We’re still trying to work out what way of life, breadwinning, and procurement does make sense in our age (we don’t think the a…

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In this weekend, paid-subscribers-only episode of Based Camp, we discuss the strategic and tactical value and purpose of celebrations, prompted to do so by the online feathers being ruffled by the 40th “wedding” birthday of online influencer Brittany Allyn (and the New York Times Style assertion that wedding-style birthdays for unmarried women are on the rise).

The culture crafters of the Based Camp community have floored us with their really cool bespoke holidays and celebrations (and modifications of traditional and historical holidays). Please continue to share your holiday styles with us and don’t be shy with your episode suggestions; we love them and are putting them to work!

Show Notes

Brittany Allyn, content creator, recently celebrated a destination wedding in a historic house in the English countryside with multiple dress changes, extended events, speeches, “something borrowed,” etc.—except it wasn’t a wedding. It was a 40th birthday.

• On Instagram, she talked about hosting “a wedding birthday”

  • and being the first person in a house’s 300 year history to rent it out for HERSELF and celebrated HERSELF and paid for it HERSELF

  • “And I just want you to celebrate you, and not wait for a partner or any reason”

• Never married; no kids, content creator

  • So in defense, this was largely for views, too

  • Insta reel of her party:

• • Her Insta in general: https://www.instagram.com/brittanyallyn/

• That said, hosting wedding-style birthdays is somewhat trending—enough so that the New York Times covered it

This is an opportunity for anyone who thoughtfully constructs culture to revisit the concept of weddings, birthdays, and all parties to think through celebration strategy:

• What weddings, birthdays, milestone celebrations, and other parties are for

• How to decide what parties are appropriate for one’s values

• Because ultimately, parties are tactical

• And it’s a problem that most parties are performative—people just hosting them “because that’s what you do” and not realizing what they’re actually for

NYT Style Covering the Wedding Birthday Trend

The NYT covered it and the broader concept in: A Wedding Weekend, No Spouse Required: For some single women, milestone birthday parties offer the celebratory feel of a wedding, without the marriage.

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On today’s weekend Based Camp episode for VIPs, …

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Are you prepared?

Whether you are or aren’t, we’re grateful to you for your support, tips, and episode (this episode is a product of them, so keep those fascinating links coming!).

Show Notes

The Los Angeles Times recently reported on an incident that suggests foreign Chinese nationals are developing bioweapons on US soil.

According to the article:

• A code enforcement officer named Jesalyn Harper discovered a clandestine biolab in a Reedley, CA, warehouse containing dangerous pathogens including HIV, malaria, COVID-19 and Ebola.

• The facility was allegedly operated by a Chinese national involved in smuggling counterfeit COVID tests while receiving millions in unexplained payments from China.

• A congressional investigation revealed critical gaps in U.S. regulations governing unlicensed biolabs, raising major national security and public health concerns.

The Chinese national running this lab had a second lab in Las Vegas, too. This is just one guy who was caught. We have no way of knowing how many active biolabs are operating undetected or were discovered but are under closed investigation.

And these are just the biolabs incidents. Scientists are also going missing. Journalists at The Daily Mail are pointing to a series of missing and dead scientists, each tied in some way to sensitive U.S. scientific or defense research.

What is going on with these Chinese labs?

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Specifically, Malcolm posits that first-wave feminism was not a neutral push for fairness but an antagonistic ideology that cast men as deliberate oppressors, promoted female moral supremacy, and attacked Christian authority, especially the Bible, using leaders’ own writings (e.g., Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Victoria Woodhull) as evidence.

Now that we reflect back on this episode, we realize that there are more than a few other movements that were interest group supremacy movements disguised as movements championing equality and the elimination of victimizing dynamics. Yikes.

We are profoundly grateful for your continued support, great ideas, fantastic conversation, and insights! Hope you’re having a great weekend. :)

Episode Transcript

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As of 2025, commercial real estate in the USA was dominated by service-oriented tenants (gyms, urgent care clinics, etc.), who, for the first time, supplante…

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We discuss why AI encourages divorce more than it encourages working through marriage problems and how toxic training data shapes the advice people are given by their LLM advisors, plus whether we think, despite training-data-driven risks, we think LLM advisors and therapists are better than average human therapists.

As a reminder, we have a monthly hangout tomorrow for top-tier paid subscribers (we look forward to seeing you!). We’d also love your feedback on which of the following potential episode topics we should prioritize outlining and recording this coming week (we’ve got some starting ideas for these, but haven’t finished the outline and are not sure where to start.

Which of these topics would you like to see covered first?

• Exploring Research that Testosterone Turns Men Conservative

• The Catholic Integralists are Coming for America

• Is Gifted Education a CIA Plot, Special Ed, or Both?

• What Naming Conventions Reveal about Cultural Values

• The Economics of the Tradwife

• What is Money??? HAS FIAT CURRENCY CEASED TO MAKE SENSE???

• USA press freedom in crisis and the hidden forces shaping information

• The Connection Between Hallucination and Being Agreeable

• The Damage Done by Kinsey

Would love your input!

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We’ve seen some evidence that the concept (and even the term) is catching on among young people—something we find to be incredibly promising, as we’re already seeing signs of early-onset dementia and cognitive decline in people of all ages who have developed over reliance on AI and frictionless living. That said, Malcolm bristles at the idea of adding friction back into one’s life for friction’s sake and makes a strong argument in favor of eliminating all unnecessary friction in life.

In place of performative friction-maxxing, Malcolm highlights a much more important underlying principle that will stave off mental and physical decline and cultivate strength: Intentionally thinking through what has inherent value and dedicating one’s life to maximizing it. He argues that so long as you have an objective function, you will constantly lean into challenges, push yourself harder, and have the drive to do hard things in a manner that both makes you stronger, happier, and healthier and makes your life impactful, meaningful, and virtuous.

To paid Based Camp subscribers, we offer free copies of The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, a book we wrote almost ten years ago to provide a jumping off point for people trying

For convenience, here are the download links:

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Heads up for our VIP subscribers whose tier includes monthly hangouts: In addition to this month’s monthly live hangout, we’re doing a bonus hangout this Tuesday. Please note that a production crew will be present while we are hosting the hangout and filming for a documentary we are participating in for a major television/streaming network. We want to let you know that by attending this hangout, you will be consenting to being photographed and recorded in connection with this film. ONLY JOIN THIS IF YOU WANT TO POTENTIALLY END UP IN THE DOCUMENTARY—our normally scheduled Hangout will not be filmed, so you’re not missing out if you don’t want any involvement in this. Please let us know if you have any questions.

Also, keep in mind that you can just log on with an anonymous name and with your camera turned off. :)

On your episode suggestions: We’ve been receiving some great episode suggestions from paid subscribers and want to thank you for them! While we expected to run most suggestion-driven podcasts on weekends, most of them are running on our main channel because they’re not just fantastic, but also topics that (1) we can safely discuss on YouTube and (2) we think will interest broader audiences. Keep the great ideas coming, and thanks for sharing your intellectual musings with us.

Episode Transcript

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For those uninitiated, Aria Schrecker (formerly Babu) is a pronatalist expert in UK policy and all-around powerhouse of a human who serves as an Editor at Works in Progress. You can find her on X @Aria_Babu.

Please keep your excellent episode suggestions coming and thanks for your patience as we unbury ourselves from sickness-related backlog.

Episode Transcript

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You can review the plan here (just use Google Translate), but major themes involve educating young women about their fertility windows, troubleshooting fertility issues early on, and investing in egg freezing infrastructure. Largely speaking, France acknowledges that the major driver of dropping fertility in developed countries is a drop in very young pregnancies and a rise in people starting families later, and with that knowledge in hand, they’re working to narrow the gap between people’s desired number of children and actual number of children (resulting from starting too late and encountering fertility problems).

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Long story short, a young Catholic woman who…

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Malcolm includes some photos from our past outfits in the video portion of this, but if you’d like to quickly see how we dressed differently in the past, scrolling reeeeeal fast down our Instagram history shows you the gist.

How do YOU approach your fashion choices beyond mere practicality and comfort? We’re curious to know.

Also feel free to share any subjects you think we should cover in future episodes!

Thanks so much for your continued support (and just for being awesome, clever people who keep sending us fascinating insights, info, and ideas). Happy weekend!

Episode Transcript

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Thankfully, Based Camp has its own VIP section for more... experimental or liable-to-fall-flat-but-still-possibly-actually-interesting-to-people episodes. This, friends, is one of those episodes.

If you don’t care to hear me out, the big message with this conversation is: What you wear should be an informed, tactical choice optimized around not just comfort, attractiveness, and utility, but also shifting external perception of you in a manner that is beneficial.

Episode Notes

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You know what we also love? Dialog with you. Please keep your great topic suggestions coming!

Episode Notes

I saw a hysterical headline on Drudge Report: “HERITAGE ‘marriage camps’ spark outcry…:

And clicked through to a USA Today article by Kate Perez, in which she writes:

• “Social media users are denouncing the idea of “marriage bootcamps” as “ridiculous” and “demographic control” online after an unadopted policy plan from the conservative think tank that helped create Project 2025 proposed the camps as a way to boost birthrates.”

• This turned out to be clickbait; Perez clarifies way further down in the article:

  • “The report also floated the idea of “marriage bootcamps” that aim to cover topics like communication, money management and conflict resolution for “cohabiting couples with children.” The successful completion of the program would conclude with couples “ready to walk down the aisle at a communal wedding,” the report states, and a potential $5,000 monetary incentive − funded by foundations or private donors − for couples to get married. Additionally, newlyweds would leave with a mentor couple to guide them through marriage following the wedding.”

  • So this is UTTERLY innocuous

But what if we were to actually create marriage bootcamps—or better yet, the Hunger Games, but for marriage? Would people voluntarily sign up?

People are getting desperate for solutions to dating that actually work to the extent that people are doing bits online where they pretend to be setting up random young men and women in grocery stores:

That clip was sent to us from Based Camper Andrew, who “saw this short and the comment on it “Bro is fixing population decline by himself”” and thought of us.

He asked: “What do you think of “cupid agents”, sponsored by either non-profits or the government to basically solve for modern men’s lack of approach experience and their approach anxiety? I know we have no real sample size to see how this works, but maybe it would bridge the discrepancy between someone’s stated preferences (e.g.: 6 6s) versus what they would actually be willing to lay-with, date, marry, whatever if that person is more-or-less “in their lap”.”

So I thought it would be fun to spitball some ideas on this front.

Some ideas:

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In this paid-subscribers-only episode, we discuss:

• What we know of actual CIA asset handling

• Modern propaganda tactics and how they don’t typically involve direct engagement with content creators

• Signs that someone is an asset of an undisclosed government agency, be if foreign or domestic

• Whether we may be involved in any indirect propaganda-driven signal boosting (we aren’t being directly supported/influenced/paid by anyone THOUGH ISN’T THAT EXACTLY WHAT WE WOULD SAY IF WE WERE???)

• What we would be used to do by a third party that found us useful in fulfilling an agenda

If you have ever suspected we’re pushing the agenda of some third-party organization, what organization do you suspect? What do you think our mission might be? Asking… for a friend (just kidding OR ARE WE?).

This episode is thanks to a paid subscriber suggestion (not sure if we’re OK attributing, but you know who you are, and please know we appreciate your delightful suggestions!). Keep those great ideas coming, everyone!

Episode Transcript

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Currently Favorite Substacks

• Astral Codex Ten: Obviously. (When Simone can’t read everything, she certainly won’t miss the link roundups).

• Knowingless: Aella is the best. Great writing, great research.

• Aporia Magazine: Interesting through spicy.

• Axis of Ordinary | Alexander Kruel: Great link roundups.

• Cremieux Recueil: Interesting analysis of research and other things.

Malcolm’s Recommended YouTube channels:

• Leaflit & Asari: Authentic and delightful commentary and annotation on current events.

• Shoe0nHead (Simone loves too): Who Malcolm describes as closest to our channel in format).

• STRANGE ÆONS (Simone loves this channel too): Fun internet histories.

• Nuxanor (Simone concurs): News commentary.

• Kirsche: More news commentary from a vtuber who Anna Valens attempted to cancel.

• ADVChina (SC loved too) & the various offshoots like laowhy86: Go to their ooooold motorcycle series, before they left China. Provided great insights into what it was like to live in China.

• Clownfish TV: Another married couple doing news commentary!

• The Why Files: Not sure if Malcolm recommended when recording, but he clued me (Simone) into the channel and it presents excellent conspiracy theory/paranormal overviews.

• BaronVonGames: Videos on games.

• Danny Gonzalez: Low-stress humor.

• The Lore Lodge: Mythology and folklore (local to our area, based on Phoenixville!)

Simone’s Recommended YouTube channels:

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