Do These 12 Things First If You Want a Bright Future | Bjorn Lomborg PT 2

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Do These 12 Things First If You Want a Bright Future" | Bjorn Lomborg PT 2

Podcast: Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu
Episode Air Date: July 26, 2023
Guests: Tom Bilyeu (Host), Bjorn Lomborg (Author & Thinker)
Episode Theme: Evidence-Based Global Prioritization for a Brighter Future

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Episode Overview

In this continued conversation, Tom Bilyeu and Bjorn Lomborg explore an evidence-driven approach to the world's most urgent problems. Lomborg, noted for his contrarian takes on global issues, outlines and defends 12 specific, high-impact interventions for global improvement, arguing that data-driven prioritization—not panic or headline-chasing—is the key to helping humanity thrive. The episode delves into poverty alleviation, overpopulation fears, the climate change debate, and concrete policy recommendations to lift millions from poverty, boost global prosperity, and save lives.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Consequences of Lifting People Out of Poverty (00:45–06:40)

• Poverty Alleviation’s Ripple Effect:
  Removing people from extreme poverty (defined as living on less than $2.15/day) empowers long-term thinking, better educational outcomes, improved health, and generational advancement.
  • “Each and every day we have lifted… 138,000 people out of poverty each and every day for the last 25 years.” — Bjorn Lomborg (03:10)
• Health & Education Leap:
  Increased income correlates with improved health (e.g., countries with >$10,000 GDP per capita essentially eliminate malaria), better disease management, and access to education.

2. Prosperity as a Climate Solution (06:40–08:57)

• Prosperity Drives Resilience:
  Historically, as nations grow wealthier, their vulnerability to climate disasters drops sharply.
  • Tom notes the reduction in climate disaster deaths from 500,000/year to ~11,000/year (06:40).
• Controversy of ‘Fewer People is Better’:
  Lomborg challenges the notion that reducing the global population inherently benefits the planet.
  • “Who’s going to stop having kids, man?” — Tom Bilyeu (10:29)
  • Educating and empowering women is the proven, humane way to moderate population growth.

3. Population Decline in Wealthy Nations (13:37–15:16)

• Aging & Depopulation Woes:
  Population decline, seen in Japan, South Korea, Russia, etc., brings innovation slowdowns and social challenges.
  • “Fewer people means less innovation. So there’s a real cost.” — Bjorn Lomborg (13:41)
• Fertility Incentives Falter:
  Government incentives have minor impacts on raising fertility rates; lasting change comes from deeper societal shifts.

4. Effectiveness of Targeted Interventions (17:33–24:31)

• Maternal and Child Health:
  Institutionalizing childbirth, providing basic emergency care, and simple interventions (like $75 breathing masks for newborns) can save 1.4M lives annually for about $5B, delivering a $87 return per $1 spent.
  • “No doctor is going to be excited about getting this mask. I mean, how’s that fun?” — Bjorn Lomborg (20:36)

5. Opportunity Cost of Focusing Primarily on Climate Policy (24:31–31:41)

• Climate Catastrophe Probability:
  Most reasonable models suggest unchecked climate change is a major problem but not an existential one (i.e., it will not “end the world”).
  • “If we do nothing… the net negative will feel like we’re 4% less well-off than we otherwise would be.” — Bjorn Lomborg (25:26)

6. Climate Economics & Policy Efficiency (31:41–36:53)

• Cost-Benefit Skepticism of Current Climate Policies:
  Most Western climate policies, including the Paris Agreement, are estimated to return less than $1 for every $1 spent—unlike the 12 recommended interventions.
  • “There is no climate policy that delivers at least $15 back on the dollar.” — Bjorn Lomborg (34:27)
• Innovation Over Restriction:
  Investing in green innovation (like R&D for new clean tech) yields far more climate benefit than current regulation-focused strategies.

7. Education as a Force Multiplier (43:38–58:59)

• Educational Technology’s Impact:
  Providing personalized learning (e.g., 1 hour/day on adaptive tablets) can triple learning outcomes for ~$21 per year per child.
  • “For every dollar spent, you get $65 of good.” — Bjorn Lomborg (53:55)
  • Teacher empowerment (structured plans, ongoing messaging) is key for lasting results.
• Compound Effects:
  Greater education stimulates productivity, prosperity, and even better health for subsequent generations.

8. Nutrition, Land Rights, and Migration (67:01–77:10)

• Nutrition:
  Focused interventions (vitamins for mothers, agricultural R&D) can save lives and increase food security.
• Land Tenure:
  Ensuring people securely own their land multiplies investment, agricultural productivity, and wealth accumulation.
• Skilled Migration:
  Allowing more skilled workers to move between countries greatly benefits both source and destination nations.

9. Free Trade—A Political & Economic High-Yield Solution (77:10–80:40)

• Trade Increases Prosperity for All:
  Even when accounting for job losses and Rust Belt effects, all countries—especially poorer ones—gain substantially from increased trade.
  • “For the poorer half of the world… for every dollar spent that is jobs lost, they will gain $95 in benefits.” — Bjorn Lomborg (78:04)
• Trade-Off Management:
  Strategies must include retraining, education, or direct subsidies for displaced workers.

10. Summary of the 12 Top Interventions ("Do These Best Things First") (89:35–91:47)

Spending $35B/year on these 12 solutions could save over 4 million lives and generate more than $1.1 trillion in annual benefit for the world’s poorest.

The 12 Priorities:

| # | Intervention | Key Impact | Benefit/Cost Ratio | |-----|-----------------------------------|-------------------------------------------------------------|--------------------| | 1 | E-Procurement | Streamlined government procurement, reduced corruption | High | | 2 | Institutional Births & Neonatal Care | Save mothers & newborns (e.g., $75 breathing mask intervention) | $87 per $1 | | 3 | Childhood Vaccinations | Immunize against diseases like measles | $101 per $1 | | 4 | Tuberculosis Treatment | Detection & treatment in poor regions | $46 per $1 | | 5 | Malaria Prevention | Insecticide nets, targeted efforts in Africa | $48 per $1 | | 6 | Education: Right-level Learning & Teacher Support | Personalized, tech-enabled, and improved schooling | $65 per $1 | | 7 | Nutrition for Mothers & Kids | Vitamins, calcium, food security | $18 per $1 | | 8 | Agricultural R&D | Innovation in crops for developing nations | $33 per $1 | | 9 | Chronic Disease Prevention | Heart disease, hypertension, cancer focus | $23 per $1 | | 10 | Land Tenure Security | Ensuring land ownership for investment & prosperity | High | | 11 | Skilled Migration Policies | Mobility for qualified workers | $20 per $1 | | 12 | Free Trade Expansion | Increase global prosperity, manage transition costs | $95 per $1 |

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Every paper in the world could have it as a headline: Over the last 24 hours, the world lifted 138,000 people out of poverty… But you know, we should recognize that this is a huge achievement." — Bjorn Lomborg (03:10)
• "The real answer of course is, it’s not like we have a lever where we can say, you know what, we’re 8 billion, but now we’re going to turn it down to 2 billion — or at least not without going into some really, really nasty ways to reduce those numbers, right?" — Bjorn Lomborg (10:32)
• "If we just let everything happen and just let sort of global warming get worse and worse, then by the end of the century… the net negative will feel like we’re 4% less well-off than we otherwise would be." — Bjorn Lomborg (25:26)
• "This mask that you give kids… it costs what, $75, and over its three-year lifetime, it can probably save about 25 lives. That’s an enormously effective thing." — Bjorn Lomborg (17:44)
• "For every dollar spent [on one-hour daily tablet learning], you get $65 of good." — Bjorn Lomborg (53:55)
• "I’m simply making the argument: these [12] are best things first, let’s just squeeze that little $35 billion in there and then get back to all the other things we would constantly debate." — Bjorn Lomborg (86:52)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• The knock-on effects of prosperity: 00:45–06:40
• Prosperity vs. climate disaster & population myths: 06:40–17:33
• Maternal & newborn health interventions: 17:33–24:31
• Climate models & economic framing: 24:31–31:41
• Why climate isn’t in the 12 ‘best things’: 31:41–36:53
• Green innovation as the best climate investment: 36:53–43:26
• Education tech and structured teaching: 43:38–53:55
• Nutrition & agricultural R&D: 67:01–68:53
• Land tenure, skilled migration, free trade: 70:55–80:40
• The list of 12, and cost/benefit summary: 89:35–91:47

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Tone & Style

The conversation is dynamic, accessible, and occasionally humorous, aiming to debunk received wisdom and provoke fresh thinking. Lomborg’s tone throughout is pragmatic and slightly iconoclastic; Tom brings earnest curiosity and pushes for clarifying details and practical takeaways.

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Who Should Listen?

Anyone interested in global development, rational public policy, or how to maximize the positive impact of international aid. Ideal for students, policymakers, philanthropists, and critical thinkers weary of apocalyptic headlines.

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Takeaway

If you want a brighter, more prosperous future, focus on interventions with the greatest evidence-backed impact—and be wary of headline-driven panic or solutions that offer poor returns for massive investment. Prosperity, basic health, education, and common-sense policies produce the fastest, most reliable progress for the world’s poorest and the planet as a whole.

Transcript

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[Tom Bilyeu]

Welcome to Part two of my incredible conversation with Bjorn Lomborg. Bjorn's approach to thinking through the world's hardest problems really highlights what I want people to take away from impact theory in general. How to articulate your values and then align your priorities around them to ensure you actually achieve your goals in a data driven way. Welcome to a continuation of the masterclass on how to think through hard problems. In today's episode, we dive into even more fascinating territory, including whether the world would be better off with less people, why climate change is not the place to start if you want to really help people and ensure a brighter future and the exact 12 things we should all be doing right now if we want a much better world. I'm Tom Bilyeu and welcome back to Part two with Bjorn Lomborg. Yeah, so where this really starts to get interesting to me is that as you when you really step back and you look at okay, what is the problem we're trying to solve. So going back people, planet, prosperity, there's a real consequence to prosperity and a lot of these I don't know if you would make this through line, but when I was going through all the different pieces, one of the things that kept coming back up is as humans thrive, they begin to prosper and then there's a real knock on effect to that prosperity. So before we go through some more of the 12, I'd like to ask directly what are the consequences of taking someone out of poverty?

[Bjorn Lomborg]

I think we almost can't imagine because you and I and most who are probably listening to this just simply because they are on the Internet and have several hours to spend on listening on this, are just so far removed from absolute grinding poverty where you really don't know whether your kids are going to survive, whether you're going to have enough money to make it through the day yet, let alone next month. And you're, you're forced to, you know, so about 700 and sorry, 680 million people live for what, what most people have heard of less than $1 a day, that's actually $2 and 15 per day. Now because of inflation, that's way too many.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But when I was a kid, that number was a lot bigger.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

Yes, yes. And that, that was also what you said. You know, we've had amazing progress in dealing with poverty. One of the things that I actually write that in the book, if you take over the last 25 years, each and every day we have lifted as a human collective. The world has lifted 138,000 people out of poverty each and every day for the last 25 years. It is just astounding. And so again, it also goes to your point of saying, we hear a lot about this. The world is terrible and yes, there are problems out there, but each and every day, every paper in the world could have it as a headline. Over the last 24 hours, the world lifted 138,000 people out of poverty. And we could have had that every day. And we don't because it's not a news story. It's not, you know, sexy or interesting in the same way as oh my God, you know, this airplane crashed or something. But you know, we should recognize that this is a huge achievement and this is what means that it's possible for people to start making slightly longer term decisions. So we know, for instance, when people start to have a little bit of capital and this will often just be, you know, a goat or a couple of chickens or something that they can actually sell, they start thinking more about how can I make sure that my kids regularly go to school so that they can learn more, so that they can become more prosperous and be even more productive than I am and you know, make their, their kids lives even better. So you know, it has this not gone education.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That, that's exactly what I want to talk about. These knock on effects. So one of them is education. What, what else is a consequence of pulling people out of grinding poverty that

[Bjorn Lomborg]

they can avoid dying from easily curable infectious diseases? If a country has more than $10,000 per, per person per year in GDP, there's no malaria. So you know, fundamentally, once you get sufficiently rich, you as an individual can afford to buy the medication, which means that you won't have the malaria parasite in you. That's good for you because then you survive or you make sure that your kid gets this medication. But it also means that, you know, nobody has gotten rid of all mosquitoes, unfortunately, so they're still mosquitoes, but if they bite you and you don't have malaria, it can't get malaria to me because it doesn't have the malaria mosquito to go around. It needs to bite other people who have malaria in order to transmit this. And so what happens is you both have people buying this medication and then the society that sets up regulations and also drains the swamps and makes sure that you spray those places that are really pesky and make sure that when somebody comes in, we have this couple of times a year somebody comes in with a deceased from a poor country, they come into Sweden, then we treat them because we can afford to. So once a country gets sufficiently rich, you don't die from easily curable infectious diseases. And of course lifting everyone else up is both great because you can actually do a lot more good, but it also means you stop dying and your kids stop dying.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. So this, this through line that I think you intended, but certainly that I took away from your work. Is that okay? As we start tackling these things with the people prosperity planet as a North star, we're looking at what does the most good as, you know, benchmarked against those three things. As we begin to do this, there becomes a self reinforcing loop. Now I often heard you talk about this in terms of climate change, but I thought it was a really brilliant rejoinder to, hey, I get it, you're trying to address all this stuff at the level of climate, but if you address this at the level of remove people from poverty, you're actually solving for the thing I think you all actually want to solve for, which is that humans are able to deal with climate better than they were before. Because one of the sort of counterintuitive things that I've heard you say that certainly doesn't get talked about is that it used to be some ungodly number of people, I think 500,000 people a year were killed by climate related devastation and now that number is like 11,000. And so that's a 99% reduction in the thing that, that people are really worried about. And I was like, how the hell is that possible? Like what are we doing? And then you were like, you get them out of poverty and some of these things just become. And I should stop. I'm really couching it because, because I think that there is a sense and of course I am very biased because I have, I have done very well for myself, but there's this sense of like people that have generated wealth are evil and I want people to Understand, like, we want everyone to be wealthy instead of everyone being poor. Like, if we're trying to, to make things equal and see people all on an even playing field, I would really encourage people to look at things you can do to lift people up rather than knock people down because they become more resilient, because their kids are more likely to survive, because they're more likely to get educated. And some of the things, in fact, one of the things that we should probably address head on is do you believe the world is fundamentally better off with less people?

[Bjorn Lomborg]

All right, so I just want to answer the other part or comment on the other part. I think that's exactly right, that this is a question of saying if you can make people better off, they will become better off in so many other ways. I think most people don't have a clear picture 200 years ago. So in 1820, it's estimated that 90% of everyone living on the planet were below a dollar a day or the two, $2, $15 today. We were extremely poor, except for a very, very small class of people who all wore those fancy ropes and, and, and lorded over the rest of us. And, and we've basically gone from a world where 90% were poor to a world where 90 or actually 92 or 3% are not poor. That's a fantastic world, and that is really a world that's worth going for. And so that just emphasizes your, your argument. Now a lot of people will say if, if we had fewer people, we would have less pressure on the environment is typically sort of an environmental sort of argument. And, and technically that's obviously true. All other things equal, if you had fewer people, there would be less air pollution, there'd be less pressure on nature because we wouldn't have to grow as much food and so on. The problem with that argument is really just, sorry, who is going to stop being there? You know, it's not like there's.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Who's going to stop having kids, man?

[Bjorn Lomborg]

Yeah, yeah. So when you sort of probe people a little bit on this conversation, it's typically, you know what, there's a little bit too many of you and just enough of me, which sort of comes across as a little hypocritical. The real answer, of course, is it's not like we have a lever where we can say, you know what, we're 8 billion, but now we're going to turn it down to 2 billion, or at least not without going into some really, really nasty ways to reduce those numbers. Right? So the reality is what we can discuss is what kind of future would we like? Would we like a world where there's 12 billion people, or would we like a world where there's like 9 billion people? Or would we like a world where there's 7 billion people by the end of the century? And that's something that we, to a certain degree can decide on. And I think what we know reduces the number of people is getting more opportunities for women and getting more education for women. So that is, women can get better educated and they can actually get a job. They can have businesses. And if they have those things, it typically means they will want to have fewer kids because the alternatives just got better. Right? And I think everyone would agree those are good things, education for women and opportunities for women. And that will sort of automatically reduce the load. Nobody's worried about this sort of runaway population, which I think is really the backbone for much of the conversation about, oh, we should have fewer people, that will end up with 20 or 30 or 100 billion people. That's just not in the cards. And I think we also need to recognize, and this is, I think, still an unsolved question, to what extent is a society where you end up with fewer people? We're seeing that in many rich countries today, not in the U.S. still, because you're having a lot of people immigrate into the U.S. but, you know, for instance, Japan, Russia, very clearly, although Russia is sort of an outline so many other ways. Let's look at Japan, you know, countries where you have women deciding to. On average, if you had sort of a repopulation, a permanent, sorry, a stable population, the average woman would get 2.1 kids. So two to replicate the man and the woman, and then 0.1, because some of these kids are going to die before they get old enough to get their own kids. So 2.1 is the sort of stable level. In many of these countries, South Korea, many others, you have just over one. And that will lead to dramatic depopulation. That means suddenly your house is no longer as much worth, especially if you're in the countryside, because nobody will be living there in 50 or 100 years. It means a lot of your infrastructure is going to be outmoded. It also means that there'll be a lot fewer to take care of you when you get old. And now we imagine that, you know, robots and that kind of thing could take over for some of that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's crazy that that's real talk now. That's nuts.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

Although I'm a little concerned about, you know, My. My old age just being cared for by robots. But, you know, who knows, maybe that could be very nice. But. But it has a lot of potential downsides as well. And then, of course, there's that overarching argument of saying fewer people means less innovation. So there's a real cost. And the way it's often been argued is that an extra person means an extra mouth, which is a problem because you need to feed that mouth. But it also means an extra pair of hands that can actually work and an extra brain that can come up with a brilliant new idea. And the sort of outcome of those things is not settled. I think it's probably arguable that, that it's not overall good to have a lot fewer people. But again, my argument is much more of a marginal point, is not to say, do you want to go from the 8 billion we have now down to a billion now? Because there's no way to do that without killing a lot of people. And I don't see anyone being actually willing to do that. But the real question is, how do we want to get it in 2100? And honestly, this is just not something that we can precisely engineer. We should get women better opportunities, and that will mean fewer kids, and that will probably mean that we'll be more likely to end at, you know, 9 or maybe even 7 billion by the end of the century. And then I think we will start having that conversation about saying, how do we get women to have more kids? Which is going to be a whole other kettle of fish.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, we're already there in some places for sure. I know that there have been incentives in Japan and I think Korea, China as well. I think started well. They had a. Would they tax you if you didn't have enough kids? I don't remember. So forgive me on that. But there, there are incentives that are being rolled out now in different countries because the population is far. Not only is it far more likely to collapse, it is already decreasing at some pretty dramatic rates. And this is math. You can't raise a kid faster. Takes nine months to make one. And then you got to raise them to maturity and, you know, give them some time before they have their own kids. So that once that starts declining, that's a pretty slow reversal. It takes multi generations to get that moving in the opposite direction. And so far, at least in rich countries, to my knowledge, the incentives just to have more kids have not worked. Well, if I am tracking, they work

[Bjorn Lomborg]

a little bit, as you'd imagine, you know, all the things equal, you're more likely to have more kids, but they, they only work, March only. So, you know, instead of having 1.2, you might, you know, squeeze people up to 1.3. So it's going to be a little bit of the solution, but it's not the main part of the solution. And again, this goes to a lot of other things. And, and now I'm going to pull that card of saying this is not my expertise. But, but in some ways my, my point is I'm trying to trade in on stuff we know works. So we know that E procurement is something we should do. The, the, the, the number of kids is almost the opposite kind of argument. We have no clue on how to make that number move dramatically and we have no idea whether that's actually a really good or a really bad thing. And people will have varying views on this all across the spectrum. And that's why I would say, look, this is an interesting conversation. I think it's very unlikely that we will have a huge impact on this in any short or medium term. And what we want to do is to make sure that women have better opportunities and that will have a very predictable outcome of saying we're not going to end up at the 10, 20 billion people by the end of the century. So we can sort of lay that panic to rest.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, let's get back to some of the things that work. So we've so far talked about e procurement, the baby breathing thing. I certainly mentioned that briefly. What are some other ones that have big impacts?

[Bjorn Lomborg]

So let me actually just take you up on that one because that's just a very, very small part of it. It's, it's helping moms and newborn kids just around pregnancy. It's a terribly dangerous thing. It used to be very dangerous for women in rich countries to be treated, to have to be pregnant. Almost a percent of all women in pregnancy would die. This is terribly dangerous. It was actually more dangerous for rich women back in the 1800s because they would be more likely to go to hospitals and in the hospitals the doctor would just from amputating a leg and then, you know, come and mess around and give you a perpural fever. I'm not sure what that's called in English, but you know, the thing that you die from. So, so, so the idea here is we've gotten that under control, but still about 300,000 women die each and every year in pregnancy and about 2.3 million kids die in their first 28 days in life. And we know how to fix this, this is not rocket science. It is basically about getting women into institutional birth so when complications arise, there's an opportunity to do something about it and then that you have those very basic emergency obstetric opportunities. And this is a package of things. One of the things that you mentioned is this, this mask that you give kids. So as you mentioned, 5% of all kids come out of mom and don't breathe and you basically need to put a mask on them and pump in air into their lungs and then they start going and then they're safe. And you need that in poor country. But even if you come into a birth facility, many of them won't have this little mask. It costs what, $75, and over its three year lifetime, it can probably save about 25 lives. That's an enormous effective thing. Now, I'm not arguing that everybody should go out and do, you know, GoFundMe thing just for that, because this is about getting all of the structure in there. So it's about getting the moms into giving birth in institutions. So about two thirds do that. Now we're arguing we should get like 90% of all women in there. And then these institutions should have a lot of different things. They should have disinfectant, they should have clean water. You'd imagine these were obvious things, but they're still not implemented. We've identified how much would that cost. Much of this is also just simply when the hospital administrator decides what should you buy with your, with your budget? A lot of them end up with buying the machine that says Ping, if you remember that one from Monty Python.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Only because of you. But yes, I, I am familiar.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

It's a, it's a skid. Where, where, you know, they have all the doctors, all the machines in there because the administrator is coming and they want to show the most expensive machine that says ping. And that's all we ever learn about it. But you know, they're so, oh, there's something, oh, we're missing the mom, right? So, so they, they realize John Cleese is doing most of the talking is a very fun skit. But you know, fundamentally you get the idea that nobody, no doctor is going to be excited about getting this mask. I mean, how's that fun? I'm not going to go to conference and say we have a mask for $75. Right? You want to be able to have, we have the newest MRI scanner or whatever it is, Right? But we need to get hospital administrators and everybody else to spend money on boring old stuff that'll actually save a lot of people. So we estimate that the total cost is going to be about $5 billion. A lot of this is cost for the women, so it's almost 2 billion of that cost is the cost in terms of lost income for the women. Typically you'll work right up to the day and possibly even some of the day where you give birth and then the day after you'll go back to work. But here, if you go into an institution, you'll actually have to take some days off. And that has a huge cost. And when we're doing this for 27 million women every year, that actually adds up. So $3 billion in actual cost and then $2 billion in extra cost for the women. That total cost will save about 166,000 moms and it'll save 1.2 million kids each. And every dollar each will on average deliver $87 worth of good. That's just one of those many amazing things we could do. So, you know, again, we've had some of these people do all of the math, look at all of the costs in all of the different countries. And of course, this is not true in this, in a, in a total metaphysical sense. It's not like all the cents and, and dollars are going to tally up exactly. But it's the best knowledge that we have, what our best models show, what this increase would cost and how many people this would save. It's just a phenomenal policy.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so for whatever reason, this one just hit me in terms of, okay, going back to climate. No one here, certainly not I, and I know not you, is saying that climate, we are saying climate is a problem, it needs to be addressed. And, but when you go back to people planet Prosperity and you're taking the balance of those, if you're only losing 500,000 people to climate problems now, and what you're just talking about getting women into institutions for birth, getting them the sanitization, getting them the little breathing thing, if, if that's saving over a million people, you're already 2x of when climate was the worst in terms of the number of people that it was killing, which was 500,000, it's now, whatever, 11,000. So compared to even what climate is now, it's just massive, massive, massive, massively more impactful in terms of saving lives. But it does beg the question. So if I'm somebody that's like, really, really, the climate is, is the meteorite streaking towards Earth that is going to just cause, you know, mass extinction? Basically, I go to the the movie the Day After Tomorrow. Did you see that movie?

[Bjorn Lomborg]

Yes, I did.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so that, that was really sobering this thought that like okay, we're, everything is just so delicately balanced and if we fall out of balance then like this cascading thing can happen that basically brings an ice age effectively overnight. And even if, even if that happened say over 12 months, it, it would just be unimaginably devastating.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

It.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So it begs the question, is there anything that we see in the data that leads us to believe that let's just assume we do nothing for climate and everybody just keeps doing their thing and we keep making people richer. China keeps bringing on coal plants like just every bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. Could it get that kind of catastrophic?

[Bjorn Lomborg]

So if you just ask a, could it, is there a non zero probability that it could be catastrophic? Yes, of course there's a non zero probability for everything. Red haired women could take over the world tomorrow. That's a non zero probability. Right. So that's not really the question. The question is, is it realistic that this would happen? And no. The answer is no. So in almost all of the UN climate panel.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, this is what I was going to ask based on the data, it's a no.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

Well, no, you can't base this on data because we, you know, you're talking about the future. So you have to base it on models because we don't have data for the future. We're worried about the future. So we have to ask what do the models indicate will happen in reasonable worst case outcomes. And almost everything that the UN climate panel shows is that this is a problem, but that it's not by any means sort of end of the world or anywhere close to that. So the only climate, so climate economics have spent a very large time trying to estimate not just what is the bad things that could happen, but try to give that an economic estimate so you know, get a sense of proportion. How bad will this be? And so the only climate economist to win the Nobel Prize in climate economics, William Nordhaus from Yale University in 2018, his model show but many other models show reasonably the similar outcomes show that if we do nothing, and again nobody's suggesting that's the right out, that that's the right policy decision. But if we just let everything happen and just let sort of global warming get worse and worse, then by the end of the century all the negative impacts and all the positive impacts, remember there's both negatives and positive, but the negatives outweigh the positives. That's why it's a net negative. The net negative will feel like we're 4% less well off than we otherwise would be. So it's a 4% problem. That's basically what he won the Nobel Prize for. And that's certainly a problem. Now remember, by the end of the century, the UN estimate that we will be much richer than we are today. They actually estimate on a reasonable sort of middle of the road scenario that the average person in the world will be 450% as rich as he or she is today. That's a phenomenally much better world. That's one where we've lifted a lot of people out of poverty as well. There'll be no poverty, no $1 a day poverty. Of course, then we'll be worrying about $100 a day poverty instead, or $10 poverty, whatever. But fundamentally so on average, we expect that we'll be 450% as rich by the end of the century. But because of global warming, unmitigated poverty, global warming, it'll feel like we're only 434% as rich. 4% reduction, that right? So 434% as rich is not the end of the world. It's a much better world, but it's a slightly less better world than it otherwise would have been.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Which is why that must be very controversial. Is Nordhaus a controversial figure? Because obviously he has become controversial.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

He's become controversial every, you know, look, pretty much everyone in climate economics agrees with him. You can find people that can sort of come up with these really, really unrealistic. It might be even 10%. But it's not going to change the argument. You need to get up to, you know, 80, 90, close to 100% for this really to hit home. And nobody can show these sorts of numbers. There are some people out there who say that, but they have no good evidence for why this would be the case. And so. And they're not well respected.

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[Tom Bilyeu]

Is there any model from a crackpot or otherwise? I mean, a player in the space, yes, but a player in the space, even if they're considered like, I'm not so sure about this guy. Is there anybody that has models that put that kind of number on the board that this would be an 80 to 90% reduction in the growth rate,

[Bjorn Lomborg]

the worst that's out there. And I think most people would agree this has pretty well been debunked. And I could walk you through that, but that take quite a while. Is sort of 23%. And it's just simply wrong in many different ways. But that's a period study that has been referenced a lot. But even that would not generate this. It would be sort of a decade worth of economic growth that we'd lose out on over this century, which obviously would be tragic and would be better to not have that. But it's not going to be, by any realistic sense, the end of the world. And it's not going to be such that we'll be worse off, we'll be less better off than we otherwise would have been. And that's the crucial bit. That's the sort of the missing conversation in this. If it's the end of the world, it makes good sense to say you should throw everything in the kitchen sink at this. If it's a problem, you should obviously, and you know, Nordhaus, sense a 4% problem. You should be. If you can throw 1 or 2% at it and fix all of it, that's great. But if you throw 5 to 10% at it and fix a little bit of the 4%, that's really stupid. And so that's the conversation that you really need to have. And unfortunately, much of the policy conversation is let's throw 5 to 10% at it and only fix part of it, which turns out to be a very poor use of resource. It doesn't mean we shouldn't fix it, but we should fix it much smarter.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. Okay, so if I were to channel the people, because there is a. Oh, I don't want to get sucked into all the debates, but I do want to be fair to some of the things that are out there and at least their frame of reference. Nobel Memorial Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz said it would be outright dangerous for people to be persuaded by Bjorn Lomborg's arguments. So what if, if I'm gonna put that hat on and I'm gonna channel him for a second, I want to make sure that we start teasing these things out. So one, you said that Nord Stream Nordhaus.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

Thank you.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That he's become a controversial figure. So I, I want to make sure everybody understands there's a lot of debate around this stuff. And so if, if I channel the guy that we were just talking. Stiglitz. Thank you. If I channel him, what I would say is, hey, look, I can't help but notice that climate is not on your 12 things. So you say, let's do something about it, but you wrote a whole book about let's do these 12 things first. And we've just spent the last 30 years finally getting people to pay attention to the only thing that really is existential. I love it. I love the idea of pulling, getting women to have birth in hospitals. I, I understand that, but like, that's never going to be existential. So why are we wasting even a second on things that are just sort of incremental improvement when we have this thing that, that could truly be cataclysmic hurtling at us? So I've already heard you, and you've said it multiple times in this interview and you've definitely spent a lot of time saying it to other people that this just isn't world ending. And without getting into like a full blown bringing somebody else on to challenge all the points, I just want to plant for people that, okay, this, this is where we get into sort of, this is a debated thing. But what I hear you saying, and this is what I found compelling, but let me know if I'm, I'm making a leap too far here, that when we look at that 250% better, we are specifically talking about the kind of things that are in the 12, or maybe exactly the 12. Like those are the things that are actually going to have the impact on prosperity and people. So lives and prosperity that we want. And by raising those who thinks you will very intentionally, but it, it's just a second order consequence. Take care of the climate. Is that your stance?

[Bjorn Lomborg]

Somewhat. So let me just. First of all, I have a whole rebuttal of Stiglitz, and Stiglitz is not a climate economist, but, you know, he's a smart guy and, and he's certainly.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So what's the Difference because he won a Nobel Prize for something with climate in the title. No, he, he, no, sorry, Nobel Memorial Prize. Okay, so I don't know.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

He won his Nobel on models of, of signaling. Essentially his most famous model is on, on why it's really hard to sell used cars because you know, whether it's a good or a bad car, a lemonade, but other people don't. It's a very good paper. It's a fun point we've debated several times. I think Sticklers is in way over his head and he knows that. That's what I think. But that's a conversation for a different time. Nordhaus is only controversial, not among economists, but among all the people who want desperate strong climate action. Because obviously that you. That that's not compatible with what he's actually found. And, and so I think it's mostly sort of a reasoned argument that I don't like his conclusion, so he must be wrong, which is not a terribly strong scientific argument. But that's a whole different kind of conversation. But I think it's very crucial point. Why don't I have climate as one of these 12? And the simple answer is it's because there is no climate policy that has a substantial sort of spending that delivers at least $15 back on the dollar. Now, most climate policies that we do in the west, so for instance, the Paris agreement delivers about 10 cents back on the dollar. That is, it actually destroys value. It costs a lot of money and it delivers a little bit of good for climate. So it's a bad idea. Now, you can have a lot of conversation. A lot of people would be very angry to hear that. I think we have very good academic arguments that it's less than a dollar back in the dollar. But, you know, 10 cents. Exactly. Who knows, it could be 30 cents. There's some people who would even argue, you know, if you really sort of tune all the characters to get the right, politically right result, you might make it one and a half dollars back in the dollar. That is it. It's a good investment, but it's nowhere near as good an investment as these other things. So that's simple.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm going to ask a really gross question. And now I am way over my head. But this is very much. Hey, thinking through novel problems.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

A guy that I know called Tom tells me you should just go ahead.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yep, that's where I'm at. Oh, am I going to perhaps rue the day? I don't think I've ever uttered this name in the podcast. Maybe once or twice. But Trump pulled America out of the Paris climate agreement. Whatever. I'm not sure how to frame it. Was he right?

[Bjorn Lomborg]

I think he was possibly right for the wrong reasons. I mean, his argument was basically, this is costing America a lot of money and it's not doing very much good, so I'm going to pull it out. It's not going to do America a lot of good. Remember, the reason why we care about global warming, presumably is because this will affect all of the world. It'll actually not affect rich countries all that much, partly because rich countries are typically fairly high latitude countries. So more warmth. I come from Sweden. Right. I mean, not like your problem. Be sorry that it gets a little better weather. But if you live further, you know, closer to the equator, that is actually a problem. Partly when you're richer, you're also more resilient, so you have less problems with, you know, more storms or more, more floods, that kind of thing. So, so I, I think there's some truth to this. I would never just go ahead and say this is, you know, Trump was just right on this and, and good for him. It's more sort of a. The way I heard it was that, you know, he got part of it, but it was not, you know, the right way to deal with, with this would have been to say we should do something else. And we actually did that all the way back to our start of our conversation. We not only did this for all the really smart things to do in the world, which is the best things first, we also did a similar process where we said, if you were to spend money on climate, how would you do that in the best possible way? So not say anything else, just say we want to spend money on climate. Where do you get the biggest bang for your biggest climate bang for your buck? And it turns out by far the best investment is in innovation. And if you think about it, it really makes sense. Back in the 1950s, Los Angeles was a terribly polluted place, mostly because of cars. The solution was not to tell everyone, I'm sorry, could you walk instead? Because that would never convince anyone in Los Angeles. Right. But the solution was instead innovating what was known as the catalytic converter, a little Gizmo innovated in 1978 that you put on a car tailpipe and it basically get rid of most of the pollution. This is the air pollution part, but that's why you can drive a lot longer and have much cleaner. I'm not saying Los Angeles is great or anything, but it's much Much cleaner than it was in 1950s, mostly because of that innovation. Yeah, it has a cost of a couple hundred dollars, but we basically convinced everyone in the world for a couple hundred dollars. Sure, I'll do that. In order to not cough. And we've gotten everyone in the world to do that. That's how we solve global warming. Not by telling everyone to be worse off, but by telling people if you invest a little bit of money, and we're talking about $100 billion there for innovation and research and development and green energy, you will innovate the technologies that are going to be so cheap faster so that everyone will eventually switch. And let me just give you one example and then I would love to go back to the other things, but Craig Venter, the guy who cracked the

[Tom Bilyeu]

human genome back in space, I met Craig Venter. Yeah, no, I know him.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

Oh, cool. Yeah, yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Don't know him well by any means,

[Bjorn Lomborg]

but he seems like a very interesting guy. I don't know, but he has a lot of slightly crazy ideas, but also really, really interesting ideas. So one of his ideas is imagine taking a gene modified algae that basically takes sunlight and CO2 and transforms it into oil. Then we just put it on the ocean surface. We grow our own Saudi Arabia out there. It'll soak up all the CO2, so then we'll harvest all the oil and then we'll keep our entire fossil fuel economy but driven on this oil that we just produced out in the ocean surface. So it's CO2 neutral. How cool is that? You can make it work in principle, but it's not anywhere close to commercially viable. But you know, let's give that man a couple million dollars to see if he can make this work a lot cheaper and a lot better. If he can, he'll be the richest guy in the world and he will make every one of us much, much better off because we'll have, you know, basically infinite energy. Without the CO2 problem. That'd be fantastic. Now there's a very good chance this won't work, right? But we should invest in a thousand things like that and we really just need one or a few of them to come true. And those are the ones that are going to power the 21st century. Right now we're instead saying, no, no, no, let's make it more costly to cut back on CO2. It's going to cost these trillions of dollars. Rich countries are sort of saying they want to do it, but poor countries, China, India, Africa, no, not going to happen. And so in Reality, we're spending a lot of money and we're very likely to not achieve anything. And that's why I'm arguing that was what our economists showed. And we had three Nobel laureates involved in this. And they basically said the very best long term solution is to dramatically increase our investment in green energy R and D. So we should definitely do that. But what we found was that was $11 back in the dollar. So had we set that target at, you know, 10 instead? But that's just historically not what we've done. It's not because we wanted to sort of skew. This is just because we didn't want to have, you know, if we, if we'd set it to five, we would have what, 40 or 100 different ideas. It will also be much harder to know whether we've gotten all of them. And that's why we've historically set it at 15. So that's why green innovation is not in there. But you know, fundamentally, it's just simply a question of saying, where can you spend the money and do the most good? But it necessitates that you stop believing, oh, but if we don't fix my favorite problem first, nothing else matters. And you know, a reasonable number of people will say, look, there'll still be poor people in 2030, but if we don't do something about climate change, it'll be the end of the world. And I get that. If, if that's your frame of mind, that actually makes perfect sense. It just happens to not be correct.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Right, okay, so going back, we've got E procurement, we've got mothers going into hospital sanitation, babies breathing. That's two. Hit us with number three.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

So take some of these very, very simple diseases like tuberculosis, malaria. Tuberculosis is what killed a fourth of everyone in the 1800s. If you watch Moulin Rouge, Satine, oh, I'm going to give away the ending. Spoiler alert. She dies again, right? And you know, she dies from tuberculosis. Everybody died from tuberculosis. This is a huge killer. We estimate over the last 200 years about a billion people died from tuberculosis. It was a tsunami of death over much of the rich world. And then we got antibiotics. You know, we used to send people in sanatoria. Now we fixed it with antibiotics. We're fine. We don't have tuberculosis or essentially don't have tuberculosis. There's a little bit of tuberculosis with the HIV epidemic from the 80s onwards, but it's still very, very little in rich countries. And it's mainly a knock on effect of hiv. It's not actually tuberculosis. It's just the thing that kills some of the people with hiv. So the reality is we fix in the rich world, but we haven't done that in the poorer part of the world. This is simply about making sure that people keep taking their medication. And one of the reasons why that's hard is you actually have to take your medication for half a year. If you've ever had your doctor prescribe you two weeks of antibiotics for something after you get well after the first week, it's hard to remember to do it the other week and imagine doing this for a whole half year. So there's lots of, you know, you game gamified, you get people on apps, you get tuberculosis anonymous where you meet once a week or a month and say, yes, I took all my medications and you know, that kind of stuff. You give people a little prize to do it. And it feels a little wrong that you have to give people a price, you know, like a juice carton or something. But if you think about it, if you make sure that these people don't have tuberculosis, they don't get to pass it on to 10 to 15 other people. That's how you stop an epidemic. So it has huge societal benefits. And then there's also a very large number of people that have tuberculosis that never get discovered. So 3, 4, 5 million people each year, we need to go out and screen those much more. In Bangladesh again, they had old, typically widows that would have 15 families in their neighborhood and they would go every once in a while and listen to them and say, hey, has anyone been coughing for a long while? And if, if the answer keeps being yes, then they make sure that that person gets in and get checked up on, on tuberculosis, those kinds of things. Yes, it has a cost. We estimate it would cost about $6 billion in total. But then we could long term avoid almost a million people dying each and every year from tuberculosis. This is simply something again we should do. Every dollar spent will deliver $46 of social benefits. This is just an incredible investment. Likewise with malaria, I'm not going to go into that, but it's basically about getting more mosquito nets out. We used to have lots of malaria. Malaria was endemic in 36 states in the U.S. it was so endemic in India, for instance, that many places in India we believe in the early part of last century were unlivable. But now we've eradicated many different places, mostly in the rich world. It's almost gone in most other places. But in Africa mostly because they have a mosquito that only bite people, whereas we have mosquitoes that'll bite people and livestock. So if you have lots of livestock, there's a lot less chance that you're actually going to get the malaria. And they also have a worse kind of malaria, a more deadly kind of malaria. So they're just simply, they had the unlucky draw. But if we get more mosquito nets, insecticides treated mosquito nets, we could save about half of the. There's about 600,000 people die each year for about $1.1 billion. We could save about 200,000 lives each and every year again. So the benefit cost ratio is about 48. So these are boring things, you know, TB, tuberculosis or malaria, not sexy things that we talk about, but they just

[Tom Bilyeu]

happen pretty rad if your kid is the one that has the tuberculosis. So let me say exactly like, yeah,

[Bjorn Lomborg]

they're incredibly important for those people. And, and of course also we believe that not only is malaria terrible for the people who die, but most people actually don't die from malaria. They're just terribly, terribly ill. And so we believe a lot of people in Africa are actually employed such that you need to have two employees because one of them is going to be as likely to be sick with malaria. And that's of course terribly inefficient. So you could also make the societies much more effective and hence richer and more resilient and more prosperous if you got rid of malaria. So this is just one of those no brainers that we should be doing all right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So I think it would be useful to go through all of them. I don't know if you, you can pop them off just off the top of your head.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

One more, because we talked, we talked about education at first and I think it'd be great to just finish that up. It's the most expensive thing that we're suggesting and it's also one of the most impactful of all of these things that we're talking about. So as we, as we talked about, there's a huge darth of good education in the world. So we, we work really, really hard in getting all the people in the poor part of the world into school. They're now in school but they're not learning very much. So the right answer is not to, you know, double teachers pays or build lots more schools or that kind of thing. Yes, it has some benefit somewhere and some countries actually have a lot more kids coming in, so they will have to build schools. But, but it's not the way that you actually solve this problem. The way you solve it. And so we asked a lot of the world's top economist education economists, they all said the same thing. There are two ways that you solve this. One is to teach at the right level. And I'm just going to tell you what that is.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So don't separate by age, separate by skill set.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

Well, yes, so, so you know, everywhere in the world we have all the 12 year olds in the same class, all the 13 year olds in the same class. But especially in poor countries, these 12 year olds are widely different in abilities. Some of them are way ahead of the teacher, many of them no clue what's going on in the class. Ideally, that teacher should teach each one of those kids at his or her own level. But of course you can't do that if you have 50 kids in your class. But what you can do, and we know this from lots and lots of experiments and large scale experiments with hundreds of thousands of kids. If you put these kids, say in front of a tablet, one hour a day, this tablet has educational software on it, it'll very quickly find out where your exact level is and start teaching you at that level. So your whole day will be seven hours of boring old classes that don't really work and then one hour of this where you actually get to interact with the, the tablet.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Are you familiar with the X Prize? They did a prize around learning on this. Is that part of what you guys looked at?

[Bjorn Lomborg]

I know that it's there, but no, this, this is, this is research that's been going on for at least 10, 15 years where they have investigated these sorts of educational softwares and found out how much does it cost. Also one of the things you need to recognize is that some of these tablets will be stolen. Some of them will be, you know, corrupt. Some of the teachers won't know how to do it. You also need solar panels to make sure that you have electricity. If you don't have power out in the middle of nowhere, you also need lockers so you can lock in the, the tablets at night. There's a lot of things that can go wrong and we've estimated all of these things also. And crucially, this is why you only have it one hour a day that the kids don't get the tablet. It turns out that that's a really bad thing because then they mostly just end up watching Netflix and doing all

[Tom Bilyeu]

kinds of so funny really fast on this because this is where our worlds collide a little bit with my obsession with AI. So I brought up the X Prize. I did A prize around this. They wanted to make sure that all kids were getting educated. Imod Mostak won that prize. He's the guy that went on to found stability AI, which gave us stability diffusion, which at one point accounted for like the top 10 apps on the app store for iPhone were all built on the back of stability diffusion. So his obsession is how do we use AI to educate people? How do we make it open source? How do we get it in the hands of all these kids? And I, there were two things that happened around the X Prize. I don't know where the borders are, so what I'm about to say, I think was imod, but I'm not entirely sure. But it was definitely tied to the X Prize. They went into some just ridiculously impoverished village. There was like a border fence. They cut a hole in the fence and they affixed effectively an iPad, a tablet. And they, they did not say a word. The tablet wasn't even in the native language. They just affixed it with an Internet connection. And something like three weeks later they had 12 year olds teaching themselves molecular biology because they were just navigating around and finding this stuff and finding videos and things that they were interested in. And I was just like, that is insane. And to me it speaks to this idea of when you get somebody who can learn at their own pace, you will be shocked at how quickly they like find that lane of like, okay, I comprehend at this level. And then they just go ham. Because to your earlier point about 3G and getting people access to phones and the Internet, the world's knowledge is at your fingertips. The second you have access to the Internet, it's, it's really pretty incredible. I, I was not at all surprised to see education on your list.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

No. And the reason why we are advocating this particular technology is partly because if you do one hour a day, partly you can spread out the usage of the tablets with lots of other kids, so the cost of the tablet becomes less of cost per kid. It's also that you need teachers buy in. Not surprisingly, teachers are worried that AI or technology will basically take over their job. And so by making sure that the teacher will sit with the kids for that one hour, ostensibly to help them with the technology problems, but really to say this is part of your job, so they're not worried about, this is the way to make sure that teachers will actually embrace this sort of solution, making it possible to start this conversation. And also this is what we've studied, We've studied this particular thing. We know this is incredibly Good. It's possible that there's an even better thing out there, but this is pretty good already. So what we find is for about $21, you can get a kid one hour a day for a whole year on this tablet. So the tablet will be spread out over, I think it's three or four years. The solar panels for 10 years. The box is also for 10 years. You also need to build a new classroom where you can do this, and that's also spread over 20 years. And, and, and, and obviously the software is almost all up there, but it's very, very cheap when you have to do it for millions of kids anyway. And so if you look at that total cost is about 31. Sorry, $21 for one kid for one year. But it means that for one year going to school. So seven hours of boring school, one hour of actually learning lots of stuff, you end up having learned as much as you normally would in one year over three years. Sorry, I said that badly. Right. Every year you go to school, you learn what you normally would have learned in three years. You're simply three times as good. And that matters in an hour. Yeah. And then when you go out and you become an adult, you will be more productive because now you actually have learned a lot more stuff, much better. And that means, and we know this from a lot of research that reflects in your hourly wage, you'll simply have a higher hourly wage. And so we've estimated what's that value over time in all of these countries. And what we find is that for about $10 billion. So this is going to cost about $10 billion to ramp this up to a lot of places. So get 90% of all kids in the poor half of the world this opportunity. But the benefit is that these kids will each and every year make $600 billion more in goods in, in, in higher income. Remember, they'll actually make 6 trillion. But this is far off. And so we're discounting it back to today. It's worth less because it's far into the future. So it's about $600 billion. And that means for every dollar spent, you'll $65 of good. I should just say this is not the only way that we're talking. There's also, and you actually mentioned that you could also do without the technology. So you just simply, one hour a day, you take all the kids who should be in first grade and put them in to first grade. You take all the kids who should be in second grade and put them into a real Second grade. It has a lot of social problems because you end up putting, you know, 6 years old and 12 year olds and you also kind of point out, yeah, you know, Steve here, not the brightest of those bunch, you're not going

[Tom Bilyeu]

to have the kind of adherence.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

But they, but it's much cheaper because you don't need the tablets and it's less effective, but it's also much cheaper. So we actually find it's also a really good idea. They do it in India, for instance. So we're suggesting that could be part of the solution. The last part is teachers are really bad. Teachers are poorly paid most places around the world and they are struggling. Many of them are just a tiny bit better than the kids that they have to teach. And so if you give them structured, or what we call semi structured teacher plans, so you basically make an outline of what you should teach today and tomorrow, every hour for the whole year if you do that, and then take them in on some courses. And this has been done. Kenya is now taking this out to the whole country after having done it for about 10% of the population. So we know this works. It costs very, very little and it can make the teachers become better teachers. And then you send out text messages to them every, every week. Oh, this week you're going to be teaching this, this and this. And you know, it just simply makes the teachers teach better. And so you can both get the kids to learn better. That's the learning at the right level. And you can get the teachers to teach better. And what we say is we don't know what countries are going to pick, so we're simply saying one third of each of these three, if you do that, it'll cost $10 billion, but the benefit will be about $600 billion. This is definitely one of the things we should do.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, no joke. That one feels like the beginning of a virtuous cycle. And again, I'm at the risk of beating a dead horse with how I've interpreted what you've put together here is this sense of all of the problems that we really care about are downstream of a few things. Keep people alive. That's one. Make sure that when they're born, that they survive, that the mother survives so that she can have the next kid and that she can raise them well. And then getting them educated is going to create this upward spiral. So if like imagine for a second that you're getting them that tablet, they're getting more educated, then they even, even if you spread this out over generations, which I don't think you need to do is you conceptualize this. But even if you did, a more educated parent is going to have a more educated child. And then that's just going to compound and compound and compound. And this is part of how the, you know, the west becomes the West. It's not like intellect is unevenly distributed, it's that there are oftentimes geographic things that create this sort of early disadvantage for some people or like malaria and things up just you've got a bad draw of the, the lottery on mosquitoes which is impossible to think that it can have that kind of consequence. But you just walked us through the math, it obviously does. And so by getting them in this educational spiral, you get them moving upwards, the GDP goes up, they're more wealthy, they can afford more education, they start having fewer kids, more attention on the kids they, that they do have, pouring more resources into those kids. And so it's just like you just get richer and richer and better and better. And that's really, really interesting. And I just want to hammer a

[Bjorn Lomborg]

point home because you're also able to hand handle all other problems better.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, right, great point. So your whole thesis around you become more resilient. So again just climate being a gravitational center for you because so much of your life has revolved around this that people are far more likely to survive climate catastrophe or be able to avoid climate catastrophe if they are wealthier because there are just so many of the knock on effects we've been talking about. And so going back, one thing that I've heard you bring up many times, but I never hear the interviewer push on this. I just want to highlight this is you spend an hour a day on the tablet and you get three years worth of learning in one year. And what happens if you're on the tablet for all eight hours of the day? Like I'm sure it's not completely linear but man it's going to be even better. It's crazy. I even think here in the western world we would be, we would be a lot farther ahead if we standardized the lesson plans again always based on data. So what teacher where created what lesson plan that yielded what outcome. Now you standardize that across as many people as you can get to take it in and then it becomes a battle of curriculum. Right? So right now we do that at the, effectively at the, at the national level. So it's nation versus nation. But man, we really going back to AI with AI we could really begin to track this stuff. So the people in this class with this curriculum, using this software, got this outcome on standardized tests. Track them over time, do this well in high school, do this well in college, make this much money. Like now you can really, really start to optimize this stuff. It becomes really incredible.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

I totally agree. I want to put down a few flags here, which is just there's a lot of stuff we don't know well. So we don't know what it would, what the impact would be of 8 hours of tablet use. My suspicion is that kids would be tired of it. Covid was a good example of distance learning is really, really hard because you know, what is going to keep the kids there? They also learn a lot of other things in school. So I would love to do some tests and actually find out is one hour the right answer? And it probably isn't. The reason why it's done is because it's much more acceptable to teachers. It's much less sort of disruptive of the whole educational model. And I think that's right if you want this to happen in the real world first. But yes, of course, we should actually have a conversation about should we do this a lot more. But then also, you know, look at what are the potential negative side effects. One obviously, is that one of the outcomes of going to school is that you learn to navigate a social setting. But the main point here is again to say that, that there are other things you need to learn. And we need to make sure that we don't just get so excited with technology that that's the only thing out. One thing is. So do you remember the one laptop per child? That was a very, very common thing like 10, 15 years ago. And everybody loved the idea, but everybody that I knew would be saying, but we haven't actually tested. And when you started testing, it turned out it was not good at all. It actually. And that's, that's why it turned out that, that it had no impact on learning. And it turned out that teachers were saying that it actually make the. Made the kids less attentive in class. So, so what we know from the evidence is that this is. You don't just give them a, a computer because what happens is they going to end up watching Netflix. Right? But what you want to do is to make sure that you put them in structured situations where they learn a lot using the tablet. And maybe one hour is as much as you can sort of handle a day. And I could certainly imagine I would, I would get really bored if I had to do this eight hours a day, even if there was somebody sitting over my, you know, breathing down my neck and saying, you have to, you know, stay on this target. The other bit I just want to mention was we actually don't look at the compound effects of saying, so now we've gotten richer. Now that means the kids, this kid, when he or she grows up, will be much better educated. So their kids will be even better educated and they'll leave this virtuous. Like, I think it's right, but we don't have the data to prove it. It's just way too hard to do. So this tells you something else, namely that it's very likely that most of the things I've just presented you are underestimates of how good they are. Because we just, you know, when I talk to the tuberculosis people, they will tell you how many people don't die from tuberculosis because they're doctors. And that's what they, that's how they think about it. But the fact that this, this will. So tuberculosis typically hit people in the 30s, 40s, you know, just when they become parents. And so this means you lose your mom or a dad and, you know, the whole family sort of careens out of control. We don't know what that has of an impact, but it's very likely not good. So the real benefit of this is probably much, much higher, but we don't include that because we don't have good enough models to it. Most people don't. So in education, we only look at the income impact because that's how education economists think about the whole world. But clearly, learning more also means that you'll probably, at least to a certain point, be happier. You'll be more likely to experience successes in other things. There's a whole lot. You'll probably be better democr, Democratic citizen. There are all kinds of better outcomes that we haven't included. So many of these, I suspect, are vast underestimates of the real benefits. But again, I don't feel like I have, you know, if, if we get 52 back in the dollar, I don't think we have to sort of say, but it might actually be even better than that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, no, for sure. Okay. So I admittedly, I think I'm a bigger believer in how valuable the time of the technology would be, but I'll let that go for now. I. I want to make sure that we at least give people a headline on the remaining, I think eight that we still have to go through. Let's go through them all and, and then we'll pick A couple to. To really dive into. And then there's another really important question I want to ask.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

So I'll just go through the list here. Yep. So we look at nutrition. Obviously, hunger is a big problem. It turns out it's kind of hard to give out nutrition because if you give out food, it's hugely, potentially corrupt. And so that's why we don't have a really good solution. We have some reasonably good solutions for nutrition. It gives $18 back in the dollar. It's actually one of the lowest. But we estimate you should spend $1.4 billion there, and you can do some really good chronic diseases. Sorry, but there's another way to fix nutrition, which is agricultural research and development. So if you remember what really, we were worried back in the 60s and 70s that a lot of people would just simply die from hunger. You know, people estimated that India was just a basket case. And, you know, we just had to triage and let India go kind of thing. There's just not enough food for everyone. And it would just get worse and worse. Instead, we had what was known as the Green revolution, which basically made seeds much more productive. So you had. You planted a rice seed or a wheat seed or a corn seed, and it simply produced two or three times the yield per acre. That simply. It's just magic out of the box. And that's what basically saved a lot of human beings. The guy here, he got a Nobel Prize Peace Prize for doing this, and he's credited for saving a billion people.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So, you know, crazy how like that nobody knows that guy's name.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

No, no. And this.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, this is where our negativity bias is. And as I have one too, but it drives me crazy that, like, there's not statues of that guy. Yes, but, you know, the. It is very easy to get people to panic about what might happen, but it's hard to get them to celebrate what actually happened.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

Yes, exactly. But we should just mention his name. Norman Bullock. Everybody should know his name. But yes, so. So. But we need a green revolution for the poor half of the world, because this was for rice, wheat and. And corn, which is mostly rich country crops. We need it for sorghum and cassava and all these other things that you've never heard of, but also could use with much higher productivity. That would both mean that you would produce more, which is great for farmers, but you'd also have lower prices, which is great for urban consumers of these food products. And it would also mean lower hunger. We get about 100 million people fewer starving so we estimate spend $5.5 billion there, and you get a bang for a buck of about 33. So we should definitely do that. Chronic diseases, you can't avoid people dying. That's just not going to happen. But chronic diseases is something that hits us when we stop infectious diseases and we can stop that from happening too soon. So that's typically heart disease and cancer. Cancer turns out to be much, much harder to do something about. But we should get people those pills, which we talked about earlier, for, for lower heart pressure and a few other things. And you can do this. And it turns out it costs about $4.4 billion. The average bang for your buck is going to be 23. You can save one and a half million lives. The reason why it's not bigger is because these are all old people that we're saving, unlike people we save from, you know, tuberculosis or from malaria, which are typically much younger people. Saving older people means you only save them, say, six or seven years. That's nice, but it's not as nice as saving a life all the way through. Then we should do land tenure security. So a lot of people don't.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Why do you guys call it that? That's such a weird way of saying own your, like, land.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Tenured security.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

I don't, I don't think our, our academic people would have allowed us to say that. But that is very, very true. Own your. And, and this is, this is mainly a question of saying that you are not certain that you own your land. Yeah, this matters a lot if you're a farmer. If I don't know if I have this land in five or 10 years, I'm not going to invest in digging up all the stones and improving the soil or getting irrigation or planting an orchard that'll only start giving fruits in five or 10 years. I'm going to just do the quick and dirty thing because that's the only thing I know will pay out while I'm still there. And that, of course, lowers productivity. And likewise, if I have a house in an urban setting or an apartment, I'm not going to change my kitchen. This is actually not the main thing that you do, but this is sort of a first world way of thinking about it. I'm not going to change the kitchen if I don't know if I can sell it and get that money back eventually, if I might just get replaced. Actually, about a billion people out of 5 billion people they asked in the world think that it's very likely that they will be evicted from Something they think they own in the next five years. This is, this is just astounding. And so it's about getting, making sure that you get the, the structures set up. So you need to have, for instance, cadastral surveys, basically land maps that show who owns everything. And then suddenly you start realizing that you and your neighbor don't agree on what I actually own. No, no, no. My grandfather actually said it went here. But then you work it out with the elders, and then you need to have some of the, of this go to court. But it will dramatically improve efficiency in your society because a lot of these societies are very based on agriculture still. That's a great way to do it. So we estimate the, the net bang, it's going to cost $1.8 billion.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But also from a capital standpoint that the property you own is typically people's most, their, their biggest investment, the thing they can borrow against, the thing that allows them to extract value from their own efforts. Anyway. We could totally derail on that. But that, that one is, is huge. Yeah, huge.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

Yes. So there's two left. I'm just going to talk very briefly about skilled migration, which is something a lot of economists would argue. If you look at someone who works at, you know, say, McDonald's and in, in Ethiopia and the very same job done in the US the pay is about 15 times higher. Right. You're just simply much more productive in most places where you have lots of other smart people around you. That's just basically how it is. And, and one argument that a lot of economists would actually make is there's a huge misallocation of work in the world. So a lot more of the world's poor should actually be working in rich countries. That would be great for them, and obviously that would be great for inequality. However, this would also be hugely politically problematic. A lot of people would not like to see a couple billion people move to the rich West. It's also unlikely that this would actually work out as well, as a lot of economists argue. But what we find is if you focus on skilled migration and if you focused on a small amount, so you basically say, imagine 10% more skilled migration than you already have. So that means a country like Canada that has lots of immigrants would take 10% of a fairly large number. But countries that are very skeptical would take 10% of a very low number. If you do that for really skilled. So that's doctors, engineers, stem workers, generally, you could actually move these people and make them much more productive in their new countries. And that would have huge benefits. It would even benefit the poorer countries. Yes, they would lose their doctors in the short while. But what it would mean would that it would be more advantageous to learn to become a doctor because you have an opportunity to actually go to a rich place as well. And it would also mean that you would have remittances that would more than outweigh the loss that you would see from losing your doctor. So overall, we find that those would call it $2.8 billion, but the benefit would be 20 times that. The last one, and this is the one I just want to spend a little more time on, is free trade or more trade. We've known for a very, very long time that one of the real reasons why we get richer is that we trade with each other. You do what you're best at, I do what I'm best at, then we trade. And that means we both get a better outcome than if you'd done everything yourself and I'd done everything myself. This is old knowledge back from Adam Smith and Ricardo and many others. And we used to have a very, very strong understanding from most of the elite in the world that more trade was actually good. We also used to neglect the fact that it's not good for everyone. If you sewed T shirts in the 1970s in the US you would lose out when you started opening up for Bangladesh because they can just simply sew T shirts better and cheaper in Bangladesh. So you would lose out your job. And that was what happened to a certain extent. And, you know, the. The Rust Belt is a good example of that. There's actually people who lose out to free trade. And so economists have been very, very bad at addressing this. What has happened is because a lot of people have sort of almost weaponized that Rust Belt. That's what's happened with Trump and many others that, you know, we've made this into. Maybe we shouldn't have free trade, or we should at least have a lot less of it. We should make sure we embargo China. We should make sure we embargo a lot of different places. That actually makes all of us less well off, but it will help these people in the Rust Belt. So the argument has been maybe that's a loss that's worth taking to make sure that these people can still work in, you know, shipping what, where you build ships, shipyards, or that kind of thing, instead of just sending all of it to South Korea and now onto Vietnam and other places.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, so that's going to end up being a. A very politically challenging problem. Because if that's a large enough voting constituency, because one thing I don't want to be Pollyanna about is a lot of the things that you're pitching are like, hey guys, we're already in the wealthy West. And so if you're struggling in the wealthy West, a lot of these things don't really apply to you. And so I have a feeling they're going to be less receptive. And they're like, that's not making my life better, so why would I ever vote for that?

[Bjorn Lomborg]

So what we've done here is, and I think this is the first time it's been academically done, is to try and estimate what is the benefits of free trade. That is we all get richer, but also what are the cost to free trade. That is, the people who work in import exposed industries will have a risk of losing their jobs or seeing lower pay or just simply being essentially dropping out of.

[Tom Bilyeu]

They're pushed out of the marketplace.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

Yes, pushed out of the marketplace, much better. And we've done that model and then done it with a standardized trade model and then looked at what would happen if we increased global trade by 5%. And it turns out that for rich countries, that is where most of the costs are going to come. That's of course why rich countries now have gotten, ooh, maybe we're not all that sure about free trade. It turns out that for rich countries, trade is still overall a great thing. It turns out that the benefits of, of an extra 5% trade is about $8 trillion, but the costs are about a trillion dollars. So you get seven, seven times as much good out of it as the cost. But the costs are real and significant. And that's why we need to be much more aware of saying, look, if you're going to have trade, you also need to make sure that you do something for the Rust Belt. That's more education, it's more opportunity to move to other sectors where they can then be competitive again. And maybe just straight out that we also subsidize them at least for a couple years, unemployment benefits of some sort. This is not going to solve all the problems, but it's certainly addressing there's a real issue. But even for rich countries, this is a great thing. We can do $7 of good for every dollar we end up losing. That's a great thing. And there's certainly enough money to go around to make sure that we compensate the losers. But for the poorer half of the world, it turns out the benefits are astounding for every dollar spent, that is jobs lost, they will gain $95 in benefits. And that's basically because all of the trade that they're going to be doing is the stuff that they can do better. So the poor half of the world will do amazingly good with this. The rich world will also do good, but not nearly as good. So we have to be more clear on our understanding that we're going to address the downside, the rust belts of the world. But fundamentally free trade is just a way to make everyone richer. But we have to be aware that there are trade offs and we have to be cognizant of that. But I think the study helps us say maybe we shouldn't be quite as gloom and against trade. We should just recognize it has downsides, but we can actually afford to do something about it. So that's the last one. It's going to cost $1.7 billion, but it's going to generate $166 billion of benefits for the poor half of the world or $95 back in the dollar.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Man, that, that one's very interesting. So I want to take head on what the potential challenges would be. So, and this is where I'm going to speak directly to my climate concern brothers and sisters out in the world. Okay. So I keep drawing this direct parallel. I feel like maybe you don't agree quite as fervently and you'll let me know here, but that as we lift the poorer half of the world out of poverty, they will, as a matter of course they will. And the problem is they're going to pass through a period where they're worse for the environment, but they're going to then get to a point where they're better for the environment. And so if we take a longer view and this is where you're, we just keep coming back to if you believe the world is ending in five years, we've got real problems. And so you constantly have to, I mean you've been very clear about what your thoughts are there. But man, I'm realizing as, as I even try to explain this now that it really does hinge on. Can we One, are you right that we don't have this really near term catastrophe staring us in the face? I am not knowledgeable enough in this. This is where I go to. I can tell you how I think through the problem, but I cannot at all give you data. But the, if we understand that like California in the 50s. Yes. Or China today, which China is both bringing on more green energy, I think than Anybody else, but they're also bringing on more coal plants than anybody else. And so it is this sort of mix bag, but that you, you want to push people up into a, a much more wealthy place as fast as humanly possible. Because with that will come, the innovation will come, the fewer children will come, the bigger investment into those kids will become, the more education, all that. And as we do that, the data shows that they will care far more about the future, thusly they will care far more about the environment and they will be better stewards, which feels like the way through. If we can get everybody to understand that, that we don't have a near term, we have a problem. We have a problem that needs to be addressed and we should be addressing it right now, today. But that we do have more time maybe than, than people think. Okay, so but with that we get back to. You're going to get a lot of people pushing back on that. I, you weren't in America when this was popping off, but there was like this whole weird moment that, that I really got caught off guard by, which was, hey, AI is going to take over trucking jobs. Everybody thought that was going to be the first thing. And trucker, sorry, you're just out of luck. And people said, well, they should learn to code. And I was like, yeah, word, they should learn to code. Because the reality is you, I don't think it wise for people to just say, oh, I'm facing a change, I don't know how to code. That's for people smarter than me. I give up. Right? But it, it, you would get banned off of Twitter at one point, you would get your video delisted on YouTube if you said the phrase learn to code. And I was like, what? Like, I get it. Not everybody's going to do it. Not everybody's going to be willing, whatever. But to say you can't even say it like that, that just doesn't make any sense to me. I'm very dizzied by that. But I accept now that that is a reality. So you're going to run into people who are like, hey, do not open free trade. We tried that. Terrible. We become over reliant on China. People have leverage against us. We outsource our infrastructure, we strip our jobs. You get Rust Belt, you get Detroit, like just all, all bad things. What on earth are you doing? Is there any argument other than cheaper goods? Which is, I'm guessing, where you're saying that we get the value. So is there any argument other than cheaper goods? And hey, you're helping the world's poor and that makes them care more about the future and therefore they'll be better for the environment. Are those the only two opportunities we have to convince people, or is there anything else?

[Bjorn Lomborg]

So I, I, I want to, I want to get back and answer, answer your question, but I think I actually first want to take this a step back. If you remember, I, I was saying, I'm simply saying here's a menu with prices and sizes. These are 12 great things. I'd be very surprised if everyone will take all 12 of them. And that's great. You know, if, if, if most people take, end up taking six of them, I'm, I'm all happy and excited about this. So I'm not.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Then let me ask you one quick point on that. When you guys came up with the 12, you like. Oh man, like, free trade made the list, damn it. And the environment didn't like. Were you kind of like, why couldn't the environment be $55 return?

[Bjorn Lomborg]

So, yes, I would have liked. So we actually had another one very brief story on, on coral reefs that we estimate delivered $24 back in the dollar. But since then, there's a new study out that showed that one basic problem that was missing was that when you restrict fishing for a while, that makes more fish and that makes more, it makes more tourism and it makes more ecological value, which is all great, but it also restricts the local fishermen. And if it, if it has to have a real impact, actually has to have a real cost. And that cost was not included. And so what we found was, well, this is actually not a terribly great investment. It's probably 2 or 3, but it's not at 15, and it's not 24 either. So that's one of the things we, we pull out. Yes, I was really annoyed because I would love to have had it. You know, it's a great thing. But you can't, you know, you can't argue with us. You, you know, we have to cut it the way that we, that we see it. And the best evidence that's, that's out there. The main point here again, is to say if we take the total of everything we've just talked about, it'll cost $35 billion a year. This is everything.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All 12. 35 billion.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

$35 billion. And it'll save 4.2 million lives and it'll generate $1.1 trillion for the world's poor half. This is just an outstanding opportunity. And remember, while I don't think you have. And I certainly don't have $35 billion in my back pocket to just finance this. But on a global level, this really is couch change. Of all the different things that we're spending on, I'm simply saying let's do these best things first. This does not mean that you can't argue for your favorite thing, and that could be climate change or AI or any other thing. I'm simply saying we are so rich that we at least should do these 12 incredibly cheap and incredibly powerful things first. So just to give you an example, right now the world spends about $1.1 trillion on climate. We can probably spend $35 billion and then get back to spending almost $1.1 trillion in this. Every year the world spends $2 trillion in military. Maybe we should just take out the $35 billion and then get back to spending $2 trillion on military and so on. So my argument is not to say that you can't also be engaged in all kinds of other things. It's just that the argument seems to tell us that when you do the analysis, these 12 things are so good that it's almost immoral not to just get those 12 things done. Now, there's reasons why these don't happen. You know, for instance, the tuberculosis. It doesn't happen because if you're rich in a rich country, you don't get tuberculosis. But also if you're rich in a poor country, you don't get tuberculosis. These are poor people in poor countries, often without a voice. You know, they're the migrant workers or the mining industry or, you know, prison population, those kinds of places. And they don't get you a lot of votes. But we should get this word out that this is actually a great thing to make sure that people don't die from these things and make sure that their local government spend more money on that philanthropists and USAID and others spend more money on. And likewise with all these 12 things. So I'm simply making the argument these are best things first, let's just squeeze that little $35 billion in there and then get back to all the other things that we, that we would constantly debate. And given the very small size of this, it's really not a big conversation. I'm not asking for us to spend, as we talked about with the 169. I'm not asking us to spend another $15 trillion, which would be hard to do, but $35 billion, which is like, what, 500 times less?

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's crazy. Now, one thing, when I was taking notes. I only got nine things. So there was something that I have put together into a couple similar ones or mashed together. So but anybody that took notes like I did might be going 12. I've only got nine. So I want to make sure that we get them all. Here's what I have. E. Procurement, the baby breathing, mother giving birth in institutions. We've got infectious disease solutions, education.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

That's tuberculosis and malaria.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I wondered about that. So that, that takes us to 10. Then we've got education, nutrition, hunger. Is that two different ones?

[Bjorn Lomborg]

Nutrition is one. So that's, that's about getting vitamins to pregnant mothers and calcium to pregnant mothers and to get feeding.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But if it's only one line item

[Bjorn Lomborg]

is what I'm saying, yes, that's nutrition. The other one was agricultural research and development, these communities. But they both address nutrition. Yes. So now we're up to 11. Yep.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So then we've got chronic diseases, land tenured security, skilled migration, free trade. So there's still one that I can't account for.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

And then that's. And that is. Right, I missed that. That's childhood immunization. So it's basically, you know, we've immunized a lot of the world giving them vaccines against measles and many others. And it's been a phenomenal benefit. We estimate this saves somewhere between four and possibly as many as 7 million kids each and every year. This is just. We should definitely be doing this. You can have all the conversations about vaccine for Covid, but vaccines against measles we just know works and is incredibly effective. It'll cost more to get the last 10, 15% that are missing in the world. But even with that, for about $1.7 billion, you can save half a million extra kids. And it means that for every dollar spent, you'll do $101 back on the dollar.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And it's really, really incredible. This whole thing has blown my mind. And I just want to thank you for giving a conceptual framework that people can follow. I think it's really brilliant way of thinking through hard problems, prioritizing and truly doing the best things first. Where can people follow you to get more of this very wise way of thinking?

[Bjorn Lomborg]

So on Twitter Lomborg, Bjorn Lomborg as my Twitter handle we have so the Copenhagen Consensus, my think tank, who's organized all of this. So copenhagenconcensus.org as where you can see it. And then of course you can read the book. I just want to show you the book because we actually published the conclusion on the COVID And most people don't see it right in front, but it actually has this line is it says benefits here and that has the cost down here. So you can literally see, you know, I've tiny bit of cost.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I have that book and didn't even notice that that's what that was.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

There you go.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Hysterical.

[Bjorn Lomborg]

So the conclusion is in the COVID You just have to watch the COVID and then you're done.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Amazing, man. Thank you so much for joining me today, boys and girls. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.