Me. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast. episode 64.

Oh, oh, oh, oh. And do me. I am on the road getting interviews witnessing events being part of all sorts of

things for the new book I just left a Donald Trump rally in Macon, Georgia.

And yes, I witnessed applause and cheers for waterboarding and I saw people booing for the very idea of climate change. Now I'm headed to

Los Angeles to spend time with abortion rights activists and I'm just going all over the place I also have some

new interviews for this show I just recently interviewed Mike Regneta of PBS

idea channel we talked all about knowing things and knowledge and theories of knowledge.

In addition to talking about cognitive biases as we always talk about, but more

importantly we talked about logical fallacies you will soon hear a whole

series of episodes about different logical fallacies look for that soon also I

just finished interviewing Stephen Lelandowski who wrote the debunking handbook

and we talked all about what it takes to try to

squash misinformation and it's just going to be great. There's all sorts of really cool

stuff coming up but I'm on the road so this episode is a rebroadcast. This is an interview you're about to hear it's great. This is one of my favorite interviews ever. I was able to ask a lot of questions that I've always wanted to understand and I ask them of psychologist Lori Santos. She heads the

comparative cognition laboratory at Yale University in that lab. She and her colleagues are

exploring the fact that when two species share a relative on the evolutionary family tree,

not only do they share similar physical features, but they also share similar behaviors. and psychologists and other scientists have used animals to study humans for a very long time

But Santos and her colleagues have taken it a step further by choosing to focus on a closer relation, the Capuchin monkey, and that way they can

investigate subtler, more complex aspects of human decision-making, like cognitive biases.

One of her most fascinating lines of research came from training monkeys how to use money.

Now that by itself is worthy of a jaw drop or two.

It's crazy. It's true. Monkeys can be taught how to trade tokens for food and for years

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