Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - EP #31 The Truth About Overpopulation w/ Dr. Marian L. Tupy & Dr. Gale L. Pooley

Episode Date: March 2, 2023

In this episode, Marian, Gale, and Peter discuss the meaning of SuperAbundance, how the world is the best it’s ever been, and go over a variety of different commodities that have become increasingly cheaper and accessible to the worldwide population. You will learn about: 10:16 | Everything is becoming abundantly cheaper. 35:16 | Will we be overpopulated, or will we be underpopulated? 53:36 | Screw the good old days! Dr. Marian L. Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org, and the co-author of Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting. Dr. Gale L. Pooley is an associate professor at Brigham Young University–Hawaii and co-authored the Simon Abundance Index alongside Dr. Tupy. Their new book, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet, is available everywhere. Learn more about their book, Superabundance, and their project, Human Progress. _____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are,  please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Levels: Real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. levels.link/peter  Consider a journey to optimize your body with LifeForce. _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now:  Tech Blog _____________ Resources How the Growth in Population X Resource Abundance was created _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots and Mindsets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

That's the sound of unaged whiskey transforming into Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey in Lynchburg, Tennessee. Around 1860, Nearest Green taught Jack Daniel how to filter whiskey through charcoal for a smoother taste, one drop at a time. This is one of many sounds in Tennessee with a story to tell. To hear them in person, plan your trip at tnvacation.com. Tennessee sounds perfect. Well, we do a little analysis on time inequality and what's happened there. We think about income inequality, but it's really time inequality that counts. You go back to 1960 and someone who lived in China, you know, basically spent eight hours a day working to just earn the money to buy

their food for that day. Well the time price of food has fallen such that they can now spend less than an hour. So you go from eight hours to one hour that means you got seven hours of time that you can now devote to something else. And that's times billions of people on the planet. And a massive transform to purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like, this is who I am. This is what I'm going to do. This is the dent I'm going to make in the universe. Hi, this is Peter Diamandis. Welcome to Moonshots and Mindsets. On today's episode,

we're going to dive into one of my favorite subjects in the world, the subject of abundance. This is the means by which you avoid this negative feeling about the world and realize that the world is becoming better and stronger, more capable every day. If you haven't been excited about your future, the future of your kids, listen to this episode. I'm going to be joined by Marian Tupi. He's editor of humanprogress.org. He is the co-author of Super Abundance, a new book that follows 12 years later after my book called Abundance, The Future is Better Than You Think. He's a PhD in international relations. His co-author is Gail Pooley, who is at the University of Hawaii.

He's on the board of humanprogress.org and the creator of the Simon Abundance Index. So during this session, we're going to talk about how we're creating abundance on almost every level possible. how we're creating abundance on almost every level possible. We're going to talk about 50 different commodities that over the last 150 years have increased in access and reduced in price. We're democratizing and demonetizing everything. That between 1980 and today, it's taken 72% less work for you to earn energy, food, water, healthcare, whatever it might be, and that abundance has grown by 250 percent. These are fundamental econometric numbers that this group is going to be discussing with you. Interestingly enough, one of the things that

we're going to talk about is human population, that in fact, increasing human population is not a bad thing, and that the numbers today predict we're 8 billion today, we're going to hit 10 billion, but then have a very rapid decrease. Here's the key point for every 1% increase in population, your personal abundance access to food, water, energy technology is increasing by three to 4%. It's one of the most extraordinary times to be alive. So this is a session to hopefully give you the's one of the most extraordinary times to be alive. So this is a session to hopefully give you the data, the background, the ability to see the world as an amazing place. The only thing more exciting than today is perhaps tomorrow.

All right, let's get into our session. Everybody, Peter Diamandis here. Welcome to Moonshots and Mindsets on an extraordinary topic, one that I'm so fond of. It's the topic of abundance. And if you're not feeling super abundant today, if you're not excited about your life, you're not excited about where humanity is going, listen to this conversation because hopefully you will see that the world is on an incredible trajectory to increase the abundance for every man, woman, and child on planet Earth. I'm joined with two friends, Dr. Marianne Tupe and Dr. Gail Pooley, who are the co-authors of Superabundance, a topic that I'm super fond of.

All right, we're gonna get into it all here. But first, good morning, good afternoon. Marianne, where are you today? I'm in Washington, DC at the C at the Cato Institute, where I work. All right. Washington, D.C., the center of all human knowledge. And Gail, how about you? Where on the planet are you?

I'm in Hawaii. All right. Well, in the middle of winter, being in Hawaii sounds like a really smart move. So, guys, super abundance. You know, I wrote a book back in 2012. It was really a turning point of my life called Abundance. The Future, I wrote a book back in 2012. It was really a turning point of my life called Abundance, The Future is Better Than You Think. Eric Drexler had written a book shortly thereafter on radical abundance, and here comes super abundance. And you've written a beautiful

book with incredible data. You know, when I'm out there teaching this subject to everybody, I say one of the most important things you need to do is train your mindset. How do you see the world? Because your mindset is everything. And unfortunately, our brains, and we'll get into this, are wired in a fear and scarcity mindset. But we're actually living in a world that is arguably safer and more abundant than any time in human history and accelerating. arguably safer and more abundant than any time in human history and accelerating. I'd love to begin, Marian, from you and then from Gail, a quick definition of superabundance.

And then let's dive into, is that true every place and what's underlying it? Marian, please kick us off. How did superabundance come into existence? What's the definition of that for you? Oh, well, thanks so much. And thanks for having us on your show. Superabundance come into existence? What's the definition of that for you? Oh, well, thanks so much. And thanks for having us on your show. Superabundance has a technical meaning that I will talk about in a second. But for the last 200 years, at least, maybe longer, people simply assume that as population grows, resources become scarcer.

They become more expensive and therefore scarcer. But in fact, what we found in superabundance is that resources are becoming cheaper and therefore more abundant. But what we found was that abundance can increase at two different speeds relative to population. It can either increase at a lower rate than population growth or higher rate than population growth. Now, by looking at hundreds of different commodities going back all the way to 1850, what we found is that in almost every case,

abundance of resources has been increasing at a faster rate than population growth. And the difference between population growth and abundance, that is the new knowledge created in the human mind. And I think that's an important discovery because most people assume that when a human comes into the world, he's just a consumer, he's just a destroyer of natural resources. But in fact, every human being comes into the world not just with an empty stomach, but also with a mind capable of creating new ideas and new knowledge. So the fact that abundance is increasing at a very fast pace, at a much higher rate than population, tells us that on average, every human being produces more knowledge and more value than he or she consumes or destroys. Amazing. So the more the population, the more people creating knowledge, the more the world

is getting better versus getting less. And I mean, intuitively, if you think back, we had a very low population in the millions and tens of millions a few thousand years ago. And now when we're in the billions. I mean, every individual can contribute a small amount now because of digital technology can become available globally to everybody. It's fully democratized in that regard. Gail, how did you come to the superabundance conversation? I actually met Marion on Twitter. So thank heavens for Twitter. He'd written this really interesting article about commodity prices and what they'd been doing. So thank heavens for Twitter. He'd written this really interesting article about commodity prices and what they'd been doing. So I reached out to him and we began this conversation

and we thought about this idea of, you know, we have a little bit of trouble measuring things with money because how do you adjust for inflation? So there was a concept known as time prices. So we thought, well, why don't we measure these things in time prices? So a time price goes back to this idea that we buy things with money, but we really pay for them with our time. So the question is, how much time does it take you to earn the money to buy that thing? And what's happening to your time price over time? So we have money prices that are measured in dollars and cents and time prices that are your time price over time. So we have money prices that can be measured

in dollars and cents and time prices that are expressed in hours and minutes. So if something took you, you know, something in a time price is pretty simple to calculate. It's just the money price divided by your hourly income. So if something costs, a pizza costs $20 and you're earning $20 an hour, that's a one-hour time-priced pizza.

So then the question is, what's happening to that time price over time? And time allows us to transcend all of this issue with adjusting for currencies and nominal versus real. We can go to any country at any time, figure out what the price of something is, what the hourly income was, the average hourly income of a blue-collar worker, for example, figure out that time price. So it allowed us to really look at all of these different things. So that was kind of our first step is let's think about time prices. I love that. One of the things I tell people is no matter who you are on the planet, wealthiest, poorest, where you are, we all have one thing in common. You've got 24 hours in a day, seven days in a week,

you know, 365 days in a year. And it's how you use your time that determines everything. Do you have to use your time to go down to the river and get water? Or can you open the tap? You know, can you fly in a private jet? Or do you have to go through TSA and SOX at LAX? And that's pretty amazing. And I remember pretty amazing. I remember the first time I heard about this and when I was doing my research for Abundance back in circa 2011 was a book by Matt Ridley called Rational Optimist, which is, you know, we should put out a series of all the books that are building this mindset. And Matt talked about save time and talked about the amount of time it took in labor to buy light to read, right? In ancient days with oil or a candle, and then ultimately now with an LED

light bulb, it's just like massive demonetization that led to the ability to read and learn at night. demonetization. That led to the ability to read and learn at night. And so, Marian, I mean, how you said you looked at 50 different metrics and how we're, I guess they're demonetizing and becoming more abundant. Was it true across all of them? Can you give some examples? And were there any that didn't become more abundant? And what might those be? Right. So in the book, we look at 18 different data sets, not 18 different resources, but data sets, some of which we get from third parties. And they contain together hundreds of different commodities, food, metals, minerals, fuel.

We even look at some services. We can talk about that in a moment. But pretty much all of them have been growing more abundant at a super abundant rate. There are some exceptions for a small period of time. So, for example, when we looked at, I believe it was 27 different resources between 1960 and 2018, we found that gold and oil have actually increased in time price slightly, which means that you had to work a little longer in order to be able to afford a golden necklace or a gallon of gas. But if you take it all the way to 1850, which is what we have done, then everything is basically becoming cheaper at a super abundant

rate. And one of my favorite data sets has to do with what we call the basic 50. And this particular time period concerns 1980 to 2018. And it looks at the world. It looks at how the average citizen or average inhabitant of the world is doing. Let's say somebody living on $10,000 or $11,000 a year in places like Brazil. So if you can just imagine that average inhabitant of the world, their time price has fallen by 72%.

They now have to work 72% less time than they would have to work in 1980. So during that period of globalization, the much maligned period of globalization that a lot of people are not very keen on these days, what we have seen is that abundance of resources has grown by 250%. Now is that a lot or is that too little? Well think about it this way. For thousands of years, there has been no increase in abundance. Time prices basically remained stagnant. The same

standard of living that you had, your parents had, your grandparents had, their parents had, your children would have, and your grandchildren would have. If you look at the line of human progress, it's basically stagnant for 10,000 years, right? Nothing happened generation to generation, millennium to millennium. It was, yeah. Correct. And then in the last 40 years, what we see is this extraordinary, you know, this extraordinary improvement where people's lives, again, as I said, improved by 252%. So from a historical perspective, this is undoubtedly the greatest reduction in human poverty ever registered.

Wow. Have you graphed population growth versus a metric of abundance? I mean, it would be interesting to see, you know, we'll get into the conversation of overpopulation and is this bad and all of that moaning that we hear, but it would be interesting to see sort of some correlating population growth with a abundance metric or with technology metrics for people to realize, you know, go humans, you know, join the Elon Musk club and get 10 kids. So I think that's a question for Gail. He's done that one. Have you done the graphing at all? Yeah, absolutely.

In fact, in the book, we've got a number of those charts that we show the difference between growth in population and growth in resource abundance. And we see typically every time population increases 1%, you'll see personal abundance increase 3% to 4%. And then when you extend that... Say that one more time. Population grows 1% and you get increase in personal abundance 3% to 4%. 3% to 4%. So every time population increases, on the average, we see this 3% to 4% increase in personal abundance. So it's like like think about it as a slice in a pie and the size of the pie so your individual slice is getting larger but we're also getting

more slices because population's growing so we're getting this double effect of everybody gets more and there's more people at the same time. So the global resource abundance is getting, you know, a 7% to 8% increase. Because it's really, when you think about it, if everybody gets more and there's more people, we get this global resource abundance effect. And that's a measurement that we try to demonstrate and show too. And across all of these data sets, you look at what's happening to the growth in that individual resource, it's abundance. And once again, abundance is this relationship back to the time price.

If it takes you less and less time, your life is becoming more and more abundant. And then everybody around you is experiencing the same thing. And we have more people. I use the example, you know, in the world of scarcity, if you have a pizza, you have to slice it thinner and thinner. In the world of abundance, you just bake more pizzas. Yeah.

It's almost like these people that are coming to the earth are bringing more pizza with them. Lots more pizza. They're bringing their own pizza and they're bringing pizza to share with everybody that's here already. So let's talk about one question first, and then I want to go to what's causing all of this. And again, if you're listening to the program here, my goal for you is to question your premise of what you have learned, maybe from parents, from history books, from conversations on CNN, I call the Crisis News Network. And I want you to let into your mind the idea that no, actually, we are creating a world that is more and more capable of greater and greater abundance,

and the world is getting better. I remember a conversation, one conversation that spurred me to write Abundance was a conversation I heard from a young couple that had just gotten married. They were in a coffee shop, and they were talking about, you know, I don't think it's morally or ethically right to bring a child into this world. And I'm like, and I was like, what world are you seeing? I'm seeing the most amazing world ever in human history. It's like the most amazing time to be coming, coming edge. I just saw Bill Gates said the most amazing most amazing times to be 20 years from now. But, you know, I think it's now and tomorrow and every day after now.

Is there anything that you're seeing that is not increasing in abundance right now? Sure. With regard to the United States, Mark Perry has this chart. He calls it the chart of the century. And if you compare, if you look at the BLS data, which is the Bureau of Labor Statistics, what you find is that basically anything that's left to the market forces and high level of competition with not too much regulation is becoming cheaper. But things which tend to be overregulated tend to become more expensive. So, for example, white goods, kitchen appliances, furniture, TVs, clothing, cars have become less expensive or more abundant relative to income, even housing. Now, this will

come as a shock to a lot of listeners, but let me explain. We have to realize that not everybody is living in LA or Manhattan, thankfully. So, when you look at the average cost of a house in the United States, that's still cheaper relative to income than it used to used to be let's say in let's say 1989 things which are becoming much more expensive are Healthcare and education as well as child care and now there The the dead hand of the government is actually making things scarce by design partly. It's through subsidies Partly it's through over regulation partly it's through over-regulation. In Virginia, very close to where I live, you cannot build a hospital unless all the other hospitals in the

state agree that there is a need for another hospital. Now, that's a crazy way to organize a delivery of a service. So education and healthcare are becoming more expensive, but primarily because of government monopolies and over-regulation. But to test whether superabundance would also apply to services, we looked at the time prices of cosmetic surgery in the United States. So as you know, cosmetic surgery, you have to pay for yourself. There is no government subsidy, and it is generally much less regulated than other types of surgeries in the United States or other types of medical delivery services. So we looked at cosmetic surgery for about 20 or a 30-year period. And what we found was that things are becoming cheaper at a superabundant rate.

Wow. Were you able to look at, I mean, education and health care is not regulated the same in every country. And one of the things that's interesting is sort of the, you know, 100 plus experiments going on in different countries in different regulatory areas. Are there any countries in which education and health care is becoming cheaper because the regulations are different there? And let me also say, listen, I'm clear. The future of education and healthcare is fully democratized and demonetized. It's going to be AI and robotics and the metaverse, right? It's going to be the best education in the world. The best health care in the world is going to be delivered by an AI. And it's going to be the same for the poorest child and the wealthiest child. That is coming, and we're going to disrupt those industries. They deserve to be disrupted, but don't get me on that tirade.

So we haven't done that research, but it's a very interesting idea to look at international comparisons. We just looked at the United States. Well, you had an interesting guest here a couple of weeks ago, I think, Emad Mostak. interesting guest here a couple of weeks ago, I think, Emad Mostak. You know, his AI stuff that he's doing where they're attempting to deliver this educational tool to young people in Africa at a cost that's tremendously affordable. So I think when you see this technology disrupt that area with these AI tools and direct delivery, you're going to see a huge flourishing of educational opportunities at very abundant prices. my peak vitality and longevity is to monitor my blood glucose. More importantly, the foods that I eat and how they peak the glucose levels in my blood. Now, glucose is the fuel that powers your brain. It's really important. High prolonged levels of glucose, what's called hyperglycemia, leads to everything from heart disease to Alzheimer's to sexual dysfunction to diabetes,

and it's not good. The challenge is all of us are different. All of us respond to different foods in different ways. Like for me, if I eat bananas, it spikes my blood glucose. If I eat grapes, it doesn't. If I eat bread by itself, I get this prolonged spike in my blood glucose levels. But if I dip that bread in olive oil, it blunts it. And these are things that I've learned from wearing a continuous glucose monitor and using the Levels app. So Levels is a company that helps you in analyzing what's going on in your body. It's continuous monitoring 24-7. I wear it all the time. It really helps me to stay on top of the food I eat, remain conscious of the food that I eat, and to understand which foods affect me based upon my physiology and my genetics.

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It's a product that I think I'm going to be using for the years ahead and hope you'll consider as well. Let me ask the big question here, right? So we've seen 72% drop in the amount of work you have to do from 1980 to today to earn or to create the same amount of access to services and products. We've seen a 250% increase in abundance over this same time period. And the question is, why are things becoming more abundant? Are humans getting smarter? Is politics getting better? Or is this all technology? What's the driving force here? So I'd go back to, let's kind of back up a little bit because people have this fundamental misconception of what a resource is. And you talk about CNN.

Our culture, our popular culture is kind of focused in on movies. And we take this recent movie, Infinity War, and Thanos is this major character there. I hate that movie. character there and he made that statement. I love the movie because it illustrates what our fundamental misunderstanding is about resources. He says, the universe is finite, its resources finite. Well, the first part of the statement is true. We do live on a planet with a finite number of atoms, but resources are not finite because it's when you add knowledge to atoms that they become resources so this and we don't we don't seem to have hit any kind of a limit on the ability to discover and create and add knowledge to atoms when you add knowledge to atoms that's when they become

valuable and they also become abundant at the same time. So think about, you know, economics. Economics is not about atoms. Economics is about knowledge. And when you think about scarcity, it's like we don't have this. We do have a finite number of atoms, but the way that we can rearrange those atoms, add knowledge to them, that's really, there's no limit to that. And that's really where the value gets created. Knowledge plus atoms equals resources. The perfect example of that, which Stephen and I spoke about in Abundance is the story of aluminum. We open up the book with that, right? That aluminum

used to be the most precious metal on the planet, worth more than platinum and gold in the 1800s, because it was so difficult to extract from bauxite. Even though aluminum is 8.3% of the Earth's crust by weight, it was so rare. And then comes along a simple breakthrough of electrolysis, and aluminum becomes, you know, as cheap as aluminum foil. It's a perfect example of that I think it was in your book that I read that when Napoleon the third the

Emperor of the French gave dinner he had his guess the King of Siam coming over for dinner exactly right he fed he the troops were fed with silver utensils Napoleon ate with gold and the King of Siam was fed with silver utensils. Napoleon ate with gold and the King of Siam was fed with aluminum utensils because it was a state dinner of highest importance. And then, you know, the capstone of the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., born, built in that same decade, the capstone is made of aluminum because that was the most precious metal back then. Crazy. And I would simply add one example to that. Think about how much more value we can get from something that used to be completely valueless,

and that would be sand. Is that, you know, just a grain of sand. It's been lying around for billions of years, then some 4,500 years ago, somebody figured out that if you heat it to 3090 degrees Fahrenheit, you can turn it into glass beads, which people used for decoration. And then later, people used it for cups. Much later, we used it for window panes. And now, glass is used in fiber optic cables or microchips. So with every step of the way, you are using this previously useless element in order to create more and more value. And who knows what we'll

be using sand in 200 years time? You know, we don't know. Or 20 years time. You know, it's so funny because the speed at which the world is changing, you know, I remember I go to the Emirates quite often, and I know the leadership there in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. And last time I was there, they said, can you give a talk about humanity and the world in 50 years? And I'm like, no, I can't tell you what's going to happen in 20 years, let alone 50 years, because the speed of change is so quick. Let me ask you guys a question. One of the things that as we talk about increasing abundance in the world and converging exponential technologies is this vision of the future portrayed by Ray Kurzweil of the singularity, right? A point in time where the speed of change is so fast that you can't predict what comes next. Ray's been a

mentor for me and we started Singularity University together based on that. Do you think about the concept of the singularities you think about abundance? Yeah, I think we've had these points of singularity that have occurred. We call them punctuated innovation where you suddenly have this huge jump going from the Pony Express to the telegraph. That was a point of singularity where the world changed in a day. So we continue to have these new innovations that appear, this ability to decode the DNA sequence. And that's going to give us this opportunity to have these singularity-like events where suddenly this knowledge and information or ability to do things or really our time now, suddenly we have this gift of time that we can do other things with. So we expect to continue to see these kinds of things happening. You know, there's a, let me give a

frame for our listeners of where we're going out 30, 40, 50 years. What could it be like in the future? And there's a concept that K. R. Drexler wrote about in the 80s called Engines of Creation and Nanotechnology. Then there was a book called Zero Marginal Society by Jeremy Rifkin. I don't know if you're familiar with the book. And it's the notion that there is the technology that's going to be materializing in the next 20 years is the idea of nano-assemblers, that there will be technology enabling humans to basically build things an atom at a time. And there's a concept of an assembler, a little microscopic device, you know, think of an organelle inside of a cell that can grab a

carbon and nitrogen and oxygen, a silicon item, whatever it is, and assemble something according to a plan. And if I have a nanobot, a nanoassembler, and I ask it to duplicate itself because it can from the atoms in my hand, it can steal a few trillion and do that. And if I take one of my nanoassemblers and I drop it into the ground and I say, build me an electric Ferrari, it'll basically grab the atoms. And what is needed there, it is the raw materials, energy, and information, right? And we're heading towards a world of a squanderable abundance of energy. Information data sets have to a large degree become free as open source is available. is available. And the cost of the atoms, you know, is, there's more capacity than you need. So imagine a world in which everything tends towards a zero cost. Do you see any arguments against that

in the long run? No, I mean, sometimes people will ask, well, you know, how can you get around the scarcity of a resource, when you know you need something right now, like, you know, how can you get around the scarcity of a resource when you know you need something right now? Like, for example, lithium batteries, right? I mean, I can't tell you how many articles I have read in the last six months about electric vehicles and how we have only so much lithium. That's true. There is only so much lithium. And therefore, this whole electric vehicle revolution is going to come to an end. Who is to say that we are going to be using lithium for electric batteries in 10 or 20

years' time? It could be something completely different. And that would be my answer to also somebody who might say, but even if you want to build a Ferrari, you will need that particular metal or those kinds of metals. Well, who is to say that that's what you're going to be needing? After all, we are using less metal that we previously used in order to create aircraft. What is it that Dreamliner is made of? It's made of something else.

It's a graphite composite. So what if you used carbon and made it out of diamond instead? You know, I mean, this is the kind of disruptive thinking I think people need to switch to. And, you know, one of my friends, one of my favorite examples of abundance is a friend of mine has started a company called the Diamond Foundry up in the Bay Area. I don't know if I mentioned earlier, but, you know, it's a company. What would you think of as more scarce than a perfect diamond, right? De Beers has taught us perfect diamonds are the most scarce, and you should pay three months of salary for your engagement ring.

Well, what Diamond Foundry has done is been able to deposit carbon atom layer by layer by layer and able to create a perfect diamond, 5 carat, 10 carat. They've built 40 carat diamonds, flawless, beautiful, 40 carat diamonds, right? And it will eventually get to five bucks a carat. So when you walk into your wife or your girlfriend with this, you know, 20 carat diamond, she goes, oh God, just a 20 carat diamond. I mean, we're redefining abundance in many ways. But that's the key, I think, is that in the book, we try to address some of the concerns that a lot of people who might open our book for the first time or encounter this whole

discipline for the first time, they might have. But obviously, in any book, no matter how long, you cannot address all the problems that the world is facing. But if you can, as you say, if you can make people to make the switch, to start thinking about solutionism, is that just because you're using X today doesn't mean that you're going to be using it in the future. Just because you slaughtered a bunch of whales, you know, 100 years ago in order to make or 200 years ago in order to make candles doesn't mean that eventually you're going to run out of whales because you will replace it with something else. And I think that in my talks, what I see is that once you explain this idea of not just saving, not just becoming more efficient, but substitution, then a light goes on. You know, I'd also add back to this idea that, you know,

what remains scarce when everything becomes abundant? It's your time. And the question for most of us is, what do I get to do with my 24 hours today? Is the world such that I have more choices to do with this fixed, limited amount of time? It's continuous, but it's fixed. That's where we see this abundance ability that we really just give you lots more choices to do with your time during the day? Well, Gail, a lot of my listeners will know I'm not a believer in fixed amount of time or not creating time abundance. And for me, it's about how do I add 30 healthy years of my life, right? How do we extend the healthy human lifespan? And so it is fixed and you can have a scarcity mindset. You know, you're going to be decrepit and old in your late 70s into your 80s and 90s and your

end. Or you can say, just like we've done in every other field, we're going to understand the science, the engineering of the human body, the DNA, epigenetics, and we're going to reprogram that and extend the healthy human lifespan. And it's not a matter of if, it's only a matter of when. And it's not a matter of if, it's only a matter of when. And so that's a different subject. Let's get into one of the fun debates I've seen on Twitter. And that is one that we should dive into, which is everyone, not everyone, there's still a significant number of people who believe in the Malthusian principle that this planet is heading towards massive overpopulation and we're screwed. And then there are those voices,

yours, mine, Elon's, that say, no, no, no, no, no. It's not happening. So what is your view on human population? Marian, you've been studying this. Give me your thoughts here. Right. So we have just reached 8 billion people.

In 1800, when Jefferson was president, there was 1 billion people in the world. At the time of Christ or Caesar Augustus, there were 300 million people in the world. Today, there is 8 billion of us. What's going to happen next is that we are probably going to peak at around 10 billion at most in around 2060 or 2080. And after that, the population is going to start declining. According to the Lancet, in 2100, so only, what, 77 years from now, there is either going to be 9 billion people in the world

or 7 billion people in the world. Obviously, the further you get to 2100, the fuzzier it gets. Obviously, the further you get to 2100, the fuzzier it gets. But essentially, by 2100, there's going to be anywhere between 7 and 9 billion people in the world. Already today in the world, in over 50% of countries, almost 60% of countries, birth rates are below the replacement level. So replacement level is 2.1 children per woman per lifetime. That accounts for babies who unfortunately don't make it into adulthood or old age. And some statistics around the world are pretty shocking. In South Korea, birth rates are, or total fertility rate is 0.9 instead of 2.1.

Correct. In Central Europe, where I come from, it's about 1.3, 1.4 instead of 2.1. Even in the United States, amongst native-born women, it's 1.7. The reason why the United States population is still growing is because of immigration, but not because of native-born children. So yes, we are going to reach a peak within my lifetime. Hopefully, it's going to be a very long lifetime, but about 2060, 2070, and then it's going to start declining. Yeah, that's where we are. The only region in the world, a large region in the world where population is still expanding is sub-Saharan

Africa. Man, there's so much to talk about here. And I think it's important for people to understand the facts here. Why has Malthusian philosophies and thinking prevailed for so long? Why is, I mean, the data is there. We're seeing negative growth rates, like you said, in the United States, even in China, for God's sakes, in Europe, in parts of Asia. It's insane. And, I mean, this is, these demographics are clear and present. and they serve as a potential danger to humanity because we said earlier, the number of minds on the planet are increasing abundance and increasing innovation. And we still use human labor. I mean, one of the things that's going to be important is can we extend the retirement age, right? At the

peak of your life, when you're 65, you have all the best contacts in the world, you know your business, but anything. Can we add 10 healthy, productive years to your life? By the way, Harvard, Oxford, Lennon School of Business, a year ago, do a study on if we can extend healthy living by a single year, it's worth $38 trillion of global economy. That's incredible, right? So what can we do if we had 10 of those years? So why are people buying this Malthusian principle here? I would say they think in atoms instead of knowledge. Interesting. And I would probably also say that they tend towards fear and fear-mongering,

They tend towards fear and fear-mongering. And so an overpopulated world where I get less makes the evening news, and increasing knowledge does not. Yeah, so I would say that's sort of a macro level. I think that when you talk about population resources, what Gail said, I think is crucial, is that they think about finite number of atoms, the stuff that they know of, you know, that the next, we only have oil for the next 60 years and things like that. And so that comes intuitively. But on a broader level, of course, I do believe that we have evolved to prioritize the bad news. You're walking through a bush. There is some rustling noise behind a tree.

If you think it's going to work out, but there is a lion hiding behind the tree, he's going to eat you. Your genes are going to get weeded out of the population. So an overreaction to a threat which doesn't exist is less costly than an underreaction to a threat that is real. And so we have developed a bunch of psychological biases, negativity biases, that make us interact with the news in such a negative way. Agreed. Agreed. I do call CNN the crisis news network and our amygdala, ancient piece of our temporal lobe about the size of your thumb, that basically views everything you see, hear, and feel looking for danger as a protective mechanism. You're sort of your red alert system. You pay 10 times more attention to negative news than

positive news. And I know people listening here have heard me say this before, you know, the news media, newspapers, magazines, radio, TV have one business model, deliver your eyeballs and ears to their advertisers. And if you pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news, then you're going to give your people watching it more negative news they don't pull away. It's unfortunate.

And good news networks don't survive. And ultimately, it's sensationalism. So we have to figure out ways to reprogram the human mind. But getting back to human population, what else are you hearing about this conversation? Do people make any viable arguments that give you pause? The issue is our basic model says wealth is really this function of population and the freedom to innovate. So it's really the number of free minds that we have that determine what kind of prosperity we're able to create. So we think about resistance to that.

What is preventing people from being able to really act and explore on their ideas? And there are places on the planet that just simply don't have a culture that is innovative friendly. People can't own property. They can't enjoy markets. They really are not free to innovate. And so the opposition from that respect is very dangerous. You've got to have people and they have to have this freedom. So when we see things that happen, war, for example, it's like, wow, we're using all these resources.

But what we're really destroying is all this human capital and potential for knowledge creation that would benefit the rest of us. So the pushback we see is really that we have civilizations that don't tolerate this idea that we need to be collaborators and not competitors. When we live in a world of atoms, we compete. When we live in a world of atoms we compete when we live in a world of knowledge we collaborate yes can you dig dig into that because there's a reason for that right if i have if i have a chunk of gold and you have a watch and i trade you my chunk of gold for your watch now you have gold and i have a watch if i know how to make something and you know how to

make something and we exchange now we both know how to make both things knowledge you know grows in a collaborative fashion where atoms don't right so knowledge has a couple of interesting features it has this this first feature that is its non rival rivalrous I can you and I can consume it at the same time in fact when we consume it it grows unlike a Snickers bar when we consume it, it grows. Unlike a Snickers bar of something physical, when you consume knowledge, it actually grows the knowledge. And Paul Romer really kind of dug into this and brought this really idea of knowledge to the table when we talk about growth. What does knowledge do for us? And so I think back to this idea, look, if we want to be able to lift one another, we have to have this freedom to do that.

And we don't know who is going to come up with these ideas. Steve Jobs, his biological father was born in Syria. Well, imagine if Steve had been born and raised in Damascus instead of San Jose. What would his life have been like? What would your life, our life had been like? So the question is, how many Steve Jobs are in Damascus today that don't have this environment where they're able to actually act on their talent and skills and share that with the rest of us? Beautiful example. I think one of the most important things is having an abundance mindset. So I try and teach the CEOs that I mentor, the entrepreneurs that I mentor, to create an abundance mindset. I'm just curious, how would you define an abundance mindset? And do you have any tricks or mechanisms to help someone get out of scarcity into abundance? Gosh, that's a great question.

I can tell you that giving talks, people tend to appreciate the positive look at humanity and the future of the planet. And very often, the people whom I've been lecturing will come back to me and say, this is the first time we've heard something like that. And it filled us with optimism. So it's not so much that our minds are foreclosed to the option of being more optimistic

and having the abundance mindset. It's just that there aren't enough avenues in life through which they are going to encounter it. Paul Ehrlich sold 3 million copies of his book warning that the world was going to end within 10 or 20 years. I know that abundance sold well, but I'm sure it didn't sell 3 million copies.

Yeah, yeah. We probably sold, I don't know, half a million at most quarter million, but you know who was Paul Ehrlich and what was his? Was his message so Paul Ehrlich not only was but is Paul Ehrlich just turned 90 He is a biologist at Stanford University and in 1968. He wrote a very famous book, The Population Bomb. And the book opened with famous words or infamous saying that in the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people were going to die due to starvation, exhaustion of resources and starvation, no matter what we do to change our course today. Very optimistic. So he didn't have an abundance.

He didn't have an abundance mindset. And, of course, that didn't happen. Today, famines are pretty much gone from the world except for war zones. And places that were at the forefront of Paul Ehrlich's mind, things like India, countries like India, they are now food exporter. In many parts of Africa, it is obesity, which is now a problem, according to the latest studies from Africa that I have seen, rather than starvation. So anyway, the point is that I don't think that people, that there are enough avenues through which this positive mindset, positive news can penetrate the human mind.

One of the problems that I've encountered is I suddenly realized that we don't actually have a constituency in the United States that can push the realistic image of what life is like in the United States. When Republicans are in charge, Democrats are saying everything is going to hell. Nothing that Republicans do can possibly be good. When Democrats are in charge, Republicans do the exact opposite. Everything is going to hell. going to hell. You know, and so the point is that even when there is good news about American economy, that doesn't necessarily get reported because there is, again, no constituency for the good news. Yeah, no, it is so true. And that's why I'm so happy to have found you. You know,

we had dinner together at Jennifer Grossman's house, who's a dear friend of both of ours, said, you guys have to meet. And Gail, a pleasure to meet you as well. I mean, there is no downside and every upside to having an abundance mindset. The only downside is it's less clicks. Yeah, I guess, you know, my experience is I'm in a classroom with, you know, young people all day. And what I try to help them understand, and they kind of come to the classroom, many of these students with this kind of feeling that, hey, yeah, you know, the world is overpopulated and we're running out and we have this climate crisis. Where did they get that from? Everything.

The media, their parents. The culture is saturated with this crisis mentality. And it's this crisis crisis, because once you declare a crisis, then you can suspend all this other, you know, civil rights and so forth and so on. But they come kind of with the popular culture. I mean, they've seen Thanos and they've watched the story. Yeah, so what's going on there? Are you able to shift their point of view? Yeah, I mean, there's something that's kind of cool about being pessimistic.

You know, you're a young guy and it's kind of cool to be the pessimistic guy. So you kind of deal with that a little bit and all guys kind of go through that. But I think being able to say, look, you've got to put this world into context. Jordan Peterson makes this argument about it's not comparing yourself to someone else today, it's comparing to who you were yesterday. And what he's really saying is look at your parents and grandparents. Look at what's happened over time to our lives. And what we realize is things used to be really really expensive and we live in this world of just just a world of super abundance where things are becoming more and more abundant which means you have more and more choices so for a young person today it's look every individual

on this planet has the potential to make somebody happy and And by that I mean you discover and create some knowledge that you can share with somebody and make somebody happy. We don't know who those people are. So it means you've got to give dignity and respect to everyone because they could actually create something that's going to lift all of us. You have that potential yourself. What is it in your life that you can do? What is your purpose that you're going to discover that's going to allow you to make this contribution in terms of discovery of knowledge that you're going to be able to share with one another? This is the opportunity. We got 7 billion people on the planet that have cell phone access, you know, connected each other. You've never, there's never been a time where we have more people with more time, more resources, and more connections to be able to discover and share knowledge.

Get on this learning curve and make this contribution and we lift one another through this process. A brief note from our sponsors. Let's talk about sleep. Sleep has become one of my number one longevity priorities in life. Getting eight deep uninterrupted hours of sleep is one of the most important things you can do to increase your vitality and energy and increase the health span that you have here on earth. You know, when I was in medical school years ago, I used to pride myself on how little sleep I could get. You know, it used to be five, five and a half hours. Today, I pride myself on how much sleep I can get. And I shoot for eight hours every single night. Now, usually I'm great

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and length of sleep that you need for recovery. It's a product I hope you'll try. It works for me and I'm sure it will work for you. If you're interested, go to mylifehorse.com backslash Peter to get a discount from Lifeforce on this product. But you'll also see a whole set of other longevity and vitality related supplements that I use. We'll talk about them some other time. But in terms of sleep, Peak Rest is my go-to supplement. Hope you'll enjoy it. Go to mylifehorse.com backslash Peter for your discount. You know, it gets me kind of pissed off at how people tend to romanticize the past and the good old days. You know, and the good old days where you would work 80-hour weeks to survive. You would get to an age of 40 and half your friends were dying from tuberculosis or other infectious agents.

And life was short. It was brutish. It was difficult. And I call bullshit on the good old days. These are the good old days. And every year, every decade is getting better at an extraordinary rate. And if you want to go and plant and grow your own food or go out to the country, you can do that.

But you don't have to. You know, I was speaking to somebody and we had this insight. Humanity is finally taking a break from survival. Human history used to be all about surviving. And we're taking a vacation from survival. Human history used to be all about surviving and we're taking a vacation from survival. In fact, anybody listening to this today that you have the time and the luxury and the technology for free to listen to this conversation is awesome. Well we do a little analysis on time inequality and you know what what's happened there we think about income inequality and what's happened there.

We think about income inequality, but it's really time inequality that counts. You go back to 1960 and someone who lived in China basically spent eight hours a day working to just earn the money to buy their food for that day. Well, the time price of food has fallen such that they can now spend less than an hour. So you go from eight hours to one hour, that means you got seven hours of time that you can now devote to something else. And that's times billions of people on the planet. So you suddenly have this flourishing of time availability to pursue other things. of being a consumer you can now become a creator and by the way amplified today by chat GPT by Dali by

stable diffusion by all of these tools that make it possible for you we're going almost it's godlike in power we can go from a spoken word to creation in a step. It's insane. Well, that's what happened to me when I saw Excel the first time. For my generation, it was, wow, I can't believe this thing can do this thing. And it's going to make my life so much better. So yeah, we have these tools. And once again, they're knowledge tools. They're tools that we can share with other people that have zero marginal cost. We sit on this cusp of this tremendous opportunity to create and lift one another out of poverty because not only do we have these resources, we have the time to use the resources and

explore what can be done with them. I challenge my Abundant 360 members. to use the resources and explore what can be done with them. I challenge my Abundant 360 members, right? I run this annual summit for the last 11 years. I've committed to running it for 25 years. I challenge people to think about in your business, in your industry, in your life, what do you see as scarce and how do you flip it into abundance, right? There is a means and a mechanism to make everything abundant. It may not be easy. It may require new breakthroughs

and technologies. But I believe there's nothing that is truly scarce. And time is what people usually say is the most scarce thing. And yes, historically, it has been. But if we're able to add decades onto the human lifespan, it becomes less so. And when you're able to speak and have something happen that would have taken you hours or days before, it becomes less so. The compression of productivity per unit time, you know, skyrockets. Is there, you know, how does, I don't talk about politics. I ignore politics, uh, to the most degree, uh, Marion, you're in the center of all human knowledge in Washington, DC, where you're bathed in politics.

Uh, where does this concept of abundance play into the United States political system or any countries around the world? Is this, is it inconvenient for the left and the right to think about abundance? So not only am I in the center of all of human wisdom, but also morality and good manners and things like that. Look, I actually think that we are living through a potentially very dangerous period. And that is the rise of degrowth economic theory. Of degrowth? Degrowth. It is called degrowth theory. There are tenured professors in the United States and

in other parts of the advanced world who are advocating in favor of basically not just slower growth, but essentially less economic activity, fundamental reduction in consumption. Typical example of that would be things like the proposals in France to ban all internal flights so that people want to fly they would only be go to somewhere they will only be able to go on trains people who would want to ban flying altogether people with proposals for every human being to have a certain amount of a carbon credit per year and once you reach it you can no longer travel

or do anything really, watch TV or bathe in warm water. So anybody who is listening to us today can Google degrowth and see that this idea is increasingly prevalent in our media and in our newspapers. And why am I worried about it? I'm worried about it because whenever something stupid comes along, you think this cannot possibly take off. There is no way any human being could possibly believe this. And 10 or 15 years down the line, sometimes even quicker, it bleeds out of the academia and starts being parroted by politicians and then implemented into practice. So I actually

do think, I'm actually deeply worried about this. Not only do we not have a pro-growth policy, there is a danger of a de-growth policy. Wow. I just saw an article yesterday about, was it Virginia wants to go to a four-day work week? Could be. I haven't heard of it. I mean, it's like, okay, listen, you work four days, I'm working seven because I love what I do. But that's a different story. Wow. I would just add a little bit to this. You know, I might be a little more pessimistic than Marion is, because I think that political power is derived from scarcity. I mean,

it's derived from this ideology of scarcity. We create this sense that there's this scarcity, and that's where this political power shows up. When someone shows up, you know, frightened of the future, and they have this untested hypothetical model, and they want to be given totalitarian power to save us from ourselves, that's very dangerous. We've just kind of gone through this thing in the last couple, three years of, wow, we're going to have this, we're going to have this crisis, and we need to, we need to relax all of our constitutional protections to, to be saved by who? By someone with a model. And so I tend to think as people come to understand, look, we have expertise, but let's not grant experts this power over making these kinds of choices. It's interesting, Gal. Yeah. You've got authoritarian governments meter out access to natural gas or electricity or information. They have a scarcity paucity

mindset where you get what I want you to get because I'm going to control you that way versus an abundance mindset is everyone has access to anything they need anytime at a de minimis in reducing cost. So food, water, energy, healthcare, education is available to everyone. And that drives growth, but the trade is a loss of control. Right. It's this entrepreneur versus bureaucrat mindset. It's this idea is that we go out and create prosperity or are we driven by this idea we have to have power and status and it's kind of this, you know, no approach to the world versus a yes approach. Can we do this? Yes, entrepreneurs would say yes. Bureaucratic mindset says no. We've got to limit this exploration of these new things because they're too risky

that's going to cause this you know other problems we've got to control what we have and take no risks and therefore have no opportunity for growth yeah that's that's so important um and again if this conversation if you listening, is new to you about abundance, this is about making the world of your future, that of your children, your grandchildren, more and more capable. If you want to revert to what life was like 100 years ago, you've got to realize how awful it was. how awful it was. I mean, a thousand years ago, it was pestilence, and you'd have the Black Plague or the Spanish Flu,

and you'd lose a significant percentage of the world's population. Well, the question I love to ask my students is, how much do I have to pay you to never use this again? It's not what you paid for it, it's what I have to pay you to not use it. That's really the value. What do they answer it, by the have to pay you to not use it that's really the value

I can't find a student that's willing to do it for less than 5 million dollars and even then they would be lying you guys walk around with a 5 million dollar thing in your pocket and why don't you just overwhelm with happiness because of what you have? That's a great question, my friend. And we have these people that say, you know, why don't we have a flying car?

Well, what would you rather have, Peter? Would you rather have one of these and everybody else on the planet have one of these? Or would you rather have a flying car? Well, sure. But in abundance mindset, it's both. Right. I mean, it's, it's not creating false trades in that regard. And we will have flying cars and we will have autonomous cars

and we will have personal AIs and we will extend the human lifespan and we will have a squanderable abundance of energy. And these are the directions that we're heading. And the only thing that can Stop it, in my mind, is sort of devastating global events. Otherwise, there's no velocity switch on the speed of technology. There's no on-off switch. It is human ingenuity and curiosity that drives things further and further and further without stop. I would worry a little bit about the word. You used the word squander. I don't think we squander.

We are trading resources for more valuable resources. We're hopeful. I mean, I use squanderable abundance of energy to mean that you have so much energy, you don't think about it. Yeah, okay. That's what I meant. You have this abundance of energy. I'm going to use, I'm going to change it.

I'm going to now use the word a super abundance of energy. Go with your book. Which means that it becomes very, very time price affordable. It's like it doesn't cost me any time to go buy this unit of energy and look what I can do with it in terms of using that to create something even more valuable. Because we're always valuing up. How we use this these resources that are very abundant to make resources that are less abundant more abundant discovering new ways to do that with our abundant resources the other thing that i would point out of course peter you're you're right there are dangers and this happy period in in human history could come to an end as a result of a political mishap or a war. We must never forget that there have been societies in the past in human history

that have been very open, very innovative, that have increased standard of living, and that were followed by dark ages. Rome had a pretty high standard of living, followed by a tremendous decline, both in innovation and literacy high standard of living, followed by a tremendous decline, both in innovation and continuous innovation for granted. Of course, people have innovated over time. But what's so remarkable over the last 200 years is that we have continued to innovate, partly because I think of what Gail said, was that this period of innovation is deeply connected to the extension of human freedom and dignity. It is not, in our model, it is not coincidental

that over the last 200 years, this, what in Europe we call liberalism, but what here in the United States you would call classical liberalism, that classical liberalism, the expansion of classical liberalism and basic human dignity was accompanied by this tremendous creation of wealth. Those came together for a reason. And that is why in superabundance, we say superabundance equals population times freedom. And that freedom is not guaranteed.

Hey, everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. And that freedom is not guaranteed. Hey everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming. I don't watch the crisis news network.

I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net, the way I see the world, by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology, how entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity, how exponential technologies are transforming our world. So twice a week, I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to dmandus.com backslash blog and learn more.

Now back to the episode. That freedom is not guaranteed. Correct. But there is an interesting change afoot as well. Have you heard or read the book The Network Network State? Yeah. And so, yeah. And I've had him on the, on this podcast and we've talked about, you know, it's interesting if you wanted to start a country in the past, you would need to go and bring your armed forces, either find some territory that was not occupied and capture it, not available anymore, or you might grow an island in the Pacific, you might go to

space. Balaji's idea of the network state, of course, is we're going to sort of tie together people who have much more in common than where they were born and create those new. So the question becomes, is there a new form of political independence that can stabilize the world and give us hope for not having this rise and collapse and rise and collapse? Is there some mechanism that might protect us? Any thoughts on that? I think I would like to hear from you. Yeah, really, more than me. Well, I think, I mean, part of my hope there is that if you think about would you rather, as an ally, would you rather have Greece or Ghana or Google? You know, I'd rather have Google,

right? I think that the nation state is going to ultimately transform into something new. And it's going to be people connected who have extraordinary power. And I don't think that the nation state can restrict the ultimate power of the individual because we live in a world of porous borders, a technology, you know, AI, you know, human level AI is coming. Ray Kurzweil's prediction is 2029. Elon Musk made a statement that it's going to be, you know, AI will be vastly more powerful than humans by 2025. We'll see. But, you know, it's this decade. We're not talking about 30 years from now. And so if each of us have access to superintelligence and robotics,

and now we have to worry about a destabilizing force there, but could it be a hyper-stabilizing force? What I can say is a lot of change is coming and it's important to sort of have a vision of where this is going. My hope ultimately is that in a world of super abundance, people have much more to lose than they do to gain in warfare Right that if you're if you are a mom today in Sub-Saharan Africa or 50 years ago where you're you know, there was a 45% Death rate for kids under five years old right that's dropped to minimus Lee now significantly

it's one of the metrics I love following that death rate of kids under five and maternal mortality rates in birth. Those things have dropped tremendously. But if your children didn't have a future and they were stuck in warfare, they didn't have access to education or health, that was a world in which you were willing to give up everything. You were willing to go to war. You were willing to revolt. You were willing to give up your life because you had nothing to look forward to. But in a world of super abundance, where you have access to all the food, water, energy, healthcare, the dreams, the entertainment, the ability to create, I don't think people are so willing to die. So that's a countervailing

force that I hope for. Yeah, I would just add to that is part of this thing that we have to deal with is human envy. And that has led to lots of issues. If you have an abundant society, but people continue to kind of be obsessed with envy against one another, the thing's not going to last. So being able to go beyond envy where we think, look, yeah, another person may have more than I have. But the correct perspective is, where was I yesterday? And Gail, that is so important. People compare themselves to their neighbors more than they compare themselves to where they were a decade ago or a year ago or where their parents or grandparents were. And that's a problem. You know, it's the billionaire who in a crash goes from $10 billion in net worth to $5 billion and throws himself in front of a train. It's like, you know, WTF. I mean, okay, I'm sorry, you lost five billions. You only have five billion now. I mean, it's insane. I do think that people engage in social comparison. But it's not, but it's in specific domains where they are, what they're mostly interested in. So it's not as though every human

being out there, every American out there in a neighborhood is looking around and saying, oh, those people have a pool, but I don't have a pool. You know, I'm going to be consumed by envy because not everybody's self-worth is derived from whether I have a pool or whether I don't have a pool. Other people have different goals in life or different domains in which they want to excel. So if I'm a little bit optimistic on this score, is that in every neighborhood there is also going to be somebody who derives his or her worth, not just from that swimming pool, but also from things like maybe being an artist or reading books or helping in a homeless shelter and things like that. Yeah, I would just add to that a little bit of clarification on envy is that, you know,

Americans have been kind of unique in that we haven't, envy has not been a high thing for us. When we see our neighbor that has a pool, it's like, well, I could go get a pool. How do I get a pool? Envy, on the other hand, is I want to take that pool away from my neighbor. I want to destroy that pool. So being able to look at someone here and say,

well, I could be like that, versus look at someone here and say, well, I could be like that versus look at someone here and say, well, I'm going to destroy that. That envy is what the problem is, I think, around the planet where I want to take what you have because I don't think you should have it for whatever reason. So being able to shift people thinking that, look, you want to be able to have these things. Here's how I acquired those things. You can follow these steps as well. And you can do it individually and you can do it as a culture. Yeah. I think having models of people being able to do extraordinary things, you know, from pauper to prince type stories, and it's more relevant and more capable than

any time ever in human history today. Oh, my God, it's extraordinary, right? We're democratizing access to all the tools to create abundance, to create wealth. Let me hit on two of the resources that you guys have developed. I want to understand what they are. First off, it's humanprogress.org. Tell me about that, Marian. Well, humanprogress.org, I'm the founder at editor of humanprogress.org, and it's a website that basically promotes positive news around the world. There are plenty of websites around the world which are devoted to the doom and gloom.

Humanprogress.org is devoted just sharing with you articles that we write about how the world is getting better. And also, we use statistics to show people that objective reality in the world is much better than people are led to believe by other news sources. And just out of interest, Human Progress was very much inspired by the book that inspired you, which is Matt Ridley's Rational Optimist. When I read Rational Optimist by Ridley in 2010, I decided that I needed to create a website that put all of those statistics on the website and then it just grew. So yeah, we have that in common. Thank you for that resource. And I commend people to go and check it out. And Gail, talk to me one second about the Simon Abundance Index. So the Simon Abundance Index actually grew out of Marion and I, our first kind of conversation is we started to talk about this bet, who would win the bet today. We expanded the data set once again from these five

commodities to 50. And then we extended the time period. And so the 10 years, we looked at 38 years. And then we looked at how those commodities had become more abundant over time. And then we added the additional factor that what has happened to populations. So the Simon Abundance Index is really an effort to measure the global resource abundance pie. What is happening to the size of that pie over time? Once again, it grows in two dimensions. It grows at the individual personal level when we each individually are able to acquire more with less time. And then we have more people on the planet. So we multiply that individual resource abundance against population and that allows us to then

provide a quantitative measurement of how's the planet doing? How are we doing? And what we see is since 1980, that abundance has grown over 500%, 600% on the planet. Guys, this has been amazing. Here's the book, Super Abundance. It's actually a beautiful cover. Superabundance, it's actually a beautiful cover. The story of population growth, innovation, and human flourishing on an infinitely bountiful planet by Marian Tupi and Gail Pooley.

Superabundance. Guys, where can people go to learn more about the book and learn about you besides those two other sites? Well, they can go to Amazon and buy it, or they can read more about it if they are unsure on superabundance.com, superabundance.com. And I'm Marian Tupi. I'm at the Cato Institute. That's cato.org. Or alternatively, you can find me at humanprogress.org. Fantastic. And Gail?

You can contact me at the same superabundance.com. You can reach me through that. Wonderful. Guys, hopefully this has been an uplifting conversation. Please, if anybody comes and tells you that the world is going to hell in the handbasket, that we're going towards overpopulation, that the life of your children and grandchildren is getting worse, stop them and tell them, stop parroting all this misinformation, that the data is there. The data is there and it's clear. We're heading towards an extraordinary world. Yes, there are problems, but guess what?

The technology and the innovative minds to solve those problems are increasing every single day. Gentlemen, I look forward to continue this conversation. Thank you for writing this. It's amazing. I want to put together sort of a reading series in abundance, you know, with Matt Ridley's Rational Optimist and abundance and super abundance

and zero marginal society. And I think changing people's, the way people see the world is so important and uplifting their hopefulness for a compelling and abundant future is so important and uplifting their hopefulness for a compelling and abundant future is so important. I look forward to continuing our collaboration, gentlemen. Thank you for an extraordinary conversation.

Thank you for having us. Pleasure. Thank you, Peter.