Valuetainment - 10 Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know

00:00:00.000 My guest today is Dr. Marianne Toupi, who wrote this book that has to do with the 10

00:00:04.000 global trends, which we'll cover today.

00:00:06.180 To describe him in a proper way, he is the editor of humanprogress.org, a senior fellow

00:00:34.980 at Cato Institute, Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, and the co-author of the Simon

00:00:39.480 Project.

00:00:39.900 He specializes in globalization and global well-being in politics and economics of Europe

00:00:45.860 and South Africa.

00:00:47.100 He has worked on the Council on Foreign Relations Commissions on Angola and advised the Central

00:00:52.680 Intelligence Agency, CIA, and the U.S. Department of State of Central Europe.

00:00:57.540 Thank you so much for being a guest on Vietaim.

00:00:59.320 Thank you for having me.

00:01:00.320 Yes, and you happen to be from Czech, right?

00:01:02.920 Czechoslovakia, yes.

00:01:03.700 Czechoslovakia.

00:01:04.140 So my best friend when I was in Germany at a refugee camp, his name was Jan Stav.

00:01:10.400 Jan Stav, his sister's name was Katarina Stav, and they were from Czech.

00:01:14.740 We were best of friends.

00:01:16.060 Two years, we were inseparable.

00:01:17.920 I have great experience with folks from Czech.

00:01:19.660 Good.

00:01:19.880 I hope I don't disappoint you.

00:01:21.440 No, no.

00:01:21.780 I'm looking forward to this.

00:01:23.080 First of all, I read all the articles.

00:01:24.660 I've seen you.

00:01:25.220 You've been interviewed by everybody pretty much at this point.

00:01:27.760 You've been on Ruben, I think.

00:01:29.360 You've been on Jordan Peterson.

00:01:30.580 You've been everywhere.

00:01:31.080 Obviously, you've been on TV as well, but I'm talking more to podcasters.

00:01:34.680 And some of these 10 trends, folks, I'll read this over to you, and then we'll go through them by learning a little bit more about your background.

00:01:40.800 So 10 trends.

00:01:43.580 Trend number one, the great enrichment, okay?

00:01:47.220 Number two, the end of poverty.

00:01:50.480 Trend number three, are we running out of resources?

00:01:53.520 Number four, peak population.

00:01:55.920 Number five, end of famine.

00:01:57.700 Six, more land for nature.

00:02:00.400 Seven, planet city.

00:02:02.080 Eight, democracy on the march.

00:02:04.340 Nine, the long peace.

00:02:06.280 Ten, a safer world.

00:02:07.540 So before we cover these 10 trends, would you mind taking a moment and giving us your background on how you came about doing what you're doing today?

00:02:16.100 Well, about 10 years ago, I read a book by a British author, Matt Ridley, called The Rational Optimist.

00:02:22.440 And the book was just filled with very interesting statistics I didn't know about.

00:02:25.780 And I thought to myself, well, you know, why don't we put all of these very interesting statistics online on the Internet?

00:02:34.660 And that's how human progress was born.

00:02:36.660 And then, of course, once we started looking into it, we realized that there is a wealth of evidence, wealth of statistical evidence,

00:02:41.900 showing that the world is actually becoming much better along many different dimensions of human well-being.

00:02:48.420 And this is not well-known at all.

00:02:50.340 In fact, a few years ago, Americans were polled on whether they think that the world is getting better or worse.

00:02:58.280 And 66% of Americans thought that the world was getting worse.

00:03:01.600 Only 6% of Americans thought that the world was getting better.

00:03:05.020 In reality, most things that we will discuss today are, in fact, improving.

00:03:09.700 And I'm not the only one doing that.

00:03:11.860 A number of people have come to similar conclusions, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker.

00:03:18.700 Then, of course, Hans Rosling, famous from the TED Talks.

00:03:23.240 There's a wonderful website called Our World in Data with Max Rosa from Oxford University.

00:03:29.080 So people who don't want to dwell in doom and catastrophism, but who are actually interested

00:03:36.440 about the real state of the world, can just go online and find out about the real state

00:03:42.640 of the world for themselves.

00:03:43.900 So you're a major, BA in International Relations and Classics from the University of Virginia

00:03:49.080 Jones.

00:03:49.700 Okay.

00:03:50.100 So if I was in high, and then you got a PhD also in international, so this is what you've

00:03:55.800 studied from University of St. Andrews in Great Britain.

00:03:58.560 Fantastic.

00:03:59.040 So I was always interested in economic history and human progress.

00:04:03.940 Why?

00:04:04.800 Well, because I always thought, well, I grew up under communism, where things weren't all

00:04:09.560 that rosy.

00:04:10.960 You know, and then I came to the West, and I realized that things could be much better.

00:04:17.020 And so I started being interested in things like, well, why are some countries poor?

00:04:20.820 Why are some countries rich?

00:04:21.980 Yep.

00:04:22.260 And then, of course, once you come to the West, you realize that a lot of people are very

00:04:26.460 conflicted about, or rather are disappointed by their standards of living.

00:04:30.200 They think that somehow, you know, it is not good enough, and they complain a lot.

00:04:34.560 And then, so I thought to myself, well, we cannot compare them to Eastern Europe.

00:04:37.480 We cannot compare them to Africa or so on. 0.75

00:04:40.440 Why don't we compare Western standards of living today with Western standards of living

00:04:44.080 100 or 200 years ago?

00:04:45.420 And that's what I mean by economic history, comparing living standards today with those

00:04:49.220 that preceded centuries or thousands of years.

00:04:51.800 And then you realize just how incredibly lucky we are, and how incredibly recent progress,

00:04:57.720 economic progress, and social progress is.

00:05:00.540 So, would you, by the way, I already, just from the first two minutes, I got a bunch of

00:05:04.380 questions for you.

00:05:04.980 But would you say, in communism, people who live in, my family, my mother said they're all

00:05:11.840 communists.

00:05:12.320 Majority of them are communists.

00:05:13.400 Their Bible was a Karl Marx, communist manifestos.

00:05:15.660 If they grew up in Russia, Baku, they thought Stalin, Lenin, good people, great leaders, strong

00:05:20.760 leaders, right, do you think a citizen in a communistic regime doesn't even know what

00:05:26.080 it means to complain?

00:05:26.980 Because who the hell is going to listen to you?

00:05:28.440 Like, you know, you can't create a Yelp in a communistic regime because you can write

00:05:31.400 all the reviews you want. 0.99

00:05:32.840 No one gives a shit. 0.99

00:05:33.640 So, in a communistic society, they don't know how to complain. 0.99

00:05:37.440 But in a capitalistic society, where there's so many opportunities, it's almost like the

00:05:41.420 kids are spoiled.

00:05:42.780 They know how to complain because everything's been handed to them.

00:05:45.380 Easy life produces more complainers.

00:05:47.640 Tough life doesn't produce complainers.

00:05:49.360 What would you say about that?

00:05:50.160 I think it's a question of freedom of speech and freedom of association and free media.

00:05:55.300 So, take the extant communist regime today, like North Korea.

00:06:02.420 A lot of people genuinely don't know that they live in a slave state that is, you know, 100 0.86

00:06:07.300 years behind the West.

00:06:09.740 They don't have access to good information, especially in the rural areas.

00:06:13.880 In the urban areas, people may get access to clandestinely imported flash drives that tell

00:06:22.340 them about the reality outside.

00:06:24.060 But, you know, especially in the world before the internet and cell phones and so on, it

00:06:28.240 was very difficult, especially in the poor rural areas of communist world, to know that

00:06:32.980 there were countries which were doing much better.

00:06:34.620 So, if the government propaganda apparatus tells you all the time you are living the life

00:06:41.860 of dreams, then some people might actually believe it.

00:06:45.140 But once in Eastern Europe, once true information started filtering through, through VCRs and through

00:06:53.920 Western broadcasts and so on, people started seeing what life is real like in the West compared

00:06:58.440 to what it was in the East.

00:06:59.380 People started complaining very quickly.

00:07:01.580 And communism lost all of its legitimacy and therefore it collapsed.

00:07:05.960 Why is it making another rise?

00:07:07.920 You know, last week I interviewed, we had an event at the vault, called the vault in Miami,

00:07:15.080 and we had about a thousand people there.

00:07:16.400 We had Dustin Poitier there.

00:07:17.680 We had different speakers at Billy Beane there.

00:07:19.120 One of the speakers I brought out was Gary Kasparov.

00:07:21.600 And you know who Gary Kasparov is the famous, the legendary, the greatest of all time, grand

00:07:26.900 master chess player who 255 months ago, he was number one, never lost.

00:07:31.900 He kept number one for that period.

00:07:33.280 Until he lost to a machine.

00:07:34.180 He lost to a machine.

00:07:35.020 IBM, which is called the blue what?

00:07:37.060 What's the machine called?

00:07:38.360 Blue something, right?

00:07:39.460 Blue, anyways, there's something blue, the machine he lost to.

00:07:42.700 And then there's some controversy with the machine, by the way, that there was people behind

00:07:46.700 the machine that were playing games.

00:07:47.980 Anyways, but when him and I were talking, he says, Patrick, just know, if you ask me

00:07:54.800 any question, I will answer.

00:07:57.100 So you have to be ready.

00:07:58.200 Do not ask a question that you don't want me to answer.

00:08:00.520 That's my kind of a guy, because I'm going to interview someone like that.

00:08:03.260 So he said, tell me about communism.

00:08:04.760 And Deep Blue, yeah, Deep Blue.

00:08:06.920 I said, tell me about communism.

00:08:08.020 He says, well, when I lived in Russia, everything was telling us how great of a country.

00:08:11.600 Russia is the greatest country in the world, and U.S. is the enemy, and all this other 0.83

00:08:14.860 stuff.

00:08:15.040 But the moment I became a good chess player at 13, I started traveling, and he says,

00:08:19.020 finally, I saw capitalism.

00:08:20.960 When I saw what capitalism produces, I could not believe it.

00:08:24.500 Yes.

00:08:24.820 The fact that we are living in it.

00:08:26.300 And he says, I wanted more of capitalism, not of communism.

00:08:29.480 Same here.

00:08:30.180 Same here.

00:08:31.020 My first visit to the Western country was in 1989, Christmas, going to Vienna.

00:08:36.020 And it was like stepping out of a black and white movie into a color movie.

00:08:39.520 It was, the difference was that big.

00:08:43.120 89.

00:08:43.940 1989.

00:08:44.580 Communism collapsed in November 1989, and we got to go to the West for the first time as

00:08:48.740 a family over Christmas.

00:08:51.380 You know how I know that?

00:08:52.240 You know why I know those dates make sense?

00:08:54.160 Because in 1989, July 15th, is when we went to Germany at a refugee camp, and my friend

00:08:59.600 Jan Stav showed up, end of 89.

00:09:02.040 There you go.

00:09:02.380 Because they were escaping communism, and we're together.

00:09:04.520 It was Albania, it was Czech, it was Poland, it was Yugoslavia, the old Yugoslavia. 0.92

00:09:09.720 You know, a lot of that stuff has changed.

00:09:11.900 By the way, what year is your birthday?

00:09:13.320 I know you're 9, 17, but you're-

00:09:15.240 76.

00:09:15.900 76.

00:09:16.480 So we're two years apart.

00:09:17.020 I was 13 when communism came out.

00:09:18.780 So you remember.

00:09:19.720 So to you, the way of living is communism.

00:09:22.880 That's what you saw.

00:09:24.000 Yes.

00:09:24.360 It was the normal.

00:09:25.300 Yes.

00:09:25.440 It was a normal thing.

00:09:26.160 And what did the media propaganda at that time under the communist regime,

00:09:31.300 what was it telling the populace, and what was school, like when you were going to school

00:09:36.940 at 13, you're going to remember what class was like.

00:09:38.860 That's what?

00:09:39.540 That's 9th grade or 8th grade?

00:09:40.980 13 is 8th grade, right?

00:09:42.160 Give or take.

00:09:42.640 7th or 8th grade.

00:09:43.860 So what was school teaching you about Czech and U.S., and what was media telling you about

00:09:48.700 Czech and U.S.?

00:09:49.380 Well, the upbringing was very similar to what Gary Kasparov has had, which is to say that

00:09:53.620 the media was blaring at you all the time about, you know, how everything wonderful was.

00:09:58.920 You know, we were constantly meeting these production targets, you know, and everything was rosy.

00:10:04.880 And, of course, schools were an apparatus of indoctrination.

00:10:12.340 One of the reasons why communists were always very keen on making their people literate was,

00:10:19.080 of course, that it was an easier way to propagandize, to, you know, to allow them to read in the media

00:10:28.380 only what the government wanted them to read in the media.

00:10:31.000 But I came from a deeply anti-communist family, and so the conversations around the dinner table

00:10:36.540 provided me with the alternative viewpoint.

00:10:40.420 And I distinctly remember, I was about 10 years old, and I was walking from my grandmother's house

00:10:47.660 down a street, which was, you know, the main shopping mall in my hometown.

00:10:54.420 And, you know, in communist countries, on every lamppost, you would have a speaker

00:11:00.520 that was blaring government propaganda at you, you know, for a few hours a day.

00:11:04.080 And as I was walking by these shops, which are completely empty, whilst listening to the radio

00:11:08.400 telling me what a great country I was living in, and how we once again met the four-year plan

00:11:13.560 in three years, and things like that, I did have a bit of an awakening, you know,

00:11:19.860 that I was living in, it was like living in two parallel universes.

00:11:26.220 At school, you had to say certain things that were expected from me, but in reality,

00:11:30.260 it was obvious that the country wasn't working the way that the government was telling us

00:11:34.820 it was working.

00:11:35.040 What percentage of the populace at the time was like your parents, who were anti-communist,

00:11:41.080 like low-key anti-communist?

00:11:42.580 Well, low-key, in a sense that, you know, personal conversations were happening.

00:11:45.960 You can't go to the public and say, I don't believe in the regime.

00:11:47.840 Precisely, precisely.

00:11:49.000 Well, obviously, it had to be high enough so that when the Berlin Wall fell at the start

00:11:57.080 of November 1989, people realized that communism was, at this point, very weak, and they all

00:12:02.260 went to the streets, and the fear was gone by that time, by the late 1980s.

00:12:06.240 People no longer feared the state.

00:12:09.700 We no longer feared that the result would be mass executions, and, yeah,

00:12:15.160 it just sort of collapsed like a souffle.

00:12:17.100 Why were your parents anti-communist?

00:12:19.100 Like, where did they get their resources?

00:12:21.180 Where did they get their information to?

00:12:22.580 From my paternal grandparents, my paternal grandparents were old enough to remember

00:12:26.540 the First Republic before the Second World War, and they remembered that it was possible

00:12:30.900 to live in a prosperous and democratic country.

00:12:33.340 Czechoslovakia was one of the richest countries in the world between the wars.

00:12:37.400 So they kept teaching.

00:12:38.860 So then why did they stay?

00:12:40.260 Why didn't they leave?

00:12:41.240 Well, because you couldn't.

00:12:42.120 There was an iron curtain around Czechoslovakia.

00:12:45.640 You would get shot on the border.

00:12:47.300 Literally. 0.56

00:12:47.860 Literally.

00:12:48.160 I mean, you couldn't get a visa to go to the West, obviously, because if you could get

00:12:51.460 a visa to go to the West, then everybody would leave.

00:12:55.320 So they just put up barbed wire and watchtowers, and hundreds of people got slaughtered on the

00:13:01.100 border trying to flee into the West, shot, torn apart by dogs, electrocuted, things like

00:13:07.820 that.

00:13:08.280 What was life, like, what was fun at 12 years old?

00:13:10.720 What were you doing for fun?

00:13:11.040 Well, as a boy, you know, you don't care.

00:13:12.800 All you need is a couple of sticks and, you know, play swords or musketeers with your mates,

00:13:21.440 or you go and, I don't know, climb cherry trees and things like that.

00:13:26.120 It didn't really matter.

00:13:27.140 I think the only thing that I regret is, of course, never having access to things like

00:13:31.520 Western cartoons and Disney and things like that, because, of course, all of those were

00:13:36.360 banned.

00:13:37.660 Yeah.

00:13:37.920 And Western music, which was banned, too.

00:13:40.120 Fully?

00:13:41.400 More or less, yeah.

00:13:42.360 So if you got it, it was underground when you got it?

00:13:44.340 You got it on a cassette, yeah, which was, you know, which was, like, re-recorded and

00:13:48.660 re-recorded and re-recorded with the quality constantly diminishing.

00:13:52.260 This was before digitalization.

00:13:54.360 Well, we got movies in Iran, but if you were caught with Rocky IV, you'd go straight to

00:14:00.300 jail, but we had it.

00:14:01.780 And you'd watch these movies, and somebody would do the audio translation, and you would

00:14:05.920 listen to somebody doing the Farsi sound of Rocky or somebody doing whatever the movies

00:14:09.620 that we were watching.

00:14:10.340 When was that?

00:14:10.880 This is 78 to 89.

00:14:14.060 Okay, so after the revolution.

00:14:16.100 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:14:16.680 After the sun takeoff.

00:14:17.180 Absolutely.

00:14:17.300 I was born October 18th, so you're going 79 on.

00:14:19.800 Okay, now I get it.

00:14:20.680 I get it.

00:14:20.700 Yeah, everything was very underground.

00:14:22.660 You couldn't do it.

00:14:23.240 And even alcohol.

00:14:24.060 Bootleggers were all underground.

00:14:25.280 You were public.

00:14:25.860 You'd go straight to jail.

00:14:27.180 That wasn't a problem in Eastern Europe.

00:14:28.180 Everybody was drunk to get through the monopony.

00:14:29.720 That was one of the ways, probably, to keep people distracted.

00:14:32.980 So going back to it, you know how they say democracy typically lasts 250 years?

00:14:38.680 That number is typically thrown around with 250 years.

00:14:41.940 Historically, how long does a communistic regime last?

00:14:45.100 Is there a number for it?

00:14:46.020 Like you said, it got to a point where the regime got weak.

00:14:49.060 They could no longer do what they were doing, and then we revolted against it, right?

00:14:52.140 And then boom, things change.

00:14:53.620 Is there a timeline where how long that system lasts?

00:14:56.180 I don't think it is cyclical.

00:14:57.460 So, I mean, basically what happened, Russia was taken over by the communists in 1917, then

00:15:02.100 because of Hitler's defeat, thank God, but Hitler was defeated, and the Soviet army marched 0.94

00:15:08.800 into Berlin, and of course, all that territory which they covered in Central and Eastern Europe,

00:15:14.100 they kept for themselves as their satellite states.

00:15:16.780 So we exchanged one totalitarian regime, which was the Nazi occupation, for the Soviet occupation, 0.76

00:15:22.160 which lasted from 1945 to 1989, basically.

00:15:27.460 40 to 50 years?

00:15:29.680 That's how long communism lasted.

00:15:31.540 Other regimes obviously survived longer or shorter.

00:15:33.800 Okay, so now let's change topics.

00:15:35.200 You said 66% of Americans believe the world is getting worse.

00:15:41.480 6% believes the world is getting better.

00:15:44.020 If you turn on the media, the media is telling you this is the most racist time of all time.

00:15:49.520 This is the worst time to, you know, things are terrible.

00:15:52.740 You know, everything is bad.

00:15:54.300 You know, civilization is not going in the right direction.

00:15:56.600 Why do you think 66% of Americans believe it's the worst?

00:16:00.680 It's been in a long time.

00:16:02.660 Well, part of it has to do with the news, in a sense that if it bleeds, it leads, right?

00:16:10.300 News is about stuff that happens, and what tends to happen are dramatic things like airplanes

00:16:14.620 flying into buildings or a famine or, you know, what's happening in Afghanistan right now,

00:16:21.040 and those things tend to be terrible.

00:16:23.380 Terrible things happen very quickly, and they are easier to medialize.

00:16:30.080 Good things tend to happen on a different time scale, gradually, over a very long period of time,

00:16:34.820 such as, you know, increases in GDP.

00:16:37.020 There is never a time, a day or an hour, that can be on the front pages of the New York Times

00:16:43.300 that, okay, overnight, the United States stopped being poor and became rich.

00:16:48.040 These things take hundreds of years.

00:16:49.820 And so that's also part of the problem.

00:16:52.640 Good things tend to happen over a very long time, and gradually,

00:16:55.380 bad things tend to happen very quickly.

00:16:57.280 So those are some of the things why people believe the world is getting worse.

00:17:03.840 Also, you have the availability heuristic.

00:17:06.580 This is basically how our minds operate.

00:17:10.020 It is the dramatic event that gets pulled out of your memory file at a much more frequent stage,

00:17:21.440 and therefore you think that danger and horrible things happen in the world

00:17:24.340 at a much, with much greater frequency than they really do.

00:17:28.300 For example, a lot of people get still obsessed about terrorism,

00:17:31.760 whereas, in fact, many more Americans die by sleeping on a wet bathroom floor.

00:17:35.920 But that's not a sort of memory that you can pull out of your memory file very quickly.

00:17:40.620 Those are just some of the things.

00:17:41.980 Also, I think that it's probably fair to say that we have evolved to be pessimistic.

00:17:46.480 You see, if you hear a noise behind a bush, you can deal with it in two different ways.

00:17:56.000 You can either proceed on your way or you can run away.

00:17:59.140 Well, if you proceed on your way and there's a tiger or a lion hiding behind it,

00:18:03.740 then you are not an ancestor, right?

00:18:06.400 Your genes get, your optimistic genes get wiped out of the pool.

00:18:09.860 So, an overreaction to a potential threat, such as running away,

00:18:15.180 is less costly from a genetic evolution standpoint than underreaction to a potential threat.

00:18:22.280 Say that one more time.

00:18:23.440 So, running away is less costly.

00:18:28.580 Temporarily, maybe, but not long term, right?

00:18:30.460 Well, in a sense that you get to pass your genes on in the long run,

00:18:35.660 whereas underreaction to a potential threat is deadly, can be deadly.

00:18:41.200 So, the optimists get weeded out of the gene pool, the pessimistic gene remains.

00:18:46.000 And it's very difficult for human brains to cope with the fact that the world is a much better place now

00:18:50.560 because the world has really changed only in the last 200 years so dramatically.

00:18:55.000 Can you unpack that?

00:18:56.020 So, one of the things you said earlier when we said 66% to 6%,

00:19:01.220 and then you said, you know, most things have improved, some things have not.

00:19:05.000 And then we have the 10 global trends that we can get.

00:19:07.420 Maybe this is the part as well.

00:19:08.820 What has improved?

00:19:10.220 What has not improved?

00:19:12.620 Well, almost everything has improved economically.

00:19:16.280 We are much richer than we were.

00:19:18.240 We live much longer.

00:19:20.160 Many fewer infants die between the age, you know, between birth and year one.

00:19:26.420 We are much more educated.

00:19:27.800 We go to school for much longer.

00:19:29.160 Literacy is much higher.

00:19:31.620 What are the other things?

00:19:32.980 There is a much greater supply of food than before.

00:19:38.480 So, economically, it's unquestionable that we are much better off.

00:19:43.740 We are also much better off medically and scientifically and technologically.

00:19:46.980 You no longer have to plow your field.

00:19:49.220 You just go to Whole Foods and buy something that was produced, you know,

00:19:52.300 on a large farm that is, you know, tended to buy technology and so forth.

00:20:00.100 But I would say that even morally we have improved.

00:20:03.360 Just consider the sorts of things that humanity used to do to each other.

00:20:07.960 Cannibalism?

00:20:08.920 Gone.

00:20:09.800 Slavery?

00:20:10.200 Chattel slavery? 0.64

00:20:11.740 Gone.

00:20:13.100 Exposure of unwanted children, meaning letting them die?

00:20:16.580 Gone.

00:20:19.200 Mistreatment, deep mistreatment of women. 0.99

00:20:21.980 Sure, mistreatment still happens, but not to the extent as we knew in, say,

00:20:26.640 ancient Greece and Rome or indeed in the Middle East.

00:20:30.200 Empathia, where women were basically properties of men.

00:20:35.260 So, along all of these different dimensions, humans have also become more moral.

00:20:42.140 Our homicide rates are a fraction of what they were 500 years ago.

00:20:50.120 We have fewer casualties in terms of conflicts when they do happen,

00:20:54.740 and war is also on the decline, but conflicts when they do happen,

00:20:57.620 they tend to result in fewer casualties than before.

00:20:59.560 So, those are some of the things that the world has improved.

00:21:02.660 What hasn't improved?

00:21:03.740 So, that part, great.

00:21:05.620 What hasn't improved?

00:21:07.080 What hasn't improved?

00:21:09.360 It's actually very difficult to come up with something.

00:21:12.200 I mean, you know, a lot of people believe that the environment is not improving

00:21:17.300 and is going to result in a catastrophe.

00:21:19.460 Now, the whole point of human progress and of the book that I have written

00:21:23.060 is to explain away all the problems, but to try to convince people that we are not like other animals.

00:21:35.440 You know, we are not like rabbits or rats.

00:21:38.020 When there is a problem that we just wait for our community or our herd to collapse.

00:21:49.300 When we have a problem, we solve it.

00:21:51.700 We are adaptive species, so we can adapt to changing climactic conditions,

00:21:55.240 and we are also problem solvers, so that we can solve them.

00:21:59.840 So, you know, climate change is one thing that people are pointing to and saying,

00:22:04.140 you know, this could be a catastrophic problem.

00:22:05.720 Well, it won't be that much of a problem if we can get all of our energy,

00:22:10.280 or most of our energy, from non-CO2-producing energy sources,

00:22:14.680 such as fission or fusion nuclear reactions.

00:22:17.020 Got it.

00:22:18.460 So the only thing that you would say is climate change,

00:22:24.200 maybe the only thing that we're looking at as an issue.

00:22:26.120 But aside from that, there's not a lot of things that's shown that's worse today than it was before.

00:22:30.700 Much depends on your time scope.

00:22:32.960 So, for example, freedom of the press is much better than what it was in the 1980s,

00:22:37.620 but it is lower than it was 10 years ago.

00:22:40.040 Okay, we included a trend in the book about freedom of the press,

00:22:43.480 because freedom of the press is still much better than what it was, say, 40 years ago.

00:22:47.680 But we have seen some retraction.

00:22:50.220 Ten years.

00:22:50.980 Yeah.

00:22:51.580 Also when it comes to democracy.

00:22:53.420 So the world is much more democratic than the one it was in the 1970s.

00:22:57.660 I mean, you know, autocracies were here, democracies were here.

00:23:00.620 That has flipped.

00:23:01.820 But in the last 10 years, we have seen some democratic backsliding, okay,

00:23:05.340 and that's something to keep an eye on.

00:23:06.860 But it is still much better than what it was 40 or 50 years ago.

00:23:10.480 So along all of these dimensions, things are really improving.

00:23:15.380 Now, there is a caveat to this.

00:23:19.460 When the audience, when the room is large enough,

00:23:22.820 there will always be somebody who will find what I think about as a positive trend

00:23:26.640 and call it a negative trend.

00:23:28.480 So, for example, I would say that increasing human wealth is a good thing.

00:23:33.780 But somebody, perhaps on the extreme environmentalist side,

00:23:37.280 might say increased wealth leads to increased consumption

00:23:40.620 and therefore greater climactic damage and therefore that is bad.

00:23:44.180 Or, alternatively, I might say, in fact, I do say,

00:23:47.500 that education of women is an unalloyed good. 1.00

00:23:50.420 It is a good thing.

00:23:51.720 But somebody who is an extremist religious person, let's say a Taliban, 1.00

00:23:58.100 are not terribly keen on female education, as you know.

00:24:02.240 And they feel that educating women is a bad thing.

00:24:04.380 So there are these outliers.

00:24:06.260 But my definition of progress is a definition of progress

00:24:09.420 that 90% of humans can agree on.

00:24:11.820 Education, good.

00:24:12.840 Longer life, good.

00:24:14.640 More money, good.

00:24:16.260 That sort of thing.

00:24:16.960 Why do they have a bigger mic than everybody else

00:24:20.140 that understands common sense?

00:24:22.020 Why are they getting so much traction today?

00:24:24.400 You told me you're an entertainment.

00:24:25.920 You understand what I'm saying?

00:24:27.860 Why are the people that are saying too much wealth is not good

00:24:32.660 and, you know, 11 million people follow an AOC?

00:24:36.600 So this is not good.

00:24:37.360 This is bad because it's all about climate change

00:24:38.860 because the world is ending in 12 years

00:24:40.180 if we don't do something about it today.

00:24:41.720 Why is she being heard by tens of millions saying she makes sense?

00:24:46.720 Why is he, the Taliban, saying,

00:24:48.900 women, why are they getting so much credibility? 1.00

00:24:51.200 Well, first of all, the world is definitely not ending in 12 years.

00:24:54.580 Of course it's not.

00:24:55.240 But that's their presentation.

00:24:57.160 I think that ideas which are on the extreme

00:25:01.340 probably get more coverage in the news

00:25:04.120 on both left and the political right.

00:25:07.240 You know, on a show like this,

00:25:09.680 or rather on a much lesser show,

00:25:12.940 let's call it a talk show on CNN,

00:25:15.420 it is not really a good show, or Fox,

00:25:18.160 it is not really a good show

00:25:19.360 when you have two people basically agreeing with each other

00:25:21.940 and are congregated somewhere along the middle of the public opinion.

00:25:27.140 It's always good to get somebody from the absolute extremes

00:25:29.620 who can scream at each other and present a real contrast.

00:25:33.500 And I think that is the key why these people get more airtime

00:25:38.580 and a bigger mic than people like us.

00:25:40.500 That makes sense.

00:25:41.260 Simply because it's more entertaining

00:25:42.500 and we always like a good fight, even today.

00:25:44.600 That's why maybe UFC is doing better than some of these other sports

00:25:47.600 because we're seeing a couple people fight.

00:25:49.040 Okay, one of the trends I want to talk to you about is population, right?

00:25:53.060 One of the trends you're talking about, I think it's number four,

00:25:55.760 peak population.

00:25:56.720 The world population will likely peak at 9.8 billion at around 2080.

00:26:02.160 2060.

00:26:03.240 Okay.

00:26:03.940 Yeah.

00:26:05.080 At around 2060 and fall to 9.5 billion by 2100.

00:26:10.980 Is that right?

00:26:12.240 So the best estimates we have right now is,

00:26:14.880 so as you know, there are about 8 billion people in the world today.

00:26:17.500 And according to Lancet, which is a reputable publication,

00:26:23.500 by 2100 there is either going to be 9 billion people in the world

00:26:27.900 or 7 billion people in the world.

00:26:30.540 There could be many fewer people in the world by 2100.

00:26:33.500 How are they coming up with that assumption?

00:26:34.860 Well, because we don't quite know how TFR,

00:26:38.700 total fertility rate, is going to play out.

00:26:41.100 So as wealth increases, women get educated and enter the labor force. 0.99

00:26:46.340 They tend to have many fewer children than when they work at home.

00:26:51.760 There is such a thing as opportunity cost.

00:26:53.860 If a woman cannot make money in the labor market, stays at home, 1.00

00:26:58.660 then, well, if she can go into the labor market 1.00

00:27:02.500 and make thousands of dollars or tens of thousands of dollars,

00:27:05.220 she is much, you know, she's likely, she can make that decision.

00:27:10.180 In fact, women do. 0.99

00:27:11.420 So total fertility rate has declined from about 5 in 1960 to about 2.4 today.

00:27:18.780 Worldwide?

00:27:19.340 Worldwide, worldwide.

00:27:20.280 In the United States, about, yeah, from about 5 to 2.4.

00:27:24.100 Now, that's worldwide.

00:27:25.160 In the United States, about 1.7.

00:27:27.040 Today.

00:27:27.580 Today.

00:27:28.060 Now, remember that replacement rate.

00:27:29.660 What were we in 60, I'm curious, in U.S.?

00:27:31.400 Do you know what the number was in U.S.?

00:27:32.380 I don't.

00:27:32.860 Okay.

00:27:33.480 But we're in 1.7 today.

00:27:34.600 The world is 2.4 today.

00:27:35.700 2.4.

00:27:36.160 Now, the issue here is that actually a replacement level is 2.1,

00:27:40.480 meaning that if we want to keep the world's population constant,

00:27:43.400 we need 2.1 children per woman to just maintain the current population. 1.00

00:27:49.440 In the West, we are already well below it.

00:27:51.980 In Korea, South Korea, it's one woman, one baby per woman per lifetime. 0.89

00:27:57.340 So you can see the issue there.

00:28:01.540 Now, the reason why we included population growth in the 10 global trends

00:28:07.080 is because a lot of people are concerned that we have too many people in the world.

00:28:11.240 That's why we have it.

00:28:12.220 However, I'm very ambivalent about this trend because progress, economic, technological,

00:28:21.720 medical, scientific, depends on ideas, and ideas are produced by people.

00:28:26.880 The fewer people you have, the fewer people you have to produce ideas

00:28:30.560 which then can reconnect or interact with each other

00:28:33.160 and then lead to inventions and innovations.

00:28:35.760 So, you know, we could really face a world in, say, 60 years' time or 80 years' time

00:28:43.580 that we'll have too few people to maintain our current rate of innovation

00:28:48.800 and also to pay for all the commitments that our governments have made

00:28:53.220 in terms of social welfare spending.

00:28:55.700 So let's go back.

00:28:57.580 1960 averages 5.

00:29:00.340 Today it's 2.4 worldwide.

00:29:03.040 Correct, yes.

00:29:03.460 U.S. is 1.7.

00:29:05.020 Correct.

00:29:05.760 To stay flat, you need to be at 2.1.

00:29:08.200 Correct.

00:29:08.720 But we're at 1.7 in U.S.

00:29:10.400 Yes.

00:29:10.760 So you mean to tell me in U.S., because we are a capitalistic nation,

00:29:15.420 which is competitive competition, women are going to sit there 1.00

00:29:18.700 and have to make a decision at one point saying, why have a kid?

00:29:21.540 Rather than working 2,500 hours per year like the average competitor,

00:29:25.460 I can only compete at 2,000 hours because the other 500 hours I'm having to raise a child

00:29:31.300 and that's going to take me back.

00:29:32.920 So they're going to say, I don't want to have two kids.

00:29:35.520 I'm okay with having one.

00:29:36.960 I'm okay with not even having a kid.

00:29:38.480 Sure.

00:29:38.820 You're saying that gradually it's going to go lower.

00:29:40.740 So are you saying if we go at this pace, if the world is going to be at the number that you said,

00:29:47.220 which is 9 billion by 2100, either 9 billion or 7 billion, where is it?

00:29:52.340 Either 1 billion more or 1 billion less than today.

00:29:55.060 Than today, 8 billion.

00:29:56.060 So either one more or one less than today.

00:29:58.080 Where is U.S. going to be for our 1.7?

00:30:00.560 Well, very much depends on immigration.

00:30:04.100 I mean, our population still continues to grow partly because of immigration.

00:30:07.560 Got it.

00:30:07.860 And this is, I believe, that 1.7 is citizen women, people who are tracked by the census.

00:30:15.820 But there are a lot of people who are having babies who are not tracked by the census

00:30:18.760 and who are not part of the statistics.

00:30:21.320 That's not a big, that's 11 million, though.

00:30:22.660 That's, say, 11 to 14 million, right?

00:30:26.560 If you're talking about illegal immigrants that we cannot track.

00:30:29.460 So you're not talking about immigrants coming in because that's about 47 million, right?

00:30:33.020 40 to 47 million, depending on what stats you're looking at.

00:30:35.820 So, but if we're at 1.7, are you saying this 330 could go lower and lower and lower?

00:30:42.360 It could go lower, certainly, if total fertility rate continues to decline, sure.

00:30:48.140 With the current trend where we are, have you, or maybe, you know, you're in the world,

00:30:53.540 so maybe you have read papers on this.

00:30:55.780 Have you seen any papers talking about if that number is going lower to the point,

00:31:00.080 if we're ever going to get to the 1 or below 1,

00:31:02.100 and what that's going to look like in America if we get to that point, or no?

00:31:05.420 I haven't read anything along those lines.

00:31:07.280 I know that Korea is an outlier.

00:31:09.740 It has, as I said, South Korea, 1 per woman per lifetime. 1.00

00:31:14.320 So we could certainly look at a demographic collapse at some point in the future,

00:31:21.540 after 2,100, population of the world could really go down.

00:31:25.280 That will retard economic growth because it will retard innovation. 0.99

00:31:28.840 And also remember that we have tens of trillions of dollars of future commitments

00:31:33.240 to our retirees, paying down the debt, and so forth.

00:31:37.680 And if we don't have the workers to do it, then...

00:31:40.600 How are we going to get that money?

00:31:41.440 So taxes to be able to pay that off, so we kind of do need to...

00:31:45.240 So, okay, so is there a number to help sustain economic growth?

00:31:51.440 Is there a number for that?

00:31:52.840 Well, I don't think about it in terms of numbers.

00:31:55.540 I mean, I think that human freedom actually trumps even things like population growth.

00:32:00.820 In other words, I want women to have as many children as they want. 1.00

00:32:05.080 Or none.

00:32:05.720 Or none.

00:32:06.580 But, and this is crucial, I also don't want Americans, American women, American men, 0.99

00:32:12.480 American parents, to be unduly influenced by environmental extremists

00:32:17.320 and people like AOC, for example, who genuinely believe that women shouldn't have 0.85

00:32:23.760 more than one child or no child at all.

00:32:27.200 In other words, I want Americans, especially American women, to make an informed decision

00:32:32.120 about whether they should have more children or not, decide for themselves freely without

00:32:36.900 being brainwashed by the extremists who say that we shouldn't really have more babies.

00:32:41.640 Well, I mean, then what that makes me think about is, I don't know the stats, but let's just

00:32:47.200 say if a UC Berkeley can house 40,000 students per year, just let's just say it's 40,000 students

00:32:56.740 that are going through Berkeley, and we know what Berkeley teaches, go furthest left, put

00:33:01.040 Berkeley, put Brown, put whatever, whichever one of those universities.

00:33:04.580 But let's pick Berkeley.

00:33:05.400 Every year, 40,000 students are replenishing through that mindset, and that mindset is

00:33:12.620 capitalists are bad, capitalism is this, it's rich, greedy people, all they want to do is

00:33:17.520 this, and negative, negative, negative, negative, negative, and they're breeding these kids,

00:33:20.780 right, the future.

00:33:22.080 Then you go to another school, like let's just say Wharton Business School, that's teaching

00:33:25.400 business, entrepreneurship, all that stuff.

00:33:27.660 If one school has got only 10,000 students, the other one's got 40,000 students, every year

00:33:33.280 for X-ing the growth, that mindset, like an investment is growing, it's going to be very

00:33:37.840 hard to compete.

00:33:38.660 So in the world, if there is a country that ought to have more kids than anybody else to

00:33:42.960 continue the mindset of capitalism, it's probably got to be U.S., but we're not doing that.

00:33:47.260 So I don't know if I'm making sense, if I sound like I'm on schums or something.

00:33:50.420 Well, the issue here is, you know, you can extrapolate any problem into the future and see collapse.

00:33:56.780 The question is whether we are going to change the way that we are looking at higher education.

00:34:02.480 Now, I already see a lot of people, like Peter Cheel, for example, talking about, you know,

00:34:07.300 do people really need to go to school to study humanities and social sciences, where they

00:34:11.840 don't necessarily learn any useful skills and may actually be brainwashed into believing

00:34:19.280 in the wrong stuff.

00:34:20.660 So maybe the university model is unsustainable, partly because it is so incredibly expensive.

00:34:27.300 You know the reasons why.

00:34:28.380 I mean, there is huge tuition inflation because of all the free money that is being, or rather

00:34:33.000 heavily subsidized loans and so on.

00:34:35.460 And also, you know, at some point, Americans may get fed up with the extreme left-wing propaganda

00:34:43.880 which is being taught at American universities and decide that they don't want to send their

00:34:50.460 children there, maybe rather do online courses with established mainstream academics, all sorts

00:34:58.040 of things could happen over the next 10, 20, 30 years, which will completely change this

00:35:02.340 particular dynamic.

00:35:03.140 Right now, what we are seeing is that even though communism, socialism have collapsed in the

00:35:07.800 late 1990, 1980s, Marxists have retreated into universities, but they have carried on their

00:35:13.460 evil works, and they have carried on educating future generations of pupils, including Americans, 1.00

00:35:23.940 and now we are reaping the harvest of that.

00:35:25.460 Yeah.

00:35:26.460 I mean, I've interviewed any of the top communist professors in the U.S. or socialist professors

00:35:30.580 in the U.S., I've probably interviewed them, whether it's, you name them, whether it's Richard

00:35:35.140 Wolf, who is a, you know, very open socialist, or Asetar Bear, who's a openly communistic professor

00:35:43.240 in Riverside Community College.

00:35:46.740 We like to interview them to kind of see what the mindset is and how it's being taught.

00:35:49.780 Sure.

00:35:50.780 I get a kick out of that.

00:35:51.780 Well, it's very big of you because, of course, leftists don't really talk to people who don't

00:35:54.500 think like that.

00:35:55.500 I love talking to communists because it's just a matter of time until the argument doesn't

00:35:58.700 make sense and you're hoping it says, well, well, well, then it's, you know, so then

00:36:03.520 we, we, the audience can make a decision for themselves, but let me give you some other

00:36:07.800 numbers here.

00:36:08.800 I'm curious on what you think about this.

00:36:09.800 So, is it, should we, is it, is it better for a country to be younger or older?

00:36:17.020 So younger, more energy, more innovation, more rebellious, more pushback, more questioning,

00:36:24.900 older, a little bit more, the drive to compete is a little less maybe, no longer wanting to

00:36:30.220 argue every point, just doesn't even have the energy to argue at every point.

00:36:33.500 thinking about a different way.

00:36:35.580 What is the edge?

00:36:36.580 If you, if we look at historically the societies that did very, very well, what was the, I'd

00:36:41.940 be so curious to know, what was the average age of a citizen of a country that was dominating

00:36:47.380 at an era?

00:36:48.380 Do we, do we have that data or no?

00:36:49.880 Well, I don't personally look at it that way because, you know, I don't believe that sort

00:36:56.300 of individuals and their life expectancies exist in order to benefit the state.

00:37:02.180 I'm thinking about it, you know, does the state provide the environment in which individuals

00:37:06.220 can flourish?

00:37:07.260 If individuals want to have more children, fewer children, if they want to live long and

00:37:10.380 if they can live long, you know, that to me is a, is a good thing.

00:37:14.580 What I would say is that more important than the structure of the population is whether the

00:37:20.420 country is free, free to, whether the people are free to talk, to think, to exchange their

00:37:32.540 ideas, invent, innovate, try those ideas in the marketplace, have access to capital.

00:37:40.020 Those I think are more important, I'll tell you a perfect example, regardless of age, regardless

00:37:45.160 of, I mean, I mean, yes, regardless of age and I'll tell you why.

00:37:51.820 China before 1978 and after 1978, China before 1978 already had hundreds of millions of young

00:37:58.100 people, but it was a dirt poor country.

00:38:00.860 GDP per capita in 1960 was like $300 per year, right?

00:38:06.900 Why was it dirt poor is because people were not free to do anything, to utilize their

00:38:12.100 brain power, to grow the economy, okay?

00:38:17.620 Today China is, of course, the second largest economy in the world.

00:38:21.640 Why?

00:38:22.640 Because the state has taken its foot off the neck of the Chinese people.

00:38:28.380 Chinese people are now have much more freedom.

00:38:30.300 It's still a very authoritarian country, but it's nothing compared to what China was before 0.52

00:38:35.040 1978 and the effect of that is showing itself.

00:38:39.000 Same in India, incredibly young and incredibly populous country before 1991, very, very poor.

00:38:47.720 Then come economic reforms.

00:38:48.860 The country becomes freer and after that, India grows. 0.96

00:38:52.220 So I think that freedom is more important than the particular structure of the population.

00:38:57.460 But I think that as a general rule, more people times freedom equals prosperity.

00:39:01.480 Okay, so let's, great point, excellent, very helpful.

00:39:04.600 But let's put ten countries, freedom to innovate, freedom to do all that stuff at the same level.

00:39:10.160 Yeah.

00:39:11.160 Put it all at the same level, right?

00:39:12.160 Well, again.

00:39:13.160 Then does age make any difference or still not?

00:39:16.160 I don't know because, I don't know, but I doubt it because young people will be more 1.00

00:39:20.720 go-and-getter attitude, you know, risk-taking and so forth, but older people have more knowledge.

00:39:25.920 You see, old people have accumulated wisdom, which the young don't have, and that's also 1.00

00:39:31.220 very useful.

00:39:32.220 We know where innovation comes, though.

00:39:34.600 Steve Jobs was in his 20s with Wozniak, or Zuck was in his 20s, maybe in teens.

00:39:39.160 Yeah, sure.

00:39:40.160 Gates was younger, you know.

00:39:41.160 Musk was younger.

00:39:42.160 So you're very rarely going to hear a 57-year-old start the next Facebook as a founder.

00:39:47.600 Older people then run those companies, which these geniuses start, because they know how

00:39:53.600 to manage them.

00:39:54.600 But remember, I'm talking about birth.

00:39:55.600 I'm talking about giving birth, right?

00:39:56.600 Yeah.

00:39:57.600 To me, you know the whole, what came first, the chicken or the egg?

00:39:59.900 I'm talking about who's giving birth to those ideas.

00:40:03.100 By the way, I don't have the answer to the question.

00:40:04.800 I'm curious to know what you think about this.

00:40:06.200 I am aware of the fact that when it comes to fundamental breakthroughs in things like physics,

00:40:12.600 mathematics, people tend to be on the younger side.

00:40:15.160 And once they discover something, they tend not to repeat important discoveries later on

00:40:21.700 in life.

00:40:22.700 So, yes.

00:40:24.200 But there are other things that go on in a society.

00:40:26.300 It's not just about technological development.

00:40:28.760 There is also things like, for example, listen to the oldies explain why the world is not 0.97

00:40:36.100 in a worse shape.

00:40:37.480 To remember the Cold War and the dangers that emanated from the world right then.

00:40:42.000 To have some knowledge about the importance of institutions which we have, such as democracy

00:40:48.540 and separation of powers.

00:40:50.540 You know, young people tend not to think about those things, but they are very important.

00:40:55.540 I ask you because you got the other that was looking at these numbers.

00:41:00.000 The average age of population in China as of 2019 was 38.4.

00:41:04.080 And that's the data they give us.

00:41:05.780 So, maybe higher, maybe lower, you have to trust the data that there's just like they

00:41:08.840 tell you their unemployment is 2% right now, which no one believes that.

00:41:12.360 But they say the average age of population in China is 38.4.

00:41:16.080 Okay.

00:41:17.080 U.S. is 38.1.

00:41:18.960 So, we're not far off.

00:41:19.960 It's not like, oh, U.S. is such a young population.

00:41:22.040 We're not.

00:41:23.040 Right?

00:41:24.040 Then it goes, India shows 26.4.

00:41:26.040 Yeah.

00:41:27.040 So, China is 38.4, U.S. is 38.1, India is 26.4, and they're now capitalism, they're producing 0.97

00:41:34.140 great engineers.

00:41:35.780 These guys are being recruited to the states left and right because they produce, most of

00:41:39.920 my software that I developed, a lot of the engineers that we use here from state that

00:41:43.660 came out of IIT.

00:41:45.280 So, I'm wondering because if we look at the enemy of the state number one right now, enemy

00:41:51.120 of the world right now, country.

00:41:52.800 If all the countries were one person, if all the countries were one country, we got 200

00:41:57.620 give or take countries.

00:41:58.980 That number, some say 191, 206, whatever, let's just say we got 200 countries give or take.

00:42:04.160 If all the countries were one country and they were to pick enemy of the state number one,

00:42:09.840 enemy of the world number one, you're probably going to see China be at the top of the list. 0.99

00:42:14.080 Okay?

00:42:15.080 And I'm not saying some don't see U.S. as the top of the list because of how deceiving, you

00:42:19.940 know, their alliances.

00:42:22.320 Most of the world doesn't want to align themselves with Iran, but China does. 0.90

00:42:25.740 Most of the world doesn't want to align themselves with Taliban, but China does. 0.96

00:42:28.300 Or North Korea, yeah.

00:42:29.300 Or North Korea.

00:42:30.300 So, China's number one above all. 0.88

00:42:32.300 Okay.

00:42:33.300 I ask this question because, to me, I think India's going to play a very important role

00:42:38.640 to keep the world a better place.

00:42:40.760 Young, big population, capitalism, freedom.

00:42:43.260 They pushed back 100 apps from China that they didn't let into India, so they're not afraid

00:42:48.140 of China to go up against them.

00:42:49.640 Some of these other guys are afraid of them.

00:42:51.440 And I think China, they indirectly take a lot of shots at India.

00:42:55.140 And the only reason you ever take a lot of shots at an opponent is because secretly you're

00:43:00.360 threatened by that opponent, that they could do something to you, right?

00:43:03.420 What are your thoughts about the future of India?

00:43:04.900 Do you think they're going to play a very big role the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years?

00:43:07.700 I think that you're onto something.

00:43:09.060 I think that if I were to predict, you know, how the next, say, 50 years are going to play

00:43:13.740 out in terms of economic growth.

00:43:15.600 I would say that India is probably going to grow at a faster pace, not just because their

00:43:20.640 population is younger, meaning that more people are entering the labor market.

00:43:27.880 But China, very importantly, is shooting itself in the foot in two crucial ways.

00:43:33.280 The most important way, or rather one of the ways, is the one-child policy, which was imposed 0.97

00:43:39.420 between 1980 and 2015, that has created a huge, huge hole in the population pyramid in China,

00:43:48.500 which is why the Chinese now are talking about, now they had two-child policy, now they are

00:43:52.760 thinking about three-child policy and that sort of thing.

00:43:54.680 So they shot themselves in the foot.

00:43:56.720 They have a lot of people who are going to become retirees, and they have many fewer people

00:44:03.480 who are not there to pay for all the things that the Chinese government now has become.

00:44:08.820 That's a scary thought, by the way.

00:44:09.820 Mathematically, it just doesn't make any sense.

00:44:11.460 So that's one thing.

00:44:12.460 The other thing is that China is clamping down on freedom of all sorts, but intellectual

00:44:18.320 freedom, freedom to think and speak and interact, publish research and so forth.

00:44:25.660 And that obviously is something that I wouldn't expect to happen in India, because India has 1.00

00:44:30.560 a long track record of being a democracy and having a rule of law, need of which is obviously

00:44:37.260 present in China.

00:44:38.260 Yeah.

00:44:39.260 As long as a leader doesn't come in India that gets voted, that all of a sudden gets

00:44:43.620 close to Xi or China, the world's a safe place. 0.88

00:44:48.220 To me, the scariest day is when India and China are on the same team. 1.00

00:44:54.040 I think that's the scariest day.

00:44:55.700 The world has to worry when India and China are on the same page. 1.00

00:44:59.260 Well, hopefully that will never happen.

00:45:01.260 Well, but the game that China plays, they are incredible at that game.

00:45:06.620 No one's better at playing the deceiving game today than China. 1.00

00:45:09.620 It's not even US.

00:45:10.620 They used to be the best.

00:45:11.980 You know, Russia used to be the best.

00:45:13.980 Israel used to be the top four best.

00:45:15.420 But today, you know, China's coming up in ways they can do a master class on that. 0.63

00:45:20.580 And, you know, nobody would even be close to them.

00:45:22.580 So that's my biggest concern.

00:45:23.580 Certainly many of their actions, including what they've done to Hong Kong, was completely

00:45:27.940 unacceptable.

00:45:28.940 Hong Kong was, of course, the greatest, possibly the greatest success story of the post-Second

00:45:34.580 World War era in terms of economic growth.

00:45:36.580 And they destroy that.

00:45:37.580 But the world is letting it happen.

00:45:40.580 Well, there is very little that you can do to a country of one point, whatever it is,

00:45:45.580 two or three billion people and thousands of nuclear weapons.

00:45:48.580 Nobody's going to go to a nuclear conflict over Hong Kong or indeed Taiwan, I think.

00:45:51.580 Yeah.

00:45:52.580 I disagree there.

00:45:53.580 By the way, I don't mind having a disagreement.

00:45:54.580 You can come back and, you know, say, you know, you have the PhD.

00:45:57.580 Please don't mention that.

00:45:58.580 I have the public high school diploma.

00:46:00.580 That's the closest I got.

00:46:01.580 That's perfectly fine.

00:46:03.580 But for me, any time we underestimate an enemy and they keep getting stronger and stronger

00:46:11.400 and stronger, sometimes...

00:46:12.400 We shouldn't underestimate them.

00:46:13.900 But it's very important that Americans should also understand that there's a lot that we

00:46:20.000 can do to get back on track in terms of American dream, growing the economy, having a strong country.

00:46:31.380 You know, there's very little that we can do about what the Chinese Politburo does.

00:46:36.500 But what we can do is to alter our economic systems so that it is not so heavily overtaxed,

00:46:46.880 overregulated, so dysfunctional.

00:46:50.580 We can stop being at each other's throats and things which make us weaker.

00:46:55.220 We can generate more economic growth.

00:46:57.500 We don't have to borrow so much money.

00:47:01.200 Much of it is lent to China.

00:47:03.940 You know, we just have to become serious about our own country.

00:47:08.020 We have to become serious about challenges in the future.

00:47:12.180 And we have to change the way that...

00:47:16.240 Right now, it sort of feels like we are not very serious about our own future.

00:47:21.380 It's as though we don't want to have a future.

00:47:22.940 Yeah, to me, it's more from the school of thought of, you know, if China's got 1.5, the world's got eight.

00:47:30.640 Six and a half billion against 1.5.

00:47:33.460 Take some of the countries that would be on China's side.

00:47:35.900 Give them another half a billion, okay?

00:47:38.000 Let's put them at two billion.

00:47:39.460 Two billion against six billion. 1.00

00:47:40.780 The world still whoops their ass, right? 0.99

00:47:42.720 So the world's got to come together and hold them accountable and publicly call them out. 0.99

00:47:47.880 It has to be very public about it because at this point of the game, they're not slowing down.

00:47:52.100 They're telling you, we're going to come after you.

00:47:53.560 You can't do nothing about it.

00:47:54.540 The world's like, I don't think they can.

00:47:56.600 I don't think they can.

00:47:57.460 I don't think they can.

00:47:58.320 In sports, you've got two things you've got to play.

00:48:02.540 Historically, the most exciting teams to ever watch in the season are the offensive teams.

00:48:07.260 Oh, my gosh.

00:48:08.040 Dan Antony was a coach.

00:48:09.820 Any team he ever coached, great offensive team to watch.

00:48:12.460 The Suns, they're like, oh, we're going to average 130 points a game.

00:48:15.440 Never won a championship, right?

00:48:17.360 Then you go look at Popovich.

00:48:19.660 Boring team to watch.

00:48:21.040 Not the most exciting team Spurs to watch, but they won five championships in the last 20 years, right?

00:48:26.320 I think we have to have a balance of offense and defense.

00:48:29.740 And obviously, as a capitalist, I'm on the offense side, but I think we need a little bit more attention to defense.

00:48:35.720 We cannot let this, what happened the last 18 months, go away with us not holding those guys accountable

00:48:41.220 because they'll do it again.

00:48:42.460 But also remember that we don't actually know how well China is doing and how much on an offense it is.

00:48:49.040 We don't really know what their real GDP growth numbers are.

00:48:52.240 We don't really know what their unemployment figures are.

00:48:54.320 We don't really know about the health of the Chinese private sector.

00:48:57.480 Are you insinuating something?

00:48:58.760 Are you insinuating that they could have their own market collapse potentially that we're not aware of?

00:49:03.020 Are you?

00:49:03.540 Well, I'm not insinuating anything.

00:49:04.780 I'm saying that we have very little idea about what is happening in China in the same way that we had very little idea about what was happening in the Soviet Union.

00:49:14.520 When the Soviet Union collapsed, it was a massive surprise to everyone, including people who should have known better, such as CIA.

00:49:20.100 What's the biggest difference between those two ways of thinking?

00:49:23.440 Well, that the Soviets didn't have a market economy and the Chinese have a quasi-market economy.

00:49:28.660 Now, but the important thing is that China has much less of a market economy now than it had five or ten years ago because Xi is clamping down on the private sector to the extent that it wasn't done between 1980 and 2010.

00:49:43.000 So he's got this view of totalitarizing everything, of putting everything under his own control.

00:49:49.580 But men are fallible, especially with men with so much power, especially men who have to make all of these calls.

00:49:56.360 And if he makes the wrong calls, then China will suffer the consequences.

00:49:59.460 Oh, I agree with you.

00:50:00.600 Did you see what George Soros, this is very weird, when George Soros, did you see the comments he made about China?

00:50:05.940 I did not.

00:50:06.540 Okay, so Ray Dalio comes out and Ray Dalio says, you know, he's lowered his investments in the U.S. and he's increased in China.

00:50:15.460 And he came out and says, look, it's a mistake if investors don't look at the advantages in China.

00:50:20.980 And we need to make more investments into China.

00:50:23.000 There's so many opportunities there.

00:50:24.680 And Ray Dalio, somebody I've interviewed before, very smart man, brilliant mind.

00:50:29.140 George Soros, not beloved by the right, not beloved by the center, not beloved by a lot of people, maybe by the far left.

00:50:37.160 It's George Soros, right?

00:50:39.240 George Soros comes out and says it's a mistake for America to do business with China.

00:50:44.560 It's a mistake that Dalio is saying that it's safe to make investments in China because we don't look at democracy the same way.

00:50:52.720 This is George Soros saying that.

00:50:54.900 So, you know, some of the stuff that's being said right now, it's almost as if Xi's maneuvering and the moves he's making,

00:51:03.780 it's forcing a lot of people in U.S., left or right, to kind of unite and say, look, I may not agree with you on taxes.

00:51:09.200 You may not agree with me on such and such policy.

00:51:11.400 But we have to agree on one thing.

00:51:12.660 China's enemy of the state, number one. 0.95

00:51:14.260 We've got to figure that part out.

00:51:15.480 There's a lot of things we can be divided on.

00:51:17.340 We cannot be divided on the enemy.

00:51:19.280 And I'm seeing that as a progress, as a positive, meaning if Xi continues to play his cards the way he is,

00:51:25.840 I think it's actually going to unite America more.

00:51:27.880 What do you think?

00:51:29.920 I think that we shouldn't overreact.

00:51:34.580 You know, we have plenty of problems of our own.

00:51:37.140 We have a $30 trillion debt.

00:51:40.140 We are running huge deficits.

00:51:42.140 And I think that we shouldn't go and look for enemies unless those enemies reveal themselves in a clear way, such as Al-Qaeda did on 9-11.

00:51:57.680 So far, China has not, to my knowledge, attacked American vital national interest front line.

00:52:08.980 Should that change?

00:52:10.140 Then we can have that discussion again.

00:52:12.160 That's not their style, though.

00:52:14.260 That's not how they attack.

00:52:16.340 They don't attack that way.

00:52:18.220 They attack through proxy.

00:52:19.900 They don't attack that way.

00:52:21.520 They don't attack like America attacks.

00:52:24.220 See, America attacks, hey, you want to fight?

00:52:27.860 Let's fight.

00:52:28.220 Let's see who's the better man.

00:52:29.420 Okay?

00:52:29.800 Now, don't get me wrong.

00:52:30.500 We've had, you know, I've had the economic hitman on my show who he explained to me in the 60s and 70s how they would go to countries and say,

00:52:36.920 if you don't do this, we're going to put your country out and we're going to do this, this. 0.59

00:52:39.740 America played a lot of games as well. 0.53

00:52:41.320 But China doesn't play that game. 0.95

00:52:43.320 China plays proxy wars.

00:52:45.000 It may well be that, forgive me, you were saying.

00:52:46.960 No, no, go ahead.

00:52:47.420 It may well be that, you know, China also realizes that this may well be the peak of its power.

00:52:54.720 And so it does want to do all those things that China wanted to do.

00:52:57.220 You think that.

00:52:57.460 Well, the Chinese are probably operating with much better numbers than we have. 0.98

00:53:02.580 They are seeing the demographic collapse coming.

00:53:06.960 They realize they made a lot of people in the world angry, which has contributed to undermining the trade relations between the rest of the world and China. 0.76

00:53:18.740 They know that by at this stage, a lot of the world is looking at them in a in a with a skeptical with skeptical eye.

00:53:27.940 So, you know, once again, I just don't want to extrapolate this particular problem until it becomes unsolvageable.

00:53:36.600 It may well be that, you know, 10 or 20 years time we'll be looking at this particular period in China as the height of its power.

00:53:43.820 I hope you're right.

00:53:44.820 But a lot of a lot of people have said that the last 20 years and they've not been right.

00:53:49.860 I had a Gordon Chang, I believe, who was a lawyer who lived in China for 20 years and he wrote a book about the collapse of China like 20 years ago or 15 years ago.

00:54:00.780 None of it happened.

00:54:01.600 So I think that's the level of optimism from the right that is thinking they're always stronger and kind of looking at the opposition as not as strong as them.

00:54:13.600 I think that level of too confident is how it how it gets some people to get knocked out.

00:54:18.840 You know, you mentioned you mentioned about where China's at and, you know, maybe they're starting to realize they're weak.

00:54:25.080 Xi, when you when you're the leader of a country and you get up and you give a speech that, you know, it's going to be public on the world news, everyone's going to read it and see it. 0.72

00:54:33.440 And you say, if anybody around the world tries to change our way of socialism thinking, we will smash their heads against the wall of China.

00:54:41.000 That's not, you know, seduction.

00:54:43.500 That's not saying, hey, why don't we create.

00:54:46.000 I'm under no circumstances and apologies for Xi.

00:54:48.680 All I'm saying is that America has to be circumspect.

00:54:51.100 We have to tell them what our clear lines, red lines are.

00:54:55.260 But, you know, let's let's let's not let's not have a conflict with a nuclear power unless we can if we can avoid it.

00:55:04.260 Yeah. And let's not let them get stronger than they are today, because if they do, then it's too late.

00:55:11.140 That's that's the part that I'm concerned about.

00:55:13.780 Again, you know, I'm just a businessman.

00:55:15.680 What the hell do I know? I'm just, you know, asking questions here and I'm conducting an interview.

00:55:19.440 So let me continue. So out of these 10 global trends that you have.

00:55:23.620 OK, we've got a lot of them. We've covered one of them here.

00:55:26.580 Which of these concerns you the most and which of them should we be most excited about out of these 10 trends?

00:55:32.960 And to remind you, the great enrichment and the poverty running out of resources, peak population and the famine, more land for nature, planet city, democracy on the march, long peace, safe for world.

00:55:47.580 Well, let me take let me take two, because they're kind of interrelated and that's that's food supply and nature.

00:55:55.440 So since the birth of agriculture 12,000 years ago, people have lived on the age of starvation.

00:56:03.140 Famines were recurrent throughout the world, often in very short intervals.

00:56:08.440 Tens of millions of people throughout history have died because they didn't have enough food.

00:56:12.040 Today, calorie consumption in sub-Saharan Africa, which is the poorest region of the world, is equivalent to what it was in Portugal in the early 1960s.

00:56:24.080 We are producing enough food to feed every human being on Earth and have some left over.

00:56:29.580 Now, of course, we are not doing such a good job of that because some of the food, you know, gets wasted, rots and so on.

00:56:36.460 But if the calories that the world produces right now were optimally distributed around the world, then no one should go hungry.

00:56:48.740 And we can we can we can and we are becoming more and more agriculturally productive.

00:56:52.960 If if the world farmer, if the average world farmer becomes as productive in terms of food production as an American farmer, we can feed the world and return land size, the size of India, back to nature.

00:57:09.040 Say that one more time. Say that one more time.

00:57:10.880 If if the average world farmer becomes as productive as an American farmer, then we can feed the entire world and return the land mass, the size of India, back to nature because we wouldn't need it.

00:57:27.020 The problem right now is in many poor countries, farmers are not particularly productive, whereas American farmers are hyper productive.

00:57:33.740 We feed not just the three hundred and thirty million Americans, but we feel feed much of the world, not just that, but food is decreasing in price.

00:57:44.060 I'm not talking about the last six months blip in terms of in terms of in terms of inflation.

00:57:50.780 I'm talking about a long term trend.

00:57:53.540 Americans now spend something like eight percent of their budget on food.

00:57:57.740 OK, whereas before sort of medieval Europe, it was 80 percent of people's incomes were spent on food.

00:58:04.220 Today, it's more like eight percent.

00:58:06.080 Holy moly.

00:58:06.800 And think about it also this way.

00:58:10.500 The the minimum wage in America, the federal minimum wage is about seven dollars, seven and a half dollars or something like that.

00:58:17.520 Yeah. But 90 percent of Americans bring home 90 percent of people who have unskilled jobs earn about twelve dollars an hour.

00:58:25.720 OK, a Costco chicken costs five dollars.

00:58:30.040 Right. And that has enough calories to maintain you for for a day. 0.97

00:58:33.340 That's two or two and a half thousand thousand calories.

00:58:36.160 So for so an unskilled worker, a janitor working on a minimum wage, earns enough money in one hour to feed himself for a day and has still some money left over.

00:58:52.420 That gives you a sense of how incredibly what an incredible improvement we have experienced in terms of food production.

00:59:01.420 And going back to nature, obviously, it would be nice if we could return more of nature to to the animals and withdraw humanity from nature.

00:59:14.360 Because because farming is the most disruptive thing that you can do for an ecosystem.

00:59:18.180 But the only way that you can do it is to bring people into the cities and to become more agricultural productive.

00:59:24.320 So right now, people are already doing things like building greenhouses inside cities, you know, in skyscrapers, using LED lights and things like that.

00:59:35.740 So I'm very excited about that.

00:59:38.280 Smart farming, giving the plant just as much water as it needs, no more, which, again, doesn't waste resources.

00:59:44.320 And instead of having to transport all that food from from a farm thousand miles away, you can actually produce this within within an urban setting.

00:59:53.680 That would be cool, too.

00:59:54.740 So there are a lot of things which humans are doing to adapt, to to improve, to innovate.

00:59:59.740 And and we are doing that in terms of food production.

01:00:02.140 Yeah, you said something in your book.

01:00:03.660 Since 1961, the global average population weighted food supply per person per day rose from twenty one ninety six calories to twenty nine sixty two in twenty seventeen.

01:00:15.160 So eight hundred more calories a day in roughly 50 years.

01:00:20.520 Right. Fifty six years.

01:00:21.380 That's right.

01:00:21.700 That we're getting eight hundred more calories.

01:00:23.460 But I see some people in America, they take a lot more than twenty nine hundred calories.

01:00:27.620 And again, that's a hundred calories.

01:00:28.940 Absolutely.

01:00:29.660 People.

01:00:30.240 So do we need to kind of get them to redistribute the food they're eating?

01:00:33.080 What we need to do is to understand that humans have evolved to consume as much food as possible because food was very scarce and supply of food was very uncertain.

01:00:45.080 So one day you may come upon a slaughtered deer or something like that.

01:00:51.140 Well, you want to munch as much of it as possible because you don't know when again you'll be able to slaughter an animal.

01:00:56.280 Um, and so we have evolved to be to to gorge basically.

01:01:02.100 Right.

01:01:02.520 Um, and and people have to understand that actually, no, the fridge will be full tomorrow morning and the day.

01:01:10.440 Don't worry about it.

01:01:11.280 Don't worry about it.

01:01:12.180 Cut those portions and so on. 0.93

01:01:13.500 And here again, I think that, you know, people need to be educated about not not in a sort of silly top down way, but but explaining people why they do certain things, not not not not forcing them to pay extra pennies for soda or something like that, but just explaining why you are doing the stupid stuff that you are doing may actually help more.

01:01:36.780 So, uh, uh, that's, uh, good on the educational side.

01:01:41.080 We're living in an era right now where a little bit more of a force is, uh, intact today in America over choice.

01:01:46.800 It used to be a big choice country.

01:01:48.360 Now it's more force.

01:01:49.500 You better do this or else that, that, that, that, that, that.

01:01:51.880 We're kind of going in that direction, which concerns certain people.

01:01:54.620 But one of the things we talked about was, uh, uh, oil oil, uh, uh, prices going up and, you know, what if it goes up?

01:02:02.340 It's gone down.

01:02:03.160 Now it's at a point where the guys are making some money.

01:02:04.960 Texas people are making money, but you get some countries that are flat out coming and saying, look, by 2030, we're going to be 50% electric cars by 2050.

01:02:16.040 We're a hundred percent electric cars.

01:02:17.840 U S has come out and said, our goal is to be, you know, 25% by 2030.

01:02:23.260 You've got general motors.

01:02:24.440 You've got these cars are manufacturers.

01:02:26.080 Big ones are coming out saying this is the direction we're going.

01:02:28.480 Uh, what's, what's going to happen to oil come 10, 20 years from now?

01:02:32.300 What, what need are we going to have for oil 10, 20 years from now?

01:02:35.480 Well, much will depend on what happens in terms of other innovation.

01:02:38.540 Much will happen.

01:02:39.520 You know, if, if we have a finally, look, people are probably not going to change their minds about fission, which is unfortunate.

01:02:46.580 Uh, because fission nuclear is a marvel.

01:02:50.060 It's been around for 70 years.

01:02:51.800 It produces plenty of energy without any CO2 emissions.

01:02:56.360 But for reasons which are difficult for me to understand, people just don't want fission.

01:03:00.560 But if we could have fusion and get plenty of energy and electricity from, from fusion, which is much, much safer, um, than even fission reactors, then, uh, then, then, then, you know, that, that could be one way in which you decrease your reliance on fossil fuels,

01:03:15.580 such as oil, um, other things, breakthroughs in hydrogen, um, maybe even solar could become more, uh, more, um, efficient and things like that.

01:03:26.980 So, so, uh, the, the future for oil doesn't seem very bright.

01:03:31.220 Um, and, but, but remember that only a few decades ago, people have been worrying to death about, about high stratospheric prices of oil.

01:03:40.220 Mm-hmm.

01:03:40.620 And in fact, just a few decades ago, people have been worrying about running out of all sorts of natural resources.

01:03:47.220 In fact, that's not what we are seeing.

01:03:49.220 What we are seeing is that natural resources are becoming cheaper over time.

01:03:54.220 And that's very counterintuitive because, because a lot of people still think that if population of the world is growing, natural resources must be diminishing and therefore becoming more expensive.

01:04:05.220 Yep.

01:04:06.220 That is not what we found.

01:04:07.220 Uh, over at the Simon project, what we found was that between 1980 and, uh, 2020, world's population increased by 75%.

01:04:16.220 But the prices of natural resources fell by 75%.

01:04:19.220 There's a one to one offset.

01:04:22.220 Every one percent increase in population decreases the prices of natural resources by one percent.

01:04:28.220 It's a very counterintuitive finding.

01:04:29.220 Interesting.

01:04:30.220 Yeah.

01:04:31.220 It's a very counterintuitive, but it is real.

01:04:32.220 Every one percent increase in population decreases the value of resources by one percent.

01:04:36.220 Uh, decreases the price of resources by one percent.

01:04:38.220 So what's happening, obviously, is that you have more people innovating and coming up with solutions to, to, to problems.

01:04:45.220 Yeah.

01:04:46.220 Uh, we are becoming, uh, you know, we, we save resources, uh, instead of, uh, um, you know, a, a, a, a pound of aluminum now produces many more Coke cans than it did before.

01:04:58.220 Our cars are much more efficient.

01:05:01.220 Just to give you an example, you know, a Ford track in 1970 produced like 12 miles in the city.

01:05:06.220 Today it's 24 miles in the city on a, what is it, on a gallon or something like that.

01:05:11.220 Um, uh, F-130, F-150, F-150, that's the one.

01:05:15.220 Um, so, uh, so we conserve more and we are also coming up with different ways of, uh, we also, um, we also no longer use certain things which we used before.

01:05:27.220 So, um, uh, one way, I don't know, we used to make candles out of whale, uh, whale brains, right?

01:05:37.220 Out of whale fat.

01:05:38.220 We no longer do that.

01:05:39.220 We use, we use electricity.

01:05:41.220 We no longer use bird poop, guano, in order to fertilize our fields.

01:05:46.220 We now use, um, we now use, uh, artificial, uh, fertilizer.

01:05:51.220 So there are many ways in which, in which humanity is actually getting around the resource problem and making resources actually decoupling, decoupling economy from, from resources.

01:06:02.220 There's a wonderful book which I highly recommend to your listeners, um, in addition to 10 Global Trends.

01:06:07.220 Uh, it's, it's Andrew McAfee's, uh, more from less.

01:06:11.220 And what Andrew found is that, um, I would recommend that you have him on your show.

01:06:16.220 What Andrew found was that, um, truly sophisticated economies like the United States and United Kingdom reached their peak usage of natural resources in 2000.

01:06:26.220 And since then, there has been a decoupling going on between, uh, between, uh, between economic growth and use of resources.

01:06:33.220 So today, we are using absolutely, not relatively, but absolutely fewer resources than we did 20 years ago, even though the economy continues to grow.

01:06:41.220 20% less resources than 20?

01:06:43.220 No, uh, we are using, uh, in absolute terms, the tonnage of copper and nickel and, and whatever else is lower today than what it was in 2000,

01:06:54.220 even though the economy is obviously, whatever it is, higher.

01:06:58.220 I don't know.

01:06:59.220 Right.

01:07:00.220 20% higher.

01:07:01.220 Sure.

01:07:02.220 15%, I don't know.

01:07:03.220 So there has been this decoupling going on.

01:07:04.220 Um, you know, we are no longer dealing necessarily with a lot of resources.

01:07:08.220 A lot of, a lot of wealth that is produced in the West is in form of knowledge, in bits, uh, not, not in form of, um, you know, um, physical stuff.

01:07:16.220 Let, let, let me ask this question.

01:07:17.220 Did you say from 1980 to 2020 the population grew by 75%?

01:07:22.220 Correct.

01:07:23.220 So, so let me get this straight.

01:07:25.220 You're saying the population grew 75% from 1980 to today.

01:07:29.220 Correct.

01:07:30.220 But you're saying it's going to be around 1 billion higher or 1 billion less of what we have today, which is 8 billion.

01:07:38.220 2100.

01:07:39.220 Yes, because.

01:07:40.220 How does that make any sense?

01:07:41.220 Because the crucial thing is the TFR, total fertility rate, which was much higher in, uh.

01:07:44.220 The 2.4 versus the 5?

01:07:46.220 Yes, because it was much higher in 1980.

01:07:48.220 How, what was that number?

01:07:50.220 What was TFR in 1980?

01:07:51.220 I can't remember what it was, but it would have been somewhere between 5 and 2.4.

01:07:55.220 Maybe it was like 4.

01:07:57.220 1980 TFR.

01:07:58.220 Now I'm curious because that is, so, so you, you've read the articles where Bill Gates, hey, what's your biggest concern right now?

01:08:05.220 1980 TFR was 1.77.

01:08:09.220 In the United States.

01:08:10.220 Whatever that number is.

01:08:11.220 So that's the statistic.

01:08:12.220 If you see 1980, for us to double from 19.

01:08:16.220 That's the United States.

01:08:17.220 That's the United States.

01:08:18.220 You have to put in global.

01:08:20.220 Okay.

01:08:21.220 Global TFR.

01:08:22.220 And how does that look so far?

01:08:25.220 Fertility rates.

01:08:26.220 We can look at that.

01:08:27.220 I am so curious right now to see what that was in 1980.

01:08:33.220 Children per woman, in 1980, was around 4.

01:08:39.220 So 1965, 1984, today 2.4.

01:08:45.180 And that's how you get a 75% increase between 1980 and 2020.

01:08:48.880 And that's why we could end up with fewer people in 2100 than we have now.

01:08:52.220 Well, let me ask you.

01:08:53.220 What did Bill Gates say?

01:08:54.220 I missed that one.

01:08:55.220 No, no, Bill Gates said the biggest concern he has is the population growth, so, you know.

01:08:59.720 I respectfully disagree.

01:09:00.720 I like Bill Gates very much, but I disagree with that.

01:09:03.340 I'm on the same page as Musk, Elon Musk.

01:09:08.740 He says that depopulation is number one threat to humanity or number two threat to humanity

01:09:13.760 after AI.

01:09:14.760 Meanwhile, he wants to go live on Mars.

01:09:16.860 So how does that make any sense?

01:09:18.280 So he wants to go to Mars and start his own little community.

01:09:22.780 He's probably worried about AI.

01:09:24.060 So on the AI part, so let's talk about AI.

01:09:26.540 I'm not a specialist on that.

01:09:27.540 I know you're not.

01:09:28.540 I just want to hear your opinion.

01:09:29.540 I want to hear your opinion on AI and Iran because you had a couple of things to say

01:09:32.560 about Iran.

01:09:33.680 But on the AI side, hey, you know where Musk is with AI.

01:09:37.200 You know, hey, we're eventually going to need UBI.

01:09:39.820 Because at one point, and he said this two weeks ago, at one point, people are going

01:09:43.400 to choose to have physical labor or not have physical labor.

01:09:48.380 So we're going to be forced to have UBI.

01:09:50.200 You know, we're not going to have a choice to do that.

01:09:53.080 Do you agree with that?

01:09:55.220 Okay.

01:09:56.220 So I started off being a proponent of UBI.

01:10:01.420 I now have a slightly different view on that because I think that work is about much more

01:10:09.600 than just earning money.

01:10:10.600 It's also about giving you a sense of meaning in life.

01:10:12.940 And that's especially true.

01:10:13.840 I agree.

01:10:14.840 Especially true in a rapidly secularizing society where a lot of people don't have religion.

01:10:22.460 I don't, I take no issue with that one way or another.

01:10:25.760 And also maybe don't have families.

01:10:30.580 You get meaning in life out of three things, three big things.

01:10:35.480 Maybe there are more, but it's family, religion, or work.

01:10:41.140 And if you have none, then I think that leads to a lot of unhappiness, a lot of drug use,

01:10:45.900 a lot of drug abuse, a lot of deaths of despair and things like that.

01:10:50.380 So I think that work is important for giving people meaning in life.

01:10:53.860 I'm personally irreligious, but work obviously fulfills me tremendously.

01:10:57.900 Now, now, so what I'm saying now is, sure, go ahead with UBI, but try it at a state level.

01:11:08.020 In other words, don't impose UBI on the United States.

01:11:11.580 But as a whole, try it at a state level and see how it works.

01:11:16.240 If people get more jobs, if they are happier, then we can talk about it and then we can see

01:11:21.960 if we can scale it up.

01:11:23.240 But in the meantime, let's start small and let's see what happens.

01:11:25.960 Yeah.

01:11:26.960 I hope they start it in Vermont and just stay there and just keep it there and not come

01:11:31.340 to any other states.

01:11:32.980 The concern I have with UBI is we learned what happened with UBI the last 12 months.

01:11:37.860 We gave a few trillion dollars of UBI, essentially, when the money went out to folks.

01:11:42.820 And what happened the last 12 months?

01:11:44.900 The billionaires became so rich that they've never had this kind of money before.

01:11:49.100 So the rich became richer due to UBI.

01:11:51.800 Why?

01:11:52.800 Because you give money to people that don't know how to handle it, they're going to go

01:11:55.440 buy products of folks who ran a business and they're going to make their money.

01:11:59.100 Money always flows to the top.

01:12:00.420 That's my opinion.

01:12:01.420 I may be wrong, but I think money is always going to flow to the top.

01:12:03.800 So I think the rich is probably going to be like, yeah, do UBI.

01:12:06.000 I don't care.

01:12:07.000 I have a net.

01:12:08.000 Free money eventually will end up in my pocket.

01:12:09.000 And your money is going to end up in my pockets anyway.

01:12:10.960 So the more UBI they do, the Warrens and the AOCs, that money ends up with the people

01:12:16.340 they hate the most.

01:12:18.000 That's just how math works.

01:12:19.240 Now, rail Kurzweil has a slightly different vision of the future and the people behind

01:12:26.240 singularity, which is that at some point in the future, we could have machines doing all

01:12:33.240 the work.

01:12:34.240 And people own machines.

01:12:36.240 And some people will own machines.

01:12:38.240 But the point is that even then, I think, some form of mental exertion, physical exertion,

01:12:48.060 some sort of a goal will be very important because people without goals, without meaning

01:12:53.240 are not, you know, it's not a good thing.

01:12:56.240 I don't disagree.

01:12:58.240 You know, anytime I've had too much time on my hand, I dyed my hair orange.

01:13:02.240 I did some weird things.

01:13:04.240 The more active I am, the more things I'm doing, the fewer dumb things I do for whatever 0.88

01:13:09.240 reason.

01:13:10.240 I like activity.

01:13:11.240 Too much.

01:13:12.240 It's perfectly possible that, you know, it's another.

01:13:15.240 I don't want orange hair.

01:13:16.240 I'm just, I'm not going to do it.

01:13:17.240 Another trend which we have is, of course, that people are working less than they used

01:13:20.240 to.

01:13:21.240 In high-income countries between 1950 and 2020, the amount of hours of work spent fell

01:13:28.240 by 20%.

01:13:29.240 So we have more time to spend with our own minds, thinking about the many ways in which

01:13:35.240 we are maybe falling short of our own standards or comparing ourselves to other people.

01:13:40.240 And when that happens, that's also a problem.

01:13:43.240 Yeah.

01:13:44.240 You know, in 1880, the average American worked 69.1 hours per week.

01:13:47.240 Yeah, I'm not surprised at all.

01:13:49.240 Today it's 39.

01:13:51.240 The city where people work the most hours per week is a city called Plano.

01:13:55.240 Plano in Texas.

01:13:56.240 They average 41.7, like nearly 42 hours.

01:14:00.240 And there's some other places, like that's 33, 34, but they're at the top.

01:14:04.240 Last thoughts.

01:14:05.240 You were saying something about the Shah with Iran. 0.72

01:14:07.240 And it was an opinion.

01:14:08.240 It's not what you study.

01:14:09.240 And I'm not...

01:14:10.240 It's not what I study.

01:14:11.240 We're trying to make a small talk about, of course, your own background.

01:14:15.240 And now we were talking about the Shah and where it went wrong. 0.80

01:14:19.240 And then you had the Islamic Revolution. 0.76

01:14:21.240 And, you know, we are all paying the price for that in the sense that we have this very ugly and repressive regime in Iran for the last 40 years. 0.74

01:14:29.240 I, you know, Shah was a modernizer who tried to really bring Iran forward. 0.62

01:14:36.240 I think that probably there were a lot of people who were very dissatisfied with the pace of reforms, right?

01:14:44.240 I mean, you look at videos from, from Tehran in 1970s and you have women with the Western hairdos and miniscuits and things like that. 0.55

01:14:53.240 It's unbelievable.

01:14:54.240 So there was a conservative backlash, but also it's not like Shah was a, was a saint.

01:14:58.240 I mean, there was a lot of corruption going on, especially amongst the government officials. 0.92

01:15:02.240 Savak, the, the secret police was brutal, but in no way as brutal as what we have in Iran now, of course, where they, you know, string homosexuals from, from lampposts. 0.97

01:15:12.240 I mean, it's absolutely insane. 0.94

01:15:14.240 Yeah.

01:15:15.240 And so, you know, heroic failure, unfortunately, he, he, he didn't get us where we need to be.

01:15:23.240 Nobody makes that dramatic of a positive impact in a country with being normal.

01:15:30.240 It's just not going to happen because they have to have, it's a complicated individual, you know, who the Shah was.

01:15:36.240 But it's another example of what happens when a country makes such great advancement that people either become greedy or they start complaining.

01:15:45.240 And what do the complainers do?

01:15:47.240 They bring the current Iran that they have. 1.00

01:15:49.240 And I'm in, I'm in U.S. right now because of what Jimmy Carter did when he went to Iran.

01:15:53.240 And Jimmy Carter's got to run for his money right now because he used to be known as the worst president, but things have changed.

01:15:58.240 And he's probably sleeping much better today because of the current climate.

01:16:02.240 Anyways, having said that, Dr. Tupi, thanks for coming out, folks.

01:16:05.240 We're going to put the link below to his book, The 10 Global Trends, written by Dr. Tupi.

01:16:12.240 Link will be below for you guys to be able to order it and read it.

01:16:14.240 Appreciate you for coming out.

01:16:15.240 I really enjoyed this.

01:16:16.240 My pleasure.

01:16:17.240 Thank you very much.

01:16:18.240 Yes.

01:16:19.240 Interesting interview.

01:16:20.240 Which of those top trends he talked about concerns you the most?

01:16:22.240 I'm curious.

01:16:23.240 Comment below.

01:16:24.240 I want to hear about it.

01:16:25.240 If you enjoyed it, press the thumbs up.

01:16:26.240 Subscribe to the channel.

01:16:27.240 And if you enjoyed this interview, I think you'll also enjoy Sit Down I Did with Gadsad

01:16:31.240 maybe two months ago.

01:16:33.240 We hit it off.

01:16:34.240 You're going to laugh.

01:16:35.240 You're going to crack up.

01:16:36.240 You're going to question some things as well.

01:16:37.240 If you've not watched it, click over here.

01:16:38.240 Take care, everybody.

01:16:39.240 Bye-bye.

Valuetainment - September 17, 2021

10 Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript