It was over five years ago that we recorded the first episode of people I most

admire. My very first guest, Harvard linguist Stephen Pinker. He's kept busy since then,

writing two books and emerging as one of the leading advocates for academic freedom.

When it comes to sociology and psychology, I think you just can't do your

job if you're constantly watching your back. It perverts the whole enterprise. You just can't do it

honestly. Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt. Five years ago, we talked a lot about his book entitled Enlightenment Now, the case for

reason, science, humanism, and progress.

I loved the book and I very much agreed with it, but I made fun of him because it seemed

to me that everyone already believed in science and knowledge and progress.

Did he really need to write a book about defending those principles?

Well, I guess the events of the last five years have proven how naive I was,

and how much science and reason do need strong advocates.

I started this conversation by asking him if you understood what had happened

to create so much hostility to science.

In a more recent book, Rationality, I tried to figure out what would seem to be obvious, namely

that rationality is a good thing and science is a good thing. Why should those even be

controversial? They were, in part, politicized because

people thought that the institutions of science, even more so today, are themselves political.

There's also a background romanticism of does reason mean that you've got to be a grim,

emotionless drone who can't enjoy music and sunsets and playing with

children. So I had to disabuse people with the idea that using reason means that there's no such

thing as human goals, preferences, emotions, so on. Yeah, in economics, rationality has really

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