The Jordan Harbinger Show - 265: Moran Cerf | Hacking into Our Thoughts and Dreams

Episode Date: October 17, 2019

Moran Cerf (@twtrdtcm) is a neuroscientist who strives to understand the underlying mechanisms of human psychology, behavior changes, emotion, decision making, and dreams. What We Discuss with Moran Cerf: What would a future in which we could connect our brains to the cloud and outsource parts of our thinking look like? Can we — or will we ever be able to — record and share our dreams like home movies of the most intimate kind? How teachers might use virtual reality attuned to our specific brain engagement patterns to ensure we're learning at an optimal rate. What happens when computers and machines can read our thoughts and know what we're thinking even before we do? What are the security risks of having our thoughts available to these kinds of networks? And much more… Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/265 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Join entrepreneur, technology investor, and self-experimenter Kevin Rose as he explores new ways to reach peak personal and professional performance on The Kevin Rose Show — listen here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiruality podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics. Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with producer Jason DeFilippo. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most brilliant and interesting people and turn their wisdom into practical advice so that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Today on the show, my friend Moran Surf and I talk about hacking humans. That's how this all started for him. This guy used to rob banks, literally and legally somehow, and we'll talk about some of the social engineering principles at work, the human. and hacking at work. His rise to fame happened because of dream, the idea that you could record dreams, which made international news based on what ended up being a little bit of a massive misunderstanding, but it brought Moran and his work into the mainstream. Today, we'll project a little bit into the future and discover how virtual reality teachers might use our specific

brain engagement patterns to ensure that we're learning at an optimal rate and using optimal methodology. I know that's just crazy. I just dove right in to turn it up to 11. here with the intro. We'll also discover that we'll soon be able to add computer chips to our brains that can outsource certain types of thinking. Imagine your brain connected to the cloud in real time. Of course, that opens us up to hackers and people with bad intentions. What happens when hackers and bad code are literally inside our brains? And can we record our dreams? And what happens when computers and machines read our thoughts and know what we're thinking even before we do? That's coming up right here on the Jordan Harbinger Show.

If you want to learn how we get these amazing guests for the show, it's all about that network. I'm teaching you how to network for personal reasons and professional reasons. Look, if you have a career, job, anything like that, you might want to look into this. The course is free. It's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe with the course in the newsletter. So unless you think you're smarter than all of them, come join us. You'll be in great company.

Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Now, here's Moran Surf. You've had this sort of, I don't even know what you call it, like, you've got your hands. and everything. There's a word that's failing me right now. I think that I heard someone using the term multi-hyphenated. That's like a multi-hyphenate, yeah. That's like the common one. I think that you can say it like my mom says it, which is you get bold too fast. That is interesting. People go, how did you have time to learn Chinese? Dada-da-da, do all these days. I just get bored fast. But there's more going on there with you because you get bored fast. A lot of kids get bored fast.

They shoplift, right? They don't learn how to fly a jet. break into a bank, which we'll get into it a little bit, become a child actor, be an art prodigy, whatever that means in Wikipedia. I think hacking is the shoplifting of the 20th century. You just do it a large scale. Why leave the house, right? No, I'm going to steal your money,

but I'm not going to go stand in the cold to do it. I'm going to get all of it from the safety of my couch. Although I do believe that you're a hacker when I heard that you took a girlfriend to see Robocop on Valentine's Day. That's a very hacker thing to do, I think. To be fair to her? I didn't know. You didn't know?

It was like we were invited to be a subject in a study, and the study involved watching a movie while our brains are being scanned, and the movie was whatever was showing that day, and Robocop was it, which I enjoyed tremendously. I bet. I mean, it's a good movie, yeah.

Future Detroit. He's a robot who's a cop. Yeah. What's not romantic about Robocop? You weren't just a hacker, you're a penetration tester, and I think a lot of people don't really know what that means.

Can you tell us a little bit about that? So the idea is that you have, say, a bank, and the bank spends a lot of time building firewalls and security systems and as much as they can, things that will stop people from coming in and stealing your money. And then they want to know that it works. Now, because they know how it works, they can't really test it themselves

because they know all the ins and outs. So they want to bring a person who pretends to be a hacker, a villain from the outside, to try to steal the money from the inside as if they were trying to kind of steal your money. There was teams, and I was in one of those teams who performed this task. They're a penetration tester,

as in they try to penetrate. This sounds a little bit kinky. Yeah, no, of course. Their job is to try to break into the bank from the outside and steal money and then come to the bank and say, hey, here's how we did it. So now you know how hackers could do it.

Now you can build better security because you have a kind of intuition of how it actually will be done. A couple of my friends do this still professionally. They're really good at it. They also, you might even know them. We'll talk about it after the show.

They consulted for Mr. Robot as well. So Dave Kennedy, maybe, is that name, ring a bell? He wrote Set, the social engineering toolkit. There's a couple other guys. Back in the day, I used to help them with some stuff, and they've got really funny stories. For example, breaking into a warehouse,

and it's 2 o'clock in the morning, and they're like, oh, the motion thing that's in the inside, the door when you're going out. So if we can trigger that from the outside, but how do we do it? So they're wiggling sticks under the door, nothing's doing it, and they go,

it must have to be something bigger. What's open at 2 a.m. that is the size of a person that's not a person, a blow-up doll from a porn store, shove that under the door, inflate it on the inside, and then move it around, and sure enough, the motion detector

unlocks the door and they walk in. The crazy thing I heard recently was something like a person from the outside, connecting to the guest network of the house that's open, through that connecting to the laptop that speaks on command, you can kind of trigger a command, make the laptop say a word that's being heard by the kid's child monitor. So it moved the sound from the bedroom of the kid to the living room where Alexa sits, and they tell Alexa to unlock the door. Wow.

Alexa, of course. So, wait, that's a little convoluting. So they join the guest network on the Wi-Fi. They connect to the laptop that's in the office. Yeah. In the kids, I think, bedroom, there's like a little laptop that kind of speaks, that listens and speaks. And that's how they make it sound, something that then gets transmitted. The baby monitor.

Yeah. Right. So then they had that transmit to the other room where the Alexa sits, the Amazon Echo. Then that unlocks the smart lock. Ooh, outsmarted yourself there, smart home. Yeah. Yeah. But that's classically how this stuff works, right?

I mean, there's all kinds of. stuff and I've found serious bugs in everything from banks to smart home software where I'm like anybody who's on my Wi-Fi network is now getting a pop-up from the smart home that's like, do you want to connect to the lock? So I can stand outside your house and it's like, do you want to connect to the lock? Sure. Dink, you know, because their smart home is already authorized. These things are not designed security first.

Yeah. And that's the biggest problem. I think they're aimed at efficiency and comfort and user interface. which usually is a trade-off with security. The more convenient it is, the more it is made to be such that, you know, grandma can easily just set it up and install it and it's going to work. It means that it's not supposed to be something that she would spend a lot of time playing with. And then security is secondary, and that's how it's going to work out.

Yeah. Ooh, scary. You didn't just hack into bank systems and fake wire money. I mean, you actually walked into the bank, which seems like a good way to get shot by the cops. So can you tell us how that works? Sure. So as a hacker, your main job is usually to sit at home and try to hack into the system virtually and just kind of move money the way it's done in movies. Yeah. But the mandate that you get is actually even bigger. They also say you can test also the organization.

Like if you think that the person who reports to this person isn't the right one, maybe, you know, someone calls and says there's a hack, who does the person who gets the kind of call connect with it? Sometimes the system don't have that. And then you have to help them just structure the system to respond to a hack. That's another thing that hackers do. Sometimes it's just about the safety of the system. So maybe there's a camera that's supposed to monitor everything, but it's on the street outside. And you can just say me knock it. And that's it.

Now you can enter the bank window, no one seeing. So there's a lot of things that you have to check that are what's called physical or organizational. And that's in the charter of hackers. Now, most of the times we don't do that because we're not good at that. This is not our bread and butter. What we know to do is how to hack. But every now and then, my team and I said,

let's actually try to exercise this line in the contract that says that we can actually try and rob the bank and see how it works. And we did that multiple times by really going to banks and, you know, coming in ski masks and the pretend guns and like say, this is a robbery, give us the money, do all of that. We did it in small branches where you think that it's not going to be a problem. We did it by usually telling the bank's kind of security system in advance that we do. That's just the teller don't know. I would imagine. Oh, the teller don't know. doesn't know. So you walk in with guns and she's like, oh, man, I should have written my will.

I got to call my kids. That's got to be illegal in the U.S. So I don't know if I bet it's illegal to an extent that you have to do a lot of things before, but I think it actually something that should be tested. So if it's illegal, then there should be some way to make it legal such that it will actually be tested. Maybe you have to contact the security, maybe you have to tell the bank teller that it will happen at some point in the next year so they can know what to do. But the point is that if you don't practice something, then when real things happen, you don't know what to do. Yeah, that's a good point.

I mean, I guess if you just tell the bank teller, look, there's a fake bank robbery happening. I'm not going to tell you much more than that, but just they're not going to shoot you. I'm going to be here. They work for us. Don't panic. They're wearing this, this and this. So when they come in, you know, act as you normally would, but you're not going to die. That's like the bare minimum you should tell this poor gal working at the front.

I think that that's the right way to do it. But I really think that if you don't try it, then the first test is where, and it's happening. And that's not a good idea. No, that's a good point. Yeah. Like, oh, it turns out we shouldn't leave the key to the vault in the lock of the vault because someone can just jump over the counter. Post it not. It says the password is here. And you've seen stuff like that, right? Yeah.

All the time. Oh, the password's really long and complicated. So we just wrote it on everybody's keyboard. We printed it out with a label maker. Exactly. Yeah. Well, I know you've mentioned that you attribute a lot of your understanding of the brain and the way that you research a lot of the neuroscience.

that you're doing to time spent breaking codes and doing pen testing. Can you give us an example of maybe something you've used in hacking that you're using in neuroscience? So yeah, for example, a few years ago, when we were hackers, we were tasked with breaking into a big telecom company. So one of those like AT&T, T-Mobile, one of those big companies.

Yeah. And we tried any possible way and we failed. So we couldn't get in. And then we tried the old fashioned way, which is you just call and you kind of ask the person for the password. So the way it went is we waited for Friday afternoon, like around 5pm when people really want to go home to call and start nagging the person on the other side on things.

And what actually happened was that the teller on the side of, let's call them AT&T for the sake of just this illustration. For the hypothetical, it's hypothetically AT&T, but only IPA. 18Q, yes. So it would be misleading. Yes. So we call the person there and we say, hi, we're the kind of technician on the ground somewhere and there's a failed cell tower and we can't access it to fix it.

Please give us the password. And she said, no, I'm trained not to give it to you, so no. And we say, no, no, trust us. It's really us. Look at the monitor. You see that there is a broken cell tower in this particular place that we're telling you about. And she looks and it is indeed the case. There is a broken cell tower.

And we tell her, look, it's Friday afternoon right now. if we don't fix it, it's going to be broken for the entire weekend. And hundreds of people won't have reception for the entire time. Help us fix that. She says, no, I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to give it a password on the phone. Then we say, look, we even remember the first three letters. Like it's a QL.

So you trust us that we just forgot the last three kind of convincing her in any possible way. Bottom line, she says no. So we hang up the phone and we say, okay, that's it. Failed. And then on Monday morning, the chief security officer for that company comes to the office, learns about the incident where there was no kind of reception for the entire weekend and the technician called and this woman didn't give the password and he is proud of her. He said, that's amazing.

You did this thing that was supposed to be a test and you managed to do it. So he calls her and he says, I want to actually make your case into a big story in the company. I'm going to circulate an email to the entire company telling everyone what happened, how you were under stress and pressure to give the password, but you didn't do it the way you should and everything is great. And he starts talking to her and asking her questions. Like tell us a little bit of yourself, how long have you been in the company, how long have you been in this position, kind of where did you get to school?

And as she gives all the answers, the company gets hacked and all of the data is stolen. And that's because not only was the person calling her on Friday, me, but also the person calling her on Monday morning, me. So we pretended to be the chief security officer. And in asking her question, we basically got all the information we did about her to let us in, her mother maiden's name, the school she went to the pet, everything we needed to know to basically pretend to be here. get her password and now get through error count to everything. Now this is the heck kind of in the computer world. But what we learned from that is that people tend to really trust someone from the inside, a lot more than they try someone from the outside.

So if I try to start telling you information right now that you think is not true, you have all the filters in the world to not let it into your brain. You'd say this is not accurate, fake news, I don't believe it, and you're going to stop it from lettering into your brain. But once it's in your brain, you trust it. So if someone from the inside contacts you and says, hey, this is what happens. You tend to not vet that information.

And that's something that we know about the brain, meaning everything that's in your head that got there, you think is facts. So, for instance, if someone tells you right now that we're not here, that you and I... And I'm not in a recording studio with Moran, sir. Someone says, actually, you're at home right now waking up in bed.

So what do you mean? I see Moran in front of my eyes. I have all the sensations of that. Like, what are you talking about? You would not let any argument convince you. you otherwise because you learned all your life to trust your mind so whatever your mind says is too if someone tomorrow says that your memory of today is not accurate and it didn't happen you would say what are you talking about it doesn't matter how many videos you show me of me

hanging out in the beach it doesn't matter how many people you bring that say hey to last day we were playing golf in the morning whatever all the fresh in the world would not change your mind because you were trained through millions of years of evolution to trust your own mind and that is what's now under scrutiny because hackers of the brain can actually get into your mind and change how you think. And that is something that we don't know how to deal with. Like our brain is not trained to not trust itself. We have this timeline in my lab that says,

don't believe everything you think. Don't believe everything you think. And that is the new world that we're going to have to get used to, a world where our own thoughts might not be kind of our safe game, our fair game for hackers. Especially this with deep fakes. And I know this is slightly different than what you're talking about. But like with deep fakes, you can watch a video of yourself

doing something. And most people have not seen this, a deep fake of themselves. There's a tool that a acquaintance made called Descript. And I use it for the podcast sometimes. And they have a, it's a transcription service. But one thing that they have that is not public is called liar, L-Y-R-E, very clever. And if you tell it which voice is yours and you give it permission and you give them permission, I can type out words in my voice and I run hundreds of hours of audio through it. And I can make myself say something. So if I wanted to put a clever little joke in the middle of this and I didn't have time or I say a word weird and I want to get rid of it and I say it in a proper way, I can type it out and put it in there. But if I get a bunch of your talks and I feed it in there and

these guys are sleeping and I give it permission to edit your voice, which is something they've protected against, I could play audio of you saying something really like different that you would never say or horrible or, you know, something negative about your friends. And I could play it for you. And you would then have to go, there's no way I said that, but I'm listening to my own voice, say it. And it sounds pretty damn real. The new movie by Melimondeau. You take a dead person and make a new movie with them. It's only a matter of time. Yeah. Right? Like, oh, this is Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and I don't know, Audrey Hepburn starring in a new action movie with Hulk Hogan. Ten years from now, we'll have that, maybe 20.

I don't know. So this really brings us to the world where I took the example from the hacking and to now the brain, where we're going to have to start thinking about our own thinking and vet it and say, you know what? This is a thought that I know comes from my mind, but I don't think I like this thought. And even though I came up with it, I don't trust it. And I'm going to have to have a friend or someone from the outside tell me, could this be a thought that I would come up with or someone in my head making me say something that's not me?

And this kind of changes everything when it comes to what is reality, not just from the outside, but within our own mind. That's a risky scary feature. Yeah, yeah. Like what if we, what happens when we can't trust our own memory, our own eyes, our own ears,

our own thoughts might not be totally accurate. And that's crazy. I think that the interesting, I have an answer. Yeah. And I'll tell you also kind of why I think it's risky. So the risk comes from the fact

that the entire world we built up to now relies on your internal decision making being the main driver of your behavior. We have sentences like beauty in the eye of the beholder. Mm-hmm. suggesting that at the end of the day, you know what's beautiful.

Or the voter knows best. So if you kind of leave the voter in the ballot, they actually know what to do. Or the customer is always right. All of those assume that at the end of the day, left your own devices, you reach into your mind, you dig in, and thoughts come up that are your thoughts.

And now this is not longer the case. So we really have to change the entire system. Like voting might look different. Purchases might look different. Marketing might not be needed because you just make a person buy. You don't need to convince them to do it. All of those things are,

going to be very different. The solution, in two words. April Fool's. So what I used to kind of tell my friends as a joke, but based on the hacking world, is that I'm surprised that April Fool is the only day of the year. People are actually skeptical. Oh, yeah. Good point. Like when April Fool's, if your wife comes to and says, hey, this is what I'm doing, you say, oh, I don't know. I know her, and I know that this is not something that you would actually do. So let me think about it. Otherwise, you just trust everything. So it's a funny kind of the idea that you suddenly start to vet everything, but this is how we should be. So if hackers would be asked, what should we do to prevent someone getting into our system, they would tell

you you can't. If someone decided to hack into your system, they will succeed. Usually they try kind of broad net, and that's why you're safe, because they don't care about you, but if you're running for office and the entire world is looking at you and they try to find dirt on you, they're going to be able to find it if it's in your computer. So the only way to respond to that is to assume that you already have been hacked and do what you do then. Meaning if you imagine not that you're trying to build the biggest firewall to stop it, but that someone already got in and you say, okay, now that someone got in, what can I do? Maybe I'll change my password in the morning to kind of stop them from getting whatever they

already got. Maybe I will tell my friends, guys, I'm not sure I can vet any email that comes out of my inbox, so you guys check that it makes sense. Maybe you check previous sent emails on your computer to see that you can remember sending everyone. You do all kinds of kinds of things that you do when someone's already. in. This is how you have to treat, I think, reality in a world where our brains can be hacked. You have to say

even though I said it, I want to revisit that. I want to maybe change my mind about things I said. You want to actually tell your friends, you help me see if there's consistency in my thoughts, so I can reflect on that. You basically do things as if you already are not in control, and you try to respond to that.

Yeah, so it's not just skepticism, it's sort of putting a check and in a balance on yourself and thinking, like, all right, is this me? Does this make sense? Is what I'm seeing? rational in some way. It seems like you could go overboard with that and become almost paralyzed by this.

It's a balance that we have to strike the same way we do in April full. We're kind of skeptical, but we also still live in the world and still interact and so on. And I think that it's going to become more intuitive as this becomes the lay of the land. Like as people start doing that,

but it definitely requires a change of how we think. It's requiring a change of the systems. Like all of the systems that rely on one decision as the key thing. Like you just put the note in the ballot and that's it, would might need to be like something that you do in multiple days or you can kind of do an average of three.

All kinds of things would have to change to allow for this, but it will be the response to our world where everything else is kind of unsafe. Right, unsafe, uncertain, yeah. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Maran Surf. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show.

And to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard from our amazing sponsors, visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding ending of the key takeaways for Moran Surf. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to Jordan Harbinger.

com slash subscribe. Subscribing to the show is absolutely free. It just means that you get all of the latest episodes downloaded automatically to your podcast player so you don't miss a single thing. And now back to our show with Moran Surf. You had this cool experiment. I think this is during one of your TED talks, one of your many TED talks. You had people hooked up to electrodes because they were, I think,

undergoing medical treatment, but in the meantime, they're just waiting to have, I guess, some sort of minor seizure, or maybe not minor, so that you're like, well, now that we got electrodes in your head, let's have you watch some movies, let's have you watch some movie trailers, let's have you look at some photos, and seeing where their brains were most engaged. And this is really interesting. You could see when somebody was interested in Marilyn Monroe, I think was the example that you used, or interested in The Simpsons, as opposed to watching, I don't know, historical footage. Where were you able to make? predictions off of what people are engaged in like how can we use that so okay so to

explain what we're looking into yeah those are patients who have brain disorder of sorts typically epilepsy that has a specific location in the brain that causes it so if we can find the location where the problem is and take it out we can fix them so they try all kinds of things and one of the things that they try is to go through brain surgery where a surgeon opens their brain sticks electrodes inside their head around the location that we think the problem emerges from, and then we record the brain activity continuously for days until the problem that they have manifest itself, and then we see exactly where it started, then we take it out. So that's the clinical procedure. They come,

electrodes are placed in their head, and they just sit there, and they wait. And they could wait two or three weeks. So their brain activity is continuously recorded, while hopefully they're going to, at some point, have a seizure that we can trace and figure out what the origin of that is. That's the clinical part. And then I come and I say, you know, you're already going to be here for the next two weeks, basically sitting in bed and just watching movies and reading books, talking to your friends. While your brain is being morning told, do you mind also me asking your questions about your movies that you prefer, the sport teams that you like, whatever, and looking at your brain from the inside and seeing how what you say matches what your brain tells me. And then they, of course,

say yes. And typically what we do in the morning is we just ask them questions about their life. We talk to them for hours. Tell me about your favorite friend, about your favorite food, about places you visited. And as they speak, we look at her brain and suddenly we see, for instance, that when they speak about Marilyn Monroe and they say, I really love this movie of Marilyn Monroe, little cell in her brain starts firing. You say, hey, we think that we see a brain cell that came to life just when he spoke about Marilyn Monroe. Let's try again. Tell me again about your favorite five actors. And she says, Marlon Brando, I don't know, Audrey Hepburn. And third is Merlin Monroe. Merle Monroe, the word are said and boom, the still fires.

They say, okay, it seems to correlate with this. And then we try to do things like show her pictures of Merrimandor and the cell still fires. We try to have her close her eyes and imagine Merrimandor and the cell fires. So we basically found in her brain a cell, typically it's a few of them, that code the concept of Merrimanour.

This is what thinking of Merle-Ler-Mond-Row looks like from inside your brain. A set of cells coming to life. So now that we find those cells, and presumably we found multiple of them, Merle-Mond-R cells, Eiffel-Tara cells, Apple computer cells,

arbitrary memories that you have in your mind, that we now know exactly the location and when they're triggered, we can do things like ask you questions about your preferences. So say something like, name the things you love the most, and they start naming them,

and we look at Merriman-Mor-Roh, and we see that the Merle Monroe maybe starts kind of to bubble up, getting ready to be executed as a memory before she even says Merriman-Ros so we can see her thoughts coming to her. We can see that it kind of comes when she thinks about things she love.

So we can start mapping not only the memories themselves, but also the connection and whether they are positive or negative and so on. In the context of engagement in content, what we do is we try to see not only how your memories work, but also how similar they are to other people's memories.

So for instance, if your set of memories are coming up in sequence that resembles that of other people who maybe bought a ticket for the movie, who may be written in surveys that they love the movie and so on, I can predict that you actually will look like them. And I can start saying, okay, give me just one brain.

that I know a lot about. And let's start seeing how similar other brains are to that brain versus very different than it. And if they're all similar, we can basically say, okay, there's something profound about these people that they all experience something similar. And if one of them tells me what I experience is love,

then we know that all 2,000 of them actually experienced love and we can start predicting that the movie's going to do well because 2,000 people look the same when they watch this movie. That's so interesting. Are you able to tell if somebody loves Marilyn Monroe or if they're thinking about like a traumatizing thing that they don't like? you can tell the difference.

Yes, because we typically also find not just Merriman-Roe, Eiffel Tower, Apple Computer cells, we also find love cells, or hate cells, or ambivalence cells. So what we see is that when I ask you questions about Merleman-Roe, Merle-Mor-Sells lights up, but also love cells light up. So, okay, that's very clear. It's love of this item.

And if I ask you about something you don't like, you still see the thing that you don't like coming up, like them they say Apple computers, but also negative emotions come up. So we can start mapping the combination to experience kind of not just the thought, but also the valence of the adult. Oh, wow.

The more specific that gets, the creepier it becomes in some ways. The creepiest thing is that typically it happens under the hood as in you don't know it. So we would know sometimes seconds before you know what's about to happen in your mind. So we can say right now, negative thoughts are emerging,

something bad is happening, like whatever she's seeing right now in the movie is making her feel bad. She's going to start crying in 10 seconds. And then I know that you're going to start crying in 10 seconds. And you don't know it yet. Like if I stop the movie right now, five seconds before and I say, what are you feeling?

He would say nothing. It's just a regular movie. And I know that if I just let your movie run for five seconds more, it's going to burst. Wow. That's wild. So computers will be able to not predict, but actually read our emotions before we'd necessarily display them. Read them and also in a positive way, maybe change them. So I think that the idea would be that Universal Studios would make two versions of the movie.

And if they see that the kids are starting to, feel bad during the movie, they're going to just kind of revoked the narrative to a different one, so it never gets you kind of sad. Oh, that's really cool. So do you think then in the future we'll have virtual reality or maybe not virtual reality, but I guess it's easier to make different versions of things in VR, teachers, doctors, trying to think who has a really important role that needs to be sensitive. Teachers and doctors are what come to mind first. Like a doctor has to be able to say, you've got stage three cancer. Now, don't get upset and freak out right now. We can treat it, but they figure out a way to tell you specifically based on how you've reacted

to countless movies, conversations, teachers especially. I couldn't pay attention in school to save my life. Imagine what I would have been if I'd had a teacher that knew how to talk to me based on when I get distracted and reel me back in instead of just yelling at me to pay attention. So I'll give you two levels. The new future and the father future. The new future is all the happening. So what you just said is what we call new future. It's already happening. So right now, there are a number of companies. I'm even involved in one of them that tries to kind of help school kids, basically say, come to the classroom as a student, we're going to put devices on your head that measure your brain activity,

and the teacher is going to teach you while getting access to what's going on in your mind. So the teacher sits there and speaks to the students, but on her monitor, she sees kind of a summary of the brain activity of the students, telling the teacher they're getting it. So she starts speaking, and the monitor says, everyone understood it, move on. And she just kind of said, okay, as you all got the long division, let's move on. Or the opposite. It says student number three and seven didn't get it.

So she just can say, okay, the two of you, let me explain it in a different way just to the two of you. Or it can say everyone got it, but it's really boring. So think of a different example for the next class. So she would just get a kind of real-time feedback on what works out. So she can move on faster if everyone got it or say it in different ways if no one got it or just target the students that didn't get it and kind of help them. That's happening right now, monitoring the students in real-time and giving the teacher feedback.

That's amazing. Version two of that, still happening right now, is one where you, kind of align the brain of a teacher and the brain of a student. So you look at all the teachers, look at their brains, look at all the student and their brains, and you basically match them. And you say, this teacher, the way he speaks, the way he thinks about the world, aligns perfectly with student one, three, and seven, but not with two, five, and eight. So let's create classrooms where we perfectly match teachers and students, so they speak the same language and they kind of think the same way. Right now, we match classes by age.

Basically, say all seven-year-olds, same classroom. But maybe some seven-year-olds are really into someone speaking fast. Yeah. Like you. Exactly. And some like it very, very slow. And some like examples that are very visual and some like equations. And we can actually create ways to teach a person based on their specific needs.

And that would be speeding up that the education. Oh, yeah. So like I'm in the classroom with the people who listen to things well but don't, can't stare at a book. Exactly. For three hours. And a teacher that also speaks like that. So that's right now. Now that's the, I call it new future to present because it's already happening.

It's just something that's done mostly by coming. companies in a very specific kind of small setting. It's not something that is offered to everyone. Unfortunately, it's in the making. Doctors, there are some that are fact-based, some that are more empathy-based, and same idea. You're going to go to a doctor. The system would know how you think, and it would match you with a doctor that can talk to you your way, that if Shio, he needs to explain to you what you're going through, they're going to use the same language.

So in a way, doctors and teachers are the same in this idea because it's content. Like, we want a person to talk to another person and deliver content to them, whether it's learning content or medical content in a way that will resonate. So we can now match that. Here's the future. It won't be human. Yeah. It will be a machine.

Because as you get to learn everything about Jordan and know what he wants and give him the perfect match, it turns out that the ideal way is to take all of your history, learn who you are, and find someone that can instantly get all his information and ideally change for that. And know that right now you're experiencing some symptoms of emerging sadness. because of the news that you got from the doctor. So the doctor needs to adapt and become from fact-based to empathy-based. And instead of just kind of bringing a different doctor who's dead

and bring one for that and one for this, we'll just have an AI that can automatically shift and align with you and know in real-time what you're going through and all your history and just align with you perfectly. That's the future. So I'm wearing goggles or something, and the doctor's talking to me and goes, as soon as it senses that I'm about to start losing it,

it's like, but I'm going to be really sympathetic in the next few minutes, calm you down and bring you back to where we can. can function again. The bad news. Now the goodness a little bit. Now the hope. Now bad news again. Now bring your wife because she can call me down in this thing. Now someone else that is a friend of yours who is actually an expert in this thing that will help you when I'm not here so you can call them afterwards. Now bring their family members who are going to be this about group. Kind of basically orchestrate an entire experience for you. It would be the best way to make sure that you understand what you need to understand. Do what you need to do. Your behavior is going

to be aligned and not go through stress in a way that you can't handle. Amazing. There's a dark side to this, though, right? Because I'm imagining them going, wow, if we can keep everyone engaged and bring them news in a way that doesn't trigger a negative emotional reaction, then we want to do that for our government propaganda or whatever. Like North Korea wants in on this. Well, every country wants in on this. There's five questions I get asked. Every time I give a neuroscience talk, regardless of what the talk was about. One of them was about the ethics of that, like of being able to perfect the messaging to a person. And the answer is, that it's very risky. It's not new. Like, marketing have been doing that for the last 80 years, trying to kind of find it's just a lot more efficient at scale and it's a double-edged order. It's going to make our life much more efficient and best and, like, experiences are going to be ideal tailored for us, but also companies can use that to, at very least, sell us more Captain Crunch. That's right. I mean, you think Facebook ads are engaging now. Just wait until they're tailor-made for your brain at that specific time of day, the current mood

that you have right now. saying that I tell my students in the business school that spam is spam because of bad targeting. Like if you get an email that is like you're looking for a lamp and suddenly an email comes with a lamp that you really want with the price that something, that's not spam anymore. That's perfect. Like you just thought and it came. Only when it comes and you don't need something, say, oh, that's spam. You delete it.

So they're going to eliminate spam. They're going to know what you want and give you everything you want at the right time. That's right. Like it's who keeps trying to sell me penis pills? But if you're online like cheap penis pills from India, I would love if that just showed of my inbox. Like then you're right, then it's not spam, right? You are known for speaking fast, which I think is funny. You're doing obviously great job right now, but I think it is funny that people tell you you speak fast. What happened when you went to Japan? You gave a talk,

and I know you had a translator. This show is normally one hour. We're going to finish in 10 minutes. That's right, yeah. People should have to play it in like a double, what is it? Two X. Yeah, two X. Yeah. Two X to understand. So I think what happens to me oftentimes, there are funny, comical moments that come with speaking fast in places that can't kind of keep up. Keep up, yeah. So when I was in Japan, I had to give a talk to a room full of executives. And there were two translators. They brought two because they said, you speak so fast it's going to tire one of them. So in the one hour talk, we're going to alternate between the, and I'll get to the point quickly.

I gave a talk and I kind of tried to navigate my talk based on the audience. I started and I said, if this joke is going to land well, I'm going to continue with this kind of angle. And if not, I'm going to go with this angle, something to keep them more engaged. And whatever I tried worked beautifully because after the first joke that didn't land, the second, to the fifth one, everyone was laughing at the right time, clapping at the right time, asking the right questions at the end,

all of the indicators that things really were engaging. And then only in the reception in the evening when I met the translator and I asked her how it went, she said, well, it was pretty difficult. You spoke very, very fast. And the first time you told a joke,

I saw that no one got it because it was too complicated. So from the second time and onward, what I translated your sentences were something like, the speaker, just told a joke. Please laugh. And then she's like, everyone laugh.

right now. Yeah, she said, tell them clap right now, ask this question. So basically she was puppeteering a room of 2,000 people with what questions to ask, went to nod their head. All they heard was like a director cut, telling them like, nod your head.

He's looking at you, like, you know, kind of like what is called a Truman Show. Truman Show, yeah. I was the only person who basically were in this talk. Would you rather have not known that happened, or are you glad that you found out? I found it amusing. I found, okay, so I have the strategy that says,

like, good stories happen to those who can tell them. So if something happens that's embarrassing and so on, immediately tell a story about it publicly. That's, you know, helping you kind of resolve. I think that makes sense. Look, I would want to know if I were in your shoes, but just not in real time, right? In real time, I'd want to believe that I was actually really funny. I know that you talked about, you hinted at it anyway, that one day we'll be able to have chips in our brain and we can maybe outsource complex thought processes to this, among other things. So like complex math. I think the example you gave was chess.

Are we going to be able to use our brain to maybe tell the chip to calculate the answer or maybe even something like, oh, I'm looking for furniture, find me furniture that I want, that's going to look good in the house, that's going to jive with other things I have in my brain, return the results to me. I mean, how sort of detailed are we able to get with this? So first of all, we should say that right now in the U.S., there are about 40,000 people that already have a chip inside their head for clinical purposes.

So someone opened their brain. Like a cochlear implant or something? So this would be usually a stimulator in their head that kind of stops them having seizures or something that regulates hormones and kind of chemicals in their brain. For Parkinson to stop the tremor, you kind of reverse current. So those are people who had a problem, and the solution was to put a chip in their head. And the chip right now is a digital device in their head that does one thing. But we know that if you put a CPU in your head, you can just turn on other features and it will do more things.

It's not made for one thing. It's made for a host of things, and we just use one of them. So in that sense, having people with a chip inside their head is already reality. It's just that we use it only for one purpose and not more. This will become, I think, a bigger reality as people will start to see benefit and as we'll find different ways to get the chip inside. Right now, you need to have a surgery. Which is, yeah, only do it in clinical reasons.

But a lot of people in Silicon Valley are spending a lot of time trying to find the ways to get stuff into your head without drilling a hole in one. And once this becomes, and there are already ways to do it, Once you get that to be cheap, efficient, risk level lower. Yeah, make it a little safer. Yeah. Then it will become a thing. So now what does it feel like to have a cheap inside your head?

The way I think about it is the way we think about mathematics, for instance. If I ask you how much is 2 plus 5, the answer just came up. Now, for that answer to come up, you actually had to go through like a 5 system interaction. You had to hear my words, turn them into symbols, what is 2, plus, what is 5, to send this equation to the front of your brain where there's a system that does computation and calculated the number seven, send it back where the simple seven becomes a word seven

and you express it. All of those things happen. You were blind to all of that. It all happened under the hood in your brain, but there are multiple systems each doing its own job and you kind of oversee this entire thing and you get the answer when it comes up. You don't even know what happened under.

Now, imagine that you replace one of them with a chip. So instead of asking how much 2 plus 5 is and getting the answer from the frontal lobe, there's going to be a chip inside your head that does computations and give it back to you. For every other system, it would look the same.

It wouldn't even know that there was not a frontal lobe calculation but that it was done by a chip. It will be one system asking the other, getting the answer after a few seconds, thinking it's it and moving on.

And if you have a chip that can do computations that are digital ones rather than analog ones, then you can also ask the question how much is 11 times 47, which is going to be harder for your brain,

but it's going to be easy for your phone, for instance. So all you have to think about is like as if your phone is now in your head. first of all, you wouldn't know it. Like, the U doesn't even know which components are working,

so it will just feel like you just came up with 11 times 47. And what did the effort was a chip. And if you put this chip inside your brain, it can do more than just calculations. It can do anything that your phone can do right now. Everything you can do can be done. So it can access Wikipedia and ask question,

and you'll just feel that you know when the French Revolution ended and how it went. So I'll just, that's the question. So it's not like Siri saying, hey, Jordan, the French Revolution. revolution ended in 1740. It's like I just suddenly feel like I know the answer or maybe I'm trying to put this in a case of like online shopping. So instead of saying, hey Jordan, you just finished this book by Moran Surf, you might also like these three books. I just feel like I should

pick up my phone and then I look at the screen and it's already purchased, downloaded and installed in Audible or whatever another book that it already knows I like. But it didn't tell me to pick up my phone. I just went, I'm going to pick up my phone. Oh, okay. The same way you know how much is two plus five without thinking, okay, I'm going to send it to thinker and come back. You just know the answer. And the same way, when you feel like you want to pick a book, you just pick the book, you will just feel that you want to pick this book. And you wouldn't even know that pick up this book. You wouldn't even know that behind the scene was like, let's look at recommendations and see which, you will just pick up a book. And that would be the book that you wanted. You

wouldn't know that for that to happen, your brain actually searched 10 different books and what people like you wanted and figured out that your best choice is this, and this is what you will feel you just wanted to do. So if that then has digital interface, we could really give people super senses for specific purposes in a way that doesn't violate someone's privacy per se, or at least not in the same way. Because right now, if I go through the TSA scanner and someone says,

oh, I can see, remember they had the whole, like, oh, my God, they can see us naked on the scanner. You remember that whole thing? Well, instead of, oh, my God, they can see us naked on the scanner, that person might have an implant that searches for weapons just using their eye. And then they just say, I feel like we need to search that person more. Not I can see them naked in my super scanner vision. Just that person's carrying something.

My brain tells me that they are. I can't see their junk, though. For the person, it might even seem like they're, you'll just see it. So you'll just see people walking around and one of them has a gun on them. And you just say, hey, you come with a gun. The same way right now, if someone has a gun on their shoulders or in their pocket, you just kind of see something kind of popping up and you say, It will just be visible.

Experience cops can do that. Like, look the way he's walking, he's packing. Like, well, at least in all the movies that I watch, right? This would be like, it wouldn't feel like we're actually doing processing. The interface, the scanner is a sensory processing that feeds into our brain. We'll just eliminate it. So the same way, you will be the scanner. You will just see three blobs and say, okay, this person with three blobs just come to us.

You wouldn't say, I'm feeling something. You just like see people and one of them would walk with like three dots on them and you say, come with these three dots. What's going on? That's it. It would just be intuition. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Maron, Surf. We'll be right back after this. Thank you for listening and supporting the show.

Your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air. And to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard so you can check out those amazing sponsors, visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at Jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. If you're listening to us in the Overcast player, please click that little star next to the episode. We really appreciate it. And now for the conclusion of our episode with Moran. serve. So if that becomes intuition and our brains can make us feel things based on this chip

that is connected to the internet, then my hacker brain, your hacker brain has to be firing and going, well, wait a minute. That means that somebody can go into our brain and make us feel something that is not necessarily based on our current perception. So maybe someone has hacked into my brain and made me feel like I need to give all my money to this random stranger. So we're going back to the beginning where we started the same circle which is the benefits

that come with being able to expand our reality come with the risk that someone else is going to show us different realities. That is the risk.

And I think society and your audience is the perfect kind of people to really start reflecting on that just decide if we want the benefits

with the risks that come. And that's historically something that was always the case when technologies emerged that are good. When nuclear power

became a thing, you could power cities but you can also make nuclear bombs. and people have to decide whether they want the good with the bad. When a steam engine emerged, you could create trains that move freight from New York, to Los Angeles in 48 hours,

and also move Jews to Auschwitz. Yeah. So I think that society has to decide. And in that sense, I think scientists are no better than anyone else. I can tell you what can be done, and you can see with dollar science, all the good things that will come from you being able to make someone buy what you want, and you can see all the bad things that come with you being the product now

and someone making you buy what they want. So all companies will never make a choice. I would say that historically, humans have not been great in our own technology. Every time we could do something and we could use it for bad, we used it for bad. So that's an sense where we don't have a good track record. Like right now, if someone says this type of person

should not be allowed to live anymore because they have inferior genes, I go, wait a minute, that's ridiculous. All my critical thinking bells and alarms are going off. But what if they just make me in a million, and other people around me feel that way and we can't quite put our finger on why, but it's because they're manipulating us to do that

because we're gearing up for a war with, I don't know, another country. Then it's, I don't have a chance to be going back full circle of what we start. I don't have a chance to filter it before it gets in my brain. It starts in my brain. There are many things right now.

So I think that the good news for us is that we can look a little bit at the past and see how it looked small scale and predict. So marketing is that, right? Propaganda is that. Like we already know that you can manipulate crowds of people to do things. It happened in history multiple times.

And we only think that they had some kind of free wheel because no one was in their head, but it was two-step. Like good marketing people, good kind of politicians, they are basically doing that. It's just that because we have some kind of way to filter, we believe that we had a free will. But it's not that far. Like Mussolini and a lot of like authoritarian in the past,

they were amazing in taking a crowd of people. and mobilizing them to some behaviors that individually, if you asked them, they didn't want to do 10 minutes before the speech started. So this has happened. And that technology was real-to-reel tape, old 19-20s microphones and metal cables. The interface was our ears and our eyes.

So now the interface is going to be different interface, but it still goes into this very, very fragile entity that sits between our ears, our brain, and changes of few neurons there, and that's it. You would behave differently. So it's like radio and, television was their primary, not even television, just radio, was their primary method of communication.

Imagine if it's beamed into everyone's brain simultaneously, not through ears and eyes. There's an experiment that I love from the 80s, this guy Ash, it's called the conformity experiment, where he brings 10 people to the lab, and he says, I'm going to show you picture with two lines. One is kind of very short, one is very long, and I'm going to ask you one by one to tell me if they're the same length or not. So one by one, he shows you cards. one of them have the same lengths, one of the very, very different. Like not, and then he shows you, say,

one card and the lines are the same, and he asks the first person, and he says, same, same, same, same. Then he shows another one where the lines are very different. And he goes to the first person who says different, the second says different, the third, so on. Then he goes to card number three, and the lines are very different,

but the first guy says same. And then the second guy says same. And the third guy says same, and what we're interested in is what the guy number seven says. Because he's the only normal. He's the only normal subject. So everyone else is a confederate. and they agreed that on the third trial

they're all going to give the wrong answer. And what we see is that guy number seven sees two lines that are clearly different length. But here's the first guy saying same. And the second guy, same, same. By the time they get to him, he says same. So it takes, what, like five minutes and 10 people or nine people

that change reality for you to also change your answers. And we know that if you change your answers, you also start convincing yourself because of cognitive dissonance, that what you did was actually correct. By the time they leave the room, these people actually believe that they saw a line of the same kind of length,

even though it's different. And they're going to convince others. And that's opening a world where our memories are malleable, so much so that we can't really trust ourselves with small influence without, you know, a big kind of propaganda machine that tries to kind of convince you just by you trying to conform. And that's 80s. That's 40 years ago. Yeah.

Now that there's... The videotape of that experiment's like all grainy and everyone's wearing these like really short t-shirts and stuff. You can tell it was like 1982 when they did this. And so this is the old-fashioned, the easiest way. way to, and now we have a lot more efficient and complicated ways to do that. The extreme version of is getting into your brain and actually changing neurons mechanically, so you will come, wake up with different thoughts. But all of those are the same idea, that you kind of

are fair game. That's it. From then on, everything is changing. And we see this on social media, too. If everyone's saying, look at these people doing this and you keep getting bombarded with this filter bubble, then eventually you start to say, well, I know that the correct answer here is to get outraged by whatever news article shows up in my feet. We have now studies in my lab on that, looking at like echo chambers and how they're formed. And we're looking at what does your mind do to my mind just by us being in the same room? And it turns out that there's a lot of things that happen between two brains that make them synchronize when we're experiencing the same content that actually changes your thoughts without you really thinking them.

So the bottom line is that if you're sitting in the room with people that are similar to you, you hear things differently than if they're different than you. So the same room can have four people who say the same thing. same things, but the things get heard differently by different people, and they get, kind of, their processing is different, and what's getting kind of coded is different. So you can say the same things and be surprised that one person hears death and the other person hears that, or you can manipulate what they hear. You can actually start kind of really understanding how the brains influence each other and how echo chambers are formed. So that's a great reason to listen to the show,

because the more people and ideas that you're around that are smart or skeptical or informed, the better off you are. It's a warning, too, because if you and I are hanging out we're like, oh, this is good. But then if I go home and I'm hanging out with a bunch of people who are sitting around smoking pot all day, talking negatively, hate their job, hate their life, and I'm going, good thing, I'm not like them. It's like, well, you're becoming more like them through, I don't know,

osmosis or whatever the hell the natural process looks like. So I guess the practical advice I would give two. One is generally stories and communication are the best way to checks and balances kind of creation of your own ideas. you bring people and you tell them your ideas, you voice them, you look at their kind of response, you hear their views, you get the best kind of way

to analyze and process your own ideas. If you just think about them yourself and you don't share them, you don't broadcast them, you will be confined to your echo chamber. If you only talk to the same people that you talk all the time, you will get a bigger but still small chamber.

The more you expose to other views, you will actually refine your ideas. So the advice to people that is not what people do right now is go outside of your bubble, And just talk to people that are not in your kind of sphere. You will, at the very least, you will get exposed to different opinions. At best, you can actually get a more nuanced understanding of your own ideas. Like, it's good for you to be with, I don't know,

the most extreme version of the other side is a way to really understand how thinking works. That's advice number one. The advice number two is if you actually want to change your behavior. If you have a behavior that you say I want to change, the best way to do it is to find people that exhibit the behavior that you want and be next to them. Don't ask them, how do you do it? Don't kind of try to learn it.

Just be next to them. Your brain will adopt those signals over time. So if you're the kind of guy who's always late, you try your best to be on time, but you're still always late. And you want to be on time. Just really put yourself next to people that are not death, people that intuitively are on time, a few days with them. And you don't have to ask them, like, how do you calculate time?

Just like, be next them. It's going to rub onto you by osmosis, and you'll become that somehow magically. And it's true for time. It's true for thinking about complex ideas. It's true for humor. If you want to be funny, it's true for the opposite. If you're kind of too much of a joker and you want to be a little bit more serious,

the people around you have a strong effect on who you are, and you can get out of your bubble by being next to other people. That's really interesting. There's a sort of common trope among self-help people. You only go as high as your five closest friends. Or you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Turns out there's science behind that's amazing. I think the one thing I would change in the world is I would not quite self-help.

Like self-help kind of suggest that it's about you helping your I would call it like others help. Like there should be a shelf that says others help and you go and you help others and others help you. This would be like the best way to actually change. Yeah, that's a good point. So personal growth might be a better all-encompassing number because you're not really doing much.

You're in the room. They're the ones who are helping you. There's a really interesting experiment that you conducted where this magician was handing photos. You say who's the better looking person. Can you take us through this? Because it really illustrates how we just lie to ourselves. And we have now version two of that.

I can tell you even what came up since. the experiment came up the first time. So the experiment looks basically like that. A person, if you are subject, comes to the lab. We tell you that we're going to ask you now to choose who you find more attractive out of two options. So we pull two cards with two pictures of, say, two women that you don't know, that are just kind of strangers.

And we say, of those two, who do you find more attractive? And you say, they're one on the right. We say, fantastic. Take the card you selected and hold it in your hand and say in one sentence, why you liked her. So you looked at the card and you say, I really like her. her smile. Say, fantastic, put it inside, let's try another one. Pick two new cards, two different women. Again, you don't know them, you look at them for a second and you say the one on the left.

We give you the card they chose and we ask you to explain why you chose this one and you say, I really like her, her style. Fantastic, let's do it again and again. For the next hour, we pull a hundred of kind of pairs and we show you the pairs, you make a choice, you hold it, you explain, you move on. But here's the trick. The guy that gives you the card isn't just a regular guy, he's a magician that we hired, and he uses sleight of hands. In every, one of 20 trials or so to give you the card you didn't choose. So if you chose card A,

he hands you card B. And the two interesting outcomes of this study were that A first. People don't notice that they didn't get what they chose. So they ask for A, they get B,

and they don't say, sorry, I asked for A, you gave me B. They just take B and hold it in their hand as if this was their choice. And the more interesting result is that they then hold the card that they didn't choose,

look at it, and explain to us why this was her choice. So they chose A, they get B, they take B, and they say, I really like her because she has beautiful eyes. So they had handed the wrong card, the one they didn't choose, and then they begin to explain why they chose that card, just making up a story. Exactly right. They take 10 seconds from the moment their brain made a choice, to the moment their brain is asked to explain the choice, and they come up in a different answer to a different choice. And they don't notice that this was in the case.

And this kind of alarms us because it suggests that what we think is, you know, the core of who we are, the choices we make is now fair game. and someone can change that and we're going to not doubt that and we're going to go with that. So if you think about the business world, if you go to the supermarket to buy a toothpaste and you have like on the shelf Colgate and Crest

and you debate between them and you try to be as rational as possible about how to choose them and you look at the price and the taste and the package and whatever and you choose one, the Colgate and you kind of head to the checkout to buy it

and in between the moment you purchased it you selected the Colgate and the moment you purchased it I replace it with the crest you probably will just buy the crest and go home with it And if I actually stopped you on the way outside and I say, you know, I'm from Procton Gamble and I'm doing a survey and I want to know why you chose crest, please give you answer. You're going to come with an answer.

And what we learned in the recent version of this study is that actually the more I ask you about it, the more I ask you to narrate your thoughts. You get more and more committed to the answer that you have so much so that if I bring you back the day after. And I say, Jordan, let's do it again. Let's again show you the 100 cards that you've seen yesterday and just do the same thing as before. if I show you the two cards that you were seeing yesterday when you chose A and I gave you B and you explained B, this time you actually choose B. So I showed you on day one A and B, you chose A, you got B, you explained it.

On day two, you actually will choose it. So in asking you to explain why you chose something, I made you create in your brain more connection associations towards B and will actually make you behave B the day after. So think about it like in the world, it means that if I ask you more at the crest in the supermarket and I ask you, please explain to me why you like Crest and let's do a focus group and let's kind of ask you why you like Crest model Cullingate.

You will convince yourself now that you want Crest. Even though this wasn't your choice 10 minutes ago, so much so that you're going to from now on always buy Crest. So if I were to give advice to like a business company, I would say, don't bother market to people, just sneak it to their baskets after they made a choice of whatever, put a different thing and ask them why. By asking them why you're going to make them create in their mind the answer that you want. They're going to do the marketing inside their head.

So they were just going to buy whatever you want from then on, not just one time. Jeez, that's crazy. So we just sort of reinforce whatever choice they made or reinforce a choice they didn't make. And we've got them for life. The advice that I kind of give people that is difficult, but it's good for couples and it's good for individuals. I can summarize it by don't ask why as much. So the point is that if I just replace the two options and I give you one, you will take it, but you will leave home and tomorrow you're going to choose the first thing again.

You wouldn't change. By asking you why, I make you reflect on the choice that you didn't make and create associations for that new option, which actually then solidifies it in your brain. So by asking someone why, you make them think incompetent. So if someone asks you, hey, why did you become what you became? I just come up with a story. Exactly. But if I look at my actual history, it's not really the reason. Exactly.

You gave an example of guys named Dennis becoming dentists with a higher than chance probability. I assume that's what's going on here. This is, yeah, so basically there's two aspects to it. One is, if you ask Dennis, why did you become a dentist, then you make it worse. Because by asking why, you make them competent answer, and then now they're going to actually believe the answer more than the tooth, and from now on, their answer becomes reality, and they're going to follow the answer, and that's where it becomes really hard. So if you don't ask why, they're going to not know why.

They're going to not reflect. The reason it works actually is something that we call implicit egoism, which is that a person whose name is Dennis works in the world many, many, days and here's his name being called. He says, sorry, you called me? And the person said, no, I didn't call you. I just spoke about dentist. He said, oh, sorry. But he kind of, the word dentist has emerged in his life. And he just hears about dentists so much more than us that when he becomes 35 and needs to choose a profession, actually the weights towards dentistry are much higher in his brain. He just heard about dentists a lot more. They think

that they're everywhere. So he actually chooses to be one, not because he really chose to be a dentist after thinking out all the option. Somehow in his mind, he just thinks, I guess everyone is dentists. So I should be one too. And then, of course, if we ask him, he's like, well, I always wanted to help people.

And I'm, you know, the anatomy of the mouth is interesting. And I like talking to people when they can't talk back. I don't know, whatever. The why is the enemy of many things, because it forces us to collapse into an answer and go with it. And then we get convinced, and from then on, it's really hard to change.

There's a ton of stories. There's a ton of things we could get into. But I would love to end on sort of a fun note with all of this brain control dystopia and all this kind of thing. Speaking of being on time, you once got sent to Rome and ended up someplace else.

This is such a funny story. Would you mind just sort of giving us like the five-minute version? I wish this was the only time this happened to me, but it's a common thing with me. So me and things that happen on a certain time don't work well. Airplanes are the biggest enemy of people like me.

Okay. So in one of the stories I told once, I was supposed to fly from Israel to Italy. to Rome and almost kind of missed the flight, got there on the last minute, stuck my, you know, hand baggage above and fell asleep, woke up when the plane touched down, left the airplane, got a cab to the Hilton Hotel, and on the way to the Hilton Hotel, kind of asked the driver for information about Rome, because I've never been there before. And I asked him, like,

what's the weather in the warm? And he says, it's like 20 degrees right now and say, okay, great, so a T-shirt is good. And I say, so what are the things that you should do in Rome? And he says, well, you definitely have to go see the piazza and the Vatican, and it kind of gives me an sir, we get to the hotel. I try to check in. They say, you're not in our list. No reservation. We kind of go back and forth.

I finally find the confirmation number, give it to the person there. And she says, sir, your reservation is for Hilton, Rome. And I said, oh, my God. The Hilton in Rome. Yeah. I said, I'm not in Hilton. She says, no, no, you're not in Rome. You're in a different country.

So the plane had a stop. I got off the plane. I took a cab, asked the driver to get me to Hilton, which existed in this other place as well, Malta. You were in Malta? Yeah. Oh, God. They're not even close. And then on the way, I keep asking,

I said, like, what's the way doing Rome? He says, in Rome? It's 20 degrees. Wonder why he asks me, but okay. And I'm asking, like, what's there doing in Rome? He says, well, in Rome, you should go get pizza. But, like, he keeps answering. He doesn't know why I'm asking him about Rome, only on.

Yeah, because he doesn't think to say, you do know you're in Malta right now, right? Like, of course you know that. You're in a cab in Malta. Yeah. So that was, so we discovered quickly that I'm in the wrong country, that at the same time the airport went to kind of, you know, whatever, DefCon 5. Because an Israeli guy flying by himself without any suitcase disappeared. You know, looking at a security camera to see what happened.

Like the plane cannot take off. It was supposed to be a stop and continue. They figured out where I was. They had me come back. The security somehow made me pass from the outside into the plane within five minutes. And I was back in my seat after about an hour and a half. You're quick explosives and weapons pat down. You're back on the plane.

Back on the plane to everyone's dismay. Yeah, you must have been everyone's favorite passenger. 3 a.m. instead of 1 a.m. We landed at Rome. Same thing. Go to the cab, ask what to do. Yeah. So you ended up flying to the wrong place, got off the plane at the wrong place,

ended up going to the hotel, escorted back onto the plane. That's not just being late. That's, like, extra talented. It's their fault, though, for letting you run off the plane during this topic. That's what I think. It's their fault. Yeah, that's right. Couldn't be your fault.

Yeah. Love this episode with Moran. He had a practical that we didn't quite get to on the show. So here it is, in a nutshell. We need to rehearse positive outcomes when we think of something we're scared of. So, for example, public speaking, you imagine failing, you imagine people laughing, but that anchors that activity to that negative feeling. Instead, rehearse yourself killing it, crushing it.

You don't do this normally because you probably feel like an arrogant douchebag, but you should rehearse positive outcomes at least two, three times as much as you rehearse negative outcomes. Why don't we do this? Because we don't want to look like schmows, even in our own mind. But we got to create this habit. When something negative pops up, you know, a negative visualization, visualize the opposite and then do it again and again and again. This is going to be on the worksheet as well. So don't worry if you didn't pick that up. It's going to be on the worksheet, which, of course, is in the show notes for every episode. So you can review what you learned here from Moran's surf. That's all at Jordan Harbinger.com. And of course,

some of Moran's talks will be linked in the show notes. I love these. This is what I used to prep for the show. They are fascinating. There's a video of this interview on our YouTube channel at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube, and we also now have transcripts for each episode, and those can be found in the show notes as well. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people like Moran and manage relationships. You got systems, you got tiny habits, no excuse not to do it.

It's going to take a few minutes per day. The course is called six-minute networking, and it's free, and it's over at Jordan Harbinger.com course. Don't say you'll do it later. You're not going to do it later. Do it now. Dig the well before you get thirsty. Don't be that person who calls someone and says, I know I didn't keep in touch, but I need a job or I need this. Don't do it. It's avoidable. Procrastination will lead you to stagnation when it comes to both business and personal relationships. The drills are crucial. They take a few minutes a day. Look, I wish I knew it 20 years ago. I'm giving it to you for free. Not, you don't even have to give me your credit card. I have

nothing to sell you. I want everyone to learn this stuff. Jordan Harbinger.com slash And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course and the newsletter. So come join us. You'll be in smart companies, certainly smarter for having taken the course. All right? Speaking of building relationships, you can always reach out and or follow me on social. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. This show is created in association with Podcast One.

This episode was produced by Jen Harbinger, Jason DeFilippo, and edited by Jace Sanderson. Show notes and worksheets by Robert Fogarty. Music by Evan Viola. And I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. advice and opinions and those of our guests are their own. And yeah, I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. And you should be thankful for that. So do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show. And remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting, which hopefully is in every

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