TRASHFUTURE - Intelligence 2.0 feat. Felix Biederman

Episode Date: January 1, 2019

Happy new year, you voles, you vulgar abbey mice. The clock might just be striking midnight, but that’s no excuse for you to not ditch your family and the people who love you in order to listen to this week’s Trashfuture. In this episode, Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Alice Caldwell-Kelly (@AliceAvizandum) join special guest Felix Biederman (@ByYourLogic) of Chapo Trap House to discuss Steven Pinker’s exceptional work of analysis, “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.” Okay, breaking kayfabe here -- this is the dumbest book on the planet. The idea that this even got published is proof of the sheer brain death involved among Harvard thought leaders. You will enjoy the takes, but you have to go into it with the following fact in hand: we didn’t make any of this up. These are real quotes. Please bear in mind that your favourite moron lads have a Patreon now. You too can support us here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/overview *COMEDY KLAXON* Milo will host Smoke Comedy at the Sekforde (34 Sekforde Street London EC1R 0HA) on January 16 at 8 pm. Come see Ahir Shah and a list of a number of great comedians. Get a ticket for free by signing up here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/smoke-comedy-featuring-ahir-shah-tickets-53346459697 Also: you can commodify your dissent with a t-shirt from http://www.lilcomrade.com/, and what’s more, it’s mandatory if you want to be taken seriously. Do you want a mug to hold your soup? Perhaps you want one with the Trashfuture logo, which is available here: https://teespring.com/what-if-phone-cops#pid=659&cid=102968&sid=front

during during Christmas, um, some of my family watched the net, uh, to like see if this, see if it sucked or not. Didn't like it. And, you know, I decided to already, uh, think that without watching that, you know, because you don't have to watch anything except for like the seminal Western works like Keemstar and the Marvel cinematic universe. And I just played video games for several hours. And that's what's up. Yeah. It's I'm more interested in the PewDiePie commentary track of Nenette than Keemstar interviewing the N word. Keemstar interviewing Hannah Gadsby. That's what's up. Gaming with Hannah Gadsby. So yes, I, I did, uh, I did comedy for a couple of years and I actually

almost, I was left it because I felt it wasn't going anywhere. But then you know, this, I got this, this Netflix special and everything sort of turned around. That was a crocodile Dundee playing the queen there. Oh my. So Hannah, you and I both know it's hard to find real ass people what we do. It's cloud shit. Yes. I, I, I thought everyone I knew was, was quite real. And then I, when I got Netflix, I would go to parties and they would, they would, they would, they would just be, be hoes who would sort of be on my jock. Yeah. This is like Patrick Stewart now. I pose who would be on my job. You know, you, you know, you know what, you know, a job life as a lesbian in Tasmania has been most troublesome. You know a job I've been thinking

that I want. Uh, I want to be the Keemstar, but a British media, like I cover it like it's YouTube drama for 13 year olds. But I just, I just wear a stupid fucking flat broom hat, sit at a desk and I'm like, what's up? It's UK media drama report. And you're just reporting on the Gatwick drone 24 hours a day. Yeah, exactly. I'm like, yo, there's fucking drama going down to the new statesman. People are saying, just, just all the feuds between the 350,000 columnists. Some people, the new statesman saying there ain't no drone at all. That would be a cool fucking, that's how I'm going to get to the UK. That's how I'm going to immigrate to the UK. That's how we need, that's how we know, that's, you get an exceptional talent visa just for reporting on

what Giles Corrin has said now about like whether Meghan Markle should slam his nuts in a car door as we've read in the past or like his whole thing now where he's saying that he loves all of the negative attention for his like insane, insane sock puppet account from a character from his own book that he slagged off because it means everyone's actually paying attention to him. Otherwise, he'd just be a normal journal. That's, that is sort of the difference between like American, like American journals will like have a disappearance period. They do something like absolutely hilarious like that, or they'll just like do something else like Steven Glass. But British ones are like, this actually like this, I'm an even better person than I thought I was.

Yeah, they go Toby Young and they like write a book about why people have to be friends with them actually. Toby Young would be on my Keemstar show. Toby Young would be like the facebanks for Lil Xan character. I'm a drama recap show. I really like the idea of Toby Young to your drama recap show as Eli Lake to Michael Rappaport's show. Yeah, exactly. His role just names to me. It's just words. Lil Xan is an American rapper who's constantly asleep. Well, that would happen if you take that many Zans. Well, he's off Xanax. He's rapping positively about how you shouldn't take Xanax. His name is Lil Xan's Hope Punk. Lil Xan is the only example of Hope Punk. Everything else, Harry Potter, Hunger Games.

No, that shit's all tired. That shit's all old. The only Hope Punk is Lil Xan. And of course, Steven Pinker. Listening to Lil Xan and reading Steven Pinker is the greatest act of resistance against Donald Trump that you can do. Hope Punk is just like motivational steampunk. You're wearing like a top hat with bolts on it and going like you can you can succeed. You know, Lemon Party is Hope Punk. No one thought that those guys could, you know, they would never find each other. But then they did. And it's like I'm just looking at looking at Lemon Party as an act of resistance. I do it every day. Yeah, you're worried about getting scurvy lemonparty.com.

That's right, dude. Those guys from Lemon Party, they actually grew up to start Pod Save America. All the Johns from Pod Save America finally got their act together and realized that the ultimate Hope Punk wasn't to be a shock site from 2003. It was to resist Trump by doing swears on stage and talking about how Iran shouldn't have nuclear weapons. Maybe the real Lemon Party was the friends we made along the way. Hello and welcome to the first Trash Future of 2019. We're still recording this, of course, in 2018. So we'll see how we get on. Will 2019 even happen? We don't know yet,

technically speaking. We don't know for sure. Will Lil Xan go back? The Aztecs could intervene and save us all. Will Lil Xan go back on Zanz? We have no idea. My thing is that I'm tired. My name is Riley. You may remember me from every episode of this podcast previously. I'm here in studio with Milo. Hello. It's me, your boy. I'm ill. I'm jet lagged. And I think I may have herpes of the face. More on this as it develops. Alice Caldwell Kelly, subbing in for Hussain, who's got a surprise wedding. Back again. It's girl Hussain. And I'm also dying. There's something going around. I had a loves to sub at Quiznos a couple of days ago, and I just

feel. And joining us for the second time, returning champion, Felix Biedermann, who you may remember from his many appearances in the podcast, episode one. Felix, how you doing? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm glad we're ringing the New Year 2019. I've an exciting project I want to announce that's starting in 2019. I've decided to take the, you know, sort of you guys have given me inspiration. I think I'll be starting my own politics podcast and I will be calling it choppo trap house. And I'll be making it with Twitter personalities, William Menaker, Matthew Crispin, Virgil Texas, Amberley Frost, and that's what's up. Oh, shit. Would you sign on and not agree? I thought that somebody was starting a podcast,

but they were actually trying to start their Samsung Galaxy S7. Because this shit blowing up. Dan Ninen interview with Keemstar. I get a lot of haters, Dan. Dan Ninen, associate editor for the Telegraph, writing an article about how everyone, everyone's hatred for him burns hotter than the Samsung Galaxy S7. I just, I got, I got into a, I got into like a brain loop last night of the way that Dan Ninen says Samsung Galaxy S7 because it's just so intoxicate. Samsung Galaxy S7. Like he just, he thinks it's the greatest punchline of all time. So he just really like throws all his weight behind it. I just, it's like stuck in my, it's perfect. The way he says it,

it's perfect. I mean, realistically, like he's, he's going to age out of being a millennial comedian soon. He's going to have to like, and he's going to have to take up the mantle that 69 is left, get a bunch of face tattoos, and become a Hope Punk SoundCloud rapper. Well, you can't age out of being a millennial other than if you're Dan Ninen, who was born too old to be a millennial, but like, because millennials do keep getting older rather. You do understand that that's how it works. Shut up for now. Shut up. Yeah. One day it's going to be like, damn, all these pensioners taking Zans. What am I thinking with like Dan Ninen was like, okay, what if it's like a breaking bad type thing? And people are like, there's no way he's making this much money in comedy.

And they're right. He's like the head of Trayway. He's actually the Trayway boss in New, because he's a New Yorker. And he's Trayway is six nines gang. I thought it was scum gang. I'm so, I'm so behind on this. Is it not the gang that you have to like sell more membership style of people? Multi-level marketing gang, but he's laundering the money that he makes through trafficking drugs and Trayway through comp by just saying like he's doing gigs for Tesla and shit. It's exactly like breaking bad. It's really into nutritious juice that you can make up in your own garage and sell to your friends. Oh, here's what it is. It's, he's the producers. That's, that's clearly what's going on. It's a producers.

Raise time for six nine and Germany. Awesome. Yo, so here's, here's what we're also doing. We've got the, the TF hateable book of the year this year. Last year, if you don't know the, the TF book award, it went to Little Wins, the awesome power of thinking like a toddler, which is a business book by a guy called Paul Lindley. Pouring one out for a boy. Yeah. Where he actually says the way to succeed in business is to, is to grow down and think like a baby. It was, it was really very quite a bit. But this year, I've decided to actually do one that's from, from, from February. It's an early contender, but it stayed the worst book written this year. And that's right. It is called Enlightenment Now

by a certain Steven Pinker, who can only be described as chaotic Gladwell. One of the few people who, from his name, you can make both the words pink and stink. Many people are saying, you know, Donald Trump is the new Steven Pinker. Many have said that Donald Trump likes flying on Jeffrey Epstein's plane even more than Steven Pinker. And soon we're going to be making a bunch of grabs that just have no y-axis. And it's really just tremendous to see more and more. We love to see Steven Pinker's grabs. Hybrid Trump, Steven Pinker, would be such an interesting individual, like the way in which he would like, look, okay, I may or may not have had sex with a child on that plane. But what you have to realize is that we

did it because it was necessary. Well, but like, okay, don't you think that we're going to get into it more? But don't you think, like, Steven Pinker is kind of Trump-like. He's sort of Trump, but for the general, the general global status quo, because they're doing the same thing. He's just taking like a bunch of selectively read graphs that don't really account for contextual data, or just outright throughout, like, absolute data and are like, we're doing a terrific job. The unemployment rate for the world's poorest 10% is lower than ever. Like, it's the same shit. It's the exact same shit, like, completely. Yeah, because he'll be like, yeah, in the last 10, you know, one of my favorite, because he's basically a graph warrior, where his whole

thing where he's saying, I'm going to just keep putting graphs in front of you about how the world has gotten better since like 1500. And you're going to just have to accept that all political action is futile, because actually your life rocks. That's more or less what his perception is. But then he was like, yeah, it's amazing. Capitalism has brought down, has brought up rather the wage of like the poorest four billion people in the world by upwards of a dollar. And it's like, it's doubled, folks. Look at this, in 1492, you would have had to have eaten poset for dinner. Do you want that? No, now shut up. Yeah, it's, it's, I mean, he, Pinker and like guys like Pinker love the elephant graph,

where it's like, oh, look, yeah, the world's absolute lowest, like the people, the absolute poorest people in the world, their income is like, you know, quadrupled in X amount of time. And it's like, yeah, no, that means they earn 25 cents more a day. Wonderful. You absolutely love to see it. Don't like, don't look at any other data about it. Don't spend that all at once, fam. So that's the thing, right? Like he will, Pinker will say like, look, life is good is amazing, because like life expectancy has increased markedly between 1771 and 2015, but he just doesn't address that it's been in decline since 2015. Oral says like, black lives matter is a bad organization because police killings of black

men have gone down since the seventies, but fails to mention that like one in three will spend time in prison, which is considerably up from then. But the thing is, the debunking of all of his like terrible stats is not something we're equipped to do because we're all, we're all silly people. I actually have a PhD in statistics. A lot of people don't know that. I have a PhD in I have a PhD in whibbistics, the fake company from the soprano second season that Sean Gismonti pumps and dumps. I actually I have an associate's degree in pre-calc. I studied advanced placement cryptocurrency pump and dump schemes. Just pumping it to some cryptocurrency. I have an MFA in cloud studies.

I've actually, that shit's a cumulative right there. I got a MacArthur genius grant and a face tattooing. I will have a joke for this as soon as I find another millennial thing. Like once we've got past face tattoos, give me a third thing. Okay, all right, cool. Let me edit that back in. Anyway, there's a very good episode of citations needed that like really rigorously debunks all of the maths. But I think what I've done is I've gone through this book and I've just found some of the the choicest morsels of what he of what of what Pinker has to say. But first let's sort of let's do a little table setting who is so just so just what race is this guy.

Let's get out the TF calipers. I thought that somebody was redistributing wealth from the global middle class to the poorest 10 percent of the world. But they were actually charging a Gulfstream G6 plane on route to a lawless island in the Caribbean owned by a billionaire. A Gulfstream G6. My father was Malcolm Gladwell, and my mother was an idiot. So I have my PhD in cognitive psychology from Harvard. Yeah, the Epstein is purchased Dr. No's volcano layer. But when it opens up, there's just a load of kids in there. James Bond shows up and he's like, well, this is much less perilous to the fate of the earth. But it's like a lot more fucked up than I

was expecting. No, you can. James Bond is like, that is not your job. That is parliament's job. James Bond is like, technically, it's legal. He's not breaking the Geneva Convention. So Steven Pinker shows up on roundups of the intellectual dark web thinkers that now is basically everyone from, you know, Sargon of Akad to Ricky Gervais, whose ideas are too true and dangerous for the mainstream to accept. Sargon of Gervais. And what makes him different from like Richard Spencer is that Pinker's main point on this kind of shit is like IQ differences between races might be real, but it doesn't mean you should be individually racist, which is conflated with rudeness, basically. Like that's more like all of his ideas are really fucking boring. He's

just what he does is he is like just strapped a feeding tube of graphs into your nostrils, more or less. Yeah. That's why Trump is bad, because Trump doesn't realize that doing racism properly is like instituting institutionally racist policies rather than like calling people whops on Twitter. And I actually, in preparation for this, I listened to the episode of Jordan Peterson's podcast with Steven Pinker on it, which was very. It's very. Has your brain expanded? It was I got so small. It's cracking. I actually, I tried to download that, but I actually have to update my Nvidia card. I couldn't handle the IQ. I was like, that's weird. You had to trip and yourself to download it. You need one terabyte of RAM to process this podcast. Damn.

She is smart as fuck. Quantum computing to process this. That's why only Riley read can listen to it. That's right. Yeah. Why only Riley read can listen to the podcast that I'm going to start Riley to Riley where I individually reach out to Riley read. Thank you for explaining that joke that I only just rise. We might off the podcast. Exactly. No, the people deserve to know about my new project. This is my soft pilot for Riley to Riley. Yeah, it's going to be the new chap by chap house, guys. Once that gets started, but no, stop downloading the Patreon. I need Riley to listen to it. You think it slows down. Patreon's bandwidth. That's the best part with other people subscribe to it. So here's, here's this example of the way that like Pinker

thinks Peterson says, well, obviously solar power actually has killed a lot more people than nuclear power through sunburn and melanoma. Almost Pinker's responses. Well, obviously it's because it's solar panel installers can fall off the roof. All the society to Steven Pinker is just Laurel and Hardy movies. Like there's like everyone's being like, I was just finishing, fitting this solar panel and I was crushed to death by a piano that fell out of the sky. It's fucked up that when you put in solar power, you have to have one extremely fat man and one skinny one move a chandelier very carefully. And all the sepsis have to be greased. No one knows why. Also, it absolutely rules that no

nuclear plant has ever been constructed. They all just occur naturally. Well, if you look at it, those like nuclear cooling towers are curved. So if people fall, they just roll off. It's like a half pipe. Yeah, like it's a dope site. That's why they have the X games, namely power plants. Yeah, I love getting my power from the American Ninja Warrior course. That is, oh my God, Harvard is so cool. Because it's just like guys who think like that, like just have a complete fucking bird brain thing where it's like, you know, actually, if you think about it, like universal health care is bad because then like there's no, there's no de-centivizing people from doing amateur jackass or backers wrestling.

And people are like, wow, you really, you know, went around the idea. Good work. Imagine how extreme Bam Margera would have gotten if he'd have had universal health care. I'm Bam Margera and this is shooting myself in the head in front of my parents. It just, it's just like completely taking the most obtuse weird. It's like, you can, you can try to outthink yourself so much that you just basically are a Facebook guy, but with more words. It's the same, like, damn, they say that shit's safe, but what if so, what if a solar panel fell on somebody? That'd be fucked up. Damn, you're right, dude. Well, what even is his, like, I know he's an academic, but what is his field? Like,

obviously not anything to do with engineering, right? Like he's, that's every time I've seen Steven Pinker referenced, you know, there are like all the, all the suck up articles that are like, you know, genius Steven Pinker says to Black Lives Matter movement, think about what it's like to be white, you know, they just refer to him as like Harvard thinker. And I think that's, I think his job is just to walk around Harvard and go like get a degree and just in thinking is. Yeah, exactly. They just, I mean, his job is that he's paid to just like go to Davos and be like, yeah, do this shit. He actually has paid to go to Davos and say, what if political correctness has gone too far? Like he's paid to go to Davos and just like

read YouTube comments and Reddit threads, but to dress it up in academic language more or less. Well, Black Lives Matter actually kills Black men because when Black men don't get arrested, then they return to their jobs as solar panels. Yeah, I mean, but he, I think he like, he does. I think he, he does. I should have looked this up before, but he's a cognitive psychologist. Yeah. What the fuck even is that though? Like, I know what a psychologist does. What, what subset of that is cognitive psychology? Is it just like, imagine, imagine if you took all the Freud, like all of the kind of attempts to have like insight into the human condition out of psychology and instead tried to make it about like a combination of race science

and poorly thought out experiment. Awesome. It's like just doing the Milgram experiment over and over again. Yeah. The two, the two genders of psychology, there's either fuck your mom's psychology or like Calipers psychology. Yeah. So he's, Cog, Cog psych is like, I guess it's like one level above Evo psych, which is just everyone with an Evo psych PhD has been on the Joe Rogan experience. You know, I've got a PhD in Mitsubishi Evo. Yo, that's just they're coming back, dude. So I, I'm cracking into this. I've got a little bit of, of pre of pre talk, which is what pre talk. Nate, can I'm going to take that again? I've got a little bit of, of, of article, like, so I'm breaking out. Okay, fine. Nate, keep it in. So this is from

an interview where he's like core ideas that the world is getting better. And so don't complain about it, right? So he's asked by the interviewer, what first gave you the idea that the world was getting better? And he says, I just stumbled across data showing that violence had declined over the course of history. The homicide rate in England was 50 times higher in the 14th century than it is today. Awesome. Thank you. The 14th century, just people continuously coming home and finding their wife banging the surf from across the village. People were getting, people were getting killed constantly for a cold shoot, like for a ton of dumb reasons then, but that's why we can't question like the economic paradigm that came up in the 1970s. Milton Friedman is right because

we don't burn witches anymore. Yeah, it's weird that they view like history as a sort of as the continuous like run of human progress. And yet they also assume that progress has now stopped, which is like, it's like, how can it be like, because they also, they don't acknowledge that like things have historically in like gotten a lot worse at various periods. Like the Roman Empire ends and then shit gets real fucked up for like a really long time and then stuff gradually gets better again. Like they've never actually thought or read anything. They just believe in the continuity of the Roman Empire through like Moscow as third Rome or the Holy Roman Empire. But he's then asked, Oh, so go ahead. Yeah, it's, Pinker's like general thing is very late 90s. Like, you know,

yeah, well, it's the end of history. I mean, I know all of you on this podcast are 15 years. He told the film's nice job and he's like, it doesn't get better than this. All of you on the, all of you on this podcast, all you listen, the oldest among you are 15 years old. So you literally weren't alive during this time. You know, but me as a 17 year old Twitch streamer who was frozen for many years after he was born. So I still get to be 17. I was still born in 1990. And living real life idiocracy. That's right. That's right. I have the biggest brain of all time now. Very, very humbled. But it was a very 90s thing to be like, well, America balanced the budget deficit. Pretty much all the major problems are done. I think we can,

I think we're going to take care of racism before this decade's over. And it was just the same sort of like pinker bird brain horseshit. And it was sort of, it was the rise of Bono as an international citizen of the world who would eliminate poverty by making a special type of iPod. That was, that was in the 2000s, but it was an extension of magical 90s center left thinking. We're going to kill racism with tax credits for basically, yeah. And it was like the 90s, the 90s were in, they were in exciting and absolutely idiotic time because of course there was a high, high index of human misery. A lot of it actually in the West where we had said that we had solved all our problems, but it was, there was sort of a rush

job to be like, well, Cold War is done. The budget is balanced. I think, yeah, now, now we take on the existential problems and then, you know, by 2002, we're going to live forever. Let's do it, guys. And then, yeah, not 11 happened, but pinker, God bless him. He's such a holdover from this time. Pinker is, he actually is like a public figure from this time because, you know, you know, public intellectuals after not 11, they would all just be like very dour universe to prevent. Yeah, guys who thought they lived in Lord of the Rings and were fighting an existential battle of good and evil because they wrote blog posts about how we should, you know, go to war. But there weren't as many guys like Pinker and the fact that we're seeing him back,

I guess, I guess it shows, you know, Obama, he really was for 90s kids because what, Steven Pinker could be the most 90s public figure we have. Oh, absolutely. If he'd been born a couple years earlier, he would have or not even born a couple years earlier. But if he'd like timing had been different that he would have been in the Obama White House as like as the like, you know, senior, senior optimism strategist or whatever. Welcome back to Keenan, Kel and Steven Pinker. So Steven Pinker interviewer says, okay, so what's behind all the good news and Sears, here's what Steven says. The most overarching explanation would be that the European Enlightenment worked. The idea that if we, we being

humanity, set ourselves the goal of improving well-being, and if we try to figure out how the world works using reason and science every once in a while, we can succeed. Hell yeah. I love using logic. Everyone feels like they're living in a Victorian painting showing the destruction of a biblical city. Like you can see the storm clouds coming over the horizon. Nobody thinks this. Who thinks this? Well, it's also the other thing I love about like who thinks this question is he's like, does he think that we invented just using A, B reasoning or like means and thinking in like the 17 hundreds? We invented being smart and we're doing being smart to racism and climate change and whatever

else we're going to fix it. It's perfect. Yeah, absolutely. No one was thinking before. That was the problem. I would just guess it. You just murdering wallards for like doing Christianity wrong. Yeah. Dude, those Romans were wild. They'd just be like, Hey, should we use logic to solve this problem? Now let's just look at this go intestine. In the 1600s, everyone was just a complete moron who was just like, Oh, damn, I can't kill enough witches to make the crops grow. Damn, I really wish I could get the things that I say, the sounds that come out of my mouth and put them in my head before people could hear them. Oh my God. I'm just imagining like a business motivation guy, but from the 1600s, who's like,

Hey, you know what? I get up at four a.m. And that's how I murder 60 witches a day and also read 800 pamphlets a day. I just, this is like a sub genus of the pinker pinker guys are guys who like they threw like evo psych and cog psych or like, all right, I have figured out the exact period in human history where cognitive thought began where there was actual personalization. And they write a, they write a 950 page book called like generals of the mind, how the West invented thinking and then Barack Obama is like, this is the best book I've read of 2018. That's Stephen Poe say that's actually not far wrong, Felix, because there is a prominent sort of liberal establishment thinker, thinker, liberal establishment thinker who does think that.

So Bill Gates on his website writes that enlightenment now opens with an argument in favor of returning to the ideals of the enlightenment, an era where reason, science, and humanism were touted as the highest, touted as the highest ideals. And then parentheses, Gates notes, insiders can get a preview of this section of the book. Oh, damn, I love being, I love being on the mind generals preorder. I love lining up around the game, stop to pick it up, making the soy face when I get it. Is Bill Gates's Patreon doing okay? I mean, I worry. I love getting Bill Gates's nudes on Patreon. The world is getting better, even if it doesn't feel that way all the time. I'm glad we have

brilliant thinkers like Stephen Pinker to help us see the big picture. Enlightenment now is my new favorite book of all time. Wow. Bill Gates read the greatest book of all time. Dude, the best book of all time is just graphs. It's the ultimate STEM opinion, but it's like, it's like, but there have to be books that are like as asinine in this as this and have made the same points that Pinker generally makes that are like better written or what the fuck Bill Gates could totally equally say something like, look, I like a world where community is presented as the highest order. Therefore, the Richard Scarry busy town books should be read by every world leader. But busy town are literally better books in every criteria that you judge.

Leading enlightenment figure, Richard Scarry. That's why there are all those bits in the busy town books where like, there's all like people doing the slave trade is presented in this like smiley for kids. Well, I'm getting on my moral worldview from Animorphs. It would be cool to post pictures of you like of busy town, like you're reading, you know, like you're reading. I just revealed myself. I don't know any books that people actually read. Fuck, you know, one of those books that like the fucking book people on Twitter read, you know, like the wife's letter by David Beckham. Yeah, exactly. The Keemstar autobiography. Yeah, the Eric Trump authorized biography.

And they just posted like this. And it's just like a worm driving a bus. I'm getting back into Richard Scarry this year. I don't think I'm ready. I went through a tough breakup. And I think I'm ready to reread busy town. I reread the Richard Scarry books every year. And you know what? I get something different from them every time. Like to have our long discussions about Richard Scarry in an adult dinner party. Passive, passive, aggressive arguments in the car with your with your life. Oh, yeah, I think I already know what subtext is. But yeah, thank you for explaining, you know, the bear who owns the hat shop to me. Oh, and don't think I didn't know what you were talking

about when you suggested that Mr. Messy refers to the disorganized soul. I know that was directed at me. Sure, you think the worm represents late capitalist malaise, but how would he even know about that? It's a worm. Read the book, the Chinzo Abe, Barack Obama, and Bill Gates are reading busy town. All right, so let's let's let's crack open the cardboard pages of Steven Pinker's busy town. Let's see what he's getting busy with. I just sort of like a hype beast Japanese Prime Minister, Chinzo Abe. Anyway, oh, good. Good. I've got that out of the way. So Steve, basically what I've done is I've picked some passages from this book. I'm going to read. We're going to go through it. It's

not actually an order because the order in which he writes it is basically here's the enlightenment is. It's when we invented being smart. Look at all these graphs. I'm worried about free speech on campus. That's how it's organized. The arguments are asinine. We've heard them before a zillion times. So we're going to focus more on like the little bits of what he says. So on his own philosophy, we don't have a catchy name for a constructive agenda that reconciles long-term gains of short-term setbacks, historical currents and human agency. It's called the five to diet. Kevin Kelly offers protopia, the pro from progress and process and topia from utopia. Others have suggested mono means one and real means real.

Others have suggested pessimistic hopefulness, optorealism and radical incrementalism. Radical incrementalism. Wow. My favorite comes from the fucking shit. All 300 of his IQ points right now. All of these are new centrist parties. I've got the best one coming up. My favorite is a serious possibilities. Steven Pinker backpack rapper. That's what he is serious possibilities. Steven Pinker. Oh my God. These are. I'm exhausted. I'm exhausted. Like villains like Cogsci can read like serious possibilities. You have to take out the controller. Steven Pinker talking to Jeffrey Epstein. You're even worse

than me. No, it's us. In order to beat optorealist in Metal Gear, you have to unplug the controller and plug it back in the second port. Whoa. These are just they're just this is just so exhausting. It's like like this is because it's like he just out works you like the pace that he keeps up is you can't match it because he just he has this he has this level of enthusiasm for complete horseshit that no one I don't think anyone on earth has the energy to like refute as it goes. How are you going to argue against optorealism because that's what I you know that's actually what I was feeling when I was reading this book and trying to grab stuff which is that you can't grab onto it anywhere. He never like makes a clear claim that isn't just a spurious statistical

claim. It's always just this vague like well actually you shouldn't worry. Here's a graph and it's like I can't get into it. It's like trying to claw smoke. It's like he took the limitless pill but it just sort of makes you dumber but you can work faster. You just do shoddier work at a pace that is too great for anyone to keep up with. He was given a placebo of the limitless pill and now he thinks he's really smart. Damn, I'm a god at this brain shit. Very cool. He thinks he knows Mandarin Chinese and he's just making noises that he likes on the menu. That's Joe's car. He walks out. He thinks that speaking Mandarin Chinese is just saying hello, 152, 153, 76. He's like egg chow mein, chop suey. Actually if you look at it, it's a very

mathematical language. You just say the number of what you want and it is presented in front of you and I actually think that is something we could learn from. That's why the Chinese are so good at math. Let's have this graph of how much Chinese you speak. It's quadrupled. As you see in the last two weeks, Stephen Pinker has spoken more Chinese than the rest of the 90% of the grab which is every Chinese person. Chinese is actually a STEM subject. Who do? Very cool Stephen. Okay, so here's an on reason which he thinks he and this is what he thinks he's arguing for. This is what he thinks about reason. This is who he thinks he's arguing against. There's the post-modern credo that reason itself is a pretext to assert power,

but this position has a fatal flaw. It refutes itself. As soon as critics of reason and science open their mouths to begin their defense, they've lost the argument because they have in that very act tacitly committed to persuasion. That is adducing reasons for what they are about to argue. Well, there's a lot going on here, as we say, but I like that. Can we just go with the implicit premise that Stephen Pinker is constantly arguing with people who are like, dude, that fact shit, I'm done with it. There's no A follows B. There's no reason for anything. Reasons suck, dude. You're pussy. He talks to socialists, but only the dumb guy socialism. But it's not even just like someone who's someone who this is like, this is like,

this is like Stephen Malin you shit. This is like, yeah, yeah, people will people will say that they're against the idea of things being true. But when they say that things are true, they're false. They are committing to the idea that truth is real. But it's like, who the fuck are you arguing with? Who do you mean against reason? What the fuck are you talking about? Some people are in favor of the credo that reason is bad, but I'm in favor of another credo one I've adopted from the brave men and women of the United States military. It's like this is equivalent. This is again, like Stephen Pinker is you think so hard you become a Facebook guy. This is like, you know, when people say pedophilia is good and we should

murder pit bulls, it's like, wait, who? Who the fuck are you arguing with? It's like, this is the same way of being like he imagines that someone has said to him actually facts are racist and his response is actually facts don't have a brain themselves and so cannot hold racist opinions. Try again. Oh, all the facts are racist. Well, a lot of them are Chinese. Absolutely. I would think that because China had because China like sort of developed an administrative like educational system that they had more facts than the rest of the world for a while. That's the next you allow a fact gap. That's the neck. Yeah, that's the next even pinker book, the fact deficit. It would be so easy to become one of these guys. Why the fuck

don't all of us do it? It's so easy. Johnny's facts, my new book. Yeah. No more Papinocchios, the invention of facts and the rise of truth in the West. Awesome. This is a plausible title. Riley, you said this back in the beginning about him being like Malcolm Gladwell, but like lawful Gladwell and I'm intrigued. True facts being like an alignment like that. Oh, no, in the DMS, we've been to in the end. We've been talking about this all day like Jordan Peterson is evil Gladwell. Stephen Pinker is lawful Gladwell and then Malcolm Gladwell is glad. Well, of course, Malcolm Gladwell is true Gladwell, lawful, neutral Gladwell. Then what is it? I think Joe Rogan is chaotic Gladwell. Oh, I was going to see Joe Rogan as Dungeon Baster

because it's all a simulation that he's experiencing. Like Joe Rogan is rolling all of our lives and we don't even know it. How different would Joe Rogan's life have been if he'd been like 20 years older and he'd have had to have done the Joe Rogan experience in the 90s? Like he's just on like e-bounds well, being like, hey, download this MP3 of me talking about DMT online. I would love to do a D&D adventure with Stephen Pinker where you just have to have facts that are like plus four to smithing. Whatever, that'd be great. Okay, so on wealth, here's what Stephen has to say about wealth. Among the brain children of the Enlightenment is the realization that wealth is created and it is created primarily by knowledge and competition. Networks of people

arrange physical matter into improbable but useful configurations that combine the fruits of their ingenuity and labor. I love to arrange math. Does he mean slaves? So wait, is he saying that the Enlightenment, the concept of economic growth didn't exist before? It's like, yeah, after, you know, they invented the wheel and then they invented the set amount of money in the world. And then, you know, Francis Bacon came along and said, yo, let's just make some more money. Let's get let's let's let this bread. This is so stupid. I always like, you know, I have like a few family members that believe this type of thing. And I generally like, avoid arguing with them because it's like, well, if someone's like 60 and believes this,

it's sort of like a function of their age, right? They have to believe the world that they're leaving with the beliefs that they practice. Like it's actually fine. Everything's okay. There's just a few problems you have to fix. And generally, someone can like believe these things and still be like a good person. They often are just like good people who want the like wish the world was a better place and have tricked themselves into believing it through like just absolute nonsense like this. And I always like, and I also don't like want to argue it because I've like never read any of this crap. And I'm like, well, I don't know if I could even refute it. I don't like know that many things outside of Keemstar podcast appearances, but actually like killing it for

the first time. I'm like, this is balonic. This is so shoddily constructed. You just refuse it with the Keemstar thing. So you'd be like, among the brain children at the Enlightenment is the realization that clout is created. Yeah, there was a set amount of clout during the Iron Age. Yeah. Well, we asked the question to gather a gaming society. We asked the question, right? Like, who is this book for? And Felix, I think you kind of hit on who this book is for. It's for people who are feeling kind of uncomfortable about the world, who are probably okay, but who don't consider themselves political and want to be reassured that things are more or less fine.

Like it's a book with no forward projects. It's just padding people on the back who want to keep considering themselves apolitical. Oh yeah, it's just people who have like 20 to 30 years left and they've benefited immeasurably from the course of the world from the time they were born till now. And they're a smart enough person to see that the world around them is very painful for a great many number of people, but not like enough to be like, all right, well, the status quo is we're headed towards ecological exit lamenting the concept. You can't molest a kid on a plane. And they say like, yeah, we're heading towards like existential ecological disaster, but they have to. It's too late for them to change their mind.

It's been too good for them and their family. And they're just like, actually, you love it. Actually, it's great. This guy, Steven Picker says, well, 300 years ago, we invented thinking. Imagine what we can do if we keep going on the same course. We're going to invent thinking too. Actually, it's funny you say that. I'll jump to this other passage where he says, what he's setting out to do is explain what he calls the optimism gap. He says, when it comes to happiness, most Americans are underachievers. Anxiety and depressive symptoms have increased in the post war decades in many people. And none of us are happy as we ought to be given how amazing our world has become. That's literally Joe Osteen shit.

It's the prosperity gospel for liberals who are atheists. It's a new atheist prosperity gospel. Did you like this is the same thing? Like every sort of fucking huckster American Protestant megalomaniac super minister has something like this where it's like you it's it's it's it's it's a Facebook thing. Again, like, oh, you're complaining. Guess what? There are people in Africa dying right now. So except I guess in Picker's case, it's like, oh, you feel bad? Well, people in Africa have quadrupled their income. How about that, dude? I want to switch the both those people are assholes and just have like red state small business tyrants who like own a muffler shop empire or something being like, well, you know, the global race of happiness has increased.

It's like it's like a worldly evangelical thing. There are different types of evangelicals in America. And, you know, you just have like the loads of guys who have the minister who has frosted tips, who just like, you know, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ was exactly areas and evangelical. Yeah, the guys who are like, Jesus Christ was the Roy Moore of his time. Actually, if you look at it, and then you have this is more the Rick Warren type where it's like living gratitude. You know, realizing that God has favored us to be it's like Hillsong, Rick Warren, that type of genius, the more cosmopolitan evangelical who realizes that they have to through like their their business or their geographical location have to traffic

with more liberals in the world. So they take a more conciliatory approach to things. And functionally, it's identical to this garbage. It's absolutely identical. Well, the way I see it is like, it's like Stephen Pinker's 14 words that we must secure the happiness of our people in a future for our dopey children. But it's not that's what's amazing about it is there is this implicit thing in Pinker and guys like Pinker where it reminds me, okay, so there's this article I saw in the greatest, you know, one of the people at the forefront of thinking to Vox, where it was like the worst thing about if America doesn't do TPP is it will be a wealth transfer away from the world's poorest

people where you yeah, you refuse to take an absolute numeric or contextual income look at like the incomes of the poorest people in the world and go, well, technically they'll make 30 cents more so that triples their income and blah, blah, blah. And the undergirding thing about that is like they were saying, we're going to be sacrificing their income for the income of middle class people. And, you know, generally, I hate, hate, hate the over focus of middle class and Western politics. It's just you say that because you can't talk about poor people, because they deserve their predicament, whereas middle class people are just, you know, they're trying their best and maybe their kids will invent the Fitbit. But there is this thing

like in the elephant graph in Pinker's overall thing in this sort of like global free trade gospel, there is this thing where it's like, well, the only people it hasn't gotten better for are the middle class and let's be honest, you know, they, you know, they're okay. And again, you know, obviously less important than the most economically precarious people. But what makes it so irritating is that Pinker is also saying implying and just outright saying the people at the highest end of the graph, the richest people, they deserve it because they invented Fitbit. He actually has a passage on why billionaires are good and deserve their wealth, which, which I've captured, which I think sort of dovetails in this nicely.

It slipped into your pokeball. He says, among the world's billionaires is J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter novels, which have sold more than 400 million copies and have been adapted into a series of films, but by a similar number of people seen by a similar number of people. Suppose that a billion people have handed over $10 each for the pleasure of a Harry Potter paperbacker movie ticket with just a tenth of the proceeds going to Rowling. She has become a billionaire, increasing inequality, but she's made people better off, not worse off. This doesn't mean that Rowling's wealth is just desserts for her effort or skill or reward for the literacy and happiness she added to the world.

Her wealth just arose as a byproduct of voluntary decisions of billions of book buyers and movie goers. That's what we see as billionaires. What does she do? What does she do with that money? She makes terrible tweets. I'm going to grab a cup of coffee. That really hurt me. Those tweets are very expensive, Alice. Well, it's like millions of man hours to produce. And so, but yeah, he's like, look, there's just, we don't know what causes billionaires. Hey, just billionaires just happen. They're cool. They're fine. They're like black holes. No one knows how they arise, but they have this gravitational pull

that sucks everything in. At no point does he think, he's like, oh, it's cool that these richest 1% of people in human history have managed to make all this money, whatever, but he doesn't see the other side of it, which is that try making a movie that isn't Harry Potter, or try seeing a movie that isn't Harry Potter. I've just had a thought. Between her and Elon Musk is the end game of capitalism where you win and the final end stage is just posting forever. That's your like punishment is you just have to tweet. We've all short circuited it and just start doing that now. As much as I want to talk about how J.K. Rowling is one of the worst posters in the world.

This is, do you guys know Gregory Mankiw? Yeah, I have a passing familiarity. The awful American economist who basically poisoned the brains of millions of my generation, the previous generation, by writing macro and micro textbooks for American colleges that are like, actually, like any regulation and taxes, if you look at this graph that excludes all of other external factors, they make the y-axis sad. Look, it's making the y-axis sad. You don't want to make the y-axis sad, huh? You're going to get the y-axis viagra. And Mankiw is like anyone with just a passing understanding can read his awful textbooks

and realize they're like just wretched propaganda, but he at least tries harder than this. This is offensively stupid. It's like it increases inequality, but people were happy when they read Harry Potter. Even Mankiw would go for something where it's like, yes, but the economic activity from buying the book increases the GDP and blah, blah, blah, or like, you know, perhaps there's a trade-off between leisure hours and blah. He will try some sort of economic justification for inequality, whereas this is just like, well, we turned it, turns out the magic was reading all along. So there's no more magic inequality. This is more Facebook. This is you're just jealous of rolling. You didn't work as hard as

rolling. You're just jealous. It's why you're complaining. He's not even fucking trying. He's not even trying. I could literally do this job and like do a better job and come up with like actual better statistic, fake statistic, like numbers juking than this. He's not, he just fucking gave up like a third of the way through and was like, yeah, I'm going to eat regardless. That's what this book is. That's what this is. This is the guy on Facebook where they're like, you stole copper wiring from my house. You called the police on me after you stole from me. Well, you know, you can say what you want, but I'm going to eat regardless. Okay. And he's not even, he's not even doing proper Steven Pinker because he's willfully ignoring the

fact that some of those Harry Potter books are very big and heavy and inevitably will have fallen from shelves and passing and possibly killing and maiming small children. Well, okay. Well, think about the Kindle though. And then he realized that Jeff Bezos has saved more lives than all the doctors in human history combined. People who have not been crushed by bookshelves. Here's the Steven Pinkertake. People get mad at Jeff Bezos for promoting inequality, but if you think about it, the Kindle has replaced bookshelves and now secret societies can no longer use fake bookshelves to hide their meetings and they have to do it out of the open and the world is more transparent. So Jeff Bezos is also the greatest transparency activist of all

time. Well, you go around to George Soros' house and you're like, hey, George, why do you have a giant Amazon Kindle set into a wall like this? Well, that's the thing. That's the other thing he's doing is he's doing a kind of switch here where it's like, yeah, there is, there is JK Rowling who has, you know, as objectionable as she is, sort of has it at her relationship to directly making people poorer is more is is less sort of close than a billionaire like Jeff Bezos, who is a billionaire because what he's done is he's stripped out and casualized and eliminated millions and millions of jobs and put people on poverty wages. His being a billionaire actually does make people's lives worse. And he's just kind of glossing over that in a really obvious

low effort way that does insult the intelligence of anyone reading this book. Jeffrey Kisses. Very fun. Anyway, it's that is the thing about this that is it just the lack of effort is stunning. Oh, the only thing I'm reading the first book I've read in literally five years now is guards my struggle. And, you know, this is the book this is the book that like Obama and fucking Bill Gates should read because at least now Scott now Scott is trying so hard like he's working his ass off to remember like a weird argument he had with his brother when he was seven. And so he had graphs and it's like it's it's because and now Scott's presentation is like, well, this is what happened in my life. And he's just working his ass off. And then you have this,

which is just this pompous fucking asshole with like a psychedelic illustration of Einstein's hair. He has that he has that thinker hair that that hair where it's like, damn, I can't even comb my hair. The ideas make it blow up. I got ideas blow up. My IQ is too high to straighten it. I can't cut my hair because I actually my my head ran out of space to put all my synapses and they're in my hair now. The IQ haircut. And he's like, all right, guys, I've solved all the problems of the world. And it's just this shit. He doesn't even give a shit. He's so fucking lazy. He's just not a good worker. Steven, like I'm about I'm about to kill you with this next one, because this is low effort. If you want to hear low effort, this is low effort. This is pinker on the environment

and climate change. One response to the prospect of climate change is to deny that is occurring or that human activity is the cause. It is completely appropriate, of course, to challenge the hypothesis of human generated climate change on scientific grounds. The great virtue of science is that a true hypothesis will in the long run withstand attempts to falsify it. And human generated climate change is the most vigorously challenged scientific hypothesis in history. So by now, all the major challenges have been refuted. And even the many skeptics have been convinced. Cool. But literally all the skeptic like the skeptics are in charge of the fucking jackoff. Like what? It's like this is what you have when you're just like this is like the perfect

pinker thing where you willfully like ignore power and capital is just you're just like everything is just an ideas battle. And this idea is winning because more people believe X and it's like, well, that doesn't really fucking matter that much if like literally all the power behind capital and government is skeptical or just doesn't care. Oh my God, he's all Shell had to do was play for time. They just had to play for time so that they could get it over the line so they could get the so they could like lobby for the tax bill to be passed. So all that shit could happen. And now they're like, okay, well, it doesn't matter anymore. So we don't have to keep arguing. And Pinker is like, ah, once again, vote the method of Voltaire wins the day.

Yeah, it's just so fucking the irony is that like this is the book that would convince Trump that climate change is bad. Like he would read a super like, oh my God, he wouldn't read. I've just I've been told someone read to me from this book, this amazing ancient text about this thing called climate bad. Okay, it's when the climate gets very bad, we're going to do something about it. I've got Jared looking into it. The climate is some of the most erratic we've ever seen it in terms of weather. And you know, you know, in my life in your lives, we've seen the, you know, we call it a double spring, you know, when you get a little bit of spring in the in the winter, and you go, Hey, I didn't ask for this. And you know, we like to love it. We like to,

we like to go around December and go a little fog, little 60 degree day to day. Hey, it's very nice. You can go for a nice drive, nice drive around the park. We love to drive around the park on a December day. But it's so it's so foggy. It's so foggy, you can't see anything. And they put up these wonderful decorations, but you can't see it because of the climate fog. We don't, we don't like seeing the climate fog. We don't like seeing him. And we, you know, we go, we go, okay, okay, you go right now till spring, but it's double spring. It's double spring. And you know, the other thing is Jennifer Lawrence, you know, show Sheldon Finkelstein for Vanity Fair can write what he wants about her. And first of all, his Christmas party,

Vanity Fair has been a disaster. And you know, you got to wonder why. And Jennifer Lawrence, actually a very nasty person, actually. Very mean woman. And Steven Picker is just sitting at the other end doing the high IQ leg cross. And he's like, absolutely 100%. Absolutely. Yes. There, there, there is a double spring. Things have been getting more erratic. It's like, yes, yes, more erratic than Lisa Rinne. When I was trying to, you know, see her a couple of times in the, in the early 1990s, it was on a friend of mine's boat, actually. And there were the waves were quite choppy that morning. However, let me tell you, things didn't go choppily with her. Anyway, thank you very much to the Boy Scouts of America.

My friend Steven Pinker, he's completely right. And the world is getting better. And you know, if we remember in the 80s, you know, Jamie Gertz wanted me very, very, very, very, very, very badly. And you know, I just, we could have done that. We could have just had a tremendous time together. But you know, at this, at this juncture in time, many have said that me and Kate Upton could be an item. And that is when an American, when a great American in 1750 invented the light bulb, that man was Thomas Edison. Okay. When that man, when that man invented the light bulb, Jennifer Lawrence didn't exist. But it is like, like all he's saying is like Trump shit, because like if you asked Trump to like talk about inequality, he'd be like,

and you know, you know, my, my great friends, they've done amazing, amazing deals for people. And so really, who's an equal here? They've made a lot of money. They've made so much money. They've made so much, but they've made so many, many lives better. It's the same argument. It's exactly the same. Oh my God. They say it's harder to date now, but private plane travel has actually improved across the country. Trump literally puts more thought into like talking about why the tax bill is good than Steven Pinker. If you guys want to hear some thought, I've got Steven Pinker's two solutions to climate change right now. Let's go. Let's go. A fleet of airplanes could spray a fine mist of sulfates, calcite or nanoparticles into the

stratosphere, spreading a thin veil that will reflect back just enough sunlight to prevent dangerous levels of warming. He's trying to put the earth in a cob. He's islamizing the earth. This is like, if you, if you, this is a fucking ether poisoned scientist from 1900. This is his idea. A fleet of private airplanes going to the islands and the, spraying whatever liquids. Steven, Steven, Steven Pinker, I've actually seen an amazing French science fiction movie, and I think if we make contact with the big face on the moon and avoid hitting him in the eye with a rocket this time, we can seek his help on climate change. If you want to hear about some 1900s shit, or some 19th century shit, rather, here's his second idea. Or a fleet of cloud ships could

spray a fine mist of seawater into the air. No, he did not say that. He did not say that. He did not say that in his fucking high IQ book. A cloud ship. Suggest something from Final Fantasy. What the? He wants to make like a pedophilia Hindenburg that's stopping climate change. Look. Did he? The thing is, the kids are the only thing that reflects sunlight, but only ones have been fucked. Only Jeffrey Epstein can save us from climate change. Did he like write this on Ambien? This is like, this is like a thought. This is the most low effort. Actually, this is the most effort he's put in, just this fucking brain, like world's fair guy opinions about how you fix existential problems. This is the dumbest fucking bullshit I've ever heard. If you

literally pulled somebody out of a room, you took everyone in America who saw Venom in theaters twice and asked them how to fix climate change. They would have better ideas than this. Let's spray seawater with cloud ships. Damn, thanks, Steven. Thanks, Steven. I've been reading this great thinker, Lando Calrissian. You might have heard of him. These measures, Pinker goes on, are relatively inexpensive, require no new exotic technologies and could bring global temperatures down quickly. Awesome. How do you know, Steven, so you have never indicated any expertise about climate or chemistry? God, he doesn't know what the climate is actually. He's not even fucking trying, man.

He's not even fucking trying. Oh, God. And he's, if this thing is like, he's just, he's this flowering of imagination that all of a sudden takes place when you have to like confront the crisis of the system, right? These just about pulling out cloud ships and seawater. This cloud ship is funny to me. Dude, a fucking zeppelin full of chemicals that protect you is so much better than a room full of Black Lives Matter protests that hate you. Hungry as fuck. He's just like, he's just like crossing out the HG Wells on the front of HG Wells books and writing Steven Pinker on them and writing like a manifesto for stopping climate change. Okay, I want to, I want to bust through a few more of these because there are some other

real, real for the jangles here. The age of reason, this is on war. The age of reason and enlightenment brought denunciations of war from Pascal Swift, Voltaire and others. But it was only after World War Two that the pacifying forces identified by Emmanuel Kant were systematically put into place. War is illegal now, according to the U. M. When military interventions have been launched, they have been rationalized as regrettable but necessary measures to prevent greater violence. But it wasn't so long ago that war was actually considered worthy and manly. You know, literally like less than 10 years after World War Two, there was America, there was a absolutely brutal, insanely costly, stupid war. Like we just didn't even take a decade,

just didn't even. Oh my God, he was writing this. We're still in, we're still in a bunch of different conflict theaters around the world. Afghanistan's still like a state we made fail. You know, we're still like, you know, you know, bombing a Syrian airfield that no one's in because like, you know, some Natset guy's wife won't fuck him or whatever. Like it's, oh, it's illegal. I didn't know there was no war. We should just tell like every, everyone just getting like vaporized in Yemen or whatever. Like actually this isn't happening. It's illegal. Getting vaporized, they can be blown into the atmosphere and stop climate change. God damn. Stephen Pink is just like, yo, World War Two was

bad, but without World War Two, we wouldn't have got bad and band of brothers and that shit was done. That's all, he's in all my classes was lessons. That's literally a better argument than what he's done. He's just like, he's J.K. Rowling in World War Two. I'm coming around to this because it's like Stephen Pinker has such contempt for the people that read this. It's so clear now. He just has complete contempt for how little he's like, he's just like, oh yeah, the world, the world's worst. Well, you know, dude, we have the fucking hallmark channel. And then Bill Gates is like, oh my God. Oh my God. Wars illegal. This is genius. Oh my God. You're the biggest great. You say? Bill Gates read Cloudships. He was like, this is my favorite book of my whole life.

Yeah. Oh my God. This is, it just, Steve, you played out the greatest grift of all time. You're a fucking God, dude. Absolutely. Steve, like we need, we need a Marvel movie about where Stephen Pinker is Dr. Strange. He just has graphs that make billionaires give you money. People telling their kids, hey, don't go near that Dr. Strange's house. Don't let him take you on his private plane. He got that name for a reason. Okay. He's going to blow you into the atmosphere, if you know what I'm saying. So here's, here's the thing. This is actually even dumber. This next one on racism and the decline of racism is even dumber than everything else I've read so far. Pinker decides to use search terms to measure a

decline in racism, calling them a quote, digital truth serum, suggesting that in the privacy of their keyboards and screens, people query Google with every curiosity, anxiety and guilty pleasure you can imagine together with many you can't imagine. You think this is Google, like what's never seen a wop in a day. It's not even Google. It's all hub search results as the interracial form consumption goes up. Racism goes down. Why? Parents explain to disobedient daughter the difference between the racist and their brain pants. I know what Pinker uses as evidence here and literally the porn hub thing would be a better argument than what he goes with. Stephen Pinker is the court intellectual of the

porn hub company. Okay. So he says, let's use then to track recent trends in racism, private sexism and homophobia, search terms. Like well into my adolescence, jokes featuring dumb polls, ditzy dames, enlisting, limp, rented, listed homosexuals were common in network television and newspaper comics. Today they are taboo. I mean, his book features a lot of dumb polls in my opinion. The numbers we looked at when we searched for Stephen just goes ahead and uses the word here and word jokes or in quotes, fag jokes are declining. Someone who searches for that word is as likely to search for topics that appeal to senior citizens such as social security and Frank Sinatra. To be fair, I bet Frank Sinatra said the N word.

I do love just the idea of like an old person whose homepage is a Google search for Frank Sinatra. Also, again, Stephen Pinker is looking at Black Lives Matter and being like, no, racism is actually better in America. People aren't searching for N word jokes anymore, but he just says the word. He's like at the Freddie Gray protest. No, look. There's a 35% decline in Polish jokes. Right. And also, this just also betrays that this is a guy who just doesn't understand how Google works. Like it's such a bizarre thing to search like so weirdly specific. It's like every morning at Clint Eastwood's house. I like Googling Frank Sinatra and slurs waking up and googling

the N word. Oh my God, Stephen. This is like, I love all like Bill Gates, Bill Gates who like, I'm probably like just untold amounts for Google executives, right? They're like, they read this, right? And they're like, they know how the internet works. And they read this part and they're like, you got it, dude. You demand. Absolutely. Yeah. No one's, no one's searching for N word jokes anymore. When I was, when I was Googling the N word every morning, I didn't realize I was part of the problem. This picture like a Crescent state thing of like, were you Google it in order to feel bad about it? I also like that he's putting Googling Frank Sinatra now into like morally questionable territory.

Like, should you be doing it? Like it's not technically wrong, but are you siding with them? I think if you Google Frank Sinatra, Google just counts it as his search for the N word, not incorrect, honestly. Did you mean, did you mean, why is the Dominican nurse taking my watch? Yes, I did actually. It's like, this is also the opinion of someone who's never heard of the YouTube algorithm. Yeah, it's never, it's like, it doesn't know that like people are getting like pushed Stephen Mollin new stuff where he's like actually white people are discriminated, whatever. He just, he's never heard of this. He's like, nope, the internet's list of waiter

and you just ask it for stuff and it gives it to you. And that's how it is. And no one's asking for N word jokes anymore. So racism is gone. Like he thinks the process is like, all right, I'm thinking about getting into racism. Let me just type in some of the most potent slurs. Find some other people using them, see if I can pick up some tips from them. He's a social racist. Oh my God. He's only a racist on the high holidays. Only after a couple of beers. This guy is sort of a G. This is like Chris Morris level. Like this is like Chris Morris wrote like a, you know, sort of fucking neoliberal thinker character. It would be this guy. This is absolutely. Oh, and Jeffrey Epstein is playing

is the space capsule. Yes. Yes. 100,000%. Oh my God. Sad by SpaceX X 10 Tassie hunt. All right. So I want to run through another couple quickly because they're so perfect. And then I think it's time for us to hang up our podcast hats on Islam. Oh boy. Strap in. All right, let's go. Let's fucking go. No discussion of global progress can ignore the Islamic world, which okay, fine so far, but it takes a turn, which by a number of objective measures appears to be sitting out the progress enjoyed by the rest much more and more jokes. Islam's just a bit hungover. It's just sitting at, you know what, like guys,

I'm just going to sit here and drink this drink this aloe vera juice you guys carry on. It is my Islam sitting on the sideline. Y'all are so fucking lucky on my parole. This is almost almost like you up. That's almost right, Felix. All the wars raging in 2016 took place in Muslim majority countries or involved Islamist groups are responsible for the vast majority of terrorist attacks. I love that they're like someone's like someone's house gets burgled and then they're like, huh? Are you sure you're not in league with the burglars because 100% of the burglaries on this street took place in your house. Absolutely. It's like, it's, you know, every, like we sell the, we actually,

this is all, this is actually true. Like the crazy David Vance conspiracy theorists who think that Theresa May is a secret Muslim who's trying to Islamize the West or whatever. That is true. There are people who think that she is the secret mom. So they think that she's supplying Saudi Arabia weapons and it is exactly a Muslim war. Anyway, it's, it's, it's, it's just, it's, it's, he asks, can the Islamic world have an enlightenment? Can there be a reform Islam, liberal Islam or a humanistic Islam, a separation of mosque and stay? You know, you know, so we have Islamic 1984, you know, the racist Silbello

quote about who the toll story of the Zulus is with this, this guy is going, who's the Muslims John Locke? Like they still fucking read him. Yeah. Who's the Muslim John Cena? Once I've converted him in the comment section on his Facebook page, you can't see me. I'm dressed modestly. You can't see me. I'm the hidden demand. This is a credo. I have adopted from the brave men and women of ours. The, the, the infidels have been compromised to a permanent end.

I am, I am pleased to announce that Osama bin Laden has been compromised to a permanent end and is now an eternal martyr. Compromised to a permanent end is the greatest sentence ever uttered in the West. Um, it's, it was the natural evolution of like the, the whole thing where like when Americans try and sound more formal, they just say things that no one ever actually says, like saying at this time instead of now and stuff like that. And then that is just like the high priest of all of that, which is compromised to a permanent end instead of kill. It's cop language. Like if you, yeah, American cops,

like especially suburban cops, suburban cops are currently the most psycho cops because they're just waiting to see like, like any person of color. So they can be like, we have an MS 13 style attack in our, in our bungalow community. But like when they, you know, as someone who as a shitty 16 year old was, you know, in friends cars pulled over many times by suburban cops and just never even handcuffed the, the main thing they would do is like, uh, could we ascertain to this scenario that we can perpendicular lies, uh, marijuana style smoking instrument of us. That type of thing.

They're speaking Mandarin. They're speaking. Cops actually speak binary. Um, when you're really good, you don't even have to decode it. You just, you just, you just understand the numbers. Um, so I'm going to run through another couple here on the future. Some economists fear that low rates of growth of the new normal. No one really knows why productivity growth slacked off in the seventies or how to bring it back up. One explanation is that America has lost its mojo. Workers in depressed regions no longer pick up and move to vibrant ones,

but instead just collect disability and drop out of the labor force. Plus investors in governments no longer backed moonshots. As entrepreneur Peter teal lamented, we wanted flying cars. Instead we got 140 characters. America has to go back in time to retrieve its mojo from fat bastard. Even Pinger admits that the growth has been slow and doesn't really know why it is. He says workers have lost their mojo, whatever that means. And he says technology driven productivity growth has a way of sneaking

up on the world without realizing it. People take a long time to figure out how to put technologies to best use and industries need time to retool their plants and practices around them. So here are some of Steven Pinker's ideas. Fourth generation nuclear power in the form of small modular reactors in every home. Uh-huh, sensible. Got it. That sounds really safe. Much safer than solar panels.

I like where you're going, Steve. A battery the size of a Walmart powering a whole city. This is just a battery the size of a walnut, which would have actually been impressive. Like walnuts are very big. In the medical realm, a lab on a chip could perform a liquid biopsy and detect any number of hundreds of diseases from a drop of blood or saliva. Wait, also, what is powering the battery? Like he does raise a battery sound just like a fucking source of energy.

He probably does. This is summarized. But I noted the medical realm one. He's just invented Theranos. He said Theranos could come save us. He's like an irredentist for it. He's like the last holdout. He's like still fighting in the 7th. He's a Japanese guy who's stuck in an island.

He just doesn't realize it was a huge scam. He just missed that week. It's just he's a complete just this just shows you how much of a dunce he is because he's like because this has been disproven before the book was written. A Japanese guy on an island clutching a bayonet and googling Frank Sinatra. I'm saying to himself, this is the enemy. Individualized education can be provided over the web to children in developing countries by volunteers called the Granny Cloud.

Another Pornhub search term. Steven Picker. Don't worry, I'll educate all these kids. And to learners everywhere by artificially intelligent tutors. Cool. Oh my. So like they're just Steven. Like so his plan is just to sprout 100,000 stuff in Malinus.

We like educate all the children. This is he is the shittiest brain of all time. Just the worst. Just the fuck. You really just hate to see it. You really just hate to hear these ideas and think about what they look like and then realize that trying to process the practical application of Steven Picker's ideas is just it's the equivalent of salting a field to your synopsis.

It's like you're just a reproblood dumber. Salting an atmosphere. Yeah, you just, yeah, there's a cloud ship running around your brain. It's like, well, you're never going to use that neural pathway again. It's just completely ruined because you thought about, you know, individual like internet homeschool classes taught from cloud ships that are spraying salt mist like a little spray bottle. You sprayed a cat into the atmosphere to prevent global war.

Because you think Keemstar is going to be like a dean of an internet school. Here's his fourth one, the rise of the techno philanthropists who instead of just writing checks for the naming rights to concert halls, apply their ingenuity connections in demand for results to the solution to global problems. Okay, okay, okay. So the guy who made tiktok is going to fix drought. You're right, Steve. Thank you.

This is another fucking, another fucking home dinger of an idea from the brain god himself, Mr. Infinite IQ on preventing littering. I, for one, am very excited to be able to call a cloud ship from my phone and have it take me anywhere. This is, I'm going to give you guys some insight. I was like ready to work out a little bit. I just can't do it now, man. I got to wait till tomorrow.

This really took a lot out of me. I'm so sorry. I can't wait to like, I can't wait to see you guys on stream later and you're just getting just your shit killed all the time. Be like, sorry guys. Dude, I'm playing hero today. I'm going to get fucking owned. My, oh my God.

And I'm here's the, I've decided this is the coup de grace. This is the stupidest possible thing. And this is, I think, where this actually most meshes with chapeau territory. This is Steven Pinker on discourse and discourse in general. Indeed, in one realm after another, we are seeing the conquest of dogma by the armies of reason. Newspapers are supplementing shoe leather and pudgetry with statisticians and data journalists like James Ball in New York and increasingly in other cities. Violent crime has been reduced with real time data crunching system called comp stat

volunteering and charitable giving are being scrutinized. The blogosphere has spawned the rationality community. Cloud ships cruising the blogosphere, sprinkling it with dangerous ideas. The rationality. Yeah. I got jumped into the rationality community. I had to name five enlightenment thinkers while they hit me with a feather duster. I'm a rational boy, level five.

He's like a character that was cut from train spotting. No, that's my, what if your dog was a nuclear power station? Do you have a thing for that? I don't know. He's he's he's the gaming clan rationality community that is just absolutely tearing up the fortnight charts. That's what he's doing. Oh my god.

This is just he like just he just I think there was a point in writing this book, like the first part that he's like, I need to use empirical evidence to back up my my claims. And then like after about like maybe 60 pages of that, he's like, you know what, who cares? And he's like, you know, now you can go viral for for facts. And hey guys, and still people still eat it up. People are still like, damn, dude, Steven, you're so good at thinking. Yeah. Just to the HIV, it was a fact.

If you like, if you like it did enhanced interrogation on Steven Pinker, he would admit he just gave up all writing this. He just wasn't even fucking trying at all. Literally, his argument towards the end is like that you can like I fucking love the science goes viral. The great becoming of this book is the transformation from Facebook at the beginning into Imgur at the end. Yeah.

Yeah. It charts it charts the line of great thinkers from Voltaire all the way through to Neil de Grass type. Here's here's the bit that's going to kill all of us. Can we imagine a day in which the most famous columnists and talking heads have no political orientation, but try to work out defensible conclusions on an issue by issue basis in which people will answer a question like, does gun control reduce crime with, wait, let me look up the latest meta analysis.

Well, I remember what the talking head said about this, which was psycho killer. Yeah. Yeah. His like vision of a perfect world includes a non ideological op-ed board. Yeah. I'm about to spike my fucking mic through my monitor. I'm about to just fucking throw a straight right at my mother like summit one G. I am.

Yeah, that's he doesn't even fucking. He has such contempt for the people that read this. It's like it's awesome. I don't know. Cloud ships. What can we do now? I don't know. Non ideological op-ed board.

Yeah. Steven Pinker is he's also ruining my evening because this is this recording is making me late for a dinner party at my house. And without my supervision, one of the guests has put on Disney songs apparently. So I've got to go and deal with that. You have to put on Bummy Boy. This is dinner parties now for the free 69 movement. Absolutely.

For free 69 have gone up. You've got you got to go in there and put on Gotti song about the dumbest guy. Putting on Frank Sinatra's song. Addressed it to Raleigh read. No, it's that's awesome. That's the thing. We're going to fix it. Cloud ships, neutral op-ed borbs.

We got it guys. We fucking solved it. I would love to see Steven Baker going like the Keemstar, Adam 22, Faze Banks, Lil Xan podcast. He would be so at home like he just has the same level of contempt. Everyone on the left and right is cloud chasing. Yeah. Yeah.

That's actually his argument. That's actually his argument. He's not cloud chasing. He's cloud chasing. Okay. Man, man, I was I was on this plane heading headed to international waters. I was like, this shit is so not me. Oh, boy, I got an international law waters loyalty card.

The great thing is they have them all over the world. Oh, boy. I think I think we're going to we're all going to die if we don't go soon. I feel like I honestly, honestly, I, I just feel like I drink like a liter of salt water. That's how it feels ready to piss it into the upper atmosphere and stop global war. Exactly. Exactly. You guys talk sometimes about how watching books and movies makes you feel

how reading this book made me feel was like, you know, when you close your eyes and just press really hard and then you're just sort of seeing stars. It's like it's that it was that reading this book was like that. Well, as as Bill Gates said of this book, this book made me feel like a natural woman. This is Bill Gates's best book ever written. Yeah. The big genius billionaire who has more resources than like only two people are richer than him. This is his favorite book.

Did Bill Gates like just replace his brain with like the AI behind Clippy? It looks like you're trying to write a comment for a book sleeve. I guess this is like this is sort of like capitalist thinking, right? But I thought that Bill Gates would be like a very if not like really amoral shitty guy, like a smart guy. But no, no, I totally wrong. He read this and was impressed. He was literally impressed by this.

He thought this was good. Let's remember back to the very beginning. This is someone who thinks that AB reasoning was invented in the 1750s. Oh boy. Anyway, people could think before was via Socratic elencus. You had to whenever you were trying to solve any kind of problem, you had to rely on bumping into a crotchety old man on the street. He would ask you like important questions until you realize the correct course of action.

All right. We're going to go drink a whole lot of hemlock. I think Milo, you got a dinner party to save Felix. You got to go lose it. Halo. I'm just I'm going to clean up my apartment to try to reconnect some brain synapses. Honestly, I think if I swung a kettlebell, I would just fucking beam my like my body would force me to kill myself with it.

It would just be into my forehead and create it. I'm going to so I'm going to I'm going to do the outmatter now. We I'm going to say thank you to Felix and Alice for hopping on and subjecting yourself to this. I think you love to see it. You love to see it. We love to see it. Love that. We in a way we have a patreon.

We actually the first leftist podcast to invent having a patreon. Yeah, it didn't exist before 1750. For the you said you're going to start a podcast called Chapo trap house. You might want to take this idea. You you can subscribe. You can get a second episode every week for five bucks a month. Yo, don't worry. Just just credit us.

Thank God we bumped into that old man in the street. And also you can commodify your descent with a teacher from little comrade. Maybe you can get one of Stephen Pinker's favorite graphs on it. I'm sure he would love to screen print that for you. You can also buy our merch on Teespring. Oh, yeah. We have other merch. Oh, we have more merch for some for some fucking reason.

We're going to do a live show at some point in February. I think you might look and book it. Yeah, just book the book the venue and please book the venue. This is the only way it works. This is my new form of of of interaction with other people. It's podcast callouts. And finally, thank you to Jin sang for our theme song. Here we go.

You can find it on Spotify. It's a very good tune. Anyways. Oh, also there's a there's a show on the 16th of January. Smoke comedy is back. I'm hosting it and our headline is going to be a his shot. It's going to be. It's going to be a very good show.

Many, many three three-peat, I think on the show. Yeah. Twice or twice or three-peat. Yeah. Double Edinburgh comedy award nominee. It's going to be dope. It's on the 16th January 8 o'clock. You can get tickets on Eventbrite.

They're free, but you should get a ticket because it'll probably sell out. Yeah. We'll link that in description. Anyways, thank you for listening. Thank you for coming on and try just after listening to this. Try not, you know, to jump off a roof installing a solar panel. Good night, everybody. Good night.

See ya.