Pushkin.

He's giving us a thumbs up.

So as usual, we just have you start by introducing yourself.

Hi, I'm Dan Gilbert.

Dan Gilbert is a huge figure in happiness science.

He's one of the field's most respected psychologists

and an absolute whiz at explaining some of the most puzzling aspects of human nature.

And that is going to be a big help, because the question I have for him is as confounding as it is

serious. With Earth Month coming up in April, I wanted to reshare this episode with Dan

that we originally released last year.

For decades, we've been dealing with a host of disasters related to global heating,

raging forest fires, devastating hurricanes, and retreating glaciers.

Hearing about these things makes us feel pretty terrible.

We feel anxious about our future and that of our children.

We get anxious with ourselves and others for letting things get this bad,

and we feel overwhelmed and pretty helpless in the face of such a big challenge.

I wanted Dan to help me answer a vexing psychological question.

We've been talking about the catastrophic danger of global warming for several decades,

but people are still debating whether it's a real

crisis and how urgently we need to act to fix it. Which is kind of weird, because it seems like

humans should be pretty good at dealing with life-threatening situations. I mean, we've had millions

of years of evolution. Our brains should be amazing threat detectors. They should be good at

...