The Hidden Force Controlling Money, Power and Your Choices

What if the real power in the world isn't what we know, but what we know that everyone else knows we know? Money only works because everyone believes everyone else believes in it. Government stands because everyone assumes everyone else will follow the rules. Even things like love and status and trust depends on shared signals that live inside of our collective mind. So today we're gonna go deep into the hidden layers of human reality, the one that shapes everything From cooperation to culture to civilization itself. And my guest is one of the world's foremost thinkers on language, mind, and human nature, Dr. Steven Pinker. We'll explore how common knowledge and the awareness of shared awareness governs everything from money to morality to meaning. Welcome back to the show, Kwik Brain Podcast, where we upgrade your greatest superpower, your ability to learn, to think, and live without limits. I'm your host and your brain coach, Jim Kwik. Today's conversation is going to stretch the way you think about thinking itself. We've done episodes on metacognition, thinking about your thinking, but this is going to go even deeper. So I encourage everyone to take notes. It's going It almost feels like it's going to be a masterclass. If you ever wonder why societies cooperate, why rumors spread, and why markets rise and fall, you're about to discover that the real force behind it isn't just intelligence or even emotion, it's shared cognition. And our guest is Dr. Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, cognitive scientist, 2-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, one of Time's 100 Most Influential People in the World Today. If I was to read the CV, it would take the entire episode. He's written a dozen books. His latest we're going to be diving into today. And if you're watching this, the extended version on YouTube, which I always encourage you to do, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. So again, grab your notebook because this episode isn't just about learning, it's about Re-Seeing the Architecture of Human Understanding and Connection. Welcome to the show, Steven.

Thank you, Jim.

Been looking forward to this conversation. Maybe we could start out by this interesting title. Your title of your latest book points to something profoundly recursive, right? When everyone knows that everyone knows—

Dot, dot, dot.

Dot, dot, dot, yes.

I had to meet with my editor to make sure those 3 dots were included.

It's a very, very clever—

So common knowledge in the technical sense that I use it in the book refers to the state in which I know something, you know something, I know that you know it, you know that I know it, I know that you know that I know it, you know that I know that you know that I know it, ad infinitum. Now that sounds impossible. Uh, your head starts to spin with 2 or 3 levels of I know that he knows that I know that he knows, let alone an infinite number which can't fit into a finite But what I suggest is that we get common knowledge at a stroke when we witness something in a public setting, that when we see other people seeing it and they see us seeing it, then that generates common knowledge in one step. That is, I know that he knows that I know that he knows just because, you know, I see him seeing it and I see him seeing me seeing it. And we have it as a common knowledge. We experience it. Sometimes we really do try to get into each other's heads as they get into our heads or just someone else's heads. That's often what we do in mysteries, in comedies of manners. And I quote a bunch of situation comedies in the book where the characters try to get inside each other's heads. We do it, of course, in everyday life, like, what did he really mean? Or what does he think that I'm— does he know what I know? But more often, we just have a sense if it's public, if it's out there, if it's there for all to see, if it's in your face, then that gives us common knowledge. And that's important because we need common knowledge to coordinate, to be on the same page. It's not enough if you and I are meeting someplace and it's not enough for me to know where you think I want to go because I might think where you want to go. To end up at the same place at the same time, we've got to just settle it by, say, having a phone call, and that generates common knowledge so each knows that the other one knows that the first one knows that the second knows. And there's an infinite number of implicit layers, but we don't actually have to think them all through. We just get it in one fell swoop.

I appreciate you unpacking common knowledge and how it's a powerful force in shaping human cooperation and communication. Yeah, you've explored— I enjoyed many of your books. You've explored the individual mind. Here, we're talking about exploring the shared mind. I was wondering, how does collective cognition differ from individual intelligence? And what happens when 2 are out of sync?

Yeah, so we have our society and our social lives are built on these shared realities, these kind of constructions that aren't written down as contracts. Sometimes they are, but they don't have to be. We just all know that they exist. And even though they're not made out of stuff, they are real for all that. So, you mentioned money before. Money is basically an idea. It's a green piece of paper. That's not worth anything as a piece of paper. What makes it worth something is I expect that you'll take it in exchange for something of value. Now, why would you do that? Well, because you know that someone else will take it in exchange for something of value. Or power. Government doesn't— government doesn't have, like, you know, wiretaps in every room and, you know, policemen stationed on every roof. No government can control the actions of every one of its citizens 24/7. What gives government the power is that we, we kind of recognize that it's there and that it's the— what the law is. Has anyone actually read the law? I mean, I haven't, but you just kind of know that there are laws and you trust other people know that there are laws. A simple example is driving on the left versus driving on the right. There's no reason to do it on either side. Um, you know, they do it— they survive just fine in England driving on the left. But it's really important because everyone drives on the same side. Why would people do it? Because they know that that's what you do. Now, there happens to be a law against driving on the left, but it wouldn't matter whether there is or isn't. We just note that that's the side you drive on, and it's in everyone's interest to follow that knowledge. Now, on smaller scales, those are examples of money and power. Well, what about the everyday life in the subtitle? Well, what does it mean for 2 people to be friends? It's not as if they sign a contract. It's not as if they say, hey, you want to be friends? This is what it implies. I invite you over every other week, blah, blah, blah. No. For us to be friends means I know that you know that we're friends, and I know that you know that I know that you know it. Likewise, if we're lovers, or if one defers to the other in everyday life, one is just the expert, the dominant, the authority. He stands his ground because he knows I'll give way. I give way because I know he'll stand his ground and so on. Or a transactional relationship that if I want you to do me a favor, I got to pay you for it. A cab driver. I can't say, I could really use a ride to the airport. Do you think you have a few minutes? Can you drive me? You do that with a friend. But of course, you don't do that with a cab driver. It's just a different understanding. And all those understandings are also matters of common knowledge. They exist because we know that the other person knows that we know that they exist.

I want to go into the money and power, but speaking of everyday situations, from tipping in restaurants to maybe certain— maybe you have to wear a suit to work. So many of our behaviors rely on these unwritten social scripts, these common understandings. Why are these small acts of coordination so central to our civilization?

Well, they're kind of what makes humans so different from other species. I mean, partly we're very smart, we can figure things out, we can solve problems, we can invent stuff. But also, a bunch of people acting together can do a whole lot more than what any individual can do, or a bunch of individuals each doing their own thing without any kind of coordination. This goes way back in our evolutionary history. Even something like driving game. Humans are no match for any large mammal. But we can get the better of them by working together. For example, we fan out, make a bunch of noise, the animals run away until they're kind of cornered at the edge of a cliff, and then they can be dispatched or even be pushed over the cliff. Native peoples do that all the time. One person can't corner an animal because the animal will just run away, but, you know, 20 people can as long as they all do it together. That's just like one of many, many examples. How do we do that? Well, one of the ways we do it is with language, and I think that's why we evolved language. It's the ultimate way to coordinate our actions. I blurt something out and you know what I've said, and I know that you know what I've said, and so on. But there are other signals. We use eye contact. We use hugs and kisses. We laugh. We cry. We blush. And in fact, in one of the chapters in the book called Laughing, Crying, Blushing, Staring, Glaring, I analyze our nonverbal language as common knowledge generators. I think that's why we evolved to blush, to cry, to laugh. And why eye contact is such a powerful cue. That's something we probably inherited from other animals where you stare another animal in the eye. That's meaningful. For a predator, that means he's going to chase you. If you're a couple of primates, that means you're challenging each other. If you're an alpha and you look at a beta, the beta looks away. We use eye contact too, not just for dominance. but to make private knowledge common knowledge. So if I say to you, can you say that while looking me in the eye? What does that mean? It means you just said something that, you know, you're trying to, you know, pull over on me. I don't think you really mean it. If you look— if you can say it looking me in the eye, that means that each of us knows that the other one knows that you mean it. And eye contact is the ultimate common knowledge generator because I'm looking at the part of you that's looking at the part of me that's looking at the part of you that's looking at the part of me ad infinitum. So that's why eye contact is so powerful in many species, but especially in humans.

In addition to eye contact, how might someone, let's say they're an educator, a parent, some form of communicator, which we all are, how would they use your insights to build stronger shared understanding? so students or teams can learn together, not just side by side?

Well, one of the big challenges in education— and I say this as someone who's been a professor for almost 50 years— is you say something to a student, and they kind of nod. I think I understand it. But it's been said— I think this is a quote from Richard Feynman— if you ever find yourself thinking, I think I understand this, it means you don't.

Mm-hmm.

Now, the teacher has to ascertain whether the student really understands something or is just kind of nodding because they don't want to look stupid because they're bored. And that common knowledge, the teacher knows that the student knows, and the student knows the teacher knows, so that the student can then move on to the next point in the next lesson. That's an essential part of teaching, as it is an essential part of of everyday life, at least the explicit parts of everyday life, the things that are— that we want to be out there. There's a lot in everyday life that we don't want to be out there, but that's a whole other story. That's not what education is about. Education is about— notice the metaphor, laying it on the table. If something's on the table, it means I can see it, you can see it, I can see you seeing it, and so on. We have a lot of metaphors in our language for common knowledge. Anything that is conspicuous, salient, out there, self-evident, That's how we talk about common knowledge without actually using the language of I know that you know that I know that you know. But getting back to education, there's that constant affirmation that a teacher ought to get as to whether the student— as to whether they know that the student knows what they're supposed to know.

I love the examples that you give because I feel like it helps people learn more deeply connecting things that they, you know, something they're learning to something they already know, some phenomenon they might be witnessing but not have words for it or labels. I'm curious, how does this, the science of common knowledge, maybe help explain phenomenon like cancel culture, social media, viral videos, online shaming? Anything? Have you seen anything there?

Yeah. And I do have a couple of discussions of cancel culture and online shaming mobs. I have one in the introduction just to establish the phenomenon. Then I even have a whole chapter on cancel culture in my part of the world, namely academia. Why do scientists and scholars and historians and critics cancel each other if they're kind of in the knowledge business?

Mm-hmm.

That is, you'd think since no one's infallible, no one's omniscient, how do we learn anything about anything? Well, we toss out an idea. And everyone gets to attack it, show what's wrong with it. If the idea survives all the criticism and attacks, then you have some sense the idea may be right. That's what science is. If you disable that process, there's some— you can't say that, then we're bound to be ignorant because we can't figure out whether an idea is true or false unless it's out there and we can criticize it. And so I asked the question, why do all people including academics, surprisingly, feel that some ideas are just dangerous and have to be shut up. And I suspect it's because our social and moral norms aren't stipulated in a contract. They're not enforced by the police and courts of law. You know, why do you no longer tell ethnic jokes, which was common not so long ago, or jokes at the expense of gay people? Why do you not call attention to if someone is unattractive, if they're overweight? You don't say anything about it in public. How do these norms survive? Well, they survive just because everyone knows that everyone knows that that's just— you don't do that. And how do they— how do the norms persist given that it isn't written down, it's not enforced? Well, if anyone breaches it in public, there are consequences. That is, they get a hard stare, someone calls them out, they don't choose not to hang out with them anymore. That's kind of how social life is ordinarily kind of regulated, policed. And I think we carry that over into the realm of ideas where it's usually not appropriate If we're doing science, if we're doing history, if we're doing government, we kind of want to know what's true or false, and we don't want to make it so that some important ideas are just unsayable. But we carry over that kind of policing mindset so that if someone seems to violate some norm, like you don't talk about race or you don't talk about sex or you don't talk about violence, then we feel, oh my God, if If I let that go unchallenged, then maybe the norm won't exist anymore. I better shame that person. And in particular, I better shame them in a public place where everyone else can see them shamed so they know that the norm still exists. In the past, we used to have criminal punishments in public. They were like public hangings and public burning at the stake and disembowelment. people would be in pillories and stocks, kind of publicly humiliated in a public— in a town square. And that's how norms and laws were enforced before there was a robust criminal justice system and lawsuits and courts of law. But we have the everyday equivalent that people who breach a norm have to be punished. People who breach a norm, public, in common knowledge, have to be punished in common knowledge. And social media makes that really easy. Uh, anyone can pile on. And I think that's right behind cancel culture.

It's— so you mentioned social lives, you know, in, in real life. You mentioned social media. What, what happens, you know, with these— there are these tools, right? Gossip, reputation, these ancient tools to help manage, uh, let's call it social order. What happens when these tools are amplified by social media by billions of digital voices. Are there any other distinctions?

That's what gives rise to, to, uh, cancel culture. It's very easy to gin up a petition with 600 signatures via social media. And, uh, and it's also social media uniquely compared to past, um, media. Anyone can potentially generate common knowledge, not just So, in the old days when there are 3 TV networks, you know, you're watching 60 Minutes, you're watching Walter Cronkite, and you kind of knew the whole country was watching it too. That's not literally true with social media. Your feed is delivered to you and you alone by an algorithm. On the other hand, since anything could go viral, and often social media will have next to your feed, there's like a trending column. you kind of have a sense that what you're seeing, anyone else could be seeing. And the additional twist is you can create common knowledge. You know, when you— in the old days, if you were to yell at, you know, Walter Cronkite or Johnny Carson, uh, you're just yelling at your TV. Now you could, um, put it out there, and for all you know, your own comment could be liked, reposted, retweeted, and potentially go viral.

Mm-hmm.

So there's a temptation to be an enforcer because you can.

Well, what about misinformation? Do you have any thoughts on, you know, misinformation spreads faster than ever, you know, digitally? So is it— do you have any insights on how someone could safeguard the quality of what becomes common knowledge in their— in the digital brain of humanity?

Yeah, one thing we've learned from the, um, explosion of first the internet, then the web, then social media is that it isn't enough to just— for information to propagate, to spread. I think that was an idea that was pretty common 20, 25 years ago. Oh, this is great. Information is not going to be siloed. You don't have to go to a library. You don't have to have a subscription to a paper. It's just free. And therefore, with information just flowing every which way, falsehoods will get exposed and the whole world will be on the same page. Well, needless to say, it didn't work out that way. And I think what we've come to appreciate is that knowledge and truth are very precious. They're very difficult to come by. And partly because it's not just because, you know, we— there's no one there filming something. We have all too many people doing that now. But just because we as humans have all of these biases and flaws in our own brains. I wrote a book about that. My previous book was called Rationality, and that was what it was about. But we all want to believe in our truth, things that make us look good, that make our side look good, our tribe, our clan, our political party, our coalition, our posse. And if opposing groups both do that, they can't both be right. They can both think they're right, but that doesn't mean that they're right. In order to get at an objective truth, something that isn't just my preference, your preference, but it's the way things are, we need very special mechanisms of weeding out falsehood, misinformation, mistakes, lies, and kind of trying to dig out the truth. And different institutions have developed those norms. So in journalism, for example, in serious journalism, There are standards of editing and fact-checking and printing and sourcing and printing corrections if there's an error, at least in respectable journalistic outlets. In academia, there's open commentary, peer review, academic freedom, at least, you know, in theory there is. That was the whole idea. In science, there's the demand for empirical testing and falsification. plus open criticism, peer review. In courts of law, there's the adversarial system and rules of what kind of evidence you can introduce. So even in Wikipedia, the contributors to Wikipedia have to sign a pledge of sourcing, objectivity, and so on. Though each— the point is that each one of these truth-seeking institutions is kind of engineered to try to sideline human biases and get at a common truth. If you don't have it engineered for that purpose, you're not going to get truth. You're going to get fake news. You're going to get conspiracy theories. You're going to get reports of miracles. You're going to get all kinds of nonsense and flapdoodle because that's just the way humans are. So what we have to do is just realize most of what you hear, unless it comes from an institution or a group or a platform that's been specifically engineered to find the truth, it won't.

I enjoyed your last book, and I appreciate how you celebrate rationality. In this hyperconnected world, rationality itself sometimes becomes a performance where people signal what they should believe, And my question, I guess I'm curious about, is how can individuals maintain genuine reason amid performance knowing?

Yeah, several things. And that is one of the things I discuss in Rationality. One of them is that I think the tools of rationality should be part of the cognitive toolkit of every educated person. One of the reasons I wrote the book is it came out of a course that I taught at Harvard. And I happened to teach the course as soon as the pandemic exploded. So I put my lectures online and I opened them up to the world. And the world listened and they were interested and curious for more. And that's what gave me the idea to turn the course into a book. But here's the idea. There are, you know, everyone knows that to be an educated person, to know how to read and write and add, but there's more to it. You got to know things like logic. You got to know probability, so I claim. You got to know what's sometimes called Bayesian reasoning, the theorem named after the Reverend Thomas Bayes, which is how do you calibrate your degree of belief according to the strength of the evidence? Should I believe this 100%, 70%, 40%, 10%? That's what Bayesian reasoning is. Correlation and causation, how do you tell them apart? A little bit of game theory, how do you make a decision when the outcome depends on some other guy's decision? So, these basic tools, I think, should be in the repertoire of every educated person. And in Rationality, I have one chapter each on these cognitive tools. That's one. Number 2, we should be aware of our own shortcomings, why these cognitive tools aren't second nature. They have to be learned. We have to be a little bit aware of the results from a lot of work in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics made famous by Daniel Kahneman in his bestseller Thinking Fast and Slow, all the ways that thinking can go wrong, all the fallacies that we're liable to. We generalize from anecdotes. We reason from stereotypes. We're overconfident about our own knowledge and wisdom and the wisdom of our side, our team, our clan, our coalition, our party. So, we've got to be aware of these biases so that we can kind of step outside them and overcome them. And third, I think there has to be just certain norms of ordinary conversation, of political debates, even in barroom conversations, that if you do something like— if someone has an idea and you just say, well, you're only saying that because it makes you look good or because it'll work to your advantage, that's an example of what's called an ad hominem fallacy. That is attacking the person rather than the idea. So, there are these norms of rational debate, discourse, conversation, discussion that just should be, you know, part of our conventional wisdom. You, uh, another example is people will often set up a straw man to knock them down instead of taking seriously an argument that someone's made. You set up an effigy, a caricature, and, you know, that makes it easy to knock it down. What you ought to do is It's now called you steelman the opposition. That is, you set up the strongest possible version of their argument, one that they themselves would agree they are actually— is actually what they're saying, and you try to refute that. So these are norms. They're like, you know, not walking around naked, you know, not insulting someone's appearance, not telling ethnic jokes. They can't really be policed. But to the extent we can say that this is just what rational, decent people do, then that would up the level of our discourse.

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I like how organized your thinking is. When we're thinking about artificial intelligence, thinking about the role either now or in the near future, participating in common knowledge formation, Where not only, you know, where not only humans but algorithms know that everyone else knows. Do you have any thoughts on how AI is participating in common knowledge formation?

Well, it could. It's— there is a potential danger of further dividing and fractionating people if no 2 people get the same answer to a query to a large language model because that model takes into account everything you've ever asked it. And maybe if it has access to your history of searches, it kind of tailors the response to what you want to hear. There's even a term for this among AI researchers. They call it sycophancy. A sycophant is someone who is a fanboy, someone who just—

A groupie.

To use a somewhat rude note, a brown-noser, a kind of a willing slave. AI systems are engineered so that they respect you, maybe a little too much. They don't want to make you— they want to keep you engaged. And so they don't challenge you. If each AI system is kind of kissing up to the user and giving them information that'll make them feel good, Then, as opposed to our best objective truth, you know, AI system that says, sorry, buddy, but what you just said is baloney. Here's, here's the best, our best understanding. If it doesn't do that, then there is the danger that different people will think they know different things because the AI has told them different things.

If you were to take it to the extreme, this is just my thinking. I just don't know whether it's 180 or extreme thinking. Like, can Can we ever have too much transparency? Like, if everyone knows what everyone's thinking, does that enhance cooperation or is it going to hinder or paralyze?

Oh, yeah. No, no, there could definitely be too much common knowledge. And the last chapter of the book is called Radical Honesty, Rational Hypocrisy. So it takes on an idea that's sort of popular in Silicon Valley and some hedge funds Some eccentric psychiatrist says, the problem with human life is that there's too much euphemism and beating around the bush and politeness and white lies. If everyone just said what was on their mind, then all our problems would go away. Now, that is definitely not true. And there are even comedies that play out what the world would be like if someone was forced to tell the truth all the time. like Liar Liar with Jim Carrey. And, you know, life would be hell because a lot of our relationships depend on benevolent fictions, like that friends would do anything for each other or value each other's interests as much as they value their own, or that romantic couples are completely monogamous even in thought. They never have fantasies about being with someone else, that an employee trusts the wisdom of the boss. All these things are literally false, but it's probably not a good idea to say them out loud because then the relationship would collapse. So, we always have to kind of balance the value of the relationship as it currently is with sometimes there are things that have to be said that are really uncomfortable. You know, if in a relationship one person is always getting the short end of the stick and the other person is just exploiting the warmth of their relationship to always take and never give, you know, the time may come when you really do have to challenge that. But generally, in our day-to-day interactions, we, um, we live with a lot of fictions that are just the basis of our stable relationships. That's why we have politeness. That's why we have— innuendo and euphemism, even something as simple as, if you could pass the salt, that would be awesome. Now, it's kind of a— we don't think about how bizarre a statement that is. Why are you pondering what would happen if the guy passed the salt? And isn't it a little bit of an exaggeration to say it would be awesome?

Mm-hmm.

But we say that because we don't want to boss people around. that, that are, are strangers or their friends. We don't treat them like they're servants. And so by framing it as a hypothetical, we treat them with respect while still getting the message across that we want the salt. And there's a lot of that in everyday life. There's even a lot of that in international relations and diplomacy. Often the policies of governments are patently false, but it's a good thing that they have them because if they were to officially declare the truth, Some wars could break out.

Yeah, that was one of the, one of the things I was thinking about in politics, leadership. Well, you know, what's more powerful, truth or common knowledge of the truth? You know, and how do leaders potentially manipulate that distinction?

I mean, I go through some examples. You know, one example is just democracy. You know, democracy is a great thing and, you know, everyone votes. But, you know, when it comes down to it, the vast majority of people are really clueless about how government works, how policy works, what will actually get them what they want or not. You know, they have lives. They're not going to sit and take an economics course and take a, you know, study, you know, huge briefing documents. And so giving people what they exactly what they want would lead to disaster, uh, because, you know, people are, are just, you know, not very smart about how government works. Now, people in government, in policy, kind of know this. And so they— even though you can vote them in, you can vote them out, you know, once they're in, they often do things that if the people knew exactly what they were, they would revolt. Although if they did revolt, life would get much worse. So there's a bit of hypocrisy in democracy. That is the tension between what would actually make people better off And what people say they want or think they want. So that's one example. And I can give some others if you want to keep on this track.

When you mentioned revolt, I was reading that— I think you were talking about revolutions often begin when— not when people become unhappy, but when they realize there are other people unhappy too. So I'm curious, how does that insight change the way we understand collective action, social change?

Yeah. So it's, um, you know, why, uh, why are dictators terrified of freedom of the press? You know, why don't they just let people, you know, bitch and moan all they want? Uh, they've got— the government has the guns, they have the police. Or why do they— or freedom of assembly, why don't they want people assembling in a public square? Again, you know, the government's got the, the brute force. The reason is that no government really has the power to control every last one of their citizens. There's a line that I like to quote from the movie about Gandhi, where Gandhi says to a British colonial officer, in the end, you will leave because 100,000 Englishmen simply cannot control 350 million Indians if the Indians refuse to cooperate. So, that's the key to power. Governments in power have to prevent their citizens from cooperating, or as I would say, coordinating. And that's why they prevent them from exchanging, from sharing their discontent. Everyone might hate the regime, but if they get punished for saying it, that means they don't know that anyone else hates the regime. Or even if they suspect it, they don't know that the other people know that they know. And so they can never stand up together storm the palace together, go on strike together. But if you generate the common knowledge that everyone hates the regime and that the time to act is now, then no government can survive the mass of people opposing it. So, sometimes a public demonstration in a public square or a— sometimes a viral article or a viral event Like in 2010, when a Tunisian fruit peddler set himself on fire in a public square to protest being harassed by the authorities, it led to the Arab Spring. A bunch of governments were literally deposed within a matter of weeks. So I tell a joke from the Soviet Union, which— and there was a lot of humor in the Soviet Union, even though it was one of the world's most repressive dictatorships. According to the joke, a man was handing out leaflets in Red Square. Of course, the KGB arrested him, only to discover the leaflets are blank sheets of paper. They confronted him, what is the meaning of this? He says, what's there to say? It's so obvious. The point of the joke is he really— he was being subversive. He was generating common knowledge. He didn't have to say anything. All he had to communicate was that now everyone who accepts the blank sheet of paper and and seeing other people accept it, now knows that they all know that the regime is corrupt. And that's why Putin's police have actually arrested people for carrying blank signs. The message is irrelevant. It's the common knowledge that is dangerous to a regime.

You mentioned money, and it's a form of common knowledge, right? A shared fiction of value that we all agree on. I'm curious about things like crypto. Okay, so we live in a world of crypto, AI, decentralized systems. Do you think that blockchain, these technologies strengthening, or do you think they're potentially eroding the foundation of the shared trust that makes economies, societies function?

Well, so crypto's— there are 2 things going on with crypto. One is the actual basis crypto, the blockchain or the open ledger. There, what's common knowledge is that there exists a ledger, a massive digital archive that in theory anyone can interrogate it. And that's what prevents embezzlement and theft. So I think people who own crypto probably don't actually check out the blockchain, but they could. And that's what makes it valuable. Then on top of that, as we know, there's been massive speculation in cryptocurrency. People buy it not because they're afraid of inflation or they want to buy drugs or weapons or all the things you could do with crypto, but because they think other people will want to pay more for it in tomorrow. So, they buy it now hoping they can unload it on other people tomorrow. Why would they think that other people tomorrow will pay more for it than they're doing it today? Well, they think those people will sell it to someone else the day after tomorrow because they think it's going to rise in value. So, that's speculation. And it happens with stocks. It happens with commodities, with gold, with tulips in the Netherlands.

Real estate.

With real estate, exactly. Um, so it's based on common expectation, close relative of common knowledge. You buy something because you think other people want to buy it because they think that other people will want to buy it ad infinitum. And that can push the price up. It's called a bubble until the market starts to run out of what are sometimes called greater fools, people who are even stupider than I am who will try to buy it in the future. And then you get a crash. The price plummets. Sometimes that can drag down an entire economy, as in the Great Depression.

So just as we wrap here, I recommend everybody gets a copy of your book. We'll put it in the show notes as we always do at jimkwik.com/notes. If you could even install one mental upgrade or an update into the global mind, one insight, Maybe from your book that everyone knows, that everyone knows, what would it be and how might it change humanity?

Yeah, I think it would just be stepping outside your own mind and realizing, appreciating your own fallibility, your own lack of knowledge, that none of us is as smart or knowledgeable as we we act as if we are. And that meta-knowledge, knowledge about knowledge, self-awareness, that I think is the key. It's the key to science. It's the key to democracy. It's the key to knowledge. And I think it's ultimately the key to well-being. In a conflict, we always think we're right. So does the other guy. That's why there's conflicts. If you could step outside yourself and realize Well, I still think I'm right, but the other guy has a point too, even though it's not obvious to me. That kind of mindset of seeing the world from the outside, not from inside your own head, that would be the key.

I like that. I mean, I'm just like— and this could be a whole podcast unto itself, but how do these innate cognitive biases affect Our podcast is about learning, right? How does these cognitive biases affect the learning processes? And what can our learners do to overcome these biases for better critical thinking and rationality?

Yeah. Sorry, is that a question or is that summing up?

I mean, if you want to say a few words on cognitive biases and how it affects our critical thinking and our—

Well, it has come up in our conversation that we We think we're smarter than we really are. We think our side, our team, our coalition is wiser than it really is. We tend to generalize from anecdotes. We reason from stereotypes instead of data or statistics. We tend to neglect certain statistical phenomena, like if something is an outlier or an exception. Probably the next time we observe it, it won't be that extreme. There's a bunch of fallacies that just— they seem natural to us as we make them. But when we step outside ourselves, we realize this is a trap that we can easily fall into.

So as we wrap, as I mentioned, this podcast is really about opening people's minds, new insights, ideas, learning. I like to ask our guests this question that is, what is one thing that you are currently learning outside of what we've been talking about, maybe you're learning or studying, that has you particularly excited?

Let's see. I'm learning a lot just from talking about this book and fielding questions and being challenged. Learning about other examples of common knowledge in everyday life that people remind me of that it didn't occur to me to put in the book. Examples from culture, examples from everyday social situations, examples from history. One of the great things about writing a book is that you hear from an awful lot of other people on the subject matter.

That's true. How can people get the book? How can people stay connected to you or go deeper in your work?

I have a website. I have an X feed and other social media feeds, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok. The book itself, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, available in any bookstore or online in the usual online outlets.

Fantastic. We'll put all those links again in our show notes. Dr. Steven Pinker, I want to thank you for your time. This was an incredible deep dive. I just want to remember everybody who's listening, get your copy of the book, watch the extended version on YouTube, and just remember that knowledge is potential power. It becomes more power when it's shared, when it's applied. I believe that the moment you realize that learning isn't just about what you know, but what we know together, you begin to unlock a higher level of intelligence, one that could fuel trust, collaboration, and progress. So, I would challenge everybody to do one thing. Is reflect on one area of your life, maybe your work, your relationships, your community, where confusion or conflict comes, misaligned understanding. And then take one step to create greater levels of clarity, maybe a conversation, a signal, a shared agreement, and watch how everything begins to shift for you. When everyone knows that everyone knows, connection becomes more cooperation and cooperation becomes change. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a screenshot, tag us both on social media, share one aha, um, so you can make knowledge more common. And that's how we change our brains and change our, our world together. Until next time, remember, you are faster and smarter than you think. Keep learning, keep growing, and as always, um, be limitless.