Transcript of Steven Pinker Returns (on common knowledge)

Wndri Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now. Join WNDRI Plus in the WNDRI app or on Apple podcast, or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcast. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Sheppard, and I'm joined by Lily Padman.

Hi.

We have one of the world's great thinkers among us today. We do. He really is one of my favorite. He's regarded, of course, as being one of the smarter people on the planet. He's a Harvard professor, but he's so optimistic. I rely on him to reset my pessimism.

Yeah, but he, as he says in here, he doesn't phrase it that way. He doesn't. But I agree with you. It sparks hope.

Steven Pinker, he's an award-winning experimental cognitive psychologist, best-selling 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 Histories of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. This was a brain twister.

Oh, yeah. Also, this has reshaped a little bit of the way I think about some things, and I think it might for other people, too.

Yeah.

It's really interesting. It is.

Please enjoy Stephen Pinger.

Hello, I'm John Robbins, comedian and host of WNDRI's How Do You Cope podcast. I'm also, Plot Twist, an alcoholic. I've written a book, Thirst: 12 Drinks That Change My Life, published by Penguin. Thirst is a book about alcohol. It's mystery, it's terror, it's havoc, it's strange meditations. But, John, I hear you cry. Isn't that a rather odd book to write for a sober man who, more than anything, wants to stop thinking about alcohol? Well, yes, but I had to go back to find out why the one thing I know will kill me still calls out across the night. It's the story of what alcohol did for me and what alcohol did to me. If that's of interest to you or someone you know, Thirst, 12 Drinks That Change My Life is available to pre order now online and from all good bookshops. I'm John Robbins, and on my podcast, I sit down with incredible people to ask the very simple question, How do you cope? From confronting grief and mental health struggles to finding strength in failure. Every episode is a raw and honest exploration of what it means to be human. It's not always easy, but it's always real.

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Hello, sir.

Nice to see you in person this time.

Yes, thank you.

Yeah, it's great to see you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to have you back. Thank you. Well, then this time you really are having me back. I know. It's much better in person. But last time, I think, I know it was Delta or Omicron that COVID was still happening. Yeah, why? You were gracious enough to allow me to do it remotely. But now Yes. Here we are. Happy to be here.

The real thing. In general, do you like going on the road?

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

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

Yeah, I was there for a year.

Had you spent that much time there ever before?

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

I had a sabbatical in Santa Barbara, too. I was going to Santa Barbara City College.

I didn't know that. 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 I hope 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 Side, understanding where people are coming from with their different political things. To step out of your culture bubble is pretty profound. I mean, you're going from Harvard to Berkeley, so it's not like- It's the same thing. 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.

I did. Well, it partly was exposure to the Berkeley granola culture, as my friend put it, everyone looks like they've just come back from gardening. Yes. But also there's the rationality community, which Berkeley is at the epicenter, and I wrote a book called Rationality.

That's right.

But also being exposed to some of these Silicon Valley people. They've acquired a pretty bad reputation, especially in the last eight months. There actually was something refreshing about the old Kando spirit. I talked to them about carbon capture or planes that would run on synthetic fuels or even on solar power and a dreamy far off look would go in their eyes. They try to imagine how to make it happen. Instead 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.

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

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. 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 a concern about the reactionary turn that a lot of Silicon Valley people were taking. The neo-reactionary movement What's that? Traditionally, people in Silicon Valley were centrist, mildly libertarian. There has been a lurch toward, this is going to sound weird to say it, toward monarchy and religion.

Kind of totalitarian.

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

It's not disruptive enough.

Disruption can be a good thing if you're improving stuff, but if you're thinking about how to make us lurch back to the Middle Ages, not so much. I think part of it is there is such a reaction to wokeness, such a recoil that people are 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.

Replace bankers. Yes, exactly. We used to hate people in finance.

You think that's just on the left, or do you think everyone had a anti-tech Well, you're right.

There's also a tech lash from the right as well.

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

I met with some people like Mike Rock, who was 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 neo-reactionary in Silicon Valley. He was ahead of his time because we've now seen, particularly with Elon Musk, at the time it was Peter feel a lurch from people who used to be pretty centrist, eclectic to highly ideological.

Yes. Now, what do you think's driving that particular niche is 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. You think that's the underpinning of that? There's some of that. I try to wrap my head around. Some of them 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.

This entire country was founded on refuting that idea 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. 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 optimist. 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 coming true. I like that message. I think Yuval is also a really good person in the intellectual space. It's optimistic. And then Bill Gates, of all people.

Absolutely, Bill Gates. There's a website, Our World and Data. Proprieter is Max Roser that I rely on. With me and with Our World and Data, I'd say it's not so much optimism in the sense of we're putting on a happy face, rose-tinted Seed 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.

Yeah, the right amount of delusion could be helpful.

Or even when you have uncertainty, you should know that within the realm of reasonable possibility is success. That's what makes it worthwhile. How do you know? Well, our ancestors were faced with pretty big problems, and they solved a lot of those. Why would we be the first generation not to solve any of the problems facing us? But 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. Anything that happens suddenly is almost certain to be bad, or it's way more likely to be bad than good because things can go to hell very quickly.

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

But good things tend to build up a few percentage points at a time, and they can compound and transform the world. Or there are things that don't happen. You don't see a headline about a region of the world that isn't having a war, like Vietnam, for example. For those of us who grew during the Vietnam War, that would have been huge news. No war in Vietnam for decades. No, you're a dreamer, you're a utopian. But of course, no war in Vietnam isn't a headline. No war in South America, etc. What Roseling does, what our world in 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. You see, there's never a Thursday in October in which it generated a headline. But if you look at the trends, it shows that we really are better off than people before us.

And still, right? Still since the last- I tried to update it with swallowing hard, grinning my teeth.

Because I read the headlines, too. There's a lot of bad stuff happening. Sure. Not Everything gets better all the time. It couldn't. That would be a miracle. War deaths have shaved off a couple of decades of progress in year 2024, last full year for which we have data. It 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. Syria? Syria in this time was one of the worst. If you look at the curve, World War II, it was just literally off the charts. Let's even start the clock in 1946. 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. 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 solve problems. They don't always succeed, but sometimes they do succeed. Just that 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.

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

When you're in the middle of when you never know. Right.

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.

That's exactly what happened. 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. Then it fell again in the 2000s. Then it shot up in 2020.

It left everyone 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?

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, and that I was getting really nervous like, damn it, what are the trends that I was really happy about? I'm going to throw this book away. That a U-turn. But the U-turn did a U-turn. 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 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, not surprisingly. But since the vaccines ended COVID and the immunity, the world has gone back on track on all 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 really important. They affect billions of people. Yes. We are even after the COVID hit, better off than we ever were in history of the world. I like the thing I think is not so much optimism, but just tracking the data. And that makes you more optimistic than if you're reading the headlines, especially. I'll bring in a little cognitive psychology here because 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, it's so recent, that tends to distort your subjective feeling of risk or estimates of danger.

If you were mugged last night, you have a different perspective on the crime, right?

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 in Cape Cod, then Everyone stays away from the beach, even though there's one death in a century. Every year, people get killed in car accidents on their way to the beach.

Yeah, by the dozen.

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

Yeah. 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.

Yeah, sometimes the professors, the mathematicians, the scientists will glom 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.

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

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

Yeah, and tough shit. We're here now, and that's what it is.

Incredible, I guess. Same thing.

That's another one, yeah. Common knowledge in the techno 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. That's a common knowledge.

But that takes a minute to really... It does take a minute. 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 Steven and I both know there are lights in here. Yes. Give us some examples of this difference between private knowledge and common knowledge because it's fascinating. Yes.

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. Now, it sounds mind boggling. 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 sitcom.

Well, give her Seinfeld because she. I know it.

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

That's right.

Then Rachel says, Joe, you can't say anything. He says, I couldn't even if I wanted to. That That captures the idea. That has four levels of thoughts within thoughts. When it gets to three, it starts to get hard. When it gets to four, it's almost impossible. What am I talking about?

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. 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 He's thinking, you're really prone to throw a rock. It just feels stable. I know you're smart. And so you've probably assessed that I'm going to go for that. And so you're going to go for paper. So if I think you're smart, I'm going to go paper. I generally Normally, if I'm with someone who's smart, we'll start with scissors. We've gotten to three steps, and four, I think, is a lot for someone.

There you go. 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 of rock, paper, scissors.

Yeah, also the great scene in Princess Bride about drinking the poison. Do you remember that whole thing? But you would have known I would have put the poison. He's given himself an immunity to the poison. They were both poisoned.

Are you saying it's what you just did is private knowledge? Yes, it is private knowledge. That would be private knowledge.

Common knowledge is, if you were to say, I'm going to play rock, that would defeat the purpose of that game. It is a recursive mentalize and get inside when 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, if they had a penalty shot, the stick handler tries to guess where the goalie is going to be, the goalie gets where the shooter is going to shoot, looking for a little tell in the other. Actually, It's one of these cases where randomness is rational. If you're predictable, then you're a sitting duck. What would be then common knowledge, though, is you blurt something out. 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. 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. 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. That's why we ignore the elephant in the room. We use euphemism We pretend not to know, we look the other way. That's a big effect in human life and in politics.

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

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.

But the steps are important. People are noticing the Emperor has no clothes on, and they are presumably too nervous to say anything.

They've been told anyone who can't see the splendid garments in different versions of the story has been cuckleded, is a heretic, is not very smart. They've been intimidated. If you accept the story, they did doubt it. They could see it with their own eyes. They wonder, 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. 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 obsequuous deference to the Emperor, now it was ridicule and scorn.

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

There you go. The reason that common knowledge was of to so many academic fields, logic, economics, philosophy, political science, is 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. 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. There are other examples couples, political protests, crashes, bubbles.

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

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

Now it buffets your confidence to also speak up.

Exactly. Now you have safety in numbers, you coordinate. The coordination is 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. 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, so she's going to go to Pete's. But then you think, 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 evolve language is that it generates common knowledge. 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.

Anyway, there are lots of cases like that. 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 all 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 to the Communist Party. But a man's handing out leaflets in Red Square.

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? He says, What's there to say? It's so obvious. It's a joke 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 who accepted it.

That we're not allowed 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. Wow.

You put a passage in your book from Sapiens, from Yuval's book, I was so glad to see that because I was already starting to think in terms of that book, in that that book's proprietary offering, at least on a really pop level, was we have been able to congregate peacefully because we believe in stories. I think that's an incredibly salient argument. 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.

Yeah. I name check Yuelal 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. They're really a 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, he's got the guns, but 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 that can be headquarters, but not necessarily. But everyone acts if the company exists, and that makes the company exist. 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.

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. Yes. I believe in Ladies First. Or we have a convention that we go every other time. Right. So in place of saying something out loud and making explicitly common knowledge, we could have a covenant that would function as that.

Some ritual. Exactly. Conventions basically solve coordination problems. For example, what day do you stay home and read the paper instead of going to work? Sunday. Why Sunday? Well, it doesn't 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, but 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 is only going down by one seventh.

Yeah, right.

Different cultures have different conventions. In Judaism, it's Saturday, which is the Sabbath, and Christianity, it was Sunday. Now, of course, both days, we call it the weekend. Things doesn't matter which days they are.

That's what the Muslims can get Friday, so we can have a full A three-day..

That would be really good.

Someone's going to claim Friday.

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

It's true. We all just decide once these two people stand in front of a whole group. There's an end at that point.

Everyone treats them as committed to each other. 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. It's also ratified by a ring that everyone can see. A lot of things from your Anthro 101 curriculum, why do these cultures do these weird things, seems to make no sense. Well, it 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. A lot of cultural conventions, starting with language. Why does the word coffee mean coffee? Why does the word desk mean desk? Very few words are automatic. It's not like they sound like what they're representing their 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. 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.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, If You Dare.

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Are you a frustrated non-practicing linguist? All throughout your book, someone might easily think you are a linguist more than a psychologist.

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

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

Well, exactly. I wrote an earlier book, which is what spawned this book called The Staff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. 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 the Bush and euphemism and shilly-shallying and weasel words? That's what eventually led to When everyone knows that everyone knows. Because the answer that I came up with, I'll just give some examples.

Yeah, I love that, Netflix and Shill.

You want to come up from Netflix and Shill? Most people know nowadays that doesn't mean you want to come up to just stream a movie and relax?

Right, yes. Chill is going to involve some romance, probably.

Romance itself is a euphemism. Yeah, right. Exactly.

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

What's happening?

Why can't we just say it? It It used to be for a century, the cliché was, Would you like to come up and see my etchings?

Oh, wow. Yeah.

Sexual come-ons are often vealed. Notice it's not even a case of plausible deniability. If he says, Do you want to come up for Netflix and chill? She's a grown woman. She knows what he means. Right. 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. 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 Chili, but she could not be hip to that term. That's like one safety net we give both people.

The real safety net is she could think, he may think that I'm ignorant to that term, and he could think, she might think that I think that she's ignorant to the term. It's not so plausible that either one doubts the other one knows. I mean, they're grownups. I did a study that when you ask people to witness dialogs 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. There's no common knowledge. I think that more plausibly, because grownups know how to interpret language, it doesn't pass the giggle test. Why does it still work? I argue that the reason that it works is it gives It's the deniability of common knowledge. You don't know that the other person knows that you know, even though you do know. It's the common knowledge that's the basis for friendships, for sexual relationships, for romance.

It feels like anything that has vulnerability attached to it.

Yeah, a boss and a supervisor, two friends. What makes friends, friends? It's not like you sign a contract. Do you think that we're friends? Why do you think you're friends? Because I think that you think that we're friends. That's what a social relationship is. 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 you use politeness, euphemism.

Finishing up Netflix and chill. What I What was fascinating was the sentence that 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 that it's Plutonic anymore.

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

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. 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 use. We have figured out how to in that murky nuance.

A lot of our mental life is thinking about what the other person thinks about what we think about what they think. 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 character's heads while they're trying to get into other character's 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 a recursive mentalizing. That is to say, thinking about other people, thinking about other people, thinking. That's what makes mysteries so engaging.

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 the In the absence of that, we can have conventions, Ladies First, Every Other Time. Talk to us about focal points and how those get brought in to bridge this.

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? This goes back to probably the first discussion of common knowledge from a brilliant man named Thomas Schilling. He said, imagine a couple get separated in New York. This was in 1960, so 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. You are trying to think of what's going on in other people's heads while knowing they're doing the same 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 The focal point solves human problems.

An example is two people are bargaining. Now, when you bargain, let's say you're dickering with a car dealer, there's a range of prices where you can make a profit. There's a range of prices that you're willing to pay the car's worth. 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 to sell it to you. How do you decide on a price? 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 The price on the car is $30,07. 62 is pleading to be relieved of $7. 62. So a round number, splitting the 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 Holbrook when he said, the Bosnia Herzegovina, we're going to divide it so that it's 51% Bosnians and Croats That's 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 interests. The 51 49 was a way of satisfying the idea it's got to be majority Bosnia without too much ethnic cleansing. There are other focal points like that in international relations which could make a difference, including a 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 on.

You're going on something, anything, instead of the debate would be endless as to where the line should be. Whereas I can see those lines, you can see those lines. I know you can see those lines.

You grew up seeing those lines. You grew up seeing those lines, exactly. You already accepted these lines for some period.

Or sometimes, 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 It used to be Jordan. It wouldn't make sense to lop them off. But then another focal point is, okay, so for every few percentage points of old Jordan that we allow Israel to keep permanently, there has to be the same number of percentage points carved out of the old Israel that will be in a new Palestinian state. 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 gerrymandering allowed in this country? It's the antithesis of that. It's like, you can just move the lines anytime you want.

That's a good point. I hadn't thought to make the connection. But yeah, one of the reasons that gerrymandering is considered outrageous is that it is not a focal point. It's done expediently. It is done to maximize the number of representatives that decide doing the gerrymandering can claim.

I want to talk about how these concepts apply to a few different categories. 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?

A lot of economic phenomena, 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 a forest, the forest will grow, they cut down the wood, it's wood. They sell the wood, they make a profit. That's the way you think economy should go. But of course, it's not the way the stock market goes.

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

No, because the famous economist, John Maynard Keynes, he likened it to a beauty contest, but not a standard beauty contest like the old Miss Rinegold ads that ran in American magazines for many years, where there are six faces you pick the prettiest. Here, he imagined there were six faces, it doesn't matter how many. But the prize goes to the person who picks the face that the most other people pick. Oh, wow. 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. You've got to get in the heads of other people. He said speculative investing is 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 beyond its actual productive value.

Without almost any acknowledgement 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.

Yeah, exactly. As long as you could find, as an investment analyst, put it, a greater fool. A greater fool. You get phenomena like meme stocks, where some influencer who just has a following, there's a guy named Roaring Kitty. This is the game stock. This is a moribun business, bricks and mortar video games.

Failing, losing money.

He talks it up 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 want to buy it up. It goes through the roof.

There's such a variety of personal power over shaping common knowledge.

If someone is public.

Yes. What a disproportionate amount of sway over common knowledge certain people have.

They know that it can be too much power, and that's why you get the chairman of the Fed or other economic tsars having to watch their words very carefully. 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.

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

I quote Alfred Kahn, who is Jimmy Carter's Inflation zeal. He said, The President has told me I've never used the word depression because using the word can actually make it happen. I agree, I won't use the word depression. But we're in danger of having the worst banana in 50 years.

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. Just talk about the power of the Super Bowl.

Well, here I owe a lot to a political scientist named Michael Chouet here in Los Angeles, UCLA, who wrote a book, 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?

Like they'll only work at scale.

Introducing a new credit card. When the Discover Card was introduced, it was a really good credit card. There were cashback bonuses and good terms. The thing is, why would you get a Discover Card if you didn't think any vendors were going to accept it? Why would a vendor accept a new card if they didn't think a lot of customers would have it? Or the best example from Chua is the Apple Macintosh computer. 1984, everyone was using IBM PCs, and I grew up on that computer. They had 24 rows of 80 characters, and you had to memorize commands like rumdur:. Fubar/. If you get one character wrong, it jokes. You had to remember where you kept all your files. They were paid. That's 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.

What an acronym That's what I'm talking about.

I'm not going to say that. 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, there may not be tech support, the price is going to stay high. No software designed for it. No software, no peripherals, no consumables. So Apple, they tried it originally with 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 in the calendar. 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. So you had a dystopian scene from 1984 of these sackloth-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 shorts carrying a mallet running and go back and forth between the corporate meeting and the woman. Then she bursts into the room She hammer throws the mallet onto the screen. It explodes in a fireball. 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. That was exactly once.

Nothing about the product. Nothing about the product. Didn't explain windows, didn't explain the mouse.

But what it did is it cut the knot. Now, since everyone knew that the Macintosh was a big thing, they could take a chance at buying one, and they have to be an early adopter. Likewise with the Discover Card. This can also work for other products that depend on these network effects, other people adopting them.

They have caché or some perceived... The brand has value or it's prestige.

Sneakers sneakers. But sometimes people think, I wear Nike's 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. What Chouet 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 sneakers. Cars, Mercedes. Cars, 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 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 depend on network effects. And more recent example, this is decades after Twitter published this book, is the year before last, the Super Bowl is sometimes called the Crypto Bowl because so many of the ads were high concept ads for crypto exchanges.

This is 2022? Yeah.

Matt Damon with a backdrop astronauts and mountain climbers and Larry David playing himself at different points in history, rejecting various innovations like fork, like the toilet, like democracy. The punchline was, they tell him about FTX crypto exchange. He says, No, I don't think so. I'm never wrong. The joke being- He's always wrong.

He's always wrong.

The irony was he was right because it was FTX, which is a Sam Benjamin free 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. It's a purely speculative investment. 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 could do that.

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

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

Then It's like the Nike sneakers. Exactly. In addition to the bidding up the price.

Yeah, and I think that happens in politics, too.

Oh, yes. 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. Let's say there's 10 candidates. Because you can only vote for one, people say, 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 them my vote. I want to vote for someone who's either going to be number one or number two, so my vote 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 gaffs 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 In a South Carolina primary, Jim Clibern endorsed Biden. I don't know even how many people have heard of Jim Clibern, 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? Yeah. 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.

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

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

You 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 then studied it in real time present day, and it pretty much holds true.

Yeah. This is my earliest encounter with the idea of thinking about thoughts, because when I was in Jewish Sunday school as a kid, we were taught Maimonides's 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 to trade, you give them a starter loan, you go into partnership so he doesn't even need charity in the future.

You fix them, basically.

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, where is the interest 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. Interesting. Then one level down from that, the other way around. The recipient knows the donor, but not vice versa. 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. 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 Patricia 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 that. Whereas Carnegie, he put his name on absolutely everything. I'm like, Yeah, he's better.

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

Why is it bad if the poor person knows?

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

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

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

Here's 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.

You should give the Kerbier enthusiasm example.

Rabbi Larry Ben David. Another great Jewish singer. It actually is a great Jewish thinger. 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 The other wing says, donated by Anonymous. Now people are starting to gasp, Hey, do you know who Anonymous is?

It's Ted Danson.

Wow, what a great guy. Yes. Larry's really peep. This is his rival. He's just, I didn't know that you could donate anonymously and people would know about it. I would have taken that option, okay? People would know about it. 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.

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

Yeah, but sometimes it bites them. 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.

There's also the compelling argument and effect of altruism, which is by people seeing other donations, it does encourage them, too. It's contagious. So you might be doing more good for the cause by owning it.

That's exactly right. And ironically, there's another medieval rabbi, rabbi Shlomo Ben Avraham. In contra-Mimonides, he argued exactly that. There's a righteousness in publicizing exactly because it will incentivize others. Bill Gates, probably the world's biggest philanthropist, he's not anonymous, and for a reason. Namely, he can cajole shame his fellow billionaires.

Also, he's an example of like, look what I did and you will live. You can give away this mass fortune. It'll be just fine.

It will work. His fellow billionaires would then be keeping up with the bills. Yes, exactly.

With the cases. No, it's one of the most genius aspects of his already genius foundation.

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 Curbier and enthusiast of Larry David, Bono outed him postumously, 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 said, Oh, Jobs, what a great guy.

Yeah, better than Bill Gates.

Like Ted Danson, although Jobs gave away one thousandth of what Gates gave away.

And had probably one millionth of the impact because he did it in this also-Secret way. Methodology that yields results. Right.

Anyway, those are some of the paradoxes That's interesting. That I talk about.

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

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

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.

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

They care, yeah. But also you can be poor and hate the rich people.

Well, that's true also.

For not getting enough money. If they're not getting it. 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 right now. 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. That's my one.

That's Larry David, I should say.

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? They're so good. 14 of them, they were all delicious.

Oh, this hypocrisy.

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

Yes, I'm glad you brought that up because this is 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 cost, and we call that altruism in the technical biological sense. Richard Dawkins wrote a book, The Selfish Gene, now 50 years old, almost. Classic book. It's interesting because it raises a 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. 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 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. An ox-pecker bird ticks off the back of an ox or a zebra.

It's good for the ox-pecker 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.

There's no sacrifice made on either end.

Except for the ticks, but we're not worried about that. That's sometimes called mutualism. There are lots 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? Exploite 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 It's 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. 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 one knows that the second knows that the first one knows ad infinitum?

Function is relying on both cooperation and coordination.

Coordination, yes.

This is really solving the coordination issue. Exactly.

The book is about coordination. As 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'll give the example of the annual Great Barrier Reef Sex Festival, as biologists call it.

Tell me more.

I want to plan a trip around this.

Oh, yeah, you got to be there. Coral has 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. 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 first 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. Yes. There's nothing they can think with. It's all a 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 sperm, that's when they release the eggs. It's concentrated enough they could find each other.

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

Light. How they plan six days.

They hit their stop watch.

How do they know what days are?

There are a bunch of molecular clocks.

They have a circadian rhythm.

Exactly, circadian rhythm. The full moon is their focal point, their clock at Grand Central, and they solve the coordination problem.

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

I don't know.

Maybe they have more receptors to that.

Are they going to tell cloudful?

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

You have a plus with a really clear sky on there.

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

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, If You Dare. Okay, now I'm I'm showing you to the wolves. Okay. 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 is It 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 the reputation of different parties on both sides. In COVID, I think it's a big black mark for my side. I heard you speaking about it. What was happening in COVID, do you think?

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

We're scared and ignorant.

There's nothing to base anything off.

It was a new pathogen.

We could all be dead in six months.

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 in violence, I looked at life expectancy over the course of the 20th century. It goes up and then there's a big notch in the teens, then it went up again. I said, Oh, Jesus, the tragedy of war, World War I. Wrong. 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? 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 got to wear a mask. It's spread by droplets, so it disinfected surfaces, then it's spread by aerosols, plexiglas. Barriers went up, the social distancing. Now, 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, so let's prepare for this. We're not sure if that's it, but let's prepare for that.

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. If new evidence comes in and you got to back off, that doesn't refute science. That is science.

It gets you closer. Yeah.

No one is infallible and no one is omniscient. That's what science is all about. 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 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 the economy, Or how inequitable the distribution of who had to go to work and who didn't.

If ever there was an elitist policy accidentally, I think it was as like, You're essential. Why?

Because I want to get my UPS package just from Amazon.

And I want to eat at that restaurant. Yeah, exactly. But my thinking job should be at home.

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 it's 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 could 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? I think the people in charge didn't give enough attention to both of those dilemmas.

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 reckless deplatforming, demonetizing, canceling of anyone who is suggesting otherwise. I don't fault anyone for the approach. It makes total sense to me, and I get Shutting down opposition.

You're right. That's another problem. 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 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.

Somehow our categorical nature has been most weaponized in that situation where if 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 wholesale write-off of people based on some wordage.

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

It's got to be open to criticism.

It's got to be open to criticism.

That's the way it works. It's a quintessential ingredient in the method.

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 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. 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 all? The idea is, no, you can't just believe something because it makes you feel good.

You believe it only if it's true. If it's true, it makes you feel bad, you still got to believe it. I think that's the right attitude, but it's a deeply weird attitude. We don't naturally think that way.

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

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. They should be saying, Hey, these are the guys who are going to be finding cures for Parkinson's disease and treatments for paralysis.

Alzheimer's. It's 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? 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. Even if they're not right, this is an argument that goes back to John Stuart Mill and his famous essay on liberty, which made the classic case for free speech. He said 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 the left isn't right about everything.

No, as it turns out, no one is.

It turns out no one is, exactly. You can point to a number of cases where I think academia dug itself into a hole because it did not have people who are expressing another point of view.

Yeah, I am liberal, and I want all those things to happen. 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 sides are having a real hard time, or my side, I don't know what your side is, grappling with that.

Yeah, same side.

I really struggle with this.

If you're looking from the outside and you go, these institutions are deeply liberal, we agree on that.

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

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. Which is great. 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 we have free speech.

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

But what does this have to do with the people who are studying antibiotic resistance or cancer metastases or the mathematicians and cosmologists? The image of the farthest out of the far out people confused with the entire university system.

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 was 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 bias that we are so elite. And also growing up in Georgia, I disagree.

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, It starts to add up to a pretty legitimate point of view against the last.

But they're not all very liberal. I went to University of Georgia. It's not very liberal at all.

But I think their eye is towards Harvard and Yale.

At Harvard, in the People's Republic of Cambridge, the name of a really good neighborhood bar, by the way. A third of the faculty 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? I got 60 professors just in our group who call themselves conservative, including some pretty famous ones like George Manku, who is 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. Yeah.

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

There are 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. History has told us that.

The experiment has been run.

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

Gay marriage, we've had a lot.

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.

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

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

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

Some people know better about some things. The thing is they got to prove it. 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.

All right, last thing, I want to close on this because we're filled with a lot of pessimism surrounding this topic. You're one of the few voices of very smart people that are saying, Don't panic about AI. The first thing I ever heard you talk about was simply this way we came about, which is a competitive evolutionary framework. Dominance is and we outcompeted a lot of things, but we're projecting that onto a machine. Tell me why we shouldn't be as terrified as some people are.

Ai could be abused like any technology could be. Our 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 can 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. There's no reason to think it'll just happen by itself.

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

Superintelligence or Fum after the comic book sound effect of something just taking off. And since it'll happen exponentially, as soon as it passes that threshold, will be powerless to stop it. I don't think that intelligence is 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 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 GPUs, video game chips. Turns out you could repurpose a video game chip to train an artificial 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. So that did lead to a big leap, just the sheer scale.

But we run out of Web. And you even tell from the fact that for all the hoopla of GPT-5, it wasn't that different from LGBT 4. 5. It's not as if it keeps going up exponentially.

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

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.

Yeah, that's troubling. But again, I'm on high alert for moral panics, and I feel like they abound everywhere you turn. I agree. 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 locked sale assessment of their character, we've got problems. How does it work? Yeah.

In the Better Angels of Our Nature, when I talk 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 flesh. 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. If you look at what Hitler did, what Stalin did, 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. You're not all, but that's a big category. One of the reasons is, what is justice? Justice means you punish someone. That's a aggression. It can give you a license to inflict harm on others, thinking you're doing the right thing. 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 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. Sometimes you get phenomena. People have written about it, like Salem witch trials.

Amanda Knox, recently.

Amanda Knox, yeah. Where Where you pick out a victim that everyone can easily- Sacrificial lamb. Is a terrifying phenomenon.

Yes, we all seem to be easily prone to that. Well, Steven, once again, you've written an incredible book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone One 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. Thanks so much for having me on. So fun. Great fun to talk to you both.

Hi there. This is Hermium Hermium. If you like that, you're going to love the fact check with Ms. Monica. Can I play the cuteest thing? Sure. I came in from recording yesterday. We were recording for many hours. Yep. And I walk I'm going to walk into the house and I hear this. This is Delta.

Good job.

That's Delta learning the theme song of Mom's Car for Her Dad.

I heard you ask and she delivered.

That was a big- Very sweet. That was a big eyewelly moment to walk in the house and hear her playing that. This little fucking girl. What a little lady. What a We had such a fun day yesterday. What'd you guys do? Mom was out of town. Mom was in Utah, I think, on work. 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. Then we watched a little Murders in the Only Murders in the Building.

Oh, my I'm behind.

Yeah. Then we watched a little Devil Wears Prada.

Oh, my favorite of all time.

Then we went upstairs and we listened to Immense World and Snuggled, and they both went to bed so peacefully. That's nice. 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. Then this morning, I got so much attention.

They brush your hair?

Luckily, I didn't have to brush their No, did they brush your hair? Oh, they did not brush my hair. I don't brush my hair, as you know.

That's one thing you can trick kids into doing is playing with your hair.

I should have done that. They were good at snuggling, for sure. That's nice. Yeah, I didn't... Because normally we all lay together and I only get one of them because Kristen has the other one. But I had both of them in my neck and it was heaven. That's very nice. And then they were both as excited as I was this morning because when we woke up, it was raining. I was initially upset because, of course, I didn't take the leaf blower.

You didn't after all that?

After all that, I thought we had escaped the rain. I thought it had been predicted for the daytime. I'm like, Oh, I said it on the fact check. Like, Oh, I got away with it. Yeah. Middle of 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 the '80s song? I don't think so. It's a good rain song. That's nice. Yeah, it was lovely.

Okay, so I feel like I've had an increase in dandruff.

Increase or a rival? I don't associate you with having dandryf at all.

I feel like sometimes I've had it before.

Well, you have one of those classic Eric compliments.

Yeah. Yeah.

Which is, go ahead and roll that out.

How that worked out. 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.

That's why I said you don't have any. 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 stick my fingers in my scalp, my finger nails, and then I'll start just scratching like crazy.

Tearing it all up.

A lot of skin comes out.

But that's a little different, I think. Are you sure? Dander is just like, you're not even touching it, and it's just raining. If you get in there with those long finger nails and start gouging, and then some skin cells come off, that's- You think that's regs?

Yeah.

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

Oh, really?

But what I have been doing is I have a new face oil. Great. I put it on the tips of my fingers and it'll really go up and through there. Yeah, that's a good idea. I think that's been helping a little bit.

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

A penetrative.

Yeah. For skincare, you should be pressing it in. Press. Okay. You don't need to do a smudgey. Oh, just press. You can just press it in.

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

Yes. Just cover all your fingers.

If I just press, I'm just going to have all hair.

But look, I'm pressing on top of hair, right?

First, you went it, though.

Okay.

You didn't just go like this.

Okay. I'm going like this, okay? Okay. And then you go in and out. Okay. And I'm touching skin, too. It's touching the hair, but the skin is getting impacted. Yeah, yeah. I think you should try that. Okay. Anyway, if people notice my dandruff, that is what's happening these days.

You don't have any, but so if they notice them, they're imagining it. Do you want... You do want to do it, don't you?

Because you see, a couple came off.

But again, none are sticking to your black hair.

Actually, right now, it's not happening, but normally it happens. It's like this is TV.

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

Exactly.

Then I went on a hike this morning. I was like, Oh, it'd be lovely to go on a hike because it's an overcast and tropical feeling. I underestimated the humidity. 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 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.

Well, this is a ding, ding, ding because we had a guest on yesterday who was quite sweaty.

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

But it was welcome.

Yeah, because he was hot. Yeah. I thought about how hot he was a few times today. Today, you did? I think that's a real testament to someone's hotness when it's like a day later, you're like, Yeah, that person was hot.

You're still thinking about it. Yeah, he was hot. Yeah.

Do you think about it at all the day?

Not today.

Not today.

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

Yeah. And he's so hot, right?

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

He has a boyish face, I'd say.

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

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

Yeah, I guess that's true.

The hot person, did you know, was in a Got Milk ad? I probably had it. Do you have him?

I might. I need to go back and look. Somebody DMed me that they're back. This guy saw a Got Milk ad in Los Angeles on a billboard.

Really? Yes. With the milk mustache? Yes.

Yeah. So people are listening.

I was just telling the girls last night when we were in spaghetti, I said, I always ate my spaghetti growing up with a huge glass of cold milk. Yes. I don't do it anymore.

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

I have too much chest congestion to drink milk willy-nilly. I'll get a little...

Okay. Clogged up.

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

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

That's what kids drank. Yes. That's what you drink. Because no one drank water. That was not a thing when I was growing up. No one ever had a glass of water with anything. I know.

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

Yeah, you haven't gotten with the program.

Well, I try, but 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'd they transition?

Could you drink more milk? I mean, let's get you more fluids in you that aren't wine or Or a Moscow mule.

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

You drink 60 ounces right before bed?

I drink at least 50. It's not ideal. It's not ideal timing.

That sounds like a terrible plan. I know. Do you wake up and pee in the middle of the night?

I do have to pee in the night.

It hurts even?

It doesn't hurt.

Oh, I'm glad we're bringing this up. Okay. I have more thoughts Remember you brought up on a fact check about the length of the penis could reduce the stream strength. Yes. So I was peeing the other day, and I was just thinking of the whole thing. 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 imagine if you had a two-foot long penis, it would probably be touching the water and you'd hear nothing. Okay. Because it would be falling one inch.

But wouldn't you be holding it up a little bit because you don't want to touch the water?

Sure. You would avoid... I can get in this situation sitting down sometimes on toilets, and it's always in public. And if I feel the water, I almost die. 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 noise. The most amount of noise would be if you peed from a rooftop. Sure. If you had a very tiny, short penis, it would fall farther. It would go through less penis and slow down less. Everything about a loud stream really screams smaller penis. Except, okay- But every boy thinks that people are evaluating their peepee size by their stream.

But also if it's a lot of pee, if it's so much pee, that would make a louder sound more hitting. More pressure. Yeah, because the pressure. So maybe that's like, oh, there's so much because the penis is so big. But as we know now, that's wrong.

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

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

I'm saying that it's just a really crazy thing that we deduce that when all signs point to, that would actually mean less penis. If someone had a three-foot hose, you would never hear it because it would be underwater. You would put it in the water and then fill the bowl up. That's disgusting. Don't you have to factor hole size, though, too, then? Urethra girth. Yeah.

We discussed that before.

Urethra diameter.

It's more like how long it has to... I mean, if it's a huge hole... It's like a pencil. Yeah. If it's a pencil hole, It's a hole and tube, and it's... I guess then if it's big, it'll still be loud and fast.

It's because the amount coming out. It's a lot of factors. It's short, though. Because you would expel it so quickly. It could be long and girthy hole, though. I think it's three second P, though. It'd be loud as hell and then over.

Bodies are so different. There's so many factors.

There are. We were really off track with that.

Yeah, you guys were. I'm really off track.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, If You Dare. You had a couple items on your list from last time we didn't get to.

Yeah, I did, but I was about to say something else before we got into penis, peeing, maybe.

You drinking 50 ounces of water.

Milk. When we were young, the doctor would tell our parents to make us drink milk for calcium. And then I had to go down to skim milk because of my cholesterol.

Right. Currently.

No, when I was little. When you were child?

Yeah. Wait, you had a high cholesterol to check as a kid? Yeah, I've had it my whole life. Yeah, that's the whole thing. I don't think my cholesterol was ever checked as a child. Oh, yeah. I mean, I almost never went to the doctor unless I was there to get stitches.

I would do physicals.

Oh, yeah. I didn't do those.

Yeah. Well, I did. And my cholesterol was high. Okay. So I had to go to Skim milk.

Okay. Were you on a statin in fifth grade?

No, but somebody did ask if I could give an update. Someone DM me to ask if I could give an update on my GLP-1 journey. Oh, yeah. And my cholesterol. We're getting our blood work done next week. Yeah. So I'll know more after that, and I will report back. Okay, great. 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.

Oh, yeah. Okay.

Let's say you go in. Yeah.

I use it all the time. You do? Yes, because unless I see a guy in a wheelchair on my way in, I absolutely use it. There's more space.

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

I will be out in one second.

What if you're pooping?

I can only tell you this. 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 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. Anyone that uses a bathroom has to wait. You just need a lot of space to operate the wheelchair. I don't think it's a fast pass to go into the bathroom. That doesn't make any sense to me. You don't It's not a fast pass. It's a size thing so you can be accommodated.

No, 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?

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

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 and there's nobody there, and all the stalls are open. If you go in there, you're taking the one opportunity for him when he comes and also nobody's there, but his stall is taken.

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

Of course.

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

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

It's that- But I do think people think that. That that thing should stay empty at all times 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.

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

But again, if he showed up and four people are standing in line to use just the handicap stall. Yeah, that's bad. Bet my life on the fact everyone's like, Oh, go ahead, bro. I'll use the other ones. The Most of the person would have to wait is for one person to use the bathroom, and I don't think that's a big deal.

What if they're pooping and it's so long?

If you think you're going to take a tremendously long dump, probably don't use it. Okay. Secondly, glance under. You can see the rest of the bathroom. If you see wheels, pick up the pace. Get out of there.

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

Oh, I do because I like to be alone in the bathroom. So if I hear the door and I'm like, I hate that. I hate that. Someone's in there, and then I look, are they still in here? Oh, I never look. I could tell you at any moment how many people are in the bathroom when I'm sitting.

You do, because when I am in, if I'm in the handicap stall, I can't see. The door is too far out for me to just peak. I would have to get up.

No, you look under.

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

Okay.

I can't just go like this. I can't reach. The bottom is there. Does that make sense?

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

I'm thinking of a bathroom. I guess that doesn't do that.

Like a foley with a door you can't see out of.

You can see under the door.

But not the sides.

But you wouldn't see out the sides. Okay.

A men's bath, I'm thinking of an airport, primarily. It's It comes down to the kneecaps.

Okay.

Or mid-cab. I can see what's happening on the floor of the bathroom. Again, I'm 50. Never once have I come out and seen someone in a wheelchair waiting for it. It just never happened. So it's very theoretical.

Do you use it or what? It's just a fun topic.

Oh, yeah. I'm just telling you why I have no guilt using it whatsoever.

I use it sometimes. Well, I I only use it if the stalls are taken. Okay. But I often feel bad about it. Oh, wow. 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. Yes. I'm like, I can't. I don't know what to do.

Yeah, you should just use it.

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

I use it because I'm a daddy long legs. And if I have my roll on bag with me and I go into the a normal stall, I have to leave my bag on the 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.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's complicated.

It is. Rob, do you shit in the handicap That one.

Or just P.

If it's the only stall open, I won't pick that first, though.

Yeah. These are very ethical. Okay, so.

But I get what you're saying.

This came to me because I was at a restaurant and I was like, Oh, what do I do? These are taken. Do I go in there? I guess I am going to, but I hate this. And then I wonder.

Could you have glanced around the restaurant, see if there's any- Wasn't it going to come out of the bathroom and go to a big glance. A big suite.

That's a little much.

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

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

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

It's just the rest are taken. I wouldn't normally.

I would never do this, but I am going to have an accident if I don't.

Yeah. Yeah. So all right. So you have no issues.

I don't. I feel very clean, conscious about that. Okay, great. But hey, maybe one day it'll bite me in the ass. I'll come out and there'll be a guy, and he'll be like, Thanks, bro. I just shit my pants. Right.

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

They sure do.

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

They age, they can get skinnier, they can get bigger, they can get less muscular, more muscular, they can get bolder, then get more hair.

Correct. So when it changes, are you allowed to say 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.

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

Yeah. That's out yesterday. Oh, it's out. Oh, my God. Yeah, It's my episode of Mom, when I guessed it on Mom's Car, we answer that very question. So go check that out.

Yeah. And listen to Delta play the theme song.

Oh, yeah. So is it going to replace? No. No. It should play at the end or something.

Yeah. 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. Cool. Some of them, she won't be able to, as even said. Some of them, you got to really span your finger. She just wouldn't have the span. It's got to be frustrating when you're a little learning piano.

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

Yeah. No one wants to.

I know. This is the practicing.

Well- You do hear these stories, but those are the phenoms.

But that's how you become phenomenal. I think that is a good lesson. If this kid doesn't want to practice, I'm not going to make them because then they're never going to be good at it.

I meet, though, so many people who say, I'm so glad my, generally, mom made me take piano. Yeah, forced me to take piano.

No, I know.

But I- But generally, everyone's grateful that had that experience.

But this is to me what I think happens. This is what my mom said when I started, and I was like, Oh, I hate practicing. She was like, I regret It's always the mom saying, I regret that I didn't get pushed into this and that I wasn't forced to practice and you have to practice. You'll thank me one day. And then what happens is if If you aren't self-motivated to do it, you're not good.

Unless they withhold things you want. If they really can enforce the rules, then they would. But your mom wasn't willing to go the way.

Oh, no. I had to practice every day, and I would just sit, and I would be miserable, and I would just tink. I would play, but I hated it. 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 it.

Well, you can't watch TV until you've played. You like it? No, because the goal isn't to make you like it. The goal is to make you do it.

Well, the goal is to make you do it so that you like it and get good and be self-motivated.

But you probably won't like it until you're good at it. Until 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 quite unenjoyable to suck at things. Yeah. So the premise can't be, well, they got to like it to do it because no one's really going to like it, except for these 0. 001 % of them are born to be a concert pianist, and they're obsessed with it.

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 liked it and was learning things and got excited about it at some point.

But could you ever play songs?

Yeah, I played the entertainer. I played My Heart Will Go On. I played a lot of songs.

And you didn't like it. Never liked it. Even when you play those songs, you could play them.

Yeah, I did like being able to play them. 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 it was just never going to happen. There are other skills that I did work quite hard at. It also being very hard, but I wanted to be good at it. I think wanting to be good at it is the key.

Yeah.

I think. All right, let's do some facts. Facts. So one thing that I didn't say in the episode but was thinking about because We talked about euphemism and the importance of it and why we do it and why we sugarcoat or sidestep or don't say the thing. Because once you say the thing, it's common knowledge and it's out there and it can change an entire relationship. 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. I'm like, we need to be honest. We need to be saying the things to the people. If something's happening, we need to call it out and say it. I was like, Huh, maybe not. Yeah. Maybe that is reckless and can permanently alter a relationship It did make me think, standing on this, 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, it's worth taking a beat.

Well, it's not a new point I want to make, but it's crazy to me how many of these long-standing debates are really this quintessential debate between contianism and utilitarianism. It's like, that's the contian approach. I don't lie because I don't lie. The ends does not justify the means. The means justifies the ends. I do the right thing and the outcome is whatever it is. Exactly. Yes. Also, no, I want a certain outcome. So how do I get to the outcome? And it's 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 in this slightly dishonest, nuanced innuendo the world 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. And it's just I think it's really interesting how many of our many, many debates just are really that thing. Is the means justify the ends or does it not?

Yes, I agree. Yeah. That was really nice.

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 I walked him out to the curb so he could get out of here. I don't know how we stumbled upon this, but somehow we were just talking about home life and family life. He said, Yeah, I got to remember my opinion is not necessarily I'm not necessarily needed.

Oh, he said that.

Which is my mantra. The best version of myself is when I'm saying, your opinion is not needed here. 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 is not always needed here.

Was he talking about at home?

Yeah, like your family life. Oh, interesting. To keep cohesion in your family, you don't always need to say your fucking opinion. But if this dude can come to that, who his opinion probably is- No. It probably is more approaching the correct thing.

If it's based in fact, that's the fallacy. It's like this smart person's opinion is perhaps perhaps better than others. It's still an opinion.

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, my hunch is I think his opinion would be correct more often than I think that's not- That's a fallacy.

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 episode, is very valid because he has experience there, and he's done a lot of research there. So his opinion is based off of facts.

And a tremendous amount of history. He really understands. Yes.

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

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

Yeah, exactly. 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.

The giggle test.

The giggle test.

It's the- Well, that didn't pass the giggle test. Yes. Is that what people say?

But they would be laughing.

First, Someone will say their opinion. They go, and then the guy go, Well, I didn't pass the giggle test.

Yeah, you nailed it. Okay, great. We don't need to go back. We 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 Xerox. 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. We talk about the Apple ad, the 1984 ad.

Oh, yeah, with the mallet.

The Apple ad being one of the most famous commercials of all time or, Iconic. Best. Yeah. And so I have a list.

Oh, wonderful. Yeah. In the same batch where people were saying they also collected the milk ads, a lot of people had the same outrage I did about Thriller, and that was comforting.

I understand. Okay, I'm going to do top 10.

Okay.

Okay, number one, Apple, 1984. Really?

That gets the number... Who compiled this list?

This one is from American Marketing Association.

A very trusted organization..

Org. Yeah. We should get chairs that say. Org.

That'd be such a shitty shirt. Why? I mean, all respect to your feelings. If I saw a guy wearing a shirt that said. Com.

No, it's specifically not. Com. It's. Org. That's what's cool about it. Then you're like, what is that? Then you ask and it's like, Oh, it's really trusted. Okay.

I'm not pitching. Edu, I guess. That a little makes sense for sure. Because then you're like, I'm a student...

Org is our thing.

It is our thing. I'm not sure that. Org has the reputational excellence that you think. I don't know that it really signifies. My God. I stand down. I stand out. I just did the thing. I'm proud.

I did it. Yeah, you shared an opinion. That was unnecessary. You're right. Okay. Apple, 1984, directed by Ridley Scott.

Where's the beef? Wendy's. Nope.

Number two, Nike, Just Do It, 1988. Nike's Just Do It, I guess, is the first Just Do It campaign, redefine the brand and athletic marketing. The first commercial featured 80-year-old marathoner, Walt Ironman Stack, jogging across the Golden Gate Bridge, paired with the now iconic slogan, Just Do It. Wow. Cool.

Good stuff.

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 Beyoncé Pink and Brittany 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.

I want to watch that one. Me, too.

For Old Spice, The Man Your Man Could Smell Like. This is 2010. Okay. Old Spice revitalizes its image with this humorous fast-paced ad starring Isiah Mustafa, in just 30 seconds. Moustapha effortlessly He had a transition from a shower to a boat to a horse, delivering witty one-liners about masculinity and confidence, all while promoting Old Spice bodywash. The ads' absurd humor, sharp writing, and charismatic delivery made it a viral sensation.

You remember that one, right?

I don't.

All right. Black guy. I can see him on the boat. He's got a full naval get up at the end. He looks like the Fisherman. What's a Wharfs' Fisherman?

Okay.

Okay. Five. Snickers. You're not you when you're 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 forms into a young man, highlighting the message that hunger can make you act out of character.

Make you act like an old woman.

Yeah.

Gordon's Fish.

Gordon's Fish. 6. Pepsi. Wow, Pepsi. Yeah. Scary Halloween, 2019. Oh, Pepsi's Halloween ad delivered a playful jab at its rival, Coca-Cola. It featured a Pepsi can dress and a Coca-Cola cape with the tagline, We wish you a scary Halloween. This tongue-and-cheek visual cleverly framed coca is the scary choice while reinforcing Pepsi's bold and irreverent brand personality.

It's crazy. They had such a good track record, and they really shit the bet on that BLM commercial they did. Remember that one? I remember. It was like cops and protesters fighting, and they decided to just have a Pepsi, and everyone got along before wine. You don't remember? It was like a huge misfire.

I don't remember. God.

It's up there with Bud Light. Is that real?

That's not good. Yeah. Okay. 7 Volkswagen, think small. This is 1960. Okay, I'm not going to read about that. Oh, my God. Ikea, pee here. Oh, interesting. 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.

Oh, my gosh. How could I have never heard that? That's great.

Okay, nine US military, I want you. 1917, '19. These aren't commercials, though. I don't love that. Okay, KFC, this is 10. Fck. 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 acknowledgement of their misstep.

That's fun. Yeah, I like that.

Okay. Eleven is McDonald's. I'm loving it.

Sure. Okay.

Netflix is a joke. It's 12. Okay. Coral and their procreation on a full moon. What happens when it's cloudy Basically, yeah, it messes it up.

Oh, it does mess it up? Yeah. Okay. That's good to know. Makes you wonder if coral can even exist in places with very consistent cloud, like England and Michigan. It's fucking gray for eight months.

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

But if the moon... We had stretches in Michigan, right where we'd set these records, where the sun hadn't broke through for 180 days. So you're looking at six months of no moon cycle, and they can't procreate. That would be problematic. But I guess they're always in tropical locations.

There is. 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 Jamseti Tata holds the title of the world's largest philanthropist of all time, having given a greater amount to charity.

How much has he given?

In 2025, Tata has donated 102. 4 billion, compared to Gates's 75. 8 billion in lifetime giving.

Wow. Well, he deserves that credit.

Yeah, good job. Tata. Yeah. All right, that's it. Love you. Love you.

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