The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - The Power of Population Change — with Dr. Jennifer Sciubba

Episode Date: May 5, 2022

Dr. Jennifer Sciubba, an internationally recognized expert in the field of demographic security, and author of “8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape Our World,” joins Scott to discuss all sorts of topics regarding population growth and migration policies as they relate to the strength of a nation. We also learn about demographic engineering and the link between aging populations and national security. Follow Dr. Sciubba on Twitter, @profsciubba. Scott opens with what he believes is playing out to be one of the biggest business stories.  Algebra of Happiness: demonstrate kindness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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cards, savings accounts, mortgage rates, and more. NerdWallet, finance smarter. NerdWallet Compare Incorporated. NMLS 1617539. Episode 160. Muhammad Ali won his first professional fight in 1960. True story. I once stood in between Muhammad Ali and Michael J. Fox at a urinal. Wrong day to wear sandals. Go, go, go! Welcome to the 160th episode of The Prop G-Pod.

In today's episode, we speak with Dr. Jennifer Shuba, an internationally recognized expert in the field of demographic security. Demographic security, I've never heard that term. An author of 8 Billion and Counting, How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape Our World. We discussed with Jennifer all sorts of topics, including population growth and migration policies as they relate to the strength of a nation. We also learned about demographic engineering and the link between aging populations and national security. Okay, what's happening? Between Twitter falling under the control of a billionaire to nearly half of the stocks on the NASDAQ being down 50%. So let's think about that. 45% of the stocks in the NASDAQ are off at least 50%. We've been sleeping on some

of the most interesting business stories over the past few weeks because of this weapon of mass distraction that is the shit show that is Twitter and The Martian. And that is while everyone, including us, obsesses over things like Meta's latest blunder or Twitter's march towards quote-unquote free speech.

Thank God I can finally be me on Twitter. We're missing a lot of stuff. So Netflix's stock tumble, Snap and TikTok have successfully been innovating and grabbing users' attention while we're all looking over here. While Mark Zuckerberg is investing all of his resources in a metaverse

and trying to increase the total addressable market around the Oculus, Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snap, finds virtual reality in the metaverse to be ambiguous and hypothetical. And instead, those were his terms, ambiguous and hypothetical. I like this guy. I like this guy. And he's dreamy. That dude's dreamy. I like that guy. I think it's important to have good-looking leaders. Anyways, he is doubling down on augmented reality. Spiegel told CNBC that 250 million people engage with AR, augmented reality, on a daily basis via Snapchat. I have said that I thought the future was about AR, not VR. Anyway, the company also recently released its second hardware product, a palm-sized drone that transmits footage to

Snapchat and allows users to edit the footage within the app and add in some AR effects. I think this probably has a lot of B2B applications. When I was in Sao Paulo filming an episode of my show, New Immersion, New Mentalist, starring Scott Galloway on CNN Plus. Gonk! Anyway, doesn't look like that show is ever going to see the light of day. By the way, it was great. I cruised down to Sao Paulo with eight talented producers and gaffers

and sound guys and video producers, and they had me ride a moped around Sao Paulo. That is definitely how I should die, right? Right? I am, by the way, I'm not afraid of death. I'm afraid of dying. I'm not afraid of death. I'm afraid of dying. I'm not afraid of death. I think death is like being stupid.

It's only painful for other people. Anyway, anyway, what did we have down there? We had a drone that would film me on this motorcycle and the thing would fly ahead of me. I actually, my brain goes to very dark places. I think that drones are going to be the new, if you think about World War I technology, the biplane, trench warfare, machine guns. You think about World War II, radar.

Intelligence actually played a big role in World War II. Isn't that weird? We didn't even think of spying and intelligence. And then FDR saw some intelligence briefs from the British Secret Service. What was it called? I don't know what it's called. And they said, this shit's impressive. And we started investing

in a post-World War intelligence apparatus. Anyways, and also tanks played a big role in World War II. The Polish showed up on a horseback against Panzer tanks. Did not end well for the good folks in Poland. Anyways, what is, I think, the new kind of technology, if you will, is going to be drones. I can't imagine a smart drone

that just flies around with a small explosive, doesn't use optics to identify, oh, this looks like it has the diameter or parameters of a Russian tank or a Russian soldier and just attach to that person and then detonate. But anyways, that's where my head goes. Back to Snap. Back to Filter. Snap recently reported that in the first quarter of 2022, it had 332 million daily active users. Think about that. A third of a billion people are on Snap every day. That is really impressive. That's an increase of 52 million or 18% year on year and over 100 million more daily active users than Twitter. Now let's go from, let's use Snap as a gateway drug to freaking meth, to like opium, to crank, to smack, whatever you want to call it. I remember people telling kids, oh no, marijuana is a gateway drug. Well, kids, let me just tell you, I've never really done any other drug but marijuana. So it wasn't a gateway. It was a toll booth for me. Made me stupider and

slower the next day through most of my college. Although it did enhance every single feature of the trilogy of Planet of the Apes. But anyways, my point is that if Snap were a gateway drug or to something, it would be a gateway drug to TikTok. Oh my God, that was a lot of drug alliteration. Anyways, TikTok, staggering. Just fricking tick and talk. Oh my gosh.

Since the start of this year alone, the app has received more than 175 million downloads. Think about this. We're talking about the population of Mexico and Canada. I don't know if that's true. I think approximately that's probably true. We're talking about half the population of Europe has downloaded the TikTok app in the last four months. When it comes to time spent

per session on mobile social apps, TikTok far outpaces the competition with users spending an average of 11 minutes per session. For comparison, people spend an average of three and a half minutes per session on Twitter. Now, look what's happened to the streamers. Netflix, for example, is just getting kicked in the Bridgerton over and over and over. It's lost a quarter of a trillion dollars. And what is bringing the stock down? Well, one, interest rates going up. We've never been able to have interest rates increase at the velocity. I think they're going to have to increase without a slowing in the economy and a recession. By the way, a recession isn't a bad thing. It's something that happens every seven years. It gives young people a chance to buy stocks at a lower price and maybe buy Brooklyn real estate for $1,000 a square foot instead of $2,000.

Anyway, it's a little bit off there. What do we have? Netflix, if it had more subscriber growth and a content budget of zero versus $17 billion. You know what it would be worth? It'd be worth what TikTok is worth. And just as see above, recessionary fears have taken every stock to the woodshed. I'm speaking at PayPal today. By the way, lovely people, nice event, just an impressive company. Quick story. I went into my whole rant about how Elon Musk is a terrible role model for young men and that masculinity is about protecting people, not punching down. And then about halfway through my rant, I realized I was

speaking to a group of people whose firm was co-founded by Elon Musk. And I'm like, oh, okay, wait, should I have thought about that before I started going on a tirade here? And it was a little awkward, a little awkward, but I'm in a lovely resort in San Diego where LeBron was married. LeBron was married here. I am strolling the same grounds as LeBron entered into a union. So I got that going for me. Anyways, Netflix, what Netflix did to the cable bundle, what Netflix did to movie theaters, what Netflix did to Hollywood, TikTok is doing to Netflix. And guess what? Every stock is down or almost every stock is down somewhere between 10 and 80%. 10% of you're lucky. Apple's off, I think, 10 or 15. Amazon is off 30 or 35%. Netflix is off 72%.

Oh my God, ET phone home. I do not understand the ET reference here, but you understand what I'm getting at. This has been, everyone is getting taken to the woodshed. But guess what? You know what stock would be up 50%? And we'd be getting a lot more attention. And it's kind of the business juggernaut. Like while you were sleeping, this business juggernaut started taking over the world. The opium that is TikTok.

And just as Facebook and Instagram have created an addiction through shame and affirmation, I do think TikTok is equally bad in terms of the addiction part. This shit is addictive. I mean, I can sit, I can pull up TikTok and start in an hour and a half later, I am still watching this thing. So the addiction is just as bad. I don't think it's as mendacious. I don't think it makes you feel as bad about yourself, but there's definitely an addictive quality there that starts to crowd out other socialization. I was with some friends vacationing a couple of weeks ago, and the dad said to me, watch this. He said, after lunch, he does the same thing. He takes his phone, he goes over to the couch, he lies down on his side, he positions the phone horizontally in front of him, and he just watches TikTok for an hour. And it reminded me of those old images of those monks in opium dens that would just smoke some opium and then just chill out and love the world. And heages a younger generation that has probably more ADHD tendencies. It takes advantage of quick hit videos. It takes advantage of signal liquidity that informs an algorithm. Think about the signal liquidity that TikTok gets.

Netflix gets two or three signals every hour. Did you watch the Benjamin Academy? Is that what it's called? The Benjamin Society on, that's on Netflix, by the way. It's Disney Plus. By the way, I'm super impressed with Disney+, mostly because I have two young boys. But the Benjamin Academy, is that what it's called? The Benjamin Society. And it's with Gary from Veep, who's one of my favorite actors in the world. He's fantastic in this, and the kids

are wonderful, and it has sort of this Wes Anderson kind of visual je ne sais quoi to it. It's really wonderful. By the way, I was taking care of my 11-year-old son this weekend, just me and him, bonding with him. Really lovely. Quick parenting device. I'm getting so far afield here, but what the fuck? It's called the Prop G Show, which means see above, Prop G mom too, or for the dads or for the moms. Time alone with each of the, extended time with each of the children, different vibe, different relationship. You both come away with more goodwill and fondness for each other. So me and my youngest, my 11-year-old, we get to do what we want. So what do we do? We wake up late. We watch a shit ton of soccer. We go on walks with the dogs. We go and we see movies. We play a little bit of basketball

and we order pizza and wings three times. I mean, you just can't get enough pizza and wings when it's dad and the 11-year-old. And we come out of that weekend just feeling really wonderful about each other. And anyways, if you're in a big family and you're a parent, you got to find that extended time with each of them. It's just magical. Anyways, the signal liquidity that TikTok gets is hundreds of signals every hour that they can then use to inform the algorithm and start helping you calibrate in on content, the exact heroin that absolutely registers with your neurons

or your dopa to make it wildly addictive, right? There is a security threat here. I don't think there's any doubt about it. The difference between TikTok being a great company and one of the five most valuable companies in the world is their ability to create some perceived sense of a Chinese wall, if you will, or a barrier in between them and the CCP. And what's interesting is most recently is that Facebook was accused of spreading misinformation around TikTok. So I am just fascinated. But one of the biggest stories, I mean, there's so much shit we're not registering, right? Abortion clinics being closed in Kentucky, more war and death and despair in Ukraine. But from a business story, I think the biggest story we're not seeing here is that Tick and

Talk continue, continue their relentless march. Stay with us. We'll be right back for a conversation with Dr. Jennifer Shuba. The Capital Ideas Podcast now features a series hosted by Capital Group CEO, Mike Gitlin. Through the words and experiences of investment professionals, you'll discover what differentiates their investment approach, what learnings have shifted their career trajectories, and how do they find their next great idea? Invest 30 minutes in an episode today. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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I'm in Memphis, Tennessee. Nice. So let's bust right into it. Where does the U.S. stand in terms of its population growth and migration policies? What role do these factors play in the larger economy? What are the two or three things we can glean from the movement of people and economic policy? So I'm a bit of a pessimist on U.S. population trends because I see a lot of things that worry me compared to our competitors. One of the things would be in our fertility trends. And so in general, let me say to start

that I'm an optimist about low fertility and population aging. There's so much negative talk about that, which is something we could come back to in a bit. But in general, I don't think that that's something to worry about. Where I do see worry is when the number of children women say they want to have is higher than the number of children they are having. And when we

ask them what's going on, why aren't they having as many as they wanted to have, a lot of these stresses, economic stresses and social stresses, keep coming up. And that's when you kind of flag it as a problem. So people aren't able to do what they want to do in terms of their family structure. So that's one thing that worries me because in the United States, that is something that's happening. And when we look at these younger generations who are the ones who are starting to have children or of the ages where they would start to have children, that's what our surveys show is that they're not having them. There are some positive trends in terms of fertility in the United States. Teen births are down. Teen pregnancies are down.

So that helps drive our lower fertility. But I do worry about those economic and social stresses. And then in terms of our mortality, that's another worrying trend. COVID aside, life expectancy in the United States is actually already starting to decline before the pandemic hit. And we just don't have the right kind of investment in our health and human capital to make sure we're the best that we can be. Yeah. I think I've read somewhere that for the first time in our nation's history, life expectancy has gone down three years in a row, and that was pre-COVID. And I think I've read somewhere that for the first time in our nation's history, life expectancy has gone down three years in a row, and that was pre-COVID. And I think it's mostly because of the opioid crisis. But you write in your book, we should recalibrate our expectation of the relationship between aging and national security.

And I had never made that link. Can you say more about the relationship between an aging population and national security? So part of what I saw, I did have the opportunity to work in the Office of Strategy at the Pentagon in the mid-2000s. And when I was there, I observed a lot of people in positions of influence really down on Russia and China's demographics and arguing that those demographic trends were going to hold back Russia and China as competitors to the United States. And I'm a political scientist by training. And so I was really skeptical of that demography is destiny rhetoric because it was just an immediate leap, forgetting all the politics that goes on behind that. So why I say this about population aging is an aging country is not like an aging individual. It doesn't mean that an

aging country is going to have these cognitive declines or physical declines or maybe be less inclined to pick up a gun and go to war. The behavior just does not equate. You've got to add the politics back in there. And so what we've seen in the case of Russia and in the case of China is that these two rapidly aging states are still aggressive in the international system and they still have the ability to project power beyond their borders. So if we buy into the idea that aging states are all gonna be peaceful,

then we become ill-prepared to deal with the realities and the realities are that aging states could be just as likely to be aggressive. Talk a little bit about demographic engineering. Sure. So demographic engineering is the idea that the government in particular tries to make the population they want through policies. These could be policies about births, deaths or migration. And it's something that happens all over the world in every country, whether democracy or non-democracy, and throughout time as well. So people know really obvious examples of demographic engineering, like the one-child policy.

Or Singapore. I think of Singapore as being very good about it. Yeah, so managing migration to keep ethnic balances, that would be an example of that as well. Moving populations from one area into another. There's also less insidious forms and less obvious forms, like even tax breaks that we get for having children. That's a way of valuing family over not valuing family. So I would think of it more like a spectrum of policies to make the population that we want. Generally speaking, we have these kind of, if you're, everyone's sort of an amateur demographer, if you read The Economist or you think of yourself as someone who understands markets. And Peter Drucker infamously said that

any major economic shift is a function of demographics, which is probably an oversimplification. But in very base course terms, we think, okay, low birth rates are bad, that the aging populations or low birth rates rates per capita that are going up, that we haven't seen that come into the negative yet. And then one reason they offer for that is the role of automation, artificial intelligence, robotics in offsetting some of the losses that you might have in the working age population. So even though we're really down on the idea of population aging, it hasn't happened yet in terms of the economy. So I was remiss to, I was struggling with whether to bring this up or not. And they always say that when you struggle with a question, the answer is probably no, which, but I don't have common sense. But just for the purposes of argument,

if abortion were to become illegal across the majority of all the states in the United States and access to abortion declined significantly in the U.S., what would that mean in terms, have you thought about what that would mean in terms of our economy and demographics? Well, I figured you would ask that, by the way, because it's a pretty big deal, pretty big demographic issue to happen in the last 12 hours, right? But I have to say, I am really not a scholar of abortion. And so anything, and even knowing that that question was coming, I thought, I don't have enough time to become a scholar on it. So here's what we do know about that. We know that it's women who are not legally allowed to get abortions may still try to have an abortion and women's health may suffer. And then we also know these extreme cases, like I write about Romania in the book, Romania under Ceausescu, who Ceausescu wanted more Romanian babies in part to shore up the economy

and make Romania competitive, but specifically Romanian babies because there was an ethnic component to that as well. So he outlawed abortion and he required that women show up at the doctor's office on a monthly basis to be examined, really just to make sure they are not trying to prevent getting pregnant. And it worked, air quotes there, in the sense that there was a spike in Romanian babies, but these were not all healthy babies. They were not all wanted babies. And so there's a generation of Romanian children who are really damaged by these policies. And as soon as he disappears, as soon as he's dead and these policies disappear,

the fertility rate goes back down. So we didn't see a positive demographic impact in terms of high quality of life for people in the wake of that. And in fact, I would say an economic burden of taking care of this cohort of children that wasn't necessarily wanted. Yeah, I don't know if you've seen them, or I imagine you've seen some of these documentaries on these orphanages of Romanian kids that were, you know, had physical maladies. It is just heartbreaking and horrific at the same time. Do you think that when you look at a nation, and when you look at its demographics,

and you think, okay, this is a really healthy nation in terms of demographic and migration patterns, and this is a nation that is likely going to face real issues. Do you have, are there any countries you're long on and short on because of demographic and migration patterns? Yeah, one of them might surprise you. So, you know, I think a lot of people, and you can look back through my own writings and see me arguing this a lot, would say that,

hey, if a country's got a declining population, if they're shrinking and their working age population is shrinking, then immigration can shore up the working age population. Sure. But I actually am pretty positive on Japan here because even though they are a country that is deliberately choosing not to bring in immigrants to supplement the workforce in large numbers, they're adapting in other ways. And I think it'd be useful for us to start using some of the rhetoric

from the climate change literature about adaptation. How do you, in these big changing structural circumstances, have sets of policies that adapt to your new reality? And so getting rid of mandatory retirement age, making sure older people who want to work longer can do so, using automation in order to make up for declines in certain parts of your workforce, bringing more women into the workforce, et cetera.

All of these things can help fill in those gaps. And we have still seen Japan's GDP per capita growth rate on the upswing. On the flip side of that, we do see that immigration can cause a lot of national stresses. And, you know, I'm not being anti-immigrant here. I'm just going to be a political scientist and say every country has to have their own conversation about how they want their demographic makeup to be. And it's in that conversation that the, you know, the good stuff happens. Sometimes that the bad stuff happens. I mean, look at France's recent election. Part of how that election plays out, it is a national conversation about who French people think they are, what they think the French nation is.

And I would say that these conversations are just going to be happening more and more, particularly across our world's largest economies, like the OECD countries, because they do have all aging populations and they're all debating the role of immigration in the future of the nation. Let's talk specifically of the nation. Let's talk specifically about the U.S. So, generally speaking, when I think of migration patterns as they relate to our economy, my go-to is, it's simple, it's a function of low taxes and sunshine. So, Florida and Texas, thumbs up. Some of the colder, higher-tax states, whether it's New Jersey or Connecticut or Minnesota, thumbs down. What's some additional nuance? If, again, you think of states as stocks, what are you long on,

what are you short on, and why? So, you're thinking in terms of where we see the most potential vibrant population in the United States and where most of our investment would be. I mean, I probably agree with you on a lot of that. I'll say that I'm really acutely aware of this as someone who lives in Memphis with Nashville three hours to the east, because you could not have more different cities in the same state. A state, by the way, for your listeners to know, with no state income tax. So come on over. And just the investment in those two different places is incredibly different. And so I feel like some of the nuances we could add in here are thinking about things like, you know, what kind of young professional environment is there available for people? What kinds of graduate schools? I think about that with the city of Memphis a lot as well. You know, having a top-notch graduate school helps you attract and retain young talent. I think it's really interesting to look at the conversations going on now about people working from home and working, you know, only going to the office a few days a week. And I wonder how much that's going to change where we see young professionals located in the U.S. I don't know. We'll be right back.

Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for. And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. Support for the show comes from Indeed. If you need to hire, you may need Indeed. Indeed is a matching and hiring platform with over 350 million global monthly visitors, according to

Indeed data, and a matching engine that helps you find quality candidates fast. Listeners of this show can get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash podcast. Just go to Indeed.com slash podcast right now and say you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. I want to double-click on Memphis versus Nashville, because you think Tennessee, same weather, same low taxes, both, if not world-class cities, great cities.

But I think something that doesn't get enough discussion is what I'll call a granola opery, and I don't know what the university or the big medical center is there, but I've always thought you can't have a tech community, which is the fastest growing part of our economy, without having a world-class engineering university. What happens traditionally is a couple of kids graduate from MIT or Stanford. They start a company in their dorm. It takes off. They like where they live.

They get rich. They start a VC firm, and they start investing in other graduates of MIT or Stanford. And I think like WashU at St. Louis. St. Louis will fun, that feels like it's a good time. And if I'm a 30-year-old thinking about where am I going to go kind of just pre-kids or with my girlfriend slash fiance, and I want to have a decent quality of life, but I want to have fun on the weekends, I pick Nashville over Memphis. And I've thought, okay, Miami's booming. Austin's booming. These are fun towns. Do you think there's anything to the notion that an investment in massive investments in culture in addition to corporations is key to attracting that human capital? Or does it all come back to college?

I guess college is fun, too. Anyways, your thoughts? I'm like bold and underline what you said about this graduate school and what you said about fun. And that's something that, you know, as I meet people from all over the world and some of them are investors and I'm always pulling them aside

and trying to shove a cocktail into their hand and talk up Memphis because I feel like one of the keys that would really unlock this city would be, I mean, the University of Tennessee Medical School is in Memphis, and we have St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. So we do have that as a strand. And then we have a lot of medical technology companies here. So you can kind of see that as a sector that's really strong.

But I think we're missing out on so much more. I mean, there's obviously so many more other sectors that could be here if we had the types of graduate schools that people would stay afterwards. I mean, all of my students, I teach students who study international relations, they go to D.C. So I would love to see more of an investment in the whole university system here in this city. Yeah, it seems like if you can figure out a job that pays you sort of a, it seems like it'd be a great quality of life. And also, you forgot to mention, obviously, barbecue, which is world class there. So, Dr. Shuba, it seems like you have a really cool job. I think that the work you're doing and getting to teach and write books, and it just seems like you have a really cool job. I think that the work you're doing and getting to teach and write books,

and it just seems like you're killing it professionally with something that's interesting and you make a good living. Can you give us a little bit of your backstory on how you got to this job, how you became a recognized expert in the field of demographics? Sure. I know it's an odd area in some ways because there's really not a lot of us who do this, but I think I came at it through the environmental route. So, you know, I was a kid who was really interested in environmental issues and population didn't have much of a home intellectually other than the environment when I was first studying it. I went to a small women's college in Atlanta,

Agnes Scott College. My graduating class was 125. So we didn't get a lot of say in the kinds of classes that were on offer, but migration was one of those classes. And I got a fantastic education. Absolutely loved learning about that. And when we were taught a lot about war and development, we were taught, you know, a lot of these really proximate causes of war, you know, maybe why these two groups are fighting, and that led to war. I was really curious about the underlying issues. I mean, always in general, wanting to peel back the layers of the onion to see, like, what are these things at the bottom that are moving and setting in motion these processes? And so I went to the University of Maryland for graduate school. I knew I wanted

to teach at a small liberal arts college in the South. Voila, here I am at Rhodes College. And while I was there, I did have the opportunity to work for the Pentagon, as I mentioned, as a demographics consultant. And I think I was lucky my advisor in graduate school noticed I was interested in this new thing called population aging. Because around the time I was in grad school, there were only three countries in the world that had a median age of 40. That's it. Now, I think I counted yesterday, there are 38. So it's been a tremendous difference in the last couple of decades. And he said, you know, if you study population aging, you're going to be one of the very few people who do this

and you can establish yourself as an expert really early. So go for it. And final question, advice to your 25-year-old self or advice to our younger listeners? Oh boy, that's a tough one because we've been talking about fertility. So I would say, if you think you want to have, I'm going to go for it.

I think if you want to have, I'm going to go for it. I think if you want to have kids, don't wait. I look at data all day and I look at rising age at first marriage and I look at rising age at first birth and I look at these patterns and, you know, I think people constantly try to say, well, once I have this amount of money in the bank account or this job or this, that, and the other, then I will make these big life decisions, whatever they are, marriage, moving, jobs. We pull this away from babies for a while. And I would say, don't necessarily wait for that

because all those other things may or may not come, but they're not necessarily gonna have to do with whether or not you waited for it. Yeah, if I had waited for the right time to have kids, I wouldn't have had kids. And I do think biology is politically incorrect and men have a bit more flexibility, but it just felt like it was never the right time. It was just, okay, maybe this is a less bad time to have kids, but we're going to go for it. Dr. Jennifer Shuba is an internationally recognized expert in the

field of demographic security. In addition to numerous academic articles, she is the author of 8 Billion and Counting, How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape Our World in the Future Faces of War, Population, and National Security. Dr. Shuba is currently an associate professor in the Department of International Studies at Rhodes College. She joins us from her home in the great city, the upcoming city of Memphis, Tennessee. Dr. Shuba, thanks for your time today. Thanks so much, Scott. How's your happiness? One of the wonderful things about teaching at NYU is you're surrounded by just some incredibly impressive colleagues. And I'm always, I believe one of the most important scholars in the world right now is Jonathan Haidt. And he just wrote a article that was in The Atlantic that is, I think, the first time in Atlantic history or The Atlantic or the history of The Atlantic is the top article three or four weeks in a row. And I took away a

couple of things from there, and I'm trying to learn and evolve and lean into some of this stuff. And one I'm good at, and the other I am not good at. The first is that Jonathan claims that in around 2015, we started getting stupid. And I love his definition of stupid. He says that when everybody is looking at research the same way a drunk looks at a lamppost, more for support than illumination, and there are no dissenters allowed to dissent, otherwise they are sanctioned, we enter into a bubble and we become stupid. And I don't care if it's Putin surrounding himself with people who don't ever question his brilliance in every decision he makes, or if it's academics who are afraid to go

where the data takes them for fear they're going to be sanctioned because of political correctness, he would argue in 2015, we started getting stupid. And that a lot of research now is basically just there to validate politically correct sentiments. I remember once, I say a lot that diversity on boards leads to better financial outcomes. And Professor Haidt said, there's no evidence of that, Scott. Now, there's no evidence that it hurts, but you're referring to a McKinsey article, and he was right, that basically is junk science, and there's no evidence that diverse boards outperform companies with non-diverse boards. Now, having said that, he said, there are better reasons to do it than just financial returns. Maybe it's good for society. Maybe we should have a quality of opportunity for people. There's a lot of good reasons to

have diverse boards, but all of these academics and think tanks start out trying to figure out a way to back into that answer because it makes them feel good. And we have lost that. We've lost a lot of that at universities on some levels. And that is, we want to skew the research such that we can get to the answer that we like, and we're afraid to ask questions that might get us sanctioned. You defend your thesis, or traditionally you've defended your thesis, your PhD thesis, and people go after you and absolutely try and contradict you. And that's important. This is why you're wrong. There's a respect. One of the things I love about the academic community is if you come up with a general line of thinking that's accepted

thought leadership, that you respect a younger academic who comes in and dispels in a credible way with data and evidence and argument your theories, and you acknowledge and celebrate if they dispel it. I don't know if that's entirely true, but it is a practice in academia. And I think there's something wonderful about the pursuit of truth. And Professor Hyde argues that we become stupid and we're no longer pursuing truth is vehemently.

I'm good at that. I like that. I'm not afraid to slaughter sacred cows. I like to be provocative. I know I offend a lot of people, but I think that there's a role for that. And I'm generally an angry and depressed person, so it feeds well.

What he also said that really struck me is that if we're gonna succeed as a country, we've gotta be a little kinder to one another. We've gotta ease up on one another. And this is something I'm not good at. And unfortunately, our algorithms across where we're spending increasingly greater and greater amounts of time are teaching us, are giving us incentives and rewards to dunk on other people, to highlight how wrong somebody is. And I suffer from that. I am not as graceful as I should be.

I'm not as kind as I should be. And so I have decided that I'm going to try and be kinder. I don't, for a while now, I've decided I'm only going to punch up. I go after, if you will, I make personal attacks, but only on people much more powerful than me. But I even need to start giving people more of the benefit of the doubt and not seeing through everything through the lens of this is what they're doing wrong, or this is how they're wrong. And maybe just demonstrating a little more grace.

And as you get older, you realize that the guy or the gal who cuts you off on traffic, you don't know what's going on with them. You don't know if their kid is struggling with something. You don't know if they just lost their job. But I do think the road back from this coarseness in our discourse, the road back to a unified or United States of America, is that we all just need to be a little kinder to each other. We need to dial down. We need to take the temperature down. Be more forgiving. Be more forgiving. Take things with a grain of salt. You don't have to respond the temperature down. Be more forgiving. Be more forgiving.

Take things with a grain of salt. You don't have to respond to every slight. We do not progress as a nation unless we start being a little kinder to one another. Our producers are Caroline Shagrin and Drew Burrows. Claire Miller is our associate producer. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. Thank you for listening to The Property Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you next week on Monday and Thursday.

For some reason, the algorithm has decided that I love dogs. True enough, knew that. That I love chiropractors adjusting people. I see every video that's ever been shot. There's this one guy in Chicago that literally can crack your ears. Support for this podcast comes from Klaviyo. You know that feeling when your favorite brand really gets you. Deliver that feeling to your customers every time. Klaviyo turns your customer data into real-time connections across AI-powered email, SMS, and more, making every moment count. Over 100,000 brands trust Klaviyo's unified data and marketing platform to build smarter digital relationships with their customers during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and beyond.

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