Good morning John!
And pre-congratulations on your your little wiggly sticky baby thing. Any day now, still waiting!
Also, thank you for providing me with several impossible tasks to acomplish while you're
busy relaxing on your paternity leave.
Living all day reading pretentious novels in the sunshine, eating fancy waffles...
I don't have a lot of data on how exactly to take care of a newborn child, but I figured something like that
So yeah! I'm happy to fix all the worlds problems while you're busy cuddling with your new baby in well rested luxury.
Speaking of all the world's problems a few weeks ago I made a video that
highlighted some of the pretty dramatic changes that humanity has ennacted upon the earth.
I made a video because I wanted to give people a more complete picture on how we impact our planet
and maybe inspire some people to help! And in that, I think that video miserably failed.
It was overwhelming, it made people hate themselves for being a part of humanity
and it was paralyzing more than inspiring.
Our brains are just not good at understanding this sort of thing, for example
we way overestimate our abilty to deal with stuff that we control
like I think I can run five busineses and occasionally jump over to Seatle
to help kickstart a space telescope. No problem! I can deal with all that! No, I won't go crazy!
But we way underestimate our ability as a species to affect stuff that we feel like we can't control individually.
And we have a know cognitive bias on remembering and basing our decisions on negative experiences
and not on the positive ones like we have to have like ten positive experiences to weigh out every negative one.
What I'm trying to say is that you are being lied to by your own brain and also by you know, society and fox news
and to some extent me in that video I made.
Humanity is not a cancer! Deforestation happens because people wanna provide better lives
for themselves and for their families. Rivers run dry because we're irrigating crops so that children don't starve
The amazing thing for me is that humans are constantly solving these huge problems
and we never notice that we do and we never celebrate!
Disasters happen all at once! Sucesses happen slowly and gradually
and they are interrupted by disasters, but they continue despite them!
This is a graph of the health and wealth of every contry in the world from 1900 to 2011.
Every country is better off. In fact, some contries in Africa are doing better now than the United States was in 1900
Here is what I think happens: I think that we look at a graph and the graph shows something increasing
wether that is climate change, or oil use, or deforestation and there is a disaster point somewhere
at the top and that graph is gonna get there maybe in ten years and we think:
We have ten years left to live on the earth!
But usually, we adapt! And capitalism adapts!
And technology adapts, and my god, even congress adapts!
We consistently every single year avoid the apocalypse not because there is one
single superhero. This isn't a television drama!
But because we do things together!
We do these things as activists and chemists and engineers and physicists and poets and songwriters.
And writers and politicians, and even bureaucrats.
We are the superhero!
None of us individually, but all of us together.
My trip to Seatle to the museum of flight
to help planetary resources launch their space telescope kickstarter was inspiring, unsurprisingly,
but maybe for surprising reasons. Wasn't just, you know,
people are going to band together and crowdfund a freaking space telescope.
but also, it was seeing artifacts of great projects that humanity has enacted together
and meeting people who are extremely smart and dedicated people who are
working their butts of to make sure that humanity continues its path towards a
more prosperous future to the majority of people the majority of the time.
And it's not just those supersmart people. It's all of us!
All of us working together to make the world work!
It turns out that they're very good at solving problems, but they do not solve themselves.
To what I've realised is that working hard to create a better future does not come from a place
of wanting to avoid inevitable apocalypse, but instead it comes from a place of optimism.
And it turns out that somehow there are a tremendous number of things to be optimistic about
and that's pretty great!
John, I'll see you or potentially someone else, if you have a baby, on Tuesday!