Dr. Gad Saad is Professor of Marketing at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada and former holder of the Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption. Dr. Saad has pioneered the use of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behavior. His works include multiple books on consumer behavior, along with over 75 scientific papers, many at the intersection with evolutionary psychology and a broad range of disciplines including consumer behaviour, marketing, advertising, psychology, medicine, and economics. He s authored 311 articles on his Psychology Today blog that have garnered over 75 billion views. His YouTube channel, The Sad Truth has generated over 38 million total views, and his podcast entitled The SAD TRUTH has yielded close to 11 million downloads since June 2020. And perhaps even more interestingly, he s currently working on his next book with the provocative title, Suicidal Empathy, and is going to get into some of the findings there as well.
00:00:58.000Earlier this academic year, Northwood University appointed Dr. Gad Saad as Visiting Professor and Global Ambassador for the Northwood Idea.
00:01:07.000His 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.
00:01:23.000Dr. 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.
00:01:38.000Dr. 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,
00:01:53.000which is an international distinction, and it goes to the professor at Concordia University whose research receives the greatest amount of global media coverage.
00:02:03.000To that point, you could call Dr. Saad a viral thought leader.
00:02:08.000He'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.
00:02:24.000In his scholarly work, Professor Saad has pioneered the use of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behavior.
00:02:32.000His 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,
00:02:44.000including consumer behavior, marketing, advertising, psychology, medicine, and economics.
00:02:51.000He's authored 311 articles on his Psychology Today blog that have garnered over 75 billion views.
00:03:00.000But 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,
00:03:13.000which is available on all leading podcast platforms, has yielded close to 11 million downloads since June 2020.
00:03:21.000In 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.
00:03:36.000His fourth book, The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, was released in October 2020.
00:03:43.000It has since become an international bestseller, and we've selected it as an OmniQuest Plus book for this academic year.
00:03:51.000His fifth book, The Sad Truth About Happiness, Eight Secrets for Leading the Good Life, was released in July 2023.
00:03:58.000And perhaps even most interestingly, he's currently working on his next book with the provocative title, Suicidal Empathy,
00:04:08.000and he's going to get into some of the findings there as well.
00:04:11.000Please join me in formally welcoming Dr. Gad Saad.
00:04:18.000Thank you, Kristen. I just want to make sure that I've got the time right. Let me just check it here.
00:04:26.000So, okay, 5.04. Perfect. Thank you so much for having me. It's so good to be back on campus.
00:04:32.000I was here in fall with my wife at the time. This time I'm here alone.
00:04:38.000But the incredible love and support that I'm receiving makes me want to come back even more often than I have so far.
00:04:47.000So 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,
00:04:53.000to try to do it in 50 minutes is hard. But to precisely address what Kristen kindly mentioned,
00:04:59.000which is some of my evolutionary psychology work and then get into parasitic mind and briefly get into suicidal empathy.
00:05:06.000So buckle up. Here we go. So first I'm going to talk about my evolutionary psychology work.
00:05:14.000For those of you who don't know what evolutionary psychology is, I'll give you sort of a quick synopsis.
00:05:20.000It all started with this gentleman in fall of 1990. I was a first year doctoral student.
00:05:28.000Thinking that I would get a PhD, something in behavioral science, but I wasn't sure exactly what.
00:05:34.000And about halfway through the fall semester, Professor Regan, I was taking an advanced social psychology course with him.
00:05:41.000And about halfway through the semester, he assigned this book by a husband and wife team, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson,
00:05:49.000which ended up completely altering my academic career forevermore.
00:05:54.000So what they did in this book, they were actually housed in a Canadian university, a McMaster University.
00:06:03.000We have our president at Northwood is Canadian. So maybe I mentioned that so that he can have some of that patriotic love for Canada.
00:06:11.000What 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,
00:06:22.000irrespective of culture, irrespective of time period. And the reason for that stems from an evolutionary calculus.
00:06:29.000And 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.
00:06:42.000Now, if you've already heard me lecture about this, or if you've read any of my books, please don't say anything.
00:06:48.000Anybody want to just take a shot at what is the main factor that predicts that there would be abuse in a home?
00:06:57.000Anybody want to take a shot? No? Okay. So yeah, go ahead. No. Yes.
00:07:05.000Okay, but you cheated. But I said don't say if you know it, right?
00:07:15.000Usually you would get, I would get a hundred answers, none of which would be that one.
00:07:20.000It would be, you know, if you're on the wrong side of the tracks, if you come from a particular socioeconomic class,
00:07:26.000if your father or mother were alcoholic, if they had child abuse in their background,
00:07:31.000all of which are reasonable answers, but all of these answers are 100-fold lesser predictor
00:07:39.000than if there is a step-parent in the home.
00:07:42.000Now, to give you a sense of how powerful that effect is, typically in science,
00:07:46.000if you have, for example, an odds ratio of 1.2, I give a placebo drug to one group
00:07:52.000and I give an actual drug to another group, and you get a ratio of 1 to 1.2,
00:07:57.000that means it has 20% greater efficacy than the placebo. So it's 1.2 to 1. This is 100 to 1.
00:08:06.000So it's an effect size that you almost would never see in science.
00:08:11.000Now, why is that an important point to make? Because you wouldn't have come up with that explanation
00:08:16.000if you weren't coming from an evolutionary lens. Because having a step-parent is exactly what you see also in other species.
00:08:23.000So for example, in lion pride, in the feline species, it's only lions that are social animals, right?
00:08:30.000So in the lion pride, when the resident dominant males are kicked out by new incoming males,
00:08:36.000what's the first thing that they do? They go around and they kill every single cub in the pride.
00:08:42.000Why? 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.
00:08:55.000Now, 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.
00:09:04.000Well, that logic is silly because that would be like arguing that an oncologist, if he or she explains cancer, they're justifying cancer, right?
00:09:13.000You're just explaining why that mechanism is. And that effect is so powerful that it is now known as the Cinderella effect.
00:09:21.000Why? Because fables are universal because they speak about universal truths, and the stepmother is only strategically evil to the stepdaughter.
00:09:33.000She's not dispositionally evil. She's not evil to her biological children. She's uniquely evil towards the stepchild.
00:09:40.000So 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.
00:09:52.000Second example that I will give from the book is, who is by far the most dangerous person in a woman's life?
00:09:59.000And here I get all sorts of answers. It's the rapist that's hiding in the tree. It's all kinds of things.
00:10:04.000By 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.
00:10:14.000And he turns into a homicidal maniac for one reason, either realized or suspected infidelity.
00:10:24.000And why is that? Because human beings are a biparental species. Human dads are actually super dads.
00:10:33.000They're not as vested as mothers, but compared to other mammalian species, we really are heavily vested in our children.
00:10:41.000Therefore, it would make evolutionary sense that your ancestors and mine would have cared about whether their women went with other men.
00:10:52.000I 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.
00:11:03.000Because that's a misappropriation of my investment.
00:11:06.000Therefore, because of paternity uncertainty, we have evolved the cognitive, the emotional, the behavioral systems to try to thwart paternity uncertainty.
00:11:16.000We didn't evolve with DNA paternity tests.
00:11:20.000So because of these examples and many others, that was my epiphany.
00:11:23.000I said, aha, evolutionary psychology seems to have an incredible ability to explain things with a lot of elegance and parsimony.
00:11:34.000So 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.
00:11:43.000Hence, why I'm housed in a business school.
00:11:45.000Why I'm housed in a marketing department.
00:11:47.000Because I study the evolutionary roots of consumer behavior.
00:11:50.000So here are some examples of studies that I've done.
00:11:56.000This is arguably the one that received the most attention, certainly from the media.
00:12:02.000This 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.
00:12:11.000So here you've got a peacock that is engaging in sexual signaling to the peahen.
00:12:17.000And 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.
00:12:26.000Therefore, you should probably choose me because I have good phenotypic quality.
00:12:53.000So we rented a Porsche and we had a beaten up old car.
00:13:00.000And 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.
00:13:12.000That itself is a very impressive feat, which we did.
00:13:16.000By the way, this graduate student at the time called me once.
00:13:19.000I think it was like a Friday night when I wouldn't be expecting him to call me.
00:13:23.000And 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.
00:13:34.000That's part of the trials and tribulations of doing research.
00:13:37.000But the dependent measure was the following.
00:13:40.000So by the way, this is very different.
00:13:41.000This is actually called a field experiment because you're not just bringing people into the lab and saying, imagine you're driving a Porsche.
00:13:49.000They're coming in and they're going to drive a Porsche and they're going to drive a beaten up old car.
00:13:54.000And 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.
00:14:04.000And the key dependent measure is a salivary assay to measure your testosterone levels.
00:14:14.000Because 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.
00:14:26.000It's an endocrinological marker of your movement along the social hierarchy.
00:14:31.000And so that's exactly what we found, right?
00:14:34.000By the way, the participants were all male.
00:14:39.000Number one, men have about 10 times the testosterone level baseline as women do.
00:14:44.000And while women, of course, also engage in sexual signaling, I'll show on the next slide.
00:14:50.000When it comes to conspicuously fancy cars, it is men that use that signal.
00:14:56.000And there is no culture that's ever been uncovered, despite the fact that there are many millionaire and billionaire women
00:15:01.000women, they don't usually line up to buy Ferraris and Aston Martins.
00:15:05.000Ninety-nine percent of Ferrari owners are male.
00:15:08.000And there is no culture where that doesn't hold true.
00:15:11.000And so one of the things that you learn in evolutionary psychology is that there is a universality
00:15:16.000that notwithstanding our cultural differences makes us very similar to each other, precisely because we share a biological heritage.
00:15:23.000Now, this is a study that, regrettably, we haven't yet published.
00:15:28.000But I say regrettably because it's a brilliant study.
00:15:31.000And actually, the gentleman with whom I'm supposed to be publishing this, you guys know him, because I tried to...
00:15:37.000Actually, he was going to be here as part of this visit, but he wasn't able to make it.
00:15:43.000Tripad 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.
00:15:53.000And we had conducted this study many years ago.
00:15:57.000We 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.
00:16:04.000But 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.
00:16:10.000So, in this study, the only reason I mention... Well, I'm mentioning it for two reasons.
00:16:14.000Number one, because I'm going to continue on the theme of the cars.
00:16:17.000Number two, Northwood is very much linked to the automotive industry.
00:16:21.000So, I'm trying to pick strategic examples from my research that would resonate with this crowd.
00:16:27.000So, in this project, what we try to do is take the same guy and create two personal ads versions.
00:16:36.000In one version, my favorite possession is my shiny, beautiful red Porsche.
00:16:41.000Deep apologies to anyone who owns this Kia.
00:16:45.000And in the other version, this is my favorite possession.
00:16:48.000And now we're going to ask people to evaluate this guy on a whole bunch of metrics.
00:16:56.000But the one that I'll talk about today is on his height.
00:17:01.000So, after you see this, and then I ask men and women, so how tall was this guy?
00:17:06.000And now we're going to get hugely different answers from men and women in ways that only evolutionary psychology could have predicted.
00:17:15.000When women see this guy with this car, he magically becomes taller.
00:17:20.000This is why you might have heard me mention in a previous lecture.
00:17:26.000I 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.
00:17:35.000On the other hand, when you ask men to judge the height of this guy, what happens to him?
00:17:48.000Men and women engage in a lot of intrasexual derogation, but we use different cues to derogate same-sex rivals.
00:17:56.000When 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.
00:18:02.000If he does, that threatens me, so I'm going to derogate him.
00:18:06.000If 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.
00:18:16.000Even 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.
00:18:27.000That gives you a sense of the unique insights that can be gleaned from an evolutionary perspective.
00:18:33.000Just so that you don't think we only study sexual signaling in men, here's an example of sexual signaling in women.
00:18:41.000Now, why do I have these two slides next to each other?
00:18:45.000Many, many species, when females are sexually receptive, they go into estrus.
00:18:52.000And estrus typically involves sending signals that they are sexually receptive.
00:18:58.000It could be olfactory, it could be visual.
00:19:01.000So in this case, you have an engorge and an enlargement of the genitalia.
00:19:06.000In the human context, we don't have quite overt signals.
00:19:13.000But 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.
00:19:22.000So with one of my other graduate students, who himself now is a chaired professor at Miami University of Ohio,
00:19:29.000we tracked women's behaviors for 35 days.
00:32:01.000Maybe I'll first give it through some examples.
00:32:05.000Then I'll give you the theoretical framework.
00:32:07.000Now, this happened at my home university.
00:32:10.000I usually am quite charitable in trying to not attack my home university out of a protocol and honor.
00:32:18.000But come on, if you get crazy on me, even an honorable man has to attack your bullshit.
00:32:24.000So this was a symposium that happened last year at Concordia.
00:32:30.000It was called the Menstrual Equity Symposium because menstruation is a human right.
00:32:37.000I hadn't known that in Canada women had been systemically stopped from menstruating.
00:32:43.000But 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.
00:32:56.000So you can read it here later if you'd like, but that's the kind of insanity that we have.
00:33:07.000This is your most recent addition to the US Supreme Court, who sits and adjudicates cases ostensibly involving these things called men and women.
00:33:19.000But when she was asked by the senator to define what is a woman, she didn't have the epistemological expertise to pronounce that.
00:33:29.000Because if you remember, her answer was, I'm not a biologist.
00:33:33.000Because until 15 minutes ago, the 117 billion people who had existed on Earth, that's a real number.
00:33:40.000The 117 billion people were able to fully navigate through the very difficult conundrum of knowing what is male or female.
00:33:48.000But 15 minutes ago, we suddenly lost our ability.
00:33:51.000That's what happens with a parasitized mind.
00:33:54.000This is me interacting with an anesthesiologist of color, because anesthesiology varies depending on my dermatological skin hue.
00:34:09.000And she was chastising me for actually arguing that only women menstruate.
00:34:18.000And she said, well, I've been to medical school.
00:34:23.000Because it takes someone to have gone through medical school to know that only women menstruate.
00:34:27.000And 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.
00:34:40.000Would you want that anesthesiologist to be doing your dosage if she doesn't agree what is male or female?
00:34:47.000So this is the top society, the American Anthropological Association, which also includes Canadian anthropologists, is the top anthropological society in the world.
00:35:00.000And 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.
00:35:25.000If 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.
00:35:32.000So they were simply saying that, you know, it can't make sense that we reject this important marker of a sexually reproducing species.
00:35:41.000Well, they were ultimately told that they can't present at the leading anthropological society because that might promote transphobia.
00:36:20.000So 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.
00:36:30.000But I argue in the parasitic mind that there's a second class of pathogens that we have to worry about.
00:36:36.000And those are I call those idea pathogens or parasitic ideas.
00:36:40.000And I'll explain in a second why I use the parasitic term.
00:36:44.000These are ideas, beliefs, attitudes and mindsets that parasitize or zombify our ability to think critically.
00:36:54.000So I'll just do a few of these, but there's a whole field.
00:36:59.000And so the field of parasitology is simply the study of the interaction of parasites with hosts.
00:37:06.000So as I explained in earlier lecture today, a tapeworm is a parasite, but that parasitizes your intestinal tract.
00:37:15.000But 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.
00:46:16.000So for number one, position one calls for any area in artificial intelligence.
00:46:20.000But the call is only open to qualified individuals who self-identify as women, transgender, gender fluid, non-binary, or two-spirit.
00:46:30.000Now, I have a computer science degree.
00:46:32.000And 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.
00:46:40.000I must have been really cheated out of a lot of great insights from queer methodology.
00:46:45.000And then position two is open for anyone who comes from a self-identifies as a member of a racialized minority.
00:46:52.000So chief lies a lot, Elizabeth Warren, because she self-identifies as a woman of color, then she would be open to this position.
00:47:04.000So you don't even have to be from a racialized minority.
00:47:12.000At my university, we launched a five-year program, five-year strategic plan to decolonize and indigenize the curriculum.
00:47:23.000So whatever course you're teaching, so I teach evolutionary psychology, consumer psychology, psychology of decision-making,
00:47:29.000decision-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,
00:47:37.000and see how I could decolonize and indigenize my courses.
00:47:42.000It literally is a form of collective delusional mania.
00:47:49.000And here's a project funded by the Canadian taxpayers to decolonize light.
00:47:57.000So all of those physicists who studied light in physics, optics, you got to remember, they were all white males,
00:48:05.000and probably a lot of them were heterosexual.
00:48:08.000If they were gay, then maybe they'd have better understanding of light.
00:48:12.000But in this case, you would really need indigenous ways of knowing to be able to study the physics of optics.
00:49:36.000All 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.
00:49:48.000So, 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.
00:50:00.000It's actually based in a biological based reality.
00:50:04.000And so what I do here is I demonstrate through what I call the building of a nomological network.
00:50:10.000Using 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.
00:50:21.000And 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.
00:50:34.000Because once you've built that nomological network, it's unassailable.
00:50:40.000You 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.
00:50:51.000That already is problematic to the social constructivist viewpoint.
00:50:54.000I 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.
00:51:05.000I won't go through it, but it's an incredibly powerful tool.
00:51:09.000By 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.
00:51:21.000So I don't have to scream louder than you.
00:51:36.000It 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.
00:51:47.000Now, I demonstrated using very important examples, one of which is, by the way, this number has changed.
00:51:53.000This is the number of Islamic terror attacks since 9-11 alone.
00:51:59.000So only in the past 24 years, this number is now much higher.
00:52:04.000I did this slide maybe four or five months ago.
00:52:11.000In nearly 70 countries, when you ask Western politicians, Western intelligentsia, Western professors, what causes these 47,000 attacks, you get ostrich parasitic syndrome.
00:52:50.000Or, 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.
00:53:09.000He said, no, no, it's actually, there's a very, very clear link to climate change.
00:53:15.000Because 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.
00:53:26.000This is why we need to get to Bataclan and kill all the infidels.
00:53:30.000So, this is what happens when a mind is so parasitized that the most fundamental reality, you're unwilling to tackle it headfirst.
00:53:41.000I'm not going to have much chance to go to suicidal empathy, but this is a synopsis of my next book.
00:53:48.000So, parasitic mind is what happens to human brains when their cognitive abilities are parasitized.
00:56:13.000I was going to say more things, but I don't have time.
00:56:15.000Number eight, promote an ethos of interdisciplinarity,
00:56:19.000consilience, which means unity of knowledge and methodological pluralism.
00:56:23.000One 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.
00:56:37.000Academia is too focused on specialized silos.
01:02:50.000Well, so technically, I'm only supposed to submit…
01:02:55.000So, you know, there's a contract with the publisher and they say, okay, please submit your book by such and such date.
01:03:01.000Now, 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…
01:03:16.000I mean, it almost literally is that because I get death threats and all kinds of stuff.
01:03:22.000I'm hoping to move it to maybe late 2025.
01:03:36.000How would you say as young adults and I guess as grown adults in this room, how can we keep our mind from becoming parasitic?
01:03:46.000Read the parasitic mind, watch my lectures. Look, I recently appeared on… Do you guys know who Piers Morgan is?
01:03:57.000Piers Morgan is, you know, probably one of the most well-known sort of media personalities in Britain.
01:04:03.000He 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?
01:04:13.000Islamophobia? Aren't you engaging in Islamophobia?
01:04:15.000Just go and watch my 17-minute exchange with him, how I remain very calm.
01:04:24.000I don't engage in emotional incontinence and the facts ultimately overwhelm him.
01:04:30.000So, the best way to do it is to always be prepared with facts.
01:04:35.000And 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.
01:04:48.000So, 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.
01:04:53.000What that does is it creates trust between you and the audience because you've admitted that you don't know something.
01:04:58.000I 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.
01:05:07.000So, a young student asks a question, well, I'll probably wing it and they won't know the difference.
01:05:47.000Welcome and thank you for your comments today.
01:05:49.000Curious, when you did your samples, how did you go about determining your sample size so that it would be representative of the population?
01:07:09.000So, I talk about this very early in the book.
01:07:11.000So, I argue that every single one of those parasitic ideas originally starts off with a noble cause.
01:07:22.000And 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.
01:07:30.000So, for example, equity feminism is a great idea.
01:07:34.000It says men and women should be treated equally under the law.
01:07:37.000And based on that definition, all of us in this room would say, yeah, I'm an equity feminist.
01:07:41.000Radical 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.
01:08:32.000And 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.
01:08:42.000So, for example, cultural relativism, which is the idea that who are you to judge the beliefs of other cultures?
01:08:50.000What they do is their business stems originally from the misapplication of biology to create hierarchies across the races, right?
01:09:00.000The Nazis said, hey, there's a natural struggle between the races.
01:09:07.000Hey, if we kill them, that's just Darwinian, right?
01:09:09.000So 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.
01:09:18.000So it always starts off from a noble place, and then it metamorphosizes into nonsense.
01:09:24.000Well, on that note, we're going to have to wrap things up this evening.
01:09:29.000But certainly this is just such a worthy inaugural scholars forum.