Taking "Degrowth" Seriously: What is the Actual Ideology/Logic of Those Who Want to Shrink the World?

Join Malcolm and Simone Collins as they dive deep into the philosophy and policies of groups advocating for global population reduction. This episode explores the arguments, motivations, and potential consequences of “degrowth” movements, including controversial proposals for family planning, technocratic governance, and the future of human flourishing. The hosts critically examine the data, challenge utopian and dystopian visions, and discuss the real-world implications for society, technology, and culture. Whether you’re curious about demographic trends, environmental debates, or the ethics of population control, this conversation will challenge your assumptions and spark new questions. Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be discussing the philosophy of the people who are aware that demographic collapse is happening. The, you know, broadly saying, aware of its consequences, but want to facilitate its continued existence and how they think that this is gonna work out. Okay. Because I’ve, I’ve heard of these people, you know, the, the degrowth people, right. The well we can manage, like, we can make things better with an older population in everything like that. Simone Collins: And like, this is good. I’m just picturing the dog in the fire ridden building. Malcolm Collins: Yes. This is fine. Yeah, I kind of blew this off. But we haven’t, well maybe they’re onto Simone Collins: something. What if we’re wrong? If we’re wrong, we wanna be corrected. Right? Yeah. Malcolm Collins: Reach out to us that has these beliefs. Mm-hmm. And they were very nice. And they sent us to their website. And this group is called the O-V-O-L-P-E Foundation. Hmm. Overlap. I, I don’t know how to pronounce it. And they do a lot of work on trying to get girls to have a fewer kids. [00:01:00] I, I will say that normally I wouldn’t care about this work, but guess what country they, they do this work in most. Simone Collins: Ah, Malcolm Collins: Thailand. Do you know what Thailand’s TFR is? It’s round one. This work is genocidal at that rate. That means the population is halfing every generation. That’s one of the lowest, like the the going to their approach. Wouldn’t Simone Collins: they wanna do this in like a really high fertility country? I mean, yeah, they do do it in, Malcolm Collins: One other country. I wanna say tan Tanzania, which is higher fertility, like 4.5. And so that’s, that’s reasonable there. But in Thailand, I’m like, if there’s any country where you don’t wanna be doing this, that’s like doing it in Korea or something. Keep in mind, Thailand’s fertility rate is one, and Korea is like, the lowest on Earth is like 0.75. Yeah. So this is close to the lowest fertility rate on earth. Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean at that point it’s, it’s already happened. You don’t have to worry about it. You Yeah. You don’t have to worry places that are involved. 2.1 at least Malcolm Collins: kicking a dead dog at this point. We should ask them about that. I wanna to go into their own words. Okay. Both [00:02:00] from the chain of emails they sent us and from their website so we can understand how they wanna structure society. And I’ll start with just sort of the wider plan here which we won’t talk about too much, but it’ll give you an idea of where we’re gonna be going with this conversation. Okay. The goal here is on one hand, the wellbeing of children, including the widespread good education, and on the other hand, equal opportunities and prosperity for all citizens of the world. The key message here as follows, fundamental right to one child per couple. This child will be supported through compulsory education, medical care, nutrition, and if necessary, financial assistance from the global community, at least until UNESCO ISCD level two or possibly level three registration with the child protection Authority. The CPA is mandatory. A second child is subject to conditions. Both parents must demonstrate and be able to independently financially support both children up to employability. Approval by the CPA is required for the third child onwards. Additional [00:03:00] requirements applied in addition to the requirement for approval. Progressive child tax policies are levied. So basically the more kids you have, the more you have to pay in taxes rather than the less. And then they go on to say in this section, this is to ensure that school attendance by less privileged children is refinanced by child taxes, by wealthier families. Presumably it would be the wealthier families who are allowed to have far more children. Right? So it’s like wealthy people can have, you could hear these like elements of ness to this, right? A, a dictatorial world government where only the wealthy can have more than two children, or really more than one child. Yeah. It seems Simone Collins: like many sci-fi dystopias where you, you have, you can’t afford to pay the government credits to have an additional child or whatever. But, Malcolm Collins: but I, but what I’m saying here is this isn’t. Token wokeness, right? Like this is, yeah, no, Simone Collins: no, no. They’re, they’re doing stuff that people would see as, as quite controversial because they believe it’s the optimal way to go, which I appreciate. Malcolm Collins: So, to continue here, this could also counteract current problems such as hunger, disease, and child labor. I realize [00:04:00] the global implementation of such a regulatory system is still utopian at the moment. I love, he uses the word utopian, where even with me, when I describe my utopians, I at least realize that to the average person, they sound dystopian. And I would guess that to your average person, this would sound extremely dystopian, right? Like, that’s not just me. You, you, you have a better ability to emulate Normies. Normies would see this as dystopian, right? The, the CPA, which monitors all children worldwide. Normies would Simone Collins: absolutely see this as dystopian. Malcolm Collins: Okay? But democracy, healthcare, computers and cell phones were also utopian not so long ago, and unfortunately still are for many people in the world today. So I’m starting with that because I think that, that this gives you an idea of the type of world structure that they’re gonna be imagining here. It, like, he seems to indicate that he sees democracy as a good thing but it’s also pretty clear that this type of world structure is meant to operate under a global technocracy closer to the UN or the eu where you have some, you know, token demographic democratic [00:05:00] elements, but they don’t really determine who’s running things. That’s more a technocratic element. And we can talk about the benefits of that kind of system later. But, but that’s, that seems to be what they’re presupposing here. And I’d also point out with a system like this they, you know, our fans who are like, are aware of falling fertility rates and everything like that. They can laugh at this when they hear it and be like, what an evil system is that? But I’d point out that we could be living in a reality. We’re such a system as this was necessary. There absolutely is a, like, honestly, even if I, if I lived in like the seventies or something right? And I was just looking at global fertility trends, I was looking at global populations. Mm-hmm. And you were like, what are you gonna do about it? And my response would probably be like, well, I don’t wanna talk about this publicly, like right now, because it would be very offensive, but we probably need to do some sort of restriction eventually. Like, this doesn’t seem [00:06:00] mathematically realistic forever. And the consequences of this could be staggering. Right. And even, even outside of that, even if you’re like, well, in the seventies you still should have known a population collapse was coming. Imagine we’re on like a spaceship or something, right? Like, like feasibly Earth might have like limited resources, right? Right. Like feasibly, right? And, and so there’s like a point on the spaceship where, you know, everyone’s having too many kids and you as the captain have to like, come in and say, okay, but we like this. We don’t have the food or the oxygen for this anymore, right? So, I’m just gonna cut oxygen Russians to like sector C for this week and we can repopulate in a b***h or we can do you know, stop having so many kids, right? So what I’m saying here is if you accept the premise that like we are anywhere near or securing capacity, and you accept the premise that the population is still going up I can see. Where [00:07:00] something like this might be necessary. Right. I just don’t think we’re anywhere near that. But, but what I’m saying here is the types of people who get into these ideas. One, this is an organization in Switzerland, so very Swiss culture, you know, watchmaker world right here. And two, a lot of them grew up during an age where it’s, it’s very hard for older people to grok and turn around and be like, oh, the world is fundamentally different now than it was when I was growing up. Simone Collins: Yeah. And to your point, there’s something very responsible about saying, I don’t know how we’re gonna feed all these people. And just to blithely assume that we’ll develop technology, which we ended up doing, that we’ll be able to sustain all these people. And now we’re at a juncture also where we’re able to very reasonably say that we can continue to have some population growth without. Worsening climate change, for example, if that’s what you care about. Whereas before we couldn’t really say that. So I also think there’s something responsible and not just being like [00:08:00] a hand wave tech will handle it and, and saying, well, until we know, let’s be careful. Yeah, Malcolm Collins: yeah. But Simone, to, to Simone’s point here, she’s talking about if we were in the 1970s, but we’re not in the 1970s. Right. And now we know tech will handle it. Correct. People are also really Simone Collins: bad at updating their but Malcolm Collins: that’s the point I’m making. Yeah. These people are older than us. Right. They grew up in a different era. They are just unaware. What, what’s the name of the EW Post where he talks about how this can be like the having kids doesn’t actually hurt the environment. It’s, it’s Simone Collins: on his substack. It’s called Go ahead and have Kids. Depopulation won’t stop climate change, but your kids might. Malcolm Collins: No, and this is really true. This is where we are with technology now because we know that the, the technocratic solution to climate change didn’t work. Like we tried this on a global scale. It didn’t work even when we shut everything down for COVID that year, like when nobody was driving to work, when nobody was flying, we incrementally hit the reductions we were supposed to, additionally incrementally hit every year by the Paris Climate Accords. Which when [00:09:00] I saw that, I was like, wait. So next year we need to keep everyone at home, keep all of the planes shut down, keep half of the factories shut down, and somehow, incrementally reduce it again. And then we need to do that again the next year. Oh, so this is just funny money that you’re playing with here, right? Like this can only be done by active scientific interventions, which require competent individuals to do. So that’s, that’s the point there. And, and, and we’ve Simone Collins: developed them and crim you talks about them, but now carbon sequestration, especially due to reduced energy costs, is gonna be a lot more affordable and make a much bigger difference in like, hey, let’s shut down all economies and travel. Malcolm Collins: So, yeah. Mm-hmm. So, to go over some of the documents we’ll be reading from here because I think this will give you an idea of how spicy mm-hmm. An aging society is an opportunity and is regulating the number of births necessary. By the way, here, I’m gonna have the Population Zero song, Speaker: [00:10:00] Without it? Malcolm Collins: So I’m gonna start with their strongest argument, and this was made over email and not in their website. I, I think it, it’s a strong argument because it’s, it’s, it’s based and it’s accurate and it shows that we’re dealing with like rational people who have an understanding of like human genetics and differences and stuff like this, right? You know? Yeah. Maybe they Simone Collins: made it to us because they felt more comfortable being more candid via email. Yeah. Malcolm Collins: Okay. So, the dilemma is that more efficient technology automation, robots in AI mean that fewer workers are needed. In the traditional sense, highly skilled workers are already in short supply, but ordinary workers are becoming less and less necessary and becoming unemployed. Since low skilled workers are proportionately overrepresented. Even high birth rates do not help solve the problem as the reproduction rate is particularly high among the less educated classes, unemployed people or workers in the low wage segment contribute little or nothing to taxpayer revenues. On the [00:11:00] contrary, they increase government. This is a completely rational point. And the reason why you are making this point to us, and the reason why we don’t address this point as directly in a lot of our outreach is we have said, you know, at the end of the day, this isn’t a warm body problem. This is a, a taxpayer problem, right? If you massively increase the population, but they’re all on welfare or something, you know, you’ve made it astronomically worse. If you’ve taken immigrant classes and these immigrant classes are drains on the state, you have done nothing to fix this particular problem. And so, you know, they’re right here. Also, ai is. Going to you know, take a lot of jobs, take a lot of people outta the workforce, et cetera. Our read at what AI seems to be doing right now is it seems to be concentrating wealth among fewer and fewer individuals and making that wealth more mobile, which means as a lot of countries hit this social security hitch that they’re gonna hit. What we’re gonna see is them try to tax the wealthiest more the AI tech moguls, [00:12:00] they’re just gonna leave to charter cities, and the problem’s gonna be so much worse than anyone anticipates. Because of ai, actually not, not a, now there are situations in which ai, any utopian fashion, ends up setting up sort of like a global UBI or something like that. But if that’s the direction that AI goes really none of our decisions today matter, right? Because we’re not actually dealing with short timelines. And so, like. AI’s. Got it, bro. Like we don’t have to worry, right? You don’t need to worry about reducing the population. We don’t need to worry about stabilizing the population because AI is gonna put everyone on UBI and care for us and be monitoring birth rates and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But if we don’t live in that world, we need to think about what world we live in. And, and, and the world we probably do live in is one in which AI is concentrated well, severely. And in that world, the number of competent humans, the fact that, as you mentioned, competent populations, and keep in mind like this is one of the most robust findings in all genetic research here. And no, and I’m not saying anything about ethnic [00:13:00] groups here, right? Like, I’m not, I’m not saying. And I’m not making the argument that IQ two correlates with ethnic groups, but what I am saying is that IQ and competency correlate very strongly with genetics, which correlates very strongly with her ability from parents. And so, things like an idiocracy are possible. Like we are seeing a global drop. We’re on 0.1 IQ points every decade which means we’re probably looking at a standard deviation drop what is it like every 15 years or something. And Simone Collins: some research has found that the larger correlations with high fertility and different polygenic scores are correlations between obesity and higher fertility and lower educational attainment, and. High Malcolm Collins: fertility. They’re the two genetic scores, the genetic predictors for low fertility. The two best ones we have right now, no, no, no. For high fertility Simone Collins: people having more kids are more likely to also have polygenic scores associated with lower educational attainment and higher levels of obesity. Malcolm Collins: And, and this matters a lot if we’re talking about the types of solutions that actually work for climate change or for many of the solutions we’re looking at. [00:14:00] Which means that, that, you know, you can’t just say, oh, well we’re, we’ll, we’re okay. That competent populations are just bowing out of the gene pool, right? And, and worse that populations that care about the environment are just bowing out of the gene pool because about 40% of the way you vote is genetic in nature as well. I know the, the, the reason why I point out where I’m just talking about her ability, I’m like, take any racial thing outta the issue is because when you, when, when you make the argument in this way like no serious geneticists will disagree with you. That, that, that like your probability of graduating from college, your probability of how you make it to an adult, your probability is highly correlated with your parents, even if you were brought up in an adoptive family, because this has been looked at with like twin studies and adoptive families and appears to be a correlated with specific genes that we can find. So like the world, this is why population collapse matters so much more than you may think it would because if you’re just like looking at Europe and you’re like, well, Europe will have like 30%, its existing population by this date, so it’ll have 30% less tax revenue. [00:15:00] That’s actually wrong. Because it is in the economically productive centers of Europe where you have the lowest pop fertility rates and by like, astronomical differences, right? So really what you’re probably looking at with a 30% population reduction is something like a 50 or 60% tax reduction. And that, that obviously is, is really terrifying. But there, there’s a reason we don’t go shelling from the rooftops. You know, it’s especially important that people who produce a lot in taxes are having more kids. Because that’s, that’s just not an optically good message. And so the way that we word that instead which is also true, is this is not a warm body problem. If you just had, you know, doubled the population, but every new person you added was on welfare, you haven’t really fixed anything. Simone Collins: Well, and when you frame it from the perspective of we have a big concern for government’s ability to protect and take care of the most vulnerable people in their societies, it suddenly doesn’t seem like we’re [00:16:00] trying to have only certain people reproduce, which is what the media repeats ad nauseum. But instead, this is about protecting our ability to sustain populations that are vulnerable and that actually need help. Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So, but sorry. What she means by that is when we are concerned about something like social security collapsing that doesn’t hurt Elon Musk, that probably won’t hurt us. But it will hurt a lot of vulnerable people. And when social security collapses, welfare systems will also collapse and, and that we’re dealing with a situation across Latin America. If, by the way you’re watching this and you haven’t seen our recent video on the UN is lying about Latin Americans fertility we are not citing like crazy conservative stuff here. We are literally just citing Wikipedia and countries own measured fertility rates. We’re across Latin America. You’re now getting fertility rates around one. And this is terrifying, terrifying because these countries are even less capable of dealing with this, this tragedy. As it steamrolls in. Now also, I wanna point here to like, nobody go and bad mouth these people or [00:17:00] anything like that. So this is, I’m, I’m quoting from the email here. Finally, we’d like to emphasize once again that we have the utmost respect for your commitment. Despite our different perspectives, we share an important goal, a livable, prosperous future for future generations on this planet. Our past to achieving the goal may differ your focus on more children. While we are consciously focusing on fewer, however, both approaches are based on concern and responsibility for humanity. Totally. You know, Simone Collins: yeah, I really respect that. We want long-term human flourishing. They want long-term human flourishing. And that’s really different from the typical antinatalists message that we get because they just want long-term Malcolm Collins: extinct. No humans ex, right? Yeah, no, no. These are people who I feel like if they actually engaged with like the modern science of like realistic solutions to carbon emission that these solutions are likely only gonna be deployed by populations that are. Competent. And by cultures that produce highly educated people and that those are the ones that are declining the fastest. And that any realistic solution to upend this is [00:18:00] unlikely to to be implementable within our lifetimes. You know, you’re then like, okay, well then what marginally can I do that is actually likely to have an effect? And it is increasing the fertility rate within the types of communities that are already dedicated to environmental custodianship. But to continue here. Humanity. And this is, this is reading from them their first email here. Humanity already consumes more than earth can sustainably provide. According to calculations, we would currently need about 1.7 Earths to permanently cover our annual resource consumption. In other words, it is impossible for 8 billion people, let alone more in the future, to live in such prosperity as wealthy minorities do in this world, which includes you and me, the wealthy minorities includes you and me. A concrete example. The average ecological footprint per capital in Switzerland, where I come from, is around 4.7 global hectares per person. In the US it’s as high as 8.1. If the entire world population were to live at this level of consumption, the earth would only sustain around 2.9 billion people in the [00:19:00] long run. This discrepancies highlights the core problem. Either we would have to drastically reduce the, our lifestyle or the number of people would need to be limited in order to achieve sustainable prosperity for all. Now I, I read this and I’ve heard this number before and I’ve never really engaged with it because I’ve been like, that’s just poppycock, right? So I tried to figure out where it’s from and how it was calculated the global footprint network, the, the GFN. And, and so first, again, I want to note Earth likely does have a carrying capacity. There is likely some hypothetical limit of the number of people that the Earth can sustain with a degree of prosperity for sure. The problem is, is that is likely, I’m gonna guess even conservatively a million times, a million X Earth’s existing population. Just, just for an example of how comical this number is that the gf whatever this environmental group calculates as like the earth’s carrying capacity the [00:20:00] Netherlands. Okay? So the Netherlands is on, right now 60 to 65% of the country would be underwater if, if not for modern technology and a technologically adapt population. The Netherlands is about the size of Maryland. Okay. It’s incredibly small. Alright. The Netherlands is the world’s second largest agricultural exporter by value, 129 billion by 2024. They produce nearly and, and, and keep in mind you could be like, oh, well then they must only produce like really small, expensive crops like seeds or something that that’s how they do it. No, no, no, no. They produce nearly 1 million tons of tomatoes a year, yielding 12 x more per acre than average global yields using greenhouses covering 24,000 acres. Efficiency tricks like lead lighting and 24 7 gross Rockwell substrates and precise nutrient delivery. CE O2 enrichment for nearby industries. So they literally take the CEO from their greenhouses and then they pump it into local [00:21:00] industrial capacity to make it even more efficient. Enclosed loop systems using just 0.5 gallons of water per pound of tomatoes. Wow. Versus global, which is 28 pounds. 20, sorry, 28 gallons per pound. There is 0.5 gallons per pound. Simone Collins: So clearly we can be super efficient if we want. And it’s not just that Malcolm Collins: for potatoes, they’re a top exporter, one point to 2 billion annually using similar precision farming techniques. But so, so I was like, okay if, if we implemented this system globally what would earth’s carrying capacity be? Right? Like we, we could set up, because I mean, he wants to create a utopian system. So I get to play in utopian world, like in his utopian system, we’re living under some sort of global technocracy, which educates everyone. And everyone is, is, is, you know, becomes competent and super efficient, right? Okay. So I’m like, okay, we play in that world. We have nuclear reactors all over the earth, you know, infinite power, whatever. You’d be able to have a, a caring capacity at around 20 billion people. Well, higher, like more than double the, the projected number [00:22:00] of people that we think earth with, with current trends is going to get anywhere near. And I’d point out, I don’t even buy that Earth has really hit the, the 8 billion number right now. Because if you look at the big countries that they’ll say like, contribute to this, a lot of them have really fuzzy reporting like China. There’s a lot of evidence. You can see everybody is on this, that their population might be a third, sorry, a third less than what they’re reporting and then other really high fertility countries. And I I, and I mean like really strong evidence that it’s a third lesson what they’re reporting. ‘cause they have a huge reason to lie about this. And we can look at things like salt consumption maps and then map them to regions where we know how much there, there actually are of a population of Chinese people. Oh, then look at the entire country. We did an episode on this if you wanna go into it. But the other thing, oh, I just Simone Collins: wanna point out in, in muse’s Substack post that I mentioned where he discusses why it’s not gonna hurt the environment that much, if we just. Allow for a slow leveling off instead of a decline. The, the projections that he finds to be pretty reliable, and they’ve been [00:23:00] pretty good at predicting population levels in the past, have populations starting to level off in, in the world at around a little under 14 billion, up from the supposed 18 billion, or sorry, 8 billion that we have now. So also, there’s not this expectation even that we’re gonna get anywhere close to the levels that you’re discussing. Malcolm Collins: Right. But the, the point here being is I also don’t think that if, if we’re talking about, sorry, what was I saying here? The, the also other places where the numbers are probably hugely office countries like Nigeria which hasn’t been conducting audits on this and distributes the national oil wealth to districts with like, like the subsidy wealth based on their claimed population numbers. And has done this unmonitored for about a decade at this point. So like, oh, basically. For a lot of the giant population countries that we think are really high fertility or like, you know, whatever in the world, they’re probably way below what we, so it’s Simone Collins: like with Blue Zones, where if you create an incentive for people to be [00:24:00] really, really old, suddenly you have a whole bunch of really, really old people in that region, in the data. Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. The point being is, I, I don’t buy this, I don’t think Earth is gonna get above 10 billion people. And I think we could already be past peep population when you consider the recent and shocking fertility collapse that we’ve had in South America and the Middle East. Yeah. Really the only place with above repopulation fertility rates anymore is like, like reliably above repopulation fertility rates is Africa. Right. And and that’s, and that’s just Simone Collins: an impoverished region. Yes. So as soon as they develop, which hopefully they will. Malcolm Collins: And I’d also point out here that when I talk about, the reason I was talking about the Netherlands is I was talking about a location and how much we would have as a carrying capacity with. Current world technology, not hypothetical world technology, right? So if we’re talking about the future, I mean, we live in an age of thinking machines. Now we have like AI systems that can go over crop fields and laser shoot all of the weeds that are more efficient and [00:25:00] way healthier than any pesticide we’ve ever had. And don’t use pesticides. You’re Simone Collins: the person who sent me the video of that, right? That’s insane. Malcolm Collins: The level of technology that we’re getting to because of AI is astronomical. Imagine giant fields tended by drone swarms and, and, and other things like this. Keep, keep in mind if you’re like, well. You, you would never be able to have the power to do something like this, right? You’d never be able to have the capacity to do something like this. The sa the Sahara, if we cover just 1.2% of it we would have, with solar panels, we would generate enough energy to, to match all of global energy. Okay? This is, this is only covering 1.2% of it, right? With that power, you could easily desalinate water, start putting up greenhouses in the region, create these CO2 to greenhouses sort of industries throughout the region, and then build flying drone swarms that take food from that region to other regions. Yeah, the, the, the humans. And by the way, the, the, the Sahara, [00:26:00] if you covered all of it with solar panels, it would be 189 x global power consumption. Right now, the amount that you could do in terms of revitalizing soils and creating basically an infinite food generator in the Sahara is astonishing with very near future technology. And I, I mean within like the next generation, if we continue to technologically advance the species and don’t stop doing that because technologically developed regions stop having kids. Okay. And that’s a big Simone Collins: point that creme makes again in this post is that with a larger population, you’re just going to end up having more innovation. And that can be great for both human flush the environment. Well, that’s true. That’s the Malcolm Collins: exact point I’m making. You don’t have more innovation with a larger population. You have more innovation. If you have a larger population that is coming from technologically productive areas in regions, you just increasing the number of people. If you just increase like. You know, the, the num like, like, and, and keep in mind this is true within countries. Like, I’m not even talking about like [00:27:00] between groups here or something. I’m saying within the United States, you know, it is, you know, Alabama’s gonna have a higher fertility rate than central Manhattan or San Francisco, right? And the kids born within Central Manhattan and San Francisco, statistically speaking, are going to be more technologically and economically productive than the kids born in rural Alabama. Simone Collins: I mean, okay, so Kmi writes though, relative to depopulation, there’s an initial short term dip in real GDP per capita for stabilization because of the greater emissions levels. This dip is not an absolute decline in living standards, just a relative one. This relative dip is quickly overcome by the greater levels of innovation and resulting from improvements to productivity that follow from having a larger population. This result holds across well, he, Malcolm Collins: he’s just making a claim. Why does he say the, the reason? Well, maybe he’s Simone Collins: arguing because this, this post is coming from the premise of people who are pretty conscientious and long-term oriented, who are concerned about having kids because they’re concerned about the future and the [00:28:00] impact that will have on the environment. So presumably these are also educated people who would meaningfully contribute. To innovation. But, Malcolm Collins: but the, the reason why I’m making this point is it is not a warm bodies problem. You know? There there are. Yes. No, we, we’ve been Simone Collins: there. We get that Malcolm Collins: Right. But the point here being is, is people have a cultural right to the culture of their parents. But a culture is a combination of things. A culture is what gender roles you take on the way you relate to educational systems, whether or not when you get sick, you believe witches did it. You know, like these are all cultural things that people have a right to pass down to their children. And we do not have a right to eradicate if these cultural beliefs lead to less thriving. It is upon the groups that hold these cultures to decide. To adopt new cultural settings, not us as the technocratic overlords to erase their cultural practices. However, what is also true is in the world today where you have high fertility rates are also regions that have culturally [00:29:00] speaking, just a different relation to education. A different relation. So you’ve got all that, but then you’ve got the genetic effects, like I was talking about, rural Alabama versus Manhattan and San Francisco or something like that. It’s not that there’s no one in rural Alabama who is going to produce or have the likelihood of producing technologically. Highly capable highly economically productive kids. But these are things that, you know, we can, we can look at and tell by looking at spreadsheets and stuff like this, right? And so we are going to hurt from this, right? Mm-hmm. And hurt likely a lot more because of the type of propaganda that comes from environmentalists and disproportionately affects people who have like an altruistic sense to try to make the world a better place, which is highly her readable. Altruism is one of it’s a very highly her readable trait really associated with genetics and, and parental heredity. So, yeah, don’t, don’t go out there trying to convince altruistic people to disproportionately have fewer kids. That’s not a, a winning strategy for the future of human history. Now I’d also point out here when we think about like how inefficient current livestock is and everything like that, we are [00:30:00] still currently in an era where we literally have like animals. Like, walk around in fields and like, that’s where we get our meat from. When you look at like where future humans are gonna be getting their meat from, it’s gonna be in giant grown vats and stuff like that . The, the ones that I’ve always loved is a book called Man After Man, which was hugely influential on me. And I’ll put a picture on screen of, of a, a meat factory from it where it’s just giant meat beasts that have like harvesting creatures crawling across them and, and, and putting the meat, meat beasts. Yeah. A food engineered creature. Let’s see if I can read the text here. Meat beasts. I mean, isn’t Simone Collins: that just what cows are? Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, no, no. Cows walk around. They eat. So you just mean Simone Collins: brainless, hunks of muscle. Malcolm Collins: Yes. Brainless, hunks that perfectly in an energy efficient fashion. Turn food into exactly muscle. And you could say, well, [00:31:00] you need to move around to build muscle. It’s like, no, you don’t. Not if you genetically engineer it to just produce muscle. Right? Like, like the way we produce meat today is comically inefficient. I recently saw a post, by the way, on the EA forums where they were arguing that even altruistic people should not be vegetarians because they just have so many negative cognitive effects cognitive effects that you’re going to do more harm to the world by like Simone Collins: retarding yourself through. Yeah. They’re like, well, there’s veganism Malcolm Collins: cause less harm by focusing on these types of animals and groan in these types of conditions and stuff like that. Because humans are herbivorous species and evolve to be a herbivorous species, an omnivorous Simone Collins: species, Malcolm Collins: oh, sorry. Humans are an omnivorous species and evolve to be an omnivorous species. And that’s why we have the ture we do because that is, that is the literature of an omniverse species and our digestive tract is not really designed for ever eating only just plants. But anyway, let’s keep going here. But the point I’m making here more broadly is that earth’s carrying [00:32:00] capacity is completely, completely, completely dependent on technology and culture and and not completely but heavy. Like, like it’s heavily modified by that. And, and that multiplier matters so much more than like the number of people, like suppose Earth’s population crashes and Europe crashes out and the United States crashes out. And it’s the Europe and the United States and Canada that are supplying a lot of food aid to many of the world’s developing starving nations. Okay. This is a place within Africa and stuff like that. Yeah. If we crash out right, the carrying capacity of Africa would actually drop, like the number of people in Africa may even drop due to starvation, just because we stop being productive and our economy stopped being stable. Right? Like, yeah. In many ways the current African population boom is. Fueled by charity. Simone Collins: Yeah. Someone in a comment on one of our videos today actually just said that, that, yeah, a [00:33:00] lot of people theorize that African populations have been held up merely because of aid from Western countries. Malcolm Collins: Well, no, and the aid hurts them a lot. It, it hurts them, well, it keeps Simone Collins: them in cycles of poverty, but it can also increase populations. Two things can be true at the same time. Yeah. So the Malcolm Collins: point being is like. Yeah. The world may actually drop in its functional carrying capacity. Its technology multiplied by carrying capacity as fertility collapse goes on, because the regions of the world that are sending food aid end up having economic collapses. And most of Europe right now is about a decade to, to three decades from having a collapsed social security system, and thus a collapsed social safety net system. And when that happens, I’m telling you what, they’re not sending anything to Africa anymore. Okay. Yeah. So Dell, was it like, the actual carrying capacity may drop because of falling fertility rates happening disproportionately in some regions and not other regions But I followed up and I asked him about this because I was like, okay, so this is just gonna basically sterilize like black people, right? Because their countries are poor. [00:34:00] Or is it that you want to, uh, you know, normalize, , the average income that’s needed to have a kid, , so that it’s less in African countries? And I’m like, but even if you did that then migrant populations in Europe and, . African American populations in the United States would be the primarily sterilized populations because they earn less money. , And they’re just like, well, we just wouldn’t consider race. And it’s like, well, you may not consider race, but the people who are being disproportionately sterilized are certainly gonna consider race. Like the optics of this are going to be horrifying even in the woke countries. You think would be the most on board with it, which is why even in woke environments are unlikely to be on board with this. I mean, Germany’s not going to sign on with a deal. , And the United States is not gonna like the progressives in Germany, the progressives in the United States are not gonna sign on board with a deal that’s going to lead to disproportionately Muslims being, , sterilized in Germany , or forced at one kid and, , , African Americans in the United States being [00:35:00] forced at one kid. Malcolm Collins: So to continue here. As the number of people grows, global environmental problems are also getting worse. More people means more demand for energy, food, and consumer goods, and thus more CO2 emissions, waste and pollution. As we are more as more intensive exploitation of soil, forests and oceans. Even the environmental panel on climate change, IPCC emphasizes that. Population growth is a significant factor in environmental problems. It is not like, as we point out, it’s just not a lot of these groups like the ip CC, they’re a bunch of like anti-human extremists. We’ve seen this from like Earth for all, which plans to like reduce global population by like 80%. They, the, the people who run this are a bunch of boomers who are unaware of either current technology. They haven’t accepted that the technocratic solution to climate change has failed. They have had control of the un, the eu, the United States government at points, the Canadian government at points like pretty much all global of power and they were not able to enact their goals. Even during COVI, [00:36:00] you had only the incremental reduction we needed that year. It is not realistic, these solutions, but a lot of boomers haven’t been able to grok. Okay. Well then I need to go back to their drawing board. Because this isn’t working. And it turns out when you go back to the drawing board, the actual solutions require more people from the types of countries and, and regions within those countries. Like within the United States, you’re saying somebody in rural Alabama is going to dedicate a huge amount of their families income to fixing climate change, right? Like get real. It’s, it’s in the regions with the highest dropping fertility rates that, that this cultural drive is the strongest. But anyway, from o overlaps perspective, a smaller world population would be less pressure on the environment in the long term. And at the same time, more resources per capita, which in turn would enable better living conditions for everyone. For these reasons, overload advocates a responsible and moderate approach to having children. We believe that global guidelines on family planning are needed that balance individual freedom with responsibility. So, this then brings [00:37:00] me to my second point, which is a big change that has happened as I have educated myself more and grown up is I realized when I was younger, I was sort of brainwashed into this like, obsession with the environment, right? Like it’s bad that bad things are happening to the environment. Like we’re about to hit a CO2 catastrophe. That, that the earth could never survive that global. Diversity will never come back. Like global population diversity will never come back to the levels it is right now, because we’re going through a great extinction right now. Mm-hmm. And I, that made me sad. I was like, wow. Like I, I do think that there is a benefit to a more diverse sort of pool of life on this planet, right? Mm-hmm. And then, you know, I grew up and I was educated and I learned that oh, after mass extinction events, you typically get adaptive radiation, which means even more diversity than you had during the extinction event. Now I will say mass extinction events can be really bad if the thing that is causing the mass extinction event is a thing that makes it harder for life to survive, right? So we had like a global [00:38:00] winter or something like that. That would be something that would genuinely concern me. Yeah. Or like a Simone Collins: nuclear winter. That would be a nuclear Malcolm Collins: winter. Really bad. Yeah. But we’re not having a nuclear winter. What is specifically leading to the, the big problems that we’re having with the environment right now? Two things. More heat and sunlight. Okay. And more CO2. What, what, what, what, what has happened during periods of, of, of Earth that have had these two things more? These are the two main thought I thought the Simone Collins: megafauna period, which was super cool though, was when we had a lot of O2, not CO2, Malcolm Collins: That was, yeah, that was more O2. But we’ve also had periods of this before and you’ve had super flourishing, actually even shots that they’ve done of rainforest recently have shown that rainforests have significantly increased in how green they are. Over I Yeah, I’ve read Simone Collins: that. Yeah. Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So we’re already seeing a response to this, which is prepping the world for an adaptive explosion right. And, and it’s, it’s very much like. No, but I want life to stay exactly as it was when humanity [00:39:00] first evolved. Just like, why is that life superior to potential future life? Like, I don’t understand that. Right? Like that, that to me seems weird. Like we should care about life’s diversity more broadly. And keep in mind we’re close to being able to see new biomes that will be as rich as Earth’s own. You know, if, if we can make it past this bottleneck, right? Like we will be able to design animals for these biomes, we will be able to, like even the idea of what life is, we will be able to map all of the life that’s left on earth and recreate these biomes in even like AI testing scenarios until we can recreate them on another planet, on our spaceships, right? But it’s not even all of that. I remember Simone, because you’d been brainwashed by all this environmentalist stuff. You worked at you know, a lot of environmental environmentalists became early prenatal. It like Elon Musk, very interested in Tesla, very interested in solar city stuff. You did you know, earth Day network. You worked at the American Council on Renewable energy. You got your degree in environmental business. And you came to me early on and you go, well, Malcolm, you know, no other species has ever caused a mass extinction before. Simone Collins: [00:40:00] No, I didn’t say that because I learned in college that that wasn’t true and that blew my mind. In, in the very program I custom designed to learn environmental business, I just had discovered in historical geology that lo and behold, Malcolm Collins: this is a regular thing species leading to, if you wanna learn about one of these events. You have the great oxidation event where species started producing oxygen as a byproduct, and it led to a mass extinction event. Yeah. And we wouldn’t have any of the life we have today if it wasn’t for that mass extinction event. Yeah. That, that we’re species evil because it created a, a world of animals that metabolize oxygen. Like no, it wasn’t evil. It created the substrate for what came after it. And even if we look at them being like, well, earth could never survive at this level of CO2, here is a graph of earth’s CO2 levels right now . And CO2 levels throughout history, you know, going back 20 and 30, 40 million years ago. What you will see is we have today at one of the lowest levels of CO2 in, in the air, in [00:41:00] all of Earth’s history. Oh, no, we’re starved a bit. See, we just, yeah. We, we are at one of the lowest levels. Not only that, but I also put on, on screen here now temperature of the planet Earth over time . We are also at one of the lowest temperatures that Earth has ever been at. We, we are actually, no, I mean like the Ice Simone Collins: Age was chillier. Malcolm Collins: No, we’re, Simone Collins: we’re technically still in the ice age. Oh, we’re just at the tail end of it or something. Yeah, we’re just Malcolm Collins: at the tail end of the ice Age. By the way, do you, Simone, do you know what an ice age is defined by? I do not. A period where there is permanent ice anywhere on Earth Surface. Simone Collins: That’s it. Malcolm Collins: Yes. The fact that the, we have Antarctica and, and, and the South Pole. We we’re not like that close to the, you’re, you might think that we’re like kind of near No, we are far from the ice age being over. When you look at the, the, the, the mere fact that these two things exist and you can go look at glaciers. Wow. I thought they, I guess this is one of those facts they don’t teach you in environmental business. But [00:42:00] what I’d also point out here is, is life finds a way, right? And I’m gonna play the life finds a way scene here. Like I don’t, I don’t believe in the supremacy of current life. I think that life is a system and that it’s our job to prevent all life from dying out. But the best way to do that is to preserve humanity so that we can see other planets as biomes, as rich, as earth’s own and prevent the sun from eventually swallowing the earth and killing all life that’s known of in the galaxy. And there’s only one species on the planet that can do that. And only some populations on earth seem to be in a trajectory to achieve that. Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Not, not all populations on earth are capable of, or if capable, interested in getting us off planet or doing anything off planet. So yeah, Malcolm Collins: there is that. Well, and this is true. I, I would, I would guess that there’s a high correlation with. Communities that would have an interest in going off planet and colonizing the solar system and the communities that are high fertility, which are often, you know, traditional religious organizations that may even have a resistance to this, you know? Yeah. This idea. Yeah. Of, of colonizing the solar system. And so the, the, [00:43:00] the people who end up dominating the future of what humanity becomes are going to be the very few tech. And why, why do I say that? Technologically productive high fertility groups are gonna dominate the future. Because they’ll have technology, right? Like we are entering a world of automated drone wars, right? Like, like if you look at the US’ project replicator, it’s literally a ship. We have an episode on this that produces autonomous ai controlled drone swarms, infinitely, right? Like this. That’s the future we’re ending in, in, in. And so you look at some populations that are high fertility and you’re like, well, you’re worried about them. And I’m like, no, they’re gonna be bringing AK 40 sevens to like a drone swarm fight, right? Like, it’s not particularly relevant, right? Like, just, just high fertility rate on its own isn’t relevant in terms of influencing the future of what humanity ends up doing. Mm. So then to keep reading here, the Val Live model as a structural framework for global population policy prerequisite, an international panel of experts annually determines the sustainably supportive population number on Earth. This is based on availability and consumption of global resources, ecological footprint, global Hector, [00:44:00] GHA security of supply particularly energy, environmental factors such as CO2 emissions, water pollution, climate change, and biodiversity. Now obviously this sounds hellish to us because we already have organizations like this and we have seen that they are willing to lie to people. If you, if you look at our recent video on the UN is lying about South America’s fertility rate. The UN for example, claimed that Columbia’s fertility rate was 1.6 this last year when the measured rate in Columbia was 1.06. Right? Like they’re putting out a number there that’s like. 0.5 off, 0.6 off the actual number, right? Like that is, that, is genocide denial. Bad. And a a, a Colombian, I think he’s Colombian professor at Penn, you know, Ivy League Penn emailed the UN about this and he said, why are your numbers off by double digit decimals? Can you correct them? And they said, we don’t wanna cause a panic, and we don’t want people to believe, lead people to believe this is a crisis. And it’s like, but it is a crisis. [00:45:00] And if more people were aware of how bad this is, but keep in mind, the UN uses these fake numbers to implement evil already, right? Like, to try to restrict who can have kids to try to which we see programs that they’re doing around this to try to you know, disseminate the belief within cultures where it is non-normative to say, well, a woman. Doesn’t have a role to have a kid to try to disseminate this belief in those cultures which is a form of cultural genocide because you’re erasing those cultures, traditional belief system. And I think that that’s wrong. But this is why I’m scared of a thing like that, right? And now remember how earlier I talked about their plan for they were gonna have like one kid, one kid, anyone could have one kid, and then you needed to like, apply to have two kids with certain regulations. Then you really needed to prove it to have like three or more kids. And then the, the people with more kids would support the people with less kids. And like, the thing I like about this plan, like I’ll, I’ll, I’ll tell something. It’s a, it’s a. It would’ve really positive genetic effects. If, if you supposing the central organization wasn’t corrupt [00:46:00] and like the way you got into it was just by purchasing the rights to additional kids, and then that money could be used for the people who had fewer kids, right? Well, yeah. I mean, Simone Collins: essentially also it’s like a, a license to have kids. So I think similarly to how many studies show that when. You look at the outcomes of children, of gay parents who have to go through so much more cost wise and hoops wise to have kids, their outcomes are really good because only the most resourced and competent and conscientious fathers who are gay end up having kids. And we’re looking at a somewhat similar system here. You have to come through so many ways. The problem is, Malcolm Collins: and the reason this system doesn’t work anymore, is because you are like presuming that most people want kids. But even in a system where people aren’t charged anything to have kids, we can’t get them to reproduce and we can’t get the ones we need reproducing the most to reproduce the least, right? Mm-hmm. So like clearly. Clearly like this, this wouldn’t work from a motivational capacity. You would just crash [00:47:00] out all of the existing systems if you attempted to implement this. And the real reason for this is because kids don’t really benefit the parents anymore. Historically speaking, when people had lots of kids, that the, the, the reason you had the kids was because they would take care of you when you were old because there wasn’t social security systems. And because they would work on the farm or they’d work on the factory and they’d help support the family or you get some dowry for them or something like that, right? Today kids don’t really do any of that, right? Like, they don’t necessarily support you in old age. They don’t help. They’re, they’re just a, a drain on you. So who benefits from a family? Having kids like who? Monetarily benefits from a family, having kids, the state benefits from a family having kids. So families today are functionally having kids and acting as care providers to, for free doing this job for free. And the state is rooting all of the benefit benefits. So in reality, you would want an inverse system if you were gonna have at work where people, well, which is what Simone Collins: many states are starting to do. I mean, South Korea is, is paying a lot to families to have kids. I mean, countries like Hungary are as [00:48:00] well. So there are some states that are starting to say, alright, I own it. I’m benefiting from this, I’m gonna pay for it. Parents Malcolm Collins: have kids, so, so it doesn’t even work from like a moral measure. So that’s, that’s like, sorry. The point I’m making here is the system is just like, if you look at the existing demographic trends, the obvious effects of this system are obvious, right? Like, it, it’s, it’s non implementable in any population that attempted to implement it. Because if you understand, like our worldview on populations, we sort of see the world as like competing cultural groups. And we have no right to interfere with another cultural group. And each cultural group has the ability first, first of all the right to autonomy, the right to not have people outside their cultural group come in and tell them or their kids how they should live or what they should value. But in addition to that, they’re each sort of exercising an experiment for what may work for the future of humanity. I can tell you, like I normally, I’m not gonna be like, that’s a dumb experiment to run, but if you attempted to implement this system that you have within any region. That region and the culture that it contained would not exist within future [00:49:00] human populations. It would go extinct within about three or four generations. Which, which shows that this system is just not a viable system in and of itself. Like imagine you were able to implement this within Switzerland, right? And you just completely ine, effectively implemented it. How quickly would the Swiss population just crash out and not exist as a meaningful human group anymore? Like, and it’s clear that you’re not stupid. Like you can run the math on the existing Swiss fertility rates. You can look at how it now all of a sudden having kids cost even more, right? Like how quickly it would crash out. Simone Collins: What are these sorts of, and Switzerland is really expensive as it is just for the record. Like Yeah. Remember when you and I traveled there and we just got to the point where for every meal and we had maybe one meal a day, we, we split an appetizer between the two of us. Yeah. Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And, and, and, and keep in mind when I say crash out, what I mean is it would crash out within its economically first. So you would eventually have a swish population that’s left, but it would likely be made up [00:50:00] of religious extremists who are like super anti-education, who like, don’t, you know that that’s the population that would be left after you completely churn through. And use up the few, you know, economically prosperous regions by implementing these sort of restrictions on their children. Because keep in mind to a less healthy family, typically the monetary restrictions you put on them are gonna matter less, right? And so they’re just gonna be like, whatever, like, screw you. Like, or you could say, well, it’s a fixed amount that we’re putting on them. And then it’s like, well then what are you doing like forcible castration and stuff like that. Like it gets super dystopian, super fast. And I just don’t see why you would implement that when you could just implement the system that we wanna implement where you let people have a right to their own cultural autonomy. And then we just see which experiment ends up working like the one that our family is running, the one that, you know, some Islamist families are running the run that some evangelical families are running the, the one that Israel is running right now. Right? But to continue here, what, what, what else would this global technocratic thing operate, right? With all this money it’s getting from these [00:51:00] family licenses accompanying measures, compulsory education on awareness and family planning, starting at the age of 12, availability of contraceptives in sufficient variety and quantity for all people. Possibility of cost-free abortions in case of unwanted or legally in. Impermissible pregnancies provided exclusively by qualified medical professionals. Dude, China did Simone Collins: this though. Malcolm Collins: No. Yeah, China did this. They’re just describing the one po child policy, which everyone now agrees was a horrible idea. Legally a penalty free medically supervised abortions worldwide was in the first three months of pregnancy regular adjustment of retirement age. Every single year is in line with demographic development. So basically they’re gonna force the olds to work longer and longer and longer. Look at France’s recent rebellions over increasing it by only like two years. I do not think that that’s actually going to happen now that the majority of people in many European countries are actually tax drains on the system and not tax contributors to the system. Funding through a global birth control fund, all countries pay a fixed [00:52:00] percentage, EG, 10% of their national tax revenue into this fund to finance the affirmation measures worldwide, Simone Collins: 10%. Malcolm Collins: They want like a Mormon tie thing here, right? Yeah. Simone Collins: Except like 6% is, is what the US spends on defense. Like that is a lot. Whoa. Malcolm Collins: So, the thing that I found most interesting in all of these automatics here because I’ve noticed this from a lot of people who are like urban monoculture cooked, and I don’t think they realize what they’re saying when they say this is that people should have a right to contraceptives, right? And what, what they’re actually saying is. Some people should have a right to sex and other people shouldn’t. Because no, a right to contraceptives is a right to sex without the consequences of sex. Right? And the reality is, is they’re like, well, yeah, everyone should have a right to sex. And it’s like, no, no, no, no, no. What you mean, and you know, and I know that you mean this is that wealthy, successful men who are attractive should have a right [00:53:00] to sex and women should have a right to sex. But like, what about the guy who’s like, yeah, but no woman wants to sleep with me. Right? Why doesn’t he deserve a right to sex? Right. And you’re like, well, because, you know, other people’s agency and stuff like that. But it’s like, why, why contraceptives? Why are you creating a world where there is just so, like, it, it, it seems like a level of, and I think it’s true from the urban monocultural perspective unattractive and unsuccessful men are considered the enemy and just do not matter. They are completely disposable. And yet all women have a right to sex. And attractive people have a right to sex, right? Like attractive men have a right to sex. And I think that’s dystopian, that’s like gross to me, right? Like, why couldn’t you equally say like, if we’re gonna build our dystopia here, I’m gonna build my dystopia. Okay. And my dystopia you know, people are supposed to accept that their desire for arousal and sex is either you know, from Satan, right? You know, a religious person would say that. Or the evolutionary, you know, scar on their mind from a, a pattern that led to their ancestors have [00:54:00] more surviving offspring than other ancestors. And, and in my world, everybody has a a mandate to self-discipline. Okay. And anyone who cannot exercise that mandate to self-discipline gets executed, right? Like they don’t, they, instead of saying that attractive people get a right to sex, we just say, no one should be having sex unless it’s reproductive sex. Okay? Now, you may say, well, that sounds really horrifying, but in truth, anyone who’s looking at this went down, they’d know like, oh, well, actually, in that world within a few generations the population would become you know, genetically much more self-disciplined. And you’d have this huge improvement in the population, so awesome. Now, I don’t actually want that world as I’ve talked about, the world I want as a world where every group has its own, sort of autonomous cultural value system. And I believe that self-discipline is an important part of a cultural value system. Self-discipline around sex, self-discipline, around pleasure. Mm-hmm. I mean, so I will be teaching my kids do not, you know, seek a partner who completely lacks self-discipline in these [00:55:00] areas. Right. Who’s like, well, I have a right to contraception because I have a right to recreational sex whenever I feel like recreational sex. Mm-hmm. And I’d be like, yeah, do, do you, that’s probably not an awesome person to bring into our bloodline. Because, you know, our experiment is dependent on, you know, austerity and self-discipline. And, and so these are just different ways of looking at this, but I, but I find it interesting that like, so much focus on, you know, the ability to, to have contraception and sex when you want to. And access to abortions and stuff like this. But again, I don’t even understand why you’d want any of this. Like the population is crashing out right now, and everyone who can build the systems you need to have any sort of stable global system isn’t gonna do it. And if you were trying to implement this global system, even think about what this would mean in terms of like warfare. Like imagine you tried to implement this in like the Middle East, right? You, you, you’re gonna have workers out there basically having the population under permanent occupation. Because, because of their religious beliefs, they’re not gonna want to accept this. Right. So [00:56:00] you’re gonna have to go into the Middle East. You’re gonna have to go into Africa. I’ve got lots of African friends. My, my, my brother in Christ. You are saying you want to turn Africa into a permanent, like global hostage state, because remember, wealthy people are allowed fewer kids in this system. So if particularly in Africa, you’re gonna have people not getting the license to have more than one kid. These are people who grew up. When many of these countries expecting like 16 kids, right? So how are you gonna implement that? Well, what you’re gonna have is you’re gonna have soldiers with guns marching down the streets to people’s houses and executing people when they break the rule because they want to. And you’re gonna have constant gorilla rage on these soldiers because the local population isn’t gonna want this. Like the actual horror of the implementation of this system is almost beyond compare. Like it only works if you brainwash everyone into your cultural value system. Mm-hmm. Or not brainwash, but you set up educational systems that are meant to eradicate their unique cultural perspectives, gender roles, everything like that, which is just global cultural genocide and creating a global cultural [00:57:00] monoculture, which will be very fragile and could lead to the death of the human species. And then all life, as we said, monocultures, like anyone who knows biology and environmentalism should know how desperately fragile we are. They are. If you look at the global monoculture today, you know the reason why, like Paris if I’m an upper middle class person in Paris or Manhattan or Rio, I’m gonna be more culturally similar. I’m wanna be, if I’m a, you know, near a high fertility population in Manhattan, like Orthodox Jews or like Amish and Al or like us or Elon, like, we’re all really different from that. This global urban monoculture has shown itself to be very weak and you want to extend its reach even harder. Like, that seems really bad. Like, like, Simone Collins: yeah, not ideal, Malcolm Collins: actual human thriving. So I asked ‘em about this point and they’re like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. We’re, we’re gonna do this all voluntarily. We just won’t send aid money to countries that, uh, you know, don’t wanna sign on for this. And if you’re aware of how international aid works, you would know that already we’ve had. Tons of aid rot in African countries because they were afraid of aid without any conditions. They’re just like, well, we’re not sure about this [00:58:00] rice. I don’t know. It could be here to sterilize us. And that was actually the specific thing that they were afraid of, that the rice would lower their fertility rates so they let it rot instead of distributing it to the citizens while people were literally starving to death on the streets. Um, so you can tell already in the majority of Africa. No one’s gonna sign on board with this. The United States wouldn’t sign on board with this. Israel wouldn’t sign on board with this. Most of the Middle East wouldn’t sign on board with this. Um, and what it would be is just people who already sort of have this mindset signing on board with this, and then slowly going extinct in regards to, uh, world power. Um. Because, you know, I, I look at this and, and most our listeners look at this and we’re like, wait, why would I, uh, like when the rest of the world is continuing to move ahead, why would I deliberately like cook myself? I can’t imagine why you would so knowingly trivialize your own culture and genetics in regards to the future of human civilization, , because that’s what they’re doing, [00:59:00] right? Like, o other places are going to move ahead even if everybody signed on board with this. , And so it really only works if you somehow get everyone. On board was it, without realizing they’re on board with it or getting governments to force minority. Like, oh, we’ll get the United States and our government on board with this, and then we’ll force it on the, , you know, Muslim and , Christian populations within our country, , which is not awesome. , That’s, that’s, that’s just as horrifying as, , enforcing it across borders. But it’s just, oh, but we did it through democracy, so it’s okay this time. So let’s assume you extended this maximal reasonableness. , You might be able to get Europe on board with this South and Central America on board with this Canada on board with this. , , but they’re already low fertility, so they’re not really relevant of the high fertility, high technology eg. Likely to get off planet, likely to colonize the solar system, likely to continue thriving populations. You’ve got populations like Israel. Israel would never, ever, ever get on board with this. , The populations like [01:00:00] the United States, which would never get on board with this. , And so basically it’s just like the countries that are already. Unlikely to be relevant to the future of human civilization. Bowing out and handing the baton to the countries that are already taking over human civilization. Malcolm Collins: So, another thing that I thought was interesting is what they thought that everyone should have a right to 30 meter squared private residence of space. Roofed needed heating or cold two meals a day with 18,000 to 36,000 calories depending on age. Outfits that are like a, a standardized outfit in another language. I don’t understand. Completing schools through unaid, I said level two, possibly three. I really hate global schooling saying, I think schooling and education should be left up to a culture because it’s often used for cultural eradication historically, that is like the main use of school systems is cultural genocide. And families, especially with AI now can educate kids themselves. See pia io, the free education system or very inexpensive education system we made for everyone. It divides education into like a, a [01:01:00] sieve like tech tree. And then it’s got like a Socratic tutor on every particular skill that you can learn. And students can interact with this until they pass and then they move into the next part of the tree and they can just learn stuff. And some families are enjoying this. And if you are one of those families, please let us know in like email or something. ‘cause we really appreciate it and it helps motivate us to keep developing systems like this. One means of transportation, E scooter, e-bike, moped free contraceptives of choice, fresh drinking water, and access to basic medical care now, I don’t, I don’t know why. Because to get these things you need to take the money from someone. Like why should a group, I, I just don’t understand, have to pay for another group’s access to these when they’re, when they’re attempting different cultural experiments. Like the very, like if you don’t allow cultural experiments to fail, you basically force people to live on in suffering because you are allowing cultures that create what you can call weakness, right? Like, like the inability to produce the resources they need to survive, to continue to replicate which eventually is going to cause enormous pain, right? Like, we were talking recently about like the morality around like EA and stuff like this [01:02:00] and, and they’re like, oh, well what do you care about? You know, these people in Africa who aren’t getting their whatever medication or food or whatever. And I’m like. Bro. Like, look at the demographics right now. The Europe and the United States are gonna crash out within the next few decades, okay? All of these populations that you’re sustaining in Africa right now it’s like a, a fish tank, right? And you’re putting in food every day. And I’m like, why are you doing that? We’re about to go on vacation for like a year. And you’re like, well, you know, I don’t want today to be the data. I’m like, well, you could be taking the time and effort that you’re spending on the, the food thing and delay our vacation or figure out some solutions so we don’t have to go on vacation. You know, give them know. But no, they don’t wanna hear that because they don’t actually care about these populations. They know this vacation is coming and they don’t care what happens in a lot of these countries when Europe crashes out, which is only a few decades away from doing. Finally I thought, then they’re like, okay, why, why shouldn’t we care about this issue? Like, like why? What’s gonna fix this? Right? Fertility collapse, number one, automation and productivity increases. [01:03:00] Technological progress will significantly increase efficiency in many industries. Automation, ai, robotics will take over tasks, reducing the need for human labor. The declining number of working people can be offset by higher productivity. Thus maintaining or even increasing economic performance, physically demanding, hazardous or monotonous work will increasingly be handled by machines and ai. So first I wanna be like, oh, so technology is gonna advance and solve problems when there are problems that your scheme has, but not when their problems that are scheme has, like the amount of food that can be produced in a region. Right? This seems like very much like, oh. So you are able to see that, that, that the technology is increasing the productivity of things to this. It’s unlikely to work realistically, if we look at the way that AI is increasing whilst with some populations, whereas draining it from other populations right now, it’s more likely gonna exacerbate all of the problems associated with this than fix the problems associated with this. And but, but I will note that this, this isn’t a problem for them. Like when I say like, a few people are gonna have all the money, right? Like, and they’re gonna move to charter cities and countries that [01:04:00] don’t tax ‘em as much. What they, they’d say as well that, that’s not relevant to our plan because we’re trying to create a global technocracy, right? Like, and, and these, the rich people would’ve to live under the, the, the jack boot of our global technocracy just as the Africans and the, and the Islamic regions have to. And I’m like, okay, like, cool, but like, obviously you’re not setting that up in the next three decades, and you’re not gonna build enough movement to build that up in the next three decades. So it’s just like a, well, hypothetically we could do X, which isn’t going to happen and would honestly be horrifying if it happened. Horrifying. Like the idea of people marching down like streets in Pakistan, shooting anyone who’s like having over that many kids or being like, oh, well now we need to take you. This child is not allowed to exist. And then the constant wars they would have was the religious people. Anyway, then they talk about extending working life, right? And they have this whole thing about how working life is gonna extend, except in 2019, in the US the, for the, the average age was 78.8. The last year we have a good measure for 20 23, 78 0.4.[01:05:00] So it’s going down. It basically, it goes up and down, but remains pretty stable. This is in the United States and we look at Europe. For 2019 you got 81.3. And then for 2023 you got 81.5. So about the same. Simone Collins: Yeah, everyone’s gonna die except for Brian Johnson. Malcolm Collins: Yeah. No, but the point being is that life extension technologies don’t actually seem to be having the impact that you would expect. I just think Ozempic is gonna have a big impact in, in numbers coming up. Um mm-hmm. But, but the, the problem is, is that people seem to get more unhealthy as technology increases as well. So that’s, that’s part of the problem here, right? Education and skills development. Again, we’ve said, I, I think just a, Simone Collins: sorry, just a note, Malcolm, we do need to record a weekend episode still, and we’re running outta time. Malcolm Collins: So can you wrap this? Okay. Fine. I won’t, I won’t go over anything else here. You get the idea. One thing they did wanna do, which I thought was cool, is they wanna make English, the world language, a American as I call it Simone Collins: American. Well, there we go. Malcolm Collins: That’s nice. Okay. We’ll go record that [01:06:00] weekend episode . Just, you know, guys no, no, ill meaning here. Like, I can understand how you could come to these beliefs if you grew up in a different era than us or you’re living in a different cultural environment. But you know, what I wanna fight for is cultural autonomy for everyone. Yeah. Um, And then the systems that work can go on and thrive and colonize space. And I think that that is the least coercive way to achieve realistic outcomes. But I think we, Simone Collins: we, you could say we’re all for this system, they propose within their own safe states. Yeah. Like, if they want to create a sovereign state that has this system and they believe it’s gonna produce the best human flourishing, we really want, like, I would love to see if the ex, if this experiment works well, and maybe it does. So yeah, would absolutely go Malcolm Collins: for it. Would no one in this organization has any kids or I, or sorry, that they’re almost all below repopulation rate. That’s what I’d argue two kids or less. In, in which case they’re not relevant to the future of humanity because they’re just not gonna be around in the future of humanity. Simone Collins: I mean, you know, it, it really depends on how many flourishing grandkids and great-grands who kids. Yeah. But I, I Malcolm Collins: don’t think kids raised in this culture are gonna have well above repopulation [01:07:00] rate grandkids. Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, I love that. Anyway, thanks for covering this. Very interesting. I mean, what I like is that they, they also care about long-term human flourishing, and it’s very interesting to see they’re, they’re exceedingly different hypothesis on how to get there. So I’m glad they’re doing what they’re doing, and I’m, I appreciate they’re reaching out to us. Malcolm Collins: Yep. Have a good Simone Collins: one. Bye now. Okay.\ People seem to enjoy the episode, by the way, on Nepo Baby Socialists today. So that was good. Oh, can you hear me? Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I can. Sorry, I was just getting a task started in my Vibe coding app. Can you hear me okay? Hello? Mm-hmm. Wonderful. And I am right now opening this so I can see the script that I have for today. Nice. I think you’ll find this really interesting actually. Simone Collins: Yeah. I, I’m always interested in, in the way that people who aren’t necessarily just [01:08:00] full out antinatalists, but like just concerned about population are looking at things. This might dovetail also with, I, I was thinking of maybe just doing. A paid member’s only episode going over this. But honestly, it might dovetail really well with this, which is a very short substack post that Remu did on the impact of having kids on environmental causes. Like whether it really is a bad idea to have kids if you’re worried about climate change. Malcolm Collins: Ah, and what, what did he come to? Simone Collins: No, Malcolm Collins: I mean, again, that’s part of our advocacy. We can probably do a longer piece on that. What I was actually thinking is I wanted to do a, another piece that does sort of what I’m doing now, like going over their own website in literature on the degrowth movement, if you’re familiar with that. Simone Collins: Is this the one where they’re like, let capitalism just. Stop working and put debt on everything. Yeah. It’s let capitalism Malcolm Collins: stop working and we’ll figure something out then. Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Malcolm Collins: And it first Simone Collins: really got big during the [01:09:00] pandemic right? Or at least that’s when people started. Yeah. I mean it’s Malcolm Collins: something that a lot of like big people, like, I think Bill Gates is pro this, a lot of the EU is, is is pro this, A lot of the UN is pro this. Mm-hmm. So, you know, it’s a, it’s a big movement. And pretty scary stuff. Simone Collins: Bill Gates. Really? Malcolm Collins: Yeah. That Bill Gates was part of it. Yeah. Good lord. Well, like stuffy funds is adjacent to it. Maybe he himself wouldn’t be aware of that. Simone Collins: Oh. Because you’ve Malcolm Collins: gotta be, it’s one of those movements that’s just like pants on head. Crazy. Yeah. This is a public episode. 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