Joe Rogan Experience #2263 - Gad Saad

Joe Rogan podcast check it out The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day Jo see you again 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 he's 13 13 and it was that's about the age you shouldn't be listening to my show yet you used to disturb me uh when I would meet my youngest daughter's friends when they were uh before high school yeah and they would say they love my podcast I was like geez 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 yeah that that most certainly is a problem but I don't know um if it's worse or better yeah you know what I'm saying like 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 you say a the Age of Innocence because I've always said that the two things that protect me in life were my Belgian Shepherds whom I love and I I saw by the way that you were talking recently about Belgian malinoa yeah so my we've my kids have grown up with by by the way the Belgian malinoa is one of four types of Belgian Shepherds the only difference across the four types is that the Belgian malinoa has short hair whereas the ones that we had have long hair they even look more wolfish more intimidating scary dogs and so anyways so always said that the two things that protect me when I sort of enter the 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 true and so once that becomes polluted because they just know more I feel like I'm losing part of them that's interesting um I don't think you should think that way I think they're human beings and 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 Dora you like Peppa Pig Yeah Peppa Pig all those kind of shows and there's you know there's something beautiful in watching a little person learned stuff about the world and and shocking when they find out about like murders and danger and scary things and you know and then their their realm of knowledge expands to you know what amazes me is seeing my children get a political Awakening so my son who's really precocious he's 13 my daughter is 16 she wasn't as into it but during the last us elections maybe because of the Tik Tok stuff and so on she became she sort of woke up to it and she would come to me and say you know wh why do we like Trump why don't we like and so m i saw an Awakening in her that my son already had I mean he literally will sit with me watch I mean Tucker is 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 was beautiful God I didn't know anything about politics blissfully blissfully unaware when I was 13 is that right right but I did worry about um Russia when I was in high school everybody was terrified before the fall of 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 yeah 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 do so one of my intellectual Heroes is John vanman 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 do you know what game theory is yes in economics yeah okay yes do you want me to explain it far please so a classic example of a of of a game theory context would be the prisoners dilemma right you 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 2 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 you use game theoretic you know 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 the the Russians can or the Soviets can can nuke us or or not we can nuke them or not and so there were 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 Van Newman is the definition of how I think an intellectual should be very broad thinker he can both discuss mathematics or economics or Game Theory uh he died I think too young but he got his PhD at the age of 23 check him out John vman wow 23 23 years old from Hungary incredible W people like that just make you feel like such a dummy I mean I was impressed with myself because I got my PhD at my 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 by the time they're 14 15 years old yeah now 16 they're 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 isn't that crazy yeah so it's it's so I'm not I'm not sure if I I support this kind of FASTT tracking because there's 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 you want to give that extraordinary mind fuel you you have someone who caught lightning in a bottle yeah you know and you you want to help that yeah I mean maybe there's a way to do it where the parents come with the kid to school or something like that but 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 the 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 uh my biggest regret I may have discussed this with you before or not but uh my parental regret is that we never taught our children all of the languages that we speak at home so 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 between the two of us we speak five languages but here's the here's the 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 these super exotic you know five language speaking kids they only speak the very vanilla French and English yeah but it's still two well % of to Americans I agree they don't even Master one language who barely know English separate versions of English you know actually I was slangs and dialects I was uh I I posted on on X that I 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 bless 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 no because too cliche they're going to know you're faking it they're going to know I'm faking it because I'm not tall enough to be a Texan oh there's some short Texans Fitness isn't just about what you do in the gym it's also about your nutrition but even with the best diet some nutrients can be hard to get and ag1 can help fill those gaps ag1 delivers optimal amounts of nutrients in forms that help your body perform ag1 makes makes foundational nutrition easy because there aren't a million different pills and capsules you have to keep track of it's just one scoop mixed in water it's such an easy routine to keep in the mornings ingredients in ag1 are selected for absorption nutrient density and potency and are intentionally picked to work in sync with the whole formula for optimal impact they are seriously committed to Quality ag1 is tested for hundreds of contaminants and impurities and they're constantly reformulating their recipe to dial it in this is all all part of why I've partnered with ag1 for years so get started with ag1 this holiday season and get a free bottle of vitamin D3 K2 and five free ag1 travel packs with your first purchase at drink a1.com Joo Rogan that's a $76 value gift for free if you go to drink a1.com slj Rogan seriously get on this but the thing is like saying it like that you can't with if you don't have a southern accent and you're throwing y'alls around people are like get out of here with that it's just a weird one and not that the accent here is so dense like the the Texas accent is probably much stronger in the rural areas yeah 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 I mean there's definitely y'alls are thrown around but that's about it right but it's not a it's not a Texas accent like you here in other parts of the state there's other parts of the state you talk to people like that's a [ __ ] 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 um it's very distinct you know like makes you know where you're at like New Yorkers like if you're in New York and you go to an an Italian deli and you're talking to this [ __ ] guy and he's making you a sandwich you know like my friend Giovani uh like it's this 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 going to say that you're going to 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 they get very upet at you I am hereby stating that in nature the most beautiful auditory orgasm is to listen to the French Canadian but now they think you're lying because now you're learn you're a flip fler flip flopper is a weird one to me cuz it's like wait a minute what do you do when you encounter new information that's right 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 cand that you should never you should always be consistent yeah which is so crazy like shouldn't you learn from new information so in in in behavioral decision- making and psychology of 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 he's the Pioneer who developed the theory of cognitive dissonance uh and so he has an amazing quote which I use in one of my earlier books uh in the parasitic mind where he basically says the types of mental machinations that the average human being will engage in to make sure that there's cogn nitive 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 is a big obstacle for me because I'm in the business of administering mind vaccines to people right 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 shits Creek well if you pay attention to X you will see you are up shits Creek 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 yeah it's like that's what they're doing they're doing that 100% albeit 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 see you know four years of an awful Administration to go oh okay wait a minute I think I think these people are bullshitting me I think these people are fully incompetent I don't think that guy's 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 um interview with Mike Johnson when uh he was talking about uh conversations that he had with Biden about liquid natural gas I don't think so Biden had signed an executive order and it limited liquid natural oh and then he said I didn't do that he said didn't do right 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 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 [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] chaos everywhere and a probably a bunch of terrifying [ __ ] that most people don't have information on but you do and all a 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 tell you background story uh because we're talking about Trump and of course he came on your show I was speaking to one of his senior advisers 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 that's fantastic what would you like to talk about what what angle would you like to do uh to pursue and I said well you know I think that a lot of people have this wrong impression of President Trump if if he was given a long format uh 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 him on your show they're like he's kind of cool and so I 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 as a human just have a a conversation with I know there's a human in there I know this the whole system's [ __ ] but I I've talked about this before but there's this 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 and goes oh look at you you she's laughing but she's laughing genuine it's not that weird performative laugh that she does sometimes it's really funny I like there's a human in there like that would be fun to just talk to a person do you 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 3 hours of worthwhile conversation with her I don't know you you don't know until you do it you know it's you don't know also based on people's conversations with other people because people are different to some people they go into conversations like it's an interview right and so they don't they don't they can't establish a flow 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 it's 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 yeah 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 it's there's a bunch of thing so it [ __ ] with the flow because as a person listening I want I want to feel a genuine conversation that's what I want yeah right 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 un less charitable than you I I don't think she's cap AP 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 you can't 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 um the ability 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 she's 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 she's a lot better everybody is so that's the goal 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 [ __ ] groceries I don't give a [ __ ] we talk about flowers I don't or don't give a [ __ ] I just want to talk like let's talk you don't want to 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 don't want to talk about it like okay let's talk about ghosts what what do you think about big 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 look there's a [ __ ] UFO right behind me very very biased I there's a UFO on the desk look that's the the sport model from um Bob Lazar what he found in the area S4 Area 51 okay I I am um I'm a romantic in that way I want to believe in stupid [ __ ] right right I do I 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 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 you telling me just telling me this [ __ ] giant ape has wandered around Seattle without anybody seeing them right it's just not likely also there's a bunch of Al reasonable explanations first of all have you ever been the Pacific Northwest you've been up I've been to Seattle uh 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 right like it's like a box of Q-tips that's what I always describe it as like there's no spaces it's just trees everywhere there it's just there's no like big Open Spaces where you you know if like 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 [ __ ] space up there it's a rainforest it's like this you know see [ __ ] 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 right they do it all the time so if you're looking in between all these trees and something 100 yards away is going in between trees and standing up tall you just saw Bigfoot right meanwhile you saw a black bear yeah exactly normal everyday average black bear standing on its back legs they do it all time and they could easily be 7t tall so you know earlier we were talking about how would you change your opinion once you have a position that's anchored yeah so and now you're saying you know 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 30 I actually celebrated 30 years in uh 2024 what examples did you use so I brought in uh subjects into the lab so let me tell you what the okay topic was and then I'll tell you how I we ran 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 the card that maximizes your utility if you leave some un 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 decisionmaker 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 sufficient ly 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 and 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 a 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 start stop and choose Apartment A or choose Apartment B and then later I applied that to other types of decisions for example mate choice right so you could apply for anything you could apply choosing between uh Fitness instructors choosing between political candidates to to vote for for anything right the reason why it's binary it's 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 in the US system we first go through Republican primary then we choose one final one and then we go through Democratic uh 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 a big deal so a a Tipping Point of information like when you have enough information to make uh rational quality decision exactly so what you do actually is you set I mean if 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 apart 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 and you start going over especially today start going over all the details and different things they do and then you get online like what's more reliable you know yeah and some some people use What's called the core attributes Uris which basically is there's only 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 for 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 I 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 look I wanted to look at what happens to those stopping thresholds for this for do you know what dysphoric mean like gender dysphoria 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 disphoria 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 dysphorics people who don't suffer from dysphoria would make their stopping decisions in a different way than dysphoric and I didn't have any ariary hypothesis why because the literature was very confused some theories said that this Forex by virtue of them being helpess 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 foric 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 ariary hypothesis and being an honest scientist I said I'm not going to posit any hypothesis I'm just going to run it and see what I get so I think I had 18 different measures that were comparing the D maybe maybe 17 measures that were comparing the dysphoric to the non-dysphoric on of which on 16 out of the 17 I Got No Effects right now that to me was worthy of publishing mean 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 asking about emotion the editor writes back to me G 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 metaanalysis 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 the psychologist in question who by the way several years later he was at USC and was hounding me because he's a super wster I couldn't believe how much he fell in my esteem but anyways that's a separate separate I won't even mention his name although he's worthy of being shamed on The Joe Rogan show and I wrote to him I said but I really think that you know 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 the certainly the scientific Community should know about it well I probably one of the first times I've ever discussed it was on the show so hopefully at least it gets that attention but it's not in the record what a shame that is a shame this episode is brought to you by zip recruiter it's that time again where we all look ahead and plan out what we want to accomplish in the new year there's the usual resolutions like wanting to travel more get a promotion or get healthier which I think is a good thing to do any time of the year if your goal is to hire more talented people for your business though you've got it pretty easy because you can use zip recruiter you can even try it for free at zip recruiter.com Rogan when it comes to hiring zi recruiter does a lot of the work for you it's powerful matching technology Works fast to find candidates for your role there's also a feature that lets you invite top candidates to apply for your job that's a smart way to encourage people to apply sooner here's to a new year of hiring made easier with zip recruiter four out of five employers who post on zip recruiter get a quality candidate within the first day see for yourself go to this exclusive web address to try zi recruiter for free go to ziprecruiter.com Rogan again that Zip recruiter.com oan Zip recruiter the smartest way to hire 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 if you want to do better in life and not get tricked by your own [ __ ] don't be married to your ideas ideas are just ideas you are not your your ideas ideas are some things that you [ __ ] 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 yeah 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 dis miss or you you can be you can be unethical and how you're ignoring certain aspects of data for your opposing ideas like people do that and succeed because of that because Academia uh rewards them the media rewards them especially you know if they can publish in a the New York Times or something like that like if they can make a story like 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 journal 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 [ __ ] and then it comes out to be the case because I I'll give you I'll give you an example so I did a study and speaking about being wetted 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 die 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 rarified world of us having just posited the hypothesis but not run the study we live in a world where we it hasn't been falsified yet so you're we're you're wetted to the idea but you 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 uh 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 I 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 leg so you feel bad 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 a beaten up old uh 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 now only when you can do you're a good scientist anyways 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 the findings that were contrary to what we had expected because we had an post Haw explanation for why it didn't work out and so listen to everybody who's an aspiring scientist always be honest don't fudge the data don't go back and pretend that you had 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 human ego human well 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 yeah 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 [ __ ] and also there's Financial reward and [ __ ] there's people that would like them to [ __ ] a little bit it 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 I I'll add something else actually I'm going to 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 of all I'd like to think that I'm still have many years left but uh 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 that I'm disappointed and probably the number one thing that most disappoints me in my fellow academics and I don't mean that as a hottie 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 they they are staying your lane professors they know their little methodology but you can't sit with them at a party and talk about things that is not within their areas of specialty they're not these big polymaths 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 and and my children and I are immersed in an endless orgy of ideas all day whereas most 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 I don't play those games and so that's been disappointing well that competition it creeps into Medical Science as well and the really scary thing I was see 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 um and when they confronted him one one of the things that he said is you have to eat what you kill in this business wow 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 just and if not justifying explaining the thought process that led him to do this which is so crazy to think unbel but that's the reality of being a person it's like you're 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 this is what war is the ultimate expression of that justification of the most horrific things yeah 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 and well I I always say and you you might have seen me post it often on X I always say the most d ous force in nature our parasitized minds yeah right it it's I mean the tsunami is 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 and the freak out and the woke mob the 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 [ __ ] out of here and everybody's like relax I don't hear any drums and you're like dude I heard drums I heard Viking drums that is literally my autobiography yeah well that's what you did you really did do that you you you were way ahead of it and you were widely criticized by a bunch of those people who turned out to be these woke [ __ ] they eventually fell into the trans and they all you know put their [ __ ] bios and their gender bios and their Twitter trans t r a n c yeah the but they fell into the trans of trans t t r ANS well trans was just the ultimate expression of this Preposterous idea yeah this inclusion like 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 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's now this cataclysmic change that's happening because of trump and so on you know Dei is out and so on I'm definitely seeing a well certainly a gr 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 and not in a in a gleeful sense of hey I was right but in the sense that well hey you were right first you were right no but we're we're we're redirecting the ship people are waking up so it's not just about me and uh you know so like this year I'm I'm a visiting professor and Global Ambassador at Northwood University I took a leave from my home University iiv because I couldn't stand the Hamas crazies and so on and you know if you go to that school you'll be hard blessed to see one parasitic idea that's great there are you know University of Austin here is trying to do big things there are several other schools how's that going it's it's coming along uh there are I mean it it it had hit a bit of a couple of obstacles but I think things are uh moving on track now now is the idea behind the University of Austin I only peripherally know what 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 board of so but but what are they trying to do are they trying to have a real University like every other university where you get accredited completely real University actually they're now I think they just uh admitted their first class of 2028 fully fully accredited and the idea is to return to Broad classical liberal not in Liberal in the political sense but like you you read the ancient Greek stories you you know you read Homer you read uh you read Socrates and Aristotle like real basic education without any of the parasitic stuff but I don't it's not just an anti-woke school it's a return to that broad education I mean you know 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 MH right right I mean they they can they can quote Cicero and you know and so on well I think what university of Austin I I haven't gone to visit yet but from my understanding is they're 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 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 yeah 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 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 you know in a in a way that's encouraging to other people to think the way they're thinking yeah like you you have to be persuasive there 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 like you don't that's like a beautiful part of education is that you might have some like there how many people there like 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 well he certainly was Lefty I don't know how hardcore but yeah I think he was a hardcore Lefty and I think he was I think during the McCarthy era I think somewhere around then I think he was even investigated yeah okay I think I think that's true not not sure if that that it was during the McCarthy era but he was a really hardcore leftwing he changed his mind people and 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 mold them over in your head and figure out why do I think this way now so one one thing about uh sort of this broad education I was mentioning earlier John Van Newman who's this kind of polymath he's an expert in so many things he's a generalist you Joe many of the biggest U 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 I you know I publish in medicine and in marketing and in Psychology and in Behavioral Science and evolution uh I I've lived my life as an interd disciplinarian but we don't train our students to be this way right you are a accounting major you are my stay in your lane stay in your lane you 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 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 consilience have we ever talked about consilience on the show I don't know okay so even if we have let me repeat it uh so consilience is a term that was sort of reintroduced into the vernacular by EO Wilson who's a he recently passed away a Harvard anthologist he studied social ants in the late 90s Joe he wrote a book called consilience colon Unity of knowledge so consilience refers to are you able to create links between different disciplines 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 you want me to just jump jum 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 they cater to our sent that's why I could understand what an ancient Greek poet had wrote 2,500 years ago and I I get what how he's feeling jealousy because you and I are running on the same softwares that that guy did and so that would be called darwinian literary criticism you could apply evolutionary theory to architecture okay 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 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 wind 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 so there are all so by the way there's a field called biof architecture which tries to incorporate our innate love of nature in the design of architectural you know 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 from Hollywood can come to this institute and do a six months stage studying about how to develop cool scripts that adhere to evolutionary principles and uh 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 dis desparate disciplines that's fascinating pretty cool stuff huh it's very very cool stuff because it's it's always so interesting to think of what what are the motivations of human thinking and how where where where do we trip on ourself where do we trip on our own just our own programming essentially I we're essentially operating with a 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 in evolutionary medicine what you the exact word 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 like this this is uh 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 and hence the mismatch so whether it be colon cancer or diabetes I abetes or heart disease or so on what ends up happening with each of these diseases is that misalignment between what was evolutionary adaptive back then and evolutionary maladaptive now creates that health condition let me give you a concrete example we've evolve the taste buds the gustatory preferences to prefer fatty foods whether 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 the the game then I I gorge on that meat because I don't know when I'm going to eat next right in today's environment of plentitude I don't face caloric uncertainty and caloric uh scarcity I become fat I overeat because that mechanism of gorging on fatty foods still is in 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 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 uh desire for fatty foods is uh that's a great example and 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 yeah your body achieves sort of a homeostasis with your food because you're not consuming like I 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 like I'll go in I'll go in but if I'm only eating steak I don't feel the need to eat anything else yeah I'm fully satisfied I'm not starving and know 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 kind of disturbing so are you are you on an all protein diet right now I'm I'm like 90 plus per only meat 90 plus percent every now and then I'll eat a cookie like I'm not ridiculous I'll have tacos if they 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 this is so good good tiasu is 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 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 a glass of wine and you know good conversation with friends and you know eating delicious food you're just enjoy you're taking part in a pleasurable experience that's essentially art that was created by a chef right so that's to me but when it comes to food like what what do I use to to fuel my body it's mostly meat mostly Wild game meat and and ribeye steaks yeah that's what I eat I had a riye yesterday at my hotel 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's the craziest one when I went back to the carnivore di 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 like a whole another gear like intellectually like iing I'm not I don't search for thoughts as much when I'm eating only like that it's palpable you feelable yeah well for me it's it's 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 [ __ ] Italy or something like that I'm tired yeah and I'm jet lagged it's a little harder to get the gears turning you I don't feel like I'm at my best and I always notice the difference when I'm eating well always right what are your thoughts on uh and I know very little about this so I'm really asking you cuz I I don't know anything about it all that OIC stuff are you are you for it are you against it what's I think if you're morbidly obese 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 die bro you're dying if you're 500 lb you're [ __ ] dying you have all the comorbidities you probably have diabetes you probably have all sorts of [ __ ] wrong with you you can't be that big and if the 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 [ __ ] it is that's your thing ozempic is probably a good way to get going uh you know I wish people would just get going with discipline and they would just get going with food choices I I would like that but godamn that's hard especially if you're so far down the road cuz 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 yeah so that's the thing right I'm 57 years old but I worked out like this when I was 17 yeah so like 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 I've gotten fat before but never out of shape I just gotten fat because I ate too much food right 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 [ __ ] 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 lb 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 see your 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 well I wonder 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 it only takes me 3 weeks to put on 10 pounds if I eat badly that's supposed that that number were 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 so that there's well it depends on what you're doing okay so it depends on how you're losing the weight and it depends on are you doing are you do you have multiple things going on simultaneously like have you started exercising have you stopped uh 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 that 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 1:00 in the morning and I'm hungry I'll [ __ ] eat everything that's there I eat everything D I'll eat cookies I'll eat whatever the [ __ ] I want cuz 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 changed your mindset and if you haven't if you're kind of dabbling and losing the weight how long is it going to take it might take a long ass time you might not ever lose it you can't you have to like get into calorie deficit calorie deficit is hard so here's the thing though you can't start yourself cuz some people do it the wrong way they go too extreme and they [ __ ] starve themselves and which is [ __ ] 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 a process what is it called autosis what it called I forget what the process is called um where your body starts eating its own tissue to stay alive and uh that's what people are doing when they're on OIC unfortunately and this this is the thing where people that are just a little overweight that get on it disturb the [ __ ] out of me like you lazy [ __ ] just go to the goddamn gym you lazy [ __ ] you're 10 pounds overweight and you're going to get on OIC that's so crazy autop that's what I thought that's what I thought you were talking about yeah wait go go back to that again body breaks down its own tissu survive it's called l i I never heard that word before maram Mar Maris marasmus marasmus or muscle atrophy can happen when your body's PR nutrients or oxygen or when cells are damaged so here listen so remember earli I was saying how you can incorporate evolutionary thinking into all kinds of areas so there's this these great studies that were 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 it triggered that in my head so in one set of studies they took I think it was M&M's and you know M&M's can you could make you could create a bowl with only one color M&M's or you can create a bowl with many colored M&M's 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 multi colored Bowl they eat more they eat more I wonder if um people that are color blind make better food choices you just there there's your there's your research project it's kind of interesting right that's kind of cool that's but some things that are brightly Co are really good for you you know like Peppers yeah like bell peppers you know like pretty bright red and they're pretty you know apples sure oranges although there are some cases where and I want to talk about another variety you can study in a second but there are some cases where colors and nature are called this was actually in my first book in 2007 I talked about aposematic coloring do you know what that means sure that's to warn you from exactly so then you you and then I use it to explain the the hair coloring of all the wers I say that that's a form of aposematic hair coloring so so check this out so the the Amazonian frog that lives in a very dangerous neighborhood you'd think that it would evolve camouflaging and yet you could see it from a satellite it's so bright yellow or red because it's saying hey idiot if you could see me you want to sort of stay wide of me I'm not even trying to hide 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 people but the Predator doesn't know which is which do you get it ah yes right so I I I use that mechanism when I'm talking about deceptive signaling and I use it in the context of deceptive branding where people Canal 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 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 please do 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 it doesn't change anything but I can give it to you whatever it's called fella or this and I guess you can guess what they they ate more when it's the multiform pasta even though interes Isn't that cool you know what's interesting too 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 if you buy a fake Ferrari you're going to notice the moment you start D this thing's a piece of [ __ ] right it's not going to handle well it's going to sound terrible won't be fast a real F it's like the re