All right, we've got Simon on the line. Simon, young people, they're just all a bit, a bit lazy, aren't they?

What are you for?

Welcome to McDonald's.

Have you get the six minutes, please?

Some say young people are work shy, but at McDonald's, we hired 47,000 of them last year.

How's your night?

Like George here, who keeps things running during a Friday rush.

Resilience, making it happen at McDonald's.

Welcome to the Quillette podcast, hosted on alternate weeks by me, Jonathan K.

And by Iona Italia. Quillette is where

Freethought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless

commentary. You are about to hear a free preview of this week's episode. To hear the full

episode, and to get access to all our podcasts and articles,

visit us at Quillette.com and click the subscribe button.

I'm your host this week, Iona Italia. In this week's podcast, I interview linguist and psychologist Stephen Pinker.

Steve is the Johnston family professor of psychology at Harvard, and the author of 13 books

on language, cognition, psychology, evolutionary science, and writing.

His books include The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Better Angels of Our Nature,

Why Violence Has Declined, Enlightenment Now, The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress,

Rationality, What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, and My Two Personal Favorites,

The Blank Slate, The the modern denial of human nature,

which I read shortly after it was published in 2003, and which radically changed my view of the

...