Gad Saad is Visiting Professor and Global Ambassador at Northwood University, and an expert in the application of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behavior. He is the host of "The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad" podcast, and the author of several books, including "The Saad Truth about Happiness: 8 Secrets for Leading the Good Life." www.gadsaad.com Take ownership of your health with AG1 and get a FREE bottle of Vitamin D3+K2 AND 5 free Travel Packs with your first subscription. Go to drinkag1.com/joerogan This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter — 4 out of 5 employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Try ZipRecruiter FOR FREE at ziprecruiter.com/rogan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Joe Rogan again. You're gorgeous. You are too, you beautiful bastard. Shut up. 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.
He'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 daughter's friends when they were 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. These kids have a far more advanced understanding of the world for good or for bad. 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 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 you say 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 saw, by the way, that you were talking recently about Belgian Malinois. Yeah. So my kids have grown up with... By the way, the Belgian Malinois is one of four types of Belgian Shepherds.
The only difference across the four types is that the Belgian Malinois 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 I always said that the two things that protect me when I sort of entered 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.
Hmm. 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, Dora.
Peppa Pig.
Yeah, Peppa Pig, all those kind of shows. And there's, you know, there's something beautiful in watching a little person learn stuff about the world and shocking when they find out about, like, murders and danger and scary things. And, you know, and then 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 U.S. elections, maybe because of the TikTok stuff and so on, 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 like?
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.
God, 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. Russia bad, United States good. Russia bad, wants to kill United States.
That's what we were basically told. All the movies like Red Dawn, Russia invades America.
Can I incorporate some professorial elements to what you just said? Please do. So one of my intellectual heroes is John von 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? Okay. Yes. Do you want me to explain it for our viewer? Yeah, please. So a classic example of a game theory context would be the prisoner's 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 confesses the other one.
So it's a two-by-two matrix. And there are different payoffs in each of these matrices, right? 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 were all these models that were developed. So for example, mutually assured destruction, is an 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.
23.
23 years old from Hungary. Incredible guy.
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. 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. Of course. So, yes, you can solve calculus really easily. Right. But you can't speak with people who are four years older than you. Isn't that crazy? Yeah.
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 a bottle, and you want to help that. I mean, maybe there's a way to do it where the parents come with the kid to school or something like that. Right.
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? What's the big deal? Isn't it weird? 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, 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 rubb. 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, 99% of Americans.
Compared to Americans, I agree. They don't even master one language. Barely know English. Barely know English. We had to have separate versions of English. Actually, I was. Slangs and dialects. I posted on X that while 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 all I got. Yeah, don't use any of those. No? No. Why? 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.
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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 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 even the general Texas accent here is fairly muted. Do you agree with that, Jamie? Does that make sense?
Definitely, y'alls are thrown around, but that's about it.
Right, but it's not a Texas accent. Like, you hear in other parts of the state. There's other parts of the state you talk to people. Like, that's a motherfucking 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're talking to this fucking guy and he's making you a sandwich, you know, like my friend Giovanni. It's fun. It's like they're talking the way they talk. 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.
So I am hereby stating that in nature, the most beautiful auditory orgasm is to listen to the French-Canadian accent.
But now they think you're lying because now you're a flip-flopper.
No, I just learned. You're a flip-flopper.
Flip-flopper 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.
That you should never, you should always be consistent.
Which is so crazy.
Like, shouldn't you learn from new information? So in behavioral decision making, in 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 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 Parasitic 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. Right.
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 Schitt's Creek.
Well, if you pay attention to X, you will see you are up Schitt's 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. 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 to see, you know, four years of an awful administration to go, oh, okay, wait a minute. 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... 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 gas.
Oh, and then he said, I didn't do that. He said, I didn't do it. 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. So they had to listen. So when Biden kicked everybody out, then he was talking to them.
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. 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 probably a bunch of terrifying shit that most people don't have information on, but you do. And all of 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'll tell you a 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 him 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 her. I know there's a human in there. I know the whole system's fucked, but 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. 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. I was like, there's a human in there.
Like, that would be fun 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? I don't know.
You don't know until you do it, you know? You don't know also based on people's conversations with other people, because people are different. Some people, they go into conversations like it's an interview, right? And so they can't establish a flow. Right? A conversation like what you and I are having is a dance. Exactly.
We're both 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.
There's a bunch of things. So it fucks with the flow because as a person listening, I want to feel a genuine conversation. That's what I want, 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 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 gonna 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.
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It's also perhaps who is she talking to? Do they have 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 bet she's a lot better. Everybody is. So that's the goal.
The goal is to talk to her like a human. 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. Don't give a fuck. I just want to talk. Let's talk. Anybody who doesn't want to talk about something, I don't need to talk to them about that.
If you've had a UFO experience and you don't want to talk about it, okay, let's talk about ghosts. What do you think about Bigfoot?
I'll find out what you're about. 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 fucking UFO right behind me. Very, very biased. There's a UFO on the desk. Look, that's the sport model from Bob Lazar, what he found in Area S4, Area 51. Okay.
I am a romantic in that way. I want to believe in stupid shit.
Right.
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 does 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, are you telling me... Are you telling me this fucking giant ape is wandering around Seattle?
Without anybody seeing him.
Right. It's just not likely. Also, there's a bunch of 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. Right. It's like a box of Q-tips. That's what I always describe it as. There's no spaces.
It's just trees everywhere. There's no big open spaces. If you go to Montana, you go to the woods, there's mountains and there's trees, but there's space in between the trees. Right. 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... 100 yards away is going in between trees and standing up tall. You just saw a Bigfoot.
Right.
Meanwhile, you saw a black bear.
Yeah, exactly.
Normal, everyday, 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. And now you'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 then 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 your utility when you're making a decision, you should look at all of the available information. You can't choose the car that maximizes your utility if you leave some information unturned.
So that's called the 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? 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. Got it. So that's called the 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, mate choice. So you could apply for anything.
You could apply choosing between fitness instructors, choosing between political candidates to vote for, for anything. 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. 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 a 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, big deal.
so a tipping point of information like when you have enough information to make a rational quality decision exactly 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 start going over, especially today, start going over all the details and different things they do. And then you get online, 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 dysphorics. Do you know what dysphorics mean? Like gender dysphoria? No, not gender dysphoria.
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-dysphorics, people who don't suffer from dysphoria, would make their stopping decisions in a different way than dysphorics. And I didn't have any a priori hypotheses Why? Because the literature was very confused.
Some theories said that dysphorics, 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, dysphorics 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 the dysphoric, maybe 17 different Measures that were comparing the dysphoric to the non-dysphoric, 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 sent it to this top journal actually called Cognition and Emotion. You were asking about emotion. The editor writes back to me, Gad, 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 is?
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 in question, who, by the way, several years later, he was at USC and was hounding me because he's a super wokster. I couldn't believe how much he fell in my esteem.
But anyways, that's a separate story. 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're succumbing to the null effects bias because it's worthy to publish this. This was, I think, in 1998. It's information.
It's information that is worthy of the, 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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ZipRecruiter, 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, right?
One of the things 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 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.
Yeah, and
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'll get rewarded for lying.
Yeah. So I can tell you a 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 to sort of tap myself on the shoulder, but some of the top people 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 out to be the case. Because 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 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 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 and 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.
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. 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 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 that, 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 findings that were contrary to what we had expected, because we had a post hoc explanation for why it didn't work out. And so,
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- Human ego. Human ego. 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 in bullshitting. There's people that would like them to bullshit a little bit.
It would make it a lot easier for us to pass this thing that we're trying to do. 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 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 haughty thing, is how non-intellectual most of them are. Most of them are just playing a game.
I mean, obviously, they're intelligent in the sense that they've gotten a PhD, they've gotten a professorship, they are stay-in-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 would be growing up hearing the art historian and the mathematician. Right.
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. Yeah.
Well, that competition, it creeps into medical science as well. And the really scary thing, 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. 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, if not justifying, explaining the thought process that led him to do this, which is so crazy to 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. Or because it benefits you. Or because if you don't, something's going to happen.
Well, I always say, and you might have seen me post it often on X, I always say the most dangerous force in nature are parasitized minds. Yeah. 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 pandemic.
reaction 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 fuck out of here and everybody's like relax i don't hear any drums and you're like dude i heard drums i mean viking 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 put their fucking bios on their gender bios on their Twitter.
Trance, 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, 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 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 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, DEI is 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- First of all, you were right. No, but we're redirecting the ship. People are waking up. So it's not just about me. And 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 heart 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 coming along. I mean, it had hit a bit of a couple of obstacles, but I think things are moving on track now.
Now, is 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 board of trustees.
But what are they trying to do? Are they trying to have a real university like every other university where you get accredited?
Oh, completely real university. Actually, they're now, I think they just admitted their first class of 2028, fully accredited. Oh, wow. And the idea is to return to broad, classical, liberal, not 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, you know, I was reading some of the stuff that the founding fathers write. And 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? Sure. I mean, 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, 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 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 – wasn't Ronald Reagan at one point in time?
I think Ronald Reagan was like – he was so left wing that he was investigated by the government. See if that's true. 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 during the McCarthy era, I think somewhere around then, I think he was 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. 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 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 all kinds of different expertise to put it all together. And so one of the things that I've been trying, certainly in my own research, I publish in medicine and in marketing and in psychology and in behavioral science and evolution,
I've lived my life as an interdisciplinarian, but we don't train our students to be this way. You are an accounting major. You are my... 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 making me an offer is to build something that I've long dreamt of, which I call the Consilience Institute. Have we ever talked about consilience on this show? I don't know. Okay. So even if we have, let me repeat it. Please.
So consilience 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 90s, Joe, he wrote a book called Consilience, Colon, Unity of Knowledge, which 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. you could study literature using evolutionary theory. And this field is called Darwinian literary criticism. Can you guess what that might mean? Or do you want me to just jump in?
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 It's because at their base, they have certain universal themes that map onto key evolutionary 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 scent.
That's why I could understand what an ancient Greek poet had wrote 2,500 years ago, and I get 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. 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 buildings. 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.
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Pretty cool stuff, huh? It's very, very cool stuff. Because it's always so interesting to think of what are the motivations of human thinking and where do we trip on ourself, where do we trip on our own programming, essentially. 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 in 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'll 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, and hence 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
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 uncertainty of 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 what I'm going to eat next, right? In today's environment of plentitude, I don't face caloric uncertainty and caloric 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.
Hmm. That makes sense. Well, unfortunately, so many doctors don't even take into account so many factors in health. And this thing that you're talking about, this desire for fatty foods, 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 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.
Yeah.
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, you will lose weight 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. I'll have tacos. You know, I love tacos. Good solid Mexican taco. 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. It's tiramisu. It's delicious. I love it. But that's just because I enjoy life. 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 a 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. Right. 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 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 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 like a whole nother gear, like intellectually. Amazing. I don't search for thoughts as much when I'm eating only like that. It's palpable. You feel that. But for me, 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 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 you because I don't know anything about it, all that Ozembic stuff. Are you for it? Are you against it?
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 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 ringdings and you can't stop eating sugary cereal or whatever the fuck it is that's your thing, Ozempic 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 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've just gotten 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 still see 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 only takes me three weeks to put on 10 pounds if I eat badly. Let's suppose 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 or 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 right have you changed your diet completely are you getting enough sleep
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. I know that for a fact. If I come home from the comedy club and it's like 1 o'clock in the morning and I'm hungry, I fucking eat everything that's there. I eat everything. I'll 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. I'll cook a pot of spaghetti. But tired is one, but it's like, what are you doing to mitigate this and have you changed your mindset? And if you haven't, 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. 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 too extreme and they fucking starve themselves, 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. 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 going to get on Ozempic? That's so crazy.
Autophagy. That's what I thought you were talking about, yeah.
Wait, go back to that again. A body breaks down its own tissues to survive. It's called autophagy. I never heard that word before. Marasmus or muscle atrophy can happen when your body is deprived of nutrients or oxygen or when cells are damaged.
So remember earlier I was saying how you can incorporate evolutionary thinking into all kinds of areas. So there's 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.
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 you know, M&Ms can, you could 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.
I wonder if people that are colorblind make better food choices.
You just, 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, absolutely.
Like bell peppers, you know, like pretty bright red and they're pretty.
Yeah.
Apples. Sure. Oranges.
Although there are some cases where, and I want to talk about another variety study in a second, but there are some cases where colors in nature are called, this was actually in my first book in 2007, I talked about aposematic coloring. Do you know what that means? Yes.
Sure, that's to warn you from... Exactly.
And then I use it to explain the hair coloring of all the wokesters. I say that that's a form of aposematic hair color. So check this out. So 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 that's so brightly 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 right so 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 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-shaped. But it's the same pasta, so it doesn't change anything. But I can give it to you, whatever it's called, fussella or whatever. And I guess you can guess what they ate more when it's the multi-form pasta.
That's interesting.
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.
If you buy a fake Ferrari, you're going to notice the moment you start driving, oh, 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. A real Ferrari, it's like what you're buying, you're paying for the engineering of this magnificent piece of technology.
Well, most... 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 sell so many of them is because you buy them and you go, holy shit, it's worth it. The reason why it developed this brand status is because they win races. That's why. Lewis Hamilton drives for Ferrari. That's why they sell Ferraris because Ferraris are the shit. 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?
Because they downplay it. They get like a regular Porsche 911, not even the 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 nouveau riche, 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. Right. 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. Right.
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 a monkey. And I paid $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? Yeah. Especially the modern art flex. I can't stand that shit. I used to go to LACMA, the LA Modern Art Museum, and I would get angry. Like, angry. I've done the same thing. 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'll find amazing art. There's so many artists out there, like legitimate, incredible artists. Like, what you're doing is bullshit. Like, one of them was a video of people playing catch. That was their art. Like, fuck you.
That's postmodernism, by the way, right? Yeah, fuck you. There are no objective aesthetic standards. Yeah. So, anything goes. So, in The Parasitic Mind, I have a section where I talk about... So, you mentioned... Where was it? It was in LA? Yeah. Okay. So, 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, sir? 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? I said, well, what is this bullshit? Yeah. Did you say bullshit? Well, maybe not bullshit, but like, what is this? Can you explain this to me? I paid an entrance fee to see this. Right.
And what do you think she said? I don't know. Well, look, it triggered a reaction in you. Isn't that what art is all about? I'm like, okay.
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Conclave, a film by Edward Berger in theaters now. I went to see Yoko Ono's exhibit once. Of course you did. 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 charlatan.
I would have to talk to her. I don't know.
So forget about her. Just in general.
The way she separated John Lennon from the Beatles, the way, 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. Yeah. That's Yoko Ono. Everybody calls her Yoko Ono.
That's 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. 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. She's screaming. She just starts screaming into the microphone while they're playing. They're playing Johnny B. Goode. Oh, my God. You never saw it? No. The best version of it is Bill Burr because Bill Burr talks over it. He explains what's happening 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. It's one of those things where if you see it, you can't believe it's real.
You know that a friend of mine recently told me, he was actually a former student of mine who's a good friend now. He told me 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. That was like 1969 at the, I think Queen Elizabeth. Maybe Jamie will pull it off. A lot of crazy things happened in Montreal.
Sugar Ray Leonard versus Roberto Duran.
That is true. That's right. Well, I guess I would expect you to know that. Yeah, yeah. That was like 81? 80s.
Somewhere in the 80s, right? Because he won a gold medal in the 76 Olympics. And by then, he was a world champion. Yeah. Somewhere in the 80s.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you've met all these guys?
I have never really met Sugar Ray. I saw him at a UFC. I did meet Roberto Duran, though.
It was amazing. What did you think? I mean, that's what I love about our conversation. It just goes anywhere. What did you think about the Mike Tyson thing with Jack Paul and so on?
Jake Paul? I'm happy they made money. I'll leave it at that. That's what I think. 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. You know, whatever. Draw your own conclusions. I have no facts.
You've met Tyson.
I paid for it. Yes, I love Tyson. I met Jake Paul, too. He's a cool guy. I'm happy they made money. I paid for it. I don't care. Right. Yeah. I was hoping it was going to be a real fight, but I was like, okay, I see what's going on.
Right.
Like if you and I sparred, we could put on the gloves and we'd 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 and I'd be dead. Eh, I wouldn't.
I would do it like at your speed. Oh. I would do it at your speed. I'd just bring myself to your speed and just move around with you. That's kind of what it would be.
Can I tell you something? I would actually be interested in doing that.
Okay. 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 was
trained at a very hard gym and we in kickboxing we try to kill each other and so there was wars in the gym essentially every day you're 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 that's 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 in a 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. Where I know 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'll get kicked out of schools. And people have been kicked out of schools because they don't let go of taps. They don't let go of submissions. So like you develop this understanding that you both could 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. Right. So this is what you do in kickboxing too, but you have to trust that the person is gonna do this. They're not gonna hit you hard.
Like a body's gonna hit me in the body, he's gonna hit me in the body like this, where we're both okay. We know he could have really hurt me, but he just touched me. So he's getting his timing, he's getting his movement, and 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 him like that. You're withholding. Yeah, 100%. You're not even going 50%. Right. You're just touching. You know, 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 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 you start incorporating moving targets. You start incorporating a person. And the best way to do that is not get two people 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 they're like, hands up, hands up. And you move around. And 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 anaerobic things.
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 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? No. No, who's that? Alvin Kamara is, I mean, recently he's kind of had a couple of off years, but he's sort of the feature running back of the New Orleans Saints. He's an all-purpose back, meaning that he both runs, but he also catches the ball a lot, right? So he's a generalist. He's a polymath. And I've always loved the way he moves.
He moves very, very elegantly, almost like a... So he's both power, but also... If you remember how Barry Sanders was in the late 90s, do you remember who that was? He was in Detroit Lions running back. And so I thought, this guy runs in a unique way that's different from all the other players. And I... Oh, I know who I was thanking. I had Dean Cain on my show. Do you know who Dean Cain is?
Sure, Superman. Superman, who used to be a football player.
Right.
And so we were discussing our favorite football players, and I was telling him, oh, this was 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, you know, they throw a ball and he's standing on a balancing ball. What is that called? 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 damn thing.
There you go. Oh, yeah. That's crazy.
That's exactly his training. You have to see what this guy makes him do. It's unbelievable. He's like a ballerina.
Well, that makes sense that he would be so agile and mobile because he's doing all these different things. Look at his body. You can't just do squats. 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 and right.
Look at this.
Wow. That's crazy. Hopping back and forth on ball to ball with balance on one leg.
Isn't that unbelievable? Yeah, it is. Oh, I'm so glad you brought it. Thank you, Jamie.
It does make sense, though, that you need to develop all this stuff. Look at that.
He's got bungee cords. Look at his 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, especially with one leg.
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, like what do you need to do to separate yourself? Like elite balance.
There's this guy, Armand Saroukian, who was supposed to be fighting Islam Makachev for the world lightweight UFC title, but he hurt his back literally like the day before the weigh-ins. It's probably because of the severe weight cut. He cuts a lot of weight. He's very muscular. But one of the things that this guy does that's really extraordinary, they put out his workout.
He does these 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 him 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 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 horse shit. 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. So he's pulling on a cable machine. 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 it's a core part of his training, his physicality. This is him with Hamzat Shmaev, 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 Hamzat 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. So Hamzat, 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's fighting at 155. So he's quite a bit smaller and still giving him, you know, he's not allowing Hamzat to run him 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. 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 particular, and taekwondo now as well.
And you've got the Australian breakdancer too.
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 going to get scrutinized, who used their position of influence to acquire a PhD in this stuff she has. But also, there's like 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? No, the physicality. Physical moves, 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 Gio Martinez, that are black belts under 10th Planet Jiu-Jitsu, and they started out their career as breakdancing.
And they were so hard to hold on to, and they were so mobile and so agile that Eddie started incorporating breakdancing into his training, like learning breakdance techniques. Because it's basically kind of gymnastics. Right. 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.
Isn't there a Brazilian self-defense or an Israeli self-defense? Capoeira. Yeah, Capoeira. That's right.
Yeah, Capoeira. But Capoeira was like a dance that the slaves had created that they were disguising a martial art in a dance. Allegedly. I'm not an expert in capoeira, but a lot of the capoeira moves, they dance, but they're dancing into wheel kicks. They're dancing into tornado kicks. These are weapons. They're techniques, but you could pretend that it's just a dance.
But it's kind of... 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 it. They hid their martial art and 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 Nubian 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. Imagine 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 age.
And he didn't know how to read and learned it later. And if you read his stuff, it's unbelievable. Like that... 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 happened later in his life. And then you see the production of quality. It's unbelievable.
So I really recommend everybody, certainly Americans, it's 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 years.
Connection, literacy, and freedom. Not allowed to attend school.
Oh, he taught himself to read.
He taught himself to read and write in the streets of Baltimore. At 12, he bought a book.
12, 13.
Do you know who Rick Ross is?
No.
Not the rapper. Freeway Ricky Ross. No. 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 fund a conscious— Oliver North, the colonel.
Uh-huh. Okay.
You know, the United States, this is like pretty established. They sold cocaine in the L.A. ghettos to fund the Contras 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, and
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 it was three strikes from one incident. It's supposed to be three strikes. Separate things. Exactly. Okay. And so he got out. So he's out now. Wow. Yeah. He's been on my podcast a few times.
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Brilliant guy. So he learned how to read while in jail.
Learned to read 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 anguish, get in anguish for the next six hours as my hair is pulling. And pick a book. Yeah. So I'm like, oh, this one. No, this one. And I'm literally sitting there. 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 and 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 Vallée'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. Okay.
Did you see that movie?
I did see it when I was like 12. 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 Vallée. And Jacques Vallée 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?
I... 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? Are you 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 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 can just put on a scale. They're not something that you can take a rule or two. They're not something that you can quantify, but they probably exist. And 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 case. Is this ringing the bell?
Don't know about the 1980 the most famous cases like Betty and Barney Hill and they were in the 1950s That's 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 it. 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 collates.
What's it called?
The Manhattan Alien Abduction. That's the one. Thank you. Thank you, Jamie. Oh, you don't know this one? No, I'm not aware of it at all. Because they sold it as the most famous, most documented case of UFO abductions.
It might be.
Okay.
I mean, I don't know what to think of those things. I read John Mack's book. John Mack was a... a psychiatrist at Harvard, 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 were all really similar, like eerily similar.
And there's no way that they could have... 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 them to other people. It's a weird thing, man. But here's the thing. They all come back. No one gets abducted and gets kidnapped. 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 and 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, 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 he'd be a great guy for you to have. I'd love to talk to him. What's his name? His name is David Deutsch.
He's a physicist by training. He wrote two bestselling books. I think one of them is called The Edge of Infinity. And we tried 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? Well, he's exactly an intellectual.
Because we could sit down and have a conversation where at the end of it, you were so hedonistically tickled in your brain, that it's as if you just had sex. Right, 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, I'll try to have him on.
Yeah, that'd be great.
I'm fascinated by quantum computing. Marc Andreessen was explaining the experiments that they've done. Yeah. 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 and does it in four seconds. Yeah, quickly. Isn't that amazing? A couple minutes. Isn't 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 and 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 it's been explained to me.
That could work with quantum computing. Exactly. They don't know what's happening. It's like these guys are making magic. Do you remember the famous quote? Do you know who Richard Feynman is? Yes. Yeah. So there's a quote. I might get it off. The quantum computer, yeah. 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 any of this.
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? They're quantumly entangled photons. What are you talking? 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 with 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 Garry 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 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 solution.
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 answers.
I still remember them. I was an A plus student. So here's one. if you take a string of ones and zeros, right? Any string. So it could be 1110001010, or it could be one million long, it could be, okay? You and I will play a game. We start. 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? Yes.
So what Professor Newborn had asked us to do as an assignment 1985, 40 years ago, is can you tell us, this is called the deterministic game, meaning that there is a way to a priori know what 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?
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 alpha, beta.
Okay.
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... Right, got it. So... 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. 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 this 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 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.
Is this based on odds? So because you have 12 coins? Yeah. 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 wings. 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. 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, and tells me whether it's too heavy or too light. It's mind-blowing shit. 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. There's other things.
Well, it is as simple as weighing them, but which ones? Is it you weigh, is it you take any two and you, so let's say I take four 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 they're the same weight. So in that case, by taking any random four, putting them on,
I've only eliminated those four. Right, but 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... Right. 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 weighings. Now I still have four. Right. 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? Right.
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.
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 wouldn't have any 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 weighing 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. Well, what do you do? So I don't remember what the thing. God damn it.
You're going 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, the digital one, I don't want you to tell people. It'll 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, I'll tell you why. Because it is almost a mystical process. I mean, we're sitting there. We're all, you know... Just give it.
Just tell us what it is. You want me to? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So before I do so, let me give you the hint to see if you'll get it. Okay. You don't think I'm putting it on the spot? 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. If you have a... 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. Right. If I look at the middle of the string, I mean, I'm getting goosebumps saying it. Okay.
If you look at the middle of this, like, look, if the middle is 111, just bear with me. Okay. If the middle is 111, the string is an odd number. Because whether it's odd number or even, it doesn't matter. Got it. If it's an odd number and I start and the middle is 1-1-1, I know that I'm going to win. Why?
The middle has to be a 1.
1 or 0, yeah. Well, no, because if the middle is 1, 1, 1, so when we're left with 1, 1, 1, I take a 1 from this side, you take any other 1, and I'll be left with 1 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 1-1-1, which I know because it's an odd string and I started the game, I'm always going to get to it. Got 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. 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 learn from how people are thinking.
Do you understand this quantum computing, this multiverse explanation?
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 in what I said. 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, right? 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 where it's really crazy because the computing power – One of the big problems with artificial intelligence is the incredible need for power, right?
This is why these – like Google is doing this AI thing where they want to develop three nuclear power plants to power their AI. Yeah, crazy. Like this is nuts. So like 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? Yeah.
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. 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 onto exactly the symptoms, the unique symptoms that I'm facing because I went on a safari in Zambia.
No physician, even if he's strained 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 is where quantum, but I don't know anything else.
Yeah, well, it's going to have applications is the point. 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, it would die of heat death before this thing could figure it out.
And this thing could do it in a couple of minutes. You would go, what? What are you even saying? You go, 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 going to 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 to know about deep AI.
So anyway, so let me give her a kudos. Do you know anything about this? I do. What's going on?
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 involves 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 going to 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, what the Trump administration- Oh, the 500 billion thing.
Right. Yeah.
This is probably in response to that. Okay. 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. Right. And it's probably a week away. or a month away or a year away or whatever it is.
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 discreet 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. Okay. So for you, it doesn't seem perceptually. No, it's bananas. Oh, okay.
It's bananas. The auto driving feature is nuts. It stops at red lights. It turns left and right. It changes lanes.
The whole thing. 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 okay? And he's like, oh yeah, no, it's fine. 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 while Led Zeppelin was playing. I was like, this is so crazy. It was driving down the street.
And how much have you noticed? It's much better.
Oh, yeah. Much, much, much, much, much better.
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. It's fun. And it's a fun car to drive because it's so preposterous. It moves like a time machine. It just goes places.
It doesn't make any noise. It's real weird. So I like driving. But the auto driving feature that exists now is just the beginning. It's going to get to the point where it's going to be stupid to let people drive.
You know, it's funny because linking it back to my area of research in psychology decision-making, there was a psychologist who has now passed away, a very famous psychologist named Paul Meal, M-E-E-H-L, who in the 1950s was already doing studies looking at what's called actuarial versus clinical judgments. What does that mean?
Let's suppose I were to tell you that when it comes to making decisions for your admissions to a university... Using an actuarial model, meaning putting in all of your admissions data and allowing a model to decide yes or no, is a much better mechanism than to allow humans to make that choice. Because humans can be hungry at 11.45 and they're pissed off because their blood sugar is low.
And depending on whether their blood sugar is low or not, they may make a different decision on the exact same file. so that he tried to argue that actuarial decisions for certain structured decisions will end up having much better, fairer outcomes for university applicants, and people were still reticent to allow the machine to make decisions. They wanted it to be in the hands of humans.
And so I think, the reason why I thought of this example is because when you said, I don't like the machine to be driving, I want to be in control,
What that to me suggests is that no matter how much actuarial evidence you might provide to people telling them, on average, you're much less likely to get into an accident if the self-driving car drives, most people are going to have the bias of saying, no, I can't relinquish control. Do you agree with that? Yes.
Yeah, I think that's definitely a factor. Also, you wonder if the car is paying attention to things that you can see but it can't see, right? So what I like to look at when I'm driving, one of the reasons why I like driving my truck, I have a Raptor and it's above the rest of the traffic. So I could see people doing stupid things way up ahead. So I could see someone slamming on their brakes.
And I know all these other people are going to have to slam on their brakes too because somebody just cut in front of that guy and stopped dead. I can change lanes.
Right.
The car is not going to know that. It's not going to see that. It's not going to be paying attention.
Just because it's not high enough.
Right. Well, it's not paying attention to anything other than the car in front of it or the car to the right and to the left. It's not looking at cars like way down the road. I'm looking at things like hundreds of yards ahead of me.
But couldn't. a couple of code lines fix what you just said?
It might not be able to see it. It's not going to see it like I see it. It would have to have sensors up where my eyeballs are. And especially, I'll move to the left lane a little bit to see what's going on over there, and I'll move back. I'll move slightly to the left so that I can see past this line. when you're taking into account other people's stupidity.
The thing is, once we get to a point where automated cars are ubiquitous, then the argument for self-driving, or driving yourself rather, is gonna be kind of shitty. Because it's gonna be so much better than driving. It's so much safer. You're not gonna worry about ever being distracted by your phone.
You're not gonna ever worry about dropping your drink in your lap and changing lanes and colliding with someone. You're not going to think about all those things because the car is going to be doing everything. And as good as it is now, it's way better than it used to be and it's going to be way better in a few years from now.
Right.
It's like I do love driving though. I love the pleasure of driving a car. It's not that I want to be in control. I enjoy it. It's like a ride. When I was a little kid, I remember thinking, boy, one day I'm going to be able to drive a car. That's like going to Disneyland every day. Because Disneyland, you're on a ride.
Some of these little race car rides in Disneyland, they're silly compared to a car. So you're on a ride.
Well, I remember in 1983, I had gone to help my brother move. He had moved to Toronto for a year, and then he ended up moving to Southern California. And I was going with him to help him move, and he took a U-Haul truck, and I took his then, I think it was called an RX-7 Mazda. Yeah. Do you remember those? Oh, yeah. Okay. And it had the cruise control on it, which was the earliest manifestation.
So I did it a bit on the highway because we have to drive from Montreal to Toronto. Yeah, you just lay back. But I wanted to be in control. I didn't like being constrained by it's on 110 kilometers.
Right.
I want to be able to adjust. Right. And so I played with it for about 50 kilometers and then I turned it off and I never used it again.
Well, now they have ones that judge the speed based on the distance between the car in front of you and you can change it. So it's like radar, laser. I think it uses laser. So the laser determines how far ahead of you the car is and slows down so that you have an appropriate amount of stopping distance.
Right. They're pretty incredible now. Do you foresee – have you heard of those – kind of flying taxis that they're taking? Is this kind of Jefferson stuff or is it real?
I think once we get really good at automating cars, why wouldn't you have automated flying vehicles? The real concern with flying vehicles is people getting into accidents in the sky and falling onto people's houses, which would happen. I mean, think about how street takeovers where people drive like assholes in the street. Imagine that happening in the sky. You're walking your dog and you're dead.
Yeah, you're walking a dog and boom, a car falls on you.
That could happen. So is that an intractable problem that ends the project right there?
No, automation. Automation changes all that. So with automation, you have a 3D perspective of everything around it. Everything around it has a 3D perspective of everything around it. And they're all moving in sync. So they all share information. You're going to know where one is at every time, but you're not going to be in control. You can't just dive bomb onto your ex-girlfriend's house. Right.
You know, fuck you, bitch. I'm going to die. You know, it's like the worry about humans is human error or, you know, doing it on purpose, which is an error.
But as someone who used to code in my computer science days, sometimes you forget the semicolon and the syntax of the programming language.
You do, but it's going to be coded by AI.
It won't be coded by people.
That's true. People that are coding right now will tell you, don't go to school for coding. Because it's a great thing to learn. So learn to code is now obsolete. Yeah, isn't that funny? Like learn to code. What was the learn to code thing that would get you in trouble? Because someone had said it in regards to people losing menial jobs.
It was like I think in the coal industry. Yes. It was that, yeah.
You don't have to learn to code, which is a crazy thing to say. But it became a thing where it would get you kicked off of Twitter. That's how suppressive – people don't understand how suppressive Twitter was. You would get in trouble for writing learn to code. Like you couldn't mock people by saying that ridiculous thing that someone had said about coal miners.
So can I take credit for having reintroduced the word into the lexicon? Did you? I think you are looking at the one who made the use of the word retard. Fool again.
Listen, no. No? I'm not going to get credit?
I never let it go.
I never let it go. Because I got banned from Twitter. Yeah, but everybody did. Retards in quiet circles has always existed. It's like a smoldering ember that reignited to a flame.
No, because now there's a skit that I do. Whenever I see somebody posting something, there are two levels. I retweet it, and then I go, are you retarded? Or if I'm really pissed, are you fucking retarded? Yeah. And so now people are creating like memes, t-shirts with me and are you retarded? Some people have said my next book after my current one, Suicidal Empathy, will be are you retarded?
So I feel as though, give me a bit of credit.
I don't give you any credit. It's been going around. It's never died in comedian circles. We've kept it alive forever. It's just too good of a word. And also it doesn't have anything to do with Down syndrome. It has to do with a specific way of thinking.
and just because some people you know oh you're an ableist that's not what it's about I would never use that term if I was talking about someone who had down syndrome that's not how you use it you use it when you're talking about someone who thinks the world is flat right you're an extreme idiot instead of saying extreme idiot yeah there's a time and a place for certain words that's why they exist you don't eliminate words and make the world a better place are there any words that you've never used and I've got one go
No, that you've never used? I mean, obviously there's a million words in the lexicon that I haven't used just because, I mean, words that we know that we find too objectionable to use. Can you guess what mine would be? What is it? It's the C word. Really? I've never used it. And I don't like when- You mean hang out in England more. I know. That's what I was going to say.
They throw that around like a beach ball at a concert.
In England, it's mate. Yeah. In Australia, he's a good cunt. Exactly.
I don't like it.
I get it. Do you feel it? Do you see my reflex? There's a lot of power in that word. But the less you use it, the more power it has. It's like the old Lenny Bruce bit. Yeah, I think that is going to be a thing of the past too. I think technology is going to bring us to a point where we're going to be able to telepathically exchange ideas and it's going to be thought-based.
It's not going to be based on language. And the problem with language, of course, you have objectable words, words that are used out of context, words that you see in print. You're lacking the sarcastic tone that the person said it in. So you read it, you could reinterpret it as being a serious statement.
There's a lot of weird stuff with language because what we're really trying to do is communicate. It's a crude form of communication that only exists because telepathy is not good.
You feel that we're going to one day be able to just, our conversation will just be, we're looking at each other in the eyes.
Yeah, yeah, I think so.
What would be the material means by which that gets instantiated? How would we do that?
Well, I think initially it would be technology, but what I think is it's an emerging aspect of human consciousness anyway. I think we're getting better at it. I think that, ironically, the thing that keeps us from it is technology. Because what is the worst way to communicate with someone where you're not exactly sure what they're saying is text. Right.
Like people misinterpret things in text messages all the time. Where one person is joking and the other person takes them seriously. Or one person doesn't understand that this person doesn't know about something else and they wrote something.
So there is... and I may have mentioned this before on this show, I can't remember, there is something to what you're saying, not quite telepathically, but so you know brain imaging. FMRI. FMRI, right? So an FMRI, I put you through the machine, and I'm able to look at which areas of your brain are getting more activated, either through blood flow or oxygenation or whatever, right?
So if I'm studying the psychology of fear-based appeals or advertising, Well, I expect your amygdala to light up more because that's an emotional center where you expect fear to be processed, right?
Got it.
So there is some researchers, I think out of UCLA, that took, I can't remember if it's like a sentence. So let's say eight different sentences. I'm getting the methodology wrong, but the general idea is valid. And based on the activation pattern that they see, they're able to tell you which sentence would have been said by looking at the brain image. Do you understand what I'm saying? Yeah.
Because each of those enunciated sentences or things that I thought about, will necessitate a different invoking of a particular region in my brain, right?
And therefore, so I can't be to the point where I'm able to read your mind in the way that if you and I were having a telepathic conversation would happen, but at least I'm able to know if you just thought about something fearful or you thought about a house. And so now they're already doing that.
So I think the analogy would be like this is the first grunts that ancient man developed to recognize particular things and to point out things before they developed a written language that was eloquent like Thomas Jefferson.
Right. Yes. As it advances. Yeah, exactly. So I've written two papers, academic papers, on the brain imaging paradigm. And I used a term that I first learned of from my doctoral professor. I did one of my minors in my PhD was cognitive studies, studies of the brain. And his name is Frank Kyle. He's now a professor at Yale University. He called it the illusion of explanatory profundity.
He was applying it to something else, but I applied it to brain imaging. Let me explain what I mean by that. There are studies that show that if you take the exact same paper, and in one version, you actually put an image of a brain imaging thing, and in the other version of the paper, you don't do that, and you ask people to judge. It's the exact same paper. Right.
Right.
Right? Right, of course. Packaging matters because it just... Showing the brain, which looks cool and science-y with all kinds of activation pattern, is science-y.
Right.
This other paper, which is exactly the same paper, doesn't have it. It's not as science-y. So hence, illusion of explanatory profundity. You're thinking that you're explaining something very profound, but it really is you don't know what the hell you're talking about. So I think... Brain imaging so far has been very powerful as a diagnostic tool because you could see things in vivo.
You could actually see certain things that before you had to do an invasive surgery to see. But to be able to fully, like now there are neuro marketing firms that tell you, that sell you, based on the activation patterns of your consumers, we can help you design better marketing campaigns, bullshit.
Right, so they're over-exaggerating the capabilities. This is a problem when Luddites sort of interpret what science is capable of and then try it based on that.
Exactly.
Do you know the story of, I think it was in India, there was a woman who was convicted of murder because through fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imagery, she had a functional memory of the crime somehow or another.
And the problem with, I talked to neuroscientists about that and they said the problem is she could have had that memory based on the evidence that was given to her when she was being tried. You would imagine that that would have a profound effect. If someone told you that you're being tried for murder and they showed you photos of the crime scene,
you might develop a functional memory of this crime scene. We're trying to think, like, who the fuck did this? Why am I being blamed? And we don't really have the capability of it. Another one is there was these Italian scientists that were actually tried and convicted. because they were liable of not telling people about an earthquake that took place.
Because the people that were trying them did not understand that the science involved in predicting earthquakes is not exact. It's not like, I know an earthquake is going to happen Tuesday at noon, or I know an earthquake is definitely even going to happen. You don't know. And because the fact that these people who didn't understand the science were trying them
They wanted to pretend that these people were responsible for not alerting all these. And I think they tried them for manslaughter. And they were convicted. And I think they won on appeal.
Wow. Yeah, see if you can find that story. That's interesting.
It's a crazy story because actual people who are geologists are like, what the fuck are you doing? Yeah, seven-year legal saga ends as Italian officials cleared of manslaughter in earthquake trial. Verdict files conviction of deputy for advice given ahead of L'Aquila earthquake. Wow. Yeah, crazy. Incredible.
Crazy, because you have a bunch of assholes that say, you should have known, we're going to take you to court. And like, hey, you fucking idiot, you don't even know how this technology works.
And they don't have to know. Well, even on a much more basic level, eyewitness testimony has been shown to be unbelievably unreliable.
Unbelievably unreliable.
The pioneer of that research, I give so many shout-outs to people who become famous after hearing about me on the show. Elizabeth Loftus, who's a venerable psychologist at University of California, Irvine, where I was for a few years, She is the pioneer of having studied the inaccuracy of eyewitness testimony.
And once you see her research, you shudder to think how many people have gone to the gas chamber because someone said, of course, I absolutely saw him. It was him.
Oh, well, yeah. I mean, I've worked with Josh Dubin multiple times on the show to help people get out of jail.
This is Innocence Project?
He was with the Innocence Project, and now he does this thing with Ike Perlmutter, and he's very involved in helping these people that have, and there's a lot of them that are in jail, either through eyewitness testimony or corrupt prosecutors or, you know, evidence was withheld or, you know, there's a ton of those cases.
Are you a consumer of all the crime shows?
No.
Not at all?
No.
Why?
Because it's bad vibes.
Oh, okay.
I don't need that in my life. I'm aware of it enough. I mean, I've paid attention to enough of them. I've read enough books. I've read enough books on serial killers. I get it.
You know what I'm, as a psychologist, what interests me is, and you see it almost in every show. I like, I don't know if you know the show, it's called Interrogation Raw, where the whole hour series is, there's a case and now they bring in the guy and they're actually filming interrogation that's happening. And invariably in almost every case that I've watched, it's the same dynamic.
The guy who eventually is convicted always thinks that he's smarter than these hick hillbilly cops that don't know anything. And seeing how the cops play them. how they really are amazing psychologists themselves to know how. Good cop, bad cop. The whole thing.
And so I love watching that interaction because the guy comes in and does his whole song and dance and he truly, because he's gotten away with it for much of his life. And then, you know, I'm just aw shucks, a stupid country boy who doesn't know what I'm talking about.
We talked about this the other day, too, that I think there's something going on as well, that people that lie all the time, they don't recognize that people can tell that they're lying because they're not good at reading lying because they lie all the time.
So they're not good at reading people because they live in this bullshit world of blinders where they're just trying to be charismatic and push forth some fake story. I watched this one where this woman hired an undercover police officer to kill her husband.
I know this case.
And she goes into histrionics.
Yes.
And they all know that she did it. They're all aware. Ma'am, your husband was. Oh, I can't believe it. And she hugs the officer. It's like, wow, this is crazy to watch.
How rewarding must it be to be that cop?
Oh, my God. It's probably hilarious. You're like this crazy bitch.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Especially, fortunately, if you're dealing with a murder that didn't actually take place.
So here's an incredible story about serendipity that relates to serial killers. So in 1989, I'm then with a girlfriend. We're going to the Charlevoix region, which is in northern Quebec. It's about five, six hours north of Montreal by car, where it's very famous because the beluga whales come there to mate, the white St. Lawrence whales.
I don't know if you know them, but they're these beautiful, very rare whales. They're all white. And so we had gone up there, and we end up at this inn in the middle of Quebec countryside. And I walk in there. There's this tall American greeting me. I'm surprised. Does he speak English? He's speaking English to me. So I put a book. That's crazy enough up there, right? Absolutely. And so...
I have a book with me that I'm reading. At the time, I was thinking, you know, maybe I'll go into maybe forensic psychiatry, which would mean I would go to med school or I'd go into forensic psychology because I was very interested in criminology. But then I decided, I think rightly so, that it's too dark for me also as a career. And so I was reading a book titled Alone with the Devil.
which you could probably pull it up, which is a book that was written by a forensic psychiatrist out of L.A. County system where he was the forensic psychiatrist who would interview many of the most famous serial killers that were running through L.A. County back then. The Angelo Bueno, the Hillside Stranglers, the Night Stalker, all those insane ones in Southern California.
And so hence, along with the devil, meaning him sitting with him. And as I put the book down, this is the guy who's checking me into this kind of bed and breakfast place. He looks at it and he goes, oh, I know the author. And I'm thinking, how does this American guy who's in northern Quebec know this author who's a forensic psychiatrist in L.A.?
He goes, oh, I used to be a public defender in the L.A. county system. Then he met a woman who was a Quebecer and then they moved there together. And I used to work with this psychiatrist. And as we started talking, he goes, all I could tell you, so this is 1989, so I'm like a 23, 24-year-old guy with long hair.
And I was telling him that I have a brother who was in Southern California, so I always go see him. And he goes, all I can tell you is don't ever, ever do something that gets you to go to L.A. County Jail for even a night. because if you piss off the cops, they'll throw you in there and they just scream, fresh fish out of water, and then the guys will have their way with you.
And so I made sure to never drink and drive in L.A. County because I don't think I would have lasted 14 seconds.
So anyways, hold on.
Let me finish. Fast forward to 2013. I am in Lubbock, Texas. I've been invited to speak at the Life Sciences and Politics Conference. I'm the plenary speaker, and the political scientist who invited me there takes me out for a Texan barbecue. And as we're chatting, he goes, you know, I know you're from Quebec. You know, my father lives in Quebec. I said, your father, you're okay.
Can I just take a guess who your father might be? And I said, was your dad a public defender in the L.A. county system? He looks at me as though I'm like an oracle. Yeah. He goes, yes, that's my dad. So imagine I meet a guy in 1989 based on this book and he knows that guy. Fast forward many, many years later, I meet his son who just tells me, oh, my dad lives in Quebec.
I take a shot at throwing and it was that guy that I met in 1989. How is that for the metaphysics of life?
That's nuts. That's nuts.
It's a small world.
That's weird. That's weird. There's certain things that are like, okay, what are we dealing with here? Like, is this a simulation? Like, what is this? Right. Have you seen the thing about the book from 1953 that talks about Elon wanting to go to Mars? Like a Wernher von Braun?
No.
Have you seen this? Where's my phone? I saw you on Twitter. Yeah, Elon tweeted it. You can find it. See, look, there's certain things where you go, come on. Just even the name Elon and Elon's going to take us to Mars.
Sorry, you mean in 1953. There's a character.
So here it is. This is in a Werner Von Braun book. So Elon is the elected leader of the Martian government, serving a five-year term. Elon and their cabinet administrator have laws enacted by two houses of parliament.
Elon in Project Mars, a technical tale, is the name of the Martian leader and the connection between the character and Elon Musk led to speculation about Werner Von Braun's influence on Musk's space exploration. This is a book from, I think it's 1953. Okay, you ready? Is that when he wrote it, Jamie? Hold on. See if you can find the tweet that Elon's tweet, because Elon's tweet is hilarious.
Because like, how is this possible? Because he's like, this doesn't even make sense.
So I do have one non-sexy explanation that can explain this. Okay. One of his parents was a huge fan of that author, read that book, And in honor of that character, actually called Elon Musk, Elon. Sure, that's great.
But what are the odds that guy's going to develop rockets? That's true. What are the odds that your little baby boy, who you're naming when he was one day old, is going to develop?
Yeah, that part.
1953 book, Mars Project, by Werner Von Braun, says the leader of Mars shall be called Elon. Someone pulled the original German manuscript out of the archives, debunked this myth, only to confirm that Von Braun did indeed predict he'd be called Elon. And Elon writes, how can this be real? It's kind of crazy.
It's kind of crazy because the guy is literally obsessed with Mars and has created rockets that you can catch.
Have you seen when Trump explains that? Yeah. It's hilarious. It's so amazing.
It's amazing what he can do with these rockets. It's nuts, man. We're living in a very, very strange time. What is this?
This is Elon's dad? This is Elon's father. Name him after reading the book. It's common knowledge. Amazing. He did name him after reading the book. Okay. Amazing.
So I got that part. Still, what are the odds? Still, still. What are the odds? There's 8 billion people on this fucking planet. What are the odds that your kid who you named Elon because you read a book becomes the guy? And Elon didn't even know about it?
Wow.
What about that thing with Barron Trump? Have you heard that crazy thing?
Oh, yeah. That's nuts, too.
That's wild. Find that one. That one's nuts, too. That one's completely bizarre. Barron, the young kid. Yeah. What is it? He'll pull it up. I don't want to fuck it up. But there's a few of those that make you want to wear it. Like... is this a simulation? Is this real?
I feel like there's aspects of it that are real. Trying to find the year. There's a series of books from like, I think it's the late 1800s or something. Yeah. About, yeah, it says 1900 here, but it's like a person named Baron Trump goes on these adventures, gets a, like a guy from Manhattan to be his like guide. It's, it's very strange and very similar to like what,
See if you can find what the synopsis is, what connects it to Barron Trump. It seems real weird. It's almost like the telepathy thing. Someone in the past says, I think something's going to happen one day. I just get this feeling. This is Elon, motherfucker. You know what I mean? I think there's some weird things about the potential futures.
And that might be also what we're seeing with this alien stuff. I think this alien stuff might be the future.
How many times have you had Elon on the show?
Oh, a bunch of times. The book was called The Last President. Ad blocker. The Last President. That's kind of crazy because if the shit hits the fan in the alien's land, he is the last president. An 1889 novel called Baron Trump's Marvelous Underground Journey. It was written by Ingle Saul Lockwood. He would go on to write another book called The Last President in 1900.
Mystery which involves a Trump family, Nikola Tesla, time travel, and dark forces.
Wow. Dun-dun-dun. He lives in a castle called Castle Trump.
So he follows the adventures of a young aristocrat named Baron Trump living in a castle named Castle Trump, which is fucking crazy. The characters describe as intelligent, curious, and somewhat arrogant, guided by his mentor, Don. His mentor, Don. Baron embarks on a fantastical journeys, including one to discover a magical portal in Russia. What? Uh-oh. Putin connections confirmed. Jesus Christ.
It's like, is this bullshit? Is life bullshit? Is life real?
Wow.
I think life's mostly real. But, you know, this is the problem with the whole idea of simulation theory. is that if it's true, if there is a simulation and the simulation, if we develop technology where the simulation becomes indiscernible from reality itself, how will we know? Maybe we'll know from goofy clues like that, like silly coding, Easter eggs that God leaves behind.
I would love to know what was the mechanism by which for each of those stories that you came up with, who came up with? Was it just a fan of one of those books who said, wait a minute?
Well, the weird one is, why is Wernher von Braun writing fiction when he's a fucking Nazi? A Nazi running NASA, and before that he was writing fiction? How does he have time? How does he have time to write fiction when this guy's in the middle of developing rockets for the Germans?
Yeah, wow.
Amazing.
Amazing story. So what, how... What are some of the things that you take away when you interact with Elon? Because I've been fortunate enough to get to know him better now and so on, and I'm just amazed by what an amazing guy he is. What are some of your views?
Well, he's just a fascinating human being. Like if we didn't live in a time of Elon Musk and you were studying him in history, you'd be like, Jesus Christ, what was that guy like? That guy must have been insane. This guy's running five different companies simultaneously. Unbelievable. Trying to develop a department of government efficiency at the same time and like...
He's a very unique human being that exists once every who knows how many generations, if ever.
And to think that there are so, like when this Nazi salute thing came out, and of course, you know, I debunked it and there's some way to it because I happen to be Jewish and I know him. But do you really need me to come out with my imprimatur to say, no, no, no? People don't really believe he made a Nazi salute.
They want to believe, so they say they believe because you can get him on that and he's on the defensive. It's an attack vector. Okay, so you don't think anybody who left- Who thinks he's a fucking Nazi. He literally wears a thing around his neck that says, bring them all home about the hostages.
Or did you see when he said, I don't know if it was after Ben Shapiro, when he went with him to, I think it was Auschwitz or something, and he said- I am Jew-ish. Yes.
Yeah. He's, you know, he's a fascinating human being and all fascinating human beings, especially all people that are in incredible positions of power and wealth, which is what he is. You're going to get attacked and you get attacked by a lot of bad faith arguments. And this is one of them.
Well, the last time I was in Austin, we had met up in person, but it was delayed, our meeting, because he ended up having to go to all sorts of depositions. And so he would be texting me and saying, oh, I'm in this hellish deposition. And then later when we met, he kind of told me a bit about it.
I mean, I won't share some of the stuff, but I'm thinking, you know, if at my level I get people coming after me, It's unimaginable to even think at what level, right? For me, it's a troll coming after me or an annoying academic or an Islamist who sends me a death threat. Okay, fine. But I mean, he's getting governments attacking him. But yet, he just keeps trucking along. It's unbelievable.
Well, I mean, it really helps to have $400 billion. That does help. That helps a lot. But, you know, if he didn't buy Twitter, I think the world would be a far more fucked up place right now. I think we would be far more confused, far less free to express ourselves.
And the narrative, the cultural narrative shifted because of people's ability to freely express themselves now on social media in front of everybody where you just didn't have that before.
Well, I mean, literally within a few days of it being maybe even the same day of it being announced that he was buying it. I had put out a clip on my channel where I said, of all things that Elon Musk has ever done or will ever do, none will ever count as much as him having bought Twitter.
If it didn't happen, you would have a complete cult-like takeover of all public discourse. All public discourse would be controlled by this ridiculous ideology, this woke ideology, what you call a mind virus, and that mind virus would have been used by corporations
And it has been and used by government and it has been used in order to enact more control over its citizens under the guise of protecting marginalized people and protecting ideas. It seems like they're doing the right thing and it seems like opposing that is doing the wrong thing. But it's just a wolf in sheep's clothing. That's all it is. It's just control.
It's just the government was – they don't give a fuck about DEI. All they give a fuck about is votes and power and control. And if they can use DEI to get their way and if they can use whatever green energy bullshit they're pushing, whatever they're doing, they're not doing it because they're trying to save you. That's nonsense. If you look at it from the perspective of this is to –
gain more power, more influence, and make more money. Then you'll see things more clearly.
So I've been asked in many different contexts, do you think that this is it, this is the end of all the parasitic stuff? And I keep imploring people to not be complacent. Yeah, not be complacent. Exactly, because sure, Donald Trump is a huge doorstop to all the insanity, but here's the analogy I like to draw.
So you know how there's the evolution of the superbug that comes about because of the misapplication of the antibiotic regimen?
Yes.
So what happens, basically? I mean, it literally is a natural selection experiment, right? So because I'm supposed to take the antibiotics for five days... but I only take it for two days and I immediately feel a lot better, I stop taking it. But what that has created is that the weak bacteria have died off, whereas the ones that have survived until that point have only become stronger.
And through the misapplication of the prescription for antibiotics, I then contribute to the evolution of the superbug. So I argue, so I'm analogizing now with the woke mind virus If you don't completely do the antibiotic regimen fully, which in this case means eradicating all those parasitic ideas everywhere, right?
Because it took 50 to 100 years for those bad ideas to originally be spawned and flourish in the university ecosystem. So you're not going to get rid of them in a four-year term with Donald Trump, and we never see them again. So it has to be a continuous cultural war to eradicate those.
Now, you'd like to think that it won't take 50 to 100 years to eradicate them, but it's not going to start and end with Trump. I'm thinking you agree with that.
No, I definitely do agree with that. And I think that it's also you have to take into consideration, although Trump won and Trump is controlling the cabinet and all these different people are going to be able to do his agenda, you still have almost half the country that didn't vote for him.
And people are always tribal, and so they're going to be opposed to everything, even the good things that he's doing. They're going to find fault in it. Did you see the CBS interview with J.D. Vance?
Just one clip. Fucking amazing. Oh, so I should watch the whole thing?
Oh, my God. It's a master class. He's so good. He is really good.
Has he been on your show?
Yeah, he's great. Thank God for that guy. He's so good at dismantling those dopey people and just breaking down. She was like, this is a country built on immigrants. He's like, yes. That doesn't mean that 240 years later we have to have the dumbest immigration policy possible. Yeah.
Well, and so actually in my forthcoming book that I'm trying to wrap up now, Suicidal Empathy, I have a section where I talk about these kinds of immigration arguments and I use something from cognitive psychology. It's called categorization theory. How do you categorize something? So when people say, you're such a hypocrite, Gad, you're an immigrant. Why are you railing against immigrants?
Your buddy, Elon Musk is an immigrant. And so then I usually give them the following analogy, satirical analogy, but a valid one. I say, Fido the house cat is a feline. So is the male lion in the African jungle. They're both called feline. Therefore, I'm just as likely to want to snuggle when I go on a safari in Namibia next to the feline called feline. the male lion.
No, I recognize that even though they're both called feline, there is a distinction between the two. I don't categorize them as an exemplar of the same identity. Whereas what these people play is, you're an immigrant, why do you rail against immigrants? So isn't it... Is it astonishing that you could have such shoddy thinking that you're unable to recognize what I just said?
It is, but again, it goes back to this tribal thing is that people don't want to admit that having an open border is going to let in terrorists because the previous administration, which was democratic, had essentially an open border policy. And it was based on this concept of empathy. And you have sanctuary cities like New York. And then as soon as the mayor opposes it, well, guess what?
He gets indicted. It's all so transparent. It's so crazy. It's right in front of your face. And so I don't understand what they're doing. And there's a lot of arguments. They're doing it for cheap labor. They're doing it to get votes. They're doing it for whatever they're doing. You're making things less safe.
And to oppose getting rid of cartel members and gang members and criminals and pedophiles and serial killers, to oppose – Getting rid of them and deporting them is just nuts.
It doesn't make any sense. The perfect example of this kind of parasitic idea and suicidal empathy is that bishop that just spoke that kind of lecture, Trump. They're your dishwashers. But nobody's questioning that there might be lovely people. That doesn't take away from the fact that you shouldn't have an open border policy.
But she's so committed to empathy that she views any position contrary to complete capitulation of your border as non-empathetic.
Right, and that is the perspective of the extreme leftists. And it's a cult-like perspective. It doesn't hold up to scrutiny. It doesn't make sense. It's not empathetic. It's certainly not empathetic to the people that are victim to those people.
Right, exactly. Well, it's not empathetic to the, I think, 900 biological women who lost medals. Did you see that study? Yeah. Right?
But what you're doing- And everyone's like, it's just a small amount.
It's a small number? No, it's not.
Well, is 900 small? What would be a big number? Also, here's the big thing. There was not 900 10 years ago. Right. OK, so what happened in 10 years and what happens 10 years from now? Are we willing to have all female sports dominated by men? Right. Who believe that they're women? That's crazy. Right. That doesn't make any sense.
Well, in Canada, there was a 50 year old man who identified with a fifth as a teenage girl. So he's competing in swimming events. I believe he was a professor.
I satirized this in The Parasitic Mind where I said that through transgravity, I identify as much smaller weight than I really am, and through trans-ageism, I am an eight-year-old boy, so I'm competing in the under-eight judo competition.
Isn't it nuts? And then that actually turned out to be true, where people go, that's ridiculous. I remember I watched Dennis Prager on Bill Maher's show a long time ago, and he was talking about how men can menstruate. Next thing you're going to be saying, men can menstruate. And the whole place goes nuts and screams and cheers. Like, what are you saying? Because this was quite a while ago.
And now it's commonplace. It's commonplace. Commonplace to say men can menstruate. In fact, Tampon Tim, Tim Walsh, the guy was putting tampons in the men's room.
So at Concordia, which is my home university, right? I'm now at Northwood, but my home university had last May a one-day symposium on menstrual equity because menstruation is a human right. What the fuck does that mean?
What does that mean, menstrual equity? How can you get men to menstruate?
I'll send you privately. It's a human right. It's a human right. Until that symposium, women had been stopped from menstruating in Canada. What does that mean?
What does it mean? It's so crazy.
Well, unfortunately for us in Canada, unlike you guys have the savior Trump, yes, Trudeau has resigned officially or won't be running the country for much longer. But we're much further down the woke abyss than you guys are. It's a cautionary tale. Yeah, exactly. So I think, yes, Pierre Poilievre will be an obvious massive improvement over Trudeau. Is that how you say it?
I mean, if you say it with a proper French accent, yeah, it's poilievre.
Other people say it differently.
What's the wrong way to say it? Every other way that an American or English Canadian would say it.
I've even heard people say it like polivet. No, it's poilievre. Poilievre. Pierre Poilievre. He's a very logical guy. It was one of the things that was interesting. A reporter questioned him on whether or not he aligns with Donald Trump in that there are two genders. And he said, well, if there's other genders, I'd like you to tell me what they are.
That's beautiful.
I'm open to, tell me what they are.
That one was great. But of course, the classic one is the apple.
Yeah, when he was eating an apple.
That was great. That was like straight out of a spaghetti Western.
Well, it seems like that's what your country needs. And I hope it happens. I hope he wins. I hope there's some sort of a recognition that if America changes course and course corrects and America starts to thrive and do better, which I think it will, and gets the violent crime down and a lot of the issues down and prices down.
And if all that stuff happens, I hope Canada comes to its senses and wakes up from this woke trance.
I mean, I think it will, but it will be a longer auto-correction.
Yeah, unless you become the 51st state. Come on, join up.
By the way, do you know that I posted a post on Twitter, on X, where I tagged Trump and I said, Dear Donald Trump, look, can you invade Canada? It won't take more than four to six committed Marines or something like that, like really to show how wimpy we are. And if you saw the tagging of Concordia that I got on X because people were saying, you have a Canadian professor who is being treasonous.
How could a human being be so lacking in humor?
The same thing as the Hitler thing with Elon. So they don't really believe it. No, it's an attack vector. They're just looking at it like, I can go after him now. And this is one of the major problems with social media is that it's really good for that. It's really good for people to be shitty. You know, what we talked about, it's the least connected form of discourse between human beings.
It's so much... It's shittier than verbal communication and what is eventually going to be telepathic communication is going to far exceed that to the point where you're not going to have to wonder what a person thinks. You're going to know what they think.
I don't think I've seen you in many years ever engage anyone on X, right?
No. I mean, occasionally. I wanted to get Peter Hotez to debate with Bobby Kennedy, and he was calling me a neo-fascist. It's neo-fascist leanings. And I was like, this is so ridiculous. I'll give a bunch of money to the charity of your choosing. Oh, yes, I remember that. I said, I'll donate $100,000. You pick a charity. Debate him here. Explain what's going on.
If you're so smart and you're so correct, come debate him. And nobody, you know, he didn't want to do it. It's just the whole thing is just like I don't like to do that because I don't like it's going to sound very hippie. I don't like negativity. I don't want to argue with anybody. I don't even want to argue with people that I disagree with.
If I disagree with someone, I'd like to have a discussion with them. I'd like to have a calm, civil discussion with you. I don't think things should be, I think you should avoid personal attacks and all that stuff whenever possible. I think it's bad for you.
Is this something that you adhere to even in your personal relationships? Yeah. Okay.
Yeah, I don't argue. I'm not interested. I don't like bad vibes. I can disagree with someone. I'll have people on the podcast that I disagree with. I'm never mean to them. I never call them names. I don't think it's good for you. I don't think it's good. Look, I'm good at it. I'm a professional shit talker. I can talk a lot of shit.
If I want to make fun of someone, I can make fun of someone pretty easily. I don't want to. I don't want to. I'm not interested. I make fun in jokes. I do stand-up. I make fun on podcasts. We fuck around and joke around, but In real life or in actual communication with another person, I don't want it. I don't think it's necessary for you to have a full, rich life. I think it's junk food.
I think it's essentially like you don't need to eat chips. Don't eat chips. Chips are killing you and Mountain Dew is killing you. Don't eat Mountain Dew. I think negativity is bad for everyone. I think it's bad for the person who pushes it out. It's bad for the person that receives it. It's the reason why people don't like being canceled.
All these people are dumping on you and it's all this negativity and like, oh, and you feel terrible and they know you feel terrible. So they keep piling on. I think it's bad for them. I think it's bad for your soul. I think it's bad for your self-respect, for how you view yourself as an evolved human being, like that you want to do that to a person and go after them like that.
I mean, the only exceptions are if someone's a criminal, someone's doing something like, you know, if you're the head of a pharmaceutical drug company that's pushing stuff on people, that's killing people and you know it is and you're hiding it. If you're a person who's involved in the trafficking of, you know, underage sex workers or whatever, whatever. Whatever it is, it's evil.
You want to go after pure evil in the world? Okay, I get it. But most of what people do when they're really shitty to each other is like political disagreements or ideological disagreements. And it shows your weakness as a person.
Well, so I think it was Henry Kissinger who said this. To your point, he said, never are the battles so fierce as when the stakes are so low. So I think it speaks to your point, right? So people get all animated and...
I think it's also a lot of people that don't understand real conflict, right? I think people have a certain amount of anticipation, just being a human being, again, with this old operating system that we have. There's a certain amount of anticipation of an enemy and of a threat and of a thing that you have to defeat.
I think it's just naturally built into us to the point where people become illogical, especially when they get super tribal. They're on a team. We're on a team, so we have to defeat the people on the other team. So you say horrible things about people on the other team on Twitter, and then people retweet it and post it to you, and you feed off of it. I think it's a stupid way to communicate.
I think it's a stupid way for human beings to think and behave. And I think it goes back to what I said before about ideas, that you're not your ideas. You cannot be your ideas. If you want to talk about ideas, just talk about what the ideas and what you think things should be and what... This is what you think is going on. And have respectful conversations with people that disagree.
And that's the best way to communicate. And that's just too hard to find.
So I had one negative interaction that sat very badly with me after the fact. And I think we've now cleared it. So to your point about not going after someone. Mm-hmm. I mean, usually, you know, I'm a very affable guy and warm and the whole thing. But sometimes if somebody pisses me off, I just kind of- Call him a fucking retard. Call him a fucking retard. But usually not someone that I know.
It's just- But even if it's a person that you don't know, there's a person on the other end of that.
That's true. But usually if I call you a retard, it's because you've been kind of doing stuff endlessly after me. Right. So you don't punch a guy if he just slaps you one time. But if he slaps you 18 times, you're probably going to-
No, you should punch him if he slaps you once. Oh, there you go. Because slaps usually lead to something else. There you go. Can't let a guy get away with a slap.
We're in Austin, so there was a point where Lex Friedman was doing all the love will conquer everything stuff. And it was pissing me off because it was in the context of, let's say, the Middle East, where I come from, where I know that love doesn't conquer all. And so that shtick was getting me angry.
And so I kind of went after him, not like in a mean way calling him names, but I said, you know, it's kind of infantile to think that love conquers everywhere or something. And then he got upset and then had blocked me. And that never sat well with me, not because he had blocked me, but because I don't like to have, you know, maintaining a bad vibe with someone. Right.
And you kind of maintain it if you're still blocked.
If I'm still blocked.
Are you still blocked now?
I don't know if I'm still blocked. I bet you're still blocked.
I don't think he unblocks people. I thought you can't block people now. Well, you can block people still. You just can't still see.
But to his credit, and I think mine, we kind of kissed and made up. And he said, oh, you know, if you ever come to Austin, you know, I'm always happy to talk to you. And I'd love to. And I'm a fan of your work. And we haven't been able to connect. I'll connect you. Thank you. I'll connect you. But that makes.
So to your point, that made me feel better because there was like this negativity, even though I'd never met him and I don't know him. I don't like that there's a guy that exists that is in any way upset at something that I said about him. Right, right. He's not a Nazi. He's not an Islamist terrorist. I don't want that. And so I take your point, and I'm glad we patched, we cleared up.
Haven't cleared it up yet with our mutual buddy. Oh, yeah, that guy? The Malibu meditator. Yeah.
Well, you know, he's on his own journey.
But even, I've really toyed with just sending him an email. And it doesn't matter. It's not like he's in my close personal circle of friends. But I don't like having, so I want to say, hey, buddy, you know, there's no hard feelings between. You think I should do it? Yeah, why not? Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, it's not going to hurt. I've had a conversation with him on the phone. Uh, I think, you know, life is short. Life goes by very quickly. And like I said, I think that stuff engaging in that stuff is just like eating junk food. I don't think you should do it. Yeah. Don't think it's smart. But less, less.
enjoyable than junk food of all the wonderful conversations we've had one of the pieces of advice that always rings in my head from Joe Rogan is you read your effing comments are you insane or something like that you had said to me yeah because one time I was we were chatting and you said and you were upset and I was upset
And so every time I almost feel like I'm falling into that trap where I'm starting to scroll, I go Joe Rogan.
There's also a thing too where if someone writes something, for some reason it seems more real than if they just say it to their friend. People talk shit all the time. They say things and then they say, I shouldn't have said that. But when it's written down, it's out there forever on the internet, which is really weird. It's another aspect of it that's very strange.
Earlier you were talking about stand-up comics. I can't remember exactly what you're saying, and I thought I'll have to tell him this guy. The funniest bit I've ever seen, of course you will know it, the bit with Bobby Lee and Brian Callen and another guy, I don't know what his name is, where he's telling them that he was molested by a Downsville guy.
Yes. Brendan Schaub. Yeah.
So I've probably watched that 10 times and there hasn't been a tedium in my laughter. Like usually if you see a joke, the fourth time is less funny. So every time I go back to it and I watch it, I laugh as much as the previous time. It's very ridiculous.
Yeah. But that's the beauty of podcasts is like you could never have something that ridiculous on like Saturday Night Live or Or on the Jimmy Kimmel show or any late night talk show. It's like the only place that's no holds barred like that is podcasts.
That guy's really funny.
Bobby's very funny.
He's very funny. I first learned of him, I saw him on Curb Your Enthusiasm. where he was, do you know that he was on that? I didn't know he was on that. Yeah, he's like a Korean bookie to Larry David or something. Whatever, some funny, and he's speaking with a Korean accent and so on. And I thought, oh, who's this guy? And then I discovered him, and so I watched some of his stand-up stuff.
I mean, some of it is a bit harsh, but he is funny.
He's a good dude, too.
And I saw him with Bill Maher recently. And I'm sorry, no disrespect for Bill Maher, but I think Bobby Lee is a lot funnier than Bill Maher. What do I know? I'm not a professional comedian.
He's purely funny, whereas Bill Maher is very political and opinionated. He has that sort of antagonistic personal style of politics. It's never just about ideas. It's a complete mockery of everything. It's a comedic bent on everything. Which everybody likes different things, you know?
Some people like that. You've had them on this show?
Yeah, yeah, I've had them on. Yeah, a couple times. I like them. It's just like I don't talk to people like that, though. And this is like as I've gotten older and wiser and had more experiences in life and thought about things more and more and more. I've decided to engage in as little of that shit as possible.
So it's interesting because you're interested in a sport that's all about combat and fighting, and yet you live by the motto of the exact opposite of that, which I wonder if many fighters might have that. A lot of fighters have that. Because they realize that their physicality is actually quite ominous. I want to live exactly the opposite of that in my personal engagements with people.
They also realize all that is extra energy. It's all just energy that you're giving out to conversations online, arguing with people online, just bad energy. It's not a good use of energy, I should say. It's an improper use of energy. It's a waste. This is what I describe to people, and I'm sorry if you've heard this before.
Say think of your mind as your mind has units of Thought you have a hundred units that you can use and you're using 30 of them on social media Arguing that's a good way to look at it Now you've deprived yourself of your music or your poetry or your art whatever you do that you really like to do You've deprived yourself of your access to your units of thought that can focus on this positive thing because you're spending time arguing about whatever the fuck it is and
Whatever it is online. Whatever it is.
Whatever. You just, why? Why? So let's say, forgive me for asking an intrusive question. Are you able to stick true to that motto as a fight is brewing with your wife?
Yeah, I don't argue with like that. I don't ever like, I don't get mean ever. Never. We don't even yell. We'll talk about stuff. We'll disagree on stuff, but it never gets shitty. I don't think you should talk to people like that that are your friends. I don't think you should talk to your loved ones like that.
I mean, sometimes you have to tell your friend, hey, dude, you're being a fucking idiot. You've got to stop doing that. You're going to ruin your life. You're doing it for their benefit. And sometimes you have to speak in harsh language just to let them know how you actually feel about what's happening. But for the most part, I don't think it's...
I don't think it's good in any way, shape, or form. And if you're in one of those relationships where you yell at each other and throw things at each other and call each other the worst things possible and then make up.
15.
15. Yeah, look, it's beautiful to be happy. It's beautiful to be in a good relationship. But like all things, like online communication, like interpersonal communication, it takes work. And you have to have a thought like, this is what I don't want out of my life. I don't want conflict. I don't want bullshit. And I don't want to be the cause of conflict.
So you have to have your own shit together too. Some people, they don't want conflict, but they create it all the time by stupid decisions and bad behavior. Right. And you gotta learn that too.
So how do you, are you able to completely do this when people are coming after you? People come after me all the time. But I don't mean troll.
People I know come after me all the time. I ignore it. Right. I don't engage. Good luck. You can have your opinions about me. Good luck. It's okay. Have fun. Enjoy your life. I self-assess all the time. I self-audit my own behavior. I'm my own worst critic. Right. So things that other people that are saying about me, especially if they're inaccurate, it doesn't work. It doesn't affect me.
I don't care. Right. I'm happy.
You are a model to live by, sir.
Well, I try, but it's hard work. It's not like this is an easy thing to try to stay at peace all the time when I work at it.
Do you ever foresee deciding, I've spoken to all the interesting people? Yes. You do?
There could be a point in time when I don't want to do this anymore, but I think it would be more related to not want to be public anymore, not interested in having your thoughts out there in the world.
Okay.
It might be the point in time where I want to enter a different phase of my life where I don't think about expressing myself publicly anymore. I could see that where I'm thinking about just living my life, doing the things that I'm interested in because I'm interested in a lot of things and I don't want to limit the amount of things that I'm exposed to that I'm interested in.
What are some of the things that you're taking? The ceramics course that you've always ... You know, whatever.
What are some of the things that are... I'm full of stuff between martial arts and comedy and archery and playing pool and all the different things that I enjoy doing. When people tell me they're bored, I just don't understand. I don't understand how you can be bored. The world is so interesting. There's so many different things to learn.
But by the way, what you just said is exactly why your podcast has been so successful. Because you exude, in French you say, joie de vivre, right? A joy for living. And that curiosity, that...
insatiable love of life that makes you open to all these other people who sit in this seat that you say give it to me and if you didn't have that quality you could have had all the other qualities if you didn't have that quality I don't think your show would have been successful you're probably right So, no, but it's true.
Yeah, no, I'm sure.
Because, I mean, a lot of people will ask me, oh, you know Joe, what's his secret? I say, there's no secret. He's a cool guy who wants to have cool conversations. I mean, it really is.
I think the secret is numbers, too.
Meaning?
Putting in the numbers. I do a lot more podcasts than most people. You do it five days a week, right? Four, mostly four, sometimes three, sometimes five.
Okay.
More threes than fives, but a bunch of fives. But the most important thing is just for 15, 16 years. It's like I've done it forever. And so in doing it for that long, over the course of that immense amount of time talking to people, you just get better at talking to people. It's like everything else.
You get better at it the more you do it, and then you understand what sucks about what you're doing.
What percentage... I'm not asking you to give names or anything. What percentage of guests that come on your show the first time you've come to the realization that they're not good enough conversationalists to ever invite again? Is it a-
Yeah, it happens. I don't want to give a number, but I mean, it definitely happens. It's like you don't know until you talk to someone. And some people, you can tell some people are bullshitting you and some people are pushing an agenda and some people just aren't that good at talking and they're not compelling and you can't drag anything out of them.
11. 11.
Wow. I was going to say 10. Wow.
And I'll just say this. I think my first time was 2014. Wow. We're 2025. So that means we are on one show a year. Well, we just banged out another good one. For many more years. Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. It's always a pleasure. You are such a joy. Always a pleasure. Appreciate you very much. Thanks.
All right. Bye, everybody. Bye.