Steven Pinker | On Progress, Challenges, and Future Visions

[00:00:00] Beatrice: Welcome to another episode of the Existential Hope podcast, where we explore visionary ideas and talk to the people shaping humanity's future through science, philosophy, and innovation. I'm your host, Beatrice Erkers, and I co host this podcast along with my colleague Allison Duettmann, and today we're very honored to be joined by a distinguished guest: Steven Pinker. Steven is a cognitive psychologist, linguist, and one of the world's leading public intellectuals. He's a professor at Harvard University and the author of numerous best selling books, including Enlightenment Now, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and How the Mind Works. His work has really been instrumental in championing the role of reason, science, and humanism in driving progress and addressing some of the world's most pressing challenges.

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So in this episode, we had a really great conversation with Steven. We spoke about if there were any updates, for example, since he wrote his book Enlightenment Now, what he thinks are the most exciting things that he sees in terms of progress right now, or what progress that could be made and his vision for how we can continue advancing towards a more brighter and hopeful future.

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For a full transcript of today's episode, recommended resources and other exclusive content, please visit existentialhope.com. And don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter to stay informed on our latest episodes and community updates. Now let's welcome Steven Pinker to the Existential Hope Podcast.

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[00:01:20] Allison: Welcome to Foresight's Existential Hope podcast. And we couldn't be more delighted than having Steve Pinker here today, who I think is really, the face of much of, the movement that really cares about progress and cares about how far we've come as a civilization, and possibly also how much further we can go.

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I've personally found myself quoting your work more times than I can count over the years. And I think there's very few people that have such breadth, and depth in terms of the research that they're producing. You've done a tremendous service, I think, to different fields.

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So perhaps we'll start somewhere. I recently had the chance of seeing you speak at the Roots of Progress Institute conference that we co hosted, in Berkeley. And what you've done there is give this really fantastic talk on checking back in on some of the claims that you've made throughout your research on where have we actually made progress as civilization versus where perhaps have we fallen a little bit behind in the past few years, or where are we still on roughly the same power?

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So do you perhaps want to take us on a little bit of a journey of just checking in on, yeah, how are we doing as a civilization, especially in the past few years, compared to perhaps how you have evaluated our progress before. 

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[00:02:29] Steven: Yes. So I do try to keep up with the indicators of human progress. And As I've emphasized in both of my books on progress, Enlightenment Now and The Better Angels of Our Nature, there isn't some mysterious force that's just guaranteed to make things better and better.

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That's not the way the universe works. In fact, quite the contrary, the universe tries to grind us down. And if we've made progress, it's because of human efforts and always pushing back against a number of forces that really, I don't want to say nature has it in for us, because that would be, not accurate, but nature doesn't care about us, and there are a lot of ways that things can go wrong, so we don't really have any, reasonable expectation that everything will just keep getting better by itself, and not everything does, of the things that have gotten worse since, I published Better Angels of Our Nature, the rate of death in war, has, climbed somewhat.

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Not necessarily for the reasons that people think because, everyone, their eyes are focused on Gaza, but far more people were killed in Ethiopia, in Sudan. A lot of people were killed in Ukraine. But that means that there has been an uptick. Taking us really back to the early 1990s, still better than the world was in the 80s, to say nothing of the world wars.

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But that's an area in which we've moved backwards a bit. Although wars don't kill that many people compared to things like pandemics. Although interestingly, the world has recovered from most of them. Economic growth has resumed. Increases in life expectancy have resumed, decreases in extreme poverty have resumed.

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So the world has achieved 2024 record levels in terms of how long people live. How many are literate, how many have some education and how many are not poor. Some other areas in which the world has continued progress that again, most people are unaware of is that homicide rates globally continue to go down.

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Suicide rates go down. As with a lot of these. Data, it does not apply to everyone, everywhere, and there's some demographics where things have gotten worse regarding suicide, for example, but overall the world has seen a rather significant decrease in the rate of suicides. There's been a lot of talk about a democratic recession, that is the world Becoming a little less democratic than it was, and that is a real phenomenon, that indexes democracy, the world is a little less democratic than it was, say, 15 or 20 years ago.

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Still close to its historic high, but there the movement has been in the wrong direction. We're back at the level of, say, the early 2000s. Which is again, way better than we were when I grew up in the 60s and the 70s, the world only had maybe 30 or 35 democracies. Now depending on how you count, more countries are democratic than autocratic in 193 in the world system.

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Women's rights are still close to an all time high, both in the United States and globally. Although there has been some backtracking in the last five years or so a lot of those curves for democracy and women's rights, there was a peak we're down, a little bit, but still way better than we used to be.

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So that's my summary of the state of the world. 

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[00:05:52] Allison: So you think that we're still pretty much on track, more or less. 

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[00:05:56] Steven: In understanding any of these trends, it's important to keep in mind that they're not just laws of nature, either up or down, but they have particular causes. And so in answering your question, are we on the right track depending on which way the forces are going.

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In the case of war, for example, there is reason for concern that some of the. Contributors to the decline of war are threatened, such as the international community, international organizations, where Britain pulled out of the European Union, Trump has pulled out of the World Health Organization, and is threatening to pull out many more.

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Global trade is considered. by many scholars to be a pacifying force, that as countries trade with each other, they're less likely to go to war because you don't kill your customers. If it's cheaper to buy stuff than to steal it and that will lose the incentive to steal it. And there have been clamp downs on trade in the form of tariffs that president Trump is proposing together with the sanctions on Russia, which were in response to its invasion of Ukraine, but which have lowered the threat to lower the global volume of trade.

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And, in the case of democracy, not unrelated to war, just the fact that democracy is not as cool as it used to be, isn't seen by as much of the world as the wave of the future. What's so bad about an autocrat who, a strong man who rules the country efficiently. As it happens, strong men don't rule countries particularly efficiently, but there's sometimes that perception.

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And to the extent that there is, that could push back against democracy. So it's complicated. at different points in history, one set of forces might be stronger than the other. Overall, there has been and continues to be progress, but at any given time there will be challenges and there are some today.

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[00:07:50] Allison: Yeah, I guess we've also speculated in that talk that you gave at the end of it, at least on like, why really is it that? our knowledge of the fact that progress is increasing as a society or a civilization isn't really quite up to speed with the fact that it is getting better each time.

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And you've talked about it at length in your books, basically, like various different psychological factors or cognitive biases, that might really prevent us from seeing that things are getting as good as they are. For example, there's one outline of our ability to read a note.

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Things that are out of the ordinary, where perhaps progress just occurring on a general rate is boring. And so I'm curious if you think that has changed in the past few years, basically, since you have done some of that work of enlightening people around it. And since there are things like the progress movement, et cetera, flourishing now.

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Do you think our perception of progress has become a little bit more accurate? 

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[00:08:42] Steven: You do get, I think, more commentators saying things like, before you get too nostalgic, don't forget rates of poverty or what it was like to have dentistry and surgery without anesthesia and mothers dying in childbirth.

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There's still a, I think, a pretty strong journalistic culture that Both deliberately and accidentally tends to hide progress. The accidental part comes from the fact that news is about things that happen, not things that don't happen. And a lot of good things are things that don't happen. A country that isn't at war, a city that doesn't get attacked by terrorists, a country that is not experiencing a famine, and those are never news.

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One of the things that built up a few percentage points a year, and that people tend to ignore as they're happening, but could transform the world as they compound, like the decline of extreme poverty, the rise in life expectancy. Then there are, when there's a journalistic habit of reporting news, you can have people who are systematically misinformed, actually get things backwards.

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And I actually, I have to admit that I was the victim of that myself before I went back to the data after working on other projects for a number of years, and I wanted to update my understanding. I was a little pessimistic because I would read stories of deaths in car crashes increased, wiping out all the progress that I plotted in a graph, or the, in the United States, the so called deaths of despair among middle aged old white men turning to drugs and alcohol and sometimes suicide, the democratic recession.

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But then I realized when I went to the graphs that a lot of these turned out to be blips, that if you, I draw it out the thought experiment. Imagine that you have something that, let's see, which way is my finger going? So I'm going up like this. Imagine A curve of progress that looks like that.

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Goes up a little bit, down, up a little bit, down, up a little bit, down, and so on. 

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[00:10:41] Allison: Can piece it together. 

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[00:10:42] Steven: Okay. But imagine every time there is a backsliding or a downtick, that's news. The preceding 10 years in which it got better, last time, same as last year, same as last year, same as the year before, then all of a sudden, oh my God, for the first time in 10 years, car crash deaths have increased.

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That's the only time you read about car crash deaths. Let's say it goes for another 10 years and it keeps going, it gets better and better. And then another year reverses and that makes the news because it's unlike all the preceding years. So 100 percent of the stories that you read are about things getting worse.

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even though they only comprise 10 percent of the trend and 10 percent selected to be as negative as possible. So as a result, people who read the news, can come away with the opposite impression. Another factor is that on top of the built in statistical biases, news is actually a deliberate attitude among many journalists that, as one journalist put it, bad news is journalism.

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Good news is advertising. Good news, it's human interest fluff. It's cop buys groceries for a single mom or puppy befriends an orangutan. It's not serious. Or that it's just corporate and government propaganda. It's like the Soviet Union where they released their five year plans. Production of pig iron is higher than it was last year.

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You don't want to take seriously the good news because it's, we're, we journalists are here to challenge power and that's power defending itself. So on top of it, if you take the statistical biases, you add the deliberate negativity bias. And the third thing that you have is just, we all have a negativity bias.

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It is a finding in psychology that bad is more powerful than good. We have a gruesome fascination with things that go wrong. And that of course feeds what journalists deliver to us. Our sources of information really are biased against seeing progress when it occurs.

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Graphs that show progress over time, like our world in data, the ones I reproduce, I think are an antidote. And I confess that even I, when I follow the news too much and don't keep going back to graphs, can get the wrong impression. 

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[00:13:00] Allison: And supposedly you have somewhat of a motivation behind actually laying out the facts and laying out the graphs and showing us where progress occurred.

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Do you think that there's something that we could be doing better if we just had a more accurate assessment of historical progress? One, it's good to be calibrated on how the world actually is. But then also perhaps looking ahead, do you think that perhaps by showing that in the past we've had challenges that we were able to overcome, we're more likely that through cooperation, innovation, et cetera, we can actually have a more positive outlook on the future?

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And is any type of that motivation in there? We just had Ada Palmer on. for our last podcast episode. And she's a sci-fi author, including many other headsets she's wearing. And she basically said that it's, yeah, we might have to save the world a few times in the future, but that's okay because we've done it a few times in the past.

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So I think looking into the past can be somewhat inspirational for also looking ahead. And I wonder if that's at all your motivation or what drove you to tell us that it's actually not as bad as we think. 

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[00:13:55] Steven: I think that's a very powerful point and it speaks to the criticism that you sometimes hear about reporting positive developments that will lull people into complacency.

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They'll say, Oh, we just have to relax and sit back and things will just get better. Which, as we said at the beginning of this conversation, that's just not how progress works. It's clawed out of an indifferent universe. And I tend to think that knowledge about what has worked in the past, what continues to work is necessary to get people to be committed to the ideal of progress.

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The fact that in the United States, poverty has gone down, contrary to people's impressions, both on the left and the right, pollution has gone down with the exception of carbon emissions. That globally suicide has gone down. When people realize this, they realize, Hey, it's not futile. It's not, we don't have to accept things just getting worse and worse.

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Human efforts can make a difference in the United States. The reduction of poverty came partly just because of economic growth, but partly because there are. Programs of redistribution, like the earned income tax credit, social security for and Medicare for older people that really have reduced the rate of poverty.

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There was a quip that Ronald Reagan is associated with it. Sometime ago, the government declared war on poverty. Now it's a good line, but it's false. Poverty rates have gone down and it turns out that you would think that people, especially liberals and progressives, people on the left would.

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Welcome this, the great society and social safety net and redistribution. Look, they have worked. We have fewer poor people than we used to. People on the left, I have found, are resistant to it, pointing that out. It gets in the way of general attack and critique of the entire establishment, all of capitalism, of markets, of institutions, of corporations, of the idea that everything.

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You have to be negative about everything sometimes supersedes the imperative to show that social reform actually works and that programs that are often reviled by conservatives and reactionaries actually do work. And I think progressives should own them. Another example is regulation. And I guess I myself had a kind of libertarian skepticism of the nanny state and of excess rules and regulations, and they can be excessive.

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But if you look at what they were designed to help with, deaths on the job from occupational accidents, deaths from fires, car crash deaths, plane crash deaths, all of them have come way down, thanks in part to regulation. but very few people know that they think of regulation as just bureaucrats trying to boss people around and indeed regulation can be intrusive, can be expensive, can be unnecessary.

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But if you're totally ignorant of the fact that regulation actually has brought about some benefits. So that's why I do think that the left has fallen down on the job. So eager to demonize the establishment that they have left themselves defenseless, naked against the conservative attack, that this is all just a waste of money and an infringement on our freedom.

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[00:17:15] Allison: Yeah. It's interesting because You might have fatalism towards the future by thinking that everything is going downhill, but we definitely also want to avoid the fatalism of just, oh, everything's improving. But I think, as you pointed out, it's not a law of nature.

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And I think to some extent it's interesting because there are things like the scaling laws, for example, for AI progress, and they're also not a law of nature. but because people believe in them to some extent, they become a self fulfilling prophecy by people working and progressing along as if they were true and making more progress and are to some extent fulfilling them in that regard.

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So I do hope that by realizing that progress is in the cards as a civilization, we can possibly like hang on to that and like really work towards that in more deliberate ways. 

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[00:17:55] Steven: We've been trying to make the world a better place for 60 years.

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We've gotten you to accept all these regulations and all these policies, but everything is worse than ever. And let's do more of it. People are going to say, geez, if it keeps failing, why should we, why bother? Why don't we just enjoy ourselves? 

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[00:18:13] Allison: Yeah, I agree. If you just think about the factors, because you're really good at also pointing out specific factors.

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So for example, like something as perhaps as I can only describe it as Henry is like reason and science, for example, and you wrote an entire book on rationality and you really go deep into the factors that might contribute to innovation and human progress. If you think about extrapolating from there, and maybe towards the future, do you think it will be the same factors that are going to be important and continue having progress to be continued.

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So for example, one could think that yes, with AI development, biotech, and basically just us applying our skills to improve technological development. We are on a pretty good trajectory. Other people are worried that we might also usher in existential risks that are man made through the tools of reason and science.

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[00:19:00] Steven: So I'm really curious just on what your perception is. What are the factors that will impact on whether progress will go well or not well in the future? Are those the same that you pointed to? And if so, are there specific new challenges that we need to look to overcome? Some will, and I would say must, like the reason is you're non negotiable.

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If you're having this conversation or any conversation, you're doing it according to rules of reason and rationality. If someone disagrees, you can say, is that argument rational? And if it's not, I don't have to take it seriously. If it is, you've just conceded that we have to apply rationality to everything.

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[00:19:36] Allison: I could say it doesn't feel good. 

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[00:19:38] Steven: Yeah. The science is. To understanding how the world works is a prerequisite when we can't develop vaccines without knowing something about the immune system and about molecular biology, there is now the, you really do have to take seriously the possibility that together with incremental progress, there is an increased risk of catastrophic events, most obviously in the case of nuclear war, because that's what nuclear bombs are designed to do.

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They're designed to blow things up. So if there are enough of them to blow up civilization, then that's a possibility that we've got to try to, take into account, minimize. Some of them I think are entirely hypothetical and indeed quite fanciful. The idea of, I think, I, doomerism. I know that I'm somewhat out of step with a lot of people in the rationality community, but I actually do think that this is almost entirely fanciful.

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The idea that I will turn us into raw materials because we, if we give it the task of manufacturing something, it'll be too stupid to realize we didn't mean, but yeah, use our bodies as raw materials. It's giving an AI the task of curing cancer. And so it conscripts all of humanity as. guinea pigs and fatal experiments, because that's one way to cure cancer.

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[00:20:54] Allison: There's definitely new scenarios that have been added, or at least there's a diversified portfolio of scenarios I think that people are worried about in that regard. But I think one thing that, you know, what we could just hope for is that as we encounter challenges, we need to cooperate better to apply the collective super intelligence of civilization to the problem of figuring out how to swarm around them and create better solutions.

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I believe that to some extent showing people positive worlds and showing people also like positive concrete progress that might be possible within five to 10 years or something might be a useful, instigator to encourage them.

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Without being too utopian or like too specific and goal directed in that regard, but I think really enabling people to draw out and color in positive worlds. And so you wrote a fantastic book, The Sense of Style, and you are, I think, one of the more eloquent people out there that is able to package really complex ideas in really good memetic packages.

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And so I'm really curious if you were to give advice to folks that were trying to inspire people that good books are possible based on the various recommendations that you made in The Sense of Style, what would you say to them? 

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[00:22:00] Steven: There's several, one of them is just how to avoid The obvious pitfalls of academia and bureaucracies, legalese, technobabble.

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And that is to try to empathize with your reader, realize your reader doesn't know what you know. Something that's difficult for us to accomplish is called the curse of knowledge, the fact that we have a lot of trouble imagining what it's like for someone. Not knowing what we know is the biggest obstacle to clear communication, whether it be in writing, in podcasting, in teaching, being vivid, having examples, realizing that language is not the same thing as thinking.

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Language is a medium of communication. Ultimately, you want to get your audience to see things in their own mind's eye to be able to visualize things. And so you've got to give them concrete images, not talk in abstractions. More crucial thing to be mindful of is tribalism, polarization, that is people will, you give people the exact same policy and you say, it comes from your favorite person, let's say they're on the left or your favorite person, let's say they're on the right.

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Or it comes from the person you hate on the right or the person you hate on the left. People totally flip. It doesn't matter what the policy is. If it comes from the people they like, they'll support it. If it comes to the people they don't like, they'll oppose it. So be mindful of the pitfalls of gratuitous politicization and polarization.

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When it comes to things like AI. I think there's been a major failing in reminding people of the ways it could benefit humanity. ChatGPT burst on the scene and it was great to fake, send, and submit fake term papers. But what about all the positive uses? could a person of limited means not have to spend thousands of dollars to hire a lawyer to draft a will if you can get a will from the GPT or artificial intelligence?

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Could a doctor who couldn't possibly? read an entire literature on a particular syndrome, have, and use AI to come up with a synthesis of a huge vast literature. Could we have. Robots that could allow elderly people to stay in their homes, could pick them up when they fall, could put them onto a toilet and then preserve their dignity, change a diaper in a baby so that having a child is not as onerous as it used to be.

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The positive visions of what AI can do have been sidelined by gimmicks. The people who are proponents of technology, the techno optimists, I think have to think harder as to how to, you can't just tell people, it's got to actually be a reality, how the technology could be deployed to make people better off as opposed to being just gimmicks or threats.

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[00:24:56] Beatrice: I think that's the perfect time for me to jump in. So yeah, I think that the theme of this podcast is existential hope, obviously. And we are literally trying to do that, but we're trying to show positive use cases, not ignoring the challenges that come with the different technologies, but definitely trying to show also how they could be useful.

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So I guess on that note, it would be really interesting to hear, do you have any, if you had to say what is your, what is Steven Pinker's favorite existential hope vision of the future? Do you, what is yours, what are your hopes for the future? What would be a great future for humanity?

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[00:25:34] Steven: Okay, I'll give a few things. One of them would be, I don't think as a teenager in the 70s and the 60s and there's folk singers talking about putting an end to war. There are barbaric human institutions that have been abolished and more or less stayed abolished.

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Legalized chattel slavery, gruesome torture and mutilation as a form of criminal punishment, human sacrifice, debtor's prisons. A lot of capital punishment itself is being abolished in country after country. Taking out a family, a laugh at the insane on a Sunday afternoon at a mental institution. Changes are possible, and I think that eliminating war between countries It's not a romantic utopia. I think it could be abolished in the same way that legalized slavery was abolished.

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So I think further reductions in extreme poverty, especially in Africa, where extreme poverty is concentrated, what happened in South Korea, what happened in China, what happened in large parts of India could be happening in much more of the world. The World Bank had the slogan, eliminating extreme poverty everywhere.

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Again, this may seem hypocritical or insincere or public relations, but I don't think it's an infeasible goal for South Korea to do it. Why can't all countries do it? And certainly in the forms of causes of premature death. The pancreatic cancer that kills someone in their forties or fifties or childhood cancers.

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I think we have every reason to think that could be, if not eliminated, drastically reduced. Neurodegenerative diseases, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Difficult problems, I don't think there's any reason to think they're going to be permanently with us. Forms of dangerous, boring, repetitive work, making beds, dropping shelves, those could be taken over by robots and no one would miss those jobs.

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Better medical diagnostics, I can't possibly hope that my doctor will process my genome, my other metabolomics, my proteome. My medical history and the vast and contradictory medical literature and whatever problem I present with, that's something where artificial intelligence really could supplement or augment human intelligence.

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Those are some examples. I'll mention one other, which might be the most important. And that is abundant, clean, affordable energy. That's probably at the root of everything. I think there's reason to think that there are solutions, whether it be in the form of new forms of battery storage or small modular and micro nuclear reactors that would, a lot of countries could get a lot richer, a lot of environmental problems could be solved if we had technologies that gave us abundant clean energy. 

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[00:28:36] Beatrice: That's a long list and the list goes on. So that's really great to hear. 

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[00:28:41] Steven: The democracy has had a huge increase until its recent plateau. But it's not inconceivable that more and more of the world could become democratic.

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It's not guaranteed. Women's rights, a lot of countries have achieved equality, at least in law. A lot of countries have not. There's no reason that they couldn't. Gay rights could certainly become universal. 

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[00:29:04] Beatrice: Yeah. What do you think, because we have, there are all these things that are really exciting, but how would you say, what's the best way for someone young who may not know where to even start, but what would be your advice?

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How do they engage in trying to help make this become real? Do you have any advice on that? 

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[00:29:23] Steven: So yeah, a lot depends on the, of course, on the person, on their talents, not everyone's going to become an engineer and work on, abundant clean energy, but there are many other niches just spreading the word through persuasion, through public relations.

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Working with organizations and institutions, including political organizations, political parties that are dedicated to positive change and progress, as opposed to just attacking the opposition. There is an organization, called 80,000 hours trying to mobilize career planning and effort for constructive projects, constructive efforts.

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[00:30:06] Beatrice: Yeah. 

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[00:30:06] Steven: Actually, Instructional Occupations, I should say, to be more specific. This is just volunteer work, but what line of work do you go into, or if you actually want to make a positive contribution? 

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[00:30:18] Beatrice: Trying to figure out your strength and like the path forward and in that sense, what suits you.

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[00:30:25] Steven: Yeah. It has to be that because you can't necessarily make a random poetry major into a nuclear engineer. 

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[00:30:33] Beatrice: Maybe with neurotech soon we can, fingers crossed. I'll just ask you a few, I know you have to leave, so Yeah. 

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Is there anything that you like, when you sit down and read or a movie you saw or something that you would recommend for our listeners. It could be fiction or nonfiction.

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[00:30:54] Steven: Oh, and in terms of human progress? 

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In regards to human progress, I think it's a great one. I read a book by Stuart Brand, who to my generation was a hero of the green Movement, he wrote the whole earth catalog, the worldwide web before there was a worldwide web, it was this big paper catalog and he made technology cool to a generation that for which technology was the enemy, technology was napalm and gasoline engines.

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But Stuart, so in a way he laid the seeds for Silicon Valley becoming a place that was cool and not just for nerds by merging hip counterculture with tech technology. Anyway, here we have a book called Full Earth Discipline, it may have a different title in the United Kingdom, but it's a vision for environmentalism.

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That takes us away from the orthodox green movement, which tends to be, somewhat, misanthropic. It treats human beings as some kind of cancer or scourge or pestilence on the face of pristine, sacred, innocent earth and sees technology as having nothing but arms, not recognizing that our climate of poverty was powered by fossil fuels and therefore fossil fuels, there was a reason that people adopted them.

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Energy capture is good. The most convenient way of capturing energy for a century was, or more was fossil fuels. And reframing the challenge for environmentalism. It's not going back, trying to undo the industrial revolution, not making everything in life more expensive, in which case people will just reject it.

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Not demonizing our own species, but rather looking at environmental harm as a problem to be solved, sometimes called the eco modernist or eco pragmatist movement. That is, how can we get what we want, that is energy, clean water, a pleasant environment, in a way that is attainable and affordable. 

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The website, Our World in Data, it's just, I find endlessly absorbing. Maybe that just shows what a nerd I am. But together with graphs that are an antidote to the negative view of the world that you get from the news, they have really good short explanatory posts with each graph, just saying, what makes the curve go up?

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What makes the curve go down? What's changed over history? You can almost get a university education, probably a better university education by just browsing and dipping and surfing our world in data. You all know of the viral videos from the late Hans Rosling, very inspiring way to grasp human progress.

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Unfortunately, Hans died of pancreatic cancer a few years ago. Some of his work is carried on by his son and daughter in law, Ola and Anna. That's an inspiration. There's a website called human progress. It's got a libertarian spin, but it used to compete with Our world in data with graphs on human progress.

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I think that's a never ending task and now they focus more on narratives and editorials reminding people of how much life used to suck because it's easy to forget it, to pocket our gains and forget. How kids who were set to work in the factories and farms and dentistry were basically pliers and light was basically tallow candles, which would set your whole fast hut on fire.

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So good reminders of how bad life would be. And also highlighting heroes of progress, people who deserve. who've been forgotten by history, but had innovations that allowed people to live longer and healthier lives. Places of progress, certain times and places in history have just been crucibles of good ideas.

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So that's human progress. So anyway, those are a few inspiring things to read. 

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[00:34:54] Beatrice: I think those are great recommendations and yeah, concrete, everyone can just go straight there after listening to this interview. Thank you so much for giving us some of your time, Stephen. And yeah, we really appreciated it and we’re excited to share this with everyone.

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[00:35:09] Steven: Good luck. Thank you so much for having me.

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