The Psychology of Irrational Empathy - Fueling Cultural Chaos (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_834)
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 3 minutes
Words per Minute
159.24329
Summary
Gad Saad is a marketing professor at Concordia University in Montreal and a visiting professor at Northwood University. He is the author of The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense and Suicidal Empathy, and is working on a new book, Suicidal empathy, which is based on his previous bestseller. In this episode, Gad and I have a conversation about what he sees today and how he explains the behavior and thinking of the public, especially young adults, and relates it to what might come next in the interplay between the media, universities, politics, and public behavior.
Transcript
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Thank you for joining us. I'm Scott Atlas. Welcome to The Independent, my show that tries to bring
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a rational perspective to some of the more complicated issues facing society today.
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Today's guest is Gad Saad. He's a professor of marketing at Concordia University in Montreal
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and is serving as a visiting professor at Northwood University. Professor Saad has pioneered the use
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of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behavior. His works include several
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books and published papers, many at the intersection of psychology with advertising,
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medicine, and economics. He's also working on a new book, Suicidal Empathy, which follows the 2020
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release of his previous bestseller, The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense.
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His YouTube channel and podcast, both called The Saad Truth, S-A-A-D, have garnered millions of views.
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Gad and I have a conversation about what he sees today and how he explains the behavior and thinking
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of the public, especially young adults, and relates it to what might come next in the interplay between
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the media, universities, politics, and public behavior. Thanks for joining us and stay tuned.
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Okay. Gad Saad, welcome. Thank you for coming. Oh, it's so good to be with you. I can't believe it's
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been more than two years since the Global Liberty Institute in Florida. So great to be with you,
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Scott. Thank you. Right. And that you were at the first of that meeting, which of course, as you know,
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is intended to think not just short term, and we'll talk about this because this is a generational issue
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and educating and emboldening people to think independently. And I think that's sort of the
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topic of what this whole discussion will be. You know, I'll start by saying you are a scholar in
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human behavior. That's the way I look at it. And specifically on how people's thinking is
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influenced, whether in marketing or in actual thought. And you've moved to take that concept
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and put it into this very, very important book you wrote in 2020 called The Parasitic Mind,
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How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. And it's based upon your concept that ideas,
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ideologies are serving as infectious ideas or infections, they're pathogens. I'd like you to
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explain that for the audience. Sure. Thanks for that question, Scott. So as I was trying to come up
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with a framework to explain how it is that people could be so irrational in their folk psychology,
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in their worldviews, I started to scour through the animal literature. So at first I, you know,
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looked at the field of parasitology, which simply looks at parasite host interactions, but a tapeworm
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could be a parasite that parasitizes your intestinal tract. But neuroparasitology is a subfield of
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parasitology where the parasite ultimately ends up going to the host's brain, altering its circuitry
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to suit its reproductive interests. So example, a wood cricket, an actual wood cricket, abhors water.
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It wants nothing to do with water. But when it is parasitized by a neuroparasite that's called a
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hairworm, the hairworm needs the wood cricket to go into water so that it can complete its reproductive
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cycle. So the wood cricket will merrily jump into the water, commit suicide in the service of the
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neuroparasite that has hijacked its brain. And so that was my epiphany. Aha, I will now use the
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neuroparasitological framework to argue that human beings could not only be parasitized by actual brain
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worms, Toxoplasma gondii is one, but they could be parasitized by idea pathogens, hence the parasitic mind.
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Sure. So the idea pathogens that you talk about, and I think we're all aware of these if you start
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thinking it with that framework, what you called radical feminism, postmodernism, etc. And
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your key point here, at least in my reading, is that these things are really stemming from
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academia. Okay. I mean, this, this, and you and I are part of academia, of course.
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And, you know, we, we were all raised probably like everybody else. I'm making the assumption,
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you know, we, we, we, uh, we have a lot of respect for academia, for universities, for professors.
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Uh, and the, but the, the origin of these so-called mind viruses, and this is sort of a,
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you know, that's the concept is the university.
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Tell me how you came from that to that and why that's such a problem, of course.
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Right. So my first, if you like, academic exposure to these parasitic ideas was in the pursuit of my
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scientific work, where I was trying to Darwinize the behavioral sciences. What does that mean?
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Most psychologists, most behavioral scientists study human behavior without ever invoking the
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biological and evolutionary roots of why we behave the way that we do. Why do we have the emotions
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that we do? Why does our, why is our cognitive system structured the way that it is? And so in
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my first semester as a doctoral student at Cornell, I had taken an advanced social psychology course and
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about halfway through the semester, the professor had assigned the book called Homicide, which is
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probably the book that most altered my sort of intellectual life. The book was written by a husband and
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wife team, two pioneers of evolutionary psychology, where they were arguing that certain patterns of
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criminality occur around the world and across time periods in exactly the same way because of
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evolutionary reasons. Now, when I saw the elegance, the theoretical elegance, the theoretical parsimony
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with which evolutionary theory was able to explain complex human behaviors, that's when I decided,
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okay, well, I'm going to take that framework and I'm going to apply it to the behavioral fields that
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interest me. And I thought that's pretty, pretty banal. I mean, of course, human beings are biological
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beings. You're a physician. You, you know that we are biological beings, but apparently my colleagues in
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the social sciences and in the business school and in economics departments thought that I was insane.
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Surely, according to them, biology matters for every species on earth except human beings. And if, if we
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are going to afford the courtesy of applying evolutionary psychology or evolutionary theory to human
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beings, it should stop at the neck. So sure, we could explain why we have opposable thumbs according to
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evolutionary theory. But surely, Dr. Saad, you're not one of those quack Nazis that thinks the most
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important organ in your body called your brain is prone to the forces of evolution. Yes, I do think
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that. And so that was my first exposure to how perfectly, supposedly reasonable academics could
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be parasitized by absolute nonsense. So that was my first exposure very early. So I finished my PhD in
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1994. So 31 years ago. And then over the next 31 years, I just saw this incessant war on reason where
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I would be sitting in meetings where I am evaluating, you know, grants to decide whether to grant that
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grant or not. And it's, you know, queer glaciology and, you know, feminist mathematics and all the
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nonsense. And so, you know, it's been a long exposure to this war on reason, which then led me to write
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the parasitic mark. Yeah, I think you're sort of pointing out a couple of things that are interesting
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to me. Number one, we've seen this happen, people in our age bracket, for decades. This is not a sudden
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phenomenon. And so that's sort of a point to consider. This is a gradual process that has
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occurred and been on campus, frankly, for decades, while most of us were not paying attention to what
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was happening, really. But the second part is, we're talking about it now, suddenly, more than ever
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before. And I actually, my contention is, it's because of what happened during the pandemic, because
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the pandemic put, exposed things. It wasn't that it created anything. It exposed in a very personal
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way. We were all affected in one way or another. Some people very severely with their families and
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people died and their kids have severe psychological problems. But others of us were just watching this
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unfold with horror. And so I think this really put it front and center. And this is sort of in a funny
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way or a strange way, the silver lining of the pandemic was that it finally forced the issue to
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be confronted. That's how I view it. So we're sitting here and we're looking at this happening
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on campus. Okay. So you sort of identified, you said this sort of infestation, this distortion of
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thinking among the university professors themselves, in your meetings. But what's happened is that
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these people are so credible in society, like I mentioned, right? We're all raised to
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respect them. Our kids, my own kids, personally, they were taught really, okay, listen to the professor.
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Society uses professors, as you know, as our experts. That is the sort of expert class in many ways.
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And so now we've given these people such credibility that they are very able to transmit
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these strange, illogical ideas to our own children, who are obviously the next leaders of society.
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Right. So two points to make. Number one, while I agree with you that certainly COVID
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crystallized a lot of the lunacy, but to use your COVID example, in the same way that we now
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most of us agree that it was a lab leak theory. So the virus starts off at the Wuhan lab, but it
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eventually it escapes. The exact same corollary happens with bad ideas. The reason why many people
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were not paying attention, including within the academic class, because their reaction to me when
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I would be standing on top of the mountain and screaming and warning people was, but come on,
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God, that's just some esoteric stupidity in some humanities. And I hate to be the guy who says,
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I told you so. I would tell them, but guess what? It'll break out of the humanities. Eventually it
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will become our last prime minister called Justin Trudeau, who is a walking manifestation of every
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parasitic idea and every reflex of suicidal empathy that I've spent decades talking about. And so,
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yes, at first it seems as though it is restricted to a small microcosm, but you know that pathogens
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eventually escape. So that's number one. The other thing I would say regarding your point about the
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authority and so-called expertise of professors, there's actually a very interesting psychological
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phenomenon here, Scott. So in one of the most beautiful social psychological phenomena that I
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learned of early in my PhD was something called the fundamental attribution error. So how do you
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attribute things in your life? And many of us, it's called the self-serving bias, we attribute successes
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internally and failures externally, right? I did well on the exam because I'm smart. I did very poorly on the
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exam because Professor Atlas is a mean jerk, okay? Sounds familiar, by the way. Go ahead.
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I faced that sentiment myself many times. Now, imagine a postmodernist professor stands up and starts
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espousing the endless nihilistic gibberish that is completely nonsensical. Now, the average audience
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member is faced with two possible options. Either they say that the guy who is espousing this stuff must be
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so profound that I'm simply too dumb to understand it, or they will say he's espousing bullshit and I see
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through him. Now, regrettably, there's the cognitive sleight of hand. Most students will say it's because
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I'm too dumb. And therefore, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault and all of the rest of the
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bullshitters, I hope I can say that word, all of the French postmodernists and so on, can get away with what
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they're doing? Because they realize the frailty of the human condition, which is, I am the fancy
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professor standing on top of the podium at Princeton. Surely, I can't be espousing nonsense.
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And we all nod and say, oh, yes, professor, you're very fancy.
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Right. I mean, part of this really is not just the respect that society has for the scholarly,
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learned professors. And by the way, as you know, well, this is not just a Western society
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construct. This is, you know, I mean, I'm sure you've traveled and I've traveled as a visiting
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professor in places like India or Southeast Asia and China. You know, you're revered as a professor,
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perhaps even more, I think probably more so than in places like the United States or Canada.
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But there's also the intimidation factor that even leaders have. It's not just students. And this is
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something that I saw. And I think it's very true that when you have people in power, whether it's
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a prime minister or a president, they're generally laymen. I'll use that term, not in a critical way,
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but that's a literal way in terms of particularly when things like that are scientific or in your field
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of psychology and in medical science and all of these areas where they are intimidated because
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partly we are taught as young people that, okay, these people must know this knowledge is esoteric.
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Right. So they defer. And society does this quite a bit. And I think this is one of the problems with
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people not being independent thinking. It's not just that they're not independent thinkers. It's simply
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that, okay, they're intimidated by people who, quote, have the credentials.
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And I actually think, and I'd like to hear your thought on this. One of the things I like to,
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I hope is that the era of trusting people based solely on their credential must be over. We need
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I agree. And that's why I abhor whenever, you know, I interact with all sorts of people on social media.
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I don't care how many followers you have. If I think that whatever you're posting is,
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is worthy of an interaction, I will interact with you. And oftentimes I, you know, I'll see people say,
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you know, whatever pediatrician here, which is kind of the start, right? I've never said,
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you know, professor, Dr. Gadsad, BSC, MBA, MS, PhD, Cornell here. Right. I mean,
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you judge me based on the veracity of my ideas. If my ideas stand the test, the sniff test, the
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ecological test, the theoretical test, then it's worthy. By the way, it's interesting that you talk
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about sort of the, that, that, that kind of ivory tower. We are the, you know, to use Thomas Sowell's
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anointed ones, right? I was, and I hate to say this, Scott, I know you were at Stanford,
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but in the first chapter of the parasitic mind, I talk about a incident that happened at Stanford.
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I had been invited to Stanford business school, which certainly is one of the meccas of academia
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to give a talk on sort of my evolutionary psychology research, how I apply it to consumer behavior,
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to economic decision making. And the gentleman who took me out the night before my talk the next day
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was himself a professor at Stanford business school. And as we sat down to have dinner,
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he looked at me and said, Oh, you know, I was doing sort of a deep dive to kind of get a better
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sense of your profile. Oh, I didn't know you, you know, you had been on Joe Rogan so many times.
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I said, Oh yeah, yeah. Many times. He goes, yeah, well, you know, and I'm going to try to put on the
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smug, arrogant, elitist face that he used. He goes, yeah, well, you know, at Stanford, we don't condone
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that. I said, you don't condone that. By the way, I've seen that smug, arrogant face many times
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Stanford and elsewhere, by the way, but God. And I said, uh, you, you don't condone what at
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Stanford? Exactly. He goes, well, we don't do our research so it could be sexy enough so that we can
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go on Joe Rogan's show. I said, well, I don't do that either, but here's where he, that there was a
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chill for the rest of the evening because I, I, I retorted with a classic gaddism. I said, well,
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isn't it better to do valuable research and then go in front of 20 million people and try to excite
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them about the research that you're doing rather than publishing your research in a peer reviewed
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paper that will be read by the editor, the two reviewers and your mom. And he, he just went cold,
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right? Now, again, I'm not denigrating and I'm sure you're not either the power and the value of
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peer reviewed papers, but shouldn't it be part of our professional responsibility to excite the
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public about the hopefully cool things that we do? Well, according to Stanford and Cornell and all
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of the anointed ones, no, we only speak to each other. We don't talk to the great unwashed.
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Right. And this is your, uh, your, your concept as well as mine that you wrote, uh, it takes haughty,
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I'm quoting here. It takes haughty professors decoupled from reality within the walls of their
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ivory tower to come up with some of the most imbecilic ideas imaginable. And, and that is, uh,
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that's so true. And it's been said in different ways really over the history by, by a lot of people,
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but it reminds me of Orwell. Orwell sets along those lines. Yeah. Right. You know, it reminds me of a,
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of a cartoon I once saw of people toasting at a PhD postdoc party who to someone who was just
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awarded the PhD in the toast was, and may our research never be practical, you know, never be
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used. I mean, this is, it is, there's sort of this reverse snobbery kind of thing going on about the,
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about that. But I want to talk about something that's a very important concept to all of the
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things that you've, uh, elucidated, which is this idea of misplaced empathy. Okay. This is in your
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fourth, you're writing another book, which is called suicidal empathy, uh, to examine this, uh,
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which I want to mention for the, for the viewers, but this whole concept of misplaced empathy,
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it's sort of tied in with a guilt, guilt-ridden behavior. Could you, could you go, uh, and give us
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the explanation of this? Yes. Thank you for that question. So let me kind of give the background.
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So take, for example, OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder. You can study OCD actually from an
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evolutionary perspective in the following way, and I'll link it in a second to how I came up with the,
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the framework for suicidal empathy. Okay. The idea that we should scan the environment for
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environmental threats makes perfect evolutionary sense. It makes perfect adaptive sense, right? So
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if, if I see you at a party, Scott, and I noticed that you sneezed into your hand,
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then you go out to shake my hand, then I'm going to very quietly after we shake hands,
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go to the bathroom and wash my hands because I don't want to catch your flu. That makes perfect
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evolutionary sense. The fact that I go to the back door of our house, make sure that it's locked
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makes perfect adaptive sense. The problem arises when the scanning of the threat becomes hyperactive.
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So what happens to an OCD person? The, the, the warning flag goes up, you tend to it. And then
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the warning flag goes up again, and now you're stuck in an infinite loop of checking. So if you
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suffer from germ contamination, OCD, you spend eight hours cleaning your hands and scalding hot water.
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You don't make it to work. So you get fired. Your skin is starting to fall off because you're
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washing it for eight hours, right? So what, what began as an adaptive process becomes maladaptive
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when in this case it hyperfires. And so when I had that framework, I said, aha, that's exactly what
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I'm going to argue for empathy. Empathy is a very noble emotion to have. It actually oils our
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sociality, right? So for example, part of empathy is having theory of mind, right? Putting yourself
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in the mind of another. We know, for example, that autistic children, one of the ways that we
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diagnose them as being autistic is they fail a theory of mind task. They can't put themselves
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in the mind of another, which is one of the symptoms or one of the manifestations of autism.
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So empathy is great as long as it is within certain regulated zones. It's, it's applied to the right
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target at the right time and the right amount, which by the way, Aristotle explained that to us.
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Several thousand years ago, when he talked about the golden mean, too little of something is not
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good. Too much of something is not good. And much of life is finding that middle sweet spot. And so
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I put all those together and I said, aha, that's exactly what we're seeing right now. Misguided,
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misplaced, orgiastic, weaponized, suicidal empathy. Therefore, MS-13 gang members are way more
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worthy of our empathy than American vets who've lost limbs, if not their lives fighting for the
00:22:58.560
United States, right? Or even the victims of the gang members.
00:23:03.020
Or, or, exactly. I mean, you don't want to put this, especially if let's say he's a person,
00:23:10.240
a criminal of color. I mean, he's already been victimized by the society that the white supremacist
00:23:16.600
society that drove- In their theory, in their theory.
00:23:19.560
In their theory, of course. That drove, that drove him to criminality. Now you're going to
00:23:24.200
double whammy him by putting him within the penal racist justice system? That's not nice. And so what
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I do in the book is I look at all of the astoundingly disastrous, both domestic and foreign policies,
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and I argue they are all rooted in this suicidal empathy.
00:23:44.000
Yeah. So I think a big, a big one that has been in the news quite a bit that everyone's familiar
00:23:48.720
with is the, the somehow hyper concern with the rights of some people to the point where it totally
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destroys the rights of, of the other people, including in, in a dangerous way. And my, my example
00:24:05.280
that I'm thinking of here, uh, is if I, uh, we talk about the trans issue with sports. Okay. It's
00:24:13.080
one thing to start talking about, okay, trans biological men who are now considering themselves
00:24:21.360
women, they want to compete in sports. It's not just actually, although partly it's the opportunity
00:24:29.620
lost to the biological women in the sports, because the fact is as nature, as all biology knows,
00:24:36.380
biological men have physical attributes that are beneficial in sports over biological women.
00:24:42.480
That's just not even arguable, uh, to be opposed to that idea. But the second part is that even to
00:24:50.280
force women, young girls to allow biological men in their locker rooms, in their showers. Okay. And I,
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I think this is an, a great example of what you're talking about where, yes, we're, we, we care about
00:25:05.560
the wellbeing and the rights of everyone. But at some point, this is, this is already completely
00:25:13.020
irrational to go to the extreme of insisting that the rights of biological males override any rights,
00:25:23.400
including privacy and personal security of girls. Exactly. And so a couple, a couple of things to
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answer. Number one, you can go to, to my YouTube channel and search Gadsad Canadian Senate. In 2017,
00:25:39.620
I was summoned, summoned in front of the Canadian Senate. What was then a bill that was tabled that
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was being discussed. It has since passed called bill C 16, which of course, famously Jordan Peterson
00:25:51.600
also tried to fight. And if you listen to my testimony, again, I hate to be the guy to say,
00:25:57.620
I told you so, but I told you so I exactly predicted every single thing that came down the line. I called
00:26:03.800
it the tyranny of the minority, right? I said, look, it is perfectly reasonable to expect that all people
00:26:11.120
should live in a world that is free of, you know, endemic bigotry. That's great. Sign me up for that.
00:26:16.060
But in the pursuit of that laudable goal, we don't rape and murder truth to achieve that,
00:26:22.460
right? So we don't all, you know, nod our heads and go, yes, yes, of course, men can menstruate. Yes,
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yes, of course, men too can bear children, right? Yes, yes, of course, we're going to call women
00:26:32.520
cervix havers. That's, that's literally true. Cervix havers, because women really, there's no,
00:26:38.560
we don't know what is a phenotype of a woman. So until about 15 minutes ago, the 117 billion people
00:26:44.920
that had existed on earth, that's, that's an actual estimate, were able to fully navigate
00:26:50.080
through the very difficult conundrum of finding out who is male or female. But 15 minutes ago,
00:26:55.040
we lost the ability to do that. So that's point one. Point two, the idea that we should met out our
00:27:03.440
investments in an evolutionarily strategic way is again, foundational to evolutionary theory. So for
00:27:09.440
example, I am much more likely to jump in front of a moving bus to save my own biological child than I
00:27:17.280
am to save a random person, not because I'm a callous and mean person, but because you would expect
00:27:22.960
that my emotional, cognitive and behavioral systems would have evolved in such a way that it confers upon
00:27:29.620
me some evolutionary advantage. I would like to save the random person. But if given the choice, I'm more
00:27:34.560
likely to save my biological child. Now, why am I saying that? Because it speaks to how you met out
00:27:40.340
your empathy gas tank, right? Yes, I want to be empathetic to the one in 10,000 transgender people
00:27:47.800
who may or may not be facing bigotry, but not at the expense of the empathy that is owed to all
00:27:54.380
biological women, to your point, right? Right. The calculus that was in, that is within our brain
00:28:00.760
has to make evolutionary sense. Suicidal empathy eradicates all that.
00:28:06.360
But how, so how do we, you know, this, this idea of this very bizarre empathy, which I'm, I, I have a
00:28:15.300
couple of sort of random thoughts about it. Number one, I'm, it's so irrational. I'm not even ready to
00:28:22.820
accept that it's sincere, even by the people who espouse it. I'm not sure because you get to this issue
00:28:29.140
of virtue signaling. There's a secondary gain here. And again, I'm not a psychologist, but as my father
00:28:37.200
used to say, a keen observer of the human condition, he said that jokingly. But, you know, it is true
00:28:43.800
that people get secondary gain from showing empathy, from even if it's pretend empathy. And I don't know
00:28:52.500
where, I'd like to hear if you think that's going on here.
00:28:55.980
I think there's definitely some of that. I think some of it is, you know, you know, vacuous,
00:29:02.540
factuous, you know, virtue signaling, but some of it, I think, and hence the parasitic nature,
00:29:08.960
right? That's why the wood cricket jumps in the water, not virtue signaling his suicide. He literally
00:29:16.060
commits suicide because you are altering people's value systems in a way where nothing becomes more
00:29:23.920
important, right? So to use, to use the term of operations research, which is a field of applied
00:29:30.280
mathematics, where you try to use algorithms to solve some optimization problem, the ultimate value
00:29:37.340
that they are seeking to optimize is signaling to your point, in a sense, how good people they are.
00:29:44.060
They're, they're tolerant, they're kind, they're compassionate in lieu of any other conflicting
00:29:50.460
value, right? So, and let me give you a... And even when it, when it shows that they're actually not
00:29:56.100
all those things. Exactly right. So here's a fantastic example. And my forthcoming book has
00:30:02.900
a million of those. There is a Norwegian man who was raped by a, so this is a male who was sodomized
00:30:12.980
by a Somali immigrant to Norway. Of course, Norway is very kind, is very empathetic. They don't believe
00:30:22.280
in harsh penalties. And so after a very, very short, you know, laughable sentence, they were going to
00:30:28.460
deport the Somali sodomizer. The, the victim of the rape is such a good and kind person that he felt
00:30:38.600
very guilty. Earlier, you mentioned guilt. He felt very guilty and torn and hurt that this guy, if he
00:30:46.780
ends up going to Somalia, will not be able to, you know, maximally flourish. He's not going to ascend
00:30:54.500
to Maslow's, you know, self-actualization, apex of actualization. He didn't use those words, but I'm
00:31:03.260
adding it to it. Now, I'm here to tell you as an evolutionary psychologist that the, the human
00:31:08.860
emotional system did not evolve to feel sympathy and empathy for the one who sodomized you. But see,
00:31:16.480
he has transcended those material biological realities that keep you and I grounded to this.
00:31:24.440
He has, he's at a higher spiritual plane. He forgives his sodomizer. It's insane. Exactly to your point.
00:31:30.980
Irrational. Yeah. I mean, you have to, a part of me always says what's dangerous is these people
00:31:37.960
actually believe what they're saying. Uh, even though it defies all common sense. Uh, the second
00:31:44.720
part, I w I want to take a little diversion here and talk about something else, which is in the field
00:31:49.920
of how this works in advertising specifically. And this is, uh, one of my, I think biggest, uh,
00:31:59.220
sort of, I'm totally disgusted by the, the advertising world combining with this idea of
00:32:06.380
infecting somebody's brain into some bizarre sort of empathy. And that is the glamorization
00:32:11.880
that we've seen, particularly in the United States, but elsewhere of obesity. Okay. This
00:32:16.840
has been going on for 20 years. You know, my, my, uh, experience going or walking around lower
00:32:22.500
Manhattan and Soho, where they have these big billboards of advertising for years, for 15,
00:32:28.480
20 years, we have seen, and on the covers of women's fashion magazines, the new healthy,
00:32:33.720
the new beautiful, and it's these morbidly obese people. Uh, and it just, uh, it's a shocking
00:32:42.080
abuse of the public by people who think that they're nicer people because, oh, we're, we're trying
00:32:50.600
to say that you shouldn't be discriminating against obesity. And I think this has a real
00:32:55.680
significant health impact because it's, it portrays obesity is good. It's not good. It's
00:33:01.500
very bad. It's the worst possible thing. Pretty much you can do for your health.
00:33:05.880
You're, you're, you're, you're predicting, or you're, you're foretelling one of the sections
00:33:10.240
in suicidal empathy, where I get it to the body positivity as a form of misplaced empathy. Right.
00:33:16.800
But it speaks to my earlier point about which objective function you're trying to maximize,
00:33:22.800
right? You're a physician. You obviously know, first do no harm, but now do no harm on which
00:33:29.860
metric. Now you would understand it as, well, there is quite incontrovertible evidence that
00:33:36.200
all things equal being 80 pounds overweight is probably not a good thing. But how about if I
00:33:41.520
were to rearrange your objective function that you're trying to maximize, whereby I say the most
00:33:47.000
important function to maximize is the sense of self-esteem of your patient. In that case,
00:33:54.680
you're now in a, a bit of a quandary. Should you tell your patient that there is unbelievable amount
00:34:01.460
of evidence that suggests that you're probably going to die early if you're 80 pounds overweight,
00:34:05.760
or should you say you go girl healthy at any weight? Well, if you've been parasitized by suicidal
00:34:12.460
empathy, the latter is the way for you to go. So throw away your Hippocratic oath, manage people's
00:34:18.660
self-esteem. As part of this sort of parasitization of, of what you're thinking, really, it's not just
00:34:29.080
teaching it. It's not just the advertising. It's also, there's a, there's a negative. There's a,
00:34:34.840
there's a cancel culture that people have to face. So I think particularly young people, okay, people
00:34:40.540
like, perhaps you, you and I don't care as much, uh, what people think of us, or it wouldn't be so
00:34:47.680
outspoken. Uh, but we know we have, we're pretty comfortable, not just in our own skin, but we have
00:34:52.640
a social structure. Uh, whereas younger people understandably, and here I'm being empathetic,
00:34:59.160
understandably, uh, care a lot about what their friends and their social world thinks they're
00:35:06.180
growing up. And I, and I, I do, uh, understand that, but this cancel culture is very effective,
00:35:12.440
I think. And I wonder, uh, what, what you think about that and what role that's playing in sort of
00:35:18.560
making people have these totally, uh, irrational, really senses of where empathy should be?
00:35:27.960
Great question. And I hope you'll appreciate my answer, although it might sound slightly harsh
00:35:34.000
in terms of the exacting code of conduct by which I abide. I care a lot less about what other people
00:35:42.000
think of me as compared to what I think of me, meaning that I am my harshest critic. And therefore
00:35:49.620
I set my code of conduct to be so exacting that I will never walk away from the defense of the truth
00:35:59.620
and the service of managing the impression that other people have of me. Because Scott, when I put
00:36:07.180
my head on the pillow to go to bed at night, I can't go to sleep and I will suffer from insomnia
00:36:13.200
and I'll have to come to Dr. Scott Atlas to help me with my insomnia because I will feel as though
00:36:20.200
I were a fraud. I'm a charlatan. How could I be? I couldn't agree more with you. You know, this is,
00:36:25.880
uh, of course, I think we're, we're very, uh, simpatico with this kind of stuff. I mean, uh,
00:36:32.000
personally, I don't know how these people look at themselves in the mirror. The people that in my case,
00:36:37.180
the lockdowners, the people at Stanford university who refuse to admit they were wrong and refuse to
00:36:43.760
admit I and others are right. I don't know how they can look at themselves. I don't know how
00:36:47.720
they can look at their children. Can I tell you how they do it? So there is a, and I feel as though
00:36:53.460
I should getting like some kind of cut of their royalties. If all of my promotion of their book
00:36:58.680
is, is causing an increase in sales. There's a, there's a book that was written by two French
00:37:03.520
psychologists, cognitive psychologists, one of whom has been on my show. It's Hugo Mercier and
00:37:09.180
Dan Sperber. They wrote a book called the enigma of reason. And they are, they argued very provocatively,
00:37:16.180
but very convincingly in my view, that the faculty of reasoning, human reasoning did not evolve to seek
00:37:25.200
some objective truth, but rather to win arguments, right? Now that's a very disheartening, you know,
00:37:33.520
insight to have, because what that basically says is most people don't care about the truth. Most
00:37:40.120
people care about winning arguments. So your Stanford colleagues are never going to come and say,
00:37:47.360
you know, in light of the incoming evidence, I now concede that Scott or Jay were right.
00:37:53.580
I would rather die before I ever accept that. So in, in, in our utopian epistemological view,
00:38:00.980
we think that all professors are simply pursuing truth. No, they're pursuing the objective of winning
00:38:08.740
arguments. So you're going to be waiting a long time before they send you that apology letter, Scott.
00:38:13.480
Yeah. Which, which now I, I, I'm not anticipating one, but, uh, you know, I, I do really, uh, feel
00:38:20.560
comfortable. It's not, it's sort of something we have to reconcile as a society that these people
00:38:29.380
will not admit they were wrong. They will not accept fact. They will not talk about what the
00:38:37.380
evidence shows. And now, now we have to figure out how to move forward when you have a society like
00:38:43.160
that. Because we're literally living in a, in a society where facts don't carry the day. Facts
00:38:49.720
don't matter. And I think that's a very cynical sort of message, but I, I'm, I am grappling with,
00:38:57.360
uh, how, how we move forward. How do we get closure, particularly again, from the pandemic
00:39:02.520
where millions of people were killed from the wrong policy. Children were, were cutting their,
00:39:07.860
their wrists were, were killing themselves, have severe psychological damage. We shifted the burden
00:39:12.480
to the poor. All these grossly unethical and immoral things were done. And yet, uh, half of
00:39:19.900
the country or whatever, we'll just simply, they want to turn the page. They want to just forget it.
00:39:25.020
They will never admit they were wrong. I mean, I do have in chapter seven of the parasitic mind,
00:39:30.920
the chapter is titled how to seek truth. I do offer a methodology for demonstrating to even your
00:39:39.880
staunchest detractors, the veracity of your position. Now, if they go, la, la, la, I don't
00:39:45.600
want to hear it. Then, then they are impervious to anything I might present. But as long as they
00:39:49.560
grant me the courtesy to at least lay out the arguments, I do have a way of doing that. Would
00:39:55.040
you like me to, to share? Sure. Absolutely. So there is a thing, uh, that I call nomological
00:40:02.300
networks of cumulative evidence, which is a mouthful, but it basically means that when you
00:40:09.820
are trying to demonstrate the, the veracity of a position you're taking, what if I get you data
00:40:16.740
from across cultures, across time periods, across species, across methodologies, all of which
00:40:23.700
triangulate to demonstrating that my position is correct. Now it's a lot more than a literature
00:40:29.040
review. It's much broader. It's a lot more than a meta-analysis. Meta-analyses are much more pointed
00:40:34.180
to a specific relationship between a couple of variables. This is a, an epistemological, you know,
00:40:41.340
you know, chainsaw. So let me give a concrete example. Let's suppose, Scott, that you were a
00:40:46.860
social scientist who argued, as do most social scientists, that toy preferences are socially
00:40:52.400
constructed. So the reason why little boys prefer certain types of toys and little girls prefer other
00:40:58.300
types of toys is because of social construction. And I want to come and prove to you that no,
00:41:03.040
there is a universality to the sex specificity of toy preferences that is due to biology. How would I go
00:41:08.980
about doing that? Okay. So now I'm going to build a partial nomological network to show you that.
00:41:14.020
Okay. You with me? Okay. Yes. I can get you data from developmental psychology showing you that
00:41:19.500
children who are too young to yet be socialized. So by definition, they could not have been socialized.
00:41:24.880
They haven't reached that cognitive developmental stage. They're already exhibiting those sex
00:41:29.460
specific toy preferences. That's a pretty incontrovertible piece of evidence, but I'm not
00:41:35.400
going to stop. I can get you data from rhesus monkeys and vervet monkeys and chimpanzees showing
00:41:42.480
you that their infants exhibit the exact same sex specific toy preferences as we do. I can get you data
00:41:48.400
from other cultures that are completely non-Western, sub-Saharan Africa, showing you that they exhibit the
00:41:54.400
same sex specific toy preferences. I'll just do two more, but the network is actually much bigger.
00:41:59.420
I can get you data from 2,500 years ago in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, where on funerary
00:42:06.280
monuments, on mausoleums, little boys and girls are depicted playing with exactly the same types of
00:42:12.920
toys as today. And I'll get you one more, if only because you're from medicine. I can get you data
00:42:18.480
from pediatric endocrinology showing you that little girls who suffer from congenital adrenal
00:42:24.700
hyperplasia, which is a disorder that masculinizes little girls' behaviors and morphologies. Girls who
00:42:32.340
suffer from this disorder have the exact sex specific reversal of their toy preferences. So look what I did.
00:42:39.860
I got you data from across cultures, from developmental psychology, from across species, from across time
00:42:45.480
periods, and so on, all of which triangulate to the incontrovertible nature of the position that I'm
00:42:52.340
taking. Now, you earlier mentioned cancel culture. So let me now close out by going back to cancel
00:42:58.280
culture. Many people ask me, how is it that you're undoubtedly probably the most outspoken professor by
00:43:06.100
orders of magnitude, and yet you're not canceled? Well, there are several reasons for that. One of which
00:43:12.260
is that I have very, very well-regulated epistemic humility. When I know something, I walk with someone
00:43:20.280
who's got all the swagger of having built my nomological network. Good luck if you want to
00:43:26.420
debate me. But when I don't know something, I'm the first to say, hey, Scott, that's a great question.
00:43:32.060
Unfortunately, it's out of my area of expertise. It's above my pay grade. So I don't try to wing it.
00:43:37.900
And what that does is you could never catch me. I've been on Joe Rogan a million times. There is,
00:43:43.820
you know, 30, 40 hours of content, yet you've never caught me with my, quote, you know, proverbial
00:43:50.740
pants down because I never bullshit. I exactly know what I know and what I don't know. And so I think if
00:43:57.700
people could have that epistemological discipline, we could have a society more built on truth and less
00:44:06.180
Mm-hmm. No, I think that's very important. No doubt. When things get crazy, I think people drop
00:44:17.480
that though. Part of it is like, for instance, in the sort of the pandemic where people, the fear,
00:44:26.000
there were a lot of emotions. It wasn't just an argument. It was something bigger. But I think
00:44:30.980
the second reason that you don't get canceled is that you're not going to allow yourself to be
00:44:36.340
canceled. I mean, I think that, and you know, this is really a fundamental point that I'm sure you,
00:44:42.160
you probably agree is that there's a, we, first of all, we need to speak out for truth. We can't
00:44:49.760
have an ethical society without the truth being spoken. But more importantly, in a funny way,
00:44:58.460
is that the value of speaking out is that you, you facilitate other people speaking out. Not
00:45:05.280
everybody has to be the tip of the spear, but we need some tips of spears. Yeah. And when you do that,
00:45:11.480
and people have said this to me many times, I'm sure you've been told the, one of the most important
00:45:15.680
things you've ever done is speak out for things that other people agree with, but they're, they're
00:45:19.980
not necessarily comfortable or they're afraid to speak out. When they hear you speak out, they say,
00:45:24.360
well, yes, I agree with that. I mean, I think there's a very important part of having the courage
00:45:30.840
to speak out. Uh, and you know, you're certainly one of those people. I want to, I want to talk a
00:45:38.260
few minutes about sort of the Trump election. Uh, now I, I view the Trump election. I think everybody
00:45:45.840
does, uh, who's following this as a repudiation of failed policies. I think this was a policy election,
00:45:52.520
uh, you know, whether it's the economy or rampant crime, uh, international instability that, that
00:46:00.640
we all saw happen under, uh, the Biden administration, but there's something more and it's hard to
00:46:06.760
quantify if it was that impactful, but it's what I call sort of a reaction of what I call cultural
00:46:13.820
perversions that defy common sense. Uh, you know, girls should be forced to allow biological men in
00:46:20.420
their locker rooms at anybody. If you're a parent of a daughter, I don't know how you would tolerate
00:46:25.760
that. I have sons, but I still, it's so obvious to me or that biological men want to be in a women's
00:46:33.300
prison, even though they're a rapist. I mean, you know, because they're going to say they're a woman,
00:46:37.600
you know, uh, how do you view the awakening? I'll call it of at least the American voter.
00:46:46.100
Uh, why did that happen? Because, okay, this, this sort of, I mean, it took something to change
00:46:53.960
this, to awaken people. Maybe it was not, uh, the cultural stuff at all. I don't know. I'd like
00:47:00.140
to hear your thoughts on that. And then I want to talk about a concern I have, which is I sense that
00:47:07.720
there's a lot of people that think, okay, Trump won. Now we're done as problem solved. There's a,
00:47:14.460
almost a very premature sort of complacency going on, but that's the second part. First,
00:47:20.460
I want to hear your views on what it means that Trump was elected. Well, I, I think you're right
00:47:26.440
on both points. I think that, you know, most decent people are tired of feeling insecure about
00:47:36.360
whether they can say that only women menstruate. I mean, let me, let me give you a very specific
00:47:41.100
example. I receive emails from ostensibly functioning adults who write to me the following
00:47:49.360
email, dear professor Saad, you know, I know that you are an evolutionary behavioral scientist who
00:47:55.240
studied sex differences, blah, blah, blah. Uh, I mean, is it, does science now consider it that,
00:48:02.240
you know, men can menstruate now imagine on the shaky grounds you're on in terms of to use the
00:48:10.840
term that everybody uses now on terms of gaslighting that you need to write me to receive my
00:48:17.100
imprimatur to something that the average three day old squirrel would otherwise know. Right. So that's
00:48:23.920
the trick that has taken place over the past 50 to a hundred years with all of these parasitic ideas
00:48:29.920
infecting our minds where I no longer what up is down left is right. Men are women. Slavery is,
00:48:36.320
is freedom and so on. And so most people woke up one day. I mean, it takes some tipping point and
00:48:42.000
said, like, I've had enough. I've had enough of going to DEI things where I'm told that I'm a disgusting
00:48:48.100
white heterosexual male. I've had enough and I'm voting for whichever candidate, you know,
00:48:54.600
frees me of that nonsense. So, so your first point is certainly true, but I really love your
00:48:59.640
second question because I've been exactly warning against, I mean, I literally started warning about
00:49:05.660
this the day after Trump won. Yes, I was elated as a Canadian that Trump had won because the, the
00:49:12.780
alternative would have been that much more disastrous, but I kept saying to anybody who would listen to
00:49:18.200
me, don't rest on your laurels. It took 50 to a hundred years for these disastrous ideas to flourish
00:49:26.380
and become part of accepted society. We're not going to eradicate this by four year term of Trump.
00:49:34.280
Yes, he's an important doorstop. The opposite would have been disastrous, but it's a long battle. Now,
00:49:40.200
I'd like to think that it won't take 50 to a hundred years to develop the vaccine against all these
00:49:46.420
parasitic ideas, but it's not going to start and end with Trump. I completely agree with you, Scott.
00:49:51.260
Yeah. And I, and I think, uh, part of the, uh, of the issue is that in my view, there's this idea of
00:50:00.900
turning the page on what I consider the most heinous, abusive leadership in our lifetimes,
00:50:08.800
which was the pandemic lockdowns. And it's not that everything is about the pandemic, but it's that,
00:50:15.140
again, the exposure, uh, of unbridled power and the people's acquiescence, which I think was even
00:50:22.720
more shocking to me. But if we turn the page on these things and just assume, okay, we're done.
00:50:29.580
We're, we fixed it. Uh, Trump is elected or whatever. Uh, we have people that are going to
00:50:34.940
repeal some of these healthcare things or, or add, uh, transparency or whatever. I think that we
00:50:40.900
eliminate the closure that is needed for people, a, who lost their family, whose older parent died
00:50:49.540
and they were forbidden from seeing them, whose child killed himself, who, uh, who became, uh,
00:50:55.620
the hundreds of millions of people who are thrown into abject poverty in the world, all these things.
00:50:59.920
We need, we need a closure of recognizing truth. But secondly, that eliminates all accountability
00:51:07.620
to those in power. If we just turn the page, we don't want to talk about it. It's uncomfortable.
00:51:12.820
So we're not going to, we're not going to go through that. And I, and I think, uh, I don't
00:51:17.640
know about the psychology of turning the page because it is easier to not talk about things that are
00:51:23.340
unpleasant, particularly since most people are shamefully complicit in not just allowing it to
00:51:30.440
happen as an acquiescence kind of thing, but also even advocating it. Uh, to me, it, it reminded
00:51:37.560
me of the historical views of what happened in Nazi Germany, where a lot of quote, good people
00:51:43.880
were complicit in watching the Jews being put on the trains and even actively through stones at them.
00:51:50.860
You see it in the movie clips, good people. Okay. The banality of evil, uh, Hannah Arendt, uh, you know,
00:51:58.080
the, and, and I'm, I'm very concerned about, so there's a, a complacency and also almost a desire
00:52:04.420
to move on as if there's no problems now, because I, and I agree with you if I, if I can go on one
00:52:12.560
more sentence, which is that I'm not sure that there is somebody like Donald Trump again. Okay.
00:52:19.300
I mean, this guy is a unique, he's the tough, I, I said, he's the toughest SOB I've ever known.
00:52:25.540
And I'm saying that in a positive way. He's a unique person. He galvanized support. He's,
00:52:32.500
he identifies with the common man, the common man identifies with him. And, uh, he's an inspirational
00:52:38.320
figure to a lot of people. And I, I'm not, I'm, I'm concerned that it's a one-off.
00:52:43.500
Well, I'll, I'll just mention your point about how you're qualifying Trump. I just posted a tweet
00:52:49.560
today. I think it's, it's currently pinned on my feed. It was a, a, a post directed to Pierre
00:52:56.820
Poilier who had an insurmountable lead in the Canadian, in the forthcoming Canadian election.
00:53:02.560
I mean, really like 30 points and now it has flipped. And so the, the point of my tweet,
00:53:08.520
and I'll, I'll kind of paraphrase it. I said, look, I said, dear Pierre, you know, here's some
00:53:13.040
unsolicited advice. You could take it or leave it. Truly historical figures are not fence sitters.
00:53:20.880
They don't equivocate. Donald Trump won the presidency twice because he doesn't give an F.
00:53:26.800
I mean, and I put star for the F. Elon Musk has achieved what he's achieved because he doesn't
00:53:33.680
give an F. Joe Rogan done what he's done because he doesn't give an F. So real historical figures,
00:53:39.620
whether they are in the, in the, in the evil side of the ledger or the positive side of the ledger,
00:53:45.240
just see a path forward and they just move forward. And in, in the case of, I hate to say it,
00:53:52.080
but in the case of Kualiev, he's, he's doing the Kamala thing, which is, you know, I won't go on Joe
00:53:57.060
Rogan because the political consultants told me I shouldn't and so on. And you're not going to win
00:54:01.380
this way. So I completely agree with you. I mean, Donald Trump is a historical figure,
00:54:05.760
like probably no other that we will ever see in our lifetimes. And it's not because I've got Donald
00:54:10.500
Trump posters in my bedroom, right. As a marital, right. I'm Canadian. I truly don't have a dog in
00:54:16.260
this fight, but no one that I can think of has had as much thrown as, as, as he has and come out
00:54:22.900
victorious. So that has to be right now regarding the, the other issues you're talking about the,
00:54:28.940
the banality of evil and the acquiescence and so on. One of my favorite experiments in all of
00:54:36.940
behavioral sciences and all of psychology, which is saying a lot, there's a lot of research in
00:54:41.240
psychology. That's great. Is the Solomon Ash conformity experiments to your, Oh, this is amazing.
00:54:47.860
Yes. I've watched this over and over again. I mean, and now, so do you mind if I explain it to our,
00:54:53.280
to the, go ahead. Absolutely. Now, several reasons why, and I've lectured this a million times,
00:54:58.920
I still get goosebumps when I lecture it, because I tell my students, you don't have to do convoluted
00:55:04.140
research for it to be some of the most impactful stuff that anybody could ever do, because I could
00:55:10.380
explain the structure of this experiment to a 10 year old. They'll get it and they'll go, wow,
00:55:15.140
this is unbelievable. That's the magic of Solomon Ash. So here's what Solomon Ash did. I'm going to put
00:55:20.780
three lines on the left. The three lines are very, very different in terms of their length. Like
00:55:26.680
a blind person would see the difference between those three lines. And then there's another line
00:55:32.580
here, X. So there are three lines here and one line here. One of these lines is the same length as one
00:55:38.300
of these three. So all I'm going to ask people is to tell me out loud, which of these three lines is
00:55:44.980
the same one as this one. Now, again, this is not ambiguous stimuli. It's very, very clear.
00:55:50.700
Right. It's obvious. It's obvious from Mars. It's obvious. But what I'm going to do now is I'm going
00:55:58.240
to test people's capacity to engage in herd-like mentality to your point about COVID. Yes, yes.
00:56:06.900
Okay. I'm happy to be stuck in a draconian prison for the next three years because dear leader said it.
00:56:12.560
I don't care what the evidence is. I am a sheep, right? So he puts, he meaning Solomon Ash,
00:56:19.280
he brings in eight people to the lab. The first seven are confederates, meaning that they are
00:56:24.860
fake subjects, unbeknownst to the eighth subject, who is a real subject. And so the first, and then
00:56:31.780
he's going to randomly allocate who sits where. And I say randomly in quotes, because it's not random.
00:56:37.000
The first seven that are going to give the answer, it's already faked. It's already rigged. And so the
00:56:43.680
first person gives the wrong answer. The second person gives the wrong answer and so on. Now,
00:56:48.440
you'd like to think that anybody who's not blind and has a modicum of a spine would look at the other
00:56:55.420
seven and say, are you effing insane? What kind of answer are you giving? But guess what? An astonishing
00:57:02.460
high number of people go, yeah, okay, yes, whatever they said. How could it be? What about your lying
00:57:09.800
eyes? So once you understand Solomon Ash, it really doesn't come as a surprise to you what happened
00:57:16.440
in COVID. Ash already explained it to us seven decades ago.
00:57:20.940
Absolutely. And I encourage people to look up. There's a video of that experiment where the first
00:57:26.360
time the real test subject, after listening to all these wrong ones, he says the right answer,
00:57:33.860
although he's uncomfortable. And then very soon thereafter, he starts just simply agreeing with
00:57:39.780
the crowd, even though it's obvious. It's really quite astonishing and frightening, frankly.
00:57:45.940
I want to just ask a quick follow-up to that one. And that is, why are some people so
00:57:52.960
acquiescent to that sort of peer pressure, but others are not? I mean, I was stunned.
00:58:02.960
And my personal experience, again, during the task force meetings was I was looking around the room
00:58:09.260
saying, am I the only person that's hearing this stuff? Why am I the only person speaking out
00:58:14.800
against what is clearly inane, illogical, and pseudoscientific statements made by Dr. Fauci and
00:58:22.140
Dr. Birx? And I wonder, people have asked me, why am I not like that? Why was I willing to be
00:58:29.100
outspoken? But I'm sort of asking you the opposite question, which is, why are people so... What is
00:58:35.220
this phenomenon of herd mentality, herd thinking, sheep-like behavior? I mean, why are some people
00:58:42.120
immune from it, and some people are just happy to go along?
00:58:46.000
So I'll answer it in two ways, both actually very, very informed from an evolutionary perspective. So
00:58:51.240
there was a study that was done now more than, I think, 15 years ago, where they primed people
00:58:56.960
either for survival or for mating. And they gave them one of two types of advertising,
00:59:03.180
either what's called a social proofing appeal. Hey, 6 billion peoples have been served and loved
00:59:08.800
it. Shouldn't you also try our burger? So social proving means everybody's done it. Shouldn't you
00:59:13.740
as well? It's been tested. The other type of appeal is one of scarcity. You know, you're the only one.
00:59:20.220
It's premium. It's newly developed and so on. It turns out that when people are primed for survival,
00:59:26.240
they're much more likely to prefer the social proofing appeal, the one where you are part of
00:59:32.600
the herd. You're moving all in sync. Because when you prime me about survival, I don't want to stick
00:59:37.680
out. I want to be part of the herd. On the other hand, when you prime me about mating, then I do want
00:59:43.580
to stick out. I don't want to be part of the herd so that I can get a chance that you pick me. So that
00:59:47.860
already gives you a sense of the evolutionary dynamics of when it makes sense to be part of the herd
00:59:53.120
and when it makes sense for me to stand up. The second point I'm going to make is that
00:59:57.960
at first it's going to sound as though I'm not answering your question, but I'm going to bring
01:00:02.580
it back. Your more general question is really, why is there a heterogeneity of personality types?
01:00:11.560
That's really your question. But why is it that you are a honey badger, Scott Atlas, but all the other
01:00:16.980
people in that room were, you know, castrated cowards. Why? Well, the answer is that evolution
01:00:23.820
would never have chosen for a singular optimal personality type because depending on the
01:00:31.720
ecosystem, different personality profiles might be the optimal one. So for example, the fact that we
01:00:38.580
have 10 fingers now, that's called a fixed trait, right? Now, some people are born with a congenital
01:00:45.180
disorder whereby they have 11 fingers or nine fingers, but the fixed phenotype is set at 10
01:00:51.300
and selection is no longer working on that problem. But when it comes to personality types, there is an
01:00:58.260
argument to be made for the conditions under which being a herd-like castrated guy would be adaptive
01:01:06.400
and where it would be adaptive for Scott atlases to emerge. And therefore, that's why you have a
01:01:13.400
distribution of both. Goddamn, where is my Nobel Prize? Look at all of these explanations.
01:01:19.660
No, but in all seriousness, you see my point? Like, there is no evolutionary reason why it should be
01:01:28.160
that the world is only inhabited by castrated herd-like people or by only Scott atlases. And
01:01:37.740
Mm-hmm. Well, I think a lot of people are happy that the world is inhabited by not just only Scott
01:01:45.040
Not your wife, though. She's very happy you did.
01:01:48.440
Okay, Gad, it was really a great pleasure chatting with you. And I'm going to have you back again,
01:01:53.940
because we never got to the part about how do we fix this? And I think this is part of, again,
01:02:00.220
an extension of your whole work is what is the solution? How do we make sure we can stop
01:02:07.460
these sort of mind viruses from being so destructive? I don't think the answer is very
01:02:13.340
simple, but we're going to catch up with you again and get a blowout on that.
01:02:18.840
I'm available at your leisure. I'll always be happy to come back. Thank you so much, Scott.
01:02:22.320
Excellent. Thanks a lot for being here, and I'll see you next time.
01:02:27.820
Thank you for listening to The Independent with Scott Atlas. If you want to check out more about
01:02:32.300
today's guest, Gad Saad, check out his podcast and YouTube channel, The Saad Truth. That's S-A-A-D.
01:02:41.120
Read his books and watch his interviews. And don't forget, please subscribe to this show on YouTube,
01:02:46.100
as well as Spotify, Apple, Google, and anywhere else you're listening to podcasts right now,