The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - August 18, 2026


On Sex Differences, Mind Vaccines, Jung's Shadow, & Parasitic Religious Memes (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1034)


Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

148.18

Word count

1,776

Sentence count

70


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 hi everybody thank you for uh posting your questions and comments uh in this subscriber
00:00:07.360 exclusive ask me anything session uh a few people just posted comments and so i i don't really have
00:00:15.120 anything to uh to weigh in on and so i'll only answer the specific questions that were posed let
00:00:22.480 me start with the first one professor sad you've called out claims that deny sex differences in
00:00:26.960 humans how does this denial of basic biology biological reality show both idea pathogens
00:00:33.760 and suicidal empathy at work what real damage has this already caused and what long-term consequences
00:00:38.880 do you see coming well this is foundational to a lot of the stuff that i talk about right i first
00:00:44.480 noticed uh the denial of reality in my evolutionary psychology work right i mean in
00:00:51.440 in evolutionary psychology, we know that humans are a sexually reproducing, sexually dimorphic
00:00:57.300 species, which is a fancy way of saying that there are innate sex differences between men
00:01:02.200 and women. There are some things that are exactly the same between men and women because
00:01:06.540 of evolution. There are some things that men do better than women because of evolutionary
00:01:12.860 reasons, and there are some things that women do better than men because of evolutionary
00:01:16.740 reasons. And so to understand the taxonomy of what makes us similar or different from each other
00:01:24.900 is very much rooted in evolutionary psychology. How is it related to both idea pathogens and
00:01:30.400 suicidal empathy? Well, it applies to all of the idea pathogens that eventually lead to suicidal
00:01:36.320 empathy. So the denial of biology is rooted in the parasitic idea. Well, it's rooted in several
00:01:44.700 parasitic ideas. For example, radical feminism rejects that there are innate sex differences
00:01:50.360 and typically argues that it's all due to social construction, right? Little Johnny is taught to
00:01:55.740 play rougher with the toy and little Linda is taught to play in a more nurturing way with the
00:02:02.140 doll and that results in a cascade of downstream sex differences and physical abilities, which is
00:02:08.300 of course, one of the most idiotic statements that one could make. Now, radical feminism is
00:02:14.820 an idea pathogen that denies biological reality. Biophobia is an idea pathogen that denies
00:02:22.180 biological reality by definition. Biophobia is the fear of using biology to explain human
00:02:29.020 phenomena. Apparently, biology applies to every single species short of one called homo sapiens.
00:02:36.160 Now, of course, the one that is probably the clearest idea pathogen
00:02:40.940 that denies sex differences is postmodernism,
00:02:44.900 because postmodernism denies that there is an objective truth, right?
00:02:49.460 Up is down, left is right, men are women, freedom is slavery, and so on and so forth.
00:02:54.380 If there are no objective truths, then to speak of the universal truths
00:02:59.540 associated with sex differences doesn't make any sense.
00:03:02.180 And here I would ask you to go back and reread The Parasitic Mind where I talk about that infamous case with my going out to dinner with my then-recently graduated doctoral student and his date and my wife and the conversation I'd had with my student's date, whereby she denied that only women can bear children.
00:03:27.240 and she denied the existence of East and West
00:03:30.780 and that the sun rises in the East and sets in the West.
00:03:33.900 Now, why is that related to suicidal empathy?
00:03:35.740 Because at its root, the reason why we deny reality
00:03:42.140 is because we want in some form or another
00:03:45.340 result in some kinder, more inclusive, more equitable, more fair world.
00:03:52.540 And I put all those things in quotes.
00:03:54.820 So take, for example, cultural relativism.
00:03:57.240 Cultural relativism says that who are you to judge the cultural practices and beliefs of another society?
00:04:04.380 If they decide to cut off the clitorises of five-year-old girls, that's their business.
00:04:08.320 Shut up, racist.
00:04:09.020 Well, if I internalize the parasitic idea of cultural relativism, then that leads to the suicidal empathetic position of open borders.
00:04:18.420 because if we don't have the capacity to clearly note that some cultures are more or less likely
00:04:26.700 to assimilate within the Western tradition, within the American ethos, well, then you shouldn't stop
00:04:33.680 some people from immigrating. All immigrants are equally likely to flourish. And so this is why I
00:04:40.080 explained that the parasitic mind and suicidal empathy go hand in hand. It is part of one story.
00:04:45.420 the parasitic mind explains how your cognitive system is hijacked and suicidal empathy explains
00:04:52.940 how your affective system is parasitized all right let's go on to the next one i'm working
00:04:58.240 on something that i would love your opinion on i can't really claim or call it anything till i'm
00:05:02.860 done but i i can explain something and then i'm not going to read the whole thing but it's basically
00:05:07.840 Frankly, it wasn't clear to me what the question is, but it relates to Jung's shadow and, you know, why some people decide to, as the gentleman who asked the question, you know, live within the shadow or not.
00:05:25.040 I mean, I guess the more general question is why do some people succumb to some of those behavioral traps and others don't, right?
00:05:36.640 We can decide to cheat on our spouse or we can show the moral restraint that stops us from cheating.
00:05:45.980 So we may still have a desire for sexual variety, but some of us will suppress that desire because we've committed to one person
00:05:55.060 and other people say, screw it, life is short, I'm going for it.
00:05:58.220 So it's very, very difficult to give a singular, universal answer as to why some people are much more capable of, you know, restraining themselves.
00:06:10.340 It could be something as simple as overeating, right?
00:06:12.860 Why is it that some of us have the restraint to not have that second burger, whereas others say, hey, I'm going for it.
00:06:19.740 And of course, Jung is hardly the only one to have, you know,
00:06:24.000 offered a framework for how we create a dichotomy
00:06:29.920 between acceptable behaviors, acceptable thoughts,
00:06:33.140 and the ones that are suppressed, right?
00:06:35.580 I mean, the seven deadly sins are all about the universal traps
00:06:41.520 that people fall into, right?
00:06:42.960 starting with pride, self-love, gluttony, lust, apathy, greed, and so on.
00:06:51.020 So it's very, very hard to offer a singular answer.
00:06:55.180 It's one that moral philosophers and theologians and psychologists have struggled with for millennia.
00:07:02.160 But thank you for that question.
00:07:03.900 Then there's a person who posted all sorts of, you know, long comments that don't really
00:07:11.940 have a question, so I'm just going to ignore those, but they're there, you know, if anybody
00:07:17.320 wants to read them, they're there in the thread.
00:07:20.360 One person posted a humorous, sarcastic post about their pink dog with free Palestine,
00:07:28.460 with three noble migrants behind the dog and so on.
00:07:32.080 Very funny. I liked it. Oh, then someone posted about, said, as an ex-Muslim, I have some experience
00:07:38.280 with how Islam works as a parasite. For example, the gene shutting down adaptability and evolution,
00:07:43.920 and then he goes on. It's not really clear what is the opinion that the person is asking me to
00:07:50.520 comment on, what specifically the idea. If you mean of Islam being a parasitic idea, well,
00:07:59.580 this is certainly something that I discuss in chapters 6 and 7 of The Parasitic Mind,
00:08:05.920 and so you might want to go and check that out. Daniel Dennett, who has now passed away,
00:08:13.340 he was a philosopher that had very much of a Darwinian bent, and he basically argued that
00:08:21.920 religions are akin to parasitic memoplexes. And so you might also want to check his work.
00:08:32.540 Next person, Professor Saad, you've spent your career studying how bad ideas spread.
00:08:37.600 What's the one intellectual habit that best protects us from being captured by an ideology,
00:08:42.720 even one that already agrees with our own politics? Thank you. Well, I mean, basically that question is
00:08:48.460 literally 32 years of my work, right? I mean, I started off in psychology of decision making.
00:08:54.380 That was the topic of my doctoral dissertation, where I looked at axioms of rational choice.
00:09:01.840 But there, it's an axiomatic definition of rationality. If I prefer car A to car B,
00:09:07.860 and I prefer car B to car C, then I should prefer car A to car C. And so that's called
00:09:14.540 axiomatic rationality because you are comparing people's ability to think critically using a
00:09:22.860 prescribed set of axioms. Now, of course, I went well beyond that because then I looked at forms
00:09:30.540 of irrationality that deny reality, right? I mean, to the first question, denying that sex
00:09:36.360 differences exist within Homo sapiens is a completely insane idea. Arguing that men can
00:09:42.420 bear children and that men can menstruate is a silly, insane idea. It's just a linguistic
00:09:48.040 game, right? You relabel women as men because they self-identify as men and voila, men can
00:09:54.840 menstruate. It's just silly, right? What is the one intellectual habit? I mean, I guess the one
00:10:02.340 that, I mean, there are many, and as I said, I've spent, I mean, my books are all about how do you
00:10:08.500 administer a mind vaccine to protect you against all this nonsense. I would say to have the
00:10:15.920 epistemic humility to be willing to change your mind if new evidence comes in that points you
00:10:26.680 away from your position. And the reason why I'm answering your question this way is because I was
00:10:31.380 asked a couple of years ago on a show hosted by a British psychiatrist, what was the singular
00:10:37.180 phenomenon that most surprised me about the human condition, and I answered the inability of people
00:10:44.740 to change their minds despite a tsunami of evidence to the contrary. So I think if you've
00:10:51.120 got epistemic humility, if you've got the epistemological framework, think like a scientist,
00:11:00.320 right, apply the scientific method objectively in evaluating evidence, that will protect you
00:11:06.760 against, uh, all of these parasitic ideas and suicidal empathy. It's not guaranteed, but it
00:11:14.200 certainly, uh, will help you to have some sort of inoculation against this nonsense. Okay. I think
00:11:22.180 I've answered all the questions. Uh, moving forward, people, when, when I ask you to,
00:11:26.280 to do an ask me anything session, I'd really appreciate it if you keep your questions,
00:11:31.460 very succinct and very clear
00:11:34.140 rather than just going off
00:11:36.640 in terms of posting a bunch of stuff.
00:11:40.960 I don't mind.
00:11:42.280 It's just I spend a lot of time
00:11:43.800 trying to identify if there's a question
00:11:46.480 where there is none.
00:11:49.240 So please make your questions clear,
00:11:51.980 direct, and succinct.
00:11:53.580 I hope you enjoyed this latest episode
00:11:55.560 of Ask Me Anything.
00:11:56.620 I'll talk to you soon.
00:11:57.540 And again, thank you for your support.
00:11:58.980 Cheers.