Cause for Optimism (Why the world is better than we think #121)

Live Inspired Podcast with John O'Leary

John O'Leary

Education, Relationships, Society & Culture, Self-improvement

4.8 • 695 Ratings

🗓️ 17 January 2019

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

True or false: The world is worse than ever before.

FALSE.

My friends, today's guest shares hard facts as to why this is the best time in human history. He'll expose which elements of your life are making you feel otherwise. Most importantly, he'll share the value of recapturing a true, positive perspective + what it could mean for your relationships, business, life + world.

Gregg Easterbrook is the New York Times Bestselling author of the book It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear. Today, he reminds us that it's great day and the best is truly yet to come.

SHOW NOTES

The United States is in its best condition it's ever been: Pollution, discrimination, rate of heart disease + cancer are trending down. Life expectancy, education, living standards, middle class income, human freedom are trending up.
Globally, we are better off: Global malnutrition and extreme poverty are at the lowest levels in history. Twenty five years ago, 40% of the global population was malnourished. Twenty five years ago, global extreme poverty was 40% v. 10% today.
So why do we feel like things are worse today?
1. Social media exaggerates the negative and buries the positive.
2. The physical proximity (and frequency) of social media to our faces enhances its psychological impact.
3. Negative news sells, distorting its pervasiveness and our reality.
4. We allow personal anecdotes to sway our overall outlook.
Optimists think problems can be fixed. Pessimists thinks we are doomed. Being optimistic is a choice that we make. Our country was built on optimists.
It's easy to feel bitter—it's the path of least resistance. Being an optimist is hard but rewarding.
The trend of civilization is forever upward, we should be hopeful because the best is yet to come.
Get Gregg Easterbrook's book It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear.
Get Gregg Easterbrook's book Beside Still Water: Searching for Meaning in an Age of Doubt.
Check out Gregg's weekly "Tuesday Morning Quarter Back" column that he's written for 17 years, here.

GREGG EASTERBROOK LIVE INSPIRED 7

What is the best book you've ever read? Willa Cather's My Antonia
What is a characteristic or trait that you possessed as a child that you wish you still exhibited today? Besides being slender? More outgoing.
Your house is on fire, all living things and people are out. You have the opportunity to run in and grab one item. What would it be? My flash drive with my next book which grows out of Beside Still Water.
You are sitting on a bench overlooking a gorgeous beach. You have the opportunity to have a long conversation with anyone living or dead. Who would it be? Jesus, the greatest moral philosopher of the sapiens and the first question would be, "is there hope?".
What is the best advice you've ever received? I view myself as an artist, not a journalist. "Listen to your muse." A muse often tells you things you wish you didn't hear. Follow your muse wherever she leads you.
What advice would you give your 20-year-old self? If you want to make a lot of money as a writer, chose one genre and stick to it.
It's been said that all great people can have their lives summed up in one sentence. How do you want yours to read? He was debonair.

***

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to the Live Inspired podcast with John O'Leary.
0:07.0	John is the number one national bestselling author of the book On Fire.
0:11.3	He's a world-class inspirational speaker and he's the host of the Live-inspired podcast.
0:16.4	John interviews extraordinary individuals on their life story so that you can wake up from accidental living
0:23.0	and more fully live your life story. Here's your host, John O'Leary. Well, hello, my friends.
0:31.6	This is John O'Leary. So happy to have you here joining us in the Live-inspired movement. Two weeks ago, my wife and I had a meeting
0:40.8	with our financial advisor, one of those sit-down meetings where we hear about what the markets are doing
0:45.6	and what the world is doing and how we, my wife and I, at least financially, are doing. And during the
0:51.8	course of the conversation, we find ourselves typically talking less about
0:54.8	money and a whole lot more about life. And so about halfway through this conversation, I look over
1:00.2	at Tim and I say, man, why is everybody so negative about the market so negative about the world,
1:06.3	so negative about our country? And he pushed back from the desk and he kind of went over to his bookshelf and
1:12.2	handed me a book. The book, it's titled, It's Better Than It Looks, and then the Subtitle, Reasons for
1:19.6	Optimism in an Age of Fear. It's written by a guy that I'd heard of before named Greg Easterbrook.
1:25.8	So my homework leaving that meeting was to read this book. I thought it
1:30.3	would take me the better part of eight months because it's more than 300 pages. It took me about
1:36.0	three days to get through this book. And Greg was speaking directly to me. And I think there's a
1:42.5	message in this book that will speak directly to you.
1:46.8	Our guest is the author of 12 books, including the New York Times bestselling book,
1:52.2	The Progress Paradox. That's another great one. He's been a staff writer, national correspondent,
1:57.9	and contributed an editor at the Atlantic for more than 40 years.
2:01.6	He's written for the New Yorker, Science, Wired, Harvard Business Review, the Washington Monthly,
	...

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