#2263 - Gad Saad
en
January 28, 2025
TLDR: Marketing expert and evolutionary psychology authority Gad Saad is a Visiting Professor at Northwood University and author of 'The Saad Truth about Happiness.' This episode features him as guest.

In episode #2263 of The Joe Rogan Experience, Gad Saad, a renowned evolutionary psychologist, discusses intriguing topics ranging from the development of modern youth to the psychological implications of consumer behavior. Saad, who is a Visiting Professor and Global Ambassador at Northwood University, shares insights drawn from his expertise in evolutionary psychology, which examines how evolutionary principles influence conventional behaviors and social dynamics.
Key Highlights:
1. Evolution of Childhood
- Changing Exposure: Saad reflects on the evolution of childhood innocence, acknowledging that today’s children have vastly more exposure to both good and bad information than previous generations. He contrasts his own childhood with current experiences, suggesting that while some exposure is harmful, children have access to knowledge that can be beneficial too.
- Children's Political Awareness: The discussion brings forth the awakening of his children to political issues, noting a contrast from his own ignorance at that age. Next-gen kids are engaging with complex topics such as politics and consumer behavior much earlier.
2. Game Theory and Decision-Making
- Game Theory Basics: Saad introduces the concept of game theory, explaining it through examples such as the prisoner’s dilemma and how it applies to decision-making during high-stakes situations like the Cold War.
- Practical Applications: He explains the significance of creating informed decisions based on various strategies and mental models, linking game theory to everyday choices.
3. Cognitive Dissonance and The Pursuit of Truth
- Cognitive Dissonance: Saad delves into the psychological phenomenon where individuals strive to maintain consistency in their beliefs, even in the face of contradicting evidence. He underscores the challenges faced by those who endeavor to introduce new ideas in a polarized environment.
4. Impact of Language and Communication
- Quotes on Ideas: Saad shares poignant observations about how people often align their identity strongly with their ideas, leading to conflict in discussions or debates. Drawing from personal experiences with social media, he emphasizes the toxicity of online communication and how it often escalates negativity.
- Empathy in Politics: The podcast touches on political discourse and the often misguided pursuit of "empathy" as it relates to policy decisions that neglect reality.
5. Personal Experiences and Influences
- The Value of Diverse Perspectives: Saad emphasizes the importance of engaging in discussions with people of different ideologies. He shares anecdotal evidence of his own experiences, reinforcing the idea that thoughtful dialogue can lead to greater understanding, even across ideological divides.
- Crisis in Higher Education: He expresses disappointment in academia, criticizing many professors for their narrow focus and lack of interdisciplinary thought.
Practical Applications of Saad's Insights
- Marketing Implications: The notions of evolutionary psychology can be applied to create more effective marketing strategies tailored to consumer psychology.
- Encouraging Open Dialogue: Saad's discussion points encourage readers to engage in civil discourse, value different viewpoints, and understand the psychological underpinnings of both their own and others' beliefs.
Conclusion
Gad Saad’s conversation with Joe Rogan in #2263 provides a comprehensive look into the intersection of psychology, marketing, and the effects of societal norms. With prevalent themes of communication, decision-making, and academic integrity, the episode invites listeners to reflect on the psychological mechanisms driving modern cultural phenomena. For anyone interested in behavioral science, consumer psychology, or social dynamics, this episode is rich with insights that challenge conventional thinking.
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The Joe Rogan experience
Joe Rogan. You're gorgeous. You are too. You beautiful bastard. Come on. Can I read you something? Oh, okay. You want to read me something? This is from my son just before I came on the show. Hi, Daddy. I was wondering if the show will be live anywhere and tell Joe that I say hello and I love his show. Oh, you just made his life. How old is he?
Well, last week was his bar mitzvah. Oh, so it's 13. It's 13. Okay. And it was... That's about the age you shouldn't be listening to my show yet. You used to disturb me when I would meet my youngest daughters' friends when they were before high school. Yeah. And they would say they love my podcast. I was like, jeez.
This is really not for you like some of these subjects not for you, but the kids today They're not 12 year olds when I was a 12 year old. Yeah, these kids have a far more advanced understanding of the world for good or for bad. Yeah, probably I mean, I don't know if it's good or bad because I mean I think Our childhood we were more exposed to things than our parents were
I don't necessarily think that's bad. So why would I think it's bad for kids today? I think the explosion, though, is you could go on and see porn that you and I don't even know they exist. Yeah, it is an issue. That most certainly is a problem. But I don't know if it's worse or better. Do you know what I'm saying? I would rather have the loss of innocence that I had as a 14-year-old than the loss of innocence my parents had.
I think they just lived in a more ignorant time. And with knowledge, you're also going to get all the bad stuff. Like I see a lot of assassination videos. Okay. You know, it's funny to say the age of innocence because I've always said that the two things that protect me in life were my Belgian shepherds.
Oh, my love. And I saw by the way that you were talking recently about Belgian Malinua. Yeah. So my kids have grown up with, by the way, the Belgian Malinua is one of four types of Belgian shepherds. The only difference across the four types is that the Belgian Malinua has short hair, whereas the ones that we had have longer, they even look more wolfish, more intimidating. Scary dogs. And so anyways, so I always said that the two things that protect me when I sort of enter the sanctity of my home was
the love of my family, my Belgian shepherds, and the innocence of my children. Because, you know, the world out there is ugly. And then you go back home. And so once that becomes polluted, because they just know more, I feel like I'm losing part of them.
That's interesting. I don't think you should think that way. I think they're human beings and you should want them to know things. It's just that we enjoy the position of being the person that has all the deep, dark knowledge of the world and dealing with this innocent child that wants to watch Dora the Explorer.
You know, you know, like you have a pig yeah Peppa pig all those kind of shows and there's you know There's something beautiful and watching a little person learn stuff about the world and and shocking when they find out about like murders and danger and scary things and you know and then they're realm of knowledge expands to you know and
What amazes me is seeing my children get a political awakening. So my son, who's really precocious, he's 13, my daughter's 16. She wasn't as into it. But during the last US elections, maybe because of the TikTok stuff and so on, she became, she sort of woke up to it. And she would come to me and say, you know, why do we like Trump? Why don't we let? And so I saw an awakening in her that my son already had, I mean, he literally will sit with me, watch
I mean, Tucker's no longer on, but he would watch Tucker with me and have conversations with me when he was 11, 12. My daughter came a bit later into the game, but it's so rewarding to see them wake up to these things and have meaningful conversations with me on these topics. It's beautiful. I didn't know anything about politics blissfully, blissfully unaware when I was 13. Is that right? Right. But I did worry about Russia.
When I was in high school, everybody was terrified before the fall of the Soviet Union. We were terrified that we were going to go to war with Russia. It was like a thing that was hovering over our head every day. That was kind of all I knew about politics. Like Russia bad, United States good, Russia bad wants to kill United States. Like that's what we were basically told. All the movies like Red Dawn, you know, Russia invades America.
Can I incorporate some professorial elements to what you just said? Please do. So one of my intellectual heroes is John Van Neumann, who was a Hungarian Jewish polymath. He was a mathematician. He was a game theorist. And one of the things that he did, he was one of the pioneers of using game theory. Do you know what game theory is?
Yes. In economics. Do you want me to explain it for a viewer? Please. So a classic example of a game theory context would be the prisoners dilemma, right? You capture two prisoners, you take them apart as the cops do, each of them can either squeal, confess or not, and depending on whether, so there are four possibilities. Both can confess, one confess, the other one. So it's a two by two matrix, and there are different payoffs in each of these matrices.
And then the question is, what is the optimal behavior? So that's called game theory, because you use game theoretic framework to model what should be some optimal behavior. Well, in the context of the Cold War, that's when game theory was first being applied, that the Russians or the Soviets can nuke us or not, we can nuke them or not. And so there are all these models that were developed. So for example, mutually assured destruction,
is a outshoot of understanding game theory. And so for the ones who are watching the show, John von Neumann is the definition of how I think an intellectual should be. Very broad thinker. He can both discuss mathematics or economics or game theory. He died, I think, too young, but he got his PhD at the age of 23. Check him out, John von Neumann.
Wow. 23. 23 years old from Hungary. Incredible. Yeah. People like that just make you feel like such a dummy. I mean, I was impressed with myself because I got my PhD in my late 20s. That's still pretty good. Well, he beat me by many, many years. So I'm a little ant compared to him.
It's bizarre when you see like young teenagers that are in college already, because they've gone through their entire high school course, but it's having their 14, 15 years old. Yeah. Now 16 are in college. Yeah. So strange. Of course, as you know, the danger of that is that you're not at the right social developmental phase. So yes, you can solve calculus really easily, but you can't speak with people who are four years older than you. So you end up being crazy.
Yeah, so I'm not sure if I support this kind of fast tracking because there's an element of just being with the right people at the right age. That is true, but also when you have an extraordinary mind, you want to give that extraordinary mind fuel. You have someone who caught lightning in the bottle. And you want to help that. I mean, maybe there's a way to do it where the parents come with a kid to school or something like that.
Isn't it strange, though, that you and I at our age, the idea of talking to someone four years older than us is like, so what? Like, what's the big deal? Isn't it weird? Like, accelerated learning that you have as a child is so rapid and so profound that a four-year age gap is nuts. Well, speaking of accelerated learning, my biggest regret, I may have discussed this with you before or not, but my parental regret is that we never taught our children all of the languages that we speak at home.
So I speak, my mother tongue is Arabic, and I also learned French because from Lebanon, and then moving to Montreal, then I learned English, and I also speak Hebrew, and then my wife, because she's Lebanese Armenian, she speaks Armenian. So between the two of us, we speak five languages, but here's the rub.
If I speak to them in Arabic or Hebrew, my wife won't understand. If she speaks to them in Armenian, I won't understand. So we just settled on French and English. So rather than them now being the super exotic, you know, five language speaking kids, they only speak the very vanilla French and English.
Yeah, but it's still two. It's, well, 99% of Americans, I agree. They don't even master one language. Barely new English. Barely new English. They have separate versions of English. You know? Actually, I was slangs and dialects. I posted on X that, well, I was coming to Texas. I'm also soon going to South Carolina, to Georgia, to Florida, to Mississippi.
And so I said if I'm going to fit in in the south since I'm doing this big what are some absolute must? Expressions that I must have so the ones I came up with and you'll add to that I'm fixing to leave Let's your heart bless your heart y'all y'all all y'all all y'all That's that's all I got yeah, don't use any of those no no why because to cliche they're gonna know you're faking it
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But the thing is like saying it like that, you can't. If you don't have a southern accent and you're throwing y'alls around, people are like, get out of here. It's just a weird one. And not that the accent here is so dense. Like the Texas accent is probably much stronger in the rural areas.
or in small cities and stuff like that. Austin is pretty mixed with a bunch of people from all over the place. So I think the, just the, even the general Texas accent here is fairly muted. Do you agree with that, Jamie? Does that make sense?
It's definitely y'all's are thrown around, but that's about it. Right, but it's not, he's not a, but it's a Texas accent like you hear in the other parts of the state. There's other parts of the state. You talk to people like that's a motherfucker, Texas accent, you know what I'm saying? Like there's a very specific way that they talk that's pretty cool, but it's very distinct, you know, it makes you know where you're at. Like New Yorkers, like if you're in New York and you go to an Italian deli and you talk into this fucking guy and he's making you a sandwich, you know, like my friend Giovanni,
Like it's like it's fun. It's like they're talking the way they talk It's like it's it's a very specific way of talking. It's cool I was gonna say that you're gonna get me in trouble because I think I mentioned to you last time that the biggest trouble I ever faced was two shows ago when I was here and I made a joke about the French Canadian accent. Yes, you did
So I am hereby stating that in nature, the most beautiful auditory orgasm is to listen to the French Canadians. But now they think you're lying, because now you're a flip flop. No, I've just learned. Flip flop. Flip flop is a weird one to me.
Because it's like, wait a minute, what do you do when you encounter new information? Don't you change your mind? Like this idea that someone who's running for office, especially, right? It's always like presidential candidates and Senate candidates. You should never always be consistent. Yeah. Which is so crazy. Like, shouldn't you learn from new information?
So in behavioral decision-making, in psychology decision-making, there's a whole field that studies what are the types of cognitive traps that people succumb to precisely to not alter their original position. And Leon Festinger, I don't know if you know, he's the pioneer who developed the theory of cognitive dissonance.
And so he has an amazing quote, which I use in one of my earlier books in the Percetic Mind, where he basically says, the types of mental machinations that the average human being will engage in to make sure that there is cognitive consistency in his mind. Because incoming information that contradicts my anchored position makes me feel icky.
So what are the kinds of mental gymnastics I'm going to go through to make sure that everything stays consistent in my mind? Which, as you might imagine, is a big obstacle for me because I'm in the business of administering mind vaccines to people, getting them to think properly.
But if the reality is that the architecture of the human mind is not built to change their positions, then I'm up shit-screech. Well, if you pay attention to X, you will see you are up shit-screech. Especially liberal people on X, like super hyper liberal people that are unwilling to look at any positive aspects of any sort of Republican ideas or policies or it's like that's what they're doing.
They're doing that 100%. I'll be it. There are a few people that have come around. Let's say to Trump. No, don't you think? Oh, yeah. Yeah, a lot of people have. But it's like they had to see, you know, four years of an awful administration to go, oh, OK, wait a minute. I think these people are bullshitting me. I think these people are fully incompetent. I don't think that guy is really the president. I think there's like a bunch of financial institutions and deep state operatives that are involved in this whole thing. Like, and that's
When did you see that interview with Mike Johnson when he was talking about conversations that he had with Biden about liquid natural gas? I don't think so. And that Biden had signed an executive order and it limited liquid natural. Oh, and then he said, I didn't do that. He said it didn't do that. That's right. And so he couldn't get a meeting with Biden. They wouldn't let him have a meeting. It took a year before he got a meeting, and there was a bunch of people in the room in that meeting. And he wanted to be alone with Biden, but Biden kicked everybody out. And so they had to listen.
So when Biden kicked everybody out, then he was talking to him. And then he found out that Biden didn't even read these executive orders. He was gone, man. We knew he was gone. I said he was gone in 2020. Yeah. The presidency ages you faster than radiation. Whatever the fuck happens when you're in that when you have all that information and all that pressure and like the whole world's watching you and then there's fucking chaos everywhere and a probably a bunch of terrifying shit that most people don't have information on, but you do. And all sudden you have this
crazy position like you age like crazy. So he was already gone four years ago. So four years of getting cooked by being the president like that poor guy. So I'll tell you background story because we're talking about Trump and of course he came on your show.
I was speaking to one of his senior advisors prior to him agreeing to come on your show and I was saying, you know, hey, I would love to have President Trump for a chat and so on. He goes, oh, that's fantastic. What would you like to talk about? What angle would you like to do?
to pursue. And I said, well, you know, I think that a lot of people have this wrong impression of President Trump. If he was given a long format setting where we can just chat, people would see that he's funny and he's not this ogre. And of course, he came on your show. There's no point coming on my show once he's been on your show. And I think you did exactly that with him. So that a lot of people, several people that I know who hated Trump after they sort of watched on your show, they're like, he's kind of cool.
And so that was exactly what I was hoping to do had I had the privilege of having him chat with me. And of course, you pulled it off. Yeah, that's the only way to talk to people. And I wanted to do that with Harris too. I wanted to be able to talk to her as a human, just have a conversation with the, I know there's a human in there. I know this whole system's fucked, but I've talked about this before, but there's just one interview that she does where she talks about meeting her mother and father-in-law for the first time.
And it's so funny when she talks about her mother-in-law grabbing her face, it goes, oh, look at you. And she's laughing. But she's laughing genuine. It's not that weird performative laugh that she does sometimes. It's really funny. And I was like, there's a human in there. Do you fund to just talk to a person? I mean, obviously you've spoken to thousands of people for three-hour chunks. Do you think had you had the opportunity, you would have been able to pull out three hours of
worthwhile conversation with her?
Right? Conversation like where you and I are having is a dance. Exactly. We're both moving. We're moving. We have to like... I actually call it a tango. Like literally. It is a tango. It's a tango. It's a dance. And you have to know that. And some people literally are having these things and don't know it's a tango.
They think that it's an opportunity for them to expose people's flaws or catch people in viral moments or an opportunity to flex your intellect. So it fucks with the flow because as a person listening, I want to feel a genuine conversation. That's what I want. And you can get that out of almost anybody if they're willing to do it.
But that you have to be skillful in how you negotiate it and how you do it. You have to think about it like it's like a dance. So I'm going to maybe be a bit more less charitable than you. I don't think she's capable of doing it.
because it takes a couple of things to be able to do what you just said. Number one, it takes vulnerability in that you're laying yourself out there. Right now I'm speaking straight without any script. And I might say something stupid that's going to be caught by millions of people, but I'm willing to take that chance for the joy of sitting and chatting with you. But if you're tight,
and you can't let yourself go. If you don't have the self-assuredness to be able to be vulnerable, then that's why she could only speak in those little chunks. Perhaps, but it's also perhaps who is she talking to? Do they have the personality? Do they have whatever it is that allows people to be comfortable and have a conversation?
Because all these conversations is just like the way I talk about like these rambling speeches that she does, which she kind of rambles on. It's because I know what it's like. She's trying to dismount. She doesn't know how to dismount. So it's pressure, right? But how is she verbally when there's no pressure? I bet she's a lot better. Everybody is. So that's the goal.
Yeah, the goal is to talk to her like a human like there was a few things they didn't want to talk about I said I don't care we could talk about fucking groceries. I don't give a shit We talk about flowers. I don't don't give a fuck. I just want to talk like let's talk You know what talk anybody who doesn't want to talk about something? I don't need to talk to them about that, right? You know if you don't if you've had a UFO experience You know I talk about it like okay
Let's talk about ghosts. What do you think about Bigfoot? I'll find out what you're about. We did. You and I talked about Bigfoot last time when you explained to me how you got off the Bigfoot train. Yeah, I want to believe. That's the problem. The problem with Bigfoot is the same problem that I have with. No, I don't believe, but it's the same problem that I have with UFOs. The problem is I am very biased.
Lickley is a fucking UFO right behind me. Very, very biased. Does a UFO on the desk? Look, that's the sport model from Bob Lazar, what he found in the area S-4, area 51. I am a romantic in that way. I want to believe in stupid shit.
I do, so I have to be careful. I have to be careful in what do I actually believe versus what do I want to believe. Like what is the data show me and the data shows me, especially what I know now from being a hunter for 12 years and spending a lot of time in the woods and knowing how many people are out there and how many people have phones and cameras and how many trail cameras there are and how many, we have like real accurate
There's only two jaguars that we know of that are in North America, and they know exactly where they are. Like, do you tell me? Just tell me this fuckin' giant ape is wandered around Seattle. Without anybody seeing him. Right. It's just not likely. Also, there's a bunch of all reasonable explanations. First of all, have you ever been to the Pacific Northwest? I've been to Seattle.
The woods up there are fascinating because it's essentially a rainforest. So there's so much rain that the forest is dense like these fingers. It's like a box of Q-tips. That's what I always describe it as. There's no spaces. There's just trees everywhere. There's not big open spaces where you
You know, if you go to Montana, you go to the woods, you know, there's mountains and there's trees, but there's like space in between the trees. It's expansive. There's no fucking space up there. It's a rainforest. It's like this. You don't see shit. And bears are known commonly to walk on two legs. They do it all the time. I've seen bears personally with my own eyes. I've seen bears in the woods walk on two legs. They do it all the time. So if you're looking in between all these trees and something,
hundred yards away is going in between trees and standing up tall. You just saw a big foot. Meanwhile, you saw a black bear. Yeah, exactly. Normal every day, average black bear, stand on its back legs. They do it all the time and they could easily be seven feet tall.
So earlier we were talking about how would you change your opinion once you have a position that's anchored? Yeah. And now we're saying, I'd love to believe in this stuff, but then incoming information comes in and then I kind of have to accept the fact that I can't believe this stuff. Well, that in a sense was the exact topic of my doctoral dissertation. I actually celebrated 30 years in 2024. What examples did you use?
So I brought in subjects into the lab. So let me tell you what the topic was, and I'll tell you how I ran it. So the idea was to study what are called stopping strategies, which means when is it that a person has acquired enough information to stop and make a choice?
Now, why is that important? Because classical economic theory argues that if you're going to maximize your utility when you're making a decision, you should look at all of the available information. You can't choose that car that maximizes your utility if you leave some information unturned.
So that's called a normative theory, meaning that's how you ought to behave normatively if you want to be a perfect decision maker, rational decision maker. But objectively speaking, that's not what we do, right? Like you and I, every decision that we make every day, we don't sample all of the relevant and available information before we make a choice.
We sample until we have sufficiently differentiated between the choices that you say, there's no point in sampling more information. I now have enough information to vote for Trump. I have enough information to marry this girl, to choose this employee. So that's called a stopping strategy. So I was studying the cognitive strategies that people use when they're making the stopping decision. So what I did, so to answer your question of how I went about doing it,
I brought in people into the lab and I made them make sequential binary choices. Binary choices means it's a choice between two alternatives. Sequential means that they acquire one piece of information at a time on these two alternatives. This was done on a computer and it's called the process tracing algorithm, meaning that it keeps track of every single behavior that the decision maker is making. It does that in the background.
And so what I was looking at, they could acquire up to 25 attributes, let's say choosing between apartments. And I was tracking the cognitive processes that they were using and deciding when to stop and choose apartment A or choose apartment B. And then later, I applied that to other types of decisions. For example, made choice.
So you could apply for anything. You could apply choosing between fitness instructors, choosing between political candidates to vote for anything. The reason why it's binary is because it only operates once you're down to two final alternatives. You might have used another process to go from 10 alternatives, like let's say the primaries and the
US system, we first go through Republican primary, then we choose one final one, and then we go through Democratic primary, we choose one, and then the final two go head to head. That's when my model comes in. And so my model really explains how we make decisions across a bewildering number of cases, specifically how we stop and say, I'm marrying her, I'm hiring him, I'm voting for him. So it was a big deal.
So a tipping point of information, like when you have enough information to make rational quality decisions. Exactly. So what you do actually is you set, I mean, if I could show it to you on a curve, it would really be cool. It's you set, you set a what's called a differentiation, a differentiation threshold, which basically says that I have now sufficiently teased the part, the Mazda and the Toyota,
that I've hit that threshold, that I'm sufficiently convinced that that decision would never be overturned, even if I sampled all of the remaining information. That's a good example, a good example, because when people are looking at cars and they're trying to figure it out, like you can start going over, especially today, start going over all the details and different things they do.
and then you get online or what's more reliable. And some people use what's called the core attributes heuristic, which basically is there might be 60 attributes that I might look at in a car, but I really care only about four attributes. I will sample those four, whichever car is ahead after those four, I'll buy that car. And so I studied all of those decision rule strategies. What about emotions though? Doesn't that play in there?
Great question. So later, once I had gotten my PhD, I started incorporating various types of emotional states to see where people shift those stopping thresholds. So one thing I did, it never got published and we can talk about that.
So I wanted to look at what happens to those stopping thresholds for dysphoric. Do you know what dysphoric means? No, not gender dysphoric. Emotion. So dysphoria is like a mild state of a clinical depression. It's not.
I'm going to kill myself, but my wife left me, my dog died, life sucks. So that's called dysphoria. It's the opposite of euphoria. So there is a psychometric scale that you could administer to people to measure their dysphoria scores. And so I wanted to see whether non dysphoric, people who don't suffer from dysphoria, would make their stopping decisions in a different way than dysphoric. And I didn't have any a priori hypotheses.
Why? Because the literature was very confused. Some theories said that this forex, by virtue of them being helpless and apathetic, life sucks, will actually acquire less information before they commit to a choice.
then there was another school of thought that thought, no, this forex are so helpless that one of the ways that they can gain control over their lives is to look at more information. So because I couldn't come up with any a priori hypotheses and being an honest scientist, I said, I'm not going to posit any hypotheses, I'm just going to run it and see what I get. So I think I had 18 different measures that were comparing that this maybe 17.
measures that were comparing the dysphoric to the non-disphoric, of which on 16 out of the 17, I got no effects, right? Now that to me was worthy of publishing, meaning that in this particular task, dysphoria doesn't seem to moderate the behavior. I send it to the stop journal, actually called cognition and emotion. You're asking about emotion.
The editor writes back to me, got gorgeous study, beautiful design, beautiful. Unfortunately, given the number of null effects you got, I can't publish it. Now, this is literally called in science, the null effects bias or the drawer, which means what?
you only end up publishing findings that give you an effect and you put into the disappearance bin all of the findings that didn't get any effects. So when you then run a meta-analysis, do you know what a meta-analysis? When you run a meta-analysis, it's not an actual accurate depiction of the totality of findings because all of those null-effect studies were never published.
And so I tried to tell the psychologist a question, who, by the way, several years later, he was at USC and was hounding me because he was a super wokester. I couldn't believe how much he fell in my esteem. But anyways, that's a separate question. I won't even mention his name, although he's worthy of being shamed on the Joe Rogan show. And I wrote him, I said, but I really think that you're succumbing to the null effects bias because I really, it's worthy to publish this. This was, I think, in 1998. It's information.
It's information that is worthy of the, that certainly the scientific community should know about it. Well, I probably, one of the first times I've ever discussed it was on this show. So hopefully at least it gets that attention, but it's not in the record. What a shame. That is a shame.
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It's interesting that one of our biggest hurdles is the human ego does not want us to ever be wrong. Right. It's a giant hurdle and human beings for whatever reason, I guess it's part of the motivation of acquiring information and of advancing your ideas. We attach ourselves to ideas.
And one of the things that I always tell young people, like if you want to do better in life and not get tricked by your own bullshit, don't be married to your ideas. Ideas are just ideas. You are not your ideas. Ideas are some things that you fuck around with in your head and you explore and you talk about with friends, but you have to always be honest about them and never be attached to them.
The problem with ideas is that ideas are just like everything else. Human beings grab them and they're stingy and they're like mine and I want my idea to win and you'll lie so your idea wins and it'll advance your career if your idea wins and if you can
Even if you can unfairly dismiss or you can be unethical in how you're ignoring certain aspects of data for your opposing ideas. People do that and succeed because of that, because academia rewards them, the media rewards them.
especially, you know, if they can publish in the New York Times or something like that, like if they can make a story like that, you get rewarded for lying. Yeah. So I can tell you at million, I mean, this is my 31st year as a professor, I can read a paper and I can, just by looking at how clean their presentation of the data is, tell you that they cheated. Because the, the,
The structure of the reality of data is never as clean as how it is presented in many of these journals. And then by the way, not not to sort of tap myself on the shoulder, but some of the top people that I'm that I know who ended up getting caught for fabrication of data. I was in private circles saying, I bet you 80% of this guy's research is bullshit. And then it comes up to be the case because I'll give you I'll give you an example.
So I did a study and speaking about being wedded to your ideas. So I had a graduate student that worked with me on a really, really cool project, which we ended up publishing in 2009. Gorgeous paper on testosterone and so on. Really beautiful paper. I noticed that as we were getting ready to run these studies,
There was always a delay where he wasn't yet ready to kind of cast the dye. And so one day we had gone for coffee. I said, you know what I think? I think that maybe you're afraid that if right now in the rarefied world of us having just posited the hypotheses but not run the study,
We live in a world where it hasn't been falsified yet. So you're wedded to the idea. But I think you're scared that if we run the studies and the data doesn't come out in support, then the, but guess what? It doesn't matter because we're going to reap some benefit from that. Well, true. And he looked at me.
And he was like, actually, you're exactly right. Professor, I'm afraid to find out whether we're correct or not. I said, just let's do it. It was actually a study on, so there was two parts of the study. And I'm not sure if I've ever discussed it with you. So I wanted to look at what happens to men's testosterone levels when they engage in acts of conspicuous consumption. And what happens to men's testosterone when they see other men engaging in acts of conspicuous consumption?
And the general story, as you might imagine, is when I engage in an act of conspicuous consumption, my testosterone goes up because I had a social win. And when I see you who's a competitor to me getting into your fancy maserati, then my tail goes between my legs. So my testosterone goes down. So we designed two gorgeous studies. We ran them. It was gorgeous. It was beautiful. By the way, I always joke that for study one, we actually had people
drive a Porsche that we rented and it beaten up old sedan. And after each driving condition, we took salivary assays so that we could measure the testosterone. And I always joke, try to get from a granting agency research funds so that you could rent a Porsche. Not only when you can do that, you're a good scientist. And so we ran the studies and several of the hypotheses that we posited
turned out to be vertical, but several were falsified, but to the credit of the editor, unlike the other guy, he found value in even the findings that were contrary to what we had expected, because we had an post hoc explanation for why it didn't work out.
Lesson to everybody who is an aspiring scientist, always be honest, don't fudge the data, don't go back and pretend that you have hypothesized the stuff after you see what the data results are. Oh, is that what they do? Oh, tons, tons. As a matter of fact, I am an ego, human evil. That's, that's, I told this whole story to your point, exactly. Yeah, it's awful.
It's awful because we rely on experts and a lot of times experts are just like everybody else. They're competing with these other experts and they're trying to get ahead and they're willing to bullshit. And also there's financial reward and bullshitting. There's people that would like them to bullshit a little bit and make it a lot easier for us to pass this thing that we're trying to do. You do a little bullshitting. Exactly. Yeah.
I'll add something else. Actually, I'm giving a talk at one of the universities here in Austin as part of this trip, and I'm going to talk about the, so I'm old enough at this point, although I'd like to think that I still have many years left, but that I can sort of look back at, you know, what are some of the great things that I've faced as a professor? What are some of the things that I'm disappointed in? Probably the number one thing that most disappoints me in my fellow academics, and I don't mean that as a hotty thing,
is how non-intellectual most of them are. Most of them are just playing a game. I mean, obviously they're intelligent. They're in the sense that they've gotten a PhD. They've gotten a professorship. They are staying in your lane professors. They know their little methodology. But you can't sit with them at a party and talk about things that are not within their areas of special. They're not these big polymath. They're not Leonardo da Vinci.
And so that has disappointed me because sort of my fantasy of becoming an academic was that every Friday for Shabbat dinner I'd be inviting all of these intellectual colleagues of mine and my children will be growing up hearing the art historian and the mathematician and the
And my children and I are immersed in an endless orgy of ideas all day, whereas most professors are just sort of mundane, publish or perish, get tenure, game the system. And so that left me with a very, and that's why I do my thing, because I don't play those games. And so that's been disappointing.
Well, that competition creeps into medical science as well. I was reading about this case where this doctor was treating people for cancer that didn't have cancer. He was giving chemotherapy to all these people that didn't have cancer. And when they confronted him, one of the things that he said is you have to eat what you kill in this business.
So it was essentially he was saying in order to thrive as a cancer doctor, he had to diagnose more people with cancer than actually had cancer. And he was in some way, if not justifying explaining the thought process that led him to do this, which is so crazy, I think. That's unbelievable. But that's the reality of being a person. It's like your ego and your mind and the justifications that you can make
for doing certain things. I mean, this is why we have war, right? This is what war is, the ultimate expression of that justification of the most horrific things, because you believe it's the right thing to do. Exactly. Or because it benefits you. Or because if you don't, something's going to happen, you know?
Well, I always say, and you might have seen me posted often on X, I always say the most dangerous force in nature are parasitized minds, right? I mean, the tsunami is devastating, but it's a one bleep. Well, what's interesting about you and your work is you predicted essentially the entire COVID
reaction and in the freak out and the woke mob the whole the whole left freak out way before it was going on you caught like the first sounds of the drums in the far distance you're like guys we got to get the fuck out of here and everyone's like relax I don't hear any drums and you're like dude I heard drums I mean that fighting drums that is literally my autobiography
Yeah. Well, that's what you did. You really did do that. You were way ahead of it and you were widely criticized by a bunch of those people who turned out to be these woke dipshits. They eventually fell into the trance and they all, you know, put their fucking bios on their gender bios and their Twitter. T-R-A-N-C-E. Yeah, the trance. But they fell into the trance of trance T-R-A-N-S.
Well, trans was just the ultimate expression of this preposterous idea, this inclusion, this idea that the more suppressed you are, or the more maligned you are, the more social credit we have to give you.
And this is in the name of equity. So we bump a biological male who thinks he's a woman ahead of actual biological women to the point where it's like literally victimizing these women and we ignore it. We try to pretend it doesn't happen. Whether it's in schools or it's like in the workplace and that's that's the ultimate expression of this ability to completely ignore reality because it doesn't align with your ideology.
Well, so I have some good news, not phenomenal news, but in the same way that there is now this cataclysmic change that's happening because of Trump and so on, you know, the eyes out and so on. I'm definitely seeing a well, certainly a growing number of institutions that are reaching out to me who are suddenly very interested and keen on speaking with me.
Well, that's good. Yeah, so that's wonderful. And not in a gleeful sense of, hey, I was right, but in the sense that- Well, hey, you were right. First of all, hey, you were right. No, but we're redirecting the ship. We're all waking up. So it's not just about me. And, you know, so like this year, I'm a visiting professor and global ambassador at Northwood University. I took a leave from my home university because I couldn't stand the hamas crazies and so on.
And, you know, if you go to that school, you'll be hard plus to see one parasitic idea. That's great. You know, University of Austin here is trying to do big things. There are several other schools. How's that going? It's coming along. I mean, it had hit a bit of a couple of obstacles, but I think things are moving on track now.
Now, as the idea behind the University of Austin, I only peripherally know what's going on. I know they brought in a lot of very interesting people that are going to be a part of it and Barry Weiss is a big part of it. Yeah, she's on the border. So what are they trying to do? Are they trying to have a real university like every other university? We get accredited. Completely real university. Actually, they're now, I think they just admitted their first class of 2028. Oh, wow. For the accredited.
And the idea is to return to broad classical liberal, not in liberal in the political sense, but like you read the ancient Greek stories, you read Homer, you read Socrates and Aristotle, like real basic education without any of the parasitic stuff. But it's not just an anti-woke school. It's a return to that broad education. I mean, I was reading some of the stuff that the founding fathers write.
And not no disrespect to Kamala Harris or Joe Biden. When you read stuff that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and James Madison wrote, those were men of letters, right? They can quote Cicero and so on.
Well, I think what University of Austin, I haven't gone to visit yet, but from my understanding is they're trying to create students who are really well read, well, you know, have critical thinking abilities. So it's not just a correction to the woke stuff, but let's return to meaningful, well-grounded, all-encompassing education. And if they pull it off, what a great thing.
Yeah, education is not supposed to be just indoctrination. It's supposed to be giving you a broad perspective on a bunch of different ways that people look at the world. And what we know about the world, that's a fact. And you're supposed to be able to form your own conclusions. The way you're supposed to be able to do that, you're supposed to see people of different ideologies debate.
and have conversations about things. You're not supposed to pull fire alarms and shut people off because you don't like what they're saying. You're supposed to have someone from your side who can calmly and reasonably and in a way that's encouraging to other people to think the way they're thinking. You have to be persuasive. There's has to be something about what they're saying that go, wow, that guy's making some really good points. Or, wow, she just shut all that down. Now I'm thinking about it differently.
You don't, that's like a beautiful part of education is that you might have some, like how many people are there? Wasn't Ronald Reagan at one point in time? I think Ronald Reagan was like, he was, he was so left wing that he was investigated by the government. See if that's true. I think, I think I've read this, that Ronald Reagan at one point in time was like a hardcore lefty.
why certainly was left out on how hard core but i think he was a hard core lefty and i think he was i think during the mccarthy era i think somewhere around that i think he's even investigated yeah okay
I think that's true. I'm not sure if it was during the McCarthy era, but he was a really hardcore left wing. He changed his mind. How do you change your mind? You change your mind by evidence, by interacting with people that have different opinions that you didn't consider before and now you do and you have to be honest about your ideas and mull them over in your head and figure out why do I think this way now?
So one thing about sort of this broad education, I was mentioning earlier, John von Neumann, who's this kind of polymath. He's an expert in so many things. He's a generalist. Joe, many of the biggest scientific innovations have happened at the intersection of interdisciplinarity, because many of the biggest scientific problems necessitate expertise in many different domains.
So the mapping of the human genome could not come from only one discipline. It took biostatisticians and biologists and geneticists and bio... All kinds of different expertise to put it all together, right? And so one of the things that I've been trying... I mean, certainly in my own research, you know, I published in medicine and in marketing and in psychology and in behavioral science and in evolution,
I've lived my life as an interdisciplinary, but we don't train our students to be this way. You are a accounting major. Stay in your lane. Stay in your lane. You stay in your silo. As a matter of fact, our universities are architecturally designed so that we never speak to people who are. If you were in the psychology department, you never talk to someone from the finance department. But what if we were to speak to each other to study the psychology of
personal finance. And now we've just created a synergy that we never thought of before, right? So one of the things that I'm hoping to do with some of the universities that are now interested in, you know, making me an offer is to build something that I've long dreamt of, which I call the, the Consilience Institute.
conciliant. Have we ever talked about conciliants on the show? I don't know. Okay. So even if we have them, it may repeat it. So conciliants is a term that was sort of reintroduced into the vernacular by E.O. Wilson, who's a, he recently passed away a Harvard entomologist. He studied social ads. In the late nineties, Joe, he wrote a book called conciliants, colon unity of knowledge. So conciliants refers to, are you able to create links between different disciplines?
But can you create an organized tree of knowledge? So he was arguing, as I believe as well, that evolutionary theory is the meta-consilient framework that can link many different disciplines. So for example, you could study literature using evolutionary theory. And this field is called Darwinian literary criticism. And can you guess what that might mean?
Or do you want me to just jump in? Yeah, just jump in. Okay. So Darwinian literary criticism means when you study certain literature narratives that have stood the test of time, the reason why they tickle our fancy is because at their base, they have certain universal themes that map onto key evolutionary, right, paternity, uncertainty, sibling rivalry.
Romantic jealousy. So in other words, there are six, seven, eight key evolutionary templates that drive much of the great literature, whether it be Arabic literature, whether it be ancient Greek literature, whether it be Japanese literature, there's always that same template. And that's why they cater to our sense. That's why I could understand what an ancient Greek poet had wrote 2,500 years ago. And I get what how he's feeling jealousy, because you and I,
are running on the same software as that guy did. And so that would be called Darwinian literary criticism. You could apply evolutionary theory to architecture. So I'm trying to give examples that you wouldn't have thought of. So architects usually are trained in how to design buildings to minimize cost and maximize the speed with which you can build a thing. They're not trained to design buildings that are consistent with our biophilic nature. Biophilic means love of nature.
So there are certain architectural designs that actually make us be more productive. Here's a simple example. Just having more windows increases productivity. As a matter of fact, there's a great study that was published in maybe Nature or Science, one of those two journals in 1984, I think.
where the researcher did only the following experimental manipulation. Half the people who had just done a surgery were placed in a room with a window, and the other half were placed in a room without a window. Everything else is controlled. It's the same surgery, everything else was controlled.
the one that was in a room with a window had many better outcomes, different metrics. Just that one manipulation being able to see the light, right? So, by the way, there's a field called Biophilic Architecture, which tries to incorporate our innate love of nature in the design of architectural buildings or
interior spaces and so on. So that would be another example of using evolutionary theory in a completely different field. You can use evolutionary theory in medicine. You could use evolutionary theory in consumer behavior. And so I argue that we can build an institute called the Consilience Institute where filmmakers from Hollywood can come to this institute
and do a six-month stage studying about how to develop cool scripts that adhere to evolutionary principles. And evolutionary computer scientists can also come in. What's unifying all of us is an understanding of the importance of evolutionary theory in these very disparate disciplines.
That's fascinating. Pretty cool stuff, huh? It's very very cool stuff because it's always so interesting to think of What what are the motivations of human thinking and how? Where are where do we trip on ourselves? What do we trip on our own? Just our own programming essentially when we're essentially operating
with a system that was in place back when we were hunter and gatherers. We have the same system. And that's by the way called an evolutionary medicine. The exact words you just said, it's called the mismatch hypothesis. The argument is that many of, and I know you're very interested in health, so I think you're like this. This is not my research. This is from other evolutionary medical guys. I think the top nine killers
in health are related to the mismatch hypothesis, which means that something that could have been perfectly adaptive a hundred years ago in the modern world becomes maladaptive. So for example, enhance the mismatch. So whether it be colon cancer or diabetes or heart disease or so on, what ends up happening with each of these diseases
is that misalignment between what was evolutionarily adaptive back then and evolutionary maladaptive now creates that health condition. Let me give you a concrete example. We've evolved the taste buds, the gustatory preferences, to prefer fatty foods because of caloric, uncertainty, caloric scarcity.
That makes perfect evolutionary sense when, as a hunter-gatherer, I have to spend 30,000 calories to go out and hunt, and I may not return with game. But then when I do get the game, then I gorge on that meat because I don't know when I'm going to eat next, right?
In today's environment of plenitude, I don't face caloric uncertainty and caloric scarcity. I become fat. I overeat because that mechanism of gorging on fatty foods still isn't me. So we still have that mechanism, but it becomes maladaptive.
And so incorporating an evolutionary lens into medicine often ends up with completely different medical interventions than that which the typical physician who's not trained in evolutionary medicine would have come up with.
Hmm that makes sense. Yeah, well unfortunately so many doctors don't even take into account so many factors in health. Yeah, and this thing that you're talking about this desire for fatty foods is That's a great example
You know, one of the best ways that people have found to sort of mitigate the effects of that is to only eat protein. When you go on one of those carnivore diets, one of the things that's so interesting about it is you naturally limit the amount you eat. Your body achieves sort of a homeostasis with your food because you're not consuming like
I can sit down and eat a steak, a steak alone, and I'll be fine. But if there's mashed potatoes sitting right there with gravy, or there's some pasta, or there's a piece of bread with some butter, I'll go in. But if I'm only eating steak, I don't feel the need to eat anything else.
I'm fully satisfied. I'm not starving. I'm not like, oh my God, I need more food. It's like I've had plenty of food, but ooh, that looks good. And that is just the trick. That's the trick. But if you can get past that trick and just be disciplined with your diet and eat as much as you want of eggs and fish and meat and you will lose weight, like in a shocking way and you'll feel a lot better. And it's kind of disturbing. So are you on an all protein diet right now? I'm like 90 plus percent only meat.
90 plus percent every now and then I'll eat a cookie like I'm not ridiculous, right? I'll have tacos if that you know I love tacos good solid Mexican taco, right? But it's like I know the reality of what food is dessert is just fun. It's just mouth fun It's just mouth pleasure. So it's like oh, it's so good. It's tiramisu's delicious I love it, but that's just because I enjoy life I like I like going to a restaurant and a great chef cooks you a great meal and
I don't think, oh my God, there's gluten in it. I'm not doing that for nutrition. I'm doing that for enjoyment. This is for passion and love and the glass of wine and good conversation with friends and eating delicious food. You're taking part in a pleasurable experience that's essentially art that was created by a chef.
So that's different to me. But when it comes to food, like what do I use to fuel my body? It's mostly meat, mostly wild game meat and ribeye steaks. That's what I eat. I had a ribeye yesterday at my house. I need fat, I need a lot of protein, and then I'm good. And if I just eat that, my brain operates better, my body feels better, less inflammation. The brain fog is the craziest one.
When I went back to the carnivore diet, I took a lot of time off, and then I went back to it. I was telling Jamie, I was like, dude, I feel like I have a whole other gear, intellectually. Amazing. I don't search for thoughts as much when I'm eating only like that. It's palpable. You feel that? For me, because I have so many conversations with people, I know when I'm off.
I know when I'm like, oh, I'm slow. Like if I just flew in from fucking Italy or something like that, and I'm tired, and I'm jet lagged, it's a little harder to get the gears turning. I don't feel like I'm at my best. And I always notice the difference when I'm eating well, always.
What are your thoughts on, and I know very little about this, so I'm really asking it because I don't know anything about it. All that Ozambic stuff, are you forward, are you against it? I think if you're a morbid Leo beast, it's probably a good idea to do something that helps you get going. Because even if the side effects are bad, it's better than you're going to throw. You're dying. Bro, you're dying. If you're 500 pounds, you're fucking dying. You have all the comorbidities. You probably have diabetes. You probably have all sorts of shit wrong with you.
you can't be that big. And if you just don't know what to do and you don't know where to turn and your habits are so deeply ingrained in your psyche that you can't pass up ring dings and you can't stop eating sugary cereal or whatever the fuck it is, that's your thing. Ozambic is probably a good way to get going.
You know, I wish people would just get going with discipline and they would just get going with food choices I would I would like that. Yeah, but goddamn that's hard Especially if you're so far down the road because it takes a long time You know when someone you know says like how do you stay in shape? I'm like because I stay in shape
So that's the thing, right? I'm 57 years old, but I worked out like this when I was 17. So I don't do anything different. I keep this thing going. I keep the party rolling. And I never let it get fat because I've gotten fat before, but never out of shape. I just got fat because I ate too much food. I've never gotten to the point where I wasn't fit. I wasn't exercising. I don't think you should ever let yourself get there because it's too fucking hard to get back.
Now, if you've gone 39 years of your life doing nothing and just eating potato chips and drinking Mountain Dew and now you're 500 pounds, you don't know what to do, you're looking at a long journey. You're looking at a long journey to getting healthy again. It's a long road and it's hard to do a long journey because you're not going to see it every day. You're not going to see any results. You're going to look in the mirror. You're still seeing all this extra meat and fat. You're going to be disgusted with yourself. You want to look like the guys at the gym. It's going to take forever.
I mean, I guess we can calculate that, but for every amount of weight that you put on or lose, what's the ratio of the speed? Meaning it only takes me three weeks to put on 10 pounds if I eat badly. That's supposed to be that number or three weeks.
What's the number, the temporal number, the time number of how long it would take me to lose 10 pounds? It's probably three, four, five times that. Well, it depends on what you're doing. So it depends on how you're losing the weight and it depends on, do you have multiple things going on simultaneously? Have you started exercising? Have you stopped drinking sugary sodas? Have you changed your diet completely? Are you getting enough sleep?
Right. All those things factor in. Getting enough sleep is a giant factor. One of the times when people make the worst food choices is when they're tired. Yes. I know that for a fact. If I come home from the comedy club and it's like one o'clock in the morning and I'm hungry, I fucking eat everything that's there. I eat everything. Do I eat cookies? I'll eat whatever the fuck I want. Because I'm like, I want to eat what I want to eat right now. I'm good. Most of the time. Tonight we're having spaghetti. You know, I'll cook a pot of spaghetti.
But the tired is one, but it's like, what are you, what are you doing to mitigate this and have you change your mindset? And if you have it, if you're kind of dabbling in losing the weight, how long is it going to take? It might take a long ass time. You might not ever lose it. You have to like get into calorie deficit. Yeah. Calorie deficit is hard. So here's the thing though.
You can't starve yourself because some people do it the wrong way. They go to extreme and they fucking starve themselves and which is fucking dangerous. It's dangerous. It's dangerous for your heart. It's dangerous for your mind. It's dangerous for your body. Your body starts to eat itself. You know, there's a process. What is it called? Autosis? What is it called?
I forget what the process is called, where your body starts eating its own tissue to stay alive. And that's what people are doing when they're on ozempic, unfortunately. And this is the thing where people that are just a little overweight that get on it, disturb the shit out of me. Like you lazy fuck, just go to the goddamn gym. You lazy fuck, you're 10 pounds overweight and you're gonna get on ozempic, that's so crazy.
autophagy. That's what I thought. I thought I thought you were talking about. Yeah. Wait, go back to that again. Body breaks down its own tissue to survive. It's called autophagy. I never heard that word before. Maramous, marasbus, or muscle atrophy can happen when your body is deprived of nutrients or oxygen or when cells are damaged.
So here, so remember earlier, I was saying how you can incorporate evolutionary thinking into all kinds of areas. So there's these great studies that we're done looking at how the human mind can be tricked because of its desire for variety seeking. And then I, of course, I offer an evolutionary explanation for it. But let me tell you the two studies that I have in mind, I think, because when you mentioned spaghetti, it triggered that in my head.
So in one set of studies, they took, I think it was M&Ms, and M&Ms can create a bowl with only one color M&Ms, or you can create a bowl with many colored M&Ms. That colorant, objectively speaking, doesn't alter the taste, it doesn't alter the smell. So it is only perceptually, it affects it in that your eyes see a different color, but it doesn't alter the gustatory experience.
And it turns out that when you offer people the multicolored bowl, they eat more. They eat more. I wonder if people that are colorblind make better food choices.
You just, there's your, there's your research project. It's kind of interesting, right? That's kind of cool. But some things that are brightly colored are really good for you. You know, like peppers. Yeah. Yeah. Like bell peppers, you know, like pretty bright red and they're pretty, you know, apples, oranges. Although there are some cases where I want to talk about another variety of things studying a second, but there are some cases where colors in nature are called, this was actually my first book in 2007. I talked about aposomatic coloring. You know what that means?
Sure, let's to warn you from... Exactly. And then I use it to explain the hair coloring of all the walksters. I say that that's a form of aposomatic hair color. So check this out. So the Amazonian frog that lives in a very dangerous neighborhood, you'd think that it would evolve camouflage.
And yet you could see it from a satellite that's so brightly yellow or red because it's saying, hey, if you could see me, you might want to sort of stay wide of me. I'm not even trying to hide. Because that's how dangerous I am. Here's the beauty of nature. Another species will co-opt that coloring scheme
and it will evolve it, but it's completely harmless. But the predator doesn't know which is which. Do you get it? Ah, yes, right, right. So I use that mechanism when I'm talking about deceptive signaling, and I use it in the context of deceptive branding, where people can now street in New York City is all about you going and buying a Prada bag,
that should be $5,000, but hopefully if they faked it, well, I can buy it for $50. And so that's how I take all of these biological examples and try to apply them in economic or consumer decision making. But let me go back to variety seeking. So you mentioned earlier spaghetti. So they did another study where they took the exact same pasta and they either gave it to you in a plate of one-shaped pasta or in a plate of
multi shape, but it's the same pasta. So it doesn't change anything, but I can give it to you whatever it's called for sellout. And I guess you can guess what the more they ate more when it's the multi form pasta, even though it's not cool. You know what's interesting to you just brought up brands.
like brands are interesting it's really fascinating how brands have status attached to them and people are so attached to acquiring these brands that they'll have fake ones of course and the fake bag thing to me is the nuttiest one because
It's just a bag. It's not a fake Ferrari. Like if you buy a fake Ferrari, you're going to notice the moment you start drawing. This thing's a piece of shit. It's not going to handle well. It's going to sound terrible. It won't be fast. Real Ferrari, it's like the reason what you're buying, you're paying for the engineering of this magnificent piece of technology.
Well, most people are buying it to show off. They're doing that, too. But rich people aren't stupid. The reason why Ferraris are so expensive, and they can sell so many of us, because you buy them, you go, holy shit, it's worth it. The reason why they develop this brand status is because they win races. That's why.
Although Lewis Hamilton drives for Ferrari. That's why they sell Ferraris, because Ferraris are the shit. But also I wouldn't... By the way, wouldn't recommend a long trip in one. Do you know that the upper uppers, usually, and you've met many of them, don't drive super ostentatious cars? Is it downplay it?
They get like a regular Porsche 911, not even a turbo. Not even that, maybe. But do you know why? Do you know why from an evolutionary... Because they have to hide. They're hiding a little bit. They're camo. They're like the frog that pretends to look like the leaf. Perhaps. But it's because when I'm new for each, I just entered that thing. I want to demonstrate to everybody that I'm the real deal. Right.
And for many other people who are in my circle, they may not be able to afford the ostentatious $350,000 Ferrari. But when I am an upper upper in the billionaire class, then me driving a $350,000 car is not a costly signal in a biological sense of my worth because every single member of my billionaire friends group
could match that signal. Therefore, the way I can then compete with my billionaire friends is if I can spend my money in a lavish, wasteful way such that I buy an art piece that a monkey could have come up with.
And I pay $180 million of it. That makes me big dog. Because you don't have enough money, Joe, to be able to buy what I'm monkey. And I pay $180 million. Both of us can buy the Maserati. And so that's where I use the principle of costly signaling from biology to explain ostentatious behaviors and consumer behavior. God, that's the dumbest flex, isn't it?
Especially the modern art flex. I that's not that I used to go to LACMA the LA modern art museum and I would get angry like angry like I just I've done the same thing just like like just furious
Because you're feeling that they're cheating you from the experience of seeing real art. This is not art. One of them is literally a plexiglass box that's sitting on the ground. I'm like, you dumb motherfuckers. You dumb motherfuckers. Meanwhile, if you go on Instagram, you find amazing art. There's so many artists out there, like legitimate, incredible artists.
What you're doing is bullshit. One of them was a video of people playing catch. That was their art. Fuck you. That's postmodernism, right? Fuck you. There are no objective aesthetic standards. Anything goes... In the parasitic mind, I have a section where I talk about... Where was it? It was an LA museum. I had gone to visit... I think it was in 1996, a couple of years after my PhD.
One of my fellow PhDs from my school had gotten a job as a professor in Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. So I went to visit him. And so he was busy teaching or something. So I said, oh, you know, I'll go to the Carnegie Museum and hang out and see stuff. So exactly like the experience you had, there was an empty canvas. So I went, looked for someone who was working there. I said, can I see the curator, please? Well, how can we help you? So I said, well, I'd like to discuss this art piece.
So then this other woman comes to me says, how can I help you sir super, you know, I said, well, you know, what is this bullshit?
So she goes, did you say bullshit? Well, maybe not bullshit, but what is this? Can you explain this to me? I paid an entrance fee to see this. And what do you think she said? I don't know. Well, look, it triggered a reaction in you. Isn't that what our art is all about? I'm like, OK. I went to see Yoko Ono's exhibit once. Of course she was. She had an exhibit in Boston when I was living in Boston. And one of the pieces was a block of wood
with a box of nails and a hammer. And she encouraged people to take a nail and knock it into the piece of wood. She encouraged people to participate. That's right. They're creating the art with her. It's a collaborative process. This was the art was nails on a piece of wood. Do you think that when she does that?
She believes it or she knows in the deep recesses of her mind that she's a Charlotte. I would have to talk to her, I don't know. So forget about her, just in general when people... Well, the way she separated John Lennon from the Beatles, you know, like everybody, like if you're in a band and one of the band members has a girlfriend, the girlfriend now gets involved in the band and starts talking about like, you know, you need to treat him better.
That's Yoko Ono. Everybody calls her Yoko Ono. That's like a standard thing that people do because they think that Yoko Ono was a wedge that drove. So a person who can do that with an intelligent guy like John Lennon. Like John Lennon was very smart. Very smart guy.
So a person who could serve, and he wanted to spend all of his time with her. That's probably a master persuader. That's probably someone who's really good at playing you. Really good at pulling your strings. How about playing herself? Because remember, the best way to tell a lie is to first believe it yourself.
Did you ever see when she appeared with John Lennon and they played on television with Chuck Berry? No. And she starts singing into the microphone and Chuck Berry freaks out? Because she sucks. And she's screaming. She just starts screaming into the microphone while they're playing.
So they're playing Johnny be good. Oh my God. You never saw it? No. The best version of it is Bill Burr, because Bill Burr talks over it. He like explains what's happening, you know, in his inimitable Bill Burr way. He's just getting angry, watching Yoko Ono just scream like a banshee. And you see the look on their faces when they're looking, you know, it's just, it's one of those things where if you see it, you can't believe it's real.
You know that my friend of mine recently told me he was actually a former student of mine who was a good friend of mine. He told me that that that famous sit-in that they had happened in Montreal. Did you know that? I did not know. Yeah. I did not know. That it was like 1969 at the, I think Queen Elizabeth. Maybe Jamie will pull it off. A lot of crazy things happen in Montreal.
Sugar Ray Leonard versus Roberto Duran. That is true. That's right. I guess I would expect you to know that. Yeah, yeah, that was like 81 80s that somewhere in the 80s, right? Because he won a gold medal in the 76 Olympics and by then it was a world champion. Yeah, somewhere in the 80s.
So, yeah, yeah. So, have you met all these guys? I never really met Sugar Ray. I saw him at a UFC. I did meet Roberto Duran, though. Okay. It was amazing. What did you think? I mean, that's what I love about our conference. It just goes anywhere. What did you think about the Mike Tyson thing that just, with Jack Paul and so on?
Uh, Jake Paul, I'm happy they made money. I'll leave it at that. That's what I think. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I think it looked like sparring to me. Yeah. It looked like sparring. It didn't look like anybody was trying to hurt anybody really. Okay. Yeah, which is good. And you know, whatever, you draw your own conclusions. I have no facts. You've met, you've met. I paid for it. Yes. I love Tyson. Yeah. I've met Jake Paul too. He's a cool guy. I'm happy they made money. I've paid for it. I don't care.
Right. Yeah. I was hoping it was going to be a real fight, but I was like, OK, I see what's going on. Right. Like if you and I sparred, we could put it on the gloves and we could go back into the gym and we could spar. And it would look almost like we're really fighting. No, because you'd punch me once. Yeah, I wouldn't. I would do it like at your speed. Oh, I would do it at your speed and just bring myself to your speed and just move around with you. That's that's kind of something I would actually be interested in doing that. OK, we could do it. It's fun, but.
I'm going to suck so badly. No, I won't suck. The thing about doing that with someone who's going to be nice to you is that you can actually learn how to do it, because you don't worry about getting hit. So the best sparring that I ever got ever was when I learned to spar with people who had the same intentions as me just getting better and not trying to kill each other. So my early days of sparring, when I was a young man, I trained at a very hard gym. And in kickboxing, we tried to kill each other.
And so there was wars in the gym, essentially every day. You were fighting. Whenever you sparred, you were essentially fighting. You weren't pulling punches. You were hitting each other as hard as you could. It's a really dumb way to do it, but that's how you make a tough guy. Right. Like, does the idea back then. Now, I think people are much more concerned with CTE, brain damage, the longevity of a fighter's career, that they would have people fight smart. And so the thing is like training partners,
especially in Jiu Jitsu, you learn to really value your training partners because your training partners help you get better and you have to trust them. Like if somebody gets me any heel hook, I have to trust them that they're not just going to rip my knee apart and they're going to let me tap. They got me. Give me a second. Let me tap. Why? No, I can't get out. Let me tap. Don't rip it apart and then let go as soon as the person taps.
This is like a, if you don't do that in jujitsu, you won't have people to train with you and you get kicked out of schools and people have been kicked out of schools because they don't let go of taps. They don't, they don't let go of submissions. So like you develop this understanding that you both can get hurt really easily. I trust you. I know you're going to go hard and I'm going to go hard, but I know that we're going to be safe with each other. We're not going to do anything to each other that we know is going to hurt each other. So this is what you do in kickboxing too, but you have to trust that the person who's going to do this.
They're not going to hit you hard. Like, a body's going to hit me in the body. He's going to hit me in the body like this, where we're both OK. We know he could have really hurt me, but he just touched me. So he's getting his timing. He's getting his movement. We're both moving fast, but we're both really good. So we have the ability to control. So instead of blasting through someone and punching them, you punch them like that.
You literally punch them like that. You're touching 100%. You're not even going 50%. You're just touching. You're going fast. And occasionally, unfortunately, sometimes you hit someone harder than you mean to because they move into something or you both hit each other at the same time. It's occasionally. But you mitigate a whole lot of impact. And then you also develop your timing better because you're not worried about getting hit. So the best way to learn boxing is, first of all, before you
do any kind of sparring is learn technique. Technique is everything. It's everything. Mechanics are everything. Learning, getting it ingrained in your body's system where you know that if you're going to throw a punch, you're going to lean your body into it. You're going to keep your hand up. When you throw a right hand, you're going to do this. When you throw the left hook, you're going to cover up with your right hand. You can learn these things so they're ingrained in your movement patterns.
And then you do them on pads and the pad holder will like throw things at you so that you cover up and you learn distance and you learn to pull away and counter and you learn all these things and then slowly start incorporating moving targets. You start incorporating a person and the best way to do that is not get two people to try to kill each other because that's what we used to do. You don't learn anything. The best way to do it is have someone gently move around with you.
and then like hands up, hands up, and you move around and like you go through a whole round where you're not even allowed to punch. Just do defense. And I suspect I just want you covering. I just want you moving good. I want head movement. I want you to be an elusive target and when punches come at you, I want you to be able to move away.
Because I was going to say that when I was a soccer player, the type of trainings we do, because you have to do a lot of sprints, is very different than the type of fitness that I do now, which is usually I just get on the treadmill. And I do a bit of interval training, but I just kind of either run or fast walk uphill without these kinds of anorobic. Right.
And so I'm kind of looking at although I just turned 60 by the way in October. Congratulations. Thank you. So I'm looking to do something that raises my heart level in a way that is akin to what I suppose would happen if you got into a ring, how your heart rate would kind of go up in ways that I'm probably not testing my heart currently because I just get on the treadmill and I just jog.
Yeah, I mean, there's a whole bunch of workouts that you could just do online. You could find online on YouTube. There's hundreds of different people that put out free workouts. And, you know, you could do them with two 10 pound dumbbells. Yeah, that's true. And, you know, they'll take you through all this different stuff, like pistol squats, do this, do that, you know, overhead press, do this, do that, and then they'll work you through the reps. And all you have to do is follow along. Have you ever seen the training regimen of Alvin Kamara?
knows that alvin camara is uh... i mean recently he's kind of had a couple of off years but he he's sort of the feature back running back of the uh... new orlean saints uh... he's an all-purpose bag meaning that he both runs but he also catches the ball of love right so he's really he does he's a generalist he's a polymath
And I've always loved the way he moves. He moves very, very eloquently, almost like a bat. So he's both power, but also if you remember how very Sanders was in the late 90s, do you remember that was he was in Detroit Lions running back. And so I thought this guy runs unique in a unique way that's different from all the other players.
Oh, I know who I was thinking. I had Dean Kane on my show. Do you know who Dean Kane is? Superman. Superman, and who used to be a football player. Right. And so we were discussing our favorite football players, and I was telling him, oh, this is about three, four years ago. I said, oh, my favorite player is Alvin Kamara. So then he tells me, go on YouTube and watch the types of trainings he does to develop those movements. And as a big fitness guy,
Just go watch it. There's a lot of plyometrics. A lot of plyometrics, a lot of stuff where they throw a ball and he's standing on a balancing ball. What does that call the platform? And he's trying to catch balls that they're throwing. I mean, I would have a hard time just staying on that dancing. There you go. Oh, yeah. That's crazy.
What that's exactly his trade it. You have to see what this guy makes him do. It's unbelievers like a ballerina Well, that makes sense that he would be so agile and mobile because you can't just like do squats You know if you want to be an amazing athlete you have to do a bunch of different things. Oh, this is cool. Oh a lot of explosions left in the eyes on but look at this Wow, that's crazy hopping back and forth on ball to ball with balance on one is that unbelievable? Yeah, it is
Oh, I'm so glad you brought it. Thank you, Jamie. It does make sense, though, that you, you know, you need to develop all this stuff. If you want to look at that, he's got... Look at this stuff. Look at this stuff. Crazy. He's got to stick with the right ball standing on one foot. I bet he has insane balance. Look at those legs. That balance is insane. That thing is so hard to stand on anyway. Yeah. Especially with one leg. I'm so... It's exciting that I shared something with you, who's like this huge fitness expert that you didn't know. Cool.
Yeah, I've seen people do similar types of workouts, but that's very impressive. Yeah. Yeah. That kind of, I mean, it just makes sense that if you want to separate yourself from everybody else, what do you need to do to separate yourself? Like elite balance, elite. There's this guy, Arman Sarukin, who was supposed to be fighting Islam Makkachev for the world lightweight UFC title, but he heard his back literally like the day before the way ends.
It's probably because of the severe weight cut they cut he cuts a lot of ways very muscular But one of the things that this guy does that's really extraordinary They put out his workout. He does this incredible mobility exercises like he's insanely flexible He's like jacked like super muscular, but like ridiculously mobile and pliable Wow
and he's doing, see if you can find his workout routine. He does all these crazy exercises where they're like twisting them in weird positions and it's very unusual for a guy that's that strong to be that agile and mobile. Do you have a lot of flexibility?
Yeah, but that's just because I started when I was a really young kid. I started it in martial arts and I was stretching from the time I was developing. I genuinely believe that my muscles are made of glass. No, that's all horseshit. See if you can find it. He does a lot of this stuff. Look at these twisting motions. He does a lot of weird mobility stuff, like hip mobility. Look at all this. Wow.
It's all very, so he's pulling on a cable machine and look how flexible he is. Wow. It's nuts.
And this is like a core part of his training that is very different than a lot of other people's training. Oh, my goodness. His ability to stand on his head like that and move his whole body around in a circle. What the hell? Incredibly agile. So this is not something that every person... No, this is super unusual. I mean, there's some wrestlers that do this kind of stuff is pretty common. I do these.
But he's like, it's a core part of his training, his physicality. His physicality is very, this is him with Hamzah Chamayev, who's one of the top middleweight contenders, one of the absolute best fighters in the world, and he's giving him a run for it.
Wow. They're really good. I mean, watching him roll, like Hamzot rolls through everybody, and he's having a hard time controlling this guy. And this guy fights two weight classes below him. That's how good he is. The blue guy is the smaller guy. The blue guy is much smaller. Yeah. So Hamzot is, he's a 185 pound guy. And at one point, he fought at 170, but he was cutting a shitload of weight. But even at 185, he's next in line for the title. And this kid, just kids fighting at 155. So it's quite a bit smaller and still giving him, you know,
He's not allowing homes out to run them over, which is very impressive. Wow. So what's the trajectory of MMA next? Is it all turned into an Olympic sport? I hope so. I hope MMA becomes an Olympic sport. It should. Is that on the agenda? I mean, I know they've pushed for it. It should be. You know, I know there's combat sports, obviously, in the Olympics, boxing and judo, in tight window now as well.
And you've got the Australian breakdowns or two. But that one was amazing. Do you think that was a troll or was real?
I think that was hubris. I think that was a person who didn't think they were gonna get scrutinized, who used their position of influence to acquire a PhD in this stuff she has. But also, there's legit break dancers in Australia. Google Australian break dancers. There's people that are legit. I love break dancing. I love watching it. It's so impressive. Like the locking and all that stuff.
The physical moves, all the, when they do a flip and land on one leg and then flip back the other way. There's a couple of guys, Richie and Geo Martinez that are black belts under 10th Planet Jiu Jitsu and they started out their career as break dancing and they were so hard to hold on to and they were so mobile and so agile that Eddie started incorporating like break dancing and doing his training, like learning break dance techniques.
Because it's just basically kind of gymnastics. Right. You know, and a lot of these guys, they can stand on one arm and spin around in a circle with their feet in like a lotus position. Like it's bananas. The Brazilian self defense or an Israeli self-couple era. Yeah, couple era. Couple era. But couple era was like a dance that the slaves had created that they were disguising a martial art in a dance.
Oh. Allegedly. I'm not an expert in Kapoora, but a lot of the Kapoora moves. They dance, but they're dancing into wheel kicks. They're dancing into like tornado kicks. These are weapons. They're techniques, but you could pretend that it's just a dance, but it's kind of. Oh, so the origin is a slavery thing? I might be wrong about that. I don't think I am. I think that's one of the things that they did was they hid their martial art in dance.
One of these left turns we take through our connections of conversation, I recently had a guest on my show who's an expert on Frederick Douglass. Do you know who that is? Sure. Regrettably, not enough Americans, not enough of anybody knows who he is, and of course he was in the era of when slavery was being abolished.
And have you ever seen his face? Yes. Doesn't he look as though he's like a newbie and king the way how regal he looks? Let's see a photo of Frederick Douglass. And I told that to the scholar and he goes, you're exactly right. Look at that. Look at that. Man, is that guy teaching classes? Oh my God. I'm getting warm and I'm a heterosexual male.
And also imagine to be an intellectual and a black man in that day. And he didn't know how to read and learned it later. And if you read his stuff, it's unbelievable.
the eloquence that he had. It's not as though he learned how to read the way a typical child learns at three, four, five. That that happened later in his life. And then you see the production of quality. It's unbelievable. So I really recommend everybody, certainly Americans as part of your history read about Frederick Douglass. He's unbelievable. How old was he when he learned how to read? So I don't want to misspeak. I'm not sure. But let's go. Probably Jamie can pull it off, but probably 12, 13.
connection literacy and freedom not allowed to talk to read and write the streets of Baltimore at 12. There you go. That's exactly what I said. Do you know who Rick Ross is? No, not the rapper, but freeway Ricky Ross.
Rick Ross was a cocaine dealer in the 1980s that didn't know at the time, but he was a part of the whole Oliver North thing where they were selling cocaine in the L.A. streets and they were using the money to follow the conscious. Oliver North the Colonel.
You know, the United States, this is like pretty established. They sold cocaine in the LA ghettos to fund the conscious versus the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. And this guy was the guy who was funneling all the cocaine through. He was making millions of dollars, couldn't read, goes to jail, goes to jail for selling cocaine for the government.
in jail learns how to read and then becomes a lawyer and then retries his own case and gets out because they tried him on the three strikes rule. This is how they convicted him on three strikes. But there's three strikes from one incident. It's supposed to be three strikes. Separate things. Exactly. And so he got out. So he's out now. Wow. Yeah. So even on my podcast a few times. Oh, so I'll check it out. Brilliant guy. So he learned how to read in jail. In jail. Yeah. Amazing. Could not read.
Amazing. Yeah. So one of the biggest stressors I face when I travel, speaking about reading, is I've got a very, very big personal library of books, many of which I've yet to read. And I wake up every day worried that, am I going to run out of time in life and not read these books? So whenever I travel and I'm going to bring a book to read on that trip,
I sit there, the guy who studies psychology of decision making, I have complete decision paralysis, because usually my wife will tell me, you're leaving in 24 hours, why don't you now go and get an anguish for the next six hours, as you know, white hair is pulling, pick a book. Yeah, so I'm like, oh, this one, no, this one. And I'm literally sitting there. Interesting. Yeah, interesting. I think you listen to books, you don't read them, right? I do read occasionally, but like 90% of them I listen to.
Yeah, I need that tactile thing. I can't do the listening. The tactile thing is great, but for me, it's a time thing. I can get listening in when I'm in my car and when I'm in the sauna. And you feel you pretty much retain as much or not? It's hard to say because it's kind of the only way I'm accessing information these days, but I retain a lot of it. It always depends on whether or not I'm excited about the information. Always. If I'm very excited about it, I retain most of it.
If I'm just like forcing myself to pay attention and then my mind drifts off into something else, then comes back and like that's a little bit of a problem. Like if things become like lately, I have been listening to a lot of UFO stuff. A lot of UFO abduction stories, a lot of UFO. I'm going through Jacques Valle's stuff because he's coming on the podcast again.
And so I've been going through all of his books. He's got several books and he's got a very nuanced perspective on this whole UFO thing that is I didn't know and I wish I knew the first time I had him on because the first time I had him on I knew that he was the guy who was he inspired the French scientist in the Steven Spielberg movie closing counters of the third kind.
Did you see that movie? I did see it. Do you remember the French scientist? When I was like 12th. This is 1977, right? Yes. So there's a French scientist in that film that is coordinating all these people that are trying to contact this UFO and they're working this out, like how to do it.
It's based on Jacques Valet. Jacques Valet has been involved in the research of these experiences that people had had or allegedly had with being abducted, with sightings, with crash sites and all these different things. He's been involved with it for a long time. Where are you on the zero? I absolutely don't believe any of this. 100, I fully believe in this. What's your score?
The more time goes on, the more I think it's way weirder than we think. I don't dismiss the idea that something from another planet can come here and visit us. I have a feeling it's weirder.
I have a feeling there may be that and then also other things. I have a feeling it's way more complicated. I have a feeling it's like life. Like if you told me that if you go to earth, you can find life. Okay, well, what kind of life are you talking about? You're talking about like fish? Are you talking about raptors? Are you talking about dogs? Like what kind of life? There's so much life. There's so much different life.
I have a feeling that alien contact, intelligent beings from somewhere other than here, is like that. I think it's probably more complex than we can imagine and probably there's an interdimensional aspect to it. There's probably a non-physical aspect to it that seems physical too.
There's probably an area of this phenomenon that plays on human consciousness and dreams and our interactions with the unknown. Because I think there's more to life than we can perceive. I think there's more to the existence.
this conscious existence in this moment in the universe. There's more to it than we're picking up on. I think we have limited senses and I think that this is what things like the telepathy tapes and all these different people that are studying paranormal phenomenon. I think that's what this is stuff is all about. I think it's part of an emerging aspect of human consciousness that we're developing stronger and stronger senses in regards to things that aren't
They're not something that you could just put on a scale. They're not something that you could take a rule or two. They're not something that you can quantify, but they probably exist. And if you've, I don't know if you've listened to the telepathy tapes. I haven't, but I just started watching, I think three days ago, a Netflix series. So you'll know this better because I don't remember what it's called. It's supposedly a New York case in the late 1980s. That's the most famous UFO abduction cases. This ring.
I don't know about the 1980s. The most famous case is like Betty and Barney Hill. And they were in the 1950s. And then the other one is Travis Walton. He's this guy right here. Oh. They made a movie out of it called Fire in the Sky. But maybe, I don't know if Jamie can pull out. It's a Netflix series that just, it's a documentary series that just start, that I think came out this year or this past year. There is kind of a guy, I don't think he's a professor or something, but he's a guy who's like the investigator who co-lates.
What's it called? That's the one. Exactly. That's the one. Thank you. Thank you, Jamie. Oh, you don't know this one? No, because they sold it as the most famous, most documented case of UFO abductions.
It might be. I mean, I don't know what to think of those things. I've read John Mac's book. John Mac was a psychiatrist at Harvard and he or a psychologist. I forget which one. He wrote a book called Abduction that was all about hypnotic regression therapy that he did with all these different people that had these abduction experiences. And they're all really similar, like eerily similar.
And there's no way that they can have enough. No, they weren't communicating with each other. They didn't know about it. They were ashamed of these stories. They didn't want to tell other people. They were telling them to their shrink, but they weren't telling to other people. It's a weird thing, man. But here's the thing. They all come back. Like, no one gets abducted and gets kidnapped. Like, what's going on? Are you really leaving or is this in your mind? In your mind, did you leave?
Like, what happened to your body? If I had a camera in your room, were you in that bed the whole time? Is this experience all happening inside your mind? And is it still real? Like, just because some things, I think there's dimensions that we don't have access to that exist around us. And these guys that pretend to understand quantum theory and all that stuff, when they start talking to you about it, talking about multiple dimensions, it leaves room for the possibility of these things. I actually had
So I've had a lot of amazing guests on my show, you know, top professors of all kinds. Arguably, the best conversation I've had, which is saying a lot with a guest on my show is one of the pioneers of quantum computing and not to serve as his publicist, but I think, you know, he'd be a great guy for you to have.
I love to talk to him. What's his name? His name is David Deutsch. He's a physicist by training. He wrote two best-selling books. I think one of them is called The Edge of Infinity. We try to discuss what is quantum physics, how do you apply that principle to quantum computing?
And remember earlier, I said that there are too many professors who are not intellectuals? Yes. Well, he's exactly an intellectual, because we could sit down and have a conversation where at the end of it, you were so he donistically, you know, tickled in your brain.
that it's as if you just had sex, but you get excited. You get excited. And so we had two conversations. I'd urge you to listen to our conversations. It was not too long ago, maybe three, four months ago. Amazing guy. Okay. Very not try to have mom. Yeah, that'd be great. I'm fascinated by quantum computing. Mark Andreessen was explaining the experiments that they've done where they did a calculation that if you turn the entire universe into a computer, every molecule, every atom of the universe was a computer.
It would take so much time to solve this equation that the universe would die of heat death first.
But you do it in quantum computing, it doesn't... Quick, four seconds. Yeah, quickly. Is that amazing? A couple of minutes. Is that amazing? Yeah, it's bananas. Like, what is happening? And he said, it's proof of the multiverse. Because somehow or another, this computer is contacting other quantum computers in an infinite number of universes. So I... Using all the computing power and solving it instantaneously. Forgive me for being eager to jump on what you're saying. I think, if I'm not mistaken, David Deutsch is one of the pioneers of the multiverse theory.
Well, it kind of is the only theory, at least as has been explained to me. That could work with quantum computing. They're all like, they don't know what's happening. It's like these guys are making magic. Do you remember the famous quote, do you know Richard Feynman as? Yes. Yeah. So there's a quote, I might get it off. The quantum computing. Yeah, where he says, if you think you understand quantum physics, you don't understand quantum physics.
And that's pretty much how I feel when I try to understand. I'm like, what is this shit? I don't understand it. It's so bizarre. Just what's measurable about it is so bizarre, like articles in superposition. So they're moving and they're still at the same time. What? The quantumly entangled photons? What are you talking about? What does this even mean? Where is this stuff? What is this? I first was exposed, because you were just saying about the computational power that would be required that you could reduce for quantum computing.
when I was first exposed to AI. So I, you know, my undergrad was in mathematics, computer science. And so I had taken an AI course before AI was the shit, right? This was 1985. And the professor who taught me was his name is, I can't believe I remember his name, Monty Newborn,
he was part of the deep blue team that was developed. Do you remember that stuff? Sure. That's the computer that beat Gary Kasparov at chess. Exactly. Exactly. And so, actually, for one of our assignments in that course, we had to develop on a game. It didn't have to be chess, but it could be some other game.
what's called alpha beta pruning, which is if you blow out the decision tree of a typical game, let's say like chess, you would need 10 to the 100 nodes if I'm not mistaken, which is more nodes than there are particles in the universe. I think in the universe, there's 10 to the 80. So there are more nodes in a chess game than there are particles or atoms in the universe. So what alpha beta pruning does
So, right, you're pruning. So what it's basically doing is it starts testing going down the tree. And if it seems like no good outcome can come here, you prune that tree. So what you're doing is you're reducing the computational complexity of the tree so that you can arrive to a final solution much quicker. And so that was the original
time that I was exposed to AI. And at the time, I thought, wow, AI is going to take over the world. And then AI went through a winter where it kind of died out. And it's only in the last three, four, five years that really it has exploded. But I want to tell you a few assignments that I had back then, and I would challenge someone to solve them on your show and post the answer. I still remember them. I was an A plus student. So here's one.
If you take a string of 1's and 0's, right, any string, so it could be 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, or it could be 1 million long, it could be set.
You and I will play a game. Let's say I start, I have to either take out the end digit from this side or the end digit from that side. Then when it's your turn, you take out the end digit from this side or that side. We keep going until we get to one digit remaining.
whomever is left with that digit, if it's a one, they win, if it's a zero, they lose. Do you follow the game so far? So what Professor Newborn had asked us to do as an assignment, 1985, 40 years ago, is can you tell us, this is called a deterministic game, meaning that there is a way to a priori know
Who would win the game before we even play just by looking at some characteristic of any string. So you understand what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah. So then my question to your and don't cheat and go check it on Google or even I have it on my YouTube channel somewhere.
So the thing is, what are the characteristics of any string that would allow us to deterministically know before we begin playing whether Gad or Joe will win. So that's game one. Okay.
And let's see if anybody's going to post it on you. I know you don't read the comments, but whatever. What would be a characteristic that you would take into consideration? Okay. So this is not a correct one, but it's too bad that I'm saying it because you can go down that path for five hours before you realize it's not correct. So I'm saving a lot of people out of beta.
Is it a ratio of how many ones and zeros that any string has? So, for example, is it if it's two to one ratio and I start, then I will win? Or is it? Yeah, it's all right. Got it.
I could look at a string that's four million digits long or five digits long and I will know ahead of time. Jesus. It's unbelievable. So I can't even possibly guess. Okay. I could give you the answer or not. No. Okay. Don't give it number two. Let people simmer in it.
You know what I would love? I would love for Professor Newborn if he's still alive to watch this show and say, my God, I must have trained the student well that he can pull this out of his butt 40 years later. Yeah, right? Yeah. So anyway, so game two or?
Problem two and imagine now you have to go off. It's due next Tuesday and now try to solve this damn thing. That's why I always tell people just study math and computer science. Whatever you end up becoming, it doesn't matter. You're never going to get as good a training as being a math and computer science undergrad. Anyways, second game, you have 12 coins.
This one I think is a bit easier. You have 12 coins of which one is counterfeit. It's counterfeit in that it's either heavier or lighter. You don't know. What is the minimal sequence of weighings
that if I had a scale that I can place these on so that I can unequivocally identify which is the faulty, the counterfeit coin and whether it's too heavy or too light. Jesus, baby, it's so hard.
Because if you have 12 coins, I could say 12 because you might fuck it up until the end. Right. No, but then I asked you for the minimal number of things. Well, you get lucky on the first two and the second one could be heavier. And then you do the third one, the third one's lighter. And you go, okay, so it's the heavier one. Okay, but then that depends on what the outcome of the weighing was.
Right. Is there what is the minimal number of sequence of weighings that will invariably converge to the right counterfeit coin? Irrespective of what happens in the weighing. Okay. And tells me whether it's too heavy or too light. It's mind blowing. Tell me what it is.
So I don't remember the sequence, but if I'm not mistaken, I hope I'm not wrong. I'm sure Jimmy could pull it off. I believe that there is a sequence of three steps that could invariably identify which coin is counterfeit and if it's too light or too heavy.
So it's not as simple as just weighing them. Well, it is as simple as what you're not. Which ones? Is it you weigh, is it you take any two and you, so let's say I take four. Right. And I put two and two and the balance weighs, then I know that those four could not have been the counterfeit because it didn't tip one way or the other because it's the same weight. Right. So in that case, by taking any random four, putting them on,
I've only eliminated those four. Remember, you could do that three times. You have 12.
Just try it. Yeah, but if you do that three times, you'll be able to figure it out really quickly. So if now you got rid of those four. So I don't remember what the sequence is, so we could try to work it out now, but I don't think it's as simple as just us doing it. If I take another four, and I put them out, and that comes out as even, I get rid of those four. I've now done two wings. Now I still have four. If I take two and two,
Now, if it does do one or the other, I won't know which one it is yet, and I won't know if it's too light or too heavy. Correct? So that means your strategy of I just take four three times will not converge me to the optimal solution of three.
So you have to do it in three steps, right? You have to do it in three steps. But by the way, he doesn't tell you at the assignment, what is the number of steps? Wouldn't you just do six and six then? No, because then you would never need to base it on. No, if you get six and six, you're sure you're going to get this unbalanced and you don't know anything. So that way gave you nothing. It just confirmed that there's a counterfactual, I mean, a counterfeit one.
So you do four and four. If you got lucky, you could catch it on the second one. No, but you wouldn't know then because you wouldn't know if it was heavier or lighter. But if you did what you just said, that means it's dependent on the outcome of that singular time that you did it. You need three. What I'm saying is irrespective of what you do, here is the strategy that will always get you. What do you do? So I don't remember what the family had to leave me in suspense. No, but I didn't tell you the other one. I didn't tell you the digit one.
Right. Well, did you want to know what you tell people? It will blow your... I could give a singular hint that would almost make everybody get it. But I don't want to give it because... No. No, I'll tell you why. Because it is almost a mystical process. I mean, you wish to do that. We're all, you know, just give up. Just tell us what it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So before I do so, let me give you the hint to see if you'll get it. Okay. And you don't think I'm putting on the spotlight? No, no, no. Okay.
What does... This is so cool. What does any string, whether it's a million strings or 20 strings, always have. Architecturally speaking. Do you understand what I'm asking? Yes. A number? A finite number? No. It always has a... It starts with M.
Jamie? What are you saying? It has a middle. A middle. Okay. Do you see where I'm going with this? Okay. So meaning if both you and I know the deterministic rule. Right.
It doesn't matter how big the string is. If I look at the middle of the string, I mean, I'm getting goosebumps saying it. If you look at the middle of this, if the middle is 111, just bear with me. If the middle is 111, the string is an odd number.
Because whether it's odd number or even right it does matter got it if it's an odd number and I start and The middle is one one one. I know that I'm going to win. Why has to be a one?
Because if the middle is 111, so when we're left with 111, I take a one from this side. You take any other one and I'll be left with one and I win. Therefore, if we both know the deterministic rule of the game,
I will always make sure. So when you take out from this side, I will counterbalance by taking out from this side. And then you take out from this side, I'll counterbalance with this side to make sure that we converge to the middle 111, which I know because it's an odd string and I started the game, I'm always going to get to it. Do you get it? Yeah. And so the entire algorithm is based on
Is the string odd or even that will determine if it's the middle three or middle four and do I start or do you start knowing that information the string could be 73 billion digits long or it could be six digits long. It's a deterministic game. I know who will win.
As long as we both know that rule, if I know it and you don't, then there's asymmetry, then I can always make sure to win. But if we both know it, we don't have to play the game. I just look at the middle and I go, you're starting or you win. We don't need to play.
Mm. It's not cool. It is cool. But I wish we hadn't done it because I would have loved to see people's attempts because you learned from how people are thinking. Do you understand this quantum computing, this multiverse explanation? I mean, I don't want to say nothing, but certainly not enough to offer any insights in this conversation.
It seems so strange and there's no real applications for it yet, which is even stranger is that they have this computing power, but they're not using it to do things. Well, but here's where it does. So I guess maybe I was being too humble. And when I said, I don't, I don't know anything about it. So here's a mind blowing thing. So you know what prime numbers are? Yes. Okay. It's an incredibly easy property to define.
We know how the number line operates, yet you know that one of the open problems in pure mathematics, pure mathematics is basically number theory. It's the purest, most theoretical form of math, which is saying a lot. Pure mathematicians don't have a formula that allows them to generate what is the next prime, right?
So usually right now what you do is you have these incredible supercomputers and through brute force someone comes out with, we now found the largest prime number ever. But it was done through algorithmic brutish force.
So I can see how a quantum computing approach will allow us to through brute force calculate much further prime numbers that today we don't have the computational power to do. So I don't know what the application would be, but that would be an example of using the raw computational power of quantum computing to solve these problems. What I was getting at was we don't have an application for it where it's being used and it's eventually going to be.
What I was getting at is that we're looking at this astounding computational ability that's baffling. And what happens when that gets applied to something? This is what my point was. My point is always what happens when that gets applied to sentient AI, when it gets applied to some large language model that's untethered. That's what it's really crazy because the computing power,
One of the big problems with artificial intelligence is the incredible need for power. This is why Google's doing this AI thing where they want to develop three nuclear power plants to power their AI. This is nuts. What happens when this insane thing that we have developed called artificial intelligence meets this other insane thing that we have developed called quantum computing?
So I don't know about that, but what I can say is that any type of problem that requires massive computational power because of the burdensome search, you can use that for. So imagine, although I don't think you need quantum computing for this, but say in medical diagnostics, where you use an AI system,
Why isn't it that we don't, why do we even go to a physician and provide him or her with our symptoms when it should be so trivially easy to put that into an AI medical diagnostic system and it can look up
rare cases in 1827 in Zambia that exactly map on to exactly the symptoms, the unique symptoms that I'm facing, because I went on a safari in Zambia. No physician, even if he's trained in infectious diseases, has probably seen that case from 1827 Zambia. So I would expect that in problems that require huge computational power to search through huge engines was where quantum, but I don't know anything else.
Yeah, well, it's going to have applications as the point. It's right now, it's this insane technology that is so above and beyond anything that's even imaginable. If you just said that to someone 20 years ago, you're going to have a computer that if you took the whole universe and turned it into a computer, he would dive heat death before this thing could figure it out and this thing could do it in a couple of minutes.
You would go, what are you even saying? What does the world look like when this thing becomes real? The world looks like we're in some sort of Terminator movie. We're in some sort of space movie, Star Trek type deal. It's not gonna be like a normal world, but it is a normal world. And this technology exists. My wife just, before I came on the show, she called me up and she goes, oh, did you see this deep AI stuff with the Chinese? I said, sweet, I'm about to head off to speak to Joe. Why are you having a deep conversation with me now?
She goes, oh, because maybe Joe's going to bring up something about AI, and you might want it all. So I do it. Do you know anything about this? I do. There's a lot going on. And what's bizarre is that China is dumping insane amounts of money. I think
I think the estimation in the American dollar is a quarter of a trillion dollars into their AI program. Their AI program also allegedly involves a little bit of espionage, so it evolves a little bit of stealing some of the data from OpenAI and some of these other places.
And one of the things that does happen, of course, with these sort of enormous technology breakthroughs is that you're gonna have certain foreign governments that are trying to infiltrate these research centers. They're trying to get access to this information, and the speculation is that they have done that, and that they are more advanced because of it than we are even aware of, and that they're dumping untold amounts of resources, sort of unchecked,
The response to this is probably what the government just recently announced with the Trump administration. Oh, the $500 billion thing. This is probably in response to that. There's an AI arms race that's going on right now, and whoever gets to the front of the line first is going to be in an insane position of power.
In a sense, it's similar to the space race, but this one is probably more consequential. Probably more consequential, because essentially, when you're dealing with quantum computing and AI, and you put the two of those together, which they haven't done yet, but once they do, what is that? That sounds like a god. It does. It sounds like something that can do things that doesn't even make sense. It's going to have the kind of understanding of the universe that we would only dream of right now. And it's probably a week away.
Sort of a month away or a year away or whatever it is. So it's going to happen quick. In a much less sort of grand context, yesterday I had, this morning I was telling you I was having breakfast with a colleague from UT Austin. I actually also met him yesterday. He came over to the hotel and we went out. He has a Tesla. And he said that over the past month or so, I don't remember the exact time,
the AI abilities of the self-driving part of his Tesla. He's noticed a huge improvement, like a really discrete jump. And so we were driving, we were going to a coffee shop.
And he wasn't looking at the road, and he wasn't using his hands, and the car was driving. Oh, yeah, I have one. But OK, so for you, it doesn't seem perceptually. And I was looking at it. Oh, no, it's bananas. Oh, OK. It's bananas. The auto driving features, nuts. It stops at red lights. It turns left and right. It changes lanes. The whole thing.
Oh, yeah. And so this was the first time I was fully immersed in a self-driving car. And I was telling him, hey, Richard, are you sure that this is OK? And he's like, oh, yeah, no, it's fine. I met my children come in, and it was like mind-blowing experience. It's mind-blowing, yeah. And what is that compared to what it's going to be? Yeah, exactly. I bought my first one, I guess, seven years ago, something like that. And I made a video of me driving on Sunset Boulevard without my hands.
I had my hands over the steering wheel. I led Zeppelin's plan. I was like, this is so crazy. It was driving down the street. And how much have you noticed? It's much better. Oh, you're much, much, much, much, much, much. 500% better. It's way better. Yeah. Like I said, now. What specifically? It makes better decisions. Now it changes lanes to avoid obstructions. It puts its blinker on and makes turns. It stops at red lights and stop signs. It just does everything. It drives like a person.
I mean, it still feels weird. I don't like to let it drive. I like to drive. I like driving, right? I like, I like, it's a fun. It's fun. And that's a fun car to drive because it's so preposterous. It's like it moves like a time machine. Yeah. It just just goes places. It doesn't make any noise. It's real weird. So I like driving, but the auto driving feature that exis