Based Camp - September 25, 2024Catholic Natalism： Peachy Keenan on Faith, Family, and Fighting Cultural Decay
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 1 minute
Words per Minute
197.20302
Summary
Peachy Keenan is the author of Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War. She's also the founder of Lost Riviera, a new media startup based in Los Angeles, California. In this episode, we talk about the declining fertility rate of American Catholics, why it's happening, and what we can do about it.
Transcript
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Hello, my name is Simone Collins. I'm here with Malcolm and today a very special guest as well.
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I'm so excited. This has been months in waiting. We are joined by Peachy Keenan. She is the author
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of Domestic Extremist, A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War. Her sub stack you can
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find at peachykeenan.com. And in addition to regularly sharing top drawer hot takes on Twitter
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and her handles, Keenan Peachy, she's actually working on a new media startup called Lost
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Riviera, which maybe we'll hear about at the end. But Peachy, welcome. Thank you so much,
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you guys. It is so great to finally be here. We were scheduling it for such a long time and to see
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your smiling, happy faces. Well, you were speaking at the Pronatalist conference and you were the
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funniest speaker there. So I am thrilled to have you on. Although I have to say some of our fans
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recently have also said my wife is really funny. And that must be incredibly gender disconfirming
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for you because, you know, the stereotype is, is women, women aren't that, that humorous.
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That is, except for the women on who are kind of like more right leaning. I feel like they
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are actually very funny and that's why they're kind of drawn into this, I think.
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Okay. Well, I had a specific question that I wanted to focus on with this episode.
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Okay. So there was a report that came out and looked at the fertility rate of the American
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native born Catholic population. And, and, and so for, for those who don't know, Peachy
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Keenan is, is, I think sort of the number one Catholic pronatalist in terms of like anyone
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I'm seeing. And it came out and said that the average fertility rate was 1.64 in the United
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States. Now that's pretty bad considering the report was done in 2008. It was called religiosity
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and fertility in the United States, the role of family fertility intentions. When we look at
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Europe, the average Catholic majority country has a fertility rate of only 1.3. And in Latin
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America, we've seen a rapid fertility collapse as well in the, the Catholic majority countries.
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Now there have been studies and we know what's causing this. Catholics actually have exactly
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the same fertility rate once they're married as any other highly religious individual, but
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they get married much later than all other Christian denominations. And so I wanted to brainstorm
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with you. Why do you think this phenomenon is happening and how can we fix it?
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Well, I mean, just take a step back a little bit from that. I'm a Catholic convert, but I
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didn't, you know, I'm not just sort of one of these sort of regular norm, normie American
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Catholics who kind of goes to mass on Easter and Christmas and like has two, 2.5 kids.
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Like, that's not me. I'm more, I definitely joined the like more fundamentalist, traditionalist
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Catholic sect. Okay. Because honestly, like I was coming from a very secular nothingness,
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you know, like actually like my mother was like a committed atheist. And when I was going
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to do it, I was like, okay, I'm, I'm in, I wanted to like do it, actually do it, like
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actually do the real thing. I'm one of the authentic, you know, the authentic Catholic
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experience. Okay. And so I found this like, you know, group of, you know, our little like
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Catholic cults. There's these bubbles that are in various cities in America. You can find
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them. They're very based parishes where it's not watered down. They're not saying, they're
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not mimicking the Pope. They're not saying, you know, who am I to judge? They're judging
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people. And they are okay. This is great. In a healthy way. Okay. They are like, if you
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listen up and you're like, oh, that you, it will lead you to good places. It will lead
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you. Social pressure towards positive action. Yeah, exactly how it's always been. That's
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very old. Everyone is supposed to be able to do whatever makes them feel good. Whenever
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they feel like doing it and be affirmed for believing whatever they want to believe about
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themselves. There's no way that could lead to any sort of psychological damage.
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Exactly. All you have to do is like walk down any street where I live and you'll see the
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consequences of that. Right. Yeah. You're in the, Malcolm, you know, she's in Southern
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California, right? So like in LA, so one, we're going to have to get to why you're living
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in LA before this, I want to hear that, but I want to hear about your marriage story and
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your conversion story. Cause did you convert before you got married after you got married?
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How did you think about this when you were dating your now husband?
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I got, I converted 10 years after we got married. I had already had four children.
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Whoa. We, yeah. So when we got married, both of us were, you know, basically former liberal,
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former kind of liberal, basic nothings who had kind of found our own way to kind of more conservative,
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political thinking. Yeah. I think you, cause of nine 11 and cause of all the like failures of
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Republican presidents and all these things. And we just kind of became like kind of radicalized
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really for both sides. And, but I was, when I met my husband, I was still, I was sort of
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politically conservative, but I was still socially liberal. That's how I had grown up.
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I went to the Ivy league. That was just, what was, you're just absorbing.
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I was a savage. I was, yeah, I was civilized. I was at the, I was at all the cool parties and
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everyone around me was, um, you know, a card carrying pro-choice feminist. So of course I was
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also, but it was for all of us, it was very skin deep. You know, we, we, we didn't think much about
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it in that era. It was politics. Wasn't identity in those days. It was like, you thought about it once a
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year on election day or if it came up in a class, like you didn't think about like my reproductive
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rights. Like that was not even a thing really. Although, you know, people were definitely
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exercising those reproductive rights all around me. And so I met my husband and he had already been
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red pilled. And so when we first started dating, we were like in the process of, you know, I just
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moved to New York city and it was very like romantic. And then we were kind of, you know, falling for each
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other. But in the process I was discovering like very alarming things about him. Like he was a
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Republican. Oh no. Exactly. My parents were Republicans, but I had never met a Republican
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like in my peer group ever who was open about it. He, he liked guns. He had a gun. He had been in
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the military. I was like, all of these things were sort of like red flags to me and my like feminist
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bubble of like, Oh no. Like what will my girlfriend say? Like, yes, no, totally. Totally. I know this
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feeling. And it came from that background too, of just actually I had someone who knew me from
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childhood recently write to me and be like, but you're a Republican that just that kind of shock.
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Right. Yeah. Trigger. Like it was crazy, but again, it was still not political politics. It was not just
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identity. He was cool. And my friends were, we were just, it wasn't our thing. We were just having fun
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going out and doing karaoke and drinking. And then, but you know, the more I hung around him,
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I was kind of like, well, you're kind of right about all this and yeah, you're kind of right.
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Like, and he was actually happening to be pro-life and, but we weren't religious. He was just from a
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kind of like a logical standpoint and like, yeah, that kind of, wow, maybe you're right. You're onto
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something here. I hadn't really thought ever about it deeply in any way. And so, you know, he was raised
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like me kind of secular nothingness because he had been baptized as a baby. His father had been a,
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you know, altar boy in Kansas city in the old days. And so, but then it had been completely
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fallen away and had never set foot in a church. So we got married in his parents' backyard with
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a judge. It was all very civil, you know, zero religion involved. And that was time with me.
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And we, I became pregnant. Like, I think that first year, you know, we were like, you know,
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we wanted to get on it just like you guys. We jumped right in and like, very sadly, we were
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unprepared to find out like at three months went in for the ultrasound. You know, there was no
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heartbeat that we had. So it was a miscarriage. And we were so, we were like lambs to the slaughter
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because we hadn't even thought it was a thing. You know, you see the heartbeat, you think,
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no one had prepared us. We were like, yeah, no, it's not me. It all worked out in the end,
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but it was, it was such a shock, you know, emotional shock. Like we were just like, no. And he said to me
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the next day, I'm going to convert. I'm going to become Catholic now because I can't, I can't deal
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with this. So really the miscarriage was his kind of inciting incident. And he was like, I need to do
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this. And honestly, my reaction was like, all right, buddy. Like, sorry, I might be out of line
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with this question, but don't Catholics think that, that, that a baby like that would go to purgatory
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because it wasn't baptized. Like that would be comforting. Sorry. I don't know. I do know at the
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time, I'm not sure. I do know. I mean, at the time we weren't Catholic at that moment and I didn't
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realize now that I have, I'm around a lot of Catholic people. I can tell you that I've had
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friends, for example, who have like a tubal pregnancy and they will actually get the tube,
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the fallopian tube with the like embryo that they have to surgically take out of you. So you will
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die and they will get that baptized. Oh, so the baptism is important. Yeah. So in terms of what
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happened to me, I didn't know anything about it. And I had, I went in for a D&E, which is like
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basically an abortion, but it's a dead, you know, you're, they put you to sleep and they do it in the
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hospital. And I didn't even think about any of that stuff, but later on I thought, oh, wow,
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they just kind of threw it in the garbage. Wow. I do feel when I think about it, I feel like,
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sorry and sad that I didn't think about it, but it is what it is. So what happens to those? I have
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no idea, Malcolm. I really don't. I'm like a very non-educated Catholic to be really frank. I don't
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know. I'm thinking to, and Malcolm and I spoke with a priest about this because we were speaking
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about IVF and we're like, well, what about the frozen embryos? And I mean, I think per the current
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status, like the current stance with the Catholic church, embryos have souls. So like there are,
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there are souls to save, but like per older stances. I'll edit it post. I'll just ask AI.
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So when I asked AI, it said that currently this is a question that does not have a hard clarified
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answer in Catholic doctrine. So then I went to be like, where did I get the idea that this was the
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case? And it was Dante's divine comedy. That is where I got this idea because this is what Dante
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believed, that limbo was where all of the unbaptized infants went. And I just remember
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this image of billions of crying, unbaptized infants looking for their parents and maybe a
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few thousand noble pagans having to look after them in limbo is this visceral image that I was
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never able to get out of my head after reading that book.
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But I actually have a question here. I love that all my theological questions go to AI now.
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I'm like, what's the correct stance on AI? God is here.
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I want to ask. So you decided like, you were keen to have kids because as you know, in this
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lefty cult that you guys started in, right? Like having kids isn't the normal path, but like you
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were planning to do it soon after getting married.
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You did it right away. And did you get married young or like right after college or in college?
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Like 20s. Oh yeah. So young for today. Absolutely.
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Yeah. What was the motivation here? Because it's interesting to me that you likely,
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like when I'm looking at like Catholics getting married later, unfortunately you almost sort of
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are the exception that proves the rule because you got married before you were a Catholic.
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So it wasn't influencing your decision-making yet. And then I can look at somebody like the Pearl
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Davis or something, right. Who starts at the Catholic, but isn't married or Nick Fuentes who
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starts at the Catholic, but isn't married. And I went through a list of like young Catholic
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influencers and they're almost all unmarried. And, and, and like, maybe if your husband had been
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Catholic, he wouldn't like, this is really interesting to me. So what motivated you to have a kid
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Yeah. I think it was actually becoming, you know, my parents had not been religious, but they had
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been conservatives. And when I became a political conservative, that did require me to, you know,
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let the feminism fall away from my eyes. And so when you do that, suddenly you're like, oh,
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my maternal instinct. Oh, I do want kids. Like maybe I don't want to wait until I'm, you know,
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in my late thirties. And then when you can kind of let yourself be, you kind of have to suppress all
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that a little bit when you are in the kind of basic feminist mindset, you, you actually do,
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because you're going to go right to work and you're going to delay everything. And if you get
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pregnant, you'll abort it. And then you'll go get your, whatever. So your career comes first when
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you can kind of, when you, when you can kind of break out of that mentality, that brainwashing,
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really that, that, that programming they put into you very young as a teenage girl, you're more in
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touch with your maternal instinct. So I, I did, I did want to, the minute we like got married,
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I was like, babies, let's go. I had never been a baby person. I was never one of those,
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like, let me take the baby. I didn't care. You know, I was, I think it was Simone. Simone had
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all these fears that she wouldn't love her kids. She's like, I don't comment. That's really common.
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If you haven't been around them yet, when you're a first timer, we don't live in a baby centric
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culture. I had, I had two cousins growing up. I didn't live near, I never held a baby from the time
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my little sister was born. Like until my own baby, like I did whole babies. Like there you go.
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Yeah. And so you're not having that, like, aren't they so cute when you see babies, it does fill
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you with these like endorphins. Like, Oh, I never had that. But when I, when I got married, I just
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knew, okay, I'm old. I got to do it now. I just, I knew I hadn't been like, you know, memed out of
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my biological clock. I wanted to get going. So now I want to go back to this story. Your husband
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converts. What are you thinking at this moment? I thought he was a little bit crazy. I was like,
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that's your journey, bro. But I can't marry you. So I'm kind of like, what are you going to do?
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What are you going to tell your husband? Like your new husband? Like, fuck you. Like I'm gonna,
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Oh, sorry, baby. I'm gonna, I'm out. Like, no, you want to support them. And I, you know,
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you're in mourning. Right. So we went through the whole conversion process. It really was a process
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of me going along with him, you know, being kind of dragged to mass drag through. And that was my
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education. So that was when I was like, I'm meeting other people, women like me who were
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actually Catholics, like cradle Catholics who were so cool, so open, so accepting much more so than
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my, you know, liberal Ivy league girlfriends who are very judgmental, very critical, very dogmatic,
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very conformist with the Catholics. I was kind of like, could let my freak flag fly. And I was like,
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kind of, they kind of brought me in as like, here, you know, here's this, here's peachy. And she needs
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us like to kind of guide her through the way. So it was really like a new peer group who were so
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much more like cool and awesome than the, than the, than the friends I'd had. And then we went
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through the whole process. We baptized all of our children because I thought, well, you know,
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rationally, this is a great way to raise a child much better than what I had, which was like,
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basically anything goes just, you know, it was wilded. Right. And I didn't want my kids to have,
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I wanted them to have structure and, you know, have an infrastructure, a moral framework that
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they could just take and grasp and help them, you know, go through life, which is, I think so great.
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And then, but finally I had three babies under three. Okay. I had a zero, a one and a two,
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three and diapers at one point. It was wild times. So finally I found like matching shoes,
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like 10 years later, I was like, okay, I'm ready. I'm now, I'm going to do it. So I went down to the
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local parish. I went through the process myself. Explain matching shoes. I don't understand.
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Oh, because I was pregnant and nursing for like 10 straight years. And then I finally found shoes
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that I could match and go leave the house. That's my joke. Oh, okay. Sorry. I'm not,
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Nevermind. It sounds like, and this is something that, that I've noted a lot is I think a lot of
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people when they're in what we call the urban monoculture, like this, this, you know, the old
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group of friends that you had and you start interacting with the educated religious people,
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you're like often really surprised by how real they are and, and, and open they are when contrasted
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with the other communities. Like it's not as much of a status game. One of my favorite lines about
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this was they were asking is whatever, one of the, the fifth horsemen of the ACS apocalypse or
00:16:43.600
whatever that former Muslim, right. Is whatever. But why, why did she go to Christianity instead
00:16:49.700
of Islam when she became like theistic and she goes, well, of all the years of attacking
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theistic people. And that was my job. She was like, it was attacking Christians. It was attacking
00:17:00.400
Muslims. The Muslims would always say, send me stuff about how they were going to kill me or
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great me or whatever. And the Christians would always send me stuff that was like, we're praying
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for your soul. We want you to, you know, just try it. Like, well, you come to mass with me
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one day. Like we really want what's best for you. And she realized that they had never really
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responded to her with anger, not in a, in a big way. And so she was like, when I started
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thinking about joining one of the communities, naturally I'm going to go to that one, even
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though it's not my birth community. And I thought that that was, it's something that I've definitely
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felt is that these communities are dramatically more accepting than individuals would think.
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Even with significant theological questioning, which individuals know we do on this channel.
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Like we do like deep theological questioning on this channel. Like, oh, this part doesn't
00:17:49.500
make sense. This part doesn't make sense. How can I do this better? And I think people
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would assume that religious Christians would take that negatively when in reality, most of
00:18:01.780
them are actually quite excited to be having a theological conversation.
00:18:07.320
Exactly. And I'm sure it's something that you, you saw as well. So you get in the community,
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you, you convert. What is, was that process like beginning to go to church, beginning to,
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Yeah. But we've been going to mass, you know, every week with the children. It was, it was
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very much a part of our lives. We were hanging out with all these people. And so I was like
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fully on board. I think it just, it was just like the chaos of my life at that time was
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like, I wasn't, it wasn't, I wasn't able to like go and take every afternoon and go do
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this thing. And then when I finally did it, you know, in a very lame, my, my local parish
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was very, at the time was very lame. It was very, you know, unorthodox, let's say very
00:18:47.620
Yeah. And you know, the Catholic school, my, our kids went to that, there was a school
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attached and you wouldn't, you would see zero of the families at the school in mass on Sunday.
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One family who was like, you know, Cungary or something. They, they were just not, they were
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just doing it because it was a way out of the public school. And so that was part of my driver
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also. I was like, well, I don't want this like water phoned in, watered down. If I'm going
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to do this, I believe this now, like I'm on board, I want to do the real thing. So we
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ended up moving to actually moved our house. We moved the whole family across town to a
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parish that is actually much more, you know, I guess you would say conservative, much more
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traditional. And which was where a lot of these families that we had been hanging out
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with were. And they're, you know, to them, I have five children. I'm something of a lightweight,
00:19:39.400
Yes. Like our TFR is off the charts. We're like meeting out in Congo and like, you know,
00:19:51.300
Yeah. Like I have a friend who has one of my good friends, you know, these women are my
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age. She has 10 kids. Another woman, my age, 12 kids. I'm like at five relatively on the
00:20:02.780
low end. But, but the thing is there's friends of ours who have, they have one child, they have
00:20:07.320
two children. It's not, and no one ever would say like, what are you, what's wrong with you?
00:20:12.020
Like, no, like any child is welcomed. You want to have, whatever God gives you is great.
00:20:17.160
There's no, no, you can't go too high as my point.
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How did you break it to your kids that you were Catholic now? Like, was this like a conversation
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that you remember having? Were they old enough that they had known that they'd grown up? And yeah.
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Yeah. They, they fully were. I mean, I think, I think my oldest, when I did the whole,
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the whole, like I did, you know, they do for adults, they do it on Easter vigil and they,
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they, they do everything at once. They do all the sacraments at once. They baptize you,
00:20:39.320
confirm you, first communion, all one shebang, right? Like they, you're in the white robe and
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they're dumped water on you. And it's just like, you're done. Like you're, and they, they were,
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they knew they were so excited because they'd been doing, they were, you know, cradle Catholics.
00:20:51.800
So they were very, you know, mommy, when are you going to do it? When are you going to do it,
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mommy? So they're thrilled. They're thrilled because now.
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That's amazing. So your kids converted before you did.
00:21:01.320
That is, that is, like, that's funny. That's amazing.
00:21:06.380
Well, they were born, yeah, born into it. They were baptized when they were little babies. So
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it's, it's been, so I'm like, you know, I hear about this, like the birth rates,
00:21:14.740
like the Catholic, what you're talking about in the beginning about the birth rates among
00:21:19.520
Yeah, it's like that school where it was all sort of like fake Catholics. The problem is that Catholic
00:21:23.700
is, I guess you'd argue that Catholic, like maybe Jew is almost a cultural identity
00:21:29.440
instead of a religion for a lot of people. And that's, what's towing down all the fertility
00:21:35.600
The Jews are the, I think, having the same schism where the Orthodox Jews, the, the, the sex
00:21:41.740
that are kind of, you know, keeping the kind of fires burning, like the ways they did it
00:21:45.980
in the old country are having lots of children, you know, even in LA, you'll see, you'll go
00:21:51.460
through the Jewish, the Jewish neighborhoods and they're walking to shul and they have like,
00:21:54.880
you know, bigger families than me. And so, but, but in both of these, you know, I grew
00:22:00.600
up around a lot of secular Jews in the West side of LA. That was like the norm and all
00:22:04.900
these private schools. And maybe you have two kids, like, you know, maybe max and, and
00:22:10.740
the same for, and the same for like the wishy-washy Catholics, the families at the, at the kind
00:22:14.900
of liberal Catholic parishes, same exact thing. Maybe they have two kids. In other words, there's
00:22:19.060
like no daylight between them and some like purely secular, non-religious at all public
00:22:25.040
school family, maybe, you know, two kids, maybe. And I was wondering, how do you take
00:22:33.240
Well, right. That's the question that you have to wonder. So when you say like Catholic
00:22:37.040
TFR is falling, well, it's, there's just no daylight anymore between kind of mainstream
00:22:42.620
American Catholicism and mainstream American liberalism. It's, it's basically, that's the
00:22:48.040
same group of people. I mean, I saw some statistic that was like 65 or 70% of, you know, self,
00:22:54.360
self-proclaimed Catholics are voting for Kamala Harris. Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure
00:23:00.920
that if the Pope could vote, he would vote for Kamala Harris, like 100%. Like that's the
00:23:05.160
world we live in here where Catholic is really like, you're like a Sino, you're like a Catholic
00:23:09.540
in name only. And the different, there's like a big schism between the conservative Catholics
00:23:15.340
in America and the kind of normie. And so how do you reconcile that? Like, like you
00:23:21.560
said, like, yeah, I'm actually like, psychologically, I really wonder when the Pope, when you feel
00:23:30.160
like the Pope, who's like the head of the church has moved in a direction that the church doesn't
00:23:34.040
like, like how did that work? I guess. It like doesn't, but I think is, you know, me and some
00:23:41.640
of my friends are always like, you know, like, oh, oh, they like this guy, like, who is this guy?
00:23:47.660
He's a Jesuit. The Jesuits have always been very liberal, but he's really, to me, a politician
00:23:52.520
and first, a politician first. Like, why is he meeting with Alex Soros? Why is he meeting with
00:23:59.800
Bill Clinton all the time? Like, what? What? He's doing a good job with the Vatican, you know?
00:24:07.340
Sorry, what? I think he's genuinely doing a good job with the politics and doing a good job with the
00:24:13.240
optics. I think removing a lot of the flair from the Pope ship, like, like going a bit more austere
00:24:18.580
was a really smart move, even if his theological stuff might be. Well, what I feel like is happening,
00:24:24.960
when I look at sort of the analogs of demographic collapse more in general, is that he's trying to
00:24:32.240
essentially do what the United States is doing, is they're like, well, let's just turn to immigration.
00:24:36.800
Immigration will solve the problem. And he's like, well, let's just loosen the rules and let's make
00:24:40.780
this a big tent religion and everyone can join and you don't have to make any sacrifices and everyone
00:24:46.160
goes to heaven. Kind of like he's just, I'm seeing policies loosen and the borders, the borders
00:24:51.640
soften and become more porous. And I feel like that's kind of the same approach, but that it's
00:24:56.940
not working. Just like how depending on immigration for demographic collapse is not going to save a
00:25:01.820
nation. Opening up to everyone and also relaxing on rules and going softer as a religion is not going
00:25:07.940
to save Catholicism. It could fudge the numbers for a little bit. But I also don't think that this is
00:25:14.140
necessarily the factor that's at play solely for lower demographic, sorry, I was going to say
00:25:21.260
demographic, lower Catholic birth rates, because it seems that the birth rates are really high with
00:25:27.760
Catholics in general, but that the issue is that they're marrying too late. And I'm curious what you
00:25:33.720
see, even within the small data point of your Catholic community, what's happening with young
00:25:40.260
people? Are they getting married in their twenties or is this a genuine issue? Even among the more
00:25:46.180
hard religious Catholics, are they getting married too late? Yeah. It seems to me that the solution
00:25:53.180
that some of the families I know have found, which is very effective to creating, to producing early
00:25:59.320
marriages is all about college selection. There is a kind of a smallish list of colleges
00:26:07.680
in the United States that if you go there, you are very likely, if you wish, to find a potential
00:26:14.840
spouse. So they're like the BYUs of Catholicism. The BYUs of Catholicism. And it's like ring by
00:26:20.380
spring is like an actual phenomenon. That was like a 19th century thing. But these are kids who are
00:26:25.540
ring by spring and you'll get the alumni magazine and the back is like all the weddings from the
00:26:29.980
class of 2022. 25 weddings from that class. We have some listeners. His families may have lapsed. Can
00:26:38.640
you give them a few colleges that they should be checking out? Yeah. So actually a great source is
00:26:43.280
something called the Newman's List, Cardinal Newman's List. I don't know the exact website. Go go Google
00:26:48.980
Cardinal Newman List. And they actually have a list of all the colleges they recommend with the usual
00:26:53.560
suspects, but also some smaller ones that people may not, you know, have heard of. Um, I have friends
00:26:58.820
who go to, um, Franciscan University in Steubenville, University of Dallas in Dallas.
00:27:05.200
Thomas Prince College has two colleges. There are a whole host of these sort of smaller schools.
00:27:11.640
I don't even know if Notre Dame is still on the list. They might not be because they've gotten so
00:27:15.280
wishy-washy, but there are these schools where if you go, you are, I've been to now three weddings
00:27:20.720
of kids who met their spouses at a school like Thomas Aquinas College, which is in Ojai,
00:27:26.480
California, which is a very kind of trad calf, great books, classical, you know, those are all
00:27:31.680
the kind of like the dog whistle for finding your wife, great books, classical, like find your wife
00:27:39.200
in one of those places. Not that, not to say you want, you went elsewhere, but I think, yeah,
00:27:43.300
Christian colleges, it really does seem to be that the marriage rates are doing fine. If you're going
00:27:48.360
to an explicitly openly Christian or Catholic college. So colleges to a great extent, at least
00:27:54.860
in the United States are a modern shorthand for marriage markets. If, if we can't, if we're not
00:28:01.300
creating organized marriage markets, like the LDS church has a bunch more like youth conferences
00:28:06.400
and youth wards, but if you don't have those, or even if you do, I mean, they still rely,
00:28:11.020
the religion essentially still relies heavily on BYU. So college is kind of the modern.
00:28:14.920
Um, yeah, I think this is a really powerful, and I hadn't considered how powerful it is
00:28:19.880
sort of social framing is you should be married by, you know, you're not married, but have a spouse
00:28:26.620
partner lined up by your second year of college. And if you don't, you effed up. And I remember
00:28:35.420
I told you when I met you, I was like, I should have found a wife by now I'm going to grad school
00:28:40.420
so I can find a wife there because I didn't, I didn't nail it the first time.
00:28:47.600
Yeah. Yeah. Are your kids doing this? You, you have one, you just sent the first one to college.
00:28:52.160
Yeah. So I've one who is at a school. It's basically a non-denominational Christian school.
00:28:57.080
I'm not going to say the name, but there are many potential prospects there. It is, it is a school
00:29:02.320
where they, you know, there are, is the ring by spring phenomenon does happen by senior year.
00:29:06.020
Okay. And he's the kind of boy who, you know, on him, it all took. Okay. Like, I don't know,
00:29:11.560
like he's just the kind of guy in all, all the religious indoctrination we did for him. It took
00:29:16.700
great guy. He is extremely devout. He's extremely chaste and he is wants to have, you know, not wait
00:29:26.100
too long. I would never tell a boy, you must be married by this age, like 22. You have to be
00:29:31.900
married by this age. Not at all because it depends on what a million things. Yeah. You need to find
00:29:37.280
the right person. Yeah. But if he did have a serious girlfriend or was thinking about getting
00:29:40.600
engaged in his early twenties, I would just be happy as a clam. So, so I mean, fingers crossed,
00:29:47.780
you know, he's definitely on, we got one, right. Okay. So because I don't understand this,
00:29:53.420
what the hell are you doing living in LA? Yeah, I know really my fault. I didn't choose. I was,
00:30:03.060
I wasn't, I didn't choose it. So my parents are New York immigrants. They immigrated from New York
00:30:07.320
city to Los Angeles, right. When they got married in the seventies in the mid seventies. And so they had
00:30:15.540
us all here. We grew up here. And to this day, you know, my mom is here. My dad is their divorce,
00:30:21.500
but they both live here. My brother and sister, well, at least my brother is still here on my
00:30:26.660
husband's side. He grew up in Santa Monica, right? Five minutes from where I grew up. He was almost
00:30:31.740
the boy next door. His parents are here. He has six siblings. They're all here. Oh, wow.
00:30:36.820
Children are here. So, you know, our Thanksgivings are these like huge family affairs in Santa Monica.
00:30:43.800
And it has always felt like, well, should we get out? Where are we going to go? How are we going to live?
00:30:48.080
Our parents are older. And the other thing is that my husband is sort of like, it's your home.
00:30:52.200
And I, I drive around Malcolm. And I see like on my, just two blocks away, tents, homeless junkies.
00:30:58.180
You see them just like doing drugs right in front of my kids. See this like almost on the way to mass.
00:31:03.560
Oh, there's a guy, you know, ODing on fentanyl. Like we see that every week.
00:31:08.060
And I'm like, we got to get out of here. And my husband's like, you know, I just, to him,
00:31:12.700
California is like his, he's seventh generation. Whoa. Okay.
00:31:18.240
This is my, this is my home. And also his job. It's not really transferable. So we have this
00:31:24.560
thing called like, you know, his income that we, we would, yeah, there's that nice, you know,
00:31:30.680
kind of nice to get an income from the man of the house. If we could pull it off one day,
00:31:35.720
I will get out. The problem for us is like, where do you go? Because you know, the, the,
00:31:41.400
the shit live blue cities tend to have like the best food, the best culture,
00:31:46.540
like things we are having. I'm going to push back here.
00:31:51.900
Simone believed all of this. Simone believed all of this. Simone, do you remember how hard I had to
00:31:56.820
fight to get you to consider to live outside a city? You're in the woods somewhere in Pennsylvania.
00:32:01.180
Yeah. Tell her your experience of moving. Like what, what happened after?
00:32:06.360
It's true. Yeah. We, I was like, I'm never going to live outside a city. The suburbs sounds like the
00:32:11.020
worst thing in the world. Like, why would I ever do that? And now I couldn't imagine doing anything
00:32:16.160
else. The food out here is great. Cost of living is amazing. And also we spend more time socializing
00:32:25.520
Right. Cause you're doing it intentionally. Yeah.
00:32:27.120
Yeah. And we have flexibility. Like, well, we most commonly will do New York or DC because we can
00:32:32.440
drive to either. No one, we were 30 minutes outside Philadelphia, but no one's there. So
00:32:37.560
screw that. But it's. You're selling me. I'm open to it.
00:32:42.660
Hold on. I'll do a better. Simone forgot. So she, the thing she complained about, she's like,
00:32:47.820
what about like getting a haircut or going to a grocery store? And then we get, get out here
00:32:52.760
and she's like, Oh, I can just drive. I feel like we used to walk 20 minutes to the grocery
00:32:58.800
store and then walk back with like bags of groceries. And now we just drive and put it in
00:33:03.260
our trunk. Or she was like, what about the food and what she forgot about. And I think this is what
00:33:08.640
something that a lot of people in cities forget about is different immigrant groups settle in
00:33:13.560
different locations. So for example, if you love Italian food, you're going to get the best Italian
00:33:18.980
food in the center of a city. But if you love Indian food, which is our favorite Indian tie,
00:33:24.420
that sort of stuff, those populations generally settle in the suburbs. And so there is way better,
00:33:31.100
you know, Indian food, sushi, you know, all the types of food that we actually like in our area.
00:33:37.220
And she was a little surprised by this. I will admit, I can't get good rendang out here. Like
00:33:42.240
the Indonesians tend to settle in cities more. But you're telling me, I would be totally open to
00:33:48.880
it. I, it does feel like maybe we're just too old to move. Maybe we'll have to do our,
00:33:53.420
when our kids migrate. Jobs matter. Like cities have jobs. Jobs matter. Yeah. Things that cities
00:34:01.320
have is some jobs you can't leave. Well, and more than that, support networks matter. And when you
00:34:06.540
mentioned the amount of family you both have living close by, when you are raising five kids,
00:34:12.240
having a local family is huge. I'm so jealous. It's been amazing. And all my, and our, and our
00:34:20.240
network of friends, we have a, we had a lot of families leave our school during the, during the
00:34:24.620
pandemic. A lot of people fled to, to Dallas, to Tennessee, to Montana, Idaho. We had a family who
00:34:32.440
moved to Charleston, South Carolina, and actually they just came back. They're returning. They just,
00:34:37.560
they felt like they couldn't replicate the community that they had here, which is, you know,
00:34:42.460
you don't realize that you can't just like pick up a whole set of friends that you've known for 20
00:34:47.420
years and replicate that elsewhere. Although, I mean, a lot of my friends are just like on my
00:34:52.780
computer, you know what I mean? They're just like on the, they're my internet friends. So I don't know
00:34:56.220
how, how, like, I think that would mitigate a lot of that. Like you said, it's okay to go like a couple
00:35:01.640
times a year and go to a party. I don't necessarily need like daily, you know, interactions with like
00:35:06.820
my girlfriends. I'm not that kind of. Do you have like a discord fan group? I have no idea. I'm not
00:35:12.540
on discord. I'm just on, I just basically Twitter is my only social media. Is there a discord? I have
00:35:19.480
no idea. There could be that you don't even know about. My teenager is on discord and he can, maybe he
00:35:24.920
could help me figure that out. I have, I have, I didn't, I know like when we started this channel,
00:35:29.880
I was like discord stupid. I don't like it. I, and then we kept having fans reach out to us and
00:35:35.420
be like, start a discord, start a discord, start a discord. And finally we started one. And now
00:35:40.780
discord is like my favorite social media platform. Cause it's the only one where there's like no
00:35:45.420
toxicity because it's all our fans. So you're just not going to get much toxicity. And when there is,
00:35:50.000
I can choose to ban them. So, you know, I've, I've actually been surprised by, but it sounds like
00:35:56.180
you don't need it because you've got your local community and stuff like that. I mean,
00:35:59.480
this is another thing I wonder that we've been building up is sort of like a community of like
00:36:04.860
influencer friends that like, I want my kids to hang out with their kids, but like, we don't have
00:36:09.380
anything like a genuinely local community. Yeah. And that's, that's, that's not a thing of value
00:36:14.900
to discount at all, especially when you have young kids. Oh yeah. Especially, you know,
00:36:19.300
you completely made the right calculation. Right. To, to misquote Sard's hell is other people's
00:36:26.740
children. A lot of the time. Okay. Because you can do all the indoctrination of your own kids that
00:36:33.140
you want and tell them all the things, the truths that you believe. And then you drop them off for
00:36:37.360
one play date and they're going to come back and they're going to tell you a lot of things that they
00:36:42.800
learned at the friend's house. Cause you didn't know the mom was some kind of like loony, you know,
00:36:48.280
social justice. I, that happened to my daughter. She came back and she knew all the birds and the bees
00:36:53.260
and she was like four. And this mom has like, it was like this new age holistic midwife or whatever.
00:37:01.600
She was a dear, a dear sweet girl, you know, but she had, she had educated my daughter and had never
00:37:07.580
without me having anything to do about it. And I was like, so you know what I'm saying? That,
00:37:13.360
so it's like, it goes both ways, the kids. So you have to be careful who they're.
00:37:18.480
Yeah. That's why I don't let my kids have friends. I, I've been very strict about this as a, as a,
00:37:22.840
as a father and a husband. Yeah. Which is to say people are like, oh, your kids don't have what
00:37:27.720
birthdays. I'm like, no F that like ridiculous. We're going to have a lot of kids. They can celebrate
00:37:33.380
the birth of their next sibling. It happens every year. You know, they need to, they need to calm
00:37:38.580
down with this indulgent stuff. Right. Our friends, like, I don't know, like do our kids,
00:37:44.000
I know they have formed friendships with other kids at their, their stuff, but like, I haven't
00:37:48.300
really tried to foster that. Well, I think that getting, having get togethers with like-minded
00:37:55.300
families who have children roughly your same age is hugely valuable. It's not something that they need
00:38:01.240
to be stuck with them six, seven, eight hours a day. But I think that doing it on a, some kind of
00:38:06.920
basis is, is obviously great. And you know, you never know, you can do a little like early
00:38:11.180
matchmaking. I know that's what we're looking at doing. We've been doing that with our little
00:38:15.520
ones with other like, along techno, technophilic types. Well, a question I have for you though,
00:38:23.000
in terms of raising kids, and this is something that came up at natalism conference last year,
00:38:27.400
is that there were some parents we met who had a lot of kids, raised them in their religion,
00:38:32.960
or at least thought they were doing that and had reached a point at which their kids,
00:38:36.920
were adults. And suddenly we're like, you know what? I'm not in this religion anymore. And like
00:38:41.720
had completely gone mainstream culture, no religion left, very unlikely to get married and have kids,
00:38:48.320
sort of everything was lost. You know, they, and it doesn't really matter from an intergenerational
00:38:53.360
standpoint and how many kids any individual has. It really matters how many grandkids they have and
00:38:57.440
how many grandkids they have. Like that's the sign of success. You've created a thriving human
00:39:01.200
who has been able to create a thriving adulthood and pass it on. Are there, are there things that
00:39:07.320
you tried to do with your kids or that you think went well with your kids? Because I mean, you
00:39:11.760
mentioned, for example, that your son actually is leaning in to religion. He's not like leaning out,
00:39:15.940
which is really exciting to hear. Are there things that you'd recommend people do or things that
00:39:22.040
you've observed over time that you think would help with cultural retention?
00:39:25.420
I think, I think the main thing and the main success stories I've seen with like the young
00:39:30.940
couples who have kind of grown up, like within our little bubble and gotten married early and had
00:39:34.660
their gun and actually gone and had kids like in their early twenties. The main thing is keeping a
00:39:39.920
little bit of a moat around them for as long as possible between them and like, whatever,
00:39:45.640
mainstream culture. So like people saying like, well, they grew up, I raised them religious,
00:39:50.420
then they just fell away. But again, there's a big difference between like being raised
00:39:54.860
religious or being raised like with actual deep faith or with an actual infrastructure,
00:40:01.020
whatever it is, whatever form that is. And being raised to actually cherish things like family,
00:40:06.740
things like, you know, your, your, your kin having a big family. I mean, I think the reason we got into
00:40:13.020
it really was one of the reasons was my husband's oldest of seven kids. And so his mother had this,
00:40:17.840
you know, she was kind of like a boomer kind of lib, but she just loved babies, right?
00:40:22.100
Happened as many as possible. And so just having this like awareness of baby, giving your children
00:40:28.220
awareness of babies are good. Babies won't hold you back. Again, it's countering with,
00:40:32.840
especially with young, young girls that you have messages that they're going to get everywhere else
00:40:37.980
with no babies should not be avoided. Like they're poison. Babies are good things to have one day.
00:40:44.240
You know, you should wait until you are, have a life partner. You should wait, you know, don't do it,
00:40:48.300
but these are a wonderful thing and you should embrace that part of your, your, your biology.
00:40:54.660
This is, it's, it's important to be able to express that in a healthy, good way.
00:40:59.020
And so I think that just countering the culture's messages with your own, like you're a very strong
00:41:03.780
family culture, creating that your own family culture is so important. And again, it comes down
00:41:08.540
to really for kids when they get a little older, they're kind of raising themselves in their peer
00:41:12.560
group, who their peers are, who their peers' parents are. What are they teaching them at the
00:41:16.880
school? Are you homeschooling them? Like where, what are they, what is like the sum total? And I'm
00:41:20.740
going to get a lot of this junk on the internet and my kids are on the internet too. Like they're
00:41:24.700
looking at the stuff that a lot of other kids are looking at, but they've kind of have already
00:41:29.280
these kind of built-in immunities and filters. Like they're not going to be looking at things that
00:41:34.300
are pornographic or things that are blasphemous or things that kind of, you know, go against like they
00:41:38.200
would, they, they like kind of are kind of conditioned to kind of like, Oh, that's not for me,
00:41:43.200
you know? And so just kind of from an early age, giving them the tools to discern, you
00:41:50.000
know, the like good way to live. And there's a bad way to live. This is what's good about
00:41:53.720
our way. And it seems to, so, you know, it's a numbers game, right? You're not going to win
00:41:58.700
them all. There's always going to be, you know, one that gets away. One of the baby turtles
00:42:02.860
gets, you know, eaten by the crabs. Like they're not going to make it to the ocean. That's why
00:42:07.740
the mommy turtle. I'm imagining crabs with like blue hair and, but so you want to have
00:42:13.700
like, what does the turtle have? Like 50 eggs. So, you know, it's a numbers game. So people
00:42:18.380
with one or two kids, you have a very low chance of grandchildren. You know, one could
00:42:23.040
decide never to get married, never to have children. One could choose something else.
00:42:26.840
One could be infertile. One could get sick and die. You don't know what's going to happen
00:42:29.800
with children. With five kids, I feel like I'm likely to, you know, get 10 plus grandchildren,
00:42:37.860
God willing. Oh, absolutely. Well, and the number of kids that you have influences the number of
00:42:41.060
kids your kids have, which I think about these people have two kids. We were like, oh, I want
00:42:45.320
to have one kid. I want to have two kids. How can you talk me into this? Or how can I'm like,
00:42:49.440
it doesn't matter if you have one kid, like your kid's not going to have kids. So we're like,
00:42:53.160
why we're not there. This conversation doesn't matter to me. I want the person who has five kids to
00:42:58.660
have 10 kids. I don't want the person who, who is thinking about one or two kids to have,
00:43:03.600
you know, one additional kid. That's not relevant. Right. So yeah, you're totally right about this.
00:43:09.280
And I, I wonder, yeah, no, I, and I think about it myself. How do I ward off the crabs better?
00:43:18.800
Ward off the crabs. But I love that, you know, it's. People who are intentional about warding off
00:43:23.400
the crabs actually do okay, Simone, but they need to think about it and see it as a real threat.
00:43:29.000
Everyone I know who has their kids taken doesn't really take it as a serious threat.
00:43:34.360
Yeah. They didn't realize that there were seagulls and crabs out there. Instead of just like,
00:43:37.980
yeah, we'll just, you know, go off to the ocean, little one.
00:43:40.260
They were basically like, if they went to church every week, they'd be fine. And I'm like, no,
00:43:46.600
Yeah. And like watching Fox news, that's not going to do it.
00:43:52.340
Subscribing to the daily wire, like that's not going to do it. Like there's, those are fine to do.
00:43:56.220
You can do those things if you want. It's much deeper than that. And a lot of it is why I just
00:44:01.160
saw today, Justin Lee, you know, at first things they've had a big post about young women are
00:44:06.500
leaving the church, Christianity and Catholicism in droves, but young men's numbers are going through
00:44:14.080
And we're seeing this, you know, there's a, you know, the political gender divide, right? Young
00:44:18.840
women are becoming way more liberal than young men. But the church is going like, whoop. Young
00:44:23.740
men are becoming more conservative, but it's also happening in Christianity. Okay. Young men are
00:44:28.160
going to, going to services of all kinds. And young women are like, no, not for me.
00:44:33.920
It's funny. Other religions aren't doing this. So, so in Mormons, it's the men who leave
00:44:39.860
disproportionately in the women who stay in conservative Jewish communities. It's the
00:44:43.840
same. That's so interesting. Why is, I guess, you know, I feel like something about me, things
00:44:49.660
that Catholicism attracts men for the same reason that like some huge proportion of men on Twitter
00:44:54.780
are always thinking about Rome and that for the same reason why like people, women go to Mormonism
00:45:01.200
for the same reason why there are so many female Mormon influencers. Like there's just very
00:45:05.520
different. Hot blondes, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yes. It's just a big houses and Stanley
00:45:12.060
cups. Yeah. Yeah. Like the Mormon pitch, the LDS pitch is like a vibe and a lifestyle. And
00:45:17.200
it's, it's a, and I think the, the, the Catholic pitch is very technical and cerebral and you're
00:45:23.780
just not going to get as many women who are like instantly sold on that, I think, but I'm
00:45:28.600
not sure. I'm hoping, I don't know if you've read about type of sexy, like Twilight, right?
00:45:34.460
No. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like Mormons have like their, their like vampire novel.
00:45:41.000
I get J.D. Vance for Catholics recent, you know,
00:45:45.220
but J.D. Vance is a dude. So there's this, this trend that I read about in the free press where like
00:45:51.360
young Catholic women are starting to wear veils and they're like getting really into it. And it's
00:45:56.580
because they see some Catholic influencer wearing a veil and they're like, what do I have to do to get
00:46:00.840
one of those? Like, is this for a special status? And I'm hoping that maybe there can be some kind
00:46:06.020
of like social media influencer way to get girls into Catholicism. Yeah. I mean, fake it till you
00:46:12.360
make it like that. That will work on that. It works, man. Start with like, you got to get a good
00:46:17.600
fashion hook, you know, and then you're in. I think the veil, the veil could be the fashion hook.
00:46:22.160
Bring back veils. Yeah. Yeah. Make them like trendy and like sponsored by like, you know,
00:46:27.300
I don't know, Vance. Yeah. I mean, I think for men, there's all these great Catholic icons,
00:46:32.080
these like kind of crusaders and knights and, you know, King Arthur, all these Charlemagne and all
00:46:37.740
these incredibly masculine, heroic, chivalric examples. And Catholicism actually does have
00:46:44.880
wonderful female role models and examples. I mean, starting with like the Virgin Mary, right?
00:46:50.320
Yeah. A beautiful ideal and this beautiful icon. And then there's a lot of female,
00:46:54.660
wonderful female saints who are heroic, Joan of Arc and St. Agatha and all these incredible
00:46:58.900
murders. But it is, you know, I think for girls, it feels like, well, okay, well, I'm not a virgin.
00:47:05.300
I don't want to wear like these kind of like robes. Like how do I, where do I fit?
00:47:10.860
It's less relatable for kind of a modern contemporary girl. Yeah. So where does she fit in? And I think
00:47:16.680
there are a lot of Catholic influencers who are kind of like, you know, moms, like mommy blogger types
00:47:22.180
who have conferences and huge fan bases and women fly around to hear them talk. And, you know, I hang,
00:47:28.220
I know a lot of them and they are like on these circuits with like huge rabid audiences, but they're
00:47:32.300
definitely preaching to the choir and they're talking to women, their own age and men. And, and really
00:47:37.860
the last nut to crack, no pun intended is like 20 something young women. Yeah. How to crack that nut.
00:47:45.600
But I swear if you could crack it, you'll, you'll save the world.
00:47:49.740
It was, it was, it was, I think a desirable pool of 20 something young men.
00:47:56.040
Maybe, but they've learned to hate men, I guess. They see men as the enemy, right? So, and I think
00:48:02.200
that that's where a lot of the next generations Catholics are going to come from.
00:48:06.940
Okay. Here's the thing. No, no, no, no, no. You give me an idea just there. So when I was a kid,
00:48:11.720
a family friend of ours was a Carmelite nun, also a Catholic convert, but like very cloistered,
00:48:17.020
very, very conservative. Now she's a mother and she had to deal with in her convent, lots of young
00:48:24.120
women converting to Catholicism and then wanting to become a nun and having to weed a lot of them out
00:48:29.200
because of anxiety disorders and other sort of mental illness adjacent issues, because they're
00:48:34.520
like, oh, this is my great way to like nope out of society. And she's like, no, this is about faith.
00:48:39.820
This is not about like you're good at, I'm wondering if like it basically reforming people
00:48:47.160
like from, I'm not going to like, I'm not saying legitimate mental illness and I'm not saying that
00:48:52.640
mental illness and anxiety problems are illegitimate, but like, I feel as though modern
00:48:57.160
culture has bestowed many young women with mental illness, depression, anxiety problems that actually
00:49:03.360
are more societally generated and not actually endogenous. A lot of it. Yeah. Like, so like
00:49:09.160
grab them in with like the nun mental health, like reform, but then like, just like slide them out of
00:49:16.620
the convent, you know, into a more like hardline religious community. Like they get punked. They
00:49:23.200
get brought in. Yeah. It's like, oh no. Yeah. Like, oh, anxiety problems. What you had joined the
00:49:28.180
convent, cool outfit, you know, makeover. And then like, you know what, actually you could also
00:49:33.000
like, it's also really, you know, you don't have to have the habit. You can have the veil,
00:49:36.900
you know, and then just like, but veils look cuter because there's more lace. I don't know. I'm just
00:49:41.900
trying to figure out some kind of pipeline here. This is great to brainstorm ways to influence,
00:49:46.700
get into their brains. And I mean, nun fashion, Malcolm and I were rating religious fashions the
00:49:51.680
other day. And like Catholic fashion is, is God tier. I mean, just, it's so good.
00:49:58.540
You mean like the clergy wear? Yeah. Yeah. But the problem is it's like rated as the top tier
00:50:04.860
because my complaint was that it was isolated to the clergy and, and that it looks really good.
00:50:10.420
Like classic Catholic priest outfits are really nice looking. Yeah. They're very bold. Yeah. Yeah.
00:50:16.140
They look very authoritative, but still have a degree of austerity to them. They don't look like
00:50:20.800
you're peacocking, like the Orthodox outfit, but they're elegant. They're elegant. Oh, very elegant.
00:50:26.380
But I was like, but then why can't I, as a regular Catholic guy, wear like that cool collar thing?
00:50:31.060
That looks dope. Oh yeah. Yeah. It looks so badass. It does. I've never heard like a secular person say
00:50:36.820
they want to wear the collar, but I mean, or describe it as dope. Yes. Oh my God. No.
00:50:42.740
Trust that guy. I know. No, it doesn't, it look, you're like, you never heard a secular guy say it.
00:50:48.580
Does any other religion regularly appear in like horror movies with a shotgun?
00:50:53.680
Like there is a reason why when you have a priest fighting vampires, he's always dressed
00:51:00.680
like a Catholic priest because the Protestant priests would look ridiculous.
00:51:07.340
The youth, the Christian youth pastor and his like short jorts, his cargo shorts would look ridiculous.
00:51:24.180
But he's good aesthetics, you know, he's really good aesthetics. And I mean, look, one of the reasons
00:51:31.160
I think I first did become Catholic is because I was an art history minor in college because I loved,
00:51:36.320
you know, going to Europe and I was lucky enough to go and like, you know, I went on like the,
00:51:40.620
the pilgrimage route across Northern Spain and I got to see all of it in Paris. And so I spent a lot
00:51:48.380
Oh yeah. Catholicism carries European art history. I mean, it's doing all the work. Yeah.
00:51:53.760
I was like, okay, whatever this is, this is awesome. Like, yeah, I'm down like Notre Dame,
00:51:58.200
like gargoyles, like, right. But then you go to like my, okay, I'm here, I'm going to join the
00:52:06.060
church in the San Fernando Valley in LA. And you look at the church, it's like, it's like puke pink
00:52:11.560
1964 monstrosity. Most hideous, linoleum, you know, and that's where you have to go to mass
00:52:20.240
every day. So like, yeah, no wonder young women who are like into aesthetics. Yeah. No interest.
00:52:27.520
Yeah. No, there's nothing gross like motel. Yeah. No, that's a big thing is in your local
00:52:35.460
Baptist church. Well, I mean, there's that, but that's a key thing about Catholicism and we with
00:52:41.600
our, you know, weird self-invented religion are really against idolatry and making things pretty,
00:52:48.060
but like Catholicism nails that and has used it for a very long time to, to, to communicate the
00:52:54.120
wonder of God, to really, you know, explain to you sort of like, this is a humbling and amazing
00:52:58.680
thing. And yet like the church has kind of dropped it to a great extent. Like it used to use the
00:53:04.700
aesthetics to communicate. This is a big deal. And to help you get into that mode. Why is it being
00:53:09.800
dropped? It's like now when everyone else has figured out how to use looks. Simone, there's a
00:53:14.700
documentary called the last cathedral about building the DC cathedral.
00:53:18.760
Cathedral is basically impossible to build anymore. Right. That was the last one. Yeah.
00:53:23.020
Well, but like, it doesn't have to be a cathedral. It could just be amazing fashion. It could just be
00:53:28.860
whatever. It's going to be one more. Antonio Gaudi. Cathedral. It's in the process of being built.
00:53:34.200
Not a fan. The one in Barcelona? What do you mean? Yeah. It's not finished yet.
00:53:38.660
Right. It's been going on for 80, 100 years. Well, maybe someone will accidentally burn it to
00:53:45.700
the ground. I hate it. I like it. I've been there. I like it. I actually like it. Yeah. I thought it
00:53:51.880
was pretty cool. That man could be eaten alive by a duck. I'll just bring him back to life. I don't
00:53:57.900
care. I'm not down with him, really. Before we leave, we got to talk about your next media empire.
00:54:06.220
What is it? Okay. So I haven't really sort of officially announced it, but I posted a little
00:54:12.360
bit about this on X earlier this year. One of the things I'd love to do after I save the culture and
00:54:19.140
like, you know, destroy femininity and smash, smash femininity. Yeah. I mean, feminism, sorry.
00:54:24.880
Women. Don't say femininity. I meant, I meant feminism. Okay. Smash the matriarch. You know,
00:54:30.480
they already did that. So what I want to do is I want to retake the culture on the, not the other
00:54:36.120
form of culture, which is, you know, entertainment, media, movies, shows, all this stuff, which as you
00:54:42.600
know, like people like me, like really, you know, we don't see ourselves represented on TV and I'm not
00:54:48.320
talking about a, this is not a Christian. So I started a media company. We're going to be
00:54:51.520
developing creative development for ideas that appeal to like people like me, but also kind of
00:54:57.900
a larger general audience. There's half the country that like, isn't into a lot of the slop on Netflix
00:55:04.080
or Amazon prime. They're not into, they're sick of, you know, the, the, the intro doc indoctrination.
00:55:09.780
Right. But also I don't want more Christian and Catholic content. That's like being handled.
00:55:16.800
A lot of it's being handled kind of badly. There's a couple interesting things. We want
00:55:22.760
to just do like good, fun, engaging stuff, whatever that, whatever form that is. And it's
00:55:29.220
like political and it's only, it's only really political because it is a political. So that
00:55:33.360
in itself now is a big political statement. If you're not having race quotas or Bechtel tests
00:55:38.780
or no woke messaging, you know, you're not celebrating any kind of like liberal tropes.
00:55:44.180
That's very kind of radical, but we haven't, we're not that far from that. That's what it
00:55:48.500
used to be. It's like old fashioned masculinity, old fashioned romance. Like, is that okay?
00:55:54.200
Like, I don't know. Like this sounds really good to me.
00:55:57.020
The nuclear family. Okay. Is that allowed anymore? Like, I don't know. Let's see.
00:56:00.840
So, but also just like fun stuff, maybe some experimental stuff that's edgy too,
00:56:04.560
for like all the weirdos that I'm friends with. So yeah, there'll be more announcements about
00:56:09.920
that in the, in the new year. I am excited for this idea. Let us know where we can help.
00:56:15.360
You know, we have a documentary that we've been meaning to make that keeps getting canceled
00:56:18.360
by the mainstream. You know, we get approval from the, the creatives like HBO. We got approvals
00:56:23.040
from the creatives at Netflix, but it got killed by the, their legal teams.
00:56:29.140
They said we're too controversial. So we'll see.
00:56:33.560
Right. I think that makes it all the more juicy and profitable, frankly.
00:56:41.220
Controversy sells. That's actually the last like speed run question I wanted to ask you
00:56:45.660
because you have a lot of hot takes, you know, on X. What, what would you say is either the most
00:56:54.820
surprising or most distinct and notable thing that you just got dogpiled for on X?
00:57:00.960
Wow. I blocked a lot of people. So if I'd be a dogpiled, I probably don't know. I got a lot of
00:57:07.020
heat for coming out a while early this year and saying that actually, no, Taylor Swift and Travis
00:57:13.980
Kelsey probably are in a real relationship. So a lot of the guys on the right were like,
00:57:18.160
how could you? No, they're not. It's all a sigh up. You're foolish.
00:57:21.940
Oh, I saw that take. I watched you make that take on an episode. I was like, oh, she's,
00:57:26.960
Well, I think they are, they were actually in, I don't know what they are now, but I mean,
00:57:31.900
they're, they were doing stuff together with each other. That was, that seemed certain to me.
00:57:36.760
Maybe it was all fake. I don't know, but I got a heat from the right from guys on the right. We're
00:57:40.940
like, you bought into that sigh off. I was like, I did. I, I don't know. We'll see.
00:57:46.180
Your argument, as I remember was that, well, Taylor Swift songs are all about, you know,
00:57:51.740
being like a cis straight woman pining after a man and hoping to find a good man. Is it insane
00:57:58.560
that she would find one? It's not like she really was able to boost her own image from any sort of
00:58:03.380
relationship. So even if they were paying her a lot, she already has enough money. It seems
00:58:08.380
right. What other reason would she, she doesn't need the money.
00:58:10.860
Like, and people would be like, oh, well, she might still do it for the money, but it's like,
00:58:14.500
yeah, but it would have delayed her possibility of finding a real man to marry. And she's kind of
00:58:20.360
old at this point. I mean, look, it could be that he has a sort of beard for her. Not that she's a
00:58:25.780
lesbian, but that she's kind of like, just, she's so married to herself, to her brand.
00:58:31.320
Kind of like no man can ever be in a normal relationship with her, but they needed to have,
00:58:37.040
give her a boyfriend just to make her seem like, you know, a normal romantic girl. Maybe that I
00:58:43.140
could buy a little bit, but I don't buy that. It was like a Pfizer branded, you know, like people
00:58:49.160
were saying that to me and I was like, I don't think so. You guys what's in panic mode. Now she
00:58:54.120
needs to find a husband. She, she's, you know, she is, she's not going to, this, this brand is not
00:59:00.380
going to look good if she gets much older and is still single. Yeah. It's hard to pull off the like
00:59:05.320
spangly body suits when you're, you know, in 10 years, like, believe me, I'm not walking around
00:59:11.740
in that stuff. I don't know, man. You just, you have to do a Hillary Clinton and you switch to the
00:59:16.960
like Kim Jong Il pantsuit. That is, that is the transition. I also watch she goes out on stage and
00:59:23.380
she's like, attention, I will now sing my song about conformity and cats. Yeah. Enjoy. It will be fine.
00:59:32.580
There will be a large enough demographic for her. I have faith, but yeah, the most heat I get is when
00:59:39.040
I like step outside the like received wisdom of like, you know, the dissident, right? That's what
00:59:43.520
I really, yeah. That's so interesting. I mean, you know, there that's, that's actually something we
00:59:48.780
really like about the dissident, right? Those that there are so many heterodox takes that you get that
00:59:54.120
a lot. And even though a lot of people have a ton of butt hurt when people deviate from, you know,
00:59:59.520
the, the typical accepted wisdom, it still happens a ton and it doesn't feel like the same,
01:00:05.080
like towing a party line thing that you get from Fox news or they're not going to, they're not going
01:00:09.760
to cancel you. They're not going to do exactly. Yeah. They might give you some shit and a group
01:00:13.800
chat, but that's it. Exactly. I love it. It's, it's great. Well, and I think that's, that's what
01:00:17.980
builds resilience and good, good takes from people is when they get pushed back. When you don't get
01:00:24.140
pushed back, it just gets so boring. And that's why I think so many, like white blue sky, for example,
01:00:28.200
people in Mastodon just kind of suck because it's not fun when people don't get pushed back.
01:00:33.980
I love that the left keeps thinking that like, they're going to take off.
01:00:44.900
Peachy, thank you so much for joining base camp. This was amazing. I'm really looking forward to,
01:00:50.320
I think you're launching a media empire at exactly the right time with AI on the rise. Cause you have
01:00:54.920
like, you can do it in a lean way and you're also, you know, this is maybe the one reason why it's
01:00:59.660
okay that you're in Southern California, right? You need to be in that. Right. I hear I might as
01:01:04.000
well take over Hollywood. Yeah. Do it. Yes. We need it. Cool. Well, thank you again. And everyone
01:01:10.800
don't forget to check out peachy keenan.com and keenan peachy on X. Definitely. Thank you guys so
01:01:16.980
much. Have a good one. Okay. And recording. Oh, that was so fun. Uh, do be snappy with the intro
01:01:23.900
because we want to be tighter about those. And then I am going to, uh, well, we've been really
01:01:29.040
growing quickly recently and I want to keep it up. Like, all right. Yeah. Peachy, you're actually
01:01:32.660
joining us at a really good time. Like you're not wasting your time now. Now you're not wasting your
01:01:37.840
time now. Had you come before? Well, I was never thinking I would be wasting my time, but that's
01:01:42.120
awesome. I'm happy you guys are doing great. When we first scheduled, uh, we were probably at
01:01:46.560
maybe a third of you count of an average video that we are today. Wow. Um, so yeah, anyway,
01:01:52.440
Simone, I will let you go. Remember to start with a big hello. Okay. Okay. Yes. This is the signature