The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast


553. Why Do Smart People Double Down On Bad Ideas？ ｜ Dr. Gad Saad


Summary

Gad Saad is a marketing professor at Concordia University in Montreal and author of The Sad Truth About Happiness, The Woke Mind Virus, and The Parasitic Mind. He's also the author of a number of bestselling books.


Transcript

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00:00:30.000 Of all of the human phenomena that I've studied in my life,
00:00:34.100 which is the one that has surprised me the most about human nature,
00:00:37.440 the inability of people to change their minds despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
00:00:43.140 Why do people double down instead of changing, even in the face of accelerating evidence of error?
00:00:49.340 I'm in the business of, you know, defending truth and persuading people of opposing ideas.
00:00:55.320 But in most of the cases, it's la, la, la, I don't want to hear it.
00:00:58.420 You know, you talk about people turning a blind eye.
00:01:00.940 There are none so blind as those who will not see.
00:01:03.840 Paradoxically, what often happens when I expose you to contrary information,
00:01:10.000 it only solidifies your position.
00:01:12.960 Because while the ostrich doesn't literally bury its head in the sand,
00:01:17.020 the metaphor is very apt, which is, I don't want to face reality.
00:01:20.500 Yeah, it's willful blindness.
00:01:21.860 It's willful blindness.
00:01:22.980 Hey, everybody.
00:01:39.200 I had a chance today to rekindle my relationship with Dr. Gad Saad,
00:01:44.120 who's a professor of marketing at Concordia University in Montreal,
00:01:49.240 which is a funny position to hold because marketing is a very capitalist enterprise
00:01:54.040 and Concordia is a very woke institution.
00:01:57.960 Anyways, Gad has been a gadfly at Concordia for a substantial amount of time,
00:02:03.080 not least because he applies the tenets of evolutionary psychology
00:02:07.520 to the analysis of human motivation.
00:02:10.240 Hence his interest in marketing,
00:02:12.280 because marketing is the study of the practical application of the analysis of motivation, right?
00:02:19.300 Gad has written a number of, two in particular,
00:02:22.960 a number of books, but two in particular that have struck a chord in the popular imagination.
00:02:28.000 The last one was called The Parasitic Mind,
00:02:30.360 where he outlines his theory of the woke mind virus,
00:02:33.420 a notion that's been propagated quite extensively by none other than Elon Musk,
00:02:38.600 who's quite happy about the theory,
00:02:40.460 not least because it accounts for the pathology that alienated his son from him
00:02:45.040 in a very tragic set of affairs or set of circumstances
00:02:48.720 that's increasingly and unhappily common across families all across the West.
00:02:54.140 He also wrote a book, Gad, called The Sad Truth About Happiness.
00:02:58.240 What did we talk about today?
00:03:00.280 Well, we talked about parasitism, which is a very deep problem.
00:03:04.060 There are evolutionary biological theories that sex itself evolved
00:03:10.680 to help organisms stay ahead of the parasites,
00:03:15.580 those organisms that utilize the resources of a host
00:03:20.500 without adding to its capability for survival.
00:03:26.000 Quite the contrary.
00:03:27.320 Well, Gad was very interested in parasitic ideas and how they spread.
00:03:31.360 And the invasion, you might say, of the parasitic ideas into the university.
00:03:36.240 And so that's really what we concentrated on, all things considered.
00:03:41.100 How do we understand and defend?
00:03:43.960 How do we understand the relationship between our ability to generate storehouses
00:03:49.820 of immense value on the merit side, on the accomplishment side, on the brand side?
00:03:55.600 How do we defend those against the encroachment of destructive parasitism?
00:04:00.580 And how do we do the same thing with our own psyches and communities?
00:04:06.800 That's the topic of today's podcast.
00:04:10.480 Dr. Sad, it's been a while.
00:04:13.520 How are you doing?
00:04:14.380 You're looking sharp as always with that gorgeous three-piece suit.
00:04:18.240 Hey, man, I've got a deadly suit maker.
00:04:21.760 L-G-F-G.
00:04:22.640 By the way, I don't know if you know this, they gifted me a red velvet suit,
00:04:30.700 which they delivered straight to me in Montreal,
00:04:33.340 which I've only worn one in public at Mar-a-Lago.
00:04:37.140 Oh, well, there you go.
00:04:38.720 That's a good and rare combination of events.
00:04:43.380 There you go.
00:04:43.960 When were you at Mar-a-Lago?
00:04:45.780 In early December.
00:04:47.520 So, he'd already won the elections, but he hadn't yet been inaugurated, and it was a mega event.
00:04:54.740 So, make education great again.
00:04:57.420 Make education great again.
00:04:59.860 There's a complicated problem.
00:05:03.440 Yeah, I know Trump, in theory, is at war with the universities, particularly Harvard at the moment.
00:05:09.000 I guess they're locked in some legal wrangle with Harvard claiming that somehow the federal government owes them the money
00:05:15.120 that they've been paying them when they used to be a university.
00:05:19.580 And so, yeah.
00:05:20.480 They only have $53 billion of endowment, Jordan.
00:05:25.240 They need the government's help.
00:05:26.380 There are stringent restrictions on how poor Harvard can use its endowment.
00:05:34.180 And so, they need to go cap in hand to the federal government to beg for largesse from the bricklayers and the electricians,
00:05:41.600 even though they despise them to the core.
00:05:45.000 Indeed, indeed.
00:05:46.160 Do you remember your time at Harvard fondly or not so fondly?
00:05:51.500 Unbelievably fondly.
00:05:52.700 Yeah, look, for a long time, as you know, it was a pretty good deal to be a university professor at a functional institution.
00:06:01.040 And it was a great deal, let's say that.
00:06:04.500 In the 1990s, when I was there, the senior faculty, the smartest people I ever met in my life were the older senior faculty at Harvard.
00:06:16.740 Unbelievably well-educated, you know, classically and scientifically.
00:06:20.740 And then the young professors who rotate out, because that's how Harvard worked, right, on about a seven-year rotation,
00:06:28.940 they were hell-bent on their research careers and not in the careerist manner.
00:06:36.220 You know, they all had the kind of obsession that you need to have if you're a scientist.
00:06:41.460 And then the graduate students were, well, they were like graduate students everywhere, and some of them were superb.
00:06:50.140 And the undergraduates were top-rate.
00:06:52.260 And then the administration served all that, and it was beautiful.
00:06:55.920 You know, our faculty meetings, everybody tried to get them over with as fast as possible so they could get back to the lab.
00:07:01.000 Lots of the professors had showers in their labs so they could work, you know,
00:07:04.460 the requisite 16 hours a day that you have to work if you want to be at the top of your game.
00:07:08.720 And that's what it was like.
00:07:11.340 So, you know, it was a privilege to be there.
00:07:14.240 Yeah, I came close to actually getting the coveted Harvard Business School position out of my PhD at Cornell.
00:07:22.780 And so I had made the first-round cuts, and then I made the cuts, what's called the campus visits,
00:07:28.300 where they invite, I think, the top three or four candidates.
00:07:31.000 And then apparently, rumor has it, I don't have absolute confirmation,
00:07:36.900 but the diversity, inclusion, equity stuff was already happening in 1993 because it came down,
00:07:43.120 as I hear the story between me and another person, she ovulates, I don't, and so she ended up getting the job.
00:07:49.740 But I came close to being with you right there at Harvard in the 90s.
00:07:53.340 Oh, that would have been an interesting early convergence.
00:07:57.020 Yeah, that's right.
00:07:59.160 The world had to wait an extra few years before we met.
00:08:02.320 Yeah, well, that DEI issue, you know, you sat on many hiring committees, I presume,
00:08:07.380 and it was certainly the case that really all the way back, as far as I can remember,
00:08:11.900 even into the 80s, if there was a candidate who was of minority status, whatever that minority happened to be,
00:08:23.260 the hiring committees, even that early, would bend over backwards to bloody well make sure that they got the job.
00:08:28.660 You know, and I would say from the 80s through about 2005, 10 maybe, merit was still essentially prioritized,
00:08:40.620 but all that other idiocy had come creeping in.
00:08:43.220 And of course, by 2010, you might as well just thrown up your hands in despair and headed for the hills,
00:08:49.220 which, you know, essentially I did six years later.
00:08:52.060 And I think it was, we'd gone to the point where, and I was probably still like this,
00:08:57.480 I think it was 70% of early applicants, like early stage career applicants for junior professorships
00:09:06.240 in STEM fields in California, which was an excellent state system for a very long time,
00:09:13.440 they're turfed out of the competition before their research dossier is evaluated.
00:09:18.520 And of course, and that's from their DEI statement, yeah.
00:09:23.140 Well, it's only gotten a lot worse since you left.
00:09:26.440 So let me give you, or for your listeners and viewers, a few recent stats.
00:09:30.960 So the Aristotle Foundation released a few months ago a study at Canadian universities,
00:09:37.860 and they looked at, they did a content analysis of Canadian job openings,
00:09:43.860 and in 98% of the posts, the postings, there was mention of diversity, inclusion, and equity.
00:09:53.340 I mean, if it were 20%, it would be a disaster.
00:09:56.700 But imagine where it's 98%, I think it was something like 477 out of 489 postings
00:10:04.300 involved diversity, inclusion, and equity.
00:10:06.620 And to that point, you know, as you probably might remember, I held a university-wide chair for 10 years,
00:10:13.880 and it finished in 2018.
00:10:16.000 When I then started thinking about applying for, you know, the next term, the next five-year term,
00:10:22.780 I then decided against it because I was under the requirement to provide a diversity, inclusion,
00:10:31.620 and equity statement, which I wasn't willing to do.
00:10:33.980 So it has now been probably five, six years since I last had university-based research funds.
00:10:42.440 And so, in a sense, I've been forced out in my ability to pursue my research
00:10:48.120 because of many of these ideological commitments that you have to publicly proclaim.
00:10:54.680 It's horrifying.
00:10:55.420 Yes, well, and I've been watching Harvard struggle with Trump and the research community as well,
00:11:02.560 bleat and beat their chest about the fact that, well, the only reason that the researchers
00:11:07.880 ever provided the requisite DEI statements was because the government had made it mandatory.
00:11:15.500 It's like, so I guess mandatory cowardice is an excuse for what?
00:11:19.600 For selling your soul to the devil.
00:11:21.440 Yeah, it's amazing.
00:11:22.980 I'll give you another amazing example.
00:11:24.900 I've been on leave now from Concordia, which, you know, the university was kind enough to grant it to me.
00:11:33.160 They were probably relieved, Gav.
00:11:35.660 I didn't want to say it, but thank you for saying it.
00:11:37.880 They were probably all celebrating.
00:11:38.820 Yeah, no problem.
00:11:39.620 Yeah.
00:11:39.920 I'm sure they were.
00:11:41.040 That left-wing hellhole, that university, that terrible pro-Hamas, constant protesting home of the resentful and miserable, that Concordia?
00:11:53.000 That Concordia.
00:11:55.540 Their five-year strategic mission is to indigenize and, what's the other term?
00:12:03.340 I can't remember the other term.
00:12:04.040 To indigenize the curriculum.
00:12:05.480 So, imagine, how do you indigenize number theory?
00:12:10.680 How do you indigenize differential equations?
00:12:14.180 How do you indigenize evolutionary psychology?
00:12:16.140 One little, two little, three little Indians?
00:12:17.980 Is that how you do it?
00:12:20.080 You're going to get me into trouble.
00:12:22.260 It's me saying it, Gav, and I've already been in plenty of trouble.
00:12:26.800 Fair enough.
00:12:27.400 So, you know, it's very, very difficult to live in the ecosystem.
00:12:30.740 I think when I first heard that you were leaving academia, I felt a bit of tension within myself.
00:12:39.740 And that on the one hand, I was, oh, no, you know, Paisan is leaving.
00:12:44.540 On the other hand, I felt somewhat envious of you.
00:12:47.980 And that while I remained in the ecosystem of infinite lunacy, you were out, man.
00:12:53.120 How do you feel now that you've been out for a few years?
00:12:55.140 Well, it's worked out very fortunate for me because, well, for a variety of reasons.
00:13:01.560 I mean, first of all, I've been on a nonstop lecture tour really since 2018, punctuated by various, you know, fits of illness.
00:13:10.740 But, and so, what's my alternative?
00:13:15.620 I can teach 150 kids in a classroom that looks like some sadistic architect designed it, what, for denizens of hell, all fluorescent lights and concrete blocks and hosable architecture.
00:13:33.040 And they can sit in desks and be numbers in a 60,000 person, what, what, monstrosity of gigantism while being lectured by the DEI mavens.
00:13:46.180 Or I can travel around the world to speak to paid audiences about exactly what I want to talk about and do something different every night.
00:13:53.040 So, that's a pretty good deal.
00:13:55.040 And then we set up Peterson Academy, which is thriving.
00:13:59.780 I just finished teaching, recording a new Maps of Meaning course.
00:14:04.600 That was my cardinal course, I guess, at Harvard and the University of Toronto.
00:14:09.040 And it'll be produced at the highest possible quality and then shown to our 45,000 students.
00:14:17.600 And that's growing extremely rapidly.
00:14:19.580 So, you know, that's the upside, and there's lots more upside associated with that.
00:14:25.200 But the downside is, I had a pretty good research career, Gad.
00:14:30.500 You know, and that's the one thing I haven't been able to replace.
00:14:35.480 Well, that and my clinical practice, you know, because I'm too evil to have a clinical practice.
00:14:40.400 So, oh, by the way, I should tell you this, this is pretty funny in the most darkly horrible, quasi-totalitarian, idiot Canadian state manner.
00:14:51.160 So, you know, the College of Psychologists have deemed me, what would you say, I need to be re-educated out of my climate apocalypse skepticism
00:15:05.300 and my disdain for the trans activists and my belief that maybe we shouldn't cut the breasts off 13-year-olds.
00:15:12.080 You know, all those terrible things that sane people know to be true deep inside of them, like the fact that there are actually men and women.
00:15:20.540 You know, I was asked on a show about a year ago of all of the human phenomena that I've studied in my life or I'm aware of,
00:15:30.240 which is the one that has surprised me the most about human nature.
00:15:33.760 And I paused for a second and I answered the inability of people to change their minds despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
00:15:42.720 Justin Trudeau comes in, he does a disastrous job.
00:15:46.200 What do Canadians do?
00:15:47.840 Re-elect him.
00:15:48.640 That's not enough.
00:15:50.900 Let's do it a third time.
00:15:52.340 Then he steps down.
00:15:53.960 Maybe it's time now to do some auto-correction.
00:15:57.060 What do Canadians do?
00:15:58.640 They re-elect the party that put them in the position that we're in right now.
00:16:02.380 So, I think that that answer that I gave, it was a British psychiatrist who was hosting me.
00:16:07.360 I think it's that much more apropos today.
00:16:09.660 It is almost impossible to get someone to change their opinions once it is anchored solidly into their personhood.
00:16:17.580 So, there you go.
00:16:18.100 Hey, I've got a biblical reference that will clear that up for you.
00:16:21.140 Okay, shoot.
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00:17:34.280 So, one of the mysteries in the story of Exodus is why it takes the Israelites three generations to cross a relatively trivial stretch of desert.
00:17:54.200 So, what's the narrative explanation?
00:18:00.020 So, it's twofold.
00:18:01.600 Remember in the account when Moses, after Moses encounters the burning bush and gets to the bottom of something and learns, which is what that story means, he goes back to get the Pharaoh to change his mind.
00:18:19.760 But he doubles down the Pharaoh.
00:18:24.760 And that's the consequence of the ever-accelerating sequence of plagues.
00:18:31.600 And the first eight plagues destroy the present.
00:18:35.360 And the last plague, which is the death of the firstborn, destroys the future.
00:18:40.060 And it isn't until the present and the future are destroyed, heaven and earth both, plus the future, that the Pharaoh relents.
00:18:48.120 And even then, he doesn't, right?
00:18:49.740 Because he sends his army after the Israelites once they do depart, right?
00:18:54.500 Now, the question is, why do people double down instead of changing?
00:18:58.740 Even in the face of accelerating evidence of error.
00:19:04.880 Okay, so the Israelites leave, right?
00:19:06.980 So, now they are escaping their tyranny and their slavedom.
00:19:11.080 And that's a dynamic, right?
00:19:12.600 Because there's no tyrants without willing slaves and vice versa.
00:19:17.600 And so, the Israelites have plenty to learn, too.
00:19:20.800 And so, the first thing that happens to them is the chaos of the Red Sea.
00:19:24.360 And that's chaos and blood.
00:19:26.660 Why?
00:19:27.500 Because when you change your mind, the first thing that happens is things fall apart.
00:19:32.560 And so, right.
00:19:33.920 And then, they cross the Red Sea and they manage that successfully.
00:19:38.060 So, that's that chaotic threshold.
00:19:39.520 And then, they wander in the goddamn desert for three generations.
00:19:45.400 Right.
00:19:45.980 Why?
00:19:46.720 Because at least under the tyranny, they knew what to do.
00:19:50.920 And in the wilderness, they are fractious, resentful, immature, and unable to govern themselves.
00:19:57.740 And it takes three generations before they recover.
00:20:01.660 So, and, you know, I talked to Carl Friston about this.
00:20:04.160 And Carl's a neuroscientist of some repute.
00:20:07.020 And he has an entropy theory of anxiety.
00:20:10.680 And I had worked on a parallel theory in my lab in Montreal.
00:20:14.920 We published a paper on it not too long before I departed for parts unknown.
00:20:23.700 Your beliefs are game principles, like game rules, that bring order to complexity.
00:20:32.760 And if you're wrong, you have to modify.
00:20:38.100 And the consequence of modification first is an encounter with unstructured entropy and chaos.
00:20:46.920 And that, the apprehension of that locks people into their tyranny.
00:20:53.000 Self-imposed, familial, cultural, whatever.
00:20:56.420 So, it's always, it's never from where you are to the promised land.
00:21:01.020 It's always from where you are through the threshold of chaos into the goddamn desert and then maybe forward.
00:21:08.560 So, in chapter 7 of The Parasitic Mind, where I talk about how to seek truth, I open up the chapter with a long quote by Leon Festinger, the pioneer of theory of cognitive dissonance.
00:21:23.320 And it exactly speaks to your point.
00:21:25.000 So, the chaos that you're talking about with the Red Sea and so on in the biblical story is the chaos that you experience internally when you are faced with a dissonant amount of evidence that is contrary to the one that you hold so dear to you.
00:21:41.180 And so, it is no accident that this incredible quote by Leon Festinger, I obviously don't have it memorized here, but basically he's saying that there is no ends to which people will go to in order to maintain the coherence of their current belief system irrespective of the amount of contrary evidence that they are exposed to because then that triggers cognitive dissonance.
00:22:08.860 And as a matter of fact, paradoxically, what often happens, as I'm sure you know, Jordan, when I expose you to contrary information, it only solidifies your position.
00:22:22.120 So, you could imagine how disheartening it is, right?
00:22:24.700 I'm coming at you with a mind vaccine that hopefully gets you to perhaps revisit some of your, you know, cherished beliefs.
00:22:33.520 You mean like a university professor should?
00:22:36.280 Like a university professor should.
00:22:38.060 And what ends up happening is exactly opposite to that.
00:22:41.540 It only emboldens you in your position.
00:22:44.220 It only solidifies that you were right despite the fact that I've shown you that you were perfectly wrong.
00:22:50.180 And so, at times, it can seem like an insurmountable struggle because I'm in the business of, you know, defending truth and persuading people of opposing ideas.
00:23:01.400 But in most of the cases, it's la, la, la, I don't want to hear it.
00:23:04.880 And that's why I talk about ostrich parasitic syndrome in the previous book.
00:23:09.460 Because while the ostrich doesn't literally bury its head in the sand, the metaphor is very apt, which is, I don't want to face reality.
00:23:17.420 Yeah, it's willful blindness.
00:23:18.480 It's willful blindness.
00:23:20.160 And so, it's a very, very difficult game.
00:23:22.420 In the Egyptian mythology, the god of the state, they had a god of the state, Osiris.
00:23:28.700 And Osiris was a great exploratory and nation-founding hero in his youth, awake and alert and curious, able to transform and to bring order.
00:23:43.560 But as he ages, he becomes ossified, and that's sped along by the fact that he's willfully blind.
00:23:54.080 That's in the Egyptian theology.
00:23:55.900 Now, he has a brother, an evil brother, Seth.
00:24:01.360 And Seth is the origin of the word Satan, by the way, through the Coptic Christians.
00:24:07.000 And Seth is the eternal evil brother of the willfully blind king.
00:24:13.760 And when Osiris is sufficiently old and sufficiently willfully blind, which means unwilling to understand the usurping motivations of his evil brother,
00:24:25.900 Osiris, Osiris chops him up into pieces and spreads his parts around Egypt.
00:24:32.760 In fact, the Egyptians regarded each Egyptian province as a piece of Osiris, right?
00:24:39.600 So, that body would come together as an integrated state.
00:24:43.060 When he can't kill Osiris because Osiris is a deity.
00:24:47.780 So, there's no killing him.
00:24:49.440 But you can make sure everything falls to pieces.
00:24:53.060 So, that's the blindness of institutions once established.
00:24:56.840 They ossify, and then they turn a blind eye to the machinations of the usurper, right?
00:25:04.480 Okay.
00:25:05.080 So, Osiris is now scattered all across the landscape.
00:25:09.080 And so, things have fallen apart, right?
00:25:12.780 People say that about their own life.
00:25:14.360 Everything fell apart.
00:25:16.680 His wife is queen of the underworld, Isis.
00:25:20.140 And she rules the domain of the underworld and chaos, which is where you go when things fall apart.
00:25:27.220 And she makes her appearance, right?
00:25:29.640 So, that's the renewal of the social order by what?
00:25:32.960 The plenitude and terror of nature.
00:25:35.180 And she finds Osiris' phallus, so the vessel of the seminal idea.
00:25:41.020 And she makes herself pregnant and has a son.
00:25:44.020 The son is Horus.
00:25:46.760 Horus is the Egyptian god of the eye, the famous Egyptian eye with the fully open pupil.
00:25:53.640 And he's also a falcon because birds of prey have the most acute vision.
00:25:59.120 And Horus is willing to see.
00:26:04.400 And he can see evil.
00:26:07.060 And so, he goes back to Egypt when he grows up, like King Arthur.
00:26:10.740 He grows up alienated from his evil community.
00:26:13.960 And he goes back to fight Seth.
00:26:16.000 And they have a terrible battle.
00:26:17.700 And Seth tears out one of his eyes.
00:26:20.640 And they continue to fight.
00:26:22.360 And Horus gets the eye back.
00:26:25.060 And he banishes Seth to the nether regions of the cosmos.
00:26:30.460 No killing him.
00:26:31.300 Because the force that usurps and parasitizes never dies.
00:26:37.880 Okay, now he's got his eye back.
00:26:40.380 Now, you think he could just slap it in his head and then he could rule.
00:26:43.900 That's not what happens.
00:26:44.860 He goes to the land of the dead, back to the underworld, voluntarily.
00:26:49.480 And he finds Osiris, his father, languishing in the underworld, you know, in a ghostly and desiccated state.
00:26:57.960 And he gives him his eye.
00:26:59.980 So, he provides corrupt tradition with the capacity to see.
00:27:06.460 And then Osiris awakens.
00:27:08.340 And they unite.
00:27:10.240 And it's the union of Osiris and Horus that is the proper sovereign of the state and the soul of the pharaoh.
00:27:18.200 Nice.
00:27:18.820 Isn't that something?
00:27:20.320 That's nice.
00:27:21.200 I guess that's why you love to study ancient themes to link them to current realities, right?
00:27:28.080 Well, it's so brilliant.
00:27:29.980 The Mesopotamians, too, worshipped vision, attention, for exactly the same reason.
00:27:36.780 It's exactly what we're talking about.
00:27:39.020 You know, you talk about people turning a blind eye.
00:27:41.680 There are none so blind as those who will not see.
00:27:44.620 The deity of the revivication of the corrupt state for the Egyptians was literally the open eye.
00:27:52.700 Pay attention.
00:27:53.860 Right.
00:27:54.200 And for the Mesopotamians, it was twofold.
00:27:57.000 Pay attention and speak the proper words.
00:27:59.260 Free associating here.
00:28:01.660 One of the greatest guests I've ever had on my show is a gentleman who, when you translate his pseudonym in English, is Eye of Mosul.
00:28:13.720 In Arabic, it could be Eye of Mosul, which he was a guy who was literally documenting the atrocities that were being committed by ISIS in Mosul at great threat to him.
00:28:34.100 And he was using the vision, the eye symbol to capture exactly that.
00:28:40.840 You should go, if you ever have a chance, you should go and listen to our chat.
00:28:45.060 Because when people say, you know, I'm too afraid to speak on campus because of reasons X, Y, Z, I usually refer them to someone like this gentleman and several other very courageous people who literally put their lives in imminent danger in order to document some of the difficult realities that people face in the Middle East.
00:29:06.080 And yet, most people here are too afraid to speak out because they might be unfriended by someone on Facebook.
00:29:12.700 And so I always try to contextualize the dangers that people feel in the West compared to some of the dangers that freedom fighters feel.
00:29:21.380 And actually, I remember in, do you remember our chat, our event that was originally canceled at Ryerson, which we subsequently held a few months later in 2017 in Toronto?
00:29:33.160 Yeah, yeah.
00:29:33.940 I remember that in the Q&A period, someone asked each of the people on the panel, including you and I, who would be some of the freedom fighters that we each most admire.
00:29:48.360 And in my case, I gave examples of people in the Middle East who speak out at truly extraordinary great personal risk.
00:29:57.340 So, there you have it.
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00:31:14.980 Yeah, well, you know, God, the thing about risk, risk is a funny thing, because there's the risk that you accrue by speaking out, and then there's the risk that you accrue by being silent when you have something to say.
00:31:31.220 Yeah, well, that's the Jonah story, right?
00:31:33.840 The dragon from the abyss will drag you to hell if you refuse to speak when your conscience tells you to.
00:31:39.900 To that exact point, when people ask me, why is it that you speak out, I usually tell them that when I go to bed at night and I have to put my head on the pillow, the only thing that stops me from having a bout of endless insomnia is to know that I was fully true in defending the truth.
00:32:01.120 If I were to modulate my speech, if I were to regulate what I say or don't say, even though the world might not know it, I would know it, and therefore, since I'm my harshest critic, since I have a very exacting code of personal conduct, I simply can't modulate.
00:32:18.720 And so, it's exactly to your point, which is, I would feel inauthentic, I would feel fraudulent if I were to not speak when I'm tasked to speak, and I only wish more people were to do that.
00:32:32.820 Yeah, there's no pillow like a good conscience, as they say.
00:32:36.480 Yeah, you know, the other, you said that you have an exacting personal standard, but would it not, I'm very curious about your response to this, would it not be the case that you could say with equal truth that an exacting conscience has you in its grip?
00:32:55.720 Yeah, that's a great question. So, in the last book, in my happiness book, I have an entire chapter on the inverted U, which is sort of the universal law of maximal flourishing.
00:33:08.320 Too little of something is not good, too much of something is not good, and life is about finding that sweet spot, which, of course, Aristotle had already explained to us via his golden mean.
00:33:19.380 Right, exactly. A soldier who's too cowardly is not good, a soldier who's a reckless martyr is going to die very quickly, and somewhere in the middle stands the golden mean.
00:33:29.780 So, to your question, I argue that my perfectionism, which is one manifestation of, perfectionism is a manifestation of my exacting standard, actually puts me beyond the sweet spot.
00:33:42.540 And let me give you an example. When I receive the galley proofs, let's say to my latest book, most authors would view that as an opportunity to celebrate.
00:33:52.900 This is the last final step before the book goes out into production. To me, I go through an infinite amount of angst, because this is the last time that I could ever find that misplaced, you know, comma or that typo on page 337.
00:34:10.680 And so, I end up spending probably five times as much time as with the typical author when they're going through the galley proof because of my exacting nature, because of my maladaptive perfectionism.
00:34:23.380 So, even for a trait that you would think is a noble trait, right, you're conscientious, you have attention to detail, even that could be in the maladaptive part of the curve.
00:34:34.660 Yeah, well, I wonder, I wonder, it's a strange thing, eh, because you have to adjudicate adaptive with a specified timeframe.
00:34:47.400 And timeframe is a tricky matter, right? Because, look, why do people go along with the horde when, even when their conscience is suggesting the alternative?
00:35:01.920 And the answer to that is, I think, you tell me what you think about this as a student of evolutionary biology and motivation, because timeframe is a crucial issue here, right?
00:35:12.940 That's why we delay gratification. That's why there's a distribution of future preference.
00:35:19.060 Forgive me for interrupting you. I was literally, before I came here this morning, I was working at the cafe on my forthcoming book.
00:35:26.160 I was working on a section on delay gratification. But go ahead, continue.
00:35:29.880 Okay. Well, so, here's a hypothesis, is that service to an exacting conscience is the longest-term game.
00:35:41.680 So, I was going to tell you, I said, what I mentioned before we began the podcast, that I wanted to tell you a story about Abraham.
00:35:51.640 And maybe I can do that now, if you don't mind, because I got Brett Weinstein's comments on this, by the way, because I'm very curious about its evolutionary significance.
00:35:59.520 I think it's the antidote to the notion of the selfish gene. And I think it's evolutionarily sound.
00:36:06.920 So, let me tell you what, let's say that as you mature, let's start out this first, is when you're immature, your timeframe is very short.
00:36:17.420 And so, you're after immediate gratification. That's the case with two-year-olds and, like, radically immature people.
00:36:23.780 They want whatever it is, they want whatever in them is demanding to be satiated now.
00:36:32.560 And they can't forego that gratification for future consideration or others.
00:36:40.420 And those are kind of the same thing, right?
00:36:42.380 You in the future is pretty much like someone else now.
00:36:45.900 It's a hypothetical, right?
00:36:48.340 And so, psychopaths, for example, serve their future selves very badly.
00:36:53.260 They don't learn from experience and they get themselves in trouble in pursuit of immediate gratification.
00:36:57.780 They're radically antisocial.
00:36:59.420 It's a propagation or an extension of immaturity.
00:37:03.420 I think that's what Marxism is, too, by the way.
00:37:06.400 Property is theft.
00:37:07.920 That's pretty damn convenient if you want what other people have sacrificed for.
00:37:12.680 Okay, so, Abraham, I'll try to make this brief.
00:37:18.520 Abraham is dependent and immature when the story starts.
00:37:21.820 He lives with his wealthy parents and he's never had to lift a finger, even though he's, like, into his seventh decade.
00:37:28.240 And then a voice comes to him.
00:37:30.880 And you could think about it as the voice of calling or the voice of adventure or the voice of conscience.
00:37:37.720 They all work equally well.
00:37:39.780 And it says to him, you have to leave your zone of comfort.
00:37:45.260 You have to leave what you are accustomed to and what served you.
00:37:50.260 And you have to journey out into the world and have the terrible adventure of your life.
00:37:57.860 And if you do that, I will make you a covenant.
00:38:02.720 This is the Abrahamic covenant.
00:38:03.840 And I took it apart in We Who Wrestle with God.
00:38:07.520 And I've been lecturing about it, thinking it through, because I think there's something unbelievably profound in it.
00:38:12.700 So, God comes to Abraham as the voice that tells him to step out of his zone of comfort and to move forward radically.
00:38:21.820 Okay, so that's a definition of the divine, by the way, in that story.
00:38:25.940 Right?
00:38:26.240 It's not a call to belief.
00:38:28.220 It's a definition of the highest calling.
00:38:30.340 Okay, so here's the deal.
00:38:32.360 God tells Abraham, if you do this, so let's say you follow the pathway of developmental impetus, you'll become a blessing to yourself.
00:38:43.580 So, that's a good deal.
00:38:44.900 And that would imply that the instinct that moves us out into the world, followed properly, is the best guarantee of our future security and opportunity.
00:38:54.720 Which has to be the case.
00:38:56.900 Those things have to line up.
00:38:58.020 Okay, so that's offer one.
00:39:00.300 Offer two is, your name will become renowned among those who know you for valid reasons.
00:39:11.380 So, you'll establish a reputation that's genuine and deep.
00:39:19.720 Number three, all your enemies will flee before you, and nothing will be able to withstand your movement forward.
00:39:29.740 Number four, you'll establish something of lasting permanence.
00:39:34.140 In Abraham's case, he establishes what I think is the pattern of paternal prowess that radically guarantees the multi-generational survival of his offspring.
00:39:49.280 And he's guaranteed to be the father of nations.
00:39:54.560 And the final kicker, and this is brilliant, you'll do it in a way that brings nothing but abundance to everyone else.
00:40:00.860 So, imagine that this would imply that the impulse that moves us past that zone of convenience that people will tyrannically cling to.
00:40:12.240 That the manifestation of that spirit is the same process that brings peace and opportunity to life.
00:40:21.720 That guarantees reputation, that makes you implacable and unopposable in the medium to long run.
00:40:31.020 That allows you to establish something multi-generationally permanent, including a biological legacy, and that brings abundance to everyone else.
00:40:41.140 So, that speaks of an alignment with the instinct to move forward.
00:40:44.700 That would be the instinct that's counter to tyranny.
00:40:47.500 That tyranny we described earlier.
00:40:49.840 That aligns all that with the pattern that would radically increase the survival of your progeny if that pattern is duplicated as it cascades down the generations.
00:41:03.240 Yeah.
00:41:03.580 I mean, I don't know if I have a ready answer regarding the specific biblical story,
00:41:08.600 but I can certainly incorporate an evolutionary angle to these temporal decisions, these intertemporal delaying gratification.
00:41:17.300 So, let me tell you about two great studies.
00:41:18.980 These are not my studies, but they're quite evolutionary in spirit.
00:41:23.300 So, usually when you study intertemporal decisions, you make people go through a bunch of tasks where you set up the tension between,
00:41:32.340 I can give you $100 now, or you can wait seven days and I'll give you $130.
00:41:39.040 And then, depending on the pattern of responses that you and I give, I can calculate your lambda parameter,
00:41:46.280 which basically captures how much of a delayed or immediate gratifier you are.
00:41:51.400 Okay?
00:41:51.680 Fair enough.
00:41:52.620 Now, most psychologists, and certainly economists, have presumed that that lambda parameter is an invariable part of your personality.
00:42:01.620 So, Jordan Peterson might be an immediate gratifier, Gadsad might be a delayed gratifier, and that becomes invariant.
00:42:09.260 Well, it turns out that the story is a bit more complex in an evolutionarily relevant way.
00:42:15.200 So, for example, if you make people drink a sugary drink or a placebo, I can get you to alter your lambda parameter.
00:42:25.540 So, people who are satiated, physically satiated because they had a sugary drink, are more likely to delay their immediate rewards because they are literally satiated.
00:42:36.440 Right, right. That makes perfect sense. Sure.
00:42:37.900 Now, and listen to this one.
00:42:39.360 So, that's related to survival, right?
00:42:41.380 Because I'm drinking something which is a consumatory thing.
00:42:45.000 Now, let's prime the mating module.
00:42:49.180 If I show men and women photos of sexy opposite-sex targets, that priming doesn't work for women for obvious evolutionary reasons.
00:43:00.980 But for men, if you prime them with photos of scantily clad sexy women, their lambda parameter changes such that they want it now.
00:43:12.980 So, in other words, they become a lot more driven by immediate gratification, even if it's in a different domain.
00:43:19.540 And that generalizes. Oh, that's interesting.
00:43:21.560 Exactly. So, I'm either catering to your mating module or to your survival module.
00:43:29.320 And because these are evolutionarily relevant triggers, I can alter what most scientists thought was an invariant lambda parameter.
00:43:38.680 And so, to your point, your intuition of asking an evolutionist about intertemporal choices, there really is an evolutionary story to that.
00:43:47.240 Well, you know, that's also reflected in the Abrahamic story because Abraham's relationship to this voice that calls him forward is sacrificial.
00:44:00.180 He has to give up something in the present that's valuable.
00:44:05.380 That's why this took me a long time to figure out, Gad.
00:44:09.080 I didn't know to begin with that the reason that the deepest relationship in these ancient stories is catalyzed by sacrifice was because people were trying to work through this paradoxical idea that if you give up something in the present of value and you do that properly, whatever that means, because that becomes a mystery, then you can stabilize the medium and long term and also the community.
00:44:37.840 And so, think about what this means, if this is right, and like it's evident to me from comparing multiple stories that sacrifice is the ritual of delay of gratification, right?
00:44:53.500 It's the ritual of work, right?
00:44:56.660 And work is the sacrifice because you give up your pursuit of immediate gratification in the present to stabilize your future and to fill it with opportunity.
00:45:08.860 And so, and what?
00:45:11.300 Sophisticated communities are dependent on sophisticated sacrifice.
00:45:15.340 And then the question becomes sacrifice in service of what?
00:45:18.160 In the Abraham story, it's in the service of the instinct that moves you adventurously forward, which is a lovely way of conceptualizing it.
00:45:28.160 But the fact that the sacrifice is involved, so what happens too is that Abraham pursues a sequence of expanding adventures, each of which demands a more exacting sacrifice.
00:45:39.260 And that culminates in God's request that he'd sacrifice his son, right?
00:45:45.580 You could say to the spirit of adventure.
00:45:47.940 Of course, Abraham gets to keep his son, which is the moral of the story, I think, which is that if you're willing to sacrifice even your children to what's highest, then you'll get them back.
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00:47:14.300 Right, and you'll win, but it's a long-term game.
00:47:21.300 You know, we did experiments with that Lambda technology, and we showed that, and this is, I think, very much in keeping with what you described.
00:47:30.060 If you put people in a state of enhanced positive emotion, they're more likely to discount the future because that's the activation of that appetitive system.
00:47:39.640 And it's also the case that extroverts will discount the future more heavily than introverts, and extroverts are in a state of enhanced positive emotion.
00:47:49.260 And so, right, an extrovert is pursuing opportunity in the social realm pretty much all the time.
00:47:55.280 Sorry, the capacity to delay gratification turns out to have unbelievable beneficial downstream effects, whether it be to your likelihood of success in life, whether it be to your health, whether it be to your happiness.
00:48:13.300 So let's just take a few examples.
00:48:43.300 For whatever I sacrificed back then, as you have.
00:48:46.460 The marshmallow test, which, of course, you're very familiar with, there is research that shows that the children who were able to, you know, pass the marshmallow test to really not take that extra marshmallow when the experimenter was looking,
00:49:04.440 if we track those children who had that delayed gratification reflex later in life, they were more successful.
00:49:13.400 So it applies to everything.
00:49:14.540 Think about weight gain, right?
00:49:16.320 When I stop myself from having the immediate dopamine hit of that extra piece of chocolate cake,
00:49:24.160 I am sacrificing the immediate pleasure today for making sure that in 10 years I'm not much overweight, which, by the way, I greatly failed at many years ago when I ended up being 256 pounds but not having the height of a football linebacker.
00:49:42.240 And so many of our downstream either successes or failures stem from the original thing that we're talking about, which is, are you able to sacrifice something today for something positive tomorrow?
00:49:55.140 I mean, would you agree that it's probably one of the traits that is most causative of our future successes or failures?
00:50:04.220 Look, I don't even have to agree.
00:50:07.620 The literature on that is crystal clear.
00:50:10.200 So, well, the most, the best predictor of long-term success in a complex, organized society is general cognitive ability, right?
00:50:19.740 And that's probably something like, part of what that is is just speed of thought.
00:50:25.820 That's not all of it because depth of thought, ability to juggle multiple concepts simultaneously, you know,
00:50:31.540 there, but it's a pretty, it's a unitary phenomenon, general cognitive ability.
00:50:35.980 It's, it's indexed with the SATs and the GREs and the MCATs, all of these tests of cognitive merit.
00:50:42.780 But the next best predictor is trait conscientiousness.
00:50:47.720 And conscientiousness is orderliness and industriousness.
00:50:51.540 And both of those are markers of the willingness to, it's complicated, A-GAD,
00:50:56.980 because we looked at the relationship between trait conscientiousness and future discounting.
00:51:03.280 And in the future discounting tasks, we couldn't find a relationship.
00:51:09.100 So whatever future discounting is indexing with regards to the ability to delay gratification
00:51:14.540 is not exactly the same component of sacrificial willingness that conscientiousness indexes.
00:51:20.740 You know, we probably tried 50 laboratory tasks, trying to find an actual task that trait conscientiousness predicted.
00:51:30.260 And we couldn't find, we couldn't find one.
00:51:32.460 We couldn't find one, not, not a task.
00:51:35.100 Self-report works, other report works.
00:51:38.160 You know what?
00:51:38.720 You can, you can derive a pretty good index of someone's suitability for a complex exacting managerial position
00:51:46.220 with a big five personality inventory if people don't cheat it.
00:51:50.580 But be damned if we could find an actual behavioral task that indexed it.
00:51:56.120 Did you, did you publish those null effects?
00:51:58.680 Yes.
00:51:59.600 No.
00:52:00.020 Have you tried publishing null effects?
00:52:02.380 Well, that's, that's the reason why I asked this.
00:52:04.680 Because, you know, one of the, the, the great stories of, you know, my null effect story is
00:52:10.720 back in, I think, the late 90s, there was a special issue in the journal, which I'm sure you've heard of,
00:52:18.120 Cognition and Emotion, you know, a top journal, where I was trying to study the relationship between dysphoria
00:52:26.540 and decision-making.
00:52:28.600 And I wanted to see whether being in a dysphoric state would make you tackle a decision-making task
00:52:37.700 with greater conscientiousness or lesser conscientiousness.
00:52:41.160 And there were, there were theories that could predict either, right?
00:52:44.440 So some people thought when you're dysphoric, you're sort of in a learned helplessness mode.
00:52:50.000 Life sucks.
00:52:50.840 Who cares?
00:52:51.340 I'm not going to put much effort into the task.
00:52:53.160 Whereas there's another research stream that argued the exact opposite, which is when I feel dysphoric,
00:53:00.320 one of the ways that I can gain control and mastery over my environment is to put in more effort into the decision.
00:53:06.380 Right, right, sure.
00:53:07.580 And so I came into the, the research without any apiary hypotheses,
00:53:12.180 precisely because I didn't have a good sense of what I should expect.
00:53:15.520 I said, let me just do exploratory research and see what I get.
00:53:18.000 And I think I had measured something like 16 or 17 dependent variables, different dependent variables.
00:53:26.620 And I had two groups, the non-dysphorics and the dysphorics.
00:53:30.960 And I think on all of the measures, except one, I had gotten no differences between the two groups.
00:53:38.680 So there was, yeah, let me just finish.
00:53:41.440 And so I had sent the paper to a special issue of cognition and emotion that,
00:53:49.120 and the special issue was on the application of emotions and decision-making.
00:53:53.400 So it couldn't have been more perfectly suited.
00:53:55.900 And the guest editor at the time, who's a famous psychologist, who, whose name you would easily know,
00:54:02.140 but turned out to be an utter abject asshole, because I recently gave a talk somewhere on some,
00:54:09.820 you know, some of the parasitic stuff.
00:54:12.020 But he really hated, he really hated me because, you know, he was of a different persuasion.
00:54:17.320 He's an ardent leftist.
00:54:18.920 But in any case, he said, he wrote back to me and said, look, I would love to accept this paper.
00:54:23.520 But unfortunately, Gad, it is laden with nothing but null effects, to which I answered,
00:54:30.020 but don't you think that the ubiquity of the null effects in this case is worthy of it being documented in the literature?
00:54:37.640 And apparently I wasn't able to convince him.
00:54:39.680 So that's what happens.
00:54:41.180 Well, let's take that apart for a minute, because I think we can probably understand why, at least in part.
00:54:47.440 So if you look at the big five structure, the emotions load on extroversion and neuroticism, right?
00:54:54.640 So you have extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness.
00:54:59.640 Extroversion and neuroticism pretty much cover the whole domain of emotion.
00:55:04.380 So extroversion is the behavioral manifestation of either lower threshold for positive emotion or more positive emotion.
00:55:11.760 And neuroticism is the behavioral expression of more negative emotion or lower threshold for negative emotion.
00:55:18.860 So all the emotional phenomena load on extroversion and neuroticism.
00:55:22.960 It's possible that the delay discounting tasks that we were referring to are primarily modulated by emotion.
00:55:34.760 So conscientiousness doesn't look emotion-dependent, because if it was, it would load on extroversion or neuroticism.
00:55:51.280 So there's some aspect.
00:55:53.360 We did one study where we found a behavioral effect of conscientiousness.
00:55:57.760 That was only one.
00:55:59.820 Breadth of attentional focus.
00:56:01.580 So conscientious people could focus their attention on a smaller place.
00:56:08.040 Now, to some degree, they sacrificed breadth of attention for that, as you'd expect.
00:56:13.740 Openness modulated that, creativity, let's say.
00:56:17.660 But it was focus of attention.
00:56:20.040 And you can see that that could be quite different psychophysiologically from the effect of emotion on modulation of delay of gratification.
00:56:31.860 So maybe that's a, you know, that might be a rabbit hole worth wandering down.
00:56:35.980 You could think, when your attention is highly focused, the disciplinary element of that is to keep all those competing motivational states out of the game.
00:56:49.740 Right?
00:56:50.060 And that seems to be, I think, tell me what you think.
00:56:53.500 That seems to be something like what we refer to when we refer to willpower.
00:56:58.300 It's like maintenance of a frame of reference, a narrow, goal-directed, task-oriented frame of reference, despite competing temptations.
00:57:11.060 And, again, trait conscientiousness is a very good predictor of long-term success, especially.
00:57:15.920 It's the best predictor, apart from IQ, of wealth and security.
00:57:19.760 It's a pretty good predictor of longevity.
00:57:23.520 It's a pretty good predictor of marital stability.
00:57:26.360 Like, what do they say?
00:57:27.680 All good things come to those who wait.
00:57:29.700 So if you're going to hire someone, trait conscientiousness is the first thing you look at after raw intelligence.
00:57:36.500 But it doesn't look emotion-dependent, which is what you discovered.
00:57:40.900 That's what you showed.
00:57:41.760 Yeah.
00:57:42.080 Yeah, that's exactly right.
00:57:43.680 Maybe I need to revive that paper because I never published it.
00:57:46.840 But are you familiar with Frank Soloway's work?
00:57:50.140 Do you know who that is, Jordan?
00:57:51.700 Does that ring a bell?
00:57:52.060 The name rings a bell.
00:57:53.140 Tell me the work.
00:57:54.020 Maybe I'll remember.
00:57:55.280 Because you mentioned the Big Five on a few occasions.
00:57:58.400 So I thought you might get a kick out of it and certainly your viewers and listeners.
00:58:03.140 So Frank Soloway is a historian of science, but also a Freud biographer.
00:58:10.280 Oh, right.
00:58:10.880 That's why I knew him.
00:58:12.280 Yes.
00:58:13.040 But his real claim to fame, a brilliant book, came out, I think, in 1996.
00:58:20.760 The book is titled Born to Rebel.
00:58:23.740 And you'll see in a second how I'm going to tie it to the Big Five.
00:58:26.360 So Soloway argues, he sort of flips the script on the typical birth order literature, usually
00:58:34.440 the birth order literature.
00:58:36.140 Right, that's right.
00:58:37.040 That's where I know him too.
00:58:38.480 So the birth order literature basically works via the differential behaviors that parents
00:58:45.700 are going to bestow on their children as a function of their birth order.
00:58:50.680 So the parent might behave differently to the firstborn, to the secondborn, and so on.
00:58:57.140 Well, Soloway completely flips that upside down by arguing that no, and he actually uses
00:59:03.140 an evolutionary explanation.
00:59:05.080 He argues that one of the most fundamental original evolutionary problems that a child
00:59:11.400 has to solve is what's called the Darwinian niche partitioning hypothesis.
00:59:17.300 It's a mouthful, but let me explain it.
00:59:19.060 So when a child is born, all niches are unoccupied.
00:59:24.740 There is the, I'm a good boy niche, I'm a rebel niche, any other ones.
00:59:29.320 So I've got the full litany of possible niches to occupy.
00:59:34.080 But as the next child comes along, if he or she wishes to occupy a unique, uncharted niche,
00:59:41.180 then there is one lesser.
00:59:42.840 And as you go down the sip ship, there are fewer and fewer niches available.
00:59:48.120 And therefore, he argued and demonstrated that when you get to the lastborn, because they
00:59:57.240 face a much more difficult problem in that all of the niches are now occupied, that forces
01:00:05.660 them to score higher on openness amongst some of the other personality traits.
01:00:11.800 And because lastborns score higher on openness, he then tests the 28 most radical scientific
01:00:20.600 innovations throughout history and demonstrates that for 23 out of the 28, the ones who espoused
01:00:28.960 the radical scientific theory were laterborns or lastborns.
01:00:34.120 And the ones who were part of the orthodoxy were the firstborns.
01:00:38.920 And I usually end this little lecture with, do you want to guess what Professor Saad's
01:00:43.820 birth order is?
01:00:44.540 The TD sait que quand vient le temps de chercher un prêt hypothécaire, les opinions surgissent
01:00:48.940 de tous côtés.
01:00:49.740 Choisis le taux variable.
01:00:50.720 Choisis le taux fixe.
01:00:51.500 Prends du court terme.
01:00:52.300 Prends du long terme.
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01:00:54.360 Fais une petite mise de fond.
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01:01:13.440 TD, on est prêts pour vous.
01:01:16.420 Are you first or last?
01:01:18.500 Last, of course.
01:01:19.820 You're last, you're last.
01:01:20.860 How else could I have made all those advances if I wasn't the non-orthodox thinker?
01:01:26.160 But I think, what do you think of this theory?
01:01:29.000 Does it resonate with you?
01:01:30.920 Well, one of the things that came to mind for me there was the,
01:01:36.060 there's also, you know, a parallel literature that indicates that
01:01:39.460 the more older brothers you have, the more likely you are to be gay.
01:01:44.640 Well, then I'm in trouble because I've got two older brothers.
01:01:47.720 No, well, it doesn't really kick in until you have more than that.
01:01:50.700 But I was just trying to put that together in my mind with this particular hypothesis
01:01:54.520 and with the increase in openness.
01:01:56.760 Because it is quite a marked, it's a marked phenomena.
01:02:00.380 And as far as I know, it's valid.
01:02:03.200 I don't know how robust the birth order literature is.
01:02:07.760 I remember Galloway's book now.
01:02:09.900 But I like the, Soloway, Soloway, sorry.
01:02:13.880 I like the niche idea.
01:02:17.560 It's certainly the case that that's one of the things also that typifies human beings above all.
01:02:23.720 You can think about the competition with children there as their experimentation
01:02:28.400 with different characterizations of themselves to garner attention, right?
01:02:34.600 And one of the things that garners attention is novelty.
01:02:37.960 That's exactly right.
01:02:39.020 Look, in a, in a, say in a nest, you have multiple hungry mouths that are opening.
01:02:46.980 And I want to get the attention of the parent.
01:02:49.680 And in many cases, of course, as you know, there is, you kill your, your sibling, right?
01:02:55.600 You throw them off the nest so that now all of the attention could be garnered to you.
01:03:01.160 Well, in the human case, notwithstanding some of the biblical stories where you literally
01:03:05.500 kill your brother, the way that we compete, it's, it's in a sense, the inaugural marketing
01:03:10.980 problem, right?
01:03:11.700 In marketing, you talk about segmentation and targeting a niche.
01:03:16.020 Well, when I'm trying to position myself in a unique niche vis-a-vis competing for my
01:03:22.300 parents' attention, that's a marketing problem.
01:03:25.000 How do I position myself so that I'm in a different niche from the rest of my siblings?
01:03:30.020 So there you go.
01:03:30.240 Sure.
01:03:30.540 And those, those open beaks, they're, they're, they're evolutionarily prime targets.
01:03:35.920 If I remember correctly, cucko, cuckoos, who they, they have a bigger and redder open mouth.
01:03:43.320 And so they're more likely to be stuffed full of food.
01:03:46.520 And the mother birds don't notice because they're so focused conscientiously on the target
01:03:52.980 and the cuckoos throw the other chicks out of the nest.
01:03:57.120 Let me, let me mention this because some of your viewers and listeners may not know this.
01:04:01.320 This is actually called brood parasitism, right?
01:04:04.340 This is where one species has literally evolved the, the darkest of parental strategies, which
01:04:11.280 is I can't be bothered raising my own children.
01:04:15.200 Therefore, let me parasitize the parental instincts of another species, place the egg there and
01:04:22.200 those suckers will raise it.
01:04:23.960 Now, by the way, that has to happen before a certain ontogenetic stage.
01:04:29.340 So if, if, if it happens before it, then the parents will keep feeding that chick, that
01:04:35.660 the cuckoo chick, even though as it's growing up, it clearly looks morphologically different
01:04:41.120 than the other ones.
01:04:42.840 It will still do it.
01:04:44.280 But if, if you come in too late into the, the, the, the, the nest, then they will catch
01:04:51.980 on.
01:04:52.900 So.
01:04:53.240 Oh, that's interesting.
01:04:55.160 I see what I mean.
01:04:55.720 I see.
01:04:56.040 And so it's just incredible.
01:04:58.100 And this is what frustrates me so much, by the way, about the people who hate evolutionary
01:05:03.020 theory, because the amount of exquisite scientific explanations and predictions that evolution
01:05:10.800 offers is so bafflingly great.
01:05:14.000 And yet people accuse us of just engaging in just so storytelling.
01:05:18.280 It's really galling.
01:05:20.640 Yeah.
01:05:21.180 Yeah.
01:05:21.840 So let's go down the parasitic rabbit hole for a bit.
01:05:25.220 So I'm going to make some propositions.
01:05:27.600 And you tell me if, if you believe that they're valid.
01:05:30.560 The first ground truth, I would say, is that I've read a array of evolutionary literature.
01:05:39.100 This isn't the only hypothesis, but it's a good one.
01:05:42.340 That sex itself emerged so that creatures who were replicating could escape the problem
01:05:49.320 of parasites.
01:05:50.020 So the theory goes is that the parasitic form is simpler than the form of the host, generally
01:05:57.520 speaking, and that can give it a reproductive speed advantage.
01:06:02.320 And so the parasite can overwhelm the host and the host perishes ignominiously with no
01:06:08.660 offspring under those circumstances.
01:06:10.300 So what the host does is mix up its genes so that the parasite is stymied in its attempt
01:06:17.900 to adapt to the host across generations.
01:06:21.220 And the parasite problem is so deep that the host is willing to sacrifice 50% of its genes,
01:06:28.780 of its variable genes, which is what happens in sex rather than, say, parthenogenic reproduction
01:06:34.940 where you just clone yourself.
01:06:37.920 So that's how deep the parasite problem is.
01:06:41.000 So is that reasonable so far?
01:06:42.860 Yeah, it is.
01:06:43.600 It is.
01:06:43.860 And I'm trying to think whether that, the theory that you just enunciated, if it's not
01:06:49.740 Bill Hamilton who came up with it.
01:06:52.520 Does that sound right?
01:06:52.800 It might be Hamilton.
01:06:53.780 Yeah.
01:06:54.220 I think it might be Hamilton.
01:06:55.820 Yeah, yeah.
01:06:56.480 Okay, so let me add one.
01:06:57.460 Yeah, go ahead.
01:06:57.840 Go on.
01:06:58.380 Well, I just want to add one more layer because this, this will tie it into your book and into
01:07:02.380 the experiences that we've had.
01:07:03.840 And so, you know, there's, this is a weird way of introducing this, but I'm going to
01:07:08.640 do it anyways.
01:07:10.300 I spent a lot of time showing my students at the University of Toronto and Harvard the
01:07:16.660 movie Pinocchio because Pinocchio is a deadly, accurate representation of development and its
01:07:24.220 perils.
01:07:24.660 It's really remarkable.
01:07:26.860 But there's weird things about it, very weird things that are hard to explain.
01:07:31.160 The fact of the bug that's the conscience, the fact that Pinocchio starts as a marionette
01:07:37.040 pulled by forces that are beyond his control, right?
01:07:40.760 You know what he's tempted by?
01:07:42.040 It's so funny, Gad.
01:07:42.920 He's tempted to become an actor.
01:07:44.840 So that's a narcissist.
01:07:46.440 He's tempted to become a liar.
01:07:48.460 So someone who falsifies.
01:07:49.760 And he's tempted to use his hypothetical illness and victimization as a ticket to the land of
01:08:00.160 the delinquents and the death of society.
01:08:02.980 That's the way the narrative lays itself out.
01:08:05.420 In any case, this is the odd part that's relevant to the parasite issue.
01:08:09.120 Um, there's a scene in the movie where Pinocchio rescues Geppetto from the belly of a whale.
01:08:17.540 And everyone swallows that, so to speak, as perfectly understandable, even though it makes
01:08:24.600 no sense whatsoever.
01:08:25.900 So I've been thinking, I've been thinking about this because I couldn't crack that.
01:08:29.120 I've been thinking about it for like 30 years.
01:08:31.300 What the hell is that?
01:08:32.260 What does that signify and why does it sit well with an audience, given its perplexing
01:08:38.960 and absurd nature?
01:08:41.400 Well, okay.
01:08:43.980 So a carcass is a storehouse of value, right?
01:08:49.740 So that's why we were herders, obviously, or hunters.
01:08:54.320 And if we hunted mammoths way back 15,000, 25,000 years ago, we would take down a
01:09:02.240 carcass that was too big for us to consume, and we would store it in the bodies of our
01:09:08.580 co-hunters.
01:09:10.340 And that was reputation, right?
01:09:13.300 Right.
01:09:13.880 Our reputation as an avid sharer made it more likely that we would live through periods
01:09:21.000 of famine because we're collective hunters.
01:09:24.000 Okay.
01:09:24.340 So that's how a carcass might be distributed and transformed into reputation.
01:09:29.520 In any case, the largest of all possible carcasses is a whale carcass.
01:09:34.700 So a whale carcass is a storehouse of value.
01:09:39.300 When the spirit that gave rise to the provisioning of the carcass dies, the dying father is inside
01:09:48.420 the whale.
01:09:48.960 And that's why the puppet who's trying to transform has to rescue it.
01:09:53.160 That's the university's cad.
01:09:55.200 So this is what's happened as far as I'm concerned.
01:09:57.940 Tell me what you think of this.
01:09:59.400 Since World War II, particularly, we set up a very conscientious society.
01:10:04.440 It was based almost entirely on merit, you know, absent corruption from, say, oh, God,
01:10:10.760 I don't know when.
01:10:11.420 But certainly from 1945 to, say, 2010, 2005, something like that.
01:10:17.840 And in consequence, we stacked up an awful lot of whale carcasses.
01:10:24.040 And the parasites moved in.
01:10:26.200 Yeah, I mean, I liked sort of the metaphor, the explanation of how using the sharing mechanism
01:10:39.920 because I can't consume, that is literally out of reciprocal altruism, right?
01:10:46.400 Right.
01:10:46.880 It's Bob Trivers.
01:10:49.180 Exactly.
01:10:49.620 And actually, I was wondering, because earlier we were talking about your time at Harvard,
01:10:55.700 Trivers got his PhD at Harvard.
01:11:00.840 And E.O.
01:11:01.580 Wilson, who was also at Harvard and recently passed away, I recently read his autobiography,
01:11:08.440 Naturalist, which I highly recommend for anyone.
01:11:10.740 Oh, yeah.
01:11:11.360 Yeah.
01:11:11.780 It's beautifully written, really gorgeous autobiography.
01:11:15.260 E.O.
01:11:16.200 Wilson used to say that when, you know, E.O.
01:11:19.740 Wilson was no intellectual slouch, right?
01:11:22.580 I mean, he was a very bright guy.
01:11:24.420 And he used to say that when Bob Trivers would walk into his office in his sort of manic phase
01:11:30.840 discussing all kinds of brilliant ideas, he would be so exhausted after that meeting that
01:11:36.960 the day was over, he had done enough, and he would just go home.
01:11:40.280 That gives you a sense of the kind of brilliance that you might find in some of these carcasses
01:11:47.460 of whales that we call universities today.
01:11:50.260 And I only wish, I long for the day that we can go back to, you know, those kinds of institutions
01:11:57.380 rather than my having to indigenize evolutionary psychology.
01:12:02.740 Right, right.
01:12:03.520 Well, that's a good place to close.
01:12:05.160 Well, we could imagine this, Gadd, then.
01:12:07.240 So, here's two types of value.
01:12:10.800 There's the value of what's being stored.
01:12:13.720 So, that's the carcass.
01:12:15.220 That would be the Harvard Endowment.
01:12:16.880 That would be the brand value of the Ivy Leagues or the brand value of a PhD.
01:12:22.000 All of those are carcasses.
01:12:24.680 And so, they can be stripped to the bone by the parasites who care nothing for the future
01:12:32.120 propagation of that enterprise.
01:12:34.540 They're just going to take everything and run.
01:12:37.920 And the cowardly professors have turned a willfully blind eye to the invasion of the parasites,
01:12:45.920 the grievance studies, the resentful mob who deprioritized the merit that built the institutions.
01:12:52.740 Okay, so, the carcass is one place of value.
01:12:57.260 The other place of value that's more, that's deeper, is the spirit of the enterprise that gave rise to the storehouse of value.
01:13:07.160 Right?
01:13:07.840 And the universities are also attacking that.
01:13:10.820 They're parasitizing the brand and they're destroying the principle upon which it was founded, which was pure.
01:13:17.060 It was basically intellectual capability and conscientiousness.
01:13:21.860 You know, we studied scientists to find out what predicted long-term research productivity.
01:13:29.180 And we thought maybe it would be, we knew IQ would matter because it matters about everything that's complex.
01:13:36.000 Openness, which is creativity, didn't predict at all.
01:13:38.840 Not above IQ.
01:13:40.420 In fact, there was a slight negative prediction, but conscientiousness was a walloping predictor.
01:13:46.860 Now, you know, openness and IQ are positively correlated.
01:13:50.180 So, if you're smarter, you tend to be more creative.
01:13:53.040 But above and beyond intelligence, openness didn't matter.
01:13:57.060 And I think that's reasonable because most diligent science isn't done by radical geniuses, right?
01:14:04.420 There are some who are revolutionary in this open manner.
01:14:08.520 But most of the incremental science, I think the reason science is so powerful is because you can turn it into something that conscientious people can do, right?
01:14:18.680 Just by diligent pursuit.
01:14:21.060 Although, I think the biggest thinkers are those who have a bent towards being generalists.
01:14:29.560 Because the biggest breakthroughs in science happen at the intersections of disciplines, right?
01:14:36.300 So, yes, while it is true that the hyper-specialist is the one who does the important incremental work, the really big ideas.
01:14:46.740 And this goes back to, I think we maybe discussed this in the past or maybe we didn't.
01:14:51.160 I mentioned earlier E.O. Wilson.
01:14:53.140 So, E.O. Wilson wrote in the late 1990s one of my favorite books of all time.
01:14:58.000 The book was titled Consilience, right?
01:14:59.740 Consilience, yeah.
01:15:00.740 Unity of Knowledge, right?
01:15:01.840 And I think both of us, you and I, in our own distinct ways, are really consilient thinkers.
01:15:09.380 When you're doing your relationship between biblical narratives and linking it to contemporary realities or to psychological realities,
01:15:18.480 you're engaging in an endeavor of consilience.
01:15:21.860 You're building bridges between ancient stories and current truths.
01:15:26.680 You're building a link between science and religion.
01:15:30.840 And so, you are being consilient.
01:15:32.760 In my own work, I have published in many, many different disciplines, which people told me not to do because they thought that that's the exact way to not build a successful academic career.
01:15:46.480 But I didn't care because I was intellectually curious.
01:15:49.420 I want to go where I want to go.
01:15:51.100 And so, I think that while it's all great for people to be incrementalists and hyper-specialists, I think the truly big guys, the ones who really stand the test of time, are the big consilient thinkers.
01:16:06.180 Yeah, well, that adds that additional element of exploration and revolutionary explanation.
01:16:12.040 That's a good time, I think, to bring this portion of the enterprise to a close.
01:16:17.640 Because you're working on a new book.
01:16:19.420 Let's just focus on that for a minute, which I'm very interested in.
01:16:23.800 Maybe we'll talk about it on the Daily Wire side.
01:16:26.540 That would be a good thing.
01:16:28.060 Suicidal empathy, right?
01:16:30.020 And so, I've got some notions I would love to talk to you about in relationship to that.
01:16:36.740 The maternal, the unsatiated maternal instinct gone mad.
01:16:43.960 The devouring mother?
01:16:45.200 The devouring mother.
01:16:45.700 That's exactly it.
01:16:47.180 The devouring mother.
01:16:48.400 Let's talk about that on the Daily Wire side.
01:16:50.880 Sounds good.
01:16:51.940 All right.
01:16:52.640 Yep.
01:16:53.360 Very good to see you, Gad.
01:16:54.900 And so, tell people just at the end here the names of your last couple of books.
01:17:00.660 So, the latest book is called The Sad Truth About Happiness, Eight Secrets for Leading a Good Life.
01:17:07.280 The one prior to that was called The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense.
01:17:13.600 And the ones before that are all within the evolutionary psychology realm, the evolutionary basis of consumption, evolutionary psychology in the business sciences, and the consuming instinct.
01:17:24.880 Right.
01:17:25.420 Well, it's a pleasure talking to you, sir.
01:17:26.940 And we'll join you again on the Daily Wire side.
01:17:29.060 For everybody who's watching and listening, as you know, we do another 20 minutes to half an hour on the Daily Wire side.
01:17:34.880 And we're going to talk to Gad today about Suicidal Empathy, which is the title of his new book.
01:17:40.360 Pleasure to see you, Dr. Saad.
01:17:42.620 It's always worth talking to you.
01:17:44.960 You too.
01:17:45.620 Thank you so much.
01:17:46.340 Thank you.