What's our problem?

English with Nab's Podcast

Get a grasp on what’s going on in this crazy world, and help steer society to a brighter future.

Imagine a book, 1,000 pages long. This book contains all 200,000 or so years of human history – about 250 years per page. The vast majority of the book covers our hunter-gatherer years. The agricultural revolution – the start of what we normally talk about as ancient history – doesn’t begin until page 950. Page 1,000 covers all of US history, from the 1770s until now.

You may notice that the book gets a lot busier towards the end. This is exciting and scary for several reasons. First, technology is increasing exponentially – the jump from page 999 to 1,000 is way greater than between any of the other pages. Second, this new technology is raising the stakes – page 1,001 could be a technological utopia – or a devastating nightmare.

The problem is, we’re not just reading this book – we’re writing it. And at the moment, it’s being written by a bunch of spoiled, immature toddlers. You see, society isn’t maturing in the way that we’d like. Tribalism, false news, floundering institutions, and political division are just some of the problems that define the tumultuous times we live in.