The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - May 06, 2025


Dave Portnoy and the ＂F＊＊k the Jews＂ Saga (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_833)

Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
Muhammad Dave Bratt Auschwitz Barack Obama Hitler
De-Extinction of the Dire Wolf! Modern Day Jurassic Park？ (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_832) The Psychology of Irrational Empathy - Fueling Cultural Chaos (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_834)

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

138.99

Word count

1,605

Sentence count

81

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

8

sentences flagged

Hate speech

21

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A psychological analysis of the idea behind Dave Portnoy, using a teachable moment approach, to explain why people do bad things, and why they will stop doing them if you teach them that they don't know any better.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I'd like to offer a psychological analysis of what the idea was behind Dave Portnoy
00:00:07.040 using a teachable moment approach for the F the Jews saga that took place.
00:00:15.840 But first, let me set the theoretical background.
00:00:20.980 So in 2007, I wrote my first book.
00:00:25.560 My first book came out, The Evolutionary Basis of Consumption.
00:00:27.920 And in one of the later chapters where I'm talking about all sorts of deleterious behaviors
00:00:38.440 that people engage in, excessive suntanning and pathological gambling and internet pornographic
00:00:46.980 addictions and propulsive buying and excessive suntanning, one of the typical arguments for
00:00:53.360 why people engage in behaviors that are detrimental to them is that they don't have better information.
00:01:01.000 If only they had better information, then they wouldn't do what they're doing.
00:01:07.880 So if you are fat, overweight, and have high blood pressure, and you spend all day on your couch,
00:01:15.840 you know, stuffing your face with French fries, it must be because you don't know any better.
00:01:20.360 Now, if only the benevolent, empathetic government were to create public service announcements
00:01:25.860 teaching you that it's bad to, you know, be a beached whale and never exercise and never have,
00:01:33.080 you know, healthy, never eat healthy foods.
00:01:37.320 If you learn otherwise, then you'll stop engaging in this behavior.
00:01:40.220 And of course, this is known as the economics of information approach.
00:01:43.900 And it's completely false.
00:01:45.280 And so the example that I like to often give is that when you are trying to, say, reach men
00:01:53.580 and get them to stop smoking, you could give them the epidemiological actuarial tables of
00:02:00.600 the likelihood of them getting cancer or heart disease in 40 years from now.
00:02:05.060 That is accurate information.
00:02:06.840 But the average young guy who's 20 and full of vigor and thinks that they are immortal
00:02:11.480 doesn't give a damn about what's going to happen in 40 years.
00:02:16.700 He thinks he's immortal.
00:02:18.560 It won't happen to him.
00:02:20.480 But if you explain to him instead that the best predictor of a young man having a physiological
00:02:28.900 based erectile dysfunction, not psychological based, but physical based, it's if you are a
00:02:37.360 heavy smoker.
00:02:37.980 And so if you tell that young man that he's likely to trigger people into doing actions
00:02:43.820 A or B is a really important skill to have.
00:02:48.100 That's why I tell my students that understanding evolutionary psychology is ultimately something
00:02:53.840 that will help you throughout your life, whether you are an employer or an employee or a manager
00:02:58.500 or a husband or a wife or a sibling or an investor.
00:03:03.160 You know, anything that you're going to do in life is only going to be served by having
00:03:08.360 an accurate understanding of human nature.
00:03:10.600 And that accurate understanding of human nature can only come via a proper understanding of
00:03:17.320 our evolutionary based human nature.
00:03:22.440 Other example, if you're trying to tell women to stop suntanning, I published a paper in
00:03:27.800 2006 with a dermatologist whereby we were looking at, you know, behavioral patterns and excessive
00:03:40.360 suntanning via an evolutionary lens.
00:03:42.840 Not surprisingly, the literature has found that young single women are the ones most likely to engage
00:03:50.040 in this behavior, whether it be exposure to natural sunlight or, you know, purchasing a surface in
00:03:57.880 an artificial sunbed.
00:03:59.160 It is overwhelmingly women who engage in this behavior, despite the fact that research shows 0.99
00:04:04.760 that women are more knowledgeable about the deleterious of such behaviors than men are. 0.71
00:04:10.840 So this falsified the premise that the reason why people do bad things is because they don't know
00:04:15.480 otherwise and simply teach them and they'll stop doing it.
00:04:20.360 So now you can see why I just gave this background framework to the Dave Portnoy story.
00:04:29.320 Dave Portnoy found out that at a bar that he owns, a couple of waitresses had put up a sign, 1.00
00:04:40.120 fuck the Jews. And one of the guys, I think there were two guys involved in the thing. One of them 0.99
00:04:46.600 is surprisingly named Muhammad. Of course, surprisingly, because Islam only loves the Jews, 1.00
00:04:53.960 right? There's absolutely no proof whatsoever that Islam hates the Jews. That's why there are 1.00
00:04:59.640 hugely thriving Jewish communities in Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco,
00:05:07.080 Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan. Just gorgeous, fertile, rich, exciting Jewish
00:05:21.240 communities in those countries. And to the extent that Jews have disappeared in all those countries
00:05:25.800 where the Jews were there thousands of years before Islam ever existed, it must be because the 0.99
00:05:32.040 Jews are Islamophobic. Because when Muhammad said on his deathbed, promise me that you will rid Arabia 1.00
00:05:38.120 of the Jews, he meant it in the most peaceful of ways. And when in the past 1400 years, hundreds of
00:05:45.160 millions of people have been killed and subjugated under the love and peace of Islam, that must just be 1.00
00:05:51.720 a misunderstanding. So Muhammad here, who was a Temple University student, was involved in this. And so at
00:05:59.640 first, Dave Portnoy had the reflex, the justified moral indignation to say, I'm going to go after you,
00:06:07.640 I'm going to get you, whoever did this. And then he swallowed a pill of suicidal empathy,
00:06:13.880 and he channeled his Barack Obama, who was, you know, as a, quote, professor,
00:06:19.720 he, you know, who is always teaching us, you know, the noble prophet Muhammad is, not Muhammad, 0.94
00:06:27.960 Barack Obama is always teaching us. And so he's the one who really popularized the term teachable
00:06:33.320 moment, if you remember, when he was president. And so Dave Portnoy decided to turn this into a
00:06:38.040 teachable moment. And he thought, I'm going to send these two guys, one of whom is named Muhammad, 0.72
00:06:43.960 I'm going to send them to Auschwitz, so that they could learn about what the Jews have gone through. 0.94
00:06:49.800 Yes. Of course, the argument there being is that to the extent that these two individuals hate the
00:06:56.120 Jews, it must be because they don't know any better. And if only we can explain to them what's 1.00
00:07:02.520 happened to the Jews, then we can maybe humanize the Jews. And as I mentioned in the first round of 0.63
00:07:09.400 doing this X spaces, which I hadn't regrettably recorded, not to be pedantic, but Dave Portnoy said
00:07:20.440 that it was in Germany, and Auschwitz is not in Germany. So it might be good to make sure that our
00:07:26.760 geographic accuracy is veridical. But notwithstanding that small error, he thought, hey, let me send them
00:07:36.040 to see what happened to the Jews, and then they could come back all full of love and respect for
00:07:41.400 the Jews. Well, in many, many countries, not just Islamic countries, you don't teach the Holocaust.
00:07:47.960 And in the European countries, now the many of the classrooms that have a great preponderance of
00:07:55.240 Muhammad's, they are forcing the teachers in France and Britain to no longer teach the Holocaust, 0.99
00:08:02.680 because the Holocaust is offensive to Muslims. Did you hear that? It's offensive to teach
00:08:09.640 the Holocaust. And by the way, the Holocaust is just a holo-hoax. It didn't happen. And if it did 0.80
00:08:15.000 happen, it was only 60 Jews that were killed, not 6 million. The Jews make up that stuff so they can 1.00
00:08:20.680 play victims. So the idea that if only you could send these two guys and teach them about Jewish 0.97
00:08:27.160 history and what the Jews have gone through, suddenly they would find love towards the Jews,
00:08:32.440 is exactly the perfectly incorrect understanding of what drives this. It's not lack of information
00:08:41.160 that caused these two folks to hate the Jews. In the case of Muhammad, it is the central feature 0.95
00:08:49.400 of what defines his identity. Okay? So if anything, you could show him a million footage of the Holocaust. 0.54
00:09:00.120 It's going to only embolden him. There's a clip that I've often shared where you see an imam who is
00:09:08.600 watching all of the bodies of the Jews that are skeletal being pushed by a bulldozer into a common,
00:09:18.600 anonymous grave. And he is lamenting, oh, ya Allah, oh, ya Allah, why did you not give us the pleasure
00:09:25.400 to kill the Jews? Why do you hate us so, Allah, that you gave that pleasure to eradicate the Jews 1.00
00:09:32.600 to Hitler and not to us? Why do you hate us, Allah, that you didn't cause us the pleasure to kill off the 0.98
00:09:41.160 Jews? Does that strike you as though that imam needed to be sent to Auschwitz? 0.54
00:09:45.400 Yes. So while I appreciate that Dave Portnoy was trying to appear magnanimous and taking the high
00:09:54.200 road by offering these two degenerates a teachable moment, as you found out now that Muhammad has 1.00
00:10:03.000 flipped, I think it was the Muhammad who flipped 180 degrees now and is no longer, is recanting his 1.00
00:10:10.840 admission and so on, whatever it is. Basically, it has forced Dave Portnoy to
00:10:17.720 withdraw his offer to send these two guys on his own expense to Auschwitz. So again, the lesson here is
00:10:27.560 that a proper understanding of what drives people to engage in behaviors is incredibly crucial when
00:10:35.000 you are subsequently trying to implement an intervention strategy. And the idea that people
00:10:40.760 do bad things, think wrong things, act in wrong ways, simply because they don't know any better,
00:10:48.200 is one of the most fundamentally erroneous views as relating to these issues. It's exactly the opposite.
00:10:58.600 People fully know the reality, and yet they persist in that behavior.
00:11:03.960 There you have it, folks. I hope that this time around, it has recorded the session. I will also be posting
00:11:12.520 this on my podcast and on my YouTube channel. Thank you to everybody who came for round two.
00:11:18.280 Thank you. I'll talk to you soon. Cheers, everybody.