https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=b39IYAHOcuA
Okay, so now you’re talking to people and you’re finding out they want to have kids and then they find out that they don’t get to, right, a little bit too late. And so where does the documentary go from there? So from there we take it into the consequences. The consequences, well, they’re partly personal, but partly economic. But everything ultimately is personal because everything ultimately comes back to, you know, whether it’s you and your life and how you live it and whether you’re lonely or not. Yeah. Or how much the state can help you, particularly in your later years, through health care, through pensions, through your city providing basic services like water. It all comes back together. So we explore a lot of those. And by the way, I sat down with, I believe, about a dozen experts, many professors, many, a priest, a monk, people involved working with government health care programs around the world. So we hear these voices. And other than one organization, which happens to be the successor to what Paul Ehrlich set up, they were the only organization who took an optimistic view. Of course, they would do that. Everybody else is negative. Everybody else is worried about the future consequences of this. And just by the way, I should call this out. Ehrlich set up an organization, author of the Population Bomb, of course, called ZPG, Zero Population Growth. Yeah. It evolved into another organization that still has something like 30,000 teachers who train other teachers who educate 4 million US high school kids every year. And they explain the population problems, usually in Africa, and their message is, please think about this. Yeah. Well, there’s nothing racist about the too many African narrative. Yeah. And when you teach someone like two and two is four, you don’t say think about that. But when you say here’s the problem in Africa and you say to a think about that, you’re not really saying think about Africa. You’re thinking about, you know, do you want the kids or not? So that’s covered in the documentary as well as part of the narrative as to why we still have this viewpoint when frankly, we should have known about this decades ago. We can also look at the self-evident economic statistics demonstrating that since Paul Ehrlich and his Population Bomb and the Club of Rome, etc., these anti-population zealots started beating the drum back in 1965, saying that we were all going to starve to death by the year 2000 when we’ll have 4 billion people, God help us, and now we have eight. And the relationship between wealth growth and population has been extremely positive, not negative or flat. And everyone on the planet virtually is richer than, well, that anyone had ever conceived of. And it’s clearly the case that we could manage this if we had half the will to do it. And so the data are in. One of the things I’ve really learned is that I believe the whole idea of natural resource, almost the whole idea of natural resource is specious in that human beings, the wealth of the planet is dependent on the psychological health and the structures of governance that are put in place by people of goodwill, and that if we organize ourselves properly and aim up, there’s no real limit to abundance. And it’s certainly not population dependent. We’re not in a zero-sum game. We are not yeast in a Petri dish. We’re not doomed to a Malthusian outcome. And the biologists who make that claim and say it’s scientific are assuming that the yeast in the Petri dish model of human function is the appropriate biological model, and it’s not. And the reason for that is because we can let our ideas die instead of us, and we can learn, and we can transform, and we’re very good at that. And there’s no justification whatsoever for stating that it’s a scientific fact that population increase is going to produce a Malthusian catastrophe. Now it can in limited circumstances, but we are not yeast in a Petri dish. That’s the wrong model. So, and I can’t disagree. I’m a data analyst. I’m only prepared to comment when I’ve done my own work or I’ve seen detailed work of others. I can’t imagine how complicated it must be to model the planet. I mean, that’s on a level beyond anything any, you know, rational statistician could do alone. It’s models on top of models on top of models. So where I come from is, look, to be honest with you, I don’t know, but I do know that we are adaptive. I do know that we should prepare because, to be honest with you, you know, green technology sounds like pretty cool things when you look at Teslas out there. They’re not perfect, but they’re, remember, I work with a lot of automotive clients, but what Elon has done for the industry, you know, is phenomenal. Well, and to bring it back to the documentary, at this point, we come back to this point of loneliness and meet people. I mean, there’s a scene where I go to a crematorium in Germany, and I’m hoping to find out something about what it’s like to bury people who have no family. I just, I nearly got an interview directly with the director, but he refused to meet me, and an intermediary kind of sat down to explain why, and it’s horrendous. And so this is off camera, but I got a long note recently with more information as to what’s happening. People with no family in care homes are being effectively mistreated, malnourished, tied to their beds for long periods of time, and we know this, or it’s known in this crematorium, because the bodies that come are, I guess, marked, and they weren’t prepared to say it because they’re fearful of the system. So, you know, someone should make a documentary about that alone, but it tells you that the life of these people without family, you know, and we can’t see it, because these people, whether it be in a suburb in Japan or in Germany or anywhere else, these people are spending their lives in their homes alone, hidden from the world. Well, the thing is, in our culture, we only seem to be able to apprehend life until about 30. Like, that’s our vision. You know, the vision is you’re young, you’re full of promise, you get educated, you have your career, and then you’re 30, and what’s happening? Well, now you’re successful. It’s like, okay, but you got 60 years left there. What are you going to do with that? Well, how long is your career going to run you? Well, you know, lots of people think about early retirement, and that’s particularly perhaps the case if you’re successful economically. So, let’s say you retired 50. Okay, fair enough. You got 45 years left. What’s your vision for that? Well, now you’re alone, you don’t have a family, you don’t have a partner, you don’t have a career either. So, what are you planning to do? Exactly. What’s your vision? And the answer is we don’t have a vision for that. We don’t have a vision for the expense of our life. And so, and that’s an interesting thing in and of itself. I mean, you know, for a long time, back in the 1860s, people even in the West were struggling along on less than a dollar fifty a day in today’s money, and it’s not like people had the luxury of developing a lifetime vision. They were sort of fending off one disaster after another like people do now who live in absolute privation. There’s about 800 million people like that still on the planet. And then once you get a little bit wealthier, a little more secure, you can start thinking about the future. And that’s very, very complicated. And this luxurious wealth we have is new enough so that our capacity to develop a lifetime vision hasn’t developed to a degree that’s sophisticated enough to take that whole time span into account. But this vision of isolated death with no one around you that cares, that’s, I wouldn’t recommend that as your life from 70 to 95. It’s pretty damn dismal. So, Jordan, it’s going to be worse in less industrialized nations because you go to Brazil and as professors there, I met three of them, the phrase they used was, we’re getting old before we got rich in Brazil. So they can’t provide the infrastructure resources to the elderly on a level comparable to what we can. So the life of elderly people, so I look at, when I look at India with the birth rate now below replacement level, growing population because it’s so young, people are living longer, which is a good thing, but I’m looking at a future for India 30 years from now where you’re going to have so many old people and so few people to take care of them. So this is a problem that we focus too much on in our own societies. This is a global humanitarian crisis of old people who are going to be left by and large to some extent to fend for themselves. And when they’re not fending for themselves, they’re going to be mostly in their homes or alone. I find the psychological argument, I would say probably more compelling. I think not because I take any issue to your forward-looking projections, but because things are so unstable on the technological and economic and political front that projecting even a decade into the future seems in some ways like a fool’s errand, right? Because God only knows what’s coming down the pipelines with regards to new technology. But I think you can make an extraordinarily strong case that one of the things you don’t want to end up happening to you in your own life is to be involuntarily childless and isolated starting at the age of 30 going forward. And so I do, you know, I’ve looked at the situation in China and in Japan with this, what do they call that, the inverted pyramidal distribution where there’s way more old people than young people. And obviously that seems untenable on the technological or on the economic front. But I do think the psychological issue is much more present, should be much more present for young people. And the warning is, don’t be thinking you’ve got a lot of time to get your act together because you don’t have as much time as you think. And you want to get things going on sooner than you might find it convenient. There’s never a convenient time to have a child.