the repertoire
571 stories told in three or more talks: Bohr's horseshoe, coffee without cream, the Rabinovitch jokes. This is not decoration on the philosophy, it largely IS the philosophy: a fixed stock of jokes and anecdotes, redeployed to carry different theory each time, and he retells them precisely because you have heard them. Each page collects every retelling, so you can watch one story do twenty different jobs.
the bits · told as he tells them
Niels Bohr's horseshoe
Niels Bohr had a horseshoe on his country-house door; when a scientist friend asked why a scientist would keep a superstitious charm, Bohr answered 'I was told it works even if you don't believe in it', Žižek's model for ideology today.
“Of course I don't, I'm not an idiot, I'm a scientist... I'm told it works even if you don't believe in it.”
coffee without cream / coffee without milk
A customer orders coffee without cream; the waiter says they have no cream but can offer coffee without milk. Even though the result is identical, the absent supplement matters, Hegelian negativity in a joke.
“Can I get coffee but without cream, please?... Sorry, we don't have cream, we only have milk, so I can only give you coffee without milk.”
Starbucks ethical consumerism
Buying a Starbucks cappuccino is sold as supporting Guatemalan organic farmers and saving the planet; the owner appeared like Anthony Giddens calling Starbucks an ersatz place of collective experience. The sin of consumerism and its redemption are packaged together in the same purchase.
“what starbucks enables you is to be a consumerist and be a consumerist without any bad conscience because the price for the countermeasure... is already included into the price of a commodity.”
the hit parade · entering, leaving, and never leaving the rotation
The chart reads the tape, not the man. The side columns compare how often a story is told per recorded talk before and since 2020, so a story that appeared sporadically in the 2010s and constantly now still ascends, and one he has quietly stopped reaching for still fades even if it never fully vanished. The rates are normalised against how much tape each era holds, since the collection is far denser after 2015; a talk dated only by its upload counts for nothing, and stories the index may hold under two names sit the side columns out. Champions are ranked by how many different years carry the story. A bar is one year of talks, 2000 to 2026 (the two earlier talks fold into the first bar).