Speaker unverified: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I do. I’m sure you do. I mean, an implementable answer that works that we know we can get everybody on board with. It seems like, for a large part of human history, having children, and it still is, having children is awesome, and children are cool and children are magical and miraculous and all of this, but you didn’t really have much competing for your attention to have a child. When you hit a certain age and you started working, especially if you’re a woman, I mean, childbirth is kind of the next step. And then having a family, raising your children, and then doing that was kind of the next step. Nowadays, especially with women being able to work, especially with women having access to birth control, there’s a lot available in the world that’s competing for the interest of people that could otherwise be having children such that we’ve almost flipped it, such that, as Ben brought up earlier, wealthy people tend to have less children than not wealthy people, or unless you’re part of particular religious communities that push childbirth a lot. I don’t know if I would say there exists a moral imperative on an individual to have children. I think that there’s a lot of interesting arguments down that path. I don’t know if we’re quite at the point yet where we need to say like, oh my God, we’re running out of people. We need to have more kids. I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but we are seeing weird demographic trends that are having big impacts on how countries are playing out. For instance, the fact that we have a disproportionately huge aging population that needs to be taken care of with medical expenses and everything, that vote in different ways than our younger population, and that when they die off, the way that society is going to look is going to be a lot different. I don’t actually have a, I’m not entirely sure what the future’s going to look like in terms of pushing people to have kids when every single industrialized country, as they become more industrialized, have fewer and fewer and fewer children. Rapid fire questions.…

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