Biden has CREATED A DANGEROUS WORLD ｜ Dr. Gad Saad (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_683)
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Summary
Dr. Saad Godstad is a professor, a writer, an author, a deep thinker, and someone who gets pulled into conversations that he may or may not want to talk about. Dr. Godstad joins me to discuss the attack on Israel, the disappearance of Jews in the Middle East, and why there are almost no Jews left in the region.
Transcript
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All right. I have a great show for you today. I have a distinguished professor that I am going
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to be going over some of the biggest stories in the news and internationally. Dr. Godstad,
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thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. Great to be with you.
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So let me give some background to my audience. I've seen you several times on the Joe Rogan
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experience. I assure you we're not going to go three hours, but Professor Saad is a professor,
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a writer, an author, a deep thinker, and someone who gets pulled into conversations that he may or
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may not want to talk about. But I appreciate you coming on today. The first thing that I wanted to
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go over with you is you've spoken openly about Israel, Palestine, over the years, the disappearance
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of Jews and Christians from Europe, Turkey, parts of Africa. I've never been to the Middle East or
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Israel, so I admit I don't fully understand the war that's going on in this region. But let's start
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with the attack on Israel on October 7th. What are your thoughts on that attack?
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Well, of course, it was a level of barbarity that's difficult for most people to comprehend.
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Now, even for someone like me who hails from the Middle East, for your viewers and listeners who
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may not know my background, I was part of the very small dwindling community of Lebanese Jews
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that had steadfastly remained in Lebanon in the 70s, even though, you know, the writing was somewhat
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on the wall, that it was probably not a viable long-term future for Jews to be in the Middle East.
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But my family was well entrenched in Lebanese society, and then the Civil War broke out in 1975.
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It became impossible to be Jewish in Lebanon, and most wars are judged against the brutality
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of the Lebanese Civil War because that war was, it pitted neighbor against neighbor. People who lived
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next to each other for years, for decades, suddenly became enemies because you're of the wrong religion,
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because you're not of the right religious heritage. And being Jewish, there weren't too many people
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who were going to look fondly upon you because, again, as you pointed out in your introduction,
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religious minorities don't typically end up faring too well in lands that are ruled by Islam. Now,
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in Lebanon, it used to be at one point a largely Christian nation, about two-thirds Christian. Today,
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it's flipped. It's now a Muslim majority. There are 56 countries that are part of the IOC, the Islamic
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Organization of Cooperation, or I can't remember what the acronym is. It's a cabal of 56 Islamic nations.
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All those nations once did not have a single Muslim in them. And then, bat your eyes, and then suddenly
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they're 90% Islamic, 99% Islamic. So what happened to the Christians in Iraq? What happened to the
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Christians in Syria? What happened to the Coptic Christians in Egypt? Each of those countries used to
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be majority Christian. And, of course, there were huge Jewish populations all over the Middle East
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before Christianity existed, before Islam existed. And now there are almost no Jews left. So in that
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grand existential sense, it doesn't surprise me that there was an attack on October 7th. What perhaps,
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even for someone with my background, surprises me is the level of depravity.
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But frankly, this is exactly what I've been warning people for decades, which is that this has nothing
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to do with contested land. It's not because we want to draw the land here, but you want to draw
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there. It's not a fight on occupation. The Jews cannot exist in Arabia. It is an affront to Islam in general
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that Jews have sovereignty. So Islam can tolerate you as long as you are a dimmi. A dimmi is an Arabic
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word. It's a Quranic concept, which basically means that when Islam comes in and rules a land,
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if you are part of what's called people of the book, so Christians and Jews, we may not force you to
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convert. We may not chop off your head. We may tolerate your existence, but you have to know
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your place. And it's not even a second class citizen. It's a third class citizen. You pay a
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jizya, which is a tax, and you're constantly reminded of your status as a lesser than, right? And so
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that's the reality in the Middle East. And this is why we had to leave Lebanon. That's why there are no
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longer any Jews in Yemen or in Saudi Arabia or in Algeria or in Libya. There are very, very few
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number of Jews in the order of maybe 2,000 in Morocco, and there's about 20,000 Jews in Iran.
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But almost in the rest of the Middle East, you have no Jews left. And so what happened on October 7
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is only surprising in the extent to which there was depravity, but it's not surprising in the sense
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that we will have peace in the Middle East once we eradicate those pesky Jews. I'm speaking, of
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course, from the perspective of the Palestinians. Yes. Okay. I felt like on October 8th, the entire
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world was on Israel's side. And within a couple of weeks, it's like they started losing the PR war.
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And all of a sudden, it was like everybody was on Palestine's side, suddenly calling for the
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eradication of all of the Jews, shutting down Israel. Did that move quickly in your mind? For me,
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it happened very quickly. All of a sudden, I saw a different America than what I had seen on October 6th,
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where, you know, people were pretty supportive of the Jews. Maybe, you know, the Hasidic Jews in New
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York, oh, we don't fully understand them. They keep to themselves, we keep to ourselves. But for the
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most part, this vitriol towards the Jewish state and the Jewish people, that really caught me off guard.
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Yes. Well, I think you're being generous in saying that it took a couple of weeks for
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public opinion to switch shift against the Jews and Israel. As a matter of fact, there were protests
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before Israel had fired a single gun in retaliation. There was already sort of preemptive protest. There
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was a genocide taking place before a gun was fired. And so, yes, you are right that even for someone
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with my background, it took me a bit by surprise at the vitriol. What's interesting is that the
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vitriol, I'm going to now focus it on me, that I've received as a Lebanese Jew and as a professor
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who's very much in the public eye, it was coming at me from all angles. So, of course, you had the
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Islamic-based Jew hatred, right? So, it's the guy that has, you know, some Islamic thing in his
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ex-bio and his name is Muhammad Ahmad. He's sending me, you know, what they're going to do to me when
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they rule and what they're going to do to the Jews. But you also had the we-will-not-be-replaced
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crowd. So, it's sort of the ultra-right-wing neo-Nazi types who were also sending me the Jew
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hatred. And then to complete the trifecta of Jew hatred cocktail, you had the progressive academic
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leftist types who also were sending me all the hate, right? You're part of the cabal of Zionists,
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you're a baby killer. And so, there was nowhere I can turn where I wasn't going to be, you know,
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facing a tsunami of Jew hatred. And incidentally, I've repeated over and over, you said you've seen
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me on Joe Rogan, I've repeated it on Joe Rogan that, of course, every single innocent life that is lost,
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whether it be Palestinian or Israeli or anybody, is a tragedy by definition. An innocent life is an
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innocent life. And so, my message is simply that I defend the right of Jews to exist. I defend the
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right of my extended family. I have family all over Israel. It wasn't pretty on October 8th for me to
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be calling everybody to make sure that they weren't at the music festival. But the mere fact that I cared
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that my family wasn't exterminated demonstrated that I was a Zionist baby killer, right? And so, it is
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a level of debauchery, of existential debauchery that's very, very difficult to handle. And we may
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think that this problem will eventually go away, but the cat's out of the bag. When you have 30, 40,
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50 years of university education that teaches you the dichotomy of the Jews have no ancestral ties to
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that land. They had actually, prior to 1948, lived in perfect Kumbaya with their noble, peaceful
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Palestinian brothers and sisters until some white-looking Zionists from Eastern and Central
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Europe came in and eradicated the Palestinians. And therefore, the Jew is the oppressor. He is the
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colonialist. The noble, brown Palestinians are lovely, kind, tolerant people. When you're taught that,
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at every single political science department, at every university in the West, well, then it's not
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surprising that you're going to have the campus protests that you have. So, there you go.
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Okay. I wanted to, I actually do want to hit on those, but something you wrote, and I'm paraphrasing
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because I went back and I couldn't find it, but it essentially came across as a warning to the West.
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You had said or tweeted that Islam or the Muslim world sees the West as a woman ready to be mounted.
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What, what, what, I have a feeling what you mean by that, but since you're here with me, what,
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So, look, Arabic is a very flowery language and a very poetic language and a very vivid language so
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that even if you're saying niceties. So, if men are interacting with each other, I go to a butcher
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shop, let's say in an Arabic context, the butcher will look at me and say, oh, what can I get your
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beautiful eyes? This is not a homo erotic moment. It's just, it's a very flowery way. Oh, my heart,
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what can I get for you, right? So, that's the positive side of the flowery language. But there's also,
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you know, Arabic societies are based on honor and shame. They're very much of a militaristic,
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conquering kind of warrior-like mentality. And so, a lot of expressions in Arabic reflect that
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reality so that I've often been told that that's what you're referring to. I've often been told when
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I speak to, Arabic is my mother tongue, having, you know, grown up in Lebanon. So, this is,
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this didn't happen now because now typically people will recognize me and they won't take
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liberties in saying those things to me. But say, 20, 25 years ago when I would have been less known
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and I'm speaking to people in Arabic, then they would usually say to me that the West is a woman
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to be mounted, right? So, try to imagine what the imagery means, right? It's to be conquered. It's to
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be vanquished. It's to be effed, right? Because every single virtue that in the West is viewed as a
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laudable virtue, compassion, kindness, empathy, generosity, magnanimity, to the mind of the people
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who wish to conquer you, each of those virtues is viewed as weakness, weakness, weakness, weakness,
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and weakness. Therefore, you have what I wrote in an article recently, you have what I refer to as
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cultural blindness, right? But when we typically think about two people talking to each other,
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if I speak Arabic and only Arabic and you speak English and only English, we're going to have a
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hard time understanding each other because we don't have a shared language. But that's
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not the only place where our communication breaks down. There are more subtle ways in which our
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communication breaks down, not by virtue of not speaking the same language, but by virtue of not
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having an intersection in our Venn diagrams in terms of what do we ascribe to particular values.
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I view those values as laudable, you view them as weakness, so we're going to speak over each other.
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There's going to be no intersection in our shared meaning. That's precisely why Western leaders
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consistently make policy decisions that for someone like me who comes from the Middle East,
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I will say, are you insane? Do you not understand what's happening? That's precisely because you have
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cultural blindness. And so that example of the West is the woman to be mounted is referring to that
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conquering mindset. Okay. Wow. That's really interesting. So almost using what we consider
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a virtue against us to get their way. For example, I read a lot of international news and I'm seeing
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what from my perspective looks like Europe being taken over by illegal immigrants that are coming in
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and the taxpayers are being abused in order to take care of the newly arrived people or as Biden would
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call them newcomers, right? And so it's like being conquered by the people that your government
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forces tax money out of you to take care of. I'm seeing this in England. I'm seeing this in France,
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Holland, Brussels. I'm starting to see it here in the United States, New York, for example.
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You've got a lot of angry New Yorkers that are saying, wait a minute, you're getting more benefits
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as an illegal immigrant who's been here for five minutes than me having lived here and paid taxes
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and worked within a system for 70 years. It's been interesting to report on and watch.
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Right. So I'll make two points regarding what you just said. Number one, about 30 plus years ago,
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various Islamists and Muslim Brotherhood guys and so on were very open about how they were going to
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conquer the West or to use the earlier euphemism, how they're going to mount the West in the way that
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you mount a woman, if you forgive the vulgarity. They said, number one, we're going to conquer the West
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through the womb of our women, meaning they're going to outbreed you. Right. So in the West,
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not just the West, even in some Far East societies that share some of our values, you don't even get
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the fertility rate that is necessary for the replacement rate, which is roughly around 2.17.
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Right. So if one society is producing six children and the other one is producing 1.3
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children, it doesn't take a fancy demographer to tell you how long it will take before some of those
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dynamics change. Demography is truly destiny. So number one, remember, is we're going to conquer
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the West through the womb of our women. Number two, we're going to conquer the West, to your point
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about the newcomers. We're going to conquer the West through hijra. Hijra is the Arabic word for
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migration. Right. Number two, number three, we're going to conquer the West by using your miserable
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laws and freedoms against you. Right. I mean, they're telling you that and you go, la, la, la. I don't
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want to hear it. So that's point one. So exactly to your point. Number two, in my forthcoming book,
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which I haven't, it's not out yet, but I'm in the process of, you know, working on it. This book is
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called Suicidal Empathy. And it basically references the fact that empathy as an emotion
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makes perfect evolutionary sense for us to have that emotion. They are, in other words, our emotional
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system, envy, love, jealousy, empathy, all of generosity, all of these emotional systems have
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evolved because they solve an important evolutionary problem. But here's the big but. But if empathy
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becomes hyperactive or if empathy is directed to the wrong target, then it becomes a maladaptive
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emotion. Right. So if I care more about the newcomer than I care about the American vet,
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that's not good. If I care more about the crystal meth homeless guy who's shooting up in the children's
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park and fornicating and defecating, and I care more about the homeless guy than about taxpayer and
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their children having free access to the public park, that's not empathetic. If I care more about
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the felon who's previously been arrested 67 times, well, let's give him a 68th chance because
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maybe the 68th time he'll turn it around. It's not really nice for us to put him in the penal system
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because, you know, he was born of a darker skin and therefore societies already turned him into a
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victim. And we shouldn't turn him into more of a victim by putting him in prison. And therefore,
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that's why we have to give him a 68th chance after he's been arrested. All of those are exactly
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manifestations of what I call suicidal empathy. So what has the West done in general, whether it be,
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as you said, Germany or the Netherlands or France or Denmark or Sweden or England, Canada is certainly
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following suit. The U.S. is following suit. You know, we can demonstrate that we are truly loving
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and kind people by opening our doors to millions of people who don't share any of our foundational
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deontological values. But I'm sure it will all work out. That's exactly what I talk about in The
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Parasitic Mind, which I don't know if you could see it here. The Parasitic Mind is a book that came out
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in 2020, where I talk about in one of the chap. Oh, yeah, it's this one here, the yellow one.
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Yes. Yep. Last one this way. The yellow one. I have a chapter on ostrich parasitic syndrome.
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Now, why do I call it ostrich parasitic syndrome? Because even though the ostrich doesn't truly bury
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its head in the sand, the metaphor now, everybody understands what it means. It's a mechanism by which
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I negate reality. I reject reality. I bury my head in the sand and hopefully the problem goes away.
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So if you let in, for example, people into Canada, let's go with Canada. So now everybody's scratching
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their head. Why is there such an exponential astronomical growth in Jew hatred in Canada?
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Well, let's see if we can break down this mystery. All right. And as I do that, let me just begin with
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an analogy. On any day that I go, bear with me, I'm going to come back to the point. Okay. On any given
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day that I go on a diet, one of three things can happen to my weight at the end of that day, based
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on the decisions that I made that day. My weight can go up, my weight can stay the same, or my weight
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can go down. There are only three states of the world, right? Now let's apply that tripartite mechanism
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to say Jew hatred and immigration. So now you see where I'm going with this. If I let in
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hundreds of thousands of people that hail from societies, where when you poll the people in
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those societies, they return 95 to 99% of polled people have endemic Jew hatred. Let me repeat that
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for your listeners. So these are Pew studies. So Pew is kind of a woke, so they're not, they're certainly
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not ultra right-wing guys. So Pew surveys, when you survey people from Islamic societies and you
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ask them, what are your views on Jews? If you got 10% of the polled people saying that they hate the
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Jews, that would be a problem. If it were 10%, that would be one out of every 10. When you get 95 to 99%
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saying that they hate the Jews, and now you let in half a million people in a year to Canada
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that hail from those societies, let's apply the tripartite model. What do you think is going to
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happen in Canada? Is Jew hatred going to go up? Is it going to stay the same? Or is it going to go
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down? My God, what a mystery. We really need Professor Saab to come and elucidate this rocket
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science mystery for us. So that's what ostrich parasitic syndrome is. It's basically living in
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la la land and completely negating every single natural law of cause and effect. If you let in
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people that don't share your values, it's going to create schisms within your society.
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Yeah. That makes total sense to me. Since you brought up Canada, and you brought up the example
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of, you know, even if we don't speak the same language, we may see things totally different.
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So I'm from Utah. It's from a predominantly European conservative Christian, out west,
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away from New York and the East Coast. I look at Canada, and I go, oh my gosh, Justin Trudeau
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is a maniac. You know, his love for letting illegals in, his opening up this idea of allowing people that
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are miserable or sick or don't have the money to, you know, have an assisted suicide,
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how expensive housing has become, on and on and on, the trucker rally, getting into people's bank
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accounts, shutting down their businesses. From your perspective, now being in Canada, how do you see
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Justin Trudeau as a leader? Do you see him as a good, benevolent leader? Or do you see him as more,
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for lack of a better word, tyrannical? I don't know. What are your thoughts?
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Well, there is a quote of mine from about seven years ago, which went viral at one point,
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and I'm sure you could pull it up, where I wish we had it handy. It would pretty much capture
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the answer to the question that you're posing. But let me try to paraphrase it. The quote goes
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something like this. At the time, so now I've been, I'm about to enter my 31st year as a professor.
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But this was at the time, I think at the time it was, I had been a professor for 23 years.
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And so at the time I said, if you were to take every single undergraduate student that I've ever
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taught, which would be in the many, many thousands, and you rank them, I'm first going to talk about
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his acuity, his mental acuity. Then I'll talk about whether he's diabolical or not. And if you rank
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them in terms of their intelligence, Justin Trudeau would be a hundred times dumber than the dumbest of
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my students. So now let's link it to not just his intelligence. Justin Trudeau is a walking
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manifestation of every parasitic idea that I discuss in my book, The Parasitic Mind. He's a
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postmodernist. He's a post-nation. He's a globalist. Instead of saying recovery for economic recovery,
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he says she-covery. Instead of saying recession, he says she-cession because he is using feminist
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language to explain the economy because he's so empathetic. He's a lot more empathetic than ogres
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like you and me. You see, he's a male feminist. He's got a feminist fiscal policy. He's got a feminist
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global policy. He's kind. He doesn't believe that any religions are better than any others.
00:25:54.900
Right? So he wants to tax you more. Just to give you a sense, in Canada, I work from January till end of
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August for the government. And only starting in September, I keep my money. It's a way to demonstrate
00:26:14.740
what the taxes are in Canada. So just to give you a sense, the highest tax bracket for the federal
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government is 33%. The highest tax bracket at the provincial level in Quebec, it's 25%. So now we're
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already well beyond 50%. We're at 58%. Now, so now I've got 42% left, right? Okay. Now, if I go and spend that
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42% left, I made a dollar, but you've already taken 58 cents. I only have 42 cents left. That 42 cents,
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if I go and buy stuff, you take 15% of that because we have both a provincial sales tax and a federal
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sales tax, what's called the GST, goods and services tax at the federal level. So now you took another 15%.
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Then there's property tax, then there is school tax, then there is carbon tax, then there is gas tax. So at the end of
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the year, I would be very lucky if I were to retain 30 cents on the dollar. So when it comes to comparing the most
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autocratic slave system, so right, a slave owns nothing, right? My entire, from January 1st to December 31st, I own
00:27:36.900
nothing. I only work for you. I'm a slave. Well, if I work for you, Justin Trudeau, until the end of
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August or early September, I'm a lot more to being a slave than to be a free man with full autonomy.
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So Justin Trudeau is a dictatorial parasite that is, that has beautiful hair and is tall. Therefore,
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it's okay if he's a dictator, because at least he legalized marijuana. And that's literally what
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millions of Canadians said, not once, not twice, but three times. He's now been prime minister on
00:28:17.920
three separate occasions. By the way, in none of the occasions that he get more than 30, 30 something
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percent of the votes. But because of the parliamentary system of Canada, he's able to
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become prime minister, even though six to seven out of 10 Canadians voted against him, yet he's not been
00:28:37.920
prime minister for eight years. So it's a total travesty. And this is why I am desperate to leave
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Canada. Maybe you guys could take me in as a political refugee.
00:28:47.560
Hey, Utah would love to have you. Yeah, Justin Trudeau, he gave a speech not long ago, I had to
00:28:54.760
go back and watch it because I was like, Oh, wait a minute, that was like a master class in political
00:29:01.100
talk. He, he was asked the question, Are you concerned for Canadian citizens? Because life has
00:29:06.960
become so expensive. He starts off by saying, Of course, I'm concerned about food and housing,
00:29:12.720
and also green energy. And the fact that the the the planet is being killed. And by the time he's
00:29:20.200
done, the entire speech was about green energy. And I was like, Wow, wait a minute, wasn't the
00:29:25.380
question about how expensive it is to live in Canada? And it was like he it was so smooth and
00:29:31.700
subtle. I think most of the people in the audience forgot what the question was.
00:29:35.960
So I'll give you a I want to bring a prop prop. Imagine that this were a the cork of a wine bottle.
00:29:45.700
Okay, I'm going to now get Arabic on you. There's an expression in Arabic that says getting drunk
00:29:51.680
simply by smelling the cork of the wine bottle. Now, literally, what that means is that you are of
00:29:58.220
such weak constituency that you don't even need to drink the bottle of wine for you to get drunk.
00:30:05.080
Again, to my earlier point, Arabic is a very poetic and flowery language. But now let's apply that
00:30:10.880
mechanism, right? Look, I'm going to get drunk by smelling the cork of Justin Trudeau. So to your
00:30:16.780
point, my God, he says such attractive platitudes, vacuous nonsense. But my God, is he tall?
00:30:25.520
Look at this. He's got such beautiful hair, and he's young, right? So therefore, I'm mesmerized,
00:30:31.040
just like by noble prophet, peace be upon him, Barack Obama, right? There isn't a single syllable
00:30:37.280
that he's ever uttered. I'm speaking about Barack Obama, not right now. That isn't a complete vacuous,
00:30:43.780
pletutinous, complete nonsense. But my God, he says it so beautifully. He's got a mellifluous voice.
00:30:50.680
He's got a radiant smile. He's tall and lanky. Therefore, look, I'm getting drunk by smelling the
00:30:56.800
quirk of Barack Obama. On the other hand, look at the quirk of Donald Trump. He's fat. He's
00:31:05.200
cantankerous. He speaks with the accent of a brawler mafia guy from Queens. He disgusts me.
00:31:13.800
You see it? Therefore, I'm not using actual substantive cues in deciding whether I should
00:31:20.380
love Barack Obama or hate him, whether I should love Donald Trump. I didn't say I love Donald Trump
00:31:27.080
or hate him because of his monetary policy. I simply got drunk by smelling the quirk of the wine
00:31:33.420
bottle. Now, that's the regrettable part of the great majority of people who vote, right?
00:31:39.320
Thinking is simply too hard. I don't have really the energy to think. Therefore, I'm going to use
00:31:45.800
peripheral cosmetic cues in establishing whom I should vote for. You're tall. You're lanky. You
00:31:54.160
have pretty hair. You say words that sound as though you're empathetic and kind. I'm sold. Oh,
00:32:00.700
you've got the word liberal in your, right? It's the liberal party of Justin Trudeau. Oh, I'm liberal.
00:32:07.540
Therefore, I should vote for him, even though there isn't a single policy of his that isn't the height
00:32:14.020
of illiberalism. But that would be too much hard work for me to think about that, right? And I don't
00:32:20.700
want to vote for the conservatives because, you know, I'm not a conservative guy. I'm liberal. I
00:32:25.740
live in Montreal. You follow what I'm saying? Yeah. So that's exactly what I refer to as human beings
00:32:32.680
are cognitive misers. Cognitive miser means that I want to avoid the effort and the exhaustion of
00:32:42.920
thinking. Therefore, I just vote using a few simplifying cues and heuristics. That's how you
00:32:49.860
get Justin Trudeau leading us for eight years. It's grotesque. And for someone who spent my entire life
00:32:56.420
studying psychology of decision-making, studying how the human mind arrives at choices, it's very
00:33:03.600
disheartening because it harkens back to the days of when Plato said that, you know, democracy is too
00:33:12.040
important to allow the populists to vote. That's why he talked about the philosopher kings, right? It
00:33:18.580
should be really the elite intellectuals who are shaping. Now, I'm not suggesting that we should get
00:33:24.860
rid of democracy, but it speaks to the fact that most people, in a sense, their vote is being wasted on
00:33:32.180
them because they don't take their responsibility seriously. You're tall, you have pretty hair, I vote
00:33:38.360
for you. Yeah. I say this with humility, but I have been told to run for office because I have
00:33:45.460
great hair. Are you tall? Well, I'm 5'10". 5'10", that's not bad. See, whenever people have told me that I
00:33:54.140
should run, I should become Prime Minister of Canada, I say, I am way too short to ever be Prime Minister.
00:34:00.520
I am the height of Lionel Messi. You could look up later how tall that is. That is less than 5'10",
00:34:06.520
and therefore, my chances of ever being a leader are next to nil. Yeah. But just, like, I've had
00:34:14.080
people confirm exactly what you're saying to me. Like, they don't know what party I vote for. They,
00:34:20.280
like, they just, they're, oh man, you should run for office. You have a great head of hair,
00:34:23.920
you know. And then the haters, you know, quit dyeing your hair with shoe polish. And I get lots
00:34:30.460
of comments and hate towards my hair, but I, you know, I was just born with it. So, okay. I wanted
00:34:38.060
to go back to the Gaza-Israel thing because this is something that I have struggled to understand
00:34:43.920
is, as a news broadcaster, I have had the unfortunate privilege of having to cover the
00:34:52.040
Russia-Ukraine war and the Gaza-Israel war. Both of them, I'm a peaceful person. I understand the
00:34:59.960
need for war. I also understand the need to avoid it. But why do you think there was such a
00:35:06.920
bombastic, energetic reaction to Israel being attacked by Gaza that we didn't see with Russia
00:35:21.020
attacking Ukraine? Now, I know people put their flags out. If they had lights on their house,
00:35:26.760
they might have changed them to yellow and blue, maybe a new lapel. But there was no real protesting,
00:35:33.380
no calling for the death of Russia. Why the difference? I've been struggling with this.
00:35:40.780
Right. Now, that's a great question. And it will take a couple of hours to respond to. So I'm going
00:35:45.740
to try to summarize it. All forms of bigotry and hatred are intolerable. And so I don't mean to create
00:35:54.880
a hierarchy of bigotry, but there is nothing remotely close to Jew hatred. Jew hatred is a
00:36:03.000
cancer of the human soul, right? Now, again, that doesn't mean, I don't mean to imply that that
00:36:08.980
means if you are homophobic, that that's not as serious. Or if you are, if you hate black people,
00:36:14.960
that's not also something that's reprehensible. All forms of bigotry where you're not judging a person
00:36:20.760
based on the merits of their character and the flaws of their character is a bad thing, right? That's
00:36:26.900
why Martin Luther King is Martin Luther King, because he recognized that in his famous,
00:36:31.200
I have a dream speech. But Jew hatred, and, you know, we can, if you'd like, get into what are
00:36:38.900
the sources of Jew hatred? Why does it exist? Jew hatred is uniquely diabolical, so that all you need
00:36:45.060
to do is kind of scratch the surface, and then the Jew haters come out from the woodwork. They come out
00:36:51.520
of anywhere. And so to our earlier discussion, what October 7th did is it unleashed all of that Jew
00:37:00.540
hatred that had been hiding, that had been dormant. It's kind of like the shingles virus, right? It's
00:37:07.300
there, and then if you don't get the vaccine, then you can, you can have an outbreak, right? But it's
00:37:14.880
already in you that, and it's lying dormant. So Jew hatred is always there below the surface. Now,
00:37:21.620
in the West, we've been fortunate in that for 70, 80 years since the Holocaust, it, the cultural values
00:37:32.400
changed such that it no longer became openly permissible to be anti-Semitic, right? And so for
00:37:40.400
a while, if you want to go to a party, and you want to be accepted with people around you, you can't be
00:37:46.500
orgiastically open about how much you hate the Jews. But after October 7th, all bets were off. Now,
00:37:53.700
here's the beautiful semantic trick that can be played. A lot of people will say, oh, no, no, no,
00:37:59.280
I love the Jews. I'm only anti-Zionist, wink, wink. It's only Israel that I hate. It's only Zionism
00:38:08.580
that I hate. It's not the Jews. That allows you, it grants you cover to be a complete
00:38:15.740
genocidal Jew hatred, but within the context of the existing ecosystem where it's okay to say
00:38:23.680
death to Israel, but it's not quite okay yet to say gas the Jews, right? And so what you saw after
00:38:30.540
October 7th is simply the release of that virus. It allowed it to proliferate openly. And I tell you,
00:38:39.040
I'm not sure that we can recover from that. When earlier you mentioned that you were, you talked
00:38:44.420
about the example where I mentioned about, you know, the woman, the West is like a woman to be
00:38:49.360
mounted. I thought you were going to mention another tweet of mine that had gone viral just
00:38:54.540
shortly after October 7th. I had put out this long tweet. I think it got 15, 20 million
00:39:00.260
views where I was expressing a somber view of the trajectory that the West was going. And the
00:39:09.560
reason why I think it went viral is because I've become known to most people as the happy warrior,
00:39:15.960
meaning that even though I deal with a lot of very difficult topics, I'm always playful. I always have
00:39:21.880
a twinkle in my eye. I could always joke around, but here my tone was very different. I was basically
00:39:27.920
saying, I truly think that the West is in a death spiral. And that caught people's attention because
00:39:33.540
they said, well, if this guy who's kind of the height of happiness, as a matter of fact,
00:39:37.920
my last book was on happiness. If that guy who is so optimistic and positive and happy can be sold
00:39:47.120
down, then maybe we need to pay attention. And the reason why I was sold down is because I recognized
00:39:53.680
that all of the auto-corrections that the West needs to do to stand the chance at fixing the
00:40:01.340
problem, they are absolutely dead set against implementing any of them, right? So the analogy
00:40:07.540
is the following. You go see your physician and God forbid he or she says, I'm sorry to tell you,
00:40:14.180
you've got stage four cancer. And here are the things we need to do to stand the chance of remedying it.
00:40:19.860
And then your response is, well, there is no such thing as cancer, but if there is such a thing as
00:40:25.260
cancer, it's probably the fault of the Jews. And if there is a cure for cancer, it's probably the
00:40:30.700
Jews that are not allowing us to come up with it because they're trying to increase the price of
00:40:37.400
the cancer drug. And therefore, the reason I'm giving this analogy is because how can you stand the
00:40:43.700
chance of having a fighting chance against cancer if you reject that it exists? And if you think that
00:40:50.140
it's a Zionist plot and so on, therefore, you're going to die of stage four cancer. Well, that's what
00:40:55.320
the West is. The West has maybe not stage four pancreatic cancer, but it's certainly stage two
00:41:01.840
pancreatic cancer. And the stats are really against you. And the way that you're fighting against it,
00:41:07.340
you're doubling down on every policy that has led us to where we are. One final point, forgive me,
00:41:13.700
I hope I'm not being too long winded. One of the things that people don't understand is they don't
00:41:20.720
they don't have the imagination of a long term view of how these dynamics happen. So for example, when
00:41:29.120
the Taliban were asked about, you know, the West, they said, you may have all the watches, but we've got
00:41:36.980
all the time in the world, inshallah, meaning that the game is a long one, right? So it may not
00:41:43.560
be in five years that Utah falls under the spell of Islam, it may be 50 years, it may be 500 years,
00:41:52.400
but inshallah, we're coming for you in Utah, and in Salt Lake City, it may take longer that but what
00:41:59.620
most people see is, I look around me today, I live in Orlando, Florida, I'm going to get my tomatoes for
00:42:07.260
tonight's pasta dinner. It's my daughter's wedding next week. Come on, what is this guy Gatsat talking
00:42:13.580
about? He's probably being hyperbolic and exaggerating. No, it's because I'm an immigrant
00:42:19.300
who has sampled from the buffet of societies outside of the West. That's why, by the way,
00:42:25.520
some of the staunchest defenders of the Western traditions are immigrants, because we don't take
00:42:32.400
the West for granted. We know that the greater buffet of societies is not the West. So when we
00:42:39.200
come to the West, we tell you in Utah, be careful, don't assume that this is for granted and the
00:42:45.520
default value, you've got to defend these freedoms. And people say, no, no, no, this is this is the way
00:42:50.800
it is. It'll always be like that. It won't. Yeah. One of my show's favorite guests is Brigitte Gabriel.
00:42:58.120
Yes. Yes. I don't know if you're a friend, but I know you guys have done a show.
00:43:02.920
Yes. Yes. We know each other, of course. Yes. So she's come on and talked about being a Christian
00:43:09.260
in Lebanon and having to hide and that she's putting out the warning. You guys outside of the
00:43:15.100
West, you don't know what it's really like to live out there. And honestly, I don't. So I'll at least
00:43:22.560
concede and admit that. We've talked about some pretty somber topics. I want to talk about your
00:43:30.180
book about happiness, the sad truth about happiness, eight secrets for leading the good life.
00:43:38.360
What's the book about? Why did you write it? Sure. Thank you so much for switching from somber
00:43:46.220
stuff to happy stuff. I actually wrote it in a serendipitous manner. What I mean by that is that
00:43:52.420
oftentimes I have a trajectory of the things that I want to write about. And in this case,
00:43:58.920
if you would have asked me when I finished The Parasitic Mind, what my next book topic would be,
00:44:04.540
I wouldn't have told you that it would be a book on happiness. The reason I wrote the book is because
00:44:08.660
I would receive tons of emails from people saying to me, to our earlier point, what's your secret to
00:44:16.300
being always so playful and smiley, professor? Tell us your secret. And enough people wrote that to me
00:44:23.720
that I thought, you know, why not take a shot at writing a book on happiness? But I was a bit tepid at
00:44:30.900
first because as you may or may not know, out of all the topics that philosophers have covered through
00:44:37.360
millennia of writing and thinking, probably none has been covered as much as how to live the good life,
00:44:44.280
right? I mean, there are several ancient Greek schools of thought that are largely dedicated to
00:44:50.640
what constitutes the good life. And so I thought, okay, if I'm going to have something fresh and unique
00:44:57.640
and distinct to say in that book, it should be, well, number one, my unique trajectory of how I
00:45:05.240
summited Mount Happiness, coupled with, of course, the ancient wisdoms and backed up by contemporary
00:45:11.740
science, right? So the neuroscience, the psychology, the happiness studies, the positive psychology.
00:45:18.720
So if I can take those three elements, what, what is my trajectory of happiness backed up by ancient
00:45:25.580
wisdoms? Here comes Epictetus, here comes Aristotle, here comes Seneca, and then rooted in contemporary
00:45:33.460
science that supports many of these mechanisms. Then hopefully I've got something interesting to say.
00:45:38.700
So that's how I decided to write the book. Now, the book, as the subtitle says, has every chapter
00:45:44.880
has a different either decision that we make that either imparts great happiness or great misery,
00:45:51.620
if we make the wrong choice, or mindset. So let me, maybe I could just start with two decisions that
00:45:58.540
really give you, right, give you a bang for your buck. So choosing the right spouse and choosing the
00:46:06.700
right profession, not surprisingly, is really a very quick conduit to being very happy or very
00:46:13.940
miserable. If I wake up next to a person next to me in bed, and I go, oh God, I'm waking up next to
00:46:20.120
this one again, that's probably not a good thing. If I wake up next to this one, I go, yes, boy, am I
00:46:25.740
lucky to be waking up next to this partner while I'm off to a good day. Now, if I go off to a job that
00:46:32.840
gives me great purpose and meaning and fills me with existential glee, and then I return at night
00:46:38.440
to that same person that I woke up to while I've cracked the code. Now, of course, the devil is in
00:46:42.660
the details in that, okay, but how do you, what are the mechanisms by which you can assure yourself to
00:46:48.140
make the right choices? Well, there is no guarantee in that life is a statistical game, but there are
00:46:55.740
certain decision-making processes that I can use that optimize the likelihood of me being happy.
00:47:02.140
So let's take, for example, for mate choice, choosing the right spouse. In evolutionary psychology,
00:47:06.360
there are two maxims. There is the birds of a feather flock together, or the opposites attract
00:47:11.880
maxim. And it may or may not surprise your viewers and listeners that when it comes to the long-term
00:47:19.760
happiness of a marriage, it's overwhelmingly birds of a feather flock together. That is the ruling
00:47:26.080
maxim. Now, the question is, but assorting on which feathers? Is it that we have to have the same eye
00:47:32.760
color or we have to have the same skin color? No, it means that we should have the same foundational
00:47:38.100
values, the same life goals, the same foundational beliefs, right? If I am a caustic atheist and you are
00:47:48.440
deeply steeped in your Mormon religion, well, I'd like to think that love conquers all, but probably
00:47:56.960
we're not off to a good start because I define myself as a, I'm speaking here in generalities,
00:48:02.640
if I am a caustic atheist and you are a committed Catholic or Mormon or Jew or whatever, well, we're
00:48:10.760
probably putting the statistical odds against us. So finding someone with whom you share all those values
00:48:17.260
is terribly important for, you know, lust fades, but these birds of a feather flock together mechanisms
00:48:24.320
really ensure that you can stay bonded for a long time. And if I may just quickly address the
00:48:30.340
profession or choosing the right job. So I argue that there are two key metrics that you should try to seek
00:48:38.960
to optimize your happiness in your job. So I say, number one, anything that allows you to
00:48:45.700
instantiate your creative impulse is all other things equal going to lend itself to greater purpose
00:48:52.780
and meaning. But now creative impulse could mean many things. You could be a standup comic, you could
00:48:57.580
be a chef, you could be an architect, you could be an author. Each of those very different professions
00:49:03.040
share one thing in common. And that is they are creating something anew from nothing until the
00:49:09.160
chef came along. That dish didn't exist until the architect came along. That bridge didn't exist until
00:49:14.940
the standup comic came along. That routine didn't exist until the professor came along. That book didn't
00:49:20.860
exist. When I start writing a book, I open my laptop. I opened the word document. There is not a single
00:49:26.720
typed word yet. 12, 14 months later, voila, I pressed the send button and it's sent to my publisher.
00:49:36.540
A year later, people send me selfies sitting on a beach in Costa Rica reading that book. That's a very
00:49:43.140
magical process, that creative process. It went from my brain to the laptop to your brain. God, that's
00:49:51.160
beautiful. So all other things equal, if you could immerse yourself in the creative impulse
00:49:56.620
it's great. The second thing, if you could have what I call temporal freedom, meaning I work very long
00:50:04.540
hours, but I'm not bound to a schedule. If right now I feel like talking to you, I set it up. If later I
00:50:11.640
want to set up a meeting with my graduate student, I set it up. If I would then want to go to a cafe
00:50:16.200
and knock out 750 words on my next book, I do it. So I'm constantly working, but I am a vagabond.
00:50:24.580
I am moving around from thing to thing. That gives me a great sense of temporal freedom. Whereas
00:50:30.680
compare that, say, to even a pilot. Once those doors close and we're going from Montreal to Singapore,
00:50:38.500
my fate is sealed for the next 16 hours. I can't vagabond around. So I say, if possible,
00:50:45.400
if you can instantiate your creative impulse and have some sort of temporal freedom,
00:50:50.760
boy, you're going to be happy occupationally. All right. Great. Well, I look forward to
00:50:55.960
the book. I can honestly say I've got two of the eight. It sounds like I have a really great marriage
00:51:03.760
and I've had many careers, but I've been able to find happiness in them or move on from them. I'm not
00:51:10.800
a tree. So if I don't want to put down roots, I don't put down roots, but it has led to a good life
00:51:17.620
and having my family has led to a good life. I'm going to put a link to the book down below.
00:51:24.820
If it's okay, I'd like to push people to your YouTube as well as your X account
00:51:30.180
so that they can continue to follow you. Professor, thank you so much for coming on. This has been
00:51:37.360
a great conversation. I can see why Joe Rogan wants to talk to you for two or three hours
00:51:43.540
at a time, but I value your time and want to be respectful, but thank you again for coming on.