[00:00:00] Robert Tracinski Create clip Hey, everybody. It's our former co founder partner, Village Global, a network driven Vetra firm. And this is Metro stories, a podcast covering topics relating to tech business with world leading experts. Everybody welcome to another episode of venture stories by Village Global Here Today with Rob Brzezinski and Jason Crawford of Roots of Progress. Rob, Jason, Welcome to the cap. Thanks. Sex.

[00:00:32] Robert Tracinski Create clip Drive me out of

[00:00:33] Robert Tracinski Create clip here. Awesome. So, Jason first want to get into, um, the roots of progress really quick. What is your sort of desired goal with it? Here's what I see You go with it and I want you to play it back and see if it's even missing. You think you want it, you tweet. That started This podcast is you think there should be a capitalism appreciation course or field or, ah, you know, institution the way there is. Ah, our appreciation and that we grossly misunderstand progress. Our Miss underappreciate What progress means that so true food editor. Add to that. But I'm curious what it would look like if we fully did appreciate progress like what is sort of a desired changer changes that would come from ah, successful capitalism or progress of appreciation. Yeah, sure. So Ah, that's we've got pretty popular. I have to give credit to my brother David, who actually came up with it. A dinner, and I I thought it was so good that I put it out there on Twitter. It seems to have touched a nerve. Yes, the you know, the routes of progress. My blow on began as really a personal project, you know, really, to examine the foundations. You know, when I saw his was coming to see as the foundations of my world view really my philosophy in politics, I realized that those were pretty deeply rooted in a keen appreciation for how far we've come. A species, how many problems we solved. Really? How crappy life was just a few 100 years ago. And you know how How much better we have it today and you know, really feeling like if you love human life If you love, you know, health, happiness thriving and flourishing. You kind of need toe. Look at that. That history that amazing upward trajectory. And just ask yourself. Wow. How did we get here? Why did it take so long in human history for us? to even really get going on on some of those things. And how do we How do we keep it going and and even speeded up? And conversely, you know, what could friend too slow stop or or even reverse it? So I started looking into that just for myself. That began as a personal project. And then I started blogging about it, and now it's, you know, really become. I wantto tell this story of progress to the world.

[00:02:43] Robert Tracinski Create clip Yeah, and and, Robert, you've been thinking about this. I've been writing about this, even speaking on this related topics for decades. What, like what is sort of the thread that ties your work together? And how have you seen sort of this? Ah, interest in progress rise and fall in the last decade.

[00:03:02] Robert Tracinski Create clip You know, the interesting thing is that this has become something of a popular thing. Recently, Steven Pinker has come out with a book, Enlightenment. Now, where he talks about the amazing progress we've made, he must read, has disagreements with how he treats everything. But the whole first section of the book is just eating you over the head with numbers and charts and graphs. showing you exactly how much progress human beings have made in the last 200 years, and it's really remarkable, and I spend a lot of my time. You're writing about politics, and if you're out there in the discussion of politics, if God forbid your own political twitter, all of it is complaining. All of it is, Oh, this is a terrible thing And, oh, there's there's drag Queen story hour and how could we permit this to happen and the people on the right? And there's some somebody said something outrageous on Twitter, and we have to go drag him and make him lose his job and all that sort of thing is what consumes every nook

[00:03:54] Robert Tracinski Create clip and

[00:03:54] Robert Tracinski Create clip cranny of people's lives when

[00:03:56] Robert Tracinski Create clip they think about

[00:03:56] Robert Tracinski Create clip politics. And it's such a backward perspective. If you actually looked and realized how much better everything is and how much we've accomplished in the last 200 years in terms of making human life, why would I want to say immeasurably better? But actually it is measurably better not. Not every aspect of that progress can be measured quantitatively, but a lot of it can. And it's not just material progress It's not just okay with your wealthier and we have more food and that sort of thing, as important as it is to be able to eat, it's also spiritual progress in, and that's

[00:04:31] Robert Tracinski Create clip on

[00:04:31] Robert Tracinski Create clip the Steven Pinker does a good job at where he talks about how people are more educated you and all around the world people. I have much higher levels of education than they used to have. They have more opportunities to enjoy culture, all these things that we also think of a spiritual dimensions of life, which again are hard to measure. But a lot of parts of that they can be measured. We concede this improvement. So if you started from that premise, it wouldn't be, Oh, how terrible that somebody said something bad over here. It would be how fortunate we are, how grateful we should be that that everything's gone so well. And then let's try to figure out what's so good about the life, the life in the system and then the way of life and the way of doing things. The political system we have and how can we keep that?

[00:05:17] Robert Tracinski Create clip Let me jump in just the last threat because material you can't debate and even your quality of life, your pleasure. Happiness you can't debate. But even on the spiritual side, like if you polled people asked if they had a connection to something deeper than themselves or more meaning in their lives now than they used to. When people also talk about the loneliness, crisis of the meeting, prices or opioid or increasing depression? Are those things true to a point, but still better than they used to be? Are you

[00:05:46] Robert Tracinski Create clip well, good? There's a lot of there's a lot of debating you can go and I've actually dipped a few toes into this. And if you actually go into the people who try to measure this sort of thing, there's a lot of controversy and it's very hard to measure because you don't have good statistics from before. But, you know, you played crisis, you know is a serious. There are always problems in the presence, so you have the opioid crisis. But it used to be, you know, ah, there was a reason why prohibition was a popular proposal, you know, 100 years ago, and that was because the widespread drunkenness and alcoholism rampant alcoholism what was considered to be a major social problem. So it's not like any of this is new, but I still try me. Not yet. You had the problems of loneliness, but on the other hand, we have far better ability to communicate with other people. Then we ever used to You know that that if you have relatively a family and they don't live near you, you, you, you you couldn't be in constant contact with them. But also the idea that, you know, there's a lot of glamorization of the past that happens. Let us sort of a golden age is, um, you know, it's like, Oh, what things are so much? No, But I was a kid. Things were so much better. You know, that kind of trying to do a best Buy Best Jimmy Jimmy Stewart accent on that. But the golden age isn't really misses. That wife really was terrible in a

[00:07:05] Robert Tracinski Create clip whole

[00:07:05] Robert Tracinski Create clip bunch of different ways, and that includes the fact that you're much less likely to have the opportunity to find a job you find

[00:07:12] Robert Tracinski Create clip interesting

[00:07:12] Robert Tracinski Create clip and fulfilling because, you know, there was, uh, fewer options, fewer less education available to people. Fewer options in the kind of jobs you did, you were likely doing menial physical labor. Uh, you go back far enough a couple centuries and the vast majority of the population is basically working 14 hours a day out in the fields. This is not a glamorization of the past aside, this is not a spiritually fulfilling way to lift.

[00:07:40] Robert Tracinski Create clip So

[00:07:40] Robert Tracinski Create clip I think when there is that there's a treadmill here, you know, when you see this lot, they actually they called it the hedonic treadmill. Right? When things go so much better for you, you get used to it. And Cecil here, start complaining about, uh, thing is that you would never have thought to complain about before, but because you get used to how great your life is And I

[00:08:00] Robert Tracinski Create clip think

[00:08:01] Robert Tracinski Create clip we're in a giant culture wide hedonic treadmill, uh, where we're all going around complaining about what are, for the most part, first world problems. Ah, and not realizing how much less fulfilling life would have been for the average person. Ah, 100 152 103 100 years ago.

[00:08:19] Robert Tracinski Create clip When you wanna think about spiritual life, you know, I would just ask. Think of your favorite piece of music, right? Your your favorite recording that just fills you with, you know, with with an extreme emotion, whatever your preferred emotion is, Well, that's, you know, pot energy or angst. But now think of what you would have had to do to hear that music. You know, just a little over 100 years ago before we have the photographs, right? You would have had to play it yourself on an instrument if you were wealthy enough to own an instrument. And if you were skilled enough to be able to perform the music or maybe hum it in your head right, But to actually hear it, you would need to do that. Or if you were super wealthy, you know, you could actually higher Ah, it's a musician to come performance from you live. Even if you were a king, you know, you got up in the middle of the night or you couldn't sleep, and you wanted to hear your favorite symphony. You know, you couldn't even assemble the musicians fast enough to plan for. It would have been just literally impossible.

[00:09:14] Robert Tracinski Create clip And today you can you get Spotify and for a few dollars a month, you can hear the best recording of any piece of music you want performed by the greatest, you know, uh, performer of that music. And you can actually get their best performance in the world in their entire career over their lives that they ever did. And that's available to you instantly on demand in the privacy of your own home. So and

[00:09:40] Robert Tracinski Create clip to get to my point about the hedonic treadmill that you still get people like, Oh, it's buffering. My Internet connections of people will still find something to complain about because they haven't gotten that mindset of realizing how good things are.

[00:09:53] Robert Tracinski Create clip Okay, so let me, Jeff. Oversight. I assumed you knew both of your projects are educating people in helping educate people that, hey, life used to suck much more than it does now. And in fact, if you realize what what it was back then, you'd realize it doesn't suck. Now. It's actually amazing. That's incredible. So let's say people understand that what it would have another critique coming says Okay, I understand that it's so much better than it was. But, you know, we we have real problems today and you could debate. Really? Not really Are what? A center climate change your nuclear war. You both front of nuclear war Ai ai, nanotechnology, biotech, bio engineering. And is it possible that progress gets us to a place from scarcity to abundance? But once we are in an abundant worlds and we're not there yet and we may be a few decades later than that, we need something else that it's not that we got us here won't necessarily get us there. And we will need more to work with the things that we have instead of sort of continue to strip mined in. Ah, some people say unsustainable. How would you respond to this?

[00:10:55] Robert Tracinski Create clip Well, first of all, is the oldest guy. Probably in this conversation I have to stop you on the threat of nuclear war because I grew up with the threat of nuclear war being a really immediate. It could happen in the next five minutes. Think And so we are way, way, way far away from no matter what problems are now, we're away far away from that now because there was a really mean this is pretty 1980 I'm pre the fall of communism there was a really ll mortal terror that hung over everybody's head. And it was a real thing because we knew that, you know, something could set off a spark. The Soviets could go nuts and decided to just do a first strike. There could be a giant misunderstanding. It could all happen next five minutes, and there's nothing anybody could do to stop it. So that's an example of a case where I'd say, you know, people don't realize, you know, even citing that now, you don't realize how much worse that was before, But I also want to talk about on the issue of sustainability.

[00:11:53] Robert Tracinski Create clip The idea Is it sustainable? Well, we've been sustaining it for 200 years now. Okay, so if you go back, there's, you know, the graft that's going around that that that is kind of gotten famous is one showing basically global GDP per capita. You back 1800. And it's this giant, you know, hyperbolic curves or parabolic curve going. No geometric growth going up. And it just keeps going. And World War two isn't even a blip on it. Okay, so things you think of his horrible cataclysms in human history, don't really slow it down. So it's just amazing phenomenon that has happened. And so we talked about it being unsustainable. Well, it keeps getting sustained year after year after year. Now there are theoretical reasons. I can argue why that is. But that's why I'm talking about White recognizing the history is so important because it's almost strange to ask the question of Oh, this is unsustainable. We're going to strip mine our way out of this. Well, if we're going to do that, I mean, Multex would have been right 200 years ago if that were true and he wasn't he was proved wrong again and again and again.

[00:12:57] Robert Tracinski Create clip I think the question of sustainability is a good one, because I think we need to think carefully about what kinds of sustainability we want and what kind of sustainability is important, right? So the modern concentrate sustainability, which I think it goes back to about the 19 seventies, is a concept of sustaining a particular process indefinitely, as if we were never going to look with better process is never going to transition. But you you know, before that we had a different concept of what we needed to sustain. What we needed to sustain was growth. It was progress. It was improving standard of living. It was improving the capacity of the economy to provide for more and more people. And the way you sustain that kind of growth is not by choosing quote unquote sustainable technologies, it's rather by making progress, too. New and better technologies that make use of more abundant resource is. So when we were running out of sperm whales for lighting oil, we switched to kerosene. Thank you, Rockefeller. When we were running out of elephant tusks for billiard balls, we switched to plastic on the same thing, if you tortoise shells for cones and et cetera, et cetera. Many many animal products were replaced by plastic when we were running out of natural fertilizer from the island off the south off of the coast of South America, where they had seagull droppings stories high. When we were running out of that natural fertilizer, we invented the Harbor Bosch process, and we're able to synthesize fertilizer. So, you know, in all of these cases, actually, in fact, a lot of the history of the 19th century and industrial pollution was migrating off of bio sources off of animal and plant sources that we were that were that our needs were, you know, exponentially growing. And we're going to outstrip those those animal and plant resources and switching to much more abundant mineral resources. So if we are near the end of any mineral resource running out, we should be just as our ancestors did back then. We should be looking for the next new technology that will make use of some you know, some new resource that is orders of magnitude. More, for instance, you know, nuclear technology and its orders of magnitude better fuel efficiency.

[00:15:09] Robert Tracinski Create clip The guy the guy to go to on this actually is Julian Simon. He was an economist mostly from 20 mostly active in the late 20th century, and he wrote a book called The Ultimate Resource. And he addressed this issue in the sort of in the theater, on the theoretical level, address this issue of resource depletion, they said. Actually, the ultimate resource is the human mind, and the more human minds there are out working to solve problems and come up with new technology, the more resource is they're going to create and This is the idea. You know, humans don't use up resources, they create new resource is but coming up with new ideas. And he looked at that that history that Jason just talked about and said, You know, every time they say, Oh, we're having a shortage of of this thing or having a shortage of that thing This is basically why multi Thomas Malthus was wrong. Every time we have a shortage of something, somebody comes up with the new idea for a new technology and either taps the new resource or find more of the existing resource. And we keep growing. And the reason we keep growing is because of the power of the human mind to innovate. And so if you're asking about what went right, what is it? We have to suspect him. What's the big lesson that we're gonna learn from this history? You know, if you want to keep this progress going, the big lesson is the power of the human mind to innovate and the need to liberate that and to allow that to happen and not to constrict. Uh, it's getting a lot of the things about all we have resource shortages or it's unsustainable. Ah, lot of the solutions are so let's restrict everything and let's make less things possible.

[00:16:40] Robert Tracinski Create clip And his, you know And he came out of the population growth movement, you know, he actually was working on trying to reduce population growth, and he suddenly rise. How perverse that wascause is every new human being born is somebody who consult problems

[00:16:54] Robert Tracinski Create clip so we shouldn't.

[00:16:55] Robert Tracinski Create clip We should not want to constrain things in order, solve problems. We should want to open things up.

[00:16:59] Robert Tracinski Create clip In fact, if there's anything to be worried about, it might be that population growth in the world is slowing. But that

[00:17:05] Robert Tracinski Create clip his death, the irony,

[00:17:06] Robert Tracinski Create clip is that he has all

[00:17:06] Robert Tracinski Create clip the concern about the population growth being excessive. The only the real problems we're seeing now, or countries that have now declining population growth

[00:17:16] Robert Tracinski Create clip and every 1,000,000 fewer, you know, human beings that are born. That's one fewer one in a 1,000,000 genius that we get in the world to help with all of our problems. And yes, I understand. I understand that I understand complaints. You know that Peter Thiel and others have hey economic growth. Is it rising fast enough? You know, hence the need for for what? You has the work that you guys are doing. I'm just curious. Let's say that we you know that the progress work that you're doing and others doing works so well that we get everyone on board and next 10 years your next few decades you see a surge. You know, I cannot go with baccarat science back where it was etcetera. Everyone's really excited about progress. What would you say to the critique? So we're not in the place Where are now, where people don't really value progress Enough. Do you think at some point, because there is a critique that progress or mark unchecked markets are sort of like a paper clip? Maximize? Er that at some point it will be too much? Or do you think that is sort of, ah, flawed premise and that it is infinite. Progress is the way of the is the way to go.

[00:18:13] Robert Tracinski Create clip Well,

[00:18:14] Robert Tracinski Create clip I look at that. I think that, you know, you said earlier we're not in abundance society yet or maybe a few decades away. We are in an abundance society by any historical measure, but we're probably what would be considered a poorer society compared to the standards of 100 or 200 years ago. There's there's a British television serious. They did a while back. I think it's called 1900 House, where they had a bunch of people. They got a group of ordinary British people from about the year 2000 and they got then they had them live as if they were in the year 1900 it was awful. Everything took so much for works to get anything done. The standard of living with so much lower they were colder. They were hungry. They were. It was, you know,

[00:18:55] Robert Tracinski Create clip it would be. I think the mother ultimately cheated by sneaking in some shampoo.

[00:18:59] Robert Tracinski Create clip Yeah, exactly. They've got a couple versions of this and people cheat like Oh, like I'll get out because they just can't handle living the way people lived on Lee 100 years ago. So the thing about this is this is that I that the concept in economics, the concept of scarcity doesn't mean you have a small amount of something. It means only that something exists in a limited quantity, right? So we're always gonna have scarcity, and that says a wealth always exist in a limited quantity. You know, even if it gets larger, it's not unlimited. But the point is that abundance is always relative to what you're used to. And you think of a Star Trek future, right? We've already projecting in our minds. Here's what things might be like. You know where we can travel faster than light speed across the galaxy. We can tell the computer to give us, uh, tea Earl Grey hot, you know, and it immediately just appears we're not even anywhere close to that technology. So we can imagine living in a society that far more abundant than today. So the human desires are not limited. If you have, if you have something you can always have more or something, you have it better. You can have a faster. And we're talking about the power of the human mind to innovate. And it's not just the power of the human mind to say, to come up with new ways of creating the same old things. It's also the power of the human mind to create new things. We didn't know we we wanted until somebody created them. It isn't that what sort of, you know, Steve Jobs sort of did it in computers, right? He says, Well, we know what we can do something we can't You're not create a better version of the existing computers. Gonna create something that does things in a new way that's easier and more interesting. And you know, we'll have a giant music library carry around in our pockets and that sort of thing.

[00:20:40] Robert Tracinski Create clip And not only will will the world get better in all those ways, but also it will happen with us working less. So, you know, I think you can extrapolate out from the future to a time when you know everybody takes a gap year off after school before beginning work just because they can on everybody retires at age 40 and we have, you know, 20 hour working weeks are the norm. With three day weekends on day, three months, it's a paid vacation per year, right? If you just just extremely from yeah, the

[00:21:12] Robert Tracinski Create clip idea of it being normal for people to go to college and spend a year the years 18 to 22 roughly, you know, not working and going and learning it is extraordinary historical perspective that that would be a normal thing for human beings to do, as opposed to be only a very small elite being able to do that.

[00:21:29] Robert Tracinski Create clip My last question on this line of thinking is, Do you concede? And I don't really have an opinion here, Mistress, Do you concede that there is what some people call a singularity on? Or do you think that there will be some? We're 100 years now means you're just not a post progress era.

[00:21:45] Robert Tracinski Create clip Well, I with regard to that sort of. For a while I worked on a sort of a futurist blawg. And and you know, I spent a lot of time studying the singularity people. And there's a lot of heights that goes around that, and to some extent it gets so speculative. And science fiction either. I'm more part of my answer

[00:22:02] Robert Tracinski Create clip is

[00:22:03] Robert Tracinski Create clip I'll let people 200 years from now worry about that. I don't mean because there's no such thing as a post scarcity economy because there's always things always exist in a limited quantity, right? And so I don't think there's gonna be anything I call the post abundance economy because, like I said, there's always new crazy science fiction things we can think of to dio that or to create that we haven't done before. And, uh, you know, we're gonna try

[00:22:30] Robert Tracinski Create clip to

[00:22:30] Robert Tracinski Create clip figure out how to go to other planets. We're gonna try to figure out how do you know make e keep falling back on Star Trek? Because that's like everybody knows that kind of Star Trek. Star Wars. Everybody knows the kind of science fiction, the things that we talked about. Who knows if those things are possible, we're always going to be trying to do something That's Maura and beyond that, you know what I mean?

[00:22:52] Robert Tracinski Create clip Yeah. No, totally. What? Another part of people, some people say, is the difference between you know, complex and complicated systems and complicated systems. Are are things like a Boeing 7 47 or even like a pencil, like I couldn't create one myself. But, you know, you line up enough people and in a market economy, and while I it gets done and it gets done Great. That's complicated system, uh, something that could be reduced, whereas complex systems can't really be reduced. And if you if you reduce them, you sort of you could mess with the way that they work in some way, like like a rainbow or a cloud. You know, it's hard, just really make sense of, um and you know, we don't put market relationships on our, you know, um, parenting. Or, you know, certain elements where you know to reduce it would would taint it in some way. And some people think that the environment is, ah, certain elements of environment are sufficiently complex, and we're using complicated mechanisms to try to address it, and something gets lost in the process.

[00:23:54] Robert Tracinski Create clip Well, I think interesting thing about that sort of thing is again. A lot of this is we're pointing to very riel existence of progress. And then people point to oftentimes very speculative things of while. Maybe this system is so complicated. The history of the past 200 years even and that includes applying to things that you call environmental issues has been one of creating progress and then spotting problems and then coming up with solutions to those problems. Right? So the idea is that human ingenuity is the, uh, the scented Crete to send our inventions create problems. Human ingenuity is also the proven, demonstrated, historically demonstrated answer to solving those problems. I mean, take the history of the smokestack. You. Why is the white of factories have smokestacks? Is because, Well, they were creating smoke that was then going and, you know, depositing. So it's all over the local town where the people lived and creating all sorts of problems. They said, Well, our solution is building taller and then, you know, send it up higher in the atmosphere and it won't you know it'll dispersed by the time it comes down and lands anywhere. So this a delusion is the solution to pollution. You spread it out and then it doesn't bother people. And then, you know, he said, that that became a problem. They came up with other things, other ways to get particular. It's out of the, uh just get it out of the air and new fuels and that sort of thing again. Technology and creativity and increased wealth in order to implement those solutions. Those are the sluice, those of the way we have for the for 2 300 years. Those are the way we have solved every one of those problems and capitals in default will blame for this. But cap people if people realize the history that also understand the extent to which capitalism is key to the solution. So, for example, take something like hygiene and sanitation, the fact that you have sewer systems and you have your cities of millions of people and there's not open sewage out in the streets because it all gets taking care of it all gets, you know, we have a clean urban environment because all of this human waste gets this taken out

[00:25:57] Robert Tracinski Create clip the process. None of that's possible without enormous amounts of iron and steel and an enormous industrial infrastructure that's able to create you have you could have scientists telling you Here's what you need to do to prevent the spread of disease.

[00:26:12] Robert Tracinski Create clip But

[00:26:12] Robert Tracinski Create clip you also then have tohave the factories and the inventors and the industrialists, creating this abundance, relative abundance of iron and steel and all the things that you need to build the pipes in the sewers and the concrete. Everything I thought you need to do in order to implement that solution order to make a healthy environment for people to live in, so that the point is if you will recognize that's been the history of the last 2 to 300 years. It would seem less daunting to say, Oh, what if there's some enormous problem out there waiting hanging over us that's going to kill us? You have there be more confidence in the fact that this is what we've been. This is the problem. We've kind of problem We've been solving all along

[00:26:51] Robert Tracinski Create clip on the question of complex systems. Ah, I'll just defer to David Deutsch in his book Beginning Infinity, where he says anything that is not forbidden by the laws of physics is possible given the right knowledge rights. And we may not have the right knowledge yet, but there's faith that we will. But eventually yes, yeah, we can. We can always get there is interest. OK, one thing you mentioned is that will work less and you know one. Some people say that in 100 gatherer societies, you know, we spent like 15 hours a week working and there's really agriculture revolution where we really started working long hours and then you know, Keane's predicted that, you know, by now we be also working significantly less than we are today. So what happened there. And I'm curious what gives us confidence that will work less in the future. Yeah, So as for the hunter gatherers, I haven't researched that one in detail yet. I have seen some. I've seen some commentary along the lines of, um, you know, that they weren't actually counting things correctly when they did those studies, for instance, maybe they counted. Ah, the amount of time you went out and kind of hunted or gathered, but not the amount of time that was equivalent to food preparation or housework and so forth. So this may not be accurate numbers. In any case, you know? What did those what did those hunter gatherers get for their for their hours that they put in, right? They didn't get antibiotics, They didn't get air conditioning, right? They didn't get cars. Or, you know, any of the things that that we enjoy today. So sure, if you don't have a lot of technology and your hours of labour aren't getting you the amazing standard of living that we have today. Maybe you don't put in all those hours, right? The exact you know, the the ideal number of hours to work for a week is going to be dependent on what you get for those hours. And if you don't have much time, you're not getting respect. You work less. But why am I so confident that will we'll be working less in the future because that is actually the history of, you know, it's not the last 53,000 years, then at least certainly the last.

[00:28:54] Robert Tracinski Create clip A couple, you know, a couple of 100 years, you know, we didn't used to have two day weekends. Used to be, you know, You said you'd be lucky. You know, you get maybe one day off on it Turned out that there were, you know, different religions. One of different days. Some religions wanted Saturday, someone some day off. And so finally, you know, one factory, just that. Okay, fine. We'll give you both days off, you know? And then we kind of got the weekend spreading from there. Much more. 40 hour workweek is low compared to what the standard used to be. I think used to be 80 and was reduced gradually, you know, down to where we are now. Retirement used to not be a thing that existed. You works until you die. Child labor, of course, was common. Paid vacations, you know, are relatively new, right? So all of these things, you know, people ask, what if automation takes all the jobs? You know, my answer is like, I hope it does, right? It's not. I hope it does that faster because what happens is when automation takes jobs. Let maybe in the short run, it takes away an individual's entire job. Right? But in the long run, what happens is it takes away a little piece of everybody's job. And you know what? That's actually a good thing because we get to work less and have on simultaneously haven't increased standard of living. So the more we more the economy progresses, and the more we can produce are ours. I think the more will continue to also work a little bit less interested, enjoy more.

[00:30:13] Robert Tracinski Create clip Yeah. Here's where I'm actually gonna disagree with Jason old, but I'm not as confident that we're actually gonna work less. I think we're going to work. Uh, we might wear around work as much as we do now, but we will do so because we choose to do so because it's not like work is, you know, a punishment imposed on us for a lot of us. Work is something we choose to do. We decide we like to do something. We want to do it. We like the rewards we get from it. And, you know, for example, it's really easy. There has been this trend recently of people. People are writing books about how you can retire at age 30 and a star, as I could tell. The main answer to that is Write a book about how to retire at age 30 sell copies of the book and then retire off of that. But, uh, the answer, invariably how to retire at age 30 is basically to save all of your money and then live on extremely little. There's a guy who has his blogger. He talks about howto live on $25,000 a year, and you can do that. And the thing is, you can she live pretty well by historical standards on $25,000 a year. You know, if we talked about I talk about the 1900 House people living like they did in 19 hundreds, if you wanted to live the way people did in the year 1900. You could do that on very, very, very little money. So would be really easy if you retire and live the rest of your life that way.

[00:31:31] Robert Tracinski Create clip But most people choose not to, because not because they're forced to work more, but because there are human, enormous rewards for working more. You work hard and you get ah, nicer life. Get a nicer house, you get to travel, you get to do all the things you really like to dio. And, you know, if you choose work, that's rewarding for you. I mean, for a lot of you know, the best mind. My concept of retirement isn't that I'll stop working if that I'll get to work only on the things that I really want to do right. So the work will be something that's enjoyable entirely, something

[00:32:05] Robert Tracinski Create clip that's

[00:32:05] Robert Tracinski Create clip enjoyable and rewarding and has fewer deadlines than now. So the point is that work is not a punishment, is not something we're trying to avoid. But the idea is that work overtime has produced much, much, much greater rewards, a much, much greater positive benefits so that you know, when you work. Now you get a lot more out of your work

[00:32:28] Robert Tracinski Create clip right. Then I

[00:32:29] Robert Tracinski Create clip get the more relevant measure.

[00:32:30] Robert Tracinski Create clip Let me zoom out here a bit. When When people talk about progress, they often and you write about this lot Robert. They often equate it with with liberalism and that also is often equated with or include democracy. And I think very recently we're sort of seeing the story of China gain one. We're seeing sort of democracy, not work out as much in the Middle East. And so there's some questions they're on about, sort of how natural or how equate with progress, that is. And then we're also seeing this sort of other success case with China, which is very succeeding economically and perhaps for that part of progress, but not not with the liberal ideals that we sometimes equate what's going on there. How do you How do you make sense of it? And how ah, you how tied up is this notion of democracy with progress, and is it sort of Ah coincidence? Or was it necessary that the U. S. You know, Leo leader in progress had both democratic and capitalist ideals?

[00:33:26] Robert Tracinski Create clip Well, ok, this actually, uh, ties into some research. I were working on this interesting little group. It's one of my major research interests going forward. It's addition little group in the 18 thirties in New York City. There there are radical Democrats in New York City, and in 18 30 that meant that you were a laissez faire. You know, there was a guy named William Leggett who was sort of leader of this group, who was the editor of The New York Post at the time, and he had a great way he put

[00:33:52] Robert Tracinski Create clip it. He called that

[00:33:53] Robert Tracinski Create clip he had this column. He wrote about the sister doctrines, and he argued that basically the free markets and representative government or democracy was a member of the Democratic Party. Democracy, as he called it, were sister doctrines that they were philosophically intertwined and came from the same roots. And we're part of the same system, and I think there's a really strong argument to be made for that, because how we got all this wealth and progress is primarily by liberating the individual, to be creative and to invent new things, to start new businesses and to decide what products he wants to buy and all of that. We liberated the individual to go out and engage in initiative and create new things. And that's how we got this enormous wealth. Well, the idea of the individual being liberated, the individual having rights, the individual having freedom is also the essence of the democracies of somewhat sloppy term for it. But the essence of a free society of representative government and the rule of law and individual rights protected by government. And historically we've

[00:34:58] Robert Tracinski Create clip seen

[00:34:58] Robert Tracinski Create clip those two have gone hand have have been very closely related. And I think philosophically, you know, in terms of the basic ideas, you see why they have to be related, because the more you have government clamping down from above, the more you and they cut off not only the freedom of individuals but their opportunities to build and create and do things. And I think you know one thing. I have one discussion. I have a high school friend, one time friend who actually has spent the last 10 years or so in China teaching. And he said, You know, the one thing he pointed out to me is that up to about 2008 China's growth was the result of becoming freer, becoming more like the West, adopting more of a Western model. And it was at 2008 that they saw the financial crisis and they had the Olympics and they were kind of puffed up. Put themselves And she Jinping, who's the current leader, sort of spearheaded this idea that no, we don't need to be like the West. We could go back to Maoism essentially and get a different result this time. And, you know, we're about 10 years instead experiment. And I think that it is.

[00:36:04] Robert Tracinski Create clip You know, a lot of us are sort

[00:36:05] Robert Tracinski Create clip of

[00:36:06] Robert Tracinski Create clip waiting for the other shoe to fall, because I think that it really is. It really is attempting to do, you know, a Maoist quasi totalitarian system, but expecting a different result the second time around. And I think that that's a contradiction that we haven't really seen play out yet. But you know, China is just really started moving aggressively in that direction, but they have a tremendous inefficiencies in their economy, mean we're sort of got astonished me how much wealth China has, but that's relative to the fact that they were exceedingly poor 50 years ago. I mean, they were basically in the Middle Ages 50 years ago. They brought in Western technology. They adopted a freer, more capitalist system, and they've advanced tremendously. There's still a lot poorer than us, and they saw a very inefficient system. And it remains an efficient in part because they have an authoritarian government and a lot of a huge amount of corruption and a huge amount of bureaucracy and, you know, favored companies and cronyism and that sort of thing. So this idea that they have somehow created an alternative model to free societies of the West is really getting ahead of ourselves. You know, they have managed by becoming more like us than man has become much wealthier. There's still a lot poorer, and they still have a lot of problems, a lot of inefficiencies. You know, the wealth is astonishing because it's such a large country. But on a per capita basis, there were still way behind us, and I wouldn't we wouldn't want to trade places with them. Let's put it that way.

[00:37:33] Robert Tracinski Create clip Yeah, I think it's a great testament to the power of liberty that even a little bit of it. You know, introducing, introducing just just partial freedom gets you this sort of catapulting economic growth like China has had. There's a good argument, by the way, that going so getting even further back than economics, I've heard a good argument that part of the reason that the scientific revolution was able to take off in Europe was because of, you know, this is the relative weakening of the Catholic Church after the Reformation had this Madison and Catholic factions that were now sort of competing with each other and fighting each other. Europe was especially compared to China at the time, was much more fragmented, right? Europe you had. You have many different countries and in many ways competing with each other. Whereas China was much more unified under a kind of a central uniform authority. And so, you know, heretics in Europe. If they were being persecuted in one place, they could hop across the border somewhere else. That maybe you had a different religion and welcome to them in on. So this allowed a lot of free thinking and ultimately a lot of, you know, progress forward in science and knowledge.

[00:38:40] Robert Tracinski Create clip That may be just wouldn't have been possible under the more uniform, you know, Society of China. I

[00:38:47] Robert Tracinski Create clip would also point out, in a real world test here and the people of Hong Kong are people who really have been given a choice to say, You know, you've you've lived under a system with relative degree of freedom and rule of law, and you're being incorporated to a system that doesn't have that and see how you can ask them how they feel about that at which they would prefer to live under. We're getting that answer in real time right now.

[00:39:10] Robert Tracinski Create clip And do you have a quick question, but a quick line on why it hasn't worked out in the Middle East? You mean the Middle East that still has monarchs? You mean the freedom that they haven't introduced? Yeah,

[00:39:25] Robert Tracinski Create clip there's an interesting actually history of that because at least sort of dealt in the history a little bit during the Iraq war because you were talking about the bath party as Saddam Hussein. And where did these guys come from? Well, one of things. One of them places they came from is that at the end of the 19th and early 20th century. Their world sort of realised, You know, we're behind the West is way ahead of us. There's far more powerful. They're colonizing us, you know, we're now a British protectorate. How did that happen? And they looked out there, said, What do we need to do to become more like the West? And they went off to Western universities and they encountered the theorists behind fascism. And so they're ideal for working heads off the West by adopting this great new, forward thinking progressive new system called fascism. And that's where the bath party came from. It then, Hussein and that this whole, the whole tradition he had they came from was guys going to the Arabs, going to the pair of the Sorbonne in Paris in in the early 19 the early 19 hundreds, and absorbing fascist ideas that were popular in Europe at the time. And they got exactly, of course, exactly wrong lesson, a system that was about to totally discredit itself. But so part of it is that in trying to catch up with West, they adopted the wrong system.

[00:40:39] Robert Tracinski Create clip And the other part is that you did that, that the Muslim world has not undergone a sort of a reformation. They haven't undergone what we went underwent in the Enlightenment where we adopted, you know, the values of, ah, reason and science and humanism and respect for individual rights. They have, you know, they're they're in Rose being made there. There are people who are who are fighting very bravely for those influences. But you know, it's the cultural preconditions of prosperity and freedom and rule of law and and a a modern society that they're still sort of truck struggling t get to make native roots in their soil.

[00:41:22] Robert Tracinski Create clip Right, right. I want to zoom out and you ask you guys a few big questions and you jump in where you see most interesting. One is what is the role of government as it relates to as it relates to progress, when it could be a get out the way you build Janeway's written books about, you know, sort of the three go with the term it for it is. But you know the relation between governments and and markets. Um, and you know, governments, you know, crucial role in research. And you know it's wrong. The Internet, it's broadly, what is the role are, How should we think about? Do you like John Rowles veil of ignorance as a moral tool? Basically, when he hears, How do you guys think about a quality? Because what I see how I think progress is, the more progress there is, the more inequality it is because you guys guess what people are unequal and meritocracy tends to tense, it tends to lead to more unequal outcomes is still better for everybody. You net because of you know, the consumer surplus that they gain. But do corporate as companies get stronger. Do they have a role in filling some of the safety nets that governments used to used to fill? Er, how should we think about some of some of these questions? Yeah, there's an entire industry devoted to safety nest. It's called insurance.

[00:42:35] Robert Tracinski Create clip Well, when I want to jump in this, go back to where we started air with the issue of realizing enormous progress is made. So I had I didn't interview a couple of earlier this year, I I interviewed Steven Pinker and he has got this book out. Enlightenment. Now he's making the case for progress. He's a real evangelist on this. We all we have to tremendous progress. Well, I brought up the issue with this issue. Came up with the welfare state. He was very extraordinary. Have to have a welfare state. Or else we're gonna have the little match girl. Now, do you remember what the little match girl waas is? This hot is extremely Grimm Hans Christian Andersen story. Basically, it's how it became a Children's story. I have no idea, because it's basically that the six year old girl with an abusive father who's out freezing to death on the streets in the middle of Copenhagen or something, somewhere like that on New Year's Eve and the so the idea that this is our alternative if we don't have the welfare state, it struck me that you know the little match girl. Lt's a story from roughly from 1800 or 18 40. I think when you know this sort of Mackenzie in life, when six year olds, you know with inadequate clothing out on the streets selling matches on a freezing night was considered a normal thing. And it's almost like even Steven Pinker, who's the evangelist of progress, still has in his head the way things were at 18 40 as like the normal we default to If you don't have a welfare state, we're in the wealthiest society ever in human history. The idea that if not for the government, taxing us and and giving welfare, and most of all for doesn't go out people like that. It goes, it gets paid back to middle class people, is in Social Security and Medicare.

[00:44:17] Robert Tracinski Create clip Eso But the idea that without you know, the government having these enormous taxes in this enormous welfare state, we'd all be starving on the streets and freezing to death. It is kind of ridiculous when you consider the enormous amount of wealth that we have an enormous amount of opportunity we have and how easy it is for someone to work. To put the relatively easy in the scale of human history. It is for somebody to work him and put food on the table on a roof over his head. So there's almost like a defeatist premise behind that to begin with, because it assumes that you're talking to people, the wealthiest people in the world with the most opportunities in the world, and assuming that without government there to bail them out. They're all gonna die. Uh, there's a kind of a perversity and not having this sort of need by not having internalized in your own head this idea of how much progress we have made. So now what I will say is, you know, there's there's private charity, but above all else, you talk about what is what should business due to provide it? What business and commerce and capitalism has generally done is make it possible for have this dynamic society where it's so easy to work to provide for yourself. That's the primary thing that that capitalism and business and industry has done, uh, so making it so that we should we should have much less need for a welfare state today than we did 100 years ago. Where 200 years ago,

[00:45:36] Robert Tracinski Create clip Jason, do you wantto unpacked your thoughts and insurance? Oh, yeah. It's just that, um, you know, you asked, should there be safety nets? I mean, if you take that, if you take that concept maybe a little bit more, you know broadly than it's usually men, right? It's usually meant government safety numbers. You just ask, Should there be safety. That's like Well, yeah, of course. You know, there's all sorts of misfortunes that can befall people. One of the great ways in which we have, you know, made progress over the course of human history is, you know, chance events are much less harmful than they used to be. And there are many reasons for that. But you know, one of the reasons is we do have a financial products we have on, and insurance is, you know, one of the most important of those. Should companies provide it? Sure, That sounds like a benefit that people would certainly want to sign up for. Right. People do get health insurance through their employers today. That's an unfortunate artifact of the way of the tax code. And you know the way that that that evolved in America, it's it's actually not a good thing. But, you know, it would be better if they if they just, you know, got enough money to sort of buy health insurance more directly on their own. But, you know, in general short, why not have all sorts of products that provide all sorts of, you know, safety nets for, you know, for different people in the under different circumstances, Not to mention, you know, of course, these things coming from from friends and family and community right where they where they have always come to him throughout history on today, with with the community technology that we have to create communities, especially online, that it seems like that should be more possible than ever. The question comes down to Should the government be providing the safety net right? And so it's my mind that's actually not such a much different question from Should government be providing food? Should government be providing, you know, clothing? Should the government be providing health care? Should the government provide any good? That is, Ah, that is a value, our service in society. The government doesn't have to provide those things, and I don't see why it has to provide the safety nets. That, and I don't

[00:47:34] Robert Tracinski Create clip know when government does provide these things attends to a bad job of them, like Social Security is much, much, much worse deal for practically everybody who's part of it. It's a much, much worse deal than if you saved your own money. You know the idea of the government take roughly 12 and 1/2 percent of your income for your entire working life and give so little back in return, including their not being a fund of savings that that you own, that if you die, goes to your to your kids, right? That's that's one of the one thing about Social Security, that sort of a scandal to be talked about, how the rule it has in the wealth gap between blacks and whites, because black men tend to die earlier and they leave and because they're, you know, they're saving because they're so security benefits arch savings built up that could be passed on. They leave less to their Children because of it. That's one of these that contributes to that. So you know a lot of the safety net. Things the government does are designed around. Political considerations are designed around somebody's, You know, somebody in Washington, one you feel Pat himself on the back that he's helped out lt Bill out and not are not actually good solutions. Ah, and they're not better solutions than what people can provide for themselves.

[00:48:48] Robert Tracinski Create clip Totally. So with just a few minutes left, I want to end on Ah, a few questions. We'll let you, uh, take it where you find most interesting for you, Rob. You know what? The critiques of you you book our companion guide Thio and ran. It's so

[00:49:02] Robert Tracinski Create clip so who is John GALT anyway? Ah,

[00:49:04] Robert Tracinski Create clip rigorous

[00:49:05] Robert Tracinski Create clip guy dying Grant to Ryan Rand's Atlas shrugged

[00:49:07] Robert Tracinski Create clip totally. On what? You know, some of you will have been inspired so many ways by women were the critiques some people have is she didn't fully appreciate that libertarianism doesn't fully appreciate how social people are and how people want to belong to things that are bigger than themselves. They accept everything that Libertarian is suggesting Iran suggest, but proposes. But thank you, Mrs. That part is as an addition, how you respond to that.

[00:49:33] Robert Tracinski Create clip Just so it just so happens that in my book ideal that that's a great way to plug it in my book. Ideal. Very dressy. With that, I have ah, chapter in which I include that all nine ran hero really wants his love because it's actually true if you look at the book because there's so much focus on her defending capitalism and making money. But if you look at the plot structure of the novel. Ah, lot of the plot is driven by the need for friendship and for common values and for, you know, the cartouche of Maine heroes. The beginning of the novel start out being very lonely. You know, the one guy has a family who doesn't appreciate him, and the other, the main heroine has a former lover who has sort of flaked out, and she feels betrayed by him. And they started very lonely. And, you know, a lot of part of the process is the novels I'm getting to find companionship with each other with other like minded people, you know, and there's This whole plot of of there, basically decided has gone beyond big government in a sliding

[00:50:29] Robert Tracinski Create clip into totalitarian

[00:50:30] Robert Tracinski Create clip ism, and people are quitting and dropping out and disappearing, and they're not going off to live in a shack in the mountains. They're forming their own little ideal society hidden away from the rest of the world, And she's very much is focused on the idea of showing what would an ideal society be and the value of having connections and companionship and trade and exchange with other people. So she did not deny that at all. Now the premise of this sneaking in there as you say something bigger than themselves and what she rejected his idea that society is something bigger than yourself in the literal sense that there's, you know, there's not some super organism out their society is just a bunch of individuals interacting with each other, gaining value from being with each other, and that they should do so on terms that are good for them. And she rejected any sort of collectivism. Any idea that there's some sort of society is a thing above and beyond, apart from the individuals that make it up, that then dictates down to the individuals what they have to do

[00:51:31] Robert Tracinski Create clip totally. That's, uh, respected time suggest one. You close this out on progress studies, you know, there's a lot more excited about it. Critique. Someone had what gender studies is thio useless Justice warriors Progress Studies is to neo liberals. How you basically that has an agenda confirmation bias. Little bit. I would you sort of response that and what are you really excited about? Parker says. Let's go on that. Yeah, And for those who haven't heard so private studies is sort of a new term that was introduced a few months ago. There was an article in the Atlantic by Tyler Cowen Patrick Collison, uh titled We Need a New Science of Progress, and they called for this new discipline of progress studies to to focus on human progress and how we make it on how we could do it better. You know, I it's a it's a new thing, and it's a new community. But the people that I've met so far who are excited about prior studies are very empirical, very historical minded and very careful with their epistemology and their approach to, you know, to to doing their research. So I hope what we'll see is not something that is, you know, sort of driven first and foremost by an ideological agenda. But it is, you know, like I'm trying to do with my blogged really very empirical and historical. Let's start from the fax. Let's just sort of look at what happened. Let's get very clear on kind of the, you know, the bottom up facts on the ground and then build up the picture from there so that we're so they were actually basing to come back to the beginning of my life. I started my project so that we're basing our world views on, you know, the a keen understanding of an appreciation for what actually happened and how we got here.

[00:53:14] Robert Tracinski Create clip Austin, I think that's a great place to to close my guest. And I have been Jason Crawford and Robert Tracinski that really doing a fantastic worth, Jason, and you could be building another company right now. But the fact that you're you're focusing on this just shows how important it is. So from listeners want to learn more? You could check out roots of progress dot or GE and Ah, and Rob, you just spoke about your new book. Who is John GALT anyway? And you can check out with Rob and Jason on Twitter. Is there any other plugs you guys wanna end with? I've

[00:53:47] Robert Tracinski Create clip got a website tracinski letter tracinski letter dot com T r a C i N s k i letter dot com.

[00:53:55] Robert Tracinski Create clip Awesome. Jason. Uh, Rob, thank you so much for great episode and for doing the work that you do. Thank you. This was fun. Thanks for having me If you're in early stage, entrepreneur, we love to hear from you. Please hit us up it Village global dot bc slash network Catalyst