An A&G Book Review: Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now

So we uh, we read a book? Who's we? Um Armstrong and Getty, Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty and then two other people, Craig got Walls, the healthcare guru, public intellectual fan favorite, and Tim Sander for vice president for litigation for the gold Water Foundation, and uh, famousist Tim Lawyer. Um, Tim, how are you? I'm great? Craig is here as well. That's what I want to be when I grew up as a public intellectual. I know it's holding me back,

though I'm pretty certain of it. Height. You need to cultivate your accent to what you need. You need some some sort of vaguely European but hard to pin down. So we set out to read a book, have and a plan to discuss it than The book is Stephen Pinker's Enlightenment, now suggested by Tim subtitled The Case for Reasons Science, Humanism and Progress. It's a very large book, oppressive, I would say, um. And my question is lots of pictures though you know what, Yes, on the plus side,

big fan of the pictures. Uh. My question is do we want to go in depth on the big ideas or do we want to go shallow on the many different ideas or both are neither. I will vote for the latter. And here's why I as you will remember, when I recommended this book, I specifically said that you could cut off the last two hundred pages and not read those. How about the first hundred and seventy those

are where the pictures are? And what the reason why I suggested the book is because I love the this this depth of detail he gets into about how much better life is today than it has ever been in the history of the world. And you know, it's so easy to get feeling depressed and down and pessimistic about the future, and page after page of this book makes clear why we have it better than any human beings ever have had it in almost any dimension you care

to mention. And that's why I loved this book so much and enjoyed going through that beginning part. I agree with all this stuff in the end when he gets into the more philosophical details, but I didn't even think that was really necessary. Just nothing lifts your spirits more than some of these statistics in here about how good life is today. Yeah, I believe when we were first when this book first came out, we were texting or

emailing about it. And it's just it's it is easy to get caught up in the day today, the world's going to hell in a handbasket. This book points out the progress that his main been made by human beings, particularly with the help of the Enlightenment, and some of the statistics about this is when we talk about regularly on the Armstrong and Getty Show, is the for most of human history, you are going to have one or more of your kids die. That was just part of life.

That's just the way it worked. Now it is a rare occurrence and and seen as just a tragedy beyond tragedies to have to endure. Um. I mean, that's a major change life expectancy and the ability to get out of childhood and everything like that, that a loan is

just incredible. And and you know, we often when we think about the olden days with with the high child mortality rate, people sometimes think, oh, well, they were neared to it, they were so accustomed to that that they weren't as affected as we we are today by the loss of a child. And we know that that is

not true. In part if you look at graveyards, If you look at old graveyards, especially around the Victorian Age, and people started to be able to afford tombstones, they built these elaborate, heart wrenching, beautifully carved headstones for their kids because they were just as effected as we are today. So it's not like they were calloused or anything. The loss of a child a hundred or two hundred years ago was a as just as heart wrenching as it is to us today. And we are very fortunate that

we so rarely experience something. Yeah, if you've ever read any of the Lincoln stuff, you up, yeah, yeah, crippling grief both he and his wife, who admittedly was already a little crazy. But hey, before we get into more specifics, the two general things that I found most interesting about the book or Pinker's discussion of the natural human tendency, the psychological anthropological tendency to see problems more vividly than

good stuff. And and it's I thought it was interesting, particularly as observers of the modern world and news and the rest of it, to say, you know what, you're right, focusing on the crow happy is a very difficult thing to resist. And we can talk about that. But the other thing, and this is the point of the book, so the very idea that you have to in the Western world defend the enlightenment, defend science, defend logic, defend pushing aside superstition um in the face of some of

the modern the forces, particularly on university campuses. I mean, it's it's shocking that you even have to do it, isn't it. Yeah, I personally I think that it's this it's really frightening. The hostility toward what they call the bourgeois virtues or bourgeois life. And there's this this romanticism toward the idea that that life should be more meaningful or more profound than enjoying a barbecue with your with

your family. We, in fact, we just had so we just went through Veterans Day, right, and every year there's somebody out there who says something sarcastic or or dark

about how you know, people should be. They're out there just shopping, getting at the sales at the mall, or they're just hanging out and having barbecues instead of thinking about what this day really means and all that, which has always really driven me crazy, because especially Veterans Day, what these men fought and died for was for our ability to just enjoy a nice holiday with their fami.

That's exactly what they wanted when they went off to war, and we do them on honor by just celebrating with our families. And I think the hostility to the Enlightenment is largely rooted in this idea that there's something you know, lax or unimportant, or insignificant or vulgar about the life of comfort and happiness with with that we enjoy today

with our technological advancement. That's a real problem. That's that generates this sort of attitude that what we should be out there crusading for national greatness or something like that instead of instead of living lives of peace and happiness. Joe's comment at the beginning prior to Tim's there about the two of overarching themes I think on Joe's earst theme, UM are aren't psychological need for the negative? That's the old. I just think of that of the is the old.

If it bleeds it leads, right, I mean, if it's shocking and negative, it's it's something people want to talk about. Um. The latter point that Tim was just expounding on the fact that we have to defend the Enlightenment is to me that just dovetails so nicely into what postmodernism is and this attack on facts in general, and that there are no facts and that there is no right answer, and that everything is is so dour and negative and and and saturated in horror basically, and then that that's

a common assault we see now across our whole university system in in all of the developed nations. Well, I know Tim absolutely has spent his life researching this sort of thing, and Jack's been talking on the Armstrong and Getty show lately about UM, the whole critical race theory and and the intersectional horror that I like to bring up somebody, anybody, why would any organized group of thinkers or political radicals or whatever, why they want to undermine

the idea that there is objective truth. What's the goal? I have an answer to that. I think this is what I think happened. And this actually can relates to the book that I just published, the Life of Jacob Knowski, because he was part of this post World War two generation, because that humble brag. Yeah, so you can buy that on Amazon dot com. Uh, there was this post World War two generation that that sought to prevent anything like

that from ever happening again. And they thought the answer was to find a universal human morality and a universal philosophy that would apply across cultures that was focused on material progress and that's just the Enlightenment all over again. But there were other people who took a different view, and they thought that what had led to World War Two or to other wars was cultural conflict, and that

the solution to that was cultural relativism. If we don't make pass judgments on other cultures, then we're not going to go to war with other cultures. And so if we just learned to get along and not criticize each other,

then that's fine. Then we we'll all be happy. Except the problem with that is that there are things you ought to criticize people and cultures for, and the that that metastasized into a war on objective truth because people started thinking, well, objective truth means you're going to tell me how to run my life, and that so therefore objective truth leads to totalitarian is m, which is crazy.

But I think that's a large part of it. Tim, Tim ascribes, Uh, I think, honestly, the most optimistic view of critical race theory that I've heard, I think that's I think that's the most optimistic defense. Yeah, I I Jack or Jell, any either of you guys want to. I mean, Jack and I've spent a lot of time watching these YouTube videos that they are there are hours long and nobody should probably ever really spend time doing.

But uh, you want to take a staff at that, Jack, I just think that would be It's a whole own topic. I would end up spending an hour on critical race theory on But what's behind it? Why? What's the why? The why? The why? I don't know. The why is that if there is no universal truth, including reason and science and the other stuff of the Enlightenment, which we can get into in a while, is those with power can determine what's the truth, and the only truth is

what they say is the truth. And that's that's the mark of maoist regimes and similar stuff all over the world. Any questioning of the Great Leader's doctrine means instant death. And it's especially easy to enforce that if there's nothing to appeal to. If I'm constantly trying to make the other feel bad and they accept it, yeah, I have a lot a lot easier time ruling, leading, doing what

I want to do, making my personal desires manifest. This book that we read in Enlightenment now, it goes through a number of different ways in which humankind is better now than it was, you know, throughout the history of of mankind. And we mentioned, uh, life expectancy and infant mortality and that sort of thing. But wealth is absolutely amazing. It wasn't that many years ago that practically everybody on

the planet lived in poverty. Fairly recently, now very few people live in what did the worldwide standard for poverty is? And um, you know that can't be glossed over at all. I mean what a change that is so few in fact, that they spend a lot of time trying to figure

out how to measure poverty. But right, so, yeah, yeah, well that's why in the United States we had to come up with this whole what do they call it, um uh instead of hunger, food insecurity, because you have to go with some sort of you might experience insecurity of food in the next year because you can't make sure hunger because there's not enough of it. But for the for the vast history of human kind of the only thing you did every single day was where am

I going to find something to eat? The fact that you don't have to worry about that anymore is such an amazing change. Yeah, that obesity is a made of a larger health problem in the United States than starvation. Surely we're the first civilization ever to have that unwealth and food. I do want to share this is this touches upon two specific statistics in the books that were two of my favorites. On food but seen nineteen sixty

one and two thousand nine. Um, we use twelve percent more land now, but we produce three percent more food. And on wealth, if we look back at by two thousand eight, all persons on the planet had an average income equal to that of Western Europe, in nineteen sixty four. And one of the things I love about this book is how he shows He shows these statistics in very unusual ways that you would never think of asking to

begin with. So I love how he shows, for instance, that we're not just richer than our great grandparents were, but the poorest people today are richer than the richest people were only fifty years ago our parents were. Well. And one of the most powerful points I think he may think he makes, and I wish I had the

graph in front of me right now. Um, maybe I'll flip to it at some point, is that the the average income or the you know, the way people live all over the world has increased enormously from widespread infant mortality, disease, misery, all of it, it's increased to this really pretty damn good state, even as we've added in last is it

thirty years, five billion people to the globe. So we've accomplished the growth and standards of living while growing the population and living that way, we we went from roughly fifty years ago spending sixty hours a week on housework to today we spend on average, the average household spends fifteen hours a week on housework technology unless light just light.

One of my favorite physics in the Boston is with the cost of light over time, where it's it's so small today to to measure the cost of lighting a room for an hour that you really can't accurately measure it. It's so cheap as compared to how much it costs for a candle a hundred years ago or something like that. It's it's amazing. Tim You're in Arizona, where light is

still cheap. Things are changing dramatically in Californi, and we're resorting the whale oil as I run gasoline and generators in my backyard to make sure I can work at night. I hate to see and everything it did, So listen before we get into more specific measures like light and whatever. The whole idea of the Enlightenment reason and science and UH and humanism, which is can we say natural rights

for now? That that idea, UM, that's what and the idea that we can make progress is the keys to understanding the Enlightenment what it was, and just life expectancy. This is perhaps my favorite UH graph in the book. And and he mentioned that you could go way way way back to ancient times your stone age, your bronze age, whatever, and life expectancy was the same, the same, the same, the same, the same. It was flat for thousands and thousands of years, and then starting in seventeen sixty it's

still flat. I mean, it raises a little bit in the America's in Europe just but when the age of science and reason really took hold in the mid eighteen hundreds and then the late eighteen hundreds, it exploads all over the world science, reason, objective truth. It raised the world life expectancy from about twenty nine years old to seventy in the space of a hundred and thirty fifty years. And all those graphs are as stark as that one.

The wealth, the life expectancy, the education, they're all as as straight up at some points, mistake. It's no accident that capitalism comes around around the same time, right, Wealth of Antients published in seventeen seventy six. And I think a lot of the reason for the hostility toward science, humanism, progress, and objective truth, I think a lot of that is

basically rooted in the hostility to capitalism. Because we're talking about these great statistics, and I keep thinking about you know, as you mentioned, I live in Arizona. About a quarter of the state of Arizona is Indian reservations. And if you go to these reservations, the statistics there are almost

the reverse of what we've been talking about. The average annual income on the Navajo reservation, which is about the size of New England, it's two and a half times the size of Massachusetts, the average annual income on Navajo is about seventy dollars per year, and the average average annual income on Apache south of their uh is about four thousand dollars a year. Something like ninety or of the populations on these reservations are employed by in some

way or another, the tribal government. And the statistics on the of of reservation poverty are abominable. Like we're talking like a quarter of the residences don't have running water

or electricity or telephone service. And and there are people who are living on these in these places who are just normal people like you and me, who are living a life that we cannot possibly imagine, and like that really is a demonstration of how this escape from poverty, the great escape you were described being, is the consequence of social and cultural variables, which are we We've said our objectivity reasons science, free markets, and exchange and people.

A lot of people are object to those because they say, well, those are those would be dangerous to our culture, that would undermine our the survival of our cultural traditions, and whatever you might think of that, It's just not true if you look at us. Groups like the Italian Americans. Italian Americans have been able to keep their culture thriving and alive in the United States with hardly any serious threat of diminishment. Why because they've participated in the capitalist

process that America makes possible. The same with just about any other ethnic group you choose to name. But insular groups that wall out those those traditions of of free markets and individualism and exchange and capitalism, they suffer terribly and then point fingers, often at other people as if it's their fault. Well, this is a dangerous conversation to

jump into and will probably end my career. Which is fine, um, But there are aspects of some culture, the cultures that are simply what we used to do or what we have done. I mean, part of my sacred culture is that I smoked too much pot. I mean now, is that a cultural norm that I should hang onto just because in college for a while I smoked too much pot? Or is that just one of the things I did

for a while. And how horrible to have a situation that encourages bad habits like that to become thought of as part of your culture. Then that's what romanticism does. I think there's Romanticism is the opposite of the Enlightenment.

It's this idea that there's some super emotional force, some forces of history or supernaturalism or something that collects us together as cultures, and is this important bond and is so beautiful and more important than human needs and human life and everything, and you know all that all that stuff you see in Disney movies that people really just do have in their brains. And as a result of that romanticism, they think of bad ideas as as just part of who they are a lot of the time.

And that's really it's it's a travesty to them, and it's a travesty to their culture, and it holds them back terrible well when it's at the basis of sending wave after wave after wave of soldiers to their deaths in the name of some imaginary national pride or something

like that. So and there are you know, all sorts of examples through history, you know, the slaughtering, torturing people over you know, variations in Christianity through the Confederacy is a great example, right, The Southern Confederacy was built on this vision of national Southern nationalism that said, oppressing black people is just part of our culture. The Southern way

of life consisted of doing these horrible things. That's what that was what the pre Civil War Southern intellectual leaders tried to say. That's a pretty good example because in instead of letting go of the bad part or dumb part, or unproductive part or a legal part of your culture and hanging onto you know, you can keep Nascar and sweet tea, you just can't place He's can't have slavery. Change is very very hard for many people. Uh yeah, yeah,

there was a follow up on that. Ad will pop into my head eventually as we're thinking about the book globally, one more kind of global question. I mean, we're not going to recount every graph for the podcast here, but basically, for every single aspect of tangible, measurable life, with very

few exceptions, is getting better. We're getting we're getting healthier, we live longer, we have more food, we have a better environment, we have all these things right, And but is there anything in the book that statistically, just factually you guys think, Boy, I don't know if that's true. Is there is Do we want to just sort of accept everything in here is accurate, or do we want

to say, boy, there's that may not be accurate to me? Well, Pinka wrote the book in part because he was kind of criticized for his previous book where he had said that there was a reduction in the international violence and war and he which one of the fascinating aspects of this book is that he attributes that he argues that would actually have essentially outlawed war, which is a really

interesting and intriguing suggestion. But he was criticized for saying that the world is more peaceful today than it was in the past, and he quantitatively shows some of that with his charts on war and his charts on genocide, etcetera. I'm just saying, is there anything in the book that any of you guys saw or thought, I'm just not sure that's accurate. I mean, in other words, do we want to accept his facts as given as we proceed.

He I, UM, I have seen him speak a couple of times on this, because he he made the rounds to a bunch of different universities and shows and everything like that. And uh, and that's where I first became aware of this book on book TV. But because we've had a rise in suicides, he he says, no, that's not true. I don't know where his statistics are different than the statistics that that that are coming to us

through you know, major newspapers. Well, and this was gonna be one of my major gripes with the book, when he gets into the recent rise of social media and suicides and stuff like that. I think he does an absolutely fabulous job of tracking historical data in all the things we've been talking about, from infant mortality to calories per worker two hours spent working to just all of the outcomes that make human life either livable or miserable.

Does an absolutely fabulous job on that. I think there are times, and this is one of them, when historical statistics are not terribly useful when you have enormous change happening at blinding speed, particularly in terms of social media and and adolescence and as a as a dad, and I don't want to, you know, claim, you know, special expertise over anybody else chatting here, but as not only a dad, but a coach and a volunteer and the rest of it. I've seen shocking changes in the emotional

health of our young people. And I think it might be the classic hockey stick graph where they're they're every statistic he he tracks. He points out that there are wobbles up and down through history. There's a war here and a famine there, and but the overall trend is acts, and I think that is absolutely legitimate unless we're dealing with a sudden and a huge change in the way human beings relate to each other and and and social

sickness being on the rise. Now. One of the other points he made is as long as you hang with the enlightenment, you will recognize these problems and find ways to cure them, because every development has downsides. And I found that kind of reassuring, reassuring. But I think he dismissed the whole suicide, misery, lack of connection thing too easily.

He did. I that's one of the things I was thinking about and asking this question because as we look at the graphs he and I watched him give a talk as well on this where he said, globally, suicides are down, and he this is a talk he just gave in the last handful of months. He said, globally suicides are down, but that's not true for the United States. And if you look at his graph in the book, the United States graph is droped topp drop thing. It

just pops up at the very end. Suicide's up. But what I found so interesting was he said he's looked at that and he said, look, yeah, teenage girls go through a period where suicides are more likely, but that's normal, and that's always been normal. He said, this uptick is not teens. He said, it's disenfranchised boomers that are retiring. It's the old white boomers that are retiring and committing suicide.

And he backs on that point. Up too, was showing that that baby boomers drug use has is steady as compared to other generations. We tend to blend all these generations together instead of saying the people who were using drugs in nineteen eight are still using drugs today, whereas the kids who were born in nineteen eighty are using drugs at a lower level than their peers were twenty years ago. Things like that, which it's an interesting now

here's here's a twist on this. So one of the things that I really kept thinking about reading the book is how much of the downside is attributable to the upside. So you know, people often say, well, capitalism causes misery, and there is a truth to that, and that is that two or three hundred years ago, if there was a crop block that wiped out your potato crop, you were just gonna die and that was it, and you

will then no longer. You would then no longer be unhappy, whereas in today's world, if you have a crop blight, you'll be fine, and you'll survive twenty more years in that's twenty more years in which to be unhappy, to be measured, as by a pholster, as miserable when you're dead. The overall amount of unhappiness does increase, precisely because capitalism

makes us happier. And then this brings to mind the conclusion of his book when he's talking about anti Enlightenment thinking, and he particularly blames Friedrich Nietzsche for this and Nietzsche wrote this little passage in one of his books where he says, well, imagine what the end process of worldwide capitalism, and he imagined what he called the last man. The lad asked man is a couch potato who is so wealthy and so happy that he does nothing with his life.

He just sits there and he's just happy, and that's going on right, And he thinks this is a horrible idea. This is so horrible. He thinks that way that this will be the destruction of everything we know to be human. And this is going back to what I was saying earlier about people who think that there's something wrong with being happy, but they want a more romantic, bold, visionary

kind of some kind of uber humanity or whatever. And maybe the reason for the rise in suicides is that, first of all, it's easier now because we have more access to the tools necessary to kill ourselves. And horrifyingly, what if the end result is we have so much wealth and we solve so many problems that there's nothing left to do but turn ourselves off. I think that's

very possible. I think that's very possible. You earlier, when we started this podcast and when you were talking about, like there's something wrong with people just to you know, sitting around enjoying their lives. Um, the super motivated people like yourself, Tim or people who are gonna, you know, write a book or study something new, they'll probably survive. But I think the average human is just gonna sit in front of a TV and get fatter until their

heart explodes. It's it's one of It's one of Getty's favorite books. Hu. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, I just and that was my other gripe with the whole hockey stick of the modern world thing. The the rapidity of change in the last couple of decades is that, um, we have never not had a purpose um as human beings, I mean and and a real purpose and not you know, delivering lectures to people about the constitution or entertaining them on a radio show. I'm talking about not being dead.

And if if you remove virtually all purpose from people's lives, and I think Pinker is way too dismissive of the change from person in person contact to online contact, those two things will deny the common people the purpose that animates them. Possibly although you know we we in this Craig you earlier said that that pinker goes through all the material measures of wealth. He does have a whole chapter on happiness and measuring how how people report self

report greater degrees of happiness. Again, there is a little downtick in America in recent years, but even that is seems to be confined to the white population. He shows that black population reports of self reports of happiness are still on the rise. So it seems to be more of a social anxiety, which I would blame the media for largely, which keeps time. Yeah, and I blame the media, blame blamers, but I you know, we we we shouldn't

over exaggerate the degree of unhappiness. I think there's there is a minor tick, and we should keep an eye on that and make sure that that it's not continuing that trend. But he couldn't be right or he wrote the book exactly before it all went the hell, he didn't That's what happens, That's what I thought, Jack. I mean, he didn't know because you know, his his talks and his the stuff he's been saying about the book has all been in the last year. And that's why I

think Joe's point is so valid. Um the hockey stick may not be relevant or you may not be capturing the hockey stick when you when you look at suicides amongst teen girls that have occurred just in the last seven to ten years, and how that's just skyrocketing by other standards and other data sources we've looked at. But according to Pinker, that's not the issue. The issue is

old white men, which I just found really interesting. Oh yeah, as far as number of suicides up, as far as number of suicide I I get that, I get his reasoning and everything. But I'm telling you, when you rearrange something as fundamental as human contact, I couldn't agree more. Joe, You're not agree You're messing with stuff at a very very basic level. I'm what I'm saying in a long

winded way as I agree with you. I think this is a weakness in the book because and it's a weakness, you could say, some people think it's a we this in the Enlightenment itself, you know, one of the one of the things when the Island was first happening the eighteenth century, one of the things that its leaders realized that they were lacking was a substitute for church, and that was actually the reason why organizations like the Freemasons

were started. They were they're supposed to be secular alternatives to church, and the Gulf still continues to be that, I guess, But you know there are there is this weakness that we, we humanists, don't really have an alternative to churches, to to have a place to go every week where you meet your neighbors and friends and so forth, and all online, like you said, Joe, online just as not substitute for that, and that could be a real serious problem, I think for the Enlightenment for most people.

Not for me, because I'm a misanthrope and I'm perfectly happy sitting in my office with my books and my cat all day. But there are lots of people out there who really want a place to go every week. Guys, we gotta hit. So far, we have not hit what I think is my favorite in the best part of the book, and it's a principle that we have not heard in the media we have. I don't think any of us have done a good job expressing this principle. So I want to hit it really quick and get

each of your thoughts on it. Page one oh one in the hardback edition. Okay, a study of two thousand people in sixty eight countries done by Kelly and Evans. I'm just gonna read this quote because I think it's so powerful. The theory that inequality causes unhappiness comes to shipwreck on the rocks of facts in developing countries, inequality is not dispiriting but heartening. People in more unequal societies

are happier. The authors suggests that whatever envy, status, anxiety, or relative deprivation people may feel in poor, unequal countries is swamped by hope. Inequality is seen as the harbinger of opportunity. Why don't we do a better job of expressing that in the face of what we see in modern America. I just wonder if it's just if that

is only true up to a point. Once everybody gets above a level of I've got I've got food, I got a big screen TV, I got a car, I like, I got the cool clothes, I like, I don't have as much stuff as I want, then they're miserable. I mean, just the country. If you're talking about the poor countries, they're the people the bottom are still in the I'm just happy, I'm alive. And got food. Now I'm not gonna bitch that I don't have as nice house. We

can stipulate this is to the developing world. Yeah, not to the developed world, the modern world. Not not not the starving country. Because there's an old saying that one of the great things about America is if you're a working class person you see somebody drive by in a Cadillac Um instead of saying, you know, I hate the rich, or damn that person cheated me, or whatever you think I'm gonna be that someday, is that still true? I

don't know. I sure hope so if it, if it ever ceases to be true, America will have really lost its heart. That that is the heart of America. And it really just really disappoints me to see how many political, politically prominent figures, including people running for office today, take the view of we shouldn't have billionaires. I mean that, what is that but pure envy and hatred for those who have achieved more than you. That's so horrifle right. And we need to get to the bedroom defensive of

the free markets in a moment or two. But is it possible, in your opinions, to indoctrinate a society to drop aspiration and adopt envy. You go from wanting to be the guy with the cadillac to hating the guy with the cadillac. Do you think because Pinker, I mean, he really risks a lot of his arguments on that this is how human beings are and you can document it and it's easily observed. Blah blah blah. Can cultural norms become sick? I think when the floor gets raised,

That's my point. I think when the floor gets raised high enough, I think he do lose that people just get into envy, And according to this study, you do. I mean they even go through in this In this lengthy study that Kelly and Evans did, they say, look, this held true across sixty eight countries. The only place it didn't hold true was in the former Soviet Block. So if you were born in bread among you know, amongst believing equality is the final answer for everything, then

it didn't hold true. But it held true for everybody else. Historic they speaking, historically speaking, civilizations in human history have been organized around envy vastly more often than they've been

organized around aspiration. I just you look at every other society in in the history of the race, and it's just human beings have been far more likely to go to envy than to say I'm gonna build something a great Well, it's amazing we've pulled it off culturally because human nature, at least looking at children, maybe you grow out of it, but looking at kids, my kids can be perfectly happy with something until until they see some somebody with something better than All of a sudden they

have sucks. Well, the fabulous study with the monkeys with the slices of cucumber. Then the one monkey gets a grape, the other monkey goes crazy. I mean, all of Stephen Pinker's graphs in the world can't talk that money out of that monkey out of envy. But don't understand human but Hollywood can. Right talking about the media blamers, this is what a role that Hollywood has so long played.

You look at the Disney movies of decades past and put aside the romanticism I complain and earlier about, but a lot of it is teaching the generations that that are coming next, look as aspire, be great, sees your dreams, make something beautiful of the world. That's an important role for Hollywood to play, and Disney is one of the

few remaining who still even tries to do this. I turn on the television and it's just constantly anti heroes and and mobsters stories, and there's where are the stories about dreaming big and making it great in the world today. It's there's a difference between envy and equality here, and that what I mean is if just because I envy somebody having more than me doesn't mean I truly want an equal society. It just means I want to be

the guy moving up the ladder. And if if I really ultimately believe there's no way for me to get ahead and everything is just going to be equal forced equality, I think you end up with the malaise of Soviet communism. Question, well, there has to be inequality to have something to aspire to. I just love the idea that inequality augments happiness, and nobody, no, no politician has the nads to make that argument today.

At the same time, but at the same time, we should mention that Pinker has a whole chapter here about equality and how in a great many different ways inequality is on is on, the reductive is reducing over time, that which again we're not hearing in the mainstream. That's right. Well, go ahead, Tim on that thought, here's a passage that I enjoyed. Progress in equal rights may be seen not just in political milestones and opinion Bell Weathers, but in

data on people's lives. Among African Americans, the poverty rate fell from fifty percent in nineteen sixty the twenty seven point six percent in two thousand eleven. Life expectancy rose from thirty three in nineteen hundred, which was seventeen and a half years below that of whites, the seventy five point six years in twenty fifteen, less than three years below whites. African Americans who make it to sixty five have longer lives ahead of them than white Americans of

the same age. The rate of illiteracy fell among African Americans from in nine two effectively zero today. Good luck with getting elected with that, messaged him, well, exactly, exactly, God yeah. Um. The difficulty I think with that argument is that you know, most people, most voters have you know,

barely a grasp on a lot of the stuff. And if you can point to the ultra rich gaming the system, which is undeniably true, I mean they write the laws, and those laws benefit themselves and they grow fabulously, fabulously wealthy. And I think people's outrage over that is absolutely legitimate. They always resort to the wrong solution, which is bigger and more powerful government, to my chagrin, and it'll it will actually cause me an early death, ironically, Mr Pinker. Um,

So that's it's a difficult argument to make. But I wish we could hammer something as simple as the great defensive capitalism, which is that Bernie and his crowd um are are sessed with slicing up the piere or Jerry Brown's infamous horrific quote about those who have extracted disproportionately from the public wealth, the idea of dividing the pie

as opposed to growing the pie. And and Pinker makes the point that we have just to cite the United States, for instance, in terms of the wealth and standard of living of the common man, we've gone from dividing up a tiny little cupcake to a pie the size of a football field. I mean, yeah, there are people who have large chunks of it, um, but everybody has so

much more pie thanks to the free market. And I've I've distracted Jack, but I think we're all propied here, Oh my god, right now, so much so that he makes the point, which I think dovetails quite nicely on that that if you were to go ahead and add in what we all pay for our healthcare and our retirement and our benefits as part of our paycheck at work, If you add that in with all of the other social programs available to Americans, the United States now has

the second largest benefit welfare state on the planet. To France. Did not know that page one O nine in the book, I could. Unfortunately, we put it all on the credit card. Yeah, we owe it to China, but we have it. You know. It was rowing the pie. There was one thing I wanted I forgot. I wanted to get back to that that we mentioned earlier, and that is this thing about community and how how people have this need for community, and that in our progress that has been in some

ways neglected. It also should be emphasized that new forms of community have been made possible now, whether they're adequate or not is something that we can only figure out years from now when we look back in retrospect. But we have not only more avenues for community, but and

and but more different ways to access those communities. And used to be two hundred years ago, if I was the only guy around who was interested in, let's say, parrots, you know, there's nobody else in town care is about parrots, knows anything about parrots. They might know Tim, he's that

quirky guy who likes parrots, and that's that right. Nowadays, I can go on Google and I can find the parrot lovers community, and I can follow pictures of parrots on Instagram, and I can email people on the other side of the world about their parrots, and and post angrily on a forum about your opinions, host a podcast with three of my closest friends about parrots. And so there are new ways of accessing community that he in

substitute now. Whether they're as good as the olden days, I don't know how you even really go about measuring that. But we do have community that previous generations did not have. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A couple of the things that will really be will we'll all have to be on the watch for over the coming decades and centuries in terms of the enlightening, Enlightenment continuing to flourish, will be you know, this automation

sense of purpose communication, all this sort of stuff. Do we have enough interactions with other human beings that are fulfilling? As Tim was just talking about it, do we have any sense of purpose when automation, you know, starts to take a lot of job. When I'm away from home and I text message my sex robot and ask her how she's doing, do I feel fulfilled? Does your wife get jealous? Exactly? Your robot doesn't answer because it's having sex with a different sex robot be jealous? I don't know.

I'm gonna go to my online encounter group and ask the other robot efforts. I'm a visionary. There are so many different topics in this book, as I mentioned at the very beginning, you could do a whole podcast on

all of them. The little stuff on crime and punishment, how that has changed with the enlightenment over the over the years, and to where we start to look at crime and punishment UMU or incarcerating people are penalizing people as a way to try to get less bad things to happen in society only as opposed to some sort of weird cosmic balancing of the social scales where you feel like you gotta you know, you gotta cut off a hand, or they have to be executed, or they

need to be beaten or whatever. Um, those advances are just amazing, with the with the advancement of well science and reason and all that. And you know that brings to mind there are several passages of this book that made me feel a little uncomfortable in the sense that they challenged my priors, as they say, because there are some measures of progress that he shows that could at least arguably say that what I think is good for society is not necessarily like that. Do you mentioned the

welfare state earlier? You know that maybe the great progress we've made possible also validates wealth re distribution in ways that I personally disagree with. Now now my answer to that, of course, is I actually think that we would end up with everybody better off if we had less of

that redistribution going on. So I think I don't think it really overrules my views, but I we should mention that this isn't some kind of you know, the libertarians all reading each other's books that Pinker is by means a libertarian, and what he says challenges libertarian views in some important way. You know, this gets I have got to air out what I think is the biggest problem in the book. I was texting you guys vehemently about

this at one point weeks ago. Um the chapter on equal rights, starting on about page to twenty four in the hardback edition, he lays out emancipated values, and he goes he very elaborately lays out that look emancipated values you can think of as liberty or libertarianism. It has nothing to do with the political left and right today

in America. And he and he's wanting to show that over time, and he's showing it with an individual person as well as a fifty year old today, as a fifty year old fifty years ago, that we all across countries and in our own lives. It's showing that people value more freedom and more liberty over time. Okay. And he sets that up beautifully it Okay. Then he's got a couple of graphs that support it, and I'm like great. But then he says things in the text of the

book that I find very tough to take. He it's almost as if he he disregards his own set up, and he he goes on to say things like two or three pages later, like, hey, and it's not like

these conservatives are gonna regress back into conservatism. As he starts, as he's talking about our our enjoyment of more rights and more liberties, and he clearly, he clearly does make the same mistake that he said he wouldn't make three pages earlier, and he starts to say, well, you know, it's not like these these nasty conservatives are regressing and

carrying our society back and angry white men. He actually uses the term angry white men getting more angry about the freedoms that are growing, as if to as if to say that people who might be more conservative on the political spectrum don't, for example, like the right to a small government, like the right to keep more of their paycheck, like the right to bear arms. I just, I just I found that so true, bubbling from a logic gap standpoint in that chapter that to me, it

was it was the worst part of the book. Yeah, I remember you texting about it at the time. It was that he kept changing the way he was using terms. Yeah, he says, he first off, he sets up emancipative values, and he does a great job of explaining it. But then he starts calling them liberal values. Now at the beginning, he says, now, I don't mean liberal like left and right. He says, I mean liberal like liberty, freedom, libertarian, And

I'm like, okay, I'm good with that. But then later on, as you read what he writes, he writes things like, um, for all of the talk about right wing backlashes and angry white men, the values of Western countries have been getting steadily more liberal, which we will see in the in the reason is the reason these white men are so angry. Well, he doesn't mean liberal in the left right since here he means freedom, so he he makes it's it's almost like this wasn't edited properly. I just don't.

I just I got so frustrated reading this because his graphics are right, his set up is right, and then he regresses into like relapsing into basically saying, yeah, liberal is good, conservative is bad. Right, Yeah, I remember that

being pretty sloppy, and actually from your text several weeks ago. Um, he refers to Muslims in the Middle East as the world's most conservative culture, but then talking about American conservatives, and as Craig said, it's incredibly misleading when you think of what conservatism means in America at this point, conserving the right to bear arms, conserving land ownership, conserving the

right to low taxes and limited government, etcetera. And a simple footnote would have cleared that up if he had said, you know, by in America, the term conservative is a little odd because it means conserving liberal values from the Enlightenment in the Constitution of the Declaration of Impendance against the progressive movement or something like that, right right. It really it really irked me, I mean because because he was so sloppy with it on the pages to twenty

five to six to seven. What he did it right on page to twenty four, And I'm like, lord, I just tim would have never made a mist ache like that, and well I would never use the word conservative because yeah, that good point, you know, that good point. Just another quibble. It bothered me. Sometimes he seemed kind of cavalier and Harvard economisty Ivory Towery, dismissing certain populist type political movements as just people being dumb, and obviously that's an unfair characterization.

He does that to libertarians too. There's a passage where he says, you know, the libertarian fantasy blah blah blah. And you know how, I'm so used to that I hardly even notice it. That is right. How About if you want to write a book covering the last two d and fifty years and defending the Enlightenment and making a timeless piece of art that's gonna sit on the shelf and we can look at forever. How about you

don't go to the orange guy and use the T word. Yeah, I mean to me, that's another just huge problem in the book. He just can't help himself well. And I just getting back to the whole Ivory Tower Harvard economist thing. I just found him a little dismissive at times, even as he made the point Beauty Flee, that positive change often causes momentary or or overcome able negative results, and

that that's part of the process and it's okay. Um, it seemed like he didn't recognize that that the common man sometimes has a pretty decent sense for those at the top of the ladder are getting really good at gaming the system, and they're claiming to me that this

is good for me. But I can feel in my gut that I'm being used, I'm being jobbed and I think popular outrage has been an incredibly well, not always but often, been an incredibly positive tool for holding the powerful to account when you know, globalization is a much more complicated thing than people um give it credit for the idea that well, yeah, globalization is unquestionably added to the total wealth, and it's a much bigger pie to

divide center center, but it's incredibly disruptive to entire parts of the planet, often for people's entire your lives, and they're not wrong to resent it just because globally speaking, standards of living have risen and and you're not saying it.

This is getting complicated. Maybe it's time to reapproach your mentioned about the welfare state him and understand that, well, okay, if we're gonna have a society that's not riven by revolution, we ought to look out for the people who are being um victimized in quotes by positive developments like hey, we can get cars manufactured much more cheaply in North Korea.

I don't know about that. That's a twist. I didn't expect you to add I I I've been hearing that for what five years now about how we you know, we haven't been Uh, we haven't been feeling the pain enough of the of the rust belt working class, and we need to listen to them more now. They need to bucket up more. That that's that. It's it's as simple as that, and I need to be pandered to less. Yeah,

well that is certainly true. But he you know, on what you said earlier about how the common people are at check against the intellectuals is a very important point, I think, because we're talking earlier about envy versus a aspiration. The American people as a whole, I think, have still never really absorbed the envy that motivates the most of the intellectual class in this country and has motivated most of the intellectual class since about the time of the

French Revolution. The common, average, ordinary Americans still believes in America as a land of opportunity through hard work and and that I can be the boss someday. And so that still is has a firm hold on the average American person, I think, and thank goodness for that, and that has to never change. Unfortunately, they're being preached to and have been for generations by intellectuals who are very

much of the envy school. I was thinking this on the way over to the studios, I was thinking about, how you know, it's often been said that Americans don't really, in their hearts of hearts, don't really believe in evil. They don't really comprehend evil, and they don't actually believe that it exists fundamentally as an important, significant force in

the universe. And that is true. I myself find I have to remind myself sometimes that evil actually exists and is out there, because it's so alien to my conception of the world. And I don't think that is true of other cultures. In Well, it's really interesting. It's really easy for it to be true for those of us born after nineteen seventy in the United States, too, right, I mean, we have soft times, he's good time. Comparatively,

we have no real evil to look at it. Yeah, I would say, when the militia comes through your village and slaughters everybody except the young boys, which it grabs up to be child soldiers, you have a pretty easy idea of yeah, or you have a pretty easy time picturing evil. Well, I hope we don't get a chance for that lesson anytime soon. No, indeed, how about it? In books, continue to live in ignorance of that I did, you know, it made me feel like a bad person

sometimes that some of these global statistics. I thought, yeah, I don't care. I should I shouldn't care for rest. I shouldn't care that things are getting better for the rest of the world. It's only it's only the numbers in my country and maybe even particularly in my orbit, that I cared about that. You speaking to some of the suicide stuff. The fact that people are committing suicide less around the world, that's good. But if it's rising among my culture in my country, you know, I'm bothered

by that. Maybe what what Jack is saying is that that that graph twelve point eighteen availability of pie in the third world just did not do it, just ran it by the time it gets here. I do. I do, intellectually speaking want the whole world to get better, but but emotionally, politically, I only care about my own. So

maybe that makes me a bad person. But that that makes you the of your town and and somebody who works hard at it, which is absolutely as honorable and aspiration as being the president of the u N or whatever the hell the Grand pubas called there at the u N. Well, in that vein and in the in sort of the defense, like Tim had said earlier, in the way he uses peculiar statistics to to make points.

I love I love the statistic because it really hits upon the first world, the third World, and free trade policy, where he says every cell phone added in the first world adds three thousand dollars of g d P to a developing country. I thought, well, that's just a beautiful statistic,

isn't it. It helps and I'm more than us I'm glad you mentioned the cell phone thing because, as you remember, several months ago now, Tucker Carlson did this rant on Fox that got a lot of publicity in the conservative world about how stupid capitalism is because all people do with it is by iPhones that they don't need. This

this section really is a beautiful refutation of that. I don't know if you saw some months ago there was circulating around on Twitter, Um, some guys in Africa used their iPhones to make a science fiction film with a green screen effects and everything that they made on a blanket hanging on a stick in there in an alley in their town. I mean, it's just what an incredible thing. I mean, you talk about something that can help but

make you feel good about the world. That is incredible, and the Tucker Carlson's and the anti capitalist reactionaries whom Pinker refers to as conservatives in this world turn their noses up out of it at it, either out of ignorance or even or out of worse motives, when they just they just don't care, and they they regard material prosperity, and that is to say, human happiness as a trivial concern relative to some sort of romanticist vision of what

human greatness really is. My favorite example of that sort of thing from the book was the discussion of I think it was it may have been African, doesn't really matter fisherman who would use their smartphones after they had their catch to ping all the villages in the region

to figure out what the fish prices were. To avoid, as he describes um, showing up to a village that's already glutted with fish and having all your time wasted making no money, when just down the coast there was a village that's like where the damn fisherman, which is all of history has been. That way, you get along the coast of people are starving here, and they got fisher rotting in the sun here right there. There's community

for you. There's some community for you well. And the ability to become an informed uh participant in the free market, and the glut of information that you know make kill usen drives all the suicide. But um, how it's upsides do it too, But how incredibly valuable valuable it is? Hey, I want to throw in one thing apropos nothing, just because I thought it was so great. And and if you know me, or if you listen to the radio show at all, you know that the indoctrination of young

people in schools and universities makes me insane um. And I'd like to spend the rest of my life fighting it, um, just because it presents such a perverse and upside down view of of history in the United States and what

makes for a successful culture. But I absolutely love this um Pinker's talking about actually is quoting uh Max Roser, and I believe it's from the period of I don't want to get hung up on this, oh, in nineteen seventy if you're going to write a headline, and this comes from his his talking about the human tendency toward negativity and finding small problems in bitching all the time,

which is I suffered from it myself. But if he said, if you only published a newspaper once every twenty five years or every fifty years, you'd have to write about the big stuff. It wouldn't be the momentary crap. It would be the big stories, the big progress. And he said, um, if you published a newspaper once describing nineteen seventy to fifteen, your headline would be number of people in extreme poverty fell by a hundred and thirty seven thousand since yesterday

every day for the last twenty five years. That's a hell. That's a hell of a stretch man. Seven thousand a day every day for twenty five years. And the number of people in extreme proty if I remember correctly, correct me if I'm wrong. I believe they settled on using a dollar ninety per day in twenty dollars U S dollars at this and they used for that that that number is astounding to me. I don't know how I

know they have a different lifestyle. I mean, they must not have Netflix, because I don't know how how are they going to afford the New Disney exactly. Yeah. You know, I've often said that the great thing about knowing history is that it makes you feel better about your own time because you hear on the news some idiots saying something like, oh, America today is the worst polarization ever and President Trump is the worst president of all time,

and all this sort of thing. And if it's the worst economy for a young person graduated from college to ever go out into every year of my entire life, you know, they'll just look back at the Civil War, I mean, or or or ninety eight, and you know, we have things so good. And that's what I love about this book is stuff like that that really gets you to stop and think, now, we we have things pretty darn good. I was looking over my notes from the book that I wanted to touch on just I

just really like the phrase hedonic treadmill. The theory of the hedonic treadmill. People adapt to changes in their fortunes, like eyes adapting to light or darkness, and quickly returned to a genetically determined base line of happiness. So you know that about myself, I know that I have myself. There was a time song ago when I was perfectly happy in my little one room house that I had, you know that right after I got out of law school.

In fact, my friends called it the unibomber shack because it was just literally an uninsulated house in in Placidville, California. And now nowadays, I mean, I could go back to it if I really had to, I think, But nowadays I get annoyed if my car makes it a kind of a little bit of rattling noise because of the coins in the coin rentainer. You know, so it does happen. By the way, hedonic treadmill would be a great name

for your band to compete with postmodern shot back. Oh yeah, well I've actually, since I've been working out on the hedonic treadmill, I've lost fifteen pounds. I'm like, you're happier. You're happier, which is happydonic treadmill. My wife is happier though. That's a treadmill that it feeds you pie while you're on Oh my god, where do I buy it? Uh?

You know what's interesting though, in one of the points he makes is um that that's fine, and it's true, but all those you know, levels of happiness that you've passed upward, you can't discount those and act them like and act like they didn't happen. My babies didn't die. I didn't die of a tooth infection at age thirty. You know, I have medicine, I have education. Serious, my baseline happiness is the same. But I should recognize that, right, Yeah,

count your blessings, you know. But like you said, it's hard to get elected on that platform, no doubt, right, right, absolutely true. Here's here's my favorite statistic. I loved the passage on page one seven, by the way, the pages are the same in the hardback in the paperback, and that he could afford the hard back because he was part of the one person he bought goddamnit, he bought

it on Amazon because of our fabulous internet wealth creating machine. Anyway, the passage Ray is talking about the dangers of traffic, traffic to danger to pedestrians. He's about how dangerous it was to be a pedestrian in past ages, and he compares it to the dangers presented by horse drawn travel.

And I just that's just a marvelous passage where he talks about the the how dangerous it was to be a pedestrian years ago there's a passenger where he says, here, uh, it takes more skilled across broad What he's talking about, he's quoting a guy from the nineteen hundreds. It takes more skilled across Broadway than to cross the Atlantic and a plant of the Atlantic and a clam boat. The engine of the city, Mayhem, is the horse. Underfed and nervous.

This vital brute was often flogged to exhaustion by pitiless drivers who exulted in pushing ahead with utmost fury, defying the law, and delighting and destruction runways were common. The havoc killed thousands of people. According to the National Safety Council, the horse associated fatality rate was ten times the car associated rate of modern times. And he says this was written in nineteen four, which is more than double the per capita rate today. Finally, somebody mentioning the h a

f T the horse associated fidelity. Right, Oh, there's an R at the end. Sorry, nobody ever talked you about that anymore. Damn horses a different book. But I remember the stat because it stood up to me that in the late eighteen hundreds in Chicago they averaged four deaths

a day from fire. Yeah, yeah, would would you just you know, that'd be the lead story in the news in any city when people wouldn't that many people die in a fire now, whereas today fire is so rare that the San Francisco Fire Department now has fewer firemen on it than it did in nineteen o six when the earthquake occurred, and firemen are more often dispatched alongside the ambulance just in order to have something to do. Wow. Wow.

So we want to go on to final thoughts on Stephen Pinker's Enlightenment now the Case for Reason, Science and Humanism in Progress UM alphabetical order by age. Wait one last thing before I love that he I love that. He threw back to our first book, UM, which was helped me out here, Oh Heaven on Earth, Heaven on Earth, Bid Joshua Murkovich, which was which was about socialism. Another fun fact from Pinker's book, Page one oh three, UM, Marks and Angles were wrong in their their communistic theory

of primitive cultures. It turns out that sharing was not universal in communistic and primitive cultures. In hunting cultures, where a lot of your success was determined by luck, whether or not you came across animals, sharing was fairly common as as practiced. However, in the farming cultures, sharing was not common because they knew it would increase laziness and laziness and lethargy amongst the population. I thought that was great that he pointed that out. This is news to

a Harvard professor in two thousand ninety. Yeah, exactly. I wanted to find a link to our first book. Um, so I don't know, I'll kick it off because that that leads beautifully to just my overall my head size, yes, from the enormous oh great, well, um, the need to defend things like the liberty and the free market, um, and and the enlightenment indeed, reason, scientific progress, the rest of it. It's it's like, you know what it's like.

It's it's exactly like this. Maybe you're about to go to bed, Maybe you're a couple of cocktails in and and you drop a glass and you realize the next forty minutes of my life are going to be spent cleaning up this mess. Or it reminds me when onyxed my old dog got sprayed by a skunk like ten thirty at night. This this terrible feeling of this shouldn't be happening. I shouldn't have to do this. Why am I?

Why is this weight been thrown upon me? It's it's idiotic and astounding and shocking and sickening to me that you have to now, especially to young people who are at universities that are supposed to be accomplishing the opposite. You have to defend the idea of reason to them. But it has to be done. And I just I think this book is a terrific tool, A primer or do you say primer and a read a chapter now, chapter later. You don't have that plow through the whole

thing it was. I think it's a great set of tools to defend um that which is elevated humanity from horror and starvation to affluence and health. So it's a would recommend from Joe absolutely, Yeah, yeah, I think I can dovetail on that and just say I would recommend this book to everything Joe said, I fully agree with.

I think it's a I think it's a very useful set of facts and objective data to point to the fact that things are not getting worse, things are getting better, demonstrably show Now, I there are some parts with the book that we may quibble with. There's some parts that I think are fairly lean, but overall, I would definitely

recommend this book. I would read this book. There's far more good than bad in this book, and I think it's I think it's it's worth consuming for, even if you agree with the principles in here, to be familiar with some of the facts, because you're going to be confronted with them as you deal with the mainstream public over the next few years. We see this the real the refutation of facts, the idea that um science is

bad because it was all created by white men. I mean, we have to get back to some basic truths here, and we have to be able to point to something like this book. And I think I think it's really helpful that the author of this book is as an atheist liberal frankly. I mean, you know, I wouldn't say libertarian. I would say he is a more liberal leaning human being, and I think that's very helpful with a book like this.

I'll let Tim goless since he chose the book, and I'll be short um if nothing else, because the book stands out, uh for not being negative. I mean, we're just we're just awash in nonfiction books about how awful things are. As A Jonah Goldberg said the other day, I don't know if there's ever been a time in US history where every group felt aggrieved. Every single group feels like now is a bad time for them. And you can pick any color, any gender, any age, anything.

And to have a book out there to to to explain the overall arc of things right now is uh, you know, we need that, ladies and gentlemen. Old simple Jack beautifully said, I I keep My grandfather was a lumber deliveryman, and uh, you know, grew up in poverty in picking cotton in and pecans in West Texas. And when I think about the progress that occurred between his life and mine and the success that I've had in my life, it brings to mind that we are so fortunate.

If you take seriously the idea that with great fortune comes a great responsibility, or if you take seriously the idea we owe it to future generations to leave the world no worse off than we found it, then a book like this that makes you feel and really see how marvelously successful and happy we are today and how much we've accomplished and even though there are still a

long ways to go. It really I think it reinforces the idea that we have an obligation to make the best of our lives that we possibly can on an individual basis, and and as as a society to try and and say we have come so far. It would really be a shame if we were to abandon it and walk away from it or denigrate the efforts of previous generations that got us this this far. Well, I had to. I hate to add length to this thing, but I think one of the biggest threats to enlightenment,

as we touched on, might just be comfort. Just what do human beings do when they don't have threat of war or starvation? What do we do? Do We just sit around and dietable obesity? Here and here's my my suggestion is the first thing that we should all do is reflect on how fortunate we are. And since it's Thanksgiving season, perhaps it's appropriate for us to say the first answer to that question is think about how lucky we Remember that that Dr. Seuss book, I Did I

ever tell you how lucky you are? This is the grown up version of that. So take a moment for Thanksgiving to look at this book and consider how fortunate we as a society and as a as a world. I really are well right, and it is an answer to the intersectional nonsense in that it is a global truly global. As Jack indicated, every every group and subgroup in the world can use this book as a gratitude exercise. As you know you're suggesting Tim and understand how far

we've come. Gentlemen, Tim and I have each selected a book. Do either of you have our next book ready to go yet? I'm gonna nominate Jack. You Jack here into the book learning. You got a book you want to suggest? You know we should do Dick, just because you keep saying him. Because I love that book it three times already, the whole thing, all the way through. I absolutely love. Surely when you reread it though you skip all the whale nonsense. No are you kidding me? All the particulars

of the whales. The chapter the Whiteness of the Whale is one of the best of the whole book. Why about why the color white is so terrifying? Man, Marvel, I'm not kidding intersectionality here is this a college social class? To be the next book we'll we'll come up with a book. Yeah, yeah, we'll come up with tweeted Jack and Gel if you have suggestions for us. Yeah, that's a that's a pretty decent idea. Alright, thanks Fellows, well done. Extra large