{
  "name": "(9) Gad Saad | The Psychology of Irrational Empathy: Fueling Cultural Chaos | Ep. 48 - YouTube",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=YjlC8Jnw70c",
  "youtube": {
    "title": "Gad Saad | The Psychology of Irrational Empathy: Fueling Cultural Chaos | Ep. 48",
    "description": "In this episode Scott welcomes Gad Saad, professor of marketing at Concordia University in Montreal and visiting professor at Northwood University. Professor...",
    "subtitles": "Thank you for joining us. I'm Scott Atlas. Welcome to The Independent, my show that tries to bring a rational perspective to some of the more complicated issues facing society today. Today's guest is Gad Sad. He's a professor of marketing at Concordia University in Montreal and is serving as a visiting professor at Northwood University. Professor Sad has pioneered the use of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behavior. His works include several books and published papers, many at the intersection of psychology with advertising, medicine, and economics. He's also working on a new book, Suicidal Empathy, which follows the 2020 release of his previous bestseller, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. His YouTube channel and podcast, both called The Assad Truth, S A D, have garnered millions of views. 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. Thanks for joining us and stay tuned. [Music] Okay. Uh, Gad, welcome. Thank you for coming. Oh, it's so good to be with you. I can't believe it's been more than two years since uh the Global Liberty Institute in Florida. So, great to be with you, Scott. Thank you. Right. and that uh you were at the first of uh that that meeting which of course as you know is intended to uh think not just short term and we'll talk about this because uh this is a this is a generational issue and uh educating and emboldening people to think independently and I think that's uh sort of the topic of what what this whole uh discussion will be uh you know I I'll start uh by saying you are a schol or in human behavior. Uh that's the way I look at it. And uh specifically on how people's thinking is influenced whether in marketing or in actual thought. And you you've you've moved to take that uh concept and and put it into this very very important book you wrote uh in 2020 called The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. And it's based upon your concept that ideas, ideologies are serving as infectious ideas. They're infections. They're pathogens. I I'd like you to explain that for the audience. Sure. Thanks for that question, Scott. Uh so as I was trying to come up with a framework to explain how it is that people could be so irrational in their folk psychology and their world views. I started to scour through the animal literature. So at first I you know looked at the the the field of parastology which simply looks at parasite host interactions. But a tapeworm could be a parasite that parasitizes your intestinal tract. But neuroparastology is a sub field of parasytologology where the parasite ultimately ends up going to the host's brain altering its circuitry to suit its reproductive interest. So example, a wood cricket, an actual wood cricket abhores water. It wants nothing to do with water. But when it is parasitized by a neuroparasite that's called a hairworm, the hairworm needs the wood cricket to go into water so that it could complete its reproductive cycle. So the wood cricket will merily jump into the water, commit suicide in the service of the neuroparasite that has hijacked its brain. And so that was my epiphany. Aha. I will now use the neuroparacettological framework to argue that human beings could not only be parasetized by actual brain worms. Toxopplasma Gandhi is one. But they could be parasetized by idea pathogens, hence the parasitic mind. Sure. So this the idea pathogens that you uh you talk about and I think we're we're all aware of these if you start thinking it with that framework. uh what what you called radical feminism uh this postmodernism uh etc. And your key point here at least in my reading is that these things are really stemming from academia. Okay. I mean this this and you and I are part of academia of course. uh and you know we we were all raised probably like everybody else. I'm making the assumption you know we we uh we have a lot of respect for academia for universities for professors uh and but the the origin of these so-called mind viruses and this is sort of a you know that's the concept is the university indeed. Tell me how you came from that to that and why that's such a problem of course. Right. So my first if you like academic exposure to these parasitic ideas was in the pursuit of my scientific work where I was trying to Darwinize the behavioral sciences. What does that mean? Most psychologists, most behavioral scientists study human behavior without ever invoking the biological and evolutionary roots of why we behave the way that we do. Why do we have the emotions that we do? Why does our why is our cognitive system structured the way that it is? And so in my first semester as a doctoral student at Cornell, I had taken an advanced social psychology course. And about halfway through the semester, the professor had assigned a book called Homicide, which is probably the book that most altered my sort of intellectual life. The book was written by a husband and wife team, two pioneers of evolutionary psychology, where they were arguing that certain patterns of criminality occur around the world and across time periods in exactly the same way because of evolutionary reasons. Now when I saw the elegance, the theoretical elegance, the theoretical parimony with which evolutionary theory was able to explain complex human behaviors. That's when I decided, okay, well, I'm going to take that framework and I'm going to apply it to the behavioral fields that interest me. And I thought that's pretty pretty benal. I mean, of course, human beings are biological beings. You're a physician. You you know that we are biological beings. But apparently, my colleagues in the social sciences and in the business school and in economics departments thought that I was insane. Surely according to them, biology matters for every species on earth except human beings. And if if we are going to afford the courtesy of applying evolutionary psychology or evolutionary theory to human beings, it should stop at the neck. So sure, we could explain why we have opposable thumbs according to evolutionary theory, but surely Dr. sad. You're not one of those quack Nazis that thinks the most important organ in your body called your brain is prone to the forces of evolution. Yes, I do think that. And so that was my first exposure to how perfectly supposedly reasonable academics could be paretitized by absolute nonsense. So that was my first exposure very early in so I finished my PhD in 1994. So 31 years ago and then over the next 31 years I just saw this in incessant war on reason where I would be sitting in meetings where I am evaluating uh you know grants to decide whether to grant that grant or not and it's you know queer glaciology and you know uh feminist mathematics and all the nonsense and so you know it's been a long exposure to this war on reason which then led led me to write the parasitic. Yeah, I think you're sort of pointing out a couple of things that are interesting to me. Number one, we've seen this happen people in our age uh bracket for decades. This is not a sudden phenomenon. Uh and so that that's sort of a point to consider. This is a gradual process that has occurred and been on campus frankly for decades while most of us were not paying attention to what was happening really. But the second part is we're talking about it now suddenly more than ever before and I actually my my contention is it's because of what happened during the pandemic because the pandemic put exposed things. It wasn't that it created anything. It exposed in a very personal way. We were all affected in one way or another. Uh some people very severely with their families and people died and their kids have severe psychological problems. But others of us uh were just watching this unfold with horror. And so I think this really put it front and center. And this is sort of in a funny way or a strange way, the silver lining of the pandemic was that it finally forced the issue to be confronted. That's how I view it. Um, so we're sitting here and we're looking at this happening on campus. Okay. So you you you sort of identified, you said this this sort of infestation, this distortion of thinking among the university professors themselves in your meetings. But what's happened is that uh these people are so credible in society like I mentioned right we're we're all raised to uh respect them our kids my own kids personally they were taught really okay listen to the professor uh society uses professors as you know as our experts that is the sort of expert class in many ways and so now we've uh given these people such credibility that they are very able to transmit these strange uh illogical ideas to our own children who are obviously the next leaders of of society. Right? So two two points to make. Number one, while I I agree with you that certainly co crystallized a lot of the lunacy I but but to use your co example in the same way that we now most of us agree that it was a lab leak theory. So the the virus starts off at the Wuhan lab but it eventually it escapes. The exact same corollery happens with bad ideas. The reason why many people were not paying attention including within the academic class because their reaction to me when I would be standing on top of the mountain and screaming and warning people was but come on that's come on God that's just some esoteric stupidity in some humanities. And and I hate to be the guy who says I told you so. I would tell them, but guess what? It'll break out of the humanities. Eventually, it will become our last prime minister called Justin Trudeau, who is a walking manifestation of every parasitic idea and every reflex of suicidal empathy that I've spent decades talking about. And so, so yes, at first it seems as though it is restricted to a small microcosm, but you know that pathogens eventually escape. So uh so that's number one. The other thing I would say regarding your point about the the authority and so-called expertise of professors, there's actually a very interesting psychological phenomenon here, Scott. So in in one of the one of the most beautiful uh social psychological phenomena that I learned of early in my PhD was something called the uh you know fundamental attribution error. So, you know, how do you attribute things in your life? And many of us, it's called the selfserving bias. We attribute successes internally and failures externally, right? I did well on the exam because I'm smart. I did very poorly on the exam because professor Atlas is is a mean jerk. Okay? Sounds familiar by the way. Go ahead. I faced that uh that sentiment myself many times. Now imagine a post-modernist professor stands up and starts espousing the endless endless neilistic gibberish that is completely nonsensical. Now the average audience member is faced with two possible options. Either they say that the guy who is espousing this stuff must be so profound that I'm simply too dumb to understand it. or they will say he's espousing [ __ ] and I I see through him. Now, regrettably, there's the cognitive slight of hand. Most students will say, \"It's because I'm too dumb.\" And therefore, Jacqu Deerida and Jacqu Lon and Michelle Fuko and all of the rest of the bullshitters, I hope I can say that word, all of the French postmoders and so on, can get away with what they're doing because they realize the frailty of the human condition, which is I am the fancy professor standing on top of the podium at Princeton. Surely I can't be espousing nonsense. And we all nod and say, \"Oh yes, professor, you're very fancy.\" Right? I mean part of the part of this really is not just the respect that society has for the the scholarly learned professors uh and and by the way as you know well uh this is not just a western society construct this is you know I mean I'm sure you've traveled and I've traveled as a visiting professor in places like India or Southeast Asia and China you know you're you're revered as a professor per perhaps even more I think probably more so than in places like the United States or Canada. Uh but but there's also uh the intimidation factor that even leaders have. It's not just students. And this is something that I saw and and I think it's very true that when you have people in power, whether it's a prime minister or a president, they're they're generally laymen. I'll use that term not not in a critical way but that's a literal way in terms of particularly when things like that are scientific or or in your field of psychology in in medical science in all of these areas where they are intimidated that because partly we are taught as as young people that okay these people must know this this knowledge is esoteric right so so they they defer and society does this quite a bit and I think this is one of the problems with people not being independent thinking. Uh it's not just that they're that they're not independent thinkers. It's simply that okay, they're intimidated by people who quote have the credentials. Agree. And I I actually think and I'd like to hear your thought on this. One of the things I like to hope I hope is that the era of trusting people based solely on their credential must be over. We need to be critical thinkers. I I I agree and I that's why I I abhore whenever you know I interact with all sorts of people on social media. I don't care how many followers you have. If I think that whatever you're posting is is worthy of an interaction I will interact with you. And often times I you know I'll see people say you know whatever pediatrician here which is kind of the start right I've never said you know professor Dr. Gatsad, BSC, MBA, MS, PhD, Cornell here, right? I mean, you judge me based on the veracity of my ideas. If my ideas stand the test, the sniff test, the the ecological test, the theoretical test, then it's worthy. By the way, it's interesting that you talk about sort of the that that that kind of ivory tower. We are the, you know, to to use Thomas Soul Souls, the anointed ones, right? I was and I hate to say this Scott I know you were at Stanford but in the first chapter of the parasitic mind I talk about a incident that happened at Stanford. I had been invited to Stanford business school which certainly is one of the meccas of academia to give a talk on sort of my evolutionary psychology uh research how I applied to consumer behavior to economic decision making. And the gentleman who took me out the the night before my talk the next day uh was himself a professor at Stanford Business School. And as we sat down to have dinner, he looked at me and said, \"Oh, you know, I was doing sort of a deep dive to kind of get a better sense of your profile.\" \"Oh, I didn't know you, you know, you had been on Joe Rogan so many times.\" I said, \"Oh, yeah, yeah, many times.\" He goes, \"Yeah, well, you know,\" and I'm going to try to put on the smug, arrogant, elitist face that he he used. He goes, \"Yeah, well, you know, at Stanford, we don't condone that.\" I said, \"You don't condone.\" By the way, I' I've seen that smug, arrogant face many times at Stanford and elsewhere, by the way. But go ahead. And I said, \"Uh, you you don't condone what at Stanford.\" Exactly. He goes, \"Well, we don't do our research so it could be sexy enough so that we can go on Joe Rogan's show.\" I said, \"Well, I don't do that either.\" But and here here's where he the there was a chill for the rest of the evening because I I I retorted with a classic gadism. I said, \"Well, isn't it better to do valuable research and then go in front of 20 million people and try to excite them about the research that you're doing rather than publishing your research in a peer-reviewed paper that will be read by the editor, the two reviewers, and your mom.\" and he he just went cold. Right now, again, I'm not denigrating, and I I'm sure you're not either, the power and the value of peer-reviewed papers, but shouldn't it be part of our professional responsibility to excite the public about the hopefully cool things that we do? Well, according to Stanford and Cornell and all of the anointed ones, no, we only speak to each other. We don't talk to the great unwashed. Right. And this is your uh your your concept as well as mine that you wrote. Uh it takes hottie prof I'm quoting here. It takes hottie professors decoupled from reality within the walls of their ivory tower to come up with some of the most imbecillic ideas imaginable. And and that is uh that's so true. And it's been said in different ways really o over the history by by a lot of people. But it reminds me of Orwell Orwell said something along those lines. Yeah. Right. You know, it it reminds me of a of a cartoon I once saw of people toasting at a PhD posttock party who to someone who was just awarded the PhD and the toast was and may our research never be practical, you know, never be used. I mean, this is there's sort of this reverse snobbery kind of thing going on about the about that. But I I want to talk about something that's a very important concept to all of the things that you've uh elucidated which is this idea of misplaced empathy. Okay. This is in your fourth you're writing another book which is called suicidal empathy uh to examine this uh which I I want to mention for the for the viewers. But this whole concept of misplaced empathy, it's sort of tied in with uh guilt guiltridden behavior. Could you could you go uh and give us the explanation of this? Yes, thank you for that question. So, let me kind of give the background. So, take for example OCD, obsessivecompulsive disorder. You can study OCD actually from an evolutionary perspective in the following way and I'll link it in a second to how I came up with the the framework for suicide. Okay. The idea that we should scan the environment for environmental threats makes perfect evolutionary sense. It makes perfect adaptive sense. Right? So if if I see you at a party, Scott, and I noticed that you sneezed into your hand, then you go out to shake my hand, then I'm going to very quietly after we shake hands, go to the bathroom and wash my hands because I don't want to catch your flu. That makes perfect evolutionary sense. The fact that I go to the back door of our house, make sure that it's locked, makes perfect adaptive sense. The problem arises when the scanning of the threat becomes hyperactive. So what happens to an OCD person? The the the warning flag goes up. You tend to it and then the warning flag goes up again and now you're stuck in an infinite loop of checking. So if you suffer from germ contamination OCD, you spend eight hours cleaning your hands in scolding hot water. you don't make it to work, so you get fired. Your skin is starting to fall off because you're washing it for eight hours, right? So, what what began as an adaptive process becomes maladaptive when in this case it hyperfires. And so, when I had that uh framework, I said, \"Aha, that's exactly what I'm going to argue for empathy.\" Empathy is a very noble emotion to have. It actually oils our sociality, right? So for example, part of empathy is having theory of mind, right? Putting yourself in the mind of another. We know, for example, that autistic children, one of the ways that we diagnose them as being autistic, is they fail a theory of mind task. They can't put themselves in the mind of another, which is one of the symptoms or one of the manifestations of autism. So empathy is great as long as it is within certain regulated zones. It's it's applied to the right target at the right time and the right amount which by the way Aristotle explained that to us several thousand years ago when he talked about the golden mean too little of something is not good too much of something is not good and much of life is finding that middle sweet spot and so I put all those together and I said aha that's exactly what we're seeing right now misguided misplaced orastic weaponized suicidal empathy Therefore, MS13 gang members are way more worthy of our empathy than American vets who've lost limbs, if not their lives, fighting for the United States. Right. Uh or even the victims of the gang members themselves in a very direct. Exactly. I mean, you don't want to put this if especially if let's say he's a person a criminal of color. I mean, he's already been victimized by the society, the the white supremacist society that drove in their theory. In their theory, in their theory, of course, that drove the that drove him to criminality. Now, you're going to double whammy him by putting him within the penal racist justice system. That's not nice. And so what I do in the book is I look at all of the astoundingly disastrous both domestic and foreign policies and I argue they are all rooted in this suicidal empathy. Yeah. So the I think a big a big one that has been in the news quite a bit that everyone's familiar with is the the somehow hyper concern with the rights of some people to the point where it totally destroys the rights of of the other people including in in a dangerous way. And my my example that I'm thinking of here uh is if I uh we talk about the trans issue with sports. Okay, it's one thing to start talking about, okay, trans biological men who are now considering themselves women, they want to compete in sports. It's not just actually although partly it's the opportunity lost to the biological women in the sports because the fact is as nature as all biology knows biological men have physical attributes that are beneficial in sports over biological women that's just not even arguable uh to be opposed to that idea. But the second part is that even to force women, young girls, to allow biological men in their locker rooms, in their showers. Okay. And I I think this is an a great example of what you're talking about where yes, we're we we care about the well-being and the rights of everyone, but at some point this is this is already completely irrational to go to the extreme of insisting that the rights of biological males override any rights, including privacy and personal security, of girls. Exa Exactly. And so couple of things to answer. Number one, you can go to to my YouTube channel and search Gads Canadian Senate. In 2017, I was summit summoned in front of the Canadian Senate. What was then a bill that was tabled that was being discussed, it has since passed called Bill C16, which of course famously Jordan Peterson also tried to fight. And if you listen to my testimony, again, I hate to be the guy to say I told you so, but I told you so. I exactly predicted every single thing that came down the line. I called it the tyranny of the minority, right? I said, look, it is perfectly reasonable to expect that all people should live in a world that is free of, you know, endemic bigotry. That's great. Sign me up for that. But in the pursuit of that laudable goal, we don't rape and murder truth to to achieve that, right? So, we don't all, you know, nod our heads and go, \"Yes, yes, of course, men can menstruate. Yes, yes, of course, men too can bear children, right?\" Uh, yes, yes, of course, we're going to call women cervix havers. That's that's literally true. Cervix havers because women really there's no we we don't know what is a phenotype of a woman. until about 15 minutes ago, the 117 billion people that had existed on Earth, that's that's an actual estimate, were able to fully navigate through the very difficult conundrum of finding out who is male or female. But 15 minutes ago, we lost the ability to do that. So that's point one. Point two, the idea that we should met out our investments in an evolutionarily strategic way is again foundational to evolutionary theory. So, for example, I am much more likely to jump in front of a moving bus to save my own biological child than I am to save a random person. Not because I'm a callous and mean person, but because you would expect that my emotional, cognitive, and behavioral systems would have evolved in such a way that it confers upon me some evolutionary advantage. I would like to save the random person, but if given the choice, I'm more likely to save my biological child. Now, why am I saying that? because it speaks to how you met out your empathy gas tank, right? Yes, I want to be empathetic to the one in 10,000 transgender people who may or may not be facing bigotry, but not at the expense of the empathy that is owed to all biological women to your point. Right. Right. The the calculus that was in that is within our brain has to make evolutionary sense. Suicidal empathy eradicates all that. But how so how do we uh you know this this idea of this very bizarre empathy which I'm I I I have a couple of sort of random thoughts about it. Number one, I'm it's so irrational. I'm not even ready to accept that it's sincere even by the people who espouse it. I'm not sure because you get to this issue of virtue signaling. There's a secondary gain here. And again, I'm not a psychologist. But uh as my father used to say, a keen observer of the human condition. He said that jokingly. But uh you know it is true that people get secondary gain from showing empathy from even if it's pretend empathy. And I I I don't know where I' I'd like to hear uh if you think that's going on here. I think there's definitely some of that. I think some of it is you know you know vacuous fatuous you know virtue signaling but some of it I think and hence the parasitic nature right that's why the wood cricket jumps in the water not virtue signaling his suicide he literally commits suicide because you are altering people's value systems in a way where nothing becomes more important right so to use to use the term of operations research which is a field of applied mathematics where you try to use algorithms to solve some optimization problem. The ultimate value that they are seeking to optimize is signaling to your point in a sense how good people they are. They're they're tolerant, they're kind, they're compassionate in lie of any other conflicting value. Right. So, and let me give you a and even when it when it shows that they're actually not even those things exactly right. So, here's a fantastic example and my forthcoming book has a million of those. Uh there is a Norwegian man who was raped by a so this is a male who was sodomized by a a Somali immigrant to Norway. Of course, Norway is very kind, is very empathetic. They don't believe in harsh penalties. And so, after a very very short, you know, laughable sentence, they were going to deport the Somali sodomizer. The the victim of the rape is such a good and kind person that he felt very guilty. Earlier you mentioned guilt. He felt very guilty and torn and hurt that this guy if he ends up going to Somalia will not be able to you know maximally flourish. He he's not going to ascend to Maslo's you know self-actualization apex of actualization. He didn't use those words but I'm I'm adding it to it. Now, I'm here to tell you as an evolutionary psychologist that the the human emotional system did not evolve to feel sympathy and empathy for the one who sodomized you. But see, he has transcended those material biological realities that keep you and I grounded to this. He has he's at a higher spiritual plane. He forgives his sodomizer. It's insane. Exactly. To your point, irrational. Yeah. I mean you have to a part of me always says what's dangerous is these people actually believe what they're saying. Uh even though it defies all common sense. Uh the second part I I I want to take a little diversion here and talk about something else which is in the field of how this works in advertising specifically and this is uh one of my I think biggest uh sort of I'm totally disgusted by the the advertising world combining with this idea of infecting somebody's brain into some bizarre sort of empathy and that is the glamorization that we've seen particularly in the United States but elsewhere of obesity. Okay, this has been going on for 20 years. You know, my my uh experience going walking around lower Manhattan and Soho where they have these big billboards of advertising for years, for 15, 20 years, we have seen and on the covers of women's fashion magazines, the new healthy, the new beautiful, and it's these morbidly obese people. Uh, and it's just a it's a shocking abuse of the public by people who think that they're nicer people because, oh, we're we're trying to say that you shouldn't be discriminating against obesity. And I think this has a real significant health impact because it it portrays obesity is good. It's not good. It's very bad. It's the worst possible thing pretty much that you can do for your health. you're you're you're you're predicting or you're you're you're foretelling one of the sections in suicidal empathy where I get into the bo body positivity as a form of misplaced empathy. Right? But it speaks to my earlier point about which objective function you're trying to maximize. Right? You're a physician. You obviously know do first do no harm, but now do no harm on which metric? Now you would understand it as well there is quite incontrovertible evidence that all things equal being 80 lbs overweight is probably not a good thing. But how about if I were to rearrange your objective function that you're trying to maximize whereby I say the most important function to maximize is the sense of self-esteem of your patient. In that case you're now in a a bit of a quandry. Should you tell your patient that there is unbelievable amount of evidence that suggests that you're probably going to die early if you're 80 pounds overweight or should you say you go girl healthy at any weight? Well, if you've been paretitized by suicidal empathy, the latter is the way for you to go. So, throw away your hypocratic oath. manage people's self-esteem as part of this sort of parasetization uh of of what you're thinking really. It's not just teaching it. It's not just the advertising. It's also there's a there's a negative. There's a there's a cancel culture that people have to face. So I think particularly young people, okay, people like perhaps you you and I don't care as much uh what people think of us or we wouldn't be so outspoken. Uh but we know we have we're pretty comfortable not just in our own skin but we have a social structure. Uh whereas younger people understandably and here I'm being empathetic understandably uh care a lot about what their friends and their social world thinks. are growing up and I and I I do uh understand that but this cancel culture is very effective I think and I wonder uh what what you think about that and what role that's playing in sort of making people have these totally uh irrational really senses of where empathy should be. Great question and I hope you'll appreciate my answer although it might sound slightly harsh in terms of the exacting code of conduct by which I abide. I care a lot less about what other people think of me as compared to what I think of me. meaning that I am my harshest critic and therefore I set my code of conduct to be so exacting that I will never walk away from the defense of the truth in the service of managing the impression that other people have of me because Scott when I put my head on the pillow to go to bed at night I can't go to sleep and I will suffer from insomnia and I'll have to come to Dr. Scott Atlas to help me with my insomnia because I will feel as though I were a fraud. I'm a charlatan. How could I be I couldn't agree more with you. You know, this is of course I think we're we're very sympatico with this kind of stuff. I mean uh personally, I don't know how these people look at themselves in the mirror. the people that in my case the lockdowners, the people at Stanford University who refuse to admit they were wrong and refused to admit I and others were right. I don't know how they can look at themselves. I don't know how they can look at their children. Can I tell you how they do it? So there's a and I I feel as though I should getting like some kind of cut of their royalties if all of my promotion of their book is is causing an increase in sales. There's a there's a book that was written by two French psychologists, cognitive psychologists, one of whom has been on my show. It's Ugier and Dan Sperber. They wrote a book called The Enigma of Reason. And they ar they argued very provocatively but very convincingly in my view that the faculty of reasoning, human reasoning did not evolve to seek some objective truth, but rather to win arguments. right now. That's a very disheartening, you know, insight to have because what that basically says is most people don't care about the truth. Most people care about winning arguments. So your Stanford colleagues are never going to come and say, you know, in light of the incoming evidence, I now concede that Scott or Jay were right. I would rather die before I ever accept that. So in in in our utopian epistemological view, we think that all professors are simply pursuing truth. No, they're pursuing the objective of winning arguments. So you're going to be waiting a long time before they send you that apology letter, Scott. Yeah. which which yeah I I I'm not anticipating one but uh you know I I do really uh feel it's not it's sort of something we have to reconcile as a society that these people will not admit they were wrong. They will not accept fact. They will not talk about what the evidence shows. And now now we have to figure out how to move forward when you have a society like that because we're literally living in a in a society where facts don't carry the day. Facts don't matter. And I think that's a very cynical sort of message. But I I'm I am grappling with uh h how we move forward. How do we get closure particularly again from the pandemic where millions of people were killed from the wrong policy. children were were cutting their their wrists, were were killing themselves, have severe psychological damage. We shifted the burden to the poor. All these grossly unethical and immoral things were done. And yet uh half of the country or whatever will just simply they want to turn the page. They want to just forget it. They will never admit they were wrong. I I mean I do have in chapter seven of the parasitic mind the chapter is titled how to seek truth. I do offer a methodology for demonstrating to even your staunchest detractors the veracity of your position. Now if they go la I don't want to hear it then then they are impervious to anything I might present. But as long as they grant me the courtesy to at least lay out the arguments I I do have a way of doing that. Would you like me to to share very Sure. Oh, sure. Absolutely. So there is a thing that I call nomological networks of cumulative evidence which is a a mouthful but it basically means that when you are trying to demonstrate the the veracity of a position you're taking what if I get you data from across cultures across time periods across species across methodologies all of which triangulate to demonstrating that my position is correct. Now, it's a lot more than a literature review. It's much broader. It's a lot more than a metaanalysis. Meta analyses are much more pointed to a specific relationship between a couple of variables. This is a an epistemological, you know, you know, chainsaw. So, let me give a concrete example. Let's suppose, Scott, that you were a social scientist who argued, as do most social scientists, that toy preferences are socially constructed. So the reason why little boys prefer certain types of toys and little girls prefer other types of toys is because of social construction and I want to come and prove to you that no there is a universality to the sex specificity of toy preferences that is due to biology. How would I go about doing that? Okay. So now I'm going to build a partial nomological network to show you that. Okay. You with me? Okay. Okay. Yes. I can get you data from developmental psychology showing you that children who are too young to yet be socialized. So by definition they could not have been socialized. They haven't reached that cognitive developmental stage. They're already exhibiting those sex specific toy preferences. That's a pretty incontrovert incontrovertible piece of evidence. But I'm I'm not going to stop there. I can get you data from Reese's monkeys and vervet monkeys and chimpanzees showing you that their infants exhibit the exact same sex specific toy preferences as we do. I can get you data from other cultures that are completely non-western. subsaharan Africa showing you that they exhibit the same sex specific toy preferences. I'll just do two more, but the network is actually much bigger. I can get you data from 2,500 years ago in ancient Greece and ancient Rome where onerary m uh monuments on mausoleiums little boys and girls are depicted playing with exactly the same types of toys as today. And I'll get you one more if only because you're from medicine. you I can get you data from pediatric endocrinology showing you that little girls who suffer from congenital adrenal hyperlasia which is a disorder that masculinizes little girls' behaviors and morphologies girls who suffer from this disorder have the exact sex specific reversal of their toy preferences. So look what I did. I got you data from across cultures, from developmental psychology, from across species, from across time periods and so on. All of which triangulate to the incontrovertible nature of the position that I'm taking. Now you earlier mentioned cancel culture. So let me now close out by going back to cancel culture. Many people ask me, how is it that you're undoubtedly probably the most outspoken professor by orders of magnitude and yet you're not cancelled? Well, there are several reasons for that. One of which is that I have very very well- reggulated epistemic humility. When I know something, I walk with someone who's got all the swagger of having built my knowological network. Good luck if you want to debate me. But when I don't know something, I'm the first to say, \"Hey, Scott, that's a great question. Unfortunately, it's out of my area of expertise. It's above my pay grade. So, I don't try to wing it.\" And what that does is you could never catch me. I've been on Joe Rogan a million times. There is, you know, 30, 40 hours of content, yet you've never caught me with my quote pro, you know, proverbial pants down because I never [ __ ] I exactly know what I know and what I don't know. And so I think if people could have that epistemological discipline, we could have a society more built on truth and less on emotional incontinence. Yeah, I think that's very important. Uh no doubt. Uh when things get crazy, I think people drop uh drop that though. uh part of it is like for instance in the in sort of the pandemic where people the fear there there were a lot of emotions it wasn't just an argument it was something bigger but I think the second reason that you don't get cancelled is that you're not going to allow yourself to be canceled I mean I think that and you know this is really a fundamental point that I'm sure you you you probably agree is that there's a we first of all we need to speak out for truth we can't have an ethical society uh without the truth being spoken. Uh but more importantly in a funny way is that the value of speaking out is that you you facilitate other people speaking out. Not everybody has to be the tip of the spear, but we need some tips of spears. Yeah. And when you do that, and people have said this to me many times, I'm sure you've been told the one of the most important things you've ever done is speak out for things that other people agree with. but they're they're not necessarily comfortable or they're afraid to speak out. When they hear you speak out, they say, \"Well, yes, I agree with that.\" And I mean, I think there's a very important part of having the courage to speak out. Uh, and you know, you're certainly one of those people. I want to I want to talk a few minutes about sort of the Trump election. Uh now I I view the Trump election, I think everybody does it, uh who's following this as a repudiation of failed policies. I think this was a policy election. Uh you know, whether it's the economy or rampant crime, uh international instability that that we all saw happen under uh the Biden administration. But there's something more, and it's hard to quantify if it was that impactful, but it's what I call sort of a reaction of what I call cultural perversions that defy common sense. You know, girls should be forced to allow biological men in their locker rooms. Anybody, if you're a parent of a daughter, I don't know how you would tolerate that. I have sons, but I still, it's so obvious to me. or that biological men want to be in a women's prison even though they're a rapist. I mean, you know, because they're going to say they're a woman, you know. Uh how do you view the awakening, I'll call it, of at least the American voter? Uh why did that happen? Because, okay, this this sort of I mean, it took something to change this to awaken people. Maybe it was not uh the cultural stuff at all. I don't know. I'd like to hear your thoughts on that. And then I want to talk about a concern I have, which is I sense that there's a lot of people that think, okay, Trump won, now we're done. Problem solved. There's almost a very premature sort of complacency going on. But that's the second part. First, I want to hear your views on what it means that Trump was elected. Well, I I I think you're right on both points. I think that you know most decent people are tired of feeling insecure about whether they can say that only women menstruate. I mean let me let me give you a very specific example. I receive emails from ostensibly functioning adults who write to me the following email. Dear Professor Sad, you know, I know that you are an evolutionary behavioral scientist who studied sex differences, blah blah blah. Uh, I mean, is it does science now consider it that, you know, men can menstruate? Now imagine on on the shaky grounds you're on in terms of to use the term that everybody uses now on terms of gaslighting that you need to write me to receive my impremature to something that the average three-day old squirrel would otherwise know. Right? So that's the trick that has taken place over the past 50 to 100 years with all of these parasitic ideas infecting our minds where I no longer what up is down, left is right, men are women, slavery is is freedom and so on. And so most people woke up one day, I mean it takes some tipping point and said like I've had enough. I've had enough of going to DEI things where I'm told that I'm a disgusting white heterosexual male. I've had enough and I'm voting for whichever candidate, you know, frees me of that nonsense. So, so your first point is certainly true, but I really love your second question because I've been exactly warning against I mean, I literally started warning about this the day after Trump won. Yes, I was elated as a Canadian that Trump had won because the the alternative would have been that much more disastrous. But I kept saying to anybody who would listen to me, don't rest on your laurels. It took 50 to 100 years for these disastrous ideas to flourish and become part of accepted society. We're not going to eradicate this by four-year term of Trump. Yes, he's an important doors stop. The opposite would have been disastrous, but it's a long battle. Now, I'd like to think that it won't take 50 to 100 years to develop the vaccine against all these parasitic ideas, but it's not going to start and end with Trump. I completely agree with you, Scott. Yeah. And and I think uh part of the uh of the issue is that in my view there's this idea of turning the page on what I consider the most heinous abusive leadership in our lifetimes which was the pandemic lockdowns. And it's not that everything is about the pandemic, but it's that again the exposure uh of unbridled power and the people's acquiescence, which I think was even more shocking to me. But if we turn the page on these things and just assume, okay, we're done. We fixed it. Trump is elected or whatever. Uh we have people that are going to repeal some of these healthc care things or or add uh transparency or whatever. I I think that we eliminate the closure that is needed for people a who lost their family, whose older parent died and they were forbidden from seeing them, whose child killed himself, who uh who became uh the hundreds of millions of people who were thrown into abject poverty in the world. All these things we need we need a a closure of recognizing truth. But secondly, that eliminates all accountability to those in power if we just turn the page. We don't want to talk about it. It's uncomfortable. So, we're not going to we're not going to go through that. And I and I think uh I don't know about the psychology of turning the page because it is easier to not talk about things that are unpleasant particularly since most people are shamefully complicit in not just allowing it to happen as an acquiescence kind of thing but also even advocating it to me it it reminded me of the historical views of what happened in Nazi Germany where a lot of quote good people were implicit in watching the Jews being put on the trains and even actively threw stones at them. You see it in the movie clips. Good people. Okay. The benality of evil. Hannah errand. uh you know the and and I'm I'm very concerned about so there's a comp a complacency and also almost a desire to move on as if there's no problems now because and I agree with you if I if I can go on one more sentence which is that I I'm not sure that there is somebody like Donald Trump again. Okay. I mean, this guy is a unique He's the tough I I said he's the toughest so I've ever known. And I'm saying that in a positive way. He's a unique person. He galvanized support. He's he identifies with the common man. The common man identifies with him. And uh he's an inspirational figure to a lot of people. And I I'm not I'm I'm concerned that it's a oneoff. Well, I'll I'll just mention you your point about how you're qualifying Trump. I just posted a tweet today. I think it's it's currently pinned on my feed. It was a a a post directed to Pierre Palev who had an insurmountable lead in the Canadian in the forthcoming Canadian election. I mean really like 30 points and now it has flipped. And so the the point of my tweet and I'll I'll kind of paraphrase it. I said look I said, \"Dear Pierre, you know, here's some unsolicited advice. You could take it or leave it. Truly historical figures are not fence sitters. They don't equivocate. Donald Trump won the presidency twice because he doesn't give an F. I mean, and I put star for the F. Uh Elon Musk has achieved what he's achieved because he doesn't give an F. Joe Rogan done what he's done because he doesn't give an F. So real historical figures whether they are in the in the in the evil side of the ledger or the positive side of the ledger just see a path forward and they just move forward. And in in the case of I I hate to say it but in the case of PV he's he's doing the Kamala thing which is you know I I won't go on Joe Rogan because the political consultants told me I should and so on and you're not going to win this way. So I completely agree with you. I mean, Donald Trump is a historical figure like probably no other that we will ever see in our lifetimes. And it's not because I've got Donald Trump posters in my bedroom, right, as a marital, right? I'm Canadian. I truly don't have a dog in this fight. But no one that I can think of has had as much thrown as as as he has and come out victorious. So, that has to be right. Now, regarding the the other issues, you're talking about the the benality of evil and the acquiescence and so on. One of my favorite experiments in all of behavioral sciences, in all of psychology, which is saying a lot, there's a lot of research in psych in psychology. That's great. Is the Solomon Ash conformity experiments to your Oh, this is amazing. Yes, I've watched this over and over again. I mean, and now, so do you mind if I explain it to our to Go ahead. Absolutely. Now, several reasons why, and I've lectured this a million times. I still get goosebumps when I lecture it because I tell my students, you don't have to do convoluted research for it to be some of the most impactful stuff that anybody could ever do because I could explain the structure of this experiment to a 10-year-old. They'll get it and they'll go, \"Wow, this is unbelievable.\" That's the magic of Solomon Hash. So, here's what Solomon Hash did. I'm going to put three lines on the left. The three lines are very, very different in terms of their length. like a blind person would see those you know the difference between those three lines and then there's another line here X so there are three lines here and one line here one of these lines is the same length as one of these three so all I'm going to ask people is to tell me out loud which of these three lines is the same one as this one now again this is not ambiguous stimuli it's very very clear what is the it's obvious it's obvious from a from from Mars it's obvious is but what I'm going to do now is I'm going to test people's capacity to engage in herdlike mentality to your point about co Yes. Yes. Okay. I'm happy to be stuck in a draconian prison for the next three years because dear leader said it I don't care what the evidence is. I am a sheep. Right. So he puts he meaning Solomon Ash he brings in eight people to the lab. The first seven are confederates, meaning that they are fake subjects, unbeknownst to the eighth subject, who is a real subject. And so the first and then he's going to randomly allocate who sits where. And I say randomly in quotes because it's not random. The first seven that are going to give the answer, it's already faked. It's it's already rigged. And so the first person gives the wrong answer, the second person gives the wrong answer, and so on. Now, you'd like to think that anybody who's not blind and has a modicum of a spine would look at the other seven and say, \"Are you effing insane? What kind of answer are you giving? You can't.\" But guess what? An astonishing high number of people go, \"Yeah, okay. Yes, whatever they said.\" How could it be? H what about your lying eyes? So once you understand Solomon Ash, it really doesn't come as a surprise to you what happened in CO Ash already explained it to us seven decades ago. Absolutely. And I encourage people to look up the there's a video of that experiment where the first time the the the uh the real test subject after listening to all these wrong ones he says the right answer although he's uncomfortable and then very soon thereafter he starts just simply agreeing with the crowd even though it's obvious it's really quite astonishing and and frightening frankly. I I want to just ask a quick followup to that one and that is why are some people so uh so so uh acquiescent to that sort of peer pressure but others are not. I mean I was stunned. I I I I my personal experience again during the task force meetings was I was looking around the room saying am I the only person that's hearing this stuff? Why am I the only person speaking out against what is clearly inane, illogical and pseudocientific statements made by Dr. Fouchy and Dr. Burks? And I wonder uh people have asked me why am I not like that? Why was I willing to be outspoken? But I I'm sort of asking you the opposite question, which is why are people so uh what is this phenomenon of herd herd mentality, herd thinking, sheep sheeplike behavior? I mean why are some people immune from it and some people are just happy to go along? So I'll answer it in two ways both actually very very informed from an evolutionary perspective. So there was a study that was done now more than I think 15 years ago where they primed people either for survival or for mating. And they gave them one of two types of advertising either what's called a social proofing appeal. Hey six billion peoples have been served and loved it. Shouldn't you also try our burger? So social proving means everybody's done it. Shouldn't you as well? It's been tested. The other type of appeal is one of scarcity. You know, you you're the only one. It's premium. It's newly developed and so on. It turns out that when people are primed for survival, they're much more likely to prefer the social proofing appeal, the one where you are part of the herd. You're moving all in sync. Because when you prime me about survival, I don't want to stick out. I want to be part of the herd. On the other hand, when you prime me about mating, then I do want 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 already gives you a sense of the evolutionary dynamics of when it makes sense to be part of the herd and when it makes sense for me to stand up. The second point I'm going to make uh is that at first it's going to sound as though I'm not answering your question, but I'm going to bring it back. The your more general question is really why is there a heterogeneity of personality types? That's really your question. Like why is it that you are a honeybadger Scott Atlas but all the other people in that room were you know castrated cowards? Why? Well, the answer is that evolution would never have chosen for a singular optimal personality type because depending on the ecosystem, different personality profiles might be the optimal one. So for example, the fact that we have 10 fingers now that's called a fixed trait. Right? Now some people are born with a congenital disorder whereby they have 11 fingers or nine fingers. But the fixed phenotype is set at 10 and selection is no longer working on that problem. But when it comes to personality types, there is an argument to be made for the conditions under which being a herd herdlike castrated guy would be adaptive and where it would be adaptive for Scott Atlases to emerge. And therefore, that's why you have a distribution of both. Godamn, where is my Nobel Prize? Look at all of these explanations. No, but but in all seriousness, you you see my point? Like there is no there is no evolutionary reason why it should be that the world is only inhabited by castrated herdlike people or by only Scott atlases. And that's why we've got the mix of both types. Well, I think a lot of people are happy that the world is inhabited by not just only Scott Atlases. Let's put it that way. Not your wife though. She's very happy to use this. Okay, Gad, it was really a great pleasure chatting with you and I'm going to have you back again because we never got to the part about how do we fix this? And I think this is part of uh again an extension of your whole your whole work is what is the solution? How do we how do we make sure we can stop these sort of mind viruses from being so destructive? I don't think the answer is very simple, but uh we're going to catch up with with you again and get get a load out on that. I'm available at your leisure. I always be happy to come back. Thank you so much, Scott. Excellent. Thanks a lot for being here and uh I'll see you next time. Cheers. Take care. Thank you for listening to the Independent with Scott Atlas. If you want to check out more about today's guest, Gad Sad, check out his podcast and YouTube channel, The Sad Truth. That's S A D. read his books and watch his interviews. And don't forget, please subscribe to this show on YouTube as well as Spotify, Apple, Google, and anywhere else you're listening to podcasts right now. And I'll see you next time. [Music]",
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