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Rationality And Human Behavior Dr Roy

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TITLE: Rationality and Human Behavior – Dr. Roy | Museum of the Future: Lessons from the Past CHANNEL: Dr. Roy Casagranda DATE: 2026-05-28 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Okay. Hi. Uh, sorry I switched the topic from the Roman Republic to rationality. I had to because I’m actually sick and to prove how irrational I am, I’m going to do the talk anyway. Um, but the Roman Republic, there’s too many moving parts and my brain is mush. So, I needed to do something really easy. Uh, the Roman Republic was too complicated. Um, and since rationality doesn’t exist, it’s really easy to talk about it. So, that’s that’s why we’re doing rationality. Okay. So, rationality. Um, I guess I should actually, you know what? Before I do that, hold on. How are we situated? It’s hard to see cuz I have lights in my eyes. H maybe we do. Okay, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to pretend that I I’m going to give each of you a hundred US dollars, but I I’m a professor so I can’t afford them. Uh because I I’m thinking there’s like even I don’t know if there’s quite a hundred of you, but you know that’s like 10 grand. I don’t have that. So So here’s what I want you to do. Uh the person on the left, I’m giving that person the $100. So, you you you right, you can do this, right? And then you two will have to work together. And we do this all the way back. And then the person who gets the $100, here’s what you have to do. You’re going to make an offer to the person to your left, you can give them anything you want. You can offer them anything. You can give them $99, $1, $50, whatever you want. You can’t negotiate. There’s no talking. I mean, except to say the money amount. So, if you if you if you decide it’s $12, you say 12. Done. You can’t say anything else. If the person accepts, then you both get it. You’re not actually getting it. This is just a This is just an exercise. I don’t want anybody coming back. Where’s my money? It’s not happening. There’s no money involved. We’re just pretending. All right. This is imaginary money like it’s going to be in the next few years for the for the planet. Um, so if the person says no, neither of you get anything. Got it? So the person to your left has to agree or you get nothing. We good? Okay, go. So, pick an amount, tell it to the person to your left, and then if that person agrees, you’re good. Are you negotiating? I told you no negotiating. Just tell them the amount. Okay. Wait, why are you talking to each other? You should have just said a number and you should have stopped, right? You’re proving my hypothesis that rationality doesn’t exist. Okay, now that person needs to say yes or no. If that’s done, let’s move on to the next step, which I’m assuming it is because I’ve lost you. Okay, let’s stop now. Since there’s not supposed to be any negotiating, we need to stop now. Okay. Did anybody end up rejecting the offer? Yes, there were there were rejections. Okay. So, who who who offered $50? So, you split it in half. So, it looks like I’m guessing a quarter or a third of you somewhere in that area. Okay. Who did more than $50? Okay. So, that looks like that’s like 20% I’m guessing again. Uh, who did less than $50? All right. Uh, I’m guessing 15%. So, that doesn’t add up to 100, but it’s okay. We’re going to move on anyway. Um, who did less than $10? Anybody? One. One person. Two people. Okay. So, now we know where the nose came from. Oh, he did. You are rational. Anybody else say yes to amount that was less than $50? What? Yes. So, two people took an amount less than $50. $2. What was your amount?

$1. Okay. What was your amount? $12. Okay. So, here’s here’s how this works. If you were rational, you would have said yes no matter how much because you’re going to end up with an extra dollar. So why why were there any nos? There should have been 100% yeses. But also, if you are rational, you would have never offered 50. You would offered $1. And then the other person, so you two are rational, and I’m going to give it to you, too, as well. You’re both rational. The rest of you are irrational. Mobuk. So that experiment has been done over and over and over again and every time it turns out that the irrational result is the majority like the vast majority. I haven’t counted y’all but you know two two couples 5% maybe of you were rational. 95% are irrational. So that’s then that begs the question, how did we get here? Because everybody if I walked, you know what I should have done before this? I should have done a survey. Who here believes they’re rational? And 95% of you would have raised your hands and 93% of you would have been wrong. Here’s the thing. We live in a world where rationality has become like the gold standard how to think. But how did we end up with that as an idea? Some of it goes back to those guys which is why I’m assuming we have a AI picture of Greeks um doing philosophy because at some level what they were saying was we need to we need to think through things and not just do what we’ve been taught to do. In other words, there need we need to question everything which assumes then that the person doing the questioning is capable of rational thinking. And if you read uh Plato, the the mind of Socrates is clearly like on a different level. So Plato Affleaton wrote plays. I swear they did that because it would make it easy to remember what he wrote. And Socrates is I think with one exception uh always the central character and Socrates was in real life Plato’s teacher. We don’t know anything from Socrates because he never wrote anything. So all we have are the accounts of his students Plato and Zenopon. Uh Zenopon had what was what’s probably a more realistic uh view of Socrates. Plato clearly was madly in love with Socrates in every way that you can think of. Um, and as a result, he always has Socrates is the central main figure. Having said that, uh, in at least one play, the Pythagoras, Socrates loses the debate. So, he doesn’t always win. He’s the hero, but he’s he’s not always the victor, which is really interesting to me. I’ve read The Republic multiple times. It’s my favorite of Plato’s works. And every time I read it, this is like the only thing I’ve ever read more than once. Every time I read it, uh, I don’t I don’t have the attention span to read something twice. Every time I read it, I’m always blown away because I I walk away going, I didn’t notice this the first time I read it. It’s really way deeper than you would think was possible. And um the thinking the like the level at which Socrates digs in it it’s shocking. There are moments where you’re like a I didn’t see this or oh this is really this is really profound. And so I think in some ways that’s what we think of as as rationality. What’s also interesting though is he’s also a nasty little manipulator who does sophistry even though he hates the sophists. And sophistry is where you try to win the debate just for the sake of winning it. You don’t care about whether you’re right or wrong. So something is sophisticated, it’s actually not supposed to that’s not a good thing. You’re not you’re not, oh that’s sophisticated sophisticated is supposed to be an insult. But uh we we frequently mess those things up. Um so S Socrates would go in sometimes and do the sophistry that he would say was horrible. And actually when he loses in the debate with Pythagoras that’s the accusation is Pythagoras was a better sophist and he beat him on on his with his sophistry rather than with the truth. Socrates of course would ask you questions. So you would you would pose a question to Socrates and he would go, “I don’t know the answer to that.” And he lies. He’s just a liar. He knows the answer almost every time. And then he would say, “Well, if that that’s a good question. What do you think about X?” And then he would get you to answer. And then you would go, you would make a hypothesis. And then he would test it through logic. And as he would test it, he would keep asking you questions. You would keep answering. He would eventually get it so that you proved you wrong. He would get you to contradict yourself through a series of really cruel manipulations. And then of course they sentenced him to death uh because they couldn’t stand him anymore. He had gone too far and they made him kill himself which is like the worst part of it because they’re like, you know, at that point you’re sentenced to death. They’re like, “No, I’m not doing it. What are you going to do? Kill me? Go ahead. That would be better.” Like I would think it would be really hard to drink hemlock. like m you drink it. Can you test it first? Does it taste good? So, I actually don’t want to talk about the grease. I just wanted to make sure to mention them because they’re obviously important for our conversation. What I want to talk about is what happened really starting in the 19th century. So, economists in the 19th century had gotten really good at describing macroeconomics. They had gotten really good at sort of doing the big picture stuff. So by 1890, macroeconomics was developed enough that they were actually explaining portions of the economy. The economy of course on the planet has gotten so complicated since then that I actually think we are way less capable of describing what’s going on today than we were in 1890, ironically enough. But they had a problem. And the problem they had was they couldn’t explain microeconomics. They couldn’t figure out what the individual was doing. And so these economists sat down and asked themselves a question. How do we figure out how to describe this little, you know, like a consumer purchasing an item? How do we figure that out? And what they should have done is turned to philosophy and they should have turned to to psychology, right? Because those are the two fields that were actually trying to answer questions like that and had been by that point for 2,400 years, right? Like this was they this wasn’t like they had just started working on this problem. Um if you go all the way back to Thales, right? That’s 25 centuries of work on this issue. Obviously interrupted centuries. It wasn’t 25 straight centuries. But still, it’s not like there wasn’t anything already done. The economists were like, why would I read philosophy? It’s such a waste of time. So, they refused to do it. They also decided they hated psychologists. So, they refused to go to psychology. They abandoned both. and they decided that they were smart enough to figure out the answer without turning to those two fields, which I I would go ahead and say is irrational. Here’s what they came up with. All humans are always right away you’ve lost me. All humans always like first of all if it was like all humans are always consuming calories to live. Okay, you there I’m good with that one. I I believe that that’s probably true. But if you’re going to do a behavior thing, you you’ve already lost me because there’s no way that that the rest of the sentence won’t be true. But this is what the rest of the sentence said. All humans are always rational and self-interested. And you’re like, wait, what? All humans are rational and always self-interested. So, how do you explain parenthood? That’s clearly not self-interest. How do you explain soldiers that throw themselves on hand grenades in combat? That’s clearly not self-interest. Max Cleland, he was a senator from Georgia, Democrat who had been in the Vietnam War and in his trench, they had beer. Uh, one thing you probably should do, especially if you if it’s a knockdown dragout fight where you’re like in a stuck position with trenches, is you want to keep your soldiers a little inebriated. I know you’re like, “Wait, but it’s against my religion or whatever.” You’re going to want to make a pass on this one. You want to make an exception. For example, the drinking age United States is 21. Combat soldiers can drink at 18. They they they you need the German military, one of the finest fighting machines in human history, had a steady flow of alcohol going because think about it, there’s somebody trying to kill that guy. You don’t want to face that sober. You need a little So the one one thing that the United States military did in the Vietnam War was made sure the beer was going to the front line, keep the soldiers nice and inebriated. So, one of the soldiers gets drunk. He starts playing with a hang grenade as a joke. And then he notices the pin has been pulled out of the hang grenade. And when he notices this, instead of throwing it like a rational human being would do in that moment, he drops it in the trench with his friends. Max Cleland doesn’t waste a second. He jumps on the hang grenade, elbows and knees on top of the hang grenade. In that moment, he knows he’s dead. There’s no way he’s going to survive this. The hang grenade is blowing up underneath him. It took off two legs and an arm and he survived. That’s not rational. Or maybe it is rational, but it’s certainly not self-interested, right? It isn’t rational according to the definition that the guys who came up with this with say though because in their mind the only type of rationality is self-interested rationality. So another test let me give you another test they like to do. All right there is a let me make sure I did the math right because I’ll mess it up if I don’t. Uh yeah this will work. It doesn’t matter. I will give you a 100% chance of getting $1 million or a a 95% chance of winning $5 million. Which one do you take? The 5 million. That’s the answer. Because mathematically, you’re going to end up way ahead, right? 100% of 1 million, 95% of 5 million. mathematically you should take the five million. The problem is 95% that there’s a one in 20 chance you’re going to go home crying. And when we as human beings we we recognize the difference between zero and and 5%. So, even if the rational self-interested answer is the 5 million, I think you’re an idiot if you don’t take the one. I mean, unless you’re already worth 50 million and then what do you care? Like, it won’t change the quality of your life. There’ll be no impact. So, why not go for the the the five? But if you’re if you’re like the rest of the population, you take the 1 million. But the argument is no, but mathematically the answer is the five million. I actually think that’s irrational. So, so that’s the type of conversation we need to have. We need to figure that out. So, here’s what they mean by all humans are always rational and self-interested. So, as a consumer, when you go to buy a product, you want the best quality product for the best price. Okay, I buy that. But then what about all the behaviors that you do that can’t be explained by that? So, for example, if you buy an expensive sports car, there is no meaningful utility in being able to drive 300 miles hour on the freeway. First of all, you’re probably not good enough of a driver to not kill yourself doing it. And then second of all, the speeding ticket or the time in prison won’t make it worthwhile. So, right, like that’s irrational. And yet, the person does it. So, how to explain that? And the answer they came up with was based on the information the person has it was a rational self-interested choice which I think is really funny. So it’s GIO right garbage in garbage out. If in other words if they have bad information they’re going to make a bad answer. How is that rational ever? Especially if what you’re really thinking is if you’re buying the expensive sports car that has no utility in your life other than maybe it’ll make you a little happy. Um or you like the color red or or it’s it’s a status symbol. You just need to have the expensive car because you want people to see you in it, right? You’re like, “Okay, especially the crowd I roll around in. If I don’t have a Rolex and I don’t have” and then you’re doing that stuff, okay, right? There’s like that’s the argument that there’s some form of rationality going on. But here’s the twist. If some if we are all always rational, then rationality doesn’t exist. Because for a thing to exist, the possibility that it doesn’t exist must occur, right? Because now rationality and behavior are synonymous. You can just say you have behavior because apparently all behavior is rational. So that doesn’t they just destroyed it. And if we’re always self-interested then again you can just say behavior because if all our behavior is self-interested then then there’s no point even having a term for it. So let me start with the self-interested thing first real quick. So elephants are on one sorry let me do bears. Elephants are a bad example. Let’s do ants are a better example. I’m going to start with bears on the other side. Bears are on one side. Bears are solitary animals. They hate each other’s guts. Like a male bear in the wild sees his mate that he mated earlier with that year, and his two cubs, his children, he will charge them with intent to murder. And now the mother, who’s a smaller animal, is stuck trying to defend the cubs who aren’t fast and don’t know what’s going on. Why is dad so mad? He wants to kill you children. Rotten. And she’s like just trying to defend this big animal that’s trying to get to his kids to kill them. So that’s on one side of the spectrum, which also then makes you wonder how they made it. Like what the heck is that? Jeez, talk about sociopath. Is that my child? I bet he’s tasty. We need to kill him. Now, on the other side of the spectrum are ants. Bees might be a good example, but we’re going to go with ants because ants go one step beyond bees. So, let’s say there’s a little body of water and the ants want to cross it. They will literally construct a bridge made out of ants. They will link together and they will cross this little body. It can’t be a big body of water obviously. It’s just a small one. The ants on the bottom of the bridge will drown. It doesn’t occur to them that this is a bad thing. This is just what they do. Well, the reality is we’re in the middle. We’re not bears. We’re not ants. We’re not always self-interested. And we’re not always sacrificing. Sometimes we are a little selfish because think about what happens with our species. If I’m rich, it increases the likelihood that my children will live to reproductive age. And if I can pass that wealth on to them, it increases the likelihood that they’ll make me grandchildren who will make me great grandchildren. In other words, there’s sort of a genetic legacy that’ll get passed on. Now, we’re just rich enough and smart enough to recognize that’s not all that meaningful, but that only just happened in the last few decades. Our species was always very driven by this to the point where we did wars over this, right? So, there’s an incentive for me to become wealthy. But if I do it at the expense of my community and in the process injure, damage or harm my community, I’ve just dramatically decreased the likelihood that my children are going to make me grandchildren because no human being is capable of surviving on our own. This the story of Robinson Crusoe is interesting to us because when when he’s stuck on the island by himself until he meets Friday in that beginning part we’re actually asking the question is he still a human? Can a human exist by themselves? And the answer is long term obviously no. But even short term he’s kind of not by himself. He’s surviving based on the skill set he’s learned over the course of his life that was taught to him by his community. If he was just born in the wild and somehow made it to adulthood, he would die because he wouldn’t have information. He wouldn’t know how to function. But the whole time, of course, the one thing he wants is to have another human being because that’s how we generate meaning in our lives. Meaning comes to us. Yeah. The meaning of life is to create meaning. It’s that’s I just ruined it for you guys. You’re still trying to figure it out. That’s the meaning of life. So, how do I know I’ve created meaning? Because a person sees what I’ve done and then they reflect it back to me. They confirm that yes, that was meaningful. Yeah, I did get something out of that. Yeah. Yeah. You will have a ripple effect that will go on after your death. You you you made an impact. That’s impossible if you’re on a desert island by yourself slowly dying. If your community is damaged, harmed, or in trouble, you’re in trouble. And our species is smart enough to know that. It’s why we have this impulse to serve. It’s why there’s a military. That’s why there’s soldiers willing to jump on grenades. We we instinctively know this. It’s part of our framework. So to make the assertion that we’re always self-interested is beyond ludicrous. It means that those guys never spent any time reading philosophy or psychology. They’re completely divorced from their own personal experiences. Like you know, you get a flat tire and somebody pulls over to help you. It’s not self-interest. They’re not getting anything out of it other than the urge to help others. And what’s really interesting is the societies that do the best at this are the societies that have the highest happiness ratings and the longest life expecties, right? They’re the the the population of people that that are linked together are the ones where there’s the most satisfaction. The populations of people that are sort of atomized and separated and always thinking only about their own well-being and wealth are the people who always say they’re the most miserable. So clearly there’s something about our species that makes us want to do both. Okay. So now let’s go back to the rationality thing because the rationality thing is actually really delicious. So political scientists, that’s my training. I’m a political scientist. Uh political scientists decided that they wanted to be scientists. So they stuck the word science on the end of politics, right? No, none of the other social sciences did that. I guess social science did it as a whole. But you anthropology, sociology, economics, uh, geography, psychology, political science. The problem was, how do you apply science to politics? So if I have an electron and I want to study the electron and I put it at the same atmospheric pressure and the same temperature and the same light levels, right? Because obviously photons hitting a electron are going to change its behavior. I can have it in Australia. I can have another one in South Africa. I could have one here in Dubai. I could have one in Moscow. And they’ll behave exactly identical as long as the conditions are exactly the same. And it can be four completely different electrons. But if I take four different people with four different backgrounds, a Russian, a South African, Emirati, and an Australian, and then I subject them, same temperature, same light levels, and I subject them to some situation, they’re going to react different based on culture, but not just culture, personality. And and and and so for me to make a rule about that is going to be really complicated. And we tried. We looked for rules everywhere. We found one. Social science, not political scientists. Political scientists never found a rule. Social scientists found a rule. We were so happy. I was a kid when it happened. I didn’t know. Here’s the rule. As technology increases, population increases. And then here is the best part about the rule. which caused which? Was it the increase in technology that allowed for the population to grow or was it the population growing that forced us to adapt to create more technology? And the answer was obviously yes. Like I couldn’t believe there was even a conversation. What What do you mean there’s a conversation? How is this a a yes or no situation? Like it’s obviously both. Why is this no? And there was one faction that was like, “No, no, the technology.” And the other faction was like, “No, no, it’s a population. Oh, excuse me. I really hate this haunt uh boobo pox fenza. I have.” You want to hear the great tragedy of this? When we got the bubonic plague, the last time, well, it’s still around. You know that, right? Like there’s an outbreak every once in a while. I feel like it’s Arizona and Madagascar that keeps happening. You’re like, “Woo, what the heck?” Uh because it’s scary. Like, what if it goes like it did the the really nasty one 1346 47 48 49 in four years half the world’s population was dead. I I don’t even know what to do with that. Um, it changed our DNA so that we’re more vulnerable to Corona viruses. Isn’t that cool? Thanks. So, the cold and COVID. Yay. I love Corona virus. Thanks, bubonic plague. All right. Um, I don’t even remember. Oh, yeah. Science. The the techn the the population grows, technology grows, technology grows, population grows until the 90s when we lost our only rule. The richest, most educated countries in Europe started to show flat population growth and eventually negative population growth. And pretty soon it was pretty much all of Europe. And then the next thing you know it was also the white population in the United States. And then it just turned out to be everybody with an education and money. It didn’t matter what your skin color was had negative population growth. I mean Japan is literally going to be extinct in a few decades if they don’t change their immigration policies and start letting people in. Um and they’ve decided that’s it. They’re that’s the path they’ll take. They don’t want the immigrants. It’s like, okay. I mean, you think about it. You just let in a little stream, let them mate with with the locals. No, it’ll make us impure. And then a culturate the children, you’ll still have your legacy. Nope. We’re going for purity. Extinction. It’s cool. That’s fantastic real estate. We’ll just wait you out. Somebody will get it. I’m not sure I would have gone that policy, but that’s what this that’s the path. So, our one rule is gone. Now, as technology increases, population decreases. Oh. Oh, well. So sad. Move on. In other words, there’s literally no rules because we can’t because things are constantly in flux, including our technology, but our also our culture. In other words, if I design a constitution in 1787, it might have been the best thing imaginable, but how’s it going to hold up in 2026? And the answer is we know it’s not. It’s going to fail miserably because, well, it needed an update. The problem is who would have done the update? Who was smart enough and rational enough that you would have had a better document? And the answer is probably there probably isn’t somebody. That’s that’s the great problem with our species. All right. So political scientists were trying to figure out how they could promote this idea that polit you could study politics as a science. And then in 1957 something happened. Anthony DS wrote an economic theory of democracy, a book called an economic theory of democracy. And what he did was he took this thing that the economist had come up with which became known as rational choice theory that people make rational choices. By the way, it’s a hypothesis. It’s not a theory. But anyway, uh and then for short, people call it rat choice theory, which I’ve always thought was a great name because it’s like a rat in a maze. So rational choice theory, which was an economics idea, got superimposed on top of politics. And what Anthony D said is voters could do this. They could apply the same logic, the same reasoning that they do when they’re in the grocery store picking a can of beans. They could they could grab that that same logic and they could apply it to how they vote. Wouldn’t that be something? But I don’t think Anthony ever meant it to become the answer. I think he thought this is a good way to approach politics. Political scientists being who they were desperate for an answer went that’s the answer. All humans are always rational and self-interested all the time. And this is the lecture that will make it so that 85% of political scientists on the planet will hate my guts forever going forward because they’re wrong. That’s insane. and the psychologists proved him wrong. That’s the best part. So there is a guy named Antonio Damasio. For the record, political scientists kept doing all these experiments like the two that I talked about. There’s other ones as well. And there time after time after time, people made the wrong decision. Antonio Damasio was a psychologist who was a professor in a university and at the same time had his own practice. It’s rare that you do that, right? Either usually you’re either in academia or you’re you’re practicing and he was both. and he had a group of clients that had had a a brain injury. They there had been a physical or disease damage done to their brain and all of them had had an IQ test before and then after and had suffered no IQ change. They were they were functionally at least IQ level the same. But all of them had their lives completely implode on them. They lost their jobs. They lost their friends. They ended up divorced. Their lives just completely unraveled. So, of course, there’s this mystery. What happened to this guy’s brain that his life is unraveling when his IQ is the same? What happened? There must be something. He noticed a pattern and that was that all of these clients were extremely irritating and he started to realize why they were losing their jobs and their friends because he’s just impossible to be around. And he he wrote about it where he say like, “Okay, this is a great session we had today. Hey, do you want to schedule your next one? And the person would go, “Yes.” And you say, “Okay, when would you like to meet?” And the person would pull open their calendar and they’d say, “How about Thursday at 1:00 next week?” Damasio was like, “Okay, no, wait. How about Monday, the week after at 2 p.m.?” Okay. No, no. How about Tuesday? That Tuesday at 3. No, no. And And they would do this for like 10 minutes. And Damasio was like, “I have to see my next client. we you need to pick and the person couldn’t do it. They couldn’t pick a time in a day. So he did the most important ethical thing you can do and that was experiment on his patience and I am eternally grateful. He told his patients, “Today’s my wife’s birthday, and I was going to cook her her favorite meal. But the problem is is I can’t by the time I’m done seeing my clients today, she’s going to get home at 7. I need to get, you know, I need to get home by 6:00 to cook her the meal, but that means I need to finish at 5 to go to the grocery store. I don’t have time. my last I see my last client at six or it finishes at six. So, you know, if I have the groceries already, I can do this, but I need somebody to go grocery shopping for me. Can you do it? And he pulls out a list of groceries he wants purchased. And the patient goes, “Yeah, of course. I’ll just go to the grocery store and and buy this for you.” What the patient doesn’t know is that Damasio is behind them watching what they’re doing in the grocery store. It’s not his wife’s birthday. Here’s what he found. They got stuck. Little things would just completely trip them up. They couldn’t make a decision. They were just frozen. one of them for one hour. So he asked for garbanzo beans, chickpeas, hummus. He asked for a can of hummus, but the the the beans, right? Not not mashed and with like chocolate and olive oil or something mixed in it. And this one client for an hour was stuck in front of the cans of beans. He had gone and he to another aisle and gotten a can opener and he had actually gotten a spoon and he had actually opened the cans and was eating them. and he had read the labels backwards and forwards because he wanted to know the ingredients and he was looking at the price and he was trying to consider like what the nutrition levels were and then the taste. That’s why he opened them up and he couldn’t figure it out. He didn’t know which can to put in the cart. There were six different brands and he was paralyzed. And at this point he’s like in tears. He can’t make a decision. And so Damasio is like, “What has happened to these people?” And of course, he he he intervenes. He runs in. He’s like, “Dude, I got this. I got this. It’s okay. You just go home now.” And he helps the guy out of the grocery store and buys the opened cans of beans. And here’s Well, fMRI come into the picture. new technology where we can look at the brain and see what parts of your brain are firing when we do things like ask you to think of the color red or show you the color red, right? And we can just see what’s happening in your brain. Now, just because an part of your brain lights up doesn’t actually necessarily mean anything, but of course we want it to because then that makes our lives easier because we can say, “Oh, red occurs in this part of the brain.” It may or may not be true, but whatever. That’s not what’s important. What’s important is it allowed us to do a better job of mapping the brain than we had before. So, starting around 2007, psychology took off in a new way. Because you think about it, what is psychology? It’s the study of the brain. And we knew this much, right? All of a sudden in 2007, we we know this much. We suddenly know a lot more compared to where we were or we’re still noobs at this. The human brain is still a complete mystery. But there it is. Fly brain is still a complete mystery. So what Damasio discovers is this. The part of the brain damaged in each and every single one of his clients was a membrane that attached the emotion center to the rest of the brain. His clients didn’t have emotions. They only had logic. They only had reason. They only had rationality. And they were paralyzed. Why did we love Spock so much in Star Trek? Because he was a funny character to us. Because we couldn’t relate to him at some level. He was a he was he was comedic. And it turns out he would have been a horrible person to be around because since he doesn’t have any emotions, he can’t make decisions. Okay, you’re in a situation where you can’t decide. You’re stuck. There are three cans of beans in front of you and you don’t know which one to pick because the taste and the nutrition and the price are all close. So you go and you grab that one, right? Yeah. And you’re like, “No.” You put it back and you grab a different one. You’ve had that experience, right? Maybe not with a can of beans, but with something. The emotion you had was regret. That’s not the right one. So, you picked a different one and you walked away. That regret is the emotion center in your brain telling you that’s the wrong one. Because here’s what we’ve discovered over the course of the last 19 years. The rational part of our brain. That’s the part that talks to you. So when you’re like sitting and you don’t have music on and you’re not watching TV and you’re not reading something and there’s that voice in your head, it’s like, “Oh my god, shut up.” And you like you try to meditate and it’s like and you’re why can’t I shut this thing off? It’s like a waterfall and then you know you numb yourself. So you go watch TV or you listen to music just to get that thing to shut up. That’s the rational part of your brain. It’s the conscious part of your brain. You know that whole conversation, do we have a subconscious? We have a subconscious. This is no longer speculation. Psychology had proposed it decades before that there is in fact the subconscious part of your brain but people were like oh I doubt that very much because when I stop to meditate I hear d and you know it’s the problems of the day was my hair okay how will I balance my pay my bills I can’t wait to buy a new house like whatever nonsensical thing is going through your brain in that moment and it’ll switch to the next You all have this, right? You’re looking at me weird. It turns out the subconscious brain, by the way, your conscious brain, it’s okay. It’s I don’t want to use the word dummy. It’s slow. It’s deliberate. It wants to think things through and it has language, which is why it won’t shut up. I just wanted to give you a moment to hear it. It turns out your subconscious mind is a superco computer. It turns out your subconscious mind is beyond comprehension genius level brilliant. If you want to get smarter, start listening to your subconscious mind more. I’m serious. Let your subconscious mind work for you. More. You already do. Whether you notice or not, I’m just saying more. When you walk into this room, there are sounds and sights and smells and you know, you can feel the temperature. There’s all this data coming in. And what your subconscious mind is literally doing is it’s filtering out the data it thinks you don’t need. So, let me give you one of my favorite experiments on this. Some researchers decided to go into emergency rooms and during breaks they would go in up to emergency room doctors and they would say, “We’re conducting an experiment on diagnosis. Would you be willing to look at some X-rays and diagnose the patient?” You know, half the emergency room doctors are like, “Go to hell.” And the other half are like, “I can’t wait.” And so they get about half of them. And then they show them the X-ray and then the emergency room doctor go, “Oh yeah, fractured tibia.” And then they show them the next one. Oh yeah, look, broken rib. Right. What the real experiment was was they took when they did the X-ray, they put a little toy gorilla in the X-ray. So there’s a there’s a broken bone, but there’s also a toy gorilla. And like 95% of the MDs didn’t notice the toy gorilla. They just noticed the broken bone. And it was because their subconscious mind literally went toy gorilla useless. Delete. Next. Oh, look. Fractured tibia done. Diagnosis. We have to think about the act of driving a car. How insane that is. There’s cars on either side of you. There’s cars behind you. There’s cars in front of you. And they’re all just as distracted as you are. They’re They’ve got their music too loud. They’re drinking. They’re eating. So, they’re using knees to steer and they’re texting. So, there’s like food and drink all over their phone. So, it’s slippery. And yet somehow we’re not just all dead. Don’t get me wrong. If you knew the data on car accidents, you would never get in one. They’re like, you would be a fan of trains. You just let me let me have trains and planes all the time to get around everywhere. Cars are dangerous. Uh I feel really sad for motorcyclists because there’s all these motorists who are eating and drinking and texting, killing them. Anyway, at least if you’re in the little glass, aluminum, plastic bubble thing, you have a chance of not being killed. So, um, somehow our brains are managing all the data coming in and delegating to you. It obviously you’re going to make a mistake eventually driving like that, but think how many hours you’ve driven like that and gotten away with it. The reality is we shouldn’t be able to. The reason we are is your subconscious mind is managing the data. Because if you had all of the data hit you at the same time, you’d be overwhelmed. You wouldn’t be able to do anything. You’d be paralyzed by it. So your subconscious mind acts as a filter. But it also does something else. It makes calculations. So some of you are really awful procrastinators. I’m going to make an argument for why that’s actually a good thing. So, don’t do I need 48 hours to do something. I’m going to start on it with 24 hours left. That that’s self-destructive procrastination. That’s not what I mean. That’s that’s Don’t think that’s what I’m endorsing. I’m against that. No, that’s wrong. That Let’s say you have seven days to do a project, but you only need two days to do it. Here’s what you do on the first, we’ll make it a college class. You you have seven days to write an essay. You know that you’ve been handed a topic. You only need two days to do the actual writing. So, what you do is on day one, the moment you get it, read the assignment. do the look at the topic and then wait three, four days max and then start. That way you still like three days to do the two-day assignment or four days to do the two-day assignment. Kill those first three days though because you’re not wasting your time. Your subconscious mind is actually working on it. Your subconscious mind was was there when you read the assignment. Here’s what’s really weird. Your subconscious mind doesn’t have the ability to talk to you directly. So, it gives you emotions. That’s why you had the regret thing with the can. Your subconscious mind went, “No, dummy. Look at this. It’s this one.” And you have the regret and it gives you the right emotion. You walk into a room and you know something’s wrong. Hair stands up on the back of your neck. Your subconscious mind is giving you a warning. Something’s wrong. Pay more attention. That’s where that comes from. That cool. Now, if you’ve ever written a college paper, you sit down on a computer and you start typing. Even if you’re one of those people who plans everything out, I admire you and I don’t understand you. Like, what is that? Like, I sit down, I just start typing. And by the way, I end up having to delete the first half of what I write because it was really just me sorting out my thoughts. Whether you’re that type of person or the planner who plans it all out and they’ve got like bullet points and they know exactly where they’re going. When you start writing the sentences that are coming out of your your mind, that’s that’s magic. You didn’t know how that sentence was going to look. You didn’t know how it was going to take form on the page. Even if you planned it out, you didn’t know. You knew what you wanted to write, but you didn’t know how it was going to unfold. That’s your subconscious. It’s literally there guiding your hand and the words are coming to you as you go. Isn’t that amazing? You know how you get stuck and you can’t think of the answer, but then you stop thinking about it and then the answer comes to you? It’s cuz your conscious mind finally turned off long enough for your subconscious mind to work on the problem and then it gave you the answer later. So, I don’t know about y’all, but when I was a kid, I was taught that women are emotional and men are logical. If true, that means women have subconscious minds that are super genius computers and men have dumb, deliberate, rational minds. Let’s sit there and go You can’t shut it up. It’s like, “Oh my god, be quiet. I can’t think.” The reality is is it’s not a gender thing other than we have, is it misogyny? Pretty sure it’s misogyny built into every single culture on the planet today. And there’s this bias against women. But the reality is is most men just get their emotions beaten out of them, right? It’s not natural to not have emotions, especially when you consider the fact that you have a subconscious mind. That that’s how it communicates to you is through emotion. And so men end up oppressed, repressed, suppressed, I don’t know, one of those three things. I’m still trying to figure out why we have three words for this. I think it’s suppressed. Anyway, men end up with some bad condition that stops them from being a fully functional person because they’re told emotions are bad. By the way, I spent years with my therapist learning how to cry. And I now cry at the drop of a hat. Like I I love it. It is my favorite thing to do after laughing. I like laughing a little bit better, but crying is number two. It’s fantastic. Uh, what surprises me when is when I cry at something I didn’t expect, like Monarch, the TV show. What the heck? There’s so much emotion in these monsters. I never expected that. Um, so here’s what Damasio ends up concluding, and it’s kind of an important thing. It’s not that we’re a rational species or not rational. It’s not that we’re an emotional species or not emotional. We need our conscious mind with in part because that’s what we’re conscious of. It’s when you think about it in many ways the the you that you present to the world but it’s also the you that you are experiencing on a regular basis. We need that conscious mind because it is deliberate and it is trying to figure out what to do next. The subconscious mind that’s the supercomput if you like. It’s the player playing your character because you’re in a computer game. Right. It feels like that. It’s really weird. It’s the that part. It’s emotion driven. In other words, being a Vulcan, being Spock is actually awful. It’s not the right answer. And this stereotype of the male being this super rational being and detached from their emotions is a disaster. It means that your subconscious mind is being ignored. I actually had a student, a female student. I did this lecture and she said, “Oh, when you do the eeny meenie miny mo thing, I always pick the one that it lands on, even if my mind is telling me not to.” AND I’M LIKE, “NO, NO, NO, NO.” That’s why you do that exercise. It’s to figure out what your subconscious mind is telling you not to have the random answer. The random answer is wrong. If there’s three items, twothirds of the time, you want your subconscious mind involved. That cool. In other words, you you can you can harness your subconscious mind by careful planned procrastination. I don’t again, I’m not endorsing the the latter form, which I have done too much in my life. Uh I need the adrenaline to make it so I can get through. So, if I know that there’s 24 hours to do a 48 hour project, I’ve got a lot of adrenaline and that’s self-destructive, but it but I love adrenaline. So, it’s like uh succeed or enjoy life. It’s hard. I could you do both? And then the other thing that you can do, of course, is trigger it with tricks like the demon d eeny miny mo thing where you’re trying to figure out which one to land on. So Daniel Conorman in 2002 won the Nobel Prize for economics even though he’s a psychologist because all of his work pointed to rationality almost certainly never occurs in the human experience. Like you could just get rid of the word. And the reason is it’s not that it’s there is no rationality. It’s that that rationality is mixed with emotion. By the way, the ancient Greeks said that the ancient Greeks said that emotion tempers rationality and vice versa. In other words, they had actually figured this out. It’s just somewhere along the line in sort of like the Anglo mindset, the English 19th century Victorian mindset, we came up with this nonsensical idea that somehow rationality needed to be divorced from emotions. And now thankfully due to psychology and some brilliant psychologists we now realize that’s a disaster. Now having said that when Daniel Conorman won the Nobel Prize in 2002 as the first non-economist to ever win it because he showed that almost everybody is almost always not rational and people are self-interested about half the time, right? There was kind of an assumption made that well but the leadership they’re rational. The leadership being the business leaders, the leadership being the politicians, they’re rational. Of course they are. Especially because the assumption was that the business leaders are all greed motivated. So they’re going to make the best decision available to them. So in 2017, Richard Thaylor, a guy who had worked with Daniel Conorman, a guy who is an economist but employs a lot of psychology in his work, won another Nobel Prize. And what he mostly showed was no, the the business and political elites are also just as irrational as everybody else. Or if you don’t like the word irrational because it’s loaded, you could just say nonrational. you can just avoid the irrational label. Um, I embrace my irrationality. Why is this important to know? Well, for one thing, let’s stop pretending. Right here, let’s do an example because I think sometimes when we’re just talking hypothetically or philosophically, it we lose the the thing. So, I’m in a taxi cab here in Dubai. uh I don’t know four months ago, 5 months ago, and the taxi cab driver um is a brown man and his name was Muhammad. So, I’m going to go with he was probably Muslim. Just I’m going to make that assumption. I’m going to take that leap. It’s not guaranteed obviously, but odds are. And he turns to me and he goes, “Where are you from?” And I said, “United States.” Actually, I don’t think I did that. I think I said Texas because that’s what I usually do. Texas. Then he said, “I like Donald Trump.” I went, “Okay, I actually don’t care. I just need you to take me home.” He wants the conversation, though, so I have to ask him why. I held off as long as I could and finally, okay, why? Cuz he’s dealing with the immigrant problem. So I I went, “There’s an immigrant problem?” And he goes, “Yes, there’s all those immigrants in the United States.” I I go, “We’re in we’re in the UAE. It’s 89% immigrant. I can tell because you’re not wearing the uniform. You’re not Amirati. So, you’re an immigrant. He goes, “That’s right. I’m an immigrant.” I’m confused. He goes, “But we’re a different kind of immigrant here. You’re different. How?” And he said, “We don’t commit crimes.” the immigrants in the United States commit crimes. So now I’m trying to I’m trying to work this out. Is is is he saying Mexicans are criminals? Is this a an anti-Mexican thing? Does this brown guy who an average American would go, I bet that guy’s Mexican, does does he think there’s cuz having lived in Texas twothirds of my life, I’m here to tell you that Mexicans are fantastic people. So I don’t, you know, like if you have a bias against them, I I have a bias for them. Um, so so I’m trying to figure this out. And I go, “So, what’s the problem? Why do you think they’re committing these crimes?” He goes, “Well, they’re unskilled.” I was like, “It’s fascinating.” Cuz to be honest, the United States would fall apart without those Mexican laborers because the United States doesn’t have those skill sets. They can do things like roof, pour concrete, lay block. For the record, for about two years of my life, I did roofing, laying block, and pouring concrete. Oh, is that horrible. I highly recommend you get a job as a laborer at some point your life. It will show you the stars in the daytime. Anyway, so I’m trying to parse this out and I go, “You know, the data shows that what you’re saying is wrong.” And he goes, “What do you mean?” And I said, “If you look at the murder rate in Texas, a person born in Texas, a person that’s a US citizen that wasn’t an immigrant is 1.8 times more likely to commit murder than an immigrant. And then when you take it one step further and take the undocumented immigrants out of the equation, the person who isn’t an immigrant is two times more likely to commit murder than the undocumented immigrant. In other words, the best people in the United States are the undocumented immigrants. And then after that are the immigrants who are documented. And he’s like confused. He’s like, “No, but all we hear about is the crimes they’re committing.” And I’m like, well, okay, I don’t know if you know about this, but there are these new devices. And so there there’s a search thing on there and you can look stuff up. Like be skeptical. You hear something, go, is that true? And look it up. Like it’s so easy. All you have to do is swipe away the the game you were playing and just go to the search engine. You’re doesn’t have to be the popular one. It can be an unpopular search engine. I don’t want to say anybody’s names because I don’t want to endorse anybody. And and look it up. You can look up the the state of Texas’s data. Like if you don’t don’t trust the news agencies, I don’t care. Just go find a reliable data source and you will see that this isn’t a thing. But that’s what we do as a species. We draw a conclusion and then we look for the things that reinforce that conclusion. We don’t look at a situation with an open mind. We come at it with a bias and that’s that’s irrational. That’s the definition of irrationality in many ways because how can you have an informed opinion? But that’s the next part. If you have an opinion but you haven’t done any research, you’ve just listened to other people’s opinions. How can you believe that that opinion has any validity? And that’s of course what we we almost always do. It has taken me years to get in the habit of is that right? The other day I was on Facebook and a friend of mine, a history professor in Texas posted bit of text attributed to President Trump. And I was like, “Oh my god, I better check to see if this is real.” It wasn’t. It wasn’t real. And I’m thinking, you’re a historian. You should know better to repost this stuff. Like, what are you doing? But it was it was believable, but it was like maybe 50% more horrible than usual. And that’s what tipped me off to the possibility that it wasn’t right. And I needed to double check. It was just a little too far because there’s like this there’s this path he’s on, right? He’s he’s Jesus. He’s an astronaut. Uh he’s the pope. Uh but this went past that. This is worse, which is hard to imagine, but it it was I felt like I feel I at one point I had another example, but I’ve lost it. So, uh I guess we’re just going to leave it at that because I I don’t want to just start randomly giving you examples. My my point in this was in in bringing up the guy talking badly about immigrants. By the way, if immigrants are such a problem, the UAE should be this crimeridden hell. You know, 89% immigrant. Like, it should be a nightmare. Obviously, there’s it’s not it’s not that. And of course, Europe’s going through the same thing where it’s become suddenly anti-immigrant. But what’s what’s insane is for some of those states, the reason they have those immigrants is they built an empire. You know, an empire whose wealth they’re still living off of. And and then another reason those immigrants are there is because they did this war, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, World War II, uh and they killed like 65 million people, dude. Like really? I I think it was 60 million in Europe and like 25 million in Asia. Uh the Asian part of World War II went eight years. The European part went six. Like that’s that’s a lot in a very short period of time. That’s a lot of work. Like the gravediggers must have been like just you know what I mean? The the number of shovels they went through. Like how do you keep up? It’s in 10 million people a year. And actually to be honest, the first three years was just like practice. The real work was in the last three years. So it’s probably like 45 million in the last three years. Just those muscles must have been. So afterwards they were desperate for labor. The UK was built by bringing in South Asians. Rebuilt. Germany was rebuilt by bringing in Turks. And then now you’re mad because they’re there. Again, that’s irrational. Here’s the next piece. Most people build their politics around one issue. Now, why do we do this? It’s a heristic. Think of how unbelievably complicated the world is. Like, what’s the biggest problem facing humanity right now? And you know, each of you had a different answer. Some of you said global warming, some of you said microplastics, some of you said war, right? Whatever the answer is all of the above. These are all p the refugee crisis the planet is going through right now, which will only expand most likely in the next few months. Uh we’re in literally the worst refugee crisis in human history in terms of numbers of people. That’s a problem that we should probably think about dealing with at some point. Wouldn’t that be interesting? Like instead of spending resources on on this thing, maybe we could be spending some resources fixing that. In any case, what we do is we simplify. We do heristic devices. Our brains realize there’s too many variables. This is why we need our subconscious mind. So the universe is complex. The asteroid belt. Uh the asteroid belt was going to be a planet. It was forming as a planet. Kis I think is the largest piece. And it’s actually spherical. So, you know, it looks like a little itty bitty planet. And then most of the rest of the asteroid belt are rocks, potato-shaped rocks that are actually really far apart. So, you know, like you watch Star Wars and asteroid field and there’s asteroids going every it’s not like that. It’s they’re really spread out. So, we can easily get past it without endangering our spaceship. Um, and actually there’s multiple different asteroid uh clusters in our solar system, but the famous one of course the asteroid belt. What happened was as the planet was forming, Jupiter decided it wasn’t it didn’t like where it was and so it actually moved into the towards the inner solar system a little bit and when it did it its gravitational tides knocked the biggest piece out of orbit and that biggest piece was the piece that was slowly bringing all the material together. That big piece was plunging towards the sun like it was done. It was finished. Random dumb luck. What are the odds? It’s like shooting a bullet with a bullet. It hit Venus, but a glancing blow. It didn’t impact head-on. It It barely grazed it and stopped it from spinning. The planets in our solar system, except for three, spin right-handed. So, my thumb up. This is the direction of the spin. Venus, Uranus, and Pluto. I know Pluto is not a planet anymore. spin left-handed. Well, Venus, the days are longer than the years. I think I don’t remember the numbers. I think a year is like 260 days and a day is 270. So, the days are really boring there. Um, and it spins this way now because it got hit with just enough force. It stopped it from spinning right-handed and started spinning it left-handed but slowly. And that was just enough to stop that rock from going into the sun and it took up orbit and it’s now Mercury. All right, cool. At some point, we’re going to go to the asteroid belt because there’s minerals up there like rare earth minerals and gold. We’re going to start mining it and that’s just fine. The problem is it’s a complex system and each piece is pulling on it on the other piece gravitationally and that’s how they have a stable orbit. We can pull rock after rock out and probably nothing will happen for for a while. But at some point we’ll have pulled out one too many and the whole system will start to unravel and all of a sudden there’ll be all these rocks flying into the inner solar system. I just showed you where one rock smacked another. It’ll be very likely that we’ll get hit by this and there will be serious consequences. 100% we’re going to do this. Even though we know how this ends, right? Because we’re rational and self-interested. The reality is we’ll never be able to mathematically, at least in the near future. I know. In 200, 300 years, maybe we will figure out what rocks we can’t pull out because it’s it’s the threebody problem. We can figure out the relationship of two objects on each other. Once the third one kicks in, we’re done. I’ve got a can of beans. If if all I have to think about is price, it’s easy. If all I have to think about is taste, it’s easy. If all I have to think about is nutrition, it’s easy. But if I have to think about nutrition, taste and price at the same time, it becomes complicated. It becomes literally complex because how do I compare value, financial value to taste? Like how many pennies is the extra taste worth? This is a a policy problem. If I could extend everybody’s life expectancy by one month, but it will cost the, you know, the government a million dollars a person, it’s probably not worth it. You’d probably better off spending that money on something else. So, that’s an easy choice. But what what do you spend it on? Do you spend it on fighting microplastics or global warming or curing cancer or going to Mars? You know what I mean? Like that’s where things get complicated. So, here’s what our brain does. Our conscious brain can’t make the decision straightforward in this multivariable situation where there’s no way to compare the variables. Our subconscious mind steps in and gives us an emotion. You know what? Taste. Grab it or price. And that’s how we pick the can up. In other words, it might not have actually been the right answer, but it was a good enough answer. That’s what our subconscious mind does for us when you end up in a situation where you’re trying to make political decisions or financial decisions for your family or decisions about, you know, like you what art to take up as a hobby on the side. Obviously, that stuff is going to be framed by the emotions you’re having. You can’t just sit down and say, you know what, we’re going to move to uh New Zealand because it’s the rational thing to do. You’re going to think about how do I feel about New Zealand? What is what are my emotions about it? Is do I really want to live in Middle Earth? And uh it it looks like it’s fantastic, but are orcs real? You know, those are the types of questions you’re going to want to ask yourself before you pull the trigger and actually go there. And the reality is it’s always an emotional answer. There’s no such thing as this concept of rationality without emotion. Anyway, I’m going to give you one more insane. No, I feel like I shouldn’t. It popped into my head, though. Maybe I’ll do it anyway. So, ThreeMile Island was a nuclear disaster that happened in the United States in in Pennsylvania, not far from Hershey, Pennsylvania. Um, in a in a an area that was roughly about equidistant between Baltimore and New York City. So like not far from Washington DC, not far from New York City. And when the disaster happened, they brought in a a team to sort of figure out what the safety protocols were and what steps to take next. And one of the guys on the team was asked if they could use a crane. So inside the nuclear reactor, there’s a dome on top of the reactor and there’s a crane that lifts the dome so you can access the reactor. And it the question was because the obviously the reactor is damaged. Uh by the way, we don’t know exactly why it stopped the chain reaction and had it not stopped there’s a high probability that pretty much everything from New York City to Washington DC would still be uninhabitable today. um the the blast radius from the explosion that would have created once the core hit the water table would have been absolutely catastrophic. Ironically enough, seven years later, the Russians have the same exact event, but their chain reaction didn’t stop. So, Chernobyl ends up being catastrophe that of epic proportions. three- mile island. Random dumb luck stopped. Anyway, they asked this guy, the the safety guy, “Can we use the crane?” And he says, “No, we got to go down there and look at the crane. It might have been damaged. We can’t just do this.” And they’re like, “But why? Who cares if it was damaged?” And he’s like, “Okay, you’re lifting this super heavy dome off of a damaged reactor. If the crane is damaged and it breaks and it falls, that force will be enough to trigger the chain reaction to start up again and we will end up with He didn’t know about Chernobyl. But actually, it’ll be worse than Chernobyl because the Russians contain Chernobyl. Chernobyl, as bad as it was, could have been so much worse. But the Russians were heroic and they they did what needed to be done and they shortened the lives of a bunch of people and they did it. It scares me if it happened somewhere else would people have been willing to make those kinds of sacrifices to save their community or were they a bunch of rational self-interested people? Know what I’m saying? Anyway, when they when he told them, “No, we have to have a safety inspection to see if the crane is damaged,” they went nuts. They being the business leaders at the top. They’re like, “No, no, we’re not doing that. It’s a waste of time. Time is money. Every day this reactor is offline, we’re losing money. We need to get in there and get this thing going again.” They’re the first thought in these maniacs minds is, “How do we put this reactor back online?” He digs his heels in. He fights tooth and nail. He does a whistleblowing event. He actually gulls up in front of a multiple committee, government committees. Like they it gets to a point where they break into his house. They mess with his stuff. They threaten his family. Like it’s bad. Finally, the government, which had the whole time had been backing business, they’re like, “Yeah, yeah, we’ll get just use the crane. It’ll be fine. Just use the crane. It’ll be fine.” Finally, the government felt enough public pressure that it went, “Okay, fine. Let’s do an inspection of the crane. The crane was damaged.” Now, it might have still worked. They might have been able to lift the dome, but do you want to take that chance? And the answer is only a completely insane, irrational person would have even thought to to do this without doing the safety inspection. So if you’ve been asking yourself the question, are the business elites really irrational? I can point to a million examples of how the business elites are completely insane irrational because all human beings are. We that’s how we are as a species. The sooner we admit this to ourselves, the sooner we can start to actually deal with the problems that we’re facing as a species. Because now if you’ve ever asked yourself the question, why haven’t we done anything about global warming? We’ve known for sure this is an issue since 1987. It’s because we’re procrastinating to get the adrenaline. By the way, I don’t know why we don’t have the adrenaline already. When is this going to happen? It needs to kick in. Anyway, all right. I if I keep going, I’ll just start to get redundant. So, I’m going to end it here. Thank you for being a fantastic audience and so irrational. I didn’t actually wrap up the talk correctly because at the end I was sick. So what I started with was an experiment that political scientists kept doing, economists kept doing because they wanted to prove that humans were rational. And what they would do is they would give you a $100 and then you they would give half half a room $100 and then they would have that person make an offer to the person next to them. And you know, you could offer $1, $50, $20, anything you wanted. $99, $37, whatever you want. And if the second person accepts the offer, then you got the money. And I didn’t actually distribute this money because I’m not rich. Uh there I think there were 100 people in the class. There was yeah, like 100 people in the room. So that would have cost me $10,000. I’m a professor. I don’t have money like that. So I couldn’t actually do the experiment. So I told them it was a thought experiment. They would do it in their heads. Almost everybody offered $50 to the other person. And if both if the other person accepts, you both get the money. If the other person says no, nobody gets the money. So if you if you offer the other person $1 and they say no, you don’t get the 99 and they don’t get the one. In that experiment, one person offered their partner $12 and they accepted. the person got the so so they would have gotten 88 and the other person would have gotten 12 and then the other couple uh they offered $1 and that person accepted. So the idea behind rational choice theory is that if you’re a rational person, you will accept whatever is offered to you because it’s more money than you came in having. So if they offered you $1, you would say yes because it’s $1 more and you wouldn’t say no. But of course, the vast majority of people did 50/50. In fact, some people actually gave the other person more money. I don’t remember what they said. It’s in the video, but like, you know, they gave them 70 and they took 30 because I guess they wanted to make sure the person said yes. And that’s of course exactly what happens. Usually, you offer $12 and the person says, “No, screw you. I don’t want it.” And so then neither of you get it. Or you offer $1 and they say, “No, screw In other words, the vast majority of people in these experiments prove over and over again that they don’t obey the laws of rational choice theory. For the record, people who say it’s rational to accept the $1 or to offer the one because that that’s the other half of the equation. A rational person would offer $1 because they would assume the other person is rational and accept the $1 and then they’re going to get the 99 and hand you the one. I actually think, and this is how I should have wrapped up the talk on Thursday when I was just out of it a little bit because I was sick and I didn’t remember to do this, that that’s irrational. If I offer $1 to the other person, there’s a high probability they’re going to say, “No, screw you. I’m I’m going to burn this to the ground just cuz you’re a dick, and I’m not going to take the dollar, and you’re not going to get the 99.” In other words, part of being a rational person is anticipating what the other person is ex thinking and experiencing. In other words, it’s irrational for me to make a proposition to the other person that has a high probability of failing. Now, I want to take it one step further. I’m a 50/50 person. If I was in that experiment, I would have offered the other person $50. And if I was offered $50, I would have taken it. And by the way, if I was offered $1 or $10 or $12, I would have said no. Go to hell. Neither one of us are going to get it because first of all, greed is not a virtue. We live in a society that tells us that greed is a virtue. Cockroaches have greed. Every being on the planet can experience greed. So, there was a time where we had leftover bread and I took some of the bread, leftover bread, and I threw it outside and the birds ate it and they were so happy. And out of the piece of leftover bread, I used like five maybe 10% of the bread. My wife went, “Why don’t you use the rest of the bread?” And I’m like, “Cuz you can’t do that with wild animals. You you you can only give them a little bit. I’m giving them a little bit for my own personal pleasure. They’re capable of foraging on their own. You can’t give them the full amount. She’s like, “Okay.” I said, “I’ll give them a little bit again tomorrow.” She’s like, “Okay.” So, next day, I give them another five or 10% and I go outside and they break it up and the birds come and they eat the bread and they’re so happy and they leave. She’s like, “Dude, we still have 85% of this bread left.” And I’m like, “That’s okay. We just need to do this slowly. Don’t give them all of this bread. So what does she do? She takes the loaf of bread, goes outside, gives them the whole loaf of bread. Walk outside. The the step in front of the door is covered in poop. I mean, it is covered in poop. There’s a layer of green poop and a pigeon. And that pigeon is on its back twitching. And and my wife’s like, “What happened?” And I said, “This pigeon ate that entire loaf, blew up his stomach. All of this poop is from this one pigeon. He just sat there and ate and ate and ate and ate and ate.” And she’s like, “Why?” And I go, “Cuz greed is a basic animal instinct. In the wild, a loaf of bread doesn’t magically appear. So animals don’t have the ability to recognize I can’t eat this entire loaf in one sitting. It will literally kill me by exploding my stomach. She’s like, what are we going to do? And I said, well, there’s two options. We can let this animal suffer or I can go bury him right now and take put him out of his misery. But he’s dead either way cuz his stomach is ruptured because greed got the best of him. Because greed is irrational. It is an irrational instinctive impulse that cockroaches have. If you put a bunch of food in front of a cockroach, it’ll literally eat itself to death. It This is This idea that somehow greed is a virtue shows how irrational of a civilization we live in. What I should care about is not whether or not I can screw the guy sitting next to me. What I need to care about is how healthy and how strong is my community. What is my relationship to other people? What is my relationship to complete random strangers? Because as a species, we are not only not a solitary animal, we can’t survive on our own. Like I know there’s that, you know, these shows where like the wild man goes out and he he jumps on the back of a small alligator and stabs it with a knife that he made with a stone and he rips out a chunk and eats it raw and he’s like, I can survive on my own. Anyway, that’s fantasy land, right? He jumped into the river to kill the the alligator from a helicopter and there’s a camera crew standing there next to him and if he gets in real trouble they’ll take him to a hospital and they’ll feed him food and give him fluids like the there’s this illusion that we have that somehow we can make it solitary that we are capable we are not capable of this we will literally go extinct in fact we think that the cutoff number for our species having enough DNA to survive is like somewhere between 10 10 to 20,000 people. In other words, literally the smallest community we could ever possibly have that could function needs to be a minimum of 10 to 20,000 people. Our species requires interaction with one another to function at any level. There is no human being who can do brain surgery, is a computer scientist, can remember a bunch of history, do a bunch of math, knows biology, can make a rocket fly, can fly a plane, and you know, and all the thousands and thousands of other be a nurse skill set, like it’s impossible because at the end of the day, we’re ants in an antill. And if the antill is unhealthy, the ants die. And and that’s the craziness of greed. Greed makes you think that somehow God loves you more than he loves the other people on the planet and as a result you you should get the 99 and screw that other person out of the $1. That’s just capitalism. That’s just the evil nasty system we’ve unleashed on the planet. That has nothing to do with rationality. And so what actually has happened is these economists and these political scientists who believe in rational choice theory are actually trying to advocate that capitalism makes sense because they’ve bought into it ideologically and they haven’t thought through the foolishness of it. At the end of the day, if we keep doing this capitalist system, we will consume all the resources. We will superheat the planet. We will fill it with microplastics that’ll make us go extinct. We’re we are we are Oruro Boros. We are the snake eating his tail and we’re not stopping. I was going to I I know I was at one point saying that I’m a 50/50 guy. Like I would give the other guy the 50. And it’s because when you think about it, this is a complete random stranger. This comes right out of Socrates and Plato’s the Republic. the the person who acts like a crook, they they ask the question like we need force to make smart people behave well. And Socrates go actually use wise people to behave well. Socrates goes what do you mean? His students are asking this question. I don’t remember, Adiamantis, Glalcon, I don’t remember which one does it, but one of them says if you know like if you have a situation where you can basically plunder money from another person, you’re smart enough to figure that out, you’ll do it. So, we need rules to fix that. And what Socrates goes, “No, you’ve mixed up wisdom with stupidity. A wise person knows not to plunder the other person because if you plunder the other person, you’ve weakened a member of your community. If you weaken a member of the community, you’ve weakened the entire community because the community strength is the composite of all the members in the community. And so it is the wise person who knows that they should take care of the members of the community and and and seek them to have them lifted up. I mean, think about it from a capitalist standpoint, from a business standpoint. If I have another business that I interact with, if that other business is doing well, they’ll have more product to sell me. I’ll have the ability to do more commerce. But if I go in there and I plunder and loot and pillage next year when I go back to do business with them, they’re damaged and they’ll never be able to provide the same kind of economic exchange that they could have if I had helped them grow. And that that’s the irrationality of the hypertransactional capitalism that we have today. It’s all about maximizing looting, looting, and plundering and pillaging. Political scientists have been proven over and over again that human beings are rational and that rational choice theory is irrational. So what they’ve said now is that it’s proscriptive. This is how people ought to behave. Like wait a minute. So political science went from descriptive to proscriptive. What are you a religion? What are you an ideology? That’s insane. It’s insane. And so that’s one of the reasons why I took a shot at rationality. If I keep going I’ll just start to get redundant. So, I’m going to end it here. Thank you for being a fantastic audience and so irrational.