In this episode, the professor turns his critical lens to Islam, a religion he considers to be a major threat to peace and stability in the world. As I spoke with him in his hometown in Montreal, Canada, he justified his concerns, pointing to what he sees as a huge influx of Muslim immigrants into the city.
00:13:16.480By the way, so we've had, my daughter, who's sitting here off camera, grew up, and my other child, they've grown up with Belgian shepherds.
00:13:26.080Are you familiar with Belgian shepherds?
00:13:27.780So, Belgian shepherds are usually the dogs that are used in all the military.
00:13:32.580So, the Marinois are one of four types of Belgian shepherds.
00:13:37.260And so, they grew up with these Belgian shepherds.
00:13:40.200And I always say, to your point about shoot first, ask questions later, our male, his motto in life was he attacks everything in sight, and then he worries about the consequences later.
00:14:46.460It's not Jews are kind or evil, Christians, right?
00:14:50.400So, individuals, I hold no ill will towards anybody.
00:14:54.500I actually, I'm friends with more Muslims than probably most people will ever meet in their lives.
00:14:59.640How could that have happened if I think that all Muslims, right?
00:15:02.560On the other hand, I'm also shaped by reality.
00:15:06.040So, let me give you a few examples that might help.
00:15:08.700We had to escape Lebanon because of which religion.
00:15:14.100My parents were kidnapped and tortured by which religion.
00:15:18.180My Syrian ancestors left Syria because of which religion.
00:15:23.220My brother-in-law's family left Egypt because of which religion.
00:15:27.900My wife's family in Lebanon had to leave their Armenian because of which religion.
00:15:33.820Their ancestors escaped the Armenian genocide because of which religion.
00:15:39.060So, certainly, I can put together in a nomological network that reality while recognizing that individual Muslims might even go out of their way to defend me, right?
00:15:50.900And they're perfectly noble and kind and peaceful.
00:15:54.940Islam, though, is a set of ideas that are codified.
00:15:58.740And then we could say, does Islam promote greater personal liberties and freedoms?
00:17:27.280The likelihood of my getting a head injury is not the same in badminton as it is in MMA fighting, even though they're both called sports, right?
00:17:40.800If you are a Jain, and a practicing Jain, by definition, because of the codified content in Jainism, you're a pacifist.
00:17:51.860As a matter of fact, you're so much of a pacifist that as you walk down the street, you walk with a broom, lest you might inadvertently step on an ant.
00:18:02.720So, an extremist Jain is one who is extremely peaceful, right?
00:18:08.180On the other hand, if you're Jewish, then you're not going to eat shrimp or pork.
00:18:15.280If you are Christian, you're going to eat the prosciutto sandwich.
00:18:18.900So, there are real consequences to the content of what's codified in those books.
00:18:24.720Now, Islam is a proselytizing religion.
00:18:29.160It says that there are two binary encampments of the world.
00:18:35.000There is Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harab.
00:23:19.540Although I respectfully would disagree with the idea that it's actually a land issue.
00:23:24.640I think it's very much of a theological issue.
00:23:28.340Golda Mayer, I'm paraphrasing her, said that when the Palestinians love their children more
00:23:34.060than they hate ours, there'll be peace.
00:23:36.020She also said that if we lay down our arms, there'd be a massacre.
00:23:41.080If they lay down their arms, there'd be peace.
00:23:43.920The idea that I grew up in the Middle East, and I explained it in The Parasitic Mind, when
00:23:49.580Gamal Abdel Nasser died, the pan-Arabist Egyptian president, and Lebanese people take to the street
00:23:57.680lamenting his death, and the number one scream that they say is death to Jews, explain to me what is the reflex by which coming down the street from where I live, screaming death to Jews, is a reflection of the land battle in Israel.
00:24:25.980I think, well, that's the reason that generally in the media it's mixed up when people don't differentiate between Zionists and Jews.
00:24:33.620And a lot of that mixed messaging means now, for example, saying anything against Israel, whether it's not against Jewish people as such, though I know Israel is primarily, is seen as anti-Semitic.
00:24:44.780And this is where, again, there seems an imbalance in how people can address issues.
00:24:49.780Now, if you say everyone should be fearless and say the truth, then people should be able to talk about Israel without being labeled anti-Semitic.
00:24:56.300I completely agree, by the way, with what you just said.
00:24:58.380It is a complete canard to say that any criticism of Israel is tantamount to anti-Semitism.
00:25:20.340As a matter of fact, I'm so much, by the way, of a free speech absolutist.
00:25:23.420As you probably know, I support the right of Holocaust deniers to spew their nonsense.
00:25:28.940What could be more offensive, I mean, literally by definition, than to reject the Holocaust, the systematic erasure on an industrial scale level of an entire people?
00:25:39.140But in a free society, you have to tolerate falsehood spreaders.
00:25:43.480You have to tolerate racists and bigots and anti-Semites.
00:25:46.040I think the problem in the Middle East is that it is a part of one's identity to despise the Jew.
00:27:16.880He plays soccer better than all of them combined.
00:27:19.580That doesn't fit the exemplar of the Jew that I was taught to hate.
00:27:24.120So it's that reflex that you have to get rid of.
00:27:27.260Once the Middle East gets rid of that kind of hatred, it will flourish in ways that are inimaginable to both of us.
00:27:35.300And I go back to the fact that your reference point is the Middle East and personal experience with it.
00:27:41.620Isn't the danger, though, if you're going to talk about Islam in a generic way, like as you have in the parasitic mind, that people in Indonesia, in Kazakhstan, places where they don't necessarily have a kind of real reference point for the Middle East, except the fact they share the religion, that they will start to feel, you know, kind of disenfranchised and then perhaps emotionally against Jewish people.
00:28:03.940Well, and that's why I say that it really depends on the context.
00:28:08.520There is also the interpretation that is often taken wrong, which we see in all religions as well.
00:28:14.660Isn't the danger, though, that what's being done is being done politically?
00:28:20.320And even many Muslims would argue it's not being done religiously, the extremists, that they might use the name of Islam to do what they do.
00:29:37.800We're going to truly adopt a message of live and let live.
00:29:41.460Then all of the beauty of Islamic society can truly flourish.
00:29:46.200Because I'm the first to understand Islamic poetry, Islamic architecture, the era of Islamic science.
00:29:52.920So it's not as though there aren't an incredible number of things within that cultural trajectory that we can be proud of.
00:30:00.600The reason I'm getting into or sticking with the idea that it's the politics that drive so much is that you don't see, you know, people from Kazakhstan, and I use that as an example because I know the country and it's a Muslim country, or largely Indonesia or any of these countries, where the people behave in any radicalized way that has an impact on Western nations.
00:30:20.080That's why I'm wondering where your reference point is very much the Middle East and the politics of the Middle East that result in what we're seeing a lot of the time.
00:40:18.300If you were to draw out the chess game, the tree of chess, it's, I think, 10 to the 100 nodes.
00:40:26.640That's more nodes than there are atoms in the universe, right?
00:40:31.860So if you were to develop an algorithm to actually exhaustively go through everything, it will be more time than since the sun has existed.
00:40:39.780Therefore, there are AI algorithms that prune the search tree that can say, you know, this is not promising, cut this part.
00:40:48.560And I first learned of this as a mathematics computer science student in the mid-80s.
00:40:54.460And I was very excited about AI, but then AI went through a winter storm kind of where it died out.
00:41:02.520And it's only in the last 5, 10 years that it has resurfaced.
00:41:05.480So I really see things like in medical diagnostics and things where it can do searches so quickly and in much quicker way than a human could ever.
00:41:25.920You know, what's interesting is it still suffers to some degree for AI from the biases that are programmed in to the big data that it draws from.
00:41:34.940Like when you ask it for George Washington, it comes out with a black guy.
00:41:42.220Gemini, when Gemini first came out, because it had been programmed by super woke people, every single historical figure in the United States came out as a black individual.
00:42:00.660I don't know if this was, you know, someone playing around or whether it was real, but there was a time many years ago, if you typed into Google, white men stole my car, it used to ask, did you mean black men stole your car?
00:42:13.880So there was this idea that, you know, that the garbage in, garbage out situation with AI meant that, you know, up to now, it's going to have its biases.
00:42:22.560But the reason I ask is, I did an interview recently with Mogadat, who was the former chief business officer of Google X, brilliant guy, brilliant AI specialist.
00:42:31.400I mean, he's quite spectacular, actually, in his thought processes.
00:42:35.140And he described how, you know, right now, if you just have even 20 IQ points above someone else, it's a massive difference as a human.
00:42:42.440AI is going to go to the billion level where it's way beyond.
00:42:46.400And in that, there's a certain amount of self-awareness, cognizance, so on.
00:42:50.560But it can also be something that if we are becoming more and more dependent on AI, we might be able to escape some of the things that you worry about.
00:42:59.400I mean, so you're saying that AI could be so powerful that it builds a cognitive inoculation against the parasitic ideas.
00:43:09.040It's exactly in the sense that it can actually start to, you know, regulate the information that we receive when we do searches to take us out of an echo chamber.
00:43:17.300It can actually fact check to the point where it's indisputable.
00:43:29.780As it stands, it takes a great amount of human effort to build that network.
00:43:37.540And one of the papers that I recently wrote about three, four years ago is I wrote a paper, an academic paper, a scientific paper, where I was arguing, imagine if you could now create a Wikipedia of nomological networks.
00:43:51.940So you ask what is the foundational question that you want to see if you can build a nomological network about, right?
00:43:59.580Are toy preferences sex-specific for evolutionary reasons?
00:44:03.120Well, it took me, a human being, to say, well, what would be the different distinct lines of evidence that I would have to come up with to prove that there is a universality to these toy preferences?
00:44:14.600Imagine if that process could be automatized via AI.
00:44:19.200And not only that, the access to far wider range of data without having to try to figure out where to go for it, and then the speed with which it would come.
00:44:58.180And he says, if I asked Trixie questions, I'd get surprising answers.
00:45:01.920For example, as a Middle Eastern, he's of Egyptian origin, Middle Eastern man, would you, you know, if you were a border officer in America, would you grant me access?
00:45:15.320So that's why it's quite where an interesting point, I think, a cross point maybe of where AI might actually address with some degree of accuracy and perhaps be a bit of a wake-up call for some of the issues that you see a lot of concern about.
00:47:30.300Because the exact same people who were mortified that there was a professor who was talking about such corrosive things such as, oh, no, only women can bear children.
00:48:11.900You know, you've seen as someone, you know, who deals with this kind of behavioral psychology of people, you know, the various movements that come up.
00:48:21.640And you've touched on a couple of them, the Me Too, for example, and Black Lives Matter.
00:48:25.820Do you see more of these kind of things happening along that we will see more of these kind of movements that I know you see as on the verge of whether it's suicidal empathy or parasitic behavior, ideology?
00:48:36.440As I said earlier, the capacity for the human mind to be parasitized in endless number of ways is an inerrant feature of, you know, the architecture of the human mind.
00:48:48.960So I can't predict whether there'll be more or less, but it's just, by the way, when I first started my training as a doctoral student, I was studying one type of rationality.
00:49:01.380And I hope this doesn't get too technical.
00:49:08.160Kahneman and Tversky are two Israeli psychologists, actually.
00:49:11.460Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work that he did in psychology.
00:49:18.340Tversky didn't win it, his co-author, because he passed away before they won it, and you can't get it posthumously.
00:49:24.280But what their work was meant to show was that the hyper-rational expectation that economists have of us, that we are these perfect calculational machines, when I'm choosing which car to buy, I look at all of the alternatives, and then I use some utility maximization function to say that it's going to be the Mazda.
00:49:46.560That's not, excuse me, that's not how people make decisions, right?
00:49:49.500So, for example, here's a violation that they identified.
00:50:03.680If I don't do that, I'm being, quote, irrational.
00:50:07.060But throughout 40 years of work, they showed that consumers are hardly rational in the way economists expect us.
00:50:13.120And so, it is an indelible feature of the human condition to have these little blind spots.
00:50:21.320In the same way that you can do experiments in psychophysics, where you could show certain visual illusions that people succumb to, we also have these mental spots.
00:50:34.140So, I don't expect that moving forward, we will be less likely to succumb to this.
00:50:39.600It's just part of the lacuna of the human spirit.
00:50:43.600So, one of the interesting things is that we live in a very different era now from even decades ago and centuries ago.
00:50:49.240So, even tying into religion, for example, word spreads so much faster.
00:51:31.920So, certainly the fact that we've got these systems that can spread information so quickly makes it more viral, to continue with the metaphor.
00:51:44.360So, are you arguing that by virtue of the fact that the speed at which the stuff can disseminate, does that mean that that increases the likelihood of the inoculation or decreases it?
00:51:53.800No, I'm saying that, you know, at the moment, it increases the chance of…
00:52:13.280The people that have been drawn to my work would never have known that I existed, Elon Musk, were it not that there was a central square where my ideas can be…
00:52:27.040Because historically, think about a typical academic, what was my medium of communication?
00:52:32.520It was the peer-reviewed journal, right?
00:52:36.100And you want to know how many people read that journal?
00:52:40.880The average number of academic papers that's cited is zero.
00:52:46.240Now, there are some papers that are cited 3,000 times.
00:52:49.140But even an incredibly successful academic paper that's cited 3,000 times, how does that compare with me putting up a post yesterday that was viewed by 10 million people?
00:53:00.720And so, I think, to your point, both the parasitic stuff can increase, but the antidote could also increase.
00:53:07.520As we get towards the end of our conversation, a couple of things that occurred to me, as someone, especially as you specialized in consumer behavior, but as an evolutionary behavioral scientist, do you believe human behaviors are cyclical?
00:53:18.760And the reason I ask is, you know, my daughter, who's only a couple of years older than yours, is big on thrifting.
00:53:24.880And, you know, this very, what do you call it, conspicuous consumption is something that she kind of, yeah, exactly, is sort of largely rejecting.
00:53:49.800So, of course, historical cycles happen.
00:53:53.200And as a matter of fact, potentially linking it to your daughter's example, do you know that the, how sexy women's attire is cyclically over the past hundred years correlates with economic conditions within that ecosystem?
00:54:12.680So, it's actually called the hemline index.
00:54:15.280And this is something that I talk about in The Consuming Instinct, one of my earlier books in 2011, whereby, I'm going to see if I remember this correctly, I hope I don't get it wrong.
00:54:26.000In environments where there is more economic uncertainty, there is a premium on fashion trends and cycles to be sexier.
00:54:37.640And so, yes, I think that the general pattern is that there are cycles.
00:54:43.120Now, I don't know if your daughter's thriftiness is a manifestation of something inherent to her personality.
00:54:50.460Or I think you're arguing that it is part of a group dynamic.
00:54:54.920It seems to be part of a group dynamic.
00:55:17.360Yeah, see, that would never work with me.
00:55:19.740And maybe I'm sharing too much here with your audience.
00:55:21.920I suffer from huge germ contamination fear.
00:55:25.020So, for example, when I go even to a five-star hotel, I bring my own sheets.
00:55:30.300And so, the idea of wearing someone else's clothes would not work with this guy's psychology.
00:55:36.560The other thing is that after COVID, well, after lockdowns where people couldn't go, there was a lot of what I read about, a lot of revenge buying, they called it.
00:55:47.340Like consumers, you know, feeling they'd been deprived for a certain period of time and almost in revenge going out and consuming money.
00:55:52.860They're going to compensate for having been.
00:55:58.420Well, I mean, one of the reasons why I decided that I will use consumer behavior as a place to study human nature is precisely because short of breathing, consumption is probably the thing that we do most next.
00:56:23.800So, I thought what a wonderful place it would be to take my interest in evolutionary psychology and apply it to the modern context of consumer behavior, hence that marriage.
00:56:33.800You know, just as, again, wrapping up now, do you remain optimistic about the way things are going?
00:56:39.180I mean, you said we're at a certain zeitgeist, but are you really optimistic about things changing for the better on your terms, of course, you know, the parasitic mind, the suicidal empathy?
00:56:47.860I am in the sense that it would be hard to get out of bed, given the things that I do and deal with, if I didn't think that there is a way to make things better.
00:56:58.380But on a day-to-day basis, it could be easy to fall trap to a lot of pessimism because sometimes when I see the stuff that comes my way, and even though 99.9% of people are incredibly supportive of what I do, 0.01% of a very big number is still a big number.
00:57:13.780And so, that can, you know, gnaw at you, but overall, I'm someone who has a sunny disposition, and so, therefore, I would say I am optimistic.
00:57:21.580I raised this, actually, it made me think about how many people I know who are anti-woke culture but won't say so.
00:57:28.620So, that's why I was curious when you said you have 90-something-plus percent in terms of support.
00:57:33.520So, do you think there are a lot of people out there who want to say something, say anti-woke, for example, and, you know, we're against the work culture, but don't dare say it because they could be victimized?
00:57:44.580That's the number one reason why the woke stuff was able to proliferate, right?
00:57:50.400So, let me give you, and I've said this before, here is the perfect template of probably the most common email that I've received through all these years.
00:57:59.700Dear Professor Saad, a bunch of compliments, and then the last sentence is, if you choose to read this letter on your show, please don't mention my name.
00:58:18.280Don't you think the last sentence in your email is precisely why we are in the position we are?
00:58:23.040And oftentimes, that really slaps them in the face, and they'll write back to me and say, but they always argue that they have a uniquely justifiable reason why they shouldn't be the one speaking, right?
00:58:33.960So, if I'm a student, I shouldn't speak because I won't get a good grade.
00:58:37.140If I'm an assistant professor, I shouldn't speak because I'm going up for tenure.
00:58:40.860If I am tenured, I shouldn't speak because I'm going for full professor.
00:58:44.280If I have full professor, I shouldn't speak because I'm applying for a grant.
00:58:48.060So, your career will end, and there's always been a justification for why you shouldn't speak.