basically a part-time accelerator program, which is sort of like an afterschool program meant to accelerate the career side of people already in school. So at least what we can do if we can't provide our own academic backend is start to like bring in the apprenticeship backend that our school offers to some kids who are interested. And the way that works is they basically, if we have a good match for the program and we have a couple students going through it, we have regular calls with them where they're like, Hey, listen, I wanna do this, I wanna do that. Like, I want, one wanted to create a hackathon, one wanted to raise money for a startup, one wanted to launch their career as a public thought leader. And we basically go through them the the things that they have to achieve to meet those ends in regular calls and coaching sessions. We break down the basics that they have to achieve. And we go through that. So far, the first two students to go through that each raised $50,000 within the first few months, I think one Oh yeah, one, one just got into Harvard. So they're, they're doing well. Like, I think the outcomes look good though.

Simone Collins [00:29:43] I, I would say that there's a selection bias in that. Like the people who are reaching out to us about this program are ambitious, intellectually curious, smart, self-driven. But we we're seeing promising signs.

Vance Crowe [00:29:58] And so I it sounds like those kids are probably a little bit older. Are they in like the, you know, junior high, high school range?

Simone Collins [00:30:05] Yes. And this is designed to be a secondary school, which is annoying for us. 'cause you know, like we, we have younger kids too where we're at like five months, almost two and three and a half, and it's gonna be a while. But we feel like things like Waldorf and like Montessori school are pretty good up until middle school because it's really at middle school where you start to get to a level with many disciplines where self-driven education just isn't gonna cut it anymore. And where you really need extra more advanced coaching and skills. Whereas before that kind of gave,

Vance Crowe [00:30:43] I, I have a friend that's a, that's a part of a Montessori experimental school for the high school level. And I, I really feel like the big challenge is you can't have, you know, a group of 10 teachers, or let's see, I think it's more like five or seven teachers know mandarin and calculus math and like, like music and all of these things because they just, you, there's not enough expertise in the, in the school to be able to advance kids at the self-directed learning level. And so I've definitely am aware of the shortcoming and, and wonder like, okay, even if you do the Montessori system or the Waldorf system, it's only gonna take you up until I think maybe the sixth grade or the eighth grade. Yeah. But then you've gotta make a jump into higher learning.

Simone Collins [00:31:29] Totally. Yeah. We, we think the system is very good up until the sixth grade, then that's when our school starts. And I think over the long run, we'd really love to start all the way with preschool. And I, I do think that when you, when it comes to cultivating genius, starting really, really early does, does matter. And I think this is something that, are you familiar with the work of Laslo Polgar, the father of

Vance Crowe [00:31:53] Susan f

Simone Collins [00:31:54] Chess geniuses?

Vance Crowe [00:31:55] Yes. Oh yeah. Yeah. So her daughter is, or his daughter is a, is a chess master here in St. Louis. She started the Webster program. So amazing. I'm very familiar with that whole thing, but go on, talk about him.

Simone Collins [00:32:07] Yeah, I mean, so I mean, what made him interesting to us and why we look at his achievements with greater interest than those of others is we really admire and trust the work of people we call shock callers. You know? So it's like, let's say like there's a parent who's like, you know, Olympian child is like really good at ice skating or something. They're like, oh, well they're really good at ice skating 'cause of, you know, I did this, this, and this. But like, who knows? Like, maybe it was just chance, you know, maybe like genetically they have all the right things for being a good ice skater, but what made Laslo polgar different is that he said, basically, I have a theory on creating genius. I'm going to create genius, put a newspaper ad out as far as I understand it, to find a wife, to have genius children. He had three children and all three of them, you know, became chess champions. You know, all three of them did become geniuses in a field. So he know, he called it, he did it, he made it happen. But, you know, a core element of their education was they started going deep into chess really, really early. You know, like we're, we're talking H five, H six, well before the sixth grade. So it is something that we think about a lot. We would like to go to earlier education eventually, but because we are self-funded up to this point, we have to, we have to start somewhere small.

Vance Crowe [00:33:21] So let's talk about what's going on in the world that has prompted you to think about this. I mean, the very first time we met, I actually met you at the same time I met Malcolm, was when we were on a phone call that Michael Vassar set up Yeah.

Simone Collins [00:33:32] To try

Vance Crowe [00:33:33] And settle a disagreement that Michael and I have where Michael says the kids, they are not all right, there's all kinds of problems going on in the world. What is going on with the kids today as far as you can tell?

Simone Collins [00:33:45] I outlook not good. You know, when, when you look at rates of teen depression and teen suicidality, so especially for teens, like that's where the graphs start to go crazy, especially in the past few years. But, but even for, for kids in the eight to 12 range, the seven to 12 range, it's, it's devastating. It, it's getting much, much worse. We are experiencing a genuine mental health crisis among teenagers. So that, that is one thing that really has us worried. We're also, and we were talking about this before we hit record, you're coming upon this age of AI where a lot of jobs are about to become obsolete. And we are educating people for exactly the kinds of jobs that AI is about to make obsolete that also has us profoundly worried. And then, you know, furthermore, we're looking at an age which, you know, you discussed with Malcolm Moore in which we're, we're facing massive demographic collapse and also a lot of cultural erosion. And we, we see a lot of people going to school losing their culture, deciding, you know, like me, I'm not gonna have kids. I'm not gonna have a family. Like, I'm just gonna work. And we're losing as a part of that really essential cultures and all these things are connected, right? I mean, I think one of the reasons why we are seeing a mental health crisis is that people are losing cultures that give them the strength and the resilience they need to, to face life's challenges, but also enjoy life's pleasures. And we're, we're stripping it out. And a lot of that we think comes from the traditional schooling system.

Simone Collins [00:35:19] So we, we feel like primarily we want just, we for our kids want a school that will prepare them for the world as it is now to prepare them to thrive. Not just professionally, not just financially, but also mentally and spiritually. And, and in terms of bodily health and our current school system. Totally failing on that front.

Vance Crowe [00:35:44] I think the, the, like the, that's an important part of it. Yeah. The personal aspect of it. So just last night I was showing my wife GPT-4,

Simone Collins [00:35:52] So this

Vance Crowe [00:35:52] Is a huge difference from the first G PT three that came out. And I've been talking about g PT three on the radio on this podcast everywhere I go, because I'm like, Hey, this is, you go to put an email together, you can throw that email into GPT-3 and it'll make it better. It'll make it sound a little bit better flow. It may even help you. I one time put a joke into it and it said, Hey, you might want to tell the joke this way because they might not get the punchline. Well, GPT-4 just came out and it is, I would compare it from a garden hose to a water main. Oh

Simone Collins [00:36:27] My,

Vance Crowe [00:36:27] My gosh. The, the amount of quality and the skill with which GPT-4 can handle things is way beyond G PT three. And the thing my wife and I were talking about is, you can go to it and you can ask it like really obscure questions like, Hey, I have this plumbing problem with the fixture. How should I fix it? And it will tell you how to disassemble the fixture, how to unclog whatever is going on with the, with the water pressure and to reassemble it together. And it's done this with computer code. I've had it do it with, you know, negotiating a little bit of a conflict that I had so much of the things that maybe I normally might have been looked to in a relationship to resolve those problems, at least intellectually, Hey, these are the things that I know about can be resolved through this GPT-4 chat thing. Now this is going to change the nature of what is it to be human? How do I offer value in the world? And I think more the threatening than just jobs, which is a serious one, right? How am I gonna add work into the world that I get paid for will be, how do I add something to a conversation that can't be added by an artificial intelligence at a way more profound level than whatever I could produce?

Simone Collins [00:37:40] Yeah, no, that's a, that's a scary question. I mean, we're all on the precipice of an existential crisis in so many ways, which, you know, deep breaths, right? But like we, we need to, to change the way that we're educating ourselves and, and our people. And, and I mean, beyond all that, we also don't want to, basically anything now that breeds conformity, you know, to your point, right? Anything that is just gonna get you to like, what any AI would do is like general common sense is not gonna give you a competitive edge or any sort of edge in relationships in life, whatever being lumpy is, is where you're gonna thrive. But also, like that goes down to like a, a, a bigger meta cultural level too, to a great extent, the public school system and, and many private school systems as well, kind of wipe out individual family cultures, which themselves, as, as units are very powerful and very meaningful and can cumulatively make a big difference. And by wiping all that out, you know, not only are people experiencing more mental health problems, like I alluded to, you know, they're not able to deal with problems that would be easier to address if they had, you know, cultivated resilience, if they'd cultivated more faith or had better traditions to, you know, build strength in certain areas mentally. We're, we're totally losing this orthogonality, this, this, this weird obliqueness that different cultural traditions bring to the table.

Simone Collins [00:39:13] And we want to see an educational system that allows people to lean into their cultures, maintain their cultures, rather than have them erased and just made sort of, you know, homogenous, mediocre, middle of the road, you know,

Vance Crowe [00:39:29] Progressive,

Simone Collins [00:39:29] I guess.

Vance Crowe [00:39:29] And I think something that's hard for people to realize, just 'cause like a fish inside of water, it's hard to even know, oh, I'm in, I'm in water. I didn't realize that, is that the culture that I come from feels like it's vanilla and people forget that vanilla is actually a flavor. It's not nothing, right?

Simone Collins [00:39:46] Vanilla

Vance Crowe [00:39:47] Isn't plain, it is actually a, a flavor that you add to it, but because it becomes so ubiquitous to you, you don't realize that you have idiosyncrasies, you have social technologies that you've learned, you have ways of dealing with problems that help you like survive and thrive in the world. And as you try and strip away these things, like I came from, what would've colloquial been thought of as a Midwestern Irish Catholic family?

Simone Collins [00:40:14] Nice.

Vance Crowe [00:40:15] And so while we weren't actually Irish, we held this kind of idea, but inside of these like Irish songs that we would sing, or the fact that we would eat, you know, Irish soda bread or, or you know, the different Irish foods around St. Patrick's Day, we also had cultural values that helped us know, like, this is how you treat your wife. This is how you treat your family. This is how you handle people being untruthful with you. And to you, it just seems like this is what everyone knows. But what you find when you step back is no, no, no. This is, this is something that has to be taught to a child. It has to be passed down from generation to generation. And just because vanilla seems ubiquitous doesn't mean that it is at all. You, you, you have to impute this knowledge onto people somehow. And that, that's why I'm very interested when you, when you say that schools are wiping out this culture, it's, it's a, it's a scary thought.

Simone Collins [00:41:11] Oh, okay. Okay. Hold on. Okay. Yeah, no, let's, let's break it down. Like, let me be your ambassador from, I guess I, I can, I can kind of explain not what just is going on with progressive culture and sort of what that distinct culture as a culture is doing, but also what it's like to grow up in the absence of culture. Because I think I kind of got both, which is interesting. So my parents, for example, first became romantically involved as my, as they were polyamorous in the Bay Area. So my father was married, my mother who went to his same high school, like, so they knew each other kind of, but like, they kind of got involved were also romantically involved, but consensually with my, at the time, father's now ex-wife who also had other relat relationships and, you know, so like that, that was normalized for me. Like, I grew up like, well, yeah, some people are like that. I also grew up, because so many of my, my friends' parents were lesbians. I thought I was gonna marry a woman. I was sure I was gonna marry a woman. I, I told, I went to school one day and said like, just passively that I was gonna marry my best friend who was a, a girl and that we were gonna have a hundred cats and live in an rv. 'cause I was like, you know, that, that sounds fun. And like my school thought I was coming out, so like there was this whole thing and they called my parents and my parents were like, I don't know, like, but I was just, I was just saying what was normalized for me, right?

Simone Collins [00:42:43] So like, this is a culture in which people can grow up. It's not that my parents told me that I should marry a woman. It, it's just, that's what I saw around me. And, and you know, my idea, like the first wedding I went to, you know, involved a naked sweat lodge and people putting on masks in, in the woods and dancing around like that. Oh, like I, I, I, I, my first like church wedding was like this really, I was like, what is, what is this strange place? You know? Like, this is a, so I, I'm growing up in this, this opposite end of the spectrum from you. But another element of this progressive culture, which I think is really interesting, is that it would, it would be better as a culture if it were cohesive and intentional. But none of this was right. Like, I didn't, my, my parents didn't necessarily sit down and be like, we're going to be polyamorous and here's the rules and here are our cultural values and we're gonna raise our children with these values. And while my, my parents did did raise me really well, I had an amazing childhood, they empowered me. They, they gave me a lot of autonomy because we didn't really have this very strong culture. I also lost a lot of really important tools. Like, I never really learned how to date or approach relationships, meaning I just didn't. But it also meant that when I finally reached college and one of my male classmates was like, oh, hey, like, do you wanna see a concert in New York with me? I went to school in DC at the time, so it was like, you know, two hour bus ride away or something. I'm like, oh yeah, like, that sounds fun, you know?

Simone Collins [00:44:14] And then he was like, oh, by the way, like instead of wandering around the city all night before the next bus, like I, my dad got us a hotel room, so that's great. I'm like, oh, great. Like, we'll be able to, you know, do some homework and sleep at night. Like, I didn't understand that if a gentleman invites you to a show and then a hotel following the show, that there would be certain expectations. And that led to a very uncomfortable evening, right? And like, so when you stop, when you, when you don't create a cohesive culture with cohesive values and tell people how it is and really thoughtfully approach these things, and you just drop all that and strip it out of society, you get people who are deeply broken and you get people who have very mismatched social contracts. So every time you engage with someone, there is a social contract. And either you guys understand the rules by which you're playing and you know that if a man invites you to a hotel room, there are gonna be certain expectations or you don't. And every, you know, I think there the expectation is we're gonna do homework and sleep, and there's another expectation on the other side of that social contract. And it really is non-functional. And, and so it's, it's, it's a, the, the world in which we're raising children now, this sort of default progressive world in which culture has been stripped out in which religion has been stripped out is one in which people seem to be given, you know, performatively are given values, you know, you know, be open-minded, be, you know, be accepting of people. And I love that. I, we, we are very, very supportive of that, and we want to protect that. But they're missing, they're missing so much infrastructure that people like me, and we're seeing this in teen suicidality and teen depression and teen anxiety are not given basic tools to thrive.

Vance Crowe [00:45:56] Yeah. There's this huge proliferation now on YouTube of videos where conservative men will sit at a microphone and talk with a group of women that are like party girls. And these party girls will talk about like how they are open sexually and they, you know, date a bunch of guys and they're hearing this conservative guy say, Hey, this is what a man values in a woman, and have you thought about what it'll be like to be 40 and having like, hooked up with hundreds of men? Like, who will want to marry you and what will your value be? And you, I think one of the reasons that this is so engaging to watch is it's a little like watching a car crash. Yeah.

Simone Collins [00:46:40] Because

Vance Crowe [00:46:40] These women have literally never thought about these things.

Simone Collins [00:46:44] No, no.

Vance Crowe [00:46:44] They were told all about like, you can be as free and sexually liberal as you want. Yeah, yeah. And then when somebody says, a man doesn't want to marry a woman that has lots of experience, in fact, he'd rather be with a woman that has very little experience. That's,

Simone Collins [00:46:58] That's

Vance Crowe [00:46:58] What he's drawn to

Simone Collins [00:46:59] Their

Vance Crowe [00:47:00] Mind shatter. Now that's not something the Catholic church teaches you, right? It's not something that they go out of their way and they're like, we're gonna explain this. It's just embedded into the culture. Exactly.

Simone Collins [00:47:10] Yeah. Well, that's why everyone's talking about chesterton's fence, right? You know, this idea of like, well, there's a fence. Well, why is it there? Oh no, well then we should take it out. No, no, no. It might be there for a reason, right? Like, that's the whole thing. People keep bringing it up now. And that's, that's what's happening. You know, this is, the Catholic church has all these traditions, you know, Catholicism has all these, and they're very complex, and a lot of them, to an outsider, if you're just looking at this from a, like, there is no, God, there's only science perspective. You're like, ugh. Like, we don't need that. So that's stupid. But then, you know, you throw it and it's, and it's not just that. And so Malcolm and I, we also wrote books on relationships and sexuality, and we've, we've done a lot of research into the subjects to a great extent because we wanna give our kids tools in the modern age to deal with these things. And it's, it's not just that women are lowering their value to men when they sleep around a lot. It's also that after you have a certain number or with, with additional sexual partners, the extent to which a female bonds to her male partner in terms of like oxytocin release, things like that, you know, like sort of all the love hormones that really create that feeling of being deep and attached love start to go down. Meaning that, you know, a lot of women who remember that, that feeling of first love, that's so powerful. You know, they, they, they, even if they find men who are crazy about them, are less likely to settle down in many cases. And I've seen this happen with friends of mine who I love very much because they're not feeling that same sense, you know?

Simone Collins [00:48:43] And I've had so many of these conversations like, oh yeah, he, he's perfect. He takes off everything on paper. It's just, I don't feel that same connection with him and they don't realize why. And again, like there are so many, you know, religious traditions and stuff like, you know, hey, you know, be careful. You know, don't, don't be a loose woman. And like, it sounds bad. It sounds really bad to say that, you know, it's just like, sleep with as many people as you want. I don't care. Like be careful, don't get an STD. But really we don't, you know, we don't realize that there are these costs and we're only just starting to see what's going on there, right? Like

Vance Crowe [00:49:13] Yeah. And I think like some of the technologies that got added into our culture, we were just talking about GPT chat, but like, you know, think about things like birth control and we've talked about in this podcast, right? It does all kinds of things besides just prevent pregnancy, right? Doesn't

Simone Collins [00:49:28] It just, yeah, it potentially

Vance Crowe [00:49:29] Changes the way people smell. It changes the chemicals that are released in your brain, but then sociologically, right? The amount of partners that you can have goes up and the, the, the separation between the, the danger of sex and, and what it is, and like, when people think about it, they're like, eh, it was just a small change. I think it was as large of a change as the nuclear bomb going off, right? It, it huge was huge. It was

Simone Collins [00:49:55] Huge. I mean, it, it profoundly changed the way that relationship markets work, that relationships work. And also it was the beginning of demographic collapse, you know, because as soon as people, as soon as people could not have kids, they, they chose not to because kids are hard, you know? And if you don't have an exogenous cultural moti motivator to have kids, and if society doesn't idolize having kids and you can choose to not have kids, then you're not gonna have kids. Although even today, I, I feel like if suddenly birth control were abolished in some countries, you know, like China right now, starting to close, vasectomy clinics is starting to limit access to birth control. You know, they're gonna start coercively removing this. I still think their birth rate's gonna be low because at this point, few people are having sex and like sex rates are plummeting anyway. People are alone and depressed. Like they're not gonna be having sex anyway. So, you know, that's another factor. But yeah. Yeah, even birth control makes a big difference. And that's not to say, you know, a lot of these things exist for a reason. Like, we theorize that the reason why that female attachment, that partner bonding goes down after a certain number of partners is look at, look at history, right? Women would live in different kinds of environments and there would be environments in which it would be in a woman's best interest in terms of like her offspring surviving, if she really, really bonded to her partner, right? You know, they were a team, they were undestructible. But if she lived in a society in which she was being, you know, her, her village kept getting rated, she kept getting traded as a sex slave. Like it would be better for her to shut off that bonding mechanism so she could survive. You know, like she, the woman who resists, who falls in love with every, every single woman, or sorry, every single man that she sleeps with is, is gonna resist.

Simone Collins [00:51:34] She's gonna, you know, get killed like much sooner. So like there are reasons why these things, you know, turn on and shut off. And honestly, like if, you know, we'll probably tell our daughters like, this is kind of a tactical decision you're gonna have to make. Do you wanna be able to pair bond really well or do you want to, you know, have a lot of different sexual partners for more instrumental reasons? And there may be reasons for that, right? Like sex is kind of a currency, whatever, right? But like, you need to know the trade off, know the trade off. And that's our cultural approach to it because we're much more like mercenary and secular in our approach, right? But like, these are still really important things and yeah, I mean there's, yeah, birth control, hormonal intervention, these things have profound effects. So, yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:52:16] What is it like to be a young person dating today in a world where you're looking at your phone and you're swiping left or right, or however that works. Like I came of age and got married right before that happened. Like I feel like I, right, the door was slamming shut right as I was coming through it and now I can't even imagine what the dating world would be like.

Simone Collins [00:52:40] Yeah. What's really interesting is we feel like we're, we're approaching, if not reaching the point at which people who actually wanna get married and have serious relationships are going to stop using online dating apps for that. Because they don't work for that. They've all become image-based. They are all really optimized around sex and really it's optimized around sex for very few women, for very many women. And they ruin standards, right? Because it makes women think that they can ultimately marry a man whose social value is much higher than hers because a bunch of men who are being lazy are slumming it with women whose social values lower than theirs. 'cause it's easy sex. And so it, it one like spoils men and, and like sort of screws up their willingness to commit an interest in committing. And it totally screws up women because they start to think that the person that they're gonna settle down with forever is gonna be much higher value with them. Plus of course there's the issue of bonding that we discussed earlier and a whole bunch of other things, right? Like their, their social value is, is, is harmed by them having many former partners among many men. So what we're seeing now among Zoomers is interesting. They're, they're dating in a much more traditional and old fashioned way. You know, they're, they're based, they're dating based on social networks or they're dating based on personal introductions. They're dating Even now a guy who goes by Indian Bronson has, has created a, a startup called keeper where you have to put down a significant amount of money and you are, it is a matchmaking service. It is a, this is, here's your wife, here's your husband, marry, marry this person, or you don't get your money back.

Simone Collins [00:54:16] So there's a strong like pressure, in this case financial because we don't have the culture to put the pressure anymore, at least, you know, among like tech elites and young people. Right. You know, and living in cities to do that. So it's really interesting for us to see where dating and relationships is going and what we personally are doing with our own networks. And anyone who, who's listening to this, who wants to get like tapped into it, email us at partners at pragmatist guide or partners@pragmatistfoundation.com and we'll loop you in. We're we're gonna try to bring back the London season because that actually was a, a social institution for matchmaking that worked really well and it really works well for diasporas who are still culturally aligned and would like to intermarry. Are you familiar with the London season?

Vance Crowe [00:55:04] No. Tell me everything.

Simone Collins [00:55:05] I'm not a woman who reads regency era novels or who watches shows like Bridgeton. So this, this, this really saw its height during the regency era in, in England through like Queen, like basically up to the death of, of Queen Victoria's husband Albert. It, it involved basically. So we had the land of Gentry right in, in the UK countryside. And this is a lot of people who are culturally aligned of the same general cultural class, whatever, who would want their kids to intermarry. But they all live out like in the countryside. They're all in like different cities and places and they're very dispersed and hanging out doesn't happen a lot. So what did, did they do well when the men of those families needed to go to Parliament to serve in parliament for that season, their families would come with them to London, they would all convene on London and they would have a series of social events over the season after being presented in a sort of formal way to the Queen. So it was sort of like very like, you know, everyone sort of got on board with this, it was like a very traditional ritualized thing. But they would then basically the, the prominent families would, would host parties throughout that season where it was understood that the people attending were single and looking to marry. So when you were, you would make your debut in society at the beginning of the season to the Queen and it was sort of like, okay, new single lady, like on the scene looking to marry. And everyone knew like very formally like what you were looking for and what you cared about. And so that's kind of a, it's, it worked really well.

Simone Collins [00:56:39] It even arguably significantly influenced policy and there are some interesting essays on that that I can share. But we, we think that bringing that back would make a lot of sense because right now a lot of culturally aligned groups would like to meet other people from those groups, but they live in totally different cities. That said, people often convene in places like Austin, you know London, New York, LA whatever. And if we were able to coordinate with other families to host a series of parties and gatherings where these people could meet throughout the year. Sort of like a series of almost like conferences, but not really, we think we could make a big difference.

Vance Crowe [00:57:16] Well it was fun to hear about the London season, but as you are a mother of a very young child, we have a little bit of crying in the background, so we are going to wrap it up for now. But if people wanted to learn more about your school and about the things that you and Malcolm are doing, where would you direct them?

Simone Collins [00:57:33] I would direct them to the cons institute.org for our school pragmatist.guide for our books where we talk about all these things. And the pragmatist foundation, which is pragmatist foundation.com for all of our other nonprofit efforts plus prenatals.org for our demographic collapse related advocacy.

Vance Crowe [00:57:55] Well, I have so much more I want to talk with you about. This has been a fantastic conversation. So we'll have you back on again, Simone to chat all about all of the various areas that you know about. Thanks so much for coming on.

Simone Collins [00:58:07] It was a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.