TRIGGERnometry - 5 Easy Ways to Save the World - Bjørn Lomborg

Episode Date: July 2, 2023

Dr Bjørn Lomborg is a researcher, writer and the founder of the  think tank, Copenhagen Consensus. He has collaborated 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. His latest book, ‘Best Things First’ posits 12 of these solutions and details how they can be applied in a relatively inexpensive manner. Check out Bjørn’s book here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1940003482/ SPONSORED BY: AG1. Go to https://drinkAG1.com/triggernometry/ to get 5 free AG1 Travel Packs and a FREE 1 year supply of Vitamin D with your first purchase!  Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Intro  01:08 Best Things First 03:18 Education in Low Income Countries 07:17 Why Hasn't Education Already Been Fixed? 10:23 Sustainable Development Goals  14:20 Maternal & Newborn Health 19:37 The Desire For Complex Solutions  20:47 Sponsor Message: AG1 22:41 Corruption in the Developing World 28:21 Trade-off Denialism  30:15 The Malaria Outbreak 35:04 Curing Tuberculosis in Developing Areas 40:27 Immunisation & Vaccines 44:50 The Growing Anti-Vax Movement 47:45 Overcoming Infrastructure Issues in Developing Areas 53:30 How To Fix Problems Effectively 56:29 Should We Bring More People to the West? 1:00:10 The Brain Drain Argument 1:02:16 What Individuals Can Do to Help the Developing World 1:05:24 What’s the One Thing We’re Not Talking About? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here are 12 things you can focus on to actually make a big impact. So let's talk about that. The UN is actually trying to save the world for about $15 trillion. So a totally absurdly large amount. You can do it for about two, one-thousand-a-bit of what the UN would actually like to spend. But what we shouldn't be doing is to say, my obsession with obesity or with climate change or with plastic straws or with all these other things take precedence over the,

fact that for most people in this world, you know, it's really about the fact that their kids are dying from easily curable infectious diseases, get bad education, are losing out of productivity because of corruption, all these other issues, that we could fix really cheaply. So get your priorities right when you care about the world. And for $35 billion, we can make the change. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Klician. And this is a show for you. If you want honest conversations, with fascinating people.

Our brilliant and returning guest today is the author of a new book called The Best Things First. Bjorn Lomborg, welcome back to the show. Thank you. It's so good to have you. Last time we were talking about something more controversial,

but this, what you're talking about now is how to save the world. Exactly. It's exciting. And save the world fairly inexpensively. Well, that is the exciting part. Because anyone can save the world if you give them a trillion dollars.

You're talking about a much smaller amount here. Actually, let me just, so, you know, the UN is actually trying to save the world for about $15 trillion. So, you know, a totally absurdly large amount. So if you promise everything to everyone, if you want to, you know, fix disease and hunger and poverty and, you know, get everybody organic apples and community gardens and, you know, fix war and corruption and climate change and everything else, the cost is about $15 to $20 trillion, and we're spending about $5 right now. So we're missing about $15 trillion. Just to give you a sense of proportion, I mean, that's 15% of global GDP. But it's also more than all the governments in the world collect in taxes. So that's just not going to happen.

We're just not going to be able to have that amount of money. And so what we're trying to say is, wouldn't it be fun if we could do a lot of it? We can't do it all. But if we could do a lot of it, the most effective stuff for very, very little money. And we actually come out with saying you can do it for about two, one thousandths of a bit of what the UN would actually like to spend. So about $35 billion. I did that calculation in my head on you. Yes, yes.

And it's roughly right. So fundamentally, for what is essentially couch change in the international community, we could do an immense amount of good. We could save 4.2 million lives each and every year. That's about 14% of all that die in the poorer half of the world. And we could make each one of these people almost a dollar richer each and every day. So that's 4 billion people. So that's about $1.1 trillion. This is just fantastic stuff.

How do you get from $30? Like the dollars get multiplied massively a bit? How does that happen? So for instance, one of the things that we know is that education sucks in most of the developing world. And a developed world as well. That is true. And people love to complain about it, and we could probably make education much, much better.

But still, remember, the average student in sub-Saharan Africa is below and far below the 99th percentile in the UK and the US. So despite the fact that you think your kids are not learning very much, they're still learning immensely much more than what happens in most of the low- and low-middle-income income countries. We call them the poor half of the world. So the 4.1 billion people who live in low and low middle income countries. So these are the people who live for, you know, less than $13 a day. Often, you know, the average is probably, what, $6 a day or something? Very, very little. We could help that. The main reason why education sucks is that you have, you know, we do this universally,

you put all the 12-year-olds in the same grade, you put all the 13-year-olds in the same grade. But remember, these 12-year-olds are vastly different. Some of them are really, really smart and knows what going on, and some of them no clue. How are you going to teach a class of 50 when they're so widely, you know, spread out? You're not. You're essentially going to try to aim for the middle, and you're going to miss, you know, all the smart kids and all the kids who don't really know what's going on. And that's a terrible waste. What we know works is to make sure that you teach each one of these kids at his or her own level. Now, you can't do that with 50 kids and one teacher, but what you can do, and I'm just giving one part of the example, you can put them in front of a tablet with educational software.

You do that one hour a day, so they're basically in front of this tablet. It'll very quickly find out just exactly how well are you on this topic. Do you know a lot or do you know very little? And then start teaching him or her right at that level. If you do that one hour a day for a whole school year, so the rest of the seven hours, odd hours or eight odd hours, it's still going to be the same boring class where you learn very, very little. And of course, all the other kids are also going to be using the same tablet. That's the way we keep the cost down. If you do that for one year, each of these students,

well, an average, have learned as much as they normally wouldn't three years. Wow. So for very, very little money, this cost about $30 per student per year for this. You know, you need solar panels to recharge them. You need to buy the tablet. You need to teach people how to use it. You need a storage so they don't get stolen, all this kind of stuff. But if you do all of that, it'll cost $30 and it'll deliver three years of learning. And that's how you make people rich, because what happens if you learn more, you become more productive when you're an adult?

And you'll have that all the way through your adult life. We can simply find a way. So there's about half a billion kids in primary school right now in the lower half of the world. If we make them smarter, they will make their nations better off, not. Not only will they make their own families better off, but they'll make their nations richer. And so the whole benefit of that will be in the order of $600 billion. So spend $10 billion on these tablets and some other things we could also talk about. And then you make them $600 billion better off in the long run.

Remember, this is actually discounted back. So much of this will happen far in the future. And we're heavily saying that's worth less. It's actually in the order of $6 trillion. but because you're comparing it to now, we're saying it's about $600 billion. That's a phenomenal investment. You spend $1, you do $65 of good. You spend one pound, you do 65 pounds of good.

That's how you multiply the world. And again, that's how you find really smart, simple things that have amazing impacts. Bjorn, before we go into and we delve into this more deeply, when I was reading your book, my question was, as I was reading it, going, Why hadn't people done this before? So the truth is, this is not rocket science. So most people know some of this stuff. So it's well known that, for instance, one of the very, very effective things in education is teaching at the right level. And you can do that with a tablet.

But if you ask most politicians, what do you want to do? You know, a tablet doesn't really look like anything. You want to build schools and go and cut the cord. Or you want to increase teachers pay, which obviously make all the teachers want to vote for you, or you want to reduce class sizes because a lot of parents are arguing for that. And look, all of these things probably have slight impacts, but very slight compared to the enormous amounts of spending. So, for instance, Indonesia back in the early 2000s,

they actually made a constitutional change, so they decided they were going to double spending on education. So they hired about a million more teachers. They have one of the lowest class sizes in the whole world. They doubled spending on each teacher, so they basically doubled their pay. And then they put it out all over the country, which you think, that's great. Right. They really care about education.

Unfortunately, some people studied this, and they looked at, so, you know, because they implement it in different regions at different times, you can actually do a pseudo-randomized control trial and see how much did it change the learning of all these kids. Turned out that it had absolutely no impact. The famous paper is called No impact. No impact. The famous paper is called Double for Nothing. So it sort of tells you the whole story there. It's a very widely quoted paper.

It also looked at how happy are the teachers. And not surprisingly, when you double their pay, they're actually much happy. which also you would imagine the long run probably mean that they will be slightly better teachers. So we're not saying that we know everything. It seems reasonable that there will be some sort of impact, but you couldn't measure it at all. So fundamentally, there's a lot of wrong ways to spend enormous amounts of money. And so the answer to your question is simply, it's not that we don't know that there are some things that work effectively and there are some things that are less effective.

But it's just we're also trying to do a lot of other things. politicians are trying to be popular. Most people are trying to do stuff that sounds good and looks good on TV. And you have the feeling that, you know, I want my kids to have a lower class size because then he or she is going to become really smart. But unfortunately, the answer is no, you should have her or him in front of a tablet for an hour a day. Wow. So there's a lot of parents there who are going to be very upset because the kid's going to be like,

you see, the tablet is the way to go. Or I'm very happy, right? Because, I mean, fundamentally, you want your kid to do a lot better. Yeah, you do. Is it partly as well beyond it? Is that we're not being honest about these conversations? People aren't being honest when we're discussing these topics. Yes, I think so. I mean, fundamentally, so the whole thing sort of stems from the UN's so-called sustainable development goals.

They run from 2016 to 2030. This is the global promises that all governments, the UK, everybody else, have promised the entire world. And they basically, as we started out, they promised everything to everyone. So of course, we're not being honest when we say, we're going to promise you everything. No, you're not. Well, you're going to promise it, but you're not actually going to deliver. We're failing in pretty much all of these promises.

We're promised to deliver all these amazing things by 2030. We'll probably be half a century late on this. And there seems to be no interest in actually spending a lot of money. So what happens is if you only have a little money and you spend it on the popular stuff, it obviously means that you'll end up not having any money for the smart stuff. And so in that sense, yes, the book is really about saying, look, why don't we do first the really smart stuff and then, you know, please feel free to spend extra money and all the other stuff. But $35 billion, that's really, you know, a couch change. Let's just spend that, and then,

you know, do all the other stuff that you want. Well, that makes sense. Beyond, before we get into the specifics, just remind everybody the Sustainable Development Goals very quickly. what were they and how far or close are we on that? So, so fundamental, I can't, I can't tell them. I've worked on these for seven years. Nobody can tell you all of them. There's 169 promises. We've got a lot of time.

Okay, good, so I'm just going to start reading. No, literally, it says, you know, it says amazing things like, you know, in poverty, which great, I'm not sure anyone really knows how we should end poverty. We can reduce poverty. But then it also goes on to talk about how we need to, to make sure that everybody get a fair wage. And we also make sure that that happens for not just for men, but for women, which is great.

And for handicapped people and for elderly people and young people without an education on and all. And then it just goes into the weeds about everything we should be doing about this. Does sound a little milk and honey. Oh, it's totally, it really is everything. And then, of course, it goes on to disease and say, we should get rid of disease.

I think that's a great idea. I'm not sure how we would do that. Again, we can get rid of infectious disease or pretty much, but you need to have your conversation about which ones should we do first and how much should we do? Some of it's realistic, some of it is not. But then, you know, communicable disease, sorry, non-communicable diseases. So the stuff that you, chronic disease, we're not going to be able to get rid of that. And they promised to, so they have more moderate. They're promising we should cut it by one-third. We're no way on the, on the the path of that. Right now, we're just not achieving it at all. And again, it's just unrealistic.

And then they go through all these other things. So it's a lot of wonderful thoughts, but nothing is actually happening. And that's why if you try to estimate the total thing, and believe me, that's very, very hard to do, but Jeffrey Sachs and some of these people in New York have actually tried, what they find is that we are getting better. But that's fundamentally because the world is getting better. So not surprisingly, the SDGs actually sort of indicate something that's nice. So it is getting better. But it's getting better very slowly. There was no pickup after 2016 when we started doing the SDGs. So there's been no sort of, yay, we all want to do it. It's just the same path as it was before. And if you follow that path, remember, COVID totally broke that. But if you imagine we sort

follow that path for the rest of this decade will be far, far away. We'll probably only get to what we promised half a century late. Makes sense. So the story is that you're saying is basically we're throwing a hell of a lot of money at a wide range of things because we want to deliver all things to all men. And here are 35 billion, 12 things you can focus on to actually make a big impact. So let's talk about that. What are the biggest things that we actually should be looking So we should be looking at education, as I talked about, and then we should look at some of these other things. So let me give you one other example. I'm not going to do all 12, but one obvious thing is maternal and newborn health. So the thing, again, I learned a lot when I was writing this book

because I work with some of the smartest economists, and they again work with all these people who actually do the stuff. I'm not an expert on this. They are, and I've just learned a lot from them. So one thing that surprised me was so many moms are still dying from childbirth. So about 300,000 moms die each and every year in this world, and they needn't do that in childbirth. 2.3 million kids die each and every year in the first 28 days in their life and earth. That's just terrible. And again, totally, totally unnecessary. So much of this is because there is complications during birth, and there's no materials to handle that.

So the mom has pre-eclampsia or a clampsia, basically high blood pressure and she bleeds out. We know how to fix that. We fix that routinely in the rich world. We should make sure moms get into institutional birth, give birth in institutions instead of just doing it at home, so that there is an opportunity to treat her if things go wrong. Likewise, and again, I didn't know this at all. So most kids that come out of mom just start breathing right away, about 80%. So 15% need a slap in the back to get going. And then they start breathing them, that's fine.

But even in rich countries, about 5% of all kids just don't breathe. So you need to start giving, you need to push in air into their lungs and then they go. And then they survive. And of course, we just do that in rich countries and rocket science. You just need a simple hand pump. I mean, in rich countries, we have something more fancy because we can't have such easy things, right? But in the poor part of the world, you just often don't have this hand pump. It costs $65 for each of these hand pumps.

It works for probably three years. And in that time, you could probably save about 25 kids. $65, 25 kids' lives saved. That doesn't seem like a lot. Why are we not doing that? And again, the point here is not that I don't want everybody to rush out and do a GoFund just for this hand pump. It's about getting all of these things. So, you know, for instance, disinfectants, you'd imagine that's a good idea to have disinfectants

on the surfaces in your hospital wing. But again, we don't. And so a lot of places do, but, you know, about a fifth don't. We should make sure that that has it there. And so the point with this argument is really just to tell people if we focus more on maternal and newborn health. That's by making sure that the women come in to institutional births. So about two-thirds are doing it now. We want almost all in institutional birth.

And that these institutions actually have midwives, that they have disinfectants, that they have this hand pump, these very, very simple things. World Health Organization has a whole list of this. If you did all of that, it would cost about $5 billion a year. So not nothing. But then you could save 166,000 moms each and every year. And you could save 1.2 million kids each and every year.

It's just, you know, it just blows your mind that we're not doing this. And the simple reason why we're not doing it is because it has very little sort of public awareness. I don't know, have you guys ever seen the, this is the Montepython skit with the machine that says pling? No. You have, it's a meaning of life. Oh, God, you've got to say that. Anyway, so they're these doctors in an operating room or something. they have all these machines and they're all totally excited about the machines and the,

and the manager of the hospital comes in. Then they, oh, let's show him the machine that says Pling, which is apparently the most expensive machine in the hospital, so everybody is very excited about it. And then at one point, John Cleese goes, Uh, still something missing, well. This episode is brought to you by Netflix's remarkably bright creatures. What if a Pacific octopus held the key to a mystery that could heal your heart? Well, that's Tova's reality.

an elderly widow working at an aquarium, Tova forms an unlikely friendship with their cramudgeonly, Marcellus, whose remarkable intelligence leads her to a life-changing discovery. Watch remarkably bright creatures with your remarkable moms this Mother's Day weekend, only on Netflix May 8th. Patient! Where's the patient? They're so excited about these expensive machines, but they forget that this is about the woman. And, you know, it's funny, and she gets just neglected all the time. time and they want to emphasize the machine that says playing.

I mean, and obviously it's a character and, you know, I'm not saying that all doctors are like that. But doctors probably rather would have an MRI scanner than they would one of those hand pumps, right? Because, you know, it's fun to go to conference and say, yes, we have this, you know, this new MRI scanner 2000 or whatever it's called. But, you know, this hand pump, oh, you know, old stuff. But it's actually this hand pump that'll help, say, 25 kids.

Because in some ways, you know, when you've got people in sitting around a room in the UN and they're all very intelligent, they almost desire complex solutions because it's more grandiose, isn't it, than something as simple and as prosaic as a handpuck. Yes. But it's not that they haven't promised also to fix this, right? Because they promise everything. But the point is that when you're promising everything, you have no direction. If you have 169 priorities, You have no priorities. And if you promise everything, you inevitably leave it to people to say, hmm, would I rather have a cheap hemp pump that nobody cares about? Oh, would I like a lot of expensive stuff and a new hospital wing and all these other things?

So, you know, the truth is we almost inevitably end up doing stuff that's less effective, not because people are bad, but because they have lots of other incentives apart from, you know, doing the best things first. And so that's why I think by making this book and by forcing everyone to sort of confront the fact that there is some incredibly effective things we can do, it becomes a little harder to not do that first. You know, the thing that you talked about in your book, which really resonated with me,

and everyone can drink now, my mother's Venezuelan. So Venezuela is the fifth biggest oil producer in the world. It should be actually, with the largest oil reserves in the world. It should be arguably one of the richest countries in the world. It should be on the same level Saudi Arabia, but because of chronic mismanagement and, to put it more accurately, corruption, it has never reached those heights and most likely, tragically, never will. And when you see in the third world, that is the real problem for me. That is a cancer, which means that we talk about education, health, all of these things, but a lot of the time it's because these funds are being leached by people in higher positions. So how do we solve

corruption beyond. Because that is one of your points in there. It is, which I will say, just to France's point, being from Russia, I was like, I like everything else beyond saying, this seems a little bit unrealistic. How do you fix corruption in the developing world? I will answer the corruption question just before I've said that all of these approaches actually assume that there will be corruption and that people will be incompetent and that people will steal some of the tablets.

So this is all based on reasonably large-scale experiments where you've gone out to do this for a region, for instance, for the tablets. So we know that someone were going to get stolen. We know that some of the teachers just don't care. We know that all these things. So if you assume sort of basic incompetency as much of the world has, then it's $65 back. So we're not assuming sort of, oh, if everything was wonderful, then we can get $65. No, if everything was wonderful, it would probably be much, much high. So we include that people are less than ideal, right?

But back to the corruption point. So corruption costs a lot of money. We don't quite know, for obvious reasons, it's hard to survey. So a popular estimate that also seems reasonably well-sourced is that it cost about a trillion dollars in the world. So we're basically losing about 1% of global GDP to corruption. So absolutely, there's a lot of ways that corruption is just terrible. And of course, for Venezuela, it's been much, much.

worse. I don't know about Rush, but I wouldn't be surprised that. Pretty bad. Yes. Yes. So how do you fix it? Well, there's a lot of ways that you don't know how to fix it. But we've actually found one, and again, this is not us. This is evidence that we know out in the literature that the biggest consumer of, so the biggest demand for most products in the world actually come from governments when they procure stuff. So anywhere from Post-it notes to roads, but obviously roads and that kind of stuff are much, much more expensive. So it really is when you ask for roads or other infrastructure projects. These are typically hugely corrupt.

So we did work in Bangladesh, and the sort of standard understanding is that they have British laws, and so you hand in a seal envelope with your bid in a government office. But the problem is it's only advertised in a really, really small and obscure journal. so only a few people see it. And then the local elite already has decided, you're going to have that bid, right? And so they put up goons outside that office so you can't physically come in with the bid.

And so they get the bid at an outrageous rate, right? If you did e-procurement, so basically put this online, a little bit like eBay, there's a lot more to it, right? But fundamentally, it's just simply, if the government said, we'd like a road, who wants to bid on it online? You can still be corrupt and you can still make some sort of impacts, but it's much harder.

Everyone will hear about it. A lot more people are going to bid for it, so that bids down the price. Typically, you also get higher quality. But crucially, it's much easier to flag if people are sifting off a lot of money. They'll probably still be sifting off some money, but less. And so what we find is, on average, this approach simply makes governments about 6.75% more effective. They simply get more for their money. We told us to the Bangladeshi finance minister,

our calculations basically show that if you do your procurement, you can get $700 million more stuff every year. How's that not cool for a finance minister? Now, the problem is, of course, he knows that the people just below him or a couple of layers down below, they're actually making a lot of money off of being corrupt. So you have to have the political will to do,

and that may be what you were sort of, is that going to work? But we know it works in a lot of countries, but there's still 70 countries in low and low middle income countries that haven't completed the e-procurement journey. It cost trivially little. So we're talking about, you know, $5, $10 million per country. And there's some add-on effects. We estimate about $72 million. This is just nothing.

And it would generate about $10 billion in more purchase opportunity. Remember, it's mostly smaller countries that are still not implemented this. And we're simply saying, that's an easy win. It's not going to work for everyone. Not everybody is going to have the political will to do it. And there will still be corruption, but less. So this is just an incredibly easy win. And again, we don't fix all corruption, but we fix some of it.

And that's, you know, the point here is, again, we need to get out of this. Oh, we've got to fix the whole problem. You know, we've got to fix all of health or all of education or something. No, we need to do better than we did before. This is kind of one of the things that's happened, isn't it? We've somehow got ourselves locked into this maximalist mindset where it's like all or nothing, either you do it. And we have this conversation in this country about all sorts of, the NHS.

We must fix the NHS. If the labor are in power, they broke it. If the Tories are in power, they broke it. And sort of people, a phrase that I heard in the last couple, couple of days that I really like is trade-off denialism. We seem to be there on a lot of these issues. Oh, God. Look, fundamentally, the world is about trade-offs. And we all know that in our personal lives, right? I mean, if we're going to replace the roof so it doesn't drip in, you can't afford your summer holiday. And we know this. And, well, you know, some people will max out their credit

cards, but eventually they'll find out that there is a trade-off, right? And you have to make these trade-offs. But, of course, politicians are elected on the promise of being able to promise more than the other guy. And that inevitably leads to everyone promising everything to everyone. And then we all get disappointed, which is bad set up. So at least what we're trying to say is, look, why don't we do the smarter stuff first? And then we can do all the other stuff you're talking about. But yeah, let's just set aside $35 billion. And the, again, the point in some ways, and it's important also to say when we say we, I'm not saying, you know, I don't have $35 billion in the couch or anything. I don't think you guys do either, right? So this is about government. So this could be

the UK government spending its development aid. It could be a lot of developing country government. So India could decide, all right, we're going to get more tablets out to our constituents. It could be rich billionaires like Bill Gates or Elon Musk that we're going to say, I'm going to spend my money. They couldn't do all of them, but they could do one or two. So it's about getting everyone to think a little smarter about this. Well, that's the exciting thing about what you're saying is you almost don't need any new money. You just need to take some of the money that you're spending on other things and put it into

this stuff that makes more impact. So we've got education. We've got the corruption. We've got the health, the maternity stuff we talked about. What about disease? Because there are some diseases that are absolutely eliminable, if that is it a word. Malaria, for example, right? Yes. Tell us about some of that stuff.

So malaria is one of those things, you know, you think, and certainly the way we've conceptualized malaria is that it's a tropical disease. And that's because almost all of it is now in Africa. But that's not true. No, it's not. William, Oliver Cromwell died of malaria in this country. It's called Agu in those times. I didn't even know that. That's a good fact. Yeah, because there was marshlands in Cambridge. There you know, malaria is not all bad. Yeah, exactly. The Irish love malaria.

But actually, yes, exactly. Russia had lots of lots of malaria in Archangel and in Moscow, in Finland. It was endemic in 36 states of the U.S. in the early part of last century. So malaria has been a problem everywhere in the world. We fixed it because we got richer and because we got more resilient and because when you're sufficiently rich, you also buy canine back then, you know, drugs, so you get rid of it.

And then you basically don't have malaria again. You know, if someone flies in with malaria in England, it's not like, oh, my God, then everybody gets malaria again. We just make sure that he or she gets treated, and then that's the end. We didn't get rid of the mosquitoes. We just got rid of the parasite that's inside the mosquitoes that's actually causing malaria.

The problem with Africa is that they have, especially bad mosquito. So a lot of other mosquitoes like to bite animals as well. And that means you dilute the problem a lot. If you get a lot of livestock, basically they'll just, you know, what do you say? They'll sting the livestock instead and they won't transmit the malaria. But unfortunately, the malaria that's the malaria mosquito in Africa almost exclusively bite humans.

So that's much, much harder. And then they also have a parasite, the malaria parasite, that specific one. is much more deadly. So that's sort of a double combo that means we've been able to do it in the rest of the world, but not in Africa. Now, by far the best way to deal with that is to get long-lasting insecticide treated bed nets. Mosquitoes typically bite at night. If you put up a bed net and sleep under it, you both make sure that the mosquito can't get to you,

and because when it sits on the bed set, because it'd like to get to you, it actually gets the pesticide and then it dies. So we know this is the way to do it. Now, if you hand out bed nets, not all of them are going to be used well. Some of them are going to be used for fishing and other stuff. You know, there's all, or bridal, you know, there's all these stories about how you do different things with them. But if you distribute more, you're going to get more people to sleep on them. And that means not only these people will be saved, but also you make it much harder for the mosquito to keep transmitting the malaria.

Sorry, I'm now forgetting what it's called, but the malaria. Parasite. Parasite. Thank you. That's the word I was looking for. So that actually becomes much more rare. So this is the way we do it. So we looked at how much would it cost to get all nations in Africa, all these 27 nations

that have most of the malaria up to 90% coverage. They're about 70% right now. And that has a cost. It's about $1.7 billion a year. So not trivial. But you could save about 200,000 people just doing that. And not only that, you would also make these people much, much more productive because malaria is typically not deadly. So the 200,000 people that die, yep, that's terrible and that's a real cost.

But the vast number of people, so we're talking about 500 million people get sick, many of them several times a year, that's a terrible disease. And you have it for five to 15 days where you basically can't do anything. And so you lose out on productivity. Many countries in Africa, you have to hire two people because you know one of them is going to be sick with malaria. That's, of course, incredibly unproductive. So not only do we save 200,000 people, but we also make them much more productive.

So again, these are simple solutions. And again, it's not that we don't know this, but it's also just one of the many, many, many things people are talking about. And so we're trying to say, well, let's talk about this first. Yeah, and tuberculosis is also something you touch on the... Tuberculosis is, you know, that's just a phenomenal thing. So a fourth of everyone who died in the 1900s died from tuberculosis. Every fourth person in Europe that died back then died from tuberculosis.

Probably the biggest killer in the world. So over the last 200 years, it probably killed about a billion people. You can't wrap your head around that. And we were incredibly worried about it in Europe and elsewhere. until we figured out, oh, we can cure it with antibiotics. And so it dropped off our radar, and we're like, okay, that's fixed. And nobody dies from tuberculosis today in rich countries. But that never happened in many countries in the global south.

So they still saw a decline. But India, just before its independence in 1946, estimated about half a million people died from tuberculosis each and every year. Last year, the World Health Organization estimated that half a million people died from tuberculosis in India. Now, they brought it down fourfold, but the population has grown fourfold as well, and that's why it's still the same number. We need to do something about that, and we know how to fix it. So the simple point is you need to get more people to take their medication. That's actually hard because you need to take it four to six months.

But it's fairly cheap, and we know how to do it, and you need to make sure that everyone do this. So you get sort of tuberculosis anonymous where everybody gets together and say, yes, I took my pills all the way through the week kind of thing. And you give them little prizes like juice boxes or something. And it feels a little odd that we have to do that in order to get people to take the medication. But if you don't get treated for tuberculosis, you on average will transmit it to 10 to 15 other people. So it's a great investment.

It's a little bit like when we distributed condoms for HIV-AIDS. it's just a good way to make sure that everybody else don't get it. And then the other part is we need to find, so we estimate about 12 million people get TB every year, but we only diagnose about seven. So we still have a lack of people that we're finding. And those are the ones that keep transmitting it to new ones, and that's what's keeping the infection rate going.

We know how to fix it. We just need, again, about $5.5 billion a year, and then we could save over this decade, 600,000 over the next three decades, about a million people each year. Yon, sorry, how are you going to find the people that we don't know that are transmitting it? Yes, yes, that's a very good question. So it's often very poor people, people in slum areas. So Brack, which is the world's biggest NGO in Bangladesh, they had old, typically widowed women walking around.

They would have like 15 families that were their responsibility. So they'd go there every second and third day and say, so how are people? Have anyone been coughing for a long time? And then, you know, if you've been coughing for three weeks, then they say, shouldn't I take you to get tested? The problem here is tuberculosis is actually a really stigmatizing disease. So, you know, for instance, if you get tuberculosis in Kenya,

about a fourth of everyone who gets it, get divorced. Their partner just says bye Why? Because it feels, do I want my kids there when he's coughing and maybe not getting well? I don't want to be the wife of the guy who has tuberculosis. Everybody else is going to shun me at the market.

Bjorn, I know you're trying to save the world, mate, but the problem is you're really doing down the concept of marriage here. Everyone's watching this guy. No one takes their wedding vows as seriously anymore. I'm sorry. And you lose your job? Because people don't want to have a guy with tuberculosis hanging around, right?

And so actually a lot of people want to lie about, do I have tuberculosis? Right, you actually go to the doctor, especially if it's a private sector doctor, he makes money off of you coming again. So he will have an incentive to tell you, no, it's not tuberculosis, right? And given that it's a little hard to diagnose, there's a good chance he's going to says, and many of the symptoms are similar to a lot of other diseases. He'll basically say, no, here's a Vic. kind of thing. I'm not saying that that's exactly what happens, but it has this tendency,

and everybody sort of wants to believe that I didn't have tuberculosis because then my wife won't leave me and I won't lose my job and all that stuff. So we need to make sure that people actually go through this. So you do that by actually testing people. You test people in prisons and mining camps and slum camps and refugee camps,

that kind of thing. You possibly, and we have new gene tests that are very cheap and effective. but you need to set up the system to do that. And it has real cost if you're going to mass test a lot of people. But all of that is included in the $5.5 billion. So again, it's not that we don't know how to. It's even not that most of the world's governments haven't already promised.

I mean, yes, they've promised everything, but they've actually extra promised this money, but still haven't delivered. So we're simply just saying, let's again do the stuff that we have promised, and that's incredibly effective. So for every dollar spent, you'll do about $46 worth of good. Bjorn, what is the connection between TB and AIDS? And is that a part of the problem with the stigma element to it? Because we all know that when the immune system collapses, it becomes very vulnerable,

the body becomes very vulnerable to certain diseases. And TB, unfortunately, finishes off a lot of AIDS patients. Yes. So there is a connection in the typical setup and all the numbers I've given you are actually without the HIV. And so for, you know, and there's a lot of different. different ways to think about that. The health community has simply decided to say the people who die from TB, but because they had HIV, died from HIV, which I think makes sense. So it's a,

it's sort of a separate problem. The main problem is not TB because they would probably have died from something else had they not gotten HIV treatment. So it's a different conversation. It's one that we mostly have fixed. So again, remember, HIV kills much, much less than, for instance, TB, it kills around 600,000s, about the same number as malaria, whereas TB, the un-HIV TB kills about 1.4 million people. So again, TB is the world's leading infectious disease killer. It wasn't in 2020 and 21 because of COVID, but it's been for the last 10 years besides COVID. I find that really surprising. So HIV AIDS only kills 600,000, I mean, it only kills it. Yes. I would have thought it'd be much, much bigger. Yes. But, and that's because,

you think about back in the early 2000s where it was huge and it had the real opportunity to take over the continent of Africa. And so it was incredibly good that we got a lot of drugs out and actually managed to deal with HIV. But it's partly because we have managed to deal with HIV and also because it got so much attention that now we should still remember that HIV is an important disease, but it's much, much harder to find these really, really... effective cheap solutions going forward. That's also why this is not one of our solutions.

And it also shows you, you know, the impact of prioritization. It does mean that we don't say we should do everything. Now, I'm not saying we should cut back on HIV, but I'm simply saying this is not the first place where we should spend more money because it turns out that you can probably only spend, you know, a pound and do, say, five pounds worth of good, which is great. But it's not nearly as great as spending a pound and do 46 pounds of good. So we're simply pointing out, you know, the stuff that you should do the very first. And obviously, immunization is a massive part of this. Yes.

So immunization is what saved most of us. We have this whole conversation about COVID. I'm just going to totally ignore it. But we know that childhood immunization is an incredibly good thing to do. So, you know, measles would probably kill two or three million kids each and every year if we didn't vaccinate. We vaccinate most kids in the world. And that means we only see about 80,000 deaths each and every year. That's a fantastic outcome.

Remember, well, you probably don't, but smallpox. Smallpox was one of the world's leading infectious disease killers. It probably killed somewhere between 300 and 500 million people in the 20th century. We eradicated that in 1978. That was an incredibly good investment. We actually go through the cost there. One of the reasons why we could eradicate it is because, that doesn't have an animal reservoir.

So most diseases, if we get rid of them in humans, they'll still survive in animals, and then they'll come back and perhaps literally bite us later on, and then we're back. But smallpox didn't. And so you could actually eradicate it. We eradicated with a vaccine. So this was the world's first vaccine.

It came from cowpox. So Yenner back in the 1700s realized, which a lot of other people had also pointed out, that the milkmaids didn't have, didn't get smallpox because they got cowpox first from the cows. And so he took their cowpox and put it into a young guy and then infected him with smallpox to see if he survived. This would not have passed the ethics to this today. It's not so you can do that today. No, I'm not sure he actually told him the whole, the full scale of what he was doing.

He survived. He survived. doesn't work. Yes, we need that. This is what we need to more. No, no. Too much red tape. Yes, I'm not arguing for that.

But I am arcing for that we're vaccinating a lot of people. A lot of kids gets vaccinated, but we're not vaccinating as many as we could. So we could still save more people from measles from, sorry, there's a lot of things in there. And now I'm forgetting most of them. But rotoviruses, for instance, which are one of the things that give. Most of the diaries that often lead to about half a million kids dying. Tetanus as well? Yes.

Polio, I'm guessing too? Polio is a different. Well, it's a different task. There's very, very little polio left. And so the main challenge with polio is really that we can't get to the places where people still have polio because people there believe that they're actually, you know, they're Bill Gates trying to put in microchips or more worse than they're. that we're trying to limit their population because we don't like Muslimism.

There are a lot of sort of conspiracy theories about that. But it's not mainly a monetary problem anymore. It's more a political issue. So this is much more about getting people from most of these poorer countries from 80% to, say, 90 or 95%. And it's going to be costlier. It's going to be harder. But what we find is it's going to save so many people that for every... pound you spend, you'll do 101 pounds worth of good. It's just simply a fantastically good way

to save about half a million kids. Do you sometimes get frustrated, Bjorn, that you're in this field and you see the way that people talk about vaccination and immunization. And look, let's forget about COVID. But the fact that there's sort of an anti-vax movement seems to be growing, to me, I find incredibly worrying. Yes. And yes, I do get frustrated, but remember, I deal with so many other stupid weird things. That it's just one of the many things. At some point, you just have to let go and say, yes, this is annoying, but, you know, it's part of a world where people have too much time. And they're quite frankly, so well off that they can afford, you know, you would never do that if your kids were regularly dying from measles.

And what we find is, you know, these people who think, oh, my kids shouldn't be vaccinated against measles. When they discover that there's a death nearby or even their own kid, they certainly want to vaccinate the next kid. So, you know, it sort of shakes people back into reality, I think. And yes, that was an unnecessary death. And I would wish that people didn't do it. But, you know, most people get this. Most people actually get that science and progress is mostly a good thing. and that you want to do mostly what your doctors tell you,

just simply because it's a good idea. It is. Beyond, coming back to the bigger issue, can I ask a slightly sort of skeptical question, which is you and the people you're working on a lot smarter than me, so I'm assuming you've thought of this, obviously. But a lot of the poorer countries in the world, many of the things you're talking about,

it's not only that they don't have the particular gadget or whatever that they need, but it's an infrastructure issue. There aren't roads. There aren't trains. There aren't whatever. Is that something that you guys have thought about and included in these calculations?

Yes. So I'm saying yes. I think we've included almost all of it. So a lot of this is based on what's called randomized control trials. So you actually do this in some villages and you don't do it in other villages and you see what happens. And so all of these bad things

that was what we talked about before, the corruption, the incompetence. and the fact that there's no roads or there's poor roads is sort of baked into the result because we did it in real world situation. So we're assuming that if the world can do what we did in these villages and this region, then we've already baked in all the other bad things.

So for instance, we look at making more research and development for better agricultural productivity. Remember, what basically got us rich and what got us, you know, the fact, is most people don't work in agriculture. That's how we get rich, right? If everybody has to work in agriculture, there's nothing else to do. So you want to get much higher productivity in agriculture.

We did that partially through the Green Revolution, where you got better seeds for rice and wheat and maize or corn so that you could grow a lot more for every hectare acre you farm. But we didn't do that in the poor part of the world because they don't have much money. And that, quite frankly, wasn't our main concern. So Casawa and Sorkham and all these other things that people grow in low-income countries. We should make those work better.

But, and we know how to do it, and we suggest we should be spending about $5.5 billion on this every year, on average. And that would actually generate much higher yields, which would benefit farmers and benefit consumers, farmers because they produce more, consumers because each product will cost less. And then you'll have many few people starving. But your point is exactly But what about the roads? What about the infrastructure? What about do they have irrigation?

Do they have mechanization? No, they still lack a lot of stuff. But the beauty of this is if you hand out a better cassawa And I'm not really sure how exactly how big that is But it's not a seed. I don't even know what that is, to be honest. It's sort of a potato kind of thing.

Yeah, they're in South America. Yes. So if you hand out that, you can grow this and make it grow more, make more Casawa. but even if you don't have the irrigation, even if you don't have the mechanization, now had you had that,

you would be doing even better, but you can do that without all of those extra inputs. And that's what's the beauty of much of this. So it works somewhat, but, you know, everything could be better, but our goal is not to make the world fantastic. I mean, that would be wonderful, but that's not what we're trying to do. We're simply trying to make it better.

You're going for the super low-hanging fruit that make the biggest impact. And that's why you're focusing on the poor half of the world. What did occur to me as you were talking, though, is it's weird how half the world is starving, essentially, or is close to that point. And in the West, one of the biggest causes of death is we have too much food and we eat ourselves into an early grave. Is there a low-hanging fruit there that we can do? Because it would be quite nice to deal with that as well. Otherwise, we're going to make the whole world fat and die early as well.

Yes. We haven't looked at that. So there's a moral part of this, and then there's the practical part. So very clearly, the moral part is it's a much better situation to end up eating too much food than too little, because you can sort of regulate that yourself. Clearly, we can't. But at least, you know, if I have to choose, I'd much rather have the position. 100%.

So we should just make sure that this is not a symmetrical issue? No, no, no. But you're absolutely right. And I don't think there's an obvious way to do this because, you know, we're involved, as I understand, we're involved to say, you know, food could, you know, eat as much of it and preferably sweet and fat because then we'll put on a lot of weight for when winter comes kind of thing. Finally, a guest that agrees with me. Wonderful. So, so, you know, we're basically fighting our genes, and I'm not sure exactly how you get around that. Now, there's a lot of other things that we can do, and your people will argue that we should have. have cities where you walk more.

If you look in New York and other cities where you walk many cities in Europe, people are just less fat. And it's also good for your general health and all kinds of other things. It probably also makes for better sort of culture and social interaction. So maybe we should be focusing on that. But the point again is this is not the kind of stuff where you spend a dollar and get amazing returns. This is the kind of thing that rich countries can focus on.

And I love us focusing on it. And again, we're rich. We can actually do several things. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. So we should be focusing on these issues as well. But what we shouldn't be doing is to say, my obsession with obesity or with climate change or with plastic straws or with all these other things, take precedence over the fact that for most people in this world, you know, it's really about the fact that their kids are dying from easily curable infectious diseases, get bad education, or losing out of productivity because of corruption, other issues that we could fix really cheaply.

And Bjorn, this is where we come to what I think you're up against with all of this, which is education and awareness of the rest of the world in the West, where we have the money to be able to put into fixing these things easily. Because I grew up for a portion of my life in Uzbekistan. I saw people with tuberculosis. I saw people, you know, I have some kind of thing with TB where I was vaccinated against it, but I had some kind of reaction. Anyway, like, that's a real thing.

And most people in the West haven't had that experience. They haven't been there. And also, we're not well educated on the trade-off conversation, which we had earlier, which is like you have a limited pool of resources. How do you best use it instead of going, I want everything, right? So it's also like there's something in the way that we think about problems that seems off to me. Do you see what I'm saying? How do we fix that?

Because if we can fix that, then this becomes automatic. You don't even need to write this book then. Yeah. All right. I don't want to take the book away from you. No, you're right. Honestly, I don't think you can fix that because it's not surprising if you don't have tuberculosis

in your entire country. It's not a big thing in your mind. Hume once wrote the famous philosopher in the 1700s in Scotland that I can read about big catastrophe in China. in the newspaper, and then I turn the page and it cuts my finger, and all I care about is my finger, right? I mean, you're just so like, this is how the world works. Honestly, we don't care all that much about far off the world.

So I don't think that's necessarily bad. You know, that's how we couldn't handle a world where we had to worry about everything all the time. We'd be, you know, nervous wrecks. So it's much more about saying when you care about the world, when you're not, don't just care about it. God, I've got to get the kids to soccer and I need all this other stuff. But when you care about the world, then you start saying,

okay, I want to make sure I care rightly about the world. And we often end up carrying, you know, the sort of plastic straw argument, which is, you know, nice. I don't want plastic in the ocean. There's a lot of other conversations we can have about that. But, you know, it's perhaps also good to get a sense in proportion. Is this really the biggest problem in the world? No, it's not.

You know, the biggest problem is that a lot of people, kids die and a lot of kids don't get education, all these things that we've talked about. So get your priorities right when you care about the world. And I think, you know, if you look at what the world spends on the world, it's perhaps 1% of its GDP. And that's nice. You know, that sort of suggests, yes, I care mostly about my finger, but every once in a while I care about people who are, you know, suffering in China. When we then spend that 1%, let's make sure we spend it well. And remember, again, 1% is much, much more than what I'm talking about here. So let's just get that right first. And that's what we're doing right here. Yeah, completely.

Now, we talk about immigration a lot on the show and, you know, the positives and negatives a bit. But you've written a very positive chapter on immigration. So let's get into that. Yes. So first of all, there's some economists out there who points out, and I think that's a good point, that the world is hugely misallocated in labor. So if you have a person who works in McDonald's in Nigeria, that person makes about 15 times less than the same person doing the same job in a McDonald's in the U.S.

That seems to suggest that you're just simply much more productive in a rich world setting. We certainly know that. We'd like to believe that the reason why we're making a reasonable, I don't know about you guys, but a reasonable... They don't send enough money, man. These guys are actually making very little... And you should spend more money on them.

But in the rich world, we're making pretty good money. We like to believe that that's because we're really smart. But the truth is, most of this is because we're among a lot of other smart people and we're incredibly productive in this part of the world. So economists would argue that maybe we should move a large part of the world to the West because that would make them much more productive. Remember, these are all the poor people. We could make them much richer by moving to the West.

Now, that's an intriguing argument. And what they find is... To some people. It's an intriguing. I'm not saying it's a wonderful thing or anything. So they estimate we could double the world's GDP. We could basically make the world twice as rich. And that would solve a large part of the inequality problem of the world.

Now, it would also make an insane amount of political problems. So that's not what we're suggesting. What we're saying is it seems that most people are more willing to have skilled migration than unskilled migration. You're fine with some more doctors coming in for the NHS because they're actually going to help save you or save your kids or something. And that's sort of okay. It will be great for those doctors because they'll come from very poor countries and they will be much more productive in a UK setting. and that will make them better often. They were part of the developing world or the global South,

and now they've become rich, or that's what we want it to happen. They've also become more productive. They also help us with our birth. We have few kids, and that's eventually going to turn into a problem. It also helps the poor world. You know, you think, what about it's brain drain? We're basically taking away a doctor, but we know that they're also going to send a lot of remittances back home

because that's how most people end up acting, and that will more than outweigh the fact that they're lost in their original country. So overall, we find that allowing a little more skilled migration, so we're suggesting 10% more than what you normally have. So Canada has a lot of immigrants. They would presumably be willing to take 10% more of a fairly high number, whereas some of the countries don't want any immigration, have very low immigration, so they would take 10% more of a very low number.

This is plausible, but again, I'm not arguing that this is totally without political implications. But if you have skilled migration, 10% more, it'll cost a couple of billion dollars, but it'll generate more than $20 billion in benefits for the world and it'll actually reduce inequality somewhat. It's not a solution or anything, but it's actually a pretty good deal. So, sorry, I said it's, sorry, $2 billion and $40 billion. It's about $20 back on the dollar. What would you say about the brain drain argument that what you're effectively doing is taking a country's brightest and best, transplanting them into a country that is already wealthy, which is going to generate more and more tax dollars for that country. But actually those people, the doctors, the thinkers, the economists are really needed in this country over here because they're the people going to help lift it out of poverty. Yes. That is a correct argument. But as I also pointed out, the remittances and much of this remittance will be used to teach them.

the next generation, it outweighs the loss two to one. So it's actually probably a good idea, even for the sending country, but it's not nearly as good an idea as it is for the rich country that receives this person and for the person, him or herself. So there's definitely political issues, and it's also one of the chapters that are least obvious. So again, we're economists. We try to simply say, this is what the numbers tell us. We're well aware, and that's, you know, we, we, We made that abundantly clear. Some economists would say, open up the entire world, have 2.4 billion people who move to their rich West. And you're like, really?

Really? But, you know, that's not what we're saying. But we are suggesting this would still be a good idea. Whether you want to do it at the end of the day is a political issue. Well, that's right. So you're giving the economic assessment of the impact of that. And then there's political dimension to that. There's a cultural dimension to that.

And that is for the society to talk about. and discuss in a political way. Just to give you a sense of what we're really trying to do, we want to put prices and sizes on society's menu. Yeah, right. We want to tell you when you talk about, oh, we could get rid of cancer or we could get rid of plastic stores or climate change or whatever. There's rarely cost associated with that.

You don't actually see, so how much is this going to cost you? But maybe you'd want to know that, just like if you go into a restaurant, you'd like to know, how much is this caviar going to cost me? Oh, 2,000 pounds? maybe I'm not going to pick that. So we put prices and sizes on the society's menu, and then you decide whether you actually want to pay for it. Bjorn, it's been an absolutely fascinating conversation.

It's so good to have you back. Before we go to the local section where our audience have already submitted questions for you that we'll ask you, and before we ask you, our very last question, the most obvious question to ask you is this. It's twofold. If I'm an ordinary person, I'm a plumber, I'm a podcast host, I'm a YouTube, I'm a comedian, I'm a whatever,

and I'm listening to this, what can I do? And the second part of that is, if I'm a policymaker and I'm in a position of influence, I'm in government, I'm in the media, what can I do? Right? Two-fold, two-part question. I would wish I could say, here's a bank. Yeah, here you should donate this amount of money. We have not done that partly because we're very wary of saying, you know,

there's very few organizations that sort of straight on do exactly what we talk about. So I think the right answer is for us normal people, it's much more to say simply, you should keep talking about these are the top priorities. So make sure that everybody else don't talk about all this other stuff first, but simply talk about let's fix tuberculosis, malaria, immunization of small kids, education, agricultural research and development, e-procurement, and these other things that I talk about in the book. Let's make sure we focus on the really smart stuff. if you do that, that's going to be worth much more than an extra five pounds, because it helps

change the political discourse to being smarter. And that, of course, goes to your other part of question. So what should policy makers do, fund these things, please? And it's important to say this is not just about rich countries spending more money, because at the end of the day, we also want poor countries to do this. Remember, poor countries have actually doubled their spending per person in schools over, sorry, per student, over the last 25 years. So they're spending a lot more money and there's virtually nothing to show for it, a little bit like what you were talking about in the rich West. We're not seeing our education results increase and sometimes they actually decrease. So you should spend it smarter. So it's not just about overseas development aid. It's also about

making sure that politicians in these developing countries get with the message. We've actually Actually, I've been fortunate enough to write in 35 papers around the world. So Times of India, China Daily, Bangkok Post, you know, Philippine Daily Inquirer, a lot of other papers across Africa and Latin America. To write, so I've written 14 articles. So, you know, one about the general priorities, 12 about these 12 individual ideas, and then sort of a summary. Again, this is not enough to get everybody on board,

but it certainly is the first push to get people to think smarter about this. If we all think smarter, this is not just going to fix the $35 billion problem, but it's also going to make us smarter about all the other challenges we face, right? Because, I mean, at the end of the day, this is for rich people, it's just 1%. It'd be cool if we could get the other 99% well, you know, more better prioritized. Absolutely. And Bjorn, the question that we always ask, all our guess, is, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? and you told me before we started,

and I'm still a little blank, so I'm going to go, because there's a lot of things we don't talk about. But I really think this book tells you about some of those stories that we don't talk about. For obvious reasons, we've talked about it. We don't have tuberculosis, but there's lots of tuberculosis in the world. We don't talk about immunization, but there's lots of kids who still need immunization.

We don't talk enough about education because we're focused on all these other things like plastic straw, we should talk more about education. So really, I'm just so excited that this podcast may actually have turned the tide and make us talk more about the things that matter most, namely the things that kill enormous amount of people and hold back development. And for $35 billion, we can make the change. Bjorn Longbour, thank you for coming on.

Best things first, make sure you grab this and find out about it. Can I just say you can actually see the conclusion on the cover? Yes, the cost is down here. The benefit is massive. Yes. Indeed. Bjorn, thank you so much for coming. me back on the show. It's such a pleasure to have someone with a positive vision and a realistic

vision. It's not just like, oh, yeah, we should be. It's actually, you're looking at how to fix the problems of the world. I think that's exactly the attitude we need. So it's a real pleasure to have you back. Thank you. And head over to locals where we're going to ask beyond your questions. We'll see you there. What do you think about AI? Oh, God.