Ralph NaderNews, Government

Episode Summary

Ralph welcomes Professor Nicholas Chater, co-author of “It's on You: How Corporations and Behavioral Scientists Have Convinced Us That We’re to Blame for Society's Deepest Problems.” Then, as most of the media turns its attention to Iran, we return to the ongoing genocide in Gaza and welcome back Dr. Feroze Sidhwa to break down his three-part series published in Zeteo called “The Truth About Gaza's Dead.”Nick Chater is Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School. He has written and co-written more than two hundred research papers and six books, including It’s on You: How Corporations and Behavioral Scientists Have Convinced Us That We’re to Blame for Society’s Deepest Problems (co-written with George Loewenstein).I was on a UK government committee as the representative of behavioural science for six years, where my role was (at least I understood my role to be) coming up with smart-aleck ideas about what individual nudges or bits of useful information we could give to the public—how that would help people reduce their carbon emissions. And I came away from that experience extremely chastened. Because almost all the interesting issues were nothing to do whatsoever with individual behavior. They were all about big systemic changes… And the shock for me was realizing that the tools that I was hoping to wield were in fact completely ineffective.Nick ChaterI think it’s absolutely true that many of the things that behavioral scientists are supposedly “discovering” [are] the things that campaigners and activists and indeed people in the political world generally and journalists intuitively have long known, and indeed probably have good evidence for. It’s simply— it’s sort of a sad process of trailing-along-behind which I think the academic world has been engaged in, where we’ve been slowly realizing that things that everybody else knew initially are actually true after all.Nick ChaterOne of the most powerful things that each of us has is the ability to propagate our own perspective and to campaign for change…I think getting people pulling together and pushing for change can be incredibly powerful. So seeing ourselves as citizens who are actively able to have our voice, make our voices heard, I think that’s where the real power lies. And I think that the campaigners and political activists and so on have always known this. And of course, also, big businesses have always known this too. And they certainly don’t want us to be doing too much of that. They want us to be focusing on quite the opposite. They want us to be focusing on our own gardens and not worrying about the big picture. They don’t want organized opposition.Nick ChaterDr. Feroze Sidhwa is a general, trauma, and critical care surgeon in California. He is also a humanitarian surgeon who has worked in Palestine, Ukraine, Haiti, Zimbabwe, and Burkina Faso. He most recently volunteered at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, Gaza. He was blocked from entering Gaza by Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence service in November 2025.In the first 25 days of the assault on Gaza, more children were killed than in the entire worst year of conflict that Airwars had ever studied previously, which was Syria in 2016. In the first 25 days in Gaza, between 2,200 and 2,600 children were killed in Gaza, compared to 1,900 in Syria. So again, if you adjust for the size of the population (because Syria is a much bigger country than Gaza is a territory), the rate of
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