Elon Musk recently sat down with the folks over at The Babylon Bee for a wide-ranging interview that was unsurprisingly filled with funny jokes and a whole lot of sarcasm. The Bee’s CEO Seth Dhillon, Editor in Chief Kyle Mann and Creative Director Ethan Nicole spoke with Musk, the famed car maker and innovator, for over one and a half hours.

Musk has become a fan of The Babylon Bee’s content, often replying on Twitter to their satire pieces. This led The Bee’s Editor in Chief to tell Musk during the interview, “You know Babylon Bee headlines better than I do.”

The trio also picked his brain on serious topics like the world’s declining birthrate, the problems with “woke culture” and the “metaverse,” along with more lighthearted ones, like whether he would rather be Iron Man or Batman. Musk, who is currently the world’s richest man worth $243 billion, had several insightful comments about many issues our culture is grappling with today.

The Declining Birthrate

For years, so-called “experts” have been warning that the world has too many people, and that overpopulation is going to lead to famine, widespread starvation, and social upheaval. This idea was popularized by Stanford University Professor Paul Ehrlich’s alarmist book The Population Bomb, written in 1968.

Rightly, Musk disagrees.

“If you just simply look at the birth rate statistics, you can tell what the future is going to be like because you can see how many children were born last year,” Musk pointed out. “And you could say, ‘Is the birth rate trending down or up?’ And it’s been trending down basically almost everywhere.”

“[We’re] trending towards well below replacement rate. And a lot of countries have been well below replacement rate for a long time … The earth is far from overpopulated. Far, far from overpopulated.”

Earlier this year, Musk issued the same warning on Twitter.

And at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit in early December, Musk again reiterated this point. “If people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble. Mark my words.”

On the Problem of “Wokeness”

Another topic that Musk touched on was the modern phenomenon of “wokeness,” after Bee CEO Seth Dhillon asked Musk why he thinks that ideology is so destructive.

“Wokeness basically wants to make comedy illegal,” Musk observed. “Do we want a humorless society that is simply rife with condemnation and hate?”

“At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary and hateful. It basically gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel, armored in false virtue,” he added.

The Metaverse

Dhillon also asked Musk for his thoughts on the metaverse – an alternative world brought about by virtual reality technology. Facebook (now rebranded as Meta) has pledged to spend at least $10 billion to promote and bring the metaverse to life.

“I don’t know if I necessarily buy into this metaverse stuff,” Musk said. “Sure, you can put a TV on your nose. Not sure that makes you in the metaverse, you know.”

“When I grew up, it’s like don’t sit too close to TV it’s going to ruin your eyesight. And now we’ve got TV, it’s like literally right here,” Musk said holding his hand up right in front of his eyes.

“I’m like, uh, what? Is that good for you?”

“I don’t see someone strapping a screen to their face all day, and not wanting to ever leave. It seems no way … I think we’re far from disappearing into the metaverse,” Musk added.

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Photo from YouTube.