Around 365 million years ago, prehistoric fish decided to leave water for land. And now there are 8 billion humans.

Today, the population of Earth will reach the 8 billion milestone, according to UN projections. It’s the result of an epic growth spurt in the last century: There were just 2 billion humans in 1925, and 4 billion as recently as 1974—so we once again doubled our numbers in less than 50 years. Corporate will love to hear that!

What drove the growth? People are living better, for longer. Child and maternal mortality rates are down, scientists have developed cures for deadly diseases, and extreme poverty rates have plunged.

But growth is hitting a wall, and it will reshape society

The world population is expected to peak in the 2080s at 10.4 billion people, hang there for a few decades, then fall at the dawn of the 22nd century. The reason: Fertility rates are declining, and many countries are not producing enough babies to maintain growth. The populations of 61 countries are projected to drop by at least 1% by 2050, with Eastern Europe suffering the biggest losses.

Shrinking populations alarm economists. Fewer kids means fewer workers contributing to the economy, at the same time the growing ranks of older people will require financial support. Everything from our cities to our healthcare systems will need to be reimagined.

Other countries have the opposite issue. While dozens of nations are grappling with population loss, other countries are experiencing population booms. Eight countries, including Nigeria, Tanzania, and Pakistan, will account for more than half of the projected population increase by 2050. Such blistering population growth can strain resources and make it harder to reduce poverty and provide education, the UN says.

Still, with peak human population on the horizon, we should expect demographic decline to become a more prominent policy issue. Per the UN, in 2050 the number of people 65 or over will be more than double the number of kids under five.—NF

World’s two biggest polluters to restart climate talks. The US and China agreed to resume talks on climate change after Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping met for three hours yesterday in Bali ahead of the G-20 summit (talks had been stalled since Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August). The two also discussed other issues, including Taiwan, and Biden came away from the meeting saying “there need not be a new Cold War.”

Ex-football player charged in UVA shooting. University of Virginia student Christopher Darnell Jones Jr. was taken into custody yesterday for allegedly shooting and killing three members of the school’s football team Sunday night. Two other students were also wounded in the shooting, which took place on a charter bus returning to campus from a field trip. The campus was locked down for 12 hours as police searched for Jones, a member of the football team in 2018 but off the roster at the time of the shooting.

Google settles 40-state privacy investigation. Google agreed to pay $391.5 million to resolve a massive investigation into how it tracked user locations in the largest multistate privacy settlement in US history. The company says that the issue at the root of the investigation—that it stored location data for users even if they’d opted into a privacy setting disallowing that—has been fixed. Location data is a key part of Google’s ad business that generates $200 billion annually. The attorneys general called the settlement a historic win for consumers.

Jeff Bezos, the world’s fourth richest man, told CNN that he will give away the majority of his $124 billion fortune in his lifetime. It’s the first time the former Amazon CEO has made this kind of commitment.

Bezos’s announcement comes after years of criticism that his ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, has lapped him in charitable donations.

• Scott is worth an estimated $24 billion and gave away over half of her net worth in less than three and a half years.
• Bezos’s most notable charitable donations so far include his promise to distribute $10 billion over 10 years (~8% of his net worth) through the Bezos Earth Fund to fight climate change.
• Bezos has also caught flak for not signing the Giving Pledge, a promise made by the world’s richest people to give away most of their wealth.

But now that Bezos has come around, how will he disburse the funds? Not sure yet. A “lifetime” for a megabillionaire could be pretty long, and he hasn’t revealed a plan.

Bezos did write one big check in recent days. He and his partner, Lauren Sánchez, awarded Dolly Parton $100 million to give to a charitable org of her choice through the Bezos Family Foundation’s Courage and Civility Award.—MM

The $32 billion FTX implosion is already on the Hollywood fast track. Nonfiction superstar author Michael Lewis, who is famous for writing The Big Short and Moneyball, has reportedly been embedded with the bankrupt crypto exchange’s former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried for six months and will pen a book telling the inside story.

News of Lewis’s next book was revealed by a CAA agent in an email to potential buyers of the movie rights. “The story has become too big for us to wait,” the email said. Lewis hasn’t written anything yet, but given recent events, you have to imagine he has a few ideas for sentences. According to the email, the author plans to focus on the rivalry between SBF and Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ), whom he likens to the “Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader of crypto.”

Lewis has a knack for telling stories about industry shifts using eccentric characters. SBF, a 30-year-old (former) crypto billionaire who once implied he would donate $1 billion to political races, claimed he was “skeptical of books,” and had dreams of buying Goldman Sachs, certainly fits the mold.

Further reading: In our interview with Lewis back in February, the author referred to the excesses of the crypto industry as “almost performing a satire” of capitalist systems. Read the full interview here.—MK

Stat: About 48,000 teaching assistants, researchers, and other academic workers in the University of California system walked off the job yesterday in the biggest strike of the year. It’s also the biggest higher-ed academic strike the US has ever seen, according to the United Auto Workers union, which represents the workers across the UC system’s 10 campuses who are trying to get a big minimum pay bump to cope with the state’s skyrocketing housing costs.

Quote: “If I was on cannabis, I wouldn’t have bit his ear.”

Mike Tyson is teaming up with Evander Holyfield to launch a line of cannabis-infused edibles called “Holy Ears.” Tyson famously bit Holyfield’s ear in a 1997 boxing match, but he apparently would have refrained had he been high as a kite.

Read: Why offshore fish farms could lead to a sustainable future…or an environmental disaster. (Quartz)

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Population trivia

If the global population is 8 billion in 2022, what’s your best guess for the global population in the year 0?

(This question probably works best as a competition among your coworkers, and the person who gets the closest wins a free lunch.)

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