10 Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know
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Summary
Dr. Marianne Toupi is the editor of Human Progress, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and the co-author of The Simon Project, a book that focuses on the 10 Global Trends. She has worked on the Council on Foreign Relations commissions on Angola and advised the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA and the U.S. Department of State of Central Europe.
Transcript
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My guest today is Dr. Marianne Toupi, who wrote this book that has to do with the 10
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To describe him in a proper way, he is the editor of humanprogress.org, a senior fellow
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at Cato Institute, Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, and the co-author of the Simon
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He specializes in globalization and global well-being in politics and economics of Europe
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He has worked on the Council on Foreign Relations Commissions on Angola and advised the Central
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Intelligence Agency, CIA, and the U.S. Department of State of Central Europe.
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Thank you so much for being a guest on Vietaim.
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So my best friend when I was in Germany at a refugee camp, his name was Jan Stav.
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Jan Stav, his sister's name was Katarina Stav, and they were from Czech.
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You've been interviewed by everybody pretty much at this point.
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Obviously, you've been on TV as well, but I'm talking more to podcasters.
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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.
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Trend number three, are we running out of resources?
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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?
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Well, about 10 years ago, I read a book by a British author, Matt Ridley, called The Rational Optimist.
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And the book was just filled with very interesting statistics I didn't know about.
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And I thought to myself, well, you know, why don't we put all of these very interesting statistics online on the Internet?
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And then, of course, once we started looking into it, we realized that there is a wealth of evidence, wealth of statistical evidence,
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showing that the world is actually becoming much better along many different dimensions of human well-being.
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In fact, a few years ago, Americans were polled on whether they think that the world is getting better or worse.
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And 66% of Americans thought that the world was getting worse.
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Only 6% of Americans thought that the world was getting better.
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In reality, most things that we will discuss today are, in fact, improving.
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A number of people have come to similar conclusions, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker.
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Then, of course, Hans Rosling, famous from the TED Talks.
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There's a wonderful website called Our World in Data with Max Rosa from Oxford University.
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So people who don't want to dwell in doom and catastrophism, but who are actually interested
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about the real state of the world, can just go online and find out about the real state
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So you're a major, BA in International Relations and Classics from the University of Virginia
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So if I was in high, and then you got a PhD also in international, so this is what you've
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studied from University of St. Andrews in Great Britain.
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So I was always interested in economic history and human progress.
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Well, because I always thought, well, I grew up under communism, where things weren't all
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You know, and then I came to the West, and I realized that things could be much better.
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And so I started being interested in things like, well, why are some countries poor?
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And then, of course, once you come to the West, you realize that a lot of people are very
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conflicted about, or rather are disappointed by their standards of living.
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They think that somehow, you know, it is not good enough, and they complain a lot.
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And then, so I thought to myself, well, we cannot compare them to Eastern Europe.
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We cannot compare them to Africa or so on.
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Why don't we compare Western standards of living today with Western standards of living
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And that's what I mean by economic history, comparing living standards today with those
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And then you realize just how incredibly lucky we are, and how incredibly recent progress,
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So, would you, by the way, I already, just from the first two minutes, I got a bunch of
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But would you say, in communism, people who live in, my family, my mother said they're all
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Their Bible was a Karl Marx, communist manifestos.
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If they grew up in Russia, Baku, they thought Stalin, Lenin, good people, great leaders, strong
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leaders, right, do you think a citizen in a communistic regime doesn't even know what
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Because who the hell is going to listen to you?
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Like, you know, you can't create a Yelp in a communistic regime because you can write
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So, in a communistic society, they don't know how to complain.
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But in a capitalistic society, where there's so many opportunities, it's almost like the
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They know how to complain because everything's been handed to them.
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I think it's a question of freedom of speech and freedom of association and free media.
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So, take the extant communist regime today, like North Korea.
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A lot of people genuinely don't know that they live in a slave state that is, you know, 100
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They don't have access to good information, especially in the rural areas.
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In the urban areas, people may get access to clandestinely imported flash drives that tell
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But, you know, especially in the world before the internet and cell phones and so on, it
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was very difficult, especially in the poor rural areas of communist world, to know that
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there were countries which were doing much better.
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So, if the government propaganda apparatus tells you all the time you are living the life
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of dreams, then some people might actually believe it.
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But once in Eastern Europe, once true information started filtering through, through VCRs and through
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Western broadcasts and so on, people started seeing what life is real like in the West compared
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And communism lost all of its legitimacy and therefore it collapsed.
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You know, last week I interviewed, we had an event at the vault, called the vault in Miami,
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We had different speakers at Billy Beane there.
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One of the speakers I brought out was Gary Kasparov.
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And you know who Gary Kasparov is the famous, the legendary, the greatest of all time, grand
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master chess player who 255 months ago, he was number one, never lost.
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Blue, anyways, there's something blue, the machine he lost to.
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And then there's some controversy with the machine, by the way, that there was people behind
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Anyways, but when him and I were talking, he says, Patrick, just know, if you ask me
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Do not ask a question that you don't want me to answer.
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That's my kind of a guy, because I'm going to interview someone like that.
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He says, well, when I lived in Russia, everything was telling us how great of a country.
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Russia is the greatest country in the world, and U.S. is the enemy, and all this other
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But the moment I became a good chess player at 13, I started traveling, and he says,
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When I saw what capitalism produces, I could not believe it.
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And he says, I wanted more of capitalism, not of communism.
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My first visit to the Western country was in 1989, Christmas, going to Vienna.
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And it was like stepping out of a black and white movie into a color movie.
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Communism collapsed in November 1989, and we got to go to the West for the first time as
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Because in 1989, July 15th, is when we went to Germany at a refugee camp, and my friend
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Because they were escaping communism, and we're together.
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It was Albania, it was Czech, it was Poland, it was Yugoslavia, the old Yugoslavia.
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And what did the media propaganda at that time under the communist regime,
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what was it telling the populace, and what was school, like when you were going to school
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at 13, you're going to remember what class was like.
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So what was school teaching you about Czech and U.S., and what was media telling you about
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Well, the upbringing was very similar to what Gary Kasparov has had, which is to say that
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the media was blaring at you all the time about, you know, how everything wonderful was.
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You know, we were constantly meeting these production targets, you know, and everything was rosy.
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And, of course, schools were an apparatus of indoctrination.
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One of the reasons why communists were always very keen on making their people literate was,
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of course, that it was an easier way to propagandize, to, you know, to allow them to read in the media
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only what the government wanted them to read in the media.
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But I came from a deeply anti-communist family, and so the conversations around the dinner table
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And I distinctly remember, I was about 10 years old, and I was walking from my grandmother's house
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down a street, which was, you know, the main shopping mall in my hometown.
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And, you know, in communist countries, on every lamppost, you would have a speaker
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that was blaring government propaganda at you, you know, for a few hours a day.
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And as I was walking by these shops, which are completely empty, whilst listening to the radio
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telling me what a great country I was living in, and how we once again met the four-year plan
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in three years, and things like that, I did have a bit of an awakening, you know,
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that I was living in, it was like living in two parallel universes.
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At school, you had to say certain things that were expected from me, but in reality,
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it was obvious that the country wasn't working the way that the government was telling us
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What percentage of the populace at the time was like your parents, who were anti-communist,
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Well, low-key, in a sense that, you know, personal conversations were happening.
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You can't go to the public and say, I don't believe in the regime.
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Well, obviously, it had to be high enough so that when the Berlin Wall fell at the start
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of November 1989, people realized that communism was, at this point, very weak, and they all
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went to the streets, and the fear was gone by that time, by the late 1980s.
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We no longer feared that the result would be mass executions, and, yeah,
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From my paternal grandparents, my paternal grandparents were old enough to remember
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the First Republic before the Second World War, and they remembered that it was possible
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to live in a prosperous and democratic country.
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Czechoslovakia was one of the richest countries in the world between the wars.
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There was an iron curtain around Czechoslovakia.
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I mean, you couldn't get a visa to go to the West, obviously, because if you could get
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a visa to go to the West, then everybody would leave.
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So they just put up barbed wire and watchtowers, and hundreds of people got slaughtered on the
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border trying to flee into the West, shot, torn apart by dogs, electrocuted, things like
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What was life, like, what was fun at 12 years old?
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All you need is a couple of sticks and, you know, play swords or musketeers with your mates,
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or you go and, I don't know, climb cherry trees and things like that.
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I think the only thing that I regret is, of course, never having access to things like
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Western cartoons and Disney and things like that, because, of course, all of those were
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So if you got it, it was underground when you got it?
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You got it on a cassette, yeah, which was, you know, which was, like, re-recorded and
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re-recorded and re-recorded with the quality constantly diminishing.
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Well, we got movies in Iran, but if you were caught with Rocky IV, you'd go straight to
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And you'd watch these movies, and somebody would do the audio translation, and you would
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listen to somebody doing the Farsi sound of Rocky or somebody doing whatever the movies
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I was born October 18th, so you're going 79 on.
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Everybody was drunk to get through the monopony.
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That was one of the ways, probably, to keep people distracted.
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So going back to it, you know how they say democracy typically lasts 250 years?
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That number is typically thrown around with 250 years.
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Historically, how long does a communistic regime last?
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Like you said, it got to a point where the regime got weak.
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They could no longer do what they were doing, and then we revolted against it, right?
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Is there a timeline where how long that system lasts?
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So, I mean, basically what happened, Russia was taken over by the communists in 1917, then
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because of Hitler's defeat, thank God, but Hitler was defeated, and the Soviet army marched
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into Berlin, and of course, all that territory which they covered in Central and Eastern Europe,
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they kept for themselves as their satellite states.
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So we exchanged one totalitarian regime, which was the Nazi occupation, for the Soviet occupation,
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Other regimes obviously survived longer or shorter.
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You said 66% of Americans believe the world is getting worse.
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If you turn on the media, the media is telling you this is the most racist time of all time.
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This is the worst time to, you know, things are terrible.
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You know, civilization is not going in the right direction.
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Why do you think 66% of Americans believe it's the worst?
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Well, part of it has to do with the news, in a sense that if it bleeds, it leads, right?
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News is about stuff that happens, and what tends to happen are dramatic things like airplanes
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flying into buildings or a famine or, you know, what's happening in Afghanistan right now,
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Terrible things happen very quickly, and they are easier to medialize.
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Good things tend to happen on a different time scale, gradually, over a very long period of time,
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There is never a time, a day or an hour, that can be on the front pages of the New York Times
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that, okay, overnight, the United States stopped being poor and became rich.
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Good things tend to happen over a very long time, and gradually,
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So those are some of the things why people believe the world is getting worse.
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It is the dramatic event that gets pulled out of your memory file at a much more frequent stage,
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and therefore you think that danger and horrible things happen in the world
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at a much, with much greater frequency than they really do.
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For example, a lot of people get still obsessed about terrorism,
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whereas, in fact, many more Americans die by sleeping on a wet bathroom floor.
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But that's not a sort of memory that you can pull out of your memory file very quickly.
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Also, I think that it's probably fair to say that we have evolved to be pessimistic.
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You see, if you hear a noise behind a bush, you can deal with it in two different ways.
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You can either proceed on your way or you can run away.
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Well, if you proceed on your way and there's a tiger or a lion hiding behind it,
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Your genes get, your optimistic genes get wiped out of the pool.
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So, an overreaction to a potential threat, such as running away,
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is less costly from a genetic evolution standpoint than underreaction to a potential threat.
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Well, in a sense that you get to pass your genes on in the long run,
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whereas underreaction to a potential threat is deadly, can be deadly.
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So, the optimists get weeded out of the gene pool, the pessimistic gene remains.
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And it's very difficult for human brains to cope with the fact that the world is a much better place now
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because the world has really changed only in the last 200 years so dramatically.
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So, one of the things you said earlier when we said 66% to 6%,
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and then you said, you know, most things have improved, some things have not.
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And then we have the 10 global trends that we can get.
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Well, almost everything has improved economically.
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Many fewer infants die between the age, you know, between birth and year one.
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There is a much greater supply of food than before.
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So, economically, it's unquestionable that we are much better off.
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We are also much better off medically and scientifically and technologically.
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You just go to Whole Foods and buy something that was produced, you know,
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on a large farm that is, you know, tended to buy technology and so forth.
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But I would say that even morally we have improved.
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Just consider the sorts of things that humanity used to do to each other.
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Exposure of unwanted children, meaning letting them die?
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Sure, mistreatment still happens, but not to the extent as we knew in, say,
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ancient Greece and Rome or indeed in the Middle East.
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Empathia, where women were basically properties of men.
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So, along all of these different dimensions, humans have also become more moral.
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Our homicide rates are a fraction of what they were 500 years ago.
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We have fewer casualties in terms of conflicts when they do happen,
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and war is also on the decline, but conflicts when they do happen,
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they tend to result in fewer casualties than before.
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So, those are some of the things that the world has improved.
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It's actually very difficult to come up with something.
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I mean, you know, a lot of people believe that the environment is not improving
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Now, the whole point of human progress and of the book that I have written
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is to explain away all the problems, but to try to convince people that we are not like other animals.
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When there is a problem that we just wait for our community or our herd to collapse.
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We are adaptive species, so we can adapt to changing climactic conditions,
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and we are also problem solvers, so that we can solve them.
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So, you know, climate change is one thing that people are pointing to and saying,
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you know, this could be a catastrophic problem.
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Well, it won't be that much of a problem if we can get all of our energy,
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or most of our energy, from non-CO2-producing energy sources,
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So the only thing that you would say is climate change,
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maybe the only thing that we're looking at as an issue.
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But aside from that, there's not a lot of things that's shown that's worse today than it was before.
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So, for example, freedom of the press is much better than what it was in the 1980s,
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Okay, we included a trend in the book about freedom of the press,
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because freedom of the press is still much better than what it was, say, 40 years ago.
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So the world is much more democratic than the one it was in the 1970s.
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I mean, you know, autocracies were here, democracies were here.
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But in the last 10 years, we have seen some democratic backsliding, okay,
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But it is still much better than what it was 40 or 50 years ago.
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So along all of these dimensions, things are really improving.
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When the audience, when the room is large enough,
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there will always be somebody who will find what I think about as a positive trend
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So, for example, I would say that increasing human wealth is a good thing.
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But somebody, perhaps on the extreme environmentalist side,
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might say increased wealth leads to increased consumption
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and therefore greater climactic damage and therefore that is bad.
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Or, alternatively, I might say, in fact, I do say,
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that education of women is an unalloyed good.
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But somebody who is an extremist religious person, let's say a Taliban,
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are not terribly keen on female education, as you know.
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And they feel that educating women is a bad thing.
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But my definition of progress is a definition of progress
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Why do they have a bigger mic than everybody else
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Why are the people that are saying too much wealth is not good
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and, you know, 11 million people follow an AOC?
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This is bad because it's all about climate change
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Why is she being heard by tens of millions saying she makes sense?
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women, why are they getting so much credibility?
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Well, first of all, the world is definitely not ending in 12 years.
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when you have two people basically agreeing with each other
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and are congregated somewhere along the middle of the public opinion.
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It's always good to get somebody from the absolute extremes
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who can scream at each other and present a real contrast.
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And I think that is the key why these people get more airtime
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That's why maybe UFC is doing better than some of these other sports
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Okay, one of the trends I want to talk to you about is population, right?
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One of the trends you're talking about, I think it's number four,
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The world population will likely peak at 9.8 billion at around 2080.
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At around 2060 and fall to 9.5 billion by 2100.
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so as you know, there are about 8 billion people in the world today.
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And according to Lancet, which is a reputable publication,
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by 2100 there is either going to be 9 billion people in the world
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There could be many fewer people in the world by 2100.
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So as wealth increases, women get educated and enter the labor force.
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They tend to have many fewer children than when they work at home.
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If a woman cannot make money in the labor market, stays at home,
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then, well, if she can go into the labor market
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and make thousands of dollars or tens of thousands of dollars,
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she is much, you know, she's likely, she can make that decision.
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So total fertility rate has declined from about 5 in 1960 to about 2.4 today.
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In the United States, about, yeah, from about 5 to 2.4.
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Now, the issue here is that actually a replacement level is 2.1,
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meaning that if we want to keep the world's population constant,
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we need 2.1 children per woman to just maintain the current population.
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In Korea, South Korea, it's one woman, one baby per woman per lifetime.
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Now, the reason why we included population growth in the 10 global trends
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is because a lot of people are concerned that we have too many people in the world.
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However, I'm very ambivalent about this trend because progress, economic, technological,
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medical, scientific, depends on ideas, and ideas are produced by people.
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The fewer people you have, the fewer people you have to produce ideas
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which then can reconnect or interact with each other
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So, you know, we could really face a world in, say, 60 years' time or 80 years' time
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that we'll have too few people to maintain our current rate of innovation
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and also to pay for all the commitments that our governments have made
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So you mean to tell me in U.S., because we are a capitalistic nation,
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which is competitive competition, women are going to sit there
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and have to make a decision at one point saying, why have a kid?
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Rather than working 2,500 hours per year like the average competitor,
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I can only compete at 2,000 hours because the other 500 hours I'm having to raise a child
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So they're going to say, I don't want to have two kids.
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.
00:30:04.100
I mean, our population still continues to grow partly because of immigration.
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
00:30:26.560
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,
00:30:55.780
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?
00:31:09.740
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...
00:31:41.440
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?
00:31:52.840
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
00:32:06.580
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
00:32:27.200
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.
00:33:05.400
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,
00:33:22.080
Then you go to another school, like let's just say Wharton Business School, that's teaching
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
00:33:38.660
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
00:34:20.660
So maybe the university model is unsustainable, partly because it is so incredibly expensive.
00:34:28.380
I mean, there is huge tuition inflation because of all the free money that is being, or rather
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
00:35:03.140
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
00:35:26.460
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
00:35:46.740
We like to interview them to kind of see what the mindset is and how it's being taught.
00:35:51.780
Well, it's very big of you because, of course, leftists don't really talk to people who don't
00:35:55.500
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
00:36:09.800
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.
00:36:36.580
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
00:36:49.880
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
00:37:07.260
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
00:38:00.860
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
00:38:17.620
Today China is, of course, the second largest economy in the world.
00:38:22.640
Because the state has taken its foot off the neck of the Chinese people.
00:38:30.300
It's still a very authoritarian country, but it's nothing compared to what China was before
0.52
00:38:39.000
Same in India, incredibly young and incredibly populous country before 1991, very, very poor.
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.
00:39:13.160
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
00:39:34.600
Steve Jobs was in his 20s with Wozniak, or Zuck was in his 20s, maybe in teens.
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
00:39:57.600
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.
00:40:06.200
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
00:40:24.200
But there are other things that go on in a society.
00:40:28.760
There is also things like, for example, listen to the oldies explain why the world is not
0.97
00:40:37.480
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
00:40:50.540
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.
00:41:05.780
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.
00:41:19.960
It's not like, oh, U.S. is such a young population.
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
00:41:35.780
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
00:41:45.280
So, I'm wondering because if we look at the enemy of the state number one right now, enemy
00:41:52.800
If all the countries were one person, if all the countries were one country, we got 200
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
00:42:15.080
And I'm not saying some don't see U.S. as the top of the list because of how deceiving, you
00:42:22.320
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
00:42:33.300
I ask this question because, to me, I think India's going to play a very important role
00:42:43.260
They pushed back 100 apps from China that they didn't let into India, so they're not afraid
00:42:51.440
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?
00:43:09.060
I think that if I were to predict, you know, how the next, say, 50 years are going to play
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.
00:43:56.720
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.
00:44:09.820
Mathematically, it just doesn't make any sense.
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
00:44:39.260
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
00:44:55.700
The world has to worry when India and China are on the same page.
1.00
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
00:45:15.420
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.
00:45:23.580
Certainly many of their actions, including what they've done to Hong Kong, was completely
00:45:28.940
Hong Kong was, of course, the greatest, possibly the greatest success story of the post-Second
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.
00:45:53.580
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.
00:46:03.580
But for me, any time we underestimate an enemy and they keep getting stronger and stronger
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,
00:46:50.580
We can stop being at each other's throats and things which make us weaker.
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.
00:47:16.240
Right now, it sort of feels like we are not very serious about our own 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.
00:47:33.460
Take some of the countries that would be on China's side.
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.
00:47:58.320
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.
00:48:09.820
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.
00:48:21.040
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
00:48:42.460
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.
00:48:58.760
Are you insinuating that they could have their own market collapse potentially that we're not aware of?
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.
00:50:00.600
Did you see what George Soros, this is very weird, when George Soros, did you see the comments he made about China?
00:50:06.540
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.
00:50:24.680
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.
00:50:39.240
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.
00:50:54.900
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.
00:51:19.280
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.
00:51:34.580
You know, we have plenty of problems of our own.
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.
00:52:30.500
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
00:52:45.000
It may well be that, forgive me, you were saying.
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.
00:52:57.460
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.
00:53:44.820
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.
00:54:01.600
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.
00:54:46.000
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.
00:55:15.680
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.
00:57:53.540
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.
00:58:10.500
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.
00:58:30.040
Right. And that has enough calories to maintain you for for a day.
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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.
00:59:38.280
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.
00:59:54.740
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.
01:00:03.660
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.
01:00:21.700
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.
01:00:30.240
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.
01:01:02.520
Um, and and people have to understand that actually, no, the fridge will be full tomorrow morning and the day.
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.
01:01:49.500
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?
01:02:03.160
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.
01:02:17.840
U S has come out and said, our goal is to be, you know, 25% by 2030.
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.
01:02:39.520
You know, if, if we have a finally, look, people are probably not going to change their minds about fission, which is unfortunate.
01:02:51.800
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.
01:03:40.620
And in fact, just a few decades ago, people have been worrying about running out of all sorts of natural resources.
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.
01:04:07.220
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%.
01:04:22.220
Every one percent increase in population decreases the prices of natural resources by one percent.
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.
01:04:46.220
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.
01:05:01.220
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.
01:05:15.220
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?
01:05:41.220
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.
01:06:43.220
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.
01:07:04.220
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.
01:07:17.220
Did you say from 1980 to 2020 the population grew by 75%?
01:07:25.220
You're saying the population grew 75% from 1980 to today.
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.
01:07:41.220
Because the crucial thing is the TFR, total fertility rate, which was much higher in, uh.
01:07:51.220
I can't remember what it was, but it would have been somewhere between 5 and 2.4.
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?
01:08:27.220
I am so curious right now to see what that was in 1980.
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.
01:08:55.220
No, no, Bill Gates said the biggest concern he has is the population growth, so, you know.
01:09:00.720
I like Bill Gates very much, but I disagree with that.
01:09:08.740
He says that depopulation is number one threat to humanity or number two threat to humanity
01:09:18.280
So he wants to go to Mars and start his own little community.
01:09:29.540
I want to hear your opinion on AI and Iran because you had a couple of things to say
01:09:33.680
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.
01:09:50.200
You know, we're not going to have a choice to do that.
01:10:01.420
I now have a slightly different view on that because I think that work is about much more
01:10:10.600
It's also about giving you a sense of meaning in life.
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.
01:10:30.580
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
01:11:23.240
But in the meantime, let's start small and let's see what happens.
01:11:26.960
I hope they start it in Vermont and just stay there and just keep it there and not come
01:11:32.980
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.
01:11:44.900
The billionaires became so rich that they've never had this kind of money before.
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.
01:12:01.420
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.
01:12:08.000
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
01:12:19.240
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
01:12:38.240
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
01:12:58.240
You know, anytime I've had too much time on my hand, I dyed my hair orange.
01:13:04.240
The more active I am, the more things I'm doing, the fewer dumb things I do for whatever
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01:13:12.240
It's perfectly possible that, you know, it's another.
01:13:17.240
Another trend which we have is, of course, that people are working less than they used
01:13:21.240
In high-income countries between 1950 and 2020, the amount of hours of work spent fell
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.
01:13:44.240
You know, in 1880, the average American worked 69.1 hours per week.
01:13:51.240
The city where people work the most hours per week is a city called Plano.
01:14:00.240
And there's some other places, like that's 33, 34, but they're at the top.
01:14:05.240
You were saying something about the Shah with Iran.
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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.
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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.
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01:14:29.240
I, you know, Shah was a modernizer who tried to really bring Iran forward.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
01:15:47.240
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.
01:16:20.240
Which of those top trends he talked about concerns you the most?
01:16:27.240
And if you enjoyed this interview, I think you'll also enjoy Sit Down I Did with Gadsad