My Second Podcast With US Army Rangers on The American Element
When contacted by officers of the elite American Army Rangers I was curious to be sure.
What might have drawn the finest warriors on the planet to me and my work?
It’s been a rewarding new friendship talking with Captain John Bradley.
You can listen in on some of our conversations.
Without further ado… click to listen to podcast #2 with me.
Excerpt from their story: Solving Impossible Problems
In Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think by the inventors of the X-Prize Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis, the authors point out that, “bad news sells because the amygdala is always looking for something to fear.” They evangelize an optimistic vision of the future, noting that human beings generally latch onto the risks in their environment, and our outlook tends to be darker than the horizon of history.
I found this sentiment most succinctly verbalized by the journalist Michael Specter, who noted in a 2010 TED Talk that a child born in Mumbai India could expect to live longer than the richest man could one hundred years ago. We lose perspective on how good we have it, and how great our potential is to improve our lot in life.
It is interesting to consider climate change in light of this vision of a future full of solvable problems, as climate change is a subject discussed in the same gloomy language we use to talk about colon cancer. We never quite get past arguing that it’s very dangerous, and we’d better bend over and prepare to suffer.
As with colon cancer, we’re unable to predict whether global warming will kill us. Can we stop it? Not anytime soon. How bad will it get? It could get about as bad, and be about as expensive as we can possibly imagine. But history tells us something about problems that seem impossible to solve: we usually solve them.