‘Wokeness’ is a mind disease…but it can be beaten
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Summary
Gad Saad is a visiting professor and Global Ambassador for Northwood University and a best-selling author. His latest book, The Woke Hypocrisy: How to Lead a Woke Life in the 21st Century, was a bestseller in 2018 and has since re-emerged as one of the most popular books of the year. In this episode of the Full Comment Podcast, Dr. Saad joins me to talk about why his new book is so popular and why it s still selling so well.
Transcript
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If you look around our society today and you think, hmm, things just aren't right, well,
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Western societies around the world are changing dramatically, and often not for the better.
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We are becoming less tolerant in the name of tolerance.
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We are adopting and accepting ideas that actually eat away at the foundations of a Western liberal
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Hello, and welcome to the Full Comment Podcast.
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My name is Brian Lilly, your host, and today our guest is Gad Saad, an academic, an intellectual
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in the best sense of those words, and someone who many of us have seen document the very
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issues and concerns that we're going to talk about today on his popular YouTube channel,
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on Joe Rogan Podcast, and elsewhere, as well as in his best-selling books.
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Dr. Gad Saad is a visiting professor and global ambassador for Northwood University, and he
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I want to open with a quote that I grabbed off the back of your best-selling book and
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recently became a bestseller again, and we'll talk about that, but I grabbed this off the
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back dust cover, and I want to read it to you and have you react, and tell me if you
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The back of the book, and I don't think this was you writing it, this is the publisher's
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promotional bit, but it's kind of summarized a lot of what you wrote about in the book.
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It said, the West's commitment to freedom, reason, and true liberalism has never been
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more seriously threatened than it is today by the stifling forces of political correctness.
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In 2020, you said we had never been under more threat.
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Do you still feel that way, or has it gotten worse?
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Could you have imagined how bad it would be in 2024?
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I was trying to predict where you were going with this.
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No, I guess one of the ways I could answer your question is saying that the book is still
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selling like hotcakes, which suggests that what I hoped would be the final mind vaccine
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and inoculation against all this nonsense has apparently not sufficiently worked because
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we are still facing the same issues, if not those issues having been exacerbated.
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So the book remains timely precisely because the phoenix of woke parasitic ideas keeps rising
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from the ashes, despite the fact that I keep hitting it.
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Well, over the summer, as I said, it came out 2020.
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Elon Musk goes on X and says, you must read this book.
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And I sent you a message and I said, I just said, how are sales going?
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Now that just to, if I may correct you, it wasn't the first time that he had endorsed
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He's been a fan of my work and of the parasitic mind for a long time.
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But that specific post, I shouldn't say tweet, that particular post, you are correct that
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you were the first one to bring it to my attention.
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And you are indeed correct that there is, I mean, more importantly than the Oprah bump,
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I think we need to revise our lexicon to the Musk bump because the book then entered two
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I think it was the Toronto Star Canadian bestseller list.
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A book that was a bestseller four years ago, returned to the bestsellers list four years
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Walk us through the parasitic mind because there's been a lot of talk about that.
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I know that Musk has been a fan of your work and of the book, and he talks about the woke
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mind virus, and that can sound like it's, you know, sloganeering, it's jingoistic, a parasitic
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So let me give you sort of the background of how I developed the idea and then link it
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So the first time that I had sort of a Houston, we have a problem moment was in my scientific
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So for those listeners and viewers that are not familiar with my work, I apply evolutionary
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biology and evolutionary psychology to study consumer behavior, economic decision.
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So yes, the consuming instinct right here, the evolutionary basis of consumption.
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You've looked at how we react and interact with goods and why we purchase certain brands.
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That's where you came out of before you got as political as you are now.
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But I was looking at the biological and Darwinian underpinnings of our consuming instinct, right?
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So for example, how do our hormones affect our food behavior?
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How do our hormones, you know, does a man's testosterone increase if he is using a, you
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As a matter of fact, so I did a study with one of my former graduate students and I'll
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In 2009, I published a paper with John Vungas, who was one of my former graduate students,
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where we actually got men to not imagine driving a Porsche.
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We actually rented, try to get a scientific granting agency to give you money to rent a
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So we rented a Porsche and we had a beaten up old car.
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And we had young men drive these two cars, either in downtown Montreal, where everybody
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can see you and on a semi-deserted highway where few people could see you.
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And the dependent measure was we took salivary assays so that we could measure the fluctuation,
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Because, and actually that's a good segue to eventually answering your parasitic mind
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So one of the things that I do as an evolutionary psychologist is I look at the behavior of other
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animals to draw homologies and analogies with human behavior.
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So for example, the peacock, right, has evolved this big, beautiful tail that's otherwise very
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It's from a survival perspective, that peacock's tail is costly.
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But the reason why it evolves, it does so through sexual selection, meaning that it confers a reproductive
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advantage to the peacock in exhibiting that signal.
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So I took that idea and I said, well, surely human beings engage in sexual signaling and
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I'm going to study it in the context of consumer behavior.
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And that's how I came up with the idea of studying it and using, so the Porsche is the human equivalent
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So I realized early in my career that what seemed profoundly obvious to me, which is that
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human beings are biological beings, and therefore if we want to study consumer behavior perfectly
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and completely, we need to study the biological forces that compel us to be the consumers that
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It was neo-Nazism, according to many of my social scientist colleagues and business school
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And so right there, I said, well, this is strange.
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How could otherwise supposedly sophisticated, intelligent, intellectual professors be such
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So that was my first exposure to how ideology can cause you to have completely irrational
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And then as my academic career progressed, I saw the infiltration, the proliferation of
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To your very specific question, why do I use the framework of parasitology?
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So in the animal kingdom, including humans, there is the field of parasitology, which studies
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So for example, the tapeworm goes into your intestinal tract, but a neuroparasite ends up
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in your brain, altering your circuitry to suit its reproductive interest.
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I would then argue in the parasitic mind that not only can human beings be parasitized by actual
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physical brain worms, like Toxoplasma Gandhi, but they could be parasitized by ideological
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brain worms, and hence my neuroparasithological framework.
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And what are some examples of these parasitic ideas?
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Post-modernism, cultural relativism, social constructivism, radical feminism.
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Each of these parasitic ideas destroy the capacity of the infected person to think rationally.
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And so I go through all of these parasitic ideas, and then I offer a mind vaccine at the
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You know, as I'm thinking about, you know, cultural relativism, I was just trying to look
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The Iranian dissident who lives in New York, she's had her life threatened.
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And she's talked about that recently, about how we've got people in the Western world declaring
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themselves feminists, but they won't speak up for the women of Iran who are being oppressed.
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They are fully on board with Hamas and Gaza and denouncing Israel, which is a state that
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So I said off the top, we have become less tolerant in the name of tolerance.
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Is that one of the parasitic ideas that you deal with?
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Look, so cultural relativism was an idea that was first espoused by an anthropologist by the
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And he wanted to create a new worldview of human behavior that abdicated biology as being
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In other words, because a whole bunch of bad folks had misused Darwinian theory.
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So for example, British class elitists argued that, well, it's a natural struggle between
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If the lower class has to die from a pandemic of tuberculosis, and if they live in squalor
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and they all die out, well, that's just Darwinian.
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It's just the natural struggle between classes.
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The Nazis came along and said, hey, it's a natural struggle between the races.
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Now, of course, it had nothing to do with Darwinian theory, but because all sorts of political
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cretins were misappropriating evolutionary theory, some idiotic professors, as often
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happens the case, said, hey, why don't we create a new worldview of humanity that completely
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abdicates biology and evolutionary theory being relevant to human beings?
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Therefore, cultural relativism does exactly that because it says that there is no universal
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Every culture has to be judged based on the idiosyncrasies of its own cultural trajectory.
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Therefore, who are you, Brian, white guy, Canadian imperialist racist, to tell us that the cutting
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off of clitorises of five-year-old girls is a bad idea?
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And that's, by the way, exactly what, since this is a Canadian show, so let's link it to
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If you remember when Justin Trudeau was a parliamentarian, before he became prime minister, Stephen Harper's
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government had released a sort of an edict or a pamphlet saying, look, we do not condone
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barbaric practices like female genital mutilation, child brides, honor killings in Canada.
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And if you remember, in a very theatrical and obnoxious, bombastic way, Justin Trudeau got
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on TV and kind of huffed and puffed and moved his hair and said, you know, I will not tolerate
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Yeah, he was upset at the use of barbaric, not the barbaric practices.
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Well, what allowed him to have the goal to do that is precisely cultural relativism.
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There is no context under which cutting off the clitorises of little girls so that they
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could never experience fully the joys of intimacy is ever a good thing.
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So each of those parasitic ideas, Brian, started off in a university setting for a noble cause,
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It's not as though the people who espouse and spawn these ideas say, let's just destroy
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They usually start off with a noble reflex, but then in the service of that noble reflex,
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I remember a colleague going back years ago, I was in radio in Ottawa, and he made a comment
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that there was objective truth, and there were a pile of other people in the newsroom that
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couldn't believe that he said that, and they said, no, there is no truth.
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Well, no, but there has to be a truth, and we can have our views, we can have our opinions,
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but beyond cultural relativism, there is a desire to say there is no truth anymore.
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Maybe some of the viewers and listeners have heard it, but even if they have, it's worth
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And for those who have never heard it, fasten your seatbelts.
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So the reason why I call postmodernism the granddaddy of all idea pathogens is precisely
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because that's the root parasitic ideas from which all of the other parasitic ideas can
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If we can espouse the idea that there are absolutely no objective truths, then you're not constrained
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by your genitalia when it comes to your biological sex.
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Who are you to say what constitutes male or female?
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As the most recent addition to the Supreme Court, when she was being confirmed and asked,
00:17:02.980
Well, until 15 minutes ago, until 15 minutes ago, the 117 billion people that had existed
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on earth were perfectly able to navigate through the very complex conundrum of what constitutes
00:17:18.740
Did you see the head of the International Olympic Committee?
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And of course, there was all the debate about the women's boxing and were there biological
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They could have settled all the debate by being upfront and honest.
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So one of the journalists just asked a very relevant question, will you handle this better
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Will you find ways of talking to the public and being upfront with them so that there isn't
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And he said, there is no scientific way to determine what is a man and what is a woman.
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This is the head of one of our biggest global bodies.
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Well, I was fortunate enough when I chose what I thought was a woman to start my family.
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It's by the complete vagaries of stochastic life that I ended up, because I could have
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easily chosen a woman with a nine-inch penis to have children with, but luckily I came out
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But just so that I don't leave your viewers and listeners hanging, can I go back to telling
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So the best way to describe what a cancerous form of intellectual terrorism, postmodernism
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is, to your point about your colleagues who were saying, what is this?
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In 2002, one of my doctoral students had just defended his dissertation.
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Okay, so I'm glad because it's always exciting when someone hears it for the first time.
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So we were going out for a celebratory dinner, myself, my wife, my doctoral student, and he
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So a few hours before the date, before the dinner, he calls me up and he says, oh, I just
00:19:31.660
wanted to give you a heads up that the lady that I'm bringing for the dinner is a graduate
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student in anthropology, postmodernism, and women's studies.
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And I said, ah, okay, so the holy trinity of bullshit.
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And so, but of course, the reason why he was calling me to say this is like, you know, please,
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can we not get into this big, you know, I said, oh, no, no, I got you.
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I'm going to be good, which of course was a complete and utter lie because about halfway
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through the evening, I turned to the lady and I say, oh, I, I hear that, you know, you're,
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Oh, so there are no objective truths, of course, other than the one objective truth that there
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But nevermind that internal cognitive inconsistency.
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Do you mind if I propose what I think are universal truths and then we can discuss it and
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I said, is it not true that within homo sapiens humans, that only women bear children?
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She looks at me, can't believe at what a simpleton I am and says, that's absolutely not true.
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She goes, oh, because there is some Japanese tribe on some Japanese Island whereby within
00:21:06.680
their folkloric mythological realm, it is the men who bear the children.
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So by you restricting the conversation to the biological realm, that's how you keep us,
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So after I recovered from the mini stroke I had at listening to such gibberish, I then
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Maybe it was too controversial, too incendiary for me to mention something as controversial
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So let me give you another example and then let's see if we can agree on this one.
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I said, is it not true since time immemorial that sailors have relied on the premise that
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the sun rises in the east and sets in the west?
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And there she used a variant, Brian, of postmodernism.
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So she said, what do you mean by east and west?
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That which you call the sun, I might call dancing hyena.
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The dancing hyena rises in the east and sets in the west.
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It's not part of the lore of the internet, the dancing hyena story.
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Why do I always recount that story is because it perfectly captures what happens to a graduate
00:22:28.220
student at a leading, arguably the leading Canadian university who is parasitized by postmodernism.
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If she can't sit at a dinner and agree on the fact that women bear children and that there
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So that gives you a sense of why I wrote The Parasitic Mind, because yes, universities can
00:23:03.220
be wonderful places, but they can also be where reason goes to die.
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It's not like a, you know, a bad weekend in Vegas.
00:23:19.240
It comes back with you like a venereal disease from Vegas, and it infects everybody.
00:23:25.840
This, talk about how that has an impact on the wider society, because Western liberal
00:23:37.320
You know, we had elevated society, and now we seem to be going backwards.
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And so how do these ideas that infect the minds of just academics at the start undermine
00:23:55.240
I love that you set up the question that way, because one of the most frequent blowback that
00:24:02.720
I would receive early in my career as I was standing on top of the mountain warning people
00:24:08.700
is, oh, come on, Dr. Saad, why are you exaggerating?
00:24:12.500
So there is some esoteric department in the humanities that is promulgating these ideas.
00:24:23.960
It's not going to make it to the business school.
00:24:27.960
I said, the virus eventually breaks free from the lab, as we think we know with the lab leak
00:24:37.000
So yes, you're right that the dreadful parasitic idea starts off in some nonsensical department
00:24:49.300
It becomes the prime minister of Canada, right?
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Bad ideas don't have a geographical limitation.
00:25:00.880
That's why I repeatedly say in my social media engagement, and earlier you mentioned Elon Musk,
00:25:07.580
We've had private conversations where we've confirmed this to each other, where there is
00:25:12.540
nothing more dangerous on earth than a parasitized mind.
00:25:17.940
Yes, a tsunami can cause great devastation, but that's a, quote, act of God.
00:25:23.140
But most of the tragedies that are imparted throughout human history start off with a bad
00:25:32.480
There is a little Austrian guy with a small mustache who said, hey, you know what the
00:25:41.760
And if we only excise that from our society, then we will all live in a utopia.
00:25:46.800
And a bunch of people said, yeah, that sounds like a great idea, Adolf.
00:25:49.640
So, to your point, that's why I stood up and kept screaming and screaming, because I knew
00:25:58.300
that those ideas were going to eventually escape and become our journalists, our pop culture,
00:26:06.680
And so, yeah, that's what happens when bad ideas infect entire societies.
00:26:14.840
When we come back, I want to talk about how it's impacting medicine, because if you haven't
00:26:21.000
been following it, the idea that we're going to put diversity, equity, and inclusion ahead
00:26:27.740
of medical knowledge is actually something happening.
00:26:32.340
Gad, before we jump back into the conversation about parasitic ideas and how they don't just
00:26:38.700
stay in the sociology department somewhere, you've got a new title.
00:26:41.980
You're visiting professor and global ambassador at Northwoods University.
00:26:56.740
So, I was approached by the president of Northwoods University there.
00:27:01.680
And apparently, having yet gone in person, I will be going soon in person to meet the
00:27:10.600
He approached me and said, look, we're big fans of your scientific work and, of course,
00:27:16.860
We are known as the free enterprise university.
00:27:24.900
And we would love to see if we can work together.
00:27:28.840
And so, in all frankness, I had never heard of Northwood either.
00:27:33.760
But boy, am I glad that I now have because, you know, it's really, we're all human beings.
00:27:40.180
And so, we'd like to say that, you know, hey, nothing phases me and so on.
00:27:44.960
But you also want to be at a place that shares your general sense of how a university should
00:27:53.380
be run that is not infested with parasitic ideas.
00:27:57.240
And so, it's been very, very refreshing for me in the few weeks that since I've joined
00:28:02.260
them to be able to interact with people, you know, who I don't have to discuss whether
00:28:08.740
the sun exists or not, or whether it's called dancing hyena or not, or I don't have to do
00:28:16.140
And I don't have to submit a diversity, inclusion, and equity statement before I apply for a grant.
00:28:23.920
And I really look forward to my visiting professorship there.
00:28:31.480
Beautiful part of the, I haven't stopped in Midland, but I love that the area of that part
00:28:39.860
And go in the fall because, you know, campus is in the fall.
00:28:45.740
That's exactly what the president told me, by the way.
00:28:47.640
He said, we want to get you here before winter breaks, precisely for the reasons that you
00:28:56.960
We were talking about how they don't just stay in the sociology department.
00:29:06.420
And then, you know, we can move from there into what happened to Jordan Peterson and the
00:29:14.060
But this is actually from one of the organizations that determines how doctors are trained in
00:29:24.140
The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada put out a notice a little while ago
00:29:29.840
that they want to change how medicine is taught and practiced.
00:29:33.640
And it said, quote, a new model of can meds would seek to center values such as anti-oppression,
00:29:41.960
anti-racism, and social justice rather than medical expertise.
00:29:47.360
I don't give a flying you-know-what about my doctor's political views.
00:29:55.480
My GP, I happen to be friends with, and we share political views.
00:29:58.960
But I really don't care when I'm being treated medically, how they view, you know, the state
00:30:08.840
And these guys want to put everything else ahead of competence.
00:30:12.380
Yeah, I've actually weighed in on that exact new training of Canadian physicians.
00:30:17.960
Look, there are certain professions and certain bodies, the FBI, judicial system, the medical
00:30:28.720
associations that should transcend politics, right?
00:30:32.900
I mean, that's like the Hippocratic oath should be first do no harm.
00:30:38.820
Now, of course, the woke physicians will say, but no, we are doing no harm by teaching you
00:30:46.940
If anti-oppression comes before your ability as a physician to perform an operation, you're
00:30:58.620
So look, I mean, that issue arises not only in, you know, at that, you know, with physicians,
00:31:06.920
it starts at the first point where, for example, they're now arguing that the grading of physicians
00:31:15.140
when they're in medical school creates undue pressures and stress on physicians, and therefore,
00:31:23.520
we should move to a more empathetic pass-fail system so that people are not competing against
00:31:33.140
But I want my emergency room physician who, by definition, is facing some of the most stressful
00:31:40.060
moments where the decision tree that he or she follows over the next five minutes will
00:31:49.380
I want them to have been exposed to stressors, right?
00:31:53.380
Seneca, in the happiness book, I talk about anti-fragility, which is a term that was coined
00:32:02.120
Seneca, the ancient philosopher, Stoic, said, I'm paraphrasing, that the strongest trees are
00:32:10.560
those that have been exposed to a lot of wind stressor.
00:32:14.880
Therefore, their bark and their roots are stronger.
00:32:18.400
The trees that haven't been exposed to wind stressors end up being brittle and they break
00:32:24.240
So let's apply that, the concept of the wind stressor to your physician.
00:32:29.120
Do you not want them to have faced stressors so that they can be trained to deal with stress?
00:32:34.920
So not only are you infusing to your original question all of this woke nonsense in the practice
00:32:42.060
of medicine, but just in the original training of physicians, you're incorporating this very
00:32:48.200
loving, I love you, you love me, we all win trophies.
00:32:53.300
I want the physician to have suffered during medical school because that makes them anti-fragile.
00:33:02.300
At the medical school level, here's just a couple of things.
00:33:05.680
This is from my colleague, Jamie Sarkanak at National Post.
00:33:12.060
She writes about the University of Calgary created a special admissions pathway for black
00:33:16.340
students, entitling applicants to have their admission essays evaluated by non-white assessors.
00:33:22.700
McGill, the University of Alberta and Dalhousie have all done the same and similar routes are
00:33:31.100
I'm all for having diversity in terms of who's getting into medical school, but it is an insult
00:33:39.160
to indigenous and black students to say, well, you should be held to a lower standard.
00:33:46.700
I mean, it's simply, isn't it, do you wake up in the morning, Brian, and say, I simply, I
00:33:52.220
mean, I wrote the parasitic mind and I don't cease to be amazed every day at the level of
00:34:02.960
Because you'd like to think that there are certain ideas that were defeated.
00:34:07.340
Let's say judging people based on immutable traits.
00:34:13.940
And we did a great job over the past 100 years to remove those systematic barriers, right?
00:34:20.380
And of course, that speaks to, I know you know this, but maybe some of your listeners
00:34:24.980
and viewers don't, the distinction between equality of opportunities and equality of outcomes,
00:34:29.900
which of course, the current contender for the presidency of the United States, Kamala
00:34:34.100
Harris, doesn't seem to understand that difference, right?
00:34:36.440
She believes that to the extent that there is any differences across people in terms of the
00:34:43.580
outcomes, it must be a nefarious cause that created that difference.
00:34:50.800
And therefore, we need to fix that so that we all end up at the same final place.
00:34:55.680
I mean, those are literally almost identical words.
00:35:12.060
We all end up dying of famine together, equally dead from the famine, as Lysenkoism showed
00:35:21.340
Because the argument there is, there are fewer women who are professors of mathematics at Brown
00:35:30.800
That's where the part that the patriarchy is demonstrating its machinations.
00:35:37.440
When I was a kid, there were a lot more men as teachers.
00:35:45.020
Elementary schools are 85% to 90% women as teachers.
00:35:50.260
You always found more men in high school teaching positions, but even that is shrinking.
00:35:57.640
Nobody says we've got to get more men into these professions.
00:36:00.520
Yeah, well, not only that, Brian, once the patterns of the narrative of oppression is no
00:36:09.880
longer present, people don't adjust their priors.
00:36:16.160
So let me break it down into a concrete example.
00:36:19.100
There used to be a time where women were discriminated from entering veterinarian school
00:36:25.460
and from entering medical school and entering...
00:36:28.300
When my mother came here in 1968, she had been working on computers in the UK.
00:36:33.280
She got to Canada and was told, oh, no, ladies can't do that job.
00:36:36.940
I'm not, you know, I'll never say there was not discrimination and oppression and things
00:36:46.500
So I would receive at my university endless emails.
00:36:49.780
You know, how are you going to be an ally to women?
00:36:55.920
As if the email was happening while we all lived in Waziristan and the tribal territories
00:37:03.460
Now, let me draw the line of what the current data shows.
00:37:08.920
So this is from US data, US government data, looking at four levels of educational attainment.
00:37:16.500
So in the US, you have what's called an associate's degree, which is like half a bachelor's.
00:37:23.080
So there's associate's degree, bachelor's degree, master's degree, and doctoral degree.
00:37:28.500
So there are four levels of educational attainment across five racial groups, whatever, Hispanic,
00:37:42.080
In each of those cells, the government has provided the ratio of male to female, right?
00:37:51.980
So let's assume we were the time when your mother came, or let's go further back to make,
00:37:57.920
to go back to when there was real full on orgiastic discrimination.
00:38:03.060
20 out of the 20 cells would have shown that men outnumber women in each of the 20 cells.
00:38:19.760
So let me, I get, I'm not trying to talk down to your audience, but it's important to explain.
00:38:25.400
Meaning that I couldn't make up data that was more of a falsification of the narrative
00:38:34.940
that women are being held back in universities.
00:38:38.080
Therefore, it offends me as a professor of 30 years to receive an email of,
00:38:44.920
how are you going to be a better ally to women?
00:38:54.720
But yet I'm being sent emails as if I lived in Waziristan, Pakistan.
00:39:02.600
which is it is impervious to incoming new data that the victimhood narrative must persist.
00:39:16.120
I mean, I know you've got anecdotes in your, or antidotes, sorry.
00:39:25.960
English is my second language, I guess, after Glaswegian.
00:39:35.780
Well, I'd like to say, I mean, it has worked in the sense that I receive, I mean, literally receive
00:39:45.940
thousands of emails from people saying, I was the biggest blue haired wokester possible.
00:39:59.160
So, so in the grand scheme of things, I haven't been able to administer the vaccine and all
00:40:07.380
And I don't think any mind vaccine could ever do that because regrettably, I think the architecture
00:40:16.660
The only thing that's unique about the current period are the specific idea pathogens that we
00:40:24.400
Cultural relativism was not an idea pathogen 500 years ago.
00:40:28.820
But there were other idea pathogens then, right?
00:40:37.000
Even Tommy Douglas did his, his thesis on, you know, sainted Tommy Douglas did his thesis
00:40:46.800
So yeah, bad ideas have been around a long time.
00:40:50.960
Regrettably, there's always an allure to these bad ideas so that they can quickly infect and
00:40:58.900
There was a time where we threw women into the water and if they swam, they were witches.
00:41:04.960
And if they didn't and drowned, then oops, I guess they weren't witches.
00:41:08.520
And people thought that that was a great test to do.
00:41:11.740
That was a diagnostic test to determine whether my neighbor, Angela, was a witch or not, right?
00:41:17.260
So we've, we've done that to Dr. Jordan Peterson.
00:41:24.940
So we must be a witch and he's got to go to a re-education camp.
00:41:28.260
Have you seen the clip, the satirical clip that I released where I feigned that the Ontario
00:41:35.200
College of Psychologists has had declared me as his re-education mentor?
00:41:41.720
I mean, that, that's now, I think my second or third most viewed clip of all of my clips.
00:41:48.140
So this demonstrates to you, by the way, the power of satire, sarcasm and humor, right?
00:41:54.380
Because the dictators don't usually eliminate the guys with the big muscles because we can
00:42:04.440
I'm speaking out if I were the dictator, the guys that really are dangerous to me as a dictator
00:42:09.540
are the guys with the sharp tongues, the guys with the sharp pen.
00:42:13.580
Those are the bastards that I have to eliminate.
00:42:16.260
So the satirist is the biggest danger to the dictator.
00:42:19.920
We have, he, he goes first to the chopping blocks.
00:42:22.400
So oftentimes I will get some smarmy, obnoxious professor that I'm talking to who tells me,
00:42:28.080
oh, but you know, aren't you demeaning your professorial, you know, image when you do all
00:42:36.460
I say, absolutely not, because I'm in the game of trying to persuade people to better
00:42:43.160
I will use any weaponry within my arsenal of weapons to try to achieve that goal.
00:42:54.680
All bets are off when it comes to trying to change human minds.
00:42:58.900
Well, you know, we're seeing in the United Kingdom what we're worried about here.
00:43:03.940
And this is something that Elon Musk is fighting back against.
00:43:07.320
He has definitely turned Twitter now X around in terms of being a place for free speech.
00:43:15.420
We just had Mark Zuckerberg admit that, yeah, he had downplayed the Hunter Biden laptop story
00:43:20.360
and he was smothering true things that were being said about COVID at the behest of the
00:43:26.800
government, the Biden administration, because it went against their, their views.
00:43:30.960
But in the UK, we're seeing people being arrested for memes posted on Facebook.
00:43:38.740
If we don't have a change in government, that sort of thing, you know, if you had told
00:43:44.920
me 20 years ago in Britain, they'll be arresting you for jokes, I would have laughed.
00:43:49.820
I mean, the cradle of the, the, the best of Western civilization comes from the UK, the,
00:43:57.380
the, the Americans, Canada, the Australians, New Zealand, we all draw inspiration from there.
00:44:06.900
I mean, life comes at you fast to your point about how quickly things change.
00:44:13.600
So I don't, I'm going to sort of paraphrase it.
00:44:15.260
Ronald Reagan famously said, and I'm sure you probably know which passage I'm talking
00:44:19.340
about, where he basically said, look, every generation, there has to be an assiduous fight
00:44:24.900
for freedom and freedom of speech, because the bad folks are always coming to bring down
00:44:30.600
those, those majestic, you know, foundational values that define the greatness of the West.
00:44:37.060
And so in the past, we had a stronger sense of our identity so that we were able to push
00:44:43.580
back against intrusions against freedom, but because of all this cocktail of parasitic
00:44:48.120
ideas, there's no longer any defense against it.
00:44:51.120
So that a place, as you said, a cradle, the bastion of the Western tradition, Britain is
00:44:56.420
now looking more like Orwell's worst nightmare.
00:45:00.020
And if I may, I don't think I've ever mentioned this to, in our, I didn't mention this in our
00:45:07.140
There is a distinction in ethics between deontological ethics and consequentialist ethics.
00:45:12.840
And I'll link it back to, you know, the 11-year-old that's being arrested in Britain.
00:45:20.220
Deontological ethics refers to absolute statements of ethical conduct.
00:45:25.760
So for example, if I say, it is never okay to lie, that would be a deontological statement.
00:45:32.060
Consequentialism, on the other hand, is another ethical statement that says that you judge the
00:45:36.260
morality of an action based on its consequences.
00:45:38.900
So then if you say, it's okay to lie if you're trying to spare someone's feelings.
00:45:43.760
And so I often joke that if you want to have a long, happy marriage, if you ever hear the
00:45:47.940
following question, do I look fat in those jeans, put on the, put on your consequentialist
00:45:54.740
Now, for many, many things in life, we are all consequentialists and that's perfectly fine.
00:46:00.380
But, so now I'm going to tie it back to your original question.
00:46:03.600
When it comes to foundational values that define the Western tradition, those by definition
00:46:12.420
If you say something like, I believe in freedom of speech, but the second you say, but you're
00:46:19.080
a degenerate asshole, because what's going to come after the but is going to be exactly
00:46:26.040
Yes, you should be able to criticize religions, but you should maintain group cohesion or community
00:46:33.620
That's what causes people to then argue that Islamophobia should be a hate crime.
00:46:38.460
In a free society, as long as it's not defamation, libelous, you know, incitement for child pornography,
00:46:46.180
direct incitement for violence, screaming fire in a theater, there are, all bets are off.
00:46:52.760
I am Jewish with a very, very tragic childhood in Lebanon, and yet I support the right, Brian,
00:46:59.480
of Holocaust deniers to spew the most offensive and insulting stuff humanly possible, which
00:47:05.920
is the rejection of a historically documented reality where an entire people were extinguished.
00:47:14.000
I support their right to exhibit such offensive language.
00:47:19.060
So that's the problem of what's happening now in Britain.
00:47:22.540
They've put on a consequentialist hat when it should be the deontological framework that
00:47:32.200
Well, you and I will continue to be out there on the good fight pushing back against bad ideas.
00:47:38.100
We could talk for another hour, but I know you've got another appearance to make.
00:47:43.840
Keep up the good fight, and let's keep in contact.
00:48:00.200
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00:48:06.920
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