54:18
Good morning, John. The other day I engaged in a little bit of posting as I sometimes do as a treat. Some people say we don't build beautiful things anymore and like lol. We built this. This is a graph of infant mortality over the last 2,300 years. And I thought it would be received as what it is. You know, probably the most beautiful graph that exists. We spend almost all of our time zoomed into the problems of right now, which is of course what we should be doing. It's how we got this far. But it's also useful to spend a little time zoomed out to see when progress has been made and what we can learn from that. And there is also power in joy. There's power in hope. There is power in the
reality of improvement. I think it's worth spending time looking at that both because it's useful and because it's true. Like the reason this graph is so beautiful is because of what it represents. Like aesthetically it's a mess. But all of the parents whose children aren't dead and all of the children who are playing games and laughing together who are not dead, beautiful. So, I actually was somewhat surprised by some of the reactions I got to the graph when I posted this. Like about half of the replies just agreed that this was all very amazing and good to see. But it also seems like many people were just unwilling to let it go without reframing this graph inside of the desperation and the confusion of
the now. Okay, sure, good graph, but antivaxers are working to take it away. AI data centers are going to take it away. What about adult mortality? Which, for clarity, also dropped precipitously in that same period. Of course, in all of these takes, there's stuff I agree with, like the US aid cuts, we cannot be numb to the brutality of the richest man in the world taking away aid from the poorest people in the world. I'll never forgive that. It's just, it's impossible. Like, the fact that is a true sentence, you could say that and it's just true, is the most monstrous thing I could imagine. And it looks like it's going to result in a world that actually will get worse from one year to
the next. But we're not heading back to how it was in 1880 or even 1950. 150 years ago, an American hospital was a place you went to die, which is still true in some places, but less true in one place because of the work of this community and the people at dftba.com and all of our goodstore partners. DFTB I'm wearing just happen to be wearing a DFTBA shirt right now. It is interesting to me that it is so hard to hear that something has gone right without immediately pointing out all of the things that are going wrong. And there are good reasons for this. Like there are people who will use progress as a sedative. They'll say like, "Look how far we've come." When what they mean is
please stop asking for more. Settle down. We're done. We're good. But that's not what this graph says to me. It says the opposite. It says ask for more. Like progress is clearly possible. And I think there are ways that we right now continue to make progress. This is not a graph of things just naturally getting better. It's not like over the course of the last 150 years, diseases got less dangerous. This is a graph of millions of little things that were not all pointed specifically at this problem. They were pointed specifically at people who wanted better lives. It's a graph of sewage systems and vaccines and antibiotics and maternal care and food security and public health workers and
parents and doctors and nurses and scientists and governments and charities and just people working hard to make their lives better for themselves and others. I see this graph with a trajectory that is not finished. It is not a graph that says everything is fine. It is a graph that says despair is not wisdom. And I think that it is sometimes easy to feel that when you are having despair publicly online that is a form of sophistication or of wisdom. It is certainly a safe thing to do in a world that doesn't reward you for having takes about how things can get better and indeed have. Sometimes I feel like the ability to name all the broken things is the same thing as an understanding of the world, but it's not
because the world is not just broken things. And I don't want to live in a mind where every piece of good news has to be immediately escorted out of the room by a committee of caveats. I don't live in that mind. I am aware of the caveats. I know about them because the world is very good at telling me about them. And I'm glad for that because the caveats are how we know where we need to keep fighting. But I also want to be able to look at a line representing billions and billions of children who got to keep being alive and say despair is not wisdom. And indeed, it is a weakness of our minds that it is so much easier to pay attention to threats than to successes. And that weakness is
especially dangerous in an information landscape so committed to giving us whatever is easiest to pay attention to, like a tiny effect of maybe just two people in a hundred choosing not to click on your video this week, John. A video that is about this very process. the very process that will keep that number getting closer to zero of just lots of people working hard to make life better for themselves and for others. But I scroll past that one because the next one is maybe something I feel like I need to know to protect myself from some potential future threat. Two people in 100 do that. And you might think that means that like 2% fewer people will see that video. But that's not what
happens. The algorithms amplify that effect. And so you end up with a video that gets viewed by around a third of the number of people who see most Vlog Brothers videos. I think this is one of the most interesting and important things about living in the world right now. These algorithms do not amplify our wisdom. So people, if you haven't seen that video, it's the top link in the description. You could check it out cuz despair is not wisdom. And if we thought it was, there's a hospital in Sierra Leone that would not exist. And there are babies who would otherwise be dead, but they're not. They can be tickled.
John, I'll see you on
