Taking "Degrowth" Seriously: What is the Actual Ideology⧸Logic of Those Who Want to Shrink the World?
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 13 minutes
Words per Minute
187.53903
Summary
In this episode, we discuss the philosophy of the people who are aware that demographic collapse is happening, but want to facilitate its continued existence, and how they think that this is going to work out okay. They are the founders of the O Volpe Foundation, a group that is trying to get women to have fewer kids.
Transcript
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Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be discussing
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the philosophy of the people who are aware that demographic collapse is happening,
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you know, broadly saying, aware of its consequences, but want to facilitate its continued
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existence and how they think that this is going to work out okay. Because I've heard of these
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people, you know, the degrowth people, right? The, well, we can manage, like, we can make
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things better with an older population and everything like that. Like, this is good.
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I'm just picturing the dog in the fire-ridden building. Yes. Yeah, I kind of blown this off,
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but we had- Maybe they're onto something. What if we're wrong? If we're wrong, we want to be
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corrected, right? Reach out to us that has these beliefs. And they were very nice, and they sent
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us to their website. And this group is called the OVOLPE Foundation. OVOLPE, I don't know how to
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pronounce it. When they do a lot of work on trying to get girls to have fewer kids. I will say that
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normally, I wouldn't care about this work, but guess what country they do this work in most?
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Ah. Thailand. Do you know what Thailand's TFR is? It's around one. This work is genocidal at that
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rate. That means the population is halving every generation. That's one of the lowest, like,
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going to- Wouldn't they want to do this in, like, a really high fertility country? I mean-
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Yeah, they do do it in one other country. I want to say Tanzania, which is higher fertility. It's,
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like, 4.5. And so that's reasonable there. But in Thailand, I'm like, if there's any country where
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you don't want to be doing this, that's like doing it in Korea or something. Keep in mind,
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Thailand's fertility rate is 1, and Korea's, like, the lowest on Earth is, like, 0.75.
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So this is close to the lowest fertility rate on Earth.
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Yeah. I mean, at that point, it's already happened. You don't have to worry about it.
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You're just kicking a dead dog at this point. But I want to go into their own words,
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both from the chain of emails they sent us and from their website, so we can understand how they
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want to structure society. And I'll start with just sort of the wider plan here, which we won't
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talk about too much, but it'll give you an idea of where we're going to be going with this conversation.
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The goal here is, on one hand, the well-being of children, including the widespread good
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education, and on the other hand, equal opportunities and prosperity for all citizens
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of the world. The key message here is as follows. Fundamental right to one child per couple. This
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child will be supported through compulsory education, medical care, nutrition, and if necessary,
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financial assistance from the global community, at least until UNESCO, ISCD level two, or possibly
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level three. Registration with the Child Protection Authority, the CPA, is mandatory. A second child
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is subject to conditions. Both parents must demonstrate and be able to independently financially
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support both children up to employability. Approval by the CPA is required. For the third child onwards,
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additional requirements apply. In addition to the requirement for approval, progressive child tax
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policies are levied. So basically, the more kids you have, the more you have to pay in taxes rather
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than the less. And then they go on to say in this section, this is to ensure that school attendance
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by less privileged children is refinanced by child taxes by wealthier families. Presumably, it would be
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the wealthier families who are allowed to have far more children, right? So it's like wealthy people
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can have. You can hear there's like elements of baseness to this, right? A dictatorial world government
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where only the wealthy can have more than two children or really more than one child. Yeah,
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it seems like many sci-fi dystopias where you can't afford to pay the government credits to have
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an additional child or whatever. But what I'm saying here is this isn't token wokeness, right?
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No, no, no. They're doing stuff that people would see as quite controversial because they believe it's
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the optimal way to go, which I appreciate. So to continue here, this could also counteract current
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problems such as hunger, disease, and child labor. I realize the global implementation of such a
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regulatory system is still utopian at the moment. I love the use of the word utopian, where even with
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me, when I describe my utopians, I at least realize that to the average person, they sound dystopian.
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And I would guess that to your average person, this would sound extremely dystopian. Like that's not
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just me. You have a better ability to emulate normies. Normies would see this as dystopian, right?
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The CPA, which monitors all children worldwide. Normies would absolutely see this as dystopian.
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Okay. But democracy, healthcare, computers, and cell phones were also utopian not so long ago,
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and unfortunately still are for many people in the world today. So I'm starting with that because I
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think that this gives you an idea of the type of world structure that they're going to be imagining
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here. Like he seems to indicate that he sees democracy as a good thing, but it's also pretty clear
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that this type of world structure is meant to operate under a global technocracy closer to the
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UN or the EU, where you have some, you know, token democratic elements, but they don't really
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determine who's running things. That's more a technocratic element. And we can talk about the
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benefits of that kind of system later, but that seems to be what they're presupposing here.
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And I'd also point out with a system like this, they, you know, our fans who are like are aware
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of falling fertility rates and everything like that, they can laugh at this when they hear it and
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be like, what an evil system is that? But I'd point out that we could be living in a reality where such
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a system as this was necessary. There is a, like, honestly, even if I, if I lived in like the seventies
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or something. Right. And I was just looking at global fertility trends. I was looking at global
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populations and you were like, what are you going to do about it? And my response would probably be
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like, well, I don't want to talk about this publicly like right now, because it would be very offensive,
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but we probably need to do some sort of restriction eventually. Like this doesn't seem mathematically
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realistic forever. And the consequences of this could be staggering. Right. And even, even outside of
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that, even if you're like, well, in the seventies, you still should have known a population collapse
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was coming. Imagine we're on like a spaceship or something, right? Like, like feasibly earth might
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have like limited resources, right? Like, right. And, and so there's like a point on the spaceship where,
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you know, everyone's having too many kids and you as the captain have to like come in and say,
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okay, but we like this, we don't have the food or the oxygen for this anymore. Right. So I'm just
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going to cut oxygen rations to like sector C for this week. And we can repopulate in a bit,
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or we can do, you know, stop having so many kids. Right. So what I'm saying here is if you accept
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the premise that like, we are anywhere near earth's carrying capacity and you accept the premise that
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the population is still going up, I can see where something like this might be necessary. Right.
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I just don't think we're anywhere near that. But, but what I'm saying here is the types of people
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who get into these ideas. One, this is an organization in Switzerland. So very Swiss
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culture, you know, watchmaker world right here. And two, a lot of them grew up during an age where
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it's, it's very hard for older people to grok and turn around and be like, oh, the world is
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fundamentally different now than it was when I was growing up. Yeah. And to your point, there's something
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very responsible about saying, I don't know how we're going to feed all these people. And just to
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blithely assume that we'll develop technology, which we ended up doing, that we'll be able to
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sustain all these people. And now we're at a juncture also where we're able to very reasonably say
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that we can continue to have some population growth without worsening climate change, for example,
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if that's what you care about. Whereas before we couldn't really say that. So I also think there's
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something responsible and not just being like a hand wave tech will handle it and saying, well,
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until we know, let's. Yeah. Yeah. But to Simone's point here, she's talking about if we were in the
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1970s, but we're not in the 1970s. And now we know tech will handle it. Right. People are also really
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bad at updating their, but that's the point I'm making. These people are older than us. They grew up in a
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different era. They are just unaware. What's the name of the Cremu post where he talks about how
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this can be like having kids doesn't actually hurt the environment. It's on his sub stack. It's called
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go ahead and have kids. Depopulation won't stop climate change, but your kids might.
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Yes. And no, and this is really true. This is where we are with technology now, because we know
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that the technocratic solution to climate change didn't work. Like we tried this on a global scale.
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It didn't work. Even when we shut everything down for COVID that year, like when nobody was driving to
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work, when nobody was flying, we incrementally hit the reductions. We were supposed to additionally
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incrementally hit every year by the Paris climate accords, which when I saw that, I was like, wait,
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so next year we need to keep everyone at home, keep all of the planes shut down, keep half of the
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factories shut down and somehow incrementally reduce it again. And then we need to do that again the next
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year. Oh, so this is just funny money that you're playing with here, right? Like this can only be done
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by active scientific interventions, which require competent individuals to do. So that's, that's the
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point. And we've developed them and Kremu talks about them, but now carbon sequestration, especially
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due to reduced energy costs is going to be a lot more affordable and make a much bigger difference.
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And like, Hey, let's shut down all economies and travel. So, yeah. So to go over some of the documents
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we'll be reading from here, because I think this will give you an idea of how spicy an aging society
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is an opportunity and is regulating the number of births necessary. By the way, here, I'm going to
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have the population zero song. So I'm going to start with their strongest argument and this was made
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over email and not in their website. I think it's a strong argument because it's, it's, it's based
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and it's accurate. And it shows that we're dealing with like rational people who have an understanding
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of like human genetics and differences and stuff like this, right? Yeah. Maybe they made it to us
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because they felt more comfortable being more candid via email. Yeah. Okay. So the dilemma is that
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more efficient technology, automation, robots, and AI mean that fewer workers are needed in the
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traditional sense. Highly skilled workers are already in short supply, but ordinary workers
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are becoming less and less necessary and becoming unemployed. Since low-skilled workers are
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proportionally overrepresented, even high birth rates do not help solve the problem as the reproduction
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rate is particularly high among the less educated classes. Unemployed people or workers in the low
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wage segment contribute little or nothing to taxpayer revenues. On the contrary, they increase government
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spending. This is a completely rational point. And the reason why you are making this point to us
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and the reason why we don't address this point as directly in a lot of our outreach is we have said,
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you know, at the end of the day, this isn't a warm body problem. This is a taxpayer problem,
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right? If you massively increase the population, but they're all on welfare or something, you know,
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you've made it astronomically worse. If you take in immigrant classes and these immigrant classes are
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drains on the state, you have done nothing to fix this particular problem. And so, you know,
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they're right here. Also, AI is going to, you know, take a lot of jobs, take a lot of people out of the
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workforce, et cetera. Our read at what AI seems to be doing right now is it seems to be concentrating
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wealth among fewer and fewer individuals and making that wealth more mobile, which means as a lot of
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countries hit this social security hitch that they're going to hit, what we're going to see is them
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try to tax the wealthiest more, the AI tech moguls. They're just going to leave to charter cities and
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the problem is going to be so much worse than anyone anticipates because of AI actually not,
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not, no, there are situations in which AI, any utopian fashion ends up setting up sort of like
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global UBI or something like that. But if that's the direction that AI goes, really none of our decisions
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today matter, right? Because we're not actually dealing with short timelines. And so like AI's got it,
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bro, like we don't have to worry, right? You don't need to worry about reducing the population. We
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don't need to worry about stabilizing the population because AI is going to put everyone on UBI and care
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for us and be monitoring birth rates and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But if we don't live in that
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world, we need to think about what world we live in. And the world we probably do live in is one in
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which AI is concentrated wealth severely. But in that world, the number of competent humans, the fact that
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as you mentioned, competent populations, and keep in mind, like this is one of the most robust findings in
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all genetic research here. And no, and I'm not saying anything about ethnic groups here, right? Like I'm not,
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I'm not saying, and I'm not making the argument that IQ correlates with ethnic groups. But what I am saying
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is that IQ and competency correlate very strongly with genetics, which correlates very strongly with
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heritability from parents. And so things like an idiocracy are possible. Like we are seeing a global drop
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around 0.1 IQ points every decade, which means we're probably looking at a standard deviation drop.
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What is it like every 15 years or something? And some research has found that the larger
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correlations with high fertility and different polygenic scores are correlations between obesity
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and higher fertility and lower educational attainment. And yeah, they're the two genetic scores,
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the genetic predictors for low fertility, the two best ones we have right now.
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No, no, no. For high fertility. People having more kids are more likely to also have polygenic
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scores associated with lower educational attainment and higher levels of obesity.
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And this matters a lot if we're talking about the types of solutions that actually work for climate
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change or for many of the solutions we're looking at, which means that, you know, you can't just say,
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oh, well, we're okay that competent populations are just bowing out of the gene pool, right? And worse,
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populations that care about the environment are just bowing out of the gene pool because about 40%
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of the way you vote is genetic in nature as well. I know the reason why I point out where I'm just
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talking about heritability, I'm like, take any racial thing out of the issue is because when you,
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when you make the argument in this way, like no serious geneticist will disagree with you.
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That, that, that like your probability of graduating from college, your probability of how much you make
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it an adult, your probability is highly correlated with your parents. Even if you were brought up
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in an adoptive family, because this has been looked at was like twin studies in adoptive families
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and appears to be a correlated with specific genes that we can find. So like the world,
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this is why population collapse matters so much more than you may think it would,
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because if you're just like looking at Europe and you're like, well, Europe will have like 30%
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of its existing population by this date. So it'll have 30% less tax revenue. That's actually wrong
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because it is in the economically productive centers of Europe where you have the lowest
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fertility rates and by like astronomical differences, right? So really what you're
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probably looking at with a 30% population reduction is something like a 50 or 60% tax reduction.
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And that obviously is, is really terrifying, but there, there's a reason we don't go shelling
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from the rooftops. You know, it's especially important that people who produce a lot in taxes
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are having more kids because that's, that's just not an optically good message. And so the way that
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we word that instead, which is also true is this is not a warm body problem. If you just had, you
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know, double the population, but every new person you added was on welfare, you haven't really fixed
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anything. Well, and when you frame it from the perspective of, we have a big concern for government's
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ability to protect and take care of the most vulnerable people in their societies. It suddenly
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doesn't seem like we're trying to have only certain people reproduce, which is what the media repeats
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ad nauseum. But instead, this is about protecting our ability to sustain populations that are vulnerable
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and that actually need help. Yeah. So, sorry, what she means by that is when we are concerned about
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something like social security collapsing, that doesn't hurt Elon Musk. That probably won't hurt
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us, but it will hurt a lot of vulnerable people. And when social security collapses, welfare systems
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will also collapse. And now that we're dealing with a situation across Latin America, if by the way,
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you're watching this and you haven't seen our recent video on the UN is lying about Latin Americans
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fertility, we are not citing like crazy conservative stuff here. We are literally just citing Wikipedia and
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countries own measured fertility rates where across Latin America, you're now getting fertility rates
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around one. And this is terrifying, terrifying, because these countries are even less capable of
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dealing with this tragedy as it steamrolls it. Now, also, I want to point here to like nobody go
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and badmouth these people or anything like that. So this is, I'm quoting from the email here.
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Finally, we'd like to emphasize once again, that we have the utmost respect for your commitment.
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Despite our different perspectives, we share an important goal, a livable, prosperous future for
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future generations on this planet. Our path to achieving the goal may differ. Your focus on more
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children while we are consciously focusing on fewer. However, both approaches are based on concern
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and responsibility for humanity. Totally, you know. Yeah, I really respect that. We want long-term
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human flourishing. They want long-term human flourishing. And that's really different from
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the typical antinatalist message that we get because they just want long-term extinction, right? Yeah.
00:17:37.160
No, no. These are people who I feel like if they actually engaged with like the modern science of
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like realistic solutions to carbon emission, that these solutions are likely only going to be deployed
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by populations that are competent and by cultures that produce highly educated people, and that those
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are the ones that are declining the fastest, and that any realistic solution to upend this is unlikely to
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be implementable within our lifetimes. You know, you're then like, okay, well then what marginally can
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I do that is actually likely to have an effect, and it is increasing the fertility rate within the types of
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communities that are already dedicated to environmental custodianship. But to continue here,
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and this is reading from their first email here. Humanity already consumes more than Earth can
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sustainably provide. According to calculations, we would currently need about 1.7 Earths to permanently cover
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our annual resource consumption. In other words, it is impossible for 8 billion people, let alone more in the
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future to live in such prosperity as wealthy minorities do in this world, which includes you and me. The
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wealthy minorities includes you and me. A concrete example, the average ecological footprint per capital in
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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
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entire world population were to live at this level of consumption, the Earth would only sustain around 2.9 billion
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people in the long run. This discrepancy highlights the core problem. Either we would have to drastically
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reduce our lifestyle, or the number of people would need to be limited in order to achieve
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sustainable prosperity for all. Now, I read this, and I've heard this number before, and I've never
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really engaged with it, because I've been like, that's just poppycock, right? So I tried to figure
00:19:19.560
out where it's from and how it was calculated. The Global Footprint Network, the GFM. And so first,
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again, I want to note, Earth likely does have a carrying capacity. There is likely some hypothetical
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limit of the number of people that the Earth can sustain with a degree of prosperity.
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The problem is, is that is likely, I'm going to guess, even conservatively, a million times,
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a million X Earth's existing population. Just for an example of how comical this number is,
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that the GF whatever, this environmental group calculates as like the Earth's carrying capacity,
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the Netherlands, okay? So the Netherlands is on, right now, 60 to 65% of the country would be
00:20:06.340
underwater, if not for modern technology and a technologically adept population. The Netherlands
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is about the size of Maryland, okay? It's incredibly small, all right? The Netherlands is the world's
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second largest agricultural exporter by value, $129 billion by 2024. They produce nearly, and keep in
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mind, you could be like, oh, well, then they must only produce like really small, expensive crops,
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like seeds or something. That's how they do it. No, no, no, no. They produce nearly 1 million tons
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of tomatoes a year, yielding 12X more per acre than average global yields, using greenhouses covering
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24,000 acres, efficiency tricks like lead lighting and 24-7 gross, rock oil substrates, and precise
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nutrient delivery, CEO to enrichment for nearby industries. So they literally take the CEO from
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their greenhouses, and then they pump it into local industrial capacity to make it even more
00:21:02.540
efficient. Enclosed loop systems, using just 0.5 gallons of water per pound of tomatoes, versus
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global, which is 28 pounds, sorry, 28 gallons per pound, they're 0.5 gallons per pound.
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So clearly we can be super efficient. And it's not just that. For potatoes, they're a top exporter,
00:21:20.100
1.2 billion annually, using similar precision farming techniques. But so I was like, okay, if
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we implemented this system globally, what would Earth's carrying capacity be, right? Like we could
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set up, because I mean, he wants to create a utopian system, so I get to play in utopian world. Like
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in his utopian system, we're living under some sort of global technocracy, which educates everyone and
00:21:42.180
everyone is, you know, becomes competent and super efficient, right? Okay, so I'm like, okay, we play
00:21:46.960
in that world, we have nuclear reactors all over the Earth, you know, infinite power, whatever,
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you'd be able to have a carrying capacity at around 20 billion people, well higher, like more than
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double the projected number of people that we think Earth with current trends is going to get anywhere
00:22:04.740
near, right? And I'd point out, I don't even buy that Earth has really hit the 8 billion number
00:22:10.400
right now. Because if you look at the big countries that they'll say, like contribute to
00:22:14.100
this, a lot of them have really fuzzy reporting, like China, there's a lot of evidence, you can
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see our videos on this, that their population might be a third, sorry, a third less than what
00:22:22.840
they're reporting. And then other really high fertility countries, and I mean, like really
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strong evidence that it's a third less than what they're reporting, because they have a huge
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reason to lie about this. And we can look at things like salt consumption maps, and then map
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them to regions where we know how much there actually are of a population of Chinese
00:22:39.000
people, and then look at the entire country. We did an episode on this, if you want to go into it.
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I just want to point out in Cremieux's sub-stack post that I mentioned, where he discusses why
00:22:49.780
it's not going to hurt the environment that much if we just allow for a slow leveling off instead of
00:22:54.840
a decline, the projections that he finds to be pretty reliable, and they've been pretty good at
00:23:00.320
predicting population levels in the past, have populations starting to level off in the world at
00:23:06.700
around a little under 14 billion, up from the supposed 18 billion, or sorry, 8 billion that
00:23:13.660
we have now. So also, there's not this expectation, even that we're going to get anywhere close to the
00:23:20.180
Right. But the point here being is, I also don't think that if we're talking about,
00:23:26.420
I'm sorry, what was I saying here? Also, other places where the numbers are probably hugely off,
00:23:32.640
countries like Nigeria, which hasn't been conducting audits on this, and distributes the national oil
00:23:38.000
wealth to districts with the subsidy wealth based on their claimed population numbers, and has done
00:23:44.740
this unmonitored for about a decade at this point. So basically, for a lot of the giant population
00:23:50.260
countries that we think are really high fertility or whatever in the world, they're probably way below.
00:23:55.940
So it's like with blue zones, where if you create an incentive for people to be really,
00:24:00.160
really old, suddenly you have a whole bunch of really, really old people in that region.
00:24:03.740
In the data. Yeah. Yeah. The point being is, I don't buy this. I don't think Earth is going to
00:24:07.640
get above 10 billion people. And I think we could already be past peak population when you consider
00:24:13.660
the recent and shocking fertility collapse that we've had in South America and the Middle East.
00:24:19.160
Really, the only place that was above repopulation fertility rates anymore is like reliably above
00:24:24.640
repopulation fertility rates is Africa. Right. And that's just an impoverished region.
00:24:29.560
So as soon as they develop, which hopefully they will.
00:24:32.860
And I'd also point out here that when I talk about the reason I was talking about the Netherlands
00:24:37.340
is I was talking about a location and how much we would have at the carrying capacity with
00:24:42.800
current world technology, not hypothetical world technology. Right. So if we're talking about the
00:24:49.820
future, I mean, we live in an age of thinking machines now. We have like AI systems that can go over
00:24:55.120
crop fields and laser shoot all of the weeds that are more efficient and way healthier than any
00:25:01.460
pesticide we've ever had and don't use pesticides. You're the person who sent me the video of that,
00:25:05.260
right? That's insane. The level of technology that we're getting to because of AI is astronomical.
00:25:12.600
Imagine giant fields tended by drone swarms and other things like this. Keep in mind, if you're like,
00:25:19.440
well, you would never be able to have the power to do something like this, right? You'd never be able
00:25:23.980
to have the capacity to do something like this. The Sahara, if we cover just 1.2% of it, we would
00:25:30.280
have with solar panels, we would generate enough energy to match all of global energy use. Okay.
00:25:37.260
This is only covering 1.2% of it, right? With that power, you could easily desalinate water,
00:25:44.240
start putting up greenhouses in the region, create these CO2 to greenhouses, sort of industries
00:25:50.720
throughout the region, and then build flying drone swarms that take food from that region to other
00:25:55.440
regions. The humans, and by the way, the Sahara, if you covered all of it with solar panels, it would
00:26:01.900
be 189x global power consumption right now. The amount that you could do in terms of revitalizing
00:26:07.800
soils and creating basically an infinite food generator in the Sahara is astonishing with very
00:26:14.140
near future technology. And I mean within like the next generation, if we continue to technologically
00:26:20.860
advance the species and don't stop doing that because technologically developed regions stop
00:26:26.780
having kids. Okay. That's a big point that Cremu makes again in this post is that with a larger
00:26:32.660
population, you're just going to end up having more innovation. And that can be great for both human
00:26:37.640
force and the environment. Well, that's not true. That's the exact point I'm making. You don't have
00:26:41.300
more innovation with a larger population. You have more innovation if you have a larger population
00:26:45.380
that is coming from technologically productive areas and regions. You're just increasing the number
00:26:51.720
of people. If you just increase, like, you know, the number, like, and keep in mind, this is true
00:26:57.440
within countries. Like, I'm not even talking about like between groups here or something. I'm saying
00:27:02.160
within the United States, you know, it is, you know, Alabama is going to have a higher fertility rate
00:27:08.080
than central Manhattan or San Francisco, right? And the kids born within central Manhattan and San
00:27:14.180
Francisco, statistically speaking, are going to be more technologically and economically productive
00:27:19.360
than the kids born in rural Alabama. I mean, okay. So Cremu writes the relative to depopulation,
00:27:25.620
there's an initial short-term dip in real GDP per capita for stabilization because of the greater
00:27:30.440
emissions levels. This dip is not an absolute decline in living standards, just a relative one. This
00:27:35.420
relative dip is quickly overcome by the greater levels of innovation and resulting from improvements
00:27:40.660
to productivity that follow from having a larger population. This result holds across-
00:27:49.220
Well, maybe he's arguing because this post is coming from the premise of people who are
00:27:54.100
pretty conscientious and long-term oriented, who are concerned about having kids because they're
00:27:58.380
concerned about the future and the impact that will have on the environment. So presumably these are
00:28:02.600
also educated people who would meaningfully contribute to innovation.
00:28:07.040
Yes. But the reason why I'm making this point is it is not a warm bodies problem.
00:28:14.460
Right. But the point here being is people have a cultural right to the culture of their parents,
00:28:19.660
but a culture is a combination of things. A culture is what gender roles you take on,
00:28:25.280
the way you relate to educational systems, whether or not when you get sick,
00:28:28.620
you believe witches did it. These are all cultural things that people have a right to pass down to
00:28:34.920
their children, and we do not have a right to eradicate. If these cultural beliefs lead to less
00:28:40.320
thriving, it is upon the groups that hold these cultures to decide to adopt new cultural settings,
00:28:47.180
not us as the technocratic overlords to erase their cultural practices. However, what is also true is
00:28:52.940
in the world today where you have high fertility rates are also regions that have, culturally
00:28:59.640
speaking, just a different relation to education, a different relation. So you've got all that,
00:29:04.480
but then you've got the genetic effects. Like I was talking about rural Alabama versus Manhattan
00:29:07.780
and San Francisco or something like that. But it's not that there's no one in rural Alabama who is going
00:29:12.780
to produce or have the likelihood of producing technologically highly capable, highly economically
00:29:18.580
productive kids. But these are things that we can look at and tell by looking at spreadsheets and
00:29:24.000
stuff like this, right? And so we are going to hurt from this, right? And hurt likely a lot more
00:29:31.620
because of the type of propaganda that comes from environmentalists and disproportionately affects
00:29:36.160
people who have like an altruistic sense to try to make the world a better place, which is highly
00:29:40.880
heritable. Altruism is one of, it's a very highly heritable trait really associated with genetics and
00:29:45.380
parental heresy. So yeah, don't, don't go out there trying to convince altruistic people to
00:29:49.540
disproportionately have fewer kids. That's not a winning strategy for the future of human history.
00:29:53.820
Now I'd also point out here, when we think about like how inefficient current livestock is and
00:29:58.140
everything like that, we are still currently in an era where we literally have like animals
00:30:04.600
that like walk around in fields. And like, that's where we get our meat from. When you look at like
00:30:12.200
where future humans are going to be getting their meat from, it's going to be in giant grown vats
00:30:17.400
and stuff like that. The ones that I've always loved is a book called Man After Man, which was hugely
00:30:22.160
influential on me. And I'll put a picture on screen of a meat factory from it, where it's just giant
00:30:27.100
meat beasts that have like harvesting creatures crawling across them and putting the meat.
00:30:34.080
Yeah, food engineered creature. Let's see if I can read the text here.
00:30:38.360
Meat beasts. I mean, isn't that just what cows are?
00:30:50.500
Yes. Brainless hunks that perfectly in an energy efficient fashion turn food into exactly muscle.
00:30:59.440
And you could say, well, you need to move around to build muscle. It's like, no, you don't. Not if you
00:31:02.460
genetically engineer it to just produce muscle, right? Like, like the way we produce meat today
00:31:08.220
is comically inefficient. I recently saw a post, by the way, on the EA forums where they were arguing
00:31:13.000
that even altruistic people should not be vegetarians because it just has so many negative
00:31:19.500
You're going to do more harm to the world by like retarding yourself through.
00:31:25.760
Yeah. They're like, well, there's ways to cause less harm by focusing on these types of animals
00:31:29.800
and grown in these types of conditions and stuff like that, because humans are herbivorous species
00:31:38.760
Oh, sorry. Humans are an omnivorous species and evolved to be an omnivorous species.
00:31:43.100
And that's why we have the dentature we do. Um, because that is, that is the dentature of an
00:31:47.560
omnivorous species and our digestive tract is not really designed for ever eating only just
00:31:52.760
plants. But anyway, let's keep going here. But the point I'm making here more broadly is that
00:31:59.220
earth's carrying capacity is completely, completely, completely dependent on technology and culture
00:32:05.220
and not completely, but like, like it's heavily modified by that. And that multiplier matters so much
00:32:11.280
more than like the number of people. Like suppose earth's population crashes and Europe crashes out
00:32:18.080
and the United States crashes out and it's the Europe and the United States and Canada that are
00:32:23.620
supplying a lot of food aid to many of the world's developing starving nations. This is in Africa and
00:32:30.240
stuff like that. If we crash out, right. The carrying capacity of Africa would actually drop. Like the
00:32:38.400
number of people in Africa may even drop due to starvation just because we stopped being productive and our
00:32:45.920
economy stopped being stable. Right? Like in many ways, the current African population boom is fueled by
00:32:54.780
Yeah. Someone in a comment on one of our videos today actually just said that, that a lot of people theorize that
00:33:01.020
African populations have been held up merely because of aid from Western countries.
00:33:05.040
No, no. And the aid hurts them a lot. It hurts. Well, it keeps them in cycles of poverty, but it can also
00:33:09.440
increase populations. Two things can be true at the same time.
00:33:12.560
So the point being is like, yeah, the world may actually drop in its functional carrying capacity,
00:33:18.280
its technology multiplied by carrying capacity as fertility collapse goes on because the regions of
00:33:24.120
the world that are sending food aid end up having economic collapses. And most of Europe right now
00:33:29.660
is about a decade to two, to three decades from having a collapsed social security system and thus a collapsed
00:33:36.780
social safety net system. And when that happens, I'm telling you what, they're not sending anything to Africa
00:33:41.420
anymore. Okay. Yeah. So Dell, what's it like the actual carrying capacity may drop because of falling
00:33:48.060
fertility rates happening disproportionately in some regions and not other regions.
00:33:52.060
But I followed up and I asked him about this cause I was like, okay, so this is just going to basically sterilize
00:33:56.660
sterilize like black people, right? Because their countries are poor or is it that you want to,
00:34:02.660
uh, you know, normalize the average income that's needed to have a kid so that it's less in African
00:34:10.140
countries. And I'm like, but even if you did that, then migrant populations in Europe and African-American
00:34:15.440
populations in the United States would be the primarily sterilized populations because they earn less
00:34:20.900
money. And they're just like, well, we just wouldn't consider race. And it's like, well, you may not
00:34:26.040
consider race, but the people who are being disproportionately sterilized are certainly
00:34:30.700
going to consider race. Like the optics of this are going to be horrifying, even in the woke
00:34:36.920
countries that you think would be the most on board with it, which is why even in woke environments
00:34:42.280
are unlikely to be on board with this. I mean, Germany's not going to sign on with a deal and
00:34:47.300
the United States is not going to like the progressives in Germany, the progressives in the
00:34:50.560
United States are not going to sign on board with a deal that's going to lead to disproportionately
00:34:53.940
Muslims being sterilized in Germany or forced at one kid and African-Americans in the United
00:34:59.280
States being forced at one kid. So to continue here, as the number of people grows, global
00:35:03.680
environmental problems are also getting worse. More people means more demand for energy, food,
00:35:08.160
and consumer goods, and thus more CO2 emissions, waste, and pollution. As we are more, as more
00:35:15.000
intensive exploitation of soil, forests, and oceans, even the environmental panel on climate change,
00:35:21.680
which IPCC emphasizes that population growth is a significant factor in environmental problems.
00:35:28.520
It is not. Like, as we point out, it's just not. A lot of these groups, like the IPCC,
00:35:32.080
they're a bunch of like anti-human extremists. We've seen this from like Earth for All, which
00:35:35.720
plans to like reduce global population by like 80%. The people who run this are a bunch of boomers
00:35:41.380
who are unaware of either current technology. They haven't accepted that the technocratic solution
00:35:46.640
to climate change has failed. They have had control of the UN, the EU, the United States
00:35:52.580
government at points, the Canadian government at points, like pretty much all global centralities
00:35:55.860
of power. And they were not able to enact their goals. Even during COVID, you had only the
00:36:00.760
incremental reduction we needed that year. It is not realistic, these solutions. But a lot of boomers
00:36:05.620
haven't been able to grok, okay, well, then I need to go back to their drawing board because this isn't
00:36:10.400
working. And it turns out when you go back to the drawing board, the actual solutions require more
00:36:14.800
people from the types of countries and regions within those countries, like within the United
00:36:19.720
States. You think somebody in rural Alabama is going to dedicate a huge amount of their
00:36:24.560
family's income to fixing climate change, right? Like get real. It's in the regions with the highest
00:36:30.900
dropping fertility rates that this cultural drive is the strongest. But anyway, from Ovalab's
00:36:37.300
perspective, a smaller world population would mean less pressure on the environment in the long
00:36:41.940
term and at the same time more resources per capita, which in turn would enable better living
00:36:46.120
conditions for everyone. For these reasons, Ovalab advocates a responsible and moderate approach to
00:36:51.180
having children. We believe that global guidelines on family planning are needed that balance individual
00:36:56.040
freedom with responsibility. So this then brings me to my second point, which is a big change that
00:37:01.840
has happened as I have educated myself more and grown up, is I realized when I was younger, I was sort of
00:37:07.080
brainwashed into this like obsession with the environment, right? Like it's bad that bad things
00:37:12.160
are happening to the environment. Like we're about to hit a CO2 catastrophe that the earth could never
00:37:17.700
survive, that global diversity will never come back. Like global population diversity will never come back
00:37:24.740
to the levels it is right now because we're going through a great extinction right now. And that made me
00:37:28.860
sad. I was like, wow, like I do think that there is a benefit to a more diverse sort of pool of life on this
00:37:34.560
planet, right? And then, you know, I grew up and I was educated and I learned that, oh, after mass
00:37:40.940
extinction events, you typically get adaptive radiation, which means even more diversity than
00:37:46.480
you had during the extinction event. Now, I will say mass extinction events can be really bad if the
00:37:53.200
thing that is causing the mass extinction event is a thing that makes it harder for life to survive.
00:37:58.420
So if we had like a global winter or something like that, that would be something that would genuinely
00:38:03.540
conserving. Or like a nuclear winter. That would be really bad. Yeah. But we're not having a nuclear
00:38:09.300
winter. What is specifically leading to the big problems that we're having with the environment
00:38:15.180
right now? Two things. More heat and sunlight, okay? And more CO2. What has happened during periods
00:38:25.260
of earth that have had these two things more? These are the two main... I thought the megafauna period,
00:38:31.380
which was super cool though, was when we had a lot of O2, not CO2. That was, yeah, that was more O2.
00:38:36.180
But we've also had periods of this before and you've had super flourishing. Actually, even shots
00:38:40.420
that they've done of rainforest recently have shown that rainforests have significantly increased in how
00:38:44.300
green they are. Yeah, I've read that. Yeah. Yeah. So we're already seeing a response to this,
00:38:50.000
which is prepping the world for an adaptive explosion, right? And it's very much like,
00:38:56.840
no, but I want life to stay exactly as it was when humanity first evolved. It's like, why is that life
00:39:01.520
superior to potential future life? Like, I don't understand that, right? Like that to me seems
00:39:06.580
weird. Like we should care about life's diversity more broadly. And keep in mind, we're close to
00:39:11.100
being able to see new biomes that will be as rich as earth's own, you know, if we can make it past this
00:39:16.340
bottleneck, right? Like we will be able to design animals for these biomes. We will be able to,
00:39:21.760
like, even the idea of what life is, we will be able to map all of the life that's left on earth
00:39:26.760
and recreate these biomes in even like AI testing scenarios until we can recreate them on another
00:39:32.320
planet on our spaceships, right? But it's not even all of that. I remember Simone, because you'd been
00:39:36.200
brainwashed by all this environmentalist stuff. You worked at, you know, a lot of environmentalists
00:39:40.820
became early pronatalists like Elon Musk, very interested in Tesla, very interested in solar city
00:39:45.240
stuff. You did, you know, Earth Day Network. You worked at the American Council on Renewable Energy.
00:39:50.240
You got your degree in environmental business. I mean, you came to me early on and you go,
00:39:55.100
well, Malcolm, you know, no other species has ever caused a mass extinction before.
00:39:59.700
No, I didn't say that because I learned in college that that wasn't true. And that blew my mind.
00:40:04.500
In the very program I custom designed to learn environmental business, I just
00:40:09.620
discovered in historical geology that lo and behold.
00:40:14.000
This is a regular thing. Species leading to, if you want to learn about one of these events,
00:40:18.760
you have the great oxidation event where species started producing oxygen as a byproduct and it
00:40:23.320
led to a mass extinction event. And we wouldn't have any of the life we have today if it wasn't
00:40:28.640
for that mass extinction event. Like, was that species evil because it created a world of animals
00:40:35.360
that metabolize oxygen? Like, no, it wasn't evil. It created the substrate for what came after it.
00:40:41.560
And even if we look at them being like, well, Earth could never survive at this level of CO2.
00:40:45.940
Here is a graph of Earth's CO2 levels right now and CO2 levels throughout history, you know,
00:40:51.280
going back 20, 30, 40 million years ago. What you will see is we have today at one of the lowest
00:40:56.380
levels of CO2 in the air in all of Earth's history.
00:41:04.220
Yeah, we are at one of the lowest levels. Not only that, but I also put on screen here now,
00:41:08.660
temperature of the planet Earth over time. We are also at one of the lowest temperatures
00:41:13.260
that Earth has ever been at. We are actually...
00:41:22.360
Oh, we're just at the tail end of it or something?
00:41:23.960
Yeah, we're just at the tail end of the Ice Age. By the way, Simone, do you know what an Ice Age
00:41:30.680
A period where there is permanent ice anywhere on Earth's surface.
00:41:35.000
Yes. The fact that we have Antarctica and the South Pole, we're not, like, that close to the...
00:41:44.660
You might think that we're, like, kind of near... No, we are far from the Ice Age being over.
00:41:49.860
But when you look at the mere fact that these two things exist and you can go look at glaciers.
00:41:56.320
I guess this is one of those facts they don't teach you in environmental business.
00:41:59.680
But what I also point out here is life finds a way, right? And I'm going to play the life
00:42:03.500
finds a way scene here. Like, I don't believe in the supremacy of current life. I think that
00:42:08.660
life is a system and that it's our job to prevent all life from dying out. But the best way to do
00:42:13.760
that is to preserve humanity so that we can seed other planets with biomes as rich as Earth's own
00:42:17.980
and prevent the sun from eventually swallowing the Earth and killing all life that's known of
00:42:21.960
in the galaxy. And there's only one species on the planet that can do that. And only some
00:42:26.380
populations on Earth seem to be in a trajectory to achieve that.
00:42:30.660
Yeah. Yeah. Not all populations on Earth are capable of or, if capable, interested in getting
00:42:38.860
us off planet or doing anything off planet. So...
00:42:41.480
Yeah. Well, this is true. I would guess that there's a high correlation with communities that
00:42:47.420
would have an interest in going off planet and colonizing the solar system and the communities
00:42:50.960
that are high fertility, which are often traditional religious organizations that may even have a
00:42:54.820
resistance to this, you know, this idea of colonizing the solar system. And so the people
00:43:00.400
who end up dominating the future of what humanity becomes are going to be the very few... And why do
00:43:05.800
I say the technologically productive high fertility groups are going to dominate the future? Because
00:43:08.840
they'll have technology, right? Like, we're entering a world of automated drone wars, right? Like,
00:43:13.800
if you look at the U.S.'s Project Replicator, it's literally a ship, we have an episode on this,
00:43:17.920
that produces autonomous AI-controlled drone swarms infinitely, right? Like,
00:43:23.140
that's the future we're ending in. And so you look at some populations that are high fertility,
00:43:29.000
and you're like, well, you're worried about them. And I'm like, no, they're going to be bringing
00:43:31.060
AK-47s to like a drone swarm fight, right? Like, it's not particularly relevant, right? Like,
00:43:36.100
just high fertility rate on its own isn't relevant in terms of influencing the future of what humanity
00:43:40.120
ends up doing. So then to keep reading here, the Ovalib model as a structural framework for global
00:43:46.300
population policy, prerequisite, an international panel of experts annually determines the sustainably
00:43:52.240
supportive population number on Earth. This is based on availability and consumption of global
00:43:57.080
resources, ecological footprint, global Hector, GHA, security of supply, particularly energy,
00:44:03.280
environmental factors such as CO2 emissions, water pollution, climate change, and biodiversity.
00:44:07.120
Now, obviously, this sounds hellish to us, because we already have organizations like this.
00:44:11.320
And we have seen that they are willing to lie to people. If you look at our recent video on the UN
00:44:16.700
is lying about South America's fertility rate, the UN, for example, claimed that Colombia's fertility rate
00:44:21.920
was 1.6 this last year, when the measured rate in Colombia was 1.06, right? Like, they're putting out
00:44:29.380
a number there that's like, 0.5 off, 0.6 off the actual number, right? Like, that is, that is genocide
00:44:38.120
denial bad. And a, a, a Colombian, I think he's Colombian, professor at Penn, you know, Ivy League
00:44:44.780
Penn, emailed the UN about this. And he said, why are your numbers off by double digit decimals? Can you
00:44:50.700
correct them? And they said, we don't want to cause a panic. And we don't want people to believe,
00:44:54.700
lead people to believe this is a crisis. And it's like, but it is a crisis. And if more people were
00:45:00.900
aware of how bad this is, but keep in mind, the UN uses these fake numbers to implement evil already,
00:45:06.900
right? Like, to try to restrict who can have kids, to try to, which we see programs that they're doing
00:45:12.860
around this, to try to, you know, disseminate the belief within cultures where it is non-normative to
00:45:18.180
say, well, a woman doesn't have a role to have a kid, to try to disseminate this belief in those
00:45:22.460
cultures, which is a form of cultural genocide, because you're erasing those cultures, traditional
00:45:26.060
belief system. And I think that that's wrong, but this is why I'm scared of a thing like that.
00:45:29.880
Right. And now remember how earlier I talked about their plan for, they were going to have
00:45:34.960
like one, one kid, anyone could have one kid. And then you needed to like apply to have two kids
00:45:40.260
with certain regulations. Then you really needed to prove it to have like three or more kids.
00:45:43.960
And then the people with more kids would support the people with less kids. And like the thing I
00:45:49.320
like about this plan, like I'll, I'll tell something that it's a, it would have really
00:45:53.580
positive genetic effects. If, if you supposing the central organization wasn't corrupt and like
00:46:00.240
the way you got into it was just by purchasing the rights to additional kids. And then that money
00:46:05.400
could be used for the people who had fewer kids. Right. Yeah. I mean, essentially also it's like a
00:46:09.780
license to have kids. So I think similarly to how many studies show that when you look at the
00:46:16.360
outcomes of children of gay parents who have to go through so much more cost wise and hoops wise to
00:46:23.560
have kids, their outcomes are really good because only the most resourced and competent and conscientious
00:46:29.720
fathers who are gay end up having kids. And we're looking at a somewhat similar system here.
00:46:35.300
The problem is, and the reason the system doesn't work anymore is because you're like presuming that
00:46:40.860
most people want kids, but even in a system where people aren't charged anything to have kids,
00:46:44.900
we can't get them to reproduce and we can't get the ones we need reproducing the most to reproduce
00:46:50.360
the least. Right. Um, so like clearly, clearly like this, this wouldn't work from a motivational
00:46:58.040
capacity. You would just crash out all of the existing systems if you attempted to implement
00:47:02.860
this. And the real reason for this is because kids don't really benefit the parents anymore.
00:47:07.520
Historically speaking, when people had lots of kids, that the, the, the reason you had the kids
00:47:12.380
was because they would take care of you when you were old, because there wasn't social security
00:47:15.740
systems and because they would work on the farm or they work on the factory and they'd help support
00:47:18.740
the family or you get some dowry for them or something like that. Right. Today, kids don't
00:47:23.660
really do any of that, right? Like they don't necessarily support you in old age. They don't
00:47:28.140
help. They're, they're just a drain on you. So who benefits from a family having kids? Like
00:47:32.760
who monetarily benefits from a family having kids? The state benefits from a family having
00:47:37.940
kids. So families today are functionally having kids and acting as care providers
00:47:42.900
for free, doing this job for free. And the state is reaping all of the bill of benefits. So in reality,
00:47:49.900
you would want an inverse system if you were going to have it work. Well, which is what many states
00:47:54.340
are starting to do. I mean, South Korea is paying a lot to families to have kids. I mean,
00:47:58.300
countries like Hungary are as well. So there are some states that are starting to say,
00:48:02.440
all right, I own it. I'm benefiting from this. I'm going to pay for it.
00:48:07.220
Parents have kids. So it doesn't even work from like a moral measure. So that's, that's like,
00:48:11.080
sorry, the point I'm making here is the system is just like, if you look at the existing demographic
00:48:15.640
trends, the obvious effects of this system are obvious, right? Like it's, it's non-implementable
00:48:21.040
in any population that attempted to implement it. Because if you understand like our worldview and
00:48:24.740
populations, we sort of see the world as like competing cultural groups and we have no right to
00:48:29.540
interfere with another cultural group. And each cultural group has the ability for, first of all,
00:48:34.380
the right to autonomy, the right to not have people outside their cultural group come in and tell them
00:48:37.740
or their kids how they should live or what they should value. But in addition to that, they're each
00:48:41.420
sort of exercising an experiment for what may work for the future of humanity. I can tell you, like,
00:48:46.960
normally I'm not going to be like, that's a dumb experiment to run. But if you attempted to
00:48:51.020
implement this system that you have within any region, that region and the culture that it contained
00:48:57.740
would not exist within future human populations, it would go extinct within about three or four
00:49:02.760
generations, which, which shows that this system is just not a viable system in and of itself.
00:49:08.740
Like imagine you were able to implement this within Switzerland, right? And you just completely
00:49:13.580
and effectively implemented it. How quickly would the Swiss population just crash out and not exist as
00:49:18.580
a meaningful human group anymore? Like it's clear that you're not stupid. Like you can run the math on
00:49:23.840
the existing Swiss fertility rates. You can look at how it now all of a sudden having kids cost even
00:49:29.320
more, right? Like how quickly it would crash out. What are these sorts of things? Switzerland is really
00:49:35.340
expensive as it is, just for the record. Like when you and I traveled there and we just got to the
00:49:40.440
point where for every meal and we had maybe one meal a day, we, we split an appetizer between the two
00:49:47.300
of us. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and, and keep in mind when I say crash out, what I mean is it would crash
00:49:51.600
out within it. So you would eventually have a Swiss populations that's left, but it would likely be
00:49:59.100
made up of religious extremists who are like super anti-education who like don't, you know, that that's
00:50:04.760
the population that would be left after you completely churn through and use up the few, you know,
00:50:11.240
economically prosperous regions by implementing these sorts of restrictions on their children.
00:50:15.140
Because keep in mind to a less wealthy family, typically the monetary restrictions you put on
00:50:20.940
them are going to matter less. Right. And so they're just going to be like, whatever, like,
00:50:24.300
screw you. Like, or you could say, well, it's a fixed amount that we're putting on them. And then
00:50:27.560
it's like, well, then what are you doing? Like forcible castrations and stuff like that. Like it
00:50:30.800
gets super dystopian, super fast. And I just don't see why you would implement that when you could just
00:50:36.480
implement the system that we want to implement, where you let people have a right to their own
00:50:40.780
cultural autonomy. And then we just see which experiment ends up working like the one that our
00:50:44.840
family is running, the one that, you know, some Islamist families are running, the one that some
00:50:49.120
evangelical families are running, the one that Israel is running right now. Right. I'm going to
00:50:53.440
continue here. What else would this global technocratic thing operate? Right. With all this
00:50:58.660
money it's getting from these family licenses. Accompanying measures, compulsory education on
00:51:04.860
awareness and family planning, starting at the age of 12 availability of contraceptives in sufficient
00:51:09.820
variety in quantity for all people, possibility of cost-free abortions in case of unwanted or
00:51:14.680
legally impermissible pregnancies provided exclusively by qualified medical professionals.
00:51:22.720
Well, yeah, China did this. They're just describing the one child policy, which everyone now agrees
00:51:26.660
was a horrible idea. Legally penalty-free medically supervised abortions worldwide was in the first
00:51:32.720
three months of pregnancy. Regular adjustment of retirement age every three years in line with
00:51:38.220
demographic development. So basically they're going to force the olds to work longer and longer and
00:51:41.580
longer. Look at France's recent rebellions over increasing it by only like two years. I do not
00:51:47.360
think that that's actually going to happen now that the majority of people in many European countries
00:51:51.860
are actually tax drains on the system and not tax contributors to the system. Funding through a
00:51:57.320
global birth control fund. All countries pay a fixed percentage, e.g. 10% of their national tax revenue
00:52:02.520
into this fund to finance the aforementioned measures worldwide.
00:52:05.960
10%? They want like a Mormon tie thing here. Yeah, except like 6% is what the U.S. spends on
00:52:14.680
defense. Like that is a lot. Whoa. Yeah, yeah. So the thing that I found most interesting in all of
00:52:22.600
these automatics here, because I've noticed this from a lot of people who are like urban monoculture
00:52:27.340
cooked, and I don't think they realize what they're saying when they say this, is that people should have
00:52:32.480
a right to contraceptives, right? And what they're actually saying is some people should have a right
00:52:40.500
to sex and other people shouldn't. Because no, a right to contraceptives is a right to sex without
00:52:46.760
the consequences of sex, right? And the reality is, is they're like, well, yeah, everyone should have a
00:52:51.460
right to sex. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no. What you mean, and you know, and I know that you mean
00:52:55.280
this, is that wealthy, successful men who are attractive should have a right to sex and women should have a
00:53:01.440
right to sex. But like, what about the guy who's like, yeah, but no woman wants to sleep with me,
00:53:05.600
right? Why doesn't he deserve a right to sex, right? And you're like, well, because you know,
00:53:10.580
other people's agency and stuff like that, but it's like, why, why contraceptives? Why are you
00:53:14.260
creating a world where there is just so like, it seems like a level of, and I think it's true from
00:53:19.640
the urban monocultural perspective, unattractive and unsuccessful men are considered the enemy and
00:53:23.960
just do not matter. They are completely disposable. And yet all women have a right to sex and attractive
00:53:29.980
people have a right to sex, right? Like attractive men have a right to sex. And I think that's
00:53:32.760
dystopian. That's like gross to me, right? Like, why couldn't you equally say like, if we're going
00:53:37.000
to build our dystopias here, I'm going to build my dystopia. Okay. In my dystopia, you know, people are
00:53:43.000
supposed to accept that their desire for arousal and sex is either, you know, from Satan, right? You know,
00:53:51.400
a religious person would say that, or the evolutionary, you know, scar on their mind from a pattern that led to
00:53:59.060
their ancestors have more surviving offspring than other ancestors. And, and in my world,
00:54:03.980
everybody has a mandate to self-discipline. Okay. And anyone who cannot exercise that mandate to
00:54:12.680
self-discipline gets executed, right? Like they don't, instead of saying that attractive people
00:54:18.660
get a right to sex, we just say, no one should be having sex unless it's reproductive sex. Okay.
00:54:24.140
Now you may say, well, that sounds really horrifying, but in truth, anyone who's looking
00:54:28.820
at this would know, they'd know like, oh, well, actually in that world, within a few generations,
00:54:33.240
the population would become, you know, genetically much more self-disciplined. I mean, you'd have this
00:54:37.840
huge improvement in the population. So awesome. Now I don't actually want that world. As I've
00:54:41.340
talked about the world that I want is a world where every group has its own sort of autonomous
00:54:45.340
cultural value system. And I believe that self-discipline is an important part of a cultural
00:54:49.740
value system, self-discipline around sex, self-discipline around pleasure. I mean, so I
00:54:53.960
will be teaching my kids, do not, you know, seek a partner who completely lacks self-discipline in
00:54:59.760
these areas. Right. Who's like, well, I have a right to contraception because I have a right to
00:55:04.080
recreational sex whenever I feel like recreational sex. And I'd be like, yeah, that's probably not an
00:55:09.500
awesome person to bring into our bloodline because, you know, our experiment is dependent on,
00:55:14.760
you know, austerity and self-discipline. And, and so these are just different ways of looking at this,
00:55:18.640
but I, but I find it interesting, like so much focus on, you know, the ability to, to have
00:55:24.080
contraception and sex when you want to and access to abortions and stuff like this. But again, I
00:55:28.780
don't even understand when you want any of this, like the population is crashing out right now
00:55:32.240
and everyone who can build the systems you need to have any sort of stable global system, isn't
00:55:36.820
going to do it. And if you were trying to implement this global system, even think about what this would
00:55:41.160
mean in terms of like warfare. Like imagine you tried to implement this in like the Middle East,
00:55:46.840
right? You, you, you're going to have workers out there basically having the population under
00:55:52.540
permanent occupation because, because of their religious beliefs, they're not going to want
00:55:57.580
to accept this, right? So you're going to have to go into the Middle East. You're going to have to
00:56:01.780
go into Africa. I got lots of African friends. My, my, my brother in Christ, you are saying you want
00:56:08.080
to turn Africa into a permanent, like global hostage state, because remember wealthy people are allowed
00:56:13.720
fewer kids in this system. So if particularly in Africa, you're going to have people not getting
00:56:18.220
the license to have more than one kid. These are people who grew up when many of these countries
00:56:22.080
expecting like 16 kids, right? So how are you going to implement that? Well, what you're going to have
00:56:25.980
is you're going to have soldiers with guns marching down the streets, the people's houses and executing
00:56:31.140
people when they break the rule because they want to. And you're going to have constant guerrilla
00:56:34.240
raids on these soldiers because the local population isn't going to want this. Like the actual horror
00:56:39.540
of the implementation of this system is almost beyond compare. Like it only works if you brainwash
00:56:46.360
everyone into your cultural value system or not brainwash, but you set up educational systems that
00:56:51.000
are meant to eradicate their unique cultural perspectives, gender roles, everything like
00:56:55.220
that, which is just global cultural genocide and creating a global cultural monoculture, which
00:57:00.560
will be very fragile and could lead to the death of the human species. And then all life, as we said,
00:57:05.600
monocultures, like anyone who knows biology or environmentalism should know
00:57:08.500
how desperately fragile they are. If you look at the global monoculture today, you know,
00:57:14.200
the reason why like Paris, if I'm an upper middle-class person in Paris or Manhattan or
00:57:18.600
Rio, I'm going to be more culturally similar. I'm going to be, if I'm a, you know, near a high
00:57:21.820
fertility population in Manhattan, like Orthodox Jews or like Amish and been out or like us or Elon,
00:57:26.160
like we're all really different from that. This global urban monoculture has shown itself to be
00:57:28.980
very weak and you want to extend its reach even further. Like that seems really bad. Like,
00:57:33.780
actual human thriving. So I asked them about this point and they're like, Oh no, no, no, no, no. We're
00:57:39.280
going to do this all voluntarily. We just won't send aid money to countries that, uh, you know,
00:57:45.040
don't want to sign on for this. And if you're aware of how international aid works, you would know
00:57:49.580
that already we've had, you know, tons of aid rot in African countries because they were afraid of
00:57:55.480
aid without any conditions. They're just like, well, we're not sure about this rice. I don't know.
00:58:01.040
It could be here to sterilize us. And that was actually the specific thing that they were afraid
00:58:05.240
of, that the rice would lower their fertility rates. So they let it rot instead of distributing
00:58:09.540
it to the citizens while people were literally starving to death on the streets. Um, so you can
00:58:14.820
tell already in the majority of Africa, uh, no one's going to sign on board with this. The United States
00:58:20.160
wouldn't sign on board with this. Israel wouldn't sign on board with this. Most of the Middle East
00:58:23.900
wouldn't sign on board with this. Um, and what it would be is just people who already sort of have
00:58:29.380
this mindset signing on board with this, and then slowly going extinct in regards to, uh, world
00:58:35.120
power. Um, because, you know, I, I look at this and, and most of our listeners look at this and
00:58:40.260
we're like, wait, why would I, uh, like when the rest of the world is continuing to move ahead,
00:58:45.080
why would I deliberately like cuck myself? I can't imagine why you would so knowingly trivialize
00:58:52.640
your own culture and genetics in regards to the future of human civilization because that's what
00:58:59.320
they're doing, right? Like other places are going to move ahead, even if everybody signed on board
00:59:04.260
with this. And so it really only works if you somehow get everyone on board with it without
00:59:09.920
realizing they're on board with it or getting governments to force minority like, oh, we'll get
00:59:13.900
the United States and our government on board with this. And then we'll force it on the, you know,
00:59:19.140
Muslim and Christian populations within our country, which is not awesome. That's, that's,
00:59:24.440
that's just as horrifying as enforcing it across borders, but it's just, oh, but we did it through
00:59:28.720
democracy. So it's okay this time. So let's assume you extended this maximal reasonableness. You might
00:59:34.200
be able to get Europe on board with this, South and Central America on board with this, Canada on board
00:59:40.760
with this, but they're already low fertility. So they're not really relevant of the high fertility,
00:59:46.100
high technology, e.g. likely to get off planet, likely to colonize the solar system, likely to
00:59:51.460
continue thriving populations. You've got populations like Israel. Israel would never,
00:59:56.400
ever, ever get on board with this. The populations like the United States, which would never get on
01:00:02.600
board with this. And so basically it's just like the countries that are already unlikely to be
01:00:08.400
relevant to the future of human civilization bowing out and handing the baton to the countries that are
01:00:14.560
already taking over human civilization. So another thing that I thought was interesting
01:00:19.540
is what they thought that everyone should have a right to 30 meters squared, private residence of
01:00:25.860
space roofed, needed heating or cold two meals a day with 18,000 to 36,000 calories, depending on age
01:00:32.720
outfits that are like a standardized outfit in another language. I don't understand completing schools
01:00:38.060
through UNESED. I said level two, possibly three. I really hate global schooling, saying I think
01:00:42.500
schooling and education should be left up to a culture because it's often used for cultural
01:00:45.960
eradication. Historically, that is like the main use of school systems is cultural genocide.
01:00:50.640
And families, especially with AI now, can educate kids themselves. See Parasia.io, the free education
01:00:55.480
system or very inexpensive education system we make for everyone. It divides education into like a
01:00:59.740
civ-like tech tree. And then it's got like a Socratic tutor on every particular skill that you can learn
01:01:04.460
and students can interact with this until they pass. And then they move into the next part of the tree and
01:01:08.520
they can just learn stuff. And some families are enjoying this. And if you are one of those families,
01:01:12.400
please let us know in like email or something because we really appreciate it. It helps motivate
01:01:15.920
us to keep developing systems like this. One means of transportation, e-scooter, e-bike, moped,
01:01:20.640
free contraceptives of choice, fresh drinking water, and access to basic medical care. Now, I don't know
01:01:25.980
why, because to get these things, you need to take the money from someone. Like why should a group,
01:01:31.480
I just don't understand, have to pay for another group's access to these when they're attempting
01:01:34.880
different cultural experiments. Like the very, like if you don't allow cultural experiments to
01:01:38.900
fail, you basically force people to live on in suffering because you are allowing cultures that
01:01:43.620
create what you can call weakness, right? Like the inability to produce the resources they need
01:01:48.680
to survive to continue to replicate, which eventually is going to cause enormous pain, right? Like we were
01:01:55.500
talking recently about like the morality around like EA and stuff like this. And they're like, oh,
01:02:01.480
well, what do you care about, you know, these people in Africa who aren't getting their whatever
01:02:04.580
medication or food or whatever. And I'm like, bro, like look at the demographics right now.
01:02:09.360
Europe and the United States are going to crash out within the next few decades. Okay. All of these
01:02:14.440
populations that you're sustaining in Africa right now, it's like a fish tank, right? And you're putting
01:02:19.360
in food every day. And I'm like, why are you doing that? We're about to go on vacation for like a year.
01:02:24.460
And you're like, well, you know, I don't want today to be the day. And I'm like, well, you could be
01:02:28.140
taking the time and effort that you're spending on the food thing and delay our vacation or figure out
01:02:33.340
some solutions. So we don't have to go on vacation, you know, but no, they don't want to hear that
01:02:39.120
because they don't actually care about these populations. They know this vacation is coming
01:02:42.400
and they don't care what happens in a lot of these countries when Europe crashes out, which is only a
01:02:47.780
few decades away from doing. Finally, I thought then they're like, okay, why, why shouldn't we care
01:02:52.780
about this issue? Like, like why, what's going to fix this, right? Fertility collapse. Number one,
01:02:57.820
automation and productivity increases. Technological progress will significantly increase
01:03:01.240
efficiency of many industries. Automation, AI, robotics will take over tasks, reducing the need
01:03:05.940
for human labor. The declining number of working people can be offset by higher productivity, thus
01:03:09.820
maintaining or even increasing economic performance. Physically demanding hazardous or monotonous work
01:03:14.720
will increasingly be handled by machines and AI. So first I want to be like, oh, so technology is
01:03:20.200
going to advance and solve problems when they're problems that your scheme has, but not when they're
01:03:25.700
problems that our scheme has, like the amount of food that can be produced in a region, right?
01:03:30.900
This seems like very much like, oh, so you are able to see that the technology is increasing the
01:03:36.360
productivity of things. Two, this is unlikely to work realistically. If we look at the way that AI is
01:03:41.620
increasing whilst with some populations, whereas draining it from other populations right now,
01:03:45.400
it's more likely going to exacerbate all of the problems associated with this than fix the problems
01:03:50.120
associated with this. But I will note that this isn't a problem for them. When I say a few people
01:03:56.620
are going to have all the money, and they're going to move to charter cities and countries that don't
01:04:00.000
tax them as much, what they'd say is, well, that's not relevant to our plan because we're trying to
01:04:04.020
create a global technocracy, right? And these rich people would have to live under the jackboot of
01:04:09.860
our global technocracy, just as the Africans in the Islamic regions have to. And I'm like, okay,
01:04:15.160
cool, but obviously you're not setting that up in the next three decades. And you're not going to
01:04:19.720
build enough movement to build that up in the next three decades. So it's just like a, well,
01:04:23.540
hypothetically, we could do X, which isn't going to happen and would honestly be horrifying if it
01:04:29.800
happened. Horrifying. Like the idea of people marching down like streets in Pakistan, shooting
01:04:37.260
anyone who's like having over that many kids are being like, oh, well, now we need to take you.
01:04:40.680
This child is not allowed to exist. And then the constant wars they would have with the religious
01:04:44.780
people. Anyway, then they talk about extending working life, right? And they have this whole thing
01:04:48.340
about how working life is going to extend, except in 2019 in the US, the average age was 78.8. The
01:04:55.760
last year we have a good measure for 2023, 78.4. So it's going down. It basically goes up and down,
01:05:04.080
but remains pretty stable. This is in the United States. If we look at Europe for 2019, you got
01:05:08.640
81.3. And then for 2023, you've got 81.5. So about the same. Yeah, everyone's going to die except for
01:05:15.820
Brian Johnson. Yeah. No, but the point being is that life extension technologies don't actually
01:05:20.160
seem to be having the impact that you would expect. I just think Ozympic is going to have a big impact
01:05:23.780
in numbers coming up. But the problem is that people seem to get more unhealthy as technology
01:05:30.900
increases as well. So that's part of the problem here, right? Education and skills development.
01:05:36.120
Again, we've said... Sorry, just a note, Malcolm, we do need to record a weekend episode still,
01:05:41.020
and we're running out of time. So can you... Okay, fine. I won't go over anything else here.
01:05:46.780
You get the idea. One thing they did want to do, which I thought was cool, is they want to make
01:05:50.080
English the world language. American, as I call it. American. Well, there we go.
01:05:57.120
That's nice. Okay. We'll go record that weekend episode. Just, you know, guys, no ill meaning here.
01:06:03.080
Like I can understand how you could come to these beliefs if you grew up in a different era than us,
01:06:07.020
or you're living in a different cultural environment. But, you know, what I want to fight
01:06:10.240
for is cultural autonomy for everyone. And then the systems that work can go on and thrive and
01:06:15.820
colonize space. And I think that that is the least coercive way to achieve realistic outcomes.
01:06:21.280
But I think you could say we're all for this system they propose within their own
01:06:25.780
city-states. Yeah. Like if they want to create a sovereign state that has this system,
01:06:32.260
and they believe it's going to produce the best human flourishing, we really want... Like,
01:06:35.460
I would love to see if this experiment works well. And maybe it does. So absolutely go for it.
01:06:42.100
No one in this organization has any kids. Or I'm sorry, that they're almost all below
01:06:46.020
repopulation rate. That's what I'd argue. Two kids or less. In which case, they're not relevant
01:06:49.180
to the future of humanity, because they're just not going to be around in the future of humanity.
01:06:52.280
I mean, you know, it really depends on how many flourishing grandkids and great-grandkids
01:06:56.380
kids are. Yeah, but I don't think kids raised in this culture are going to have well above
01:06:59.360
repopulation rate grandkids. Yeah. Well, I love it. Anyway, thanks for covering this. Very interesting.
01:07:04.480
What I like is that they also care about long-term human flourishing, and it's very interesting to
01:07:10.320
see their exceedingly different hypothesis on how to get there. So I'm glad they're doing what
01:07:14.880
they're doing, and I appreciate they're reaching out to us. Yep. Have a good one. Bye.
01:07:19.120
Now. Okay. People seem to enjoy the episode, by the way, on Nepo Baby Socialists today,
01:07:24.760
so that was good. Oh, can you hear me? Yeah, I can. Sorry. I was just getting a task started in my
01:07:34.420
vibe coding app. Can you hear me okay? Hello? Wonderful. And I am right now opening this so I can
01:07:44.820
see the scripts that I have for today. Nice. I think you'll find this really interesting,
01:07:51.460
actually. Yeah, I'm always interested in the way that people who aren't necessarily just full-out
01:08:00.160
antinatalists, but, like, just concerned about population, are looking at things. This might
01:08:05.800
dovetail also with, I was thinking of maybe just doing a paid members-only episode going over this,
01:08:12.640
but, honestly, it might dovetail really well with this, which is a very short sub-stack post that
01:08:18.860
Cremu did on the impact of having kids on environmental causes, like, whether it really
01:08:25.560
is a bad idea to have kids if you're worried about climate change. Oh, and what did he come to?
01:08:31.920
No. No. I mean, getting that as part of our advocacy, we can probably do a longer piece on
01:08:36.360
that. What I was actually thinking is I wanted to do another piece that does sort of what I'm doing
01:08:40.520
now, like, going over their own website and literature on the degrowth movement, if you're
01:08:45.400
familiar with that. Is this the one where they're, like, let capitalism just stop working and put debt
01:08:51.960
on everything so that nothing works anymore? Basically, it's like, let capitalism stop working and we'll
01:08:54.720
figure something out then. Mm-hmm. It first really got big during the pandemic, right? Or at least
01:09:01.100
that's when people started. Yeah. I mean, it's something that a lot of, like, big people,
01:09:04.840
like, I think Bill Gates is pro this. A lot of the EU is pro this. A lot of the UN is pro this.
01:09:09.900
So, you know, it's a big movement and pretty scary stuff.
01:09:14.640
Bill Gates, really? I thought Bill Gates was part of it, yeah.
01:09:19.800
Or, like, stuff he funds is adjacent to it. Maybe he himself wouldn't be aware of that.
01:09:24.040
Because you've got to be, it's one of those movements that's just, like, pants-on-head crazy.