00:00:39.560So you started in evolutionary psychology, understanding human behavior, but have very much grown into a public figure, a public commentator on human behavior.
00:00:54.460What was that transition like from point A to point B?
00:01:04.000This is how we advance knowledge, you know, irrespective of which discipline we're working in.
00:01:09.020But I grew a bit impatient with the speed at which information flows within academic settings, right?
00:01:17.920If you publish an academic paper and it is highly successful, that means that probably you'll get 100 citations in 10 years.
00:01:27.820Well, 100 citations means that, you know, 100 other academics have cited that work maybe in a decade.
00:01:33.880Well, I can get on a show, Joe Rogan, and I can have 20 million people consuming that knowledge.
00:01:41.820So I view my job as an academic as one that is twofold.
00:01:47.320I have to create knowledge, but then I have to disseminate knowledge, and all bets are off when it comes to disseminating knowledge.
00:01:54.560So here I'm a bit different than many of my colleagues who've always felt comfortable only operating within the ecosystem that they're familiar with.
00:02:03.640I'd like to say that I was certainly one of the first ones to appreciate these types of interactions.
00:03:37.800I said, well, I don't do the research so I can appear on Joe Rogan either.
00:03:41.880But if I'm doing research that is interesting to the public, ultimately the public is the taxpayer that pays our salaries, then surely I'm going to take that opportunity.
00:03:52.320I'd rather go on Joe Rogan, and these are the exact words I said, than have someone publish a paper that will be read by your mom, your wife, the editor, and two reviewers.
00:04:04.040He apparently didn't like that answer, but that's the truth.
00:04:08.060Yeah, there's a great deal of elitism and ivory tower sort of thought process that goes into that there.
00:04:13.420I am curious, you moved from Lebanon originally in your younger life, and then to Canada, and now you're in Mississippi at some level, working with the University of Mississippi Declaration of Independence Center.
00:04:31.140How does a Lebanese-Canadian end up in Mississippi?
00:04:34.680well the incredible thing maybe this is the first time that the story is being told in
00:04:40.220in a public setting i was once tweeting something you know or you know maybe the the sads need to
00:04:47.480move i don't remember the exact timber of what i was saying and i just happened to notice a response
00:04:53.820from a you know pretty well connected uh gentleman from mississippi saying well something to the
00:05:00.480effect of you know well we'd love to have you in Mississippi let me know if this is something that
00:05:05.440interests you now it was unbelievably fortuitous that I had even hung around long enough to notice
00:05:11.440that reply because oftentimes you know when you have a large platform I mean you're going to get
00:05:15.620millions of replies you don't see most of them and so I actually replied to the gentleman and said
00:05:20.480well you know please send me an email very shortly thereafter he sends me an email says do you mind
00:05:27.240if I connect you with somebody at the Declaration of Independence Center, who happened to be Stephen
00:05:32.280Scaltetti, whom you just had a chat with, and Rankin-Shirling. Within a week or two, we held
00:05:38.760a Zoom meeting, and shortly thereafter, we were talking about how this guy could move to Mississippi,
00:05:45.280and it happened. Sometimes life is magical that way. We're hospitable and persuasive,
00:05:50.280is what I hear. You are. You are. I'll tell you another very quick story before you go on.
00:05:54.440you know we are a storytelling animal so oftentimes it is these stories that resonate the most with
00:06:00.860people. Last year I was being courted by several universities some of which at the time were
00:06:07.000laying a lot of money at me and so when I had gone down to visit Mississippi for the first time and
00:06:12.840visit you know Rankin and and Steven and the rest of the gang at Ole Miss when I returned I told my
00:06:19.620wife, I said, I think Mississippi is now number one on our to-go list. She goes, are you sure?
00:06:25.460Here's how much they're going to offer you. Here's how much this other school is going to offer you.
00:06:29.520Are you sure you want to be there? And then believe me, I was able to convince her because
00:06:33.400earlier in October, the whole family came down. They saw the magic of the place. They now understand
00:06:38.620why we belong there. Now, I don't want to sound like too much of a homer, but Oxford is a special
00:06:43.300place. It's God's country. So we're glad to have you there. I'll tell you what drew me to
00:06:49.200your work and your commentary originally, and I've been out of college now longer than I care
00:06:54.300to admit, about 23 years. When I was in college, these concepts of moral relativism, of postmodernism
00:07:01.840were very much the hubbub amongst college professors, right? And the thought process was
00:07:09.280very much so all cultures are equally valid, there are no real truths, you know, everybody can define
00:07:17.060for themselves, what is moral and immoral. And it always struck me as a logically bankrupt set
00:07:25.180of thought processes that were at some level rooted in a really naive view of human nature,
00:07:32.200right? That what divides us from my perspective is that there are people who believe that human
00:07:38.800nature is flawed and subject to evil, and there are people who look at human nature as being
00:07:44.760perfectible. And because of that, they'd say, well, all cultures are equally valid because they can
00:07:49.740all arrive at that point of perfection. I'm curious if that thought process resonates at
00:07:57.120all with you. I think it does based on the writing that I've read from you.
00:08:00.560Right. So in the parasitic mind, I basically argue that in the same way that many animals,
00:08:08.000including humans, can be parasitized by a wide range of parasites. For example, a tapeworm
00:08:14.200can parasitize your intestinal tract. But a neuroparasite is one that needs to end up in
00:08:20.400your brain, altering your neuronal circuitry to suit its interest. So for example, a wood cricket
00:08:27.020abhors water. It wants nothing to do with water. But when it is parasitized by a hairworm,
00:08:32.260The hair worm needs the wood cricket to jump, happily commit suicide into water because then the parasite can complete its reproductive cycle.
00:08:44.120I then said, aha, I'm going to use this mechanism, this framework to argue that human beings can suffer from ideological parasites, postmodernism, cultural relativism, social constructivism.
00:08:57.000but I would add a slight twist to what you were saying regarding the genesis of a lot of these
00:09:03.900idea parasites. I think that all of those parasitic ideas start out with a noble objective
00:09:11.360and then in the service of that noble objective, if you need to murder truth, so be it. So for
00:09:18.480example, equity feminism is the idea that men and women should be treated equally under the law.
00:09:24.360Based on that very narrow definition of feminism, you and I would probably put up our hands
00:10:57.140That's the essence of suicidal empathy, isn't it?
00:11:00.140Yeah, that's a beautiful way to set it up.
00:11:02.080So let me give my narrative for how parasitic mind follows or precedes suicidal empathy.
00:11:10.380We are both a thinking and feeling creature.
00:11:15.020So it's wrong to say, you know, it's reason and not emotion.
00:11:18.480We've both evolved a cognitive system and an affective system.
00:11:24.260Parasitic mind explains what happens to a human being when their cognitive system is parasitized.
00:11:31.760But in order for me to completely own your ability to think, I have to then hijack your affective system.
00:11:39.480That's where suicidal empathy comes in.
00:11:41.260And let me explain the theoretical framework of how I came up with this idea.
00:11:45.020we know from evolutionary theory that many psychiatric disorders are the misfiring of an
00:11:53.580otherwise adaptive process and i know it's a mouthful so let me break it down so take for
00:11:58.280example ocd when let's say you have germ contamination fear right the person who
00:12:04.680suffers from that form of ocd is stuck in an infinite loop in their bathroom washing their
00:12:10.680hands in scalding hot water until their skin is falling off. But that mechanism is actually rooted
00:12:17.740in an evolutionarily appropriate process if it is done within well-modulated regions. So let's say
00:12:25.180I have the pleasure, Russ, of meeting you in Oxford soon. And I noticed that prior to you coming up to
00:12:31.400me, you're incessantly sneezing into your hands. Therefore, you seem to have a cold. Well, I will
00:12:37.540discreetly so that I don't offend you. After I've shaken your hand, I'll head off into the bathroom
00:12:42.740and wash my hands. Therefore, scanning the environment for environmental threats makes
00:12:48.060perfect evolutionary sense. The problem with some of these psychiatric disorders is that they
00:12:53.700misfire. They become hyperactive, right? That's exactly the principle with suicidal empathy.
00:13:00.120Empathy itself is a perfectly relevant evolutionary virtue because we're a social species. In
00:13:07.440order for you and I to have a meaningful interaction I need to put myself in your mind and
00:13:11.580vice versa so it's perfectly reasonable to be empathetic I want to have a spouse who's empathetic
00:13:16.860I want my physician to be empathetic so this is not an attack on empathy full stop it's an attack
00:13:24.740on dysregulated empathy hyperactive empathy that is invoked in the wrong situations and towards
00:13:32.300the wrong targets. That results in what I call civilizational seppuku. Seppuku was the Japanese
00:13:39.240practice whereby a samurai, when they lost honor, the only way they can redeem themselves is to
00:13:45.820literally engage in self-disembowelment. That's the only way they can regain their honor.
00:13:50.980Well, I argue, regrettably, that the West suffers from civilizational seppuku.
00:13:56.420and and i'm a mississippi yokel so so let me tell you how i think about this and maybe get
00:14:02.300your thoughts but like at some level you you can tell looking at me i'm a portly guy i've had too
00:14:06.340much fried chicken and catfish in mississippi you'll get used to that when you're here um
00:14:10.560we have gone through this phase where the american mentality is not only hey we're not going to be
00:14:17.360rude right so if i walk out in the street it would be very rare for somebody to walk up and0.96
00:14:21.960be like, dude, you're fat. But we've gone from, hey, don't be rude, to actually let's celebrate0.84
00:14:28.560something, right? This whole fat positivity thing, right? And at some level, we're actually
00:14:36.120celebrating things that are harmful to people because we don't want to be rude or we want to
00:14:42.320be accepting. You know, you talked about the other day on X, and you've got 1.2 million followers on
00:14:47.960It's incredible. But you talked about this the other day, that if you look at instances of self-reported mental health disorders, that across the political spectrum, you see this huge slide from the far left to the far right, where the far left is now indicating mental health, self-identifying mental health at plus 60 percent.
00:15:07.200so that we went from let's not stigmatize mental health problems to literally kind of let's
00:15:13.600celebrate it let's talk about how brave we are for wallowing in our self-misery and it just
00:15:19.200strikes me as counterproductive to the fabric of society perfectly stated as a matter of fact in
00:15:24.520this book which is the book between these two this one came out in 2023 the sad truth about
00:15:29.920happiness to your point about that figure that you're talking about political orientation
00:15:34.140and correlating that with mental health issues in the book i talk about this unequivocal finding
00:15:41.520that has been repeatedly reported by many researchers showing that political orientation
00:15:47.180and happiness scores today to some extent you can argue that happiness is sort of the opposite
00:15:53.440side of the coin of suffering from say depression right well it might not surprise your
00:15:59.520lovely listeners in Mississippi, more conservative I am, the higher my happier score. More progressive
00:16:08.860I am, the lower my happier score. And I think I have a plausible explanation for that. Maybe you
00:16:14.440could tell me what you think of it. So I argue that the conservative person wakes up in the
00:16:19.560morning filled with gratitude. I live in a free society. I have freedom of speech. I have freedom
00:16:26.340of conscience. I have freedom of assembly. It may not be a perfect society, but out of the full
00:16:31.040panoply of societies, I am really grateful to be here. I'm grateful to be in Oxford, Mississippi.
00:16:36.380It's a beautiful place. Therefore, sure, I could change things, but I'm happy. On the other hand,
00:16:41.840the progressive wakes up in the morning and says, I live on stolen land. I live in an Islamophobic,0.59
00:16:47.240transphobic, misogynistic society. I've committed genocide against the indigenous people. I'm a1.00
00:16:53.060terrible person and so on. So I'm self-flagellating. So here's an idea. Around the corner, if I could
00:16:59.820simply burn down the current society and socially engineer the new society, around the corner lies
00:17:06.880unicornia. So I can't be happy today. I'm filled with existential angst. I think that tells the
00:17:12.920same story as the finding that you talked about on X. Is there a world in which, because you
00:17:18.100described positive motives or at least potentially good motives with some people who are like, hey,
00:17:24.200let's just tolerate everything. Let's not make anybody feel bad. Let's not confront people with
00:17:28.780truth. Is there an element that could actually be insidious about that in that when I was, again,
00:17:36.220when I was in college, all these concepts were floating around and the message was, hey, you
00:17:41.560just need to be more tolerant, more accepting, not question these things. But what I figured out was
00:17:46.520that those were people who were operating from positions of weakness with their social
00:17:51.560views, and now that some of those social views are no longer in positions of weakness, they're
00:17:56.500no longer interested in relativism and postmodernism.