Good morning John.

Yesterday I was part of the unveiling ceremony for the 75th Annual Doomsday Clock. This is basically a subjective measure of how close to doom we are.

Super fun. You've probably noticed that there's been a lot of bad piling up over the last 3 years. Pandemics and climate change and rising isolationism and fascism feels.

Reflecting that, the clock has been set to 100 seconds to midnight for the last 3 years which is as close to midnight as it has ever been in those 75 years. As the kids say, big yike. Is it the kids who say that?

When they asked me if I would be interested in giving some remarks, I was like, only if I can be hopeful about it. And they were like, of course! Yes, we want that.

Then I looked at the previous years, and what was being said about this year, and I was like honestly, this seems quite bad. So then I sat down to what was a challenging writing assignment. I was going to be going last, after a bunch of people went over why things are particularly bad right now and in many ways worse than they have been for a long time.

And then say something hopeful and ideally empowering? And I want to talk about how I took that challenge on, just as a writing assignment. I started by saying that just because you might be staying in the same place, it doesn't mean that you're not active, it doesn't mean you're stagnant.

Which means, we can talk both about the good news and the bad news, and there is plenty of both. So that was my transition out of what I knew would be bad news coming from the person before me. Then, I zoom way out.

We think far more about what happened this morning than we do about what happened 4 billion years ago. Even though that thing that happened 4 billion years ago is a bigger deal. A bunch of water and energy and carbon was like, hey, I'm going to be alive!

And then depending on how you categorize it also, reality that we haven't uncovered yet. Somewhere between a few million and a few hundred thousand years ago, the universe started to talk to itself about itself. It started to be like, wow that's pretty.

And that's us, like that's this. This is the universe talking to itself. Ahh!

So let's keep an eye on that because there's a reason why we're so worried. This is really wonderful! So we're protecting something great.

So that's good, a little bit of perspective you don't usually hear when you're talking about multi-lateral arms treaties. But my most important trick here, and something that I think we would all benefit a great deal from, is talking about the fact that things are hard for reasons. Like you, right now, are in the middle of the largest communications revolution in the history of the human race.

So like, yeah, we're gonna be bad at it. It doesn't mean we should resign ourselves to being bad at it, it doesn't mean we can't be better, but it's not surprising that we're having a hard time. I'm getting legitimately worried by the number of people who seem to think we can solve these problems if only humans weren't so awful and stupid and bad.

I think that idea is seductive, I think that it is tremendously disempowerment and I think that it is objectively wrong. Humans do things that were once impossible constantly. Like this that we're doing right now was once impossible.

And in the future, we will do many things that are currently impossible. I think that getting stuck in disempowerment is the worst place to be for challenging institutions and solving hard problems. Rage without an outlet is only ever going to make things worse.

So in my remarks, I decided to offer an alternative to this. Once in a while, instead of getting mad, get curious. Start with a person or institution that deeply discusses a big problem.

That might be the Prison Policy Initiative for incarceration. David Roberts' Volts newsletter and podcast for climate change, or Fair Fight and Stacey Abrams for voting rights. Spend some time engaging with those problems on a deeper and deeper level.

And even, listen to people who disagree with you about those things so you can understand not the most awful, radical, terrible version of those arguments, but the arguments that they are making that are actually convincing people. You will realize that big, hard problems are made up of thousands of smaller problems. And each one of those smaller problems has a bunch of people working on them.

And if each of us is focused on one of those problems, we're going to be way more effective than if all of us are focused on all of them, and thus not engaging deeply on any of them. And that is how I hope I wrote a talk about doomsday that wasn't depressing. John, you can see those remarks at the link in the description.

I will see you on Tuesday.