Steven Pinker: “Common Knowledge Changes Everything”

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Gist – “Steven Pinker: Common Knowledge Changes Everything”

Host: Mike Pesca
Guest: Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University
Date: October 6, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this thought-provoking episode, Mike Pesca hosts renowned cognitive psychologist and best-selling author Steven Pinker to discuss the central thesis of Pinker's latest work: the concept of "common knowledge" and how it shapes everything from social coordination and cultural taboos to political action and the structure of power in everyday life. Pinker draws on history, current events, and humorous anecdotes to illuminate the sometimes subtle, sometimes seismic societal shifts triggered when “everyone knows that everyone knows.”

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Key Discussion Points

1. Defining Common Knowledge (10:54–12:16)

• Pinker distinguishes between the everyday and technical academic meanings of “common knowledge.”
• Quote:
  “Common knowledge in the technical sense means that 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 it, ad infinitum. So it's when everyone knows that everyone knows.” (Steven Pinker, 11:53)

2. The Emperor’s New Clothes and Real-Life Parallels (12:16–15:56)

• Pinker and Pesca use the fable as a springboard to explain how many societal norms and political crises hinge on moments when facts shift from private suspicion to public certainty.
• Pinker applies this model to Joe Biden’s 2024 debate performance:
  • Before the debate, Biden’s cognitive decline was privately suspected.
  • The highly publicized debate caused a tipping point—everyone knew that everyone knew, which “doomed his reelection prospects.”
• Quote:
  “When he appeared in a public debate with Donald Trump ... what changed was not so much that more people believed that he was cognitively impaired ... but now everyone knew that everyone knew.” (Pinker, 13:27)

3. The Mechanics and Importance of Common Knowledge in Social Life (14:25–16:56)

• Social coordination depends on common knowledge—examples include:
  • Making plans ("meeting at Starbucks" only works if it's explicit)
  • Driving conventions (everyone agrees to drive on the right)
  • Social roles and relationships (friendship, love, business transactions)
• The lack of explicit understanding leads to failed coordination.

4. Self-Deception and Leaders’ Blind Spots (16:56–18:56)

• Pesca and Pinker explore how leaders sometimes remain ignorant of what is common knowledge to everyone else.
• Pinker notes leaders can self-deceive, insulating themselves from negative truths to maintain confidence or power, which can be disastrous in positions of authority.

5. Common Knowledge, Lies, and Pluralistic Ignorance (19:03–23:05)

• The difference between common belief and common knowledge: people can act on common beliefs even if they’re untrue or acknowledged as lies.

• Pinker introduces the “spiral of silence,” where individual private beliefs are masked publicly due to fear of punishment. "Preference falsification" emerges, leading to situations where no one truly believes the public consensus, yet everyone assumes others do.

• Quote:
  “There can be a disconnect though between common misconception and private knowledge. And this is called a spiral of silence or pluralistic ignorance, where everyone thinks that everyone else believes something and no one actually believes it.” (Pinker, 20:06)

• Soviet-era anecdote: In totalitarian societies, gestures as simple as handing out blank leaflets generate subversive common knowledge (“What’s there to say? It’s so obvious.”).

6. Public Demonstrations as Generators of Common Knowledge (22:05–23:21)

• Why demonstrations threaten dictators: the act makes visible the shared discontent, which can catalyze collective action.
• Pesca references the "I am Spartacus" moment as a classic example of common knowledge in action; Pinker admires the illustration.

7. Spirals of Silence in Modern Institutions: Cancel Culture and DEI (23:29–26:58)

• Pinker and Pesca discuss how difficult it was for academics to voice opposition to mandatory diversity statements—a modern "spiral of silence."
• When authorities dropped the requirement, there was no “hue and cry,” revealing the consensus was more imposed than genuine.
• Quote:
  “No one, you know, I gotta say, as a professor there, there was never a discussion, should we have mandatory diversity statements? It was implemented by stealth by the DEI bureaucracy, and no one got to discuss it.” (Pinker, 25:49)

8. Why Pinker Became Interested in Common Knowledge (26:58–29:24)

• Contrary to Pesca’s suggestion, Pinker says his interest didn’t stem from frustration with postmodernism or anti-empirical trends, but from problems in linguistic theory.
• Everyday indirect speech (e.g., “If you could pass the guacamole, that would be awesome”) relies on subtle, shared contextual understanding—an implicit form of common knowledge.

9. Indirect Speech and Social Navigation (29:24–31:24)

• People rarely say precisely what they mean; instead, they rely on others to infer intent, maintaining deniability or politeness.

• From flirting to bribery to everyday requests, indirect language depends on mutual social knowledge.

• Quote:
  “A lot of language doesn't actually say what it means ... The listener has to fill in a lot of gaps, connect the dots, do a lot of mind games like, oh, what does he really mean by that?” (Pinker, 29:06)

• Pinker connects this phenomenon to evolutionary strategies—social creatures need to manage risks in communication, especially when the full truth would carry costs.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• On the power of public acknowledgment:
  “It isn't enough to know that your friend likes to go to Starbucks, because your friend might know that you like to go to Pete's, and each one of you might try to outguess the other. ... You got to have the phone conversation, generate the common knowledge.” (Pinker, 14:56)

• On demonstrations:
  “A public demonstration generates common knowledge. You're seeing everyone and you're seeing everyone see everyone, and you suddenly know, hey, I'm not the only one who hates the regime.” (Pinker, 22:36)

• On spirals of silence in academia:
  “No one even really was aware that they were in place. Fortunately, they were rescinded by our current dean ... I think most of us would say this is a welcome change. No one thought ... there was a hue and cry.” (Pinker, 25:49)

• Pesca’s closing:

  • Praises Pinker’s accessibility and the importance of understanding these social phenomena for contemporary issues.
  • Reminds listeners to subscribe for bonus content, which includes additional Pinker insights.

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Intro to Pinker's book and concept: 10:54–12:16
• Emperor’s New Clothes & Biden 2024 Debate: 12:16–13:56
• Social Coordination and Friendship: 14:25–16:56
• Self-deception in leadership: 17:02–18:56
• Common knowledge vs. belief, Soviet joke: 19:03–23:05
• Demonstrations, ‘I am Spartacus’ moment: 22:05–23:21
• Cancel culture and DEI spiral of silence: 23:29–26:58
• Pinker on origins of his interest: 27:52–29:24
• Indirect speech as evolutionary adaptation: 29:24–31:24

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Tone and Language

The conversation is accessible, witty, and intellectually rich, reflecting both Pinker’s playful but rigorous approach and Pesca’s commitment to "responsibly provocative" journalism. The topics are treated seriously but not somberly, with real-world and pop culture references adding levity to complex ideas.

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Conclusion

This episode of The Gist offers a thorough, enlightening exploration of how the technical concept of common knowledge quietly, but powerfully, influences everything from politics to personal relationships. Pinker’s insights reveal why what "everyone knows that everyone knows" is often more important than the facts themselves, and why tipping points in social knowledge can transform societies, upend institutions, or simply make sure you and your friend don’t have to drink coffee alone.

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For even more in-depth discussion, including bonus content and further exploration of general knowledge paradoxes, Pesca invites listeners to subscribe to Pesca Plus.

Transcript

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[E]

It's Monday, October 6, 2025. From Peach Fish Productions it's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca. Headline NBC woman sentenced to eight years for attempting to assassinate Brett Kavanaugh. Other headlines from other sources say California resident gets over eight years in prison for attempting to assassinate Justice Kavanaugh. That's ABC going local. Washington Post goes conspiratorial Kavanaugh assassination plotter sentenced to eight years in prison. Not much of a plot. Got to the house, backed off. Politico goes aspirational would be Kavanaugh assassin sentenced to over eight years in prison. Risks confusing the reader that this is a Brett Kavanaugh cosplayer. Stephen Miller and others went nuts not conspiratorial. They didn't go aspirational, they just went nuts because the would be California assassination plotting woman was inarguably only three of those four things. If you're saying wait a minute, I remember the guy who tried to assassinate Brett Kavanaugh, that's this woman. The New York Times tells it pretty pretty well right up top. Ms. Rosky, 29 was charged under her legal name Nicholas J. Roski in September her attorney September there's a couple of weeks ago her attorneys disclosed to the court that she is transgender and now uses the name Sophie. But here is NBC's On Air Report of the sentencing.

[C]

The woman who plotted to Assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was sentenced to in prison on Friday. Sophie Rosky was arrested near Kavanaugh's Washington home in June of 2022. That's after her attorney says she changed her mind in a taxi while on the way and called 911 to turn herself in.

[E]

Okay, my big complaint isn't of the description of the gender of the defendant. It's the description of the action of the defendant. You heard there a quote from Rosky's defense attorney saying changed her mind while on the way to Kavanaugh's house. But listen to the charging document. Two deputy U.S. marshals were stationed outside Brett Kavanaugh's house. And the document says upon seeing law enforcement present that this defendant decided to walk past the front of the house and directly pass the deputy U.S. marshals. In the defendant's own words, quote, I noticed immediately that there were people sitting outside and this was a very likely empty neighborhood. So I was like, okay, this, they're keeping a lookout. The document goes on say it was only after this point, observing a visible law enforcement presence that the defendant received a phone call from his sister or her sister after speaking for approximately 20 minutes called 91 1. So that's when the chickening out occurred. So that tells me that the important thing that changed was Rosky's mind. And the important question was when? Let me also say this, the eight year sentence. Lot to argue about. I do think eight years, fine. I looked up some other sentenc and it seems that for instance, if you actually complete or are, I hate to say successful, but if you are an actual literal assassin, you'll probably spend life in prison. If you are an attempted assassin where your bullet strikes the target a la John Hinckley, you'll spend decades in prison. Some of it depends on was your target a president? Was your target a federal judge? Here's a headline. Idaho man sentenced to 25 years in prison for November 2011 shooting at the White House. Defendant fired at least eight shots in the attack. It hit the building, but you shoot at the White House, you get a long time. Then we come down to threats. A Florida man was sentenced to 18 months in prison for making threats against Pelosi and AOC. Another man was sentenced to 46 months for threatening President Obama, Maxine Waters and other members of Congress. You put the president in there, you're going to get a harder sentence. Then There was the January 6th rioter who also threatened AOC. Sentenced to 38 months in prison. I think the actual actions of the riot plus the threat, I also think that that's a little light. Then there's a guy don't want to give his name. He worked in the court system. He threatened AOC and Bernie Sanders. He got 46 months in prison. So there's a range, and I've articulated some of the range. So I would say actually having weapons, actually going to the house of Brett Kavanaugh, but then deciding of your own volition, but also the presence of police officers and the likelihood of getting caught and not being successful of getting into the house. Yeah, eight years seems okay. And when we say an eight year sentence, when we hear an eight year sentence, I think we think of it as numbers on a page or numbers in our ear. We say, that doesn't seem too long. I don't know, maybe we think of half the lifetime of a house cat or a second grader. But a year is a long time. 2000, 920 days. I mean, in 2032, Nicholas or Sophie Rosky will still be a year away from getting out of prison. So it's not that I have sympathy, it's not that I have anger, certainly, that this person is transgender. The right has made a big deal of the judge mentioning this at sentencing, but I think the context was fine. Talking about Rosky's parents now accepting her as transgender and having hope that that will have a positive effect, or if that had happened before, it might have forestalled some of these horrible decisions that Rosky made. There is, of course, even though it's not adjudicated as such, the mental unwellness aspect. And if there really were a major deterrent effect from 8 to 25, I'd maybe buy into it, but I just don't think it is. And I think for Rosky, this is incredibly important. For Kavanaugh, very scary. But for society as a whole, a story to argue about in the context of the culture war and hope that it doesn't bleed into an actual political war. On the show today, in the spiel, I keep it in the courts a little less violently, talking about the emergency docket and scotus. But first, Steven Pinker is here. And I know that you know that I know that you know what we're gonna talk about because I mentioned it on a previous episode somewhat obliquely. His new book is called When Everyone Knows that Everyone. Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power and Everyday Life. Professor of psychology at Harvard University, Steven Pinker. Up next, life's been a little crazy lately. Perhaps you've been hearing some of the segments on the show or just looking out the window and things. 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[F]

Steven Pinker is the Harvard professor whose interests include the language instinct, how the mind works, and rationality. In fact, those aren't just his interests. Those are titles of three of his fabulous works. And now another interest that has become a book, common Knowledge. When Pinker says common knowledge, it's a little different from our definition, which is something like, oh, that's just stuff everybody knows. Actually, it incorporates that, but goes beyond. And the name of the new book is When Everyone Knows that Everyone Knows Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power and Everyday Life. Welcome back to the gist.

[G]

Thank you.

[F]

So I'm very interested in the book and its implications, but I do think we have to do some laying of the predicate first.

[E]

So.

[F]

So, as I said, common knowledge is not just the almost dismissive, oh, yeah, everybody knows that. What's the definition you were working with to try to educate us on your ideas?

[G]

Yeah, it's. It's not a great term, but it's what's used in the, the literature. So I was, I was stuck with it. Common knowledge in the technical sense means that 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 it, ad infinitum. So it's when everyone knows that everyone knows. And that's what, et cetera. And that's what gave me the title for the book.

[E]

Right.

[F]

And it's a little different from reciprocal knowledge, which could be greatest example of.

[E]

Common knowledge and how it informs everything.

[F]

You'Re writing about the emperor's new clothes. What was important about the emperor's new clothes is the emperor knew he had no clothes. I knew and I knew that you knew. But there is a circumstance in which I could know the emperor has no clothes, and I could see you looking at the emperor, but I might not be sure that you know that I know the emperor has new clothes. So that is true. But when might something like that come up in the world or complicate our definition, your definition of common knowledge?

[G]

Well, it comes out all the time when someone blurts something out, as in the little boy in the story, when something that everyone suspected is exposed in a public arena that everyone knows that everyone is familiar with. So I'll give you an example from the news. A bit more than a year ago, everyone knew that Joe Biden was undergoing cognitive decline, but when he appeared in a public debate with Donald Trump In June of 2024, what changed was not so much that more people believed that he was cognitively impaired, although there was some increase. But now everyone knew that. Everyone knew it because it was a highly watched television debate. It was highly commented on. So now it could no longer be kept as private knowledge. It now was common knowledge in this technical sense, and that changed everything. That's what doomed his reelection prospects. So that's just one example. In social circles, often there'll be something that everyone knows, but that, if it gets blurted out, changes everything. Often people are attracted to each other sexually, but if a professor said to a student or one member of a couple said about the spouse of another couple, I'd really like to have sex with you, it may have been on his mind. Everyone may have suspected that it was on his mind. But once it's blurted out, that is a deeply transformative moment. The reason being that common knowledge is what allows us to coordinate, and that's why it's such an interesting topic. So it allows us to coordinate on everyday things, like meeting at a certain time and place. It isn't enough to know that your friend likes to go to Starbucks, because your friend might know that you like to go to Pete's, and each one of you might try to outguess the other and never end up at the same place. You got to have the phone conversation, generate the common knowledge. We're going to meet at one of the two of them. It doesn't matter which one, as long as you meet at the same one. Or try driving on the right as opposed to driving on the left. There's no advantage to one or the other, but it better be common knowledge that everyone drives on the same side. So that's cases of social coordination depending on common knowledge that are pretty well recognized. I also note that our informal social relationships depend on common knowledge. What makes two people friends? Well, I know that you know that we're friends, and I know that you know that I know that you know, or lovers, or a dominant and a subordinate or transaction partners. All of these things depend on common knowledge in the same way that conventions like driving on the right or staying home on Sunday depend on common knowledge. Right?

[F]

And the book has all these charts, like a friendship chart, where if I'm committed to the friendship and Steven's committed to the friendship, then we have a friendship.

[E]

But if we're both indifferent to the.

[F]

Friendship, then there is a friendship score of zero. And that kind of works out too, in terms of coordination. It's when Stephen really wants to be friends with Mike. And Mike's like, I just. I'll interview him once every three years, but that's it. And there's a coordination problem. We don't have common knowledge. So it's very interesting, and there are all these great charts that show coordination. But I do want to go back to the Joe Biden example. It's very much like the emperor having no clothes because, well, we're talking about a ruler. But also, in both cases, the emperor didn't know that everyone knew. And Joe Biden, we are led to believe, and I think this was the case, didn't know that everyone knew. He was kept in the dark about a few things, including the extent to which everyone knew he was experiencing cognitive decline. And I guess, what's the inference from there that this created the coordination problem?

[G]

Well, yes, it certainly reinforced it. I think at the core, there was another psychological phenomenon of self deception. Very often we keep unpleasant truths from ourselves, even if we might register it at some level. It's a little Freudian, that is, that there's an unconscious knowledge of something that the ego keeps out of consciousness, although it can. There can be some anxiety because of that repression. We probably do it because the best liar is the one who believes his own lies. And so we all think that we're a little more competent, a little smarter, a little more charming than we are in reality. And we think that to persuade other people that we are that, and that's fine in social life. It can be a problem when you've got a leader because the leader can wield power. And in fact, in addition to Biden torpedoing the chances of the Democratic Party because he kept up the self deception and his advisors were not able to penetrate it with the common. Well, it wasn't yet common knowledge. It was widespread. Private knowledge that he was impaired is partly what determined the series events in 2024. In the other direction, though, leaders.

[E]

One.

[G]

Might say, including our present leader, can, because of self deception, implement policies that can be disastrous. But they refuse to acknowledge evidence that it's going badly because it damages their own sense of self. That is necessary to project the confidence that can bully other people into accepting your wisdom, knowledge and legitimacy.

[F]

Well, I'll give you another example of how common knowledge comes into play, the inverse of Joe Biden.

[E]

So there was Joe Biden not being.

[F]

Read in on the common knowledge that everyone else has. And that creates coordination problems, cognitive dissonance, dissonance just a tough situation for the President. Then you have Donald Trump clearly lying about some things. Let's just take a clear lie. He says something like, I'm actually the greatest president since Abraham Lincoln, or I am. No one is better or more pro black people than any president maybe except Abraham Lincoln. This is a good example of common knowledge. Cuz he's lying or at least exaggerating. We know he's lying or at least exaggerating. I believe, and I bet you will buy into this, he knows that we know that he's lying or exaggerating. And so there's really no problem there. It's an example of common knowledge that isn't exactly knowledge but operates as such.

[G]

Well, it's common, it's common belief because it's if it's okay, right, which is, you know, which is, which is psychologically you know the same thing. For something to be knowledge, it's got to be true. But there is a common belief. There can be a disconnect though between common misconception and private knowledge. And this is called a spiral of silence or pluralistic ignorance where everyone thinks that everyone else believes something and no one actually believes it. And that can happen whenever there is punishment of publicly expressing a belief. Then you get preference falsification, where people lie about what they believe to avoid the punishment. But because everyone else is lying, you might actually think they actually believe it, even if no one believes it. And the case of they know they're lying, we know they're lying, we know they know that we know they're lying. Still they lie. That was a saying in the old Soviet Union where there was severe repression of criticism of the government. It could send you to the gulag. And there's a lot of pluralistic ignorance where no one knew that everyone else was as disgruntled as they were. And I reproduce a joke from the old Soviet era. There was a rich vein of subversive underground humor in the Soviet Union. You wouldn't tell it in any case, where you fear that other people might out you because you could be sent to the gulag. But the story was about a man handing out leaflets in Red Square. And of course the KGB arrest him, take them back to police headquarters, only to discover that the leaflets are blank sheets of paper. There's nothing written about it on them. They confronted him and they said, what is the meaning of this? And he says what's there to say? It's so obvious. Now the point of the joke is he was generating common knowledge. It was Subversive to hand out the blank sheets of paper, because as people accepted them, then they knew they weren't the only ones that what was private knowledge. He was making common knowledge. This can also happen in public demonstrations. Why is it so fearsome to a dictator if people speak their minds or show up in public? The government has the guns. It's because a public demonstration generates common knowledge. You're seeing everyone and you're seeing everyone see everyone, and you suddenly know, hey, I'm not the only one who hates the regime. We all do and we all know it. And that can give people the collective power to challenge the authority of the dictator, which they wouldn't have had if each one hated the dictator but didn't know that other people knew. They may even have privately suspected that everyone had the same feeling, but they may not have known that other people knew that other people knew to the extent that they could generate a coordinated resistance. And in the case of life imitating a joke, Putin's police last year arrested someone for carrying a blank sign.

[E]

Right.

[F]

And I'm thinking of the demonstration and everyone knowing there is something to the I am Spartacus, I am Spartacus moment that wasn't just invigorating. It actually is proof of concept that everyone knows that this should be objected to or what the emperor was doing.

[G]

A great example. I wish I had remembered it to include it in the book. But yes, that's a great example.

[F]

So in your chapter on council culture, which was excellent, you talk about spirals of silence and I'll just throw this out at you. Of Trump's and I know what your politics are, and we align of Trump's initiatives. They range from, and actually you've been very outspoken on the trying to kneecap colleges. They range from the ill advised to the unconstitutional to possibly the horrific. But I find that there's less pushback on the anti DEI initiatives than the college funding, than a lot of the immigration due process. And I suspect that this is the exposure of the spiral of silence that was that characterized a lot of the thinking about dei. Do you think that's fair?

[G]

Yeah, I suspect it is. We know from public opinion polls that a majority of people are against racial prejudices. DEI is kind of a euphemism for that. And. But we also know that especially in universities, people can be punished for criticizing racial preferences. I mean, there's kind of two problems. One of them is assuming people object to racial preferences. There's the problem, but there's a kind of a meta problem of if you Criticize it. There have been professors who've been fired, who've been disinvited from lectures. And it's not surprising that of all the things that Trump did, this is one where he has struck a chord. I mean, called dei. DEI is more than racial preference. It's become kind of a euphemism for that. It's also, you know, kind of feel good measures. We all treat each other with respect and, you know, I don't think there's anything so bad about that, but people often use.

[F]

No, but I'm thinking, and maybe you are too, of something like a diversity statement. Which was most. I don't know most, but a lot of people in academia were against it for practical reasons and even philosophical reasons was very hard to say so, and there were costs to saying so. And then when someone cuts in like a lightsaber, like a cleaver, and just cuts it all out, you know, you don't have. It just exposes that the only thing keeping it in place, or one of the main things was a spiral of silence.

[G]

Exactly. Yes. And. And fortunately, to bring up a local reference, my own university, Harvard, did get rid of the diversity statement requirement. No one, you know, I gotta say, as a professor there, there was never a discussion, should we have mandatory diversity statements? It was implemented by stealth by the DEI bureaucracy, and no one got to discuss it. No one even really was aware that they were in place. Fortunately, they were rescinded by our current dean, Hopi Hoekstra, and it's one of the measures that Harvard has taken, some of them before Trump came into office, some of them maybe hurried along by his extortion of the university. But I think most of us would say this is a welcome change. No one thought.

[E]

Yeah, that was my question.

[F]

When they were taken away, was there a hue and cry or either a hue or a cry about diversity statements in the way that it certainly was true when they talked about threatening Alzheimer's research.

[G]

No hue, no cry. No, no. You don't think anyone misses them?

[F]

So why. Here is my theory. Why are you interested in the things you're interested in? You're a thinker. Your thoughts take you to places that maybe are under explored. There's a purity of intellectual pursuit. But I would think that there are. I mean, I just can't get around the fact that there are so many recent trends that you've been writing about in other topics. A rejection of empiricism, a rejection of the scientific method, an embrace of postmodernism. That seems to me Very much informing this book. And I don't exactly know how A translated to B, but it all does seem part of a morass about knowing what we know and how we know it and challenging the recent trend of challenging knowledge is that. Do you. Do you know if that factored into why this area of pursuit.

[G]

It doesn't feel like it, to be honest. Although, you know, who knows what goes who. What my unconscious motives are or what. What strikes a chord with me? No, I actually got into it through my academic curiosity about my main subject matter, language, because. And this was a topic that I broached 15 years ago in my book, the stuff of language is a window into human nature. And there's a sense in which one of the chapters in that book, Games People Play, kind of grew into the current book. What everyone knows that everyone knows. And here's the puzzle. And linguists have long known about this. A lot of language doesn't actually say what it means. If I say, if you could pass the guacamole, that would be awesome. I'm not saying if you could pass the guacamole, that would be awesome. It's false, it's hyperbole, it's. It's bizarre. But everyone knows what it means in context. So this is a fact about language. It's one of the reasons why it took a long time to get computer systems that would understand people. Because if you simply parse, well, here's the subject and here's the verb and here's the object, so figure out who did what to whom. You're not going to really understand language because a lot of it is so indirect.

[F]

And just figuring out, yeah, right, versus yeah, right. I mean, that'd take years.

[G]

Yeah, the listener has to fill in a lot of gaps, connect the dots, do a lot of mind games like, oh, what does he really mean by that? And in the case of if you could pass the guacamole, that would be awesome. What he really means is, give me the guacamole. Anyway, the question was, as someone who's interested in the human mind, why. Why do we do this? Why don't we just blurt out what we want? And there are a lot of other cases where we fall back on various kinds of weasel words. Shilly shallying, beating around the bush, hoping the listener will catch our drift. You go to a fundraising dinner and what my dean says is, you're a bunch of rich people and we want you to give us money, even though, of course, that's why we're all there. And everyone kind of knows that. We'll say something like, we're counting on you to show leadership and friendship and helping us in our campaign for the future. Or in sexual encounters. Do you want to come up and see my photographs? Come up for Netflix and chill. Any grown woman knows what that means. But why is that different than, hey, do you want to come up and have sex? I mean, some people do that, maybe some pickup artists, but most people don't. Or imagine that you're trying to offer a bribe. You're at a restaurant, you have no reservation, but you want to jump the queue and have the maitre d show you to a table. And there have been articles about people trying to do that. You might say something like, gee, this is. I was wondering if you might have a cancellation. Or is there any way to shorten my wait? As opposed to, if I give you a $50 bill, will you seat me right away? So we do this all the time. And what led me to the phenomenon of common knowledge is that puzzle, that puzzle about the science of human beings. And the answer that I suggested 15 years ago in the stuff of thought was the difference between beating around the bush, shilly shallying euphemism, and learning something.

[E]

So much of Steven Pinker is so good, and I want to give you so much more of it. So we have an extra 20 minutes. We talk for a long time. That is for you. My Pesca plus subscribers go to subscribe.mike pesca.com Sign up to be a Pesca plus subscriber. You get bonus episodes. You get an ad free podcast. You get in this some quotations of John Maynard Keynes. You get a discussion of paradoxes of general knowledge and you get to help the gist. And I know that you know that you want to do that. Subscribe.mikepeska.com as the weather cools and I try to stay cool, I'm swapping in the pieces that get the job done, which are the warm, durable, built to last, quintessentially quince pieces. Quince delivers wardrobe staples every time that carry me through the season. Oh, I've got my eye on a suede trucker jacket. I am suave, if not suede. And though not a trucker, it is perfect for layering and just looks really casual and put together. But you know, a lot of craftsmanship goes into it. As with all the quince clothing, it's really a go to across the board. Bedding, bath, cookware, travel accessories. I say layer up this fall with pieces that feel as good as they look. Go to quince.com the gist for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q U I n c e.com the Gist Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com the Gist Morning Zoe.

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Wow, impressive. Let me try. T mobile is the best place to get iPhone 17 Pro because they've got the best network.

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So what are we having for launch?

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[E]

And now the spiel. The Supreme Court's October session starts today. On the docket, some interesting cases. Colorado's ban on conversion therapy, transgender athlete cases out of Idaho and West Virginia, a Louisiana Voting Rights act case and a Rastafarian whose head was shaved in prison. No Rosta, no cry. But mostly I and I think most court watchers or authoritarian fretters are watching the shadow docket. This is the not at all nefarious sounding term for temporary rulings before courts can get to the real thing. Here's an L A Times headline. Trump's executive powers face test second sentence. Chief Justice John Roberts and his conservative colleagues have given no sign so far. They will check President Trump's one man governance by executive order. Well, you know, he is the president, so that's that's the only man or person who could try to attempt that governance. But also they have given some signs. For instance, he hasn't won on everything. For another, they don't always explain their rulings but in public. And sometimes they do. And the explanations which are sometimes also embedded in past rulings have, if not a logic then a through line to them. And the through line isn't necessarily we want to let Trump win, though others, including Katanja Brown Jackson says no, what you're doing is you want to let Trump win. The question I have, and I am among those who probably is on the non Freddie side of the authoritarianism is upon us continuum, but certainly open to the best arguments thereof. So the question I have is what to think about the shadow docket? Is the grand worry about it justified? And will the Trump wins usher in some version of authoritarianism in which there is no clawing back the society we once knew? Or will it be more the case that it's bad news for an FCC commissioner here, a former Department of Education worker there? I have some answers. So Trump did win 84% of the shadow docket cases. But keep in mind they drop the dogs. The drop the dog strategy means they take the cases to the Supreme Court that they think they could win. And so far that is 21 victories, 19 in a row by a lot of counts. They did have about 80 losses from lower courts that they didn't even attempt to get the Supreme Court to overturn. So 21 temporary victories today on the Gist list I linked to a very good Reuters article which I'm going to talk about and add to if you're interested in subscribing to the Just List free today. Text Mike to 33777 so very commercial. Anyway, what the Just List Reuters article does is it lists some of the reasons why the Supreme Court ruled the way it did. And before I even get to that, I did find another case where it was a Trump win at the Supreme Court. But it wasn't even the case that the dissenters were all the liberal justices or even only liberal justices. Justice Sotomayor in one of the cases, which was Trump v. American Federation of Government Employees, this was about the executive firing government employees. She said, I think pretty sound logically the plans, the firing plans themselves are not before the court at this stage and thus we have no occasion to consider whether they can and will be carried out consistent with the constraints the of of law. So that lower court ruling was overturned. I mean she's pointing to a sloppy judge ruling. That seems something even a liberal justice should do. The Reuters article said that the court identified specific errors by federal judges in four cases, all right, that twice issued opinions that lawsuits challenging a Trump policy were brought in the wrong lower court. They twice predicted Trump would eventually win. Wait a minute. You're allowed to do that? Yeah, that's a standard test for winning on the emergency or shadow docket is not the only test. But they can look ahead to the future and say, well, when this all plays out, we think the President's going to win. It's obvious that the person who asked for the stay is going to win. So we're going to put the stay in place now. Otherwise the eventual winner will be harmed because he won't have or we won't have, as the people who elected him, the benefits of his policy. And by the way, is the Supreme Court right to predict they're going to win? Yeah, probably. They are the sixth in the six. Three. Katanji Brown. Jackson even complains about this. In one dissent that I came across, she was making a Calvin Ball analogy, you know, that Calvin and Hobbes thing. And she said there seem to be only two rules and one is that there are no rules and the other is that the administration always wins. Wins. So what I'm saying, to go back to my original premise, when the Supreme Court issues a stay and says, yeah, we think the administration is going to win, they're probably right. But let's continue. Reuters found that there were a couple cases that involved Trump's firing of Democratic officials from federal agencies that it will potentially overturn. This is the Humphreys executor case. You know, any time I could talk Humphreys executor, I'm going to talk Humphreys executor. This is my pledge to you. So you add it all up. A bunch of these shadow docket cases seemed decently or reasonably reasoned. And I found that one, I mean, I found that it was quite publicly listed where Sotomayor and Jackson disagreed with each other. But there are a whole bunch of cases, including some of the ones I mentioned, that might represent giving the President too much authority. Even if this is in line with age old debates that have always been had between conservatives and liberals on the court and has nothing to do with Judge Roberts seeking to overturn our democracy or Justice Alito being corrupt or anyone being in the pocket of MAGA or the administration. When you have enough conservatives on the court, they're going to enact conservative jurisprudence. And the Trump administration might take advantage of such conservative jurisprudence. By the way, there were many things that Biden tried to do which was in line with, say, the expanded powers of the judiciary. Now, when everyone hears this, I don't know, I have people I talk to who tsk, tsk, and say that I'm Essentially under panicking. I'm a classic under panicker. Yeah, that's probably true. The fact that I've always been right and no one asked me if Osama bin Laden had plans to attack the United States before 9 11. So we can't review the game film and see if I would have gotten that one wrong. But the fact that we live in panicky times and not panicking is usually not just the best but the correct assessment. Also the fact that we always think we live in exceptional times and it's all going to seed or pot or hell based on this, the crossroads or the pivot point we're right at, I don't know, I tend to take a longer view. It might be an under panicky view. But let me leave you with a good quote I came across from Bob Bower. He was writing about the emergency docket. He's former White House counsel to Barack Obama. Also collaborates with a smart guy, smart lawyer, very smart lawyer named Jack Goldsmith, who very critical of Donald Trump, very worried about Donald Trump seizing too many powers, but also at the same time does look at the shadow docket and say, yeah, I don't know if this is the authoritarian keystone we've been looking at for. So here's the Bauer quote. Accusatory rhetoric raising questions about the political or personal motives of justices, whether in the majority or the dissent, connects only with two publics. The segment that intensely dislikes particular decisions and welcomes these kinds of attacks. And another that will be confirmed in its belief that the democracy debate is a sham warped by political agendas. Expert chatter about the conservative majority as partisans in robes who lie down for the president or the dismissal of the dissenters is motivated by an anti Trump agenda does not in these fraught times serve the wider public well. I am not a lawyer. I am not a legal expert. I am someone who interviews lawyers. But I speak for the wider public when I say the analysis of the shadow docket as a vector to rush to the pronouncement that the Supreme Court is illegitimate has great costs and those costs might be worth bearing. But right now, with the current question marks about what these rulings will be, I would say we're not there yet. And that's it for today's show. Corey Warr is the producer of the Gist. Ashley Khan does our coordination of production, which is one way to say it. Jeff Craig runs our socials. Kathleen Sykes helps me with the Gist list. Michelle Pesca helps more than helps, really orchestrates it all from above. Pulling the strings sort of a Svengali in robes. When she wears a robe, a bathrobe, sometimes it's white, it's not black. And thanks for listening.

[H]

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