One thing along the line in this conversation where we haven't got to yet that I think is important is that it's an unfortunate feature of human nature that we're much more motivated to deal with things when they're bad than when they're good.

So if you're trying to raise money and

you show me how bad something is that I care about, I'm going to give you money to fix it.

If you're trying to raise money by saying, look how much better this has got, I'm like,

hey man, I don't need to get involved. It's getting better without me.

And so as human beings, when we're focused on problems,

and of course there's always going to be problems,

we tend to focus on the bad.

And there's a super negative consequence of that.

And that is we don't notice when the world's getting

a lot better.

And so if we think about the world just in our lifetime, I'm a little older than you, but our basic lifetime,

when I was a kid, I don't know if you remember, but Lake Erie caught on fire.

You know, how disgusting does water have to be to burn, right?

How much sewage and stuff has to be in it?

That when I lived in LA for a few months when my mother went back to school for a little

while, and when you were in the

hillside of LA the city disappeared in the smog now it's blue skies it's

become an incredibly clear place there's so many parts of the world that have become so much better if you look at the

kindness of us to each other.

So Pinker points us out in both of his books and this is a super important point.

In his book, Better Angels of Our Nature, he shows the data where if you set the rape and homicide rates in 1973,

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