The Candice Malcolm Show - Ep 13 ｜ Dr. Gad Saad ｜ Activate Your Inner Honey Badger

00:00:00.000 The fact that social justice warriors and other intellectual terrorists are in the minority

00:00:04.920 doesn't negate the fact that they wield much of the power, right? So it keeps everybody in check

00:00:10.480 because nobody wants to fall prey to their e-mob and their cancel culture and so on.

00:00:15.800 So the reality is if everybody were to somehow trigger their ire, their own ire, their indignation,

00:00:22.460 or what I call activate your inner honey badger, then the problem can be resolved very quickly.

00:00:27.500 If you don't do that, then it's drip, drip, drip. It's death of the West by a thousand cuts.

00:00:32.800 We will one day wake up without any of our freedoms. We won't recognize the society that we used to love.

00:00:38.660 Political correctness has a chilling impact on our culture and our society.

00:00:42.960 A silent majority of people disagree with what they see and hear on the news,

00:00:46.840 but they decide to keep quiet, keep their opinions to themselves, and engage in a form of self-censorship.

00:00:52.720 And who can blame them? They don't want to risk losing their job, losing their livelihood,

00:00:56.920 losing friends or family members, all just overholding what a rabid mob considers to be

00:01:02.920 the wrong opinion. My guest on today's episode of the True North Speaker Series has been living on

00:01:08.600 the front lines of the culture war against the radical left for years. And he says that if we

00:01:14.220 don't stand up for our core values, values like truth and freedom, that these values will soon be

00:01:20.200 lost forever. Dr. Gad Saad is an author, public speaker, and professor at Concordia University

00:01:26.700 in Montreal. He runs a popular YouTube channel called The Sad Truth and has been speaking about

00:01:32.120 free speech and political correctness for years. His latest book, The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious

00:01:38.660 Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, is coming out on October 6th. And in our conversation today,

00:01:44.140 we talk about these infectious ideas, how they've been fomenting on university campuses for decades,

00:01:50.140 and the best way to combat them. Dr. Saad, known lovingly online by his followers as The Gadfather,

00:01:57.780 says it's time to treat this war as the serious threat that it is. Unleash your inner honey badger

00:02:03.920 and start fighting back. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Let me know what you think in

00:02:09.180 the comment section, and please share this video with friends and like-minded compatriots.

00:02:14.300 Don't forget to subscribe to True North. And if you'd like to support this podcast,

00:02:18.420 please visit tnc.news slash donate.

00:02:31.660 Dr. Gad Saad, thank you so much. Welcome to the True North Speaker Series. It's such a pleasure to have

00:02:36.140 you today. Thank you so much for having me. Very excited to be here. Well, we were just saying,

00:02:40.840 I met you once before in Montreal. We invited you to speak at a Civitas conference. And I remember that

00:02:46.500 presentation that you gave. You talked about the concept of idea pathogens and the ostrich syndrome,

00:02:53.980 which I see you've also incorporated into your latest book. So hopefully we can go through some of

00:02:59.040 those concepts at more length, because I really want to talk about your new book that's coming out on

00:03:04.300 October 6th. But before we get there, Dr. Saad, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background

00:03:09.600 and how you ended up being this sort of prominent public intellectual?

00:03:16.020 So I've been a professor for 26 years. My area of scientific research is marrying evolutionary biology

00:03:23.560 and evolutionary psychology to study human behavior in general, but consumer behavior in particular.

00:03:29.140 And so I've been within the ecosystem of the university, as I said, for almost three decades.

00:03:35.660 And as I always recount, and as I do in chapter one of my forthcoming book, I faced two great wars in

00:03:42.140 my life. The first war that I faced was in Lebanon as a child. I was in the Lebanese civil war and my

00:03:49.340 family had to escape Lebanon because we are Lebanese Jews. And so that afforded me an understanding of

00:03:56.280 how ugly tribalism could be, how ugly identity politics is when pushed to the extreme.

00:04:02.300 But I faced a second war in my life, and that war has been the war on reason, the war on science,

00:04:09.380 the war on logic and common sense that I've been seeing with increasing frequency on the university

00:04:15.960 campus. And so what compelled me to, as you said, become a public intellectual is, number one,

00:04:21.940 I'm sitting there in that war, seeing how people are no longer committed to logic, reason, common

00:04:28.120 sense, and science. But also I'm someone who, just because of my, you know, genetic makeup,

00:04:34.400 I am very indignant of nonsense. And so when I see nonsense, I feel personally affronted.

00:04:42.240 And so put all those together, and voila, I'm in the public eye.

00:04:46.100 Well, it's interesting that you compare those sort of two different, I guess, battles or wars,

00:04:51.420 because, you know, in Lebanon, that that is a real war where people are actually being killed and

00:04:56.720 murdered. When we think about identity politics, and the sort of culture wars that happen in North

00:05:02.540 America and the West, you know, they're almost like kind of silly, like, like, identity politics,

00:05:07.660 you just sort of roll your eyes on it. But, but you've seen how those dangerous ideas can really

00:05:12.700 manifest into something that's, that's, that's truly dangerous. So maybe you can expand a little

00:05:18.040 bit on how you compare those two, you know, different kinds of battles or wars that you've

00:05:23.240 lived through. So at the most fundamental level, I like to use the language of war or violence. So

00:05:31.400 for example, I talk about postmodernists being intellectual terrorists, right? So on 9-11,

00:05:37.820 19 committed zealots decided to fly planes onto buildings. Well, intellectual terrorists,

00:05:45.700 postmodernists, they fly their planes of BS onto our edifices of reason. So at the most fundamental

00:05:52.400 level, there's a murder of truth, truth matters. So that's, so that's at the grandest level,

00:05:58.460 they are literally, or rather figuratively, raping truth, right? There is such a thing as male,

00:06:05.600 female, there is such a thing as biology, there are universal truths that scientists wake up every 1.00

00:06:11.340 day trying to uncover. Postmodernists say no, there are no objective truths, there's only,

00:06:18.000 you know, you're, you're shackled by your subjective reality and subjective biases. So at the most

00:06:22.460 fundamental level, there is literally an attack on, you know, all of the things that makes our societies

00:06:28.980 enlightened, which is the pursuit of truth. We have the scientific method that allows us to

00:06:34.200 educate what is true from what is false, right? This is why we don't rub crystals to resolve diabetes,

00:06:41.440 right? Because we have a mechanism by to judge whether rubbing crystals works or not. So that's

00:06:47.180 one issue. But then they are downstream effects of all of these, as you kindly pointed in the start of

00:06:53.760 the intro about what I call idea pathogens. So identity politics is not just a silly thing that

00:06:59.840 we're just, you know, indignant about. Identity politics has now entered every single hallway

00:07:06.940 of academia. So we give professorships, not as a function of whether you have merit, but as a

00:07:13.920 function of whether you belong to certain classes of people who possess certain immutable traits. I mean,

00:07:21.000 a few years ago, you would have thought that this is a grotesque, racist idea. Today,

00:07:25.740 it is cloaked in the robe of social justice. So it doesn't matter if my CV is 50 pages long.

00:07:32.380 If I am not a person that has this and this marker, I'm simply put to the back of the queue.

00:07:38.500 When you now apply for grants, you have to state what is your commitment to what I call the die

00:07:44.600 religion, diversity, inclusion, and equity. If you don't write the correct things, you don't get a grant.

00:07:52.360 I know of a natural sciences professor at a prominent university in Montreal who was denied

00:07:59.340 a grant. He does important science. He was denied a grant because they didn't get past the fact that

00:08:04.920 his die statement was sufficiently progressive. So the science didn't matter. The die religion 0.99

00:08:12.600 superseded the science. So if I may just correct your earlier point, it's hardly silly, these squabbles,

00:08:19.640 because the downstream effect is truly disastrous to an enlightened, scientific-oriented society.

00:08:26.620 Oh, and I didn't mean to downplay it at all. I just think that we have so much of this in our

00:08:32.600 society. It's like politics has seeped into every aspect of our life. Like you just said,

00:08:37.180 even in hard sciences, you now have to repeat the correct mantras. And I think a lot of Canadians out 0.98

00:08:43.300 there just sort of really roll their eyes at it. Like they don't see the problem as serious

00:08:48.440 as what some of the alarmists on the left are proclaiming. And so when they're constantly being

00:08:54.000 lectured about systemic racism or about, you know, rape culture in our society or all of these sort of

00:09:00.100 buzzwords that the left has created, they just don't, they've had enough of it. They kind of roll

00:09:05.040 their eyes at it. So it's not that it's silly. It's just that we're so tired of it. And I wonder if you

00:09:11.160 get that feeling as well, because you've been on the front lines fighting this fight for, I don't

00:09:16.520 know, years and years. And it seems like, you know, it's not going away. It's just getting worse and

00:09:21.220 worse. I think it's getting worse and worse because it's exactly what you're saying. People are tired

00:09:27.900 of it. They roll their eyes at it, but then they don't become, as I say, soldiers of reason. There's

00:09:33.700 no, you could roll your eyes from today until pigs fly. If you don't get engaged in fighting back

00:09:40.080 against these idea pathogens, then the problem won't be resolved. The reality is, I think the

00:09:44.940 great majority of people are anti all this nonsense, but they don't speak. And again, to come back to the

00:09:52.320 analogy of the 9-11 hijackers, it didn't take 19 million people to bring down the Twin Towers. It

00:09:59.680 didn't take 190,000 people. It required only 19 committed people. So the fact that social justice

00:10:06.820 warriors and other intellectual terrorists are in the minority doesn't negate the fact that they

00:10:12.260 wield much of the power, right? So it keeps everybody in check because nobody wants to fall

00:10:17.700 prey to their e-mob and their cancel culture and so on. So the reality is if everybody were to somehow

00:10:23.880 trigger their ire, their own ire, their indignation, or what I call activate your inner honey badger,

00:10:30.760 then the problem can be resolved very quickly. If you don't do that, then it's drip, drip, drip.

00:10:35.720 It's death of the West by a thousand cuts. We will one day wake up without any of our freedoms.

00:10:40.640 We won't recognize the society that we used to love. And you can see that happening. I feel like

00:10:46.300 Canadian society right now is just crippled with political correctness where we've had some very

00:10:52.200 high profile people sort of get canceled or the cancel culture mob has gone after them and they've

00:10:57.600 been removed from their positions. And it creates a chilling effect across society. What would your advice

00:11:03.640 be for some of those Canadians that really don't agree with what's going on, but they also don't

00:11:08.960 find themselves in a position where they can really speak out against it? So there are several ways that

00:11:14.600 I can answer this. And by the way, forgive the shameless plug, but in chapter eight, like the last

00:11:19.280 chapter of the book, I exactly address your question, which is the chapter is titled Call to Action,

00:11:24.260 because it's insufficient to explain the problem. You also have to offer a vaccine,

00:11:29.440 a set of solutions and inoculation, right? So I mentioned earlier, you know, activate your inner

00:11:35.360 honey badger, but let's talk about the one you mentioned, you know, I might lose friends.

00:11:40.160 So I actually addressed this one in the book. So I argue that friendships are anti-fragile. So to use

00:11:47.880 the term of Nassim Talib, my good friend. So anti-fragility is something that you want in a system. In other

00:11:54.260 words, you need to shock the system and it not break for it to be a strong system, right? If it

00:12:00.700 is very brittle and if I just go boo and it breaks, then that's not a good system. Well, I argue that

00:12:05.540 friendships, true friendships should be anti-fragile, which means what? Candace and I, if we're good

00:12:10.920 friends, we could sit down around the table, disagree on Justin Trudeau or Donald Trump or whatever else

00:12:15.740 we're debating and walk away from that conversation without any threat to our friendship. If we can't do

00:12:23.180 that, then Candace is not a friend that I wish to have around in my inner circle. She's not worthy 0.84

00:12:29.120 of the title of my friend. So one of the ways that you get around that sort of cowardice of I'm going

00:12:34.760 to lose friend is to recognize that it's better to be accompanied by a few strong friends, loyal

00:12:41.260 friends with whom I could have these heated exchanges than to be surrounded by a bunch of castrated 0.95

00:12:45.500 cowards. Another one that I often hear is, you know, who am I to judge? You know, I'm, you know,

00:12:51.840 I don't want to judge another culture. I don't want to judge another thing. If they want to believe

00:12:55.720 in BLM, no judge. Okay. Now, as long as your judging is rooted in a set of coherent principles,

00:13:03.500 we judge all the time. When I'm deciding who to marry, I judge different candidates. I belong to

00:13:09.640 the society of judgment and decision-making as a behavioral scientist. So judging is an inherent

00:13:15.320 part of human nature. I think oftentimes what happens is people think back of the sort of the

00:13:21.100 religious edict, you know, don't judge others lest you be judged. In that case, what the religious

00:13:26.580 edict is talking about is moral hypocrisy, right? Don't judge others for doing something and then

00:13:33.020 you turn around, do it yourself. It's in that sense we mean don't judge others, right? Don't throw stones

00:13:38.320 in a glass house and so on. But the idea that I shouldn't judge others because they are imbeciles,

00:13:44.320 cretins, intellectual terrorists. No, I spend all day judging people and I expect others to judge me.

00:13:50.020 It's called being human. Well, absolutely. But Dr. Saad, what about if you're in a position where

00:13:56.460 you worry about your job? I mean, we've seen a lot of people, high-profile people, lose, you know,

00:14:01.120 I'll give you an example, Stockwell Day. He went on CBC Power and Politics, said that he didn't think that

00:14:06.000 Canada was a systemically racist country, compared racist bullying that some kids might get to the

00:14:12.280 bullying that he received because of the way he looked and the fact they wore glasses. And that was enough.

00:14:16.620 He got fired from the CBC or he forced to resign from his prestigious legal law firm that he was

00:14:23.780 affiliated with. And I think that those kind of things have a really chilling effect that you worry,

00:14:29.140 okay, if I write something on Facebook that gets interpreted the wrong way, I could lose my job,

00:14:34.140 which has a really deep impact on your ability to provide for your family and your entire life.

00:14:40.400 So what about, you know, positions that it's not just friendship, but it's actually your livelihood?

00:14:46.060 Yeah, so I also talk about this in the book. Look, people often say, oh, but you know, Professor

00:14:49.860 Saad, you have tenure. Well, first of all, tenure is not this great cloak that protects you from

00:14:56.720 all ill consequences. I've had to suffer quite serious consequences in academia, despite being

00:15:03.980 tenured. And I don't need to get into all the details, but I can assure you, it's not an easy ride

00:15:08.540 to be who I am from within the venomous pit of academia. I've received probably more death threats

00:15:16.880 than anyone who is watching the show has hairs on their heads. I used to walk in to campus having to

00:15:24.560 check in with security who would accompany to my classroom and lock the door so that if a student

00:15:29.520 leaves and they want to come back in, it is they can't come back in without me opening the door.

00:15:34.540 My university accompanied me to the Montreal police for us to file a police report because

00:15:42.840 of the death threats that I was receiving. Tenure did not protect me from that. When I would walk

00:15:48.200 into the campus, this was several years ago. Luckily, this has stopped. But in 2017, when I would walk into

00:15:53.920 campus, my wife would drop me. I would literally have, and I've never experienced anxiety before in the

00:15:59.760 true sense of the term, I would go to my class and then I would rush back to my, to, for my wife to

00:16:06.140 pick me up. And I would literally let go a deep breath of a sigh of relief that I've survived another

00:16:12.240 week because I didn't know whether whomever is sending me the death threats is just a quack who's 1.00

00:16:16.560 trying to intimidate or whether they're really going to do it or not. So we all have a, you know,

00:16:22.260 cross to bear. Some of us more, some of us less. The reality though, is that if you look at the

00:16:28.840 18 year olds who went, who landed on the beaches of Normandy so that you and I can have this

00:16:34.240 conversation today, they didn't receive a guarantee that they would be protected. They, they, they were

00:16:40.360 likely to lose a lot more than their jobs. And yet they said, yeah, yeah, sign me up. I'll go land on

00:16:45.880 the beaches of Normandy. And they were going to be mowed down like little mosquitoes by the Germans.

00:16:50.780 So I'm not minimizing the real threats that people face. And I'm not suggesting that we be reckless

00:16:57.720 martyrs, but everybody has a potential cost to bear. The problem is that each person has exactly

00:17:04.520 the same logic as what you're saying. You know, let, let get sad and other courageous guys carry

00:17:10.920 the burden for me. You know, I have a job and I've got little kids. Guess what? I have little kids too.

00:17:15.780 And I have a heart and I have a brain and I get panicky when I see six suspicious looking guys coming

00:17:22.240 towards me. Cause I don't know if they were the ones who sent me the 18 thousands death threat,

00:17:26.440 but I do it because not doing it would make me feel as though I'm a cowardly fraud. So

00:17:32.200 each person has to calculate their own calculus of the trade-offs of costs and benefits. But it is

00:17:39.880 simply a cowardly to say, I stand to lose in a war. Everybody stands to lose, but we expect

00:17:47.080 courageous people to stand up. That's it. And I wondered though, like, at what point do you feel

00:17:52.920 like that call to action is there? Because, you know, when, when the second world war was going on,

00:17:58.920 we saw the threat. We knew what Hitler was. We knew that Nazis were expanding all across Europe. 0.62

00:18:05.240 But I think that the, it was a much more obvious idea that the society was at war. Whereas, Gad, you

00:18:11.560 know, today you look around and, you know, life is pretty good. People are pretty comfortable. A lot of the

00:18:16.680 sort of culture wars play out online. And so it doesn't really feel real. Now, obviously,

00:18:21.480 over the summer, we've seen very violent riots. We've seen gun battles. We've seen a lot of this

00:18:27.880 sort of pent up anger that we experienced online boil over and happen in real life. So, you know,

00:18:34.200 how do we know when it, when it, when it's time, you know, for us to, you know, metaphorically

00:18:38.760 go to the beaches of Normandy? I mean, do you think that's happening now? Do you think that's

00:18:42.760 been happening for the past two years? Do you think that may happen in the next five years? Where are we

00:18:46.500 here? Right. So for many, many years, I've been warning, not hyperbolically, literally,

00:18:52.100 that in 10, 20, 50, 100 years, if we don't change course, we will have exactly the same reality

00:19:00.500 as I escaped in Lebanon. And people said, oh, but aren't you exaggerating, Professor? And now we see

00:19:04.820 the violence, right? What protects the West is a set of values that is truly unique in our sort of

00:19:11.940 collective history, right? There is something unique about the system. It's an anomaly what

00:19:16.980 the West has given us for the number of years that it's given us. Much of our history is not

00:19:22.580 laden with peace and love and freedom, right? Much of our history is paved in rivers of blood.

00:19:30.260 So some of us are either cursed or endowed with the capacity to look at patterns and predict what's

00:19:38.900 going to come in the future, not because we are prophets, not because we are Cassandras,

00:19:42.900 modern-day Cassandras, but because, first of all, we've seen what happens in societies where you lose

00:19:48.420 those protective values, but also because some of us are able to detect patterns and take them to their

00:19:54.420 logical conclusion. So the problem, as you correctly said, is the old famous parable of the boiling

00:20:00.580 frog, right? If you put the frog and you only increase the heat by a bit by below a just noticeable

00:20:06.180 difference, it doesn't realize that it's being boiled, right? So that parable is really apt here,

00:20:12.260 because it exactly speaks to what you're saying. Well, yeah, maybe there is a bit of problem, but

00:20:16.020 you know, I'm busy this week, you know, with my daughter's graduation, and yeah, I don't have time

00:20:21.140 for this culture war. The reality, though, it's drip, drip, drip, right? You don't see it in one

00:20:25.940 year. You don't see it in five years. But as someone now who's been long enough in academia for

00:20:30.660 26 years, I warned about every single one. As a matter of fact, my satire, I often joke, but I'm

00:20:38.340 being serious, that my satire is prophetic. The reason why my satire is prophetic, because I take

00:20:44.100 a current position, and then I apply, if you like, an extrapolation to some future date,

00:20:51.380 I satirize that extreme condition, and then I put my hands like this, and I wait for reality to catch

00:20:58.820 up to my satire. So listen to the proverbial canary in the cold mines who is warning you. Don't brush it

00:21:07.060 off as hyperbolic talk. Look, my child right now, one of my children has a teacher who has BLM as a

00:21:18.020 sign, you know, on her avatar, right? There are two things that one can do now. Say, well, hey,

00:21:22.820 so what? You know, I love Black people. I want to support Black people. What's wrong with that? 1.00

00:21:27.300 But that would be a very facile understanding of BLM. BLM is a political organization that has certain

00:21:32.780 positions that either I agree with or disagree with. But irrespective of that, it shouldn't be

00:21:37.900 my teachers, my child's teacher, who is putting it as a political position, right? So I have two

00:21:45.760 choices. I could either be quiet, or I could contact nicely, politely, quietly, behind closed doors,

00:21:52.400 the principal, and say, hey, I don't think this is appropriate for... So this is what I mean by there

00:21:57.320 are many ways by which you can get involved. Not everybody has my platform. Not everybody has my

00:22:02.260 position. But each of us has some sphere of influence from which they can engage their

00:22:08.360 engagement. Don't sit idly. Don't be a coward. Don't diffuse the responsibility onto others.

00:22:15.080 You have a voice, use it. Excellent. Well, let's get into your book a little bit more,

00:22:20.060 Professor Seid, because I think it's a really important book. I admit I haven't read it yet,

00:22:23.860 because we set this interview up pretty fast, and the book doesn't come out until October 6th. So

00:22:29.120 as I was researching the book, I'm really excited to read it. So hopefully you can

00:22:33.740 help explain and talk about what it's all about. But the book is called The Parasitic Mind,

00:22:40.220 How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. That is a great title, and it's so true, because

00:22:46.560 the least common thing in our society right now, it feels, is common sense, the thing that's supposed

00:22:51.760 to drive us all. But maybe you can tell us a little bit about what some examples are of these

00:22:57.000 infectious ideas that are killing common sense. So perhaps I could start off with the analogy from

00:23:03.520 the animal kingdom. So the way I thought about, you know, using idea pathogens and parasites,

00:23:11.020 parasitic mind, is if you think of parasites in nature, parasites can infect a host in many organs.

00:23:20.240 A tapeworm can go into your intestines. But neuroparasites are parasites that specifically

00:23:26.620 seek an organism's brain. They're brain parasites, brain worms. So the classic example that some of

00:23:32.820 your viewers might know, and that's why I'm going to use it, Toxoplasma gondii is a brain parasite

00:23:38.600 that can inflict actually humans. But the classic example is when it infects the brain of a mouse,

00:23:45.680 the mouse loses its innate fear of cats, and it actually becomes sexually attracted to the cat's

00:23:51.840 urine, which is not a good thing for a mouse to exhibit. Or, yeah, or you could have, for example,

00:23:58.580 a type of brain worm that parasitizes the brains of ungulates, deer, moose, elk. And so when they are

00:24:05.680 parasitized by this brain worm, they start engaging in what's called circling behavior. They kind of bob

00:24:10.920 their head up and down, and they can't extricate themselves from this, you know, motor pattern. So

00:24:16.540 even if the looming predators are coming, they're stuck in this pattern, right? So parasites can cause

00:24:23.160 animals to engage in behaviors that are maladaptive to them, but adaptive to the reproductive cycle

00:24:30.320 of the parasite. And so I said, aha, as someone who was an evolutionary psychologist, so I study

00:24:36.300 oftentimes comparison across species, I said, aha, I'm going to use that example to argue that human beings

00:24:44.780 could be not only parasitized by actual physical brain worms in the same way that the mouse can, but we can

00:24:52.100 be regrettably parasitized by a completely other class of brain worms, which I called idea pathogens. So in this

00:24:58.760 case, these are terrible ideas that instead of causing us to go around in a circling behavior, they lead

00:25:06.300 us to the abyss of infinite lunacy quietly, right, in a docile manner. So then the, so as any good

00:25:13.200 epidemiologist would do, I then say, okay, well, where did this infestation begin? So if we are studying the

00:25:20.300 origins of the COVID-19 virus, well, we can also study where do these idea pathogens come from? And I'll give

00:25:27.240 examples of idea pathogens in a second. And I argue that all of these dreadful idea pathogens, regrettably, I say, because I'm a

00:25:35.240 professor all come from the university ecosystem. It takes intellectuals to come up with really uniquely dumb

00:25:42.660 ideas, right? So now that I've kind of set up the parasitological model, the epidemiological model, what are some

00:25:51.340 examples of idea pathogens? So the granddaddy of all idea pathogens, because it literally negates truth, is, as I mentioned

00:26:00.000 earlier, postmodernism. Postmodernism is the granddaddy of idea pathogens, because it literally removes our ability for sense

00:26:07.980 making, right? There is no point in me waking up in the morning as a behavioral scientist, thinking that there might be some

00:26:14.360 regularities that I could study in the world, if there are no objective truths. It's my truth, it's subjective truth, who are you to

00:26:21.740 judge my truth, and so on, right? So postmodernism is intellectual terrorism. Now, postmodernism then leads to all sorts of other

00:26:31.120 idea pathogens. So for example, militant feminism is itself an idea pathogen, not because I don't support equity feminism, which

00:26:41.300 basically says that men and women should be equal under the law. Any enlightened person would agree with that. But militant feminism goes 1.00

00:26:47.860 much beyond that. It rejects the possibility that there are evolutionary-based sex differences. So a lot of times I draw

00:26:54.980 ire from people because I'm an evolutionary psychologist, because evolutionary psychologists are racist, are sexist.

00:27:01.320 Nothing could be further from the truth. All that evolutionary psychologists are doing is study the evolutionary mechanisms that

00:27:08.240 led to the human mind, right? So transactivism is another idea pathogen. Now, that doesn't mean that transgender people 0.88

00:27:16.060 don't exist. It doesn't mean that we should not fight against bigotry against transgender people. When it comes to that,

00:27:23.300 I'm about as liberal as they can come. But in the pursuit of social justice towards transgender people, I don't have to murder

00:27:31.900 truth. I 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

00:27:42.180 woman. And now you are transphobic if you don't allow him to compete against 100-pound woman because, bruh, it's transphobic to

00:27:50.580 presume that there are any biological differences between these two individuals, right? So what happens with idea pathogens in many

00:27:58.300 cases, well, in all cases, is that they share one thing in common. They all are completely committed to the rejection of reality. It frees us from the

00:28:08.560 shackles of reality. You put trans, it frees me from the shackles of my biology and my genitalia. You put 0.96

00:28:15.120 postmodernism, it frees me from the possibility of a universal truth. So all of these idea pathogens, cultural

00:28:22.620 relativism, transactivism, militant feminism, identity politics, the culture of perpetual offense, right?

00:28:30.560 Feeling being higher than thinking. All of these various strands of idea pathogens, when put together, result in

00:28:40.280 truly hallucinatory positions.

00:28:43.300 And they are starting to tear our society apart. One of the things that I noticed about all these

00:28:49.100 different idea pathogens that you mentioned is that at the very basic level, they have something going for

00:28:55.420 them. Like the idea of postmodernism, it's like, I remember when I was in university, the whole idea

00:29:01.360 is that you have to develop critical thinking. So it's important to question things. But the problem

00:29:05.680 with postmodernists is that they question everything. They pull apart the very foundation

00:29:10.300 until there's nothing left and you don't have anything. And it's the same with feminism. It's like, 1.00

00:29:15.260 you know, there's been a history of women being sort of marginalized, not being allowed to vote, 1.00

00:29:20.580 not being full citizens, not being able to own property, those kinds of things. It's like,

00:29:24.140 yeah, it's important that we fight so that women have equal, like you said, equal rights under the 0.99

00:29:29.620 law. It's just that at a certain point, you know, it goes from fighting an injustice that we can all

00:29:36.300 more or less agree with. Then they go overboard and they take it to keep going and going and going to

00:29:43.300 its logical conclusion, where it starts to sort of tear everything apart. So I wonder, how do you stop

00:29:50.260 that process from happening? How do you say, like, at what point do you say, you know, yes,

00:29:55.080 transgender people need to be protected and we should treat them with dignity and we should make

00:29:58.640 sure that they're physically safe? To, you know, crossing that line to say, you know, now we're going

00:30:03.880 to allow children and very young people to take pills to alter their entire chemistry of their body

00:30:10.700 and have long-term biological effects. Or we're going to allow, you know, boys to play sports,

00:30:16.420 physical sports with girls just because they say that they identify as a woman and now there's no 0.98

00:30:21.540 such thing as gender whatsoever. At what point has it gone too far and how do we stop it at that point?

00:30:28.220 Well, it's gone too far whenever in the pursuit of social justice, in the good sense of the term,

00:30:36.020 we in any way murder a millimeter of truth, right? In other words, so in the first chapter of my book,

00:30:45.780 I talk about what are the two fundamental ideals that drive my life. And I argue that they are truth

00:30:53.600 and freedom, right? In other words, there's no way for me to do what I do if I don't, and when I say

00:31:03.180 freedom, by the way, I don't mean just freedom of speech. I mean, so for example, I give examples

00:31:06.460 in my book of how, when I used to be a soccer player, I used to play the number 10 position,

00:31:10.560 which is the playmaker position. That allows me to kind of freely move around the field,

00:31:14.920 looking for spaces to exploit. When a coach would put a positional restriction on me,

00:31:20.800 you're going to play today, Gad, more on the left side of midfield, and you're going to track back

00:31:24.780 this guy, my brain would explode because it would remove my capacity to be free, right? If you tell me

00:31:30.760 publish in only these types of journals because you are housed in a business school, no, I want to

00:31:35.620 publish in medicine and in economics and in psychology and in business. I don't care. I just

00:31:39.680 pursue interesting problems. So the pursuit of freedom is a fundamental driver for me. The pursuit

00:31:45.540 of truth, the defense of truth is fundamental for me. So to answer your question, the point at which we

00:31:52.800 say no is when in the pursuit of laudable goals, like protecting transgender people, having equal rights for

00:31:59.840 all people, we start being consequentialist in our ethics. What do I mean by that? When you have

00:32:06.560 truth, you could be one of two types of truth seeker. You could be what's called the deontological

00:32:13.040 person. It is always wrong to lie. That is a deontological position. A consequentialist position

00:32:19.720 would be it is okay to lie if the consequences are to protect your feelings, right? So one, and the

00:32:26.280 reality is it's not that we should always be deontologically minded is that depending on the

00:32:31.120 context, it may, if your spouse tells you, do I look horrible and fat in those jeans and you want

00:32:37.100 to have a long lasting marriage, maybe you want to be consequentialist and say, no, no spouse, you look

00:32:42.400 gorgeous, right? So it's, I'm not suggesting that you're always have to be deontological, but when

00:32:46.960 we're dealing with grand topics of societal importance, we, we should never be consequentialist

00:32:52.780 about the truth, right? I can, I can completely walk and chew gum at the same time. I could defend

00:32:59.200 the rights of women whilst accepting that there are innate sex differences. I could defend the rights

00:33:06.240 of transgender people whilst saying that 270 pound guy that's 300 pounds with a nine inch penis is not a 0.97

00:33:14.160 woman. That should not cause me to be canceled for saying something that is as obvious as a two-year-old

00:33:21.600 recognizing this. So this is what I mean. Pursue justice, pursue truly liberal ideals, but never

00:33:29.760 give up one inch of truth. Absolutely. So I guess that would be chapter three of your book, which is

00:33:36.660 called non-negotiable elements of a free and modern society. Okay. I want to talk about chapter four,

00:33:44.280 because the title is anti-science, anti-reason and illiberal movements. And there's so many times,

00:33:52.120 I'll give you just an example in Canada, you know, the prime minister, Justin Trudeau and his party are

00:33:57.300 called the liberal party, but you know, the, the ideas that they pursue and the, the, the ideas they

00:34:02.500 put forward are hardly liberal. They don't, they don't live up to that ideal of small L classical

00:34:07.120 liberalism. And we see, we see them sort of say, you know, we're the party of science. And if you're

00:34:13.080 conservative, you're anti-science. And we're starting to see this a little bit in the U S as well. I know

00:34:17.500 you've been critical of Joe Biden for, for saying that, that, that he's, he's the scientific, he's a

00:34:23.900 party of science. And if you believe in science, you're going to vote Democrat. Maybe you can talk a

00:34:27.960 little bit about this chapter and how, how sort of politicians manipulate some of those words.

00:34:32.180 Sure. So first I'll address this left, right, and science denialism thing. It is absolutely

00:34:39.020 untrue that, you know, the right are the science deniers and the left are the pro-science folks.

00:34:45.200 The reality is both engage in science denialism as a function of whether the particular scientific

00:34:51.680 truth, you know, clashes with their ideological positions. So it is much more likely that a Republican

00:34:58.940 senator from the South to be stereotypical might reject evolution because of some evangelical,

00:35:05.460 you know, belief, but it is equally true that when it comes to evolutionary psychology,

00:35:11.480 the application of evolutionary principles to the study of the human mind, say sex differences,

00:35:15.980 then it becomes much more the left who become grotesque anti-science folks, right? Now, as someone

00:35:22.640 who inhabits the ecosystem of the university, all of the idea pathogens that I speak of, all of which

00:35:29.900 are perfectly anti-scientific, they all stem from the left. So it's not that I am a pro-right guy and

00:35:37.480 an anti-left guy. It's because the ecosystem that I inhabit is one where it is completely driven

00:35:43.680 driven by leftist science denialism. That would be like arguing that if I am a physician that treats

00:35:51.900 diabetes, you come to me and say, but doc, why don't you ever talk about melanoma? Well, because I

00:35:58.060 don't specialize in melanoma. It doesn't mean that melanoma is not important, but I treat diabetes.

00:36:03.820 That's my specialty. So the fact that I critique the left as science deniers doesn't at all mean that

00:36:09.020 the right doesn't do it. So that's number one. You're exactly right about so-called the liberal

00:36:14.440 party. And that's why I've got illiberal in that chapter heading, because a lot of the positions

00:36:18.740 that the Democrats and the left and the liberals currently espouse could not be any more illiberal.

00:36:25.660 I mean, literally, you could not define an idea pathogen that is more illiberal than some of the

00:36:30.980 platforms that they take. So let's go back, for example, to the di-religion, diversity, inclusion,

00:36:36.300 and equity. And that will speak to some of the stuff that I discuss about anti-science and so on.

00:36:41.880 So I talk about, for example, the indigenization of the Canadian campuses, right? Well, indigenization

00:36:49.000 happens in many forms. So indigenization could be that at a ceremony, say graduating ceremony,

00:36:56.380 you first have to start off by self-flagellating publicly that you are stealers of the land and you're

00:37:02.740 all evil who are sitting in this thing. And then we go on with the ceremony. Well, first,

00:37:07.320 I argue that that's really grotesque because the students who are there, where it is their moment to

00:37:13.640 shine, have to first begin by having the cloak of intergenerational guilt placed on them. That's not

00:37:21.600 a progressive thing. That is a grotesque thing. You couldn't imagine something with lesser nobility

00:37:27.820 than to impose that collective guilt on them. This doesn't mean that indigenous people were not

00:37:34.120 mistreated, but it means that Joe Blow should not have to experience it right now when he's

00:37:39.560 graduating with his commerce degree. So that's at one level where we see this kind of nonsense.

00:37:44.920 Let's take it at another level. The peer review process in science is fundamental to educating what

00:37:52.480 is correct or not. We put a paper through the peer review, your colleagues break it apart every

00:37:58.920 syllable, and then eventually through multiple rounds of revision, we can then publish this paper

00:38:03.800 as something that's been vetted. Well, there is a indigenous professor at University of British

00:38:08.320 Columbia who several years ago, when she didn't get tenure, filed a complaint with the Human Rights

00:38:14.780 Tribunal arguing that this process of having to write things down by publishing them was an affront to her

00:38:22.480 oral tradition history as an indigenous person. Well, you know who else has oral traditions?

00:38:28.780 Jewish people, for much longer, for 5,000 years. So I should have told all those Jewish Nobel Prize

00:38:35.380 winners to never write things down because, brah, oral tradition. So that's second level.

00:38:41.920 Third level. When we adjudicate any controversy in science, we use the scientific method. There is no

00:38:51.600 alternate way of knowing. So, for example, when we say indigenous way of knowing, it is perfectly fair 0.91

00:38:58.640 to say that if you're going to study something in the Great North, to the extent that those folks have

00:39:04.700 lived in that land for thousands of years, they may have unique knowledge about the flora and fauna of

00:39:10.720 that land that we should be engaging with. So that's perfectly fine. So specific domain-specific

00:39:16.940 knowledge that is indigenous knowledge. But there isn't an indigenous way of knowing that is different

00:39:23.840 from the scientific method. I can't pray to my ancestors to better understand environmental impact

00:39:30.460 that is different from the scientific method. But guess what? The Quebec Minister of, I think,

00:39:35.520 Environment was placed in very hot waters a few years ago because when they were talking about

00:39:40.520 environmental impact studies and he said, well, what do you mean indigenous way? Don't we use the

00:39:45.400 scientific method to decide that? He was basically feather and tarred as, you know, a Nazi. So, no,

00:39:52.680 there is no Lebanese Jewish way of knowing or really good-looking people way of knowing or indigenous 1.00

00:39:59.100 way of knowing. There's just the scientific method. The scientific method is what liberates us from the

00:40:05.360 shackles of our unique identities. It's what allows all of us to meet in a common arena and use an incredibly

00:40:12.780 powerful framework free of biases if it is practiced properly to adjudicate different ideas. So this is

00:40:21.520 one example of what I talk about anti-scientific ideas. There is no unique ways of knowing there's

00:40:26.760 the scientific method and that's it. Well, it's interesting. It reminds me a couple of years ago,

00:40:31.160 Professor, there was a Black Lives Matter protest in Toronto and one of the speakers called Justin Trudeau

00:40:37.080 a white supremacist. And it was kind of shocking because, you know, to us, Justin Trudeau is this

00:40:42.540 sort of loopy leftist that is, you know, loving of all people or whatever. And hearing someone on the

00:40:48.000 far, far left call a left-wing politician white supremacist just didn't really make sense. But

00:40:52.520 over the past few years, we've seen this new kind of shifting definition of words. So what used to be a

00:40:59.060 racist? A racist used to be, you know, someone who judged or believed in inferiority based on race,

00:41:06.660 whereas now it's someone who, I guess, opposes immigration or someone who is not part of the

00:41:13.500 woke left, someone who fights back against Black Lives Matter. You know, the term racist can apply

00:41:17.860 to just about anyone. And it's the same thing with white supremacy. It's sort of what you're talking

00:41:22.800 about, that they believe that, you know, just the very idea of scientific method is a white supremacist

00:41:30.100 idea. And we've sort of seen that creep up more and more over the past few years, where now you're

00:41:36.200 talking about how it's sort of mainstream in society. So how can we push back against that?

00:41:43.440 Well, in many ways, you could push. I mean, if you're in my position, you do it in the way that I'm doing it.

00:41:47.800 But if you're a if you're a parent and you see your kid learning stuff that is insanely,

00:41:54.040 you know, grotesque, if not an affront to truth, you say, hey, wait a minute. No, I will not be

00:41:59.600 quiet. And again, as you said, the problem is that most people simply can't activate their inner

00:42:05.460 honey badger because, regrettably, the eighth deadly sin, which didn't make it into the list of

00:42:10.640 seven deadly sins, is cowardice, right? Most people say, look, I mean, I've got enough stress in my life.

00:42:16.200 I don't want to go and meet the principal who I'm probably going to have a heated exchange with.

00:42:23.500 So let me be quiet. Well, as you're being quiet, your child is being slowly parasitized by these

00:42:29.120 idea pathogens so that three years down the line, eight years down the line, they do wake up with

00:42:34.680 their blue hair in the feminist glaciology course at their university because, you know, you can't study 0.89

00:42:41.040 ice formation without recognizing that it's patriarchal. Even ice has patriarchal connotations.

00:42:47.960 By the way, I'm not being satirical. There literally is a paper on feminist glaciology,

00:42:52.140 right? There's a section in the book where I talk about all of the different, you know,

00:42:56.180 feminist and fill in the blank. There's feminist physics, feminist mathematics. I mean, 1.00

00:43:00.220 I studied mathematics. I thought what mathematics does is it offers us axioms that couldn't be any

00:43:07.040 freer from bias precisely because they're axiomatic. They are self-contained process. No,

00:43:12.740 no, no. Even mathematics can be enriched by a feminist perspective. So you can either tackle 1.00

00:43:20.220 the problem when you see your child in grade three being parasitized by this BS, or you can wait till

00:43:25.980 they have red and blue hair when they're 22. And again, of course, I'm being satirical and facetious

00:43:32.220 when I say this, but the reality is that that's the progression. So, you know, there isn't a singular

00:43:37.780 recipe for how everybody should engage. You have to find what is your sphere of influence and simply

00:43:44.360 not walk away from a fight. So it could be somebody posts something on Facebook who's a friend of yours

00:43:51.220 and you think that you disagree with, engage them publicly, politely. I'm not saying you have to be

00:43:56.400 an ass. I'm not saying you have to be impolite, but don't constantly walk away from possible

00:44:02.920 teachable moments because you're afraid to judge. You're afraid to confront. Everybody has influence.

00:44:09.680 It literally is a trench, street to street battle of ideas, and we all have a voice. So just get engaged.

00:44:18.780 Well, absolutely. I mean, there's so many examples that I know of. I have a friend,

00:44:21.920 I have a friend who lives in Palo Alto, which is like a very kind of liberal left-wing city in

00:44:28.060 California. And basically at her brother's son's school, it's a small private school. And at this

00:44:34.500 point, more than half the students in this child's class, I think he's like 12 or 13 years old,

00:44:40.420 more than half the students now identify as being transgender or part of the LGBT community in some

00:44:46.500 way. And I think that terrifies a lot of parents because, you know, they don't want to be seen as

00:44:52.020 bigoted. They don't want to be seen as being not understanding of, you know, what kids are going

00:44:58.880 through and that kind of thing. But obviously when you have that kind of ratio, there's something

00:45:03.740 political happening in the school. And like you said, if you don't stand up against it now, I mean,

00:45:08.960 what's going to happen when the child gets to university or, you know, when they get older,

00:45:14.180 it can be pretty, pretty terrifying. Dr. Saad, I feel like these problems have been present on

00:45:21.160 university campuses for years and years. We all know the story of Jordan Peterson and how he sort

00:45:25.920 of stood up and fought back and had this huge sort of mob of hatred, but he was ringing the alarm bell.

00:45:31.040 You've been ringing the alarm bell for years and years. And I feel like this is maybe the first time

00:45:35.060 we start to see these ideas spill out into society. So it's not just university campuses anymore.

00:45:40.900 It's corporations, it's newspapers, it's media companies, it's political parties. Maybe you

00:45:47.320 could talk a little bit about the origin of how this started on campus and then how it's now spreading

00:45:53.300 into society. Yeah. So it started with a confluence of idea pathogens. So for example, cultural relativism

00:46:03.040 is a idea that first developed, you know, 100, almost 100 years ago by Franz Boas, who was a

00:46:11.480 anthropologist who, a cultural anthropologist who wanted to really remove the influence of biology

00:46:19.220 and understanding human phenomena. And the reason originally started as a quote, noble reason, which

00:46:25.960 is that at various points in history, people have usurped evolutionary ideas to their nefarious

00:46:34.000 political pursuits. So in the 1930s and 40s, the Nazis said, hey, there's a Darwinian natural struggle

00:46:42.380 between the races. We won. So who cares if we kill those lower folks? And British class social elitists 1.00

00:46:49.200 much earlier had said, hey, there's a struggle between the classes. And if the lower classes lose out,

00:46:54.560 so who cares if they don't get educated and they don't get health care? Hey, that's a natural

00:46:58.160 Darwinian struggle. It's called social Darwinism. Well, none of these ideas have anything to do with

00:47:02.900 Darwinian theory. It's not as though they are a natural, you know, consequence of Darwinian theory,

00:47:10.020 but all of these cretins usurp these ideas. So a bunch of anthropologists under the guise of trying 1.00

00:47:17.080 to stop these from happening in the future, created a new edifice of knowledge where you completely

00:47:24.460 reject that there are any human universals. So, for example, Franz Boas' eventual student, Margaret Mead,

00:47:32.420 who was a committed cultural anthropologist, came up with the idea that, you know, there are some folks

00:47:38.560 in some exotic island where their sexual behaviors are exactly opposite to the typical pattern.

00:47:44.720 Men are chaste and virginal and no, no, no, I don't want to have sex. And it is the women that run after him. 0.99

00:47:49.980 And that was an example that even when it comes to sexual behavior, there are no universal. Well,

00:47:54.680 guess what? That whole study and all that research was utter bullshit, complete nonsense. There's a

00:47:59.480 book that came out called The Faithful Hoaxing of Margaret Reid, but she was so desperate to believe

00:48:04.300 in the idea that there are no human universals. There is no possibility that there is a biological

00:48:09.360 set of imperatives that define our common shared humanity that she was parasitized by that idea

00:48:16.320 pathogen. So, different idea pathogens on campuses arose for different reasons, but they each did

00:48:23.480 their part in destroying the edifice of truth. So, that 40, 50, 60, 70 years later, we end up with

00:48:31.020 women who have nine-inch penises. Boys, too, can menstruate. Again, me stating that does not 1.00

00:48:37.260 reject or negate or make light of the fact that transgenderism is a real issue and these people

00:48:44.040 should exist in complete freedom of bigotry. So, that's the problem, is that once you are permissive

00:48:50.880 to allow a small chip to the edifice of truth, it's a domino effect. So, you have to be engaged.

00:48:58.340 If you see your child being taught white fragility, you say, oh, no, no, no, you're not going to teach my 0.99

00:49:05.080 child that they have to feel bad because they have a certain skin in you. No way. And if enough people

00:49:11.820 do it, if enough people activate, when I say activate your inner honey badger, let me explain

00:49:17.400 the analogy clearly or the metaphor. A honey badger is the size of a small dog. It can be attacked by

00:49:25.720 six. You can go on YouTube and see one honey badger fending off six lions, right? Why? Because once you

00:49:35.980 annoy it, it goes berserk. It is so ferocious that the lions say, yeah, I don't want to deal with that,

00:49:44.060 right? So, what does it mean to activate your inner honey badger? It means that if you attack

00:49:50.460 my sense of dignity, my sense of truth, I lose it. Now, lose it doesn't mean I become violent,

00:49:56.760 but that means if you think with your blue hair you're going to come at me being indignant,

00:50:02.220 I'm going to match you a hundredfold with my indignation. Why? Because I could defend my

00:50:08.440 principles. I mean, look, even how I'm speaking now, I'm the warmest and fuzziest guy, but if you

00:50:13.260 piss me off, I'm coming for you, right? So, I understand that people have different personalities,

00:50:18.560 but if you are going to defend your child from a pedophile, right, you should also defend your

00:50:24.640 child from idea pathogens. Both are dangerous to a child. The pedophile is dangerous to your child in

00:50:30.380 one way, and having your child grow up hating himself or herself and his or her culture and his

00:50:36.500 or her skin color, that too is horrific. So, be indignant. Fight for true principles. 1.00

00:50:43.780 Well, amen to that, Dr. Saad. I think that, you know, so many people get frustrated. They see things

00:50:49.180 happening online, and, you know, that's how they feel inside, but they don't really have the courage.

00:50:54.640 And so, you know, so important books like yours and people like you who are sort of out there day in,

00:50:59.560 day out, living and fighting these culture wars, you know, serve as an example, because just to bring

00:51:06.000 it back to the idea of common sense, you know, it's like they can sit there and tell you that

00:51:11.340 there's no difference between men and women, but, you know, we all have our lived experiences. We all

00:51:16.320 see it every day. I mean, I have an 18-month-old son, and I can tell you with no bit of uncertainty

00:51:22.860 that the preferences that he's shown since he was a very little boy were masculine. You know,

00:51:29.540 he likes to play with balls. He likes to play with sticks. He likes to throw rocks. Very different

00:51:34.560 than his cousin who, you know, she likes to have dolls. She likes to play with, like, you know,

00:51:40.540 hug things, and it's just very different. You can see it in small, small children before

00:51:45.240 they're even socialized. So to sit there and say, you know, the reason that boys play with

00:51:51.300 trucks and rocks and balls is because of the way they're socialized, it's like,

00:51:55.440 well, you know, anyone who's ever had kids knows that that's just not true, and I think that that,

00:52:00.620 you know, that's just one example of millions, that common sense is being fought against, and

00:52:06.040 we're told basically to, you know, to disbelieve our lying eyes, basically. Yeah, I'm glad that you

00:52:13.660 brought up the example of toys. I don't know if that's because you're familiar with some of my work

00:52:17.540 on toy preferences, or it was just serendipitous, but in Chapter 7, where I talk about how to seek

00:52:22.920 truth, I argue that we can build an unassailable argument by using what I call nomological networks

00:52:32.100 of cumulative evidence. It's a lot of fancy words, so let me break it down, and I will use the example

00:52:37.100 of toy preferences to explain it. So let's suppose I want to prove to you that toy preferences are not

00:52:43.680 socially constructed. By the way, social constructivism is another one of the idea

00:52:47.800 pathogens that I discuss in the book. Social constructivism is the idea that we are born

00:52:51.540 empty slate with equal potentiality, and it's only, you know, evil socialization that makes us go into

00:52:58.540 one trajectory or another. So toy preferences, the typical social science argument, is that toy preferences

00:53:04.420 is a manifestation of gender socialization. We teach little Johnny to play rough and tumble with 0.96

00:53:10.980 trucks and balls and sticks, and we teach little Linda to play with nurturance with dolls, and that 0.94

00:53:19.080 starts a cascade of gender role specialization. And so if I want to actually prove to you that, no,

00:53:26.340 there are sex-specific toy preferences that are not due to social constructivism, how would I go about

00:53:33.560 doing that? So I would build a nomological network of cumulative evidence. What does that mean?

00:53:38.920 It means that I would say to myself, what would be the evidence that I would need to amass

00:53:45.020 stemming from different time periods, different cultures, different disciplines, different

00:53:51.320 methodologies, different everything you could imagine, such that it becomes impossible for you

00:53:57.360 to negate the tsunami of evidence that I'm drowning you in. And so let me just give you a few. I won't

00:54:04.080 build the whole network, but let me give you a few. You touched on the fact that if you take children

00:54:08.880 who are in the pre-socialization stage, they already exhibit those preferences. Well, those studies have

00:54:14.500 actually been done. This is how we establish that something is not due to socialization. We go to

00:54:19.080 developmental psychologists, and we elicit those preferences from children who could, by definition,

00:54:24.820 didn't have the cognitive ability to yet be socialized. So already that would be enough to, you know,

00:54:31.080 offer a death blow to the social constructivist argument. But let me give you a few more.

00:54:36.920 You could take different species. So you could take vervet monkeys. You could take rhesus monkeys. 0.61

00:54:42.880 You could take chimpanzees. And you could show that the infants in those species exhibit the same

00:54:49.160 sex-specific preferences as human infants. Well, to argue that that's due to the sexist patriarchy

00:54:55.460 would be a bit of a tough sell unless you're arguing that the sexist patriarchy affects little

00:55:00.960 mama vervet monkey and little papa vervet monkey. So now I've used data from developmental psychology

00:55:06.580 and from comparative psychology. Comparative psychology means across different species to

00:55:11.140 demonstrate that there is something that is beyond social constructivism when it comes to toy

00:55:16.660 preferences. Let me give one or two other ones. You could take little girls who suffer from 1.00

00:55:21.400 congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which is an endocrinological disorder that masculinizes

00:55:27.940 little girls. They become masculinized in their morphology. They become masculinized in their

00:55:32.720 behaviors. Well, little girls who suffer from congenital adrenal hyperplasia are more likely to

00:55:38.080 exhibit male-boy-based preferences. So this is suggesting that there is a hormonal signature,

00:55:45.280 biological signature to toy preferences. Now, I could provide you with many, many other such evidence.

00:55:51.120 When put together, it becomes impossible for you to argue against me. You could take your best shot,

00:55:57.980 but I've drowned you. So one of the things that I argue in chapter seven, or the main thing that I

00:56:03.200 argue in chapter seven, is that when you're engaging in debates, don't be hysterical. Don't let your

00:56:09.600 emotional affective system kick in. Simply say to yourself, what would I need to provide as evidence

00:56:16.640 to Candace so that I could at least put a chip, if not trash, her ideological walls? And I do this

00:56:25.380 exercise not just for evolutionary-based arguments. So in the book, for example, I use that epistemological

00:56:32.300 tool to answer the question, is Islam peaceful or not? I don't have to engage in hysteria. I don't have

00:56:40.220 to ask Justin Trudeau or George Bush or Barack Obama what he is going to tell me that Islam is. Can I build a 0.82

00:56:48.900 nomological network that completely establishes whether Islam is peaceful or not? I'll leave it for your viewers to

00:56:56.140 read the book to decide what the answer is. But in other words, there is a time when you need to engage your

00:57:02.380 affective system, your feelings, and there's a time to engage your cognitive system. One last thing I

00:57:09.560 know, I hope I'm not being too long-winded, one should also have epistemic humility, meaning to know

00:57:15.660 what you know and know what you don't know. When I know something, and I'm being interviewed on a show

00:57:20.080 like yours, I will speak with all of the swagger of someone who knows what they're talking about.

00:57:25.180 But if you were to ask me now, by the way, Professor Saad, what about the legalization of

00:57:30.520 marijuana under Justin Trudeau? What are the net position on that? I frankly don't know the answer

00:57:36.980 to that. I haven't built my own internal nomological network to answer that. So I would be the first to

00:57:42.980 say, you know what, I simply don't know enough about this. So part of being a truly pious person

00:57:48.880 in an intellectual sense is to know what you know and know what you don't know.

00:57:53.360 Well, that's very good advice. I think humility is something that we should all

00:57:57.740 work towards. And also, you know, gratitude is another

00:58:02.340 area where people just don't really, you know, show the gratitude. So, you know, a lot of the

00:58:07.980 indigenous land ceremony thing that you talked about earlier, it's like, instead of acknowledging

00:58:12.560 that we live in this tremendous society and that Western civilization has brought so much good to the

00:58:18.240 world and so much order and peace and freedom and all these things, you know, we can only look at the

00:58:23.580 negative things. So we focus on the things that we need to improve upon or that pull our society

00:58:29.680 apart. And I think that that too is part of the problem. Well, I'll just ask you a final question

00:58:36.720 because, you know, you keep bringing it back to the universities as sort of the origin of these

00:58:41.320 dangerous idea pathogens. And you are a university professor. You've seen it unfold. I think a lot of

00:58:47.340 parents sort of worry about sending their children to university. They worry about what kind of ideas

00:58:52.080 they'll get, what the culture will do to them. Like you say, you know, you can't help but not

00:58:56.580 turn into sort of a blue haired feminist in some of these departments. I know my own experience at 1.00

00:59:01.760 university was that most students were kind of tuned out and they didn't really care. They didn't

00:59:06.040 really listen to their professors. And it was really kind of hard to understand and grasp all the

00:59:10.220 concepts they were trying to teach us because the very nature of postmodernism is that it's really

00:59:15.320 confusing and it doesn't really lead you anywhere. It doesn't provide any good in your life. You just

00:59:20.940 kind of are left feeling lost, basically. So you have children yourself. I imagine that you would

00:59:27.800 encourage them to go to university. But, you know, is there an alternative? Is there a school in Canada

00:59:33.440 that's particularly better or better than other ones or that's good? What is your advice to parents

00:59:39.180 about sending their kids to universities? Look, obviously, I'm someone who is very committed to

00:59:44.840 education. Universities are the great purveyors of knowledge, but also the great purveyors of

00:59:50.820 BS. That's the that's the the irony. So what I would suggest is, well, number one, of course,

00:59:56.400 you don't have to be educated. You don't only have to go to university. We now have you can go on

01:00:00.880 YouTube and get much better education than what you could have imagined ever. You want to study

01:00:06.060 evolutionary psychology? Well, there are clips of every great evolutionary psychologist that you

01:00:10.580 could ever imagine. And that's going to be much better than any evolutionary psychology course you

01:00:14.180 take at the university setting. So so lifelong learning is something that we should all aspire to

01:00:18.820 pursue. I always tell the story that when I walk into my study where I'm sitting right now talking

01:00:23.160 to you, there are probably over 200 books in my own personal library that I've yet to read. And I often

01:00:29.080 am filled with angst as to when am I going to get to reading? There's all this great knowledge that I've

01:00:33.640 yet to learn. And I would probably place myself on the higher end of people who know things. And yet I am

01:00:40.600 humbled by how little I know and how much more there is for me to know. So the instinct to always want to

01:00:46.420 learn more does not need to only come from universities. But to to come to your the crux

01:00:51.000 of your main question, I can't say this university is more parasitized by the blue haired folks than 0.98

01:00:55.720 this university. But what I can say is that you need to explain to your children that they should

01:01:01.140 go to university for a growth of their spirit. I don't mean that in the in the, you know, religious

01:01:07.040 sense. But knowledge is truly liberating. It can take us to all sorts of wonderful landscapes. And I

01:01:12.820 don't mean to imply that your education should only be practical, or only be, you know, only do natural

01:01:18.740 sciences or the business school or medical school. No, you could study the humanities in a very, very

01:01:24.500 liberating way in a very cerebral way. But you should never be in university number one to be an activist.

01:01:31.300 That's not the goal of universities. When I go to a restaurant, it's not because I want to go bowling.

01:01:35.780 It's because I want to eat. So when I go to university, it's to go on an intellectual

01:01:41.300 enrichment, right? I go to Jamaica for the sun, I go to university to grow as a as a cerebrally. So

01:01:50.000 just be sure that when you are sending your kids and spending your hard earned money for their tuition,

01:01:56.520 that they are not engaging in these parasitic ideas. Now, I understand that you can't be monitoring

01:02:02.760 every single thing that they study in class. But if they're going to study feminist epistemology of 1.00

01:02:08.120 ice, well, then maybe I'm not going to fund your tuition. If they're going to study neuroscience or

01:02:14.040 Shakespeare or business school or law school, by the way, those things can to be parasitized by all this

01:02:20.720 nonsense, at least give them the tools to be able to protect themselves from all of these dreadful

01:02:27.320 ideas. I remember I had a professor of first year university, I went to the University of Alberta in

01:02:32.520 Edmonton, and it was the history of political thought, so political philosophy. And she told

01:02:37.800 us on the first day, you know, there's three other professors that teach the same course,

01:02:41.560 it's a requirement for all political science students. Why don't you go and sit in on each of

01:02:45.720 these teachers and listen, because we have very different philosophies and different worldviews.

01:02:50.020 And, you know, later in school, I remained in her class. But, you know, a couple years later,

01:02:54.740 I realized that like two of the professors that taught the class were ardent Marxists,

01:02:58.800 where she was much more of a classicalist. And, you know, I thought that's something that a first

01:03:03.520 year student wouldn't really know. But as you get more experienced in university, you can kind of

01:03:08.820 see the difference that there are still really good teachers out there, and there's still good

01:03:13.300 programs that do. And also, the fact that you can learn so much on YouTube and these kinds of channels,

01:03:19.600 I know you have a very popular YouTube channel, The Sad Truth, where you're pretty prolific,

01:03:25.200 you post a lot of videos up there, commenting on all the different day to day culture war things.

01:03:32.240 And then your book, why don't you tell us so where we can find your book and the best ways

01:03:36.320 that we can continue to follow you? Thank you. So yeah, so this, the parasitic mind will be out

01:03:43.040 on October 6. So it really matters if you pre order it, because when when the book is released,

01:03:48.400 it really helps if there are tons of pre orders, because then they go into sales, the first day it's

01:03:52.900 released. So if you're planning on buying the book, please pre order it, you can do it from any,

01:03:57.020 all the portals carry it. So that's easy to find. You could follow me on Twitter at Gadsad, G-A-D-S-A-A-D.

01:04:05.780 I have a public Facebook page. And as you said, I have a YouTube channel where I can either just open

01:04:11.320 up the camera and talk about something that's pissing me off. Or it could be chats just like the

01:04:17.340 one you and I are having. So I have a whole series, almost 200 chats with really incredible

01:04:22.060 people. Not most of them are scientists, but all sorts of interesting people, comedians, actors,

01:04:27.420 lawyers, anybody that I think would be fun to have a conversation with, I'm likely to invite.

01:04:33.920 And so if you've just tuned into who I am, you have about 1133 episodes to catch up on. And so good

01:04:43.300 luck with that. Well, I definitely recommend that everyone go check that out and definitely pick

01:04:48.400 up the book. Dr. Zai, I noticed it's already a number one bestseller on Amazon. So it shows,

01:04:53.660 you know, how big of a following that you do have. Thank you for all the work you do. Keep it up. And

01:04:58.100 thank you for joining us on the Turn North Speaker series. Oh, thank you so much for having me. It was

01:05:01.760 really fun.

The Candice Malcolm Show - September 22, 2020

Ep 13 ｜ Dr. Gad Saad ｜ Activate Your Inner Honey Badger

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