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Conversations with tyler is produced by the mercatus center at george mason university, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. Stephen pinker has stridden into the room and requires no further introduction. i'd like to start with your early work on irregular verbs. So why do we have hundred and 65 or so quirky exceptions like a stride strode come came, sing, sang, go, went and so on? It just seems there could be no rhyme or reason behind it.

Steven Pinker has spent an entire academic career thinking deeply about language, cognition, and human nature. Driving it all, he says, is an Enlightenment belief that the world is intelligible, science can progress, and through rational inquiry we can better understand ourselves.

He recently joined Tyler for a conversation not only on the power of reason, but also the economics of irrational verbs, whether violence will continue to decline, behavioral economics, existential threats, the merits of aerobic exercise, photography, group selection, Fermi’s paradox, Noam Chomsky, universal grammar, free will, the Ed Sullivan show, and why people underrate the passive (or so it is thought).

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