Speaker 1: Because four hours. Simply enough, this is Armstrong and Getty
Speaker 1: extra large. Do we have a name for this thing?
Speaker 1: Book review stopped using the word club book review, damn it,
Speaker 1: it's not a club. We're not middle aged ladies with
Speaker 1: our pinkies in the air. That's the perfect start right there.
Speaker 1: All right, that's what we're talking about, this here book
Speaker 1: that we read. So are we doing this? We are?
Speaker 1: We're doing and some they should have let me know.
Speaker 1: So we uh, we read a book? Who's we? Um
Speaker 1: Armstrong and Getty, Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty and then
Speaker 1: two other people, Craig got Walls, the healthcare guru, public
Speaker 1: intellectual fan favorite, and Tim Sander for vice president for
Speaker 1: litigation for the gold Water Foundation, and uh, famousist Tim Lawyer. Um, Tim,
Speaker 1: how are you? I'm great? Craig is here as well.
Speaker 1: That's what I want to be when I grew up
Speaker 1: as a public intellectual. I know it's holding me back,
Speaker 1: though I'm pretty certain of it. Height. You need to
Speaker 1: cultivate your accent to what you need. You need some
Speaker 1: some sort of vaguely European but hard to pin down.
Speaker 1: So we set out to read a book, have and
Speaker 1: a plan to discuss it than The book is Stephen
Speaker 1: Pinker's Enlightenment, now suggested by Tim subtitled The Case for
Speaker 1: Reasons Science, Humanism and Progress. It's a very large book, oppressive,
Speaker 1: I would say, um. And my question is lots of
Speaker 1: pictures though you know what, Yes, on the plus side,
Speaker 1: big fan of the pictures. Uh. My question is do
Speaker 1: we want to go in depth on the big ideas
Speaker 1: or do we want to go shallow on the many
Speaker 1: different ideas or both are neither. I will vote for
Speaker 1: the latter. And here's why I as you will remember,
Speaker 1: when I recommended this book, I specifically said that you
Speaker 1: could cut off the last two hundred pages and not
Speaker 1: read those. How about the first hundred and seventy those
Speaker 1: are where the pictures are? And what the reason why
Speaker 1: I suggested the book is because I love the this
Speaker 1: this depth of detail he gets into about how much
Speaker 1: better life is today than it has ever been in
Speaker 1: the history of the world. And you know, it's so
Speaker 1: easy to get feeling depressed and down and pessimistic about
Speaker 1: the future, and page after page of this book makes
Speaker 1: clear why we have it better than any human beings
Speaker 1: ever have had it in almost any dimension you care
Speaker 1: to mention. And that's why I loved this book so
Speaker 1: much and enjoyed going through that beginning part. I agree
Speaker 1: with all this stuff in the end when he gets
Speaker 1: into the more philosophical details, but I didn't even think
Speaker 1: that was really necessary. Just nothing lifts your spirits more
Speaker 1: than some of these statistics in here about how good
Speaker 1: life is today. Yeah, I believe when we were first
Speaker 1: when this book first came out, we were texting or
Speaker 1: emailing about it. And it's just it's it is easy
Speaker 1: to get caught up in the day today, the world's
Speaker 1: going to hell in a handbasket. This book points out
Speaker 1: the progress that his main been made by human beings,
Speaker 1: particularly with the help of the Enlightenment, and some of
Speaker 1: the statistics about this is when we talk about regularly
Speaker 1: on the Armstrong and Getty Show, is the for most
Speaker 1: of human history, you are going to have one or
Speaker 1: more of your kids die. That was just part of life.
Speaker 1: That's just the way it worked. Now it is a
Speaker 1: rare occurrence and and seen as just a tragedy beyond
Speaker 1: tragedies to have to endure. Um. I mean, that's a
Speaker 1: major change life expectancy and the ability to get out
Speaker 1: of childhood and everything like that, that a loan is
Speaker 1: just incredible. And and you know, we often when we
Speaker 1: think about the olden days with with the high child
Speaker 1: mortality rate, people sometimes think, oh, well, they were neared
Speaker 1: to it, they were so accustomed to that that they
Speaker 1: weren't as affected as we we are today by the
Speaker 1: loss of a child. And we know that that is
Speaker 1: not true. In part if you look at graveyards, If
Speaker 1: you look at old graveyards, especially around the Victorian Age,
Speaker 1: and people started to be able to afford tombstones, they
Speaker 1: built these elaborate, heart wrenching, beautifully carved headstones for their
Speaker 1: kids because they were just as effected as we are today.
Speaker 1: So it's not like they were calloused or anything. The
Speaker 1: loss of a child a hundred or two hundred years
Speaker 1: ago was a as just as heart wrenching as it
Speaker 1: is to us today. And we are very fortunate that
Speaker 1: we so rarely experience something. Yeah, if you've ever read
Speaker 1: any of the Lincoln stuff, you up, yeah, yeah, crippling
Speaker 1: grief both he and his wife, who admittedly was already
Speaker 1: a little crazy. But hey, before we get into more specifics,
Speaker 1: the two general things that I found most interesting about
Speaker 1: the book or Pinker's discussion of the natural human tendency,
Speaker 1: the psychological anthropological tendency to see problems more vividly than
Speaker 1: good stuff. And and it's I thought it was interesting,
Speaker 1: particularly as observers of the modern world and news and
Speaker 1: the rest of it, to say, you know what, you're right,
Speaker 1: focusing on the crow happy is a very difficult thing
Speaker 1: to resist. And we can talk about that. But the
Speaker 1: other thing, and this is the point of the book,
Speaker 1: so the very idea that you have to in the
Speaker 1: Western world defend the enlightenment, defend science, defend logic, defend
Speaker 1: pushing aside superstition um in the face of some of
Speaker 1: the modern the forces, particularly on university campuses. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's shocking that you even have to do it,
Speaker 1: isn't it. Yeah, I personally I think that it's this
Speaker 1: it's really frightening. The hostility toward what they call the
Speaker 1: bourgeois virtues or bourgeois life. And there's this this romanticism
Speaker 1: toward the idea that that life should be more meaningful
Speaker 1: or more profound than enjoying a barbecue with your with
Speaker 1: your family. We, in fact, we just had so we
Speaker 1: just went through Veterans Day, right, and every year there's
Speaker 1: somebody out there who says something sarcastic or or dark
Speaker 1: about how you know, people should be. They're out there
Speaker 1: just shopping, getting at the sales at the mall, or
Speaker 1: they're just hanging out and having barbecues instead of thinking
Speaker 1: about what this day really means and all that, which
Speaker 1: has always really driven me crazy, because especially Veterans Day,
Speaker 1: what these men fought and died for was for our
Speaker 1: ability to just enjoy a nice holiday with their fami.
Speaker 1: That's exactly what they wanted when they went off to war,
Speaker 1: and we do them on honor by just celebrating with
Speaker 1: our families. And I think the hostility to the Enlightenment
Speaker 1: is largely rooted in this idea that there's something you know,
Speaker 1: lax or unimportant, or insignificant or vulgar about the life
Speaker 1: of comfort and happiness with with that we enjoy today
Speaker 1: with our technological advancement. That's a real problem. That's that
Speaker 1: generates this sort of attitude that what we should be
Speaker 1: out there crusading for national greatness or something like that
Speaker 1: instead of instead of living lives of peace and happiness.
Speaker 1: Joe's comment at the beginning prior to Tim's there about
Speaker 1: the two of overarching themes I think on Joe's earst theme,
Speaker 1: UM are aren't psychological need for the negative? That's the old.
Speaker 1: I just think of that of the is the old.
Speaker 1: If it bleeds it leads, right, I mean, if it's
Speaker 1: shocking and negative, it's it's something people want to talk about. Um.
Speaker 1: The latter point that Tim was just expounding on the
Speaker 1: fact that we have to defend the Enlightenment is to
Speaker 1: me that just dovetails so nicely into what postmodernism is
Speaker 1: and this attack on facts in general, and that there
Speaker 1: are no facts and that there is no right answer,
Speaker 1: and that everything is is so dour and negative and
Speaker 1: and and saturated in horror basically, and then that that's
Speaker 1: a common assault we see now across our whole university
Speaker 1: system in in all of the developed nations. Well, I
Speaker 1: know Tim absolutely has spent his life researching this sort
Speaker 1: of thing, and Jack's been talking on the Armstrong and
Speaker 1: Getty show lately about UM, the whole critical race theory
Speaker 1: and and the intersectional horror that I like to bring
Speaker 1: up somebody, anybody, why would any organized group of thinkers
Speaker 1: or political radicals or whatever, why they want to undermine
Speaker 1: the idea that there is objective truth. What's the goal?
Speaker 1: I have an answer to that. I think this is
Speaker 1: what I think happened. And this actually can relates to
Speaker 1: the book that I just published, the Life of Jacob Knowski,
Speaker 1: because he was part of this post World War two generation,
Speaker 1: because that humble brag. Yeah, so you can buy that
Speaker 1: on Amazon dot com. Uh, there was this post World
Speaker 1: War two generation that that sought to prevent anything like
Speaker 1: that from ever happening again. And they thought the answer
Speaker 1: was to find a universal human morality and a universal
Speaker 1: philosophy that would apply across cultures that was focused on
Speaker 1: material progress and that's just the Enlightenment all over again.
Speaker 1: But there were other people who took a different view,
Speaker 1: and they thought that what had led to World War
Speaker 1: Two or to other wars was cultural conflict, and that
Speaker 1: the solution to that was cultural relativism. If we don't
Speaker 1: make pass judgments on other cultures, then we're not going
Speaker 1: to go to war with other cultures. And so if
Speaker 1: we just learned to get along and not criticize each other,
Speaker 1: then that's fine. Then we we'll all be happy. Except
Speaker 1: the problem with that is that there are things you
Speaker 1: ought to criticize people and cultures for, and the that
Speaker 1: that metastasized into a war on objective truth because people
Speaker 1: started thinking, well, objective truth means you're going to tell
Speaker 1: me how to run my life, and that so therefore
Speaker 1: objective truth leads to totalitarian is m, which is crazy.
Speaker 1: But I think that's a large part of it. Tim,
Speaker 1: Tim ascribes, Uh, I think, honestly, the most optimistic view
Speaker 1: of critical race theory that I've heard, I think that's
Speaker 1: I think that's the most optimistic defense. Yeah, I I
Speaker 1: Jack or Jell, any either of you guys want to.
Speaker 1: I mean, Jack and I've spent a lot of time
Speaker 1: watching these YouTube videos that they are there are hours
Speaker 1: long and nobody should probably ever really spend time doing.
Speaker 1: But uh, you want to take a staff at that, Jack,
Speaker 1: I just think that would be It's a whole own topic.
Speaker 1: I would end up spending an hour on critical race
Speaker 1: theory on But what's behind it? Why? What's the why?
Speaker 1: The why? The why? I don't know. The why is
Speaker 1: that if there is no universal truth, including reason and
Speaker 1: science and the other stuff of the Enlightenment, which we
Speaker 1: can get into in a while, is those with power
Speaker 1: can determine what's the truth, and the only truth is
Speaker 1: what they say is the truth. And that's that's the
Speaker 1: mark of maoist regimes and similar stuff all over the world.
Speaker 1: Any questioning of the Great Leader's doctrine means instant death.
Speaker 1: And it's especially easy to enforce that if there's nothing
Speaker 1: to appeal to. If I'm constantly trying to make the
Speaker 1: other feel bad and they accept it, yeah, I have
Speaker 1: a lot a lot easier time ruling, leading, doing what
Speaker 1: I want to do, making my personal desires manifest. This
Speaker 1: book that we read in Enlightenment now, it goes through
Speaker 1: a number of different ways in which humankind is better
Speaker 1: now than it was, you know, throughout the history of
Speaker 1: of mankind. And we mentioned, uh, life expectancy and infant
Speaker 1: mortality and that sort of thing. But wealth is absolutely amazing.
Speaker 1: It wasn't that many years ago that practically everybody on
Speaker 1: the planet lived in poverty. Fairly recently, now very few
Speaker 1: people live in what did the worldwide standard for poverty is?
Speaker 1: And um, you know that can't be glossed over at all.
Speaker 1: I mean what a change that is so few in fact,
Speaker 1: that they spend a lot of time trying to figure
Speaker 1: out how to measure poverty. But right, so, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: well that's why in the United States we had to
Speaker 1: come up with this whole what do they call it,
Speaker 1: um uh instead of hunger, food insecurity, because you have
Speaker 1: to go with some sort of you might experience insecurity
Speaker 1: of food in the next year because you can't make
Speaker 1: sure hunger because there's not enough of it. But for
Speaker 1: the for the vast history of human kind of the
Speaker 1: only thing you did every single day was where am
Speaker 1: I going to find something to eat? The fact that
Speaker 1: you don't have to worry about that anymore is such
Speaker 1: an amazing change. Yeah, that obesity is a made of
Speaker 1: a larger health problem in the United States than starvation.
Speaker 1: Surely we're the first civilization ever to have that unwealth
Speaker 1: and food. I do want to share this is this
Speaker 1: touches upon two specific statistics in the books that were
Speaker 1: two of my favorites. On food but seen nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: one and two thousand nine. Um, we use twelve percent
Speaker 1: more land now, but we produce three percent more food.
Speaker 1: And on wealth, if we look back at by two
Speaker 1: thousand eight, all persons on the planet had an average
Speaker 1: income equal to that of Western Europe, in nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 1: And one of the things I love about this book
Speaker 1: is how he shows He shows these statistics in very
Speaker 1: unusual ways that you would never think of asking to
Speaker 1: begin with. So I love how he shows, for instance,
Speaker 1: that we're not just richer than our great grandparents were,
Speaker 1: but the poorest people today are richer than the richest
Speaker 1: people were only fifty years ago our parents were. Well.
Speaker 1: And one of the most powerful points I think he
Speaker 1: may think he makes, and I wish I had the
Speaker 1: graph in front of me right now. Um, maybe I'll
Speaker 1: flip to it at some point, is that the the
Speaker 1: average income or the you know, the way people live
Speaker 1: all over the world has increased enormously from widespread infant mortality, disease, misery,
Speaker 1: all of it, it's increased to this really pretty damn
Speaker 1: good state, even as we've added in last is it
Speaker 1: thirty years, five billion people to the globe. So we've
Speaker 1: accomplished the growth and standards of living while growing the
Speaker 1: population and living that way, we we went from roughly
Speaker 1: fifty years ago spending sixty hours a week on housework
Speaker 1: to today we spend on average, the average household spends
Speaker 1: fifteen hours a week on housework technology unless light just light.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite physics in the Boston is with
Speaker 1: the cost of light over time, where it's it's so
Speaker 1: small today to to measure the cost of lighting a
Speaker 1: room for an hour that you really can't accurately measure it.
Speaker 1: It's so cheap as compared to how much it costs
Speaker 1: for a candle a hundred years ago or something like that.
Speaker 1: It's it's amazing. Tim You're in Arizona, where light is
Speaker 1: still cheap. Things are changing dramatically in Californi, and we're
Speaker 1: resorting the whale oil as I run gasoline and generators
Speaker 1: in my backyard to make sure I can work at night.
Speaker 1: I hate to see and everything it did, So listen
Speaker 1: before we get into more specific measures like light and whatever.
Speaker 1: The whole idea of the Enlightenment reason and science and
Speaker 1: UH and humanism, which is can we say natural rights
Speaker 1: for now? That that idea, UM, that's what and the
Speaker 1: idea that we can make progress is the keys to
Speaker 1: understanding the Enlightenment what it was, and just life expectancy.
Speaker 1: This is perhaps my favorite UH graph in the book.
Speaker 1: And and he mentioned that you could go way way
Speaker 1: way back to ancient times your stone age, your bronze age, whatever,
Speaker 1: and life expectancy was the same, the same, the same,
Speaker 1: the same, the same. It was flat for thousands and
Speaker 1: thousands of years, and then starting in seventeen sixty it's
Speaker 1: still flat. I mean, it raises a little bit in
Speaker 1: the America's in Europe just but when the age of
Speaker 1: science and reason really took hold in the mid eighteen
Speaker 1: hundreds and then the late eighteen hundreds, it exploads all
Speaker 1: over the world science, reason, objective truth. It raised the
Speaker 1: world life expectancy from about twenty nine years old to
Speaker 1: seventy in the space of a hundred and thirty fifty years.
Speaker 1: And all those graphs are as stark as that one.
Speaker 1: The wealth, the life expectancy, the education, they're all as
Speaker 1: as straight up at some points, mistake. It's no accident
Speaker 1: that capitalism comes around around the same time, right, Wealth
Speaker 1: of Antients published in seventeen seventy six. And I think
Speaker 1: a lot of the reason for the hostility toward science, humanism, progress,
Speaker 1: and objective truth, I think a lot of that is
Speaker 1: basically rooted in the hostility to capitalism. Because we're talking
Speaker 1: about these great statistics, and I keep thinking about you know,
Speaker 1: as you mentioned, I live in Arizona. About a quarter
Speaker 1: of the state of Arizona is Indian reservations. And if
Speaker 1: you go to these reservations, the statistics there are almost
Speaker 1: the reverse of what we've been talking about. The average
Speaker 1: annual income on the Navajo reservation, which is about the
Speaker 1: size of New England, it's two and a half times
Speaker 1: the size of Massachusetts, the average annual income on Navajo
Speaker 1: is about seventy dollars per year, and the average average
Speaker 1: annual income on Apache south of their uh is about
Speaker 1: four thousand dollars a year. Something like ninety or of
Speaker 1: the populations on these reservations are employed by in some
Speaker 1: way or another, the tribal government. And the statistics on
Speaker 1: the of of reservation poverty are abominable. Like we're talking
Speaker 1: like a quarter of the residences don't have running water
Speaker 1: or electricity or telephone service. And and there are people
Speaker 1: who are living on these in these places who are
Speaker 1: just normal people like you and me, who are living
Speaker 1: a life that we cannot possibly imagine, and like that
Speaker 1: really is a demonstration of how this escape from poverty,
Speaker 1: the great escape you were described being, is the consequence
Speaker 1: of social and cultural variables, which are we We've said
Speaker 1: our objectivity reasons science, free markets, and exchange and people.
Speaker 1: A lot of people are object to those because they say, well,
Speaker 1: those are those would be dangerous to our culture, that
Speaker 1: would undermine our the survival of our cultural traditions, and
Speaker 1: whatever you might think of that, It's just not true
Speaker 1: if you look at us. Groups like the Italian Americans.
Speaker 1: Italian Americans have been able to keep their culture thriving
Speaker 1: and alive in the United States with hardly any serious
Speaker 1: threat of diminishment. Why because they've participated in the capitalist
Speaker 1: process that America makes possible. The same with just about
Speaker 1: any other ethnic group you choose to name. But insular
Speaker 1: groups that wall out those those traditions of of free
Speaker 1: markets and individualism and exchange and capitalism, they suffer terribly
Speaker 1: and then point fingers, often at other people as if
Speaker 1: it's their fault. Well, this is a dangerous conversation to
Speaker 1: jump into and will probably end my career. Which is fine, um,
Speaker 1: But there are aspects of some culture, the cultures that
Speaker 1: are simply what we used to do or what we
Speaker 1: have done. I mean, part of my sacred culture is
Speaker 1: that I smoked too much pot. I mean now, is
Speaker 1: that a cultural norm that I should hang onto just
Speaker 1: because in college for a while I smoked too much pot?
Speaker 1: Or is that just one of the things I did
Speaker 1: for a while. And how horrible to have a situation
Speaker 1: that encourages bad habits like that to become thought of
Speaker 1: as part of your culture. Then that's what romanticism does.
Speaker 1: I think there's Romanticism is the opposite of the Enlightenment.
Speaker 1: It's this idea that there's some super emotional force, some
Speaker 1: forces of history or supernaturalism or something that collects us
Speaker 1: together as cultures, and is this important bond and is
Speaker 1: so beautiful and more important than human needs and human
Speaker 1: life and everything, and you know all that all that
Speaker 1: stuff you see in Disney movies that people really just
Speaker 1: do have in their brains. And as a result of
Speaker 1: that romanticism, they think of bad ideas as as just
Speaker 1: part of who they are a lot of the time.
Speaker 1: And that's really it's it's a travesty to them, and
Speaker 1: it's a travesty to their culture, and it holds them
Speaker 1: back terrible well when it's at the basis of sending
Speaker 1: wave after wave after wave of soldiers to their deaths
Speaker 1: in the name of some imaginary national pride or something
Speaker 1: like that. So and there are you know, all sorts
Speaker 1: of examples through history, you know, the slaughtering, torturing people
Speaker 1: over you know, variations in Christianity through the Confederacy is
Speaker 1: a great example, right, The Southern Confederacy was built on
Speaker 1: this vision of national Southern nationalism that said, oppressing black
Speaker 1: people is just part of our culture. The Southern way
Speaker 1: of life consisted of doing these horrible things. That's what
Speaker 1: that was what the pre Civil War Southern intellectual leaders
Speaker 1: tried to say. That's a pretty good example because in
Speaker 1: instead of letting go of the bad part or dumb part,
Speaker 1: or unproductive part or a legal part of your culture
Speaker 1: and hanging onto you know, you can keep Nascar and
Speaker 1: sweet tea, you just can't place He's can't have slavery.
Speaker 1: Change is very very hard for many people. Uh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there was a follow up on that. Ad will pop
Speaker 1: into my head eventually as we're thinking about the book globally,
Speaker 1: one more kind of global question. I mean, we're not
Speaker 1: going to recount every graph for the podcast here, but basically,
Speaker 1: for every single aspect of tangible, measurable life, with very
Speaker 1: few exceptions, is getting better. We're getting we're getting healthier,
Speaker 1: we live longer, we have more food, we have a
Speaker 1: better environment, we have all these things right, And but
Speaker 1: is there anything in the book that statistically, just factually
Speaker 1: you guys think, Boy, I don't know if that's true.
Speaker 1: Is there is Do we want to just sort of
Speaker 1: accept everything in here is accurate, or do we want
Speaker 1: to say, boy, there's that may not be accurate to me? Well,
Speaker 1: Pinka wrote the book in part because he was kind
Speaker 1: of criticized for his previous book where he had said
Speaker 1: that there was a reduction in the international violence and
Speaker 1: war and he which one of the fascinating aspects of
Speaker 1: this book is that he attributes that he argues that
Speaker 1: would actually have essentially outlawed war, which is a really
Speaker 1: interesting and intriguing suggestion. But he was criticized for saying
Speaker 1: that the world is more peaceful today than it was
Speaker 1: in the past, and he quantitatively shows some of that
Speaker 1: with his charts on war and his charts on genocide, etcetera.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying, is there anything in the book that
Speaker 1: any of you guys saw or thought, I'm just not
Speaker 1: sure that's accurate. I mean, in other words, do we
Speaker 1: want to accept his facts as given as we proceed.
Speaker 1: He I, UM, I have seen him speak a couple
Speaker 1: of times on this, because he he made the rounds
Speaker 1: to a bunch of different universities and shows and everything
Speaker 1: like that. And uh, and that's where I first became
Speaker 1: aware of this book on book TV. But because we've
Speaker 1: had a rise in suicides, he he says, no, that's
Speaker 1: not true. I don't know where his statistics are different
Speaker 1: than the statistics that that that are coming to us
Speaker 1: through you know, major newspapers. Well, and this was gonna
Speaker 1: be one of my major gripes with the book, when
Speaker 1: he gets into the recent rise of social media and
Speaker 1: suicides and stuff like that. I think he does an
Speaker 1: absolutely fabulous job of tracking historical data in all the
Speaker 1: things we've been talking about, from infant mortality to calories
Speaker 1: per worker two hours spent working to just all of
Speaker 1: the outcomes that make human life either livable or miserable.
Speaker 1: Does an absolutely fabulous job on that. I think there
Speaker 1: are times, and this is one of them, when historical
Speaker 1: statistics are not terribly useful when you have enormous change
Speaker 1: happening at blinding speed, particularly in terms of social media
Speaker 1: and and adolescence and as a as a dad, and
Speaker 1: I don't want to, you know, claim, you know, special
Speaker 1: expertise over anybody else chatting here, but as not only
Speaker 1: a dad, but a coach and a volunteer and the
Speaker 1: rest of it. I've seen shocking changes in the emotional
Speaker 1: health of our young people. And I think it might
Speaker 1: be the classic hockey stick graph where they're they're every
Speaker 1: statistic he he tracks. He points out that there are
Speaker 1: wobbles up and down through history. There's a war here
Speaker 1: and a famine there, and but the overall trend is acts,
Speaker 1: and I think that is absolutely legitimate unless we're dealing
Speaker 1: with a sudden and a huge change in the way
Speaker 1: human beings relate to each other and and and social
Speaker 1: sickness being on the rise. Now. One of the other
Speaker 1: points he made is as long as you hang with
Speaker 1: the enlightenment, you will recognize these problems and find ways
Speaker 1: to cure them, because every development has downsides. And I
Speaker 1: found that kind of reassuring, reassuring. But I think he
Speaker 1: dismissed the whole suicide, misery, lack of connection thing too easily.
Speaker 1: He did. I that's one of the things I was
Speaker 1: thinking about and asking this question because as we look
Speaker 1: at the graphs he and I watched him give a
Speaker 1: talk as well on this where he said, globally, suicides
Speaker 1: are down, and he this is a talk he just
Speaker 1: gave in the last handful of months. He said, globally
Speaker 1: suicides are down, but that's not true for the United States.
Speaker 1: And if you look at his graph in the book,
Speaker 1: the United States graph is droped topp drop thing. It
Speaker 1: just pops up at the very end. Suicide's up. But
Speaker 1: what I found so interesting was he said he's looked
Speaker 1: at that and he said, look, yeah, teenage girls go
Speaker 1: through a period where suicides are more likely, but that's normal,
Speaker 1: and that's always been normal. He said, this uptick is
Speaker 1: not teens. He said, it's disenfranchised boomers that are retiring.
Speaker 1: It's the old white boomers that are retiring and committing suicide.
Speaker 1: And he backs on that point. Up too, was showing
Speaker 1: that that baby boomers drug use has is steady as
Speaker 1: compared to other generations. We tend to blend all these
Speaker 1: generations together instead of saying the people who were using
Speaker 1: drugs in nineteen eight are still using drugs today, whereas
Speaker 1: the kids who were born in nineteen eighty are using
Speaker 1: drugs at a lower level than their peers were twenty
Speaker 1: years ago. Things like that, which it's an interesting now
Speaker 1: here's here's a twist on this. So one of the
Speaker 1: things that I really kept thinking about reading the book
Speaker 1: is how much of the downside is attributable to the upside.
Speaker 1: So you know, people often say, well, capitalism causes misery,
Speaker 1: and there is a truth to that, and that is
Speaker 1: that two or three hundred years ago, if there was
Speaker 1: a crop block that wiped out your potato crop, you
Speaker 1: were just gonna die and that was it, and you
Speaker 1: will then no longer. You would then no longer be unhappy,
Speaker 1: whereas in today's world, if you have a crop blight,
Speaker 1: you'll be fine, and you'll survive twenty more years in
Speaker 1: that's twenty more years in which to be unhappy, to
Speaker 1: be measured, as by a pholster, as miserable when you're dead.
Speaker 1: The overall amount of unhappiness does increase, precisely because capitalism
Speaker 1: makes us happier. And then this brings to mind the
Speaker 1: conclusion of his book when he's talking about anti Enlightenment thinking,
Speaker 1: and he particularly blames Friedrich Nietzsche for this and Nietzsche
Speaker 1: wrote this little passage in one of his books where
Speaker 1: he says, well, imagine what the end process of worldwide capitalism,
Speaker 1: and he imagined what he called the last man. The
Speaker 1: lad asked man is a couch potato who is so
Speaker 1: wealthy and so happy that he does nothing with his life.
Speaker 1: He just sits there and he's just happy, and that's
Speaker 1: going on right, And he thinks this is a horrible idea.
Speaker 1: This is so horrible. He thinks that way that this
Speaker 1: will be the destruction of everything we know to be human.
Speaker 1: And this is going back to what I was saying
Speaker 1: earlier about people who think that there's something wrong with
Speaker 1: being happy, but they want a more romantic, bold, visionary
Speaker 1: kind of some kind of uber humanity or whatever. And
Speaker 1: maybe the reason for the rise in suicides is that,
Speaker 1: first of all, it's easier now because we have more
Speaker 1: access to the tools necessary to kill ourselves. And horrifyingly,
Speaker 1: what if the end result is we have so much
Speaker 1: wealth and we solve so many problems that there's nothing
Speaker 1: left to do but turn ourselves off. I think that's
Speaker 1: very possible. I think that's very possible. You earlier, when
Speaker 1: we started this podcast and when you were talking about,
Speaker 1: like there's something wrong with people just to you know,
Speaker 1: sitting around enjoying their lives. Um, the super motivated people
Speaker 1: like yourself, Tim or people who are gonna, you know,
Speaker 1: write a book or study something new, they'll probably survive.
Speaker 1: But I think the average human is just gonna sit
Speaker 1: in front of a TV and get fatter until their
Speaker 1: heart explodes. It's it's one of It's one of Getty's
Speaker 1: favorite books. Hu. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, I just and
Speaker 1: that was my other gripe with the whole hockey stick
Speaker 1: of the modern world thing. The the rapidity of change
Speaker 1: in the last couple of decades is that, um, we
Speaker 1: have never not had a purpose um as human beings,
Speaker 1: I mean and and a real purpose and not you know,
Speaker 1: delivering lectures to people about the constitution or entertaining them
Speaker 1: on a radio show. I'm talking about not being dead.
Speaker 1: And if if you remove virtually all purpose from people's lives,
Speaker 1: and I think Pinker is way too dismissive of the
Speaker 1: change from person in person contact to online contact, those
Speaker 1: two things will deny the common people the purpose that
Speaker 1: animates them. Possibly although you know we we in this
Speaker 1: Craig you earlier said that that pinker goes through all
Speaker 1: the material measures of wealth. He does have a whole
Speaker 1: chapter on happiness and measuring how how people report self
Speaker 1: report greater degrees of happiness. Again, there is a little
Speaker 1: downtick in America in recent years, but even that is
Speaker 1: seems to be confined to the white population. He shows
Speaker 1: that black population reports of self reports of happiness are
Speaker 1: still on the rise. So it seems to be more
Speaker 1: of a social anxiety, which I would blame the media
Speaker 1: for largely, which keeps time. Yeah, and I blame the media,
Speaker 1: blame blamers, but I you know, we we we shouldn't
Speaker 1: over exaggerate the degree of unhappiness. I think there's there
Speaker 1: is a minor tick, and we should keep an eye
Speaker 1: on that and make sure that that it's not continuing
Speaker 1: that trend. But he couldn't be right or he wrote
Speaker 1: the book exactly before it all went the hell, he
Speaker 1: didn't That's what happens, That's what I thought, Jack. I mean,
Speaker 1: he didn't know because you know, his his talks and
Speaker 1: his the stuff he's been saying about the book has
Speaker 1: all been in the last year. And that's why I
Speaker 1: think Joe's point is so valid. Um the hockey stick
Speaker 1: may not be relevant or you may not be capturing
Speaker 1: the hockey stick when you when you look at suicides
Speaker 1: amongst teen girls that have occurred just in the last
Speaker 1: seven to ten years, and how that's just skyrocketing by
Speaker 1: other standards and other data sources we've looked at. But
Speaker 1: according to Pinker, that's not the issue. The issue is
Speaker 1: old white men, which I just found really interesting. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: as far as number of suicides up, as far as
Speaker 1: number of suicide I I get that, I get his
Speaker 1: reasoning and everything. But I'm telling you, when you rearrange
Speaker 1: something as fundamental as human contact, I couldn't agree more. Joe,
Speaker 1: You're not agree You're messing with stuff at a very
Speaker 1: very basic level. I'm what I'm saying in a long
Speaker 1: winded way as I agree with you. I think this
Speaker 1: is a weakness in the book because and it's a weakness,
Speaker 1: you could say, some people think it's a we this
Speaker 1: in the Enlightenment itself, you know, one of the one
Speaker 1: of the things when the Island was first happening the
Speaker 1: eighteenth century, one of the things that its leaders realized
Speaker 1: that they were lacking was a substitute for church, and
Speaker 1: that was actually the reason why organizations like the Freemasons
Speaker 1: were started. They were they're supposed to be secular alternatives
Speaker 1: to church, and the Gulf still continues to be that,
Speaker 1: I guess, But you know there are there is this
Speaker 1: weakness that we, we humanists, don't really have an alternative
Speaker 1: to churches, to to have a place to go every
Speaker 1: week where you meet your neighbors and friends and so forth,
Speaker 1: and all online, like you said, Joe, online just as
Speaker 1: not substitute for that, and that could be a real
Speaker 1: serious problem, I think for the Enlightenment for most people.
Speaker 1: Not for me, because I'm a misanthrope and I'm perfectly
Speaker 1: happy sitting in my office with my books and my
Speaker 1: cat all day. But there are lots of people out
Speaker 1: there who really want a place to go every week. Guys,
Speaker 1: we gotta hit. So far, we have not hit what
Speaker 1: I think is my favorite in the best part of
Speaker 1: the book, and it's a principle that we have not
Speaker 1: heard in the media we have. I don't think any
Speaker 1: of us have done a good job expressing this principle.
Speaker 1: So I want to hit it really quick and get
Speaker 1: each of your thoughts on it. Page one oh one
Speaker 1: in the hardback edition. Okay, a study of two thousand
Speaker 1: people in sixty eight countries done by Kelly and Evans.
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna read this quote because I think it's
Speaker 1: so powerful. The theory that inequality causes unhappiness comes to
Speaker 1: shipwreck on the rocks of facts in developing countries, inequality
Speaker 1: is not dispiriting but heartening. People in more unequal societies
Speaker 1: are happier. The authors suggests that whatever envy, status, anxiety,
Speaker 1: or relative deprivation people may feel in poor, unequal countries
Speaker 1: is swamped by hope. Inequality is seen as the harbinger
Speaker 1: of opportunity. Why don't we do a better job of
Speaker 1: expressing that in the face of what we see in
Speaker 1: modern America. I just wonder if it's just if that
Speaker 1: is only true up to a point. Once everybody gets
Speaker 1: above a level of I've got I've got food, I
Speaker 1: got a big screen TV, I got a car, I like,
Speaker 1: I got the cool clothes, I like, I don't have
Speaker 1: as much stuff as I want, then they're miserable. I mean,
Speaker 1: just the country. If you're talking about the poor countries,
Speaker 1: they're the people the bottom are still in the I'm
Speaker 1: just happy, I'm alive. And got food. Now I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna bitch that I don't have as nice house. We
Speaker 1: can stipulate this is to the developing world. Yeah, not
Speaker 1: to the developed world, the modern world. Not not not
Speaker 1: the starving country. Because there's an old saying that one
Speaker 1: of the great things about America is if you're a
Speaker 1: working class person you see somebody drive by in a
Speaker 1: Cadillac Um instead of saying, you know, I hate the rich,
Speaker 1: or damn that person cheated me, or whatever you think
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be that someday, is that still true? I
Speaker 1: don't know. I sure hope so if it, if it
Speaker 1: ever ceases to be true, America will have really lost
Speaker 1: its heart. That that is the heart of America. And
Speaker 1: it really just really disappoints me to see how many political,
Speaker 1: politically prominent figures, including people running for office today, take
Speaker 1: the view of we shouldn't have billionaires. I mean that,
Speaker 1: what is that but pure envy and hatred for those
Speaker 1: who have achieved more than you. That's so horrifle right.
Speaker 1: And we need to get to the bedroom defensive of
Speaker 1: the free markets in a moment or two. But is
Speaker 1: it possible, in your opinions, to indoctrinate a society to
Speaker 1: drop aspiration and adopt envy. You go from wanting to
Speaker 1: be the guy with the cadillac to hating the guy
Speaker 1: with the cadillac. Do you think because Pinker, I mean,
Speaker 1: he really risks a lot of his arguments on that
Speaker 1: this is how human beings are and you can document
Speaker 1: it and it's easily observed. Blah blah blah. Can cultural
Speaker 1: norms become sick? I think when the floor gets raised,
Speaker 1: That's my point. I think when the floor gets raised
Speaker 1: high enough, I think he do lose that people just
Speaker 1: get into envy, And according to this study, you do.
Speaker 1: I mean they even go through in this In this
Speaker 1: lengthy study that Kelly and Evans did, they say, look,
Speaker 1: this held true across sixty eight countries. The only place
Speaker 1: it didn't hold true was in the former Soviet Block.
Speaker 1: So if you were born in bread among you know,
Speaker 1: amongst believing equality is the final answer for everything, then
Speaker 1: it didn't hold true. But it held true for everybody else.
Speaker 1: Historic they speaking, historically speaking, civilizations in human history have
Speaker 1: been organized around envy vastly more often than they've been
Speaker 1: organized around aspiration. I just you look at every other
Speaker 1: society in in the history of the race, and it's
Speaker 1: just human beings have been far more likely to go
Speaker 1: to envy than to say I'm gonna build something a
Speaker 1: great Well, it's amazing we've pulled it off culturally because
Speaker 1: human nature, at least looking at children, maybe you grow
Speaker 1: out of it, but looking at kids, my kids can
Speaker 1: be perfectly happy with something until until they see some
Speaker 1: somebody with something better than All of a sudden they
Speaker 1: have sucks. Well, the fabulous study with the monkeys with
Speaker 1: the slices of cucumber. Then the one monkey gets a grape,
Speaker 1: the other monkey goes crazy. I mean, all of Stephen
Speaker 1: Pinker's graphs in the world can't talk that money out
Speaker 1: of that monkey out of envy. But don't understand human
Speaker 1: but Hollywood can. Right talking about the media blamers, this
Speaker 1: is what a role that Hollywood has so long played.
Speaker 1: You look at the Disney movies of decades past and
Speaker 1: put aside the romanticism I complain and earlier about, but
Speaker 1: a lot of it is teaching the generations that that
Speaker 1: are coming next, look as aspire, be great, sees your dreams,
Speaker 1: make something beautiful of the world. That's an important role
Speaker 1: for Hollywood to play, and Disney is one of the
Speaker 1: few remaining who still even tries to do this. I
Speaker 1: turn on the television and it's just constantly anti heroes
Speaker 1: and and mobsters stories, and there's where are the stories
Speaker 1: about dreaming big and making it great in the world today.
Speaker 1: It's there's a difference between envy and equality here, and
Speaker 1: that what I mean is if just because I envy
Speaker 1: somebody having more than me doesn't mean I truly want
Speaker 1: an equal society. It just means I want to be
Speaker 1: the guy moving up the ladder. And if if I
Speaker 1: really ultimately believe there's no way for me to get
Speaker 1: ahead and everything is just going to be equal forced equality,
Speaker 1: I think you end up with the malaise of Soviet communism. Question, well,
Speaker 1: there has to be inequality to have something to aspire to.
Speaker 1: I just love the idea that inequality augments happiness, and nobody, no,
Speaker 1: no politician has the nads to make that argument today.
Speaker 1: At the same time, but at the same time, we
Speaker 1: should mention that Pinker has a whole chapter here about
Speaker 1: equality and how in a great many different ways inequality
Speaker 1: is on is on, the reductive is reducing over time,
Speaker 1: that which again we're not hearing in the mainstream. That's right. Well,
Speaker 1: go ahead, Tim on that thought, here's a passage that
Speaker 1: I enjoyed. Progress in equal rights may be seen not
Speaker 1: just in political milestones and opinion Bell Weathers, but in
Speaker 1: data on people's lives. Among African Americans, the poverty rate
Speaker 1: fell from fifty percent in nineteen sixty the twenty seven
Speaker 1: point six percent in two thousand eleven. Life expectancy rose
Speaker 1: from thirty three in nineteen hundred, which was seventeen and
Speaker 1: a half years below that of whites, the seventy five
Speaker 1: point six years in twenty fifteen, less than three years
Speaker 1: below whites. African Americans who make it to sixty five
Speaker 1: have longer lives ahead of them than white Americans of
Speaker 1: the same age. The rate of illiteracy fell among African
Speaker 1: Americans from in nine two effectively zero today. Good luck
Speaker 1: with getting elected with that, messaged him, well, exactly, exactly,
Speaker 1: God yeah. Um. The difficulty I think with that argument
Speaker 1: is that you know, most people, most voters have you know,
Speaker 1: barely a grasp on a lot of the stuff. And
Speaker 1: if you can point to the ultra rich gaming the system,
Speaker 1: which is undeniably true, I mean they write the laws,
Speaker 1: and those laws benefit themselves and they grow fabulously, fabulously wealthy.
Speaker 1: And I think people's outrage over that is absolutely legitimate.
Speaker 1: They always resort to the wrong solution, which is bigger
Speaker 1: and more powerful government, to my chagrin, and it'll it
Speaker 1: will actually cause me an early death, ironically, Mr Pinker. Um,
Speaker 1: So that's it's a difficult argument to make. But I
Speaker 1: wish we could hammer something as simple as the great
Speaker 1: defensive capitalism, which is that Bernie and his crowd um
Speaker 1: are are sessed with slicing up the piere or Jerry
Speaker 1: Brown's infamous horrific quote about those who have extracted disproportionately
Speaker 1: from the public wealth, the idea of dividing the pie
Speaker 1: as opposed to growing the pie. And and Pinker makes
Speaker 1: the point that we have just to cite the United States,
Speaker 1: for instance, in terms of the wealth and standard of
Speaker 1: living of the common man, we've gone from dividing up
Speaker 1: a tiny little cupcake to a pie the size of
Speaker 1: a football field. I mean, yeah, there are people who
Speaker 1: have large chunks of it, um, but everybody has so
Speaker 1: much more pie thanks to the free market. And I've
Speaker 1: I've distracted Jack, but I think we're all propied here,
Speaker 1: Oh my god, right now, so much so that he
Speaker 1: makes the point, which I think dovetails quite nicely on
Speaker 1: that that if you were to go ahead and add
Speaker 1: in what we all pay for our healthcare and our
Speaker 1: retirement and our benefits as part of our paycheck at work,
Speaker 1: If you add that in with all of the other
Speaker 1: social programs available to Americans, the United States now has
Speaker 1: the second largest benefit welfare state on the planet. To France.
Speaker 1: Did not know that page one O nine in the book,
Speaker 1: I could. Unfortunately, we put it all on the credit card. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we owe it to China, but we have it. You know.
Speaker 1: It was rowing the pie. There was one thing I
Speaker 1: wanted I forgot. I wanted to get back to that
Speaker 1: that we mentioned earlier, and that is this thing about
Speaker 1: community and how how people have this need for community,
Speaker 1: and that in our progress that has been in some
Speaker 1: ways neglected. It also should be emphasized that new forms
Speaker 1: of community have been made possible now, whether they're adequate
Speaker 1: or not is something that we can only figure out
Speaker 1: years from now when we look back in retrospect. But
Speaker 1: we have not only more avenues for community, but and
Speaker 1: and but more different ways to access those communities. And
Speaker 1: used to be two hundred years ago, if I was
Speaker 1: the only guy around who was interested in, let's say, parrots,
Speaker 1: you know, there's nobody else in town care is about parrots,
Speaker 1: knows anything about parrots. They might know Tim, he's that
Speaker 1: quirky guy who likes parrots, and that's that right. Nowadays,
Speaker 1: I can go on Google and I can find the
Speaker 1: parrot lovers community, and I can follow pictures of parrots
Speaker 1: on Instagram, and I can email people on the other
Speaker 1: side of the world about their parrots, and and post
Speaker 1: angrily on a forum about your opinions, host a podcast
Speaker 1: with three of my closest friends about parrots. And so
Speaker 1: there are new ways of accessing community that he in
Speaker 1: substitute now. Whether they're as good as the olden days,
Speaker 1: I don't know how you even really go about measuring that.
Speaker 1: But we do have community that previous generations did not have. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: A couple of the things that will really be will
Speaker 1: we'll all have to be on the watch for over
Speaker 1: the coming decades and centuries in terms of the enlightening,
Speaker 1: Enlightenment continuing to flourish, will be you know, this automation
Speaker 1: sense of purpose communication, all this sort of stuff. Do
Speaker 1: we have enough interactions with other human beings that are fulfilling?
Speaker 1: As Tim was just talking about it, do we have
Speaker 1: any sense of purpose when automation, you know, starts to
Speaker 1: take a lot of job. When I'm away from home
Speaker 1: and I text message my sex robot and ask her
Speaker 1: how she's doing, do I feel fulfilled? Does your wife
Speaker 1: get jealous? Exactly? Your robot doesn't answer because it's having
Speaker 1: sex with a different sex robot be jealous? I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go to my online encounter group and ask
Speaker 1: the other robot efforts. I'm a visionary. There are so
Speaker 1: many different topics in this book, as I mentioned at
Speaker 1: the very beginning, you could do a whole podcast on
Speaker 1: all of them. The little stuff on crime and punishment,
Speaker 1: how that has changed with the enlightenment over the over
Speaker 1: the years, and to where we start to look at
Speaker 1: crime and punishment UMU or incarcerating people are penalizing people
Speaker 1: as a way to try to get less bad things
Speaker 1: to happen in society only as opposed to some sort
Speaker 1: of weird cosmic balancing of the social scales where you
Speaker 1: feel like you gotta you know, you gotta cut off
Speaker 1: a hand, or they have to be executed, or they
Speaker 1: need to be beaten or whatever. Um, those advances are
Speaker 1: just amazing, with the with the advancement of well science
Speaker 1: and reason and all that. And you know that brings
Speaker 1: to mind there are several passages of this book that
Speaker 1: made me feel a little uncomfortable in the sense that
Speaker 1: they challenged my priors, as they say, because there are
Speaker 1: some measures of progress that he shows that could at
Speaker 1: least arguably say that what I think is good for
Speaker 1: society is not necessarily like that. Do you mentioned the
Speaker 1: welfare state earlier? You know that maybe the great progress
Speaker 1: we've made possible also validates wealth re distribution in ways
Speaker 1: that I personally disagree with. Now now my answer to that,
Speaker 1: of course, is I actually think that we would end
Speaker 1: up with everybody better off if we had less of
Speaker 1: that redistribution going on. So I think I don't think
Speaker 1: it really overrules my views, but I we should mention
Speaker 1: that this isn't some kind of you know, the libertarians
Speaker 1: all reading each other's books that Pinker is by means
Speaker 1: a libertarian, and what he says challenges libertarian views in
Speaker 1: some important way. You know, this gets I have got
Speaker 1: to air out what I think is the biggest problem
Speaker 1: in the book. I was texting you guys vehemently about
Speaker 1: this at one point weeks ago. Um the chapter on
Speaker 1: equal rights, starting on about page to twenty four in
Speaker 1: the hardback edition, he lays out emancipated values, and he
Speaker 1: goes he very elaborately lays out that look emancipated values
Speaker 1: you can think of as liberty or libertarianism. It has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with the political left and right today
Speaker 1: in America. And he and he's wanting to show that
Speaker 1: over time, and he's showing it with an individual person
Speaker 1: as well as a fifty year old today, as a
Speaker 1: fifty year old fifty years ago, that we all across
Speaker 1: countries and in our own lives. It's showing that people
Speaker 1: value more freedom and more liberty over time. Okay. And
Speaker 1: he sets that up beautifully it Okay. Then he's got
Speaker 1: a couple of graphs that support it, and I'm like great.
Speaker 1: But then he says things in the text of the
Speaker 1: book that I find very tough to take. He it's
Speaker 1: almost as if he he disregards his own set up,
Speaker 1: and he he goes on to say things like two
Speaker 1: or three pages later, like, hey, and it's not like
Speaker 1: these conservatives are gonna regress back into conservatism. As he starts,
Speaker 1: as he's talking about our our enjoyment of more rights
Speaker 1: and more liberties, and he clearly, he clearly does make
Speaker 1: the same mistake that he said he wouldn't make three
Speaker 1: pages earlier, and he starts to say, well, you know,
Speaker 1: it's not like these these nasty conservatives are regressing and
Speaker 1: carrying our society back and angry white men. He actually
Speaker 1: uses the term angry white men getting more angry about
Speaker 1: the freedoms that are growing, as if to as if
Speaker 1: to say that people who might be more conservative on
Speaker 1: the political spectrum don't, for example, like the right to
Speaker 1: a small government, like the right to keep more of
Speaker 1: their paycheck, like the right to bear arms. I just,
Speaker 1: I just I found that so true, bubbling from a
Speaker 1: logic gap standpoint in that chapter that to me, it
Speaker 1: was it was the worst part of the book. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember you texting about it at the time. It
Speaker 1: was that he kept changing the way he was using terms. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he says, he first off, he sets up emancipative values,
Speaker 1: and he does a great job of explaining it. But
Speaker 1: then he starts calling them liberal values. Now at the beginning,
Speaker 1: he says, now, I don't mean liberal like left and right.
Speaker 1: He says, I mean liberal like liberty, freedom, libertarian, And
Speaker 1: I'm like, okay, I'm good with that. But then later on,
Speaker 1: as you read what he writes, he writes things like, um,
Speaker 1: for all of the talk about right wing backlashes and
Speaker 1: angry white men, the values of Western countries have been
Speaker 1: getting steadily more liberal, which we will see in the
Speaker 1: in the reason is the reason these white men are
Speaker 1: so angry. Well, he doesn't mean liberal in the left
Speaker 1: right since here he means freedom, so he he makes
Speaker 1: it's it's almost like this wasn't edited properly. I just don't.
Speaker 1: I just I got so frustrated reading this because his
Speaker 1: graphics are right, his set up is right, and then
Speaker 1: he regresses into like relapsing into basically saying, yeah, liberal
Speaker 1: is good, conservative is bad. Right, Yeah, I remember that
Speaker 1: being pretty sloppy, and actually from your text several weeks ago. Um,
Speaker 1: he refers to Muslims in the Middle East as the
Speaker 1: world's most conservative culture, but then talking about American conservatives,
Speaker 1: and as Craig said, it's incredibly misleading when you think
Speaker 1: of what conservatism means in America at this point, conserving
Speaker 1: the right to bear arms, conserving land ownership, conserving the
Speaker 1: right to low taxes and limited government, etcetera. And a
Speaker 1: simple footnote would have cleared that up if he had said,
Speaker 1: you know, by in America, the term conservative is a
Speaker 1: little odd because it means conserving liberal values from the
Speaker 1: Enlightenment in the Constitution of the Declaration of Impendance against
Speaker 1: the progressive movement or something like that, right right. It
Speaker 1: really it really irked me, I mean because because he
Speaker 1: was so sloppy with it on the pages to twenty
Speaker 1: five to six to seven. What he did it right
Speaker 1: on page to twenty four, And I'm like, lord, I
Speaker 1: just tim would have never made a mist ache like that,
Speaker 1: and well I would never use the word conservative because yeah,
Speaker 1: that good point, you know, that good point. Just another quibble.
Speaker 1: It bothered me. Sometimes he seemed kind of cavalier and
Speaker 1: Harvard economisty Ivory Towery, dismissing certain populist type political movements
Speaker 1: as just people being dumb, and obviously that's an unfair characterization.
Speaker 1: He does that to libertarians too. There's a passage where
Speaker 1: he says, you know, the libertarian fantasy blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: And you know how, I'm so used to that I
Speaker 1: hardly even notice it. That is right. How About if
Speaker 1: you want to write a book covering the last two
Speaker 1: d and fifty years and defending the Enlightenment and making
Speaker 1: a timeless piece of art that's gonna sit on the
Speaker 1: shelf and we can look at forever. How about you
Speaker 1: don't go to the orange guy and use the T word. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean to me, that's another just huge problem in
Speaker 1: the book. He just can't help himself well. And I
Speaker 1: just getting back to the whole Ivory Tower Harvard economist thing.
Speaker 1: I just found him a little dismissive at times, even
Speaker 1: as he made the point Beauty Flee, that positive change
Speaker 1: often causes momentary or or overcome able negative results, and
Speaker 1: that that's part of the process and it's okay. Um,
Speaker 1: it seemed like he didn't recognize that that the common
Speaker 1: man sometimes has a pretty decent sense for those at
Speaker 1: the top of the ladder are getting really good at
Speaker 1: gaming the system, and they're claiming to me that this
Speaker 1: is good for me. But I can feel in my
Speaker 1: gut that I'm being used, I'm being jobbed and I
Speaker 1: think popular outrage has been an incredibly well, not always
Speaker 1: but often, been an incredibly positive tool for holding the
Speaker 1: powerful to account when you know, globalization is a much
Speaker 1: more complicated thing than people um give it credit for
Speaker 1: the idea that well, yeah, globalization is unquestionably added to
Speaker 1: the total wealth, and it's a much bigger pie to
Speaker 1: divide center center, but it's incredibly disruptive to entire parts
Speaker 1: of the planet, often for people's entire your lives, and
Speaker 1: they're not wrong to resent it just because globally speaking,
Speaker 1: standards of living have risen and and you're not saying it.
Speaker 1: This is getting complicated. Maybe it's time to reapproach your
Speaker 1: mentioned about the welfare state him and understand that, well, okay,
Speaker 1: if we're gonna have a society that's not riven by revolution,
Speaker 1: we ought to look out for the people who are
Speaker 1: being um victimized in quotes by positive developments like hey,
Speaker 1: we can get cars manufactured much more cheaply in North Korea.
Speaker 1: I don't know about that. That's a twist. I didn't
Speaker 1: expect you to add I I I've been hearing that
Speaker 1: for what five years now about how we you know,
Speaker 1: we haven't been Uh, we haven't been feeling the pain
Speaker 1: enough of the of the rust belt working class, and
Speaker 1: we need to listen to them more now. They need
Speaker 1: to bucket up more. That that's that. It's it's as
Speaker 1: simple as that, and I need to be pandered to less. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well that is certainly true. But he you know, on
Speaker 1: what you said earlier about how the common people are
Speaker 1: at check against the intellectuals is a very important point,
Speaker 1: I think, because we're talking earlier about envy versus a aspiration.
Speaker 1: The American people as a whole, I think, have still
Speaker 1: never really absorbed the envy that motivates the most of
Speaker 1: the intellectual class in this country and has motivated most
Speaker 1: of the intellectual class since about the time of the
Speaker 1: French Revolution. The common, average, ordinary Americans still believes in
Speaker 1: America as a land of opportunity through hard work and
Speaker 1: and that I can be the boss someday. And so
Speaker 1: that still is has a firm hold on the average
Speaker 1: American person, I think, and thank goodness for that, and
Speaker 1: that has to never change. Unfortunately, they're being preached to
Speaker 1: and have been for generations by intellectuals who are very
Speaker 1: much of the envy school. I was thinking this on
Speaker 1: the way over to the studios, I was thinking about,
Speaker 1: how you know, it's often been said that Americans don't really,
Speaker 1: in their hearts of hearts, don't really believe in evil.
Speaker 1: They don't really comprehend evil, and they don't actually believe
Speaker 1: that it exists fundamentally as an important, significant force in
Speaker 1: the universe. And that is true. I myself find I
Speaker 1: have to remind myself sometimes that evil actually exists and
Speaker 1: is out there, because it's so alien to my conception
Speaker 1: of the world. And I don't think that is true
Speaker 1: of other cultures. In Well, it's really interesting. It's really
Speaker 1: easy for it to be true for those of us
Speaker 1: born after nineteen seventy in the United States, too, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, we have soft times, he's good time. Comparatively,
Speaker 1: we have no real evil to look at it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would say, when the militia comes through your village
Speaker 1: and slaughters everybody except the young boys, which it grabs
Speaker 1: up to be child soldiers, you have a pretty easy
Speaker 1: idea of yeah, or you have a pretty easy time
Speaker 1: picturing evil. Well, I hope we don't get a chance
Speaker 1: for that lesson anytime soon. No, indeed, how about it?
Speaker 1: In books, continue to live in ignorance of that I did,
Speaker 1: you know, it made me feel like a bad person
Speaker 1: sometimes that some of these global statistics. I thought, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't care. I should I shouldn't care for rest.
Speaker 1: I shouldn't care that things are getting better for the
Speaker 1: rest of the world. It's only it's only the numbers
Speaker 1: in my country and maybe even particularly in my orbit,
Speaker 1: that I cared about that. You speaking to some of
Speaker 1: the suicide stuff. The fact that people are committing suicide
Speaker 1: less around the world, that's good. But if it's rising
Speaker 1: among my culture in my country, you know, I'm bothered
Speaker 1: by that. Maybe what what Jack is saying is that
Speaker 1: that that graph twelve point eighteen availability of pie in
Speaker 1: the third world just did not do it, just ran
Speaker 1: it by the time it gets here. I do. I do,
Speaker 1: intellectually speaking want the whole world to get better, but
Speaker 1: but emotionally, politically, I only care about my own. So
Speaker 1: maybe that makes me a bad person. But that that
Speaker 1: makes you the of your town and and somebody who
Speaker 1: works hard at it, which is absolutely as honorable and
Speaker 1: aspiration as being the president of the u N or
Speaker 1: whatever the hell the Grand pubas called there at the
Speaker 1: u N. Well, in that vein and in the in
Speaker 1: sort of the defense, like Tim had said earlier, in
Speaker 1: the way he uses peculiar statistics to to make points.
Speaker 1: I love I love the statistic because it really hits
Speaker 1: upon the first world, the third World, and free trade policy,
Speaker 1: where he says every cell phone added in the first
Speaker 1: world adds three thousand dollars of g d P to
Speaker 1: a developing country. I thought, well, that's just a beautiful statistic,
Speaker 1: isn't it. It helps and I'm more than us I'm
Speaker 1: glad you mentioned the cell phone thing because, as you remember,
Speaker 1: several months ago now, Tucker Carlson did this rant on
Speaker 1: Fox that got a lot of publicity in the conservative
Speaker 1: world about how stupid capitalism is because all people do
Speaker 1: with it is by iPhones that they don't need. This
Speaker 1: this section really is a beautiful refutation of that. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you saw some months ago there was
Speaker 1: circulating around on Twitter, Um, some guys in Africa used
Speaker 1: their iPhones to make a science fiction film with a
Speaker 1: green screen effects and everything that they made on a
Speaker 1: blanket hanging on a stick in there in an alley
Speaker 1: in their town. I mean, it's just what an incredible thing.
Speaker 1: I mean, you talk about something that can help but
Speaker 1: make you feel good about the world. That is incredible,
Speaker 1: and the Tucker Carlson's and the anti capitalist reactionaries whom
Speaker 1: Pinker refers to as conservatives in this world turn their
Speaker 1: noses up out of it at it, either out of
Speaker 1: ignorance or even or out of worse motives, when they
Speaker 1: just they just don't care, and they they regard material prosperity,
Speaker 1: and that is to say, human happiness as a trivial
Speaker 1: concern relative to some sort of romanticist vision of what
Speaker 1: human greatness really is. My favorite example of that sort
Speaker 1: of thing from the book was the discussion of I
Speaker 1: think it was it may have been African, doesn't really
Speaker 1: matter fisherman who would use their smartphones after they had
Speaker 1: their catch to ping all the villages in the region
Speaker 1: to figure out what the fish prices were. To avoid,
Speaker 1: as he describes um, showing up to a village that's
Speaker 1: already glutted with fish and having all your time wasted
Speaker 1: making no money, when just down the coast there was
Speaker 1: a village that's like where the damn fisherman, which is
Speaker 1: all of history has been. That way, you get along
Speaker 1: the coast of people are starving here, and they got
Speaker 1: fisher rotting in the sun here right there. There's community
Speaker 1: for you. There's some community for you well. And the
Speaker 1: ability to become an informed uh participant in the free market,
Speaker 1: and the glut of information that you know make kill
Speaker 1: usen drives all the suicide. But um, how it's upsides
Speaker 1: do it too, But how incredibly valuable valuable it is? Hey,
Speaker 1: I want to throw in one thing apropos nothing, just
Speaker 1: because I thought it was so great. And and if
Speaker 1: you know me, or if you listen to the radio
Speaker 1: show at all, you know that the indoctrination of young
Speaker 1: people in schools and universities makes me insane um. And
Speaker 1: I'd like to spend the rest of my life fighting it, um,
Speaker 1: just because it presents such a perverse and upside down
Speaker 1: view of of history in the United States and what
Speaker 1: makes for a successful culture. But I absolutely love this
Speaker 1: um Pinker's talking about actually is quoting uh Max Roser,
Speaker 1: and I believe it's from the period of I don't
Speaker 1: want to get hung up on this, oh, in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy if you're going to write a headline, and this
Speaker 1: comes from his his talking about the human tendency toward
Speaker 1: negativity and finding small problems in bitching all the time,
Speaker 1: which is I suffered from it myself. But if he said,
Speaker 1: if you only published a newspaper once every twenty five
Speaker 1: years or every fifty years, you'd have to write about
Speaker 1: the big stuff. It wouldn't be the momentary crap. It
Speaker 1: would be the big stories, the big progress. And he said, um,
Speaker 1: if you published a newspaper once describing nineteen seventy to fifteen,
Speaker 1: your headline would be number of people in extreme poverty
Speaker 1: fell by a hundred and thirty seven thousand since yesterday
Speaker 1: every day for the last twenty five years. That's a hell.
Speaker 1: That's a hell of a stretch man. Seven thousand a
Speaker 1: day every day for twenty five years. And the number
Speaker 1: of people in extreme proty if I remember correctly, correct
Speaker 1: me if I'm wrong. I believe they settled on using
Speaker 1: a dollar ninety per day in twenty dollars U S
Speaker 1: dollars at this and they used for that that that
Speaker 1: number is astounding to me. I don't know how I
Speaker 1: know they have a different lifestyle. I mean, they must
Speaker 1: not have Netflix, because I don't know how how are
Speaker 1: they going to afford the New Disney exactly. Yeah. You know,
Speaker 1: I've often said that the great thing about knowing history
Speaker 1: is that it makes you feel better about your own
Speaker 1: time because you hear on the news some idiots saying
Speaker 1: something like, oh, America today is the worst polarization ever
Speaker 1: and President Trump is the worst president of all time,
Speaker 1: and all this sort of thing. And if it's the
Speaker 1: worst economy for a young person graduated from college to
Speaker 1: ever go out into every year of my entire life,
Speaker 1: you know, they'll just look back at the Civil War,
Speaker 1: I mean, or or or ninety eight, and you know,
Speaker 1: we have things so good. And that's what I love
Speaker 1: about this book is stuff like that that really gets
Speaker 1: you to stop and think, now, we we have things
Speaker 1: pretty darn good. I was looking over my notes from
Speaker 1: the book that I wanted to touch on just I
Speaker 1: just really like the phrase hedonic treadmill. The theory of
Speaker 1: the hedonic treadmill. People adapt to changes in their fortunes,
Speaker 1: like eyes adapting to light or darkness, and quickly returned
Speaker 1: to a genetically determined base line of happiness. So you
Speaker 1: know that about myself, I know that I have myself.
Speaker 1: There was a time song ago when I was perfectly
Speaker 1: happy in my little one room house that I had,
Speaker 1: you know that right after I got out of law school.
Speaker 1: In fact, my friends called it the unibomber shack because
Speaker 1: it was just literally an uninsulated house in in Placidville, California.
Speaker 1: And now nowadays, I mean, I could go back to
Speaker 1: it if I really had to, I think, But nowadays
Speaker 1: I get annoyed if my car makes it a kind
Speaker 1: of a little bit of rattling noise because of the
Speaker 1: coins in the coin rentainer. You know, so it does happen.
Speaker 1: By the way, hedonic treadmill would be a great name
Speaker 1: for your band to compete with postmodern shot back. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: well I've actually, since I've been working out on the
Speaker 1: hedonic treadmill, I've lost fifteen pounds. I'm like, you're happier.
Speaker 1: You're happier, which is happydonic treadmill. My wife is happier though.
Speaker 1: That's a treadmill that it feeds you pie while you're
Speaker 1: on Oh my god, where do I buy it? Uh?
Speaker 1: You know what's interesting though, in one of the points
Speaker 1: he makes is um that that's fine, and it's true,
Speaker 1: but all those you know, levels of happiness that you've
Speaker 1: passed upward, you can't discount those and act them like
Speaker 1: and act like they didn't happen. My babies didn't die.
Speaker 1: I didn't die of a tooth infection at age thirty.
Speaker 1: You know, I have medicine, I have education. Serious, my
Speaker 1: baseline happiness is the same. But I should recognize that, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: count your blessings, you know. But like you said, it's
Speaker 1: hard to get elected on that platform, no doubt, right, right,
Speaker 1: absolutely true. Here's here's my favorite statistic. I loved the
Speaker 1: passage on page one seven, by the way, the pages
Speaker 1: are the same in the hardback in the paperback, and
Speaker 1: that he could afford the hard back because he was
Speaker 1: part of the one person he bought goddamnit, he bought
Speaker 1: it on Amazon because of our fabulous internet wealth creating machine. Anyway,
Speaker 1: the passage Ray is talking about the dangers of traffic,
Speaker 1: traffic to danger to pedestrians. He's about how dangerous it
Speaker 1: was to be a pedestrian in past ages, and he
Speaker 1: compares it to the dangers presented by horse drawn travel.
Speaker 1: And I just that's just a marvelous passage where he
Speaker 1: talks about the the how dangerous it was to be
Speaker 1: a pedestrian years ago there's a passenger where he says, here, uh,
Speaker 1: it takes more skilled across broad What he's talking about,
Speaker 1: he's quoting a guy from the nineteen hundreds. It takes
Speaker 1: more skilled across Broadway than to cross the Atlantic and
Speaker 1: a plant of the Atlantic and a clam boat. The
Speaker 1: engine of the city, Mayhem, is the horse. Underfed and nervous.
Speaker 1: This vital brute was often flogged to exhaustion by pitiless
Speaker 1: drivers who exulted in pushing ahead with utmost fury, defying
Speaker 1: the law, and delighting and destruction runways were common. The
Speaker 1: havoc killed thousands of people. According to the National Safety Council,
Speaker 1: the horse associated fatality rate was ten times the car
Speaker 1: associated rate of modern times. And he says this was
Speaker 1: written in nineteen four, which is more than double the
Speaker 1: per capita rate today. Finally, somebody mentioning the h a
Speaker 1: f T the horse associated fidelity. Right, Oh, there's an
Speaker 1: R at the end. Sorry, nobody ever talked you about
Speaker 1: that anymore. Damn horses a different book. But I remember
Speaker 1: the stat because it stood up to me that in
Speaker 1: the late eighteen hundreds in Chicago they averaged four deaths
Speaker 1: a day from fire. Yeah, yeah, would would you just
Speaker 1: you know, that'd be the lead story in the news
Speaker 1: in any city when people wouldn't that many people die
Speaker 1: in a fire now, whereas today fire is so rare
Speaker 1: that the San Francisco Fire Department now has fewer firemen
Speaker 1: on it than it did in nineteen o six when
Speaker 1: the earthquake occurred, and firemen are more often dispatched alongside
Speaker 1: the ambulance just in order to have something to do. Wow. Wow.
Speaker 1: So we want to go on to final thoughts on
Speaker 1: Stephen Pinker's Enlightenment now the Case for Reason, Science and
Speaker 1: Humanism in Progress UM alphabetical order by age. Wait one
Speaker 1: last thing before I love that he I love that.
Speaker 1: He threw back to our first book, UM, which was
Speaker 1: helped me out here, Oh Heaven on Earth, Heaven on Earth,
Speaker 1: Bid Joshua Murkovich, which was which was about socialism. Another
Speaker 1: fun fact from Pinker's book, Page one oh three, UM,
Speaker 1: Marks and Angles were wrong in their their communistic theory
Speaker 1: of primitive cultures. It turns out that sharing was not
Speaker 1: universal in communistic and primitive cultures. In hunting cultures, where
Speaker 1: a lot of your success was determined by luck, whether
Speaker 1: or not you came across animals, sharing was fairly common
Speaker 1: as as practiced. However, in the farming cultures, sharing was
Speaker 1: not common because they knew it would increase laziness and
Speaker 1: laziness and lethargy amongst the population. I thought that was
Speaker 1: great that he pointed that out. This is news to
Speaker 1: a Harvard professor in two thousand ninety. Yeah, exactly. I
Speaker 1: wanted to find a link to our first book. Um,
Speaker 1: so I don't know, I'll kick it off because that
Speaker 1: that leads beautifully to just my overall my head size, yes,
Speaker 1: from the enormous oh great, well, um, the need to
Speaker 1: defend things like the liberty and the free market, um,
Speaker 1: and and the enlightenment indeed, reason, scientific progress, the rest
Speaker 1: of it. It's it's like, you know what it's like.
Speaker 1: It's it's exactly like this. Maybe you're about to go
Speaker 1: to bed, Maybe you're a couple of cocktails in and
Speaker 1: and you drop a glass and you realize the next
Speaker 1: forty minutes of my life are going to be spent
Speaker 1: cleaning up this mess. Or it reminds me when onyxed
Speaker 1: my old dog got sprayed by a skunk like ten
Speaker 1: thirty at night. This this terrible feeling of this shouldn't
Speaker 1: be happening. I shouldn't have to do this. Why am I?
Speaker 1: Why is this weight been thrown upon me? It's it's
Speaker 1: idiotic and astounding and shocking and sickening to me that
Speaker 1: you have to now, especially to young people who are
Speaker 1: at universities that are supposed to be accomplishing the opposite.
Speaker 1: You have to defend the idea of reason to them.
Speaker 1: But it has to be done. And I just I
Speaker 1: think this book is a terrific tool, A primer or
Speaker 1: do you say primer and a read a chapter now,
Speaker 1: chapter later. You don't have that plow through the whole
Speaker 1: thing it was. I think it's a great set of
Speaker 1: tools to defend um that which is elevated humanity from
Speaker 1: horror and starvation to affluence and health. So it's a
Speaker 1: would recommend from Joe absolutely, Yeah, yeah, I think I
Speaker 1: can dovetail on that and just say I would recommend
Speaker 1: this book to everything Joe said, I fully agree with.
Speaker 1: I think it's a I think it's a very useful
Speaker 1: set of facts and objective data to point to the
Speaker 1: fact that things are not getting worse, things are getting better,
Speaker 1: demonstrably show Now, I there are some parts with the
Speaker 1: book that we may quibble with. There's some parts that
Speaker 1: I think are fairly lean, but overall, I would definitely
Speaker 1: recommend this book. I would read this book. There's far
Speaker 1: more good than bad in this book, and I think
Speaker 1: it's I think it's it's worth consuming for, even if
Speaker 1: you agree with the principles in here, to be familiar
Speaker 1: with some of the facts, because you're going to be
Speaker 1: confronted with them as you deal with the mainstream public
Speaker 1: over the next few years. We see this the real
Speaker 1: the refutation of facts, the idea that um science is
Speaker 1: bad because it was all created by white men. I mean,
Speaker 1: we have to get back to some basic truths here,
Speaker 1: and we have to be able to point to something
Speaker 1: like this book. And I think I think it's really
Speaker 1: helpful that the author of this book is as an
Speaker 1: atheist liberal frankly. I mean, you know, I wouldn't say libertarian.
Speaker 1: I would say he is a more liberal leaning human being,
Speaker 1: and I think that's very helpful with a book like this.
Speaker 1: I'll let Tim goless since he chose the book, and
Speaker 1: I'll be short um if nothing else, because the book
Speaker 1: stands out, uh for not being negative. I mean, we're
Speaker 1: just we're just awash in nonfiction books about how awful
Speaker 1: things are. As A Jonah Goldberg said the other day,
Speaker 1: I don't know if there's ever been a time in
Speaker 1: US history where every group felt aggrieved. Every single group
Speaker 1: feels like now is a bad time for them. And
Speaker 1: you can pick any color, any gender, any age, anything.
Speaker 1: And to have a book out there to to to
Speaker 1: explain the overall arc of things right now is uh,
Speaker 1: you know, we need that, ladies and gentlemen. Old simple
Speaker 1: Jack beautifully said, I I keep My grandfather was a
Speaker 1: lumber deliveryman, and uh, you know, grew up in poverty
Speaker 1: in picking cotton in and pecans in West Texas. And
Speaker 1: when I think about the progress that occurred between his
Speaker 1: life and mine and the success that I've had in
Speaker 1: my life, it brings to mind that we are so fortunate.
Speaker 1: If you take seriously the idea that with great fortune
Speaker 1: comes a great responsibility, or if you take seriously the
Speaker 1: idea we owe it to future generations to leave the
Speaker 1: world no worse off than we found it, then a
Speaker 1: book like this that makes you feel and really see
Speaker 1: how marvelously successful and happy we are today and how
Speaker 1: much we've accomplished and even though there are still a
Speaker 1: long ways to go. It really I think it reinforces
Speaker 1: the idea that we have an obligation to make the
Speaker 1: best of our lives that we possibly can on an
Speaker 1: individual basis, and and as as a society to try
Speaker 1: and and say we have come so far. It would
Speaker 1: really be a shame if we were to abandon it
Speaker 1: and walk away from it or denigrate the efforts of
Speaker 1: previous generations that got us this this far. Well, I
Speaker 1: had to. I hate to add length to this thing,
Speaker 1: but I think one of the biggest threats to enlightenment,
Speaker 1: as we touched on, might just be comfort. Just what
Speaker 1: do human beings do when they don't have threat of
Speaker 1: war or starvation? What do we do? Do We just
Speaker 1: sit around and dietable obesity? Here and here's my my
Speaker 1: suggestion is the first thing that we should all do
Speaker 1: is reflect on how fortunate we are. And since it's
Speaker 1: Thanksgiving season, perhaps it's appropriate for us to say the
Speaker 1: first answer to that question is think about how lucky
Speaker 1: we Remember that that Dr. Seuss book, I Did I
Speaker 1: ever tell you how lucky you are? This is the
Speaker 1: grown up version of that. So take a moment for
Speaker 1: Thanksgiving to look at this book and consider how fortunate
Speaker 1: we as a society and as a as a world.
Speaker 1: I really are well right, and it is an answer
Speaker 1: to the intersectional nonsense in that it is a global
Speaker 1: truly global. As Jack indicated, every every group and subgroup
Speaker 1: in the world can use this book as a gratitude exercise.
Speaker 1: As you know you're suggesting Tim and understand how far
Speaker 1: we've come. Gentlemen, Tim and I have each selected a book.
Speaker 1: Do either of you have our next book ready to
Speaker 1: go yet? I'm gonna nominate Jack. You Jack here into
Speaker 1: the book learning. You got a book you want to suggest?
Speaker 1: You know we should do Dick, just because you keep
Speaker 1: saying him. Because I love that book it three times already,
Speaker 1: the whole thing, all the way through. I absolutely love.
Speaker 1: Surely when you reread it though you skip all the
Speaker 1: whale nonsense. No are you kidding me? All the particulars
Speaker 1: of the whales. The chapter the Whiteness of the Whale
Speaker 1: is one of the best of the whole book. Why
Speaker 1: about why the color white is so terrifying? Man, Marvel,
Speaker 1: I'm not kidding intersectionality here is this a college social class?
Speaker 1: To be the next book we'll we'll come up with
Speaker 1: a book. Yeah, yeah, we'll come up with tweeted Jack
Speaker 1: and Gel if you have suggestions for us. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a that's a pretty decent idea. Alright, thanks Fellows, well done.
Speaker 1: Extra large