How The World Stopped Caring About The Environment

In this eye-opening conversation, Simone Collins and Malcolm Collins declare 2025 the year climate activism collapsed—and they’re not mincing words. From Greta Thunberg’s pivot to Palestine solidarity, Bill Gates’ major memo shift (”Three Tough Truths About Climate”), Matthew Yglesias rethinking his past positions, and even progressive New York walking back aggressive climate mandates... the movement that once dominated headlines is fading fast.

We dive deep into why: overhyped apocalyptic predictions that never materialized, market forces solving “crises” like peak oil, historical moral panics (Satanic Panic, video games, comics), and the bigger question—what panics are actually justified?

Simone shares her personal journey from hardcore climate activist (saving sea turtles, Earth Day Network, custom environmental major) to realizing many doomsday claims were overblown. We contrast climate with real existential issues like demographic collapse (aka “TISM”), water shortages in major cities, and AI disruption—plus why some panics (ozone hole, Y2K, leaded gas) were worth the freakout and actually got solved.

If you’ve ever donated to climate causes, worried about the apocalypse, or wondered why the vibe shifted from “save the planet” to class conflict & human dignity... this episode is for you.

We also riff on everything from Kylie Jenner housekeepers to hag-maxing Karens channeling maternal energy into Earth-worship, why young men stopped caring when the hot activists aged, and how the prenatal movement avoids the same pitfalls as old climate hysteria.

Episode Transcript:Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Malcolm. I’m excited to be speaking with you today because 2025 was the year that climate activism died.

And I don’t think enough people are talking about it, but major activists and donors and even states are dropping climate change like it’s hot. So we’re, we’re talking about Matthew Glacia, Greta Thunberg, bill Gates, and even the state of New York, which is insane what even New York lost climate change.

I’ll, I’ll go into it. It, it’s, I’m like, okay. I mean, it’s clear we’re, it’s over. It’s over. We, we we’re not trying to make fetch happen anymore.

Speaker: You only fight these causes cause caring cells All you activists can go yourselves That was so inspiring! What a wonderful message!

Simone Collins: And in general that the sentiment has shifted. From saving animals and the earth to class conflict and human dignity. And this is ex exemplified by Fels, like Kylie Jenner being criticized for watching her animal cruelty-free makeup on her housekeepers.

No one cares that it’s animal [00:01:00] cruelty free. They’re like, how dare you? Yeah, I love, I love that you a

Malcolm Collins: housekeeper. She, she got it all cheap or whatever. The, the, this office that was able to do animal testing really cheap, and then they found out it was just because they were doing it on interns.

Simone Collins: There’s, I think there’s that, I heard about that separately, but this, this was this was a, I think a more prominent kerfuffle, but I just think it’s really funny because she, she pays her housekeeper.

The housekeeper obviously consented to it. But I think just mere, I think it’s exemplified because what, what really people are freaking out about is basically in any way using a paid employee, I guess, you know, for anything. And, and to not do it.

Malcolm Collins: It’s a fascinating phenomenon, how hard, how fast and how completely the climate movement was abandoned.

Yeah.

Speaker: Alright, that does it! I f ed it!

Malcolm Collins: We will be teaching our children about the climate movement as a historic movement.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And speaking [00:02:00] of, of historical movement, I think this, this is a there’s a wider question that this development, the 2025 crash of climate activism brings to light, which is, this is of course not the first panic we’ve had.

And I think it’s really important to ask ourselves in light of current panics that are actively going on current things, people are like, we have to spend money on this. We have to change our lives around this. We have to learn. How to better divine what is worth our time because I spent a huge portion of my youth dedicated to climate activism.

That’s what her degree is in. I save the sea turtles. I like spent a summer volunteering to help the baby, sea turtles make it to the ocean and measure the giant sea turtles. And by the way, do you know the secret to stopping a giant sea turtle as they’re making their way back to the ocean? So you can measure her, you stick your knee, you need two people, but you stick your knee behind her front fin and then she can’t move forward.

And then that, that frees you up. Interesting. Yeah. But it doesn’t always work when you get a big enough [00:03:00] turtle, you just can’t stop them. At one point I just watched that one of the Italian volunteers just ride her straight into the ocean. He just like gave up and got on top of her and was like, I mean, like, you’re not supposed to do that, but he’s just like, screw it.

Like I’m going for it. And it was a beautiful thing to watch because there was bioluminescence in the ocean at the time and we’re doing all this overnight, so it’s like dark and just watching an Italian ride into a glowing ocean on a turtle. It is one of those things you’ll never forget in your life.

But the point being is, is you dedicating the point being is that we, we need to, we learn. We need to learn. Yeah. I, I, yeah. And then I studied environmental business. My, I tried to build an entire custom college major around this. I worked for Earth Day Network. This is the group of people who created Earth Day.

I, I worked for the American Council on Renewable Energy. I was extremely dedicated to this. And there are a lot of people now that are extremely dedicated to working on, on AI related apocalyptic organizations and, and working on all sorts of other panics. And so what I wanna do is also go through some historical panics and we’ll also discuss climate change more, and we’ll also discuss the [00:04:00] current crash, because I just think it’s amusing.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and it’s also interesting to talk about from the perspective of you and myself as Yeah, the figureheads of the prenatal movement. Like yeah, demographic

Simone Collins: collapse

Malcolm Collins: is

Simone Collins: another one of those

Malcolm Collins: we’ve gotta freak out about this. And, you know, we should, but the point being is just because something is like. A big problem for civilization or something that’s going to affect everyone.

Yeah. It does not mean that you can turn it into a movement or that it will stay a movement in any point of time. Yeah. Like, right, right. Now that climate chain has crashed out doesn’t mean that anything existential has changed about I mean, depending on, like deforestation for example, is like.

Happening at, it’s still happening, right? Oh, and,

Simone Collins: and I’m gonna get into it too, but also like a lot of major cities Mexico City, I think it’s Sao Paulo South Africa for sure. They’re just running outta water. They’re just drawing down their water tables. I mean, you talked about Iran too, there is going to get a point where they do not have more groundwater to pull from.

There’s going to be nothing left. So some of these are like [00:05:00] existential questions for civilization. Mm-hmm. Well, and so I, I think we, we, yeah. The, the, the larger discussion of this podcast is when is it a justified panic when you need intervention? And I think a justified panic is one where the issue is actually real and imminent.

And one of the big problems with climate change is that, yeah, climate change is real. It’s just not as imminent if as people have repeatedly claimed. And that two will not resolve via normal environmental or market forces. And I think a, a big common factor, and we’ll we’ll discuss this more too, is if something is, is priced into the market, for example, with peak oil.

This wasn’t the big panic that people thought it was, because there are economic incentives for companies to build innovations, to address diminishing oil supplies and to be better at extracting oil because people are willing to pay for it. And as prices go up and people pay more for oil, people who are entrepreneurial are willing to invest in technologies that allow them to extract oil more efficiently.

And so the problem essentially gets resolved.

Malcolm Collins: But I wanna, I, I [00:06:00] wanna take a second to just explain peak oil because some of our fans are young and may not know about this panic. Okay. Peak oil was a panic that was had in the eighties that human civilization would run out of easy. So sources of oil to top

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Like 10 years ago.

Malcolm Collins: And, and, and because you would’ve ran out of oil already. We built a civilization on oil, which we, we have. Mm-hmm. That human civilization would collapse at the point that we ran out of oil. Yeah. Now what is, what is interesting about this, and the reason I think is it’s a good thing to sort of meditate on as a crisis is peak oil, you know, within the time period must have seemed like the most obvious problem there could ever be a problem.

Is our civilization based on oil? Mm-hmm. Yes. Mm-hmm. Is the oil supply finite? Yeah. Hundred percent. It runs on magic or something, right? Like obviously it’s finite, right? Yeah. Mm-hmm. And what happens when we no longer have oil? If civilization runs on oil Yeah. Civilization stops. Yeah. Right. This is simple logic, easy if then, then uhhuh.

This isn’t even [00:07:00] like climate change or something like this, right? Mm-hmm. You know? Mm-hmm. Where like people could debate the science of it or something. Yeah. This is just like if then, and it went in as a panic. Mm-hmm. And it went out as a panic. And I, I think that something that you did not get to is, I don’t just wanna look at this from the perspective of what are the panics worth having, I wanna look at this from the perspective of how do you create a panic?

Like, okay, that’s fun. Why, why were people ever so panicked about the environment?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and we can also, I’m gonna, I’m gonna walk through some of the historical and recent well, relatively recent moral and social panics, because I think that there are some major moral panics that we really should have had that we never had.

And pretty much every actual moral panic that has taken place over the last a hundred plus years. Totally stupid and unjustified wasn’t ever a problem. Like, why were you wasting your time on this? Well, like in the meantime, your lunch is being eaten by Satan. Essentially. [00:08:00] So, we’ll, we’ll get into that too.

But first, because I really think people, a lot of people haven’t realized that climate change is over as a cause now, but it’s, it’s over. No one cares about it anymore. I wanna make sure people get the memo, and I wanna go through the prominent detractors and, and, and major former activists who have now moved on because I really wanna hammer this home just to make it clear.

Just there are so many people who haven’t. They’re, they’re essentially like that person who’s still living in the bunker, who assumes that the nuclear apocalypse has taken place. And they didn’t realize that the world just kept going on and, and no bomb actually hit. We’ve received letters from people written on like recycled paper using old, like billing envelopes that they didn’t use for payment.

So they’re, everything’s recycled and they’re writing to us being like, how dare you be in support of prenatal when there are too many people in the environment is in crisis. And they just didn’t get the memo. So let’s, let’s just be super clear about. What, what has happened? So let’s start with Matthew Glas.

Though though he later took the [00:09:00] post down on December 28th, so just, just a little bit ago, he posted 10 years ago, I believe that catering to the views of youth climate activists was important, but because I was not paid by the same people who are astroturfing these groups, I was allowed to learn that I was wrong and change my mind in response to information.

And then in, in relation to this, and this is all on X, who

Malcolm Collins: massive, by the way, you, you get a, you know, context.

Simone Collins: He, he’s like a, a major, I think leftist thought like he co-founded Vox. He he’s that guy. Oh, great, great.

He’s the

Malcolm Collins: founder of Vox. That’s what we needed to know. Continue. Okay. Sure.

Simone Collins: Great. So I, in, in relation to this coddled, affluent professional, that’s the ex username posted a few years ago, a full professor of physics offhandedly assured me that climate research was a scam and almost entirely a product of bad incentives in the grant industrial process.

He knew of people doing perfectly reasonable modeling that were forced out of. [00:10:00] Out for lack of funding because they didn’t come to the correct conclusions. Yeah. If you look at academic knowledge production, it’s actually a lot easier to engineer unanimity and consensus than you’d imagine. And then on the subject of youth not actively caring about climate change, we have GRS at Sundberg, the mascot of climate change.

She began vocally supporting Palestinians in criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza shortly after the escalation of the Israel. Israel. That was a bad

Malcolm Collins: investment, huh? I know.

Simone Collins: Jump salt in October, 2023 though. So like, this isn’t only 2025. When the shift started, when she first made this pivot, she tried to shoehorn it into environmental justice.

But I’m not so convinced. But specifically in a December 20, 23 Guardian op-ed. It, she explained that solidarity with Palestinians aligns with the movement’s longstanding support for marginalized groups facing oppression and then argue that there can be no climate justice [00:11:00] without human rights.

How can there environmental climate justice? Yeah. She’s trying to be like, but Well, but environmentalism is the same as imperialism occupation and humanitarian crises, which it, it is not Ms. Ms. Thunberg. But she was trying to shoehorn it. She was basically pivoting to those issues and trying to be like, no, they’re all the same.

But they’re, they’re not gta, they’re not but technically she’s still active in environmental causes today. Her activism is broadened over time to encompass climate justice. But I think climate justice is just your way of saying, I pivoted away from environmentalism and I don’t wanna admit it. And she, she did participate in an extinction rebellion protest in Venice in November of last year.

Which they, they dyed the, the Grand Canal Green. And I looked at pictures of it and I’m like, I can’t tell what was done. And yes, it was non-toxic dyes, don’t worry. But Extinction Rebellion, which also goes as xr, they, they operate as a grassroots, non-hierarchical network. So basically anyone can organize actions in its name [00:12:00] and they follow these principles of like non-violence, non blaming individuals, et cetera.

But they, they, they try to do creative high visibility protests. They, they’ve done road and bridge blockades and occupations of public spaces and sit-ins and glue ins and lock-ins, and. Symbolic stunts, like fake funerals and dramatic performances and targeted campaigns. But she really, she’s really not focused on environmentalism anymore.

Her, her, she’s

Malcolm Collins: now, by the way, I was trying to figure out what she’s doing post a Flotilla. ‘cause you know that that’s where she was living. That was her main gig. She’s still living at an activist house in London. Yeah, this is, this is what happens. You, you just sort of chill out. No, but I don’t even know like how she can come back from this.

At this point we have another episode like what’s next for like the left? Because

Simone Collins: I know

like

Malcolm Collins: what, and, and it was made so much worse by the situation in Iran right now because the fact that she has done nothing about what the Iranian government is doing, which is exponentially worse Yeah. Than what Israel did.

It, [00:13:00] it really goes to show for her the problem was the Jews. It was not,

And when I say, say she’s done nothing about the situation in Iran, I mean, she has not even made a single tweet about it. She’s able to motivate an entire Flo Tillek instruction when it comes to Gaza, but when it comes to the Iranians, she can’t even lift an actual finger.

Simone Collins: but she, she’s great name recognition. She can bounce back as soon as she wants to. I think she how Oh, reality TV show some kind of pay the media piece writing stupid fluff for the leftists Eat right up. Like, I, I just, I think she’ll be fine.

I just, it’s clear that she, she dropped and, and, and I think also Greta, she comes from a very media savvy family. She, she rode the wave of climate activism and left it because she realized that the attention wasn’t there anymore, and it’s just not. But, you know, while she only really was a mouthpiece that didn’t actively cater to real environmental outcomes, someone who actually really did seem to seriously [00:14:00] care about climate change and trying to do concrete meaningful things to address it was Bill Gates.

But similarly to Greta Thunberg, bill Gates is slowly backing away from climate change work and shifting his attention to human rights. And he still says climate change is a serious problem, but now, and, and it is. I mean, but, but that’s just not what people said it was. He’s recently shifted from a climate disaster framing toward a focus on human welfare and adaptation and realistic expectations about emissions cuts, which is.

Perfectly logical. But for contrast in his 2021 book, how to Avoid a Climate Disaster. ‘cause he wrote a fricking book about it. This is how focused he was. Gates framed climate change as one of humanity’s biggest challenges and focused heavily on reaching net zero emissions through innovation and policy.

He emphasized that avoiding more than 1.5 to two degrees Celsius of warming required aggressive emissions cuts across electricity and manufacturing and transport and agriculture and buildings. Now this isn’t [00:15:00] 2021. This is after, in 2020, we realized just how little a cut in emissions you get from literally shutting down the entire world because of COVID-19.

So I think, you know, it’s, it’s, he really held to this for a long time. But then came the pivot in October, 2025. He published this memo and this blog post. Hey, you can look it up. It’s titled Three Tough Truths About Climate. He argues that climate strategy should focus on human welfare even more than temperatures, the greenhouse gas emissions.

And he said that too much attention has gone. To near term emissions, emissions goals and doomsday rhetoric, and not enough toward improving the lives in, in, in, in a warming world. In his, his ventures that were primarily based around climate change are now kind of like their funding and staffing is being shifted around.

So his venture initiative, breakthrough energy and related clean tech is, is getting some scaling back while he’s putting more emphasis in technologies that [00:16:00] cut emissions, but more focus on improving livelihoods. And he’s also increased overall spending on global health and anti-poverty work through his foundation.

And he is positioning climate more as just one major issue among several drivers of human suffering, with the focus really being on, on human rights. Now let’s look at states. Let’s look at New York, right? Because New York is, is an extremely for those who live outside the United States. It it’s, it’s a very progressive leftist, environmentally focused state.

And well, they, they used to be extremely, extremely committed to climate change. Another. They’re not exactly meeting their commitments. So they once aimed to nearly eliminate greenhouse gas emissions. Their goal was to do so by 2050 and get 70% of their electricity from renewables by 2030. That’s four years from now.

But they are years behind on this. And their, their government hotch, I, I, I don’t know how to pronounce her name now argues that reliability and cost need to be [00:17:00] prioritized. Because obviously they do the, she does blame surging energy demand, high utility bills, and a hostile federal administration on this.

She, she doesn’t admit that, just it’s not practical. But beyond that, several marquee policies have been delayed or softened, including regulations to implement the 2019 climate laws cap and invest program that would change major emitters and, and they would charge major emitters and fund clean energy and efficiency investments.

So her administration also postponed all anti electric new buildings law, the. Sorry. Her administration also postponed an all electric new buildings law, backed an offshore gas pipeline, previously rejected on environmental grounds and approved an extension for gas. Plant powering a Bitcoin mine I think you’ll remember like the New York was famous for, oh, they’re gonna take away your gas stoves.

So they’re walking back on all of this. And then even in the exact opposite direction, the administration is courting energy intensive [00:18:00] tech and industrial investment, including a proposed 100 billion micron memory chip complex, expected to consume as much electricity as about 1.5 million homes.

Even as the state projects electricity demand could rise up to 24% by 2040. So they’re just kind of dropping it. It’s just like,

Malcolm Collins: I, I think it’d be really fun and I could see things moving in this direction is if the right decides to try to take this issue from the left like they did with Maha. I mean, the two movements are really tiny.

Well, one

Simone Collins: of our friends who, who runs a nonprofit that has always worked with state level. Republican policy makers, like state legislators? Yeah. On climate tech. Not because it’s a progressive cause, but because there are a lot of practical, economic and logistical reasons. To invest in clean tech.

Malcolm Collins: It’s not just that, it’s that as the Republican party has undergone its re construc and association you’ve got major figures like Elon, you know, he says he wants to be a centrist or whatever now, but [00:19:00] everyone knows he, he’s a right leading individual. Right. And he’s, he cares a lot about the climate.

Like you care a lot about like, environmentalism. And I think a lot of, if you just reframe it to protecting our hunting and fishing grounds mm-hmm. If you reframe it to Oh yeah. Like the old Teddy

Simone Collins: Roosevelt conservation of like, I love nature, it’s awesome. I I wanna go shoot some animals in it and camp and have fun.

And it’s cool. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: If you, if you, if you come out as you know, with a campaign of, we need to you know, do. Do protection of wildlife and protection of wildlife from contamination, I think move away from all the global warming stuff. Right. Like that, that doesn’t play to a Republican base.

Simone Collins: So, so let me hunt and stop turning the frogs gay.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I think that would appeal to, of the, the Maha base. Yeah, totally. Yeah. That would appeal to most mainstream Republicans. Yeah. And it would completely destabilize the Democrats if the Republicans were coming at it to appropriate

Simone Collins: climate activism that would be real appropriate climate activism.

Well [00:20:00] that’s, that’s actually the thing because now climate change has been made so uncool. There’s this woman actually a, a woman named Clara Chen. Or Fang surveyed 1003 self-identified climate activists and found that they’re mostly female, non-Hispanic, white, progressive, middle class, over 50 and highly educated.

So what does that mean? They’re Karens, so like now climate change has really become like the only people who now still care about it are progressive old Karens and, and Colin Wright on X wrote this, it is increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that such women are, are channeling the energy and protectiveness that would.

Ordinarily be directed toward child rearing into climate activism, treating Earth itself as their vulnerable child. And Joe Lonsdale, like the, the Joan Lonsdale wrote, climate activism is a religion for midwives who want to feel intellectually superior, but are not. Women tend to be more religious than men and will [00:21:00] often seek it out, out in their lives.

Proceed accordingly. And then in response to that sentimental robotics, another user on X pointed out just did some napkin math, not according to not, not accounting for loss productivity. We could be looking at 12 to 15 trillion in capital expenditure for climate efforts since 2000. Imagine how much we could have done with those funds.

Not saying environmentalism is important, but obviously improving air quality, et cetera, is good. But for 15 trillion, I feel seriously ripped off.

Malcolm Collins: So Simone, who is Joe Long? You said the Joe who, who is this?

Simone Collins: Joe of? Of like the Trump administration, the famous investor, the, the. I mean, like,

Malcolm Collins: okay. Somebody tied to the Trump.

He’s, yeah. He’s a, he’s

Simone Collins: an, he’s a very famous philanthropist and entrepreneur and investor. He founded Palantir. Okay. That guy that’s, he’s with UT Austin, founded Palantir.

Malcolm Collins: That’s easy. That’s easy. Okay. So the, the few points I wanna make here before you go further Uhhuh one is, is that I think a big reason climate change has dropped off, as you say, it’s a bunch of old women [00:22:00] now.

Yeah. Is a lot of young men pretended to care about the climate because hot young women cared about the climate. Yeah. Not anymore. They’re old now. Hot young women. You, you were one of them back, back in the day. I’m old now. I’m a hag. You’re hag maxing now. I’m ha I’m a

Simone Collins: hag mixer. Absolutely.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yes. Nobody, but I’m

Simone Collins: caring for a child now, not the climate.

You see it

Malcolm Collins: Actually, I, I even asked online just because, you know, we, we’ve got a high enough profile now. I was like, is there any like, quotes or tweets of like, people thirsting after Simone couldn’t find any. Right, because I’m a

Simone Collins: hag. I could let it, let it be. And remember wearing my hide scarf, it’s perfect.

My little hide gloves. Look. What? What? Look at this. Look. Look at this. Look. What am I I’m Whistler’s mother. Exactly, exactly. So with glasses with my asses,

Malcolm Collins: The

Simone Collins: point, by the way, people are so stupid, and I cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen this. People appear to believe that rim width is an indication of prescription strength.

Malcolm Collins: I, I know this as well. I’ve seen this as well. They’re [00:23:00] very dumb. But they think it, I don’t, I don’t even need

Simone Collins: glasses. I don’t. I wear them because it makes people think you’re smarter

Malcolm Collins: anyway, Simone? I think that this is hugely, like, as these women get older and more undesirable, they’re screeching at society is going to become increasingly more disgusted by the general public.

I think there was a great, I mean, well, I think

Simone Collins: they’re, they’re, they may be playing a non-trivial role in the the 25 20 25 dropping climate change like it’s hot thing.

Malcolm Collins: Right. Well, and I, well, the degree to which they do not control the narrative anymore is really strong. The one thing that got me recently is if you look at the last I was looking at it, it had been published for like four days.

And it was the Paramount Plus on YouTube for free, the new Star Trek thing.

Oh, right. And after four days of being live four free on YouTube, it was like at 130,000 views. Mm-hmm. Which is less views than we get in a normal, well, they even

Simone Collins: [00:24:00] advertised it. Didn’t you see that there was even a, a. An advertisement for, yeah, it was an app.

It’s not like it was just put on because I thought, well, okay, well they must have just published it. No one knew to even look for it. And the algo’s really weird now, so give them credit. But no, they paid for about it. This is a multimillion

Malcolm Collins: dollar production was

Simone Collins: major stars in

Malcolm Collins: it,

Simone Collins: right? Like,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. But just nobody cares about what the left

Simone Collins: mainstream media is.

Zombified, they’re working like it’s 1990 and they don’t realize that the, the fundamental economics have completely changed. The media landscape has completely evolved. They, they’re just gonna run outta money and die. But they are, they’re dead men walking. That is it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah, it is completely. Whenever we deal with them, I’m always just like, this is stupid.

Extremely frustrated. Yeah. This is so stupid. And we, we do more work with the mainstream media than we cannot talk about because of NDAs and stuff like that. Another thing about mainstream media talk about running a movement is there was the recent thing where Nick, the guy who exposed the Somalian fraud, did an interview as a YouTuber.

And then the YouTuber tried to cut him it so that it made him look like [00:25:00] he said a bunch of stuff he didn’t say. And Nick had filmed it all with his phone. I don’t know if he had done that secretly or whatever. And so it came out that the YouTuber was fraudulently manipulating the tapes and it made him look really bad.

But what, what Nick Shirley is who you’re talking about, Nick. Shirley, yeah. Is that we’ve had to do that while without being able to film our own stuff without li like legally I couldn’t, even if I had filmed what happened during that viral interview, I couldn’t even share that with you. And what’s even crazier about the viral interview, the piece that that was attached to was supposed to go live in December, and it has not gone live yet.

And we haven’t heard anything from the team yet. So we think they may have just dropped it rather than put in a disclaimer that their own person was wrong. Like, I don’t know, like what they were gonna do after. Like, they, they seem to not be aware that like we might do a longer episode trying to dive into what, what happened with that.

But just to cancel an entire filmed project out of embarrassment is

Simone Collins: Yeah. Surprising me because from what we can [00:26:00] tell when journalists. Have run pieces on us, they tend to do really, really well.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we just had a piece go viral in Germany.

Simone Collins: Yeah. They, they, they perform quite well and that makes us happy because we don’t want people to travel all the way from Germany or France or wherever.

Even just if it’s just New York or DC to spend a day or two at our place and get a hotel and everything and have it not yield an ROI, so we, we are sensitive to that. It it is, yeah. So it, it, it surprises me that they invested in sending people out and then ultimately didn’t run anything. But,

Malcolm Collins: but I mean, what, even, even

Simone Collins: if they just make it a fully, you know, fair and, and non sensationalized, non hit piece coverage of demographic labs.

‘cause they have plenty of footage of us just talking about the issue in a didactic manner, which was our point in the first place. If we don’t ask people to do hit pieces on us and we, we encourage them to make them interesting, but we, we, you can just use us for responsible news coverage and many people do.

[00:27:00] Anyway, let’s, let’s move forward though, because I think that the bigger, the bigger question that we need to be asking ourselves moving forward about panics is, Hey, you know what, when should I actually be changing my life and behavior? When should I be donating to a nonprofit about this? When should I be caring and when can I reliably understand that one, this may not actually be a real problem or as urgent as it is, or two, this will probably self-correct, or, or market market factors will self-correct this.

It will be priced in and people will come in and innovate a solution in time. So I wanna, I wanna share some unjustified panics, and there are really two types of unjustified panics, which is either the problem is not real, or not as imminently urgent as it is, or. The, the problem is a self-correcting one through market dynamics or just through like natural self-correction.

So obviously as we’ve just been talking about, environmental doomsdays are just one of those, the problem is just not as urgent as people say it is. What I didn’t realize, ‘cause I feel like [00:28:00] we’ve kind of been. Gaslit about this repeatedly is how many times people have said we have like five years left.

It’s all about to end and then nothing happens. So this even goes back to, and I’m sure it goes back earlier, but there was this Earth Day end of civilization prediction series in the 1970s where around the first Earth Day public figures and some scientists warned of looming environmental collapse within a few decades, including claims that cities like New York would literally be underwater.

And yes, we’ve had like hurricanes where there’s been flooding, but they meant actually permanently durably underwater and, and that the world would face unavoidable global famine and resource exhaustion by the end of the century. And then also media reports in the seventies based on some scientific papers warned of an impending ice age.

Ice age. And this was right before this like series in the nineties where everyone was talking about global warming instead. But they said that aerosol pollution and natural cycles would cause an ice age. And they predicted, of course, again, [00:29:00] famines and societal collapse. Like literally Time Magazine, which used to be big for those who were babies.

And, and Newsweek, which is one of the really big publication, amplified this as this consensus view like, oh, everyone knows the world’s gonna end and it never did. And even, even though the scientific community was divided on this, and then the, the trends do shifted toward, oh, it’s global warming instead, nevermind.

But every time this happens, they kind of just bury the, well, we were wrong part of this and just switch to a new form of apocalyptic system. Yeah. And, and well, it’s absolutely true that environmental problems like pollution and biodiversity are, are serious. Loss of biodiversity. The, the actual imminent collapse scenarios just haven’t played out.

Even in the, the eighties and two thousands. So after the seventies, there were all these short-term climate apocalypses, some high hope, high profile statements, forecast that entire nations would be wiped out by sealable rise around the year 2000, or that the [00:30:00] Arctic would be ice free by the summer of, or the early 2010s.

That just didn’t happen. But I totally remember, don’t you remember? Oh, the pool of rice cops are melting. Well, there’s a

Malcolm Collins: famous one where Greta Thornberg predicted, and this was like 15 years ago, that in five years the world was going to be flooded. No, just like this

Simone Collins: number of times that they’ve done this and then it’s just all like, well, I dunno.

Like they just keep going after. But this makes sense to me when I think, you know, in the context of I, you know, I worked for Earth Day Network, the people who started Earth Day and started one of the earlier panics. You know, that there is a. Because a lot of these organizations raised a lot of money in the world of academia as, as was alluded to in those earlier tweets I read off.

And, and as, as you know, the earth data raised a lot of money. Then you have these sprawling nonprofit and academic organizations who have a lot of money and have a very vested interest in not being shut down when it turns out the world actually isn’t ending. So they have to build a new panic. They have to, they would either have [00:31:00] to find a new cause or they would have to find some new way to justify fundraising so that they don’t lose their jobs.

And so I think part of why climate change just kept sticking around was for a very long time, people were able to just kind of keep the delusion going. But let’s move on from climate change. We talked about. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: I, I wanna talk a little bit. So I think that what we are, we’re seeing, and it is very interesting, is climate change as a movement.

If you contrast it with Greta Thornberg’s current movements, for example, right? Mm-hmm. And where the left seems to be going more Yeah. Is, is structured quite differently. Climate change is an apocalyptic assist movement, right? Like it is, yes, fix this or else civilization falls apart, right? Mm-hmm. To drop an apocalyptic movement is, from a historic perspective, pretty rare.

Yeah. True. Even when religions that are apocalyptic the predictions don’t come true, people involved in them they often end up, just doubling down, right? Like it’s

Simone Collins: a sort of hope springs eternal thing, but [00:32:00] just apocalyptic springs eternal. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Right. And the, the and it’s, and it’s so interesting ‘cause I think right now the movement that’s growing, that it’s structurally closest to the old climate change movement is the prenatal movement, right?

Like in the same way that a climate change advocate might get excited when they see the numbers being down again. Mm-hmm. I get excited because I’m like, ah, I made a good bet. My predictions are right. Yeah. The numbers are down yet again. But the point here being is that they’ve moved from an apocalyptic movement to a movement that is much more, it’s fundamentally

Simone Collins: revolutionary.

It’s about upending the social order.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It’s a, it’s about yes, upending the so revolutionary and religious Hmm. It is a structure of basically metaphysical beliefs around how the world works. Yeah. We go a lot more in detail in it in our video on Zhan Mond because I think he’s a very good explanation of this study of anti, well,

Simone Collins: yeah.

It’s when we first became aware of anti-colonialism as a concept, ‘cause we just hadn’t really. It recognized that it was an organized philosophy?

Malcolm Collins: Well, I [00:33:00] couldn’t conceive of how the philosophy of anti-colonialism could view the Jews, the, the native population of Israel as the colonizers. And if people are like, well, they came there from Moses this time, we know that the population was 50% at least the original population.

So the, the, the native population after being. Removed by an empire could be seen as colonizer by coming back to their original land. Right. They would post something like a, a, a, a meme of like Mount Rushmore losers

Simone Collins: weepers. It’s,

Malcolm Collins: this is a, a sacred monument, and you could post something like the Temple of the Rock on top of you know, the, the, the pure temple.

And it’s exactly the same defacing. And yet they would, it would offer no. And so I didn’t understand that until I took time to understand colonialist theory and how the groups aren’t divided was in colonialist theory. Mm-hmm. And colonialist theory does not really bear much concern for historic realities.

Mm-hmm. [00:34:00] It’s a religious framework. And I think that part of the community that previously within this apocalyptic movement has gone down this new religious. Pathway. And then the other part of the movement, the bill Gates of the movement, right? Mm-hmm. They’ve moved in the pathway that a lot of the traditionalist EAs started to move.

You know, even they used to care about the climate and they don’t care so much anymore. And they, they’ve gone down the pathway of well, I want to like reduce the most in the moment suffering. I mean, if you point out that this is going to lead to, and I think that this is where hard ea slash the sort of prenatal ideological agenda really contrasts with the agenda that, that these people had, right?

Yeah. And I think it’s been laid very bare which is our plan. Is to attempt to use our resources, voices, power lives, to build the structure that future human civilization will be able to, to launch from. Like everything [00:35:00] that I do, I’m, I’m generally unconcerned with the life or suffering of any live human today because there’s going to be so many humans in the future if we do things right that I have a duty to plan long term for human civilization.

And you see this with actors like Elon, like that’s clearly Elon’s goal as well, right? Like, his actions are not meant to leave in the moment suffering, you know, after he left. Yeah. It’s, it’s a

Simone Collins: focus on long-term human flourishing. Long-term

Malcolm Collins: human flourishing. If you look at Bill Gates’s actions, it is, it’s immediate

Simone Collins: negative utilitarianism.

Malcolm Collins: And I, and I’d say selfishly even about reducing in the moment suffering. And I think that’s. One of the core thing that divides the intellectual left and right. Right now, I think that that’s the core question that divides which side you are on. As an intellectual, is your core goal long-term human fl flourishing, or is it suffering reduction?

Yeah, if it’s long term human flourishing, you are a rightist. If it’s suffering reduction, you’re a leftist. Yeah, I

Simone Collins: mean, especially when you combine that with [00:36:00] how you define self, like is, is your point of identification of, or, or optimization around those furthest from you culturally and familiarly?

Or is it focused more inwardly in the circle?

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, no, no. The point I was making, it was sort of an inversion of that point. I, it just wasn’t connected, not inversion. That’s not exactly what I mean. The point I’m trying to make here is that the left right now has an intellectual cast, bill Gates, the soft effective altruist that those, those communities as opposed to hard ea.org, which we have.

So the soft effective altruist in the bill in the Bill Gates class they are not bought into the religion that the, the masses and the influencer class believes. The the Hassans and the Greta Thornberg’s and many of the foot soldiers of the left, the ones who are at these protests and everything like that.

What they believe is more like. A, a very poorly thought through religious framework. But it is one that they believe without logic and uncritical, a lot of

Simone Collins: [00:37:00] it’s just based on of avoidant behavior and avoiding discomfort and, and focusing on it in immediate optics that, that make you look good. And when you popularity points, I think,

Malcolm Collins: right?

But, but this, but in the right we have a, a, a mirroring structure, right? You have the intellectual cast who will intellectually engage with cross-cultural religious anthropology and topics and stuff like that. But you also have the religious foot soldiers who are just foot soldiers. They’re just operating off of a metaphysical framework that they have not deeply engaged with.

And I think it’s important to recognize that and see how these two factions are changing in both the left and the right.

Simone Collins: Sure. But let’s move on. Other, other forms of panic that I think very, and I mentioned this already consistently, don’t bear out. Ironically, our social panics. Just to give you a couple that have taken place in America in the last 20 years, there have been several musical panics like through, throughout the last a hundred or so years.

People have [00:38:00] freaked out collectively around jazz and then rock and roll, and then rap and hip hop. Like this is the end. It’s gonna, it’s gonna cause everyone to go crazy and become people. I think it maybe, did I genuinely, no, I think, I think it’s, I think it’s a symptom, not a cause. Okay. And, and then I, there was a 1950s comic panic.

Did you know about this? I didn’t know about this. Yeah, I’ve heard of it vaguely, but tell me more. Comic books were accused of causing juvenile delinquency and moral decay, and it literal really led to, to

Malcolm Collins: video game panic to

Simone Collins: Senate hearings and the comics code authority. Like, there, there was actual like, legislation and, and major action to control the story

Malcolm Collins: that the, the feminist frequency of that generation.

Simone Collins: I,

Malcolm Collins: I think, I

Simone Collins: kind of think so. And then there’s the famous Satanic panic where, you know, just people thought that there were all these, these groups sacrificing children and stuff. I feel like it was kind of an early qan on kind of thing. There’s a really great podcast called American Hysteria that I think maybe earlier she did, the host of that did a, [00:39:00] a podcast on the Satanic panic.

But if you wanna just hear about. Various things that people had moral panics about. Definitely check out the podcast. American Hysteria. I love it. She is still delightful. Very, very leftist, but I, most of the podcasts I listen to are super leftist. But you just

Malcolm Collins: listened to far leftists your entire, I love

Simone Collins: listening to Far Leftists.

Yes. Then there was the, yes. As you alluded to the, the panic around violence and video games, which totally, like a lot of researchers looked into this, tried to see a correlation between playing violent video games and expressing violent behavior. And there just wasn’t one that wasn’t born out at all.

And then there were two red scares. There was one from 1919 to 1920. We need

Malcolm Collins: another red scare, by the way.

Simone Collins: And then I, well, that’s the thing. It’s so funny. And then the, the forties and fifties and what people believed at these times, at these times, and this is when it actually wasn’t born out, was it?

Communists had. Infiltrated every, nearly every organization. And they hadn’t at that time, and now they actually have, I know, it’s just so ironic. I’m like, no one bets an [00:40:00] eye. You know, where, where’s a red scare when you need one? And what I think is so funny is there were all these moral panics. And throughout the 20th century, as these moral panics played out, people were increasingly losing their religion.

Only sort of going through the motions of their religious affiliation and, and cascading into soft. And then super soft religion as you define it, in the pragma guided crafting religion, which is basically just not really following the rules anymore, not really making any hard sacrifices in favor of your religion.

And this led to genuine moral decay. This led to genuinely people becoming less disciplined, having less inhibitory control, having more mental health prob