The news and social media are replete with bad news. As the old saying goes, “If it bleeds, it leads.” And people naturally gravitate to negative news and data than they accept positive outlooks. A catalyst of bad news is technology, as it both conveys information and is the source of disruption. Technology gets blamed for many of the world’s ills, and the technology industry relies on fear, uncertainty and doubt to sell products. Author and journalist Gregg Easterbrook has a different perspective – a cynical optimism, as he describes it – and catalogs why we’re better off today than ever before, thanks in large part to technology, in his new book, It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear. Easterbrook joins Pod2112 to talk about the appeal of "declinism" and why the world is much better than we perceive.