Marian Tupi joins me to talk about her new book, Super Abundance, and her vision for restoring a pro-growth agenda in the United States. We talk about the role of GDP growth in our economic and political discourse, and why it has been sidelined in favor of spending cuts and tax increases. We also discuss the environmental impact of population growth, and how that impacts our ability to live sustainably and sustainably on a planet that is rapidly running out of resources. And we talk about why we need to learn to live in a more harmonious lifestyle with the planet. This episode was produced by Tall Tales and edited by Alex Blumberg. Our theme music is Come Alone by my main amigo, Evan Handyside. Our ad music is by Build Buildings, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. The show was mixed and produced by Riley Bray. Additional music was mixed by Bobby Lord. If you like what you hear, please consider leaving us a five star review on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe to our new podcast, Rate/subscribe and leave us a rating and review in iTunes! Thank you for listening and reviewing the podcast! It really does take the podcast to the highest quality listening experience possible. Timestamps: 4:00 - What's the best way to get the most out of your time on the road? 5:30 - How do you feel about the podcast? 6:20 - What do you think about it? 7: What's your biggest takeaway from this episode? 8: What are you looking for? 9:15 - What would you'd like to see me to do next? 11: What kind of growth strategy? 12:00 -- what s your biggest challenge? 13:30 -- What are your biggest superpower? 14:40 -- What s your best piece of advice? 15:40 - How would you're looking for in the next chapter? 16:10 -- How do I would you like to hear from me? 17: What s the most important thing you're going to do in the future? 18:00 19:15 -- What is your biggest fantasy? 21:20 -- what do you need to be doing in 2020? 22: What is the biggest thing you re going to be the most impactful thing you can do in your life? 23:30
Transcript
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00:00:23.000seeing an emerging debate in the Republican presidential field where some, like Nikki Haley are on the side of spending cuts as a way to address the growing national debt problem.
00:00:36.000Others like Donald Trump are opposed to making any cuts to Social Security or Medicare.
00:00:41.000And that's part of a bigger battle on how to address the deficit, how to address national debt between Republicans and Democrats, where, you know, the classical conservative view is focusing on spending cuts.
00:00:53.000The classical liberal view amongst Democrats is to cover it via tax increases.
00:01:13.000And as you know, one of my core objectives here is to be a pro-growth candidate.
00:01:19.000To actually deliver not only American cultural self-confidence, It's a big part of what the heart of this campaign was all about, reviving a missing national identity as Americans.
00:01:29.000But that's also the foundation for an economic vision, an economic revival, unleashing the American economy, restoring GDP growth to a level that, frankly, we've enjoyed in most of our nation's history until most of our national history, until the early 1970s.
00:01:45.000We were growing at over four plus percent per year.
00:01:48.000That has since tapered off dramatically.
00:01:51.000There are deep-seated reasons why we're going to talk about some of those today.
00:01:55.000But the question is why it is that no one is actually addressing GDP growth.
00:02:01.000And it's not just because they're not thinking about it.
00:02:04.000That would be too easy to address, actually.
00:02:07.000It's because there's quietly a new philosophy in America that That says that actually we should not focus on growth.
00:02:16.000Not on economic grounds, but on philosophical grounds.
00:02:20.000That the anti-growth agenda is itself the morally sound one.
00:02:25.000That somehow we should learn to live less.
00:02:27.000Learn to live in a more harmonious lifestyle with the planet.
00:02:36.000I think that's actually what accounts for the disappearance of GDP growth from the economic policy debates that we otherwise were having even as recently as a couple decades ago where growth was an objective.
00:02:47.000I personally think that, you know what, if Kennedy said we're going to put a man on the moon and we accomplished that, I think it's a much more achievable goal to say we're going to restore 4 plus percent GDP growth in this country.
00:02:57.000I have a vision for how to do it, but today I'm actually joined by the author, one of the co-authors certainly, of a book that's caught my attention.
00:03:07.000His voice really speaks to some of these issues in a way that's truly unafraid.
00:03:24.000And we're going to have a deep conversation about not only the themes in your book, but what's behind the anti-growth agenda in this country.
00:03:37.000It was only a matter of months ago, late last year.
00:03:41.000Tell me what the thesis of the book is.
00:03:44.000And I've had a chance to page through it, but I haven't had a chance to hear it in your own voice yet.
00:03:49.000Give me your core motivation for what brought you to this project, what you hope to accomplish with it, what its core thesis is, and then we'll get right into how that relates to some of the areas I'm focused on, which is restoring a pro-growth agenda in this country.
00:04:02.000Well, I think that people have been wondering about the relationship between population and resources and population and a livable planet for a very long time, right?
00:04:15.000And for most of that time, people thought that if you have population increasing, you're going to run out of resources.
00:04:22.000You know, Malthus famously publishes his paper in 1798 claiming that population is increasing at a much faster rate than resources.
00:04:30.000Therefore, we are all going to starve to death.
00:04:32.000Same with Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford University biologist.
00:04:36.000He's still alive, still publishing, still appearing on 60 Minutes.
00:04:40.000This is sort of the climate scaremonger.
00:04:49.000And he published a book, The Population Bomb, in 1968. And obviously, none of those prognostications came true.
00:04:58.000But more recently, people are still concerned about the planet running out of resources.
00:05:03.000But people are also very concerned about the overall impact of humans on the planet.
00:05:10.000So I think that the book is really intended for all those people out there, especially potential parents who are freaking out about having children because they are somehow going to damage the planet and everything is going to end up in tears.
00:05:24.000And so when we were publishing this book, we suddenly started realizing over the last four or five years In mainstream media, or maybe you can say left-wing progressive media like the New York Times and the Washington Post, you have a constant stream of articles about how humans are bad for the planet, how bringing a child into the world is an act of selfishness, how humanity is a cancer upon the planet.
00:05:46.000And so, I think that what we are doing is scaring ourselves, and especially scaring the children, the young people, to death.
00:05:53.000They are depressed, they are anxious, they don't want to have babies, and basically the book shows That population growth is not only is it not bad for the planet, it is good for the planet.
00:06:07.000What we show by looking at data over the course of last 170 years is that every 1% increase in population has reduced prices of commodities by about 1% relative to wages.
00:06:21.000So we have this extraordinary situation.
00:06:33.000You see, what happens is that biologists and the doommongers, they sort of think about the human being, a newborn, as coming to the world only with an empty stomach.
00:06:44.000But a newborn comes into the world with an empty stomach but also a pair of hands and most importantly a brain capable of creating new ideas which then can be turned into inventions, innovations, productivity gains and higher standards of living.
00:07:01.000A perfect example of that would be two German chemists in the early 20th century who discovered synthetic fertilizer.
00:07:09.000Before then, humanity, in order to grow food, We would use animal dung or even human excrement in order to grow food.
00:07:53.000It's actually just ingenuity itself and that the more people you have, it's a probabilistic game that the more likely it is that you are to have a breakthrough innovation.
00:08:04.000Economists like to distinguish between Smithian growth and Schumpeterian growth.
00:08:09.000Smithian growth, named after Adam Smith, is all about division of labor, more trade, division of labor, that sort of thing.
00:08:18.000But Schumpeterian growth, named after Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian economist, is all about innovation.
00:08:24.000The reality is that over the last 200 years, the main driver of human prosperity, the fact that today the world is so much more prosperous than what it was even 200 years ago, is just new inventions and innovations, new ideas.
00:08:39.000So a typical example would be, you know, in a Smithian growth economy, you just add more workers with shovels in order to build a canal.
00:08:50.000In a Schumpeterian economy, you invent a giant digging machine, right?
00:08:56.000So instead of having to use thousands of workers, you just use a machine, giant excavator that uses fossil fuels.
00:09:05.000And so this is how you create prosperity, through technological innovation.
00:09:09.000And nobody knows how to come up with new technologies and new inventions.
00:09:19.000This is actually, this gets to the heart of what I think of as what I call small ball economics and big ball economics even within the Republican Party.
00:09:29.000It's just the thing I was talking about a moment ago where I think that there is this captivation with the Smithian view, as you put it.
00:09:38.000It's not just that it would be—I mean, in fairness to that view, and I'm much more moved by the Schumpeter vision, but to get the best alternative on the table, I think it's not just a matter of more shovels.
00:09:50.000It's a matter of, you know, they would argue, you know, different kinds of shovels in different places because you have different regions that may have different areas of expertise.
00:09:59.000You then sort yourself to your best expertise, then you open up trade— Then there's gains from trade to allow an efficient trading equilibrium.
00:10:07.000That's the fullest extension of the Adam Smith or the Smithian view.
00:10:11.000I think that's been the neoliberal consensus for the last 40 years of growth in the global economy, 50 years.
00:10:20.000That's how we actually achieve growth in the economic pie, but without enough of an emphasis on Human ingenuity and innovation as a game changer in its own right.
00:10:33.000And so you would say the Schumpeter view is that's actually the real driver of longer-run prosperity, not assuming how you optimize an existing fixed pie through gains from trade and human productive capacity.
00:10:57.000Maybe, I don't know, certain agricultural produce which doesn't have to be produced here because it can be imported from South America or whatever.
00:11:04.000Or maybe we don't have the weather for it.
00:11:08.000But that's not an end-all be-all, right?
00:11:11.000But the ultimate driver of growth, really, the high rates of growth that we've been accustomed to and certainly the high increase in GDP was new technology.
00:11:23.000And that is something that you are right that we have sort of stopped talking about, about how the administrative state, how the D.C. bureaucracy, how different mandates from the government, how taxation performs in order to undermine innovation in this country.
00:11:42.000So talk to me about what you think is behind this, not only loss of growth from the conversation, but the fact that we enjoyed, as I noted, 4 plus percent GDP growth in this country through about 1971. And it's been, it's tapered off and declined considerably.
00:12:38.000It's low digits, low single digits, so maybe 5%, right?
00:12:42.000And so in a population of 300 million people, which is what the population of the world was at the time of Christ or Caesar Augustus, that 5% will amount to many fewer people than a population of 8 billion people.
00:13:34.000I don't know whether governments are very good at stimulating the number of inventors or innovators.
00:13:41.000I know there was an OECD study done about 10 years ago looking at different governments around the world trying to stimulate invention and innovation, and that didn't prove to be successful.
00:13:55.000So we don't actually know where inventors or innovators come from.
00:13:58.000What we do know is that a lot of inventors or innovators are actually quite quirky individuals.
00:14:04.000They tend to be a little bit on the spectrum.
00:14:07.000They have very different personality traits than the mainstream of humanity.
00:14:13.000But what I think you want to do is to create an environment Where if the innovator does exist, he or she can succeed.
00:14:25.000One aspect of promoting innovation is, of course, having the maximum potential amount of freedom.
00:14:32.000In large chunks of the world, people are not free.
00:14:37.000They're not free to think, to publish, to communicate, to invest, to profit.
00:14:44.000If Steve Jobs' father didn't emigrate from Syria to the United States but remained in Syria, if Steve Jobs was born in Syria, he could never have accomplished what he accomplished in the United States.
00:14:56.000The guys behind Google, or for the matter, Elon Musk, had they remained in their home countries, they would probably not be able to build the kinds of enterprises which they have.
00:15:05.000So freedom is also a huge component of it.
00:15:08.000We know that because If you look at China, for example, China has been the most populous country in the world for 2,000 years, but it was dirt poor until about 40 years ago because they only had that one component, which is a huge population, but they didn't have freedom.
00:15:27.000It was only after they started liberalizing in the late 1970s that they started growing.
00:15:32.000But freedom is not just about you not having to live in a crappy country where you cannot do anything.
00:15:45.000Whether you're disincentivized because the paperwork can go on for months or years.
00:15:56.000The precautionary principle which has been embraced by the European Union and which a lot of people would like to import into the United States.
00:16:05.000The precautionary principle basically says That you cannot bring a good into the market unless you prove that it will not do any harm to anyone.
00:16:18.000So no innovation can be marketed until you can be absolutely 100% sure that it's not going to harm anyone.
00:16:27.000Well, you know, if those were the conditions for marketing innovation 100 years ago, we wouldn't have cars, we wouldn't have planes, we wouldn't have anything.
00:16:36.000So all of these things, I think, work in combination to suppress the natural innovativeness of the people who might otherwise be innovators and inventors.
00:16:48.000You know, that's a lot of the—it's very first personal to me.
00:16:51.000I mean, I think I've seen that firsthand.
00:16:52.000So the first major company I started was a biotech company, Roivant.
00:17:00.000But I will tell you from firsthand experience, I mean, the level of constraint applied by FDA to this industry— The biotech and pharmaceutical industry is absolutely the number one impediment to innovation in that industry.
00:17:19.000And you would sort of, you'd run the math beforehand.
00:17:22.000Okay, here's what the cost is to develop that drug.
00:17:35.000And the number of times you're required to do two or three phase three studies instead of just one or two.
00:17:42.000Might increase your increment in confidence by 1%, 2%, adding that second 2,000-patient study on top of a 2,000-patient study you already did, big diminishing returns and what you learned from that.
00:17:55.000And yet, that is the precautionary principle in action here in America.
00:17:59.000I think a big part of that is what holds the nuclear energy revolution back, too.
00:18:08.000One having to do with FDA. Here's a thing that an American government could do tomorrow, and that is to conclude an agreement with the European Union of mutual recognition of drugs or food items.
00:18:26.000Right now, if you are a European company, and Europe is not third world, if anything, their health and safety standards are higher than ours.
00:18:36.000So the thing is, if something is approved for consumption in the European Union, it should by default be approved for consumption in the United States.
00:19:02.000Some of these are nonsensical, burdensome goalposts that most companies actually end up marketing their drugs in the U.S. long before they go to Europe, just because Europe is not paying nearly as much for prescription medications as the U.S. is.
00:19:19.000So companies then focus on the U.S., And then in Europe, okay, if they've already met the U.S., you're actually seeing a little bit of, good for the Europeans, I guess, but free-riding in the other direction where all the cost is borne in the U.S. There's definitely free-riding on the part of the Europeans.
00:19:35.000But mutual recognition, if you go through the trouble of developing something in the EU, it doesn't have to be a drug.
00:20:13.000On the one hand, the government is creating reams of regulations which make it almost impossible to build a nuclear power plant in the United States.
00:20:24.000Oh, it is basically economically near impossible.
00:20:26.000And on the other hand, so the left hand is doing that, the right hand of the government.
00:20:31.000It's actually subsidizing and giving all sorts of subsidized loans to nuclear power stations in order to make up for the costs of overregulation.
00:20:42.000So this is a typical D.C. craziness that you encounter.
00:20:47.000But, of course, I'm a huge fan of nuclear fission and fusion, and I think that we should be building much more of that.
00:20:53.000And I think that part of the reason why we stopped growing in the 1970s, to go back to the original point that you were making, is that our energy costs are much higher than they would have to be if we truly had a free market in energy, if we allowed for different forms of energy to be built and supplied to the American people.
00:21:12.000In the short to medium run, I would say that the greatest thing that the American government could do in order to stimulate growth would be to get out of the energy situation and allow the market to take care of it, allow us to drill for natural gas, which produces much less CO2 into the atmosphere than burning of coal, more nuclear energy.
00:21:37.000We can do this if the government just gets out of the way.
00:21:41.000You know, I fully agree with you on that.
00:21:45.000I'll just go one step further on this.
00:21:47.000I agree with you that unshackling ourselves from the constraints on U.S. energy is probably the lowest hanging fruit, easiest way to unlock innovative power in America.
00:22:00.000I'm curious for your perspective, just to know what our respective priors are on this.
00:22:06.000I don't even think that reducing CO2 is a worthy public policy goal in and of itself.
00:22:15.000We can go into the details of the climate debate.
00:22:23.000Whether or not that's an existential threat for the planet or whether or not—actually, this is a theme that probably resonates, I think, with your argument.
00:22:32.000The best way to handle climate change is through human innovation that allows for not only adaptation, but as my friend Alex Epstein says, mastery of that change in climate.
00:22:44.000And so that goes back to the innovation argument that, ironically, your best way to deal with the supposed threats that you're addressing with an anti-innovation agenda, like the climate cult, and I do think it has a religiosity to it, It's actually through doing more of the very thing that they don't want you to do, which is use of energy to innovate.
00:23:07.000I think they're extremely well written, full of good ideas.
00:23:12.000First of all, even assuming that CO2 is a problem, and I'm perfectly willing to To acknowledge that because, you know, I'm not a climate scientist.
00:23:25.000I do not believe at the same time that we are facing some sort of a climate apocalypse.
00:23:30.000If you are looking, I mean, if this is an existential crisis, then you have to be able to measure it.
00:23:57.000So in fact, through this climate mastery, We are managing to survive better than ever before.
00:24:06.000And so that convinces me that we are not facing a climate apocalypse or rather existential crisis.
00:24:13.000Now, of course, The problem that we are facing is that the same people who are saying we need to get away as quickly as possible from energy sources which emit CO2 into the atmosphere are the same people who are saying that we cannot use the energy sources which would enable us to do that.
00:25:14.000G.K. Chesterton, I'm not a religious person myself, but I do believe what G.K. Chesterton said, is that when people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything.
00:26:02.000There is that God-shaped hole in human hearts, and it will be filled by something.
00:26:10.000People simply need to believe in something transcendental.
00:26:14.000It's very difficult for humans to cope with the idea of a directionless universe where things happen ad hoc, etc.
00:26:22.000I happen to believe that, but regardless, the point is that most people are looking for some transcendental meaning in their lives.
00:26:29.000And I think that the green religion, well, environmentalism has become a green religion.
00:26:36.000And it's very interesting how it maps onto the main features of Christianity.
00:26:41.000These people will be the first ones to say, I don't believe in Christianity.
00:26:46.000But when you think about the structure of the two religions, there is the Garden of Eden, which is, of course, a planet before industrialization.
00:26:58.000You have your devils, and that's the fossil fuel companies and fossil fuel CEOs.
00:27:03.000Look at how people talk about fossil fuel CEOs.
00:27:25.000And as I like to say, you even have indulgences.
00:27:28.000So before the Reformation, the Catholic Church, if you committed a crime, you could give some money to the Church and your crimes would be forgotten and they would be forgiven.
00:27:41.000And how else are we to interpret the behavior of people like John Kerry?
00:27:52.000And so how else are we to interpret the behavior of people like Al Gore or John Kerry or Leonardo DiCaprio and countless other Celebrities, Meghan and Harry, they fly around the world on private jets.
00:30:17.000I wonder whether the more successful approach will be to create a sort of religiosity, zealotry around a pro-growth agenda itself, right?
00:30:30.000I mean, there's two ways to play this game.
00:30:33.000One is make people aware of that vacuum.
00:30:36.000And then hope that the awareness, the power of reason, etc., to see that fact gives them liberation from the fact to say that either they're going to adopt a true religion grounded in truth, a true God, or they're going to recognize that, hey, I thought I was being a secularist, but I'm not even being secular.
00:30:54.000I'm just being a religious fanatic again without even recognizing it.
00:31:02.000The different approach would be to spawn, you know, a religion around the pro-growth agenda itself.
00:31:12.000And at least then we have tangible human prosperity rather than human demise, which is where I think the climate cult leads us.
00:31:20.000It's the goal of the climate cult, actually, to lead us to human demise.
00:31:22.000It's actually a form of self-flogging, a sort of wearing a hair shirt, apologizing for human existence.
00:31:28.000And even if you listen to the Saints, Greta Thunberg or whatever, this is directly what they're saying, right?
00:31:36.000It's actually about apologizing for the injustices of capitalism.
00:31:41.000Climate justice is actually more the emphasis on the justice than the climate, which involves mostly the West.
00:31:47.000Countries like the U.S. in particular apologizing for their success.
00:31:51.000Why not compete with that with actually a new belief system in the importance of economic growth, productivity, innovation, prosperity in itself, I wonder whether that might actually just be more effective than the approach that, you know, folks like I, maybe folks like you and I, if I may say, have been taking so far on this did.
00:32:15.000Do you follow, and what's your reaction to that?
00:32:17.000Well, first of all, I think that you've zeroed in on something very important, and that is the excessive use of the word justice in anything like climate justice.
00:32:25.000And I think the reason why they're doing it is because once you start using things like climate justice, whenever you put justice in it, You can stop thinking in terms of trade-offs.
00:32:42.000So that snail or whatever it is that you need to save...
00:32:48.000If that's justice, then the welfare of the human species and the future of humanity doesn't really matter because the goal is to preserve whatever it is that you are trying to do.
00:33:00.000Whereas what I'm talking about is the constant need for trade-offs.
00:33:07.000The more you regulate the energy industry, for example, the energy output, the more you micromanage it and you choose between winners and losers, The more of an impact you have on economic growth and therefore future prosperity of the American people.
00:33:21.000Now, with regard to what you are asking, I mean, it is not for me to suggest campaign points, but I do think that there must be a market for this kind of pro-growth optimistic vision of America.
00:33:41.000Certainly, whenever I leave D.C., And go, for example, to the West Coast and meet with people in the Silicon Valley or LA and San Francisco.
00:33:50.000There's a lot of sort of future techno-optimistic attitude that we are going to fix this country by simply innovating our way out of scarcity and out of problems.
00:34:01.000Because the difference between 2% economic growth rate And a 3% in economic growth.
00:34:25.000And we also know from American history That there were times when Americans were much more optimistic about the future.
00:34:34.000I mean, the 1950s and 1960s were all about, you know, creating new technologies, famously what Peter Cheel talks about, about flying cars, etc.
00:34:46.000People used to be much more optimistic.
00:34:48.000And maybe it was after the 1970s energy crisis that people became much more pessimistic.
00:34:56.000And then more recently, I think what happened was that both political parties started embracing victimhood.
00:35:03.000I mean, you have your own book, The Nation of Victims, right?
00:35:17.000And so now for the first time in a very long time, we don't really have a political party or a candidate who is putting across the positive vision, is that if we just do certain things differently, we can actually be much more prosperous in the future.
00:35:37.000And I would like to see that kind of candidate emerge and embrace that sort of Yeah, much of what you say describes my candidacy.
00:35:54.000I don't like to use the word techno-optimism because the mistake that some of those folks in Silicon Valley make, in my opinion, is that they use this as a cop-out from addressing fundamental moral issues that don't have a technical is that they use this as a cop-out from addressing fundamental moral issues
00:36:15.000And I think those deserve to be addressed by free speech, an open debate, and an exchange of ideas, kind of what you could, in a reduced sense, call the culture war issues or whatever.
00:36:29.000And so I don't think we're going to resolve the question of how to address historical racial injustice in the United States whatsoever.
00:36:41.000well, we can debate that, but maybe abortion or something like this, by a techno-optimistic view of the future.
00:36:52.000And that's okay, because not every question needs to be settled through this.
00:36:55.000And this is, I guess, gets to the heart of my criticism of that Silicon Valley crowd that you're talking about.
00:37:00.000Some of them are, I think, afraid of wading into the waters of moral and normative debate and sort of sublimate that into technology will solve everything AI will help us.
00:37:35.000I mean, one problem with, of course, the cultural issues is that if we forego freedom of speech, if we forego certain areas of research that we cannot go into because God knows what monsters are hiding there.
00:37:53.000Then we may also forego on a lot of different life-saving technologies.
00:37:59.000A perfect example of that would be drugs.
00:38:04.000Should we know about genetic differences between people on a molecular level or genetic level?
00:38:09.000Well, yes, if it means that our drugs, for example, can be tailored to different people depending on the need.
00:38:19.000But once you say that we cannot research in that particular area because it is politically incorrect, then there is a lot of human suffering down the line of people who are not going to be given life-saving medicines and things like that.
00:38:35.000Where we might be prevented from going from a purely research standpoint because they become politically radioactive.
00:38:44.000So, research, freedom of speech, freedom of research, freedom of publishing, this is all incredibly important and I fear that we are using it because of these red guards on American campuses.
00:38:59.000So in the interest of maybe not just violently agreeing with one another, I'm going to maybe just press on a couple places on your thesis.
00:39:05.000I wouldn't say these are areas of disagreement, but areas of curiosity, just put pressure on it a little bit.
00:39:11.000One relates to the US, one relates to China.
00:39:15.000Let's start with the China example, and then we'll come to the US question I had for you.
00:39:20.000So in China, I like your thesis about freedom.
00:40:05.000Well, there's a lot of copying going on, that's for sure.
00:40:07.000So China was a deeply totalitarian society before 1978. After that, there was a process of liberalization, meant in the best possible way, until about 2012. The country was still a dictatorship, authoritarian dictatorship, but it was becoming more free.
00:40:24.000It used freedom as a tool to achieve economically.
00:40:26.000They used freedom as a tool to catch up with America and the West.
00:40:31.000And then after Xi takes over, we are now once again seeing a switch from authoritarianism back to totalitarianism.
00:40:49.000Because the Chinese were able to generate a lot of economic growth between 1978 and, say, 2012. By simply copying the things that we have done well in the West.
00:41:02.000And even today, the West continues to provide a disproportionate amount of innovation around the world, precisely because innovation and freedom, freedom to think, freedom to speak, are deeply connected.
00:41:16.000So China was approaching a point where You can achieve only that much with copying, right?
00:41:26.000Be it borrowing or buying or even stealing intellectual property of others.
00:41:31.000But then the question was, was China going to become a member of that small club of countries that actually does original innovation or not?
00:41:39.000And my hypothesis is that China cannot become a member of that small group of countries which produce innovation because freedom has been on a downward trajectory over the last decade or so.
00:41:53.000So it would be much more difficult for China to...
00:41:57.000I agree with you to share our premise.
00:41:59.000I'm just saying if somebody's looking at this for the outside in who doesn't necessarily share our premise here, would they look at the results?
00:42:06.000And say that the results are consistent with that?
00:42:08.000Or would they say, no, no, no, there actually is enough original non-copycat innovation here that it puts pressure on the thesis that freedom actually matters for innovation?
00:42:18.000I would say that China cannot overtake the United States, cannot continue to grow at its current pace if it doesn't become freer.
00:42:33.000In other words, they've reached a limit.
00:42:36.000And in fact, Xi made a deliberate decision, which has been known throughout history, including the history of China, was that he was presiding over a country where economic dynamism, which was introduced in the 1970s, was beginning to create alternative which was introduced in the 1970s, was beginning to create alternative centers of
00:42:56.000Wealth was beginning to disseminate into the pockets of billionaires, corporations, party chiefs in different provinces, etc.
00:43:06.000That's very dangerous for an authoritarian slash totalitarian society.
00:43:11.000And what tends to happen in instances like that is that either the totalitarian folds and innovation bursts out or the totalitarian, in order to maintain his position, his lock on power, destroys economic innovativeness.
00:43:29.000This is what happened in China with the collapse of the Song Dynasty in the 12th century and its replacement by first the Mongols and then the Ming Dynasty.
00:43:38.000They basically decided not to innovate anymore.
00:43:46.000They produced Paper currency, whether you like it or not, they produce gunpowder, a compass, and many other innovations, I think printing press.
00:43:56.000But then the Ming come in, and they basically say, we don't want to innovate anymore because it's internally destabilizing, right?
00:44:03.000And so this is exactly what China did under Xi, or rather what Xi did with China.
00:44:08.000He basically decided instead of innovating, instead of decentralization and instead of all this dynamism that we had, I'm going to reconstitute the Communist Party.
00:44:23.000I'm going to put it back firmly in charge of the country.
00:44:28.000But that will come at the cost of dynamism.
00:44:32.000There is just one thing that I want to say about China and the United States.
00:44:35.000I know that right now the relationship between China and the United States is very bad.
00:44:40.000And, you know, there are many good reasons for that.
00:44:44.000But what I would encourage Americans to think about is that whatever China is doing, we have a lot of power on our side to make it easier for America to grow.
00:44:55.000We cannot help the fact that China is poaching a lot of intellectual property from the United States.
00:45:01.000Don't engage in victimhood culture vis-a-vis China.
00:45:04.000What worries me so much, especially in the last 10 years or so, is that we constantly say, well, we need to punish China for X, Y, and Z. And God knows China is doing a lot of bad things.
00:45:22.000I think another question that we should be asking ourselves is, what is it that we are doing to ourselves in order to keep us from innovating, from growing?
00:45:31.000Can we have a different regulatory environment where anybody can succeed?
00:45:38.000And that way we don't have to worry about how much China is stealing because we are growing like crazy.
00:46:06.000What if we had an immigration system that actually was smart enough to bring in the best people from around the world to create value here rather than elsewhere?
00:46:17.000All of those things could be combined.
00:46:33.000Rather, what you should be saying to the American people, you are victims of a horrible, vile, wicked force in the world, and it's called Washington, D.C. I'm just making a note here.
00:46:51.000What are the obstacles and impediments to growth in the United States itself?
00:47:11.000The rise of a victimhood mentality itself makes for a less productive population.
00:47:16.000I think anti-meritocratic hiring practices are on the list.
00:47:20.000I don't think affirmative action is particularly conducive to allowing the best people To actually innovate, if you tell people it has to be based on quotas of race, sex, or sexual orientation that they're hiring, engineers or scientists or innovators, you're probably going to get less ingenuity and scientific innovation on the back of it.
00:49:24.000Equity means proportional representation of different groups, be they sexual orientation, be they gender, be they race, be they age, nationality, whatever, in the positions of socioeconomic influence.
00:49:48.000And my argument is That the beauty of the Enlightenment, what the Enlightenment gives the world is the notion that your birth doesn't matter.
00:49:58.000It's what's in your mind that matters.
00:50:01.000The great advance of the Enlightenment was to say that the nobility in Europe in the 18th century, who were entitled to all sorts of perks and all sorts of jobs, Should be deprived of those perks and those jobs because they didn't earn it through their intellect or through their hard work.
00:50:22.000They were there by the accident of their birth.
00:50:24.000And so what enlightenment insists on is merit, is meritocracy.
00:50:38.000We are more educated, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
00:50:41.000And I think that meritocracy played a huge part in it.
00:50:44.000And when we get away from it, when we start appointing people into positions of power because of irrelevant characteristics, this must by necessity reduce our growth and destroy us.
00:50:56.000Not to mention that it's of course a zero-sum game.
00:51:00.000So this gets to a pretty interesting place.
00:51:03.000So I agree with everything you just said.
00:51:06.000I don't know how much you've been following what I've been saying in the last six to 24 months, but maps onto identifying exactly these two obstacles.
00:51:23.000I think that that presents some interesting challenges for your thesis, for your policy prescription on population growth, actually, versus the question I asked in the beginning, which was, let's just decide early on.
00:51:37.000Is it about creating the conditions for an existing population to be more innovative, productive, successful, prosperous as a consequence of that innovation?
00:51:48.000Or should it be playing the passive probabilistic game of just assuming more is better?
00:51:54.000And against the backdrop of these cultural obstacles, degrowth and equity, it's like I feel like we get more juice out of the existing squeeze if we tackle those things head on, versus focusing on just more people holding versus focusing on just more people holding those conditions constant.
00:52:16.000Of course, you would say don't hold those conditions constant, but...
00:52:19.000What I worry about is to the extent we're not making much progress on addressing those conditions, actually populating into those conditions, you know, through immigration or whatever, we could decide what the mechanism is.
00:52:35.000May risk making that problem worse because you're actually ossifying the very conditions of degrowth and equity in the first place, just perpetuating the very thing that you...
00:52:53.000I think that, you know, production, reproduction rates rising and, you know, catching up to, you know, exceeding death rates by a wider margin is a good thing, all else equal for the planet.
00:53:04.000But I just wonder whether as a matter of prioritization, tackling these cultural obstacles To innovation and growth is just we live in a moment where that's more important than wishing population growth into existence for a probabilistic game,
00:53:24.000believing that a small number, the 1% of that population bell curve that ends up innovating is shouldering a much greater burden against the backdrop of a rest of population who actually has embraced degrowth and equity as their agenda.
00:54:06.000It's a defense against people who are saying that humans are a cancer on the planet and the best thing that could happen for the planet is for all of humanity to die out.
00:54:17.000Under no circumstances would I want to be misunderstood as saying that we should force people to have more children.
00:54:26.000There are huge chunks of young people around the world, including the United States, who are saying to us in public opinion polls, We cannot bring children into the world because it's going to end.
00:54:38.000And this is nutty, and this is counterproductive.
00:54:40.000So you and I agree on that, and I don't misunderstand you to be saying that at all.
00:54:44.000I think you've been very clear about it.
00:54:45.000But I'm asking a different question about prioritization.
00:54:47.000I think that they are part of the same thing, which is zeitgeist.
00:54:52.000Within it, you have both the anti-population, humans are a cancer type of people, whilst at the same time you have...
00:55:01.000The same kinds of people tend to also be people who favor equity, who are against meritocracy, who are against capitalism.
00:55:10.000It's a part and parcel of the same mindset, right?
00:55:14.000So, trust me, once you start attacking people or criticizing people on equity, you will hear from the environmentalists and whoever else because it's the same group of people, essentially.
00:55:51.000But the difference between being a little bit of the techno-futurist and talks about, let's reproduce, let's repopulate the stuff that Elon Musk will say a lot of the stuff on a given day, because it conveniently elides the more controversial questions of whether we need to get rid of affirmative action in America, right?
00:56:18.000Versus leading first with that degrowth and equity agenda and dismantle that.
00:56:26.000I mean, the top two things I said on day one when I rolled out this campaign about four weeks ago, five weeks or whatever it was.
00:56:40.000We can do that with the stroke of a pen, race-based affirmative action, which is fundamentally anti-meritocratic, and something that's anti-meritocratic is anti-innovative.
00:56:49.000And abandon the demands of the climate cult in the United States, which is a great obstacle to the energy industry, which in turn is a great obstacle to growth itself in our country.
00:56:59.000Those are culturally fraught things to say.
00:57:03.000Those are things that even most other, forget Democratic candidates, Republican candidates are willing to say.
00:57:09.000I don't think there's been a U.S. presidential candidate, even on the Republican side in modern history, that has said those things out loud.
00:57:16.000Now, you know, I think as we expand, one of the things I've been doing is expanding the Overton window and running a truck through it.
00:57:23.000And so maybe others will jump on that train later this year.
00:57:29.000But it seems to me that hitting that head on is almost more important right now than in an abstract sense talking about Birth rates and death rates right now.
00:57:48.000I think they're part of the same thing.
00:57:50.000I think they're part of the same, but it's emphasis.
00:58:03.000If you want more growth, you have to have best people in charge of companies, in charge of government agencies, Because only the most talented people are going to get you there, right?
00:58:34.000Then by embracing growth, you're of course immediately, explicitly denying the degrowth agenda.
00:58:42.000And you are saying that we are going to grow our way out of these environmental concerns that people have.
00:58:51.000We are going to use a lot more gas, which is going to lower CO2, and we are going to go full on building more fission reactors and hopefully one day fusion reactors on the planet in the United States.
00:59:06.000So that tackles, by unleashing the energy potential of the United States, you are taking care of the degrowth agenda.
00:59:17.000And of course, once you embrace the pro-growth agenda and you're saying that the future is going to be bright, then you are also addressing the problem of low population rates.
00:59:27.000Right now, native-born American women have 1.7 children per woman.
00:59:40.000It's quite possible that one of the reasons why our growth begins to taper off in the 70s and why population rates...
00:59:53.000I'm beginning to slow down after the Great Recession is because people see a dark, more scarce future ahead of them.
01:00:02.000But by embracing growth, by embracing merit, you are essentially creating a positive vision of the future where children born into the world Can be better off, so parents can start having more children.
01:00:21.000I gotta admit, this is quite persuasive, actually.
01:00:27.000Because it is an affirmative vision into which the, you know, equity and degrowth are obstacles, but it's actually kind of a new dream, focused, is what we say is the premise of the campaign, new dream, new American dream, focused on Growth itself, prosperity itself as an objective, and the anti-merit agenda, the climate cult, these are all obstacles to that, but actually there's more to it than just taking down the obstacles.
01:01:40.000What he suggests, and having spoken to Israelis, I think it's possible, is that they have a fundamentally optimistic vision of the future for their country because they've been growing like crazy for the last 20 years or so.
01:01:57.000What's the GDP growth rates over there?
01:02:01.000I don't remember right now, but it's much higher than what it was in the 1970s and 1980s when Israel was fundamentally a socialist country.
01:02:08.000But actually, it was Netanyahu who started liberalizing the country as a finance minister in the 1990s and then maintained that deliberization or rather deregulation type of governance.
01:02:27.000If we can return that optimism to America, then it's perfectly possible that people are going to have more children, willingly, without any government need to spend more money or regulate or persuade anyone.
01:02:39.000And one of the topics you'll hear, I did not want to end this without covering this topic as well as, it's a bit of an offshoot, but it's, I think, important in our discussion about your thesis is that The kind of innovation sort of matters, too.
01:02:59.000So you could say that GDP growth has tapered off.
01:03:01.000We face a lot of cultural travails now.
01:03:03.000But some people will say, no, no, no, we've had the Silicon Valley boom.
01:03:06.000We had the Internet age, for God's sake, in the post-1970 period.
01:03:13.000Some of the greatest innovation known to mankind, especially in tech, is of a kind that we hadn't seen in the pre-digital, pre-internet era.
01:03:25.000We're now in the third wave internet, right?
01:03:29.000Web 1.0, Web 2.0, now we're moving to Web 3.0.
01:03:34.000And yet, we're still having the conversation that we're having about the absence of innovation driving prosperity.
01:03:41.000Maybe We're not talking enough, the argument would go, about the right kind of innovation and that creating a social media app.
01:03:51.000Think about multi-trillion dollar companies like Facebook.
01:03:54.000I mean, the entire social media industry is based on picking at certain insecurities.
01:04:03.000What will you click on faster As a consequence of what I present you, and then what does that let me know about your inner soul and your preferences than you know about your own so that I can advertise to you to buy things more effectively?
01:04:21.000I think persuasively, I think a lot of people would say, I think I'm even very open to saying that That's not the kind of innovation that necessarily has and drags us forward in terms of human prosperity, but that is what the market will deliver if it's against the backdrop of Human psychological insecurities that lend to that being the most profitable incremental business opportunity to pursue, which is what led to the birth of the modern social media industries.
01:04:50.000Tell me if you're following what I'm saying, and what's your response to that?
01:04:55.000I would say that Silicon Valley was born and succeeded within the regulatory and taxation environment which has been created by the federal government and by states' governments.
01:05:08.000It was a regulatory environment which basically allowed them to do whatever they pleased and they flourished as a result.
01:05:15.000I am fundamentally opposed to government choosing winners or losers in the market system.
01:05:24.000What I want is for us to have a fundamentally deregulatory and tax simplification agenda, which will basically extend the same kind of most favored treatment that the Silicon Valley enjoyed to all the other different industries of which which will basically extend the same kind of most favored treatment that the Silicon Valley enjoyed to all Remember when Barack Obama ran on creating 8 million jobs in the green industry?
01:05:50.000Well, I'd be surprised if he created 8 jobs, let alone 8 million jobs, right?
01:05:55.000His presidency was saved by fracking and the massive decline in the prices of gas and prices of energy because of fracking and fossil fuels.
01:06:07.000But the point is that he could not have known Where innovation was going to come from.
01:06:14.000He thought it would come from green energy.
01:06:18.000And the same goes for any presidential candidate or for that matter any politician.
01:06:23.000You simply don't know where the innovation is going to come from, which industry is going to flourish.
01:06:31.000And therefore, I think the goal of American decision makers should be to make the whole business environment in the country as easy to navigate as possible and then let a thousand different flowers bloom.
01:06:50.000But I think grounded in first principles, which I respect, I just wonder whether...
01:06:57.000And we're not going to resolve this today, but I think it's something I struggle with, think about deeply, is even if we get that policy prescription right, low regulation, debt, taxation, get the state out of it.
01:07:13.000I think that there is this reality of a third variable of culture.
01:07:20.000Like if you have the people regulated by the state, the state, I think there's this creation.
01:07:24.000People come together to create a government.
01:07:25.000People also come together to create a culture.
01:07:28.000And I think that so long as we have that apologist streak in our culture, call it woke, call it what you want, That apologist streak is, I think, independently an impediment to prosperity, flourishing, excellence, and growth.
01:07:48.000It's partially mediated through government, yes.
01:07:50.000But even in, we live, I think, in a moment today where government is not the only threat and impediment.
01:07:59.000And I think part of what I worry about is not only is there an independent impediment in the culture, but that culture creates certain psychic insecurities that even allow a free market capitalist economy to To almost create the kinds of innovation that innovate against the backdrop of a culturally insecure populace that lends themselves to produce more Snapchats and Facebooks rather than
01:08:36.000But I think that we would be not completely honest if we said that was the only impediment, because it's just more profitable to create an app in the near term that exploits the insecurities of a teen girl who grew up in a culture that didn't instill in her the psychic fortitude that she needed.
01:08:55.000And I think this goes back to Adam Smith.
01:08:57.000I mean, Adam Smith, I think, said, I don't know if it's so many words, but, you know, the cultivation of virtue is a precondition for capitalism to achieve its optimal results, right?
01:09:06.000Because if virtue is the delta between what we want and what we need, and those are the backdrop demand conditions, then...
01:09:15.000The profitable opportunity will be to still give people what they want rather than what they need.
01:09:19.000And I think we can't wish ourselves into a first principles reality when there's this third variable of culture that is an equally an impediment to.
01:09:30.000I mean, I think that capitalism is a moral system because in order to succeed in capitalism, you have to provide your fellow human beings with something they want.
01:09:41.000But it's not a sufficiently, it's not a sufficient morality.
01:09:44.000Because if somebody wants child pornography, for example, you should be able to say, well, I'm not going to provide it to you.
01:09:52.000In other words, capitalism has a moral component in it, but it also needs to be buttressed by other ethics, such as there may be a market for child pornography.
01:10:14.000I just think that the mental anguish, the anxiety, the cultural weltschmerz that we are going through right now, Is an outcome of ideas, of bad ideas that have been poisoning the public discourse for very many decades.
01:10:38.000Identity politics that you have identified poisons that aspect, the meritocracy.
01:10:43.000Then you have the degrowth theory, poisoning pro-growth agenda.
01:10:47.000Then you have the apocalyptic vision of the world, which is poisoning America's willingness to have children to the future.
01:10:54.000So all of them are connected to a set of bad ideas, which can only be combated with other bad ideas.
01:11:00.000And that is what we are trying to do, both you and me.
01:11:05.000And I think that, as I think about the framing of what I'm trying to accomplish here, presidential race, whatever, that's just a means to an end, to a national cultural revival.
01:11:19.000I think I will be both the pro-growth candidate, but not at the expense of also taking on the cultivation of this word that we've sort of lost in our culture.
01:11:33.000We've lost growth in our lexicon, but we've also lost this concept of virtue.
01:11:37.000And I think the cultivation of virtue in a way that takes on the cancerous ideologies, what you call the bad, what charitably call the bad ideas, I think is equally important as a frontier to push in a way that makes me a little bit different than just the techno-futurist I think is equally important as a frontier to push in a way that makes me a little bit different
01:12:01.000Taking on an important optimistic outlook that I share that we'll bring to the table in this pro-growth, pro-innovation agenda, but it has to be against the backdrop of cultivating virtue as an alternative to the cultural poison that fills the wake of the vacuum of virtue that we've since created.
01:12:28.000And free market capitalism, they both require an ethical, well-informed, well-educated population, and we are losing that.
01:12:38.000I think that's something that both, to wrap our conversation from where we began, that Adam Smith and Joseph Schumpeter would both agree on.
01:12:54.000It may have been his greater contribution of the two, but they go together.
01:12:58.000Wealth of Nations could not have existed without the backdrop of his ethical foundation against which that Wealth of Nations was built, and maybe we channel a bit of the two of them into the conversation we're having today.