Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way. He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. B.P. Peterson's new series on Depression and Anxiety: A Guide to Finding a Brighter Future You Deserve. Season 4 Episode 65: "The Green Revolution" is a compilation highlighting the progress of the human race in nearly every sector worth a listen. For this episode, this is our first compilation highlighting how the world is on a pace to have less than 5% of the world s population living in poverty by 2030, and that we are living in an age of seemingly impossible progress. We would like to promote an alternative narrative in which we are all the better off than we were in the past 50 years, and how we can all be a part of the future you deserve to be part of a better, more prosperous and more peaceful, more just like the rest of the 21st century world. If you haven't heard of the Green Revolution yet, let me remind you of the incredible progress we veer world we ve made in the story of the last 50 years. The Green Revolution? The story of how we ve gone from a world where we ve eradicated world hunger and food production and abundance, we ve become a better place than we ve all been able to eat enough of the best food we ve ever been in the last 150 years, because we ve done so, because it s all been done so in a better way than that we ve got a better chance to be a better and more of a world that s better at eating enough of it, better than most of us have ever been here to eat more of it. It s not only that, but we ve been here, and it s more than enough of that, and so much more, because of it We ve already got it all, and now we ve gotten there, and more.
00:16:12.660So the whole sixth extinction narrative is just false, and I debunk it.
00:16:18.320The other way it's false, as you alluded to earlier, we have seen biodiversity in many parts of the world increase, but with the rise of invasive species.
00:16:31.940So in Hawaii, you know, if you agree with, look, this is a non-scientific issue.
00:16:38.760It's just a question of what species do you want on the islands of Hawaii?
00:16:42.520Do you want the native species, meaning the species that were there?
00:16:45.600Yeah, well, underneath that is also this issue of purity and disgust and borders.
00:16:51.860It's like, well, that was nature before the invasive species, and that nature is somehow allied in your mind with ethical purity.
00:16:59.320And these invasive species are somehow aligned in your mind with something disgusting and inappropriate.
00:17:07.700And there's an ethical element to that.
00:17:09.880And you haven't sorted any of that out in your thinking, because, like, do the islands care?
00:17:15.060Life moves around, and that's how it is.
00:17:17.640And so there's a weird, unexamined projection of a religious issue onto what's hypothetically a scientific issue and mucky thinking.
00:17:26.760What was defined as natural in Hawaii or in the Americas or anywhere is pre-European.
00:17:32.400So the purity is pre- so Europeans are the contaminators, right, as opposed to, like, the indigenous people who are manipulating ecosystems at continent-wide levels, right, through fire mostly, but also through hunting and extinctions, certainly in the Americas, but also really around the world.
00:17:51.460You have this alteration of ecosystems by indigenous, pure indigenous people.
00:17:55.500So in any event, yeah, if you want to save the species that were in Hawaii before 1500 or 1700, that's fine.
00:18:03.760But you can make a case for that not on purity grounds or spiritual grounds just because you're worried that you like those species.
00:18:10.620You know, there's some cool bird species that could go extinct, you know, on the islands of Hawaii if you don't remove some of the invasives.
00:18:18.500Fine. You're just manipulating that environment. You're doing it not out of science. There's no scientific basis for it. You're doing it because we like those species.
00:18:28.320And that's it. And that's where I get to at the end of the book where I kind of go, I can't, if I show you a picture of an endangered mountain gorilla of Rwanda or the Congo, and I'm like, I want to save that gorilla.
00:18:39.960And if you're like, I don't care about that gorilla, that's a clash of values. There's no scientific argument I can make to saving those mountain gorillas.
00:18:47.400I think they're really beautiful and amazing, and they remind us of our common ancestors or whatever it may be, but there's no like, that's not going to be solved by some scientific analysis.
00:18:57.060No, and we still have to, even if that is true, we still have to have a serious discussion at the policy and ethical level about what steps are being taken by hypothetically well-meaning, ignorant Westerners who think in a low-resolution manner and whose thoughts are contaminated by unaddressed ethical concerns, asking poor people in developing countries to sacrifice their lives often to protect animals.
00:19:23.460It's like, well, first of all, that isn't going to work in the long run, because they're just going to kill the damn animals.
00:19:28.220And that's exactly what you would do if you were there as well.
00:19:31.780And, and they're not, you can't just ignore them.
00:19:35.000And that kind of gets shunted into the, well, you know, they're human beings contaminating the planet anyways.
00:19:40.060And so the animals should come first or something like that.
00:20:35.880Yes, there are the network and synergetic effects that people living close together and exchanging ideas and, and similar companies existing next to each other, communicating and so forth.
00:20:49.060And look, the historical record is absolutely clear.
00:20:52.380Cities have been the drivers of progress, whether it's Amsterdam in the 17th century or London, sorry, 18th century or London in 19th century, New York in the 20th century.
00:21:02.700That's where stuff happened, not just in terms of economic growth, but also in terms of culture and, and, and, and things like that.
00:21:13.140So, and the final point, cities also consume less energy than urban areas per capita, because we have public transport, people don't have to drive their Jeeps and four by fours wherever they go with long distances.
00:21:28.760So, uh, people consume less energy in, in, in, in cities per capita.
00:21:35.020And that said, that's a, that's again, a good thing.
00:21:38.100I think people are moving into cities, uh, cities are where innovation happens on the whole.
00:21:45.100They're, the bigger they are, the, the more efficient they are in some sense.
00:21:49.680They, they have fewer gas stations, fewer miles of road per person in bigger cities.
00:21:55.280If you see what I mean, you know, they become more concentrated, um, uh, more than half the world now lives in cities that leaves the rest of the landscape on trampled, um, cities only occupy about 3% of the world's land surface, uh, I believe.
00:22:11.340Um, uh, so, uh, actually it's a good thing because, and, and, you know, uh, it, yes, you, you know, some of us like to live in rural areas rather than in, in cities.
00:22:23.080Um, uh, but those of us who want to can do that cities are where people come together and they mix and they have ideas and they, and they produce baby ideas, you know?
00:22:33.200So it was the city states of ancient Greece or the city states of, of Renaissance Italy that really drove the world economy in their day.
00:22:41.080Likewise in Britain and Victorian times or California today, you know, California is two great big city states, Los Angeles and San Francisco effectively.
00:22:49.460Um, uh, uh, and, um, so I think, uh, I think the fact that the world is becoming more urbanized or was until the last year, I mean, it'll be interesting to see whether city centers really do lose their allure after the pandemic, because a lot of businesses have discovered that they don't need to pay for expensive real estate.
00:23:12.900They can let people work from home, um, um, I suspect it'll lead to a lot more hot desking, you know, people, uh, coming into the office two or three days a week, working from home two or three days a week, um, uh, which will cut down on commuting, make some of the city's problems less bad, um, uh, and cut the cost of real estate in the middle of cities.
00:23:35.780Uh, so I suspect we're in, that we could have quite a soft landing for some of the problems that cities have, um, these days, but it won't all be plain sailing.
00:23:44.580I mean, things are going to go wrong in that respect.
00:23:48.600Going online without express VPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:23:53.840Most of the time you'll probably be fine, but what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:24:01.480In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury, it's a fundamental right.
00:24:06.900Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:24:16.220And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:24:19.420With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:24:26.800Now, you might think, what's the big deal? Who'd want my data anyway?
00:24:30.160Well, on the dark web, your personal information could fetch up to $1,000.
00:24:35.080That's right, there's a whole underground economy built on stolen identities.
00:35:12.320If we are moving to a world where millions of people are going to be destroyed by, you know, oceans rising or crop failure or whatever, or tsunamis or earthquakes and whatever, why is it that due to natural disasters, that natural disasters have seen 99% decrease in human mortality?
00:35:36.620And the answer seems to be that partly we are richer and therefore we are able to build more sturdy dwellings.
00:35:48.840But we are also more technologically savvy so that we can predict where a hurricane going to strike and exactly when so that people can escape from the path of destruction.
00:36:00.300And we can also detect earthquakes underneath the ocean floor, giving people on land more time to move to higher ground from a tsunami wave and things like that.
00:36:38.780We're not going to overpopulate the world in any cataclysmic sense.
00:36:44.040Everyone has increasingly more than enough to eat.
00:36:48.940There's more land for nature and that trend seems upward.
00:36:52.940More people are moving to urban areas and that's advantageous rather than disadvantageous.
00:36:58.820There are more democracies and so we're better governed.
00:37:02.100We're more peaceful and we're less likely to die from catastrophes.
00:37:06.500Yeah, I tend to try to squirm out of the optimist pigeonhole because I'm not arguing for looking on the bright side and seeing the glass is half full.
00:37:16.920But rather just basing your understanding of the world on data rather than journalism.
00:37:22.640The problem with journalism being that it is a highly non-random sample of the worst things that have happened in any given period.
00:37:28.560It is an availability machine in the sense of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman's availability heuristic, namely our sense of risk and danger and prevalence is driven by anecdotes and images and narratives that are available in memory.
00:37:43.600Whereas the, since a lot of good things are either things that don't happen, like a country at peace or a city that has not been attacked by terrorists, which almost by definition are not news.
00:37:55.940Or are things that build up incrementally, a few percentage points a year and then compound, like the decline of extreme poverty.
00:38:04.040We can be unaware, we can be out to lunch about what's happening in the world if we base our view on the news.
00:38:10.440If instead we base our view on data, then not only do we see that many, although not all things, have gotten better.
00:38:17.780Not linearly, not without setbacks and reversals, but in general, a lot better.
00:38:24.540And it also, paradoxically, because as I've also cheaply put it, progressives hate progress.
00:38:31.500But the best possible case for progress, that is for striding for more progress in the future, for being a true progressive, is again, not to have some kind of foolish hope, but to look at the fact that progress has taken place in the past.
00:38:44.900And that means, why should it stop now?
00:38:50.260Do you think that it's a reasonable thing to do from a rational perspective to compare the present to the past rather than to...
00:38:58.300I mean, there is a tendency to compare the present to a utopian future.
00:39:02.340And I mean, that's kind of a cognitive heuristic because we're always looking for ways to make things better.
00:39:08.360And I suppose that's that tendency taken to its extreme.
00:39:11.120But it does seem to me that some of the decrying of the current situation is a consequence of comparing it to hypothetical utopia instead of actual other countries or other times.
00:39:23.300Yeah, utopia is a deeply dangerous concept because people imagine a world without any problems.
00:39:30.180And since people disagree with each other, that means that in order to have complete harmony and agreement, you've got to get rid of all those nuisances, those people who are not on board with your plans for utopia.
00:39:42.620Which is, of course, why it's been the utopians that have been the most genocidal regimes in history.
00:39:49.640What if people start understanding more about their biases, about how they perceive the world?
00:39:56.620You know, this is obviously done in colleges and universities, in psychology courses, as well as in biology courses and things like that.
00:40:05.260But, you know, it's not as though human beings are incapable of changing their worldview based on evidence.
00:40:17.820We no longer believe that a sacrifice of a little child will produce better harvest.
00:40:28.160We no longer believe that throwing a virgin into a volcano is going to give us military success.
00:40:39.580We no longer believe in all sorts of things that we have taken for granted.
00:40:44.200In other words, we have shown that we are capable of learning and learning from evidence.
00:40:49.780We have internalized that focusing on irrigation and fertilization is a better way to produce food than prayer.
00:41:00.080And that gives me hope that as we move forward, we'll be able to learn more about the rest of the world, internalize not just that information, but also why we are being pessimistic and negative.
00:41:51.040We're adopting our responsibilities as stewards of the planet rapidly.
00:41:55.000We are moving towards improving everyone's life.
00:41:58.080I lived under an apocalyptic shadow my whole life.
00:42:06.280I mean, I don't want to complain about that too much because I lived in a very rich place and I had all sorts of advantages and all of that.
00:42:12.380But the apocalyptic narrative was still extraordinarily powerful and demoralizing.
00:42:17.520And it looks to me that there are reasons to doubt its validity on all sorts of dimensions.
00:42:23.820And I'm not sure what that will do to people, but hopefully it'll make us more optimistic and positive and less paranoid and afraid and happier with who we are, but still willing to participate in improving the future.
00:42:39.400And to lift some of the weight off young people who are constantly being told that the planet is going to burn to a cinder in the next 20 years.
00:42:46.380And there's no reason for a counterproductive and anti-human pessimism.
00:42:51.680We could have a planet where there was enough for everyone and where there was enough for the non-human inhabitants too that contribute to making life rich.
00:43:03.180And there's no reason not to aim for that.
00:43:05.560And there's absolutely no reason not to assume that it's within our grasp.
00:43:08.940So we want to aim properly and we can have what everyone seems to want, whether they're on the right or the left, when they're thinking properly, which is an eradication of absolute poverty.
00:43:20.440So no one is forced into penury and starvation and no children fail to develop.
00:43:25.540We can reduce the impact of relative poverty, which is an intransigent problem, but not unaddressable.
00:43:32.120And we could restore to a large degree or maintain a sustainable ecology around us.
00:43:39.700And we don't want to forget that and drown in our threat sensitivity.
00:44:11.120And just on that question of optimism, it's a bit of an evangelical cause for me, this, because I was steeped in pessimism as a young man, as a boy in school, at university.
00:44:25.660I believed that the population explosion was unstoppable, that famine was inevitable, that the oil was going to run out, that the rainforests were going to disappear, that cancer was going to shorten my lifespan, that pesticides were going to make life unlivable, you know, all that kind of stuff.
00:44:40.220And it came as quite a shock when I found that the world was getting better, not worse, during my life, dramatically so.
00:44:47.220And so I want to tell today's young people that there is another possibility to the, you know, extinction rebellion kind of stuff that they're being fed by everybody, not just the education system, but the media and their parents, you know, the grownups.
00:45:05.060I think it's quite important to have some optimism.
00:45:08.300Why is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we're to expect nothing but deterioration before us?
00:45:16.480It's Thomas Babington Macaulay, Lord Macaulay, writing in 1830.
00:45:21.480So already then he was fed up with the doomsters saying it can't get better.
00:45:25.420It's been getting better in the past, but it's going to get worse in the future.
00:45:28.420And that's what every generation says.
00:45:30.060And I think so far they've been wrong.
00:45:31.460And I think there's a good chance they're wrong now.
00:45:33.000Well, it might be a consequence of the human tendency to overweight negative information, right?
00:45:39.480We're wired to be more sensitive to threat and to pain than we are to hope and pleasure.
00:45:45.840And I suppose that's because you can be 100% dead, but you can only be so happy.
00:45:50.980And so it's better in some sense to err on the side of caution.
00:45:54.220And maybe when that's played out on the field of future prognostications, everything that indicates decline strikes us harder than everything that indicates that things are going to get better.
00:47:05.520You know, they're okay when they talk about themselves.
00:47:09.020And I think what that's telling you is that your information about your own life comes from your own experience.
00:47:13.920Your information about the planet comes from the media.
00:47:16.240And that implies to me that it's not just our inbuilt biases that are doing this.
00:47:21.860That there is a top-down effect from what the culture chooses to tell us.
00:47:29.760Do you have any sense of the motivation for that?
00:47:32.600I mean, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that much of what drives the production of the news is the search for attention, the search for eyes.
00:47:42.040And you'd expect the news to evolve towards the maximally attention-grabbing form, right?
00:47:49.740And so apart from the ability to grab attention, can you think of any reason why pessimism is the sales item of the day from the perspective of the news companies?
00:48:05.840Exactly. And this is where my argument breaks down a bit because it becomes circular.
00:48:28.240But there's another phenomenon, too, which is that good news tends to be gradual and bad news tends to be sudden.
00:48:37.360That's not always true, of course, but it surprisingly often is true.
00:48:42.720You know, 168,000 people were lifted out of extreme poverty yesterday and the day before and the day before and the day before.
00:48:50.580It's never newsworthy, whereas 3,000 people were killed when an airliner flew into a skyscraper.
00:49:00.140That is newsworthy because it's so sudden, so unexpected, so new.
00:49:05.820Well, it's funny, when I ran across statistics like the one that you just quoted, which I think is worth repeating over and over,
00:49:13.900170,000 people lifted out of poverty today could be three-inch headlines every day because it's an unparalleled event in human history,
00:49:21.620although it's occurring every day right now.
00:49:23.720But maybe it's also because you have to prepare for the worst, but you don't really have to prepare for the best.
00:49:30.560You know, if the best is happening, then you can just keep on doing what you're doing.
00:49:36.220But if there's a flaw somewhere or an error, then maybe you have to make some changes in your behavior,
00:49:41.200and that might be another reason why we're prone to seek out negative information.
00:49:48.280And does that explain why we're loss-averse to the extent we are?
00:49:51.860Well, I think so. I think it's the same phenomenon.
00:49:54.400So, anyways, the point is, or one of the points is that despite the potential adaptive utility of being more sensitive to negative information,
00:50:04.900it can really get out of hand, right, because it can precipitate, say, a nihilistic attitude with regards to the future,
00:50:11.860or depression, or high levels of anxiety, or resentment, or even hatred of humanity, for that matter,
00:50:18.980if we're the destructive species that we're always made out to be.
00:50:21.940And so, it still seems to me that work that concentrates on demonstrating from a historical perspective
00:50:28.820how much better things are getting is very much worth putting forward.
00:50:33.360There's a word I want to introduce to the conversation at this point, which is Panglossian.
00:50:37.500People sometimes accuse me of being Panglossian.
00:50:40.240Dr. Pangloss, as you remember in Candide, in Voltaire's novel, is someone who says, he's a caricature of Leibniz,
00:50:48.260and he says that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
00:50:54.020And yes, Lisbon has been destroyed by an earthquake, but that must have been because they were evil people,
00:52:37.560So what will happen is both that we're leaving ourselves in the rich world to become much more infighting and much less well-off than we otherwise would be,
00:52:46.060and that we're actually seeing the other three quarters of the world just simply running possibly even ahead of us,
00:52:53.020but certainly running ahead without looking at the same kind of problem.
00:52:57.980So it does go down to basic principles.
00:53:00.340It's like, do you believe this is a problem that can be solved by intelligent, well-meaning people who are doing central planning?
00:53:06.020And I've toyed with those ideas and worked on UN committees that are devoted to what are the UN millennium goals.
00:53:14.000And I looked at how that central planning was done, and that's an interesting story in and of itself because it isn't even cabals of experts.
00:53:21.380So this committee I was on was composed of, you know, ex-presidents and prime ministers and people like that from all over the world.
00:53:28.200And so you think, well, they have some political and economic expertise.
00:53:31.280These, they're putting together these, the new vision of the UN for the new millennium, let's say,
00:53:36.080but those aren't the people who are actually making the decisions because they're completely occupied.
00:53:40.280They already have lives that are absolutely full.
00:53:42.320So then the decision-making power falls down the bureaucracy until it lands on the shoulders of someone who has spare time for one reason or another.
00:53:50.960And they make the decisions in the name of that person.
00:53:53.900And then all those decisions are aggregated, and there isn't anybody who's, in some sense, taking central responsibility for that.
00:54:01.940So the document that I worked on, to begin with, looked like it was written by people who were stuck in the 1980s.
00:54:07.780It was all Cold War ideology, essentially, the Northern Hemisphere against the Southern Hemisphere.