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This episode was proudly made possible by Subaru.
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You know, a lot of people lose sleep every night
because they think the world is going to hell
and that things are getting worse.
And we have a mass media that operates under the principles--
if it bleeds, it leads.
And you can understand why that is the case.
I mean, we have inherited an amygdala in our brain
which is the part of the brain that's
responsible for triggering an alarm during moment in which we
have to flee or neutralize a perceived threat.
This has been biologically selected
for because it has helped us survive over time.
So you can understand why we are glued to the TV screen
through the most negative news and creating
a sort of self-amplifying feedback
loop of doom and gloom.
But again, my friends, look a little bit closer.
Peek behind the curtain.
And what you actually find is a lot more reassuring.
According to the work of Steven Pinker, who
wrote the book, "The Better Angels of our Demons,"
and has a viral TED Talk called, The Myth of Violence, the world
has actually been getting better for hundreds of years.
Today-- according to Pinker-- the chances
of a man dying at the hands of another man on a global scale
are the lowest than they've ever been in the history of mankind.
Listen to that again.
The chances of a man dying at the hands of another man
are the lowest that they've ever been.
Hans Rosling, a statistician and data visualizer,
has gone viral with a series of talks-- including a TED
Talk-- in which he maps every nation on earth
by every measurable indicator of quality of life
and shows that every nation is improving.
Even the ones on the very bottom are
doing better than they used to be.
So again, when seen as a whole, you
see the man-machine civilization increasingly leveraging
its tools to address the grand problems of humanity.
I mean, there was an article recently
in The New York Times that said that the most extreme form
of poverty around the world is actually almost eliminated.
I mean, I would have never known.
This was in The New York Times.
It's unbelievable.
Or a 2010 United Nations Development essay
cited by Bill Clinton and Time Magazine
in an article titled, "A Case for Optimism,,"
in which he says-- forget about the info-haves
and the info-nots.
And he cited the cell phone as the greatest invention
in history to pull people out of poverty.
So again, these are just the numerous amount of examples.
There's infinitely more.
But the world is on the right track.
It's not utopia, as Steven Johnson would say,
but it's leaning that way.
And I'm not just saying that because I'm an optimist.
These are data-driven facts.
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Be sure to check out SecondChance Subaru
at revision3.com/subaru.
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