The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Evolutionary Psychology, the Parasitic Mind, and Suicidal Empathy (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_806)

00:00:00.000 Happy St. Patrick's Day, and got a little woo-hoo there from some of the audience members.

00:00:13.000 I'm Dr. Kristen Stayhauer, Academic Vice President and Provost here at Northwood University,

00:00:18.000 and I am just pleased and honored to be welcoming you to our inaugural Scholars Forum.

00:00:25.000 This is a program that complements the work that we've been doing in enhancing the scholarly community here at Northwood University.

00:00:33.000 It complements our symposia that are focused on our faculty, staff, and students' research,

00:00:39.000 as well as our Leadership Insights of View from the Helm series.

00:00:44.000 It showcases the scholarly work of our faculty members, and it also offers a look at their emerging research and findings.

00:00:53.000 And joining us today is Dr. Gad Saad.

00:00:58.000 Earlier this academic year, Northwood University appointed Dr. Gad Saad as Visiting Professor and Global Ambassador for the Northwood Idea.

00:01:07.000 His appointment is a bold affirmation of Northwood's unwavering commitment to promoting a culture rooted deep in intellectual freedom, personal responsibility, and the defense of free enterprise and liberty.

00:01:23.000 Dr. Gad Saad is Professor of Marketing at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, and former holder of the Concordia University Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption.

00:01:38.000 Dr. Gad Saad has received numerous awards from Concordia University for teaching and for his media work, including as co-recipient of the President's Media Outreach Award Research Communicator of the Year,

00:01:53.000 which is an international distinction, and it goes to the professor at Concordia University whose research receives the greatest amount of global media coverage.

00:02:03.000 To that point, you could call Dr. Saad a viral thought leader.

00:02:08.000 He's appeared on many leading media outlets, including 11 times on Joe Rogan's podcast, and he has a sizable social media following, including over 1.1 million followers on X.

00:02:24.000 In his scholarly work, Professor Saad has pioneered the use of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behavior.

00:02:32.000 His works include multiple books on consumer behavior, along with over 75 scientific papers, many at the intersection of evolutionary psychology and a broad range of disciplines,

00:02:44.000 including consumer behavior, marketing, advertising, psychology, medicine, and economics.

00:02:51.000 He's authored 311 articles on his Psychology Today blog that have garnered over 75 billion views.

00:03:00.000 But wait, there's more. His YouTube channel, The Sad Truth, has generated over 38 million total views, and his podcast entitled The Sad Truth to Dr. Saad,

00:03:13.000 which is available on all leading podcast platforms, has yielded close to 11 million downloads since June 2020.

00:03:21.000 In addition to his scientific work, Dr. Saad is a leading public intellectual who often writes and speaks about idea pathogens that are destroying logic, science, reason, and common sense.

00:03:36.000 His fourth book, The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, was released in October 2020.

00:03:43.000 It has since become an international bestseller, and we've selected it as an OmniQuest Plus book for this academic year.

00:03:51.000 His fifth book, The Sad Truth About Happiness, Eight Secrets for Leading the Good Life, was released in July 2023.

00:03:58.000 And perhaps even most interestingly, he's currently working on his next book with the provocative title, Suicidal Empathy,

00:04:08.000 and he's going to get into some of the findings there as well.

00:04:11.000 Please join me in formally welcoming Dr. Gad Saad.

00:04:18.000 Thank you, Kristen. I just want to make sure that I've got the time right. Let me just check it here.

00:04:26.000 So, okay, 5.04. Perfect. Thank you so much for having me. It's so good to be back on campus.

00:04:32.000 I was here in fall with my wife at the time. This time I'm here alone.

00:04:38.000 But the incredible love and support that I'm receiving makes me want to come back even more often than I have so far.

00:04:47.000 So thank you for your warm reception. So today what I'd like to do is give you a feel, if you're not at all familiar with my work,

00:04:53.000 to try to do it in 50 minutes is hard. But to precisely address what Kristen kindly mentioned,

00:04:59.000 which is some of my evolutionary psychology work and then get into parasitic mind and briefly get into suicidal empathy.

00:05:06.000 So buckle up. Here we go. So first I'm going to talk about my evolutionary psychology work.

00:05:14.000 For those of you who don't know what evolutionary psychology is, I'll give you sort of a quick synopsis.

00:05:20.000 It all started with this gentleman in fall of 1990. I was a first year doctoral student.

00:05:28.000 Thinking that I would get a PhD, something in behavioral science, but I wasn't sure exactly what.

00:05:34.000 And about halfway through the fall semester, Professor Regan, I was taking an advanced social psychology course with him.

00:05:41.000 And about halfway through the semester, he assigned this book by a husband and wife team, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson,

00:05:49.000 which ended up completely altering my academic career forevermore.

00:05:54.000 So what they did in this book, they were actually housed in a Canadian university, a McMaster University.

00:06:03.000 We have our president at Northwood is Canadian. So maybe I mentioned that so that he can have some of that patriotic love for Canada.

00:06:11.000 What they did in the book is they basically demonstrated that there are certain patterns of criminality occur in exactly the same way for the exact same reasons,

00:06:22.000 irrespective of culture, irrespective of time period. And the reason for that stems from an evolutionary calculus.

00:06:29.000 And so let me give you a couple of examples. So one example in the book is looking at what is the biggest predictor of there being child abuse in a home.

00:06:42.000 Now, if you've already heard me lecture about this, or if you've read any of my books, please don't say anything.

00:06:48.000 Anybody want to just take a shot at what is the main factor that predicts that there would be abuse in a home?

00:06:57.000 Anybody want to take a shot? No? Okay. So yeah, go ahead. No. Yes.

00:07:05.000 Okay, but you cheated. But I said don't say if you know it, right?

00:07:15.000 Usually you would get, I would get a hundred answers, none of which would be that one.

00:07:20.000 It would be, you know, if you're on the wrong side of the tracks, if you come from a particular socioeconomic class,

00:07:26.000 if your father or mother were alcoholic, if they had child abuse in their background,

00:07:31.000 all of which are reasonable answers, but all of these answers are 100-fold lesser predictor

00:07:39.000 than if there is a step-parent in the home.

00:07:42.000 Now, to give you a sense of how powerful that effect is, typically in science,

00:07:46.000 if you have, for example, an odds ratio of 1.2, I give a placebo drug to one group

00:07:52.000 and I give an actual drug to another group, and you get a ratio of 1 to 1.2,

00:07:57.000 that means it has 20% greater efficacy than the placebo. So it's 1.2 to 1. This is 100 to 1.

00:08:06.000 So it's an effect size that you almost would never see in science.

00:08:11.000 Now, why is that an important point to make? Because you wouldn't have come up with that explanation

00:08:16.000 if you weren't coming from an evolutionary lens. Because having a step-parent is exactly what you see also in other species.

00:08:23.000 So for example, in lion pride, in the feline species, it's only lions that are social animals, right?

00:08:30.000 So in the lion pride, when the resident dominant males are kicked out by new incoming males,

00:08:36.000 what's the first thing that they do? They go around and they kill every single cub in the pride.

00:08:42.000 Why? Because male lions do invest heavily in their children, and therefore it doesn't make evolutionary sense for them to waste their resources on cubs that were saved by someone else.

00:08:55.000 Now, this doesn't mean that you're justifying child abuse. A lot of people think that when you offer a scientific explanation for a reprehensible action, you're justifying it.

00:09:04.000 Well, that logic is silly because that would be like arguing that an oncologist, if he or she explains cancer, they're justifying cancer, right?

00:09:13.000 You're just explaining why that mechanism is. And that effect is so powerful that it is now known as the Cinderella effect.

00:09:21.000 Why? Because fables are universal because they speak about universal truths, and the stepmother is only strategically evil to the stepdaughter.

00:09:33.000 She's not dispositionally evil. She's not evil to her biological children. She's uniquely evil towards the stepchild. 1.00

00:09:40.000 So whenever you have a stepparent, and by the way, notwithstanding the fact that most stepparents are not going to be abusers, but it is a 100-fold greater risk to have a stepparent.

00:09:52.000 Second example that I will give from the book is, who is by far the most dangerous person in a woman's life?

00:09:59.000 And here I get all sorts of answers. It's the rapist that's hiding in the tree. It's all kinds of things.

00:10:04.000 By far the number one most dangerous person across every culture that's ever been studied, across every time period that's ever existed, is her long-term partner.

00:10:14.000 And he turns into a homicidal maniac for one reason, either realized or suspected infidelity.

00:10:24.000 And why is that? Because human beings are a biparental species. Human dads are actually super dads.

00:10:33.000 They're not as vested as mothers, but compared to other mammalian species, we really are heavily vested in our children.

00:10:41.000 Therefore, it would make evolutionary sense that your ancestors and mine would have cared about whether their women went with other men.

00:10:52.000 I don't want to spend the next 18 years raising a child that suspiciously looks like the really sexy gardener who comes and does our garden once a week.

00:11:03.000 Because that's a misappropriation of my investment.

00:11:06.000 Therefore, because of paternity uncertainty, we have evolved the cognitive, the emotional, the behavioral systems to try to thwart paternity uncertainty.

00:11:16.000 We didn't evolve with DNA paternity tests.

00:11:19.000 Right?

00:11:20.000 So because of these examples and many others, that was my epiphany.

00:11:23.000 I said, aha, evolutionary psychology seems to have an incredible ability to explain things with a lot of elegance and parsimony.

00:11:34.000 So then I'm going to take that framework and apply it in the behavioral sciences in general and in consumer and economic behavior in particular.

00:11:43.000 Hence, why I'm housed in a business school.

00:11:45.000 Why I'm housed in a marketing department.

00:11:47.000 Because I study the evolutionary roots of consumer behavior.

00:11:50.000 So here are some examples of studies that I've done.

00:11:56.000 This is arguably the one that received the most attention, certainly from the media.

00:12:02.000 This was now more than 15 years ago with one of my former graduate students, John Vungas, who's now himself a professor at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York.

00:12:11.000 So here you've got a peacock that is engaging in sexual signaling to the peahen.

00:12:17.000 And he's saying, look, despite the fact that this tail is very burdensome and it's going to reduce my survivability, here I am standing.

00:12:26.000 Therefore, you should probably choose me because I have good phenotypic quality.

00:12:29.000 Right?

00:12:30.000 It's an honest signal of my fitness.

00:12:33.000 Well, I took this principle and I tried to identify a corollary in the human context.

00:12:40.000 What humans do engage in literally the word is peacocking.

00:12:43.000 Right?

00:12:44.000 So specifically, I wanted to argue that fancy cars could be used akin to the peacock's tail.

00:12:51.000 Now, how did I go about doing this?

00:12:53.000 So we rented a Porsche and we had a beaten up old car.

00:13:00.000 And as some of you may have heard me if you've heard me in other lectures, try to get a scientific granting agency to release funds for you so that you could rent a Porsche for the weekend for scientific research.

00:13:12.000 That itself is a very impressive feat, which we did.

00:13:16.000 By the way, this graduate student at the time called me once.

00:13:19.000 I think it was like a Friday night when I wouldn't be expecting him to call me.

00:13:23.000 And one of the participants had jammed the transmission and now he's panicking because do we have enough funds to be able to fix it and so on.

00:13:34.000 That's part of the trials and tribulations of doing research.

00:13:37.000 But the dependent measure was the following.

00:13:40.000 So by the way, this is very different.

00:13:41.000 This is actually called a field experiment because you're not just bringing people into the lab and saying, imagine you're driving a Porsche.

00:13:49.000 They're coming in and they're going to drive a Porsche and they're going to drive a beaten up old car.

00:13:54.000 And they're going to do it in two conditions, either in downtown Montreal on the weekend where everybody can see me as a winner or forgive me if you have one of these cars as a loser.

00:14:04.000 And the key dependent measure is a salivary assay to measure your testosterone levels.

00:14:14.000 Because the argument is we know from many animal species, including humans, when you have a competitive bout, the winner has a rise in their testosterone and the loser has a drop in theirs.

00:14:26.000 It's an endocrinological marker of your movement along the social hierarchy.

00:14:31.000 And so that's exactly what we found, right?

00:14:34.000 By the way, the participants were all male.

00:14:37.000 And the reason is very simple.

00:14:39.000 Number one, men have about 10 times the testosterone level baseline as women do. 1.00

00:14:44.000 And while women, of course, also engage in sexual signaling, I'll show on the next slide. 0.98

00:14:50.000 When it comes to conspicuously fancy cars, it is men that use that signal. 0.61

00:14:56.000 And there is no culture that's ever been uncovered, despite the fact that there are many millionaire and billionaire women 0.99

00:15:01.000 women, they don't usually line up to buy Ferraris and Aston Martins. 1.00

00:15:05.000 Ninety-nine percent of Ferrari owners are male.

00:15:08.000 And there is no culture where that doesn't hold true.

00:15:11.000 And so one of the things that you learn in evolutionary psychology is that there is a universality

00:15:16.000 that notwithstanding our cultural differences makes us very similar to each other, precisely because we share a biological heritage.

00:15:23.000 Now, this is a study that, regrettably, we haven't yet published.

00:15:28.000 But I say regrettably because it's a brilliant study.

00:15:31.000 And actually, the gentleman with whom I'm supposed to be publishing this, you guys know him, because I tried to...

00:15:37.000 Actually, he was going to be here as part of this visit, but he wasn't able to make it.

00:15:43.000 Tripad Gill is arguably my, not arguably, he is my most illustrious doctoral student, who's now himself a professor at L'Oreal University in Canada.

00:15:53.000 And we had conducted this study many years ago.

00:15:57.000 We just haven't published it yet, just because you get, you know, you have a million projects on the go, and it just starts collecting dust.

00:16:04.000 But one of the things that I'm hoping to do soon is try to close out all these projects that really deserve to be published.

00:16:10.000 So, in this study, the only reason I mention... Well, I'm mentioning it for two reasons.

00:16:14.000 Number one, because I'm going to continue on the theme of the cars.

00:16:17.000 Number two, Northwood is very much linked to the automotive industry.

00:16:21.000 So, I'm trying to pick strategic examples from my research that would resonate with this crowd.

00:16:27.000 So, in this project, what we try to do is take the same guy and create two personal ads versions.

00:16:36.000 In one version, my favorite possession is my shiny, beautiful red Porsche.

00:16:41.000 Deep apologies to anyone who owns this Kia.

00:16:45.000 And in the other version, this is my favorite possession.

00:16:48.000 And now we're going to ask people to evaluate this guy on a whole bunch of metrics.

00:16:56.000 But the one that I'll talk about today is on his height.

00:17:01.000 So, after you see this, and then I ask men and women, so how tall was this guy?

00:17:06.000 And now we're going to get hugely different answers from men and women in ways that only evolutionary psychology could have predicted. 0.95

00:17:15.000 When women see this guy with this car, he magically becomes taller.

00:17:20.000 This is why you might have heard me mention in a previous lecture.

00:17:24.000 Maybe you did.

00:17:25.000 I'm not sure if I said it.

00:17:26.000 I always try to convince my wife, since I need a few more inches to reach six inches, that I need to get the Porsche so I can finally become taller. 1.00

00:17:35.000 On the other hand, when you ask men to judge the height of this guy, what happens to him?

00:17:44.000 He becomes shorter.

00:17:45.000 Why?

00:17:46.000 That's called a derogation strategy.

00:17:48.000 Men and women engage in a lot of intrasexual derogation, but we use different cues to derogate same-sex rivals.

00:17:56.000 When it comes to men, what threatens me is not that the guy is more handsome than me, is that he has higher social status than me.

00:18:02.000 If he does, that threatens me, so I'm going to derogate him.

00:18:06.000 If he's walking around with a fancier car that I could hope to have, then one of the ways I can derogate him is say, oh, he must be some short little guy.

00:18:14.000 He's compensating for it.

00:18:16.000 Even though, objectively speaking, the height of this guy did not change, it went in opposite directions depending on whether it's female calculus or male calculus.

00:18:27.000 That gives you a sense of the unique insights that can be gleaned from an evolutionary perspective.

00:18:33.000 Just so that you don't think we only study sexual signaling in men, here's an example of sexual signaling in women.

00:18:41.000 Now, why do I have these two slides next to each other?

00:18:45.000 Many, many species, when females are sexually receptive, they go into estrus. 0.96

00:18:52.000 And estrus typically involves sending signals that they are sexually receptive.

00:18:58.000 It could be olfactory, it could be visual.

00:19:01.000 So in this case, you have an engorge and an enlargement of the genitalia. 0.67

00:19:06.000 In the human context, we don't have quite overt signals.

00:19:13.000 But what we do have is a change in the types of attire that women will wear as a function of where they are in their ovulatory cycle. 0.97

00:19:22.000 So with one of my other graduate students, who himself now is a chaired professor at Miami University of Ohio,

00:19:29.000 we tracked women's behaviors for 35 days.

00:19:34.000 Why 35?

00:19:35.000 Because that covers the natural variance in menstrual cycle length across women.

00:19:40.000 So 35, on average 28, so it covers most women. 1.00

00:19:45.000 And every day we kept track of a whole bunch of things, but I'll only talk about sexual signaling here.

00:19:50.000 And what we found is that during the maximally fertile phase, during the ovulatory phase, which is a few days,

00:19:56.000 this is when they are most likely to engage in scantily clad signaling.

00:20:03.000 It could be I wear the stilettos when I'm ovulating.

00:20:07.000 It could be I wear my hair differently.

00:20:09.000 It could be I show more skin.

00:20:11.000 And I mean, the results couldn't be any more perfect.

00:20:15.000 So again, that shows you how an evolutionary understanding allows us to study all sorts of things,

00:20:21.000 some things that are the same across men and women and some things that are different.

00:20:24.000 What is exactly evolutionary psychology?

00:20:31.000 This is actually something that, you know, I really would like you to walk away with it,

00:20:38.000 certainly to the faculty who are doing research and certainly to the students.

00:20:43.000 There are two levels of scientific explanations.

00:20:48.000 Most of science operates at the proximate level.

00:20:52.000 Proximate explains the how and the what of a mechanism.

00:20:57.000 OK.

00:20:58.000 So much of science operates at the proximate level.

00:21:01.000 Most Nobel Prizes have been won at the proximate level.

00:21:04.000 But if you focus all of your pursuits, your scientific pursuits at the proximate level,

00:21:10.000 you're missing a whole range of explanations that occur at the ultimate level.

00:21:15.000 What's ultimate mean?

00:21:16.000 What does it mean?

00:21:17.000 It means the ultimate Darwinian why.

00:21:20.000 Why would the mechanism have evolved to be of that form?

00:21:25.000 So to fully understand any mechanism involving any biological agent, including humans,

00:21:32.000 you need to explain something at both the proximate and ultimate level.

00:21:36.000 And I'll give you a specific example to demonstrate that.

00:21:39.000 So take, for example, pregnancy sickness.

00:21:41.000 The reason why it's actually called pregnancy sickness out of the morning sickness,

00:21:45.000 while many women will experience it in the morning, others don't. 0.98

00:21:48.000 So the most general term is pregnancy sickness.

00:21:51.000 Now, you could set your clocks to the temporal specificity of pregnancy sickness.

00:21:57.000 It always happens during the first trimester.

00:22:01.000 It happens at exactly the start and end of something called organogenesis.

00:22:07.000 Organogenesis is when the organs are forming in utero.

00:22:12.000 When that is happening, it is uniquely important for childbearing women 1.00

00:22:19.000 to not be exposed to teratogens, which are foodborne pathogens.

00:22:24.000 Because if you are exposed to foodborne pathogens, that could wreak havoc to organogenesis.

00:22:29.000 Therefore, women will evolve certain aversions to certain foods 1.00

00:22:34.000 and certain attractions to other foods that are perfectly consistent with that logic.

00:22:39.000 For example, pickles are an antimicrobial product.

00:22:43.000 And therefore, women who may have never liked pickles suddenly have a voracious appetite 1.00

00:22:49.000 for pickles during organogenesis.

00:22:52.000 Okay?

00:22:53.000 Now, okay, this all sounds great, but you could ask, who cares?

00:22:57.000 What's the practicality?

00:22:58.000 Well, there are huge practical implications.

00:23:01.000 If you go see your OBGYN, right?

00:23:08.000 And you're saying, look, the severity of my pregnancy symptoms are really bad.

00:23:13.000 So please give me a pill so I can assuage those symptoms.

00:23:17.000 That's understandable.

00:23:18.000 You have an exam tomorrow and you don't want to be running to the bathroom every three seconds.

00:23:22.000 So maybe the spill will help.

00:23:24.000 It is the perfectly incorrect thing to do from an evolutionary perspective.

00:23:28.000 Why?

00:23:29.000 Because the more pregnancy sickness you experience, the greater the outcome of the childbearing.

00:23:38.000 Meaning that the likelihood, for example, of you having a miscarriage is lesser

00:23:44.000 the more pregnancy sickness symptoms you have.

00:23:48.000 Why?

00:23:49.000 Because it's the ultimate insurance policy.

00:23:51.000 If all of the other things failed, well then, by constantly feeling nauseous and throwing up,

00:23:57.000 I am expelling any possibility that I've been exposed to teratogens.

00:24:02.000 So more pregnancy sickness means healthier outcome. 1.00

00:24:06.000 And yet, when you go see your physician, it's the exact opposite that happens.

00:24:10.000 So I've lectured this in front of, I mean, literally OBGYNs.

00:24:15.000 So for example, at University of California, Irvine, I was a professor there for a few years,

00:24:20.000 where I was teaching in a health-related MBA program.

00:24:25.000 So many of the students who were coming to get their MBAs were coming from the medical fields.

00:24:30.000 And they would all come up to me at the end of the class and say,

00:24:33.000 Professor Saad, I'm an OBGYN.

00:24:35.000 I never learned this in medical school.

00:24:37.000 How could it be?

00:24:38.000 Well, you didn't learn it in medical school because you were stuck in proximate world.

00:24:41.000 Once you understand both proximate and ultimate, you become that much of a better practitioner.

00:24:47.000 Okay?

00:24:48.000 So that's number one.

00:24:49.000 Evolutionary theory allows you to understand the world using two epistemological lenses,

00:24:55.000 proximate and ultimate.

00:24:58.000 I won't go through all this, but this is just to kind of give you a sense.

00:25:02.000 One of the things that I love about evolutionary psychology and something that President McDonald

00:25:07.000 and I talked about very early when he had reached out to me kindly about the possibility of joining

00:25:13.000 Northwood and maybe setting up an institute is precisely the idea that you could set up

00:25:18.000 an institute using a whole bunch of different disciplines, all of which are united in their

00:25:25.000 application of evolutionary theory and feels that you would have never imagined it were possible to do that.

00:25:30.000 So let me just mention one or two such fields.

00:25:33.000 But, I mean, just going through all of these would be probably three, four lectures in a course

00:25:38.000 because it's that cool.

00:25:41.000 Take, for example, literary Darwinism.

00:25:44.000 What is that?

00:25:46.000 Well, if you're studying literature, you typically will study literature from a Marxist lens 0.99

00:25:53.000 or a feminist lens or a postmodernist lens, all of which are bullshit. 0.68

00:25:58.000 Instead, what you could do is study literature through an evolutionary lens. 0.91

00:26:03.000 What does that mean?

00:26:04.000 Well, literature moves us and I'm able to understand a Greek tragedy that happened 2,500 years ago

00:26:13.000 to a completely different guy in a completely different era in a completely different ecosystem

00:26:19.000 and precisely because the software that's running his brain is indistinguishable from the software that's running mine.

00:26:25.000 Notwithstanding that we're from different cultures and different millennia,

00:26:29.000 it's the exact same concerns that animates our lives here and the Greek tragedies.

00:26:37.000 It's paternity uncertainty, it's sexual longing, it's sibling rivalry, it's parent-child conflict.

00:26:44.000 So the stuff of literature comes down to about five, six key universal themes.

00:26:50.000 And so you could study all of the great works via an evolutionary lens.

00:26:55.000 I'll just mention one more, evolutionary architecture, right?

00:27:00.000 Now that's a cool, I just recently saw the movie The Brutalist, which deals with brutalist architecture.

00:27:06.000 And I actually did a clip on my channel comparing brutalism to, say, evolutionary architecture.

00:27:12.000 Architects are typically trained to maximize or optimize a couple of things.

00:27:18.000 Minimize the cost it takes to bring up the building and maximize the speed at which you can put up the building.

00:27:25.000 But what you're not looking into is something that's very important, which is called biophilia.

00:27:30.000 Biophilia is innate love of nature.

00:27:32.000 And so you can create certain designs that are consistent with some of the evolutionary principles that we want.

00:27:39.000 We want to have windows. That's really important.

00:27:42.000 There's a great study that was published, I think, in Nature in 1984,

00:27:46.000 which is a very prestigious scientific journal, where the only thing that they manipulated,

00:27:50.000 they had half the people went through the exact same surgery as the other half.

00:27:54.000 One half they put them in a room with a view, with a window, the other one without a window.

00:27:59.000 And just that manipulation led to huge differences in outcome.

00:28:04.000 And so living green walls, for example, would be an example of incorporating biophilia within architecture.

00:28:13.000 So each of these disciplines, whether it be economics or political science or consumer behavior,

00:28:19.000 all of these fields can greatly benefit from an infusion of evolutionary theory.

00:28:25.000 And so hopefully I've given you a bit of a flavor.

00:28:29.000 Now, I'm going to segue from that to my parasitic mind work.

00:28:35.000 So very early in my career, as I tried to Darwinize the business school, incorporate evolutionary psychology,

00:28:45.000 whether it be in studying leadership or entrepreneurship or behavioral economics or game theory or consumer behavior,

00:28:53.000 I was astounded to see so many of my colleagues get really triggered and angry by that.

00:29:00.000 Right. Well, what do you mean you're applying biology to study consumer behavior or to study organizational leadership or what?

00:29:08.000 You know, we're not animals. We are.

00:29:12.000 We don't exist in a world where biology applies to 1,999,999 species.

00:29:20.000 But there is one species that somehow transcends its biology.

00:29:24.000 Well, social scientists do think that.

00:29:27.000 They think that what makes us human is that we are cultural beings.

00:29:31.000 We transcend our biology.

00:29:33.000 Or if biology matters, it only matters up to the neck.

00:29:38.000 So if you apply evolutionary theory to explain opposable thumbs, that's OK.

00:29:43.000 If you apply evolutionary theory to explain why our pancreas is the way that it is, that's OK.

00:29:48.000 But surely, Dr. Saad, you're not one of those Nazi quacks who thinks that the human mind evolved through an evolutionary process.

00:29:55.000 No, that's exactly what I'm thinking. 0.66

00:29:58.000 It didn't happen magically, your mind.

00:30:00.000 Right. Your mind is due to the same forces that have shaped the evolution of every other species that exists on Earth.

00:30:08.000 Hence why Darwin is Darwin.

00:30:11.000 So why am I mentioning this is because that was my first exposure to what happens to a mind that is parasitized by ideology.

00:30:20.000 Here are the social scientists who are supposed to be super educated and all fancy professors and they all went to fancy schools.

00:30:28.000 And yet we couldn't agree on the most fundamentally banal statement like human beings are biological beings.

00:30:35.000 As a matter of fact, I spoke at a fellow Michigan school in 2008.

00:30:41.000 It was at University of Michigan.

00:30:43.000 University of Michigan has arguably one of the top three psychology departments in the world.

00:30:48.000 My doctoral supervisor got his PhD in psychology at University of Michigan.

00:30:53.000 And I also spoke at the business school, at Ross School of Business, one on Thursday and on Friday.

00:30:59.000 I give the talk on Thursday in the psychology department that had a lot of biologically minded folks.

00:31:05.000 They were like, oh, yeah, this is gorgeous, beautiful work.

00:31:07.000 Exact same talk the next day at the business school.

00:31:10.000 I couldn't finish a sentence.

00:31:12.000 The amount of heckling that I was getting.

00:31:14.000 Right.

00:31:15.000 Because they were very wedded to their environmental perspective.

00:31:20.000 Everything is due to the environment.

00:31:22.000 Consumers learn how to behave through advertising.

00:31:25.000 No.

00:31:26.000 Advertising exists in its form because of evolution.

00:31:29.000 Right.

00:31:30.000 I don't learn to be attracted to women with the hourglass figure because I consume Beyonce clips. 1.00

00:31:37.000 Beyonce clips exist in that form because they cater to my evolved preference.

00:31:43.000 It's the exact opposite causality.

00:31:45.000 So that was my original exposure to parasitic ideas. 0.98

00:31:49.000 And then we went down an orgy of imbecility after that for the next 30 years, resulting in me writing the parasitic mind. 0.94

00:31:58.000 So what is the parasitic mind? 0.99

00:31:59.000 You'll see in a second.

00:32:01.000 Maybe I'll first give it through some examples.

00:32:05.000 Then I'll give you the theoretical framework.

00:32:07.000 Now, this happened at my home university.

00:32:10.000 I usually am quite charitable in trying to not attack my home university out of a protocol and honor. 1.00

00:32:18.000 But come on, if you get crazy on me, even an honorable man has to attack your bullshit. 0.99

00:32:24.000 So this was a symposium that happened last year at Concordia. 1.00

00:32:30.000 It was called the Menstrual Equity Symposium because menstruation is a human right.

00:32:37.000 I hadn't known that in Canada women had been systemically stopped from menstruating.

00:32:43.000 But apparently we needed to have a one day symposium to give women menstrual equity, which of course also meant to put menstrual pads in men's bathrooms and so on. 1.00

00:32:56.000 So you can read it here later if you'd like, but that's the kind of insanity that we have.

00:33:02.000 Of course, you guys all know this.

00:33:04.000 Well, I say our, but it's yours.

00:33:06.000 I'm Canadian.

00:33:07.000 This is your most recent addition to the US Supreme Court, who sits and adjudicates cases ostensibly involving these things called men and women.

00:33:19.000 But when she was asked by the senator to define what is a woman, she didn't have the epistemological expertise to pronounce that. 1.00

00:33:29.000 Because if you remember, her answer was, I'm not a biologist.

00:33:33.000 Because until 15 minutes ago, the 117 billion people who had existed on Earth, that's a real number.

00:33:40.000 The 117 billion people were able to fully navigate through the very difficult conundrum of knowing what is male or female.

00:33:48.000 But 15 minutes ago, we suddenly lost our ability.

00:33:51.000 That's what happens with a parasitized mind.

00:33:54.000 This is me interacting with an anesthesiologist of color, because anesthesiology varies depending on my dermatological skin hue.

00:34:09.000 And she was chastising me for actually arguing that only women menstruate.

00:34:18.000 And she said, well, I've been to medical school.

00:34:21.000 You haven't.

00:34:22.000 Exactly.

00:34:23.000 Because it takes someone to have gone through medical school to know that only women menstruate. 1.00

00:34:27.000 And then later, when I told her, but I've published scientific papers in top journals on the menstrual effect, she said that I was mansplaining.

00:34:38.000 Now, this is an anesthesiologist.

00:34:40.000 Would you want that anesthesiologist to be doing your dosage if she doesn't agree what is male or female? 0.99

00:34:47.000 So this is the top society, the American Anthropological Association, which also includes Canadian anthropologists, is the top anthropological society in the world.

00:35:00.000 And they recanted on an acceptance of five women who are anthropologists and archaeologists who were going to speak about the fact that it was insane to remove biological sex as a relevant marker when doing anthropological and archaeological research.

00:35:24.000 Right.

00:35:25.000 If you're a physical anthropologist, you could look at a skeletal romaine and in about four seconds, you could know if it's male or female.

00:35:32.000 So they were simply saying that, you know, it can't make sense that we reject this important marker of a sexually reproducing species.

00:35:41.000 Well, they were ultimately told that they can't present at the leading anthropological society because that might promote transphobia.

00:35:54.000 All right. 0.95

00:35:55.000 So let's now delve into quickly the parasitic mind.

00:35:59.000 So there are two great threats to humanity that we face.

00:36:03.000 The first one are here, biological pathogens.

00:36:06.000 It could be fungi.

00:36:07.000 It could be parasites.

00:36:08.000 It could be bacteria.

00:36:09.000 It could be viruses.

00:36:11.000 Right.

00:36:12.000 I mean, mosquitoes kill more people than all other animals combined by many, many orders of magnitude.

00:36:19.000 Right.

00:36:20.000 So if you're going to have an evolutionary based fear, as I do of mosquitoes, that makes a lot more sense than to be afraid of great white sharks and polar bears.

00:36:29.000 OK.

00:36:30.000 But I argue in the parasitic mind that there's a second class of pathogens that we have to worry about.

00:36:36.000 And those are I call those idea pathogens or parasitic ideas.

00:36:40.000 And I'll explain in a second why I use the parasitic term.

00:36:44.000 These are ideas, beliefs, attitudes and mindsets that parasitize or zombify our ability to think critically.

00:36:54.000 So I'll just do a few of these, but there's a whole field.

00:36:59.000 And so the field of parasitology is simply the study of the interaction of parasites with hosts.

00:37:06.000 So as I explained in earlier lecture today, a tapeworm is a parasite, but that parasitizes your intestinal tract.

00:37:15.000 But a neuro parasite is one where the parasite seeks to end up in the host's brain, altering its neuronal circuitry to suit its reproductive interest.

00:37:26.000 And I'll give you an example of that.

00:37:28.000 Here's an example with a spider wasp and a spider.

00:37:35.000 When the spider wasp stings the spider, it renders it zombified.

00:37:41.000 It's alive, but it's zombified.

00:37:43.000 It takes it into its burrow.

00:37:46.000 It lays its eggs on it.

00:37:48.000 And then as the eggs hatch, they eat the spider in vivo while it's alive.

00:37:54.000 And the spider can't do anything about it.

00:37:56.000 It's completely zombified.

00:37:57.000 So imagine political correctness as the equivalent of the spider wasp sting.

00:38:04.000 Oh, yes.

00:38:05.000 No, no.

00:38:06.000 Men too can menstruate.

00:38:07.000 Yes.

00:38:08.000 Yes.

00:38:09.000 Of course.

00:38:10.000 Yes.

00:38:11.000 Men too can bear children.

00:38:12.000 Oh, absolutely.

00:38:13.000 Borders are racist. 0.98

00:38:14.000 Absolutely.

00:38:15.000 Only Nazis would have borders in the country. 0.92

00:38:16.000 Right. 1.00

00:38:17.000 And we just haplessly go along happily into the burrow to be eaten by bullshit. 1.00

00:38:23.000 Here's another example. 0.99

00:38:25.000 Toxoplasma Gandhi, which can parasitize many animals, including humans, by the way.

00:38:30.000 The most famous example is when a mouse is parasitized by Toxoplasma Gandhi.

00:38:34.000 It loses its innate fear of cats.

00:38:37.000 It actually becomes sexually attracted to the cat's urine, which is not a good mate choice

00:38:43.000 to have.

00:38:44.000 Here's another one.

00:38:45.000 This is another neuroparasite that parasitizes the brains of ungulates, deer, moose, elk.

00:38:53.000 And when they get parasitized, they stop fleeing from predators.

00:38:58.000 They start engaging in what's called circling behavior.

00:39:00.000 They kind of bob their head.

00:39:02.000 And even as the wolves are coming, they can't extricate themselves from that pattern.

00:39:07.000 And bad things happen to them.

00:39:11.000 Now, one more example, and then I'll link it to human context.

00:39:15.000 This wood cricket abhors water.

00:39:18.000 This is a hair worm. 0.90

00:39:20.000 When the hair worm goes in this guy's brain, the hair worm needs this guy to jump in water.

00:39:26.000 Why?

00:39:27.000 Because for it to complete its reproductive cycle, it has to happen in water.

00:39:31.000 Therefore, when this guy who hates water is parasitized, it merrily and happily jumped

00:39:37.000 to its suicide in the service of this hair worm.

00:39:40.000 So now we're going to come to some beautiful human examples. 0.95

00:39:44.000 Queers for Palestine are wood crickets. 1.00

00:39:48.000 Right? 0.63

00:39:49.000 Why?

00:39:50.000 Because if you are using your queer identity, more power to you. 1.00

00:39:55.000 If the way you present yourself to the world is through your queer identity, and you have 1.00

00:40:01.000 one of two choices.

00:40:02.000 You could either side with Tel Aviv, which is one of the most queer friendly cities in

00:40:08.000 the world, short of Montreal, San Francisco, New York.

00:40:13.000 Probably Tel Aviv is right up there.

00:40:16.000 Or you could side with Gazan society, where I'm happy to tell you that they have discovered

00:40:24.000 a really, really powerful new conversion therapy.

00:40:27.000 It's a gravity based conversion therapy.

00:40:29.000 They throw you off buildings head first, and that really cures you of your queerness. 0.95

00:40:34.000 So this wood cricket are these folks.

00:40:38.000 Right?

00:40:39.000 Here's another wood cricket.

00:40:42.000 This is a Jewish wood cricket.

00:40:44.000 By the way, in case anybody starts shifting, I'm Jewish.

00:40:47.000 So I can say these things.

00:40:49.000 Although I think that anybody should be able to say anything.

00:40:52.000 But people say, oh, only use the N word if you are black. 0.97

00:40:56.000 Only criticize Jews if you're Jewish. 0.99

00:40:58.000 I don't buy that. 0.92

00:40:59.000 But in case you're worried, Jewish wood cricket here, Anna Epstein, is so progressive that

00:41:08.000 when the October 7th attack happened, she was caught on camera at Boston University taking

00:41:15.000 down the photos of the kidnapped babies.

00:41:20.000 That's how progressive she is.

00:41:22.000 Now, had she been at the Nova Film Festival, all of her progressive outlook would not have

00:41:29.000 saved her from what happened to the other 1,200 people who were gang raped and decapitated

00:41:35.000 and burnt and shot.

00:41:37.000 But she's smarter than you. 0.99

00:41:38.000 She's more progressive than you.

00:41:40.000 That's why she knows.

00:41:41.000 So you don't have to hear guys like me who escaped the Middle East running really fast

00:41:45.000 from being decapitated.

00:41:47.000 Wood cricket, Jewish Epstein here knows better because she trained at an American university.

00:41:57.000 Here's another wood cricket.

00:41:58.000 This is Jewish Tal Nitzan, who was doing her PhD at Hebrew University.

00:42:04.000 Hebrew University is one of the prestigious universities in Israel.

00:42:08.000 And she was doing her doctoral dissertation trying to demonstrate that the IDF, the Israeli

00:42:15.000 soldiers, engage in rampant rape of Palestinian women.

00:42:18.000 So she set out to do her research. 0.97

00:42:21.000 And, oh my God, horrible thing happened.

00:42:24.000 She wasn't able to identify a single documented case of rape by the Israeli soldiers on Palestinian

00:42:33.000 women. 0.81

00:42:34.000 What did she do? 0.80

00:42:35.000 Did she conclude that her hypothesis was refuted and maybe the Israelis are not as evil? 1.00

00:42:40.000 Oh no.

00:42:41.000 What did she conclude?

00:42:43.000 She concluded that the inherent othering of the Palestinian women is so great that the 0.99

00:42:51.000 Israeli soldiers did not even think them worthy of being raped. 0.99

00:42:56.000 Therefore, had she found that they raped Palestinian women, they would have been evil monsters. 1.00

00:43:03.000 And if she found that none of them raped Palestinian women, it solidified that they are evil monsters. 0.99

00:43:10.000 So all possible states of the world confirmed that the Israeli soldiers were evil. 0.99

00:43:17.000 That's what happens to a parasitized mind.

00:43:20.000 Here's another one.

00:43:22.000 This one's going to be in my next book, Suicidal Empathy, which I'll try to talk about.

00:43:26.000 This guy who describes himself as feminist and anti-racist, that's already a problem to define

00:43:34.000 yourself as that. 0.99

00:43:35.000 He was raped by a Somali immigrant in Norway. 1.00

00:43:40.000 Literally raped. 1.00

00:43:41.000 He was sodomized. 0.95

00:43:43.000 In Norway, they don't believe in the meanness of the penal system.

00:43:47.000 You shouldn't really punish people.

00:43:49.000 You should rehabilitate them.

00:43:51.000 So after he served a very, very minimal sentence for rape, he was going to be deported.

00:43:57.000 This guy who was the victim of the rape felt terrible and felt guilty that his rapist was

00:44:04.000 now going to be sent back to Somalia where he wouldn't be able to maximally flourish in his life. 0.80

00:44:10.000 Well, I'm here to tell you as an evolutionary psychologist that our emotional system

00:44:15.000 did not evolve to experience empathy and sympathy for our rapists.

00:44:20.000 So it is literally anti-human nature to be experiencing the emotions that this guy had,

00:44:27.000 and hence suicidal empathy, which I'll come to in a sec.

00:44:30.000 So what are some examples of pathogenic ideas?

00:44:37.000 And this is the granddaddy of them all, postmodernism, because it purports that there are no objective

00:44:43.000 truths other than the one objective truth that there are no objective truths.

00:44:47.000 So it is a form of intellectual terrorism.

00:44:50.000 Up is down.

00:44:51.000 Left is right.

00:44:52.000 Men are women. 0.98

00:44:53.000 Slavery is freedom.

00:44:54.000 War is peace. 0.96

00:44:55.000 Anything goes.

00:44:57.000 Hence, intellectual terrorism.

00:44:59.000 Okay?

00:45:00.000 So what I do in the book is I go through all of these pathogenic ideas.

00:45:04.000 I describe where they originate from.

00:45:07.000 They all originate from academia, unfortunately.

00:45:10.000 And then I offer a mind vaccine.

00:45:15.000 Few examples from Canada, because I mean, of course, the United States has also been infected with some of these parasitic ideas.

00:45:23.000 But, you know, Canada is way ahead in its walkness.

00:45:27.000 So this is at one of the leading universities when it comes to engineering and computer science.

00:45:34.000 University of, excuse me, Waterloo.

00:45:37.000 It would be kind of like the Caltech or MIT of the United States.

00:45:42.000 Fortran, which was one of the early computer science languages, was developed at the University of Waterloo.

00:45:49.000 So it's a very serious technical university.

00:45:54.000 Canada research chairs are the highest professorships in Canada because they're endowed by the Canadian government.

00:46:01.000 So they're very prestigious professorships.

00:46:03.000 So they had calls for two professorships, Canada research chairs.

00:46:08.000 This is literally taken from there.

00:46:10.000 So I'm not being satirical.

00:46:11.000 I'm not adding any hyperbole.

00:46:13.000 This is literally what the call is.

00:46:16.000 So for number one, position one calls for any area in artificial intelligence.

00:46:20.000 But the call is only open to qualified individuals who self-identify as women, transgender, gender fluid, non-binary, or two-spirit.

00:46:30.000 Now, I have a computer science degree.

00:46:32.000 And I'm ashamed to say that when I studied computer science, I didn't incorporate the liberating framework of being two-spirit when I studied computer science.

00:46:40.000 I must have been really cheated out of a lot of great insights from queer methodology. 1.00

00:46:45.000 And then position two is open for anyone who comes from a self-identifies as a member of a racialized minority.

00:46:52.000 So chief lies a lot, Elizabeth Warren, because she self-identifies as a woman of color, then she would be open to this position.

00:47:04.000 So you don't even have to be from a racialized minority.

00:47:08.000 If you self-identify, that's Canada.

00:47:12.000 At my university, we launched a five-year program, five-year strategic plan to decolonize and indigenize the curriculum.

00:47:23.000 So whatever course you're teaching, so I teach evolutionary psychology, consumer psychology, psychology of decision-making,

00:47:29.000 decision-making, all of these courses, I would have to now go back, which of course I won't, but I would have to if I wanted to abide by this,

00:47:37.000 and see how I could decolonize and indigenize my courses.

00:47:42.000 It literally is a form of collective delusional mania.

00:47:49.000 And here's a project funded by the Canadian taxpayers to decolonize light.

00:47:57.000 So all of those physicists who studied light in physics, optics, you got to remember, they were all white males,

00:48:05.000 and probably a lot of them were heterosexual. 0.78

00:48:08.000 If they were gay, then maybe they'd have better understanding of light. 1.00

00:48:12.000 But in this case, you would really need indigenous ways of knowing to be able to study the physics of optics. 0.95

00:48:20.000 That's what Canadian taxpayers pay.

00:48:23.000 That's why I'm a visiting professor and global ambassador at Northwood University.

00:48:28.000 Because I can't stomach navigating through this kind of nonsense all day long.

00:48:33.000 When I asked for my leave of absence, I don't think I had yet finished typing the leave of absence.

00:48:41.000 I received, yes!

00:48:44.000 Dear Dean, yes!

00:48:47.000 Go away! 1.00

00:48:49.000 No?

00:48:50.000 Do you want me to...

00:48:51.000 This one, you've seen it before.

00:48:53.000 How much time have I got?

00:48:54.000 About ten minutes?

00:48:55.000 No?

00:48:56.000 Yeah?

00:48:57.000 Six minutes?

00:48:58.000 Six minutes?

00:48:59.000 I'm going to skip this one, but it's a great story.

00:49:01.000 Basically, this is a story where a woman that I was interacting with told me that sure men can bear children.

00:49:07.000 This was in 2002, and she told me there is no such thing as the sun.

00:49:11.000 That which you call the sun, I might call dancing hyena.

00:49:15.000 The setup of that story is a very funny one, but just in this...

00:49:20.000 Because of time shortage, I'll skip it, but it's a great story.

00:49:23.000 It demonstrates what happens to someone who is getting their training in postmodernism and women's studies and all this kind of nonsense.

00:49:32.000 Let me skip this.

00:49:36.000 All I'm going to do here is to basically say that social constructivism, which is the idea that it's only social construction that makes us who we are, is completely false premise.

00:49:46.000 There are biological imperatives. 0.94

00:49:48.000 So, for example, when it comes to toy preferences, the fact that little boys around the world prefer certain toys and little girls around the world prefer certain toys is not due to your parents being patriarchal pigs.

00:50:00.000 It's actually based in a biological based reality.

00:50:04.000 And so what I do here is I demonstrate through what I call the building of a nomological network.

00:50:10.000 Using many lines of evidence, I can show you that the position that there are biological reasons why little boys and little girls prefer certain toys is an incontrovertible fact.

00:50:21.000 And so, if anything, learning this methodology, this epistemology, whether you're a faculty member or student, is an incredibly powerful tool because it makes it very difficult for anybody to debate you.

00:50:34.000 Because once you've built that nomological network, it's unassailable.

00:50:38.000 I'll just give you a few examples.

00:50:40.000 You could look at other species, vervet monkeys, rhesus monkeys, and chimpanzees, and show that their infants exhibit the exact same toy preferences as human infants.

00:50:51.000 That already is problematic to the social constructivist viewpoint.

00:50:54.000 I could get you data from developmental psychology showing you that children who are too young to be socialized, they haven't yet reached that cognitive developmental stage, already exhibit those preferences, and on and on.

00:51:05.000 I won't go through it, but it's an incredibly powerful tool.

00:51:09.000 By getting you data from across species, across cultures, across settings, across methodologies, all of which triangulate to the same conclusion, it becomes very difficult for you to argue against me.

00:51:21.000 So I don't have to scream louder than you.

00:51:23.000 I don't have to call you names.

00:51:24.000 I just present this, and here we go. 0.85

00:51:28.000 This is chapter six of the parasitic mind. 0.89

00:51:32.000 It's ostrich parasitic syndrome. 0.61

00:51:34.000 It's a malady that I coined.

00:51:36.000 It refers to the metaphorical reality, because the ostrich doesn't actually do this, but it refers to the fact that you put your head in the sand and you go, la, la, la, I don't want to hear it.

00:51:47.000 Now, I demonstrated using very important examples, one of which is, by the way, this number has changed.

00:51:53.000 This is the number of Islamic terror attacks since 9-11 alone.

00:51:59.000 So only in the past 24 years, this number is now much higher.

00:52:04.000 I did this slide maybe four or five months ago.

00:52:07.000 So it's now closer to 47 plus.

00:52:11.000 In nearly 70 countries, when you ask Western politicians, Western intelligentsia, Western professors, what causes these 47,000 attacks, you get ostrich parasitic syndrome.

00:52:24.000 Let me just mention a few.

00:52:25.000 You ready?

00:52:26.000 Buckle up. 0.96

00:52:27.000 It turns out that these attacks are due to lack of adequate exposure to art.

00:52:33.000 So, for example, who amongst us didn't say one day, you know what, I haven't been exposed to enough Modigliani, Chagall, and Picasso. 0.99

00:52:42.000 That's why I'm joining ISIS to kill the Jews in Syria. 1.00

00:52:46.000 It's a direct link. 1.00

00:52:47.000 Not enough art, you become a jihadi. 1.00

00:52:50.000 Or, here's another one from our good friend Bill Nye, the science guy, who explained to us that the Bataclan terror attack in Paris, where they scream Allahu Akbar as they murdered the kuffar, the infidels, the non-Muslims, and provided the quotes from the Quran. 0.68

00:53:09.000 He said, no, no, it's actually, there's a very, very clear link to climate change.

00:53:15.000 Because those jihadis, Ahmad and Muhammad, when they were walking around in the jihadi camp in Raqqa, Syria, they said, you know what, there's too much CO2 emissions. 0.97

00:53:26.000 This is why we need to get to Bataclan and kill all the infidels. 1.00

00:53:30.000 So, this is what happens when a mind is so parasitized that the most fundamental reality, you're unwilling to tackle it headfirst. 0.94

00:53:41.000 I'm not going to have much chance to go to suicidal empathy, but this is a synopsis of my next book.

00:53:48.000 So, parasitic mind is what happens to human brains when their cognitive abilities are parasitized.

00:53:56.000 Right?

00:53:57.000 We are both a thinking and feeling animal. 0.96

00:53:59.000 Suicidal empathy completes the story by now explaining what happens to our emotional system when it is hijacked by parasitic nonsense.

00:54:09.000 And hence, suicidal empathy.

00:54:10.000 It's the misfiring of otherwise a noble emotion called empathy.

00:54:15.000 So, I won't get into it because I don't have time.

00:54:17.000 So, I'll just wrap up here to try to stay to time.

00:54:21.000 How do we save our universities?

00:54:23.000 So, let me just go through these.

00:54:25.000 Pursue knowledge unencumbered by ideological activism.

00:54:28.000 No knowledge is forbidden if gathered objectively using the scientific method.

00:54:32.000 Freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry, and the pursuit of truth are deontological principles.

00:54:37.000 They're absolute truths.

00:54:38.000 There is no, I believe in freedom of speech, but.

00:54:41.000 Once you put but and you put conditions, you're doing consequentialist ethics and it's a violation of a deontological principle.

00:54:47.000 No more identity politics and oppression Olympics and victimology poker and all that stuff.

00:54:52.000 No more coddling of the culture of offense and the ethos of perpetual victimhood.

00:54:57.000 Very few people have the genuine victimology story of my childhood growing up in the Lebanese Civil War.

00:55:04.000 Yet, what defines me is that I have surmounted my victimology story.

00:55:10.000 I didn't wallow in the dreadful reality in which I grew up.

00:55:14.000 I overcame this and hence, that's a success.

00:55:19.000 A just society is rooted in the ethos of a meritocracy.

00:55:22.000 We are not social ants.

00:55:24.000 The reason why I said this, I mentioned this in the earlier lecture today.

00:55:27.000 E.O. Wilson was a famous evolutionary biologist when asked, what are your views on communism?

00:55:32.000 His answer was, great idea, wrong species, right? 0.72

00:55:36.000 If you're a social ant, communism is good because you're all equal other than the reproductive queen. 0.97

00:55:41.000 Humans are not equal. We're equal under the law.

00:55:44.000 We may be equal under God, but some of us are taller, shorter, harder working, less harder working, more intelligent, less intelligent.

00:55:51.000 That's why communism has failed everywhere it's been tried because it's anti-human nature.

00:55:56.000 It violates the most fundamental precepts of what it is to be a human.

00:56:00.000 And certainly, people at Northwood understand this.

00:56:03.000 Promote an ethos of intellectual and political diversity.

00:56:06.000 Nothing is sacrosanct.

00:56:08.000 No ideology is above criticism.

00:56:11.000 And let me just wrap up.

00:56:13.000 I was going to say more things, but I don't have time.

00:56:15.000 Number eight, promote an ethos of interdisciplinarity,

00:56:19.000 consilience, which means unity of knowledge and methodological pluralism.

00:56:23.000 One of the things that I was hoping to possibly do in an institute here at Northwood would be to create a center that really promotes this crossbreeding from many different disciplines.

00:56:37.000 Academia is too focused on specialized silos.

00:56:41.000 Encourage bold thinking.

00:56:43.000 Academia should be about the forming of intellectual Navy SEALs, not bean counters.

00:56:48.000 Be bold.

00:56:49.000 Be honey badgers.

00:56:50.000 Strike the right balance between specialization and generalization.

00:56:54.000 Remove the stifling bureaucracies in academia.

00:56:57.000 Every time I want to run a scientific study, just to go through the ethical board makes you want to not run the study.

00:57:03.000 Because if I ask people, what is your sex?

00:57:05.000 Well, now I have to ask your 873 genders, right? 0.99

00:57:09.000 If I ask you, how much money do you make, which is a standard question,

00:57:13.000 well, that might offend someone's sensibilities if they come from a culture where we don't use money,

00:57:17.000 but we use the number of cows you own in Central Africa.

00:57:20.000 And so it becomes an endless pursuit of the futile.

00:57:24.000 And then finally, science, reason, logic, and a commitment to evidence-based thinking,

00:57:28.000 Trump ideology, hurt feelings, and fashionable anti-science for intellectual gibberish.

00:57:34.000 Thank you very much.

00:57:35.000 I kept it.

00:57:38.000 Yes?

00:57:42.000 Well, thank you.

00:57:43.000 What a tremendous treat it always is to hear you talk about your research,

00:57:47.000 and particularly your emerging research.

00:57:50.000 Thank you.

00:57:51.000 We have some time for Q&A right now, so we will have a roving mic in the room,

00:57:56.000 and then we can also take questions online.

00:57:59.000 And I will hand the mic over to Kerry to be our runner.

00:58:08.000 In the back, yeah.

00:58:14.000 Is there a predisposition for someone having a parasitic mind?

00:58:20.000 Oh, that's a great question.

00:58:21.000 Actually, I have a, speaking about emerging research, with one of my graduate students,

00:58:27.000 who regrettably has disappeared for now a couple of years, often what happens with these graduate students,

00:58:32.000 they get sucked into a black hole, and they never come out, and you don't know what happened to them.

00:58:37.000 What I was, the research project was to exactly address your question, which is, what are some predictors?

00:58:44.000 It could be morphological predictors, it could be personality predictors, it could be demographic predictors,

00:58:50.000 that answer exactly your question, which is susceptibility to fall prey to parasitic ideas.

00:58:57.000 Now, what I can tell you is that all of the parasitic ideas that I talk about in the book stem from the left.

00:59:06.000 That's not because I'm inherently saying that people on the right cannot be parasitized by bad ideas,

00:59:12.000 but it's because I exist in the ecosystem of academia. 0.99

00:59:16.000 Academia is almost exclusively run by leftist professors, and therefore you expect that the idiotic ideas are going to come from the left. 0.96

00:59:23.000 But just to give you an example, when it comes to evolution, it is people on the right who have animus towards it, 0.99

00:59:33.000 because it usually attacks their religious sensibilities.

00:59:36.000 On the other hand, when it comes to the application of the theory of evolution to the study of the human mind,

00:59:44.000 it's people on the left who hate the idea.

00:59:46.000 So depending on whether I'm criticizing evolution or evolutionary psychology, I'm either on the right or the left.

00:59:52.000 But all of these ideas are usually coming from the left.

00:59:57.000 But surely there are more questions.

01:00:03.000 Don't be shy.

01:00:05.000 Hi.

01:00:06.000 Hi.

01:00:07.000 I'm curious.

01:00:08.000 Could you give us some examples of how you, your process of vetting sources in your pursuit for knowledge?

01:00:25.000 Sources in what context?

01:00:28.000 Like say I'm doing a literature review?

01:00:31.000 Not necessarily.

01:00:32.000 More like, not like book-based research, right?

01:00:37.000 More so like conversational.

01:00:40.000 And, you know, this…

01:00:42.000 Yeah.

01:00:43.000 I mean, it depends on the context, right?

01:00:44.000 I mean, if I'm writing a book or I'm writing an academic paper, there are vetted sources, right?

01:00:50.000 So it's an other peer-reviewed journal that is highly reputable that I'm citing that journal, right?

01:00:57.000 Or that author.

01:00:59.000 Where the…

01:01:00.000 So I don't know the gist of your question, but where you can fall into a bit of a problem is where you…

01:01:07.000 You know, on social media, things move very quickly, right?

01:01:10.000 And when you retweet something, you don't sit and spend six weeks vetting that source when you retweet it, right?

01:01:17.000 Now, almost always, whatever I retweet is fine.

01:01:19.000 But, of course, once in a while…

01:01:21.000 I'll give you an example.

01:01:22.000 A few days ago, I retweeted what looked like a woman in a burqa, okay? 0.98

01:01:29.000 A burqa, her identity is completely erased, okay? 1.00

01:01:34.000 And so I retweeted it and I said, sarcastically, all cultures are equal, okay?

01:01:40.000 And someone pointed to the fact that that specific image happened to be from a minuscule sect of…

01:01:50.000 …a Jewish sect where that photo was that of a Jewish woman, meaning that they owned me because I thought that it was an Islamic woman.

01:02:00.000 And then I just doubled down.

01:02:01.000 I said, well, that simply demonstrates that the very minuscule Jewish sect… 1.00

01:02:06.000 I mean, really, you could count the number of women on one hand that practice this… 1.00

01:02:10.000 …are also engaging in behavior that I would disagree with because they're erasing the identity of women.

01:02:15.000 But there are hundreds of millions of Islamic women that do this. 1.00

01:02:19.000 But the people on Twitter thought, ah, they had got me in a gotcha moment because I thought…

01:02:24.000 So, it depends on the context.

01:02:26.000 If it's in a formal publication, then I do my vetting because it's usually sources that are reputable.

01:02:35.000 But on social media, it's a bit more difficult to do.

01:02:38.000 Thank you.

01:02:45.000 When will your next book be released and where will it be available for purchase?

01:02:48.000 Thank you for that question.

01:02:50.000 Well, so technically, I'm only supposed to submit…

01:02:55.000 So, you know, there's a contract with the publisher and they say, okay, please submit your book by such and such date.

01:03:01.000 Now, that date is only 2026, but because of the freedom that I've been afforded by Northwood to actually work on the book instead of ducking and weaving as people at my university are trying to decapitate me…

01:03:16.000 I mean, it almost literally is that because I get death threats and all kinds of stuff.

01:03:22.000 I'm hoping to move it to maybe late 2025.

01:03:26.000 So, we'll see.

01:03:27.000 But I would say no earlier than another nine months, no later than 18 months.

01:03:34.000 Thank you.

01:03:35.000 Thank you.

01:03:36.000 How would you say as young adults and I guess as grown adults in this room, how can we keep our mind from becoming parasitic?

01:03:46.000 Read the parasitic mind, watch my lectures. Look, I recently appeared on… Do you guys know who Piers Morgan is?

01:03:57.000 Piers Morgan is, you know, probably one of the most well-known sort of media personalities in Britain.

01:04:03.000 He also comes often to the US and he had me on his show and, you know, he was screaming the canard, but, you know, aren't you engaging in Islamophobia?

01:04:13.000 Islamophobia? Aren't you engaging in Islamophobia?

01:04:15.000 Just go and watch my 17-minute exchange with him, how I remain very calm.

01:04:22.000 I just spit facts.

01:04:24.000 I don't engage in emotional incontinence and the facts ultimately overwhelm him.

01:04:30.000 So, the best way to do it is to always be prepared with facts.

01:04:35.000 And what that allows you to do is it allows you to be epistemologically humble, meaning that if you ask me a question on a topic that I'm not very sure about, I'm the first to admit to that.

01:04:48.000 So, I will say, you know, that's a great question, but unfortunately I don't know enough about this. Let me get back to you.

01:04:53.000 What that does is it creates trust between you and the audience because you've admitted that you don't know something.

01:04:58.000 I think what often happens to people because people have egos, especially if they're professors, is they think that they should never admit to not knowing something.

01:05:07.000 So, a young student asks a question, well, I'll probably wing it and they won't know the difference.

01:05:11.000 No. People are smart.

01:05:13.000 I wouldn't be able to go on Joe Rogan all the times that I have in front of 20, 30 million people each time.

01:05:19.000 People are dissecting every word you say.

01:05:21.000 If you start spewing BS, people are going to catch you.

01:05:25.000 The fact that I'm still standing is because I'm very disciplined in knowing what I know and knowing what I don't know.

01:05:31.000 So, what I would suggest, whether you're a young person or not, is have that discipline.

01:05:37.000 Know what you know.

01:05:38.000 And Confucius already told us that several thousand years ago.

01:05:41.000 Thank you.

01:05:42.000 Thank you.

01:05:43.000 Dr. Saad, thank you for your…

01:05:45.000 How are you, sir?

01:05:46.000 Good, good.

01:05:47.000 Welcome and thank you for your comments today.

01:05:49.000 Curious, when you did your samples, how did you go about determining your sample size so that it would be representative of the population?

01:05:56.000 Which study?

01:05:57.000 Any.

01:05:58.000 Any study?

01:05:59.000 Any.

01:06:00.000 So, there are different…

01:06:01.000 That's a great methodological question.

01:06:02.000 There are different ways by which you can arrive at a sample size determination.

01:06:11.000 Depending on the power of the statistical test you want to do, you can literally enter into a formula that says,

01:06:18.000 OK, given what I'm trying to do, I need 147 people.

01:06:22.000 OK?

01:06:23.000 The other way, there are also rules of thumbs that you can use.

01:06:26.000 So, typically, if you're running an experiment, let's say the experiment has four conditions, like four different groups,

01:06:32.000 what you always want is to at least have 30 people per group.

01:06:36.000 Because what that does is it starts diluting the effect of a singular outlier.

01:06:42.000 So, past 30, you're in good…

01:06:44.000 So, there are different ways by which you can achieve that.

01:06:47.000 And, of course, we follow all those ways.

01:06:49.000 Thank you.

01:06:50.000 Thank you.

01:06:53.000 Thank you so much.

01:06:54.000 I know you.

01:06:55.000 I know you.

01:06:56.000 Thank you so much for the talk.

01:06:58.000 Fascinating topic.

01:06:59.000 So, I have a question.

01:07:00.000 Why do you think so many people are driven towards these ideas if they are harmful?

01:07:06.000 What do you think is…

01:07:07.000 Yes.

01:07:08.000 Great question.

01:07:09.000 So, I talk about this very early in the book.

01:07:11.000 So, I argue that every single one of those parasitic ideas originally starts off with a noble cause.

01:07:22.000 And in the pursuit of that noble cause, if I have to murder and rape truth in the service of that noble cause, so be it.

01:07:30.000 So, for example, equity feminism is a great idea. 0.98

01:07:34.000 It says men and women should be treated equally under the law.

01:07:37.000 And based on that definition, all of us in this room would say, yeah, I'm an equity feminist. 1.00

01:07:41.000 Radical feminists then come along and say, well, in the service of eradicating rampant sexism, let's promulgate the idea that men and women are indistinguishable from each other. 1.00

01:07:53.000 Right?

01:07:54.000 Because then that will allow us to squash the patriarchy quicker. 0.90

01:07:59.000 So, in the service of what sounded like a noble goal, and this is, by the way, what consequentialism is, right?

01:08:05.000 If I have to murder and rape truth in the service of a higher noble goal, so be it.

01:08:10.000 No. 0.98

01:08:11.000 Transgender activism is the same thing, right?

01:08:14.000 Yes, of course, transgender people should live free of bigotry.

01:08:17.000 But in the pursuit of that goal, we don't nod our head and say, yeah, of course, men too can menstruate.

01:08:23.000 Yes, yes, of course, the Budweiser guy is really a girl because he decided, you know what I'm talking about? 0.89

01:08:29.000 Right?

01:08:30.000 Okay.

01:08:31.000 I mean, that's insane.

01:08:32.000 And so I think each of those ideas have a stickiness about them, stickiness in the sense that they're viral, because they start off from a noble place.

01:08:42.000 So, for example, cultural relativism, which is the idea that who are you to judge the beliefs of other cultures?

01:08:50.000 What they do is their business stems originally from the misapplication of biology to create hierarchies across the races, right?

01:09:00.000 The Nazis said, hey, there's a natural struggle between the races. 0.83

01:09:04.000 The Jews are inferior to us. 1.00

01:09:06.000 We're Aryan. 1.00

01:09:07.000 Hey, if we kill them, that's just Darwinian, right? 0.65

01:09:09.000 So then a whole bunch of anthropologists came along and said, well, one of the ways that we can curtail that is by removing biological arguments from the study of human nature. 0.97

01:09:18.000 So it always starts off from a noble place, and then it metamorphosizes into nonsense.

01:09:24.000 Well, on that note, we're going to have to wrap things up this evening.

01:09:29.000 But certainly this is just such a worthy inaugural scholars forum.

01:09:34.000 Thank you so much.

01:09:35.000 Thank you, Dr. Gadsad.

01:09:36.000 Thank you.

01:09:37.000 We are so pleased that you're a visiting scholar here at Northwood University and Global Ambassador for the Northwood Idea.

01:09:42.000 Those of you who are in the room, please join us.

01:09:44.000 We have a reception where you can speak with Dr. Saad afterwards.

01:09:47.000 And thanks to all who've joined us online.

01:09:49.000 Thank you, guys.

01:09:50.000 Have a wonderful evening.

01:09:51.000 Thank you.

01:09:52.000 Thank you.

01:09:53.000 Thank you.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - March 18, 2025

Evolutionary Psychology, the Parasitic Mind, and Suicidal Empathy (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_806)

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