Whatever the panic or anxiety you feel especially in the city Something about going through a medium like that makes you be here right now The fertility treatment that they're that they're floating for for men is actually like a high testosterone treatment Because guys that are doing that are doing testosterone. Basically your tests. These are like I don't need to keep producing testosterone Yeah, it actually creates major fertility issues issues. Yeah. Yeah, plus heart issues and stuff like that It creates more red blood cells and like much more likely to have a heart action like that But it turns the materialistic side so it's like well It's a causation is it like were they more materialistic and did like they're bling because of testosterone Or they also are they taking testosterone which then makes them more materialistic. I don't know But I can say that testosterone is much more complicated than we think it is. I mean, I mean Are we going by the way? Yeah. Oh, we're live Okay, I never got that. You know, usually there's like that. I lived in LA It's usually very clear when there's like the clap, you know, and you're going to clap, you know, the natural the thing You know a little warning so One of the big parts about research in general is disentangling causation So you have correlation and you have causation, right? And like in every language you sometimes those two things get mixed up people say, oh, yeah This causes that this is but like the difference between causation and correlation is like the difference between lightning and a lightning bug They sound the same. They're totally different in the majority of science You could talk about social. Let's talk about social science specifically There's really experimental designs that aren't very good at disentangling cause from effect Or causation correlation rather and so what we came along we said was All that we learned as graduate students about behavioral endocrinology or even about economics or whether about psychology whatever it is is based on Scientific methods that were flawed and you could say that across many many fields It science is an evolving thing just like just like everything else We had a you know brief discussion about currencies. You know, obviously that's evolving and size evolving but like what we came around so We decided we're going to provide an experiment We're gonna set something up that leaves no doubt Whether something was caused by testosterone or not and the way you do that is you look at the medical literature. What do they do? Randomized control trials RCT is like the the highest standard the highest bar for for disentangling cause from effect And so it doesn't necessarily have to be sophisticated But you do have to have some controls in place make sure that well nobody in the experiment Knows what they're getting because then you're gonna have the placebo effect which sometimes we you know Quite powerful and so the way that we ran the experiment was we said, okay We're gonna tell people that they're getting either testosterone or they're getting placebo But that nobody knows so it was double-blind to both the people that came in for the experiment and the person that was given it So we had an assistant walk in with a tray that had gel in it and they didn't know and they said you're getting one of those Two, you know either way, you know, be careful You know, if you have testosterone on you You know don't come in physical contact with a female because there's some risk especially females pregnant You don't want to give her shock of testosterone. That's not a good place to be So that was like kind of the first part of the study was to figure out Well, how do we design it in such a way that the results give us some forward movement in terms of learning something about science I'm at the world the way people make decisions So this this study produced a variety of different papers. So we did a few different experiments You were talking with the cognitive reflection one or yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's crazy. There's I mean People know this test like you see it even on online tests now the cognitive reflection tasks So, you know, you know a bat and a ball, you know together cost a dollar five You know the the difference between them as a dollar and then you say, you know How much does a ball cost, you know that kind of thing So so I don't want to give away the answer It's kind of fun to like not give away the answer is but like the point of the of that particular experiment was saying Does testosterone blunt your ability to really think through a problem? Mm-hmm So, I don't know if you have the paper open right there, but you know, you could look at like the cognitive reflection And so it's like it's like a pretty famous test like in in like social psychology And it has like this intuitive answer that you just want to say and it's in the intuitive answer is the wrong answer And so we want to say well if you if we gave it testosterone How does it affect your cognition because this it's called a cognitive reflection task Can I reflect on the on the answer I'm about to give and then cross-check it with the actual question make sure I'm giving the right answer And so it had not been done with testosterone like nobody had had taken a biological variable Intested it So we did and we found that if you gave guys the the this this hormone essentially this this powerful hormone They would be less capable reflecting on their answer and they gave the wrong answer And it was a large sample size that you know the the methods are I would say bulletproof like there's never been a reviewer That's pushed bow your methods are sketchy now like it's solid and in the world of these kinds of experiments a very big big Experimental sample size. Yeah So it was like I would say a good forward movement on lots of fronts like the methodologically it was better than than other studies had been done and The finding was unique to say like a hormone could actually affect the way you think in kind of this rapid way And also was incentivized like if you if you gave the right answer you got paid for it So what does this mean for somebody who's reading this like, you know, you always view some some studies like okay Like what do I do with this data? Yeah I think there's like the who like who I'd a professor once said like if it doesn't pass that who gives a rat's ass Yeah, it was very funny Bill man good guy anyway, so I think that's a fair question like there's science That's interesting and there's science. That's relevant. Yeah, so so this one this area is called So this our field is called neuro economics. We're looking how biological factors affect financial or economic decision-making Economic decision-making is a really broad area of Of human life like it's not just money like this particular one is about is is like They're kind of like math puzzles you could say but there are other other studies we did looking at stock trading There's other puddles puzzles we did looking at people's preferences for status goods Like whether people wanted the Rolex versus the Cassia or the Calvin Klein over the you know, the Levi's whatever it is So we tested kind of different domains of of human life and saw well How does how does this hormone affect this specific domain? And the results were really interesting. It was like either we had a really strong result or it was just nothing And and I was shocked because you know as a scientist you want to have Huge results like you want to say yeah at a 300% this or had a you know, whatever like Because that's the way that science works You're incentivized to show that your research showed some result the second part that I'm going to get to in a second It doesn't matter in a practical Quotodian day-to-day sense like that's less important in general in academia Although I think that's changing. I think you're seeing a lot of pushback You're seeing you know behavioral economics specifically thinking of problems that are really important like poverty Labor laws all sorts of exotic areas like you know prostitution I know some of that works in the area of like human trafficking and things like that that like economics can bear Can can weigh in in a way that's really interesting really powerful and so the area that that was focused on is really just Biological factors and testosterone really want to go deep into that So one of the reasons it's difficult to disentangle cause from effect is that historically there wasn't a drug You could give people and so what people did historically is they would they would just like measure They'd take like a blood draw or a saliva like you just spit in a tube and they'd go see how much testosterone you had And they would say well, you know Amir's got a higher level your two standard deviations higher than most people Okay, you're a high person and then your behavior was this like they would have looked at you doing something But the problem is that testosterone Responds to what's happening in your environment. Oh, yeah, you're every hormone. Yeah, like we're a dynamic Fluctually throughout the day the readings right morning to afternoon. Yeah, there's a diagonal cycle It's highest in the morning. Yeah, because over the overnight you're converting cholesterol into into testosterone the boys are doing that and so The experiments themselves sometimes do things like so that's so obviously Affect you not just that your body is likely to produce more testosterone But psychologically you're a different person Because maybe you're a challenge like a lot of this they do with like say heterosexual men They'll expose them to a pretty woman and like see how they behave. I saw I didn't read the actual full study But I just for the abstract where they had What I think whether it was a picture of a woman or an actual woman They're doing a bench press, you know that study and they're able to give up more reps Uh-huh for just a female being there. Yeah, like a conf I don't know that specific one But like there's those ones would like a confederate like they call it a confederate So like, you know research assistant or someone they know who's who you know that would seem to be attractive and they Yeah situation and so this one was skateboarding where like they had this like, you know Hot girl at the skateboard skate park and the guys were taking much riskier stuff when they had so it's a similar thing They're peacocking they have to impress And just the absurd of it like oh, I'm gonna do a kickflip. I'm gonna take this girl home Like you're probably you're probably back. I need it. I know she's there like completely aware of it But it's true even when we did an experiment we had to be careful not to actually all of our experiments We don't have females research assistants interesting because all of our participants are male smart Yeah, and like we learned from people that you know, if you have an attractive female in your study Like at least have it constant throughout the study But like there was there was a researcher who's in our in this area research Who's like an attractive female and she was in some of her sessions and not in all of the sessions And I was sitting there as a graduate student. She's presenting this paper And she was like showing these spikes and testosterone in some of the sessions and not the others I was like well, you're the confound in your study. She was a common denominator. She was only in some but she was not common She was in some but not the others. I was like, you know, if as a participant you notice this very attractive professor It's gonna affect your physio. It was like completely messing up the thing. She's a very smart person It's not the disper work. It was just that these are things that you wouldn't necessarily think of and how the fields evolved Yeah, so we went from like Measuring baseline like saliva or blood and then correlating that with a behavior So going back the beginning we talked about correlation causation so that I would say, okay So you're a high testosterone guy. Will you behave this way? Well?  Isn't it crazy loser?  Yeah, and so there's this whole biological like Background to this study of like you see in the animal literature you see some evidence of it in the human literature But like how do we know what's causing what like in among people? There's lots of variability There's like variability seasonality dams of the day. There's like a million things that could vary So we said let's just make this very clean. There's a drug that came on the market I think it was 2001 called andro gel just a gel and he just rubbed on your skin It comes through your skin it and your increases your testosterone levels. So it's FDA approved 2001 and then we said well Let's use that so we'll do a double blind study medical grade, you know, we had a psychiatrist on the team It was like very, you know ethics approval Like a full bottom is taking the blood. It was like a it was like a Medical grade lab study. So we have groups that came in they got that testosterone gel and groups that came in They got placebo and we saw how it affected them. We even asked them what they thought they got Did you think you got testosterone? How sure you are none of that stuff predicted their behavior and they were wrong Like they're all 50 50 like nobody was able to guess what they got So it's not like that was a that was a way to confound their behavior and we tested that in any way that we can So back to your question about well, why does this matter in everyday lives? So so the same is okay Is the drug you gave is it commensurate with the amount of variability that you would find in testosterone? Like that's the first thing I'd probably wonder like did you shoot people off off the charts in terms of testosterone? So when you measure it in blood that that drug only goes up about when you measured Free testosterone it goes up like 60% you guys are measuring in units of picky moles or So of one paper that's in blood one paper. It's in saliva. So I try to remember which one so so When I first got that question I said well the variability that you see in blood From the drug is actually similar to what you see in people's cycles And I was like done. I'm done with that question like it's the short answer was yes This is within what's called physiologic range. Yeah, the reference ranges. Yeah, bingo And like a few people get shot up to be like super physiologic fine And so that I was like I thought I was done with that question And then we did the second experiment where we measured in saliva And their levels were way off the charts So even the FDA I don't know if he is watching you should pay attention to this The testing they did before approving the drug was seemingly all the papers were on serum So you're drawing blood and you're seeing what the level is interesting I work with a lot of my wife's a naturopath. Oh, okay, and we've worked a bunch of different laboratories Yeah, and there's still an ongoing like debate between like hormone testing like saliva versus blood Yeah, it's a huge difference. Yeah, it's a huge difference. Yeah Yeah, and among I would imagine the same would be true among other hormones as well Like actually, it's also true with them. I think with estrogen you find or progesterone I found a similar thing with progesterone someone on our on the team David Zava great guy. He runs a lab out of Portland just near Portland And he's like an incredible scientist that does a lot of testing for like naturopathic schools I think he's affiliated with NCNM the one in Portland, okay, so he like knows that world very well and the guy is like a Biology genius and he's been very helpful on the on the study So so when you ask is it is it realistic? I would say it's probably not in the sense that the levels were so high that this is for the saliva Yeah, but just but blood.  I don't know what's happening in your brain We don't have direct evidence of that So I know we're getting like in the in the weeds mythologically on the hormone stuff like So in some ways you could say to take something to to a bit of an extreme level you learn something about it and The results in all the studies that we found were like almost binary like it either had a big effect like this cognitive reflection task Like yeah guys were less able to think through their answers and gave the intuitive incorrect answer like Significantly more than the guys that got placebo like that's what the the facts say so was it everybody that got the testosterone gave the for the test was off or was it like a Belkerv maybe like 50 60% of the people on testosterone So there are three questions. Yeah, we measured each question in like individually, okay So like the bat and the ball question. Yeah, there was the widgets question and trying to think of the third off top My head here, but so each individually they all there's like, you know, so even it did a t-test You just say the distributions were different.  We could do it But um, it's like it shifted you to that intuitive space where you're not really you're like you're not really thinking in an executive level You're being more impulsive.  Yeah, and so that's what makes this stuff super interesting in that If you look at the cognitive reflection test, it's measuring this ability to it's essentially blunting your ability to To think Reflectively about something. However, it's still intact like people that took a longer to answer the questions Like they could still answer the questions but to give the right answer took them longer to do it So it's almost like they're aware that they're struggling to think to think through the question So it but it makes sense like the mechanism would make sense if I was to shock you and put you in the high testosterone state I Mean think of the states in your life where you're in a high testosterone state And so it could be like we said preparing for a fight So maybe this puts them like this is like you're talking about a sympathetic versus parasympathetic systems like fight versus flight I mean like would that maybe put them into like a fight mode more I Supposed to acutely but chronically because you know hormone levels there has to be homeostatic Levels like even though there's a reference range is a reference.  We're like pregnenolone Pogestrone testosterone or DHEA so it goes pregnenol DHEA testosterone and estrogen and all these other derivatives Right all of them have a symbiotic relationship and there are some of them are they work against it Yeah, like cortisol testosterone are antagonists. Yeah, cortisol. Well, yeah, there's still debate but it's some some people would say there's something called like Cortisol steel where like if you have too much high cortisol it shunts a lot of your other hormones Yeah, yeah, or like it might deviate certain like Cofactors which converts to DHEA to testosterone, but the DHEA might end up becoming estrogen as opposed to testosterone Yeah, it's pretty non-linear. Yeah. Yeah, it's super calm. It is extremely complicated. We measured we did a panel we did like a full mass spectrometry panel of About 15 hormones so we would measure whether Testosterone just went up or it was like it's just like a wrecking ball through your system So we were able to measure that so we had testosterone we had DHEA and we had But another form of testosterone. I'm trying to remember top ahead one mark McGuire used What was over the counter back in the 80s? Nothing against Mark McGuire is a big A's fan. I lived in Bay area It's not trend bull is it? No, it's like an over-the-counter. It's like a it's a cold It's a it's an upstream metabolite up testosterone I'm trying to think off top my head, but it was over-the-counter available at the time But we also measured cortisol like melatonin. Oh melatonin, too I guess like so we did a mass back. So this is like atomic level measurement extremely extremely accurate and Most these hormones were everything that was not expected to be associated with testosterone was unchanged unchanged So I think mathematically it was a partial derivative like it just changed that thing without changing any of the other Yeah, you think it'd be like your whole system is gonna be out of whack interesting So you could yeah, there is no difference on the other like non-testosterone related hormones Even though we gave him the shock of up testosterone. So it was like so that is acute It's like a one-shot. Yeah chronically you might expect there'd be some You know how frequently were they putting the trend? We just did one shot. Oh, it's like one thing Yeah, you know, we're trying to make it as realistic as they did a test before testosterone How long was it afterwards? So I did a test.  Okay, so within like 48 hours everything It was there within eight hours or like, you know from 8 in the morning. They're done by like four So it was just one day. Yeah, you mentioned stocks trading one only. Oh, that was wild Yeah, so yeah, so because We I was at a crazy lab so the labs called the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies and my advisor was California Yeah, it's in LA. Yeah, yeah Claremont, California, yeah, well the city they call the city of trees and PhDs and we're this we're in Toronto The city of cold weather very cold weather gloomy. No, son Yeah, could we just do the interview there is that cool?  I'm a little disappointed. We don't have holler. Come on or Elon Musk like rocket like two minutes in California Let's do this. Yeah, let's hyperloop Toronto to LA bro to the beach, please I'm a side tangent before we get into stock Microsoft. It boggles my mind that we don't have Ground transportation like a hyperloop yet Especially here in Canada, we have the second biggest landmass in the world. Yeah, I'm very expensive plane tickets I know cross Canada monopolize. It's I mean it's good for the airlines Yeah, good, but like not all people would ride the hyperloop, but we should absolutely have a hyperloop I mean, I mean just for us. Yeah, now kidding I mean, I do miss going home, but I think airlines extremely inefficient and you know, I would like to be Let's say you have a hyperloop and there's different hyperloops. You have different hyperloops Yeah, there's different versions of hyperloops day. There's Ones where they want to build underground. Yeah, we have tracks Okay, you have above ground hyperloops or prefabs think like Lego pieces Yeah, simple physics magnetism, right negative versus positive type idea. Yeah, like a maglev kind. Yeah Yeah, I think like monorail Japan type idea, but in a tube. So there's literally a tube with magnets Right, you have hyperloop stuff where it's what's a technical term aeronomics. No, I might I'm butchering But it uses air pressure to go through. Oh, yeah, pneumatics pneumatics Yeah, exactly.  Yeah Especially the up the above ground because you're is prefabbed You don't have to really build anything. You're just on platforms and you put them together I feel like there should be like a sponsored Like we should have like hyperloop like so there's virgin and there's Elon, right? Like there's Richard Branson Yeah, there's a bunch of them. There's even like in the crypto space. There's a company doing like software called R loop He can look up what they're doing afterwards. Yeah related transportation Well, what are we waiting for? Yeah, because we should go surfing after this. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it Still light. I think in LA. It's three hours. Yeah, we could do it. All right. So let's stock market Okay, so so similar question that we had was like, okay There seems to be This like macho culture in finance. It's it's male dominated. Most of the guys moving billions of dollars a day our guys, you know, so is there a biological factor is it why is it that they Act in that particular way is there a particular factor that we could manipulate and change their behavior And so if you stand back and say, okay Well of of the the variables that I can manipulate which ones are candidates genes. I can't manipulate I can't manipulate gender not in this like experimental setting. Yep I don't you know in the in the toolbox of neuroscience or behavioral endocrinology Like if neuro economics broadly stated, you're not going to do I mean, there's also I guess you could do a transmac tms Like you could block a certain part of the brain do like a little, you know, little subtle In kind of impedance of the front prefrontal cortex or whatever Like from a causal in your causal toolbox. We're thinking well, okay What's something that that fluctuates a lot and seems to be Deterministic or powerful or potent like testosterone was like the obvious answer I mean relate to our earlier conversation about about the winter effect The challenge hypothesis a huge animal literature about it It just seemed like the candidate to hormone and We had done other studies at the lab before that using cortisol. We had used Some actually use one with naltrexone Which for those at home that's For like alcoholics and heroin addicts to get off of it what it does is it blocks it blocks the The dopamine pathways in your brain And we somehow got ethics approval to use that which I'm a bit surprised I mean a small proportion of people will like permanently be damaged by it really like a very small proportion Is a similar like methadone? I don't know how similar they are But this is like it's just so you don't get a kick out of doing something. It's bad Yeah, just it's probably similar mechanism I suppose it's like a blocker. Yeah blocks neurons from yeah So you just don't feel good about it.   They were safe And then I'll truck some was safe So the lab was that I was really proud to say it was like the like pioneering lab in neuro comics and worked with some really interesting people So it's time for me to come up with my dissertation chapter And as I said testosterone seemed like the right candidate And it had had not been done in this context, but we had the resources. I had the money to do it It's pretty expensive with this stuff off.   Oh, yeah, the dose is a drugs. It was I mean we bought a retail at a pharmacy Yeah, like through through it was uh, we paid people well between 60 and 120 bucks a person And they'd buy the drugs play the phlebotomy. It was it was probably all in it was well over 100,000 maybe 200,000 Even if you count the man hours, it's even higher than that real graduate students slaves So it was basically free, but um So a lot went into it and so we did we said, okay Well, let's create a stock market that is real in the sense that people are trading stocks in real time with each other And let's see if the people they get testosterone or those markets where guys are at high levels of testosterone Well, well those markets transact at different prices Then markets where guys are trading at their normal levels again double blind randomized controlled trial You don't know so what we did it was everybody was in the same group got the same thing Because it's you know, it's cleaner that way It's really cleaner to to disentangle cosmic effect if everybody's on the same thing So we ran a bunch of sessions.  We're not logging people into e-trade accounts Like that's way too complicated. What we did was we use a paradigm. It's just called double auction markets Which was pioneered by verne and smith Uh, he's he's like considered one of the major pioneers in experimental economics consider like the father of experimental economics Or dutch auction. What's that dutch? Um, he dutch No, this is like trading in real time. So I mean, there are dutch auctions in experimental economics like charlie holt For example works in that space. Uh, so verne verne smith again. He's a very bright guy He's like 90 something 92 93 the guy's amazing very very sharp Um, and he's like he founded this field and he won the Nobel prize Along with the same year as danie conerman and uh, almost toverski who won it posthumously. They wanted the same year What's interesting? I've done I've worked on their topics now and verne smith funded the project So it was really cool to have a noble laureate who's like very well respected Support the project and he gave us a good amount of money to be able to pull it off Awesome So the way he does it he says, okay, well instead of a real stock market I mean, it's it's real but in the sense of a stock, which is there's so much stuff going on in the real world There's you know, the fed could change there's fed change the rate. It could be a presidential election a bomb Earnings whatever let's just create an asset that everybody knows what it's worth And so there's no real question about the fundamental value and let people trade on maybe Thoughts or emotions or whatever it is that would drive their beliefs about the price But we're all in the same session and we all know what it's worth. So you'd walk in samir You're welcome.  They immediately started bidding up the prices Like double triple quadruple the price And we're like I'm standing there. I proctored all of all of them in my lab coat I'm like I'm like and I can see in the side screen like what's going on. I'm like, this is crazy Yeah, like and then I would would have a session then, you know a few a week later We'd have a session with all all placebo and these guys are trading so like the fundamental value like drops like this So they're trying to buy below and sell above In the placebo sessions. I'm watching at real time. Yeah, I can't believe this is happening I was like, I'll wait till the data are all in.   Nobody's buying anymore I can't resell this thing and they would collapse collapse collapse all of them So it was like this is like feeling like I now found a variable that can manipulate markets at least in this time in this little Yeah It was huge. It was like it changed it literally changed the course of my life To see that you change one variable In a double blind study and you can affect a financial market So I wonder what hedge funds are thinking like, oh, how do we use this? You know, it's crazy. This was nuts. So we did this 2013 Yeah An article came out in the financial times like right around the same time showing there's a physician in new york Who prescribes the exact same drug two guys on wall street Really like Anderjell. Yeah. Yeah, and he says, yeah, I prescribe it. I mean you could look it up I think Lionel bassoon, I think is his name. I've not met him personally.   I just talked about trading There are other other things as well that we that we show that affects So I was I was actually surprised pleasantly that um, it's actually more realistic than just like a silly lab experiment It's like the reverse. It's like we're simulating the real world and not even knowing we're simulating the real world I have two questions on this. Yes number one we touch briefly for example with the example of Whether it's two deers or two mooses fighting.  Yeah It is what it is. That's nature. Yeah, there's no mercy nature, right, right? So genes are surviving Humans a little bit different but not too different, right? We have evolutionary biology Which is dictated by our environment and then we have evolution psychology. They're all together Mm-hmm Is there some Hypothesis of why we think they would behave that way based on evolutionary and biology or psychology Why would they start bidding bidding bidding bidding? Hmm, you know like if we look at like Let's say we're a scientist of pure observation And we just look at hunters and gatherers and how tribes grew up and we just sit there and just look at them Do you think there's some type of knowledge that we can gain? Is there some comparison there? If we were to observe like free roaming people sure versus the lab Well, I mean that's that's what motivated the question It's like we observe free roaming people and we don't know why the hell they do certain things And so we take the world and simplify it and then manipulate one variable So we can make some claim about the effect of that one variable because we have too many it becomes too ambiguous We don't know what the hell is going on. Yeah But this really tries to get at the questions you're asking of like Evolutionarily, why would testosterone do these like these manifold things? What would affect the way you think what would it make you more impulsive? So let's go back to the fighting. Yes If you think about being at an elevated testosterone level and it's making you more impulsive In some situations, that's actually a good thing Like if you're trading in a rapid environment and you think too much You may not do as well if you're an athlete and you're in a imagine playing a very Sport requires tremendous speed and you're and you're thinking too much of it like thinking about like procedural memory That's not going to serve you If you know life-threatening situation and you need to act quickly that may actually be the best the best outcome Whether it's good for the other person or not So encouraging this like rapid deployment of resources without thinking too much about it Is actually an evolutionary movement Tours making you more likely to survive and to you know propagate it as a specific genetic makeup And so what what's really interesting? It's not just in a violent sense It's not just in a thinking sense like we have another paper that you mentioned really early on was uh on preferences for status goods Yeah Blink blink totally like I mean this I would admit I thought this was a long shot I was like you guys like I know there's a theory about it But like I mean but to choose something like like an Audi over a Ford or like a you know Whatever it's just I my my prior was like we'll we'll see I don't care I don't have a dog in this fight But like the the short answer is that we saw that people had a preference for the higher status brands. It's crazy like Extremely strong robust no matter how you slice the data. It's pretty so it's like a survey like sir So before treatment here's a survey after treatment here's a survey We did we did some baseline stuff before treatment We also did validation outside of this like an even bigger validation of seeing what do people think about these brands Okay, I think that Calvin Klein is a higher status than Levi's. They're probably very similar quality the natural Perception of that brand. Yeah, so we vetted we tested that with a totally different sample like 600 people And then we said in this experiment How would you rate these brands and then which there's another question of Looking at the advertisements and we only changed so we'd have the same image like say You know a fancy watch and we only changed the way that it was written So one was drawing out the power aspect like someone powerful watch for you know Pilots things like that and this other one was this is extremely high quality. Well made swiss And the other one was like when you wear this people know that you're the man or people know that you're high status I say man because they're all men in the study. We can't give them the drug And so we found that on those two those two dimensions one is the the ad they rated the ads that was Identical visually except for those few words about status They they chose that as a higher one like that was a huge preference for that particular one And also among the brands we'd have a continuum. We'd have on one end the similar quality Lower status to similar quality higher status and we just saw that People would just choose a higher status one interesting And so we tested in a couple different ways and it was like wow So in terms of survival, there's like a very deep literature in animal literature about About survival about how status signals your biological fitness. Oh, yeah, and um, and so that too is based like in a famous theory almost What's his last name anyway blank out Israeli researcher talking about how how animals signal this stuff and how humans we seem to be You know, we're in the lineage and so this particular hormone made people more Choose something that would signal to others that I am a higher status than this other person Yeah, that's why I always like to relate things to like evolutionary biology. It's all it's all in that But so we're taking an ancient hormone. Yeah taking a modern dude Tweaking just that and seeing how would you behave in a financial situation in a thinking situation? You know a consumer situation just to see like does this matter? I always tell people we're just highly more involved chimps And you know for me I've had the doctor Christopher D. Carlo on here Talks about like free will and critical thinking. Yeah, really cool guy It's gonna be on actually this week again And uh, you know, we're talking about free will how free will doesn't really exist We're more predetermined on the evolutionary lineage that we had Obviously, it's not saying that Free will is binary. It's not like Yes, or no, there's a spec. There's a there's like a bell curve, right?  Why do you behave that way? hell Genetics plays a role hormones plays a role lineage of your ancestry plays a role the environment that you live in Well, this plays a role, right? and so it's It's interesting to see how like, you know, we're surrounded by all these environmental factors, right? You talk about the stock market the phone social media But yet we're still paleolithic apes Emotionally speaking hormonally speaking Yeah, and it's it's for me. It's like You know, that's why I like, you know behavioral economics is very fascinating. It's like And so anything that I view it's it's You know when people say like, oh, I never understood why that person behaved that way Like you're not asking the right questions That's a wrong question why the person's behaving that way the right question. What are the factors making that person behave that way? It's not about how you like that person to behave a certain way There's a reason why that individual behaves that way. There is internal consistency to those people An external observer might seem irrational or whatever. Yeah, I mean We the bottom line is we are not optimized for the world that we live in Whether it's our tribe size or our environment living, you know, Toronto Most of us can afford apartments at this point, you know, and to be isolated, you know, maybe right Fuck, Toronto's getting crazy, man. I know. Can I can I slip here? Is that cool? Can I just move into the studio? There's like a new new york coming up over here. I know man Yeah, I gotta be a crypto billionaire to have a place But yeah, I mean There's always some internal consistency with like even wild behavior Like if you look at like, you know, whether people are having a psychotic episode like well to them, that's something that's going on I mean, we're not talking about such extreme situations And to answer that super complicated loaded question the way we addressed it was like, what are behaviors that we care about? So like we're not going to talk about, you know Whether somebody was rude to the waitress we can we'll do things that we can measure I mean there are people people who probably measured up. We're saying, okay, let's take something quantifiable such as bidding for a stock or choosing a specific product or answering a question But but there's sort of to interject but there's That stock study Is a beneficial study for hedge funds or other institutions because It may not be A study where they can directly apply A strategy But it adds more to data points within their pre-existing strategy like You know hedge funds. They have different baskets, whether it's like might be daily high frequency trading Might be like medium holds long holds different baskets. You move around the baskets. You're arbitraging. That's it at the end date Making spreads arbitrage. Okay, then you have different other types of investors. You might be kind of like warm buffet investors where it's like You know value investing the long hold, right?  You know, I was like, I'm gonna get my asymmetrical return, you know 100x return Yeah, um, the lottery ticket. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, but the stock market's interesting because it's a amalgamation Of so many psychological pressures Testosterone as you mentioned plays a big role but Lately I've been digging in a lot to Rene Girard like memetic theories And it goes to biology like we have something called mirror neurons. This is how babies learn very well Like their little baby and how you express yourself and this is how they can learn language is easy It's monkey see monkey do, you know, it's in us mirror neurons. Yeah.  I shall behave that way as well And so you have the stock market and you have all these people high testosterone alpha and I'm I'm bidding a bidding and you see me you want to compete me we're two bucks We're going at it. And so you're trying to open me and but Even people not at our level of like say alpha status, whatever you want to call it through memetic theory They start behaving like us through osmosis isn't like I study you. I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna do what he does No, no, no, no, this is subconscious just because I'm around you. I'm picking up your kind of well. We call that hurt I mean behavioral finance like yeah hurting behavior. Yeah, yeah, yeah people dismiss their own internal signal to say Well, this is doing this and this is doing that Yeah And nowadays people can do that in a very overt way of making people do that through Tweets and through whatever I'll give you example in Canada. It's like I'm not hating on anybody But I remember in in this is actually price of crypto too. Weeding crypto same thing I remember people telling me have I invested any wheat stocks Have you seen them? Like have you actually done your due diligence on the negative earnings?  Yeah, and I'm like no I'm not really not really my cup of tea. That doesn't mean you know a lot of people made a lot of money But you can see like even when crypto with the ICO boom like everyone just throwing money and people asking me about tokens. I'm like Like have you done your due diligence like and the people get caught up in this Well, there's no answer. I mean you could have invested In an ICO early and you could be a multi multi millionaire right now. I mean When you start talking about behavioral finance like what just like any other area of science is like you try to break it down In pieces you can understand So hurting is like a phenomenon that's measured that's like people do their best to measure They both try to do both in an empirical data sets and also in experiments Where they say like they call it information cascades like for example They'll have somebody where they have like some signal about what something's worth So like we're talking about what wheat is worth or what crypto is worth Well, they're given a signal and then they see other people Give a signal and you see where people like dismiss their signal and go with the crowd Like so they're really trying to get at the mechanism of what causes this whole information cascade where they Just start to dismiss what they know is true and go go for that and so you talk about different investment styles I mean Buffett is unique in some ways And value investors is they're kind of like a cult I worked with with uh, george athenasakos at ivy for for a number of years on this project Looking at the different personality types that invest in certain ways And so we're working on this for some time to see our value investors really that different from say a day trader And so we were in the process of collecting data ascertaining different personality types If I could I'd have a big lab and test their hormone levels But to try to the market is composed of all of those people and then there's also institutional factors a day trader Nothing's constraining you from buying or selling your amount of money But institutions like mutual funds or say, you know hedge funds or pension funds They move it at like this glacial pace in massive quantities And and when you're trying to follow what people are doing like it's it's very very difficult I mean it's mind boggling. So what I find when you're trying to really study something that it's a bit Maybe unsatisfying at the end because by trying to understand something you must isolate To to have any firm statement about it and by doing so you have had to sort of blind yourself to the rest of the complexity It's just like the matrix like where if you see the whole thing, you know the in the movie They say well, you just want to understand you have to see it encoded And so it's funny I was looking I saw the matrix and I was whatever when it came out And then as a graduate student I was looking at a matrix of data It's like I am living in that in our world where you can't understand the complexity You can what you just said it in that earlier sort of paragraph like spans 100 careers of scientists that would never really be able to fully answer the questions In multiple fields, you know evolutionary biology finance I could spend the rest of my career trying to understand one of those questions And maybe with with changes in technology maybe changes with blockchain or Or something it would give me a handle on it But man, it's it's really frustrating because in a poetic sense you can express yourself You can toss up these questions, but when you actually get down to the work of doing the science The the question becomes much more provincial much much more circumscribed Than the the initial excitement that drove you to the question. Yeah So so it's not to like discourage any budding economist or scientist But like that's just the truth about trying to make a hard statement Well in a scientific way talks about like for example black swan events is like you can Create this projections and you can create the frameworks all you want But there's certain things that you'll you can never expect Well, there's did he I saw net who says he disagrees with him. Okay, so I found this very interesting.  He's like a Comes from like I'm trying to think is his like native field, but he's now in finance and he he takes the opposite perspective of of telep He says Yes, there are black swan events Well, let's just just for a second talk about we even buy black swan black swan event is like something that's From a normal distribution perspective unlikely to happen Yes, so like let me say the six sigma event So the standard deviation is you know one then something it hits here over at whatever the main plus six So that should statistically never happen But there's a problem in that very characterization, which is a financial markets follow normal distribution So i'm going to nerd out on this for a second. It's important because if we think the normal distribution is is a fair model of Returns well, then you're going to have fairly flat tails you have small tails But like if you use a parallel distribution or some other distribution has really fat tails Well, then something that happens really far from the mean is not that unlikely So point one the second part of that Is when something like a major crash happens It happens when it's least likely statistically So time has gone on and as time is going on and nothing and there's been no volatility This normal distribution of like let's say the prab, you know a moving average or whatever of 60 days or whatever is shrinking And so at that point you're getting more confident that yeah, I can actually take this bet and talk about that whole Module confidence. Oh, yeah, I got this Well in that moment you're just waiting for that crash to happen So those are two points to think about when we when we Toss around words like black swans is Is that maybe the distribution is wrong? Yeah, and it's the most wrong before the crash So when you talk about risk management from a from a hedge fund perspective or from, you know, any financial perspective You have to think about that and so Sorinette makes the point that if you look at like they're testing on materials like let's say you're working on like A container that holds water or a rocket ship a rocket's actually something he studied and he would say yeah They would blow up suddenly, but it wasn't but if you actually look at it the material would would start to rattle And then you'd say oh there's early telltale. Yeah, there's something coming Well, even like the 2008 financial collapse, it's not like the big short right If you're watching and you know, even now Even now I'm seeing something happening and I'm not like a Economist or like a genius by any means.  You're seeing a pattern. So what pattern do you see that seems Math it's like negative negative yield interest rates can't go higher non-stop quantitative easing, you know, they want to introduce some mmt theory in the states for me. It's like So I don't see so continue. I don't see this going very well So you think they'd be like what like hyperinflation feel hyperinflation It might be student debt crisis that happens 1.5 or 1.4 trillion dollars owed in student debt You can't claim bankruptcy both Canada the United States, which is pretty fucked up There's no system in place to kind of fix that or even create some type of better let's say Secondary solution in case that does happen, you know, the problem with a lot of these like financial system There's never second order thinking It's like well, we're going to do this one thing But they don't think the butterfly effect is like what does this one thing do like think about for example the real estate market We're talking about Toronto They literally can't raise the interest rate 1% The cause of collapse because people they're spread so thin right average saving 400 dollars They even had to loosen up the stress test here in Canada because people couldn't get mortgages So now that's kind of loosened up Most people are going outside of Toronto or most people who are buying underneath a million dollars Which put 5% because that's what they can afford Now they got to get mortgage insurance because they only put 5% and so at the end of the day, they're really brutal It's brutal. They're in the red. Yeah, actually they owe money Every month they're not even saving anything forget the 400 bucks. You're owing money every month Yeah, and this is our interest rate. So what what did the Canadian bank put it like two? I don't know.   Basically. Yeah, it's free And then I really think I wave you think something's gonna come and push that over Yeah, I don't know what it is. Maybe the student debt crisis. Maybe more trade war Maybe we have a cold war. We're China happening now stuff going on with Hong Kong Uh, uh, we see a lot of unrest these days. You see stuff happening in Bolivia right now You see stuff happening in Chile right now, Argentina Colombia Venezuela all of Latin America is going up in our at least is never like super chill just generally speaking Like at the moment at the moment. Yeah So it's like but it seems like everything at the exact same time is kind of like a boiling pot happening and for me is like Call me old-fashioned, but When you have the middle class getting squeezed and everyone their debt ratio is ridiculous And you have that average saving of 400 bucks And Canadian GDP is not going very well The math just means that eventually there's gonna be something has to eventually we have high debt And you don't have cash flow coming in to pay that debt It's not like it's be just a small thing like the thing will unwind because you have this hurting and you have this momentum effect I think a lot of people are thinking about that and I think that this whole mmt this endless This makes no sense to me this mmt theory if Should we explain it? Should we should we go into that? Yeah, you can explain. So like in nutshell is modern, uh, monetary Yeah, monetary theory and Basically doesn't have to be pegged to anything Forget the gold standard forget even 1 to 10 reserves fractional reserves As long as the government owns money They can print as much as this takes quantitative easing and puts it on steroids Unlimited print steroids like testosterone exactly exactly with it. Yeah, so it's like, oh, we need another we need another 500 billion dollars It is really a person of a button Yes, and then they say they so the justification is that we could use that money by going paving roads in arkansas Yeah, or like doing something that's economically meaningful and that there's no comeuppance essentially It's crazy drug. It's like you can do you could be high the rest of your life and there's no coming down from it I mean Yeah, call me old-fashioned too, but I think that there is a fundamental reality that there has to be some sort of balancing of the books and um Like it kind of gets in a deeper concept about economic theory And there was a statement. I think it was robert solo who said that Macro economic training is both very expensive and very wasteful Something to that extent this is a few years ago and as someone who like went through the torture of macro economic training You know to do islm and all the derivations of the equations and all that it was like very difficult And you know to pass your qualifying exams and get the phd is like a pretty It's a vetting process They murder most of us on the way and like you feel so proud that when you finished that like I now have this model and I now understand math and max understand the world well I find that it gave me kind of a false confidence that I maybe should not have had about how how the world actually works And and I know this is unpopular to say someone someone who's who's trained neoclassically, but um I'm a big fan of data and I'm a big fan of facts And there was not one regression not one piece of data analysis done in my macro class Now that same class does have it's all actually I was just talking to professor the other day It's all done in in our markdown. So it's all pulling real data real time testing it. It's actually beautiful So so we shouldn't be hopeless about it I think there's that that this data revolution that we're having is actually going to make us better scientists And we'll it will help us understand these kinds of things because now it's all going to be monitored And if you see collapse there might be ways to head it off rather than seeing everything unwind There may be something I don't know who's leaving the Fed or what's doing like from the 2008 bailouts to the bank is ridiculous It's like even like the stock markets we're talking about literally they're they're getting free money Buying back their own stocks almost a zero interest, right? It's not even capitalism anymore. It's not even cronyism. It's like IMF central bank wall street cronyism I can't even compete if in a while, you know earlier you and I were talking about China It's like how do you compete against a Chinese government Chinese company that has a limited funding from the government that doesn't care about profit? You don't that's a reality. Yeah, you just can't compete. They have a black hole of money from the government. They don't care They'll operate at a loss forever So for me, it's like I'm not even viewing this as investor. I'm viewing that as majority of the people just want to have a better quality of life and A lot of the problems that we have today especially now in our political environment is talking about let's say automation or Oh, it's the rich people's fault or blah blah. It's sure. Yeah, it's for votes. Everyone's blaming the fingers Um for me I view as One obviously there's always an educational problem education has to adapt that's a place for everybody Uh, but if we're talking about finances if we're talking about the economy If I'm talking about for example, like real case studies like my mom, right or my brother Um, regardless of if my mom makes 60k or 80k a year Her buying power decreases every year and it decreases a lot It's not like simply 2% 2% is just inflation Right, you get all this quantitative easing and interest rates next thing.  So if you look at the buying power, it's lost 70% since the 80s The same dollar you had in 80 is worth 70% less today And so where does this go? You see the trend line?  How do we increase the ladies the buying power if a person has more buying power?  It's 400 savings Average is a lot of people in dissavings also dissaving average 400 think about 400 bucks. That's a slim margin You know, thank god we're in canada. We have socialist healthcare system not the best But I get a broken arm. I can go er Like er is good when it comes to socialist system. Er is good. Yeah anything else Not good. Not good. I give credit for er like emergency related Like a cute like right now.  Yeah And obviously it's not life-threatening. It's not an issue. It's like eight month wait. I'm gonna get the Wow. Yeah, yeah, you know, they got to meet out like resources to like the most urgent things It's pretty it's pretty like Calculate I have some buddies that are doctors and they're not a waste that's happening in the system. I mean I I'm amazed when they tell me well, so who comes and sees you and I've a buddy He's like um 80 the people are just there because the board and it's free Really? Yeah, and one of the communities near here. I was like board as an as an american I've driven myself to the hospital. I think three times with like fractures like bike wreck. I mean the whole thing's like And I appreciate health care so much that I don't ever use it unless I have to even I still think like well I want to conserve it for the people who actually need it and I talked to my friends or physicians and the things they tell Me I'm just like appalled And so I'm not I don't not taking a political position on it But I just think in terms of like caring about if we're going to really care about the sign You have a broken health care system. We're actually around the whole picture We're ranked pretty low when it comes to health care and what domain I'm fairly new in Canada So what is it like the quality of it is a quality how it's distributed with quality and time Time waiting for something who's good in the in the realm of social. Is this UK good or France? Actually, France is good. They have a two-tier system. They're socialist and private So that's one of the Trends in Canada trying to people to push is more private There's was a male isn't a male clinic here now that you could do listen. There's private But it's not how you think it is.  Yeah, whatever you want to do basically Um, there's very strict laws of what is allowed privately in Canada.    Yeah, like on earth. But you know, the yeah, exactly right mother guy. Let's say. Yeah And nature is about competition and it's about conserving energy. All right And if we look at systems today, uh, I'm a big believer in game theoretical models And so if we only have one model, there's no competition. There's no incentive to improve anything whatsoever And so for me, it's like, why don't we have a two tier system?  Um, but imagine you had that here you would create a more Streamline competition and I see now there's even f m r i so somebody Just created one for like new New f m r i machine for four hundred thousand dollars That's like less than half. Yeah. Yeah, I just saw it. Yeah, that's true. That trend the trend of lower imaging technology I used to work in in healthcare and the invention in dentistry was they had 3d volumetric tomography machines you could get in office for like 250 000 and now they're less But like replacing basically a high radiation Cat scanner and so a doctor could could lease or buy this thing That would give you like one thousandth of the radiation of a cat scanner And now it's available to the public so technology I mean to kind of bring back in like technology is the great disruptor and the great equalizer And so and so I mean you talk about nature like there are people kind of on the fringes thinking about things and those Whether it's the innovator thought i'm going to create this x-ray machine Whether it's the f r i machine that's cheaper or the x-ray machine That's much lower radiation in terms of microceiver. It's in cost like that innovation Is that competition you're talking about in crypto? Is that competition we're talking about? Like all the things that you're talking about kind of rope all back in DNA sequencing was like $10,000 when their first came out roughly Now it's you know 23 to do like a full full gene one. Well, they don't do full full gene Yeah, they do just like simple stuff. So it's cheaper like $199. Yeah, I don't know. I haven't done it I haven't done it. Yeah, should we just they were related my dad's from Romania. Where are you from? You former Yugoslavia. Okay, probably not but yeah I'm wary of doing it. Yeah, I'm a little uncomfortable about it too I listened to one of my one of my favorite podcasts lately is hidden forces And let me pull up the last one right now. You I'll send it to you afterwards um The latest episode was with kyle bass and He was talking about The chinese companies that do like and he mentioned 23 meet the do majority of the gene sequencing for all these companies And so it's they they offshore to china and they have all the data. Oh, that's comforting. Yeah, exactly He like he mentioned that public. Yeah. Yeah crazy Yeah, and so for me, I'm like and I've still haven't done it and I literally just listened to this episode So if you guys are wondering go check out hidden forces podcast.   It'd be john doe. I'll pay cash Like I don't want my name attached to that really the outpatient services. I say yeah I like privacy. Yeah, like my goal in the future like another way to make health care better Is to have more interoperability of health care like even as an ontario resident I it's very difficult for me to take almost impossible to take my medical documentations from the ontario government and to go to bc. It's very hard very very hard And so this is why in fact a lot of times why there is malpractice in medicine Well in canada per se is There's a there's a dissidence between communication between practitioners in different places So like you go to one place or hospital they have this data on you, but that data isn't shared over here It's like the example of the united states like cia fbi.  It's kind of similar like they're not sharing data So you don't have a cohesive unity of data So amr has been around for ever but it still is like archaic as it was when it was proposed Yeah, super archaic So, you know, maybe there's a blockchain solution. Maybe there's something that can like share information better It's just it's really confusing. Yeah, ideally what I would like to see in the future is There's also testing too much creates like double negatives. It's not always good to test There's too many variables right testing can be can cause you know x-rays themselves are damaging Yeah, yeah, yeah, and also there's stuff like white coat syndrome just a very act of going seeing a doctor skews tests because you're just anxious and nervous And so what I would like to see in the future ideally is My dream would be a star trek tech where we have in-home units So saliva you're in the whole nine yards, right? Let's say a unit like this. Yeah, yeah, okay That unit has my data. This is a node It's not related to my name Let's call me like i'm a number i'm number 12 or number 10 and it's encrypted whatever encryption We want to use like p2p encryption or whatever and as a node it's connected to A Oracle and the oracle is taking other nodes information And we can have some form of machine learning within these oracles That are doing pattern recognition So let's say i'm using this machine on a quarterly basis like a full Thing it can be like Let's say it take it does a dutch test. It does all these Metabolites of hormones so like a panel like a panel like a beyond a full comprehend I mean like full hormonal panel cortisol panel Uh everything like we'll look at like top markers that matter is maybe like you came and do heart rate variability for that Your devices can communicate with exactly because centralize healthcare You know, I have like an aura ring that I wear shows my heart rate variability my sleeping stuff So we do this data aggregation. Yeah Yeah And so basically let's say I do it every quarter for like the big panel But on like a daily basis taking like small markers like heart rate variability, maybe my oxygen, etc And then we have this oracle encrypted I'm a number But it's collecting a bigger reference sample pool Of seeing patterns between other types of stuff and let's say it sees something. It's preventative.  I don't want repair medicine. I don't want it before it's too late I want early early detection. Yeah. And so see something.    Yeah, and they shouldn't They should be it's doctors is more should be on the human side of things Ideally test should be for robots At the end of the day people are bad at analyzing data And now there are a lot of people who are They might be out of business like radiologists like you see they had machine learning for analyzing I had this conversation. So my wife's cousin. He's an ER doc And he it's so funny. We're just out a couple days ago and he had pitched a similar idea to one you just mentioned Which I should probably not mention publicly, but it was like similar thought pattern Of like, hey, there's he sees Just the amount of waste is really really bothersome.  I think someone is going to crack it. I'm sure people are working on it Um, and so I could definitely set you up with him. He's he's again, he's a very entrepreneurial dude And he has like ready solutions because like I see this every single day and it drives me insane And this would be a way to solve the United States that can do much better than we can and be here Unfortunately in Canada, we have a high regulatory hurdle with our socialists Socialist health care system. It's like worse than like the FDA like or like the Couple of reasons that one it's a small country to it's like the amount of capital and regulatory Mental punishment you have to go through it's not really worth it for Canada Like it's easier not even as a pilot like it'd be like not some worth pilot You need somewhere that's like a little more permissive and a little bit more private because I have to somehow fit within our system It can't be totally private like right now Like you as like right now There's there's very stringent laws of who's allowed to have access to your medical files This should be I mean no totally But even you as an individual having access for them There's for the longest time this changed lately It's really good that it changed like for example life labs is a popular lab over here You would have to walk in to your doctor or walk back to life labs to get your results You can't like get a phone Phone technically it's not in the scope Security reasons phones aren't allowed even these cell fax say some fucking doctor's office will not use email They use fax because they consider more secure I'm like who the f where did you get this shit from? I'm like, you know made just a carrier pigeon.  It's like. Oh, thank you. Now. I have email to receive my stuff Uh-huh And so we're in we're in the stone ages over here. Uh-huh and I think The only way that I see Going back to using nature as an example. There's a great saying from Whether his name was gall that's called gall's law Where no complex organism ever evolved from other complex organism. There is an evolutionary Pathway where it's like simple organisms or a single cellular or the multi cellular Then the cells get together then it makes tissue and so forth and so forth. There's like a hierarchical level It's not like oh boom. There we go. We got this thing right and this can be applied to anything It's like you can't just make a startup overnight to have a billion dollar company You know, I mean there's a process, right? Definitely and so we can't just come in and be like healthcare system change so ideally what would make sense where it's like Is there like a small town that we can run a pilot as you mentioned, you know I don't want to give away the secret sauce of this person because he works very hard on these things But I would mention that there are foreign countries that have Databases that are much more welcoming and permissive for these kinds of things For that crack that would be like so you have the software side and you have the hardware side And then you have the regulatory side like so we were just talking about this and thinking How would you launch something that would be let's say stick with your example of preventive medicine? Yes like those are Pretty difficult. I mean just the just forget the regulatory for a second Forget the hardware just the software Of like machine There's also a lot of hype around AI and I think you know this but I feel like whenever I hear that word too much hype It's not AI to begin with I mean I mean It's funny AI is what people have on slides when they're trying to pitch AI to somebody like even economists We use regression all the time that's in machine learning, but we don't like give it a sexy name We just call it like, you know Or nearly squares or panel date or time series But like the public is like so enamored with this idea of AI like it's it's loops or it's, you know I think when you sit down and tell people what when people say AI today, so anyone listening Whenever anybody's saying AI today Probably 99.99% of time It's machine learning. Okay, but what that what is that? the Most algorithms that you see online or ml is literally just pattern recognition That's all it is it goes from filter one to filter two and down the line it goes recognize logic Or logic recognizing patterns. Yeah, there you go. So yeah, it doesn't have wisdom But it has the ability to move large amounts of data. Yes that a human mind would not be able to look at like 20 million piece of data like you have, you know, put that on aws and they can they can do that like split second So so I don't think AI is is the Penultimate solution it is a tool and going back to the radiologist thing. I asked him the same thing I said, what about radiologists are they going to lose their jobs? He said well those that don't use technology are going to are going to lose their jobs Which is which is true about anything and so I think that we embrace technology Versus trying to fight it like If it's better than human judgment, we should use it and be aware of its flaws But we need to incorporate those things. I mean but things that's just what People are like that whatever it is. They're resisting Forward movement and whatever it is because they're afraid or they're suspicious or whatever And once those grounds are addressed then I think that there's potential for for things to evolve the regulatory side I think that if something's like political suicide It's not going to happen regardless of how good it is for the public. I agree. I agree and who's you know if All it takes is one screw up I mean look at what's happening with autonomous vehicles like how many people have gotten killed by autonomous vehicles Like there was the one accent like I think it was it was in texas How many people get murdered every single day by people like your benchmark for perfection here is one Million I think it's like a million people die a year of car accidents Our benchmark is is in is inappropriate when we're looking at at technology People think zero is the appropriate number of mistakes, but like that's not the right number. No, the right number is What's the current Best thing that the current system can do and if we're doing a thousand times better than that with a or autonomous And I just think it's hard to build the stomach because it's it's a very much a cognitive thing because they think that we're not responsible for someone's death But you're responsible for it by by not shifting to a better way of doing things and that's the problem with you know Well, they don't look at it as a net utility you look at like this is a net plus utility or net negative utility Like generally speaking is like if you look at like okay a million people a year die from car accident human error phones this and that drinking whatever Daylight savings time.   Is it like a big like jump during that? There's a blip. Yeah when you lose not gain Yeah, we're all pretty tired. Especially if a kid, which yeah, you're like there's a big blip for a lot of stuff Yeah, cardiovascular like heart attacks to that day. Really? Yeah, it's like interesting. It's insane Well, maybe maybe that's a way to like keep the population down and then lower healthcare costs. It's just kidding kidding kidding kidding, but uh We look at all these people dying a million people And you mentioned maybe like one or two died from cell and we're still in the early stages of self-driving I'm like guys It's a net utility win for everybody self-driving, you know, I still have some questions like The philosophical question of the train trolley question Right, so anyone's listening is like, okay, you have a train if you imagine a train on a track and the track is about to fork and It's a one person versus five people. It's usually like one to three. Yeah, it says one to three ratio It's like, all right, but three people and like that yeah So there's three people and let's say fork the right fork and one person on the left fork But you as the individual control the lever So what do you do? Do you kill one person or do you just don't touch the lever and the track goes Its original path and kills three people Mm-hmm For me, it's like well one way it's a self-driving car. I'm not the person deciding the lever It's the software the question. Well, who programs the software? Well, it's The car manufacturer let's say Tesla in this case Are they right? I don't know.  Oh, you have a helmet I'm gonna kick you versus the other one that doesn't have I mean and That the trolley car problem gets really interesting because there's another twist on that and they actually have done There's a lab in nyu the green lab where they would actually Do this experiment. There's another twist on it. They would say well What if there was this is no offense to anybody? But they would say what if there was a very overweight person on the bridge?  Yeah Stop the train and there was something so it's the same utility. So they took that like, okay You're still killing one instead of three, but the notion of like Pushing someone physically like people couldn't do it. They couldn't do it.  There was something physical about that. Yeah, it was interesting But but yeah, it's it is hard for people to stomach and Caltech did some interesting work on this Even not about killing people about money going to Africa or not Like some people just like so they could push a button and this paddle would hit this ball and it would go towards this other village They're just like they couldn't even touch it It was so uncomfortable for them because they're like, we're not really going to do a trolley car and kill problem But like making the decision who lives or dies in the scent but statistically It was like people that would starve in Africa versus one village somewhere else And they just couldn't even bear to make the decision of $50 going to save someone's life for food or medicine or something So it's people man. I mean this whole show the whole world It's it's all about people it's about the things that that we're afraid of it's the things that we are not optimized for Like I was saying earlier.  That's beautiful.  It's like it's pretty crazy Well, who's to say that we will I mean, I don't maybe I think the environment I mean it should kind of fold back on to Providing us with an environment that we're better suited for I mean, I know this might seem out of the blue But the notion of communities and living and feeling that we belong to something Is one of the healthiest things that I that a human or any any mammal maybe other animals needs You know could could experience but like our current environment splinters us so so dramatically that we make decisions based on my unit Which would be me or my family your wife your kids whatever Which is different from my community Yes And and the factors and the the automatic reactions that would have been good for society Get so split up because our tribes. I don't even know what our tribes are made up in him You know and so and so I don't know the future of the world I mean we're kind of we are kind of getting into these bigger questions about what's going to happen with money and all of that The environment may never Roll back and providing us with those with those tribes and communities and spaces where we make decisions They care about other people unless we're conscious of that. I see a trend happening. Yeah, I think here here in Toronto everywhere in the world It's huge in california, but I don't find it as salient here people aren't talking about That depends on what community you're in but I think that's in my community. There's very tiny. I hardly have any friends here Not yet. That's true. I'm like the new guy Yeah, you know And Toronto is not the most like I've noticed that you know not very like hey come over have a drink. It's like I don't know you bro They don't say bro.  Yes, not to say it's not friendly people a lot of friendly people They're just like not receptive. It's true The ones I have met though have been really great But just strangers on the street kind of stuff like if you're sitting in a bar next to someone here They they probably won't talk to you in the states your best friend by the end of that High five in the game. It's like me my best analogy. Toronto.  Oh, you're from where? Okay. Let's be friends Like you're not from here either. Yeah, but the people that are like core here Like they do have a good community like I've been introduced to my wife's family like they're really tight And I I love being part of that. Yeah, but getting in is you know if you're a bit of an outsider It's a bit a bit a bit difficult because the culture Is uh, I can't think of the the right word off top of my head, but I don't think so. Toronto has a culture Really, you don't think it's a culture. I don't think so the social thing as a toronto identity.  I have a job. There's opportunities. I put my head down.  No, no, no, I lived in bc for five years bc. What are they like? Are they like more like well, they don't like torontonians begin with I heard that I've heard that first minute I moved in I got a bad vibe because I'm from fucking toronto Um, I've known I was there like before I moved here and they would talk smack smack So I lived in colona small town interior bc beautiful I actually had a hard time fitting in at the beginning because everyone's open because a small town is maybe like, uh, like The area I live there was only a hundred thousand people. That's a small town I went to heelsburg high school. Yeah heelsburg capital 10,000 people So everyone said hi right everyone. Everyone knows you and it was everything about you Well now like depending on where you live. I had a hard time of getting used to that There are people who know you here you can walk out.  I'm like It's weird, huh? It's weird It took it took it took some time for me to adapt to that now like did you then feel that it was genuine eventually I actually like to do a thing when I walk around toronto one of my meditations I walk With noise cancellation headsets and I just walk and I just smile at people and I see how they react.  Really? Yes But the headphones would think that you're like smiling at something else like you ever think that But I just smiled a smile. Really? Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. You get a little bit once a while I think I think the part of it is the weather is a big part of it. Oh for sure like People just it just makes you just close down and you want to get from where you're going as quickly as possible And you just you're just tunnel vision. I agree in this it wasn't at all like that Like I found like in california, but you know, I went to grad school I was like wearing a tank top every day flip-flops and like Strutting around happy and here. It's like we're like little ogres like that's like going from one thing to the next Summer time is crazy. It is amazing And people are more open. It's true. Oh, yeah It's just even in the elevator standing like people just like on their phones trying to avoid making eye contact or talking to you In my building or my office and so it's like I just when I an elevator I do not put my phone. I'll put it away and I'll say hi and I'll just like And sometimes people will like just shrink and some people they'll be like, oh my god You're saying something and they're like fine. I gotta be proactive and open that communication I really believe we're gonna see a massive Ex this of young families or people fed up with city life leaving A couple of reasons why from an economic standpoint is just not worth it Like I mentioned earlier the cost of living in Toronto unless like A family couple downtown Toronto if you're not pulling in at least 150 together It's like you're you're not getting my Like regular condo rental like a simple two bedroom condo. It's like $3,000 depending on what neighborhood you're in That doesn't include utilities that doesn't include anything else doesn't include all your other costs like these like the base bone overhead costs of your living per month comes like 6k Yeah, just basic. This isn't like oh man.   I don't know women across all provinces and territories in Canada across all different trades Is like about 40 45k The total medium the median for it for everything old territories all provinces all trades all right 45k and so 45k To live in downtown Toronto It's not gonna happen, but they're not here. I mean They're getting pushed out and they have to commute if they work here It's and so I think the whole idea the only reason but there's two people There's two reasons why people live in a metro palatine number one. They're young.  I like I get it. I can tell you're a party Yeah, was was you got that I've retired you've retired from part of hung up your uh, I've I've partied for 10 lifetimes. Wow. Uh, I was a total nerd. I was like I never I got kicked out of high school when I was in grade nine.  I was in a club scene like crazy. I've oh, oh, yeah Like part now you tell me now. I tell you it's too late now, you know Things I would ask you yeah by the time and uh, and so when I viewed as like Work is changing a lot of work is becoming more and more remote A lot of it Like even for my company we're all remote all of us all different sections of our company's remote My buddy has one of the world's biggest software conferences, uh, qcon info q Floyd Pretty much 90 of his company's remote. He has like more than like 80 employees all around the world. It works Different countries too and not just canada And so for me, it's like I think people People come to terms where it's like, why should I kill myself to live in toronto? When I can go live in wherever where so what's your opportunity? let's say in ontario you want to go live in Orillia Or berry But of the people that you said it could work remotely they have they didn't really have hard skills Or are you saying this is people like someone who would who who doesn't necessarily have like advanced education? Like forget forget education if you look at any corporate corporation or enterprise and you walk in 99% of the older job is on the computer. Why can't you do that job from home? It's cheaper for the companies to there's there's that evolution certainly They don't need insurance. It don't need the overhead cost, right the physical space physical space It can be like there's a realistic commercial real estate issue with that because that's happening Right, you can come in only once a week for a company meeting, you know just for like two three hours But so okay, that's true But still housing is still under height like extraordinarily high demand people are asking you know getting above bidding still Whether it's apartments condo in toronto. Yeah, but you can go like say Orillia or you can go to burlington You can find beautiful properties within your price range and it's not just a cost of property. It's the quality of your lifestyle too Like I have I I own a cottage in just north of wassega I I can see my private beach like right there.  Four point cortisol test. I believe it You could do Let me show you. Oh, here you go. Here's a good view um I live in these like townhouses man behind my private beach. There's mount nox over here. I went hiking every weekend. Oh That's like You know almost as cool as being able to walk down blower street One thing bad about toronto, they really designed it bad.  You're depressing right now. I know this is beautiful. I've been there I said live in nature. I have not had a moment of like being This I'm part hippie. Let's face it. Yeah So like be a one with nature is really important for your like emotional well-being the closest thing I get is swimming in a chlorinated pool is like because there's something about your mind moving quickly Like you your imagination can span the universe, but like your body Something about putting your body in sync with nature like when you swim you can't move any faster Then your ability to swim through and I find that there's something very spiritual about that because Whatever the panic or anxiety you feel especially in the city Something about going through a medium like that Makes you be here right now Because there's a lot of things we obsess about. I mean, yeah, we live in an apartment. We have a baby. It's very loud She's very loud. She's wonderful. She just screams to the baby and like we're constantly thinking How do we get out of this and so even on a professor's salary, which you know in the business school is not bad And and my wife was working for a family business. You probably find it interesting skin care um, but like The amount we'd have to make to outbid somebody on a house that'd be good enough for even one or two kids You know, it's it's pretty significant the thought of being of paying $8,000 or $10,000 in just living expenses is like not that sexy No, and so the thought is so we have a choice like you said we can move out of town I mean, I now work, you know right downtown so it's so it'd be a heck of a commute I'm giving up my life to get to work. Um, or we you know, we fight harder and make more money I mean, it's these are like major life decisions that affect your quality of life So we talk about this constantly and and it is something I think that vexes lots of people and it's not unique to toronto No, my mom lives in san francisco and have friends that you know that oh, they're random There's insane You know and friends in new york and televieve and like The whole world is going through this and so I so go back to your original question Not to be like an end of days kind of person But like something's got to give In and I think that I would love to have the time to pay attention to those like Stress fractures and to see what's going on and I mean at the moment. I'm not jumping at opportunities I'm sitting on you know more cash than I would if had I not been thinking if you look at most people They're sitting on the cash. Yeah apple amazon everyone sitting on cash So I can't see the future, but but I would feel better when I have a long track record of of um Cash flows and to know that you know if there's a disturbance or perturbation of that cash flow that there's not going to be a fire sale going on You know so so I've just become very conservative working in finance for this long has changed me. I was much more of I was a bit less conservative, but now I just think we all need to think in terms of long-term responsibility And it's not a sexy thing. Well, it's interesting. I have students like that went to ivy business school Got great jobs making you know around six figures or more living at home And knowing they're missing out on the club scene knowing they're not have access to the social stuff But like I actually have a lot of respect for that They they say look they are forecasting this at 21 22 That there's no way I'm buying a house and I'm okay to eat some humble pie and have my mom do my That was the question. Why do you have to buy a house? I I advise all young couples and it's like I'm talking about all of them now But I'm only 34 but people who are thinking buying a house in situation does Matter like if you can financially afford it like buffer wise if you're loaded.  What then? What are you gonna do nothing? You're fucked. Yeah that you can't yeah the money is illiquid like there's no you can't take it out of house Like a pure and I'm viewing it as like risk to reward ratio sitting in the sidelines. I'm like this is a horrible deal Like there's no benefits in this deal. It's a I think it's partly a fomo part like you're talking about this No, it's just people just saying well, it's a million now at this rate.  We lived on the top I remember and he rented out the bottom and that's how he retired and I tell people I'm like, I'm not telling you don't go to real estate. That's not the question I'm just saying if you really believe this investment, it's not you are the liable party at hand Everything's on you. You can take that money and put it to work.  You got that you got a person paying your mortgage Or the basement, but you know, sure whatever, right? So like this is kind of it's it's a psychological switch Right, but I've been looking at those and they're also quite expensive. I mean it all duplexes in Toronto 2.5 going up for sure. Oh, yeah. Yeah, like you got to put down $400,000. Oh, yeah Kitchener Waterloo, yeah London all the university students guaranteed paychecks from the government I have a place in London. I when I was working at at ivy. I bought like a three-story townhouse. Yeah, it was $333,000 Here it would sell for it's it's gorgeous. It would sell for like 1.5 here So I thought I'm just like carving it off just shipping it here and just plopping in the back Do you have a backyard? I could just like drop it into that. Cool. Okay. Okay. That's the only way I think All right, I think we covered a lot man, we have spanned like everything man Yeah, yeah billions of years and like current modern reality the things we struggle with Our hormones or finances. They're all related in the future. All related smiling at people smiling at people Okay I know we covered a lot. I know A lot of my audience will have a shit ton of questions And definitely they're going to be interested in the research and everything we talked about is on the site I will leave it on show notes, but if people want to get ahold of you, what's the best resource for them? Um pretty private with my email, but I have a website. Yeah, I have like just put it my phone number Uh, I think you can reach me to write through youtube. Okay. Can't you I have like a account there Okay, I'll put your website in the show notes, too. Oh, so everyone can see it. Yeah. Yeah, just my like just my name Yeah, yeah, I'm happy to like yeah, certainly any like uh Science questions or life questions or whatever. I may need to update some of those pictures I don't look that was like my triathlon, but you have all the reference I'm on your side right now Like if you guys are interested for all the studies that we talked about it's on the site like everything from the stock market testing to the cognitive reflection test to the bling-bling status test It's all there on the recent publication So you can see it and actually go through the literature and the research yourself, which I do recommend But yeah, highly go highly recommend go check it out Cool. Cool. Thanks. Thanks


Let's take a look at working with the spreadsheet, which you're going to be using in part four and five of Lab 8. You're going to download the spreadsheet from your Blackboard account. In my case, it automatically saved the file. In your case, it may open up the file. If it saves it to the desktop or to a download folder, then you'll want to actually come in and it looks like it saved mine to a download folder. You're going to locate that file and open it up. In this case, it's opened up in LibreOfficeCalc, but I'll also show you what it looks like in Excel. Now right now it opened up and it, for some reason, had the part five. If you scroll up, you'll find the part four. As you start to enter information. Now in this particular case for the spring 2020, your measurements are in a video. You need to go watch the video with the measurements for part four in order to put these values in there. And when you start entering values, you'll see that it starts to do calculations. You won't get the final complete calculations correct until you fill in all of the information. This information came from watching the videos. You put it on your worksheet, then you transferred it to the spreadsheet. These values down here, once you have all the measurements in, you will transfer back to your worksheet and the percent differences will get transferred back to the worksheet. When you get down to part five, again, you're going to be filling in some values here. Now I've got values of one in here. Those are not the correct values. You'll actually have to fill in from the table. So for example, on part five for Mars, the very first number is going to be that 1.523. Don't put the units in, just put the numbers in. Once you've done that and you've filled in all of these numbers from the table in the report, again, it will start to do some calculations. The calculations will not be correct until you have all of the values filled in. Once you've got those calculated values, you'll transfer those back to your worksheet to be able to turn that work in. Now this opened in LibreOffice, which is the free version here.  You should see a very similar behavior. Now again, it says here not to open it because it could contain viruses, but this is coming from me. So go ahead and enable editing. You're going to have to do that before you're allowed to put in values, which in this case are values again that you get from the video. And again, it will start to fill in the calculations as you enter those values. So remember, if it says that you have to enable editing in Excel, do that. Put in all of the values, then get your calculated values. If you have any difficulties using the spreadsheets, let me know.