The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - August 31, 2024


Justin Trudeau, Parasitized Minds, and Suicidal Empathy (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_705)


Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

152.46046

Word count

1,546

Sentence count

89

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

12

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Dr. Gad Saad joins me to talk about his new book, The Woke Mind Virus and why we should all be worried about what s going on in the minds of the young and impressionable, and how to deal with it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Now, more on big tech and the crucial role it plays
00:00:03.240 in promoting or suppressing free speech.
00:00:05.720 Facebook's parent company Meta is one of the worst offenders
00:00:09.500 in censoring and suppressing conservatives.
00:00:11.880 You can rail against white people, Western civilisation 0.92
00:00:16.140 and Christianity, but if you take a negative view
00:00:19.580 on DEI policies, cultural Marxism, socialism,
00:00:23.680 then you may find yourself censored.
00:00:26.520 But these radical ideas are on the rise again
00:00:29.540 and as Professor Gad Saad writes on X,
00:00:33.280 we need to combat them.
00:00:35.000 Socialism, communism appeal to many people because on the surface
00:00:39.080 it seems so fair, compassionate and kind.
00:00:42.120 Of course, once you're able to think beyond that of a five-year-old,
00:00:45.660 you realise that it is the antithesis of fairness,
00:00:48.760 compassion and kindness.
00:00:50.000 It is contrary to human nature and hence it is always doomed to fail.
00:00:54.340 But like the proverbial phoenix, it rises from the ashes 1.00
00:00:57.760 to parasitise a new generation of imbeciles. 1.00
00:01:02.060 Dr Gad Saad, visiting professor and global ambassador 0.99
00:01:06.240 of Northwood University and esteemed evolutionary behavioural scientist,
00:01:11.060 joins me now.
00:01:12.480 Dr Saad, the cultural Marxists seem to be winning the ideological debate.
00:01:18.000 They dominate academia and now their influence has spread
00:01:21.960 well beyond college campuses.
00:01:25.320 Well, this is one of the things that frustrates me so much
00:01:28.780 because when I began warning people nearly three decades ago
00:01:32.480 that these dreadful ideas were festering on university campuses,
00:01:37.000 people would say to me, exactly to your point, Rita,
00:01:39.520 oh, but don't worry, this is just in some esoteric department
00:01:42.440 in the humanities.
00:01:43.820 But then, of course, I warned them that it starts off
00:01:46.380 in an esoteric department in the humanities,
00:01:48.180 but eventually it becomes our prime minister of Canada,
00:01:51.860 it becomes our journalist, it becomes our popular culture.
00:01:55.460 And so the virus has escaped and now it has infected us all.
00:02:01.840 It has escaped.
00:02:03.620 It is prevalent certainly in media, in the culture.
00:02:08.060 You look at what Hollywood's producing,
00:02:10.420 what the celebrity class promote.
00:02:13.960 Is there a cure for it?
00:02:15.740 How can we combat something that seems to have spread far and wide?
00:02:21.260 Though I would argue the overwhelming majority of people
00:02:24.180 are still not infected.
00:02:26.440 They still can see the difference between the woke insanity
00:02:29.500 and just common sense, rational views. 0.94
00:02:34.300 Well, in the parasitic mind, I do offer an inoculation against, 0.80
00:02:38.360 a sort of mind vaccine against all of these parasitic ideas. 0.76
00:02:41.440 But let me give you one recent instantiation of this type of parasitic thinking.
00:02:47.460 So, for example, now we see Kamala Harris that has been coronated
00:02:51.280 as, you know, empress of the world.
00:02:53.460 And the reason why she is resonating so well,
00:02:56.440 because she has hijacked people's emotional systems, right? 0.99
00:02:59.860 It's about positive vibes.
00:03:01.640 It's about joy.
00:03:02.700 It's about excitement.
00:03:03.920 It's about fun.
00:03:04.780 And so that's a form of parasitic thinking,
00:03:07.660 when you allow your emotional system to take over your cognitive system.
00:03:13.060 Emotions are wonderful.
00:03:14.340 If I'm going down a dark alley and I experience fear
00:03:17.460 because I see three young men loitering,
00:03:19.640 it is perfectly evolutionarily relevant for me to feel fear.
00:03:24.000 But if I'm choosing the leader of the free world,
00:03:27.040 I probably should not be basing it on positive vibes and fun.
00:03:30.320 And so at times I feel very pessimistic about the plight of our society.
00:03:36.080 But then if I weren't somewhat optimistic,
00:03:37.940 I wouldn't be able to get out of bed.
00:03:41.680 Well, you mentioned your bestselling book,
00:03:45.080 The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense.
00:03:49.740 Elon Musk said his son was killed by the woke mind virus.
00:03:55.100 His son now identifies as a girl and has transitioned.
00:04:02.300 Explain how wokeness is a virus.
00:04:06.180 And if you've got someone within the family,
00:04:08.880 if you've got wokeness in the workplace,
00:04:11.360 how can you deal with that?
00:04:14.340 How can you help people return to common sense?
00:04:18.760 Well, I actually,
00:04:20.020 the reason why I use the term parasitic rather than just virus
00:04:23.660 is because it actually kills the host in the service of the parasite.
00:04:28.820 So let me give you an analogy before I answer fully your question.
00:04:32.080 So you take, for example, the wood cricket,
00:04:34.120 which is an actual cricket that abhors water.
00:04:37.280 But when it is parasitized by a particular hair worm,
00:04:41.140 the hair worm needs it to jump into water
00:04:44.180 in order for it to complete its reproductive cycle. 1.00
00:04:47.720 So when the wood cricket is parasitized by that brain worm,
00:04:52.280 it merrily jumps to its death in the service of the parasite.
00:04:56.960 So this is why it's very important to use the metaphor of parasitic thinking
00:05:00.860 more than the metaphor of virology.
00:05:03.740 How do you resolve that?
00:05:04.980 Well, you resolve it hopefully by people like me
00:05:07.560 constantly beating the drum,
00:05:09.480 standing on top of the mountain,
00:05:10.780 and offering hopefully better ideas.
00:05:12.500 It's a very, very tough battle,
00:05:15.340 but I stand optimistic that we will win eventually the battle of ideas.
00:05:22.780 Now, the word woke is used often.
00:05:27.000 Many on the left say nobody knows what it means.
00:05:30.420 It's just something that is misused and overused.
00:05:33.520 Do you have a definition for woke?
00:05:36.880 So originally it started, if I'm going to be charitable,
00:05:39.680 the original term started as, you know,
00:05:42.300 being awakened to, you know, progressive social justice,
00:05:46.380 you know, the bad plight of people.
00:05:49.220 But of course it has metamorphosized into a much more nasty virus
00:05:54.080 or parasitic idea,
00:05:55.520 which is all things that are related to, you know,
00:05:59.400 irrational ideas that originally were spawned on campus.
00:06:02.560 So postmodernism,
00:06:04.040 the idea that there are no objective truths,
00:06:06.380 is the ultimate woke idea.
00:06:08.040 Because it is that framework that allows us to state without cracking a smile 1.00
00:06:14.220 that a six foot four guy who has a nine inch penis 1.00
00:06:17.880 can call himself Linda the next day and can suddenly become a woman. 0.99
00:06:21.840 If there are no objective truths,
00:06:23.420 then we are certainly not bound to our genitalia.
00:06:26.880 So postmodernism, cultural relativism, social constructivism,
00:06:31.380 all of these things,
00:06:32.720 I argue is what really defines wokeness.
00:06:35.560 And regrettably, every single one of these dreadful ideas, Rita,
00:06:40.280 originated with professors.
00:06:44.820 True, true.
00:06:46.200 And you did warn decades ago that it was going to go beyond university campuses,
00:06:50.940 and it certainly has.
00:06:52.240 It's prevalent in workplaces now, in the culture, as we've mentioned.
00:06:56.540 I do like a definition Elon Musk gave for woke.
00:06:59.920 I'll just read that one out.
00:07:01.540 He said,
00:07:01.880 Wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful.
00:07:05.820 It basically gives people a shield to be mean and cruel,
00:07:09.180 armoured in false virtue. 1.00
00:07:11.100 And I think that's a nice, simple explanation that I think applies to most settings.
00:07:16.060 Something else you've been writing and talking about recently is suicidal empathy.
00:07:21.360 Explain to my audience what you mean by that,
00:07:23.780 and again, how that can manifest itself.
00:07:26.580 Right, yeah, thank you.
00:07:27.440 That's a great question.
00:07:28.100 That's actually the topic of my next book that I'm currently working on.
00:07:31.720 So look, empathy is a noble virtue.
00:07:34.100 Our emotional system has evolved to solve important evolutionary problems.
00:07:39.480 But the problem arises when it misfires.
00:07:42.880 So take, for example, obsessive-compulsive disorder, right?
00:07:46.120 Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a misfiring of an otherwise adaptive process.
00:07:51.100 For me to wash my hands because I shook the hand of someone that sneezed in his hand
00:07:55.760 makes perfect evolutionary sense.
00:07:57.900 But if I spend the next eight hours washing my hands, it becomes dysfunctional.
00:08:03.160 So same thing applies for empathy.
00:08:05.460 Within a certain functional zone, to be empathetic makes sense.
00:08:10.540 When it misfires, when it becomes hyperactive,
00:08:14.020 when it targets the wrong individuals, right?
00:08:17.340 When you start caring more about illegal migrants than you do about your own veterans 0.97
00:08:23.200 who served in protecting your country,
00:08:25.680 when you care more about homeless people who are doing drugs in the park
00:08:29.940 rather than the children who play in those parks,
00:08:32.680 that's what I call suicidal empathy.
00:08:34.680 When you are so kind-hearted and progressive
00:08:37.740 that you allow millions of people into your country
00:08:40.860 that don't share any of the foundational values that define your host society,
00:08:45.700 that becomes suicidal empathy.
00:08:47.980 So when you take parasitic thinking, the topic of my earlier book,
00:08:52.420 and you couple it with suicidal empathy,
00:08:54.900 you have the perfect cocktail for the end of the West.
00:09:02.720 Yes, we are in a civilizational war, aren't we?
00:09:06.900 And the anti-West forces seem to be winning.
00:09:11.040 Before you go, you are in Canada.
00:09:13.260 You mentioned your Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, 0.97
00:09:15.320 has been a poster child for the parasitic mind, 0.95
00:09:18.960 the woke neo-Marxists. 0.78
00:09:21.240 What state is the country in?
00:09:23.700 And have Canadians finally tired of Trudeau's performative, caring routine?
00:09:29.640 Have they finally woken up to the fact
00:09:31.800 that he hasn't actually been fantastic for the country?
00:09:34.760 Well, they seem to have tired of him,
00:09:37.700 and yet they found a way to elect him on three occasions.
00:09:40.360 But I can answer you on a personal level.
00:09:42.820 I'm so tired of him that that's precisely why
00:09:45.680 I've taken this visiting professorship
00:09:47.660 and global ambassadorship at Northwood University in Michigan,
00:09:52.340 precisely because I needed to put a pause button
00:09:55.000 on all the woke craziness that's taking place in Canada.
00:09:58.840 Well, you've got an election coming up next year,
00:10:01.700 so best of luck.
00:10:02.920 Dr Gadzad, thank you so much for your time.
00:10:05.280 Always a pleasure to have you on the program.
00:10:07.620 Thank you so much.
00:10:08.280 Cheers.