Bjorn Lomborg On Climate Change Being The New COVID-19 Scare Tactic | PBD Podcast | Ep. 254
PBD Podcast Episode 254. In this episode, Patrick Bet-David is joined by Bjorn Lomborg, Adam Sosnick and Tom Ellsworth.
0:00 - Start
5:21 - Why Gen Z Is Increasingly Developing Anxiety About Climate Change
11:10 - Climate Activist Defends his controversial book
22:22 - Why AOC's $30 Trillion Proposal Is a WASTE of Money
38.44 - Is Climate Change The Next COVID-19 Scare Tactic?
52:05 - Is Nuclear Energy The Answer To All Our Problems
1:00:09 - Kamala Harris Issues Climate Change Warnings In Africa
1:04:50 - Is Greta Thunberg Manipulated By Big Media?
1:15:54 - How We Can Make Poor Countries $600B Richer Every Year
1:28:07 - How Big Pharma Is Creating Hypochondriacs Through Fear & Ads
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Check out BjornLomborg.com: http://bit.ly/40GQ29Q
Check out the Copenhagen Consensus Center: http://bit.ly/3ZG3sS4
Purchase Bjorn Lomborg's book "False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet": https://bit.ly/3U6gYNQ
Pre-order Bjorn's upcoming book " Best Things First": http://bit.ly/3KutSSG
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Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
You want to hustle on something like a chick sweet victory?
I know this life's meant for me.
Why would you bet on Goliath when we got bet David?
Value payment, giving values contagious.
This world of entrepreneurs, we get no value to hated.
How do you run, homie?
Look what I become.
I'm the one.
Two out of three with Patrick Swayze.
Yes, two out of three with Patrick Swayze.
Yes, we have Bjorn Lomborg today.
Let me properly introduce our guest.
He became internationally known for his best-selling book and controversial book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, in 2001.
He's the former director of Danish government's Environmental Assessment Institute, EAI, in Copenhagen.
Lomburg agrees that global warming is real and man-made and will have a serious impact, but enumerates about other disagreements with scientific consensus.
In 2009, Business Insider claimed that Lomborg is one of the 10 most respected global warming experts.
In 2004, he was listed as Times 100 most influential people.
He's got a master's degree in political science and a PhD in political science, which is kind of wild.
I want to ask about that as well.
Having said that, it's great to have you on the podcast today.
It's great to be here, Patrick.
Thanks for coming out.
Yes.
Obviously, you were off-camera.
You were telling us your travel skills.
You've been all over the place.
But if you don't mind, Bjorn, you know, before we get started, taking a minute or two and share with the audience a little bit about your background, how you went from who you were then to all of a sudden data, statistic, climate change, global warming, and then who you are today.
Yes, and it's a weird story.
Sorry.
But fundamentally, I'm like I think most sort of young people, I was worried about the environment.
I was worried about a lot of things.
I was a member of Greenpeace, not in a rubber boat, but worried enough.
I had the backpack, the badge, the poster on my wall, and thought the world was coming to an end.
Seriously, literally.
What age is this?
So early college, 18, 20.
So I have that poster.
I don't know if you've ever seen it.
It's supposedly an Indian saying where it says, only when they caught the last fish and cut down the last tree will they realize they can't eat gold.
Can you pull it?
I'll find that real quick.
Later on, of course, I've realized that's actually a made-up quote from a movie in the 70s.
Yes.
Well, my poster didn't look like that, but yes, it's the same quote.
The fundamental point here is that I thought, like certainly most of my friends, the world was in a really bad place and getting worse and worse.
Then I read an interview with an American economist called Julian Simon in Wyatt magazine back in 1998.
And he said, pretty much everything you know about the environment is wrong.
Things are in general getting better.
And I was like, no, that's just crap.
But he said one thing that really annoyed me because by then I was actually teaching statistics in political science.
And I always told my students to go check the data.
And he said exactly that.
Go check the data.
And so I figured, all right, that's a challenge.
I'm going to prove him wrong.
Of course he's wrong, but we'll have fun.
So I brought together some of my best students and we bought his book and we're going to go through it and meticulously show how he's wrong all kinds of places.
Turns out that much of what he said was right.
You know, if you think about it, it's kind of obvious.
Most places in rich countries, the air has gotten much, much cleaner.
In London, we have good data back from 1585 and the London air got worse and worse and worse over the last 400 years up to about 1890.
And since 1890, it's gotten cleaner and cleaner and cleaner so that today London air is cleaner than it's ever been since medieval times.
You need to know this.
And we don't.
We don't often think about this, that mostly, partly because we're rich, partly because we decide to clean up.
London air is better today than medieval times.
Yeah, and this is true pretty much probably not the same exact dates for Florida, but Florida air is much, much better, and the U.S. air is much better than it was four decades ago because we've cleaned it up for a lot of different reasons, but mostly because we're rich and we can afford to do so.
When you're poor, you want to get rich.
When you're rich, you actually want to stop coughing.
So this is not rocket science, but we don't know.
And that's incredibly important.
And it will become important as we talk about global warming because fundamentally people think global warming, just like all the other threats, is the end of the world.
It's not.
It's a slight impediment on the world getting better.
So global warming means the world gets better slightly slower.
Now, that's a very different kind of worry than the world is going to end.
Is there any statistics of what age bracket fears global warming the most?
You know, like, is there a, you know, Gen Zs or Gen Ys or, you know, millennials or boomers or Gen Xs?
Is there any statistics on who fears it the most?
Gen Z is top of the list.
But no, I'm asking, like, is there actually statistics?
So it used to be that young people worried more.
So global warming, age gap, younger Americans most worried, 70%, 18 to 34, 56%, 55 and older.
How about the ones in between?
Are they confused?
Like, what about the age?
Can you go a little higher?
I'm just curious to know what this.
Okay, there it is, 15 to 34.
So less and less think global warming will pose a serious threat in your lifetime.
Well, yeah, but that's because when you're old.
But you know what this shows, though?
It shows that people fear it less as they age than those like 55 and older.
They don't even think about it, 29%.
But the younger audience, 82%, understanding global warming issues.
Why is it that, you know, it's normally younger students, 18, 20, 22, that fear this the most?
I'll give you my perspective real quick.
I grew up in L.A. and he immigrated to L.A.
And I remember growing up at the smog in Los Angeles.
And we were born within three years of each other.
And you probably read about it, that the air in Los Angeles was horrible.
The joke was, I don't touch, I don't trust air I can't touch.
But the smog was so bad.
And you can see the pictures from Los Angeles through the 70s.
They went to unleaded fuel and other things that happened with power plants.
Santa Nofre went online, which is an old nuclear power plant in Southern California.
And so I have a perspective in my own lifetime that I have seen L.A.'s air get much better.
I don't look at this as, oh, screw the grandkids.
I'm out of here in 40 years.
So, you know, I'm not worried about it.
I don't look at it that way.
I have perspective on Los Angeles, which was a horribly filthy city.
And now you take a look.
And again, the reason why I'm asking this question, because you'll hear stuff like, you know, Greta talk about in 12 years, we're all going to be dead.
And how dare you?
You know, an AOC gets up 12 years if we don't do this.
$30 trillion.
Why does this resonate with kids more than it does to people who are older?
I think in some sense, it's just because they live longer.
They have more likelihood of experiencing the really bad impacts of climate change.
But probably also because we're, you know, when you're young, certainly I had that experience.
You just hear all these scary stories and you think, oh my God, the world is going to end.
If you're a little older, you've heard a lot of other scary stories.
I mean, if you think back to the first environment summit in the UN in 1972 in Stockholm, the head of that environment conference told the world, we have just 10 years left in 1972.
So, you know, we constantly hear this.
And there's always the next thing around that's going to destroy us all.
And once you've heard a few of them, maybe you become a little more skeptical about the next one.
And you should.
Look.
There are real problems and certainly was a real problem in Los Angeles with the air pollution.
But we fix these problems.
And remember, we fix them by being smart.
So, you know, the main thing that actually fixed the Los Angeles air pollution was the innovation of the catalytic converter.
It was, you know, because most air pollution in Los Angeles is caused by cars.
It was basically that every car got its own little cleaning facility.
And unleaded fuel.
You know, they're talking about now by 2035, a certain percent of cars that are sold in California have to be electric.
Well, there was a time where they said by a certain date, all cars have to be unleaded fuel.
But unleaded fuel and the catalytic converter, you're right.
Combine to make a huge change.
Unleaded fuel was a fantastic idea, but it didn't actually increase the air pollution.
But it's very, very polluting, but it's not part of the air pollution.
It sits on the ground and infects everything you eat and the vegetables, that kind of thing.
But yes, absolutely.
So you were saying, so the biggest difference, I just sent you, if you can show the picture of LA before in LA now, you said the biggest difference was a catalytic converter.
It's a thing they invented in 1974, and it basically takes out a lot of the pollution from the exhaust pipe.
It cost a couple hundred dollars.
So, you know, it's not free, but it's not a big deal.
And we put it on, we enforced it, and now the air is much, much cleaner.
And this also tells you how we fix most problems.
We don't fix problems by telling everyone, I'm sorry, imagine telling most Los Angeles, Los Angeles, is that the word?
Yeah, you got to tell them, sorry, you can't drive.
You have to walk, run, or something.
That's never going to work, right?
But you can tell them, put on this catalytic converter, and then we fix much of the problem.
So instead of what we're also trying to do now today with global warming, telling everyone, I'm sorry, could you be a little poor, a little colder, a little warmer, a little more uncomfortable, eat a little less and have a little less of all the fun stuff, but then we'll try and fix global warming.
That'll never work.
What will work is technology.
Yesterday, we had Charlie Kirk on, and one of the things we were talking about is the conversation came about DeSantis and Trump.
And I asked the question, I said, so if DeSantis goes against Trump, who win?
He says, no, Trump's going to win.
I said, if you're DeSantis, do you go in?
He says, absolutely.
He says, because you have to go in to learn how to win the fight.
He says, you know, Reagan didn't win the first time.
This person didn't win the first time.
He's kind of going through the process, right?
He made a very good point.
So the first time you write a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist, 2001, you're coming out, you got some data, you're confident.
But now you're a bullseye, you're a target, right?
And everybody wants to prove you wrong, which forces you to go and get better at your arguments.
You make your arguments stronger.
What areas at first when you wrote your first book, where were some of the leaks where you're like, okay, these guys do have a good point.
Let me go look at this a little bit further.
Okay, I didn't think about this one here.
Oh, no, I am right in this part because I know the whole thing when you went back and forth, they wanted to say that your book was an opinion piece.
And then I don't know how many people wrote against 267 people appealed to say, I can't believe you're doing this.
And then eventually they let your book stay.
You ended up essentially winning the fact that the book stayed.
But what changed from the first time you wrote that book were some areas you knew you had to do even more research in?
So It's a difficult question because fundamentally, I think I came in as a newbie.
I wrote a lot of stuff.
Yes, I wrote a lot of stuff that I think actually held up really well, but there was a lot of stuff I didn't know very well.
I think the big difference is that now I get a lot more of the backside of all those stories.
I think most of the data that I told already back in 2001 was correct simply because I wasn't telling, you know, I wasn't saying, hey, I found this.
This was what the international organizations were telling us.
You know, I've never disputed global warming.
I think the UN Climate Panel is the right one to take that conversation.
But what I actually did was read them.
When you read most of the stuff in the newspaper, like you just mentioned, AOC telling us we only have 12 years left.
Look, this is the public sort of PR version of the story.
What is actually the background is politicians asked the UN Climate Panel, the IPC, what will it take to stay at below 1.5 degrees centigrade, which is this made-up target.
And it's basically incredibly difficult to do.
So the UN came back and said, if you want to do this almost impossible task, you have to do almost impossible stuff.
You have to change your entire economy, the entire global setup in 12 years.
That's how the 12 years ended up.
It's basically saying if you want to do something impossible, you've got to do it in 12 years.
Now, that's a technically true statement, but the UN Climate Panel never says you should do this.
They're simply saying if you want, you know, it's a little bit like saying, what would it take to stop all traffic deaths?
You know, about 40,000 people die in traffic every year in the U.S. What would it take to stop all of it?
Well, one suggestion would be to set the speed limit at three miles an hour.
Nobody would die.
But of course, there is some enforcement issues, and I think maybe a lot of people would not feel particularly comfortable about that.
But it's true to say if you want to get rid of 40,000 people dying every year on the road, one solution could be to set the speed limit three miles an hour.
But it's not actually recommending that.
Nobody would want that.
And it doesn't take into account we have other things that we like as well, like being able to get to our family in time.
Can I follow up on that, Dean?
These days, I think that there's such a craving from most people for just universal truths.
Like what is actually the truth?
Don't give me a narrative.
Don't give me your opinion, whether it's with COVID, whether it's with inflation, whether it's, you know, are we in a recession?
Are we not?
Like everyone wants to push their narrative.
I think what would be helpful is what are the resounding universal truths that everyone can full on agree upon?
Like forget about your opinion, buddy.
This is the truth of this matter when it comes to climate.
Like you've been pretty clear that climate change is real.
Man, some of it is man-made.
What is people on the left, the right, up, down?
What are the most universal basic truths that everyone agrees upon from there?
I'm going to give you first the thing everyone agrees on, then what most people agree on, and then maybe we'll get higher guesses.
Amazing.
So everyone, pretty much everyone agrees we're emitting CO2, that says main greenhouse gas, because we burn a lot of fossil fuel.
CO2 wraps around the world, makes the world a little bit more sort of holding back infrared radiation, so it actually heats up the world a little bit.
That's what everybody agrees on.
That's the basic sort of greenhouse effect or what we call global warming or maybe even climate change.
So CO2, check, not good.
We're putting out CO2 and that causes the world to warm up.
Copy that.
It's also universally accepted that if you change the world's temperature, that will have a cost.
Look at Miami and look at Boston.
They're both pretty good cities to live in.
They've certainly been adapted.
Lots of air conditioning in Miami, lots of heating in Boston.
Both of these places would be off if the temperature gets warmer or if it gets colder, because all of the infrastructure, all the buildings have been built to that particular temperature.
If it gets warmer, Miami will have to put in more air conditioning and Boston will have to put in more air conditioning.
And likewise, if it gets colder, you'll need to have more heating, both of them.
So it's fundamentally costly when the weather or the climate tracks off from what it used to be.
That's the main reason why global warming is a problem.
Global warming is a problem because we track off from what our infrastructure is adjusted to everywhere on the planet.
It's not the end of the world.
A couple of degrees temperature change is not suddenly going to make Miami or anywhere else unlivable.
It's just simply going to present somewhat of a problem.
Now, everybody would agree with the first part of it, but now I'm tracking into what most climate economists try to focus on.
So climatologists, all the natural scientists, they look at what will happen when you put in more CO2 and how much does the temperature go up.
But economists then try to say, what's the total impact of that?
What are all the bads and ups, the positives of that?
Remember, as it gets warmer, we'll also be able to produce more food.
We'll have more growth days from any place in the world because CO2 is also a fertilizer.
We'll also have more green stuff.
We'll probably be able to produce more.
Overall, when you add up all of this, it's a negative.
That's why it's a problem.
But you need to add up all of it.
Most economists will tell you that the impact of global warming over the century will be in the order of, say, 4% of GDP.
So it means that by the end of the century, if we do nothing about climate, it'll feel like we're 4% less well off than we otherwise would have been.
There's too much.
Almost like inflation for the world.
It's like one or two years of recession over the next 80 years, which is why most economists say it's a problem.
It's not the end of the world.
This is not 100%.
Remember also at the same time, and this is a little hard to hold in your head, but the UN estimate that we'll be much richer by the end of the century.
Just like, you know, from 1900 to 2000, the world got incredibly much richer.
The UN and the standard scenario estimate that each person on the planet will be 450% as rich as he or she is today.
That's an astounding and wonderful achievement.
That means, you know, especially the world's poor, we'll be pulled out of poverty, lots of great things from that.
Because of global warming, we will not be as rich.
Instead of being 450% as rich as we are today, it'll feel like we're only 434% as rich.
Yes, that's a problem.
No, it's not the end of the world.
Things will be much better, but slightly less, much better.
That's why I'm arguing, and most climate economists are arguing, this is not the end of the world.
Actually, most other things that happen in the 21st century will probably be much more important.
Like, for instance, our pension problems, you know, most countries in the world, especially rich world, are not saving enough for old for people when they get old and all the other problems.
Infrastructure, how do we deal with the fact that the world is aging, so we have ever fewer young people supporting ever more old people?
There are lots of other challenges for the world.
Those are probably going to be much bigger.
I just learned that term, by the way.
I've heard of climate scientists.
This is a new term, climate economists.
What's the difference in those two people?
So the climate scientists are the ones who run the computer models.
They all natural scientists.
They'd be like physicists sort of thing.
And they basically look at all the natural effects and try to estimate the natural variables to say if you put an extra ton of CO2, how much warmer does it get?
That's what they ask.
The climate economists will say, all right, so temperature goes up by this.
We take that from the climate economy, sorry, from the climate scientist.
How much will that impact our economy?
How much worse is that going to make you?
Who's more important?
Are they both obviously equally important?
You need both, but unfortunately, we've had very little conversation.
So look, one of the climate economists, his name is William Nordhaus.
He's a professor at Yale University.
He's the only climate economist to get the Nobel Prize in 2018.
So these are important people.
But when you talk to most of the climate conversation, it's all natural science.
And that's wrong because you need to actually say, how much is this going to affect us?
Take one thing that's incredibly important for Florida, sea level rise.
Obviously, as temperatures rise, water, just like everything else, expands.
And that means you get higher sea levels.
That's also absolutely uncommon.
I live in Miami.
I see the sea level.
The streets get flooded.
It's insane.
They've raised the roads significantly over the last few years.
So we absolutely will have a problem with sea level rise.
Now, the question is, is this going to be unmanageable or not?
And the simple answer is no.
We know how to do that.
And a good example is Holland.
Holland basically has 40% of its area below sea level.
And yet most people live there fine.
If you've ever flown into Amsterdam, they're one of the few airports in the world, I'm sure, who on their website proudly point out that they are the only major airport that was formerly a site of a naval battle.
But you fly in there, there's no water.
You don't have to worry about this.
And they've fixed the whole thing.
So the total cost of all that Holland has done over the last 50 years is about $10 billion.
So yeah, it's not nothing, but it's not a big thing for a rich country over 50 years.
Here's a question for you.
Like for me, the ability to sell something, you'll see a lot of gaslighting.
You'll see a lot of exaggerating.
Why use this to ask for the amount of money that they ask?
What was the amount they asked in Paris Accord or even AOC's proposal?
I think AOC's was 30 trillion.
Paris Accord was around, what, 100 trillion?
The number is a big number.
They're like ridiculously large numbers.
But you did a video and you said the fact that the improvement, you know, it would only improve the temperature by what, 0.3 degrees?
I think that was the number that you said in an article with the Paris Accord, $100 trillion.
If you're saying there's more efficient ways to fix this, you'll see reports and they'll say, well, here's what we got.
What is the most efficient way for us to be able to catalytic converter 200 bucks you were talking about, right?
That's kind of what fixed LA.
Yes.
What are some of the things we individually could do?
And what are some of the things the government can do to help with this?
So I'm going to disappoint you right off the bat and say this is not a problem that individual can fix.
People love to talk about, oh, you should take your car a little less.
You should eat a little less.
So paper straws are not going to fix climate change?
No.
So these are all good things.
Please feel free to do them and they're probably good for other things.
But don't believe that this is a question about us doing a little less and then we've fixed it.
The main issue here is that there is about somewhere between four and six billion people out there, the non-rich people in this world, who want to be rich.
That's China, India, Africa.
And they want to get out of poverty.
And you can't blame them.
They will want to do that by producing much more by becoming rich, just like we are.
And that will emit a lot more CO2 unless we have a different technology.
to take over.
And that gets back to the whole point of the catalytic converter.
Instead of making this about us feeling guilty right now and we got a cut in the next three years, which will be fantastically costly, lead to a lot of voters saying no.
You know, that's, if you remember back in France in 2018, you had the yellow vests that were basically revolting because they said, I don't want to pay more for my gas.
And you will get these sorts of protests once people start seeing the incredible price hikes that those kinds of policies will lead to.
You will not be able to do it.
And even if you do, you will only be able to do that for the rich countries, which is a small fraction of the total emissions.
This is about finding a way that the world can both become richer and better off in so many other ways and also cut its emissions.
That's not easy.
So people, you know, the people can do nothing about it on a day-to-day basis.
So keep driving your gas cars, keep smoking cigarettes.
Matter of fact, double down on cigarettes, cigars, smoke out of them.
Now you're slightly skewing my point.
But yes, look, this is not predominantly about what each one of us do.
The only reason I ask this question is because you'll hear the argument.
I'm obviously being a little bit sarcastic here.
But what I'm saying is the blame is on the people.
You know, here's who it is.
We caused this.
This is because of us.
And it is catastrophic.
If we don't fix it, you know, it's going to be the end of the world.
And what about you and other?
Okay, so do something about it.
And I think this is the main point.
If you think this is the end of the world, and a lot of people have been led to believe that it's the end of the world.
Certainly the media sort of narrative, a recent OECD survey showed that all the rich countries, about 60% of all people now believe that global warming is likely or very likely to lead to the extinction of mankind.
That's just, you know, that's crazy.
That's not at all what the UN is telling us in its 4,000 page long report.
This is not the story.
It's the media story.
So if you think global warming is this meteor hurtling towards Earth, that's all you should be concerned about.
That's the AOC point.
You know, if we have 12 years left, and I get why she thinks that, I get why Greta Thunberg thinks, you know, they've heard constantly and over again on the media, this is the end of the world.
If that's true, this should be our only concern.
That's absolutely correct.
But it's not.
That's not actually what global warming is.
Global warming is a problem, not the end of the world.
And it's one that we can fix very poorly right now, but that we can fix fairly effectively over a longer term.
And that is through innovation.
So again, if we could come up with the equivalent of the catalytic converter for climate change, we could fix it.
Can you give us some more examples of catalytic converters?
And I'm being serious.
What are some things we've done?
Whether it's entrepreneurs, military, whether it's whoever it is, what are some things we've done?
So if I had the full example, we'd already solved it, and I'd be a very rich man.
So I'm going to give you examples, but they're not going to be able to do that.
I want you to be rich.
Reggie, I want to be rich, and I want you to be rich.
So fourth generation nuclear basically it's a new technology.
So we're third generation right now.
It promises to be incredibly safe and incredibly cheap.
Now, remember, that was what they said about the other three generations.
So, you know, I'm a little skeptical, but let's see.
There's a lot of good arguments.
It seems reasonable.
If that's true, we could basically have incredibly cheap electricity in the future that would be entirely CO2-free.
How cool would that be?
So that's one very obvious solution.
Now, remember, electricity is only about 20% of our emissions.
We can make it more, but it's still not a solution for most of the emissions.
But it would be a fantastic start.
So that's one.
Craig Venter, the guy who cracked the human genome back in 2000, you may remember him.
He has some crazy ideas, and some of them are fun crazy.
So one of them is that he has this plan to take genetically modified algae, put them out on the ocean surface, and let them grow.
There they will suck up sunlight and CO2 and create oil.
We could basically grow our own Saudi Arabias out on the ocean surface.
Then we'd harvest them.
We could keep our entire fossil fuel infrastructure.
And remember, because the oil has just been grown out on the ocean surface, you know, half a year ago, it would be CO2 neutral.
Now, the important point to remember is this does not work yet.
It sort of works in a laboratory.
Yes, that's the exon claim algae, biofuel breakthrough.
We're still not much closer to commercialized algae, biofuels.
So the point here again is I'm not advocating for this.
I'm saying this is one of many, many ideas.
Those are the kinds of things that could power humanity in the rest of the 21st century.
So the point is not to come up and say, oh, this is the one that's going to be the winner.
There are tons of these ideas out there.
We just need one of them to work.
So my point is we should be investing a lot more in those researchers because researchers are cheap.
And imagine if we could come up with one.
Imagine if this Craig Venter innovation actually could become true.
Everyone would buy it, not just rich, well-meaning Americans, but also the Chinese, the Indians, and the Africans.
So the whole point here is to say, this is just like we did with the catalytic inverter.
We're going to solve this with technology, not by moral exhortations.
Is that the word?
You know, thou shalt not.
By the way, did you ever see that speech that was given that guy, Konstantin Kissin?
It was sort of where they do it, I think, in Oxford University.
And he's a comedian, and he kind of basically went in on the...
I sent this to you on Slack, Rocky.
He kind of went in on the woke climate change agenda.
Are you familiar with this?
I saw.
And he brilliantly just took it down one by one by one.
It's on Slack.
This guy, did you ever see this?
Can we play that?
It's a very good idea.
I'm so open to rational argument.
A small minority, I accept.
Because one of the tenets of wokeness is, of course, that your feelings matter more than the truth.
But I believe in you.
I believe there are those of you here who are woke who are open to rational arguments.
So let me make one.
We are told that your generation cares more than any other about one issue in particular, and that issue is climate change.
We're told that many of you suffer from climate anxiety.
You wish to save the planet.
And for tonight, and tonight only, I will join you.
I will join you in worshiping at the feet of St. Greta of climate change.
Let us all accept right here, right now, that we are living through a climate emergency and our stocks of polar bears are running extremely low.
I join you in this view.
I truly do.
Now, what are we to do about this huge problem facing humanity?
What can we in Britain do?
We can only do one thing.
You know why?
This country is responsible for 2% of global carbon emissions, which means that if Britain was to sink into the sea right now, it would make absolutely no difference to the issue of climate change.
You know why?
Because the future of the climate is going to be decided in Asia and in Latin America by poor people who couldn't give a shit about saving the planet.
And I don't know if we want to continue watching the video, but this goes to your point where you talked about China, India, and Africa, and he added Latin America.
They are concerned of poverty.
That's their main concern.
So we have the luxury here in the United States or in the EU to things are so good.
We forget how good we have it here.
That we'll move on to other issues that are so magnified beyond our daily living that we, all right, we're going to St. Greta of climate change, right?
Whereas people struggling to put food on the table in poor countries or countries that have had famines or countries where wealth inequality is completely exacerbated, their day-to-day living concerns are not the global climate.
And that's kind of what you were saying initially, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And look, we've got to realize that we're not going to fix climate change.
Again, his point is absolutely right.
If all of the rich countries were to vanish tomorrow or basically stop emitting CO2, just remember how terrible this would be.
You would not be able to move.
You'd not be able to keep cool down here in Miami or warm in Boston.
Half of all food would not be available.
There'd be a lot of terrible consequences.
But even if you did this, the net impact would be a reduction of about one degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century.
We would be able to measure it, but not very much, and certainly not before mid-century.
It would have no impact.
So we have no sense of how little we matter.
What really matters is to convince all the people who you rightly point out have more important priorities like feeding their kids and making sure they don't die from easily curable infectious diseases and basically pull people out of poverty.
We are not going to convince most of the world to do this by being poor.
We're only going to convince people to do this if it actually makes them at least as rich and preferably even richer.
Who makes the money, Tom, with, you know, follow the money concept.
Who makes the money?
Who wants this?
Like, who wants this $100 trillion or $30 trillion?
Who's going to benefit the most if AOC, Paris Accord, if they're successful, who gets this money?
Okay, I may need you to help me here.
I have heard and read more than once that both AOC and COFI know that these immense quantities of money and the things they're going to be thrown at is really a wealth distribution.
It's really a tax, and it's a wealth distribution.
That the ultimate differences that are in there are well known.
And when I look at it, I say to myself, okay, Pat, where's the money going?
And I've seen, and I haven't done this exhaustively, and this is right in your backup.
I see traditional energy companies getting billions of dollars in grants to go study, well, algae biofuel, which seems on the surface to be a very interesting and good thing.
But I kind of see a lot of that happening.
But what I don't see is, hey, you know what?
One half of China is living in poverty we cannot even fathom because we don't see it.
The visuals are suppressed.
And they want electricity, a washer, dryer, and a car.
And when you multiply that times billions of people, it's not 1%.
It's 5%, 6%, 7%, correct?
That's really what we're talking about, is the modernization and mechanization of the large poor economies results in tremendous amounts of CO2.
Now, which is also the argument for Gen 3, Gen 4, nuclear, and electric cars that are recharged by the cleaner, more efficient nuclear so that you get out in front of the creation.
But we're used to where have you, because this is what I've seen with the money.
The money's going in grants, the money's going to think tanks.
It actually doesn't end up on the table to help make lives better on a lower CO2 basis in Uganda.
So absolutely, it doesn't go to Uganda.
But I would actually argue that the grants are the kind of things that I'm also arguing for.
That's the research, but that's a tiny fraction of where the money goes.
The vast majority simply goes to buy stuff that we already know.
In your research, you're talking about like the consensus groups, like the Australia.
No, I'm talking about that we should absolutely be researching the fourth generation nuclear power plants or the next generation biofuels, those kinds of things, because that's really, really cheap.
That's basically buying researchers.
They cost nothing.
What we spend most of our money on is subsidizing existing solar panels, existing wind turbines, existing technology that we know is ineffective, but we just put up more of it.
So, you know, back in 2009, when we had one of these endless climate summits in Copenhagen, we have the world's biggest wind farm producer, Vestas, you may know.
And so when everybody in the world decided we were going to save the planet back then, and on all metro stations, Vestas had put up posters and advertising everywhere where it said, make a good climate deal.
Now, they're probably nice people and they want to do that, but it's also very clear that they would make a ton of money from such a good agreement, right?
Because they're going to go build wind farms out of...
That's their product.
It basically says use a lot of Vestas products.
Follow the money as well.
Well, it's not surprising that there's a lot of money when you distribute $100 trillion.
A lot of people are going to get rich.
But I think also politicians love this.
Not predominantly because it goes to any particular place, but because they get to distribute the money and because politicians live off of producing fear, if you will.
They get to say, the world is ending, but if you vote for me, I can make it stop, kind of thing.
And that's an incredibly powerful metaphor.
I want to show you this.
If you can go up to the Vietnam article that was written about new vaccines analysis that just came up of, you have the link.
If you just go to viotamin.com, it'll come up.
Just go to viotamin.com and sandwich.
Rob, just go to viotamin.com, it'll come up.
Go to vietame.
There you go.
It's on the top right.
Story right there to your right.
Perfect.
Okay, so if you look at this, so new vaccine analysis reveals 300,000 excess U.S. debts, $147 billion in damages.
We are living in one of the most revealing years of our lifetime, particularly when it comes down to glorious life-saving COVID-19 vaccine.
But just how life-saving is it or was it?
Time reveals all.
As research continuously points to the vaccines and effectiveness, especially how it was initially sold to Americans, recent data keeps exposing its fallacies and fatality.
According to researchers, behind a new analysis by human projects, a wing of Portugal-based research from finance technologies and the U.S. COVID-19 vaccines injured 26.6 million people, disabled 1.36 million people, and cost 300,000 excess deaths.
The economic cost of damages resulted in $147 billion in 2022 alone.
Researchers behind vaccine damage projects said they ought to estimate the human cost, including that's caused or hastened by the vaccines, as well as the impact of the overall economy of each aspect of the vaccine damage.
So if you go a little lower, this is from Edward Dowd.
We had him on a couple weeks ago, what is it, a couple months ago?
A couple months ago, Ed Dowd.
So he shows the numbers at the top, estimated human cost, estimated economic cost, injuries, 89.9 billion, disabilities, 52.2 billion, excess death, 5.6 billion, but go all the way to the bottom, all the way to the bottom, all the way to the bottom, all the way to the, right there.
Okay, right there on that tweet right there.
Pfizer Moderna in 2022 combines COVID-19 vaccine revenue in the U.S. of $11.5 billion.
So for every $1 they made, it cost the U.S. economy $13.
Quite the negative societal ROI, largest crime scene in history.
Multiply this across the globe, numbers.
Now, you have to know that this research is coming from this organization.
You have to go test the research.
You have to go do your own due diligence on this to see where it's at.
But Ed Dowd is also a data guy.
He's done very well for himself.
And he went from being a financial guy to wanting to study all the statistics, wrote a book about it, and boom, everybody wants to talk about it and read about it.
But here's the question.
I asked this because we went down this rabbit hole with COVID and we thought, oh my God, it's going to be amazing.
It's going to be great.
A New York Post story came up that said, with the expert COVID view blown up, green terror must be next.
Okay, this just came up a month ago.
I'm sure you've seen the story.
It is necessary to consider with the arguments of courageous skeptics like Bjorn Lomberg and others who have long documented the disconnects from reality in the climate change discourse.
Despite the alarming predictions of climate catastrophes, many of these forecasts have been consistently off the mark.
For example, at the 2021 Glasgow UN Climate Summit, John Kerry claimed we have now only nine years left to stop global warming.
That's pathetic to even say something like that.
This followed Prince Now King Charles 2019 claimed that we had only 18 months left.
And AOC claimed the same year that we had only 12 years left.
At least she's more optimistic.
These predictions conflict with the 2004 prediction with the British Greens that climate change would destroy all human civilization by 2020.
Thank God we're still around.
Additionally, the climate refugees prediction has been repeatedly overblown.
In 2005, the United Nations Environment Program forecasted that 50 million climate refugees would be created by 2010, but this massive migration flow failed to materialize.
The proposed solutions, such as banning gas stoves, mandating Teslas, and eating mealworms are nonsensical, nonsensical, and cater to the emotions of rich progressives rather than addressing the actual risk of climate change.
So this is the part where the average person is sitting there who doesn't have all day, all night, doesn't get paid to do research.
They have a family, they have a wife, they have kids, they have a husband, they have a job, they have responsibilities, they have things they want to do.
They want to take care of their health.
They want to increase their financial situation in a better place.
But they're trying to reason and say, okay, Mr. Expert, Mrs. Expert, okay, government, you're here to help us.
Every time you do, I'm a little bit worried and paranoid.
Why was it that COVID that was supposed to be so beneficial for us for us to go do all this stuff with vaccines, now everybody's turning around and not looking good, especially the experts?
If that's the case, you ask for all this money.
Why should we trust you with climate change?
Maybe you're using the same method to get money out of us and use fear tactics to get us to fall for this crap.
Do you see the credibility why the same people that don't trust the COVID argument now are having a hard time saying, is this the next thing?
Oh, absolutely.
So, Patrick, again, I'm the kind of guy that will read the UN Climate Panel report and actually mostly believe that the climate scientists are doing good work.
But some of their policy recommendations are not very good.
I would probably do the same with the COVID.
I should just say I'm not a COVID expert whatsoever.
But I know a lot of these people.
Fundamentally, I probably don't.
I would tend to not agree with the whole idea that vaccines were a terrible sort of scam.
But it was very clear that we were being told in the COVID conversation that this is going to be the end of mankind.
We need to do drastic things.
And one of the drastic things we did, which a lot of people were already skeptical about when we did them, was to close our schools.
We now know that that was a terribly bad idea in so many different ways.
So the World Bank has shown that it basically costs a lot of kids a year or more of their education around the world.
And this makes kids everywhere poor.
The World Bank estimate it will cost the world about $1.4 trillion per year starting in 2040 because these kids will now be out in the employment market and they will be less productive because they just lost a year of schooling around the world.
This is terrible.
And we knew back then what that tells you is we need to have a less biased conversation.
We need to have a conversation where it's allowed to say, wait a minute, is that a good idea?
And that was not allowed because we're so panicked in the COVID conversation.
And likewise, we seem to be so panicked in the climate conversation that we often don't ask the same questions.
So I absolutely agree with you.
We need to ask these questions.
And I think a lot of experts seem to just jump on this one solution.
No, the solution, no matter what the problem is, the solution is always solar panels and wind turbines, no matter what you ask.
And that's probably not correct.
It's a little part of the solution, but it's not a very large part of it.
Can I challenge something you said respectfully?
You just said, let's have a listen.
Let's do it unrespectfully.
Oh, damn.
Well, within arm's reach of you, I'll do it respectfully.
You say, let's have a less biased discussion.
How do you do that when so many of these scientific things inevitably become political and political has policy?
And policy has usually got two sides of the aisle, regardless of the country you're in.
Because in politics, I think we can agree boogeymen get created.
Each side creates a boogeyman, and then they can control the outcome, which leads to policies and benefactors.
In the case of COVID, COVID was a boogeyman.
The control was masking and civic controls.
Policies got put in place for education.
The benefactor, now we turn out billions and billions of dollars went to pharmaceutical companies and others.
That's always where it is.
How do you have a less biased discussion on this?
This is my question for you and my challenge to you, because you yourself have twice been part of good, not good natured, but good logical attempts to create like the Copenhagen consensus, the Australian consensus, and both of those failed.
How do we have a less biased conversation on this?
I should just say Copenhagen consensus hasn't actually failed yet, at least.
No, no, no.
Should I say that?
Okay, should I say that?
Yes.
They didn't come to consensus.
There's an awful lot of shouting.
Oh, God, yes.
So anyway, you're absolutely right.
I may be a little bit more.
Yeah, well, or naive or hopeful.
I tend to believe that when you work with people who disagree with you a lot, it's worthwhile to be polite and it's worthwhile to try to sort of engage them in polite conversation because it also makes all the people who listen in much more likely to say, oh, maybe he has an argument.
And so I agree with you that it is hard to get people, especially sort of in the very religious environmental movement, to get them to move.
But I think, and that's back to you, Patrick, your point of saying, you know, most people have kids to pick up from school.
They have other and more important things to do.
And so in some sense, it's about convincing them that there is a problem, for instance, with climate change, but it's not as big as it's been promoted.
It's not the end of the world.
It's a problem.
And many of the solutions are actually quite expensive and will deliver quite little.
And having that conversation and having it respectfully, I think, can help make it more likely that many people are going to say, all right, I actually, I think that makes some sense.
Maybe we should start looking more for where can we get the biggest bang for our buck?
What can we actually do?
And that, of course, goes back to the whole idea of saying this is all about research.
This is about making sure that we find these innovations that'll make the world able to do this at an affordable cost.
Right, because you go back to Al Gore, he created the boogie man, Inconvenient Truth.
And we'll jump to Pat in less than 10 seconds here.
But we just read here that the Great Barrier Reef, the pictures he showed, was a natural life cycle happening on one side, and there was actually a monstrous bloom simultaneously happening on the other side.
And now the Great Barrier Reef is actually bigger.
So what Gore would be accused of, not accused of, but proven, rather selective imagery and editing in building that.
And then the polar bears have come back and everything.
So people go, oh, well, you said this about COVID.
You said this about Inconvenient Truth.
And you were wrong and you were wrong and you were wrong.
He won an Oscar for that.
Correct.
And now we look back.
2006 won an Oscar for that.
Well, let's just say no opinion.
We can factualize it.
It's probably not the best scientific indicator either.
But the point is, but to you, you said, we understand that.
I stopped watching the Oscars a long time ago.
But I mean, this year, the movie that won, anyways, I don't even want to get into it.
It's very weird what things they do there.
But, you know, to the average person, being an Oscar award-winning documentary means you kind of know what you're talking about.
You know, the whole film Created Media Critic Collective rating Rotten Tomatoes was 51% and 61% for metacritic.
If you can go to the article you were just showing a minute prior to this, Rob, which you had on, you had an right there.
It says, don't forget the helpless critters, Greens love to hype up.
Remember the vanishing polar bear, Keystone is Al Gore's Moral Panic Masterpiece and Inconvenient Truth.
Turns out their numbers are up from two and a half to five times since the 60s.
The allegedly dying coral of the Great Barrier Reef now holds more coral than any time since record keeping began.
Yeah.
This is where they lose credibility.
Yes.
And they should, because they're not telling us the full story.
Now, remember, again, the polar bears, and I've been pointing this out for quite a while.
We have more polar bears than we've had since the 1960s.
We have much more.
And this is mostly not anything to do with climate change, but because we stopped shooting polar bears.
You know, we actually enacted a global treaty back in 1976 where we dramatically reduced the number of polar bears we shoot, which has led happily to the fact that we now have many, many more polar bears.
And again, one of the points I try to emphasize is if you actually cared about polar bears and if you wanted to protect them even more, shouldn't we be a little concerned about the fact that we this year and every year we shoot about 700 polar bears out of the 26,500 polar bears there are.
If you want to do something to help polar bears, instead of not driving tomorrow, maybe you should enact not shooting 700 polar bears.
Again, this is not rocket science.
And if we can stop having this very, very polarized conversation, we can actually get somewhere with smart, simple policies.
It's interesting here what you're talking about.
The agreement on the conservation of polar bears came into effect in May 26th of 1974 in an effort to protect the species through a coordinated approach by the five polar bear range states, Soviet, what is that, Russia, Norway, Greenland, Denmark, and US and Canada.
700 a year, 26,000.
And now it's what?
No, sorry, we used to shoot about 15, 14, 1,500, and then it went down to 700.
700 gas.
And remember, 700 is mostly in Canada because it's Inuit that are allowed to catch them.
So it's both caught by Inuit.
It's also sold as a trophy hunting and a way to bring in money to the local communities.
Can you pull up those three images that we have about nuclear has the highest capacity factor?
If you can zoom in a little bit when you look at this.
So, okay, nuclear has the highest capacity factor at the top with 92.5%.
And by the way, this is coming from U.S. Energy Information Administration.
So this is not like something that's from a blog.
It's the U.S. Department of Energy.
Okay.
So nuclear 92.5%, geothermal 74.3, natural gas around 57%.
Hydropower 42%.
Coal 40%.
Wind 35.
Solar 24.9.
Yet that's all we keep hearing about.
If you go to the next one, the CO2 emissions, you should have, yeah, that one right there, if you could.
There you go.
And then the last one would be great.
Zoom in a little bit so we can see it all.
CO2 emissions avoided by the U.S. power industry.
Again, nuclear, and that's by million metric tons, 476, 187, 174, 45, and geothermal.
Bjorn, can you explain this chart right there?
Go back to the one you were on.
No, just go on the one that we were on.
Explain this chart.
What does this mean to the average person?
So, well, I'm not sure it means anything to the average person, but let's take a step back and say, if you have more nuclear power, you use less of everything else.
Now, you use a little bit less of wind and solar, but you also use less of fossil fuels, and it means you end up emitting less CO2.
Nuclear simply replaces CO2-emitting energy.
So that's why nuclear has saved more CO2 than any other technology.
If you have more wind, if you have more hydro, you also save CO2, but much less.
And what you have to remember is it's really hard to keep a society running with wind and solar because they predictably will run out.
At night, there's no solar.
When the wind dies down, there's no wind.
And we have no sense of how little batteries we have.
Right now, the world has batteries to cover enough electricity consumption in the world for one minute and 15 seconds.
So fundamentally, batteries are not in any time soon going to be able to step in on this.
So whenever you use solar or you use wind, you inevitably have to have some backup power that both has greater cost, and that also means typically gas.
So unless you're very fortuitously positioned where you have lots of hydro as backup, you will emit more CO2.
So nuclear is the only large-scale way that we can cut a large part of our CO2 emissions from electricity.
Tom, what are you noticing in private equity, what direction money is going to with nuclear?
Are you seeing like a trend there?
Yeah, you're seeing if you take a look at the minds of private equity and in venture capital, you have people like Bill Gurley and others like him that are pointing out that investment in Gen 4 nuclear is not only important, but it's critical because Gen 3 nuclear has proven to be safe.
As a matter of fact, you look around France.
France has got a ton of nuclear and it's not old nukes, right?
It's relatively new.
And so that's how they're being powered.
But they're looking at it as investment opportunities.
And You're not seeing a bunch of investment in like the next 2% more efficient solar panel.
And you're seeing full recognition that, oh, we could just get lithium from seawater.
And then you take a look at the energy it takes to get the other resources it takes to get the lithium out of the seawater.
But you're seeing tremendous interest and investments in new nuclear power.
And more importantly, evangelists saying, will you please read the reports?
And I'm seeing VCs, they'll tweet it, they'll connect to a report and say, will you just read this?
Will you just read this?
And they're trying to push, you know, rather than just yelling or making documentaries that are fake, they're trying to get people to read the facts, such as we're right here.
And so they're smart people are out on the forefront, but they're being drowned out by the political people.
Follow up on the nuclear thing.
We were talking about this off camera before we started.
Nuclear is one of those words where, I mean, it's just you say the word nuclear, people are like, have a nuclear meltdown.
That's a taboo word.
You hear that.
I mean, we all know what happened in World War II in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and then there's been disasters.
We were talking about the Three Mile Island that they kind of covered up and Chernobyl and was it Nagasaki or Fukushima?
Anyway, all these situations.
You hear nuclear, people get freaked out.
What should we not be fearful of when it comes to nuclear?
So if you actually look at how dangerous different things are given how much kilowatt hours they produce or how much energy they produce, it turns out that nuclear is one of the safest things ever.
It's a little bit like with airplane crashes.
Actually, it's incredibly safe to fly, but every time there is a crash, you won't hear about it.
Great analogy.
So it's a little bit the same way with, you know, Chernobyl, obviously, was a terrible disaster.
But, you know, 10 years later, the EU, the World Health Organization, the International Nuclear Commission, and several other organizations went together and said, well, how many people actually died from this?
And they find that it's much less than 2,000 people.
Remember, this is in a world where coal-fire power, which emits lots and lots of air pollution, will routinely kill about half a million people every year.
But it happens all the time.
And it's not one single disaster.
It only kills half a million people every year.
So the air pollution from coal-fired power.
So it's basically the fact that you've cleaned up much of this in the U.S., but most places, you just belch out this black smoke, especially in poor countries, and it simply blankets the neighborhoods with dirty air.
Or West Virginia.
I don't know about that.
But if you go to New Delhi, for instance, it's terrible, literally terrible.
It's like smoking a pack of cigarettes or something a day.
Now, that's also because they burn a lot of their agricultural waste.
It's not just the coal-fired power plants.
But we know that coal-fire power plants make a huge impact.
And the point is, there's a lot of deaths from a lot of different technologies, how hydropower very clearly also leads to big breakdowns of dams, that kind of thing.
And even wind power and solar power, people will drop down from the rooftops where they're installing them or down from the wind turbines.
They're not nearly as dangerous.
So they're still pretty good.
So are you advocating for more use of nuclear?
Nuclear is incredibly safe, and we should recognize that, just like you actually most people recognize airplanes are incredibly safe, although that's not.
I think that's an important distinction because these days you hear what's going on in Ukraine.
Putin drops a nuclear threat every single day.
Obviously, there's two different examples, but just the word nuclear, people, the hair raises on their skin right there.
It's alarming.
Yes.
Yes.
And just because you share a word, you shouldn't think that that's the same thing.
But it's the same word.
Exactly, exactly.
But it's kind of hard to distinguish the two.
And this is also why fourth generation nuclear power, because remember, third generation actually had to be actively protected.
So if you lose all power, that was what both had in Fukushima and Chernobyl, if you lose all power, basically you can get a real meltdown.
What they're saying is that the new fourth generation nuclear is passively safe.
That is, if you lose all power, it just stops, which of course is a better setup.
There's a lot of technological reason why we didn't do it for the third one because you'd be like, well, shouldn't we have done that already?
But so the point here is it's potentially much safer.
It's potentially much cheaper.
But again, I want to see that before we say, yay, let's go.
I want to get a reaction from you on this story of Kamala Harris.
Kamala Harris issues dire climate change warning in Africa.
Existential threat to the entire planet.
Okay, she said this three days ago.
I want to say April 1st.
Vice President Kamala Harris visits Panuka Farm in Zambia and gave stern warning about the existential threat of climate change, calling it a global priority.
Harris noted that Africa is one of the lowest emitters of greenhouse gases, but is playing some of the highest costs related to climate change, particularly in terms of food security.
Harris highlighted the importance of climate-resilient agriculture and reducing greenhouse gas emissions around the world, citing food scarcity as a cause of conflict and displacement.
Harris's visit to Africa as part of the Biden's administration efforts to build partnership and bolster the continent's growth amid global rivalry over its resources.
What's your thoughts about the story with Kamala Harris?
Well, it's very typical of almost all Western politicians will go down and lecture poor Africans on climate change.
And I think it tells you two things.
First of all, she wants to say this is an existential threat.
And it goes back to that whole conversation we had before that most people who are advocating on climate will tell you, this is the end of the world.
And it's obvious because if you can get people to believe this is the end of the world, you don't think about the costs.
It's a little bit like with COVID.
If we don't do all these draconian things, we're all going to die.
Then you're more willing to let yourself do that.
It is not.
Climate change is a problem, not the end of the world.
And it'd be helpful if you actually told the truth on that.
The second bit is much more sinister, I think, because that goes to saying, I'm here in Africa, and a lot of people will typically say, you are so vulnerable to climate change.
So that makes it the most important thing we should all cut our carbon emissions.
Well, why are they vulnerable?
Because they are poor.
Remember, yes, poor people are most vulnerable to climate, but they're also most vulnerable to pretty much everything else.
They're vulnerable to not having enough food, to not having good health, not having good schooling, all these other things.
So why not target economy?
Why go climate instead of economy?
If you actually want to make poor people less vulnerable, also to climate, but presumably also to all these other things, you lift them out of poverty.
It's not rocket science.
And they know that themselves.
So what Uganda and others are actually saying is, we would like to get rich as you are, Ms. Kamala Harris, right?
They would obviously like to be like the U.S.
They would like to have a lot more energy.
What are we telling them?
We're telling them, no.
We're saying you cannot start using fossil fuels.
I know we're using, what, 80, 90% of our energy from fossil fuels, but no, you can't do that.
So Uganda actually wants to increase its emissions and have much more energy that would make them much richer, which is a tiny fraction per capita of what the U.S. would ever do.
But the U.S. and almost all other rich countries are saying no.
We are literally telling, no, you have to stay in poverty in order to fix climate change.
I think that's incredibly entitled.
And of course, the reason why we do that is because Camilla Harris and all other Western politicians know that they can't tell you or me or other rich people, I'm sorry, you have to go, you know, sit in the cold and dark and be poor.
That's never going to work.
But they don't seem to mind to tell that to poor countries.
And that's, of course, why a lot of African countries don't like us very much.
Just to give you a sense of proportion, the average person in Uganda has less power than what in total for industry and everything than the average Californian use to heat his or her pool.
That's the sort of level we're talking about.
They use more on heating their pools than the average Ugandan has for everything.
And this, of course, is why they actually think, and I think they have some moral right to say that, we'd like some more.
So why doesn't Greta go down to Africa and interact with people who have so much?
So little.
Why doesn't she do that?
She's got a photo shoot.
Yeah, she knows that that would look bad.
But it is impressing that she goes to the U.S. and to Americans and Europeans and tell them you got a cut, but not to Chinese and Indians and Africans because she knows that would be looking really bad.
How naive is Greta?
She became the face of the movement when she was 12 years old.
I mean, she dropped out of middle school to pursue this, you know, not exactly an expert.
She just cared about the environment, respect.
Now I think she's 18 years old, right?
She may have single-handedly brought down Andrew Tate, arguably.
But she's no expert, right?
I mean, she's not the doogie hauser of climate.
Shout out to that show.
I know you watched that back in the day.
But how naive is she?
And everyone listens to Greta, especially on the woke left.
But does she actually know what's really going on?
Is she actually understanding budgets and ROIs and investments?
Like, could she possibly understand this as much as scientists?
What are your thoughts on Greta?
So I'm actually going to surprise you a little and say I have a lot of respect for Greta.
She basically listens to what pretty much everyone tells you the world is ending.
And she's at least taking the consequence of that and saying, well, if this is really the end of the world, we got to do much more than all these adults are saying.
I respect that a lot.
She's misinformed, but it's not her fault.
It's really because pretty much everyone in the media, in the mainstream media, and Camilla Harris, as we've just heard, is telling us this is an existential threat.
Unless we do something about it, we might all die.
I think it's respect that she took that consequence.
What we should take from that is, of course, not to say, oh, she must be an expert.
She's just regurgitating what she's heard.
We should say maybe we shouldn't scare our young people this much because there's no justification for scaring this much.
It's a problem, but it's not the end of the world.
And there's a huge difference.
One makes you give up everything and makes you give up your school.
The other one is one of the many challenges we need to fix in the 21st century.
She's, some people would say, a useful idiot is what she is.
She's good to be used as a pawn to validate more of their point and connect with younger kids, students.
And oftentimes, adults are afraid to go after somebody that's younger because you seem like you come across as a bully.
It's a perfect person to use and abuse others who have opposing views.
It's extremely strategic.
She's certainly been used by a lot of people.
And she has had that sort of moral Teflon, as they call it.
She's a kid.
How dare you?
How dare you?
How dare you criticize a kid?
And if you're just watching peripherally and you see that, you're like, oh my God, this girl cares so much.
But then you see the pictures of where she's getting fake arrested in Germany, I believe.
You have that, Rob?
And then you believe that a lot of it is grandstanding and showcasing for clicks and eyeballs.
Yeah, this image right here.
So what you see is her being arrested.
And then what you don't see behind the scenes, I'm sure you can, if you keep looking at the images, cops.
Yeah, she's actually really talking to them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Basically, selfies.
She looks like she literally.
She's not an expert.
This girl, unfortunately, is being used and her shelf life is happening.
You know what?
You know what?
I want to do something.
I want to do something.
Can you do me a favor and play this video?
I saw this video.
This guy, I'm going to send it to you, Rob.
Let me know when you see it.
This is a video that papa.
Let me find this and send this to you, too.
This is Airdrop.
This video validates Robert's MacBook Pro, who is who I'm sending you to.
No, don't send it that one.
I'm going to send it to Rob's iPhone.
I send it to both of them, Rob.
At this point, I'll send it to your BlackBerry.
I'll send it to your Nextel.
I swear to God, whatever you want.
By the way, shout out to Rob today.
He's on the ball.
He is, you know, sometimes.
He's second into it.
No, no, he's not fired.
Sometimes he's got, you know, he doesn't get his coffee.
He had his favourite this morning.
He drank a Devolt drink.
He had the right drink.
So, Rob, if you got it.
That gold power.
Usually drinking wisdom in the morning.
It's that gold-powered laptop.
He's old school.
Rob, you got it.
All right.
So check this out, this video.
Rob, you're allowed to use your voice, buddy.
You're doing sign language.
Watch this here.
Watch this here.
You just got to see this.
It's phenomenal.
Okay.
Watch it.
If you know it, don't say anything, Tom.
It ruined the joke or stuff.
Just kind of watch it.
Have you ever seen this or no?
That's the first time.
I have not seen this.
How seen can human beings be programmed?
Watch this.
Go ahead.
Watch this.
Despite what you might be thinking, these two circles are not equal.
I repeat, these two circles are not equal.
One is, in fact, larger than the other.
Which one do you think is equal to the other?
What I need you to do is determine which one that is.
Red or blue.
So please raise your hand if you believe the blue circle is larger than the red.
They look exactly the same, but the blue looks maybe a little bit better.
All right.
Please raise your hand if you believe the red circle is larger than the blue.
All right, very good.
Now, before I said anything about these two circles, what was your first instinct?
Equal, right?
Because they look equal.
And the reason why they look equal is because, in fact, they are equal.
These two circles are identical.
Yet I got just about every one of you to raise your hand and say that they're not.
So what do we learn?
That you can be manipulated like that to believe in something that goes against your natural instincts.
Just imagine.
Just imagine as a child, you're taught that the blue circle is larger than the red.
If you say it enough times, you convince yourself that's the truth.
If you're told the lie enough times, it becomes part of your reality.
Wow.
And if enough people are taught that lie, that the blue circle is larger than the red, well, now it becomes part of the culture.
And if that culture then passes that misinformation along to the next generation, well, now it becomes tradition.
Oh, my God.
What do you think about this when you see this?
What's your reaction?
How much truth is there with the credibility of how they're using this to get people to say, no, it's real.
It's real.
It's real.
Let me say, oh, maybe it is real.
Let me buy into it, right?
It's totally real.
We've seen things generationally in the United States that were started by one political party that were adopted by another.
And then now you look back in history.
Wait, that's not the way it is.
This political party said this when it started.
I can look at history, but we've gone through generations where it's been appropriated the other way.
It's all over the place.
This pretty much describes our educational system, by the way.
Bingo.
This is our educational system for the most part.
I got to sit there and listen to this programming of my kids, and they're going to come down and tell daddy, hey, daddy, the red circle is bigger than the blue.
Billy, it's not.
No, it is because my teacher said so.
Your teacher is also brainwashed.
Okay.
Pat, I don't care how many times you show me that video.
That blue circle is convinced.
You think the blue is bigger than the red.
We all know you think the blue is bigger than the red, but I think they are genuinely equal and they both have a voice in America.
And I'm talking about those two circles.
Yeah.
No, but there's credibility behind the fact that all of us fell for this.
Now, by the way, none of us are like above this.
Nobody can be like, well, let me tell you, because of my IQ score, when I went to Mensa, bullshit, you're also part of this.
We're all victims of this to some point.
Okay.
At some point, you fell for this.
Okay.
If you fell for Russia, you're part of the circle problem.
If you fell for the Russia collusion, if you fell for the COVID, you're also part of the problem.
Everybody was convinced it's only one way or the highway.
There was no need for debate.
There was no need for discussion.
What was that one story you told about the teacher?
She came into the class and she basically said, Hey, guys, I want to tell you, kids, that if you have blue eyes, you're smarter than anyone with brown eyes.
And then all the blue-eyed kids are like, Yeah, we're smarter than you.
And then the teacher came back the next day.
She goes, Actually, I had my facts incorrect.
It's actually the brown-eyed students that are smarter than the blue.
And all the brown-eyed kids are going.
And then she came back the third day and she's like, Totally kidding.
You guys are all completely equal.
But it's just sort of proving your point.
Like, if you can fall for a narrative and you're gullible and you don't question things.
If you keep saying white people are racist, shit, maybe they're going to believe they're racist.
And I've wasted all my money giving to the protesters on behalf of the marginalized red circle because it was the same size the whole time and we've been marching in the streets.
Damn it, we're equal.
How much of the problem is this, Bjorn?
Well, I think there's certainly a part of this that we're easily manipulated on many of these things because we don't have a good connection to most people don't have any good intuition about what is global warming.
If you think back on acid rain, do you remember acid rain in the 1980s?
This idea that air pollution would actually kill off the forests.
It was huge in Germany.
Acid rain.
I'm more familiar with the purple rain.
That's Prince that has done his thing.
In Germany, a majority of people actually believed that acid rain would lead to there being no forest in Germany in the year 2000, which, of course, was entirely true, untrue.
And we've had many of these kinds of conversations.
Now, all of them have partly, they're partly true, but they are also massively exaggerated.
So I would tend to say this is much more a question of there being so much interest in pushing a story because it makes for policymakers get to save your life.
We get to save you.
It means that you get to spend a lot of money.
And it means that you get to control the conversation for a decade or so.
So I get why this happens.
And I think in our sort of excitement of getting rid of this, we shouldn't forget there are real problems out there, but we should just have a sort of sense of what's the right level of concern.
And we have no good sense in that climate.
And I think Pat brought up a very good point at the very beginning, this conversation about like where Gen Z falls in terms of where this is on their list of priorities.
And this is at the very top of their list.
And it's because, A, of course, you want to care about the planet.
Like, what kind of psychopath doesn't care about the planet?
I think we can all agree we have one planet despite what Elon Musk is trying to do on Mars.
I'm not moving to Mars anytime soon.
Like we all care about Earth.
But then also the age thing is a big thing.
If you're 14 years old, if you're 16 years old, you're 18 even, you can't vote.
You don't have a job.
You haven't even been to college yet.
You're not worried about prices and home prices and mortgages and the stock market.
These are not concerns of yours.
But the earth, you can do something about that.
You can actually tangibly do something, quote unquote, to help the environment.
And that's why this comes at the top of their list.
I can completely empathize and understand why young people treat this as such high priority.
But if they're only hearing one side of the story, why would they ever know other ways?
The only reason they're hearing that is because they're talking about that, because that's what they're hearing.
Correct.
And that's what they're being taught.
So they're going to school and the teachers are telling them this is the biggest problem.
This is the biggest problem.
Matter of fact, I'm going to ask you, Bjorn, what do you think?
What do you think is the biggest problem we're dealing with right now in the world?
Oh, thank you.
This is what I've been spending in the last 20 years of answering.
It turns out the question is wrong.
So the short answer here is the biggest problem in the world is that we all die, but we don't have a good technology to avoid it.
So it doesn't make sense to rank the worst problems.
It only makes sense to rank what are the best solutions.
So you can't really say what are big problems because it depends on whether we have anything to do about it.
And it turns out that there are some really, really good solutions to the world's big problems.
So you mentioned poverty.
We know how to get people out of poverty by getting more trade, for instance.
That is opening up our trade.
Do you remember 20 years ago, everybody was very in favor of free trade?
Then we started becoming realizing, oh, wait, there's actually problems with free trade as well, the Rust Belt and that kind of thing.
And that's absolutely true.
But we still have not, we've kind of lost sight on the fact that trade still helps many, many more than it inconveniences.
So for rich countries, for every dollar that it costs for people like in the Rust Belt, it generates benefits for the U.S. of about $7.
So yes, we need to compensate them.
We need to have that conversation.
But for poor countries, free trade generates $1 problem for every time it generates $95 of net benefits.
That's incredible.
This is, you know, that's why, of course, China got so much richer.
That's why China has lifted out most of its population now from poverty.
This is because of the power of free trade.
So that's one of the many solutions.
Do you mind if I give you a few more?
Go for it.
I'm listening.
Good.
So we're actually doing, I'm coming out with a book this month on what are the 12 smartest things to do.
So this was one of the smart things to do.
Education is obviously a big issue.
So education sucks most places in the world.
It certainly is terrible for most of the poor people in the world.
They go to school.
We've managed to do that and everybody is in school, but they have really, really poor education.
So they learn almost nothing.
And one of the reasons is that there is such a big difference between the best student in the class and the worst student in the class.
If you imagine you put all the 12-year-olds together in one grade, obviously some of these kids know everything the teacher is saying and more, and some of them have no clue what's going on.
So the solution to that is to get more individualized learning, what they call learning at the student's own level.
One way of doing this is getting kids in front of a tablet one hour a day.
If you do this, the tablet will have software in the local language that actually teaches this student.
And so the software very quickly figured out, oh, the student is really smart, so I can rush ahead.
Or the student has no clue what's going on, so I'll back up and start doing this.
If you do this, it'll cost about $30 per kid per year.
Now, they're not going to get the tablet.
They'll share many of them.
And, you know, in these poor countries, you'll also need to have solar panels to recharge them at night.
And you need a locker to store them at night so they don't get stolen, that kind of stuff.
We've calculated all that, and this is done on many, many studies, right?
It'll cost about $30 per student per year, but it means that each of these kids over a year will learn what they normally would have learned in three years in school.
They'll simply learn three times as much.
Now, remember, it's still a pretty crappy school, so it's just less crappy now, but it means that they will become much more productive when they become adults and they will produce much more.
It actually turns out that this benefit delivers about $65 of benefit for every dollar it costs.
So again, if we do these kinds of things, we could actually make the poorer part of the world about $600 billion richer every year by an investment of about $10 billion.
That's just fantastic.
So the point here is to say there's a lot of things we haven't heard of because they're not sexy, if you will, but they just happen to be incredibly effective.
Let me give you one more and then I'll, I have 12, so you can just say stop.
I'll give you one more.
So tuberculosis is the world's leading infectious disease killer.
It's not COVID.
It was in 2020 and 2021, right?
But even in 2022, it was not.
Tuberculosis is a killer that we don't even think about anymore in the rich world.
It used to kill a lot of us.
Tuberculosis over the last 200 years probably killed about a billion people.
So everyone you know, no, that's not true, but a fourth of everyone you knew in the 1800s died from tuberculosis.
Killed Doc Holiday.
We all know that if you watch Wyatt Urban, Young Guns.
Well, there you go.
Yeah.
And yeah, and it was a terrible disease, but then came peninsulin.
And we basically got rid of it.
We knew how to fix it.
And it's not been a problem in rich countries.
It still is a huge problem.
So it kills 1.4 million people in the poor part of the world.
And this is mostly moms and dads.
So it's middle-aged people who've just got their own family.
We've already educated them and then they die.
That's not just a terrible tragedy for those families, but it also means that there's less productivity in the nations.
Which goes back to your initial point.
If you're trying to not die of tuberculosis, you're like, you want me to worry about the climate in 2100?
Exactly.
Dream on.
Yeah.
And so we need to get more medication.
This is mainly a problem of people actually taking it.
One of the reasons why it's really hard to get people to take it is you need to take the medication for four to six months.
Have you guys ever gotten like a two-week peninsulin cure?
I'm looking for a two-week vacation, Bjorn.
Sorry about that.
But I can't help you there.
But it's hard to keep up doing when you get well, to keep remembering to take it.
But these guys actually have to take it for four or six months.
And that's really hard.
So you need apps.
You need to have sort of games, maybe tuberculosis anonymous, where you get together every week and say, yes, I took my pills and that kind of thing.
So there's a lot of ways to sort of engage people in doing it, because if they don't, they create multi-resistant tuberculosis, which is much worse.
And then we need to find a lot more.
So we estimate about 10 billion, sorry, 10 million people get sick every year, but we only treat about 6 million of them.
And it's the 4 million that both die, but also pass on the tuberculosis to new generations that then go on and die.
So if we do this, it'll cost about $6 billion, but we'll save about a million people every year.
It turns out, again, it delivers $46 of social good for every dollar spent.
So what we're basically trying to say is there are these 12 amazing things.
In total, they will cost $35 billion per year.
Not trillion dollars like AOC's solutions to climate, a very, very small amount.
It will save 4.2 million lives every year, and it will make the poorer part of the world $1.1 trillion richer every year.
It will simply deliver an incredible amount of good at very low cost.
And that's the basic point.
So you ask, what are the biggest problems?
Well, here are the best solutions for the world.
These are very cheap.
They're incredibly effective.
And you've never heard of them.
Because they're not fun, right?
They're not the kind of thing that we talk about with climate that makes us all anxious and politicians can get you worried about.
They just happen to be incredibly good solutions.
What do you think about the fact that big pharma can only advertise in two countries, U.S. and New Zealand?
Tom, you know what I'm thinking about with this?
Here's what I'm thinking about.
You know, we talked about this briefly a month and a half ago.
It may have even been with Ed Dowd when we talked about this.
When it comes down to solutions that is about your health, you know, or something that has to do with like a COVID vaccine shot, you know, how much money, Pfizer's valuation doubled during the two years they went from being a $40 billion company to being $100 billion company during COVID.
What a great, profitable thing COVID was for Pfizer.
Pfizer was probably sitting there in this room saying this was a great way to increase the valuation of the company.
So if they're sitting there and they're saying, let's think about what else we can do to take the company from a $100 billion company to $300 billion company.
You know what?
Another pandemic would kind of speed up the process.
The mind goes there.
I think the part about having profit in the area of health, there's a part about that that it's a little bit, I understand the innovation part where you can innovate to find solutions.
Like, you know, the debate where some people are saying the cure for cancer is already here, but they don't want to have it because if they do it, they would lose so much money.
You know, the cure for this is such and such here, but they don't want to have it because if they do it, it would be so many of these cures are around, but they're being kept aside because other companies will be affected by that cure and profit margins could go from XYZ to whatever.
How much do you think there are plenty of other cures out there that we could solve a lot of the issues we have on pennies on a dollar, but some companies are suppressing them from being known to the public because it could cost them their valuation of 20%, 50% or 70%?
Do you know what I'm asking?
I don't think so.
I think that's mostly sort of conspiracy theory.
We know that we have a lot of incredible medical breakthroughs that have happened.
Basically, these companies made a lot of money on them at first because they sell them to the rich world.
And then eventually it goes broad and everybody gets them because the patent runs out.
And that's what has saved countless lives and has made human health much, much better.
What we're seeing now increasingly is that the costs go up.
So for instance, these gene modification tests, drugs that are specifically designed to alter your genes because you have a gene malfunction.
They cost, I just saw this news story, they cost, what, $3 million or something.
That's very, very costly.
That could only work in the very richest of countries, and they may not be good value for money.
But the crucial bit here is the technological innovation happens in rich countries where we're willing to pay for them.
A lot of the problems are in poor countries where they can't pay for them.
And so my point here is simply to say there's a lot of things we already know how to do.
We just couldn't really be bothered spending money on it because we're focused on other things.
We're focused, if you want to put it very bluntly, we're focused on climate change because it gets all the attention instead of these very, very simple things.
Malaria is another good example.
Malaria is almost exclusively in sub-Saharan Africa.
It didn't used to be that way.
So remember, 36 of the U.S. states in the early 20th century were endemic and malaria.
I'm sure I can't remember the 36 say, but I'm sure Florida was one of them.
But when you grow up, when you get rich, when you start putting screens in your doors and you can afford to tackle this, it becomes a lot easier to tackle.
And that's why we basically eradicate in most rich world countries.
They haven't in the poor world.
They're also a little unlucky.
They have a much, much worse mosquito that distributes the do you think it's okay for big pharma to advertise on TV events, sporting events, all that?
Do you think that's okay?
I don't have a good, I haven't thought about that.
I come from a place where we don't, so I haven't thought about it.
Yeah, but why don't you guys?
Because you do come from a place that don't.
It's only two places that do.
It's us and New Zealand.
Why don't you guys?
Why don't the other 190, whatever amount of countries that we have, why don't they advertise?
That's a good question.
They're not allowed.
Oh, by the way, I'm not saying that we have the answer.
I'm just saying let's have the discourse.
What can we speculate why they don't allow pharma companies to advertise in those countries?
So I know when I come to the U.S., I see all these ads and all kinds of things they can do.
And I'm sort of like, ooh, I should do that because it'll make me more safe.
And then I'm also starting worrying, oh my God, do I have this?
Do I have this disease?
Could this be, you know, I don't know.
I'm just freewheeling here, but I'm guessing that a lot of this leads to some anxiety as well.
And it also leads me to vastly overspend because I'll, you know, I know.
So when I go to, have you ever guys ever gone to get vaccinated for something?
Then they tell you, did you know this bug?
And you have no idea.
Is this something that bites one person in Sweden every year?
Or is this something we all die from?
But you feel like maybe I should get that vaccine.
It's not advertising on things you have virtually no sense of is probably not the right way to get information.
Imagine if they did it for Boeing and Airbus.
They were advertising, do you really want to get on a Boeing flight?
Don't you want to go with a more safe Airbus?
Can you make these decisions?
It's probably nice to have other people making those decisions, whether we should certify them as airworthy.
What do you think, Tom?
I'm against pharma advertising.
And I go back to a case study that was back when I was growing up, there were afternoon soap operas were very popular in the United States.
And when they would, on General Hospital or The Young and Restless, there were these very incredibly popular shows that were like the most popular shows on television at the time.
And they would invent some random malady to create a storyline and tension.
And an amazing amount of, let's face it, mostly housewives who were home watching these things used to call their doctor or go to their doctor and say, I think I've got these two symptoms.
I think I have blueze wai because they saw it in general hospital.
And so I think there's a certain psychosomatic effect that you can have on the populace.
And I do not think that a hyper-medicated populace is a good thing.
And I don't, I'm not in favor of pharma, you know, advertising for two reasons.
One, I don't think there's that the societal benefit is there to scare and induce.
And then also, pharma has to get back the cost of their advertising.
And the drugs in America are already expensive, Pat.
And so now if you're advertising a Super Bowl commercial, well, then the Super Bowl commercial cost is going to be in that medication.
And I think that we did very, very well in the rest of the world with pharmaceutical representatives educating doctors at symposiums and then doctors, you know, prescribed them accordingly as the various FDAs of the world in the various countries or collections of countries did it.
So I am against medical advertising for that reason.
Psychosomatic effect on the populace.
And it increases, not decreases, the cost of the medications at the end unit because you got to get the advertising dollars back.
And you create this, and suddenly you create this monster where you're a research organization looking for the next problem.
And you're trying to find the next problem on a grand scale.
And you do make a good point that eradicating malaria, which is one of the things that the Gates Foundation, I don't agree with them on everything at all.
But the Gates Foundation, one of their charters was, hey, what are one of our BHAGs, Big Harry Audacious Goals, to quote a popular business book?
And they said, let's eradicate malaria on a global basis.
And it's not that it's still a problem in sub-Saharan Africa.
It's that it's down to sub-Saharan Africa.
And the progress has been made.
We're going to help elevate the quality of life for those folks.
You know what you guys made me think about, both of you?
So while you're talking, I went up there and I looked up because what you said, you said there's a part when you look at it and, oh, my God, do I have this?
Am I not taking this?
Maybe because of stress all the sudden, right?
And then Tom, the way you Dixon site, you know, you start kind of being worried about it.
So I went online.
Have you guys ever had anybody in your life that's hypochondria?
do you have anybody close to you that's hypochondriate?
Do you have anybody in, you probably don't because you live in a country that they don't advertise, but do you have somebody that- Yes, fortunately not close to me in my immediate family, but there is a member of the extended family that- Well, don't.
We don't need the details.
It's just close.
That's just the name.
The name, please.
Please give us the name, phone number.
No, no, no.
I was literally describing it so people listening can go, got it.
I know what you mean.
Yeah.
So do you have somebody in your life that is?
Yeah.
Hypochondriac is a real thing.
They think they're sick.
And they're like self-crazy.
You know what's crazy about them?
It's like I'll sit there and I listen to them and I'll be like, man, I would hate to be you because you have so many sick.
Did you know that if you do this?
Did you know that if you do that?
Did you know that?
Did you know that this?
Did you know that?
Did you know that?
Don't touch it.
Don't know.
Oh my goodness.
What must you be thinking about all day long?
But here's the question.
How did you become this?
Can you pull up data, Rob?
Type the following.
Increase in hypochondria cases in America.
Okay.
Increase in hypochondria cases in America.
We're jealous because in your country, this doesn't exist.
Because in your country, you're not being advertised left and right that the end of the world is coming.
See if you can pull up a chart because the one I have right now is showing that it's been an increase and more and more people are dealing with hypochondria.
They're afraid that they're not healthy.
They're not good.
You know, they're having issues.
You know, I don't know if you're able to find it or not, but keep looking for it.
While you're looking forward, we'll talk about it.
Here's an article here that says anxiety is the most searched symptom on Google.
But how does that happen, though?
Like, here's who we asked the question last week when we were talking to a couple of friends.
Who gets the best out of you?
Right?
And we thought about a couple names.
And then a follow-up question was, I want you to think about the person that gets the worst out of you.
Who gets the worst out of you?
Okay.
So then the next question becomes, who do you listen to on television that by the time you're done, you have anxiety?
Who do you listen to on YouTube or television?
By the time you're done, you're like, man, you know, we got this, right?
So if you watch advertisements on health, like I'll give you an idea.
You know, I almost don't want to, I can't tell this story.
It's too, it's a terrible, it's a funny story, but I can't tell this story.
It's a very nice thing.
I mean, I can't tell you.
You don't have to name names.
He's going to feel so bad.
He's going to feel so bad.
But I'll give you one of the stories.
I won't tell this whole story.
But by the way, this is from 30 years ago.
So we have.
30 years.
You passed the statue of limitations on the story, Pat.
I'm going to tell you this story.
I won't tell the other one, but I'll tell this one because this is not as dark as the other one.
We had a guy that were playing basketball one day, 13, 14 years old.
Conversational masturbation comes up.
Okay.
This is where we're going.
Obviously, nobody here has ever masturbated, but some do.
Okay.
You've heard.
Yes.
Statistics, right?
My boys are getting to that age, so they're going through a puberty class that we got to sign off and all this stuff.
And I'm looking at the content of this puberty class that they got to go through.
I'm like, dude, I can't teach it to you in five minutes.
As a father, I'll break it down for you how this stuff works.
But so we're going through this, playing basketball.
One of our guys asks a question because there was a story that week in school about AIDS.
Okay.
And the story was that, you know, AIDS is starting to spread.
So then one guy asks a question.
He says, can you get AIDS by masturbating?
And so we collectively as a group are like, of course you can get it.
We're playing a prank on this guy.
This poor guy gets so scared.
Obviously, it's a dirty prank that, you know, sometimes it's not the type of stuff that happens.
This guy gets worried.
He goes to the doctor.
He starts panicking for a couple weeks.
He asks his mom to go to the emergency room, goes to the doctor, asks his mom to step out of the room and asks the doctor, can I get AIDS from masturbating?
And the doc starts laughing.
She says, what do you mean?
He says, no, I'm telling you, because they're talking about in school right now that this can happen.
This was a topic of discussion in the school for about a month.
Look at Tom's face for a second.
By the way, as dumb of an example as I'm giving you right now, go back to when you were a kid and how somebody would say something to you.
I had a cut one time here.
Okay.
We got into a fight and I got a cut and the other guy's blood touched my blood.
And I was like, hey, you're going to die because that guy's sick.
You know, for a week, I'm like, this is it.
I'm going around telling everybody in my family, mom, I love you.
I love you.
Something happens.
I love you.
Nothing's happening, right?
So again, I'm giving you a very simple example here as when we were young, what we feared because somebody bullshitted you into thinking you could die from XYZ because you're doing this.
And young boys, that's a conversation boys have amongst boys when you go through this phase, right?
You think bring that up to 45 years old and you're sitting and watching a basketball game, ESPN.
Have you been farting a lot?
Like there could be a cause that you have liver cancer.
And with this medicine that's out here right now by this FDA approved, they're not FDA approved, but if you take this medicine, you need to see your doctor because if you have farted more than 17 times in a day, that may, I know this is a joke, but people are sitting there saying, maybe I have liver cancer because I fart one too many times.
Maybe I have this.
There's a part of me that's convinced based on what both of your answer was, not based on data.
There's a reason why these other countries don't allow big pharma to advertise because it probably increases anxiety.
How many can you rob?
Can you pull up a commercial to see what percentage of commercials on TV are about some drugs or prescription or big pharma?
I'm so curious to know what percentage is, 70% drugs and a low therapeutic value study finds.
No, I want to know what percentage of commercials on TV, what percentage of commercials on TV are big pharma.
Yeah, I just want to know what you're solving for one out of every 10 commercials.
6.6 billion.
I hate big spenders.
Big pharma spent $6.6 billion on ads last year.
$6.6 billion.
Find the total ad spend overall.
I just want to know what percentage is big pharma.
That is all I want to know.
What percentage is big pharma?
20% of that is high-speed talking at the end of the end of the ad?
Okay, there you go.
I just found one.
I just include Jennifer Raffs and loss of head.
Okay, watch what I just found.
Check this out.
Check this out, Tom.
Pharmaceutical industry, TV advertising spending in the United States from 2020, it's shown the dollar amount, but it's also shown on this website Statista that says in 2020, TV ad spending of the big pharma industry counted for 75% of total ad spend.
What?
Tom, did you hear what I just said?
Wait, wait, what?
Okay.
Okay, so let me send this to you, Rob.
Go Google this.
Type in what?
Oh, you found it?
75%.
What are we talking about?
So no wonder people have hypochondria in America.
No wonder people are panicking that they're dying.
No wonder people are so worried about everything because of these ads 75% of the time.
My question a lot of times, I'll go from this.
Let's just say I have a very strong argument in some area, right?
And I'm a capitalist to the core.
So I prefer to talk to communists and socialists.
So I'll have a Sam Cedar or a Jenk or Cow or Pac-Man or what was that?
Vivek, not Vivek, one of the bigger socialists.
He's got an interesting name, a communist, or Richard Wolf, the professor, who's the number one socialist professor in America, according to Forbes 2016, 2017.
And I'll talk to them and I'll say, ooh, there's a leak right there for your capitalist argument.
Got it.
Oh, okay.
You see, they have a point there.
They have a point here, right?
And you're kind of trying to strengthen the argument.
75% of ad spend is by big pharma.
If you're sitting there, you're wondering why the other 190-something countries don't allow pharma to advertise.
You have to ask the question, why?
So what would happen in America if in 2024, moving forward, we took a six-year break, Big Pharma.
Not permanent.
Let's just take a six-year break.
Let's see how much anxiety drops in America.
Let's see the levels of anxiety drop in America.
I'm never going to hear about this in the story I just gave you about my friend who back in 13, 14 years old, he thought he's going to get AIDS from masturbation.
I'm sure that story is going to come up quite often when people ask me questions.
He's in the lobby with a rifle pack.
Oh, this is why you do it in the body.
Not that you can't get out and that they can't get in.
Exactly.
What do you think about this stuff?
What do you think about why these countries are not doing it?
Am I just like, you know, going crazy right now thinking about why these other major countries in the world don't allow big pharma to advertise on their TVs?
I think we've just underlined it.
And you can take a look at all this.
Let's take a look at all the high.
Look at the cost of all the hypochondriacs, needless trips.
So how much doctor's time would we save?
How much deductible expenses, $15 a time.
And then people that are hourly, that are not paid a salary, but then they don't work those hours because four hours are not there because we all know it takes forever to sit in the waiting room.
So they have to take half a day off and then they got to pay 20 bucks.
Add all that stuff up, Pat.
Look at all the time and cost and societal benefit you would get out if we just could cut hypochondria in half in America.
And also, my guess is that the bigger problem is that we're really all worried about it.
Have you ever read one of those doctor books or go on Net Doctor and see what are different kind of symptoms?
Web every night, one hour a night on WebMD.
One hour a night.
You'll drive yourself crazy.
It's very easy to get to feel that there's a lot of things that could worry you.
I don't think we need to be hypochondriacs to actually get more worries.
So it would cut a lot more anxiety than just for the highest.
I'd like to just, because I think actually we've sort of ended up in a place where we're talking very much about the same thing that we worry about with climate change, that we're in some ways allowing everyone to expand on all their fears and worries.
And if you then confirmed constantly on TV, yes, you are going to die.
Yes, that next hurricane you saw is actually the one that's out to kill you.
And it's just going to get worse from here on out.
We're essentially allowing, if you will, pharma ads and browsing on WebMD for the climate conversation as well.
And maybe we should ask for a little more sensibility so that people wouldn't be as scared, both on medical issues and on climate.
Well, climate and pharmaceutical industry have one thing in common.
They use the prospect of tremendous doom to get a purchase decision.
And so call it what you will, when you line up with a saying, you know, I'm supporting all the following elements of climate change.
I'm going to do this.
You've made a purchase decision.
You've been sold.
You've been marketed to, you've been lobbied, and you made a purchase decision.
And so now you're with that group, with that mob.
And that's what the pharmaceutical industry is doing.
They're finding pick a doom, get it out there, amplify it, and then be the solution.
Yeah, I think accidentally we have started a conversation on a topic that I would love for you to do more research on.
That's why you came here today.
I don't know if you know.
I got a job and I got to go back in a year.
If you could, I would be so curious to know the link because I tell you, you know how miserable life can be if you have somebody who has hypochondria.
You know how much it hurts the people around you?
Do you know why?
Because the folks who have hypochondria, they don't know it and they're not trying to hurt you.
They're sincere.
I don't think they're playing games because they need attention.
I sincerely believe they are so afraid that the world is coming to an end with their health, that they're dying, that everybody around them constantly has to hear the message.
You have no idea how sick I am.
If you only know how sick I am, you don't know how sick I am.
Shame on you.
Do you know what I'm going through?
You know how sick I am?
And we have, if we don't bow down and say, oh my God, you are so sick.
And you say the opposite, that's why you don't do research.
You don't sympathize for people like this.
The other person, like, look, man, I love you.
I understand you.
You know, you may have some things here.
But where does that fear come from?
Now we know.
Thanks to big pharma.
75% of ads spent is these guys.
By the way, if you look it up, it says the U.S. consumer drug advertising boom on television began in 1997 when the FDA relaxed its guidelines relating to broadcast media, relating to broadcast media.
Why?
Type in 1997 FDA broadcast media, FDA broadcast media.
Can you click on that and see what stories comes up?
Well, we're not going to do it right now, but I have to go take a look at this to see what was the reasoning behind it.
Who pushed this?
Okay, the background.
Introduction.
The Scottish and the system.
Sponsors who are interested in advertising their prescription human and animal drug, including biological products for humans directly to consumer through broadcast media such as television, radio, telephone communication system.
Background, the FDA requires manufacturers, packets, and distributors who advertise prescription human and animal drugs, including biological products for humans, disclose an advertisement, certain information about the, okay, that's fine if you disclose.
You still scare the crap out of a bunch of boomers.
Exactly.
Okay, this prescription drug doesn't distinguish between them.
Anyways, I want to know why the other guys don't do it.
So, Patrick, I've heard your request for me to look into this.
But if I could just say, because I have spent the last 20 years on figuring out how people worry about climate change.
So let me just take it back to saying.
Sure.
It seems to me, and I've never thought of the parallel, but in reality, we have a situation where we've now made an enormous number of people, both kids, but also really adults, incredibly worried.
We have a Camilla Harris who will go out and say, this is an existential threat.
And we have everyone telling us this could be the end of mankind.
That is a terrible thing to tell people.
Now, if it was true, we should probably be saying it, but it's not.
That's not what the UN Climate Panel is telling us.
And so just as concerned as we should be about the terrible state of people being hypochondriacs and living in this permanent state of fear, there's something really odd about the fact that we've allowed ourselves to live in a society now where a large number of people and all the top politicians are telling us this is the end of the world.
And of course it makes us make really bad decisions.
You know, there was a game back in the days called Bullshit.
I think we need to start playing bullshit again.
We're studying why.
Do you know what immigrants in America make the biggest income per year?
Do you know from what country make the biggest income per year?
Is it not Korean and Japanese Haitians?
It's Indians.
Really?
Indians?
Above everybody.
It's not even close, by the way.
Japan's up there.
China's up there.
We're doing a video here next week on this topic.
We're doing it this week here on this topic.
But then I went in there to see why this is.
U.S. has the Indian immigrant community in America is only 1% American population.
But 8% of CEOs in Silicon Valley are Indian.
1% population, 8%.
What they're doing with STEM, what percentage of their kids go to STEM versus going to regular, wanting to be teachers and all these other degrees.
And then it led to this whole rabbit hole I went into on Indian parenting, right?
Go to indiaparenting.com.
Go to indiaparenting.com.
I think this is the set.
I hope I get it.
Maybe if I'm wrong, we're just going to have to Google it and it'll come up.
Type Indian, India Parenting, Indian Parenting.
Let's see if this comes up.
There it is.
That's the one.
Is it India or Indian parenting?
That's the one.
Okay.
Why isn't it coming up?
We just looked at this two days ago.
It's not coming.
We need an Indian IT guy.
This website.
Help us out here.
This website gave 10 things.
This website.
I was just on this site two days ago.
Website gave 10 reasons or 10, 10 things Indian parents do.
That's different.
You know what was point eight?
Or number nine?
Judgmental, and you're like wow, because you typically are race thinking.
What don't judge don't, don't give them bad self-esteem, lift them up side said.
What Indian parents do is they judge hardcore and they'll judge and say that kid is bad, that did it.
This is bullshit, don't buy into this.
Don't buy into that, don't buy into this.
I think we need to get a little judgmental again with big pharma and freaking climate change.
I think we need to judge a little bit and say, hey, Greta, Al Gore, I'm going to pull a bullshit card on you, buddy.
I think you're full of shit.
Go ahead.
Let's see what you got here with your Oscar award-winning performance that you had scared the crap out of all the people.
What kind of liability or responsibility should you get for doing that?
Anyways, we went in a whole different rabbit hole today.
Phenomenal.
Now we have to go read a bunch of different material.
I was not looking forward to having to do this, but we have to do this now.
And it's all because of you.
You get the blame.
Why'd you do that?
What's this all about?
We're being friendly with you.
Yes, and then I just make you all interested in all kinds of shit.
You know what?
I don't appreciate it.
Stop playing games of my heart.
What I do appreciate is a great conversation, and we had that today with you.
We're thankful for you for coming out.
This was fantastic.
We want to encourage everybody to go buy our friends here's book, False Alarm, How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions of Dollars, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.
The link will be below, Rob, both in chat and as well as description.
Bjorn, once again.
And sorry.
And if you are interested in the 12 Smart Solutions, I'm coming out with a book this month.
It'll be called Best Things First.
Is that also on Amazon to put the link or not yet?
It will be, but it's not yet.
All right, well, we're going to get you the link.
Fantastic.
We'll put that there as well.
But it's great having you on.
Thanks for coming out.
This was fantastic.
Gang, we're doing a live podcast this Thursday with Ruby and Dave.
We're looking forward to seeing you guys there at 5990 Live.
Dave Ruben.
If not, you will see it on podcast.
Except we're doing it Thursday night.
We're not doing the morning.
We're doing it Thursday night, 7 tonight.
First time we're testing this.
We'll see what's going to happen.
A lot of European people who watch the podcast will be sleeping, but I want you to wake up and stay up that night.
I want you to stay up because we're going to do a bunch of things to help minimize your hypochondria you're dealing with with all these BS commercials that we have to watch 75% of the time.
