183: How Demographics Are Foretelling Serious Problems with Dr Robert Cohen

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Hello and welcome to episode 183. This is episode 183. Today we're talking with Dr. Robert Cohen. Dr. Cohen is a physician, an army veteran, having deployed to the Middle East. He's a scientist, a world traveler, a poverty reduction expert, and he's creator and host of the Demo Crises podcast. So that's kind of a play on democracy, right? It's democracy. And he's also a man on a mission. In his words. We are making all of the mistakes of previous civilizations, from allowing economic inequality to get out of control, to destroying our environment, to choosing very poor leadership. So he says the good news is that there is a solution in his prescription to play on the doctor side of things. One thing that has helped past societies correct mistakes in time is a functional media that explains the great challenges of the time as well as the solutions that are out there. And sadly, he believes that we don't have that right now. And he's hoping that his podcast, his getting out there and broadcasting these ideas and the need, the demand signal that's out there right now is going to help solve that. So that's his diagnosis and his prescription. So hopefully Dr. Cohen, through having a voice on our podcast, which I thought was a really, really good podcast, and you know, I didn't agree with him on everything, but he's probably a little bit more of an expert. Sometimes I just go with my gut feel and what I see and hear from all of my, you know, hundreds of clients that I meet with constantly and people that I see when I go out and I travel and meet new audiences, talk about real estate investing, talk about, you know, the more safe ways of protecting and growing capital and in cash and growing wealth for the future. I'm talking to people all the time about where they see challenges, where they think problems are. We don't agree on everything, but we agreed on most things. And I really enjoyed this conversation, found it certainly intellectually inspiring in this discussion with Dr. Robert Cohen. So I hope you enjoy it as well and many, many more podcasts coming up in rapid succession. I appreciate all of you, your patience in the short two week break we had to take here with my traveling and my business focus. But also greatly appreciate the substantial prodding that I got to get back on the horse. And some of that came from these awesome guests who have spent their time to be on the show with me. Really do appreciate your patience as well. These are coming pretty quickly now and hope you really enjoy them. There's some awesome ones coming. Thank you so much and enjoy episode 183 with Dr. Robert Cohen. Well, everyone, welcome back to Heroic Investing. And as I mentioned in the introduction and the brief biography, we have the distinct pleasure of having Dr. Rob Cohen with us. Rob is an MD, not your typical MD, seeing patients every day, but I will let Rob describe that as he gets a little bit into his background. And then we're gonna jump right into this topic because it's gonna be fantastic. So, Rob, first and foremost, thanks so much for joining us here on Heroic Investing.

Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. So can you explain to the layman like myself, what kind of doctor you are and a little bit about your military background and then what you're doing today?

So I am board certified in preventive medicine, which is its own specialty, just like pediatrics, obgyn, general surgery, or internal medicine. Did my residency in preventive medicine at Walter Reed. It basically means public health for doctors. So it's a lot of doctors see patients every day. But for issues where you have maybe an epidemic across the country, like the measles epidemic, which is currently being a real problem in a few states, or the Ebola epidemic overseas, you need clinicians that are also able to work at the public health level. And so that's what preventive medicine doctors are trained to do. And so when I deployed with the army in 2015, I worried about things like chemical and biological weapons in the Middle East. I was stationed in Kuwait. And so that's that story.

Perfect. So five years in the in the army, as you said, you're 34 today and obviously a practicing physician. So what do you do today? Like, what's your typical day or week like?

I work in international health. So right now I'm worried a lot about the Ebola epidemic in Congo. So I'll be going back to the Congo in a month to help try to finally get that outbreak under control. This is the second biggest Ebola outbreak in the world's history after the terrible 2014 outbreak in West Africa that infected 28,000 people, devastated three countries, and killed 11,000. This one is really a threat to Congo. So I Work on that. I do analyses for the US Government on our international health programs in general, because we have a lot of places around the world where we help on things like hiv, malaria, maternal and child health, and. And I contract for the US Government to do that.

Nice. And you're located out of Washington, D.C. yes. Awesome. All right. Grew up, I think, on the Northeast. Is that right? You mentioned college up in Harvard.

Yeah, Harvard undergrad. Although I grew up in San Diego, California.

Nice.

So. But that was. Nice place. But I, I'm very interested in the international problems we face. So we talk about this a lot on our podcast. You know, we're becoming a very interconnected world, and a lot of these global problems don't stay overseas. And so it's easier to focus on those when you're stationed on the east coast and the West Coast. Also, my, my military, I was stationed on the east coast at Walter Reed, as well as another base over here. And so I've become pretty much an East Coaster in mentality.

Very cool. Okay, so you've got a website. Demo Crisis. Demo Crisis.com. so, first of all, that should be a title of your book coming up here. And this is an AW, it certainly sucks you in to see exactly what it's about. And you mentioned that you've kind of broken it down into three different seasons and have finished season one. And that's what we're going to focus on. Walk us through that, if you would.

We, on the Demo Crises podcast, which you can also find at Demo crisis or demo crises.com, we are very concerned about what's happening in the world. A lot of problems are accelerating. Just for example, the global human population never crossed a billion until 1820. And then now it has skyrocketed. We hit 2 billion and I believe 1911, 3 billion in 1950, and now it's 7. And so the human population is really increasing. Our technological capacities are really increasing. And the devastation of what it's doing to our planet is just one problem. We look around the world, we see a lot of democracies that really do not seem to be up to the task of dealing with 21st century challenges. But we've also developed so many advances. There's a tension between all of our good achievements and all of the dangerous, unprecedented things we're causing to our society. And so if we want to live in a good world instead of a bad world, we have to solve the problems and maintain the good ones. And that involves not just status quo. We are, you know, as we research the first Season on the global crisis of democracy. We have found, not surprisingly, that America and the world are all making a lot of the same mistakes of previous civilizations that reached really impressive heights and then collapsed places like ancient Rome, ancient Greece, ancient Athens, medieval France, medieval England, 19th century England, Qing Dynasty and Ming dynasty China. All of these societies reached really impressive heights and thought they would be exceptional forever, and then very quickly discovered that that was not, in fact the case because they had reached beyond their, their carrying capacity. And the, the laws of exponential growth means that things, once they start to accelerate, they really accelerate. And so we are, we look at the research which has been done, which, you know, all of our researchers are working on, and we see solutions. There are solutions there. One of the podcast guests we talked to told us, you know, 90% of societies that reach this point collapse, but 10% don't. And so what's different about those 10%? And I'm sure we'll get into that.

Yeah, well, let's go there. So some of the biggest, maybe top five mistakes that we are repeating from Rome and Athens and, you know, any others?

Yeah. And so speaking of which, for the topic of your podcast. Right. So it's about investing. And so one of the big challenges is if your society goes through a decline and it really hits people's wallets and investments pretty hard, right. When, when the currency gets devalued, for example, your investments really lose their value very, very fast. And that stinks for each individual person and of course, really severely. And then of course leads to a lot of societal unrest as they kind of blame the elites who have kind of failed everybody else for this. So, so what are the mistakes that we're making? Like many others, one of our guests on which we talked to in episode two says the three big mistakes that, that we really make are letting inequality get out of control. So when inequality is out of control, the really rich people live this ridiculously opulent life and, and the poor people suffer a lot. And the rich people of course, control the government, don't pay any of the taxes, and they tax the peasants in ancient China or ancient Greece or whoever, they tax them harder and harder and harder to the point where the peasants eventually, like, they can't pay it and they revolt. For example, in 17th century China, that's when opium really took off. And you look around America at the opiate epidemic today and you see, wow, that looks pretty similar. So the first thing is really out of control inequality leading to the suffering of the lower middle class, the suffering of the lower Middle class. There's a lot of people that fit that description. And they are pretty unhappy right now. No matter what they look like, no matter where they live in the country, whether they're on the far left, the far right, no matter the color of their skin or where they came from, they're all suffering. That's consistent with what happened in a lot of these ancient societies. The second thing that he talks about is what he calls elite conflict or elite incompetence or elite overproduction. So basically, when you have a population that is getting very large, there's a limited number of elite positions. And so there's one president, for example. And so what you get is fierce competition among the super rich for the elite positions. And there are lots of examples of this. And basically what they do is they try to milk more and more money from the state for their own benefit. And that lasts for a while, and then eventually it doesn't. Right. Eventually you run out of other people's money, as Margaret Thatcher once said. And so that would be. Problem number two is, is this challenge. And we propose potential solutions for that, which we could talk about. And then the third one is the collapse of state finances. So you look at our $22 trillion debt, and it's at the highest level since World War II. And everyone says, oh, see, in World War II it was fine. But the thing is, right after World War II is a pretty unique situation. The United States was the only industrial power on Earth that was not destroyed by World War II. And every other country on Earth owed us money. And we had the demographic dividend coming back from all of Russia's. You know, Russia lost like what, 20 million men in World War II or something like that. Like, they were completely destroyed. We had the advantage of a much bigger and more productive workforce comp all these other countries. So we got out of it after World War II. But that was a very unique time. The world is not like that today. And you look at our $22 trillion debt and you really worry about that. Those are my top three. But there are others that we could also talk about, which the environmental destruction. I'll give you a fourth one. So terrible environmental destruction that we're doing to the planet. I mean, the rate of deforestation, the rate of animal extinctions is 1,000 times higher than baseline. I don't remember the exact numbers, but the typical rate of extinction of animals is like one species every thousand years or something that we're at. A species one every two years are going extinct right now. And that's also accelerating as the human population escalates and does more and more damage to the environment. And there are books about how societies have overpopulated, destroyed their environment, and then collapsed. And we're really worried about that. We need to start reversing it yesterday.

What's your method of reversing? I mean, is it the democratic one where we'll control the people and control the pregnancy and birth rates and that kind of stuff, or.

I mean, yeah, I mean, it's. It's hard. It's hard to give every solution in a short period of time. We're gonna have to. We're basically all the problems. You know, just. So I'm a physician, right? So when you've got a patient who's very sick, right, There's a lot of things that can kill the patient. You got a patient in the icu, let's say they've got cancer, but they've also got. Their clotting factors don't work anymore and their lungs don't work anymore, and their brain has kind of stopped functioning. Right. Any one of those things can kill the patient. And so a good doctor in the ICU is going to have to treat every single one and do it with the best available medicine. And it's really hard to do. So, I mean, just if you ask, how do we solve our overpopulation problem? That is a really good question and probably involves taking a hard look at a lot of our societal values, because we have this belief that we should just. Everybody should have as many kids as they want and damn the consequences. And, you know, I understand why they feel that way. The alternative seems pretty unappealing. On the other hand, there was a famous social scientist who said, the freedom to overpopulate will eventually cost us all our other freedoms. We're going to have to confront that eventually. And Americans like to not confront anything until there's kind of too late or overwhelming evidence of a problem. And I would argue that we're kind of there. And it's even worse if you go overseas. You go to a place like India, for example, which is just, you know, severely overpopulated, and they have tons of people living in poverty, millions of people living in pretty severe poverty. There's a middle class and it's growing finally. But they're trying to introduce mandatory birth control legislation, actually, because they simply cannot build the infrastructure to keep up with a population growth like this. We talked to a guest in episode 13 who pointed out Egypt in 1980 had a population of 40 million. Today, it's 91 million. That means Hosni Mubarak would have had to build enough infrastructure to deal with and jobs in a desert to deal with 50 million new poor people. That's basically impossible. And so you look at the Arab Spring, you think, how come Hosni Mubarak couldn't deal with it? I don't know how anybody could have dealt with that. And so these are really hard. Another one of these insights we realize as through all our research is societies that succeed. According to Jared diamond, who's my favorite author, a book about environmental collapse. He says those are the societies that recognize the societal values that are damaging to their own society and change them before it's too late. It's not fun to change societal values. It's really unpleasant. Actually involves sort of an identity crisis. But the alternative is pretty ugly. For example, let's take the American Civil War, right? There was a societal value about slavery. They thought slavery was good. There were a lot of people that kind of enjoyed that situation, yet it was untenable. And they had to change that societal value to preserve their society. And ultimately they did, but in between, they didn't do it easily. And it cost a Civil War of 800,000 dead and a pretty terrible legacy. So ideally, an intelligent civilization recognize these problems and change before a lot of these tragedies or see what's right and just do it. Abolish slavery without needing to have a civil war over it. But unfortunately, humanity. Humanity doesn't always do that. And that's what we call the global crisis of demoralization.

Well, I completely agree with you that we can change values without imposing one person's values on another. I mean, the other side of the Civil War was that there were people who didn't necessarily like enslaving other people, but they did like to retain the goods and services that they had provided rather than give them to the north, which was really what was happening to them. I mean, I didn't come from the south, but it wasn't just about imposing white will on black. I mean, I think you would agree with that.

Oh, yeah. I mean, the south had a way of life and the north had a different, totally different business model. Instead of agriculture, it was industrialization.

But what about, like, developing societies and the trends that happen there with respect to population? Like the US Population, you know, is leveling and could go down if we. If we didn't have a lot of immigration. Right. So, I mean, a lot of our population goes up, but a lot of it's happening from people who are first generation Americans or not legal Americans. Population in Japan going down, if I understand the demographics correctly, and China has, with their one child policy that they've gotten rid of, could have caused that, may still cause that in a population that has been rapidly rising. And one of the philosophies I've read there is that, you know, the quickest way to control populations is clean water and good food and, you know, having, having the ability to not, you know, other options, not, not have to produce so many kids, have, you know, have a goal for a future for your children. I mean, one of the reasons why most people in America have fewer kids is because they want to be able to send them all to college and do all this stuff. And it costs too much to do that. So we make a conscious decision not to. Is that, is there any validation there based on what kind of what you've looked at?

Yeah, everything you said is correct. Demography is complicated. If population goes up too fast, that's a problem. But if population birth rates drop precipitously and you suddenly have a very old country, and then the only way to sustain population is to bring in other people that have a different culture and that happens fast, that's a different demographic problem, which is still a problem which we are also experiencing in many ways in a lot of the West. And so why are we doing it? So that we have found that the age at first marriage and the age at first birth in the United States is increasing. And there are social scientists who say that that's the sign of a pessimistic society. Because if you get married young, as they did after World War II, you're optimistic, you're getting married young, you're having kids young, everything looks great. But if you're worried that the next few years are going to bring a financial collapse and major political unrest, you might wait to have kids, you might wait to make that commitment. And we're seeing that. And so this gets back to the problem. It's really a symptom of our societal afflictions in general. What would be really nice is if life wasn't quite so hard and people were able to sort of live a balanced life where they're able to have a reasonably sized family, have a job where to get ahead doesn't require working really hard. So basically, you know, the birth rates in America are really also and Europe, there's significant separation. The hard working middle class really is postponing having kids. But the more economically challenged people in the country have lots of Children. So the birth rates in poor communities is actually rather high. And they don't have a lot of optimism for the future, which it would be much better if we gave those people more optimism and we made the burden on sort of the middle class a little bit easier. Winfrey, let's talk about maternity leave, right? It's not set up well in America right now for middle class women to hold down a job, go have a baby and be able to come back into the workforce. And that means a lot of people's wives. If you want a wife who's a career woman, she often has to go breastfeed in the bathroom at work. Like, do you really, you know, nobody wants that. It's really, it's really hard. And we need to find a way to, you know, I realize economics, you want to find a way to make everybody as productive as possible. But, you know, these are big challenges in our society that are leading to all this general angst and suffering that we're feeling. They're all sort of one straw after another from all these different problems, and we really have to find a way to solve of them.

Do you think that technology that, you know, holding people accountable socially will have a continued positive impact? Like my example is North Korea, right? So North Korea people are probably not as aware, maybe many places in Africa similar, because they don't have access to, you know, the Internet, they don't have access to communications as well. They are able to be lied to or they're able to have a distorted reality. But if you have the capability, the means and the health to have access to things like that, it's more difficult to be lied to on a global scale. Like, I have trouble personally believing that North Korea today will ever go back to where North Korea was even 10 years ago, or that concentration camps could happen again in secrecy. What are your thoughts there?

I never want to say. Never. You know, that's the thing about these previous societies. They looked good, everything, life was good in China in the 1700s. They thought they were the peak civilization on earth. And yet the problems got really bad. And maybe, you know, maybe there wouldn't be concentration camps. But what happened in that case is China thought it would be the most dominant power on Earth and they dismissed Japan and Britain as trifling irritations. And then once China crumbled from within, Britain showed up, dominated them in the first and Second Opium War, and, you know, basically subjugated China, caused untold misery, multiple rebellions. Lots of their population declined from all this, all the famine and the civil war. And 100 years later, Japan invades it and commits unspeakable atrocities. So, you know, ancient Rome thought was a glorious civilization for a thousand years, and yet they made all the mistakes and they solved a lot of problems. Initially, there was a very fascinating study. One historian, 210 Proposed Reasons for the fall of Rome. Everything from malaria to barbarians to public baths to feminization, to, like, literally everything you can come up with. And most of those are probably wrong. The lesson is that complex societies do solve many problems, but as exponential growth happens, not just population, but exponential growth of all the problems, eventually those lines cross and the problems accelerate faster than the human ability to adapt. And a lot of other authors are saying that right now, including in Tom Friedman's recent book. And so when these problems get out of control, like, what happens when the overfishing that we're doing to the oceans causes all the fish to basically not be able to support our even larger population? So many people depend on fish for protein. When that food source suddenly dries up at 10, 15, 20 years, like, what the heck is going to happen? Like when, let's say climate change gets a little bit worse and all these droughts that we're seeing in the Midwest that are affecting our food production suddenly become a larger problem. Or maybe these immigration crises. We say there's no, you know, can't imagine concentration camp. There is this crisis happening on the border with kids at least being separated from their parents for a political issue. I don't really want to get into the current president very much, but there are, there are things that are happening right now that look pretty ugly. There are human rights abuses in many places. And as life gets harder, eventually something has to give. And humanity has shown before that even though we said it couldn't have happened, our concern is, well, it could if we don't act intelligently.

I wouldn't go so far as to be naive and say that it can't happen. And I acknowledge that. For example, let's take Uber, right? So you're riding on Uber, and now there's a social accountability that goes both ways. So, I mean, you can be rude to your Uber driver or he could be rude to you. But it was, you know, first generation was that the Uber driver can't be rude or he won't get any more rides, right? Taxi drivers used to be ridiculously rude and used to steal from people, especially in foreign countries. And that just doesn't happen anymore because they're held socially accountable. And so that might be Getting a little Pollyannish there. But I will say that once you get hungry or you feel like you're threatened, then stealing the Uber car and beating him up and getting rid of him, all that stuff is probably back on the table. Social accountability doesn't matter so much when you're fighting for survival. I will acknowledge that. I just believe that knowledge is a Pandora's box, that it's hard to put the lid back on. And at least that's my optimistic view, that when you spread all of the world's knowledge across the globe, really hard to put it back in the box.

Yeah. The way I like to frame it is we're in a race between our better angels and our worst angels. We have both. That's very obvious. And, you know, the way I like to frame it is if I asked you, Gary, what is the percent chance that our society is doomed? You would say, well, you know, is it 100% chance? You would say, absolutely not. We've solved big problems before. But if I asked you, you know, is the chance that we're doomed 0%? You would have to say no, because the history looks pretty bad, which means the chance of a big societal tragedy is between 0 and 100%, which means it's possible, but it depends on what we do. And so that means it's up to us. Like we are characters in a movie whose ending is not written. And that's kind of exciting for me. But it could end really badly, or it could end sort of gloriously. And actually another episode on our podcast. So there's. There's this concept in astronomy called a type 1 civilization. Can I talk about that for a minute, please? So a type 1 civilization was put forward by an astronomer in the 60s. Basically this concept of we look out at the world and we say, you know, it's an infinite universe. There are billions of planets, approximately the right distance from their stars as Earth is, where we should find intelligent life. Yet we have found no evidence of any intelligent life. And so there was a famous physicist who puts forward something called the Fermi Paradox. He said, in an infinite universe of infinite, you know, billions of planets just at the right place, why have we found no evidence of intelligence life? And his. These are one of the feces. These. Well, it's the nature of intelligent life to destroy ourselves. So the goal of these planetary civilizations would be to develop a civilization in which they harness enough technology to harness enough energy for the parent star to achieve sustainability on their planet so that they can live long enough to act productively in. In the Galaxy. And I know that sounds very science fictiony, but there's a recent book written about this by an astronomer named Adam Frank that one could look at. Michio Kaku, famous physicist, talks about this in his book as well. So just prom trust me that it's not totally SC fiction. But the point is, we are a type 0 civilization. We get our energy from the ground, and in doing so, we're sort of slowly destroying the planet. And so what we have to do is make the transition from a type 0 civilization that burns fuels from the ground to become a type 1 civilization that harnesses energy from the sun. Tom Friedman calls that a transition from burning fuels from hell to fuels from heaven, which is a nice metaphor. And if we can do that, then we can build this great civilization on Earth instead of fulfilling the Fermi paradox, showing that it is the nature of intelligent life to destroy ourselves.

That's fascinating. I think you referenced a book there. Did you, other than Freeman's or so.

So, first of all, we could learn about this on episode 12 of season one of the demo Crises podcast, which we recently released. But the books relevant in this case are Michio Kaku, famous physicist, wrote a book called Physics of the Future. There's a guy named Adam Frank who wrote a book called I think it's the Light of the Star that's just out about a couple months ago. And both of them talk about type one civilization.

Very cool. All right, I'm going there, but. And we're running out of time, but we can't leave until you tell me how Teddy Roosevelt solved all of the problems that we currently face.

What I'd like to do is tease it a little bit. I'll give a little bit, but yes. So that's our favorite episode from season one, episode seven. So basically, Teddy Roosevelt, his own party, didn't even want him to be President because he was such a good guy that they didn't want him to come in and break their stranglehold on the public dollars. And so they tried to bury him in the vice presidency. That was the one place they couldn't do. Teddy Roosevelt couldn't do any damage to the entrenched corruption that was in both parties, Democrats and the SO. And then William McKinley got shot at the Buffalo Pan American expedition by an anarchist, a random event in history, and suddenly this guy, Teddy Roosevelt, gets ushered into the presidency, and he faces a country that is falling apart at the seams. Rising economic inequality. We talked about that earlier. Due to massive technological change, robber barons that controlled 90% of their industry. Vicious partisan hatred between Republicans, Democrats over pretty much every issue you can come up with, including race, but also labor versus capital. Partisan media that was totally full of lies on all sides. And Teddy Roosevelt takes this challenging situation and solves it. He launched the American century. He took a society that was really in decline. If you look at a lot of numbers and actually the age at first marriage. That was one mentioned thing I mentioned earlier. If you look at the data on that from one of our podcast guests, that started to go finally down again in 1900, right after Teddy Roosevelt comes in and solves everything. And so what I will simply say is, is it was not just about him. There was a secret ingredient that was also present then, that is not present now. And our solution is that that is the thing that we have to change. And you and I and all of us have actually some control over that secret ingredient. And if you push me on it, I'll tell you what it is. But I'm trying to tease it.

That's quite all right, well, everybody just go to democrises.com podcast in there you can learn more about Rob and his initiatives and all of the incredible research that has been going on here to support this. Season one is behind them. They're heading on to season two, and then three will follow. But it's episode seven, so jump out there. It's called Of Mavericks and Muckraker, so go find it. And I think teasing was perfect. Thanks so much, Rob. Any last parting thoughts there before we close this up?

Yeah, my last parting thoughts are in this movie with its unwritten ending. Another thing we've really shown is that actually every human being can play a much bigger role than they think they can. So we all actually have a role in this drama that's unfolding in front of us. And we can either be part of the problem, the solution, or just somebody sort of watching it happen and not contributing. And I encourage all of us to really think about where are our unique talents and how can we apply them to this goal of building a type 1 civilization and avoiding civilizational collapse.

Fantastic. That's awesome. Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Rob. That was beautiful. Falls right in line with my vision to help others put in place maybe not quite as exciting, but some passive income, whether it's real estate or otherwise, so that they can get back that one valuable thing, which is their time, until they can provide that unique genius to the rest of us. So that's really my secret formula, I guess, or my goal I concur with that is a better way. Well, thanks so much Dr. Cohen and and everyone run over to his website, you know, to find out much more. I think you're going to get pretty excited about what you see. Rob. Really appreciate you giving 30 minutes to me and to this awesome audience.

Thanks Gary.

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