The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - June 14, 2026


How You React to Elon Musk's Success Says A Lot About You (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1004)


Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

140.01

Word count

1,762

Sentence count

45

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

A few days ago, Elon Musk became the first trillionaire on Earth, and of course, many people were perfectly happy with that outcome. And many others were bathing in seething anger that such a reality could exist. And so I wanted to discuss several principles that can explain why different people could look at the same reality and arrive at different conclusions.

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 .
00:00:00.040 Hi everybody, this is Gad Saad. As many of you know, a few days ago there was the IPO of SpaceX,
00:00:09.440 which was, you know, usually successful, leading to Elon Musk becoming the first trillionaire on
00:00:20.040 Earth. And of course, many people were perfectly happy with that outcome, and many others were
00:00:27.880 bathing in seething anger that such a reality could exist. And the typical suspects, the Bernie
00:00:34.980 Sanders, the AOCs, the Elizabeth Warren, the Gavin Newsom, were all reading from the same playbook
00:00:42.520 that this is intolerable that such a reality could exist, that a single individual could amass
00:00:50.220 such wealth. And so today I wanted to discuss several principles that can explain
00:00:57.480 why different people could look at the same reality and arrive at different conclusions.
00:01:04.600 So I want to begin with Herman Rorschach, his iconic test and the power of seeing,
00:01:13.340 the inkblots. So this is a biography on Rorschach. For those of you who don't know
00:01:19.540 the Rorschach inkblot test, it's a projective technique that was used. It's part of a class of
00:01:27.580 psychoanalytic tools that were called projective techniques. Projective in that oftentimes when
00:01:35.180 at least that's what these folks thought that someone may not, they may have some latent
00:01:43.340 responses that they either are they're inaccessible to them or they don't wish to share
00:01:50.080 these projective techniques would unlock that right so if you think about the old Freudian
00:01:56.620 you know the the unconscious mind right and that you know you repress many things so for example
00:02:02.560 a word association technique you know I'm going to give you a word and please tell me without
00:02:09.160 thinking much what's the first thing that comes to mind if I say mother and you say Hitler well
00:02:15.680 maybe we need to explore that on the proverbial couch because you didn't have time to filter your 0.92
00:02:22.480 response and when I said mother you said Hitler well probably this is something worth you know
00:02:29.280 digging deeper into and that was subsequently you say in marketing if I tell you first word that
00:02:35.880 comes to mind when I say the word Mercedes and you say power or status. And so the idea is to use
00:02:41.860 these projective techniques to unlock some of these latent motives, latent preferences, latent
00:02:49.180 repressed, you know, issues. Now, in the case of the Rorschach-Inkblad test, I'm going to give you
00:02:56.040 sort of an amorphous stimulus and ask you to tell me what you see. And the idea is then you are
00:03:01.240 projecting onto that stimulus things that hopefully the analyst can tell you about now
00:03:06.760 why am I saying all this because I've often said that the way that people respond to me
00:03:14.380 is akin to a Rorschach inkblot test in French there is an expression that says
00:03:21.280 tell me who your friends are and I will tell you who you are right well the same applies to
00:03:31.040 tell me uh show me how you react to a stimulus and I'll tell you who you are so many of the
00:03:37.740 most secure you know alpha successful men in the world react to to me to my work to my humor to my
00:03:49.580 larger than life personality in ways that are distinctly different from how other males
00:03:55.560 my academic colleagues you know beta guys on Twitter and so on react to me how could it be
00:04:02.600 right I haven't changed but you know a very very powerful guy looks at me and says oh I love your
00:04:10.040 boldness I love your sense of humor I love your big personality I love the way you know you express
00:04:17.160 yourself in your academic work someone else looks at that and says oh how unbefitting of a professor 0.73
00:04:23.720 he's such a buffoon how he uses satire
00:04:26.760 he just is not welcomed in our community of esteemed scholars 0.97
00:04:31.880 well I think the hierarchies have assorted themselves
00:04:36.880 and maybe I'm not very interested in going to their cool kids party
00:04:41.880 but the reason I'm saying that is because I then become a Rorschach inkblot test
00:04:47.200 tell me how you react to me and I'll tell you who you are
00:04:50.060 Well, I've extended that maxim to tell me how you react to Elon's Musk success, and I'll tell you who you are.
00:04:59.660 Now, many people look at Elon's success and say, my goodness, he deserved it.
00:05:06.300 He innovated.
00:05:07.960 He's a visionary.
00:05:09.520 He's a futurist.
00:05:10.860 He's an incredible mind, and he deserves all of the spoils that he gets.
00:05:16.900 and by the way his spoils end up having downstream consequences on many many other people in in a
00:05:25.220 beneficial sense right so it's not as though he's you know uh taking all of this money and
00:05:31.240 you know buying luxury yachts and nobody else other than him is benefiting so now i'm going
00:05:38.060 to try to explain why it is that not the people who look at elon and see his success and go yeah
00:05:43.920 as I would, right? I mean, I'm not diminished by Elon's success. On the contrary, it makes you
00:05:52.040 dream of all the endless possibilities, right? This guy came to Canada with nothing, right? He
00:05:57.660 had a difficult childhood. Look where he is now. Wow, what a story. It's incredible. We should
00:06:02.840 emulate his secret sauce recipe. But if you are suffering from, look at this one, you're suffering
00:06:12.140 from one of the seven deadly sins for those of you who and by the way this this is a cool book
00:06:18.200 because it actually looks at so it's called jewish christian and classical reflections on human
00:06:23.700 psychology well precisely the reason why those seven deadly sins are so powerful is because
00:06:30.440 they really do reflect many of the moral trappings of the architecture of the human mind one of which
00:06:38.420 of course is envy we know also from the ten commandments that one of the commandments is
00:06:42.640 don't covet your wife's neighbor that's rooted in envy why don't i have as hot a wife as the
00:06:49.920 neighbor i want her i'm coveting i'm envious of what the other one has well 0.97
00:06:56.460 socialism and communism and the welfare state and the nanny state
00:07:04.180 are rooted in parasitic envy, right?
00:07:09.040 It's precisely the idea that why should someone else
00:07:13.560 have more money than this person, than me, right?
00:07:16.460 Elizabeth Warren maybe is worth many, many millions of dollars,
00:07:19.940 but that's a reasonable, logical amount of money to have.
00:07:24.540 Bernie Sanders owns many homes, which he was able to obtain
00:07:28.340 by writing books about how evil capitalism is,
00:07:32.600 But using the capitalist publishing system, he doesn't see any irony in that statement, but he's deserving of it because they are the reproductive queens in the communist social ant colony, and therefore it's okay for them to have money.
00:07:52.780 But the money that Elon has amassed in their view and point in their calculus, that's simply obscene.
00:07:59.900 So what is it that they are maximizing in their calculus, right?
00:08:05.020 I've explained to you before that the field of operations research is the applied mathematics field that says here is some objective function that we're trying to maximize.
00:08:15.100 By maximize, it means either minimize or optimize some metric.
00:08:19.040 And then what is the mathematical solution that maximizes that metric?
00:08:23.960 Well, if according to Gavin Newsom and Bernie Sanders and AOC and Elizabeth Warren, what
00:08:31.420 you're trying to minimize is income inequality, well, then, of course, that Elon is not worth
00:08:37.660 a trillion dollars and someone else lives on food stamps, that is wrong.
00:08:43.220 And therefore, we're going to intervene, take his money, so that then we can have more income equality, right?
00:08:52.140 That's exactly the parasitic system of Canada.
00:08:54.840 That's why we are finally, thank God, fleeing Canada to the United States.
00:09:00.460 Okay.
00:09:01.460 But if you realize that there are other metrics to optimize, the greater utility to the greatest number of people, well, is Elon doing that?
00:09:11.440 Well, we know, I saw one stat that said that something like 4,400 people as a result of
00:09:17.900 the IPO became millionaires and about 400 of them became 100 millionaires.
00:09:24.040 Now, they will be taxed, so that will go into the public coffers.
00:09:28.920 So never mind whatever taxes that Elon pays, never mind how much innovation he creates,
00:09:35.440 how many, you know, human problems he solves.
00:09:38.340 he is contributing in endless ways to the public coffers in ways that all of these parasitic
00:09:46.580 people the Gavin Newsom's and the Bernie Sanders and the AOC's could not if they lived 100,000
00:09:54.180 lifetimes so using the metrics of contributing to the public good who's contributed more Elon
00:10:03.440 or all those people so now I'm going to read you from this book the number one book the instant
00:10:12.080 number one New York Times bestseller book I'm going to read you from page 145 this is from the
00:10:18.080 chapter called govern me harder daddy are you ready speaking of Musk suicidally empathetic
00:10:25.500 socialists would love to see him taxed at a nearly 100% rate as he is apparently unfairly wealthy
00:10:33.880 when other Americans must rely on food stamps to survive. These same folks fail to realize that
00:10:40.060 Musk's companies have injected $338 plus billion into the U.S. economy over the past five years
00:10:47.560 alone stemming from $110.7 billion in salaries, $46 billion in levy taxes, and $182.2 billion
00:10:58.760 in procurements. Musk's ability to generate and allocate capital is astoundingly greater
00:11:05.220 than would be the case of a caring and empathetic centralized government agency.
00:11:10.560 The parasitic reflex to punish successful capitalists who otherwise inject extraordinary economic activity is a manifestation of the tall poppy syndrome and is also captured by a cross-cultural insight stemming from Bono, the lead singer of U2, who said, quote,
00:11:30.800 in the United States you look at the guy that lives in the mansion on the hill and you think
00:11:36.040 you know one day if I work really hard I could live in that mansion in Ireland people look up 0.97
00:11:42.920 at the guy in the mansion on the hill and go one day I'm going to get that bastard close quote 0.86
00:11:49.260 pathological envy bathing and suicidal empathy fuels socialism so rather than people saying my 0.92
00:11:56.660 god what an inspiring story that musk has thus far lived how can i emulate that how could i
00:12:04.760 achieve one millionth of a percent of what this guy has achieved the socialists that are now
00:12:12.640 populating half of the political that you know the u.s government called the democrats are
00:12:20.260 completely internalizing and normalizing the ethos of parasitic pathological envious socialism
00:12:29.080 there you have it folks congratulations Elon you deserve it cheers