 So you unwrote a new book, it's called Open, The Story of Human Progress. And one of the nice things about this book is it doesn't deal with controversial issues at all. It's just a smooth, easy read. No, I mean, the wonderful thing about the book is how timely it is. And I'm curious, did you start writing this book kind of seeing the dark clouds of closure appearing or was this a book that you were planning to write in respect of that? Well, I always have a couple of book ideas on my mind constantly, and then I try to write about what's most important at that time. I think I consider myself some sort of a firefighter against the forces of closed mindedness of authoritarianism, of mysticism, and wherever they go and start a fire and try to tear down civilization, I want to be there and try to put up a defense, in a way, or a case for the other side. So yes, I did look at this change appearing in many places. We've had a backlash against open trade for a long time and migration and also open societies generally. The whole idea that innovation comes from surprises in various places. That's something that neither right or left is very happy with because they want to know and they want to decide what happens next. They want to control, and they want to control both right and left. Yes, I mean, the backlash against innovation is quite fascinating given the progress we've made, given the clear evidence of how innovation has changed the world. I mean, I know we're both, I interviewed Matt Ridley recently, and I know you're quite friendly with Matt, and he's obviously done a lot of work on innovation. Could you summarize, I mean, I know you can't go into detail, can you summarize quickly kind of your previous book, Progress? Because I think it's important to set the frame of where we are, at least pre-COVID where we were. And I think that sets the context for why this backlash against what made this progress possible so horrifying. Yeah, yeah, that's a good place to start because progress is really, in a way, it's a book about gratitude and why we should be grateful for the gifts of civilization, of the great innovators, the thinkers, the entrepreneurs who've given us so much because it basically starts with the idea that, look, everything that has happened that really improved our lives, our life spans, our health, wealth, opportunities and so on, they happen in the blink of an eye if we think of the whole of Homo sapiens existence. It's happened in the last 200 years and most specifically in the last 25 years if we are going global. Over the last 25 years, we reduced extreme poverty by three quarters around the world, more than has ever happened before, reduced child mortality, illiteracy and chronic undernourishment by around half. In just 25 years, it is astonishing, the accomplishment. You'd think we'd be celebrating in the streets. I mean, that's reason for dancing in the streets and yet nobody knows this. No, and had this been a political program, had someone said that, elect me and then I'll reduce poverty by three quarters in 25 years, they would be singing his name and dancing in the street and wrecking statues everywhere. But now this happened through this kind of seemingly chaotic development of lots of people developing and exploring new knowledge, experimenting with new technologies and business models and exchanging the results. And so it's, they don't have time to erect statues or dance in the street because they are making progress all the time. So I'm the one dancing in the streets and sort of trying to give them their due. No, the book was wonderful. I highly recommend it. If you haven't read progress, you should. It describes what has happened and provides the reasons for it. I mean, it is a consequence of freedom. Freedom even a little bit, it turns out. Even a little bit of freedom as we see in parts of Asia where they haven't opened up completely, where they haven't embraced the kind of freedom that we believe in and we think that it's essential for human survival. Just some civilizations, some freedom of entrepreneurship produced this amazing, amazing progress in parts of the world that partially we don't even read about. I mean, even Africa, things have gotten significantly better in parts of Africa. Yeah. So it's very counterintuitive and people still don't believe me. That's why Nag. No, I use that because often in my talks, I'll ask people, how many people do you think are in extreme poverty today? And they'll say 50%, once in a while somebody had read your book or Rational Optimist or something and get closer to the number. And then I asked them, well, do you think it's been improving in the last 25 years or worse? And almost always people think it's worse and they think half the population of the world is in extreme poverty. They have no concept of what has happened in recent history. And the other question I'd like to ask is how many people do you think lived in extreme poverty 250 years ago, in the West, in Europe and in the United States? And that's over 90% and they don't really refer to that. So Telangist Open is a book that tries to explain the progress. It tries to explain what happened over the last 250 years or really throughout human history why we've seen steady progress most of the time, not always and then why we've seen exponential progress over the last 250, 250 years, is that right? Yeah. Yeah, and now I'm gonna try to explain what this book is about. I'm trying to say that it's like the Star Wars prequels and sequels, but better. So if progress was the original trilogy, explaining what happens here and now in our world or in a galaxy far, far away, then Open is the prequel trying to explain so what did it take? Which kinds of institutions, the openness, the individual liberty and the free markets did it take to create this kind of progress in various civilizations? But also a sequel to the extent that I'm trying to look at so what happens next here and now because all these golden ages that we had when people started to get close to rapid scientific development, technological innovation, more economic productivity and so on, they were ended, they were cut short because the religious, the political and commercial establishment they felt threatened by and cut it short. So are we in such a period right now? Cause there are forces like that on the march. Well, absolutely. And they seem to be winning at least for now but hopefully this book and others will reverse the trends. Before we go on, let me remind everybody if you like the show, please like it. It's the like button is easy on YouTube, just press it. And if you wanna ask questions of Johann, feel free to do that on the super chat on YouTube. And since we're a capitalist enterprise here, the more dollars you put with your question, the more likely I am to ask your question to Johann. So the more likely you are to get an answer. So if you support the show, if you wanna see the show continue, please use that as one of the ways in which you can support the show. Thank you guys for everything, all of you who support the show in a variety of different ways. Okay, so what is it? What is it that makes it possible for civilizations to progress? So what is it that characterizes civilization? I'd say it's, if we're looking at the institutions that it takes, it's basically three freedoms. It's the freedom to explore strange new knowledge even though it might threaten ancient taboos, religious understandings and traditions. Then using that science, though that knowledge to create useful technologies to improve people's lives in various spheres, to improve the power at our disposal, the ability to turn useless resources into something that we sustains our lives and to experiment with the kind of business models that will make this very efficient. So those are the two first freedoms to explore and to experiment. But the third one is almost equally important. The freedom to exchange this knowledge and the result of it, the technology, the goods and services with others so that we can make use of the brains and the skills and the hard work of everybody else in other places, in our society, in other cities, in other countries so that there's then strength in numbers because the more people, the more chances that someone will find this important new knowledge, this new technology. And wherever we've had those three things, at least a little bit of it somewhere in history, we have what the historians are still amazed by. How were they able to, in such a short time, to create something amazing when there was just sort of dirt and famine before? So you would describe the freedom to think, the freedom to produce and the freedom to trade are the three freedoms that are necessary in order for civilization to arise. And do we see that in, let's say, ancient civilizations or whatever level they could achieve? Yeah, we do. And that's why Open is partly a history book. I'm trying to explain that it happens early on. The fact why everything important for the average person's opportunities happened only in the last 200 years. That's only because this is the first time we had those institutions in a more sustainable long-term way wasn't cut short. But even in the first years, when we had the first settled civilizations, ancient Mesopotamia, when we had the first Greek city-states and so on, that was only because they were relatively open to those freedoms compared to the other cultures at that time. And even if we go so far back as the, really the dawn of the Homo sapiens 300,000 years ago, we can find in the first human settlements 300,000 years ago in Kenya, we can see that they have tools that are made from obsidian volcanic glass that couldn't have been produced there because there were no volcanoes. So they had long-distance trade relationships with others. So there's something about the intelligence, the ability to communicate and to cooperate that is there from the beginning. And whenever there's been freedom to use that in a wider, more important way, then we've seen these results. So in 300,000 years ago, somebody had to have the audacity to discover how to use, to invent new tools. And then people had to, they had to be enough freedom for people to value that and be willing to trade with them. And we see the evidence of that trade in Africa. I mean, it's truly stunning 300,000 years ago. I mean, because it's not, we're not even fully human, right? It's not Homo sapiens 300,000 years ago. And yet these principles still apply then. What is it? Because we don't know 300,000 years ago, but we know something about Mr. Potamia in Greek cities. And certainly we know about even in China, I mean, this is true, right? China goes through these periods of great innovation and collapse and innovation and collapse. What is it that typically triggers that, that collapse? Yeah, China is an interesting example. Of course, they've been everywhere, right? They've been the best and the worst in so many different instances. And in Song China, 1,000 years ago, when Europe in the middle ages and the dark ages was so desperately poor that it wasn't even interesting to raid and to steal because there was nothing there basically. Well, back then Song China used the compass to navigate. They used the printing press to print books and they used gunpowder to fight. The three inventions that Karl Marx writing in the 1860s said, this is what created modern capitalist bourgeoisie in Europe. So it tells you something that progress is possible in other places in other cultures that very early on when we have this openness. Well, why was it stopped? Well, there is something called Cardwell's Law in Economic History named after Joe Cardwell, who was a technology writer. And he said that there is always pushback from traditional elites. This is the political elites, the religious elites and the incumbents in the economy. They dominate, they're in charge. They don't like innovation. And the moment that innovation starts to threaten their power, they want to shut it down. And this happened in so many places. In every ancient culture, we see this struggle between these forces, the new innovators, the eccentrics and the entrepreneurs and the traditional establishment. And oftentimes, unfortunately, this establishment wins out in the end, often when it threatens religion. For example, in the, you know, in the Abbasid Caliphate and the Muslim civilization 1,000 years ago, made amazing progress. They discovered the Greek philosophy. They discovered Aristotle. They made immense progress in medicine, astronomy and so on. But the moment, and they had some freedom to do that, but the moment that they started to use logic and induction and empirical data to begin to challenge the religious elite, that's what this is too much. And they started to shut it down. Yeah, no religious elites clearly have an incentive to stop the free thinking as do many political elites. And of course, the freedom to produce it, to trade the incumbents have a huge incentive to kill and to destroy that. So every culture that has experienced these does phenomenally well and you break it down to, it's sort of a practical policies. You break it down to exchange, you break it down to immigration and then of course, open minds, you know, the ability to think. And of course, there is no more controversial topic, controversial topics today than trade, which I find of all the topics out there that are controversial, this one blows my mind. This is the one that I thought Adam Smith solved 250 years ago and we were done with it, but I guess we have to keep revisiting it. And then of course, immigration is probably the most emotionally charged of all the topics out there. And again, people think of this as just as a right-wing thing, but it's really, at least in the US, both left and right, generally anti-immigration for different reasons, but... What we need today, what I called a new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning, any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of the stare, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist broads. All right, before we go on, reminder, please like the show. 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