Greetings. This will be the first, frankly, that I've ever recorded while on allergy medicine.

I'm taking Benadryl to ward off the evils of August ragweed here in northern Wisconsin.

So I'm going to start with a fact. This is not going to be what I talk about specifically in this episode.

10,000 years ago, there was approximately 50,000 kilograms of wild mammal, terrestrial wild mammal weight for every human being that was alive on the planet.

Fast forward to 200 years ago in the year 1800 when there were one billion humans and there was

approximately 80 kilograms of wild mammal biomass relative to each human.

Now, during that period, most of that was the result of a growing population of humans.

But since 1800, when there were 80 kilograms, to today, there are only two and a half kilograms of mammal weight per human on the planet.

That is a result, yes, growing the number of humans from 1 billion to 8 billion, but also the decimation

of wild mammal populations. There are still 6,000 plus mammal populations, but the number of them

and the average weight of them is diminishing.

I find this to be a profoundly disturbing statistic,

but when my friend Tom Murphy shared this with me a few days ago,

it was on the heels of what I'd been noticing from recent, frankly, and podcast episodes,

the vitriol and tribalism and different sort of tenor in the comments on YouTube and in my

emails.

Someone said, I subscribe to your podcast because of XYZ guests and now I'm unsubscribing

because of this clown. I got massive positive feedback from a recent guest episode. At the same

time, I got massive negative feedback. So I think what I'm attempting here is really difficult.

And today I'm going to describe what it looks like.

Of course, I'm making this up, but it's tethered to reality and also tethered to

science to run the gauntlet of discourse about the future. So when I talk about the reduction in

...