The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad

00:00:00.480 Hi everybody, this is Gatsad. It's been a while since my last clip. I've been away for quite a bit of time.

00:00:08.480 As some of you know who follow me, I've taken a family vacation to Portugal.

00:00:16.760 Fantastic trip. Portugal is a beautiful country, gorgeous beaches, gorgeous weather, lovely people, good food.

00:00:23.620 Then came back for a short period back to Montreal and then headed off.

00:00:31.660 My book, The Sad Truth About Happiness, was released a month ago now.

00:00:37.500 And the first place I had stopped off was at Joe Rogan's show in Austin.

00:00:45.900 Had a great time with Joe as always.

00:00:48.020 And then headed off to New York, did some media engagements there, including, I think it was my third appearance on Greg Gutfeld's show.

00:00:57.580 Then came back to Montreal for a bit of time and then headed back to California, where I was invited to speak at the Commonwealth Club, which is a really beautiful venue.

00:01:11.020 This is in San Francisco.

00:01:14.140 And actually, I was expecting to see a real, you know, dystopia in San Francisco, which I actually, I had thought that the last time that I was in the area, I think it was in 2018.

00:01:27.180 I was speaking at the Association for Psychological Science, APS, in 2018, I think.

00:01:34.600 And at that time, maybe the hotel was in a slightly more seedy part.

00:01:40.560 I'm not sure.

00:01:41.080 But I had seen a lot more homeless people and so on.

00:01:44.320 Whereas this time around, I didn't quite see as much.

00:01:47.740 I went with the whole family.

00:01:49.200 Then I also had some engagements in Southern California.

00:01:52.200 I did the Adam Carolla show.

00:01:54.180 Adam is such an affable, lovely guy.

00:01:55.800 I did the Tom Bilyeu show, which is not aired yet.

00:02:02.180 He hosts the show from his truly beautiful home.

00:02:07.160 He has an incredible setup.

00:02:09.220 We had a really, really deep conversation, maybe two and a half hours long.

00:02:13.080 I think you guys will really enjoy it.

00:02:15.080 Did a whole bunch of other shows remotely.

00:02:17.580 I did the Babylon Bee.

00:02:18.960 I did their show on location.

00:02:26.080 That was really fun.

00:02:27.380 And actually, there was a really interesting thing that happened at the end of the...

00:02:31.720 When the gentleman, one of the two co-hosts, invited me back...

00:02:36.640 Not invited me.

00:02:37.280 Drove me back from their location back to Newport Beach, where my family and I were staying.

00:02:43.180 I don't know if you guys know, but they're a Christian outfit, quite committed, quite religious Christians.

00:02:53.360 And on the way there, and to some extent on the way back, my co-host, we were discussing religion.

00:03:02.660 He was quoting all sorts of scriptures.

00:03:04.180 And I was kind of joking about that at one point when we were heading back to Newport Beach.

00:03:09.020 I said, well, let me do some stretches because I need to prepare for round two of the scriptures that are going to come my way.

00:03:16.760 But it was all done in a very nice way.

00:03:19.600 And then at the end of the day, as we pulled up to our condo in Newport Beach, he said,

00:03:26.540 Do you mind if I pray for you or something to that effect?

00:03:30.280 And so he kind of put his hand on me and then did this ad-lib beautiful prayer, which was really, really touching.

00:03:41.980 As you guys know, I'm not particularly religious, although I really do appreciate many of the reflexes that come with having faith.

00:03:54.700 Of course, faith can make you do horrible things.

00:03:56.840 It can cause us to be tribal.

00:03:58.440 It can cause us to hate those who don't share our faith.

00:04:01.540 So it's not as though religion is always rosy.

00:04:04.300 But here was an instance where it was just a really, really beautiful, touching moment.

00:04:10.140 And I truly was touched by it, even though I don't think I'd ever had someone put their hand on me and start praying.

00:04:18.480 But it was a very, very beautiful prayer with a lot of affection and truly profound sentiments.

00:04:26.020 So I really appreciate it.

00:04:27.680 So why am I sharing this?

00:04:30.120 Because, you know, it speaks to one of the points that I discuss in this book, in The Sad Truth About Happiness, that, you know, you have to be open to the world.

00:04:40.080 You have to, you know, life is truly a playground, not just in the most obvious sense of, you know, have a playful mindset.

00:04:48.820 But there are so many incredible opportunities to meet all sorts of incredible people and connect with people that you otherwise might think that you don't have things in common with.

00:04:59.040 And so just get out there.

00:05:01.000 Have fun, be open, be curious, be engaged.

00:05:07.500 And not that I wish to bring this up again.

00:05:09.440 And don't be like the many, many people who listened to my very innocent quip on Joe Rogan, where I was making fun of various accents, including the Portuguese accent, the Hebrew accent, and then the French Canadian accent.

00:05:25.440 And it led to hundreds of hate mails, death threats, insults, racist insults, Arabic insults, anti-Semitic insults, calls to have me fired because I was joking about the French Canadian accent being unattractive.

00:05:44.220 That's not a prescription to live a happy life.

00:05:48.220 It's not a way to conduct yourself with honor and dignity.

00:05:54.180 Imagine if, you know, I had been weak enough to completely capitulate to all that pressure.

00:06:02.460 Think of the gentleman who recently in Toronto, I think, a principal who, because he had the diversity inclusion equity mob come after him, ended up committing suicide.

00:06:13.940 I think it was a 60-year-old man.

00:06:15.180 He just couldn't handle the tsunami of pressure he was getting.

00:06:20.280 And I'm sure whatever he got was probably infinitesimally smaller than what I got.

00:06:24.940 I mean, you know, I went into a store today and the gentleman said, oh, my God, it's not right what they did to you.

00:06:30.140 It's not right what your university put out as a statement instead of supporting you.

00:06:34.580 And then my neighbor has a kid who's my son's age.

00:06:40.140 The kid asked my son, oh, what happened with your dad about, you know, the joke he made?

00:06:45.100 What was that all about?

00:06:46.080 And so on.

00:06:46.960 And so, you know, it's made the news everywhere here, which itself is a sad story.

00:06:52.740 Especially when someone makes a joke about an accent and it can so inflame people's passions in such a negative way.

00:07:00.640 That's not really how you want to live life.

00:07:02.460 Now, in my case, I'm fortunate enough that I have a strong personhood that while it was bewildering to see this and it was frustrating and it angered me,

00:07:12.720 I wasn't going to jump off a building.

00:07:16.060 I wasn't going to commit suicide because, you know, a bunch of humorless fascists were going to come after me.

00:07:22.300 But again, it shows you that that's not the prescription to live a good life.

00:07:27.320 People might like Thai food or they hate Thai food.

00:07:30.320 And if they say it, that doesn't make them anti-Thai.

00:07:33.100 People might love Italian, how it sounds, or they may hate it.

00:07:36.940 And that's okay.

00:07:37.580 That doesn't mean they hate Italian people.

00:07:39.100 So, I made a flippant joke about the accent using a catchphrase in a front to human dignity,

00:07:48.520 which I've used, as I've said before, to describe the Beatles, U2, Bruce Springsteen, Hillary Clinton singing karaoke on that late show.

00:08:02.380 You know, if my wife makes a bad meal, I say that this meal is in a front to human dignity. 1.00

00:08:06.560 So, it's part of a running gag.

00:08:08.440 There was nothing that was meant.

00:08:10.120 There was nothing there.

00:08:11.180 I mean, literally nothing.

00:08:13.220 And yet, to see the level of hatred that I received, those were real people who really wanted me out of Quebec,

00:08:22.500 kicked back to the Middle East, who really wanted me fired, a 30-year professor.

00:08:29.200 Is that a good, healthy way to live life?

00:08:31.540 When we were walking around today, my wife was saying, oh, you know, I hope that you don't get one of these crazy folks coming up to you now on the street.

00:08:40.940 Is this what should be happening in the 21st century?

00:08:44.100 A guy makes a joke in Texas about an accent that's 4,000 miles away.

00:08:49.640 And now, the wife is asking, oh, is it going to be safe for us to walk out?

00:08:54.780 That's not a prescription for a healthy, secure, anti-fragile society.

00:09:01.320 So, anyways, a lot of stuff has happened the past month.

00:09:03.480 Hopefully, much of it is now blown away past us, which speaks, again, to something that I discuss in the book, which is be anti-fragile.

00:09:14.300 Believe me, it wasn't tough to see, you know, the Minister of Justice of Quebec, I think it was the Minister of Education or Science, all weighing in against me.

00:09:24.500 As if, you know, I was, you know, I had caught, I had been caught, you know, selling national secrets to an enemy state.

00:09:33.860 I made a joke with Joe Rogan on the local accent, which Quebecers themselves will make about their accents, with the French will make about Quebecers, which all kinds of people make fun of all sorts of accents.

00:09:48.240 People make fun of the way the Lebanese speak French, where, at least the very old-school Lebanese, they roll their R, je regarde, right? 0.94

00:09:58.940 The R is rolled, it's heavy, it's like a Middle Eastern R. 0.99

00:10:02.240 People make fun of that.

00:10:03.520 So what?

00:10:04.220 Laugh and move on.

00:10:06.460 We got to get rid of this guy. 1.00

00:10:08.000 I will never send my child to Concordia with that racist monster. 1.00

00:10:13.520 Really? 0.99

00:10:14.440 You're telling me I'm racist because I made a joke about an accent?

00:10:17.780 I'm fully francophone.

00:10:19.820 Oui, je parle le français couramment.

00:10:22.700 Oui, j'ai appris à parler le français avant que j'ai appris l'anglais.

00:10:26.740 You're going to call me a hater of French culture?

00:10:31.180 It's unbelievable.

00:10:32.540 What a, if anything, it is disappointing to see that in a so-called inclusive society,

00:10:41.580 people can very, very quickly show their hatred of immigrants, their hatred of people from the Middle East, their hatred of Jews.

00:10:49.580 And this is for someone who's been living here since 1975.

00:10:53.160 So apparently I haven't yet gotten the street creds of having lived long enough to be able to make fun as a Quebecer of the Quebecer accent.

00:11:03.120 Not good people.

00:11:04.320 That's not the way we want to live life.

00:11:05.780 I was disappointed that not, that there weren't more folks who, you know, high-profile folks who, you know, weighed in on the matter.

00:11:16.700 Because again, it's, the issue is trivial.

00:11:19.920 The local accent joke is, but it's, it captures something.

00:11:24.060 Imagine if I had been in an emotionally fragile state.

00:11:29.040 Imagine if I was going through a rough period of my life where receiving such a gigantic blowback, a tsunami of blowback, of hate, insults, threats, ministers, politicians, television shows, newspapers, all weighing in about me making a joke, about an accent.

00:11:49.640 Imagine if that would have pushed me over the edge.

00:11:52.560 Wouldn't that have been tragic?

00:11:54.380 Luckily, I have a strong personhood.

00:11:56.860 I've got a strong family.

00:11:58.340 I know who I am.

00:11:59.320 I know what I stand for.

00:12:00.640 And therefore I can go like this and let it blow by.

00:12:03.600 But that's not how we wish to organize society.

00:12:06.720 Because not everybody has a strong personhood.

00:12:09.900 The 14-year-old who's being bullied doesn't have that strong personhood.

00:12:13.240 The 60-year-old principal who killed himself because he dared question some of these diversity, inclusion, and equity,

00:12:22.300 tenants that said that Canada is an endemically white supremacist society said, wait a minute.

00:12:28.160 No, we're not.

00:12:29.160 And because of that, he received so much hate that he ended up committing suicide.

00:12:33.240 That's not how we want to live in a free society.

00:12:36.800 You don't like my French-Canadian joke?

00:12:39.280 You go, I don't give a damn what this guy said on Joe Rogan. 0.96

00:12:41.980 Who cares?

00:12:42.660 I'm going to speak the way I speak. 0.88

00:12:44.520 F him.

00:12:45.340 That's what a healthy person does.

00:12:47.180 They don't contact my university to try to get me fired from a 30-year career.

00:12:52.300 Which, of course, would have been insane to try to actually do.

00:12:57.320 But the fact that they felt that reflex suggests that it's not a good thing.

00:13:02.240 And speaking of these kind of free speech issues and so on and an anti-fragile society,

00:13:07.780 I haven't read yet the details.

00:13:09.960 But my good friend Jordan Peterson just had, I think, a court case that ruled that...

00:13:16.300 I don't want to misspeak because I haven't read it, but I think from what I understood

00:13:19.700 that the Ontario Board of Psychologists could force him to take social media training

00:13:29.780 because of some of his tweets that were offensive, right?

00:13:33.040 A free society does not cause professional orders to train their members

00:13:42.980 how to be more inclusive on social media.

00:13:47.200 In a free society, you recognize that people will say things that you don't like,

00:13:53.040 in which case you turn the channel.

00:13:55.340 You unfollow them.

00:13:56.900 You ignore them.

00:13:58.120 You offer a countering position.

00:14:01.100 That's what you do in a free society.

00:14:03.460 Again, the reflex has been with us throughout all of eternity, which is,

00:14:08.540 if I am in power and you say something that I don't like,

00:14:11.980 I will get rid of you.

00:14:13.320 The only thing that's happening that's different in the West now 1.00

00:14:16.120 is that getting rid of you doesn't imply that I imprison you or kill you,

00:14:21.100 as has been the case throughout human history. 0.99

00:14:23.540 What you now do is you cyber bully, you harass, you intimidate,

00:14:28.700 you contact the employer of the person.

00:14:31.220 You put endless amount of pressure to destroy a person's life.

00:14:35.740 Well, you're not going to destroy this guy's life

00:14:37.720 because I am a honey badger and I will fight you till the end

00:14:43.080 because these are the principles that we cannot lose.

00:14:48.500 It can't be the case that we live in a society

00:14:52.200 where a professor with my record,

00:14:55.720 with my sense of dignity and honor,

00:14:58.900 who doesn't have a bad bone in my body,

00:15:01.840 I mean, I love Quebec.

00:15:04.240 I love Quebec society.

00:15:06.640 I'm still in Quebec in part because my family and my wife's family are here

00:15:10.800 because we've grown up here.

00:15:13.720 Yes, I don't like the Joelle accent.

00:15:16.620 Let me repeat it.

00:15:17.540 I find it very unattractive,

00:15:20.980 but so do millions of people

00:15:22.540 and saying so does not make me Himmler.

00:15:25.780 And speaking about the issue doesn't make me a victim

00:15:30.100 because a lot of people said,

00:15:31.360 oh, enough, Jew, now you're playing the victim. 1.00

00:15:35.020 Receiving hundreds of death threats and insults 0.98

00:15:37.740 is not me playing victim.

00:15:40.320 It's me documenting what happens to someone

00:15:43.840 in today's reality

00:15:45.640 where they say something that someone finds offensive, right?

00:15:49.300 In some places in the Middle East,

00:15:51.380 you draw an image of a prophet

00:15:54.600 and it's off with your head.

00:15:56.900 Well, what happened here?

00:15:57.900 I made a joke about an accent.

00:16:00.380 Well, it's off with his metaphorical head.

00:16:02.880 That's not a good way to live.

00:16:04.880 And honorable people who are watching this

00:16:06.920 should be thinking about contacting my university

00:16:09.920 or writing an article and saying,

00:16:11.880 hey, this cannot be tolerated.

00:16:14.320 Someone of Gadsad's stature

00:16:16.780 who should not be,

00:16:19.500 well, not,

00:16:20.680 I shouldn't say someone of Gadsad's stature,

00:16:23.140 anybody.

00:16:23.500 It could be a graduate student.

00:16:26.020 It could be a janitor working at the university

00:16:30.060 should not be held to a standard

00:16:33.380 whereby if they make a joke somewhere,

00:16:35.900 let alone outside of their professional role,

00:16:40.200 then there could be a mob of people

00:16:42.960 who come and occupationally harass you.

00:16:45.280 I mean, frankly,

00:16:45.860 I think that that should be a criminal offense, right?

00:16:49.060 Because imagine if all of us were able,

00:16:53.140 every single time someone says something anywhere

00:16:56.100 that we don't like,

00:16:57.760 we then start a mob to get that person fired.

00:17:01.500 I don't support that.

00:17:03.320 It's grotesque.

00:17:04.420 It's immoral.

00:17:05.500 It lacks dignity.

00:17:07.100 It's fragile.

00:17:08.460 It's insecure.

00:17:10.000 It's grotesque.

00:17:12.060 There you have it, folks.

00:17:13.300 But notwithstanding these difficult moments,

00:17:17.360 I retained my smile.

00:17:19.180 I had a fantastic time in California.

00:17:22.140 California is such a beautiful place,

00:17:23.720 notwithstanding some of the difficult political ideologies

00:17:27.820 that run through the veins of much of California.

00:17:31.440 The sun was not always there, by the way.

00:17:33.800 For the first time ever,

00:17:35.620 we had a bit of rain,

00:17:37.940 which, you know, the old song,

00:17:39.860 it never rains in Southern California,

00:17:41.840 apparently needs to be revised.

00:17:43.300 It rarely rains in Southern California.

00:17:46.900 So there you have it, folks.

00:17:47.980 The Sad Truth About Happiness is doing quite well.

00:17:51.540 Please help me keep the momentum going.

00:17:54.400 As I said, order a copy.

00:17:55.900 It's a really, it's a fun book.

00:17:58.360 It's not about all this parasitic stuff.

00:18:01.180 It's positive.

00:18:02.280 It's optimistic.

00:18:03.260 It's happy.

00:18:04.640 It's joyful.

00:18:06.160 I think if you give it a chance and read it,

00:18:09.240 you'll enjoy it.

00:18:11.240 To those of you who are going back to school,

00:18:13.600 I do have many viewers who are students.

00:18:17.700 Best of luck in the new semester.

00:18:19.200 It's about to start.

00:18:21.820 Looking forward to meeting a new group of students.

00:18:25.180 It's always exciting when I first meet a new batch of students

00:18:28.780 and I introduce them to, you know, consumer psychology

00:18:31.880 and evolutionary psychology and psychology of decision making

00:18:34.860 to see how their worldviews are certainly changed

00:18:39.100 by some of these, some of this material

00:18:41.180 that they've never seen or heard of before.

00:18:43.720 So that's always exciting.

00:18:45.300 That's what keeps my teaching always fun and, you know, engaging.

00:18:51.040 And there you have it.

00:18:52.260 Have a great end of summer.

00:18:54.020 Don't let people bully you.

00:18:55.960 Always be nice and kind as a default value.

00:18:59.280 But if people come after you wrongly,

00:19:01.680 so be a honey badger.

00:19:03.600 Never capitulate.

00:19:04.740 Cheers, everybody.

Jordan Peterson and I - Roommates at the Gulag of Undesirables (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_582)

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript