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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the best of Coast to Coast podcast.

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Speaker 1: Become a Coast Insider and you can hear this complete conversation,

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Speaker 1: as well as recent shows featuring guests discussing new cases

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Speaker 1: of the troubling cattle mutilation phenomenon, worries, some instances of

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Speaker 1: clandestine c I a torture, and the evidence that the

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Speaker 1: lost city of Atlantis may have really once existed. Check

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Speaker 1: out these programs and many other fascinating episodes waiting for

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Speaker 1: you and the Coast to Coast archive by heading over

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Speaker 1: to Coast to Coast a m dot com and signing

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Speaker 1: up for Coast Insider. Now here's a highlight from Coast

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Speaker 1: to Coast AM on iHeart Radio and welcome back to

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Speaker 1: Coast to Coast. Let me tell you about our guest

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Speaker 1: for the next couple hours. Stephen Pinker back with us

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Speaker 1: an experimental psychologist who conducts research and visual cognition, psycholinguistics,

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Speaker 1: social relations. He earned his b a from McGill and

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Speaker 1: his PhD from Harvard, and he's currently a john Stone

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Speaker 1: Professor of Psychology at Harvard. He has also taught at

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Speaker 1: Stanford and m i T. He's an elected member of

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Speaker 1: the National Academy of Sciences and a chairperson of the

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Speaker 1: Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. That's pretty novel.

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Speaker 1: And here's Stephen back. His latest book is called Enlightenment,

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Speaker 1: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Steven, welcome

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Speaker 1: back to the show. Thank you so much. It's been

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Speaker 1: about six and a half year or something like that.

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Speaker 1: That's right. I was trying to remember the last time.

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Speaker 1: Where where are you now? I am in Arizona. I'm

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Speaker 1: in Tempe, Arizona, near the campus of Arizona State. So

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Speaker 1: I'm gonna be in Scotchdale on April one for a

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Speaker 1: live event and had we timed it, we could have

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Speaker 1: seen you there. But it's good to good to have

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Speaker 1: you back on the show. You know, we're we're in

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Speaker 1: a very strange time. I mean, you heard some of

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Speaker 1: the news stories that I had on you know, people

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Speaker 1: shooting people at YouTube than killing themselves, some kid biting

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Speaker 1: the head off of a chicken, a couple keeping their

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Speaker 1: nine year old and a bathtub making making her drink

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Speaker 1: toilet water. What's going on with people? Stephen. One thing

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Speaker 1: you have to keep in mind is that the world

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Speaker 1: has seven point three million people and what the news

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Speaker 1: consists of is all of the most awful, strangest, weirdest,

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Speaker 1: most upsetting things anywhere on the planet Earth, in this country, anywhere,

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Speaker 1: among three fifty million people. Now you hear about the

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Speaker 1: absolute worst everywhere. You don't hear about the people who

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Speaker 1: just get up, go to work, raise their families, lead

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Speaker 1: normal lives. Uh. And so our our impression of the

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Speaker 1: world can get distorted by the fact that that's that's

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Speaker 1: what the news does. It finds the strangest, most awful,

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Speaker 1: the most violent things anywhere. You really can't tell from

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Speaker 1: the news whether the world has been getting more or

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Speaker 1: less violent, more or less peaceful, by just noticing the

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Speaker 1: worst events. Because as long as the world isn't perfect,

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Speaker 1: and the world will never be perfect, they will always

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Speaker 1: be enough strange things happening somewhere on Earth, and they'll

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Speaker 1: all be crammed together on the news, and so you

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Speaker 1: get the impression that the world was just falling apart.

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Speaker 1: Whereas when you look at numbers which count out the

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Speaker 1: number of people who don't murder each other, don't bite

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Speaker 1: the heads off chickens, the number of kids who graduate

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Speaker 1: from school without biting any heads off chickens, you see

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Speaker 1: actually we're we're doing better. And that that's a big

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Speaker 1: theme of the book that you can't get your impression

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Speaker 1: from the news because the usual it's like the greatest

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Speaker 1: hits collection of all of the worst things happening anywhere

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Speaker 1: on the planet. Well, you know, I was I was

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Speaker 1: in the television news business, Stephen for a number of years,

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Speaker 1: and very rarely, I can't even remember when would we

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Speaker 1: lead a newscast with a story of something enlightening. It

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Speaker 1: was that that we always used towards the end of

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Speaker 1: the newscast, But the beginning was always some murder, some fire,

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Speaker 1: some horrible car accident. It's always something tragic. Yes, I

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Speaker 1: don't have to tell you of the famous slogan if

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Speaker 1: it bleeds, it leads, that's true. And um yeah, and

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Speaker 1: so we tend to forget about you know, says a

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Speaker 1: kind three that was at war in the seventies and

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Speaker 1: thought that was for five years ago. Uh, and they've

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Speaker 1: been at peace ever since all those years. It's just

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Speaker 1: not in the news because a country at peace is

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Speaker 1: not is not not not news. And we What I

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Speaker 1: try to do in the book is I try to

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Speaker 1: plot over time, rates of crime, rates of murder, rates

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Speaker 1: of disease, rates of death of children, rates of death

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Speaker 1: of mothers, and childbirth. All of these measures that they

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Speaker 1: don't necessarily make the news, they kind of they creep

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Speaker 1: up on you because the improvements are year by year

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Speaker 1: by year, and before you know it, we're living into

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Speaker 1: our eighties. UH, kids are going to school, We have

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Speaker 1: more hours of leisure than than our parents and grandparents had. UH.

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Speaker 1: And in measure after measure, we're actually doing a lot better.

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Speaker 1: But you can't tell just from from the news. I

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Speaker 1: can't remember in my lifetime when we were without war,

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Speaker 1: for example, I mean we went from World War Two

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Speaker 1: that we went into the Korean War, you know, several

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Speaker 1: years later than Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. It just doesn't seem

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Speaker 1: to stop. Stephen and um. One would think that's a

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Speaker 1: great example because we said, of course it's true, and

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Speaker 1: there hasn't been a time in our lifetimes when there

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Speaker 1: has been some more somewhere. But if you count out

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Speaker 1: how many there are and how many people get killed,

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Speaker 1: you see a graph that has some undulations, ups and downs.

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Speaker 1: It's a bit of a roller coaster, but the overall

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Speaker 1: trend is down. That in UH I've been not even

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Speaker 1: counting World War Two, which is the worst war in history.

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Speaker 1: Then that the Korean War was was pretty nasty. We

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Speaker 1: tend to forget how many millions of people died in

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Speaker 1: the Korean War. Vietnam War also very destructive, maybe two

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Speaker 1: to three million Vietnamese killed in fifty thousand fifty eight

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Speaker 1: thousand Americans. But even as horrible as Iraq and Afghanistans

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Speaker 1: have been, there are nowhere near as destructive as Vietnam was.

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Speaker 1: And there are whom the Vietnam War was going on.

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Speaker 1: There were also wars in Central America, America and Cambodia

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Speaker 1: and Laos and all over Africa. A lot of those

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Speaker 1: wars have stopped. We of course note the few that

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Speaker 1: are still going on, like the Syrian Civil War, which

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Speaker 1: is the worst civil war in the generation. Even with

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Speaker 1: the Syrian Civil War, the rate of global depth in

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Speaker 1: warfare is much much less than it was in the eighties, seventies, sixties, fifties.

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Speaker 1: But your your your assessment is that things are getting better,

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Speaker 1: not worse? Am I correct? They I mean, not, of course,

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Speaker 1: not everywhere for everyone. I mean that would be impossible,

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Speaker 1: I would be magic, right. I mean, if you live

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Speaker 1: in Syria. Things aren't too well right now exactly if

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Speaker 1: you if you pick the worst spots on Earth, and

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Speaker 1: if you pick the people who are worst off, they'll

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Speaker 1: be pretty badly off. But if you, if you look

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Speaker 1: at humanity as a whole, uh, then then there's unmistakably

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Speaker 1: been improved movement. And I can give you some example. Okay,

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Speaker 1: please like to hear him. Well? Worldwide, Um, the rate

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Speaker 1: of extreme poverty. I mean, this is just about as

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Speaker 1: poor as you can get. You can't even afford to

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Speaker 1: feed yourself in your family if you cut off a

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Speaker 1: dollar ninety per person per day. Uh. The rate now

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Speaker 1: is nine point six percent. That's still a lot of people.

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Speaker 1: But thirty years ago it was close to the rate

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Speaker 1: has come down that that dramatically just in thirty years.

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Speaker 1: I already mentioned war. The rate of death in war

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Speaker 1: right now in the across the planet is one point

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Speaker 1: two per hundred thousand per year, which which is awful.

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Speaker 1: But we during the Vietnam War it was nine hundred

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Speaker 1: thousand per year in the eighties, Remember there was a

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Speaker 1: war between Iran and Iraq. Like World War One, half

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Speaker 1: a million people killed. We had to worry that one

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Speaker 1: tanker sunk in the entrance to the Persian Gulf would

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Speaker 1: help the flow of oil to the rest of the world.

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Speaker 1: These were scary times. We tend to forget at how

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Speaker 1: scary earlier decades were because we're so scared of what's

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Speaker 1: going on right now. I've given another example of um

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Speaker 1: when the peace treaty was signed between the government of

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Speaker 1: Colombia and the communist guerrillas of the FARC organization the

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Speaker 1: year before last. That ended the last war in the

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Speaker 1: Western hemisphere. We've got an entire hemisphere of the world

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Speaker 1: that has no wars going on, and that that that's unprecedented.

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Speaker 1: And the whole parts of the world like Southeast Asia,

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Speaker 1: there was wars in Cambodia, Laos and of course Vietnam,

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Speaker 1: and there hasn't been a war there since a very

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Speaker 1: brief one in the really since we pulled out. What

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Speaker 1: does that tell you that well, the I mean, we

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Speaker 1: seem to be involved in all of them. Stephen, at

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Speaker 1: one form or another, the United States doesn't have such

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Speaker 1: a great track record of his staying out of war. UM.

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Speaker 1: The just another example from something completely different. You know,

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Speaker 1: for most of human history, very few people could read

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Speaker 1: a write now the rate of literacy worldwide is from

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Speaker 1: people under the age of Let me give you another example.

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Speaker 1: The disease smallpox killed three hundred million people in the

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Speaker 1: twentieth century. Doesn't exist. It was exterminated. But but new

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Speaker 1: diseases plopped up, well they can. I mean AIDS of course,

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Speaker 1: as is an example, and AIDS had a terrible death

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Speaker 1: toll in sub Sahan Africa, although that has been reversed

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Speaker 1: thanks to anti retroviral drugs and polio and guinea worm

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Speaker 1: may be eradicated within a few years. Malaria is going down,

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Speaker 1: and pneumonia's going down, diarrhea's going down. All the diseases

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Speaker 1: that killed children by the millions have gone down. Just

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Speaker 1: one more example is democracy. Now, there's really troubling signs

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Speaker 1: for democracy. In the last couple of years, Russia and

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Speaker 1: Venezuela and Turkey and whole and have all gotten less democratic.

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Speaker 1: But still, if you count up all the world's countries,

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Speaker 1: hundred and ninety two countries the this decade, since two thousands,

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Speaker 1: the world has never been more democratic. Now you hear

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Speaker 1: that you might be gotten I'm nuts for saying that,

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Speaker 1: because we were all aware of the pushbacks against democracy

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Speaker 1: but think about it. When I was a student in

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Speaker 1: say in the nineteen seventies, half of Europe was behind

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Speaker 1: the Iron Curtain, communist totalitarian dictatorships. Uh Portugal and Spain

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Speaker 1: were fascist dictatorships. Greece was under the control of the

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Speaker 1: military government. Almost all of South America was under the

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Speaker 1: control of military governments. South Korea and Taiwan today their democracies,

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Speaker 1: they used to be military governments. In Africa, there was

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Speaker 1: not a virtually, not a single democracy. Now there are

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Speaker 1: a number of them. They're doing pretty well. Uh so

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Speaker 1: that's yet another measure. And again, you know what I'm saying.

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Speaker 1: It can only be appreciated when you when you count,

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Speaker 1: when you step back from the news and you say, okay,

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Speaker 1: how well, what's the report card for the world as

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Speaker 1: a whole look like? If we count year by year,

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Speaker 1: don't just focus on the worst cases, but focus on

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Speaker 1: all of the boring countries that have gotten democratic bit

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Speaker 1: by bit. All of the wars that you've forgot about,

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Speaker 1: like an Angola and Mozambique in Nicaragua that sizzled out

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Speaker 1: and haven't reignited. All the kids who are going to school,

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Speaker 1: who can go to school before all the people in

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Speaker 1: Bangladesh and China who are living kind of lower middle

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Speaker 1: class lifestyles who used to be desperately poor. It's that

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Speaker 1: kind of perspective, looking at the world as a whole

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Speaker 1: and looking at um measures that you tell you year

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Speaker 1: by year that show you that things really have been improving.

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Speaker 1: Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at

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Speaker 1: one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to Coast

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Speaker 1: am dot com for more