Steven Pinker | Why the future looks better than you think

[00:00:00] Steven: So a hundred percent of the stories that you read are about things getting worse, even though they only comprise 10% of the trend. I have to admit that I was the victim of that myself before I went back to the data. I was a little pessimistic because I would read stories of deaths in car crashes increased — oh damn, wiping out all the progress that I plotted in a graph. But then I realized, when I went to the graphs, that a lot of these turned out to be blips.

[00:00:28] Allison: Hi everyone. Welcome to Foresight's Existential Hope podcast. We couldn't be more delighted than having Steven Pinker here today, who I think is really the face of much of the movement that really cares about progress and cares about where we've come as a civilization, and possibly also how much further we can go. I've personally found myself quoting your work more times than I can count over the years, and I think there are 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 two different fields.

So perhaps we'll start somewhere — which I guess there's one place that comes to mind. I've recently had the chance of seeing you speak at the Roots of Progress Institute conference that we co-hosted, helped organize to a small amount, in Berkeley. And what you did there is give this really fantastic talk checking back in on some of the claims that you've made throughout your research: where have we actually made progress as a 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 par? So do you perhaps want to take us on a little bit of a journey of just checking in on how we're doing as a civilization, especially in the past few years, compared to perhaps how you have evaluated our progress before?

[00:01:51] Steven: 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. 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 always pushing back against a number of forces. I don't want to say nature has it in for us, because that would not be 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.

Some of the things that have gotten worse since I published Better Angels of Our Nature: the rate of death in war has climbed somewhat — not necessarily for the reasons that people think, because everyone's eyes are focused on Gaza, but far more people were killed in Ethiopia, in Sudan, and 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 fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties, to say nothing of the world wars. 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 — that was definitely a downturn in a lot of measures. 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. 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.

Other areas in which the world has continued to make progress that, again, most people are unaware of: homicide rates globally continue to go down, suicide rates go down. As with a lot of these data, it does not apply to everyone everywhere, and there are 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 there, that is a real phenomenon: in indexes of democracy, the world is a little less democratic than it was, say, 15 or 20 years ago. Still close to its historic high, but the movement has been in the wrong direction. We're back at the level of, I'd say, the early 2000s — which is again way better than when I grew up in the sixties and the seventies, when the world only had maybe 30 or 35 democracies. Now, depending on how you count, more countries are democratic than autocratic among the 193 in the world system.

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

[00:05:34] Allison: So overall, you think that we're still pretty much on track, more or less?

[00:05:38] Steven: Not so much. 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. They have particular causes. And so in answering your question — are we on the right track? — it depends on which way the forces are going. 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 and international organizations. Britain pulled out of the European Union, Trump has pulled out of the World Health Organization and is threatening to pull out of many more. Global trade is considered by many scholars to be a pacifying force, in that as countries trade with each other they're less likely to go to war — because you don't kill your customers, and if it's cheaper to buy stuff than to steal it, you lose the advantage of stealing it. And there have been clampdowns 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 global volume of trade.

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, 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. To the extent that there is, that could push back against democracy.

So it's complicated. In all cases, there are forces that hold us back, there are forces where we try to push back as a species, and 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.

[00:07:46] Allison: Yeah. I guess we've also speculated in that talk you gave — at the end of it, at least — on why really it is that our knowledge of the fact that progress is increasing as a society or civilization isn't really quite up to speed with the fact that it is getting better each time. And you've talked about it at length in your books on various psychological factors or cognitive biases, et cetera, that might really prevent us from seeing that things are getting as good as they are. For example, there's one like this outlier version of our ability to be drawn to things that are out of the ordinary, where perhaps progress just occurring at a general rate is boring. And so I'm curious if you think that has changed in the past few years — basically since you've done some of that work of enlightening people around it, and since there are things like the progress movement, et cetera, and like Flourishing Now, and since there are things like Our World in Data — do you think our perception of progress has become a little bit more accurate?

[00:08:43] Steven: A little. 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. There's still, I think, a pretty strong journalistic culture that 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 — like a country that isn't at war, a city that doesn't get attacked by terrorists, a country that is not experiencing a famine. Those are never news, and some people are unaware of them even if they're increasing. One of the things that builds up a few percentage points a year and that people tend to ignore as they're happening, but that could transform the world as they compound, is the decline of extreme poverty and the rise in life expectancy.

Then there is a journalistic habit of reporting news that can leave people systematically misinformed, or actually getting things backwards. And actually, I 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 wanting to update my understanding, I was a little pessimistic because I would read stories of deaths in car crashes increased — oh damn, wiping out all the progress that I plotted in a graph — or the United States deaths of despair among middle-aged white men turning to drugs and alcohol and sometimes suicide, or the democratic recession. But then I realized, when I went to the graphs, that a lot of these turned out to be blips.

If you draw out the thought experiment: imagine that you have something that — let's see which way my figure is going. So I'm going up like this. Okay. Imagine a curve of progress that goes up a little bit, down, up a little bit, down, up a little bit, down, and so on. Am I going in the right direction? I don't know, to find a mirror reversed in this feed. Is that going—

[00:10:57] Allison: I think we can piece it together.

[00:10:58] Steven: Okay. But imagine every time there is a backsliding or a downtick, that's news. Preceding ten years in which it got better, better, better — last year 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 ten years, car crash deaths have increased. That's the only time you read about car crash deaths. Let's say it goes for another ten years and keeps getting better and better, and then another year reverses. And that makes the news, because it's unlike all the preceding years. So a hundred percent of the stories that you read are about things getting worse, even though they only comprise 10% of the trend — and 10% selected to be as negative as possible. As a result, people who read the news can come away with the opposite impression.

Another factor is that on top of the just built-in statistical biases of news, there is actually a deliberate attitude among many journalists that — as one journalist put it — bad news is journalism, good news is advertising. That good news is human-interest fluff: it's "cat buys groceries for single mom" or "puppy befriends orangutan." That's not serious. Or that it's just corporate and government propaganda, like the Soviet Union where they released their five-year plans: production of pig iron is higher than it was last year. You don't want to take seriously the good news because journalists are here to challenge power, and that's power defending itself.

So if you take the statistical biases and add the deliberate negativity bias, and then the third thing, which is just that we all have a negativity bias — it is a finding in psychology that bad is more powerful than good. It's very hard to have a compelling action movie or novel in which bad things don't happen. We have a gruesome fascination with things that go wrong. That of course feeds what journalists deliver to us. Our sources of information really are biased against seeing progress when it occurs. Graphs that show progress over time — like Our World in Data, the ones I reproduce — are an antidote. And I confess that even I, when I follow the news too much and don't keep going back to the graphs, get the wrong impression.

[00:13:26] Allison: Supposedly you have somewhat of a motivation behind actually laying out the facts, laying out the graphs, and showing us why progress occurred. Do you think that there's something that we could be doing better if we just had a more accurate assessment of historical progress? On one hand, it's good to be calibrated on how the world actually is — that's fair enough. But then also perhaps looking ahead: do you think that by showing that in the past we've had challenges that we were able to overcome, we are more likely, through cooperation and innovation et cetera, to actually have a more positive outlook on the future? And is there any of that motivation in there?

We just had Ada Palmer on for our last podcast episode, and she's a sci-fi author, among many other hats she's wearing. And she basically said that 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. 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.

[00:14:22] Steven: I think that's a very powerful point, and it speaks to the criticism that you sometimes hear about reporting positive developments — that it will lull people into complacency. 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, is just not how progress works. It's hard. 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. 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, but globally suicide has gone down. When people realize this, they realize: hey, it's not futile. We don't have to accept things just getting worse and worse. 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, and social security and Medicare for older people — that really have reduced the rate of poverty. There was a quip that Ronald Reagan is associated with: the government declared war on poverty, and poverty won. 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 welcome this. The Great Society and social safety net and redistribution — look, they have worked! We have fewer poor people than we used to.

But people on the left, I have found, are resistant to pointing that out. It gets in the way of a general attack and critique of the entire establishment — all of capitalism, markets, institutions, corporations, everything — the idea that you have to be negative about everything. Sometimes that 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. I myself had a kind of libertarian skepticism of the nanny state and of excess rules and regulations — and they can be excessive. 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 either as just bureaucrats trying to boss people around — and indeed, regulation can be intrusive, can be expensive, can be unnecessary. But if you're totally ignorant of the fact that regulation has actually brought about some benefits, why would you expect anyone to support regulation? So that's why I do think the left has fallen down on the job. By demonizing the establishment, 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.

[00:17:52] 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. And I think to some extent it's interesting because there are things like the scaling laws 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 to some extent fulfilling them in that regard. So I do hope that by us realizing that progress is in the cards as a civilization, we can possibly hang onto that and really work towards it in more deliberate ways. I'm also really curious—

[00:18:40] Steven: That's exactly right. Yes. If your message is: we've been trying to make the world a better place for 60 years, we've gotten you to accept all these regulations and all these policies, but everything is worse than ever — let's do more of it! People are going to say: geez, if it keeps failing, why should we bother? We should just enjoy ourselves.

[00:19:02] Allison: Yeah, I agree. If you just think about the factors — because you are really good at also pointing out specific factors. So for example, something else I can only describe as an underpinning, 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, maybe towards the future, do you think it will be the same factors that are going to be important and continue to drive progress? 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 may have also ushered in existential risks that are man-made through the tools of reason and science. So I'm really curious just on your perception: what are the factors that will impact 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?

[00:20:07] Steven: Yeah. Some will, and I would say must — like reason. You're non-negotiable. 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.

[00:20:30] Allison: I could say it doesn't feel good.

[00:20:32] Steven: Yeah. But facts don't care about your feelings, as the T-shirt says. And science — understanding how the world works — is a prerequisite. We can't develop vaccines without knowing something about the immune system and about molecular biology.

There is now, though, a need to really 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 — they're designed to blow things up. So if there are enough of them to blow up civilization, that's a possibility we've got to try to take into account and minimize.

Some of them I think are entirely hypothetical and indeed quite fanciful. The idea of AI doom-ism — I know that I'm somewhat out of step with a lot of people in the rationality community, but I actually do think this is almost entirely fanciful: the idea that AI will turn us into raw materials because, if we give it the task of manufacturing something, it'll be too stupid to realize we didn't mean to use our bodies as raw materials. Or giving an AI the task of curing cancer, and so it conscripts all of humanity as guinea pigs in fatal experiments, because that's one way to cure cancer. I think these scenarios are rather silly and they don't keep me up at night.

[00:22:03] Allison: There are definitely new scenarios that have been added — or at least there's a diversified portfolio of scenarios that people are worried about in that regard. But I think one thing we could just hope for is that as we encounter challenges, we need to better apply the collective superintelligence of civilization to the problem of figuring out how to work around them and create better solutions as well. And yeah, possibly one big notion of how we could get there — at least in our Existential Hope program here — is that we believe that to some extent showing people positive worlds, and showing people concrete positive progress that might be possible within five to ten years or something, might be a useful instigator to encourage them. But without being too utopian or too specific and goal-directed in that regard. Really enabling people to draw out and color in a positive world.

And so you wrote a fantastic book, The Sense of Style, and you are, I think, one of the more eloquent people out there who is able to package really complex ideas into really good memetic packages. So I'm really curious: if you were to give advice to folks that were trying to inspire people that good worlds are possible, based on the various recommendations that you made in The Sense of Style, what would you say to them? Pun density?

[00:23:20] Steven: The sellers — one of them is just how to avoid the obvious pitfalls of academic and bureaucratic legalese, techno-babble — and that is to try to empathize with your reader, to realize your reader doesn't know what you know. Something that's difficult for us to accomplish; it's called the curse of knowledge: the fact that we have a lot of trouble imagining what it's like for someone not to know what we know. That, I think, 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 — 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 crucially, something to be mindful of is tribalism and polarization. People will take the exact same policy — you say it comes from your favorite person on the left, or your favorite person on the right, or it comes from the person you hate on the right, or the person you hate on the left — and 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 from the people they don't like, they'll oppose it. So being mindful of the pitfalls of gratuitous politicization and polarization.

And 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 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 they can get a will from an AI? Could a doctor who couldn't possibly read an entire literature on a particular syndrome use AI to come up with a synthesis of a 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 preserve their dignity, change a diaper for a baby so that having a child is not as onerous as it used to be? The positive visions of what AI can do have been sidelined by gimmicks. I see ads for Apple where you can design your own emojis — a basketball emoji looks like Larry Bird. Is that the best that technology has to offer?

The people who are proponents of technology, the techno-optimists, I think have to think harder. You can't just tell people: it will actually be a reality. You have to show how the technology could be deployed to make people better off, as opposed to just being gimmicks or threats.

[00:26:30] Beatrice: I think that's the perfect time for me to jump in. The theme of this podcast is existential hope, obviously, and we are literally trying to do that, but we try to show positive use cases — not ignoring the challenges that come with different technologies, but definitely trying to show how they could be useful. More than just say it, really trying to show it. So I guess on that note, it would be really interesting to hear: do you have any — if you had to say — what is Steven Pinker's favorite existential hope vision of the future? What are your hopes for the future? What would be a great future for humanity?

[00:27:12] Steven: I'll give a few things. One of them — and I don't think this is unreasonable: I was a teenager in the sixties and seventies with folk singers talking about putting an end to war, which can seem a little cringe nowadays, but I don't think it's an unreasonable hope. There are barbaric human institutions that have been abolished, or more or less abolished: legalized chattel slavery, gruesome torture and mutilation as forms of criminal punishment, human sacrifice, debtors' prisons — and capital punishment itself is being abolished in country after country; taking out a family to laugh at the insane on a Sunday afternoon at a mental institution. Changes are possible. And I think that eliminating war between countries is not romantically utopian — I think it could be abolished in the same way that legalized slavery was abolished.

Further reductions in extreme poverty, especially in Africa where the extreme poverty is concentrated. What happened in South Korea, what happened in China, what's happening in large parts of India — that could be happening in much more of the world. The World Bank had the slogan of eliminating extreme poverty everywhere. Again, this may seem hypocritical or insincere or like public relations, but I don't think it's an infeasible goal. If South Korea could do it, why can't all countries?

In terms of causes of premature death — the pancreatic cancer that kills someone in their forties or fifties, or childhood cancers — I think we have every reason to think those could be, if not eliminated, drastically reduced. Neurodegenerative diseases — Alzheimer's and Parkinson's — are difficult problems, but 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, stocking shelves — those could be taken over by robots and no one would miss those jobs. Better medical diagnostics: I can't possibly hope that my doctor will process my genome, my metabolomics, my proteome, my medical history, and the vast and contradictory medical literature, along with whatever problem I present with — but that's something where artificial intelligence really could supplement or augment human intelligence.

Anyway, those are some examples. Oh, 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 in the form of new forms of battery storage, or small modular and micro nuclear reactors — that would allow a lot of countries to get a lot richer, and a lot of environmental problems could be forestalled, if we had technologies that gave us abundant clean energy.

[00:30:23] Beatrice: That's a long list, and the list goes on — so that's really great to hear.

[00:30:27] Steven: I'll throw out a few more. 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 — it's not guaranteed. Women's rights: a lot of countries have achieved equality, at least in law, and a lot of countries have not, but there's no reason that they couldn't. Gay rights could certainly become universal.

[00:30:56] Beatrice: Yeah, I like that. And what do you think — because you say there are all these things that are really exciting — how would you say: what's the best way for someone young who may not know where to even start? What would be your advice? How do they engage in trying to help make this come real? Do you have any advice on that?

[00:31:19] Steven: Yeah. It depends a lot 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, working with organizations and institutions, including political organizations and political parties, that are dedicated to positive change and progress as opposed to just attacking the opposition. There is an organization, I'm sure you've heard of it, called 80,000 Hours, trying to mobilize career planning and effort toward constructive projects and constructive efforts.

[00:32:05] Beatrice: That's a really good directory to go to.

[00:32:07] Steven: Actually, constructive occupations — I should be more specific. This is not just volunteer work, but what line of work do you go into if you actually want to make a positive contribution?

[00:32:19] Beatrice: Yeah. So basically, trying to figure out your strengths and the path forward — and in that sense, what suits you.

[00:32:28] Steven: Yeah. Which it has to be, because you can't necessarily make a random poetry major into a nuclear engineer.

[00:32:38] Beatrice: Maybe with neurotech soon we can — fingers crossed.

I'll just ask you a few — I know you have to leave soon.

[00:32:46] Steven: I'm going to have to go in about five minutes.

[00:32:48] Beatrice: Yeah. I'll ask you a few quick questions just to wrap up. Firstly, do you have any recommendations? Is there anything that you like — when you sit down and read, or a movie you saw — that you would recommend for our listeners? It could be fiction or nonfiction.

[00:33:08] Steven: Oh, in terms of especially human progress?

[00:33:13] Beatrice: In regards to human progress, I think is a great one. Yeah.

[00:33:16] Steven: Yeah. I read a book by Stewart 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: this big paper catalog. And he made technology cool to a generation for which technology was the enemy — technology was napalm and gasoline engines. But Stewart — in a way, he laid the seeds for Silicon Valley becoming a place that was cool and not just for nerds, by merging the counterculture with technology.

Anyway, his book is called Whole Earth Discipline. I think it may have a different title in the United Kingdom, but it's a vision for environmentalism that takes us away from the orthodox green movement, which tends to be somewhat misanthropic — it treats human beings as some kind of cancer, scourge, or pestilence on the face of pristine, sacred, innocent earth, and sees technology as having nothing but harms, not recognizing that our escape from poverty was powered by fossil fuels, and therefore there was a reason that people adopted them. Energy capture is good. The most convenient way of capturing energy for a century 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), not demonizing our own species, but rather looking at environmental harm as a problem to be solved. Sometimes it's called the eco-modernist or eco-pragmatist movement: how can we get what we want — that is, energy, clean water, a clean environment — in a way that is attainable and affordable? So Whole Earth Discipline — it may have a different name in the UK — is really an inspiring book.

The website Our World in Data — I find it 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 notes with each graph, just saying: what makes the curve go up, what makes the curve go down, what's changed over history? It's a really good way to learn — you can almost get a university education, probably a better university education, by just browsing and surfing Our World in Data.

You'll all know of the viral videos from the late Hans Rosling — a very inspiring way to grasp human progress. 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 has a libertarian spin, but it used to compete with Our World in Data with graphs on human progress. I think that's a never-ending task. Now they focus more on narratives and editorials reminding people of how much life used to suck, because it's easy to forget and to pocket our gains — forget how kids were sent to work in factories and on farms, and dentistry was basically pliers, and light was basically tallow candles which would set your whole house on fire. So good reminders of how bad life was, and also highlighting heroes of progress: people who have been forgotten by history but had innovations that allowed people to live longer and healthier lives, and places where progress, at certain times and places in history, was just a crucible of good ideas. So that's Human Progress. Anyway, those are a few inspiring things to read.

[00:37:24] Beatrice: I think those are great recommendations — and yeah, concrete. Everyone can just go straight there after listening to this interview. We're at time, so thank you so much for giving us some of your time, Steven. We really appreciated it and are excited to share this with everyone.

[00:37:40] Steven: Good luck. I wish you success with this project — it's fantastic that you're doing it. Thank you so much for having me.

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