(spray paint tin whooshing)
(upbeat rock music)
- Welcome to Reckless Disagreement,
the only show on the Internet you can trust.
I'm your host, the sexy genius,
and I've spent the day memorizing poetry
because of this scene from Good Will Hunting.
- As a matter of fact I won't,
because Wood drastically underestimates
the impact of social--
- Wood drastically underestimates the impact
of social distinction predicated upon wealth,
especially inherited wealth.
You got that from Vickers,
Work in Essex County, page 98, right?
- Because Matt Damon is a brilliant mathematician,
he has apparently memorized entire history textbooks
right down to the page number of certain important quotes.
Hence.
I figure if memorizing history textbooks
makes you a good mathematician,
memorizing romantic poetry will probably help me
figure out how to escape from this YouTube bunker
I've locked myself in.
That logic follows, right?
(chuckling)
I'm getting a little desperate.
So let's just get right to discussing all the weird
assumptions Hollywood makes about smart people.
(thudding)
(clicking)
- It is a melancholy truth that even great--
- Great men have poor relations.
Dickens.
- Oh no, I know Hamlet,
and what he might say with irony, I say with conviction.
What a piece of work is man.
- I get what they're going for here.
If your brain has all this extra space,
you may as well fill it
with expensive sounding words, right?
But the ability to repeat things other people wrote down
doesn't necessarily mean you're smart.
Think of all your friends who can recite Bill Pullman's
speech from Independence Day.
- We will not go quietly into the night.
- Which is actually pretty close to what's happening
in this famous scene from Tombstone.
First, Doc Holliday's like, "In vino veritas."
Then real quick, Ringo's all "Agi quod agis."
Then Holliday gives him a look,
takes his time, and says, "Credat Judaeus Apella, non ego."
Ringo takes a second, then
"Iuventus Stulturum ... magister."
And then Holiday's all, "In pace requiescat."
That's not a conversation,
"Credat Judaus Apella non ego"
is a semi-antisemitic line from one of Horace's satires
that means let the Jew Apella believe it, not I.
Holliday says,
- Evidently, Mr. Ringo's an educated man.
Now I really hate him.
- But really, they're just throwing semi-relevant
famous quotes at each other like a couple
of 19th century Jake Peraltas.
- Welcome to the party, pal.
- Besides, what kind of loser would spend all his time
memorizing lines from his favorite...
(buzzing)
Well, this is a little bit different,
but you know whenever a genius movie character
quickly solves a Rubik's Cube?
(jazzy music)
- Basic link.
- Solving the Cube isn't an insane feat.
Anyone can do it provided they read the instruction manual
that comes with every Rubik's Cube.
It's a party trick, like knowing origami
or quoting Dr. Strangelove.
♫ Da da da da da da
- Yee-haw.
- Oh, and I've decided after very little research
that this phenomenon can be traced back
to J. Robert Oppenheimer,
who reacted to the first ever successful nuclear bomb test
by remembering a quote from Hindu scripture.
- Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
- He didn't actually say it, he just remembered it.
Because if he had really responded to the first ever nuclear
explosion with, I am become death, destroyer of worlds,
everyone would've been like, (scoffs) shut up, Julius.
(thudding)
The J in J. Robert Oppenheimer stands for Julius.
(clicking)
Was that clear without me explaining it?
Here's an incomplete list of smart characters
that are also huge dicks.
You've for your Dr. House, your Tony Stark,
your John Nash from A Beautiful Mind,
Mark Zuckerberg from Social Network,
Henry Higgins from My Fair Lady,
Nathan from Ex Machina, Caleb from Ex Machina,
Ava from Ex Machina eventually,
Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes.
Alan Turing, Julian Assange, Dr. Stephen Strange, Khan,
wait.
How many Benedict Cumberbatches have we had here?
A whole batch of Cumberbatch (laughs).
Well that was terrible.
I should learn how to edit so I can cut that out.
In real life, you can be a genius and cool to people.
It's true, I've seen it happen.
In fact, the tendency is toward the opposite of this.
The smarter you are, the more aware you are
of your own shortcomings, and the knowledge
that you don't have.
It's dumb people who tend to be cocky
and overestimate their own intelligence.
This is called the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
The people who think they're wicked smart
are actually wicked dumb.
For example, see men explaining jokes to women on Twitter,
most of Reddit, or the people correcting my abridged
definition of the Dunning-Kruger Effect
in the comments below.
Yeah, I know about you.
I understand that there really have been smart people
in the world who were also dicks,
but the infatuation with them that movies seem to have
is still pretty baffling to me.
It's like we think the best part of being smart
would be not having tolerate other people anymore.
Which, like, life hack,
you don't have to be smart to be a dick to people.
You can be dumb and mean,
that's just some information for you to chew on.
(thudding)
Batch of Cumberbatch, you're better than this Sargent.
Movies really like to show us smart people writing on glass.
I don't have much to say about this
other than it's weird.
Are smart people too distracted by their own genius
to keep a (bleep) notepad around?
Scraps of paper are everywhere.
I have one here, and I'm literally trapped
in an underground bunker with a bunch of DVDs
and some camera equipment.
I'm living off rat stew and refried beans,
and even I know where the damn notepad is.
That's all.
(thudding)
Oh gee, I just thought of something clever,
I should write it down.
(clicking)
- When did you become an expert
in thermonuclear astrophysics?
- Last night.
- When Tony Stark needs to build something,
we always see it happen because Robert Downey Junior
looks great with shirt off.
Especially for a 52 year old man.
Wow, 52.
Looking good, Bobbo.
Bobbo and I are friends,
which is why I get to call him Bobbo.
But there's nothing sexy about working your brain muscle,
so movies just skip that part
and make brilliant ideas seem like they pop up
with no warning like boners sometimes do.
- No, no, no, no, tell me.
(dramatic music)
- Well, each of his messages begins
with the same five letters.
C-I-L-L-Y.
So I suspect that Cilly must be the name of his amore.
- That's impossible, the Germans are instructed to use
five random letters at the start of every message.
- [Woman In Blue Dress] Well, this bloke doesn't.
- Love will make a man do strange things, I suppose.
- Yes, yes.
Love just lost Germany the whole bloody war.
(sploshing)
(groaning)
- What is that?
What's the matter with you?
- Genius.
- If we all go for the blond,
we block each other, not a single one of us
is gonna get her.
- We love this idea so much
that we write it into true stories.
Alan Turing didn't crack the German codes
because of something a girl said in a bar.
It would've been illegal for her to discuss
her decoder transmissions with him at all.
And John Nash didn't invent the Nash Equilibrium
because of a pretty blond,
because that's not even how the Nash Equilibrium works.
Wait a minute.
Matthew Good was in the Imitation Game,
and he was also in Watchmen,
where he played Ozymandias,
who sometimes quoted Percy Shelley,
who wrote Epipsychidion, which sounds like epiphany.
Ephipahnies do happen in real life.
But this is still part of Hollywood's weird aversion
to showing us characters who actually work
for a living.
Would Tony Stark ever have done the board meeting?
Batman sleeps through his.
Indiana Jones sneaks out of his office window
to avoid grading even a single paper.
And those people are all geniuses.
I'm not saying we have to have a 45 minute scene
where Indiana Jones gets in trouble at tenure review,
but it's kinda weird how much we idolize laziness.
American culture has this major hard on
for pulling yourself up by your bootstraps
and paying your dues, but all our really brilliant
aspirational heroes never do any of that.
(thudding)
- These smart arms are controlled by my brain
through a neural link.
Nano wires feed directly into my cerebellum,
allowing me to use these arms
to control fusion reaction in an environment
no human hand could enter.
- Question, Dr. Octopus.
Are you a physicist, or a neurologist, or a roboticist?
Because you just casually described
incredible breakthroughs in all of those fields.
And you know what?
It's not fair for me to use a super villain.
Let's stick to normies, like Lucius Fox from Batman
who not only knows how to design and build a train system
but also how to run a multinational super corporation
and cure fear toxin.
But fine, again, I get it.
We're still in superhero movies.
Dr. Elizabeth Straw from Prometheus
is an archeologist and astronaut,
and feels comfortable performing
an autopsy on an alien head.
Those are three very specific skills
that require a lifetime of study,
and the third one isn't even a thing.
And bringing back Will Hunting,
he's not just a great mathematician,
he memorizes textbooks, already said that,
and is a total expert in the probably made up field
of reading peoples' minds based on their paintings.
- Maybe you married the wrong woman.
- [Sean] Maybe you should watch your mouth.
- And this is a problem that has bled over
into the real world.
Bill Nye the Science Guy isn't an expert in all of science,
but we treat him like an expert in climate change
because he has science in his middle name.
I mean, I agree with him,
but we may as well be getting a take from Dennis Quaid
since he at least played a climate change expert
in a movie.
Which is why real climate experts have issues
with what he says.
Also, you know how Stephen Hawking occasionally predicts
the end of the world?
That's fine, but it has nothing
to do with theoretical physics,
which is his area of expertise.
Science is actually like a whole of different things.
It's really well illustrated by this cartoon
by Professor Matt Mike,
which shows a circle containing all of human knowledge
and shows a Ph.D as a tiny little red dick
poking out toward the rim.
Which, by the way, vindicates the entire point
of my show because we've conclusively proven
that movies are screwing with our heads
and making us dumber, so this isn't just a bunch
of pointless observations.
These are real problems.
I'm doing important work here.
We all are.
Together.
Let's finish up.
(thudding)
There's the title, have you read it?
Is it long enough?
Great.
Cool, go. (clicking)
I'm not really worried about smart people.
They're gonna be fine.
If anything, they're probably in on it.
Trying to fool us, make it harder for us to know
what's really going on so they can stay one step ahead.
My God.
What are the smart people hiding?
Oh well, it's probably boring.
I mean, they're just a bunch of nerds anyway.
(thudding)
Oh, dammit.
(crackling)