Prosperity & Peril: A Candid Discussion on Human Evolution and Extinction - Malcolm J Collins

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My name is Stuart Alsop and today we're interviewing Malcolm J. Collins. He is a VC, he's also involved in PE, a CEO, 5X, best selling author, Wall Street Journal, and an educator. And he's also got a podcast called basecamp on YouTube. Go check it out. But welcome to the show, Malcolm.

It is so wonderful to be here with you today.

So what has been on your mind for the past? Like, what's the most interesting thing that's happened in the last few days in the sort of intellectual sphere that's got your mind churning?

Oh,

I'm.

Well, okay. Yeah, so, I mean, the, the recently I was editing and so I've been spending a lot of time on one of our episodes that's on a specific antinatalist argument, but I don't know how interesting that's going to be to your audience. It's on the concept of negative utilitarianism and how this is a somewhat reasonable philosophical concept, but that has a lot of negative implications and that creates a lot of negative externalities for society. One of the things that we're most publicly known for is running the pronatalist movement. So this is the movement that's focused on falling fertility rates in developed countries and in non developed countries now. So, you know, if you look at like a lot of people are like, oh, you can solve this as immigration, but like as of 2019, by the UN zone statistic, collectively Central America, South America and the Caribbean, where we get most of our immigrants, it fell below replacement rate. So they do. You know, we're like a farmer who has unsustainable water management practices, draining from a evaporating pond and being like, oh, I don't see the problem because it's not affecting me yet. I'm taking water from the pond across the street. And it's like, well, you're making things worse there in the short term. So. But one of our big enemies are the anti natalists, right? So there's a lot of, like, Dumb reasons. People are anti natalists. And I don't want to go like too into them. They're just really bad arguments, you know, like this is racist, obviously not racist. It's in fact affects white people a lot less than like East Asian and Southeast Asian populations. Or they'll say it's bad for the environment. That's, that's pretty silly. Fertility rates are falling no matter what. We're just trying to draw attention to how we create, you know, some sort of solution to that. But there's one really smart argument, which is the negative utilitarian argument. And that's why I spent so long on it and so much time thinking about it recently. Although we had written about it in our, in our book on the subject and what the unit. The negative utilitarians have a few key points to their position, but specifically the. They believe one of two things. Either the human life is predominated by suffering to such an extent that any positive emotions we feel don't matter. Basically they, they would say that the negative emotions we feel are so acute when compared to the positive emotions. And they're right about this. Like if you cut off like my finger, there's no positive emotional equivalent I could have to that. Right. And when we talk about the happiest moments of our lives, we're often talking about things that don't actually fill us with a positive emotion in the moment. But more are like life milestones. Like we'll say the day I gave birth to a kid or the day I get married. And these typically aren't like flushed with positive emotional states. They're more like this is life milestones that we're self defining in this way or this way. And then the other thing that they often argue is that even if our lives were predominated by positive emotions, positive emotions don't matter. Um, so they'll either say that positive emotions don't matter because they can be caused by trivial stimuli. Like, you know, if Sisyphus rolling the ball up the hill every day made him happy, would that task have intrinsic value? Or they'll say positive emotions don't matter because of the asymmetry hypothesis, which is to say that if, okay, if you're bringing somebody into the world, like if you're having a kid, um, it's bad if that kid has a life predominated by suffering. But it's good if that kid has a life predominated by happiness. But if you don't bring a kid into the world, it is not bad if that kid doesn't feel any happiness, but it is bad if they feel suffering. So you can only cause negatives by bringing new people into the world. And so they don't want people to exist at all. And it's a very interesting movement because a lot of their arguments, like I could get into, if you actually want to dig deep into why I think their arguments are logically flawed. If you adopt perspectives that I think most people do, but they're at least better thought through than the other arguments against us.