Peak Human

0:00The new book, Peek Human, covers what we might learn from Rome and other empires like ancient Athens, China's song Dynasty, the Italian Renaissance. Peek Human, are we Peek now? I think we live in a golden age, for sure. We have never had so many people living lives in freedom, longer lives, in better health, more wealth than at any other point in human history. And I would very much like to extend that golden age a bit, and that's a reason why I write about lessons from history. You look at seven golden ages, there are more. You could find golden ages in most places and most civilizations throughout history, because it's not really in comparison to their neighbors, their rivals. It's compared to what they would otherwise have been. Do we make the best of ourselves of the culture that we've got here? So it's not a clash between civilization, it's a clash within every civilization. On whether they should keep going,

1:02being more open to innovation and progress, or whether they should retreat and decline. But nobody says we're going to retreat. No, they usually say, oh, we want stability, we want protection, we want someone to take care of us. But that's the same thing, because that's what leads to stagnation, because it shuts you off from all those experiments, all that exchange that would have helped you to find something new, acquire new capacity and keep going. You have to keep poking people, changing things, and people in power don't like that. This is the major problem. Why would elites ever be happy about change? They built their power on a particular system of production, certain ideas, a particular mentality, whereas trade, innovation, growth, it's all about change. It's about people doing better things tomorrow than they did today. In our full interview, Norberg explains where we can learn from

2:03history's goldmages, like ancient Athens, Rome, and more. And also, how can we keep America's gold mage going? You can find the full interview at johnstossil.com.