A Better Future Through Enlightenment: Interview With Steven Pinker

Rule Breaker Investing

The Motley Fool

Business, Investing, Invest, Rulebreaker, Stocks, Company, Growth, Stockmarket, Fool, Foolish

4.5 • 928 Ratings

🗓️ 7 March 2018

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Poverty, disease, violent crime, famine... nearly every measure of human suffering is going steadily down, as surely as overall prosperity is going up. That's not just optimism, that's what the data show. Today we're delighted to present our guest Steven Pinker, author of several books including his latest, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, which highlights an optimistic, if counterintuitive, look at the future.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for Rulebreaker investing comes from our friends at Rocket Mortgage by Quicken Loans.
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0:19.6	It's the Rule Breaker Investing Podcast with Motley Full Co-founder David Gardner.
0:27.0	All right, welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing.
0:32.0	Well, what a way we have to start March for you. We've got
0:35.2	Dr. Stephen Pinker of Harvard University, the author of the new book Enlightenment Now. I mentioned
0:40.4	this last week. Some of you may have picked that book up and already
0:43.6	read some of it. It's a long book. It's about 455 pages. I am happy to say I
0:48.5	read it all and have this special opportunity to share my conversation with Dr. Pinker when he visited Fool HQ yesterday.
0:56.4	The focus of our conversation starts with the world of money and stocks because that's where
1:00.6	I like to start things, but you'll see we go from there to talk a lot about how we humans view our society today where the world's headed and from one of the foremost I won't call him an optimist he doesn't call himself an optimist but from one of the
1:13.8	foremost bright thinkers who brings data and some history to show that things not
1:19.0	only aren't quite as bad as you might think that they are they actually might be better than they've ever been before.
1:25.2	And just by way of introduction then, here's a little bit more of a formal introduction for our
1:28.8	guest this week.
1:30.4	My new favorite book of all time, that's what Bill Gates had to say about Stephen Pinker's new book.
1:36.0	Stephen Pinker is one of the world's leading authorities on language and the mind.
1:40.0	That's right, he's a psycho-lingquist.
1:42.0	He's the Harvard College Professor of Psychology at
	...

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