Something You Should Know - The Surprising Benefits of Cursing & How the World is Getting Better and Safer

Starting point is 00:00:00 As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know is all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu. She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future.

Starting point is 00:00:42 Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, a food label tells you

Starting point is 00:01:08 how many calories are in the food, but how do they come up with that number? Then, swearing. Why do we do it? Is there any value in it? And why you use the same swear words most of your life? For each of us, our swearing tends to sort of ossify towards the end of adolescence. So what I think of as being highly offensive is likely to be very different to what my parents thought was highly offensive and will be different again to what my daughter thinks of. Plus, you've heard the slogan that sex sells? Well it doesn't, and I'll explain why.

Starting point is 00:01:42 And if you think the world is going to hell, it may just be your thinking is wrong. If you think in terms of facts, there's no conclusion that you can come to, but that most things are getting better for most people in most places in our very large world. All this today on Something You Should Know. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared.

Starting point is 00:02:20 It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 00:03:06 Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi there. Welcome to Something You Should Know. You know, I'm sometimes asked, well, actually, I'm frequently asked,

Starting point is 00:03:27 what was my favorite episode of this podcast? And my answer is I don't really have one. My favorite episode is whatever episode I'm working on right now. But I don't, well, I don't really remember them all. I mean, this is episode 560, so that's a lot of episodes. But I sometimes go back and listen to some of the previous episodes and some of which I've forgotten, and they're really interesting. So if you're a relatively new listener, or even if you've been listening for a while, I invite you to go back into the archives on whatever platform you're listening on and enjoy some of the previous episodes of

Starting point is 00:04:10 Something You Should Know. First up today, a question I've always wondered about is, you know on a food label, it tells you how many calories in each serving. Well, how do they come up with that number? How do they know there are that many calories in that food? Well, calorie counts are calculated by burning food. To figure out how many calories a food has, scientists use a calorimeter. I think I'm pronouncing that right. One type of calorimeter essentially burns up food inside a device surrounded by water. By measuring how much the temperature of the water changes, scientists can determine how much energy was contained in the food.

Starting point is 00:04:54 And that's what calories are, energy in food. Density explains why cold water feels colder than cold air at the same temperature. Because water is denser than air, your body loses heat 25 times more quickly while in water than it would in air at the same temperature. That loss of body heat makes you feel colder. You could heat your house with people. People give off body heat, as anyone who's been trapped in a small crowded room knows. So how many people would it take to warm up your home with just body heat in

Starting point is 00:05:32 the winter? The answer is about 70 people in motion or about 140 people standing still. A Lego brick can support 770 pounds of force. For anybody who stepped on one, Lego bricks do seem indestructible, but they're not quite indestructible. Legos can support four to five times the weight of a human without collapsing. They are strong enough to support a tower of 375,000 bricks, which would be a Lego tower about 2.2 miles high. After that, that bottom Lego could collapse. And that is something you should know. Since the first caveman smacked his head on a rock, there has probably been swearing. People swear, and it seems to me they swear more than ever before.

Starting point is 00:06:33 But why do people swear, and what makes swear words so horrible? Why are some worse than others? And is there any benefit from swearing? Here to shed some light on that is Emma Byrne, who has spent a long time looking at the subject of swearing. Emma is actually a robotic scientist, but for our purposes, she's the author of a book called Swearing is Good for You, and she joins me from the UK.

Starting point is 00:07:00 Hi, Emma. Welcome. So why the interest in swearing? One of the things that really intrigued me about swearing is the fact that it is so incredibly important in our language. It has various different roles from helping us express sympathy or bonding in teams through to killing pain. And there are a lot of positive points to swearing. And yet we spend a lot of our time trying to tell ourselves not to do it. But when you look at all cultures throughout the world and throughout time, in fact, even when you look at other primates that can communicate, swearing is an essential part of every language that we know of. So it's something that we can't make go away, no matter how hard we may try. And we think that it

Starting point is 00:07:42 probably comes from, certainly from parts of the brain that are really involved in processing emotions, not just our own emotions, but the emotions of others as well. And swearing is that kind of language that remains when all other words fail us, when circumstances are so extreme that there's nothing else in our vocabulary that we'll just quite do. It does seem though that swearing lately in the last, I don't know, five, ten years seems to be much more, I don't know if it's acceptable, but it's certainly more commonplace. I think what happens in every generation, you see writers saying something very similar going all the way back as long as history has been recorded, that this generation's swearing,

Starting point is 00:08:24 they're just so much more likely to use offensive words than we are. But part of that is just a function of the way that taboos evolve in societies. So there are words that certainly at your age or my age, as we grew up, we probably wouldn't have used that commonly in front of people uh would have thought of them as being particularly strong swear words uh like the f word and particularly like the c word um but over time those taboos move on but that's not to say that swearing has become necessarily more commonplace just that what constitutes swearing has changed so there are words like the n word for example that used to appear in literature and that my grandparents would not have thought of as being particularly offensive. unsayable, whereas words like damn or bloody or even taking the Lord's name in vain is considered far less offensive to most people. But it's not that swearing as a whole has become more

Starting point is 00:09:33 commonplace. It's just the attitudinal shift has changed what we see as swearing, what we define as taboo language. Is there any sense of the words like the F word, the C word, the S word, how did it become that those words became offensive? I mean, the words are just words, but somehow they elevated or de-elevated into this category of words that are so forbidden. But it says who? I mean, how did that happen? Yeah, it's a really fascinating thing to watch evolving as languages change. So for example, the C word back in Chaucerian English was just a commonplace term, you know, it's a way that you spoke about that part of the body, because our taboos about bodies were very different then, whereas religious swearing was far more important. What's more, the idea of women swearing was considered considerably less

Starting point is 00:10:32 offensive back in those days than it is now. Now women are judged more harshly than their male counterparts for swearing, whereas back in Chaucer's days, it was a fairly equal opportunity. And what you see are occasionally there are people who define a moment in history. So in the history of the English language, a chat by the Reverend Richard Allistree is highly fundamental. He writes this pamphlet called The Lady's Calling that essentially shapes our attitudes down to this day about the difference between men swearing and women swearing. But you also see in different sort of societal eras. So here in the UK, the Victorians are known for their propriety and their desire to cleanse their language of things that might be seen as being

Starting point is 00:11:16 offensive. And to the point which even the word trousers became replaced by the term the unmentionables. There was much hitching the term the unmentionables. There was much hitching up of the unmentionables as Dickens writes at one point. So there are times when in our culture, in our society, we seem to want to police our language more. And they tend to coincide with times of great social upheaval where people are feeling sort of under threat and particularly under threat by members of society that aren't necessarily, you know, people who've been powerful up until this point. And we see it now. I think there is a reflection now in the various calls for civility. Quite often, those people who are calling for civility are the ones you have the least to lose if circumstances carry on as they

Starting point is 00:12:01 are. Whereas those people who are saying things that are deemed offensive are quite often those that are saying, look, things have to change. I cannot allow this to go on in good conscience. We see that over and over again, that linguistic propriety and social upheaval, or at least a demand for linguistic propriety and social upheaval, do tend to go hand in hand. So are you saying that these words existed and were relatively benign, but because of somebody or something or some event or some movement, and they became more offensive, but they were words before? Or did someone say, I'm going to come up with a swear word and the F word, it's going to rhyme with duck, and here it is? Yeah, I mean, it's the first of those two. And we see it happening now with the kinds of words that are used as slurs. So again, even sort of 10, 20 years ago, it was still possible

Starting point is 00:12:56 for someone to, in good faith, say, but hey, is it okay for me as a white person to use the n-word you know is is it really that bad whereas over time as that conversation's taken place and as people of color have been granted finally some space to to put forward their their opinions on this and say look for for us for a person of color the the n-word out of a white person's mouth can quite easily be a precursor to a hate crime. You know, this is not something that you as a white person can ever understand the emotional intent behind that or the emotional effect of that on a person of colour. And that's why we'd prefer this not to be common parlance. And that's not because, you know, any great, much as some people would like to believe this, it's not because there's some sort of committee of social justice warriors who sat down and gone, what words should we ban now?

Starting point is 00:13:52 It's that the conversations that we've had, the things that we've paid attention to, have been more about the feelings of marginalized groups, the impacts of that kind of language on marginalized groups, whereas we talk far less about our feelings about religion. It might not seem that way, but we talk far less about the importance of religion in our lives than we did, say, sort of 50 to 100 years ago. So it's a consensus, but it's not an explicit consensus. It's an emergent consensus, if you will, that what gets spoken about, what gets reflected in the media, what gets reflected in popular culture tends to influence what we think of as sayable or unsayable. And it particularly influences us as we're growing up. So for each of us, our swearing and what we consider to be the unsayable tends to sort of ossify towards the end of adolescence. So what I think of as being

Starting point is 00:14:43 highly offensive is likely to be very different to what my parents thought of as highly offensive, and will be different again to what my daughter thinks of as highly offensive, because it will all be a reflection of what's going on in the media and in popular culture and in our society as we each grow up. My guest today is Emma Byrne, and she is author of the book Swearing is Good for You. Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural.

Starting point is 00:15:15 It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll, of course, have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers.

Starting point is 00:15:43 It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest.

Starting point is 00:16:24 Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed, critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show

Starting point is 00:17:11 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Emma, let's talk about the usefulness and the benefits of swearing because I think for a long time people have dismissed swearing as vulgar and unnecessary, but in fact, there is some real research that says it has benefits. Yeah, I mean, we've really known for about 150 years that swearing is a very special part of language, and it can be incredibly useful when people have suffered from brain injuries or from stroke. It's the kind of language that tends to persist even if you lose all of the rest of your ability to speak or to understand language. And the first person to notice this was actually a neuroscientist back in the

Starting point is 00:17:55 Victorian era called John Hughlings Jackson, who went out to study people with epilepsy or people who suffered from strokes and found that they were very, very fluent in their use of profanity. And that various doctors have been describing these patients as being aphasic, as being entirely without words, when actually it turns out that they were extremely fluent, just not in the kind of language that these doctors were willing to write down in a medical journal. So Hughlings Jackson is the first person to write these words down and say, mainly at that time, there were religious profanities, blasphemies that people were using over and over again, and to try to understand what that meant about the structure of the brain.

Starting point is 00:18:36 And from that point on, it's allowed us to unpack the way that language and our emotions and the way in which we learn things are kind of linked together. So most of us have this sort of rule of thumb that language is on the left hand side of the brain and emotion is on the right hand side of the brain. But in reality, it's a bit more complicated than that. It's a lot more redundant than that. So my background is as a computer scientist and we talk about redundancy, the ability to have systems that if a bit of it fails, then something else will take over. Our brains are brilliant at that. And when we lose the parts of our brain that are usually found on the left, things like Broca's area or Wernicke's area, the things that allow us to produce speech, there are still other parts of our brain that can pick up on our emotions, pick up on the content of our feelings,

Starting point is 00:19:27 and that can still communicate with the incredibly sophisticated muscle movements that are required in order to make speech. So when you think about it, in order to say anything, you have to coordinate the action of your diaphragm, your lungs, your throat, your vocal cords, your teeth, your tongue, your lips. And that's a really difficult thing to do. And Brokers and Wernicke's are usually, you know, very, very adept at doing that. But if you lose them, if someone, for example, has to amputate the left side of your brain, as sometimes happens, that the parts of your brain that deal with emotion can still get those muscles to move, can still make extremely fluent speech, but it seems to be predominantly limited to just those swear words. So there is this connection between swearing and emotion and

Starting point is 00:20:17 language that is distributed throughout the brain and is highly resilient to all kinds of other damage. But when people swear, oftentimes it's looked on as, well, you know, you should have picked another word, but you picked that word because you're, you know, deficient in whatever you're deficient in. But in fact, using that word, whatever it is, because you hurt yourself or you, you know, cut yourself or whatever, almost has or actually has a therapeutic effect. That's quite right, yeah. So there's been some fantastic studies in the last 10 years, and they're so reproducible.

Starting point is 00:20:56 There are many studies in psychology that suffer a little bit with trying to reproduce them. You never quite get a strong effect again. But this experiment that was done at the University of Keele here in the UK has been reproduced multiple times and it basically shows that if you ask someone to plunge their hand in ice cold water something that's quite painful that they can do that for about half as long again if they're swearing than if they're using a neutral word. Those same researchers

Starting point is 00:21:25 have looked into that to try to unpack why that might be. And they found sort of various physiological correlates of having a heightened emotional response while you're swearing. So that heightened emotional response might be part of the reason why you can withstand more pain. They've also looked at things like whether or not swearing increases your resilience in other sort of types of activities. So you can actually exert more strength and more stamina if you're swearing than if you're not. So a number of things that we're able to do that all seem to focus on resilience, withstanding pain, being stronger, that somehow swearing is prompting that in our body. And we're still trying to figure out

Starting point is 00:22:06 exactly what it is that allows us to do that. But it does seem to be something to do with the increased emotional arousal that we feel when we use swearing. What about though, when you're not necessarily in pain or something. But sometimes swearing seems like the word seems to be perfect, but is it just a choice? Like when you see something odd or something disturbing and you go, what the F? You know, that feels right sometimes as opposed to saying, gee, what's going on?

Starting point is 00:22:44 I mean, you know what I mean? It's like that really, that's really more fitting. That's right. And a lot of that is to do with our theory of mind, our ability to model the emotions of other people. So when we swear, it's usually because we have either experienced this emotional uptick in ourselves, we've seen something surprising or exciting or amazing or dismaying, or we've noticed that someone else is feeling the same way. And I did some research about five years ago, looking at how football fans use swearing on Twitter. And we thought, you know, here in the UK, soccer fans have a bit of a reputation of being fairly aggro towards each other.

Starting point is 00:23:26 And the kinds of terrorist chants that you hear if you go to a game can sometimes be quite insulting towards the other team. And we thought that that would probably be the same on Twitter. But when we looked at it, most of the swearing that football fans use is used to demonstrate either sympathy because, you know, you are sharing this this terrible this excrementally bad game with other fans or it's used in elation you know that this is so fornicatingly good and that football fans on twitter never actually swear at members of the opposite team what they do is they swear in bonding they swear in either excitement you know shared excitement with other fans of the same team

Starting point is 00:24:06 or in commiseration in that sort of shared misery with other fans of the same team. And particularly with some of the teams that we've looked at, including one that I follow myself, it definitely shows that misery does love company

Starting point is 00:24:18 and that willingness to express your disappointment, but to not do that in a way that is abusive towards any particular player. In fact, we only found in thousands of utterances, hundreds of thousands of utterances on Twitter, we only found one episode that led to people being explicitly abusive with their swearing. And that was where one particular player had carried out a very nasty tackle

Starting point is 00:24:44 on another player and caused them to be injured and taken off the pitch. And that not only were the opposing team's fans upset about this, but his own team's fans were berating him in no uncertain terms and saying he deserved to have a red card because that behavior had been so bad. So we do sometimes use it aggressively to keep people in line. But more often than not, it is actually used, as you say, sort of rhetorically, it's chosen to express an excited state or a sympathetic state or a depressed state. It's not used as a means of, you know, sort of essentially a verbal cudgel. Sometimes it seems, though, it's used in a somewhat benign way. Like, you know, I can see, you know, two people talking and looking at the guy across the room and, oh, do you know him?

Starting point is 00:25:28 Oh, yeah, he's an effing idiot. Now, you could just say he's an idiot, but instead he's an effing idiot. And it's a little different. I mean, it's subtle, but it is different. You're right. And that degree of nuance that you can bring to bear with a really well-chosen swear word, because normally when we're choosing words, we're really thinking about its kind of semantic

Starting point is 00:25:51 associations. What does it, what images is it going to conjure up in that person's mind? What associations? But with swearing in particular, we're also having to think about what emotional state that's going to convey. And the stronger the swear words, the greater that degree of understanding that you're hoping that the person listening to you is going to take away in terms of how much should you be avoiding that person? How much do you need to be excluding that person from your social group? Or how bad is the situation that you're describing? And we have these layers of nuance. You mentioned something a moment ago, which I find interesting, that people, when describing,

Starting point is 00:26:32 as you just said, oh, he's not just an a-hole, he's a total a-hole. Like, we need that to really drive the point home. Yeah. And this is one of the ways that English is surprisingly fluent with swearing. So our swearing vocabulary is quite poor compared to, say, Spanish. It's certainly very poor compared to Russian in terms of the number of words we have that are denoted as swearing. We have very few. We tend to rely on the same set of the F word, the S word, A-hole, and the C word. But the ways in which we modify them, or certainly even if you think of the ways in which we can conjugate the F word, we use them so fluently. Well, it's a subject that everyone's exposed to, either because they swear or they hear other people swear and

Starting point is 00:27:25 it's interesting to hear the origins of it and the reason for it and and all the other things you discussed emma burn has been my guest her book is swearing is good for you and you'll find a link to her book in the show notes thanks emma thanks very much It's been a pleasure. Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events.

Starting point is 00:28:02 Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our Lister poll results from But Am I Wrong? And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. So when you look at the world, do you think the world is a better place than 5, 10, 20 years ago? Or does it look like the world's just

Starting point is 00:29:06 falling apart? Is your life better or worse than it was 5, 10, or 20 years ago? What about your community? It's easy, because we look at news and social media, it's easy to think that things are going to hell in a handbasket. But what if you were to objectively measure things that really matter? What then? Could it be that things are just leaps and bounds better than they were before? Well, the answer is yes, according to Greg Easterbrook. Greg is the author of 10 books. He has written for The New Yorker, Wired, Harvard Business Review, and The Wall Street Journal. And he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences just last year. His new book is called It's Better Than It Looks, Reason for Optimism in an Age of Fear. Hi, Greg, thanks for being here. So what are the things that

Starting point is 00:29:57 you measured, objectively, to come to the conclusion that things are so good now. Longevity, disease rates, pollution rates, crime rates, education levels, living standards. In the United States, almost every barometer, objective barometer, this is not how you feel about your life, this is what we can measure. Almost every barometer has been positive at least four years, and in most cases for decades, in some cases for generations. And the positive arc of events applies in almost all other developed countries, Western Europe, Japan, principally, and is beginning to apply to a surprising extent in the developing world, including the parts of Asia and Africa that seemed close to hopeless a couple of generations ago.

Starting point is 00:30:50 And by that, I don't mean that everything's fine. Of course, I don't mean that. And I don't mean that you would necessarily feel great about what you read in the newspapers or increasingly on your phones. I'm just saying that almost everyone in the world today lives better, objectively, than almost everyone from any past generation. So why do people feel as if the opposite is true? Well, there are a variety of theories. One is that if you look at the past, Americans especially, but people in many nations have always felt negative about their national conditions. I begin one chapter called, it's titled, How Declinism Became Chic, by describing great works of literature that talk about how terrible the condition of the United

Starting point is 00:31:31 States is, and how Western society is about to end, and how everything's falling apart, and we can never possibly came up with a rate of change. And I don't tell you the titles of the books. And then the punchline at the end is that every book play novel etc that I described was written at least a hundred years ago so people have felt this for a long time I think in the modern era improving communications is great how can you be how can you possibly be opposed to improving communications but communications in order to draw attention to itself, this has long been true of newspapers now is true of social media on your phone, relentlessly emphasizes the negative and overstates discord. So when you look at your phone,

Starting point is 00:32:18 or whatever your other source of news is, when you listen to podcasts, you tend to hear emphasis on whatever's most negative and most bleak. And if that's all you hear, it makes you think that everything's falling apart. Even if you look out your window and you say, hmm, the sky is blue today. I'm in Washington, D.C. The sky is not blue today. But if you look out your window and things seem fine and all the people you know are

Starting point is 00:32:40 fine and your local health care and schools and economy, all these things are fine, but you look on your phone, and your phone is telling you bang, bang, bang, terrible, terrible, terrible. You think, well, maybe I don't understand what's going on. Maybe the world's actually worse than what I think. This is emphasized in the United States by the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump got 63 million votes by relentlessly telling voters that the condition of the world was terrible. As he said just before his election in October of 16, referring to the United States, our country has never been in worse condition than today. That's the reverse of what was true. But 63 million people

Starting point is 00:33:26 believed him. And so we're surrounded by all these negative messages, and the negative messages sink into an awful lot of people. But it may be so that the world is better, according to the benchmarks that you outlined. But if my life isn't better, people are selfish. If the world is better but your life sucks, well, it doesn't really matter that the world is better. You've got to make your world better. Well, people are selfish, and I think, Mike, you can use selfish, and it's not necessarily a compliment to call someone selfish, but to be selfish is at some level rational. We think that market economics are rational in part because people act in their own self-interest first,

Starting point is 00:34:09 not in the interest of distant people that they don't know, but that at the end everyone ends up better off as a result. So I don't think it's necessarily bad to consider your own situation before you consider the larger arc of the world. Most people's own situations are much better than they're willing to admit. If you measure by buying power, almost everybody, including the middle class, has had steady increase in buying power since the end of World War II, has had steady increase in buying power in the last decade.

Starting point is 00:34:41 If you measure people's health, public health, and almost all things, except now in the United States in painkiller addiction has been improving dramatically. Heart disease rates, cancer rates, stroke, hypertension, they're all in three generation long cycles of decline. We're almost all of us, not every single person, but almost all of us are healthier than we used to be. We almost all are better educated than we used to be. There's a single generation long decline in violent crime. There's a single generation long decline in the frequency and intensity of wars in the world.

Starting point is 00:35:17 Today, a person living anywhere in the United States, anywhere in Europe, anywhere in Afghanistan, is less likely to be a fatality of war than in any previous generation. All these things show that average people, I'm not talking about the rich here, average people are in better shape than they've ever been in. But we sure don't want to believe that about ourselves. And at some level, what we want to believe ourselves will always trump what you can show with facts and statistics. Well, sure, because your reality is your reality. I don't care what your chart says. If you think your life sucks, your life sucks.

Starting point is 00:35:57 Well, but see, that's getting... I started by saying, 15 years ago, I wrote a book about what you think about your life. It's clearly true. If you think your life is terrible, then that's how you experience life. But this is a choice that we make. This is not something that's imposed on us by outside forces. Most people choose to have a negative or positive view of their own lives. In my previous book, I argued that choosing to experience your own life in a negative way harms only one person, you. You're the only person that suffers because of

Starting point is 00:36:31 that choice. To choose to experience your life in a positive way, I certainly don't mean to be a Pollyanna about this. People who are optimistic and have positive views of the world are also well aware of all of the many terrible problems of the world, and they also have many terrible problems in their own lives. People who are optimists are not people who don't have problems. They are people who believe that they can solve their problems. Well, sure. If your perception of the world from watching the news or being on social media, that the world is nothing but a pack of problems,

Starting point is 00:37:05 well, you kind of absorb that and it becomes part of your view of life and the world and everything. And in fact, we live in a culture where it's very much, you know, if it bleeds, it leads. And the weird and the unusual and the negative and the sad and the catastrophic

Starting point is 00:37:23 is what we see more of in the news. In the past it was, I read something terrible in the newspaper, and therefore everything must be terrible. Now we have to resist the urge to say, I saw something terrible on Instagram, and therefore everything must be terrible. Our perception of life should be based on fact. And if you think in terms of facts, you still may say, well, I don't like my neighborhood, I don't like my friends, I don't like my family,

Starting point is 00:37:52 I can't give it, you know, no one can answer what you decide to feel about your own experience of life. But if you look at facts and use rational analysis of facts to understand the world, there's no conclusion that you can come to, but most things are getting better for most people in most places in our very large world. But the flip side of that is that there still is a great deal of suffering

Starting point is 00:38:20 and injustice in the world that I think people are uncomfortable with, that we see it in the news all the time, and it's hard to turn away. Oh, you shouldn't, Mike, you shouldn't just be uncomfortable with the suffering in the world, you should be angry. You can be an optimist and still be angry. Look at the United States. We still have, depending on how you measure it, 8 to 10 percent of people who live in the United States. We still have, depending on how you measure it, 8 to 10 percent of people who live in the United States, the wealthiest society in the world's history, are still living in poverty. That's outrageously high. If you look at the larger world, global poverty is in decline. I think actually the biggest, most important story in the larger world in the last 25 years is the decline of extreme poverty in Asia and Africa.

Starting point is 00:39:06 But there's still a lot of poverty. But I think here is the distinction between the optimistic and pessimistic worldviews. If you become a pessimist, you think, well, you know, why should I even want to try to help Africa or Asia? I'm just going to fail anyway. If you're an optimist, you think that problems can be fixed. There does seem to be, though, in this country particularly, or maybe it's around the world, that it isn't just problems to be solved. There's a big divide in what is the problem. I mean, there's a lot of people today, particularly on college campuses, calling for socialism in the end of capitalism.

Starting point is 00:39:48 Well, that's not a problem to be solved. That's a fundamental difference and divide in how we should live. And that's a—I don't know how you solve that. I don't know either. There's an old—you may know this old joke in journalism, Mike, that the ultimate headline that you can put on the front page of the newspaper any day of the week is the headline, utopia still not achieved, which is both true, will always be true, and has the requisite negative slant to it. If your standard is, I'll only be happy if everything is perfect for everyone, then you're never going to be happy because absent divine intervention, it's really hard to imagine how everything could be perfect for everyone. But if your standard is, most things are better for most people, and I see trends of progress in important social issues, let's say climate change is one,

Starting point is 00:40:46 that means a lot to a lot of people, then I think you can be optimistic about the future. If you really hope that we can devise some system of government or economics that will end all problems for everyone, we shouldn't rule that out. It would be nice to have that kind of utopian ideal, but it doesn't sound terribly practical, does it? So what do we do with this? I mean, it's great to say that despite all the problems that we see in the world, that things are getting better, and they have been getting better for some time.

Starting point is 00:41:20 So now what? Well, let's suppose that you make that pivot. Mike, first of all, I think that you, not you personally, but anybody who thinks in optimistic terms, you increase your likelihood of a better experience of your own life. And that's not an inconsequential thing. I can't guarantee this will happen for you, but most people who switch from a negative to a positive view of the world find that their own experience of their own life, their own one chance at life improves. And that's not a small thing.

Starting point is 00:41:51 But then you look out to the larger world and say, okay, what effect is this going to have on the country or even the entire earth? If I think that things can be improved, instead of saying that now, in the last 10 years, our politics has been really motivated with this desire to harm other interest groups. And that's not the way to think about it at all. We should think in terms of civic spirit and want to help other interest groups and want to participate in a grand civic experiment whose end result will be positive, not negative.

Starting point is 00:42:26 And I think if you buy what I'm selling intellectually, that the world is getting better and the improvement of the world can be accelerated, then it makes you want to be civic-spirited. What does seem interesting to me, though, is that we can't all today agree on what the problems are that we need to fix. That some people claim man-made global warming is destroying the world. Other people say it's not. Some people say we need to stop immigration, illegal immigration into this country. Others say open the borders. We can't agree on the problems. And added to that is the level of rhetoric and the yelling and the screaming at each other

Starting point is 00:43:10 makes a lot of what you're talking about seemingly impossible. Yeah, and as I cite, what I think was an important political science textbook from about 12 years ago, this was right before Facebook. So before all this, not only do we want to scream at each other, but we want to scream at people that we've never met and never will meet, who are just little avatars on Facebook and similar websites. But there's a really good political science textbook called Red or Blue Nation, who I think it's 2006 was the publication year. And its basic thesis is that it used to be

Starting point is 00:43:46 considered polite for people not to discuss politics or religion in public because you didn't want to offend somebody else. Now we've gone, and that kind of tended to dampen a lot of kinds of debate. Now we've gone all the way to the other extreme, where people are expected to have very strongly phrased, angry opinions about practically everything. And remember, this is from 2006, this book I'm describing, and not by me, by the way. And the result is a society where people yell at each other. And what do we have now on cable news, on our phones, even at public events, we have a society where people yell at each other. We need to get past that, Mike.

Starting point is 00:44:27 We really need to get past that. Well, it's an interesting topic, and the good news is, as you point out, that things objectively are better, are getting better, have been getting better for some time, and that's a message that I think we all need to take to heart. Greg Easterbrook is my guest. The book is It's Better Than It Looks, Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear. And you will find a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Greg. Okay. Thanks a million, Mike.

Starting point is 00:45:00 I'm sure you've heard the advertising slogan, sex sells. But apparently it doesn't. I'm sure you've heard the advertising slogan, sex sells. But apparently, it doesn't. And violence, well, that sells even worse. Researchers at Ohio State University found that viewers are less likely to remember ads when they're shown around films and TV programs with explicit sex or violent content than during more family-friendly material. And the same goes for the graphic ads themselves. In looking at the results from 8,489 participants,

Starting point is 00:45:34 the study found that violence had the greatest negative influence. Brands advertised with or around violent content were remembered less often and evaluated less favorably and less likely to be bought than products plugged alongside other media. The lead author of the study says it's not that people are not attracted to sex and violence. On the contrary, people have been attracted to sex and violence since forever. But while violence and sex attract attention, it is at the expense of the surrounding content.

Starting point is 00:46:10 So they just don't remember the brands being advertised, which is the whole point of the advertising. And that is something you should know. Remember, we have great advertisers on this program that support this podcast. So I hope you will consider doing business with them because they are what keep this podcast going. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper.

Starting point is 00:46:40 In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity.

Starting point is 00:47:04 The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you next time. Thank you.

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