well we we do a little analysis on uh time inequality and uh you know what what’s happened there we think about income inequality but it’s really time inequality that counts you go back to 1960 and someone who lived in China you know basically spent 8 hours a day working to just earn the money to buy their food for that day well the time price of food has fallen such that they can now spend less than an hour so you go from 8 hours to 1 hour that means you got 7 hours of time that you can now devote to something else and that’s times billions of people on the planet and a massive transformative purpose is what you’re telling the world it’s like this is who I am this is what I’m going to do this is the dent I’m going to make in the universe hi this is Peter D mandis welcome to moonshots and mindsets on today’s episode we’re going to dive into one of my favorite subjects in the world the subject of abundance this is is the
[00:01:00] means by which you avoid this negative feeling about the world and realize that the world is becoming better and stronger more capable every day if you haven’t been excited about your future the future of your kids listen to this episode I’m going to be joined by Maran tupy he’s editor of humanprogress.org uh he is the co-author of super abundance a new book that follows 12 years later after my book called abundance the future is better than you think uh he a PhD in uh International uh relations his co-author is Gail pulley uh who is at the University of Hawaii uh he’s on the board of human uh progress.org and the creator of the Simon abundance index so during this session we’re going to talk about how we’re creating abundance on almost every level possible uh we’re going to talk about 50 different Commodities that over the last 150 years have increased in Access and reduced in
[00:02:02] price we’re democratizing and demonetizing everything that between 1980 and today it’s taken 72% less work for you to earn energy food water healthc care whatever it might be and that abundance has grown by 250% these are fundamental econometric numbers that this group is going to be discussing with you interestingly enough one of the things that we’re going to talk about is human population that in fact increasing human population is not a bad thing and that the numbers today predict we’re at 8 billion today we’re going to hit 10 billion but then have a very rapid decrease here’s the key point for every 1% increase in population your personal abundance access to Food Water Energy technology is increasing by 3 to 4% it’s one of the most extraordinary times to be alive so this is a session to hopefully give you the data the background the ability to see the world
[00:03:01] as an amazing place the only thing more exciting than today is perhaps tomorrow all right let’s get into our session everybody Peter dandis here welcome to moonshots and mindsets on an extraordinary topic one that I’m so fond of uh it’s the topic of abundance and if you’re not feeling super abundant today if you’re not excited about your life if you’re not excited about where humanity is going listen to this conversation because uh hopefully you will see that the world is on an incredible trajectory to increase the abundance for every man woman and child on planet Earth I’m joined with two friends Dr Maran tupy and Dr Gail pulley who are the co-authors of super abundance a topic uh that I’m super fond of all right we’re going to get into it all here but first good morning good afternoon uh Maran where are you today I’m in Washington DC at the KO Institute where I work all right the Washington DC the center of all human knowledge and and Gail have how about you where on the planet are
[00:04:00] you uh I’m in Hawaii all right well in the middle of uh of winter being Hawaii sounds like a really smart move so guys um uh super abundance uh uh you know I wrote a book back in 2012 it was really a turning point of my life uh called abundance the future is better than you think uh Eric Drexler had written a book shortly thereafter um on radical abundance and here comes super abundance and you’ve written a beautiful book uh with Incredible data you know when I’m out there teaching this subject to everybody I say one of the most important things you need to do is train your mindset how do you see the world uh because your mindset is everything and uh unfortunately our brains and we’ll get into this are wired in a fear and scarcity mindset but we’re actually living in a world that is arguably safer and more abundant than any time in human history and accelerating uh I’d love to begin uh Marian with a uh from you and then from Gail a quick definition of
[00:05:00] super abundance and then let’s dive into is that true every place and what’s underlying it Maran uh please kick us off how did Super abundance come into existence what’s the definition of that for you oh well thanks so much and thanks for having us on your show um super abundance has a technical meaning um uh that I will talk talk about in a second uh but for Mo for the last 200 years at least maybe maybe maybe longer people simply assume as population grows uh resources become scarcer they become more expensive and uh therefore scarcer um but in fact what we found um in super abundance is that uh resources are becoming cheaper and therefore more abundant um but what we found was that abundance can increase at two different speeds relative to population it can either increase at a lower rate than than population growth or higher rate than population growth Now by looking at 100 of different Commodities going back
[00:06:01] all the way to 1850 what we found is that in almost every case um U the abundance of resources has been increasing at a faster rate than population growth and the difference between population growth and abundance that is the new knowledge created in the human mind and I think that’s an important Discovery because most people assume uh that when a human comes into the world he’s just a consumer he’s just a destroyer of natural resour ources uh but in fact every human being comes into the world not just with an empty stomach but also with a mind uh capable of creating new ideas and new knowledge so the fact that abundance is increasing at a very fast pace much at a much higher rate than population tells us that on average hum every human beings produces more knowledge and more value than he or she consumes or destroys amazing so the more the population the more people creating knowledge the more the world is was getting better versus getting less
[00:07:02] and I mean intuitively if you think back we had a very low population in the millions and tens of millions a few thousand years ago and now in the billions I mean every individual can contribute a small amount that be now because of digital technology can become available globally to everybody it’s fully democratized in that regard uh Gail how did you come to the super abundance conversation I actually uh met Marian on Twitter so thank heavens for Twitter um he’ written this really interesting article about commodity prices and what they hadd been doing so I reached out to him and we began this conversation and we we um thought about this idea of you know we have a little bit of TR trouble measuring things with money because how do you adjust for inflation so uh there there was a concept known as time prices so we thought well why don’t we uh why don’t we measure these things in time prices so a Time price you have
[00:08:00] uh goes back to this idea is that we buy things with money but we really pay for them with our time so the question is how much time does it take you to earn the money to buy that thing and what’s happening to your time price over time so we have money prices that can be are measured in dollars and cents in time prices that are expressed in hours and minutes so if something took you uh you know something in a Time price is pretty simple to calculate it’s just the money price divided by your hourly income so if something cost a pizza cost $20 and you’re earning $20 an hour uh that’s a that’s a 1 hour time pric pizza so then the question is what’s happening to that time price over time and time allows us to transcend all of this uh issue with adjusting for currencies and nominal versus real we can go to any country at any time figure out what the price of something is what the hourly income was the average hourly income of a blue collar worker for example figure out that time price so it allowed us to
[00:09:01] really look at all of these different different things so that was kind of our first step as let’s let’s think about time prices I love that one of the things I tell people is you know uh no matter who you are on the planet wealthiest poorest where you are we all have one thing in common you’ve got 24 hours in a day 7 days in a week you know 365 days in a year and it’s how you use your time that determines everything do you have to use your time to go down to the river and get water or can you open the tap you know you fly in a private jet or do you have to go through TSA and socks at LAX and that’s pretty amazing and I remember the first time I heard about this and when I was doing my research for uh abundance back in Circa 2011 was a book by Matt Ridley called rational Optimist which is you know we should put out a series a series of all the books that are building this mindset and and Matt talked about save time and talked about the amount of time it took in labor to buy light to read right right in uh in ancient days with an you
[00:10:01] know oil or was it a a candle and then ultimately now with an LED light bulb you know it’s just like massive demonetization um that led to the ability to read and learn at night and so so Marian I mean how you said you looked at 50 different metrics and how uh were’re I guess they’re demonetizing and becoming more abundant um was it true across all of them can you give some examples and were there any that didn’t become more abundant and what might those be right so in the book we look at 18 different data sets not 18 different resources but data sets uh some of which we get from third parties and uh they contain together hundreds of different uh Commodities food Metals minerals fuel we even look at some Services we can talk about that in a moment but um uh but but pretty much all of them have been growing more more abundant at a super abundant rate there
[00:11:01] are some exceptions for a small period of time so for example when we looked at um uh I believe it was 27 uh different resources between 1960 and 2018 we found that gold and oil have actually increased in in in time price slightly which is which means that you had to work a little longer in order to be able to to afford a golden necklace or a gallon of gas but if you take it all the to 1850 which is what we have done then everything is basically becoming cheaper at a super abundant rate and uh one of my favorite um data sets uh has to do with what we call the basic 50 um and and this this this particular time period U concerns 1980 to 2018 and it looks at the world it looks at how the average citizen or average inhabitant of the world is doing let’s say somebody living on 10 or $1,000 a year in places like Brazil um so if you
[00:12:02] can just imagine that that average inhabitant of the world um their time price has fallen by 72% they now have to work 72% less time than they would have to work in uh 1980 so during that period of globalization the much maligned period of globalization that a lot of people is not very keen on these days um what we have seen is that abundance of resources um has has grown by 250% now is that a lot or is that too little well think about it this way for thousands of years uh there has been no increase in abundance time prices basically remained stagnant the same standard of living that you had your parents had your grandparents had their parents had your children would have and your grandchildren would have you know if you look at the at the line of of human progress it is basically stagnant for 10,000 years right yeah nothing nothing happened generation to gener generation Millennium to Millennium who
[00:13:00] was yeah was correct correct and then in the last 40 years what we see is this extraordinary um you know this extraordinary Improvement where people’s lives again as I said improve by 252 per. so from a historical perspective this is undoubtedly the greatest reduction in human poverty ever registered Wow have you graphed population growth versus a metric of abundance I mean it would be interesting to see you know we see all we’ll get into the conversation of overpopulation and is this bad and all of that moaning that we hear but it would be interesting to see sort of a uh a some correlating uh population growth with a abundance metric or with technology metrics uh for people to realize you know go humans you know join the Elon Musk club and get 10 kids um so uh I I think that’s question for Gail he he’s not GA have have you done the graphing at all yeah absolutely in fact in the book we’ve got a number of of those charts that we we show the
[00:14:00] difference between uh growth in population and growth in resource abundance and we see typically every time population increases 1% you’ll see personal abundance increase 3 to 4% and then when you say say that one more time population grows 1% and you get increase in personal abundance 3 to 4% 3 to 4% so every time population increases uh on the average a we see this 3 to 4% increase in personal abundance so it’s like think about it as a a slice in a pie and the size of the pie so your individual slice is getting larger but we’re also getting more slices because population’s growing so we’re getting this double effect of everybody gets more and there’s more people at the same time so the global resource abundance is getting you know a 7 to 8% increase because it’s really uh when you think about it if if
[00:15:02] everybody gets more and there’s more people we we get this Global resource abundance effect and that’s a measurement that we try to we try to demonstrate and show too and across all of these data sets you look at uh you look at what’s happening to the growth in that individual resource it’s abundance and once again abundance is this relationship to back to the time price if it if it takes you less and less time your life is becoming more and more abundant and then everybody around you is experiencing the same thing and we have more people I use the example you know in the world of scarcity if you have a pizza you have to slice it thinner and thinner in the world of abundance you just bake more pizzas yeah it’s almost like these people that are coming to the Earth are bringing more pizza with them lots more pizza uh they’re bringing their own pizza and they’re bringing pizza to share with everybody that’s here already so so let’s talk talk about um uh one question
[00:16:00] first and then I want to go to what’s causing all of this uh and again if you’re listening to the program here my goal for you is to question your premise of what you have learned maybe from parents from history books from conversations on CNN I call the crisis use Network and and I want you to let into your mind the idea that no actually we are creating a world that is more and more capable of greater and greater abundance and the world is getting better you I remember a conversation one of the conversation that spurred me to write abundance was a conversation I heard from a young couple that just gotten married they were in a coffee shop and they were talking about um you know I don’t think it’s morally or ethically right to bring a child into this world and I’m like and I was like what world are you seeing I’m seeing the most amazing world ever in human history is like the most amazing time to be coming coming at just saw Bill Gates said the most amazing time is going be 20 years from now but you know I think it’s now and tomorrow and every day after now now um uh is there anything
[00:17:03] that you’re seeing that is not increasing in abundance right now uh sure uh with regard to the United States um Mark Perry has this chart it’s called the he he he calls it the uh the chart of the century and um if you compare um if you look at the BLS data which is the Bureau of Labor Statistics what you find is that basically anything that’s left to the market forces and high level of compet ition with not too much regulation is becoming cheaper but things which tend to be over regulated tend to become more expensive so for example um um white goods um kitchen appliances uh Furniture um TVs um clothing cars uh have becoming uh less expensive or more abundant relative to income even housing now this will come as a shock to a lot of listeners but let me explain uh one you know once we we we have to realize that not everybody is living in LA or Manhattan
[00:18:02] when thankfully so when you look at the average average cost of a house in the United States that’s still cheaper relative to income than than than used to be let’s say in let’s say 19 1980 things which are becoming much more expensive are health care and education uh as well as child care now there the the the Dead Hand of the government is actually making things scarcer by Design partly it’s through subsidies partly it’s through uh overregulation in Virginia very close to where I live you cannot build a hospital unless all the other hospitals uh in the state agree that there is a need for another hospital now that’s a crazy way to organize a delivery of a service so education and Healthcare are becoming more expensive but but primarily because of government monopolies and overregulation now so but to to test whether superabundance would also apply
[00:19:01] to Services we looked at the prices time prices of cosmetic surgery in the United States so as you know cosmetic surgery you have to pay for yourself there is no government subsidy and it is generally much less regulated than uh than other types of surgeries in the United States or other type of type of types of medical delivery services so we looked at uh surgeries uh sorry we looked at cosmetic surgery uh for about 20 or a 30-year period and what we found was that things are becoming cheaper at a super abundant rate wow were you able to we able to look at I mean education and Health Care is not regulated the same in every country and one of the things that’s interesting is sort of the uh you know 100 plus experiments going on in different countries in different regulatory areas are there any countries in which education and Healthcare is becoming cheaper because uh the regulations are different there and I let me also say you know listen I’m clear the future of education and
[00:20:00] Healthcare is fully democratized and demonetized it’s going to be Ai and Robotics and and the metaverse right it’s going to be the best education in the world the best health count in the world is going to be delivered by an AI and it’s going to be the same for the poorest child and the wealthiest child that is coming and we’re going to disrupt those Industries they deserve to be disrupted but don’t get me on that Tade so we haven’t done that research um but it’s a it’s a very interesting idea to to look at International comparisons we just looked at the United States well there was a you had an interesting guest here a couple of weeks ago I think iMed M mustak um you know his AI stuff that he’s doing where they’re attempting to deliver this educational tool to uh to young young people in Africa at a cost that’s tremendously uh affordable um so I think when you see this technology disrupt that area with these AI tools and Direct Delivery you’re going to see a a huge flourishing of educational
[00:21:01] opportunities at very abundant uh prices this episode is brought to you by levels one of the most important things that I do to try and maintain my Peak vitality and Longevity is to monitor my blood glucose more importantly the foods that I eat and how they Peak the glucose levels in my blood now glucose is the fuel that powers your brain it’s really important High prolonged levels of glucose what’s called hypoglycemia lead to everything from heart disease to alzheimer’s to sexual dysfunction to diabetes and it’s not good the challenge is all of us are different uh all of us respond to different foods in different ways like for me if I eat bananas it spikes my blood glucose if I eat grapes it doesn’t if I eat bread by itself I get this prolonged spike in my blood glucose levels but if I dip that bread in olive oil it blunts it and these are things that I’ve learned from wearing a continuous glucose monitor and using the levels app so levels is a company that
[00:22:03] helps you in analyzing what’s going on in your body it’s continuous monitoring 24/7 I wear it all the time really helps me to stay on top of the food I eat remain conscious of the food that I eat and to understand which foods affect me based upon my physiology and my genetics you know on this podcast I only recommend products and services that I use that I use not only for myself my friends and my family that I think are high quality and safe and really impact a person’s life so check it out levels. l/ Peter give you two additional months of membership and it’s something that I think everyone should be doing eventually this stuff is going to be in your body on your body part of our future of medicine today it’s a product that I think uh I’m going to be using for the years ahead and hope you’ll consider as well let me ask the big question here right so we’ve seen uh 72% uh drop in the amount of work you
[00:23:01] have to do from 1980 to today to earn or to create the same amount of access to services and and products we’ve seen a 250% increase in abundance um uh over this same time period and the question is why are things becoming more abundant are humans getting smarter is politics getting better or is this all technology what’s the driving force here so I’d go back to uh let’s kind of back up a little bit because people people have this fundamental misconception of what a resource is and you talk about CNN our culture our popular cultur is kind of focus in on movies and we take this recent movie um Infinity war and Thanos is this major character there and he I love the movie because it illustrates it illustrates what our our fundamental uh misunderstanding is about resources he says the universe is finite
[00:24:02] its resource is finite well the first part of the statement is true we do live on a planet with a finite number of atoms but resources uh resources are not finite because it’s when you add knowledge to atoms that they become resources so this uh and we don’t we don’t seem to have hit any kind of a limit on the ability to discover and create and add knowledge to atoms when you add knowledge to atoms that’s when they become valuable and they also become abundant at the same time so think about you know economics economics is not about uh atoms economics is about knowledge and when you think about scarcity it’s like we don’t have this we do have a finite number of atoms but the way that we can rearrange those atoms add knowledge to them that’s really there’s no limit to that that and that’s really where the value gets created
[00:25:00] knowledge plus atoms equals resources the the perfect example of that uh which uh Stephen and I talk spoke about in abundance is the story of aluminum we open up the book with that right that aluminum used to be the most precious metal on the planet worth more than platinum and gold in the 1800s um because it was so difficult to extract from boxy even though aluminum is 8.3% of the Earth’s crusted by weight it was so rare and then comes along a simple breakthrough of electrolysis and aluminum becomes you know as cheap as aluminum foil it’s a perfect example of that I think it was in your book that I read that when Napoleon III the emperor of the French uh gave dinner uh he had his uh guest the king of sayam coming over for dinner exactly right he he fed he the troops were fed with silver utensils Napoleon ate with gold and the king of sayyam was fed with uh aluminum utensils cuz cuz it was a state dinner of highest highest importance and then
[00:26:02] you know the Capstone of the Washington Monument Washington DC born built in that same decade the Capstone is made of aluminum because that was the most precious metal back then crazy and I would simply add one example uh to to that in think about how much more value we can get from something that used to be completely Valu less uh and that would be sand is that you know just a grain of sand um it’s been lying around for billions of years then some 4 and a half thousand years ago somebody figured out that if you if you if you heat it to 390° Fahrenheit you can turn into glass beads which people used for decoration and then later people used it for cups much later we used it for window panes and now um glass is used in fiber optic cables or microchips so with every step of the way you are using this previously useless element in order to create more and more value and who knows what we’ll
[00:27:01] be using sand in 200 years time you know we don’t know or or or 20 years time you know it’s so funny because the speed at which the world is changing you know I remember I go to the Emirates uh quite often and I I know the the leadership there in Dubai and Abu Dhabi and last time I was there they said can you give a talk about uh Humanity in the world in 50 years and I’m like no I can’t I can’t tell you what’s going to happen in 20 years let Al on 50 years uh because the speed of change is is so quick let me ask you guys a question one of the things that as we talk about increasing abundance in the world and in you know converging exponential Technologies is this vision of the future uh portrayed by Ray Kur of the singularity right a point in time where the speed of change is so fast that you can’t predict what comes next um Rey’s been a mentor for me and we started singularity univ together based on that uh do you think about the
[00:28:01] concept of the singulari as you think about abundance yeah I I think we’ve we’ve had these points of Singularity that have occurred we call them punctuated uh Innovation where you suddenly have this huge jump going from the Pony Express to the telegraph that was a a point of Singularity where this the world changed in a day uh so we continue to have these new innovations that appear this ability to to decode the DNA sequence and uh you know that that’s going to give us this opportunity to have these Singularity like events where suddenly this knowledge and information or ability to do things or really our time now suddenly we have this gift of time that that we can do other things with so we expect to continue to see these kinds of things happening you know there’s a uh let me give a frame for our listeners of where we’re going out 30 40 50 years what what
[00:29:02] could it be like in the future and there’s a concept that uh krix Drexler wrote about in the 80s called um engines of creation and nanotechnology uh then there was a a book called zero marginal Society by Jeremy riffkin I don’t know if you’re familiar with the book and it’s the notion that there is the technology that’s going to be materializing in the next 20 years is the idea of Nano assemblers that uh there will be technology enabling humans to uh basically build things an atom at a time and there’s a concept of an assembler a little microscopic uh device you know think of an organel inside of a cell that can grab a carbon and nitrogen and oxygen a silicon item whatever it is and assemble something according to a plan and if I have a uh a nanobot uh Nano assembler and I ask it to duplicate itself because it can from the atoms in my hand it can
[00:30:01] steal a few you know trillion and and do that um and if I take one of my Nano assemblers and I drop it into the ground and I say build me an electric Ferrari um it’ll basically grab the atoms and what is needed there it is the raw materials energy and information right and we’re heading towards a world of a squander abundance of energy uh information data sets have to large degree become free as open source uh is available and the cost of the atoms you know is uh there’s more capacity than you need so imagine a world in which everything uh tends towards a zero cost um do you see any arguments against that in the long run um no I mean sometimes people will ask well you know how can you get around uh the scarcity of of a resource when you know you need need something right now like for example lithium batteries right I mean I I can’t tell
[00:31:01] you how many articles I have read in the last six months about um electric vehicles and how we are we have only so much lithium U that’s true there is only so much lithium and therefore this whole electric vehicle Revolution is going to come to an end who is to say that we are going to be using lithium I know for electric batteries in 10 or 20 years time it could be something completely different and and that would be my answer to also somebody who might say but even if you want to build a Ferrari you will need that particular metal or those kinds of metals well who is to say that that’s what you’re going to be needing um after all uh we are using less metal uh that pre we previously used in order to create aircraft what is it that that that Dreamliner is made of it’s It’s Made of something else it’s a gra a graphite uh composite yeah so what if you what if you used carbon and made it out of diamond instead you know I mean this is the kind of disruptive thinking I think people need to switch to and uh you know I one of my friends
[00:32:01] one of my favorite examples of abundance is uh A friend of mine has started a company called The Diamond Foundry up in the Bay Area I don’t know if I I forgot if I mentioned earlier but you know it’s a company what would you think of as more scarce than a perfect diamond right Deus has taught us perfect diamonds are the most scarce and you should pay you know three months of salary for your engagement ring well you know what Diamond Foundry has done has been able to deposit carbon ad them layer by layer by layer and able to create a perfect diamond 5 karat 10 karat they’ve built 40 karat diamonds Flawless beautiful 40 Kar diamonds right and the and it will eventually get to five bucks a carrot so when you walk into your your wife or your girlfriend with this you know 20 karat diamond she goes H God just a 20 karat diamond I mean it’s we’re redefining um abundance in many ways but that’s the key I think is that in the book we try to address some of the
[00:33:02] concerns that a lot of people who might open our book for the first time or or encounter this whole discipline for the first time they might have but but obviously in any book no matter how long you cannot address all the problems that the world is facing but if you can as you say if you can make this if you can make people to make the switch to start think about solutionism is that just because you are using X today doesn’t mean that you’re going to be using it in the future just because you slaughtered a bunch of whales uh you know 100 years ago in order to make uh or 200 years ago in order to make candles doesn’t mean that eventually you’re going to run out of whales because you will replace it with something else and if once and I think that in my talks what I see is that once you explain this this idea of not just saving not not just becoming more efficient but substitution then a light goes on you know I’d also
[00:34:00] add back to this this idea that you know what what remains scarce when everything becomes abundant it’s your time and and the question for most of us is what do I get to do with my 24 hours today is the world such that I I have more choices uh to do with this fixed limited amount of time it’s continuous but it’s fixed and that’s where we see this abundance ability that we really just give you lots more choices to do with your time during the day well Gail a lot of my listeners will know I’m not a believer in uh in fixed amount of time or uh not creating time abundance uh and for me it’s about how do I add 30 healthy years of my life right how do we extend the healthy human lifespan and so it is fixed and you can have a scarcity mindset you know you’re going to be decrepit and old in your late 70s into your 80s and ’90s and your and your end or you can say just like we’ve done in every other field we’re going to
[00:35:02] understand the science the engineering of the human body the DNA epigenetics and we’re going to reprogram that and extend the healthy human lifespan and it’s not a matter of if it’s only matter of when and uh so that’s a different subject let’s get into one of the fun debates I’ve seen on Twitter uh and uh that is one that we should dive into which is everyone not everyone there’s still a significant number of people who believe in the malthusian principle that this planet is heading towards massive overpopulation and we screwed and then there are those voices yours mine Elon and say no no no no no it’s not happening so what is your view on human population uh Marian you’ve been studying this um uh give me your thoughts here right so we have just reached 8 billion people in 1800 when Jefferson was President there was one billion people in the world at the time of Christ or Caesar Augustus uh there
[00:36:00] were 300 million people in the world today there is 8 billion of us what’s going to happen next is that we are probably going to Peak at around 10 billion at most in around 2060 or 2080 and after that the population is going to start declining uh according to the landet in 2100 so only what 77 years from now uh there is either going to be 9 billion people in the world or uh 7 billion people in the world obviously the further you get to 2100 the the you know the fuzzier it gets uh but essentially um by 2100 there’s going to be anywhere between 7 and uh 9 billion people in the world already today in the world in over 50% of countries almost 60% of countries um birth rates are below the replacement level so replacement level is 2.1 children per woman per Life lifetime um that accounts for babies who
[00:37:00] unfortunately don’t make it into adulthood or or old age and um some statistics around the world are pretty shocking uh in uh in South Korea um birth rates are or total ferity rate is 0.9 instead of 2.1 correct in um uh in Central Europe uh where I come from it’s about 1.3 1.4 um instead of 2.1 even in the United States amongst native born women it’s 1.7 uh the reason why the United States population is still growing is because of immigration but not because of native born children so yes uh we are going to reach a peak um you know within my lifetime um hopefully it’s going to be a very long lifetime but about 2060 2070 and then it’s going to start declining yeah that’s where we are the only region in the world large region in the the world where population is still expanding is subsaharan Africa man
[00:38:01] there’s so much to talk about here uh and I think it’s important to for people to understand the facts here um why has malthusian philosophies and thinking prevailed for so long why is I mean the data is there we’re seeing negative growth rates like you said the United States even in China for God’s sakes in Europe in parts of Asia it’s insane and I mean this is these demographics are clear and present uh and they serve as a potential danger to humanity because we said earlier the number of mines on the planet uh are increasing abundance and increasing uh Innovation and we still use human labor I mean one of the things that’s going to be important is can we extend the retirement age right at the peak of your life when you’re 65 you have all the best contacts in the world you know your business bur everything can we add 10 healthy productive years to your life by the way Harvard Oxford
[00:39:01] London School of Business a year ago do a study on if we can extend Healthy Living by a single year it’s worth $38 trillion to the global economy that’s incredible right so what can we can we do if we had 10 of those years so why are people buying this malthusian principle here I I would say they think in Adams instead of knowledge interesting and and I would probably also say that they are uh tend towards fear and fear-mongering right and so an overpopulated world where I get less is makes the evening news and uh uh increasing knowledge does not yeah so I would say that’s sort of a macro level I I I think that when you when you talk about population and resources uh what Gail said I think is crucial is that they they think about finite number of atoms the the the stuff
[00:40:00] that they know of um you know the the next we only have oil for the next 60 years and things like that and and so so that comes intuitively but on a um um on a broader level of course I do believe that we have evolved to prioritize the bad news um you’re walking through a bush uh there’s some rustling noise behind a behind a tree um you know if if if you think it’s going to work out uh but there is a lion lying uh hiding behind the tree he’s going to eat you you your genes are going to get weeded out of the population so an an underreaction sorry overreaction to a threat which doesn’t exist is less costly than an underreaction to a threat that is real and so we have developed a bunch of psychological biases negativity biases that make us make us in interact with the news in in such a negative way agreed agreed and it’s um you know I I
[00:41:03] do call CNN the crisis News Network and our migdala ancient piece of our temporal lobe about the size of your thumb that that uh basically views everything you see here and feel looking for danger as a protective mechanism your sort of your red alert system uh you pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news and I know people listening here have heard me say this before you know the news media uh newspapers magazines radio TV have one business model deliver your eyeballs and ears to their advertisers and if you pay 10 times more attention to negative news and positive news then you’re going to give your people watching it more negative news they don’t pull away where it’s unfortunate and you know good news networks don’t survive um and ultimately it’s sensationalism that is so we have to figure out ways to reprogramming reprogram the human mind but getting back to uh to human population um what else are you hearing
[00:42:01] about this conversation what are do people make any viable arguments that that uh uh give you pause well I I think uh you know the issue is our our our basic model says U wealth is really this function of population and uh the freedom to innovate so it’s really the number of free uh Minds that we have that determine what what kind of prosperity we’re able to create so we think about resistance to that what is preventing uh people from being able to to Really act and explore on their ideas and there there are places on the planet that just simply don’t have a culture that is innovative friendly um people can’t own property they can’t uh they can’t enjoy uh markets they really are not free to innovate and so the opposition from that respect is very dangerous um you’ve got to have
[00:43:00] people and they have to have this Freedom so when we see things that happen War for example it’s like wow we’re using all these resources but what we’re really destroying is all this human capital and potential uh for knowledge creation that would benefit the rest of us so the push back we see is really that that uh we we have civilizations that don’t uh tolerate this idea that we need to to be collaborators and not competitors when we live in a world of atoms we compete when we live in a world of knowledge we collaborate yes can you dig dig into that because there’s a reason for that right if I have if I have a chunk of gold and you have a watch and I trade you my chunk of gold for your watch now you have gold and I have a watch if I know how to make something and you know how to make something and we exchange now we both know how to make both things knowledge you know grows uh in a collaborative fashion where atams don’t
[00:44:00] right so knowledge has a couple of interesting features it has this this first feature that it’s it’s non-rival rival Rous I can you and I can can consume it at the same time in fact when we consume it it grows unlike a Snickers bar of something physical when you consume knowledge it actually grows the knowledge and uh Paul RoR uh really kind of dug into this and brought this really idea of knowledge to the table when we talk about growth what does knowledge do for us and uh so so I think back to this idea look if we want to be able to lift one another we have to have this freedom to do that and we don’t know who is going to going to come up with these ideas uh Steve Jobs his biological father was born in Syria well imagine if Steve had been born and raised in Damascus instead of uh San Jose what would his life have been like what would your life life our life had been like so the question is how many Steve Jobs are
[00:45:00] in Damascus today that uh don’t have this uh environment where they’re able to actually act on their talent and skills and share that with the rest of us beautiful example when I think one of the most important things is um having an abundance mindset so I try and teach the CEOs that I Mentor the entrepreneurs and I Mentor uh to create an abundance mindset I’m just curious what do you guys is how would you define an abundance mindset and do you have any tricks or uh or mechanisms to help someone get out of scarcity into abundance gosh that’s a great question I um uh I I I I can tell you that uh giving talks uh people tend to appreciate the um uh the positive look at humanity and the future of the planet and very often the people that that whom I’ve been lecturing will come back to me and say this is the first time we’ve
[00:46:00] heard something like that and it filled us with optimism so it’s not so much that uh our minds are for close to the option of being more optimistic and having the abundance mindset it’s just that there aren’t enough Avenues in life through which they are going to encounter it Paul ER sold 3 million copies of his book warning that the world was going to end within 10 or 20 years I know that abundance sold well but I’m sure it didn’t sell 3 million copies yeah yeah I I we probably sold I know half a million at most quarter million but you know who was Paul Erick and what was his uh what was his message so Paul erck Not only was but is Paul erck just turned 90 uh he is a biologist at Stanford University and in 1968 he wrote a very famous book the population bomb and the the book opened with famous words or inFAMOUS uh saying uh saying
[00:47:02] that uh in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people were going to die due to starvation exhaustion of resources and starvation no matter what we do to change our course today very optim we know so he didn’t have an abundance he didn’t have an abundance uh mindset and uh of course that didn’t happen uh today famines are pretty much gone from the world except for war zones and um places that were at the Forefront of Paul er’s mind things like India uh countries like India um they are now food exporter in many parts of Africa it is obesity which is now a problem according to latest studies from AF from from Africa that I have seen rather than starvation so anyway the the point is that I don’t think that that people that there are enough aen VES through which this positive mindset positive news can uh can can penetrate
[00:48:03] the human mind one of the problems that I’ve encountered is I suddenly realized that we don’t actually have a constituency in the United States that can push the realistic image of what life is like in the United States when Republicans are in charge Democrats are saying everything is going to hell nothing that Republicans do can possibly be good when Democrats are in charge Republicans do the exact opposite everything is going to hell um you know and and and so the point is that that that even even when there is good news about American economy that doesn’t necessarily get reported because there is again no constituency for the good news yeah no it’s it is so true and that’s why I’m so happy to have found you you know we had dinner together at Jennifer Grossman’s uh house who’s a dear friend of both of ours said you guys have to meet and uh and g a pleasure to meet you as well I
[00:49:00] mean it’s there is no downside uh and every upside to having an abundance mindset um the only downside is it’s less clicks yeah I guess you know my experience is I’m in a classroom with you know young people uh all day and uh what I try to help them understand and they kind of come to the classroom many of these students with this kind of feeling that hey yeah you know the world is overpopulated and we’re running out and we have this climate crisis and so where did they get that from everything I mean the media their parents the culture is saturated with this crisis mentality and it’s this Crisis crisis because once you once you declare a crisis then you can suspend all this other you know civil rights and so forth and so on so um but but they come kind of with the popular culture I mean they’ve seen Thanos and they they’ watched the story yeah so what’s going on there what what are you able to shift their point of view yeah I mean there’s
[00:50:01] some kind of there’s something that’s kind of cool about being pessimistic you know you’re a young guy and it’s kind of cool to be the pessimistic guy so you kind of deal with that a little bit and all guys kind of go through that but I think being able to say look you’ve got to you’ve got to put this world into context Jordan Peterson makes this argument about it’s not comparing yourself to someone else today it’s comparing to who you were yesterday and what he’s really saying is look at your parents and grandparents look at what’s happened over time to our lives and what we realize is things used to be really really expensive and uh we live in this world of just just a world of super abundance where things are becoming more and more abundant which means you have more and more choices so for a young person today it’s look every individual on this planet has the potential to make somebody happy and by that I mean you you discover create some knowledge that you can share with somebody and make somebody happy we don’t know who those
[00:51:00] people are so it means you’ve got to give dignity and respect to everyone because they could actually create something that’s going to lift all of us you have that potential yourself what is it in your life that you can do what is your purpose that you’re going to discover that’s going to allow you to make this contribution in terms of discovery of of knowledge that you’re going to be able to share with one another so I think being able to help them understand look this is your potential this is the opportunity we got 7 billion people on the planet that have cell phone access uh you know connected each other you’ve never there’s never been a time where we have more people with more time more resources and more connections to be able to discover and share knowledge get on this learning curve and and make this contribution and and we lift one another through this process a brief note from our sponsors let’s talk about
[00:52:00] sleep sleep has become one of my number one longevity priorities in life you know getting eight deep uninterrupted hours of sleep is one of the most important things you can do to increase your vitality and energy and increase the health span that you have here on Earth you know when I was in medical school years ago I used to pride myself on how little sleep I could get you know it us to be 5 5 and 1/2 hours today I pride myself on how much sleep I can get and I shoot for 8 hours every single night now usually I’m great at going to sleep if I’m exhausted you know I’ve worked a hard day I’m right out but if I’m having difficulty and it occurs I’m having insomnia or my mind’s overactive and I need help to get that 8 hours I turn to a supplement product by life force called Peak rest now Peak rest has been formulated with an extraordinary scientific depth and background includes everything from long lasting melatonin to magnesium to L glycine to Rosemary extract just to name a few this product is about creating a sense of rest and
[00:53:01] really giving you the depth and length of sleep that you need for Recovery it’s a product I hope you’ll try it works for me and I’m sure it will work for you if you’re interested go to myli horse.com back/ Peter uh to get a discount from Life forse on this product but you’ll also see a whole set of other longevity and vitality related supplements that I use well talk about them some other time but in terms of sleep Peak rest is my go-to supplement hope you’ll enjoy it go to myli horse.com back/ Peter for your discount you know I I get to me kind of pissed off at how people tend to romanticize the past in the good old days you know and the good old days where you would work 80 hour weeks to survive you you would get to an age of 40 and half your friends were buying were dying from tuberculosis or other infectious a agents and you know life was short it was brutish it was difficult and um I call on the
[00:54:02] good old days these are the good old days and every every year every decade is getting better at an extraordinary rate and um you know if you want to go and plant and grow your own food or go out to the country you can do that but you don’t have to um you know I was uh uh speaking to um uh somebody and we had this Insight humanity is finally taking a break from survival human history used to be all about surviving and we’re taking a vacation from survival and the fact that anybody listening to this today that you have the time and the luxury and the technology for free to listen to this conversation is awesome well we we do a little analysis on uh time inequality and uh you know what what’s happened there we think about income inequality but it’s really time inequality that counts you go back to 1960 and someone who lived in
[00:55:01] China you know basically spent 8 hours a day working to just earn the money to buy their food for that day well the time price of food is Fallen such that they can now spend less than an hour so you go from eight hours to 1 hour that means you got seven hours of time that you can now devote to something else and that’s times billions of people on the planet so you suddenly have this this flourishing of time availability to pursue other things instead of being a consumer you can now become a Creator and by the way Amplified today by chat GPT by Dolly by stable diffusion by all of these tools that U make it possible for you we’re going almost it’s Godlike in power we can go from uh a spoken word to Creation uh in a step it’s insane well that that’s what happened to me when I saw Excel the first
[00:56:00] time for my generation it was wow I can’t believe this thing can do this thing and it’s going to make my life so much better so uh yeah we have these tools and once again they’re knowledge tools they’re tools that we can share to with other people that have zero marginal cost so we set on this cusp of this tremendous opportunity to create and lift one another out of out of pock because we we now have not only we have these resources we have the time to use the resources and and explore uh what can be done with them I challenge my abundance 360 members right I run this annual Summit for the last 11 years I’ve committed to running it for 25 years um I I challenge people to think about in your business in your industry in your life what do you see a scarce and how do you flip it into abundance right there is a means and a mechanism to make everything abundant it may not be easy it may require new breakthroughs and
[00:57:01] Technologies but I I believe there’s nothing that is uh truly scarce and time is what people usually say as the most scarce thing and yes historically it has been but if we’re able to add decades onto the human lifespan it becomes less so and when you’re able to speak and have something happened that would have taken you hours or days before it becomes less so the compression of productivity per unit time um you know skyrockets um is there you know how does I I don’t talk about politics I ignore politics uh to the most degree uh Marian you’re in the center of all human knowledge in Washington DC where you’re bathed in politics uh where does this concept of abundance play into the United States political system or any countries around the world is this is it inconvenient for the left and right to think about abundance so not only am I in the center of all of human wisdom but also morality
[00:58:01] and good manners and things like that um look I actually think that uh uh we are living through a potentially very dangerous period and that is the rise of degrowth economic theory of degrowth degrowth it is called degrowth Theory there are tenu professors uh in the United States and in other parts of the other parts of the advanced world who are advocating in favor of basically not not just slower growth but essentially less economic activity fundamental reduction in consumption um typical example of that would be things like the proposals in France to ban all internal flights so that people people want to fly they would only be go somewhere they would only be able to uh go on
[00:59:00] trains uh people who would want to BU ban flying allog together people with proposals uh for every human being to have a certain amount of a carbon credit per year and once you reach it you can no longer travel or or do anything really watch TV or or or bathe in warm water so anybody who is listening to us today can Google degrowth and see that this idea is increasingly prevalent in our media and in our newspapers and why am I worried about it I’m worried about it because because whenever something stupid comes along you think this cannot possibly take off there is no way that any human being could possibly believe this and 10 or 15 years down the line sometimes even quicker it bleeds out of the Academia and starts being parroted by politicians and then implemented into
[01:00:02] practice so I actually do think I’m actually deeply worried about this not only not not only do we not have a prog growth policy there is a danger of a degrowth policy wow I just saw a an article yesterday about was it Virginia wants to go to a 4-day work week could be I haven’t heard of that I mean it’s like okay listen you work 4 days I’m working seven cuz I love what I do um but that’s a different that’s a different story uh it’s wow I I would just add a little bit to this you know I might be a little more pessimistic than than Marian is because I think that political poers derived from scarcity I mean it’s derived from this ideology of scarcity we create this sense that there’s this scarcity and that’s where this political power shows up when someone shows up you know frightened of the future and they have this tested hypothetical model and they want to be given totalitarian power to save us from ourselves that’s very
[01:01:02] dangerous we’ve just kind of gone through this thing in the last couple three years of wow we’re going to have this we’re going to have this crisis and we need to we need to relax all of our constitutional protections to to be saved by who by someone with a model and so I I I tend to think as people come to understand look we have expert but let’s not Grant experts this power over making these these kinds of choices interesting G yeah you got authoritarian governments meter out access to natural gas or electricity or information they have a scarcity pity mindset where you get what I want you to get because I’m going to control you that way versus an abundance mindset is everyone has access to anything they need at any time at a DI Minimus and reducing cost so Food Water Energy Healthcare education is available to everyone and that drives
[01:02:01] growth but you’re the trade is loss of control right it’s this entrepreneur versus bureaucrat mindset it’s this idea is that we go out and create Prosperity or are we are we driven by this idea we have to have power and and uh status and it’s kind of this you know no no approach to the world versus a yes approach can we do this yes entrepreneurs would say yes bureaucratic mindset says no we’ve got to limit this this exploration of these new things because they’re too risky it’s going to cause this uh you know other problems we’ve got to control uh what we have and take no risks and therefore have no opportunity for growth yeah that’s that’s so important um and again if this conversation if you’re listening is new to you about abundance um this is about making the world of your your future that of your children your grandchildren
[01:03:01] more and more capable right if you want to revert to a what life was like 100 years ago you’ve got to realize how uh awful it was um I mean a thousand years ago uh it was pestilence and you know you’d have a the black plague or the Spanish flu and you know you’d lose a significant percentage of the world’s population well you know the question question I love to ask my students is how much do I have to pay you to never use this again it’s not what it’s not what you paid for it it’s what I have to pay you to not use it that’s really value and I they answer it by the way I can’t find a student that’s willing to do it for less than 5 million and even then they would you guys walk yeah you guys walk around with a $5 million thing in your pocket and you’re you know why don’t you like just overwhelmed with with happiness because because of what you have uh that’s a great question my friend and we we have these people that say you know
[01:04:00] why don’t we have a flying car well what would you rather have Peter would you rather have one of these and everybody else on the planet have one of these or would you rather have a flying car have one of these sure but in abundance in abundance mindset it’s both right I mean it’s it’s not creating false trades in that regard and we will have flying cars and we will have autonomous cars and we will have personal AIS and we will extend the human lifespan and we will have a squander abundance of energy and these are the directions that we’re heading and the only thing that can stop it in my mind um is uh you know you know sort of devastating Global events otherwise there’s no velocity switch on the speed of Technology there’s no onoff switch it is human Ingenuity and curiosity that drives things further and further and further without stop yeah I would worry a little bit about the word you use the word squander I don’t think we squander we are trading resources for more valuable resources we we’re hopeful I
[01:05:02] meant I use I use squander abundance of energy to mean that you have so much energy you don’t think about it that’s what that’s what I meant this abundance of energy I’m going to use I’m going change it I’m I’m going to now use the word a super abundance of energy go with go with your book which means that it it becomes very very time price affordable it’s like it doesn’t cost me any time to go buy this unit of energy and look what I can do with it in terms of of using that to create something even more valuable because we’re always valuing up how do we use this these resources that are very abundant to make resources that are less abundant more abundant discovering new ways to do that with our abundant resources the other thing that I would point out of course Peter you’re you’re right there are dangers and this happy period in in human history could come to an end as a result result of a political mishap or a war uh we must never forget that there have been Societies in the past in human history
[01:06:02] that have been very open very Innovative that have increased standard of living and that were followed by Dark Ages uh Rome had a pretty high standard of living followed by a tremendous decline both in Innovation and literacy and standards of living uh song China uh which has developed uh paper money and printing press and gunpowder in 12th century ad was followed by Ming China and 800 years of stagnation so we cannot take this period of abundance or what economic historians call a period of uh continuous innovation uh for granted of course people have innovated over time but but what’s so remarkable over the last 200 years is that we have continued to innovate uh partly because I think of what Gail said was that this this period of innovation is deeply connected to the extension of human freedom and dignity
[01:07:02] it is not in our in our model it is not coincidental that over the last 200 years this what in Europe we call liberalism but what here in the United States you would call Classical liberalism that that Classical liberalism the expansion of Classical liberalism and basic human dignity was accompanied by this tremendous creation of wealth those came together for reason and that is why in super abundance we say super abundance equals population times freedom and that freedom is not guaranteed hey everybody this is Peter a quick break from the episode you I’m a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming I don’t watch the crisis News Network I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet I spend my time training my neuronet the way I see the World by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology how entrepreneurs are solving the
[01:08:01] world’s Grand challenges what the breakthroughs are in longevity how exponential Technologies are Transforming Our World so twice a week I put out a Blog one blog is looking at the future of longevity age reversal biotech increasing your health span the other blog looks at exponential Technologies AI 3D printing synthetic biology AR VR blockchain these Technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do if this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural Nets with go to demand.com back/ blog and learn more now back to the episode that freedom is not guaranteed um correct but there um is a interesting change of foot as well um the uh have you heard of or read the book the network State yeah book yeah and I I’ve had him on the on this
[01:09:00] podcast and we’ve talked about you know it’s interesting if you wanted to start a country uh in the past you would need to go and bring your Armed Forces either find some territory that was not occupied and capture it not available anymore um or you could might grow an island in the in the Pacific you might go to space uh B’s idea of the network state of course is we’re going to sort of tie together people um who are much more in common than where they were born uh and and create those in you so the question becomes is there a new form of political Independence that can stabilize the world and give us Hope for not having uh this rise and collapse and rise and collapse is there some mechanism uh that might protect us any any thoughts on that I think I would like to hear from you yeah really more than more than me
[01:10:01] well I think I mean part part of part of my my hope there is that uh if you think about would you rather if as an ally would you rather have Greece or Ghana or Google you know I’d rather have Google right um I think that the nation state is uh going to ultimately transform into something new um and it’s going to be people connected uh who have extraordinary power and I don’t think that the nation state can restrict the ultimate power of the individual because we live in a world of poorest borders a technology you know AI a you know human level AI is coming uh Ray Kell’s prediction is 2029 Elon Musk made a statement that it’s going to be you know AI will be vastly more powerful than humans by 2025 we’ll see but you know it’s this decade we’re not talking about 30 years from now and so if each of us have access to Super
[01:11:01] intelligence uh and Robotics and and now we have to worry about a destabilizing force there but could it be a hyper stabilizing Force um what I can say is a lot of change is coming and uh it’s important to sort of have a vision of where this is going uh My Hope ultimately is is that in a world of super abundance um people have much more to lose than they do to gain in Warfare right that if you’re if you are a mom today in subsaharan Africa or 50 years ago uh where you’re you know there was a 45% uh death rate for kids under 5 years old right that’s dropped dominous now significantly it’s one of the metrics I love following that death rate of of kids under five and and maternal mortality rates and birth those things
[01:12:00] have have dropped tremendously but if your children didn’t have a future um and they were stuck in Warfare they didn’t have access to education or health that was a world in which you were willing to give up everything you were willing to go to war you were willing to revolt you’re willing to give up your life cuz you had nothing to look forward to but in a world of super abundance where you have access to all the food water energy healthc care the dreams the entertainment the ability to create I don’t think people are so willing to die um so that’s a counterveiling force that I hope for yeah I would just add to that is part of this thing that we have to deal with is human envy and that is led to lots of lots of issues if if you have an abundant Society but people continue to kind of be obsessed with envy against one another that things not going to last so being able to go beyond Envy where we think look uh yeah another
[01:13:02] person may have more than I have but the correct uh perspective is where was I yesterday and G that is so important people compare themselves to their neighbors more than they compare themselves to where they were a decade ago or a year ago or where their parents or Grandparents were and that’s a problem you know it’s the billionaire who in a crash goes from $10 billion in net worth to5 billion and throws himself in front of a train it’s like you know WTF I mean okay I’m sorry you lost 5 billion only you only have 5 billion now I mean it’s insane I I do think that people engage in Social comparison um but it’s not but it’s in in specific domains where they are um what they are mostly interested in so it’s not as though every human being out there every American out there in a neighborhood is
[01:14:00] looking around and saying oh those people have a pool but I don’t have a pool um you know I’m I’m going to be consumed by Envy because not everybody’s self-worth is derived from whether I have a pool or whether I don’t have a pool other people have different uh goals in life or different domains in which they want to excel so if if I’m if I’m if I’m a little bit uh optimistic on this score is that in every neighborhood there is also going to be somebody who deres his or her uh worth not just from that swinging pool but also from things like uh maybe being being an artist or reading books or uh helping in a homeless shelter and things like that yeah I would just add to that a little bit clarifica clarification on Envy is that uh you know Americans have been kind of unique and that we haven’t you know Envy has not been a a high high thing for us when we see our neighbor that has a pool it’s like well I could
[01:15:01] go get a pool you know how do I get a pool you know Envy on the other hand is I want to take that pool away from my neighbor I want to destroy that pool so being able to look at someone here and say well I could be like that versus look at someone here and say well I want to destroy that that Envy is what the the problem is I think around the planet where I want to take what you have because I don’t think you should have it for whatever reason so being able to shift people’s thinking that look you want to be able to have these things here’s how I acquired those things you can follow these steps as well and you can do it individually and you can do it as a is a culture yeah I think having models of people being able to do extraordinary things you know from poer to to Prince type stories um and it’s more relevant and more capable anytime ever in human history to today oh my God it’s extraordinary right we’re we’re democratizing access to all the tools to create abundance to create wealth let me
[01:16:00] hit on two of the resources that you guys have developed I want to understand what they are um first off it’s uh humanprogress.org um tell me about that Maran well humanprogress.org I’m the founder at editor of humanprogress.org and it’s a website that basically uh promotes uh positive news around the world there are plenty of websites around the world which are devoted to the Doom and Gloom humanprogress.org is devoted just sharing with you articles that we write about how the world is getting better and also um we use statistics to show people that objective reality in the world is much better than than people are led to believe by other new sources and just out of interest uh human progress was very much inspired by the book that inspired you which is Mt Ridley is rational Optimist when I read rational Optimist by Ridley in 2010 I decided that I needed to create a website that put all of those statistics on the website and then it just grew so uh yeah we had we have that in common
[01:17:00] thank you for that for that resource and I commend people to go and check it out and and Gail uh talk to me one second about the Simon abundance index so the Simon abundance actually grew out of Maran and I our first kind of conversation is we started to talk about this bet whether who would win the bet today uh we expanded the data set once again from these five uh Commodities to 50 and then we extended the time period instead of 10 years we looked at 38 years and then we we looked at how those uh Commodities had become more abundant over time and then we added the additional factor that uh what do happened to populations so the Simon abundance index is really an effort to measure the global resource abundance Pi what is happening to the size of that pi over time once again it grows in two Dimensions it grows at the individual personal level when we each individually are able to acquire more with less time
[01:18:02] and then we have more people on the planet so we multiply that individual resource abundance against population and that allows us to then provide a a quantitative measurement of how’s the planet doing how are we doing and and what we see is uh since 1980 that abundance has grown over 500% 600% on the planet guys this has been amazing here’s the book super abundance it’s actually a beautiful cover the story of population growth Innovation and human flourishing on an infinitely Bountiful Planet by Maran tupy and Gail pulie super abundance guys uh where can people go to learn more about the book and learn about you besides those two other sites well they can go to uh Amazon and buy it or they can read about it if they are unsure on super abundance.com super abundance.com and I’m Marian tupi I’m at
[01:19:00] the KO Institute that’s k.org uh or alternatively you can find me at humanprogress.org fantastic and Gil you can contact me at the same uh super abundance.com you can reach me through that wonderful guys uh hopefully this has been an uplifting conversation please if anybody comes and tells you that the world is going to hell in the hand basket that we’re going towards overpopulation that the life of your children and grandchildren is getting worse stop them and and tell them stop paring all this misinformation that the data is there the data is there and it’s clear uh we’re heading towards an extraordinary world yes there are problems but guess what the technology and the Innovative Minds to solve those problems are increasing every single day gentlemen um I look forward to continue this conversation thank you for writing this this uh it’s amazing I want to put together sort of a a a reading Series in abundance you know with Matt Ridley’s
[01:20:00] rational Optimus and abundance and super abundance and zero marginal society and and I think changing people’s the way people see the world is so important and uplifting their their hopefulness for a compelling and abundant future is so important um I look forward uh uh to continuing our collaboration gentlemen uh thank you for an extraordinary conversation thank you for having us pleasure pleasure than you [Music] Peter