TRASHFUTURE - *UNLOCKED* Intelligence 4.0 Ft. Felix Biederman

Episode Date: August 28, 2020

You voted, we listened! Our listener poll of "which of our series' do you want unlocked" returned a result! So... welcome back to the world of intelligence.   Riley, Alice, Milo, and Chapo Trap House's Felix Biederman have once again sat down and cracked open a book of brain literature. This time we read through British brain god Dr. Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist (2010), and it left us all a lot happier as we explored a truly beautiful mind. It's a balm for the soul. Check it out!

Hello and welcome to this episode of TrashFuture, the fourth in our intelligence series. It is me, Riley. I'm here once again with Alice. Yeah. What's up? Milo. Hello. It's me in an undisclosed location. Returning to us once again is ChapoTrapHouse and ChapoFYM's Felix Biedermann. Felix, how's it going? Hello. Thank you for having me.

Yeah. Back to talk to you again with more brain gods. Yep. You guys like you. These are your favorite guys, like my favorite guys, like we have in our show. It's it's like conservatives who are afraid of jacking off. Like, I love those guys. Those are my guys. There's a kind of charm to the guy who thinks that jacking off like makes ghosts live in

your house. Or the guy who like did reverse cowgirl for the first time at age 62. David Brooks is now like, yeah, I believe in God now. Everything's beautiful. I want to pull aside everyone at Penn Station and tell them about reverse cowgirl. I love reverse cowgirling. My wife strap on. Yeah. My my favorite David Brooks, the genre of tweet is where he's like,

why won't my 16 year old girlfriend listen to Miles Davis? It's cool. Those are those are good. But I also like the ones where it's like he just wants everyone to know he's fucking. Yeah. And it's like in the time of Corona, who's getting top? What's up, man? It is still better than the the other genre of in the time of Corona tweet,

which is the we are going to karate chop this pandemic with our bad ass Dr. Fauci, et cetera, et cetera, that you pointed out is a Gen X psychosis. Well, that like, well, Gen X is like the only way they can likes like say that they like something or someone is by saying they want to fuck them because like they're like all Gen X language is channeled through like needlessly aggressive print ads from 1992 that are like, uh, do you want maybe maybe you're too gay to drink this soda? I don't know. Just saying.

Yeah. And like the way like the way the Gen X men compliment each other is like, oh, yeah, he's a real son of a bitch. I'd suck his dick. Just kidding. I'm not gay. Like I'm just it's just like a funny thing for me to say. So with Dr. Fauci, like they all they all want to fuck him.

But I think the worst the worst pandemic tweets are the ones that are like, uh, uh, yeah. So today I wore sweatpants. Yeah, it's like the real designing a podcast in motherfucker. So here's what I here's what I've done. I have found yet another one of these rational optimist just books for the terminally bird brain and I have yet again found some gems from it. Um, and so just in the tradition of the intelligent series, I'm now going to subject

Felix and my co-host to the backstory of a man named Matt Ridley. Matt Ridley is the fifth Viscount Ridley and he has written a book called The Rational Optimist, which came out in 2010. Yes. Now, good rational optimism. Everything like got better after 2010. It's a big right. Matt Ridley is the fifth Viscount Ridley, a title he inherited from his father.

He's trained as a scientist and he has a PhD from Oxford of the mating habits of pheasants. He's a famous climate skeptic and it continues to be one of the UK's last few proponents of fracking. However, unlike Pinker and Gladwell, Ridley has not been a take machine forever. He only became one in 2010 after he lost his previous job like to face. He's like the two face of this Batman's rogues gallery here. Hell yeah. I'm this is this is to Felix. What do you think his previous job was?

All right. I'm going to. Okay. All right. I'm really going to use my brain power. He's Landon Gentry. You read shitty thinking books and his name is Matt Ridley. I'm going to say like Chief Creative Officer of Barclays.

That is so close. That's dangerously close. In 1994, Ridley became the board member for the UK Bank Northern Rock after his father has been a board member for 30 years and chairman from 87 to 92. I'm so fucking good at this. Ridley then became chairman in 2004 after inheriting the position from his father. Alice, play that stinger. Thousands of Northern Rock savers have queued for hours and branches to empty their accounts.

Many more have withdrawn cash via the internet. Despite reassurances from the bank over the safety of their savings, customers have now taken out well over a billion pounds. Is that good? He didn't run on the bank in like 2010. He was doing a speed run. That fucking incredible. He was doing a bank speed run.

Yeah, bank 80 percent. No, I remember the collapse of Northern Rock. I do. I was like, I would follow financial news around that time for some insane reason. But yeah, no, he's a what a baller. What a fucking baller. So did he so he became famous after this, I'm presuming, right? Yeah, like unwillingly.

Like he got he got hold in front of like select committees and stuff. And then he like pivoted that into books about why things are getting better. And that's cool. Exactly. Well, that's so OK. This Ridley, he's like a very specific type of like British for lack of a better word, celebrity. Something that happens in your country a lot is like someone is famous for fucking up. Like that would like in America, the guy who is on the board of the bank that collapsed,

like wouldn't become fit. It would just be like people would make fun of him. And then he would like quietly get a consulting job where he makes eight million dollars a year. Because that's just how it works here. And like you would like be in it. He would be in an intercept story for like bundling for Joe Biden and saying something like, I'm going to kill Bernie Sanders with a gun, not getting a job. But like because Britain is so shame based,

when someone becomes a celebrity for fucking up like, yeah, they work for the bank that had a run on it or like a tech firm that lapsed or they were a government minister in a specific department of the government that like killed a thousand people in one day. They they're like, all right, well, you get to be a pundit and celebrity now, because people know you as the fucking up guy. Yeah, they get they get a game show called like Grand Blasini or something. Yes. Here's here's what he then said after in an interview with Newcastle, a Newcastle newspaper.

He said, I enormously regret what happened at Northern Rock. It's actually an incredibly painful memory for me and something that I will have to live with for the rest of my life. All his losses was lessons. It's me more than it could ever hurt you. Anyway, I have to now just become like a famous columnist. This is his penance, right? He doesn't like writing books about how things are going to get better.

He's just been like forced to do it. It's like a court ordered Gladwell. Yeah, Britain like no longer had Australia to have a penal colony. We started making columns. That's why we have so many northern rock collapse. And he's like, oh, this is bad, yo. After this, I'm not going to be able to get horny for pheasants for ages for real. So I love I love to think he like he definitely when he was in school,

he like definitely knew he was just going to inherit that stupid bank job from his dumb ass dad. So he's like, yeah, why learn anything about banking or like the economy? It's just like, yeah, I just I know a lot about birds. Let me let me let me be the money guy. It was his decision that led northern rock to be incredibly invested. Or at least it was the board's decision of which he was part that led northern rock to over like zealously invest in the US mortgage pack securities. It's why it was the only British bank that failed.

Okay, so I want to jump right into the rational optimist from 2010. This is his book, right? His post northern rock book. The book shops are groaning under ziggurats of pessimism and the airwaves are crammed with doom under my own adult lifetime. I have listened to implacable predictions of growing poverty, coming famines, expanding deserts, imminent plagues, pending water wars, inevitable oil exhaustion that happened already, mineral shortages, thinning, falling sperm counts,

thinning ozone acidifying rain, nuclear winters, more epidemics, the Y2K computer bug, killer bees, sex change fish, global warming, ocean acidification, and even asteroid impacts that would presently bring this happy interlude to a terrible hand. Can we go back to the sex change fish? Yeah, can we can we can we go back to those in the falling sperm counts? These guys are all like they all have a thing about fertility. It's weird. Yeah.

Well, there is there there is like a fertility thing that is happening. Like people are having less. Everybody's miserable. It's not because they're putting like Easterdial in the water or whatever. Well, yeah, no, it's literally because like people can't afford to and their livestock and no one has any friends like that. But that's like that's like too too direct of a problem for this guy. So he's just like, um, yeah, actually, um, it's crazy.

They put a chemical in the water that makes people get. My favorite thing from that passage is the phrase ziggurats of pessimism. It's just like what dude? Yeah, the Mayans built ziggurats and nothing bad ever happened to them. Not sure that's accurate. So also I like that he notes like the ozone layer of Y2K like those things happened. The ozone layer did thin and then we stopped using HFCs or CFCs or whatever that it stopped thinning. Y2K was prevented from being a disaster by a lot of people working really hard.

We did have the sex change fish and then we all worked very hard to like make like to dump testosterone into all of our lakes and bodies of water. So here's what he says. He says, I will make a concession at the start. The pessimists are right when they say that if the world continues as it is, it will end in disaster. For example, if all transport ends on runs on oil and oil runs out, then transport will cease.

But the world will not continue as it is. It is my proposition that the human race has become a collective problem solving machine doing so through invention driven often by the market. This sounds like Steven Pinker to me. But here's where it diverges from Steven Pinker almost immediately. When I'm going to read to you the title of the prologue. Felix, again, this is when I realized that this is the book that I had to show you when I saw the title of the prologue.

Hold on to your desk when you're about to hear this title. All right. Prologue. When ideas have sex. Yes, my man. Yes, yes, yes. All right. This guy, this guy's a gamer.

You know, he's like, he realizes that the guys who invent thinking too, he has to like differentiate himself. I already, I'm already fucking vibing with this guy. Yeah, absolutely. He absolutely like him. Like all of the other intelligence guys, they don't talk about sex because the only kinds of sex that they're having are like insanely illegal. Whereas this guy is just like, he's like having sex with the mind.

It's cool. He's a true sapier sexual. I'm hitting this social contract theory from the back. Well, this guy, this guy, he's like, I'm going to assume he's, you know, despite his landed gentriness is not a pedophile because all the, like Stephen Baker never talks about sex because it's like his publicist was probably like, Stephen, you shouldn't talk about that in light of the many things. But this guy, like, yeah, he probably like puts on a Nora Jones CD and like

pathetically pokes his wife. Yeah. And he's like, he thinks of himself as like a sexual creature. So he's going to talk about it. God, this is, this is really an episode that's going heavy into like pathetic middle-aged guy sexuality between this guy and David Brooks. And I'm so here for that. So here's, here's where we get the actual mechanism that he proposes.

He says, on my desk, as I write, sit two artifacts of roughly the same size and shape. One is a cordless computer mouse. The other is a stone handaxe from the Neolithic era. Absolutely confirmed gamer. Wow. We live in a society. That is, that is so. I love it when guys do shit like this, just like,

the craziest thing is if you had something very new and something very old. To remind you of some nonspecific ideas. On my desk, as I write this with my light up keyboard. I have a swastika and a yin and yang to remind you that some things are good and some things are bad. Both are designed to fit the human hand. The difference between them shows that the human experience today is vastly different from the human experience of half a million years ago.

He's right. That's just, that's just that tweet about how we get more cool ranch, you know, in a day than the average medieval peasant would have gone their entire lifetime. This is so asinine. So here's what, here's how the, it actually functions, right? He says, humanity is experiencing a burst of evolutionary change driven by good old fashioned natural selection, but it is selection among ideas, not among genes. This is Dawkins.

He's just bicing Dawkins. The sexual marketplace of ideas. Yes. The habitat in which those ideas reside is the human brain. That's just the selfish gene. You've just taken the selfish gene and you've made it a hornier. He does cite dark things. I wait, hang on.

He says. We're back to the fucking president is the quarterback thing. It's like, oh, in the game of, in the game of ideas, there's one, there's one quarterback and that idea lives in the human brain. So he says, I believe that in some point in human history, ideas begin to meet, mate and have sex with each other. Mate, just yes. Okay, sure.

Sex is what makes biological evolution cumulative because it brings together the genes of different individuals and by exchanging with free trade humans beings invented the division of labor, the specialization of efforts, italics for mutual gain. This man is a savant, right? He's accidentally invented dialectics while trapanning himself. And it's just like, one idea meets the other idea and they make a little baby idea. And it's like, yeah, well done. It's like, it is like, this would be familiar to anyone who's ever had a thought before.

Yeah, like anyone who's learned anything at all ever in their lives. Like a toddler would be able to basically formulate the same theory. You know what it is? It's, it's like this whole prologue is just like, yo, does anybody else like hear themselves as like a voice in their own head? It's like, you know how, you know how when you're thinking stuff, it's kind of like you say it to yourself, but you don't hear it? Well, this shows how much of class is signifiers because this guy is presumably,

like he goes to the like British society dinners who you dress like the Riddler. Yeah, exactly. But he is as smart as like Bayes Bank. Easily. Yeah, like he's like, like this is just, yo, Doug, it's so crazy how sometimes when you have an idea, it's like you're like, don't think you'll see it again, but then it helps you have another thought. Doug, what's so, what's so crazy is like we use all these words every day,

but then they like help us find more words. Wow, I can't wait to see his chapter on two-faced Buckinghamshire ladies. So here's, he says, it is perfectly possible and indeed profitable, probable rather, that in the year 2110, a century after this book is published, humanity will be much better off than it is today, as will the ecology of the planet. This book dares the human race to embrace change, be rationally optimistic, and therefore strive for the betterment of humankind in the world that it happens. I'm kind of into this now, right?

Because like he's convinced me in the first, in the prologue of his book, because this guy is presumably way happier than I am, right? Like, I'm fucking, I'm full of like, despair and anger and terror. And I just like pinball between those three things all the time. This guy's like, he reads the same news I do in the morning, and then he's like, man, we're gonna, we're gonna think the shit out of this. He's like, yeah, great.

Well, he keeps writing columns in his main column right now is about how the problem with the UK coronavirus response is that it's shut out to any private testing laboratories. Yeah, he's just, he's just a beautiful, perfect, happy idiot. I envy him that. Oh, so here's the, when you said phase banks, I now, you said it around the perfect paragraph, because this is a very phase banksy in paragraph. I am writing in times of unprecedented economic pessimism in 2010. The world banking system has lurched to the brink of collapse.

To my intense regret, I played a part in one phase of this disaster as a non-executive chairman of Northern Rock, one of the many banks that ran short of liquidity during the crisis. But this is not a book, this is not a book about that experience. This is a really involved bank collapse. This is exactly like the phase banks notes app thing about cheating on Alyssa Violet. I was involved in several situations that could be described as cheating. This absolutely should have been a screenshot. Yeah, yes.

So what he says basically, he handwaves that away by saying that, look, the problem with that market was that it was a market in assets. I like markets and goods and services. Anyway, but he says, rational optimism holds that the world will pull out of the current crisis because of the way that markets and goods services and ideas allow human beings to exchange and specialize honestly for the betterment of all. Well, we certainly got Labyrinth's earthquake, which was a tune to be fair. So I mean, you know, say.

So, you know, he does a lot of like Steven Pinkership, which we can ignore. And then he says, and so then, but then talking about how trade, he says, is it possible not just that the recent credit boom, but the entire postwar rise in living standards was a Ponzi scheme made possible by the gradual expansion of credit that we have in effect grown rich by borrowing the means from our children at that a day of reckoning is at hand. That is awesome because he's like, he's rewriting the postwar boom and like the war boom really is instead of being like a vindication of sort of Keynesianism and like the types of economies that Western countries had then

into retconning it into being the economy since the late 70s, which is just like a debt-laden consumer economy. And then also putting in a nice thing about austerity and deficits in there. This guy absolutely like as I'm still I'm very, very into my idea that he just doesn't know what's going on. That's why he's so happy. This guy just works. This guy goes to work in the business factory and he goes to work in the business factory when he works in the money office. And the more business there is, the more good. So here's the thing. I'm going to now pertinent to that. Here's how he thinks the economy keeps moving. So long as somebody allocates sufficient capital to innovation, then credit crunch will not in the long run

prevent the relentless upward march of human living standards. If you look at a graph of world per capita GDP, the Great Depression of the 30s, the Great Depression of the 30s is just a dip in the slope. By 39, even the worst affected countries, America and Germany, were richer than they were in 1930. How'd that happen? Nothing bad happened after 1939. You just don't look into it. Don't do any research at all. This chapter was ghost written by like a German like washing machine manufacturers about us page. No. I want you to, again, this is, this is Tamilo and Felix. Can you guess for me what the next sentence addresses after by 1939, America and Germany were richer than they were in 1930?

Okay, I'm going to say the Holocaust was a failed three way of ideas. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I can't give you this one. Now Hugo Boss has been involved in a number of production contracts over a long and varied career. Close. Milo's closer. There's something about like the innovations, though. At least you got a Volkswagen. Yeah. Hitler invented the Volkswagen. There is no gap. There is no gap between the previous sentence and what I'm about to say. All sorts of new products and industries were born during the Depression. In 1937, 40% of DuPont sales came from products that did not exist before 1929.

Cool. Interesting. It just just sets up Germany from 1930 to 1939. And it's like, yeah, the interesting thing about this is rayon. Can you imagine a world without a sink? So growth will resume unless prevented by the wrong policies. We have to have faith that somebody's subware is still tweaking a piece of software, testing a new material or transferring a gene that will make yours in my life easier in the future. I'm sorry. Imagine being a scientist or like some kind of like experimental programmer or something and just thinking that like you're potentially very real effect on the world is just there to bail out this fucking idiot who's just like, ah, some smart guy is going to come

and do it. This is phase banks too, because like this entire thesis really, because it's like, yo, we're all working together for the same thing. I like signed off on a bunch of bad loans in a bank. You invent things. It's like, we're working towards the same goal here, man. We just want to see everyone have good vibes. So in fact, again, you keep prefiguring what comes next. This is on trade and hierarchy. As I write this, it is nine o'clock in the morning. In the two hours since I got out of bed, I've showered in water, heated by North Sea gas, shaved using an American razor, running on electricity made from British coal, eaten a slice of bread made from French wheat, spread with New Zealand butter and Spanish marmalade. It's just we live in a

society. Just every sentence is just yard. They fucking like a corporation invents this ad every year and it's just like, ah, we're international because you get up and you buy your, it's just add Naenon. You get your sushi from the 7-Eleven. And that means that we're all more together than we are apart. It's like, cool. So people also use this like bird brain to argument for like, like again, like the pro-Europe people love this shit where they're like, huh, sure. The very meal you eat is from another country. People do it in America too. They're like, oh, you're for Trump and don't like immigrants. So that spaghetti that you're eating came from someone who you'd call undocumented 100 years ago. And it's like, no one gives it. Like,

none of those people give a shit. Like the Nazis, like Nazis would just like watch movies by Jews because they like them. No one, no one is like, oh, you got me. And like, just imagining an arts guy being like, well, listen, there's no ethical consumption under fashion. I love getting up in the morning and just being like, wow, calmly, I'm having this croissant from France and this bacon from Denmark and all this meth from Kentucky. I have also consumed minuscule fractions of the productive labor of many dozens of people. I thought that was going to be like minuscule fractions of the like, pineal glands of many dozens of people. Somebody had to drill the gas, install the plumbing,

design the razor, grow the cotton and write the software. And though they did not know it, they were all working for me in exchange for some fraction of my spending, each supply be with some fraction of their work. They gave me just what I wanted, exactly what I wanted it as if I were Louis the 14th at Versailles in 1700. Again, what happened after that? No, it's fine. I this this sort of this fantastic Sun King fantasy he's invented for himself where he can get like oatmeal or something at nine in the morning as if by fear that rules. I love this guy so much. This is yeah, this is fucking on. Yeah, like he's, he's just leaving a boring life and writing these shitty articles and books and he's just like, I am Alexander.

I have never, never been this happy. Yeah, to him, the entire economy, like down to like, the smallest, seemingly irrelevant, like down to like, literally like police shootings and stuff is all like one gigantic Rube Goldberg machine, which just presents him with breakfast. Yeah, he's just doing more of some grammar shit just to get like some toast. No, I mean, this is this is my favorite thing. I have never been this happy eating oatmeal as this guy has just sort of like eating some like rapidly cooling oatmeal in the morning. And you have to go to work later and this guy is like, yeah, I'm kind of like a king. Here's the thing, Felix, I remember you told me that Malcolm Gladwell depressed you and I was

like, I'm going to find someone who's not going to make him sad. Malcolm Gladwell, like he wasn't fucking trying. It was like, I've seen much better from Mr. Gladwell and like the book that we read was just like, it was infuriating, but very dull. Like you could tell he was just sort of out to lunch for this one. It's probably written mostly by researchers, but this is like, I've never heard someone do this before. This is fucking awesome. Here's here's another one. This is one of my favorite lines in the entire thing. Commerce is good for minorities. If you don't like the outcome of an election, you have to lump it. But if you don't like your hairdresser, you can find another cool markets. Nice markets are good at supplying minority needs. For example,

the other day I bought a device for attaching a fly fishing rod to my car. How long would I've had to wait in 1970s Leningrad before some central planner had the great idea of supplying such a trivial need? Oh my God, he's the king. I just love, I just love the idea that in 1970s Leningrad, no one ever went fishing because they couldn't, no one had supplied them with a way of like moving the fishing rod. You're going to take the fishing rod on the Marshrutka? Don't think so, Comrade. Oh, I just want to, I just want to go hiking, but there's so much bureaucratic red tape keeping me back. You know what though? This is genuinely true. So Zhukov and Eisenhower were friends for like the rest of their lives. And Eisenhower used to send Zhukov fancy fishing gear

because apparently he could not get it in the Soviet Union. So maybe this guy actually has a boy. Oh, shit. There is a really interesting book about, it's like partial fiction. It's called Red Plenty. It's about the Soviet Union trying to like, like use computers to increase standards of living so they could have like kind of the level of consumer choice and like, not really consumer choice, but like consumer accommodation that America had. Interesting book. They like almost succeeded. Yeah. I mean, there's some like, like I keep thinking about how Anastas Mikoyan was really into ice cream. And like that was the one thing that he refused in his like bureaucratic oversight to compromise on standards for was ice cream. And it's like, yeah, it's cool.

You'd love, you love a treat boy. Yeah, I love the idea that even in the Soviet Union, they had their Steven Pinkers. They're like Stepan Pinkerov who was like always going like, well every year the production of coal and very dangerous radioactive materials increases so that eventually we'll be living in space. So speaking of the goals of the Soviet Union, his next section is about how capitalism is dying. Weird. He says the turnover of firms is accelerating so much that most criticism of corporations is out of date already. Large companies not only fall more often these days. The disappearance in a month in 2008 of many star banking names is merely an accelerated

case in a particular industry. Capitalism is dying and fast because the size of the average American company is down from 25 employees to 10 in just 25 years. Does it mean anything? Like what? Like what does that mean? The fact that like the average size of it, that's like pulling out the rat like the stupidest possible fact of all the average number of words that the person knows has gone from like what? This guy lives in a cartoon, right? He lives in the cartoon where Donald Duck is on the assembly line and it's just like he's been replaced by a robotic duck and now you need to hire fewer ducks and that's cool. When the fuck has like any economist ever used as a measure of whether

capitalism is working or not? Like how many how many person are there? How many companies? We still have that's why we have a line. It's a stupid measurement, but that's why that we have a line. You can look at the line. The line goes down. The market economy, he says, is evolving a new form in which to even speak about the power of corporations is to miss the point. Tomorrow is largely self-employed workers clocking on to work online and bursts for different clients when and where it suits them. We'll surely look back on the days of bosses and foreman meetings, appraisals of time sheets and telling Lee trade unions with amusement. I think this guy is an NPC that you argue with in Deus Ex. This is like reading

a series of failed speech checks. Doubt. No, that's right. This is Matt Ridley. He's like the first quest giver wake up by busy causes, the Great Recession. He's like, he's like heavy with the high elves and you like, you try to do a persuade thing. He's just like, no. Yeah. This is like, this is what you do is this like when you talk to an orc peon like 12 times when you poke him and say, we're not that kind of orc. We're getting to this level of Matt Ridley now. I got my marmalade from another country. I mean, Geralt is a perfect example of the kind of gig economy he's talking about. So this is perfect, right? Because I think he predicts the

gig economy, but because he's a total bird brain, he thinks it's going to be a emancipatory instead of causing people to like sleep in their cars. This is this is the kind of witcher NPC who's like, you know, the like fat shithead merchant NPC like who's wearing like six cod pieces and like a hat with a bunch of feathers in it. And it's just like, that's this guy, right? Speaking of speaking of some more merchant shit, nor can there be any doubt that the collective brain enriches culture and stimulates the spirit. The intelligentsia looks down on commerce as irredeemably Philistine. You have a PhD in bird fucking conventional and lowering in its taste. But for anybody who thinks that great art and great philosophy have nothing to do with

commerce, let him visit Athens and Baghdad to ask how Aristotle and Al Khurzimi had leisure time to philosophize. I was like, well, let him see how Uday Hussein had a gold toilet, but also some, you know, some good sonnets. No, I mean, like unexpectedly finding himself advocating for the caliphate there. I mean, fair enough. There were no other political organizations that were enabling. It's just like a guy buys a lamp and he like gives a pouch of coins to a merchant who like hands that on to a philosopher who invents a bigger pouch of coins. Wait, fuck. Sorry. This is like only this is only slightly on topic, but I was on quora today. The Saddam Hussein thing just reminded me of it. And there was like someone was talking about

the guy like the US soldiers who were guarding Saddam Hussein before he was executed. And there was like an interview with one of them where it was like, you know, by the end of it, I really felt like Saddam was my boy, you know, like when they killed him, I really felt like I'd let him down. Like I really got home. Yeah, well, this like if Ridley wrote an article in like the 1800s, he'd like a lot of people think there needs to be a political solution to slavery, but actually they've invented this new thing called the cotton gin that's going to make slavery more or less obsolete. Oh, he keeps talking about slavery for some reason. So we'll get to the slavery bit. Quick thing. Here's how he explains global poverty. He says the aborigines of Australia

lacked not only steel and steam when they first met Westerners, they also lack courts and Christmas. Dr Ridley, there's a there's a Mr Diamond on the phone for you. He says it's urgent. They not only lack steel and steam, they also lacked courts and Christmas. So poverty is institutional. Yeah, because you gotta have Christmas. Yeah, you gotta have Christmas. That's how you solve poverty is Santa comes and gives you stuff. He keeps ripping off other dog shit authors. So like Jared Diamond Dawkins. And it's like, it's great because he like he contains none of their malice, right? He's just a dumb ass who's like, huh, what if what if they invented Christmas? Yeah, he has like he has like a weirdly, I don't know about good heart, but he's like,

he's not a yeah, he's not a malicious animal. That's where to put it. Yeah, I'd say in the world of episode one, he's a Hudson. Yes, yes, he's not a Branson. He's a Hudson for sure. This is having like the reverse effects of the Gladwell episode. I'm not feeling drained from this. I'm feeling quite energized. This is this is a delight to me. Exciting. I wanted to arrest Malcolm Gladwell after that. Yeah, you wanted citizens or but now it's like I want to like I would hang out with yeah. You know what I want to do? I want to organize this guy's surprise birthday party. Oh my god. Just think about how happy he would be. He would be totally, totally, there would be no flicker of awareness there. Yeah. Imagine how happy he'd be thinking about a balloon.

Oh my god. His surprise birthday party is a first Christmas for a bunch of people who are dressed up as aborigines. So wait, have we just talked to the podcast into trying to adopt this guy? I would. So I have a few more things to get to because I know we're going to crunch in time soon. A few years ago, the World Bank published a study of intangible wealth trying to measure the value of education, law and other such nebulous things. It simply added up the natural capital and produced capital and measured what was left over to explain each country's per capita income. So a Mexican who crosses the border to America can quadruple his productivity almost immediately with access to smoother institutions, clearer rules, better educated customers in simpler forms.

Damn. Better educated customers. Yeah. Sure. Okay. I mean, the thing is that the average, the average American gets four times as much baconator every day than the average Mexican can get in their entire lifetime. Yeah, that's right. I can't wait to read these books when like we're literally just out of people. Like social security actually is insolvent because like just no one could afford to have kids. Everyone is miserable and there are like 30 people left and it's like, yeah, you know, if we start breeding now, we can repopulate and, you know, nowhere to go but up. Honestly, guys, this strange ancient tool was called an optical mouse and we one day hope to figure out what it's for. In the meantime, I have this stone hand axe. So here is here is

another. I'm going to instead of telling you the name of the chapter, I'm going to read the passage and ask you to tell me what you think he's trying to get at. Yes. Picking out the pecans from a bowl of salted nuts gives diminishing returns. The pieces of pecan in the bowl get rarer and smaller. Gradually, the bowl like a moribund goldmine ceases to yield decent returns of pecan. Now imagine a bowl of nuts that had the opposite character. The more pecans you took, the larger and more numerous they grow. You're doing a bit. You swapped this out with a passage from capitol to own us. Yet that is precisely the character of the human experience since 100,000 years ago. And externally, the global nut bowl has yielded ever more pecans.

The global nut bowl. He's saying that ideas are like pecans, right? He's a fucking master. Absolutely. And the ideas are like pecans in a bowl of salted nuts, which I guess are like not ideas or are they bad ideas? It's just anything else. Assaulted nut could be like seeing the face of a friend or drinking some mountain dew. It doesn't really matter. Anything that's not an idea. So, quick round of guesses here. What is the chapter called? Brain gods. Intelligence is the chest of the mind.

Milo. Not both. Yeah. Felix. I'm going to give you a real guess. Traveling inside the mind of Matt Ridley, I'm going to say trail mix and Aristotle. Fuck, that's so good. Unfortunately, no. It's the invention of invention, increasing returns after 1800. Oh, wait. He's literally like, remember when people invented being smart? He's that guy.

Yes. Yeah. He kind of crib pinker too. He's just cribbing everyone else's ideas because he doesn't understand that that's just cribbing other people's stupid ideas. Because that's just ideas having sex. He's too dumb to plagiarize, right? He's just, he reads a thing and it comes back into his brain and he's like, huh, I just invented this thing. I must be really smart. I don't think he's a plagiarist. I think he's just like, I think he's just a dumb. He's just, he's just, he's just walking around the world with his eyes and mouth completely open all the time. Yeah. It's like, he probably plagiarized all the time when he was

at Eaton or whatever. And it was just like, no one could do anything. He's like, yeah, his dad kind of like owns all the loans in the UK. And like, he's a nice enough guy. Like, just like, it's okay. He's not going to, it's not like he's going to harm anyone any day. People's ideas just keep having sex in his head. So that's, here's the next line from a chapter on how Africa can get itself out of poverty. In the 1930s, Nashville, Tennessee was rescued from poverty by music entrepreneurship using good local copyright laws to start recording indigenous music. It was not rescued from poverty by the giant dams of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Likewise, Bamako and Mali could

build upon its strong musical traditions, given the right copyright laws and some entrepreneurial spirit with the Colonel Tom Parker of Bamako. His idea is mixtapes. You know, you know what Mali really needs right now as a Pat Boone? Just awesome. It's cool. It's great. That's the of all of the the chapter on Africa getting itself out of poverty. That's the only like suggestion I could I could glean that wasn't just look the invention's going to they're going to invent something. They're going to invent African Dolly Parton and you know I'm here for it. Climate change. The world needs plentiful joules of energy if it is not to be run on slaves. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. What's the dual value of slaves again?

Awesome. And at the moment, the cheapest by far source of that energy is the burning of hydrocarbons. Okay. Yeah, the two kinds of economy is still slavery. It still exists, like especially in countries that sell hydrocarbons. Yeah. No, these are these things. It's that's the thing when you have Matt Ridley brain slavery is like a history thing and hydrocarbons is an economy thing and these are two different classes. There wasn't any economy history. They were too busy doing history. That's true. You don't see a lot of buildings that are just marked with a big sign that say slave factory, but you do see a lot that have marked up with like oil factory. Exactly. Check me out.

All trade before like really the invention of rudimentary computers. It was just guys being being like just tossing money around and being like, let's hope that a philosopher gets something. I was like, I can't wait to make like a magic school bus style program where Matt Ridley goes back to the 17th century and it's all staged. So like, it's a bunch of actors going like, well, we'd love to do some trade and commerce, but we're too busy wearing these tricorn hats. You could totally trick Matt Ridley with some kind of like animatronic Google. I was saying a society for creative anachronism. Like you could make him think he traveled in time. Charles the second to eat cheese.

So he says Matt, Matt, you've got a magic jar of marmalade from Spain and it helped your time travel. He says your grandchildren will your grand. This is talking about the IPCC scenarios that they published before the most recent one where they said we have five years of climate left. He says your grandchildren will be rich, but don't take my word for it. All six of the IPCC scenarios assume that the world will experience so much economic growth that people alive in 2100 will be on average four to 18 times as wealthy as we are today. In fact, in the hottest scenario, income rises from 1000 per head in poor countries today to more than 66,000 in 2100 even adjusted for inflation. Okay, cool. I love to like drive my Ferrari as the like tires boil off on the road.

Yeah. Does not say how many degrees it will rise, but everyone will be able to afford air conditioning, which means that global warming won't even be a problem. This guy is so his mind is so beautiful. I think honestly, I think the attitude of approaching this with he's so happy is like this is the only way you can be active an active contributor to politics or economics or whatever. 100% you can either be like absolutely furious, like coiled with rage all the time and try to do politics or you can just you can just be this guy and you can just be like, man, I'm going to be rich. You know the thing? The other thing is this is how I think Bill Mitchell thinks. Yeah. I think this book is a look into why Bill Mitchell is always so happy and why he's

so certain that everything bad that happens is either a trick or a mistake or whatever because the world can't be bad because the world is good. It's a good place. It's even purer than Bill Mitchell, right? Because there's no like triggering the libs to it, right? None of this is spiteful, even if his bank like loses everybody's savings, he's not getting anything out of that except for the conviction that, huh, we're going to, we're going to invent something. He can't send a man called Liz Truss Axis. That's what we're saying, essentially. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. He is, because like American, just for your benefit, Felix, I don't think we've explained to you the concept of the Instagram Tory.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know what we're talking about, right? Yeah. No, I do. Yeah. The guys, the guys who are, because American conservatives tend to like, a lot of them are going into the dark enlightenment thing and some British conservatives are as well. You have like Josh Hawley and stuff, whereas most of our conservatives are just like they saw an Alexa and have been thrilled ever since. Yeah. Well, yeah. It's like, for some of you, even though I think of the UK is such a dour awful place there, you can't like, you have to account for really stupid guys. And I, you know what, like everyone always talks about their hypotheticals of revolution, but like a real thing that would happen is a lot of the

people who you think you're going to execute during a revolution, they'd find a way to like, worm into a Politburo or whatever. It's like, always, it's just like, it just, it doesn't mean that it's like an invalid idea. Just like, that's how things happen sometimes. Like people who are vicious, brutal, and would do anything to get ahead in this system will probably try to do the same in the next one. But I think like Matt Ridley would just happily be walked to his execution. Like if there was like an armed insurrection, like a Leninist, because it's like, he'd be like, no, I think that iPads can lead to cure and cancer. I don't, like I don't agree with what you guys do and kill me. Like he's like, oh boy, central lever.

He's also confident like the market will find a solution to him being executed before it happens. Actually, I think there's like, I think there's a lighter ending to this too, which is that like, if the hypothetical in Minecraft, like revolutionary committee decides this guy's too harmless to kill, he absolutely is happy working in a shoe factory for the rest of his life. Oh my God. Yeah. No. Yeah. Absolutely. He'd be like, wow, someone somewhere is taking the first step of their new day, something that I built. Because he's making business, which is good. Yeah. He says, the future will feature ideas that are barely glints in engineer's eyes right now. Devices in space to harness the solar wind say, or the rotational energy of the earth,

or devices to shade the planet with mirrors placed at the Lagrange point between the sun and the earth. You know what the thing is, right? I'm, I'm genuinely, I'm hurt on his behalf that the role that he's, he's set up for this like kind of like genius who's going to come to his rescue is being filled by like the most incompetent, most bad faith, most actually malign actors. Like this guy is holding out for a savior and what he's guessing is Elon Musk being like, here we just drill the tunnels under the thing and this is fine. Just fire a bunch of Teslas to Elon. He says, how do I know this? Because ingenuity is rampant as never before in this massively networked world of ours and the rate is accelerating. His coat of arms went as

ingenuity rampant on a green background. That's where the depression is. The depression isn't this guy. The depression is how, how, how this guy is being failed by this, by this ideology. Like this beautiful idiot could have had like actual progress and instead he's just like, like enthralled to a bunch of snake oil salesmen. It's really sad. He says, when asked at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, which invention would most likely have a big impact in the 20th century? Nobody mentioned the automobile, let alone the cell phone. No one was talking about the smartphone in the 19th century. That's the thing that, you know, in the ancient Greek Agra, no one was talking about

only fans and yet now you see we live in a society. Yeah. This is like he's, that's the, he, Buttigieg also is kind of, kind of does that a little bit. Remember how he used to do that where he'd be like, you know, we have, we have, we used to have Facebooks, but now we invest in Facebook or whatever. He's kind of doing the same thing. I would, I dare you, I double dare you buy Microsoft stock in 1750. I bet you won't be able to. I just love the idea that this guy is like, man, the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, nobody's predicting a lot of stuff. Yeah. Cause the president just got shot. So even more today, you cannot begin to imagine the technologies that OE portentious and common

place in 2100. So yeah, that's the whole thing, right? He's like, look, the more we trade, I'm sure someone else will figure out a solution to that litany of problems that I set up at the beginning on someone else do it. Are you guys familiar with my favorite, sorry, if I short story, the golden man? I'm not. It's a filmmaking short story. It's like, it's from a book of stories who he really is called the golden man. And I, I love it. It's about the movie. It's the story that they based the Nicholas Cage movie next off of, even though it has really nothing to do with the short story, but it's about this sort of like nonverbal golden humanoid, like literally golden that's super fast and has like a natural ability to perceive events that will happen like

five seconds in the future. And it also, like when it's a human woman sees him, he, they just like want to, they feel like this innate desire to breed with him. They feel this like overpowering attraction. I mean, yeah, we feel okay, Nick's weird shit about women for sure. But it's a great story because it's like, yeah, if you saw the, like the next thing that overtakes humanity, wouldn't be like, oh yeah, it's a human who's cooler, like a robot. It would be this thing that you have like, you have no idea what it is. You can't really predict the future on the terms of what we know now because by definition, it would have to be something completely out of your realm of prediction or knowledge. And that's like, that's a lot of dicks writing on the future mostly,

like that's why he's such a, he was such a good sci-fi author because he's like, yeah, things will be like horrifying in a way that you've never thought of because like, why would you be able to? But Matt Ridley is the inverse of that. He's literally taking the things that are bad and being like, ah, but they're for good reasons. Imagine the kind of, imagine the kind of apps and space mirrors and different kinds of biodome will have to deal with those problems later. And a kind of a different approach to the same thing, E&M Banks called this the outside context problem, right? Like you don't have, if you're living in the Aztec Empire, you don't have a framework of understanding for a bunch of dude's shelf in a wooden sailing

ship with guns. This guy, like he says, the inverse, he's invented the outside context solution. And he's just like, yeah, something, something, he's, in his way, he's actually like a pesadist. He's like, yeah, the aliens are going to fix it. Like something real crazy is going to happen. He's still an interstellar. Like his Aztec thing, instead of being like, yeah, they couldn't conceive of this happening, they're no favorite reference. And they, so they just like, there was just a horrible genocide. But to him, it's like, no one could have predicted this happening.

A Mayan man was able to learn Spanish. So cool. So here's the conclusion onward and upward. I have presented, he writes, the case for sunny optimism. I've argued that the world is networked on ideas or having sex with each other more promiscuously than ever. I love that. The pace of innovation will redouble and economic evolution will raise the living standards of the 21st century to unimagined heights. It is precisely because there is still far more suffering and scarcity in the world than I or anybody else with a heart would wish that ambitious optimism is morally mandatory.

That's the heart of it, isn't it? Like he's not a bad guy and he doesn't want people to suffer. And as such, he's identified the only way you can exist as like a banker and not go insane with that feeling is just that, yeah, so let's go fix it. Yeah, yeah, he says, large corporations, political parties and government bureaucracies will crumble and fragment as central planning agencies did before them. The banker dammer rung, meaning the crisis of 2008, I think, swept away a few Leviathans. I'm so glad I have that on speed dial. But the fragmented and short-lived hedge funds and boutiques will spring up in their place.

Yeah, you're getting a digital bank. Yeah, you can get you can get Monzo. It's convenient. You can text your friends money or you get the soft bank vision fund, which is like what if we made an office worth a trillion dollars? I love to get my collateralized debt obligation from a woman called Jixden on Etsy. So it's like, yeah, don't worry. Oh, he's just like the problem with capitalism is that the companies are too big. They employ too many people. They have to employ fewer people so that people can have more like climbing wall companies. It's the he says the collapse of Detroit's big car makers in 2009 left a flock of entrepreneurial startups in charge of the next

generation of cars and engines. What? Since when has there been a small car company? Tesla? Yeah, it is like one of the most valuable companies in the entire world. Yeah. And all of their cars just keep like, you know, blowing up if you use the brakes. Damn, this plucky bunch of lads down at Renault who just got together and are going to start making cars. That's the thing, right? He's like, yeah, oh man, highways are super inconvenient. And that just he's someone who would be shown Elon Musk's idea that every person has a personal tube that goes from their house to everywhere else. And he'd be like, awesome. This is great. So the bottom up world is to be the great theme of the century.

Doctors are having to get used to well informed patients who've researched their own illnesses. Journalists are adjusting to readers and viewers who select and assemble their news on demand. They're all going insane on Twitter. No, journalists are all like, no, you have to buy a newspaper, otherwise I will die. Yeah. Broadcasters are learning to let their audiences choose the talent that will entertain them, which I guess is like him saying that like the X factor in American Idol is good. We do be having the masked singer though. So climate change is I wouldn't worry about it. People will move freely and find ways to exchange their specialized production for diversified consumption. This world can already be glimpsed

on the web in what John Perry Barlow, the guy who was owned by all those hackers, calls.communism a workforce of free agents bartering their ideas and efforts, barely interested in whether or not that barter yields any real money. Yeah. It's all just one big hackathon. Cool. Yeah. Everyone's just being paid an exposure. What is genuinely true is that the Mayans just could not have predicted Sarah Palin being on the masked singer. They could never have known that. And in a way, that's awesome. What if there's somewhere there's a stone calendar with like a giant masked singing figure? And we're all. And again, you can see that where he says the world in what John Perry Barlow

calls.communism, a workforce of free agents bartering their ideas and efforts, barely interested in whether that yields real money. He's just saying it's clout. Yeah. He's just predicted clout. Oh my God. Let's go rules. The phase banks comparison, I guess is very good. He's the happiest man. The final paragraphs. People are willing to share their photographs on Flickr, their thoughts on Twitter, their friends on Facebook, their knowledge of Wikipedia, and their software patches on Linux, their donations on Global Giving, their community news on Craigslist, their pedigrees and ancestry. You're not listing things going on Craigslist for the community. You and even their medical records on patients like me. Thanks to the

Internet. Each is giving according to his ability to each according to his degree that never happened in Marxism. Oh my God. The 21st century will be a magnificent time to be alive. Dare to be an optimist. Book closes. Why? I'm going around to some gentlemen's house from Craigslist, latest a day to hang out. Yeah, he's reading Craigslist. Wow. Look at this. This guy, the guys on here said he wants a cool hangout with a straight guy. Yeah. The next innovation. No, I type in a few keystrokes and I suddenly have a new friend. The next innovation that will save us from climate change is this crystal this guy found that lights up when he jerks off with a guy. It's just some leathery guy is jacking off in

front of Matt Ridley. He's like, wow, we just met. He's comfortable enough to do that in front of me. The Internet is amazing. Humanity is amazing. I love. Are you fucking? If you exposed Matt Ridley to chat roulette, he would forget to eat. He would be so enthralled. He would die of starvation. It would be the greatest moment of his life. So I guess, I guess Trashfuture now has a new mission. A dot find and adopt this man as our love son. I think we need, we need to get Matt Ridley on mom's basement. Let's go. Yeah. Basswood. Basswood loved him. Basswood out because they are man cut from the same cloth. They have the same thing going on. I hate to just reference episode one twice in the same show, but this is just smart shit. This is just this is exactly that episode.

Okay, I think that's all we have time for today. But firstly, Felix, thank you so much for coming on and sharing the beautiful world of Matt Ridley with us. Thank you so much for showing me this. And to our patrons, you know what it is. Thank you for listening to Trashfuture. Thank you for being a patron and we'll see you on the free episode on Tuesday shirts and all that shit in the description. You know what it is. There's nothing else. There's just shirts. There's no live shows. It's quarantine, bitch. Yeah. We've got, you know, the stream. It's Tuesdays. It's not Tuesdays at all. It's Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays at nine. We have fun. You know where it is. So yeah, thanks for listening. We'll see you on Tuesday later.