All right, I've got a, what's going on? Say something, Jason. Testing, testing. That's working, okay, so why is this? It's always something. All right, we'll just jump in. The music for some reason is not playing. You can't hear anything, right? I don't hear, I just hear you. Yeah, I have no idea why that is not filtering through unless let's just make one, that is right, that is right, should be, all right. We will do that next time. All right, welcome everybody to your Unbook Show. Thanks for joining us this evening. It's Thursday night, February 9th, those days we do interviews. So I am particularly happy today to have Jason on the show. We're gonna be talking about all things progress. Jason is the founder of the Roots of Progress, which is a nonprofit dedicated to establishing a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. He writes, speaks about the history and philosophy of progress. He's writing a book and he is being a technology founder and started a few companies. He has also worked for a bunch of relatively big, one very big tech companies as an engineering manager. So Jason, welcome. Thanks a lot, it's great to be here. So let's just jump right in on this issue of progress. Let's first define what it is. What do we mean by progress? Yeah, sure. Well, in the broadest sense, if we have a humanistic standard of value, then progress is anything that we do that helps advance our ability to live our lives, longer, healthier, happier lives, lives with more freedom and choice and opportunity, lives of thriving and flourishing. I break it down into three big categories. One is material progress or technology and industry. Another is progress in science and the growth of our knowledge. And then the third is progress in morality, society and government. Now, sometimes when we talk about progress, we use that term to mean more the first and a little bit of the second. So sometimes we use progress in a narrow sense to mean, well, all of the huge growth in world GDP and science and technology and industry have advanced and you can just see it on the charts. It's more of an economic thing. But I think in the broadest sense, you would include all the advances in morality and society as well. And Steven Pinker does that, right? And what's the book? Enlightenment Now was his big... Enlightenment Now, that's right. We talked about moral progress. I mean, I don't know that we define morality exactly the same, but generally broadly speaking, he documents, for example, the decline of violence. Yeah, so that was actually his previous book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, was all about just the decline of violence. And then his book after that was Enlightenment Now was more broadly progress across the board. So this is progress. And as you said, at the end of the day, it boils down to individual well-being, individual ability to pursue their happiness and to live a happy life and successful life. Why is it, and I think the graphs, as you described them, the graphs show this and arguably this is somewhat true about moral and certainly political progress as well. Why is it that for such a long time in human history, we didn't have progress? I think the simplest reason is that progress compounds. Progress begets progress. And so the more we make of it, the faster the rate of progress increases. So if you look at this quantitatively, if you take world GDP or GDP per capita or whatever you want and you plot it on a graph, you will find that it grows faster than any exponential curve. If you try to fit it to an exponential curve, an exponential curve would have a constant percentage increase at each year, right? But in fact, what happens is the percentage increase over time itself increases. So we're growing at a higher terms in percentage terms now than we were a few hundred years ago. And so I think you can see this compounding. Basically, I think the compounding comes because there are these reinforcing feedback loops at almost every level. So technology itself allows us to build more and better technology. Machine tools allow us to build better machines, right? Computers allow us to design better technology and communicate about it and so forth. There's a feedback loop between technology and science. Technology helps advance science and then science helps create new technology. There is a feedback loop in terms of wealth generation and wealth surplus. As we make progress, we generate more wealth, we have more surplus to plow into R and D, which then it lets us make progress faster. There is a feedback loop with regard to population. The more we progress, the more we can support a larger population, the more the population grows, the more brains we have to make progress. And at the deepest level, I think there is a feedback loop in terms of ideas. The more we advance in terms of science, the more we, and technology, the more we can figure out explicit and ultimately epistemological methods for making science. And perhaps at the deepest level, the idea of progress itself, the more we make progress, the more people believe in it, at least until the mid 20th century. And the more people believe in it, the more they actually try to go out and make it. And so there's a feedback loop at that level as well. I mean, all that sounds right, but it does sound a little deterministic. I mean, there are periods in history where progress declines, right? And where progress goes backwards. I mean, obviously the fall of Rome is a period of where by every measure, progress, but at least in the West declines. So what is your sense? What drives that? And to what extent is that a risk we face today given how many of these feedback loops and how many of this reinforcement exists today? Yeah, so it's certainly not deterministic and it's certainly not one way. So in particular, I think that I have become convinced after a long study that progress has actually slowed down a little bit in the last 50 years or so. I think progress was actually a lot faster about 100 plus years ago. In particular, the period from about late 1800s to early 1900s, maybe if you just wanna pick a really round number, you could say like 1870 to 1920 or so was an extremely rapid period of invention. And the last 50 years just don't compare, even though we've had some amazing things in the last 50 years, we've had computers in the internet and all of that is a huge deal and I don't wanna downplay that or dismiss it. But in the equivalent period 100 years ago, again about 1870 to 1920, we also had an equivalent revolution in communications that was like telephone and radio. And then on top of that, we had a revolution in energy with electricity. We had a second revolution in energy with the internal combustion engine, which led to a revolution in transportation with automobiles and airplanes. We had a revolution in applied chemistry, which gave us things like the first synthetic fertilizer and the first synthetic plastics. And we had a revolution with the germ theory and health efforts that gave us some of the earliest vaccines, water sanitation efforts, and really were bringing down rates of infectious disease mortality. So you had all of those things stacked on top of each other in that kind of late 19th, early 20th century period. And I think the last 50 years for all of its progress just doesn't compare. So what has happened in those last 50 years? I have basically three sort of top hypotheses. Number one, the growth of the regulatory state and sort of the overburden of that regulation will not be surprising to you or your audience. Number two is the centralization and bureaucratization of funding for research and development. And particular, especially for basic science that kind of got concentrated into a small number of federal agencies. And then number three is just the idea of progress itself in the mid to late 20th century, there was something of a backlash against progress, especially after the world wars and the Great Depression and the rise of totalitarianism and a number of other things. And people started questioning whether progress was real or whether it was illusory, whether it was something that we wanted, whether progress in our capabilities and in science and technology and industry actually led to better outcomes for humanity. And of course, some of them started to question whether humanity was even the right standard. And some of them adopted other standards of value such as the radical environmentalists. So I think that very thing, of course and of course all these things interact and in particular, the growth of certain types of regulations enabled a certain type of obstructionist kind of activists to get in the way of a lot of processes where we actually build things and create things. And so when you combine that with a populace where a lot of people have decided that maybe they actually will do good for the world not by building and creating but by slowing things down and stopping them, then you get this, you get this vetocracy where anybody can come along and veto something. Oh, that's what vetocracy means. We can ask you. Yeah, vetocracy, rule by the veto. You wanna build something, anybody, community activists can come along and have a veto, right? That's the idea. And to what extent do you think, so you talked about moral progress and moral progress has kind of a feedback mechanism to the rest of progress. To what extent do you think moral ideas shifted sometimes during the 20th century had an impact on people's attitudes to progress and therefore kind of this loop and slowing things down?  I mean, yeah, before we get to walking, what went wrong? I mean, let's just take a moment to appreciate what's gone right in the last few hundred years. 1775, the entire world lived under monarchy essentially, right? And so, and now, since then we've got, we've replaced most monarchies in most places with either figurehead constitutional monarchies or democratic republics. Women didn't have the right to vote or a lot of other rights in a lot of places. We still had slavery. Slavery has now been outlawed everywhere in the world and exists only in a few small backwaters under the outside the law and under the radar. So a lot of things have gone right. Yes, I think there was a shift, there was certainly a shift in some deep philosophical ideas about the nature of technology, the nature of sort of our relationship to nature and to the universe, our place in the universe and the nature of our ability really to create organizations and systems that do good for humanity and that create human well-being. And so people were super optimistic about progress right up until about the start of World War I. And as soon as World War I hits, even before World War II and the atomic bomb and even before the depression, you can see people starting to ask in a big way, wow, what went wrong? I mean, I think to fully appreciate this, one of the amazing things is how much people really thought just before World War I that perhaps we were entering into a new great era of world peace. And they thought that this would happen in part because of technology. So just the general expansion of growth of industry, the expansion of trade between nations was supposed to bring nations closer together when the telegraph was invented, especially when we had transcontinental telegraph lines, especially under the water and all of Europe was connected by telegraph lines. It was amazing how people would just wax poetic about this. Like now we're all connected, these far flung peoples who have not been able to communicate can now send messages to each other. This is shortly the beginning of universal brotherhood of man, right? And so when Europe exploded in World War I, it was just a huge blow to that slay, frankly naive optimism, right?  And then of course, after that, we had moral regress moving into totalitarianism and then you got World War II. So that period, and then again, combined with the Great Depression in between, plus just the rise of totalitarianism around the globe, all of this was a huge blow to the optimists who saw, like Condorcet was this extremely optimistic French Enlightenment thinker who wrote, I mean, so he believed that moral and technological and industrial part of that, all these things just went together hand in hand. He's got some line that I can't quote off the top of my head, but it's something like nature has connected by a chain that cannot be broken, truth, happiness and virtue, something like that. Like as we continue, we're just naturally gonna get more virtuous. And it turns out those things are not as tightly coupled as we would like them to be. And the Nazis used some of the most cutting edge technology of the day in there to implement their oppression. It turns out that when you add technology to a totalitarian regime, it just helps them be more oppressive and more, and or create empire or wage war or whatever it is. It's also true that we probably defeated them due to superior technology and the fact that technology allowed the defeat of collectivism and both the Nazi and ultimately the communist regimes fell because they partially because they couldn't keep up and certainly they couldn't keep up militarily. Sure, no, that's absolutely true. I mean, there's a fascinating books about World War II and everybody thinks the Germans made these great weapon systems and there's these fascinating books comparing what the US did in like three, four years to what the Germans had done. And I mean, the weapon systems of the West were far superior to anything the Nazis had done because. And just the manufacturing, I mean, the way that we ramped up manufacturing in World War II, we were, I forget the stats, but we were churning out tanks and battleships and everything at amazing speed. And when the Germans found out how fast we were building battleships, I think they were shocked, they couldn't believe it. I think both Germans and Japanese were shocked and realized that they had no chance. It truly is stunning what happening in World War II. Let me remind everybody, you can ask questions, use the super chat. So, super chat is available. As you know, we've got a target for the day. And you can ask about anything related to progress, technology, state of the world, just go for it and ask anything that comes to mind about these related to these topics. So we come out, so I'm interested in this kind of historical analysis. This is actually quite cool. So we come out of World War II and to a large extent, at least the Nazis are crushed and the West is one, I suppose the democracy is one and freedom is one. Does that optimism come back? Does the belief in progress come back? Do these ideas, I mean, communism's still around, so that holds things back a little bit. So here's what's interesting. So I think what happened is actually something like this. Even before World War II, going back to the 20s or even earlier, even pre-World War I, you started to get this idea that the best way to run everything was quote unquote, scientifically. And to some people that meant a kind of top-down control by technical elites. In the post, especially in the 20s and 30s around this time and going into World War II, I think a reaction to what was going on in the world. So a lot of people were starting to think, well, look, we still want progress, but we can't trust it to the chaos of democracy and free markets. And so we have to have a more top-down control. And so progress needs to be achieved by, again, this technical elite that will basically run things. There was this phrase, I think about, was it Walter Littman who used this phrase that democracy needed to be for the people, but no longer by the people? And that was the idea. And so mid-20th century, you've got this very technocratic era. So if you think of the decades during and after World War II, what were the huge sort of examples of progress that you might point to? Well, a lot of them were things like the run-up, well, the mobilization for World War II itself, but then even after the war, the interstate highway system, the Apollo program, these are all federal projects, right? Massive, federally funded, top-down managed projects. And so this was kind of the way that a lot of things were going. This is also the era of, I'm about halfway through reading this enormous book, The Power Broker, which is the biography of Robert Moses, who is this guy who sort of ran all the parks and roads and bridges and tunnels and everything in New York City. And he was very much the technocrat, right? Yes. And suppose the erasist, I mean, there's a lot of this, at least there's accusations about how he built the highways and how he built a lot of the infrastructure. Yes, certainly. Worked to segregate cities. Yeah. So I think what happened was, in the mid to late 20th century, you got this rise of sort of people who were questioning a lot of things that were going on. And I think in part, they were starting to question industry and science and progress itself. So you got the environmentalist movement, right? Which was looking at all sorts of grievances, pollution and pesticides and nuclear radiation and all kinds of things. And rather than saying, well, there are health hazards here that we need to use maybe technology to detect and protect us from and guard against or replace them with safer chemicals and safety systems and so forth, right? They just said, look, this is the nature of progress. You can't even separate the good from the bad. We should just, this was a mistake, essentially. But there was also this kind of broader counter-cultural reaction that saw, I think, the very growth of large systems, large organizations, whether it was a private or government, I don't think they saw much of a difference. Any kind of a large organization was a threat to individual freedom. And there was this movement, there's this counter-cultural movement for more kind of decentralized, local, bottom-up, local communities, right? That could even have a local, so think about something like the whole earth catalog. A lot of the technology that it was promoting was things for communities to be these kind of like local self-sustaining, right? And they wanted the energy and the electricity systems to be small, local power plants that not these huge centralized things with a power grid and they wanted, right? And so all of this kind of fused together to create essentially a backlash against progress. And I think to some extent, it was a backlash against the authoritarianism and then the top-down control of the technocrats. And to that extent, I do sympathize with it, at least a little bit. But I think what happened was progress and technocracy got linked in a lot of people's minds. And so when you were against technocracy, you were actually against progress as such. People basically said, well, if that's what progress means, if that's what it takes, then I don't want any of it. Let's forget about this progress stuff. It's no good.  Let's go back to the previous state of nature, you know, which was actually good. And I mean, for folks in the audience who don't know Rousseau, Rousseau basically said as early as 1750 that the advance of arts and sciences, and again, 1750, we haven't seen anything yet, right? And yet even then he's saying the advance of arts and sciences have degraded and corrupted our morals. They've made us worse people. We're not as happy, we're not as good.   So, you know, those ideas were always around, but I think they were always in the background. And certainly by the late 19th century, there was way too much popular sentiment in favor of technology and industry and all the amazing benefits it was bringing to people that people could see coming into their homes, right? Light bulbs and refrigerators and automobiles and everything that those, you know, those voices, those reactionary voices against technology just kind of got drowned out. But then in the post-World War era where the optimists themselves have been dealt a blow, they're not as confident anymore. Everybody's wondering what the heck happened to progress. Everything was going so well. How did things go so wrong? Then there was this opening for this alternate explanation to come in and say, actually progress was the mistake and we should, you know, stop it. Or, you know, the more watered down version is, well, let's slow it down and, you know, let's be really careful about it and so on and so forth. So what if you think that it's true that that, at least to some extent, shifted maybe in the 1990s? If we think back, you know, during this period, right? In the, in garages in different places, right? People are starting to tinker.  And something happens that, you know, whole new technology is basically invented almost stealthily, right? I think the culture doesn't even realize it's happening. You know, now I was growing up in the 70s, but I was a kid. I certainly didn't know until a computer showed up in my classroom, oh my God, what is this, right? And probably in the late 1970s. So that happened, but then it seemed like to be embraced by the culture sometime in the early 1990s and maybe during the 80s and 90s. And then there was a very brief period of optimism and a round tack, which I think kept crashing after 9-11. But I think 9-11 kind of that optimism in American culture dissipated. So kind of put into this context the kind of this historical context of wall, the tech industry played and how it kind of grew, you know, during the second half of the 20th century at least. Yeah, I mean, I think the tech industry, you know, computers and software and the internet was kind of the one industry that kept going at the same pace that almost everything was going 100 years prior. So, you know, I mean, you think of the founders of the great tech companies, what would they have been doing if they had been born 100 years earlier or 75 years earlier or something? Well, they probably would have been tinkering with internal combustion engines or dynamos or electricity or chemistry or something like that. And that's what those people were doing, right? Those were the Edison's and everybody else like him.  But these things, even when they wane, they never completely go away, right? They leave traces and parts of them around, right? And we still have traces and parts of all of those, you know, all of those previous things. So the spirit of progress never completely went away. But I think it got, you know, so you think, okay, computing kept racing ahead at the same pace that everything had been, but what happened to manufacturing, to energy, to construction, to transportation?  And nuclear power basically got stunted. In transportation, we almost got sort of, you know, real supersonic transport. We did get it for a while, but it was always super expensive. It was never available to the masses and never really came down significantly in price. And then ultimately it went away, you know, and now we don't have it anymore. Hopefully it's coming back again soon. But, you know, these are sort of the things that happened. Now, one author, Jay Storz Hall, who wrote this book recently, Where Is My Flying Car? And he has a really interesting hypothesis about what happened here, which is that computing and, you know, communications technology was the only field of technology that for progress did not require high and increasing energy densities. And so when the future of energy was more or less cut off, it actually had these ramifications to all these other fields like transportation and manufacturing and construction. And computing was able to go forward because computers actually get better when you scale them down and make them use less energy, then they can go faster, which is unlike almost any other, right? That's because it's an information technology rather than a physical, it's bits rather than atoms. So bits get better when you scale them down and you always try to use less and less energy per bit. Whereas everything else, you know, you tend to, if you look at the history of, you know, of transportation, right? We're using more and more energy to go faster and faster and push higher loads and so forth, right? And is the explanation for the lack of progress in nuclear the same as you gave for the lack of progress more broadly? Yeah, I think so. I think there's a very clear, yeah, pretty much. I mean, I think there's a very clear effect of regulation here. The late 60s and into the early 70s were a time of extremely turbulent and rapidly, you know, increasing regulations on nuclear. And that's about when the learning curve on nuclear failed. This is a fascinating thing, by the way. So just side note to illustrate how wrong the nuclear industry went. Every new technology starts out expensive and gets cheaper as you build more of it, right? And in fact, you can even quantify this and there's a typically a power law whereas every time you double the total amount produced or installed capacity or whatever, however you wanna measure it, the price per unit comes down by some percentage like 10 to 25% per doubling. And with nuclear, in the early days of nuclear, the cost of building a nuclear plant was coming down along one of these, it's known as a learning curve or an experience curve in economics. And so it was coming down along one of these curves pretty steep on 25% per doubling of capacity until about 1970. And at that point, the learning curve inverts and things start to get more expensive per unit the more we build, right? So we got negative learning. Somebody called it forgetting by doing, right? But I mean, it's basically just the increase of the bureaucracy and everything that you have to do. Regulation and fear, I mean, fear drove a lot of that. I mean, for some reason, nuclear became this fearful technology that required the government to intervene at every step. Well, yeah, well, it had the bad luck to be introduced to the world as the most horrific weapon that we had ever seen, right? And so, not only did it start out with that reputation, but then also in its earliest days, it was under the absolute tight control of the military, which you can sort of understand why they would want to do that. But still, it was, there was some line somewhere where when the original, before the NRC, there was this thing called the AEC, the Atomic Energy Commission. And when that was established, somebody, there was some line, somebody said they've established like an island of socialism in the middle of capitalism, because it was being so... Because the government controlled it, yeah. So, you know, so we're at a point now, you know, you said a progress has slowed significantly over the last really 100 years since 1920. The internet, obviously the internet and technology are one area in which we've seen growth. Tyler Cowan, who agrees with you about the slowing down of growth in the last 100 years, or at least in the last 40, 50 years, he's now turned optimistic about the future. So he believes we've hit a kind of a turning point and we're gonna see accelerated growth into the future. Do you see that? Do you see any reason to believe that? And, you know, where's Tyler getting this from? If he don't agree with him? Yeah. I think it's possible. It's possible that we'll end up making rapid progress again in spite of ourselves. I think, so the biggest things on the horizon are right now, I would say artificial intelligence and potentially and genetic engineering. Those are kind of the huge, like obvious things that could create enormous amounts of value in the coming decades. Now, of course, you know, all of these are going to run into all of the same problems, right? People are going to be fearful. I mean, so today, you know, maybe 50 years ago, people were fearful about nuclear weapons and not computers. Today, people can be fearful about anything. We're really good at figuring out what to be afraid of for any new technology that comes out. And this has always been, you know, by the way, I mean, just to put this in a better perspective, people have always been afraid of new technologies, even in periods of very high and rapid progress.  And they faced all sorts of opposition, right? And people were afraid of the, people didn't like the smoke and they were afraid of the noise and this is going to scare my cattle and don't build it on my land.  So there's always been some degree of this. It's just a, what's changed, I think it's just a matter of degree and it's ramped up to the point where it's really put the throttle on progress. So all of these things could get in the way of AI. We're already seeing very harsh debates about AI and it almost doesn't do anything super significant yet, right? You can just see the possibility and yet already, I think there's an enormous amount of debate around it. And it's extremely easy to imagine how genetic technologies, you know, have gone wrong. You know, and don't get me wrong. Like I don't think we should ignore safety issues. I think there are absolutely safety issues around all these things and we should take them seriously. But I think that we could get what we've gotten in some other fields, which is a lot of safety theater, a lot of slowdown and obstruction that doesn't even necessarily add a lot of safety but does block a lot of progress. Yeah, I mean, arguably that a lot of the safety slowdown of nuclear has actually made them less safe. We have all nuclear power plants. We don't have new ones. We've not applied new technology to nuclear. Do you think that the world is changing now in its attitude towards nuclear power? There, I am definitely seeing signs of a shift, whether it will carry through and actually allow us to build anything. I don't know. But I mean, the great irony in a certain sense is that the shift is actually, in a sense, motivated by fears about climate change. And people who are concerned about climate change, deeply concerned, but who are also understand sort of the power of technology and who are sort of come at climate change from a pro-technology, pro-human standpoint, they look at the problem and a lot of them say, wow, nuclear is the solution. And so what we have now is the thing, the number one reason to be optimistic about nuclear is that we now have a new generation of young founders who are coming in, who are not jaded by the system, who didn't get burned by some previous failure and who actually want to build stuff that works and is cost-effective and don't just want to sort of milk the regulatory capture for all it's worth. And they are building. Now, I will tell you, a lot of them are choosing to build outside the United States. Interesting, this is a nuclear field in particular. Yes, I would say of the top folks that I have talked to in the field, all but one of them, all but one company that I know of, I haven't talked to all of them, but yeah, most of them are looking to build in Europe, in Asia, yeah, anywhere but the U.S. There are some, some contrarians who think U.S. is the place to build, but... Yes, I mean, look, here's the best argument I've heard for why nuclear companies should not build anything in the U.S. The U.S. NRC has essentially not approved a new project that's gotten to completion in their entire existence, right? Since 1974 or whenever they were created, not a single thing has gone from beginning to end. They literally do not know how to approve projects. Whether they want to or not, they don't have the experience doing it, right? So if you want to build nuclear, maybe you should go to some regulators who at least have approved something in the past, right? At least know what that looks like, know how something might get through their process, right? Yes, I mean, it's interesting. I just read that the Canadian regulators just approved one of these small nuclear power plants to actually be built in Canada. Their projects in the Netherlands, their projects in Scandinavia, their projects in all these places that are considered, you know, quite socialist from the perspective of Americans, but where they are regulated as a far more open to innovation and it seems like that American regulators are. People don't realize the burden. I don't think people have a real sense of the burden of regulation that exists in the United States. So when Newscale went to get their advanced nuclear reactor design approved, it took them something like six to eight years and half a billion dollars just to go through a design approval part, right? We're talking like, I forget, something like millions of pages of documentation. Maybe it was only a quarter million.  And they could only do it because they had enormous amounts of funding behind them, obviously, right? Half a billion dollars. And by the way, this is just for a design certification approval. So that does not allow you to actually build the thing that you have designed. It just certifies a new design. Now to actually build the plant, you have to go get a construction license. And if you get a construction license, that doesn't allow you to operate it. You have to get an operating license, right? Although you can apply for a combined construction and operating. But there's just layers upon layers of this stuff. So what's the- And what it means is that nuclear is expensive, right? And so the problem is nuclear can't compete on a, you know, in the market because you just, you literally can't make a profit on. Because of these regulatory costs. How can do- In fact, the irony is the only place that nuclear can get built in the United States is in the South where the States still have, you know, state monopolies over electricity. And the way that they do it is they just jack up the prices essentially. They start charging customers more for electricity that they're not even delivering yet or that they start charging customers more per kilowatt hour in order to finance the construction of new stuff that isn't delivering yet, right? And that's the only way that they can do it when you've got that control. So how do we shift this? How do we change this? How do you change the attitude? So part of the goal of the process is a new philosophy of progress. How do you see that evolving? And how do you see the path to convincing people to change their minds about these things and to see a real shift? Yeah. Well, I think there's an opportunity now in part because there is a budding progress movement. And there are a number of intellectuals of all kinds, journalists, academics, but also founders, investors, even some politicians, a lot of folks who are interested in this basic idea that progress is underrated, that it's been neglected, that we've kind of dropped the ball and lost sight of it and that we need to get back to thinking about it. And it's interesting it's kind of a bipartisan movement. There are people from across the political spectrum who are interested in this, right? There are people, there are conservatives who see this as how we rebuild American dynamism. There are libertarians who of course just want more free market activity. There are people on the left who want to redistribute all the wealth, but they've finally realized that you have to create it before you can even redistribute it. So there's this sort of, yeah, across the spectrum community that is building. And so, yeah, you've got folks like Tyler Cowan from the Mercatus Center. He and tech founder, Patrick Collison, wrote this article in the Atlantic a few years ago calling for a new discipline of progress studies. Basically just saying, again, it's underrated, it's understudied. And that really kind of kicked off and galvanized this movement. And so now people just call it the progress studies community or the progress community. And so that just the energy around that is one of the most interesting and hopeful things. So in addition to my organization, the Roots of Progress, there is a sort of roughly quarterly online magazine called Works in Progress, just for articles and journalism about this. There is actually a DC policy think tank called the Institute for Progress, focusing on what policy changes we can do to unblock things. And there's just a lot of interest. So that's the number one thing. How do we change it? I think change needs to come at multiple levels at once. So at the deepest level, what I and my organization are doing is we are working on establishing a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. We're taking a look back at what happened in the 20th century where we got a lot of fear and skepticism and doubt about the very idea of progress. And we wanna restore a sense of humanism that humans and human wellbeing are our ultimate goal and standard of value here. And also a sense of human agency that, hey, we actually have some control over our destiny. We are not subject to these forces of nature that are outside our control. If we build technology, we can make it work. It's not destined to collapse on us or to have horrible side effects that we can't foresee or control. We can actually do something. If climate change is an actual problem, then we can actually fix it. We don't have to just roll back all of industry and human consumption and confine ourselves to poverty or relative poverty. We can keep growing the economy and keep growing wealth and we can find a way to solve any problems that might generate. So those are the really core basic ideas. And then at other levels, I think we just need people figuring out how to actually make a forward progress. So people figuring out what can we do in terms of policy? What can we do all the way from reforming NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act to reforming immigration and letting more people come in and actually innovate here. And then at the level of the founders and the technologists themselves, just keep making progress. Ultimately, it's actual examples of progress that convince people that, yes, this can continue. And when they see it coming into their homes and making their lives better, I think that is unnecessary. Otherwise you get into a vicious cycle where people feel like, eh, what has even happened lately? How has my life improved? Do we really need more progress? Maybe we're done. Maybe all the big things have been invented. And we need to just continually show people how much left there is to do. So to what extent do you think, do you think you need to go deeper philosophically in order to do that? I find that people seem to be blind to experience and seem to resist learning from experience, learning from the facts, because I mean, I don't think very many people appreciate the progress that has been made over the last 40 years. There has been a lot of progress, maybe not at the same rate as, you know, 1870 to 1920, but certainly at a higher rate than it was in 1650 to 1700. And certainly at an amazing rate in terms of just the quality of life that people experience, again, the internet, technology, the iPhone, computing have changed people's lives. The fact that we can do this and people can watch it all over the world and at marginal cost of zero. But people have this lack of appreciation even for the progress that exists. So I think the first thing we need to do is actually teach that history. So I think people don't know that history or it's not viscerally real to them. How far we've come and in how short a time and what an amazing achievement that was. So, you know, one of my top recommendations would be the history of progress should be a subject that is taught in school. It should be, I mean, the history of invention should be taught in K-12. By high school level, I think you could be teaching the concept of progress explicitly and at least by university, I think you could be teaching the philosophy of progress and what led to it and this stuff. But even the basics, even the basic facts of why do we need industrial agriculture? Why do we need big machines driving through the fields? Why do we need synthetic chemicals to help grow the food? Could we just do away with all of that? Why do we need to vaccinate our children against, you know, measles and polio and COVID, right? Why do we need to generate energy? Why do we need any more energy, right? Maybe we should be trying to use less energy. Like if you had a historical perspective, I think, you know, you would understand why we need all of those things. Yeah, I agree completely with that. I mean, I travel a lot at universities and high schools and the ignorance of kids about what life was like before progress, before industrialization, before the industrial revolution, they have no concept. They have no clue what life expectancy was then, but they also have no clue what life expectancy is today. They have no clue about poverty in the world. They think everybody's dirt poor everywhere except where they live. And it's, you know, the idea that extreme poverty has dropped to 8% is not something that they, you know, you ask students and they say 40, 50, 60%, they think poverty keeps getting worse. The last 40 years have been bad. And a lot of that is because an opposite history is being taught, right? And we're so kind of inspired history that suggests that, oh, the past was wonderful and everything is awful today. Yeah, you know, there's a good writer on history of technology, Stephen Johnson. And he recently said that he looked through a, I think it was like a 20th century American history textbook. And, you know, the word labor was mentioned like hundreds of times. Yep. And I think vaccines and antibiotics were mentioned like zero times. And probably entrepreneur was mentioned zero times. Right, but I mean, those were some of the biggest advances in the 20th century, right? So yeah, so you say that people don't learn from facts and experience, which I agree. I mean, I'll say something about that, but first you got to teach them the facts. So if they don't even know the facts, how can they learn from them? But then I mean, the second thing I would say was is I think that, so you're right in a sense that people don't learn from the facts or from experience. In another sense, there's nothing else that they learn from. And so I think the resolution of that paradox is that facts don't explain themselves, right? Facts don't interpret themselves. So I think people do draw lessons from the facts, but which lessons they draw are contingent on who among the intellectuals steps forward with explanations and how good those explanations are and which ones take hold and catch the popular consciousness. And so we need the continual, so we need both. We need the continual fact of ongoing progress and we need now the intellectuals to step up and to explain what that really means and how we should interpret it and how we should think about it. And do you see that as a big part of what the Roots of Progress as an organization is going to be doing? That is exactly what we are doing, yeah. Okay, now I know that you've just hired a new CEO. You guys are growing. So tell us a little bit about what the plans are, what she's going to be doing. I know Hike, it's funny. Yeah, that's right. You know the story of how I met Hike? No, I don't. This is, God, this is 30 years ago. Hike shows up in Austin, Texas and contacts me and she says, oh, and I can't remember exactly how she did it, but we get together and she says, I was in a subway or something, something in New York and by accident she met somebody else who was an objectivist, Hike is an Iron Man fan. And she told them, she's moving to Austin and they told her, you got to look up your own book and she was in Austin doing an MBA just as I was leaving Austin and we met. That was I think 1991 or 1992. So it's been a long time. But yeah, she's fabulous.  I'm shocked that I didn't think of her when you asked me about a CEO for Roots of Progress, but she's perfect. It's a great day. Well, thank you. I agree. So yeah, so for folks in the audience, Hike Larson is the new CEO of my nonprofit. She just started full-time less than two weeks ago. So she's just getting ramped up and she is fantastic. She's amazing. So a little bit of history, the Roots of Progress started as a blog and for me it started as an intellectual side project. It was a hobby while I was working in the tech industry. A few years ago, I decided to go full-time and become a progress researcher and writer. And so it became my full-time occupation. And initially I was supported by grants from various folks. My first check was from Tyler Cowan and his Emergent Ventures Fund. And so eventually I created a nonprofit organization really initially as, frankly, the Jason Crawford Show. It was just, it was a way to fund my own work. People who wanted to support me, it was a way to do it. But in the last year or so, it became clear to me that there was a lot of energy and opportunity for something much bigger than just me for an organization that would really create the intellectual foundations of the progress movement and that would support dozens and eventually hundreds and more of progress writers, not just myself. And so that is the big ambition now to really create the intellectual foundation and the community around this new philosophy of progress. And so we've brought on Haika as the CEO. I am the president of the organization and essentially the kind of intellectual leader and spokesman. I'm gonna be devoting most of my time to writing a book on progress, which I've been working on. And then Haika will be building the team and leading and managing and running the projects. The big program that we have announced that we are developing is a fellowship for progress writers that is designed as a career accelerator. So any progress writer who wants to make a big ambitious, has a big ambitious career goal, maybe that's writing a book, maybe it's just launching a really popular blog, maybe it's quitting your job and going full time on this writing and research, whatever it is, we will help you with money, connections, mentorship and marketing and PR support and other kinds of tactical support to help you hit those goals. So that's what we're gonna do. How do you see routes of progress fitting into the broader progress movements? And do you see the progress movement generally growing and is there still dynamism and excitement behind it? Yeah, I definitely think so. The way we fit into the progress movement broadly, I would say is we are the ones focusing first and foremost on that intellectual foundation. I mean, as I said, when I spoke at Ocon last summer, I encountered, I ran at an early age, I read Atlas Shugged when I was about 12, 13 and one of the biggest things I took away from that and have never forgotten is the deep power of ideas and especially philosophical ideas to shape the course of history. And so I think sort of uniquely in the space, we are focused on the need to have a really solid intellectual foundation for the progress movement and to get that in place. You can walk into a bookstore today and very easily find an entire shelf or a bookcase full of books on environmental studies. There needs to be shelves and shelves full of books on progress studies. And most of them haven't been written yet. Only a few of them really exist. So we need writers who are gonna go out and just cover this from every angle and from every aspect. And so that's what we're doing. And I would say, where we fit into the broader ecosystem, well, the Institute for Progress is focusing on political policy and really what can get done kind of this year in Washington. And they know much more about that than I do and they're much better at it. The Works in Progress as I mentioned is a magazine and they're creating a publication for this. Other folks are focused on the economics of it or on the technology and the scientific aspects. There's a lot of folks focused on this issue that I mentioned about the way that we fund and organize and manage scientific research these days. And there are a lot of exciting experiments in different ways of funding science in order and really fundamental scientific research and technological research in order to try to get around some of the bureaucracy and the stifling system that has been created. And so all of that is going on. And we are, I think in part an umbrella organization for everybody who's interested in progress and we are in part, like I said, helping to build out that intellectual foundation and build the broader community and connect all of these people. And to what extent do you think this philosophy of progress is gonna be grounded in a philosophy of both reason and a philosophy of freedom? And do you worry that many people within the progress movement at least, you know, maybe not hostile to reason, but maybe hostile at least to some applications of freedom? As you said, they want progress in order to redistribute well. Yeah, well, I mean, I think it needs to be certainly grounded in reason. And I think that you would find pretty broad agreement on that. Now, I also think that freedom of all sorts, economic, liberty, personal liberty, individual rights is an absolutely essential component of progress. That you will get less agreement on at least in terms of being as consistent and principled and absolute about it as an objectivist would be. So I think there is room for an interesting and healthy debate within the community. I think if we at least start from the premise that we're in, so I mean, remember, the principles that I named is I think super fundamental to this are seeing humans as valuable and human life and wellbeing as a standard of value and ultimately believing in human agency. Now, those are even more fundamental, far more fundamental than political philosophy, right? And I think if we can agree on that and if we can say, okay, now human flourishing is our standard. Progress is our goal. Now, let's all debate based on history and economic theory and data and evidence and philosophy. Let's debate which political system is actually going to lead to that. That would be, let me at least say that would be a far healthier debate than we are having today over politics where so much of it is about redistribution and identity, right? I would love to have a political debate. I would love to have the big political debate in this country be about whether more technocratic, top-down solutions or more decentralized and bottom-up and more economic freedom or less economic freedom, what's gonna lead to progress? If that were the debate we were having in this country, we would be massively better off, but that's not even the debate we're having. So let's get there.  So what extent does the fact that you, an objectivist, is that an issue with the progress movement? Does, do they care? Is it something you have to overcome or is it just? No, it hasn't been. And I think it's because of the way that I approach these issues is that I approach them in a very empirical and historical way. So when I started writing about progress, I didn't start out by saying, day one on my blog, let's, you know, I'm here to show why individual liberty is the root of, you know, it's her, right? I didn't even start off talking about what are the roots of progress, although that was in the title of the blog. So that was the ultimate goal. My first question was actually the most basic and simple that you can imagine. It was, what actually is the progress that has happened? If we want to explain progress, and if we wanna make any claims about what were the deepest causes of it, the first thing we have to know is actually, what is to be explained? What were the big breakthroughs? And I found that, I mean, I realized that I barely knew. I barely knew what the Industrial Revolution was. I didn't, you know, I had it vaguely in my head as well. There were steam engines and trains and cotton and coal and steel, maybe something like that. I, you know, but I barely knew kind of even what the big breakthroughs were or why they were important. And so I just set out to understand at an object level, at the most basic level of historical facts, what happened and how did it happen? Who did it? Under what circumstances in which, you know, and I think when you examine that story, you do absolutely find a huge influence of enlightenment values, of reason and science and liberty and freedom of thought and economic freedom and all of that. I think also, the picture is not simple. And I think that someone who wants to make a claim about laissez-faire capitalism being the best social system or the one that's going to lead to progress or anything has a lot to explain. And I also think that a lot of the challenges that did arise in the 20th century are difficult ones to resolve, even if you are starting with a rights-based framework. I think the tragedy of the 20th century is that we didn't even attempt to solve those problems on a rights-based framework. We solved them in an extremely ad hoc and an extremely unprincipled way. And ultimately in the U.S. at least, and really throughout the rest of the world, we solved them through micromanagement. But there are really tough questions of, who is liable when a drug company releases a drug onto the market that turns out to contain toxic substances and is killing people? Under what circumstances is the drug company liable? For what? The negligence, is it gross negligence? What exactly is it? No, I think that's right. I mean, another example is in the West in the late 19th century, there was a lot of law that started to deal with water rights. What is not easy to figure out in terms of rights, rights on rivers, rights on lakes? And there was the beginning of law trying to deal with that because as ranchers and farmers got into conflict and cows are pooping in my water that I'm, and at some point the government just took it all over. And water became a common resource and therefore the law stopped dealing with it. So today you have to reinvent or re-conceptualize what it would look like to have private property over water where we were heading in that direction. That was the evolution kind of of a free market. And there's a lot like that. There's a lot of issues where progress just stopped in a legal sense from the legal perspective working out all these kind of details. Yeah, what happens when you build a nuclear power plant next door to me, right? Do I have no say in it? Do I have some say in it?  That is more complex like that because there's more threats. There is the issue of threat. You should be able to deal with, you know, reasonable rational fear in some kind of preemptive way. But it's hard. It's not easy. How do you do that without violating rights? It's not, you're right in the sense that it's not an easy thing to do. Yeah, and instead of thinking through those issues, what we did was every time a problem arose, we just created another agency to send in inspectors, establish guidelines. You must do it this way. There's actually, okay, if you want a really interesting example of something that went differently and that I think went fairly well, I wrote an essay on the history of factory safety. So in the early 20th century, there were a lot of accidents in all kinds of industrial, right, and workers had a pretty high, you know, accident and fatality rate. And the interesting thing that happened was, a big part of the problem was that the fact, safety was not really approached as a systemic issue where you look at the way the plant is designed and you look at where accidents could happen and you figure out, okay, what kind of, you know, all right, we need to put a guard over this spinning blade and people need to be given this kind of safety equipment and so forth, right? Or they need this kind of training. Safety was just seen as sort of a very individual issue. Well, if you slipped and made a mistake, then that was your fault and you shouldn't have done that, you know. So they weren't seeing the impact that the environment could have. And what really drove the change was a change in the liability law. So it used to be that the way liability would happen was just through torts. If you got injured or if you died and your family would come forth and sue, try to sue the many facts. And that was really difficult. There were lots of ways companies could escape liability. And so ultimately what happened was the law changed to a workers comp system, which was just a no fault system, which just said, look, we don't take this to court, except maybe to, you know, or maybe there's a lightweight process, but we don't try to determine who was at fault. If an accident happens in the factory, the factory pays out on a fixed schedule according to, you know, a death is this many thousand dollars and a lost, you know, finger is this many dollars and so forth, right? And what that did was drive, I did a few things. One was it drove a systematic focus on safety. So the company started investing in safety engineering and they had safety departments and so forth. The other thing was we got insurance involved. And I think insurance is a highly underrated mechanism for dealing with risk and safety because the insurance agencies now had an enormous profit motive, financial incentive to understand the cause of accidents and teach people how to prevent them. And the companies could pass on that financial incentive by telling factories that we will reduce your premiums if you do the following key safety mechanisms, which is especially important by the way for the smaller shops, which are probably not gonna have an accident very often just because they're tiny, right? And so they might, if they're doing unsafe things, they might not even feel the problem for years, but they feel the impact to their insurance premiums right away. And so there's an interesting, you know, within nuclear, there's one of the interesting writers on nuclear has a similar proposal to do a significant amount of the safety, you know, driving the safety through insurance. Yeah, I think that makes complete sense. Yeah, the problem with the regulatory agencies is essentially with regulation, all of the incentives are one way, right? So the regulator gets blamed for anything that goes wrong. They don't get credit if something goes right. And nobody blames them for the invisible things that don't happen, right? For the plants that don't get built, et cetera and so forth. But it's the beauty of the insurance company makes money if nothing goes wrong.  Exactly, right? What we need is we need the incentive to prevent harm, but we also need the incentive in the other way to reduce costs. And those need to come up against each other and get balanced out to find the right trade-off, right? Because safety is good, but that doesn't mean that any safety measure you can ever conceive of or implement is good. Some of them are literally not worth it, right? And so we need to figure out the right trade-off to make there. And insurance is this financial mechanism that helps to do that. Whereas with the regulators, the incentive is all one way and it's this ratchet that just goes to higher and higher levels of safety theater, right? Yep, no, and healthcare is probably one of the areas where this is most needed and most absent is a proper insurance market that actually functions in this way rather than the kind of insurance market we have today that's heavily, heavily regulated. Right, let's go to, we've got a few questions. Let's go to the questions and we'll see where this takes us. And by the way, you guys can still ask questions, $20 questions get priority, but you can ask questions for any amounts. And let's see, Jennifer asked the woman. Who's getting this money, Iran? Where's this going? What's that? Who's getting this money, Iran? I said, where is this going? I get the money. You get the promotion, I get the money. All goes to my pocket. There's actually an ongoing slight, small competition between different interviewees in terms of who can raise more money for me. Okay, this is great, but we don't need $20 questions. You gotta at least buy me a drink the next time I see it. Sounds good, Iran, we'll do that. All right, Jennifer says, the woman's made progress, but they glorified violence. I like to think that it is less true now. Is this a sign of moral progress? That we don't have the violence associated with the... I think there is, I think it is a sign of moral progress that we don't glorify war, certainly, and other types of violence. And again, I think Pinker's book, Better Angels of Our Nature is a good example of that. And it might be that the glorification of violence with the Romans, particularly the games and turning it into entertainment, was ultimately a sign of their decline and ultimately sign of that whole moral shift led to ultimately the fall of Rome. So, if morality shifts away from you towards more violence, probably the progress is gonna go away as well. But yes, we don't quite have gladiators and lions and people slotting each other as entertainment. Right, not quite. We don't torture cats in the street for fun, which is something that children would do in the Middle Ages. I mean, the historical examples that Pinker gives in that book are astonishing. Yeah, I was, I mean, everything he said, it was like, yes, I know that. It was nothing that I didn't know in terms of the horrors, but it was like putting it all together and giving you the timeline. Oh, yes, I can now see the progress I can see. I mean, torture of human beings, nevermind cats, was something people went to see in the town square. We're talking about people ripping out internal organs. Not only see, but participate in, right? Thinking of people in the stocks and they get stones thrown at them, yeah. You know, and so we've made a lot of progress. Let's see, Jeremy says, it seems that progress innovation are still able to push through regulation, veto, precautionary principle, to have net progress to some degree. But it seems to be slowing. How do we see progress studies reversing that trend? Ultimately, I think we need to counter all of the kind of three factors that I said earlier. We need regulatory reform. We need, I think, reform to the way that we fund and manage science and fundamental research. And ultimately, underlying all of that, we just, we need a shift in the way that we think about progress. We need to believe in it again and we need to get our ambition back. You know, I think the number one thing that is an indication of just how far we've come and why we're in trouble is the fact that if you think about people's vision of the future, you know, we used to dream of moon bases and flying cars. And today, the most optimistic vision of the future that you will get out of the mainstream other than a few weirdos like me is a vision where we avoid disaster. So if we could stop climate change and prevent pandemics, and maybe if we're lucky, relieve a little bit of extreme poverty in the worst-off nations, that is like an optimistic vision of the future, right? But it's all the negation of negatives. Here are some bad things that might happen or that are happening and let's make them not happen or avoid them, right? And the notion that we could have, anti-aging technology and nanotech manufacturing and fusion energy and be settling the solar system and all of that. All of that is just like wacky sci-fi, you know, you're like way out there. And I want that to be, once again, the mainstream vision of what the future could be. What did you think of Mark Andreessen's piece, Build? It's Time to Build. Yeah, it's Time to Build. Instant classic. Yeah. It was a, I think it was Andreessen himself who described it somewhere later as a primal scream of rage the lack of ambition and dynamism And what was the response to that? What's your sense of the kind of a cultural response? I'm sure the progress movements rallied around it but was there, did you get a sense that it had water impact? You know, it's hard for me to tell because I've been in the middle of Silicon Valley for so long that like a lot of my world is Silicon Valley people.  Those of you who haven't read it, it's definitely worth reading. Mark Andreessen is a famous venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and he wrote Time to Build which is really good. I mean, it's not perfect, but it's really good. And it's a primal scream. So it really is that it has that kind of sense of. It's just the basic idea like, can we get stuff done? Yes. Why is it that in the middle of, so he wrote in the middle of COVID, right? And he was just looking at like, we can't even make enough masks. We have to import masks, you know, for people. Well, who was it? Wasn't China sending us gift packages, right? Charity, relief packages of PPE. It was just ridiculous, right? California has a drought. I mean, in the past, if you have a drought, you build canals, you pump water in. I mean, with technology today, you would bring, build desalination plants with small nuclear power plants next to them. I mean, it's. There's some great lines from Atlas Shrugged, you know, where some, you know, a hard winter happens and the power goes out or the bridge goes out or whatever, and there's this line. People did not remember that the bridge didn't, you know, the power didn't always go out. The bridge didn't always go out. The food kept flowing, the heat and the oil kept flowing, right? And California built, I mean, if you think about the drought in California, you know, I think it's one of the most drawing things. There's always been droughts in California in the old days, right? In the 19th century, they built canals. They pumped water from one part of the state to the other part of the state. They built reservoirs. They did stuff. And today, everybody kind of twiddled their thumb. Okay, don't take showers. That's the solution to a drought. And that is. Ever since Carter put on a sweater and told people to turn down the heat, right? It was, you know. All right, although I'm sympathetic to Carter, not because of that, but because he was the, he did more deregulation than any other president in modern. We can give him credit for that. Yeah, yeah. It's hard to believe, but it actually, that is the historical fact. Okay. So I haven't looked into this history. Do you think it was, he actually did it or it just happened under his administration? Well, it happened. Because of him or was it building up before it? Yeah, to support it. Because there were bills in Congress, right? They literally passed a bill on Democratic Congress with Jimmy Carter president. Deregulate trucking, deregulate the airlines. Dere, you know, they, and it wasn't just like today when Republicans get in, they change the people at the regulatory agencies and they tinker a little bit. They make it less regulation. No, these were bills to the past Congress that actually did away with massive scopes of regulation, which we don't need. Nobody conceives of doing that today. And that was mostly under Jimmy Carter. It started under Ford. And then, you know, Nixon was the great regulator. All the alphabet agencies were established by him. Then Ford and Carter were deregulators and Reagan got the credit. But Reagan did some deregulation, but mainly Reagan got the credit. I mean, most of the actual work was done during the administration of Carter. And yes, I don't think it was him necessarily driving it, but the people he appointed as economic advisors, the people he appointed to work with Congress were all of that mind, which is surprising, but there you go. Another reason not to think just of left and right, but... Yeah. So who's your favorite builder? Talking about building. Favorite builder, wow. Well, builder I think he takes here as maybe broader than just building, building. Sure, yeah, yeah. Yeah, gosh. Yeah, there are so many. Yeah, I don't, I don't know if I have a favorite, but there are certainly some that are underrated. I've been reading about, I've been reading about George Stevenson, who was the, held as the father of the locomotive, that kicked off this amazing revolution in transportation. One that I've only read a little bit about, but I think is underrated and I want to learn more about a Samuel Insol. So Insol was, so Edison and sometimes Westinghouse get the credit for creating the technology, the electricity industry, which they did. But Insol was, it seems, the one who really scaled it and built it up big and made it more efficient and cost effective. Was that GE? No. He might have merged with GE at some point, but he had his own empire, I think mostly based around Chicago and the Chicago area and then expanding into the greater area, just now. All right, oops, what did I do here? All right, KFAC says, have you seen objectivists in tech, how common objectivists in tech compare to other fields? Some 20, 30 years ago, there was a joke in the local objectivist community that I was a part of that half of objectivists were ex-Catholic computer programmers because those two demographics seem to be overrepresented. I do feel there is something, yeah, maybe something of a correlation there, but yeah, I don't know. It's not a huge demographic even within tech. I don't think it's a huge demographic in any circles. I do think, by the way, that there are a lot of stealth iron-ran fans. People who kind of don't wanna talk about it, but loved Atlas Shrugged or fans more broadly. All my views, I mean, I think every single one of the founding generation of Silicon Valley was an Iron-Ran fan. I mean, it's stunning to me. Stories of the Steve Jobs loved Atlas Shrugged. We know Larry Ellison did, we know Sam McNeely did. Maybe Bill Gates, I know, I've met Michael Dell who claims that in his dorm room he was reading Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged while building those first computers. So I think that generation, it inspired almost all of them. Don Valentine, it's a Coyote Capital who I got to know really well and was a huge Iron-Ran fan. And it really is interesting how much impact she had. They weren't subjectivists, but they were inspired. And I think that's true of many. We know the guy from Uber, right? I'm not sure if we're good, but we know the guy from Uber was inspired, right, man. All right, let's see. John asks, at some point will you consider developing curricula for teaching about progress? I will not only consider it, I've already done it. So I actually created a high school level course in the history of technology, which was commissioned by a private high school called the Academy of Thought and Industry. And I believe you can still go to their website and find it on their list of virtual course offerings. And I've been talking to them about how to make that even more broadly available. But I think it might be one of the courses that you can sign up for, even if you're not enrolled in the high school and do it online. So definitely check that out. Yeah, I absolutely feel that some sort of material should be created here. It's something that I definitely talk to with people. It's an ongoing thread of conversation. The challenge, of course, is not, creating curricula materials is easy. Getting adopted is hard. So the question is, and I had a whole, it did a whole kind of half day workshop with some folks talking about different approaches to this. And I think one approach is a very top-down approach where you say, let's actually go get maybe the curriculum standards changed. So one of the progress writers I like is Jim Pethicuchus at AEI. And his last newsletter, he said we should have AP progress. The AP courses, advanced placement, high school courses, there's AP physics and there's AP chemistry and AP history and AP English. He says there should be AP progress. And so I agree with that, at least in spirit. And so that would be one way to do it, get an AP test or have it built into the curriculum standards at some state or national level. So that's a pretty top-down and I think maybe essentially kind of political effort. The other way to do it is very bottom-up and just appeal directly to the parents, to the families or just directly to the students, especially as they get old enough. And I think that's essentially a media effort. Could you make children's books, YouTube channel, TikTok? I don't know, I'm too old to know what the kids are into these days. You're too old. What am I gonna say? But essentially media around understanding progress and the history and the current state of it. And yeah, I think those would be fantastic efforts and certainly the kinds of things that my organization could and I expect at some point we'll get into, especially as we branch out. So Annemarie asked a perfect follow-on to this. How many years before there is a start of a curriculum, perhaps a kindergarten video to teach the history of progress, something that parents and future grandparents like me could use to start to explain it to kids? Yeah. Is this something which progress is planning on doing? Is this part of the mission or is this something? No concrete plans, but remember our CEO just started less than two weeks ago. So we're still forming the plans and the priorities. But yeah, I mean, so my thinking is and I haven't thought this out thoroughly, but my thinking is you can start teaching some of the basics at a very early age. I would not teach the concept of progress at the kindergarten level. I think, like I said, by high school, the concept of progress can be maybe explicitly taught as a historical phenomenon. Like, hey, look at all these things that happened and they happen within this relatively short and span of time after there hadn't been much of that for most of human history. But what you can do even before the high school level, I think, certainly at middle school level, you could teach about specific inventions and inventors, teach about Edison, teach about the light bulb, teach about the challenges that people had in growing food and farming and how people made better machines and better fertilizers and so forth, right? I mean, good history. And the other thing I think you can do at that grade school level is just teach some of the basics of what is electricity. How do plants grow? Where does our food come from, right? What do plants need to grow? Some of the just basics of botany that way, right? And so if kids start off with a good grounding in science and just kind of understanding basically how the world works and then in middle school, they start learning about inventors and inventions. And then by high school, they can start getting a bigger sort of historical perspective. And then by late high school or university, they're ready to actually be to tackle some of the big philosophical questions and debates. That's roughly how I see the progression going. Just like with philosophy itself, it's not the kind of thing that you want to sort of artificially start introducing or, you know, let alone kind of ramming down kids' throats too early. It's just gonna be too much of a floating abstraction for them. Good. Ian said, I asked, has Jason looked at the history of power grids in the United States? It seems like the companies ran into problems dealing with knowledge numbers of property owners for permissions, then pushing, then push for city level regulations to avoid the issue. I have not looked into it deeply. I think, yes, there was some of that from what I know. However, it's important, I think to understand also that there was a very explicit push to socialize electric power. So remember what I said about the sort of rise of technocracy, the, you know, the 20s and 30s, right when the electric power industry was getting built out and deployed and, you know, going into rural areas and getting built out to the whole country, was also a period of, there was a lot of sympathy for socialism and for government planning and top, this was the way. And, you know, the great irony of this is that Russia in, you know, Soviet Russia in the 20s was looking to America to understand how we do things and decided they wanted to copy what we were doing, which was, which they thought was working amazingly well. And what they decided to copy was our factories and our system of, you know, managing the factories. And in fact, they said, aha, we'll do it even better because we don't have to deal with that messy capitalism. We will put all this stuff on a sound socialist foundation and we will take the scientific management of factories and apply it to the entire economy. And then you got, you know, the five year plans and everything. And at the same time, America didn't know what it had. And it was looking to Soviet Russia and saying, hey, maybe these guys have a better social system and maybe we should even be copying some of them. So that's the great irony and tragedy of the early 20th century that we had this chance and we squandered it. But so in the, so in this period, you got all these social reformers who wanted government to come in and plan everything. And they explicitly saw that the second industrial revolution with electricity and everything was, they saw it as a chance to remake society. So they saw that the first industrial revolution had come along and had transformed the world. And in their opinion, it had not been transformed 100% for the better. We got these grimy, you know, smoke stacks and we got these, these sooty factories and all this, you know, dirty use of technology and people were concentrated in unsanitary cities and there was all this population density. And their view was this was done because, you know, it was all in the hands of Greek capitalists and nobody had any regard for human factors and human values. So now electricity is coming along and they're saying, aha, we have a clean source of power. It can be distributed out to the countryside so we don't have to concentrate people in dense cities. We can remake the world and let's seize the chance and let's seize the chance to do it, you know, on the basis of what they saw, what they saw as human values and let's do it through top-down government control. And so they were very strong advocates of government coming in and taking over the power industry. And, you know, and there were people who thought for practical reasons.  Electricity was a thing that was centralized and then you built the huge power plant and then you built the lines out everywhere and you needed control over an entire region and only a strong central government could do that. So they thought capitalism was gonna fail and that they were gonna be better at it. But then you had in the New Deal, you know, the New Deal comes along and all of a sudden federal government where it was very opposed to these top-down projects for a long time now is suddenly very favorable to them. And that's when you get things like the TVA, the Tennessee Valley Authority, which takes control of this large region and is creating the dams and the hydroelectric power plants, ironically created so much of a demand for power that they later had to create coal-fired power plants just to keep up with the demand and a lot of people didn't like that. That was seen as such a betrayal, right? But so yeah, it wasn't, so I think there were these problems with property rights and how do you get the right of way and all of that stuff. But there was also a very explicit push for government ought to be doing this and let's take it over. All right, Chasbott says, Jason, if Mel Brooks asked you to be a technical advisor on his show, History of the World, part two, would you accept and what sort of input would you provide? I'm so sorry, I've never seen History of the World. I know it's classic. Part one, huh? It's a Mel Brooks classic for whatever that's worth. Yes, I've heard of it, I'm just, yeah. All right, let's, Michael asks, are you sure humans aren't born with any instincts or knowledge of danger? Why are super young children afraid of snakes but not umbrellas? Why are we all disgusted by the smell of feces, dangerous knowledge about reality is hardwired into us? Yeah, I think that's basically true at some level. But the amazing thing about humans is that we have this conceptual layer which has the ability to look back on all of that and even override it, right? We might be afraid of snakes but we can choose to go in and play with the snakes anyway or even adopt them as pets, which people do. Yeah, we can identify which snakes are dangerous, which are not and treat them differently depending on that fact. And we can even do things that are harmful to us or harmful to our lives. We can certainly do things that are harmful to our reproductive success, right? Which a purely evolutionary theory might think is almost impossible. So I think that's the really unique thing about humans is that we can override some of those species instincts. I mean, I also think I suspect, I don't know, I haven't researched this. I mean, I suspect we have a lot less in the way of instincts than animals do. I mean, a newborn baby is extremely helpless compared to the newborns of many other species, right? But yeah, I don't think you have to be, I don't think you have to say, oh, we have absolutely nothing that's built in. There's some, sure, there's revulsion at bad smells or even simple things like the baby sort of looking around for the nipple and sucking. I mean, all of that they do from day one, from hour one. So, yeah, some things built in, but not on an enormous amount and it's overwriteable is the really key back. And I think the philosophical point is what's not built in our ideas, but inclinations, fears, things like that could be built in. Again, I doubt that it's fear of snakes, it's fear of something and part of what biology needs to figure out is what those things are. All right, Jupiter, let's see. I find a problem with even having a simple conversation about progress and the immense benefits our current standard of living. The inevitable response is how someone is getting exploited as a result. I mean, so the first thing I would say is you might just choose who you talk to and ask yourself whether you really want to have this conversation.  If you're going to have these conversations, so I've had good experiences with people, talking to people like this who were so far away from my worldview that they had that kind of reaction. And here's what has worked. The first thing you have to do is just drop any hope or goal of changing their mind. Just forget about it, that's not even your purpose. Instead, set a goal of just trying to figure out where the hell they're coming from and just start asking questions, just get curious. Somebody's being exploited, who's getting exploited? Oh, well, how is that person getting exploited? Well, but gee, that type of person was really much worse off in the... Do you know how those people lived 100 years ago? Let me tell you. Don't you think that they're better off now? So maybe they're worse in this way, but much better off, seems like a good trade-off. What do you think and see what their reaction is, right? And ultimately, you will... If you do this and you really honestly get curious about where people are coming from, you will start to build up a picture of other people's worldviews. And you will start to understand what are all the trains of thought and what are the fundamental premises? And try to find what's the deepest idea where you and this person disagree, right? So if you disagree on something, try to find the idea you disagree on that's even deeper than that and the one that's deeper, right? Go, see how many layers of that onion can you peel back until you get to the most fundamental thing where you say, yeah, oh, if I believed that, all of those consequences would follow, right? But here's the deepest thing where we disagree. And just make it an exercise to do that. And by the way, one amazing thing that happens after you've spent like 45 minutes asking people questions like this, is they get a little, they kind of run out of steam and they've said their piece. And then they sometimes they'll say, well, what do you think, by the way? How do you think about it, right? And now they're actually, they're actually ready to listen. And maybe you can now get through them. Whereas if you just try to hammer your point through at the very beginning, they're not even gonna hear you because they're just waiting for a chance to speak. So that's how I would approach it. Yep, good advice. All right, Mary-Ben, Mary-Ben, something like that. Anyway, she says, would Jason consider collaborating on a series of Ironman University lectures called Luminaries of the Enlightenment, each highlighting a great figure of the 19th century, Darwin, Kuri, Edison, and their impact on today. That sounds like a lot of fun. Right now I am fully committed to writing my book, but yeah, I mean, in principle, something like that could be interesting. So we can talk. Yeah, I don't know if she works for the Institute. Maybe she does. I have no idea who she is. I should know this stuff. Stephen Alpert says, great interview. Thanks, Stephen. Theamast says, can primitive technology be shown to people so that they see how our survival depends on it in order to put things into perspective today? Yeah. And primitive technology be shown to people. Well, I think this is your point about teaching them about the history and how people needed to build a plow on tools and weapons and even at the very basic level just to survive. Yeah, sure. I mean, I think you can certainly show the way that we used to live. And whether that's 15,000 years ago in the tribal hunter-gatherer era or whether it's 5,000 years ago or whether it's 500 years ago or even 50 or 100 years ago. I mean, at all these different points, you can point to things where you're just absolutely shocked that they didn't have them. I mean, it was only, it was less than, I mean, 150 years ago, as I recall, most homes didn't have toilets. So, just imagine waking up in the morning and going to the outhouse or pissing in a chamber pot or something, right? I mean, just... So, yeah, I mean, I think you absolutely have to do this. Now, I mean, again, as, as Yaron said, people don't always learn from facts. So you can start to, you can start to make these, you know, points and that you will still get, you won't always get through to people. You will still get, get it hammered home. This is part of why it has to come as part of a basic education. And there are so many of these facts, right? It's like a, like to truly comprehend the magnitude of it. You have to go through how life has changed in absolutely every, every dimension, every sphere. The way we grow our food, the way we make our products, the way our homes are set up, the way we get around the kinds of work that people do, how much we have to work, how, you know, our susceptibility to, to the weather, the prevalence of disease and our ability to cure diseases and our ability to communicate and stay in touch and, you know, and all of these things. I mean, it's just, you can't even do it in a single conversation, right? I mean, when I created a, like I said, when I created a high school course to go over what I thought were the basics of this, it was like six weeks of, you know, of daily lessons, just to go over kind of the, what I consider to be pretty much the basics. So, yeah. Adam asks, what do you say to those wanting to help the world innovate and progress, but they are frustrated by bureaucracy and attempted to hold back that potential, the way those in atlas do until society adapts a more free philosophy?   Why do that?  I don't think it was actually a practical manual for how to create a revolution in the world, right? There was a fantastic premise, literally in the sense sort of a fantasy of like, what if we could do this? And it was a literary device to show what Ran wanted to, an idea that Ran wanted to illustrate about, you know, who moves the world. But I don't think it's a practical plan for revolutionaries. The way to actually change the world is to live in the world to be a part of it and to use those talents. And now it's up to you whether, so there are a lot of different ways to deal with the fact that we do have all of this bureaucracy. One thing you can do is you can, you can avoid it and sidestep it and you can go work in a relatively unregulated area. Or as I said earlier about nuclear, you can just go to a different country where the regulations are going to be more favorable.  And I think by the way, I think they did better at defeating the taxi monopolies than anyone could have done if they didn't have a smartphone-based ridesharing app, right? If you had gone out with a think tank and a policy white paper and a political campaign to try to defeat the taxi monopolies in the name of some abstract potential innovation that they were holding back, I think you probably would have gotten nowhere. But if you show people an amazing, you know, service that they can get that's so much better than standing on the street and trying to hail a cab or calling the dispatch and waiting half an hour, and then people see some special interests is trying to take this away, you've got a much better platform, right? And then the other thing you can do is you can decide to actually join the effort as an intellectual and explicitly address those things and try to get the regulation changed or come up with a better policy proposal. Somebody who I think does this really well and I'll point to as a model for how to approach this kind of thing is Eli Dorado. So Eli is at the Center for Growth and Opportunity and I really like his writing. What Eli does is he actually goes out and he looks at what are the amazing technologies that we could have over the next few decades if regulation doesn't hold it back. And by the way, how might policy hold it back or is already holding it back? And what could we do about that? And just come up with a proposal. And then he shows people like, look, we could have this amazing source of energy. We could have this really cool transportation. We could have this and this and this. Here's what's holding it back and here's what we should do about it. And here's a practical plan that someone could actually adopt. I think that's the, it's the right combination of sort of forward-looking optimism and realism about the challenges of regulation. That's great. All right, we got a bunch though of questions. So maybe short of answers. Sorry. No, that's okay. You're doing great, but now... Okay, lightning round. These guys paid less money, put it that way. Okay, all right. All right, we got through the $20 questions. Now we're on to the $5, $1. $2, $5, $10. We give them less attention. All right, Apollo Azuz says, as how do you gauge moral progress? How you gauge moral progress? Yeah, it's tough, right? It's the hardest thing to measure. Economic progress you can sort of measure in dollars in GDP. Moral progress, I don't know how to measure it, but you can look at things. You can look at the decline of violence can be quantified. You can look at homicide rates. You can look at rates of people dying from war or rates of wars starting. You can look at literacy rates and education and a lot of different things like that. So I think you just have to look at a dashboard of different metrics and combine it with a qualitative sense of what's going on. Yeah, and look at liberty, look at freedom, look at how many people are free in the world relative to the... And even that is hard to measure and places come out with freedom index, democracy index, and I don't know how much to trust any of them, but it's a rough metric. Z-Race, you listed three causes for the recent slowed rate of progress. What about the government monopolization of education as the primary cause of all? I wouldn't say it's the primary cause of all, but it certainly has led to, I think stagnation in education, where I don't think we have a significantly different, I don't think we've gotten better at educating for at least a hundred years. Maybe much longer. We've gotten worse, maybe. Yeah. And certainly it makes it harder, I think to introduce some of the reforms that I'm talking about, like introducing progress into the curriculum. Thoughts on Monsanto. I don't know much about Monsanto. They create a lot of agricultural innovation and are predictably vilified, but I haven't researched them. And I think that was what they sold to you, a big European company, I think Bob Monsanto, I think so. Which is interesting, because they can't sell their products in Europe, but Europeans do own them. Apollo Zeus, progress versus progressivism. So Stephen Pinker had this line in his book Enlightenment now that he caught some flak for, maybe it was a little bit too snarky, but I have to admit I like it.  So yeah, I don't think progressivism is super favorable to progress these days, and that's a little bit of irony of terminology. And it's probably true, that's probably true from the beginning of the movement. The movement was a German movement that came to America in the mid 19th century and was responsible for a lot of the controls that slowed down progress, starting in the mid 20th century. Yeah, and again, you have to, I mean, they were not progressive in the sense of wanting industrial progress. They wanted what they saw as social progress. Good, all right, Boz asks, tips for Boon. He asked this question for everybody, any of you. So you qualify to answer this. Tips for Boon, out parents of an eight month newborn. That's question number one. And then how do we gain back focus and energy? Question number two, and then he said, thoughts on Bitcoin tech layoffs, China, AR, VR, 3D pinching and remote work. Okay, how much did he pay for all the five bucks? And he does it every single day. That's about 10 questions. So I got about 50 cents per question. Bird out parent of an eighth month. Oh, look, I sympathize. My kid is about a year and a half. So get help and ask yourself if you're doing too much. Brian Kaplan has this book called selfish reasons to have more kids. And he says, the people underrate the benefits of kids, but also they overrate how much effort you really need to put into it. So don't drive yourself crazy. I already forgot what the other questions were. How do we gain back focus and energy? Yeah, I mean, it's such a personal thing, right? I just figure out what works for you. Get sleep, drink water, get exercise. I don't know. I'm not an expert on this by any means. I don't expect you to answer these. Emily Oster, go check out Emily Oster. She's one of the best writers on parenting stuff. So just quick thoughts on Bitcoin tech layoffs, China and other stuff. Bitcoin, super interesting technology, I think, or at least the underlying kind of blockchain cryptocurrency I think is super interesting, has potential. We'll have to see where it goes. It's got a lot of problems and is still looking for its ultimate use case, but I see actual use cases. Especially if you're in the US and you don't have to deal with the international financial system, you have no idea how hard it is for people in other countries to even just buy stuff from the US because they can't even use their freaking credit cards. Tech layoffs, I don't have a lot to say there. It's cyclical. A lot of tech companies probably got overstaffed when there was easy money and now many is not so easy anymore. Not much to say. China is really interesting because they've achieved in a lot of economic progress in the last, what, 40, 50, 60 years. And they did it without instituting less safer capitalism. So they've, it's sort of a, and not only that, but also apparently, I mean, going back to the people don't, the lessons that people learn from facts and from history are not determined. They're contingent, right? And everybody in the West was hoping that China would naturally open up and liberalize and learn freedom by getting some capitalism and they didn't. So we'll see. But I still think that not opening up and not having freedom across the board. ISIS said, this might be wishful thinking or bias, but I think it's going to hamper their ability to innovate, right? Their amazing growth was mostly catch-up growth. And they have, they have innovated and leapfrogged and gotten ahead in some ways. It's easy to dismiss and downplay them and I don't wanna do that too much. But you look at, where is CRISPR coming from? Where are mRNA vaccines coming from? Where is, you know, where's chat GPT coming from? None of it's coming from China. So. Michael asks, how patients, how patients should I be with people who don't get objectivism before I block them? So, yeah, coming back to my, like, how do you, so I don't know if you're talking about block them on social media or what, but like, or block them out of your life. I only do that to people who are nasty and belligerent, and are just assholes, basically. I don't do that to people based on them disagreeing. I have good friends whom I adore who disagree with me very deeply on philosophy and politics. And I don't think you have to have that in order to have even a friendship, let alone blocking somebody. But if someone turns nasty, especially on social media, if they start throwing insults and just degrading the conversation, then hit the block button. Michael asks, is in an objectivist world with sporting events that went to the death to be allowed? I know my answer to that. Probably not. No. No, there's no way. Yeah. You can't sign away your life. There's no contracts for slavery. There's no contracts for, you know, to, so no. And nobody would want to watch them anyway. So it's a relevant question because nobody would pay to watch in an objectivist world, an event like that. All right, Justin asks, are Democrats or Republicans more receptive to your ideas? I don't know. Like I said, I feel that there's definitely interest in this progress movement from across the board. And, you know, from the left, from the right, and, you know, from the libertarians who don't feel like they're on the left or the right. And so that's encouraging.  Yeah, I think we'll see as some of this stuff actually gets turned into policy, who's voting for it and who against it, who's championing it, you know, but it hasn't quite gotten that far yet. Justin asks, is the progress movement part of effective altruism? No. They are adjacent and I think there is some overlap. A lot of the effective altruist folks are interested in progress studies and vice versa. But there are separate movements that came from sort of independent places. I hadn't even heard of effective altruism until I was years into, you know, studying and doing progress. And I think ultimately there are some fairly different, you know, fundamental premises in there. Justin also asks, what can one do to help the progress movement? If you are in science, technology or business, you are already helping to move progress forward. So do it and be proud of it and be ambitious with it. If you are in academia, especially in history, economics or philosophy, progress should be a part of your work and you should figure out how to incorporate those ideas into, you know, what you do. If you are a communicator of any kind, writer, journalist, teacher, then you should be thinking about how to communicate about progress, about the history and the philosophy of it and what we need.   Great, last question I think. Justice says, is the anti-vax movement scary for progress? I think it's scary for health, you know, we had almost eliminated measles in this country and then it had a resurgence after people stopped getting vaccinated. So, yeah, I mean, I also think it's scary just because I think people are putting sort of feelings essentially ahead of a more hard-headed rational look at things. So, yeah, and I mean, you know, ultimately if we're gonna, if part of progress is developing more and better vaccines, you're, that is just going to be, you know, hampered by, you know, if people are sort of irrationally afraid of them. So, yeah, I mean, I don't see a huge threat to like progress overall in other fields or something because of that. Only in the sense that it spreads the fear, right? So there's, it spreads the fear, the fear of pharmaceutical companies, those evil companies and that, you know, that ultimately is associated with the nuclear and with everything else, just fear is not good for progress. And I think, by the way, that I'm starting to think that a significant part of the anti-vax is not just people, maybe, you know, not having trust in science and technology, but also part of this rejection of authority and the system, right? People don't trust the authorities anymore and the elites. And I sympathize with that. I think the elites and the authorities have done a lot to lose people's trust and sort of deserve that. But I also think some people have taken it too far to the point where they don't trust any kind of authority, any kind of system, any kind of, you know, the establishment. And so, you know, vaccines are this thing that is kind of created by these big companies and then pushed by the government. And, you know, you can't verify for yourself that it's even doing what you say it's gonna do, but they tell you you need it for your own good and for public health and et cetera. And it just, it pushes all the buttons of anybody who's inclined to not trust the system and not trust the authorities. And so I think that's, you know, part of what we're seeing along, and then combine that with any sort of distrust of science and technology. And, you know, I think that's what you get. So. The one last question. Okay, thoughts on progress in psychology? Progress in psychology? Yeah, man, I don't know. It's one area I haven't really studied. I think that, you know, we still, there's still so much that we don't know and so much of a theory that we don't have. And so there's a lot of progress to be made. And I honestly don't know exactly where it's going to come from. All right. We went for two hours. All right. Thank you, Jason. I owe you. Absolutely, fun conversation and good questions and thanks for having me on. Absolutely, anytime. All right, everybody. I will see you guys tomorrow morning for our news roundup. And thanks for all the superchatters. Thanks for all the people to ask questions. It was great. And I will see you all tomorrow. Thanks, Jason. Bye. Yep, thanks a lot.