Degrowth Is Our Answer

In this episode of The Gifted Podcast we dive into the concept of degrowth with special guest Matt Orsagh, the author of the newsletter 'Degrowth is the Answer.' Matt shares his personal journey, from obtaining degrees in English, film, and finance, to advocating for a shift away from GDP-focused growth. 

We discuss the environmental and societal benefits of a wellbeing-based economy, touching on issues like universal basic income, shorter work weeks, and sustainable living. Matt also highlights the importance of building community and living within planetary boundaries to ensure a better future for upcoming generations. 

00:00 Introduction to the Gifted Podcast 

00:22 Meet Matt Orsagh: Author of The Newsletter 'Degrowth is the Answer'. 

00:45 Matt's Journey: From Finance to Degrowth 

03:48 Understanding Degrowth and Its Importance 

04:38 The Concept of Planetary Boundaries 

06:54 Degrowth in Practice: Work, Income, and Community 

16:33 Challenges and Benefits of a Wellbeing Economy 

21:58 Future Perspectives on Economic Systems 

22:48 The Changing Attitudes Towards Capitalism 

23:26 Generational Shift in Political Power 

24:38 Critique of American Individualism 

26:22 The Role of Advertising in Consumerism 

27:13 Discovering Degrowth 

29:12 Historical Context of Environmental Awareness 

33:27 Future Challenges and Adaptations 

36:43 The Importance of Community and Communication 

40:10 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript

 
Degrowth Is Our Answer

 Welcome to the Gifted podcast dedicated to the exploration and cultivation of the outside genius found in neurodivergence.   

 Today, I have a special guest with me, Matt Orsag. He's the author of a newsletter called Degrowth is the Answer.  That is my answer to degrowth. We're going to go Backwards so we can go forwards or we're not going to go forwards and Matt has a really great newsletter. I like his messages.  Matt, thanks for being here.  I want to know about degrowth being the answer  how you got there and what made you start it.

Thanks for having me. First of all, I'm happy to be here. I started, geez, how far back do I want to go? I started writing the newsletter in September of 2023,  but I'll go back and give you a little bit of my tale of woe and how I got here. 

I graduate, I'd like to joke with people that I one useless undergraduate degree in college. Was it enough for me? So I got to, I got an English degree in a film degree because I'm a storyteller. I love stories and those are the things that I gravitated to.  Then a couple of years out of school, I realized I should probably go back and get a business degree to be more useful more marketable  just, be able to do more in the world. And so I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, moved back, moved down to Atlanta when I was about 13, 14, went to school up in  Indiana, Notre Dame, and then back to Atlanta.   I was in Atlanta and I got my graduate degree in finance at Georgia state. 

So I'm in my mid to late twenties by now. I had a friend who from high school who had moved to New York and needed a roommate. I thought, Hey, I've got a finance degree and I know someone in New York. I'll go to New York. It was a little naive, but it worked out just fine. Then I got my CFA charter, which is a charter financial analyst designation.

Those are the people around the world who are financial professionals. It's just a certification for financial professionals because I did that in college or in my graduate degree. And I thought this is the next step and I can do that. I joined this after I passed my CFA, you have to take three exams.

I don't recommend it unless you're really into finance. But if you are, then it's not a bad career path. Then I actually joined the CFA Institute which is this global, financial professional training association, but they had just started up  a think tank arm of the organization. 

So I was fighting the good fight for corporate governance and sustainability issues for quite a while, I joined them in 2005 and just left them a couple of years ago,   I started out focusing on corporate governance. Issues at companies. And that was, and I gravitated to that because it was the stories of what's going on at companies.

I knew all the numbers and could build the spreadsheets and all that finance stuff, but I liked the stories. What's the story of this company? What's the story of this industry? What's the story of, whatever's going on in the financial world that led into what, people have probably heard about ESG was started in As in five by the PRI principles of responsible investment. 

It came out the meetings  to put it together. We're in  2005. It came out in 2006 and ever since then,  more and more investors and businesses have been concentrating on ESG issues, environmental issues, like climate, social issues, anything that's a human resource issue at companies but also, modern slavery and those heavier issues and then governance, just how the company is governed. 

 Over time that grew from  focusing mostly on governance. When things started to the E and the S getting more prominence, especially the E and things like climate change natural capital, biodiversity loss.     I hope this story isn't too long, but it's it frames how I got here.

And that led me to coming across degrowth a couple of years ago. What degrowth is deemphasizing growth in our society, in our civilization,  because we're slaves to GDP and growing  our economies, politicians get elected doing that CEOs get promoted doing that  you and I, have mortgages to pay and kids to send to school and families to feed.

 The way to do that in our capitalist economy is to grow that pie. So we all have a little bit more and everybody's happy. , that works as long as you have a planet that has inexhaustible resources. Unfortunately, that's not the case for us. We're running into some of the barriers of that right now,  and the environmental implications of living that way are coming back to haunt us.

. Climate change is just the most  prominent one in people's minds.  But I would tell people to look at the planetary boundaries framework, and it's something that was started by this place called the Stockholm  Resilience Center, I think about 10, 15 years ago.

 What they look at is nine planetary boundaries that we don't want to breach because if we do,  it causes problems for us that are feedbacks that really harm the planet. Our ability to, survive and strive on this planet, we've already crossed six of those climates. Just one of them, land use and water use plastics in our environment and a couple others. 

Are those the same as the tipping points? No. Tipping points are different. But they're related. Like climate leads to tipping points 

the Gulf stream and the Atlantic possibly shutting down.

Is comes from climate change and the melt of of glaciers and ice and Greenland that makes the water  the fresh water come into the ocean and eventually that can shut down the Gulf Stream that warms Europe, I think would be I forget the exact numbers, but it would be quite a bit colder without the Gulf Stream.

Bringing that water up 15 degrees minimum to 75 or something ridiculous. . I forget what, I forgot what it was, but thank you for that. , so you could have a mini ice age in Europe in the not too distant future, and people think, oh, that, take they'll take care of climate change, but we've based our societies and how we live on in Europe on what we have now, and so that would be devastating if that happened.

 There's many other tipping points like that. It's still the Amazon  rainforest going from a net carbon  sink to a net carbon emitter. If it gets to, If it gets cut back too much and we're on track for that, although it is slowing down now cause they're starting to take care of it.

But so those are tipping points, but but the planetary boundaries, I think is a good framework for kind of jumping into this issue.   What degrowth says is let's focus less on trying to grow our economy because it leads to these. Problems  and  you might see how people might say wait, I have to grow, we have to grow for me to have my job for me to get paid for us to live. 

And  that's just the case because that's a society we've built. That's the  civilization we have. That's capitalism as it is now. It's not going to be easy to change that and it's not going to change overnight. But the things we can do, we can live differently and within our means as a society  as a civilization, and it's things like, shorter work week because, we don't need to work as much as we do.

It's just interesting stories on this . One of the reasons that the five day work week came around the United States was Henry Ford back when he was building, changing the world with the automobile industry.  We used to have a six day work week here in America  and he found that it was more efficient.

If he gave his workers a little bit more time off or less mistakes, higher quality in the vehicles and all that stuff. And so that was one of the main things that eventually  moved us to a five day work week. He also found it was better if he paid them so they could buy cars. Yes.  Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.  Henry Ford was no great humanitarian, he did it because it was a business decision. Yeah.  John Maynard Keynes famously. , I think it was the forties when he said  by the turn of the century, this is year 2000,   that we would have a work week of about 15 to 20 hours by the time year 2000 rolled around because we'd gain some more inefficiency and we wouldn't need to work as much.

He's not for off and what we could do, we could have a shorter week, work week we have, efficiency gains that we've, with all these wonderful tools we have,  but, and  AI will only, there are problems with the eye, of course, but that will only allow us to be more efficient.

Think about the work you were doing,  20 years ago, 25 years ago and doing that same work today, does it take the same amount of time?  So if  we cut back, to a 32 hour work week, what  time that would give us. We travel less. We use less resources because you're not going, you're going to work one less day a week.

You'd have more time with your family. If you have teenagers, maybe that's not such a good thing, but for most people, my teenager, I'm not there. I'm going to have teenagers in a couple of years. Okay.   Taking the growth path is moving to the idea is to move to a well being based economy.

One that's not based on trying to grow GDP , if we grew GDP by 2 percent a year,  we'd have doubled our economy, I think by my mid century.  Think of the resources problems we're having now. The idea of degrowth is to move to a wellbeing economy and base our decisions on what's our collective wellbeing. , 

we have a degrowth plan too for our group,  our group has to work 20 hours a week because we're so sensitive.  We require it for our bodies.  Also mental illness on the flip side. Most exceptional people either break one way or both ways.  20 hours a week is actually the ideal. For us, but also we're creative.  We create things.  Our body is meant to make things as well. And that was another thing that was really easy for us with Degrowth is that since we've always been makers, I make a lot of the things I've rebuilt cars. I've, made my own furniture. I've made my own jewelry. We like to make. Degrowth idea for our group was pretty easy.  

We're just animals after all  think about the animals you're around in your life, are they doing the same thing for eight hours straight  or do they do something and take a little nap, take a break, go get something to eat, take a little break, go get something to drink.

Take a little break, go play with your friends, take a little break, go explore something, take a little break. That's how we're meant to live. That's how we do it.  Most of us can't concentrate on a task for more than, an hour or so at a time, and then we have to take a break and do something else, refresh our minds and then come back to it or do something else.

 There's diminishing returns if we're just trying to crank out 40 hour, 60 hour weeks  with almost anyone. 

The shorter timeframe makes sense. So the, the less work is just 1 part of it, but it's also things like, universal basic income and other issues like that.

There was a town in Canada  in the mid seventies, I believe that they did a social experiment on.   I think they gave a couple hundred dollars to folks who were at the lower end of the income scale to see what outcomes.

That would lead to and what it led to was better health outcomes, less stress  medical outcomes kids stayed in school longer because they didn't have to leave to help their families to earn a living.  Less crime,  all outcomes were generally better.

What it was is there wasn't, that fear attached to not being able to pay rent, not being able to pay the mortgage, not being able to buy food and less need to hustle to, take that low paying job just because you had to, , put some food on the table.

Stockton, California did something similar. I think it was in the late eighties, early nineties. What they found was if you have that for people that needed a universal basic income it helps   all outcomes for that society.   We did this experiment with COVID  a lot of people got checks from the government for a couple of months or for what I forget was a year, 15 months, 18 months.

What, the stat that jumps out to me was child poverty in the United States went down for, it was like eight. And again, I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was like 80. It went down from 18, 19 percent to 7%. Yeah. It's also the child poverty numbers are already ridiculously low.

So it was like 40 percent to 20 percent  if you  did low income, that was huge.  It's even bigger than people realize.  Yeah.  I was like  can we keep doing that? That's a great look at the outcomes it had, but politically it wasn't. So it went away.

But and, I would tell people to explore whatever I've written and others have written job guarantees is another one. Universal basic services is another one such as, public transport and all those kinds of, and healthcare and education and those kinds of things, look at.

The Nordics in Europe who have  a kind of a a more fulsome social contract than we do here in the States. Yeah. They also have half day schools, which is really good for the lot of us who struggle to sit like for that period of time, then the other part is that it opens up a whole nother avenue for income for the creatives because the kids come home, they just have those four basic classes.

And then they do. What they're interested in. So it's almost ideal because you're getting like the main   points is society wants everyone to know, but then you come home and then there's a strong middle class because they have the creatives working,  cultivating kids one on one for their creative things.

I didn't know about that half day thing. That's great. , it's not all of them, but the ones  that are particularly interested ironically in the profoundly gifted, . So you're learning. By doing and making, and then you can apply that to chemistry, physics, math, and know it so much more completely. Whereas our society only gives you a 2d version of that.  It's harder for you to make and grow 

 that's interesting.   A good way to think of it is, to address the planetary boundaries that we've crossed.

Climate, land use, water issues, plastics, and biodiversity loss nitrogen and phosphorous in our livers, rivers and oceans that result in dead zones in those places. I think those are the six. I may have missed one, but to give nature a chance to heal and get back in balance.  We need to, of course, we hear all about greening the supply of energy and that's great.

Wind, solar, geothermal green, our energy sources as much as possible. Although that has its own issues as well, because you have to mind those, if you replace  every internal combustion engine with an EV.  , that switch, this is the problem from CO2 to all the mining you have to do for all these minerals. 

DeGrow says that, yes,  green everything, but also cut back on the number of cars you have. Pull that for the economics people out there  green, that supply curve, but pull that demand curve down, consume less, consume better  structure our cities. So the walkable bikeable,  I was doing research on this recently, in the United States, we have about 330 million people, 340 million people, and we have about 300 million cars. 

Now, think about all the children who can't drive.  We have more cars than actual people who can drive,  which is insane.   Extra cars just laying around, you got to have a lot of rental cars for just in case someone needs someone when I guess, but  why not target. 

This could be the future, it could be that with self driving car tech, self driving technology, you could have a fleet  of mostly electric autonomous vehicles that are only 150 million of them. 

Why do you go to self driving vehicles? Why not trains or rail? . Yes, trains and bikes and stuff in the cities, but if you're, living in Iowa City and you've got to get, somewhere. Yeah. Less populated, you're still going to have cars, but you'd have a lot less of them. 

You wouldn't own one. This is in theory, you wouldn't own one, but you just dial one up and say, I need to go to the grocery store. Let me get a car.  One will come and get you in 10 minutes. You'll go do your shopping or go see a movie or go visit your friends or whatever.  We don't need 300 million cars.

That's just one  scale down consumption and resource use as much as you can, as well as greening,  everything.  People complain that, Oh, it's, everybody's going to go live in caves, and we're gonna have a huge recession.  Before oil was discovered.

I don't think we were living in caves. But how many caves are there? There's a lot of people. , there's too many people for all the caves. Yeah.  That's just the hyperbole people throughout there, back at  the conference of the parties meeting last year on, the big climate change meeting that happens in November, December, every year, I think the head , from the UAE, the head of the group that was running it complained that, , if people, get rid of oil and gas, let's go back to living in caves, and that's, it's just, hyper hyperbolic scaremongering,  but the degrowth, being economy.

We want to get to is one where you have more time  to spend with your teenagers.  You have less stress about, keeping up with the Joneses and paying your mortgage. You still, you'll still have a mortgage and you'll still have responsibilities and bills.  But if you have, universal basic income for people who need it. 

If you have a shorter work week, if you have a society that's based more on, and  I think needs to bring it all together and people would like more is you have a better sense of community because you're more involved in your community  because you have time to, you can belong to that community garden or , we have a huge population of baby boomers who are retiring. 

I see this as a, an opportunity to switch to this model. Those people are gonna need more care from their communities.  Some of them aren't going to have family to help them. \ that's one thing, that we can do more to build community. But I think  community and  solidarity are things that are going to help, could help if we go this route. 

For us to transition to that way of life, and that's not going to happen next Tuesday, but I think  if we're having this conversation 10 years down the road, I would hope we're well on the way to that kind of model and then, moving forward towards it as we go on.  

What our aging demographics look like in about 10 years?  One of the concerns that I see when I look at that is our aging demographic, a lot of the boomers have not been very kind to the youngest demographic  we have a very divisiveness  our government and the people who have a lot of power, really like to separate us.

 The other ring of someone  is a great way to, to to breed mistrust and contempt in a group, and that goes back , to our instincts. When we first were living in caves, someone who's different, it's better to not trust them than to trust them. 

I actually think that's very much put into our system in school. I don't know that was true for , if maybe from a different tribe or whatever. Yeah. Yeah.  They recognize differences in people in your group for sure, because everybody had a  gift or thing to offer. The othering we do, making everybody the same right out of the gate and then being like you're gifted, you're not, you have grades, I wonder, how do you see people moving through that?  The universal income, it would be great for the creatives. 

I don't have an answer how we get there, but but sorry, everybody. I didn't, I don't have an easy answer.

I wish I did.  I think it is  community , that can get us there.  Things were better in the past when everyone knew each other and let's go back to that time. It's just that  when you know someone, when you talk to them, And you get to know  their story,  it's harder to other them.

It's harder to believe some kind of conspiracy theory about their, that group, or if you hear, if you hear, a powerful faction trying to get you to,  divide and conquer, those groups. So  and, they, what, if we follow business as usual and don't really do much, we're in for, environmental catastrophes.

We're into cliff dwelling. The irony of that statement, that  we're all going to live in caves. Literally. That is why those guys live in the cliffs because of environmental collapse.  So we're going to have environmental collapse, which will, it'll be harder to get food.

It'll be harder to get water. People will won't live as long. There'll be parts of the earth where the people can't live. It'll create huge, displaced populations in the tens of millions every year. They're looking for a place to go. And that's all. So let's not do that, if we go  down this degrowth path, if we go down a path, it's more based on wellbeing and less on economic growth. 

We can mitigate some of those things. There's always going to be problems, I'm not going to say otherwise,  but if we focus more on a wellbeing economy and get to where we're living within our means  environmentally, and we pull back. To the safe side of those borders of the planetary boundaries  you, and you have more time and resources to have that community and build that community. 

The very rich in the world won't be as, won't be as rich, but most people will be better off and happier and healthier, better educated.  That's not a bad world.  I'm not going to say that's easy to do. We have political problems. We have political factions.  we have an economy and a way of life that's ingrained in, in, in all of us and most of us and saying, Hey, let's change. That  is hard  and I see it when I talk to people about this and I come from the financial world  and a lot of people in the financial world anywhere really but in that world, and I'll talk about it cause I know it is, their reaction is wait, you're telling me I'm going to have less stuff.

And less money. No, I don't want that. I want more money and more stuff.  You explain that's bad in the long run, and studies show that , over a certain level of income, you're not really getting any more happiness or fulfillment in life. You're just getting more. 

 I like wealth. Everybody likes wealth. But I understand  that to pursue it to the point of degradation of my future and my children's future is folly.  I hope the work that I'm doing helps more people realize that and helps our society go towards that,  place.

And I think we will get there. It's just a matter of the speed with which we get there.  Will it happen soon enough? Like you, if you look at  surveys of,  people on their views of capitalism, and I'm not bashing any capitalism.

It's just the system we live in. We used to live in feudalism, a lot of bad things about feudalism.  And we live in mostly capital capitalist society, a lot of bad things about capitalism 200 years from now, it'll be some other ism. And there'll be really bad things about that need to be fixed.

That's just the nature of it.  But  if you look at the nature of it, like you could live with a cashless society.  It'd be fine. We could live with a financial system that is closer to what the Amish would work and they would be totally fine with that.  200 years from now, we may be, who knows.

But just what I'm saying is now, like you look at surveys,  young folks. Anyone under 35 or 30, usually  they have, they don't have a positive view of the economic system we have. Whereas 10 years ago, they did 20 years ago.

They really did. And 30 years ago, there was no doubt that capitalism was the way the truth and the light.  Where the trend is going with the people who are now about to enter, those people who are in their twenties and thirties and forties, they drive the economy with their consumption.

That's how it works.   They don't like the system more often than not, less, less than half of them do. They can't drive the economy right now. They don't have the money to buy houses. They can't afford to have children. There's not going to be any drivers there. 

But I think that's where they are seeing how the system we had is broken and needs to be changed and they will change it once they get power.

 They don't have power now,  but.   But look at the average age of our leaders in Congress.   I think the average age in the Senate is over 70.

 It's right around high sixties or low seventies and the age in the house isn't much better. It's, I think it's low sixties.  So those folks aren't going to be in power. A lot longer if the laws of nature stay and stay intact and they will. , we're going to get to the place where these policies are going to come. 

It's just, do we get there in time? And this way of thinking about the world is going to come and it's just, do we get there in time?  The average age of the U S Senate, 65. 3 up from 64. 8.  I actually thought it was higher. I thought it was higher. And the oldest Senator is 90.  Yeah. Chuck Grassley.

A young spry 90. Yeah. My, my mother in law and grandmother are around that age and they're in homes.   The joke is, why would you want  someone that old running the country when at home you don't let them have the remote. Yeah. Or you were afraid to have them driving.

  Not that there isn't wisdom in those people, it's time for levels of dementia start to kick in because their body's breaking down. Yeah. It's time for the next generation to take the reins.    If you look back to how  Most indigenous societies ran and were, the kind of cult of individualism that we have here in the United States just wasn't the thing, it was the group that mattered the most. And if compromise that group with your selfish, self centered actions, you're ostracized or, that hunting trip you never returned from. Yeah. You were taken out on a lot of hunting trips, , there's a balance, I love the American individualism and exceptionalism to a point, because, I love the parts of my life and the parts I see in my kids that are their personalities and their individual things.  And I celebrate them. But not to the point where it hurts society or civilization.  We've lost track of that, I think. And not just in the United States. But it's just very pronounced here. 

So the individualism of the United States is a funny thing though, because we've stripped it away by taking away everybody being their creative self. We individualize by buying things. We individualize by external simple, stupid things. I find that the version of individualism we have is already dysfunctional.   Indigenous societies everyone's creative that's the whole thing you're creating what you need you're creating and you know learning and growing as a whole practice for everything. So the individualism we've have has been turned on its head in the worst way. And the collective societies, there's so much you can read about the Asian particular Japan or China, or those, they have social capitalism ratings for people. Those collective things go a little too far too. 

I would just like health.  , like I said, there's a balance to be struck there. And I liked the way you put it about the we're sold  consumerism as individualism and there's a great, there's great. , this could be another, to our podcast, but just on advertising and how that grew  and it grew out of psychoanalysis and people, I think it was it Freud's nephew?

It was one of the guys who started.  Marketing.  They recognized that  you could make people confuse their wants and their needs, believe that their wants were their needs  and make them insecure. 

And that's what a lot of what advertising is, making you insecure about what you have. And this face cream is going to make you younger. This car is going to make you more virile this, whatever product is going to make you better.   It's advertising. And it's, and that's part of, the degrowth model is scaling back advertising.

 I like a lot of countries actually have, you can't advertise to children,  should push that a little farther perhaps because there's so much that, drives this consumerism that we just don't need.  

 When you started this thing up, like what made you feel so drawn to this? I just, I saw that.  And again, I go back to I, I see myself as a storyteller and stories is the way we understand the world.

We're very strange animals and that we tell stories and we define ourselves by the store with the stories we have, no other animal does that or can do that.  But it's such an interesting part of what we are as people.  And that story or , those ideas. That meme, whatever you want to call it, wasn't really out there for a lot of people.

I came across, this de growth idea and the things behind it, , four or five years ago.  And I was, and I remember thinking, how did I not come across this? In, in my whole life.  I wish I'd known this 20 years before, and I could have done more about it, known more about it, that there's a different way you could.  Structure your society and live your life ends up being better for everyone.   I wasn't seeing that  discussion out there very much.  So I thought that and I discovered Substack about two years ago and I put two and two together.   I fancy myself a storyteller and a writer and this thing isn't being talked about.

These stories aren't being told.  I can do that. I can help educate people and spread the word about this. Hopefully that helps. And gets more people to understand it and helps us move to that kind of that way of life sooner rather than later before it's too late.  , I wish I'd known about it sooner and I wish we'd been having these conversations sooner,   I think we are, we are the stories we tell ourselves.

As a society, as a civilization,  and  I hope five, 10 years from now, we're telling ourselves a story of, a degrowth story or a wellbeing economy story and focusing more on ourselves and our health and our education and our environment than we are on.  \

So just a couple of years ago, when you say that there's a, the whole onboarding or awareness of kind of collapse  that most people are coming to, I remember them talking about this back when I was a kid,  the limits to growth book came out in 72.

That's before I was born.  I remember this in the eighties,  a big, huge push for the recycling and all this earth stuff.  Then the nineties is disappeared. ,  I think around 2003, I think I became aware of oh, that's what that was , but it took a long time for everybody  know about it.

How did it come to your attention?  I think it was during COVID, it wasn't  really caused by COVID. It's just the job I had, I do a lot of research and reading around sustainability issues.

And I came across degrowth just in my research,   I remember,  there was like some sitcom in the. 80s and 90s. I think it was family ties. Do you remember that one? Oh, yeah. The youngest daughter was upset about climate change. , and I don't know what I was 20, 18  or something.

That's the first I'd heard about what that meant. I was like, Oh yeah, there's a problem. And  then it went away.  I didn't really think about it. I knew what it was and I knew, Oh yeah, eventually we need to do something about this,  but it wasn't really in people's consciousness. It wasn't my consciousness. 

The cop meetings didn't start until I think the mid nineties. I know scientists knew about CO2 and the atmosphere and what it did. The scientists at Exxon Mobil, or it was just Exxon back then, knew about it long before that. , we did have the the ozone thinning and that was a thing for like sun, but I don't remember too much other. 

But ozone was solved. . Yeah. Those are, we got rid of the CFCs and those almost solved.  It's interesting to read just the missteps in history. If the leadership of the oil companies had done something different, , I think it was the first Bush administration in the early nineties, George Bush senior wanted to do something about climate change and then he gave it off to someone.

I forget who it was in his cabinet. I . And he quashed it  and nothing came of it. And  the disinformation campaign that the oil companies have had over the past, 30 years and , think about the nineties, the Berlin wall had just come down, America had won, the cold war,  everything was hunky dory.

I'm probably dating myself was saying honky dory, everything was good.  Things were growing and everybody was happy and the pie was growing and people were generally getting better off all around the world. China was starting to grow, and so  how do you stop the music at the party?

 Of course there were people that were worried about it and talking about it and raising their voices about it. I'd look back at the degrowth literature and there isn't really anything until the early aughts and then it slowly grows and now there's a lot more coming out there and hopefully, People will hear this and have, have these conversations and read what I've written and go down those rabbit holes and learn about it and it will take off. 

But, I came across it through my research  and then started researching more until and reaching out to people and talking to them.  I had a podcast when I was at CF Institute and this guy. Tim Te Barric. He's a French guy. He sweet, he teaches at Lund University in Sweden, I think.

 He is very well known in the degrowth circles. And he was kind enough to be on the podcast.  I used that platform to help educate people.  I knew that this was a really important thing when I did that podcast for a year and a half.  And  I saw,  that episode was the  most listened to one of any of the episodes by a pretty wide margin. And it was targeted to finance professionals, the folks that have the money and have the power in the finance field industry. And this wasn't tens of millions of people listening to it, but the interest was the most for that. 

 I had all kinds of topics that I talked about. I talked about, Climate change. I talked about, oceans. I talked about financial reporting around,  capital and the climate talked about all different kinds of things. But the thing that the people gravitated towards the most was degrowth

 I was like, wow, this, there's something here that if I talk about this and research about this and write about this,  it's not just going to be, screaming into the void. It's going to, people really want to know more about this. Which is where it started for me that I got the idea of doing more around digress. 

Interesting. When you look at it, like, how do you see it going?  What are your hopes? But what also your realistic views? My realistic views are, it's a range, it could be a lot of things, step back  and look at the history of earth.

We've, this is, we're in the middle of our sixth great extinction on earth  and we, the time we're living in now or up until now has, was really the Goldilocks  zone of earth. There's. The, there's so many things environmentally catastrophic things that happened, all the time on earth going back to  when things, when life first appeared on earth  and the volcano under Yellowstone national park is the biggest volcano on earth and it erupts like every 600, 000 years and it hasn't erupted for 800, 000 years or something like we're due.

Yeah. We're also due to the giant earthquake on the east or west coast that should like just take everything from five over and drop it into the ocean. Yeah.  Oceans rise and fall from ice ages and climate change. And we've had this climate change  in the past  and on earth's history, but it's usually happened over millions of years,  it's manmade because of what we're doing.

 That broad scope. It's this happens, we're messing with things to the point where it's going to get really bad for us.  We're not going to go extinct. I don't think,  but I can see population of earth. We crossed 8 billion last year.  I think it'll be much less than that by the end of the century.

Birth rates are under 1 percent or under 2. Replacement rate 1. 8 or something 1. 7, 1. 6, 1. 8. And it's different in different countries. Japan is right around 1 or something like that, or just over 1.  A lot of that, they surmises environmental, in endocrine disruptors  and plastics in the, in our environment.

I saw a study where I think it was a hospital in New, in New Mexico looked at It's 60 to 80 placentas and mothers after birth and all of them had plastic. Come on. I know. Can you get any place that doesn't?  basically. So we're screwing things up a lot to the point where, nature is going to say you're going to, there's going to be less of you because of that.

And I see that happening and I accept some, there's going to be some form of  natural population.  Control from mother nature. . It has the potential to be brutal, really bad. Yes. But  we can't mitigate that if we live consciously and try to move to a more wellbeing. 

We're not going to stop everything,  but we could make our lives better and the lives of most people in the world better  versus if we do nothing, so we have to do something. We're not going to avoid some of the stuff that's already happening. Sea levels will rise. It will get hotter.

 Our water will be less easy to come by. We will have less food security, all those things. We will to some extent, it's just the extent.    That's where, I tell people like it's your children's future that we're playing with  and your grandchildren's and your children aren't going to  be able to have grandchildren if we go too far in one direction. 

And so that's the story I start with, but I try to say it in a nice way.  You've got to meet people where they live. You got to meet people where they are. And there's audiences. I can have a very frank, brutal conversation with  and audiences that I have to ease them into it.

 I think if you're ever wagging your finger at someone, you lose them, and there's some people you have this conversation with, they're just going to ignore you and climate change isn't real and don't worry about it. , that's just going to, they're not, you're not going to convert those people or not going to listen to you,  but  whoever you're talking to or trying to convince or just trying to educate,  I think you have to meet them where they are, where they live, and that's going to be different for, an 18 year old college kid versus a, a CEO of a fortune 500 company.

You can get to both of them, but it's just a different story.  So do you see anything that's fascinating around the actual change of the population or such like that. One of the things that I thought was fascinating was Chernobyl wolves are now cancer resistant.  I wonder as part of your degrowth, do you see anything around humans  changing?

I don't know. That's interesting. I didn't really thought of that.  I'm sure, that will happen in some cases, in some ways it's if we live a we live in a world that is, whatever it settles on, two degrees  Celsius centigrade, if we live in a world, 30, 40 years from now, that's two degrees warmer or three degrees warmer.

What does that mean? Do we adapt? Do we just leave those places that you can't live?  I grew up in the Midwest  and the United States, and you've seen that rust belt. Yeah. When all the manufacturing left, people left, went to the South, not everybody, of course, but a lot of people did.

You could have another migration the other way, because  I think the great lakes have 20 percent of the freshwater in the world  and the cooler climate.  So Duluth, Minnesota looks mighty attractive compared to Pensacola, Florida, 30 years from now and a hundred years from now, Florida is going to have a lot less electoral votes. 100 years from now it'll probably have zero because it'll be gone if we just, if we don't do anything,  there'll be Jacksonville and Tallahassee may still be around, but most of it will be on,   the Gulf of Mexico will extend up to near Memphis  because it will take back Mississippi River for that part of it.

 There'll be an inland ocean in the middle of Australia for the same reason,  if we continue, and not doing enough.  Yeah, it will be amazing change.  I think the most interesting thing will be how much we have connection with each other and how much we can still communicate.

Because if we maintain that, there'll be coordinated efforts. If we don't, it will be much different.  All those star links, all  they might actually end up cutting one group completely off. And allowing one group to have so much knowledge compared to the rest, and we'll have to figure out something.  We could have incredible differences between the rich and the poor, or the powerful and the not powerful.   This is one of the things I wrote on the idea of all these billionaires and you don't have to be a billionaire, to build a bunker, but building bunkers and, survival shelters.

 My thinking is who's going to work for you in those bunkers. How are you going to get your food? , do you want to live underground for 20 years in a row without ever going outside?

Would you want that?  You'd be very pale. I'll give you that  vitamin D source. It's you don't, you're not winning anything if that's the, if that's where it ends up. Maybe invest those billions into,  building a better society instead of your bunker.   I really appreciate you coming by and  talking with me. It was fascinating to just see your different perspective and how you got there . Everybody who's on this space  come from different avenues and it's interesting to see how they each got there.

 I just want to say, thank you. Is there anything you want to add that I can make sure the audience hears?  I would just say, read about these ideas. Talk to people. I think the idea is, as I said, I think community is the is our way out our way, not out because they're bad things are gonna happen no matter what we do.

But I think connecting through things like this and more people talking and understanding these issues and understanding what's really going on. Is the way, is the best course of action. So I'm happy if someone wants to reach out to me and argue with me or tell me I'm wrong, that's fine.

Or, read what I've written or ask for, what are some other resources to, to continue on their journey of educating themselves about these things. I'm happy to do that.  You can, and as we said earlier, when we were starting this conversation, I'm the only Matt Orsag in the world.

Orsag is a strange name. There may be another one, but I've never come across them. So I'm easy to find. I can't hide from you. If you want to reach out to me on social media I'd be happy to do I know you're on Substack. Are you on other platforms? Yeah. Mostly LinkedIn and Substack are the ones I use the most, but I'm on  Twitter and X now, facebook and Instagram and threads are ones I look at occasionally, but LinkedIn and Substack are the main ones I'm on.  Thank you, Matt Orsag, who does Population Degrowth is the Answer. That's his newsletter on Substack. I highly recommend everybody go out and look at it. It's a great newsletter.

He's got a very important message, and we do need to really seriously talk about how we're going to do degrowth. This is part of my platform as well. Degrowth is the answer, but it could be a beautiful answer. It could be an answer that leads to community. It could be an answer that leads to a slower pace of life, a more  healthy, complete family oriented artisan sort of life.

And so degrowth is the answer for many things. If you ask me, I hope, Matt, thank you so much for coming on and I hope you enjoyed your time. I did. Thank you for having me. It was a great discussion.



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