Ask Dr. Drew - Dr Gad Saad: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense - Ask Dr. Drew - Episode 33

Episode Date: February 26, 2021

“Read this book, strengthen your resolve, and help us all return to reason,” says Jordan Peterson, in a review of Dr. Gad Saad’s latest publication “The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense” available now at https://go.drdrew.com/gadbook. Dr. Gad Saad is a professor, evolutionary behavioral scientist, and author. He hosts The Saad Truth podcast and YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/gadsaad. More about Gad Saad: https://www.gadsaad.com/  Follow Gad Saad at https://twitter.com/GadSaad  Dr. Gad Saad is Professor of Marketing at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada), and former holder of the Concordia University Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption (2008-2018). He has held Visiting Associate Professorships at Cornell University, Dartmouth College, and the University of California–Irvine. Dr. Saad received the Faculty of Commerce’s Distinguished Teaching Award in June 2000, and was listed as one of the ‘hot’ professors of Concordia University in both the 2001 and 2002 Maclean’s reports on Canadian universities. Saad was appointed Newsmaker of the Week of Concordia University in five consecutive years (2011-2015), and is the co-recipient of the 2015 President’s Media Outreach Award-Research Communicator of the Year (International), which goes to the professor at Concordia University whose research receives the greatest amount of global media coverage. [Streamed live on Feb 17, 2021] Get an alert when Dr. Drew is taking calls: http://drdrew.tv/ Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation ( https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/FirstLadyOfLove). THE SHOW: For over 30 years, Dr. Drew Pinsky has taken calls from all corners of the globe, answering thousands of questions from teens and young adults. To millions, he is a beacon of truth, integrity, fairness, and common sense. Now, after decades of hosting Loveline and multiple hit TV shows – including Celebrity Rehab, Teen Mom OG, Lifechangers, and more – Dr. Drew is opening his phone lines to the world by streaming LIVE from his home studio in California. On Ask Dr. Drew, no question is too extreme or embarrassing because the Dr. has heard it all. Don’t hold in your deepest, darkest questions any longer. Ask Dr. Drew and get real answers today. This show is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. All information exchanged during participation in this program, including interactions with DrDrew.com and any affiliated websites, are intended for educational and/or entertainment purposes only. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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A psychopath started this way. He was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction, fentanyl and heroin. Ridiculous. I'm a doctor for... Where the hell do you think I learned that? I'm just saying, you go to treatment before you kill people. I am a clinician. I observe things about these chemicals.

Let's just deal with what's real. We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time. Educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat. If you have trouble, you can't stop and you want help stopping, I can help. I got a lot to say. I got a prevent and to treat. If you have trouble, you can't stop, and you want to help stop it, I can help. I got a lot to say. I got a lot more to say. And I will be taking your calls at the usual number, 984-237-3739, 237-3739. And of course, we're on the restream.

I'm watching you guys chat it up here. A lot of cold Texans in our restream today. But speaking of someone who's cold, I'm going to welcome in my guest, Dr. Gad Saad, who is in the, as he describes, the frozen tundra of Montréal. He is a professor of marketing at Concordia University up there in Canada. He is the research chair in Elluchet Biology Sciences and Darwinian Consumption. He has held visiting professorships

at Cornell, Dartmouth, and Irvine here. His new book is The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. Dr. Saad can be followed at Saad, S-A-D-G-A-A-D, the opposite of his name. The Sad Truth is his podcast, and of course, sad is spelled S-A-A-D.

Dr. Sad, thank you and welcome for joining us. Dr. Drew, very good to be with you, sir. So I want to talk a little more broadly about you to start out with and evolutionary biology because I was originally trained as a biologist. And when I was trained, there was not a distinction between biology and evolutionary biology. It was thought of as one thing. If you were a biologist, you were an evolutionary biologist. That was just a foregone conclusion. How did you get into evolutionary biology? And then how did you go from there to your current topics in marketing? Right. So my first semester as a doctoral student at Cornell,

my eventual doctoral supervisor, who's a cognitive psychologist, suggested that I take a course in advanced social psychology by a professor named Dennis Regan. And about halfway through the semester, he assigned a book by two of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology, Margot Wilson and Martin Daly, husband and wife team. The book is titled Homicide, where they basically looked at patterns of criminality

around the world via an evolutionary lens. And that lens was so extraordinary in its explanatory power, it was so parsimonious, that that's how I became, you know, bitten by the evolutionary bug. And since I was very interested in studying psychology of decision making in general, and consumer psychology in particular, I had my epiphany, I would apply evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology to study consumer behavior. Interesting. I want to, you know, this is, again, this is all very fertile landscape for me.

I have lots of interesting kind of, I think about this a little bit. And back to the homicide thing, I have my own little homicidal evolutionary biological kind of thoughts. These aren't even theories. They aren't even hypotheses yet. But there's a book called Albion Seed, which chronicles the four major diasporas out of regions of England into the United States and the particular regions of the United States, the characteristic, the cultures, the genetic heritages of these individuals. And there was a group that came in from the highlands of England into particularly the Carolinas in that area. And they were essentially, if you watch Game of Thrones, they were essentially wildlings. They were maniacs.

And they were alcoholics addicts too. A lot of my patients can look at their heritage right back to the Scotch-Irish that came in through that part of the country. But it's occurred to me that a lot of these sort of wild mass killings we've seen in this country have usually happened in the West. And I thought, well, you've got all these wild things coming into the southern states, and then the really crazy ones thought they'd put their family on a wagon and go West.

It makes sense to me that we'd have an interesting population out here in the West. Well, yeah, sure. That's certainly true. In the case of the book Homicide and in my work, I don't look so much at aggregate data in the sense of specific ethnic groups or so on, but rather the evolutionary mechanisms that result in individual differences in behavior. So to go back to the homicide case, forgive me if I ask you this question, but do you know what is the number one predictor of child abuse? So for example, if I asked you, what is the greatest predictor that a child is likely to be

abused? is it the socioeconomic status is it which side of the track he or she lives on and this fact that i got by the way comes from homicide so i would imagine well one element that sort of an easy layup is whether the parents had been abused right so that's the classic one you would give or for example if there's an alcoholic parent, which are all, they explain some of the variants, but the biggest predictor, which is a hundredfold greater in its predictive ability is whether there is a step parent in the home. And this, in evolutionary biology became known as the Cinderella effect also by Martin Daly. Yes. I'm aware of that. I'm aware of that. And we can see

this in countless other animals where when a new male comes in and removes the residing dominant male, the first thing that he will do is get rid of any cubs that could not have been sired by him because it doesn't make evolutionary sense to be invested, right? So look how powerful and how parsimonious that explanation is. You could take the next 99 strongest variables, and they wouldn't have the same predictive ability as that one insight. Well, and it's parsimonious from the standpoint also of general evolutionary biology in that it's a feature you see in other mammals. Exactly.

Yeah. And to be fair, it's not's not step parent it's step father that's the one that really that really is the problem right it depends it depends on which type of abuse so for example in the cinderella effect it's the evil stepmother so for example if it comes to sexual abuse then of course it's going to be overwhelmingly a stepfather but if it comes to other forms of child abuse uh the ladies can hold their own ground when it comes to diabolical hearts, right? To quote your earlier comment about cross mammals, that's one of the fields cousins so that you can get a sense of the evolutionary linkage between us and our animal cousins. But very rarely do you ever see that

studied in economics or in psychology and so on. Well, I guess, I mean, it's not vogue today, let's say, but when I was in training, it was routine to look to other primate, the closer, the better, other primate species, and see if you see primordial behaviors, primordial biologies, primordial hormonal systems, and then extrapolate it over to the human and see if it helped clarify our understanding of things. One experiment that comes to mind to me is with capuchin were, there's a famous experiment that has been completely shattered, but it's, I guarantee you, accurate, believe me, which is they give a monkey a, they reinforce its behavior, giving it like a nut or something. It's like a nut,

and he's in a cage next to another monkey, and they both are getting their nuts, getting their nuts, and all of a sudden, the experimenter gives a grape to the one of the monkeys and then when the monkey is given the other one's giving a nut he throws it back at the experimenter which fits perfectly with human behavior this is how it makes perfect sense i think that the study that you're referring to might be the one by laurie santos at yale university if i'm not mistaken i think that's right so you're exactly right we can now by the way you were saying that you you were exposed to that in your studies but i think you studied biology right so that makes sense with right within the social science yeah yeah i can yeah within the social sciences i can assure you that

till today most social scientists consider it completely heretical to apply evolutionary thinking to study human behavior, or they're willing to conceive that, you know, our opposable thumbs are due to evolution, but anything above the neck must be due to some mysterious force outside of evolution. It's insane. It's so wild to me. Yeah, and I, the question, you know, whenever I look at comparative cultures, for instance, I always want to know, of course, culture has a huge influence. The environment has a huge influence on us. But I always want to know why those behaviors.

What is it about the human that those were the behaviors that were, for lack of a better word, selected for in that particular culture? Why do the Aztecs tear the heart out and throw the body down the stairs of the temple? The comparative culturists go, they believe the sun wouldn't come up if they... No, no, no, no, no.

Why that behavior? Why did they start with that one? Why did it stick and resonate with that population? These things don't come from nowhere. What's that? Exactly. And I was going to say that what you just described is exactly what behavioral ecologists study, which is, so typically people think of evolutionary psychologists as folks who

study human universals, things that make us all similar. But that's actually not true. We also study cross-cultural differences as adaptive responses, right? So culture itself can be malleable in ways that are perfectly in line with evolutionary thinking. So let me give you, I think, an example that you might enjoy. So if you look at the distribution of the use of spices across cuisines around the world, if you were simply a cultural anthropologist, you would simply revel at demonstrating that Mexican food is spicier than Swedish food. But the conversation would end there. The next question

to ask is why? And it turns out, and as a physician, you might really appreciate this, it turns out that the hotter the ambient temperature that the culture is in, the more you'll have a proliferation of foodborne pathogens. Therefore, the use of spices is an antimicrobial solution to an ecological problem within that niche. So you are using culture, in this case cuisine, to solve an adaptive problem. Which is usually my, see, I just see everything that involves biological systems involves some sort of evolutionary pressures, including culture. And I don't understand why we pull that out and go, oh, no, no, not that. That's special.

And indeed, it has some special qualities in whether you call it cultural memes or whatever we call it. It's... It needs special consideration and study still under the same forces that everything else biologically is. And maybe I can...

Oh, sorry. go ahead, Greg. If you think otherwise, then you're into human exceptionalism, and that's a gigantic mistake. But go ahead. Exactly right. I was going to say that for your viewers, if you're thinking about the nature versus nurture dichotomy, so I often teach my students that it's really an erroneous dichotomy, because let me draw an analogy. So if you take all of the ingredients of a cake, the butter, the eggs, the sugar,

the baking soda, when you first see them, they're all distinct from one another. Then you bake the cake. If I then asked you to point to the eggs in the cake, you wouldn't be able to point to the sugar. It's an inextricable mix of all of the ingredients. Well, there is no nature or nurture. We are an inextricable mix of both forces. That's right. That's right. And they feed back on one another in terribly complicated ways.

I was always a fan of David Buss, but he seems like his stuff's under scrutiny these days. And some of it I'm sympathetic to because we tell ourselves as evolutionary biologists just so stories because we're sort of used to thinking that way. And we don't necessarily get the opportunity to do classical RCT studies to confirm our biases or at least our thoughts. Although you have to be pretty creative to come up with those kinds of studies. As a matter of fact, of all of the attacks against evolutionary psychology, the one that I find most galling is the just-so story attack. Because good evolutionary psychologists actually do the exact opposite. They set the evidentiary threshold for an adaptation so high

that it actually squashes the evidentiary thresholds of other sciences. So in chapter seven of the parasitic mind, I talk about an epistemological approach, which I call nomological networks of cumulative evidence. So if I want to demonstrate to you that some phenomenon is adaptive, I will get you data from across species, across cultures, across time periods, across methodologies, and so on. So that if all of that data points in the exact same direction, it becomes unassailable that I'm onto something. And the original guy who built such a network was Charles Darwin, right? Before he published Origin of Species, he actually assiduously collected data from many different

disciplines, all of which, when put together, made it incontrovertible evidence. So I really get frustrated when people attack. I mean, David Buss is a good friend of mine, and I've been attacked many times, because the people who levy these attacks are simply demonstrating their ignorance of the epistemology of evolutionary thinking. Is this nomological network thought process helping push back against some of these attacks? It is because ultimately I can walk into a room where I know that out of 400 people, 395 are going to a priori be hostile to what I'm saying, but I very calmly present the data and then nobody utters a single word against me because I don't turn into a hysteric.

I don't get emotional. I don't scream. I say, oh, you want me to prove to you that toy preferences are not socially constructed? Let me build the nomological network for you. And then I drown you in a tsunami of evidence. So it becomes impossible for you to argue against. You brought up the word hysteric and hysterical and histrionic. I've been thinking lately, like we have come, I thought we were into a narcissistic term, but I'm beginning to think we're into a histrionic turn. I mean, if five years ago, somebody came up to me and told me they were seeing Nazis everywhere and thinking about Hitler all the time, I'd put them in the hospital. I'd certainly think about putting them on medication.

And now that's our news media. It's a collective process. I mean, the delusionality has become really concerning, actually. Do you agree? Oh, I agree big time. As a matter of fact, one of the terms that I coined in writing The Parasitic Mind is collective Munchhausen, right? So you may know this, but many of your viewers may not there's a psychiatric condition uh that traditionally was called now they changed the term but used to be called munchhausen syndrome this is where someone faints an injury or a medical illness so they can garner empathy or sympathy munchhausen syndrome by proxy

is where you take someone who's under your care, an elderly person, a pet, a biological child, you harm them so that you can garner by proxy the sympathy. Well, I argue that the hysteria that we see is a form of collective Munchausen, right? Everybody is so afraid that Donald Trump is going to round them up in detention centers to gang-rate people of color. It is so orgiastic in its stupidity. I can get away with that kind of satire because ultimately I typically outrank everybody on victimology because I come from the Middle East where we escape execution. So in a sense, you and I can say the exact same thing. I'll get away with it because of the progressive calculus, whereas you will be coined as the new Himmler. It's grotesque and it has to stop. It is wild to me. I hope we look

back at this and shake our heads and go, whoa, how'd that happen? I mean, really be critical of what we've done. But let's talk about the book for a second, The Parasitic Mind. The subtitle is How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. What led you to write it and what do we plan to learn by reading it? Yeah, thanks for asking. So I guess I faced two great wars in my life. The first war was growing up in Lebanon. We were part of the last group of Lebanese Jews in Lebanon. And when the Civil War broke out in 1975, it became rather precarious to be Jewish. And so we had to leave the brutality of the Civil War. The second great war that I faced is once I became a professor, actually, even before when I was a doctoral student. When I became a professor in 1994, I started seeing the great war on reason, on common sense, on facts, on logic. All the way back then. I'm surprised that you could see it

then. I'm sort of... Yes, because I of yes post-modernism and all that nonsense in the social sciences so and and a term that i use in the book biophobia the fear of using biology to explain human phenomena so at first it was restricted to the blowback i would get in my own scientific field but then i started seeing that all of these, what I call idea pathogens, that were all spawned on university campuses, were now proliferating across all the nooks and crannies of society in HR departments, in granting agencies, in politics, in culture, in Hollywood. And so I wrote this book to trace the evolution of these idea pathogens and to inoculate ourselves, to vaccinate ourselves against this imbecilic stupidity. Other than critical reason, what is to inoculate ourselves, to vaccinate ourselves against this imbecilic stupidity.

Other than critical reason, what is the inoculant? Well, so there are a couple of things. Number one is if you develop the discipline of not critical thinking in general, although of course that's the case, but of how to think like a nomological network builder. In chapter eight, I talk about several calls to action. So for example, one of them is activate your inner honey badger. And so why do I use that imagery? Because the honey badger is an extraordinarily ferocious animal. It's the size of a small dog, and yet it could intimidate six adult lions attacking it. Well, I argue that you have to defend your principles with the

ferocity of a honey badger. If you come after me, Dr. Drew, I don't mean you, but someone on Twitter or whatever, they really have to not miss because if you don't miss, I'm coming after you, I'm coming after your ancestors, I'm coming after your dead ancestors, because I'm very self-assured about what I know and what I don't know. And so we have to be honey badgers. We have to be critical thinkers. We have to not subcontract our voices to the few who are willing to have the courage to defend the free societies that we live in. And so for all of these different reasons, cowardice, apathy, lack of critical thinking,

we are allowing these miscreants to lead us to the abyss of infinite lunacy. It's so interesting to me when people push back on biology and the way they do. There could be no practice of medicine, the way the post-structuralists think about things. We couldn't do what we do. It would be impossible. There'd be no such thing as a pattern called a diagnosis, because that doesn't exist. You couldn't have it. What do we do with the likes of michelle foucault

uh we uh read him and laugh at him and move on and study something serious holy am i allowed to use a slightly spicy word on your show or not? The BS, can I break it? Oh yeah, BS, no problem. I call them the holy trinity of BSers, meaning Michel Foucault. Let me guess, let me guess. Chausseur? Foucault? Is Chausseur one of them? No, there's worse.

Wait, hold on. Who is it? Jacques Lacan. Well, Lacan at Jacques Lacan. Who is it? Jacques Lacan. Jacques Lacan. Lacan at least had a basis in psychoanalysis, right? He was a physician. Yeah, he at least had a basis in it. So he would drift away, but it would never be unmoored completely the way the other ones are completely unmoored. Okay, yeah.

Jacques Derrida. Derrida. That was The other one I would argue is Jacques Derrida. Derrida. That was the one I was trying to think of. Derrida. Because Derrida, I always thought Derrida was actually joking. I thought he was actually like had his tongue in his cheek. He was so out there. But okay.

Well, I do have a theory, by the way. I do have an evolutionary biological theory as to how these guys were able to get away with it. So I, and I think there is some compelling arguments. I don't have the definitive proof that I might be onto something. So imagine you are one of these guys looking enviously at the guys in neuroscience

and the mathematicians and the physicists. How come they're getting all of the recognition on university campuses? Surely we're also important. So let's create a verbiage that is as impenetrable as mathematics. I have a background in mathematics, right? If you don't understand mathematics, within the first line, you're out, you're gone. You can't follow anything, right?

That's right. So let's create prose that is as complicated, but completely gibberish nonsense, because hopefully through this mechanism of full profundity, we can be taken seriously. So I think deep down inside, they were trolling the world. Oh, so really? Oh, you think they were? Well, again, you know, if you really want to think evolutionary biologically, Jesus, I'm going to get skewered for this. But where my biological head goes is, don't know the french woman of the time

must have found that appealing and somehow that they were oh i'm not trying to impress the women in this case but i'm just saying or if they were gay maybe it was the man i don't know but it was something there was an evolutionary motivation behind it somewhere i'm sure and it certainly gave them status you know i gave them status in the French world at the time. And to be fair, it was harder to do nuclear physics. It is harder to do that. And by the way, they utilize in my view, a wonderful sleight of hand that comes actually from a basic principle in psychology that's called the fundamental attribution

error. The fundamental attribution error is the mechanism that says, do I attribute something dispositionally? I did well on the exam because I'm smart or I did well on the exam because it was easy because Professor Pinsky gave an easy exam, right? Well, so let me add a principle to these postmodernists. So when they get up in front of a crowd at Princeton

and start spewing their nonsense, the audience members is faced with one of two options. It's either I don't understand what they're saying because I'm too dumb to understand it, or it's because I know that they're charlatans. Well, guess what? Most people turn it inwards. If I don't understand what they're saying, it's clearly because I'm dumb. Now, I can't tell you how many people have written to me after hearing me provide this

explanation and tell me, thank you, Dr. Saad, for liberating me, because I used to think when I was in college that I was a moron, because I could never understand a word in postmodernism. And I tell them, no, no, no, it's not you who was a moron. They were just charlatans. And you'll be able to tell me what this phenomenon is, but there's a cognitive psychological phenomenon which comes out in these experiments that they've done over. This is a reproducible experiment where you put five people in a room

and you have a long line and a short line and four people in the room are confederates and one person is the subject. The four people that are confederates say the shorter line is the longer line and something like 85% of the time the subject will, will agree with them and believe it because they're interviewing them later.

They're going, no, that was, that was the longer line, even though they're obviously shorter. What do we call that phenomenon? I use that, that example.

That's by the way, the Solomon Ash conformity experiments. I always use that example because I want to demonstrate to my students that for you to come up with a finding that is extraordinarily powerful in what it demonstrates, you don't have to come up with convoluted experimental designs. As a matter of fact, most of the most beautiful experiments in the behavioral sciences are the ones that apply a very simple methodology to explain something incredibly profound. And I use the three-line example that you just said. Yes, we are a social species, so regrettably, we're very easy to succumb to group conformity. But the internal experience, I'm sure, for the subject is, I'm dumb, or my vision's no good, or there's something flawed about me and something good about them,

and therefore, and this is the phenomenon that's going on in college campuses today where people cannot stand up to stuff because they feel less than for thinking they ought to even. And what's amazing about it is that these idea pathogens have so eroded the ability for people to make sense of the world that people write to me sometimes and you can literally feel as though they are in despair because they no longer know whether it's okay for them to question the position that, you know, only women menstruate. Am I allowed to think that or is that now a form of vile transphobia? So when you've been able to eradicate people's self-confidence in the most basic, banal facts, you're doing pretty well with your idea pathogens. Now, there's a little part of me that sinks into a certain amount of solace by thinking about Hegelian philosophy. And I will tell myself a story, maybe it's true or not. This is non-scientific thinking.

This is purely philosophical thinking, which is maybe these extreme positions are going to hit a synthesis. You know, Hegel is famous not actually for saying this, but having a construct of thesis, antithesis, synthesis being the way we move forward in history. That's a gross oversimplification of his many, many thousands of pages. But I just sort of console myself by thinking, you know, maybe we'll get a, maybe we'll move us forward in some way. We'll have a synthetic sort of diathesis that will come out of this. Am I deluding myself? Is this more delusional thinking? It's a bit optimistic because I think that a lot of these idea pathogens really come from

originally a noble place, but they are profoundly destructive. And so I don't see it as part of some grand optimistic design that we're heading towards. Now, I guess one possible way by which I might agree with you is that, so to borrow my good friend Nassim Taleb's anti-fragility idea, perhaps by facing these incredible stressors to our critical thinking abilities, that will serve as an anti-fragility mechanism by which we can develop better critical thinking. So in that sense, it might be that the current lunacy we're facing will come out of it stronger in our capacity to think. So it will challenge us to think more, to think clearer, to think better, to express it better, and to be resilient. Amen. I hope so. That's pretty optimistic. There's no point in getting up in

the morning. There's no point, right? Pretty optimistic. I like that. And so again, I'm not sure I heard, again, I want to push your book a little bit. What will somebody take away? Why would they read it? What would they take away? Obviously, I'm interested in all this stuff, but what does the average person want to read it for and What's he going to take away, he or she? Well, maybe I can just mention a few of the idea pathogens because otherwise we can't have a concrete example of what we're talking about. So we mentioned postmodernism. Now, postmodernism is probably the granddaddy of all of the idea pathogens because it basically

purports that there are no truths, right? We're completely shackled by subjectivity. We're shackled by our personal biases. So at its very foundation, it's anti-scientific because you and I do wake up every day thinking that there are certain natural regularities that we can study. So militant feminism would be another one. Cultural relativism would be another one. Social constructivism would be another one. So if you are a parent and you are sending your children to these posh universities so that they can become the next generation of intellectual terrorists, because that's the only outcome of all of this nonsense, right? There is no, now, by the way, when I take these positions, I'm not arguing

that you shouldn't study the humanities or the social sciences. I'm not being elitist and creating a hierarchy of what's okay to study or not. But what I'm saying is irrespective of which endeavor you choose to study, it has to be rooted in reason and logic, not always in the scientific method, because you don't necessarily study Shakespeare using the scientific method, but it can't be anti-intellectual, anti-scientific. So if nothing else, if you're spending 70, 80,000 per year on your child to attend Oberlin College to study feminist glaciology, well, as an economist, I would put on my hat of an economist and say, maybe this is not a good way for you to be spending your money. So

life is about navigating opportunity costs. And let's spend our time elevating ourselves by traversing wonderful intellectual landscapes rather than studying complete nonsense again i i've just found myself starting in a basic place which is truth exists the scientific method is the best way we have to approximate that truth period and now let's get to work but no yeah good Yeah, good. No, I'm completely right. By the way, as a physician, I mean, you probably know this already, but there's a whole movement called the fat acceptance movement, right? Which basically says that, you know, arguing that you are obese is a construct.

It's not real. It's part of capitalism. It's white supremacy. No, I know. So when you are no longer able to agree that all other things equal, being morbidly obese is not really a good trajectory, is that really what we should be studying in universities? It's insane. Well, it's more of a moral ethical question for physicians. If you're going to harm people by not bringing something up, you have to really think about this.

And I'm sympathetic to the fat shaming and all of it. And there's something called the obesity paradox that people that are obese tend to live a little longer than the average person. So there's things to be discussed. But I think a physician and a patient should be at their liberty to discuss the whole landscape together and figure out what's best for that patient. But I want you to go back to your economist hat. I've been wondering lately, you mentioned how going to Oberlin would be maybe a waste of money if you were going to study certain topics, whether the market is going to equilibrate in some way or adjust. Because, you know, I was very much an enthusiast of high, high education. Now I'm thinking, you can pretty much get the same education pretty much anywhere.

In fact, you want to try it online? Okay. Whatever. I've become much less of an enthusiast. Let's put it that way. And I can't be alone with that. Look, I'm obviously someone, I mean, I spent my whole career in academia. So of course I support the trajectory of always seeking to learn. But I agree with you that given today's delivery systems, there's an endless number of ways by which we can enrich ourselves. People could listen to this conversation and I'm sure that you're going to get emails,

and I'm sure I'll get emails where someone says, you know, I listened to you for an hour, and I probably learned more than a whole semester at Oberlin. I don't mean to be hitting on Oberlin. I just use that as an archetype of the typical kind of nonsense that goes on. So there are a multitude of ways by which we can get enriched. What I don't want to see is universities becoming nothing but a source to get credentials, right? One of the challenges that I face, for example, being housed in a business school, is oftentimes you'll get students, let's say MBA students,

who are not necessarily there for intrinsic reasons. They're there for the extrinsic reason of needing to get an MBA because that's an important marker in their trajectory, right? That frustrates me because as a purist, I just want to walk into class and hopefully enrich you in your education. And I have to kind of break your reflex of telling me, how will the next syllable that you mentioned, professor, help me get a better job? Well, the reality is not every syllable I utter will help you get a better job. Well, the reality is not every syllable I utter will help you get a better job, but hopefully by training you how to think and be intellectually curious, you can set your own path. Interesting. What do people push back on you for? I've not

heard anything today that is particularly controversial. Have you said stuff, except that maybe women menstruate, that may be the zone that you get in trouble well look according to me nothing that i'm saying is really controversial but according to the zeitgeist of today tons of stuff that i say is controversial so for example if i say that not all religions are equally likely to met out violence well a a half lobotomized person should be able to come to that conclusion yet you'll be accused of bigotry, right? Because, no, no, no, there are wonderful people in all religions and mean people of all religions. Well, that's true, but it's also true that being a Jain, if you're an extremist Jain, you're unlikely to be heading towards violence than if you are a fundamentalist Muslim guy. That's a fact

right as a matter of fact i build a nomological network of cumulative evidence in chapter seven where i try to answer the question is islam inherently peaceful or not and i let the evidence speak for itself and i'll let your your viewers see what the conclusion is and so if i talk about sex differences someone will accuse me of being a sexist. If I talk about Islam, I'm an Islamophobe. If I appear in front of the Canadian Senate to talk about the dangers of Bill C-16, I did that with Jordan Peterson, where we were talking about the dangers of the transgender bill. Of course, we both support transgender rights, but we were saying that there are slippery

slope arguments that could lead us down the abyss of infinite lunacy infinite lunacy then you know you're a vile transphobe luckily though given the number of controversial positions that i take i actually don't get nearly as much hate as some of my colleagues in the space maybe it's just because i have an intoxicating smile well i mean you come from a biological scientific perspective maybe that's a little bit of insulates you a little bit from it. But I know, what was that, C-19? What's that bill? C-16. C-16.

C-16. Yeah. I know the issue with Jordan Peterson was not preferred gender pronouns. His issue was mandated speech that happened to be about preferred gender pronouns. And people can't dissociate those two things. They're two different topics. Mandated speech by a government, how is that perceived up there in Canada generally? Not the gender issues, but the mandated speech.

Are people in favor of the government telling them how to use their tongue? So it depends who you're asking. If you're asking the people who are in the business of managing hurt feelings, then they would say it's a great idea for Big Brother to be, you know, overseeing everything that we say, right? In Canada now, I think they're thinking about having some sort of mechanism by which you check what people are writing online, that they're not espousing hate speech, right? Well, that's really Orwellian, right? Because let's suppose that I share statistical data about the terrorism rates across different religions, straight facts from established research institutes. Would that be considered hate speech? So hate speech, hurt feelings, incitement to violence are all euphemisms for fascists to stop us from exchanging ideas.

It's grotesque. And again, I should know what I'm speaking about because I come from cultures where it was endemically unlikely for you to be able to express yourself. And it disheartens me to see that we are now succumbing to that reflex in the West. What do we do with facts that buttress bigotry? How do we have those conversations? Because I think we would both, you would agree with me that we don't want people to be bigoted. We don't want it to enhance haze. We don't want people to build their argument of hate using our data. How do we buffer against that? You know, so that's, I think, part of a discussion that typically in academia we talk about forbidden knowledge. Forbidden knowledge is the idea that there are certain research questions that you shouldn't ask because if the findings come out a particular way, they might be misused.

And to be fair, humans have a long history of doing that, right? They do. But by the way, that's a very, very dangerous reflex because the atomic bomb could not have come about if there wasn't a thing called physics. So in other words, myself as an academic, my job is to pursue faithfully the epistemology of the scientific method so that I can tackle interesting research questions. What other people decide to do with that knowledge is not really my problem because then it's an endless slippery slope, right? You could come up with endless justifications for why almost nothing that I study is safe.

So I don't think that's a good argument. As long as you are true to the scientific method, all bets are off. All questions are within play. I have a caller who wants to ask you about the stepfather data. Anthony, hey, buddy, what's going on? Not so much. How are you? Good.

I sent you an email finally. I got through my hundreds of emails and got to you so what's going on thank you i appreciate it um i was wondering because i had a stepfather and you know you know my story and everything and i come from a really crazy abusive background i scored really high on the aces study and I haven't had homicidal tendencies, but then I was addicted for 20 years on some sort of substance. Do you think that curved that behavior, or how does that apply to your theory? So I want to caution you. Don't reverse the associations.

Don't go, the people who had been homicidal have this history with, if I have this history, I'm going to be homicidal. Those are very different ways of looking. But go ahead, Dr. Saad. Yeah, I was just going to say that it also, you know, I often get the following reflex from people. So if I say that, you know, step-parent is the number one predictor of child abuse, then someone will put up their hand or many people will put up their hand and say, well, I was raised by a step parent and nothing happened to me. They were very loving. Right. Now, of course, the data, the evolutionary biological data works at the aggregate,

men are taller than women, even though every single WNBA female player is taller than almost every man alive today, that one doesn't negate the other. So it's very difficult for me to comment about specific instances without speaking to you more, but I would caution you against this type of cognitive bias. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't general, don't, yeah. This to me, what Anthony reminds me of is how people aren't used to thinking statistically or probabilistically. And it's hard when you think that way all the time to get everyone to kind of get on board with that. I think that's one of the places we're failing in terms of helping people make sense of things.

And this is where a lot of people who hate evolutionary psychology typically succumb in that quicksand, right? So, for example, if I say, you know, on average, men are more likely to be driven by, you know, sexual variety seeking than women, not that women are not, but not as much. And then someone will put up their hand and say, but you know, I left my wife because she was, well, of course, there's always exceptions, right? I mean, men prefer to date younger women than older women not withstanding the fact that your aunt jenny is older than your uncle bob but people use the singular exemplar as a mechanism to violate or falsify your theory that only holds true at the average whenever somebody says on average or you know generally speaking just put a bell curve in your head it may not be a perfect bell curve. It may not have exact standard deviations, but just generally speaking, we're talking about a standard

distribution. And by the way, if there isn't a standard distribution, you'll usually say it. You'll usually say, you know, the distribution holds for these situations, but there's an outstanding group over here or a certain age group that, you know, alters the distribution of the variants. And, you know, alters the distribution of the variants. And, you know, I don't know. But, Anthony, I appreciate the question, buddy. Okay, thank you. All right, man.

Let's see. I've got some interesting questions here. Let me get to them. And also, we've got a bunch of people commenting on the restream here. Tell people again what your training is i think they're look and i'll tell i'll talk about mine we'll just because people have questions about both your and my training so let's just spell it out your training is yeah my my you mean i throughout my whole education or just my phd your whole what's

your postdoc everything let's just play it out my undergrad was in mathematics and computer science. Then I did an MBA at McGill, which is known as the Harvard of the North, McGill University of Canada. Then I did an MBA also at McGill. I did a mini thesis in operations research, which is an applied mathematics field. Then I went to Cornell and I did an MS and a PhD. And my doctoral dissertation was in the general area of psychology decision-making specifically, if I want to describe the problem that I studied in my dissertation, I looked at what's called the stopping strategy in information search. So

when you're choosing between two candidates to vote for, or two people to whom you're going to marry, or two products to purchase, let's say cars, you don't look at all of the available information before you make a choice. Rather, you look at a certain amount of information and then you're ready to stop and commit to a choice. And so what I looked at is the cognitive strategies that people use in reaching that stopping decision. So my background was in psychology of decision-making, the idea being that I would then apply it to consumer behavior, hence being housed in a marketing department. But then I got sideswept by evolutionary psychology, and that's how I then became an evolutionary psychologist.

And where was that training? Well, so I was lucky in that I didn't have to do a postdoc. I got an assistant professorship straight out of my PhD at Cornell. So one of the reasons why many people actually that come from psychology or mathematics will go on to do PhDs via the business school is because the academic market in the business school is still very hot in that unlike many other fields where you have to do one, two, three postdocs, it is still feasible to get an assistant professorship straight out of your phd and so my training was a technology of decision making and then i became an evolutionary consumer psychologist the um the stop point is

that what we sort of experience consciously is okay i've seen enough i'm ready to make a decision that's sort of what we tell ourselves? Yeah, exactly. So the way it actually works is if you could imagine, in statistical decision theory, it's called stopping barriers. So imagine that there is a threshold that I have to reach for me to choose candidate A. And there's a similar threshold

that I have to reach to choose candidate B. So what it ends up being cognitively is that it's a race. Literally, it's a cognitive race in my brain to see which of the two stopping thresholds I reach first. So you don't do this consciously. I mean, you don't say, I am going to choose Mazda when I hit the stopping threshold for Mazda. But effectively, neuronally, cognitively, what you're doing is exactly that. And so in my doctoral dissertation, what I did is I literally mapped those stopping thresholds. I demonstrated, for example, what happens to the stopping thresholds under time pressure

versus under no time pressure. So I was literally mapping what is taking place neuronally. I was doing it experimentally through a cognitive task. Interesting. And me, I have a biology degree at Amherst College, a medical degree, MD from USC. Did an internal medicine residency, then a chief residency, then an assistant clinical professorship in medicine. Then I ended up working in a psychiatric hospital for many years, ended up running their addiction services, got another board certification in addiction medicine and taught through the Department of Psychiatry, another assistant clinical professor position. So those were my experiences. All right, listen, we got to take a little break here.

We are talking to Dr. Gad Saad, of course. The book is called The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. It's out now. Go to Amazon. Go wherever you normally go to buy books and do so. You can also listen to Dr. Saad's podcast called The Saad Truth. Twitter handle is SaadGad. It's, it's, uh.

Oh, Gadsad. Yeah, what I've got here is, is GadsadGad. Okay, Gadsad, G-A-D-S-A-A-D. And website, same, Gadsad, G-A-D-S-A-A-D, and website, same, gadsad.com. Take a little break. Back with you guys on the restream and with phone calls after this. This pandemic began, we were not sure how it spread. Everyone began wearing masks and using hand sanitizers.

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Use code DrDrew20. All right, we're back. We're back with Gadsad, Gadsad.com, G-A-D-S-A-A-D, and the sad truth. Twitter handle is at Gadsad. And we've been talking about his training and evolutionary theory. And I'm a little surprised we did not touch on game theory,

which is kind of interesting. Is that because it's hard to talk about? Is that not one of your areas of specialization? Tell me. Yeah, so it isn't one of my areas of specialization. But game theory, as you're exactly right, utilizes the framework from evolutionary theory where you're trying to model oftentimes, for example, dyadic relationships. John Maynard Smith was the gentleman who really made this popular to apply game theoretic arguments in evolutionary biology. There's a whole field in economics where you study game theory, right?

You want to study the relationship between suppliers and distributors or suppliers and consumers, and so you apply game theoretic arguments. In my case, I'm not trying to model the behavior mathematically. I'm actually really trying to understand descriptively what's going on in your brain. So maybe I'll give you, just to give you a context of the type of stuff that I study in my work, which you'll find interesting as a biologically minded person. So for example, I've done research looking at how the menstrual cycle of women affects their consumatory behaviors. So for example, how do they dress as a function of where they are in their ovulatory cycle? Which types of foods do they prefer as a function of

where they are in their ovulatory cycle? So I use principles linked to the survival module and to the reproductive module to make certain predictions. So in this case, I'm looking at specific consumatory behaviors, but via a hormonal and evolutionary lens. Now let's look at men. I've looked at studies that look at what happens to men's testosterone levels when they engage in conspicuous consumption. So again, I take these phenomena that would be interesting to marketers, to economists, and I put a physiological, hormonal, biological, evolutionary twist to it. And to me, it shocks me that until I came along 20 plus years ago, no one had thought of doing

that. It amazes me that you could study economics and sociology and marketing and uh you know anthropology without ever invoking the word biology it's insane yeah i whenever we look at the behavior of animal systems we look at the biology of the animals to figure out how it plays out in the in the social systems it's very weird that we don't do it with humans very again it's all human exceptionalism it's because we sort's because we're sort of biased that way. Now, it's interesting to me that it seems like I think you'd characterize yourself as a cognitive psychologist, but you seem to have a particular interest in motivational states. And I've always thought that not enough was done about the motivation that colors our cognition? Because that is the prince in the behavioral system, is what's driving behind and our frontal lobe is trying to make sense of.

Yeah, what a great question. So you're exactly right. Starting from my doctoral dissertation, it's very calculational. It's very cognitive. You have to reach a certain stopping threshold before. But where are the emotions? Where's the lust? Where's the situational hunger? So in 1996, I was a young assistant professor, two years out of my PhD, I had gone to a economic psychology conference in Bergen, Norway. And the plenary speaker at that economic psychology conference

is a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon by the name of George Lowenstein. And he was talking about the incorporation, like incorporating, infusing cognitive psychology and psychology decision-making with hot cognition, with our emotional states, with our, you know, fluctuating blood sugar levels. And to me sitting in the room, maybe I was sort of an irreverent young assistant professor. I was thinking, do we really need to hear a plenary speaker tell us that humans are driven by biological forces? And so in a sense, on the one hand, I was astonished that people didn't know this already. But on the other hand, I was thanking my lucky stars because then I could lay my flag somewhere where no one else in the social sciences had gone.

But weirdly, a lot of it got used backwards, in my opinion, at least a lot of famous studies. They're showing that if you take a stimulant before you have a date, the physiological responses are going to make you, because they're similar to what happens to the sympathetic system with attraction, you're going to be more attracted to that person. That's not what's interesting. What's interesting is why are the motivational drives in place that you ask that person out? What did that person mean to you? And what's this thing called chemistry that we've still not gotten close to yet?

And why the Mazda, not the Porsche? These are all things that go into motivational states as well as cognition. And if I can, you said why, and that sort of prompted me to mention the following. And you may know this, obviously, as an evolutionary-minded person. In science, we talk about two levels of explanations. There's the proximate level and the ultimate level. The proximate level is where much of science operates, the how and the what of a phenomenon. How does diabetes operate? The Darwinian why, because you mentioned why, is the ultimate

explanation. It seeks to look for the Darwinian ultimate explanation for why we have developed that particular system to be of that form. And I always tell my students and any colleague who wants to listen, these two levels of analyses are not competing against each other in a zero-sum game. You need both. They complement each other. For me to fully understand the phenomenon involving a biological agent, I have to tackle it at the proximate and ultimate level. Nearly all of the social sciences

operate only at the proximate level. They don't even know that there is an ultimate level. And that's truly regrettable because there are a whole richness of explanations that we simply miss by not asking the why question. Let's go back to my Aztec model at the very beginning. The approximate is, well, they believe they have to do that to make the sun come up in the morning. But the ultimate question is, why did that behavior develop and why did it stick? There are human biological, psychological processes

at work there that have social, cultural reverberations and ramifications, but all that is proximate. The ultimate is what is it in the human brain that causes these things to do what they do, these human behaviors. And you're so right about that. Can I ask you, if I can turn it on you and ask you a question, Dr. Drew? Yeah. Do you feel that in medicine that there isn't enough

evolutionarily trained physicians? Because someone that I know well, whom I respect greatly, Randy Nessig, is actually the pioneer. He's a psychiatrist, but who is an evolutionist. And his quest in life has been towinize the medical curriculum in the same way that i'm trying to darwinize you know economics and psychology and marketing he has been on a you know mission to incorporate evolutionary thinking in medicine do you feel that there's been progress there or are we still viewing all medical issues through the proximate lens only but before before i answer that where was he trained undergraduate? Just out of curiosity,

because it might tell me something about why he was thinking. I'm going to maybe misspeak. I'm thinking maybe university of Michigan, or maybe he was a faculty member there. There was a huge group of evolutionists there. So maybe that's how he was, you know, because if I were betting on it it i would say he had a deep

liberal arts training because it is an actual liberal arts training not just basically i mean a deep profound critical you know critical thought reading, analysis in the liberal arts gives you those kinds of thoughts. Like how do we Darwinize medicine? Unfortunately, not only are we not doing that, we're not even teaching critical reasoning. People are very much, and I hate to be critical of my peers, but I see an awful lot of algorithmic kinds of thinking, just very pathway-driven rather than thought-driven, and certainly not reasoning and problem-solving. I feel like I know this was happening when I was in medical school. I thought my biochemistry was way too basic. It was way too basic based on what I'd just done a year before in college.

And I went over to the biochemistry professor after a few months of this. I thought, Kim, what are we doing? And she was like, you know, this is what we do. And I brought in my problem sets from, this was now like November, from the previous June. And she looked at the problem sets and she went, oh, well, from the previous June. And she looked at the problem sets and she went, oh, well, these are graduate level problems. I go, yeah, I'm in graduate school now. I'd like graduate education. What are you saying? Well, it'd be impossible to teach this. Impossible. And so that was the level. So that's kind of why I asked about undergraduate

education, because that's where the critical thought training comes in. If he went to MIT, if he went to Caltech, if he was a mathematician, if he was a problem solver, if he had deep liberal arts education, then that's the opportunity, because the opportunity does not occur that I can see anywhere in the graduate education of doctors. And then there are those that are naturally that way, right? That have just great critical instruments. People have that. And then those people do really well in the wards and they expand their critical reasoning.

But if they either don't have the natural inclination or haven't been trained into it, it just becomes very algorithmic. And I've sort of been seeing that playing out in this current epidemic. It's been rather concerning. The idea of improvisation and learning and critical thought in the face of unknowns has not been a good part of this, uh, our response to this, to this pandemic, at least not out in the, uh,

and some of it's been because people are scared and it's been politicized. There's so many other forces that have come in. But speaking of politicizing, uh, so other than your training, have you spent any time in America? I mean, real time,

like lived here. Uh, so I lived, uh, so you're right. When I was at Cornell, I was there. And then I did visiting professorships, as you mentioned in the introduction, at my alma mater at Cornell, at Dartmouth. And I spent two years in Southern California at UC Irvine. Right. And to tell you something, and I'll say this on air, the only thing that will make me envious of another human being is if they live in Southern California and I don't. So therefore, consider yourself envious.

Be careful. Be careful. That was Orange County. That was very different than L.A. County. Trust me, very different. True, true. So I am jealous of people that live in Orange county so so so i'm with you on that so yeah it's your plea your your your very passionate plea i think you've gone on some show

where you were talking about the homelessness crisis and you know and and i was really moved by how clearly heartfelt your position was it it is I wake up every day troubled by this because I know the psychopathology. I know what this is. This is my patients and they're dying on the streets. Imagine you're a great surgeon or something and all you see is the pathology

that you could correct with your scalpel everywhere and people are dying and the politicians are the ones killing them. It's a thing that drives me mad. But anyway, so to the point I was trying to get to is Canada versus the United States. I mean, what, what can you, what light can you shed on all? I guess I'm, I'm, I'm not asking a clear question, but maybe you'll come up with an answer that, that is clearer than my question, which is essentially, we've been discussing material that we agree is a problem probably everywhere in North America, probably. Is there a difference between what's going on as it pertains to these topics we've been sort of surveying in Canada versus the United States? In terms of the idea passages that i discussed in the parasitic mind i think uh you know the old argument when the or the old saying when the u.s sneezes canada catches a cold i think these idea

pathogens traverse the the boundaries so our universities are just as parasitized by this stupidity if anything our our prime minister justin trudeau is a walking manifestation of every one of the imbecilic ideas that i discussed. Well, I guess that's why I thought things were actually worse up there, because of C-16, because of when I hear Justin Trudeau talk, I think, oh, that must be how they think up there. But is that not the case? In the academic hallways, that's how people think. And then the guys who are trained in those schools become our politicians. I think the common person doesn't think that way. The everyday person doesn't believe this. I think if I were to compare Canada and the U.S., not necessarily on some of the points that we've

been talking about, but more generally, one of the things that I really admire about the U.S. in general, although of course it varies across states and so on, more so than in Canada, is that we are much further along in our socialist bent than the United States, right? And especially, and much more in Quebec, right? So if Canada is worse than the US, Quebec is worse than the other provinces. And so as someone who is very driven, the socialist system is wonderful to pick up the people who are not working 18 hours a day. But the ones who are driven are the ones who then subsidize everybody else. And so that ethos of equity and so on is one that is viscerally offensive to me. And so if I were to complain about something in Quebec, it's that specific, right?

So what salary you get is not a function of whether you get a Nobel Prize or not. It's how many years have you been in the union? This type of mindset is truly offensive to someone who is driven by an ethos of meritocracy. And I think I have some sense of this. I'm going to ask a question that may not have an answer and may even be less, maybe more problematic than I realized for you. But I have a sense of the French versus, let's call it other or British or English speaking, tension in Canada.

I'm a little bit of a Francophile. And so I sort of tuned into it a little bit. And I'm wondering little bit of a Francophile, and so I sort of tuned into it a little bit. And I'm wondering how that, is this mostly driven by that French-esque socialist bent? Certainly there's that. Look, I learned French before I did English, because growing up in Lebanon, my mother tongue was Arabic, but everyone who was in the educated classes would learn French because Lebanon used to be a French protectorate, right? And so when I came to Canada, I spoke French fluently. I didn't speak English, but then I opened my eyes to the world and I studied in English and became proficient in English. And I

also speak Hebrew and so on. What I don't like about the French mindset is that because they're trying, I say they, meaning the Quebec society, in Quebec French you say les Burlens, the indigenous French Canadians, because they are so paranoid about losing their identity, they institute certain laws that frankly are somewhat Orwellian. So you've probably heard of things like, you know, there's a language police that comes around to make sure that your French sign is bigger than your English sign. As a libertarian, as a freedom loving person, this type of stuff offends me. I appreciate the French language. I love the French french language i speak french fluently

but that doesn't mean that we should protect our heritage by instituting orwellian law so maybe that's the thing that i would well yeah it's underneath that is it's very interesting to me because underneath that is that basic tension between um what i would call a more British system of autonomy and meritocracy and the French post-Napoleonic fraternity. It's very interesting to me. Very. And I don't know how, when I think about it and when I go up to Canada,

I always think, God, how did they survive this long with these? There's a real tension there, right? Yeah. I mean, it's not as bad as it was and you know we had two referendums in quebec where we close to you know 1980 1995 so you don't quite feel it as much as you did you know 25 years but it's still there you know hiding it it has to be because the the historical the the historical baggage and

lineage is just too profound it's just too too much there i i you know when i started you know looking at you know our own history here in this country and i and i i was thinking about our institutions and i was kicking around england for some reason years ago and i thought oh oh that's why our institutions work so well they they were were British institutions that we just have been tearing down ever since. But that's a very rigorous, particular kind of a bureaucratic background. It's very different than the Napoleonic sort of stuff, seems to me. But in any event, listen, it has been a privilege. You exceeded my expectations. I knew we'd have a lively conversation. And if I got you in any trouble, I apologize. I feel as though everything we discussed was sort of matter of fact based on the biology as we all understand it.

And I don't want to be told that we are in any way undermining people who are trying to prevent thought or ideas that end up being used against other people. Of course we're against that. Of course we are against that. But we just want to talk about the biology and the evolutionary systems as we understand them based on our long, long, long periods of study. Dr. Saad, anything you want to say before I let you go? I'm going to take a couple of calls. So those of you on hold, please do hold. I'm going to try to get to you in a second, but I'll let Dr. Saad finish up.

Just such a delight to finally meet you. You are more charming than I thought you'd be. And I already knew that you were charming. So thank you so much for having me on your platform. And I hope to speak to you again soon. I hope so too. Take care now. So we'll let Dr. Saad go and I will go to the phone calls very quickly here

and talk to Westside Will. Westside Will, what do you want to say? How's it going? The one and only Dr. Drew. What's happening, man? Okay. Right. So I am curious about, well, some people say, you know, oh, is it safe? Is it not safe? I know so many people about the vaccine. They have opinions a mile long. And then also in conjunction or perhaps associated with that in your expertise and your training and knowledge and years of greatness. What would you say to do when you think things will return to some sense of normalcy, some sense of, you know,

I know it's going to be a new normal or a new kind of world or a new, you know, perspective, but I'm just fascinated by it. And I would love to know when things people can expect back to their, yeah. All right. So I know that people are planning to travel this summer. I was, Susan was looking at some cruises and they were sold out. People are getting on cruise ships. And that's one of the highest sort of panic porn sort of risk environments, at least from the standpoint of what people believe about these environments. I am using UVC lights and halodine to keep myself safe from on the cruise and on the plane.

So that's that's. And by the way, there are plenty of other pathogens besides coronavirus that we can get exposed to. And so that's a good thing. We will be doing behaviors that will decrease our exposure to many different things because of that, number one. Number two, I think the end of the summer is when you're going to see things, this built-up demand for social contact is going to start to play out. I'm hearing more and more people going, oh, there are people out, the traffic is up, but there is this pent-up demand. I think that demand is going to be released when this is no longer officially not a pandemic. It is officially now an endemic virus, meaning we've all been vaccinated. There will be a few cases here and there, but it will not have that potential to break out and cause mass death as it has. And I think like when you see bars open up is when you're going to start to see people

really get out and amongst it. So look to bars opening as being sort of the threshold when people are going to kind of want to be socializing a lot. And there's huge pent-up demand. I mean, people want to go to movie theaters. People want to go to theaters and see. There's just people want to do things together. We have a natural need for that, and that is pent up.

And I think somewhere at the end of summer, beginning of fall is where you're going to see that start to get acted out. Now, when are things going to be normal again? I'm having trouble seeing past that. I'm sort of feeling like there's going to be this exuberance that I'm not sure what's going to happen next. I have to get there first, and I can kind of see how this so-called new normal is going to express itself. Jeff, what's going on? Yes, I wanted to talk to you about the people that have COVID that are under 18 years old want to get to take the severity of their problem when they have it. And then if we look at the data, why more kids aren't playing sports? There's 3 million kids in California that aren't getting to play.

Right. California is... Can you touch on that? Yes. California has stepped up and sided with the CDC, which is if you can get down below 25 cases per hundred thousand, you can open schools. You can start to have sports.

You can start to do things. If you get down below seven cases per hundred thousand, you're pretty close to opening things up again. It's very clear that teachers and students are more, this is data from the CBC, you are more likely if you're a student or a teacher to get COVID out in your home or the community than in school. That is a statistical fact. And if that is true, it is safer for the teachers and the students to be

in school. The CDC has said the schools can open without vaccinating the teachers. I know several teachers unions want to get the vaccine first. I am very sympathetic to that. I think that's a reasonable request for teachers to want that. Why, if we want schools open, we can't prioritize teacher the way we have prioritized older folks as well. Why we can't have multiple priorities has been a mystery to me. We can only do one thing at a time. That's insane. That's not how you do medicine.

We do the best we can. We get people as fast as we can. Speed should be our priority, not sticking with some pre-existing draconian plan. Part of that speech should be educators and teachers. Hey, Joe, what's happening? How's your dad? All right.

I just spoke to him about 20 minutes ago. He's feeling better. Feeling better. He actually knew a couple who also had the second Moderna shot and they were sick as anything for about a day. This is

nausea, vomiting, flu-like symptoms. It's very common with the second shot. Especially, flu-like symptoms are very common, usually one to two days. Nausea and vomiting

are kind of unusual, but could be part of that. I was told by my hematologist's office, because I had blood test results, and that's what I wanted to ask you about. They told me that it's actually more common than you think. I'm sure it is, but it's not considered typical, right? And when the typical reaction is muscle aches, fatigue, sleepiness, fever, flu-like syndrome. But for some people, nausea and vomiting is part of flu-like syndromes. The real issue though is people that have had COVID, those are the ones having exuberant reactions at that second thought, which is why some people are thinking we should just give them one and not two. That's one of the reasons we're

thinking that. And that really think of the vaccines as boosters. Because I've had my, you've heard me talk about my Adatex score before. I've had my immune. By the way, this thing's called an I-1 that I keep holding up. You can get it at drdrew.com slash I-1. That my immunity is just off the chain. Even as recently as last week, I had it measured. And so I know I'd have a terrible reaction if I got the vaccine. So I'm very concerned about that. Did you get your results back from Addictive Score?

Yeah, I did. I did. And they were higher even than they were when I was sick a month before. So I'm going to do it again in March and see if there's any decay in that. There were four different viral proteins that I was extremely active against. So it's, and I was something like 10 times above vaccine level. So it was pretty, pretty reassuring. Let's put it there. I'm not so worried about the variants.

So I certainly don't want to get one. I hope, and I hope Susan's able to get it because I that's what I'm really curious is if Susan is if Susan has the antibodies for it you know I know why didn't she get sick well why we've I've tested her for antibodies she didn't have it and so why didn't she get sick that's the question and what is it does she not have an ACE2 receptor is there something about her ACE2 receptor is there something about her T cell response and ability to mount something to keep the virus out? It's a really interesting question.

And we don't have those answers yet. Tell me about your labs. Things came out very good, except for one parameter. First things first, vitamin D. You know, I heard your interview and you were talking about obesity. And of course, as people have seen myself on the show, when I was 250 pounds ago, my vitamin D levels were at eight. Wow, that's really interesting. That's very interesting. Yesterday, they were 64. That's extremely high. Good for you. Good for you. That's very interesting. Yesterday, they were 64.

That's extremely high. Good for you. Good for you. That's great news. And that's the thing. My focus the last six months, because I had the last major blood test was six months ago, was to get that up. Because I heard people are having better outcomes with higher vitamin D levels. But the one level that was slightly elevated and it was high end of normal is something called the bilirubin. Can you please explain that and how can I get that lower?

Don't worry about it. Normal is normal with bilirubin. And you have two different kinds of bilirubin. You have what's called indirect bilirubin and you have of bilirubin. You have what's called indirect bilirubin, and you have direct bilirubin. One is the bilirubin that's in your biliary system, in your gallbladder, and in your bile ducts. It's bile, and that's your direct bilirubin. Your indirect is sort of a breakdown product of hemoglobin. So it's fine.

Some people have their bilirubins are up all the time. It's called Gilbericin. I mean, the normals between 0.2 and 1.2 and mine was at 1.3. Yeah, now don't even think about it. It's not one of those levels that you try to adjust. If it were 30, we'd be paying attention

to it. That's sort of the way to think about it. Most liver tests have to be really up for us to pay a lot of attention to it. I mean, you could, the one thing you could worry about, if you want to worry about something, is you could get a liver ultrasound to make sure you're not having fatty liver, which you're taking care of. Well, I have a fatty liver to begin with. All right.

So you know you have that, so don't even worry. But you're taking care of that with your diet. You're dealing with that by losing weight and watching your diet. So all right, my friend. Thank you. Good questions. Good questions. Let's see.

We got everybody. All right, listen. Let me go on to the restream here quickly and see if you guys are looking at stuff. All right, I'm seeing your questions. You guys are just attacking each. All right. I'm seeing your questions. Nothing really. You guys are just attacking each other, which is lovely. But that's the way these things go, I guess. I'm looking at the data.

I'm just looking at local data for us here. Orange County is way down. Let's see if the California data has come in yet. Because usually it comes in later in the day, like around 7 o'clock at night. So let's see. We are the 17th. Today, what is it? We're up a little bit in California, a little bit from we were in the mid fifties. Now we're at 60, 66. I'm not sure that's a real change. There is a general, there is a tendency for an oscillatory pattern to develop. Generally speaking, we go up and then we go down. But that's not a significant up, that's for sure.

And that's not happening in Southern California, it doesn't appear like, because the numbers here are quite down. Let's see what the overall situation is for the country. Oh, this is the national data. I beg your pardon, that's national data. So national data is 6,6000, which is essentially where we were between the second surge and this most recent surge. So we're back down to sort of our baseline. I think we're going to drop below that. And hospitalizations are plateauing a little bit. It's also at 60,000. Death rates are going down rapidly. Okay, so let me do look at California since that's what I'm stuck in. It's interesting

to compare California and Florida. You might want to look at those pieces of data yourself because you won't really believe it until you look at, oh, yeah, California is way down now. And we're just, our hospitalization also plateauing maybe a little bit, but it's at a much lower level than it was. And, yeah, California also, we were at about the level we were. We were at 3,000 when we were considered under control, essentially, and now we're at 4,000.

And we'll see if the virus wants to go back up again with some of those variants. I don't think so. But again, this virus has been very nefarious. But I'm looking at California right now, which has essentially three times the population of Florida, if I remember. Caleb, look for me, California versus Florida. I think Florida is 10 million, California is 30 million, something like that. So we have about three times the cases here. But we peaked at 50,000 cases in California, being completely locked down the entire time,

while Florida being completely open peaked at 18,000 cases, 19,000 cases. Am I getting that right? I'm looking it up. Yeah. So I guess that's about right. If it's really one third, that's about equivalent. But the point is that one was open, one was closed, and they had essentially the same outbreak in terms of cases per 100,000.

Essentially the same. So interesting. Yeah, close, right? All right. Let me go back to the restream here. Yes, I will be on Fox 11 tonight, Joe. But I'm going to be sort of phasing out of Fox 11. I will not be in there next week. I've got to go to New York next week. We have another Teen Mom reunion to do. And it's a sign to me that the coronavirus thing is sort of winding down. Yes, Anthony Brown, that was Caleb's voice. Yeah.

If one wanted to ensure that you get negative COVID result for air travel, could you use nasal swab with Betad9 to advertise prior to the COVID test? That's an interesting question. I don't know the answer to that. I think the idea of halidine is to displace it from the ACE2 receptor before it gets in. The question is, is that the only thing you're measuring when you do a swab? I suspect, well, it's interesting. It might reduce the risk of a positive result or of a false positive result.

I would think it would reduce the risk of a false positive result. That's interesting. And 40 million versus 20 million, Christopher, is that what you're saying? And in any event, I do have to have some international travel, and they're requiring a vaccine before international travel, which is why I may take the vaccine later in the spring because I'm going to be required to. So Sean's asking how long before I leave California.

Sometimes I wonder that myself. California is a frustrating place to live. It really is. Okay. All right, you guys. Thank you all for being here today. Thank you to Dr. Saad for being my guest. I don't know.

Do you know what Susan's got planned for tomorrow? I've suggested a few possible guests here. It may just be me here interacting with the restream. We haven't done that in a couple of days. And also do look back on the yesterday show. It was kind of special. We did a Zoom of many graduates from Celebrity Rehab. Bob Forrest, Shelly, was here with us. Bob and Shelly, who are my treatment team. And I woke up thinking about that today. And Bob texted me. He was sort of moved by the experiences, was sort of moving to see everybody and how well they're doing. It's kind of uncanny.

In fact, everyone is doing really, really well. So look at yesterday's Zoom broadcast. We had a Zoom meeting, and then we did a stream with all Zooming of all the different celebrity rehab graduates. So GSR Savage, I'm back to normal most of the time. Not always. I get that feeling again of fatigue and sick, but I'm sometimes, most of the day, about 90%, 95% myself.

All right, everyone. Thank you all for being here, and we'll see you. Yes, Susan has to get her colonoscopy tomorrow. Maybe we won't be doing a show tomorrow. Right, it's not on the schedule for tomorrow. We will not be doing a show tomorrow because Susan will be getting a colonoscopy, and so the producer, she's yelling from another room. She will not be available for tomorrow. We will not be doing a show tomorrow because Susan will be getting a colonoscopy. And so the producer, she's yelling from another room. She will not be available

for that. But we are... Maybe? Maybe you'll do a show? I wouldn't count on it. But if she's feeling well enough, I guess she's feeling good. She's doing her colonoscopy prep now. And you know, everyone

is happy when they do that. Thank you, Caleb. Thank you, Dwight, for doing the screening, and we will see you all tomorrow, if not tomorrow, at least Friday, middle of the day sometime. See you then. This pandemic began, we were not sure how it spread. Everyone began wearing masks

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Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation and Susan Pinsky. This is just a reminder that the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care or medical evaluation. This is purely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm a licensed physician with over 35 years of experience, but this is not a replacement for your personal physician, nor is it medical care. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger,

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