I Know that She Knows that I Know that She Knows: Steven Pinker on the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life

Today on the James Alteger show. You want it to be obvious enough that a person who is willing knows that they're being propositioned. You don't want to be like George Costanza in Seinfeld where his date invites him up for for coffee. He says, no, the caffeine will keep me up. And then on the way out he realizes coffee doesn't need coffee, coffee needs sex.

The main idea is that laughter, it generates common knowledge. When you're laughing, you know it because it's interrupting your breathing and everyone around you knows it because it's noisy. But laughter can also be used aggressively, as when the whole room starts to jeer, laugh at something stupid. You know, when you make fun of the preacher, the teacher, the politician, the blowhard, late night TV, where most of the monologues now are jokes at the expense of Donald Trump. It's a way of taking someone down.

There it's taking someone down aggressively. That's why a shared sense of humor is one of the keys to romantic attraction and also the keys to friendship. This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Alteger Show. I first got really impressed with Stephen Pinker when he wrote the book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Why Violence Has Declined.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (62 minutes, 11,134 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.