CultureFriday 08.05.22

Elon Musk claims the world is facing a potential population collapse due to low birth rates.

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MUSK: What we face is called population collapse. Collapse. Like, people have no idea how fast the population’s going to collapse.

FULL SEND: What are we trending at?

MUSK: Japan is pretty far along in that, like Japan actually lost, like, went down by 600,000 people last year.

TFULL SEND: The Japanese are not in the bedroom at all, then we're not alone.

MUSK: It would seem not.

FULL SEND: What about, what about the u.s. we gotta increase, right?

Yeah, most likely. The US has been below replacement rates for 50 years. The only reason population has increased..

FULL SEND: Since like yearly in the 70s?

MUSK: Yes. Is the early 70s since, like ‘71, ‘72.

FULL SEND: Why are we spewed with all this BS, like yeah, we're overpopulating but the population’s growing, right?

MUSK: No it's not. So I mean we should say, the, like, lifespan is increasing. People are living longer, that's the only reason why the population of Earth isn’t plummeting but it will plummet. So you know, just like one thing, one metric to track is the ratio of adult diapers to baby diapers. Like at what point does a country have more adult diapers than baby diapers? And like Japan went past that point over 10 years ago.

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