Steven Pinker Returns (on common knowledge)

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

Armchair Umbrella

Tv & Film, Music, Comedy

4.6 • 68.3K Ratings

🗓️ 24 September 2025

⏱️ 120 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Steven Pinker (When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life) is a cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, and author. Steven returns to the Armchair Expert to discuss how in general things have gotten better, that tracking the data can make one more optimistic than reading headlines, and the differences between private knowledge and common knowledge. Steven and Dax talk about how evolved language generates common knowledge, the role of conventions and ritual in human coordination, and the power of Super Bowl advertisements. Steven explains the counterintuitive fact that announcing one’s philanthropy actually does more good, why we have to expose ourselves to a universe of ideas to find out which ones are good, and why he’s not afraid of AI.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now.
0:06.5	Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.
0:10.0	Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.
0:14.0	Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert experts on expert.
0:16.7	I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Lily Padman.
0:18.9	Hi.
0:19.8	We have one of the world's great thinkers among us today. We do. He really is one of my favorite. He's like, you know, he's regarded, of course, as being one of the smarter people on the planet. He's a Harvard professor. But he's so optimistic. I rely on him to, like, reset my pessimism. Yeah, but he, as he says in here, he doesn't phrase it that way.
0:40.4	He doesn't.
0:39.3	But I agree with you. It sparks hope.
0:43.0	Stephen Pinker. He's an award-winning experimental cognitive psychologist, best-selling author, and Harvard
0:48.0	Professor. His books are rationality. Enlightenment now. That's a great one. The blank slate,
0:53.5	the sense of style, and his new book,
0:56.4	When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, Common Knowledge, and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life.
1:03.8	This was a brain twister.
1:05.9	Oh, yeah.
1:06.6	Also, this has sort of reshaped a little bit of the way I think about some things, and I think it might for other people, too.
1:14.7	Yeah, yeah.
1:15.4	It's really interesting.
1:16.3	It is.
1:17.2	Please enjoy Stephen Pinker.
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