Steven Pinker

So as I've mentioned, the book is called The Punisher's Brain, your nonfiction work.

And according to your website, it received a blurb by none other than Professor Steven Pinker of Harvard University.

So that must have been a great honor.

It was.

I had...

The whole reason I got into law and neuroscience was in part due to Steven Pinker.

I had read his, we were on a vacation and I'd read, I was at the pool reading his book.

I think the book I was reading was How the Mind Works.

And somebody like John Brockman especially should really be coming out and speaking on what he knows.

When Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Pinker flew out to a TED conference on Epstein's private jet in 2002, their agent Brockman was on board as well.

Pinker's scanty ties to Epstein have been singled out in recent weeks.

He says he only boarded Epstein's jet because of Brockman.

And I started collecting information about music and sound and how important it is to the creation of the world.

And what I discovered basically is unlike Steven Pinker's comment that sound is no more than auditory cheesecake, sound and music.

I found that sound and music are central.

We're not made of matter.

But it is interesting to think what happens when the complexity of the LLMs reach the same level of complexity of connections.

You know, I remember like Steven Pinker was, someone asked him, describe what the human brain is and kind of a sentence.

And he said, making patterns.

That's like human intelligence.

But let's get to the feedback.

First and foremost, you meant Steven Pinker, not Peter Singer.

that's right i was surprised to learn that they're different

people despite having the same name

I found out that I made that mistake by posting on the Discord.

As soon as our episode was done, my phone was blowing up and people were like, oh, did you see Scott Alexander posted a response? And I was like, uh, I wish I had seen that while we were recording because then I could have told Steven.

Then people on the Discord were like, did, did you mean Steven Pinker rather than Peter Singer? And

I'm like, are those different people?

If we can wake up every day and be grateful for everything from the air we breathe, which we couldn't live if it was here and we just take it for granted, to the water that we drink and then to the people in our lives and the country that we live in and just do, you know, a gratitude kind of, you know, thinking or journal every day.

that will expand and change people's lives i think that uh you know we are missing uh gratitude uh in in many ways uh you know for for many people but what i will say on the other side is uh if you take the news out of it and you take the negativity of social media out of it uh our planet is in a really good place and that may sound strange But there's a Harvard professor, Steven Pinker, who wrote this book, The Better Angels Among Us.

And he is a very analytical guy.

And he went back through the history of humanity.

They'd refer me to people.

You know, it was just part of my life that I would be continuing to mentor people because that's what I truly enjoyed.

You know, I didn't know if I was going to get back into, you know, maybe teaching, you know, be a professor, who knew what.

But, you know, as I said, the book just kind of took on a life of its own as I was reading through the journals, developed a very raw.