The Progress Report: A Robot Saved My Heart

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Zachary: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the Founder of The Progress Network. Joined as always by Emma Varvaloucas, the Executive Director of The Progress Network. And we are in the dog days of summer. I don’t know whether dog days deserves to continue to be an expression, but for the time being it is.

And The Progress Report is our weekly news that you can use or news that you should use, or news that you should know in a world full of really, really negative news all the time. So, our feeds and our minds, it is important to take a step back and try to find some tidbits of human beings doing good things in the world because human beings are always doing good things in the world, even as human beings are always doing bad things in the world, and it would behoove us all, or at least we believe it would behoove us all and maybe you believe it would behoove us all. Given that you are listening to this podcast that we are now recording, that we all pay some attention to some of the good things that are happening in the world as part of our Daily News diet.

And in that spirit, the peeps of The Progress Network spend their days scouring the planet for stories of uplift. In a world where there is a lot of down draft. So Emma, what do you have for us this week?

Emma: So today we’re gonna start with the story that The Progress Network has been on top of for a long time. So if you are a consistent TPN reader or listener, this might not be news to you, but we haven’t updated the numbers in. Probably since 2019, I think is the last time we really touched on this. So the Atlantic reporting on our falling prison population numbers.

Peak was 1.6 million Americans in 2009 that has already come down. This is from 2023, which is the last year that data is available. That’s already come down to 1.2 million. We are apparently on track to fall to about 600,000. So a decline of about 60%, which would have seen like a goal of your wildest fantasies 20 years ago.

Oh, it is amazing. And if someone’s wondering how did that happen? Why did that happen? It’s really because of this stunning drop off in. Youth incarceration. It’s not just that we’ve gotten soft on the youth or something. They are actually committing fewer crimes and there are fewer arrests and they’re being incarcerated less frequently.

And what happens with that is that because so many people, once they enter the prison system, never really leave. They might leave, they commit another crime, they come back. It’s kinda like the biggest deciding factor if someone’s gonna end up in the prison system. This article says most people don’t like wake up at 50 years old and decide like I would like to commit a crime today usually happens when they’re young and then they kind of get stuck in the prison system. You know, we’ve talked about this trend before, but like I said, we have updated numbers now. Great article in the Atlantic if anyone wants to check it out and feel cheerful.

Zachary: Yeah, I’m involved with this group called One For Justice, which does, it’s sort of a coalition of nonprofits dedicated to prison reform, and this is definitely a major. Major trend. The youth part is the most important one, as you point out in that anybody who visits a prison, state or federal, mostly state, but definitely federal too.

You’re just struck by how many of the people there basically have committed crimes between the ages of 17 and 25 or something. Meaning it’s kind of a young person’s dilemma that then becomes an older person’s, because as you said, once you’re shunted into that pathway, it’s really, really hard to get out.

And that’s probably the next area to really focus on, which is once you’re in the system, as it were, it’s really, really difficult to get out of the system. We penalize people, we take away rights to vote. You know, it used to be you served, you did your time, sort of thing. And I’m sure there are crimes that many people feel should never have an afterlife.

Meaning once you’ve done something particularly heinous, there should be no rehabilitation to society. But most people don’t fall in that category. They’re like. Low level drug deal or low level burglary. Prison conditions are still a real problem and funding is a problem, particularly in the south, but the numbers are better, even as the conditions are arguably worse, and that’s sort of the next thing to look at, but that’s definitely pointing in the right direction.

Emma: It is. I will say there is a worrisome trend of the Trump administration wanting to send immigrants to for-profit prisons, and I have a feeling that maybe the for-profit prisons are such large lobbyists of the Trump administration, maybe because their populations are falling. So for every, every reaction there’s a reaction. But overall, still a good piece of news.

Zachary: If Congress, I mean we’re, we’re recording this on the, on the week where Congress is debating a bill, that by the time you listen to this may have been passed or may have collapsed, but it does seem certain that there’s gonna be a lot more federal US federal funding for detention facilities for undocumented.

I think one thing that may happen with these multi-billion dollar spends on these facilities is that you’ll build these shiny new facilities and they will be half empty, which is. Won’t really matter if you’re the contractor who built them. ’cause you’re just building them. Right? You don’t care how they’re being used. It is emphatically not gonna be the best use of taxpayer dollars in the long term.

Emma: So we’re gonna stick on the progress that has happened this week, and that includes the first fully robotic heart transplant in the United States. We are not the first people to do it in the world, but we’re only a few months behind. Do you wanna take a guess at which country achieved this first?

Zachary: Japan, China, something like that –

Emma: Saudi Arabia.

Zachary: That was not on my top 10.

Emma: That’s why I asked. ’cause I was also like, okay, all right.

Zachary: Not the usual suspect.

Emma: Yeah. Doing full robotic heart transplants. The cool thing about that, which might be obvious to some people but not obvious to others, you don’t have to open up people’s chest to do it, is just a series of small incisions, like other robotic surgeries, obviously, of great benefit to the patient who doesn’t have their chest carved open.

Zachary: Yeah. Wow.

Emma: So good for– 

Zachary: I mean good for people, but it’s great for the robots too.

Emma: Great for robots, great for the team. Great for the patient.

Zachary: Great day for robots.

Emma: See if that can be repeated at scale. Last but not least, let’s talk a little bit about Nepal. We mentioned Nepal recently. Talk about its economy, which is doing marvelously better than it used to be doing and clean technica.com, they cover a lot of renewable energy.

Climate stuff. They have this great article about nepal’s, rapid electrification of its economy. It has really stunning EV numbers. About 70% of all new passenger vehicles sold in Nepal are electric, which is really high. I mean, only a few European nations have numbers like that. For instance, when they’re trying to introduce electric buses, electric garbage trucks, all kinds of things that are electric. And it’s particularly impressive because just two decades ago, half of Nepal’s population had access to the national electricity grid. Now it’s at 94%. So they’re really like, made a lot of progress in a short amount of time, and now we’re kind of leapfrogging to get ahead of this EV and electrify everything trend.

So good for Nepal. Yeah. The way they did that for curious minds is by very intense government intervention that would not make Americans happy, but essentially they had an almost 300% import tax on gas powered vehicles and the import tax for EVs versus something between I think 30 and 90%. I mean, basically if you wanna buy a car and Appal and import it, it’s wildly expensive, but it’s less expensive to get an EV than it is a traditional gas powered blend.

Zachary: Getting these super efficient EVs from China, from companies like BYD. So they’re not only privileging EVs, they’re getting the best and cheapest supply of EVs from China,

Emma: Yep. A hundred percent. I’m sure they’re getting their buses and their electric garbage trucks from China too.

Zachary: Everything, everything.

Emma: That stuff. I would love to go back to Nepal. I have to say I haven’t been there in, in 15 years and I imagine it looks wildly different because when you used to be on the Nepali roads, I mean that smog and that pollution was just suffocating. So very curious what it’s gonna look like there in 20, 30 years.

Zachary: I mean, the mountains are still there and probably haven’t changed a lot since you were– 

Emma: Yeah, the mountains are still there. That is true. But these days.

Zachary: Just, just saying all.

Emma: Might look a bit different. It’s littered with garbage.

Zachary: all those people going up and down and up and down and up and down.

Emma: Yep.

Zachary: On that note, thank you for tuning in to this lightning round of robotics and EVs and prisons, which one doesn’t belong.

Anyway, we will be back with you after July 4th. We hope you all, for those of you listening in the United States have a. Contemplatively celebratory long weekend. We hope that you take a moment to appreciate all that we have. I know. I know that those words feel sometimes hollow to people in a world full of ah.

But as we try to do here and as we try to do in our own lies, to remember that there are things going on that will make our future. A better world because there are lots of us humans doing a lot of things to make it so. So please tune into our longer form podcast, check out the newsletter, What Could Go Right? which you can get at The Progress Network dot org for free in your mailbox every week, and we will be back with you next week.