Gad Saad Discusses Porn...and Seinfeld

And I love the fact, by the way, that you said that you don't modulate who you bring on. So let me let me share my own personal experience. I was just contacted a few days ago. And if she's listening now, I'm sorry if I haven't responded yet, I will. I was contacted by a very famous former porn star. I won't mention her name. I didn't actually know her work, but I have since gone and done my research on her and And if my wife is listening, it was completely for research purposes. And so anyway, so so I she reached out to me, said, hey, would you come on my show? You know, I'm a fan. Now, if I were the typical academic, I would be doing all sorts of machinations in my head and calculations. Well, is it good for my brand to be speaking to a porn star? Doesn't it make me look less professorial? And actually, I never even entered my mind. I saw that she had a sufficiently large platform that she was certainly an intelligent person. And I'm very likely to reply to her and say, hey, let's let's do it. So and I think that comes across with you. There's no pretense. Let's just sit down and have conversations with interesting people. Of course, in my case, my show is infinitely smaller than yours, but it's been successful within my sphere for I think similar reasons to why yours has been so successful. The porn star thing is very interesting because people avoid even the topic of porn. But yet clearly a lot of people are watching it. And a good example, and I don't mean to throw this guy under the bus, is the the journalist from the New Yorker who unfortunately was on a Zoom call recently and thought he had muted his video and did not. And why was why was it work on the Zoom call decided to start masturbating and didn't know the way to do it? I wasn't going to say his name. I just want to say that you said his name and not me. I guess I feel terrible for the man because first of all, because I masturbate. I know that's going to sound crazy, but I do. And I know there are many men who masturbate. Well, you're married. So of course you masturbate. Well, even before I was married, I masturbated. I'm going to be honest with you. I am a lifelong masturbator. I think I discovered it in my teenage years and I've been an avid pursuer of it ever since. I think it's a clarity device, but it's also I mean in terms of like when you get horny, you get very confused. Like men who are horny have one thing on their mind and it's it's a good tool to eliminate that one thing from your mind. And you could look you don't want to be fixated by something. If you're hungry, you should eat. You know, you don't want to be just like starving all day. Just eat if you I'm sorry, but my point is we all sort of want to pretend that we're not doing it. We're not doing that. It's very straight. Intellectually, we all know that we do it. Everyone knows we do it. Everyone does it. Pretty much everyone does it. But when you discuss it, people like oh, they roll their eyes. They pull their head. It's out of shame. It's a very strange thing. We have biological needs. And if you don't attend to these biological needs, I believe that you can have very confusing motives and people that are excessively horny. They're distracted. It's not healthy to Seinfeld references that speak exactly to that point. You ready? So the first one is actually one that I discussed in my first book, my 2007 book, The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption, where I was talking about how you can analyze cultural products, including, you know, sitcom themes via an evolutionary lens. And so I take the example of the classic episode from Seinfeld, master of my domain, right? Where you remember that show. So my domain, of course, is a euphemism for who could withstand their masturbatory urges the longest. And then I say, well, let's analyze that plot line of that particular show from an evolutionary perspective. And so the first thing you might remember is that there are three male characters and one female one. They all recognize that she has to put in more money into the into the pot, the bed because it isn't as difficult for women to resist their masturbatory urges. So that was the first point. Then as each one was losing the bed, meaning they were succumbing to their masturbatory urges. It's interesting to look at what was the trigger that caused them to lose the bed. So in the case of Kramer, it's because he is seeing a gorgeous young woman scantily clad doing all sorts of sexy positions as she's exercising. So what triggered him to masturbate was the visual imagery. Whereas when it came to Elaine losing the bet, it's because she fantasized about becoming the long term partner, the wife of John F. Kennedy, Jr. Right. And she wasn't she wasn't masturbating over the cabana boy who was 18 years old with a nice ass. And so that spoke to the differences in terms of the content of the fantasies of men and women. And then the second point I want to make that is also from Seinfeld is there is an episode where George decides to forego sex. And by freeing his mind from having to focus on sex, he starts learning a whole bunch of new languages and he's solving chemistry equation problems because 99% of his brain is no longer focused on sex. And so there you go. Yeah, that's that's a real issue with people. But again, discussing porn or especially having a conversation with someone who participates in the the actual production and acting in policy acting with air quotes. It's it's forbidden. It's taboo. It's it's it's you you get looked down upon for some very bizarre reason that probably has to do with our puritanical shame. I'm not sure if we've discussed this before, but even if we have, I think it's worth repeating. It's probably many years ago that we discussed it. So in one of my other books, I talk about the evolutionary explanation of pornography and I specifically talk about porn that is directed at heterosexual males. So typically you might think that because men are interested in sleeping with many women that pornography is going to have one man sleeping with multiple women in a particular scene. Right. And that's called polygyny one man many women. Whereas actually the study has been done scientific study. It turns out that there's a lot more what's called polyandrous depictions in porn. Polyandry is one woman with multiple men. So why is it that porn directed to heterosexual men has a lot more scenes with one woman having sex with multiple men and there it turns out that the explanation comes from something called a sperm competition hypothesis. The idea being that men and actually males and many species get a rise literally and seeing other men having sex. So for example, when you are trying to get a stud, let's say a horse or a dog to mate with a female, you often will make him watch another male having sex and that will get the rise out of him. And so there's some really interesting scientific ways by which you could study a product like pornography, which of course is one of the most, you know, the products that we spend the most money on. Episodes of the Joe Rogan experience are now free on Spotify. That's right. They're free from September 1st to December 1st. They're going to be available everywhere. But after December 1st, they will only be available on Spotify, but they will be free. That includes the video. The video will also be there. It'll also be free. That's all we're asking. Go download Spotify. Much love. Bye-bye.