← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Do These 12 Things First If You Want a Bright Future | Bjorn Lomborg PT 1
01:30:26
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- [00:00]
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- [01:00]
Tom Bilyeu
I've thought a lot about what I want impact theory as a show to be. I see it as having evolved through three phases. In phase one, I really wanted to help people establish their mindset through a useful belief system. In phase two, my goal was to help people deploy that mindset in their lives, relationships, careers, and more. Now in phase three, I want to help people learn how to approach novel problems. I don't think of myself as having answers, but I've certainly seen firsthand that you can accomplish a lot in life if you can rapidly build a useful framework for thinking through the most difficult problems. And that's precisely why I'm excited about today's episode with Bjorn Lomborg. Bjorn is known for his very counterintuitive approach to the world's most contentious problems. He's built an army of supporters and detractors alike, but I think honestly, that misses the point. Find most interesting about Bjorn isn't his exact stances on anything, including climate change. Rather, it's how he thinks about setting priorities. Bjorn and I go deep on how to evaluate novel, difficult problems and live and die by the religion of data. We get into some pretty fascinating territory in this episode, including whether it's evil or not to put a price on human life, why it's critical to avoid panicking when the stakes are high, how to avoid negativity bias, how the CIA used polio vaccines to catch Osama bin Laden, and how to get your priorities straight and make real progress, whether in your life or at the global scale. Without further ado, I'm Tom Bilyeu and I bring you Bjorn Lomborg Panic is
- [02:36]
Bjorn Lomborg
not any kind of mode to be in if you actually want to solve issues. Climate change is a problem, but it's not going to be the end of the world.
- [02:45]
Tom Bilyeu
You wrote a book called Best Things First. What? And we'll definitely get into the specific things that you recommend. But even more importantly than that, what I liked about the book is that you're helping people take a new way of thinking, which I think is incredibly important. So I want to linger for a second on the strategy that's being deployed right now. I think you and I agree that for the most part I'll be very generous and say I think people are well intentioned, but it does not seem to be working. So I want to. What do you think is their point? Are they trying to scare people more and more and more because they think that's the only way to get people to act?
- [03:24]
Bjorn Lomborg
If you listen to all those stories, you would be panicked. I totally understand why people think, oh my God. But what you need to understand is that if you actually look at the data, most things are getting better and better around the world in pretty much all kinds of ways, both in obvious ways. We live longer, not shorter. We're better off, we're better educated, all these things. And there's still lots and lots of stuff that needs to be done. We're not nearly well educated enough. We're still dying needlessly from lots of different things. And yes, climate change is a problem, but again, not the end of the world. How many people die from climate related disasters? Well, we have pretty good data over the last hundred years for people dying from floods, drought, storms and wildfires. If you look at how many people die, it used to be about half a million people each and every year on average in the 1920s. Today that number is down to around 18,000. So we've seen a reduction of about 97% in deaths. This has very little to do with climate, but everything to do with the fact that we've become much smarter, we've become much more resilient, we've lifted a lot of people out of poverty and that means they can actually afford to make sure they don't die from these very preventable problems. And that's of course, the crucial point. Climate change will create more problems, but it'll create more problems in a world that's headed in the right direction. It'll simply slow progress slightly. That's a very different kind of thing than saying it's the end of the world. So I think these Guys. So Greta Thunberg and others are just simply scared because they see this in the media picture. You also ask, why are a lot of other people pushing this agenda? If your thing is global warming or something, you want people to spend money on that. And so you're going to push all the stories that give you more leverage on that front.
- [05:22]
Tom Bilyeu
But so hold on because there's an assumption that you made there and I think this is part of the problem. So what I want to tease out, and honestly, I'm talking to myself as much as I'm talking to anybody. I have lately become very paranoid about AI. I'm normally a super optimistic guy and I can just feel the pull of my concern. And I have a rule in my own life where I distrust my own emotions. And when I. The reason I distrust my own emotions is I know that I have a negativity bias. I know that I am going to be way more likely to believe that something negative is true. I know that I'm way more likely to click on a link that says that we're all going to die. Like I get it. And as somebody building a YouTube channel, I know that, that if I put a way more like doom and gloom terrifying headline that people are going to click on it. But going back again to your book, Best Things first, the thing that draws me to you and, and, and I really do want to stay on this point for a second about the way that people think, how to get them to take action, what the right actions are to take. I think it is important to understand why we are where we are first so that people can begin to unwind it. Okay, so I'm talking to myself. What I'm trying to say is, okay, look, you have a negativity bias. People are going to try to rile you up through the negativity because that is the thing that's going to get you to take action. But what you just said, if you're somebody who's really gotten sucked into this, your mind is taken over by the panic and you think I want people to spend money on my problem. That to me is where this breaks. And this is where as an entrepreneur I in fact I just tweeted out today, I'm not trying to motivate or inspire people. I'm trying to empower them with goal oriented solutions that actually work. And so it's that, that actually work thing that I think we have to tease apart. So my point here is I don't think, I really hope that people don't want you to spend money on something. I hope that money spent for them is a proxy for. That's how we get results. And, and I think the very problem is we have to get people to stop talking about, this is where I want you looking. This is where I want you spending money and asking themselves what actually works. Does that make sense?
- [07:33]
Bjorn Lomborg
It totally makes sense. And this, of course, is exactly the way that I would think as well. You know, it's about, where do you get the biggest bang for your buck? Where do you actually get a lot of efficiency for every motivation and time and money spent, rather than where you don't. But I, but I think. So what I was trying to talk about is if you've sort of gotten engulfed in this one thing that's going to doom mankind, and that could be climate change, or it could be AI, then clearly you think there's a big meteor hurdling towards Earth. There's nothing else that matters. So I get that idea. And that's why I think we need to sort of take a timeout and say, well, that's not actually the case, certainly not for climate change. I would actually, I don't know if you know those guys. There's a, it's an existential threats center at Oxford University. They've looked into this and they, they would probably agree with you a lot more. With AI. This is not at all my thing, but that is actually something we should be concerned about. Toby Ord makes a very sort of rough what is going to kill mankind this century? And his climate change probably has a 1 in 100 chance of doing that. AI could be a third, you know, 33%. That's, that's a pretty big thing. So clearly, over the century, we should probably be spending more time looking into that. I have nothing smart to say about that. That's just not my thing.
- [08:58]
Tom Bilyeu
So I'll beg to differ with you on that. So I have often heard people in my position that are on camera for a living say, look, the way that I protect myself is I just never talk about things I don't know about. And I think that's the wrong approach. So the reason I believe that. So I, for a while, I was teaching a business class that I called Business Decision Making. The reason that I taught that class, because it is hard to convince people that that is the class they need. Because if I said copywriting, $100 million copywriting tactics, people will sign up for that class all day long. Now, the reason I don't teach that class is that you can Hire somebody else to do that. But if you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to be able to think through novel problems.
- [09:40]
Bjorn Lomborg
So.
- [09:41]
Tom Bilyeu
Meaning not only a problem you've never thought about before, a problem no one has thought about before. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but what I see you doing in your shift, because everything that I know about you up until Best Things first is climate, climate, climate. But Best Things first does not read like a climate book at all to me. So I was like, ooh, here is a guy that again, I'm going to put words in your mouth for a second and then you can speak for yourself. So here's how it feels from the outside and for people that don't know you and I met 90 seconds before we started rolling. We do not know each other at all. But reading your book, watching a ton of interviews, all of that, the thing that I put together is you beat your head against the climate thing forever and ever and ever and it didn't work and you now have stepped back to say the point I've been trying to make this whole time is you just have to prioritize. And so I think so going back to, just to tie these ideas together, I don't think you should at all worry about talking about a subject that you don't know, as long as you're approaching it from a framework of thought perspective. Here is how I would approach that problem. Because my gut instinct is that trying to tell people that there isn't an asteroid hurtling towards Earth in the form of AI, in the form of climate change, whatever, that's a losing proposition. It's never going to. People are in the grips of panic. So now my thing is just like, okay, cool, there's an asteroid hurtling towards Earth. It is climate change. Now what do we do about it? Now I understand the nuances of your argument well enough to know the reason that you're trying to de escalate people is because when panicked you make short term decisions. Because if you think we're only going to be here for five years, you only think about solutions that can be enacted in five years. So I get that. But I want to stay at a 30,000 foot view on the way to think through a novel problem first and then we can sort of get sucked into the weeds. We are going to, for people listening, we are going to go through the 12 things, we're going to talk about what you need to do. But I want to do it as an example of how to apply your framework of thought against incredibly Difficult, novel problems. So one, how, how does that sound in terms of beat my head against the wall with climate forever and ever and now I'm just switching my pitch up instead. I'm going to get you excited about things that will actually work. And it is a bit of a magic trick of like, okay, I'm just going to take you over to, to the thing that is going to hopefully get you excited about saving millions, potentially billions of people with way easier solutions.
- [12:14]
Bjorn Lomborg
So there's a lot of truth to this. I should just say I've actually been doing both. So I've both been talking about climate for the last 20 years and I've been talking about all the other problems like tuberculosis and education in the third world for at least 18 years or thereabouts. But the point is, everyone in the rich world only ever want to talk about climate change because that's what interests people in the rich world. Whenever I talk in the poor half of the world, they all want to hear about all these solutions. So in that sense, I'm just happy that best things first is the first real chance I've gotten to make this argument for everyone else as well. So I've been trying to do both things at the same time and I think it's the same. It's the flip side of that coin. Look, climate change is a real problem, but we shouldn't let that dominate so much that we end up only spending money or primarily spending all of our resources there. Just like TB and, sorry, tuberculosis and education and all these other things are big problems, but they shouldn't suck up all our attention, they should suck up some of our attention and we should spend it correctly. And so I'm basically trying to say worry less about climate, but be smart about it. And there are some amazing ways you can actually help fix climate change, but likewise, be maybe a little bit more concerned about tuberculosis and education than we are right now. Oh, but there are really, really smart ways to do that, and here are some of them. So I think it's the same sort of approach. It's simply to say what works, what do we know actually work? And I think that's probably the difference between what I've been talking about in the book and I've been talking about the last 20 years. There are a lot of things we know either work or don't work. On the AI side, I'm a little worried and again, I'm talking a little bit out of my field, but my sense is we don't know what works and what doesn't work in the same way. So it's much more sort of a probing place. And that's. So I like to sort of basically support myself on all these other smart guys who've actually already looked across the field and said, you know what? That policy in climate doesn't work. You know what? That policy for tuberculosis is incredible. But I, I don't. I haven't seen anything that says in, in. In AI, this is what stupidly doesn't work, or this is what really works. It. It seems more like a nebulous kind of, we worry, but we're not quite sure what to do. And then I, I'm not the right guy to come because I basically just try to say, here's a lot of period research that shows us this is dumb, this is smart, let's do the smart stuff first.
- [14:58]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. So that's why I think you're the guy to talk to. And I get it. Look, I get the impulse, and maybe one day I will get drugs so much in the public sphere that I'll be like, I give up. But business has taught me one immutable truth. You must learn to think through novel problems, which means you need a rubric by which you think through things you have not yet encountered. So I would not expect you, or right now, quite frankly, anybody, to know what the answer is to, to AI for sure, maybe not even to climate change. But I would very much expect there to be a bifurcation between people that know the data and then people that simply know how to approach the problem. And so, you know, I beseech everyone watching this interview, you may not know the data on a subject, but if you can build a rubric by which you know how to approach a problem, then you really have something. So that's what I want this interview to be, that you and I are going to approach these. These very difficult problems so that we can expose the way you think. Again, I don't know you personally, but you have quickly become one of the people where I'm like, whoa, I see the way by which you approach problems, and I find it very, very useful. One of the things you've said that I think will be a big theme as we talk today is data is my religion. I don't even know if you remember saying it, because it was like an offhanded comment to somebody that was like, trying to push you in a different direction. Uh, you were like, I don't know anything about religion. Data is my religion. I was like, oh, word. Uh, so I, I Took that note and I was like, yes. So as an entrepreneur, if your data, if, if data isn't your religion, you will fail like that. That is just a, a guarantee. Okay, so framing the problem within that idea, I want to, to start building the basis by which I think people ought to approach hard problems. And you let me know if this makes sense to you. So first and foremost, I don't think you can about solving any problem until you say what I'll call your North Star. What is your North Star? Meaning what are you optimizing for? Because earlier you were saying, I just want to do what works. What do you mean works? So like, you, you have to define that. So one, I would like to know what is your North Star and what, when you say do the best things first. The best for what?
- [17:19]
Bjorn Lomborg
Yes, that's a very good question. That is really the fundamental point. So what I really try to get people to think about is there is a methodology that has been used for at least half a century, which is called benefit cost analysis, that basically tries to look at how much does a solution or a policy or something cost and how much good does it do. And I'll get back to just defining what exactly is good. But, but it, it sort of makes sense if you just think about it without, you know, probing too, too deeply. We all do this in our private lives. And if you run a business, clearly you need to ask, how much is this going to cost, how much good is it going to deliver? And then get a ratio. That's why we typically talk in sort of, you spend a dollar and you get how many dollars are good for the world back. So the basic is really, really simple. Then the question is, what is the good? The cost is typically fairly obvious. That's often that you actually have to hand out dollars. It's also that you have to spend time, you have to spend other people's time. You have to inconvenience them in a lot of different ways. And we have a lot of ways that we try to calculate that, but mostly it's just cost. But the benefit side is a different thing. And that's where you say good. Good for who? What is it that works? And again, economists have spent a long time on doing this. It's not the same thing to say that they are right or this is the only way to think about it, but I think it's a pretty reasonable way to try to estimate it. So we say, look, there are three important things in most people's evaluation of what's good. It's good if you can make people, save people's lives or save them from having pain or suffering in some way or another. That's the social impact, if you will. Then it's good if you can save the environment, that is, you have more wetlands or you have less pollution or something that you, that you don't kill off species, those kinds of things. So environmental benefits. And then it's good if you get people out of poverty. If you give them more resources, you have more opportunity. That's economy, or as the UN likes to say, it's people, planet and prosperity. So it's a way to try to say there are these three different areas and we try to model those very specifically. So, for instance, for people, we try to estimate what is the value of saving, on average, one human life. Now, very clearly, most people would tend to say, but that's infinite. But if you actually, if you're going to spend money and try to see, if I spend money here, I can save on average one life, and if I can spend money here, I can save three lives, then it's kind of obvious I should probably do the three lives. But if you could also spend that money, say on education or something else, and make people $30,000 richer, then what should you do? Well, we probably all agree, well, you should save three lives rather than make $30,000, but what it was $30 million, would that be better? You know, at some point there's going to be a changeover, certainly $30 billion. We'd probably say, yeah, we should probably do the $30 billion. And we do this all the time in, you know, in public works, for instance, you have states deciding. I come from a place here in Sweden where the state runs a lot more. So excuse me, if, if I'm running a little afoul of some of the US centric ways of thinking about it, right. But the state will go in and say, here's a pretty dangerous traffic area where people are. There's an intersection, and there's quite a number of people that die if we put in a roundabout, or do you call it a traffic circle?
- [21:20]
Tom Bilyeu
We do. We call it a roundabout, but we basically don't have them. So I'm married to a Brit, so I'm very familiar. But the average American is like, what?
- [21:29]
Bjorn Lomborg
Yeah. Yes. So you drive around in a circle instead. It slows you a little bit down, but it also pretty much excludes all accidents. So you can save people's lives putting in a roundabout or a traffic circle. But it also has cost. It has cost and actually putting it up and also slows people down. There's a very clear trade off and lots of people so Department of Transportation in the US and many other places actually have very clear routines for how much are they willing to pay to put up this roundabout or put a center divider into a busy road so people don't accidentally go into the opposing traffic and cause huge traffic?
- [22:10]
Tom Bilyeu
Let me ask you something though, that I think some people are going to be thinking, is it not evil to put a price on human life?
- [22:18]
Bjorn Lomborg
It feels evil. It feels like surely you shouldn't be doing that, but not doing that. And I think that's, that's back to your sort of 30,000ft view. Not putting a price on human lives, just saying everything is important gives you no direction. Because what we're really trying to do is to give you a sense of how much good will you achieve if you spend a dollar here where you'll have some people that are lifted out of poverty, some environmental benefits and some lives saved compared to this other place where you can get the same sort of things but in different proportions. How are you going to compare those two if you don't actually make it into an explicit conversation about how much are you willing to do? And I think it's also important to say we all do this individually. One way to say that is if people take more dangerous jobs, they ask for a wage increase. This happens universally, but people are also happy to do a more dangerous job. If you get what the Brits call danger pay, if you get a little more money, all right, then I'll take a little more risk. Or perhaps the best way to look at it, you're willing to cross the street to buy a candy bar, but crossing the street has a non zero risk of death. You're essentially saying, I'm willing to take on a slight risk of death to have candy. And we do these things all the time.
- [23:51]
Tom Bilyeu
I'm obsessed with something I call frame of reference. So we all have a frame of reference that is built of our beliefs and values. Those are the two biggest ones. But usually people build their frame of reference entirely by accident. It's based on where they grew up, what their parents celebrated, the, you know, potential lover that scorned them. Whatever you, you end up crafting a view of what is true about yourself in the world and what ought to be true about usually the world. So you, you craft this framework, but you don't realize you've done it. You don't realize that you're making all these trade offs all the time. And when you go to, especially in a political realm, when you go to campaign for a policy or something like that, no one ever talks about this idea of the North Star. I am optimizing for this. And in business you learn real quickly you've got to talk about some gnarly things because it's like we just have to ruthlessly prioritize. We just, I'm going to do this, I'm willing to spend that. Because when I think about my own product, for instance, so one of the things that we sell is education. And I'm like, why don't we give it away for free? And the answer is, because my employees won't work for free. Why won't my employees work for free? Like if they could really do good. But it's, it's a self evident question. But nobody stops to go, okay, I get how this whole chain works. I get that nobody's going to work for free. And that's okay. And so beginning to pull all these things into the light, stop letting them be invisible assumptions and visible values. And, and this is why I think you have to ask the question, is it evil to put a price on a human life? Your answer is correct. You can't do anything unless you know what your trade offs are. But, and, and now this is where I know your punchline is that there, I forget the group, the UN put out 169 sustainable goals, right? And gave ourselves 30 years to get there.
- [25:50]
Bjorn Lomborg
50.
- [25:50]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, 50. Okay, we're halfway there and we, we have basically made no progress. And so that's where it's like, well, we spent a lot of money but we haven't made the demand that we get results. So again, this is why I say you have to pull your North Star into the light. Now the one thing is, you gave me three and this is part of where I think people go awry. So I'm very curious. So we've got people, Planet Prosperity, I love those. But I, people are going to have to knowingly bring that balance out of the realm of the just sort of, we assume we're not really talking about it into, let's talk about it. Like, where are the breaking points? Because I, so I have a North Star. Everything I do in my life is about increasing human flourishing and decreasing human suffering for as many people as possible, while at the same time I'm the center of my life, right? So I don't give everything away to become a popper to make sure that everybody else is taken care of, maybe that makes me a worse person. I'm perfectly willing to entertain that argument, but I'm at least honest with myself about what I do. So for me, human flourishing is already sort of this balanced equation between people and life I think is a less easy way to remember it maybe, but life, so you're not dying and prosperity. And I think, I don't know if everybody will agree with this, but to me the environment is merely people sort of groping around for what helps with life and prosperity. And I think they go to well, if the planet isn't here, if we're damaging it and we diminish our ability over time to live and be prosperous. So that one to me is already sort of, that's a maybe path to these two things. But these two things are ultimately the one that we have to pull into the light and focus on. Agree or disagree?
- [27:48]
Bjorn Lomborg
I mostly agree. I think you're absolutely correct if you think for instance about air pollution. The most damaging part about air pollution is that you die. So again, it's really just down to that. And likewise you just mentioned if there are no life forms, we're all going to die because of that. So that's why we would sort of selfishly really want to preserve them. But I do think that the environment conversation goes further than that. So once you're out of extreme poverty and you sort of get into the middle class or the rich part of the world, you can also start saying I'd actually like to know that there are whales out in the ocean. Even though I'm never going to meet them and I don't really care about them and they're not in any reasonable way going to impact my life or not. I just like the fact that they're there or I like the fact that there is, you know, a lot of tropical jungle in, in Brazil. Even if I never going to see it. And it's certainly not really going to impact my. So we also have this, this value that it's just good stuff is there. And, and so I think it's, it's more a way of really making sure that everyone comes into this conversation that we're saying we're actually valuing all of these things so not just. It can come across as a little crass and very human centric. Look, if the penguins really don't do anything for me, you know, kind of thing, but we can actually like the fact that they're just penguins and it's cool that they're there and I'm willing to spend something. Remember, we're not willing to spend everything right. We, we certainly care more about making sure that our own kids and our own surroundings are well done. But I think it's fine to bring in all of them. But obviously for most people it's more about life, then it's about prosperity and then it's about environment.
- [29:49]
Tom Bilyeu
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- [30:49]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so as you begin to try to prioritize those things, what is the methodology that you look at? It seems that analysis, which is where you started, is one of the sort of big pillars for you. So given because I, I want to acknowledge this is incredibly complicated. And even as we pull our North Star into focus and we can all say, we can debate, obviously at the level I don't expect everyone to share my breakdown of what I think the North Star ought to be, but at least then we can debate it because it's a known quantity. But whatever anybody comes up with actually implementing that, when you have whatever eight and a half billion people that all have sort of competing ways of going about something, competing views, et cetera, et cetera, competing levels of awareness, it, it just, it gets incredibly complicated very, very fast. So again, going back to the framework for the conversation for me is how do we begin to untangle these very difficult situations? Okay, so North Star, we've got it. You've laid out yours, I've laid out mine. That next thing then becomes how do you. I'll put words in your mouth again and tell me how close I'm getting. You use cost benefit analysis as the way to not decomplexify but navigate the complexity of the real world, which we probably have to talk about, because I think present in your thinking is the assumption that implementing fixes is brutally difficult. And, and so having fantasy like, wouldn't it be great if we could. X, Y, Z is nonsensical. And I feel like that's what you're approaching with the idea of doing the best things first.
- [32:32]
Bjorn Lomborg
Yeah, I hear that. I'll get back to that in just a second. So. So I want to pull back a little bit and actually say cost benefit analysis is not very complicated in principle. It's of course, very, very complicated if you actually have to do the Excel sheet. Yes. But fortunately you can say, look, I trust that really smart guys have done this. I'd like to just look a little bit over their shoulder and see some of the things that have gone into the mix. But then I can see people doing that. But the simple part, the conceptual part, is actually fairly simple. And that is all there is to this conversation for me. And again, remember, this is not how I live my life. I'm not saying that's the only way you should live your life, but that's the way that I'm trying to help. The policy conversation of what should we do as a community or as a nation or as philanthropist or whatever. This is being helped by looking at the costs and the benefits in some sense. We compare this a little bit to saying, imagine going into a restaurant and getting this big menu of all the things that you can get, but there's no prices and no sizes in there. You have no idea what you're going to pay for all these things that you might order, and you have no idea what, what size you're going to get. So when you order a pizza, you have no Idea if it's a dollar or $1,000 for this pizza, and you have no idea if it's like, you know, this tiny little pizza or this, you know, the, the big thing that'll feed your whole group and more. You need to know. So we're basically trying to put prices and sizes on society's menu. We're going to tell you it'll cost this much based on a lot of evidence and stuff, and it'll do this much good. Now, at the end of the day, you might still then end up saying, look, I get that you're telling me spinach is incredibly cheap and it's good for you, but I don't like spinach. I'm just not going to buy it. And that's Fine. We can then go through that menu afterwards and say, no, I'm not going to have that. But at least we'll give you some direction to make smarter choices. I think that's how we think about it. And the cost and benefit analysis is really just a very simple way of giving us something where we can see, ooh, this gives a lot of bang for the buck. This gives a very small bang for your buck. Maybe we should do the big bang for the buck first on that. Then come some of those sort of things that go into the mix of how do we do that? One is, as we talked about, what's the value of human life? And there's a lot of legislation and analysis of this. In the U.S. for instance, in 9, 11, there was that whole question of what should you compensate the. The families of the people who died in 9, 11, how much should they be compensated? And should people who made more money be compensated more because they didn't have as much they would have. They've lost? Yeah. This is a big, you know, sort of philosophical, but very clearly a very big issue here. What most people would say is that most of the value, there's certainly some value in lost income in the future, but most of the value is simply a value that we ascribe that all human beings have, that all human beings are in some sense equally worth. And so in the US that number both from the Environmental Protection Agency and from Department of Transportation and many others. And it also comes out of that whole thing of how much are you willing to get paid extra for a dangerous job? That sort of suggests that it's about $10 million per life. This does not mean that you would imagine anyone being willing to sort of sign off their life for $10 million. That's not what that means. But it means that we as a society sort of say, look, if we can save one life for less than 10 million, we'll probably put up that roundabout or that center divider or whatever. If it's going to cost us a lot more than 10 million, we'll probably not. If, if it'll just save one life. That's how. That's about the cutoff point. And this is going to make people feel uncomfortable. But there has to be a cutoff point somewhere. You know, if you're willing to spend a million, sure, 100 million. No, we're not going to do it. Somewhere in between, there has to be that cutoff point. And that, with a lot of research, seems to be about $10 million. Now. It's important before we go on that this is true for a very wealthy country like the U.S. not true for really poor countries. One way you can see that is if you go to the US everybody drives fairly safe cars and they'll just have one person in each seat and they'll have a seat belt and all kinds of stuff and they'll have airbags and stuff. Go to, you know, India or another much poorer country and you, you'll have people sitting all over TR with no airbags and no seat belts and stuff. And it's not because they don't want, they, they, they care less about dying than we do. It's just that they can't afford to care as much because they have many other competing demands. And so it turns out that in India and many other places, the value of a human life where the cutoff point is, is much, much lower. And so in our estimates for the poor half of the world, the low and lower middle income countries is about 120. Sorry, I should know this number and now I'm getting old, I'm getting uncertain about it. It's $128,000. That feels very unreasonable. Surely it should be the same in the rich and the poor countries. But no, if it was, if we really meant that we would spend all of our healthcare spending all of our money that we're currently spending in the US we'd be spending it in India. And we're not. Because again, as we talked about, most people in America care about people in America, most people in Sweden care most about people in Sweden and so on. And that's, there's nothing wrong about that. We just got to be honest. And putting this out in the open is both going to make it very honest and obvious, but it's also going to be a little uncomfortable.
- [38:47]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay. So to that point, I think this is a big part of the strategy of panic. And I don't want to be naive. I know that there are some people that use panic as a power grab. So if they can get you worried, they can get you controlled under their thumb and doing what they want. But, but again, for the sake of this conversation and just for my own sort of sanity and worldview, I'm going to set that aside and just assume that people have good intentions. So to wrap that idea up, we have people that, and I want to steel man the argument for a second. So you have people that are they really believe that there is an asteroid headed towards Earth. And again, I don't care what they think is the worst Thing, nuclear war, AI climate is, is irrelevant. I think the, you think through the problem the same way. So there is an existential threat that we're facing and the only way to get people to pay attention and to act is by really getting them worried. They understand that we have a negativity bias. They understand that. I mean I, I can triple quintuple views on a video just by putting a fear inducing headline which to anybody that follows me, hey, we are, we are doing our best to back away from that, but that is, it's really effective. And so they look at that as a tool and they say, look, I have their best interests at heart. Hey everybody, I'm, I'm trying to help you sincerely. And I'll say you put them in an FMRI machine and they, they pass like they really are trying to help you. Their empathy centers are lit up, their compassion centers are lit up. They are trying to do good in the world. And so in an effort of trying to do good, they're, they want to panic you. And then when that gets them, let's say 10% of where they want to go, they go, oh, I need to panic you ten times more. And so they just keep like really freaking people out. So I actually understand the tactics. So what I want to understand is do you think a little bit of panic is good and it's a spectrum and it breaks. Do you think that that's just fundamentally the wrong way to think about it? How do we, because I, as we get into to best things first and the specifics, I think you have sort of abandoned that strategy altogether.
- [41:02]
Bjorn Lomborg
Yes. So I would, I guess, I guess my answer would be twofold. So I would, I certainly try to not deal in panic because as, as we started off talking about, it's very hard to imagine that that actually helps you make smarter decisions. But also I think in some ways it's not like me saying we shouldn't panic and we should take that panic out, that there's not going to be a lot of panic in the world anyway. So I, I, I tend to see the world very much as a marginal conversation. And I'm simply trying to set out some unpanicked advice that in a pretty panicked world can help us be a little smarter. And, and I think that's the right way to do it. So I'm basically saying, look, if you look at this world and look at it without panic, but simply ask what kind of things can you do and how much will they cost and how much good will they do for People, planet and prosperity and then you have a sense of, oh, that might be the right thing to do. Now again, if, if, if you're then looking at the, the menu and I've said, oh, these are very cost effective and these are terribly cost ineffective. Maybe you've just heard about, did you hear about this? Aspartame is now giving you cancer, which is, you know, I don't know if you saw fa, FDA actually came out and said, come on guys, you know, this is very unusual. It's just, it's just one of those many things, you know, that you, you get health advice. But maybe you're going to be looking at my menu and say, oh, but that has aspartame in it. So that's, that's the only thing I'm concerned about. Fine, you know, if that makes sense for you. But at least I'm trying to give you unpanicked advice and I think that that's helpful and if it helps some people move to more towards smarter policies, that's great.
- [42:54]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so that makes a lot of sense to me. I want to take a biological approach to this. I think it, I think it's very important for people to understand you're having a biological experience. If you can understand yourself through the lens of biology, you're going to be able to make way more rational decisions. The reason I think panic in the final analysis is not the way to go is you're triggering the sympathetic nervous system. You're putting people into fight or flight, like even looking. And I am, I am but a headline reader when it comes to climate in general and really just a headline reader when it comes to Greta, but you know, seeing the, the really emotional outpouring, the you know, fear of like, I don't have a future and crying and really like expressing a lot of distress. Again, assuming that that is all really sincere. And I have not seen anything that makes me believe she is anything but 100% sincere. The blood is leaving your prefrontal cortex which is the seat of higher level cognition. So you've moved yourself into an incredibly emotional state which will get you to act, but it won't get you to be rational. It won't get you to do cost benefit analysis. And as somebody who really believes my mission in life is to empower people with goal oriented things that actually help them, that work in the real world. Lesson maybe not lesson number one, but lesson number two or three is you. You, you must get control of your emotions. You must be really skeptical. Emotions are necessary. We can't make decisions without them. I'm not saying be a robot. Some of the most amazing things in life are driven by emotion. But you really have to have a skeptical eye towards what emotions do to your physiology and whether that puts you in a position where you're making the best decisions or not. And I'll put it to people like this. Let's say you're on national television and you have to win at a game of Jeopardy. Whatever. Do you really want to be crying hysterically during that? Do you want to be anxiety through the roof, or do you really want to be rational, calm, at ease? And I think part of what makes your message struggle for the kind of attention. I will say I watched a debate with you where the audience got to vote on who was most persuasive. From your opening, there were three of you. You were the most, I would say, just sort of rational, like, hey, we need to do things to improve the world and we just have to be cost benefit analysis about it. And the other two were some variation of you need to be really worried. And this is either sort of a, a middle problem or this is like full blown panic. And it just ranked. Full blown Panic had the most votes, Middle Panic had middle votes. And then your column rational was in third place. And the more you guys talked, the more it just settled into those three positions. And so the reason that I think that you aren't in positions like that, you don't just naturally spring to the top, even though I found your arguments the most compelling, is because it isn't putting people in an emotionally heightened state, but is also more likely to get a more thoughtful, useful path to execution. All right. Anything I said there that feels incorrect for where you're at and how you see things.
- [46:13]
Bjorn Lomborg
No, no, I totally agree. And, and again, I also think I, I get the idea of saying I'm certainly not going to win any popularity contests with, with, with just sort of making a very rational and calm argument. But I think when, when a lot of people and I, I hear this a lot, when you sort of give people this alternative view, then when you've calmed down because you know you can't be in panic all the time, you, you start sort of to think about, well, maybe that guy who, who just had that comm argument. That's not, that's not totally off. And again, my point is simply to take a, a world that's pretty panic and make us slightly smarter. And you know, I'm, I'm all happy if, if that helps a little bit. If we push ourselves in the right direction. I write in the book, and this is also my, my think tank, one of our sort of core ideas. Our goal is not to make everything right, although I'd love that. But it's about making the world slightly less wrong. So, you know, I'm simply trying to push in the right direction and anything I can do to. To help that, then I'm happy.
- [47:20]
Tom Bilyeu
No, I love that. One thing that I, I am very troubled by because of my own limited cognitive abilities is another issue with the. The rational arguments that we're going to go through here in Best Things first is holding a nuanced position is very difficult in that it's just hard to explain. It's hard to explain to other people, it's hard to explain to yourself. But it's very easy to say AI is going to kill us all. It's very easy to say that we're not all the ice caps are going to melt and the sea level is going to rise by six feet and we're just going to all be obliterated. Those are easy positions to hold on to. Right? Like, I saw a headline that said hot takes in in a. A world that's heating up or something like that. I was like, oh, that's just so linguistically clever. And it, like, it's easy to hold on to those ideas, but it's far more difficult to walk people through the nuanced position of, well, innovation is really going to combat a lot of that. And for a while, I don't know that it's still true, but for a while, actually global warming was causing more ice to form in Antarctica. So in the Arctic Circle it was melting, but in the Antarctic it was. It was freezing. It didn't, I don't think, last for very long. But it's like you get these very complicated things, so that's hard. Whereas the other side is easy. And again, I'm talking to myself here, like I understand. I'm over here taking notes because ideas will pop into my head and be, oh, God, if I don't write this down, that sort of nuanced understanding of this moment will, Will pass me by. And so I'm saying all of this because I really want people to begin thinking through how. How is it that I, Timmy, Sally, you know, Jimmy Jerome out there, how do I make decisions? How do I think through these different things and, and really begin to crystallize that in a way that allows them to, to think well through problems. Okay, so with that setup, you end up going from being known for or having written books about climate to now you're writing books about these. This other side that you said that you've been dealing with already for 18 plus years, which highlight your North Star as being. You've walked us through it. So people, planet prosperity are the words typically used around these things. That feels like it sits pretty well with your view. So how did you come up with the 12? I know the 12 aren't in any particular order if I remember correctly, but what was the criteria for the 12 that you chose? And if you can like even just run us through a handful of them to orient people to what this is.
- [49:52]
Bjorn Lomborg
Yes. So let me just take, take the background for this first. And that was what you mentioned with the 169 targets. So the UN has actually set targets for all kinds of things for 2030. You know, this is a, well, intentional list of saying we want to make for a better world. So it runs from 2016 to 2030. So this year is we're at halfway to, sorry, we're at halftime for these goals, but we're nowhere near halfway. And that's basically the point because the UN ended up basically promising everything to everyone. So they talk about we should get rid of poverty, we should get rid of hunger, we should get rid of corruption and war and climate change, and we should fix infectious diseases. Oh, and chronic diseases too. And we should also make sure that there's no want for any other kind of thing. And we should have better university education, we should have good jobs for everyone and we should have organic apples for everyone and community gardens and the whole thing. And you're sort of like, really, you know. Yes, of course. You know, I would love this world where we had everything to everyone. But clearly if you're promising everything to everyone, you have no priorities. You're literally not giving any direction. You're just saying all good things in apple pieces.
- [51:17]
Tom Bilyeu
But why is that bad? So that, that sounds amazing and I think part of people's hang up is what's the problem? Like, that sounds awesome. Yes, let's do it. And we have Bjorn. There are so many people in the world. There's so much wealth. Like, come on, come on. Can't. Can't Elon Musk solve these problems by himself?
- [51:35]
Bjorn Lomborg
So I can put it to you in a way I love, which is just numbers. So if you try to cost how much this is going to cost, it'll probably cost an additional 10 to 15 trillion dollars. To give you a sense in proportion. Right now, the global tax Intake of all governments in the world is $15 trillion. So we basically have to double global taxes. I don't think anyone is going to vote for that. We just don't have enough money to do all these things.
- [52:08]
Tom Bilyeu
So hold on, because I think we have to attack some of the common misconceptions. I think people are okay with that and I think that they would say, yeah, yeah, I'm middle class, so it just doesn't really apply to me. But tax the corporations, tax the rich, and we're good. Like, I don't think if you were to pull the world for whatever that means, I think they'd be like, yeah, double taxes.
- [52:31]
Bjorn Lomborg
Okay, that's certainly not my. But that's interesting because I haven't actually asked people that question. But of course you would end up paying. At the end of the day, you know this. Given that the global GDP is only this large, about $100 trillion, this is 15% of global income each and every year. This is going to have to go out from something else that you otherwise would have had. So this is real money that is not going to be available to you. That's why I'm simply trying to make the point of saying we don't have enough resources to deliver everything to everyone. And so we are going to end up making hard priorities. But if we don't talk about them, they'll end up being priorities that are set instead by some things grabbing a lot more attention in the global sphere. And they get some funding and then lots and lots of things get very little attention. And hence we don't end up spending any money on it. That's, of course why we're failing on all of these targets. So the UN Secretary General, they've been pushing this for a very long time. They came out with what I thought was a surprisingly honest report a couple of months ago and basically said, we're failing on all of these targets. We're failing. They didn't say this, but we're failing because we've tried to say let's do everything, which means there's no direction. What should you spend on next?
- [53:56]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so I'm gonna. I wanna pause you there for a second and then we'll certainly get into why priorities matter. But I want to address directly this, the taxing. So whenever you can solve something with a thought experiment, do. And so I think in the answer that you just gave there, we've already run the experiment of whether more taxes are going to solve the problem. So if we're trying to tackle a certain subset of these problems with enough resources that we still aren't getting the desired outcome. And so pouring more money into the problem is not going to create the solution that you want. And I can't remember if I read this in the book or if I've just heard you talk about it in interviews, but there was a South American country that doubled their investment into education and it did not yield Indonesia. Excuse me, walk people through that. As, as. But one example of how oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes the answer isn't more money, it's better strategy or better priorities.
- [55:02]
Bjorn Lomborg
Yes. So this, this, this goes for education. And almost everyone in the world would agree that education is incredibly important and there's a huge lack of education everywhere, but of course, most, most crucially for the world's poor half. So we have about half a billion, almost half a billion kids in primary school in the poor half of the world. And while they're in school and they're at least technically learning to read, they can't actually process really, really simple sentences. So give them a sentence that says, vijay has a red hat, blue shirt and yellow shoes. What color is the hat? Now, the answer is red. Right, but, but 80% of these kids cannot answer this after having read this sentence. They can sort of process the individual words, but it just doesn't glue together.
- [55:57]
Tom Bilyeu
In their native language.
- [55:59]
Bjorn Lomborg
Yes, this is in their native language. Yes.
- [56:01]
Tom Bilyeu
Whoa, whoa, whoa. How, how big of a sample size is this one country? This is just Indonesia.
- [56:06]
Bjorn Lomborg
This is, this is UNESCO. I believe it's about 40, 50,000 kids from across the poorer half of the world. So we're very.
- [56:18]
Tom Bilyeu
In multiple countries.
- [56:19]
Bjorn Lomborg
Yeah, yeah, yeah. In many different countries. We're very short. Yes. What that means is you've taught them to be able to say red hat. Okay, red hat. But, but they haven't actually learned to glue that together into a sentence that they can sort of make meaning of if you say it to them. Of course they can actually solve the problem because they, I mean, they're, they're well aware of how to navigate a world where you tell them stories, that kind of thing, but they don't read a sentence. They read the individual words. Right. And this is one of the many, many problems. There's a lot of these kinds of indicators. So there's a lot of really, really. There's a lot of people with really, really poor education. They've technically learned stuff, but they don't actually have that ability. And that, of course, hugely affect their own futures. And it also affect their country's futures. Because this is what makes you rich. If you're well educated, you can actually process a lot of stuff, you can become incredibly productive. That gives you a salary, but also makes your country rich. And that's why this is so important. So Indonesia, as one of many, have, you know, they actually put their, their wallet where their voices were and said, look, we really care about education, so we're going to double our spending in education. So they, they went from 10% of the state budget to 20% of their state budget. They, so they basically made a lot more money available. Remember, their economy has also grown, so it's actually more than a doubling. But what they basically did was they hired another, more, a little more than a million extra teachers. So they dramatically reduced class sizes and they doubled the spending, sorry, the pay for each teacher, which is, you know, incredible. Imagine that you actually have all that available money. And because of the way they did it, so they did it in different regions at different times, you can actually do a pseudo random controlled trial study, basically looking at where they did it first, you should see the impacts first and then where they did it later, you should see the impact later. And there's this very famous study that's been hugely cited that tried to do exactly that. And it's called, and you can sort of tell the outcome from the title, it's called Double for Nothing. So what they found was that despite doubling spending on education, there was no outcome, there was no change in the educational outcome. Now, the teachers were happier, which of course is a nice thing, but presumably not your primary objective from spending more money in the educational system. And we already knew that. And again, this goes back to. We have lots and lots of information about what works and what doesn't work. More money for teachers is great for teachers, but it doesn't have much impact or any impact at all. Class sizes are only very little impact. There are lots of things that don't work in education. There's a few things that do work. And so what I'm trying to basically push is to say, look, we have this. So the World bank has put together a huge list of very, very large. It's a paper, but it really is a book of all the things that we've ever tested in education. And they find that half of all the things that you think work don't, most of the other things almost don't. And then there's a few things that do. And so what I'm trying to say is, look, if you want to do education do the stuff that really works. Yes. It's not the thing that's going to get, you know, obviously teachers would like doubling pay for teachers to work. I totally get that. But you know, parents also like to have smaller class sizes because it feels like that should really work. And yes, it does work a little bit, but it's very, very costly because you need to hire a lot more teachers. So what we try to emphasize is there's an incredibly effective way to do education. Let's do that first. And that's where, you know, the best things first come in. It's simply to say there's a way to spend fairly little money and get huge impacts. There's also a way to spend lots of money and get very little or no impact. I think we should do the first one first.
- [60:40]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, so now talk to me about the nature of prioritization. Why is it problematic to try to do a lot of things at once? Like assume that the 169 things were just, we had all the money and the resources in the world. Would we then be fine or. No, still having 169 things is going to be problematic.
- [61:00]
Bjorn Lomborg
No, I think, I think so. Look, a sort of general working assumption for an economist, I should just, I'm a political scientist, I'm pretend economist. Right. But yeah, the, the sort of standard argument for economists is you can fix anything with enough money. Now we could take everyone to the moon if we wanted to. It'd be fantastically expensive. But in principle, do you actually believe that? Well, I say that as an argument. No, we would probably need someone back down here.
- [61:31]
Tom Bilyeu
But Sorry, sorry, not the moon part. That with enough money you can solve any problem. I actually don't think that's true personally.
- [61:42]
Bjorn Lomborg
So for an economist that would be more sort of an argument of saying just redefines what, what enough money means some things. So, so can you make everyone happy, for instance? Probably not. I'm not going to, you know, talk about sort of very subjective kind of things, although I would, I would imagine we could make a sort of simulation machine that could make people happy or drugs that would just make them, you know, think that they are happy, that kind of thing. But, but you know, certainly all sort of outcome oriented things we can get to any sort of level of, of, of eradication if we're just willing to throw enough money at it.
- [62:20]
Tom Bilyeu
Interesting.
- [62:21]
Bjorn Lomborg
Yes. Okay, so my assumption would be that,
- [62:23]
Tom Bilyeu
yeah, listen, I think it's certainly marginally true.
- [62:26]
Bjorn Lomborg
I'm not sure whether it's, it's true out in the extreme. So, but I'm looking forward to your counter example.
- [62:31]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. When you say marginally true, what do you mean?
- [62:34]
Bjorn Lomborg
So I mean in for, for the next year, for a realistic sort of. If you had an extra trillion dollars, which is a large amount of money, but not $100 trillion, which is the whole global GDP, for an extra trillion dollars right now for the next year, we could solve any kind of problem within a trillion dollars. Obviously we couldn't do more than that, but you tell me what you want to fix. And we could in principle do that for a trillion dollars, but we couldn't do it for a trillion trillion dollars just simply because that money is not there. We wouldn't know how to do it. We wouldn't be able to can. So Bill Gates has this conversation about getting rid of the last polio. I don't know if, you know, he's trying to eradicate polio, which would be a wonderful thing to do, but unfortunately there is a little bit of polio in Pakistan and a few other countries, and these countries are very worried about vaccinations, partly because we actually cheated with Osama bin Laden about, we said that it was a polio thing. Do you remember? They wanted to make sure that it was Osama bin Laden who was living in that compound. So they actually had someone go there and say, pretend to be a polio expert and they were going to test people for whether they had polio. That was how we got the DNA to know that it was Osama bin Laden. But of course that has a really bad side effect that people think maybe it's just the CIA coming to try to kill you kind of thing. And there's a lot of other things they think that, that it's Christians trying to limit the population of Muslims, that kind of thing. So there's a lot of. And, and when you get down to you're trying to, you know, inoculate the last three people and you don't know who they are kind of thing, that that gets really hard and maybe money just can't solve that problem. So I, I, I would, I would, I bet. And again, my sense is if we gave everyone in Pakistan a billion dollars each, we could probably do it, you know, sort of thing, but not with realistic money.
- [64:48]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so here's my take on that. So one, you and I both subscribe that data is the right religion when talking about things like this. And so I don't have the data on this. So this is my gut instinct, based on more than 20 years as an Entrepreneur, the more capital you have, the less disciplined people tend to be. So as you pour money into a system, I think you begin to break things. I don't think that you just go, oh, this is a resistant problem, pour more and more money into it. But that does not mean that money isn't an effective solution when coupled with intelligence. And so that's where this really becomes an issue. And so you need to only look at different countries, right? Different countries have had wildly different outcomes. Is it culture, is it the people that run for either elected office or dictators? Just the, not the wisest, most compassionate, intelligent person ends up being the, the leader or the leadership class. Like that is certainly going to be a big part of this. And look, not to denigrate myself, but if you've got an extra trillion dollars laying around, I would highly encourage you to give it to Elon Musk and not to me, as he just has a track record. You know, I'm over here like killing myself to run one company and homeboy has like seven companies and you know, they're all multibillion dollar companies. So there, there are people that are either better, you know, he would say that he's better at engineering than me and I would completely concede that point. So there are people that are better with capital allocation or they're better at engineering their way out of a problem, whether that's computer engineering or physical engineering. Like they just have a different skill set. And so given that skill set is not evenly distributed and that different people are going to be good at different things, different people are going to pursue public office, running a company, solving a problem, whatever, and that just throwing money at it has not seemed to solve this problem. You've got corruption and a whole host of well meaning people that, oh, pay teachers more. It's just the wrong solution. Um, so you really need a, a sustainable feedback loop. It's what I call the physics of progress. I think it's the only way to move forward. And the physics of progress was something I thought I had come up with. And then I realized it's just a scientific method recontextualized for business. And you come up with your best guess. Your hypothesis on this is what we would need to do to solve this problem. You turn that into a thing that you can do. So an experiment. You run that experiment and before you start the experiment, you need to know what is your desired outcome and what is the predicted outcome of this particular test. And so when you run the test, you look at the results and this is where most people fall down. They either don't know how to accurately analyze the data, or if the data tells them that their approach was inadequate, ego kicks in and they just aren't willing to see the truth that is right there before them. And I mean, if you're in politics, you are highly incentivized not to be wrong. So, oh, lo and behold, the data says exactly what we wanted it to say, even though we're not making any progress somehow. So you get that data, you basically further educate yourself, you now have a more enlightened hypothesis, a better experiment, and you just run it. And so you, you live in that loop. And as far as I can tell, it is the only path forward to solve these incredibly large challenges. But when I've seen incredibly bright, well meaning people still struggle to effectively run physics of progress, I'm like, this is where it seems like things fall apart to me and why the solution isn't more, more, more, more money. It really is like, how do you get the, the brightest people you can possibly find in that area with as much usable data as humanly possible in a loop where they can fail and get smarter on this sort of continuingly improving spiral?
- [69:00]
Bjorn Lomborg
No, I, I totally agree. I'll, I'll just say I think maybe I, I came across a little wrong because I, I, I was asking that, or answering that very sort of hypothetical. Can we, if we had enough money, solve any one problem? And I think, yes, you get worse and worse at it, but you can't, you know, you could certainly solve polio if you just had enough trillions because we could just give a trillion to everyone and make sure they got vaccinated kind of thing. And, and even the most hardened sort of, you know, Muslim crusader would say, okay, yeah, that sort of thing. And likewise, you can solve any one problem with sufficient money. But I'm not arguing that we should be doing it because it'll be very, very bad. And that's of course what we're essentially trying to do, is to say there are some things we know work really well, there are some things we know don't work, let's do the ones that work really well. And furthermore, your whole point about how you need to progress and find more knowledge, that's absolutely true in business because it's very unlikely that you can just come in and do what others already do and make a lot of money on it. No, you have to be better than everybody there. But for global problems, it turns out that we actually already know some of the smartest Things, we're just not spending money on them because they have bad PR or because nobody really cares, that kind of thing. So I don't even have to be particularly smart. I mean, I'd like to believe that some of the people that we work with are really, really smart. But, you know, fundamentally, I'm not coming here and saying, here's a fantastic innovation. It's just simply saying it turns out that within education, there's been, you know, at least a couple thousand education economists over the last 50 years trying to work on what works and what doesn't, and they've found out, no, it's not about doubling the spending on teachers or having lower class ratios. Mostly it's about these very, very simple things. So I don't even have to sort of, you know, we, we say innovate the deep, deep plate or, you know, reinvent the. Yeah, that's, that's probably the wheel.
- [71:12]
Tom Bilyeu
I know, but wherever you were about
- [71:14]
Bjorn Lomborg
to go with the deep something, the deep plate instead of the flat plate. But you know, that, that.
- [71:20]
Tom Bilyeu
It is not an American saying. How about that?
- [71:22]
Bjorn Lomborg
But, yeah, anyway, so. But, but yeah, we're simply basically saying, here are stuff we already know is great and we've done the numbers and this is how great they are.
- [71:33]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so when you guys were rolling up to come up with the things you were going to do, and I'm guessing you didn't set. Did you set out to say, like, it needs to be a dozen? I'm guessing not.
- [71:45]
Bjorn Lomborg
So, yes, that was actually a question. Sorry, I totally took it a different direction. How do we come up with the 12? So we started with the UN's 169 promises and basically said, look, let's try and look at how effective can all of these be if you do them in the smartest possible way. Now, it turns out if you read them, about half of them are just simply impossible to even operationalize. They're more sort of aspirational, nice things to do. But we really tried our best. And what we found, and this is back in 2014, 15, because we were actually trying to advise the UN to not. Not set 169, but just set the very most effective ones. And we completely failed because I met with most of the UN ambassadors who set these targets, and they were like, oh, this is very interesting what you're doing, but we're not actually. They didn't say this very, very loud, but they said, we're not actually trying to make the best targets. When I spoke to the Brazilian ambassador, He was saying, I'm trying to get Brazil's five points in there. And the Norwegian ambassador was trying to get Norway's four points in there. And that's how we ended up with 169 things. It was basically just what all the capital thought would be wonderful to have in this wonderful big document for the whole world. But that meant that we could actually see which one were really effective and which one weren't. And so we said this was our Nobel laureates. We said, we're going to call everything that delivers more than $15 back on every dollar a phenomenal outcome. And so we just wanted to focus on the most phenomenal outcomes. Of course, there's no magical limit where 15 sort of turn. You know, if it's 15.5, it's great. If it's 14.5, we should never do it. It's just sort of a way to, to calibrate what are the very, very best things we, we wanted to do. So this time we went back and reanalyzed all of the studies that we did. We also talked to a lot of economists to find out, are there other things that we should be looking at now that we didn't look at back then? And also, are there some of the things, for instance, cell phone coverage turned out to have do $17 back on the dollar because it increases economic growth in the country. So it might actually be a good idea for a country to make sure fundamentally, if you have no coverage, you have a very ineffective distribution of goods and services in the country. So we know empirically back then, so this is data from the early 2000s, if you get more, and for most poor countries, it's almost all cell phone coverage. So cell phone, both that you can talk and that you get 3G, that's basically it that actually increases your growth rate. And because it costs, you know, say hundreds of millions or maybe a billion or so to increase it, but your economy, if this can increase your growth rate by a couple tens of percentage points, that's a great investment. But this is no longer the case because this has all happened, you know, going from 3G to 5G, nice, you get, you know, you get better view on Netflix, but it's not going to dramatically change your spending anymore. It was much more, you know, those, those people who. So this is one of the studies that we made. If you're a fisherman and you have the opportunity, you've just caught fish, you're still out in the, you know, away from two different harbors, you can go Online and see where can I get most for my fish, you know, which is really which harbor has the most demand or the most need for my fish that actually increases societal production. But, you know, whether you have 3G or 5G doesn't really matter. So this was one that we recommended back in 2015, but not anymore. And, and so we went through them and that was how we ended up with 12. These were simply the 12 that made the cut of delivering 15 or more dollars back on the dollar. On average, they actually deliver $52 back on the dollar. So it's just a fantastically huge bang for your buck. And, and there, there's certainly more out there. It'd be very, very surprising if we've caught everything in the whole world. But we believe that we've really scoured it. So it's probably most of what we should have in there. So the 12. Well, there's probably a real 14. I don't know what the last two are, but these are 12amazing ideas. And these 12 ideas are really amazing. And we have very, very good reason to believe that that's true.
- [76:23]
Tom Bilyeu
Very interesting. So I thought it was going to be something like we took an 8020 approach. What are going to be the 20% of things that yield 80% of the value? But instead what you guys did is just set a marker. If we get a 1 to 15 return, then we'll call that a win and let's just see how many things settle out. And it happened to be 12.
- [76:43]
Bjorn Lomborg
Yes. And also, remember, we had really smart people. So again, I, I'm not the guy who's. I'm just a sock puppet who talks about all the smart stuff that other people have done. But in reality, we had some really smart education people work on the education solutions, nutrition people and nutrition and tuberculosis people and tuberculosis. So these are all the people who've done this for decades of their lives, work with a lot of the other people who've done similarly, who have all the knowledge of what works and what doesn't and seen all the results. And then they have done the estimates of how much will this cost. And there we include all the, you know, the stupid stuff that's going to happen. So we always include that some of this is going to go to corruption, some of this is going to, you know, go down with, with, you know, just general incompetence and so on. But what is realistic? If you spend this much money, how much can you realistically get out? And what will that impact be in terms of saved lives and Saved and more prosperity and better environment.
- [77:49]
Tom Bilyeu
That's very interesting. Are you familiar with the guys that wrote the book Freakonomics?
- [77:55]
Bjorn Lomborg
Yes.
- [77:57]
Tom Bilyeu
I'm curious. Is. So when you were talking about the phone and the Internet having this big impact on you didn't say gdp, but I interpreted it as gdp. That is very interesting to me. And that rang that same bell that Freakonomics rang, which is the outcome that you get from doing things can often be very surprising. And I'm really curious on the phone, 1. What, what is it? What's the fundamental thing there that's happening, do you think? Is it. And I'm sure it's a confluence of a few things, but is it that I now have access to the Internet and so I can get ideas very rapidly? Is it communication so I can get the price for my fish and I know where to go? Is it I can just reach out and talk to somebody to do business deals and I no longer have to worry about the infrastructure of the company. All of the above. Like what. What is the principle at work there?
- [78:56]
Bjorn Lomborg
So again, these are mostly studies that have just been done across a wide area of. Of economies where you see that the more Internet you get, and this again is the early 2000s, you get higher growth rates. So they don't actually separate it out. But my reading of the literature is that to a very large extent, it's that it becomes easier for you to make optimal choices. So for the fishermen to find out where to go, but also for you to get a good loan if you want to have a loan. If you live in a village, you go to the guy who lend out money and you sort of have to either accept it or decline it. But now you can go on your phone this like a decade later and basically ask for a loan and find out how much it's going to cost and get a much cheaper loan. And again, the guys who want to lend out money were stuck with the people that they were close to. Now they can actually lend out to the best people with the best ideas around the whole country and so on. So it's simply an efficiency multiplier. The fact that you suddenly got a lot more information. So I think this was again, the idea was that when you have no information or very little information, and it's very hard in most of these countries to get a landline because that's controlled by the bureaucracy and it's really hard to use. And obviously, even if you have a landline, you have to call someone who will then help you find this information. Now suddenly you have this information straight up. It just makes life much easier. Also, for many poor countries, it's just simply a question of having banking access. So you may know in Kenya, for instance, they had had basically money on their cell phone and the people who sold cell phone cell phone minutes were the ones where you could also go and pay in say I have 10 bucks or something. Instead of having it rolled up in my sock and worry about being mugged at night or that I lose it in some way, I give it to the guy who sells the cell phone minutes and he puts it into my phone and then I can actually pay with my phone by, you know, basically doing a text, someone else $3 or you know, the equivalent local currency and then they can get it on their account and so on. So you basically have banking for the really poor. And that means that they can become much more effective. It's also a wonderful way of, of reducing crime. It also means, you know, a lot of people would spend a long time to when, when you had sufficient resources, like 100 or $200, you'd actually take a bus to the big city to deposit in a bank and you no longer need that. So there's a lot of these kinds of things. And I think it's all of these things accumulating.
- [81:50]
Tom Bilyeu
It's really interesting that basically the book is a snapshot in time. It's these are the things right now. But like you were talking about back in 2015, it was, was a different set of things. So because I've been on my sort of doomer arc with AI, I am a huge believer in AI. I'm just trying to work through myself. There are also things coming our way that if we're not thoughtful about, we're not going to navigate well. But I have a feeling that in the not too distant future, as you re up what the, the everything that gives a 1 to 15 return, part of that is going to be deploying AI to the poorest places in the world. If your assessment is correct, that what this really is about is the efficiency of markets so that the guy with the fish knows where to go. Because that's actually going to change from day to day. For sure. It could change from hour to hour. And when I think about Waze, I don't know if you guys know what that is, but. So it was bought, I think by Google, but Waze was and is a technology that would say, okay, based on where you're going, where you're at in your car, go here, turn Turn right here, turn left here. It would take you in some of the weirdest ways possible. But not only was it responding to traffic, it was controlling traffic. And so it would know, oh, I'm going to divvy things up in this way. And so AI will be the same like hey, if, if you're going to get to the fish market by 1205, go to this fish market person. If you're going to get there at 12:15, make sure that you go to this person. Because this is what we've seen over time the price has changed based on timing and all that day of the week, whatever, whatever, and AI will just be able to crunch so much data. Going back to data is really the thing that we need to understand. All right, anyway, utterly fascinating that this becomes like these snapshots that are rolling and, and what is going to be useful in one pretty narrow window will change relatively rapidly.
- [83:39]
Bjorn Lomborg
Okay, I should just say it's not that rapid. So we had 16 things, four of them we dropped and this was one of them with the Internet because it's now been built out. Some of it was because they're become new data. And then one of them we actually brought on, so sorry, we, we dropped five and then we brought one more on which, which is basically controlling heart medication. So a very large part of the rich world of old people are on heart medication. And it's one of the, remember heart disease or cardiovascular disease really is the biggest killer in the world and we have dramatically reduced. It's still the biggest killer, but we've dramatically reduced it in the rich world basically because we've learned how to control blood pressure for old people and we do it with very cheap medication. We need to do that in the poor part of the world because they're also increasingly getting old. And one of the things we tried to do was when we did this in 2015, it was fairly expensive still to do mostly because it was really, you have to have a lot of doctors involved and semi annual tests and all that stuff and they found a smarter and more streamlined way to do it. And now it delivers $16 back on the dollar. So this is one of the things. But most of these things are just simply good ideas and they're going to be good ideas still in most of, of the 2000 and twenties.
- [85:14]
Tom Bilyeu
Very interesting.
- [85:15]
Bjorn Lomborg
So it's not like, you know, tomorrow all this knowledge is going to be useless. It's going to be pretty stuck for, for the 2000s I think.
- [85:24]
Tom Bilyeu
I hope you're wrong because the angle I was coming at it from is that, hey, we actually are lit. And in fact, here's something that's important. We are lifting people out of poverty at, at an almost alarming rate. Like it's really exciting. And in terms of taking the opposite tack of instead of trying to panic people, really getting people optimistic, hopefully only realistically, because I don't want to make the exact same mistake in the opposite direction. I'm going to lie about how good it is and just try to get people excited. But if when we do things like get cell phones in people's hands or. I know one of the things that you guys, I think if I remember correctly, is on the list is just like a little breathing apparatus that gets babies that something like 5% of all infants just, they fail to breathe immediately. And if you breathe for them a couple times, then it jump starts and all is well. So that if we actually do these things, like there really is a noticeable consequence of that. Okay, so let's talk about the actual things that people can do. What was the biggest bang for Buck on your list? So if 1 to 15 was the cutoff, what was the one that was like 1 to 30 or whatever?
- [86:33]
Bjorn Lomborg
So we try not to do that because, because this, it's not a, it's not a competition between these. These are just simply all amazing. But given that you've asked for it and it's not surprising that that's what happens, the, the thing that is in some sense the smallest is most likely to have the biggest bang because it's easier to have a big bang if you're really small. So one of the things we've also tried to emphasize. Well, think of it this way. If you were just talking about how can I spend $1? You can spend $1 in a particularly silly situation and make a huge difference, but it's harder to do that with $1 billion. But obviously it's not really interesting to write a book about how you can spend $1 because once you spend $1, that's no longer interesting. And so we tried to do this for pretty big problems. But I'm given that you've asked me what is the biggest one, it turns out the biggest one is what's called E procurement. And it sounds incredibly boring. But if you think about it, corruption is a huge problem in the world. So about we, we estimate, but for obvious reasons, we don't know how big of a problem corruption is because there's nobody who answers correctly on those surveys. But it's probably at least a trillion dollars of cost from corruption. And it's very likely much more than that. And there is very little that you can do about corruption. It's actually one of the places we talk about how I believe that you can just spend money and get rid of it. But obviously corruption is actually one of the places where you can't spend money and get rid of it because you're just going to, you know, sort of generate more corruption with more. With most of the things that you could do something about. But, well, it turns out vast amount of corruption is associated with procurement from states. This is, you know, governments basically buying, buying anything from pens to roads, but obviously the roads are much, much more expensive. So it's mostly infrastructure, that kind of really expensive spending that is hugely corrupt. But it turns out that there's a really great way to deal with this, and that's E procurement. It's basically putting the procurement on ebay, if you will, right now in many countries, this has happened in most rich countries, so we are actually doing this, but there's still about 70 countries out of the 200 countries in the world who still haven't done it. So there's a huge opportunity to do this. And we did work, for instance, in Bangladesh, where they've taken over some of the British rules. So they had very elaborate rules of how you bid for. For contracts. So, you know, the local government will say, we want to build this road. They'll publish it in an obscure journal or obscure newspaper somewhere. Then people will hand in sealed envelopes with their bids, and then they're presumably going to pick the lowest bid. But the reality often is that the ruling elite have already decided who's going to get the bid. And then they literally put up goons outside the office where you have to hand in your sealed envelope so you physically can't get in there. And so what happens is if you put it online on an ebay kind of service, then suddenly it becomes much harder. You can still do this. You can make sort of the E equivalent of goons, but it's harder to do. It's more visible if you try to do it. And also you get many, many more people to hear about this. It's not in some obscure place. And you can also do it faster. So what it turns out is that when you do this. So we got, we worked with Bangladeshi government, they actually implemented 4% of all the spending that they had on E procurement. And we could see the difference in spending, both in quality. So you typically get higher quality and you get lower Prices. This is not surprising. Everyone who's gone on ebay will know that when you ask lots of people how much you're going to pay for this, you'll end up with lower prices. You'll basically get a better quality. So this is great. We found that this could Save Bangladesh about $700 million each and every year. And the cost of doing this is trivial. It's in the tens of millions of dollars once. So it's a really, really great setup. And you can actually get, we estimate, $125 back on each dollar. Now, the reason why it doesn't happen, of course, is, and we, you know, the Bangladeshi finance minister, he, he went all in and said, I'd love you. Of course he'd love to have $700 million extra, but all of the people just below him wouldn't because they're the ones who get all the bribes. And so obviously they are sort of like very resistant to this. So there's a lot of work that goes and you need to put in a lot of political will to do it. But ultimately this will be great for your country. And so we estimate for about $76 million. So everything else I'm going to be talking about is billion dollars. But for $76 million, you can basically build these protocols. You can build the computer systems. They could also take them from other countries, but they typically don't. And build these, do more development with all the officials who have to do it, and you will end up saving about $10 billion each and every year on average for these other 70, for these remaining 70 countries. So for trivial amounts of money, we can do an amazing amount of good. And this is one of the reasons why we're saying this is certainly One of the 12 best things we should do. We can really make all governments provide more for less and with higher quality.
- [92:28]
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