Do People Really Become More Conservative As They Age?

Analyzing common claims that people grow more conservative over time, we find political attitudes largely persist across life stages. However, when folks shift ideologies, it trends from progressive to conservative rather than vice versa. We argue this reflects both individual agency and systemic youth indoctrination, making today’s brainwashed generations potentially unrecoverable.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Gen Alpha is remarkably conservative in a lot of their views. Not old timey conservative. They're more conservative, like this channel's conservative.

I would say, like, they're, they're pretty, like, politically aligned. When I talk to gen alpha, like, broadly, they're just, like, super politically aligned with us. But it's going to require a hard victory by you know, the Republican side and some significant voting and voter reform after that victory that prevents the type of shenanigans we keep seeing by the quote unquote elite in our society.

Simone Collins: Which is unlikely.

Malcolm Collins: I don't think it's that unlikely. I think it could happen. Yeah, I think that they consistently overplay their hand. I think that they were so happy with how the overplay went during the COVID situation. We might see something else like that in the near future over something more trivial.

And the question is, is how far do they need to go before the general public wakes up? And keep in mind that the demographics are not in their best interest.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: It's very good. Low stress watching, [00:01:00] although it's really hard to Danny Gonzales

Malcolm Collins: is a fantastic I, I really took him as an inspiration when we started this channel as part of like, the character I wanted to do, you know, very You're not at all like

Simone Collins: Danny Gonzales, but I, I mean, I love you way more, but I don't I mean, Danny's He has

Malcolm Collins: a sort of wholesome, family friendly vibe, but put on top of controversial content for us, and instead of

Simone Collins: Right.

Yeah. Like when he covered the tour of that house that had like the weird like sex dungeon, and

Malcolm Collins: I mean, the problem is like conservative intellectual content is so much of it is either like, you know, daddy, daddy figures, you know, like you're

Simone Collins: like Jordan Peterson, your bed, et cetera,

Malcolm Collins: you know, muscle bros or like angry bros.

And there's not a lot of

Simone Collins: a lot of in between.

Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, I don't feel like there's a lot of people who it's really easy to emotionally connect with.

Simone Collins: Well, here's the thing is ever since there was, there was a bit of a golden age of this, I think with like the early days of the daily show. And people like, who's that super flamboyant [00:02:00] conservative speaker with the hair, Milo, Milo Yiannopoulos.

Yeah. Like those were examples of people on each side of the political divide that didn't take themselves that seriously. And I think that's another thing that I really miss a lot is like, can we just

Malcolm Collins: stop taking everything so seriously? No, it is true actually. Yeah. Nobody really takes their thing as, as a, like a bit.

Anymore, you know, or

Simone Collins: now it's all my brand, but not even ironically, more just like actual, like spurging out about their big style. I don't care.

Malcolm Collins: No, I mean, it's something that we need to consider in terms of How we're doing videos because we do a juggling of different topic varieties in a way that you know, typically if you wanted to do like traditional YouTube, like if we were just trying to play the algorithm, what we would do is just one category of video.

And instead we try to keep like a menu of, of categories [00:03:00] specifically sex, politics and religion. Yeah. And, you know, a lot of times when somebody is interested in one of these domains with this battering of like AI safety stuff and general science stuff but when somebody is interested in one of these topics, they're often not interested in in other of those topics, right?

Which it can hurt your videos click through rate, which can hurt the way people interact with your videos. Obviously we do a lot of perennial stuff as well. And like the strategies I can use to get around that is like one of the strategy that I've been doing with the tracks, which is because they're so different from our other content is to visually differentiate the thumbnails so that when people are looking at the content we're putting out, they can immediately tell I've actually thought about changing the the white.

Bottom left corner on the thumbnails to be different colors, depending on the topic that we're talking about. Yeah. But well, it would be

Simone Collins: how many's a little, I mean like, yeah, let's, I mean maybe like a color coding. We realize while is a little, little much, but making the tracks [00:04:00] look very different, at least would be good.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that's the goal. So we'll see if it works. But anyway this topic is an interesting one today which you have mentioned in other videos and you've mentioned this when we've been talking and I have, I had to correct you multiple times because it hasn't sunk in is you have the notion that people become more conservative as they age.

Right. You know, there's a famous quote that is misattributed to Winston Churchill. That it's something like,

if I meet a young man who's not a liberal, I think he has no heart, and if I eat an old man who's not a conservative, I think he has no brain, or something like that. If I eat an old man. But, did you get a chance to look at the research on this before jumping in?

Simone Collins: I did. And I didn't want more than that, which was, I consulted illicit. org, my favorite place to get summaries of studies in a nice digestible format to see what they [00:05:00] pulled up because illicit uses AI to essentially do a meta study for you, and then it will give you like a paragraph summing up the issue.

And then it will. Link to the studies that it cites and give you, you can actually select columns. I'm like, okay, well, what is their conclusion? And then what was the intervention tried? Like, it's just, just plugging it here, guys. I love it. It is not 100 percent free anymore. You have to pay for like cool features now.

And I think there's a limited number of searches, but I still love it. So I have my, my own little research here, but I am so glad to talk about this. Cause yeah, I really was under that impression. I think a lot of it came down to this one completely anecdotal, but still formative experience in high school where a substitute teacher in Mrs.

Walsh's biology class who I just hated. He, he imagined the comic book guy from the Simpsons. Yeah. But he's a substitute teacher. And I don't know what I had said to him, but he'd said something like, oh yeah, you're idealistic now, [00:06:00] but then you'll discover later. And you're, you know, you'll come to your senses.

And I remember thinking like. F**k you. I'm never going to let go of my idealistic anything now because you said that and I hate your face and like, you know, I just wouldn't let it go. Is this person a

Malcolm Collins: conservative? Like what did you told them?

Simone Collins: I honestly have no idea what I told them.