https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=hQiHxrY5uEw
Back in the late 1800s, there was a biologist named Thomas Huxley, and he was the famous novelist, eldest Huxley’s, I think great-grandfather, perhaps grandfather, and very intelligent man, and a very gifted family. And Huxley was a great defender of Darwin, by the way, too, and he was commissioned by the English government to do a study of oceanic resources. This was back in the 1890s. And because the English at that point were concerned to some degree that, you know, maybe it would be possible that we would overfish and cause trouble because of that. And Huxley did an exhaustive study, and he concluded that there were so, there’s so much ocean, and there’s so much resource in the ocean that there wasn’t a possibility that human beings with their rather puny technologies could ever do anything but put a small dent in the absolute overwhelming plenitude of the water that covers more than half the planet. And so that’s only 130 years ago, thereabouts. That’s not that long. You know, that’s two relatively old men ago. It’s not that long. And, you know, yeah, put them back to back, sort of. And so that’s yesterday in some sense, and it really wasn’t at all until the 1960s that we had some sense that we had developed technologically to the point where some of what we could do mechanically might start to have planetary repercussions, say with, you know, we saw that with air quality in cities, for example, and the denuding of the countryside. And then perhaps the overfishing in relationship to the oceans, which started to happen after World War II. But nobody had any sense really until 1960 that, well, maybe we had to take care of things a little bit better than we were because there was more of us. We were starting to become a force that was to some degree a match for nature, you know, and bloody well, thank God for that, you know, because nature was more than a match for us for a very long period of time, right? Our species has come up through epochs, eons of absolute brutal privation and difficulty and starvation and freezing temperatures and burning in the desert sun and lack of water and lack of hygienic facilities and like just hand to mouth suffering. And, you know, we’ve managed to organize ourselves to the point where that’s still the lot of a substantial number of people on the planet, but that’s decreasing very rapidly. You know, the UN now projects that by the year 2030, abject poverty, which is defined as living on less than a dollar 90 a day in today’s US money, will be eradicated. There won’t be anybody in the world that will be able to do that. There won’t be anybody in the world that poor and the cynics say, well, that’s a pretty damn low barrier, let’s say, but if you double it, you also see that’s decreasing very rapidly. And if you triple it, you see that’s decreasing very rapidly and you got to draw the bloody line somewhere, you know, and abject poverty is abject poverty. And the fact that it’s decreased by 50% in the last 12 years from 2000 to the year 2012, we decreased the absolute level of abject poverty in the world by 50%, right? It was the fastest economic, it was the most spectacular economic miracle in the history of humankind. And you know, you hardly ever hear about it, hardly anyone knows about it. It’s like, it’s a bloody miracle. There’s more middle-class people in the world now than non-middle-class people. And there are way more obese people than there are starving people. And so that’s something to celebrate, you know? I mean, it’s a funny thing to celebrate, but it’s quite the thing to celebrate. And the fastest growing economies in the world are in Sub-Saharan Africa. And they’re growing at five to 7% a year. So it looks like the economic miracle that’s, you know, that took place in India and in China, most of Southeast Asia, is really starting to kick in in Africa. And it seems at least in part, it’s because of the collapse of the Soviet Union back in the 1989 and the lack of overt pressure to have African countries pursue the most pathological, possible economic doctrines that anybody could ever imagine. They just stopped doing that, has freed people up to start to become, well, if not rich, at least richer, and at least with the possibility of a continual rise upward, you know? The child mortality rate in Africa now is the same as it was in Europe in 1952. I mean, that’s really something, you know? And longevity rates have increased tremendously in Africa. And we’re kicking the slats out of some major diseases. Polio’s pretty much gone. It looks like we’re putting a pretty good dent in malaria. That’ll do great things for Africa. I think there’s a real possibility with some concerted effort that we could get rid of tuberculosis in the next 15 years or so, if we made that a target, that would be something. That’s an ancient scourge of mankind. We could certainly do without that. And there are intelligent people who are working hard on trying to eradicate these problems, and they’re doing it successfully. And so, you know, I’m not in favor of the whole there’s something wrong with humanity and we’re a scourge on the bloody planet, and it would be better off if there were fewer of us and the whole planet would be thriving if there were none of us at all. I think that there’s something unbelievably dangerous about that attitude. And I think it’s ungrateful and unfair and unsympathetic and ungrateful and non-empathetic, because I really do see that, like, I don’t know a lot about human history because, God, there’s a lot of history to know about, you know, and the more you know about human history, the more you know that there’s just endless details that you have no idea about. If you do a reasonable overview, you do see that it’s a bloody mess, you know, that it’s privation and war and catastrophe and brutality and struggle and strife and difficulty all the entire way through, you know, people striving against odds that are just absolutely astronomical, and yet succeeding, you know, that overall the story overall is one of, I wouldn’t say unbroken progress, but it’s decent progress, and it’s better now than it’s ever been by a huge margin, and there’s every bit of evidence to suggest that it could continue to get better and better and better. You know, here’s another thing that’s really cool. Do you know that we’re adding four years of life expectancy every year now? So once we hit a year every year, then that’s it. We don’t die anymore, but those last eight months a year, they’re gonna be tough to manage, you know, but four months a year is really something, and so, you know, we’re basically living longer and we’re living healthier and we’re smarter than we were because we’re much more, our nutritional levels are higher than they were because we’re not starving, especially the people at the bottom end, and, you know, we’re educating people all over the world. The Chinese graduate more engineers every year than the US have engineers. Now that’s terrifying because, God, we’ve got all these engineers already, and they’re making gadgets at such a rate that you can’t even keep track of the gadgets, right? You go online and, like, there’s all these technologies and all these subcultures using them, and you don’t even know what the technologies are. If you’re fully informed, you can’t keep up with the new stuff that you might buy, and it’s not like it’s trivial technology. It’s unbelievably powerful technology. Like, I’m in awe of many of the young people that I work with because they’re more, they’re savvier about the technological infrastructure that constitutes the web than I am because I’m old and it’s hard to keep up as you get old, and, you know, they come up with tools to make difficult things very simple, very rapidly, and there’s just subcultures everywhere that are doing this at an unbelievably rapid rate, you know, and you go to somewhere like Silicon Valley, and I’ve spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley, and it has its problems, but, Jesus, there’s an unbelievable collection of smart people there, and they’re working on things like, they’re working on things like MAD, and it’s working, you know? You see someone like Elon Musk, I mean, what the hell do you make of someone like that? You know, I mean, what did he do? He made an electric car, which is basically impossible, and it works, which is basically impossible, and then he built an infrastructure so that you could charge the damn thing wherever you drove, and that was basically impossible, and then he made it cheap because if you buy an electric car and you factor in the price of gas, the electric car is actually about as expensive as the gasoline car, and so that was unbelievable, and then he built a bloody rocket, which was one-tenth the price or less of a NASA rocket that you could reuse, which was impossible, and then he put one of his cars on top of the rocket, and he shot it up into space, and then this happened, right? This all happened, and he’s still alive, and, you know, and then he went and blew it all by smoking pot on Joe Rogan, you know, because, well, it’s so funny, you know? We, you know, we like our insane geniuses, like predictable and safe, and so we don’t want them doing strange things like having a tiny puff of marijuana on a show famous for marijuana, so. So anyways, you know, that’s all good news.