An Evening with Steven Pinker

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-- Tickets cannot be re-sold on re-seller platforms. Re-sold ticket will not be honored.

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Join us for an in-person and virtual* Live Talks Los Angeles event:

*Virtual event airs on October 13 at 6pm PT/9pm ET

discussing his book, "When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life"

*interviewer to be added

TICKETS:

• $50 General Admission ticket + signed copy of the book
• $25 General Admisison tickets
• Additional signed books available for purchase at event
• Face masks recommended

• The virtual version of this event airs on October 13, 2025, at 6pm PT/9PM ET and is available on video-on-demand for five days.
• Tickets for the virtual event can be purchased here (includes the signed book)
• ASL interpreter provided upon request.
• Free parking at the venue

From one of the world’s most celebrated intellectuals, a brilliantly insightful work that explains how we think about each other’s thoughts about each other’s thoughts, ad infinitum. It sounds impossible, but Steven Pinker shows that we do it all the time. This awareness, which we experience as something that is public or “out there,” is called common knowledge, and it has a momentous impact on our social, political, and economic lives.

Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He has won many prizes for his teaching, his research on language, cognition, and social relations, and his twelve books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Rationality. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.”

“Think you know what others think about what you are thinking? It turns out you’re probably wrong. And thanks to When Everyone Knows, now we know why. Once you read this book, you’ll never view human behavior quite the same way again.”—Jonah Berger, New York Times bestselling author of Contagious and The Catalyst

"Common knowledge" is necessary for coordination, for making arbitrary but complementary choices like driving on the right, using paper currency, and coalescing behind a political leader or movement. It’s also necessary for social coordination: everything from rendezvousing at a time and place to speaking the same language to forming enduring relationships of friendship, romance, or authority. Humans have a sixth sense for common knowledge, and we create it with signals like laughter, tears, blushing, eye contact, and blunt speech.

But people also go to great lengths to avoid common knowledge—to ensure that even if everyone knows something, they can’t know that everyone else knows they know it. And so we get rituals like benign hypocrisy, veiled bribes and threats, sexual innuendo, and pretending not to see the elephant in the room.

Pinker shows how the hidden logic of common knowledge can make sense of many of life’s enigmas: financial bubbles and crashes, revolutions that come out of nowhere, the posturing and pretense of diplomacy, the eruption of social media shaming mobs and academic cancel culture, the awkwardness of a first date. Artists and humorists have long mined the intrigues of common knowledge, and Pinker liberally uses their novels, jokes, cartoons, films, and sitcom dialogues to illuminate social life’s tragedies and comedies.

Consistently riveting in explaining the paradoxes of human behavior, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… invites us to understand the ways we try to get into each other’s heads and the harmonies, hypocrisies, and outrages that result.

Host or Publisher Live Talks Los Angeles