The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 553. Why Do Smart People Double Down On Bad Ideas? | Dr. Gad Saad

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and evolutionary psychologist Dr. Gad Saad reunite for a conversation that blends ancient myth, evolutionary theory, and cultural psychology. Together, they dissect cognitive dissonance, the dangers of willful blindness, and the evolutionary logic behind sacrifice, delayed gratification, and identity formation. This episode was filmed on May 23rd, 2025.  | Links | For Dr. Gad Saad: Read “The Saad Truth About Happiness: 8 Rules for Living the Good Life” https://a.co/d/1IqTyM9 On X https://twitter.com/GadSaad On Facebook https://www.facebook.com/Dr.Gad.Saad/ On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/doctorgadsaad/ On YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLH7qUqM0PLieCVaHA7RegA Spotify Podcast https://open.spotify.com/show/5T2wjkFxsjvuxO1SDcZh29 Apple podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-saad-truth-with-dr-saad/id1516343565 

Of all of the human phenomena that I've studied in my life, which is the one that has surprised me the most about human nature, the inability of people to change their minds despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Why do people double down instead of changing, even in the face of accelerating evidence of error? I'm in the business of, you know, defending truth and persuading people of opposing ideas.

But in most of the cases, it's la la la, I don't want to hear it. You know, you talk about people turning a blind eye. There are none so blind as those who will not see. Paradoxically, what often happens when I expose you to contrary information, it only solidifies your position. Because while the ostrich doesn't literally bury its head in the sand, the metaphor is very apt, which is, I don't want to face reality. Yeah, it's willful blindness.

It's willful blindness. Hey everybody, I had a chance today to rekindle my relationship with Dr. Gad Sadd, who's a professor of marketing at Concordia University in Montreal, which is a funny position to hold because marketing is a very capitalist enterprise and Concordia is a very woke institution anyways, Gad has been a gadfly at Concordia for a substantial amount of time not least because he applies the Tenets of evolutionary psychology to the analysis of human motivation hence his interest in marketing because marketing is the Hence his interest in marketing, because marketing is the study of the practical application of the analysis of motivation. Gad has written a number of, two in particular, a number of books, but two in particular that have struck a chord in the popular imagination. The last one was called The Parasitic Mind, where he outlines his theory of the woke mind virus, a notion that's been propagated quite extensively by none other than Elon Musk,

who's quite happy about the theory, not least because it accounts for the pathology that alienated his son from him in a very tragic set of affairs or set of circumstances that's increasingly and unhappily common across families all across the West. He also wrote a book, GAD, called The Sad Truth About Happiness. What did we talk about today? Well, we talked about parasitism, which is a very deep problem. There are evolutionary biological theories that sex itself evolved to help organisms stay ahead of the parasites, those organisms that utilize the resources of a host

without adding to its capability for survival. Quite the contrary. Well, Gad was very interested in parasitic ideas and how they spread and the invasion, you might say, of the parasitic ideas into the university. And so that's really what we concentrated on, all things considered. How do we understand and defend? How do we understand the relationship between our ability to generate storehouses of immense value

on the merit side, on the accomplishment side, on the brand side. How do we defend those against the encroachment of destructive parasitism? And how do we do the same thing with our own psyches and communities? That's the topic of today's podcast. Dr. Saad, it's been a while. How are you doing?

You're looking sharp as always with that gorgeous three-piece suit. Hey, man, I've got a deadly suit maker. LGFG. By the way, I don't know if you know this, they gifted me a red velvet suit, which they delivered straight to me in Montreal, which I've only worn one in public at Mar-a-Lago. Oh, well, there you go. That's a good and rare combination of events.

There you go. When were you at Mar-a-Lago? In early December, so he'd already won the elections, but he hadn't yet been inaugurated, and it was a mega event. So make education great again. Make education great again. There is a complicated problem. Yeah, I know Trump is at, Trump in theory is at war with the universities, particularly Harvard at the moment.

I guess they're locked in some legal wrangle with Harvard claiming that somehow the federal government owes them the money that they've been paying them when they used to be a university. They only have $53 billion of endowment, Jordan. They need the government's help. I know, but there are stringent restrictions on how poor Harvard can use its endowment. And so they need to go cap in hand to the federal government to beg for largesse from the bricklayers and the electricians,

even though they despise them to the core. Indeed, indeed. Do you remember your time at Harvard fondly or not so fondly? Unbelievably. Unbelievably fondly. Yeah. Look, for a long time, as you know, it was a pretty good deal to be a university professor

at a functional institution. And it was a great deal, let's say that. In the 1990s, when I was there, the senior faculty, the smartest people I ever met in my life were the older senior faculty at Harvard. Unbelievably well-educated, you know, classically and scientifically. And then the young professors who rotate out, because that's how Harvard worked, right, on about a seven-year rotation,

they were hell-bent on their research careers and not in the careerist manner. You know, they all had the kind of obsession that you need to have if you're a scientist. And then the graduate students were, well, they were like graduate students everywhere, and some of them were superb. And the undergraduates were top-rate. And then the administration served all that and it was beautiful. You know, our faculty meetings, everybody tried to get them over with as fast as possible so they could get back to the lab.

Lots of the professors had showers in their labs so they could work, you know. The rec was at 16 hours a day that you have to work if you want to be at the top of your game. And that's what it was like. So, you know, it was a privilege to be there. Yeah, I came close to actually getting the coveted Harvard Business School position out of my PhD at Cornell. And so I had made the first round cuts, and then I made the cuts what's called the campus visits where they invite, I think, the top three or four candidates. And then apparently, rumor has it, I don't have absolute confirmation,

but the diversity inclusion equity stuff was already happening in 1993 because it came down as I hear the story between me and another person, she ovulates, I don't, and so she ended up getting the job. But I came close to being with you right there at Harvard in the 90s. Oh, that would have been an interesting early convergence. That's right. The world had to wait an extra few years before we met. Yeah, well that DEI issue, you know, you sat on many hiring committees, I presume,

and it was certainly the case that really all the way back, as far as I can remember, even into the 80s, if there was a candidate who was of minority status, whatever that minority happened to be, the hiring committees, even that early would bend over backwards to bloody well make sure that they got the job. You know, and I would say from the 80s through about 2005, 10 maybe, merit was still essentially prioritized, but all that other idiocy had come creeping in. And of course by 2010, you might as well just throwing up your hands in despair and headed for the hills, which essentially I did six years later. I think it was, we'd gone to the point where, and

it was probably still like this, I think it was 70% of early applicants, like early stage career applicants for junior professorships in STEM fields in California, which was an excellent state system for a very long time. They're turfed out of the competition before their research dossier is evaluated. And of course, and that's from their DEI statement. Yeah. Well, it's only gotten a lot worse since you left. So let me give you, or for your listeners and viewers, a few recent stats. So the Aristotle Foundation released a few months ago a study at Canadian universities and they looked at, they did a content analysis of Canadian job openings

and in 98% of the posts, the postings, there was mention of diversity, inclusion and equity. I mean if it were 20%, it would be a disaster. But imagine where it's 98%. I think it was something like 477 out of 489 postings involved diversity, inclusion, and equity. And to that point, as you probably might remember, I held a university-wide chair for 10 years and it finished in 2018.

When I then started thinking about applying for the next term, the next five-year term, I then decided against it because I was under the requirement to provide a diversity inclusion and equity statement, which I wasn't willing to do. So it has now been probably five, six years since I last had university-based research funds. And so in a sense, I've been forced out

in my ability to pursue my research because of many of these ideological commitments that you have to publicly proclaim. It's horrifying. Yes, well, and I've been watching Harvard struggle with Trump and the research community as well, bleat and beat their chest about the fact that the only reason that the researchers ever provided the requisite DEI statements was because the government had made it mandatory. It's like, so I guess mandatory cowardice is an excuse for, for what? For selling your soul to the devil.

Yeah, it's amazing. I'll give you another amazing example. I've been on leave now from Concordia, which, you know, the university was kind enough to grant it to me. They're probably relieved. I don't want to say it, but thank you for saying it. They're probably relieved, Gav. I don't want to say it, but thank you for saying it. They're probably all celebrating. Yeah, no problem. Yeah, I'm sure they were.

That left-wing hellhole, that university, that terrible pro-Hamas, constant protesting home of the resentful and miserable, that Concordia? That Concordia. Their five-year strategic mission is to indigenize and what's the other term? I can't remember the other term. To indigenize the curriculum. So imagine, how do you indigenize number theory? How do you indigenize differential equations?

How do you indigenize evolutionary psychology? How do you indigenize evolutionary psychology? One little, two little, three little Indians? Is that how you do it? You're going to get me into trouble. It's me saying it, Gad, and I've already been in plenty of trouble. Fair enough. So, you know, it's very, very difficult to live in the ecosystem. I think when I first heard that you were leaving academia, I felt a bit of tension within myself, and that on the one hand I was, oh no, you know, Peisan is leaving. On the other hand, I felt somewhat envious of you, in that while I remained in the ecosystem of infinite lunacy, you were out, man. How you feel now that you've been out for a few years?

ecosystem of infinite lunacy, you are out, man. How you feel now that you've been out for a few years? Well, it's worked out very fortunate for me because, well, for a variety of reasons. I mean, first of all, I've been on a non-stop lecture tour really since 2018 punctuated by various, you know, fits of illness. But, and so, what's my alternative? I can teach 150 kids in a classroom that looks like some sadistic architect designed it, what, for denizens of hell, all fluorescent lights and

concrete blocks and hosable architecture, and they can sit in desks and be numbers in a 60,000 person, what, monstrosity of gigantism while being lectured by the DEI mavens or I can travel around the world to speak to paid audiences about exactly what I want to talk about and do something different every night. So that's a pretty good deal. And then we set up Peterson Academy, which is thriving. I just finished teaching, recording a new Maps of Meaning course. That was my Cardinal course, I guess, at Harvard and the University of Toronto. And it'll be produced at the highest possible quality and then shown to our 45,000 students.

And that's growing extremely rapidly. So you know, that's the upside and there's lots more upside associated with that. But the downside is, I had a pretty good research career, Gad. You know, and that's the one thing I haven't been able to replace, well, that and my clinical practice, you know, because I'm too evil to have a clinical practice. So, oh, by the way, I should tell you this, this is pretty funny in the most darkly horrible, quasi-totalitarian, idiot Canadian state manner. So you know, the College of Psychologists have deemed me, what would

you say, I need to be re-educated out of my climate apocalypse skepticism and my disdain for the trans activists and my belief that maybe we shouldn't cut the breasts off 13 year olds. You know, all those terrible terrible things that that sane people know to be true deep inside of them, like the fact that there are actually men and women. You know I was asked on a show about a year ago of all of the human phenomena that I've studied in my life or I'm aware of, which is the one that has surprised me the most about human nature and I paused for a second and I answered The inability of people to change their minds despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary Justin Trudeau comes in he does a disastrous job. What do Canadians do?

reelect him That's not enough. Let's do it a third time then he steps down Maybe this it's time now to do some autocorrection. What do Canadians do? They re-elect the party that put them in the position that we're in right now. So I think that that answer that I gave, it was a British psychiatrist who was hosting me.

I think it's that much more apropos today. It is almost impossible to get someone to change their opinions once it is anchored solidly into their personhood. So there you go. Hey, I've got a biblical reference that will clear that up for you. Okay, shoot. So one of the mysteries in the story of Exodus is why it takes the Israelites three generations

to cross a relatively trivial stretch of desert. So what's the narrative explanation? So it's twofold. Remember in the account, when Moses, after Moses encounters the burning bush and gets to the bottom of something and learns, which is what that story means. He goes back to get the pharaoh to change his mind.

But he doubles down the pharaoh. And that's the consequence of the ever accelerating sequence of plagues. And the first eight plagues destroy the present, and the last plague, which is the death of the firstborn, destroys the future. And it isn't until the present and the future are destroyed, heaven and earth both, plus the future, that the Pharaoh relents. And even then he doesn't, right, because he sends his army after the Israelites once they do depart, right?

Now the question is, why do people double down instead of changing? Even in the face of accelerating evidence of error. Okay, so the Israelites leave, right? So now they are escaping their tyranny and their slavedom, and that's a dynamic, right? Because there's no tyrants without willing slaves, and vice versa.

And so the Israelites have plenty to learn too. And so the first thing that happens to them is the chaos of the Red Sea, and that's chaos and blood. Why? Because when you change your mind, the first thing that happens is things fall apart. And so, right, and then they cross the Red Sea and they manage that successfully. So that's that chaotic threshold. And then they wander in the goddamn desert for three generations. Right, why?

Because at least under the tyranny, they knew what to do. And in the wilderness they are fractious, resentful, immature, and unable to govern themselves. And it takes three generations before they recover. So, and you know, I talked to Carl Friston about this, and Carl's a neuroscientist of some repute. And he has an entropy theory of anxiety, which is a very... And I had worked on a parallel theory in my lab in Montreal, we published a paper on it, not too long before I departed for parts unknown. Your beliefs are

game principles, like game rules, that bring order to principles, like game rules, that bring order to complexity. And if you're wrong, you have to modify. And the consequence of modification first is an encounter with unstructured entropy and chaos. And that, the apprehension of that locks people into their tyranny. Self-imposed, familial, cultural, whatever. So it's always, it's never from where you are to the promised land. It's always from where you are through the threshold of chaos, into the goddamn desert, and then maybe forward. So in chapter 7 of the parasitic mind Mind where I talk about how to seek truth, I open up

the chapter with a long quote by Leon Festinger, the pioneer of theory of cognitive dissonance, and it exactly speaks to your point. So the chaos that you're talking about with the Red Sea and so on and the biblical story is the chaos that you experience internally when you are faced with a dissonant amount of evidence that is contrary to the one that you hold so dear to you. And so it is no accident that this incredible quote by Leon Festinger, I obviously don't have it memorized here, but basically he's saying that there is no ends to which people will go to in order to maintain the coherence of their current belief system irrespective of the amount of contrary evidence that they are exposed to

because then that triggers cognitive dissonance. And as a matter of fact, paradoxically, what often happens, as I'm sure you know, Jordan, when I expose you to contrary information, it only solidifies your position. So you could imagine how disheartening it is, right? I'm coming at you with a mind vaccine that hopefully gets you to perhaps revisit some of your cherished beliefs.

You mean like a university professor should. Like a university professor should and what ends up happening is exactly opposite to that. It only emboldens you in your position. It only solidifies that you were right despite the fact that I've shown you that you were perfectly wrong. And so at times it can seem like an insurmountable struggle because I'm in the business of defending truth and persuading people of opposing ideas. But in most of the cases, it's la la la, I don't want to hear it. And that's why I talk about ostrich parasitic syndrome in the previous book. Because while the ostrich doesn't literally

bury its head in the sand, the metaphor is very apt, which is, I don't want to face reality. Yeah, it's willful blindness. It's willful blindness. And so it's a very, very difficult game. In the Egyptian mythology, the god of the state, they had a god of the state, Osiris. And Osiris was a great exploratory and nation-founding hero in his youth, awake and alert and curious, able to transform and to bring order. But as he ages, he becomes ossified and that's sped along by the fact that he's willfully blind. That's in the Egyptian theology.

Now he has a brother, an evil brother, Seth. And Seth is the origin of the word Satan, by the way, through the Coptic Christians. And Seth is the eternal evil brother of the willfully blind king. And when Osiris is sufficiently old and sufficiently willfully blind, which means unwilling to understand the usurping motivations of his evil brother, Osiris chops him up into pieces and spreads his parts around Egypt. In fact, the Egyptians regarded each Egyptian province as a piece of Osiris, right? So that body would come together as an integrated state.

He can't kill Osiris because Osiris is a deity, so there's no killing him. But you can make sure everything falls to pieces. So that's the blindness of institutions once established. They ossify and then they turn a blind eye to the machinations of the usurper. Right. Okay, so Osiris is now scattered all across the landscape, And so things have fallen apart. People say that about their own life. Everything fell apart.

His wife is queen of the underworld, Isis, and she rules the domain of the underworld and chaos, which is where you go when things fall apart. And she makes her appearance. So that's the renewal of the social order by what? The plenitude and terror of nature. And she finds Osiris's phallus, so the vessel of the seminal idea. And she makes herself pregnant and has a son.

The son is Horus. Horus is the Egyptian god of the eye, the famous Egyptian eye with the fully open pupil, and he's also a falcon because birds of prey have the most acute vision. And Horus is willing to see, and he can see evil. And so he goes back to Egypt when he grows up like King Arthur. He grows up alienated from his evil community, and he goes back to fight Seth. And they have a terrible battle, and Seth tears out one of his eyes.

And they continue to fight, and Horus gets the eye back, and he banishes Seth to the nether regions of the cosmos. No killing him, because the force that usurps and parasitizes never dies. Okay, now he's got his eye back. Now you think he could just slap it in his head and then he could rule. That's not what happens. He goes to the land of the dead, back to the underworld, voluntarily, and he finds Osiris, his father, languishing in the underworld, in a ghostly and desiccated state. And he gives him his eye.

So he provides corrupt tradition with the capacity to see. And then Osiris awakens, and they unite. And it's the union of Osiris and Horus that is the proper sovereign of the state and the soul of the pharaoh. Nice. Isn't that something? That's nice. I guess that's why you love to study ancient themes to link them to current realities,

right? Well, it's so brilliant. The Mesopotamians, too, worshiped vision, attention, for exactly the same reason. It's exactly what we're talking about. You know, you talk about people turning a blind eye. There are none so blind as those who will not see. The deity of the revivification of the corrupt state for the Egyptians was literally the open eye. Pay attention. Right.

And for the Mesopotamians, it was twofold. Pay attention and speak the proper words. Free associating here. One of the greatest guests I've ever had on my show is a gentleman who, when you translate his pseudonym in English is Eye of Mosul in Arabic, it would be Ayn al-Mosul, which was, he was a guy who was literally documenting the atrocities that were being committed by ISIS in Mosul at great threat to him, and he was using the vision, the eye symbol, to capture exactly that. You should go, if you ever have a chance, you should go and listen to our chat,

because when people say, you know, I'm too afraid to speak on campus because of reasons X, Y, Z. I usually will refer them to someone like this gentleman and several other very courageous people who literally put their lives in imminent danger in order to document some of the difficult realities that people face in the Middle East. And yet most people here are too afraid to speak out

because they might be unfriended by someone on Facebook. And so I always try to contextualize the dangers that people feel in the West compared to some of the dangers that freedom fighters feel. And actually I remember in, do you remember our chat, our event that was originally canceled at Ryerson, which we subsequently held a few months later in 2017 in Toronto. Yeah, yeah.

I remember that in the Q&A period, someone asked each of the people on the panel, including you and I, who would be some of the freedom fighters that we each most admire. And in my case, I gave examples of people in the Middle East who speak out at truly extraordinary great personal risk. So there you have it. Yeah. Well, you know, God, the thing about risk, risk is a funny thing because there's the risk that you accrue by speaking out and then there's the risk that you accrue by being silent when you have something to say. Yeah, well that's the Jonah story, right? The dragon from the abyss will drag you to hell if you refuse to speak when your conscience tells you to.

To that exact point when people ask me why is it that you speak out, I usually tell them that when I go to bed at night and I have to put my head on the pillow, the only thing that stops me from having a bout of endless insomnia is to know that I was fully true in defending the truth. If I were to modulate my speech, if I were to regulate what I say or don't say, even though the world might not know it I Would know it and therefore since I'm my harshest critic since I have a very exacting code of personal conduct I simply can't modulate and so it's exactly to your point, which is I would feel inauthentic

I would feel fraudulent if I were to not speak when I'm tasked to speak. And I only wish more people were to do that. Yeah, there's no pillow like a good conscience, as they say. Yeah, yeah. You know, the other... You said that you have an exacting personal standard, but would it not... I'm very curious about your response to this. Would it not be the case that you could say with equal truth that an exacting conscience has you in its grip? Yeah, that's a great question.

So in the last book, in my happiness book, I have an entire chapter on the inverted you, which is sort of the universal law of maximal flourishing. Too little of something is not good, too little of something is not good, too much of something is not good, and life is about finding that sweet spot, which of course Aristotle had already explained to us via his golden mean. The golden mean. Right, exactly. A soldier who's too cowardly is not good, a soldier who's a reckless martyr is going

to die very quickly, and somewhere in the middle stands the golden mean. So to your question, I argue that my perfectionism, which is one manifestation of perfectionism is a manifestation of my exacting standard, actually puts me beyond the sweet spot. And let me give you an example. When I received the galley proofs, let's say to my latest book, most authors would view that as an opportunity to celebrate. This is the last final step before the book goes out into production. To me, I go through an infinite amount of angst because this is the last time that I could ever find that misplaced comma or that typo on page 337.

And so I end up spending probably five times as much time as with the typical author when they're going through the galley proof because of my exacting nature, because of my maladaptive perfectionism. So even for a trait that you would think is a noble trait, right? You're conscientious, you have attention to detail,

even that could be in the maladaptive part of the curve. Yeah, well, I wonder, it's a strange thing, Abe, because you have to adjudicate adaptive with a specified timeframe. And timeframe is a tricky matter, right? Because look, why do people go along with the horde even when their conscience is suggesting the alternative? And the answer to that is, I think,

you tell me what you think about this as a student of evolutionary biology and motivation, because timeframe is a crucial issue here, right? That's why we delay gratification. That's why there's a distribution of future preference. Forgive me for interrupting you. I was literally, before I came here this morning, I was working at the cafe on my forthcoming book. I was working on a section on delayed gratification, but go ahead, continue. Okay, well, so here's our hypothesis is that service to an exacting conscience is the longest-term game.

So, I was going to tell you, I said, I mentioned before we began the podcast that I wanted to tell you a story about Abraham, and maybe I can do that now if you don't mind, because I got Brett Weinstein's comments on this, by the way, because I'm very curious about its evolutionary significance. I think it's the antidote to the notion of the selfish gene, and I think it's evolutionarily sound. So, let me tell you what, let's say that as you mature, let's start out this first, is when you're immature your time frame is very short.

And so you're after immediate gratification. That's the case with two-year-olds and like radically immature people. They want whatever it is, they want whatever in them is demanding to be satiated now. And they can't forego that gratification for future consideration or others. And those are kind of the same thing, right? You in the future is pretty much like someone else now. It's a hypothetical, right?

And so psychopaths, for example, serve their future selves very badly. They don't learn from experience and they get themselves in trouble in pursuit of immediate gratification. They're radically antisocial. It's a propagation or an extension of immaturity. I think that's what Marxism is too, by the way. Property is theft. That's pretty damn convenient if you want what other people have sacrificed for. Okay, so Abraham, I'll try to make this brief. Abraham is dependent and immature when the story starts. He lives with his wealthy parents and he's never had to lift a finger even though he's like into his seventh decade. And then a voice comes to him.

And you could think about it as the voice of calling, or the voice of adventure, or the voice of conscience. They all work equally well. And it says to him, you have to leave your zone of comfort. You have to leave what you are accustomed to and what served you. And you have to journey what you are accustomed to and what served you, and you have to journey out into the world and have the terrible adventure of your life.

And if you do that, I will make you a covenant. This is the Abrahamic covenant. And I took it apart in We Who Rest With God, and I've been lecturing about it, thinking it through, because I think there's something unbelievably profound in it. So God comes to Abraham as the voice that tells him to step out of his zone of comfort and to move forward, radically. So that's a definition of the divine, by the way, in that story. It's not a call to belief.

It's a definition of the highest calling. Okay, so here's the deal. God tells Abraham, if you do this, so let's say you follow the pathway of developmental impetus, you'll become a blessing to yourself. So that's a good deal. That would imply that the instinct that moves us out into the world followed properly is the best guarantee of our future security and opportunity, which has to be the case. Those things have to line up. Okay. So that's offer one. Offer two is your name will become renowned among those who know you for valid reasons. So you'll establish a reputation that's genuine and deep.

Number three, all your enemies will flee before you, and nothing will be able to withstand your movement forward. Number four. You'll establish something of lasting permanence. In Abraham's case, he establishes what I think is the pattern of paternal prowess that radically guarantees the multi-generational survival of his offspring. And he's guaranteed the, to be the father of nations. And the final kicker, and this is brilliant,

you'll do it in a way that brings nothing but abundance to everyone else. So imagine that this would imply that the impulse that moves us past that zone of convenience that people will tyrannically cling to, that the manifestation of that spirit is the same process that brings peace and opportunity to life, that guarantees reputation, that makes you implacable and unopposable in the medium to long run, that allows you to establish something

multi-generationally permanent, including a biological legacy, and that brings abundance to everyone else. So that speaks of an alignment with the instinct to move forward. That would be the instinct that's counter to tyranny, that tyranny we described earlier, that aligns all that with the pattern that would radically increase the survival of your progeny if that

pattern is duplicated as it cascades down the generations. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if I have a ready answer regarding this specific biblical story, but I can certainly incorporate an evolutionary angle to these temporal decisions, these intertemporal delaying gratification. So let me tell you about two great studies. These are not my studies, but they're quite evolutionary in spirit. So usually, when you study intertemporal decisions, you make people go through a bunch of tasks where you set up the tension between I can give you $100 now or you can wait seven days and I'll give

you $130. And then depending on the pattern of responses that you and I give, I can calculate your lambda parameter, which basically captures how much of a delayed or immediate gratifier you are. Okay, fair enough. Now most psychologists and certainly economists have presumed that that lambda parameter is an invariable part of your personality. So Jordan Peterson might be an immediate gratifier, Gadzad might be a delayed gratifier, and that becomes invariant. Well Well it turns out that the story is a bit more complex in an evolutionarily relevant way. So for example, if you make people drink a sugary drink or a placebo, I can get you to alter your lambda parameter.

So people who are satiated, physically satiated, because they had a sugary drink, are more likely to delay their immediate rewards because they are literally satiated. That makes perfect sense, sure. Now, and listen to this one. So that's related to survival, right? Because I'm drinking something which is a consumatory thing. Now let's prime the mating module.

If I show men and women photos of sexy opposite sex targets, that priming doesn't work for women for obvious evolutionary reasons, but for men, if you prime them with photos of scantily clad sexy women, their lambda parameter changes such that they now want, they want it now. So in other words, they become a lot more driven by immediate gratification, even if it's in a different domain. And that generalizes, oh that's interesting. Exactly. So I'm either catering to your mating module or to your survival module. And because these are evolutionarily

relevant triggers, I can alter what most scientists thought was an invariant lambda parameter. And so to your point, your intuition of asking an evolutionist about intertemporal choices, there really is an evolutionary story to that. Well, you know, that's also reflected in the Abrahamic story, because Abraham's relationship to this voice that calls him forward is sacrificial. He has to give up something in the present that's valuable. That's why that, that's why that this took me a long time to figure out, Gadd, I didn't know to begin with that the reason that the deepest relationship in these ancient stories is catalyzed by sacrifice was because people were trying to work through this paradoxical idea that if you give up something in the present of value and you do that properly, whatever that means, because that becomes a mystery, then you can stabilize the medium and long term and also the community.

And so, think about what this means, if this is right. And like, it's evident to me from comparing multiple stories that sacrifice is the ritual of delay of gratification. It's the ritual of work. And work is the sacrifice because you give up your pursuit of immediate gratification in the present to stabilize your future and to fill it with opportunity. And so, and what? Sophisticated communities are dependent on sophisticated sacrifice. And then the question becomes sacrifice in service of what? In the Abraham story, it's in the service of the instinct that moves you adventurously forward, which is a lovely way of conceptualizing it. but the fact that the sacrifice is involved.

So what happens too is that Abraham pursues a sequence of expanding adventures, each of which demands a more exacting sacrifice, and that culminates in God's request that he'd sacrifice his son, right, you could say, to the spirit of adventure. Of course, Abraham gets to keep his son, which is the moral of the story I think which is that if you're willing to Sacrifice even your children to what's highest then you'll get them back Right and you'll win but it's a long-term game. You know, we did experiments with that lambda Technology and we showed that and and this is, I think,

very much in keeping with what you described. If you put people in a state of enhanced positive emotion, they're more likely to discount the future, because that's the activation of that appetitive system. And it's also the case that extroverts are more, will discount the future more heavily than introverts, and extroverts are in a state of enhanced positive emotion.

And so, right, an extrovert is pursuing opportunity in the social realm pretty much all the time. And so- Sorry, the capacity to delay gratification turns out to have unbelievable beneficial downstream effects, whether it be to your likelihood of success in life, whether it be to your health, whether it be to your happiness. So let's just take a few examples. You and I sacrificed going out and partying when we were

young, when many of our friends did so. We probably stayed in school, I don't know when you finished your PhD, I finished my PhD in my late 20s, when many of my friends would have already been earning paychecks for five, six, eight years, but by sacrificing that, when you look at us when we're both 60, probably one would argue that I've made up for whatever I sacrificed back then and as you have. The Marshmallow test, which of course you're very familiar with, there is research that shows that the children who were able to pass the Marshmallow test to really not take that extra Marshmallow when the experimenter was looking. If we track those children who had that delayed gratification reflex later in life, they were more successful.

So it applies to everything. Think about weight gain, right? When I stop myself from having the immediate dopamine hit of that extra piece of chocolate cake, I am sacrificing the immediate pleasure today for making sure that in 10 years, I'm not much overweight, which by the way, I greatly failed at many years ago when I ended up being 256 pounds,

but not having the height of a football linebacker. And so many of our downstream, either successes or failures stem from the original thing that we're talking about, which is are you able to sacrifice something today for something positive tomorrow? I mean, would you agree that it's probably one of the traits that is most causative of our future successes or failures?

Look, I don't even have to agree that literature on that is crystal clear. So, well, the most, the best predictor of long-term success in a complex organized society is general cognitive ability, right? And that's probably something like, part of what that is, is just speed of thought. That's not all of it, because depth of thought, ability to juggle multiple concepts simultaneously. But it's a unitary phenomenon, general cognitive ability. It's indexed with the SATs and the GREs and the MCATs, all of these tests of cognitive merit. But the next best predictor is trait conscientiousness. And conscientiousness is orderliness and industriousness, and both of those are markers

of the willingness to... It's complicated, eh, Gad? Because we looked at the relationship between trait conscientiousness and future discounting, and in the future discounting tasks, we couldn't find a relationship. So whatever future discounting is indexing with regards to the ability to delay gratification is not exactly the same component of sacrificial willingness that conscientiousness indexes. You know, we probably tried 50 laboratory, trying to find an actual task that trait conscientiousness predicted. And we couldn't find one. We couldn't find one, not a task.

Self-report works, other report works. You know what? You can derive a pretty good index of someone's suitability for a complex, exacting managerial position with a big five personality inventory if people don't cheat it, but be damned if we could find an actual behavioral task that indexed it. Did you publish those null effects?

Yes. Have you tried publishing null effects? That's the reason why I asked this because, you know, one of the great stories of, you know, my null effect story is back in, I think, the late 90s, there was a special issue in the journal, which I'm sure you've heard of, Cognition and Emotion, you know, a top journal, where I was trying to study the relationship between dysphoria and decision-making. And I wanted to see whether being in a dysphoric state would make you tackle a decision-making task

with greater conscientiousness or lesser conscientiousness. And there were theories that could predict either, right? So some people thought when you're dysphoric, you're sort of in a learned helplessness mode, life sucks, who cares, I'm not going to put much effort into the task. Whereas there's another research stream that argued the exact opposite, which is when I feel dysphoric, one of the ways that I can gain control and mastery over my environment is to put in more effort into the decision. Right, right, sure. And so I came into the research without any apriory hypotheses precisely because I didn't

have a good sense of what I should expect. I said, let me just do exploratory research and see what I get. And I think I had measured something like 16 or 17 dependent variables, different dependent variables, and I had two groups, the non-dysphoric and the dysphoric, and I think on all of the measures except one, I had gotten no differences between the two groups. So there was, yeah, let me just finish this. Please do.

Yeah. And so I had sent the paper to a special issue of cognition and emotion, and the special issue was on the application of emotions in decision making. So it couldn't have been more perfectly suited. And the guest editor at the time, who's a famous psychologist whose name you would easily know but turned out to be an utter abject asshole because I recently gave a talk somewhere on some you know some of the parasitic stuff but he really hated me because you know he was of a different persuasion he's now ardent leftist but in any case he said he wrote back to me and

said look I would love to accept this paper, but unfortunately, God, it is laden with nothing but null effects, to which I answered, but don't you think that the ubiquity of the null effects in this case is worthy of it being documented in the literature? And apparently I wasn't able to convince him. So that's what happens. Let's take that apart for a minute, because I think we can probably understand why, at least in part. So, if you look at the Big Five structure, the emotions load on extroversion and neuroticism, right?

So you have extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness. Extroversion and neuroticism pretty much cover the whole domain of emotion. So extroversion is the behavioral manifestation of either lower threshold for positive emotion or more positive emotion. And neuroticism is the behavioral expression of more negative emotion or lower threshold for negative emotion. So all the emotional phenomena load on extroversion and neuroticism. It's possible that the delay discounting tasks that we were referring to are primarily modulated by emotion, right? But that conscientiousness, remember these are orthogonal traits. So conscientiousness doesn't look emotion dependent because if it, it would load on extroversion or neuroticism.

So there's some aspect, we did one study where we found a behavioral effect of conscientiousness. That was only one. Breadth of attentional focus. So conscientious people could focus their attention on a smaller place. Now to some degree they sacrificed breadth of attention for that, as you'd expect. Openness modulated that, creativity let's say, but it was focus of attention. And you can see that that could be quite different psychophysiologically from the effect of emotion on modulation

of delay of gratification. So maybe that might be a rabbit hole worth wandering down. You could think when your attention is highly focused, the disciplinary element of that is to keep all those competing motivational states out of the game. Right? And that seems to be, I think, tell me what you think, that seems to be something like what we refer to when we refer to willpower. It's like maintenance of a frame of reference, a narrow, goal-directed, task-oriented frame of reference, despite competing temptations.

And again, trait conscientiousness is a very good predictor of long-term success, especially. It's the best predictor, apart from IQ of wealth and security, it's a pretty good predictor of longevity, it's a pretty good predictor of marital stability. Like, what do they say? All good things come to those who wait? So if you're gonna hire someone trait conscientiousness is the first thing you look at after raw intelligence But it doesn't look emotion dependent, which is what you discovered. That's what you showed. Yeah. Yeah, exactly

That's exactly right. Maybe I need to revive that paper because I never published it Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. Maybe I need to revive that paper because I never published it. But are you familiar with Frank Salloway's work? Do you know who that is, Jordan? Does that ring a bell? The name rings a bell. Tell me the work. Maybe I'll remember.

Yes, because you mentioned the Big Five on a few occasions, so I thought you might get a kick out of it, and certainly your viewers and listeners. So Frank Salloway is a historian of science, but also a Freud biographer. Oh right, that's why I knew him. Yes, but his real claim to fame, brilliant book, came out I think in 1996. The book is titled Born to Rebell. And you'll see in a second how I'm gonna tie it to the big five. So Salloway argues, he sort of flips the script on the typical birth order literature.

Usually the birth order literature. Right, that's right, that's right. That's where I know him too. So the birth order literature basically works via the differential behaviors that parents are going to bestow on their children as a function of their birth order. So the parent might behave differently to the firstborn, to the secondborn, and so on.

Well, Soloway completely flips that upside down by arguing that no, and he actually uses an evolutionary explanation. He argues that one of the most fundamental original evolutionary problems that a child has to solve is what's called the Darwinian Niche partitioning hypothesis. It's a mouthful, but let me explain it. So when a child is born, all niches are unoccupied. There is the, I'm a good boy niche,

I'm a rebel niche, any other ones. So I've got the full litany of possible niches to occupy. But as the next child comes along, if he or she wishes to occupy a unique uncharted niche, then there is one lesser. And as you go down the sip ship, there are fewer and fewer niches available. And therefore, he decided, he argued and demonstrated that when you get to the last born, because

they face a much more difficult problem in that all of the niches are now occupied, that forces them to become score higher on openness amongst some of the other personality traits. And because Lastborn score higher on openness, he then tests the 28 most radical scientific innovations throughout history and demonstrates that for 23 out of the 28, the ones who espoused the radical scientific theory were later borns or last borns. And the ones who were part of the orthodoxy were the first borns. And I usually end this little lecture with, do you want to guess what Professor Saad's birth order is? Are you first or last?

Last, of course. You're last, you're last. How else could I have made all those advances if I wasn't the non-orthodox thinker? But I think, what do you think of this theory? Does it resonate with you? Well, one of the things that came to mind for me there was the, there's also, you know, a parallel literature that indicates that the more older brothers you have, the more likely you are to be gay.

Well, then I'm in trouble because I've got two older brothers. No, well, it doesn't really kick in until you have more than that, but I was just trying to put that together in my mind with this particular hypothesis and with the increase in openness. Because it is quite a marked, it's a marked phenomena and as far as I know it's valid. I don't know how robust the birth order literature is. I remember Galloway's book now. But I like the, Salloway, sorry, I like the niche idea.

It's certainly the case that that's one of the things also that typifies human beings above all. You can think about the competition with children there as their experimentation with different characterizations of themselves to garner attention, right? And one of the things that garners attention is novelty. That's exactly right. Look, say in a nest, you have multiple hungry mouths that are opening and I wanna get the attention

of the parent and in many cases, of course, as you know, there is, you kill your sibling, right? You throw them off the nest so that now all of the attention could be guarded to you. Well in the human case, notwithstanding some of the biblical stories where you literally kill your brother, the way that we compete, it's in a sense the inaugural marketing problem, right? In marketing, you talk about segmentation and targeting a niche. Well, when I'm trying to position myself in a unique niche, vis-a-vis competing for my parents' attention, that's a marketing problem.

How do I position myself so that I'm in a different niche from the rest of my siblings? So there you go. Sure. And those open beaks, they're evolutionarily prime targets. If I remember correctly, cuckoes, they have a bigger and redder open mouth, and so they're more likely to be stuffed full of food, and the mother birds don't notice because they're so focused conscientiously on the target, and the cuckoos throw the other chicks out of the nest.

Let me mention this because some of your viewers and listeners may not know this. This is actually called brood parasitism, right? This is where one species has literally evolved the darkest of parental strategies, which is I can't be bothered raising my own children. Therefore, let me parasitize the parental instincts of another species, place the egg there, and those suckers will raise it. Now, by the way, that has to happen before a certain ontogenetic stage.

So if it happens before it, then the parents will keep feeding that chick, the cuckoo chick, even though as it's growing up, it clearly looks morphologically different than the other ones, it will still do it. But if you come in too late into the nest, then they will catch on. So-

Oh, that's interesting. I see. You see what I mean? I see. And so it's just incredible. And this is what frustrates me so much, by the way, about the people who hate evolutionary theory, because the amount of exquisite scientific explanations and predictions that evolution offers is so bafflingly great. And yet people accuse us of just engaging and just so storytelling. It's really galling.

Yeah, yeah. So, let's go down the parasitic rabbit hole for a bit. So I'm going to make some propositions, and you tell me if you believe that they're valid. The first ground truth, I would say, is that I've read an array of evolutionary literature this isn't the only hypothesis, but it's a good one, that sex itself emerged so that creatures who were replicating could escape the problem of parasites. So the theory goes is that the parasitic form is simpler than the form of the host,

generally speaking, and that can give it a reproductive speed advantage. And so the parasite can overwhelm the host and the host perishes ignominiously with no offspring under those circumstances. So what the host does is mix up its genes so that the parasite is stymied in its attempt to adapt to the host across generations.

And the parasite problem is so deep that the host is willing to sacrifice 50% of its genes, of its variable genes, which is what happens in sex, rather than say, parthenogenic reproduction, where you just clone yourself. So that's how deep the parasite problem is. So is that reasonable so far? It is. I'm trying to think whether the theory that you just enunciated, if it's not Bill Hamilton who came up with it, does that sound right?

It might be Hamilton. Yeah. I think it might be Hamilton. Yeah. By the way, go ahead. Go on. Well, I just want to add one more layer because this will tie it into your book and into the experiences that we've had. So, you know, there's, this is a weird way of introducing this, but I'm going to do it anyways. I've spent, I spend a lot of time showing my students at the University of Toronto and Harvard the movie Pinocchio, because Pinocchio is a deadly accurate representation of development and its perils. It's really remarkable. But there's weird things about it, very weird things that are hard to explain. The fact of the bug that's the conscience, the fact that Pinocchio starts as a marionette

pulled by forces that are beyond his control. You know what he's tempted by? It's so funny, Gad. He's tempted to become an actor, so that's a narcissist. He's tempted to become a liar, so someone who falsifies. And he's tempted to use his hypothetical illness and victimization as a ticket to the land of the delinquents and the death of society. That's the way the narrative lays itself out.

In any case, this is the odd part that's relevant to the parasite issue. There's a scene in the movie where Pinocchio rescues Geppetto from the belly of a whale. And everyone swallows that, so to speak, as perfectly understandable, even though it makes no sense whatsoever. So I've been thinking, I've been thinking about this, because I couldn't crack that. I've been thinking about it for like 30 years. What the hell is that? What does that signify and why does it sit well with an audience given its perplexing

and absurd nature? Well, okay. So a carcass is a storehouse of value, right? So that's why we were herders, obviously, or hunters. And if we hunted mammoths way back 15, 25,000 years ago, we would take down a carcass that was too big for us to consume and we would store it in the bodies of our co-hunters. And that was reputation, right? Right. Our reputation as an avid sharer made it more likely that we would live through periods of famine because we're collective hunters. Okay, so that's how a carcass might be distributed and transformed into reputation. In any case, the largest of all possible carcasses is a whale carcass. So a whale carcass is a storehouse of value.

When the spirit that gave rise to the provisioning of the carcass dies, the dead, the dying father is inside the whale and that's why the puppet who's trying to transform has to rescue it. That's the university's GAD. So this is what's happened as far as I'm concerned. Tell me what you think of this. Since World War II, particularly, we set up a very conscientious society. It was based almost entirely on merit, you know, absent corruption from say, oh God, I don't know when, but certainly from 1945 to say 2010, 2005, something like that. And in consequence, we stacked up an awful lot

of whale carcasses and the parasites moved in. Yeah, I mean, I liked sort of the metaphor, the explanation of how using the sharing mechanism, because I can't consume, that is literally out of reciprocal altruism, right? It's Bob Trivers. That's Trivers. Exactly, and actually I was wondering,

because earlier we were talking about your time at Harvard, Trivers got his PhD at Harvard and E.O. Wilson, who was also at Harvard and recently passed away, I recently read his autobiography Naturalist, which I highly recommend for anyone. It's beautifully written, really gorgeous autobiography. E.O. Wilson used to say that when, and you know, E.O. Wilson was no intellectual slouch, right? I mean, he was a very bright guy.

And he used to say that when Bob Trivers would walk into his office in his sort of manic phase discussing all kinds of brilliant ideas, he would be so exhausted after that meeting that the day was over, he had done enough and he would just go home. That gives you a sense of the kind of brilliance that you might find in some of these carcasses of whales that we call universities today. And I only wish, I long for the day that we can go back to, you know, those kinds of institutions rather than my having to indigenize evolutionary psychology. Right, right. Well, that's a good place to close. Well, we could imagine this, Gad, then. So here's two types of value.

There's the value of what's been stored. So that's the carcass. That would be the Harvard Endowment. That would be the Harvard endowment, that would be the brand value of the Ivy Leagues, or the brand value of a PhD, all of those are carcasses. And so they can be stripped to the bone by the parasites who care nothing for the future propagation of that enterprise. They're just going to take everything and run.

And the cowardly professors have turned a willfully blind eye to the invasion of the parasites, the grievance studies, the resentful mob who deprioritize the merit that built the institutions. Okay, so the carcass is one place of value. The other place of value that's more, that's deeper, is the spirit of the enterprise that gave rise to the storehouse of value. Right? And the universities are also attacking that. They're parasitizing the brand and they're destroying the principle upon which it was founded, which was pure, it was basically intellectual capability and conscientiousness. You know, we studied scientists to find out what predicted long-term research productivity.

And we thought maybe it would be, we knew IQ would matter because it matters about everything that's complex. Openness, which is creativity, didn't predict at all, not above IQ. In fact, there was a slight negative prediction, but conscientiousness was a walloping predictor. Now you know, openness and IQ are positively correlated, so if you're smarter you tend to be more creative. But above and beyond intelligence, openness didn't matter. And I think that's reasonable because most diligent science isn't done by radical geniuses, right? There are

some who are revolutionary in this open manner, but most of the incremental science, I think the reason science is so powerful is because you can turn it into something that conscientious people can do. Right? Just by diligent pursuit. Although I think the biggest thinkers are those who have a bent towards being generalists, because the biggest breakthroughs in science happen at the intersections of disciplines. Yeah, yeah, that's right. breakthroughs in science happen at the intersections of disciplines, right? So yes, while it is true that the hyper specialist is the one who does the important incremental work,

the really big ideas, and this goes back to, I think we maybe discussed this in the past, or maybe we didn't. I mentioned earlier E.O. Wilson. So E.O. Wilson wrote in the late 1990s one of my favorite books of all time. The book was titled Consilience, right? Consilience, yeah. Yeah. It's a great book.

Consilience, Unity of Knowledge. And I think both of us, you and I, in our own distinct ways are really consilient thinkers. When you're doing your relationship between biblical narratives and linking it to contemporary realities or to psychological realities, you're engaging in an endeavor of conciliance. You're building bridges between ancient stories and current truths. You're building a link between science and religion, and so you are being conciliant. In my own work, I have published in many, many different disciplines, which people told me not to do because they thought that's the exact way to not build an academic successful academic career. But I didn't care because I was intellectually curious. I want to go where I want to go. So I think that while it's all great for people to be incrementalists and hyper specialists,

I think the truly big guys, the ones who really stand the test of time, are the big, conciliant thinkers. Yeah, well that adds that additional element of exploration and revolutionary explanation. That's a good time, I think, to bring this portion of the enterprise to a close. You're working on a new book. Let's just focus on that for a minute, which I'm very interested in. Maybe we'll talk about it on the daily wire side. That would be a good thing.

Suicidal empathy, right? And so, I've got some notions I would love to talk to you about in relationship to that. The maternal, the unsatiated maternal instinct gone mad. The devouring mother. That's exactly it. The devouring mother. Let's talk about that on the daily wire side. Sounds good. All right. Yep. Very good to see you, Gad. And so, tell people just at the end here,

the names of your last couple of books. So, the latest book is called The Sad Truth About Happiness, Eight Secrets for Leading a Good Life. The one prior to that was called The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. And the ones before that are all within the evolutionary psychology realm, the evolutionary basis of consumption, evolutionary psychology in the business sciences, and the consuming instinct. Right, well it's a pleasure talking to you sir and we'll join you again on the Daily Wire side. For everybody who's watching and listening as you know we do another 20 minutes to half an hour on the Daily Wire side and we're going to talk to Gad today about Suicidal Empathy, which is the title of his new book.

Pleasure to see you, Dr. Saad. It's always worth talking to you. You too. Thank you so much.