Steven Pinker's Last Meal

This week I sit down with Steven Pinker — cognitive scientist, Harvard professor, and one of the most consequential public intellectuals alive — for a conversation that ranged from the architecture of power to the nature of free will, from the hard data on human progress to why changing your mind might be the bravest thing you can do.

What struck me most about Steven is that his optimism is more of a conclusion than a disposition. When you plot measures of human wellbeing over time, good things go up and bad things go down. Not because of magic or destiny, but because we're smart, we solve problems, and when we build institutions designed to seek the truth, we compound those gains across generations.

We get into why our brains are wired to believe the world is falling apart even when it isn't — and why the structure of news almost guarantees a distorted picture of reality. We talk about Enlightenment values not as historical artefacts but as living, anti-fragile tools; about super forecasters and the hard limits of prediction. We also discuss Steven's lates work, the theory of common knowledge, which turns out to explain everything from why money has value, to how dictatorships fall, to why a child pointing out that the emperor has no clothes changes the world.

We also go deep on collective rationality — the strange and somewhat hopeful fact that irrational individuals consistently build rational civilisations. Steven makes the case that our institutions of science, law, and journalism are essentially gadgets engineered to make us smarter than we are individually. And we argue about AI, free will, Marshall McLuhan, and whether anyone actually forms their beliefs based on evidence.

This is one of those conversations I'll be thinking about for a long time.

CHAPTERS:

0:00 – Introduction

1:30 – An Era from Which You Can't Return

6:00 – Is the World Getting Better?

11:40 – Wired for Pessimism

17:50 – Anti-Fragile Enlightenment

20:40 – Steven's Last Meal

32:40 – First Memories

35:40 – The Montreal Police Strike

45:10 – Common vs. Private Knowledge

50:10 – How Dictatorships Fall

58:10 – Collective Rationality

1:03:30 – Why We Don't Change Our Minds

1:08:30 – The Case for Irrationality

1:13:00 – AI & the Future of the Mind

1:24:50 – Quickfire Questions

1:35:20 – Free Will & the Performance of Life

1:45:01 – Last Word

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Last Meal is conversation series where I sit down with some of the world's sharpest thinkers to go deep on the questions that actually matter — rationality, identity, legacy, progress, and what it means to live well. Hosted by Tom Nash.