Gad Saad, evolutionary psychologist and visiting professor at Northwood University, dissects modern cognitive biases—like misjudging immigration risks with "Fido the house cat" analogies—and critiques woke ideologies, including Canada’s transgender sports policies and "menstrual equity." He contrasts AI’s precision (e.g., Tesla’s near-human self-driving) with human resistance to data-driven decisions, like safer university admissions or driving. Rogan agrees, citing China’s $250B AI investment and U.S. countermeasures, while questioning fMRI reliability in legal cases. Saad warns of "parasitic" ideological behavior, comparing it to antibiotic-resistant superbugs, and both joke about Rogan’s potential to expose Kamala Harris’s lack of vulnerability. Their 11th conversation highlights Saad’s interdisciplinary Consilience Institute proposal and Rogan’s evolving approach to podcasting—prioritizing curiosity over conflict while considering a quieter future. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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.
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 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 US 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.
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.
So there are four possibilities.
Both can confess.
One confess.
So it's a two-by-two matrix.
And there are different payoffs in each of these matrices.
And then the question is, what is the optimal behavior?
So that's called game theory because you use game theoretic framework to model what should be some optimal behavior.
Well, in the context of the Cold War, That's when game theory was first being applied, that the Russians or the Soviets can nuke us or not, we can nuke them or not.
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.
It's bizarre when you see 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.
Well, speaking of accelerated learning, my biggest regret, I may have discussed this with you before or not, but my parental regret is that we never taught Our children, all of the languages that we speak at home.
So I speak, my mother tongue is Arabic, and I also learned French because from Lebanon and then moving to Montreal.
Then I learned English, and I also speak Hebrew.
And then my wife, because she's Lebanese-Armenian, she speaks Armenian.
So between the two of us, we speak five languages.
But here's the rub.
If I speak to them in Arabic or Hebrew, my wife...
I 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.
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.
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.
So in behavioral decision-making, in psychological 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's cognitive consistency in his mind.
Because incoming information that contradicts my anchored position makes me feel icky.
So what are the kinds of mental gymnastics I'm going to go through to make sure that everything stays consistent in my mind?
Which, as you might imagine, is a big obstacle for me because I'm in the business.
Of administering mind vaccines to people, right?
Getting them to think properly.
But if the reality is that the architecture of the human mind is not built to change their positions...
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.
And there was a bunch of people in the room in that meeting.
And he wanted to be alone with Biden.
But Biden kicked everybody out.
So they had to listen.
So when Biden kicked everybody out, then he was talking to him.
And then he found out that Biden didn't even read these executive orders.
He was gone, man.
We knew he was gone.
I said he was gone in 2020. The presidency ages you faster than radiation.
Whatever the fuck happens when you have all that information, all that pressure, and 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.
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.
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 going to be caught by millions of people, but I'm willing to take that chance for the joy of sitting and chatting with you.
But if you're tight and you can't let yourself go, if you don't have the self-assuredness to be able to be vulnerable, then you can't.
That's why she could only speak in those little chunks.
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 has wandered around Seattle?
So, and now you're saying, you know, I'd love to believe in this stuff, but then incoming information comes in and then I kind of have to accept the fact that I can't believe this stuff.
Well, that...
In a sense, was the exact topic of my doctoral dissertation.
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 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, a rational decision maker.
But objectively speaking, that's not what we do, right?
Like you and I, every decision that we make every day, we don't sample all of the relevant and available information before we make a choice.
We sample until we have sufficiently differentiated between the choices that you say there is no point in sampling more information.
I now have enough information to vote for Trump.
I have enough information to marry this girl, to choose this employee.
So that's called a stopping strategy.
So I was studying the cognitive strategies that people use when they're making the stopping decision.
So what I did, so to answer your question of how I went about doing it, I brought in people into the lab and I made them...
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 not 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.
You could apply for anything.
You could apply choosing between fitness instructors, choosing between political candidates to vote for, for anything, right?
The reason why it's binary, it's because it only operates once you're down to two final alternatives.
You might have used another process to go from ten alternatives.
Like, let's say the primaries in the U.S. system, we first go through Republican primary, then we choose one final one, and then we go through Democratic.
Primary, we choose one.
And then the final two go head-to-head.
That's when my model comes in.
And so my model really explains how we make decisions across a bewildering number of cases, specifically how we stop and say, I'm marrying her, I'm hiring him, I'm voting for him.
You set what's called 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.
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, maybe 17. Measures that were comparing the dysphorics to the non-dysphorics, 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, Gadd, 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 wokester.
I couldn't believe how much he fell in my esteem.
But anyways, that's a separate...
I won't even mention his name, although he's worthy of being shamed on the Joe Rogan show.
And I wrote to him, I said, but I really think that...
You know, you're succumbing to the null effects bias because I really, it's worthy to publish this.
This was, I think, in 1998. It's information.
It's information that is worthy of the, 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.
And human beings, for whatever reason, I guess it's part of the motivation of acquiring information and of advancing your ideas.
We attach ourselves to ideas and one of the things 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.
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...
You can be unethical in how you're ignoring certain aspects of data for your opposing ideas.
So I can tell you, 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 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...
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 we're You're wedded to the idea.
But I think you're scared that if we run the studies and the data doesn't come out in support, then the...
But guess what?
It doesn't matter because we're going to reap some benefit from that.
Well, true...
And he looked at me and he was like, actually, you're exactly right, Professor.
I'm afraid to find out whether we're correct or not.
I said, just let's do it.
It was actually a study on...
So there was two parts of the study.
And I'm not sure if I've ever discussed it with you.
So I wanted to...
Look at what happens to men's testosterone levels when they engage in acts of conspicuous consumption and what happens to men's testosterone when they see other men engaging in acts of conspicuous consumption.
And the general story, as you might imagine, is when I engage in an act of conspicuous consumption, my testosterone goes up because I had a social win.
And when I see you, who's a competitor to me, Getting into your fancy Maserati, then my tail goes between my legs.
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...
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.
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.
Actually, I'm giving a talk at one of the universities here in Austin as part of this trip.
And I'm going to talk about the...
So, I'm old enough at this point, although I'd like to think that I still have many years left, but that I can sort of look back at, you know, what are some of the great things.
That I've faced as a professor.
What are some of the things that I'm disappointed in?
Probably the number one thing that most disappoints me in my fellow academics, and I don't mean that as a hottie 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 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.
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.
Well, trans was just the ultimate expression of this preposterous idea.
This inclusion, like this idea that...
The more suppressed you are, 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.
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.
Well, I think what University of Austin, I haven't gone to visit yet, but from my understanding, is they're trying to create students who are really well-read, well-read.
We 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.
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, I mean, 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.
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.
Consilience.
Have we ever talked about consilience on the show?
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...
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.
Okay, so I'm trying to give examples that you wouldn't have thought of.
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 surgery were placed in a room with a...
The one that was in a room with a window had many...
Better outcomes, different metrics.
Just that one manipulation, being able to see the light, right?
So, by the way, there's a field called biophilic architecture, which tries to incorporate our innate love of nature in the design of architectural buildings or interior spaces and so on.
So that would be another example of using evolutionary theory in a completely...
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.
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, it 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 that misalignment between what was evolutionarily adaptive back then and evolutionarily maladaptive now creates that health condition.
Let me give you a concrete example.
We've evolved the taste buds, the gustatory preferences, to prefer...
Fatty foods because of caloric uncertainty, caloric scarcity.
That makes perfect evolutionary sense when, as a hunter-gatherer, I have to spend 30,000 calories to go out and hunt, and I may not return with game.
But then when I do get the game, then I gorge on that meat because I don't know when I'm going to eat next, right?
In today's environment of plentitude, I don't face caloric uncertainty and caloric...
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.
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.
Your body achieves sort of a homeostasis with your food because you're not consuming like...
I can sit down and eat a steak, a steak alone, and I'll be fine.
But if there's mashed potatoes sitting right there with gravy, or there's some pasta, or there's a piece of bread with some butter, I'll go in.
But if I'm only eating steak, I don't feel the need to eat anything else.
I'm fully satisfied.
I'm not starving.
I'm not like, oh my god, I need more food.
It's like, I've had plenty of food, but ooh, that looks good.
And that is just the trick.
That's the trick.
But if you can get past that trick and just be disciplined with your diet and eat as much as you want of eggs and fish and meat, you will lose weight in a shocking way.
You probably have all sorts of shit wrong with you.
You can't be that big.
And if you just don't know what to do and you don't know where to turn and your habits are so deeply ingrained in your psyche that you can't pass up ring-dings and you can't stop eating sugary cereal or whatever the fuck it is that's your thing, 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.
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?
Although there are some cases where, and I want to talk about another variety of study in a second, but there are some cases where colors in nature are called, this was actually my first book in 2007, I talked about aposomatic.
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 might want to sort of stay wide of me.
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.
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, fusela.
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.
And for many other people who are in my circle, they may not be able to afford the ostentatious $350,000 Ferrari.
But when I am an upper upper in the billionaire class, then me driving a $350,000 car is not a costly signal in a biological sense of my worth because every single member of my billionaire friends group could match.
that signal.
Therefore, the way I can then compete with my billionaire friends is if I can spend my money in a lavish, wasteful way such that I buy an art piece that a monkey could have come up with and I pay wasteful way such that I buy an art piece that a monkey could have 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.
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.
That's Yoko Ono.
Everybody calls her Yoko Ono.
Like that's like a standard thing that people do because they think that Yoko Ono was a wedge that drove.
So a person who can do that with an intelligent guy like John Lennon.
John Lennon was very smart.
Very smart guy.
So a person who could like 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.
You know that my 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.
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.
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, like, the best sparring that I ever got ever was when I... Learn to spar with people who had the same intentions as me, just getting better and not trying to kill each other.
So my early days of sparring, when I was a young man, I trained at a very hard gym.
And in kickboxing, we tried to kill each other.
And so there was wars in the gym essentially every day.
You were fighting.
Whenever you sparred, you were essentially fighting.
You weren't pulling punches.
You were hitting each other as hard as you could.
It's a really dumb way to do it, but that's how you make a tough guy.
Right.
Like, 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.
When 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 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.
So this is what you do in kickboxing too, but you have to trust that the person is going to do this.
They're not gonna hit you hard.
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 them like that.
You're withholding.
Yeah, 100%.
You're not even going 50%.
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 throw things at you so that you cover up.
And you learn distance and you learn how to pull away and counter.
And you learn all these things.
Slowly start incorporating moving targets.
You start incorporating a person.
And the best way to do that is not get two people to try to kill each other.
Because that's what we used to do.
You don't learn anything.
The best way to do it is have someone gently move around with you.
And 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.
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...
So I'm looking to do something that raises my heart level in a way that is akin to what I... 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.
That kind of, I mean, it just makes sense that if you want to separate yourself from everybody else, what do you need to do to separate yourself?
Like, elite balance.
There's this guy, Armand Sarukian, 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.
He's insanely flexible.
He's jacked, super muscular, but ridiculously mobile and pliable.
See if you can find his workout routine.
He does all these crazy exercises where they're twisting him and weird.
It's very unusual for a guy that's that strong to be that agile and mobile.
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 breakdancers in Australia.
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 like breakdancing into his training, like learning breakdance techniques.
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...
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 full.
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.
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?
You're talking about, like, fish?
Are you talking about raptors?
Are you talking about dogs?
Like, what kind of life?
There's so much life.
There's so much different life.
I have a feeling that alien contact, intelligent beings from somewhere other than here, is like that.
I think it's probably more complex than we can imagine and probably there's an interdimensional aspect to it.
There's probably a non-physical aspect to it that seems physical too.
There's probably...
An area of this phenomenon that plays on human consciousness and dreams and our interactions with the unknown.
Because I think there's more to life than we can perceive.
I think there's more to the existence, this conscious existence in this moment in the universe.
There's more to it than we're picking up on.
I think we have limited senses and I think that...
This is what things like the telepathy tapes and all these different people that are studying paranormal phenomenon.
I think that's what this 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.
I don't know if you've listened to the telepathy tapes.
But maybe, I don't know if Jamie can pull out, it's a Netflix series that just, it's a documentary series that just started, 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.
John Mack was 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.
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?
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?
I think there's dimensions that we don't have access to that exist around us.
And these guys that pretend to understand quantum theory and all that stuff, when they start talking to you about it, talking about multiple dimensions, it leaves room for the possibility of these things.
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.
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...
Alpha-beta pruning, which is if you blow out the decision tree of a typical game, let's say like chess, you would need 10 to the 100 nodes, if I'm not mistaken, which is more nodes than there are particles in the universe.
I think in the universe there's 10 to the 80. So there are more nodes in a chess game than there are particles or atoms in the universe.
So what alpha-beta pruning does...
So, right, you're pruning.
So what it's basically doing is it starts testing going down the tree, and if it seems like no good outcome can come from here, you prune that tree.
So what you're doing is you're reducing the computational complexity of the tree so that you can arrive to a final solution much quicker.
And so that was the original time that I was exposed to AI. And at the time, I thought, wow, AI is going to take over the world.
and then AI went through a winter where it kind of died out.
And it's only in the last three, four, five years that really it has exploded.
But I want to tell you a few assignments that I had back then, and I would challenge someone to solve them on your show and post the 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 1-1-1-0-0-0-1-0-1-0, or it could be 1 million long.
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.
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 who would win the game before we even play.
Just by looking at some characteristic of any string.
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.
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 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?
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. A 1 or a 0. 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 one, one, one, which I know because it's an odd string and I started the game, I'm always going to get to it.
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.
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...
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, like, one of the big problems with artificial intelligence is the incredible need for power, right?
This is why these, like, Google's doing this AI thing where they want to develop three nuclear power plants to power their AI. Yeah, crazy.
This is nuts.
So 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?
But what I can say is that any type of problem that requires massive computational power because of the burdensome search process, You can use that for, right?
So imagine, although I don't think you need quantum computing for this, but say in medical diagnostics where you use an AI system, why isn't it that we don't, why do we even go to a physician and provide him or her with our symptoms when it should be so trivially easy to put that into an AI medical diagnostic system and it can look up Rare cases in 1827 in Zambia that exactly map 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 in Zambia.
So I would expect that in problems that require huge computational power to search through huge engines, 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'd 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 what's bizarre is that China is dumping insane amounts of money.
I think the estimation in the American dollar is a quarter of a trillion dollars into their AI program.
Their AI program is 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 with the Trump administration.
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.
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.
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...
He wasn't looking at the road, and he wasn't using his hands, and the car was driving.
You know, it's funny because linking it back to my area of research in psychology and decision-making, there was a psychologist who has now passed away, a very famous psychologist named Paul Mehl, M-E-E-H-L, who in the 1950s was already doing studies looking at what's called actuarial.
What does that mean?
Let's suppose I were to tell you that when it comes to making decisions for your admissions to 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 the 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 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.
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.
And especially I'll move to the left lane a little bit to see what's going on.
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 going to be kind of shitty.
Because it's going to be so much better than driving.
It's so much safer.
You're not going to worry about...
Ever being distracted by your phone.
You're not going to ever worry about, you know, 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.
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.
There is something to what you're saying, not quite telepathically, but so you know brain imaging.
FMRI. FMRI, right?
So in 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?
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?
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.
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.
Packaging matters because it's just showing the brain, which looks cool and science-y with all kinds of activation pattern.
It's sciency.
This other paper, which is exactly the same paper, doesn't have it.
It's not as sciency.
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 neuromarketing firms that tell you, that sell you, based on the activation patterns of your consumers, we can help you design better marketing campaigns.
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, like, 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?
It doesn't, 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's gonna happen Tuesday at noon, or I know an earthquake is definitely even gonna happen.
You don't know.
It's just, 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 they were trying, I think they tried them for manslaughter, and they were convicted, and I think they won on appeal.
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.
He was with the Innocence Project, and now he does his 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 is withheld or, you know, there's a ton of those cases.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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 LA. He goes, oh, I used to be a public defender in the LA County.
Then he met a woman who was a Quebecerer, 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's 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 LA 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.
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?
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 Wernher von Braun's influence on Musk's space exploration.
This is a book from, I think it's 1953. Okay, you ready?
1953 book, Mars Project, by Wernher 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's literally obsessed with Mars and has created rockets that you can catch.
Because if 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 Ingallsall Lockwood.
He would go on to write another book called The Last President in 1900. Mystery which involves the Trump family, Nikola Tesla, time travel, and dark forces.
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?
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.
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, this 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, 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.
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.
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 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 astonishing that you could have such shoddy thinking that you're unable to recognize what I just said?
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.
Like, 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, you know, 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.
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.
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.
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 can disagree with someone, and 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...
I don't think it's good for you.
I don't think it's good.
Look, I'm good at it, okay?
I'm a professional shit talker.
I could 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 mean, 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's 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 I mean, the only exceptions are if someone's a criminal.
If 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 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.
So I, you know, I... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Like, 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.
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, like...
I don't want to give a number, but it definitely happens.
It's like you don't know until you talk to someone.
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.