Rolling the clock forward, you and Elon tweeted recently about population collapse.
What do you think is going to happen there?
Oh well, I've thought for at least 10 years that the biggest problem in 50 years will be that there's just not enough people.
I remember hearing you say a few years ago that you thought we'd peak at about 9 billion.
Yeah, we probably won't hit 9.
And I knew the stats because Think about how crazy it is to think that we might be living on Earth right now, at a time with the most number of humans that are ever going to exist at one time ever.
Yeah, that's highly probable.
That blows my mind.
The population collapse in developed countries is precipitous, right?
It's like we fall off a cliff because there's no kids.
Everyone knows this from the pandemic, the R0 number.
If fewer people are reproducing, next generation, you have fewer people to reproduce as fewer people are reproducing, and it yeah yeah yeah, yeah.
Well i, i worked on a un committee about it's got to be 10 years ago now to help draft the un secretary general's report on sustainable economic development, and so i looked at all sorts of things like that i was very curious, for example, about because people have been beating the overpopulation drum since.
Well, it really kicked in in the 1960s, you know, because there were dire predictions.
By the year 2000.
The Club of Rome came out and said well, there'll be riots and mass starvation and mass movement of migrants and all the things you hear about climate change, because there's too many people on the planet.
And that just didn't happen at all.
That was just.
It wasn't just wrong, it was anti-true, it was absolutely wrong.
What happened instead was that everyone got way richer and the the bottom section of the population in terms of economic distribution got lifted out of poverty.
Inequality still exists, but that's that power law phenomena we already talked about, not that that's trivial, it's just unbelievably difficult to determine what to do with.
There are solutions, but certainly getting rid of capitalism isn't the solution, And so I looked at population trends and first of all found not that this is an act of genius or anything that as soon as you educate women, the size of family shrinks precipitously, like below replacement.
And that's partly because women have other options.
That's a huge part of it.
We're seeing this play out.
Oh, yes.
I mean, all the countries in the West are way below replacement.
Korea is way below replacement.
South Korea, Japan, way below replacement.
Yeah, yeah.
I think the number one on the planet might be Chad.
Chad, the country.
In terms of growth?
Eight children on average.
Yeah, i think nigeria will have more people in it than china by the end of the century.
So yeah yeah yeah, and musk you know he's a far looking man and and so he's looking around the apocalyptic corner.
Let's say like oh, we're running out of people, and what that means, of course, is that you run out of young people.
Right, you don't run out of old people first, because everyone who is here now is going to be 30 years older in 30 years, and It'll be young people we don't have enough of.
And, of course, young people are the ones who do the innovation and are going to do most of the heavy lifting, et cetera.
And so there's going to be a terrible shortage of young people.
Well, you see this with some of the things that I posted, that ONS data the 501 of women are childless by 30.
And both men and women are replying to that tweet saying, well, good.
There's too many people on the planet in any case.
I know.
I know.
This NPC midwittery is so dangerous because it makes people believe that they actually have something grounded backing up their claims.
Yeah well, and this idea that the planet has too many people on it.
There's no sentiment more implicitly genocidal than that statement.
So what do you mean too many people?
Exactly.
And what do you mean the planet?
And what do you propose to do about that exactly?
Mass abortion, is that your answer?
Or should we do something a little more dramatic?
Maybe we'll just shame people out of having children.
And I've seen people do that, literally.
I saw a professor when I was at a TED I think it was, it doesn't matter was a number of professors talking to a couple hundred students and one of the professors who was an environmentalist activist type and he got up on stage and shook his finger to the whole young crowd, saying that him and his wife had only decided to have one child, which was, in my opinion, one child too many for him, and told all the young people there if they had a shred of ethical decency that they would severely limit their reproductive potential.
And I stood up and said that I thought that that was the most, one of the most appalling things I'd ever heard anyone in academia say to young people, which is really saying something, because they say plenty of appalling things.
And it was a very uncomfortable moment and he huffed off the stage.
But you know, in a frenzy talking about how you couldn't talk about such things without being pilloried on ethical grounds.
And yeah, that's for sure, you come out as a emissary of the academic establishment, you tell young people that humanity is so corrupt that they should seriously consider not propagating because that violates the deepest of ethical norms, and you think that's a good thing and that that's your right, and It was just beyond comprehension.
It's beyond comprehension, but it's associated with like a deeply rooted existential self-hatred.
And I mean hatred at the level of humanity is like a virus on the planet, that we're a cancerous growth.
Alex Epstein calls this human racism.
Hmm. right right right it's that yeah well we're a cancer on the planet you know unchecked growth just like a cancer it's like that's us say a cancer it's okay we know where your heart is located because what's what's the implications for for a doctrine like that what do you do with the cancer cut it out yeah that's for sure poison it or whatever whatever there's nothing you don't do to a cancer So are you going to use a metaphor like that?
There's too many people on the planet.
You're going to use a metaphor like that?
And then you're going to also decide that you're virtuous while you're using it because you're on the side of the planet, whatever the hell that means.
So yeah, it's unbelievable.
And a huge part of it's rooted in this existential shame and horror at the condition of being human and the fact that life is rife with suffering and a lot of it's unjustified.
And You know it's a Mephistophelian position, so Mephistopheles was laid out, portrayed in Goethe's Faust.
That's the story of a man who sold his soul to the devil for knowledge.
It's a story of intellectual pride.
And Goethe stands in relationship to German literature in the same manner that Shakespeare stands in relationship to English literature.
And Goethe's Mephistopheles says straight out, twice in in the play, once in the first.
There's two books, and once in the first book and once in the second.
Girtha has him restated twice existence is such a foul thing, because of all its suffering essentially, that it would be better if it was merely enough annihilated, and that's the mephistophelian stance.
This whole show should just come to a halt.
Look at how corrupt people are.
Evil reigns everywhere.
It's nothing but will to power.
We're destroying the planet with our unchecked ambition, all of it rooted in greed and Machiavellianism and jockeying for position.
And we're so contemptible that we should just roll up and die.
And we should shame women into not having children.
And we should shame men so they never manifest any planet-destroying ambition.
And It's unbelievably appalling.
It goes all the way down to the bottom, the bottom of things.
That's what's tearing our culture apart, this dispute about the nature of existence at the most fundamental level.
And the universities have come out on the wrong side.
What's happening, people?
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Peace.
