Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. I've been both a tech writer and a tech executive for 15 years, and I've seen this industry grow from a bunch of dorks building things in their garage into a multi-trillion dollar behemoth that has monetized every corner of our lives. Better Offline is a podcast where I'll lead you through the good, the bad, and the stupid of the tech industry, and tell you exactly how venture capitalists and technocrat billionaires intend to influence your digital lives. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcast.

Get ready for our 2024 iHeart Podcast Awards, presented by the Hartford, live at South by Southwest. Celebrating the best of the best. We'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year, and celebrate the most innovative talent and creators in the industry. Podcasts have always reflected our culture. Watch live Monday, March 11th on iHeartRadio's YouTube channel, and listen on iHeartRadio stations across America.

And the winner is... The winner.

See all of the colonies now at iHeartPodcastAwards. Com. Youtube is the streaming partner of the 2024 iHeartPodcast Awards, and we'll be honoring Rotten Mango with the Innovator Award presented by YouTube. Tune in live Monday, March 11th at 9:00 PM Eastern on iHeartRadio's YouTube channel. You won't want to miss this.

Hey, everybody. It's your old pal Josh. And for this week's Select, I've chosen our 2015 episode on Zero Population. It's an extremely interesting episode about the upper limits of human population that the Earth can handle. And interestingly, it's also about just how many humans humanity can handle, too. When does eating Soylent Green make sense? Maybe you can decide for yourself in this heady episode. Enjoy.

Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. This is stuff you should know. Podcast. Jerry's over there. It's pretty much the norm.

Yep.

Yep. How are you doing, man? How are you feeling? Is it spectacular?

A little rough, sir.

Are you? You'll make it through, won't you?

Yeah. Yesterday, we celebrated the beginnings of gin and tonic season.

It's definitely that weather for sure.

Yeah, it's hard to not sit on the deck and have a citrus, delightful drink. Nice I'm just a little sleepy, but I'm feeling good. I feel like this topic is all about being down in the dumps.

A little bit. It depends. It depends on where you land. And you just placed yourself pretty squarely in the gloom and gloom camp, my friend.

No, I'm actually not in the gloom and gloom camp.

I was about to say, which if I remember correctly in our episode was Malthus write about carrying capacity? Yeah. You overtly said that you are an optimist.

That's right. Not a Malthusian naysayer. Yeah, I forgot about that one. We've touched on this a few times.

We did a whole profile on Norman Borlog alone on our very short-lived, and reasonably so, live webcast. Oh, yeah. Do you remember? We did basically a book report on Norman Borlog.

Yeah. Well, I think he's even controversial.

He is very much so.

You win a Nobel Prize.

For saving a billion lives.

Yeah, but still people are going to pooh-pooh you. Yeah.

You get pooh-poohed.

Interesting stuff.

If you don't know what we're talking about, you should probably press pause. Go listen to the Malthus episode. Go to stuffyoushouldknow. Com/podcasts. I think it's plural. Slash archive. Yeah. Make that your homepage, and all 700 and change episodes are there. And then do CTRL+F. Is everybody doing this so far? Yeah. And then type in Malthus, M-A-L-T-H-U-S. It's going to highlight that link, click that, and press play, and then come back to us.

That's right.

We'll wait.

Boom.

So we're back.

It's been an hour.

What we're talking about is carrying capacity in part. The carrying capacity, Chuckers, is just a... It's a reflection of a larger issue. And that larger issue is population, specifically overpopulation.

Yeah. And is that a thing or not is the big question.

Because at any given point in time, No, they have the CIA World Fact Book has a pretty good assessment of how many people are alive. It's a total guess. It's a total estimate. We could be at 10 billion right now. We could be at 100 million, and everybody just is really terrible at counting. The point is we don't specifically know. It's probably pretty accurate, but it's still a guess. The point isn't to shoot holes in the estimates of how many people are alive on the planet. It's to point out that there There's so many people we don't know, and we can't possibly know at any given point in time. And that has led a lot of people to say, well, wait a minute. There's this thing called carrying capacity, which is the Earth's ability to support and sustain us humans, and really any creatures, but really, we're just concerned with us humans at this moment.

With the quality of life.

Right. And sustainably. Yes. Those two factors have to be met, or else you're putting a tremendous amount of stress on Earth, and you're eventually bringing about your own demise. So a lot of people are saying, We're probably past carrying capacity, and we just don't know it yet. Or other people are saying, There's really no such thing as carrying capacity, thanks to human ingenuity. Anytime we come up against it, we'll figure out a way around it. And Norman Borlog was a way to go. But before Borlog really became famous, there was a lot of people who were legitimately concerned that we were all going to die.

Yeah, Borlough, if you haven't listened to that one, if you didn't follow Josh's instructions, like a good little podcast listener, he was one of the leaders of the Green Revolution in the '60s and '70s, in which we made great advances in agriculture.

In yields.

Yeah, new types of wheat in Mexico, new types of rice in India that yielded much, much more than they ever had.

And plus, they were drought flood resistant. They could stand up and hold more grain.

They could stand up and say hello.

Basically, they could pick the Daily Double at Hialeia.

So Borolog was, by all standards, a very smart guy. He was. He cared very much about people.

Yeah, he wasn't doing it for Fame or riches or anything like that. This guy felt like he was working against the clock. And if he didn't, and he wasn't the only one doing this. Yeah. He's the most famous. But if he didn't do it, then, yeah, a lot of people were going to starve.

Yeah. And I think I proposed to you before this that we do just one on the Green Revolution. And I think that will be a one, two, three podcast suite after this one.

I can't wait. I love this stuff. Ecology, population. That was another one we did, too, was how population works. And it sounds so like eyebleedingly boring, but it turned out to be really interesting stuff. So go read that, too. We'll wait. Go ahead. We'll pause.

And we're back. And it's 1968.

Yeah, and everybody's a little nervous.

Everyone is nervous. And a Stanford biology professor, Paul Eerlich. There's another famous Paul Eerlich. This is Paul R. Eerlich, I believe.

Oh, it's a different one?

Well, there's two dudes.

I did not realize that.

What do you mean?

I mean, I'm familiar with the other Eerlich then, I guess.

Well, who was the other one again?

He wrote some other famous books. He's a biologist. I think it's not the same guy?

Yeah, the other guy was a German physician who worked in chemotherapy, immunology.

Oh, yeah. That's not what I'm thinking of. Yeah, different guy. So this guy, he wrote other things besides the population bomb.

Yeah. So in 1968, He writes The Population Bomb, goes on The Tonight Show, it explodes, it's a huge hit.

Apparently, he was on more than once, too.

Yeah, and everyone got super nervous because his book started with these words, The battle to feed all of humanity is over. Oh, good. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. No, that's not so good. That's how he starts his book. He basically says there's going to be a Malthusian collapse at And at some point in the book, he said, If I was a betting man, I would wager by the year 2000, England won't be around.

Boom. He drops the mic. We should probably mention who Malthus is. Thomas Malthus was a very forward-thinking smart, mathematically inclined minister, I believe, in the early 19th century, late 18th century.

Yeah, an economist.

And he was the one who said, We have a problem here, everyone. I've just done the math. And population grows exponentially, but our food supply grows linearly. And so we are destined to outgrow our food supply, and that's where the idea of carrying capacity came from. So Malthus and Malthusians are the people who think like, were going to exceed the food supply eventually and die from famines. And Eerlik was one of the most vocal and alarmest neo-Malthusians around.

Yes, absolutely. And he scared the pants off of people back then. In 1968, there were about three and a half billion people. And the birth rate, we're going to talk a lot about birth rates and such because that has a lot to do with this.

Buckle up.

The American women had three and a half babies on average, and the global birth rate was five babies per woman. It seems like a lot to me.

It was a lot. Five kids? Supposedly in the '50s, we were at six. The global average fertility rate was six babies per woman. And that's not just per woman. You want to talk about fertility rates? Sure. So fertility rate basically is the number of live births that a population has assigned to the population of women thought to reasonably be a reproductive age, so 15 to 44, times a thousand. So you take all of those, figure out how many women there are, and then you multiply it by a thousand. So you have something like 50 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44, and that's your fertility rate. Yeah. Okay? Yes. You can figure out how many actual births are taking place.

Yeah, with reasonable detail. Yeah. So like Malthus, Eerlik did the math in the '60s and said, You know what? Our food production isn't keeping up. Just like Malthus said. We're in big, big trouble, wrote the population bomb and co-founded Zero Population Growth, which is an organization that is now called... What are they called now?

Population Connection.

Population Connection. A little sunnier name.

Sounds electric company-ish. It does.

You should check out their website. It's good. They have a lot of good information on that just to help you figure out what you might want to believe. So people are scared. The zero population growth group, their big thing is contraception and giving women control of their reproduction, basically, and their fertility. You decide how many kids you want.

Exactly.

They have that many.

They've identified that there's an issue that could easily address overpopulation, and that is cutting out unwanted pregnancies or having unwanted kids. They've identified that plenty of people... There are two different fertility rates. There's the wanted fertility rate, and then there's the unwanted fertility rate. Pretty much across the board in any country in the world, the unwanted fertility rate is higher, whether slightly or largely, than the wanted fertility rate. So they're saying if the unwanted fertility rate is like three 2.8 babies per woman in a given country, and the wanted fertility rate is 2.5, well, if we can just figure out a way to only have the wanted pregnancies, then you are doing a lot to control over population. And the way that they figured out how to address this is to just basically spread awareness and access to contraception. Yeah.

The two-pronged approach. What their goal is, they aren't saying that people should not have babies. Like you said, they're saying people should only have the babies that they want to have. Exactly. And their ultimate goal is to have a sustainable global birth rate below the replacement level, which means there's a lot of different factors, but it basically means that the world is not growing. It's like working a club at a door, being a doorman. One person goes out, one person comes in. You got a little clicker. That's basically what that means. Is someone dies, someone can be born. And of course, it's not that one-to-one, but in a big picture way.

If you're a bouncer and you're tasked with keeping it an even ratio, you just have to remember that you can't keep people inside until a new person comes along because that's called kidnapping. They still have to leave, and you have to deal with an imbalance for a little while.

That's true. Right now, the replacement level fertility rate in the US is 2.1 babies for a woman, and 3.0 in other developing countries because they have higher death rates and shorter lifespans, which makes sense.

We're on to the replacement rate, basically, right? Yeah. The replacement rate is the number of kids a woman of reproductive age would have to have to replace herself. And she's not just replacing herself, she's replacing herself and her male mate who she's reproducing with. These guys can't have babies. Yes. And it's gross to think that a woman is giving birth to a boy and a girl who mate and reproduce her. That's not the point. You want them to go mingle with other people's babies. But the replacement rate, you would think then is two, right? For every woman, 2.0 kids is what you need to have to have an even replacement rate. That means as people die, new people are born, and the population never grows or declines, it stays the same. The replacement rate is never actually 2.0, though.

Well, it's 2.1 right now.

And the reason why is because we humans tend have more male offspring than female. Apparently, for every 100 girls that are born, 107 boys are born. So the actual replacement rate is 2.07, and then they round up to 2.1. Yeah.

Plus, there's a lot of other factors, too. For sure.

Those other factors include things like you said, like infant mortality rates, lifespan, immigration into a certain area. And the thing is, of birth rates or fertility rates and replacement rates, the replacement rate tends to be a little more stable. The birth rate, the fertility rate, has a lot more to do with social attitudes, access to health care, education, and it can change dramatically from place to place. Whereas, say, anywhere in the Western world, the developed world, the replacement rate is about 2.1..

Yeah, exactly. That's in the 3.0 for the developing countries.

All the demographers We're just stood up and we were clapping.

So clearly, Eerlich was not correct in his dire predictions. He was a little off. Here we are in 2015, and there are problems, but England is still around.

That was a bad prediction.

Four billion people haven't starved to death. Yeah. But does that mean that he was wrong altogether?

No.

Not necessarily. Because right now, and this was a pretty startling stat to me, Over the past 110 years, we have grown from 1.6 billion people to 7.2 billion people in 110 years.

Well, we're expected to get up to 9.2 in another 35 years by 2050.

One of the reasons we have this many people, most of the reasons are positive because of advances in health care. The lifespan in 1900 was 31 years old, and now it's 70, or maybe even a little bit higher because that was in 2012. Imagine it's a little bit higher. And the infant mortality rate globally in 1900 was 165 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2013. It was down to 34. So that's why there's more people. It's because we're doing better at taking care of ourselves.

Yeah, and those are two huge factors when it comes to demographics and population, because the longer you live, the more old people you have. So therefore, the less babies you need to replace those people. And the fewer babies that die or that survive infancy- Will be adults one day. Exactly. But really, if you're a demographer, the sweet spot is that working age. So when you're a demographer, especially one that's economics-minded, Chuck, that sweet spot, the reproductive working age people, that's a good sizable population you want to have. If you have a lot of babies, well, then you have a lot of people who are raising those babies, who those babies are dependent on. So say you have a lot fewer women in the workforce, so your workforce is depleted. If you have a lot, like an aging population, you have a lot of older people who have already aged out of the workforce and are now dependent on the taxes paid by that workforce. So a large population of either babies or old people, and God forbid, both at the same time, it puts a lot of strain on the middle. You know what I'm saying?

Sure. So when When you have a longer life expectancy and a lower infant mortality rate like we have now in the developed world, you want to have something closer to the replacement rate. Right.

Which makes sense. Right. I got some more stats, too, that would seem to back up Eirelick's predictions, or not predictions, but at least his gloomy outlook.

He was a gloomy dude.

Currently, I couldn't find much on what he felt today.

Yeah, I'm curious.

Is he still around? I'm curious. I bet some good interviews. I'm going to check that out. So currently, as of last year, an estimated 805 million people go to bed hungry every night, more than half of which are in Asia. One in four people in sub-Saharan Africa was chronically malnourished. 750 million people worldwide lack access to clean water, contributing to about 850,000 deaths per year. Here's the thing, though, is we're living in cities now more than ever. People are moving into cities, which is a good thing in one way because it provides a lot of economic opportunity for people, especially in developing countries. But when you look at these cities, a lot of them are full of slums and sweatshops in these developing nations.

Something like half of the population in a lot of cities live in slum conditions.

Yes, here in Africa, 61 %. Right.

So you think sub-Saharan Africa, I think rural in a lot of ways. So yes, I'm aware that they lack access to clean drinking water, and that's an issue that sub-Saharan Africa faces. You don't think about that being an issue in a city. But the problem with slums is they very rarely have access to clean drinking water in the exact same way that places like rural Africa have the same problem.

Yeah, and we're not even... I mean, that's clean drinking water and sanitation and shelter. We're not even talking education and health care and all the things that people need to live a fruitful life. So cities are a problem. Even if Airlook was wrong, there are clearly issues. Some people will argue, and we'll get to the critics and stuff later, but a lot of people argued that it's distribution of food and stuff like that. We have the resources. We're just not dividing it out properly.

Right. And apparently, I read that if everyone lived like an American and consumed like an American does, the carrying capacity would be something like two billion. So we would have already far exceeded it. Sure. But if everybody lived with just the minimal amount that they need to live, the carrying capacity would be something like 40 billion. We've been able to sustain the carrying capacity as it is right now because not everybody lives like an American. But if you're an American, that means that a lot of the other world, especially developing world, thinks that you are overconsuming by a lot. Sure. And that's really evident in... There's a graph that went around recently that shows water use in agriculture by type of product. So everything from soy to beef, it showed how much water it uses. Oh, yeah. Did you see that?

I didn't see that, but I've seen stuff like that because beef is a huge consumer of water, right?

106.28 gallons of water used to produce one ounce of beef.

Yeah.

That's a lot. That's a lot of water. And so that's part of the point, where is if everybody's, and apparently in China and India, in these ascending countries with ascending economies, one of the great benefits of being part of the developed world is you can get steak anytime you want, baby. And I want a big one right now. Put it in front of me. I'll give you some money. Here, just take this and put it in your pocket. There's some money for you. Give me my steak. And you don't care how much water it took. And these people who are saying they don't necessarily agree with their But they're saying, he wasn't totally off.

He was alarm.

There are problems.

Clearly, there are problems.

They're saying, this is one of the problems. This is one of the problems with too many people.

Yeah. And so getting back to contraception and zero population growth, or now the population connection. Their big goal, they say there are 222 million women in the developing world who have an unmet need for family planning. So they're not saying, we want to put our ideals on you, and you shouldn't be having kids. They're saying there are that many women that are like, I don't want these five kids. I would have wanted two. And I either don't know about contraception, don't have contraception, or I have literally no idea how conception works, sadly.

For a lot of them, I shouldn't say a lot, the first idea that women just need access to contraception, and they will use it. Yeah, that's the no brainer. Yeah, and they're working on that, right? Sure. But they found in studies that something like 10% or less of the women who are defined as having unmet contraceptive needs cite a lack of access as to why they're having unwanted kids. Instead, they're saying it's things like family pressure or societal pressure to have a bunch of kids. Like you're saying, not understanding contraception or how conception works.

Yeah, they say they don't believe that they need contraception if you have sex infrequently or after birth, after I've had one kid, we don't need to use contraception anymore. Got you. Like, literally not knowing how conception works. Right. So that's a big educational hurdle that population connection is trying to overcome.

Right. So they're saying it's not just getting contraception to women. It's educating them on how to use it and changing their social outlook.

Yeah, changing the culture. Yeah. Largely men saying, I want more babies.

Right. Like Revolutionary Road or something. All right.

So We're going to talk a little bit after the break about what the critics of zero population growth have to say.

Hey, Ed, why can't I get good results from Google anymore? It's just a bunch of junk now, like nonsense, AI, gibberish, and ads. I can't actually get answers to my questions anymore.

Well, Robert, this is something I've talked about on my weekly tech podcast, Better Offline, and I call it the Rot Economy. Google isn't incentivized to give you good search results anymore. What they are incentivized to do is to have more search results and have sponsored content that makes them money and search engine optimized content that makes other people money so that Google can make more money. It's all part of a growth all cost system that is destroying the tech industry. Better Offline is a podcast where I'll lead you through the good, the bad, and the stupid of the tech industry, and tell you exactly how venture capitalists and technocrat billionaires intend to influence your digital lives. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcast.

Get ready for our 2024 iHeart podcast awards, presented by the Hartford, live at South by Southwest. Celebrating the best of the Best. We'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year and celebrate the most innovative talent and creators in the industry. Podcasts have always reflected our culture. Watch live Monday, March 11th on iHeartRadio's YouTube channel and listen on iHeartRadio stations across America.

And the winner is... The winner.

See all of the colonies now at iHeartPodcastAwards. Com. Youtube is the streaming partner of the 2024 iHeartPodcast Awards, and we'll be honoring Rotten Mango with the Innovator Award presented by YouTube. Tune in live Monday, March 11th at 9:00 PM Eastern on iHeartRadio's YouTube channel. You won't want to miss this.

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So we're back? Yes. We're talking about solutions to overpopulation, but not everybody thinks it's a problem. Yeah. Some people say overpopulation is a myth.

Yeah.

They say that Eerlik, in and of himself damaged his own argument.

Yeah, he got a lot of personal heat. Yeah. Still does.

Because of the language he used, it was so alarm us starting his book off with that we've already lost, and no matter what we do, billions of people are going to die. And then it not panning out. Saying that England wasn't going to be around in 30 years. I mean, that was putting a lot on the line. Sure. And so a lot of people said, your specific landmarks or milestones were unmet, therefore your whole argument is out the window. Yeah. And some people believe that. Other people are like, That's not necessarily true. That is alarmist as well, possibly, or reactionary, at least. But some people say, I still don't agree with Eerlik, because humans are smart. We can figure our way out of any problem.

That's right. Critics will say that humans are not parasites of the Earth. We are the saviors of Earth, and we are the ones that are coming up with these solutions like the Green Revolution and longer lifespans and progressing medically to help people live longer.

I don't know about saviors of Earth.

You don't think?

I think that's stretching it a little bit. I think we extract a little too much to be called saviors of Earth.

Well, I guarantee you there's a lot of people that think humans are saviors of Earth. Sure.

I would see us more as like, Homer with Pinty the Lobster again in the saltwater and fresh water, trying to strike the balance. I wouldn't call him a savior of either the goldfish or Pinchy at that moment. He's just keeping them both in stasis.

How many times have you referenced Pinchy the Lobster?

That's probably seven. Seven?

Yeah. It's not bad. It's one for every 100 shows, roughly. Other critics will say that low birth rates are no good for the economy, like you were talking about earlier. Older people and babies, well, I guess low birth rates wouldn't affect that, but older people are more of a tax on society than they are spenders and investors.

But in the same way, if you have too many babies, that's a big tax. Eventually, those babies will be a workforce.

Yeah, and they'll spend money, too.

Exactly. So the baby boom and the postwar economic boom in the United States, it's not coincidental that they went hand in hand. There were a bunch of people having babies, and eventually, they grew into the workforce, And they made a bunch of money in the '80s for the United States.

Yeah, and it's also supported in developing countries. More than 70 countries are categorized now as low fertility, with two babies or less per woman. And those areas are expected to make a big economic gains in the coming decades because there are going to be people to spend money and be in the workforce.

And there's a few ways that the workforce and wealth and the economy and birth rates are all tied together, too. It turns out that if you give a woman rights to her own contraceptive decisions, the birth rate tends to inevitably fall as a result. And then when that happens, it happens because some women have more babies than they want to when they don't have right to their own contraceptive decisions. Another reason is when they have those rights, they usually also have the right to an education. When they enter school, they will tend to put off having kids because once they graduate from school, they'll usually enter the workforce. Just by nature of getting to the whole thing later on in life, they're having you are kids as well. And when you have more educated women in the workforce, your economy is stronger, too. So directly and by proxy, lower birth rates are associated with a stronger economy. But again, you don't want to get too low, because if you get too low, then all of a sudden, the generation before it started to taper off is going to be bigger than the generation that's working.

And if it costs $50,000 in tax money to keep the average retiree afloat, say in the United States, well, that divided by a thousand people is a lot easier to bear than divided by 100 people, 100 working people.

You know what I mean? Yeah. We got to keep the old folks and keep them in stake in Oultine. Right.

So if you're an economist, a demographer, whatever, everybody's saying you want to get a country developed, and you want to get them at that 2.1 replacement rate, and everything will be hunky dory from there.

Yeah. And the other thing a critic might say, too, is, and this is what we were talking about earlier about the environment, the impact on the environment, like we're just going to destroy our world with so many people. It turns out that impact carbon emissions aren't really tied to population growth rates. It's tied to per capita income levels by evidence that China and the US have some of the lowest fertility rates right now, and we are the worst polluters. It's not because we have all these people. It's because we're consuming too much as Americans. Exactly. And I guess in China as well.

Which actually makes it seem nerve-wracking that Sure. India and China, with these enormous populations, are starting to become wealthier and wealthier because that's just going to make it even worse as far as the environment goes.

Did you check out the population connection site? No, I didn't. They have a pretty interesting FAQ that if you don't know where you I mean, it's helpful to read. They say things like, instead of we want to focus on quality of life, not quantity. And instead of saying, how many people can the Earth support, maybe how many people can't the Earth support. Because right now, all these people are dying from lack of clean water and sanitation and food. There's the counter argument that you hear from critics a lot. I've seen this stat thrown around that the entire world's population could live in Texas.

I I've seen that before. It's so mind boggling. I have trouble believing it. I think somebody forgot to carry a one or something.

No, it's true. Population Connection says, Sure, you could fit everyone in Texas. You could also fit 40 people in a phone booth. But Texas, they said, No way has the carrying capacity to take care of those people. So it's a little bit of a hollow fact that you throw out when you say that. Right. Make sure you can jam everyone in there.

Texas, it'd be like, What are you guys doing here? Everyone. Exactly.

But it's pretty interesting stuff. I recommend people read their FAQ. It seems like they definitely have the right mindset because what they want to do is make sure people have a good quality of life all over the world.

Well, I will go read their FAQ because I suddenly feel underprepared. But I will tell you that the impression that I have from researching them without going on their website was I didn't find anything like beware population connection or the population connection myth or anything like that. There's definitely debate on the other side saying overpopulation is a myth, but no one seems to be attacking population connection as a nefarious organization.

Yeah, because they're not saying don't have babies. Right.

And that's a really sticky situation to be in because a lot of people are like, well, God wants us to have as many babies as we possibly can. Who are you to be meddling in that thing? It's a fine line that a group like that has to walk, and they seem to be walking it fine. Yeah. They're just saying, here's some contraception. Maybe let's not have unwanted babies. Let those little angels stay in heaven, and we'll just go from there. Yeah.

I think that's on their homepage.

Hey, Ed, why can't I get good results from Google anymore? It's just a bunch of junk now, like nonsense AI, gibberish, and ads. I can't actually get answers to my questions anymore.

Well, Robert, this is something I've talked about on my weekly tech podcast, Better Offline, and I call it the raw economy. Google isn't incentivized to give you good search results anymore. What they are incentivized to do is to have more search results and have sponsored content that makes them money and search engine optimized content that makes other people money so that Google can make more money. It's all part of a growth or cost system that is destroying the tech industry. Better Off Loan is a podcast where I'll lead you through the good, the bad, and the stupid of the tech industry, and tell you exactly how venture capitalists and technocrat billionaires intend to influence your digital lives. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcast.

Get ready for our 2024 iHeart podcast awards, presented by the Hartford, live at South by Southwest. Celebrating the best of the best. We'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year and celebrate the most innovative talent and creators in the industry. Podcasts have always reflected our culture. Watch live Monday, March 11th on iHeartRadio's YouTube channel, and listen on iHeartRadio's stations across America.

And the winner is...

The winner. See all of the colonies now at iHeartPodcastAwards. Com. Youtube is the streaming partner of the 2024 iHeartPodcast Awards, and we'll be honoring Rotten Mango with the Innovator Award presented by YouTube. Tune in live Monday, March 11th at 9:00 PM Eastern on iHeartRadio's YouTube channel. You won't want to miss this.

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All right, the behavior will sink. Where did you find this?

I don't remember I don't know where I ran across it, but I'd read it a while back, but I have to give a shout out to Josh from Jersey, the original Jersey, not New Jersey, who recently wrote in to suggest we do an episode on that. And that perfect timing because he wrote in after you'd selected this one. Oh, yeah. And I was like, these two would go great together. Hand in hand. Yeah. So thanks, Josh, for reminding us.

Well, thank you, Josh, for thanking Josh.

Which Josh?

I'm thanking all the Joshes. Okay. So in 1972, this dude named John B. Calhoun, this was one of his experiments. This guy, what he liked to do was build rat and mouse utopias.

He's been doing it since the '40s. Yeah.

And basically, with the aim to see what would happen to a population, in this case, mice or rats, if you gave them a perfect mouse world. Right.

And he called these world universes.

Yeah.

And the one in 1972, the one that really made all the headlines, I guess, was called I remember it was 25. So he had 24 under his belt already. And it was a pretty good size. It was over 100 inches square. The walls were 54 inches high. It had space for... Let's see. What's 256 times 15, Chuck?

I'm going to go with about in my head, I'm going to say close to 30,000.

It is exactly 3,800.

Yeah, that's what I meant. I meant 3,000.

3,840. Okay. Okay. So there was enough room comfortably for 3,840 mice?

Yes.

And long before that, he introduced four breeding pairs, so eight mice. He First is introduced to Universe 25.

Yeah, and it was well-stocked, by the way.

They had everything they wanted.

Food, water that was cleaned out. They were all disease-free. No predators? Yeah, he threw a cat in there once a week. Right.

Just to keep them on their toes or something.

Yeah. I mean, it was mouse heaven is what they called it.

Yes. And he actually did in papers about these universes, he would refer to them as heaven or utopia, and he would use words like that. So he introduces these four breeding pairs of mice to universe 25. And after 104 days, it took them to finally settle down and be like, okay, this place is actually pretty great. It's not too good to be true. Despite the fact that it seems to be built by human hand, which is weird, and the temperature Sure never changes. But we're just going to say it's probably fine and start breeding. And they started breeding pretty quickly.

Oh, yes.

They started doubling in population every 55 days after that, right?

Yeah. Like you said, because it was so great there, they were just like, Hey, let's eat and do it and make little baby mice. There is no end in sight. So you're doubling every 55 days. This was all a big study to study what overpopulation, what would happen. And what he found time after time was that things went bad.

Yeah, which is really something. Because remember, Paul Eerlich released the population bomb in 1968. But for decades before that, John Calhoun, saw firsthand what the real problem was. The real problem wasn't overpopulation leading to scarcity of food and conflict and resource wars, and famine, starvation. Didn't. What he found was that the real problem was overpopulation itself.

Yeah, but just too many mice and not enough valuable roles for mice to play. Exactly.

So there comes to be a point in any mouse population as far as Calhoun was concerned. And again, this is Universe 25, and he wasn't making one a week or something. These were detailed smart studies. He was hired by the National Institutes of Health. He spent 20 or 30 years working there. He was a bona fide, legitimate researcher. And he would find that at some point the abundance would lead to overpopulation rather than scarcity. He never ran out of food. They always had enough food and water and everything. What came to be an issue was space and social interactions. There were just too many people. There are too many mice, I should say. To the mice, there are people. Sure. And they're rubbing shoulders up against one another, constantly moving past one another. There's not enough room And like you said, there wasn't enough. There were too many mice to fulfill the number of social roles needed, right?

Yeah. It says by day 3:15, so this is close to a year, a lot of mice are living in there, and they said there were more peers to defend against. So males were stressed out and stopped defending their territory. They abandoned it. Said normal social discourse broke down completely. Social bonds broke down. There was like, randomized violence for no reason, it seemed like. The female mice, the mothers, saw this and would attack their own babies. And it was procreation slumped, infant abandonment increased, mortality soared. Then he talked about the beautiful ones, which I thought was hysterical. There were these male mice that just, they never fought, they never sought to reproduce or have sex. All did was eat, sleep, and groom, and just loaf around. So all these social barriers are completely being destroyed. These social norms, I should say.

Yeah. And the females that could reproduce went off by themselves, sequester themselves away from society. And the males that were capable of reproducing became those beautiful ones and didn't seek sex either. So over time, they lost their ability to carry out these complex social interactions that lead to reproduction, and they just stopped reproducing in general.

Yeah. By day 560, and this is, I guess, that's the close to two-year mark. Well, I guess 18 months. They had 2,200 mice, and then growth ceased.

Yeah, which isn't even close to the 3,840 that this place could conceivably hang on to.

Yeah. So it was... How many was it? 3,800? 3,840. Yeah. So at 2,200, they stopped reproducing. Very few mice survived past weaning at that point. The beautiful ones were still secluded. The females, they basically called this the first death of two deaths.

He did specifically call it- A social death, essentially. Exactly. Like the death of the spirit, the death of the society. Yeah. And then eventually, The physical death, the second death.

Yeah, the one leads to the second. There is a point that you pass, and he came up with a great name for it called the behavioral sink, where I think they revert to it as the event horizon. Once you pass that, it's all over.

Right. There's no coming back from that. And once there's no coming back from that, not only has your society collapsed or does your society collapse, your population becomes extinct because reproduction becomes impossible. Even he found, which is pretty startling, he found that even after enough of the population dies off, that it returns to those optimal ideal numbers of the early days in universe 25 or any of the universes, they Hold on. Reproduction doesn't start up again. Because remember, social norms and bonds have broken down.

Yeah, they were so messed up.

So they can't even figure out how to reproduce once there's room for people enough again.

It's crazy. It is. It's so interesting.

He said that He wrote this really blockbuster paper called Population Density and Social Pathology, and it was published in Scientific American in 1962. And he said that the individuals that are born under these circumstances will be so out of touch with reality as to be incapable even of alienation. Wow. So they can't even feel like they're not connected to society anymore because there's no society for them to ever connect or disconnect from.

It's frightening.

It really is. And a lot of people jumped on this and said, whoa, what's going on here? Because if you look at his data, every time he ran this experiment, the results became the same. There was an abundance of resources. There was never scarcity. Population became overpopulation. Once it reached the point of the behavioral sink, the population slid into extinction. And on the way, there was violence, cannibalism.

Pansexualism.

Yeah. Infanticide. Just all the horrible things you can possibly think of on the way toward extinction. And so a lot of people said, these mice are reflective of our own society, don't you think? Yeah. And Calhoun was like, yeah, I would say that's probably correct.

Yeah. And there was a big boom at the time because of this experiment in literature and movies with a lot of doomsday scenarios. Tom Wolf the great writer, wrote in the Pumphouse Gang in 1968, he actually referenced the behavioral sink in reference to New York City. He said it was easy to look at New Yorkers as animals, especially looking down from some place like a balcony at Grand Central at the rush hour Friday afternoon. The floor was filled with poor white humans running around, dodging, blinking their eyes, making a sound like a pin full of starlings or rats or something. And there are all these movies that came out. There was one called ZPG with Oliver Reid and Geraldine Chaplin. It was called zero population growth.

Yeah, for a generation, the government said, no one's allowed to have babies. Here's your robot baby.

Right. And they were like, no, we're going to have a real baby.

And they're like, no, you're not.

I think I didn't see it, but I'm sure it ended very poorly for them.

I didn't see it either. I saw it on IMDb, though.

And of course, Soylent Green. Yeah. Great movie.

From the novel Make room. Make room. I had no idea what's called that. I didn't either. There's another novel called Stand on Zanzibar. And there were people called Muckers who ran amok and just suddenly went crazy and started killing a bunch of people. I don't know, it happens from time to time in the news. A lot of people were saying, Yeah, this stuff that Calhoun's finding is clearly extrapolatable onto human society. And at the time, too, there was a lot of discussion about what to do about inner city overpopulation, crime, housing projects. There's this really great documentary called The Pruit Igo Myth. And it's about... There was this The Pruitt Igo Project in St. Louis. You've heard of this? I think we talked about it before, but it became like the poster child for how no matter what you do for poor inner-city people, they're going to screw it up, and it's going to become crime-ridden, and it's them. It's not their quality of life or education or anything like that. It's them. And this documentary just totally demolishes that idea, but it's still a long-standing idea. And there were a group of policymakers who looked at Calhoun's research and said, Clearly, we need to do something.

There's too many people, and there's a lot of people who don't have valuable social roles, and they're turning it crime and everything. It was very much open to interpretation, because Calhoun, even though he was putting these things in terms like heaven, and utopia, and hell, and behavioral sink, and that stuff, he was still just putting data out there. And it was up to society at large to interpret it. And it really said a lot about your attitudes towards your fellow human, how you interpreted it. But Calhoun himself actually took something of an optimistic view of all of this data, which is mind boggling.

Yeah, I was surprised to read this, actually. It makes sense, though, if you think about it. Yeah, he found that there were outliers, and that not all the mice descended into hellish violence and looting and mouse looting. He found that some could actually handle this, and what he called the ones that could had a high social velocity, mice that fared well with a lot of high number of social interactions. That is not me.

And he said, I'm a type A blood type, blood personality type.

He said that basically, these mice will thrive. And he said, and even the ones who don't, what he termed the losers, found ways to be more creative. Yeah. Self-sufficient? Yeah. He had a sunnier outlook, basically, saying that man is essentially a positive animal, and we will create and design our own solutions.

Right. And his solution was, and it makes sense because he found that it's not scarcity or famines or anything that leads to trouble. It's overpopulation itself. His idea was, Well, let's go find more space. And so he was a member of this group called the Space Cadets, which was a group of thinkers that were trying to figure out how to establish colonies on Mars or the moon or wherever, which is exactly what Calhoun's point was, is that we just need more space. We can sustain ourselves, that's fine. But even if we don't stress agriculture, the planet or whatever, we're still going to run into problems. So let's go off to other worlds.

And Terraform.

Oh, and did you see the thing about the Rats of Nim?

Oh, was that inspired by this?

It was based directly on his research. Oh, really? Isn't that cool? Very cool. Mrs. Brisbane and the Rats of NIM.

Nice.

Yeah, so go see that again. And also, go read The Behavioral Sink. Super interesting read. It's an article on cabinet by Will Wiles that informed a lot of this episode.

Yeah, this stuff It was fascinating to me. I agree. Because I see both sides. Clearly, there are some issues going right now, but I also think that there are solutions around the corner. Yeah.

I ultimately don't have a strong opinion either way, and I think if I think about it, it's because I think humans will become ingenuitive.

You can have steak tonight?

Tons.

Me too. Grass-fed only.

That doesn't make it any better. I mean, that's why beef is so... It uses so much because it eats so much food that also requires water. Yeah, right. It requires water like two times over, at least.

Dumb cows. Yeah.

We should feel bad about our steak consumption, Chuck.

I don't eat much steak?

Good for you, buddy.

It's because Emily doesn't eat beef.

Oh, yeah.

Usually, I just will cook chicken because it's not like I'll have a steak and I'll cook her chicken every now and then. But usually it's just easier because chicken comes in like a two or three pack. Right. You know? Yeah. Yeah.

Plus, you cook it until it's dry as a bone so you can feel better about the water consumption.

That's right.

If you want to know more about population growth, and specifically zero population growth, type those words into the search bar at howstuffworks. Com. And since I said search bar in somewhere. It's time for a listener mail.

I'm going to call this Linguist Sticks Up For Us.

All right. Right?

Hey, guys. I studied linguistics in college, so it always tickles me when you guys go on tangents about words and language. The main reason I'm writing is because I want to offer you a counterpoint to the language police that have been harsing your vibe. Grammar nuts are what we call in the biz prescriptivists who like to dictate how people should speak. Linguist on on the other hand, are descriptivists who make their careers out of how people actually speak in real-world situations.

Oh, I didn't realize. I thought linguists could be one or the other. I didn't realize that linguists tend to be descriptivists. That's what she says. Who wrote Infinite Jess? David Foster-Walace? Yeah. He was a big-time prescriptivist. Oh, really? He used to drive him crazy.

How people should speak?

Yeah. Yeah. I'm not into that. Like that there is a specific way that humans are supposed to speak and write and communicate. And if you deviate from that, you're about as bad a human being as you can be.

And that would be like the downfall of society or something? Pretty much. Oh, come on. We don't use the terms good or bad grammar. Instead, we prefer standard and non-standard. Linguists recognize the social functions of non-standard grammars and observe their uses and functions rather than to try and micromanage them. A final point. I'm certain your listeners still know what you mean when you say things like, There's a lot of something, even if it isn't standard grammar. In the laws of linguistics, as long as you're interlocutor, which is a listener.

Interlocutor. Interlocutor. Yeah.

As long as they accurately understand what you mean, you have successfully communicated. Okay. That's why humans invented language, isn't it? Go be free and know that I will always love your show no matter how you speak. That is from Kristen. Thanks, Kristen. The supportive linguist.

Appreciate That's funny that Kristen mentions that as long as your interlocutor understands what you're saying, you're communicating correctly. Sure. Someone else, I don't remember who it was, they wrote in and suggested we do an episode on shorthand.

Oh, interesting. I was just talking about that with Emily last night.

Bam, it's all over the place.

I took speed writing in high school, and she was very surprised at that.

So like speed writing with hand?

Speed writing is like- Or like stenography? No, right with your hand. It's basically a version of shorthand, but not exact shorthand. Got you. It's a shorthand.

It sounds like shorthand, but more aggressive.

Yeah.

Like max power or something.

The joke was my friend Shannon, I won't say her last name, but she would cheat in class because she didn't learn the shorthand. So the test were they would just read a long passage quickly and you would have to do it and then transcribe that into longhand. She was just super good at writing really fast. She would just write down everything in longhand super fast and then figure out how to transcribe it back to shorthand and then back to longhand. She got caught doing that. The teacher was like, That's cheating.

Yeah, it sounds like it.

She was like, Oh, writing really fast.

Still doesn't count. Nope. That's not speed writing. That's just writing fast. If you want to get in touch with us, either to show us support, criticize us, even something neutral is fine. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook. Com/stuffyeshouldknow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks. Com. And as always, join us at our luxurious home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow. Com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. I've been both a tech writer and a tech executive for 15 years, and I've seen this industry grow from a bunch of dorks building things in their garage into a multi-trillion dollar behemoth that has monetized every corner of our lives. Better Offline is a podcast where I'll lead you through the good, the bad, and the stupid of the tech industry, and tell you exactly how venture capitalists and technocrat billionaires intend to influence your digital lives. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcast.

Get ready for our 2024 iHeart podcast awards, presented by the Hartford, live at South by Southwest. Celebrating the best of the best. We'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year, and celebrate the most innovative talent and creators in the industry. Podcasts have always reflected our culture. Watch live Monday, March 11th on iHeartRadio's YouTube channel and listen on iHeartRadio stations across America.

And... And the winner is... The winner.

See all of the colonies now at iHeartPodcastAwards. Com. Youtube is the streaming partner of the 2024 iHeartPodcast Awards, and we'll be honoring Rotten Mango with the Innovator Award presented by YouTube. Tune in live Monday, March 11th at 9:00 PM Eastern on iHeartRadio's YouTube channel. You won't want to miss this.

It's A Wonderful Life is one of the most popular movies ever, but it has more to offer you than you ever thought. You know how long it takes a working man to save $5,000?

In this world where there's a lot of hopelessness, people need this movie.

George Bailey was never born. Join the many partaking in this one-of-a-kind podcast experience. Listen to all 10 episodes available now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Savegeorge Bailey. Com. Subscribe now.