00:00:00.000So, as Rick said, I'm currently in the United States at Ole Miss because, as Rick correctly said, it became very, very difficult for me to be at Concordia.
00:00:12.600For any of you who think that whichever school you come from is anti-Semitic, Concordia is the true benchmark of Jew hatred.
00:00:22.500It has been referred to as Gaza University for nearly 25 years.
00:00:28.380So Bibi Netanyahu was canceled from speaking at Concordia back in 2002.
00:00:36.400And so for someone who is as outspoken as me, as irreverent to orthodoxy and political correctness,
00:00:44.000and who's very Jewish, it became very, very difficult.
00:00:47.060And so right now I'm going to leave, but we'll see. It might be a permanent move.
00:00:52.280So right now I'm at Old Miss, as I said.
00:00:54.560what i'd like to do is this is of course not a you know energy or natural resources based talk
00:01:03.180but it should hopefully be relevant to all of you in that i'm sure you faced in your lives
00:01:10.360an employee maybe one of your children coming home or coming to work and espousing a insane idea
00:01:18.000men too can menstruate queers for palestine
00:01:22.760the scientific method is white supremacy and so having lived in the university ecosystem for
00:01:30.760nearly you know more than three decades 32 years now i can tell you that i've been warning about
00:01:38.200these trends for many many years my scientific work is in evolutionary psychology and so i
00:01:43.920studied the biological underpinnings of why we do the things that we do, but specifically in the
00:01:49.540economic and consumer context. And most of my social science colleagues would have huge animus
00:01:56.020to my work because they simply could not believe that human beings were driven by biological
00:02:02.480forces, which seemed quite extraordinary. How is it possible that you negate the fact that we are
00:02:08.560biological beings well to them to most social scientists biology applies to every single
00:02:13.980species except one humans and so that's when i first started thinking about writing the parasitic
00:02:20.100mind which is one of my earlier books the parasitic mind basically looks at what happens when your
00:02:25.920mind is hijacked when it's zombified by parasitic ideas and you'll understand why i use the term
00:02:32.620parasitic in a second and my forthcoming book which will be out on May 12th and my publisher
00:02:38.820asked me to put a QR code on the last slide so you can all pre-order it dutifully
00:02:44.420what that book does is it looks at what happens to our emotional system when it is hijacked so
00:02:53.080if I can hijack your thinking system and I can hijack your feeling system then I own you and so
00:03:00.880the 45 or so minutes that we have I'll be talking about some of these phenomena. Now let me first
00:03:08.200begin. I hope this is not too academic or professorial. I first want to explain the
00:03:13.200concept of axiomatic irrationality. Now what is axiomatic irrationality? It comes from behavioral
00:03:20.900decision theory. So for example if I tell you that I prefer car A to car B and I also prefer car B
00:03:27.860to car c then it must be that i prefer car a to car c that's called the transitivity axiom if i
00:03:33.560don't do that i'm being intransitive in my choices and therefore i'm being axiomatically irrational
00:03:40.040okay let's take another one the next one if i tell you that this burger is 90 fat free
00:03:46.860it is isomorphically equivalent it is logically identical to saying this burger is 10 fat
00:03:53.680but depending on which frame i show you consumers will have completely different perceptions and
00:03:59.900hence in this case again they're being irrational in an axiomatic sense or take the third example
00:04:05.500if i show you two cars next to each other and i say which one do you prefer and you say car a
00:04:11.180and then in a separate task i first show you car a and i tell you rank it on a scale of 0 to 100
00:04:18.900and then I separately show you CAR B and I ask you to rank it from 0 to 100,
00:04:24.340you should still be preferring CAR A because in the previous elicitation technique,
00:04:28.900you chose CAR A, but it turns out that people have preference reversals.
00:04:32.900If I give it to you one form, you choose CAR A.
00:04:35.320If I give it to you in another form, you choose CAR B.
00:04:38.020That's considered axiomatically irrational.
00:04:40.820And so my doctoral training was very much within this paradigm,
00:04:43.920studying psychology of decision-making.
00:04:45.600but then in applying evolutionary psychology i started seeing people saying that biology
00:04:52.100doesn't matter i started seeing some of these transgender stuff that were creeping up in
00:04:58.000academia and so there has to be some other form of irrationality that can grip people beyond this
00:05:06.080very restrained notion of irrationality that i just described and so fasten your seat belt
00:05:11.720it's going to get wild so these are the two books uh that are relevant to today's talk the the book
00:05:18.800the the yellow one deals with our cognitive system and the forthcoming one the one on the
00:05:24.020right deals with our emotional system what are some examples of parasitic ideas
00:05:29.860radical feminism is a parasitic idea equity feminism is a totally reasonable idea which says
00:05:39.220there should be no institutional reasons why men and women are not treated equally and therefore
00:05:45.740we could all raise our hand and say yeah i'm an equity feminist radical feminists push that
00:05:50.240principle by saying in order for us to squash the patriarchy and the status quo we need to argue
00:05:57.820that men and women are indistinguishable from each other that any sex difference between men
00:06:03.320and women must be due to social construction and in that sense you're negating biology so as
00:06:09.380someone who's an evolutionist it's very clear that humans are a sexually dimorphic species meaning
00:06:15.540that there are evolutionary based differences between men and women well if you go to women's
00:06:20.720studies classes you can't say that that's a parasitic idea postmodernism is probably the
00:06:29.100granddaddy of parasitic ideas because it basically argues that there are no absolute truths there are
00:06:36.100no universal truths we are shackled by subjectivity we're shackled by relativism and therefore that
00:06:44.660serves as the fertile ground for all kinds of the insane ideas that you've been seeing flourish
00:06:50.240so i won't go through all of these now but each of these boxes is a manifestation of a parasitic
00:06:55.840idea. Now why did I use the term parasitic? So in the animal kingdom there's the field of
00:07:06.200parasitology. Parasitology is the study of parasite host interactions. So a tapeworm could
00:07:13.560be a parasite, is a parasite, but it goes into your intestinal tract. A neuroparasite is a parasite
00:07:21.040that ultimately wants to find its way to the host's brain,
00:07:26.760altering its circuitry to suit its interests.
00:07:29.740So, for example, the spider wasp, the top left one,
00:07:34.400it stings the spider, rendering it completely zombified.
00:07:39.000It then drags it to a burrow, fully in vivo, it's alive,
00:07:43.960and then it lays eggs on it, and then as the eggs hatch,