1180: Dean Spears | The Quiet Apocalypse of Global Depopulation

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Jordan Harbinger Show - Episode 1180: Dean Spears | The Quiet Apocalypse of Global Depopulation

Introduction

In Episode 1180 of The Jordan Harbinger Show, host Jordan Harbinger engages in a compelling conversation with Dean Spears, author of After the Spike: Population Decline and the Great Recession. The episode delves into the provocative thesis that the world is heading towards a significant population decline—a scenario that, contrary to popular belief, may not bode well for humanity. Spears argues that depopulation could lead to reduced innovation, economic stagnation, and challenges in addressing global issues like climate change.

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1. The Population Crash Argument

Dean Spears introduces his core argument, asserting that global depopulation is the most probable future scenario. He emphasizes that this decline is not merely a demographic shift but a profound transformation with far-reaching consequences.

“The population is a huge ship, slow to turn. If you have a kid today, they're going to be deciding whether or not to have a kid in, say, three 30 years, right? And 30 years from now is when decarbonization needs to be well underway or maybe done right.”
— Dean Spears [00:49]

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2. Historical Population Trends

Spears provides a historical perspective, highlighting that for much of human history, population growth was minimal. It wasn't until advancements in sanitation, healthcare, and nutrition a few centuries ago that populations began to surge exponentially.

“For centuries, the population's been growing fast. And all the while, living standards around the world have been improving.”
— Dean Spears [04:27]

He projects that this rapid growth, referred to as the "spike," is nearing its end within the lifetime of current generations, potentially leading to a sharp decline in population numbers.

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3. Timing and Policy Misalignment

A critical point Spears makes is the misalignment between the timeline of population decline and the urgent actions required to combat climate change. He contends that population reduction will not occur swiftly enough to alleviate the immediate pressures of environmental degradation.

“The timing of population decline just doesn't line up with the urgency of what needs to happen on climate change.”
— Dean Spears [19:56]

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4. Challenges in Increasing Birth Rates

The conversation shifts to policy measures aimed at increasing birth rates, which Spears argues have historically been ineffective. He cites examples like China's one-child policy and various government incentives worldwide that have failed to reverse declining fertility rates.

“Of the 26 countries that we can see in the data, lifetime birth rates have ever fallen below 1.9, averaging over a woman's lifetime. None of them ever have gone back up above 2 yet, so 0 for 26.”
— Dean Spears [10:30]

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5. Environmental Impact

Addressing common concerns, Spears discusses the relationship between population size and environmental impact. While more people do contribute to increased pollution, he argues that technological advancements and policy changes have historically mitigated environmental degradation despite population growth.

“We’ve addressed environmental problems before by changing what people do, implementing new laws, implementing new technologies.”
— Dean Spears [14:43]

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6. Counterarguments to Population Control

Spears challenges the simplistic notion that reducing population alone can solve global issues. He emphasizes that human ingenuity and societal advancements have historically overcome resource constraints through innovation rather than merely reducing population numbers.

“It's not just the rare geniuses or luminaries working in one place. It's something that gets widely shared.”
— Dean Spears [58:04]

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7. The Role of Ideas and Innovation

A pivotal theme of the discussion is the intrinsic link between population size and innovation. Spears posits that a larger population fosters a greater generation of ideas, leading to technological and scientific breakthroughs essential for societal progress.

“Depopulation will result in fewer ideas, fewer innovations and bouts of creativity. Then we won't be making the same sort of progress towards higher living standards.”
— Dean Spears [59:36]

He illustrates this with the example of oral rehydration salts developed in Bangladesh, which transformed global health outcomes without being depleted by use.

“Ideas and knowledge have this property that they get used, but they don't get used up.”
— Dean Spears [47:24]

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8. AI's Potential Role

The conversation touches upon the role of Artificial Intelligence in compensating for a declining population. While acknowledging AI's potential to enhance productivity, Spears remains skeptical that it can fully replace the nuanced contributions of a diverse human population.

“Nobody knows exactly how productive AI is going to be... making humans more productive is something that we need in a future with AI.”
— Dean Spears [60:35]

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9. Implications for Economic Growth and Sustainability

Spears discusses how population decline could hinder economic growth and sustainability efforts. He argues that a stable or growing population is crucial for maintaining the workforce and fueling economic activities that drive societal advancements.

“If we're on a path to depopulation and there aren't enough other people, then some of the discoveries that we could come up with won't happen.”
— Dean Spears [50:36]

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10. The Future and Stability vs Depopulation

Spears emphasizes the need for a balanced approach—aiming for population stabilization rather than unchecked growth or decline. He highlights the complexity of achieving this balance, noting that it requires profound social changes and consensus-building.

“Ultimately you'd need the birth rate to be about an average of 2 for the population to stabilize.”
— Dean Spears [43:00]

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11. Conclusion

Dean Spears concludes by underscoring the importance of recognizing and addressing the impending challenges of global depopulation. He advocates for societal shifts that make parenting more feasible and equitable, thereby encouraging stable birth rates without coercive policies.

“Other people make the discoveries from that we can use... We won't be on the same path to an abundant future.”
— Dean Spears [47:24]

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Key Takeaways

• Global Depopulation is Imminent: Spears predicts a significant decline in global population within the next few decades, driven by consistently falling birth rates worldwide.

• Ineffectiveness of Current Policies: Government incentives to increase birth rates have largely failed, as seen in various international attempts.

• Innovation Depends on Population: A robust population fosters innovation and economic growth, which are essential for addressing global challenges.

• Technological Solutions are Insufficient: While AI and other technologies can enhance productivity, they cannot fully compensate for the loss of human ingenuity and collaborative progress.

• Need for Societal Change: To stabilize the population, profound changes in societal attitudes towards parenting and gender roles are necessary, making child-rearing more feasible and equitable.

Dean Spears presents a thought-provoking perspective that challenges conventional wisdom on population dynamics, urging listeners to reconsider the long-term implications of declining global populations.

Transcript

[Audible]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger.

[Dean Spears]

Show, the population is a huge ship, slow to turn. If you have a kid today, they're going to be deciding whether or not to have a kid in, say, three 30 years, right? And 30 years from now is when decarbonization needs to be well underway or maybe done right. So the timing of population decline just doesn't line up with the urgency of what needs to happen on climate change.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become.

[Louise Freely]

A better informed, more critical thinker through.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional cold case homicide investigator, real life pirate or music mogul. And if you're new to the show or you want a handy way to tell your friends about it, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today we're talking about the population crisis, but maybe not in the way you're thinking. Instead of too many people on the planet, today's guest argues that we're actually headed for a population crash. Like me, this might sound like good news to you, but today's guest, Dean Spears, is here to convince us that it's not. From fewer ideas and innovation to fewer hands available to Clean up the messes.

[Louise Freely]

Of tomorrow that we're making today.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Of course, planet Earth is heading towards a crisis from which it might actually be impossible to recover. All right, here we go with Dean Spears, your book, after the Spike.

[Louise Freely]

It's about depopulation.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So not about having too many people, but about having too few. And this, for people like me, I.

[Louise Freely]

Should say, is maybe it's a little bit backwards, as I've been led to believe that we have way too many people on this planet already.

[Dean Spears]

But actually, global depopulation is the most likely future. And so what depopulation means is that every decade, every generation, the world's population will shrink. And that's the path we're on. That in a few decades, the world's population will begin to decline. And once that happens, there's no reason to think it'll automatically reverse. And so a big question before us is, should we welcome that or should we want something else to happen?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Because I'm thinking, okay, sounds good. We need less people, right? Don't we need less people? We want them. I mean, look, I don't want them.

[Louise Freely]

All to die at once.

[Dean Spears]

Well, that is the story that we hear. Yeah. But in fact, depopulation won't solve climate change or reduce global poverty or make the world fairer. And we stand to lose something very important because people are a core ingredient in scientific and social progress. People help you get what you want. Other people are win, win. Their lives are good for them and good for you.

[Louise Freely]

Okay, I want to get into the details on some of this because of course, my three counter arguments to why we don't need more people are, hey.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It'S going to help with competition for resources.

[Louise Freely]

It's going to stop global warming.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Water use, land, food, all that stuff.

[Louise Freely]

I guess we'll get into the details on that later, because you just popped all those bubbles with one sentence. But tell me how the population has changed over time.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Because when I was younger, it was.

[Louise Freely]

I don't know what, the population was 4 billion or something, and it was.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Like, oh my God, what are we going to do? How are we going to survive this? Everything is going to implode in global warming and housing and food. We're all going to starve to death.

[Louise Freely]

And that didn't happen. We have twice as many people now.

[Dean Spears]

So for a very long time, the size of the world population was pretty flat. 10,000 years ago, there were less than 5 million people. That's about the size of metro Atlanta. And that started to change a few hundred years ago as we got better at keeping one another alive and especially keeping children alive through things like sanitation and the germ theory of disease and better nutrition. So there were a billion of us in 1800, doubling to 2,100,000,000 later and quadrupling since then. So the only thing that you and I have ever known has been a world where the population's been growing fast. And all the while, living standards around the world have been improving. Other progress has been happening, too, but actually, that period of population growth has been really brief. That's why we call it the spike in the world population. But the thing is, the spike is coming to an end within the lifetime of a baby born today. Chances are the size of the world population is going to peak and then begin to decline. And what's remarkable is that decline could be just as fast, just as exponential as the upslope.

[Jordan Harbinger]

When will we peak? What number will we peak at?

[Louise Freely]

And when might this happen?

[Dean Spears]

So nobody knows for sure. The UN puts it in the 2000 and 80s at around 10 billion people. But other groups of demographers and population scientists put it even sooner, seeing that birth rates seem to be dropping faster than people have recently thought. There's a group in Europe that thinks it's going to be in the 2000s. The critical thing is, of course, the year when the number of deaths is greater than the number of births, and the number of deaths has been going down, but the number of births has been going down too, all along. And so what's going to happen is we're getting close to the point where the world's going to have an average of 2 births per 2 adults. That's the dividing line. And not very long after that, we'll hit that year of depopulation.

[Louise Freely]

I see. So you wrote in the book, within 300 years, peak population of 10 billion.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Could fall below 2 billion. That's pretty stark.

[Louise Freely]

To reduce the population by 80%.

[Dean Spears]

Think of it this way. If we've quadrupled in the past hundred years, right. It's the same sort of logic that could apply just in the other direction. And so if the birth rate goes to an average of 1.5 kids per 2 adults, which is what it is in Europe right now, pretty close to what it is in the US or Canada, 1.5 kids per two adults, which is. Would cause the population to drop by about 10% per decade or about 2/3 per century. So that's the sort of thing that isn't outlandish. It's something that if you've been To Canada or Europe or Vermont for that matter. You've seen something that could cause a fall in the size of population that rapid.

[Louise Freely]

Yeah. Oh, my gosh, I hadn't thought about that.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But how does it happen?

[Louise Freely]

It's not just people getting killed in conflict or war or starving to death. Right. This is just a natural course of life and people having fewer kids.

[Dean Spears]

Right. It's not about people being killed. In fact, death rates the biggest picture. I mean, not that there aren't fluctuations like Covid or something, but death rates in the biggest picture have been falling for a very long time, which is why the population grew, because more of the babies who were born did survive. But the thing that we often overlook or don't notice is that all along, truly, for centuries, birth rates have been falling too. So all this time, while we've been going up the spike and the population's been growing, people have been having fewer children. On average, it was around six in 1800. For the world as a whole, five and a half in 1950 and half of that today. So it's not that people have been having more children and that's why the population's been growing. It's the numbers of births have been falling. And now, since death can only go so low, since the fraction of babies who die at the start of life can only go as low as zero, and eventually the number of births is going to have to pass below that.

[Louise Freely]

I see. Okay. So this is a natural cycle of life, just to be clear, because I think a lot of people go, oh, well, they're counting on these crazy events. In fact, I thought when Covid hit and they were showing pictures in India of people just being locked in buildings.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Like, I really thought, we're going to.

[Louise Freely]

See 100 million people die in India.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's just going to be crazy.

[Louise Freely]

And that's not what happened, thankfully.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But by the news cycle in the beginning of COVID when everybody was panicking.

[Louise Freely]

I was just thinking, oh, my God, this is going to be just a legendary sort of biblical plague level of event in places like India where they can't get medical treatment and they're all.

[Dean Spears]

Penned in and it was very bad. But, yeah, I go to India a lot. I work in India. And what's striking is how much society has just continued on its way after. I mean, that's a whole nother story, what people can adapt to. But, yeah, I think what is amazing about the situation that we're in of the big change of global depopulation coming is just how normal the Family sizes that are going to lead to it are going to be. And if you're in the United States right now, the United States has an average birth rate of 1.6. Right here in Texas it's 1.8. Right. So those are numbers below two kids per two adults. And that's going to cause depopulation. But it's not like life feels that different than it would feel in a society that was at say 2.1 or 2.2. I mean, if you were around in the 90s, early 2000s, you remember that going to the grocery store, jogging around the lake, it's probably going to feel pretty similar in life. But we've crossed this profound threshold where now we're on the path to depopulation. And you might not have even noticed or seen when your society crossed that line of two.

[Jordan Harbinger]

What happens when birth rates dip below replacement?

[Louise Freely]

Can't we come up with policies or something to get people to have more kids? I know nothing about this, but I know countries have tried to do this.

[Dean Spears]

No, you're exactly right that many countries around the world have said that they're trying to do something about this and it basically hasn't ever worked anywhere. One way of looking at it is China's birth rate is at 1, which is extremely low, even though they're saying that it's a policy of China to increase the birth rate. But at one in China, even though they're talking about it, there are many countries out there where governments say we either have a tax credit or a child care policy or just exhortation, just getting on TV and saying have more kids. But of the 26 countries that we can see in the data, lifetime birth rates have ever fallen below 1.9, averaging over a woman's lifetime. None of them ever have gone back up above 2 yet, so 0 for 26. And many of those are places where governments say they're trying to do something about it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, because China, they had the one.

[Louise Freely]

Child policy for people who don't know. And that ended. I don't even know in the aughts. I can't even remember when that changed, but it had been going for such a long time. People had one kid and then I.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Know Korea and Japan are trying to get people to have kids.

[Louise Freely]

I'll have to take your word for it if it's not working.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But it's just got to be tough. I'll ask why it's not working, but I will posit that it's got to be tough to tell people, hey, have More kids and we'll pay for daycare.

[Louise Freely]

And it's like, yeah, the problem is.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I still have to take care of.

[Louise Freely]

The kid and pay for everything.

[Dean Spears]

Exactly. Here's a thought experiment that I sometimes ask people to ask themselves. So these government programs that might offer, say, a few thousand dollars or something, either in the form of paying for daycare or a child tax credit or something like, would you have married somebody different for $4,000? No. Right. Nobody has ever said yes to me on that one yet. And so if people making their biggest picture family formation decisions where they're writing their own life story in their biography, no one's marrying somebody different for a few thousand dollars. It makes sense that people aren't going to be having a radically different number of kids on average in response to a policy change like this. So that's not to say nothing could ever change. We wouldn't have written this book if we weren't optimistic that humanity could stabilize the population instead of depopulating. But at the scale of the things that we've seen governments try so far, nobody has a solution for this.

[Louise Freely]

It seems highly unlikely that you could simply economically incentivize people to have kids. If you catch this problem early, you.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Can like, oh, I really wanted eight kids, but we really can only afford five.

[Louise Freely]

Okay, what if schooling, college is free. We subsidize your food, we subsidize your.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Housing so that you can have more space.

[Louise Freely]

And it's like, well, I already have five. What's the difference if I have a few more?

[Jordan Harbinger]

But people who have no kids or have one kid, they know that it's 10 times the amount of work to have three kids, and you're just not going to get them to do that.

[Louise Freely]

When you're like, I'll pay for your in law unit and college, it's like.

[Jordan Harbinger]

What about the other 30 years that.

[Louise Freely]

I got to deal with?

[Dean Spears]

And you see, growing up, you see your parents, and so if you see your parents struggling with it, if a young woman sees her mom struggling and parenting is burdensome or unfair or difficult to combine with the other things that she aspires to in life, then, yeah, she's going to grow up correctly. Perceiving that it's hard to do in ways a lot more than money. So I think part of what we have here is an intergenerational challenge for our grandchildren, say, to feel like they can choose to have more children and fit it in with the other things they value in their lives, whether that's education or work or family. Or just sitting around playing video games with friends, right? Whatever it is you value, if you're going to be able to think, believe that you can fit it in with parenting too, then we have a lot to work to do. You know, showing the next generation that so that they can show the next generation that. And then maybe we'll have people growing up feeling like they can aspire to more children, but we're pretty far from that. And it's not just a simple, let's pass a piece of legislation this year policy challenge.

[Jordan Harbinger]

What about pollution in people? More people is more pollution, right?

[Louise Freely]

There's garbage, there's carbon footprint, all of that stuff.

[Dean Spears]

I think part of that is right. People are polluting. We do have big environmental challenges and human activity causes greenhouse gas emissions and has other destructive consequences. So it's really natural to think that the way to protect the environment is to have fewer humans. But it turns out to be more complicated than just that story. Because every time we've solved an environmental problem before and we have addressed environmental problems before, it's been by changing what people do. So let me give you an example. Consider China in 2013, where the particulate matter air pollution was just truly terrible. So this is breathing in tiny particles in the air. They're sometimes called PM2.5 based on their small diameter. And it's just really bad stuff, like for children to breathe this in. It causes stunting and diseases. It causes older adult mortality. And in 2013, it was so bad in China that it was called the airpocalypse. It was in international coverage. The US embassy said that it was 755 on a scale that goes up to 500. Like international journalists were evacuated. So awful in 2013. So then what happened next? In the decade that followed, the size of the Chinese population grew by 50 million people. That's a lot. That's the entire population of Canada or Argentina. So if it's the case that more people always causes more pollution, then what happened to the particulate air pollution in China? And the answer is that it got better. It declined by half. And that was because the people there changed what they did. The policymakers just changed what they did. They implemented new technologies, they implemented regulations, they shut down coal fired power plants, they made different decisions. And it's not just China. Over the same decade, while the world's population has grown by over 750 million people, particulate air pollution has fallen for the world as a whole. Every time we've addressed environmental challenges, whether it's banning CFCs to save the ozone layer in the 80s or taking lead out of gasoline in the 70s or regulating sulfur dioxide in order to not have acid rain in the 90s. That's always happened. While the population's been growing, it's been because of changing what people do, implementing new laws, implementing new technologies. And that's the path to reducing humanity's environmental footprint.

[Louise Freely]

Because it does at first glance seem like population is a good lever to pull to get lower carbon emissions. But first of all, I remember CFCs from the weekly reader that we had as kids in elementary school. And it was like CFCs and nobody could pronounce chlorofluorocarbons. And I remember I was the only kid in class who could say it.

[Dean Spears]

I think I probably was getting the same weekly readers.

[Louise Freely]

Yeah, we all were, right?

[Jordan Harbinger]

It was from like Addison Wesley, one of his textbook publishers.

[Louise Freely]

And I remember loving those things, they're so interesting. And then we never used them.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But that was the big thing, man, spray paint and all these, making mattresses and stuff. Spray, spray anything that sprayed and anything.

[Louise Freely]

That had a chemical smell, like the mattress you slept on that had 10 billion amounts of whatever CFC is being used to manufacture this thing. And then it was, you're right, acid rain this, acid rain that.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And then I kind of went to college and just never heard about it again.

[Dean Spears]

Yeah, I don't really think that I was hearing about climate change as an important challenge until, I don't know, high school or something. It was these other problems that now if you have another kid today, they're not adding more to the ozone hole depletion because they're not using CFCs.

[Louise Freely]

Yeah. And the ozone thing kind of wrapped itself up. I'm not gonna try and disagree with an expert here, but it will sound like I'm doing that.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I'm a little bit against being like.

[Louise Freely]

Eh, we'll just change the technology and it'll be fine.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I know you're not totally doing that.

[Louise Freely]

But it sounds to some people like.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay, so CFC's in the 80s, we just banned them.

[Dean Spears]

Okay. No, so I'm not saying it's going to be automatic. It's going to be a huge political fight.

[Louise Freely]

Yes.

[Dean Spears]

The book that I wrote before this one was about particle air pollution in India, saying that how terrible it is for children's health there and how they need to shut down coal plants and find some other ways. Probably they're politically not going to choose to do that. So I don't want to undersell the political fight here, but I also don't want us to get distracted from the political fight that we need to have by thinking that depopulation, which is not going to start for decades, is going to somehow be the solution that gets us off the hook for today's environmental challenges. I understand the temptation to think that in a challenge as huge as climate change, depopulation could at least help. Right. But the problem is that the population is a huge ship, slow to turn. If you have a kid today, they're going to be deciding whether or not to have a kid in, say, 30 years. Right. And 30 years from now, and is when decarbonization needs to be well underway or maybe done. Right. So the timing of population decline just doesn't line up with the urgency of what needs to happen on climate change.

[Louise Freely]

Yeah, I see what you mean.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And it also seems like we can't.

[Louise Freely]

Build nuclear power plants in under frigging half century for some reason either. I don't really understand that. That's a different podcast, probably.

[Dean Spears]

Yeah, no, I mean, back on the topic of India and coal plants, if we want to do something useful for the world, then let's volunteer to build nuclear power plants for every Indian district and maybe have the experts in France run them or something.

[Louise Freely]

But jeez, it seems like this is a totally different show, and I'm going to get emails about why we should.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Or should not do that.

[Louise Freely]

But let's stay on topic.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So you wrote in the book that.

[Louise Freely]

The lifetime climate footprint of babies born now and in the future, it keeps decreasing. So basically, anybody born now has a lower carbon footprint than I did being born in 1980.

[Dean Spears]

I mean, it's the same logic as the CFCs in the ozone hole. Anybody born now isn't probably going to contribute to the hole in the ozone layer because they're not going to use CFCs. And per person, carbon emissions have been falling in places like US and Europe, falling not as fast as they need to do, but they have been falling, which means that a new kid born today is going to contribute less to the stock of carbon emissions than we did. And it also means that any sort of change that might happen in the trajectory of the population, this is another reason why it's going to be too late for that to have much of a difference for climate change. Even on a pessimistic trajectory for decolonization, even assuming that it takes the whole next hundred years to phase out carbon emissions, if the path of the population were to deviate a little bit today from its most likely path, that too would take many decades to turn into a change in the number of people, a change in the size of the population. And so the exact time when emissions per person are going to be high, which is to say the near future, the coming years and decades are going to be the time when. When no real change or deviation from the trajectory of the population could make much of a difference. So even a change in the population path that will eventually, someday be big, all of that will happen on the tail end of our decarbonization challenge. So, in short, if what you're caring about is climate change, and we should be caring about climate change, then let's focus on that. Let's do something about that now, when it's urgent, when emissions are high, and not think that anything that happens with the population, whether it's depopulation in six decades or if we find a way to stabilize instead, is going to do anything to help us or frankly hurt us that much on our urgent climate challenges.

[Louise Freely]

I see. Yeah, that does make sense. I was shocked to read that we're more sustainable than people in 1950 because you would just think they're using such lesser amount of electronics and they're driving less, probably. I guess efficiency of things has just gone way up like crazy.

[Dean Spears]

Well, a kid born today is more efficient because they're going to live their lifetime out into a future where there is going to be ever less coal being burnt.

[Louise Freely]

Right.

[Dean Spears]

They're going to be getting their energy from wind or solar or nuclear, for example.

[Louise Freely]

It's just 1950. You just think, oh, there's a refrigerator in the house, everybody plays outside. They all watch TV in one room together for a couple hours. The end.

[Jordan Harbinger]

How are they using more resources?

[Dean Spears]

Sure, but a person born in 1950 was 40 in 1990.

[Louise Freely]

That's right, yeah. Hard to think about the fact that there's just such a longer and higher footprint. It's actually quite a short amount of time, I guess, in terms of the climate. I just remember the Mad Men scene where they have the picnic in the park and then when they're done, they just take the blanket and they throw all the garbage and they just leave it and they go home and it's like, okay, well, maybe we are more sustainable than those types of people.

[Jordan Harbinger]

What do you attribute the declining birth rate?

[Louise Freely]

You said we're less fertile, we're having fewer kids. Why? What's happening?

[Dean Spears]

So the fundamental reason. Exactly, you said, is birth rates, that birth rates are falling and falling for the world as a whole. Below this, two kids per two adults dividing line. But why Are birth rates low and falling? Here's what's so interesting is that everybody has a theory about this and everybody's theory is different. And none of them really explain the bigness of falling birth rates, the fact that birth rates been falling for not just decades, but centuries, and that low birth rates are found around the world. Two thirds of people now live in a country where the birth rate is below 2. I study India. So what often comes up is just how much of an exception India is. So sometimes you'll hear social conservatives say that birth rates are falling because of the decline in marriage or the decline in religiosity, or that people are having children so late. But India is a place where almost everybody gets married. Most of them are arranged marriages. People tend to start having children relatively young, like in their early 20s. And most people have. Religion has a role in their lives. Hinduism, Islam. Yet India is now below 2 at around 1.9. So the fact that marriage remains common, the fact that people start having children early. Also, female labor force supply is really low there. Another story that we sometimes hear as to why birth rates are low is that the conflict between career and family, especially for women. And for Claudia Goldin, the Nobel Prize winning economist about gender, that's the title of her book, Career and Family. And yet we see India as an example there of a place with low birth rates, even though many women aren't in the labor force. And so my point isn't that India explains everything. In fact, just the opposite. My point is that India is a great big country, doesn't fit these trends, and for almost every explanation or theory that you hear, you can find a country that's the exception. You think the problem is too much feminism? Look at South Korea, where it's a very unequal society. The gender wage gap is as high as it is anywhere in the oecd, and the birth rate is really low. Look at Latin America, where over 90% of people report being Christian in a Pew survey and the birth rate's at 1.8. You think the problem is too much capitalism? Look at Northern Europe. You think the problem is not enough capitalism? Look at Texas. There are exceptions everywhere.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Speaking of sustainability, here's some consumerism. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Skims. Look, I wear underwear every day. No commando experiments happening over here as.

[Louise Freely]

Far as you guys know.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But for something I wear literally every day, I probably put zero thought into it, honestly. Then Skims launches their men's line, and.

[Louise Freely]

I think, all right, let's see what the hype's about. I My wife's been singing Skims praises.

[Jordan Harbinger]

For years, so when they drop stuff.

[Louise Freely]

For guys, I figured there had to be something to it. So I ordered a few pairs, expecting just a slightly upgraded version of the same old basics. But nah, these are on another level folks.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Louise Freely]

They hold their shape all day, whether.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I'm sitting for hours recording interviews or.

[Louise Freely]

Often sprinting through an airport trying to catch a flight. And the waistband actually stays put, which.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Shouldn'T be revolutionary, but apparently nobody can make underwear with that stinking waistband that stays still. And I'm not even overweight. What the heck guys? Skims for Men is legit, super comfortable and built to actually fit.

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Shop skims [e-mail] and let them know we sent you. After you place your order, select Podcast in the survey and select the Jordan Harbinger show in the dropdown menu that follows.

[Jordan Harbinger]

This episode is sponsored in part by Audible. People always ask me how I managed to get through so much content, especially.

[Louise Freely]

Since I prep for every interview.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I'm talking two to three books a week, and it's all thanks to Audible. I've got Audible in my ears while.

[Louise Freely]

I'm getting my 10,000 steps in, running.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Errands, even doing stuff around the house.

[Louise Freely]

I don't mess with physical books anymore at all. Audible is just way more efficient. I listen on 2 or even 3x.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Speed, which lets me cover a lot.

[Louise Freely]

Of ground without sacrificing quality.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right now I'm listening to Good Inside by Dr. Becky Kennedy. She's got this really down to earth way of talking about parenting that is not preachy. And here's what a lot of people don't realize. Audible is not just audiobooks anymore. You get access to thousands of titles with your membership, podcasts, Audible originals, and cool stuff like their Words and music series where artists tell their stories in their own words. The variety makes the membership way more.

[Louise Freely]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, creators every single week, it is because of my network. The circle of people I know, like and trust. I'm teaching you how to build your network for free [e-mail] I know you're.

[Louise Freely]

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[Louise Freely]

I would definitely want to hear what you say to people who make the argument, hey, women, they can have jobs. They can choose to not be married and still survive. They're not dependent on a man. Women can get a divorce with no fault in many states and still end up with resources to survive.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's contributing to lower birth rates.

[Louise Freely]

So basically the argument that equality causes lower birth rates, can we address that a little bit? I mean, you kind of touched on it, but it doesn't seem too crazy when you think about it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Hey, I don't need to stay home.

[Louise Freely]

Thus I don't need to have a bunch of kids because I can have a career. I can follow that logic. But you're saying that that's not necessarily going to explain the problem.

[Dean Spears]

I'm saying that these sorts of career and family conflicts for women probably are very important in a lot of people's families and a lot of people's decisions. But when you look at the biggest picture of low birth rates being something that's unfolding all, all around the world and has been for centuries, it just can't fit all the facts. The birth rate in France in 1900 was three. And that wasn't because they had solved all the gender inequality problems. We already talked about South Korea, which is a pretty gender unequal society by all the measures that we have. For example, the gender wage gap. And yet we see the lowest birth rate of all. A place like Sweden, where we've over the last 10 years seen the birth rate fall from low to lower, from 1.8 to 1.4. Is the story that you want to tell that Sweden was an exceptionally unequal society 10 years ago? And I don't think that makes sense. But there is something important here, which is lots of people assume or there's policy prescription that we hear that the way to raise birth rates is to roll back the clock on gender equity, or that any sort of escaping of depopulation, if we were to stabilize the population instead, that would require things to be worse for women. That's something that you hear some people advocating. It's something that you hear other people worrying about and saying we'd better just accept depopulation because we don't want to make things worse for women. I think either way, there's an assumption there that it has to make things worse for women. And I want to hold on that and push back on that assumption, because hidden in that assumption, or maybe not even hidden in that assumption, is the presumption that children are especially women's responsibility. And I think that doesn't have to be the case. For sure, there are ways that having and bearing children burden women, that it doesn't burden men, but it takes a lot more than the nine months of pregnancy to make a child. It takes long nights and long years thereafter to raise a child. And men can and should do more of that. So I think to those who would say that what we should be fundamentally thinking about here is women and what women are contributing, I would say there's a role for dads to contribute more. And maybe if parenting had been something that we've all seen as everybody's job all along, then we wouldn't be so much in a challenge where people are looking at parenting and thinking, no, thank you.

[Louise Freely]

Yeah, you're probably onto something there. I know my wife would definitely agree with you as well.

[Jordan Harbinger]

What do you think of the whole.

[Louise Freely]

Reversal on abortion rights in the United States? I don't want to get into the morality or religious elements of that because that's 10 hours of podcasting that I don't really feel like doing. I'm thinking more in terms of population growth.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Some people say, hey, look, we need.

[Louise Freely]

To be doing this for various reasons. Some of those people have reasons that are more wholesome maybe than others for making that argument.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But basically restricted abortion or forced birth.

[Louise Freely]

Whatever you want to call it. What do you think of this in terms of the depopulation? It almost seems like it's a drop in the bucket. But what do I know exactly?

[Dean Spears]

My own take as a voter is that I believe in reproductive freedom and access to contraception and abortion. But as an economics professor who does statistics, let me tell you about some of the facts. One is that we have in the past few years seen abortion access be restricted here in Texas, and that has not caused a giant spike up in the total fertility rate. That hasn't brought the birth rate back up to replacement, in part because people find what they need, such as medication abortion through telemedicine. We can look at the data from South Korea again in 2017. Amongst the sort of richer countries with good high quality data, South Korea was the only one that the Guttmacher Institute rated as abortion being basically restricted. And it also had the lowest birth rate of all of the countries in that data set. That's not a randomized controlled experiment evidence or anything, but it is a fact to contend with if you want to say that banning abortion is a way to enduringly raise birth rates. And I think biggest of all is the experience of Romania, where the dictator Ceausescu, talking about wanting higher birth rates for nationalist reasons, banned abortion in a particularly draconian way, instituting that mandatory pelvic exams for women at work to see if they were pregnant, for example, to really use the power of the state to try to ban abortion and raise birth rates. And so what did you see in Romania when decree 770, the name for this program, happened? You see an immediate spike up in birth rates because some people might have been already pregnant or just weren't planning their lives around this. But then a few years thereafter, you see the birth rates start to fall. And what's going on there is that people understand this is the law and they're making different decisions and not getting pregnant as much, for example. And birth rates are falling pretty much in parallel to the rate that you see birth rates falling and other sort of similarly middle income countries at the time, such that after some years pass that the birth rate in Romania isn't that much higher than it would have been before the program. Of course, this all ends with Ceausescu being overthrown and killed, which is also another way in which this wasn't a sustainable policy that somebody might implement in order to try to change the population. So the point is government coercion, banning abortion, whatever your perspective on that, if your interest is the overall population wide birth rate and whether we're going to have depopulation or a stabilized population instead government coercive programs like this can really Influence and harm people's lives and take away their autonomy and wreck their ability to form the families they want and the careers they want. It can hurt people, but it isn't powerful enough to get us off the path to depopulation, to stabilization, instead of. Because people have shown that they'll find other ways.

[Louise Freely]

Okay, so people either get access to birth control, access to illegal abortions, or they just stop having sex when they might get pregnant.

[Dean Spears]

Right. And all of this matters. It matters for the families people can build. You do see in Romania a lot of maternal mortality, people dying in pregnancy, and that's awful. But what you don't see is the radical change in the size of the Romanian population that Ceausescu might have hoped for.

[Louise Freely]

So it sounds like antinatal or pro natal policies, like China, Romania, basically. Is it safe to say they didn't have an effect that wasn't happening anyway in terms of declining population?

[Dean Spears]

That's exactly right. Both for Romania trying to cause birth rates to go up. You mentioned China, who with their one child policy, is trying to cause birth rates to go down. And yet when you look at China's birth rate over the decade to the one child policy, it was falling about as fast as it was falling in other middle income developing countries like India or Latin America or Chinese neighbors. China probably ended up in a pretty similar place, birth rate wise to where it would have without the one child policy. Which just goes to show that governments don't have a lever that they can use to set the birth rate. You hear the Federal Reserve bank sets the interest rate or something like that. There's no Federal Reserve bank that can set the birth rate.

[Louise Freely]

That's right. You can set the interest rate for money, but you can't get your wife more interested in having more babies. There's a hard line there.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So it's not feminism, it's not government policy.

[Louise Freely]

I'm gonna assume it's not contraception, because the birth rate's been falling since before that was mainstream and widely available and.

[Dean Spears]

Continuing to fall even in places where people all generally have contraception.

[Louise Freely]

And you mentioned lack of religion or liberalism, and you point to India and you say, look, this is not a super liberal, super secular place and they're having the same issues or Latin America.

[Dean Spears]

Right? Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So there's just no grand theory that.

[Louise Freely]

Explains everything that could cause the population decline that we're seeing.

[Dean Spears]

I think that's right. I think it's something that a lot of societies are converging on for in a way that has been going on for a long time. If you were looking for something big picture to say, you could say that probably a lot of parenting offers the same pleasures and rewards that it would have decades ago. If my kiddo gets me up in the middle of the night because he's throwing up in his bed or something, I'm really glad that I have a washing machine that I can throw those sheets into right now. And somebody wouldn't have had that maybe 75 years ago, might not have even had a second pair of sheets to change out or something. Or maybe 200 years ago they would have been in the same bed with me to begin with. Like, things are a little bit better. But I'd say the costs and benefits of having a kid are probably pretty similar to that snuggle at the end is going to be similar to what.

[Louise Freely]

It would have been.

[Dean Spears]

But all these other things in life, whether for you that's education, whether for you that's work, whether for you that's playing a video game or listening to podcasts, or just sitting around in the air conditioning and not having a toothache, whatever it is that you value, it's probably a better alternative to compete with having kids than it would have been for somebody 50 or 100 years ago. And so it's just going to be a very big picture change in people's decision making. And that means that any sort of response that's going to lead us to stabilizing the population instead of depopulating is going to also have to be a pretty big picture shift.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I keep thinking of countries where they.

[Louise Freely]

Do so much for parents. I got a really close friend in Sweden and he's like, yeah, I get.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Two months off, but then I get.

[Louise Freely]

Extra time because of this. And he's not as much as my friends because I work at Apple instead of estate company.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I'm like, when are you at work ever? And then other times it's like, yeah, no, I'm sending my son to this.

[Louise Freely]

And I'm like, oh, doesn't that get expensive?

[Jordan Harbinger]

No, it's totally free daycare, free day camp, free school, free this, free college, so you don't have to pay for health insurance. You get two months off or more.

[Louise Freely]

Whatever it is, 10 weeks, I think, every year. And you don't have any daycare expenses for your kid.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But their birth rate is not increasing.

[Louise Freely]

In Sweden or Scandinavia.

[Dean Spears]

Right. All that's great and I would be excited to see that here. And Sweden's at 1.4.

[Louise Freely]

Yeah, one of the lowest in the West.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's Crazy to me. So it's not affordability, clearly not what.

[Louise Freely]

We'Re talking about here.

[Dean Spears]

Right. One of the things that we learned from examples of places like Sweden or Denmark at 1.5 or places where things are more subsidized, see low birth rates. And of course, we also see that comparing richer or poorer people within a country, within the United States or within Sweden, it's not like we see the richer people, on average, having these huge families with three or four children. We do see that richer countries tend to have lower birth rates and that as time's gone on and places have become richer, birth rates have fallen. Economists have studied young women who win the lottery and compare them with. With young women who played the lottery and maybe won a tiny prize or didn't win. And you see that young women who win the lottery don't go on to have more children than young women who didn't. And so there's a lot of evidence stacking up about the fact that it's not just money in the most direct or literal sense. Not that money might not be able to help or be part of a package of solutions, and not that children aren't, of course, expensive. But the evidence doesn't seem to suggest that just writing a check or government policy, as usual, is going to be what changes it.

[Louise Freely]

No, it's just got to be other opportunity cost, career stuff, leisure time. I want to move on to whether there'll be enough to go around. I know this is a question people have been asking for generations, but if you look at the current economic situation, the housing crisis, it does kind of seem like there might not be enough resources if we add another 20%, 25%, whatever it is, to the population over the next few centuries.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And I know we've always been talking about this. People have always been like, there's not enough.

[Louise Freely]

What was it, tungsten or something? That was a big deal when I was in high school.

[Jordan Harbinger]

We're gonna run out of light bulbs. And it's, oh, come on, really? There's no other way to make a light bulb.

[Louise Freely]

And then, I don't know, five years later, it was like, you have to buy LEDs.

[Dean Spears]

Now. There are lots of other ways to make light bulbs, right? Yeah, exactly. I mean, and remember the rappy tubicine between that and LEDs. I forget what those were called, but.

[Louise Freely]

I literally don't even. I thought those were also. There's some kind of gas in there that gets excited by the electricity and that lights up. It's on the tip of my Tongue, Right.

[Dean Spears]

So we've had two types of light bulbs since we were kids is the point. People come up with new things. Now, I want to pause for a second about adding 20% of the population, because I think one mistake that people sometimes make is to think that the alternative to increasing the population generation after generation. And there's a third possibility, and that's the one that we're arguing for. And after the spike, which is that the population stabilizes. So I don't know.

[Louise Freely]

Oh, I see. Just somewhere.

[Dean Spears]

Exactly, you know, the population's probably going to peak and begin to decline. And so then the question is, do you want that decline to continue or should it stop somewhere and maybe somewhere importantly smaller than today? Maybe 4 billion, maybe 3 billion. I mean, asking exactly what size of the population we should seek, asking exactly how many doctors or nurses a society needs. It's beyond us to answer that question precisely. Economists and sustainability studies couldn't answer it like that. But we know that it matters. And so I don't think anybody knows the exact right number at which humanity should stabilize. But as long as you think it should stabilize at some level, even a level smaller than today, even 3 billion or 2 billion, instead of falling forever, then fundamentally you'd face the same challenge. Because at that time, you would need the birth rate to be about an average of 2 for the population to stabilize. So for that to ever happen at any level, we'll need a birth rate of 2. That's a challenge that nobody knows the answer to. And it's one that all of us face who want to avoid depopulation.

[Louise Freely]

Okay, now back to light bulbs, man.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Like, we're just back to light bulbs is the strategy. Okay? We'll just.

[Louise Freely]

We're going to innovate our way around these shortages because it was like oil.

[Jordan Harbinger]

We're at peak oil.

[Louise Freely]

There's copper, tungsten. We've always innovated our way around these things.

[Dean Spears]

We might innovate if there are other people to help us find the ideas and help us find the discoveries. This is one of the reasons why depopulation matters, and we should want to avoid it, that we're all made better off by sharing the world with other people alongside us, other people who are alive before us. And that's because other people make the discoveries from that we can use. Let me give you an example of how ideas are a special type of renewable resource. The most obvious examples of technology are rich countries at the technological frontier, inventing the next iPhone or something. But high tech is not the only tech Progress happens wherever people are solving problems. And one of the most productive technologies ever conceived was invented in Bangladesh in the 1960s. In my work on sanitation in developing countries, I once visited a hospital in Dhaka called icddrb. And that hospital, in practice, because it was in Bangladesh, in Dhaka, focused a lot on cholera, on diarrheal disease, and in fact, people there called it the cholera hospital. And that's the place where doctors first mixed oral rehydration salts.

[Louise Freely]

So Gatorade, basically.

[Dean Spears]

Exactly. Gatorade. Okay, so if you've got a kid who is suffering from bad diarrhea, they could truly die if they don't have the right mixture of salt and sugar dissolved in water to prevent them from dehydrating. And it truly transformed humanity's ability to prevent children from dying of diarrhea. So you're exactly right. Today we can just go to the store and get a bottle of Gatorade or get a bottle of Pedialyte, or if you're living in Utrebrasch, you can mix it in your own kitchen from sugar and salt and water. And it truly transforms humanity's ability to keep people alive. So what's the point of this story? What does this have to do with population? So what it has to do with population is this. When you drink that bottle of Gatorade, it's gone. If you give your kid that bottle of Pedialyte, it's gone. No one else is going to ever drink that bottle again. But the formula, the recipe, and even more important, the understanding that's a way to save lives continues undiminished. And the economists who have figured out what's the ultimate driver of improving living standards, why people are less poor today, why society is safer and fairer and healthier today, have figured out that this is the key. The fact that ideas and knowledge have this property that they get used, but they don't get used up, and that the next generation can build upon them again. And so if you have more people, it's not going to consume the true driver of economic progress, which is these ideas and knowledge. Drinking more bottles of Pedialyte doesn't use it up. But if we're on a path to depopulation and there aren't enough other people, then some of the discoveries that we could come up with won't happen, and we won't be on the same path to an abundant future. We won't be on the same path to eliminating poverty.

[Louise Freely]

Yeah, what is that called when you have an innovation everyone can use? Non rival.

[Dean Spears]

Non rival, exactly. So in economics, a rival thing is something that if I use it, you can't. If you take an antibiotic pill, I can't give that antibiotic pill to my kid. But the formula for it or the germ theory of disease behind it continues undiminished.

[Louise Freely]

Okay, I want to go back to is there going to be enough? And then dive back into innovation here. What about food insecurity and human habitats?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Because we've got global warming or climate.

[Louise Freely]

Change making a lot of land uninhabitable.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Over the next century or so.

[Louise Freely]

Right. So I'm hearing about, oh, these islands are going to be gone and these.

[Jordan Harbinger]

People have to go somewhere.

[Louise Freely]

And so what about famines, for example? I mean, yes, we got to find a place for people to live. There's probably enough land, honestly, in a lot of different other areas. So I don't want to address that. But I know that we have food issues across the globe. Even the Ukraine war, it was like.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, my gosh, Africa is going to.

[Louise Freely]

Starve because the breadbasket of Europe is in war.

[Dean Spears]

It's true that there are and have been places where there hasn't been enough food to go around, but generally that's not today, in 2025, because there just simply isn't enough food in the world. It's because the food isn't getting to that place and being made available for basically political reasons, like, as you say, because of war. For decades, people have been talking about overpopulation as a cause of famine. When Paul Ehrlich published his book in 1968, the Population Bomb, he started it with the warning that there's nothing we can do now to avoid famine because the population is growing, and soon some extraordinary number of people he put, are going to starve to death every year. But the thing is, that isn't what happened. The population kept growing, and we didn't all starve to death. And in fact, there's more and better food available on every continent than there was at his time. You can measure children in poor countries like India, that children today are notably taller than children 10 years ago of the same age who are notably taller than children 10 years before them would have been because they have better food, better sanitation. In fact, just the opposite is true. Humanity's nutritional status has, on average, gone up over time as the population has gotten bigger. And so why is that? We're used to thinking of other people as eating our slice of the pieces, or that population economics is a pie, and the more people eating it, the smaller the sliver that you're going to get. But in fact, just the opposite is true, because that idea misses the fact that somebody has to bake the pie in the first place. Somebody has to make the thing. And the critical economics idea there is fixed costs. The fixed costs is the cost of anything happening at all of your business. Being open of your restaurant, being open of. Of your podcast being produced. Right? You make this podcast and there's some cost, some challenge, some opportunity cost of making it at all. But if one more person listens to it, that doesn't make it any more expensive to produce your podcast.

[Louise Freely]

Right?

[Dean Spears]

All of the costs of producing a podcast are the fixed costs of even making it in the first place. So it's nothing but good for you if twice as many people or three times as many people listen to it because it's not any more costly to produce it. But if, on the other hand, there aren't enough people listening to it, then it might not generate enough revenue to satisfy the fixed cost of it existing in the first place.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's the problem with most podcasts.

[Louise Freely]

Yes, they go overboard on production and then they get a thousand listeners and it's like, oh, there's no ROI here.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, it's great for some schmo like.

[Louise Freely]

Me who sits around under a light with a microphone in front of them with half the time, no pants on. Of course, I'm fully clothed for this.

[Jordan Harbinger]

One, but sometimes just can't be bothered. The costs are low. I pay my team fairly and pay.

[Louise Freely]

Them above market rate, but that's because I can afford to do it.

[Dean Spears]

Well, they're low, but they're not zero. And that's my point.

[Jordan Harbinger]

They're not zero. But you're right, if I double the amount of people who listen to this.

[Louise Freely]

I literally force my network to absorb my variable costs anyways. They pay for that, and they're happy to because it means they got twice as much ad inventory to sell. So, yeah, this makes sense. The restaurant example, I think, for a city makes sense, right?

[Jordan Harbinger]

You've got, like, down the street from me, there's an Ethiopian place, there's a.

[Louise Freely]

Korean place, there's a Japanese place. They're all in the same little shopping center that wouldn't have worked in the town that I grew up in, because the demand for Ethiopian food, Japanese food, and Korean food together probably isn't enough.

[Jordan Harbinger]

To sustain one restaurant that had all three, let alone three restaurants that have each.

[Louise Freely]

But here, they're thriving. Those places have been open for a long time and they're always full because there's a lot more people around here, so. Right. The fixed cost of having that around as the population grows, we can have more things. That's your argument, right?

[Dean Spears]

I mean, it's things like restaurants, it's things like media, but it's also truly important things like niche medical treatments. My mom unfortunately died of a rare form of cancer, a type of mucosal melanoma that only a few hundred people in the United States have ever had since the 70s, since they've been writing it down and basically nobody really knew what to do about it because there aren't enough people who have had this for there to have been a good study of what to do or tried and tested protocols of how to respond to it. I'm not saying that it would have solved everything. We don't want more people to have cancer. But you can see how if there aren't enough people who need the sort of medical treatment that you need, who need and want whatever it is you need and want, you're not going to get it. So other people needing and wanting what you need and want is part of what makes it possible for you to get it. A depopulating future is one where there's going to be less of you benefiting from other people wanting and needing what you want and need.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Speaking of innovation, here's some stuff other people invented that you can buy to fill the hole in your soul. We'll be right back. This episode is also sponsored by flykit. If you travel internationally a lot, well, congrat freakin lations.

[Louise Freely]

Maybe you don't have little kids, but.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Anyway, jet lag is your enemy, right? It used to steal days, even weeks from my life. Enter flykit, the jet lag game changer. I first discovered it on a trip to Bhutan. Ah, before kids, when I could actually do stuff. The trip leader swore by it and.

[Louise Freely]

At first glance it seemed like glorified vitamins and I was kind of pissed. I actually asked for a refund.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And then I tried the app and it's not hocus pocus. It's algorithm based scheduling tailored to your trip details. It tells you when to eat, when to sleep, when to take the supplements, and it's like having a personal travel health assistant in your pocket. I've tested it on multiple time zone busting trips to and from Asia and.

[Louise Freely]

Beyond and it works every single time.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Flykit is rooted in Navy Seal research and was initially designed for fighter pilots and athletes to combat inflammation that flying causes. FlyKit uses AI because of course to time everything from light exposure to meals, all tailored to your specific travel itinerary. So if you're tired of losing precious.

[Louise Freely]

Days of your life to jet lag, you've got to check out flykit.

[Jordan Harbinger]

A few of you have tried it.

[Louise Freely]

You said it was amazing.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I'm telling you, this is not just like placebo.

[Louise Freely]

Oh, I'm not tired.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I this is completely different than jet lag. It's like dealing with jet lag when you're a teenager. You almost just don't even care. Everything is in one small, organized packet.

[Louise Freely]

The app walks you through every step of the way.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Go to flykit with 2t's com that's flykit f l y k I t t.com to get a fly kit for 15% off with code jordan flykit with 2t's.com promo code jordan. Try it out on your next trip. Let me know how it lands for you.

[Louise Freely]

I want to know what you think.

[Jordan Harbinger]

This episode is also sponsored by Progressive. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice. Progressive loves to help people make smart choices. That's why they offer a tool called Auto Quote Explorer that allows you to compare your Progressive car insurance quote with rates from other companies. So you save time on the research and you can enjoy savings when you choose the best rate for you. Give it a try after this [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. I've got homes.com as a sponsor for this episode. Homes.com knows when it comes to home shopping, it's never just about the house or the condo. It's about the homes. And what makes a home is more than just the house or property. It's the location.

[Louise Freely]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Louise Freely]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Louise Freely]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

So when it comes to finding a home, not just a house, this is everything you need to know, all in1place.homes.com We've done your homework. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do which is take a moment and support the amazing sponsors. They make the show possible. All of the deals, discount codes and ways to support the podcast are searchable and Clickable over at jordanharbinger.com deals if you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you're not sure if there's a code, email us jordanordanharbinger.com we are happy to surface codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Dean Spears.

[Louise Freely]

Medications is probably the most important one, but possibly slightly abstract. I think another one that most people can relate to is phones. They're probably not going to make the iPhone 16 for 100,000 customers. It's just because each one would have to cost $100,000. And it's just the market's not there for that. Even 10 million people, they probably wouldn't make the iPhone 16. I don't know how many people have buy iPhones every year. It's a ton, and they're innovating a little bit each time.

[Dean Spears]

And it has to be a ton for it to be worth their while.

[Louise Freely]

Right. Otherwise they would just make the iPhone. We'd still be on the 3G or something like that, and they'd go, this is the phone we have for now until it stops working for everybody. We're not going to make another one. Because there's no point. There's no point in figuring out how to make this smaller with a better camera because not enough people are going to buy it. So, yeah, it's not worth it to make iPhone 16 for that amount of people.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You want more people to do that.

[Dean Spears]

And you do see specialized mobile phones, for example. Poor people in a place like Uttar Pradesh, like, optimized to not have to be charged very often or to what somebody there needs, because if enough millions of people will buy it, then it is worth the fixed cost of developing it.

[Louise Freely]

Endogenous economic growth, I think was the term you used in the book. So more people generate more ideas. Does that give places like China and India an advantage just due to sheer population size, or is it kind of like. Well, it depends on how many stem people you have, et cetera, et cetera.

[Dean Spears]

Yeah, I mean, possibly. But I think part of the value of ideas is that they spread across borders. And I'm not going to claim that happens perfectly. And some of the most interesting research right now happening in endogenous technological progress is studying how, for example, when scientists move from Europe to the United States to be closer to their collaborators. You see them suddenly start getting more patents. And you know, that's the way that economists measure scientific progress, is more patents. So all of which is to say international borders and where people are certainly matters. But at the biggest picture, with this idea that more people cause more innovation and more technological progress, what I want to suggest is that it doesn't exactly matter who you are or where you are. It just happens because of what people are doing in the course of people's business. A nurse treating a new baby and a mom giving them their standard lactation consulting advice to promote breastfeeding. And then they have an idea like, hey, maybe if we tie the baby onto the mom this way, that's going to keep it warm and keep it safe. And then that's a new idea that people can sew the same tie on, wrap and do it all over the world and save more lives. And so it's not just the rare geniuses or luminaries working in one place. It's not that ideas stay bottled up in the place where people come up with them. It's something that gets widely shared.

[Louise Freely]

Is your argument that depopulation will result in fewer ideas?

[Dean Spears]

Depopulation will result in fewer ideas, fewer innovations and bouts of creativity. Then we won't be making the same sort of progress towards higher living standards, against new forms of cancer, against poverty that we otherwise would. And it could be even worse than that. It could be not just a missing out on progress, but we also need one another to curate and teach the ideas that we have. Think of how much of society's GDP goes into teaching and organizing ideas. Both old fashioned ways like universities, new ways like podcasts. A lot of what we do is make ideas useful for one another. And so it could be worse than merely not discovering ideas. It could be that if there aren't enough other people to learn from and curate the ideas, then we actually lose some knowledge that could have been useful for us.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Won't AI make up for some of this?

[Louise Freely]

It seems like AI will eventually be able to come up with tons of new ideas, spread things faster, make our systems more efficient. It seems like AI could probably make up for some of this. And I have other counterarguments, but I'm curious what you think of the AI idea. Maybe it's too hyped up.

[Dean Spears]

Yeah, nobody knows exactly how productive AI is going to be. You have economists who are optimistic, who think it might raise GDP by a number like 7% or more. Skeptical ones like Daron Acemoglu who thinks like 1%. But what I want us to get away from is thinking that making up for a loss of people is good enough. Because the progress that we have right now, the living standards we have right now, that's not good enough. There's still a lot of poverty in the world. And even for those of us who are more privileged, things could be better. So what matters is, do we continue making the progress that we could make? And are other people still going to be important to making that progress, even in a future with AI? So I think the real question is AI going to make people more productive? So many technologies in the past have made people more productive. So Daron Acemoglu, an economist at mit, tells the story about the Industrial Revolution. And one type of technology that came along was to spin wool and to making thread. And once that technology came along, nobody ever did that work anymore. That was a substitute for humans. Humans went and did something else, presumably productive in the economy. But another type of technology was the industrial factory itself or the water wheel driving an industrial factory. And what that technology did is made humans more productive. It was a compliment to humans. And so if AI is the sort of technology that makes humans more productive, which it seems very likely to be, so many other technologies all the way from computers on the one hand to pencils on the other, have made humans more productive. In fact, if AI makes humans more productive, then you care all the more about there being a larger population alongside with you, because it matters all the more that people could make more progress.

[Louise Freely]

Okay, can't we just invest more in the people that we have? I know the total number probably matters, but doesn't 1000 or 100,000 PhD AI STEM people out compete 1 million ditch diggers?

[Dean Spears]

Yes, we can and should invest more in the people that we have. And over the next, say six decades, until the2880s, while we're moving towards the population to peak, we should be. That's not just investing more in education, but in sort of early life health that helps people grow to their potential. But what we're talking about here is one of the longest term challenges humanity faces and whether we want to be making longest term progress. And so eventually we're going to get to a future where people have the health and nutrition they need at the start of life, people have the education they need at the start of life. And it matters how many of us there are.

[Louise Freely]

You wrote in the book about how humans versus other mammals as a species kind of are different.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And I think we very much might kill ourselves via disasters and reproduction.

[Louise Freely]

Before we get to the depopulation thing.

[Jordan Harbinger]

We have to be the only species.

[Louise Freely]

To figure out, one, healthcare, and two, how to limit our own fertility.

[Dean Spears]

We've changed both our mortality rates and our fertility rates. It used to be that maybe a quarter or more of children died in childhood, and now, at least in places like Austin, Texas, that's a much tinier fraction. And what other animal has managed to do that? And similarly, what other animal would have lowered their birth rates from a number like 6, 200 years ago to a global number like 2.3 now? So it is a way that we're unlike other animals. If the global birth rate does go below two and stay there, then there will only be so many humans ever born. There have so far only been so many humans ever born. Demographers estimate it that it's a number like 120 billion. And so I don't have a crystal ball. I don't know exactly where below 2 the global birth rate might go. But if it goes anywhere below 2, then we're going to end up with a number on the order of 30 billion future births ever happening. And so, 30 billion future births, 120 past births, that would mean that humanity is 4/5 over in the sense of 4/5 of birth already happening. And that's something that you don't really see other animals deciding to do.

[Louise Freely]

Yeah, that's a good point. Are larger populations better able to withstand potential extinction? I mean, it seems like that should be a given, Right? If we get hit by an asteroid and it kills 90% of the population, 10% remaining of 10 billion is more than 10% of 2 billion. I don't know.

[Dean Spears]

And another possibility is that deflecting an asteroid could be a challenge that you need to do it once and for all.

[Louise Freely]

Right.

[Dean Spears]

And so if one asteroid is coming and we need to send up one rocket ship to deflect it one time, then who's going to be more likely to succeed at that grand challenge? Humanity that has 5 billion people, or humanity that has 5 million people? Clearly the 5 billion society is going to be more likely to build the rocket ship they need or overcome the challenges they need, or simply have enough workers to make it happen. So absolutely, there are some grand challenges that have this fixed cost feature that a larger population would be more likely to succeed.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. What about carbon removal?

[Louise Freely]

This is an interesting argument. So that number is fixed, Right? So more people to remove the carbon in the future is less cost per person.

[Dean Spears]

Exactly. That's another example of this. So someday we're going to reach net zero carbon emissions and an extra person won't be putting more carbon into the atmosphere. And so then what happens after that? Hopefully what happens after that is negative emissions that we do. Intentional activities, planting forests, weathering to take the carbon out of the atmosphere. But that's going to be costly. It's going to require people to choose to do that instead of doing something else with their time and their money. And so the more people there are at that time, the bigger the economy and the population, the cheaper per person it's going to be to decarbonize in the sense of negative carbonize and take carbon out of the atmosphere. And this is one of those cases where we discovered this by accident. Serendipitously. We were taking the climate economy model that Bill Nordhaus used for his Nobel Prize winning work to think about what the optimal carbon tax should be. We were using it to ask a different question, which is how does it matter whether we're on a future path of depopulation or a path of population stabilization? Doesn't make a difference. And what we found to our surprise, is that when we just did the simplest thing of plug the two population paths into the model, we found a slightly lower eventual long term temperature in the larger population. At first we thought that must have been a mistake. We sent our postdoc research scientist back into the code to figure out what we did wrong. And the answer was this possibility of negative emissions or someday taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, that if there are more future people, they can do more of that.

[Louise Freely]

Okay, so a bigger world is a better world. Is that something that you support? I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but where does that bigger is better idea start to break? Do we add 50 billion people to the Earth? Maybe not.

[Dean Spears]

Yeah, I think that would be way far outside of what we have science or experience to be able to say that 50 billion people would be better. But something like 50 billion people just isn't on the table. It's outside possibility. The size of the population is almost certainly going to peak and begin to decline. Our practical question that we face is do we want to start thinking about strategies to stop that decline, to stabilize the population somewhere, and if so, where? But 50 billion people, I don't think there's any sort of path that might get us there.

[Louise Freely]

So if depopulation is global, are the Amish and the Mormons just going to inherit the earth? They have a lot of kids.

[Dean Spears]

That's a question we get a lot they have fewer kids than they used to. The birth rate for Utah as a whole, where there are a lot of Mormons, is now below 2. The birth rate for Amish people is lower than it was a few decades ago. And when I say something like the birth rate for Amish people is lower than it was a few decades ago, that doesn't count the people who left and stopped being Amish. And so when you have this question, like, I've got this small group of people that has unusually high birth rates, are they going to take over the whole world? The answer is probably not, because you would need their children to continue having high birth rates and their children to continue having high birth rates and for everyone to stay in the fold generation after generation. Don't forget, the Catholics of Quebec and Canada in the mid 20th century had an extremely high birth rate. Numbers like 9, 10, 11 children were not unheard of. And today Quebec is on average below 2. So even though you have a subgroup with a really high birth rate doesn't mean it's going to stick.

[Louise Freely]

Yeah, that makes sense. Come on, Mormons, we're counting on you. I guess I should speak to the Amish too, but I'm going to go ahead and guess. A very small number of Amish people are listening to this podcast. It's funny, I said something about Amish people a while ago and I got a bunch of emails from Amish people. I guess they do this rumspringer where they can go join the world for a couple of years and they pick up podcasts. Must be kind of slow out there in the beginning of your rumspringer when you're downloading podcasts.

[Jordan Harbinger]

All right, what about other concerns I.

[Louise Freely]

Should say about how to increase population, government programs like free.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Doesn't Israel have free ivf?

[Dean Spears]

So Israel did make IVF free. And so one question we sometimes get is how much of this could be fixed with physical technology, with just, let's say artificial wombs, for example?

[Louise Freely]

That's a better question. Pretend I asked you that question instead.

[Dean Spears]

Yes, I like, you don't even have to have the pregnancy to have the baby. And Israel's example of free IVF tells us something important, because what actually happened when Israel did this is that you saw women getting married later and forming families later and starting to have kids later because more of them felt, I'll be able to have one kid instead of zero kids. And that's what matters. People are less focused on being able to have two kids instead of one kid, for example. And so if you feel like you've got it covered, that you're going to be able to have one kid, maybe you just start your whole parenting part of your life later. And so if IVF is suddenly freely available to you, then that's great. That makes you better off. But society as a whole might not see more people having children if they're just delaying having children because what's important to them is to have at least one. But I mean, another question is how many people actually get to those ages and want to have more children than they biologically can? It's truly important for some people. My own family, my spouse and I had three miscarriages. It was terrible. Statistically, in the population as a whole, we don't see that many people who are getting to their 40s and really wanting to have more kids.

[Louise Freely]

No, you're right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And also, man, supporting parents is actually.

[Louise Freely]

Hard and very expensive. It's the childcare, the healthcare, the education. Solving these externalities requires collective action that we're just not really willing to take. It's just sort of easier for a country to solve this on the national level by saying, come live here. We have lower taxes, a higher standard of living, better healthcare than where you're.

[Jordan Harbinger]

From, and you should come live here.

[Louise Freely]

And then we get immigrants that are qualified to come and do certain kinds of work in our country, but that's at the cost of their own country. Right? I mean, the brain drain, right?

[Dean Spears]

It's not going to work for the world as a whole.

[Louise Freely]

Exactly. So I see how this is sort of a game that's being played nationally. It's quite interesting.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So the recommendation is stabilize. What does that mean?

[Louise Freely]

Population's not going up. It's also not going down. Do you have a theory on how we do that? Or is it just, yeah, this is somebody else's problem. My book's about overpopulation.

[Dean Spears]

I think it's everybody's problem.

[Louise Freely]

Nice deflection.

[Dean Spears]

I think right now a lot of people still think that we're headed towards overpopulation. Now, a lot of people still worry that there are going to be too many people. And even if they don't think there are too many people, they would say, well, great, depopulation is something to welcome. And so I don't think we can get too far ahead of that in this conversation. We need to start from there and say, hey, let's think about whether depopulation is the future should welcome. And if not, maybe let's work on building a consensus that stabilizing the population would be a better alternative. So I think it's far too soon to be jumping to a policy prescription. I mean, we've already seen it probably won't work. But more importantly, if we're really going to change what it is to be a parent, make parenting more feasible, make parenting more fair, if we're really going to share the work of making the next generation so that more people feel like they can fit parenting in, that's going to be a big social change. And it's not going to happen unless many of us think that it's a good idea. And many of us think that depopulation is something to avoid. So don't call your senator. Instead, go talk to your buddy or your sister or something like that and say, what do you think about this? Do you think depopulation is something to welcome?

[Louise Freely]

A lot of my friends who are not planning to have kids, frankly wonder why they should bring a child into a world that's full of wars and ecological disaster and lack of resources for some people. But Steven Pinker was on the show, and he explained that we're healthier, safer.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And better educated than we ever have been in history.

[Dean Spears]

If you spend a lot of time going to a place like Uttar Pradesh, India, you can truly see it. Their economic growth and progress isn't just a statistic on a page. It's children being more likely to survive. It's children growing taller. It's kids having shoes who wouldn't have had shoes 10 years ago? The world. We have important setbacks and important challenges. And the ones that we've talked about today, both climate change and child diarrhea are amongst them. But that doesn't mean that a life today isn't better, on average, for the world as a whole than any life has ever been. And so I do think that a life in the future is likely to be well worth living. And that's one of the reasons that counts. We've been talking about how other people's lives are good for you, that you benefit from them existing. Part of the story is that other people's lives are good for them, too. And one of the things that we would lose in a depopulating future is that a lot of lives that could be really great wouldn't happen.

[Louise Freely]

Yeah, I suppose that's the core of the theory here.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I used to think that it was.

[Louise Freely]

Just uncertainty that causes people not to have kids, but I guess it can't be that, because people who live in poverty and in other countries have way more uncertainty than I do in Silicon Valley, and they have more kids than we do, so it's very confusing. It's really obvious that there are many.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Causes to this and you can't maybe.

[Louise Freely]

Even address each one, or at least it'd be very challenging to address each one individually.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I don't hold out a ton of hope that this is a problem that's.

[Louise Freely]

Going to get solved. It's almost like the carbon thing where you go, yeah, we should definitely do something about that. Hopefully those other guys go first and, oh, I think we need a little elbow room around here. I'm going to be dead before this is a real concern anyway. And it's like, well, okay, you have the Natalists who are like, I have to have 13 kids and you should have 13 kids, too. But for every one of those, there's millions of people that are like, no, thank you. They're too expensive, and I'd rather play Xbox at night than change diapers.

[Dean Spears]

Yeah. I think when we talk about whether to be optimistic or pessimistic, I think the example of climate change is a good one in another way, too, which is that we're talking about a change that might unfold six decades from now. And there was a time six decades ago when climate change was a change that was going to unfold decades in the future. And six decades ago, in the 1960s, people knew some big picture facts about climate change. People knew that. Not everybody knew, but some people knew that burning fossil fuels puts carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and that's going to lead to warming. And they wouldn't have known all the details, so. But they would have known there's going to be big problems. And so scientists were collecting data on CO2 concentrations. In the 60s, Johnson gave a speech to Congress about pollutants including carbon dioxide. If you'd gone outside then, or if you'd gone on their equivalent of a podcast and said, hey, this is a big deal, it's coming in a few decades and what we need to do right now is immediately get rid of everyone's internal combustion engines. Then you would have sounded ridiculous in the 1960s and nobody would have listened to your next sentence. But what actually happened, with a lot of conflict and setbacks and grittiness, is that people started doing the science, people started doing the social science. We developed journals like Nature Climate Change and Social Movements and Political movements. And it's not that everything's perfect now, but we're in a much better position six decades later today than we would have been if people hadn't been doing all of that work all along, even though they only knew some big picture things and not the answers. So we only know some big picture things and not all the details. But that gives me hope that if we get started talking about this and working towards something new now, a few decades from now, we might know a lot more than we do today.

[Louise Freely]

This seems tough, man, because as I alluded to earlier, countries that are actually in a position to do something about this, in many ways, like the United States, it's an easier lever to go. How do we make more immigrants come here? How do we make it easier?

[Dean Spears]

Or who can we blame? Can we blame women? Can we blame, who can we blame?

[Louise Freely]

Yeah, we're already doing that part. But we could say, all right, more H1B visas. All right, we're going to come up with a labor visa that's going to let people come in to work on farms and things like that, or in restaurants, things that we are having trouble staffing.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's sort of a problem that's really.

[Louise Freely]

Easy, relatively speaking, to solve versus trying to get people to have more kids.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Here in the United States.

[Louise Freely]

So I hate to say it, but it's essentially a problem where a country like the US can go, we can make this Central and South America's problem with the stroke of a pen. Why would we try and solve it?

[Dean Spears]

But I mean, not forever, right? Because don't forget Latin America is below 2 and Sub Saharan Africa is still above 2. But it's falling there too. So it's just kicking the can down the road. Eventually the countries where migrants come from are going to have birth rates below 2 if they don't already. And so it's only a delay, not a solution.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But man, you can really kick that can quite far.

[Dean Spears]

You can delay for a long.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's right, because there's a world in.

[Louise Freely]

Which the entire continent of South America is essentially depopulated. Aside from the people that insist on staying.

[Dean Spears]

You and I aren't going to see how this plays out six decades from now.

[Louise Freely]

Exactly. In a few centuries. It could just be, hey, people don't.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Want to live in a place that is either flooded with ocean water or.

[Louise Freely]

Super, super hot and you can't grow anything. And they just all moved to air conditioned Europe and the U.S. and so those countries are okay because they've got their population is stable, but every other country that was on the bottom of that ladder just is extinct now. You can go to Guatemala, it's a giant national park, there's nobody there. Something like that. That's not impossible either. It's almost easier for that to happen in my imagination than it is to solve this problem in the United States with some sort of magical set of policies.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's fun to think about.

[Louise Freely]

Maybe I'm glad I'll be dead by the time this is a real problem.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Maybe that's the real good news.

[Louise Freely]

At the end of this podcast is every one of you list to this is probably going to be underground by the time this is actually an issue.

[Dean Spears]

I don't know. You don't think you have teenager listeners?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, they're going to be 90 or 100, and they'll be like, oh, yeah.

[Louise Freely]

There'S not enough people. Oh, well, let's play mahjong again.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Teenagers are. I'm going to go ahead and go out on a limb and say they are not super worried about what's going.

[Louise Freely]

To happen in 60 years, because when I was a teenager, that really wasn't on my radar either.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Dean, thank you for coming on.

[Louise Freely]

Unique viewpoint on this.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I think most people, myself included, before.

[Louise Freely]

Hearing this, really was like, we need less people, not more.

[Dean Spears]

Thank you so much for having me. I just want to say I think that was the most fun one of these I've done yet.

[Louise Freely]

Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate that.

[Jordan Harbinger]

How do you earn the trust of a violent outlaw gang knowing the whole time you're going to betray them? Jay Dobbins didn't just infiltrate the Hells Angels. He became one of them, living a lie so deep it nearly consumed him.

[E]

The Hells Angels in Arizona were operating violently and with impunity. No one was really checking them. And so I was approached by a case agent. He was a savage of an investigator, and he approaches me and he says, I want you to lead this undercover investigation, and we're going to get side by side with the Hell's Angels. My first reaction was like, I'm not the right guy. I had already started crossing paths with members of the Hell's Angels. Not as targets, just in the criminal community in that society. He's like, dude, you got a head start. You'll figure out how to play the game. They already know who you are. We don't have to start from scratch. You know, I jumped in, and my mentality on this job was always dangerous boys go to dangerous places. ATF didn't hire me to sit at a desk and do a computer investigation. They hired me to get out and get in the weeds and get down and dirty. The Hell's Angels, they have historically bled and died in defense and fighting for that that is their religion. It's more important than their wives or girlfriends, than their kids, than their jobs, than their house, their income. There's nothing more important to those true believers then that Hell's Angels name and that death head logo. And they are very much willing to die for it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

In this episode we unpack the fake crimes, real danger and brutal psychological cost of going all in undercover. Check out episodes 1111 and 1112 for more with Jay Dobbins.

[Louise Freely]

I don't know man.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I like to listen to experts but for some reason all that extra elbow room and all that less pollution on.

[Louise Freely]

Earth, it does seem like a good idea.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Now I am afraid that ideas would slow down, but I'm also thinking that AI and technology could make up for some of this.

[Louise Freely]

Again, I have done zero research on this aside from reading this book.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So listen to experts. I wonder what you all think of this. I'm curious what other experts and what you listeners who are quite educated as a bunch think about this as well. All things Dean Spierce will be in the show [e-mail], advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show [e-mail] deals Please consider supporting those who support this show. Also our newsletter. We bit wiser. You guys love reading it. We love writing it. The idea is to give you something specific and practical that'll have an immediate.

[Louise Freely]

Impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's like a two minute read promise. And if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out.

[Louise Freely]

It's a great companion to the show.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Jordanharbinger.com news is where you can find it.

[Louise Freely]

Don't forget about six minute [e-mail] I'm.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Ordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram or connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sidlowskis, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends. When you find something useful or interesting, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in population, population growth, population crashes, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn and.

[Louise Freely]

We'Ll see you next time.