est your intelligence. Many of you have not seen this news, but I want to see if you can use your powers of deduction. What percentage of the population thinks that things are moving in the right direction? Go. How are you doing that? How are you doing that? 25.6 percent. You guys, you guys and gals, you impress me. I've never seen a group that could guess things better than you. But once again, once again with no help whatsoever, you got the right answer. Almost all of you. So congratulations to you. Yeah, about a quarter of the country thinks things are fine and in the right direction.

Now I happen to be in the 25 percent. Surprise. I had a realization the other day that two things are true. I tweeted this. Two things are true at the same time. You'll see if you agree with the first one. I think you'll agree with the first one but not the second one. The first one: everything appears to be broken. Agree? Like everything in the world, all of our systems, all of the way we think about things, education, government, supply chains, military. Correct, right? Would you all agree? Now I say seems broken, right? It appears broken. Now that could be an impression, right? When everything looks broken, you could be wrong. You know, it could be like the face thing. You see it as broken but it's not so broken. Because remember, the central fact of our human cognition is that we're looking for problems so we can fix them so we can survive. Your brain is a problem identifier. It's not built to keep you happy and stupid, because if it keeps you happy and stupid, you're also going to be dead, right? Because you won't see a problem. You need to see problems to stay alive. So you're a problem identifier.

Now add to the world news a news model that gets more clicks for bad news, right? There's a bad thing coming. You'd better get afraid. So now people are automatic problem identifiers and solvers, and then the news model gives you nothing but problems. What in the world would you think about your world? You would think your world is falling apart because that's all you see, right? But when was the last time you saw a big news story about good news? Hey, here's a news story of something that was working great. I try to give you those stories, but even when you see them in the press, they don't really frame them that way. It's more like, well, the fact happened. But you know, I'll tell you, hey, things are moving in the right direction.

All right, here's my take. So number one, I think we all agree everything looks broken. And I would say that it is. I would say it's not just that it looks broken. It's actually all broken. All of it. Would you agree with that? Would you take it further and say it doesn't just look broken, it's broken? Right, in the sense of it's not where we want it to be. No, not maybe 100 percent broken, but everything's not where we want it to be. Which is a perfect situation for humans. Humans love it when things are not where we want them to be. That's like our perfect situation. You're continually like, ah, got to build this thing, got to fix this thing. That's where we're at our best, when everything's a little bit broken and we're working on fixing it. It's the ideal human situation. And we do it well. The Adams law of slow-moving disasters. We do fix things pretty well.

All right, here's my uber-optimistic take. Are you ready? Everything's broken. That's true. And we live in a self-correcting system. That our politics and