Bjorn Lomberg is a Danish academic and author of False Alarm, and the author of The Environmental Skeptic, a book which argues that climate change is man-made. In this episode, he discusses his views on climate change, and how powerful interests are using their influence to advance their own interests, and why we should be worried about climate change at all - not just in terms of the impact it has on the planet, but on the political and economic systems that support the climate change alarmism that is being peddled by the world's political and corporate elite. He also asks the question: why is climate change a problem at all, and what can we do about it? And why is it so difficult to solve climate change if we don t have the money to fix it? Stay Free with Russell Brand is out now on all of the social medias, if you're a member of the Stay Free AF community, you're joining us live now on Locals. If you're not yet a member, you can become a supporter of Stay Free by becoming a patron of the show by clicking here. You'll get 10% off your first month with discount code STAYFREE at checkout, and get 20% off for the rest of the month if you sign up at stayfreeaf.org/strive.fm/keepfree. To find a list of our sponsorships, go to stayfree.org.uk and use the discount code: stayfree at checkout to receive 10% of your total for the month, plus a discount of up to $100, plus shipping and free shipping throughout the resturant, plus free shipping, plus some other goodies! to receive a 20% of the entire month of your choice, plus I'll get 15% off my entire month for a year, plus an extra 3 months of shipping and a free shipping offer, plus they'll get an extra 7 days free shipping and I'll send you an extra $10% off the first month, and you'll get 7 days of free shipping anywhere else they say I'm listening to the show next month, I'll be shipping you get an ad-only version of this week's ad-free version of the podcast, I'm working through the show for free on my favourite podcast, stay free on the second month, no matter what you decide that you decide what you're listening to your favourite pod is best, and I'm also getting a discount code, too!
00:00:00.000Hello and welcome to Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:00:03.000Every week I have one in-depth conversation with someone with a fascinating and illuminating mind and expansive consciousness and unique insights.
00:00:11.000Previously I've spoken with Rick Rubin, he's amazing, Tim Robbins, the actor, Maya, Tulsi Gabbard, Graham Hancock, and on today's show we've got Danish academic and the author of False Alarm and sceptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomberg.
00:00:24.000Bjorn and I are going to be... kissing.
00:00:30.000If you're a member of our Stay Free AF community, you're joining us live now on Locals.
00:00:48.000Make the next questions very grown up and a little more serious next time.
00:00:54.000Bjorn, you're famous for these things.
00:00:56.000You are broadly regarded as left-wing.
00:01:00.000You wrote that book, The Environmental Skeptic.
00:01:04.000And what I want to say is that your position on climate change is what's brought you to prominence and I believe garnered you a good deal of criticism in some Yeah, it has, hasn't it?
00:01:18.000This is what I most want to understand.
00:01:19.000This is what I most want to understand.
00:01:21.000I believe your position is that you say climate change is real, that climate change is man-made, but the efforts that are being suggested to amend it will not make a sufficient difference and there are other things that could be done that will be more meaningful.
00:01:34.000One of the questions that I have is that I know that polluting the planet cannot be good on a spiritual level and it seems that there's significant evidence to suggest that, you know, that man-made climate change is real.
00:01:45.000What I know and what I understand is that global elites do not promote ideas which are harmful to their interests.
00:01:55.000And I know that industrialization and consumerism and the commodification of everything on the planet must be in numerous ways harmful.
00:02:04.000Why are they promoting this climate change idea and advocating for the solutions that they are, including things like ESG, if those things will not be effective?
00:02:16.000And what about the other side of the argument, energy giants who are clearly pollutants?
00:02:22.000I feel like of the biggest pollutants in the world, 70 of them are Corporations, you know.
00:02:30.000So what I want to unpick is, where is the power in this argument?
00:02:34.000I recognise that if something like the argument for climate change is being as promoted as broadly as it is and is supported by powerful interests, that means that they are somehow benefiting from it, likely financially, and that the ultimate solutions that will be suggested will inhibit and impede the motion, movement and freedom of ordinary people.
00:02:51.000But I don't quite understand how it is, because it sort of seems to me like the sort of thing that typically I would believe in, because I do care about the planet, I love the environment, I'd love to impede the interests of the powerful, regulate, control their businesses and their polluting behaviours.
00:03:06.000So tell me how you've arrived at this position, and tell me how powerful, in particular as a starting point, how do the powerful benefit from their current climate change rhetoric?
00:03:16.000All those guys who went to Davos last year and, you know, go to listen to Greta Thunberg.
00:03:22.000A lot of them arrive in their own private jets.
00:03:24.000So, in some sense, what you can see is they're telling us, well, we should cut down on all kinds of stuff.
00:03:30.000But, of course, they're not actually interested in cutting down on their private planning.
00:03:34.000You know, there's this fun point of Kerry.
00:03:38.000John Kerry, the climate czar from Biden, who went to Iceland to pick up his environmental award in private plane.
00:03:48.000And, you know, so it's sort of like, yeah, that's not how you're going to solve this problem.
00:03:56.000But currently it's being suggested that we should fix it by buying, say, lots of solar, lots of wind.
00:04:02.000Most of this is subsidized and obviously a lot of people are making a lot of money off of it.
00:04:06.000But the problem is it cuts very little at fairly high cost.
00:04:11.000So actually what we're doing is we're doing a tiny bit of fixing climate change.
00:04:15.000So if you actually look at the whole Paris Agreement, for instance, it will solve about 1% of all the stuff that we're talking about trying to solve.
00:04:23.000So it'll cut a very, very minimal part of what we're trying to solve.
00:04:27.000yet it is going to be fantastically costly you know we're talking several trillion dollars and of course it's not going to be mainly the guys flying to Dava so pay it'll be you and me and everybody else and so what I'm trying to say is look you're never going to solve this problem partly by making Poor solutions, that is.
00:04:46.000Expensive solutions, I'll fix very little.
00:04:48.000But also, you're not going to do this by telling people you have to pay an insane amount of money.
00:04:53.000So one study in Nature Magazine showed that the average American by mid-century, if we actually tried to do the Biden plan of cutting all emissions to net zero by 2050, would cost in the order of $11,000 per person per year.
00:05:11.000So you're saying that what they're doing is they're manipulating this situation so that the solutions fall, ultimately affect ordinary people financially negatively?
00:05:21.000I tend to believe that they're not being that cynical.
00:05:26.000I think more it's the easy way to solve this problem.
00:05:30.000See we're doing something, we're putting up solar panels, we're putting up wind turbines, it feels like we're doing something but the reality of course is Emissions keep going up.
00:05:55.000You got by burning coal for 200 years.
00:05:57.000Let's hope that the developing world won't have to do the same thing.
00:06:00.000But I understand that they are sort of making the same priority and saying, look, we'd actually like to get out of poverty first.
00:06:06.000I see that that's why they think that people regard globalism as an issue and globalism as a solution, because it would appear that you would not be able to create a homogenized solution without accordance across nations, that all of those narratives would have to collapse.
00:06:24.000You'd have to say, China, India, nations that haven't benefited from a couple of hundred years of fossil fuel burning, industry, you're going to have to get up to speed because ultimately this is one planet.
00:07:25.000And of course, most industrialized processes, most heating, a lot of cooling, and this is crucial, all the stuff that actually underpins civilization.
00:07:36.000So fertilizer, half the world's population is dependent on fertilizer that's produced with gas.
00:07:42.000Steel and cement, These things we don't have any good way of doing with electricity.
00:07:49.000Again, we could eventually get there, but we're not anywhere close.
00:07:53.000And the second part, sorry, just very briefly, is even if you had solar and wind, a hundred percent, what happens on days when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing?
00:08:59.000But that's only one-fifth of the issue.
00:09:01.000You've highlighted cement, power generation in other areas.
00:09:05.000No, not power generation, but industrial processes and heating.
00:09:13.000And the impossibility of storing electricity, even if you were able to generate that.
00:09:19.000So quite quickly, it seems, Bjorn, we arrive at the point that in order to solve these problems,
00:09:26.000if that truly were the intention, we would have to radically re-evaluate our entire economic models.
00:09:33.000Because you'd quickly have to say, well, the cost and value of batteries is only built upon
00:09:40.000our current understanding of supply, demand, economics, manufacture.
00:09:45.000If we had a truly globalist project, you'd say, we're making those fucking batteries because we're solving that problem because this is how we have to resolve it and we're going to flatten out and regulate all cost.
00:09:58.000Right, so what you're essentially saying is that what's being highlighted by the current climate change movement are sort of problems that are manageable that don't make a meaningful difference.
00:10:14.000Like the current capacity for solar and wind being an example of something that isn't going to significantly move the needle.
00:10:21.000And in order to significantly move the needle, you would have to radically interrupt the ascent of certain powerful interests.
00:10:30.000And I think that you're absolutely right.
00:10:33.000If we tried to go net zero, remember, society can do pretty much anything they want.
00:10:37.000It's just going to be Very, very uncomfortable to do some things, right?
00:10:41.000We could certainly go net zero, but, you know, imagine your life without your phone, without this lighting, without the heating, without all the other stuff, you know, and without, you know, food for four billion people.
00:10:51.000There's a lot of unpleasantness built into that setup, which is why it's not going to happen.
00:10:57.000And so, yes, we are currently just merely suggesting sort of, you know, very tiny solutions.
00:11:02.000They're not tiny in the sense that they're not costly, but they won't solve very much.
00:11:07.000My point has been, and I think this, so I worked together with more than 50 of the world's top climate economists and three Nobel laureates on finding out where can you actually do the most good for climate.
00:11:18.000What they said was, this is all about innovation.
00:11:20.000And let me just tell you a story before I tell you this thing, but if you may have heard about this, back in the 1860s, whales, we hunted whales, we almost hunted whales to extinction.
00:11:32.000Uh, because whales provide this incredibly bright and clean burning, uh, fuel.
00:11:39.000So basically it lit up most of Western Europe and North America.
00:11:43.000And, you know, you could tell, and you know, if there'd been green pieces and Fridays for the future, they would have gone back and said, you know, you've got to change this out and live with slightly dimmer lighting and more polluting lighting, but hey, go back and, you know, save the whales.
00:11:56.000And of course people weren't actually willing to do that.
00:12:31.000One thing I will outright reject there, Björn, is the idea that political power lies with ordinary people.
00:12:40.000That it's, we, the people, refuse to stop using whale blubber until there is a better and greater innovation.
00:12:47.000It was profitable for the whaling industry, then it became profitable for the oil industry.
00:12:53.000And also what this points to for me is that we have no ethical substrata to call upon.
00:13:01.000No one is willing, there is no recourse for, if we are a species that has a shared responsibility to one another and the planet to improve or alter our conditions, no one has the resources mentally, I don't think there's anything spiritually anymore to do that.
00:13:20.000Ultimately, all that we've been coached, trained, conditioned to a point where ultimately everybody will just do what's best for them.
00:13:53.000I think there's a lot of people who would prefer to just watch TV than, you know, take hard choices.
00:13:58.000I'm not blaming people, I'm saying... No, no, but on the other hand, I think there's a lot of people out there who are actually, every day, you probably have quite a few on your show, you know, people that I meet every once in a while, certainly a lot of the climate worries, you know, the Friday for Future and many others, they actually want to do something, you know, Greta Thunberg, I have strong disagreements with her, but I think, you know, she's actually said, you know, I don't want to go by airplane.
00:14:25.000So I'm, you know, I'm going to go through all this extra trouble to showcase that I actually care about the planet.
00:14:30.000I think a lot of people want to do at least a moderate, moderate, moderate, sorry, moderate part of, I should just say I'm Danish.
00:14:38.000So English, English is not my first language.
00:14:59.000So I think people are willing to do some, but I think we just have to realise the current way we're trying to solve climate change, we're essentially saying, let's go far beyond what people are willing to do.
00:15:44.000I don't know enough about it, but it seems to me that we're in a place of existential
00:15:48.000crisis and I believe it is a spiritual crisis.
00:15:51.000I believe we have lost our connection to meaning, purpose, God.
00:15:55.000And I feel that if you're saying, oh, well, you have to let various African nations undergo their own version of an industrial revolution, commercialization, commodification, various sets of corrupt organizations and influences, that's not enough of a vision.
00:16:13.000The vision I want is, Guys, we're in serious trouble!
00:16:18.000And the climate change thing, I agree with your cynicism about the way that the climate change argument is being presented because I know that you do not get elitist, globalist interests Backing ideas that will be pejorative to their desired outcomes.
00:16:45.000You know, for me, it seems, you know, for example, you talk about Greta Thunberg, she appears to me to be an entirely authentic and passionate, saintly, you know, savantish figure that really deeply cares about an issue.
00:16:59.000But I recognize when you see someone all over the same kind of newspapers that ultimately support corporate interests, I recognize, oh, what she's saying mustn't negatively impact their desires, because otherwise you would be seeing her.
00:17:44.000I'm going to go the other way and try and see if we can't fix, you know, some of the world's big problems with simple things that we know work.
00:17:52.000And so let me just, on the catastrophe side, let's just remember over the last, what, 25 years?
00:18:01.000One and a quarter billion people have come out of poverty.
00:18:04.000That's a hundred and thirty-five 1,000 people every day.
00:18:09.000While we've been talking, you know, it's a couple thousand people have come out of poverty.
00:18:37.000I feel like these are the arguments that are used when people say, here's an area which sounds comparable but is somewhat distinct.
00:18:45.000Of course, who am I to say that those 1 million people don't have the rights to buy their consumer objects or be lifted out of poverty or whatever it is you're saying.
00:18:52.000But when I say, for example, hey, American democracy is Meaningless.
00:18:57.000The Republican Party and the Democrat Party are ultimately controlled by the same financial interests and nothing will meaningfully change for ordinary people.
00:19:03.000They go, yeah, but the Democrats are going to do this thing that cuts things by 10%.
00:19:20.000I think it's easier when you're actually close to starving and you almost have no life, that it's easier to just simply say that is desperation.
00:19:31.000Well, but it's actually really, really good.
00:19:34.000If you get a chance to be lifted out of poverty, be able to teach your kids, all that kind of stuff.
00:21:26.000So, you know, there's been research on fourth generation nuclear.
00:21:31.000Imagine, and there's a lot of reasons why this may not come true, but you could imagine that fourth generation nuclear would be incredibly cheap, very safe, that seems reasonable, and it'll have no CO2 emissions.
00:21:44.000If you could do that, and there's a lot of people who say this will happen, I'm still, you know, somewhat skeptical, but let's see.
00:21:52.000No, because Chernobyl was a bad third generation.
00:21:55.000There's a lot of reasons why fourth generation, for instance, can't do, it'll be physically impossible to do sort of Chernobyl thing.
00:22:02.000But fundamentally, the idea is, if you could innovate something that would basically be very cheap and powerful, and could give power 24-7, And would actually deliver no CO2.
00:22:16.000Everyone would switch, not just rich countries like England and the US and the rest of Europe, but also Chinese, Indians, Africans.
00:22:26.000So again, if we could innovate our way to finding smart solutions to this, That's the way you solve these problems.
00:22:32.000So it's a little bit like the whale example.
00:22:35.000Instead of trying to tell people, don't kill the whales, because there's all these financial interests and people want the clean light.
00:22:43.000But if you could actually say, oh, here's a nicer, better, cheaper, that doesn't, a product that doesn't kill the whales, that would actually be really cool.
00:22:50.000And that's what I tried to do, not just in climate, but across the world and saying, there are all these amazing things that we're sort of forgetting because they're not very sexy.
00:23:00.000But we could, for fairly little money, change the world in amazing ways that would really make a big difference.
00:23:27.000Of course, it is valuable to offer solutions that are in advance on what is currently being discussed and offered.
00:23:38.000And your example of How, that one way to end an inefficient and transgressive technology is to try to sort of tell people, oh please stop, it's, you know, the whales, the plants, whatever.
00:23:55.000But another way is, yeah, this is better and cheaper.
00:23:57.000But the problem is, it feels to me that progressivism and the ongoing technologisation of everything is broadly I love you!
00:24:07.000for us. It seems that and one of the and by the way, I sort of
00:24:12.000think that I do exist in a very particular space where I love
00:24:16.000you. You have to do this while you're saying all right.
00:24:18.000Yeah, my particular space is there is a requirement for a shift
00:24:22.000in the consciousness of individuals and cultures. And so I'm
00:24:27.000pleased to understand that I'm not saying I'm not trying to nullify or
00:24:33.000even gainsay what you're explaining to me.
00:24:37.000I'm just always, when I feel like, oh God, we can't break people out of the idea that the solution is He's comfort and privilege and the acquisition of more material goods and there's this thing I think about a lot like sort of obviously you know Gandhi said like that you know we're never gonna meaningfully change the world if we don't overcome our infatuation with gadgets and trinkets he's saying this in like the 1940s and
00:25:05.000what I feel like is there is... And you're sitting with your cell phone. Yeah, absolutely.
00:25:09.000And like, you know, there is no sign that we're going to be able to break this obsession
00:25:14.000with the material. Okay, so now I think, Bjorn, I think I understand a little better now what you
00:25:20.000are saying. That the way that firstly, well, is part of your argument that climate change isn't
00:25:28.000the most significant threat to our time? It certainly is.
00:25:32.000It's certainly exaggerated in much of the general storytelling, so it is a problem.
00:25:38.000But again, you hear about this one catastrophe after another from climate, and then you see at the same time If you actually look at the data, how many people die from climate-related disasters?
00:25:51.000So that would be floods, droughts, storms, wildfires, and extreme temperatures.
00:25:55.000And we have good data for that for the last hundred years.
00:25:58.000So if you think back in time, in the 1920s, on average about half a million people died every year from these climate-related disasters.
00:26:06.000Today, so last year in 2022, it was 11,000 people.
00:26:12.000So the ones that died in Pakistan, all the people who died in India from big floods and many, many other places, that sums up to 11,000 people.
00:26:20.000So that's like 99%, almost 99% lower, despite the fact that the world has quadruple in size.
00:26:27.000It has nothing to do with climate, but has everything to do with the fact that when you get people out of poverty, they become more resilient.
00:26:35.000They basically have much better technology.
00:26:37.000So we work with Bangladesh, for instance.
00:26:38.000I don't know if you know, Bangladesh in 1970 had the world's worst hurricane.
00:26:43.000It killed somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 people.
00:26:47.000And a lot of them didn't hear that it was coming before it was too late.
00:26:52.000So we worked with the Bangladeshi government and we were looking at should we build more shelters for people for where they can go to.
00:27:00.000And it turns out, no, they've already done that.
00:27:02.000They've basically made sure that everyone has places to go for these shelters.
00:27:06.000So basically they've gone from, you know, like having hundreds of thousands of people die in a hurricane To having somewhere between ten and a thousand people dying.
00:27:15.000That's still terrible, but it's much, much less terrible.
00:27:17.000What they actually told us was, now we'd like to have shelters for our animals.
00:27:22.000Because, you know, animals are a big part of their value.
00:27:24.000They, you know, they worry about the fact that if I'm a farmer and this is my only cow, I'd like to know that that's safe.
00:27:31.000But it's a wonderfully better world where you have to worry about your cow than you have to worry about your kids dying from a hurricane.
00:28:37.000So the economist argument for this would simply be to say, We've all built our cities and our infrastructure, so all houses and everything, to a particular temperature.
00:28:48.000So, you know, houses in Helsinki work great.
00:28:51.000Houses in Athens, I'm not... reasonably great, right?
00:28:54.000But they both work because they're at the temperature that they were built.
00:28:58.000If you change that temperature, it becomes a little less optimal.
00:29:02.000Basically, you have to change a lot of your infrastructure in the long run.
00:30:44.000I don't think that can happen just because a few people have gotten a bit carried away themselves.
00:30:47.000There must be some central power that is benefiting significantly.
00:30:52.000So I think newspapers love bad stories.
00:30:55.000And look, it's not, again, because newspapers are ugly.
00:30:59.000It's actually because when you give people a pile of good news and a bad news...
00:31:03.000They say they want to read all the good news, they end up reading all the bad news, right?
00:31:07.000So newspapers are basically giving us what we want, and we want bad news.
00:31:11.000And climate is such a great bad news generator that I think we've sort of talked ourselves into that.
00:31:17.000Now, clearly, there are also interests involved.
00:31:19.000But I think there, as you would also be pointed out earlier, there's obviously also interest from the fossil fuel companies to say, oh, it's no problem.
00:31:28.000Just keep on using your oil fire, your oil heater here in the house.
00:31:34.000So obviously there are interests on all these sides.
00:31:37.000I'm simply trying to say the evidence, so there's only one economist who ever won the Nobel Prize in Climate Economics, William Nordhaus from Yale University in 2018.
00:31:48.000And he basically estimated, and this is what most of the big models also estimate, is that global warming is a problem, it will feel like, because if you try to add up all of the problems that will come from climate change, it will feel like by the end of the century, if we do nothing, that we will be 4% less well off than we otherwise would have been.
00:32:09.000Now remember, in the UN standard scenario, we'll be about 450% richer by the end of the century, mostly in poorer countries.
00:32:17.000So it will feel like instead of being 450% as rich, we'll only be 434% as rich.
00:32:23.000That's a problem but it's certainly not the sort of the end of the world kind of categorization that we often hear.
00:32:29.000Banshee asks, "Do we need to accept a reduction in our level of comfort to solve these problems regardless of the
00:32:39.000So if you want to solve it now and completely solve it, yes, you will have to see a reduction in your well-being.
00:32:49.000It'll be a little colder, it'll be a little darker, you'll be a little poor.
00:32:54.000It's not going to be the end of the world, but it is going to be noticeable less comfortable.
00:33:00.000But that's, of course, also why this will never happen.
00:33:02.000And it may happen somewhat in rich countries where we're willing to sort of, you know, we're so well off that we can sort of accept to maybe become slightly less well off.
00:33:11.000But it's not going to happen in most developing countries.
00:33:14.000No African is going to say, sure, I'll just let my people stay in, my family stay in poverty and accept that for the good of the planet.
00:36:09.000There's a lot of other things we, you know, asked them to do that they didn't do.
00:36:12.000But my goal is sort of, you know, I would love for everyone to just pick up on all the smart stuff we say, but I'm happy if they just pick up on one, right?
00:36:29.000A lot of these things are stuff we know how to do.
00:36:31.000So let me just walk you through one of them.
00:36:34.000Uh, so tuberculosis, for instance, um, it used to kill, you know, it used to kill about a quarter of everyone in the rich world, a hundred years ago.
00:36:44.000We don't think about that anymore because we fixed it.
00:36:48.000You know, you don't die from tuberculosis.
00:37:45.000You get fine after a week and then you're sort of like, oh yeah, I forgot yesterday.
00:37:49.000And it's sort of like, I'm fine, but you're not, at least not for tuberculosis, right?
00:37:54.000So the idea is you need to have like apps to make sure people take it.
00:37:58.000Maybe, you know, uh, groups where you, uh, where you get together a little bit like Alcoholics Anonymous, but just for tuberculosis and just for those six months where you get together.
00:38:07.000Yes, I took my, my, uh, my pills all the, all of last week or something like that.
00:38:11.000There's lots of different local things, but the trick here is, That we estimate together with Stop TB, which is the world's biggest organization on tuberculosis, that for about $5 billion extra, we've actually promised to spend even more globally, but just for $5 billion extra, we could save almost all of these people for the rest of eternity.
00:38:31.000And of course, very quickly, you almost don't need any money because there'll be no reservoir of death left over.
00:38:37.000So you could save about 27 million people's lives.
00:38:41.000And remember, this is crucial also because These people are typically middle-aged people.
00:38:47.000They're not young people, but they're, you know, in the prime of their lives.
00:39:49.000It doesn't feel like it's all that important because, you know, we care more about, oh, I need organically grown carrots and that kind of stuff.
00:40:02.000Here are 12 amazing things that we could do.
00:40:06.000I suppose the reason people don't care, even though you said that that one pound or dollar is fine by the way, most people watching this are probably American, like the ideology, the kind of prevailing mentality does not appreciate or care about those, but you're saying even it's beneficial economically.
00:40:29.000And you feel that when you translate these ideas into some kind of into the language of economics and it's more likely to be impactful or it's just it's real so you should tell that story.
00:40:40.000Actually you're you're not going to get better off in the sense that you'll have more money right because these are people you're saving so it's it's it's not economically beneficial it just happens to be incredibly good thing to do so we try to translate good into into dollars, but that's really just a measure of trying to say, you've got to look at how much do you have to spend in order to achieve a certain benefit.
00:41:04.000It's just like when we talked about climate, right?
00:41:06.000I mean, how much do you spend on the solar panels and how much do you avoid climate, climate damage?
00:41:11.000Here we're simply saying, if you spend a little bit on tuberculosis, you can actually get a huge benefit.
00:41:17.000Let me, let me just tell you one other story.
00:41:19.000I've lots of them, but you know, just stop, stop me.
00:41:22.000But you know, there's, Globally, we have really bad education.
00:41:26.000I mean, we have pretty bad education many places in the rich world, but in the poor world, it's really, really bad.
00:41:33.000So, although we have gotten everybody into school, which was nice, and that was our promise back in 2000 to 2015, they learn almost nothing.
00:41:42.000So, although we say that we don't have illiteracy anymore, they Functionally, a lot of these guys don't read very well.
00:41:51.000So, you know, one of the tests you give 10-year-olds in the developing world is to say, read this sentence, and it says, BJ has a red hat, a blue shirt, and yellow socks.
00:42:34.000But it turns out that there is an amazing way to, and that's, of course, again, you know, this is the sort of optimism that I try to bring to the table.
00:42:41.000When you ask people out there, there are lots of ways not to do it.
00:42:45.000So Indonesia is shown as a couple of them.
00:43:07.000So, uh, there's a famous paper called, you know, double for nothing.
00:43:10.000Uh, basically you pay a lot more money, but you didn't actually improve the schooling outcome.
00:43:15.000However, there's an amazing way you can do this.
00:43:17.000The big problem in education is that, and this is true everywhere, but especially in developing countries, if you have like, uh, you know, 60 kids that are all 12 year olds, because that's how we do classes, You know, if you try to teach them anything, some of them are going to be totally lost, and some of them are going to be incredibly bored because they're way ahead, and you're really only teaching a small segment of that class, right, because they're all over the board.
00:43:42.000The problem is to teach them at their right level.
00:43:46.000One way you can do that, and this has been tested in a lot of places, we're actually helping Malawi to do this for their entire country now, so one way you can do that is by putting these kids in front of a tablet One hour every day.
00:44:37.000So you can, you know, you can teach them three times as much.
00:44:39.000That means that they will become much brighter.
00:44:41.000They will be better able to deal with all their problems in their nation at very low cost.
00:44:46.000So we estimate that for every dollar you spend, so it costs about $25.
00:44:52.000Per kid per year because you need you need solar panels to charge the typically they don't have power to charge the tablets you also need a safe to lock them in because otherwise they'll get stolen and and some of them will break up and all that kind of stuff.
00:45:05.000So if you spend that $25 you actually make that kid smarter better educated and the long run he or she will be better equipped to deal with that country leaving them with about $54 of benefits.
00:45:20.000I see what interests you is evident opportunities to improve that are achievable and popularising them.
00:45:31.000Do you think it's a kind of inertia that prevents these ideas from being taken on board?
00:45:43.000Or do you imagine as I do that reality is organised around the interests of a relatively small number of elite institutions and corporations and if they can't extract profit from these endeavours they're very unlikely to be carried out and the only sociological and humanitarian aid that is ever carried out is a panacea, palliative or distraction in order for the agenda and interests of the powerful to continue Unimpeded and that there isn't where even where there is interest there is no power to meaningfully change the trajectory of the if not world events the kind of the kind of solutions that you're presenting seems like that if you did have access to you know the Tunisian government or you know like you've had like you said in Bangladesh you were able to get these measures taken on board and it was relatively effective it but do you not
00:46:40.000Imagine, mate, from what you know about climate change, that they must know that as well, and that they are not doing that because, presumably, the way that their agenda is organised... What is power other than the ability to influence and organise reality?
00:46:56.000And the most powerful people, interests in the world, are the interests that organize reality.
00:47:02.000So the agenda that gets set, the information that gets conveyed, the arguments that get advanced, the information that gets censored, is all being organized around those principles.
00:47:12.000I understand that we are entering into an age where Information is now available in a way that is completely unprecedented.
00:47:20.000So there is some new requirement for an ability to censor and control data, to condemn, cancel and criticize alternative voices.
00:47:31.000All these things have become necessary because the potential to convey information is now Has radically advanced.
00:47:38.000The potential to organize, dispute, disruption, radical activism and protest has radically advanced.
00:47:44.000So now to counter that, the hegemonic powers need to be able to bleach out that problem through sort of reductivism, demonization.
00:47:57.000So from pretty old school medieval social tools in fact.
00:48:01.000And so Like, I obviously applaud your endeavours to create positive solutions and fascinated to hear that this is something that you're working on with Jordan Peterson, who obviously is a person that sort of meets head on the cultural and ideological challenges.
00:48:20.000And I've spoken to Jordan a number of times and I adore him in many, many ways.
00:48:25.000But I like that he faces so much criticism because I think he's attacking He's attacking some pretty entrenched systems of power.
00:48:34.000And also, as I've said to him personally, I disagree with him in some of the areas.
00:49:38.000Fundamentally, the idea here is to say that I think you're right that a lot of money gets spent on sort of this, you know, keeping everybody at check.
00:49:47.000But some money, and what we're trying to say is, alright, if some money, if some resources are actually being spent on trying to do good.
00:49:54.000And I think, you know, some of the money that we spend on climate is actually trying to do good.
00:49:59.000What does Bill Gates think about your climate change hysteria perspective?
00:50:07.000He feels, I think, I mean, he's written a book about it.
00:50:10.000I think he's somewhat more concerned, but he's very much aligned with the idea of saying, You are not going to solve this problem before it's sufficiently cheap that people will actually want to buy it.
00:50:23.000So I think he feels that I'm probably a little too optimistic.
00:50:28.000Otherwise, I would have changed my mind.
00:50:31.000But he's probably a little more worried about climate.
00:50:34.000But I think he agrees on a lot of the basic fundamental points, namely that we need To innovate in order to get better technology so that it'll basically become this whale versus petrol kind of solution.
00:50:49.000That's also why he's investing in fourth generation nuclear.
00:50:53.000There's a lot of different proposals in fourth generation, and it's very likely that only one of them will go through.
00:50:58.000And that's, of course, why he may very well end up wasting all his money.
00:51:15.000All right, Bjorn, thank you so much for joining us for this conversation.
00:51:20.000It's really kind of you to explain those rather complex global issues that are difficult to outline in such a candid and straightforward way.