We were delighted to meet with Steven Pinker on 21 June, World Humanist Day. Pinker is an experimental psychologist, and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He is interested in all aspects of language and mind, and his research particularly focuses on common knowledge, language acquisition, emotion, the moral sense, rationality, and trends in violence. During the event, we focused particularly on his latest book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, where Pinker attempted to unravel the paradox that, while science has made considerable progress, scepticism towards it is still widespread, leading, for example, to the spread of fake news and conspiracy theories.