Hi, guys! Welcome to a new episode of my channel, The Dissenter.
And today, we have again with us Fernanda Drumond, the Head of Operations at Gapminder.
I've already had her once on the show, and I will leave a link to it in the description box. Please go watch, because it's very interesting.
Hi, Fernanda! Everything well with you?
Hi. Everything's perfect. It's a pleasure to be here with you again. And thank you for having me again.
The pleasure is mine. Our first conversation was great, and surely this one will be as much, or even better.
So, this time I would like to talk about more general questions about human progress.
Because last time we focused mostly on specific themes, but then we also have general questions that more or less accompany human progress in general, let's say.
And so, what bad can come from people having wrong notions about human progress?
For example, if people think that the world is much worse than it actually is, couldn't it happen that
they put aside measures that really do work, and try to substitute them with others that don't work?
Only because they think that those measures aren't working, when they in fact are?
Well, that's a very complex questions, because
it involves several different professional areas.
Three things came to my mind now.
Which are problems that we get when we have a wrong view of the world.
First, it's the one you said, the fact that we might make decisions that are not the best for the population of any country.
For example, if we don't understand well how how's the impact of immigrants in a certain population,
we may end up making decisions that are not the best.
Both for the local population, and for the immigrants that are just arriving.
And even for the country of origin of those immigrants.
And not only talking about immigration, but also where we will invest money, like for example
on infant mortality, or mothers' mortality.
To try to avoid more deaths of mothers due to pregnancy.
So, we have to understand where the worst cases occur, or each case.
Of those problems, to know what...
We have to pick up stats about those problems, to know where we have to improve, where the decisions have to be made.
That is one of the problems I notice.
Of having an erroneous view of the state of the world.
Another problem has to do with mental health.
If we don't see how the world is improving, we end up
putting a lot of stress on our backs.
There are nowadays several authors, several psychologists out there, talking about depression, anxiety,
how everything that's happening in the world ends up aggravating our mental health problems.
And so, if we get to understand how the world is improving,
it helps us to understand that, wait a minute, things are not getting worse,
but rather that the way I feel is another thing, right?
And so, it's very important for us to understand how the world is, to avoid
a lot of stress. Stress that is perfectly unnecessary.
And the third thing that I imagine has to do with our personal lives.
If we understand how the world is, we make better decisions
about our life, about our careers, about our personal relationships.
And so, I think that if we have data and stats about the world,
it ends up affecting us in macro, but also in micro ways.
Exactly.
No, I really do think that those are three very interesting and important points for people to know about.
Now, another thing.
With the massive amount of data that we process nowadays...and I'm particularly talking about Big Data
and all of the institutions around the globe that we have,
to analyse this and that problem,
I'm not sure if I should put this question this way,
but what is the probability of a catastrophe happening
that we can predict or that is not controllable?
Is it that high?
That is a very difficult question for me to answer, because, first,
here at Gapminder we love data, right? We love stats. And so it's kind of the more the better.
I think that we have to question about that catastrophe of Big Data, too much data, we have to pose that question to data analysts.
I think that...and this is my opinion as a "legal", and not as an "expert",
I think that we are improving technology so much that, in a way or another, we will be able to adapt
all of what we're doing to avoid that super chaos.
I think that what will cause this chaos
is simply that way that we, humans,
deal with it. The same way as it is for financial crises due to the credit market.
So, the problem is not technology itself, I think.
That exhuberant amount of data, but rather the way we're dealig with it.
Our way to understand, to analyze what's going to happen in the future and make predictions.
Sometimes the predictions we make are completely mistaken.
And things happen, and they bring chaos.
So, I'm not sure, but I think that
that we will be able to absorve it, with the technology that we have
and more conversations like this,
and having more people to get informed about Big Data,
I think we will be able to understand how those processes work better, and we will be able to absorve that, avoiding a super chaos.
It's just that people are too dramatic, you know?
It's similar to that story about overpopulation, that human population is growing too fast, and it will bring the world to an end.
Suddenly, there's an exponential growth, and we will get to 30 billion people.
There's a lot of drama we create around things that we don't properly understand.
With demographics, we are starting to understand it better.
It's just a matter of understanding better how population growth works.
It's very similar to Big Data. If we understand a bit better what's happening, what
are the measures being put to work at the moment, we end up
understanding that it's not really about chaos, and we don't need to have all that drama. It's just a matter of
learning more about the subject, and to democratize it a bit more.
To have more people discussing and learning about it, and arriving at new solutions.
Right, and it's just because of that that I like doing interviews with you, to try to help putting this out there. Otherwise, people
will live thinking that tomorrow climate change will come and will destroy everything.
And that Trump will simply launch the bombs and blow up half of the world.
That's right.
So, we have to be a bit more optimistic in a realist way, right?
Yes. More realist, I would say.
Even though we hear Trump saying all of those things,
and all of those tweets about having a bigger button than the other one, you know.
I think that's important to think rationally.
The probability of that actually happen is very small.
And so, we don't need to be alarmists all the time.
Who needs to be alarmist, in my opinion,
or the ones that want to be alarmist, are the ones who want to gather more attention. The ones that are trying to gain more clicks,
or to gain more donations.
To gather more funding.
But I think that nowadays it's a very crooked way to call for attention, and to earn money.
I think that
in the current era, people are asking for more data, and proof, and facts.
And so, I think that's worthier to present facts, and to try to think rationally, than to try to dramatize things in that way.
Exactly.
And another thing.
Isn't it important for us to try to be...and particularly thanks to all these data we have access to nowadays...for us to be more pragmatica than ideological?
An example that quickly comes to my mind is...
the question about people criticizing the fact that people allow for sport hunting in poorer countries, to try to use the money they collect from sportsmen who want to use protected areas,
and that money then goes, in those cases, to help
preserve species near extinction that otherwise
would not be possible in those places, due to lack of funding.
It's only an example, but...
That's a very interesting example.
To be honest, I've never heard about that before.
What they're saying is that
people from richer countries pay to hunt in poorer countries...
and the money that comes from there...
The money is used to help preserve species near extinction, and usually
they only allow for some very specific animals from that species to be hunted.
For example, the older ones that can no longer reproduce, and so
That's interesting.
And so, I gave this example, but the question was:
if, like in this example, where there are people, like vegans, who immediately criticize
this approach, only because we're killing animals,
but since, in that context, it ends up having a positive balance,
it's it more important for us to analyze things in a case by case basis, and to not be so ideological, when trying to solve problems?
Very interesting, your question.
Because it's a question...I would say, immediately, that, yes, we have to be more pragmatic.
But after you gave that example, I thought about the consequences
of that action, from the moral point of view.
Because then I would have to say that we need to allow for hunting to happen.
And so...how interesting.
I think that we need to try to be more pragmatic, with data.
But it's very difficult
very difficult for human beings in general to not put their values into those questions.
In any life question, in any activity we're doing.
In our job, in our personal lives, when we're talking about the world.
I personally think it's impossible for us to not put our values, and our emotions.
That example you gave me, it's a very typical one.
How can't we analyze it from the moral side?
From the moral side, I would say, no, let's not hunt lions anymore, or any other animal for that matter, because
we don't do that anymore.
We don't accept that anymore.
Even if we like it or not, society's values change.
What was seen as something acceptable 30 years ago, to hunt, right?
Hunting as an activity always was
how do you say? It was always valued by the elites. They hunted...
until a few decades ago, they did that, to hunt.
And nowadays we are changing, the world is changing.
And so, I think that at the same time that we try to be pragmatic,
it's completely impossible for us to get out of, or to ignore our moral values.
Like it or not, we have our moral values that guide our actions.
So, we defend what we think is right. It's impossible for us to say that
it has to go one way or another.
I think we have to listen to arguments from both sides, and try to decide what to do.
And that's valid for all types of discussions.
In relation to abortion, for example.
Questions that are still very controversial.
If we are in favor or against abortion.
The question about hunting. Well...
That's valid for...
also for the role of women in the work market. Or the role of women at home.
Those are all values that we end up incoporating in our daily lives.
And that doesn't mean that
we shouldn't act ideologically.
It's impossible to not act ideologically.
We only need to gather more data and stats
to try to guide our actions in a more rational, and less emotional way.
And, to be honest,
I find that to be very difficult. I'm a very emotional person.
My decisions are very much based on my emotions.
And so people have to constantly remind me of the facts.
And to remind me of the arguments from the other side, for me to not be guided only by the heart.
Right, and even nowadays, due to studies in Psychology, we know that reason is not disconnected from emotions.
But let's not get into that because that's a discussion to have with other people.
I'm sure that there are much more qualified people than me to talk about that.
So, really, let's leave that to other interviewees.
Right, but now that we were focusing on the moral aspect,
maybe I would jump right away to another question I had for later that is,
Do you know the effective altruism movement?
The effective altruism movement?
"Effective altruism", in English.
Effective altruism.
Tell me about it a little bit.
Basically, it's based on the ethical theory by Peter Singer.
And then there's also a young philosopher, 30 or 31 years old, William MacAskill from the UK.
He basically created a movement, which he called "effective altruism",
which is based on...Well, let me give you an example.
Because it might be easier for me to explain that way.
We have charities, and people can give donations to them. And, normally,
the ways people are convinced to choose one charity or the other,
has to do with the image the particular charity projects. It depends on it being a positive image, and if they are able to convince people.
And what William MacAskill did was to
create an institution, whose name I can't recall now,
but that studies...statistical studies, like Gapminder does.
It studies charity by charity, to verify if
the money people donate is effectively used
to solve the specific problem, instead of
being wasted on administrative issues, and to keep up the administration, for example.
Or even if the solutions those charities created are not the most efficient ones to solve the problem.
And so they want for people to
verify those data before they choose the institutions they want to give money,
since they could be donating to institutions that would not contribute much, or very little, to solve the problem at hand.
Basically, this is it. I mean,
what happens many times is that
people make decisions that are not that rational, in terms of the charities they support. For example,
if they feel personally connected to the cause.
Or if they are presented with cases of people who suffer from a particular problem,
and because there's a face associated to the problem, people much more easily donate to that charity.
And, well, I'm not here to criticize the good intentions of the many charities out there.
It's simply to objetively evaluate the efficienty of them solving the problems they propose to solve.
And so, there's that. And this is what, in general, effective altruism is.
Right
And so, they have this very scientific and statistical approach to these problems. Let's put aside our emotions, and let's see
which institutions are the best in solving this or that problem.
So, last time we already talked about how Gapminder doesn't
any sort of political or economic affiliation. It doesn't defend any specific political or economic model.
But, from a moral perspective,
could Gapminder go along
a movement like this? Like the one I've just described?
Very, very interesting.
Since that movement seems to me to be a very new thing,
even the name of the philosopher you gave.
He is very young, right?
Yes, William MacAskill, yes.
So, it's difficult for me to evaluate and to say right away
that, yes, in fact, that wave of
effective altruism is exactly what Gapminder is following.
It's very difficult for me to say so. I can't affirm that.
At least without knowing the movement pretty well.
But, from what you've just exposed to me, it seems to be exactly
what Gapminder wants for
things to be.
For people to take the time to think. And instead of simply chosing
and not only about donations. People can donate to whatever charities they want, of course.
But, really, to evaluate the impact of each charity. To evaluate the indicators
that those charities have already attained.
That's a huge debate we're having, even in the Human Development sector,
because it's very difficult to
evaluate purely
non-quantitative indicators. Indicators that are not immediately quantifiable.
Qualitative indicators, the ones charities usually work with,
or even Gapminder. We also work with qualitative indicators.
It's very difficult to properly evaluate them, to understand them, and to know if the impact that's happening
is really effective, and if we're really bringing good solutions to
the problem we want to solve.
It's a debate that's been going on in the sector of International Relations and Human Development.
It's been going on for at least 4 decades.
Or even more.
Maybe 5 decades, for around 50 years that we've been discussing that.
Since people started discussing the impact of the United Nations on the poorer countries.
So, that's a very long debate, and
international organizations, the NGOs...
Do you say "NGO"? The non-governmental organizations.
Yes.
That's it, right?
And we've been discussing that for a very long time. How
how can we measure the impact that those organizations, or that altruism
has for those that are in need.
And so I think it's really important to evaluate what each of those organizations is doing for us to know if the money we invest is worth it, or not.
And also our work.
Or even our emotional work.
I will give you an example.
Besides working here at Gapminder, and trying to bring
a view of the world based on facts for everyone,
I also do volunteer work.
By volunteer work, what I mean here is that I am part og a NGO, here, in the south of Sweden,
and we've built a center of resources for young people in Nepal.
And we've also been working on a program we call "Zero Waste in Schools".
Also in Nepal.
And so, we want for children to learn the waste cycle, and also how to recycle.
And to use less resources.
And I'm talking about that because that's a type of work,
both mental and physical, that I offer that NGO. It's a volunteer work. I'm putting my resources,
what I know about. In this case it is mostly administrative work, and also planning.
And to make reports, and all of that.
I'm putting those resources that I have to offer in those projects which I believe in.
Yes, I've got involved with that for emotional reasons.
I love Nepal. My husband is Nepali. And I would love to help Nepali society.
But, by doing so, by putting the emotional
into choosing where I will work,
I also have to create indicators which I can measure, and to keep track off, to see if we're creating the impact we want.
And so, I think that it's not necessary to separate the emotional side from
the rational side, as we say.
I think we can easily join them together. There's no problem with that.
Also because if we choose charities
for which to donate either our time or money,
if we are to choose based only on what's rational,
the money will all go to the same institutions. Because those are the effective ones.
I think that what I try to do...or what I see other people in this sector trying to do is to
okay, so we know that this charity here is good enough, that it is already
using money effectively. That they are very good, and
that they do not waste a lot of money on administrative affairs.
Okay, so these ones are very good.
So now, let's help this one here to follow the example coming from there.
To help it improve its system, its projects.
How the projects are implemented, and so forth.
It's a wave that I think comes a bit from above.
People who donate money are the ones who must demand for those charities to improve the way they work.
So, I think there's no problem with joining both aspects, the emotional and the rational.
Even though, as my answer made clear,
I don't know effective altruism very well.
I would love to know more about it, to check if my answer would be really that.
For the time being, as a layperson, I think we can easily join them together.
Okay, so I leave the hint, and if someday at Gapminder you want to get in touch with William MacAskill,
I think that it could be a very interesting thing.
I will certainly do that. Thank you bery much.
So now, moving on to another topic.
What is the role of media in transmitting a  biased reality.
I mean, a reality that they usually give as much worse than it really is?
Well, okay, let's see...
The media...your question is about the media, right?
It has the role of informing the citizens.
Right?
So,
the ideal would be for the media to inform the citizens about all that's happening, in a realistic way, and on the basis of
statistical data, and also on the basis of samples...
sample cases of what's really happening in the world.
But that's somewhat impossible.
For the journalists to really show up, based on a representative sampling, what's happening in the entire world.
Journalists and editors, they are humans like us.
They are people who have values. People who make mistakes, as well.
And they're also people who are interested in certain subjects, and not others.
And what ends up happening is that
create more articles and stories about
certain topics, and not others.
That's something that we can't change.
We don't expect that to change.
Also because journalists also have bosses
and they also have to earn money, and to grab attention from the public.
And they really get more attention from a disaster that's happenind here and now,
being it a shooting at a school,
or a terrorist attack, or a plain that crashed.
It's obvious that they will deal with those issues, instead of dealing with other things, that could be more
educational for the population.
Obviously, the journalists will prefer to write about the terrorist attack that's happening now, than about the rate of fertility in the world.
The fertility rate, or the number of children per woman.
It has a much bigger impact in the world population in the long run than the terrorist attack that's happening here.
But if everyone is talking about the terrorist attack, they will also have to talk about it, otherwise they will lose their audience.
And so that's obvious. There's no problem about dealing with that terrorist attack, or any other disaster that's happening.
We don't expect that to change.
The most important thing is to always try to put that
into perspective.
Yes, this is happening, we have this terrorist attack going on, 20 people are dying here now.
But also look at how the number of terrorist attacks around the world changed.
In this region, as it increased or decreased?
In Europe, has it increased or decreased?
And in Africa, how has the number of terrorist attacks changed over time?
Do you understand? The question here is that you need to remember
that what we would prefer for journalists and the media itself
to put everything they are reporting into perspective.
For them to always show the change over the long run.
It might happen that it's worsening.
Like, for example, environmental degradation. It's really getting worse.
So, let's show that. Let's show how it's getting worse in the long run, and how it's changing around the globe.
Not just in that place, but around the world.
For us to remember that it's not just about our bubble.
But also what's happening throughout the globe.
Right. And then, I think there's also another perspective we can  have about journalistic work.
And this is a positive perspective. That is, for example,
this question that we've been talking a lot about,
about the childre in Thailand who got trapped in the cave.
You know what I'm talking about, right?
Even when dealing with news like this,
we can look at it in another way.
People might think, okay, so they're giving too much attention to...
okay, the theme is important, and poor children, and so on, but they're giving too much attention to it,
and they're making too much journalistic coverage of it. But, on the other hand,
we can also look at it this way.
Never before in our human history
would we even imagine that people around the world would focus and pay attention to
people they were completely unrelated to.
And from a foreign country. And, I mean,
even there we can see positive aspects of human progress, because
until very recently it would have been absolutely unthinkable
for people who were completely disconnected at the personal level from those ones, to even pay attention to their lives.
Yes, that's true. And that's a very interesting example, because I'm here saying that
the media is too closed. That it only deals with small cases,
but that's a beautiful case that happened, in which the media played an important role helping.
It's a sad case that people are still trying to solve. But what I was trying to say is that the attention the media gave to that case
ended up bringing
some benefits to it, like some international celebrities who got so shoked by the case
that they decided to donate money to help with the search operations.
So, really, I think that
we understand...here, at Gapminder, we've done a study
which shows that people are getting more negative about the world. People think that...
it's one of the super erroneous perceptions we've found, that people think that the world is getting worse and worse.
When, in fact, examples like that show that the world is really getting...people want to help, the world is not getting worse.
People are worrying about these things, and that's great.
International celebrities that have nothing to do with Thai children are donating money, time, and calling for more people
on Twitter, for example, to give more money and help them.
I think that's a beautiful case, in fact.
A beautiful case of international cooperation.
Exactly.
Now, I just want for all things to go right with it, when it comes to the rescuing operation.
Sure.
And, then, another question, that is also related to what I've just said, in regards to the way
society in general is progressing toward something better.
Little by little, and at an increasing pace,
that is...I think that another perspective people have to have of things.
Many times they have too negative in regards to what people might do in society.
But there are many problems that people as thei cause being society
or the "system",
but in fact those problems have a natural basis.
For example,
the natural state of human beings, if no one did anything about it,
would be that of poverty, and famine, and misery.
It would be living as hnter-gatherer tribes still live in some places, right?
And so, without many commodities.
So, I mean, the worst problems that affect humanity
and that we're solving little by little, they have a natural basis,
and it's humanity as a collective that
has to do something in order to try to countervene what nature brings of bad.
That is, even with its problems, society has much more of a positive than a negative effect.
According to some people say, of their perspectives.
Exactly.
From the moment we started living in society,
we were able to find solutions for the problems that used to cause our death,
or caused bigger problems,
like poverty, famine, disease.
So, living in society was a great solution, a great benefit for the human population.
There are many problems, and as the centuries went by,
many more problems came around. Socities developed too quickly,
and some abstract concepts that render us prisoners of the system as it is now.
We really have to try to change that. I think that we should never try to conform to things as they are.
We always have to try to improve more and more.
But it's true that we've already had a lot of evolution and progress in human life, there's no doubt about that.
And it was people who've done that. It wasn't really things happening in a natural way.
Exactly.
If it was in a natural way, as we said, we would still be living like hunter-gatherers.
Exactly.
And we would never fo beyond that.
It's like Hans Rosling used to say, right?
It's not that human beings lived in balance with nature.
Human beings died in balance with nature.
Now, we live.
Right, exactly.
And then, another bias, that I can't recall if it's referred to in Factfulness or not, but is
the bias many historians have of looking at human history and
and to see cycles.
For example, oh, now this society has already reached a peak, and now it can only fall down, inevitably.
And after that, can only come catastrophe, and war, and the society is going to dissolve, and things like that.
Because there are people that have a strong bias like this, of seeing cycles throughout history.
But even if that until some time agor could have some sort of basis on reality,
isn't it also true that now, and particularly since the industrial revolution, what happens is that the circumstances,
and also thanks to globalization, and to a more global view of the world that we have,
the circumstances in which we live at the moment are completely different from
the ones all people lived in throughout most of human history, until around 200 years ago, right?
Yes, exactly. What you're talking about is from the book, Factfulness, what you've just talked about.
I think that what's happened differently now is the tehcnological revolution,
that starts, let's say, with the industrial revolution, and then comes the technological revolution.
So, how will we know what will happen in a century, or two centuries?
The changes we've had over the last century, with the technological revolution was never seen before. So,
We can't...I think it's very
naïve of us to think that we will go back to that cycle that we've seen before, and that happened before.
How we live today...so many things changed over the last century due to the technological revolution that it's kind of
impossible for us to say that's a cycle, that we're part of a cycle.
I don't think that it will be a major catastrophe.
I also don't think it will be a bed of roses.
It's simply human life continuing, taking its course, and not necessarily in a cycle.
But it's following this path, with the technological revolution. With technology having a bigger role to play in our lives.
And we becoming even more dependent on technology.
And we can view it from a negative side, but also from a positive one.
It's bringing more progress for humans, right? Then,
it has positive and negative aspects.
Exactly. And this then links to another very specific question, that is also dealt with in the book.
That is that people pay too much attention, mainly when they appear in the media,
to specialists and activists.
Because, I mean, even people who present themselves as "specialists"...and they can really be specialists in the respective fields, but no one has
a crystall ball, and the world is too complex for someone alone, and even we all together to try to predict
Exactly.
what will happen in the future, right?
The questions is that specialists are people like the rest of us, and they also make mistakes, and have their values.
And they have their emotions.
So, we really have to pay attention to what they're saying,
but we also have to criticize them and to think about what they're saying.
The ideal would be to listen to several different specialists for us to make decisions.
Specialists are people like us. Specialists also responded incorrectly to our 12 questions about the state of the world.
We made 12 questions about basic facts, about what's the current state of the world.
And specialists and activists actually give worse answers in their respective fields of work.
For example,
activists who work with projects related to gender equality.
That want to bring equal rights for men and women.
They were the ones who gave the worst answers to the questions about
how much time women, in this case girls, study, in comparison with men.
30-year old men, around the globe, on average, study for 10 years.
And women for around 9 years.
The difference is only of 1 year. And those are data collected around the world, and we discuss that in the book.
Activists that work with women's rights, on average, answered this question worse than other people.
So, in fact, activists, and specialists, are good in what they do, but
everyone has to remind themselves to have an update of their vision of the world, and to keep up to date.
And to look at the data, to make sure that their predictions of the future are more accurate.
Right, and then it's like Hans Rosling used to say,
when people asked him if he was an optimist or a pessimist, that we rather was a very serious possibilist.
A very serious one. I worked as an assistant of his here, for several years,
even before he fell sick.
And he used to say that very seriously.
He went mad every time someone called him an optimist.
He would say, "I'm not an optimist. I'm only analyzing the facts. And the facts tell me that
there's been progress, in terms of health,
in terms of demographics. There's been progress. I'm not saying that the world is beautiful, I'm just looking at the numbers.
And, if everything stays like this, this is how the population will grow.
It will not grow absurdely. It will only grow to reach 11 million people.
And so, you don't need to be so alarmist.
So, he got angry when people called him an optimist.
It's not being optimist, but rather to look at the numbers, to see what's happened, to see what's the best path to take. It's just that.
Exactly.
And don't you think that another thing that serves as a bias to the way people look at
progress, and to the state of the global human population, let's say, is that since we only live, on average,
80 years in the most developed countries, and 70 years in the entire world,
since for us even sometimes weeks or months seem like a very long time,
that it seems for us that things happen very very very slowly,
when, in fact, if we're to have a historical perspective  of how things have been changing, things are changing really fast.
Very fast, exactly.
Our history...we've been living in this planet for millions of years,
and we have to keep in mind that we only live for those 70/80 years.
And we try ous best to live those 80 years, and to live as well as we can.
And also to have a beautiful family, and work, and success, and money.
And to eat well, and work well, and all of that.
And, well, we're trying to do all of that
in a very short period of time, and we think that it's taking too long, because it takes a lot to achieve each of those things.
It takes time for us to achieve what we want.
Our vision of the world is too centered on that little time we live in this world.
Humans are here for millions of years, and we have to remember what happened  until we arrived here, in fact.
Well, those are, again, kind of philosophical questions, about how, let's say,
time changes, and how time influences our lives.
I was listening to an audiobook today.
By an author who's called Matt Haig,
and the book is title "Notes on a Nervous Planet".
Very good.
And he says that in the beginning we've created, around 8 centuries ago,
we only determined the time as day and night.
Then we also determined time by the mealtime.
Or the time we arrive from work.
The time we're with our families.
And it was only around the 15th or 16th century that we created the clock. The clock marked only the hours in the beginning.
Not the minutes.
And only on the 16th or 17th century did it start to mark the minutes.
And now we even have the concept of 15 minutes for 6 hours, that is something very new in our lives.
And, in fact, instead of us using the time to our advantage,
we are the ones who are serving the time nowadays. We are sort of slaves of time.
Everything has to be up to the second.
It's a very weird idea.
Of thinking about that all the time. About how we
keep track of our lives accoding to what time tells us.
We have to remember that we also have to relax now and then.
We can't be stressed all the time, running after time.
Exactly.
Okay, so, now, perhaps a question more in the pessimistic sense, but maybe it doesn't have to be put in a pessimistic way.
What are the problems people should pay more attention to and that can have more impact in the future?
What are the problems in general? Gosh, if you have until tomorrow, I can keep up with speaking about many problems we have to contend with here.
Okay, then perhaps it's better to focus on climate change.
It's a very important problem, and that can have a strong impact.
But, I mean, there's that side, but then you also have the side where people might be exaggerating a bit.
Like, for example, the question of
people very rapidly stating that it will inevitably happen that
certain natural resources will be completely depleted.
Because, I mean, several times since the industrial revolution people predicted that this or that would be completely consumed, right?
And that industrialization would disappear because we would no longer have raw materials to keep producing
of this and that.
So, if you want to talk about that in specific. That is,
the aspects to which people look with concern to climate change and they're right to do so, but also the aspects they ten do exaggerate a little.
Your questions is very good. Now I understand better where you want to go with it.
And, in fact, I think that you've already answered it a bit.
I think that, we are 7, almost 8, billion people in the planet.
I think that we have the right conditions to educate everyone in order for us to act on several fronts.
We don't need to act exclusively on the climatic questions, on the environmental question.
I think that
as I told you before, and we show here in the book, Factfulness,
that people are too alarmist, that they have a very negative view of the world, that things are getting worse.
And they end up calling attention to what is fashionable at the moment. And sometimes
they present things in a very alarmist way, as you said for the climatic questions.
"My God", they say, "we're going to waste all of our resources, and humans will not even have a place anymore to...
we won't have any more resources to sustain ourselves, or any place on Earth to live in.
And, well, we will extinguish not only the human population, but also all other animals and plants.
So, there are people who have that very alarmist vision.
I think that
really,
we have to invest a lot on research to...
and also promote awareness campaigns within the population
to try to avoid the worst scenario. To try to avoid for climate change to bring more serious impacts to our society.
So I think that, yes, we should have campaigns directed at individual people.
How each individual can contribute to improve things.
To help, or at least to have less impact on the natural environment.
We have to invest more in research and development to come up with greener solutions.
Better solutions for the natural environment.
And we really have to talk about it, and to demand from our politicians that they take actions that are better for the environment.
We really have to do that.
But we also have to remember, because it's something that we easily forget,
to take care of human beings, and of our population, because that's why we are here.
If we focus too much on the environmental issues, and by investing so much in them, we end up forgetting about the people who are still living
in need. I think that we focus so much on the environmental problems, that we end up forgetting about poverty issues.
Or about disease. Or vaccination.
You what I mean?
That's why I started answering that question by saying that we are 7 or 8 billion people in the world,
and we have the conditions to act in different areas at the same time.
So, as many people are dealing with environmental issues,
we should also have many people raising awareness about...hey, what about these people here, about these children that are dying of diarrhea?
Diarrhea is one of the factors behind...is the biggest factor behind child death until 5 years of age.
But almost nobody talks about it. Why? Why are people talking more about climate change, than about those children dying of diarrhea, which is something
relatively easy to treat, and also very cheap to treat.
How many children could we be saving? If we were to talk more about this,
it's immeasurable.
I don't really know the number, but we could really be talking more about these societal problems, instead of talking only about climate change.
Let's talk about that, but also about those other things. Let's invest more in those other problematic areas.
There are still almost 1 billion people who live in extreme poverty.
Why do they still live in extreme poverty?
Why haven't we been able to reach out to them and to provide them with a better quality of life?
Also, why can't they themselves get out of poverty?
There are so many questions we should be debating, and we don't do it because we focus too much on climate change.
I think we should open up more the array of things we should discuss.
Okay, very good.
Fernanda, just before we finish this, I would like to ask you to show the book to the camera again.
And maybe to tell people what the book teaches, a short message that it gives people about how they should look at the world, how they should analyze the world.
Okay.
So, the book is "Factfulness".
We still don't have it translated to Portuguese.
But the book will be released in Portuguese by January 2019.
But if we will keep the title in English, Factfulness, or if we will translate it to Portuguese, we're still debating that.
But factfulness is the habit of making decisions
based on facts, right?
It's the habit of analyzing life, of living life, of making decisions
based on facts, and not only on emotional factors, or
ideological ones.
So, what does the book show?
We've been doing a study for more than 10 years, about
what people know and don't know about the world.
About basic facts about the world.
For example, life expectancy for the world population.
Where people live in the world. If more people live in Asia, Africa, America, or Europe.
And so these are very basic facts. These are not tricky questions. They are not difficult.
So, we've done that research with more than 14.000 subjects,
with representative samples of people from 12 rich countries,
and we've seen that people know nothing about the world. That they have a very erroneous view of life.
That we have the impression that the world is divided in two.
Between rich and poor.
We have the tendency of having that binary vision of things.
To put things into two categories.
We've also discovered that people think that the world is getting worse and worse.
And we think that the world population is just growing and growing.
And that it will explode one day, and will end with all of our resources.
We show in the book that it's not really like that. That those three very erroneous views we have of the world
that they are, in fact, erroneous, that it's not really like that.
That stats show that there are bad things in the world, but the majority of social indicators are improving.
There's not that division of the world between one and the other.
Most things don't happen on the extremes, but rather on the middle.
Most of the human population is not really rich nor poor, but it's really on the middle.
And we also show in the book that the world population will not simply keep growing and growing.
The experts from the United Nations show that...
they estimate that the world population will stabilize at around 11 billion people.
So, in the book, we give hints about
we can fight those dramatic instincts we have.
And how to live a less stressful life.
A very fun book. It's an easy-read. It doesn't have a lot of technical words, let's say, that are difficult,
The book flows in a very pleasant way.
And the best of all, is that is has personal stories of Hans Rosling's.
About how he reached that vision of the world based on facts.
With stories of his life, since he was very young, about he decided to become a sword swallower.
So, it's a very worthy read. It makes us feel closer to Hans Rosling.
So, we recommend it to everyone.
Yes, and I can assure you that what Fernand says is all true. I've already read the book,
and i loved it. So, for the viewers,
go buy the book. These interviews are not enough. You really have to buy it.
These interviews are not even 1% of the book. The book is fantastic.
Exactly, and that's why I've already had these two interviews with you, and we will probably have to have more.
Sure.
Okay, so, Fernanda, again, thank you very much for taking the time to come on the show again
And it was a pleasure to talk with you again. It's always very good to talk with you. They're always very fun and informative interviews.
Great. It's also a pleasure for me to be here with you. It's very pleasant to talk with you too.
And, thank you. Have a nice day. And I hope to have another opportunity to talk with you, when the book is out in Portugal.
Sure, we will certainly do it.
Thank you very much.
