The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Dr. Jesse Bering - ＂The Incredible Afterlives of Dr. Stevenson＂ (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_966)

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00:01:05.240 Hi everybody this is Gad Saad after a couple of weeks of break because I was away in Israel

00:01:11.480 I'm back with another fantastic guest Professor Jesse Behring. How are you doing sir?

00:01:17.740 Good how are you Gad? Good to see you. Likewise so I wanted to just read very briefly a very small

00:01:24.660 portion of your bio and then the book that your latest book which is coming out in April I believe

00:01:30.720 so you are a science writer you are a research psychologist professor of psychology at University

00:01:38.260 of Otago and head of the science communication program at that university you are the author of 0.86

00:01:44.100 the belief instinct why is the penis shaped like that and other reflections on being human nature we 0.67

00:01:51.040 could certainly talk about that perv and suicidal and your latest book coming out soon please go out 0.95

00:01:57.960 there and pre-order it the incredible afterlives of Dr. Stevenson one scientist's epic quest for evidence

00:02:06.060 of reincarnation apparitions poltergeist and other matters of the soul wow that's a mouthful let's

00:02:14.240 start there how do you decide like how does this guy come into your radar that you say you know what

00:02:20.420 I'm going to spend the next 12 14 18 months writing about him take it away well I mean I my own my own

00:02:28.100 research program is on the psychology of afterlife beliefs my earliest research as a PhD student was

00:02:35.940 looking at how children think about the mind after death so for my dissertation for instance I had a

00:02:45.340 little puppet show and in that show a character a mouse character died and we asked children of different

00:02:52.900 ages um whether the character could have a variety of different types of psychological states so you know

00:03:01.840 thinking smelling tasting loving you know all these types of uh psychological capacities but by the way

00:03:09.440 before you go on your doctoral supervisor is a very well-known evolutionary based developmental

00:03:15.800 psychologist David Bjorklund correct correct yeah okay take it away we can see well I mean

00:03:21.900 my earliest research was on children's reasoning about the afterlife and the most shocking thing

00:03:27.580 really was that the younger the child the more likely they were to say that mental states survived

00:03:34.200 biological death which went against the grain of common sense and what people sort of understood about

00:03:40.420 afterlife beliefs because people just assumed that we learn about the afterlife through religious

00:03:47.880 indoctrination and so on but in fact it seemed to be that there's an innate basis to the

00:03:57.320 idea that the mind survives death I've been sort of operating on the assumption as a site as a scientist for many

00:04:05.240 years that this is all explicable through psychological processes these are cognitive biases that

00:04:13.160 that um it was just kind of a non-starter to me that uh when you die that's it the brain stops working

00:04:20.680 therefore any psychological states that are dependent on the brain stop as well and um I spent many years

00:04:29.320 writing about um the afterlife through the lens of that materialist assumption that um that when you're dead

00:04:38.280 that that's it and I still I should say I still sort of lean in that direction but over the over the years

00:04:46.360 I came across some theoretical work including the writings of Dr. Ian Stevenson um who got me thinking

00:04:54.440 I guess a little bit more deeply about possibility perhaps that um that there's something a little bit more

00:05:02.120 complicated about um life and death had you did you know of him early on in your doctoral work or is this something

00:05:12.760 that you know recently you came across that okay let me drill down this guy he wasn't on my radar at all until

00:05:19.400 about 2000 and um 2012 2013 when um I wrote an article for Scientific American about his research program

00:05:31.000 um and um that um that sort of precipitated me going deep deeper into his his line of thinking and his his work

00:05:41.160 and it was you know me approaching this from the perspective of a skeptical psychological scientist who

00:05:46.520 believes that the afterlife can be explained through cognitive biases innate predispositions um social cognition

00:05:55.960 and coming you know face to face with these arguments from a parapsychological perspective which is quite

00:06:05.240 different where he's saying that I'm aware of all these things that you're talking about but still look there is

00:06:12.040 evidence that lends itself at least to the interpretation that the survival of consciousness after death is possible

00:06:21.240 so me writing this book was kind of trying to reconcile these discrepant views me as a scientist a

00:06:28.280 materialistic sort of hard-nosed empiricist and um the parapsychological perspective where he's at least

00:06:36.760 arguing that there is evidence that the mind survives death if if you started I don't know I don't want to put

00:06:42.360 a number in your in your mouth but if you started at a skeptical level of zero belief in this stuff

00:06:49.640 subsequent to you know understanding his own research and writing this book what's the number zero is not

00:06:57.800 at all 100 you're fully convinced what's your number well I started at negative zero for sure

00:07:06.040 it wasn't even a question that I was willing to indulge it just seemed strange to me and patently obvious

00:07:12.680 that um when there's no neurological activity and the brain's dead then mental states cease um what was

00:07:21.720 more puzzling to me for all these years was the fact that people the majority of people um seem to

00:07:29.560 ignore the importance of the brain in generating psychological states and are simply willing to say

00:07:35.320 that when you're dead you still have these abilities after writing the book I would say I'm

00:07:43.240 at least on the positive side of the scale that could be a one it could be a one um I mean I think

00:07:50.600 my my task in this book at least as I saw it was not to convince anybody but to present as strong a case

00:07:58.280 based on his evidence Ian Stevenson's evidence as possible and let the reader come to their own

00:08:03.160 conclusion but I would say that I I'm not quite as ardent um a disbeliever as I was and at least I'm

00:08:10.680 willing to entertain the possibility that I've been wrong this whole time well so a couple of as I was

00:08:16.840 kind of reading very quickly through some of the the biographical details of Stevenson's life you know

00:08:23.800 as often happens with this you know serendipitous life that we live a couple of connections to yours

00:08:31.080 truly number one he's born in Montreal um yeah I've been in Montreal since 1975.

00:08:37.240 he was associated to McGill and I think subsequently got his medical degree at McGill right and then

00:08:42.840 bequeathed uh some stuff to you know the history of socials go ahead he left his he he left um

00:08:50.840 um um a significant amount of his will to McGill yes exactly yeah I did an undergrad and MBA at McGill

00:08:59.480 and thirdly he spent a bit of time at Cornell correct yeah I did my MS and PhD at Cornell and

00:09:07.000 fourthly you're not gonna necessarily be able to predict this only a few days ago and a very rare

00:09:15.720 occurrence I purchased a fiction book usually I'm a I'm a I'm a very avid reader but 99% maybe not 99%

00:09:25.240 but very very high percent non-fiction I bought this beauty first edition 1955 now I say maybe the French

00:09:34.680 pronunciation Aldous Huxley but apparently I was corrected it's Aldous Huxley and tell us the link

00:09:41.880 between Aldous Huxley and your guy in that book so just to back up a little bit so Ian Stevenson was um

00:09:51.800 one of the reasons that he appealed to me was that he was not your traditional sort of stereotypical

00:09:56.600 believer in the paranormal he was a very respected psychiatrist um a medical professional sorry that

00:10:04.840 could go either way that could either demonstrate that you've got scientific credentials or you're a

00:10:09.960 perfect bullshitter because you are a psychiatrist so I'm not sure well he yeah I mean he would be

00:10:15.320 he would be cognizant of those discrepancies as well but he was um the so he he like you said you know

00:10:24.680 he got his medical degree from McGill um and developed a really strong reputation basically as a um

00:10:33.240 um psychiatric interviewer so he wrote textbooks on psychiatric interviewing techniques um his

00:10:41.320 specialization before he got into parapsychology and all this paranormal business was psychosomatic

00:10:47.160 medicine so he was interested in how emotional states induce physical changes so um you know he was

00:10:55.640 part of these uh groundbreaking studies back in the 40s and 50s where you know you would get a you would get a

00:11:02.520 patient or a participant to think about a distressing situation in their lives so you know a cheating

00:11:08.680 spouse or money problems or you know whatever else is going on in their lives and he would actually see

00:11:15.000 how this these negative emotional states would affect their physical organs so he could actually tell

00:11:21.000 that the you know like the colon would change colors or texture um just simply because of these really

00:11:27.560 potent emotional ruminative states so that's important for his belief in reincarnation we'll

00:11:34.760 get back to that in a moment but from there he became an expert in these interviewing techniques

00:11:40.920 with psychiatric patients and he wrote these books about sort of proper ways to handle um people with

00:11:48.760 mental illness and psychiatric conditions in the examining room and how to kind of navigate the

00:11:54.200 conversation with them to get the information that he needed so he was um you know a prominent

00:12:01.880 psychiatric figure he by the time he was 38 39 he was the head of the neurology and psychiatry department

00:12:09.320 at the university of virginia which is a good school um and he's still doing his sort of mainstream

00:12:15.160 conventional work in that area and um he only kind of shifted to uh the paranormal research i think what

00:12:24.760 kind of led him in that direction was and this is where alvis huxley comes back into it because uh he

00:12:31.960 was one of the first investigators to study psychedelics right so yes this was before timothy leary

00:12:40.520 all of that stuff um he was really a leading figure in that field where he he was trying to interview

00:12:48.840 people who had taken mescaline or lsd and trying to get a sense of what phenomenologically what it was

00:12:56.840 like to be in the head of somebody experiencing um these altered states and he did cross paths without

00:13:05.480 aldous huxley he was very much influenced by um huxley's book doors of perception um which is an

00:13:13.880 incredible read a short but incredible read but he wanted to empiricize it he wanted to kind of

00:13:19.720 discipline the discipline of psychedelic research anyway through all the through all of this he

00:13:25.960 he began to kind of question the relationship between mind and body because on these trips because

00:13:31.240 he used himself as a subject in some of the psychedelic research and all these on these trips he thought

00:13:36.440 he had um some recollections of a previous life and that motivated him to begin to take seriously the

00:13:47.080 possibility that maybe um there is a scientific way to approach these paranormal questions got you

00:13:57.880 now if if there are two things that one can do i mean there are maybe more than two but you can

00:14:03.400 just identify the occurrence of paranormal phenomena uh and and i actually i did a quick search and and this is

00:14:13.080 not uh like a pejorative recrimination but i checked your book for daryl ben only oh yeah yeah only because

00:14:21.880 he you know he was a very mainstream highly respected research similar yeah research psychologist from my

00:14:29.080 university at cornell absolutely who then did the whole esp but now some people have looked at it again 0.83

00:14:34.520 and said oops it looks like it was a pure big moist pile of bullshit uh so number one we can identify 0.91

00:14:42.520 occurrences and then we can debate whether they're genuine occurrences or not but then number two is 0.98

00:14:46.920 the so what is the mechanism by which these these things happen was he largely focused on the

00:14:52.440 documentation the former or did he tackle both levels of of analyses well i would say definitely

00:14:59.640 the former he had he had some sort of speculative ideas about mechanisms um but he invested most of

00:15:06.840 of his energy in terms of researching the phenomena itself to try to document the occurrence of these cases

00:15:13.480 so um and one of the differences between his approach for instance and daryl bam was that

00:15:19.240 he thought that um that we'll get most traction in terms of research from what he called spontaneous cases

00:15:29.320 not experimental laboratory derived experimentation about these anomalous phenomena because he thought

00:15:36.760 that they were largely driven by strong emotions they were unpredictable they couldn't be simply conjured

00:15:44.120 up in a laboratory setting because it didn't replicate naturalistic conditions where these phenomena

00:15:50.360 would typically occur and that's antithetical of course to what you and i do in terms of controlled

00:15:57.320 laboratory methods and replication the importance of replication but um the to me the most convincing evidence

00:16:05.640 probably is with the spontaneous cases um if you trust the um i guess the the veracity of his investigations

00:16:15.720 themselves interesting uh what percent i don't know if that data exists but what percentage of

00:16:23.480 of surveyed i mean we can just restrict it to psychologists or more generally you know academics

00:16:31.080 what percentage do we think or know are open to believing that such phenomena are possible um

00:16:41.960 i don't have the current statistics but um i do remember quite a while ago that it was quite

00:16:46.840 quite quite low and they were disciplinary differences okay let me see if i can if i can uh predict what's

00:16:55.080 up so disciplinary would be at the level of social sciences versus natural sciences or is it yeah oh just at

00:17:01.480 that level not we're not going more granular no we're talking sort of humanities versus um you know hard

00:17:08.920 sciences i guess um okay so humanities are more likely to believe in it than hard sciences yes i mean

00:17:15.960 i think that that that that was demonstrated yeah okay but but is it in the order of you know one percent

00:17:22.440 believe it or is it the 22 percent believe it um i don't know the figures offhand but it was it was quite

00:17:28.520 low in terms of people with um hard science advanced degrees i guess i'll put it that way just because

00:17:36.760 they'd be so much more predisposed to being sort of having a materialist ethos is that the general idea

00:17:43.080 correct yeah so yeah so i guess the the fundamental distinction in these conversations are you know

00:17:50.360 boils down to um you know traditional mainstream what ian stevenson would call orthodox scientists who

00:17:58.760 believe in the sort of materialist view that the brain generates consciousness causes psychological states

00:18:07.320 versus those that um are more open to the possibility that there's some type of dualism

00:18:15.480 that perhaps the brain is a a sieve or a filter for some consciousness that's out there so the brain

00:18:22.120 isn't actually causing or generating or producing consciousness it's simply the the lens through which

00:18:28.200 consciousness is expressed is there beyond the the disciplinary breakdown that we just mentioned are there

00:18:35.160 other predictors of how likely i am to be a believer in paranormal so let me think of a few off the top

00:18:41.400 of my head uh does my religiosity score affect the likelihood of my believing in paranormal and my

00:18:49.720 a priori hypothesis would be more religious more belief in paranormal is that is that right that's correct

00:18:56.520 and i mean really if you if you think about religious believers i mean they believe in the

00:19:01.720 believe in the supernatural they might not like to sort of consider themselves to be believers in

00:19:05.560 paranormal or supernatural phenomena but i mean if you get into the weeds in terms of their actual

00:19:11.240 uh epistemology it is paranormal right so we kind of quarantine religion as this sort of sacred space that

00:19:19.720 um we can't dig into more deeply uh about the the sort of falsifiability or empirical nature of their

00:19:26.200 claims but you know whether you believe that um you know bigfoot is real or you know your dead

00:19:35.800 grandmother um is in heaven watching you you know categorically they're not that different in terms of

00:19:43.480 explanatory value how about personality traits first so the one i was going to think about i was going to

00:19:50.760 propose but then i could think of it going in opposite directions there's a hypothesis open-mindedness

00:19:58.360 at first could seem as though well the more open-minded i am the more i am open to the possibility of

00:20:04.520 believing that there is something beyond it but oh but for example i'm extremely open-minded i think

00:20:11.560 but yet i am so wedded to a materialist perspective that then that shuts down the possibility of my open-mindedness

00:20:18.680 being open to the stevenson stuff does that does that make sense um yeah i think so i mean um

00:20:27.080 there there have definitely been studies on individual differences and um psychological

00:20:32.440 personality traits and likelihood of um subscribing to paranormal or supernatural beliefs and um

00:20:42.840 the big five traits for instance and openness to experience would certainly be one of those

00:20:46.360 those um and that's you know one of the reasons i think that i struggled so much to even read ian

00:20:53.480 stevenson's cases you know i think you know you've got to somehow allow yourself the um intellectual license to

00:21:04.040 even explore or indulge in this literature to um you know to judge it adequately and that's what i that's

00:21:14.280 what i did in this book have have there been other biographies written on him or is this the inaugural one

00:21:21.400 no surprisingly not and it was a very difficult book to write because um he's got a very um

00:21:29.480 protected legacy i guess people are very defensive about his reputation he's got this sort of cult following among

00:21:38.200 um believers in reincarnation and paranormal phenomena that he was he was the investigator who provided

00:21:46.280 solid evidence of life after death mostly in the form of these uh case studies of reincarnation but other

00:21:53.960 other uh categories of evidence as well and um i had a hard time for instance interviewing some of his

00:22:02.600 contemporaries because they saw me as a skeptic and didn't even want to open the door to have this

00:22:09.880 conversation with me because i don't think that they they trusted me to handle um his story in the

00:22:17.000 way that they wanted the narrative to be told and if they read it now would they say that they were wrong

00:22:22.680 and you you were very fair to him i think that they should i would hope so because i think i was quite

00:22:27.880 sympathetic to um him as a figure and i do have enormous respect for him as a scientific investigator

00:22:36.200 and um sort of rogue figure that went against the grain and um fought against the majority um you know

00:22:46.760 not in any other way but you've got a lot in common with him in that sense because i think that he was

00:22:51.640 willing to forge a path that was courageous and brave and um something that his contemporaries um

00:23:00.120 you know wouldn't give the time of day and um you know his arguments at least from a sort of

00:23:07.800 philosophy of science perspective about why we just simply assume that you know there's no consciousness

00:23:14.840 after death without actually digging any deeper i think he was right i think it is a genuine

00:23:20.120 scientific question um that deserves a scientific approach and because parapsychology has been

00:23:28.360 so sensationalized over the years and you know has found itself sort of in the grips of the

00:23:33.720 entertainment industry and you know really um uh it's not highly regarded at all now i think it's

00:23:40.760 unfortunate because i think there are still a lot of questions that that could be approached from

00:23:45.480 a scientific perspective like he was trying to do i was gonna say that one of the reasons by the

00:23:49.560 way thank you for the kind words in your earlier comparison uh one of the reasons why i asked you

00:23:54.520 you know did you start at zero and then what was your eventual number is that when i've been asked

00:24:00.440 previously actually by a psychiatrist it was i was on a british show and the the host of the show was

00:24:07.480 is a psychiatrist and at the end of the show he asked me in all your years you know as a professor and

00:24:15.240 as a behavioral scientist what what has been the singular phenomenon that has surprised you the

00:24:19.720 most about the human condition which surprisingly is a question that i've never been asked before so

00:24:24.600 i had to really very quickly kind of think on my feet and then my answer and you'll see how it's

00:24:28.600 related to my question to you about have has your number moved i said well the inability for people

00:24:34.840 to change their opinions once it is anchored irrespective of how much evidence that you show

00:24:41.400 them so for me if nothing else the fact that you were open to the possibility of having your number

00:24:49.960 go from zero to a positive number is exactly the kind of epistemic humility that we should all hope to

00:24:57.000 have a scientist the second very quick point and then i'll see the floor back to you is so i said daryl

00:25:03.000 bem who's you know a well-respected uh academic who dabbled the only other person that i could think

00:25:09.800 off the top of my head that straddled both would be susan blackmore of memetic fame who also i think 1.00

00:25:21.320 had literally a position as a you know parapsychologist and he went in the opposite direction yes right so are

00:25:29.240 there other famous or infamous typically psychologists that we could think of that were able to straddle

00:25:37.800 both sides of the yeah um one of i mean one of the figures that i write about in the book and i had a

00:25:44.440 colleague of ian stevenson who actually played a central role in his work was um gardner murphy who was a

00:25:52.360 a well-known social experimental psychologist um in the 1940s through 60s i would say um who was not

00:26:02.440 only the president of the american psychological association but also the american society of

00:26:08.440 psychical research oh wow so he saw no obvious sort of um tension or contradiction between his belief i mean

00:26:19.560 and and and he was like ian stevenson i mean parapsychology is a very broad i guess discipline

00:26:25.960 if you want to call it that in terms of anomalous phenomena but these people were primarily interested

00:26:31.000 in the question as am i about whether the mind or consciousness survives biological death gardner murphy

00:26:36.920 was definitely primarily interested in that question and um he he thought that at some point we would

00:26:46.680 have a sort of comprehensive understanding of these phenomena that would lead to a reproachment between

00:26:54.440 um psychological science and parapsychology but yeah he walked in both of those worlds

00:27:01.480 um and you know i think people either thought that that that but either they either held that against

00:27:09.560 him they thought that well he can't possibly be that bright a mind if he actually believes in these

00:27:13.160 phenomena or they thought that well maybe there's something to it if somebody's so prestigious and

00:27:18.280 somebody somebody who knows this much about our our discipline um is giving the time of day to this

00:27:24.120 question are there can one go to many well-reputed universities and get a phd in parapsychology

00:27:34.760 um that's a good question they've definitely um they've definitely fell to the wayside fall into the

00:27:43.480 wayside um there was one in um edinburgh um i don't know what degree offerings the university of virginia

00:27:53.320 have at the moment in terms of postgraduate or graduate research um but the parapsychology unit that

00:28:01.160 ian stevenson founded is very much still at the university of virginia it's part of the medical

00:28:05.080 school wow um they don't necessarily like to regard themselves i think some of the staff there as

00:28:13.160 parapsychologists they've kind of shifted their focus more toward the psychology of anomalous phenomena

00:28:19.400 so for instance they study near-death experiences but they're looking more now at how those types

00:28:25.160 of experiences changes the individual psychologically right how they view the world then whether it was

00:28:31.320 real or not well you know i as as you're speaking both about psychiatry and about near-death experiences

00:28:39.320 it i can't help but think that there used to be if you remember in the 90s this craze of repressed

00:28:47.640 memories that the therapist would then elicit from you it's latent it's hidden

00:28:54.920 it's oh if you weren't sexually abused in this life then it must have been when you were

00:28:59.880 napoleon so there so i can see how there is a potential bridge from some therapeutic approaches

00:29:09.400 within the mental health profession so is that exactly what happened is it is was that his bridge

00:29:15.960 in that he was no no in fact ian stevenson had a very strong aversion to past life regression

00:29:22.200 therapy he thought he thought it was fraudulent he thought that these were therapists taking

00:29:25.960 advantage of vulnerable patients because he believed that putting people into these hypnotic

00:29:32.200 states would just sort of induce these dream-like sequences that seemed very real and powerful and

00:29:37.560 emotionally evocative to the patient but in fact had no basis in reality and it couldn't be investigated

00:29:45.480 from a scientific perspective because it was typically somebody saying that i was you know i was a peasant in

00:29:51.320 you know 16th century belgium and you know there's no record of their existence so you couldn't actually

00:29:56.520 investigate the case try to find that person who lived um so he felt very strongly that these past

00:30:03.800 life regression approaches were bullshit and um he was primarily focused instead on um children's

00:30:14.840 seemingly spontaneous recollections of previous lives and these sort of unbidden conversations 0.97

00:30:20.920 that they would have at a very early age two to five years old for instance where they're giving

00:30:27.720 you know names and descriptions of places and you know describing the interior of a house and what

00:30:34.280 they did for a living and you know all these types of things and then he would try to he would try to sort of

00:30:38.920 interrogate the child separately from the family of the person that died ideally before they had any

00:30:47.240 contact and see if they lined up and sometimes he had autopsy records and medical reports um that

00:30:58.600 showed you know how the person died the previous existence the previous personality he called it and

00:31:03.960 whether it mapped onto what the child was saying and um you know i have to say there are a couple

00:31:09.640 there are a handful of cases that are hard to explain if you if you take ian stevenson at his word

00:31:15.080 and i actually think he was a really meticulous scrupulous thoughtful scientific investigator and

00:31:22.200 that's why i had trouble just simply explaining away some of these idiosyncratic cases wow but you have

00:31:28.600 to get in you have to get into his work to actually read the case studies to understand the convincingness

00:31:34.920 of them and and i want to come back to near-death experiences in a second so it's filed in the back

00:31:39.240 of my mind but just to to continue with the point you just raised the ones where you thought were very

00:31:45.320 compelling that sort of had your ears perked up were you able you yourself to rule out all of the

00:31:55.160 cognitive biases that would otherwise perfectly explain that for now and let me before you go on

00:32:01.080 let me explain one such example which probably for you will be real you know you'll you'll know it but

00:32:06.760 maybe some of our listeners won't so for example there's something in in psychology of decision making

00:32:11.400 called the cell a bias i actually used this explanation when i was talking in one of my

00:32:16.360 chats with jordan peterson because he's a huge youngin guy and he was all into this synchronicity

00:32:21.400 youngin synchronicity and then i offered him this explanation and he just said you know what i think

00:32:27.240 you got me so let's see if we can have a similar success right here so the cell a bias basically is the

00:32:32.680 following uh when i say you know every single time that i get into the shower my phone rings it's

00:32:40.360 unbelievable right well the reality is that there are four possible states of the world i can get

00:32:45.800 into the shower or not get into the shower and the phone can ring or the phone cannot ring my brain

00:32:52.760 only codes when i get into the shower and my and and the phone rings so that's cell a so that's coded

00:33:00.440 as an occurrence in my brain whereas the three other cells by by the very nature of that state

00:33:06.840 are not coded in my brain therefore i have an overestimation of the number of cases where these

00:33:13.160 two events happen so yeah so if we take that example or any one of a bunch of other well-documented

00:33:20.760 cognitive biases could we and i'm not trying to be you know injurious to his legacy but would we be able

00:33:28.520 to quickly erase most it's not a geography i should say i mean it's i definitely am critical with his

00:33:35.160 work right um so i don't believe simply everything that he wrote and argued um but there are individual

00:33:44.200 cases i mean he had thousands and thousands of cases not just of reincarnation but apparitions and

00:33:49.400 mediums and all these types of things and within them is kind of this corpus of cases that

00:33:58.040 i guess would strain credulity in terms of the skeptics ability if you take it at least at his

00:34:05.400 word which again i do because i i think he was a valid sort of trustworthy meticulous scholar um are hard

00:34:14.120 to explain by these types of processes and it's mostly because of the specificity of the information

00:34:21.320 that you know in these reincarnation cases for instance a young child would give not only

00:34:25.320 you know you know i died in a car accident but you know i died on on you know on this route in this

00:34:33.400 town in this car that was this color that you know i was in the car with this person you know very

00:34:40.360 specific details that um i don't know how to explain you know how how you know and that's where that's

00:34:48.520 where i ran into the sort of brick wall as a psychologist um and accounting for those studies

00:34:58.440 very interesting i mean i can't rule out the possibility that you know it was all made up who

00:35:03.240 knows but now i really want to know about his legacy and his background and his approach and his right

00:35:09.320 i read everything that this guy ever wrote over you know 40 years of a career and he was a he was a

00:35:15.960 respectable serious scientific figure so would you consider yourself the current leading scholar on

00:35:25.080 ian stevenson i should be if i'm not um and i think you know there are people certainly that have

00:35:34.440 invested a lot of time and energy in researching his cases and writing about him but i i think that you

00:35:40.920 know many many people have been just kind of i talk in the book about motivated reasoning that people

00:35:46.520 kind of have these talk about psychological biases they they want to see what they already believe

00:35:52.680 and find confirmation of their beliefs going into it i think i was far enough removed as a skeptic

00:36:00.440 but also a not a sort of mean-spirited debunker or anything like that that was trying to take him down

00:36:06.040 right but i think i was far enough removed from him as an individual as a person um but also the

00:36:12.680 um the cases themselves to do them justice um and you know at the end my publisher was saying well

00:36:22.600 what's your conclusion here and um i kind of hesitate this is this is true for probably all of my books

00:36:31.240 because i you know most of my books i kind of just want to take the reader for a ride with you know some

00:36:35.320 interesting studies and issues and you know getting to think a little bit more deeply about

00:36:40.120 complicated uncomfortable material um but i was you know basically i basically kind of you know again

00:36:49.400 i i want the reader to decide here's the strength of the evidence you decide for me i felt like i was on

00:36:55.160 a journey with you know don quixote or something that you know it was kind of like this all of his cases

00:37:01.160 were so intricate and involved and complicated that um you don't know exactly what you're seeing

00:37:08.760 you know and that's where the motivated reasoning biases come into full effect because you you can

00:37:13.480 interpret them in terms of the survival of consciousness after death but um if you're a

00:37:18.920 non-believer going in you'll just assume that something must be wrong in his data collection or his research

00:37:23.800 right um so like i said at the beginning you know i kind of i left it thinking

00:37:31.400 maybe i'm wrong you know you know maybe you know all these years i've been operating on this false

00:37:37.320 presumption that the brain stops working after death and therefore the mind stops working after death

00:37:42.360 maybe it's a little bit more complicated than that at least i'm now willing to entertain that

00:37:46.600 possibility and i think it is a genuine scientific question right i was just gonna say one more thing

00:37:51.640 about this general topic and then maybe we can get into a bit of evolutionary psychology um so i as i

00:37:58.440 said earlier i read you know i'm a voracious reader uh largely of non-fiction but and and i've often read

00:38:04.760 biographies but recently for whatever reason i've been on this like orgiastic kick of only reading

00:38:11.080 biographies so i recently read a biography on leonardo da vinci i read a biography on uh abraham maslow by the

00:38:20.840 the way fantastic biography uh i'm looking here i just finished a biography on francis bacon i just

00:38:27.400 finished a biography on cleopatra so from the perspective of a reader i can see sort of the

00:38:34.040 the unique style of reading a biography versus you know some other book from your perspective as the

00:38:40.280 author of these different genres did you find that your writing style or discipline or process was

00:38:49.160 different for this biography than some of the other books and if so how yeah i think i found myself

00:38:55.400 stepping back a little bit more in this book and inserting fewer anecdotes and kind of my story i

00:39:01.160 mean occasionally i'll kind of bring them in just to have a juxtaposition between cases that he was

00:39:06.600 highlighting and experiences that i've had that i can't explain um but this was his story and i wanted to

00:39:13.960 do justice to it so i wanted to give him the stage basically so it was backing off a bit um trying to

00:39:21.880 be a little less intrusive in terms of my own theoretical scaffolding and argumentation and letting

00:39:28.760 him make the as clear an argument as he can take can make through my own words i guess you know you know

00:39:37.240 like i said he had hundreds of articles many books very involved complicated cases and for me the trick

00:39:44.280 was synthesizing this material in a way that somebody who'd never heard of ian stevenson has no idea who

00:39:49.880 this guy is or what he you know what his his objective was um to tell the story clearly right you know it's

00:39:58.920 interesting because earlier today i uh published my inaugural article on x on platform and i i actually

00:40:09.240 posted it just for subscribers so far and then eventually i'll release it and in that article i was

00:40:15.720 sort of using the fact that i have a forthcoming book uh coming out soon to then discuss my writing

00:40:23.960 process and how i go about it and at one point i talk about that you know it really in my case but

00:40:29.640 i think in in any author's case it's part top down in that you know you start off with a you know pretty

00:40:38.920 accurate table of contents and then you populate that table of contents as you go along so that's the

00:40:44.520 top down but then there is a bottom up organic part whereby while doing my research on empathy and

00:40:52.680 suicides because my book is about suicidal empathy i i get into cross-cultural instantiations of suicide

00:41:01.080 that i didn't necessarily a priori have a clear road map that i was going and those are some of the

00:41:07.880 most fun nuggets by definition because i wasn't prepared to go there that's part of my discovery

00:41:14.040 during the process of writing this book and so at an even more meta level the fact that you probably

00:41:20.440 decided to write this book is not something that 15 years ago i could have asked you you know down

00:41:27.480 the line do you think you'll be right exactly and it was the same thing for me for example for the

00:41:32.760 happiness book where is it's this one uh i after parasitic mind i would be lying to you if i said oh

00:41:40.280 my next book was going to be on happiness but what ended up happening is that many people would write

00:41:45.080 to me jesse and say how is it that you deal with all of these very complicated thorny controversial

00:41:51.080 issues but you always seem like you're joking around there's a twinkle in your eyes you're funny

00:41:55.400 you're satirical what's your secret professor what's your secret i said you know what let me let me take

00:42:00.040 a shot at writing a book so do you agree that part of our intellectual lives that makes it so enriching

00:42:07.640 is that you get these organic bottom-up stuff coming up yeah i mean the proposal for this book looked

00:42:13.480 nothing like that result um i was originally you know i was originally writing a book about

00:42:20.040 you know the illusion of the afterlife and how psychology can explain why people believe in such

00:42:23.960 an outlandish thing and over the course of this i went deeper into the ian stevenson work and i'm like

00:42:30.200 well maybe i'm being a little presumptuous here and that changed the complete direction of this book

00:42:36.040 book but um yeah i mean and it was this book took me two years to write i mean i didn't have

00:42:43.240 a lot of um background in parapsychology you know because i just never gave it the time of day

00:42:48.680 but um so i had to become an expert in a literature that was relatively foreign to me but you know the

00:42:54.520 best way to learn about a topic is to write about it right i think and um so that's what i did and you

00:43:00.600 you know it was as you know you probably can relate you know that sort of an immersive process

00:43:06.120 of losing yourself in the writing it's unbelievable i wrote about that today it's therapeutic you know

00:43:11.800 it's it's taking you outside of your life i mean i felt like i was i felt like i developed a relationship

00:43:17.080 with ian stevenson like i got to really know him and that kind of added this sort of meta level to

00:43:24.360 the afterlife question because here i was like almost having conversations with him across time i mean

00:43:29.240 he's been dead for almost 20 years now and um nevertheless through these intimate correspondences

00:43:35.400 these letters that he wrote um you know his his arguments i felt like i was having a conversation

00:43:41.560 with him um i loved it yeah do you once you finish a book and it's gone do you ever so i maybe i'm

00:43:51.080 being too hyperbolic or maybe not uh at least for my first book many years ago much more so than now

00:43:57.240 but i still sort of get it i get almost like a postpartum depression because i am so enthralled

00:44:06.440 in the process of right like i can't see right i can't see left i get up i go to the cafe i open the

00:44:13.400 laptop and i'm gone for the next eight hours oh i have dream i have dreams where i'm actually working

00:44:18.040 on lines in the book is that right yeah editing lines and different words and that sort of thing so but

00:44:24.440 then when that finishes do you sort of wake up and you're like what what do i do with myself today i

00:44:29.480 mean that you know that immediate purpose and meaning i experience that um you know usually

00:44:36.200 there's another project i need a project in my life to work on i mean that's just simply my happy space

00:44:40.600 is to find a project and you know i've got one that i'm trying to sort of segue into now that hopefully

00:44:47.960 will you know um fill that need but yeah i mean i i did feel like i i said everything i could

00:44:54.040 possibly say about ian stevenson's work and i i felt like it was a very exhaustive process and there

00:45:00.360 was very you know not much else i could do right with it i think as far as i possibly could um so i

00:45:06.200 felt like i came to the end of the road with it but yeah there's a bittersweet sort of feeling at the

00:45:11.160 end of it so if you you're for for the people who don't know i mean you're trained as an evolutionary

00:45:17.960 psychologist uh very much you know within that paradigm todd shackleford also who was at florida

00:45:26.680 atlantic university so there are many well-known evolutionary psychologists that you've dealt with

00:45:30.760 you've published papers in academic journals and evolutionary psychology how do you compare

00:45:35.160 your happiness or fulfillment level today yeah when publishing your next academic paper versus

00:45:45.800 the book and i don't mean to imply it might seem as though i'm it's a leading question where i'm

00:45:50.600 asking you to say i much rather write books now so yeah whatever the answer is it's fine take it away

00:45:57.240 um i i still have yeah i still like both yeah me too you know i one of the things that happened

00:46:04.920 with writing this book about ian stevenson was that it kind of rebooted my interest in doing research

00:46:11.480 on afterlife beliefs so as a consequence of this i'm kind of returning to my roots i mean my earliest

00:46:17.880 research was on the psychology of afterlife beliefs and because of writing this popular book you know i'm

00:46:24.360 i'm thinking more seriously about you know laboratory studies proper investigations of um of the afterlife

00:46:33.800 you know maybe not parapsychology but um maybe as well you know maybe i can add a bit of that in

00:46:39.560 there in there too so i think that there's like you you know it's it's balancing both worlds you know

00:46:45.640 having a foot in you know maintaining a solid foot within your academic discipline and your area of

00:46:51.480 training and specialization you know research that you're passionate about but also you know you know

00:46:57.640 trying to tell good stories and making an impact in the world and um so i would say it's balanced right

00:47:06.680 i mean i would say it's also balanced for me but it is increasingly tilting towards broader audiences

00:47:14.040 because we live as we i mean we didn't need thomas soul to tell us this but we live in a world where

00:47:20.920 there are trade-offs where there are opportunity costs and in an infinite resources world i want to

00:47:27.960 do everything perfectly full throttle right but like you know uh let me address the third round revision

00:47:38.040 of some journal that i've been fighting with for 18 months which if that paper will be incredibly

00:47:44.040 successful i could hope to have it cited maybe 200 times or let me write a book which is going to be

00:47:51.640 translated into 25 languages and read by a million people well and i don't even enter money into the

00:47:58.040 equation just in terms of reach right where we create knowledge and we disseminate knowledge and my itch

00:48:04.200 for dissemination is no longer being scratched when i get 72 citations of my next paper yeah no i completely

00:48:11.960 understand that and i think that that's what um motivated me to begin you know writing for

00:48:16.920 scientific american and slate you know all these places because you get um because you're you're

00:48:22.440 passionate about the research itself and you want to talk about interesting science and you want people

00:48:27.320 to understand it and be engaged with it and it's just kind of quarantined or lost within these these

00:48:33.320 echo chambers these very small academic communities that you know it never gets out of that space

00:48:38.280 um you know interestingly enough ian stevenson's work kind of spoke to that because he

00:48:46.520 he like i said he had this really strong aversion to his science being i guess bastardized or kind of

00:48:56.520 um you know popularized in a way that you know unscrupulous tv executives would see some story about

00:49:05.160 paranormal phenomena and sort of want to make a big you know hair raising the you know movie or story

00:49:12.040 about it he thought it belonged to science and he wanted to talk just to scientists and people who

00:49:16.920 would take the work seriously so i think some of it has to do with the subject matter i guess if that

00:49:22.840 makes sense yeah yeah no i get it what are some things that uh are exciting you let's let's let's

00:49:29.400 geek out a bit on some of our own interests in evolutionary psychology what's some of the stuff

00:49:34.440 that you're excited about from an evolutionary psychological perspective um well i'm still

00:49:41.160 writing about sex you know i i had a sort of detour in my career where i was writing quite a lot about

00:49:47.240 human sexuality and evolutionary foundations of of sex um so i've been writing this weekly column for

00:49:54.520 laplante and familiarizing myself with the literature you know getting re-familiarized with

00:50:01.240 the sort of um uh ongoing research in evolutionary psychology and there's still loads of fascinating

00:50:07.720 stuff i'm my next piece is going to be about um uh the tactics tactics that people use when they're

00:50:14.840 in relationships to detect infidelity and and also um the counter tactics that people that are in

00:50:21.080 in some sort of extramarital relationship used to hide the old evolutionary arms race the arms race

00:50:28.440 for sure yeah so there's some really fascinating work with um interviewing people about their sort

00:50:33.720 of everyday techniques for figuring out whether their partner is really cheating on them or not

00:50:39.240 um and you know i think so i i think i've got a taste for and this might be kind of contradictory to

00:50:48.760 what i said i've got a taste for you know sort of sensational sort of fascinating attention worthy

00:50:54.280 topics in evolutionary psychology because that's what attracts people's attention and gets them

00:50:58.440 thinking a little bit more deeply about the theoretical basis yeah of the field do you does it frustrate you

00:51:06.600 uh the extent to which never mind our academic colleagues who are still the tractors of evolution

00:51:12.840 psychology but just everyday people and certainly in in social media i i never cease to be amazed by the

00:51:20.200 extent to which people who know almost nothing about what i do are so convinced that it's all

00:51:26.520 quackery charlotte yeah right i mean we we sit around with a martini with a cigar psychology to them 0.52

00:51:32.200 yeah exactly and we just come up with bullshit just so stories that have absolutely no basis when of

00:51:37.320 course the exact opposite epistemologically is true right if someone has rigorous exactly

00:51:43.960 before you before you commit to the idea that something is an adaptation the type of

00:51:49.080 nomological network of cumulative evidence that you have to build to support the idea that's an adaptation

00:51:55.560 is astoundingly more rigorous than all of the other sciences but apparently i'm just a

00:52:00.520 bullshitter who come who concocts you know kipling stories sure yeah no it's enormously frustrating

00:52:06.520 um and it's usually you know people who have a very thin sort of superficial understanding of the

00:52:13.560 discipline and they've heard about evolutionary psychology and their gender studies or sociology

00:52:19.480 coursework um and just have a very knee-jerk reaction to it um without understanding that the

00:52:26.120 you know the main point about proximate and ultimate causation and um separating those explanatory

00:52:34.440 um levels uh so yeah do you feel that it is an indelible part of the architecture of the human mind to

00:52:47.080 always be resistant to evolutionary theorizing regarding human behavior or could we ever slay permanently that

00:52:58.040 phoenix to never arise from the ashes again i think it has something and this you know may have something

00:53:05.320 to do with my long-standing interest in the afterlife because i think a lot of it has to do with our fear of

00:53:09.880 mortality and what evolutionary explanations ultimately mean about human existence and our finite

00:53:18.920 um place in the world um our very ephemeral nature and i think that's terrifying and frightening to people

00:53:28.680 um and ultimately those types of existential um anxieties to me seem to be at the heart of a lot of

00:53:38.840 people's aversion to evolutionary theory we are we are animals you know we are biological organisms

00:53:45.480 i saw a lot an old interview with rodney dangerfield and he was on howard stern or something and

00:53:50.920 and he was an old man at that time and he was near death and howard stern asked him asked him basically

00:53:55.320 if he believed in the afterlife and he said well we're gorillas you know do gorillas come back from

00:54:00.920 the dead you know is there an afterlife for gorillas and you know that's the sort of question that i've

00:54:06.520 struggled with too like um why would just human beings have this kind of uh continuation of consciousness

00:54:14.360 after death what about a termite or a sand fly or our dogs or a gorilla whatever um what does the

00:54:22.040 afterlife look like for them um and yeah so i hear you i'm sorry that went off on a bit of a tangent but

00:54:31.000 yes i've had i have that same uh frustration i guess with people who think they understand evolutionary

00:54:39.720 psychology but um don't at all all right next question and before i ask you about any other

00:54:48.360 projects that you might be working on beyond the forthcoming book that you're so oh i have one that

00:54:54.120 you might be interested in but yeah so hold on hold on hold on uh so this might it may or may not go

00:54:59.640 strictly to my uh exclusive subscribers uh in my last book in the happiness book i have a chapter on the

00:55:07.000 the psychology of regret where i actually talk about work actually by one of my former uh professors at

00:55:14.600 cornell thomas gilevich who did empirical studies of a lot you you're familiar with this stuff so

00:55:20.360 regret due to action regret due to inaction regret due to action i i regret that i cheated on my wife and

00:55:26.520 now my marriage is over regret due to inaction i regret that i became an accountant because my dad and his

00:55:33.880 dad were accountants but in reality i wish that i would have become an architect because i've always

00:55:38.200 been interested in that and i think you probably know jesse that most people's biggest looming regret

00:55:45.800 is one associated with inaction that the road that i did not take uh so if i were to ask you now you're

00:55:52.920 still a relatively young man uh if i were to say to you 50 wow there you go if i were to say to you

00:56:01.640 today so far what might be your biggest looming regret could you share it with us and will it

00:56:09.960 coincide with what thomas gilevich told us about action versus inaction um yeah for sure for me i mean

00:56:17.960 you know i've written extensively about the fact that i'm gay and you know i didn't come out of the

00:56:22.520 closet until relatively late i was in my sort of early 20s when i came out to my mother i sort of

00:56:30.120 sublimated i would say my sexuality and really threw myself into academic research and and um my romantic

00:56:39.400 and sexual life sort of took a back seat to everything else and i think i lost precious time

00:56:45.480 from that um i mean i've been with my partner now for 20 years and i'm very grateful for that um but

00:56:52.280 i think i got a bit of a late start uh coming out as late as i did um but it was also you know as an

00:57:00.280 artifact of growing up in a conservative town in the midwest and you know not knowing any gay people

00:57:06.280 and having you know these sort of stereotypic assumptions about what homosexuality was and

00:57:11.080 all these types of things and um so i guess that would be my biggest so but is the regret due to

00:57:17.000 the fact that you carried that burden longer before it came out or that you missed opportunities that

00:57:24.920 oh both i would say probably the latter actually um you know youth is you know it's it's it's fleeting and

00:57:34.440 um i feel like there were missed opportunities for sure in terms of sex and dating and romance

00:57:40.840 and all those types of things um but but also just that guilt and anxiety and shame and you know

00:57:47.880 all these horrible feelings that sort of go along with um uh coming out of the closet it was complicated

00:57:54.600 for me you know because my mother was i i my mother was dying at the time she was sick and i didn't

00:58:00.440 want to burden her with that you know about but me um but um yeah i guess if i had to say any any sort

00:58:09.400 of big regret it would be not being more uh open and honest with myself and with others earlier

00:58:17.240 wow what an amazing answer uh all right tell me about the project that you were so excited to tell me

00:58:22.200 about well um i i know you know who solomon ash is yeah come on man so um i i mean his work that you

00:58:35.480 know the famous line study where unconformity i mean i eat breathe and sleep that study absolutely i mean

00:58:42.920 it's so simple but so profound and it it has always made an enormous impact on me um because

00:58:51.880 i think that it spoke so much about human psych human social psychology and uh majority influence

00:58:58.760 and conforming all these types of things anyway um nobody's ever written his biography oh my god sign

00:59:06.840 me up first reader of that book so last month i went to um the museum of the history of psychology at

00:59:16.920 the university of akron of all places that's where they have these this incredible archives repository

00:59:21.320 of university of akron yes yeah as in ohio correct i didn't think ohio was a real place

00:59:29.160 it's a it's a arm of the smithsonian it's um got this enormous collection it's been around for a

00:59:36.680 while but it's quite i don't think it's on many people's radar anyway the the estate of solomon ash

00:59:43.080 left all of his files and his letters and his records to to this to this collection this library and i

00:59:52.760 i found um his memoir you know his autobiography thousands of pages that he wrote that he never

00:59:59.960 he never got around to finishing and you know it talks about growing up as a boy in poland um he

01:00:08.600 didn't move to the us till he was 13 didn't know can i just remind you that he's jewish yeah that's and

01:00:13.800 he was influenced by the holocaust for sure with those studies so the memoir talks a lot about being

01:00:20.280 jewish and and growing up in this village in poland um moving to the us in 1920 you know this incredible

01:00:27.640 story and that's what i'm digging into next so hold on just so i understand first of all my excitement

01:00:34.200 level is at 100 so that number one number two are you saying that you'd like to help in uh publishing

01:00:42.680 his autobiography or is it that you'd like to write a biography using access to his autobiography

01:00:49.800 both i would say a little bit of both you know it's but but i'm also trying to make his work

01:00:56.280 relevant to what's happening today and looking at looking at his famous studies and his sort of core

01:01:02.360 ideas about conformity and influence through the lens of contemporary conversations um well i mean it's

01:01:09.080 almost impossible sorry to interrupt you forgive me it's almost impossible to think of a set of studies

01:01:16.760 that are more relevant to everything exactly more than solomon ash for sure yeah so nobody's done this

01:01:24.840 before no there is a um there's a very slim volume that's kind of like a set of memorial essays to him

01:01:34.520 with a very with a very short autobiography that he wrote but no proper treatment in terms of his life

01:01:41.800 story and he was a good guy like he was completely sane and sober and clear-headed and brilliant and um

01:01:52.600 uh and but also had very deep humanitarian interest uh he was of course milgram's advisor

01:02:01.800 and um just crossed paths with so much that was happening and at the the height of social psychology

01:02:08.040 in the 1950s and 60s that's amazing so i wonder if he would have crossed at all with maslow because

01:02:16.200 as i mentioned uh the biography oh by the way the guy who wrote the biography on maslow is still alive

01:02:24.040 i reached out to him and you might imagine i mean he wrote this biography i don't know maybe in the 70s

01:02:29.720 and here's this guy who was borderline and diapers in the 1970s not quite uh and i'm writing to him now

01:02:36.680 and so i'm hoping to get him on on the show that's cool soon so that that should be really cool so what's

01:02:42.120 the timeline for this project oh i'm on sabbatical this year and you know putting together the proposal

01:02:48.520 it's pretty early days um but i've got all the material and um the next step would be tracing his story

01:02:56.600 you know maybe talking to his grandchildren who are still alive wow uh maybe going to poland

01:03:04.760 to visit his hometown and seeing sort of where he grew up but also i mean they've been as you know

01:03:10.120 there have been you know it's been decades since that work and there have been thousands of studies

01:03:16.520 iterations with the lines and conformity so you know it's got it's gonna be a pretty formidable project

01:03:23.240 oh my god i'm so excited for you i can't wait let make sure to come back when you when the book

01:03:27.880 comes out oh yeah make sure to send me i mean i knew it would speak to you because oh my like it's

01:03:32.280 almost i mean short of you telling me that you're meeting leonardo da vinci next week

01:03:37.160 to discuss his work that would be right up there so uh yeah you're exactly right uh listen it's uh

01:03:44.440 what a pleasure it is to talk to you i hope that we'll get a chance to see each other in person

01:03:48.440 in new zealand soon working on it i know i know you are thank you so much say hello to

01:03:54.840 your colleague at yes uh he was a lovely fellow i met him at university of buckingham and uh

01:04:00.520 come back anytime stay on the line so we could say goodbye offline and again let me just read

01:04:05.880 the title of the book before you go the incredible afterlives of dr stevenson coming out this april

01:04:13.320 university of chicago press go pre-order right now people thank you jesse thank you yeah

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - February 12, 2026

Dr. Jesse Bering - ＂The Incredible Afterlives of Dr. Stevenson＂ (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_966)

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