Gad Saad is one of the most influential public intellectuals globally, who has led the growing blowback against the twisted mind culture that has pervaded liberal democracies in the West. His recent book, The Parasitic Mind, is an international bestseller, and is just translated into Hebrew and is receiving rave reviews.
00:00:00.120Welcome. I'm Vivian Berkovich, former Canadian Ambassador to Israel, and this is a big day for the state of Tel Aviv and beyond.
00:00:10.080We are launching our YouTube channel now with this video, and the first interview is with Professor Gad Saad.
00:00:18.800Gad Saad really needs no introduction, as one of the most influential public intellectuals globally,
00:00:24.800who has led the growing blowback against the twisted mind culture that has pervaded liberal democracies in the West.
00:00:33.420His recent book, The Parasitic Mind, is an international bestseller, and if you haven't read it, you really should.
00:00:40.220By the way, it was just translated into Hebrew and is receiving rave reviews.
00:00:45.620The book focuses on what has been happening and how can we fix things.
00:00:50.240A professor at Montreal's Concordia University, Gad Saad is on leave this year and has joined Michigan's Northwood University as a visiting professor and global ambassador.
00:01:02.160You can see his full bio at stateoftelaviv.com. That's all one word, stateoftelaviv.com.
00:01:09.140I spoke with Gad Saad on Tuesday, December 10th.
00:01:12.700We got into a lot, post-October 7th Jew hatred, why Canada has become one of the most anti-Semitic countries in the Western world.
00:01:23.020Like, what the heck is going on there?
00:01:26.160And we have a lot of fun discussing his recent week at Mar-a-Lago and the red velvet jacket.
00:04:01.700And I think that your book is going to do exceptionally well here, not just because I've been reading comments about it.
00:04:07.180And you also, you've been picked up by what is considered to be the sort of, you know, top publishing house for important books in the country.
00:04:17.620You share a publisher with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
00:04:21.700I'm sure he feels very honored by that.
00:04:23.400And what's interesting is that we don't have the same degree of mind pathogens in Israel, in my view, that we see in other Western countries, certainly Canada, which is where you and I have both lived for most of our adult lives.
00:04:45.220So, we'll just park that observation, but I do want to get back to it when we sort of start delving into the Middle East, because there's something there, and I'm not sure what it is.
00:05:10.880So, I'm an evolutionary behavioral scientist, meaning that I study the biological roots of what makes us tick, why we behave the way that we do.
00:05:21.060Now, one of the toolboxes, one of the tools within the arsenal of toolboxes of an evolutionary psychologist is you often engage in what's called comparative psychology.
00:05:31.220You compare human behavior to some of our animal cousins to see if there is evolutionary continuity.
00:05:37.940So, our primate cousins may engage in a certain behavior that's identical to how we behave, and that's how we have an idea that there is an evolutionary link between us and them.
00:05:51.080So, as I was trying to think about what was causing this great war on reason that we were seeing, up is down, left is right, nothing made sense, I thought, well, let me delve into the animal literature, and this is why I introduced it as such.
00:06:09.220I wanted to see whether there was a field that explored irrational, erratic behavior, suicidal behavior, and other species, and that's when I fell upon the field of neuroparasitology.
00:06:23.180Now, parasitology is the study of parasites and parasite-host interactions.
00:06:30.140Neuroparasites is when the parasite ends up in the host's brain.
00:06:35.940So, for example, a tapeworm parasitizes your intestinal tract, whereas a neuroparasite goes to your brain, typically altering your behavior to suit its interests.
00:06:49.260So, let me give you an example, and then I'll, this is kind of the big background, okay?
00:06:54.840So, take, for example, a wood cricket.
00:06:59.660The wood cricket abhors, it detests water, and it wants to stay as far away from water as possible.
00:07:06.260But when it is parasitized by a specific brain worm, a hair worm, the hair worm needs the wood cricket to jump into water in order for it to complete its reproductive cycle, right?
00:07:21.240And therefore, when a wood cricket is parasitized by this particular brain parasite, it merely jumps and commits suicide to its detriment, but in the service of the parasite.
00:07:34.180And so, I had my epiphany, aha, I now had found the biological mechanism or metaphor to argue that human beings can be parasitized by actual brain worms, but they could be parasitized by a second class of brain worms.
00:07:54.140And so, in the same way that Toxoplasma gandhi is an actual brain parasite that could infect human brains, parasites like postmodernism, cultural relativism, social constructivism, political correctness, identity politics, all biophobia, the fear of using biology to explain human behavior.
00:08:18.360All of these collections of ideological parasites can lead us to become like the wood cricket, jumping into the abyss of infinite lunacy and merely committing suicide.
00:08:55.360But in a sense, I mean, by the way, I've had doctoral students and postdocs want that approach me to actually study the neural mechanisms that result in all of the things that I'm talking about.
00:09:13.140So, for example, can we do functional magnetic resonance imaging of brains of people who are either ideologically captured or those that have the inoculation against this type of thinking?
00:09:26.360So, ultimately, everything that you do, all of your thinking is biological-based.
00:09:33.640But, yes, to your point, you're right that I'm using it as a biological metaphor to explain the behavior.
00:09:40.600I'm just curious, though, that now that you've raised these doctoral students and postdocs, has anyone actually done that research?
00:09:46.100So, with one of my graduate students, who regrettably has disappeared on me, as often happens with graduate students, I sought to empirically test several features in my book, The Parasitic Mind.
00:10:04.660So, for example, and this may take us in a unique direction, one of the things that I talk about in The Parasitic Mind is actually something that comes from zoology.
00:10:16.360Am I able to use a spicy term, but that's actually from zoology on your show?
00:10:23.260Okay, so the formal term is kleptogamy, but the more colloquial term, albeit in the scientific literature, is called the sneaky fucker strategy.
00:10:36.820Now, in a second, I'll explain how I apply it in The Parasitic Mind and how this particular doctoral student was going to empirically work on this project with me.
00:10:45.000So, the sneaky fucker strategy is a strategy found in some species where you have two male phenotypes.
00:10:53.900One male is the chlorotypical male, dominant, big, intimidating.
00:10:58.800And the other male is actually not masculine looking and tries to pretend to look as though he is female and approach the dominant male so that that dominant male can be tricked into thinking that that sneaky fucker is actually a female, lets him through.
00:11:20.700And then he sneakily has sex with many of the females that the big male is protecting.
00:13:21.540You know, when a graduate student is starting to work on a thesis with you, it's really the first time where, in their educational career, they're not learning material that is presented to them passively, where they actually have to go out and generate the knowledge.
00:13:42.460Now, for many graduate students, they perform wonderfully well at that, whereas other students end up getting sucked into a black hole of which they never come out.
00:13:51.580That's why some doctoral students will take seven, eight, ten years to finish a PhD, not because it was uniquely difficult.
00:13:58.800I mean, you should be able to finish a PhD in, you know, four to six years, but they end up getting sucked and they never come out.
00:14:05.640And so, to answer your question in a very long-winded, but hopefully interesting way, I have several empirical studies with graduate students that have thus far not come to fruition, but maybe they'll resurface and we can publish it.
00:14:23.480I think it'd be fascinating to read about.
00:14:24.920So, the mind pathogen, you have lived the mind pathogen for the last number of years, at least a decade.
00:14:35.460Justin Trudeau has been in power in Canada for almost 10 years, and I would suggest that he is the poster boy for the mind pathogen and every form of woke and campus and social lunacy that we can think of.
00:14:50.540I'll throw your suicidal empathy category in there as well.
00:14:54.480I mean, he's just an embarrassment of riches that never stops giving, and it used to be, you know, with Canadians, we're kind of looking around thinking, what is happening?
00:15:06.760It took most Canadians a little too long to figure it out, but now it's like the whole, the sluice has been opened.
00:15:37.640Because this is all related to your book and how you analyze society and these crazy norms that have been imposed on us from out of nowhere.
00:15:47.440Diversity is our strength, being one of my favorites.
00:15:51.600But you've been living, you've been in the belly of the beast at Concordia and in Montreal.
00:16:23.400So, imagine that this is the cork of a wine bottle, okay?
00:16:27.900And so, there's an expression from Arabic that basically says, getting drunk by smelling the cork of the wine bottle, which refers to the fact that you are of weak constitution, right?
00:17:22.520He speaks with the cadence of a Southern Baptist minister, even though every single syllable that he's ever uttered is a platitudinal sack of bullshit.
00:17:33.340But yet, I am drunk by smelling the cosmetic cues.
00:17:37.700On the other hand, Donald Trump, he's cantankerous.
00:17:47.980So, at no point did I say, I love Barack Obama for the following monetary policies or immigration policies or tax policies or domestic policies.
00:18:00.840That would be too much for me because I would have to engage in something called thinking.
00:18:05.920It's much better to simply get drunk by smelling the cork of the wine bottle.
00:18:10.100On the other hand, if people say they hate Donald Trump, they didn't say they hate Donald Trump for these substantive reasons.
00:18:18.880Now, why is it so that the architecture of the human mind is so easily prone to succumb to getting drunk by smelling the cork of the wine bottle?
00:18:29.680Because in a world filled with computational complexity, I have to find a way to apply a heuristic, a shortcut to cut through the clutter.
00:18:41.900And so, by using affective processing, emotional-based processing, it gets me to make a decision without having to do the hard effort of actually thinking.
00:18:53.120This is why I call human beings, they're cognitive misers, right?
00:18:57.000They're lazy in pursuing any sort of intellectual heavy lifting.
00:19:01.640Now, to come to your point about Justin Trudeau, he is the ultimate manifestation, as you exactly pointed out, I've been saying this for many years, that he is the epitome, the exemplar of every idea pathogen that I discuss in the parasitic line.
00:19:18.440But to my point about the getting drunk by smelling the cork of the wine bottle, most of the Canadians who succumb to Justin Trudeau, not once, not twice, but three times, it's because he's tall, he's young.
00:19:35.520He says complete nonsense, but it just seems like he's sweet.
00:19:42.800Now, I know it's become cliche to say this, but believe me, Vivian, and I know you know this.
00:19:47.580Many of my middle-aged female colleagues, if you saw how they were reacting on my personal Facebook page, if it had been the other way around, had it been male colleagues reacting to a female politician that way, it would have been a hashtag MeToo moment.
00:21:24.360Because you're explaining how it happens.
00:21:27.880But what's happening now, and I would suggest for the last 10, 15 years, has been kind of, you know, building this momentum is very different from the way the world was in the 70s, in the 80s, even in the 90s.
00:21:44.720So what about our societies and our minds, our beings has changed to allow us to succumb?
00:21:54.380So I think the capacity for the human mind to be parasitized is not something that is specific to this era.
00:22:03.860So to your question, I can go back throughout all of human history and demonstrate that, regrettably, the architecture of the human mind doesn't have built-in inoculation to not be parasitized.
00:22:16.980So, for example, 300 years ago, we thought that it was a really good idea if we thought that the neighbor was a witch, that we would throw her in water.
00:22:25.720And if she swam, if she didn't drown, then that proved that she was a witch.
00:22:30.960But if she did drown and then died, oh, oops, I guess she wasn't a witch.
00:22:35.260And we thought that that was a wonderful way to adjudicate these types of decisions.
00:22:39.380Today, we look at that parasitic thinking and go, my God, what the hell were these idiots thinking?
00:22:45.340So what is, but to your question, what is unique about the current period is that all of these parasitic ideas,
00:22:53.080which took 50 to 100 years to be spawned on university campuses and then to escape from the university campuses,
00:23:04.000So they result in Justin Truro, but the idea pathogens took many, many years before they were able to escape and become our journalists and our prime ministers and so on.
00:23:17.120By the way, this speaks to an important point that I would often get in response to me standing on top of the mountain and warning people.
00:23:25.520People would say, come on, Professor Saad, aren't you exaggerating?
00:23:30.140I mean, there's some silly ideas in some, you know, humanities department, in some, you know, highfalutin ivory tower, but who cares about that?
00:23:41.360I said, well, and I would literally say, yes, it starts off in that ivory tower, but then it will escape that lab to use the biological metaphor.
00:23:53.920So what is unique to the current period is the unique idea pathogens that have all come together.
00:24:00.600So that's part one, that those idea pathogens that I discuss in the parasitic mind hijacked our cognitive system, our ability to think.
00:24:10.880My next book, Suicidal Empathy, completes the story by then arguing that human beings are both a thinking and feeling animal.
00:24:21.320Suicidal Empathy parasitizes our emotional system that hijacks our emotional system.
00:24:30.080Once you put those two grand parasitic realities together, you get exactly the unique current reality that you asked about, right?
00:24:39.000So it becomes orgiastically most important for me to demonstrate that I'm infinitely tolerant, infinitely empathetic, infinitely compassionate without ever recognizing that evolution did not endow us with the desire to indiscriminately ascribe empathy to anyone, right?
00:25:04.600So for example, evolutionarily speaking, you and I have evolved the emotional system that causes us to be willing to jump in front of a truck to save our biological children, much more so than random children.
00:25:22.000That doesn't mean that we wish for random children to be hurt, but we do strategically met out our investments, our risk-taking, in line with our evolutionary interests.
00:25:34.200Now imagine if there could be a parasite that removes that ability to discriminate.
00:25:40.320As a matter of fact, it creates a perverse form of empathy.
00:25:44.860Guatemalan illegal immigrants are more important than American vets.
00:25:52.380That demonstrates that I've truly transcended vulgar empathy.
00:26:18.980And speaking of unique realities that we're facing today, October 7th.
00:26:23.920So there was one world on October 6th and then October 7th happened.
00:26:30.940By late afternoon in Toronto and Montreal, I was in Toronto on October 7th, 2023.
00:26:36.940And by late afternoon, when Hamas was still savaging and slaughtering its way through Israel, there were celebrations, open celebrations on the streets of Montreal and Toronto.
00:26:50.620And we have seen in the ensuing 14 months, the utter breakdown of both our cities.
00:27:03.260You've spent much of your adult life in Montreal.
00:27:05.820We are now looked at around the world as being an absolute gutter of pro-Hamas hatred, anti-Semitic violence, and a lot of mind pathogens are swirling around in that mix.
00:27:25.580And on top of that, we have the suicidal empathy, which is way too kind, if you ask me, of our prime minister, who is just not dealing with anything real.
00:27:42.320Help unpack what has gone on in Canada since October 7th.
00:27:48.580And for our American and European listeners, Canada has become, in many ways, the petri dish for the world.