Everything You Know is About to Collapse - David Friedberg - #1084
Modern Wisdom
Chris Williamson
4.6 ⢠5.9K Ratings
đď¸ 13 April 2026
âąď¸ 131 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | You've said the future's going to be epic. You're really optimistic about it when a lot of people are |
| 0:05.0 | pretty worried. How come? I think people have had a tendency to be worried about the future |
| 0:13.5 | because humans are programmed to be that way. We always were worried about some predator |
| 0:19.8 | coming around the corner eating us like we're we're |
| 0:21.9 | tuned to survive right so we're tuned to always there's always some existential threat to humanity |
| 0:26.8 | this goes back to kind of biblical eras thousands of years ago it was the the great flood that was |
| 0:32.9 | about to come there was the um you know the plague the plague's going to wipe us all out. There's |
| 0:40.1 | starvation. You know, the late 19th century population was outstripping food supply. And there was |
| 0:49.4 | this big belief that we were going to run out of food. And there was this kind of rush to and and the primary |
| 0:54.9 | reason was all the world's fertilizer actually came from these guano fields off of the south |
| 1:01.1 | American coast so these giant islands covered in in poop and they would the clipper ships would go |
| 1:06.3 | down they'd get all this poop and they'd bring it back to Europe and they use it as fertilizer to farm. If you don't have fertilizer, you get less yield, less calories. So the islands were kind of diminishing and there was this big call to action. We're going to run out of fertilizer. The world's going to starve. We're going to die. And then there was this invention called the Haber Bosch process where they figured out how to take nitrogen from the atmosphere, compress it, and make fertilizer. Boom. Suddenly, population skyrocketed. Every generation has these |
| 1:34.2 | existential threats, climate change, COVID. There's always, and now it's AI. I think fundamentally |
| 1:40.9 | AI is one of these most kind of like mind-numbing sort of unbelievable to understand kind of technologies. |
| 1:49.5 | And when these kind of things happen that we don't fully grok that seems so overwhelming, like a plague, like running out of food, like COVID, we have a tendency to be very existential about it. Now, you compare that to the |
| 2:04.2 | facts on the ground. The facts on the ground, people are living longer, they're living healthier, |
| 2:08.3 | they're living better lives, across the board, across populations. And people can argue all day |
| 2:13.2 | long about relative prosperity. Hey, some people in America have gotten really far ahead. They're doing |
| 2:19.3 | really well. The rest of us feel left behind. But if you look at some of the metrics of like, |
| 2:25.1 | hey, everyone has a home. Everyone has a car. Like everyone has some of these things that we take for granted |
| 2:30.2 | today that we didn't have a hundred years ago, that were really things to struggle to get. |
| 2:36.8 | Now, separate to that, there's an extraordinary compounding effect happening in technology generally. |
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