315. The World is Not Ending | Bjørn Lomborg

[0] Hello, everyone watching and listening on YouTube or associated podcasts.

[1] I have the great privilege today of speaking once again to Dr. Bjorn Longberg.

[2] We've talked several times on my podcast before.

[3] It's always good to talk to him.

[4] Dr. Longberg researches the smartest ways to do good with his think tank, the Copenhagen consensus, He's worked with hundreds of the world's top economists and seven Nobel laureates to find and promote the most effective solutions to the world's greatest challenges, from disease and hunger to climate and education.

[5] For his work, Lomburg was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of the world.

[6] He's a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and a frequent commentator in print and broadcast media for outlets including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, CNN, Fox.

[7] and the BBC.

[8] His monthly column is published in many languages by dozens of influential newspapers across all continents.

[9] He's also a best -selling author whose books include False Alarm, How Climate Change Panic Costs, Trillions, Hurts the Poor and Fails to Fix the Planet.

[10] The skeptical environmentalist, cool it.

[11] How to spend $75 billion to make the world a better place, the Nobel laureates guide to the smartest targets for the world and prioritizing development, a cost -benefit analysis of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

[12] All right, hello, Mr. Longberg.

[13] Very nice to have the opportunity to speak with you again.

[14] I thought today we would start our discussion by talking about what young people are being told.

[15] And I want to lay out a few ideas for you, and we can delve into this, and we'll move on from there.

[16] So I've just been reading Alex Epstein's book, Fossil, future.

[17] And in that book, he details out, first of all, his belief that in the foreseeable future, that not only should we, not only will we have to use fossil fuels, but we should use them.

[18] And he explains why, I would say, on ethical and practical grounds.

[19] But he also says something that struck me is very interesting, which is that the view that's being put forward to young people of the role of human beings on the planet, in relationship to the environment is essentially predicated on an implicit religious metaphor.

[20] And I want to lay out the metaphor, and I want to lay out why I think his claim that it's a religious metaphor is technically correct.

[21] So the story is something like this.

[22] The planet is fragile and virginal and continually pillaged.

[23] The pillaging forces are the patriarchy, essentially, the social structure, it's a masculine metaphor.

[24] The social structure is viewed as a force that's nothing but devouring and negative.

[25] And so you have nature, you have culture, nature's all positive, culture's all negative.

[26] Then you have the individual, also part of the story, and the individual is basically characterized as some combination of predator and parasite.

[27] And so the reason that's a religious story, as far as I can tell, is this is complicated, but I'd like to be able to lay it out.

[28] When I wrote my book in 1999 called Maps of Meaning, it struck me that the basic cognitive and perceptual categories were something like chaos, order, and the process that mediates between them.

[29] I looked at a lot of mythological work, a lot of religious writing across multiple cultures, and tried to look at the correspondence between that and certain neuropsychological models that were being built, including models of hemispheric processing.

[30] So our hemispheres are set up in some real sense so that the right hemisphere processes novelty and chaos and possibility, and the left hemisphere imposes order.

[31] And the fact that the hemispheres have this structure, indicates, because they're adapted to the natural world, let's say, indicates that the most fundamental way of perceiving the world is something like a place of possibility and chaos and potential, on the one hand, and a place of habitable order and culture and predictability on the other.

[32] So you have those two domains, and then consciousness looks like it's the process that mediates between the two.

[33] And Epstein, now I learn, in 1999, that these domains, chaos, order, and the process were always represented metaphorically or symbolically.

[34] It's like an a priori axiom of cognitive function and perception itself.

[35] The chaotic domain, potential and so forth, tends to be represented with female symbols, feminine symbols, and the orderly domain tends to be represented with masculine symbols.

[36] And so you can see how this plays out in the modern world because you have Mother Nature, who's virginal and fragile, being raped by the catastrophic patriarchy.

[37] And you can see those metaphors lurking underneath, right?

[38] There's the positive female, the negative male, on the cultural front, and then you have to lay the individual on top of that.

[39] And the individual in that story, positive, feminine, negative masculine, is also represented negatively.

[40] Now, that's a very compelling story.

[41] because it does cover all the domains of existence.

[42] And there is a beautiful and plentiful and positive element of untrammeled nature, let's say, and there is a tyrannical and predatory aspect of culture, and the individual can be a destructive, parasitical, and predatory force, but that's only half the story, and that's the problem.

[43] And so the point I'm trying to make is that we can't structure our perceptions, without using something like an a priori category system.

[44] And the a prior category system, whatever your a prior category system is your religion, it functions in exactly the same way.

[45] And we have a religion now that's focused on nature worship, the derogation of culture, and the damnation of the individual.

[46] And that's the story that's being told to young people, right?

[47] The planet's fragile, culture is nothing but a destroying force, and individual effort is to be construed as predatory, say, in the patriarchal sense, and parasitic in relationship to the natural world.

[48] So I'm wondering what you think about that.

[49] Yeah, no, I think it's a great metaphor.

[50] So again, if we go along with us and if we all have religion, I would tend to say that my religion is data.

[51] There's a famous statistician that say, If you, without data, you're just another guy with an opinion, right?

[52] We have a lot of knowledge about the world.

[53] And the reality is that much of this is built on, you know, stories and metaphors and things that we've heard.

[54] And it's probably not very conducive to understanding what the world is actually like.

[55] And I totally agree with you that everybody, not really just young people, but especially perhaps young people, are told, this is the end of times, you know, this idea of should you really have children?

[56] Should you really put them in?

[57] to this world, this terrible world, the world is going to end in, you know, whatever the number is right now, but, you know, eight years or 12 years or whatever.

[58] The feeling is that this is sort of ends of times.

[59] And that's very much, as you point out, a sense of we have this beautiful world that we somehow, this natural world that we've somehow despoiled and made terrible in so many different ways.

[60] And I would argue that certainly if you look back in time, this very clearly is a very modern way of thinking about the world.

[61] You know, two, three hundred years ago, we were terrified of nature because we really worried about, you know, the wolves out there.

[62] We were terrified about nature in the sense that it would kill us in all kinds of ways.

[63] Just, you know, think about one of the things I'll talk about a little later, smallpox, a disease that we've eradicated in 1978.

[64] But even in the 20th century, it killed about 300 million people.

[65] So, you know, it killed a couple of, you know, somewhere up to five million people every year.

[66] This is a terrible disease, and it was not the only disease that you were struck with.

[67] This killed, you know, royalty and everybody else.

[68] Nature used to be terrible.

[69] What has happened is that we have actually found a way to live such that we can now say we like nature, we love nature, we want to set aside lots of nature.

[70] Remember, you know, most of European nations, for instance, cut down most of their forests to build navies, to fight each other.

[71] But the fundamental point is you get reforestation when you're rich, when you're well off, when you can actually deal with the issues.

[72] And so, again, that tells you something that I think is incredibly important if we're actually going to have a good conversation.

[73] It is that you need to understand, overall, things are moving in the right direction, and that we're much better off, you know, with just one statistic.

[74] If you look at the number of people that die from climate -related disasters, so these are the disasters that we hear about all the time.

[75] You know, floods, drought, storms, wildfires, extreme temperatures, those kinds of things.

[76] We have pretty good data for that.

[77] We certainly have good data for the last hundred years.

[78] How many people die every year?

[79] Well, it turns out that in the 1920s, about half a million people died each year from those disasters.

[80] That's a terrible outcome of the world.

[81] How many people died today?

[82] If you ask most young people, if you ask most people in the world, they'll probably think that number has gone up and up, and it's just worse and worse.

[83] Nothing could be further from the truth.

[84] Last year, it's the last full year that we have, 2021, less than 7 ,000 people die.

[85] We've seen a decline of more than 99%.

[86] Why?

[87] It's got nothing to do with climate.

[88] It's not because climate has gotten better or indeed really worse.

[89] We can't really tell in most of these impacts.

[90] There's a few of them we can, but mostly we can't.

[91] What has changed is our ability to handle it.

[92] That's why we don't die from smallpox.

[93] That's why we can afford to actually make sure we have forests.

[94] That's why most rich nations are reforesting.

[95] And that's why fewer and fewer people are dying.

[96] from these disasters.

[97] So I think we need to tell that alternative story, if you will, that yes, you hear all these terrible things.

[98] And it doesn't mean that there are no problems.

[99] There's still lots of people that are terribly troubled from floods.

[100] There are still lots of people that are terribly troubled by droughts and all these other things.

[101] There's still a lot of infectious disease from both tuberculosis, malaria.

[102] The world is not fine, but the world is much better.

[103] And that's important because that put us in a very different frame of mind.

[104] It means we are not, you know, looking at the world being despoiled, and hence we need to make some sacrificial offerings to, you know, please this deity that we're worried about.

[105] It's instead to say, look, we're actually dealing with this in the right direction.

[106] We're actually making things better, but we can do even more.

[107] That's a very different message.

[108] And, of course, one that's much more optimistic and I would hope.

[109] Well, it's also more balanced.

[110] Okay, so you started talking about the relationship, your concentration on data, and so I wanted to delve into that a little bit.

[111] So there's data, of course, and data would be something like a representation of the patterns in the world, not merely the subjective patterns, not merely the psychological patterns, but the patterns in the, well, let's say the objective world, the patterns that exist in somehow, that transcend mere subjectivity.

[112] And so those are patterns that we're going to test our presumptions against.

[113] But part of the reason I wanted to delve into the underlying metaphorical substructures is because a lot of your work and the work of the more non -naive optimists that I've encountered in the last 10 years has this counter -narrative element that structures it.

[114] I mean, because you're a priori axioms, they're the reverse of the environmentalist axioms in some sense, in this way.

[115] is what I mean, is that you started your description by pointing out that we shouldn't be lulled into thinking that nature is only benevolent.

[116] It's only been a very short period of time, historically speaking, that any of us at all, anywhere on the planet, had the luxury of ever assuming that nature was a benevolent force for more than a few seconds, right?

[117] And so, because nature is conspiring in all of its benevolence to destroy us as rapidly as it possibly can, all the time as well, with cold and heat and floods and disease and acts of God and volcanoes and earthquakes, et cetera, et cetera.

[118] And so you have to be extremely naive if you don't also see nature as a threatening force.

[119] And so now, you shouldn't see it as only a threatening force because we're also dependent on it.

[120] All right.

[121] So you flesh out the malevolent nature side of the story.

[122] But then you also say, well, look, everyone who's listening, don't be so pessimistic about our culture, our Western culture, let's say, but the global culture even more broadly.

[123] Because in many ways, we've been moving in the right direction.

[124] Things are a hell of a lot better by almost every metric you can imagine than they were 100 years ago.

[125] They're better by most metrics than they were 50 or 20 years ago.

[126] And not just a little bit better, a lot better.

[127] So, and then And so then you can flesh out the positive side of the culture.

[128] And then on the individual side, you can say, well, you know, there are people who are predatory and there are people who are parasitical.

[129] And everyone is subject to temptation and failure to hit the mark, let's say.

[130] But by and large, people are striving in the right direction.

[131] And you can view human beings as a positive force, even though there's some ambivalence about that.

[132] And so that fleshes out the story.

[133] You know, you can also think about it.

[134] as Rousseau versus Hobbes.

[135] And strangely enough, you come down more on the side of the Hobbesians, even though I don't think that's your temperamental proclivity.

[136] Because for Rousseau, right, the nature was all positive.

[137] We were turned into negative creatures because we were perverted by our socialization.

[138] And human beings, well, for Rousseau, human beings were innately good, assuming that they weren't warped and twisted by culture.

[139] But Hobbs had the alternative viewpoint.

[140] Hobbs said, well, the state of nature is chaos and war, and we need a strong socializing force in order to integrate and organize us so that peace can obtain.

[141] And I've thought for a long time that a comprehensive worldview melds Rousseau and Hobbs.

[142] It's the same comprehensive religious idea in some sense is you need a representation of nature that's positive and negative.

[143] You need a representation of culture that's positive and negative and a representation of the individual that's positive and negative.

[144] And we've offered a crippled religious view to young people.

[145] It's also got this apocalyptic end, right?

[146] This apocalyptic undertone, which is not only is nature virginal and fragile and culture, rapacious and predatory, and the individual corrupt, but this is a bloody emergency and the apocalypse is upon us, like if it isn't tomorrow, it's 10 years from now.

[147] All of that's religious force, I would say, operating at the metaphorical and mythological level.

[148] And a lot of what you've been doing, and I want to get at the foundations of this, a lot of what you've been doing is saying, well, look, let's just hold on on the apocalyptic vision side.

[149] It isn't obvious that the bloody catastrophe is upon us now in any manner that would make incautious emergency action anything other than destructive.

[150] There's no reason to assume that as a social force were only predatory and parasitical and we could give ourselves some credit for striving in the right direction and also being able to master this because one of the things that I really liked about your work and about many of the people who are working on the optimistic front, this is mostly economists do this, is the idea that well, we don't have an apocalyptic challenge on our hands, but we have some challenges, but we're the sort of creatures that can actually master those challenges if we don't panic and do something too stupid.

[151] Yeah, and look, that's exactly the right point.

[152] I actually think, I love your, your Hobson, Rousseau.

[153] In some ways, you're probably right that I would argue, of course the world originally was like Hobbs and not Rousseau, but what we've actually managed with a hundred, you know, three, of 400 years of hard work, is that we have turned the world into something that's much closer to Rousseau.

[154] I'm not sure I'm going to go down in history with this philosophy lesson.

[155] But yeah, the fundamental point is what we achieve is by making the world safer for us, by actually achieving to make sure that people don't die from smallpox and that they don't die from all these other things, that we can actually produce a lot of the things that we need for our world in a much more sustainable way.

[156] Remember, you know, if you look at the history of, for instance, fire over the last 10 ,000 years, typically whenever, you know, humans come around, they just burn the whole stuff because it's in their way.

[157] You know, if you're Indian, we have lots of evidence to show that Indians just burned large tracts of land because it brings out the animals, you know, makes them defense and you can kill them and you eat them.

[158] It makes a lot of sense.

[159] But that's really destroying nature.

[160] What we're doing now, of course, is to a very large extent that we grow very efficient food so that in rich countries, at least, in countries that have sufficient resources to actually care about other things than just surviving, they set aside more and more nature.

[161] That's why, you know, just in Denmark where I am right now, you know, we used to have about a third of the country covered in forest.

[162] Then we caught about all of it down, so we're down to about 2%.

[163] Now we're back up to 14%.

[164] Why?

[165] Because we're rich.

[166] We actually like and we plant for us so that we have places to take our kids out and watch it.

[167] And so, again, the point here is it's not just optimism.

[168] It's actually realism to recognize that you're only going to fix the problem by looking at the data, finding out what are the challenges, fix many of these challenges and realizing you can't fix everything, or at least not everything at once.

[169] So you fix the most important challenges that takes the least resources to get the most impact.

[170] So fundamentally, and again, this is what the economists love to say, the ones that have the biggest bang for the buck.

[171] But in reality, it's much more about making sure that if you can only do some things, sometimes you do the smartest stuff first.

[172] And that's what's brought us to here.

[173] And that's why we should stop saying it's the end of the world, but still recognize that there are plenty of troubles around.

[174] And again, also, just let's remember, we're sitting in two developed countries where we're very well off, where we're not worried about, you know, neither smallpox because we've eradicated that.

[175] But we're not worried about tuberculosis either.

[176] We're not worried about not having enough food.

[177] We're not worried about all these, yes, all these different things that most people in this world.

[178] So, you know, by far, far over four billion, probably more like six, six and a half billion of the eight billion we are on the planet.

[179] worried about every day.

[180] And that's why I'm also really frustrated with this way that we're very often so focused on saying, for instance, on climate change, which is a real problem.

[181] We're saying it's the only problem and then we forget about all these other things where we could help much more, make sure that people are saved much better and that they could also then eventually get to a point where they would want to preserve nature and think about other things and just simply making sure they survived the night.

[182] Okay, so we talked about some of the reasons that this new quasi -religious view of the world in our place and it might have arisen.

[183] Your point was that, well, because of technological progress, we've been able to begin to view nature as a much more benevolent force than we ever had the luxury to before.

[184] But there's some other, there's some other social pressures, let's say, that are pushing this narrative forward that I think are worth delving into.

[185] You mentioned one when we just had a bit of a preliminary conversation, is that there's a huge competition for people's attention online, and that competition has intensified dramatically in the last 20 years, because there are so many voices clamoring for everyone's attention all the time.

[186] And one of the advantages to an apocalyptic vision is that it is attention -grabbing.

[187] And so any narrative that tilts towards, towards the apocalyptic, is likely to get magnified in online communication.

[188] Because things are good and slowly getting better isn't much of a headline.

[189] And it, right, and there's nothing novel about it.

[190] Okay, so that's one, that's another possible contributing factor.

[191] Can I just give you one?

[192] Yes, please do.

[193] So the world, our world and data, it's a wonderful website.

[194] And they point out, I love the statistic.

[195] You know, we have no sense of how many people we've lifted out of poverty.

[196] So for the last 25 years, it's, you know, in the order of almost a billion people.

[197] So every year, for the last 25 years, we could have had a headline in every paper in the world everywhere around telling us last yesterday, 138 ,000 people were lifted out of poverty.

[198] How come you never hear that?

[199] That's just an astoundingly amazing thing.

[200] And yes, there are still many problems.

[201] Yes, there are still many poor people.

[202] But the fact is we, you know, 200 years ago, we used to be almost all extremely poor.

[203] You know, there was a few royalty in that.

[204] And then, you know, it was 90, 95 % of all of us had what is, you know, typically known as a dollar a day, but it's really 2 .15 now.

[205] But the fundamental point is we were incredibly poor.

[206] Now we have less than 10 % that are extremely poor.

[207] That's still a problem.

[208] We should still help them, and there's a lot of ways we can do that.

[209] But that is one of those many stories that you don't hear because, yeah, it doesn't generate cliques.

[210] Yeah, well, part of it, part of it, and it's a deep psychological problem, too, is that we are structured psychologically so that the negative has more impact than the positive does.

[211] And that's a very difficult bias to work against when you're in a situation where you might be making the case that the positive should be what's predominating.

[212] It's like, well, fair enough, but that isn't exactly how we're wired.

[213] And I suppose that's why, because we can be 100 % dead but only so happy.

[214] And so it's conservative in some sense, and I don't mean politically, to be a little more hyper -alert to the negative than to the positive.

[215] But that's a tough thing to fight against when the negative can grab attention, especially when it's blown up to apocalyptic proportions.

[216] Okay, so there's a couple of other things I want to delve into there, too.

[217] So there's this psychologist, Jean Piaget, and Piaget is very interested in ethical development and cognitive development.

[218] He developed a stage theory of human cognitive and moral development across time.

[219] And the last stage in his sequence of cognitive slash ethical transformations was the messianic stage.

[220] And not everyone hits that, but more philosophically sophisticated young people pass through something approximating a messianic stage.

[221] And it occurs somewhere between the ages of 16 and 21, which, by the way, is the right stage of life to bring young men into the military, if you're going to do it effectively.

[222] Like there's a whole radical principle, process of neuronal pruning that takes place between age 16 and 21.

[223] That's analogous to what happens between the ages of two and four.

[224] It's almost as if at that point you die into your adult configuration, right?

[225] So because you're paired down to what is only going to work for your environment.

[226] Okay.

[227] So now, one of the psychological consequences of that is that when when young people are in this stage of development and they're looking for how to separate themselves from their parents and to maybe even move beyond the narrow confines of their immediate friendship group, they're trying to catalyze their identity with a broader social mission.

[228] And in archaic societies, that step would be catalyzed by something like an initiation ritual, where the old personality is symbolically destroyed, put to death, that account for some of the torturous elements of the initiation ceremonies.

[229] And then the new man, because the initiation ceremonies tend to be more intense for boys, the new man is brought into being as a cultural entity.

[230] And then he's aligned with the mission and purpose, let's say, of the tribal unit.

[231] It's something like that.

[232] Well, right now, I think the radical leftists on the environmental side have been very good at capitalizing on those urges.

[233] because what they offer to young people is this, but it's pathological in some real sense, because it's a shortcut to messianic moral virtue.

[234] So the idea would be, well, there is an apocalypse.

[235] We need to save the virginal planet, so there's a bit of a St. George thing going on there to protect the virgin, let's say.

[236] And the way to do this is to become something approximating an activist who's dead set against the evil patriarchy and the predatory and parasitical individual.

[237] And you can understand why that's attractive because it does offer young people a grand vision.

[238] They're now protectors of the planet.

[239] They're participating in something that's beyond themselves.

[240] But the problem with it is is that it's an invitation to a very one -side story and it's got this terribly destructive anti -human element.

[241] And so, well, I'm curious about what you think about that.

[242] I think it's a very good metaphor for how the world, in many ways, have come to work.

[243] I think you're absolutely right.

[244] It's a very sort of stimulating and very easy message to fall into.

[245] The world is terrible, but here is how we can help.

[246] And the story very easily become, I'm going to help by cutting tons of CO2.

[247] Now, again, I bring my data points to this.

[248] And so I think there's two parts of it.

[249] I mean, first of all, I think we should recognize it's wonderful that young people and really everyone wants to do good.

[250] We should encourage that.

[251] That's wonderful.

[252] And, again, it's part of the fact that we're now well off, that we can stop worrying where's our next meal coming from, and then we can start thinking about it.

[253] So how are we going to help the world?

[254] But the reality is that when we're being told this, it's the end of the world, and hence, this is the only thing that matters.

[255] We're very likely to make very poor decisions.

[256] I mean, if it was true, you know, if there was a meteor hurtling towards Earth, The only thing that matter, and it was going to sort of wipe out the whole world, the only thing that matters was to get this, you know, the space shell or the whatever, the starship or whatever, up there and deflect it.

[257] That's what we should be focused on.

[258] But that's not the right metaphor for climate change.

[259] It's a problem.

[260] And it's a problem that we, in many ways, as we can, as we saw with that statistic I told you on before, you know, the fact that we've seen dramatically declining levels of people dying from climate -related disasters, because we can actually adapt to much of this and because we can predict it, we can make sure that people become more safe from these things.

[261] It's not the end of the world.

[262] It is a problem.

[263] And saying this is the only problem makes us very likely to make really poor decisions because we only focus on this and forget all the other.

[264] Let me just one other thing.

[265] So I think there's two points to one is that thinking it's the end of the world and thinking this is the only problem, make you forget all the other problems.

[266] But also when you look at them, what are the solutions that are typically offered?

[267] They're terribly inefficient.

[268] So they will typically involve something along the lines of saying, you know, I'm going to forego driving my car, which will at best have virtually no impact.

[269] It's not that, you know, please do it if it makes you feel good, and especially if it works into your plans, but it's not how you solve the world.

[270] And, you know, people will talk about going vegetarian.

[271] Again, great thing.

[272] I'm vegetarian.

[273] But, you know, it's not going to save the world.

[274] You need to get a sense of proportion.

[275] Most of the things that people talk about are small fractions of what it will actually take.

[276] And what they're really suggesting and what everybody's now talking about is this net zero idea that we need to cut all carbon emissions from all economies by 2050, this would be enormously costly.

[277] And also terribly, terribly fatal for many countries, especially the poorer countries, who basically keep alive by having lots and lots of access to fossil fuels.

[278] One way of just seeing that is right now, half the world's population survive on nitrogen that comes from fertilizer, that comes from natural gas.

[279] We have no way of knowing how we could possibly get enough nitrogen to feed most of the world if we went to net zero.

[280] We saw a small example of that.

[281] It was a very badly performed example in Sri Lanka, but still it's worthwhile to point out.

[282] You cannot actually feed most of the people on the planet if you want to go organic and go net zero right now.

[283] And that tells you a story, because as Norman Bolag loved to point out one of the Nobel laureates that actually helped save a billion people or so.

[284] He said, I look around the world and I don't see 4 billion people willing to give up their lives, right?

[285] So there's no 4 billion volunteers to say, all right, I'm not going to be here.

[286] We need to be realistic about this and say the current solution is often very counterproductive.

[287] So stop believing it's the only problem and stop arcing for bad solutions.

[288] Okay, so let's talk a little bit about that, too, from a motivational perspective.

[289] So we have this appeal to the messianic urge of young people.

[290] But now here's how the appeal gets warped.

[291] because it is the case that each young person should take their place as a responsible, productive, and generous member of the broader social order.

[292] But that's really difficult.

[293] That's genuine moral effort.

[294] And that would require growing the hell up, being willing to make sacrifices, including the future in your deliberation so you're not impulsively hedonistic, serving other people, starting a family, starting a business, like all these things that you have to do in the micro -world that require real effort.

[295] Well, here's the shortcut that's being dangled in front of young people.

[296] It's like, forget about all that, all that activity, that difficult, painstaking, conscientious, local activity, that's all just part of the predatory parasitical patriarchy.

[297] So you just dispense with all of that.

[298] Instead, you can put yourself forward as an ally of virginal nature and instantly, as an anti -apocalyptic advocate of that sort, you're elevated to the highest possible moral stature, which is something like, well, it's something like a messianic figure.

[299] I'm saving the planet.

[300] It's like, well, I don't think you are.

[301] I don't think you're doing any of the work necessary to save the planet.

[302] I mean, one of the things I really liked about your work when I came across it, and that's probably, it's got to be 15 years ago or more now, was that you had done the detailed, data -driven work that was necessary to differentiate the landscape of problems.

[303] So, first of all, you'd admit to the complexity of the problems that were in front of us.

[304] You weren't falling prey to the idea that there was only one problem.

[305] There was one solution, and you were the person merely by advocating for that solution, who was now God Emperor of the World.

[306] There was none of that in your work.

[307] And I think part of the reason it's had a hard time getting traction to some degree is that you're insisting to people that they actually pay some attention to the complexity of the challenges that confront us, right?

[308] And the problem with that is that that runs contrary to this narcissistically attractive meta -narrative, which is, no, no, you can just oppose the patriarchy and everything that goes along with it, all that responsibility, which maybe you don't want to shoulder anyway, and you can instantly become morally superior by being a climate change activist.

[309] And some of that's attractive to the messianic drive in young people, but also some of that's attractive to just straight, bloody, what would you say, hyper -simplified narcissism.

[310] Because people, one of the dark motivations of people is to obtain unearned moral virtue, because we need reputation.

[311] And if you can put yourself, that's why we worship allies now.

[312] If you can put yourself forward as an ally of the noble cause, then all of a sudden you have as much moral stature as anybody can hope to gain.

[313] But you haven't done any of the real work.

[314] And the real work is the devil's in the details and the data in relationship to the real work.

[315] And so one more thing to add on top of that.

[316] So there's this enticement that we're offering to young people.

[317] It's like, well, here's a worldview.

[318] We can identify the villains.

[319] The villains are culture and the predatory individual.

[320] You can be an ally.

[321] now you have overblown moral virtue merely because you're on the right side and then you don't have to think through any of this because you've already got the story right even though it's a one -pixel story.

[322] So that's a very bad moral trap.

[323] But then there's something darker going on too.

[324] You know, in Epstein's book, Fossil Future, he cites some of these, the more radical environmentalist types who say things like, I think it was McKibbon, he quoted, who said something like, as far as I'm concerned, the vista of an unspoiled river, so any natural environment that's completely untouched by human beings, is so valuable that one person or a billion isn't worth that.

[325] It's something very close to that.

[326] And so there's a malevolent anti -humanism that's at the bottom of this too, which is also, it's part of this metaphor.

[327] It's part of the idea that intrinsically, human beings are something like a cancer on the face of the planet or a virus or a biological force that's gone wrong, a Malthusian nightmare, and that only that which is completely unsullied by human beings, untouched by human hands, is intrinsically valuable.

[328] And you can put that forward as a moral claim and say that you're on the side of nature.

[329] But the flip side of that is, yeah, like if there's too many people on the planet there, mate, which of them do you think should go and, exactly how are you going to bring that about?

[330] And so that's the dark side of this, of this like apocalyptic, environmentalist utopian narrative, is that human beings are categorized as evil in and of themselves, and all human activity as evil.

[331] And one of the things that we've discussed is that not only is that a pathological viewpoint and extremely dangerous, but interestingly enough, it's probably also counterproductive from the hypothetical perspective, of the environmentalist utopians.

[332] Because if the goal is to produce a greener, more biodiverse planet, let's say, then it seems to me, this is something we can discuss, that the evidence suggests very strongly that if you make people richer, we can talk about what that means, if you make people richer in a benevolent manner, or at least you get the hell out of their way, then they start caring about the environment in a distributed manner, and you get a positive relationship between the remediation of absolute poverty and environmental awareness.

[333] So not only does this narrative not solve the climate problem and destroy the economy, it actually makes, I think it makes the climate problem a lot worse, and we're seeing that play out in Europe right now.

[334] I think there's a number of things to unpack here.

[335] So I think you're absolutely right that we have very good evidence to saying if people are better off, they're much more likely to be environmentally concerned.

[336] Environment problems are poverty problems.

[337] That's really what that is.

[338] When you're poor, yes, you just cut down forest in order to feed your kids.

[339] You'll basically litter around everything because honestly you have other things on your mind right now.

[340] Whereas once you're well off and most of your future is secure, you can care a lot more about the environment.

[341] And I also think, yes, you're absolutely right.

[342] There's a lot of people who seemingly get a lot of sort of instant credit by just throwing paintings of whatever, you know, a painting at whatever famous painting there in a museum with, or just, you know, get some sort of, you know, glue themselves to highways or whatever.

[343] That's not how you solve this problem because it is very, very complicated.

[344] And as you also point out, if you actually want to make part, be part of the solution, help.

[345] bring the world onwards, it's actually going to take a lot of painstaking work.

[346] And I think you nailed it on why are my solutions much harder to sell?

[347] Well, fundamentally, because it's more boring.

[348] It is not as flashy and exciting as being able to get on a TikTok video and show your virtue, but it's actually about a lot of hard work.

[349] I mentioned Norman Bollock.

[350] He got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

[351] He was the originator.

[352] There's a lot of other people along with him for the Green Revolution that basically worked through the 60s and the 70s.

[353] And most people today probably don't even remember.

[354] But if you go back and read what people were worried about, we were incredibly worried about the fact that most nations just would not have enough food.

[355] And so, you know, there is literally people considering maybe we should do triage and say, well, India is just a goner, you know, they'll just have to sort of die out.

[356] And what Norman Bullock said was, we actually have the technology to make much more food on every hectare, every acre or every acre of land.

[357] We do that by making genetic modification, so he just did it with normal genetics.

[358] He simply constructed together with lots and lots of other researchers, constructed seeds of both rice and wheat that were shorter, and that meant they were shorter, and so they could put more energy into their kernels, and that meant there were many more kernels, much less straw, and we got much more food.

[359] That is, you know, in a very short hand, that's basically.

[360] basically what fed the world.

[361] That's what brought India from being a basket case to now being the world's leading rice exporter.

[362] It doesn't mean that they're not problems in India.

[363] It doesn't mean that we've fixed everything.

[364] But what that tells you is, this is the way you actually walk towards a solution.

[365] So a lot of environmentalists, a lot of, you know, very, very smart thinkers back then basically said lots and lots of people are going to die.

[366] Literally hundreds of millions of people are going to die.

[367] And I'm okay with that because, you know, it had to happen.

[368] Yeah.

[369] Whereas the right way is to sit down and actually use science and spend your entire life working on making these rice grains more effective.

[370] It's not nearly as sexy, and of course I'm only telling the big story because he got the Nobel Prize.

[371] You know, there were lots and lots of other researchers whom I don't even know, none of us really remember anymore, but those are the people that actually made it work.

[372] And so I'm often struck, as you also point out, I'm often struck when people say there are too many people on the planet because when you drill it, when you drill into it, it means, you know, just enough of me, but too many of you, it's never, you know, you're not actually going to have you or your family leave, but you think someone else should go.

[373] Now, I get the idea of saying that maybe in some sort of very detached way we would like to see a world that had fewer people.

[374] I think that's probably wrong, but you can have that argument.

[375] But if you actually look at it in the philosophical implications of that is that you're telling lots and lots of people to die.

[376] The reality should be, I think, and that's what our history shows us, is when you have rich and wealthy countries, you can actually get both.

[377] You both get fewer kids, because once you grow up, once you get rich enough, kids actually start to be really expensive, so you have few of them, and that's one of the reasons why we no longer see this population explosion as people talked about in most of the rich world.

[378] Actually, we're likely to see that spread over the whole world in the next 40 years or so.

[379] So we are over most of the problem, and what we have managed to do is we can now grow food much more effectively, and we should be moving towards growing it even more effectively so that we can have all the people well -fed on less and less land, so there's more space for nature.

[380] We're doing that in the rich world.

[381] We can also do that in the poor.

[382] The thing that's interesting here, or one of the things that's interesting, you talked about Norman Borlaig and about the sexiness of, say, your vision.

[383] And the thing is, when I started to delve into the research on the economy and environment front, I actually found the work that you were doing, so to speak, highly sexy, because I thought, oh, my God, here's a better story.

[384] We could make everybody in the planet rich, and I want to go into what rich means.

[385] and at the same time make the planet much more sustainable on the biological front.

[386] We could do both of those.

[387] Why isn't that just way better than the Malthusian zero -sum game?

[388] Let's delve into those issues a little bit.

[389] So we're offering young people a cheap way out of their privilege -induced guilt.

[390] So now they have this Russoian landscape set in front of them.

[391] They're pretty secure.

[392] they're pretty comfortable.

[393] They're not going to die of malaria or smallpox.

[394] They have enough to eat.

[395] They have educational opportunity.

[396] But now they're scrounging around trying to figure out what to do with their life because they need to justify their miserable existences to themselves.

[397] They need something meaningful.

[398] And so the radicals come along and say, well, just be an ally of the virginal planet.

[399] And that is simple, so it has that appeal.

[400] But it's also simple in an underhanded way because it isn't the message, look, why don't you be like Norman Borluck and develop something like a noble vision which is, well, maybe we don't have to starve 4 billion people to death.

[401] Maybe we can feed them.

[402] Okay, what do people eat?

[403] Oh, they eat food.

[404] Yeah, so how about if we make food more efficient?

[405] We make agriculture more efficient.

[406] Let's see if we can feed all those people.

[407] And that's a pretty hard problem, so how about I devote my whole life to this?

[408] And then you might say to young people, well, that's a hell of a price to pay to devote your whole life to something, but we could be saying forthrightly, well, don't you want an identity?

[409] Don't you want to devote your life to the solution of some genuinely difficult problem?

[410] I mean, that's where you're going to find meaning.

[411] I mean, how meaningful has your work been to you?

[412] Very meaningful.

[413] And I think, so I just want it to slightly flippantly, but not only flippantly say, I'm very, very pleased and gratified that you thought this was very exciting.

[414] I think it's also a little bit because you're a nerd.

[415] So, you know, it is a more nerdy solution.

[416] And it is less immediately satisfying, but I think that's exactly the point we need to get out.

[417] We need to tell people this will ultimately be a much, much more rewarding understanding.

[418] Look, we should also have people that work on climate because, again, climate is a real problem.

[419] But you're not going to solve it by throwing paint at something.

[420] You're not going to solve it by telling people you can't, you shouldn't, you should freeze, you should not have a nice life.

[421] The way you're going to solve this, of course, is by being the guy that comes up with the technology that actually delivers clean energy or cleaner energy at much lower cost.

[422] This is how we've solved pretty much all problems.

[423] We haven't solved them by wishful thinking or telling people, I'm sorry, could you not do stuff that you like to do?

[424] That never works.

[425] What does work is you come along with a better solution.

[426] This is a slightly trite metaphor.

[427] But back in the 1860s, the world was basically fishing up all whales.

[428] Why?

[429] Because whales have this wonderful opportunity of whale oil.

[430] Turns out the whale oil just burns much, much cleaner and much brighter than any other oil.

[431] Remember, that was pretty much the only lighting that you had back in the 1860s.

[432] 60s.

[433] So pretty much all Western European and North American rich homes were lit up with whale oil.

[434] And so everyone just went out to the ends of the world to catch whales.

[435] You could not have stopped the slaughter of whales by telling everyone, I'm sorry, could you dim your lights a little bit?

[436] Could you go back and have that sooty light that you didn't like?

[437] That's not going to work.

[438] What did work was, ironically, that we found oil in Pennsylvania.

[439] that we actually found ground oil, the oil that we just used today, mineral oil, and you could substitute that for whale oil.

[440] It turned out it was much cheaper.

[441] It burnt better, and it was much easy to get hold of.

[442] And so we pretty much stopped hunting whales after that.

[443] There are still some because, you know, they also give meat.

[444] But the fundamental point is technology solves this problem, not good intentions.

[445] Right.

[446] Well, so that means that we can thank the fossil fuel industry for saving the waves.

[447] And you can think, you know, if you think about, well, we can thank the fossil fuel industry for a lot of things.

[448] If you think about in around 1900, almost everyone worried about the fact that you could see cities becoming more and more congested.

[449] You had horse carriages and they lived an enormous amount of manure.

[450] So there are lots of people who were really worried about the fact that by, you know, by extrapolation, by 1920, 1930, all of New York, all of London would be covered by feet and feet of horse manure.

[451] How are you going to solve that?

[452] And along came the automobile.

[453] Again, the point here is not to say that a technology that we then innovated 120 years ago is the right one for today.

[454] Eventually, that will go the way of the dinosaur.

[455] We'll find other ways.

[456] But we should not be kidding ourselves and believing that just wishing it wasn't so makes it go away.

[457] The way you do this is through technology.

[458] Well, especially, okay, so let's talk about wealth a bit, Because in the West, it's easy for people.

[459] Like I saw yesterday, I think it was Extinction Rebellion, or one of these damn groups put out this message saying that, well, you know, people should just stop flying because flying produces water vapor and carbon dioxide.

[460] And, you know, really we don't need to fly.

[461] And so I'm reading that.

[462] I'm thinking, well, because there's Marxism of a terrible type lurking under the earth.

[463] It's like, well, who the hell determines what we need exactly?

[464] I mean, needs are, first of all, needs aren't self -evident.

[465] Really what you need to do is you need to breathe, you need to drink water, and you need to eat.

[466] After that, what constitutes a need gets pretty damn dubious.

[467] And my concern is that if you get people adjudicating the, what would you call it, the comparative validity of need, you turn the whole world over to people who say, well, you don't really need that.

[468] And you don't really need shelter.

[469] You don't really need, well, you don't need, you can have bugs.

[470] You don't really need food.

[471] You can eat a minimal protein source.

[472] Well, you don't really need children, because they're kind of hard on the planet anyways.

[473] You certainly don't need pets, because they add to the carbon dioxide load.

[474] You don't need your fireplace.

[475] You don't need a gas stove.

[476] You don't need a heater.

[477] And then what you have is this insistence that the way to planetary salvation is to tell other people what they don't get to have.

[478] And what's interesting about that, too, and this is the hypocritical element, and I certainly see this at the elite Davis Glover.

[479] global level.

[480] It's like, well, exactly who are you telling here that they don't get to have what they need?

[481] Because you don't mean that for yourself.

[482] You're not going to go live in a damn hut in the middle of Africa and burn dung.

[483] You're not proposing that.

[484] You're proposing that these damn poor people in the third world country and maybe in your own country.

[485] And there's too many of those blighters anyways that they should just be bloody well satisfied with the fact that they've got what they have now.

[486] And they shouldn't in any manner ever dream of having this sort of wealth of opportunities and security that we have in the West, then we could talk about wealth because people in the West are guilty about wealth.

[487] Well, we have all these things we don't need.

[488] It's like, well, yeah, that's actually the definition of wealth.

[489] You've got a choice of toothbrushes.

[490] Maybe you don't need it, but it's not a bad side effect.

[491] But we should get down to brass tax here, people.

[492] When we're talking about wealth for the typical person, here's what we're talking about.

[493] Your house isn't too cold or too hot.

[494] So you have heat.

[495] and maybe you have air conditioning.

[496] That'd be kind of nice.

[497] You have running water.

[498] You have good sanitation.

[499] So you have a toilet and you have clean water.

[500] You have a plentiful supply of high -quality food that you don't have to spend all your time scrounging around to deliver.

[501] And it's reliably sourced.

[502] And your children have the opportunity to live, to live healthily, and to be educated.

[503] That's like 90 % of wealth.

[504] And so when we're talking about wealth that we want to provide the rest of the world.

[505] We're not talking about 19 -20 spats wearing capitalist depredations, champagne, hooker, and cocaine.

[506] We're talking about the basics of life, right?

[507] Temperature regulation, provision of water, provision of food, health and opportunity for children.

[508] And we still haven't provided that to everyone in the world, and we could.

[509] That's one of the things that's so optimistic about your work.

[510] Not only could we do that, we should do it, and we could and should do it in a way that would benefit the long -term sustainability of the planet.

[511] Yeah, and look, again, you rightly point out that people will want to manipulate your choices.

[512] And not only does that have a dubious sort of moral impact, but it's also, you know, just from an economist's point of view, if you tell people you can't fly, it's not like they're going to say, oh, I was actually going to, I was planning on spending 5 % on my income.

[513] on flights.

[514] So I'm just going to burn these money.

[515] I'm just going to spend it on other stuff, which also produce carbon emissions.

[516] And so, you know, we have no sense of saying the only real way, and I have some respect, sort of intellectual respect for these people who are actually saying the only way to solve global warming is by making everyone poor, what's called degrowth.

[517] First we make the rich world poor, and then once the poor world have gotten slightly richer, we also say stop to them.

[518] At least it's intellectually honest.

[519] It's also terribly terribly anti -human.

[520] And it's not going to happen.

[521] There's no constituency.

[522] No politician would ever get voted into office or if he or she actually delivered on it would get re -elected on that sort of platform.

[523] And what that tells you is this is just simply, you know, again, wishful thinking.

[524] And I keep getting back to saying, if you're actually serious about problems, are you going to suggest something that'll actually work?

[525] Are you just going to suggest something that makes you feel good or that you know have no chance on Earth to get carried through?

[526] Again, there is an argument and I think there's a legitimate argument for putting a carbon tax on things.

[527] That's a simple way that we make regulation that says there's a global bad here, we tax it, and then you put that global bat into your considerations.

[528] But that's how you solve it efficiently.

[529] And of course, the reality of that is that in any realistic formulation this, people will fly slightly less.

[530] And that's no good for many of these moral crusaders because they want to completely get rid of it.

[531] It's not going to happen.

[532] What needs to happen if you actually want to solve this problem again is to get innovation.

[533] You know, we already know how to, for instance, decarbonize most of the electricity system.

[534] It's just through nuclear.

[535] We know that's worked for 50 years.

[536] The reason why we're not doing it, and the reason why I'm a little skeptical about it, is that it's too costly right now.

[537] We can have a whole conversation about why that's the case.

[538] But there's a lot of innovation going on about fourth -generation nuclear that could become much cheaper.

[539] We just saw the breakthrough, maybe fusion as well.

[540] But the point is that there's lots of technologies.

[541] Those are the ones that we're going to focus on, because, again, you're not going to tell people you can't have your whale.

[542] You have to dim your light.

[543] What you can say is, oh, here's a better alternative.

[544] Oh, it also happens to be cheaper, and it doesn't kill whales.

[545] So the degrowth model is predicated on the idea that, well, let's lay out the ideas, that really there are too many people on the planet, and the people who are there now, especially the rich ones, are consuming far too many resources per capita.

[546] And so the only way forward to a sustainable planet is through degrowth.

[547] Okay, so let's take that apart.

[548] first of all, who's going to impose that degrowth?

[549] Can you imagine the totalitarian state that would have to be built in order for every single one of your purchase to be monitored, which is really what the plan is in some real sense?

[550] I mean, that's just a terrible, nightmarish vision of petty tyranny everywhere, where every single move you make is analyzed in terms of its overall planetary consequence and only calculated by people who do not have your best, interests in mind, by the way.

[551] But worse than that is that there isn't any evidence whatsoever that if you use this strategy of degrowth and you make people poor, that you're going to get anything approximating the beneficial effect that you propose.

[552] I mean, let's look at how this is already playing out.

[553] So what has Germany managed with an approximate degrowth strategy?

[554] I mean, so part of the growth as well, we certainly don't need fossil fuels or nuclear on the energy front.

[555] Okay, so from what I've been able to gather now, energy is about five times more expensive per unit cost in Germany than it is in the United States.

[556] A huge number of industrial endeavors are fleeing Germany for U .S., which isn't so bad, or China, which is really not good, because it's too expensive even to do such things as build batteries for electric cars in Germany now.

[557] but also you might say, well, that's all worth it because now we have all these renewables and the place is much cleaner and if we have to pay a price in terms of loss of industrial productivity, say Levy, but I read the other day too and I hope this is accurate that Germany has fallen to something underneath the 100th position in the world in terms of emissions per unit of energy produced because as we've moved foolishly and precipitously towards unreliable, renewals, especially on the wind and solar front, the Germans have had to, especially because they killed their nuclear plants, they've had to turn back to coal.

[558] And so now they're burning way more coal than they used to for five times the electricity price and a reliable power to boot.

[559] And so this degrowth philosophy, which violates the presuppositions of economic motivation, let's say on a psychological and economic front, is not only going to demolish the industrial structure, make the poor, much poor and more desperate, but it's going to bring about worsening of the conditions for environmental sustainability and very, very rapidly.

[560] Now, we're also seeing in Europe, and you can comment on this a bit, is that because we're now in an energy crisis, a foolish energy crisis, that people are starting to deforest Europe and they're starting to burn peat in Ireland again, because they have to heat their damn home.

[561] So even by the standards of the environmentalists themselves, perverse though those standards may be, the degrowth philosophy is completely unsustainable politically and psychologically.

[562] Because you're just not going to tell people, you know, you can let Grandma freeze in the dark.

[563] I think you're absolutely right that it's not going to happen.

[564] People are just not going to allow that, and they won't accept that sort of tyranny as you're talking about.

[565] You would need much, much more than anyone would be willing to offer up, just to give you one sense of it.

[566] For the average American, some estimates indicate that going net zero would actually cost you in the order of $12 ,000 per person per year by 2050.

[567] That's just impossible to imagine than anyone would ever accept.

[568] And also, I think we need to separate.

[569] there has been this tendency in almost all conversation to totally muddle climate and environment.

[570] Now, environment is a lot of other things, and it's, for instance, air pollution and all these other things that are fairly local to you.

[571] So degrowth would actually solve climate change because we would stop producing.

[572] It wouldn't solve a lot of the other environmental problems because now we would start, you know, burning everything else and we would be terribly poor and, you know, life would be horrible in so many other ways.

[573] I think fundamentally we just need to get back to realizing that when you're saying and these protesters will glue themselves to the roads and say we don't want you to use any fossil fuels.

[574] But of course when they come back in their lives, they're crucially dependent mostly on lots and lots of energy produced by fossil fuels.

[575] And they would probably most of them not be willing to give that up.

[576] And if they're not even willing to do that, of course they're not going to get anyone else to do that just by gluing themselves on highways.

[577] What they're going to do, sorry, what they're going to do is if they could come up with a new innovation that was cleaner than anything else.

[578] If they, instead of, you know, gluing themselves to the road, would actually take up the university, go and, you know, figure out, and it need not be a solution to climate change, but one of those solutions, but one that was actually effective.

[579] Then, of course, they would have done really good in the world.

[580] And so, again, that I think that's the sort of purpose of our whole conversation to say, you know, stop believing this is the end of the world because it's not.

[581] But also, stop believing that the solution to the end of the world is to glue yourself or to just be, gloomy or tell everyone, we should just stop with everything.

[582] The solution is smart technologies.

[583] The solution to the end of the world is not to become a frightened tyrant that says, oh my God, this guy is falling.

[584] I need all the power now.

[585] I need to make these centralized decisions.

[586] These centralized decisions are going to affect every single element of your life and your children's life, assuming you get to have children at all.

[587] And that's going to bring us towards a more benevolent planet.

[588] It's like none of that's true.

[589] There's not an apocalypse.

[590] You don't get to be a frightened tyrant.

[591] We don't need centralized top -down control of absolutely everything we do.

[592] And even if we did have all of that, what we would get wouldn't be the positive outcome that everyone who's on that side is touting.

[593] What we'd get is the same kind of centralized planning disasters that we've seen play out time and time again over the last hundred years all over the world.

[594] This is every single way you cut, this is a bad set of solutions.

[595] Now, I want to steal manned a little bit.

[596] So, you know, the idea that there are too many people on the planet is actually predicated on, you might say data, which is one of the weird things about data, is that if you put, if you take a petri dish that's full of a nutritive medium, and you put a mold on it, the mold will grow until it eats all the available nutrients, and then it will all die.

[597] And so that's a kind of limits to growth model.

[598] But the world in that model is a encapsulated petri dish, and the biological agents are mindless, single -celled organisms.

[599] So you might say, well, that's not a great metaphor for human beings, because first of all, human beings aren't mold or viruses or cancers.

[600] We're a very strange breed of creature, because we can think and we can react, and we can modify the environment, and we can modify ourselves.

[601] And so it isn't obvious at all.

[602] People say follow the science.

[603] The science is Malthusian.

[604] We're all, you know, microorganisms in a petri dish or rats in a colony.

[605] We're going to overpopulate until we devour everything.

[606] It's like, I don't think so.

[607] If you, first of all, why would you use single -celled organisms as the cardinal metaphor for human populations?

[608] It's a preposterous.

[609] biological metaphor.

[610] And one of the things the economists have pointed out, as opposed to the biologists who tend to be more Malthusian repeatedly, is, look, you can create your linear models of what's going to happen if.

[611] But what you're failing to take into account is the proclivity of people to revolutionarily transform the way they interact with the world and to continually figure out how to do more with less.

[612] And there's no indication whatsoever that we've run to the end of that process.

[613] Quite the contrary, we'd seem to be getting faster at it all the time.

[614] And there's no reason to assume that the limits -to -growth Petri -Dish model of human catastrophe is the appropriate biological metaphor.

[615] That's not justified by science, and 99 % of scientists don't believe it.

[616] And one of the things that's so interesting, you know this perfectly well, is that economists in biologists and biologists have been betting against each other, really formally, since the mid -60s.

[617] And the biologists like, what's his name at Stanford, Paul Erlich, who's been screeching since the mid -60s about the fact that were Malthusian organisms doomed to extinction.

[618] He's been wrong in every single one of his predictions, and publicly and massively, and I would say even murderously wrong in some fundamental sense.

[619] So he predicted that there would be way too many people on the planet.

[620] by the year 2000.

[621] That was seriously wrong.

[622] He predicted that all of the prices of our commodities were going to spike through the roof as everything became more and more scarce as there became more and more of us.

[623] That was 100 % wrong.

[624] He had a famous bet with Julian Simon, and Simon collected, I think, just after the turn of the millennia, because Simon, the economist, claimed that, no, no, quite the contrary.

[625] As there are more people, there'll be more commodities, there'll be more resources and the prices will fall.

[626] He even offered Ehrlich the opportunity to pick the basket of commodities they would bet on.

[627] And Ehrlich got stomped.

[628] And what we've seen continually time and time again is the economists have been right, which is that there's no limit to human ingenuity.

[629] And that also means that if we got food, water, sanitation, opportunity to the billions of people that don't have it, we would produce a few more spectacular hypergeniuses like Elon Musk, let's say, or Norman Borlaug, and God only knows what sort of efficiency they can produce for us.

[630] So the idea that we could convert natural resources into human cognitive ability, that seems like a pretty damn good trade from the perspective of economic flourishing and environmental sustainability.

[631] Yeah, so just two points in that.

[632] I think it's incredibly important to remember that it's not just the Elon Musk's and the Norman Bolaggs that make up the world.

[633] Also, because, you know, it is, you very early on said that you've done all this great work, and thank you very much.

[634] But, you know, this is the work of literally many hundreds of the world's top economists that I've helped sort of shepherd together, but there are lots of lots of people involved.

[635] And likewise, with Norman Bullock, I'm sure that's also true with Elon Musk.

[636] And so the fundamental point is, this is about getting everybody on board with this, and that's also why I'm so.

[637] excited.

[638] We have this conversation because I think this is about telling, you don't need to be Elon Musk to be on this positive side of history.

[639] You need to make sure that you're pitching into this very long battle in order to make the world better.

[640] And again, also, sorry, I'm just being the nerd here, right?

[641] But of course, nobody's 100 % wrong.

[642] I get that this is a sort of metaphorical 100%.

[643] But it's more the argument here is to recognize that a lot of biologists and Julian Simon actually wrote about that, the guy you mentioned the bet with Polarlich.

[644] And he said it is very curious how most of the people who think the world is going to end are typically natural scientists.

[645] They're typically biologists or biologists inspired.

[646] And I think that is because the models that cover those, and it's not just mold, but it's also, you know, fox, what is it, rabbit populations that they will sort of interact and then there are too many rabbits and then there's too many foxes and so on.

[647] Those are all models of individuals that act without foresight.

[648] And it makes sense.

[649] That's how, you know, 99 % of nature is.

[650] But we're not that.

[651] We actually not only know how to think ahead of us.

[652] That's, of course, why we're having this conversation.

[653] That's why we're worried about things like climate change.

[654] And again, you mentioned very early in the program, you know, that there's sort of evolutionary reasons why we tend to be worried about stuff.

[655] I heard this one guy say, you know, we're the descendants of the guys who worried about the saber -toothed tigers.

[656] You know, the guys who said, oh, it'll be fine, are the ones who, you know, didn't get to pass on their genes.

[657] So in that sense, it makes perfect sense.

[658] And we should be happy that there's a lot of people out there pointing out, this might be a problem.

[659] Oh, my good, this could actually be a problem.

[660] We just shouldn't believe that all of those problems are then all of the ends of the world.

[661] Because if our evidence has ever told us anything.

[662] Or they're all the same problem.

[663] Yes.

[664] If our evidence has ever told us anything, sorry.

[665] That is that overall, we have enormously succeeded.

[666] I just want to give you one other data point.

[667] In 1900, the average life expectancy on the planet Earth was 32.

[668] today is like 74.

[669] We have more than doubled our lifetime.

[670] Each one of us has gotten twice the amount of the life on this planet.

[671] That's just astounding.

[672] And actually, it hasn't stopped because of technology and because of medical advancement, but also because we get better sanitation and everything else.

[673] We actually continuously see life expectancy to go up.

[674] It hasn't done so in the U .S. and we could talk about that.

[675] But globally, it absolutely does, and it still does, in the sense of every year you live, you add about three months to your life expectancy.

[676] How amazing about that.

[677] A stunning statistic.

[678] Yep, that's true.

[679] Okay, so let's go back to the biological metaphor here.

[680] Okay, so we've already established, I hope, for everyone listening, that we are not mold in a patriotic dish.

[681] That's a bad metaphor.

[682] So now you said, well, maybe we're foxes and rabbits.

[683] And there is this nature, red, in tooth and claw that's going to modulate our population by necessity, and that's sort of the biological argument, that even though we're not mold, let's say, we're more like foxes or rabbits, and we're going to multiply until the predators take us out or something like that.

[684] But I would say here's why, biologically, that's not true.

[685] So Alfred North Whitehead, I believe it was, said the reason we think is so that our ideas can die instead of us.

[686] So here's the human -com.

[687] cognitive transformation.

[688] So imagine that you go do something stupid and you get killed.

[689] Well, that's not so good.

[690] Now you're dead, but your pattern, even your DNA, is no longer around.

[691] That's a dead end.

[692] It's an evolutionary dead end.

[693] You did something stupid and now you don't exist.

[694] And neither do your descendants.

[695] Okay, so that's how animals work.

[696] But that's not how human beings work because we've taken this new leap.

[697] And our leap is, well, let's make a virtualized self.

[698] Let's make an avatar in imagination.

[699] Let's play out a few different scenarios of what might be.

[700] Let's allow the stupid scenarios to die before we implement them.

[701] And then let's do that broad scale.

[702] That's why we have free speech.

[703] So what you and I are doing in this conversation, to the degree that it's successful, and this is what everyone who's listening is doing too, is that we're undergoing a sequence of micro -deafes.

[704] and micro -rejuvenations.

[705] And so you'll offer an idea and then all criticize it or add to it and kill some of it and shape it.

[706] And then you'll take that and you'll kill some of it and shape it and we'll toss it back and forth with the hopes that by the time we finally implement it, we actually won't have to die.

[707] And so human beings have substituted the ability to think abstractly, which is partly to die abstractly, for the process of real death.

[708] And in principle, if we are capable of maintaining open dialogue and engaging in critical thinking, we can make most of the death that would otherwise be necessary to control our populations virtual.

[709] We don't actually have to act it out.

[710] We can act it out in simulation, and then we can only implement the ideas that seem to be productive.

[711] And we're actually really good at that.

[712] The whole human enterprise is precisely that.

[713] So that's another reason why the biological model is just not tenable.

[714] We are not of the same kind, even as foxes and rabbits, certainly not of mold, and certainly not of cancer or viruses.

[715] And so the biologists who are thinking seriously, they have to take this into account, and I don't think they are, you know, to paint with a broad brush.

[716] No, and I think that is why you have all these economists telling us, actually, in many ways, we have moved on, and we're much better at fixing problems.

[717] Again, I think it gives a better way of thinking about problems that you say, yes, it's great that there are people out there pointing out problems.

[718] I'm happy that organizations like Greenpeace are there because they point out and nip at the heels of corrupt officials or governments that don't do their job and simply tell us these are potential problems.

[719] But it shouldn't be taken as, oh, my God, that means we're going to die.

[720] No, it means here is another of the many, many problems that have beset us from all, you know, time and memorial, and that we've also fixed, and typically fixed in a way that actually left the world better, not worse off.

[721] The environment is not purchased at the expense of the economy, and the economy is not purchased at the expense of the environment necessarily.

[722] They can work in harmony, and we know that, how do we know that?

[723] We know that, because as you accelerate people up the GDP production curve, so every individual is making more money, you get to a point where people, as we already pointed out, start to take a longer -term vision.

[724] And that vision includes environmental maintenance.

[725] So let's say we want a vision for the planet on the environmental sustainability side.

[726] So how do we do that?

[727] Well, why don't we produce as many people as we possibly can who are as concerned as they can be that their relatively local environment, the one they can actually control, is as green, productive, and sustainable as possible?

[728] We want billions of people working on them, not just a few.

[729] Well, how do we get billions of people working on it?

[730] Well, we help them with cheap energy and the provision of plentiful food.

[731] We help them provide security for their family and opportunity for their children.

[732] And then we enable them to take a longer -term view.

[733] And they'll automatically start attending to the sorts of concerns that hypothetically predominate among the environmentalists.

[734] And the data that that's going to happen is very clear.

[735] Yeah.

[736] So just...

[737] Are very clear.

[738] So just to take a step back, the economists typically call this the inverse Kutznets curve.

[739] So basically what you see with most environmental problems, as you get richer, first problems increase.

[740] You know, you get more air pollution as you industrialize in China or in India.

[741] And then once you get sufficiently rich that this is actually meant now your kids are not dying, you have enough food, then you start to worry and say, I'd actually like to cough less.

[742] And so you get the other side of this.

[743] So there is a sort of intermediate disconnect.

[744] So once you start getting people out of poverty, they actually get more pollution.

[745] Now, if you lived in that situation, you would undoubtedly make the same decision.

[746] You'd say, I'd like to have more food and more opportunity for my kids, and then I'll cough a little bit.

[747] That's remember what we also did back in the 1800s when pretty much all cities in Europe and the U .S. were terribly terribly polluted, but we were getting richer and richer.

[748] So there is this disconnect for a short time, but it's very hard to imagine that the right way is to say, well, then let's not at all start down the route of getting much better off and actually living in a world that we both like and that way we'll actually be worried about the environment in the long run.

[749] Well, it's not like the developing countries are going to go along with these employees.

[750] They're just going to tell us colonials to go take a flying leap, which is exactly what they should do.

[751] because basically what we're telling them is, well, you know, we got pretty rich, and we're pretty happy to fly in our private jets to Davos and think about the globalist utopia.

[752] But we don't think you guys should have any of that.

[753] And, you know, the faster you get at being poor, the better.

[754] And there's just absolutely no likelihood at all that places like India and China are going to do anything but lift a middle finger to us when we do that, and rightly so.

[755] And then on the pollution front, we should differentiate that a little bit.

[756] It is true that as the world got more industrialized, and that will happen in places like China and India, that air pollution increased, for example, particulate production increased, but it increased.

[757] You could argue that it decreased inside houses as it increased outside houses.

[758] And so even that wasn't a clearer, like, downside on the pollution front, because, well, your work has indicated this quite clearly, or at least you've brought it to people's attention, In the developing world, because people burn dung and wood, very low quality fuel with high particulate content, many, many young people around the world are dying every year in elderly people as well because of indoor air pollution.

[759] We have no sense of this.

[760] So, you know, three and a half billion people in households, mostly in the very poor South, they basically, as you say, cook and keep warm with dirty fuels like dung and cardboard.

[761] And the impact of that is equivalent, according to the World Health Organization, to if you look inside huts, if you've ever been one in Africa, it's terribly polluted inside.

[762] And it's like smoking two packs of cigarettes every day for three and a half billion people.

[763] It's not surprising this kills millions of people every year.

[764] And again, it's not to say, you know, if anything, this just simply makes us realize that there are a lot of different problems.

[765] And some of them you solve very simply by getting people out of absolute poverty.

[766] Not only do they stop dying from not having enough food and getting easily curable infectious diseases, but also they stop dying from indoor air pollution.

[767] One of the first things they do is they get a stove that actually runs a natural gas.

[768] Remember, that's why we're not afraid of going into our kitchens in the rich world.

[769] And so it should be in the poor world.

[770] And we need to have that conversation and we need to understand.

[771] And that's, of course, why overall getting to develop country status is something that almost everyone aspires to and certainly something that's worth having.

[772] Okay, so let's talk about some of the...

[773] So people who are listening, we spend a lot of time in the philosophical realm and in the relatively low -resolution realm trying to lay out the underlying conceptual landscape and to, what would you say, delineate something like a metaphysics of optimism.

[774] That might be a good way of thinking about it.

[775] But one of the things that's admirable about your work is that you also concentrate on the devil in the details.

[776] And so we wrote an op -ed recently that got a fair bit of distribution on a couple of problems that we could solve globally, let's say, we could address, at a relatively low cost, billions of dollars instead of trillions, and so that's like 1 ,000th the cost, for people who want to do the mathematics.

[777] So what do you see, what could people think about in terms of low -hanging fruit?

[778] What are things we could address in the next 10 years to speed the process of improvement and to address both economic and environmental issues simultaneously?

[779] Yeah.

[780] You know, it's a great question, and that's really what I've been spending the last couple of years on and really a very large part of my career is basically engaging people in saying there are lots of problems.

[781] And we should be honest about that.

[782] The world still has lots and lots of problems.

[783] Some of them are very hard to solve.

[784] Some of them are very easy to solve.

[785] If that's true, why wouldn't we want to solve the easy ones first?

[786] Some of them are incredibly expensive to solve.

[787] Some of them are very, very cheap to solve.

[788] Why wouldn't we solve the cheap ones first?

[789] So what we try to go for is simply, as you said, the low -hanging fruit, saying, of all the different problems in the world, where are some really smart solutions?

[790] And it typically ends up being such that you can't solve all of the problem.

[791] Remember, we rarely solve all of any problem.

[792] You don't go to university to learn everything.

[793] You go to a university to learn enough.

[794] You don't, you know, well, I could go on without metaphor.

[795] I don't think I will.

[796] But the point here is to say you need to find out when is enough enough.

[797] What are the really smart things?

[798] So take one thing that we actually wrote about in the op -ed.

[799] Everyone needs education.

[800] One of the reasons why countries have gotten rich is that people have learned reading, writing, communicating, understanding, and becoming much more productive citizens.

[801] So if you look back in 1800, almost the entire world accepts for a very tiny sliver of the aristocracy.

[802] We're basically illiterate.

[803] We are now in a world where more than 90 % or at least technically literate.

[804] We've moved an enormous amount of way, and that's why a lot of rich countries are rich.

[805] That's why we're well off.

[806] That's why we have the human flourishing that we have.

[807] So this is incredibly important to understand.

[808] We believe that almost half of the difference between being poor and being rich is whether you have an educated population.

[809] Now, nobody disagrees.

[810] Yes, we should all have educated people.

[811] But the truth is, it's really, really hard.

[812] We know that in rich countries because we have that conversation constantly, how do we make our schools better?

[813] But it's much, much clearer in the rest of the world.

[814] So we look a lot on what the World Bank calls the low -income and lower -middle -income countries.

[815] So that's about half the world's population is $4 billion out of the $8 billion we're on the planet.

[816] So you could say it's the poor half of the world.

[817] In that part of the world, when you do studies, you probably heard about the PISA studies.

[818] We try to find out how good are people, how good are students around the world to do different things.

[819] So there's similar kind of studies done across pretty much all of the world.

[820] It turns out, and this is terrible, so there's 650 million kids in school.

[821] So kids and adolescents in school in the lower 4 billion of the world, so in the low and low middle -income countries.

[822] Of these kids, 80 % cannot read and do math in any reasonable way.

[823] And let me just give you an example of what that means.

[824] It's not rocket science.

[825] It's, for instance, you let them read a statement like this.

[826] Vijay has a red hat, a blue shirt, and yellow socks.

[827] What color is the hat?

[828] 80 % of the kids can't answer this when they're 10 years old.

[829] Likewise, a 10 -year -olds, a math question would be, we have six pieces of cheese.

[830] What is the way to divide this to two people, so each get the same amount?

[831] And again, about 80 % can't.

[832] The right answer is three, by the way.

[833] This is really depressing.

[834] And the truth is, we don't know how to fix this.

[835] We know a lot of ways that don't work.

[836] So, for instance, in Indonesia, in 2001, the parliament decided they spent about 10 % of public, expenditure on education.

[837] So a lot of money on education, but they decided we're going to do more.

[838] So they decided we're going to put in the constitution that we need to spend 20 % on education.

[839] That's potentially a great thing.

[840] You really want to help the country.

[841] So what they did was they built a lot of new schools.

[842] They got many more teachers that they went up from 2 .7 to 3 .8 million teachers.

[843] They now have one of the lowest class sizes in the world.

[844] They have, they have great teachers, they have lots of teachers, and they're really well paid.

[845] Unfortunately, you couldn't tell the difference in the outcome on students.

[846] They were still just as bad.

[847] And of course, what that tells you is, so there's this wonderful study it was called Double for Nothing.

[848] We basically, in Indonesia, paid twice as much and got nothing out of it.

[849] That's the worst kind of way to try to help the world.

[850] Now, a lot of people will make these arguments.

[851] We need to pay teachers more.

[852] It turns out that if you pay teachers more, they become really, really happy, which is not surprising, but it doesn't actually increase learning by students.

[853] Likewise, if you make class sizes smaller, it has virtually no impact.

[854] What is the main problem here?

[855] The main problem is it's really hard to teach a lot of kids.

[856] So, you know, say there's perhaps 60 kids in a class in the typical Global South to teach them.

[857] They're all 12 -year -olds, but they're why?

[858] wildly different abilities.

[859] You know, some of them are incredibly bored because they know all the stuff and they want to go on to the next class.

[860] Many of them have no clue what's going on.

[861] No matter what the teacher tries to do, it's always going to be wrong for most of the students.

[862] This is why, you know, a lot of people have then tried to say, are there ways to solve this?

[863] And the answer is yes.

[864] These are the Norman Bulldogs, if you will, of the world who've come up in new and interesting and amazing ideas.

[865] I'll tell you about one of them.

[866] So this one is about getting basically a teaching aid on a tablet.

[867] So it could be an iPad, but it will probably be a cheaper, you know, knockoff Android kind of thing.

[868] And then it teaches you at your level.

[869] So what it does is it starts asking some questions and you can pretty quickly find out what is actually your level.

[870] And then it'll teach you through that school year.

[871] So one hour a day, this is partly because then you can actually still have.

[872] most of the school running as it usually do, then it also means you can share the iPad with or the tablet with many, many other students over the day.

[873] If you have one hour a day for a year, the amazing thing is we now know that you can triple the learning.

[874] You can actually make kids learn three times as much, as if they'd gone to school three years.

[875] Now, remember, it's a low -quality school, so it's not as amazing as it sounds, but it's still much, much better.

[876] Yeah, but it's an improvement.

[877] Well, what it means, Bjorn, is that you're now putting children for an hour a day into the only place that learning actually takes place.

[878] So we've known this.

[879] Psychologists have known this for 100 years.

[880] So this psychologist named Vigotsky, Russian psychologist, came up with this notion called the Zone of Proximal Development.

[881] And what he noted was that parents spontaneously, one of the things he noticed was that parents spontaneously speak to their infants and their toddlers at a level that slightly exceeds their current comprehension level.

[882] And they do this automatically, and so you can imagine that there's a horizon of learning, and the horizon of learning is the place that's optimally challenging for you.

[883] That's the only place, that's also, by the way, on the border between order and chaos, technically speaking.

[884] That's the only place that learning ever takes place.

[885] And so if you have a classroom full of 12 -year -olds, say 60 of them, Some of them have an IQ of 70, which means no matter how you, how hard you try, no matter how much effort you expend, you'll never get them beyond the basics of rudimentary literacy.

[886] And some of them have IQs of 145, which means those are kids who could learn to read at 12 to 1 ,500 words a minute and who'd be capable of operating at the highest end of cognitive development.

[887] They're all in the same class.

[888] Well, obviously you can't pitch to the middle of that, because as you said, you'll make a shambles of it.

[889] But the data that you're laying out in terms of the effectiveness of this technology is an indication of the utility of finding that zone of proximal development.

[890] That's what people talk about, by the way, when they talk about the zone, being in the zone.

[891] And I like the particularity of your solution, too, because you're saying, well, look, we need to educate people.

[892] We need to educate them because educated people generate more of the wealth that provides security and opportunity.

[893] literacy is core to that and say basic numeracy.

[894] You can't even operate a computer without that.

[895] And then we have some very efficient technological strategies that are also cost -effective where we can target and solve that particular problem.

[896] It's very particularized.

[897] And that's also a lovely vision.

[898] It's like, well, why not make education cheap and useful?

[899] It's incredibly simple.

[900] And also, remember, there are lots of other solutions.

[901] Don't first focus on those.

[902] focus on these incredibly effective ways.

[903] So, you know, we talk about, and there's lots of different data that shows, how do you make sure these tablets don't get stolen?

[904] So you need a place that you lock them up for the night.

[905] How do you recharge them?

[906] You need a solar panel.

[907] You need all that cost.

[908] You also need some people to operate it.

[909] But all of this has actually been proven.

[910] So one of the things that we've helped do, and this is by no means just us, is now Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world, is actually aiming at over the next four years to spread this out to all of their schools.

[911] So that's more than 3 ,000 schools and they're going to get this out to all one to four graders, fourth graders.

[912] That's an amazing achievement.

[913] Again, this is the kind of thing they'll make Malawi richer because they'll become more productive in the long run.

[914] So we do the whole cost and benefit calculation.

[915] So this will have real costs.

[916] We're talking about several billion dollars if you were going to do this globally.

[917] But billion is a very low number when you're thinking about how much we're spending on some of these other problems, as you mentioned, it's not a trillion.

[918] And secondly, it's going to dramatically improve all of these countries to become better so that they'll both be better off to have human flourishing, but in the long run also have better environment.

[919] We actually then try to say, well, so for every dollar you spend, how much good do you end up doing?

[920] It turns out that you make so much good that it's equivalent to $54 of social good in the long run.

[921] So every dollar in, $54 out.

[922] And this is based on realistic assumption.

[923] That's 54 more dollars that you could go off and do some more good with, too.

[924] Although, you know, because one of the things we should...

[925] Much of this is somewhat out in the future because that's what education is all about.

[926] Of course.

[927] But, you know, we have this reflexively anti -capitalist notion in the West often that lurks at the bottom of some of the metaphorical realms that we've been discussing, that there's something suspect about wealth, but the thing about wealth is that if you use it ethically, it's life more abundant.

[928] If you use that ethically, then part of the utility in gathering wealth is that hypothetically you can go, well, first of all, make more wealth with it, but you can do good things with it.

[929] And so it isn't like Scrooge McDuck luxury in the money bin that we're talking about here.

[930] It's the opportunity to make things better for people.

[931] Now, the other thing we wrote about not op -ed, you just talk about the education front, maybe we can close with this next proposition.

[932] And by the way, for those of you listening and watching, this is just one of many, although Bjorn's done a very good job of trying to rank order these in terms of, well, let's do the cheap and easy things first.

[933] We might as well hit the ball out of the park, at least in the places we can.

[934] And maybe we can save some of the problems we don't know how to solve for the future, which is a perfectly reasonable way of going about it.

[935] You also talked about, we also talked about the provision of nutritional to pregnant women and women who have infants.

[936] And so do you want to just walk through that briefly?

[937] Just very briefly again.

[938] We've gone from a world over the last 100 years.

[939] In 1928, we estimate about two -thirds of the whole world was deficient in food.

[940] So basically we were starving.

[941] Two -thirds of us were starving.

[942] Today that number is down below 10%.

[943] But that's still very high.

[944] That's still about 800 million people.

[945] So there's still a big problem.

[946] again, we can have diminishing problems and still want to do something about it.

[947] How do you fix this?

[948] Well, in the long run, you actually need to get much better productivity in agriculture, and we have some other solutions for that.

[949] But it turns out just giving out lots and lots of food is not only very expensive because you actually have to distribute it, it also typically destroys local agriculture.

[950] And if you give out all the food, then they don't have any incentive to produce it next year and you actually end up very easily make more problem.

[951] Here is we have a few small, a few really good solutions.

[952] One of them is this.

[953] And that's the one for pregnant women.

[954] So one of the things with pregnant women is they basically start off the next baby, right, in their bodies.

[955] And they typically have very low levels of vitamins and minerals and nutrients.

[956] Now, again, if we gave them all the nutrients, that would probably be better, but that turns out to be really hard, but we can give them all the necessary micronutrients, vitamins, and a pill.

[957] we already do that in a simple sense because we give them what's known as vitamin A and oh I'm sorry I'm just blanking of that some other thing that's sort of in the standard package from the World Health Organization but if we expand that the pill will be a little more expensive but remember we already have the whole infrastructure in place to hand out this pill it's one pill every day for every pregnant woman that's about 50 million pregnant women we're talking about every year.

[958] So it's not a small operation, but it would actually be fantastically cheap because we just need to exchange that pill.

[959] It's already being done there.

[960] We just need to get many more produced and get them distributed and get some more information out.

[961] And if you do that, it means that the child will be born with a better possibility of developing its own mind.

[962] We know that because if you're not born early or if you're not low birth weight, you have better chances in your life.

[963] So we can basically make about 50 million kids better chances next year.

[964] If we did this, it'll cost in the order of $140 million.

[965] So it's literally peanuts that we're talking about.

[966] If we did that, these kids would grow up.

[967] It would basically mean that somewhere between 2 and 3 million more kids would be better at school.

[968] They would go longer.

[969] They would learn more.

[970] They'd become more productive.

[971] they would help their countries become richer.

[972] Again, this is a simple thing, and it's a very well -documented thing, and we know that if you spend $1 here, you can do about $38 of social good.

[973] And again, this is not just making up more value or McScrooge, as you were talking about.

[974] This is actually making sure that really poor women can make the life for the next generation much better.

[975] The point here is not that this is what you should be doing, but it's one of the many things that you could choose and say, look, I want to do something that actually matters and that has huge impact rather than just go with, oh my God, the world is terrible and then I'm just going to give up or I'm just going to go for these cheap, easy virtue signaling.

[976] This is about there are a lot of technologies, there are a lot of innovations where we can actually make a lot of good at very low cost, very effectively.

[977] Isn't that what we should be doing for 2023.

[978] Okay, so let's sum up this conversation.

[979] I'll sum it up briefly and then let's see what you have to add or subtract from that.

[980] So we started by talking about the underlying metaphysics or even theology of the current worldview and laid out the proposition that we tend to see, we tend to insist that young people see the planet as a fragile virgin and culture as a rapacious predator and the individual as a parasitic predator and that that has its echoes in the a prior religious landscape but that it's a very one -sided story and the corrective to that story is well nature can be pretty damn hard on us and needs to be tamed and controlled in a manner that's sustainable we should be extremely grateful for what our culture has provided us with not least the ability to look at nature as though it was benevolent and we shouldn't be so damn hard on individual people because for all their flaws They can be Norman Borlaig, for example, or the people who worked along with them, who are genuinely contributing not only to a much more productive and generous economy, but also doing that in a manner that's beneficial on the environmental front.

[981] And so we need to balance our viewpoint, and we need to stop terrifying young people into apocalyptic nightmares by insisting that the world is going to collapse and that all the power should be given to, like, terrified, centralized tyrants.

[982] So that's the first part.

[983] Then we talked a little bit about the motivational landscape for that worldview is that people are being enticed into these apocalyptic views, partly by being offered an easy pathway to moral virtue when they're susceptible to that need.

[984] And so it's all about climate, it's all about carbon dioxide.

[985] There's only one problem.

[986] If you're just concerned about it, that means you're morally virtuous.

[987] You've identified the enemy, and now you have nothing else to do.

[988] That's a bad model.

[989] The proper model is for people to develop a sophisticated, a theory of the world and of their own action that's as sophisticated as the actual problem set and to be willing to devote mature time and energy to the solution of a set of real problems, which we could solve.

[990] And then we sort of closed the conversation, mostly you did that, by delineating a couple of the areas that are basically constantly, We could educate poor people for relatively low outlay, economically, certainly one that would produce a tremendously high return on investment.

[991] We already know how to do that.

[992] The infrastructure is already in place, and we could do the same thing on the nutritional front, and then we'd have fewer starving and stunted children, and they'd all be more well -educated, and then we also pointed out, being wealthier and being more intelligent, they'd also be more likely to take a long -term view of, let's say, ecosystem sustainability, and they'd start to work in a distributed manner to serve the environment locally.

[993] And so, like, why the hell is that a bad idea?

[994] That seems to be like a really good idea.

[995] So anyways, that's my summary of the conversation.

[996] Do you have anything that you want to add or subtract to that?

[997] I think it's a great summary.

[998] I think it really just summarizes into, you've got to stop believing that this is the end of the world.

[999] That's not what the data shows us.

[1000] And we've talked about that for a number of different things.

[1001] So we live much longer, we're much less poor.

[1002] So there are many fewer poor people.

[1003] Air pollution, for instance, indoor has gone down dramatically.

[1004] We know how to solve many of these problems, and we are a smart species, so we will keep on learning how to fix this.

[1005] Yes, this is not about moral virtue and just showing up and saying, I want to do good.

[1006] This is about the long, hard grind of the Norman Borlaugs and all these other guys that actually helped us think out what are smart ideas.

[1007] That's what this third idea was then, or this third part of the conversation was really about, there are a lot of smart things.

[1008] Do you want to be part of that?

[1009] I would love for all of us to be part of that.

[1010] And I think that was part of why we also wrote this all bet.

[1011] It's sort of, you know, the new year is a place when you start talking about, so, you know, what do you want to do?

[1012] What do you want to do for next year?

[1013] How do you want to look at the world?

[1014] Stop being scared.

[1015] Start thinking about how can I help?

[1016] And wouldn't that be amazing if we actually had a lot of more people saying, I want to help.

[1017] I want to be one of the guys who helped get these tablets out in a developing country somewhere.

[1018] I want to be the gal who focuses on making sure that we get these cheap tablets out to pregnant women.

[1019] I want to help push forward these very simple ideas and, of course, come up with new ideas.

[1020] This is the way we solve problems.

[1021] This is the way we actually make the world even better.

[1022] Right.

[1023] Well, that was the other stream that I didn't summarize is that we'd also talked about the fact that the mold in a Petri -Dish model, biological model of human existence is not appropriate.

[1024] Neither is the fox and rabbit model.

[1025] Is that we have the capacity to generate and kill new ideas constantly.

[1026] and we're very good at testing them in those countries where there's freedom of expression and freedom of thought.

[1027] We're very good at testing those ideas.

[1028] We're very good at implementing them.

[1029] We've learned continually how to make more with less.

[1030] We're getting better and better at that in every possible way, especially as our computational power increases.

[1031] And so what that would mean is that if we could shed, maybe if we could shed the apocalyptic pessimism and encourage young people to work diligently towards a mature and integrated vision of the economy and the environment, invite them to participate as people whose basic destiny is to make the world a better place for people and for nature itself, that that's a viewpoint that's much better, that's much more likely to lift people out of abject poverty and also to produce a greener and more sustainable world.

[1032] Well said.

[1033] All right, Dr. Longberg.

[1034] Hey, for everybody who's watching and listening, I mean, first of all, thank you for participating in this conversation.

[1035] And more power to you, by the way, on the upward and onward front.

[1036] There's no reason to be destroying your motivation by engaging in apocalyptic doomsaying when there's many things that need to be done and could be done that are productive and useful.

[1037] And many things that are positive, that are beckoning and that have already made themselves manifest.

[1038] Bjorn noted, for example, that we've lifted a tremendous, this number of people out of poverty in the last 15 years, and we could do an even better job at that.

[1039] In the meantime, I'm going to talk to Dr. Longberg for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform.

[1040] I'm interested in, with all my guests who are generally very successful and interesting people, I'm always interested in the manner in which their responsible destiny made itself manifest, right?

[1041] So one of the things that all young people contend with is the issue of where to find the central purpose, the meaning in their life.

[1042] And, you know, it's easy to get nihilistic and cynical about that and think that life has no purpose in the final analysis.

[1043] But I think that's a pretty gloomy and unwarranted supposition.

[1044] And one of the things I have seen among the people I've met whose lives are together and who are doing productive and generous things is they do find engagement in something that's truly meaningful.

[1045] And it does get them out of bed in the morning and help motivate them to be productive.

[1046] and not only for themselves and not only for their own gain, if in case that has to be said, but so that they're working in a manner that's extremely socially responsible and meaningful in a reciprocal manner.

[1047] And so I'm going to talk to Bjorn about how his interests made themselves manifest in the early part of his life in my attempt to trace how such things come about.

[1048] And so we'll see you in January.

[1049] And Merry Christmas to you, by the way.

[1050] Hello, everyone.

[1051] I would encourage you to continue listening to my content.

[1052] with my guest on dailywireplus .com.