Andrew Sage

And that's what really kept populations in check.

You know, I remember hearing, I don't even remember who it was, but this one person had like 19 children and only eight of them survived to adulthood.

Yeah, they honestly did pretty good.

Like by those metrics, like, yeah, the infant mortality rate was unbelievably high.

Yeah, yeah.

So families had a lot of children, but only a few of them made it to adulthood.

And thanks to early industrialization, things were able to change a bit.

You know, we improved our agriculture, we invented refrigeration, we got better fertilizer.

And most importantly, we developed advancements in sanitation.

You know, doctors were actually washing their hands.

You know, we developed vaccines so children weren't dying of measles and mumps.

imagine that oh good lord and we also had an overall improvement in medicine you know one of the greatest inventions of humanity I think is the vaccine and it's such a wonderful thing that there's not this massive movement of people who

challenge its very legitimacy in this day and age and threaten all of our lives as a result you know imagine being in that world oh god so we eventually hit 1 billion in the year 1804 which is just below the current population of china and things really began to accelerate from there we end up creating something called a j curve of exponential population growth

Thanks to, like I said, the decline in infant mortality and improvements in fertility and food production.

And then the other billionaire milestones started rolling.

By 1804, Haiti had just gained its independence.

Napoleon I was crowned Emperor of France.

And Lewis and Clark had begun their expedition across America.

In 1927, that's 123 years later, we hit 2 billion people.

You know, by then we had Trotsky being expelled from the USSR, which had just been founded.