How The World Stopped Caring About The Environment
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 1 minute
Words per Minute
181.16246
Summary
In this episode, we discuss the end of climate change activism in the 21st century, and how the current climate panics are a symptom of a larger societal collapse. We also discuss some historical examples of when climate change was at its height, and what we can learn from them.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hello, Malcolm. I'm excited to be speaking with you today because 2025 was the year that
00:00:05.340
climate activism died. And I don't think enough people are talking about it, but major activists
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and donors and even states are dropping climate change. Like it's hot. So we're talking about
00:00:16.980
Matthew Glacius, Greta Thunberg, Bill Gates, and even the state of New York, which is insane.
00:00:22.420
I'll go into it. I'm like, okay. I mean, it's clear. It's over. It's over. We're not trying
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to make Fetch happen anymore. You only fight these causes because caring cells. All you activists can
00:00:39.360
go for yourselves. That was so inspiring. What a wonderful message. And in general, the sentiment
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has shifted from saving animals and the earth to class conflict and human dignity. And this is
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exemplified by folks like Kylie Jenner being criticized for swatching her animal cruelty
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free makeup on her housekeepers. No one cares that it's animal cruelty free. They're like,
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how dare you? She wants to become a housekeeper. She got it all cheap or whatever. This office that
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was able to do animal testing really cheap. And then they found out it was just because they were
00:01:11.140
doing it on interns. I think there's that too. I heard about that separately, but this was,
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I think a more prominent kerfuffle, but I just think it's really funny because she pays her
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housekeeper. The housekeeper obviously consented to it. But I think just near, I think it's
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exemplified because what really people are freaking out about is basically in any way using a paid
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employee, I guess, you know, for anything and to not do it yourself. It's a fascinating phenomenon.
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How hard, how fast, and how completely the climate movement was abandoned.
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All right, that doesn't stupid ass rainforest. This place sucks. I was wrong, the rainforest.
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We will be teaching our children about the climate movement as a historic movement.
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Yeah. And speaking of historical movement, I think this, this is a, there's a wider question that this
00:02:04.620
development, the 2025 crash of climate activism brings to light, which is, this is of course not
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the first panic we've had. And I think it's really important to ask ourselves in light of current
00:02:17.700
panics that are actively going on current things. People are like, we have to spend money on this.
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We have to change our lives around this. We have to learn how to better divine what is worth our time
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because I spent a huge portion of my youth dedicated to climate activism.
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That's what her degree is in. Save the sea turtles. I like spent a summer volunteering to
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help the baby sea turtles, make it to the ocean and measure the giant sea turtles. And by the way,
00:02:42.240
do you know the secret to stopping a giant sea turtle as they're making their way back to the ocean
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so you can measure her? You stick your knee, you need two people, but you stick your knee behind her
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front fin and then she can't move forward. And then that, that frees you up. Yeah. But it doesn't
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always work when you get a big enough turtle, you just can't stop them. And at one point I just
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watched that one of the Italian volunteers just ride her straight into the ocean. He just like gave
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up and got on top of her and was like, I mean, like, you're not supposed to do that, but he's
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just like, screw it. Like I'm going for it. And it was a beautiful thing to watch because there was
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bioluminescence in the ocean at the time. And we're doing all this overnight. So it's like dark and
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just watching an Italian ride into a glowing ocean on a turtle is one of those things you'll never forget.
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But the point being is, is you dedicating is that we need to, we need to learn. We need to learn.
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Yeah. I, yeah. And then I studied environmental business. I tried to build an entire custom
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college major around this. I worked for earth day network. This is the group of people who created
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earth day. I worked for the American council on renewable energy. I was extremely dedicated to this.
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And there are a lot of people now that are extremely dedicated to working on, on AI related
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apocalyptic organizations and, and working on all sorts of other panics. And so what I want to do
00:03:55.740
is also go through some historical panics and we'll also discuss climate change more. And we'll
00:03:59.300
also discuss the current crash. Cause I just think it's amusing.
00:04:01.640
Well, it's also interesting to talk about from the perspective of you and myself and the
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figureheads of the prenatalist movement. Like yeah. Demographic collapse is another one of those.
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We've got to freak out about this. And you know, we should, the point being is just because
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something is like a big problem for civilization or something that's going to affect everyone.
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It does not mean that you can turn it into a movement or that it will stay a movement in any
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point of time. Like right now that climate chain has crashed out. It doesn't mean that anything
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existential has changed about, I mean, depending on like deforestation, for example, is like
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Oh, and I'm going to get into it too, but also like a lot of major cities, Mexico city,
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I think it's Sao Paulo, South Africa, for sure. They're just running out of water. They're just
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drawing down their water tables. I mean, he talked about Iran too. There is going to get a point
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where they do not have groundwater to pull from. There's going to be nothing left.
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So some of these are like existential questions for civilization.
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Well, and so I, I think we, we, yeah, the, the, the larger discussion of this podcast is
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when is it a justified panic when you need intervention? And I think a justified panic
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is one where the issue is actually real and imminent. And one of the big problems with
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climate change is that, yeah, climate change is real. It's just not as imminent as people
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have repeatedly claimed. And that two will not resolve via normal environmental or market forces.
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And I think a big common factor, and we'll, we'll discuss this more too, is if something is,
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is priced into the market, for example, with peak oil, this wasn't the big,
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panic that people thought it was because there are economic incentives for companies to build
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innovations, to address diminishing oil supplies and to be better at extracting oil because people
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are willing to pay for it. And as prices go up and people pay more for oil, people who are
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entrepreneurial are willing to invest in technologies that allow them to extract oil
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more efficiently. And so the problem essentially gets resolved.
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But I want to, I want to take a second to just explain peak oil because some more fans are young
00:06:03.480
and may not know about this panic. Peak oil was a panic that was had in the 80s that human
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civilization would run out of easy sources of oil to tap.
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And, and, and because we built a civilization on oil, which we have, that human civilization
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would collapse at the point that we ran out of oil.
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Now, what is, what is interesting about this? And the reason I think is, it's a good thing
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to sort of meditate on as a crisis is peak oil, you know, within the time period must
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have seemed like the most obvious problem. There could ever be a problem. Is our civilization
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It runs on magic or something, right? Like obviously it's finite, right?
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Yeah. And what happens when we no longer have oil, if civilization runs on oil, civilization
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stops, right? Like this is easy. If, then, then this isn't even like climate change or
00:07:00.960
something like that. Right. You know, or like people could debate the science of it or something.
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This is just like, if, then, and it went in as a panic and it went out as a panic. And I, I think
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that something that you did not get to is, I don't just want to look at this from the perspective
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of what are the panics worth having? I want to look at this from the perspective of how do you
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create a panic? Like, why were people ever so panicked about the environment?
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Yeah. Well, we can also, I'm going to, I'm going to walk through some of the historical and recent,
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well, relatively recent moral and social panics, because I think that there are some major moral
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panics that we really should have had that we never had. And pretty much every actual moral
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panic that has taken place over the last hundred plus years, totally stupid and unjustified wasn't
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ever a problem. Like, why were you wasting your time on this? Well, like in the meantime, your lunch
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is being eaten by Satan essentially. So we'll, we'll get into that too. But first, because I really
00:08:03.020
think people, a lot of people haven't realized that climate change is over as a cause now that it's,
00:08:07.900
it's over. No one cares about it anymore. I want to make sure people get the memo and I want to go
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through the prominent detractors and, and, and major former activists who have now moved on
00:08:17.740
because I really want to hammer this home just to make it clear. Just, there are so many people who
00:08:22.860
haven't, they're, they're essentially like that person who's still living in the bunker, who assumes
00:08:27.180
that the nuclear apocalypse has taken place. They didn't realize that the world just kept going on and
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no bomb actually hit. We've received letters from people written on like recycled paper using old
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like billing envelopes that they didn't use for payment. So they're, everything's recycled and
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they're writing to us being like, how dare you be in support of prenatalism when there are too many
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people in the environment is in crisis and they just didn't get the memo. So let's, let's just be
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super clear about what, what has happened. So let's start with Matthew Iglesias. Though he later took the
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post down on December 28th. So just, just a little bit ago, he posted 10 years ago. I believe that
00:09:07.100
catering to the views of youth climate activists was important, but because I was not paid by the
00:09:13.260
same people who are astroturfing these groups, I was allowed to learn that I was wrong and change my
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mind in response to information. And then in, in relation to this, and this is all an accident,
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by the way, you get a, you know, context. He's like a major, I think, leftist thought,
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like he co-founded Vox. He's that guy. Great. He's the founder of Vox. That's what we need to
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know. Okay. Sure. Great. So in relation to this coddled affluent professional, that's the X username
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posted a few years ago, a full professor of physics offhandedly assured me that climate research was a
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scam and almost entirely a product of bad incentives in the grant industrial process.
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He knew of people doing perfectly reasonable modeling. They were forced out of, out for lack
00:10:00.600
of funding because they didn't come to the correct conclusions. If you look at academic knowledge
00:10:06.260
production, it's actually a lot easier to engineer unanimity and consensus than you'd imagine.
00:10:12.160
And then on the subject of youth, not actively caring about climate change, we have Greta Zundberg,
00:10:17.320
the mascot of climate change. She began vocally supporting Palestinians and criticizing Israel's
00:10:24.500
actions in Gaza shortly after the escalation of the Israel. That was a bad investment, huh?
00:10:28.880
In October, 2023 though. So like this isn't only 2025 when the shift started. When she first made this
00:10:37.480
pivot, she tried to shoehorn it into environmental justice, but I'm not so convinced, but specifically
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in a December, 2023 Guardian op-ed, she explained that solidarity with Palestinians aligns with the
00:10:51.880
movement's longstanding support for marginalized groups facing oppression, and then argued that
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there can be no climate justice without human rights.
00:11:04.220
Yeah, she's trying to be like, but well, but environmentalism is the same as imperialism,
00:11:09.060
occupation and humanitarian crises, which it is not, Ms. Thundberg. But she was trying to shoehorn it.
00:11:16.060
She was basically pivoting to those issues and trying to be like, no, they're all the same, but
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they're not. Greta, they're not. But technically, she's still active in environmental causes today.
00:11:25.620
Her activism has broadened over time to encompass climate justice. But I think climate justice is just
00:11:31.000
your way of saying, I pivoted away from environmentalism, and I don't want to admit it.
00:11:35.280
And she did participate in an Extinction Rebellion protest in Venice in November of last year,
00:11:42.260
which they dyed the Grand Canal green. And I looked at pictures of it, and I'm like, I can't tell
00:11:47.080
what was done. And yes, it was non-toxic dyes, don't worry. Extinction Rebellion, which also goes as XR,
00:11:53.920
they operate as a grassroots non-hierarchical network. So basically, anyone can organize actions in its name,
00:11:59.860
and they follow these principles of non-violence, non-blaming individuals, etc. But they try to do
00:12:07.700
creative high visibility protests. They've done road and bridge blockades and occupations of public
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spaces and sit-ins and glue-ins and lock-ins and symbolic stunts like fake funerals and dramatic
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performances and targeted campaigns. But she's really not focused on environmentalism anymore.
00:12:26.300
Now, by the way, I was trying to figure out what she's doing post the flotilla, because that's
00:12:30.740
where she was living. That was her main gig. She's now living at an activist house in London.
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This is what happens. You just sort of chill out. No, but I don't even know how she can come back
00:12:40.060
from this at this point. We have another episode of what's next for the left, because-
00:12:43.960
And it was made so much worse by the situation in Iran right now, because the fact that she has done
00:12:52.920
nothing about what the Iranian government is doing, which is exponentially worse than what Israel did,
00:12:59.660
it really goes to show, for her, the problem was the Jews.
00:13:03.240
When I say she's done nothing about the situation in Iran, I mean, she has not even made a single
00:13:09.380
tweet about it. She's able to motivate an entire flotillic instruction when it comes to Gaza.
00:13:15.200
But when it comes to the Iranians, she can't even lift an actual finger.
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Great name recognition. She can bounce back as soon as she wants to.
00:13:25.180
Oh, reality TV show, some kind of pay the media piece, writing stupid fluff for that leftists
00:13:32.500
eat right up. Like, I just, I think she'll be fine. I just, it's clear that she dropped in.
00:13:38.520
And I think also Greta, she comes from a very media savvy family. She, she rode the wave of
00:13:46.140
climate activism and left it because she realized that the attention wasn't there anymore. And it's
00:13:50.100
just not, but you know, while she only really was in a mouthpiece that didn't actively cater to real
00:13:56.020
environmental outcomes, someone who actually really did seem to seriously care about climate change
00:14:01.980
and trying to do concrete, meaningful things to address it was Bill Gates. But similarly to Greta
00:14:08.980
Thunberg, Bill Gates is slowly backing away from climate change work and shifting his attention to
00:14:13.860
human rights. And he still says climate change is a serious problem. But now, and it is, I mean, but,
00:14:19.200
but just not what people said it was. He's recently shifted from a climate disaster framing toward a
00:14:24.740
focus on human welfare and adaptation and realistic expectations about emissions cuts, which is
00:14:29.480
perfectly logical. But for contrast in his 2021 book, how to avoid a climate disaster,
00:14:35.600
because he wrote a fricking book about it. This is how focused he was. Gates framed climate change as
00:14:40.700
one of humanity's biggest challenges and focused heavily on reaching net zero emissions through
00:14:46.260
innovation and policy. He emphasized that avoiding more than 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius of warming required
00:14:52.280
aggressive emissions cuts across electricity and manufacturing and transport and agriculture
00:14:57.680
and buildings. Now this is in 2021. This is after in 2020, we realized just how little a cut in
00:15:04.700
emissions you get from literally shutting down the entire world because of COVID-19. So I think,
00:15:10.160
you know, it's, it, he really held to this for a long time, but then came the pivot in October,
00:15:15.020
2025. He published this memo and this blog post and you can look it up. It's titled three tough truths
00:15:20.940
about climate. He argues that climate strategy should quote, focus on human welfare, even more than
00:15:26.880
temperatures, the greenhouse gas emissions. And he said that too much attention has gone to near term
00:15:33.200
emissions, emissions goals and doomsday rhetoric, and not enough toward improving the lives in a
00:15:39.380
warming world. In his, his ventures that were primarily based around climate change are now kind of
00:15:46.700
like their funding and staffing is being shifted around. So his venture initiative breakthrough energy
00:15:52.360
and related clean tech is, is getting some scaling back while he's putting more emphasis in technologies
00:15:59.120
that cut emissions, but more focus on improving livelihoods. And he's also increased overall spending
00:16:06.980
on global health and anti-poverty work through his foundation. And he's positioning climate more as just
00:16:12.560
one major issue among several drivers of human suffering with the focus really being on, on human rights.
00:16:19.000
Now let's look at States. Let's look at New York, right? Cause New York is, is it extremely, for those who live
00:16:23.760
outside the United States, it's, it's, it's a very progressive leftist environmentally focused state. And well,
00:16:31.080
they, they used to be extremely, extremely committed to climate change. Another, they're not exactly meeting
00:16:36.320
their commitments. So they once aimed to nearly eliminate greenhouse gas emissions. Their goal
00:16:41.940
was to do so by 2050 and get 70% of their electricity from renewables by 2030. That's four years from now,
00:16:48.760
but they are years behind on this. And their, their government heart, Hochul, I don't know how to
00:16:55.400
pronounce her name now argues that reliability and cost need to be prioritized because obviously they do
00:17:02.100
that she does blame surging energy demand, high utility bills and a hostile federal administration
00:17:07.860
on this. She, she doesn't admit that just, it's not practical, but beyond that, several marquee
00:17:13.740
policies have been delayed or softened, including regulations to implement the 2019 climate laws cap and
00:17:19.560
invest program that would change major emitters and they would charge major emitters and fund clean
00:17:25.340
energy and efficiency investments. So her administration also postponed all anti-electric new buildings
00:17:31.720
law backed an offshore gas pipeline previously rejected on environmental grounds and approved an
00:17:42.820
extension for a gas plant powering a Bitcoin mine. I think you'll remember like the New York was famous
00:17:49.220
for, Oh, they're going to take away your gas stoves back on all of this. And then even in the exact
00:17:55.640
opposite direction, the administration is courting energy intensive tech and industrial investment,
00:18:01.360
including a proposed 100 billion micron memory chip complex expected to consume as much electricity
00:18:07.680
as about 1.5 million homes, even as the state projects electricity demand could rise up to 24%
00:18:14.640
by 2040. So they're just kind of dropping it. It's just like, I think it'd be really fun. And I could
00:18:19.940
see things moving in this direction is if the right decides to try to take this issue from the left,
00:18:25.060
like they did with Maha. I mean, the two movements are really tight.
00:18:28.000
Well, one of our friends who runs a nonprofit that has always worked with state-level
00:18:32.580
Republican policymakers, like state legislators on climate tech, not because it's a progressive
00:18:41.140
cause, but because there are a lot of practical economic and logistical reasons to invest in clean
00:18:48.180
tech. It's not just that. It's that as the Republican party has undergone its reconstructure
00:18:54.180
and association, you've got major figures like Elon, at least he says he wants to be a centrist or
00:18:59.280
whatever now, but everyone knows he's a right leading individual, right? I mean, he's, he cares a lot
00:19:03.440
about the climate. Like you care a lot about like environmentalism. And I think a lot of, if you just
00:19:08.800
reframe it to protecting our hunting and fishing grounds, if you. Oh yeah. Like the old Teddy
00:19:14.760
Roosevelt conservation of like, I love nature. It's awesome. I want to go shoot some animals in
00:19:20.640
it and camp and have fun. And it's cool. If you, if you come out as, you know, with the campaign of
00:19:26.160
we need to, you know, do, do protection of wildlife and protection of wildlife from contamination,
00:19:33.740
I think move away from all the global warming stuff, right? Like that, that doesn't play to our
00:19:37.800
Republican base. So let me hunt and stop turning the frogs gay. Yeah. And I think that would appeal to,
00:19:44.120
of the, the Maha base. Yeah, totally. Yeah. That would appeal to most mainstream Republicans.
00:19:50.140
Yeah. And it would completely destabilize the Democrats. If the Republicans were coming at it.
00:19:55.320
To appropriate climate activism. That would be.
00:19:57.580
To appropriate climate activism. Well, that's, that's actually a thing because now climate change
00:20:01.880
has been made so uncool. There's this woman, actually a woman named Clara Chang, Changshin-Fang,
00:20:09.720
or Fang surveyed 1,003 self-identified climate activists and found that they're mostly female,
00:20:16.160
non-Hispanic, white, progressive, middle-class, over 50, and highly educated. So what does that
00:20:20.860
mean? They're Karens. So like now climate change has really become like the only people who now still
00:20:26.880
care about it are progressive old Karens. And, and Colin Wright on X wrote, it is increasingly
00:20:35.360
difficult to avoid the conclusion that such women are, are channeling the energy and protectiveness
00:20:40.120
that would ordinarily be directed toward child rearing into climate activism, treating earth
00:20:46.040
itself as their vulnerable child. And Joe Lonsdale, like the, the Joe Lonsdale wrote, climate activism
00:20:52.780
is a religion for midwits who want to feel intellectually superior, but are not. Women tend to be more
00:20:58.640
religious than men and will often seek it out in their lives, proceed accordingly. And then in response
00:21:04.520
to that, sentimental robotics, another user on X pointed out, just did some napkin math, not
00:21:10.140
according to, not, not accounting for lost productivity. We could be looking at 12 to 15
00:21:15.780
trillion in capital expenditure for climate efforts since 2000. Imagine how much we could have done
00:21:20.860
with those funds, not saying environmentalism is important, but obviously improving air quality,
00:21:25.580
et cetera, is good. But for 15 trillion, I feel seriously ripped off. So Simone, who is Joe
00:21:30.560
long? You said the Joe, who, who is this? Joe, of, of like the Trump administration,
00:21:36.520
the famous investor, the, the, I mean, like, okay. Somebody tied to the Trump administration.
00:21:41.140
Yeah. He's, he's, he's a, he's a very famous philanthropist and entrepreneur and investor.
00:21:45.260
He founded Palantir. He's with UT Austin. That's easy. That's easy. Okay. So the, the few
00:21:52.300
points I want to make here before you go further. One is, is that I think a big reason climate change
00:21:57.220
has dropped off. As you say, it's a bunch of old women now is a lot of young men pretended to care
00:22:03.200
about the climate because hot young women cared about the climate. Yeah. Not anymore. They're
00:22:07.120
old now. You were one of them back in, back in the day. I'm old now. I'm a hag. You're hag maxing
00:22:13.760
now. I'm a hag maxer. Absolutely. Yeah. Nobody, but I'm caring for a child now, not the climate you
00:22:20.420
see. Actually, I even asked online just because, you know, we've got a high enough profile now. I was
00:22:24.760
like, is there any like quotes or tweets of like people thirsting after Simone? Couldn't
00:22:28.920
find any, right? I'm a hag, but I couldn't let it, let it be. I'm wearing my hag scarf. It's
00:22:34.520
perfect. My little hag gloves. Look at this look. Look at this look. What am I? I'm Whistler's
00:22:39.780
mother. Exactly. Exactly. With glasses, with glasses. By the way, people are so stupid. And
00:22:47.820
I cannot tell you how many times I've seen this. People appear to believe that rim width
00:22:53.440
is an indication of prescription strength. I know this as well. I've seen this as well.
00:22:59.420
They're very dumb, but they think I don't, I don't even need glasses. I don't, I wear them
00:23:08.580
Anyway, Simone, I think that this is hugely, like as these women get older and more undesirable,
00:23:17.540
their screeching at society is going to become increasingly more disgusted by the general
00:23:23.840
public. I think there was a great. I mean, well, I think they're, they're, they may be
00:23:28.000
playing a non-trivial role in the, the 25, 2025 dropping climate change, like it's hot thing.
00:23:34.140
Right. Well, and I, well, the degree to which they do not control the narrative anymore is
00:23:38.540
really strong. The one thing that got me recently is if you look at the last I was looking at
00:23:43.480
it, it had been published for like four days and it was the Paramount Plus on YouTube for
00:23:47.620
free, the new Star Trek thing. And after four days of being live for free on YouTube, it was
00:23:54.380
like at 130,000 views, which is less views than we get in a normal.
00:23:59.200
Well, they even advertised it. Didn't you see that there was even a, a, an advertisement
00:24:03.900
for it? It's not like it was just put on. Cause I thought, well, okay, well, they must've
00:24:07.780
just published it. No one knew to even look for it. And the algo is really weird now.
00:24:11.780
So give them credit, but no, they paid it for a million dollar production was major stars
00:24:17.300
in it, right? Like just nobody cares about what the mainstream media is zombified. They're
00:24:24.500
working like it's 1990 and they don't realize that the, the fundamental economics have completely
00:24:30.080
changed. The media landscape has completely evolved. They, they're just going to run out of
00:24:33.880
money and die, but they are, they are dead men walking. That is it.
00:24:37.820
Yeah. Yeah. It is completely, whenever we deal with them, I'm always just like, this is
00:24:43.240
This is so stupid. And we do more work with the mainstream media that we cannot talk about
00:24:46.900
because of NDAs and stuff like that. Another thing about mainstream media talk about running
00:24:50.360
a movement is there was the recent thing where Nick, the guy who exposed the Somalian fraud
00:24:54.560
did an interview as a YouTuber. And then the YouTuber tried to cut him. It's so that it made
00:24:59.300
him look like he said a bunch of stuff he didn't say. And Nick had filmed it all with his phone.
00:25:04.420
I don't know if he had done that secretly or whatever. And so it came out that the YouTuber
00:25:07.080
was fraudulently manipulating the tapes and it made him look really bad. But what, what
00:25:13.980
Nick Shirley. Yeah. Is that we've had to do that while, without being able to film our own
00:25:18.720
stuff without like legally, I couldn't even, if I had filmed what happened during that viral
00:25:25.160
interview, I couldn't even share that with you. And what's even crazier about the viral
00:25:28.980
interview, the piece that that was attached to was supposed to go live in December and
00:25:33.120
it has not gone live yet. And we haven't heard anything from the team yet. So we think they
00:25:37.980
may have just dropped it rather than put in a disclaimer that their own person was wrong.
00:25:42.140
Like, I don't know like what they were going to do. They seem to not be aware that like we
00:25:47.280
might do a longer episode trying to dive into what, what happened with that, but just to cancel
00:25:52.180
an entire filmed project out of embarrassment is.
00:25:56.640
Yeah. It surprised me because from what we can tell when journalists have run pieces on
00:26:08.680
Yeah. They, they, they perform quite well. And that makes us happy because we don't want
00:26:12.500
people to travel all the way from Germany or France or wherever, even if it's just New
00:26:17.880
York or DC to spend a day or two at our place and get a hotel and everything and have
00:26:22.340
it not yield an ROI. So we, we are sensitive to that. It is. Yeah. So it, it, it surprises
00:26:27.920
me that they invested in sending people out and then ultimately didn't run anything, but.
00:26:33.400
But I mean, even, even if they just make it a fully, you know, fair and non sensationalized
00:26:38.680
non hit piece coverage of demographic labs, cause they have plenty of footage of us just
00:26:43.260
talking about the issue in a didactic manner, which was our point in the first place. If
00:26:49.860
we don't ask people to do hit pieces on us and we encourage them to make them interesting,
00:26:53.700
but we, we, you can just use us for responsible news coverage. And many people do anyway, let's,
00:27:01.040
let's move forward though, because I think that the bigger, the bigger question that we need
00:27:04.800
to be asking ourselves moving forward about panics is, you know, what, when should I actually
00:27:10.280
be changing my life and behavior? When should I be donating to a nonprofit about this? When should
00:27:14.240
I be caring? And when can I reliably understand that one, this may not actually be a real problem
00:27:21.260
or as urgent as it is, or two, this will probably self-correct or our market market factors will
00:27:27.680
self-correct this. It will be priced in and people will come in and innovate a solution in time.
00:27:33.200
So I want to, I want to share some unjustified panics. And there are really two types of unjustified
00:27:37.920
panics, which is either the problem is not real or not as imminently urgent as it is, or the problem
00:27:44.400
is a self-correcting one through market dynamics or just through like natural self-correction. So
00:27:50.020
obviously, as we've just been talking about environmental doomsdays are just one of those,
00:27:55.240
the problem is just not as urgent as people say it is. What I didn't realize, cause I feel like we've
00:28:00.020
kind of been gaslit about this repeatedly is how many times people have said, oh, you have like five
00:28:08.960
years left. It's all about to end. And then nothing happens. So this even goes back to, and I'm sure it
00:28:14.260
goes back earlier, but there was this Earth Day end of civilization prediction series in the 1970s,
00:28:20.060
where around the first Earth Day, public figures and some scientists warned of looming environmental
00:28:25.660
collapse within a few decades, including claims that cities like New York would literally be
00:28:29.980
underwater. Yes, we've had like hurricanes where there's been flooding, but they meant actually
00:28:34.180
permanently, durably underwater and, and that the world would face unavoidable global famine and
00:28:40.200
resource exhaustion by the end of the century. And then also media reports in the seventies,
00:28:44.760
based on some scientific papers, warned of an impending ice age, ice age. And this was right before
00:28:50.260
this like series in the nineties where everyone was talking about global warming instead. But they said
00:28:54.700
that aerosol pollution and natural cycles would cause an ice age. And they predicted, of course,
00:28:59.540
again, famines and societal collapse, like literally time magazine, which used to be big for those who
00:29:05.700
are babies and newsweek, which was another really big publication amplified this as this consensus
00:29:11.420
view, like, oh, everyone knows the world's going to end. And it never did. And even, even though the
00:29:16.860
scientific community was divided on this and then the trends shifted toward, oh, it's global warming
00:29:22.660
instead. Nevermind. But every time this happens, they kind of just bury the, well, we were wrong part of
00:29:29.640
this and just switch to a new form of apocalypticism. And, and while it's absolutely true that environmental
00:29:36.140
problems like pollution and biodiversity are serious, loss of biodiversity, the actual imminent collapse
00:29:43.240
scenarios just haven't played out. Even in the, the eighties and two thousands. So after the seventies, there were all
00:29:49.020
these short-term climate apocalypses. Some high profile statements forecast that entire nations
00:29:54.520
would be wiped out by sea level rise around the year 2000, or that the Arctic would be ice-free
00:30:01.360
by the summer of, or the early 2010s. That just didn't happen. But I totally remember, don't you?
00:30:07.000
Oh, the polar ice caps are melting. Well, there's a famous one where Greta Thornburg predicted,
00:30:10.760
and this was like 15 years ago, that in five years, the world was going to be flooded.
00:30:14.200
No, just like the number of times that they've done this. And then it's just all like, well,
00:30:19.000
like they just keep going after. But this makes sense to me when I think, you know, in the context
00:30:23.760
of, I, you know, I worked for Earth Day Network, the people who started Earth Day and started one of
00:30:29.120
the earlier panics, you know, that there is a, because a lot of these organizations raised a lot of money
00:30:37.780
in the world of academia, as, as was alluded to in those earlier tweets I read off. And, and as, as,
00:30:43.380
you know, the Earth Day Network raised a lot of money, then you have these sprawling nonprofit
00:30:48.080
and economic organizations who have a lot of money and have a very vested interest
00:30:52.400
in not being shut down when it turns out the world actually isn't ending. So they have to build a new
00:30:57.760
panic. They have to, they would either have to find a new cause, or they would have to find some new
00:31:03.220
way to justify fundraising so that they don't lose their jobs. And so I think part of why climate change
00:31:09.020
just kept sticking around was for a very long time, people were able to just kind of keep the
00:31:15.600
delusion going. But let's move on from climate change, because we've talked about, I want to
00:31:20.160
talk a little bit. So I think that what we're seeing, and it is very interesting, is climate
00:31:24.860
change as a movement, if you contrast it with Greta Thunberg's current movements, for example,
00:31:29.480
right, and where the left seems to be going more, is structured quite differently. Climate change is an
00:31:34.720
apocalypticist movement, right? Like it is. Yes. Fix this or else civilization falls apart, right?
00:31:41.360
To draw up an apocalypticist movement is, from a historic perspective, pretty rare. Even when
00:31:48.320
religions that are apocalypticists, the predictions don't come true, people involved in them, they often
00:31:54.880
end up just doubling down, right? Like it's a sort of hope springs eternal thing, but just
00:31:59.800
apocalypticism springs eternal. Yeah. Right. And it's so interesting, because I think right now,
00:32:07.560
the movement that's growing that is structurally closest to the old climate change movement is the
00:32:11.480
pro-natalist movement, right? Like in the same way that a climate change advocate might get excited
00:32:16.040
when they see the numbers being down again, I get excited. I'm like, ah, I made a good bet. My
00:32:20.400
predictions are right. The numbers are down yet again. But the point here being is that they've moved
00:32:27.220
from an apocalypticist movement to a movement that is much more... It's fundamentally revolutionary.
00:32:33.660
It's about upending the social order. Yeah. It's about, yes, upending the social order.
00:32:37.980
So revolutionary and religious. It is a structure of basically metaphysical beliefs around how the
00:32:44.640
world works. We go a lot more in detail in our video on Zorhan Mandami, because I think he's a very
00:32:49.200
good explanation of this. Well, yeah, it's when we first became aware of anti-colonialism as a concept,
00:32:55.140
because we just hadn't really recognized that it was an organized philosophy.
00:32:59.460
Well, I couldn't conceive of how the philosophy of anti-colonialism could view the Jews, the native
00:33:06.040
population of Israel, as the colonizers. And if people are like, well, they came there from Moses'
00:33:11.760
time, we know that the population was 50%, at least the original population. So the native population,
00:33:17.320
after being removed by an empire, could be seen as colonizers by coming back to their original land,
00:33:23.320
right? They would post something like a meme of like Mount Rushmore.
00:33:29.000
This is a sacred monument. And you could post something like the Temple of the Rock on top of
00:33:36.440
the Jewish Temple, and it's exactly the same defacing. And yet they would offer no. And so I
00:33:42.900
didn't understand that until I took time to understand colonialist theory and how the groups
00:33:49.800
are divided within colonialist theory. And colonialist theory does not really bear much concern for
00:33:57.820
historic realities. It is a religious framework. And I think that part of the community that
00:34:04.020
previously within this apocalypticist's movement has gone down this new religious pathway. And then
00:34:09.940
the other part of the movement, the Bill Gates of the movement, right? They've moved in the pathway
00:34:15.860
that a lot of the traditionalist EAs started to move. You know, even they used to care about the
00:34:19.920
climate, but they don't know much anymore. And they've gone down the pathway of, well, I want to
00:34:26.580
like reduce the most in the moment suffering. I mean, if you point out that this is going to lead
00:34:30.980
to, and I think that this is where hard EA slash the sort of pronatalist ideological agenda really
00:34:37.240
contrasts with the agenda that these people have, right? Yeah. I think it's been laid very bare,
00:34:43.220
which is our plan is to attempt to use our resources, voices, power, lives, to build the
00:34:53.180
structure that future human civilization will be able to launch from. Like everything that I do,
00:35:00.420
I'm generally unconcerned with the life or suffering of any living human today, because there's going to
00:35:06.140
be so many humans in the future if we do things right, that I have a duty to plan long-term for
00:35:12.080
human civilization. And you see this with actors like Elon, like that's clearly Elon's goal as well,
00:35:16.780
right? Like his actions are not meant to leave in the moment suffering, you know, after he left.
00:35:20.900
Yeah. It's, it's a focus on long-term human flourishing. If you look at Bill Gates's actions,
00:35:27.480
it is immediate negative utilitarianism. And I, and I'd say selfishly even about reducing in the
00:35:34.540
moment suffering. And I think that's one of the core thing that divides the intellectual left and
00:35:40.160
right right now. I think that that's the core question that divides which side you are on as an
00:35:46.460
intellectual. Is your core goal long-term human flourishing or is it suffering reduction?
00:35:52.820
If it's long-term human flourishing, you're a rightist. If it's suffering reduction, you're a
00:35:56.920
leftist. Yeah. I mean, especially when you combine that with how you define self, like is your point of
00:36:03.620
identification of, or, or optimization around those furthest from you culturally and familiarly,
00:36:10.680
or is it focused more inwardly in the circle? Well, no, no, no, no. The point I was making,
00:36:15.300
it was sort of an inversion of that point. I, it just wasn't connected, not inversion. That's
00:36:19.440
not exactly what I mean. The point I'm trying to make here is that the left right now has an
00:36:26.180
intellectual caste, Bill Gates, the soft effective altruists, those, those communities, as opposed to
00:36:31.840
hard EA.org, which we have. So the soft effective altruists in the bill, in the Bill Gates cause,
00:36:36.040
they are not bought into the religion that the, the masses and the influencer class believes.
00:36:43.720
The, the Hassans and the Greta Thornburgs and many of the foot soldiers of the left, the ones who
00:36:49.160
are at these protests and everything like that, what they believe is more like a very poorly thought
00:36:54.660
through religious framework, but it is one that they believe without logic and uncritically.
00:36:59.540
A lot of it's just based on avoided behavior and avoiding discomfort and focusing on
00:37:04.580
immediate optics that, that make you look good and win you popularity points, I think.
00:37:11.000
Right. But, but this, but in the right, we have a, a mirroring structure, right? You have the
00:37:16.480
intellectual caste who will intellectually engage with cross-cultural religious anthropology and
00:37:22.080
topics and stuff like that. But you also have the religious foot soldiers who are just foot soldiers.
00:37:28.000
They're just operating off of a metaphysical framework that they have not deeply engaged with.
00:37:33.000
And I think it's important to recognize that and see how these two factions are changing in both the
00:37:39.920
Sure. But let's move on. Other, other forms of panic that I think very, and I mentioned this already,
00:37:44.760
consistently don't bear out, ironically, are social panics. Just to give you a couple that have taken place in
00:37:51.460
America in the last 20 years, there have been several musical panics. Like throughout the last hundred or so years,
00:37:58.760
people have freaked out collectively around jazz and then rock and roll and then rap and hip hop. Like this is the end.
00:38:07.560
It's going to, it's going to cause everyone to go crazy and become evil.
00:38:12.780
I think, I think it's a, I think it's a symptom, not a cause.
00:38:15.980
And then there was a 1950s comic panic. Did you know about this? I didn't know about this.
00:38:22.980
Comic books were accused of causing juvenile delinquency and moral decay.
00:38:26.020
And it literally led to Senate hearings and the comics code authority. Like there was actual
00:38:32.840
like legislation and major action to control the feminist frequency of that generation.
00:38:40.220
I think I kind of think so. And then there's the famous satanic panic where, you know, just people
00:38:45.620
thought that there were all these, these groups sacrificing children and stuff. I feel like it was
00:38:49.980
kind of an early QAnon kind of thing. There's a really great podcast called American Hysteria that
00:38:56.140
I think maybe earlier she did, the host of that did a podcast on the satanic panic. But if you want
00:39:01.860
to just hear about various things that people had moral panics about, definitely check out the
00:39:06.520
podcast, American Hysteria. I love it. She is delightful. Very, very leftist, but most of the
00:39:15.760
I love listening to far leftists. Yes. Then there was the, yes, as you alluded to the panic
00:39:20.480
around violence in video games, which totally like a lot of researchers looked into this,
00:39:24.820
tried to see a correlation between playing violent video games and expressing violent behavior.
00:39:29.360
And there just wasn't one that wasn't borne out at all. And then there were two red scares.
00:39:38.140
And then I, well, that's the thing. It's so funny. And then the forties and fifties and what
00:39:42.160
people believed at these times, at these times, and this is when it actually wasn't
00:39:46.400
borne out. Was it communists had infiltrated every, nearly every organization and they
00:39:52.880
hadn't at that time. And now it's just so ironic. And like, no one bats an eye, you know, where,
00:40:00.480
where's a red scare when you need one. And what I think is so funny is there were all these moral
00:40:04.900
panics and throughout the 20th century, as these moral panics played out, people were increasingly
00:40:10.400
losing their religion, only sort of going through the motions of their religious affiliation and
00:40:16.160
cascading into soft and then super soft religion, as you define it in the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting
00:40:21.760
Religion, which is basically just not really following the rules anymore, not really making
00:40:26.500
any hard sacrifices in favor of your religion. And this led to genuine moral decay. This led to
00:40:32.440
genuinely people becoming less disciplined, having less inhibitory control, having more mental health
00:40:37.440
problems, not, not getting married, not, not successfully building careers and lives and
00:40:42.340
savings. And now we've ended up where we are and it's not good. And there, but yet there's been no
00:40:46.880
moral panic about that, which I think is very interesting. But then let's talk about, let's talk
00:40:50.720
about examples of problems that have been resolved by market forces. And I already talked about peak oil,
00:40:55.740
but you had the, the multiple sort of either population or, or famine based predictions. So
00:41:02.680
in the 19th and 20th century, you have this, this Malthusian, both like the Thomas Malthus driven and
00:41:08.940
then the Neil Malthusian predictions that population growth would cause huge famines and mass starvation,
00:41:15.740
but instead, yeah, it was, it was, yeah, because in the past it absolutely happened that when populations
00:41:21.600
grew too much, then there would be some kind of massive famine. But in this case, because a lot
00:41:26.380
of this happened right around the industrial revolution and huge technological breakthroughs,
00:41:30.160
you had agricultural productivity just expand dramatically. I think they call it the green
00:41:35.720
revolution, right? And basically everyone was okay. And then you still though, again, in the 1970s had
00:41:43.860
Paul Ehrlich published the population bomb. And he predicted that literally hundreds of millions of
00:41:49.960
people would starve in the seventies, regardless of policy and that global death rates would climb sharply.
00:41:56.840
And the countries like India were essentially beyond hope. Like it's too late. It's all over now. And yet
00:42:01.940
instead, basically everything was fine. And just there, there was, there was no like desperate
00:42:08.800
rationing and huge death. And when there were famines, they were mostly driven by war and policy, not by
00:42:15.400
planetary carrying capacity, which was the argument that he made. I think also arguably COVID-19 was one of those
00:42:23.020
sort of would have resolved on its own kind of panic, panics. They, when you look at excess mortality in
00:42:32.080
The countries that implemented, we've done another episode on this, implemented more restrictions had,
00:42:37.640
generally speaking, and this is also true of states, the more restrictions an American state implemented, the
00:42:42.300
higher its death rate was. The states that implemented the least number of restrictions had the lowest death
00:42:46.520
Yeah. So I think it, you know, that's, it's a really great example of a really serious panic that like
00:42:50.560
probably did more damage than good. But I also want to point out that there are absolutely justified,
00:42:56.280
justified panics. Oh yeah. Also, we have to also think about the fact that the COVID-19 moral panic
00:43:03.740
and in general panic caused people to completely, so many people lose complete faith in the media,
00:43:13.020
in their governments. Like you, you have so many knock-on problems from what happened,
00:43:18.500
but there were absolutely even environmental panics that were totally justified and caused people to
00:43:24.060
freak out and then solve the problem. Can you think of one that's environmental?
00:43:31.440
Yeah, you do. But yeah. So in the 80s, scientists realized, oh my gosh, there's massive seasonal thinning
00:43:40.160
in, in the atmospheric ozone layer over Antarctica, and that it was linked to chlorofluorocarbons,
00:43:49.800
I'm pretty sure they made that word up. That's not real.
00:43:52.480
I don't think the ozone layer is real. I'm a doctor.
00:43:55.720
But basically it, they realized it was a big problem. Oh my God, we're all going to get skin cancer.
00:44:00.560
And then they, they, they, they created the 1987 Montreal Protocol, and it had various amendments
00:44:07.400
that required a phase down and then near elimination of almost 100 ozone depleting substances,
00:44:14.100
including most CFCs and halons. When they achieved basically almost total, I mean, 98 point to 99%
00:44:21.500
reduction in their production and consumption within, compared to their peak levels.
00:44:27.040
And now the ozone layer is on track to recover to pre-1980 levels by the end of the century,
00:44:33.860
which is really cool. Like we, we solved that problem. I think arguably also lead and gasoline,
00:44:39.260
it was like, oh my gosh, like this is causing people to go dumb. And then we're like, well,
00:44:43.880
let's take out the lead. And so we did. And that's great. I think the fears of nuclear war,
00:44:49.920
though elements of it were overblown. For example, a lot of people are like, well,
00:44:53.680
if there's some kind of nuclear attack, it's going to cause a nuclear winter and we're all going to
00:44:57.420
die. When like, then later, when you look more closely and you model a little bit better,
00:45:01.760
it would cause more localized issues, but not like a total worldwide nuclear winter in most cases.
00:45:07.220
But still, I think it was justified panic when people realized that countries were kind of,
00:45:13.320
they had their fingers over the nuclear buttons and like, hey, maybe we shouldn't just,
00:45:18.000
maybe this shouldn't be the way we communicate. And that, that caused a lot of, I think,
00:45:22.500
international social norms that turned countries against nuclear as the go-to war thing of choice.
00:45:30.920
Another one that was actually pretty justified, even though to most people who even lived through
00:45:35.700
it, including you and me, because we're olds, is Y2K. For those who are not aware, in the year 2000,
00:45:44.640
people predicted that computers would fail at midnight on January 1st, 2000, due to this date
00:45:50.420
programming issue with, with how computers were originally designed. They just didn't put it in
00:45:54.480
enough numbers. Why did they felt so big when it was happening? It felt like COVID.
00:45:58.640
Well, yeah, no, people were like, they were, they were creating bunkers full of food and they thought
00:46:04.060
planes were going to fall out of the sky. And, and this was because legacy systems stored years at two
00:46:09.140
digits, meaning that the, the mini computer systems would misinterpret 2000 as 1900. And that would break
00:46:16.340
functions involving a lot of comparisons and interest calculations and expirations and scheduling
00:46:21.400
and literally billions of dollars were spent on fixes. And some people like built bunkers and
00:46:27.360
stockpiled supplies. So people thought that 300 to $600 billion were spent on, on basically,
00:46:34.500
I guess, weatherizing us for, for the, the, the Y2K. Uh-huh. Which is a lot, but however,
00:46:41.040
however, in for comparison, a major synthesis by the climate policy initiative estimates that
00:46:46.280
a cumulative global climate, climate finance of about 4.8 trillion U S dollars between 2011 and
00:46:53.940
2020. So, you know, that's the, you know, Y2K was nothing in comparison and even updated data
00:47:00.440
shows that about 850 to 900, 140 trillion, sorry, billion USD in 2021, which was, that was about like
00:47:09.660
1.3 trillion per year. So anyway, like it was peanuts compared to what we spent on the environment,
00:47:15.000
but it was actually a real risk. And it wasn't something that was going to cause planes to fall
00:47:21.760
out of the sky. It wouldn't have caused people to not be able to get food, but basically banking
00:47:27.940
and power and telecom and air traffic and, and many key government systems like social security payments
00:47:33.260
would have actually not worked. So it would have caused real disruption. And we did actually need to
00:47:39.340
like, Oh, this is a problem we need to fix. Like it was justified. I'm saying it was justified.
00:47:44.340
It was money well spent. I'm glad that we did it. Um, because inconvenience. Yeah. I mean,
00:47:50.220
cause it would have sucked. Okay. A lot of people would have gone without their social security
00:47:54.700
payments and then had trouble getting food. And I mean, a lot of people's, I mean, people,
00:47:59.760
maybe their entire savings could have been wiped out by, by market crashes related to the stock market,
00:48:04.640
just total, totally going out of control. Like a lot of really bad things could have happened.
00:48:08.360
So it is very, very good that we panicked about that and took action. So you're a Y2Ker. You were
00:48:15.620
pro Y2K. You are pro Y2K. That is right. Saying the Y2K panic was justified or at least more so than
00:48:22.600
environmental damage, right? Yeah. And so I think these, these are the common characteristics of
00:48:27.860
justified panics, which is, I think the biggest thing is they're not priced in. I think when something's
00:48:34.120
priced in, like, Oh, we're going to run out of oil, oil gets more expensive. Okay. Well then
00:48:38.240
the market responds by finding more efficient ways of producing oil.
00:48:41.300
Like eventually, you know, like how it is like, Oh, we can't live in this place anymore. So we move
00:48:48.160
away. And then like, you know, we have to figure this out or like, you know, peak oil or like, Oh,
00:48:52.480
like we, you know, humanity eventually just finds a new way of, I mean, I, I, I, listen, I mean,
00:48:59.760
like when, when people settled, like when, when English colonists settled in New England,
00:49:04.960
there was like a mini ice age going on. It was super cold here that we've dealt with climate
00:49:10.180
change throughout human history. We, we adapt. I think it's one of those things that you slowly
00:49:14.860
adapt to and climate change was overwrought because they, they said it was a lot more urgent
00:49:20.140
essentially than it was. We basically have more time to adapt to that. So yeah, I think when you,
00:49:25.700
when you make it apocalyptic, it is unfounded when you're like, Oh, there's this urgent thing we need
00:49:31.860
to handle right now. And there's a very clear reason why at this point it's going to happen.
00:49:35.460
Like Y2K was clear. We knew we had a clear deadline. We knew exactly why it was clear like that. But
00:49:41.320
when it's more like, Oh my thingy, my, my equation says like that, that, that typically correlates with
00:49:48.820
is not playing out to you. Like, how do you, what's your takeaway with how we should be signaling
00:49:54.180
per natalism? It's per natalism going to become the next big movement. Like, how do we,
00:49:58.340
how do we handle that? I think that it's, it's not, we shouldn't be framing it as this, like
00:50:05.520
this year, it's all going to fall apart. I think very similarly to it's, it's kind of like this
00:50:11.680
combination of, of climate change and Y2K of like, well, the writing's on the wall. Like
00:50:18.200
the way many countries, social services are set up requires this thing that is going to not
00:50:26.120
be the case anymore. And so we have to change it. Like the, the numbers will change and the
00:50:31.900
equation will break. It is very simple logic. There's nothing that's going to change the fact
00:50:36.540
that that's going to happen, but we, we do have time to adapt. And I think that's why it's important
00:50:42.400
for us to talk about this, but we shouldn't make it this immediate panic because it's not,
00:50:46.860
it's something we can plan for. And as you point out many, many times, like endlessly,
00:50:52.100
it's not going to change. We're not going to start increasing our, our output of humans. Like
00:50:58.380
the, the birth rate's not going to go up suddenly. We more have to just adapt the systems. We have to,
00:51:03.340
we have to analogously build the computer systems that can deal with the year 2000.
00:51:09.220
Well, this is why my framing of, of pronatalism is our job is to replace the existing population,
00:51:15.920
right? Like when you change it to, from the, from the framing of like, this is cataclysmic,
00:51:19.920
think about society. I do point that out. I'm like, why don't you care given how cataclysmic
00:51:24.940
this is when I'm talking to reporters, but like the goal of the movement is not to prevent the
00:51:28.500
cataclysm. It's to replace the population today, which is kind of priced in. I mean,
00:51:33.060
one of the things I was talking to Simone about is, you know, how easy our kids are going to have
00:51:38.400
it dominating the future of human society. If you look at like 40% of kids in fourth grade can't
00:51:43.080
read now, right? Like one, the education system is failing because people are being idiots and
00:51:47.140
still sending their kids to school. And then like the, the upper middle class parents of students
00:51:51.260
who are still giving their kids a decent education are still, their kids, what was the word? Like
00:51:57.500
cutting their knees, something like that. What is that? No, they're not letting their kids play
00:52:01.420
rough and tough. Well, they're not letting their kids. No, well, more importantly, they're not
00:52:04.300
allowing their kids to learn how to use AI or be on the internet or be really good with tech. So like
00:52:09.000
that's, you also don't want to undercut your kids by, by disempowering them in a tech enabled age.
00:52:15.840
Like you have to find a middle ground. So yeah, I feel like we have a major strategic advantage.
00:52:20.820
Then on top of all of that, even genetically speaking, smart people are just not having
00:52:25.600
kids much anymore. And in terms of getting into positions, there's going to be so few young
00:52:30.720
people as our kids are growing up. I mean, consider like getting into Harvard, right? Like
00:52:34.700
that was as hard as it could have ever been. Like when I got into Stanford or she got into Cambridge,
00:52:39.620
the years that we got into our generation, because that was that giant generation when not only was
00:52:44.120
a generation larger than any generation before it, but it was a generation that was also more
00:52:49.520
focused on getting into college than any generation before it. Now, like people don't want to go to
00:52:53.880
college at high rates anymore. And the, the number of, of people who even could apply a smaller.
00:53:00.060
So for them getting into these top schools, getting into top positions is just going to be
00:53:05.160
dramatically easier unless AI changes everything. And like, no human has a job.
00:53:09.260
Yeah. And so speaking about AI, actually, I just in like, okay, like last five minutes,
00:53:13.920
cause I have to go get the kids. There are current panics. I think some are justified. Like I alluded
00:53:18.660
to earlier water shortages, that, that is an actual thing that like people kind of need to figure out
00:53:23.300
sooner rather than later, because Mexico city is about to run out of water. Johannesburg is about
00:53:27.380
to run out of water. Cape town is about to run out of water. Major Indian mega cities like Delhi and
00:53:32.980
Bangalore and Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata are all about to run out of water as are a bunch of other
00:53:40.000
places, including Sao Paulo and Beijing and Cairo and Jakarta and Istanbul and Mexico city and London
00:53:44.840
and Tokyo and Miami. They're all in, and not a very good position. So I think that's one
00:53:48.940
demographic collapse. We talked about what about, where do you stand with anti-apocalyptic system?
00:53:53.460
Because it's not, it doesn't really fit neatly into any of my criteria. Like it's not necessarily a
00:53:59.940
social panic, but it is kind of a social panic. It should, it should be treated as more of a social
00:54:04.700
panic. The Ellie Isaac Bukowski, the murder bots are going to kill us all is unfounded, stupid. You
00:54:10.780
can watch our videos on why we think it's stupid, but the, the AI will completely disrupt the way
00:54:15.140
society and the economy work. It's something we need to be paying attention to that a lot of people
00:54:21.080
will be out of the job in the short term is something we need to pay attention to and how we
00:54:25.100
work with AI instead of making ourselves a threat to AI by these jihadists. You know, we need to,
00:54:31.220
to find a way you can look at our Sons of Man series on this, where we talk about how you can
00:54:37.460
build this durable alliance. We'll do a track on it eventually where I go deeper into it. But
00:54:41.600
the wider thing I want to talk to you about AI here is I think it's something that people get
00:54:45.700
wrong. And it's one of those really like dumb takes you here all the time on the internet.
00:54:48.860
The reason why the billionaire class stopped caring about climate change is because now
00:54:54.480
they're all invested in AI and AI runs counter to climate change. A lot of people like Elon,
00:55:00.680
for example, he was pro climate and pro crypto at the same time, right? Like a Bitcoin crypto
00:55:05.400
explicitly, right? Like they don't care that their causes conflict with each other. That's not why
00:55:11.400
they left climate change. I don't even think it's tangentially related to why they stopped caring
00:55:16.500
about climate change. I just think that the climate movement lost its steam, mostly through
00:55:26.060
hyperbolic freakouts, where I think with the pronatalist movement, we've done a very good job
00:55:32.460
of localizing our hyperbolic freakouts so that we will see these collapses in places like Korea and be
00:55:38.960
able to point and say, look, I told you so in a way that is going to be hard for other people to miss.
00:55:43.600
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Yeah. I think people need to look at, at the way, how I've moderated my
00:55:56.440
views is I need not complex modeling, but just very clear brass tacks. Like this system requires X to
00:56:07.460
work. X is, is not going to be a constant anymore. We cannot expect X to continue. And therefore,
00:56:13.200
we cannot rely on the system anymore. Like that, that is a very clear thing with demographical apps
00:56:19.060
that I know we just haven't addressed and that, that we can't address. And therefore we have to
00:56:24.780
prepare accordingly with AI. I really, I just don't, I don't, it's, I think it's hard to prepare
00:56:33.320
because it's such an unknown unknown. Well, I mean, when I am developing for AI, I literally just
00:56:41.260
will ask AI, Hey, what capability can I give you that would scare AI safety experts most?
00:56:47.920
That's been my design philosophy was the autonomous agents, which are mostly working now. We'll get
00:56:52.440
them to our, the reason why we haven't released them yet to like the VIP fans, which is what we're
00:56:56.160
going to do is because the RFAB main site was so buggy when I first thought it was safe to release
00:57:01.740
that I was just really embarrassed about that. And I never want to make that mistake again.
00:57:04.600
I want to do extensive testing so that even when we're doing our initial rollout, it's fairly bug
00:57:10.260
free, but I'm excited to be moving forward. Decided to have our fab stable. I mean,
00:57:16.560
Oh, wait in the comments, if you've made it this far, cause I actually do want to, I want to know
00:57:22.180
more about people's thoughts on what we should actually be panicking about now. Like what,
00:57:26.960
what panic is justified now? Yeah. Climate change is over.
00:57:30.140
I'll tell you a panic we haven't seen yet, but I expect we will see is more a panic around young
00:57:36.780
people dating AIs. It's a thing that's happening. It lends itself very well to like a debauchery
00:57:42.760
panic, robo sexuality ads being out there. I can see it. I can too. I mean, I'm basically married
00:57:51.600
to an AI. Like you're not. I also just feel like people kind of don't care anymore. Like there's
00:57:56.000
this really interesting moral malaise. I don't know. I, I, I just, things have gotten so absurd
00:58:02.600
now that I, I have difficulty. Do you know how absurd the world is? You and I are famous in this
00:58:10.440
crazy timeline. Well, you got, you got Octavian telling you, mom, get the kids. Yeah. They might be
00:58:20.700
outside now. So I got to run. I love you very much. And I will make your mango curry for dinner.
00:58:26.000
Good night, Malcolm. Oh, what episode do you want to run tomorrow?
00:58:29.320
I don't know. Your call. Um, it can be either of yesterday's episodes or either of today's
00:58:33.920
episodes. Like this one, this one's good. We'll run this one. Yeah, it's timely. I mean,
00:58:38.800
cause you know, 2025 is, is now quickly disappearing in the rear of a mirror. We got to do this while
00:58:44.780
it's fresh. People are forgetting about it already. Oh my God. All right. Ciao. Ciao.
00:58:51.020
And see if you can find anything wrong with the website because we are at a stage where I think
00:58:55.060
we can start advertising like tomorrow, if you can. Well, have you put in the Google ads yet?
00:59:01.960
You just said you did. I can't remember. Yeah. Oh yeah. Google and Reddit ads are now working.
00:59:06.080
Wonderful. Oh, oh, nice. Yeah. Yeah. But I love you to death. And I'm making you the mango curry
00:59:12.500
tonight, right? Yeah, that would be great. Yeah. So if you're doing the mango curry. Peppers and green
00:59:17.820
onions, but cut in those slightly larger chunks, not in little circles, right? Yes. And I would add
00:59:23.200
some garlic and sambolic, but not the hoisin. Yeah. Not hoisin. Yeah. Okay. Sambolic. Oh,
00:59:28.620
sambolic. Yeah. I could see that. I could see that. I think mangoes are so disgusting.
00:59:34.080
Oh, well, I appreciate you cooking with them for my benefit. As long as I don't have to cut it. I'm,
00:59:39.180
I'm okay. Because they're slimy. Yeah. They're the vaginas of fruit. There's a lot of fruits I don't like.
00:59:47.920
Come on. It's just gross. Anyway, actually, probably what's that really disgusting smelling
00:59:53.720
one? Durian. Durian's probably. Do the people think that they're like cool for liking? And I'm
00:59:58.900
like. Don't, don't even. No. Yeah. I'm sorry. No, that's not. It's not cool. For some reason,
01:00:05.080
lots of people acted like liking durian. Did you have to deal with that too? It was a thing. Yeah. I didn't
01:00:10.540
have to deal with it in any office. Thank goodness. But I am aware of it as a problem.
01:00:17.000
It was cringe. It was very, it was very cringe. It was the, it was a Silicon Valley startup version
01:00:23.580
of the person who microwaved fish in the lunchroom. You know, don't do it. It's not cool. Just don't.
01:00:33.420
Hey. Yeah. Hey, who wants to set up the trains?
01:00:38.020
You guys are too busy fishing? Yeah. Yeah. Looks like Octavian's going to have to get things
01:00:44.480
started. Huh, buddy? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm getting, I'm getting the pieces. Okay. Wow.
01:00:51.800
I'm getting the rubber bags off of the tracks if he would want me. Yes, please. Thank you
01:00:56.600
very much. Absolutely. Thank you, Octavian. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. It's okay, buddy. You're
01:01:12.420
going to build something. Yeah. Yeah. So how, so how these fish go on with the magnet is this,
01:01:21.420
it's just a teeny tiny magnet on this part of it. Very nice design, isn't it? Yeah. I love it.