The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - June 25, 2025


Iran's Nuclear Program, Mutual Assured Destruction, & the NYC Mayoral Race (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_842)


Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

144.35497

Word count

1,207

Sentence count

55

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

8

sentences flagged

Hate speech

10

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, Gad Saad Saad talks about the Iranian regime's nuclear program and why it's a civilizational threat. He also discusses the role of game theory and rational choice theory in predicting the outcome of nuclear war.

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 .
00:00:00.380 Hi everybody, this is Gad Saad. There are a lot of things that are pissing me off these days.
00:00:06.840 Let's start with a new analysis of the preemptive strike on Iran to dismantle its nuclear program.
00:00:18.380 And so here what I'd like to do is talk a few minutes about game theory.
00:00:23.220 So for those of you who are not familiar with game theory, it's a field in applied economics, if you'd like,
00:00:32.580 where you try to study optimal behavior in various situations.
00:00:37.320 So the classic example of game theory would be the prisoner's dilemma, right?
00:00:41.680 You catch two prisoners, you separate them as the cops do,
00:00:45.420 and then each one you ask to either confess or not.
00:00:52.000 They could confess or not.
00:00:53.840 Therefore, there are four possible outcomes.
00:00:56.760 Prisoner A can confess or not. Prisoner B can confess or not.
00:01:00.100 So there are two by two matrix of payoffs.
00:01:03.700 And then depending on those payoffs, there is some optimal behavior.
00:01:07.300 The prisoner's dilemma arises because, of course, each prisoner thinks the ideal situation is for me not to confess
00:01:13.900 and for the other guy to confess.
00:01:16.300 And then by both doing so, then that results in a suboptimal outcome.
00:01:21.180 So anyways, there's an endless number of situations that could be modeled via game theory.
00:01:27.440 One of the original guys to develop game theory was one of my intellectual heroes in that he was a true polymath.
00:01:36.160 I think I mentioned him recently on my most recent appearance on Joe Rogan's show, John von Neumann.
00:01:43.200 I was actually looking for one of his biographies in my personal library to show it to you,
00:01:48.240 but I can't find it because I have so many books.
00:01:50.560 In any case, John von Neumann was an unbelievable guy, a true polymath.
00:01:54.480 Now, at the time of World War II, the classic example of a game theoretic situation,
00:02:02.740 which effectively led to the development of game theory as an applied mathematics discipline,
00:02:10.000 applied economics discipline.
00:02:11.780 By the way, you see game theory also being used in evolutionary biology, evolutionary game theory.
00:02:18.440 So John Maynard Smith would be a perfect example of someone who utilized game theory
00:02:24.620 in the context of understanding certain evolutionary dynamics.
00:02:28.400 In any case, during the Cold War, you had the Soviet Union, you had the United States.
00:02:36.300 They were locked in a never-ending atomic bomb arms race, so each can attack or not.
00:02:47.880 So therefore, it's a two-by-two matrix.
00:02:49.840 But what ensured that neither did anything was the fact that there was the doctrine of mutual assured destruction,
00:02:58.660 meaning that applying rational choice theory, both don't want to, you know, be blown to smithereens.
00:03:07.780 And so the Soviet Union knows that if they launch a bunch of atomic bombs on the United States,
00:03:13.260 the United States is ready, able, and willing to launch a whole bunch of atomic bombs on the Soviet Union.
00:03:22.260 And therefore, that realization, as predicted by, you know, the rational choice theory
00:03:31.480 and mutual assured destruction, made sure that neither of them ever did so.
00:03:36.960 Now, they came close to having that outcome in 1962 in the Bay of Pigs incident
00:03:43.800 when the Soviet Union brought their, you know, very nasty weaponry to the shores of the United States and Cuba. 0.91
00:03:54.580 Now, why am I talking about all this?
00:03:56.440 Because the eschatology of the Iranian regime is actually contrary to mutual assured destruction, 0.96
00:04:05.700 meaning that while both the Soviet Union and the United States did not welcome the eradication of their people
00:04:14.560 and of their civilization, imagine if you have a eschatology, meaning like an end-of-times theological narrative
00:04:22.600 that says we welcome that reality because that's when good things will happen in the afterlife, right, and so on.
00:04:30.860 So, just look up the Shia-based doctrines that are, you know, specific to their eschatology,
00:04:38.320 and then you would see that if they were to get a nuclear weapon and say,
00:04:42.480 hey, now that we've got four nuclear weapons, we can lob them on Israel, get rid of 10 million Israelis, 1.00
00:04:51.120 and then, of course, if Israel hits us back and kills 40 millions of us, that's a great outcome. 0.99
00:04:57.200 10 million Jews killed for 40 million? Sign me up. 1.00
00:05:01.740 So, therefore, the exact principles that ensure that the constraints imposed by rational choice theory
00:05:09.120 and mutual assured destructiveness do not apply to the Iranian regime, right?
00:05:14.100 You won't hear that on all the talking points, pundits.
00:05:17.080 That's why you're hearing it from Gadsad, because I know one or two things about game theory
00:05:21.480 and about all of those, you know, issues like rational choice theory and so on.
00:05:26.000 So, once you approach it from that perspective, you can appreciate that making sure that Iran never has nuclear weapons
00:05:35.460 is a civilizational threat that should be welcomed by any society that abides to the principle of,
00:05:45.100 I wish to survive, because the other interlocutor doesn't care about that survival instinct.
00:05:51.940 As a matter of fact, they welcome death as a form of theological liberation.
00:05:59.400 So, that's number one.
00:06:00.280 Number two, today I saw, I didn't even know her name.
00:06:03.340 I've seen her.
00:06:03.920 I never watched Sex and the City.
00:06:06.320 I can't stand these kinds of shows.
00:06:07.800 But Cynthia Nixon, okay, who is, you know, a lesbian and queer and all this, 0.58
00:06:15.400 and her children are maybe queer, I don't know, whatever, was going around,
00:06:21.440 thank God that the socialist, Islamist guy is winning, you have to vote for him. 1.00
00:06:27.020 So, imagine that she presents herself by saying, oh, my children are Jewish and they're queer or I'm queer or we're both queer or everybody's queer.
00:06:36.140 And then she says, so here's a great idea.
00:06:39.340 I live in New York City, which is the, historically, the center, the world center of capitalism. 0.50
00:06:46.400 I have so-called Jewish children, I'm queer, so what better alignment with my values than to go around acting like an unhinged maniac by saying that we must vote in this guy.
00:07:02.000 Now, I don't know tons of stuff about this guy, but I do know that apparently he's quite anti-Israel, not a huge friend of the Jews,
00:07:11.100 apparently was not a fan of discussing issues dealing with the Holocaust, so he doesn't seem like a great guy.
00:07:18.340 The extent to which he's an Islamist or not, I'm not sure, but certainly from everything that I've read from other sources
00:07:24.820 suggests that he doesn't seem to share in many of the foundational values that have made New York City the great historical city that it is.
00:07:35.040 And yet, endless Jews and Cynthia Nixon and so on, all of the wood crickets are celebrating the ascendancy of this guy, 1.00
00:07:44.640 who's never held a real job, who's a complete schmuck, who's a complete moron, who's a noble Muslim, 1.00
00:07:51.840 who's a socialist, who's promising all sorts of free things to everybody because those asshole guys who live on Fifth Avenue, 1.00
00:07:59.660 they deserve to pay more taxes. And if I'm a mayor, I will take all their money so that we can have free grocery stores. 1.00
00:08:08.900 Because socialism and communism has always worked. And wherever Islam goes, there's only a flourishing of personal liberties. 1.00
00:08:16.280 It's unbelievable what is happening to the world. Have a good day, everybody. Cheers.