Joe Rogan Experience #2263 - Gad Saad

Rogan and Saad open on raising kids in the internet age before diving into Saad's academic work on decision-making, cognitive dissonance, and the corruption of modern science by ego and incentives. They explore evolutionary medicine, the carnivore diet, and consumer psychology of status and branding. A long middle stretch covers AI, quantum computing, self-driving Teslas, and brain imaging. The back half is a wide-ranging cultural critique of woke ideology, trans issues in sports, immigration, and the value of Elon Musk buying Twitter, closing on why both men avoid online negativity.

• Saad reveals a 1998 study he ran showing depression had no effect on decision-making got rejected purely for its 'null effects', exposing publication bias in science.
  00:27:33
• Saad says he privately bet a colleague's research was '80% bullshit' before that person was caught fabricating data.
  00:34:25
• A cancer doctor reportedly diagnosed healthy people with cancer, justifying it with 'you have to eat what you kill in this business.'
  00:39:35
• Saad claims he predicted the COVID overreaction and woke movement years early, 'that is literally my autobiography.'
  00:40:38
• Saad calls his conversation with quantum-computing pioneer David Deutsch arguably the best he's ever had.
  01:37:31
• Saad recounts a near-impossible serendipity: meeting an LA public defender in rural Quebec in 1989, then meeting that man's son in Texas in 2013.
  02:21:47
• Saad, who is Jewish and knows Musk, publicly debunked the claim that Musk made a Nazi salute, calling it an 'attack vector.'
  02:32:36
• Rogan argues nothing Musk ever does will matter as much as buying Twitter, which prevented a 'cult-like takeover of all public discourse.'
  02:35:11

• Saad's research found people don't sample all available information before deciding, they stop once choices are 'sufficiently differentiated.'
  00:24:27
• A 1984 study found surgery patients in rooms with a window had measurably better recovery outcomes than those without.
  00:51:03
• The 'mismatch hypothesis' holds that the top killers in health stem from traits that were adaptive for hunter-gatherers but harmful today.
  00:53:42
• Studies show people eat more M&Ms or pasta when offered multiple colors or shapes, even though taste is identical.
  01:03:35
• Saad uses 'costly signaling' to explain why billionaires buy $180M art a monkey could make, only they can afford to waste that much.
  01:08:19
• A quantum computer reportedly solved in minutes a calculation that would outlast the heat death of the universe on classical hardware.
  01:38:33
• In a 1985 AI class, Saad learned chess has more decision-tree nodes (~10^100) than there are atoms in the universe (~10^80).
  01:40:37
• Eyewitness testimony has been shown to be unbelievably unreliable, per pioneering researcher Elizabeth Loftus.
  02:17:36
• A 1953 Wernher von Braun novel names the leader of Mars 'Elon', and Musk's father reportedly named him after the book's character.
  02:26:23
• Saad cites a brain-imaging study where researchers identified which sentence a subject thought of from activation patterns alone.
  02:54:54