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Everything is better than it's ever been in history and everybody is anxious and worried and what's going on.
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>> Most people do not realize [music] how bad the past was because they've never been told that story of history.
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We see a world that was much nastier.
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It was more violent and people [music] were much more familiar with death in the past for that reason.
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I do not think progress is guaranteed.
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I do not think it is inevitable.
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It all depends on our choices today and what path we take. >> Well, hello everyone.
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It's Jim Oanessy with another Infinite Loops.
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I am so excited about my guest today, Chelsea Flet, [music] managing editor of human progress at the Ko Institute, author of Centers of [music] Progress and the forthcoming, I love this title, The Grim Old Days.
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Chelsea, [music] welcome.
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>> Thank you so much for having me, J.
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So Chelsea, everything is better than it's ever been in history and everybody is anxious and worried and pining for the bad old days. What's going on? >> Oh my goodness.
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There are a bunch of psychological reasons why people are biased to imagine that the world was better in the past.
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And so we've actually seen this throughout history.
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If you look into the distant past, you'll see that even in what we might imagine were the good old days, people were pining for an era that was earlier still.
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There are so many examples of this.
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You can even find in uh you know the Old Testament a line saying, you know, say not thou, why were the former days better than these?
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You can find quotes from so many people throughout history talking about the good old days in eras that we think of as the distant past.
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So this seems to be actually a constant of human psychology. >> Yeah.
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And uh I was thinking it's probably an apocryphal story, but they when they translated a Sumerian tablet uh it was like all of the good poems have already been written.
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[laughter] But let's make this personal because your story about the C-section, what a lot of people don't understand in my opinion is human lives are at stake.
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And you know it you can have the luxury beliefs of oh it was so much better back then but we both know that the data is incredibly conclusive.
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It was not better back then.
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Let's talk about that a little bit. >> Absolutely.
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I think one of the most dramatic ways in which life has become better in the modern world compared to the past would simply be that our children are able to survive.
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Now that was not always normal.
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Today, it's very rare for a child in a modern developed country not to make it through childhood and to adulthood.
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But there was a time in history when half or more of your children were statistically not expected to survive.
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It was extremely normal for most of our ancestors to experience child loss and people were much more familiar with death in the past for that reason.
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And the oped you're referring to with the C-section would be um the story of the birth of my first child.
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It was uh what seemed like an ordinary pregnancy, but then she seemed to stop growing or to be growing at a pace that was much slower than they would expect um according to all the ultrasound measurements.
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And so we ended up doing an induction.
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When that failed, we had an emergency C-section.
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And what they learned when they did the emergency C-section was that uh her umbilical cord was actually wrapped around her neck not once, not twice, not three times, but four times over.
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It's called a quadruple nucal cord. It's very unusual.
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And that's both what prevented her um from being able to descend and be born the ordinary way, which is why we needed the C-section, and also what was preventing her from getting the nutrition to grow properly.
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Uh which is why she had what's called IGR, intrauterine growth restriction.
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Basically, she wasn't growing enough because the umbilical cord was becoming more and more compressed um being wrapped around her neck.
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So that is an example of a baby who had I given birth in the pre-industrial era or you know prior to modern C-sections would probably not have survived.
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And today she is a thriving first grader.
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>> I'm I'm delighted to hear that.
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And uh the reason that hit me so square between the eyes is all three of my sisters had emergency C-sections.
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Uh talked to the doctors and literally this is a long time ago, but the doctors were like, "Yeah, no, she would have died and the baby would have died too."
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And it it just to me like I get almost emotional about it because we have this set of attitudes you know the Malthusian or Rouso I mean you know I I I was thinking about Jeanjac Rouso when I was preparing for this and you know the contradictions for those who don't know his work he you know he was the oh man was uncorrupted back in nature and it was society that corrupted mankind and all of these things.
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Uh he wrote a lot of books.
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He ended up getting exiled for those books.
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Uh but in Emil for example which was about education, he prescribed you should have a natural attentive child rearing so that you can preserve the natural goodness.
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And then you look at what he actually did.
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What he actually did was put all five of his children in orphanages and paid no attention to their upbringing or their education.
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And it seems to me that struck a chord with me because we see a lot of that.
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My my friend Rob Henderson termed uh coined the term luxury beliefs and it seems like there's an epidemic of those going around.
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back to the the kind of the cause.
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You you say human nature.
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One of the things that I think is I I wonder if the nostalgia my mom used to always say, "Yeah, grab your rosecolored glasses cuz you're going to need them."
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But I why why with all of the I'm a I'm a former quant, right?
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That's what I used to do before what I do now.
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I was a uh algorithmic quantitative investor.
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So I really like data and all of the data is on your side, my side.
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Why do we still have all of these various cults of doom and and we're going to destructure?
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Well, I think that most people, you and I are exceptions, most people do not realize how bad the past was because they've never been told that story of history.
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You have this very common view like Jeanjacuso had that the distant past was this lovely place.
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The state of nature was great.
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Medieval peasants had more leisure time than us is a very common misconception you hear.
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uh going around otherwise very well-informed people will state that as though it is fact and it's not.
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That actually comes from an estimate by historian Gregory Clark that he later revised and we know that actually medieval peasants worked significantly more days of the year than we do today.
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And also their work was backbreaking agricultural labor, not nice office jobs in in an aironditioned building.
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People have this false view of what the past was like.
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And when you are comparing the present, which does have problems, to this imagined utopia in the past, then yeah, the the present seems pretty bad compared to that wonderful utopian vision.
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But when you compare the present to where humanity has actually been, you find a very different story.
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And so that's what I'm trying to do with this book.
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Give people a proper historical perspective of what life was like.
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And that story you told about Jean Jacqu Rouso is a great example.
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Here was a man who idealized the state of nature.
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He was a sort of counterenlightenment figure.
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And yet, if you look at look at how he treated his own children, he abandoned them in orphanages that had an extremely high rate of death in an era when all children had a much worse likelihood of survival than today.
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They almost certainly were doomed because of that.
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And he said that he needed to uh send them off to orphanages so that he would have the tranquility of mind to do his writing, including uh a book on how to educate children and how to raise children, which I find deeply ironic.
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And unfortunately, he was not some sort of uh he was not unique.
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There were many people abandoning their children in these orphanages often due to poverty.
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And if you look at just the the rate of abandonment and the number of children who were dying in the past due to poverty, due to poor nutrition, poor sanitation and extremely high rate of disease. It's astronomical.
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And I think another reason why people don't appreciate how how far we've come is because we have in eliminating so many problems of the past also eliminated the memory of those problems.
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This is often said of vaccination we have not only eliminated many childhood diseases but we have eliminated even the memory of those diseases.
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Most people today have never met someone who who had polio and all of the effects of that are thus um completely out of mind.
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Let's let's uh give our listeners and viewers a bit of a taste of your forthcoming book.
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Uh because I think here I mean [laughter] it's a dark place our past uh I think Hobbes uh o over Rouso right life is uh nasty brutish and short and that wasn't him editorializing that was him being a journalist.
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Yes, on that line I agree with him.
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Obviously, not all of his political conclusions, nor I Yeah, right.
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But he actually did have a very realistic view of what it was like in the state of nature.
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But when we look at most of human history, not not just the, you know, pre-state societies, although those were also absurdly violent, but if we look at all of history up through the early modern era, just prior to industrialization, we see a world that was much nastier.
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It was more violent often.
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um people I there are still issues with crime today, but if you look at the crime rates in early modern London, for example, they had a rate of violent crime that's actually even worse than uh the the rate of crime in the United States today and certainly much much worse than current crime rates in Western Europe.
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People do not have a sense of just how brutal the past was.
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They had extremely high rates of crime.
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They had very low clearance rates in terms of actually catching the criminals.
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Uh but when they did catch criminals, they also had sometimes absurdly disproportionate punishments.
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You could be executed in the past for so many crimes that today no one would dream of executing someone for.
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And yet, despite those extremely harsh punishments and the fact that you could be executing for executed for things like trespassing or very minor theft, they had these extremely high crime rates. So, it was more brutal. It was also short.
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As um Hobbes tells us, people in the past lived far shorter lives.
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And it's not just due to those high rates of childhood death that we were discussing.
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Actually, if you look at uh people's likelihood of uh surviving to old age, people lived longer at any age that you look at.
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People sometimes today think, well, if there was a high rate of childhood death, but if you could make it to adulthood, then your chances of reaching old age were the same as today.
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This is not actually true.
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If you look at someone who was 60 years old in the past, their chance of making it uh to 70 was worse than a 60-year-old's chances today.
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Look at someone who is 70 years old in the past.
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Their chances of making it to 80 were worse than that of a 70-year-old today and so on.
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At every single uh age bracket, every decade, your chances of survival have improved.
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>> You know, I I often I don't do it every time, but whenever I get into a hot shower, I often say, "Thank you, universe."
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Because like if you've ever been in a situation where you didn't have hot water, where you didn't have any of those amenities, it's not a fun thing, right?
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And and I wonder uh what modern convenience do you think gets the least amount of credit?
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You know, handwashing, antibiotics, which one would you say, "Wow, people really aren't thinking this through." >> Oh my goodness.
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I think that people fortunately do have a sense that electricity has been a big improvement.
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I think the most underrated advancement might be air conditioning. >> I It's so funny.
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I was just thinking that. >> Yeah.
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If you look at um the rates of death due to extreme heat, you know, even with uh average temperatures having gone up, uh the deaths from extreme weather have actually dropped and that's largely due to the spread of air conditioning, also better medical care in general.
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But I don't think we appreciate fully just how important it is to modern health and well-being that we now are spending much of our lives in temperature controlled environments.
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Most of our ancestors did not have central heating.
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They froze in the winter and they did not have air conditioning.
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They were slaving away uh harvesting during the summer and many of them suffered the health consequences of that.
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And you know, I was just reading something that really caught my eye and it was about uh like medieval times.
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Often the most valuable thing you possessed was a bed and just to to think about that kind of freaked me out. >> Yes.
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The modern uh modern beds and mattresses are another thing that I think people do not fully appreciate.
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Most of what our ancestors slept on would not be recognizable as beds to modern people.
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Often they would just stuff uh you know hay into a piece of a sack of cloth and that would be their bed.
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Sometimes they would sleep directly on hay.
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Furniture in general is something that we have today that most of our ancestors did not have in recognizable form.
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Even the very wealthy uh who did have furniture would often have to have that furniture serve multiple functions and it would move around throughout the day.
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And so the word for furniture in most languages was very similar to the word for moving or movable.
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Actually the word movable uh referred to furniture in English for a long time as well.
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You can see that word used to refer to furniture in some of Shakespeare's writing.
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Uh because when the wealthy wanted to clear a room for dancing, they would move aside all of their furniture, they would fold up all of their tables.
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Tables that did not fold and were just meant to stand permanently in one spot or fairly recent.
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Um, you can find writings in history of very wealthy people bragging about owning couches and their letter correspondents not knowing what was being referred to because a sofa was once something that even the absurdly wealthy did not have.
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Uh, yeah, upholstered furniture very new, once an extreme luxury, now something that is unremarkable.
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Having furniture with drawers that open in and shut would have once been something that only the highest members of the nobility had access to.
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Now, no one would consider that very impressive.
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Everyone has access to pieces of furniture that once were extreme luxuries.
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You can often get them for free off of secondhand marketplaces.
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It's incredible how far we've come in terms of home furnishings.
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And I think you're right that that's another kind of progress that most people don't even think about. They're not aware of it.
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I do think most people hopefully have some sense that electricity and vaccines and modern medicine have been great innovations, but things that are more mundane like having furniture, having central heating and air conditioning, um modern dentistry is another one, plumbing, uh running water.
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These are things that people often take for granted.
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>> I'm always struck by people's inabil it seems to be to me a incredible lack of imagination to understand viscerally understand right how hard our ancestors actually had it.
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Uh, Bill Bryson has a great book called America One Summer.
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And you know, oh my god, like [laughter] literally the president's son died because he got a sliver playing uh lawn tennis at the White House and sepsis ensued.
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You're dead because no antibiotics.
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But it it also just boggles my mind that we just can't seem to process it and and we continually have the same voices of doom, right?
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And again, I mentioned in our earlier chat that I look, I'm largely in an empiricist, right?
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What does the data show me and is that good or bad?
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And yet I I think obviously of Mthus himself, right?
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He he claimed to have the data, right?
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He he made a mathematical error.
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But I mean it goes on and on, right?
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Like William Miller in 1843 uh said he had mathematically figured out that the world was going to end in 1843.
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He had like a 100,000 followers who joined him on some mountain here in the east waiting.
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They sold all their possessions and they were waiting for the uh end of the world.
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Nothing happened, of course.
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Um and then he was like, "Hold on, wait a tick.
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I got to rerun the math."
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Ah, I see I see my mistake.
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It's actually going to end in 1844 again. Nothing happens.
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And you would think like if we were in science that would be no matter how beautiful your theory, if the evidence does not support it, it's wrong and you got to get rid of your theory.
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But today there are 19 million followers of what became 7th day Adventism.
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And [laughter] like and and that got me thinking are a lot of these arguments really more theology, more orthodoxy, more religious in nature than scientific.
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Um, I mean, you've seen obviously many doomsday prophecies that failed to come to fruition that were advocated by religious figures.
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But I think that you also see them as you pointed out with many know more secular figures as well unfortunately.
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And either way, you do have to wonder whether it's just a facet of human nature that we see these predictions of doom over and over again appearing that fail to materialize.
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Whether it's Malthusianism and this idea that overpopulation will cause a societal collapse and an ecological crisis or more recently uh whether you know climate change will not be a practical problem that we are able to address through innovation through policy solutions but rather the actual end of the world.
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We've seen people claim that in you know just 12 years the world will become uninhabitable for that reason and then of course that didn't actually happen.
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Um if you look at you know history and you see some of these doomsday beliefs it's easy to dismiss the people then as ignorant but we have a lot of dumerism today as well.
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So it might unfortunately just be something that humans are very psychologically prone to and that we need to work against with evidence and data. >> Yeah.
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And you know, Paul Erlick, very famous for the population bomb and everything was going to people were going to be starving to death.
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And you know, he gave testimony in Congress in 1974, in June of 1974, basically saying within a decade, billions of people will die from starvation.
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And he was taken very seriously.
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uh and he continued to be taken very seriously right up until he died.
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And you know uh Julian Simon who wrote the ultimate resource about human nature being the ultimate resource actually made a very famous bet with Erlick about u rare minerals and uh Errol said they're going to be more expensive 10 years from now because we were running out of them.
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Simon was like, "Nonsense.
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We're going to figure out a way to get more of them."
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And Erlick, of course, lost the bet.
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Um, and and I thought that it was uh indicative of what kind of guy he was because he didn't make the check out to Simon. His wife did.
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And and and yet they just continued soldiering along.
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Like the thing that I have the hardest time with is like there were you you mentioned uh the uh apocalyptic uh forecasts like Al Gore's you know and inconvenient truth.
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He was nice enough to put dates on all of those and we passed all of those dates and yet the fervor and everything else has not diminished.
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I am not arguing that there we we have problems that need solving. We do. We absolutely do.
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Um but I I don't think that it gets harder for me to take people who are nice enough to put a date on something and then continue like to propound the same theology even though all of their forecasts have proven wrong.
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And that's why I said more like it seems more like a belief system to me than any kind of serious inquiry.
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>> I I think I would agree with that.
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Greta Thunberg is another example where she at one point made a doomsday prediction with a specific date that she posted on social media.
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She tweeted it out on Twitter and when that date came and passed, she quietly deleted the tweet apparently rather than uh updating her beliefs and admitting defeat as at least you know Erlick's wife uh sort of did by writing that check.
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It's it's unfortunate, but I I if you look at why people believe these things, sometimes it is based on the level of evidence that they have at the time to be fair to them.
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Like when we first saw this great panic about overpopulation and its strain on resources and the ensuing ecological collapse and societal collapse that would come out of that.
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That was at a period in history in the 60s and 70s when the population of the world really was growing very fast um to unprecedented levels that we had never managed to support before because that level of population had never existed before.
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And so I think it is somewhat understandable that people were concerned about that.
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Of course, what we saw when death rates for children went down, which and lifespans lengthened, which is what caused that ballooning of population in the the 70s when global development was reaching these corners of the world that had not yet um had access to modern medicine and modern prosperity.
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And we saw people surviving childhood for the first time, living to old age uh you know for the first time at rates closer to that in uh the modern world in rich countries.
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And we saw that population rise instead of the population just continuing to explode and to the point where where resources were strained and people starved.
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We saw a couple of different things.
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We saw on the one hand people actually started to have fewer children because they knew that half of their children were not going to die anymore.
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As childhood survival went up, birth rates actually came down.
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Uh which slowed the rate of population growth.
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And now we're actually at a point where uh birth rates have fallen so much in many countries that some people are worried about the opposite, right? Population collapse.
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And on the other hand, we also saw resources explode.
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What we saw was this incredible growth in agricultural productivity, the green revolution uh which allowed us to not only produce enough food to feed everyone but actually produce a huge surplus.
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Today, even in the poorest area in the world, subsaharan Africa, more food is produced and is strictly speaking needed to feed the population.
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They produce more than the recommended 2,000 calories per person per day.
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And where there is still malnutrition, hunger, starvation, that is not an issue of of not having enough food.
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That is an issue of war and instability preventing the incredible amount of food that humanity produces uh from getting to where it needs to go uh to to market to be purchased by the population and feed them. >> Yeah.
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And um you know sort of back I I I also agree I I'm our current world is not perfect [laughter] and and yet I think that uh progress is the the way out of many of these problems and and it annoys me sometimes.
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You know, back to Eriel, I I'm not going to use him as my only uh horse to beat here, but um another thing he said again, I think in testimony when asked like, "What proof do you have for this?"
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And and his answer was, "We have mathematically based, computerverified, absolutely scientifically verifiable forecasts."
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and like okay [laughter] if you do then they should prove true and they continually failed they continually didn't work and then you see this the rise of I think of Anel Keys at the University of Minnesota who jked his stacks uh his stats because his theory
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was proven wrong by the evidence and then you start polluting the data pool and that's like poisoning the well right like if you're a data based uh investigator and there's a lot of fake data in there that that is it definitely is not science, right? And like I'm I'm
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And like I'm I'm a huge believer in the scientific method, right?
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I I love it because it's kind of like punk rock.
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It's like take nobody's authority, you know, I we're going to prove it for ourselves, all of that.
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And then that somehow drifted over into scientism, right?
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Which is more marketing than anything else.
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Whenever I hear people say the science is settled, it just makes me go crazy because the very nature of science is it is never settled.
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And right like imagine if it's 18 whatever and everyone's like, "Nope, Newton got it all right.
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we don't have to do look into that anymore.
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We've got all the knowledge.
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And it just seems to me to be such an arrogant point of view.
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But I guess that brings us back to human nature, right?
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Because it look, I think that evolutionarily speaking, we are all essentially the descendants of cowards.
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And by that I mean we have I think most of our um thinking is driven by not rationality but by emotions right and the king of all emotions is fear specifically fear of the unknown.
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And if you look back in time that makes a lot of sense.
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If you and I were wandering around the savas of Africa and we saw a bush moving and we ran away because we didn't know what that was and we thought it might be a saber-tooth tiger to come kill us, we were the ones who survived as opposed to the guy was like, "Oh, I wonder what that is."
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[laughter] And you know, then they get eaten.
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But so I I get that that's in our base code, but you you would think that all of the centuries of advancement would have at least altered that base code a little bit.
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No, >> if you look at the world today compared to the extreme level of superstition that our ancestors uh lived in, I do think there has been some progress there.
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But unfortunately, as you say, there are some uh people who engage in the logical fallacy of argument from authority to uh just try to shut down debate.
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As you say, true science means you have to continuously be open to updating your beliefs if new evidence comes in.
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And instead what you often see is if someone has made their career on expounding a certain theory or a certain idea uh like Paul Erlic again um with overpopulation then when new evidence comes to the four and brings that into question instead of updating his beliefs what he would do would be a just appeal to authority and all of the scientific awards that he'd won to arg argue that he must be correct regardless of the evidence.
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This is very unfortunate and if you look at our ancestors though I do think we have come a long way despite those problems that persist.
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Uh people were horrendously superstitious in the past to the point where oh my goodness even in the 18th century uh there was a case in Romania of a stake being driven through the heart of a corpse to prevent it from rising up as a vampire.
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That's maybe an extreme example, but our ancestors had such a great fear of ghosts and goblins and so many superstitions that would be horrifying to a person today that it's difficult to wrap the mind around.
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difficult to wrap the mind around. But one way that I've been uh one thing that makes more sense about that once you realize it is the fact that almost everyone among the common people and actually all levels of society was at
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least somewhat inebriated all the time which makes their encounters with the supernatural um and that makes more sense to me and uh when you think of it that way why they were having these constant encounters with the supernatural that they were writing about what was going on there. Sometimes
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Sometimes they actually did uh die of right there were real uh repercussions of these beliefs.
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There are many deaths recorded in England for example at one point of uh people being killed by fairies being frighted by fairies by the supernatural.
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What was actually happening?
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I I think that probably people who were under the influence uh got a terrible fright when they saw something moving in the darkness and went into cardiac arrest.
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That's what I assume actually happened.
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Uh but I do think some of the superstition at least must relate to that fact that everyone had at least some alcohol in their system at one point in time.
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Even children were drinking weak beer, watered down wine.
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That was just the case throughout most of history in much of the world >> and primarily because potable drinking water was scarce and that's why everybody drank so much.
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I mean and that you know we got the term drunk as a lord right because the lords could get better booze than the peasants.
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Uh but you know that is a fact that very few people I think are aware of coffee shops for example.
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coffee shops really revolutionized human society because instead of being drunk, everyone was wired [laughter] and and yet also the your idea about superstition and and scapegoating.
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I I think scarcity breeds that and a scarcity mindset breeds that because you know if you go through your grim old days, witch hunting, fox tossing, you know, death was omniresent.
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I when when I was I got married very young.
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I was 22 and I'm uh was on my honeymoon in 1982 and we had the uh pleasure of meeting a in his 90s guy.
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His name was Percy Cowan and he was a delight.
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Uh we were 22 years old and yet we had drinks with him every night because his stories were so great.
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And so I asked him about the Spanish flu and he just started to laugh.
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And he's like, "Jim, you you don't understand.
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We had a fundamentally different view towards death back in those days because we were surrounded by it."
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He's like he, you know, he had other great exploits like he was a uh a pilot during World War I and got shot down three times and but but it really illuminated for me the way that people used to look at death, right?
36:52
And and him saying no, I mean like of course the people just naturally assumed that they would lose family members.
37:04
And I was like, wasn't the emotional toil?
37:06
And he goes, well, there was just so much of it that it, you know, you got inured to it.
37:14
And and I and I wonder if we flip that is is the fact that we now uh at least here in the west live in relative safety with relative scarcity.
37:27
Is that like a cause for people the anxiety I led with, right?
37:37
Like, man, what would happen if I couldn't like find drinking water or whatever?
37:42
And and and does the very prosperity that our forebears granted to us cause the mindset that we're discussing right now? >> Yeah. Quite possibly.
37:56
As I said earlier, I think a lot of people have never been told the story of how hard their ancestors had it.
38:04
When you met that fellow on uh your honeymoon, the world that he described to you was very far removed to the one that you were experiencing.
38:15
It was almost beyond your imagination.
38:16
Uh at one point uh in graduate school when I was on an Amtrak train, the fellow who sat next to me uh who I struck up a conversation with uh told me that he was illiterate.
38:29
He he did work with horses on uh farms.
38:33
He was this sort of traveling worker and he could not read or write.
38:38
And that blew my mind because I had never met someone who could not read or write.
38:42
and I didn't understand how he could even survive.
38:47
And he said, you know, he would use an X to mark his name on documents.
38:52
But when you research the past, you learn that actually the vast majority of our ancestors could not read or write.
39:01
Uh William Shakespeare's parents could not read or write.
39:04
So many people even in the upper echelons of society were illiterate.
39:10
And this is something that today we forget.
39:12
Most people cannot even imagine what it would be like to go through the world not being able to read.
39:21
Um the degree to which people drink, like I mentioned earlier, is something that most people are not aware of.
39:28
Let me give you uh one of my favorite examples from the book The Grimold Days.
39:33
The Order of Temperance in uh Hessa in Germany in 1600 had this rule that their members could only drink seven glasses of wine with each meal for two meals a day for a total of 14 glasses.
39:50
And this was the temperance society.
39:52
These are the people who were focused on reducing alcohol consumption.
39:57
So when I say people were drinking a lot in the past, I I don't just mean that they were enjoying a glass now and then.
40:03
I mean that their level of alcohol consumption is truly [laughter] ridiculous compared to the modern day and I think that must have had a huge effect on their experience of the world and women were uh drinking at that same level while pregnant as well.
40:19
So fetal alcohol syndrome was probably quite widespread.
40:24
Children were drinking from preposterously young ages and no one saw any issue with that.
40:29
It would sometimes be watered down, but still the cumulative effect was that people were always at least slightly inebriated and people were much much more familiar as you said with death in the past than people today to an extent that most people do not realize.
40:48
Again, the average family lost children before adulthood, and people often would bury their own family members in the grave when they passed away.
41:03
So, the average person had firsthand experience of loss that was very visceral.
41:10
They the average person had seen and perhaps handled multiple corpses.
41:17
Today, it's very common for someone in young adulthood to have never had a firsthand experience with death, to have never lost a family member.
41:26
Most parents today, very fortunately, in rich modern countries, will never lose a child.
41:33
Their children will not predesce them.
41:36
That was not the norm throughout most of history.
41:38
And to just take all of that for granted is I think unfortunately the result of people never being told that that was once the case and not even being aware of it. >> Yeah.
41:49
And uh as a parent and grandparent the fear of losing a child or a grandchild is real and uh I think we experience it just because we we don't have any familiarity with it.
42:04
And when that happens it is truly a tragedy because it is such a low probability event.
42:14
Um and and I think that but but the same is true when we look at the past in terms of even family structure, right?
42:25
Families were a lot more violent in the past than they are today.
42:29
Do you think that's also because everyone was sauced all the time? >> That was part of it.
42:36
I think that people in a world of dire poverty who were often hungry, you know, sleeping on the floor or on very rough surfaces and thus sleepdeprived, doing backbreaking layer labor all day, bitten by fleas and other insects, having aching teeth constantly due to a lack of modern dentistry.
43:02
They were not really acting their best.
43:05
In part, I think because they were in such discomfort and such pain.
43:07
That's not to excuse their actions, of course.
43:13
Uh, but I do think that makes it a bit more understandable.
43:15
If you were inebriated and suffering in all of these different ways, you probably would not be acting your best either.
43:21
But I I think you're right that unfortunately a lot of people have this romanticized notion that in the past, yes, people might have been poor, but they had these very close-knit, caring, wonderful families.
43:37
They had these very strong social ties.
43:40
And so that sort of made up for it.
43:44
There were things that were better about the world prior to modernity and capitalism and all of that.
43:50
And one of those things was that we had these incredibly wonderful uh close-knit families that really cared for one another.
43:58
But if you look at the actual past, unfortunately, what you see, as you say, is that they had extremely high rates of violence toward their spouses, their children.
44:08
Um, one example would be a rather horrifying law uh from 1595 in London that said, "No man shall after the hour of nine at the night keep any rule whereby any such sudden outcry be made in the still of the night as making any afra or beating his wife or servant."
44:32
In other words, no beating your wife or servant after 9:00 p. m.
44:35
And that was a noise regulation.
44:39
It it existed in uh the same group of laws that uh forbade using a hammer after 9:00 p. m.
44:46
It was just accepted that of course you would beat your wife until she screamed.
44:50
That was as ordinary as using a hammer.
44:54
[gasps] But so that your neighbors could hopefully get some sleep, you should uh maybe cut that out after 900 p. m.
45:00
You know, stop just have your beatings at 8:00 p. m.
45:05
instead of 9:00 so people could get some sleep.
45:07
This to a modern mind seems so absurd it almost strikes you as some kind of parody.
45:13
But this was the actual rule that our ancestors experienced.
45:20
Spousal abuse was not given any thought.
45:23
Beating your servants was also completely acceptable.
45:25
Beating your employees uh and beating your children of course also no one saw any issue with for most of history.
45:33
And now we have made real moral progress along all of those dimensions.
45:39
If your boss is displeased with your work, he can fire you or she can fire you.
45:44
Uh but they cannot kill you.
45:47
And in the past that was sometimes unfortunately the case.
45:53
There was an example in uh very early America of a couple in what is today Maine that went uh too far and actually did face uh a trial over killing their servants, a free servant, not an enslaved person, a free servant by cutting off his toes which led to his death.
46:14
and uh they did not actually end up being found guilty of homicide, just cruelty.
46:24
That shows you how far we've come.
46:27
Beating your servants, acceptable, cutting off their toes, maybe a bit far, but you probably didn't know that would lead to the servants's death.
46:36
That was the world our ancestors lived in.
46:38
this kind of extreme violence against one's servants, one's wife, one's children, and certainly animals.
46:46
Oh my goodness, no one uh gave a second thought to violence against animals.
46:48
We can talk about fox tossing, which he mentioned at one point in case your listeners are not familiar with that if you want.
46:56
That was the lived reality of people in the past, extreme violence.
47:02
And it was very far removed from this romanticized notion that some people have today of family life in the pre-industrial era.
47:13
>> I I have a friend uh Jason Zwag who uh talks about risk, but I think his example is applicative here.
47:20
He says, "The way we try to show people about risk is we show them a picture of a snake."
47:28
Um, and he goes, "The real way you want to show people that is by throwing a live snake in their lap."
47:34
And I wonder is there I I mean uh hopefully your book will let people in on uh what the past really looked like, but you know the the there's going to be a limitation to the number of people who read it and and is like how about a show where we put people under conditions that were common and not that far back, right?
48:00
like my grandfather, we have extremely long uh generations in my family.
48:07
So my grandfather was born in 1885 and he was the youngest child and I I'm the youngest male grandchild he had and then my son was born a hundred years after my grandfather.
48:21
But let's just pick his his his birth a year of 1885.
48:24
If c can you imagine a reality show where we put people back under conditions of 1885?
48:31
I mean, honestly, I think that that might do more for getting people to understand. Oh, man. No way.
48:39
I'm not I don't want to churn the butter. >> Oh, absolutely.
48:47
I think that there as we get farther and farther from that reality, more and more of a market of of people wanting to know what it was like to actually live back then instead of the sanitized whitewashed view that you sometimes get.
49:02
And I think that we are seeing the market respond to that.
49:07
Actually, there is a reality show called Back to the Frontier. >> Oh.
49:12
>> That kind of has that as its premise.
49:12
It basically takes families and puts them into this extreme um camping scenario where they're not allowed to use modern technology.
49:23
They're not allowed to interact with, you know, the camera crew and the cameras are the only piece of modern technology that are technically present.
49:30
And you know, that's just one example.
49:33
There's also a book that just came out. I've bought it. I haven't read it yet.
49:38
um called Yester Year, which has as its premise that a woman who is a very successful influencer uh showcasing a traditional lifestyle where you make your own bread, you churn your own brother.
49:53
this sort of um you know online tradife phenomenon that we now see somehow goes back in time and has to actually experience what life was like in the era that she's emulating which I think is a really interesting premise and I'm excited uh to read that and see how the book is.
50:09
Uh but yeah, we are seeing these different responses in the market from that reality show to that novel I just mentioned.
50:17
that novel I just mentioned. uh we're seeing more of an appetite I think for for pe of people trying to find out what life was really like in the past and we are seeing this market response to try to provide that insight and you know my
50:32
book the grim old days an introduction to the pre-industrial past is part of this hopefully it will give people that insight and take them on a tour of what their ancestors actually experienced not the whitewashed fairy tale version, but the very unfortunate and grotesque reality. And as you said when you first
50:53
And as you said when you first mentioned the book, it is in some ways very grim and very depressing.
50:58
But I think it's also in some ways very hardening and uplifting because as I was doing the research for this book and writing it, I would go back and forth between on the one hand feeling revulsion and horror at some of the things that I was learning and chronicling and on the other hand feeling this extreme sense of gratitude that I live in a world where we no longer have to contend with so many of the horrors.
51:30
that our forebears experienced. >> Yeah.
51:33
I I tend to think of everyone alive today, no matter what the conditions, uh as like can you imagine like the poorest among us uh today, what that would have been like a 100red years ago.
51:47
I mean, hell, 30 years ago, global poverty has collapsed essentially.
51:50
I think it was like 2 whatever billion in 1990 and now I think it's something like it's under a billion.
51:59
It's in the 800 millions and the uh access that people now have to clean drinking water again that has skyrocketed and and I wonder because most of that is happening in the non-industrialized world uh why maybe we just don't clock that. Right?
52:18
It's like it's very difficult to imagine the difference in a life where you suddenly have access to clean drinking water.
52:30
You you suddenly are living on more than $2 a day.
52:36
That that's just like utterly transformational.
52:39
And it's very difficult for us in the west in the rich west to even conceive of either of those problems.
52:49
And and so again, back to your idea that it's almost a failure of imagination of uh the people here in where we're we're we're living pretty well, I would say.
53:00
Um and don't really remember that, you know, there's huge levels of progress happening uh around the world.
53:10
They're just not evenly distributed, right?
53:12
Um, and but that kind of brings me to I I I'm a big believer in systems, right?
53:18
And if you look back historically, systems were usually autocratic.
53:25
They were centrally ruled.
53:27
Um, and it really wasn't until the emergence of more freedom for individuals and the development of distributed value networks that we started really cooking with gas, so to speak, right?
53:40
And you know there's so many examples of this.
53:43
You know tech people call them mesh networks but essentially a distributed value network is as its name implied the value is distributed widely and you have expert nodes that are expert in different things.
53:59
I brought up the coffee houses, right?
54:01
Coffee houses are what gave rise to the uh ability to price uh insurance for ships uh properly because essentially all of the insurers with different specialtities, right?
54:14
Would gather at the coffee house, get wired on caffeine, but they would pass around slips and each would put their mark on what they were willing to ensure and what not.
54:26
And of course that gave birth to Lloyds of London.
54:28
But that's not the only example, right?
54:31
The Republic of Letters is another one.
54:33
It wasn't a government or a church or a university that gave birth to enlighten the age of enlightenment.
54:41
It was essentially the republic of letters where people would write to each other with their interesting insights.
54:48
They called themselves natural philosophers back then before we started calling them scientists.
54:53
But one of the problems with that of course is value capture right and distributed networks when they can be captured like for example the republic of letters got captured by the royal society and and you shift because institutional priorities are different than diffuse priorities. Right?
55:14
So you start caring more about process rather than discovery.
55:20
you start caring more about credentials rather than curiosity and and but I do think that systems that allow for maximum curiosity, maximum ability at experimentation, obviously look at the United States of America right now.
55:38
We're much more heavily regulated than we were than we used to be, but that spirit is still very much alive.
55:45
Have Have you read Howard Bloom's uh book um The Genius of the Beast?
55:50
um a radical revision of capitalism.
55:54
>> I have not read that book, but what you're saying is uh right in line with my own beliefs.
56:03
And one of the hopes I have for this book, The Grimmold Days, an introduction to the pre-industrial past, is that it will spark conversations about why the world has changed so dramatically since the past.
56:21
In my prior book, Centers of Progress: 40 Cities That Changed the World, I tried to look at some of history's most innovative and creative cities, and examine also what they had in common with each other.
56:37
What sorts of conditions lead to progress, to innovation?
56:42
Uh, you know, Paris during the days of the Enlightenment is one of the cities featured in that book.
56:47
Also Edinburgh during the Scottish enlightenment when their reading societies had a similar function to the Republic of letters that uh was centered in Paris that involve intellectuals conversing across the world.
57:01
If you look at uh Amsterdam during the Dutch golden age, you also see this incredible openness to different ideas and this incredible tolerance for different viewpoints.
57:17
And you see thinkers as diverse as Thomas Hobbes, who we started out this podcast discussing, an absolute monarchist.
57:26
Um, you know, he was able to uh publish his writing uh in Amsterdam when presses in no other city in Europe wanted to touch some of his more radical ideas.
57:38
a figure as different as him and John Lockach the father of liberalism uh you know took refuge there for a time.
57:49
This uh degree of openness is what helped the city flourish during its golden age.
57:54
If you look at uh ancient Athens and the philosophical discussions in its agora again we see something similar.
58:05
It's when different views are all able to be aired.
58:08
when true freedom of uh thought flourishes that we see society make massive leaps forward.
58:18
And unfortunately we also see that throughout history that is fairly rare to have uh freedom of speech, freedom of belief, freedom of thought.
58:30
And it's a very abnormal circumstance that often only lasts for a brief moment in time before fizzling out.
58:39
And so I think one lesson from studying history is just how abnormal it is to live in a society like the one we have today in the United States with you know modern liberal democracy.
58:55
Obviously that's very different from most of human history.
58:59
Having freedom of speech constitutionally guaranteed is something most of our ancestors didn't even know to dream of.
59:06
Uh the ability to criticize the government is something that many people around the world unfortunately still lack.
59:16
And so safeguarding that freedom, I I think the importance of that is really driven home when you study history and you realize just how unusual our current moment in time in this country is. >> Yeah.
59:35
And you know again back to this distributed value idea that when you move from very highly concentrated power to diffuse power you you mentioned Athens and and the various city states of ancient Greece they were diffuse right there was no central authority.
59:51
Um the reason Germany won with Gutenberg, China had the tech.
59:56
China had the tech a long time before Gutenberg, but the Song dynasty and the mandate of heaven was no no, you're not going to be writing that.
1:00:10
Whereas the Germany that Gutenberg lived in was highly diffuse.
1:00:12
There was it was not a unified country.
1:00:15
And so they they you know they had the topology, if you will, uh versus China having the tech.
1:00:25
And topology won, Germany won.
1:00:25
And if you look at uh England uh verse Germany, England had a much more centralized authority and they actually gave a royal monopoly on printing to the stationers company in 1557 and the Star Chamber would persecute anyone publishing anything not with a royal warrant or license.
1:00:48
So over in Germany, you get Luther doing the reformation because he no central authority, not even the church because they they governed the papal states, but there were a lot of other states uh in Germany that they where their reach did not get to and and so you you got the reformation.
1:01:09
Then you look and you see bismar unifies Germany. What happens? Well, not great things.
1:01:17
So I I definitely think that a the it's why I'm so passionate about our at least theoretical form of government in the United States, right?
1:01:27
A constitutional republic that intentionally separates the powers.
1:01:33
Now, that hasn't always worked out perfectly, but the as you mentioned, the the I I I honestly think that the uh Bill of Rights is more responsible for more prosperity, more progress, more everything than almost any other document, right?
1:01:52
Because essentially if you have the freedom to speak, if you have the freedom to inquire, if you have the freedom to, you know, tinker, you know, innovation steam often times comes from, wow, that's weird, right? Like penicellin.
1:02:07
The only reason we got penicellin was because he forgot to clean up his lab.
1:02:12
And and and so I I I just think that you know cognitive failures can emerge in a diversified meshed network just as well as a centralized society.
1:02:24
But that happens basically when everybody in the network starts having correlated priors, right?
1:02:33
That's how by the way in the market that's how you get booms and crashes.
1:02:37
Suddenly everyone starts thinking the same way and then that destroys the value of the distributed value network and you get a narrative lock and the rest is history.
1:02:45
And it it does seem to me that institutions and their goals are also need to be looked at very closely, right?
1:02:58
because institutional goals are very different than individual goals and and they and they optimize for very different things than the crazy I think of Claude Shannon, right?
1:03:10
Uh the inventor of information theory, which is why we have these little beauties.
1:03:15
I'm holding up a iPhone here uh for people just listening to us.
1:03:20
And yet like a lot of what he did was just kind of fart around.
1:03:27
You know, he did a trumpet that uh that uh burst out fire when you played it and he did mechanical machines that had no real value other than to his curiosity.
1:03:39
But those two seemed like inexurably linked to me. >> No, absolutely. I agree with you.
1:03:45
We've got this unfortunate constant tendency as human beings toward group think and toward ideological conformity and trying to force everyone to think the same way and only express a very limited range of ideas.
1:04:05
But you know maybe it's my bias as someone who works at a think tank but I truly believe ideas can change the world.
1:04:11
And so when you have an environment of true intellectual freedom where people are able to express ideas including unpopular ideas then you have the actual possibility of change including positive change.
1:04:24
That is how you get progress I would argue.
1:04:27
Now in my books I don't uh hammer any particular uh narrative about how the world uh changed so dramatically.
1:04:42
changed so dramatically. I hope people will become curious about that and have those conversations and think for themselves and hopefully come to the right conclusion which in my view is that freedom institution and policies of freedom as
1:05:01
well as a culture of true intellectual freedom have been a key driving force in the transformation of the world in the epilogue of the Grimmel days, I very briefly describe some of the theories regarding what actually prompted the industrial revolution. And this is one of the key
1:05:23
And this is one of the key questions in economic history and people disagree.
1:05:28
Some people credit um the enlightenment.
1:05:33
Steven Pinker of Harvard University who is an advisory board member I should say of human progress uh credits much of our progress to the enlightenment.
1:05:43
enlightenment. Uh my colleague Deodra McCloskkey, an an economic historian uh believes that it was ultimately a change in how people uh thought about commerce and uh the respect given to people who were engaged in the marketplace that helped uh create the great escape that huge liftoff in economic growth that utterly transformed human lives and you know other theories about there is this idea of
1:06:17
decentralization maybe because Europe for example was so fragmented with different uh governments in competition with each other perhaps that allowed technology and competition in technology to progress as it could not in uh consolidated empires that you saw in other parts of the world because if you are ruling over an empire you actually have an incentive to fear technology because that could be destabilizing in your empire, right? But
1:06:45
But if you've got many different little states in competition with one another, then you have to allow some level of technology uh to move forward just so your state can remain competitive.
1:06:55
I mean, these are all different theories and ultimately I don't tell the reader which to endorse.
1:07:02
Uh and some of these theories may also be uh they might not necessarily be mutually exclusive, right?
1:07:09
Maybe they're all true to some extent or maybe several of them are true to some extent.
1:07:13
But somehow or other, we got this utter revolution in how humanity lived.
1:07:19
And it does seem to have occurred uh around the same time as the rise of, you know, classical liberalism, new forms of government, new forms of thought.
1:07:31
And I do think that there is some relationship there. >> Yeah.
1:07:36
And I I uh It's funny to me because the other thing that we see emerging and primarily really facilitated by uh our technological inventions is the idea of basically you you can live in your own cognitive bubble uh forever, right?
1:08:00
And if if you're only listening to people who agree with you, you you're probably going to be hardpressed to understand the other point of view.
1:08:10
Something I always try to do is I always try to read people I know I'm going to disagree with uh theories that I know I'm going to disagree with because it it isn't that there might not be some value there, right?
1:08:25
Like I'm I'm addicted now to steelmanning the ideas of arguments that I don't agree with because when you do that and thank God that we now have large language models that allow us to do that really easily, you you start looking and you're like, you know, they do have a point there.
1:08:45
[clears throat] [laughter] and and and I think that the more that we do that, the more we can understand some of these basic topics that we're talking about right now, right?
1:08:55
Uh if you're if you're trapped in a confirmation bubble, uh you literally you you lose the ability to understand a person whose point of view does not um conform to your own.
1:09:11
And so I I I'm I'm what I would call a rational optimist.
1:09:18
And by that I mean that, you know, there will always be problems, but we will, you know, hopefully come up with better solutions and continue to move forward.
1:09:29
I I'm a huge fan of uh David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity because I think he nails it.
1:09:33
And and and I think that the idea that is floating around here is that back to kind of institutions and centralized authorities and everything like if I'm the king, I probably want to stay being the king.
1:09:51
[laughter] And so I I could see being threatened by innovations that make it less likely for me to be continually the king.
1:09:58
But that metaphor travels, right?
1:10:02
It's like if I'm the CEO or if I'm the head of this particular group or if my guild has the better spot versus the other guilds, you're going to probably want to slow down that other guild's uh speeding up and in and embracing new technologies.
1:10:21
When you're the king or you're the emperor with the mandate from heaven, you like things to remain pretty much the same.
1:10:28
And and and I definitely think that that has been the the constant battle throughout history, right?
1:10:35
Every bit of human freedom for everybody has been hardly fought for.
1:10:42
And you you often times can get discouraged by people being more comfortable with, hey, freedom, safety, freedom, food.
1:10:54
I'll take safety, food, and and I'm not saying that those are not desirable things.
1:11:02
They're incredibly desirable, but you sometimes lose the plot, right?
1:11:07
Because how did you get that safety?
1:11:07
How did you get that food?
1:11:10
It was from the system over here that was working on very different principles, right?
1:11:15
And and so I I wonder what what do you think right now is kind of the biggest roadblock in favor or in front of people who are arguing for progress and and for innovation.
1:11:35
>> I think right now the big battle is probably fear of AI.
1:11:44
as he said it's important to take your critics's views seriously and I think that a criticism of innovation in a you know free market system is that you know creative destruction does have that destructive aspect someone usually does stand to
1:12:03
lose when there is a new innovation even if on the whole it lifts everyone up you do have to acknowledge that destruction and as you point out rightly the incumbent, you know, centers of power or businesses, they stand to lose when a new technology appears. Uh we saw
1:12:19
Uh we saw at one point in time Uber and Lyft and other rid share companies being this new innovative force in the world that had to go up against the incumbent uh taxi business and all of the regulations that protected the taxi companies.
1:12:42
And now as those ride share companies have you know flourished and become profitable you're seeing uh them actually act as the incumbent business that is trying to block the rise of uh self-driving cars in situations like um you know that of Whimo and its self-driving cars.
1:13:06
are trying to block with regulations these even newer business models that there is a great appetite for in the market.
1:13:14
Many people stand to benefit not just these new companies which will enrich many people but the public as a whole will benefit in terms of greater convenience and also much greater safety.
1:13:26
They've shown that the deaths, the car accident deaths um with self-driving vehicles will likely drop significantly.
1:13:35
And so that's actual human lives being saved by this new technology.
1:13:41
But the incumbent that stands to lose has an incentive to try to block the new technology from arising.
1:13:50
And a situation where I think you see that prominently today is with the rise of AI in many different areas.
1:13:59
And I think that the incredible amount of push back that you see against AI is just another manifestation of this same thing that we've seen again and again throughout human history where people are they've got some psychological biases against change.
1:14:15
And also whoever is the incumbent who stands to lose from a change even if that change is positive on the whole is going to fight that change tooth and nail.
1:14:26
And you know that that I think is what we're seeing.
1:14:31
And I think that these anxieties in our current digital age are also manifesting in this weird rise in nostalgia for the distant past that we're now seeing online.
1:14:44
Um and more and more on both the far left and the far right.
1:14:48
You see it in different ways.
1:14:51
this longing for a past that never was.
1:14:55
And so that is what I'm trying to push back against in my book.
1:15:02
And as you say, too many people only interact with viewpoints that they know they agree with.
1:15:10
They don't seek out alternative viewpoints.
1:15:13
I'm so glad that you do, but unfortunately, most people are not like that.
1:15:17
The world would be a better place if more people like you, Jim, were constantly seeking to test their ideas against the alternatives. But most people don't.
1:15:28
And so that's why I think that it's very important for people who have a certain view about how the world should be like myself to not just preach to the choir and put out policy papers for people who u may already agree with me but rather to try to do outreach through books like the grim old days that are meant for a popular audience and that are not ideological.
1:15:55
Again, the book does not push any particular viewpoint about how the world has changed so dramatically.
1:16:03
It just tries to prove to the reader that we really have made a great deal of progress and while the world is not perfect, we have come so far and hopefully diffuse some of this uh very misinformed nostalgia that we're now seeing for the distant past that I again think is motivated in part by the anxiety ies of our current digital era and the rise of AI.
1:16:36
>> Yeah, I I think that um what's interesting is when you uh do go back and look at innovations and how they were received, same playbook every single time when photography came out, portrait artists were nonpluc.
1:16:54
[laughter] And and what you see is the same thing like when radio first came out, everyone was like there they would show photographs of dead birds around radio towers and you know it's poisoning our the air.
1:17:11
It's poisoning our minds and and look I get that.
1:17:14
I I totally understand people wanting to be cautious when a new technology comes around because you know what?
1:17:22
Electricity was dangerous and and fire was dangerous.
1:17:27
And it and the answer isn't no more fire, no more electricity.
1:17:34
It was okay, we're gonna have to come up with some safety rules.
1:17:38
We're gonna have to come up with innovations to make it less dangerous.
1:17:42
So, you know, you don't ban fire.
1:17:42
Every every technology is, in my opinion, dual use, right?
1:17:48
And and it ends up being the operator who determines whether that use is is morally correct or even just socially whatever correct.
1:17:58
So, you know, a hammer can build a lot of houses or it can kill somebody.
1:18:03
Fire, same sort of thing.
1:18:05
And so, rather than banning the technology, we didn't ban fire.
1:18:08
We came up with fire escapes, fire department, fire alarms, fire extinguishers because the the very nature of that technology was so incredibly good for humanity.
1:18:21
I mean, after all, when we figured out how to control fire, we started cooking our food. And guess what?
1:18:30
Made the preffrontal cortex cooked food.
1:18:32
And so it literally changed humans in a way that if we hadn't had it would have been uh inconceivable.
1:18:42
So I I I definitely am not a uh you know I'm not panglossian about any of this.
1:18:49
Uh we do not live in the best of the best of all possible worlds, but we can strive to make the one we do live in a lot better.
1:18:57
And I think that's the message of your book.
1:18:58
By looking back and seeing the world and humanity for what it actually was, maybe more people will be like, "Ah, you know, on second thought, [laughter] maybe I'm not going to wax all nostalgic uh about that."
1:19:16
Because, you know, we tend to for we all of us are incredibly unreliable narrators and we we tend to update our own memories based on what we think and believe now.
1:19:28
And I'm an ineterate journalkeeper and I've been called a lawyer, a liar in my own handwriting often enough to understand that. It's like, oh, okay.
1:19:38
I really didn't think that back when I was 33.
1:19:40
I I thought the opposite.
1:19:42
Tell us when and where people can get your new book.
1:19:46
When when is it coming out and can they get it everywhere like the normal? >> Yes.
1:19:54
The grim old days, an introduction to the pre-industrial past again as the title.
1:19:58
And it is available for pre-order right now.
1:20:01
Wherever books are sold, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, whatever your book seller of choice is online right now, you can uh buy it for pre-order.
1:20:12
The publication will be in October, mid-occtober, and so that's when you can expect the book to ship out and you can receive a copy.
1:20:20
And yeah, I I just want to say I couldn't agree with you more, Jim.
1:20:24
The message of this book and of the whole broader human progress project is hopefully to help people think about what kinds of policies and institutions can help drive progress forward.
1:20:41
And one criticism you often get when you talk about progress and how far we've come is this accusation that you are panglossian or that you are uh complacent.
1:20:55
you are encouraging complacency and you will ultimately slow down further progress if you talk about how far we have come.
1:21:03
Because when you talk about how things have gotten better, some people will assume, well, that means you're saying that things will just inevitably keep getting better regardless of what human beings choose to do.
1:21:15
And so, you might as well sit back and just wait for the world to get better and and be complacent and not try to make any positive change.
1:21:23
And that could not be further from the truth in my view.
1:21:26
my view. realizing how dramatically life has changed, how far we've come and seeing that hard evidence that progress is possible, dramatic progress is possible, I think is very hardening and encouraging to people who want to solve the problems we still have today, who
1:21:50
want to change the world, to know that is possible, and to take courage from that fact that we have already come so for know that it is possible that our descendants might live in a world one day as different from the world today as our world is from that of our distant ancestors. The people who lived in the
1:22:08
The people who lived in the grim old days described in my book and it really drives home just how important it is to learn the right lessons from history and get it right.
1:22:19
What sorts of conditions lead to societal progress?
1:22:27
How can we create the sort of society that will allow innovation that will allow new ideas to be tested and that will hopefully lead to positive changes because change is a constant.
1:22:42
The world is always changing, but hopefully the world our descendants inhabit will have changed in positive ways and they will not look back at our era and think, "No, those were the good old days."
1:22:56
Um, I have a line something like that toward the end of my book.
1:23:01
>> The uh I guess that I'm certainly rooting for you and after this podcast I will go pre-order your book.
1:23:07
Um, but there's a reason why the quote uh what we learn from history is we don't learn from history is now a cliche is because we're we're fighting an uphill battle.
1:23:20
But that also fits right in with what you just said, right?
1:23:23
Ideas are great, but you have to take action.
1:23:29
You have to make those ideas come into the world.
1:23:32
And that requires perseverance. It requires courage. It requires action.
1:23:38
And it also in requires the ability to do so.
1:23:42
Um, if you are prevented from doing a bunch of stuff like those poor printers in London, uh, guess what?
1:23:50
You're you're not going to have a diffusion of progress and Germanyy's going to have the reformation and not you.
1:23:56
So I I could not uh agree more with the idea that for progress to flourish is a an ultimately great thing for humanity.
1:24:07
But that does not mean that there are not going to be a ton of problems.
1:24:12
There are not going to be a ton of things that we have to overcome.
1:24:17
That's just part of the way things work.
1:24:19
Um so I will definitely be reading your book.
1:24:22
Um and hope many many others will as well, Chelsea.
1:24:25
Um, so our final question on this show is a fun one. At least for me.
1:24:30
Some people look at me and like I I knew you were going to ask me this and I was thinking about it and I did I just it's too hard.
1:24:35
So Chelsea, we're going to make you the empress of the world just for a day. You can't kill anyone.
1:24:42
You can't put anyone in a re-education camp.
1:24:45
You can't do any of the things that would progress.
1:24:51
But what you can do is we're going to hand you a magical microphone and you're going to say two things into it that are going to incept all 8 billion plus human beings on the planet today for whatever their next morning is.
1:25:03
When they wake up, they're going to say, you know, I just had two of the greatest ideas and unlike all of the other times, I'm actually going to act on these two.
1:25:13
What two ideas are you going to incept in the world's population?
1:25:20
I am going to wave my magical wand and allow the people of the world to experience far higher levels, ideally perfect levels of economic freedom and social freedom.
1:25:31
Let's start with the latter.
1:25:33
Many people around the world today do not have the right to criticize their governments and their policies.
1:25:40
They do not have freedom of speech.
1:25:40
They do not have the ability to uh you know uh have have religious freedom to have any ability to question the presiding order.
1:25:52
It must be total ideological conformity all the way down.
1:25:55
And there are so many great ideas that humanity itself could be missing out on because the people who have those ideas in their heads live in societies where they simply are not allowed to even propose change.
1:26:11
And the other one would be economic freedom.
1:26:13
I don't think that this gets enough credit for driving change forward.
1:26:18
So many people with great ideas also might not be able to implement them because they live in dire poverty and they are just focused on the basics of survival.
1:26:31
But when you allow people to enrich themselves through free and voluntary exchange in the market, when you allow new innovations to actually take hold and improve human lives uh through, you know, not being hampered by overregulation, then you can see truly dramatic change.
1:26:54
you know, not overregulating AI and allowing for, you know, data centers to be built, for more compute power to exist, that could have a truly dramatic change on living standards, perhaps beyond what we can even imagine right now.
1:27:11
I do not think progress is guaranteed.
1:27:11
I do not think it is inevitable.
1:27:14
And actually I think that when you study history there is a very dark and pessimistic lesson there which is that progress is the exception not the rule.
1:27:23
So many societies throughout history in fact through the vast majority of history have seen stagnation or have seen moves backwards in terms of living standards.
1:27:36
And so we cannot know that our descendants will live in a world that is more technologically advanced than ours.
1:27:43
We cannot know that they will be freer than us or experience higher standards of living than us.
1:27:50
It all depends on our choices today and what path we take right as a society.
1:27:56
And it is my hope that we will choose a society that is freer and that allows us to create a future of true progress.
1:28:02
So our children and our children's children will have, you know, happier, easier, uh, more exciting, wonderful lives, maybe in ways we can't even imagine.
1:28:16
and they will one day look back at our time period and maybe, you know, have a reality TV show about how terrible it was to live in the 2020s or read a book about how horrible people had it in the 2020s and they'll look back at what we're experiencing now and think, "Wow, our ancestors were tough. They had it really bad."
1:28:37
You know, that's my hope.
1:28:37
I want my children and my grandchildren to hopefully live in a world that is better still.
1:28:44
Well, you're preaching to the choir with that one, Chelsea.
1:28:46
I I endorse both of those.
1:28:49
Um, and having six grandchildren certainly helps.
1:28:52
Uh, because you desperately want them to live in a world that is better than the one you lived in.
1:28:58
And I think that's a very common thing among anyone with children or grandchildren.
1:29:03
uh we we want the world to get better for them, but it's incumbent on us to make that happen because you're absolutely right.
1:29:12
Uh long periods, you know, like a thousand years [laughter] of dark ages uh where progress is either going backwards or progressing very very slowly.
1:29:25
So Chelsea, congratulations on the new book.
1:29:30
Uh it was delightful chatting with you and wish you all of the best of success with it. >> Thank you so much J