00:06:17.120There's only, you know, you're shackled by your subjective reality and subjective biases.
00:06:21.900So at the most fundamental level, there is literally an attack on, you know, all of the things that makes our societies enlightened, which is the pursuit of truth.
00:06:31.440We have the scientific method that allows us to educate what is true from what is false, right?
00:06:37.040This is why we don't rub crystals to resolve diabetes, right?
00:06:41.980Because we have a mechanism to judge whether rubbing crystals works or not.
00:06:47.820But then there are downstream effects of all of these, as you kindly pointed in the start of the intro, about what I call idea pathogens.
00:06:56.260So identity politics is not just a silly thing that we're just, you know, indignant about.
00:07:01.980Identity politics has now entered every single hallway of academia.
00:07:07.840So we give professorships not as a function of whether you have merit, but as a function of whether you belong to certain classes of people who possess certain immutable traits.
00:07:20.660I mean, a few years ago, you would have thought that this is a grotesque, racist idea.
00:07:25.140Today, it is cloaked in the robe of social justice.
00:07:29.000So it doesn't matter if my CV is 50 pages long.
00:07:32.360If I am not a person that has this and this marker, I'm simply put to the back of the queue.
00:07:38.520When you now apply for grants, you have to state what is your commitment to what I call the di-religion, diversity, inclusion, and equity.
00:07:47.100If you don't write the correct things, you don't get a grant.
00:07:52.520I know of a natural sciences professor at a prominent university in Montreal who was denied a grant.
00:08:11.620The di-religion superseded the science.
00:08:13.960So if I may just correct your earlier point, it's hardly silly, these squabbles, because the downstream effect is truly disastrous to an enlightened, scientific-oriented society.
00:08:26.240Oh, and I didn't mean to downplay it at all.
00:08:28.660I just think that we have so much of this in our society.
00:08:33.280It's like politics has seeped into every aspect of our life.
00:08:36.220Like you just said, even in hard sciences, you now have to repeat the correct mantras.
00:08:41.500And I think a lot of Canadians out there just sort of really roll their eyes at it.
00:08:45.820Like they don't see the problem as serious as what some of the alarmists on the left are proclaiming.
00:08:52.480And so when they're constantly being lectured about systemic racism or about, you know, rape culture in our society or all of these sort of buzzwords that the left has created, they just don't, they've had enough of it.
00:09:09.560And I wonder if you get that feeling as well, because you've been on the front lines fighting this fight for, I don't know, years and years.
00:09:17.880And it seems like, you know, it's not going away.
00:10:05.300So the fact that social justice warriors and other intellectual terrorists are in the minority doesn't negate the fact that they wield much of the power.
00:10:13.640So it keeps everybody in check because nobody wants to fall prey to their e-mob and their cancel culture and so on.
00:10:21.040So the reality is, if everybody were to somehow trigger their ire, their own ire, their indignation, or what I call activate your inner honey badger, then the problem can be resolved very quickly.
00:10:32.940If you don't do that, then it's drip, drip, drip.
00:10:35.800It's death of the West by a thousand cuts.
00:10:38.020We will one day wake up without any of our freedoms.
00:10:40.500We won't recognize the society that we used to love.
00:10:45.740I feel like Canadian society right now is just crippled with political correctness where we've had some very high profile people sort of get canceled or the cancel culture mob has gone after them and they've been removed from their positions.
00:10:59.800And it creates a chilling effect across society.
00:11:02.560What would your advice be for some of those Canadians that really don't agree with what's going on, but they also don't find themselves in a position where they can really speak out against it?
00:11:11.980So there are several ways that I can answer this.
00:11:15.440And by the way, forgive the shameless plug, but in chapter eight, the last chapter of the book, I exactly address your question, which is the chapter titled Call to Action.
00:11:24.260Because it's insufficient to explain the problem.
00:11:27.880You also have to offer a vaccine, a set of solutions and inoculation, right?
00:11:32.180So I mentioned earlier, you know, activate your inner honey badger.
00:11:36.140But let's talk about the one you mentioned, you know, I might lose friends.
00:11:39.320So I actually address this one in the book.
00:11:42.700So I argue that friendships are anti-fragile, to use the term of Nassim Talib, my good friend.
00:11:50.480So anti-fragility is something that you want in a system.
00:11:54.040In other words, you need to shock the system and it not break for it to be a strong system, right?
00:12:00.040If it is very brittle and if I just go boo and it breaks, then that's not a good system.
00:12:04.680Well, I argue that friendships, true friendships should be anti-fragile, which means what?
00:12:09.580Candace and I, if we're good friends, we could sit down around the table, disagree on Justin Trudeau or Donald Trump or whatever else we're debating and walk away from that conversation without any threat to our friendship.
00:12:22.100If we can't do that, then Candace is not a friend that I wish to have around in my inner circle.
00:12:28.320She's not worthy of the title of my friend.
00:12:30.180So one of the ways that you get around that sort of cowardice of I'm going to lose friend is to recognize that it's better to be accompanied by a few strong friends, loyal friends with whom I could have these heated exchanges than to be surrounded by a bunch of castrated cowards.
00:12:46.800Another one that I often hear is, you know, who am I to judge?
00:12:50.780You know, I don't want to judge another culture.
00:12:54.760If they want to believe in BLM, no, judge.
00:12:57.340OK, now, as long as you're judging is rooted in a set of coherent principles, we judge all the time.
00:13:04.960When I'm deciding who to marry, I judge different candidates.
00:13:09.020I belong to the society of judgment and decision making as a behavioral scientist.
00:13:13.760So judging is an inherent part of human nature.
00:13:17.120I think oftentimes what happens is people think back of the sort of the religious edict, you know, don't judge others lest you be judged.
00:13:24.480Right. In that case, what the religious edict is talking about is moral hypocrisy.
00:13:29.660Right. Don't judge others for doing something and then you turn around, do it yourself.
00:13:34.560It's in that sense we mean don't judge others.
00:13:37.140Right. Don't throw stones in a glass house and so on.
00:13:39.920But the idea that I shouldn't judge others because they are imbeciles, cretins, intellectual terrorists.
00:13:46.100No, I spend all day judging people and I expect others to judge me.
00:13:50.020It's called being human. Well, absolutely. But, Dr. Saad, what about if you're in a position where you worry about your job?
00:13:57.620I mean, we've seen a lot of people, high profile people lose, you know, I'll give you an example.
00:14:01.940Stockwell Day, he went on CBC Power and Politics, said that he didn't think that Canada was a systemically racist country,
00:14:07.900compared racist bullying that some kids might get to the bullying that he received because of the way he looked or the fact they wore glasses.
00:14:16.000And that was enough. He got fired from the CBC or he forced to resign from his prestigious legal law firm that he was affiliated with.
00:14:24.620And I think that those kind of things have a really chilling effect that you worry, OK, if I write something on Facebook that gets interpreted the wrong way,
00:14:32.860I could lose my job, which has a really deep impact on your ability to provide for your family and your entire life.
00:14:40.960So what about, you know, positions that it's not just friendship, but it's actually your livelihood?
00:14:46.060Yeah. So I also talk about this in the book.
00:14:47.780Look, people often say, oh, but, you know, Professor Saad, you have tenure.
00:14:52.260Well, first of all, tenure is not this great cloak that protects you from all ill consequences.
00:14:58.560I've had to suffer quite serious consequences in academia despite being tenured.
00:15:04.540And I don't need to get into all the details, but I can assure you it's not an easy ride to be who I am from within the venomous pit of academia.
00:15:13.000I've received probably more death threats than anyone who is watching the show has hairs on their heads.
00:15:21.600I used to walk in to campus having to check in with security who would accompany to my classroom and lock the door so that if a student leaves
00:15:30.080and they want to come back in, it is they can't come back in without me opening the door.
00:15:34.520My university accompanied me to the Montreal police for us to file a police report because of the death threats that I was receiving.
00:15:51.820But in 2017, when I would walk into campus, my wife would drop me.
00:15:56.140I would literally have and I've never experienced anxiety before in the true sense of the term.
00:16:00.640I would go to my class and then I would rush back for my wife to pick me up and I would literally let go a deep breath of a sigh of relief that I've survived another week
00:16:12.500because I didn't know whether whomever is sending me the death threats is just a quack who's trying to intimidate or whether they're really going to do it or not.
00:16:25.440The reality, though, is that if you look at the 18-year-olds who landed on the beaches of Normandy so that you and I can have this conversation today,
00:16:35.360they didn't receive a guarantee that they would be protected.
00:16:39.020They were likely to lose a lot more than their jobs.
00:16:43.200And yet they said, yeah, yeah, sign me up.
00:16:44.860I'll go land on the beaches of Normandy.
00:16:47.080And they were going to be mowed down like little mosquitoes by the Germans.
00:16:50.780So I'm not minimizing the real threats that people face, and I'm not suggesting that we be reckless martyrs, but everybody has a potential cost to bear.
00:17:01.720The problem is that each person has exactly the same logic as what you're saying.
00:17:06.680You know, let Ghat Saad and other courageous guys carry the burden for me.
00:17:11.940You know, I have a job and I've got little kids.
00:17:14.720I have little kids, too, and I have a heart and I have a brain, and I get panicky when I see six suspicious-looking guys coming towards me
00:17:22.800because I don't know if they were the ones who sent me the 18,000th death threat, but I do it because not doing it would make me feel as though I'm a cowardly fraud.
00:17:31.860So each person has to calculate their own calculus of the trade-offs of costs and benefits, but it is simply cowardly to say, I stand to lose.
00:17:43.880In a war, everybody stands to lose, but we expect courageous people to stand up.
00:18:47.000So, for many, many years, I've been warning, not hyperbolically, literally, that in 10, 20, 50, 100 years, if we don't change course, we will have exactly the same reality as I escaped in Lebanon.
00:19:02.200And people said, oh, but aren't you exaggerating, Professor?
00:19:05.640What protects the West is a set of values that is truly unique in our sort of collective history, right?
00:19:13.320There is something unique about the system.
00:19:15.740It's an anomaly what the West has given us for the number of years that it's given us.
00:19:20.680Much of our history is not laden with peace and love and freedom, right?
00:19:26.280Much of our history is paved in rivers of blood.
00:19:29.840So, some of us are either cursed or endowed with the capacity to look at patterns and predict what's going to come in the future, not because we are prophets, not because we are Cassandras, modern-day Cassandras, but because, first of all, we've seen what happens in societies where you lose those protective values, but also because some of us are able to detect patterns and take them to their logical conclusion.
00:19:55.600So, the problem, as you correctly said, is the old famous parable of the boiling frog, right?
00:20:01.260If you put the frog and you only increase the heat by a bit, by below a just noticeable difference, it doesn't realize that it's being boiled, right?
00:20:10.360So, that parable is really apt here because it exactly speaks to what you're saying.
00:20:13.960Well, yeah, maybe there is a bit of problem, but, you know, I'm busy this week, you know, with my daughter's graduation, and, yeah, I don't have time for this culture war.
00:20:27.520But as someone now who's been long enough in academia for 26 years, I warned about every single one.
00:20:34.760As a matter of fact, my satire, I often joke, but I'm being serious, that my satire is prophetic.
00:20:41.160The reason why my satire is prophetic, because I take a current position, and then I apply, if you like, an extrapolation to some future date.
00:20:51.120I satirize that extreme condition, and then I put my hands like this, and I wait for reality to catch up to my satire.
00:21:00.320So, listen to the proverbial canary in the cold mines who is warning you.
00:21:06.260Don't brush it off as hyperbolic talk.
00:21:08.620Look, my child right now, one of my children, has a teacher who has BLM as a sign, you know, on her avatar, right?
00:21:20.300There are two things that one can do now.
00:21:46.220I could either be quiet, or I could contact nicely, politely, quietly, behind closed doors, the principal, and say, hey, I don't think this is appropriate for...
00:21:55.660So this is what I mean by there are many ways by which you can get involved.
00:22:18.100Well, let's get into your book a little bit more, Professor Seid, because I think it's a really important book.
00:22:22.560I admit I haven't read it yet because we set this interview up pretty fast, and the book doesn't come out until October 6th.
00:22:29.100So as I was researching the book, I'm really excited to read it.
00:22:32.860So hopefully you can help explain and talk about what it's all about.
00:22:38.200But the book is called The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense.
00:22:43.000That is a great title, and it's so true because the least common thing in our society right now, it feels, is common sense, the thing that's supposed to drive us all.
00:22:52.580But maybe you can tell us a little bit about what some examples are of these infectious ideas that are killing common sense.
00:22:59.840So perhaps I could start off with the analogy from the animal kingdom.
00:23:04.660So the way I thought about, you know, using idea pathogens and parasites, parasitic mind, is if you think of parasites in nature, parasites can infect a host in many organs.
00:23:20.360A tapeworm can go into your intestines.
00:23:22.200But neuroparasites are parasites that specifically seek an organism's brain.
00:23:31.020So the classic example that some of your viewers might know, and that's why I'm going to use it,
00:23:36.600Toxoplasma gondii is a brain parasite that can inflict actually humans.
00:23:40.220But the classic example is when it infects the brain of a mouse, the mouse loses its innate fear of cats,
00:23:48.440and it actually becomes sexually attracted to the cat's urine, which is not a good thing for a mouse to exhibit.
00:23:56.040Or, yeah, or you could have, for example, a type of brain worm that parasitizes the brains of ungulates, deer, moose, elk.
00:24:04.900And so when they are parasitized by this brain worm, they start engaging in what's called circling behavior.
00:24:10.180They kind of bob their head up and down, and they can't extricate themselves from this, you know, motor pattern.
00:24:16.340So even if the looming predators are coming, they're stuck in this pattern, right?
00:24:20.500So parasites can cause animals to engage in behaviors that are maladaptive to them,
00:24:27.620but adaptive to the reproductive cycle of the parasite.
00:24:32.120And so I said, aha, as someone who is an evolutionary psychologist, so I study oftentimes comparison across species,
00:24:38.360I said, aha, I'm going to use that example to argue that human beings could be not only parasitized by actual physical brain worms in the same way that the mouse can,
00:24:51.580but we can be regrettably parasitized by a completely other class of brain worms, which I called idea pathogens.
00:24:57.800So in this case, these are terrible ideas that instead of causing us to go around in a circling behavior,
00:25:05.400they lead us to the abyss of infinite lunacy quietly, right, in a docile manner.
00:25:11.660So as any good epidemiologist would do, I then say, okay, well, where did this infestation begin?
00:25:18.060So if we are studying the origins of the COVID-19 virus, well, we can also study where do these idea pathogens come from?
00:25:26.660And I'll give examples of idea pathogens in a second.
00:25:29.280And I argue that all of these dreadful idea pathogens, regrettably, I say, because I'm a professor,
00:25:35.760all come from the university ecosystem.
00:25:38.480It takes intellectuals to come up with really uniquely dumb ideas, right?
00:25:44.420So now that I've kind of set up the parasitological model, the epidemiological model,
00:25:50.620what are some examples of idea pathogens?
00:25:52.780So the granddaddy of all idea pathogens, because it literally negates truth, is, as I mentioned earlier, postmodernism.
00:26:02.460Postmodernism is the granddaddy of idea pathogens because it literally removes our ability for sensemaking, right?
00:26:08.780There is no point in me waking up in the morning as a behavioral scientist thinking that there might be some regularities that I could study in the world if there are no objective truths.
00:26:18.800It's my truth. It's subjective truth. Who are you to judge my truth and so on, right?
00:26:23.380So postmodernism is intellectual terrorism.
00:26:28.260Now, postmodernism then leads to all sorts of other idea pathogens.
00:26:32.140So, for example, militant feminism is itself an idea pathogen, not because I don't support equity feminism,
00:26:41.000which basically says that men and women should be equal under the law.
00:26:43.620Well, any enlightened person would agree with that. But militant feminism goes much beyond that.
00:26:48.740It rejects the possibility that there are evolutionary-based sex differences.
00:26:53.480So a lot of times I draw ire from people because I'm an evolutionary psychologist because evolutionary psychologists are racists, are sexists.
00:27:01.340Nothing could be further from the truth.
00:27:03.640All that evolutionary psychologists are doing is study the evolutionary mechanisms that led to the human mind, right?
00:27:10.520So trans-activism is another idea pathogen.
00:27:14.120Now, that doesn't mean that transgender people don't exist.
00:27:16.920It doesn't mean that we should not fight against bigotry against transgender people.
00:27:22.080When it comes to that, I'm about as liberal as they can come.
00:27:26.200But in the pursuit of social justice towards transgender people, I don't have to murder truth.
00:27:32.360I don't have to argue that it is not true that a 270-pound guy who's 6'4 can suddenly change his gender, become a trans woman,
00:27:42.680and now you are transphobic if you don't allow him to compete against a 100-pound woman because, bruh, it's transphobic to presume that there are any biological differences between these two individuals, right?
00:27:55.360So what happens with idea pathogen in many cases, well, in all cases, is that they share one thing in common.
00:28:02.580They all are completely committed to the rejection of reality.
00:28:07.020It frees us from the shackles of reality.
00:28:10.040You put trans, it frees me from the shackles of my biology and my genitalia.
00:28:14.660You put postmodernism, it frees me from the possibility of a universal truth.
00:28:19.360So all of these idea pathogens, cultural relativism, trans activism, militant feminism, identity politics, the culture of perpetual offense, right?
00:28:34.020All of these various strands of idea pathogens, when put together, result in truly hallucinatory positions.
00:28:43.020And they are starting to tear our society apart.
00:28:46.300One of the things that I noticed about all these different idea pathogens that you mentioned is that at the very basic level, they have something going for them.
00:28:55.760Like the idea of postmodernism, it's like, I remember when I was in university, the whole idea is that you have to develop critical thinking.
00:29:14.300It's like, you know, there's been a history of women being sort of marginalized, not being allowed to vote, not being full citizens, not being able to own property, those kind of things.
00:29:23.740It's like, yeah, it's important that we fight so that women have equal, like you said, equal rights under the law.
00:29:29.880It's just that at a certain point, you know, it goes from fighting an injustice that we can all more or less agree with.
00:29:38.820Then they go overboard and they take it to keep going and going and going to its logical conclusion where it starts to sort of tear everything apart.
00:29:46.880So I wonder, how do you stop that process from happening?
00:29:51.440How do you say, like, at what point do you say, you know, yes, transgender people need to be protected and we should treat them with dignity and we should make sure that they're physically safe?
00:29:59.920To, you know, crossing that line to say, you know, now we're going to allow children and very young people to take pills to alter their entire chemistry of their body and have long term biological effects.
00:30:13.420Or we're going to allow, you know, boys to play sports, physical sports with girls just because they say that they identify as a woman.
00:30:20.800And now there's no such thing as gender whatsoever.
00:30:23.620At what point has it gone too far and how do we stop it at that point?
00:30:28.200Well, it's gone too far whenever in the pursuit of social justice, in the good sense of the term, we in any way murder a millimeter of truth.
00:30:42.100Right. In other words, so in the first chapter of my book, I talk about what are the two fundamental ideals that drive my life.
00:30:51.540And I argue that they are truth and freedom.
00:30:58.360In other words, there's there's no way for me to do what I do if I don't.
00:31:02.580And when I say freedom, by the way, I don't mean just freedom of speech.
00:31:05.000I mean, so, for example, I give examples in my book of how when I used to be a soccer player, I used to play the number 10 position, which is the playmaker position that allows me to kind of freely move around the field looking for spaces to exploit.
00:31:17.420When a coach would put a positional restriction on me, you're going to play today, Gad, more on the left side of midfield and you're going to track back this guy.
00:31:25.540My brain would explode because it would remove my capacity to be free.
00:31:29.260Right. If you tell me publishing only these types of journals because you are housed in a business school.
00:31:34.640No, I want to publish in medicine and in economics and in psychology and in business.
00:31:38.740I don't care. I just pursue interesting problems.
00:31:41.320So the pursuit of freedom is a fundamental driver for me.
00:31:45.080The pursuit of truth, the defense of truth is fundamental for me.
00:31:49.280So to answer your question, the point at which we say no is when in the pursuit of laudable goals like protecting transgender people, having equal rights for all people, we start being consequentialist in our ethics.
00:32:26.100And the reality is it's not that we should always be deontologically minded is that depending on the context, it may if your spouse tells you, do I look horrible and fat in those jeans and you want to have a long lasting marriage?
00:32:38.340Maybe you want to be consequentialist and say, no, no spouse.
00:32:54.100I can I can I can completely walk and chew gum at the same time.
00:32:58.420I could defend the rights of women whilst accepting that there are innate sex differences.
00:33:04.240I could defend the rights of transgender people whilst saying that 270 pound guy that's 300 pounds with a nine inch penis is not a woman.
00:33:14.660That should not cause me to be canceled for saying something that is as obvious as a two year old recognizing this.
00:33:22.460So this is what I mean, pursue justice, pursue truly liberal ideals, but never give up one inch of truth.
00:33:33.480Absolutely. So I guess that would be chapter three of your book, which is called Non-Negotiable Elements of a Free and Modern Society.
00:33:40.640OK, I want to talk about chapter four because the title is anti-science, anti-reason and illiberal movements.
00:33:49.900And there's so many times I'll give you just an example in Canada.
00:33:54.300You know, the prime minister, Justin Trudeau and his party are called the Liberal Party.
00:33:58.620But, you know, the ideas that they pursue and the ideas they put forward are hardly liberal.
00:34:04.100They don't they don't live up to that ideal of small L classical liberalism.
00:34:07.760And we see we see them sort of say we're the party of science and if you're a conservative, you're anti-science.
00:34:14.620And we're starting to see this a little bit in the U.S. as well.
00:34:17.320I know you've been critical of Joe Biden for saying that he's he's the scientific he's a party of science.
00:34:24.520And if you believe in science, you're going to vote Democrat.
00:34:27.240Maybe you can talk a little bit about this chapter and how sort of politicians manipulate some of those words.
00:34:32.160Sure. So first, I'll address this left, right and science denialism thing.
00:34:38.220It is absolutely unsure that, you know, the right are the science deniers and the left are the pro science folks.
00:34:45.080The reality is both engage in science denialism as a function of whether the particular scientific truth, you know, clashes with their ideological positions.
00:34:55.860So it is much more likely that a Republican senator from the South, to be stereotypical, might reject evolution because of some evangelical belief.
00:35:06.720But it is equally true that when it comes to evolutionary psychology, the application of evolutionary principles to the study of the human mind, say sex differences, then it becomes much more the left who become grotesque anti-science folks.
00:35:20.680Right now, as someone who inhabits the ecosystem of the university, all of the idea pathogens that I speak of, all of which are perfectly anti-scientific, they all stem from the left.
00:35:34.040So it's not that I am a pro right guy and an anti left guy.
00:35:38.700It's because the ecosystem that I inhabit is one where it is completely driven, driven by leftist science denialism.
00:35:46.800That would be like arguing that if I am a physician that treats diabetes, you come to me and say, but doc, why don't you ever talk about melanoma?
00:35:57.300Well, because I don't specialize in melanoma.
00:35:59.520It doesn't mean that melanoma is not important, but I treat diabetes.
00:36:11.320You're exactly right about so-called the liberal party, and that's why I've got illiberal in that chapter heading, because a lot of the positions that the Democrats and the left and the liberals currently espouse could not be any more illiberal.
00:36:25.640I mean, literally, you could not define an idea pathogen that is more illiberal than some of the platforms that they take.
00:36:32.000So let's go back, for example, to the di-religion, diversity, inclusion, and equity, and that will speak to some of the stuff that I discuss about anti-science and so on.
00:36:41.860So I talk about, for example, the indigenization of the Canadian campuses, right?
00:36:47.660Well, indigenization happens in many forms.
00:36:50.820So indigenization could be that at a ceremony, say, graduating ceremony, you first have to start off by self-flagellating publicly that you are stealers of the land and you're all evil who are sitting in this thing, and then we go on with the ceremony.
00:37:06.420Well, first, I argue that that's really grotesque because the students who are there, where it is their moment to shine, have to first begin by having the cloak of intergenerational guilt placed on them.
00:37:24.360You couldn't imagine something with lesser nobility than to impose that collective guilt on them.
00:37:31.300This doesn't mean that indigenous people were not mistreated, but it means that Joe Blow should not have to experience it right now when he's graduating with his commerce degree.
00:37:41.380So that's at one level where we see this kind of nonsense.
00:37:46.980The peer review process in science is fundamental to educating what is correct or not.
00:37:53.380We put a paper through the peer review, your colleagues break it apart, every syllable, and then eventually through multiple rounds of revision, we can then publish this paper as something that's been vetted.
00:38:05.560Well, there is an indigenous professor at University of British Columbia who several years ago, when she didn't get tenure, filed a complaint with the Human Rights Tribunal,
00:38:15.400arguing that this process of having to write things down by publishing them was an affront to her oral tradition history as an indigenous person.
00:38:26.240Well, you know who else has oral traditions?
00:38:28.940Jewish people, for much longer, for 5,000 years.
00:38:32.940So I should have told all those Jewish Nobel Prize winners to never write things down because, brah, oral tradition.
00:38:53.240So, for example, when we say indigenous way of knowing, it is perfectly fair to say that if you're going to study something in the Great North,
00:39:02.640to the extent that those folks have lived in that land for thousands of years,
00:39:07.120they may have unique knowledge about the flora and fauna of that land that we should be engaging with.
00:39:33.740The Quebec minister of, I think, Environment was placed in very hot waters a few years ago because when they were talking about environmental impact studies,
00:39:42.020and he said, well, what do you mean indigenous way?
00:39:44.680Don't we use the scientific method to decide that?
00:39:47.580He was basically feather and tarred as, you know, a Nazi.
00:39:51.360So, no, there is no Lebanese Jewish way of knowing or really good-looking people way of knowing or indigenous way of knowing.
00:40:29.920It reminds me a couple of years ago, Professor, there was a Black Lives Matter protest in Toronto,
00:40:34.340and one of the speakers called Justin Trudeau a white supremacist.
00:40:38.760And it was kind of shocking because, you know, to us, Justin Trudeau is this sort of loopy leftist that is, you know, loving of all people or whatever.
00:40:46.420And hearing someone on the far, far left call a left-wing politician white supremacist just didn't really make sense.
00:40:52.400But over the past few years, we've seen this new kind of shifting definition of words.
00:43:13.060Even mathematics can be enriched by a feminist perspective.
00:43:18.000So you can either tackle the problem when you see your child in grade three being parasitized by this BS or you can wait till they have red and blue hair when they're 22.
00:43:29.220And again, of course, I'm being satirical and facetious when I say this, but the reality is that that's the progression.
00:43:35.520So, you know, there isn't a singular recipe for how everybody should engage.
00:43:40.600You have to find what is your sphere of influence and simply not walk away from a fight.
00:43:46.380So it could be somebody posts something on Facebook who's a friend of yours and you think that you disagree with, engage them publicly, politely.
00:44:22.720I have a friend who lives in Palo Alto, which is like a very kind of liberal left-wing city in California.
00:44:29.240And basically at her brother's son's school, it's a small private school, and at this point more than half the students in this child's class,
00:44:38.140I think he's like 12 or 13 years old, more than half the students now identify as being transgender or part of the LGBT community in some way.
00:44:46.640And I think that terrifies a lot of parents because they don't want to be seen as bigoted.
00:44:52.640They don't want to be seen as being not understanding of what kids are going through and that kind of thing.
00:44:59.780But obviously when you have that kind of ratio, there's something political happening in the school.
00:45:05.160And like you said, if you don't stand up against it now, I mean, what's going to happen when the child gets to university or, you know, when they get older?
00:45:55.740So it started with a confluence of idea pathogens.
00:46:00.180So, for example, cultural relativism is a idea that first developed, you know, 100, almost 100 years ago by Franz Boas, who was a anthropologist, who, a cultural anthropologist, who wanted to really remove the influence of biology in understanding human phenomena.
00:46:21.420And the reason originally started as a, quote, noble reason, which is that at various points in history, people have usurped evolutionary ideas to their nefarious political pursuits.
00:46:35.260So in the 1930s and 40s, the Nazis said, hey, there's a Darwinian natural struggle between the races.
00:47:00.960Well, none of these ideas have anything to do with Darwinian theory.
00:47:04.180It's not as though they are a natural, you know, consequence of Darwinian theory.
00:47:10.180But all of these cretins usurp these ideas.
00:47:13.320So a bunch of anthropologists, under the guise of trying to stop these from happening in the future, created a new edifice of knowledge where you completely reject that there are any human universals.
00:47:26.860So, for example, Franz Boas' eventual student, Margaret Mead, who was a committed cultural anthropologist, came up with the idea that, you know, there are some folks in some exotic island where their sexual behaviors are exactly opposite to the typical pattern.
00:47:44.680Men are chaste and virginal and no, no, no, I don't want to have sex.
00:47:48.340And it is the women that run after them.
00:47:50.300And that was an example that even when it comes to sexual behavior, there are no universal.
00:47:55.140That whole study and all that research was utter bullshit, complete nonsense.
00:47:59.120There is a book that came out called The Faithful Hoaxing of Margaret Reid.
00:48:02.700But she was so desperate to believe in the idea that there are no human universals.
00:48:06.820There is no possibility that there is a biological set of imperatives that define our common shared humanity that she was parasitized by that idea pathogen.
00:48:16.780So, different idea pathogens on campuses arose for different reasons, but they each did their part in destroying the edifice of truth.
00:48:27.180So that 40, 50, 60, 70 years later, we end up with women who have nine-inch penises.
00:48:35.100Again, me stating that does not reject or negate or make light of the fact that transgenderism is a real issue and these people should exist in complete freedom of bigotry.
00:48:47.340So, that's the problem is that once you are permissive to allow a small chip to the edifice of truth, it's a domino effect.
00:48:58.400If you see your child being taught white fragility, you say, oh, no, no, no, you're not going to teach my child that they have to feel bad because they have a certain skin you.
00:49:10.800And if enough people do it, if enough people activate, when I say activate your inner honey badger, let me explain the analogy clearly or the metaphor.
00:49:20.960A honey badger is the size of a small dog.
00:49:34.860Because once you annoy it, it goes berserk.
00:49:39.280It is so ferocious that the lions say, yeah, I don't want to deal with that, right?
00:49:44.500So, what does it mean to activate your inner honey badger?
00:49:48.040It means that if you attack my sense of dignity, my sense of truth, I lose it.
00:49:54.920Now, lose it doesn't mean I become violent, but that means if you think with your blue hair you're going to come at me being indignant, I'm going to match you a hundredfold with my indignation.
00:50:09.120I mean, look, even how I'm speaking now, I'm the warmest and fuzziest guy, but if you piss me off, I'm coming for you, right?
00:50:14.980So, I understand that people have different personalities, but if you are going to defend your child from a pedophile, right, you should also defend your child from idea pathogens.
00:50:28.620The pedophile is dangerous to your child in one way, and having your child grow up hating himself or herself and his or her culture and his or her skin color, that too is horrific.
00:50:45.680I think that so many people get frustrated.
00:50:48.720They see things happening online, and that's how they feel inside, but they don't really have the courage.
00:50:54.400And so, you know, so important books like yours and people like you who are sort of out there day in, day out, living and fighting these culture wars, you know, serve as an example.
00:51:04.860Because just to bring it back to the idea of common sense, you know, it's like they can sit there and tell you that there's no difference between men and women.
00:51:13.460But, you know, we all have our lived experiences.
00:51:16.920I mean, I have an 18-month-old son, and I can tell you with no bit of uncertainty that the preferences that he's shown since he was a very little boy were masculine.
00:51:29.380You know, he likes to play with balls.
00:51:43.060You can see it in small, small children before they're even socialized.
00:51:47.200So to sit there and say, you know, the reason that boys play with trucks and rocks and balls is because of the way they're socialized.
00:51:54.460It's like, well, you know, anyone who's ever had kids knows that that's just not true.
00:51:59.020And I think that, you know, that's just one example of millions, that common sense is being fought against, and we're told basically to, you know, to disbelieve our lying eyes, basically.
00:52:12.280Yeah, I'm glad that you brought up the example of toys.
00:52:15.120I don't know if that's because you're familiar with some of my work on toy preferences or it was just serendipitous.
00:52:19.900But in Chapter 7, where I talk about how to seek truth, I argue that we can build an unassailable argument by using what I call nomological networks of cumulative evidence.
00:52:33.740It's a lot of fancy words, so let me break it down, and I will use the example of toy preferences to explain it.
00:52:39.400So let's suppose I want to prove to you that toy preferences are not socially constructed.
00:52:45.020By the way, social constructivism is another one of the idea pathogens that I discuss in the book.
00:52:49.280Social constructivism is the idea that we are born empty slate with equal potentiality, and it's only, you know, evil socialization that makes us go into one trajectory or another.
00:52:59.940So toy preferences, the typical social science argument, is that toy preferences is a manifestation of gender socialization.
00:53:07.900We teach little Johnny to play rough and tumble with trucks and balls and sticks, and we teach little Linda to play with nurturance with dolls.
00:53:18.320And that starts a cascade of gender role specialization.
00:53:22.000And so if I want to actually prove to you that, no, there are sex-specific toy preferences that are not due to social constructivism, how would I go about doing that?
00:53:34.320So I would build a nomological network of cumulative evidence.
00:53:38.900It means that I would say to myself, what would be the evidence that I would need to amass stemming from different time periods, different cultures, different disciplines, different methodologies, different everything you could imagine such that it becomes impossible for you to negate the tsunami of evidence that I'm drowning you in.
00:54:03.820I won't build the whole network, but let me give you a few.
00:54:06.540You touched on the fact that if you take children who are in the pre-socialization stage, they already exhibit those preferences.
00:54:13.360Well, those studies have actually been done.
00:54:15.480This is how we establish that something is not due to socialization.
00:54:18.260We go to developmental psychologists and we elicit those preferences from children who could, by definition, didn't have the cognitive ability to yet be socialized.
00:54:27.860So already that would be enough to, you know, offer a death blow to the social constructivist argument.
00:54:42.620You could take chimpanzees and you could show that the infants in those species exhibit the same sex-specific preferences as human infants.
00:54:52.320Well, to argue that that's due to the sexist patriarchy would be a bit of a tough sell unless you're arguing that the sexist patriarchy affects little mama vervet monkey and little papa vervet monkey.
00:55:03.700So now I've used data from developmental psychology and from comparative psychology, comparative psychology means across different species, to demonstrate that there is something that is beyond social constructivism when it comes to toy preferences.
00:55:19.040You could take little girls who suffer from congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which is an endocrinological disorder that masculinizes little girls.
00:55:28.660They become masculinized in their morphology.
00:55:31.260They become masculinized in their behaviors.
00:55:33.200Well, little girls who suffer from congenital adrenal hyperplasia are more likely to exhibit male, boy-based preferences.
00:55:41.860So this is suggesting that there is a hormonal signature, biological signature to toy preferences.
00:55:47.540Now, I could provide you with many, many other such evidence.
00:55:51.520When put together, it becomes impossible for you to argue against me.
00:55:56.560You could take your best shot, but I've drowned you.
00:55:59.040So one of the things that I argue in Chapter 7, or the main thing that I argue in Chapter 7, is that when you're engaging in debates, don't be hysterical.
00:56:08.680Don't let your emotional, affective system kick in.
00:56:12.200Simply say to yourself, what would I need to provide as evidence to Candace so that I could at least put a chip, if not trash, her ideological walls?
00:56:24.440And I do this exercise not just for evolutionary-based arguments.
00:56:28.380So in the book, for example, I use that epistemological tool to answer the question, is Islam peaceful or not?
00:56:36.760I don't have to ask Justin Trudeau or George Bush or Barack Obama what he is going to tell me that Islam is.
00:56:48.000Can I build a nomological network that completely establishes whether Islam is peaceful or not?
00:56:54.660I'll leave it for your viewers to read the book to decide what the answer is.
00:56:57.980But in other words, there is a time when you need to engage your affective system, your feelings, and there's a time to engage your cognitive system.
00:57:08.680One last thing I know, I hope I'm not being too long-winded.
00:57:12.280One should also have epistemic humility, meaning to know what you know and know what you don't know.
00:57:17.380When I know something, and I'm being interviewed on a show like yours, I will speak with all of the swagger of someone who knows what they're talking about.
00:57:24.900But if you were to ask me now, by the way, Professor Saad, what about the legalization of marijuana under Justin Trudeau?
00:57:55.320I think humility is something that we should all work towards.
00:57:59.500And also, you know, gratitude is another area where people just don't really, you know, show the gratitude.
00:58:06.920So, you know, a lot of the Indigenous land ceremony thing that you talked about earlier, it's like instead of acknowledging that we live in this tremendous society
00:58:14.880and that Western civilization has brought so much good to the world and so much order and peace and freedom and all these things, you know, we can only look at the negative things.
00:58:24.500So we focus on the things that we need to improve upon or that pull our society apart.
00:58:30.020And I think that that too is part of the problem.
00:58:34.200Well, I'll just ask you a final question because, you know, you keep bringing it back to the universities as sort of the origin of these dangerous idea pathogens.
00:58:46.460I think a lot of parents sort of worry about sending their children to university.
00:58:50.220They worry about what kind of ideas they'll get, what the culture will do to them.
00:58:54.180Like you say, you know, you can't help but not turn into sort of a blue haired feminist in some of these departments.
00:59:00.320I know my own experience at university was that most students were kind of tuned out and they didn't really care.
00:59:05.800They didn't really listen to their professors.
00:59:07.140And it was really kind of hard to understand and grasp all the concepts they were trying to teach us because the very nature of postmodernism is that it's really confusing and it doesn't really lead you anywhere.
00:59:18.180It doesn't provide any good in your life.
00:59:20.640You just kind of are left feeling lost, basically.
00:59:53.980So what I would suggest is, well, number one, of course, you don't have to be educated.
00:59:57.880You don't only have to go to university.
00:59:59.220We now have you can go on YouTube and get much better education than what you could have imagined ever.
01:00:05.380You want to study evolutionary psychology?
01:00:07.000Well, there are clips of every great evolutionary psychologist that you could ever imagine.
01:00:11.320And that's going to be much better than any evolutionary psychology course you take at the university setting.
01:00:15.240So so lifelong learning is something that we should all aspire to pursue.
01:00:19.160I always tell the story that when I walk into my study where I'm sitting right now talking to you, there are probably over 200 books in my own personal library that I've yet to read.
01:00:28.120And I often am filled with angst as to when am I going to get to reading?
01:00:31.920There's all this great knowledge that I've yet to learn, and I would probably place myself on the higher end of people who know things.
01:00:39.760And yet I am humbled by how little I know and how much more there is for me to know.
01:00:44.080So that the instinct to always want to learn more does not need to only come from universities.
01:00:48.860But to to come to your the crux of your main question, I can't say this university is more parasitized by the blue haired folks than this university.
01:00:56.400But what I can say is that you need to explain to your children that they should go to university for a growth of their spirit.
01:01:04.640I don't mean that in the in the, you know, religious sense, but knowledge is truly liberating.
01:01:10.380It can take us to all sorts of wonderful landscapes.
01:01:12.460And I don't mean to imply that your education should only be practical or only be, you know, only do natural sciences or the business school or medical school.
01:01:21.100No, you could study the humanities in a very, very liberating way, in a very cerebral way.
01:01:26.800But you should never be in university number one to be an activist.
01:01:45.580I go to university to grow as a cerebrally.
01:01:49.440So just be sure that when you are sending your kids and spending your hard earned money for their tuition, that they are not engaging in these parasitic ideas.
01:02:00.620Now, I understand that you can't be monitoring every single thing that they study in class.
01:02:04.620But if they're going to study feminist epistemology of ice, well, then maybe I'm not going to fund your tuition.
01:02:11.180If they're going to study neuroscience or Shakespeare or business school or law school, by the way, those things can, too, be parasitized by all this nonsense.
01:02:21.440At least give them the tools to be able to protect themselves from all of these dreadful ideas.
01:02:27.720I remember I had a professor of first year university.
01:02:30.920I went to the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and it was the history of political thought.
01:02:36.900And she told us on the first day, you know, there's three other professors that teach the same course.
01:02:41.540It's a requirement for all political science students.
01:02:44.040Why don't you go and sit in on each of these teachers and listen?
01:02:47.540Because we have very different philosophies and different worldviews.
01:02:49.880And, you know, later in school, I remained in her class, but, you know, a couple of years later, I realized that, like, two of the professors that taught the class were ardent Marxists, where she was much more of a classicalist.
01:03:00.980And, you know, I thought that's something that a first year student wouldn't really know.
01:03:04.660But as you get more experienced in university, you can kind of see the difference that there are still really good teachers out there and there's still good programs that do.
01:03:15.140And also the fact that you can learn so much on YouTube and these kind of channels.
01:03:19.620I know you have a very popular YouTube channel, The Sad Truth, where you're pretty prolific.
01:03:25.400You post a lot of videos up there commenting on all the different day-to-day culture war things.
01:03:40.320So, The Parasitic Mind will be out on October 6th.
01:03:44.000So, it really matters if you pre-order it, because when the book is released, it really helps if there are tons of pre-orders, because then they go into sales the first day it's released.
01:03:53.220So, if you're planning on buying the book, please pre-order it.
01:03:55.960You can do it from any – all the portals carry it.