The Youngest Guy in the Worst Room in America w/ Rep. Maxwell Frost (episode #558)

If you noticed a bit of a set change, it's because we’re in the nation’s capital...and we got one: a real-life member of Congress. Rep. Maxwell Frost.

We talk about broken housing markets, broken healthcare, broken Congress, Trump’s corruption, a broken Cuba, Epstein, UAPs, and the tragedy of being a drummer with no place to practice.

• Making music is for rich kids now
• From jazz drummer to Hillary field organizer
• Sandy Hook, March for Our Lives, and the road into politics
• Florida’s felon disenfranchisement fight
• Guns, swamps, Confederate flags, and talking to people who don’t like you
• Florida’s politics are red… its ballot issues are a lot messier.
• Gaining political power is easy. Keeping it is the hard part.
• The case for going big, whether Congress likes it or not
• Housing abundance, rent hikes, and the great pet-fee wars
• Donald Trump’s extremely lucrative career in public service
• Biden’s DOJ, Brazil’s crackdown, and the problem with accountability theater
• Political violence, Trump’s rhetoric, and blaming the victim
• UAPs, Epstein files, and the bipartisan hunt for weird stuff
• Cuba, war powers, and why Frost doesn’t want another Venezuela-style adventure

Watch/Listen On:

• Substack
• YouTube
• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify

When Everyone Stops Pretending w/ Steven Pinker (Episode #557)

The famed psychologist joins the Fif to discuss common knowledge, collapsing norms, authoritarian lies, campus insanity, the persistence of progress, and the enduring menace of postmodernism.

• Steven Pinker on why “common knowledge” is much stranger than it sounds
• The social machinery behind weddings, money, and power
• How a norm starts to die once someone breaks it and gets rewarded
• Trump as the great destroyer of polite restraints
• The institutions that lost the authority to enforce trust
• How new taboos appear without anyone admitting who created them
• The spiral of silence reaches Harvard
• Pinker tries to fix academic freedom from inside the building
• The Trump administration turns a real university problem into a power grab
• Why dictatorships keep lying after everyone knows the truth
• The subversive power of a blank protest sign
• Ceaușescu discovered that crowds are not always props
• The right decides cancel culture is useful after all
• Pinker revisits the case for progress, with several ugly caveats
• Why stories can change moral imagination
• Postmodernism gets a second life in Trumpworld
• Silicon Valley goes looking for kings
• Harvard’s antisemitism debate gets very uncomfortable
• The blank slate takes another beating
• The Monty Hall problem breaks the room

Read When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… by Steven Pinker

(Bookshop | Amazon)

Watch/Listen to the Episode:

• Substack
• YouTube
• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify