An Evening with Dr. Gad Saad on an Alaskan Cruise - Many Topics Covered! (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_851)
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Summary
In this episode, we take a peek behind the curtain of the world s most famous social media accounts and get to know a little about the man behind it all, author and podcaster Gad Chaudhuri. We talk about his life, his love of the beautiful game, and why he thinks Lionel Messi is the greatest soccer player of all time.
Transcript
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So many of you know, Gad has, on all his platforms, millions of followers, and millions and millions
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and millions of views of the things that he's done through his books and his podcasts and
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his posts. And I thought, well, what if we tonight kept this really light and just were able to
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get into Gad's mind, look behind the curtain just a little bit, and pull things from his
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social media postings and have him speak about those things. And so that's what we thought
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we would do. Kristen was very helpful as well. We put some questions together. And we're going
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to throw a lob ball question, first of all, because when you do see, in fact, I think one
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of your most recent postings, was that in California where you were, you were juggling?
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Yeah. So besides his amazing wife, Annie, who's really kept discreet in the social media postings,
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and there are two kids who he does, he can explain his own reasons for that. But privacy
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is important. Besides those three very, very important people to his life, it seems to me
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the next important one is soccer. And he was a great soccerer. He played a lot of soccer
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in his youth. And in 2023, a young man by the name of Messi came to Miami. And recently, Gad
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and Annie, I think, well, you were there for sure when he scored two goals. And so I said,
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I thought, that's where I would like to start is, so where does this love of the beautiful
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game come from? And I've heard elements of it before, Gad, but maybe we could just start
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Well, thank you all for being here. Thank you for having me. I was mentioning to Tice yesterday
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that my childhood hero growing up in Lebanon was Johan Cruyff, who was the top Dutch player at the
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time. The 1974 Dutch team was a very stylish team. They played a very different football,
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which you call soccer here. And so you grew up in Lebanon or pretty much anywhere in the world,
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soccer is sort of a religion. So I grew up, played a lot of soccer, was certainly heading to potentially
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a professional career. I'd always been interested in only doing two things in my life, playing
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soccer, becoming an academic. It looks like the second one worked out really well. The first
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one, there were some injuries that unfortunately put on some roadblocks. So I've seen all, I'm
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old enough to have seen pretty much all of the great soccer players, Cruyff, Pele. I was
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very young with Pele. Maradona, Zidane, all of those combined do not add up to being nearly
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as good as Lionel Messi is. So on the first hand, I love him just because I love soccer.
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And the things that he does on the field is pure, you know, poetry. He's just absolutely
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unbelievable. But I think the second reason why I so admire him is perhaps as important as
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his stratospheric talent as a soccer player is how he conducts himself as an individual.
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He has every reason in the world to have a chip on his shoulder, to be lacking in humility.
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He certainly deserves it. He's probably the most famous person in the world. And yet when
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you see him, he's just a regular guy. He never walks away from shaking someone's hand. He never
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fakes injuries. You know, in soccer, one of the things that's really unattractive is you're
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always diving to try to convince the ref to, you know, to call a penalty for you. And so he's very
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honorable. He's a, he's been a family man his whole life. He's been with the same girl since
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they first met, I think he was nine years old, eight or nine years old in Rosario in a small
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town in Argentina. So he embodies all of the noble qualities that we all aspire to be. And he happens
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to also, as my wife always says, if I hear someone crying like a little girl in the house, it's probably
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my husband watching Messi. So for all of those reasons, I love him. And I should just mention
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that two years ago, one of the beautiful things about being in the public eye, the way that I am,
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is you get to meet people that you otherwise might have never intersected with. So two years ago,
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I received an email. I don't have the exact words, I'm paraphrasing. Dear Professor Saad,
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my name is Jorge Mas. I'm the majority owner of Inter Miami. Inter Miami is the team that he plays for
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now. I know of your love of Lionel Messi. So anytime that you'd like, come down up, you know,
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you'll be my guest, you could meet him and so on. And so two years ago, I went down. And so
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be out there, there are rewards that come your way. So that's, that's why I love Lionel Messi.
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And when you say he's the most famous, I didn't know how famous he was. He is the number one
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followed person on social media in North America, half a billion people, followers,
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unbelievable. But I mean, even that doesn't really capture it. I mean, the World Cup final
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is, I think, watched by half of humanity. So you, I can't imagine you could go to any small town in
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Pakistan or Africa where if you said Lionel Messi, people would know, I mean, people might know
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Elon Musk or not know Elon Musk. People might know Donald Trump or not know Donald Trump,
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but no one doesn't know Lionel Messi. Yeah. And yet he's just a regular guy. Yeah. Amazing. So
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let's switch to another love of yours. You and I have spoken about this as we get a little older,
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health is important to us. So food is another thing that you do a lot of posting on and
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it could be you're at a restaurant. It could be here. It could be Shabbat. It could be, you know,
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some celebration like that. Just share where that comes from. I know, uh, Kirsten and you had some
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conversations about the, about the prep, prepare and yeah, yeah. Well, uh, my wife, and it's not just
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because she's here, she's a unbelievable cook. Uh, and actually a few years ago, she had begun a
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uh, chat, a YouTube channel where, I mean, you'd never see her face, but I would just film her
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making the food and she would explain all the Lebanese food precisely because we don't want to
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put her identity out there. Yeah. Yeah. And the, the channel, I'm, I'm speaking in the past tense
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because she, she only did about 10 episodes. It was really going well, but then she decided,
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I don't want to do this anymore. The channel was called Food Satisfaction, S-A-A-D. And so we,
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we never come, we never, uh, run out of, uh, puns with the name. My, my, my channel's called The Sad Truth,
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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,
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uh, during COVID, when COVID started, I thought, okay, well, let's turn this dreadful situation into
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something positive. I was much, much heavier. I, you know, I'd been a, uh, a very competitive soccer
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player in my youth, but then progressively over the years, over the next 30 years, I put on an unhealthy
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amount of weight. And so I used the COVID lockdown to lose, uh, at my most, I had lost 86 pounds.
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Uh, and now I think I've put on about 10, 10 of those yesterday. If anybody saw, if any of you
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saw me looking upset, uh, we had gone to the gala dinner and I wore another jacket that didn't look
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as though it was fitting as nicely on me. And that really sent me into a spiral of anger. Uh, but,
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but to your point, uh, I lost 86 pounds and I did it. Not that any of you here looking at you,
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none of you need to lose weight, but, uh, maybe some of your family members or friends need to use
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those. First, I, my wife would keep track of every single calorie that went into my mouth
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so that by the end of the day, she could tell me, you know, you've eaten 1542 calories,
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because she uses an app. And so I would try to never exceed about 1500 calories. And then I would
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try to always do at least 15,000 steps, typically 15,000 to 20,000. Do that for 18 months and suddenly
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you become very spelt. Yeah. Um, when I first met Gad, he was on campus and, um, he said,
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Ken, I need to get my step. I never go right for, for years now, right? Yeah. It's about five years,
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five years, never less than 10,000. And he said, how far to go from the campus downtown? I said,
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maybe 25 minutes or a half hour. And then I did some work. I was in the office and I drove downtown and,
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uh, and Gad still wasn't there. Uh, and then, uh, so probably like an hour and 10 or something.
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Yeah, you slightly underestimated. Yeah, I know, I know. And then Mariela and I were walking downtown
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and, um, uh, I, I, I was out about 45 minutes. I was halfway there and I thought, uh, oh, this Gad
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was correct. But I, it's admirable Gad. Thank you. Yeah, really, really good. So let's shift to a little
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bit more serious now. So some of you may not know that, um, uh, Gad taught a course on campus this
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year. Uh, worked again with Kristen in the academic group and, um, and it was wrapped around the
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parasitic mind is, is, look, that book, by the way, with, uh, about to sign in India, I believe I read.
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And the Persian rights. And the Persian rights. I think this will make almost 30 foreign rights.
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I mean, unbelievable, unbelievable success. And so Gad, uh, designed a course just for our students.
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And, um, and look, we have great faculty. We have very good faculty. Um, but I had several students
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come up to me. I know Kristen happened the same thing because a couple of those students, we, uh,
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are children of people who work with us. And they said that it was the best course they ever had
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at Northwood. And so my question before we get too far into, you know, academia is, um, the, the art of
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being a professor is, um, something that is very difficult. I mean, most people think it's easy,
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but you seem to have mastered world-class researcher, the service, you know, our research service and
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teaching, and, and you add on to that this, um, craft that you've developed to be what our students
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have said, a fantastic teacher. Just talk a little bit about that. That's very sweet. Actually, when I
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was at the last event in Midland, one of the students at the President's Freedom Celebration,
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he gave me a card and it, it had me tearing up, which, uh, yeah, it was, I mean, I couldn't, the words
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were really beautiful. Uh, look, I try to, uh, of course, teach the material, but then I always think,
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what would be some exercises, pedagogic exercises that I could give that can really drive the content
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home? And so for this course, which was the first time I was teaching it, based on the person at
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Vine, I came up with four assignments that they had to do, which I'll briefly mention here. Uh, the,
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so the, for those of you who don't know the parasitic mind, just to put very quickly, is the idea that
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there are certain dreadful ideas, idea pathogens, parasitic ideas that can cause people to completely,
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uh, lose their capacity to, to reason, right? And so it's a, it's, it uses a metaphor of a neural
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parasite in the animal kingdom, okay? And so what the book does is it traces where these parasitic
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ideas come from. They all come from university campuses. And then towards the end of the book,
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I offer a mind vaccine. How could you inoculate yourself against these parasites? And so the four
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assignments that I asked the students to do, the, the first assignment was to identify in the
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literature a scientific study that would be considered forbidden knowledge. Because regrettably,
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now in academia, what you have is certain disciplines, certain topics that are taboo to study.
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Do not study race differences. Do not study any research that might link psychiatric conditions
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to transgenderism. Uh, don't study sex differences. Or if you study sex differences,
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if women are shown to be superior than men on a task, then go ahead and publish it. But God forbid,
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if it, if the results show that men are superior on that task than women, then file those results that
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don't ever show it, because then you are a misogynist patriarchal pain. And so what I asked the
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students to do is to identify a study that would be construed as for an example of forbidden knowledge,
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and why it was important to not succumb to that reflex, why it was important for the researchers to
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actually do that study. So there they have to go into the literature and actually think about what
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would constitute forbidden knowledge. The second assignment, I always also try to link it to
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personal things in their lives. I said, okay, well, we're talking about wokeism. We're talking about
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parasitic ideas. Give me three examples from your personal or professional lives where you have faced
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some woke situation, and how did you handle it? And so now they have to go and try to think about,
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you know, that time when I applied for a job, and they asked me what my gender identity was,
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and how did I, and so on. So that was the second assignment. The third assignment, so in chapter
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eight of the parasitic mind, I implore people to activate their inner honey badger. And for those of
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you who don't know what that is referring to, the honey badger has been ranked as the most ferocious
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animal in the animal kingdom. It's the size of a small dog, yet it is so fierce and ferocious that
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when it comes across adult lions, the adult lions will move aside and say, sorry, sir,
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I didn't mean to block you. Why? Because it is truly fierce. So when I ask people to activate
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their inner honey badger, I'm not imploring them to be physically violent. I'm saying, look, if you have
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a set of principles that you believe in, don't cower. You know, don't suck your thumb in a fetal
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position. Stand up and defend your principles. Be a honey badger. And so what I asked them to do is,
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I asked them to go through the very large catalog of conversations I've had on my show
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with many honey badgers. I listed about a hundred of them that run the gamut. It could be, for example,
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the current head of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharia, who was getting death threats at Stanford and people
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were trying to revoke his tenure when he was arguing that maybe the COVID policies were maybe draconian
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and misplaced. It could be people who are criticizing Islam while living in the Middle East. Now that's a
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real honey badger if you understand the risks that you take for doing that. And so I asked people to go
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through the catalog, identify one honey badger and tell us about it. So now they have to kind of,
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again, link it to their lives and why that person motivated them. And then the fourth assignment,
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I asked them to develop a research question and a set of hypotheses that are within the general rubric
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of the parasitic mind. So what would be a, so just to give you an example of a study that I was doing with
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one of my graduate students, we were looking at whether your morphology can be predictive of the type
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of political positions that you hold. And actually there is some research, which I discussed in the
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parasitic mind, that shows that a man's physical formidability correlates to their political positions.
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So if I am very physically strong, I'm less likely to support policies of egalitarianism.
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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
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say socialism is really lovely and it's kind and it's unfair for some people to be, you know, make more money
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than others and so on. And so that's an example of my research based on my person. So now they have to
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go out there and come up with their own ideas. So I think for all of these reasons, it turns out that
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I think it resonated with them. Yeah, well, it sure did. And, you know, the relevance and tying it back to
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themselves based in research and really good. I wish I took a course. So I'm going to stick with education
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here. And I think it's somebody's, oh, yeah, you know, it's me. Yeah. Who else? Okay, so I like I just
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begs the question, did any of the responses or the what they came back with the kids, were you like,
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wow, I hadn't thought about that? I mean, did it make you any of their responses make you think
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about it? I mean, were you surprised? I mean, honestly, it wasn't wow, I never thought it was more
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there. Look, being a professor for 31 years in that ecosystem, I'm constantly surrounded by
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parasitized woke imbeciles, right? And so to have students at Northwood, none of whom seem to be
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parasitized. Right. All of whom were like, yes, yes, yes. Right. In a sense, that surprised me,
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because I can just sit down with normal, rational students. And I don't mean to imply that all of
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the students are wokesters. The reality is most are not. Right. But you always have some students
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in a 30-year career that are going to be problematic in that sense. So I think what surprised me in an
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incredibly positive sense is that just how put together they were. They were engaged, they were
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serious, they were fun, they were polite, they were not woke. And so more than anything, that's what I
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took away from my interaction with them. Good question, thank you. So we're going to stick with
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education. It's not a surprise, Gad, that you have concerns with the academy, right, and what's
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happening on university campuses. And I'll talk about this a little bit on, on Wednesday, that this
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is not new. This has been going on for a long, a long time. But recently on X, you posted this.
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I want you to stop and think about this for a moment. All of your children are being educated by academics.
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95 to 99% of whom think that Kamala Harris would have been a far superior president than Donald Trump.
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These academics have used their minds to conclude that Harris better encapsulates the values of the
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United States. And you ended by saying, choose your universities wisely. And this caught the post of
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many, many people, including Elon Musk, and a friend of yours. And Mr. Musk responded, the level of
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propaganda at elite universities would make North Korea jealous. Can you share just a little bit more
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with us when you suggest your readers, people need to start to choose their universities wisely?
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I know you've all gone to university, but you don't know how bad it is in there.
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Living day to day within an academic setting, it's absolute, and part of why I am so irreverent
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to all of this nonsense, because of the unique characteristics of my personality, I simply can't
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stomach the nonsense that I see. I can't sit at a departmental meeting where I'm unsure whether
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it's a bunch of adults called professors or whether we're in a kindergarten class. So the infantilization,
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and I hate to say it, and I hope some of the ladies here are not going to be upset, but I'm not,
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I'm hardly the first to say this, many female academics who are honey badgers are saying that
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of the feminization of academia is absolute, right? How are you all doing? How's everybody doing?
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Don't talk down to me. Let's, let's get the department going and let's move on, right? And so,
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so it's part an attack on meritocracy, right? Where we should all be equal. So for example, I used to,
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I had a departmental chair who had asked all of this. She's no longer a departmental chair.
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She had asked all the professors, whenever they had an accolade, to share it, any accolade,
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so that then we could put it up on the departmental page for obvious reasons. And so I took her to task
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and I started sharing mine. She writes back to me privately. She goes, well, could you not share
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all of the accolades because then that other people are not going to feel good about it. So I had to
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temper my achievements because someone who hasn't published since Baruch Spinoza was around
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might get offended because, you know, they're not doing any research. So tone it down. And so,
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so it's not just the woke stuff that's a problem in academia. It's this, it's the attack on meritocracy.
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It's all of that stuff. And so the, the gist of that, uh, email was exactly that. Now,
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the other thing that I hate about academics is that, I mean, tenure exists precisely to ensure
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that if you are a coward who's otherwise too afraid to speak, well, we've given you now institutional
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protection to be able to speak. And yet there is no creature that is as, uh, cowardly as the academic.
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It doesn't exist. And this is why I refer to them, I hope you don't mind me saying this, as the
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invertebrate gastrati because they don't have a spine and they don't have any testicular fortune.
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And so I would love for there to be a, a potion that academics could take where they can have a
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sense of courage, right? We, we tend to choose our Navy SEALs based on having certain attributes that we
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admire, courage, physical bravery, honor, integrity. Well, I'd like to think that our intellectual Navy
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SEALs would possess those traits. They don't. Now they could be wonderful hyper-specialists, right?
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Within their very small areas of concentration, they're, they have a lot to say. But once you ask
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them to step out of that lane, uh, they simply are not willing to weigh in. Now, I will receive,
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I mean, literally thousands and thousands of emails from professors. And, and I think you guys have
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probably, some of you have heard me mention this before. I mean, I, it literally is as if it was
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ChatGPT that wrote it. It's, Dear Professor Saad, a bunch of compliments, and then the last sentence is
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always, you know, if you decide to read this letter on your show, please don't include my name,
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right? So not only are they not courageous enough to be the ones to stand up and speak,
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but they're not even willing to stand next to the one who stands up and, and speaks.
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We can't have that. And so when I tell people choose your schools carefully, choose a place that
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hopefully embodies many of the virtues that I'm talking about. One of the, from an administrator's
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point of view that I can't understand with that is, um, CADS, uh, institution back in Canada,
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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
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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
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in Michigan, a Canadian guy from Montreal, uh, Jordan Peterson, uh, Canadian guy from Toronto and
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Gad Saad from, uh, from Montreal. Those to me, of all the, the academics that I think are high profile,
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one having passed away a couple of years ago, I just can't understand why they would not take
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advantage of that, but that's, yeah. But they, not only they, they don't take advantage of my profile,
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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.
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
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,
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
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,
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
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
00:35:54.920
world with empathy lacking. Nothing could be further from the truth. Empathy is wonderful,
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,
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
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
00:39:45.000
celebrate their unique personhood seems very empathetic to the dragging twerking, the twerking
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,
00:40:15.160
gang members do not deserve free healthcare as much as American vets who've become amputees because
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
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
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
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.
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?
00:47:21.480
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,
00:47:42.360
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,
00:49:25.720
So, I'm just looking at the clock. Other people have some commitments.
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.
00:50:04.040
Yes, and we're just going to take a great photo to exclude you.
00:50:19.400
We can leave anything in here until we come back.