Gad Saad is an evolutionary behavioral scientist and host of the podcast The Sad Truth. He is also the author of the new book, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. And he is a guy who, and he'll explain this, is a behavioral scientist but is a professor of marketing.
00:00:20.980I know I've had that experience a lot of times.
00:00:25.520And that's what we're going to talk about today.
00:00:28.460We're going to talk about the parasitic mind, this parasite that has been intentionally injected into us and whether or not the West will stand or not.
00:00:40.420And we are becoming dangerously close to losing what made the West the West and indeed losing the freedoms of the West.
00:00:52.140The guest I have for you today is one of my favorite people.
00:02:18.100Listen, before we start, last time you shook me to the bones because you taught the professor of marketing something, which is always don't say my forthcoming book, but say the parasitic mind.
00:04:57.600So, it's just a tool which can be channeled either for good or evil.
00:05:02.960So, the study of marketing is really the study of persuasion.
00:05:06.560So, I could use marketing techniques to hopefully convince you to not lead a sedentary lifestyle, or I could use marketing to sell you BS.
00:05:15.480In my case, I'm not really so much interested in the application of the work more than actually understanding what makes people tick.
00:05:24.260The way that subsequently other people use it, it's for them to decide.
00:05:28.780So, I wanted to set this up because we are in a place now where people who study behavioral science and study marketing have really shaped many things that are going on right now.
00:05:49.820They are actively, Cass Sunstein is one of them, actively engaged in moving us toward an illusion of freedom of choice or free will.
00:06:07.320But by the way, Sunstein and his colleague, Richard Thaler, in their book, Nudge, Richard Thaler was my professor at Cornell.
00:06:14.540He subsequently won the Nobel Prize, so I'm very familiar with their word.
00:06:17.160Look, again, it's the same thing, right?
00:06:19.800You can either use these behavioral principles for good or for evil, but you're right that in today's political realities, and given the fact that most people are cognitive misers, then they become very easy to manipulate, right?
00:06:33.940Right. And especially now with social media, I mean, just the algorithms are smarter than the average bear, smarter than all of us, really.
00:07:01.560So, I wrote an article, I think it was in 2003, a scientific article, where I argued that contrary to what we might think, when people choose a candidate, let's say a presidential candidate, they don't sit there and, you know, navigate through all of the issues.
00:07:17.940Rather, they use simplifying heuristics to make a decision, who's taller, who looks more presidential, who has a more brawny face.
00:07:27.420And the reason for that, again, is because most people are cognitive misers.
00:07:31.460By the way, this is exactly what explains why so many people have a repulsion or what I call an aesthetic injury against Donald Trump.
00:07:39.320It's not because they don't agree with his policies necessarily.
00:07:44.300So, they use these emotional-based shortcuts to form an opinion, when in reality, they should be looking at, what do each of these two platforms represent, and who do I align with best?
00:09:08.920That's how people make decisions, which is quite regrettable, because you would think they would spend a lot more cognitive effort to make decisions, but they don't.
00:09:16.320So, let me read something to you I found just the other day.
00:09:23.340I think you'll find it really interesting, especially when you know who wrote it.
00:09:32.800I found this the other day, and I think what we're going through right now couldn't be expressed any better than this.
00:09:42.860At the beginning, they knew, the people who are taking our country apart and our Western way of life, at the beginning, they knew they could never raise their treason to any respectable magnitude by any name which implies violation of law.
00:10:01.120They knew their people possessed as much moral sense, as much devotion to law and order, as much pride in and reverence for the history and government of their common country as any other civilized and patriotic people.
00:10:13.620They knew they could make no advancement directly into the teeth of these strong and noble sentiments.
00:10:18.760Accordingly, they commenced by an insidious debauching of the public mind.
00:10:24.440They invented an ingenious sophism, which, if conceded, was followed by perfectly logical steps through all the incidents to complete the destruction of the republic.
00:10:36.740With the rebellion, thus sugar-coated, they have been drugging the public mind for their goals for more than 30 years.
00:10:47.520And until at length, they have brought many good men and a willingness to take up now arms against the government.
00:11:01.560Yeah, and I think many people feel the same way.
00:11:08.700And it's weird because I think each side feels that way about the other.
00:11:14.000That somehow or another we've all been hypnotized.
00:11:16.420But I contend that those who have now fallen in line with Marxism and the fact that America and the West is systematically racist and you're born a racist, all of this stuff.
00:11:35.900I believe that's the insidious lie, but it seems to be working.
00:12:01.820Because, look, what I basically say in the parasitic mind is that in the same way that all sorts of animals can be parasitized by actual brain worms, you know, a mouse can be parasitized by Toxoplasma gondii, causing it to no longer be afraid of a cat, but rather being sexually attracted to the cat's urine.
00:12:21.040Well, I argue that there are a set of idea pathogens that parasitize our minds, leading us to the abyss of infinite lunacy.
00:12:28.580Now, where do these idea pathogens come from?
00:12:30.860They all stem from, regrettably, I say because I'm a professor, they all stem from the university ecosystem.
00:12:36.580It takes intellectuals to come up with really dumb ideas.
00:12:39.500And so for 40, 50 years now, we have seen a constant and pervasive attack on our reasons, on our edifices of reason, which have resulted in the downstream effects that we are seeing today in our public discourse.
00:12:53.740If you'd like, I can discuss some of these idea pathogens.
00:12:56.000Yeah, I want to, because that's, I mean, that is what the parasitic mind is about.
00:13:17.740Okay, so here, let me start with the granddaddy of all idea pathogens.
00:13:24.320So postmodernism is really the epitome of intellectual terrorism, because what it basically says is that there are no objective truths.
00:13:34.940Everything is shackled by our subjectivity, by our personal biases.
00:13:41.040You can imagine how anti-scientific that is, because scientists wake up in the morning thinking that they're going to go to work to try to uncover truths.
00:21:01.900So, I am amazed at how the left, I think what the left has done to the West, I believe, is evil.
00:21:13.520But, and I don't use that word lightly.
00:21:16.320I think anything that is destroying man's freedom and man's ability to clearly think is pretty evil.
00:21:26.460But it is also in the same regard, unbelievably beautiful.
00:21:32.480It, they have, they have put this thing together to destroy the West where I think in a hundred years from now,
00:21:41.240when it all is exposed and we really know how it was done,
00:21:45.660it will be studied for a long time on how to cripple half of the world.
00:21:52.540Well, that, but that's why, so my, when I analogize between, you know, parasites and idea pathogens,
00:21:59.880or when I talk about these idea pathogens as mind viruses, I'm not just sort of being, you know, poetically flowery in my language.
00:22:08.480It's precisely for what you just said, right?
00:22:10.560A virus, an actual virus is a beautiful thing, right?
00:22:14.140It has the circuitry, the machinery to be able to find a way to enter your cell so that it could then use your machinery to replicate itself.
00:22:30.700These idea pathogens are wonderful because they could, as I said, lead me quietly to the abyss of infinite lunacy while I'm feeling proud about my progressive nature.
00:30:24.940That's a common, you know, position that people take where they say, look, if all you get are benefits in believing and being a religious believer, then why not do it?
00:31:01.580If you are a truth purist, then you're not convinced by that.
00:31:06.400Because then in my case, I'm going to say, even if religion offers me a functionally beneficial value, I'm not going to believe it unless you can prove to me that it's true.
00:31:17.140In other words, I'm not going to be consequentialist about my belief in religion.
00:31:21.160So, yeah, so I will tell you that when I started searching whether God exists or not, I did prove enough of it to me, but I can't prove anything.
00:32:02.780And by the way, that's one of the reasons, that's one of the evolutionary arguments for religion.
00:32:07.060So, in one of my earlier books, The Consuming Instinct, I offer an evolutionary analysis for kosher laws, for specific kosher laws, right?
00:32:15.620So, one possibility would be to say, well, you're not allowed to eat certain types of shellfish and stuff because God dictated it.
00:32:22.860Another way, if you look at it biologically, there is a pathogen that can be found in some of these foods whereby you can't even tell if the food has that pathogen or not.
00:32:35.140All you know is that one day Moshe is walking around in the desert and he either drops dead or not because of the food.
00:32:41.940Well, short of me understanding germ theory and so on, what other way can I attribute causality than to say it must be a divine, you know, an edict that says don't eat this food.
00:32:54.460But there are very clear biological reasons why people would have succumbed to these particular food consumptions.
00:33:00.920But 4,000 years ago, they didn't know that.
00:33:03.760Therefore, they put it on the broad shoulders of God.
00:33:06.360So, that brings me to, you know, I believe that if there is a God, he's got to be the greatest mathematician ever.
00:33:17.160The entire universe falls apart if you're playing math over here one way and math over here another way.
00:33:24.080It, it, it, it, he's a scientist if, if he exists, he's the ultimate scientist because it all has to work.
00:33:31.960Um, but if you're, if you're, um, looking at that, your, your, um, uh, theory here with, with kosher, I, I accept that that it could be the way that it all happened.
00:33:45.660But that just goes to universal truths that there are things that are true, whether you put a, uh, sports car cover over that engine, or you put a bus cover over that engine, it, the engine still is working the same.
00:34:04.300So, which speaks, I'm sorry, that's your point.
00:34:07.580So, so this is, the problem is we've erased the big truths.
00:34:13.060We've erased that, that the universe is mathematical and it works the same way for everyone.
00:34:21.560Not only have we erased specific truths, we've, we've erased what, what I call the epistemology of truth, right?
00:34:29.080The scientific method is what allows me to adjudicate between competing hypotheses, right?
00:34:35.520There's a clear way for, if I want to know whether men on average are taller than women, there is a way that I can collect data to absolutely confirm this one way or the other, right?
00:35:38.140But I don't want my child to be taught in school that sometimes boys menstruate and sometimes girls menstruate.
00:35:46.820Now that, again, speaks to my earlier point, which is in the pursuit of protecting transgender people from bigotry, I don't have to sell bullshit.
00:35:56.680I don't have to murder truth in the service of that earlier laudable goal.
00:36:01.260That's the problem with all of these idea pathogens.
00:37:38.620Well, if people read my book and get the vaccine, the parasitic mind is going to drive me straight to Stockholm for the Nobel Prize.
00:37:48.040So, we're looking at all of these crazy things, and I think people hear things like that, and they blow it off because that's crazy.
00:38:05.100And they can't possibly mean that, or, you know, it's just so crazy, nobody's going to believe it.
00:38:11.420And then all of a sudden, you wake up in a world where you're looking around going, am I the only one that doesn't believe that?
00:38:19.640Glenn, just for you to know, over the past, I don't know, five to ten years since I've become a lot more vocal on many of these issues because of social media and so on, I've always been fighting these idea pathogens.
00:38:30.400But now social media offers me, you know, a much bigger platform to do it.
00:38:34.180I've received innumerable emails, exactly speaking to your point, which is some student, some professor, some parent of a student writes to me, unable to make sense of the world, right?
00:38:50.200They don't know which is, and basically, I'm sort of the anchor for them, right?
00:38:55.260Thank you so much, Dr. Saad, by listening to you, I still feel as if I am grasping reality.
00:39:03.540Like, why is it that you need me to tell you, as I did with the Canadian Senate when I appeared in front of them to testify about the transgender stuff, that, hey, Canadian senators, no, really, trust me, I'm an evolutionary psychologist.
00:39:16.600There is such a thing as male and female.
00:39:19.220In the 21st century, you need a fancy-smancy professor to come to you to tell you that a sexually reproducing species has this thing called male and female.
00:39:28.540And then one of the senators, upon hearing my testimony, points to me, you could all watch it, the testimony is available, and he says, you are pro-genocide, sir, you are pro-genocide.
00:39:40.640And then I say to him, well, you better be careful because it might not be a good look to be telling someone who escaped execution in Lebanon that he is pro-genocide.
00:39:49.720But that's the lunacy that we've reached.
00:39:51.780Can you tell me, do these people that are preaching this, let's say just militant feminism, I see them hanging out with really hardcore Islamists, not a Muslim, an Islamist.
00:40:15.340And I'm like, you are the first person to be killed or contained, you know, if the Islamist gets their way.
00:40:27.280How does that work in people's brains?
00:40:31.480Look, you may or may not know the name Leon Festinger.
00:40:35.100He was the pioneer of the theory of cognitive dissonance.
00:40:38.300These folks have completely fractured diseased minds of cognitive dissonance mush, right?
00:40:46.280I mean, think about there's a group called Queers for Palestine.
00:40:53.320Do you know what happens to LGBTQ people in Palestine?
00:40:56.960If you really want to be queers for something, be queers for Tel Aviv, because Tel Aviv has one of the most vibrant LGBTQ communities.
00:41:06.200But that's the kind of fractured minds they have, because they have bought into the idea pathogen that the poor Palestinians are the oppressed and the evil Zionist Jews are the oppressors.
00:41:19.980It's part of the currency of victimology poker.
00:41:24.460But doesn't the your people are throwing gays off of the roof of a building in Iran mean anything?
00:42:56.680That's a consequentialist statement would be it is OK to lie.
00:43:00.340If, for example, I'm trying to spare someone's feelings.
00:43:02.560So if you want to have a longstanding marriage and your spouse says, do I look fat in those jeans, maybe lie to him or her because you want to protect their right.
00:43:11.060The reality is we're all we're all at times consequentialist.
00:43:23.660I never sacrifice a millimeter of truth in the pursuit of some downstream consequence.
00:43:29.300So to answer your question, my feeling is that you versus the other guy who is your age, who is parasitized, is that you are probably deontological when it comes to the capital T truth.
00:44:02.360Here we are sitting now at a time where I'm looking at the polls and I.
00:44:11.940I can't knowing what I know about America.
00:44:16.640You have a group of people who will not to cry or call to stop the violence on the street.
00:44:24.120They're still calling it peaceful protests while cars are burning behind them.
00:44:30.320One step after another, America, all the police are racist and we should take your guns and defund the police and have open borders and have open borders.
00:45:29.160If you would have told me, I mean, certainly before COVID hit, I would have said it's a cinch that Trump is going to be reelected.
00:45:35.640If you told me before the last, I mean, the first debate, the presidential debate, not the VP debates, I thought that he didn't come across as, you know, as well as he should have.
00:45:47.940Because regrettably, most people will use, as I mentioned earlier, right, they smell the cork of the wine bottle.
00:45:55.260And so they will simply say, oh, he looked so bullying, whereas the other guy looks affable and somewhat confused and he's he's Uncle Joe.
00:46:02.280And so I think that might have shifted some of the few remaining undecided towards Uncle Joey.
00:46:08.100So if I were to predict today, I'm tilting it slightly towards I call him avocado brain.
00:46:16.320I'm tilting it to avocado brain a bit more than to bullying Trump.
00:48:57.280So but there's not there's not there's nothing in the average person that sees an and again, I don't mean this to be mean, but in a man who is clearly in decline and say, I want one of these two to keep me safe.
00:49:13.280I'll pick the guy who reminds me of my grandfather when we had to take the keys away.
00:49:18.420I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to be hyperbolic and even push it further to those people who would still prefer Biden.
00:49:25.700Biden could be in an induced coma where he could only flip his eyelids.
00:49:31.760They would still think that is a much better option than brazen, vulgar, orange man bad.
00:49:39.080And I know this for a fact because I've tried to engage some of these people, some of whom are otherwise really intelligent people.
00:49:46.280But there is a complete wall of emotional hysteria that is simply impossible to penetrate.
00:49:53.020And by the way, I don't mean to imply a lot of times people think, oh, you know, I must have posters of Trump in my bedroom that my wife and I use as foreplay.
00:50:02.800No, you don't. I mean, I'm not the only one.
00:50:09.820So it's not that I'm such a Trump lover.
00:50:13.280It's that I think I'm sufficiently nonpartisan, especially as a Canadian to say, wait a minute, there are very compelling reasons why someone might like Trump.
00:50:23.060It can't be that 60 plus million people in the last round voted for a complete racist monster.
00:51:57.680How do you cut through the immediate call that something's a conspiracy theory and so therefore must be discredited and say and and and get to people and say, look, I I'm not I don't want you to believe me.
00:52:38.740If they start with that position, then no amount of evidence that I can present to you is ever going to penetrate you because you've already built up the wall.
00:52:47.320Now, let's assume for a minute that they don't do that, that they actually are open to hearing my evidence.
00:53:19.860What he did instead is over two, three decades, he assiduously collected data from many, many different fields, from paleontology, from ecology, from animal husbandry, from geology.
00:53:32.620So that when you put all the data together, it became incontrovertible that he was correct.
00:53:38.840And for 150 years, people have been trying to falsify him to no avail.
00:54:02.220If I want to prove to you that toy preferences are biologically based, the fact that little Johnny likes trucks and guns and little Linda prefers dolls, that's not due to your parents being sexist.
00:54:27.900I could bring you data from different animals, so vervet monkeys, rhesus monkeys, chimpanzees, all of whom exhibit the same sex-specific toy preferences in their infants.
00:54:41.820In other words, an infant vervet monkey boy and an infant vervet monkey girl has the same preferences as human infants.
00:54:50.320Well, that seems pretty compelling evidence.
00:54:52.240I could give you data of children, human children, who are in the pre-socialization stage of their cognitive development.
00:54:59.500In other words, they're too young to have been socialized, and they already exhibit those toy preferences.
00:55:05.340I could, I'll just give you one more, just because you'll get the point.
00:55:08.500I could look at little girls who suffer from congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which is an endocrinological disorder that masculinizes the behavior of little girls.
00:55:18.400Well, little girls who suffer from this disorder have toy preferences that are like that of boys.
00:55:23.920So bit by bit, I can build this suffocating network of cumulative evidence around you.
00:56:37.600And the West is a, there's a great book.
00:56:43.860Somebody tried to finish Winston Churchill's book on the English-speaking peoples.
00:56:49.980And I read it, I don't know, 15 years ago.
00:56:52.680And it ended with, it foretold the ending of the West, that it was under attack and it was being subverted from within.
00:57:00.960And it said, only after it falls will the world realize how benevolent, how good, how caring and and how charitable that system really was.
00:59:36.700A honey badger for your viewers, those who don't know is an extraordinarily ferocious animal.
00:59:42.080It is the size of a small dog, but it can withstand an attack from six adult lions.
00:59:47.520They, the, the lions will approach it trying to investigate and it starts acting completely berserk that they're actually intimidated and they retreat.
00:59:55.980Well, I argue that we have to be ideological honey badgers.
00:59:59.280Meaning what, if you have a set of principles that you can truly reason, you could explain those first principles, be a honey badger.
01:00:08.980And that's if, I mean, you follow me on social media.
01:00:11.420We've known each other for a few years.
01:00:37.820I respect that a lot more because the world is shaped by brazen people, by courageous people.
01:00:44.020In the same way that we choose Navy SEALs because of their physical bravery and courage, we should be choosing academics who have intellectual Navy SEAL qualities.
01:00:53.840Instead, most academics and thinkers are cowardly, are meek, are politically correct.
01:01:00.340And it's only a few of us who have the temerity to speak out.
01:01:03.480So to answer your question, each of us, however big or small our platform is, should be engaged in the battle.
01:01:09.780If someone posts something on Facebook that is insane, challenge them politely.
01:01:13.920If you're at a pub and someone says something that you find objectionable, engage a debate.
01:01:18.540But what they do, what they do instead is they say, I don't want to lose their friendship.
01:02:55.800This is the Saudi blogger who has now been languishing in a Saudi prison for six, seven years because he dared say some rather innocuous things about the Saudi government.
01:03:06.320But now imagine how much courage he had.
01:03:08.320He was criticizing the Saudi government while living in Saudi Arabia, right?
01:03:14.280So, then imagine when someone exhibits that kind of courage, and then I receive an email from someone who's at Wellesley College, but they're boo-hoo-hoo, so afraid to speak out.
01:03:25.420I mean, imagine the level of cowardice you might have when you are so pampered at Wellesley College that you're afraid to speak, while they are heroes in the Middle East, knowing that if they speak, they're going to be killed, and yet they speak.