The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Elon Musk Should Win A Nobel Peace Prize - Interview on Al Arabiya - Part I (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_803)

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome. I'm Riz Khan. My guest today is someone who's turned controversial

00:00:14.620 conversations on issues such as the woke culture into an art form. The renowned evolutionary

00:00:20.380 behavioral scientist Dr. Gadsad pulls no punches as he fights what he believes should be universal

00:00:26.340 truths and real freedom of speech. His best-selling book The Parasitic Mind explores how the human

00:00:32.740 thought process can be hijacked by irrational ideas and how these parasitic beliefs shape much

00:00:39.040 of modern society. Professor Saad's upcoming book is called Suicidal Empathy, exploring how excessive

00:00:45.620 compassion for harmful ideologies is threatening much of Western society. Well his impact and

00:00:52.000 presence on social media has earned him the friendship and support of people such as the

00:00:56.120 world's richest man. I found him to be incredibly engaging, very very humble, zero ego, just two

00:01:08.060 guys. I mean we literally hugged, sat there for four hours completely locked in. You know he was

00:01:14.280 confiding in me in a very trusting way, in a very intimate way. So I thought he was just absolutely

00:01:19.780 lovely. I mean he is an eccentric guy but I've got nothing but positive affection for him.

00:01:26.120 And Professor Saad has welcomed Donald Trump's second presidency as an opportunity to turn the tide on

00:01:31.880 woke culture and to boost freedom of speech. I caught up with him in his hometown of Montreal

00:01:36.980 in Canada for a candid conversation covering a number of controversial ideas that he's put forward.

00:01:42.960 In this, the first of two episodes, Dr. Saad explains what he sees as the real danger of the parasitic

00:01:48.880 mind, his abhorrence of what he calls social justice warriors, and how he justifies his position.

00:01:55.180 I am putting the epistemological noose around your neck. I don't have to emote louder than you,

00:02:01.320 I don't have to scream louder than you. If I can have this, you know, gargantuan

00:02:06.040 triangulation of evidence, I'll let that do the talking for me.

00:02:14.880 Professor Gad Saad, technically, but Gad Saad, I'm glad you could spend some time with me in this

00:02:20.700 conversation. There's so much to talk about. I guess I should start by asking, which pronouns

00:02:24.640 would you prefer I use for you?

00:02:26.360 He, they.

00:02:28.560 Happy to do that. Now, you've written so many books, or you've written a number of books,

00:02:32.900 I should say, that really look at the human condition from a number of angles. I'm going

00:02:37.280 to go through a couple of those down the road, but let's start with the parasitic mind because

00:02:41.280 that's the one that really got you out there. And having been through it, I don't know,

00:02:46.480 one sense I got was that you seemed almost angry or frustrated with the way society has gone.

00:02:52.100 Was it essentially a vent?

00:02:53.940 I mean, in a sense, yes, because having been in academia for nearly, well, for 31 years now,

00:02:59.920 I always tell people I faced two great wars in my life. The first one was the Lebanese Civil War

00:03:04.820 growing up in Lebanon. The second one was the war on reason, on logic, on common sense, 0.87

00:03:10.480 on reality that I saw on university campuses. And I just couldn't understand how supposedly,

00:03:16.480 intelligent people could be parasitized by such nonsense. And so, it was really a result of me

00:03:23.700 having stood at the top of the mountain, screaming into the wind, nobody paying attention to me. 0.69

00:03:28.220 Eventually, they paid attention with the parasitic mind.

00:03:30.840 Isn't a best-selling book in its own way an infectious idea?

00:03:34.560 It is. So, in the mimetic sense. So, if you remember, Richard Dawkins famously wrote a book in

00:03:40.820 1976 called The Selfish Gene. In that book, he argued that, of course, humans are a biological

00:03:47.040 animal, but also a cultural animal. Our genes spread, but so do our memes, which is packets of

00:03:54.600 information. So, when you're reading my book, I am literally infecting your brain with my ideas.

00:04:00.160 Now, you state in the book that people should proactively judge, not just judge simply to be

00:04:05.380 politically correct. Where does that leave someone like me? I'm an old-school journalist,

00:04:10.020 and it was kind of beaten into me years ago as I trained, that I should not take a position,

00:04:15.220 that I should not be involving myself in the story with adjectives or a commentary or an opinion.

00:04:20.640 All that's changed now in the media, as we know. But I'm kind of stuck in that world. Where does that

00:04:25.080 leave me, where I don't want to be in an argument with you, screaming and shouting that you're right or

00:04:29.120 wrong? I just want to hear your opinions and let people decide. So, in your case, if you're wearing

00:04:33.760 your hat as a journalist, then perhaps not judging is the right ethos to invoke. But in my case, if I

00:04:41.340 am a creator of truth and a defender of truth, then by definition, I have to judge, right? I mean,

00:04:46.840 I belong to the Society of Judgment and Decision-Making, as someone who studies psychology of decision-making.

00:04:52.420 So, it's perfectly natural to judge. And in the book, I talk about the fact that many people are

00:04:57.760 reticent to judge because they view it as gauche. Who am I to judge? Who are we to judge?

00:05:02.640 Now, that's an injunction from the New Testament, but it refers to not being a moral hypocrite,

00:05:07.920 right? Don't judge others if you are committing the sin yourself. You know, people who cast stones

00:05:13.420 from a glass house and so on. But that doesn't mean that we never judge. I judge those who engage

00:05:20.240 in reprehensible acts. It's perfectly part of our repertoire of human behavior.

00:05:24.440 Of course, it makes it very difficult for me, because I'm kind of stuck in this world where

00:05:28.380 conversations like this normally would involve me trying to catch you out or, you know, trying to

00:05:33.200 have a go at you. But what I want to do is really get the most out of where your mind is and how it

00:05:39.400 works. And I wonder, you know, in the sense that you say, you say in the parasitic mind that, you know,

00:05:45.640 we're basically capitulating. We're surrendering our opinions to the woke culture and to political

00:05:50.720 correctness. What's wrong with, what's wrong in your mind with that particular approach of at least

00:05:57.480 accepting it?

00:05:58.580 Right. So each of those parasitic ideas that I talk about in the book, and maybe it's worth that I

00:06:02.860 mention what some of those ideas are.

00:06:04.400 Please.

00:06:04.740 So postmodernism is the granddaddy of all parasitic ideas, because it purports that there are

00:06:09.500 no universal truths. We are completely shackled by subjectivity. So to speak of an objective truth

00:06:15.680 is completely nonsensical, according to the postmodernists. Cultural relativism is an

00:06:20.480 offshoot of that. It says, who are you to judge absolute moral truths, right? If another culture 0.99

00:06:25.840 wants to cut off the clitorises of little girls, that's their business. Don't be a cultural imperialist. 1.00

00:06:31.420 Social constructivism is another parasitic idea. It basically says, we're not biological creatures.

00:06:37.340 Everything is due to social construction. So if Bubba can bench press more than Linda, 1.00

00:06:41.780 it must be because his parents taught him to play rough and tumble. It can't be because there are

00:06:46.280 physiological, hormonal, morphological differences between men and women. Now, each of these parasitic 0.53

00:06:53.220 ideas originally started off from a noble place. So take, for example, trans activism, right? Yes,

00:07:00.740 of course, trans people should live free of bigotry. That doesn't mean in the service of that goal,

00:07:07.000 we end up murdering and raping truth. So that yes, if a six foot four, 280 pound guy decides that 0.60

00:07:14.020 he's Linda tomorrow, who are you to judge whether he's not really Linda? So no, I do judge people who

00:07:20.520 in the service of an original noble goal, decide to kill truth. You see these ideas to explain the

00:07:28.760 parasitic mind as basically parallel to biological parasites. Exactly. Yeah. So let me, yeah, let me

00:07:33.980 give you, yeah. So I was trying, so earlier I mentioned memes. Memes are not the same as the

00:07:40.440 neuroparasithological framework that I took, and let me explain why. A meme could be positively valenced,

00:07:46.040 neutral, or negatively valenced. A parasitic idea is inherently negative, right? And the reason why I

00:07:53.760 chose the neuroparasithological framework comes from the animal kingdom. So in nature, the field of

00:07:59.300 parasitology is the study of host parasite interactions. So for example, you could be

00:08:04.420 parasitized by a tapeworm that takes over your intestinal tract. A neuroparasite is one that seeks

00:08:11.260 to end up in the host's brain, altering its neuronal circuitry to suit its reproductive interest. So for

00:08:17.920 example, a wood cricket abhors water. When it is parasitized by a hairworm, the hair

00:08:23.640 worm needs it to jump into water in order to complete its reproductive cycle. And so that was

00:08:28.700 my epiphany. Aha! I will now use that framework to argue that human beings could be parasitized by

00:08:34.560 actual physical brain worms, but also ideological brain worms, and hence the parasitic mind.

00:08:41.040 Why do you think humans are so vulnerable to these idea pathogens? Well, I love that you asked it that

00:08:47.720 way because I've often been asked, is the parasitic mind something that is specific to the current

00:08:53.580 period? And my answer is no. The capacity for the human mind to be parasitized is an indelible part

00:09:00.700 of the architecture of the human mind. What is specific to the current period are the specific

00:09:05.680 parasitic ideas that are taking over. 300 years ago, it was perfectly a good idea if we thought that 1.00

00:09:12.100 our neighbor Linda was a witch to throw her into the body of water. And if she swims, then we know 0.99

00:09:18.140 she's a witch. And if she drowns, oops, I guess we were wrong. That's a parasitic idea. So there are 0.76

00:09:23.340 many reasons for that. One of which is, as I said earlier, it helps us get through difficulties in

00:09:29.040 life. For example, some people argue that religion itself, Daniel Dennett, the famous evolutionary

00:09:35.260 philosopher argued that religion is akin to a parasite. So there are a wide variety of reasons

00:09:42.060 why we are susceptible to this parasitic thinking. I'll get on to religion a little bit later because

00:09:46.780 it's something you touch on quite a bit. But I'm guessing from what you say, even a good leader or

00:09:52.880 someone who's a great orator essentially is infecting everyone. Well, I mean, that's Machiavelli,

00:09:59.180 right? Machiavelli said it doesn't matter if the leader is truly an honest person. What matters is that

00:10:05.760 you manage that. That's why when you say, for example, someone has Machiavellian intelligence,

00:10:11.080 a salesperson who has high Machiavellian intelligence, what is he or she doing? They are tailoring their

00:10:17.440 sales pitch as a function of the customer that they're standing next to, right? That's what a politician

00:10:23.180 does. That's why when politicians are on the campaign, you always see them with a baby. Why? Because 0.88

00:10:28.980 that shows that I am nurturing, I am kind, I am compassionate, right? You never see them with babies

00:10:34.180 unless it's about seven days before the election cycle. So of course, it's all about this kind of

00:10:39.740 impression management. And I guess dating sites, the person always has a puppy. Yeah, a puppy. Or I've

00:10:44.960 actually joked once, but it's based on actual science. If you hold a puppy, if you hold a guitar, and you

00:10:51.800 come out of a Porsche wearing a fireman uniform, sit back and enjoy the ladies. Yeah, fair enough. 0.91

00:10:58.980 You know, you've alluded to, you know, the issues that you that you are concerned with in the 0.78

00:11:04.900 parasitic mind. What do you think are the three biggest risks facing us because of the parasitic

00:11:10.080 mind? And so the answer to that is also picked up in my forthcoming book called Suicidal Empathy,

00:11:16.400 which we'll touch on that. Look, it causes us to take certain public policy decisions that are

00:11:23.180 deeply problematic. On a smaller scale, although an important one, it causes about 900 medals to be

00:11:31.000 given. This was an actual study commissioned by the United Nations, because people say, well, what's

00:11:36.480 the big deal about this transgender thing? Well, there's, there've been almost, and that's an 1.00

00:11:40.620 underestimate, 900 medals in major competitions that have been given to biological males, and hence

00:11:47.280 real biological women have lost those places on the podium. So in a small scale, you get this kind 1.00

00:11:52.840 of consequence. But how about unchecked illegal immigration? How does, what does that do to the

00:11:59.520 vitality of a society? I mean, economically, it certainly doesn't help. How about if it changes the

00:12:04.600 fabric of that society? How about if you let in millions of people who don't share your foundational 0.97

00:12:09.360 values? You're going to irrevocably change the nature of that society. So there are a wide range of

00:12:15.120 consequences, most of them negative, that come about if we allow these parasitic ideas to flourish.

00:12:20.680 By the way, the perfect manifestation of someone who is both a manifestation of a parasitized mind 0.63

00:12:26.560 and suicidally empathetic is our current prime minister. Oh, we're here in Canada. In Canada,

00:12:31.800 right. Well, we can touch on the politics in a moment. But the reason I'm asking it in this way is

00:12:36.600 that you talk about, say, immigration, for example. Sure. It sounds like it's a broad sweeping brush

00:12:44.140 when you apply the idea to immigration. People forget the nuances. And that is that there are

00:12:49.340 benefits from immigration. Of course. In the US, they're going crazy in the agricultural sector 0.91

00:12:52.840 now because they've lost all the workers. So how do you balance not overgeneralizing in such a way

00:12:59.480 that it's counterproductive? Right. It just has to be common sense, right? I'm an immigrant. So

00:13:04.980 oftentimes people will write to me and say, you're such a hypocrite. You rail against open door 1.00

00:13:08.920 immigration, but you're an immigrant yourself. And your buddy Elon Musk is an immigrant. So why are you

00:13:13.320 railing against immigration? That's like arguing that my little cat, house cat Fido is a feline

00:13:19.120 and the lion in the jungle is a feline. Therefore, since they're both feline, you should also go to

00:13:25.320 the jungle and cuddle up with the lion in the jungle. Immigration has to be pursued in such a way that it 1.00

00:13:34.560 always leads to a net benefit to the host society. If that criterion is met, then come in, my brother,

00:13:42.080 and let's build a more pluralistic society together. If you allow entry to millions of people

00:13:47.820 who are coming in for no other reason than you being empathetic, it's not going to result in good

00:13:52.940 outcomes. One of the things you wrote in The Parasitic Mind, to quote you, is that progressivism

00:13:59.380 has become the enemy of reason. And you talk about, I love this term, the land of progressive unicorns,

00:14:04.880 referring to unicorns, a mythical but admired creature. Why do you feel that progressivism

00:14:10.680 is the enemy as such? Isn't there room for some understanding? Because it is always rooted in this

00:14:18.280 hopeful ethos. So take, for example, social constructivism, which basically says we're born

00:14:23.700 tabula rasa with equal potentiality. And the only reason that Lionel Messi became Lionel Messi or Albert

00:14:31.040 Einstein became Albert Einstein is because of a particular schedule of reinforcement, some

00:14:35.660 socialization. Maybe his parents hugged him a lot, or maybe they didn't hug him enough, or maybe they

00:14:40.180 took him to McDonald's enough, or maybe not enough. It can't be because there is innate differences in

00:14:46.300 potentiality across people. Because here, what the progressives are mixing up is equality under the

00:14:52.660 law with equal potentiality. Now, it's very hopeful for me to think that all of my children have the

00:14:59.900 potential to become the next Lionel Messi if only I find the right schedule of hugging. But the reality

00:15:05.880 is, my children are unlikely to become NBA players because I'm a short Jewish guy. Okay, so the genes

00:15:13.980 are already working. Now, there are some short guys that ended up in the NBA, but the statistics are

00:15:19.120 against you. So me recognizing that there are certain biological realities is harder to swallow than the

00:15:27.000 progressive unicornia that says, given the right schedule, we will all be beautiful. Socialism is a

00:15:32.840 wonderful idea if you're three years old. Because I teach my kindergarten kid that sharing is caring. It's

00:15:39.720 inherently unfair that Elon Musk has more money than the guy who's homeless, right? Wouldn't it be better

00:15:45.800 if benevolent government comes in and creates equality? That's what Kamala Harris told us. Well, socialism and

00:15:52.980 communism have been tried in endless countries. They've always failed. Why? Because unicornia is

00:15:59.400 inconsistent with human nature. I'll tell you a quick quote that I think you'll love. E.O. Wilson,

00:16:04.860 are you familiar with E.O. Wilson? I don't recognize the name. E.O. Wilson was a Harvard biologist

00:16:09.560 who recently passed away, one of the great scientists of the 20th century. His specialty was social ants. He was an

00:16:16.480 entomologist who studied social ants. Now, in social ant colonies, it actually is communistic. There is a

00:16:23.700 reproductive queen, and then there's a bunch of worker ants and a bunch of warrior ants that are

00:16:28.640 completely indistinguishable from each other. So when he was asked in an interview, Professor Wilson,

00:16:33.600 what are your thoughts on communism? His answer was, great idea, wrong species, right? So what the progressives

00:16:40.660 are doing, they're saying, we will impose our beautiful rosy view of unicornia to a species

00:16:47.800 that hasn't evolved to be consistent with that unicornia. So no, I think it's a bad idea to succumb

00:16:53.480 to these ideas. So essentially, it sounds like you're saying the land of progressive unicornia

00:16:57.240 ignores basic science. Exactly. It ignores the most fundamental features of our evolved human nature.

00:17:05.380 Here's a great example from, say, so I teach at a business school. So there were many years ago,

00:17:10.140 there was a company that decided that they wanted to break free of the antiquated notions of toxic

00:17:17.820 masculinity. In what context? Romance novels are almost exclusively read by women around the world,

00:17:24.760 right? I mean, literally almost exclusively. And I'm about to describe to you the exact same male

00:17:31.380 protagonist that's been depicted in every romance novel ever written. You ready? He's a count. He's got

00:17:39.220 some royal title. He's a neurosurgeon. He's tall. He's bold. He's aggressive. He wrestles alligators on

00:17:46.120 a six-ab pack. But he could only be tamed by the love of this one woman. I just gave you the plagiarized

00:17:52.320 version of every single romance novel that has ever existed. Why is that? Because women fantasize about 1.00

00:17:59.080 a particular type of male archetype. It's part of their innate human nature. Now, this progressive

00:18:05.680 unicornia company came along and said, we want to break free of this toxic masculinity. So they're

00:18:11.080 going to come up with a guy that cries a lot, sucks his thumbs, goes in a fetal position, is pear-shaped, 0.99

00:18:16.620 has a whiny voice. He's very sweet and sensitive. Guess what happened to that line? The market said, 0.99

00:18:22.360 I don't want it. So you thought that you had the chutzpah to impose what you want consumers to read.

00:18:30.680 And consumers said, no, no, no. I come with an endowed human nature and I decide what I want to

00:18:36.820 fantasize about. So there are real consequences to approaching political systems or consumer products

00:18:42.620 with a lack of an understanding of human nature. You reserve quite a lot of ire in your book

00:18:47.840 for what you call the SJW, social justice warrior. Explain that concept. So the social justice warrior is

00:18:54.360 typically someone who is very much entrenched in sort of progressive unicornia. I even give an example

00:19:00.440 of a type of social justice warrior with a spicy term. Do you know where I'm going with this?

00:19:05.760 Male feminists as sneaky. Do you remember what the last part is? Sneaky effers. Sneaky. Okay. Okay. Now, 1.00

00:19:13.820 that term, sneaky effer, actually comes from science. It's so in the 1970s, the official scientific term

00:19:22.700 is kleptogamy, which is the stealing of mating opportunities. But the colloquial term, even within

00:19:28.440 the scientific literature, is a sneaky effer. So example, you have many species where the males,

00:19:35.040 there are two phenotypes of male. There's the traditional male who is, you know, very masculine

00:19:39.620 and so on. There is another type of phenotype of a male that mimics females. So when the big dominant

00:19:46.580 male sees this one, it dupes him into thinking that he is a female and then goes around and

00:19:53.440 surreptitiously engages in mating opportunities. So I took this principle from the animal kingdom

00:19:58.640 and I argued that human male feminists, social justice warriors, are adopting the sneaky effer 1.00

00:20:04.960 strategy. I'm very, very kind. I hug the trees. When I put gas into my car, I start crying because I am

00:20:12.320 raping Mother Earth with the devil's juice and so on. And so I'm very kind. You could trust me,

00:20:17.480 Linda. You don't have to worry about me. I'm a kind and compassionate person. I'm a sneaky effer.

00:20:23.000 How do you propose to protect those who are genuinely vulnerable? Because we can't all be

00:20:28.580 that archetypal, you know, super strong alligator wrestling type. There are those who need, to some

00:20:34.080 degree, I guess, support and protection. So how does it not kind of dissolve into this, as you say,

00:20:39.660 unicornia kind of perspective? Look, I'm not suggesting that empathy is something that should

00:20:47.300 be eradicated. We are a multifaceted creature, right? We can be ruthlessly violent and we can be

00:20:55.980 infinitely kind and loving, right? She's not on camera right here, but my daughter is here. I would

00:21:02.280 be willing to jump in front of a truck to save her life, right? So that allows me to have empathy,

00:21:08.580 have love, have unlimited compassion for the right targets, right? But on the other, the problem is

00:21:15.660 when you take these virtues and they misfire. So I don't know if we want to talk about suicidal

00:21:22.300 empathy later, but maybe I can. We'll talk about it. We'll carry on. Yeah. So suicidal empathy is simply

00:21:27.800 the misfiring of an otherwise adaptive emotion. So let me draw an analogy. OCD is a psychiatric

00:21:35.000 disorder, right? But at its root, it is based on something that is quite evolutionarily advantageous.

00:21:42.080 The idea of scanning the environment for potential threats makes perfect evolutionary sense. But for

00:21:48.440 most of us, once we have tended to that threat, it then goes away. So for example, if you and I shake

00:21:54.140 hands, and I noticed that a minute before you shook my hand, you sneezed into your hand, I might later

00:21:59.000 quietly go into the bathroom and wash my hands. I wash my hands once, and then I resume our

00:22:04.860 interaction. The OCD sufferer will be stuck in an infinite loop for the next eight hours, washing

00:22:11.480 their hands until their skin is falling off in scalding hot water. So it is a misfiring of an otherwise

00:22:17.980 adaptive process. So yes, be empathetic, be kind, be generous, be compassionate. Those are all part of

00:22:25.260 the repertoire of human realities. But it has to be properly regulated.

00:22:30.680 What you refer to, though, in the parasitic mind is something that's very interesting. And

00:22:33.900 I think a lot of people recognize this, based on what we see in the media. And that is the faux outrage,

00:22:40.420 false outrage.

00:22:41.120 Exactly. So and here I can link it, if you'd like, very quickly to an evolutionary principle. So for a signal

00:22:48.980 to be meaningful, it has to be costly. And let me explain what I mean by that. You take a peacock's tail,

00:22:55.860 right? The peacock's tail could not have evolved via natural selection. Natural selection is the mechanism

00:23:03.380 that confers survival advantage for that trait to have evolved. Well, when the peacock evolves that big tail,

00:23:10.480 it is burdensome. It makes it more conspicuous to predators. It makes it more difficult to

00:23:16.000 take flight. So why would evolution have resulted in the evolution of such a burdensome tail?

00:23:23.040 Well, there we talk about sexual selection. Some traits evolve because they confer a reproductive

00:23:29.420 advantage. So even though it is handicapping me from a survival perspective, I am communicating to

00:23:35.900 the peahens, the females of that species, despite the fact that I've got this very burdensome tail,

00:23:41.580 I am still here. Shouldn't you choose me as your mate? How am I going to link this to what you just

00:23:46.780 asked? Putting hashtag bring the girls home, putting hashtag refugees welcome, love is love,

00:23:55.820 and all the other nonsense is costless. So it's not an honest signal. It's a faux signal. Any of us can

00:24:03.280 need it. But if I speak openly in some regions of the Middle East, where I know I might be taken into

00:24:12.000 the back corner and a bullet is put through my head, that is a costly signal. That is true signaling and

00:24:18.400 not virtue signaling. I remember the section where you were saying basically choose me when it came to

00:24:22.700 peacocks and peahens. But it made me also wonder, you use this term, it's just an aside that just

00:24:28.180 occurred to me, this term testicular fortitude quite a bit in the book. And that made me think,

00:24:33.280 well, what about the women? Yes. Well, I use it in a sort of hyperbolic sense. Margaret Thatcher

00:24:40.400 has more testicular fortitude than most men alive today in the West. So it applies equally to both

00:24:46.460 sexes. Or if I were a transgender activist to the 680 different genders. When it comes to making 0.98

00:24:53.560 decisions, I know you say there's a danger in prioritizing feelings over facts. But isn't

00:24:59.240 part of the problem that people don't really know what the facts are anymore, that they're so busy

00:25:04.100 looking for confirmation bias? Yeah, that's true. Let me discuss first the tension between feelings

00:25:09.460 and thought. Please. It's a false dichotomy. It's not that we are an animal of reason rather than an

00:25:17.580 animal of feeling. We are both, right? The challenge is to know when to invoke the right

00:25:23.740 system at the right time. So if I'm walking down in a dark alley because I'm taking a shortcut to get

00:25:29.140 home, and then I notice four young men who are loitering, I will get a fear-based response. My heart

00:25:35.540 will start racing. I will start breathing heavier. My blood pressure will go up. All of these things

00:25:42.340 have triggered my emotional-based system. And it makes perfect evolutionary sense for that to have

00:25:47.180 happen. On the other hand, if I'm trying to do well on a calculus exam, triggering my emotional

00:25:52.720 system is not going to make me do a better job on the calculus exam. Now, I apply that example when

00:25:58.900 it comes to, say, choosing our political leaders. Regrettably, most people end up invoking their

00:26:06.200 affective system rather than their cognitive system. And so here I talk about, actually, an expression from

00:26:12.360 Arabic says that getting drunk by simply smelling the cork of the wine bottle. Because what that 0.60

00:26:20.180 basically says, I don't need to be, I don't need to actually drink the wine to get drunk. I just take

00:26:26.020 a whiff and I'm already, right? So it refers to someone who has a weak cognitive constituency, right?

00:26:31.620 So for example, if you ask people, why do you love Obama? Well, he's tall, he's lanky, he's got a

00:26:37.480 left-lewish voice, he's got a radiant smile. It could well be that every single syllable he utters

00:26:42.280 is complete rubbish. But I'm already getting drunk by his cork. On the other hand, why do you hate 0.99

00:26:47.420 Donald Trump? Well, he's cantankerous. He speaks like a brawler from New York. He's not presidential.

00:26:53.860 But you didn't say anything about whether you agree with his immigration policy or his fiscal policy.

00:26:58.640 So the reason why I discussed that tension is because many of the problems that we face is because we

00:27:05.040 trigger the wrong system at the wrong time. Regarding your issue of what do we know what

00:27:09.840 is true or not? Well, one thing I could tell you is that there shouldn't be a government agency

00:27:14.980 that decides for us what is true or not. I don't know if you remember under the Biden administration,

00:27:19.740 there was a woman, Nina something, that came out who was going to be the first official czar of

00:27:25.400 this information. I mean, Orwell couldn't have come up with such a ridiculous notion. Do you remember 0.85

00:27:31.040 her? Vaguely. But I was thinking that the issue is partly that with politics, the scene has become

00:27:37.760 distorted anyway. Right. Well, and look, for example, in science, once you utter the words,

00:27:44.380 these two words, settled science, you understand nothing about science. Because science deals in

00:27:51.520 provisional truths. Yes, there is a truth, but that truth can move. What we thought was true,

00:27:57.400 I mean, the Copernican revolution was about the, you know, people thinking one way about the cosmos,

00:28:02.800 and then Copernicus and Galileo came along and said, No, no, that's not how it works. So the idea

00:28:07.860 that it's settled science, and therefore we need to remove your YouTube channel, we need to get you

00:28:13.920 off of Twitter, because you are espousing false beliefs. Is it disinformation to say that men menstruate,

00:28:21.220 or is it vertical information? So this whole idea of we tell you what the facts are,

00:28:26.600 is a terribly Orwellian dangerous idea. I'll get on to how this has been affected by social media and

00:28:31.700 the mainstream media as we progress. But what I was getting at also is, isn't it now that the case

00:28:36.740 with politics, it is more about smelling the cork than actually listening to what the real policy

00:28:42.140 should be? And I think there is a reason for that. Look, we face a lot of computational complexity

00:28:47.660 in our everyday life, right? Imagine if I sat there aching about every single decision by looking at

00:28:54.840 every single piece of information that is relevant before I decide which restaurant to go to or which

00:28:59.700 car to purchase, then I would be stuck in choice paralysis, right? So I use what are called

00:29:04.780 decision rules or heuristics that allows me to cut through the clutter, right? And so for example,

00:29:11.880 when people evoke their affective system, that's a very quick shortcut, right? Because it allows me to

00:29:18.900 say, look, how do I feel about Obama? He's lovely and majestic. How do I feel about Trump? He seems mean

00:29:25.020 and cantankerous, good enough, right? Because it cuts through the clutter. Now, it's a suboptimal way

00:29:30.420 of making decisions, but it is a very quick way to navigate through the computational complexity.

00:29:36.840 You know, when it comes to, in your opinion, which is more important, truth or freedom? And who wins when

00:29:44.100 they clash? For example, if you have people, you know, putting out because of free speech, putting out

00:29:48.540 falsehoods, disinformation, and so on in the media?

00:29:52.560 It's very hard to put an ordinal ranking on which one. One requires the other in an infinite loop,

00:30:00.000 right? I can't pursue truth if I don't have the freedom to pursue truth and vice versa, right? So

00:30:06.540 that's what I, and I'm glad you raised those two because I'm guessing you're referring to the

00:30:10.780 parasitic mind, where in chapter one, I say that the two fundamental ideals that, you know, that inform

00:30:17.820 my life are truth and freedom, right? I don't think you can have one without the other, right? I have to

00:30:24.500 have the complete freedom to be able to pursue truth where it takes me, which, by the way, leads to a

00:30:29.740 very dangerous idea, forbidden knowledge, which I briefly referred to in the parasitic mind, and I pick up

00:30:35.500 again in suicidal empathy. Forbidden knowledge is the idea that there are some inquiries that we should

00:30:44.720 refrain from pursuing because the consequences would be too great to pursue them, right? Now, and if I may,

00:30:51.400 let me explain here the concept of deontological versus consequentialist ethics. Deontological ethics

00:30:57.020 is absolute statements. It is never okay to lie would be a deontological statement. A consequentialist

00:31:03.740 statement would be, it's okay to lie if you're trying to spare someone's feelings. And so I often joke that if you

00:31:09.720 want to have a long, happy marriage, right? And your spouse says, do I look fat in those jeans? Put on your

00:31:16.540 consequentialist hat and say, you've never looked more beautiful. You're lying, perhaps, but that is a

00:31:21.880 consequentialist lie. For most things in life, it is perfectly reasonable for us to be consequentialist. For freedom of

00:31:29.680 speech, for the pursuit of truth, for journalistic integrity. Those are by definition, deontological

00:31:36.700 statements. So if you say, yes, pursue truth, but don't hurt people's feelings, the but there is a big

00:31:42.900 problem. Professor, from where do you get your news? How do you make sure you're getting what you would

00:31:47.580 consider accurate? Wow, what a great question. It's really a collection of stuff. Some of it TV, some of it

00:31:53.140 I read, some of it is just the scrolling through X. So I don't have a single one-stop shop place.

00:32:00.980 It's a bit of the... But what I try to do is triangulation of the veracity of information.

00:32:07.740 Do you see what I mean by that? Yeah. I always say that there's a triangle,

00:32:10.960 information plus diversity leads to perspective. Right. There you go. But the thing is, are you

00:32:16.000 constantly aware of the risk of an echo chamber, constantly trying to validate your own thoughts?

00:32:20.060 Because you're obviously quite, you know, forceful in your thoughts. There's a risk you could always

00:32:24.420 be seeking validation. Albeit, if you, for example, will look at some of my followers, I mean, now I

00:32:30.820 have a lot of followers, so I can't give you an empirical estimate. But I can oftentimes have on my

00:32:37.300 feed two people that just responded to something that I posted, and they couldn't be more diametrically

00:32:44.660 opposed from each other. Now, I actually take that with some encouragement, meaning that if every

00:32:51.320 time I post something, everybody always agreed with me, then probably I've created an echo chamber.

00:32:57.940 But if, you know, just with one post, I can have 20 people, 14 of whom agreed with me, six,

00:33:04.660 whoever, then I think I'm building a diversified chamber.

00:33:08.200 So I used to give this example that if I covered the Israeli-Palestinian situation, and I would have

00:33:13.820 people from both sides. But either way, no matter how I did the debate or the conversation, I would

00:33:19.080 get viewer feedback saying, oh, you're so pro-Palestinian, for the same show where they said

00:33:23.520 you're so pro-Israeli. And my producer would say, how can that be? I said, well, my explanation was

00:33:27.840 people bring their own baggage when they're watching. And that's why I ask, in your case, how you kind of

00:33:33.740 put your mind outside that potential echo chamber?

00:33:37.140 Well, so I'll give you an example of confirmation bias that my former doctoral supervisor had told

00:33:43.500 me many years ago. So he had been hired to help some company. He's a cognitive psychologist and,

00:33:49.960 you know, consumer specialist at Cornell. He just recently retired, by the way. So he had been hired

00:33:56.920 by a company where half the executives seemed to be for a product launch and the other half seemed to

00:34:04.680 be deadly set against the product launch. And so what was going to break the tie is they were going

00:34:09.660 to bring a bunch of them, put them in a focus group, and then based on that interaction, either

00:34:15.440 one side would win or the other side would win. After that interaction happened, then you pulled both

00:34:22.080 sides, both sides said, you see, we won. Now, how could it be? How could it be that they both saw the

00:34:27.620 exact same interaction and arrived at exactly the opposite confirmation, right? Well, it's exactly to

00:34:34.440 your point, which is I only look for information that supports my position and I filter out perceptually

00:34:41.520 and cognitively any information that doesn't agree with my position and therefore I solidify my

00:34:47.780 anchored position. I was recently asked by on a show by a British psychiatrist. This was about a

00:34:52.580 year ago. At the end of the show, maybe the best question I've ever been asked, maybe you'll beat it

00:34:57.160 on this show. He said, what is the singular phenomenon that, you know, you've seen in the human condition

00:35:06.740 in your 30 plus years as a professor that has most surprised you? So I had to pause for a second.

00:35:11.520 And then I said, the inability for most people to change their anchored positions, irrespective of

00:35:19.420 the amount of conflicting evidence that they might be shown, which itself, and that's why, by the way,

00:35:24.780 in chapter seven of the parasitic mind, I try to offer a means by which we can break through that

00:35:30.240 resistance. I talk about nomological networks of cumulative evidence, which we could talk about.

00:35:34.940 So I'm mindful of even my capacity to succumb to this kind of echo chamber. That's why I try

00:35:41.500 a sample from many different sources. How do you regard conspiracy theories? You know,

00:35:46.020 the moon landing wasn't real, or that there were chips and vaccines during COVID, these kind of

00:35:51.760 things that are out there. How do you regard them?

00:35:54.920 I apply the scientific method, right? So I think there is now enough evidence that the Holocaust 1.00

00:36:01.800 did happen. So if you're a Holocaust denier who argues that, you know, it was all the Hollywood made

00:36:08.560 and there was no, there were no ovens and so on. I don't have to take it seriously because I know

00:36:12.460 the accumulation of evidence has already established that that thing happened. And so you just apply

00:36:19.240 the scientific method as you navigate between what is true or false. There's no other way to do it.

00:36:23.380 It's difficult though with things like the moon landing. It doesn't have the same empirical

00:36:26.280 basis, the Holocaust, for example.

00:36:28.220 That is true. That is true. But by the way, I mean, I don't know if it's the right time to do it, but

00:36:31.580 maybe it is. Do you want me to talk about how you do the nomological networks?

00:36:36.400 Please do, yeah.

00:36:38.020 So in a sense, it speaks to your general question, how do you seek truth? How do you know what's true,

00:36:41.800 what's not true? And so in chapter seven, the chapter's title, How to Seek Truth,

00:36:46.760 I argue that there is an incredibly powerful, albeit very cognitively taxing method to try to decide

00:36:54.920 whether something is true or not. So let's take, for example, I give several examples in the chapter,

00:36:59.080 but I'll discuss one here. Let's suppose I wanted to counter the idea that social constructivists

00:37:05.400 offer that toy preferences are sex-specific due to socialization, meaning it's because mommy taught

00:37:13.340 Linda to play with the doll and taught Bobby to play with the truck. That's why they have those

00:37:18.000 preferences. Let's suppose I wanted to demonstrate to you that that's not true. There are universal

00:37:23.660 biological and evolutionary-based reasons for those sex-specific toy preferences. How would I go about

00:37:28.960 doing that? So I'm going to build a nomological network of cumulative evidence, meaning I'm going

00:37:34.020 to get you data from across cultures, across time periods, across species, across methodologies

00:37:40.100 that will triangulate to demonstrate that this position is unassailable. And I'll give a few examples.

00:37:46.680 Well, from developmental psychology, we know that young infants who are too young to yet be socialized,

00:37:53.420 by definition, they don't have the cognitive apparatus to be socialized, already exhibit those

00:37:58.640 sex-specific toy preferences. So that already takes out the socialization argument. I can get you data

00:38:03.460 from vervet monkeys, rhesus monkeys, and chimpanzees showing that they have the same sex-specific toy

00:38:08.740 preferences. I can get you data from sub-Saharan Africa, where cultures that are very non-Western, 0.91

00:38:15.060 they exhibit the same sex-specific toy preferences. I can go back 2,500 years ago, showing you that in ancient

00:38:21.340 Rome and ancient Greece, on funerary monuments, little boys and girls are depicted playing with

00:38:26.600 exactly the same types of toys as we have today. So look how I am putting the epistemological noose

00:38:32.560 around your neck. I don't have to emote louder than you. I don't have to scream louder than you.

00:38:37.020 If I can have this, you know, gargantuan triangulation of evidence, I'll let that do the talking for me.

00:38:44.600 And so that's why, by the way, I'm epistemologically quite humble, in that I know what I know,

00:38:49.580 and I know what I don't know. That's why I never get caught in interviews. I give

00:38:53.740 thousands of interviews because I'll never try to wing it. If you ask me a question that I think

00:38:59.940 that I haven't done the requisite nomological network for, I'll say, hey, Riz, you know,

00:39:04.500 that's a great question. It's above my pay grade. I don't know. But if I know, good luck to you if you

00:39:08.820 want to debate me. Fair enough. No, because a lot of people obviously want to try to catch you out.

00:39:13.140 But if you know your stuff, that's obviously going to be important. But it was interesting because

00:39:16.760 you did say people who spew falsehoods should be judged. Now, that stuck with me.

00:39:23.540 Judge? That doesn't mean in prison. No, no, I didn't. I realized what you meant. It was the

00:39:27.500 whole chapter on us taking a position and so on, which is why I started asking you about my

00:39:31.720 situation as a journalist. Because, of course, as a human being, I have in my head judgments and

00:39:36.420 opinions. But I really, difficult as it is, I enforce them in terms of my journalistic work.

00:39:42.120 I want to stand away and hear the story. So many people say that politicians in general happily

00:39:47.340 lie. And in the case of Donald Trump, who I know you do like as a politician, he regularly is accused

00:39:55.460 of lying. And people actually, you know, metrically record this. How do you reconcile your belief then

00:40:04.000 about his veracity with that documentation?

00:40:08.020 So there are lies and then there are lies. So Donald Trump lies about, I've got the biggest

00:40:14.020 in the world. I'm the greatest lover in the history of humanity. The biggest audience was ever at my

00:40:20.000 inauguration, right? They're ego defensive lies, right? So is he fibbing? Undoubtedly. That is a very

00:40:26.600 different lie than if you are a postmodernist saying that there are no objective truths. That eradicates

00:40:34.420 the possibility of truth being. And it's that that allows them to say slavery is freedom, war is peace,

00:40:41.160 men are women. So lies don't all come in the same final shape, right? Is he lying in the sense that he's

00:40:49.180 constantly trying to protect his ego because he's a benign narcissist? Yes. But there are guys on the

00:40:55.860 progressive side that are lying. If you say, for example, that socialism is the means by which

00:41:02.640 people are most likely to flourish, that is a much more consequential lie than I am the best lover of

00:41:10.340 all time. Both are lies. One is much bigger than the other. But he does have those consequential ones

00:41:15.140 too. You know, they're eating the cats and dogs in Springfield, Illinois, and so on. People react to

00:41:19.060 this. Yeah. Okay. In that case, I think it's the fog of the rapidity of how information comes about,

00:41:25.460 right? I think though, and Elon Musk recently said it, he said, look, we will put out stuff often,

00:41:31.160 and it'll turn out to be false, in which case we're happy to correct our position. So just have

00:41:37.920 the epistemological humility to accept that sometimes you'll get it wrong. True. No, I heard

00:41:42.060 him say that. He was actually in the White House as he said it. Exactly. Now, the question is this,

00:41:45.680 though, if putting out this information without checking its veracity in the first place,

00:41:49.960 there are consequences, the risks are great. So from your side, how do you rationalize that with

00:41:56.440 saying someone like this is worth the leadership position? Because I think all politicians lie,

00:42:01.760 as you said. The question is, which one is the lesser of a liar? I don't think that when I put my

00:42:09.520 imprimatur in supporting a particular candidate, I think that they are interchangeable with a saint,

00:42:14.700 right? I think that given these options, this is probably the better option. So given the types of

00:42:21.060 values that are important to me, it is incontestable to me that Donald Trump would have been a much

00:42:27.240 better choice than Kamala Harris. All right, you're picking between those candidates, but I'm talking

00:42:31.720 in the general sense with politicians. They all lie. Yeah, I was going to say, so in the sense of

00:42:36.800 Donald Trump, you see him as something of a cure. As you said in a recent essay, you wrote about his

00:42:41.140 election victory saying, it's an unequivocal repudiation of the ideological parasites that

00:42:46.320 have wreaked havoc on our societies. And if, as you also say, it took decades of assiduous

00:42:51.740 indoctrination for these parasitic ideas to flourish in every nook and cranny of our institutions,

00:42:56.780 we'll get onto those further. How can four years of a Trump presidency turn them around? You've said

00:43:03.460 it takes decades. That's a fantastic question. It's actually one that I keep hammering now with

00:43:08.500 people that don't be complacent in thinking that just because Donald Trump, you know, he came along,

00:43:15.680 he's got the polio vaccine, he administers it everywhere, and polio seems to exist. To your

00:43:21.460 point, what you just mentioned, it took, depending on the parasitic idea, it's taken between 50 to 100

00:43:27.240 years for these idea pathogens to develop originally on university campuses and then to break out of the

00:43:34.440 university. So it won't be sufficient to only kind of rest on our laurels to say, hey, Donald Trump is

00:43:40.580 here, we've eradicated this nonsense. That's why even I've had people who say to me, so now that

00:43:46.000 Donald Trump has come to power, will people even read suicidal empathy? I say, of course they will,

00:43:51.980 because these parasitic ideas have not gone away. The reflex to be suicidally empathetic is not going

00:43:57.540 to magically go away because this guy came into office for four years. The next president might be one

00:44:02.680 that is as committed to these parasitic ideas and off we go on the woke train. So

00:44:08.240 there's much more in the fight to be had. I want to get your perspective on this as someone who's

00:44:13.920 actually a couple of years younger than me, but around the same kind of age. For me, it seemed like

00:44:17.720 there was a massive change in the curve where this suddenly all became public. I don't remember these

00:44:22.920 kind of debates for the last, say, 40, 45 years. Because you weren't in academia. So it takes a while

00:44:29.600 for all of these. So for example, take shingles. The virus is within you, it's dormant, and then

00:44:36.280 something will trigger it such that you might get an outbreak and I don't. But it is in there. So

00:44:41.780 what you were reacting to is the fact that you didn't know that shingles was flourishing in the

00:44:47.800 background, whereas I was living in the petri dish of shingles called academia. So, and let me give you

00:44:54.440 the background of how I first was exposed to Houston, we have a problem. So my scientific work

00:45:01.500 originally was in the application of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology and studying

00:45:06.580 human behavior in general and consumer behavior and economic behavior in particular. And so as I

00:45:11.800 tried to Darwinize the business school, the idea being that you can't study entrepreneurship or

00:45:17.960 or consumer behavior or economic behavior without ever invoking our biological nature. To me, that

00:45:25.800 seemed like a very banal and obvious statement. Well, apparently, it was completely heretical to most

00:45:31.600 of my academic colleagues. And so I was right, that was my first exposure to parasitic ideas. How could

00:45:38.020 these otherwise bright, educated people be questioning the fact that human beings, consumer behavior,

00:45:44.180 consumers are biological? You don't think our hormones affect our behavior? How? Right? And so

00:45:50.820 I saw it, but it took a while for other people who were not inhabiting that ecosystem to then hit them.

00:45:59.820 And that to me is frustrating because had people listened when I stood up on top of the mountain and

00:46:06.820 saying we have a problem, then we wouldn't have had to have 900 medals being stolen by

00:46:13.380 trans women. I appeared in 2017. I appeared in front of the Canadian Senate. I was summoned,

00:46:22.820 as was Jordan Peterson, separately to talk about Bill C-16, which at the time was a bill that hadn't

00:46:30.420 passed yet, trying to incorporate gender identity and gender expression under the hateful rubric umbrella.

00:46:39.060 And I said, yeah, of course, I support the idea that no person should face any bigotry, but beware of

00:46:45.700 the proverbial slippery slope. Now, if you go back and you listen to my warnings, I hate to say it,

00:46:52.820 but they were prophetic. How do you regard the way? Well, this also occurred to me, the word political

00:46:59.380 correctness came in, I don't know what, maybe 15, 20 years ago that I could really remember. And

00:47:04.820 suddenly all the parameters changed. I couldn't put on an African accent, for example. I certainly 0.99

00:47:09.860 couldn't, if I was an actor, go on, blacken my face and appear as an African. When that all started

00:47:15.460 to emerge, how did you regard that? I was very concerned by it because I saw the kind of stifling

00:47:21.620 environment it created in otherwise banal interactions on campuses. I remember at one point

00:47:28.740 someone asked me, this was probably about 10 years ago, oh, where are you from originally?

00:47:34.180 And I was about to answer, I said, oh, I'm so sorry, I know that I'm not supposed to ask that.

00:47:37.540 I said, what do you mean you're not supposed to ask that? You recognize that I don't look as though

00:47:41.860 I'm indigenous to Canada, because I have a particular morphological look. What's the problem

00:47:48.100 with you asking where I come from originally? So I've noticed that for a while, look, I compare it,

00:47:53.540 and you might remember this from the parasitic pine. The parasitic wasp stings a much bigger

00:48:03.300 spider, rendering it zombified, and then it takes it to its burrow, lays its eggs on it, and then its

00:48:10.580 eggs as they hatch eat the spider in vivo while it's alive. And so I argue that political correctness

00:48:18.420 is akin to the spider wasp sting, because it stultifies me, right? I'm now afraid to say,

00:48:24.980 I recognize that you don't look French-Canadian. So what if I were to say, Mr. Crown, where are you

00:48:29.780 from? How is that an insult? But that's what happens with political correctness. It removes our 0.78

00:48:35.300 ability to have natural dynamics. Just an aside, I tend to say, what are your roots? I find it kind

00:48:41.220 of safer. And this is the issue. Aren't there so many landmines now onto which we can easily step?

00:48:47.060 Not if you're called Gatsad. I mean, I don't give a S-H-I-T. You know, there's a, and I invoke 0.55

00:48:55.780 this in chapter eight of the parasitic mind, I say, activate your inner honey badger, right? The

00:49:00.740 honey badger, for the viewers and listeners who may not know, has been literally ranked as the most

00:49:06.340 ferocious and fierce animal in the animal kingdom, which is saying a lot. There are a lot of ferocious

00:49:10.820 animals in the animal kingdom. The reason, it's the size of a small dog. It is so fierce that

00:49:16.980 adult lions will stay clear of it, right? That's why there's the expression, honey badgers don't

00:49:22.820 give an F. I live my life this way, maybe to a fault, and I wish more people would invoke

00:49:29.780 him. You're in the book basically saying evoke your honey badger. Exactly.

00:49:33.220 How do you regard Andrew Tate? I interviewed him in his home in Romania.

00:49:37.940 Yeah, I've never interacted with him. I don't know much about him. I mean, he seems maybe not to my

00:49:44.900 aesthetic taste in terms of his delivery, like kind of the bro stuff. Some of his pictures,

00:49:49.780 and I'm hardly one who can't engage in locker room talk, right? I mean, I was literally a soccer

00:49:55.540 player myself. So it's not less though I'm a dainty, Puritan madam. But he seems a bit too

00:50:02.660 harsh for me, for my taste. He's had a lot of influence, especially on young men.

00:50:05.700 On young men, yes.

00:50:06.420 Yes. You know, in the approach to some of the things you talk about, you can't refute facts,

00:50:11.540 like, you know, men are physiologically stronger than women and so on, I think.

00:50:15.380 Yes.

00:50:15.540 That's why I was curious in case you'd come across.

00:50:17.060 I mean, he certainly will say some things that are backed by evolutionary science, if not common

00:50:22.580 sense. But I think the style of how he does it is a bit problematic. What did you think of him?

00:50:29.460 Did you enjoy interacting with him?

00:50:30.580 Yeah, it was actually interesting talking with him, because again, I think he's used to people

00:50:33.860 engaging him for an argument. And he had to stop and think when I just ask an innocent question.

00:50:40.340 So, you know, I'm going to go back to Donald Trump just for a couple more questions. Joe Rogan,

00:50:46.500 someone with whom you've appeared a number of times now, has been very influential. How much

00:50:51.300 do you think he played a role in tipping the scale in favor of Donald Trump?

00:50:55.460 Huge. As a matter of fact, before he had appeared with Joe Rogan, I was in touch with

00:51:02.660 Trump's people about him coming on my show, which is a much smaller show that, I mean,

00:51:09.780 I'm a popular guy, but I'm not Joe Rogan popular. And when they had asked me, what would be your idea

00:51:15.620 of, you know, what would you want to get out of it? I said, well, you know what I'd love just to

00:51:19.620 sit with him and to humanize him so that the people who are on the fence can actually see he's a 0.86

00:51:25.140 funny guy, he's got a great sense of humor, he's a regular, he could, he could, you know, just shoot

00:51:31.620 the blank, right? Well, that's exactly what ended up happening when he went for three hours on Joe

00:51:38.260 Rogan, which of course, at that point, once he's done Joe Rogan, there's no point on coming on my

00:51:42.740 show, he's done the biggest show. But so to your question, I think it really helped to humanize him,

00:51:48.980 because so often his interactions are ones where he's put on the back foot, where he's defensive,

00:51:55.300 whereas here, he's calm, he's relaxed, there's no gotcha stuff with just two guys chatting.

00:52:01.860 I think it probably flipped a few people who were fence sitting.

00:52:05.060 How do you feel he's done so far now, about a month into the presidency as we're talking?

00:52:08.580 I don't think, and I mean, as you said, I'm a bit younger than you. I can't think of a four-week

00:52:15.540 period where a president did more stuff than this guy has done. Is it good stuff?

00:52:21.940 Well, you told me, is there some bad stuff? I'm asking you really, because I'm essentially just

00:52:27.860 taking the position of getting your perspective on this. So far, I haven't seen anything that has

00:52:32.500 caused me great alarm. He got rid of all the Title IX stuff where

00:52:37.780 biological males can enter female spaces. That's good. He's trying to cut down on open border 0.99

00:52:45.460 immigration. I think that's good. He's trying to reduce the excessive waste and corruption 1.00

00:52:51.700 through DOGE. That's good. So, so far, I think I'm happy.

00:52:54.900 Okay, because some would say there's been some backfiring, firing all those people in the government

00:52:59.460 who now suddenly have to be re-recruited because it's overdone. The Gaza Riviera, you know?

00:53:04.260 The Gaza Riviera. Yeah, that's a bit of Trump bombast. I'm not sure if I would have approached

00:53:10.340 it exactly the same way. But that, again, is, I think, stylistic, right? He's a great

00:53:15.940 negotiator. It could well be that he says that without literally meaning that because he's trying

00:53:21.460 to angle for a better negotiation position. So I can't pretend to know what's exactly in his mind,

00:53:26.500 but I can see how the optics of such a proposal could irk a lot of people the wrong way.

00:53:32.820 Now, in the parasitic mind, you talked about an analogy where there's an elderly woman being 0.90

00:53:36.660 attacked in an alleyway. Yes. 0.72

00:53:38.180 And you could be one of two sorts of people, the one who goes in and helps or the one who kind of

00:53:42.180 walks away and avoids getting involved. And you said, be the first, get involved.

00:53:48.260 Some might say with what's just happened, as we're talking again with the situation with Ukraine,

00:53:52.660 he has now said, I'll go into Ukraine, but if we can have mineral rights, it's like,

00:53:56.420 I'll help you, old lady, but as long as you give me some money from your purse. 0.99

00:54:00.180 Except, hasn't there been already a lot of the purse of the United States taxpayer

00:54:05.780 given to Ukraine? So the question becomes, how far do you want to take this? I mean,

00:54:11.140 how much are the American and, frankly, the Canadian taxpayers owing in the protection of Ukraine?

00:54:19.140 If you are a strong isolationist, you'd say, we've already spent way too much money.

00:54:24.660 If you're a globalist, we haven't spent enough money. It depends on your perspective.

00:54:28.900 Talking of those close to the president, Elon Musk is also a fan of yours and your book.

00:54:34.260 And he's certainly, you know, a lot of his decisions. Do you feel that he was shaped to

00:54:39.060 some degree by what you wrote in The Parasitic Man?

00:54:41.860 Well, there is an article that came out in Wall Street Journal about seven, eight months ago. The

00:54:49.540 title of the article, The Man Who Fuels Elon Musk's Nightmares. Do you know who that man is?

00:54:57.300 So I suspect, I mean, it's hard to answer that question without being immodest, but certainly, 0.99

00:55:03.620 I probably paid a hand. I missed that in my research. I mean, you said that Elon Musk should

00:55:08.260 get the Nobel Prize.

00:55:09.220 I do.

00:55:09.940 In which field?

00:55:10.980 Well, probably peace in the sense that, I mean, someone will probably correct me, but I would say

00:55:19.860 probably within a week of him having purchased Twitter, I did a sad truth clip where I said of

00:55:27.460 all the things that Elon Musk has done and anything that he will do in the future, none will be as

00:55:34.340 historically consequential as him having bought X.

00:55:38.100 I remember you quoted that.

00:55:39.380 Exactly. And so, so the fact that he has freed many of us from the oversight of the, in French,

00:55:47.620 you say the bien pensants, the good thinkers, the ones who are better, or as Thomas Sowell would say,

00:55:53.140 the anointed ones. The fact that I could now go on a thing and even use the R word, you know what 0.99

00:55:58.260 the R word is? Somebody says something really idiotic. I go, come on, man, are you retarded? 1.00

00:56:02.900 Oh, I get it. 0.99

00:56:03.860 So, so that was completely, no, no. I mean, I, the only strike I ever got on former Twitter,

00:56:11.380 I think it was maybe like a seven day violation was because I had used the R word. Real life cannot 0.98

00:56:17.700 be sanitized in this way, right? When I was in the Lebanese civil war, I didn't know if the next

00:56:23.140 minute I was going to live or not. And that was my reality growing up. You can handle the R word.

00:56:30.180 How did you find Elon Musk as a person?

00:56:32.900 So we, we spent a lot of time together. He actually invited me down to meet him at his house.

00:56:39.700 We ended up spending maybe about four hours together. I found them to be incredibly engaging,

00:56:46.180 very, very humble. I mean, we had communicated many times, but that was the first time that we

00:56:51.780 had seen each other in person. Zero ego, just two guys. I mean, we literally hugged,

00:57:00.420 sat there for four hours, completely locked in, sometimes discussing some very personal,

00:57:05.620 intimate things, sometimes discussing about maintaining human consciousness via interplanetary

00:57:12.100 travel. So sometimes it got very, you know, esoteric and philosophical. Other times,

00:57:17.620 as a matter of now, I could say it because he's mentioned it himself. He told me that the original,

00:57:22.020 you know, trigger for him that got him into the, the woke mind virus was the reality that he faced

00:57:28.260 with his own son who became his daughter, right? At the time, I didn't know if that was public,

00:57:34.100 so I never had mentioned it, but you know, he, he was confiding in me in a very trusting way,

00:57:39.300 in a very intimate way. So I thought he was just absolutely lovely. I mean, he is an eccentric guy,

00:57:44.580 uh, but I've got nothing but positive affection for him. He got, he got some flack for doing the

00:57:50.500 Roman salute, which is often compared with the Nazi salute. As someone who's culturally Jewish,

00:57:54.820 how did you feel about that? Well, I, I said, I actually had right away tweeted. I don't know if

00:57:59.300 you saw it. I said, you know, I can't believe that I was able to spend all this time in, in,

00:58:06.740 you know, the grand Nazis house. And as a Jew, I came out alive. Of course, I was mocking the idea

00:58:12.260 that he is, you know, pro Nazi and so on. It's so silly. Come on. A lot of the stuff you write, 0.99

00:58:16.900 actually, this was interesting to, to notes, even in your book that your irony and satire gets lost on

00:58:22.180 a lot of people. Oh my God, it's unbelievable. Uh, so, well, first the power of irony and satire,

00:58:29.220 satire, and sarcasm. So in the book, in the Persec Vine, I say that it is akin

00:58:34.420 the, to the surgeon's scalpel cutting through warm butter, right? The reason why dictators 0.84

00:58:41.460 go after the satirists first, they don't go after the guys with the big muscles. Those are easy to

00:58:46.500 handle. But the guy who's got the sharp tongue, the guy who's got the, the sharp pen, hence the pen

00:58:52.420 is mightier than the sword. That's the one that I'm scared of because he's the one who can attack,

00:58:58.020 attack my ideology, my position, right? So he makes me scared. And so, so that's, that's the reason

00:59:04.740 why I use satire and sarcasm. But to your point, what amazes me is how often, usually it's somebody

00:59:10.580 new who doesn't know my style, who I'll, I'll write something that is completely satirical,

00:59:16.580 and then they will just start sending me endless hate mail, not realizing that I was being satirical.

00:59:26.180 Dr. Gadsard explaining how he believes the parasitic mind is shaping our world today.

00:59:31.540 On the next episode of the conversation I had with him, 0.93

00:59:34.100 I challenge his fears that Islam is a danger to the world.

00:59:38.180 Islam, though, is a set of ideas that are codified. And then we could say, does Islam

00:59:44.900 promote greater personal liberties and freedoms? Yes or no? There is only these answers. It's either

00:59:51.140 yes or it's no, right? I would venture that based on historical facts, it doesn't promote greater

00:59:59.460 personal liberties and freedoms. And so I can't be Islamophobic in saying that. It's a nonsensical 1.00

01:00:05.380 term. I am a Islamo-realist. Plus, a look at how Suicidal Empathy, also the title of his next book,

01:00:12.740 will drag down the world order if it's not fully resisted now. Join us for that. But in the meantime,

01:00:18.500 don't forget to leave your thoughts and comments, subscribe to the channel, and we'll see you next

01:00:22.660 time. A big thank you from me and the team for watching. I'm Riz Khan. See you soon.

01:00:29.460 I'm Riz Khan. See you soon.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - March 13, 2025

Elon Musk Should Win A Nobel Peace Prize - Interview on Al Arabiya - Part I (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_803)

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