Steven Pinker Returns (on common knowledge)

Summary

Podcast Summary: Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

Episode: Steven Pinker Returns (on Common Knowledge)
Release Date: September 24, 2025
Host: Dax Shepard (with Lily Padman)
Guest: Steven Pinker (Harvard Professor, Cognitive Psychologist, Author)
Topic: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life

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Overview

This episode features the return of renowned cognitive psychologist and author Steven Pinker, who joins Dax Shepard and Lily Padman to discuss his latest book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. The episode unpacks the idea of "common knowledge"—what it is, how it differs from private knowledge, and why it underpins so much of human cooperation, culture, economics, and political life. Pinker and the hosts also weave in broader discussions about optimism, progress, societal coordination, language, and the challenges of truth in information-dense modern cultures.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Steven Pinker’s Return & The Importance of Optimism

• Dax and Lily are excited to host Pinker in person, noting his reputation as an optimistic thinker who offers a fact-based, hopeful perspective on human progress.
• Pinker clarifies his outlook is not mere optimism, but attentiveness to data that’s often overlooked by headline-driven media.
• He emphasizes:

  “It's not really optimism. It's really more just attention to facts, to data that you don't get from the news..." (09:37)

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2. Life in California & Silicon Valley's Shifting Politics

• Pinker reflects on a year in Berkeley, being exposed to “granola culture” and the rationality community.
• He contrasts the “can-do spirit” of Silicon Valley with the more pessimistic intellectual tone in Boston.
• He discusses the recent political shifts among tech elites, noting a movement from centrist libertarianism to reactionary or even monarchist ideas as a backlash to “wokeness” and anti-tech sentiment.
• Dax adds that both the political left and right have increasingly developed an anti-tech “techlash.”

  “If the left likes it, then it must be awful.” (06:33)

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3. Progress, Crisis, and How We Perceive Risk

• Pinker reviews misleading perceptions about progress due to the media’s coverage of sudden, often negative, events.
• He references the overall trends of reduced war deaths, increased life expectancy, and improvements in global poverty and democracy, reminding that setbacks are typically “blips” rather than true reversals.
• He introduces the "availability bias"—our tendency to overestimate risks based on the most recent or vivid events.
• Memorable quote:

  "You don't see a headline about a region of the world that isn't having a war. … But if you look at the trends, it shows that we really are better off than people before us." (10:14–11:03)

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4. Defining “Common Knowledge” (Technical vs. Casual Meaning)

• Pinker distinguishes the technical, recursive definition from informal usage.

  “Common knowledge in the technical sense is, I know something, you know it. I know that you know it. You know that I know it. … ad infinitum. So that's common knowledge.” (15:55)

• Example from Friends: “They don't know we know they know we know.” (16:43)

Private vs. Common Knowledge

• Private: “Everyone knows, but no one knows that anyone else knows.”
• Common: "Everyone knows and you know that everyone knows..."

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5. Implications of Common Knowledge

• Common knowledge enables social conventions, coordination (rendezvous, protests), and collective action.
• Pinker’s examples:
  • The Emperor’s New Clothes: The boy’s outburst makes the emperor’s nudity common knowledge, changing social dynamics instantly. (20:09–21:18)
  • Money: The value of money is predicated on common knowledge—everyone accepts currency because everyone else does. (22:01)
  • Public protest: Why autocrats fear demonstrations—these create visible, undeniable collective sentiment. (22:01–25:31)
  • Rendezvous Problem: Language and rituals are tools for generating common knowledge quickly and unambiguously (wedding ceremonies, traffic rules, etc.).

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6. Euphemism, Indirect Speech, and Social Relationships

• Pinker explores why humans use indirect speech, euphemisms, and ambiguous language in sensitive social contexts (e.g., “Netflix and Chill”).
• The purpose: Maintain plausible deniability, prevent creating unwanted common knowledge, and protect relationships from irrevocable changes.

  “What I thought was fascinating was ... they can maintain a plutonic relationship in the wake of 'Netflix and Chill', but 'I'd like to come upstairs and have sex with you' ... we cannot participate in this illusion ... anymore.” (37:14)

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7. Focal Points & Coordination Without Explicit Agreement

• Focal points: How people coordinate when communication isn’t possible (e.g., the clock at Grand Central).
• Used in bargaining, international relations, and even animal behavior (e.g., coral spawning on a fixed night after a full moon).

  “So a focal point or common salience is when you don't have common knowledge ... Not because necessarily it was convenient … but if anything is going to pop into someone's mind, that would be just because it sticks out.” (38:44)

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8. Common Knowledge in Economics & Marketing

• Stock Market: Keynes’ “beauty contest” analogy explains speculative bubbles, meme stocks, and the importance of anticipating what others will do.

  "You're picking the stock that you think other people are going to pick..." (44:27)

• Super Bowl Ads: Products that require mass adoption (credit cards, tech platforms) use widely viewed events to generate common knowledge, fostering network effects.

  "If you advertise in public, where other people know what a Nike wearer is like ... then they're likelier to identify with a product." (50:02)

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9. Common Knowledge and Social Standing in Philanthropy

• The paradox of visible vs. anonymous charity, drawing on Maimonides’ ladder of righteousness—double-blind giving is “most righteous,” but public giving encourages others (effective altruism).

  "They agree that a common knowledge gift is less righteous than a double blind gift. That is the person is more generous is more likely to donate in the future." (57:00)

• Curb Your Enthusiasm parody highlighted this social paradox. (57:02)

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10. Cooperation, Mutualism & Social Coordination

• Evolutionary biologists’ views on cooperation: Not all helping is altruistic; mutualism is about mutual benefit, not self-sacrifice.
• Coordination problems exist for all animals; humans use knowledge, animals evolve simple focal points (e.g., moonlight for spawning coral). (63:13–64:41)

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11. Current Events: COVID, Academia, and Political Polarization

• Pinker critiques the failures in COVID response: overstated certainty, lack of transparent cost-benefit analysis, and suppression of dissent.

  "It's not immoral to suggest those things in a state of knowledge and say we don't know. ... But at this point we're hedging our bets." (69:45)

• On academia’s left-leaning reputation: It’s problematic for public trust and for intellectual diversity. Suppressing alternative viewpoints can hinder discovery and truth-seeking.

  "You've got many departments where it's 100% left and you know the left isn't right about everything." (75:40)

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12. AI Fears: Should We Be Terrified?

• Pinker downplays existential fears about artificial intelligence, attributing them to anthropomorphizing machines rather than technical realities.

  “In the case of something that is designed by humans ... there's no automatic reason to think that they should want to maximize their power, maximize their well being.” (80:34)

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13. Moralism and Mob Behavior

• Much violence is driven by moral convictions, not just self-interest; common knowledge of wrongdoing enables coalitions and mobbing.

  "As I put it, the world has far too much morality." (83:56)

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On the News and Progress:

  “Anything that happens suddenly is almost certain to be bad ... Good things tend to build up a few percentage points at a time, and they can compound and transform the world.” (10:10–10:14)

• On Euphemism and Indirect Communication:

  "If she [knows the code] turns it down, it’s less painful ... it gives you deniability of common knowledge." (35:04–36:30)

• On Super Bowl Ads as Network Effect Triggers:

  "For products that depend on network effects ... companies are willing to pay more per viewer and more likely to advertise in the super bowl." (50:02–51:14)

• On Academic Freedom:

  "No one's infallible. Kind of expose ourselves to a universe of ideas and find out which ones are good." (79:37)

• On Moralism:

  “The world has far too much morality.” (83:56)

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Noteworthy Timestamps

| Timestamp | Topic / Quote | |---|---| | 09:37 | Pinker on optimism: “It's not really optimism. It's really more just attention to facts, to data that you don't get from the news...” | | 16:05 | Technical definition of common knowledge | | 20:09 | Emperor’s New Clothes explained as a common knowledge moment | | 35:04 | The function of “Netflix & Chill” and indirect speech | | 38:44 | Focal points and the Grand Central Station analogy | | 44:27 | Keynes’ beauty contest and the stock market | | 50:02 | Super Bowl ads and generating common knowledge for networked products | | 57:00 | Philanthropy: the common knowledge ladder of righteousness | | 69:45 | COVID-19: importance of honest uncertainty and cost-benefit analysis | | 75:40 | Problems of academia’s political monoculture | | 80:34 | AI will not crush humanity—anthropomorphizing the issue | | 83:56 | “The world has far too much morality.” (on moral aggression and witch hunts) |

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Tone and Language

Pinker maintains a clear, witty, and layered intellectual style, with Dax and Lily unpacking concepts in an accessible and often humorous way. The conversation is lively, thoughtful, and peppered with pop culture examples that ground complex ideas (e.g., Friends, Princess Bride, Curb Your Enthusiasm). Dax frequently turns to analogies and personal confessions to clarify psychological insights, while Pinker offers precise technical language and research-backed evidence to support his explanations.

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Final Thoughts

Pinker’s newest book and this conversation reveal the hidden scaffolding beneath human society—how collective rituals, conventions, and even fictions all rest on invisible but crucial “common knowledge.” The episode connects philosophy, psychology, history, economics, and daily life, making the abstract feel urgent and practical. Listeners come away challenged to rethink how we coordinate, cooperate, persuade, and even disagree, with Pinker’s characteristic blend of data, clarity, and optimism offering a refreshing antidote to cynicism.

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If you found Steven Pinker’s arguments compelling, his new book, "When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows," digs deeper into all these paradoxes, from wedding rings to war and money to memes.

Transcript

[Dax Shepard]

Wondry plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now. Join Wondry plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Lily Padman.

[Lily Padman]

Hi.

[Dax Shepard]

We have one of the world's great thinkers among us today.

[Lily Padman]

We do.

[Dax Shepard]

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, he's so optimistic. I rely on him to like reset my pessimism.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. But he, as he says in here, he doesn't phrase it that way.

[Dax Shepard]

He doesn't.

[Lily Padman]

But I agree with you. It sparks hope.

[Dax Shepard]

Steven Pinker, he's an award winning experimental cognitive psychologist, bestselling author and Harvard professor. His books are Rationality, Enlightenment. Now that's a great one. The Blank Slate, the Sense of Style, and his new book When Everyone Knows that Everyone Knows Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power and Everyday Life. This was a brain twister.

[Lily Padman]

Oh, yeah. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Lily Padman]

It's really interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

It is. Please enjoy. Steven Pinker. We are supported by Tropical Smoothie Cafe. Life moves fast nowadays. The pace of life just seems to be getting quicker and quicker and when that starts getting overwhelming, take a break and get on tropic time. Tropical Smoothie Cafe believes enjoying the fun and taste of the tropics is the getaway you need in the middle of your day. Take a moment of me time with made to order smoothies, bowls and wraps. Every sip and bite feels like a little trip to a tropic resort. And if you're looking to kickstart your day, check out their protein packed breakfast. Tropical Smoothie Cafe makes it easy breezy. To get your morning protein, try a freshly blended peanut paradise smoothie with 22 grams of protein.

[Lily Padman]

Mmm. Sounds delicious.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Steven Pinker]

He's an object.

[Dax Shepard]

He's an exper. Hello, sir.

[Steven Pinker]

Nice to see you in person. Thank you. It's great. Thank you so much for having me.

[Lily Padman]

So happy to have you back.

[Steven Pinker]

Thank you. Well, then this time you really are having me back.

[Lily Padman]

I know. Much better in person.

[Steven Pinker]

But last time, I think. I don't know if it was Delta or Omicron, but Covid was still happening.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Steven Pinker]

And you were gracious enough to allow me to do it remotely. But now here we are. Happy to be here.

[Dax Shepard]

The real thing in general. Do you like going on the road?

[Steven Pinker]

Almost every author bitches about book tours. But I figure, you know, I spent all this time writing a book. People want to hear about it. How can I complain about that? I like the fact that people are actually interested in all the work that I did.

[Dax Shepard]

How long did you end up in Berkeley? Because last time we talked to you, you were on sabbatical.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah, I was there for a year.

[Dax Shepard]

Had you spent that much time there ever before?

[Steven Pinker]

Not in Berkeley. I lived in Palo Alto for a year. I was a professor at Stanford early in my career, and I spent a sabbatical in Santa Barbara, so I spent more than three years in California.

[Dax Shepard]

I've been a sabbatical in Santa Barbara, too. I was going to Santa Barbara City College.

[Steven Pinker]

I didn't know that.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, yes. Went there for a year and then came to la. So I was just in Nashville for the better part of the last three months, filming or. No. We built a house there and hoped to retire there and be on the lake. I was already suspicious of this, but I was also delighted to experience it so palpably, which is just three months. There was very helpful in me looking at LA from the outside, kind of understanding where people are coming from with their different political things. Like, to step out of. Of your culture bubble is pretty profound. I mean, you're going from Harvard to Berkeley, so it's not like you're the same thing, but there's no Mason Dixon line being crossed. But did you feel like you got understanding of anything in that year there? You're like, I see where this is coming from.

[Steven Pinker]

I did well, partly was exposure to the Berkeley granola culture. As one friend put it, everyone looks like they've just come back from gardening. But also there's the rationality community, which Berkeley is kind of the epicenter. And I wrote a book called Rationality.

[Dax Shepard]

That's right.

[Steven Pinker]

Also being exposed to some of these Silicon Valley people, they've acquired a pretty bad reputation, especially in the last eight months.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Steven Pinker]

There actually was something refreshing about the old can do spirit. I talked to them about carbon capture or planes that would run on synthetic fuels or even on solar power, and kind of a dreamy, far off look would go in their eyes and they tried to imagine how to make it happen.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Steven Pinker]

Instead of complaining about how we're doomed and how everything is corrupt, they're at least some of them trying to solve problems. That was refreshing.

[Dax Shepard]

It's still fertile ground for optimism. People do feel very empowered to fix things. Did you get any perspective looking back towards Boston?

[Steven Pinker]

The mindset that problems are solvable, that you don't just moan about what's going wrong, but you try to fix them using human engineering. Now, there's a lot of that at Harvard, especially at mit, my previous academic home, but in the general intellectual culture, it's much more. Let's bemoan everything that is going to hell. There was some refreshment there, although when I was there, there was already concern about the reactionary turn that a lot of Silicon Valley people were taking. The neoreactionary movement.

[Dax Shepard]

What's that?

[Steven Pinker]

Traditionally, people in Silicon Valley were centrist, mildly libertarian. There has been a kind of lurch toward. This is going to sound weird to say it, toward monarchy and religion.

[Dax Shepard]

Kind of totalitarian.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah. As opposed to the liberal democracy, which is not sexy, it's not revolutionary, it's not exciting.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. It's not disruptive enough.

[Steven Pinker]

Disruption can be a good thing if you're improving stuff. But if you're thinking about how to make us learn back to the Middle Ages, not so much. And I think part of it is there is such a reaction to wokeness, such a recoil, that people are kind of springing away from what they see as the excesses of the left, but ricocheting all the way to the right. If the left likes it, then it must be awful. Partly exaggerated by the fact that a lot of the cultural mainstream went really anti tech. Tech became the villain.

[Dax Shepard]

Kind of replaced bankers.

[Steven Pinker]

Yes, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

We used to hate people in finance.

[Lily Padman]

You think that's just on the left, or do you think everyone sort of a anti tech?

[Steven Pinker]

Well, you're right. There's also a tech lash from the right as well.

[Dax Shepard]

They fit perfectly two archetypes. Like if you're on the right, they represent the swamp in the conspiracy of who's running everything. They're actually really running everything. And then if you're on the left, you don't trust any corporation intrinsically. And if they have a lot of power, then you know, they can fill a lot of buckets.

[Steven Pinker]

Right?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Steven Pinker]

I met with some people like Mike Brock, who is one of the tech entrepreneur and former CEO who basically left to blog full time about what he early on spotted as a threat to ideals of liberal democracy. Coming from a neoreactionary in Silicon Valley, he was ahead of his time because we've now seen, particularly with Elon Musk. At the time it was Peter Thiel. A lurch from people who used to be pretty centrist, eclectic to highly ideological.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Now what do you think's driving that particular niches? Perhaps belief. I mean, I guess it seems very intuitive that perhaps they don't think the masses should be trusted with decisions because they're not quite as smart as they are. Do you think that's the underpinning of that?

[Steven Pinker]

There's some of that.

[Dax Shepard]

Like I try to wrap my head around how someone would go like, you know, the best move is one single person making all the decisions that can't be challenged. That seems so antithetical to reason.

[Steven Pinker]

This entire country was founded on refuting that idea.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Steven Pinker]

Because we tried it. It was called monarchy. It didn't work out so well. You know, democracy, as they say, the worst form of government. Except for all the other ones that have been tried.

[Dax Shepard]

Right, right. That's fair. Well, what I always appreciate about you, and while I'll always need a dose of you if ever you want to come, is I am drawn to the optimists. I'm a bit cynical and skeptical and so I really need you. There's a handful of you, I think you're very much an optimist. The ideals of the Enlightenment that you explored, and if we look at them from the long arc, they're kind of coming true. I like that message. I think Yuval's also a really good person in the intellectual space that's kind of optimistic and. And then Bill Gates, of all people.

[Steven Pinker]

Absolutely. Bill Gates. There's a website, Our World in Data proprietor is Max Roser that I rely on. And with me and with Our World in Data, I'd say it's not so much optimism in the sense of putting on a happy face. Rose Tinted glasses, seeing the glasses half full. I think there's a role for that because it gives you the gumption to actually try to solve things with some confidence that you might succeed.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, the right amount of delusion could be helpful.

[Steven Pinker]

Or even when you have uncertainty, you should know that within the realm of reasonable possibility is success. That's what makes it worthwhile. And how do you know? Well, our ancestors were faced with pretty big problems, and they solved a lot of those. So why would we be the first generation not to solve any of the problems facing us? But, you know, it's not really optimism. It's really more just attention to facts, to data that you don't get from the news, because the news concentrates on what happened yesterday. And anything that happens suddenly is almost certain to be bad, or at least way more likely to be bad than good, because things can go to hell very quickly.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, rainbows are rare. You don't get the sudden really great thing.

[Steven Pinker]

But, you know, good things tend to build up a few percentage points at a time, and they can compound and transform the world. Or they're things that don't happen. You don't see a headline about a region of the world that isn't having a war. You know, like Vietnam, for example. For those of us who grew up during the Vietnam War, that would have been huge news. No war in Vietnam for decades. Nah, you're a dreamer, you're a utopian. But of course, no war in Vietnam isn't a head war in South America, et cetera. So what Rosling does, what our world and data does, what I try to do is show you the things you can't get from the headlines, like plotting deaths in war over time, plotting how long people live, how many mothers die in childbirth, how many kids die, how many kids go to school. And you see, there was never a Thursday in October in which it generated headline. But if you look at the trends, it shows that we really are better off than people before us.

[Lily Padman]

And still. Right. Still since.

[Steven Pinker]

So I try to update it with swallowing hard, gritting my teeth. You know, I read the headlines, too. There's a lot of bad stuff happening. Not everything gets better all the time. It couldn't. That would be a miracle. So war deaths have shaved off a couple of decades of Progress. In year 2024, last full year for which we have data, it kind of sent us back to the 90s. Things definitely got worse. People think, oh, that must be because of Gaza. It's actually much more Sudan, also Ukraine and a bunch of other Conflicts.

[Dax Shepard]

Syria.

[Steven Pinker]

Syria in its time was one of the worst. So if you look at the curve, World War II, it was just literally off the charts. Let's even start the clock in 1946. So even then it goes down. In the last few years it's crept up a bit. Still not like it was even in the 80s, the 70s, the 60s, the 50s. So there has been progress, but not a miracle. It's not inexorable. It doesn't happen by itself. It happens because people rack their brains to try to solve problems. They don't always succeed, but sometimes they do succeed. So just the mindset of let's look at the data. Sometimes we'll find things are getting worse. Because sometimes things do get worse, sometimes they get better. And by and large, in general, almost everything has gotten better.

[Dax Shepard]

They tend thus far to be blips rather than patterns, right?

[Steven Pinker]

When you're in the middle of one, you never know, right?

[Dax Shepard]

But I look at the homicide rate during COVID it spiked and it got a little scary, maybe even doubled in some places and in a sense now fallen and rejoined the initial curve.

[Steven Pinker]

That's exactly what happened. And so one of the graphs that I plot is American homicide rates. In the 90s there was the great American crime decline, where violent crime fell in half in some places like New York by three quarters. And then it fell again in the 2000s, and then it fell, it shot up in 2020 and it left everyone.

[Dax Shepard]

Scrambling for the explanation. And everyone claimed it, whether it was the broken windows theory or it was the stop and frisk theory, or Dubner, was it abortion being legalized?

[Steven Pinker]

I look at all those hypotheses and we don't know for sure. I think some are more plausible than others. But what you're saying is right. In that case it was a blip in that I was getting really nervous, like, dammit, what are the trends that I was really happy about? Is then a U turn, but U turn did a U turn. So we don't know whether it's a blip or a new normal of war deaths. Again, back to the 90s, not back to the 80s, 70s, 60s, 50s. There's a huge war that everyone forgets about between Iran and Iraq, sometimes called the Idiot war, where probably 800,000 people were killed, maybe close to a million. In the 80s, people forget about that. Anyway, going back to the theme, some things have gotten somewhat worse. Another thing is democracy. The world got more and more and more Democratic. Then about 10, 15 years ago, it kind of leveled off and went down a Bit better than it was in the 80s, 70s, 60s, but not going in the right direction. Is this a blip? Will the momentum reverse? We just don't know. But some things do reverse. So updating my graphs, Covid screwed up a lot of them. Yes, not surprisingly. But since the vaccines ended, Covid and the immunity, the world has gone back on track on all of the positive trends. And so we're actually at global records for GDP per capita that recovered, longevity that recovered after taking a dip, extreme poverty. And those are, like, really important. They affect billions of people. Yes, we are. Even after Covid hit better off than we ever were in history of the world. I like to. I think it's not so much optimism, but just tracking the data. And that makes you more optimistic than if you're reading the headlines, especially. And I'll bring in a little cognitive psychology here, because it's my field, but there's a bias called availability. Namely, if there's an image, if there's a narrative that is available in memory that you can retrieve on demand, easily because it's so vivid, it's so salient, it's so gory, so recent, that tends to distort your subjective feeling of risk or estimates of danger.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. Like if you were mugged last night, you have a different perspective on the.

[Steven Pinker]

Crime rate, especially if it was you. But even if you read about someone who was mugged or you read about a guy eaten by a shark on Cape Cod, then everyone stays away from the beach. Even though there's, you know, one death in a century. Every year, people get killed in car accidents on their way to the beach.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, by the dozen.

[Steven Pinker]

So anyway, that's a distorter. That's in general, the story that I like to tell. Let's try to follow the data, not the headlines.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So this current book, it's immediately confusing, which you immediately start to unwind. But what we would call common knowledge is not what you would refer to as common knowledge.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah. Sometimes the professors, the mathematicians, the scientists will glue onto a word. It's a little bit misleading, but that's the thing about words. Once they stick, they stick. They get grandfathered in. There's nothing you can do about it. That's just what they're called.

[Dax Shepard]

That's right. Awful is your example in the book.

[Steven Pinker]

So, yeah, awful does not mean filled with awe. It used to. Yes. Terrific doesn't mean worthy of terror or causing terror.

[Dax Shepard]

And tough shit, we're here now. And that's what it is.

[Lily Padman]

Incredible. I guess.

[Steven Pinker]

Same thing that's another one.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Steven Pinker]

Common knowledge in the technical sense is, I know something, you know it. I know that you know it. You know that I know it. I know that you know that I know that you know it ad infinitum. So that's common knowledge.

[Dax Shepard]

But that takes a minute to really, like. You can say it, I read it. But you really need the diagrams, and you really need to think about all the implications of that. So knowing that Stephen and I both know there are lights in here.

[Steven Pinker]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Give us some examples of this difference between private knowledge and common knowledge, because it's kind of fascinating.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah. So private knowledge is when everyone knows something, but no one knows that anyone else knows it. Common knowledge is when everyone knows something and you know that everyone knows it. And you know that right now it sounds mind boggling. Like, how could I know that you know that? I mean, you start to get confused. It's even used as a source of humor in some cartoons and sitcoms.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, give her Seinfeld. Cause Fried Friends.

[Lily Padman]

I know it.

[Steven Pinker]

Everyone has told me about that episode. They don't know we know they know we know.

[Lily Padman]

That's right.

[Steven Pinker]

And then Rachel says, jo, you can't say anything. And he says, I couldn't even if I wanted to. So that captures the idea. So that has four levels of thoughts within thought.

[Lily Padman]

Right.

[Steven Pinker]

When it gets to three, it starts to get hard. When it gets to four, it's almost impossible. So what am I talking about?

[Dax Shepard]

I think another great example of it is rock, paper, scissors. When you're playing rock, paper, scissors. And this is terrible. I'm assessing how clever I think my opponent is right away. And I think if they're just baseline clever, there is something that feels sturdy about rock. It feels powerful. If you're someone who doesn't do any thinking, you're really prone to throw rock. It just feels stable. I know you're smart, and so you've probably assessed that I'm gonna go for that, and so you're gonna go for paper. So if I think you're smart, I'm gonna go paper. So I generally, if I'm with someone who's smart, will start with scissors. We've gotten to three steps, and four, I think is a lot for someone.

[Steven Pinker]

There you go. So that's a great example of thinking about other people thinking. The fancy schmancy term is recursive mentalizing. Mentalizing means mind reading, getting inside someone else's head. Recursive means you try to get inside the head of someone who's trying to get inside someone's head. Oh my God, that's a great example. Rock, paper, scissors.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Also the great scene in Princess Bride about drinking the poison. Do you remember that whole thing?

[Steven Pinker]

But you would have known.

[Dax Shepard]

I would have put the poison. He's given himself an immunity to the poison. They were both poisoned.

[Lily Padman]

So are you saying it's what you just did is private knowledge? Yes, right, that would be private knowledge.

[Steven Pinker]

So common knowledge is, if you were to say, I'm gonna play rock, that would kind of defeat the purpose of that game. It is a kind of recursive mentalizing. Get inside one another. The optimal strategy when you're playing it is to be totally random. Just have a perfect random number generator in your head. Unless you can capitalize on some tell or some habit in the other person. It's called an outguessing standoff. There are other examples, like in hockey, say at a penalty shot, the stick handler tries to guess where the goalie's gonna be. The goalie guess where the shooter's gonna shoot, looking for little tells in the other. And actually it's one of these cases where randomness is rational. If you're predictable, then you're a sitting duck.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Steven Pinker]

What would be then? Common knowledge, though, is you blurt something out. So if something is public, if it's out there, if it's visible, that generates common knowledge. Without you having to think through all the layers, you just intuitively know it. And I think that's what makes common knowledge so potent in human life. It's not so much that we can do the rock, paper, scissors, or they don't know that we know that they know that we know. We do do that up to a certain point. But when something is just conspicuous, self evident, public out there, that's what generates common knowledge. So that's why certain public things make such a difference, even if everyone knew it the whole time. Conversely, it's why sometimes we try to keep things out of common knowledge, even if everyone knows it. There's a big difference between everyone knowing it and everyone knowing that everyone knowing it. And that's why we ignore the elephant in the room. We use euphemism, we pretend not to know, we look the other way. And that's a big effect in human life and in politics.

[Dax Shepard]

The emperor has no clothes is great. We all know that colloquially, but just walk through the basic steps of it.

[Steven Pinker]

So the thing about the story of the emperor's new clothes, it is a story about common knowledge. Probably the most famous because when the little boy said the Emperor was naked. He actually wasn't telling anyone anything they didn't already know. They could see the emperor was naked, but he's changed their knowledge nonetheless. He actually was adding to their knowledge.

[Dax Shepard]

But the steps are important. So people are noticing the emperor has no clothes on and they are presumably too nervous to say anything they've been told.

[Steven Pinker]

Anyone who can't see these splendid garments in different versions of the story has been cuckolded, is a heretic, is not very smart. So they've been intimidated. If you accept the story, they did doubt it. They could see it with their own eyes. They wonder, you know, are they crazy or am I crazy? When the boy blurted it out and everyone could hear him, that gave them common knowledge. And crucially, here's the other part of the story that is why I began the book with it, that common knowledge changed their relationship. And the reason that I think common knowledge is so important in just everyday social life is that our relationships depend on common knowledge. In the case of the story, it is instead of of obsequious deference to the emperor, now it was ridicule and scorn.

[Dax Shepard]

His days are likely numbered once everyone recognizes we've been asked to participate in this lie.

[Steven Pinker]

There you go. So the reason that common knowledge was of interest to so many academic fields, logic, economics, philosophy, political science, is that a lot of large scale social phenomena that depended on it, like money. What makes a greenback valuable? It's just a piece of paper. It's, you know that other people will accept it. Why do they accept it? Because they know that still other people will accept it. Everyone knows that. Everyone knows it has value. That's what gives it value. Conversely, when that common knowledge disappears, which it can, you get hyperinflation and it really can become worthless. And there are other examples. Political protests, crashes, bubbles, you say this.

[Dax Shepard]

Is why autocrats hate any public demonstration. Cuz what it's letting everyone else know is you're not alone in this assessment of our leader.

[Steven Pinker]

Not only are you not alone, but in addition, everyone knows you're not alone.

[Dax Shepard]

So again, it's this so now that buffets your confidence to also speak up.

[Steven Pinker]

Exactly. Now you have safety in numbers, you coordinate and the coordination is kind of the magic word in the book because what common knowledge is necessary for is coordination. People doing things on the same page that benefit them both. Without common knowledge, you might know and she might know. But if you don't know she knows, you know, then you still might miscoordinate. So for example, just even something like A rendezvous, ending up at the same place at the same time. Let's say you both want to get together for coffee. Your cell phone goes dead. Well, you can't just guess she likes to go to Starbucks. Because she might think, well, he likes to go to Pete's. And you say, okay, well, she knows I want to go to Pete's. She's going to go to Pete's. But then you think, no, no, no, she knows that I know that she likes to go to Starbucks, so she's going to go to Starbucks after all. And it's just going to be 50 50. The reason we evolved language is that it generates common knowledge. And as soon as you say, hey, let's meet at Starbucks, that puts an end to it. You don't have to go through the layers, right? Anyway, there are lots of cases like that. So going back to the public protest, why do autocrats fear public protest? Why is freedom of assembly one of the fundamental rights? No dictatorship can control an entire population if the population stands up and opposes them altogether. I quote the scene from the movie Gandhi where the character, maybe in real life he told a British officer, eventually you'll leave because 100,000 Englishmen cannot control 350 million Indians if the Indians refuse to cooperate. That was Gandhi's big insight. But what it depends on what will make 350 million Indians refuse to cooperate. Well, one of them can't just refuse to cooperate, because if everyone else is, he'll be a voice in the wilderness. A public protest where you see everyone and you see everyone seeing everyone, you realize the moment is now. Or if it's a public article that goes viral that everyone's read. I recount the joke from the Soviet era, a lot of great jokes from the Soviet era, because it was one of the ways in which they generated common knowledge amongst themselves beneath the notice of the government and the Communist Party. But a man's handing out leaflets in Red Square, and of course, the KGB arrest him, take him back to headquarters, only to discover that leaflets are blank sheets of paper. They confront him, what is the meaning of this? And he says, what's there to say? It's so obvious. It's a joke about common knowledge, namely, by handing out the blank leaflets. He was like the little boy in the emperor's new clothes. He was conveying the information of people.

[Dax Shepard]

Who accepted it, that we're not allowed.

[Steven Pinker]

To speak freely and that we all know that there is something to protest, that there's a basis for our grievance in a case of life. Imitating a joke. Putin's forces have arrested people for carrying blank signs.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow. You put a passage in your book from Sapiens, from Yuval's book. And I was so glad to see that. Cause I was already starting to think in terms of that book. And that that book's kind of proprietary offering, at least on a really pop level, was we have been able to congregate peacefully because we believe in stories. And I think that's an incredibly salient argument. And I would argue your book actually then breaks down the mechanisms by which story does travel or how we buy into story. But you do make some distinctions between common knowledge and say, story, just broadly.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah. I name check Yuval. Noah Harari. The way he puts it is that human life depends on fictions. Fictions like the government, the church, corporations, they're not real. I think it's a really important insight. So I don't disagree with him. What I say is that I would put it differently. They're not exactly fictions. There really is such a thing as Microsoft now. It's not stuff, it's not a particular building. Likewise the US government or Harvard University. But they're real, even though they're not stuff. But what they are is they depend on common knowledge. What makes a leader a leader? Well, I mean, he's got the guns, but you know, as we said, no government can control all of its subjects. What gives someone power is everyone recognizes that he has power. What makes currency useful is that everyone treats it as if it's useful and knows that everyone else treats it as useful. What makes a corporation is there is a public document, a charter, there can be headquarters, but not necessarily. But everyone acts as if the company exists and that makes the company exist. So it's common knowledge is the way I would put it. Rather than a fiction or conventions, a convention is a way of doing things that makes everyone better off and that exists thanks to common knowledge. A convention like Driving on the Right.

[Dax Shepard]

We were there with the coffee analogy, so let's do it there, which is you and I want to meet for coffee. We both know we have different spots we think through who's more probable to concede to that spot. But then we might have a pre existing convention which might be ladies first.

[Steven Pinker]

Yes, right.

[Dax Shepard]

Like I believe in ladies first. Or we have a convention that we go every other time.

[Lily Padman]

Right, right, right, right.

[Dax Shepard]

So in place of saying something out loud and making explicitly common knowledge, we could have a covenant that would function as that.

[Lily Padman]

Some sort of ritual.

[Steven Pinker]

Exactly. And conventions basically solve coordination problems. So for example, what day do you stay home and read the paper instead of going to work? Sunday. Why Sunday? Well, it doesn't have to be Sunday, but as long as everyone agrees it's the same day, then it can work. Because you don't want half the people showing up to work and then the other half staying home. And then on Thursday, it's the other way around. It wouldn't work very well if everyone picked their own day. If everyone picks the same day, productivity's.

[Dax Shepard]

Only going down by 1/7.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah, right. And different cultures have different conventions. So in Judaism it's Saturday, which is the Sabbath. In Christianity was Sunday. Now of course, both days we call it the weekend things. It doesn't matter which days they are.

[Dax Shepard]

Let's hope the Muslims can get Friday so we can have a full three day weekend.

[Lily Padman]

Would be really good.

[Dax Shepard]

Someone's got to claim Friday.

[Steven Pinker]

A wedding ceremony. When do you stop treating someone as available? A coming of age ceremony, like a bar mitzvah.

[Lily Padman]

It's true. We all just decide. Once these two people stand in front of a whole group, there's an end.

[Steven Pinker]

At that point, everyone treats them committed to each other. And crucially, it's another common knowledge generator, like a public protest, like blurting something out. Namely, they're up there, everyone's watching, and everyone is watching. Everyone watching. And it's also ratified by a ring that everyone can see. So a lot of things from your Anthro 101 curriculum. Why do these cultures do these weird things? Seems to make no sense. Well, it kind of makes no sense that they're doing it that way, but it does make sense that they're doing it some way and they all agree on what that way is. And so a lot of of cultural conventions, starting with language. So why does the word coffee mean coffee? Why does the word desk mean desk? Very few words are onomatopoeic. It's not like they sound like what they're representing. They're conventions. But that's good enough as long as everyone knows that the sound coffee means the concept coffee, then I can order a coffee and I can expect to get it. And we do that 50,000 times with every one of the words in the English language. Every one of them is a convention that works because of common knowledge.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more Armchair expert if you dare. We are supported by Quint's. With Quint's you can get luxury basics at prices that make sense. Get all the good stuff, high quality fabrics, classic fits and lightweight layers for warm weather without dropping a Fortune. I just was staring at a box of quints that arrived yesterday. Kristen's been firing off orders. We all love everything that arrives.

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[Steven Pinker]

Yeah, no, I'm a psychologist by training and by occupation, but I am fascinated by language.

[Dax Shepard]

There's so many clues into our psychology, right?

[Steven Pinker]

Well, exactly. So I wrote an earlier book which is what spawned this book called the Stuff of Language as a Window into Human Nature. And that book had a chapter called Games People Play on why we don't just say what we mean. Why is there so much beating around the bush and euphemism and shilly shallying and weasel words and that's what eventually led to when everyone knows that everyone knows. Cause the answer that I came up with. I'll just give some examples.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I love that Netflix And Chill.

[Steven Pinker]

You want to come up with Netflix and Chill. Most people know nowadays that doesn't mean you want to come up to just stream a movie and relax.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, chill's going to involve some romance. Probably.

[Steven Pinker]

Romance itself is euphemism, right? Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Eventually we'll get down to the F word, I guess. Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

What's happening? Why can't we just say it?

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah, it used to be for a century the cliche was, would you like to come up and see my etchings?

[Lily Padman]

Oh, wow. Yeah.

[Steven Pinker]

Sexual come ons are often veiled. Notice it's not even a case of plausible deniability. If he says, you want to come up for Netflix and Chill. She's a grown woman. She knows what he means.

[Lily Padman]

Right.

[Steven Pinker]

Still, that's better than do you want to come up and have sex? Better in the sense that it is more comfortable, more considerate. If she turns it down, it's less painful. Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

What I was reading, which is so fascinating, is there's plausibility of misunderstanding built into it, which is she knows he knows Netflix and Chill, but she could not be hip to that term. That's like one safety net we give both people.

[Steven Pinker]

The real safety net is she could think he may think that I'm ignorant of that term, and he could think she might think that I think that she's ignorant of the term. It's not so plausible that either one doubts that the other one knows it. I mean, they're grown ups. In fact, I did a study that when you ask people to witness dialogues and you say it could be a threat, could be a, come on, could be a bribe, does the hearer know what the speaker is up to? Even with indirect weasel words, hints, the listener knows what the speaker is up to. But the difference is the listener doesn't know that the speaker knows that the listener knows, and the speaker doesn't know that the listener knows that he knows. So there's no common knowledge. And I think that more plausibly, because grownups know how to interpret language, it doesn't pass the giggle test, then why does it still work? I argue that the reason that it works is it gives you deniability of common knowledge. You don't know that the other person knows that you know, even though you do know. And it's the common knowledge that's the basis for friendships, for sexual relationships, for romance.

[Lily Padman]

It feels like anything that has vulnerability attached to it.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah, a boss and a super supervisor to friends. What makes friends friends. It's not like you sign a contract. Do you think that we're friends. And why do you think you're friends? Because, you know, I think that you think that we're friends. That's what a social relationship is. And blurting something out changes the common knowledge and therefore changes the relationship. When you want to not change a relationship, but you still have information that you want to slip through, that's when.

[Dax Shepard]

You use politeness, euphemism, finishing up Netflix and Chill. What I thought was fascinating was the sentence that was, they can maintain a pluton relationship in the wake of Netflix and chill, but I'd like to come upstairs and have sex with you. We cannot participate in this illusion that it's plutonic anymore.

[Steven Pinker]

It permanently changes the nature of the relationship. You know, as we sometimes say, some things once said can't be unsaid. And the reason, I claim, is when they're said, they generate common knowledge. Common knowledge is what determines your relationship.

[Dax Shepard]

This just proves that we figure out how to operate in nuance, even though everyone's so opposed to it and you're so drawn to everything that's definitive. We have all these mechanisms, like we want to be able to speak in nuance. Maybe I just advanced on you, but also I can act like it was a joke and it's a silly word I used. We have figured out how to dance in that murky nuance.

[Steven Pinker]

A lot of our mental life is thinking about what the other person thinks about what we think about what they think. And a lot of fiction, a lot of movies, a lot of novels are driven by the viewer or the reader trying to get into the characters heads while they're trying to get into other characters heads, sometimes also trying to get into the author's head. Like a mystery. The whole point of it is like a workout of the mental muscles that you use in recursive mentalizing, that is to say, thinking about other people, thinking about other people, thinking. That's kind of what makes mysteries so engaging.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, we're drawn to that. We know that that's an important thing to understand. Okay, so if direct speech is the quickest way to common knowledge, and then in the absence of, we can have conventions, ladies first every other time. Talk to us about focal points and how those get brought in to bridge this.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah, So a focal point or common salience is when you don't have common knowledge. Let's say you're incommunicado, your cell phone goes dead. You just haven't been able to meet and agree on things. You don't have a convention. That is some rule that you can fall back on, then what do you do? So this goes back to probably the first discussion of common knowledge from a brilliant man named Thomas Schelling. He said, imagine a couple gets separated in York. This was in 1960, so cell phones were yet to be invented. How might they find each other? As we talked about before, they can't try to get into each other's heads about where they're likely to go. But he said a good solution would be they both go to the clock at Grand Central Station at noon. Not because necessarily it was convenient, not where they got separated. But if anything is going to pop into someone's mind, that would be just because it sticks out. Yeah, you are trying to think of what's going on in other people's heads while knowing they're doing the same thing thing and pop out. Salience conspicuity is a solution to that problem. Now, the thing is, it's not just in this somewhat contrived case of being separated, but there are lots of cases where focal points solve human problems. So an example is two people are bargaining. Now, when you bargain, you know, let's say you're dickering with a car dealer, there's a range of prices where he can make a profit. There's a range of prices that you're willing to pay the car is worth and you both want to come to any agreement rather than walking away because you really do want the car, you're willing to pay for it. He wants money, the sell it to you. How do you decide on a price? So what people often do is they split the difference or they settle on a round number, as Schelling put it, the salesman who says that his rock bottom price on the car is $30,000 $7.62 is pleading to be relieved of $7.62. So around number splitting difference is a focal point that makes a difference in international relations. Sometimes wars have been ended when a diplomat or mediator suggests some focal point that they agree on. So, for example, the Bosnian war was ended by Richard Holbrooke when he said that Bosnia Herzegovina. We're going to divide it so that it's 51% Bosnians and Croats, 49% Serbs, where do those numbers come from? Well, if Bosnians felt that a country called Bosnia has got to be majority Bosnia, but there are all those Serbs there and they're going to fight and kill if they're worried about their issue, the 5149 was a way of satisfying the idea. It's got to be majority Bosnia without too much ethnic interest. And there are other focal points like that in international relations which could make a difference, including really important one which we're now seeing threatened is lines on a map. Going back to our discussion of progress from earlier in the conversation, one of the things I wrote about my previous books was the fact that there are fewer wars since World War II than there were in the centuries before. In particular, the great powers didn't go to war with each other. Why? Well, one reason is the world decided to freeze the borders on the map. Even if they were illogical, even if they ran in the middle through territories, they separated ethnic groups, the lines are there. If we accept them, it prevents endless bickering and sometimes invasions and sometimes ethnic cleansings. They may be illogical, but the fact that they're there makes them focal points. And it's at least something that we can agree with on. You're kind of going on something, anything instead of the debate would be endless as to where the line should be.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Steven Pinker]

Whereas I can see those lines. You can see those lines. I know you can see those.

[Dax Shepard]

You grew up seeing those lines. You already accepted these lines for some period or sometimes.

[Steven Pinker]

Here's another example. The reason that the 1967 lines won't work is that a lot of the Jewish areas of Jerusalem expanded into what used to be Jordan.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Steven Pinker]

And so it wouldn't make sense to lop them up. But then another focal point is, okay, so for every few percentage points of old Jordan that we allow Israel to keep permanently, there have to be the same number of percentage points carved out of the old Israel that will be in a new Palestinian state. Again, this is all part of the good old days when people actually talked about a two state solution and US Presidents tried to get the two sides to agree on it. That's the way the agreement would have worked. Again, it doesn't necessarily make any sense. Who's to say that what Israel had in 1949 is the right amount of territory? There's no answer to the question, what's the right amount of territory? There is an answer to the question, can everyone see a certain division of territory and know that the other guy sees it? So again, you got a focal point. Going back to your question, why is.

[Lily Padman]

Gerrymandering allowed in this country if it's the antithesis of that? It's like you can just move the lines anytime you want.

[Steven Pinker]

That's a good point. I hadn't thought to make the connection, but yeah, one of the reasons that Gerrymandering is considered outrageous.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Steven Pinker]

Is that. It is not a focal point. It's done expediently. It is done to maximize the number of representatives that the side doing the gerrymandering can claim.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I want to talk about how these concepts apply to a few different categories, and then I want to save a tiny bit of time to throw you into the lion's den of popular issues. We deal with that. I love watching you navigate. But how do these focal points affect the stock market?

[Steven Pinker]

A lot of economics. In particular, ones that aren't just predictable from boring. Supply and demand and investment. You buy a stock because they're building a factory. They'll make widgets. People will buy the widgets. They'll make a profit. You get a share of the profit. Or they'll plant seeds for forests. The forest will grow. They cut down the wood. It's wood. They sell the wood. They make a profit. That's kind of the way you think economy should go. But of course, it's not the way the stock market goes.

[Dax Shepard]

It started that way, but it didn't take long to.

[Steven Pinker]

No. Because the famous economist John Maynard Keynes, he likened it to a beauty contest, but not a standard beauty contest like the old Ms. Rheingold ads that ran in American magazines for many years where there were six faces and you pick the prettiest. Here he imagined there were six faces. Doesn't matter how many. But the prize goes to the person who picks the face that the most other people pick.

[Lily Padman]

Oh, wow.

[Steven Pinker]

And all of them are picking the face that they think the most other people will pick. So he says to solve that, you can't just look at beauty. Beauty. You've got to get in the heads of other people. He said speculative investing is kind of like that. You're picking the stock that you think other people are going to pick, increasing demand in the future and driving the price up above and beyond its actual productive value.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Without almost any acknowledgment of whether the company itself is destined for bigger profits or not. That's not really the goal. You're incentivized to sell your stock for more even if the company collapses.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah, exactly. As long as you could find, as investment analysts put it, a greater fool. A greater fool. And so you get phenomena like meme stocks where some influencer who just has a following. There's a guy named Roaring Kitty.

[Dax Shepard]

This is the game stock.

[Steven Pinker]

So this was a moribund business.

[Dax Shepard]

Bricks and mortar, video games failing, losing money.

[Steven Pinker]

He talks it out on his social media feed. Then Everyone buys it because they know that all these people are following this feed and they're going to to want to buy it up. And so it goes through the roof.

[Lily Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

So there's such a variety of personal power over shaping common knowledge if someone is public. Yes. Like what a disproportionate amount of sway over common knowledge certain people have.

[Steven Pinker]

And they know that it can be too much power. And that's why you get the chairman of the Fed or other economic czars having to watch their words very careful. So Alan Greenspan famously said, I've learned to mumble with great incoherence. If you think I've been clear, you've misunderstood what I said. Because he knew that any little hint that he gave of, say, the economy getting better, getting worse, veering toward recession.

[Dax Shepard]

For the last six years, it's been, is he gonna lower the interest rate? So any adjective he uses could send a huge surge in the stock market.

[Steven Pinker]

So I quote Alfred Kahn, who is Jimmy Carter's inflation Z, and he said, the President has told me, you know, I've never used the word depression because using the word can actually make it happen. So I agree. I won't use the word depression, but, you know, we're in danger of having the worst banana in 50 years.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, now, super bowl ads, these are fascinating. It didn't even occur to me that public and private knowledge are at play in what products people advertise. So just talk about the power of the Super Bowl.

[Steven Pinker]

Well, here I owe a lot to a political scientist named Michael Choi here in Los Angeles, ucla. He wrote a book, kind of a predecessor to my When Everyone Knows that Everyone Knows, called Rational Ritual, where he talked about the super bowl phenomenon. The phenomenon is there are products that can't succeed until lots of people adopt them. But why would people adopt them unless lots of other people adopt them?

[Dax Shepard]

Like, they'll only work at scale introducing.

[Steven Pinker]

A new credit card. Like when the Discover card was introduced, it was a really good credit card. There were cash back bonuses and good terms. This. The thing is, why would you get a Discover card if you didn't think any vendors were going to accept it? And why would a vendor accept a new card if they didn't think a lot of customers would have it?

[Lily Padman]

Yes.

[Steven Pinker]

Or the best example from Chua is the Apple Macintosh computer, 1984. Everyone was using IBM PCs, and I grew up on that kind of computer. They had 24 rows of 80 characters and you had to memorize commands like roomdir, colon, fubar, slash, and if you get one character wrong, it chokes. You have to remember where you kept all your files. They were pain. And that's what why personal computers didn't take off. Well, Steve Jobs supposedly stole an idea from Xerox, which is the wimp computer. Windows icons, menu, pointing device like a mouse.

[Dax Shepard]

What an acronym for that?

[Steven Pinker]

So it's clearly a better way for ordinary people to use a computer. The problem is who's going to buy a Macintosh? Until they knew that enough other people were buying Macintosh. Because then you might be an orphan. The there may not be tech support. The price is gonna stay high.

[Dax Shepard]

No software designed for that.

[Steven Pinker]

No software, no peripherals, no consumables. So Apple, they tried it originally with the Lisa and it flopped. They then had the stroke of genius. What if we advertise it on an ad that everyone will talk about on the super bowl, where the super bowl is something that everyone watches and everyone knows that everyone watches. It's almost like a holy day on the calendar. And so they hired Ridley Scott of Alien and Blade Runner fame, and he directed the most expensive and probably famous commercial in the history of television. The 1984 ad, where it capitalized on the fact that that year, 1984, was of course the name of Orwell's famous novel. And so he had a kind of dystopian scene from 1984 of these sackcloth clad drudges filing in. Everything was black and white and there was a corporate guy issuing drivel. And then intercut, there was a scene of an athletic young woman in a tank top and red shirt carrying a mallet, running. And you go back and forth between the corporate meeting and the woman and she bursts into the room. She hammer throws the mallet onto the screen. It explodes in a fireball and then creeping up on the screen, it's on January 20th, Apple will introduce the Macintosh and you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984 that was. The ad ran exactly once.

[Dax Shepard]

Nothing about the product, nothing about the product didn't explain Windows, didn't explain the mountain.

[Steven Pinker]

But what it did is it kind of cut the knot. So now, since everyone knew that the Macintosh was a big thing, they could take a chance at buying one and they wouldn't have to be an early adopter. Likewise with the Discover card. Now this can also work for other products that depend on these kind of network effects. Other people adopting them, you know, they.

[Dax Shepard]

Have cachet or some kind of perceived the brand has value or prestige.

[Steven Pinker]

Sneakers are sneakers. But sometimes people think I wear Nike as opposed to Adidas, what generates that feeling? Well, if you advertise it in public, where other people know what a Nike wearer is like or what a bud drinker is like, then they're likelier to identify with a product. And so what Chouess showed. So this isn't just a story. Showed that for products that depend on network effects, websites, where you go to the website only if enough other people are going to it. Tech standards, things with brand loyalty that people consume in public, like beer and.

[Dax Shepard]

Sneakers, cars, Mercedes cars.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah, as opposed to things that people consume in private, like batteries, breakfast cereal, underwear. What he showed was that companies are willing to pay more per viewer and more likely to advertise in the super bowl. And advertisers charge more per viewer. Not just the size of the audience, but the fact that the event is common knowledge for the super bowl for those products, as opposed to the products that don't appear, depend on network effects. And more recent example, this is decades after TR published his book is the year before last. The super bowl was sometimes called the crypto bowl because so many of the ads were high concept ads for crypto exchanges.

[Dax Shepard]

This is 2022.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah. Matt Damon with a backdrop of astronauts and mountain climbers and Larry David playing himself at different points in history, rejecting various innovations like the fork, like the toilet, like democracy. And the punchline was they tell him about FT crypto exchange and he says, nah, I don't think so. And I'm never wrong. The joke being he's always wrong. He's always wrong.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Steven Pinker]

The irony was he was right because it was ftx, which is the Sam Bankman Fried Exchange. But the idea was, as with the Macintosh, they were not advertising the benefits of crypto, like the government can't confiscate it, it won't be a victim of hyperinflation. You can buy weapons with it. It was simply. Don't be left out. Other people are doing it, therefore they're going to bid up the price. It'll be worth more in a year than it is now. Now it's a purely speculative investment. And to gin up again, going back to the Keynesian beauty contest, guessing what other people are going to guess. Other people are going to guess. The super bowl can do that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I mean, that's my problem with crypto. There's no there there.

[Lily Padman]

Well, they're selling. It feels like being on a team, having a group identity.

[Steven Pinker]

Then it's like the Nike sneakers.

[Lily Padman]

Exactly.

[Steven Pinker]

In addition to the bidding up the price.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. And I Think that happens in politics, too?

[Steven Pinker]

Oh, yes. So I talk about that on the American primaries. It's a bizarre custom. It starts off in New Hampshire and Iowa. They're hardly a sample of the United States, but everyone knows they're important because what they do is they generate common knowledge of who has a chance of winning. So let's say there's 10 candidates because you can only vote for one. People say, well, I don't want to throw away my vote on who's going to come in seventh versus eighth. Even if I think that that person would be the best president, I'll be throwing away my vote. I want to vote for someone who's either going to be number one or number two. So my vote is counts. How do they determine that? Well, they try to guess who other people are going to vote for, and they're doing the same thing. Which is why in the primary season, minor gaffes and indiscretions and things that are utterly meaningless can actually determine who gets nominated and who doesn't. In the case of Biden in 2020, no one knew who the nominee was going to be. Then suddenly, before the South Carolina primary, Jim Clyburn endorsed Biden. I don't know even how many people had heard of Jim Clyde, but the media played it up like this was big news. And then that gave Biden the momentum that he needed. Conversely, and I say common knowledge giveth and taketh away. In 2024, everyone knew that Biden was declining.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Steven Pinker]

Did everyone know that? Everyone else knew. Well, when he had that ill fated debate with Trump in which he kept stumbling, the difference wasn't so much the number of people who thought he was impaired. That did go up, but only by a little bit. A majority of people already thought he was impaired. Right.

[Dax Shepard]

I was saying in January on this show, and I, I got some heat. I was like, guys, this can't be our candidate. And I was like, shut up. He's doing a great job. And I'm like, I was just too early on the. When you can say it out loud.

[Steven Pinker]

Exactly. But then when it was in that heavily watched debate, then it was common knowledge.

[Dax Shepard]

He couldn't deny anymore. Okay. Money is fascinating. I like this whole chapter on donating. If you could do a loose hierarchy that this famous rabbi came up with, Maimonides, you studied it in real time, present day, and it pretty much holds true.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah. So this is kind of my ear. Earliest encounter with the idea of thinking about thoughts. Because when I was in Jewish Sunday school as a kid, we were Taught maimonides, ladder of righteousness or charity, depending on how it's translated. Where the righteousness of a gift does not just depend on the cash value of the gift, but also on the circumstances of giving. In particular, the states of knowledge of the donor and the recipient. Now, the highest level to give him credit was you teach someone a trade, you give him a starter loan, you go into partnership, so he doesn't even need charity in the future.

[Dax Shepard]

You fix them, basically.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah, you fix them. I think everyone would agree. Teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Okay, then the other rungs were the interesting ones. Next one down was double blind. The rich person puts money into a community chest. Goes away, the poor person comes and retrieves it. Donor doesn't know the recipient, or vice versa. Level below that. The donor knows the beneficiary, but not vice versa. So a rich person leaves cash on the doorstep of a poor person, goes away in the dead of night. Poor person wakes up the next morning, there's the donation. The donor knows the beneficiary, but not vice versa. That's not quite as righteous as neither knows the other.

[Lily Padman]

Interesting.

[Steven Pinker]

Then one level down from that, the other way around. The recipient knows the donor, but not vice versa. So he said, imagine that a rich person walks around with a bunch of coins in his backpack and the poor person picks them out. The donor doesn't know the beneficiary, but the beneficiary does know. That's a little worse. Worst of all is rich person puts money into the hand of the poor person. Common knowledge.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Now, this is incredible because as you point out, what's the fucking difference if the impact is that you say, right, But I know, I am obsessed with the 1800s patrician class. I've read all these biographies. I love Rockefeller because he didn't put his name on anything. Like Chicago University is his. We don't know that. His research foundation. We don't know know that. Whereas Carnegie, he put his name on absolutely everything. And I'm like, yeah, he's better.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah, we all do that. But why? From the poor person's point of view, you know, who cares?

[Lily Padman]

Why is it bad if the poor person knows?

[Steven Pinker]

Well, you're right. And in our studies, people putting themselves in the shoes of the poor person don't care. They just don't. The more cash, the better.

[Lily Padman]

The poor person is picking the money out of the rich.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, they're just saying the fact that the guy, although he won't know who he helped, he will be absorbed here's.

[Steven Pinker]

Our explanation as to why we verified that people more or less followed Maimonides intuition. They agree that a common knowledge gift is less righteous than a double blind gift. That is the person is more generous is more likely to donate in the future.

[Dax Shepard]

You should give the Curb youb Enthusiasm.

[Steven Pinker]

Example, Rabbi Larry Ben David, another great Jewish thinker. And it actually is a great. So the episode was Larry donates money for the wing of a conservation nonprofit and it's named after him, carved in stone, donated by Larry David. And the other wing says donated by Anonymous. Now people are starting to gossip. Hey, do you know who Anonymous is?

[Lily Padman]

Ted Danson.

[Steven Pinker]

Wow, what a great guy. Larry is really. Pete, this is his rival. I didn't know that you could donate anonymously and people would know about it. I would have taken that option.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, people would know about it.

[Steven Pinker]

That captures the paradox that he got the benefits of the reputation for generosity and the reputation for not caring about reputation, even though he did benefit from it.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, what we want out of people is hysterical. And it all comes from being like a hundred member troupe of people. Yes, we want them to be benevolent but egoless.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, but sometimes it bites them. You know, there are people who give a ton of money away who aren't saying it, like billionaires. And then people outwardly and publicly hate them. And they don't know. Well, they're also giving away a ton of stuff. They're just not really talking about that.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, there's also the compelling argument in effective altruism, which is by people seeing other donations, it does encourage them to. It's contagious. So you might be doing more good for the cause by owning it.

[Steven Pinker]

That's exactly right. And ironically there's another medieval rabbi, Rabbi Shlomo Ben Avraham. Contra Maimonides, he argued. Exactly. That there's a righteousness in publicizing. Exactly. Because it'll incentivize others. So Bill Gates, probably the world's biggest philanthropist, he's not Anonymous and for a reason. Namely he can cajole shame his fellow billionaires.

[Dax Shepard]

Also, he's an example of like, look what I did. And you will live. You can give away this mass fortune.

[Steven Pinker]

And it works fine. And his fellow billionaire would then be keeping up with the bills.

[Lily Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

No. It's one of the most genius aspects of his already genius foundation.

[Steven Pinker]

Absolutely. I talk in the book about how the opposite was. Steve Jobs, who was criticized for not giving anything away. Then in an incident worthy of Curb youb Enthusiasm, Larry David, Bono outed him posthumously, said oh no, no, he really did give a lot, but he just was not the kind who cared about his reputation. And so all of a sudden, oh, Jobs, what a great guy.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Better than Bill Gates, like Ted Danson.

[Steven Pinker]

Although jobs gave away 1000 of what.

[Dax Shepard]

Gates gave away and had probably 1 millionth of the impact because he did it in this also methodology that yields results.

[Steven Pinker]

Right. So anyway, those are some of the paradoxes that I talk about.

[Dax Shepard]

I want to read the list, because in that section you're quoting somebody.

[Steven Pinker]

Oh, the social paradoxes. David Pinsoff deserves the credit.

[Lily Padman]

It's just people of means judging other people, though. As you say, the poor person is not judging any of this. They want the money and that's it.

[Steven Pinker]

That's exactly right. So we show that in our studies.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Steven Pinker]

The point of view of the recipient, they don't care. If you take the point of view of a third party observing it, they care.

[Lily Padman]

They care. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But also you can be poor and hate the rich people.

[Steven Pinker]

Well, that's true.

[Dax Shepard]

Also for not getting enough money. Yeah. If they're not getting something from them. This list of phenomena by David Pins is great. We try to gain status by not caring about status. We rebel against conformity in the same way as everyone else does. We show humility to prove we're better than other people. Fuck, that one is so prevalent. Yeah. We don't care what people think and we want them to think this. We make anonymous donations to get credit for not caring about getting credit.

[Steven Pinker]

That's my monadies. Yeah, that's Larry David, I should say.

[Dax Shepard]

We briefly defy social norms that people will praise us. I'm the most guilty of that one. I'm like, oh, my God, I'm repugnant. Aren't those great?

[Lily Padman]

They're so good.

[Dax Shepard]

14 of them and they were all delicious.

[Lily Padman]

The hypocrisy.

[Dax Shepard]

I want to talk about why we cooperate. Mutual reciprocity and mutualism.

[Steven Pinker]

Yes. I'm glad you brought that up, because this is kind of zooming up to really the big picture. What are we talking about here? This isn't just humans. This is any organism. How can one organism benefit another? Well, there's one possibility is that it incurs a cost. And we call that altruism in the technical, biological sense. And Richard Dawkins wrote a book, the selfish gene, now 50 years old, almost classic book. And it's interesting because it raises a punishment puzzle. You'd think that evolution would only select for selfishness. Why should it ever happen that one organism should be nice to another? Most Animals aren't unless they're related. But you do have things where they take turns grooming each other, they share food. And Dawkins had two explanations. One is if they're related, they share genes. So any gene that makes you altruistic is helping a copy of itself inside that relative or reciprocity. If you trade favors, then everyone could win in the long run. But a lot of good deeds in the animal can kingdom aren't altruistic in this technical sense of you pay a cost when you benefit someone else, but in some cases each one benefits the other. So an oxpecker bird picks ticks off the back of an ox or a zebra. It's good for the oxpecker because they get a meal, all those yummy bugs. It's good for the ox because he's tormented by fewer pests. And so everyone wins.

[Dax Shepard]

There was no sacrifice made on either end.

[Steven Pinker]

I mean, except for the chicks, but we're not worried about that. That's sometimes called mutualism. There are lots of, of cases, cleaner fish symbiosis, where everybody wins. And so there, there isn't the same evolutionary paradox, because if everyone wins, then of course they can both evolve. There's a different dilemma. And the dilemma isn't motivational like, oh, is he going to cheat me, exploit me? Is he going to take but not give when it's his turn? Is there going to be treachery? Is there going to be guilt? All that drama, which I think is very real. But in these cases it's a different problem, and that is getting on the same page. It's more of a cognitive problem. And here we go back to our couple rendezvousing all these other cases where it's good if everyone is on the same page. But how do they get there? If each has to know that the first squad knows that the second knows that the first squad knows ad infinitum.

[Dax Shepard]

Functions, relying on both cooperation and coordination.

[Steven Pinker]

Coordination, yes.

[Dax Shepard]

And this is really solving the coordination issue.

[Steven Pinker]

Exactly. The book is about coordination. And as with human focal points, like meeting at Grand Central at noon, some animals have evolved without much cognition, thinking, even a brain. They solve the problem with focal points. I give the example of the annual Great Barrier Reef sex festival, as biologists call it.

[Dax Shepard]

Tell me. I want to plan a trip around this.

[Steven Pinker]

Oh yeah, you gotta be there. So coral have this problem. They are stuck to the reef. They can't get out and get around. How do they mate? They can release their sperm or eggs into the water and hope for the best. That's really wasteful if you're doing it 24 7. So it'd be best if they could all somehow agree on what day to do it. But it's not enough for one of them to think, hey, January 1st, or eclipse or whatever would be a good day. Unless all the others agreed. Why would they agree? Now, of course, we're using agree metaphorically here. They don't have brains.

[Lily Padman]

Yes.

[Steven Pinker]

So there's nothing they can think with. So it's all the question of what evolves. That works in practice. What works for them is a fixed number of days after the full moon, say six days after the full moon. That's when they release the sperm. That's when they release the eggs. And so it's concentrated enough they can find each other.

[Lily Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

Not to get too in the weeds, but are they responding to the gravity or the light?

[Steven Pinker]

Light.

[Lily Padman]

And how they plan six days.

[Dax Shepard]

They hit their histograms.

[Lily Padman]

How do they know what day is it?

[Steven Pinker]

Well, there are a bunch of molecular clocks.

[Dax Shepard]

They have a circadian rhythm. Like that.

[Steven Pinker]

Exactly. Circadian rhythm. And so the full moon is their focal point, their clock at Grand Central. And they solve the coordination problem.

[Dax Shepard]

Sorry, I'm too distracted by this, but what happens on a cloudy night? Does it fuck up the whole system?

[Steven Pinker]

Good question. Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

Maybe they have more receptors to that.

[Dax Shepard]

Or they can tell clouds.

[Steven Pinker]

Australia. It's not that much. There's not that much clouds.

[Dax Shepard]

You haven't blessed with a really clear sky. Some.

[Steven Pinker]

Or maybe they don't even need clear sky, but just a difference. It may be just the difference between the night before or I don't know the answer.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare. This podcast is supported by fx is English Teacher. I love English Teacher.

[Lily Padman]

I love this show too.

[Dax Shepard]

Last year's critically acclaimed series returns to follow Evan, Gwen and Markie as they vie for their students divided attention. See why Cosmopolitan called its premiere season a masterclass of comedy? Again, this was really my favorite comedy.

[Lily Padman]

Of last year and we got a shout out on that show.

[Dax Shepard]

Gotta watch English Teacher. FX's English Teacher returns September 25th on FX. All episodes streaming on Hulu Hulu. This show is sponsored by Better Help. You know who gives the best life advice? Baristas. They are pulling shots of espresso while solving people's marriages, career and whatever weird things going on in their shoulder that day. And don't even get me started about airport bartenders. They're like therapists who serve whiskey, Right? But here's the thing. As wise as these bathroom philosophers and barstool counselors might be, they're not actually trained professionals. You gotta get a trained professional on the case.

[Lily Padman]

Even though we are a show called Armchair Expert, we understand, in fact, because we are a show, we understand that a professional is a professional. We talk about all kinds of things on here with each other, but it's different when you're talking to a therapist. Just, they know more.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. It's so helpful to have someone outside of your little ring of emotions that can kind of objectively watch what's going on. That's why Better help has over 30,000 licensed professional therapists who are actually qualified to help with things like relationships, anxiety and depression. They've been matching people with the right therapists therapists for over 10 years and they've got a 4.9 rating from 1.7 million client session reviews to prove it. Find the one with better help. Armchairs get 10 off their first month at betterhelp.com Dax that's betterhelp.com Dax we are supported by Hills Pet Nutrition. Something we celebrate here on Armchair Expert is that we all have juggles, struggles, faults and flaws because we're human. Those of us with pets know this all too well. We are their whole world. And that can be a lot of pressure. Things are just going to go wrong sometimes, and we can only plan for so much pet. Parent guilt is unavoidable.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. Like when you left one of your dogs when you went traveling, you probably had guilt.

[Dax Shepard]

I did. Whiskey wasn't fit to make the trip, but I was relieved that he's having such a great time with Peggy at home. But yeah, because you're only human. There's his science. Does more find the right [e-mail] Dax okay, now I'm throwing you to the wolves.

[Steven Pinker]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

I heard you talking about COVID and I don't know why. This is a bit of a pet project of mine. But I guess as I feel the tension in this country politically, what scares me the most, this is what seems to be a complete breakdown or failure from either side to acknowledge that the other one has an occasional good point or that each side can't admit when they error. And I think that's dramatically reduced kind of the reputation of different parties in both sides. In Covid, I think, is a big black mark for my side. And I heard you speaking about it. So what was happening in Covid, do you think?

[Steven Pinker]

The first thing to keep in mind is that we started out everyone was ignorant.

[Dax Shepard]

We're scared and ignorant.

[Lily Padman]

There's nothing to base anything off.

[Steven Pinker]

It was a new, new pathogen.

[Dax Shepard]

We could all be dead in six months.

[Steven Pinker]

We know that pandemics can kill a lot of people way more than wars. History has been driven by pandemics that we often forget about. Empires can fall. When I was working on Better Angels of Our Nature and plotting trends and violence, I looked at life expectancy over the course of the 20th century. And you know, it goes up and there's a big notch in the teens. Then it went up again. I said, oh, geez, that's the tragedy of war. World War I.

[Lily Padman]

Wrong.

[Steven Pinker]

It was the Spanish flu. Killed way more people than World War I. There's stuff to worry about. No one knew how was it transmitted. And the problem with, I think a lot of the public health experts is they overplayed the state of knowledge. They said, first masks don't matter, then you gotta wear a mask. It's spread by droplets, so disinfect surfaces. Then it's spread by, you know, aerosols, plexiglass barriers went up, social distancing. Now it's, it's not immoral to suggest those things in a state of knowledge and say we don't know. But at this point we're hedging our bets. The downside is so bad, the worst case is this.

[Dax Shepard]

So let's prepare for this. We're not sure if that's it, but let's prepare for that.

[Steven Pinker]

And that is the scientific method. You're never certain of anything. You have a degree of credence that goes up or down with the evidence, but you're never certain. And if new evidence comes in and you've got to back off, that doesn't refute science. That is science.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Gets you closer.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah. No one is infallible and no one is omniscient. That's kind of what science is all about. And I think the experts did not convey that enough. There was too much confidence. Which meant that when they changed their mind, it looked like they were flip flopping. They were arbitrary. Also, what they didn't do, and this is something that scientists themselves can't do, is the cost benefit analysis at its best. The scientists could say, if we have this policy, there'll be many more cases. But how much, many extra cases are worth, say, keeping a generation out of school for two years or all of the depression and anxiety or hit to.

[Dax Shepard]

The economy, or how inequitable the distribution of who had to go to work and who didn't? If ever there was kind of an elitist Policy. Accidentally, I think it was that I was like, you're essential. Why?

[Steven Pinker]

Because I want to get my UPS packages from Amazon.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I want to eat at that restaurant.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

But my thinking just job should be at home.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah. So there are basically two failures there. I devoted a chapter in my previous book, Rationality, to each one of them. One of them is calibrating your degree of confidence in an idea according to the strength of the evidence, sometimes called Bayesian reasoning. And the other is decision making under uncertainty and risk. Namely, given that you're not certain. No one's ever certain we're not God. Given that there can be mistakes in both directions, There can be false alarms that can be bad, there can be misses that can be bad. How do you make the optimal decision? Trading off the false alarms and the hits and the misses. And I think the people in charge didn't give enough attention to both of those dilemmas.

[Dax Shepard]

They're all going to come with a downside and an upside. It's a trade off. You're trying to do an analysis. I would add a third category of issue, which was a kind of reckless deplatforming, demonetizing, canceling of anyone who was suggesting otherwise. I don't fault anyone for the approach. Makes total sense to me. And I. I get it. Shutting down opposition.

[Steven Pinker]

You're right. That's another problem. And that's a third problem, which is, given that we are all fallible, given that the only way we've bumbled our way toward any kind of progress is people say things, other people tell them they're full of crap. If you disable that by saying there's some things you can't say, we might have false beliefs and no way of determining what they are.

[Dax Shepard]

Somehow our categorical nature has been most weaponized in that situation where if you were opposed to it, we had a clear distinction for you. You don't believe in science. Lock. Stop. So this is a fruitless endeavor for me to talk to you about it. That kind of wholesale write off of people based on some wordage.

[Steven Pinker]

Absolutely. And the irony is that the whole thing about science is it is a way of dealing with human fallibility, human ignorance.

[Dax Shepard]

It's gotta be open to criticism.

[Steven Pinker]

It's gotta be open to criticism.

[Dax Shepard]

That's like the quintessential.

[Steven Pinker]

And criticism. Now, of course, it doesn't mean anyone can believe anything they want as long as the evidence really does lean very strongly in one direction. But part of human nature that makes science so difficult and alien to a lot of People, including sometimes scientists themselves, is ideally, the idea is facts don't care about your feelings. Everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. These are all vital, but these are not the way people naturally think. We naturally think when it comes to big cosmic questions, why do bad things happen to good people? Why do, do wars start and revolutions and epidemics? We like to think in modern times, well, we can answer those questions. We've got scientists, we've got journalists, we've got data specialists, we've got archives, we've got experiments. It's going to be hard, but we can actually answer those questions. And so you ought to believe only what the evidence points to. For most of human history, thousands of years, none of that existed. You could not find out. Ask why did a plague happen? We're never going to know what's an uplifting myth that brings the people together and inspires us. And the idea is, no, no, you can't just believe something because it makes you feel good. You believe it only if it's true. And if it's true and it makes you feel bad, you still gotta believe it. I think that's the right attitude, but it's a deeply weird attitude. We don't naturally think that way.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So along those lines, what price do you think academia has paid for being pretty explicitly left leaning?

[Steven Pinker]

It's a problem in a number of ways. One of them is just reputation. The confidence that people have in universities has been sinking as Donald Trump has tried to cripple universities. There's not been enough pushback from the public. I mean, they should be saying, hey, these are the guys who are going to be finding cures for Parkinson's disease and treatments for paralysis.

[Dax Shepard]

Alzheimer's.

[Steven Pinker]

Alzheimer's, yeah. Give us clean energy prosthesis for people who are paralyzed. Kneecapping the institutions that are going to give us. That doesn't make any sense. But I think that some of the opposition has been muted. Like, well, aren't universities just indoctrination camps for wokeism? So that's one problem. The other is universities just going about doing their business are going to be led into some errors if some opinions. You can't say that because the things that you can't say, well, they might be right. And even if they're not right, this is an argument that goes back to John Stuart Mill and his famous essay on liberty, which of made the classic case for free speech. So the reason that there should be free speech is threefold. One of them is the other guy might Be right. The other is the truth might be somewhere in between. The third is, even if he's wrong, you'll have better reason to believe what you believe if you can explain why he's wrong. Now, universities have fallen down on those principles. You've got many departments where it's 100% left and you know the left isn't right about everything.

[Dax Shepard]

No, as it turns out.

[Steven Pinker]

Exactly. And you can point to a number of cases where I think academia kind of dug itself into a hole because it did not have people who were expressing another point of view.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I am a liberal and I want all those things to happen and I want our universities to be funded and I believe in the fourth estate and all those things. But I also think this criticism of elitism is legitimate. It's a realistic issue that I feel like our side's having a real hard time. Time or my site. I don't know what your site is grappling with that.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah, same side.

[Lily Padman]

I really struggle.

[Dax Shepard]

Just if you're looking from the outside and you go, these institutions are deeply liberal. We agree on that.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. That's also a talking point. I think the right is really pushing that talking point hard so that there is this, like, ew, universities are liberal. I think that's part of the propaganda. It is right. It's being pushed.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah. I've written about this. I wrote an article called Harvard Derangement Syndrome, How I've been a big critic of Harvard, even though I'm a Harvard professor. They're fine with that.

[Lily Padman]

Which is great.

[Steven Pinker]

Which is great. I'm not just defending my team. I'll identify what the problems of Harvard are. But some of the attacks have been just out to lunch. Yeah, we've got some jargon spewing leftists in the Department of Romance Languages, but, you know, we have free speech.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. They should be allowed to say what they want to say, too.

[Steven Pinker]

But, you know, what does this have to do with the people who are studying antibiotic research or cancer metastasis or the mathematicians and cosmologists? The image of the farthest out of the far out people confuse with the entire university system.

[Lily Padman]

We talked about this before. He's in Nashville for a little bit. So I was there for the summer and I got in the cab and the driver is from Nashville and he was talking about Nashville and I said, oh, yeah, but I lived in LA for 15 years. And he was like, oh, I'm sorry. And I. Because, like, if we said that in the reverse, you're elitist. I was like, why do you get to say it? I do think there's this like bias that we are so elite and also growing up in Georgia. I disagree.

[Dax Shepard]

I guess, I mean we acknowledge those are the elite institutions. They all result in higher income and a higher socioeconomic standing. When you go to these elite universities and if they're all very liberal and then our policy in Covid is keeping all the rich educated people in their house while the uneducated people are working and servicing them, you know, this starts to add up to a pretty legitimate point of view against the loud very liberal.

[Lily Padman]

I went to University of Georgia. It's not very liberal at all, but.

[Dax Shepard]

I think their ires towards Harvard and Yale.

[Steven Pinker]

At Harvard, in the People's Republic of Cambridge to the name of a really good neighborhood bar. By the way, a third of the faculty identified identify themselves as very liberal. Two thirds don't. I co founded the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard to push back against the cancel culture and the political correctness and so on. I did a little poll. How many of you would identify as conservative? And I got 60 professors just in our group who call themselves conservative, including some pretty famous ones like George Mankiw was George W. Bush's economic advisor. I don't think we have as much diversity as we should have, but it is not a monolith.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, okay. I didn't get any action on that one.

[Steven Pinker]

There's some cases where a left wing position was by and large right and sometimes a right wing position is by and large right. Markets really are better than a totally planned socialistic communist economy.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. History has told us that the experiment's been run.

[Steven Pinker]

Also, if you have assistance for the poor, that is not going to drive you into, you know, serfdom, into totalitarianism. If you've got Social Security, Security. So I think the left won that debate.

[Dax Shepard]

Gay marriage, we've had a lot.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah. The institution of marriage has not fallen apart as a result of gay marriage. And it has not led to people being able to marry their animals or to polygamy.

[Dax Shepard]

Having black neighbors didn't kill your neighborhood. We've gotten it right a bunch.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah, but no one's infallible. Kind of expose ourselves to a universe of ideas and find out which ones are good.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I think the fear for me is I think it's dangerous to think you know better.

[Steven Pinker]

Some people know better about some things. The thing is they gotta prove it. And again, that's the whole thing about science which people, including scientists themselves, can lose sight of. It's not a Priesthood, they're not oracles. They have reasons. Why do you think such and such? Well, I'll show you. These are the experiments and these are the data. When you stop doing that, you're not doing science anymore.

[Dax Shepard]

All right, last thing, I want to close on this because we're filled with a lot of pessimism surrounding this topic. And you're one of the few voices of very smart people that are saying, don't panic about AI. And the first thing I ever heard you talk about was simply this kind of way we came about, which is a competitive evolutionary framework. Dominance is rewarded and we out compete at a lot of things. But we're projecting that onto a machine.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So tell me why we shouldn't be as terrified as some people are.

[Steven Pinker]

AI could be abused like any technology could be. Are AI is going to turn us into pets or farm animals or wipe us out, either intentionally or by accident? I don't think so, because humans do those things. We did exterminate a lot of species. We enslaved other people, we conquered. But the thing is, humans are products of natural selection. That is a process that works by competition. Whichever variant has the most descendants takes over. And so whatever competitive instincts led that to happen are there with us now. In the case of something that is designed by humans, not evolved by natural selection, there's no automatic reason to think that they should want to maximize their power, maximize their well being. They could pull their own plugs unless you do something really stupid, like program them to make sure that they can't be turned off or that their own power is maximized. That would be a very stupid thing to build into an AI. Don't do that. But there's no reason to think it'll just happen by itself.

[Dax Shepard]

You refute this notion that because it's smarter, it can make itself smarter ad infinitum. We all kind of believe that it'll make itself smarter on its own, that there's some limit to that super intelligence.

[Steven Pinker]

Or foom after the comic book sound effect of something just taking off. And since it'll happen exponentially, as soon as it passes that threshold, we'll be powerless to stop it. I don't think that intelligence is kind of a stuff that you just have more and more and more and more of. It's a gadget that solves certain problems, can be extended to solve other problems. But you've got to actually come up with intelligence, new mechanisms for it to become smarter. Still, granted, there was a big surprise in how much smarter AI got with scaling that is the AI awakening of about 10 years ago when suddenly we got Siri and Google Translate and then the large language models came, largely because our ability to crunch numbers got so much more powerful thanks to GPU's video game chips. Turns out you could repurpose a video game chip to train an artificial intellig intelligence neural network. So that was a big thing. And the fact that all of us for 20 years have been generating all this text, we've been writing Reddit posts and Facebook posts, so there's all this data to train these things on.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Steven Pinker]

So that did lead to a big leap, just the sheer scale, but we've kind of run out of web. And you can even tell from the fact that for all the hoopla of GPT5, it wasn't that different from GPT 4.5. It's not as if it keeps going up exponentially.

[Dax Shepard]

I already wasn't using it to its capacity. I'll just say, say that. Yeah, like the fact that there was a better one. I was like, okay, I think I'm really just using it as Google for the most part.

[Steven Pinker]

Right? Well, there's a generational difference. Apparently older people use it as semantic Google that is not just text, but ideas. Younger people, they say, are using it as companion.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that's troubling. But again, I'm on high alert for moral panics and I feel like they abound everywhere you turn.

[Steven Pinker]

I agree.

[Dax Shepard]

I lied to you. There was one other word I wanted you to explore a little bit, which is moralism. I just thought this is a good concept to point out because I feel like this is something everyone should police themselves about. Once your argument or your debate has what I would say devolved into your lock sale assessment of their character, we've got kind of problems. How does it work?

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah. In the better angels of our nature, when I talked about why do people kill and injure and aggress, one category is just sheer exploitation. You make people slaves because before you had machines that was a labor saving device. Why do we eat animals? We don't hate the animals. We just like the taste of their food. So some amount of aggression is purely practical, instrumental. But an awful lot is moral. As I put it, the world has far too much morality. So if you look at what Hitler did and what Stalin did and what Mao did, if you look at most homicides aren't to steal goods like shooting a clerk at a 7 11, most of it is revenge and honor. A guy disses you, you come back and you shoot him and you think you're doing the right thing. Most murderers think they are being moral and that they're doing justice right. Not all, but that's a big category. So one of the reasons is what is justice? Justice means you punish someone. That's a kind of aggression. It can give you a license to inflict harm on others thinking you're doing the right thing. And one of the things going back to when everyone knows that everyone knows. I talk about how common knowledge of a wrongdoer is a great way to form a coalition. That is if you want to be on on the winning side, you want to be part of a big powerful group. You all agree that someone did something bad and so you pile on you mob. That is one of the surefire ways to join a majority coalition. And so sometimes you get phenomena. People have written about it like Salem.

[Dax Shepard]

Witch trials, Amanda Knox recently.

[Steven Pinker]

Amanda Knox. Yeah. Where you pick out a victim that everyone can easily sacrificial lamb is a terrifying phenomenon.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, yes, yes. We're all seem to be easily prone to that. Well, Stephen, once again, you've written an incredible book. When everyone knows that everyone knows common knowledge and the mysteries of money, power and everyday life. It's such an honor to get to chat with you occasionally. I hope we get to do it again. I sure hope so.

[Steven Pinker]

Thanks so much for having me on. Great fun to talk to you both.

[Dax Shepard]

Hi there. This is hermium Permium. If you like that, you're going to love the fact check. Ms. Monica, can I play the cutest thing?

[Lily Padman]

Sure.

[Dax Shepard]

I came in from recording yesterday. We were recording for many hours.

[Lily Padman]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

And I walk into the house and I. I hear this. This is Del.

[Lily Padman]

Oh, good job. Good job.

[Dax Shepard]

That's Delta learning the theme song of mom's car for her dad.

[Lily Padman]

I heard you asked and she delivered.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, that was a big, very sweet. That was a big eye welly moment to walk in the house and hear her playing that. Oh, this little fucking girl. What a little lady. What a little lady. We had such a fun day yesterday.

[Lily Padman]

What you guys do?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, mom's out of town. Mom was in Utah, I think on work. And so I made an enormous batch of fresh spaghetti and we all sat down as a family and ate our spaghetti and shared about our day. And then we watched a little little murders in the only murders in the building I'm behind.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Then we watched a little Devil wears Prada.

[Lily Padman]

Oh, my favorite of all time.

[Dax Shepard]

And then we went upstairs and we listened to immense world and snuggled and they both went to bed so peacefully. That's nice. Oh, it was just the most lovely night. I really love when it's just the three of us sometimes because I get all the attention that. And then this morning I got so much attention.

[Lily Padman]

Brush your hair.

[Dax Shepard]

Luckily I didn't have to brush their hair.

[Lily Padman]

No. Did they brush your hair?

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, they did not brush my hair. I don't brush my hair as that's.

[Lily Padman]

One thing you can trick kids into doing is playing with your hair.

[Dax Shepard]

I should have done that. They were good at snuggling for sure.

[Lily Padman]

That's nice.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I didn't because normally we all lay together and I only get one of them cuz Kristen has the other one. But I had both of them in my nook and it was heaven.

[Lily Padman]

That's fair.

[Dax Shepard]

And then they were both as excited as I was this morning. Cuz when we woke up it was raining. I was initially upset because of course I didn't take the leaf blow.

[Lily Padman]

You didn't? After all that?

[Dax Shepard]

After all that, I thought we had escaped the rain. I thought it had been predicted for the daytime. And I'm like, oh, we. I said it on the fact check like, oh, I got away with it.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Middle of the the night on one of my seven times waking up, I wake up and it's just pouring outside. But then in the morning I got to open my door and meditate on my bed with the sound of rain. And the girls came in, they were dancing because it was raining. Then we listened to I Love a Rainy Night. I Love a Rainy Night. You don't know that 80s song?

[Lily Padman]

I don't think so.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a good rain song.

[Lily Padman]

That's nice.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it was lovely.

[Lily Padman]

Okay. So I feel like I've had an increase in dance dandruff increase or.

[Dax Shepard]

Or arrival. I don't, I don't associate you with having dandruff at all.

[Lily Padman]

I feel like sometimes I've had it before.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, you have one of those classic Eric compliments.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Which is go ahead and yeah, roll that out.

[Lily Padman]

Amy was braiding my hair and Eric said it's a good thing you don't have dandruff because you'd really see it on your hair because it's so dark. And I said, yeah, I do have it sometimes. He said, well yeah, I did see one flake. That's why I thought it.

[Dax Shepard]

That's why I said you don't have any.

[Lily Padman]

Oh my God. But I do feel like it's increased. And every now and then I'll just like this is Gross. I'm not going to do it right now, but I'll, like, stick my fingers in my scalp.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

My fingernails. And then I'll start just, like, scratching like crazy, kind of tearing it all up. Lot of skin comes out.

[Dax Shepard]

But you're. That's a little different, I think.

[Lily Padman]

Are you sure?

[Dax Shepard]

Dander is just, like, you're not even touching it, and it's just kind of raining. If you get in there with those long fingernails and start gouging and then some skin cells come off. That's.

[Lily Padman]

You think that's regs?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

Huh.

[Dax Shepard]

Now you know where I get it, which I can't stand it. And I do have a new approach to this. I'll get it in my beard. And I like to itch my beard because I can't get lotion on the beard.

[Lily Padman]

Oh.

[Dax Shepard]

I can't penetrate the skin. I'll just get a bunch of lotion all over the beard.

[Lily Padman]

Oh, really?

[Dax Shepard]

But what I have been doing is I have a new face oil.

[Lily Padman]

Great.

[Dax Shepard]

And I put it on the tips of my fingers and really go up in, through.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, that's a good idea.

[Dax Shepard]

And I think that's been helping a little bit.

[Lily Padman]

Okay. Or a gel. Like, a gel moisturizer would also probably have that same impact.

[Dax Shepard]

A penetrative.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. And, you know, like, for skincare, you should be pressing it in. In press.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Lily Padman]

You don't need to do, like, a smudgy. Oh, you can just press it in.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. I do need to. I do think I need to get my fingers between the hairs.

[Lily Padman]

Yes. Just cover your arm.

[Dax Shepard]

If I just press, I'm just gonna have all hair, but, like.

[Lily Padman]

Like, look like I'm pressing on top of hair. Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, first you went through it, though.

[Lily Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

You didn't just go like this.

[Lily Padman]

Okay, I'm going like this. Okay. And then you go, like, go in and out.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Lily Padman]

And I'm touching skin, too. It's touching the hair, but. But there's. The skin is getting impacted.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

I think you should try that.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Lily Padman]

Anyway, if people notice my dandruff, that.

[Dax Shepard]

Is, so be it.

[Lily Padman]

What's happening these days?

[Dax Shepard]

You don't have any. But. So if they notice them, they're. They're imagining it. Do you kind of want. You do want to do it, don't you?

[Lily Padman]

Did you see one came up, a.

[Dax Shepard]

Couple came off, but again, none are.

[Lily Padman]

Sticking to your black right now. It's not happening, but normally it happens. It's like, this is. This is tv.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. It's like when you have a Dog who can do a trick and until you ask it to do it with other people.

[Lily Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

And then I went on a hike this morning. I was like, oh, it'd be lovely to go on a hike because it's so overcast and tropical feeling. And I underestimated the humidity. And I do not think I've ever been more drenched on a hike, ever. I have my weight vest on and when I got back and took off the weight vest, it was so soaked. And then my tank top, I hung up and it actually dripped like I had been in a swimming pool from where it was hanging.

[Lily Padman]

Or this is a ding, ding, ding. Because we had a guest on yesterday who was quite sweaty.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yes. Who sweat through their shirt onto the couch. And then you sat there and then you were quite damp.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Afterwards.

[Lily Padman]

But it was. It was welcome.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Because he was hot.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I thought about how hot he was a few times today.

[Lily Padman]

Today.

[Dax Shepard]

I think that's a real testament to someone's hotness. When it's like a day later, you're like, you're thinking about it.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was hot.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Do you think about it at all today?

[Lily Padman]

Not today.

[Dax Shepard]

Not today. Okay.

[Lily Padman]

Not until right now that he's come up. I'm thinking about it now.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And he's so hot, right?

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, He. He has a very cute face. Some people have very.

[Dax Shepard]

He has a boyish face, I'd say.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, I guess it's bold, boyish. But there's also something. It's not all that cookie cutter, but it's very handsome. Some people have faces like that. Like, you just kind of want to look at them for a really, really, really, really long time. That's really lucky.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That's almost. Maybe the definition of attractiveness is you want to look at it for a long time.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, I guess that's true.

[Dax Shepard]

The hot person did you know was in a Got Milk Milk at.

[Lily Padman]

I probably.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you have him?

[Lily Padman]

I might. I need to go back and Look. I. Somebody DM'd me that it. They're back. Like they. He saw this guy saw a Got Milk ad in Los Angeles on a billboard.

[Dax Shepard]

Really?

[Lily Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

With the milk mustache.

[Lily Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

So people are listening.

[Dax Shepard]

I was just telling the girls last night when we were in spaghetti, I said, you know, I always ate my spaghetti growing up with a huge glass of cold milk.

[Lily Padman]

Milk. Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't do it anymore.

[Lily Padman]

I know. You didn't even drink it in hot water.

[Dax Shepard]

I have too much chest congestion to drink milk willy nilly. I'll get A little, you know.

[Lily Padman]

Okay. Clogged up.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I would love it. But they thought that was an anthem. They thought that was crazy.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. This is. Milk at dinner is a real watershed marker of generations. My generation had been milk with dinner constantly. Constantly. That was common.

[Dax Shepard]

That's what kids drank.

[Lily Padman]

Yes, that's what you drank.

[Dax Shepard]

Because no one drank water. That was not a thing when I was. No one ever had a glass of water with anything.

[Lily Padman]

I know. And this is why I'm confused why I'm the only one who's like not attracted to water.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You haven't gotten with the program.

[Lily Padman]

Well, I try but it's not in my. It's not how I grew up. And I think you're right. It's not how a lot of people grew up. So how they transition.

[Dax Shepard]

Could you drink more milk? I mean you. Let's get you more fluids. You. That aren't, you know, wine or. Or a Moscow mule.

[Lily Padman]

I haven't had a Moscow mule in years. I save my water for right before bed and I drink 60 ounces.

[Dax Shepard]

You drink 60 ounces right before bed?

[Lily Padman]

I drink at least. At least 50. And it's not ideal. It's not ideal timing, but that sounds.

[Dax Shepard]

Like a terrible plan.

[Lily Padman]

And do you.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you wake up and pee in the middle of the night?

[Lily Padman]

I do have to pee in the.

[Dax Shepard]

Night and it hurts.

[Lily Padman]

Even it doesn't hurt.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I'm glad we're bring.

[Lily Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

I have more thoughts about. Remember you brought up on a fact check about the length of the penis could reduce the stream strength.

[Lily Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

So I was peeing the other day and I was just kind of thinking of the whole thing and there's so. I mean the fact that boys think that is so comical because if you really think it all through all of it would suggest you're better off with a very quiet stream. Because a. Imagine if you had a two foot long penis. It would probably be touching the water and you'd hear nothing.

[Lily Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Because it would be falling 1 inch the.

[Lily Padman]

But wouldn't you be holding it up a little bit cuz like you don't want to touch the water.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure. You would avoid. This is. I have. I can get in this situation sitting down sometimes on toilets and I. And it's always in public and if I feel the water, I almost die.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But if you really think it through, if you had a real garden hose on you, you'd be peeing like two inches above the water and that would make the least amount of noise. The most amount of noise would Be if you peed from a rooftop.

[Lily Padman]

Sure.

[Dax Shepard]

So if you had a very tiny, short penis, it would fall farther. It would go through less penis and slow down less. Like everything about a loud stream really screams smaller penis.

[Lily Padman]

Except.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, but every boy thinks that people are evaluating their PB size by their stream.

[Lily Padman]

But also if. If it's a lot of pee. If it's like so much pee.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

That would make a louder sound. More pressure. Yeah. Because the pressure.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

So maybe that's like, oh, there's so much pee because the penis is so big. But as we know now, that's wrong.

[Dax Shepard]

And you're getting into prostate health when you're getting into, like how. How fast it can come out.

[Lily Padman]

I'm just trying to explain how you boys think problematically.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, Right. I'm saying that it's, it's just a really crazy thing that we deduce that when all signs point to, that would actually mean less penis.

[Lily Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. If someone had a three foot hose, you would never hear it because it would be underwater.

[Lily Padman]

Ew.

[Dax Shepard]

You would put it in the water and then fill the bowl up.

[Lily Padman]

That's.

[Dax Shepard]

Don't you have to factor hole size though too? Then urethra girth.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, we discussed that.

[Dax Shepard]

Urethra diameter.

[Lily Padman]

It's more like how long it has to. I mean, if it's huge. If it's a huge hole.

[Dax Shepard]

Looks like a pencil.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. If it's a pencil hole and tube and it's. I guess if. Then if it's big, it'll still be loud and fast because the amount coming.

[Dax Shepard]

Out is it maybe short, Short, short though, because you could sell it so quickly. It'd be like long and girthy hole though. I think three second pee, though. It'd be very like loud as hell.

[Lily Padman]

And then bodies are so different. There's. There's so many factors.

[Dax Shepard]

There are. I just. We were really off track with that.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, you guys were really off track.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare. We are supported by Skims.

[Lily Padman]

Okay. So, you know, I love skims so much and it has a ton of different products. It has apparel, it has swim, it has menswear, which I know you like. And I've raved about a lot of the different product lines in these ads we get to do. But Skims is best known for their incredible intimates, and that makes total, total sense. The quality of their bras and underwear is truly unmatched. It's luxe, it's comfortable fabrics, it fits that feel good and look good under clothes. Which is hugely important. And it's really everything you could want. Like, it is very, very, very hard to find comfortable underwear that's also cute.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, that's the big challenge. But you're endlessly recommending this to friends.

[Lily Padman]

I am. I have multiple of their bras. They all fit great. They work well under all clothes. And I recently tried the Fits everybody lace tanga. It's made with this like really, really, really soft Fits Everybody fabric. I'm obsessed with it. It has this lace trim, so it adds a little bit of sexiness, but it's also comfortable. It's the most comfortable underwear I own and it makes me feel amazing every time I wear it.

[Dax Shepard]

Shop Monica's favorite bras and [e-mail] after you place your order, be sure to let them know we sent you select podcast in the senior survey and be sure to select our show in the drop down menu that follows. Skims.com you had a couple items on your list from.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, I did. But I was about to say something else before we got into peace. Peeing Maybe.

[Dax Shepard]

You drinking 50 ounces of water milk.

[Lily Padman]

When we were young, the doctor would tell our parents to make us drink milk for calcium.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

And then I had to go down to skim milk because of my cholesterol.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. Currently, no.

[Lily Padman]

When I was little.

[Dax Shepard]

When you were a child.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Wait, you had a high cholesterol?

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, I've had a check as a kid. Yeah. That's a whole thing.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't think my cholesterol was ever checked as a child.

[Lily Padman]

Oh, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, I almost never went to the doctor unless I was there to get stitches.

[Lily Padman]

I would do physicals.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah. I didn't do those.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, well, I did. And my cholesterol. Cholesterol was high.

[Steven Pinker]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Sky high.

[Lily Padman]

So I had to go to skim milk.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Were you on a statin in fifth grade?

[Lily Padman]

No, but. Oh, somebody did ask if I could give an update. Someone DM me to ask if I could give an Update on my GLP1 journey.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh yeah.

[Lily Padman]

And my cholesterol. I'm getting. We're getting our blood work done next week.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

So I'll know more after that and I will report back.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great.

[Lily Padman]

Oh wow. This is actually a ding ding ding. Something I wrote down that I wanted to ask you about. Is your ethics around the handicap stall.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh yeah. Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

Okay, let's say you go in.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I use it all the time.

[Lily Padman]

You do?

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Cuz unless I see a guy in a wheelchair on my way in. Yeah, I Absolutely. Use it. There's more space.

[Lily Padman]

What if they come in when you're in there?

[Dax Shepard]

I will be out in one second.

[Lily Padman]

What if you're pooping?

[Dax Shepard]

I can only tell you this. I. I'm 50. I always use the handicap stall. And I've never in my life exited and there was a guy in a wheelchair waiting. Wow. Which has never happened. Now, if that happened and I, I had made them wait a long time, I'd feel bad if I made them wait the standard time. I don't think being handicapped means you don't have to wait. Like, anyone that uses a bath has to wait. You just need a lot of space to operate the wheelchair. I don't think it's a fast pass to going to the bathroom. That doesn't make any sense to me. Like, you don't, you don't have a. It's not a fast pass. It's a. It's a size thing, so you can be accommodative.

[Lily Padman]

I know, but it's just that there's only one. And most bathrooms have multiple stalls and then one handicap stall. So that's the ethics around it. Right.

[Dax Shepard]

It's like I would argue if I walk in and there's a dude in a wheelchair walk waiting, clearly I'm not going to take the handicap stall. He is going to get first up. That's guaranteed.

[Lily Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

And if he has to wait like everybody else has to wait for a stall to open up, I don't think there's any ethical dilemma in that.

[Lily Padman]

No, there's no, there's no ethical dilemma in him having to wait if there's a line. Right, but it's. If there is no line. You came in, there's nobody there and all the stalls are open.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

If you go in there, you're taking the one opportunity for him when he comes. And also nobody's there but his stalls taken.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So I think what happens is people conflate some things. So, like the handicapped parking spot is closest to the door because obviously they should have to travel the least amount of distance because it's harder.

[Lily Padman]

Of course.

[Dax Shepard]

But there's no rationale for someone that's handicapped shouldn't have to wait for a stall.

[Lily Padman]

No, no, no. It's not, it's not that they don't have to wait. It's like.

[Dax Shepard]

But I do think people think that, like, that, that thing should stay empty at all times.

[Lily Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

In the event that someone that's handicapped comes in so that they can go immediately in. That's. That's not how bathrooms work.

[Lily Padman]

Well, it's just that the. Okay, if it's a one stall thing, I sort of agree with you. But if there's like five stalls. There are five stalls specifically, so that people don't have to wait that long. Right. But if everyone went into the hand handicap stall, that guy would have to wait for so long.

[Dax Shepard]

But I. Again, if he showed up and four people are standing in line to use just the handicap stall.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Bet my life on the fact everyone's like, oh, go ahead, bro. I'll use the other ones. The most the person would have to wait is for one person to use the bathroom. And I don't think that's a big deal.

[Lily Padman]

But what if they're pooping and it's so long.

[Dax Shepard]

If you think you're gonna take a tremendously long dump. Yeah, probably don't use. Use it.

[Lily Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Secondly, glance under. You can see the rest of the bathroom. If you see wheels, pick up the pace. Get out of there.

[Lily Padman]

I don't think anyone's in the middle of their poop and looking under.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I do, because I like to be alone in the bathroom. So if, like, I hear the door and I'm like, I hate someone's in there. And then I look like, are they still in here?

[Lily Padman]

Oh, I never look.

[Dax Shepard]

I could tell you at any moment how many people are in the bathroom when I'm do.

[Lily Padman]

Because when I am in. If I'm in the handicap stall.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

I can't see. Like, the door is too far out for me to just, like, peek. Like, I would have to get up.

[Dax Shepard]

No, you look under.

[Lily Padman]

I know what you're saying, but I'm saying the door itself is, like, here. Like, I'm on the toilet. Right. The door is there leading out.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Lily Padman]

So. And I can't just go like this. Like, I can't reach. It's the. The bottom is there. Does that make sense?

[Dax Shepard]

No, because the bottom's also. It's not like it goes to the floor and only is open at the door. They're all only coming down.

[Lily Padman]

I'm not. I'm thinking of a bathroom, I guess.

[Dax Shepard]

That doesn't like a Foley with a door you can't see out of.

[Lily Padman]

You can see under the door, but not the sides. But you wouldn't see out the sides. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. A men's bath. I'm thinking of an airport primarily. And it sits. Comes down to, like, the kneecaps.

[Lily Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

In our mid, mid calves. And I can see what's happening on the floor of the bathroom. And again, I'm 50. Never once have I come out and seen someone in a wheelchair waiting for it. It's just never happened. So it's like. It's very theoretical.

[Lily Padman]

Do you use it or a fun topic?

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah. I'm just telling you why I don't. I have no guilt using it whatsoever.

[Lily Padman]

I use it sometimes. Well, I only use. Use it if the stalls are taken.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Lily Padman]

But I often feel bad about it.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow.

[Lily Padman]

Like, should I just wait till someone comes out and then I'll use one of those. But then I feel awkward if other people are waiting.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Lily Padman]

I'm like, I can't. I don't know what to do.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you should just use it.

[Lily Padman]

I do. I do end up just using it, but I feel like I use it.

[Dax Shepard]

Because I'm a daddy long legs and if I have my roll on bag with me and I go into the normal stall.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I kind of have to leave my bag outside because there's not room between my knees and that. So it's like, of course I'm going to use the bigger ones so I can have my luggage in there.

[Lily Padman]

Right?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Lily Padman]

It's complicated.

[Dax Shepard]

It is. Rob, do you. In the handicap one or just pee? If. If it's the only stall open. I won't pick that first, though.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

So, yeah, but I get what you're saying.

[Lily Padman]

This came to me because I was at a restaurant and I was like, oh, what do I do? These are taken.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

Do I go in there? I guess I am going to, but I hate this.

[Dax Shepard]

Uhhuh.

[Lily Padman]

And then I. I wonder, could you.

[Dax Shepard]

Have glanced around the restaurant, see if there's any.

[Lily Padman]

Was it going to come out of the bathroom and go to a big glance? It's a little much.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Excuse me. So sorry to interrupt. Is anyone here in a wheel wheelchair?

[Lily Padman]

And if so, do you have to use the bathroom anytime?

[Dax Shepard]

So when do you think you'll be using the bathroom? Because I was thinking of using the stall.

[Lily Padman]

It's just, it's. The rest are taken. I wouldn't normally, I would never do.

[Dax Shepard]

This, but I am gonna have an accident if I don't. Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

So all right, so you have no issues.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't. I feel very clean conscious about that.

[Lily Padman]

Okay, great.

[Dax Shepard]

But hey, maybe one day it'll bite me in the ass. I'll come out and there'll be a good guy and he'll be like, thanks, bro. I just shit my pants.

[Lily Padman]

Right. I don't know why I wrote this. I must have been watching something But I wrote people change physically through a relationship.

[Dax Shepard]

They sure do.

[Lily Padman]

I'm trying to make sense of what I wrote, which I think I get.

[Dax Shepard]

Skinnier, they can get bigger, they can get less muscular. More muscular, they can get bolder, they get more hair.

[Lily Padman]

Correct. So when it changes, are you allowed to say it anything? Actually we don't need to answer this because we talked about this on Mom's Car. When I was on your episode of Mom's Car.

[Dax Shepard]

We said. Oh, we were talking about one of the callers had a husband who got very into weight training.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Uh huh. That's out yesterday.

[Lily Padman]

Oh it's out. Oh my God. My episode of Mom. My When I guessed it on Mom's Car. We answer that very question. So go check that out.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah. And listen to Delta play the theme song.

[Lily Padman]

Oh yeah. So is it going to replace.

[Dax Shepard]

No, no, no, no.

[Lily Padman]

It should play at the end or something.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Bob made a video today of everything that's going on. His version is pretty complex. And so there are other layers that she'll learn.

[Lily Padman]

Cool.

[Dax Shepard]

Some of them she won't be able to. Is even said like some of them you got to really span your finger. She just wouldn't have this span. It's got to be frustrating when you're little learning piano.

[Lily Padman]

Oh yeah. I tried. Couldn't do it. Well I could but I didn't want to.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Steven Pinker]

It's.

[Dax Shepard]

I, it's no one wants to.

[Lily Padman]

I know this is the practicing.

[Dax Shepard]

Well you do hear these stories but those are the phenom.

[Lily Padman]

But that's how you become phenomenal.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

I think that is a good lesson. Like if this kid doesn't want to practice, I'm not to make them because then I, they're never going to be good at it.

[Dax Shepard]

I meet though so many people who say I'm so glad my generally Mom.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Made me take piano. Yeah. Forced me to take piano.

[Lily Padman]

No, I know but I like generally.

[Dax Shepard]

Everyone'S grateful that had that experience.

[Lily Padman]

But this is, this is to me what I think happens. This is my mom. My mom said when I started and I was like, oh, I hate practicing. Yeah. She was like, I regret, you know, it's always, it's always the mom saying I regret that I didn't get pushed into this and that I didn't. Wasn't forced to practice. And you have to practice.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

You'll thank me one day.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

And then what happens is if you aren't self motivated to do it, you.

[Dax Shepard]

Don'T, you're not good unless they withhold things you want. Like if. If they really can enforce the rules. Yeah, then they would. But your mom wasn't willing to.

[Lily Padman]

Oh no. I had to practice every day and I would just sit and I can't be miserable. And I would. And I would just tink. I would. I would play but I hated it. It would like I associate it with. I associated it with such misery that over time I was like, I don't want to do it. And at that point your mom has to be like, okay, yeah, I guess you've been practicing for two years and you still hate.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, they go, you can't watch TV until you like it played. No, because you weren't. The goal isn't to make you like it. The goal is to make you do it.

[Lily Padman]

Well. No, the goal is to make you do it so that you'll like it and get good and be self motivated.

[Dax Shepard]

Probably won't like it until you're good at it. So you can make music. And that's very satisfying. It's not going to be. It's not fun for anybody to suck at something. It's. It's quite unenjoyable to suck at at things.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So like the premise can't be well, they gotta like it to do it because no one's really gonna like it. Except for these.001%. Are they like born to be a concert pianist and they're obsessed?

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. I mean I think people who are adults who play piano well started liking it early on their own and maybe they still had to be forced to practice. But probably when they were practicing they like liked it and were learning things and. And got excited about it.

[Dax Shepard]

You ever play songs?

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, I played. I played the Entertainer. I played My Heart Will Go On.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Lily Padman]

I played a lot of songs.

[Dax Shepard]

And you didn't like it? Never liked it. Even when you play those songs.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, I did like being able to play them.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

But I guess this is all to my point. I liked having this skill. I did not like getting to the skill and these skills increase and increase and increase. So I was. It was just never going to. Gonna happen.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

There are. There are other skills that I did work quite hard at it also being very hard. But I wanted to be good at it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

I think wanting to be good at it is sort of the key.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, I think. All right, let's do some facts.

[Steven Pinker]

Facts.

[Lily Padman]

So one thing that I didn't say in the episode but was thinking about because we talked about. About like euphemism and kind of the importance of it and why we do it and why we sugarcoat or, you know, sidestep or don't say the thing.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Lily Padman]

Because once you say the thing, it's common knowledge and it's out there and it can, it can change an entire relationship.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

I was sitting with that after because I was like, that's, that's so antithetical to my approach to life. I am so on it. Like, I, I'm like, we need to be honest. We need to be saying the things to the people.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Lily Padman]

If something's happening, we need to call it out and say it. And I was like, huh, maybe not. Yeah, maybe that is recognized list and can permanently alter a relationship. So it did make me think, standing on this, like, I'm honest and I'm going to say what's true and it's my job to say what's true and my job to call out bad things or whatever.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

It's worth, like taking a beat.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, it's, it's not a, A new point I want to make, but it's, it's crazy to me how many of you. These longstanding debates are really this kind of quintessential debate between Kantianism and utilitarianism. It's like, that's the Kantian approach. I don't lie because I don't lie. The ends does not justify the means. The means justifies the ends. Like, I do the right thing and the outcome is whatever it is.

[Lily Padman]

Exactly. Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

And also, no. I want a certain outcome. So how do I get to the outcome? And it's kind of like, yeah, you could be dead honest and blah, blah, blah, and stand on that. But if you start noticing the outcome of that is always bad. Whereas I could play with. In this slightly dishonest, nuanced innuendo world.

[Lily Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

And save everyone face and keep relationships going. And it's like, okay, well, I just got to prioritize what is my goal in life. To maintain my relationships or be correct or what? You know?

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And it's just, I think it's really interesting how many of our many, many debates just are really that thing. Does the means justify the ends or does it not?

[Lily Padman]

Yes, I agree.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

So that was really interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

Can I say one out of school thing he said when we were leaving? I hope he would feel comfortable with this. I think he would, but we were. I walked him out to the curb so he could get out of here. And I don't know how we stumbled upon this, but somehow we were just talking about like home life and family life. And he said, yeah, you know, I just, I gotta remember my, you know, my opinion's not necessarily needed.

[Lily Padman]

Oh, he said that.

[Dax Shepard]

Which is my mantra, as you know, I try to. The best version of myself is when I'm saying, your opinion's not needed here. And I don't know why I found that so comforting that here's one of the smartest people in the world and he knows his opinion's not always needed.

[Lily Padman]

Is he talking about at home?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, like family life. Like, interesting to keep cohesion in your family. You don't always need to say you're a fucking opinion. But if this dude can come to that.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Who his opinion probably is. No, it probably is. No more approaching the correct thing if.

[Lily Padman]

It'S based in fact. That's the fallacy, is like this smart person's opinion.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

Is perhaps better than others. It's still an opinion.

[Dax Shepard]

It's still an opinion. But I do think if there was somehow to do an opinion shootout with Steven Pinker and someone average off the street.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

My hunch is I think his opinion would be correct more often than I.

[Lily Padman]

I think that's a. I think that's not.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a fallacy.

[Lily Padman]

I think that's a fallacy because depending on what we're talking about. Yes. I think his opinion on elite institutions, something we discussed in the episode, is very valid because he has experience there and he's done a lot of research there. So, like, his opinion is based on.

[Dax Shepard]

Based off of facts and a tremendous amount of history. He really understands.

[Lily Padman]

Yes. But his opinion on whether or not chocolate is a tasty treat is not more or less valid than anyone else. So you just have to. But like, we do that though, we as people are like, oh, this high status person's opinion in general is better.

[Dax Shepard]

This is the tech bro issue is like, they are a genius in this little segment of knowledge, but should they be telling you what supplements to eat? Probably not.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay, so he mentions the giggle test. I didn't know what that was. Passing the giggle test refers to making an argument, proposal or statement that is plausible, reasonable, and factually and emotionally sound enough to be presented with a straight face without eliciting laughter or appearing ridiculous.

[Dax Shepard]

Ah, the giggle test.

[Lily Padman]

Giggle test.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, that didn't pass the giggle test.

[Lily Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Is that what people say?

[Lily Padman]

Well, they would be laughing.

[Dax Shepard]

First they someone say their opinion, they go. And then like I go, well, I didn't pass the giggle test.

[Lily Padman]

Exactly. Yeah, you nailed it.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great. Moving on.

[Lily Padman]

We don't need to. Yeah, we don't need to go back. I need to do that again. Did Steve Jobs steal the WIMP computer from Xerox? While Apple leveraged ideas that Steve Jobs and his team saw at 0xerox, it is inaccurate to say that Jobs stole WIMP, Windows, icons, menus, pointer computers from them. The exchange was part of a formal deal and the Apple team significantly refined and commercialized the technology for a mass audience. Okay, this is fun. So we talk about the Apple ad, the 1984.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah. With the mallet.

[Lily Padman]

The Apple ad being one of the most famous commercials of all time or, you know, iconic best. Yeah. And so I have a list.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wonderful.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, in the same batch where people are agreeing that are saying they also collected the milk ads. A lot of people had the same outrage I did about Thriller and that was comforting.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, I understand.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

Okay. I'm gonna do top 10.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, okay.

[Lily Padman]

Okay. Number one, Apple 1984.

[Dax Shepard]

Really? That gets the number. Who, who's this who compiles this one?

[Lily Padman]

One is from American Marketing Association.

[Dax Shepard]

Very trusted organization dot org.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, we should get shares that say dot org.

[Dax Shepard]

That'd be such a shitty shirt. I mean, all respect to your feelings, if I saw a guy wearing a shirt that said like dot com, you'd.

[Lily Padman]

Be no, it's that it's a, it's specifically not dot com. It's dot org. That's what's cool about it. And then you're like, what is that? And then you ask and it's like, oh, trusted. It's really trusted.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. I'm surprised you're not pitching Edu. I guess that a little makes sense. For sure.

[Lily Padman]

Then you're like, I'm a student.org is our thing.

[Dax Shepard]

It is our thing. But I, I, I'm not sure that.org has the reputational excellence that you, I don't know that it really signifies.

[Steven Pinker]

My God.

[Dax Shepard]

I stand down. I stand out. I just did the thing. I shared an opinion.

[Lily Padman]

That was unnecessary.

[Dax Shepard]

You're right.

[Lily Padman]

Okay. Apple 1984, directed by Ridley Scott.

[Dax Shepard]

Where's the beef? Wendy's.

[Lily Padman]

Nope. Number two, Nike. Just do it. 1988 Nike's Just Do It, I guess is the first Just do it.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow.

[Lily Padman]

Campaign redefined the brand and athletic marketing. The first commercial featured 80 year old marathoner Walt Ironman Stack jogging across the Golden Globe Gate bridge. Paired with the now iconic slogan, Just do it. Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

Cool stuff. Good stuff.

[Lily Padman]

Okay. Three is Pepsi's gladiator commercial that is in 2003. Cinematic spectacle that brought pop culture to the super bowl stage. Set in a Roman Coliseum, the ad featured Beyonce, Pink, and Britney Spears as gladiators who defied the oppressive emperor played by Enrique Iglesias. The women overthrew the ruler and reclaimed their power, distributing Pepsi to a roaring crowd, all to the beat of Queens. We will rock you.

[Dax Shepard]

Ah, I kind of want to watch that.

[Lily Padman]

Me too. For Old Spice. The man your man could smell like. This is 2010. Okay. Old Spice revitalizes image with this humorous, fast paced ad starring Isaiah Mustafa. In just 30 seconds, Mustafa effortlessly transitioned from a shower to a boat to a horse, delivering witty one liners about masculinity and confidence, all while while promoting Old Spice body wash. The ad's absurd humor, sharp writing and charismatic delivery made it a viral sensation. Huh?

[Dax Shepard]

You remember that one, right?

[Lily Padman]

I don't.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah, black guy. I can see him on the boat. He's got like a full navel. Get up at the end. He looks like the fisherman. What's a wharf's fisherman?

[Lily Padman]

Okay, okay. Five. Snickers. You're not you when you're hungry. Hungry Also Super Bowl Betty White group of friends plays a rough game of football with one player portrayed by White performing poorly and getting tackled into the mud. A teammate hands her a Snickers bar and after taking a bite, she transforms into a young man, highlighting the message that hunger can make you act out of character.

[Dax Shepard]

Make you act like old woman. Yeah, that Gordon's fish.

[Lily Padman]

Gordon's fish. Six. Pepsi. Wow. Pepsi.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

Scary Halloween 2019. Oh. Pepsi's Halloween ad delivered a playful jab at its rival Coca Cola. It featured a Pepsi can dress in a Coca Cola cape with the tagline, we wish you a scary Halloween. This tongue in cheek visual cleverly framed Coke as the scary choice while reinforcing Pepsi's bold and irreverent brand personality.

[Dax Shepard]

You know, it's crazy. They had such a good track record and they really the bet on that BLM commercial they did. Remember that one?

[Lily Padman]

I don't remember.

[Dax Shepard]

It was like cops and protesters fighting and they decided to just have a Pepsi and everyone got a lot of people. You don't remember? There's like a huge misfire.

[Lily Padman]

I don't remember.

[Dax Shepard]

God, it's up there with Bud Light. Is it real?

[Lily Padman]

That's not good. Yeah. Okay. Seven. Volkswagen. Think small. This is 1960. Okay, I'm not going to read about that. Oh, my God. IKEA PE here.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, interesting.

[Lily Padman]

2017. IKEA's print ad push boundaries by inviting women to urinate on it. Yes, you read that, right? The ad incorporated a pregnancy test. What if it detected pregnancy? A discount for a baby crib was revealed.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my gosh. How could I have never heard of that?

[Lily Padman]

That's great. 2017. Okay 9. US military, I want you 19, 17, 19. These aren't commercials, though. I don't love that. Okay, KFC, this is 10. FCK. It's. That's what it's called. FCK. This was 2018, when KFC faced a chicken shortage in the UK. The brand turned a crisis into a moment of humor and transparency. Their print ad featured an empty bucket with the letters FCK replacing the KFC logo. A cheeky acknowledgment of their misstep. That's fun.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I like that.

[Lily Padman]

Okay, 11 is McDonald's. I'm loving it. Oh, sure. Okay. Netflix as a joke, is 12. Okay. Okay. Oh, coral and their procreation on a full moon. What happens when it's cloudy? Basically, yeah. It. It, it messes it up.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, it does mess it up.

[Steven Pinker]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, that's good to know. Makes you wonder if coral can even exist in places with like, very consistent cloud, like England and Michigan. It's great for eight months.

[Lily Padman]

As long as it's consistent, then it would be fine. But it's. If it's. Yeah, you can never know the moon.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, like we. We had stretches in Michigan Right. Where we'd set these records with the. The sun hadn't broke through for 180 days.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So you're looking at like six months of no mo. And they can't procreate. That would be problematic. But I guess they're always in tropical locations.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, you're right. Oh, one more. Sorry. He said Bill Gates is the biggest philanthropist in the world. He's not. He's a big philanthropist. But Indian industrialist Jim Jam Set Gsett Seti Tata holds the title of the world's largest philanthropist of all time, having given a greater amount to charity than. How much is he given in 2025? List Tata. Tata has donated 102.4 billion compared to Gates's 75.8 billion in lifetime giving.

[Dax Shepard]

Whoa. Well, he deserves that credit.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. Good job. Yeah. All right, thanks. Love you.

[Dax Shepard]

Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining one Wondry plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short [e-mail] survey.