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