Dr. Ghat Saad is a Canadian evolutionary psychologist who has written best selling books, including The Consuming Instinct and The Parasitic Mind. Dr. Saad has devoted his distinguished career to exploring evolutionary explanations for human behavior, including consumer behavior. He is now serving as a visiting professor and Global Ambassador at Northwood University in Michigan while on leave from his position at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.
00:00:00.000Hello, hello. With me today is Dr. Ghat Saad, a Canadian professor and evolutionary psychologist who has written best-selling books, including The Consuming Instinct and The Parasitic Mind.
00:00:18.740Dr. Saad will be coming to Iceland soon, where he's going to be speaking in front of a live audience at Silverberg in Harpa, and tickets for that event are already on sale, so be sure not to miss that if you are located here in Iceland.
00:00:32.180Dr. Saad, who holds a PhD from Cornell University, has devoted his distinguished career to exploring evolutionary explanations for human behavior, including consumer behavior.
00:00:43.980He is now serving as a visiting professor and global ambassador at Northwood University in Midland, Michigan, while on leave from his position at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.
00:00:57.220In his research, Dr. Saad delves deeply into the biological underpinnings of human actions and social trends.
00:01:04.000In his book, The Parasitic Mind, and numerous peer-reviewed articles, he analyses complex topics with remarkable clarity, offering well-argued, evidence-based perspectives.
00:01:16.440With a unique ability to simplify complex concepts and present accessible ideas, Dr. Saad has become a compelling voice whose influence extends far beyond the classroom.
00:01:26.760His podcast and YouTube show, The Saad Truth, has attracted a wide and diverse audience, drawn to his honesty and intellectual depth, shedding a new light on many of today's most pressing issues.
00:01:40.040Dr. Saad continues to emerge as a powerful force, both in academia and in the public sphere, and that is why I am thrilled to have him on my show.
00:01:49.140Very warm welcome to you, Dr. Ghat Saad.
00:01:52.180Thank you for that incredibly generous introduction.
00:01:59.460And I hope you can excuse my thick Icelandic accent here, but the first thing we always ask upcoming guests of Iceland or guests of Iceland is, what do you know about Iceland?
00:02:14.060What have you heard about Iceland, if anything?
00:02:23.200I was speaking to an artist who was putting up his art in this cafe, Italian cafe, and when I told him that I was soon going to Iceland, he spent the next 30 minutes telling me that it was going to be a life-changing experience, that he's been back four times to Iceland.
00:02:42.140He even had, I can't remember if it was the president of Iceland or the prime minister of Iceland who just showed up to one of his, you know, art things in Reykjavik, and everybody was down to earth and lovely.
00:02:54.360And so anything that I've heard has been nothing but great.
00:03:00.900I hope we will succeed to your expectations.
00:03:04.320But I would like to ask, I would like to start off with a question about, because there has been an intense public debate about wokeism here in Iceland over the past few days, actually.
00:03:16.320There's a nationally known activists from the far left of the political spectrum here in Iceland that recently declared that woke was a terrible ideology and it caused a major stir.
00:03:30.260And since then, those aligned with the woke movement have been working hard to defend it, offering explanations like being woke just means being kind to others, being aware of social injustices faced by minority groups, and that those who oppose it are simply bad people.
00:03:48.860Now, you have written and spoken extensively on this topic.
00:03:54.040And to begin with, I would like to ask you to explain to our listeners what your personal take on the woke ideology is, how would you best describe it, and what do you see as its main flaws?
00:04:11.740So, look, as you mentioned in the introduction, you know, a minute or two ago, my area of scientific research is in applying evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology to study human behavior in general and consumer and economic behavior in particular.
00:04:30.000Very early in my career, now this is going back to 31 years ago when I finished my PhD in 1994, very quickly I noticed that many of my colleagues in the social sciences,
00:04:41.740and the business school thought that it was very dangerous and very corrosive to argue that human beings are shaped by biological forces.
00:04:52.700To them, biology mattered for every single species on Earth except one called human beings.
00:05:00.140And if it applied to human beings, it applied for all of our traits except the ones that are above the neck.
00:05:08.120So, the main organ that defines your personhood, which is called your brain, somehow it was viewed as very, very distasteful to argue that the human mind could be shaped by the same evolutionary forces that shaped the behavior of every other species.
00:05:24.220So, that was my first introduction to what I subsequently called parasitic thinking because here were supposedly very intelligent people who could completely look at you and negate reality that the average two-day-old pigeon would know that it's true, right?
00:05:40.780I mean, surely you don't think that human behavior exists outside of our biology.
00:05:45.920Somehow we exist in a world where biology ceases to matter.
00:05:50.120And so, over the next nearly 30 plus years, when I first started writing The Parasitic Mind, I realized that perfectly intelligent human beings could be zombified by ideological capture.
00:06:04.000And so, let me explain very quickly why I used the neuroparasitological framework, and then I'll link it back to your question about, you know, is woke good or bad?
00:06:18.600Parasitology is the field of host-parasite interactions, but parasites can end up in many different places in your body.
00:06:26.820So, if you have a tapeworm, it parasitizes your intestinal tract, but a neuroparasite is one that ends up in the host's brain, altering the host's circuitry to suit the interests of the parasite.
00:06:42.620So, for example, a wood cricket detests water.
00:06:49.380But when it is parasitized by a hairworm, the hairworm needs the wood cricket to jump in water in order for it to complete its reproductive cycle.
00:06:58.920So, that same wood cricket that hates water suddenly jumps and commits suicide in the interest of the parasite that has zombified its brain.
00:07:11.580That's when I said, aha, I will now use this neuroparasitological framework to argue that human beings could not only be parasitized by actual physical brainworms, but they could be parasitized by ideological brainworms.
00:08:30.200But then radical feminists came along and said, well, that's not enough.
00:08:34.160In order for us to accelerate the battle against the mean patriarchy, let us now promulgate the idea that there are no innate sex differences between men and women.
00:08:45.600And any sex differences between men and women must be due to social construction.
00:08:52.220And if we promulgate this idea, it will allow us to more quickly reach our goal of gender equality in society.
00:09:33.040It makes me a solid defender of the truth.
00:09:35.160But still, wokeism, this ideology, which you describe as totally unsustainable for the species, homo sapiens, human beings.
00:09:48.320It has had a stronghold or has been the, I would say it has been the leading ideology in Western societies for the past 10 years or roughly about so.
00:10:03.960Would you agree with that or how would you describe the status of the woke ideology?
00:10:09.380So, it might be that the last 10 years is when people started seeing it on their radar, on their way to pick up the eggs for tonight's omelet.
00:10:21.460But I've been standing on top of the mountain for nearly 30 years screaming for somebody to pay attention, right?
00:10:28.420The reality is it takes a while for these things to spread, right?
00:10:32.700When I first started, you know, attacking all of this parasitic nonsense, people would say, oh, come on, Dr. Saad.
00:10:41.560This is just some silly idea that is in some silly department in the humanities.
00:10:48.940Those ideas eventually will break out of the lab, right?
00:10:52.440Just like the Wuhan COVID virus came out of the lab and then it's locked down for three years, the bad ideas might start off in some esoteric philosophy department or women's studies department.
00:11:06.100But then it becomes our prime ministers and our leaders in industry and our Hollywood stars and our prime ministers in Canada.
00:11:14.760And so, yes, you're right that people have taken notice over the past 10 years.
00:11:20.420But the origins of those parasitic ideas, we can date them back to 50 to 100 years ago, depending on which parasitic idea you're talking about.
00:11:31.860For example, cultural relativism, which basically purports that there are no universal moral truths.
00:11:40.040Who are you to judge the cultural values and practices of another culture, you disgusting racist?
00:11:46.880That started close to 100 years ago by a professor of anthropology at Columbia named Franz Boas.
00:11:55.860And then he trained his doctoral students in this nonsense.
00:12:00.080On the other hand, postmodernism really picked up about 40, 50 years ago with a bunch of French postmodernists, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan.
00:12:10.200So it depends. But you're right that people woke up to it probably in the past decade.
00:12:17.220And like what I was trying to say is I feel that this has been the ruling idea in our institutions and in big corporations and everywhere in our society in the past 10 years, 10, 15 years.
00:12:33.660So would you agree with that, that this has been the ruling, this basically flawed ideology has been a ruling ideology in our Western hemisphere for the recent 10 years?
00:12:48.540I mean, absolutely. Right. I mean, just think about every leader of Western countries, whether it be the New Zealand, you know, Jacinda Ardern or it be Angela Merkel or it be, you know, anybody who was in France or it be the Canadian prime minister who recently stepped down, Justin Trudeau and on and on and on.
00:13:11.880All of them share one thing in common, which is they were all fully zombified by these parasitic ideas.
00:13:18.920Now, let me let me give you an example, which I think will resonate with people from Iceland.
00:13:25.520Iceland is a small country that has, would it be right for me to say it's about 300,000 people? Is that right?
00:13:31.720Yeah, it's about 320,000 Icelandic people and then some 80,000 foreigners. So it's 400,000 all in all.
00:13:38.220So let's suppose now that you let in 150,000 people from Yemen, Pakistan and Syria.
00:13:49.640Do you think that the indigenous culture of Iceland might change or do you think it would only be enriched?
00:13:59.220I genuinely think it would change. And since Icelandic, Icelandic born people are not having babies anymore, we would probably very soon be overrun by the new population.
00:14:14.320Exactly. Now, you stating that doesn't make you a mean racist. It makes you a person who is wedded to reality, right?
00:14:24.240But the same people who tell you that yesterday, John, who was a six foot four, 285 pound NFL football player, woke up the next day and became Linda and suddenly, automatically, magically, through the magic wand of transgenderism, became a woman.
00:14:45.980It is now very transphobic of you to say that Linda, that has nine inch penis and testicles and was called John yesterday.
00:14:55.940It is transphobic of you to say that you don't feel comfortable with Linda taking a shower with your 13 year old daughter.
00:15:06.860Well, the same people who believe that also think that it is racist and bigoted what you said when you said that Iceland's culture would forever change if you let in people from Yemen.
00:15:20.480Now, that's not because you are bigoted against people from Yemen.
00:15:24.740It's because we live in a real world where cultures have many different values.
00:15:31.640Some values we share with others, other values we don't share with others.
00:15:37.540So we know that if Iceland were to let in 100,000 indigenous Danes into Iceland, they're likely to more assimilate than people who come from Yemen.
00:15:50.080It doesn't take a fancy professor and evolutionary psychologist to explain that to someone.
00:15:56.380But yet, when you are parasitized by cultural relativism, when you are parasitized by suicidal empathy, which is the topic of my next book, that becomes a meanful thing to say.
00:16:10.860Why are you being mean to noble people from Yemen or Pakistan or Algeria, right?
00:16:19.960I understand the culture from the Middle East.
00:16:22.180There are millions and millions of perfectly beautiful and peaceful people in the Middle East.
00:16:27.920But they also come with a baggage of values that couldn't be any more contrary to Icelandic values.
00:16:38.020So you have one of two choices you can make.
00:16:40.520You could either write articles about the mean Professor Gadsad coming to Iceland, or maybe open your brains up a bit and actually take time to listen to what I'm warning you about, because it would take exactly five minutes for Iceland to no longer be Iceland.
00:16:58.540Yeah, like you said, you've been watching this for over 30 years.
00:17:05.700But the masses of people are maybe starting to recognize this now, which I think is mainly because of immigration policies in Europe and also in the States, where the border was just like border control was just shut down.
00:17:24.480And these immigration policies in Europe that have totally just, you know, they have been bankrupting the European communities and the cultures.
00:17:39.020And also, as you mentioned, the transgender thing, when we see that women have to compete in sports with biological men who identify as women, that's, I would say that this has, those two factors have been very eye-opening for people to see there's something strange going on here.
00:18:04.620Why would you, if you, could you pinpoint what it is that is making this, what they would call the backlash of the woke ideology now, where that is coming from?
00:18:16.960Well, here's the regrettable part of the architecture of the human mind.
00:18:22.740And that is that it is a lot more comforting for people to ignore realities until the point that it comes and bites them in the ass, right?
00:18:36.860So diabetes doesn't exist until my child has diabetes, right?
00:18:43.980But when, so for example, there are many Jewish billionaires in the United States and Canada that were completely oblivious, and I know many of them, and they're fans of mine and so on, but they were completely oblivious about these issues until their son or daughter was affected by huge Jew hatred at their alma mater.
00:19:09.180Suddenly, the slap of reality woke them up, right?
00:19:13.160That's the regrettable feature of the human spirit, which is, it's a lot easier for people to just ignore reality and say, you know, it's happening over there.
00:19:45.700Why are you waking up now when you could have woken up 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, and avoided unbelievable amount of costs that we will have to bear?
00:20:09.920Because I can assure you that people will wake up at some point violently.
00:20:15.120I've been begging people to wake up so that we can resolve the problem peacefully.
00:20:19.840But the problem is going to be resolved one day or another.
00:20:23.300Do you prefer it to happen peacefully or violently?
00:20:27.260The reality is with every passing day, Europe is coming to much closer to violence than to peaceful solutions.
00:20:34.640Yeah, I mean, I think, like I was mentioning before, this conversation we're having in Iceland right now stems from this leftist politician who was criticizing the woke ideology.
00:20:47.640And it's because they're saying now the woke ideology has been hurting us.
00:21:09.520Sorry, before, forgive me for interrupting you.
00:21:12.520I hate the fact that they are waking up to it for pragmatic reasons.
00:21:18.760If we don't wake up, it's because we will lose elections, rather than waking up because it is morally wrong and grotesque for you to argue that six foot four men should be sharing the locker room with your 13-year-old daughter.
00:21:35.680That should have woken you up rather than the loss of elections.
00:22:04.520The capacity for the human mind to be parasitized is eternal.
00:22:09.700In other words, this is not a unique feature that is happening today.
00:22:15.940What is unique to today is the specific parasitic ideas that are zombifying us, right?
00:22:23.180But 300 years ago, in a place called Salem, Massachusetts, where we had the Salem witch hunts, it was perfectly natural if you thought that Linda, your neighbor, was a witch, to throw her into the water.
00:22:36.480And if she swam, that proved that she was a witch.
00:22:40.120And if she drowned, oh, I guess we were wrong.
00:22:43.780So the capacity for the human mind to succumb to imbecilic zombification is eternal.
00:22:51.820What is unique to the current time is the specific cocktail of these parasitic ideas.
00:22:58.640As I said, postmodernism, by the way, is the granddaddy of all parasitic ideas because it removes the possibility of there being an objective truth, right?
00:23:08.660Postmodernism purports there are no objective truths other than the one objective truth that there are no objective truths.
00:23:14.860So you could imagine how that becomes complete intellectual terrorism.
00:23:18.840Up is down, left is right, women are men, because there are no objective truths.
00:23:22.600Who are you to say what is the objective truth, right?
00:23:25.500So I think that there is a way to create a mind vaccine to defeat the current parasitic ideas.
00:23:36.340But as we know from actual biological pathogens, they mutate, right?
00:23:42.320So once I create a vaccine to fight this particular flu strain, then the next one comes out next year and the vaccine is no longer.
00:23:50.640So we have to be forever vigilant against bad ideas.
00:23:54.260And that's why I've dedicated my life to psychology of decision making, because the most dangerous thing in nature is what's inside this brain, right?
00:24:06.940I mean, yes, tsunamis can cause great damage, but nothing can bring about the end of civilization as much as parasitic ideas.
00:24:15.620And so that's why I wake up every day saying, what can I do to hopefully defend the truth?
00:24:21.800And what advice do you give your readers and what can you give our listeners?
00:24:28.380How can we defend reason and intellectual freedom in these current times?
00:24:36.500So in Chapter 8 of The Parasitic Mind, I implore people to activate their inner honey badger.
00:24:44.080And I suspect that maybe some people from Iceland may not understand the reference.
00:24:48.900So if I could take a minute to explain it, the honey badger, the African honey badger, has been ranked as the absolute most ferocious animal in nature.
00:25:11.240It's only the size of a small dog, small to medium-sized dog, but yet a band, a pride of adult lions, if they come across it, will say, excuse me, sir, I didn't mean to interrupt you.
00:25:26.360Please let us move aside so that you can pass.
00:25:29.980Because it walks very tall, because it defends itself to death, right?
00:25:36.080Now, when I ask people to activate their inner honey badger, I'm not saying, I'm not imploring you to be physically violent, but I'm imploring you to be ferocious in defending foundational principles of the Western tradition, right?
00:25:52.520Guys like me who escaped the Middle East, came to the West, and we appreciate what's in the West because we've sampled from the buffet of possible societies.
00:26:03.040And we know that it's not the default value throughout history to have the freedoms and liberties that we have in the West.
00:27:22.240Yeah, but people, they're internally afraid of offending, you know, trans people, for example.
00:27:33.280I mean, it's almost only if you say that it's strange that women have to compete in competitive sports with trans women, which are biological men.
00:27:46.820You are somehow you are attacking trans people as a whole and you're transphobic and you're an evil person.
00:27:57.200How do you respond to ideas like this?
00:28:01.200So that's I mean, I discussed this in The Parasitic Mind, but I actually complete that story, which addresses your question in Suicidal Empathy, the next book that actually I was working on just before I came to meet you.
00:28:15.460So let me explain the background of the follow up to The Parasitic Mind, and then it will hopefully answer your question.
00:28:22.660The Parasitic Mind talked about what happens to our cognitive system once it is parasitized.
00:29:05.740But like Aristotle explained to us 2,500 years ago, everything in the right amount, in the right place, in the right measure, right?
00:29:15.720So therefore, if empathy starts misfiring, if it becomes hyperactive, if it targets the wrong targets, then it becomes suicidal empathy.
00:29:27.820So when you're talking about the trans issue, for every case where you're trying to be empathetic to the biological male who wishes to wrestle with biological females and therefore you want to be empathetic to her,
00:29:47.660what about the empathy for all of the biological women who are not going to be on the podium because he's going to steal that opportunity from them?
00:29:57.840We know that there was a recent study done by the UN of none other than the UN is not exactly a conservative organization.
00:30:05.020They found that there were roughly 900 medals that were lost in the study that they did, but that were taken by biological men who are trans women against biological women.
00:30:19.540Aren't half of humanity called women deserving of your empathy?
00:30:24.640Well, when you suffer from suicidal empathy, that no longer matters.
00:30:29.280So, for example, MS-13 gang members from El Salvador are worthy of greater empathy than are American vets who are homeless on the streets.
00:31:35.820But surely we have the ability to recognize that while I can cuddle in bed with Fido, the house cat feline,
00:31:44.960if I try to cuddle in bed with the African male lion in the savannah, it might end up badly for me, even though they're both called felines.
00:31:54.500So what level of stupidity must you be succumbing to to say all immigrants are equal?
00:32:16.800Well, you reconcile it by being suicidally empathetic.
00:32:20.620But one last thing about the trans thing.
00:32:23.360I mean, I often see that when you are when someone is criticizing this thing with with the trans women and women's sports is they always get this.
00:32:33.840And that they are denying the existence of trans people.
00:32:39.140They are they want to erase trans people and they don't acknowledge trans people for what they are.
00:32:47.380I mean, well, how how how do you answer notions like that?
00:32:51.620Not only have I heard it, I appeared in front of the Canadian Senate in 2017 as an expert witness, because in the 21st century,
00:33:04.200you need an evolutionary behavioral scientist to appear in front of the Canadian Senate and and confirm that for a sexually reproducing species made up of two phenotypes, male and female,
00:33:17.780there really is a way to define what is male or female.
00:33:21.100When I said that, one of the senators, a Canadian senator said to your point, to your question, he said, you are promoting the genocide of transgender people.
00:33:34.860Yeah, to which I answered, you might want to be careful about accusing someone who literally escaped a genocide in Lebanon of of this genocide stuff.
00:33:46.980I would be careful about saying such things. And of course, it didn't go to welfare.
00:33:51.220So I understand that reflex. But that's why I implore you to be honey badgers.
00:33:56.320Look, I wish for every person in society to live free of bigotry.
00:34:01.800I don't care if you want to call yourself Linda and wear heels and wear, you know, a dress.
00:34:09.920That's great. More power to you. And you shouldn't be discriminated against.
00:34:13.780That doesn't mean in the pursuit of that I have to go down the road of uniquely celebrating your personhood whilst sublimating the rights of my daughter.
00:34:27.400Right. My daughter also has rights. Right.
00:34:30.640And those rights are that she should be allowed to play soccer against other individuals who share her biological sex.
00:34:39.660Life is about modulating these tradeoffs of conflicts. Right.
00:34:46.840Some men, if they feel sexually starved, feel that it is their right to attack women sexually.
00:34:54.300But it turns out that you don't have that right because the right of women to be free of your sexual aggression supersedes your sexual frustration rights.
00:35:06.240Yes. So by the exact same logic, more power to all transgender people.
00:35:11.860That doesn't mean that you destroy the dreams of actual biological women so that we could all stand and sing along to your unique, beautiful personhood.
00:35:22.460Exactly. Now, Donald Trump, the president of the United States, he has, since he took office in January, made some steps against the woke mind virus.
00:35:36.760And he has, for example, banned biological men in in women's sports with a presidential order.
00:35:46.580Do you think that Donald Trump will have an influence on on suppressing the woke mind virus?
00:35:56.300Or is it going to make the the woke ideology even stronger to have an opponent like him?
00:36:01.780Or what do you think is the effect of Donald Trump coming into office of the United States in these times?
00:36:09.900So in the short term, him having won is certainly good news for all those fighting these parasitic ideas.
00:36:18.340Because, of course, the the the the alternative would have been a acceleration and doubling down on all of this woke nonsense.
00:36:26.440So in that short term window, of course, you can rejoice at his victory.
00:36:32.300But so this is the really important but be complacent into thinking that because Donald Trump won his second term, this is going to result in the magic erasure of all parasitic ideas.
00:36:49.800It took, as I mentioned earlier, 50 to 100 years for all of these parasitic ideas to first be spawned on university campuses and then to escape into every nook and cranny of society.
00:37:02.660It won't be Donald Trump who comes along and gives us the final vaccine and will never hear about these parasitic ideas.
00:37:10.140So, no, I tell people this is going to be a generational battle.
00:37:14.700Now, I'd like to think that it won't take 50 to 100 years to eradicate all this nonsense, but it certainly won't end because Donald Trump came to power.
00:37:26.260And I mean, you would have thought that this must if it's going to end any any any time, it's going to have to end in the in the universities, in the academia, because it's it's started.
00:37:40.440It's it's it stems from the academia and do you think that we will ever see our Western universities start to go on Vogue or against the Vogue mind virus?
00:37:57.640Yeah, again, it's going to be a nuanced answer.
00:38:00.080On the one hand, I think that the specific parasitic ideas that we're speaking about will wane.
00:38:07.860They will lose effectiveness, but never underestimate the ability of intellectuals and professors to come up with some of the dumbest ideas.
00:38:29.660Well, I'm going to tell you why professors come up with the dumbest ideas, because regrettably, many of the professors who pontificate these things are perfectly decoupled from the auto corrective pressures of reality.
00:38:46.080So, for example, if you are an engineer that is tasked with building a bridge or an architect, you can't use postmodernist physics because there is this thing called the bridge will collapse because there is no postmodernist physics.
00:39:08.280But when I'm a professor of intersectional lesbian dance therapy, I could stand up in front of a bunch of idiotic students, pontificate about stuff that has no real value, and all of those students will go, yes, yes, beautiful, professor.
00:39:27.260Thank you, thank you, because I am perfectly decoupled from reality.
00:39:31.540That's why, by the way, the two places where you saw the least parasitic ideas were not that they're not there, but the lesser is the engineering school and the business school.
00:39:45.600Why? Because you can't build economic models where people's money is going to be affected by doing postmodernist or feminist economics, right?
00:40:00.420But in the other disciplines, in women's studies and anthropology and sociology and so on, I can afford the luxury of spouting nonsense.
00:40:11.200So I do think that these specific parasitic ideas will wane, but then professors will be hard at work in coming up with the next generation of idiocy.
00:40:23.960Okay, but how has this stance of yours against the Vogue mind virus, if you say, how has that affected your career?
00:40:37.560I mean, I have interviewed Jordan Peterson a couple of times, and he told me personally that, I mean, they didn't counsel him, but they took away his academic career because he had no means to, you know, properly work as a professor and have PhD students under him and so on and so on.
00:40:58.400Because just because of his stance against this woke ideology, he was just side-trailed, kind of.
00:41:05.080And you have, you know, endless of examples like Brett Weinstein and others that have had to just make a run for it out of their academic career.
00:41:17.100So how have you managed to survive in this atmosphere?
00:41:21.780Well, I have had to bear huge amounts of personal and professional costs.
00:41:41.180If I didn't have a thick skin, I might have jumped off a building because the types of stuff that people write about you and put about you, they post things about, I mean, complete lies, complete fabrications.
00:41:54.480But my desperate defense of the truth supersedes what someone, some idiot might write about me, right?
00:42:31.500So it's now been seven years, and I suspect that I will never hold it again because I was, at that point,
00:42:37.380simply too outspoken against all of the things that my university was defending, indigenous knowledge and transgender and gender pronouns and the rest of it.
00:42:46.660And I was very, very dead set against it.
00:43:39.220So it would be difficult to get rid of me.
00:43:41.180But for example, as you kindly pointed out in my introduction, when you said I'm currently at Northwood University,
00:43:47.820the reason why I'm at Northwood University is because it has become very, very dangerous for me to be an outspoken Jewish professor at my university.
00:43:56.900There are literal, genuine, physical threats against me.
00:44:01.520So, you know, all of the people that you could think of that have probably bore a cost as professors,
00:44:09.280and I don't mean to be engaging in a competition of victimology,
00:44:13.440it probably pales in comparison to what I've had to bear because I'm probably the most outspoken professor by many orders of magnitude.
00:44:24.240But at the end of the night, when I put my head on the pillow, I could sleep well because I know that I never modulated my speech in order to pursue selfish careerist interest,
00:44:36.440which goes back to our original question, which is, what is my advice to people?
00:44:41.900Look, when the young men landed at Normandy at the end of World War II, most of them knew that they were going to be mowed down like little mosquitoes by the German machine guns.
00:44:57.300And yet they all said, yeah, yeah, okay, I'll go.
00:44:59.900So there is no justification for why you shouldn't speak.
00:45:03.520There is always some excuse you can give me for why it shouldn't be you, right?
00:47:31.760Well, the suicidal empathy I've already spoken about.
00:47:36.820Empathy is beautiful and it's a noble virtue when it is applied properly, right?
00:47:43.640So, for example, there is a Norwegian man who about 10 years ago was sodomized and raped by a Somali immigrant.
00:47:53.400After the Somali immigrant had served a short sentence, I don't know, three, four years, which is not much for a rape.
00:48:02.220When he was going to be deported, the really, really empathetic and kind and compassionate victim of the sodomy felt very guilty that now he was going to not have a good life in Somalia.
00:48:16.540Well, I'm here to tell you and to tell all Icelandic people that our emotional system did not evolve to be empathetic toward our rapist.
00:48:27.160That's what I mean by suicidal empathy.
00:48:29.420So that journalist in question is void of a brain.
00:49:58.860He said, oh, comments that he's made about women.
00:50:01.060I'd like to see which comments he makes, because I'm willing to bet that Monday morning when I wake up, I have defended more women's rights on that Monday morning than this idiot will in his entire life.
00:50:16.140I defend the right of women to be free of sexual attacks in the Middle East.
00:50:22.280I defend the rights of women to not have to share showers with biological men.
00:50:29.020I defend the right of women to not lose medals to biological men.
00:50:34.620So I will put up my schedule as a defender of women against this idiot any day of the week.
00:50:40.300When it comes to Muslims, I have nothing but love for individuals, right?
00:50:46.580I know more Muslims, and I'm friends with more Muslims than this journalist will ever meet in his entire useless life.
00:50:55.360That doesn't mean that Islam is compatible with Icelandic values, right?
00:51:02.840Iceland has certain values that it's proud of.
00:51:07.880Now, I would be happy to sit with him and debate whether the foundational values of Islam are compatible or antithetical to Icelandic values.
00:51:54.160So this idiot needs to go and find his brain, and then we can talk.
00:51:58.120Yeah, it's the thing with the liberal media.
00:52:00.580I mean, you often get the feeling that they're willingly ignorant and, you know, they somehow manage to misinterpret everything that, you know, their opponents say.
00:52:14.720So this wasn't a perfect example of that, but what about the thing about Elon Musk, that you're having the influence or you're influencing Elon Musk, which is then dismantling US foreign aid programs.
00:52:30.720So you were the ideologist behind that evil doings of Elon Musk in the current American administration.
00:52:40.340Look, it always gives me great pride that I can have the ear of important and powerful people.
00:52:51.140I have been hopefully able to offer Elon some ideas that he has taken and then shared with the president.
00:52:59.840That doesn't make me or him mean people.
00:53:04.000Aid is nice, but not suicidal aid, right?
00:53:07.740So, for example, there is no reason why there should be whatever, I don't know what the thing is, a $75,000 grant to promote transgender theater in Peru, right?
00:53:22.880That's not what American taxpayers should pay.
00:53:27.060But that's precisely what suicidal empathy is, which is you're willing in your desperate desire to appear infinitely dysregulated in your compassion, kindness, and empathy.
00:55:42.740The idea that you should scan environmental threats makes perfect evolutionary sense, right?
00:55:49.120If you and I meet in Reykjavik, and I notice that you sneezed into your hands before we met, and then you shook my hands, I will go quietly to the bathroom to wash my hands so that I don't catch your cold.
00:56:03.960But if I spend eight hours a day washing my hands until my skin comes off, and I'm stuck in an infinite OCD loop of germ contamination fear, it becomes dysregulated, right?
00:56:19.660What started off as an adaptive process, when it misfires, it becomes maladaptive.
00:56:27.600That's exactly my argument for empathy.
00:56:30.360Empathy is perfectly noble when it is directed in the right amount to the right people at the right context.
00:56:39.480When it becomes orgiastic and unregulated, it becomes suicidal.
00:56:46.600Well, okay, Dr. Gadsad, it's been an absolute honor to have you here on my show, and I'm looking forward to seeing you and your lecture here in Iceland in June here in Harpa, the conference hall.
00:57:00.200The tickets are already on sale, as we already said, and I hope you will have a wonderful time here in Iceland.