It was a bet between a sick, twisted, malevolent entomologist masquerading as a demographic
expert who called babies a disaster and was wrong about literally everything he ever predicted.
And a pro-human, life-affirming economist who switched from team death to team life
when he realized that the ultimate resource, that is humanity's capacity for ingenuity
and adaptation, was something to be celebrated, not something to be decried as our would-be-overlords
bid us do.
It was a bet, in other words, between good and evil.
Paul Ehrlich bet against humanity.
Julian Simon bet on humanity.
Now here's the awkward part for the psychopaths and twisted individuals in establishment media
and academic circles who seek to curry favor with the would-be social engineers by being
so against humanity, Julian Simon won the bet, and that's precisely why you've never heard
about it.
Let's fix that.
Today on The Corbett Report, we're going to do a deep dive on the most important bet
you've never heard of.
You're listening to The Corbett Report.
The first thing that should happen is that the president ought to say, from now here
on out, no intelligent patriotic American family ought to have more than two children
preferably one, if you're starting a family now.
Not any law, but just say, this is what responsible people do.
You ought to make the FCC see to it that large families are always treated in a negative
light on television wherever they appear.
There ought to be a tremendous amount of television time devoted to spot commercials,
the sort we've had against smoking, but the ones in the middle say, in the middle
of Beverly Hillbillies, you get a scene which shows Los Angeles in the smog, and
it just says, this city has a fatal disease.
It's called overpopulation, and so long.
Now that sort of campaign, you could have a census, a sample census, which would see whether
that was having a desired effect.
If that didn't, you could move to giving women bonuses for not having babies.
That almost certainly would do the job.
If that didn't have the effect, then you could move to changing the tax structure
so that people who had the money and had the children paid for the children.
In other words, you would increase taxes on people with children rather than decrease,
and since when they have the children, they require more services.
If that doesn't work, then you'll have the government legislating the size of the family,
and people say, oh, that's impossible.
Government can never intrude and tell you how many children to have.
Well, I got news.
You know, it intruded a long time ago and told you how many wives you can have,
and there's not the slightest question that if we don't get the population under control
with voluntary means that in the not-too-distant future,
the government will simply tell you how many children you can have
and throw you in jail if you have too many.
Welcome back, friends.
Welcome back to another edition of The Corbett Report.
I'm your host, James Corbett of CorbettReport.com,
coming to you as always from the sunny climbs of Western Japan here in late March of 2026.
With episode 496 of The Corbett Report podcast,
the most important bet you've never heard of.
Now, as I am sure that my well-informed listeners and viewers are well aware,
that was a snippet of an interview conducted with Dr. Paul Erlich by WOITV of Ames, Iowa
in April of 1970, aka that period of time, that strange and interesting period,
where this otherwise obscure entomologist, aka bug scientist,
was rocketing to worldwide fame on the back of the success of his 1968
fear-mongering, hype-filled book of doom saying called The Population Bomb,
and his subsequent appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson
and other media outlets.
Yes, in that strange time, late 1960s, early 1970s, Paul Erlich became
the government-approved establishment media-sanctioned academic superstar
who was allowed to pronounce on the fate of humanity however wrong he was in those pronouncements.
As I say, I'm sure that my well-informed audience is aware of Paul Erlich
and his infamous career of predicting things that did not come to pass,
time and time and time and time again throughout the years,
but if not, you can get caught up to speed, not only with his recent death and our recent
pronouncements on that in the recent edition of New World Next Week.
Erlich contributes to the depopulation agenda with James Evan Pallotto of mediumonarchy.com,
but of course you can also consult episode 339 of the Corbett Report podcast
on Meet Paul Erlich, pseudoscience charlatan.
Erlich was many things, but cautious and understated he was not.
The Population Bomb opens with the lines,
the battle to feed all of humanity is over.
In the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death
in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.
And it only got worse from there.
As far as petroleum goes, you all know that where the action is there,
we're running out rapidly, some estimates are it'll all be gone by the year 2000
and conflict over that is getting to be rather serious.
You just got to remember this, there's no way out of the arithmetic,
there will never be seven billion people in the year 2000.
Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come and by the end,
I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.
Incredibly, these predictions of doomsday are no mere aberrations in the career of an otherwise
careful and understated researcher.
In fact, they barely scratch the surface of the catalogue of Erlich's ridiculous
and ridiculously wrong chicken little pronouncements.
Speaking at the Institute of Biology in London in 1969,
Erlich opined that if I were a gambler,
I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.
Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,
Erlich told Mademoiselle magazine in 1970.
The death rate will increase until at least 100 to 200 million people per year
will be starving to death during the next 10 years.
And what of the decade after that?
Writing about the great die-off in the pages of the Progressive in April 1970,
Erlich warned that 4 billion people would starve to death in the 1980s,
including 65 million Americans.
Most remarkable of all, decades of being spectacularly wrong
have not stopped Erlich from continuing to spread his particularly distasteful brand of doom porn.
He was back at it just this past March,
assuring readers of The Guardian that overpopulation means that the collapse of civilization itself
is a near certainty in the next few decades.
If only Paul Erlich was an unsuccessful charlatan,
barking his end of the world predictions like a madman on a street corner,
it may be possible to dismiss him as a harmless crank.
But rather than being shunned as a charlatan,
Erlich has been embraced by the respectable scientific community.
He has been awarded the Kraftward Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences,
the World Ecology Award from the University of Missouri,
the Distinguished Scientist Award of the American Institute of Biological Sciences,
as well as prizes and awards from the Sierra Club,
the World Wildlife Fund, the United Nations and a slew of other organizations.
He was awarded a MacArthur Prize Fellowship and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2012.
He continues to deliver lectures around the world and is still sought after for comment
on population and ecology issues by mainstream media outlets,
and he currently holds the position of being Professor of Population Studies
of the Department of Biology at Stanford University.
But none of this, not the consistently wrong predictions,
not the fear mongering, not the accolades and career success,
is as concerning as Erlich's ultimate solution
for the problem of overpopulation that he claims to detail.
Hi, my question is for Paul Erlich.
Do you have any regrets about urging developed countries
to use their political power to coerce vulnerable countries
into drastic population control programs,
having heard of the atrocities in India and China?
Yes, definitely. If I were writing the,
Van and I were writing the Population Bomb again today,
we'd write it differently.
Sometimes you make mistakes.
I think that was a mistake.
I don't think the recent thing that the Chinese,
are you going to have a question later on the Chinese policy?
No, please, you can go on.
I'm not trying to censor what you're saying.
No, no, no, that's all right.
I think the main problem with the Chinese stopping,
I think, their one child family program
is the moral hazard one.
That is the Chinese,
it's not going to increase their family size very much.
We know now that in the past,
they probably would have gotten to the same place
if they had not had the relatively coercive program.
It's still much debated.
But some of the things we did not recommend,
we said these are the sorts of things
that have been suggested or could be done.
A good example is we said in one of our publications
that it would be one of the things that might be good
if you could do it safely and biologically safely
would be to add something to the water supply,
excuse my laryngitis,
add something to the water supply,
that would make you have to take an antidote
before you can have a baby.
And everybody said, that's just terrible, that's ghastly.
Ghastly?
Did it get rid of the whole abortion problem?
Get rid of the whole unwanted child problem?
Make people make rational decisions?
It's certainly one of the things that every government
must pay great attention to
is the size and composition of its population.
It's probably the number one thing
that should be in government policy.
It at least is discussed in Australia.
In the United States, you can't even dare discuss it.
Protestations aside, forced sterilization programs
were indeed something that Erlich discussed frequently
and in great detail in his early work
on the population issue.
That is, before the public fully realized
the horrors of his ostensible solution
to the population crisis.
In 1969, the New York Times reported
how Erlich had told the United States Commission
for UNESCO that
the government might have to put
sterility drugs in reservoirs
and in food ship to foreign countries
to limit human multiplication.
A 1972 article in the Boca Raton News
noting this proposal,
decried Erlich as worse than Hitler
and pointed out how he opposed efforts
to lift the Chinese out of poverty.
It also quoted him as suggesting
that some form of world governance
was going to be necessary to institute
international policy planning
to save the globe.
But most damning of all is Ecoscience,
a 1977 textbook co-authored by Paul Erlich,
his wife Anne, and John P. Holdren
who would go on to become Obama's science czar.
In this book, they not only double down
on the idea of adding sterilence
to the water supply,
noting that no such sterilent exists today
and lamenting that it would have to clear
a number of technical hurdles
in order to be acceptable,
but they actually go so far as to argue
the constitutionality of population control
and even forced abortions,
concluding that such a practice
could be sustained under the existing constitution.
In this book, they also greatly elaborate
on the type of world governmental body
that would be required to enact
a truly global population control program,
calling it a planetary regime,
which they describe as sort of an international super agency
for population resources and environment.
They argue that it could control the development,
administration, conservation,
and distribution of all natural resources,
renewable or non-renewable,
at least insofar as international implications exist,
including all international trade
and all food on the international market.
The planetary regime might be given responsibility
for determining the optimum population for the world
and for each region
and for arbitrating various country shares
within their national limits.
Control of population size
might remain the responsibility of each government,
but the regime would have some power
to enforce the agreed limits.
As I say, I'm sure that my well-informed
listeners and viewers already know,
at least a little bit about Paul Ehrlich
and his incredible track record
of getting everything he ever pronounced completely,
100% demonstrably wrong,
and yet being lauded in the establishment media
as some sort of scientific hero for doing so.
But if you aren't aware of that story,
then yes, please, absolutely,
you should check out Episode 339 of the Corporate Report
on Meet Paul Ehrlich's Pseudo-Science charlatan
because I go into that story in great depth.
And also introduce another character
who is the other side of today's eponymous bet,
namely Julian Simon,
a professor of economics and business administration
at the University of Illinois in the 1960s, 70s, 80s,
as at the exact same time as Paul Ehrlich was operating,
who, like Ehrlich, became very interested
in the question of population and natural resources,
and who, like Ehrlich, started from that Malthusian world view
that there are too many people
and we must find a way to reduce that number,
but ended up coming to a very different conclusion.
I came here to Washington
to enlist the aid of the State Department's
Agency for International Development, AID,
in an experiment to pay people in India
to have fewer children.
Because I, as so many other people then,
as almost everybody then, and as still most people now,
thought that fewer people would be a good thing
and that population growth was one of the great threats
to humankind along with war.
And as I was waiting for this appointment,
I leaned over the balcony, it was a spring day,
and I saw a sign pointing to the Iwo Jima Memorial.
And I remembered reading about the Jewish chaplain
giving a eulogy at Iwo Jima and saying,
I wonder how many Mozart, Mozart's, and Einstein's,
and Leonardo da Vinci's we are burying here today.
That moved me when I read it,
it moves me when I think about it now,
and then I got to think,
what am I doing in this business
trying to have fewer human beings on the face of the earth,
which may mean fewer Einstein's, fewer Leonardo's, and so on.
So that moment was a big shock to me, yes indeed.
It happened about the same time that I first came across this
evidence suggesting that more human beings,
more rapid population growth,
did not mean poor economic development.
So the two things went hand in hand.
Now, hopefully my audience is aware of Julian Simon and his work,
if only because I have had cause to mention it a number of times here
on the Corbett Report,
not only for example in the aforementioned Episode 339 of this podcast,
but also in my important but often neglected questions for Corbett
on are there limits to growth?
So if you are interested,
if you do not remember that episode,
or if you didn't see it at the time,
please consult the transcript for today's episode
at corporatereport.com slash the bet for a link directly to that episode.
But long story short, yes,
Julian Simon had a very, in fact,
precisely contradictory view of human population growth
as compared to Paul Ehrlich and the Ehrlich's of the world generally.
But if you don't know about Julian Simon or his ideas,
well, you're not to be blamed for that.
I suppose it isn't hard to see why Ehrlich became a media superstar
and Simon was shunted off into obscurity.
And there are a couple of reasons for that.
First and most easily understood is that Paul Ehrlich's idea,
his argument, his fundamental argument for population growth bad,
is so simple that a five-year-old can understand it.
I want candy.
That boy ate candy.
Now there's no candy.
Is a very simple argument, but it is also very simplistic.
Julian Simon's counter to that, however,
is not at all intuitive, but is actually demonstrably correct
and much more insightful.
Namely, the observation that as growing population
puts greater demand on various resources,
the human ingenuity that is used to devise solutions
to that problem of growing demand,
whether that be better methods for extracting
or refining or using materials
or finding alternative materials, et cetera,
actually leaves humanity better off
than it was before that problem arose.
As I say, that is not at all intuitive,
but it is not only insightful.
It is demonstrably correct.
Any resource that you can think of is orders of magnitude
cheaper for us to procure today
than it was for our ancestors a century or two centuries
or a millennia ago.
That's again, not something that most people understand right away.
It has to be explained to them.
And undoubtedly, there are still those who need explanation
about that, which is why you should see
are their limits to growth.
But the other, and perhaps even more obvious answer
to why Erlich became the superstar,
who was the one all the accolades and awards
and was the scientist, the expert that we all had to listen to,
whereas Simon is a footnote in the history of economics,
is because Erlich was the mouthpiece
for the psychopathic, malevolent,
anti-human social engineers
who want to engineer their hatred of humanity into us
so that we begin to desire our own extinction.
That is why Erlich became the media darling.
And I guess, again, there are many things to say about this,
but one thing that needs to be clarified
is that me calling Erlich wrong about everything
and Simon was the one who had it right
is not just a matter of opinion, it's a matter of fact.
And that revolves around the bet that this podcast is about.
So what was that bet?
How did it arise and what was the wager?
The celebrity environmentalist and the little known skeptic
collided directly at the end of the 1970s,
ending the decade locked in a bet
that would leave their legacies forever intertwined.
In 1980, Simon challenged Erlich in
social science quarterly to a contest
that directly tested their competing visions of the future,
one apocalyptic and fearful of human excess,
the other optimistic and bullish about human progress.
Erlich agreed to bet Simon that the cost of chromium,
copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten
would increase in the next decade.
It was a simple thousand dollar wager,
five industrial metals, ten years, prices up or down.
At the same time, the bet stood for much more.
Erlich thought rising metal prices would prove
that population growth caused resource scarcity,
bolstering his call for government-led population control
and for limits on resource consumption.
Erlich's conviction reflected a more general sense
after the 1973 Arab oil embargo
that the world risked running out of vital resources
and faced hard limits to growth.
Simon argued that markets and new technologies
would drive prices down, proving that society
did not face resource constraints
and that human welfare was on a path of steady improvement.
The outcome of the bet would either provide ammunition
for Erlich's campaign against population growth
and environmental calamity, or promote Simon's optimism
about human resourcefulness through new technologies
and market forces.
That was a short extract from The Bet, Paul Erlich, Julian Simon,
and Our Gamble Over Earth's Future by Paul Sabine,
which is one of the few, if not the only,
full-length manuscript-level study of The Bet
between Simon and Erlich.
And I bring it to your attention because
it is one of the very, very few mainstream,
and at least known, studies of what actually happened
between Simon and Erlich.
But that is not an unreserved recommendation,
and there are some quibbles that one might have
with this book and its fundamental bias.
So on that note, I'll send you to Pierre Des Rochers
of MasterResource.org and his recent re-review of that book,
a re-look at The Bet, Simon, Erlich, and Paul Sabine.
Definitely worth checking out.
Anyway, this is one of the very, very few times
that The Bet has been covered in detail.
But as Des Rochers mentions, probably still the standard
for This Bet and coverage of it was set of all places
in the New York Times Magazine in December of 1990
by John Tierney, who wrote Betting on the Planet.
And the reason that this managed to get any coverage
whatsoever in the establishment press,
and then and only then only in the New York Times
Magazine was because John Tierney was a standard
establishment media repeater who, like all of the people
in his class, reporting for the Epstein class
and the Pennymasters of the New York Times Magazine,
had the same worldview, the same malevolent,
Malthusian, anti-human worldview as all of his colleagues,
and was in 1985 preparing a report for some mainstream
publication or other Rolling Stone or Newsweek
or Atlantic Monthly or any of the other periodicals
he was reporting for at the time on population growth in Kenya.
And he reached out to an economist for a quote
about population growth, expecting the standard quote
that everyone would expect.
The economist lecturing, oh, there are too many people
and we're going to have to do something
to reduce the population.
Instead, he got Julian Simon on the other end of the line
who surprised him by saying, isn't it a wonderful thing
that so many people can be alive in that country today?
And that struck John Tierney like a lightning bolt.
And from that point on, he very much changed his tune
and began reporting against the interests
of the Epstein class on things like the bet.
And so he was the only reporter to give any coverage
of the bet and what happened with it there in December 1990
as the bet finally concluded.
So his way of framing this in this article
was Simon offered to let anyone pick
any natural resource, grain, oil, coal, timber, metals,
and any future date.
If the resource really were to become scarcer
as the world's population grew, then its price should rise.
Simon wanted to bet that the price would instead decline
by the appointed date.
Erlich derisively announced that he would accept
Simon's astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in.
He then formed a consortium with John Hart and John P. Holdren.
That's a name that should ring a bell to my regular audience.
Colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley
specializing in energy and resource questions.
In October 1980, the Erlich group bet $1,000 on five metals
that they themselves chose.
Chrome, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten
in quantities that each cost $200 in the current market.
A futures contract was drawn up obligating Simon
to sell Erlich, Hart, and Holdren
these same quantities of the metals 10 years later,
but at 1980 prices.
If the 1990 combined prices turned out to be higher
than $1,000, Simon would pay them the difference in catch.
If prices fell, they would pay him.
The contract was signed and Erlich and Simon
went on attacking each other throughout the 1980s.
And so just on one economic note about what this
bet was and how it was structured,
please note that Simon was really putting himself
on the line for absolutely any price rise to any level.
So if prices rose to the point where it was
a million dollars to buy those five metals,
well, he'd have to pay the differences
in the $999,000 difference to Erlich.
But on the other side,
Erlich could only be on the hook for $1,000.
So if somehow the resources dropped to $0 by 1990,
he would have to pay $1,000.
So Simon was unlimited liability
and Erlich had $1,000 liability.
So it was a very, very fair and safe bet
that Erlich, how could he lose?
Because he knows that, I mean, hell, millions of people
are tens of millions, hundreds of millions
of people are going to starve to death by 1990,
let alone the price of commodities.
Oh yeah, you're going to try to buy commodities in 1990.
Let me tell you, that's not going to work.
Well, what actually happened?
So after a lengthy and very voluminous
detailed study here, we get to the punchline.
The bet was settled this fall without ceremony.
This fall, of course, indicating 1990,
when this article was written,
Erlich did not even bother to write a letter.
He simply mailed Simon a sheet of calculations
about metal prices, along with a check
for $576.07.
Simon wrote back a thank you note,
adding that he would be willing to raise the wager
to as much as $20,000,
pinned to any other resource
and to any other year in the future.
Each of the five metals chosen by Erlich's group,
when adjusted for inflation since 1980,
had declined in price.
The drop was so sharp, in fact,
that Simon would have come out slightly ahead overall,
even without the inflation adjustment
called for in the bet.
Prices fell for the same cornucopian reasons
they had fallen in previous decades.
Entrepreneurship and continuing technological improvements.
Prospectors found new loads,
such as the nickel mines around the market
that ended at Canadian companies
near monopoly of the market,
around the world that ended at Canadian companies
near monopoly of the market.
Thanks to computers, new machines,
and new chemical processes,
there were more efficient ways
to extract and refine the ores for chrome
in the other metals.
For many uses, the metals were replaced
by cheaper materials, notably plastics,
which became less expensive
as the price of oil declined.
Even during this year's crisis in the Persian Gulf,
the real cost of oil remained lower than in 1980.
Telephone calls went through satellites
and fiber optic lines instead of copper wires.
Ceramics replaced tungsten and cutting tools.
Cans were made of aluminum instead of tin.
And votes' fears about America going to war over tin
remained unrealized.
The most newsworthy event in the 1980s concerning that metal
was the collapse of the international tin cartel,
which gave up trying to set prices in 1985
when the market became inundated with excess supplies.
Is there a lesson here for the future?
Absolutely not, said Ehrlich in an interview.
Nevertheless, he has no plans to take up Simon's new offer.
The bet doesn't mean anything.
Julian Simon is like the guy who jumps off the Empire Statebuilding
and says how great things are going so far
as he passes the 10th floor.
I still think the price of those metals
will go up eventually, but that's a minor point.
The resource that worries me the most
is that declining capacity of our planet
to buffer itself against human impacts.
Look at the new problems that have come up.
The ozone hole, acid rain, global warming.
It's true that we've kept up food production.
I underestimated how badly we'd keep on depleting
our topsoil in groundwater.
But I have no doubt that sometime in the next century
food will be scarce enough that prices
are really going to be high, even in the United States.
If we get climate change and let the ecological systems
keep running downhill,
we could have a gigantic population crash.
Simon was not surprised to hear about Ehrlich's reaction.
Paul Ehrlich has never been able to learn from past experience,
he said, then launched into the cornucopian line
on the greenhouse crisis,
how even in the unlikely event
the doomsayers are right about global warming,
which they're not, humanity will find some way
to avert climate change or adapt,
and everyone will emerge the better for it.
But Simon did not get far into his argument
before another cheery thought occurred to him.
He stopped and smiled.
So Ehrlich is talking about a population crash, he said.
That sounds like an even better way to make money.
I'll give him heavy odds on that one.
All right, so there you have it.
This is the actual result of this infamous decade long bet.
And there is no doubt Simon was the winner
and Ehrlich did not even have the courtesy
to so much as supply a note along with the check.
He just mailed a check and had done with it
and never engaged Simon again
because he knew he would be made full of again.
If you're so sure of your convictions,
I don't know, $20,000, any resource that you pick
over any period of time, Paul Ehrlich,
put your money where your mouth is.
No, that doesn't mean anything.
All right, so what does this bet really mean?
What does it really prove?
Does it prove anything at all?
Or is it just economic hocus pocus?
Well, there are arguments to be made
that this is certainly not a definitive death blow
to the Malthusians because they still exist,
although they are one fewer in rank as of today in March of 2026.
But anyway, yes, they still exist.
They're still around.
They're still making their arguments.
How so when they lost the bet?
Well, there are a number of arguments that could be made.
But it is important to note that there are things
that really did happen in the 1980s
that really did prove the point that Simon was making
and that was the underlying basis of the bet itself.
For example, one can drill down on, say, 10.
What did happen in the tin markets in the 1980s
and what does that show us?
The everyday market forces that Simon, Robert Solo,
and other economists had cited in response
to the limits to growth, technological innovation
and substitution, price-driven competition,
and new sources of supply also helped lower commodity prices.
Each mineral had a slightly different story.
Tin was used in the late 1970s and 1980s,
largely to coat the interiors of steel containers,
as well as for soldering electronic components.
International tin prices depended heavily
on agreements that tin-producing countries
had made to limit production and sustain higher prices.
During the late 1970s tin prices rose sharply.
Many observers anticipated shortages.
Malaysian producers sought to corner the tin market
to force prices even higher in 1981 and 1982.
New high-quality tin deposits discovered
in the Brazilian Amazon, however,
undermined this market-cornering effort.
By the end of the 1980s, Brazil,
a previously marginal producer,
produced roughly one-quarter of the world's tin supply.
At the higher prices of the late 1970s,
demand for tin also started to fall.
Manufacturers substituted aluminum and plastic for tin and packaging.
Trying in vain to stabilize prices,
the International Tin Agreement held a quarter
of the world's annual tin production off the market.
The International Tin Council soon ran out of money, however,
and the agreement collapsed.
Tin prices went into freefall,
dropping more than 50% from $5.50 per pound
in October 1985 to $2.50 per pound in March 1986.
Overall, between 1980 and 1990,
the gyrations of the tin market supported
the arguments of Simon and the economists.
New sources of supply, production substitution,
and above all, the breaking of the tin cartel
had a far greater impact than population growth on tin prices,
ultimately driving them down almost 75%.
So, the price of tin in the 1980s
exactly reflects Simon's overall argument,
that in fact, not only did it not go up
because, oh my God, we're running out of tin,
but in fact, the price fell dramatically
because other methods were found,
other resources were found for various production needs for tin,
at the same time that the market cartel
of trying to keep prices up through artificially limiting the supply
fell apart because, oh my God, we discovered tin over here
and now a producer that was completely marginal
in the world economy is now a major producer of tin,
so we can't keep the price down like we used to.
I wonder if that applies to other resources on the planet today,
like, oh, I don't know, oil?
Yes, it does and that is exactly the point.
Yes, cartels can function through various means
of duplicity and government intervention
to try to keep prices artificially up
and certainly that does happen,
but the point is that, yes, as the prices rise,
human ingenuity will lead to ways to make that irrelevant
and, again, this is, again, not an intuitive point
for people to understand,
so I tried to frame it in a way
that maybe people can grasp it.
I call it, oh my God, we're running out of whale blubber argument.
I don't know if you'll show this image,
but there is, obviously, a finite amount of petroleum on earth.
We don't know how much,
but we first begin drilling for the most easily available resources
and then we expand over time with new technologies,
but the mistake that people like Erlich made
is to think that, well, of course,
we skim the best deposits first
and as a result, the price of extracting the resource
will increase over time, whereas Simon
and people of his mindset will point out,
well, no, look at the historical data.
The price is not only not going up,
it's often going down,
and that's because on the one hand,
you've got the type of deposits that you have access to,
on the other, you've got the new technologies
to access those deposits,
and what human history teaches us,
even in the world of non-renewable resources,
is that the human brain or capacity
to come up with new ideas
always more than make up for the fact
that we're tapping into increasingly less interesting deposits,
and so with new technologies,
you can actually extract petroleum,
which might seem more difficult
to reach than previous deposits,
you can access it more easily
and extract it more profitably
or at least at a lower cost than before,
and so you must always look
at the kind of physical stuff that is around you,
but you must never forget
the capacity of the human brain
to develop technologies
to tap into those resources ever more efficiently,
which is why Simon referred to the human brain
as the ultimate resource.
Ultimately, what is around us is not what matters,
you know, there was coal for long before human beings
came along, natural gas, iron ore,
but this physical stuff only became a resource
through the development of human technologies
that allow our ancestors
to turn otherwise worthless stuff
into things that are valuable
and to do it increasingly efficiently over time,
and in the context of a market economy,
Simon and others will tell you,
you've got a few things happening,
you've got a feedback mechanism,
which is the price system,
which tells you that when the price
of a resource temporarily goes up,
you know, there might be a war,
there might be a shortage,
there might be a new demand
for a particular resource,
well, this tells people
to look for more of the stuff,
to use it ever more efficiently
and to develop substitute,
and through the combination
of these three forces triggered
by the price mechanism,
humanity has been able
to expand its resource base
and after a century,
after almost two centuries
of industrialization,
we've never not only run out
of theoretically depletable resources,
we've got more resources than ever before.
I like to think of the
air lick of the 19th century
screaming from the rooftop,
so no, we're running out of whale blubber,
how will we heat our homes,
how will we have light,
oh no, it's all,
we're all going to hell,
and the Simons of the 19th century
pointing out, well, you know that sticky stuff
that keeps pouring,
bubbling up out of the ground,
that might be important in the future.
And if I may just point out,
yes, if I can just point out
a little thing about that,
what many Americans don't realize,
and if you're listeners
have not picked up on my accent,
I'm French-Canadian,
it was actually a Canadian
that first developed heroes
in other bitumen,
a fellow named Abraham Gessner,
he eventually moved to New York City,
but I just want to point out
that Canadians actually
played a significant role
in saving the world.
And like a true Canadian,
you had to point that out,
so as a fellow Canadian,
I understand the urge.
Although I didn't know that
about kerosene, interesting.
All right.
Well, of course, the point is
that our lack of imagination
can be a severe impediment
to our ability to understand
how the world is unfolding,
and that's the point
that I think Simon is pointing out,
and it's a non-intuitive point.
It's not immediately understandable
in the way that someone
like an air like getting up
and saying, look, we're running out of this,
therefore we're doomed,
is immediately understandable
and immediately appeals to people.
But I think it's important
to get to the underlying philosophy
of air like,
which as I think you mentioned,
goes back to Thomas Malthus.
Or even before the,
it's just that in the English-speaking world,
while Malthus is the best town,
but the first modern Malthusian
was actually an Italian Jesuit.
So the current Pope is a Jesuit,
so the apple didn't fall too far
from the tree for that.
But yes, the point is that,
you know, the problem with Malthus
and the name of the previous fellow
was Botero,
but the point is that they view the world
and the view resources as a finite pie.
And so, you know,
how do you deal with a finite pie?
Well, the less people you have,
the bigger the share for each individual, right?
Or at least that's their thinking.
The problem that,
and of course,
someone like Simon
will view the resources rather like a garden.
You know,
it's not only that you can expand your,
you can plant more stuff,
but you can expand your garden over time
and grow ever more things.
That was Pierre Des Rochers of MasterResource.org.
I hope people are familiar with him
because I interviewed him over a decade ago
about the Simon Ehrlich bet,
but also hopefully you know of his work and his writings,
which you can find,
again, linked in the transcript
for today's episode
at CorbettReport.com slash The Bet.
But I hope that you are starting to understand
the bigger picture,
the real point that is being made here.
There is much more to discuss about these points
and the objections that people might have economically
to the points that are being raised,
for example,
talking about fluctuations in markets
not being relevant over,
say, a 10-year period, etc.
Yes, of course,
and that's a point that Julian Simon himself made.
For example,
if you watch the full video,
we watched a short clip
of Julian Simon earlier in today's episode.
If you go to the transcript
at CorbettReport.com slash The Bet
and watch the full video,
you will see that he makes that precise point.
People concentrating on a two-year economic trend
or a five-year price trend
or a 10-year trend
are missing the point.
No, this is about the intergenerational centuries long span
where it is demonstrable
that any key resource that you look at today
is orders of magnitude cheaper for us
than it was for our forebears
hundreds of years ago
or thousands of years ago.
And that is the point.
And I hope people can understand
the deeper point that is being made here.
It is not an economic point.
This is not about the price of metals.
It's not about monetary prices.
It's about what that indicates
about the availability of various resources
in a growing population,
in a world of a demonstrably growing human population.
And yet things are easier to get than they were before.
How can that possibly be?
We are on a finite fixed pie.
And if you take a slice of pie,
that's one less slice for everyone else
and we're going to run out.
But that is not the case.
And that is so hard to understand.
I recognize that that is not an intuitive point,
but it is a demonstrable, very, very important insight
and one that flies directly in the face
of the favorite worldview
of the master manipulators of humanity,
the social engineers,
who make Paul Ehrlich a star
for telling you that babies are a disaster,
that humans are a cancer on this earth,
that we need to limit the human population,
that we need presidents coming in
and telling the FCC
that they must show programming, programming,
which tells you that big families are bad
and only stupid people have big families
and we don't want that.
We want fewer children.
Well, guess what, guys?
Mission accomplished.
Birth rates absolutely plummeting
across the entire planet.
Demographic winter is upon us.
The human population is shrinking
and I know that many people,
even in my own audience, are cheering it on.
Yay! Wonderful.
We need fewer people.
I have decided that I don't like all these people
running around living their lives
on my planet taking my share of the pie.
Therefore, I have decided it's a good thing
that the human population is declining.
Not only is that demonstrably wrong
for all of the reasons we said today
is demonstrably wrong for other reasons.
For example, I've talked about the recent book
After the Spike a few times in recent months
and I would again commend that to your attention
in which the authors make the very important point
that there is absolutely no precedent
in all of human history
for a sustained, declined, plummeting birth rate
going below replacement rate
and then returning to some replacement rate
so that we can achieve some optimal balance
in the human population.
I see people, even someone in my own comment section,
quite recently, opining that he feels
that the right number of people on the earth is 500 million.
Why do we need any more than that?
He asks.
And no doubt those types of people cheer on
the plummeting birth rates,
the declining human population,
thinking that we're going to just magically level out
at whatever they have decided.
1 billion, 2 billion, 500 million people.
However many people they think there should be
will just magically materialize
a sudden return to replacement birth rate
and everything will be fine after that.
No, after the spike makes the point
that once you plummet through a certain minimum population
for civilizational capacity, bye-bye civilization.
And we end up going back to hunter-gatherer times
and nobody's fixing that with some magical,
oh, we'll just level out
and have today's exact standards of human population
but at one-tenth of the level today.
500 million.
I wonder why people are so interested in that number.
It couldn't possibly be
because that's what the Georgia Guidestones
has predictively programmed into them.
What is it?
The Epstein-class literally card-carrying eugenicists
behind the Georgia Guidestones.
Oh, you don't know that story?
Well, I've talked about that in the past
so I'll put that link in the transcript as well
so that you can go and find out
who was behind the Georgia Guidestones
and why they might be interested
in getting you to desire their agenda
of human depopulation.
That is what this is about.
And that is the sick, twisted, malevolent,
psychopathic, human-hating mentality
that has been drilled into so much of the population.
Even the population that prides themselves on,
I'm not manipulate, I see through the propaganda,
have adopted the Aerolik Epstein-class view of humanity.
Babies are a disaster.
We need fewer people on this planet.
Meanwhile, the people who have been
nay-saying that doomsaying
and being on-team humanity, team life,
have been consistently denigrated
to the extent that they've received
any coverage whatsoever.
Well, you have two choices.
Choose death or choose life.
I choose life.
So on that note,
I think I'm going to leave the final words today
to Julian Simon.
Thank you for enjoying and investing your time
in this exploration today.
As I say, all of the transcript,
the transcript, the complete hyperlink transcript
with links to absolutely everything
that I've talked about today
is at CorbettReport.com slash The Bet,
which is also the place for Corbett Report members
to go log in and leave your comments
on today's episode.
I'm looking forward to reading them.
On that note, I think I'll leave this today,
but I am James Corbett of CorbettReport.com,
looking forward to talking to you again
in the near future.
I think the attribute that distresses me most,
aside from the usual ugly things of people
who are bullies or exploiters,
but among ordinary good people,
the attribute that causes me most trouble
is lack of imagination
and the inability to imagine the good things
that can be created by other people.
This feeds into people's fear
about population growth
and about their fear that we are going to be
running out of copper and of oil.
They can't imagine
so many people simply are unable to conceive
how other people can respond to problems
with new ideas and with imagination
and with solutions,
which will leave us better off
than the problems had never arisen.
Oil.
The 19th century was transformed by it.
The 20th century was shaped by it.
And the 21st century is moving beyond it.
But who gave birth to the oil industry?
And what are they planning to do with that power
in a post-carbon world?
A price to carbon in their future.
The negative impact of population growth,
that is important not only for the planet,
it is important for the business.
What you see is the biggest challenges in conservation.
The growing human population.
How and why big oil conquered the world.
Watch the documentary for free at CorbettReport.com
or purchase a DVD copy at NewWorldNextWeek.com.