This is Trend Following Radio, where great thinking comes alive.

Nobel Prize winners, legendary traders, bestselling authors, and the pros that know what drive us irrational human beings.

I am your host, Michael Covel, not filtered, raw, honest.

That's my passion.

My guest today is Donald Hoffman.

He's a cognitive scientist at UC Irvine, also the recipient of the Trolland Award of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

I found Donald through this great article in the Atlantic and his fantastic TED Talk.

Don studies how our visual perception guided by millions of years of natural selection

authors every aspect of our everyday reality.

His research is about uncovering the underlying secrets of human perception.

He's discovered many clues that point to our very subjective nature of reality.

The way Don sees it, we actively create everything we see,

and there is no aspect of reality that does not depend on consciousness.

This is one of those conversations where I am out of my element.

It might not feel that way to you, but when you go take a look after this conversation,

when you go take a look at some of Don's writings, his TED talk,

imagine if you put yourself in my shoes to conduct this interview. Great stuff. I am so

fortunate to have such great guests on this show. I hope you enjoy this conversation with

Donald Hoffman.

And I want to hear the backstory of this and how this came to be. As a teenager, you're pondering whether or not we, us Homo sapiens, are robots.

How does that, as a teenager, how did that happen? Well, it was from two different influences.

On the one hand, my dad was a minister. I heard in church one story about human beings, but then I was also learning to program. And it was early days of programming.

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