The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - November 11, 2024


Elon Musk vs Oprah Winfrey & the Importance of Costly Signalling in Elections (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_750)

Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
Donald Trump Oprah Winfrey Elon Musk Sam Harris
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Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

136.13

Word count

691

Sentence count

40

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, Gad Saad explains the concept of costly signaling, also known as the Zahavian's Hypothesis, or the Handicap Principle, and how it can be applied to current events, such as the billionaire battle between Oprah Winfrey and Elon Musk.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
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 Hi everybody, this is Gad Saad. On many previous occasions I've explained the concept of costly signaling, also known as Zahavian signaling, also known as the handicap principle.
00:00:14.940 You can read this book by Emots and Avishag Zahavi. Zahavian signaling refers to a type of costly signaling. Let me explain to you what that is. And as you can see here, it shows the peacock's tail.
00:00:31.340 The idea basically is that some traits could not have evolved because they confer a survival advantage. If anything, they reduce your survivability.
00:00:46.060 So the peacock's tail is very burdensome. It's hard to take flight from predators. It makes you conspicuous. And so, if anything, you should be less likely to evolve that trait if it were simply for survival.
00:01:03.800 But when we know through sexual selection, there are traits that evolve because they offer a reproductive advantage.
00:01:11.720 But then why should it be so burdensome? And so, the concept of costly signaling means, in evolutionary biology, means that a trait, in order for it to be an honest signal, it has to be costly to the one who is emitting the signal.
00:01:30.800 Because otherwise, anybody could imitate it and do so in a duplicitous manner.
00:01:36.680 So if a female is trying to identify the really top contenders from the pretenders, if the signal is one that everybody can copy, then the female is stuck in a situation where she can't discriminate between the different males.
00:01:54.400 But if having that particular trait or a particular behavior is so costly that that itself serves as an honest signal of my quality, then this is known as a costly signal.
00:02:09.460 And so, again, this is what Zahavi signaling is because Zahavi studied, he was an Israeli ornithologist who studied a form of behavior that the Arabian babbler engages in, which is a costly signal.
00:02:23.200 So it's actually a term that I have originally used in my 2007 book, The Evolutionary Basis of Consumption, where I'm explaining all sorts of consumer-related phenomena via the process of handicapping or the handicap principle or costly signaling.
00:02:40.840 Now, why am I talking about all this today?
00:02:43.240 Because you remember that a while ago when Elon Musk purchased Twitter, at the time Twitter, for $44 billion, I said, that actually is a costly signal.
00:02:54.460 Now, costly, I mean, yes, in that it's a lot of money, but costly in the evolutionary sense, in that in order for you to demonstrate that it is an honest signal,
00:03:06.880 you end up actually engaging in an overspending to demonstrate, in this case, the willingness to which you're willing to go in order,
00:03:20.160 the extent to which you're willing to go in order to demonstrate your dogged defense, in this case, of freedom of speech.
00:03:27.640 Well, let's look at what just happened, the billionaire battle between Oprah Winfrey and Elon Musk.
00:03:36.000 Elon Musk, some reports have come out that he spent about $130 million of his money in order to help elect Donald Trump.
00:03:46.580 He even held town hall meetings in Pennsylvania.
00:03:52.540 I'm talking about Elon.
00:03:53.500 He stayed in Pennsylvania.
00:03:54.940 He's a busy guy.
00:03:56.260 He's got a lot of things on his plate, but he was willing to give up all of his time,
00:04:01.560 all of his energy, and give tons of money to Trump and his campaign precisely because he thought that it was a worthy endeavor to make sure that Trump won.
00:04:14.060 Now, contrast that to Oprah Winfrey.
00:04:17.180 In order for her to host Kamala Harris, she charges her a million dollars. 1.00
00:04:23.980 So that's not much of a costly signal or an honest signal of your commitment to the cause or to the policies or to the ideology of Kamala Harris
00:04:33.900 when you are saying that for me to grant you a forum, you better pay me a million dollars.
00:04:41.740 So Elon Musk pays $130 million in order to support the election of Donald Trump.
00:04:48.040 Oprah Winfrey asks for a million dollars.
00:04:51.340 That says it all for you.
00:04:53.300 Costly signaling, handicap principle, and honest signals. 0.99
00:04:57.960 There you have it.
00:04:58.660 There is the application of evolutionary biology to a current event.
00:05:03.900 Take care, everybody.