Speaker 1: Welcome to had to Money. I'm Joel, and today I'm
Speaker 1: talking about how the world is getting better with Mary
Speaker 1: and Tupy. Okay, so you've heard the phrase this is
Speaker 1: why we can't have nice things. Our modern society has
Speaker 1: produced a slew of nice things, though that would have
Speaker 1: been hard to fathom fifty years ago, much less two
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty years ago. PCs and smartphones, gore tex
Speaker 1: and duct tape, GPS and the barcode. All of these things,
Speaker 1: to greater or lesser degrees, have made our lives better.
Speaker 1: But how did those innovations and that abundance come about.
Speaker 1: Why do twenty twenty five look so radically different in
Speaker 1: the developed world than eighteen twenty five. Well, Mary and
Speaker 1: Tupey's book Superabundance was a revelation to me a few
Speaker 1: years ago, showing how far we've come in pretty easy
Speaker 1: to understand language. Maryon Twopy is a senior fellow at
Speaker 1: the Cato Institute. He's also the founder and editor of
Speaker 1: human Progress dot org, a site that seeks to evidence
Speaker 1: these dramatic improvements. With Thanksgiving coming up tomorrow, I couldn't
Speaker 1: think of a better time to cover this topic. So
Speaker 1: Mary and Twopy. Thank you so much for joining me
Speaker 1: today on the podcast.
Speaker 2: Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: Okay, first question we ask everybody who comes on. I
Speaker 1: like to splorage on craft beer, fancy craft beer. Honestly,
Speaker 1: with Thanksgiving I might pops off really nice tomorrow. What
Speaker 1: is that for you, though? What do you like to
Speaker 1: splurge on while you're still being smart and thoughtful about
Speaker 1: your finances in your future.
Speaker 2: I save a lot of money to be able to travel.
Speaker 2: I really enjoy traveling and exploring different parts of the world,
Speaker 2: so I would say that is my luxury, although I
Speaker 2: do like beer as well.
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, then we can be friends. Then what's
Speaker 1: the last great trip you went on?
Speaker 2: I must say I think my last great trip was
Speaker 2: to Argentina. I think that a discovery of Buenos Aires.
Speaker 2: It is a proper Western, well functioning, beautiful, laid out
Speaker 2: city in Latin America that you wouldn't expect to find,
Speaker 2: and I enjoyed being there very much.
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, after I went a long long time ago.
Speaker 1: It was probably thirty years ago, so I'll have to
Speaker 1: like put it back on my list. I have to
Speaker 1: go as an adult. Let's get to the topic. I'm curious, like,
Speaker 1: have we as a society become too accustomed to our
Speaker 1: current level of wealth without understanding how it's come to be.
Speaker 1: It seems like there's like a disconnect right now, and
Speaker 1: there's like a burn it down sort of mentality without
Speaker 1: really understanding what we're attempting to burn down.
Speaker 2: Yes, I think that is a very good perspective to have.
Speaker 2: We have gotten to where we are by being a
Speaker 2: much more open society to new innovations. New innovations don't
Speaker 2: just have to be technological, medical, scientific innovations. They can
Speaker 2: be also ethical, cultural innovations. And basically, for a variety
Speaker 2: of reasons, Europe in the eighteenth century became much more
Speaker 2: open to new ideas. New ideas flourished, and they brought
Speaker 2: about what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction.
Speaker 2: A lot of old presumptions, dogma's ideas were simply swept away,
Speaker 2: and the society well became much more open to innovation.
Speaker 2: And as a consequence of that, we have unleashed for
Speaker 2: the last two hundred years an era of unprecedented innovation
Speaker 2: and consequently greater economic growth as well as I would
Speaker 2: say improved morality where people treat each other much better
Speaker 2: than they used to. And I think that in certain
Speaker 2: ways we have certainly forgotten about that. The society is
Speaker 2: becoming much more close. You can see it in terms
Speaker 2: of how we treat international trade, which is of course
Speaker 2: very important to to to innovation and to economic growth,
Speaker 2: but also society is becoming much more skeptical about certain
Speaker 2: kinds of innovation. Tacker Carlson, for example, was interviewed by
Speaker 2: Ben Shapiro about two years ago, and Ben Shapiro asked
Speaker 2: him what would he do about autonomous truck trucking autonomous
Speaker 2: you know, trucks, and Tucker said that he would ban
Speaker 2: it in a second because it would put a lot
Speaker 2: of truckers out of work. But if you made the
Speaker 2: same argument two hundred years ago, or even one hundred
Speaker 2: years ago about horse buggy drivers, sure, then we would
Speaker 2: still be, you know, riding horse buggies rather than driving trucks.
Speaker 1: At the bank, right, I mean, there's a million things
Speaker 1: you could point to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So that's that's a very long answer to your
Speaker 2: short question, but it was a good one.
Speaker 1: Do you think that the twenty four hour news cycle
Speaker 1: is part of the problem that it impacts our ability
Speaker 1: to see the good things that are happening in the world.
Speaker 1: I know that these websites for a minute, that we're
Speaker 1: dedicated to only publishing good news, but it does feel
Speaker 1: like the twenty four hour news cycle before it existed,
Speaker 1: we were just less aware of maybe some of the
Speaker 1: negative things happening in our society, and maybe ignorance was bliss,
Speaker 1: at least to a certain extent.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure if ignorance is ever bliss, but maybe.
Speaker 2: All right, I will tell you I agree with you
Speaker 2: broadly speaking, but I think that there is something else
Speaker 2: going on, which is a negativity contagion. So it's not
Speaker 2: so much that we have twenty four hour cycle, though
Speaker 2: that's part of it. It's that there's just so many
Speaker 2: more outlets and they're all doing the same things, which
Speaker 2: is presenting negative news. So it's not just that Fox
Speaker 2: has to compete against NBC and CBS and ABC. You
Speaker 2: now have websites where most people get their news, in
Speaker 2: addition to radio and newspapers and so forth, and we
Speaker 2: have evolved to prioritize bad news. And so because you
Speaker 2: have now this hyper competitive environment, the only way that
Speaker 2: you can get people to come back to you. In
Speaker 2: the phase of all of that competition is to present
Speaker 2: the worst news first and repeatedly and in the worst
Speaker 2: possible terms, and there is very little time and space
Speaker 2: for positive news. The hundreds of little innovations that are
Speaker 2: happening every day that are improving people's lives simply do
Speaker 2: not make it on those websites or on those newscasts
Speaker 2: because in order to get those eyeballs, they have to
Speaker 2: focus on the negatives. So the perception that is created
Speaker 2: in the human mind is that everything in the world
Speaker 2: is getting worse, and that is certainly incorrect, it's unrealistic,
Speaker 2: and it is highly damaging. So it's the negative emotional
Speaker 2: contagent which we have to deal with, and there is
Speaker 2: not an easy solution to it, because it's not like
Speaker 2: it's a market failure in a sense of hyper competition
Speaker 2: of of of media only there there is there is
Speaker 2: a there is a human nature at play. We desire
Speaker 2: bad news that because we have evolved to look out
Speaker 2: for bad news in order to survive.
Speaker 1: You you run a site that focuses on a lot
Speaker 1: of good news that highlights the progress that we've made,
Speaker 1: so which is kind of the opposite of what drives
Speaker 1: in the media ecosystem right now, can you share maybe
Speaker 1: a few things, a few recent things from your site
Speaker 1: that you guys have been working on.
Speaker 2: Sure, so, Human progress dot org is specifically intended to
Speaker 2: combat this negativity, emotional bias, or contagion, and people can
Speaker 2: sign up for a week summary of all the good
Speaker 2: things that have taken place. You know, it's just one
Speaker 2: email a week saying hey, you know, this is what
Speaker 2: has happened in the last few weeks. We have seen
Speaker 2: children who were genetically unable to hear regain their hearing.
Speaker 2: We have seen new advances. We have seen new statistics
Speaker 2: showing how certain threatened species of whale are actually expanding
Speaker 2: all over the world. We have seen the discovery of
Speaker 2: a new antibiotic which will which will enable us to
Speaker 2: get around the problem of superbugs, and so on and
Speaker 2: so forth. So again, the good news is out there
Speaker 2: if you just look for it. But I'm afraid that
Speaker 2: you know, our reach is you know, hundreds of thousands
Speaker 2: of people. It is not millions that the doom and
Speaker 2: gloom newscasts get every day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, let's just talk about progress. Is all progress
Speaker 1: good because it does seem like most of the time,
Speaker 1: much of the time, specially over the past couple hundreds,
Speaker 1: a lot of the progress that we've experienced has been
Speaker 1: to our benefit personally economically. Automation though it can bring
Speaker 1: down prices, but it can also reduce jobs, as we
Speaker 1: were kind of referring to. So how do you square
Speaker 1: that circle on progress, good, bad? Somewhere in the middle.
Speaker 2: I would say that my definition of progress obviously has
Speaker 2: the human in front of it, so you know, it
Speaker 2: is a very humanistic or human centric or entropercentric project,
Speaker 2: if you will. And if there are aspects to progress
Speaker 2: which are damaging to humanity, that then we need to
Speaker 2: we need to we need to talk about it. For example,
Speaker 2: it is an open question whether the fact that we
Speaker 2: have much more free time than people in the past.
Speaker 2: It's just the reality is that as people earn more
Speaker 2: money than number of hours of work is lower or
Speaker 2: goes down, believe it or not. Even though Americans, for example,
Speaker 2: work much more than people in Western Europe, we still
Speaker 2: work about a third less than what we did two
Speaker 2: hundred years ago. Right, So we have all this time
Speaker 2: on our hands, and you know that provides much more
Speaker 2: time for introspection and especially if you are amongst the
Speaker 2: least fortunate people in the United States, say somebody who
Speaker 2: doesn't have a family, maybe you have just lost your job,
Speaker 2: et cetera. Having a lot of time for rumination may
Speaker 2: not be a bad idea, especially if you have access
Speaker 2: to all the bad news. So there's another aspect of it,
Speaker 2: which is social media. I am not putting down social
Speaker 2: media because I think the jury is still out, you know,
Speaker 2: social media, and it enables us to do a lot
Speaker 2: of marvelous things, keeping up with cousins across the you know,
Speaker 2: across the world, speaking to our parents who may not
Speaker 2: live in the United States but in your or elsewhere.
Speaker 2: It allows us to get alerts for tsunamis and things
Speaker 2: like that. So there's a lot of positive to it.
Speaker 2: But maybe, as Jonathan Hyde argues, taking them out of
Speaker 2: high schools is not a bad idea. So we have
Speaker 2: just hired a human progress a young psychologist from Harvard
Speaker 2: who will be researching these issues and hopefully make us
Speaker 2: understand better about the negative aspects of progress.
Speaker 1: Can you talk about what has propelled human economic activity
Speaker 1: to accelerate in such an epic way, especially over the
Speaker 1: past one hundred and fifty years and maybe why it's
Speaker 1: been experienced more in a more heightened way in countries
Speaker 1: like ours then maybe and even a stark difference of
Speaker 1: like North Korea and South Korea, right, like one thriving
Speaker 1: economic hub and one closed off from the world. Is
Speaker 1: it kind of pointing back to what you mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: being closed off from trade and therefore being closed off
Speaker 1: from innovation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that you're basically a right when you
Speaker 2: have two states made up of essentially the same people,
Speaker 2: like East Germany and West Germany and North and South Korea,
Speaker 2: and they are producing fundamentally different economic results, that suggests
Speaker 2: being more open to international trade, have enforceable private property
Speaker 2: rights to give just two examples, maybe a stable currency
Speaker 2: are very important. So Economic Freedom of the World Report,
Speaker 2: which is co published by the Cato Institute and Fraser
Speaker 2: Frasier Institute in Canada, they look at regulatory structure, they
Speaker 2: look at trade openers, they look at they look at
Speaker 2: sound currency trade and basically what they find is that
Speaker 2: the more open you are, the less regulated you are,
Speaker 2: the less overtaxed you are, the better you And what
Speaker 2: has happened was that for a variety of contingent historical reasons.
Speaker 2: Many of these things came together in Northwestern Europe, especially
Speaker 2: in Holland or Netherlands and the United Kingdom in the
Speaker 2: seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and they were able to grow
Speaker 2: rapidly and show the path to the rest of the world.
Speaker 2: And since the United States is simply a daughter country
Speaker 2: of Great Britain, many of those institutions and very importantly
Speaker 2: cultural values that Britain had had been translated into the
Speaker 2: American context, and America could build upon the British the
Speaker 2: British origin story to become the wealthiest country in the
Speaker 2: world by the year nineteen hundred. So fundamentally it's about institutions,
Speaker 2: but I think that cultural reasons play also a part.
Speaker 2: And it is a highly contentious territory, I would say,
Speaker 2: but I think those two are very important. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I heard you say at one point that the good
Speaker 1: old days were buying large very bad, and I loved
Speaker 1: I love that because so many people like look back
Speaker 1: with nostalgia to a bygone era and they're like, I
Speaker 1: was so great back then. But I don't think if
Speaker 1: most of us were offered a time machine, we'd go back,
Speaker 1: probably even fifteen or twenty years when you ask a youngster, hey,
Speaker 1: would you give up your smartphone for a million dollars? Like,
Speaker 1: they wouldn't do it, you know, they just wouldn't. They
Speaker 1: wouldn't want to be parted from that progress. So how
Speaker 1: do you How bad was life back in the day?
Speaker 1: How great is it? How great do we have it now?
Speaker 2: First of all, I wish we did have time travel,
Speaker 2: because I think that I would love to send every
Speaker 2: college kid or school kid to Pompeii, where I was
Speaker 2: what three or four weeks ago. This is the city
Speaker 2: that was destroyed by volcanic corruptions in seventy nine AD
Speaker 2: and can be visited in a close on Naples today.
Speaker 2: And the fascinating thing that you see in Pompeii is
Speaker 2: that the tile roads have large stones running through them.
Speaker 2: Instead of pedestrian walks, they have these large stepping stones.
Speaker 2: Why do they have them, Well, they have them because
Speaker 2: streets would basically be running with sewer. All the human excrement, urine, awfal,
Speaker 2: blood from slaughtered animals would be simply dumped into the street,
Speaker 2: and then you would have water running down those streets
Speaker 2: in order to flush it into the sea, which is
Speaker 2: partly why Pompeii is on a hill, you know, going
Speaker 2: down to the Mediterranean Sea, and people used to cross
Speaker 2: streets on stilts and things like that because basically, basically
Speaker 2: it was incredibly filthy. That's the first thing that you
Speaker 2: would that you would discover if you went acting time,
Speaker 2: the fils and the stench everywhere. The other thing that
Speaker 2: you would quickly realize is that people lived to about
Speaker 2: thirty Today, life expectancy around the world is about seventy three.
Speaker 2: It's about seventy nine in the United States, so everybody
Speaker 2: has been granted an extra life. Fifty percent of children
Speaker 2: before the age of fifteen died. Okay, murderate in Renaissance
Speaker 2: Italy was about forty per hundred thousand. Today in Italy
Speaker 2: it's zero point three per one hundred thousand. So when
Speaker 2: it comes to violence, life expectancy, child maternal mortality, roughly
Speaker 2: one thousand women per one hundred thousand childbirths would die.
Speaker 2: In the old days to day, it's a fraction of that.
Speaker 2: People were ignorant and illiterate. Our best evidence suggests that
Speaker 2: even the most sophisticated society is roughly ten percent of
Speaker 2: people could read and write. Today it's obviously almost universal,
Speaker 2: so along so many dimensions, life was just so much
Speaker 2: more difficult. And don't forget that we were incredibly poor.
Speaker 2: So GDP per capita per person per day was about
Speaker 2: two to three dollars. Right today globally it's about forty
Speaker 2: dollars adjusted for inflation. So that gives you a sense
Speaker 2: of where we were and where we are today. The
Speaker 2: last two hundred years are really unprecedented in human history
Speaker 2: in terms of the extraordinary flourishing of humanity. And I
Speaker 2: think that it is deeply connected to the increased liberalization,
Speaker 2: not using it in political terms, you know, as in
Speaker 2: liberal in the United States, liberalization of economy and politics.
Speaker 2: Governments became much more responsive, They started enforcing they stopped
Speaker 2: behaving in arbitrary fashion, they started enforcing equality before the law.
Speaker 2: And of course in the economy, we just became much freer.
Speaker 2: In fifteen or sixteenth century England, for example, whether you
Speaker 2: wanted to import something or export something, you need the
Speaker 2: permission of the king, who would give you a monopoly
Speaker 2: on the export of salt or the import of wool
Speaker 2: and whatever else. Today you can pretty much start a
Speaker 2: business anytime you like. You just have to deal with regulations.
Speaker 1: Yeah, is progress something you think of as unavoidable or
Speaker 1: do you think it's something that needs to be safeguarded?
Speaker 1: Like I think about not being able to recreate the
Speaker 1: pyramids right, like almost like that ability has been lost
Speaker 1: and we don't know how right the pyramids were made,
Speaker 1: or rockets. I've heard Elon Must say something along the
Speaker 1: lines of like, if we hadn't started to make rockets again,
Speaker 1: some of that knowledge would would have been lost. What
Speaker 1: would have gone away? Is that how progress is? Can
Speaker 1: it be lost?
Speaker 2: Well? I don't know about the pyramids. I'm pretty sure
Speaker 2: that we could make them with heavy machinery today. I
Speaker 2: think that the question about the pyramids is how did
Speaker 2: the ancients create them without heavy machinery? But we could
Speaker 2: probably do that. No, progress is definitely not guaranteed. When
Speaker 2: people started realizing that the world was improving at a
Speaker 2: very fast click in the nineteenth century, there was an
Speaker 2: emergence of a number of schools of thought. Hegel marks,
Speaker 2: can't people like that who started talking about progress as
Speaker 2: being unavoidable. But that is clearly not true. Progress can regress.
Speaker 2: After the fall of the Roman Empire, for example, Europe
Speaker 2: forgot a lot of the knowledge that the Romans possessed.
Speaker 2: To this day, we don't know how to make Roman concrete,
Speaker 2: for example, even though it has withstood for two thousand
Speaker 2: years and so and people in the dark ages in Europe,
Speaker 2: you know, used to walk amongst the monuments built by
Speaker 2: the Romans, wondering who were these people who created all
Speaker 2: of this? Because they forgot right. So so knowledge can
Speaker 2: be lost, Progress can regress. There is nothing unavoid about it.
Speaker 2: And that's what concerns me is that, as you noted
Speaker 2: at the beginning of the interview, so many people have
Speaker 2: forgotten the reasons why progress has happened. It happens because
Speaker 2: of an open economy tolerant of new ideas. And when
Speaker 2: that goes, or when our institutions change, and you know,
Speaker 2: when we embrace socialism, for example, like the North Koreans
Speaker 2: or the Cubans or the Venezuelans, then I'm afraid progress
Speaker 2: will stall and eventually go into reverse.
Speaker 1: One retort that you might hear from people who think
Speaker 1: of progress as not like an evident, self evidently good thing, is,
Speaker 1: in particular, like some of the environmental ramifications that progress
Speaker 1: the negative harms to our environment, that progress can create
Speaker 1: what would you say to that.
Speaker 2: I would say yes and no. So what tends to
Speaker 2: happen when countries start industrializing, So you go through this
Speaker 2: process of moving from agriculture to industry to services, and
Speaker 2: when countries undertake industrialization, there is a lot of ecological
Speaker 2: harm that takes place. That being said, it's not like
Speaker 2: life in the agricultural society was without its risks. For example,
Speaker 2: food would be contaminated at all times, people were suffering
Speaker 2: from tremendous gustro intestinal problems, riven with parasites and so forth.
Speaker 2: But never mind, let's put that aside. The point is
Speaker 2: that once you move from agriculture to industry, you do
Speaker 2: tend to create a lot of environmental damage. But then
Speaker 2: what happens is that what is called an environmental Kuznetz
Speaker 2: curve kicks in. And this is just a fancy way
Speaker 2: of saying, is that when people become rich enough, they
Speaker 2: start caring about the environment, and they have enough wealth
Speaker 2: to start protecting their environment. So there are a number
Speaker 2: of things that go on. One of them is that
Speaker 2: you simply have more money and more resources human and
Speaker 2: otherwise to clean up your reverse, which is why today
Speaker 2: people are swimming in the Seine, and there are dolphins
Speaker 2: in Thames in London that didn't used to be the
Speaker 2: case during industrialization, so nature naturally rebounds. Another thing that
Speaker 2: happens is urbanization. Basically the most disruptive element on land
Speaker 2: is the human being. And when you take humans of
Speaker 2: the land, in other words, as you move from agriculture
Speaker 2: to industry and re later to services, more and more
Speaker 2: people end up in the cities. By twenty one hundred,
Speaker 2: something like eighty percent of humanity will be in the cities,
Speaker 2: which means that we will depopulate areas in which we
Speaker 2: currently live and where we disrupt the natural flow of
Speaker 2: flora and fauna, and that will bounce back. So the
Speaker 2: best thing that you can do for the environment is
Speaker 2: really to urbanize and to become as agricultural efficient as possible.
Speaker 2: So the Greens, I'm afraid, are riven with contradictions. On
Speaker 2: the one hand, they don't want to build nuclear power
Speaker 2: stations even though they don't emit CO two, and they
Speaker 2: are the best solution that we have currently to reducing
Speaker 2: CO two in the atmosphere. It's more expensive than gas.
Speaker 2: Gas still produces some CO two in the atmosphere, but
Speaker 2: much less so than coal. But you know, if we
Speaker 2: could switch all of humanity to gas and then eventually
Speaker 2: to nuclear, then we would be able to reduce COO
Speaker 2: two dramatically. Another thing which the Greens are against is GMOs.
Speaker 2: But suppose that you can genetically modify some of our
Speaker 2: most important crops such as sweet and corn and soy
Speaker 2: and so forth, so that you can produce much more
Speaker 2: per acre. That means that you can feed growing global
Speaker 2: population on fewer and fewer acres of land, which means
Speaker 2: that you can return more and more acres of land
Speaker 2: back to flora and fauna. So there are solutions for
Speaker 2: environmental comeback that modern society offers, and I if you're
Speaker 2: open minded about it, and the Greens very often aren't.
Speaker 2: And I'm not even talking about like the extinction movement,
Speaker 2: which also holds promise for the future where we'll be
Speaker 2: able to basically use the DNA of dead or extinct
Speaker 2: animals in order to bring them back.
Speaker 1: We got more to get to. Specifically, it takes so
Speaker 1: much less time to buy almost all of the goods
Speaker 1: and services that we enjoy. We'll talk about why that
Speaker 1: is with Mary and Tupe right after this. I'm still
Speaker 1: talking with Mary and twopee and I want Mary and
Speaker 1: I want to talk about specifically your book Superabundance. And
Speaker 1: this was released in twenty twenty two and to me,
Speaker 1: like as I was reading it, it was striking because
Speaker 1: you put things in terms there were so much easier
Speaker 1: to understand. And part of what made it easy to
Speaker 1: comprehend was when you talk about time prices, how long
Speaker 1: specifically people must work to be able to afford every
Speaker 1: day items. Talk about that concept like how does that,
Speaker 1: how can that help maybe us appreciate the progress that
Speaker 1: we've made and what sort of progress have we made
Speaker 1: when we look at the concept of time prices.
Speaker 2: Well, time prices have been implemented in the book by
Speaker 2: necessity because we wanted to see how much cheaper resources
Speaker 2: are today than they used to be before. I mean,
Speaker 2: the idea that most people subscribe to is a zero
Speaker 2: sum idea, which is that the more people you have,
Speaker 2: the more resources they use. Therefore resources are becoming more
Speaker 2: expensive and scarcer. The opposite is true, resources are becoming
Speaker 2: cheaper as you have more people in the world because
Speaker 2: people bring new ideas and they basically grow the resource
Speaker 2: by But since we were going back to eighteen fifty.
Speaker 2: We simply didn't have the currencies, and we didn't have
Speaker 2: the exchange rates, and we didn't have the inflation rates,
Speaker 2: so we couldn't use normal currencies. So we simply what
Speaker 2: we asked ourselves is basically, how long did people have
Speaker 2: to work in order to buy a bag of potatoes
Speaker 2: or a bag of oranges, or a bunch of bananas,
Speaker 2: or a pound of beef or a pound of pork
Speaker 2: and whatever else. And so that was done by necessity,
Speaker 2: but it's also a smart way. I think that everybody
Speaker 2: should do it to measure human well being or rather
Speaker 2: abundance or prosperity, simply because it is a Everybody has
Speaker 2: only twenty four hours in a day. So if you
Speaker 2: are an Indian peasant, for example, and you are spending
Speaker 2: six hours a day to earn enough money to buy
Speaker 2: your food, but an American can do it in ten minutes,
Speaker 2: that makes a difference. So what we really want is
Speaker 2: for people to spend less and less time during their
Speaker 2: work day to spend on necessities clothing, food, housing, that
Speaker 2: sort of thing, and have more time to work to
Speaker 2: earn money for leisure or education or alternatively, just not
Speaker 2: working at all. And you know, have time off and
Speaker 2: enjoy it with your family. So it makes it so
Speaker 2: it made accounting sense for the book, but it also
Speaker 2: makes sense from a moral or ethical standpoint, because what
Speaker 2: you really want to do is a measure how much
Speaker 2: more time we have today? Too? Well, let me put
Speaker 2: it this way, because we work so little time to
Speaker 2: earn the food that we eat, for example, we have
Speaker 2: much more time to earn the money to travel to
Speaker 2: Argentina for example, or you know, or buy a car,
Speaker 2: which which an Indian cannot because most of the time
Speaker 2: he spends working, he's working to provide food for his family.
Speaker 2: So what is it?
Speaker 1: So? Is that what it means then, to be able
Speaker 1: to spend so much less time to buy let's say
Speaker 1: a pound of sugar or an hour of light like
Speaker 1: the light bulbs and the energy that it costs to
Speaker 1: light our homes. It doesn't mean it means more leisure,
Speaker 1: more ability to consume new products that are made Like,
Speaker 1: what else does it really mean that we have such
Speaker 1: an abundance of extra time because it cost us less
Speaker 1: of our working hours, less time of working to get
Speaker 1: the money to buy that stuff.
Speaker 2: Well, essentially, it means abundance. It means prosperity. The reason
Speaker 2: why an American house looks very different from a Brazilian
Speaker 2: favela or an African hut is because because we don't
Speaker 2: have to spend all this time working to buy our food,
Speaker 2: for example, right, you know, we have much more time
Speaker 2: left after we earn enough money to buy our food,
Speaker 2: to buy refrigerator and a tea and two cars in
Speaker 2: a garage, and books and tables and chairs and everything else.
Speaker 2: So if you look at a middle class American house today,
Speaker 2: it looks very different from an African hut or Brazilian
Speaker 2: favela precisely because we can buy so much more with
Speaker 2: our time than Africans or Brazilians can.
Speaker 1: I think about like limited resources like oil, even that
Speaker 1: has gotten cheaper over time, and that seems kind of
Speaker 1: counterintuitive that a scarce resource could get less expensive. And
Speaker 1: when you think about twenty thirty years ago, some of
Speaker 1: the predictions about peak oil, those haven't really come to pass.
Speaker 1: And gas prices are not six dollars a gallon where
Speaker 1: I live.
Speaker 2: So what do you explain that, Well, it's just that
Speaker 2: it's not as scarce as people thought it was. So
Speaker 2: for example, using the old drilling methods. Many American oil
Speaker 2: fields where quote unquote exhausted in the nineteen eight tea,
Speaker 2: in the nineteen nineties, but then somebody again we are
Speaker 2: going to going back to population and ideas. Then somebody
Speaker 2: came up with the idea of fracking. And so what
Speaker 2: you do. You return back to those oil fields which
Speaker 2: are exhausted with the old technology, and you apply this
Speaker 2: new technology, which is fracking, and you are able to
Speaker 2: get so much oil and gas out of those out
Speaker 2: of those same oil fields that America today is the
Speaker 2: world's greatest export of oil and gas. Right, So that
Speaker 2: is one example of how you can how something that
Speaker 2: is supposedly scarce becomes less scarce. And even if at
Speaker 2: some point in the future we run out of oil
Speaker 2: in the ground, you can of course turn coal into oil.
Speaker 2: The Germans during the Second World War and South Africans
Speaker 2: under apartheid were able to do that. We have the
Speaker 2: technology to do that. So you may go through an
Speaker 2: extra step to get to oil, but you can still
Speaker 2: do so. And we have coal deposits lasting us for
Speaker 2: tens of thousands of years, and of course by that
Speaker 2: time will be already switched over to a different kind
Speaker 2: of energy.
Speaker 1: Source and so forth as a human ingenuity.
Speaker 2: Because of human ingenuity, Yes, I mean, eventually we want
Speaker 2: to get to a place where all of our energy
Speaker 2: comes from the sun for example, right, yeah, which you
Speaker 2: know there are there are a lot of sci fi
Speaker 2: sort of ways of doing that. The technology is currently
Speaker 2: not that. And fusion. You know, if we have fusion
Speaker 2: and we have solar and maybe thermal thermal energy, you know,
Speaker 2: we'll be able to get away from from fossil fuels altogether.
Speaker 1: I don't want to make light of income inequality, and
Speaker 1: I don't want to make light of people who don't
Speaker 1: have nearly the same resources, whether it's because of their
Speaker 1: familial ancestry. I had a more difficult life than I
Speaker 1: have or and you have. I don't know, But what
Speaker 1: would you say to a US citizen listening to this
Speaker 1: podcast who thinks they're poor? Well, and especially when you
Speaker 1: think about the global context, like, how would you I
Speaker 1: don't know, I'm curious how you would speak to someone
Speaker 1: like that.
Speaker 2: Well, at a metal level, I don't consider inequality to
Speaker 2: be a proper measure of human well being. I consider
Speaker 2: poverty to be or reduction in poverty to be a
Speaker 2: proper measure of human well being. So I don't really
Speaker 2: care that Jeff Bezos is worth three hundred billion dollars
Speaker 2: and Elon Musk is worth five hundred billion dollars. It's
Speaker 2: not a zero sum game. They've grown the economic pie,
Speaker 2: and consequently the fact that they are super rich has
Speaker 2: no negative impact on my life or the lives of
Speaker 2: the fellow Americans. In other words, they didn't take anything
Speaker 2: from fellow Americans. So that is not a proper measure
Speaker 2: of human well being. What is happening at the bottom
Speaker 2: of the income letter is of concern. That is a
Speaker 2: proper measure of well being. What we want to see
Speaker 2: is wages for the bottom ten percent or bottom twenty
Speaker 2: percent to continue to increase, and you can really only
Speaker 2: do that in a growing economy where there's competition for labor.
Speaker 2: And when it comes to Americans specifically, we are of
Speaker 2: course the richest large country in the world. There are
Speaker 2: some countries which are richer per capita. They tend to
Speaker 2: be much smaller, and they tend to be they tend
Speaker 2: to have a specific set of characteristics, like for example,
Speaker 2: Norway has very few people, but it has so much
Speaker 2: oil that basically that basically they have trillions of dollars
Speaker 2: in their sovereign fund. And even then, you know, going
Speaker 2: for dinner in Norway is a nightmare because it's so expensive,
Speaker 2: and you.
Speaker 1: Know it isn't once it was very very expensive.
Speaker 2: I can attest, yeah, because of taxes, and you have
Speaker 2: similar situation in some of the Middle East and cheekdoms
Speaker 2: like United Arab Emerits and so forth. But in terms
Speaker 2: of Americans as such, we are of course living miraculously
Speaker 2: better than our ancestors, and we are living extraordinarily well
Speaker 2: compared to the rest of the world. The Chinese income
Speaker 2: per capita is something like median income per capita is
Speaker 2: something like thirteen or fourteen thousand dollars, so they at
Speaker 2: the same level as Mexico, whereas whereas the United States
Speaker 2: is fifty or sixty thousand dollars per person, so we
Speaker 2: are simply much richer than even our competitors.
Speaker 1: This might not be a question. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you ever gotten asked this question before, but when how
Speaker 1: can understanding human progress change the way that we as
Speaker 1: individuals think about personal finance or long term investing. Because
Speaker 1: with you talking about progress, and especially in an economy
Speaker 1: like ours, man, I want to invest in that progress,
Speaker 1: so I can rea some of the benefit. Yeah, how
Speaker 1: would you talk to somebody who was wondering about their
Speaker 1: personal finances or their investing life.
Speaker 2: Gosh, you know, I'm not an investor, God knows, I've
Speaker 2: made a lot of mistakes in the stock market myself.
Speaker 2: But basically, if anybody is approaching investment thinking, okay, let
Speaker 2: me invest in raw materials. You know, because the population
Speaker 2: is increasing and we are consuming more stuff and consequently
Speaker 2: things must become more expensive. That's not really how it works.
Speaker 2: So it's really a negative investment strategy. I would say
Speaker 2: to invest in raw materials. Now you can chance upon
Speaker 2: a time when raw materials do become more expensive, like,
Speaker 2: for example, the first decade of the twenty first century,
Speaker 2: when China really took off and started growing at a
Speaker 2: very fast click. They were consuming so many raw materials
Speaker 2: that raw materials actually increased in price. But you know,
Speaker 2: at twenty or thirty or forty year strategy, investing in
Speaker 2: raw materials is probably not a good idea. But what
Speaker 2: drives economy forward is technology, really, and so being exposed
Speaker 2: to tech stocks is probably a better idea. Again, this
Speaker 2: is just how I read how I read the lessons
Speaker 2: from our book is that what drives human progress forward
Speaker 2: is really new technology.
Speaker 1: So a recent Pew study found that fifty seven percent
Speaker 1: of people said that their children are going to grow
Speaker 1: up to be worse off financially than their parents. And
Speaker 1: this is a reversal of the American optimism that I
Speaker 1: think has kind of been at the heart of who
Speaker 1: we are as a country. It's gotten down to significantly
Speaker 1: over the years. So how is that possible? Does this
Speaker 1: go back to kind of the beginning of our conversation,
Speaker 1: how is it possible? Given the progress that's been made,
Speaker 1: and specifically in this country that's been keenly felt, why
Speaker 1: are we so pestimistic about the future and the ability
Speaker 1: of our children to do better than we have?
Speaker 2: There is a very strange thing going on whereby people
Speaker 2: in the United States, but other places in the world
Speaker 2: as well, are much more optimistic about the personal lives
Speaker 2: than about the society as a whole. So there is
Speaker 2: about thirty point difference on average if you ask people
Speaker 2: how are you doing financially? Oh, I'm doing okay, you know,
Speaker 2: things are fine. How is America doing? Oh, it's going
Speaker 2: to help. And this is this is a consistent finding
Speaker 2: in in opinion polls, and that I think has to
Speaker 2: do with the fact that you know, when when you
Speaker 2: are looking at your life, you can you can speak
Speaker 2: much more objectively about where you are today as opposed
Speaker 2: to last year, whether your income has grown and so forth,
Speaker 2: Whereas if you are looking at society there is probably
Speaker 2: that negative emotion contagion going on where where you only
Speaker 2: hear bad things about the United States, and so you
Speaker 2: you know, you you internalize that for the country, even
Speaker 2: though you personally are doing well. Now, I don't want
Speaker 2: to be too blase about it. Of course, there are possibilities.
Speaker 2: Of course, there are scenarios under which the future generations
Speaker 2: could be poorer. If, for example, we shut ourselves off
Speaker 2: from global trade, we will be poorer. If we elect
Speaker 2: a socialist to the presidency, we will be poorer. There
Speaker 2: are scenarios as such. Yes, I we shouldn't be too blase.
Speaker 1: In some ways you're pointing to not to I try
Speaker 1: to avoid politics on the show, but you're pointing to
Speaker 1: both parties that could lead, of course to places that
Speaker 1: are not great, and so I just I just want
Speaker 1: to point that out there.
Speaker 2: I don't, of course, but I mean that. That is
Speaker 2: why I've chosen examples from both parties is because both
Speaker 2: parties are have become parties of victimhood, where the politicians,
Speaker 2: both Republican and Democrats, are basically telling their electorates the
Speaker 2: world is set against you. Everybody is exploiting you in
Speaker 2: spite of the fact that you are the most lucky
Speaker 2: generation in global history, in the luckiest one of the
Speaker 2: luckiest places in the world. You know, everything sucks because
Speaker 2: that's how you keep people, That's how you keep your
Speaker 2: troops constantly anxious and constantly voting for you and supporting
Speaker 2: you financially. And it's the wrong way to go about it.
Speaker 2: But both parties are guilty.
Speaker 1: What's one data point about global progress that still blows
Speaker 1: your mind? Maybe something that you found when writing the
Speaker 1: book Super Abundance, or something that you featured recently on
Speaker 1: the website Human Progress. Like, what is something that maybe
Speaker 1: or when people are asking for like a factoid that
Speaker 1: just is like ridiculous of human flourishing.
Speaker 2: What would you point to, Well, look, the obvious things
Speaker 2: would be life expectancy. I enjoy life. I recommend that
Speaker 2: people you know, stop worrying too much and enjoy life.
Speaker 2: To and the fact is that life expectancy, you know,
Speaker 2: two hundred years ago was about thirty years and today
Speaker 2: it's in the United States approaching eighty. So we are
Speaker 2: given an opportunity to enjoy twice almost three times as
Speaker 2: much life as we as we would have had in
Speaker 2: the past. But if you're asking me about the specific statistic,
Speaker 2: given that Thanksgiving is coming up, we wrote an article
Speaker 2: last year and will probably write an article this year
Speaker 2: as well, about the price of Thanksgiving, a time price
Speaker 2: of Thanksgiving, and on our calculation, basically, an American worker
Speaker 2: today can buy one point seven Thanksgiving dinners for the
Speaker 2: same amount of time that he or she would have
Speaker 2: to pay for it in nineteen eighty six. Eighty six
Speaker 2: is Reagan was president.
Speaker 1: But.
Speaker 2: Eighty six is the first year for which we have data. Basically,
Speaker 2: the American Farming Bureau started tracking down the price of
Speaker 2: turkey and cranberry sauce and you know, buns and whatever else,
Speaker 2: and they put it in this basket of commodities. How
Speaker 2: you could, you know, feed a bunch of people for
Speaker 2: Thanksgiving dinner? And then we track that over time all
Speaker 2: the way to twenty twenty four, and I'm sure we
Speaker 2: will do one for twenty twenty five, and basically what
Speaker 2: we find is the relative to human labor or relative
Speaker 2: to time that you have to spend working to earn
Speaker 2: that money to buy Thanksgiving dinner has dropped by has
Speaker 2: dropped so much that now you're getting one point seven
Speaker 2: dinners for the same amount of time that you would
Speaker 2: have gotten one in nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 1: So like deflation in terms of time prices.
Speaker 2: Oh, certainly, And there's deflation going on throughout the economy.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you look at your iPhone and you
Speaker 2: adjust for quality, then deflation is definitely going on, definitely
Speaker 2: going on once you are just for quality when it
Speaker 2: comes to cars and food, et cetera.
Speaker 1: And deflate for all of the things the other gadgets
Speaker 1: you don't have to buy because your iPhone does all
Speaker 1: those things now precisely.
Speaker 2: So, wherever the market is allowed to function properly, wherever
Speaker 2: you have competition, you you know, prices tend to go
Speaker 2: down relative to labor. But that is not true for
Speaker 2: the entire economy. In healthcare, for example, or in education,
Speaker 2: when when you have a lot of government meddling, subsidies
Speaker 2: and restrictions to entry and so forth, you can actually
Speaker 2: have a situation where things become more expensive relative to
Speaker 2: working time. But places where the American economy is quite open,
Speaker 2: you know, where American farmers, for example, can work without
Speaker 2: too many regulations, or we can import stuff that we
Speaker 2: don't grow in the United States, things tend to go
Speaker 2: down in price.
Speaker 1: Man. There's so much good academic knowledge that you've offered. Man,
Speaker 1: I want to get into your personal story a little bit,
Speaker 1: which is fascinating. How and why this is meaningful to
Speaker 1: you because of how you grew up. We'll get to
Speaker 1: that and more right after this. We're still talking with
Speaker 1: Maria to be about how the world is getting better.
Speaker 1: Got a few more questions for you, Marion. I heard
Speaker 1: your co author Gail Pooley of superbund It say the
Speaker 1: difference between rich and poor is five years. What do
Speaker 1: you think he meant when he.
Speaker 2: Said that difference between rich and poor? Well, I don't know.
Speaker 2: By the way, Gail is the one who writes our
Speaker 2: articles on Thanksgiving, so please look out on Human Progress
Speaker 2: website for his latest take on Thanksgiving. But it could be.
Speaker 2: It could be, for example, life expectancy that rich people
Speaker 2: in the United States live longer than poor Americans, partly
Speaker 2: because of bad diet, but are other reasons as well,
Speaker 2: So I don't know specifically what he meant.
Speaker 1: I think one of the things he was referring to
Speaker 1: is the massive price decrease that happens when something new
Speaker 1: comes to the four right, So a new piece of
Speaker 1: some sort of new technology or some sort of new yeah,
Speaker 1: new progress that's made, and it's very expensive, Like early
Speaker 1: adopters end up paying gazillions of dollars sometimes for really
Speaker 1: expensive new things, and because they're willing to fork over
Speaker 1: a ton of money, the price goes down precipitously as
Speaker 1: producers start to make more of those that good for
Speaker 1: the masses. So especially as like a consumer just waiting
Speaker 1: for the price to go down, just waiting five years,
Speaker 1: you can have the same nice thing that the early
Speaker 1: adopter has, but you can pay a fraction of the price.
Speaker 2: Yes, I think that makes a lot of sense. I
Speaker 2: haven't heard Gail say that, but obviously it makes a
Speaker 2: lot of sense. I would recommend that everybody watches Wall
Speaker 2: Street where where the main protagonist walks on the beach
Speaker 2: with an early cell phone. This was in the mid
Speaker 2: nineteen eighties, and it looks like a brick and costs
Speaker 2: thousands of dollars, and basically the battery lasts for a
Speaker 2: couple of hours, and the phone calls are incredibly expensive.
Speaker 2: And today we have this miracle of iPhone, and God
Speaker 2: knows what we will have in the future. Maybe all
Speaker 2: the functionalities of the iPhone will be put into sunglasses
Speaker 2: or something like that, or maybe you know, microchip attached
Speaker 2: to our heads. So I'm very bullish on the future.
Speaker 2: And as Gail says, you know, the rich get there first,
Speaker 2: and they cause a lot of envy and resentment. But
Speaker 2: then things go down in price. Again, going back to
Speaker 2: the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpetter, it is that the beauty
Speaker 2: of capitalism it is that it reduces luxury goods to
Speaker 2: things that an ordinary person. And by my favorite example,
Speaker 2: since you are always interested in examples, is of course,
Speaker 2: what's happening to the price of diamonds now. Artificial diamonds,
Speaker 2: which are not really artificial because they are chemically and
Speaker 2: physically indistinguishable from natural diamonds, are so pervasive and their
Speaker 2: price is dropping so fast that even natural diamonds are
Speaker 2: becoming cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And so when you
Speaker 2: think about the very definition of luxury, which is a
Speaker 2: diamond necklace for Marie Antoinette or something like that. Even
Speaker 2: those things capitalism can make super abundant for the ordinary
Speaker 2: people like you and I.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this isn't just academic to you. Can you tell
Speaker 1: me maybe a little bit about growing up for you
Speaker 1: and the reality of growing up in a communist country specifically,
Speaker 1: it feels like this, this is highly academic to you,
Speaker 1: but it's also super personal.
Speaker 2: Well, it's highly academic to me because it's important to
Speaker 2: have facts in one's hands. But yes, it is personal
Speaker 2: to me as well, because I grew up behind the
Speaker 2: Iron Curtain. I grew up in communist Czechoslovakia, where, you know,
Speaker 2: we had constant shortages of basic necessities and not to
Speaker 2: mention lack of political freedom. So I grew up in
Speaker 2: a society which was very poor relative to the United States,
Speaker 2: and coming to the United States was an eye opener,
Speaker 2: you know, to be able to basically get access to
Speaker 2: so much at a relatively affordable cost was Yeah, it
Speaker 2: was a tremendous It was a tremendous improvement in my
Speaker 2: standard of living and also reminded me of the difference
Speaker 2: of what happens when you live in a society which
Speaker 2: doesn't allow the human spirit to flourish and a society
Speaker 2: which does allow human spirit to flourish. So, as an
Speaker 2: intellectual working at a think tank, I tried to it's
Speaker 2: my job to put things in an academic sort of
Speaker 2: way and lead with the evidence and reason. But there
Speaker 2: is a personal story here as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, Mary, this has been wonderful. I've really enjoyed
Speaker 1: talking to you. Do you have any like parting words
Speaker 1: or where would you like to send our audience for
Speaker 1: more information and more encouragement about how great the world
Speaker 1: is and how yeah, how do we partake in this
Speaker 1: abundance and enjoy it?
Speaker 2: Well, if I should put my philosophical pants on, what
Speaker 2: I would say to your listeners is the following. You
Speaker 2: are where you are in your life, and there are
Speaker 2: two different perspectives on your life you can take. You
Speaker 2: can compare your life to an idealized version of your
Speaker 2: life where you know everything is perfect, and if you
Speaker 2: do that, then you grow more and more resentful because
Speaker 2: no matter how well off you are compared to the
Speaker 2: ideal state of living, you're always going to come short,
Speaker 2: and so you grow resentful and envious and unhappy. But
Speaker 2: if you compare yourself, so to speak downwards, if you
Speaker 2: compare yourself to thousands of previous generations, and if you
Speaker 2: compare yourself to how people live in other parts of
Speaker 2: the world, then surely the prevalent emotion that you should
Speaker 2: have in your life is one of gratitude that you
Speaker 2: were born in the United States today rather than being
Speaker 2: born in the United States two hundred years ago or
Speaker 2: being born in Nigeria. So I think that having gratitude
Speaker 2: in your life and approach it that way can actually
Speaker 2: make you a happier person. I genuinely believe that happiness
Speaker 2: is a state of mind, and depending on what you
Speaker 2: focus on, you're either going to be miserable or you're
Speaker 2: going to be relatively happy. And that is basically what
Speaker 2: my life's work is devoted to. Please go and check
Speaker 2: out human progress dot org and sign up to our newsletter.
Speaker 2: It's just one email a week that will give you
Speaker 2: all the good news that has happened in the past week.
Speaker 2: And if you don't subscribe, then you will never know
Speaker 2: about it and you will go around breading doom and
Speaker 2: gloom rather than rather than having a much more cheerful disposition.
Speaker 1: Agreed. I think that's a great way to end it.
Speaker 1: And I will put a link to the newsletter sign
Speaker 1: up as well in the show notes up on our website. So,
Speaker 1: Marian Toopy, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Speaker 2: My absolute pleasure.
Speaker 1: Oh Man, what a great conversation. I'm so thankful that
Speaker 1: Marian was able to join me. He's such a busy guy,
Speaker 1: working on such important issues and trying to help us
Speaker 1: all understand a little bit better the world that we're
Speaker 1: living in. And it's one of those things, you know,
Speaker 1: the proverb of the elephants, where someone's holding the trunk,
Speaker 1: someone's holding the center, someone's holding the foot, and you
Speaker 1: don't feel like you're touching the same thing. And I
Speaker 1: think sometimes not knowing right our history, not knowing exactly
Speaker 1: how much progress we've made, not being able to put
Speaker 1: it into digestible terms, that can create more pessimism in
Speaker 1: our lives. And so I think of Mary and Twopy
Speaker 1: as not even an optimist, but as someone who's trying
Speaker 1: to bring real information that does show the good, the
Speaker 1: realistic good that's happening in our country, around the world,
Speaker 1: to he's reporting on it so that we can see
Speaker 1: the reality of the world we're living in more clearly.
Speaker 1: And I guess my big takeaway, I mean, what gosh,
Speaker 1: what better message than what he was saying at the end.
Speaker 1: It makes me think of Charlie Munger when he said
Speaker 1: former Warren Buffett partner. He said, the world is not
Speaker 1: driven by greed, it's driven by envy. And he said
Speaker 1: someone will always be doing better than you. This is
Speaker 1: not a tragedy. And Marian was talking about comparing our
Speaker 1: lives to the ideal and how we're bound to be
Speaker 1: even despite all the progress we make individually, we're bound
Speaker 1: to be not terribly happy if we're constantly comparing ourselves
Speaker 1: to the people around us, or to the ideal life
Speaker 1: we want to have that we don't have right now.
Speaker 1: And he said, stop worrying too much and enjoy life.
Speaker 1: I think that's a really good way to end this episode, where,
Speaker 1: especially this week of Thanksgiving, remember how much we have
Speaker 1: to be thankful for individually, just the non monetary aspects
Speaker 1: of our lives. I know I'll be giving thanks for
Speaker 1: so many things that have nothing to do with money,
Speaker 1: but the fact that I have more time in my
Speaker 1: life because of the abundance that is available to us
Speaker 1: because what he calls superabundance, right, because of all the
Speaker 1: progress that's been made over many decades, a couple of centuries. Really.
Speaker 1: Then this leads to my Thanksgiving meal costing less so
Speaker 1: that I can enjoy work less and enjoy more time
Speaker 1: with my family. So I hope you're able to have
Speaker 1: a wonderful Thanksgiving with people that you love. And I
Speaker 1: hope this episode was helpful to you in terms of
Speaker 1: how you perceive the world around you. Let's go out
Speaker 1: and be super grateful this week. All right, that's going
Speaker 1: to do it for this episode. Until next time, Best
Speaker 1: Friend Out.