TRIGGERnometry - "Climate Activism is a Religion" - Marian Tupy

Episode Date: October 20, 2022

SPONSORED BY: Ridge Wallet. Use Code “TRIGGER” for 10% off your order at: https://www.ridge.com/TRIGGER SPONSORED BY: easyDNS - domain name registrar provider and web host. Use special code: TRIGGERED for 50% off when you visit https://easydns.com/triggered/ Marian Tupy is the editor of Human​Progress​.org and a senior fellow at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. He specialises in globalisation and global well‐​being and politics and economics of Europe and Southern Africa. He is the co-author of 'Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet'. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ | Channel ID: UCo_8zzSxKeL3arKWVuP8wdQ 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. CHAPTERS: 00:00 Intro 03:08 Is Population Growth Bad for the Earth? 13:07 The Religion of Extreme Environmentalism 22:31 Future Problems from Depopulation & China 27:30 Why Freedom is Necessary for Prosperity 32:20 Can We Be Optimistic About the Future? 37:23 Fears Around Using Nuclear Energy 45:20 The Unfairness of Environmentalism 49:47 Data Behind Marian’s Optimism 1:04:14 What's the One Thing We’re Not Talking About? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The planet is infected with us. We're all going to die. Isn't that all true and correct? It's certainly not true. And actually the history of the relationship between population growth and abundance of natural resources is much more complex than people realized. It's very interesting to see how extreme environmentalism maps onto Christian theology. On the one hand, you've got your Garden of Eden.

That's the world before industrialization. you have your devils, fossil fuel, fossil fuel CEOs, people like that. You have your saints, Greater Thumburg. You have your priesthood, which is the IPCC scientists. And of course, you even have indulgences, like back in the days before Reformation, where you are allowed to fly around the world on a private jet. But so long as you give a few thousand pounds or dollars to a green cause, all those sins are simply washed away.

And one of the fundamental features of any religion, religion is Apocalypse, is the end of days. What we are saying is that if the world is going to end, it will certainly not end because we are going to run out of natural resources. The British energy problems are not an outcome of physical limits on fossil fuels or energy that can be produced in the world. They are an outcome of stupid decisions made by your politicians for the last 20 years. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishin. And this is a show for you. If you want honest conversations, we're fascinating people.

Our brilliant guest today is the editor of Human Progress.org, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, whose latest book is called Super Abundance, the story of population, growth, innovation, and human flourishing on an infinitely bountiful planet. Very loaded. Mariam Tupi, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you very much for having me. It's a great pleasure. It's great to have you on. Before we talk about your book and your very interesting views on the world, tell everybody who are you? How are you where you are, what brings you to be sitting here talking to us? Well, I guess it starts with my birth in Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. And that's really my background. Then when I was a child, my parents moved to South Africa. Later, I went to Great Britain. I studied at San Andreas University. And I've been in Washington, D.C. at the Cato Institute, which is a libertarian think tank for the last 20 years. And as you mentioned, I run a website called humanprogress.org, which is basically just a website trying to document and promote the notion that the world is improving along many different dimensions of human well-being.

And that led me to writing a book about population and innovation and natural resources. Well, speaking of all of that, Marion, the self-evident truth that everyone's been completely persuaded about for the last, God knows how many years is the planet's overpopulated, humans are the virus, the planet is infected with us, we're all going to die, and as we die, we're going to make everything terrible. Isn't that all true and correct? It's certainly not true, and actually the history of the relationship between population, growth and abundance of natural resources is much more complex than people realize in our dumped down age. For two and a half thousand years, people have been wondering what is the exact

relationship between population growth and resources? And people have been genuinely torn on the issue. Not all of them were negative. Ancient Greeks and ancient Chinese understood that, you know, if you had too many people in marginal land, at some point you could have famines and people would die off, That's true and that happened often. On the other hand, nations needed more people for the military and to pay taxes. So there was always this sort of uneasy relationship between the two notions. I think where the notion of overpopulation really became very toxic and very negativistic was in England, actually in 1798, when Thomas Malthus, who was an English- Anglican prelate,

a population, an essay on population where he basically showed what he thought he was showing mathematically, that whereas population grows at a geometrical rate, which is to say, one, two, four, sixteen, et cetera, food would only grow at an arithmetic rate, one, two, three, four, five. And therefore, that sort of gave a scientific imprimatur to this notion that too many people would lead to a catastrophe. And that was picked up by the famous Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich in its population bomb in 1968. And, you know, people have been debating it ever since. Now, I should perhaps say that there has been amongst intellectuals and academics a slight shift away from this sort of overpopulation, overconsumption of resources,

doomsterism. But that has not penetrated the public consciousness. So to this day, you can find the United Nations publishing press releases saying that growth in population is going to create a worst world. There is another website run by an NGO called Overshoot Day, where they try to measure how many planets we would need in order to feed humanity, if it keeps growing. We have the de-growth agenda. We have the anti-natalist agenda. We have newspaper stories about how the world would be much better off without any human beings in it.

And on the absolute far extreme, we have people who have decided to take this issue into their own hands. some of the mass shooters in the United States and also in Norway in recent decade had been driven by Malthusian concerns. We had a horrific mass killing in the United States about four years ago where a man killed 22 people in El Paso and left behind him a manifesto saying basically you guys are using too many resources. You won't stop.

Therefore, I have to do something about it by killing as many of you as I can. So the issue is very much still at the back of the public consciousness, and this book is meant to somehow combat it. And Marion, why is it that so many people think that overpopulation is a real danger for our planet and the future of the human race? I think it's because the notion of finitude of atoms, which is absolutely true. The world really has only a finitude of atoms is actually quite,

it is quite commonsensical and intuitive, which is to say, if you have the finite quantity of atoms, but you are increasing the people using those atoms, then at some point you must run out. But this ignores a very fundamental difference between human beings and other animals. We are animals, but we are animals who are capable of planning forward, and we are animals capable of innovating out of our problems. And that is done through human knowledge. So an American economist Thomas Sowell has a famous quote where he says that the caveman had exactly the same amount of resources, the same amount of atoms at his disposal as we do today. But the difference between his stand of living and our standard of living is the knowledge we are able to bring into the world and use those atoms in a more intelligent way.

A perfect example of this would be the difference between a Rolls-Royce driven out of a car dealership worth half a million pounds. And then when you smash it into the wall, you know, the number of atoms are exactly equal. But the value in the new Rolls-Royce and a destroyed Rolls-Royce is obviously very different because the atoms have been rearranged differently. one in a very intelligent way and the other one in a chaotic way. So with the finite number of atoms, we can still create an infinite amount of value. That's what we are basically saying. Another example, if I may, is iPhone. iPhone is a great way of dematerializing the world.

In other words, we are saving a lot of atoms that we don't have to put into. television sets, into cameras, into maps, into campuses, into calculators, and all those other things that we would have to have. Instead, we put it on this device. So that, that's, that I think should, I hope it goes some way into explaining why the number of atoms in the world is actually not a limiting factor in terms of how much value we can create. Do you think part of the narrative of overpopulation comes from the fact that a lot of people who would believe this live in cities. Now, if you live in central London and you experience central London every day of the week and you're trying to find a property in central London and you're trying to get to the tube,

and it would feel all the time like you are living in a constant state of overpopulation. It's possible, but there are other parts of the world where people don't necessarily feel gloomy about the future because there are too many people living on top of each other. The Chinese, at least until recently, had a very positive attitude about the future, even though they lived on top of each other in a few very important and very popular cities. Hong Kong is an example of a territory

which has a very high level of population density, and yet it was a very vibrant place where people apparently were very happy because they kept on moving there. I think that if we are, are looking at the source of discomfort and a sense of dejection about the future. It may come from the fact that in Britain you cannot build that many houses, or rather not that you cannot build that many houses, but you refuse to build that many houses of governmental

policy. And by the way, I'm not bashing Britain. I've spent five years in a beautiful country and I love it. We have the same problem in the United States. It's not that all of these people living in the cities, you know, are concerned about overpopulation. is just that they've decided that you're not going to build in my backyard. I like my little house, you know, and I don't want to be, I don't want you to build anymore. That is a concern, but I think it's policy driven rather than driven by some sort of a fundamental physical lack of space.

I mean, if you wanted to, you could build a brand new city in the United Kingdom full of skyscrapers. and, you know, create half a million housing units that way. But you've made a decision not to. Marion, before, I want to hear from you because in the book you talk about the figures around all of this and the fact that actually every new human being on average produces more resources than they take up and you explain why this is. And I want to get into all of that. But I want to talk a little bit about the cultural and philosophical underpinnings of all

of this because I hear you, the Marthusian view begins to take over. and blah, blah, blah. But there's got to be a reason. I feel like there's got to be also a cultural and a philosophical explanation of why so many people find appealing some of these things that we now hear. We've got 12 harvest left. The world's about to end. We've got a climate crisis.

We've got a population bomb. We've got a this. We've got a that. Why are so many people? And I, by the way, don't even exclude myself. because until I started looking at the data and talking to people like you and Peter Zahan and a bunch of others, I was very persuaded by instinctively persuaded without looking at the data by some of these arguments. So what is it about our culture in this moment and in the recent history that makes us so susceptible to this idea that we are a plague on the planet?

I think that part of it has to do with the decline of traditional religion. I personally am not religious, but I do buy into G.K. Chesterton's famous quote, where he said that when people stop believing God, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything. And I think that human beings have this fundamental need for the transcendental, right? So we are the only species in the world who are capable of foreseeing our death. You know, an antelope running through the African bush. She or he understand that, you know, they could be eaten by a lion. They're running away to save their lives.

But they don't have a sense of finitude of their lives. They don't realize that, you know, they will grow older and die. They don't have a need for the transcendental. But human beings do. they need to get some sort of a meaning out of their lives. Now, in the old days, obviously a religion, be it be Judaism or Christianity or Islam, provided that kind of certainty. But without it, people still need a search for the transcendental.

They still need to commit their lives to a meaning, to some sort of a heroic vision of themselves. what is it that they are trying to accomplish with their lives, aside from going to work? And I think that many people, especially in secular societies, have embraced extreme environmentalism as a substitute for religion. It's very interesting to see how extreme environmentalism maps onto Christian theology. On the one hand, you've got your Garden of Eden, that's the world before industrialization. You have your devils, fossil fuel, fossil fuel. CEOs, people like that. You have your saints, Greater Thumburg. You have your priesthood, which is the IPCC scientists. And of course, you even have indulgences like back in the days

before Reformation, where you are allowed as one of the chosen few to fly around the world on a private jet. But so long as you give a few thousand pounds or dollars to a green cause, all those sins are simply washed away. That is why somebody like Leo de Capri or John Kerry or Emma Thompson can go on the telly, having just flown in a first class, and be good environmentalists. Their sins have been washed away by saying the right incantations and saying the right amount of money to these green causes. So that's a very long way of saying that I think that there are religious overtones to environmentalism. And one of the fundamental features of any religion, any religion is apocalypse, is the end of day. the world that ends and is going to reconstitute itself in some way.

And Christianity has it, Islam has it, Judaism has it, Hinduism, Buddhism have it. Some religions like Christianity are working up to the end of days where the world will end. Others have a circular or cyclical religious belief where the world will be destroyed, but then it's going to be renewed and it's an eternal cycle like that. But all of them have this notion of an apocalypse. And so I think that that plays a very large role in why people keep on embracing these apocalyptic views. One of the statistics I'm very proud in the book that we have found is that the number of apocalyptic movies has been growing every decade since the 1950s, even though the world has

improved along very many different dimensions. We live longer, we live healthier lives, we are much richer. Poverty is collapsing around the world. But with every decade, the number of apocalyptic movies is actually increasing, with one exception that it was 1990s because of the peaceful resolution of the Cold War. Right. That makes so much sense and really, really profound points, Marin. I love it. So convert me. Make me an anti-apocalyptic pro-human expansion person. What are the facts? What is the data?

What should people know? Well, it's not, in the book we don't argue that apocalypse cannot happen. This is not a book which predicts the future. There are plenty of ways in which humanity could destroy itself. We have plenty of nuclear weapons. We have a madman in Europe currently threatening to use them. That's just one way in which Apocalypse could be brought about. We could have another asteroid strike.

We could have a pathogen that we don't really know how to cure. By the way, one way in which having a bigger economy and a richer economy and continue to grow economically is that the rich of the society is, the more likely we are going to be able to come up with solutions to future problems. A society, 50 years from now, which has unlimited amount of energy created by fusion power, for example, could potentially power an extra strong laser that would destroy an asteroid. We cannot do it right now because our knowledge is too primitive and our society is not rich enough. Or if we are extremely wealthy in the future, you know, it could be six times richer on average across the globe by the year 2100. happens, then of course the society will have much more money to do things like we have just done, which is to shut down the society for two years to wait out a COVID pandemic. Part of the reason

why your current economic reforms are so difficult to push through is because you've just burned through half a billion pounds. Here in this country, we spend something like four trillion dollars to get through the pandemic. But let's imagine the society is extremely rich. Well, that would allow us to shut down the economy if we needed to for for a few months while we are looking for a vaccine for a new pathogen, which you know is coming because on a molecular level, evolution continues to go on and pathogens are continuing to evolve to get around our defense systems. So there's a lot of ways in which the world could come to an end, and we are not dismissing all of those possibilities. What we are saying is that if the world is going to end,

it will certainly not end because we are going to run out of natural resources. That's what we are saying. We are trying to remove just one of the bricks in the wall of the apocalyptic thinking, saying to the extent that you are worried about natural resources, you don't have to be, because we have plenty. We are going to have plenty. If there is a resource which is going to go up in price because it becomes less abundant and more scarce, then we are going to, then a lot of, of things are going to happen. One thing that's going to happen is that we are going to use less of it. We are going to create efficiency gains. This can of water used to weigh three pounds of aluminum. Now it weighs, sorry, three pounds, three ounces of aluminum. Now it weighs half an ounce.

We, of course, replace things which become expensive with other things. We no longer kill whales in order to produce candles. use electricity. When prices go up, we search for new deposits. So there are many ways in which humanity get around the problem of natural resources becoming more expensive in a short run. In the long run, however, they are becoming much less expensive. So if you want, we can get into the data. Yeah, Marion, this is all incredibly interesting and just a refreshing change from the narratives that we've been sort of forced to swallow. How much of a problem will depopulation be? Because you touch upon it in your book, particularly when it comes to China and the Chinese economy. Depopulation is going to be problematic along many different dimensions.

One is that Western advanced countries, social democracies by and large, and I include here the United States, which has a bigger social safety net than Canada, we have promised so much to future generations that we have no idea how we are going to pay for. Our social security is upon this scheme based on the notion that there are always more people at the bottom paying the retirees at the top. If that pyramid now starts going like this, then of course our taxes will go to, we'll have to go massively up in order to pay for the promises that we have promised to future generations in terms of social security. Another problem with the population is going to be national debt. If you have few people being taxed, then it's going to be so much harder and so much

longer to pay down debt. But the most important reason why deep population could be a problem, not could be, but will be a problem, is that human beings are the only entities in the world capable of having new ideas. And new ideas lead to inventions. And those inventions then get market tested. And out of that, you get innovations which improve productivity and standards of living. So without human beings, no new ideas, no new cancer drugs, no better ways of transport, no new breakthroughs in energy, including clean energy.

We simply need people in order to innovate. Nobody else is going to do it for us unless we get AI, and I have no idea if or when that is going to happen. Marion, and how big a problem is the Chinese situation for China, but also for the world as a whole, because it's one of the biggest economies that there is, and it's a manufacturing powerhouse. So I cannot quantify it.

What I can tell you is that China would have had 400, million additional people today. But it's if it didn't have the crazy one child policy between, I don't know, 1978 and 2015, but much more importantly, its population pyramid would look much healthier than it is today. I'm not necessarily worried about Chinese, about Chinese industrial power, because of course we can move production to countries like Bangladesh and India and many other places. In some ways, it might be even preferable because there are democracies, you know, and our relationships with them, that is to say, British and American relationships with them will be better in the future than they are likely to be in China if she remains in power.

So I'm not terribly worried about that. I am worried that because of this insane population, policy, China is reaching a peak, which is to say, I don't believe that China is ever going to catching up with Western democracies. GDP per capita in the United States is similar like $70,000 in China is $10,000. It's very difficult to see China becoming seven times richer in a situation where they're going to, where they're turning more dictatorial both politically but also economically. Without economic freedom,

political freedom, you cannot have economic growth because it's not just population growth, but those people also have to be free, right? China has been the largest or the most populated country for at least 2,000 years, but they were dirt poor until recently because you need people,

but those people must be free to talk to each other, to write, to publish, to associate, to exchange ideas, and to criticize each other's ideas. And if China is not going to have freedom of speech, it cannot innovate. Similarly, if it's not going to have high level of economic freedom, then people are not going to be allowed to sell, to buy, to invest, to profit. And she has been moving away from economic freedom for at least 10 years.

So that tells me that China could be reaching a peak. And that in itself has potentially negative consequences because if China believes or the Chinese leadership believes that they're never going to get stronger than they currently are. This may be their time to attack Taiwan and bring the world into a conflict. Amaran, I'm really enjoying this conversation so much. You're making some brilliant points. And one of the things that you touched on is something I talked about in my book,

but it seems to me you have a much more in-depth understanding of the connection between freedom and prosperity. And I think this is something that people seem to be. to have forgotten for a while, and maybe that is because we endlessly hear about how successful China has been in recent decades and so on. But you touched on it, but explain to people, why is freedom necessary for prosperity, for technological progress, for scientific progress? Well, China has mimicked a lot of Western development, and I'm glad for it, by the way. I really am delighted that 1.3 billion people or how many they are, we cannot trust the Chinese statistics, are much better off than they used to be at the time of Mao when he killed 45 million of his fellow citizens and Chinese people had to eat dirt in order to survive.

So I'm really delighted about that. But what China cannot do very easily, in fact, I don't think that it can do it at all is to produce new cutting. edge research, because for that, you need freedom. Why are our COVID vaccines so much better than they are in China? It's because we are able to rely on much better technology. We are able to critique each other. We have open-sourced. We have data, which we have to subject to criticism from fellow scientists, you know, and people, if they don't, like something, they don't have to take it, right? You cannot force somebody to take the vaccine. And so, whereas in China, they have developed an inferior product which they are forcing their people

to use. And that has then knock on consequences, such as having to shut down entire cities and therefore destroy your economy. The relationship between freedom and intellectual progress is very interesting, and it has roots in deep history. And if you'll allow me, I'll I'll talk a little bit about the difference between the Chinese Empire and Europe. So, empires generally are so large that they are not worried about being attacked from the outside. China is not worried about being attacked from the outside. China's biggest concern is domestic tranquility. And the greatest danger to domestic tranquility is to have,

three people who are swapping ideas, criticizing the government, and so forth. So Chinese government, for millennia, the same goes for the Ottoman Empire, for the Russian empire and many other empires that have come and gone. Their biggest concern was to clamp down on domestic descent. Again, they are not worried about outside. They are worried about problems inside. And so they squash any kind of innovativeness. Europe was different, and it is for that reason, in my humble opinion, why industrial revolution and the Enlightenment starts in Europe,

which is to say that whereas the Europeans had empires on the outside, they conquered other peoples, Europe was never conquered after the fall of the Roman Empire. Charles V tried to do it in the 16th century. Louis XVI's tried to do it in 17th century. Napoleon did it, but then lost it. and he never conquered Britain. But the point is that Europe was always dismembered. Europe was always disjointed.

And so there was a lot of competition going on between different countries in Europe. In Europe, what these small countries worried about was not internal dissent. It was that they are going to be swallowed up by competing countries. And as a consequence, they had to allow for a greater degree of domestic freedom

and they had to attract the best brains because that allowed them to innovate both militarily but also financially and economically. The European way of succeeding and of self-preservation was basically to generate economic growth at home. And it is through this competition and a desire for self-preservation

that liberalism, with small L, classical liberalism, arose in Europe in the 18th century. Marion, it's so interesting what you're speaking about, because right the way through there's this vein of optimism, and I find it incredibly jarring because I'm a rabid pessimist. And looking at the world now, it seems as if resources are going to be more scarce than ever. We have an energy crisis.

We have the war in Ukraine. we have that and how that's going to impact and how it's going to cause a food crisis. Is there room for optimism amongst all of this, with all of this situation, as we see it at the moment? The British energy problems are not an outcome of physical limits on fossil fuels or energy that can be produced in the world. They are an outcome of stupid decisions made by your politicians for the last 20 years. and maybe even longer. In Europe, on the continent, it's the same thing. It's not an outcome of climate change.

It's an outcome of climate policies. We moved too quickly without having a plan to basically eliminate as much as possible of fossil fuels. Whatever your view on fossil fuels, I'm not taking a position on this. I do believe that emitting ever more CO2, in the atmosphere is a problem. But clearly, the timeline and the plan that our politicians have come up with was

completely unrealistic. We are not paying a price for there being too little oil or gas in the world or uranium. We are paying a penalty for politicians forcing us into energy consumption patterns, which were not congruent with reality. And that's what the book is about. The book tells you that there is plenty to be used for. for hundreds of thousands, millions of years, we are never going to run out of these, out of these energy sources

or natural resources. But yes, as a society, we could certainly decide not to use them and simply to shut off the lights and just, you know, close the door on Western civilization. That we could do that. But that's going to be a choice. It's not going to be forced on us by physical limits of the planet. That's what the book is about.

Marron, but what'd you mean? I remember when I was at school, you know, I mean, all this stuff should have run out by now. Coal was going to run out by 2050. Oil was going to run out by 2020, I think. Other stuff was going to run out even earlier. We're never going to run out of oil. We're never going to run out of coal.

We're never going to run out of those resources? In a word, no. Today we have greater known resources of oil than we had 100 years ago, even though we obviously used a lot of oil. in the intervening 100 years. We also have more known reserves of natural gas. And these are known reserves. They do not mean that those are the only reserves in the world.

They are the known reserves given the price of oil and gas today. In other words, it pays us to go and explore parts of the world to look for additional deposits at this price. If the price was twice as high, we would have twice as much of an incentive to go and explore other parts of the world in search for new deposits. So that's just what we know. But also, don't forget that just because we are using some sort of an energy today, that doesn't mean that we are going to be using that energy or natural resource 100 or 200 years from now. A perfect example of that would be the recent craze and the recent concern around the world about lithium and lithium prices. So at the moment, the commercially viable technology that we have in order to produce electric batteries for our electric vehicles is lithium iron batteries.

and they are very good. And obviously, you can open a newspaper on any given day, and there is going to be probably a story. There is a high likelihood there's going to be a story about, you know, where are the lithium deposits? How are we going to get to them? What if the Chinese get there first? Well, who is to say that we are going to be using lithium ion

in 10 years or 20 years in order to power electric vehicles? There are scientists who are already working on sodium iron batteries, which is just salt. And who knows what is going to be happening in the future. So I think that people who are concerned about us running out of anything, they forget that technology is dynamic. Technology always changes. And just because we are using something today doesn't mean we'll need it in the future.

And why is it, Marion, that certain types of energy, for instance, nuclear, is seen as even though it's... it's cleaner than the vast majority of others at our disposal, we are less reluctant to use it. More reluctant. Sorry, more reluctant to use it. My apologies. Absolutely. Why is that? Gosh. So having spoken to people who have been thinking and looking around this since the 1970s, it seemed to have been an outcome of the world being greatly concerned about nuclear weapons that at some point that sort of concern about nuclear weapons in the 60s has sort of

flown over into concern about having nuclear energy at all. In the United States, we had the seven miles island, seven mile island nuclear accident in the 1970s. Nobody died, but of course Americans like they always do, overreacted, and we stopped building nuclear power stations ever since. I believe that the agency responsible for nuclear safety and permit program for American nuclear power station endeavor in its 50-year existence has never given a single permit for a single nuclear reactor in the United States. So we haven't built anything in a very, very long time.

The other thing is, of course, that the media simply refuses to report on one basic fact is that when you look at people dying from different sources of energy, nuclear is one of the safest. Not only is nuclear good because it doesn't produce any CO2 into the atmosphere, which is what I thought the environmentalists were concerned about. But it doesn't kill that many people in the nuclear power creation process. Very few people die on science. building these nuclear reactors, for example, in industrial accidents compared to even building of wind farms, you know, or hydroelectric dams. People always die in building of these things.

And nuclear is actually pretty safe. And of course, it beats the hell out of millions of people who die due to indoor pollution or burning of biofuels and things like that. And so it's a choice that people have made, the extreme environmentalist movement, and I want to distinguish very deliberately and as clearly as I can between smart environmentalists who get this and the extreme environmentalists who don't. There has been recently a shift away from this, you know, blanket refusal to consider nuclear power. and the people are looking at it again, and I hope that we will be seeing a nuclear renaissance. Now, I would be amiss if I didn't mention that when you consider all the costs associated with building of nuclear power stations, and even carbon tax, you know, negative externalities, that natural gas is still a better way,

of power in civilization than nuclear. It's still cheaper, even when you account for negative externality of CO2 into the atmosphere. But if people are almost religiously committed to not using fossil fuels, then nuclear is the way to go, and hopefully in the future fusion. Marion, do you think we're at a point now as a society where we're, you know, we drunk the Kool-Aid a little bit with Greta Thumburg and, you know, Extinction Rebellion and saying, you know, the world is got 50 harvest left.

It's 12, man. Get it right. Sorry, 12 or whatever it is. Stop being racist. Stop being right. Exactly. That these people insist upon and taking school children on exile marches. But now that we've got bills coming and hitting our map, which are just astronomically high,

which are going to mean that a lot of people struggle to pay their bills, do you think this is a moment where we're all going to have to wake up and actually realize what we're dealing with and how important energy is? I think that we are waking up and I hope, I think there is a reasonable chance that we have seen peak apocalyptic environmentalism. I have two reasons to say that. One is that half of the world, the underdeveloped or the developing world, is never going to buy into our nonsense. We just have to stop thinking. We just have to stop thinking. And just don't even pretend that people in India and China and Bangladesh and Africa, which is, which is still very poor, are simply going to start using windmills. It's not going to happen for decades. They would have to be at a completely different level of economic development

to start playing around with wind farms and whatever. So they're going to be reliant on coal and natural gas for a long way to come. And even that is better than using biofuels in order to power their own societies. So that's one half of the population. The second half of the population, which are the advanced economy, like yours and ours are economies which are by and large democratic. And I do not believe that with any level of brainwashing coming from Whitehall or from Greta Thumburg or people who glue themselves to roads on M5 or whatever it is, I don't think with any level

of that kind of propaganda and brainwashing, the good people in the United Kingdom are going to decide that this is the future they're going to go. In other words, democracy is going to win. And if it's not going to be the Tory party, which changes the green policies and the Green New Deal or net net zero, it's going to be somebody else. And the sooner the British political establishment awakes to the fact that the British people are suffering and their living standards are collapsing, the less likely it is that you will have a really nasty party emerging that will do it for, them. And that is a concern that I have, that we still have, we still have democracies here in the West. And if our center right and central left simply refuses to acknowledge that lives of our

people are getting worse by government design, somebody else is going to fill that void. And it is that void that I want to avoid. Well, this is a problem because, you know, you see all these politicians and all these celebrities go on TV and go, look, we've got a consumer. And yet they're the ones going on holidays. They're the ones using private jets. And when ordinary people can't afford to heat their own homes, and many of them in their businesses and pubs are having to close down or shop for a prolonged period of time,

you do think this is going to create severe civil unrest because people realize it's not fair. Yes, and part of the reason why the public in this country and in yours has the politicians in utter contempt is precisely because they see the level of hypocrisy that is going on in both societies. I don't have a specifically strong feeling about guns in this country, which is a very toxic subject,

but you always see the politicians being well protected while other people aren't, even though crime is rising in the United States. You see them constantly raising taxes on air travel, but they themselves fly around on private jets or first class, which is much more carbon intensive. You see them telling you to drive, you know, little prices while they enjoy being driven around in SUVs as big as a house.

You see them telling you that the world is going to be swallowed up by the oceans while at the same time they're buying beachfront properties. And they basically think that we are so stupid. And they think that they can basically freak us out to an extent where any kind of policy can be implemented. And to that extent, I was actually impressed with some of the work done in the UK by your former head of your Supreme Court, Jonathan Sumpion, who was deeply concerned that the kind of public reaction to COVID, you know, you end up with a Chinese virus, but also with a Chinese society, where if people get, if people can be free, out to sufficient extent that the world is going to implode, that they would be willing to part with their civil liberties and their basic freedoms. On the other hand, all of these apocalyptic

predictions have been wrong in the past. And if you put a date on it, if you say that we only have five or ten years, you know, on the planet left, and that time expires, you know, once again, we will have to have a conversation about whether we should be believing these people. You know, what sort of credibility do they have? And do they all? And do they all? also realize just how extraordinarily it is damaging to our institutions. You know, how are we supposed to believe the leadership in our societies when they get these calls wrong time and time again? You know, they complain about populism. They are the causes of populism because they keep on saying things which are obviously not true.

No, and I was going to say that's absolutely right. And that's, we've seen that right the way through, you know, since the Iraq war, really. Constantine wrote a brilliant thread on it, which went viral on Twitter, because we don't have faith in our leaders anymore. And when you look at something like Net Zero, which none of us voted for, none of us, or only a small fraction of people wanted. Your girlfriend did. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Only a small fraction of us wanted. And the fact it's going to have such horrendous consequences, means that what is the point in democracy, really, when it comes down to it. All right, well, look, Mara, before you get into that, let's talk about the positive side of this. No, no, let's keep it negative. He wants to drag us down into the gutter and into the pessimistic stuff. But you actually have a very positive message.

And look, I think Francis and I both agree with everything you've said about the impact on democracy of hypocritical politicians, the Chinese virus giving us a Chinese society. I hear all that. But if you don't mind, Francis, let's do a bit of the more positive stuff because you actually have a great and very inspiring message, I think, which is that we can use the power of technology, we can use the power of human minds, the human ingenuity that is contained within human beings to triumph over these problems and to overcome many of these issues.

And you mentioned earlier that we could talk about the data around of that. And I'd be really keen that we get some of that So, Marion, talk to us about why you are hopeful and optimistic for the future, what you see as the opportunities for human beings to transform the world and to continue to expand our understanding of it. I'm rationally optimistic about the future, just to clarify that so long as we don't have a massive war caused by politicians, so long as we are able to innovate without a precautionary principle, so long as we are able to feel. freely speak and publish and research for which you need, of course, freedom of speech. And so long as we have the free markets which can tell us which inventions and innovations are valuable and which inventions and innovations are not valuable. But with that being said, so in this book, we have looked at 18 different data sets with

some of our data sets going back to 1850. And we looked at hundreds of commodities, goods, finished goods. services, food, fuel, etc. And what we found is that for every 1% increase in population, we had 1% decrease in the price of all of these goods, services, and commodities. And that tells us that human beings, on average, are more producers than they are consumers. That tells us that we are able to really produce more wealth than we consume, right? Otherwise, you would see the opposite. With every 1% increase in population, you would see a decline.

Also, you would see an increase in prices in greater scarcity. But once again, what we find is the exact opposite. Prices go down, the more people you have. I'm going to give you just a few things that we found. I'm going to, the longest data set that we have goes back to 1850 and is for, American blue-collar workers. This is manufacturing workers. Okay.

So what we found is that pork, for example, fell in price by 98%, which means that the same amount of time which got you one pound of pork in 1850, you now get 63 pounds of pork for the same amount of work. Okay. For the same amount of work that bought you a pound of rice, you now get 41 pounds of rice. Some amount of work that got you, say, a pound of wheat, now you get 31 pounds of wheat. We go with corn, rye, but we also look at minerals like nickel or phosphate or barley, coffee, copper. And everywhere we find that prices have been dropping to such extent that basically whatever you've could get for an hour of work in 1850, you can now get a multiple, even though the number of people in the world has risen from 1 billion people in 1800 to 8 billion people today. And I should

mention that when we looked at prices, what we did, we looked at prices of things relative to wages, because of course wages increase over time as well as humanity becomes more productive. And if you let me, I'm also going to give you a global perspective. We did it for the United Kingdom as well, but we did a global perspective where we looked at what happened to prices of commodities during the era of globalization, which was to say after 1980. And that's just a period of 40 years. And what we found, for example, that coffee fell in price by 90%, so now you get, sorry, this is where the age is coming in and I have to my glasses. Not everything improves over time, my friend. No, I certainly don't. But

85% cheaper. You can now get seven for the price of one. Pork, 84% cheaper. You get seven for the price of one. Salmon, 80% cheaper, you can get five for the price of one. And this is just in the scope of the last 40 years. And people might want to ask, you know, we often get, you know, part of the doom and gloom is that people feel that things are not improving at a faster pace. But actually, what we found is that in the last 40 years, living standards have improved by

about 250% as a global average. And what people have to keep in mind when they are thinking, is this fast enough or not, is that for tens of thousands of years, human standards of living haven't changed at all. In other words, if you were living to the age of 25 or 30 in ancient Egypt, you are living to the age of 25 or 30 in ancient Rome and then in Norman England, right? as many babies died to the Asian Egyptians as they did in Britain in year 1000, maybe with little differences, but generally the living standard just remained the same, the same amount of food that you consumed, you were able to consume living on the age of starvation,

your parents, your grandparents, their grandparents, going back thousands of years, you know, would be able to do. So the fact that in the last 40 years alone, we were able to increase our living standards globally by 250% that in itself should tell you that we are doing something right. Yeah. And I think it's very easy to ignore these statistics because when you see something like the energy bills, you forget in many ways how good we have it and actually how rapid technological progress has been. just in the last 10 years, if you think how much everything has changed with the internet

and how much the internet has been able to change our lives and improve lives. And like, for instance, this wouldn't happen. So tell us something positive to do with technology as well. How can technology and technological advances improve our lives in the coming years? Well, first of all, let me acknowledge that the West is going through, and the whole world actually is going through a very difficult. period. When the last two years, the last three years...

I'm trying to be positive, Marion. Yeah, it doesn't come naturally to... The last two years have been difficult. And of course, the sort of slope of human progress is not a smooth line upwards. It's a jagged line. You know, often we take two step forwards and one step back. I believe that both our reaction to COVID, but also our economic policies have been, you know, not not everything we have done was right.

In fact, I think that most of it was done poorly. But I still think that very few Britons would deny that life in 2022 is better than what it was in 1979 or 1980. You know, be it a trip to a dentist or a trip to a doctor to have a quadruple, you know, bypass surgery, or cars or food or even the cleanliness of the environment. I mean, Britain is a much, much cleaner country than it was, you know, 40 years ago. So that being said, where would I take technology? I mean, I think that there are tremendous opportunities for technological improvement of human society in the future. Biotech creation of bespoke medical treatments for every individual.

You know, when the genome. was decoded, it cost a billion dollars. Now you can get your genome decoded for $100. That obviously makes it easier to identify your risks to give you a risk profile, what you should be doing with your life, how much you should be drinking, should you be smoking, should you be eating certain types of foods, so that you can optimize your health in the future. So I think, you know, that's combined with mRNA and the way that mRNA can be used not only against COVID, but they can be used and cancer against all sorts of other things. Artificial intelligence and human and supercomputing can be applied in order to really develop

new drugs, discover the formation of proteins and all other things and all sorts of other things that we need in order to produce much better drugs in order to keep us alive and healthy for a longer period of time. And obviously, longevity and health are the best proxies for highest standard of living, you know, because the longer we live and the healthy we are, that tells us that we are doing all sorts of other things in life well. What are the other technological? I mean, I already talked about biotech. Artificial intelligence, if it happens, it could really boost our productivity. So even if we do have the world, sort of flatlining in terms of population.

That doesn't mean that we wouldn't get any inventions because human brain would now cooperate with AI. But we just don't know whether that's going to happen or when. But if we can pull it off, then I think that we can just dramatically increase the human brain's computing power. Other things that we can talk about are maybe breakthroughs in energy.

You know, energy goes into everything as Europeans and Americans are finding out, right now. Energy is absolutely fundamental to powering our civilization, not just this Zoom call, but also the cost of your avocados or a loaf of bread. Everything is based on energy. What if we could actually spend some serious money behind fusion energy, which is very safe and could power our civilization for millennia to come and make energy too cheap to measure? What if energy became free? I think that would make our living standard jump quickly by order of magnitude and make us much more optimistic. We could cut the price of absolutely everything we do in society by a significant margin.

Marion, and we've got to wrap up in a second. But before we'll ask you our last question, I wanted to ask you something else because temperamentally I agree with you and the more I look at the facts of it, the more I agree with you. And probably because I grew up in the 90s when we had this brief moment of all. optimism. I am someone who's inclined to believe that technology and scientific progress is how we are going to deal with many of the difficult problems that we do face. However, we've also seen, as you and Francis were talking about earlier, that when you get rapid technological change,

including of the type that we've seen in the last decade, particularly, it comes with very significant trade-offs. And the ability to communicate with everybody in the world, the ability to connect, not everybody, but most people in the world through the internet, has been incredible. And it's also got to the point where, you know, countries are having civil wars because of Facebook, quote, unquote. I mean, I'm simplifying. But you know what I mean. We are very divided in Western countries and so on. So while remaining optimistic, how do we manage some of the trade-offs of these technological developments because it seems to me, you know, the area that Francis and I are in, you know, social communication, cultural programming, entertainment, and particularly social media,

that is an area where everyone knows there's a big problem and no one quite knows what to do about it. Any technology developed by the human brain can be used for good and evil. A baseball bat can be used to hit a baseball and it can be used to bash you to death, not to mention guns and anything else, knives. So what you do with your technologies also matter. I think that any new technology from gramophones to bicycles was first met with a wall of negativism. In other words, Writing of novels was supposed to lead to mental collapse throughout the Western world. You know, television, radio, all of these things were considered to be potentially world-ending events, but they didn't happen. I think that when it comes to social media, I don't like them.

I don't partake. I left Facebook in 2012 when I realized that it was making me unhappy that what I was putting up on Facebook was a curated picture of my life and what I was consuming was a curated picture of my life. So basically I was posting lies and consuming lies. And once I realized that I left Facebook. And that was a choice, a choice which can be made independently by any number of you, by all eight billion people. So I think that what we are going through right now is a period of adjustment to a new technology. But that period of adjustment will resolve itself. You know, it took us 50 years to figure out that drinking and driving was not a good idea. And right now, it's sort of been internalized into us

that cars are much better operated when you are sober, right? But it took time to square the human brain with this new technology. And I think that will probably happen with social media as well, or at least I hope that will happen with social media, is that people are simply going to leave, realize that much of it is simply unreal, that is making them unhappy, and they could be spending their time doing better things than being on social media. So I think it's, these are early days, it's a new technology, but I think we'll probably figure it out in the way that we have figured it out with novels and bicycles and radio and television. Marion, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on.

We're going to finish with our final question, which is always the same. It's what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? Well, I'm basically a follower of the Enlightenment. I believe that enlightenment, I aspire to the ideals of the Enlightenment. One of the main features of the Enlightenment was freedom of speech. I don't think that we are putting enough emphasis on the way that freedom of speech is being destroyed by our governments, by the media, by cancel culture. freedom of speech is not only necessary in order to produce new inventions and innovations, but also to produce new ideas in this country.

We need a lot of reforms because the country is not functioning very well, and I wouldn't like ideas that I propose to be cancelled just because they seem to outrage. In the same way, in the United Kingdom, you need to undertake a lot of reforms. And what if somebody tells you that your proposal for, I don't know, NHS reforms, is somehow, I don't know, whatever, they will cancel you for that. So we need freedom of speech. We need to preserve freedom of speech.

It's absolutely fundamental. We should be talking about it more. We should be talking more about people getting canceled for joking, for expressing wrong ideas, and also for having peculiar forms of behavior. And that's important because as we discuss in our book, a lot of people on whom we rely for some of the most important innovations and inventions in the world are also very peculiar people, right? Look at somebody like Steve Jobs, incredibly difficult,

and apparently quite an unpleasant person to be about, but he's changed the world. Look at the personal peccadillos of somebody like Bill Gates. Again, an imperfect man who has changed the world. Look at somebody like the co-discoverer of, DNA, Jim Watson. He likes to provoke people. He likes to constantly needle them with politically incorrect opinions. But what if we shut him down just because he was politically incorrect? Would we have had DNA? And so I think that freedom of speech, but also I think greater

tolerance for eccentricity or neurodivergent individuals who may be saying the right things and have weird forms of behavior, but we need them because genius usually is, comes with people on the spectrum. A fantastic answer, Marin. I really recommend everybody get superabundance. Tell our fans where they can find your work online. Thank you very much. So the book is Superabundance.

We have a website, www.spabundance.com. The other website which I run is humanprogress.org. and if you are interested in getting in touch, I can be found at cato.org. Thank you very much. We're going to ask you a couple of questions that only our supporters will see in a moment. But for now, thank you so much for joining us

and thank you for watching and listening. We'll see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or a show. All of them go out at 7pm UK time. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon. We have made so much progress and we're about to throw it all away because of the narratives that we discussed and we explored in the interview.

What are the best strategies to ensure that we don't do that and we pull back from the cliff face?