The Progress Report: New Discoveries

Prefer to read? Check out the Audio Transcript

Zachary Karabell: What could go right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined as always by my co host, Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network. And What Could Go Right? is our weekly podcast, and this is our adjunct to our weekly podcast series. At the Progress Report where we scour the world for news and headlines and ideas and people and things, and places that you may not have picked up on in your daily dose of dystopian news, but at the Progress Network, Emma Varvaloucas, aided by an able team of able-bodied people. Looks 24/7 around the world for news. that you can use. Well, maybe not news that you can use, but certainly news that points to a more positive future or to human beings and societies and states and governments and individuals, and maybe even four legged creatures, the famous cats and dogs, the meme of the week, even they are trying to make the world a better place, or at least trying to escape being eaten inadvertently or advertently by a set of people somewhere in the world.

And we are trying to look at a present and a future through a different lens, through a less hysterical one, through a more constructive one, even though we acknowledge and will continue to acknowledge and genuflect in the direction of the ever present reality that there is a lot in the world that is completely messed up.

And there’s ample reason to believe that it is certainly possible that we will indeed descend downward instead of ascending upward. Yes, that was redundant, but I wanted to put an emphasis on both of those trajectories. So, Ms. Varvaloucas, the mistress of all news, or at least of all good news, what do you have for us today?

Emma Varvaloucas: So, I was going to end with this, but since you mentioned four legged creatures, I figure I might as well start off with my little fun tidbit. This has to do with a no legged creature. So, Australia just recognized a number of new species, 750 of them, actually, to be exact.

Zachary Karabell: Wow.

Emma Varvaloucas: Per Australian reputation, some of them are really wacky, and I just wanted to give a call out to a new marine worm.

Welcome to our, you know, new species list, and they named this, this worm after who? David Attenborough, who you probably know as the narrator of Planet Earth. So, the official name is Marphysa , or Marphysa, who knows? davidattenborough. That is the official name. And I thought that was so hilarious.

Zachary Karabell: Do you think David Attenborough has now gotten a t shirt saying, I had this amazing career and all I got was this lousy worm?

Emma Varvaloucas: I hope so. I mean, if he doesn’t have one by now, someone should make one for him. 

Zachary Karabell: I mean, I’ll, you know, more power to him getting a worm named after him. But I do think that that as a, like a lifetime achievement award could be a bit, I don’t know, deflating, but maybe not. Maybe that is. the apex of what we can all aspire to, to have some reptilian creature named Aphrodite, but that’s a lot of, that’s a lot of creatures.

It is a lot of creatures.

Emma Varvaloucas: Australia comes out with quite a lot of new species every year, actually. Um, not enough to make up for the, you know, big extinction numbers across the world, but yeah, actually there’s a, a lot of them are like, oh, this is a new subspecies of a subspecies. And there are creatures that like we never heard of or care about like marine worms, but it does happen.

Zachary Karabell: Well, but a lot of the creatures that we talk about going extinct are also minor variants of other creatures that are not extinct. I mean,

Emma Varvaloucas: yeah, the

Zachary Karabell: same mollusks in the other direction. Mollusks. Yeah,

Emma Varvaloucas: this is true. It’s a hard word to say

Zachary Karabell: ten times fast. Mollusks.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. So that was just my fun tidbit. Yeah.

That, that, that was not the like most important thing, but I just thought it was.

Zachary Karabell: Well, it’s important for those 700 and some odd species.

Emma Varvaloucas: And maybe for David Attenborough, or not.

Zachary Karabell: And clearly for David Attenborough.

Emma Varvaloucas: So let’s move on to something else, yeah. This one is very interesting because on the one hand, it’s actually very old news, and on the other hand, I think that it’s News that most people are completely unaware of, so I’m going to talk about it anyway.

Many people probably don’t know that last Friday, which was Friday, September 13th, um, marked the 30 year anniversary, I know, yeah, this is a good thing though. It was the anniversary of the passage of the Violence Against Women Act, so this was, you know, bipartisan support in Congress, signed into law by Bill Clinton, written and championed by who?

Mr. Joe Biden, President Joe Biden, it was the first federal legislative package to designate domestic violence and sexual assault as crimes, um, and it did a lot of other things, like establish the national hotline for domestic violence, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, why am I bringing this up?

Because the White House, uh, courtesy of the FBI, released figures on domestic violence and rape and sexual assaults from the 90s until now. And On the one hand, we know that lots of violent crime dropped since the 90s, so we should expect a drop also in domestic violence and sexual assaults. However, I was still really astounded by these numbers.

Um, so annual domestic violence rates have dropped by 67 percent between 1993 and 2022, and the rate of rapes and sexual assaults have declined by 56%. Um, I actually thought that was kind of jaw dropping.

Zachary Karabell: And that, and that probably, again, theorizing, that figure may be even better in that it would seem, and I don’t know that there’s any proof of what I’m about to say, that, uh, women were less likely to report rape or domestic violence in the 1990s for legitimate fear that they would either not be believed or that the legal scrutiny would just be excruciating, and I think are more likely to report such crimes today, especially given the prevalence of hotlines and changing police practices, and.

You know, the kind of response to domestic violence by police tends to be more aggressive, like to remove someone from the home and ask questions later. So you would think that reported numbers were lower than actual numbers in the 90s and that reported numbers are closer to, but probably still lower than actual numbers, well, definitely still lower than actual numbers today.

So maybe that that number, that delta is even more positive than the official one. At least that would be my theory.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, there is some proof to your theory, um, if only, if we’re looking at how much the hotline is used and if you’re to look at other FBI, uh, crime data, for instance, if you want to look up the FBI crime data on human trafficking, human trafficking numbers have gone up every year since whenever they started, tracking it because of better reporting like there’s a lot of things in the world that have gone up because of maybe not entirely because of better reporting but at least in part because of better reporting

Zachary Karabell: right the statistics have gone up whether or not the actual rate of prevalence has

Emma Varvaloucas: okay so let’s move away from domestic violence and into something equally as Jaw dropping?

A 47 year old father from Arkansas has undergone the first ever partial face and a whole eye transplant. So the real big thing right now is the whole eye transplant. Um, this actually happened in 2023, I believe, but they just published about it now. So it’s news to us, not news to him or his, uh, you know, team of surgeons and physicians.

So, whole eye transplant has been impossible forever. It is still basically impossible in the sense that he does not have vision in that eye, but it is like functionally alive, meaning the retina is responding to light and, you know, he’s recovering just fine with it. So, it’s maybe you’re thinking like, oh, wow, we like popped a new eyeball into him and he’s got a working eyeball.

Not exactly that, but it’s still A pretty big step forward. Um, physicians are divided about whether it’ll ever be possible to do a whole eye transplant. Uh, but still, it’s pretty impressive. And even aside from the, the questions over the eye transplant, this guy, you know, he had a workplace accident. Um, he wasn’t able to speak or talk.

Or smell or taste normally, and now he can, which is pretty amazing in and of itself.

Zachary Karabell: Wow, wow. Yeah, I mean, it’s hard to not go about that whole concept, but I mean, I suppose as a, as a general advancement of how much can we restore that which has been destroyed is, is a, you know, I mean it was only 30 years ago, four years ago, the first heart transplant.

And the amount of movement that we’ve made and also people surviving them, which is a huge component. Like, we’ve always been able to conceive of the idea of replacing one organ with another, but for decades, we were not able to prevent, you know, the body rejecting them. So that’s a huge part of it too.

It’s not just the mechanics of an operation, it’s the, how do you ensure that the body accepts the graft or the transplant, and that’s been a huge part of the advancements as well.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, 100%, and as, exactly as you’re saying, his body’s not rejecting the eyeball either, so it has accepted the new eye. And the other, you know, bit of fun news with this is that the guy was quoted in, uh, forget which outlet, but he was like, I can grow a beard again and I’m really excited about it.

So, you know, it’s the little things in life. So last but not least, I also wanted to give a quick mention to Polaris Dawn, which is the first private spacewalk in all of human history. It’s just been completed. It’s also the farthest we’ve gone in space since the 1960s and 70s, the Apollo missions. And the crew brought back with them, you know, data for 36 different experiments that they’re doing primarily on testing how the human body reacts to space conditions.

But also people might know this one already, also SpaceX’s new spacesuit, which could be the first to be produced like on a mass scale and not. You know, as a personalized space suit for each individual astronaut costs millions. So we might have like mass scale, cheap space, cheap, quote unquote, relatively cheap, uh, spacesuits in the future.

So that’s, um, you know, regardless of how people feel about Elon Musk, that is, that is pretty commendable.

Zachary Karabell: And look, I mean, this is between Musk and the guy, uh, Jared Isaacman, who was part of this, another young billionaire who has made money in aerospace. Whatever the political oddities of Musk, and they appear to be getting exponentially odder by the day, uh, the ability of SpaceX to both innovate and, and deliver, pun intended, right?

Deliver payloads at a cost effective way has been pretty astonishing. Now, I mean, the flip side of it is And this is my own personal views here, like, Musk’s hypocrisy, anti government hypocrisy is kind of ludicrous in that SpaceX is, at heart, um, an outsourced, independent contractor for a government agency, NASA.

They’re able to do things much cheaper than NASA is, so it kind of satisfies multiple needs for the federal government, for our own space exploration, for the delivery of satellites. So, um, yeah. But the idea that like, SpaceX is a private venture as opposed to All the ways in which government does things wrong is, it’s like calling, you know, Boeing a private venture.

I mean, Boeing, yes, has a commercial aircraft division, but they have this massive military division that is a, sort of an adjunct of government, not separate from government, in the same stew of SpaceX. So, it’s odd that Musk is, I mean, sometimes Musk’s attitudes remind me of that famous, I think it was 2016, where someone took a shot of some campaign event and people had the signs, you know, government hands off my Medicare.

And, uh, it just bears remembering that, right? It’s not like there’s this thing called a private industry and a thing called government or public private. SpaceX is actually a near perfect iteration of a public private hybrid.

Emma Varvaloucas: Very good point. That bears repeating. I think probably a lot of people don’t even realize that.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, sometimes it seems like Musk himself says it’s simple, but it’s clearly not true. Or doesn’t

Emma Varvaloucas: care.

Zachary Karabell: Or doesn’t care is probably more to the point. So on that note, we will leave you with those tidbits of the week and we will return with ever more tidbits. There are lots of tidbits out there.

Jocularity aside, we do think it’s important for all of us to try to read the news with an eye to paying attention to stories that are usually not the primary ones that are featured. Because They just don’t get as much attention. I mean, to be fair, the Polaris Dawn story did get a fair bit of notice, but not necessarily notice as we should really be paying attention to these sorts of things.

It was a story, but it wasn’t necessarily treated as a story of import. And some of that you could judge by, like, how many op eds there were, how much commentary there is, what it is that it kind of engenders. Lots of other discussion. So it’s not just, were they news? It’s, did that news have a tale? And to some degree, often these stories have a moment of being, quote unquote, the news, you know, prominent on a homepage, prominent on a feed, but they don’t necessarily link together as a cohesive story of progress or change for the better.

And then obviously that’s what we’re trying to do. So we will be back with you next week. Thank you, Emma and the team at Progress Network for finding that. Thank you Podglomerate for producing and thank you to all of you who are listening. If you don’t get our weekly newsletter, What Could Go Right?, please sign up for it at theprogressnetwork.org. And, as always, send us your comments, your ideas, and your thoughts, and we welcome them, and we’ll try to respond accordingly. We will be back next week.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thanks, Zachary, and thanks everyone, as always, for listening.