The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - February 24, 2026


More Analogies for Piers Morgan - "Let There Be Light"! (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_971)


Episode Stats

Length

5 minutes

Words per Minute

136.75163

Word Count

769

Sentence Count

45


Summary

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

Gad Saad uses analogies to prove his point on Piers Morgan's show. It's a great example of analogical reasoning, and a reminder of the importance of analogies in the application of logic.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.160 Hi everybody, this is Gad Saad. Some of you who watched my most recent appearance on
00:00:07.280 Piers Morgan's show might remember that the structure of our 20-minute exchange was
00:00:15.640 him taking a position and then my offering a set of analogies to demonstrate
00:00:23.500 the erroneous nature of his positions. And I use analogies because they're actually
00:00:31.020 an incredibly important and powerful cognitive structure of how to make arguments.
00:00:38.800 In this book right here, in my 2023 book, I really do hope more people were to go out and
00:00:46.820 order a copy. Between pages 118 and 122, I offer some discussion of the importance of
00:00:58.400 analogical reasoning. I'll just read a small part just from the introduction,
00:01:02.920 although the entire section, the entire book is fantastic. In my public engagement, I often use
00:01:09.140 analogical reasoning to demonstrate the fallacy of a given position. The power of analogies comes
00:01:14.760 from our human desire to compare and contrast experiences and data. Or to put it in the
00:01:20.960 context of this chapter, analogies apply intellectual variety seeking and interdisciplinary interests
00:01:27.100 to the common sense application of logic. Some of the greatest scientific insights in human history
00:01:33.800 were arrived at via analogical reasoning, perhaps none as famously as Johann Kepler's use of extensive
00:01:41.580 analogies in developing his cosmological work on planetary motion. So this is in the 2023 The Sad Truth
00:01:50.320 About Happiness book. And so despite the fact that I had prepared a very broad range of analogies for
00:01:57.800 Pierce, I wasn't able to get through. The point that I was trying to make, I mean, there were different
00:02:04.120 analogies were used for slightly different reasons. But one of the arguments I was trying to make is that
00:02:08.700 you really have to have the imagination to extrapolate from a current position. If the current position is
00:02:17.540 this, can I trace a trajectory to forecast where I'll be at time t plus x? And so let me try three new
00:02:26.440 attempts. Okay. So if a train is one kilometer away, and it is traveling
00:02:34.320 toward me where I am stuck on the train tracks, it's a kilometer away, it's traveling at 60 kilometers an hour,
00:02:43.380 and now I have to decide, hey, can I
00:02:45.980 predict the trajectory of where this is going to go?
00:02:49.760 Well, it turns out if you do the calculations, Grok did the calculations for all these three examples
00:02:54.440 I'm going to give you next. It takes exactly
00:02:57.400 60 seconds for the train to hit you. But at second one, second two, second three, second four, second dot dot dot 59,
00:03:07.180 see, the train is not hitting me, there is no problem. So for 59 out of the 60 seconds,
00:03:13.520 I was perfectly fine. This is how Pierce is thinking. Look, here I am on the street, there's only 6% Muslims,
00:03:21.460 nothing can go wrong, the train is barreling down. Okay, you don't like this analogy, here's another
00:03:26.880 one. Now these are, in a sense, hyperbolic because they seem so obvious, but they exactly demonstrate
00:03:34.160 the point of the inability to extrapolate from a current position using very predictable trends to a
00:03:41.960 future position. The two atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World
00:03:50.820 War II by the Americans on Japan took 43 seconds to hit the ground from the place where they were
00:04:03.460 launched or dropped. So for 42 out of those 43 seconds, the person who saw the bomb dropping said,
00:04:12.240 see, the dropping of the bomb didn't result in anything. It's perfectly fine. At the 43 second,
00:04:18.140 they're incinerated into oblivion. Imagination to extrapolate, the bomb is dropping. For 90 plus
00:04:28.040 percent, 99 percent of the time, you're alive after it dropped. You're only dead when it hits the ground.
00:04:36.240 Okay, number three. If you jump off the Empire State Building, it takes about 8.8 to 9 seconds for your
00:04:46.140 brain to be splattered on the ground because there is a very predictable reality. It's called gravity
00:04:53.280 that will ensure that if you jump out, you will die. But for many, many seconds, you're not dead. As a
00:05:00.980 matter of fact, it's a very exhilarating form of adrenaline freefall. But you're dead.
00:05:08.100 So I hope my friend, Pierce Morgan, who, by the way, I really do appreciate going on his show because
00:05:16.560 he's always very respectful with me. We always have good conversations. But I just need to find a way
00:05:22.620 to crack that nut to be able to say, you can't keep going, but it's time T equal now.
00:05:30.940 It's perfect. So we're all good. I'm trying. Take care, everybody.