This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Hey, this is Robert from the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast.

Joe and I are both lifelong Star Wars fan, so we're celebrating May the 4th with a brand

new week of fun, thought-provoking Star Wars-related episodes.

Join us as we tackle science and culture topics from a galaxy far, far away, such as the

biology of taun tons and wampas on

the ice planet hot, or the practicality and corporate business sense of the Sith rule of two.

Listen to Stuff to Bo Your Mind on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Music your podcasts. This is our American stories, and up next the story on the human story,

how humanity has suffered and thrived over decades, centuries, and millennia.

I used to believe in the good old days. I used to believe in the good old days.

I used to believe that the world was kind of an awful place.

You're listening to Johann Norberg, the author of a book called Progress.

Looking at big business, looking at polluting factories, thinking that there has to be another way.

There has to be good old days back in the past where we live more in harmony with one another and with nature.

And when I began looking for that, when I began looking at history specifically and the history of my own ancestors in northern Sweden, I realized that that was all a lie.

In the late 1870s, there was a major crop failure in northern Sweden where my ancestors lived, my great-great-great-great-grandfather, Eric Norberg, and his family were there trying to deal with the problems.

He tried to smuggle in bags of wheat flour from southern Sweden.

The trade wasn't open yet.

There were still major difficulties in trying to supply people with this.

But when people look at their family trees at that time,

...