Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Steven Pinker:

It’s a state sometimes called pluralistic ignorance or a spiral of silence where everyone mistakenly thinks that everyone else believes something and no one actually believes it.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Steven Pinker. He’s a cognitive psychologist, a psycholinguist, and a professor at Harvard University. Pinker is a prolific author. His books probe how the human mind works, from language and human nature, to rationality and morality. He joins me to discuss his latest book When Everyone Knows that Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. In it, he explores how shared awareness drives coordination, shapes norms, and shifts collective behavior. After the interview, I’ll answer your questions about Border Czar Tom Homan’s alleged $50,000 bribe and about America’s very first law enforcement agency. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Understanding common knowledge can help us make sense of life. Psychologist Steven Pinker explains how. Professor Steven Pinker, welcome to the show. Thanks so much.

Steven Pinker:

Thank you.

Preet Bharara:

I’m going to start with an easy question. What is a public intellectual and are you one?

Steven Pinker:

I suppose a public intellectual is someone who comments on both affairs of the day and longstanding issues about how we understand the human condition, making use of knowledge from the world of university research, literature, someone who traffics in ideas and makes them widely available.

Preet Bharara:

You are one of many public intellectuals, I guess academics, who write for the lay public. Do you think there’s a right balance of academics who write for the lay public versus for their peers? Should there be a different balance? Should some people hang up their hats from doing columns for the New York Times and go back to academia full time? How do you think about where learning should happen?

Steven Pinker:

So the huge enterprise of university scholarship and research, in theory, all of it should be made available to the public. The public is paying for a lot of it through taxes, through perks. So if universities aren’t just taking in each other’s laundry, that is professors writing articles that are going to be read by other professors, then all of them should be making their ideas accessible. And by the way, this would actually help the conduct of scholarship too. Most academic writing is dreadful. Dreadful not only in the sense that intelligent laypeople can’t understand it, but if fellow academics can’t understand it. Often I come across papers in my own field, I don’t know what they’re talking about. Because they are-

Preet Bharara:

So who is the audience? So why does that happen? Why does that happen?

Steven Pinker:

Well, I wrote a whole book on that. It’s called The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. Well, I think the main impediment to clear writing is a psychological phenomenon that’s called the curse of knowledge. Namely, when you know something, it’s very hard to imagine what it’s like not to know it. And so academics will use abbreviations and jargon and generic language instead of concrete descriptions of who did what to whom, because it’s just so obvious to them and they assume it’s obvious to everyone else, which it isn’t sometimes. Not even to people in their own field who just don’t happen to be in their own labs or don’t happen to be in their own heads.

So I think because academia can be insular, you have small circles of professor, grad student, postdocs, research assistant, undergrads, they meet every week, they all know each other’s lingo, and it doesn’t occur to any of them that they’ve got to actually explain what actually happened in the lab. If you’re doing studies on kids, do they actually see toys or puppets as opposed to stimuli or conditions? They talk in meta-concepts like framework level, paradigm approach instead of the actual content of ideas. So there’s a lot, and this would… I think as well as making knowledge available to the curious public, which is a good thing, it would make knowledge available to one another and hasten the progress of understanding even within academia.

Preet Bharara:

I also feel like there’s… Over time I’ve discovered that there’s a disconnect between the way one hears a sentence or a paragraph in one’s mind and what happens between the mind and the fingers on the keyboard. I dictate more than I used to because I think the way I’m thinking about it as I speak takes away the barrier of expectation of yourself when you actually have to type a sentence. There’s a lot of pressure to type out a good sentence. There’s less pressure to say a good sentence, at least in my view. And the other, I don’t know if you have a view on whether or not student writing has gotten better or worse over the years. Let me ask you that first.

Steven Pinker:

Well, it’s very hard to judge over the years. I find that the problem with student writing isn’t so much the undergraduates who are still in the habit of writing.

Preet Bharara:

Speak English.

Steven Pinker:

Speak English, but it’s the grad students who often mistakenly think that the lingo, the terms in their own little lab group are universal. And also they are often terrified of appearing naive or simplistic. And so they try to often sound as sophisticated as possible, which often means that they are as opaque as possible. There is something to reading your own prose aloud, to actually mumbling it as you write it, because readers listen to their own voice as they read something. And the rhythm and the sound of a sentence, even if it’s on the printed page, are alive in the reader’s mind and they affect how easy it is to understand a sentence. It also flags sentences that are too long and complex or phrases that are hard to attach into the overall meaning of the sentence.

When you say them aloud, you might realize that you’re leading your reader down a garden path and analyzing the words of a sentence wrong. And it just simply makes the prose more graceful if it conforms to the rhythm and melody of the English language.

Preet Bharara:

People in an effort to impress others with their knowledge, I think this is what you’re saying, resort to overly complex structure and $20 words. When I think… The most impressive writing to me is from somebody like yourself and others who are deeply, deeply educated and credentialed and wise about something, but speak in simple sentences.

Steven Pinker:

And it isn’t just trying to impress, that’s the most common theory of why it’s the curse of knowledge. That is people are actually oblivious to the fact that not everyone knows what they know, and so they may not be trying to impress. They think they’re being clear and they’re not because they’re clear to themselves, but they’re not clear to anyone else.

Preet Bharara:

So to me, isn’t that a failure of empathy in the following sense that the writer has not put himself or herself in the shoes of the reader?

Steven Pinker:

That’s exactly right. No, that’s exactly what it is. Yes.

Preet Bharara:

Anyway, let’s get to your book. Your newest book, When Everyone Knows that Everyone Knows…: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. There’s a lot of punctuation going on there, sir.

Steven Pinker:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

Why is that?

Steven Pinker:

The ellipses, those three dots are meaningful. And in fact, I had to argue with my editor to keep them. He worried that the indexing services on Amazon and Library of Congress would choke on the three dots. Although then I convinced him that there are a number of books out there that have ellipses in their titles. The reason is that common knowledge in the technical sense 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, ad infinitum. Technically even if there are three levels of thoughts about thoughts, 17 levels of thoughts about thoughts. It’s not the same as an infinite number of thoughts about thoughts.

And so the three dots are to signify that common knowledge is not just when everyone knows that everyone knows, but also when everyone knows that and when everyone knows that and so on. Now, of course, it raises the question of how could a mortal human being with a finite brain represent an infinite number of I know that she knows that I know that she knows. The answer is that we… I have a little chapter on that called Reading the Mind of a Mind Reader. One possibility is that we think a few levels and then think to ourselves, et cetera, ad infinitum and so on… That is, we just have an abbreviation that indicates that this is a sample of an infinite series that actually thinking through the infinite series, which of course you can’t do.

But another possibility is that when something is self-evident, when it’s public, when it’s conspicuous, when it is out there, that gives us the intuition that everyone knows that everyone knows, ad infinitum, even if we don’t have to think all those thoughts. And I think the feeling, the sense that something is out there, you can’t take it back. It’s in your face. It’s the elephant in the room. That intuition captures the abstract concept of common knowledge even if we aren’t reeling out all the, I know that she knows this.

Preet Bharara:

You realize that when you do the whole, I know that you know that I know that you know, it comes across like an Abbott and Costello routine.

Steven Pinker:

A little bit, or like a-

Preet Bharara:

That’s confusing to people.

Steven Pinker:

Who’s on first? Actually it’s a little bit more like the… Better examples would be the fairly well known episode of the situation comedy Friends where two of them have been caught in an affair and the rest try to play practical jokes. But the couple knows that they are aware and so they play practical jokes on the people that are playing practical jokes. And at one point, one of the characters, Rachel says to Joey…

Rachel:

They don’t know that we know they know we know. Joey, you can’t say anything.

Joey:

Couldn’t if I wanted to.

Steven Pinker:

There’s also a sequence in the Princess Bride, there’s a scene in which there’s a cup that is poisoned and each one is trying to think, out guess the other.

Preet Bharara:

With iocane powder.

Steven Pinker:

Yes, exactly.

Preet Bharara:

So when you talk about common knowledge, let’s break it down a little bit and then I want to ask you about the emperor and whether or not he has clothes. When you say common knowledge, you’re not talking about sort of a basic fact. Like it’s common knowledge that the United States is composed of 50 states or that the sky is blue. What are you talking about?

Steven Pinker:

So it’s an unfortunate bit of jargon in some academic disciplines, economics, mathematical game theory, logic, philosophy, linguistics. The term just as stuck. But in this sense, you’re right. It does not just refer to something that is widely known or conventional wisdom, but it refers to something that is known to be known, and that is known. When everyone knows that everyone knows.

Preet Bharara:

So give us a simple example of that.

Steven Pinker:

Well, if two people are trying to rendezvous, for example, and each one knows where the other one likes to go. I know that she likes to go to the bookstore. She knows that I like to go to the camera store. Then even if each of us knows where the other one likes to hang out, it’s not enough for us to rendezvous because she knowing that I like to go to the camera store, might go to the camera store, but then she knowing that I know that she likes to go to the bookstore, might then second guess herself, “I better go to the bookstore after all.” It’s only if both of them know that the other one knows which they can generate by a conversation. That’s why we have language.

That language can generate common knowledge and cut through everything in a stroke where if you blurt it out, if it’s said in a public setting where you know the other person has heard you or you know they know that you have heard them, then that generates the common knowledge. In any public event, an announcement, a public demonstration, a broadcast, that is where you hear it and you know that everyone else is hearing it. That generates common knowledge. And that’s different from everyone merely knowing something because everyone might know it privately but not know that anyone else knows it.

Preet Bharara:

Right. So for example, tell me if this makes sense. When you go into a Broadway show and the announcement is made before and at the beginning, no flash photography. It’s not only important that you know that no flash photography, but you know that everyone else has been told the same thing and everyone else knows. And so when someone breaks the taboo, there can be a group reaction to that and it also causes you to be more obedient to it. Is that true?

Steven Pinker:

Yes, that’s right. So that would be a fine example because you do have common knowledge and in general, norms, things that people just know you don’t do only work when they’re common knowledge. That is you could trust that everyone else knows it and know that everyone else knows it. So even things like not smoking in a public place, picking up your dog poop after walking your dog, not telling ethnic jokes, things that aren’t… As in the case of pooper scooper laws, there is a law and technically there’s punishment, but it’s not like you have cops on every corner surveilling the entire public as to whether they’re obeying it and willing to write a ticket at that very moment.

Generally, these norms work simply because when everyone knows that everyone knows it, you’re kind of entitled to informally enforce it by looking daggers at the offender, by telling them to stop. Ordinarily, if there wasn’t common knowledge that that’s a norm, in this case that there is a law, someone could say, “Go to hell, it’s none of your business.” And then they could force you to back down as opposed to you forcing them to back down. But if there’s common knowledge this is the norm, then generally the enforcer of the norm can expect the violator to back down as opposed to vice versa. And I have a whole chapter on authority, dominance, saving face, challenging someone’s face, and how common knowledge of who gives way to whom makes a lot of social life possible.

But conversely, when it’s challenged, that’s when you often get interpersonal violence. An awful lot of-

Preet Bharara:

What this keeps making me think of is our entire regime of traffic conventions, who has the right of way when you’re allowed to pass at a stop sign? Who has the first go? Who has the second go? That’s enforceable because I know that you know and you know that I know who’s supposed to make the first left turn and when you’re supposed to pass. The second part you mentioned is when there’s a violation of that, you get, I guess in that context, road rage. Is that a fair application of your principle?

Steven Pinker:

Yes, exactly. You get road rage usually when neither one or one of the two doesn’t recognize the norm, is either not aware of it or has a different interpretation of who has violated it. And often it is why do people come to blow? Sometimes there are homicides as a result of road rage. In fact, a lot of homicides are the result of trivial altercations, of curses, of minor signs of disrespect, which then escalate into a fatal feud. Those are often cases where neither one recognizes that the norm says that they give way to the other, or someone who is habitually giving way wants to change the norm, wants to establish their dominance. “No, you get out of the way from me. I don’t get out of the way from you.”

If both of them think that, neither one accepts the norm as to who comes first, who gets the right of way, that’s when you get these altercations.

Preet Bharara:

So the very, very famous well-considered story, the emperor has no clothes, that has singular foundational importance and meaning to these concepts that you’ll elucidate in the book. Do you want to remind people what the story is and why it’s important?

Steven Pinker:

In fact, I begin the book with the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes because it’s a story about common knowledge. The little boy said the emperor was naked, he wasn’t telling anyone anything they didn’t already know, but he was still changing their knowledge. How come? Because now everyone knew that everyone else knew that everyone else knew that the emperor was naked. He was conveying information, even if it wasn’t that the emperor was naked. He was conveying the information that now everyone knows that everyone knows the emperor’s naked. And the reason that that was significant is that it allowed the people to coordinate their change in their relationship to the emperor from sequence deference to ridicule and scorn.

And that ability to coordinate, if you’re the only one challenging the emperor, then you got to wonder if maybe something’s wrong with you, or at least you have to feel reprisals from everyone else. But if all of you recognize it at once, and that’s what common knowledge allows you to do, then you’ve got the power of numbers, more important, the power of solidarity, more generally, the ability to coordinate. And that’s what was granted by blurting out the observation in public where everyone could hear it and everyone could see that everyone else could hear it.

Preet Bharara:

Right. So the conceit is the reason foundationally that it unfolds the way it unfolds is the emperor is told, am I correct? That he’s being given clothes, but it can only be seen by certain kinds of people.

Steven Pinker:

Well, on the converse that the only people who can’t see it are… Well, in various versions of the story, Anderson actually adapted it from an older folk tale. And the older folk tale, if you couldn’t see it, that means that you were cuckolded.

Preet Bharara:

Right? So it’s a bad thing. So everyone had the incentive-

Steven Pinker:

It’s absolutely a bad thing.

Preet Bharara:

So everyone had the incentive to say, “Look, I can’t see it, but my eyes must be lying to me because I don’t want to have that other quality either having been cuckolded or not being smart or whatever the case may be.” So it’s a little bit of everyone wants to be in the club and goes along with the falsehood for the reasons you say, because everyone doesn’t know that everyone else knows and that spell hasn’t been broken.

Steven Pinker:

Yes, right. It’s a state sometimes called pluralistic ignorance or a spiral of silence where everyone mistakenly thinks that everyone else believes something and no one actually believes it. And that happens when expression of an opinion is punished or in danger of being punished, and it can be broken by a little boy saying the emperor is naked.

Preet Bharara:

So in that example, it’s a good thing. The truth comes out, the blind can see the farce, the hoax unravels, and the elites are wrong, and the ordinary people see that the emperor actually doesn’t have any clothes, and that’s kind of normatively a good thing. Sometimes the emperor does have clothes, and when I say that, I’m thinking about other examples of things where in modern society, a view develops that something that I know that you know and that everyone else knows is actually wrong. For example, the efficacy and safety of vaccines. I feel like in some ways in certain communities, there’s a replication of the emperor’s new clothes going on there, where people are enjoying a common revelation with other like-minded people about vaccines. But that’s wrong. Am I missing the point here?

Steven Pinker:

Do you mean a skepticism about vaccines?

Preet Bharara:

Yes.

Steven Pinker:

Or denial of the efficacy of vaccines.

Preet Bharara:

Correct.

Steven Pinker:

Although there it’s not exactly analogous because it’s not as if it was something that people knew all along then that they kept to themselves, but rather it’s a spreading of bogus knowledge that is-

Preet Bharara:

Well, but you’re saying it’s bogus knowledge. They don’t think it’s bogus knowledge.

Steven Pinker:

I am saying it’s bogus knowledge. And you’re right, they don’t think it’s bogus knowledge and they’re wrong. And I’m saying that not because I am infallible just because there’s enormous amount of evidence if one looks at it dispassionately. But yes, people get their sense of knowledge, that is what they believe, usually from some trusted authority or institution, because none of us really has the time or expertise to get to the bottom of every knowledge claim. We have to trust that certain cliques, certain institutions have earned the right to be taken seriously in their claims. And what we often see is that now different segments of the population trust or distrust different institutions.

Preet Bharara:

Right. So talk a little bit more about that because what you describe for society to work, as you write, there has to be trust in these institutions because no individual can be expert. I think it’s a New Yorker cartoon, that’s one of my favorites since. It’s a husband and wife couple. I’m going to get it slightly wrong, and neither the husband or the wife calls out from the bedroom. “I found something NASA missed.”

Steven Pinker:

That’s right.

Preet Bharara:

There seems to be a lurch, and maybe this has happened before in history in much worse ways, but there seems to be a trend away from the reliance and expertise. Does any of your thinking about common knowledge and what you research and write about in the book, explain that?

Steven Pinker:

Well, to be honest, it’s not what the book is about. So this book is really about… It’s a book of science and philosophy and economics and psychology, about the human condition.

Preet Bharara:

But the human condition is relevant to politics. I mean, you do talk about bubbles, economic bubbles, and you talk about meme stocks. That’s current today stuff that your work has a bearing on, right? Do we want to talk about that?

Steven Pinker:

So that’s a phenomenon that is directly related to the phenomenon of the book. In this case, common expectation. It’s a general phenomenon in economics that was pointed out by John Maynard Keynes back in the 1920s. Well, he asked people to consider a beauty contest, a newspaper beauty contest, where the object isn’t to judge the prettiest face. The object is to guess what the most other people will deem to be the prettiest face when everyone else is doing the same thing. Trying to guess what everyone else will guess what everyone will guess will be is the prettiest face. And he compared that to speculative investing where you buy a security not because you think that its present value is necessarily with-

Preet Bharara:

All the values and what other people think.

Steven Pinker:

Well, yes. So it’s not just that there’s a factory, they buy a machinery, they’re going to churn out widgets, they’re going to sell widgets at a profit. I’ll get a share of the profit. But a lot of people buy stocks because they think, “Well, I think that it’s going to be worth more in the future, and so if I buy it now, sell in the future, I’ll make a profit.” Why would it be worth more in the future? Well, often it’s because other people think that other people think that other people think that it’ll be worth more in the future. And so a lot of the phenomena in economics that are not predictable by standard supply and demand and present value, the irrational exuberance, the bubbles, the busts, the depressions, the panics are driven by common expectation.

That is people getting in the heads of other people as they get in the heads of other people. In the opposite direction of a bubble like appreciation of a stock, in the case of a meme stock, by the way. The term comes from cases where an influencer posts something that cues people to the possibility that some stock will appreciate, which does make it appreciate, at least for a while. The famous case was the video game store GameStop, which like a lot of bricks and mortar stores, did not have great future prospects for making a profit because people buy things online, they don’t get it into their cars and park and walk into a store. And its stock price was tanking for exactly that reason for fundamentals.

But then an influencer named Roaring Kitty, I think his real name is Keith Gill, talk the stock up, and people started buying it because they knew that a lot of people were following this guy, and if they were all following him, then they knew that other people were following them. And so if he talked it up, it meant that people probably would buy it. And so it soared before it crashed. Then a year later, he just posted a cartoon of someone sitting up in their chair, and that was enough to set the stock up through the roof again. The converse is when you get a bank run where people lose confidence in a security-owning institution. People might withdraw money from a bank, not because they think there’s anything wrong with the bank other than they fear that other people think that other people think that there’s something wrong with the bank.

And everyone withdraws their money before so many people withdraw the money that the bank can no longer cover its deposits, and that can cause a bank to fail, which in 1929 led to the Great Depression. And so there have to be means of stopping this reverberant doubt, this self-reinforcing expectation of failure. And so that’s why we have… Well, Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued a bank holiday, just no one could touch their savings for a few days. That just reassured people that other guys aren’t withdrawing their savings because I can’t. And it calmed down the panic followed by federal deposit insurance where, as advertised by big gold seals on the window of the bank, the bank couldn’t fail, at least up to a point because the feds would bail it out. And people were not in danger of losing their savings because of this insurance.

Not that the insurance necessarily had to be used, but just the fact that people knew it was there meant they were less likely to fear that other people feared that other people would fear that the bank was shaky.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Steven Pinker after this. Is part of what you’re describing also explains the store of value for digital currency like crypto?

Steven Pinker:

So in the case of… Well, there are two aspects to cryptocurrency as there are to any kind of money, there’s what actually backs it up. In the case of crypto, there is the common knowledge that the value resides in a public ledger encrypted but public that prevents embezzlement or fudging the books. And that is common knowledge. Anyone with enough savvy can look at the-

Preet Bharara:

And there’s trust in that.

Steven Pinker:

The blockchain. Well, the thing about the blockchain is that the blockchain itself, the genius behind it is that you don’t need trust. That is the encrypted algorithms ensure that it can’t be hacked directly.

Preet Bharara:

But you have to have trust in that fact that you just mentioned.

Steven Pinker:

You have to have trust in that fact. Or if you’re savvy enough, you can verify it for yourself. You can look at the algorithm, you could see how it’s encrypted. But on top of that though, the reason that so many people buy crypto isn’t because it’s just secure. That is, it’s safe against inflation, safe against government confiscation, but for speculative reasons, namely, they think that other people think that it’ll be worth more in the future. So they buy it now in the hopes of unloading it in the future at a higher price. So that depends on common expectation of rising prices.

Preet Bharara:

Which changes.

Steven Pinker:

… demand, which changes, and which of course it can inflate and it can also pop.

Preet Bharara:

So if you’re trying to be a savvy observer of either economic trends or other trends, what are you supposed to do?

Steven Pinker:

Well, what you’re supposed to do, and actually I talk about a famous theorem in the realm of common knowledge. I mean the sound investment advice is don’t speculate, don’t act on a hot tip, don’t try to time the market. Just buy an index fund, a boring basket of securities.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s what I do. But if you’re trying to make it bigger and you start to see signs that people are really into tulips, don’t jump on board.

Steven Pinker:

Well, on average, I mean, some people, if they jump on board early enough and they get out early enough, they can make a killing. On average though not everyone can because… And so yes, don’t speculate on tulips or anything else, unless of course you have inside information, which is often illegal.

Preet Bharara:

Well, don’t do that. If i can tell people, don’t do that.

Steven Pinker:

Don’t do that. I mean, that is a way to make money if you really do have inside information. The reason is in general, and this is what ties it back to common knowledge, is that prices of securities are an estimate of the present value of some security. And the thing is that in a large open market, that’s common knowledge. You know the price, everyone else knows the price, everyone else knows that everyone else knows the price. If there’s some scrap of information suggests that it is underpriced, that the company’s coming out with an insanely great gadget or there’s going to be a crop failure. So stock up on soybeans now. The thing is everyone else already knows it. They have already bid up the price to what it is worth at present.

So again, unless you’re really, really early or have inside information, the current price, which is common knowledge, already reflects the present value of the stock. So you’re not going to make a profit by buying it at the present, at the current price, which incorporates the common knowledge of its present value.

Preet Bharara:

So you’re talking about economics. Is there to the extent you want to talk about it or address in the book relevance to these concepts and principles to our politics?

Steven Pinker:

There are a lot of political phenomena that depend on common knowledge or common belief, common expectation. One of them is the American primary process where the nominee for one of the major parties is selected. In a rolling set of statewide elections beginning with New Hampshire and Iowa, the reason that common knowledge is relevant is that there’s often a field of anywhere between four and a dozen candidates. And people… Since we have a voting system, called first-past-the-post, where whoever gets the most votes wins and everyone else is out in the cold, people try to game the system. They don’t want to waste their vote on determining who comes in at sixth place versus seventh place. If your vote makes a difference, it’s only in deciding between first and second place.

And so people don’t just vote for the candidate they think it would be the best president, but the one they think the most other people are going to vote for, which of course depends on what those other people think that still other people are going to vote for. The result is that anything that is salient, public, that seems to make a difference, that catches everyone’s attention early in the process, can lead to momentum and to a winner, not because they’re necessarily preferred by everyone, but because some event makes everyone think that other people are going to vote for them. In the case of Joe Biden in 2020, for example, he sprinted ahead of the pack when Jim Clyburn, a representative, endorsed him just prior to the South Carolina primary.

Now, I don’t know even how many people had heard of Jim Clyburn before that event or why his endorsement should make so much of a difference. Well, sure it was going to nudge the African-American vote in South Carolina and give him a push, but the fact that everyone was talking about it as if it were a big deal made it a big deal. Everyone had at least some reason to pick one person out of that entire field of candidates. Conversely, sometimes there can be a gaffe, an embarrassment that will sink a candidacy for no particularly good reason. Other than that people think that other people are bailing out and so they bail out.

Preet Bharara:

It makes me think the system you describe where only the winner matters, and so people are thinking about what other people think. In a system of ranked choice voting, is that upended?

Steven Pinker:

That’s right. And that’s one of the arguments for ranked choice voting. Exactly.

Preet Bharara:

And do you believe based on your work, does that afford a greater degree of respect to the autonomy of the voter or the preferences of voters?

Steven Pinker:

It’s got a lot of advantages. There’s a famous theorem in the mathematics of voting from Kenneth Arrow that no voting system is perfect. If you think about all the things you want a voting system to accomplish, you can’t have everything. But the one that we have, first-past-the-post, has very few advantages. So anyone who studies voting system says, “The one that we have now sucks.” I mean, there’s just no question. Nothing’s perfect, but a lot of possible systems are way better than what we have now.

Preet Bharara:

So ranked choice voting is at play in the city that I’m sitting in right now, the city of New York. What are some of the advantages of that in this regard?

Steven Pinker:

Well, the advantage is that… I mean, the main advantage of any of the alternatives to first-past-the-post is that you are likelier to get a candidate that is preferred by most people, or at least dis-preferred by the fewest people. The obvious cases, when you’ve got three candidates… If you have two candidates, it doesn’t make so much of a difference. If you’ve got three candidates, there can be big trouble. There could be one candidate who, let’s say, he’s on the far left and 34% of the voters prefer him or her, but 66% prefer the other two, but they’re split evenly between them. The two, say centrist candidates, 33 and 33. So you have a candidate that is preferred by barely more than a third, and he can win.

And meanwhile, two-thirds of people are unhappy with the choice. They didn’t get the kind of policies that they want. If you have either ranked choice where you rank them, and if no one gets a majority, then the lowest ranked candidate’s votes get reallocated to the survivors and so on. Or if you have a runoff or an instant runoff, then it wears down to two and the votes that go to one of the losers get reallocated to the two-way choice, then you can prevent that minority victory from happening.

Preet Bharara:

This may be a silly question, but if we had a national popular vote plebiscite for president after the primary process, would that be better than what we have now or not?

Steven Pinker:

Well, it would be better because the electoral college introduces additional perversities, in particular, the winner-take-all feature of the electoral college that anyone who gets 51% of the vote in a state gets-

Preet Bharara:

Which magnifies the first-past-post issue that you’re talking about.

Steven Pinker:

Well, I think it introduces other distortions because even if you had direct voting in a plebiscite, as soon as you have three candidates, the problem of the minority candidate winning reasserts itself, so certainly direct voting would be better than the electoral college, but the direct voting should have either a runoff or ranked choice or one of the other alternatives to the first-past-the-post system.

Preet Bharara:

So this idea of common knowledge, how does it get undone? What changes… So let’s say today there is common knowledge in the way you define it and describe it, what things happen to cause that common knowledge to shift?

Steven Pinker:

Well, usually it’s something that is public, that is out there, like the little boy saying emperor was naked with an earshot of everyone else. Or in the case of economic phenomena, a viral post by an influencer or a statement by the chair of the Fed, which is often why the Fed chair watched their words very, very carefully, lest they set off a speculative bubble or a panic. Alan Greenspan, who was chair of the Fed for many years, said, and I quote him in the book, “Since I’ve become a financial leader, I’ve learned to mumble with great incoherence. If I seem clear to you, you misunderstood what I said.”

Preet Bharara:

These things that you mentioned that undo common knowledge that the emperor has no clothes.

Steven Pinker:

Well, that generates common knowledge.

Preet Bharara:

Right? Or I don’t know if this was in the same category, but there was a moment during McCarthyism where a lawyer said, “Sir, have you no decency?” And things kind of changed. The person uttering that statement could not have predicted that things would change. Is there any predictive value? So if someone’s trying to change the landscape of what is common knowledge, is that a hopeless endeavor?

Steven Pinker:

No. Well, some people have the platform that they know that they will be seen and seen being seen. In other cases, you’re right that it can be capricious. That what as we now say, goes viral, is hard to predict, but virality is a common knowledge generator, that is virality means it increases exponentially. And as we know, exponential growth can saturate a population of any size often very quickly. And so something that has the power to go viral can, you never know, result in common knowledge. If again, it’s not enough that everyone gets the message, but everyone has to know that everyone else is getting the message. But there are predictable ways of generating common knowledge and they’re exploited.

Obviously a leader giving a presidential address, a fireside chat can generate common knowledge. In advertising, big events like the Super Bowl are common knowledge generators and advertisers know it because when they advertise some product that only works if enough people adopt it. Say when the Discover the credit card was introduced. The problem they faced was no one was going to apply for a credit card if they didn’t think stores were going to take it and no store would take it unless they thought a lot of customers were going to use it.

Preet Bharara:

Chicken and the egg problem.

Steven Pinker:

And so the Discover card was announced in an ad on the Super Bowl. The advantage being not just that lots of people watched the Super Bowl, but crucially, lots of people know that lots of people watch the Super Bowl. It’s almost like a national rite, a national holiday, almost like a religious holiday. And so Super Bowl ads as predictable common knowledge generators are used for products that depend on network effects, that depend on being widely adopted for their success.

Preet Bharara:

Are some phenomena or norms or people immune from changes to common knowledge? And what I’m thinking of is there are lots of people who don’t like Donald Trump and they believe that Donald Trump has no clothes and they have believed over the course of now 10 years plus that the next thing that happens will be that viral moment which will cause the fog to lift and everyone to realize that Donald Trump has no clothes and that’s not happened. And my question is, do you think… I don’t know if it’s a fair question or not. If you think that the persistence of Donald Trump’s popularity with a certain segment of the population enough to get him the presidency, not once but twice, reduces the likelihood that that will ever happen?

Because now everyone knows that everyone else knows that the guy has full solid suit of Teflon. Does that make any sense?

Steven Pinker:

I think the bigger phenomenon is that what Trump has done is he’s shattered norms. Norms are… Going back to earlier in our conversation. There are rules of conduct that aren’t actually enforced by authorities, but that exist because everyone knows they exist. They’re just some things you just don’t do. Why don’t you do them? Well, everyone knows you don’t do them. And how does that even survive? Well, it survives because if you do flout it, you can expect that everyone else will come down on you like a ton of bricks in public. And that’s how norms survive. What Trump did is he deliberately broke many longstanding norms such as that politicians don’t obviously and flagrantly lie. I mean politicians lie, everyone lies. But usually you have to at least deny that you’re lying or have it cloaked in enough plausible deniability that you may be wrong, but you’re not engaged in a barefaced lie.

You don’t comment on the looks of your opponent, especially women. You don’t flagrantly insult your colleagues, calling them them stupid or your predecessors in office. All of these norms of decorum, which people kind of thought were invulnerable simply because anyone who flouted them, their career would be over and before Trump, their career would be over. But he managed to show that by shattering them and not enough people coming down to challenge him and restore the norm meant the norm no longer existed because people no longer thought that the norm existed because he challenged them and he got away with them. So all of these norms, and I think the fear is that once the norm is shattered, since it only exists because people think it exists.

And if people don’t think it exists, it doesn’t exist, then he has paved the way for others. And you see that in other politicians and influencers where there’s a lot more insults, misogyny, racist comments that no one could have gotten away with 10 years ago, in your face trash talk. Things that were just beneath the dignity of any public figure that now that he’s broken the norm people engage in.

Preet Bharara:

When a norm is shattered, is it replaced with a new norm or is it replaced with nothing?

Steven Pinker:

It could be either. I mean, how norms come into being is another question, and it itself has a lot of caprice and unpredictability.

Preet Bharara:

There’s nothing inherently… When we say norm, usually people mean that as a positive, but there’s nothing inherently good or bad about any norm, correct?

Steven Pinker:

That’s right. There are various norms and taboos that sometimes they’re there just as focal points for coordination. They’re common knowledge that allow people to know that they’re part of a circle of people who are all agreeing to do something some way for the benefit of all of them. So for example, it’s good if everyone agrees on a particular day of the week as the day of rest so that you stay home, you can stay home.

Preet Bharara:

I pick Wednesday, mine’s Wednesday.

Steven Pinker:

The problem is… You can pick Wednesday, but everyone else is going to be at the committee meeting wondering where are you? So it only works if everyone picks the same day. Now it could be any day, it could be Saturday, it could be Sunday. And of course, we see there are different communities of people who pick different days.

Preet Bharara:

Look, the entire world, China, India, every country in the world uses the same calendar for that reason.

Steven Pinker:

Yes, why a seven-day week? Well, why not? It could be a six-day week, it could be an eight-day week. The Babylonians, for their screwball astrological reasons, alighted on seven days. And since then it’s been self-reinforcing because if any country had a six-day week, they’d be so out of sync with the rest of the world that it would work to their disadvantage.

Preet Bharara:

I’ve been told since sixth grade, which is a long time ago for me, that we would all be on the metric system by now. How come that hasn’t worked?

Steven Pinker:

Well, probably because the United States is powerful enough that it can be out of sync with the rest of the world, and it’s such a large internal market and so influential because of its dominance of media and business and science that it can get away with it. But smaller countries can’t and don’t and have gone off the imperial system. I grew up in Canada and I still think in terms of Fahrenheit and feet and inches. Fortunately I moved to the United States where my childhood system is still in force. But even when I go back home to Canada, people often don’t know what I’m talking about. My nieces and nephews, when I say it’s 72 degrees out, they think I’m nuts. They don’t know what that means.

Preet Bharara:

It’s very, very hot. Steven Pinker, I know you have a lot of other interviews to do. The book is terrific. When Everyone Knows that Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. Thank you for your time and your insight. Good luck to you, sir.

Steven Pinker:

Thanks Preet. Appreciate it.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Steven Pinker continues for members of the CAFE Insider community. In the bonus for insiders, we discuss how laughter and comedy informs common knowledge and vice versa.

Steven Pinker:

One of the major discoveries, if you want to call it the science of humor, due to Robert Provine who actually went out with a tape recorder and just recorded people laughing and then looked to see what made them laugh. It’s very rarely anything funny.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider. Stay tuned. After the break, I’ll answer your questions about Border Czar Tom Homan’s alleged $50,000 bribe and about America’s very first law enforcement agency. Now let’s get to your questions. This question comes from Russ on X, and it’s a question that a lot of people have been asking, including members of Congress. What is your take on the Border Czar Tom Homan news that he accepted a $50,000 bribe? So Russ, thanks for your question. I want to say at the outset that as with a lot of cases that are not in the public realm where a charge hasn’t been brought, or disclosure hasn’t been made, or transparency is not the order of the day. We don’t know. We don’t know all the facts.

I was a prosecutor for a long time. I represent people who were the subjects and targets of investigations, both individuals and entities. And if you don’t know the facts, you have to be careful in how you opine on these things. And there have been people who have been rushing to judgment in one direction or the other, and I’m not going to be one of those people. So the first question is what are the facts? Here’s what we know so far. A few days ago, several outlets reported including Carol Leonnig, who’s a pretty good reporter. As good as they come in my view. She was, I think, one of the original reporters on this topic, but several outlets have since confirmed a report that in September of 2024, undercover agents posed as businessmen and gave Homan or at least offered Homan $50,000 in cash.

That was allegedly in exchange for helping them secure immigration related government contracts, if and when might reenter the Trump administration. Now a couple of things there. We don’t know who the focus of the investigation was. There have been some reports that it wasn’t Homan himself who was being targeted necessarily, but that it was an outgrowth of an investigation of other parties. Second, stings are perfectly lawful, perfectly legal. Third, to the extent, one question that arises is was this in some way a weaponization by the Biden administration or the Biden Justice Department of Tom Homan? There’s no evidence to support that.

That theory would require a lot of forethought on the part of government agencies to select one person out of many, many, many, many people who might’ve gotten a job or taken a job in a Trump administration. By the way, it was before the election. The election hadn’t even happened yet. And you would imagine if there was a malicious intent or some kind of underhanded desire to weaponize the Justice Department to hurt Donald Trump before his election for purposes of affecting his presidency after the election, they kept it mighty quiet. This apparently incriminating a bit of news about Tom Homan. So you can draw your own conclusions about the weaponization charge. So among the facts that are being disputed, and I’ll get to the legal exposure question in a moment.

Among the facts being disputed or whether or not Tom Homan accepted the $50,000 in cash, or whether he was just offered it. White House folks, including the spokesperson, said he didn’t accept the money, he never took the $50,000. On the other hand, it’s been reported as I just said, that there was camera coverage to the meeting. So those facts should be able to be dispelled pretty clearly. Other relevant facts seem to be that this exchange that was recorded on videotape apparently, occurred several months before Donald Trump took office and the Justice Department and the FBI that was investigating this for whatever reason, didn’t see fit to charge Tom Homan or anyone else in this scheme during the pendency of the investigation up through January 20th.

So it very well could have been that the prior Justice Department did not yet have sufficient facts to charge Tom Homan with a specific federal crime. What are some reasons for that? Well, it’s a little bit of a muddle because Tom Homan was a private citizen at the time and not at that moment in a position to engage in an official act in exchange for, in a quid pro quo scheme, in exchange for the $50,000 in cash. Perhaps they were waiting to see what would happen with Mr. Homan if he would get a job that allowed him to be in a position to engage in an official act that probably was a legal problem that the Justice Department and the FBI were facing. There’s also the question of what constitutes an official act, and then even if there were some action taken, as an alleged quid pro quo, what was that action?

So there is probably a real legal question about whether or not Tom Homan could have been charged or would be chargeable with some kind of public corruption on a services’ fraud, quid pro quo crime, given his status as a private citizen that’s based on various decisions, including a not too long ago Supreme Court decision, with which I have some familiarity. So I’m not in a position to doubt there were legal infirmities in a potential case against Tom Homan. But let’s look at what else is at stake here and what people are saying about the incident. The White House last Monday, per press secretary, Caroline Leavitt, said, “Mr. Homan never took the $50,000 that you’re referring to. So you should get your facts straight.” Number one, it’s not clear how to get your facts straight when we are not being allowed to know the facts.

We’re not privy to the facts and the facts are being hidden, including the video recording, the audio recording, and any other information from this Justice Department and this FBI about why the case was closed. Ms. Leavitt went on to say, number two, “This was another example of the weaponization of the Biden Justice Department against one of President Trump’s strongest and most vocal supporters in the midst of a presidential campaign.” I have seen no evidence based on the conduct of the agents in the case, the lack of leaking of the conduct that they analyzed in the case to support any conclusion of weaponization. Let me make two larger points. Tom Homan may very well be completely innocent of criminal activity, or at least not chargeable because of insufficient evidence.

But long ago, in my view, this administration has lost the entitlement to the benefit of the doubt. They have lost the entitlement to an assumption of regularity of process. And I can say that for a lot of reasons. Most recently you have reporting that the Eastern District of Virginia, the United States attorney, in a separate case granted, but it’s part of the same machinery of justice that operates within this administration. That the Eastern District of Virginia, United States attorney, was fired per Donald Trump. His handpicked US attorney was fired by Donald Trump because he did not believe there was sufficient evidence to bring a case of mortgage fraud against Trump’s political nemesis, New York Attorney General Letitia James. That’s one example. There are many, many others.

So you have a pattern and practice of this administration going after its enemies, weaponizing the department, projecting in a way what they say about the Biden administration, going after their enemies and protecting their allies. All of this could be dissipated and a cloud over Mr. Homan could be lifted with just some transparency and it doesn’t seem to be any good reason given what’s at stake not to make those disclosures. And the second thing I’ll say is whether or not Mr. Homan is chargeable with a crime or was chargeable with a crime. I’m not sure when that became the standard for disqualification of a government official with a lot of power and a lot of authority, especially one who talks a big game about force and about compulsion and about aggressive enforcement of border laws and about bringing the hammer down on other people with criminal charges.

Depending on what the facts would reveal, depending on what the videotape shows, depending on what the other witnesses would say, whether or not Tom Homan is fully chargeable federally with crimes, I think there’s a real question about whether he’s fit to serve in office. And so it is centrally important, I think, to the public, to the oversight responsibilities of members of Congress, for a person who has as much authority and power and deference as Tom Homan has, is to understand whether or not he exercised good judgment and has the proper integrity and character to carry out his function. So the bottom line is, both for understanding whether or not there was criminal justice favoritism accorded to Tom Homan and for understanding whether or not he’s fit to have this responsibility.

In the federal government, there should be more disclosure, there should be more transparency, and that is exactly what Senate Democrats have asked for in their letter to the Justice Department. If there’s nothing to see here, it should be pretty simple to show there’s nothing to see here. This question comes from Elliot via email. “On the September 11th episode of Stay Tuned, you said the US Marshals Service is the oldest federal law enforcement agency. I had always thought that title belonged to the US Postal Inspection Service, but according to their official websites, both agencies claim to be the oldest. So which one really is?” Elliot, thanks for your question. You really know your history.

Goodness. So we took a deep dive on this and here’s what we found. As I mentioned during that episode previously, the US Marshals service was formally created by Congress way back with the Judiciary Act of 1789. So it was the first federal law enforcement agency established by law after the Constitution was ratified and our federal government was organized. Now, the Postal Inspection Service’s history is a bit less clear cut. But first here’s a bit about who they are. Like the Marshals, the Postal Inspection Service is an essential but often overlooked law enforcement agency. It’s the law enforcement arm of the Postal Service. Its agents protect the mail system, postal employees, and customers.

They investigate everything from fraud and scams to illegal items sent through the mail like narcotics, as well as cyber crimes that exploit the mail. The agency has been a leader in developing forensic techniques, particularly handwriting analysis. In fact, experts at the service played a role in the Unabomber case in the 1990s, helping to identify Ted Kaczynski who mailed several of his bombs. I myself have a lot of personal experience with the US Postal Inspection Service. When I was a line prosecutor, my second trial involved both the DEA and the US Postal Inspection Service. It was a case involving the shipment of heroin hidden in packages sent to a hospital in Westchester. So I put both DEA agents and US Postal Inspection Service agents on the stand.

And I can say from personal and professional experience, folks from that service are excellent public servants. So now back to your question, back in the 1700s, there was no email, no phone, no internet. If you wanted to communicate over long distances, you relied on the mail. That made the postal system absolutely vital to national security and of course commerce. In 1775, even before the Constitution, the second Continental Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin as Postmaster General. Did you know that? Franklin hired postal surveyors to investigate mail crimes and offenses that occurred on postal roads. These surveyors were essentially proto law enforcement officials. And so over the years, their role grew.

In 1792, a new postal statute made mail theft a federal offense with punishments ranging from fines to jail time, even the death penalty. By 1801, they were given the title special agents to reflect their expanding law enforcement duties. And by the early 1800s as the country expanded west, young man, there was a wave of stage coach and train robberies that kept the special agents quite busy. I’m sure you’ve seen movies about those crimes, but the modern US Postal Inspection Service wasn’t officially named until 1954. So yes, people were investigating postal crimes before the Marshal service was created. But whether that counts as a federal law enforcement agency in the modern sense, I suppose, is debatable. In the end, I’ll let historians argue about which agency truly came first.

What I can say is that both the Marshal service and the Postal Inspection Service have played essential roles in American law enforcement in keeping us safe, and I’ve been honored to work alongside both. And now for a slightly less serious question, this one comes in an X post from Mike who writes, “Who wins a fight between 1 trillion lions and the Sun?” Well, Mike, I’m glad someone finally asked me this. I’ve been wanting to get done on this debate. For those who don’t know, Who Would Win is a popular meme that started around, I guess, 2010 when a 4chan user posed a hypothetical battle between two video game characters. The meme quickly spiraled with people imagining absurd match-ups. That’s a pretty absurd one, Mike. Like a stick versus a Marine or Jeff Goldblum against himself.

And oddly, to my mind, one of the most enduring versions is the question, who wins in a fight between 1 trillion lions and the sun? I don’t even get the question. Lions are living beings, and the sun is essentially a nuclear reactor. So I don’t know what it means to defeat the sun, to emerge victorious over the sun, to kill the sun. It is a lot more easy to imagine what it takes to defeat, kill 1 trillion lions. It’s not a close call. I don’t care if it’s a trillion lions or 3 trillion lions. You have, among other things, the issue of no atmosphere and no oxygen, and the inability of space flight. I don’t even understand the meme. So anyway you look at it, the sun wins. But the meme that has been more interesting to me and is a little more serious is this one, a Who Would Win debate that resurfaced on Reddit in 2020.

And the question is, who would win in a fight between 100 men and a gorilla? Well, at least now we’re talking about a matchup between living beings. This one is a much closer contest, as you might imagine. The consensus among experts, and yes, there are experts who have thought about this, is that while the gorilla would dominate in any one-on-one fight, 100 men could ultimately prevail thanks to their numbers and ability to cooperate. That outcome, of course, would require overwhelming force. I imagine careful coordination and a willingness to accept heavy casualties. Collective action would be the most important element there for the men. In other words, victory depends completely and entirely on teamwork and sacrifice.

Now, of course, the real Who Would Win debate is one from when I was young, long before Reddit, and I remember it from the great, great film, Stand By Me.

Vern Tessio:

You Think Mighty Mouse could beat up Superman?

Preet Bharara:

What do you think? Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Steven Pinker. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at @PreetBharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Bluesky, or you can call and leave me a message at 833-997-7338. That’s 833-99-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters at cafe.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández. And the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner, and Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.