My suggestion is that we should first work to ensure the Third World has clean drinking water and sanitation.

Obviously any group that has to have funding also needs to get attention to their issues.

We worry about the seemingly ever-increasing number of natural catastrophes. Yet this is mainly a consequence of CNN - we see many more, but the number is roughly constant, and we manage to deal much better with them over time. Globally, the death rate from catastrophes has dropped about fifty-fold over the past century.

I really try to say things as they basically are and it so happens that it is a good message that things are getting better, but there are still problems.

Surely the biggest problem we have in the world is that we all die. But we don't have a technology to solve that, right? So the point is not to prioritize problems; the point is to prioritize solutions to problems.

Global warming is real - it is man-made and it is an important problem. But it is not the end of the world.

Of course, the world is full of problems. But on the other hand it's important to get the sense... are we generally moving in the right direction or the wrong direction?