 is that he is about to publish a new book, how innovation works. I understand that there's a little delay in publishing it in the UK, but that it's coming out in the US in May, in the middle of May. Correct. It comes out on the 14th of May in the US. The UK publisher has decided to delay publication in order to hopefully get the other side of the coronavirus epidemic and to give time for me to add a short afterward about the epidemic. Good. And we'll talk a little bit about that. So if you enjoy this interview, go out there and pre-order the book. There's huge value in pre-orders. So don't wait for the book to come out. Amazon is there. And I know most of you have lots of time on your hands right now because you're all hunkered down at home. So please go and pre-order the book. I'm hoping that actually, this year might be a good year for book sales because it's one of the few things that we're going to have time to do. Well, I'm a little mixed on that because I hope this ends quickly, but you're probably right because I doubt it ends quickly. I think you're right. I think we're going to be hunkered out for a while, although I'm finding that I'm busy now. I'm busy now than I usually am. There's more going on. Me too, actually. Yeah, no, it's non-stop, isn't it? And it's a very worrying situation for a lot of people. So I was going to start off with the question of, obviously the rational optimist was this very positive book about the future of mankind, about the present, about how much we have progressed from the past, but also how much potential there is in the future, how much more there is to be done and to achieve. And given what's going on in the world right now, are you still a rational optimist? Yes, I am. And the reason I say that is 10 years since the rational optimist came out in 2010. And every year since then, people have said to me, well, are you still a rational optimist in view of what's going on, whether it's a war in Ukraine or a war in Syria or Eurozone crisis or whatever it might be. And of course, this particular crisis, the coronavirus pandemic, is a lot worse than most of those and is a real shock to the world economy and potentially a horrific episode in terms of its death rate and the effect it has on society through that. Very, very frightening for a lot of people. And yet I've argued that a lot of the threats that face us are defeatable, are beatable. And I think this is too. It so happens that the world of viruses has come up with a devastatingly clever combination of contagiousness and lethality among old people certainly, which the contagiousness enables the virus to spread among people who are not showing symptoms. And then the lethality among older people is sustained by that spread. So this is a very, very dangerous virus, not minimizing the effect of it. And it comes after a series of what you might call reassuringly disappointing potential pandemic. So things like SARS and bird flu and swine flu and even Ebola, which was lethal to a lot of people, but could not apparently escape from relatively small areas, perhaps gave us too much comfort that this idea of a pandemic virus was not a huge threat. But if you look back at HIV in the 1980s, we clearly are a sitting duck as a very large population for these viruses. And we should have spent a lot more time preparing for it. But we will get through this. We have modern medicine. We sequence the genome of this very quickly. And I suspect that we will work out how to prevent people dying out of how to prevent people spreading the virus and so on. So when we come out of the other side of this, we will be able to resume civilization. This is not going to be the end of the world. And just to say why I'm still a rational optimist, in the 10 years since I wrote that book, and I wrote it in the middle of a very deep recession, in the 10 years since, there has been spectacular progress in the retreat of poverty, now less than 8% of the world lives in extreme poverty. That number was something like 60% when I was born. That's incredible. Child mortality, almost any measure you can think of has been getting better. And what really excites me is that those numbers have been getting better for the poorer people of the world, much faster than for the richer people of the world. So global inequality has been going down. Just to give you an idea of that, the income of the average Ethiopian has doubled in the last 10 years. The income of the average Italian has gone slightly backwards in that time. So Ethiopians are much poorer than Italians, but they're catching up with Italians. And that's a good thing as far as the world is concerned. It would be nice if Italians were getting richer faster too, but that isn't the case. And of course Italy is now at the epicenter of a particularly vicious pandemic. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist roads. Using the super chat and I noticed yesterday when I appealed for support for the show, many of you stepped forward and actually supported the show for the first time. So I'll do it again. Maybe we'll get some more today. If you like what you're hearing, if you appreciate what I'm doing, then I appreciate your support. Those of you who don't yet support the show, please take this opportunity, go to uranbrookshow.com slash support or go to subscribestar.com uranbrookshow and make a kind of a monthly contribution to keep this going. I'm not showing the next