https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=OOkRJb4UbPM
I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jump-started the development of literacy across the entire world. Illiteracy was the norm. The pastor’s home was the first school, and every morning it would begin with singing. The Christian faith is a singing religion. Probably 80% of scripture memorization today exists only because of what is sung. This is amazing. Here we have a Gutenberg Bible, a Bible printed on the press of Johann Gutenberg. Science and religion are opposing forces in the world, but historically that has not been the case. Now the book is available to everyone. From Shakespeare to modern education and medicine and science to civilization itself. It is the most influential book in all of history, and hopefully people can walk away with at least a sense of that. Around 1900, almost everyone worried about the fact that you could see cities becoming more and more congested. You had horse carriages and they lift an enormous amount of manure. So there were lots of people who were really worried about the fact that by extrapolation, by 1920, 1930, all of New York, all of London would be covered by feet and feet of horse manure. How were you going to solve that? And along came the automobile. Again, the point here is not to say that a technology that we then innovated 120 years ago is the right one for today. Eventually that will go the way of the dinosaur. We’ll find other ways, but we should not be kidding ourselves in believing that just wishing it wasn’t so makes it go away. The way you do this is through technology. My concern is that if you get people adjudicating the, what would you call it? The comparative validity of need, you turn the whole world over to people who say, well, you don’t really need that. Well, exactly who are you telling here that they don’t get to have what they need? Because you don’t mean that for yourself. You’re not going to go live in a damn hut in the middle of Africa and burn dung. You’re not proposing that. You’re proposing that these damn poor people in the third world country and maybe in your own country, and there’s too many of those blighters anyways, that they should just be bloody well satisfied with the fact that they’ve got what they have now and they shouldn’t in any manner ever dream of having this sort of wealth of opportunities and security that we have in the West. Hello everyone watching and listening on the on YouTube or associated podcasts. I have the great privilege today of speaking once again to Dr. Bjorn Lombard. We’ve talked several times on my podcast before. It’s always good to talk to him. Dr. Lombard researches the smartest ways to do good with his think tank, the Copenhagen Consensus. He’s worked with hundreds of the world’s top economists and seven Nobel laureates to find and promote the most effective solutions to the world’s greatest challenges from disease and hunger to climate and education. For his work, Lombard was named one of Time magazine’s hundred most influential people of the world. He’s a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a frequent commentator in print and broadcast media for outlets, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, CNN, Fox and the BBC. His monthly column is published in many languages by dozens of influential newspapers across all continents. He’s also a bestselling author whose books include False Alarm, How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor and Fails to Fix the Planet, The Skeptical Environmentalist, Cool It, How to Spend 12,000 per person per year by 2050. Yeah, that’s just impossible to imagine that anyone would ever accept. And also, I think we need to separate. There’s been this tendency in almost all conversation to totally model climate and environment. Now, environment is a lot of other things and it’s, for instance, air pollution and all these other things that are fairly local to you. So degrowth would actually solve climate change because we would stop producing. It wouldn’t solve a lot of the other environmental problems because now we would start burning everything else and we would be terribly poor and life would be horrible in so many other ways. I think fundamentally we just need to get back to realizing that when you’re saying, and these protesters will glue themselves to the roads and say, we don’t want you to use any fossil fuels. But of course, when they come back in their lives, they’re crucially dependent mostly on lots and lots of energy produced by fossil fuels. And they would probably, most of them, not be willing to give that up. And if they’re not even willing to do that, of course, they’re not going to get anyone else to do that just by gluing themselves on highways. What they’re going to do is if they could come up with a new innovation that was cleaner than anything else. If they, instead of gluing themselves to the road, would actually take up university, go and figure out, and it need not be a solution to climate change, but one of those solutions, but one that was actually effective. Then, of course, they would have done real good in the world. And so again, I think that’s the sort of purpose of our whole conversation to say, stop believing this is the end of the world, because it’s not. But also stop believing that the solution to the end of the world is to glue yourself or to just be gloomy or tell everyone we should just stop with everything. The solution is smart technologies. The solution to the end of the world is not to become a frightened tyrant that says, oh, my God, this guy is falling. I need all the power now. I need to make these centralized decisions. These centralized decisions are going to affect every single element of your life and your children’s life, assuming you get to have children at all. And that’s going to bring us towards a more benevolent planet. It’s like none of that’s true. There’s not an apocalypse. You don’t get to be a frightened tyrant. We don’t need centralized top down control of absolutely everything we do. And even if we did have all of that, what we would get wouldn’t be the positive outcome that everyone who’s on that side is touting. What we’d get is the same kind of centralized planning disasters that we’ve seen play out time and time again over the last hundred years all over the world. This is every single way you cut this. This is a bad set of solutions. Now, I want to steal man and a little bit. So, you know, the idea that there are too many people on the planet is actually predicated on you might say data, which is one of the weird things about data, is that if you take a petri dish that’s full of a nutritive medium and you put a mold on it, the mold will grow until it eats all the available nutrients and then it will all die. And so that’s a kind of limits to growth model. But the world in that model is a encapsulated petri dish and the biological agents are mindless, single celled organisms. So you might say, well, that’s not a great metaphor for human beings, because, first of all, human beings aren’t mold or viruses or cancers. We’re a very strange breed of creature because we can we can think and we can react and we can modify the environment and we can modify ourselves. And so it isn’t obvious at all. People say follow the science. The science is Malthusian. We’re all, you know, microorganisms in a petri dish or rats in a colony. We’re going to overpopulate till we devour everything. It’s like, I don’t think so. If you first of all, why would you use single celled organisms as the cardinal metaphor for human for human populations? It’s a preposterous biological metaphor. And one of the things the economists have pointed out, as opposed to the biologists who tend to be more Malthusian repeatedly, is, look, you can you can create your linear models of what’s going to happen if. But what you’re failing to take into account is the proclivity of people to revolutionarily transform the way they interact with the world and to continually figure out how to do more with less. And there’s no indication whatsoever that we’ve run to the end of that process. Quite the contrary, we’d seem to be getting faster at it all the time. And there’s no reason to assume that the limits to growth petri dish model of human catastrophe is the appropriate biological metaphor. That’s not justified by science. And 99 percent of scientists don’t believe it. And one of the things that’s so interesting, you know this perfectly well, is that economists and biologists have been betting against each other really formally since the mid 60s. And the biologists like, what’s his name at Stanford, Paul Ehrlich, who’s been screeching since the mid 60s about the fact that we’re Malthusian organisms doomed to extinction. He’s been wrong in every single one of his predictions and publicly and massively and I would say even murderously wrong in some fundamental sense. So he predicted that there would be way too many people on the planet by the year 2000. That was seriously wrong. He predicted that all of the prices of our commodities were going to spike through the roof as everything became more and more scarce, as there became more and more of us. That was 100 percent wrong. He had a famous bet with Julian Simon and Simon collected, I think, just after the turn of the millennia, because Simon, the economist, claimed that no, no, quite the contrary. As there are more people, there’ll be more commodities, there’ll be more resources and the prices will fall. He even offered Ehrlich the opportunity to pick the basket of commodities they would bet on. And Ehrlich got stomped. And what we’ve seen continually time and time again is the economists have been right, which is that human there’s no limit to human ingenuity. And that also means that if we got food, water, sanitation, opportunity to the billions of people that don’t have it, we would produce a few more spectacular hypergenicists like Elon Musk, let’s say, or Norman Borlaug. And God only knows what sort of efficiency they can produce for us. So the idea that we could convert natural resources into human cognitive ability, that seems like a pretty damn good trade from the perspective of economic flourishing and environmental sustainability. Yeah. So just two points in that. I think it’s incredibly important to remember that it’s not just the Elon Musk’s and the Norman Borlaug’s that make up the world. Also, because you very early on said that you’ve done all this great work and thank you very much. But this is the work of literally many hundreds of the world’s top economists that I’ve helped sort of shepherd together. But there are lots and lots of people involved. And likewise with Norman Borlaug, I’m sure that’s also true with Elon Musk. And so the fundamental point is this is about getting everybody on board with this. And that’s also why I’m so excited we have this conversation, because I think this is about telling you don’t need to be Elon Musk to be on this positive side of history. You need to make sure that you’re pitching into this very long battle in order to make the world better. And again, also, sorry, I’m just being the nerd here, right? But of course, nobody’s 100 percent wrong. Yeah, I get that this is a sort of metaphorical 100 percent. But it’s more the argument here is to recognize that a lot of biologists, and Julian Simon actually wrote about that, the guy you mentioned that the bet with Paul Ehrlich. And he said it is very curious how most of the people who think the world is going to end are typically natural scientists. They’re typically biologists or biologists inspired. And I think that is because the models that cover those and it’s not just mold, but it’s also, you know, fox, what is it, rabbit populations that they will they will sort of interact. And then there’s too many rabbits and then there’s too many foxes and so on. Those are all models of individuals that act without foresight. And it makes sense. That’s how, you know, 99 percent of nature is. But we’re not that. We actually not only know how to think ahead of us, that’s of course why we’re having this conversation. That’s why we’re worried about things like climate change. And again, you mentioned very early in the program that there is sort of evolutionary reasons why we tend to to be worried about stuff. I heard this one guy say, you know, we’re the descendants of the guys who worried about the saber toothed tigers. The guys who said, oh, it’ll be fine, are the ones who didn’t get to pass on their genes. So in that sense, it makes perfect sense. And we should be happy that there’s a lot of people out there pointing out this might be a problem. Oh, my good. This could actually be a problem. We just shouldn’t believe that all of those problems are then all of the ends of the world. Because if our evidence has ever told us or they’re all the same problem, yes, if our evidence has ever told us anything, sorry. That is that overall, we have enormously succeeded. I just want to give you one other data point. You know, in 1900, the average life expectancy on the planet Earth was 32. Today, it’s like 74. We have more than doubled our lifetime. Each one of us has gotten twice the amount the life on this planet. That’s that’s just astounding. And actually, it hasn’t stopped because of technology and because of medical advancement, but also because we get better sanitation and everything else. We actually continuously see life expectancies to go up. It hasn’t done so in the US, and we could talk about that. But globally, it absolutely does. And it still does in the sense of every year you live, you add about three months to your life expectancy. How amazing is that? A stunning statistic. Yeah, that’s OK. So let’s so let’s let’s go back to the biological metaphor here. OK, so we’ve already established, I hope for everyone listening, that we are not mold in a petri dish. That’s a bad metaphor. So now you said, well, maybe we’re foxes and rabbits. And there is this nature red in tooth and claw that’s going to modulate our population by necessity. And that’s sort of the biological argument that even though we’re not mold, let’s say we’re going we’re more like foxes or rabbits and we’re going to multiply until the predators take us out or something like that. But I would say here’s why biologically, that’s not true. So Alfred North Whitehead, I believe it was, said the reason we think. Is so that our ideas can die instead of us. So here’s the human cognitive transformation. So imagine that you go do something stupid and you get killed. Well, that’s not so good. Now you’re dead, but your pattern, even your DNA is no longer around. That’s a dead end. It’s an evolutionary dead end. You did something stupid and now you don’t exist and neither do your descendants. OK, so that’s how animals work. But that’s not how human beings work, because we’ve taken this new leap and our leap is, well, let’s make a virtualized self. Let’s make an let’s make an avatar in imagination. Let’s play out a few different scenarios of what might be. Let’s allow the stupid scenarios to die before we implement them. And then let’s do that broad scale. That’s why we have free speech. So what you and I are doing in this conversation, to the degree that it’s successful, and this is what everyone who’s listening is doing too, is that we’re undergoing a sequence of micro deaths and micro rejuvenations. And so you’ll offer an idea and then all criticize it or add to it and kill some of it and shape it. And then you’ll take that and you’ll kill some of it and shape it. And we’ll toss it back and forth with the hopes that by the time we finally implement it, we actually won’t have to die. And so human beings have substituted the ability to think abstractly, which is partly to die abstractly for the process of real death. And in principle, if we are capable of maintaining open dialogue and engaging in critical thinking, we can make most of the death that would otherwise be necessary to control our populations virtual. We don’t actually have to act it out. We can act it out in simulation and then we can only implement the ideas that seem to be productive. And we’re actually really good at that. The whole human enterprise is precisely that. So that’s another reason why the biological model is just not tenable. We are not of the same kind, even as foxes and rabbits, certainly not of mold and certainly not of cancer or viruses. And so the biologists who are thinking seriously, they have to take this into account. And I don’t think they are, you know, to paint with a broad brush. No, I think I think that is why you have all these economists telling us, actually, in many ways, we have moved on and we’re much better at fixing problems. And again, I think it gives a better way of thinking about problems that you say, yes, it’s great that there are people out there pointing out problems. I’m happy that organizations like Greenpeace are there because they point out and nip at the heels of corrupt officials or governments that don’t do their job and simply tell us these are potential problems. But it shouldn’t be taken as, oh, my God, that means we’re all going to die. No, it means here is another of the many, many problems that have beset us from all time and memorial and that we’ve also fixed and typically fixed in a way that actually left the world better, not worse off. The environment is not purchased at the expense of the economy and the economy is not purchased at the expense of the environment necessarily. They can work in harmony. And we know that. How do we know that? We know that because as you accelerate people up the GDP production curve, so every individual is making more money, you get to a point where people, as we already pointed out, start to take a longer term vision. And that vision includes environmental maintenance. So let’s say we want a vision for the planet on the environmental sustainability side. So how do we do that? Well, why don’t we produce as many people as we possibly can who are as concerned as they can be that their relatively local environment, the one they can actually control, is as green, productive and sustainable as possible. We want billions of people working on this, not just a few. Well, how do we get billions of people working on it? Well, we help them with cheap energy and the provision of plentiful food. We help them provide security for their family and opportunity for their children. And then we enable them to take a longer term view. And they’ll automatically start attending to the sorts of concerns that hypothetically predominate among the environmentalists. And the data that that’s going to happen is very clear. Yeah. So just to take a step back, the economists typically call this the inverse Kutznets curve. So basically what you see with most environmental problems, as you get richer, first problems increase. You get more air pollution as you industrialize in China or in India. And then once you get sufficiently rich that this is actually meant now your kids are not dying, you have enough food, then you start to worry and say, I’d actually like to cough less. And so you get the other side of this. So there is a sort of intermediate disconnect. So once you start getting people out of poverty, they actually get more pollution. Now, if you lived in that situation, you would undoubtedly make the same decision. You would say, I’d like to have more food and more opportunity for my kids. And then I’ll cough a little bit. That’s, remember what we also did back in the 1800s when pretty much all cities in Europe and the US were terribly, terribly polluted, but we were getting richer and richer. So there is this disconnect for a short time, but it’s very hard to imagine that the right way is to say, well, then let’s not at all start down the route of getting much better off and actually living in a world that we both like and that where we’ll actually be worried about the environment in the long run. We’ll be back in one moment. First, we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan’s new series, Exodus. So the Hebrews created history as we know it. You don’t get away with anything. And so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the tyrant and violate your conscience without cost. You will pay the piper. It’s going to call you out of that slavery into freedom, even if that pulls you into the desert. And we’re going to see that there’s something else going on here that is far more cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine. The highest ethical spirit to which we’re beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of freedom against tyranny. And yes, exactly. I want villains to get punished. But do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price? It’s such a Christian question. Well, it’s not like the developing countries are going to go along with this. No, they are. They’re just going to tell us, colonials, to go take a flying leap, which is exactly what they should do. And because basically what we’re telling them is, well, you know, we got pretty rich and we’re pretty happy to fly in our private jets to Davos. And think about the globalist utopia. But we don’t think you guys should have any of that. And, you know, the faster you get at being poor, the better. And there’s just absolutely no likelihood at all that places like India and China are going to do anything but lift a middle finger to us when we do that. And rightly so. And so and then on the pollution front, we should differentiate that a little bit. It is true that as the world got more industrialized, and that will happen in places like China and India, that air pollution increased, for example, particulate production increased. But it increased. You could argue that it decreased inside houses as it increased outside houses. And so even that wasn’t a clear, like, downside on the pollution front, because, well, your work has indicated this quite clearly, or at least you’ve brought it to people’s attention. In the developing world, because people burn dung and wood, very low, low quality fuel with high particulate content, many, many young people around the world are dying every year and elderly people as well because of indoor air pollution. We have no sense of this. So, you know, three and a half billion people in households, mostly in the very poor south, they basically, as you say, cook and keep warm with dirty fuels like dung and cardboard. And the impact of that is equivalent, according to the World Health Organization, to if you look inside huts, if you’ve ever been one in Africa, they’re terribly polluted inside. And it’s like smoking two packs of cigarettes every day for three and a half billion people. It’s not surprising this kills millions of people every year. And again, it’s not to say, you know, if anything, this just simply makes us realize that there are a lot of different problems. And some of them you solve very simply by getting people out of absolute poverty. Not only do they stop dying from not having enough food and getting easily curable infectious diseases, but also they stop dying from indoor air pollution. One of the first things they do is they get a stove that actually runs on natural gas. Remember, that’s why we’re not afraid of going into our kitchens in the rich world. And so it should be in the poor world. And we need to have that conversation. We need to understand. And that’s, of course, why overall getting to develop country status is something that almost everyone aspires to and certainly something that’s worth having. OK, so let’s talk about some of the… So people who are listening, we’ve spent a lot of time in the philosophical realm and in the relatively low resolution realm trying to lay out the underlying conceptual landscape and to, what would you say, delineate something like a metaphysics of optimism? That might be a good way of thinking about it. But one of the things that’s admirable about your work is that you also concentrate on the devil in the details. And so we wrote an op-ed recently that got a fair bit of distribution on a couple of problems that we could solve globally, let’s say, we could address. At a relatively low cost, billions of dollars instead of trillions. And so that’s like one thousandth the cost for people who want to do the mathematics. So what do you see? What could people think about in terms of low hanging fruit? What are things we could address in the next 10 years to speed the process of improvement and to address both economic and environmental issues simultaneously? Yeah, it’s a great question. That’s really what I’ve been spending the last couple of years on and really a very large part of my career is basically engaging people and saying there are lots of problems. And we should be honest about that. The world still has lots and lots of problems. Some of them are very hard to solve. Some of them are very easy to solve. If that’s true, why wouldn’t we want to solve the easy ones first? Some of them are incredibly expensive to solve. Some of them are very, very cheap to solve. Why wouldn’t we solve the cheap ones first? So what we try to go for is simply, as you said, the low hanging fruit, saying of all the different problems in the world, where are some really smart solutions? And it typically ends up being such that you can’t solve all of the problem. Remember, we rarely solve all of any problem. We don’t you know, you don’t you don’t go to university to learn everything. You go to learn at university to learn enough. You don’t know. Well, I could go on without metaphor. I don’t think I will. But the point here is to say you need to find out when is enough enough. What are the really smart things? So take one thing that we that we actually wrote about in the in the op-ed. Everyone needs education. One of the reasons why countries have gotten rich is that people have learned reading, writing, communicating, understanding and becoming much more productive citizens. So if you look back in 1800, almost the entire world, except for a very slight tiny sliver of the aristocracy, were basically illiterate. We are now in a world where more than 90 percent are at least technically literate. We’ve moved an enormous amount away. And that’s why a lot of rich countries are rich. That’s why we’re well off. That’s why we have the human flourishing that we have. So this is incredibly important to understand. And we believe that almost half of the difference between being poor and being rich is whether you have an educated population. Now, nobody disagrees. Yes, we should all have educated people. But the truth is, it’s really, really hard. We know that in rich countries because we have that conversation constantly. How do we make our schools better? But it’s much, much clearer in the rest of the world. So we look a lot on what the World Bank calls the low income and lower middle income countries. So that’s about half the world’s population is four billion out of the eight billion we’re on the planet. So you could say it’s the poor half of the world. In that part of the world, when you do studies, you probably heard about the PISA studies. We try to find out how good are people, how good are students around the world to do different things. So there’s similar kind of studies done across pretty much all of the world. It turns out, and this is terrible. So there’s 650 million kids in school. So kids and adolescents in school in the lower four billion of the world, so in the low and low middle income countries. Of these kids, 80 percent cannot read and do math in any reasonable way. And let me just give you an example of what that means. It’s not rocket science. It’s, for instance, you let them read a statement like this. Vijay has a red hat, a blue shirt and yellow socks. What color is the hat? 80 percent of the kids can’t answer this when they’re 10 years old. Likewise, 10 year olds, the math question would be we have six pieces of cheese. What is the way to divide this to two people so each get the same amount? And again, about 80 percent can’t. The right answer is three, by the way. But this is really depressing. And the truth is we don’t know how to fix this. We know a lot of ways that don’t work. So, for instance, in Indonesia in 2001, the parliament decided they spent about 10 percent of public expenditure on education. So a lot of money on education. But they decided we’re going to do more. So they decided we’re going to put in the constitution that we need to spend 20 percent on education. That’s potentially a great thing. You really want to help the country. So what they did was they built a lot of new schools. They got many more teachers. So they went up from 2.7 to 3.8 million teachers. They now have one of the lowest class sizes in the world. They have great teachers. They have lots of teachers and they’re really well paid. Unfortunately, you couldn’t tell the difference in the outcome on students. They were still just as bad. And of course, what that tells you is, so there’s this wonderful study. It was called Double for Nothing. We basically in Indonesia paid twice as much and got nothing out of it. That’s the worst kind of way to try to help the world. Now, a lot of people will make these arguments. We need to pay teachers more. It turns out that if you pay teachers more, they become really, really happy, which is not surprising, but it doesn’t actually increase learning by students. Likewise, if you make class sizes smaller, it has virtually no impact. What is the main problem here? The main problem is it’s really hard to teach a lot of kids. So say there’s perhaps 60 kids in a class in the typical global south to teach them. They’re all 12-year-olds, but they’re wildly different abilities. Some of them are incredibly bored because they know all the stuff and they want to go on to the next class. Many of them have no clue what’s going on. No matter what the teacher tries to do, it’s always going to be wrong for most of the students. This is why a lot of people have then tried to say, are there ways to solve this? The answer is yes. These are the Norman Borlaugs, if you will, of the world who’ve come up with new and interesting and amazing ideas. I’ll tell you about one of them. So this one is about getting basically a teaching aid on a tablet. So it could be an iPad, but it’ll probably be a cheaper knockoff Android kind of thing. And then it teaches you at your level. So what it does is it starts asking some questions and you can pretty quickly find out what is actually your level. And then it’ll teach you through that school year. So one hour a day, this is partly because then you can actually still have most of the school running as it usually do. Then it also means you can share the iPad or the tablet with many, many other students over the day. If you have one hour a day for a year, the amazing thing is we now know that you can triple the learning. You can actually make kids learn three times as much as if they’d gone to school three years. Some low quality schools are not as amazing as it sounds, but it’s still much, much better. Yeah, but it’s an improvement. Well, what it means Bjorn is that you’re now putting children for an hour a day into the only place that learning actually takes place. So we’ve known this, psychologists have known this for a hundred years. So this psychologist named Vygotsky, Russian psychologist, came up with this notion called the zone of proximal development. What he noted was that parents spontaneously, one of the things he noticed was that parents spontaneously speak to their infants and their toddlers at a level that slightly exceeds their current comprehension level. And they do this automatically. And so you can imagine that there’s a horizon of learning and the horizon of learning is the place that’s optimally challenging for you. That’s the only place, that’s also by the way on the border between order and chaos, technically speaking. That’s the only place that learning ever takes place. And so if you have a classroom full of 12 year olds, say 60 of them, some of them have an IQ of 70, which means no matter how you, how hard you try, no matter how much effort you expend, you’ll never get them beyond the basics of rudimentary literacy. And some of them have IQs of 145, which means those are kids who could learn to read at 12 to 1500 words a minute and who’d be capable of operating at the highest end of cognitive development. They’re all in the same class. Well, obviously you can’t pitch to the middle of that because as you said, you’ll make a shambles of it. But the data that you’re laying out in terms of the effectiveness of this technology is an indication of the utility of finding that zone of proximal development. That’s what people talk about, by the way, when they talk about the zone being in the zone. And I like the particularity of your solution too, because you’re saying, well, look, we need to educate people. We need to educate them because educated people generate more of the wealth that provides security and opportunity. Literacy is core to that and say basic numeracy. You can’t even operate a computer without that. And then we have some very efficient technological strategies that are also cost effective where we can target and solve that particular problem. It’s very particularized. And that’s also a lovely vision. It’s like, well, why not make education cheap and useful? It’s incredibly simple. And also remember, there are lots of other solutions. Don’t first focus on those. Focus on these incredibly effective ways. So we talk about, and there’s lots of different data that shows how do you make sure these tablets don’t get stolen? So you need a place that you lock them up for the night. How do you recharge them? You need a solar panel. You need all that cost. You also need some people to operate it. All of this has actually been proven. So one of the things that we’ve helped do, and this is by no means just us, is now Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world, is actually aiming at over the next four years to spread this out to all of their schools. So that’s more than 3,000 schools. And they’re going to get this out to all one to four graders, fourth graders. That’s an amazing achievement. Again, this is the kind of thing that will make Malawi richer because they’ll become more productive in the long run. So we do the whole cost and benefit calculation. So this will have real costs. We’re talking about several billion dollars if you were going to do this globally. But billion is a very low number when you’re thinking about how much we’re spending on some of these other problems. As you mentioned, it’s not a trillion. And secondly, it’s going to dramatically improve all of these countries to become better so that they will both be better off to have human flourishing, but in the long run also have better environment. We actually then try to say, well, so for every dollar you spend, how much good do you end up doing? It turns out that you make so much good that it’s equivalent to 54 out. And this is based on realistic deception. That’s 140 million. So it’s literally peanuts that we’re talking about. But if we did that, these kids would grow up. It would basically mean that somewhere between two and three million more kids would be better at school. They would go longer. They would learn more. They would become more productive. They would help their countries become richer. Again, this is a simple thing and it’s a very well documented thing. And we know that if you spend 38 of social good. And again, this is not just making up more value or make scrooge as you were talking about. This is actually making sure that really poor women can make the life for the next generation much better. The point here is not that this is what you should be doing, but it’s one of the many things that you could choose and say, look, I want to do something that actually matters and that has a huge impact, rather than just go with, oh my God, the world is terrible. And then I’m just going to give up or I’m just going to go for these cheap, easy virtue signaling. This is about there are a lot of technologies, there are a lot of innovations where we can actually make a lot of good at very low cost, very effectively. Isn’t that what we should be doing for 2023? OK, so let’s sum up this conversation. I’ll sum it up briefly and then let’s see what you have to add or subtract from that. So we started by talking about the underlying metaphysic or even theology of the current worldview and laid out the proposition that we tend to see, we tend to insist that young people see the planet as a fragile virgin and culture as a rapacious predator and the individual as a parasitic predator. And that that has its echoes in the a priori religious landscape, but that it’s a very one sided story. And the corrective to that story is, well, nature can be pretty damn hard on us and needs to be tamed and controlled in a manner that’s sustainable. We should be extremely grateful for what our culture has provided us with, not least the ability to look at nature as though it was benevolent. And we shouldn’t be so damn hard on individual people because for all their flaws, they can be Norman Borlaig, for example, or the people who worked along with them who are genuinely contributing not only to a much more productive and generous economy, but also doing that in a manner that’s beneficial on the environmental front. And so we need to balance our viewpoint and we need to stop terrifying young people into apocalyptic nightmares by insisting that the world is going to collapse and that all the power should be given to like terrified centralized tyrants. So that’s the first part. Then we talked a little bit about the motivational landscape for that worldview is that people are being enticed into these apocalyptic views, partly by being offered an easy pathway to moral virtue when they’re susceptible to that need. And so it’s all about climate. It’s all about carbon dioxide. There’s only one problem. If you’re just concerned about it, that means you’re morally virtuous. You’ve identified the enemy and now you have nothing else to do. That’s a bad model. The proper model is for people to develop a sophisticated, a theory of the world and of their own action that’s as sophisticated as the actual problem set and to be willing to devote mature time and energy to the solution of a set of real problems, which we could solve. And then we sort of closed the conversation, mostly you did that, by delineating a couple of the areas that are basically constitute low hanging fruit. We could educate poor people for a relatively low outlay economically, certainly one that would produce a tremendously high return on investment. We already know how to do that. The infrastructure is already in place and we could do the same thing on the nutritional front. And then we’d have fewer starving and stunted children and they’d all be more well educated. And then we also pointed out being wealthier and being more intelligent, they’d also be more likely to take a long term view of, let’s say, ecosystem sustainability and they’d start to work in a distributed manner to serve the environment locally. And so like, why the hell is that a bad idea? That seems to be like a really good idea. So anyways, that’s my summary of the conversation. Do you have anything that you want to add or subtract to that? I think it’s a great summary. I think it really just summarizes into, you’ve got to stop believing that this is the end of the world. That’s not what the data shows us. And we’ve talked about that for a number of different things. So we live much longer, we’re much less poor. So there are many fewer poor people. Air pollution, for instance, indoor has gone down dramatically. We know how to solve many of these problems and we are a smart species. So we will keep on learning how to fix this. Yes, this is not about moral virtue and just showing up and saying, I want to do good. This is about the long hard grind of the Norman Borlaugs and all these other guys that actually helped us think out what are smart ideas. That’s what this third idea was then, or this third part of the conversation was really about. There are a lot of smart things. Do you want to be part of that? I would love for all of us to be part of that. I think that was part of why we also wrote this op-ed. The New Year is a place when you start talking about, so what do you want to do? What do you want to do for next year? How do you want to look at the world? Stop being scared. Start thinking about how can I help? And wouldn’t that be amazing if we actually had a lot more people saying, I want to help. I want to be one of the guys who helped get these tablets out in a developing country somewhere. I want to be the gal who focuses on making sure that we get these cheap tablets out to pregnant women. I want to help push forward these very simple ideas and of course come up with new ideas. This is the way we solve problems. This is the way we actually make the world even better. Right. Well, that was the other stream that I didn’t summarize is that we’d also talked about the The mold in a Petri dish model, biological model of human existence is not appropriate. Neither is the fox and rabbit model is that we have the capacity to generate and kill new ideas constantly. We’re very good at testing them in those countries where there’s freedom of expression and freedom of thought. We’re very good at testing those ideas. We’re very good at implementing them. We’ve learned continually how to make more with less. We’re getting better and better at that in every possible way, especially as our computational power increases. And so what that would mean is that if we could shed, maybe if we could shed the apocalyptic pessimism and encourage young people to work diligently towards a mature and integrated vision of the economy and the environment, invite them to participate as people who whose basic destiny is to make the world a better place for people and for nature itself. But that’s a much that’s a viewpoint that’s much better. That’s much more likely to lift people out of abject poverty and also to produce a greener and more sustainable world. Well said. All right, Dr. Lomborg. Hey, for everybody who’s watching and listening, me first of all, thank you for for participating in this conversation and you know, and more power to you, by the way, on the upward and front, there’s no reason to be destroying your your motivation by engaging in apocalyptic doom saying when there’s many things that need to be done and could be done that are productive and useful and many things that are positive that are beckoning and that have already made themselves manifest. Bjorn noted, for example, that we’ve lifted a tremendous number of people out of poverty in the last 15 years and we could do an even better job at that. In the meantime, I’m going to talk to Dr. Lomborg for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform. I’m interested in with all my guests who are generally very successful and interesting people, I’m always interested in the manner in which their responsible destiny made itself manifest. Right. So one of the things that all young people contend with is the issue of where to find the central purpose, the meaning in their life. And, you know, it’s easy to get nihilistic and cynical about that and think that life has no purpose in the final analysis. But I think that’s a pretty gloomy and unwarranted supposition. And one of the things I have seen among the people I’ve met whose lives are together and who are doing productive and generous things is they do find engagement in something that’s truly meaningful and it does get them out of bed in the morning and help motivate them to be productive and not only for themselves and not only for their own gain, in case that has to be said, but so that they’re working in a manner that’s extremely socially responsible and meaningful in a reciprocal manner. And so I’m going to talk to Bjorn about how his interests made themselves manifest in the early part of his life in my attempt to trace how such things come about. And so we’ll see you in January and Merry Christmas to you, by the way. Hello, everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guests on DailyWirePlus.com.