The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - October 30, 2025


The Democrats Suffer from the Semmelweis Effect (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_907)

Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
Donald Trump Joe Rogan Suicidal Empathy Jesse Watt Semmelweis
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Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

166.16

Word count

477

Sentence count

27


Summary

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

In this episode, psychologist and author Gad Saad joins me to talk about the concept of cognitive dissonance and why it's a symptom of advanced TDS in people with severe cases of it. We also discuss why the most extreme cases of TDS occur in former cable news hosts and why they tend to be the most resistant to new evidence.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Let's bring in scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at Ole Miss and author of the forthcoming book, Suicidal Empathy, Gad Saad, who really needs no introduction.
00:00:13.900 Gad, why is it seem like a lot of the people with the most severe cases of TDS are former cable news hosts?
00:00:22.120 Well, I can't speak to why they're former cable hosts, but I can tell you is what they're exhibiting is something that we have long studied in psychology.
00:00:32.260 So there's something called the Semmelweis effect, named after a Hungarian physician who identified what was killing women who had just given birth.
00:00:42.940 It was because the doctors that were delivering the babies were not washing their hands after having worked on cadavers.
00:00:49.760 Well, all the other physicians, no matter the amount of evidence that you showed them, were going, la, la, la, I don't want to hear it, right?
00:00:58.140 This is exactly also the theory of cognitive dissonance.
00:01:01.160 I don't want to see any evidence that is contrary to that which I already hold dearly in my brain.
00:01:07.060 And so no amount of evidence that suggests that Donald Trump is doing a good job is going to get these people to alter their anchored positions.
00:01:14.760 But isn't it a sign of adulthood as being open-minded, as being mentally flexible, curious about new ideas, accepting new data and information?
00:01:28.260 Absolutely. And if you look at, you were talking about cable news people, if you look at the top podcasters, say Joe Rogan, well, what makes him so great and the reason why he's built such a platform is because he truly does come to every conversation open-minded.
00:01:46.520 He doesn't have an a priori stance and no amount of evidence is going to shift them.
00:01:51.100 He says, hey, let's have a conversation and let's see where that takes us.
00:01:54.540 And because of that intellectual humility, he's been able to become the biggest podcaster.
00:02:00.160 And so they could certainly learn a lot from Joe Rogan and his ilk.
00:02:04.440 So arrogance would be a major indicator of advanced TDS.
00:02:11.400 I would call it intellectual hubris, right?
00:02:14.280 And so I am so arrogant in feeling that my position is the correct one, that you could show me all of the evidence in the world.
00:02:23.380 I am never going to admit that I might be wrong because I've built my entire personhood on Trump being an existential threat.
00:02:31.480 So I'm not going to appear now on Jesse Watt's show and say, oops, I guess I was wrong.
00:02:36.180 And I will double down and triple down forevermore.
00:02:38.780 Well, I was wrong once about the red wave and I learned my lesson.
00:02:44.240 Don't make bold predictions on television about elections.
00:02:47.340 We'll just wait and see what happens.
00:02:49.900 Gad Saad, great to see you as always.
00:02:51.520 I feel enlightened.