 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, are candidates? Jeans, I can't manipulate. I can't manipulate gender, not in this like experimental setting. Yep. Um, I don't, you know, in the, in the toolbox of neuroscience or behavioral endocrinology, like a neuroeconomics broadly stated, you're not going to do, I mean, there's also, I guess you could do a transmitting TMS. Like you could block a certain part of the brain, do like a little, you know, little subtle, um, 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, uh, the challenge hypothesis, huge animal literature about it, um, it just seemed like the candidate to hormone. And, uh, we had done other studies at the lab before that using cortisol, we had used, uh, some actually use one with naltrexone, which, uh, for those at home, that's, uh, for like, uh, alcoholics and, uh, heroin addicts to get off of it. What it does is it blocks, it blocks the, uh, 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 it similar to 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 that's bad for you, just, so it's probably similar mechanism I propose. It's like a blocker. Yeah, it blocks neurons from, yeah. So you just don't feel good about it. It's like, you know, people suck their thumb, put the, maybe that's, this is like gross. I never suck my thumb for the record, but, um, I'd imagine this just makes it not pleasurable to go have a drink or do whatever. So we had, we had like a, a bit of a precedent at the lab of doing things that were edgy or difficult, that were hard to pass, but safe, like for all intents and purposes, they were safe. Um, and then all trucks were almost safe. Um, so the lab as that, I was really proud to say it was like the, like pioneering lab in neuro-economics and worked with some really interesting people. So it was time for me to come up with my dissertation chapter. And as I said, testosterone seemed like the right candidate. Um, and it had, had not been done in this context, but we had the resources and had the money to do it. Um, it's pretty expensive with this stuff off. By the way, you have to pay people really well. You know, you do the blood drugs. You got to buy the drugs. People understand studies are fucking expensive. Yeah. Very expensive. Oh yeah. The doses of drugs. It was, I mean, we bought a retail at, at a pharmacy, like through, through, it was, uh, and we paid people well between 16, 120 bucks a person and they'd buy the drugs, play the bottom. I mean, it was, it was probably all in. It was well over a hundred thousand, maybe $200,000. If you count the man hours, it's even higher than that for 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 that get testosterone or those markets where guys are at high levels of testosterone, will, will those markets transact at different prices than 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. Cause 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 piloted a bunch of times. And then we, uh, so I may talk for a second about the paradigm. 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 Vernon Smith. Uh, he's, he's like considered one of the major pioneers in experimental economics, considered like the father of experimental economics. Or Dutch auction. Was that Dutch? Um, he, 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 Vernon 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, uh, along with the same year as Danny Conorman and, uh, almost Tversky, uh, who won it posthumously, they wanted the same year. What's interesting, I've done, I've worked on their topics now and Vernon Smith funded the project. So it was really cool to have a noble laureate who's like very well respected, uh, 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 changed the rate. It could be a presidential election, a bond, 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. Here is the fundamental value chart for this trading period. And so you'll be trading with a bunch of other guys and buy and sell for whatever the hell you want. So that's the experiment. And what we found was the guys that, that came in, that got testosterone, 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 them in my lab code and 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, we'd have a session then, you know, a few, a week later, we'd have a session with 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 session. I'm watching it real time. Yeah. I can't believe this is happening. I was like, I'll wait till the data are all in. I don't want to like get too excited about it. But I got the data set and I was like, it's like that kind of almost fell out of my chair. Like, holy shit, this hormone actually drives these price bubbles like to the sky. And then at the very, almost at the very end of the trading sessions, because they know that it's finite, it's like 12 periods. They're like, oh crap, 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 little size. 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 to guys on Wall Street. Really? Like Andrew Jill. 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 know comment on him as a person. I just know he's featured in a Financial Times article. I'm thinking, holy shit. Do you know that I just showed in a scientific way that the drug you're giving to guys who are actually moving hundreds of millions or billions of dollars? Like this is what it does to them. And they don't know that these guys are taking the drug off label, meaning a use other than what it was prescribed for. So that kicked up a whole bunch of attention. I had, you know, as interviewed by like NPR and a bunch of other media outlets like, what the hell is going on here? So when you talk about why this matters, I didn't really complete my thought, but it's better to come back to it now and say it matters because the drug we use in the experiment to model changes that have happened in your body anyway, are actually being used in the real environment by people who are doing the actual behavior that matters, that affects that affects the world and affects the world economy. So from we talked about cognitive reflection, 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 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 touched briefly, for example, with the example of whether it's two deers or two mooses fighting. Yeah. When it's a tough testosterone goes up, the loser. Yeah. It is what it is. That's nature. Yeah. There's no mercy in nature. Right. Right. It's genes are surviving. Humans a little bit different, but not too different. We have evolutionary biology, which is dictated by our environment. And then we have evolution psychology. They're all together. 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? 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. 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 thing. 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 going to imagine playing a very sport requires tremendous speed and you're and you're thinking too much of it, like thinking of it 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. Yeah. So encouraging this like rapid deployment of resources without thinking too much about it is actually an evolutionary movement towards making you more likely to survive and to propagate it as a specific genetic makeup. And so 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 on preferences for status goods. Yeah. The bling bling. Totally. Like I mean, 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 my my prior was like, well, we'll see. I don't care. I don't have a dog in this fight, but like 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 was 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. Yeah. 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 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 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 it in a couple of different ways and it was like, wow. So in terms of survival, there was like a very deep literature in animal literature about, about survival, about how status signals your biological fitness. Oh yeah. And, and so that too is based like in a famous theory, almost what's his last name? Anyway, Blank and an 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 in that. 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, in a consumer situation, just to see like, does this matter? I always tell people we're just highly more evolved chimps. And, you know, for me, I've had the doctor, Christopher DeCarlo on here. He talks about like free will and critical thinking. Yeah, really cool guy. It's going to be on actually this week again. And, 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? So you behave in a certain spectrum. It's not like if I if you look at the history of your life, you behave in the certain spectrum. It's not like you deviated from like one to 20. Like there's a natural type of behavior pattern that you have. 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. And that's why I like, you know, behavioral economics. It's 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 is 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. Yeah, an external observer might seem irrational or whatever. I mean. 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 in Toronto, most of us can afford apartments at this point, you know, and to be isolated. You know, maybe, right? Toronto's getting crazy, man. I know. Can I can I slip here? Is that cool? Can I move into the studio? Like a new New York coming up over here. I know, man. Yeah, I got to 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 measure that we're saying, OK, let's take something quantifiable, such as bidding for a stock or choosing a specific product or answering a question. 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 preexisting 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, let's say at the end date, making spreads, arbitraging. OK, then they have different other types of investors. You might be kind of like warm Buffett investors, where it's like, you know, value investing, the long hold, right? Then you might have crazy investors, like, let's invest in a startup, your fucking lunatic. Don't you work with startups? Or something like that. You know, I was like, I'm going to get my asymmetrical return, you know, 100X return. Yeah. The lottery ticket? Yeah, pretty much. But the stock market's interesting because it's an amalgamation of so many psychological pressures. Testosteron, 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 languages easy. It's monkey see, monkey do. You know, it's in us, mirror neurons. So like a memetic theory pretty much is monkey see, monkey do the way you behave. 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, I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm going to do what he does. No, no, no, no. This is subconscious just because I'm around you. I'm picking up your kind of. We call that hurt. I mean, behavioral finance like hurting behavior. Yeah, yeah, yeah. People dismiss their own internal signal to say, well, this is doing this and this is doing that. 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 an example in Canada. It's like, I'm not hating on anybody, but I remember in this is actually a price of crypto to weed and crypto. Same thing. I remember people telling me, have I invested in any wheat stocks? Have you seen them? Like, have you actually done your due due diligence on the negative earnings? Or like even like the market size of Canada, like thirty five million people out of thirty five million people, how many are actually using means like a tiny little dinky market. Yeah. And I'm like, no, I'm not really not really my cup of tea. That doesn't mean a lot of people need a lot of money. But you can see it like even with crypto with the ICO boom, like everyone just throwing money and people asking me about tokens. I'm like, Mike, have you done your due diligence? 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 measure 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 cascade. It's 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 George Athanasakos 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're 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 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 have any firm statement about it. And by doing so, you have had to sort of blind yourself to the rest of the complexity of it, just like the matrix, like where if you see the whole thing, you know, in the movie they say, well, you just want to understand you have to see it encoded.