Hi. Welcome to my, uh, sponge world.
I'm just, uh...
replenishing some resources for my spongelings.
Everyone is so absorbent!
What are we gonna do?
Greetings, greetings. Welcome, welcome.
I am Bill Nye, and I'm here to save the world.
In 1965,
my family and I went to the World's Fair in New York, New York,
the town so nice, they named it twice.
And the United Nations had a scoreboard
depicting the total number of humans in the world.
And we had just missed it. This thing was clicking away.
We just missed it changing
from 2,999,999,999 people on Earth
to three billion people.
But today it's not three billion,
it's almost seven and a half billion people.
So, in my lifetime, it has more than doubled.
It has substantially more than doubled.
Uh, right now, we have going on seven and a half billion,
and by the time this show is over that you are now watching,
there'll be another 4000 people.
And by the end of next week from when you're watching,
there'll be about another million.
From this episode till a week from now.
It's astonishing. Now, of course, all these people
are using a lot of the Earth's resources.
And this causes many of us to freak out.
It's time to revisit the sponge people.
Now, the sponge people represents the world's population.
And they are marching down the conveyor belt of life,
and like so many of us, they are using the world's resources,
represented by this finite amount of water here in the kiddie pool.
So, I, representing the natural processes of life,
squeeze the sponge people out
and return them to the conveyor belt of life.
But I want to complexify this a little more
because we are clever.
We keep finding ways to stretch our resources
to support more and more people
We're figuring out ways to grow more food with less land.
We're developing renewable resources of energy.
This isn't to say we don't have problems. Problems we have, people.
Close to a billion of us are undernourished.
We can produce enough food for everybody, but we're not good at distributing it.
It gets caught up in certain places
and not distributed to the people who need it.
And we have...
sponge factories and sponge buildings.
Screw those corporate sponge pigs.
I think we all agree that we need to do more with less.
And we need to get better at distributing food.
And here's the tricky thing.
Population isn't just about babies.
If you're like me,
you're old and getting older.
And you're not helping.
That's because people are living longer.
And for the first time in history,
there are countries where older folks outnumber young people.
But who's gonna provide for those old folks when they retire
after, let's say, 17 successful seasons on their groundbreaking Netflix show?
Seventeen seasons.
I'm sure your gathering population growth
is bound up with lots of other difficult issues.
The way we treat the environment,
how our economies grow,
migration of people, women's rights, access to healthcare,
and contrashep... ception. And contraception.
And I meant that. Not contrasheption.
"Contraception."
And even the word "overpopulation" has a lot of baggage.
When we use that word, who exactly is the "over"?
I mean, it's not me. Heh.
I mean, I'm not the overpopulation problem.
It's those other people.
But I just need a minute, that's all.
Tell them how you really feel, Bill.
Here's the deal.
My mother was, I admit,
very good at puzzles.
And she was recruited by the United States Navy
to work on the Enigma code,
this notorious code in World War II.
And then she went on to get a master's degree and a doctorate,
because she believed that women can do math.
Women can do anything.
Women are... people with brains.
I was not there, but the family myth is that my great grandmother,
my father's grandmother,
did not attend the birth of her first grandchild,
which would have been very traditional in those days.
Instead, she was marching in the Suffragette Parade
in Washington, D.C., where we grew up.
Then my mother, it is said,
threw her bra on the fire at the Equal Rights Amendment Parade.
The ERA Para... I wasn't there. I did not witness this interaction.
But this is the family myth. Now, look, everybody.
Half the people in the world are girls and women.
So, let's have half the scientists and engineers be girls and women.
We'll have twice as many brains to solve problems
and they'll probably solve those problems in new ways.
And by the way,
when women are in power, no matter where they are,
in the United States, in North America, in the developed world,
in the developing world, in remote places, in congested places,
when women are in power, when women get education,
they have fewer kids.
And the kids they have have a higher quality of life
because they have more resources to distribute for the fewer kids.
It's not rocket surgery. It's science.
Thanks, y'all.
Addressing overpopulation is a global concern.
So, we sent our correspondent, Emily Calandrelli,
to find out more about this firsthand in the country of India.
There are 1.3 billion people in today's India,
including more than 650 million women.
Shockingly, less than a quarter of those women have jobs.
Think about that. Less than 25 percent.
My mother wasn't allowed to study after a certain class, because she was a girl.
Social scientists believe there is a direct link
between overpopulation
and a lack of education and employment for women.
Do you think your mother's generation had different opportunities than you had?
I would rather say they had no opportunities.
Change is happening.
And it's happening right here
on the campus of India's tech giant, Infosys.
And that change arrives every morning
in the form of 68,000 female employees,
fully one-third of the company's workforce.
Very early on, we realized that the software industry
had a preponderance of men,
and we felt that, to be a truly democratic and inclusive company,
having more women working was very important.
What about your own family?
Well, my wife is a very strong woman.
If you meet her, you'd rather interview her than me.
And she used to be a journalist.
She's now... She's a philanthropist.
So, she's very, very, you know...
She's quite something.
It's this mindset of equality that led to the hire of this woman,
one of the top female execs at Infosys.
The gender-based roles are very distinct here.
And it may be extremely easy for women
to choose to probably, you know, be a very active homemaker.
Was this the future that you saw for yourself?
Did you envision having both a family and a career?
To be honest, no.
But then, at every stage, when I had a doubt, work or home,
you know, "How do I take it forward?" Infosys gave me the option.
For Infosys, and for India,
it's those options that are creating a different future.
My mom finds herself in me.
She feels all her broken dreams that she could not nourish,
completed by me.
She's really very proud of me.
Being educated, it means people are family planning,
and it's really good, because they can think
about the overpopulation and the problem that it causes to the Earth.
I think being educated is a really good solution.
♪ No gray Only black and white ♪
♪ No, the Earth Is moving too slow ♪
♪ To share And close your eyes ♪
I know.
She was so sweet. She was so sweet.
- And she won your heart. - She did, absolutely.
I hear things about India. You know, its population is increasing.
- Yeah. - How much do people talk about that?
They know that it's a stigma about India, and they don't like it.
And so, companies like Infosys, they're investing in women,
which has this really interesting, unintended side effect
of having women have fewer children.
So, there are studies that show
that with increased education for women,
women often have fewer children, on average.
But they still have kids, right?
They do have kids, right. But when you educate women,
they become more educated about things like contraceptive methods,
and then when they have a career,
they often just start having a family later on in life.
And because of things like biology, they typically have fewer kids.
But what I liked about Infosys the most, that's really unique to their company,
is that they have 16 weeks of paid maternity leave.
They have paid paternity leave, and paid leave for adoptive parents,
which, you know, these policies are unheard of in the United States,
which is the only developed nation in the entire world without a maternity...
A paid maternity-leave policy.
You're not ticked off about it. You're fine.
I mean, it's crazy.
You go halfway around the world to this company in Bangalore,
and they have these progressive policies for women.
And I'm like, "They don't have that back in the United States."
Do you think those policies are gonna come over here?
Like, pressure from the developing world to the developed world?
I mean, it has to eventually.
Women won't put up with this for much longer.
Women in the United States.
Countries like China and Russia and Albania and Serbia,
they all have paid maternity-leave policies.
- The United States just needs to catch up. - That's all you're saying.
- That's all I'm saying. - Thank you. Great performance.
- Thank you. - Blow it up.
Emily Calandrelli.
Now, population is a complicated issue,
but I am very grateful that we have a panel of experts to help us sort it out.
Greetings, greetings, greetings.
We are here with Dr. Rachel Snow, chief of Population Development
at the United Nations Population Fund.
We have Dr. Travis Rieder,
ethicist at the Berman Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
My father was an alumnus.
And Dr. Nerys Benfield, director of Family Planning at...
- How do I say? Montefiore Medical Center? - Yeah, yeah. That's it.
And professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
Thank you all so much for being here.
So, um... what should we be doing?
Well... So, as a physician and as a family planning specialist,
obviously, I think that access to healthcare is incredibly important,
and access to family planning.
You know, in that wonderful piece, you talked about
how educating women leads them to have fewer children.
Well, that doesn't happen by magic, right?
- Either women are having less sex, or... - I hope that's not true.
Or... Right.
Or they're using contraception when they're having sex.
And I think that contraception is the tool
by which all of these things can get actualized.
So, contraception, would we call that a resource?
- I think so. - What resources should we be focused on?
I'm interested in clean water, renewable, reliable electricity,
- and access to the Internet. - Those are important, but we need justice
and we need education.
How do we introduce, or export, or create justice?
Excellent healthcare, excellent education systems,
empowerment of women, family planning.
Those lead to all the positives, all the multiplier effects.
Now, family planning's not expensive, is it?
No, it certainly isn't. I mean, I think it's, uh...
in fact, one of the most cost-effective interventions
- that we have for healthcare. - That's right.
It's cost-saving, in fact, which is a very rare thing for a healthcare dollar.
So, what do you think the most important limited resource is?
You talk about food, you talk about water, well, there's another one
we sometimes forget about when we're talking about population
and that's one that I think you're gonna also talk about in this show,
which is the atmosphere's ability to absorb our greenhouse gases
without disrupting the climate in a violent way. Right?
So, most of my own work is on, um,
could we actually think about population as a variable to be addressed
in mitigating and adapting to climate change.
So, you're saying that...
If I understand this... the statistics, or the actuarial numbers of population,
affects the climate.
Population is one of the main drivers of climate change, so...
Rachel, uh, wrote a very important report that talks about this.
So, when it's climate change, there are individual emitters
and there's a lot of us doing the emitting.
And so, the people who have the highest fertility rate, like in Niger,
are doing almost no emitting, right?
They burn some charcoal now and then.
Well, so, the average Nigerien emits 0.1 metric tons of carbon annually.
- How many does the average American emit? - I did that with my coffee this morning.
- Sixteen metric tons is what the average... - So, 160 times?
- Yeah. - Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
And so, our two kids are way more problematic.
The Nigeriens, with an average of seven children, are not the problem
- when it comes to climate change. - So, should we have policies
that penalize people for having extra kids in the developed world?
So, I do think that we should at least consider it.
Well, "at least consider it" is like "do it."
One of the things that we could do that's kind of least policy-ish
is we could encourage our culture and our norms to change, right?
I would take issue with the idea that we do anything
to incentivize fewer children or more children.
I think it's all about...
This is where it's justice. It's human rights.
We're really clear, people should have the number of children they want,
the timing of children, and if...
Some families have five or six children. God bless them. I mean, that's fine.
- But most people end up with fewer. - Let me ask you this...
But when you talk about penalties, who are you gonna end up penalizing, right?
So, even in a rich country like the United States,
we've gone down that road before.
And who ends up being the people who are penalized is poor women,
- minority women, disabled women. - How were they penalized?
There's been... You know, there was forced sterilization
that was legal in the United States even up into the '70s.
So, we really have, um...
not come at it from a place of justice, necessarily, in the past.
Population studies are often framed around women.
It's all about women, women having kids.
Is there some aspect of population...?
Mm...
Population and resources that is overlooked that has to do with men?
Most definitely. I think there's two aspects of that.
One, I think that men have less contraceptive options,
which limits their capacity for engagement in that decision.
It's either condoms or sterilization.
That's all men really have.
Although, there's lots of work being done
to bring some new flavor to the... the toolbox
that men will be able to use.
- Uh, stay tuned for that. - Yeah.
But, go on.
And then I think the second thing is that, you know,
women have the uterus. I mean, that's kind of the bottom line.
So, making sure that women have the capacity
to control their, you know, reproduction is the first necessary step.
The bottom line is that when you empower women,
all of a sudden, people make better choices.
When women have education, their children are healthier,
the whole family is healthier.
The male is healthier, too.
So, there is something special about empowering and educating women.
There is something special.
Seems really good for sustainable development.
Do you all have an opinion on the ideal human population for the Earth?
I don't, but I'm ready to live on Mars.
I'm there. I'm...
No. I'll take whatever comes.
I'm not worried about the numbers.
I really think that's not the place for us to worry.
I think the place to worry is, are we, in fact, creating a just world
for lots of people, to create and innovate?
- And I think we'll be okay. - We'll save the world.
- Thank you all very much. - We'll save the world.
Now... we were curious about what men could do to affect population.
So, we sent our correspondent Joanna Hausmann into the field.
Super hard, babe. You got it.
- Nice. - Get your legs right. Just a little bit.
Hey, Bill, I'm here at a mini-golf course
to talk to couples I don't know about male contraception.
This is a terrible joke, and I apologize.
That was bad.
Hey, guys. Oh, my God.
Hi, I'm from Bill Nye's show.
I'm not a "crazy person."
I know this is weird, it's the first question I ask,
but what kind of birth control are you guys using?
- Is that a trick question? Oh. - No, it's a real question.
Contraceptives or...?
- Contraception. Birth control. - Birth control. Like, no babies happen.
There's a control on the amount of births.
- Honestly? - I would like honesty.
I just pull out.
That's not, like, a foolproof...
My dismount's amazing.
- I'm on birth control. - You take it every day? Is it annoying?
No, I take my protein shake every day.
I don't think it's the same.
I have the implant in my arm. It's cool. You wanna feel it?
- Yeah. - It's right there.
- Oh, girl, I feel it. - It feels...
- Yeah. - I have an IUD. It's in my uterus.
You can't feel it.
What if I told you that there's this new type of system
where they inject a gel into your...?
- Into her? - Into you.
- Ew! - That sounds violent.
And then makes your sperm infertile.
- Is that something that appeals to you? - Sounds good to me.
How's that get implemented?
It's a bit of a surgery. You don't like that?
- No, I don't like that. - It's less invasive than, you know,
- a birth of a child, but... - Okay.
Yeah.
There's another option.
It's comparable to the pill. Testosterone level would go down.
- Down? - So, there could be loss of libido.
That's not good.
- Would a guy get mood swings? - Yeah.
I think I'm already moody enough.
- Does that have side effects? - Yeah. There's blood clots,
you might gain weight, there's a possibility of cancer...
Well, that's the same as for female birth control, though.
Oh, see, I didn't know that.
You didn't know that? Okay.
- Now I feel bad. - Yeah.
- Then there's the sperm switch. - Oh, I have heard of this one.
They surgically implant a switch in your body
and then it turns on and off the sperm.
- Isn't that dope? - You'd have a robot penis.
Click that sucker off.
- I'll take a robot penis. - That's really progressive of you.
- I love that. - Thank you.
It is kind of relieving to know that the responsibility
- doesn't just have to be the woman. - Yeah.
Death to sperm.
Joanna, that was cool.
That was interesting.
- Is that what you call it? - I think "interesting" is the word.
How did you get those people to talk so openly
about something that would be... so personal?
- I... I... - You're a charmer.
I think the tripping helped.
They were like, "Oh, this person's a little off.
"Let's, you know, just talk to her." Um...
Also, I think women are very used to talking about this type of stuff.
So, I would go for the girls first. I'd like look at the girl like,
"So, birth control, am I right?" And they'd be like, "Ugh. Girl, I feel you."
But the guys would just... start retracting from the conversation.
But I'll wheel them back in.
- You did, and they were wheeled or rolled. - They were wheeled.
- Yes. And clubbed. - They were rolled, wheeled.
- All of those. - So, how does Vasalgel work?
- "Vasalgel"? Yeah. - Vasalgel.
So, Vasalgel works in the following way.
Basically, what they do is they inject this gel in this pathway, so the sperm...
- In the vas deferens kind of situation? - In the vas deferens, exactly there.
- That's a tiny thing to be poking it up. - Yeah, it's a tiny, tiny needle.
And it's completely reversible.
So, if you're like, "Oh, I wanna have a baby tomorrow," you can go and...
That's the exact sound it makes.
- Yes. Yes. - And you remove the gel.
- And you just remove the gel. - The gel, is it a plug or a spermicide?
It's a plug, so... Yeah.
- So the sperm gets absorbed - Reabsorbed into the body.
The way it does with the valve or the way it does if guys have a vasectomy.
Exactly.
- Is this sign language for "vasectomy"? - It can be. Thank you very much.
- Thank you. - It's a great piece.
- Thank you. - And piece, I guess, is the term.
Joanna Hausmann, ladies and gentlemen.
I wish I could stand here at the end of the show and say:
"Eureka! We figured it out.
The solution to population growth is... a few, fewer... sponge people."
Or whatever.
It's not that easy, though. There's a lot to consider.
It's kind of like coming up with a scientific metaphor.
It seems simple enough, and then...
six weeks later, all you have are sponge people.
Really? Sponge people? That's the best you could do?
One thing's clear though, we're not getting another planet,
so we need to figure this out.
And I've asked some audience members to help.
Hey, audience members.
Thanks for sitting patiently while I went on and on.
Right now, everyone has a place to sit,
but there are more people coming.
Oh, look at this.
Not enough room right now.
We need more seats.
Engineers, can you help us out?
In the past, humans have worked around problems like this.
We needed more room in our cities and we built skyscrapers.
We needed to get water to more people, we built aqueducts.
Our streets got really dirty and stinky, so we built sewers.
In all of these cases, we engineered our way out of an awkward situation.
Pretty sweet.
Now there's room for everyone, unless...
there are even more people.
Perhaps, I should've seen that coming.
Engineers, this is a problem we're facing today.
We have a lot of people, we have limited resources,
and we need to make sure everyone gets enough.
We need to innovate and find solutions no one has even dreamed of yet.
That is a pretty nice one. You know, I hadn't even dreamed of this yet.
Dig in everybody.
Beer is a resource, too.
An important one.
We can do this. We just need to be creative.
We need to use our resources thoughtfully, we need to share.
Share your car, share your food.
But don't share pictures of your food, because nobody cares, all right?
In other words...
...don't be a big selfish sponge.
Yeah. Don't be like this guy. Or gal.
Sponges have no gender.
But do keep working together to save the world.
- Yeah! - Whoa, yeah! Nicely done.
Blow it up, yeah!
Save the world, Bill.
Nye.