The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - An Evening with Dr. Gad Saad on an Alaskan Cruise - Many Topics Covered! (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_851)

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00:00:42.960 So many of you know, Gad has, on all his platforms, millions of followers, and millions and millions

00:00:51.420 and millions of views of the things that he's done through his books and his podcasts and

00:00:57.700 his posts. And I thought, well, what if we tonight kept this really light and just were able to

00:01:03.620 get into Gad's mind, look behind the curtain just a little bit, and pull things from his

00:01:10.940 social media postings and have him speak about those things. And so that's what we thought

00:01:17.120 we would do. Kristen was very helpful as well. We put some questions together. And we're going

00:01:24.580 to throw a lob ball question, first of all, because when you do see, in fact, I think one

00:01:31.500 of your most recent postings, was that in California where you were, you were juggling?

00:01:35.200 Yeah. So besides his amazing wife, Annie, who's really kept discreet in the social media postings,

00:01:44.720 and there are two kids who he does, he can explain his own reasons for that. But privacy

00:01:51.240 is important. Besides those three very, very important people to his life, it seems to me

00:01:57.880 the next important one is soccer. And he was a great soccerer. He played a lot of soccer

00:02:03.840 in his youth. And in 2023, a young man by the name of Messi came to Miami. And recently, Gad

00:02:14.460 and Annie, I think, well, you were there for sure when he scored two goals. And so I said,

00:02:18.160 I thought, that's where I would like to start is, so where does this love of the beautiful

00:02:24.040 game come from? And I've heard elements of it before, Gad, but maybe we could just start

00:02:29.020 out with that. Yeah.

00:02:29.940 Well, thank you all for being here. Thank you for having me. I was mentioning to Tice yesterday

00:02:35.360 that my childhood hero growing up in Lebanon was Johan Cruyff, who was the top Dutch player at the

00:02:44.160 time. The 1974 Dutch team was a very stylish team. They played a very different football,

00:02:50.560 which you call soccer here. And so you grew up in Lebanon or pretty much anywhere in the world,

00:02:56.720 soccer is sort of a religion. So I grew up, played a lot of soccer, was certainly heading to potentially

00:03:03.600 a professional career. I'd always been interested in only doing two things in my life, playing

00:03:08.640 soccer, becoming an academic. It looks like the second one worked out really well. The first

00:03:14.340 one, there were some injuries that unfortunately put on some roadblocks. So I've seen all, I'm

00:03:20.920 old enough to have seen pretty much all of the great soccer players, Cruyff, Pele. I was

00:03:28.240 very young with Pele. Maradona, Zidane, all of those combined do not add up to being nearly

00:03:35.740 as good as Lionel Messi is. So on the first hand, I love him just because I love soccer.

00:03:43.240 And the things that he does on the field is pure, you know, poetry. He's just absolutely

00:03:48.800 unbelievable. But I think the second reason why I so admire him is perhaps as important as

00:03:55.240 his stratospheric talent as a soccer player is how he conducts himself as an individual.

00:04:01.480 He has every reason in the world to have a chip on his shoulder, to be lacking in humility.

00:04:06.940 He certainly deserves it. He's probably the most famous person in the world. And yet when

00:04:11.940 you see him, he's just a regular guy. He never walks away from shaking someone's hand. He never

00:04:19.000 fakes injuries. You know, in soccer, one of the things that's really unattractive is you're

00:04:28.200 always diving to try to convince the ref to, you know, to call a penalty for you. And so he's very

00:04:35.160 honorable. He's a, he's been a family man his whole life. He's been with the same girl since

00:04:41.240 they first met, I think he was nine years old, eight or nine years old in Rosario in a small

00:04:48.360 town in Argentina. So he embodies all of the noble qualities that we all aspire to be. And he happens

00:04:57.400 to also, as my wife always says, if I hear someone crying like a little girl in the house, it's probably 0.60

00:05:03.320 my husband watching Messi. So for all of those reasons, I love him. And I should just mention

00:05:10.440 that two years ago, one of the beautiful things about being in the public eye, the way that I am,

00:05:17.000 is you get to meet people that you otherwise might have never intersected with. So two years ago,

00:05:22.280 I received an email. I don't have the exact words, I'm paraphrasing. Dear Professor Saad,

00:05:29.480 my name is Jorge Mas. I'm the majority owner of Inter Miami. Inter Miami is the team that he plays for

00:05:36.520 now. I know of your love of Lionel Messi. So anytime that you'd like, come down up, you know,

00:05:43.640 you'll be my guest, you could meet him and so on. And so two years ago, I went down. And so

00:05:49.480 be out there, there are rewards that come your way. So that's, that's why I love Lionel Messi.

00:05:53.880 And when you say he's the most famous, I didn't know how famous he was. He is the number one

00:06:01.880 followed person on social media in North America, half a billion people, followers,

00:06:06.440 unbelievable. But I mean, even that doesn't really capture it. I mean, the World Cup final

00:06:11.320 is, I think, watched by half of humanity. So you, I can't imagine you could go to any small town in

00:06:19.560 Pakistan or Africa where if you said Lionel Messi, people would know, I mean, people might know

00:06:25.640 Elon Musk or not know Elon Musk. People might know Donald Trump or not know Donald Trump,

00:06:29.880 but no one doesn't know Lionel Messi. Yeah. And yet he's just a regular guy. Yeah. Amazing. So

00:06:35.960 let's switch to another love of yours. You and I have spoken about this as we get a little older,

00:06:42.920 health is important to us. So food is another thing that you do a lot of posting on and

00:06:47.480 it could be you're at a restaurant. It could be here. It could be Shabbat. It could be, you know,

00:06:52.040 some celebration like that. Just share where that comes from. I know, uh, Kirsten and you had some

00:06:57.640 conversations about the, about the prep, prepare and yeah, yeah. Well, uh, my wife, and it's not just

00:07:05.080 because she's here, she's a unbelievable cook. Uh, and actually a few years ago, she had begun a 0.97

00:07:11.800 uh, chat, a YouTube channel where, I mean, you'd never see her face, but I would just film her

00:07:19.400 making the food and she would explain all the Lebanese food precisely because we don't want to 0.78

00:07:24.520 put her identity out there. Yeah. Yeah. And the, the channel, I'm, I'm speaking in the past tense

00:07:29.800 because she, she only did about 10 episodes. It was really going well, but then she decided,

00:07:34.120 I don't want to do this anymore. The channel was called Food Satisfaction, S-A-A-D. And so we,

00:07:43.000 we never come, we never, uh, run out of, uh, puns with the name. My, my, my channel's called The Sad Truth,

00:07:49.880 S-A-A-D. And so it's easy to love food when you have such a great cook. Uh, but regarding the health issue,

00:07:56.680 uh, during COVID, when COVID started, I thought, okay, well, let's turn this dreadful situation into

00:08:04.360 something positive. I was much, much heavier. I, you know, I'd been a, uh, a very competitive soccer

00:08:10.280 player in my youth, but then progressively over the years, over the next 30 years, I put on an unhealthy

00:08:16.760 amount of weight. And so I used the COVID lockdown to lose, uh, at my most, I had lost 86 pounds.

00:08:25.480 Uh, and now I think I've put on about 10, 10 of those yesterday. If anybody saw, if any of you

00:08:32.200 saw me looking upset, uh, we had gone to the gala dinner and I wore another jacket that didn't look

00:08:39.960 as though it was fitting as nicely on me. And that really sent me into a spiral of anger. Uh, but,

00:08:47.800 but to your point, uh, I lost 86 pounds and I did it. Not that any of you here looking at you,

00:08:53.080 none of you need to lose weight, but, uh, maybe some of your family members or friends need to use

00:08:57.960 those. First, I, my wife would keep track of every single calorie that went into my mouth 1.00

00:09:05.080 so that by the end of the day, she could tell me, you know, you've eaten 1542 calories,

00:09:10.520 because she uses an app. And so I would try to never exceed about 1500 calories. And then I would

00:09:17.320 try to always do at least 15,000 steps, typically 15,000 to 20,000. Do that for 18 months and suddenly

00:09:25.960 you become very spelt. Yeah. Um, when I first met Gad, he was on campus and, um, he said,

00:09:36.040 Ken, I need to get my step. I never go right for, for years now, right? Yeah. It's about five years,

00:09:40.920 five years, never less than 10,000. And he said, how far to go from the campus downtown? I said,

00:09:46.920 maybe 25 minutes or a half hour. And then I did some work. I was in the office and I drove downtown and,

00:09:53.960 uh, and Gad still wasn't there. Uh, and then, uh, so probably like an hour and 10 or something.

00:10:01.000 Yeah, you slightly underestimated. Yeah, I know, I know. And then Mariela and I were walking downtown

00:10:05.880 and, um, uh, I, I, I was out about 45 minutes. I was halfway there and I thought, uh, oh, this Gad

00:10:13.240 was correct. But I, it's admirable Gad. Thank you. Yeah, really, really good. So let's shift to a little

00:10:18.760 bit more serious now. So some of you may not know that, um, uh, Gad taught a course on campus this

00:10:25.640 year. Uh, worked again with Kristen in the academic group and, um, and it was wrapped around the

00:10:31.960 parasitic mind is, is, look, that book, by the way, with, uh, about to sign in India, I believe I read.

00:10:39.720 And the Persian rights. And the Persian rights. I think this will make almost 30 foreign rights. 0.69

00:10:45.560 I mean, unbelievable, unbelievable success. And so Gad, uh, designed a course just for our students.

00:10:53.000 And, um, and look, we have great faculty. We have very good faculty. Um, but I had several students

00:11:01.640 come up to me. I know Kristen happened the same thing because a couple of those students, we, uh,

00:11:06.760 are children of people who work with us. And they said that it was the best course they ever had

00:11:12.760 at Northwood. And so my question before we get too far into, you know, academia is, um, the, the art of

00:11:22.760 being a professor is, um, something that is very difficult. I mean, most people think it's easy,

00:11:30.360 but you seem to have mastered world-class researcher, the service, you know, our research service and

00:11:36.440 teaching, and, and you add on to that this, um, craft that you've developed to be what our students

00:11:42.760 have said, a fantastic teacher. Just talk a little bit about that. That's very sweet. Actually, when I

00:11:48.040 was at the last event in Midland, one of the students at the President's Freedom Celebration,

00:11:55.560 he gave me a card and it, it had me tearing up, which, uh, yeah, it was, I mean, I couldn't, the words

00:12:02.840 were really beautiful. Uh, look, I try to, uh, of course, teach the material, but then I always think,

00:12:09.960 what would be some exercises, pedagogic exercises that I could give that can really drive the content

00:12:16.760 home? And so for this course, which was the first time I was teaching it, based on the person at

00:12:21.400 Vine, I came up with four assignments that they had to do, which I'll briefly mention here. Uh, the,

00:12:29.720 so the, for those of you who don't know the parasitic mind, just to put very quickly, is the idea that

00:12:35.080 there are certain dreadful ideas, idea pathogens, parasitic ideas that can cause people to completely,

00:12:42.360 uh, lose their capacity to, to reason, right? And so it's a, it's, it uses a metaphor of a neural

00:12:49.640 parasite in the animal kingdom, okay? And so what the book does is it traces where these parasitic

00:12:55.480 ideas come from. They all come from university campuses. And then towards the end of the book,

00:12:59.800 I offer a mind vaccine. How could you inoculate yourself against these parasites? And so the four 0.86

00:13:05.240 assignments that I asked the students to do, the, the first assignment was to identify in the

00:13:11.160 literature a scientific study that would be considered forbidden knowledge. Because regrettably,

00:13:18.120 now in academia, what you have is certain disciplines, certain topics that are taboo to study.

00:13:24.120 Do not study race differences. Do not study any research that might link psychiatric conditions

00:13:32.120 to transgenderism. Uh, don't study sex differences. Or if you study sex differences,

00:13:38.040 if women are shown to be superior than men on a task, then go ahead and publish it. But God forbid, 0.92

00:13:43.640 if it, if the results show that men are superior on that task than women, then file those results that 0.93

00:13:48.760 don't ever show it, because then you are a misogynist patriarchal pain. And so what I asked the 0.80

00:13:53.960 students to do is to identify a study that would be construed as for an example of forbidden knowledge,

00:14:01.080 and why it was important to not succumb to that reflex, why it was important for the researchers to

00:14:07.000 actually do that study. So there they have to go into the literature and actually think about what

00:14:12.200 would constitute forbidden knowledge. The second assignment, I always also try to link it to

00:14:17.720 personal things in their lives. I said, okay, well, we're talking about wokeism. We're talking about

00:14:22.360 parasitic ideas. Give me three examples from your personal or professional lives where you have faced

00:14:28.680 some woke situation, and how did you handle it? And so now they have to go and try to think about,

00:14:34.600 you know, that time when I applied for a job, and they asked me what my gender identity was,

00:14:40.520 and how did I, and so on. So that was the second assignment. The third assignment, so in chapter

00:14:46.280 eight of the parasitic mind, I implore people to activate their inner honey badger. And for those of 0.99

00:14:54.600 you who don't know what that is referring to, the honey badger has been ranked as the most ferocious

00:15:00.920 animal in the animal kingdom. It's the size of a small dog, yet it is so fierce and ferocious that

00:15:07.160 when it comes across adult lions, the adult lions will move aside and say, sorry, sir,

00:15:13.880 I didn't mean to block you. Why? Because it is truly fierce. So when I ask people to activate

00:15:19.960 their inner honey badger, I'm not imploring them to be physically violent. I'm saying, look, if you have

00:15:25.000 a set of principles that you believe in, don't cower. You know, don't suck your thumb in a fetal 0.99

00:15:29.880 position. Stand up and defend your principles. Be a honey badger. And so what I asked them to do is, 0.99

00:15:35.480 I asked them to go through the very large catalog of conversations I've had on my show

00:15:42.840 with many honey badgers. I listed about a hundred of them that run the gamut. It could be, for example,

00:15:49.960 the current head of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharia, who was getting death threats at Stanford and people

00:15:58.600 were trying to revoke his tenure when he was arguing that maybe the COVID policies were maybe draconian

00:16:05.720 and misplaced. It could be people who are criticizing Islam while living in the Middle East. Now that's a

00:16:14.520 real honey badger if you understand the risks that you take for doing that. And so I asked people to go

00:16:19.640 through the catalog, identify one honey badger and tell us about it. So now they have to kind of,

00:16:26.600 again, link it to their lives and why that person motivated them. And then the fourth assignment,

00:16:33.800 I asked them to develop a research question and a set of hypotheses that are within the general rubric

00:16:42.760 of the parasitic mind. So what would be a, so just to give you an example of a study that I was doing with

00:16:48.520 one of my graduate students, we were looking at whether your morphology can be predictive of the type

00:16:58.520 of political positions that you hold. And actually there is some research, which I discussed in the

00:17:04.600 parasitic mind, that shows that a man's physical formidability correlates to their political positions.

00:17:15.320 So if I am very physically strong, I'm less likely to support policies of egalitarianism. 0.74

00:17:24.840 If I am more weak and I cry and I suck my thumb and I watch Bridget Jones diary, then I'm more likely to

00:17:31.560 say socialism is really lovely and it's kind and it's unfair for some people to be, you know, make more money

00:17:39.720 than others and so on. And so that's an example of my research based on my person. So now they have to

00:17:47.640 go out there and come up with their own ideas. So I think for all of these reasons, it turns out that

00:17:54.280 I think it resonated with them. Yeah, well, it sure did. And, you know, the relevance and tying it back to

00:18:00.600 themselves based in research and really good. I wish I took a course. So I'm going to stick with education

00:18:08.680 here. And I think it's somebody's, oh, yeah, you know, it's me. Yeah. Who else? Okay, so I like I just

00:18:18.040 begs the question, did any of the responses or the what they came back with the kids, were you like,

00:18:24.600 wow, I hadn't thought about that? I mean, did it make you any of their responses make you think

00:18:30.440 about it? I mean, were you surprised? I mean, honestly, it wasn't wow, I never thought it was more

00:18:36.280 there. Look, being a professor for 31 years in that ecosystem, I'm constantly surrounded by

00:18:44.440 parasitized woke imbeciles, right? And so to have students at Northwood, none of whom seem to be 0.99

00:18:51.080 parasitized. Right. All of whom were like, yes, yes, yes. Right. In a sense, that surprised me,

00:18:57.640 because I can just sit down with normal, rational students. And I don't mean to imply that all of

00:19:03.720 the students are wokesters. The reality is most are not. Right. But you always have some students

00:19:10.680 in a 30-year career that are going to be problematic in that sense. So I think what surprised me in an

00:19:15.960 incredibly positive sense is that just how put together they were. They were engaged, they were

00:19:23.640 serious, they were fun, they were polite, they were not woke. And so more than anything, that's what I

00:19:29.000 took away from my interaction with them. Good question, thank you. So we're going to stick with

00:19:37.000 education. It's not a surprise, Gad, that you have concerns with the academy, right, and what's

00:19:42.840 happening on university campuses. And I'll talk about this a little bit on, on Wednesday, that this

00:19:48.360 is not new. This has been going on for a long, a long time. But recently on X, you posted this.

00:19:56.680 I want you to stop and think about this for a moment. All of your children are being educated by academics.

00:20:02.920 95 to 99% of whom think that Kamala Harris would have been a far superior president than Donald Trump.

00:20:15.560 These academics have used their minds to conclude that Harris better encapsulates the values of the

00:20:22.440 United States. And you ended by saying, choose your universities wisely. And this caught the post of

00:20:29.000 many, many people, including Elon Musk, and a friend of yours. And Mr. Musk responded, the level of

00:20:37.240 propaganda at elite universities would make North Korea jealous. Can you share just a little bit more

00:20:44.920 with us when you suggest your readers, people need to start to choose their universities wisely?

00:20:51.720 I know you've all gone to university, but you don't know how bad it is in there.

00:21:01.640 Living day to day within an academic setting, it's absolute, and part of why I am so irreverent

00:21:09.000 to all of this nonsense, because of the unique characteristics of my personality, I simply can't

00:21:15.400 stomach the nonsense that I see. I can't sit at a departmental meeting where I'm unsure whether

00:21:23.640 it's a bunch of adults called professors or whether we're in a kindergarten class. So the infantilization,

00:21:30.360 and I hate to say it, and I hope some of the ladies here are not going to be upset, but I'm not,

00:21:35.000 I'm hardly the first to say this, many female academics who are honey badgers are saying that 1.00

00:21:39.240 of the feminization of academia is absolute, right? How are you all doing? How's everybody doing?

00:21:47.800 Don't talk down to me. Let's, let's get the department going and let's move on, right? And so,

00:21:53.880 so it's part an attack on meritocracy, right? Where we should all be equal. So for example, I used to,

00:22:02.680 I had a departmental chair who had asked all of this. She's no longer a departmental chair.

00:22:08.840 She had asked all the professors, whenever they had an accolade, to share it, any accolade,

00:22:15.560 so that then we could put it up on the departmental page for obvious reasons. And so I took her to task

00:22:23.480 and I started sharing mine. She writes back to me privately. She goes, well, could you not share

00:22:29.480 all of the accolades because then that other people are not going to feel good about it. So I had to

00:22:35.960 temper my achievements because someone who hasn't published since Baruch Spinoza was around

00:22:44.280 might get offended because, you know, they're not doing any research. So tone it down. And so,

00:22:50.120 so it's not just the woke stuff that's a problem in academia. It's this, it's the attack on meritocracy.

00:22:56.520 It's all of that stuff. And so the, the gist of that, uh, email was exactly that. Now,

00:23:03.640 the other thing that I hate about academics is that, I mean, tenure exists precisely to ensure 0.61

00:23:12.760 that if you are a coward who's otherwise too afraid to speak, well, we've given you now institutional

00:23:19.720 protection to be able to speak. And yet there is no creature that is as, uh, cowardly as the academic. 0.98

00:23:30.440 It doesn't exist. And this is why I refer to them, I hope you don't mind me saying this, as the 0.99

00:23:37.400 invertebrate gastrati because they don't have a spine and they don't have any testicular fortune.

00:23:44.920 And so I would love for there to be a, a potion that academics could take where they can have a

00:23:52.760 sense of courage, right? We, we tend to choose our Navy SEALs based on having certain attributes that we

00:24:01.320 admire, courage, physical bravery, honor, integrity. Well, I'd like to think that our intellectual Navy

00:24:09.160 SEALs would possess those traits. They don't. Now they could be wonderful hyper-specialists, right?

00:24:15.560 Within their very small areas of concentration, they're, they have a lot to say. But once you ask

00:24:21.960 them to step out of that lane, uh, they simply are not willing to weigh in. Now, I will receive,

00:24:28.760 I mean, literally thousands and thousands of emails from professors. And, and I think you guys have

00:24:34.520 probably, some of you have heard me mention this before. I mean, I, it literally is as if it was

00:24:40.440 ChatGPT that wrote it. It's, Dear Professor Saad, a bunch of compliments, and then the last sentence is

00:24:47.400 always, you know, if you decide to read this letter on your show, please don't include my name,

00:24:54.680 right? So not only are they not courageous enough to be the ones to stand up and speak,

00:25:00.520 but they're not even willing to stand next to the one who stands up and, and speaks.

00:25:06.280 We can't have that. And so when I tell people choose your schools carefully, choose a place that

00:25:11.800 hopefully embodies many of the virtues that I'm talking about. One of the, from an administrator's

00:25:17.160 point of view that I can't understand with that is, um, CADS, uh, institution back in Canada,

00:25:25.960 it's, it's, it's, it's fine. Uh, it came from a Catholic background, Loyola, I believe, right?

00:25:30.280 Well, that was Jesuit. Jesuit, Jesuit, uh, years and years ago. Um, but, um, to not take advantage

00:25:40.360 of the profile that God has from a purely, you know, promotional marketing point of view is just,

00:25:47.480 I just don't understand that. And, and I would, uh, I mean, there, there, Mr. Shapiro, former president

00:25:54.120 in Michigan, a Canadian guy from Montreal, uh, Jordan Peterson, uh, Canadian guy from Toronto and

00:26:00.040 Gad Saad from, uh, from Montreal. Those to me, of all the, the academics that I think are high profile,

00:26:08.120 one having passed away a couple of years ago, I just can't understand why they would not take

00:26:13.000 advantage of that, but that's, yeah. But they, not only they, they don't take advantage of my profile,

00:26:20.600 they actively disassociate themselves from my profile. Right. Uh, it's, it's, it's astounding.

00:26:27.240 So we're going to, this isn't universities per se, but it's related to kind of intellectual,

00:26:33.320 uh, impact. So Mossab Hassan Youssef is an American author and former Palestinian militant,

00:26:42.520 best known for his work as a spy for Israel Shin Bet security service. He was born in 1978,

00:26:49.320 some of you have probably seen him on, uh, television in Ramallah, and he is the oldest son

00:26:56.280 of Sheikh Hassan Youssef, who was the co-founder of Hamas. Okay. The co-founder of Hamas's son. 0.63

00:27:06.280 Several days ago, Mossad Hassan Youssef publicly noted the number of Nobel prizes won by Jews

00:27:14.680 compared to other groups and citizens around the world. Specifically, he shared that among 15 million

00:27:22.040 Jews, 216 of them have won Nobel prizes. To put that into context, of the 1.6 billion Muslims,

00:27:33.480 11 have won a Nobel prize and the shared rest of the entire humanity have won 748. So my question,

00:27:44.360 I mean, this is a powerful set of facts from a very small community. So as a professor and an

00:27:49.560 intellectual guy for more than 30 years, what, how, what do we take away from that, from that remarkable

00:27:55.320 intellectual success and impact from really a small Jewish community?

00:28:01.000 Yeah, well, thank you for that question. Uh, for those of you who don't know the gentleman that he

00:28:05.080 mentioned, you want to talk about a honey badger? It would be difficult to find a bigger honey badger.

00:28:11.880 This is, as you correctly said, the, the son of the founder of Hamas, who found a way to extricate 0.96

00:28:19.640 himself from this ideology of hate. And actually we, we know each other well. He's been on my show.

00:28:26.520 You should go and watch our conversation. It's absolutely unbelievable. We obviously both speak Irish,

00:28:31.720 so we can also relate them on that level. Uh, but to your question about the, the, the Jewish, uh,

00:28:39.080 I can't say monopoly, but over representation, it's about almost 25% of Nobel prizes have been won by

00:28:47.560 0.20% of the world's population. So like most things, there is a nature and a nurture element to this

00:28:56.040 phenomenon. Of course, the nature element is one that people frown because people don't like to hear

00:29:02.920 that there might be some innate genetic differences, even though certainly IQ tests seem to support

00:29:08.840 it. Uh, but I'll leave that aside. Just the, the cultural expectations of academic excellence within the

00:29:17.640 Jewish home is really the stuff of legend. And I'll mention a quick story, which if any of

00:29:25.000 you have read the parasitic mind, you might, uh, recognize it from there. So after I did it,

00:29:31.640 I'm only telling you this part of my academic trajectory because it's relevant to the story.

00:29:36.440 So I did an undergrad in mathematics and computer science at a top university. And then I did an

00:29:42.600 MBA at that same university. And I was heading on to pursue, you know, my training to hopefully become

00:29:49.400 a professor. One of my brothers who lives in Southern California was very keen on me

00:29:55.480 working with him after I had finished my MBA. So he was trying to convince me to not continue

00:30:02.520 in pursuing my, you know, my PhD and so on. Uh, when my mother caught wind of the story

00:30:09.400 of the fact that this brother was trying to convince me to work with him. And I, I had visited him in

00:30:16.520 Southern California. Uh, so I come back to Montreal and she sort of very, uh, uh, worriedly asks me to

00:30:25.880 another room to speak to me privately. I'm thinking, what, what's happening? She goes, I hear that you're

00:30:32.120 thinking of, uh, you know, leaving school. Uh, I said, no, not really. She goes, you do understand that

00:30:38.840 if you were to leave now, people are going to know that you're somebody who dropped out of school.

00:30:43.640 Well, so for my mother, having had a mathematics and computer science degree and an MBA,

00:30:51.800 and then taking a break for a year or two before I pursue my MS and PhD at Cornell, uh, would be,

00:31:00.920 would bring huge shame to the family because I would be just an illiterate dropout. And now I,

00:31:07.160 it's not as though I went on to pursue my PhD to please my mom, but that gives you a sense of,

00:31:13.640 the, the, the dogged and assiduous expectations that come with being in a Jewish household. So, 1.00

00:31:21.480 you know, you even see in the Talmud, there are, the system is set up to argue with each other.

00:31:27.720 So to be a scholar, now the rabbis will argue that by scholar, they don't mean secular scholars,

00:31:34.120 they mean, you know, Torah scholars, or Talmudic scholars, but it is enmeshed within the Jewish DNA

00:31:41.400 to revere learning. And so it's not surprising that you have something. Yeah. I went, Mary Elman,

00:31:47.640 we were in Vancouver the other day and I ran into an old friend, Barbara Farber, uh, from Ottawa and, uh,

00:31:53.720 Jewish. And, um, she had invited me to Haifa, in fact, where, uh, Jim's wife just was, and, um, uh,

00:32:01.160 I never been able to get there, but she, she, she talked to me about just the, the research and what

00:32:07.720 they've done with that land. It's just an, it's incredible what's happened. And, uh, so that's

00:32:12.120 great. So now just a few more questions, folks, and then we're going to open it up. And if you have

00:32:16.440 something that sparks, uh, I don't think at all minds, if you say, Hey, I want to follow that up,

00:32:21.720 but now we get to look behind the curtain for his upcoming book. Uh, recently someone on X wrote

00:32:28.280 that there was no more book, book ever that he was wanting to read more, uh, than your upcoming book,

00:32:35.720 Suicidal Empathy. Um, well, Elon Musk has also said that. He did. He did. In fact, in my notes here,

00:32:41.800 I've seen him basically say, Gad, would you hurry up and get it done? Right. Uh, and, uh, you've

00:32:47.720 attracted one of the world's largest publishers, uh, that, that you've shared. Um, and there are,

00:32:53.880 there's just so many people looking forward, uh, to the book. Um, and in fact, I, I sent a note to Gad

00:33:00.280 maybe a couple of months ago, people are stealing your, your term, suicidal empathy. I've seen other

00:33:05.240 people start. So that's the momentum that it has. Uh, and at Northwood, we'll do whatever we can to

00:33:11.400 certainly promote it. And, um, it's a multi-year, um, uh, work in progress, but as successful as a

00:33:18.280 parasitic mind has become, you've heard 30, uh, versions around the world. Many of us at Northwood

00:33:25.160 believe suicidal empathy will be even more popular than the famously successful parasitic mind. So 0.97

00:33:31.800 it's likely complex, but why do you believe right now that it just seems to be so much

00:33:37.080 interest in, in this book? Yeah. Uh, yeah. Thanks for that question. So just to step back to kind of

00:33:44.200 give you the narrative of how these two books follow each other. So the parasitic mind is, 0.92

00:33:50.360 and I think I mentioned this briefly to Jim yesterday in our conversation, the parasitic mind

00:33:57.240 explores what happens to your cognitive system when it is parasitized. Your cognitive system means,

00:34:03.720 means you're thinking, but we're both a thinking and feeling animal. And so what suicidal empathy does

00:34:09.960 is it completes the story by then saying, okay, well, for me to completely hijack your brain,

00:34:15.160 I also need to parasitize your emotional system and suicidal empathy. But let me explain why I'm

00:34:21.640 focusing on empathy in particular. So like most things in life, the sweet spot is where you need to

00:34:30.920 find in order to have maximal flourishing, right? Aristotle explained to us 2000 plus years ago in

00:34:39.560 Nicomachian ethics about the golden me, right? Too little of something is not good. Too much of 0.58

00:34:45.240 something is not good. And there's a sweet spot somewhere, everything in moderation. And that

00:34:50.280 exactly holds for empathy. So empathy as a virtue and as an emotion is, makes perfect evolutionary sense,

00:34:58.760 because we're a social species. And as a social species, we need to develop what's called theory

00:35:05.320 of mind. Theory of mind means I need to put myself in the mind of Tice to be able to infer what he might

00:35:12.360 be thinking for us to have a meaningful conversation. One of the ways, the main way you actually diagnose a

00:35:19.800 young child as being autistic, you can't give a blood test. There is no physiological marker. You actually

00:35:27.880 make them go through a theory of mind test, which they typically fail. So theory of mind is a

00:35:34.520 fundamental feature of human sociality. So no one is arguing that empathy is not a good thing,

00:35:40.680 because there's already there's been about 10 hit articles written about me saying, you know, the

00:35:46.120 the Jewish puppeteer behind Donald Trump and Elon Musk is trying to destroy empathy to create an evil 1.00

00:35:54.920 world with empathy lacking. Nothing could be further from the truth. Empathy is wonderful, 0.91

00:36:00.840 as long as it is targeting the appropriate targets at the right place, at the right amount, right? So

00:36:07.720 example, let me draw an analogy. OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, is a misfiring of an otherwise

00:36:18.200 adaptive process. It sounds like a mouthful, but let me explain. The idea that if I noticed that Kent

00:36:25.240 was sneezing profusely, and then shook my hands, I might discreetly go to the bathroom, wash my hands,

00:36:32.600 because I don't want to catch his cold. Therefore scanning the environment for environmental threats

00:36:38.440 makes perfect evolutionary sense. But once you attend to that threat, the warning flag goes down,

00:36:45.720 and I go on with my day. What happens to the OCD sufferer? That mechanism is hyperactive, and always

00:36:54.120 the warning flag continuously goes up, so I'm stuck in an infinite loop. So I am now washing my hands for

00:37:00.920 eight hours a day, and scolding hot water while the skin is falling off. I can't make it to work,

00:37:07.080 because I'm stuck in this repetitive OCD loop. So what started off as an adaptive mechanism, scanning the

00:37:13.720 environment for threats, misfires, and becomes maladaptive. Well, I argue for the exact same thing

00:37:21.400 when it comes to empathy. Empathy is great when it targets the right people, and the right amount.

00:37:28.520 Nearly every single of the problems that we see in the West today stem from suicidal empathy, right?

00:37:38.120 All immigrants are equal. No, they're not. They might be equal under the law once they become citizens, 0.97

00:37:45.960 in that sense they're equal, but they're not equally likely to internalize the values of the host societies.

00:37:52.920 Why don't you ask the Dutch about their beautiful Muslim, uh, they've come in now in the hundreds of

00:37:59.800 thousands, right? The reflex is, we're all equal, we're all equally likely to get along. But the average

00:38:07.640 three-day-old pigeon knows that to be false. That's like arguing that your, your cat Fido is feline,

00:38:17.480 and the wild cat called the lion is also a feline. Therefore, since they're both called feline,

00:38:25.080 they're equally likely to want to cuddle with you. That's why I will jump off the jeep in my Namibia

00:38:31.080 safari to cuddle with the wild lion. If I did that, something would happen. I'd become dinner.

00:38:38.280 Therefore, the fact that I recognize that these two creatures called both felines are not equally

00:38:44.120 likely to eat me, doesn't make me bigoted. It makes me someone who navigates the statistical

00:38:49.800 regularities of life. But when you become, uh, infected with suicidal empathy, you no longer do

00:38:57.160 that. All immigrants are equally likely, but that's not true. Some immigrants come with values 1.00

00:39:04.520 that are perfectly antithetical to Western values. I mean, literally, you couldn't have come up with

00:39:11.400 greater animus to Western tradition than the values that those folks come with. That doesn't mean that

00:39:17.160 every one of those folks is a mean person. I know more people who are lovely from those cultures than

00:39:22.760 all of you will ever meet in your life. But does that ideology mesh well with the West? No, it doesn't.

00:39:30.280 The quicker the West finds that out, the quicker you'll be, but that's not happening. So that would be

00:39:35.000 one example. Uh, having young children have reading hour with twerking drag queens because we need to 1.00

00:39:45.000 celebrate their unique personhood seems very empathetic to the dragging twerking, the twerking 0.95

00:39:51.560 drag queen, but maybe five-year-old children should not be pedagogically trained how to read with

00:39:58.040 the twerking, right? So each of these mechanisms, whether they be domestic policies or foreign policies,

00:40:04.680 stem from infinite tolerance, infinite kindness with zero doorstops, right? Uh, no, uh, Guatemalan, 1.00

00:40:15.160 gang members do not deserve free healthcare as much as American vets who've become amputees because 0.87

00:40:22.520 they fought a war to keep you free. Uh, I'm more likely to jump in front of a bus to save my biological

00:40:30.520 children, as any of you are, by the way, than I am to save random children. Even though I would love to

00:40:36.360 save every child on earth, if you give me a choice through what's called the trolley problem,

00:40:41.240 who will I save? Every single human being on earth would say, I would save my children first.

00:40:47.720 That's called evolution. Suicidal empathy negates that. It says that if you have that reflex,

00:40:54.440 you're a bigot, you're a monster, you're callous. No, you're not. It's called evolutionary theory. And so 0.99

00:41:00.120 what the book does is it goes through this litany of problems we're seeing in the west and we're saying that the

00:41:05.640 quicker, and I say that the quicker you get rid of the suicidal empathy, the better we'll be off.

00:41:11.960 So as a three decade, uh, educator, uh, I'm going to go back to one of my very first questions about

00:41:20.600 teaching. Gad, I have to compliment it. The way you were able to take a complex issue, reconstruct it,

00:41:27.160 and then give examples is a master class in teaching. So, uh, I'll just point that out. You

00:41:32.920 know, one of, uh, before I ask my last question here, um, one of your followers did have a picture

00:41:39.400 of you recently in it, and it said, uh, uh, with your quote, it said, a society dies when it cares more

00:41:46.360 about exhibiting infinite tolerance and empathy than invoking its survival instinct. And, and so

00:41:54.520 that's exactly right. Yeah. So my last, my last question is, uh, more about, uh, Gad, just, uh, as a

00:42:01.560 man, um, and it really, in my view, reflects your life, particularly over the last several years. Um,

00:42:09.000 and it's more about you maybe as a husband, a father, and a friend to many.

00:42:12.360 Uh, I might not have to pronounce this exactly right, Gad, but it's a Hebrew phrase called

00:42:18.440 which means it's translated as be strong and resolute or be strong and courageous. And I think

00:42:29.640 it has served as a powerful source of resilience for the Jewish community for, for years. Its origins

00:42:36.760 are found in the Torah where Moses repeatedly exhorts Joshua and the Israelites with these words as

00:42:42.200 they prepare to enter the promised land, et cetera. I can't imagine what it would be like

00:42:48.040 to walk on a campus home for three decades of your life and need to have security to get you to your

00:42:54.760 office to do your work. Uh, I can't imagine being invited to London and needing security to get you

00:43:01.400 into the house of Lords. And so, uh, you could have easily fallen in line with most people, put your head

00:43:07.720 down, go about your work, you know, collect your pension. And you haven't done that. You have, um,

00:43:12.680 practiced just that from maths every day, it seems to me. Can you just talk about where that really,

00:43:19.480 that courage comes from? Thank you for the kind words. Um, you know, one of the things that evolution

00:43:26.600 does is it for a sexually reproducing species is it takes a male and a female, puts them together and 0.84

00:43:33.240 the random shuffling of genes results in a unique individual. So part of that courage stems from just

00:43:42.520 my person. Uh, but if I can sort of crystallize why I do what I do. So I always argue that I am my worst

00:43:55.800 possible critic, right? I don't care about what some person says on, on social media, because if I did,

00:44:02.840 I would have wilted away. I mean, I get millions of, you know, horrible stuff said about it. Uh,

00:44:10.840 by being my worst critic, I then set my exacting standards of conduct to be really high, meaning

00:44:20.280 that when I go to bed at night and I put my head on the pillow, in order for me to not have

00:44:28.200 bouts of insomnia and having been fraudulent, I need to feel that I never equivocated

00:44:36.440 anything that I wanted to say. I need to feel as though when I saw truth being raped in the alley,

00:44:47.240 I was the guy who stood, right? When, when, when you hear a woman being, uh, accosted by some nasty 0.97

00:44:53.880 guys in an alley, there are two types of guys. There are those who pretend they didn't hear

00:44:59.240 and walk away because I don't want to get into, you know, or there are those who say,

00:45:04.120 hey, this look, this looks like this lady needs help. Well, truth matters. Men do not menstruate. 1.00

00:45:13.160 Men do not bear children. It pisses me off when people say things like that. I feel physically

00:45:20.360 ill that human beings can be so disingenuous. And therefore, I speak out because I simply

00:45:27.560 can't bear the other possibility of cowering. Because then, one of the reasons I think that

00:45:34.440 people resonate well with me is because I'm very authentic. And I'm authentic because I'm,

00:45:39.320 I have a strong sense of self, right? I may not be a tall guy, but I'm very tall. I walk tall. And, uh,

00:45:47.640 that's just the unique combination of, of my genes. I simply can't equivocate my speech. One of the

00:45:53.320 universities, by the way, that was very keen on hiring me and was throwing huge wads of money at

00:46:00.280 me. I felt that their founder was saying, we love everything that you do, you say I do. But

00:46:06.760 the second that I heard him say, but, I said, I'm out of here. Because I, and by the way, I'm not,

00:46:15.080 I'm not saying this because this is a Northwood event. One of the things that I loved in my one

00:46:19.800 year at Northwood is that everybody is on exactly the same train. I never felt that anybody wanted me

00:46:27.080 to equivocate a millimeter of anything. On the contrary, it was, thank you, speak out. And so,

00:46:33.800 to our earlier question, if any of you have children that are looking for a school, whether it be them

00:46:40.200 going to Northwood or some other school, you want them to be at places where that ethos is enmeshed

00:46:46.120 within the DNA of the institution. So, I speak out. One of the fundamental premises of any university is

00:46:53.080 to seek the truth. And that's why we exist. And so, it ties in nicely to, you know, a full career.

00:46:59.960 Uh, questions that you might have on your mind, uh, while we have a few more minutes? Anything?

00:47:06.920 Yes, Jim?

00:47:08.360 I think, yes. I'll be the last one.

00:47:10.440 I have lots of questions.

00:47:13.240 Questions, not monologues, yes?

00:47:18.520 Not a monologue.

00:47:21.480 And it's actually a question I don't know the answer to, so I'm curious what you have to say.

00:47:28.600 So, when you talk about the parasitic mind, you talk about how it affects people with their

00:47:34.600 boteness and they lose rationality. Does it happen on the right also? And if it doesn't,

00:47:40.280 why would it only happen on the left?

00:47:42.360 Yes, that's a great question. I actually addressed that question in the first chapter of the

00:47:46.200 parasitic mind. Uh, because I was preempting the possibility that someone would ask this.

00:47:51.320 Because it turns out that all of the parasitic ideas that I critique in the book stem from the left.

00:47:59.640 But that's because academia is completely monopolized by the left.

00:48:05.880 Therefore, and I mean, it's in the order of 80 to 1, 130 to 1, 16 to 1.

00:48:13.080 It's not 1.2 to 1, right? And so, the fact that I focus on leftist parasitic ideas in no way

00:48:22.200 implies to your point that people on the right could not be parasitized.

00:48:26.760 And let me give a specific example that speaks to that point using my own scientific research.

00:48:34.760 Evolution is much more likely to be resisted by people on the right.

00:48:41.480 Evolution in general, as the mechanism for how species come about.

00:48:47.000 Evolutionary psychology, which is the application of evolution to the study of the human mind,

00:48:54.440 is much more likely to be resisted by people on the left.

00:48:58.840 So, this is a perfect example how, depending on whether you're talking about evolution or evolutionary

00:49:04.360 psychology, it's either people on the right that are parasitized or people on the left.

00:49:08.760 So, no, the architecture of the human mind is not such that only people of one persuasion could be

00:49:15.960 parasitized. But when it comes to the university ecosystem, yes, almost all parasitic ideas,

00:49:22.040 all parasitic ideas are from the left.

00:49:25.720 So, I'm just looking at the clock. Other people have some commitments.

00:49:29.240 We're together for another five days.

00:49:33.160 That you might, you know, pull GAD a science aid.

00:49:36.440 I've been able to sleep on this. I've got a question.

00:49:38.840 I would encourage you to do that and with that, GAD, this was fabulous.

00:49:46.360 And I can't thank you enough to hear about it.

00:49:52.040 So, we have our resident photographer.

00:49:58.360 Oh, yes.

00:49:58.760 Do you have your Northwood vest?

00:49:59.880 Yes, I do. We brought it.

00:50:01.240 Do you want to see that?

00:50:01.880 So, to our guest, thank you.

00:50:02.840 Are you okay?

00:50:04.040 Yes, and we're just going to take a great photo to exclude you.

00:50:07.480 I think that's yours.

00:50:08.360 I guess we are.

00:50:10.200 GAD gave us permission to exclude.

00:50:14.280 Did you want us to go outside?

00:50:15.720 We want to go outside.

00:50:16.600 Okay, yeah.

00:50:17.400 So, do we need our jacket?

00:50:18.680 Sure.

00:50:19.400 We can leave anything in here until we come back.

00:50:22.280 Yep.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - July 24, 2025

An Evening with Dr. Gad Saad on an Alaskan Cruise - Many Topics Covered! (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_851)

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