#1084 - David Friedberg - Everything You Know is About to Collapse

Chris Williamson· Host0:00

You've said the future's gonna be epic. You're really optimistic about it when a lot of people are pretty worried. How come?

David Friedberg· Guest0:07

I think people have had a tendency to be worried about the future because humans are programmed to be that way. We always were worried about some predator coming around the corner and eating us. Like, we're, we're tuned to survive, right? So we're tuned to always-- There's always some existential threat to humanity. This goes back to kind of biblical eras thousands of years ago. It was the, the great flood that was about to come. There was the, um, you know, the plague. The plague's gonna wipe us all out. Uh, there's, uh, starvation. You know, the late nineteenth century, uh, population was outstripping, uh, food supply, and there was this big belief that we were gonna run out of food, and there was this kind of rush to... And, and, and the primary reason was all the world's fertilizer actually came from these guano fields [chuckles] off of the South American coast. So these giant islands covered in, in poop, and they would-- The clipper ships would go down, they'd get all this poop, and they'd bring it back to Europe, and they'd use it as fertilizer to farm. If you don't have fertilizer, you get less yield, less, less calories. So the, the islands were kind of diminishing, and there was this big call to action, "We're gonna run out of fertilizer. The world's gonna starve. We're gonna die." And then there was this invention called the Haber-Bosch process, where they figured out how to take nitrogen from the atmosphere, compress it, and make fertilizer. Boom.