This is a transcript of a YouTube interview (Vishen Lakhiani interviewing Peter Diamandis) where Diamandis argues that world-changers should avoid mainstream news because it disproportionately focuses on negative events. He explains an evolutionary bias (amygdala scanning for threats) that makes negative stories more salient, describes how news outlets exploit this, and contrasts that negativity with long-term, technology-driven improvements in human well-being (longer lifespans, reduced extreme poverty, lower costs for food/energy/transport/communication).
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So, Peter, that leads to the question I'd love for you to talk for a moment about, because I know this is your passion about the idea of abundance. And one more thing you said you wanted to share on this interview is why we need to turn off the media.
Yeah. So I guess, you know, one of the questions that I've heard you ask is, what do you believe that most other people don't? And two ideas there. The first is that you don't have to watch the news. I think that I want to give people a different perspective here, which is I don't watch the television news, I don't read the newspapers. I get my news filtered through Google news where I can search for the subjects and I can get very quickly the few things that I need that are relevant to me. I've got filters that if any of my companies or any of the areas of. Of interest come up, those stories come to me directly. So here's the situation. We're living in a world today where the news media is a drug pusher and negative news is. They're a drug. And in every device that you have, the news media is pushing into your tablet, your tv, your radio, your laptop. Negative news from every corner of the world, every murder, every problem on the planet is being filmed in high definition and delivered to your laptop and into your living room over and over and over and over again. And the reason is, is that we as humans, we pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news. And that's because of an evolutionary development as we were evolving on the savannas of Africa hundreds of thousands and millions of years ago. If you missed a piece of good news, like some food over there, well, that's too bad, you missed it. You missed a piece of negative news. Like a squiggle on the ground is a snake and not a stick. Your genes were out of the gene pool. And so we've evolved an ancient piece of our temporal lobe called the amygdala that scans everything we see and everything we hear for negative news. And when it detects it, you're put on red alert. And the old saying is if it bleeds, it leads. And so for that reason, we pay far more attention to negative news. And that's why newspaper and the television has got 10 times the negative news. You know, open up the paper tomorrow and just flip through the pages and you'll see that. And the question is that the way the world truly is, and I'm not saying that those things aren't going on in the world it's just disproportionate, right? You don't have reporters standing in front of airports and saying, today there was no crashes at this airport today, or today there was no school shootings at the school today. They're only reporting the negative issues. And the fact of the matter is we have orders of magnitude, much better news going on in the world. It's just good news. Networks don't succeed. They fail. If you watch the TV news over and over and over and over and over again, you're going to get this negative mindset which is just going to make you feel like the world is going to hell in a handbasket and why would you ever want to invest? And so forth. But by almost every measure we have, the world is getting extraordinarily better. Right. Over the last hundred years to use that time span, which we can all, you know, we've all read about and think about in our history books, the human lifespan has more than doubled. You know, I'll talk about in a little bit how we're going to double it again. The per capita income for every nation on this planet has more than tripled. We're living in a world where we've gone from, you know, 99.9% extreme poverty to less than 1% extreme poverty on the planet. Steven Pinker, who wrote a great book, the Better Angels of Our Nature, a professor at Harvard, a friend of mine, shows us we're living during the most peaceful time ever in human history. Your chance of dying a violent death are 1-500th of what they used to be just centuries ago. The cost of food has dropped 13 fold. The cost of energy has dropped 20 fold, transportation 100 fold, communications thousands of fold. And so, by almost every measure we have, the world has gotten extraordinarily better. And it's not because we're smarter or have better politicians. It's the impact of technology. Technology is that thing which takes what used to be scarce and makes it abundant over and over and over again. And we can talk about that if you.
