Social Justice Gone Bad, Woke Politics, and the Death of Cancel Culture (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_785)
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Summary
Dr. Gad Saad is a visiting professor and global ambassador at Northwood University, evolutionary behavioral scientist, and author. In other words, far smarter than me. In this episode, Dr. Saad discusses his new book, "The Parasitic Mind," and his thoughts on the murder of George George Floyd.
Transcript
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This is a man's opinion that I have been looking forward to having in conversation all week.
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I'm so happy to welcome to the show, Dr. Gad Saad, visiting professor and global ambassador
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at Northwood University, evolutionary behavioral scientist and author.
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So listen, I just finished your book, The Parasitic Mind.
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And I would love if you could just give us the thesis, give us the thesis of the thrust
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So in the animal kingdom, there is a field called parasitology, which basically studies how parasites
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So for example, a tapeworm looks to your intestinal tract to parasitize it.
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Neuroparasitology is when a parasite looks for the host's brain to alter its neuronal circuitry
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So for example, you have a wood cricket that abhors water.
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It doesn't, it wants nothing to do with water, but when it is parasitized by a hairworm, the
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hairworm needs the wood cricket to jump into water in order to complete, in order for the
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I thought, aha, I'm going to now use the neuroparasitological framework to argue that
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human beings can be parasitized by another class of brain worms.
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And so what the book does is it traces where all these parasitic ideas come from.
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And regrettably, Ben, they all come from university campuses because it takes professors to come
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And then these ideas proliferate to every nook and cranny of society, as we've seen over
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And at the end of the book, I offer hopefully an effective mind vaccine against the lunacy.
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Well, you argue about the sort of the duality of the human condition, the analytical mind
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And you posit that in places and spaces and in subject matter where we should be thinking
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analytically, we have chosen the emotional brain.
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And that's the cause of a lot of the issues that we deal with today in society.
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So look, it is a false dichotomy to argue that reason takes precedence over affect or feelings.
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We are both a thinking and feeling animal, but what matters in life is that you invoke
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So if I'm taking a shortcut to get home through a dark alley and I see four young men that look
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suspicious that are loitering around, I will have an emotional-based fear response that makes
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perfect evolutionary sense for me to have that response.
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On the other hand, if I'm trying to do well on a calculus exam, all of the fear response in
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the world is not going to make me perform better on that exam.
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So when it comes to, say, choosing a prime minister or a president, you would like to
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think that the electorate is going to invoke their cognitive system.
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But regrettably, to your synopsis, most people end up voting with their feelings.
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So at no point did the electorate say, I like him or dislike him because of policy reasons
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I simply use peripheral affective cues to make my judgment.
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So I guess through that lens, you could explain some things that have boggled my mind.
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Like, how did we get from a point in time where prior to the murder of George Floyd, which
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was a disgusting abuse of police power, but prior to his murder, we were living in, which
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what at that point was the fairest, most equitable version of Western society at any point.
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But it's the struggle to get to that that level that makes that makes Western society great.
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And then but with that, with that catalyst of his murder, people started feeling like society
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was unfair, people started feeling like there was a patriarchy, people started feeling like
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everywhere you looked, people who look like me had our boot on our heel on somebody's neck.
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I mean, the part that I might, you know, disagree with is that, you know, George Floyd was the
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Now, it is true that George Floyd, you know, instigated all sorts of subsequent realities
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downstream, but the parasitic ideas that allowed the post George Floyd reality to happen have
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been festering in academic ecosystems for 50 to 100 years.
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So it's not as though we needed George Floyd's, you know, brutal murder to be where we are.
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The abyss of infinite lunacy has been unfolding, regrettably, for many, many years.
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Post-modernism, I argue it's the granddaddy of all parasitic ideas, is really a form of
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intellectual terrorism, because it says that it purports that there are no objective truths
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other than the one objective truth that there are no objective truths.
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Well, that framework then provides the room for us to say up is down, freedom is slavery,
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war is peace, you know, women can have penises, of course, men too can menstruate.
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So yes, the George Floyd incident served as a catalyst for some realities, but the problem
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Was, it sounds like you say, yes, so much of this is coming from the universities and
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So I argue in the book that each of these parasitic ideas, and let me just at the very
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least mention them so that, you know, your listeners have a clue of what I'm talking about.
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And another idea pathogen is cultural relativism.
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Who are we to judge the rituals and behaviors and beliefs of another culture?
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Another one is identity politics, social constructivism.
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Biology doesn't matter in explaining human affairs.
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So each of these parasitic ideas have served as, if you like, a plane of BS hitting our edifices
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Now, each of these parasitic ideas, to your question, starts off with a noble cause.
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So no, it's not by some, you know, willful evil design that we got here.
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There should be no institutional or legal reasons why men and women shouldn't be treated
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By that definition, both you and I would put up our hands and say, hey, we're proud equity
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But then radical feminists came along and said, in order for us to accelerate the squashing
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of the evil, toxic, masculine patriarchy, we need to argue that there are no innate sex
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They're all due to social construction because that will allow us to better serve our ultimate
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So in the service of what started originally as a noble goal, if we have to rape and murder
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And so I argue that each of these parasitic ideas started from a noble place and then
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And of course, this dovetails very nicely into your other book, The Suicidal Empathy, that
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states it's excessive compassion undermines societal cohesion, values and security.
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So let me kind of give you the background to the sort of the one-two punch of those two
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In the parasitic mind, I'm arguing that our cognitive system, hence, right, our thought
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But as I mentioned earlier in our conversation, we are both a thinking and feeling animal.
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So not only could our cognitive system be parasitized, so can our emotional system enhance suicidal
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Look, within certain functional norms, being empathetic is perfectly laudable, right?
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We've actually evolved empathy as part of our human sociality.
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This is called theory of mind in order for you and I to have a productive exchange.
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So it makes perfect evolutionary sense for social species to experience the sentiment
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If empathy becomes hyperactive, if it targets the wrong targets, then it becomes dysfunctional.
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Dr. Satt, we're going to take a quick break and we're going to come back on The Ben Mulroney
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This is The Ben Mulroney Show, and this is the conversation with the author of Suicidal
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Three years ago, we could not have had this conversation without worrying, at least by myself,
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worrying that the online mob would come to cancel me.
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And something seems to have changed in society.
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You know, it takes a while for people to find their spines, for them to find their testicular
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And so like anything, for example, shingles is something that is within you and then something
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So there are many triggers that resulted in people finally finding their voice.
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I mean, certainly it helped without wanting to turn this into a political conversation.
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The fact that Donald Trump now won certainly is going to change the landscape, at least
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Yeah, it feels, Doctor, it feels like we were and I was talking about with my producer about
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this this morning, that nothing really changed in Donald Trump.
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The moment met him, the world that he was railing against years ago that people thought he was
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And I mean, I will draw an analogy in my own personal life, right, or my professional life.
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The exact same people who used to want to, if disassociate themselves from me in academia
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or ignore me or ostracize me, are now lining up to all send me letters of invitations and
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awards and so on, because they've always loved my work.
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Well, unfortunately for them, I've kept a copy of the emails that I had received 20 years
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And so while I wish to be charitable and not be too gleeful, you've got the receipts.
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Is there a flashpoint, is there a moment where the force of the cancel culture hurricane
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Look, seeing a male pummel a bunch of women in the Olympics is certainly one, right?
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I mean, people love to see things vividly, right?
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And so when you're talking in the abstract, it's difficult to get people to understand
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But if you're seeing, you know, a six foot five, you know, a guy who used to be called
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John yesterday, now playing rugby with five foot two women, people will eventually wake
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So I don't think there's a singular moment, but there is a confluence of factors that
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led to the fact that there is now an auto correction taking place.
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I think a lot of it had to do with people telling us that the reality that we could see
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with our very own eyes and hear with our very own ears was not real.
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And at some point, a lot of rational people said, wait, hold on.
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I can feel the heat and my clothes are on fire.
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And you're not you're talking to me like I'm an idiot.
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But what what upsets me, though, Ben, is that it takes for us to get this far into the
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abyss of infinite lunacy before people wake up.
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So, for example, I know of many very wealthy Americans, Jewish Americans who are now suddenly
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waking up to the fact, oh, boy, we've got a real anti-Semitic problem at my alma mater.
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Well, why weren't you able to put the, you know, connect the dots together when some
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of us were standing on top of the mountain screaming for 30 years?
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But the reality is that the architecture of the human mind is such that you only wake up
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And then you suddenly realize that, oh, yes, there is such a thing as diabetes.
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And I've got to wonder, you've got guys like Joe Rogan, who are a greater force in media
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You saw the numbers that Pierre Polyev got during his sit down with Jordan Peterson, bypassing
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Are these buttressing forces against the pendulum swinging so wildly back to where it had been?
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Look, I am in the business of creating knowledge and spreading knowledge.
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So I will go wherever I need to go in order to make that happen.
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And so as you may or may not know, Ben, I'm one of the, I'm proud to say I'm one of the
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I think I recently reached 10 appearances on his show.
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But I'll tell you a quick story, which I discussed in the parasitic mind.
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I had gone to give a talk at the Stanford Business School in 2017.
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You know, one of the meccas of prestige in academia.
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And the gentleman who was a fellow professor, a consumer psychologist who had taken me out to
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dinner the night before, looked down with unbelievable smugness at the idea that I would go on Joe
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Well, to my earlier point, those same people who thought that it was beneath them to speak
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to the great unwashed that might listen to Joe Rogan now write to me and say, oh, please,
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But given the fact, let's go back to the top of our conversation where we said that so many
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of these bad and toxic ideas stem from our universities and places of higher education.
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How do we deprogram those faculties so that they don't keep churning out?
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They're not the factories of of of misinformation and brainwashing.
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Well, I mean, the most important thing to I think we alluded to this earlier is to get
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If your professor is espousing nonsense, like, of course, men, too, can menstruate, raise your
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If your friend at the pub is saying stuff that they learned in their lesbian dance therapy
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class at Oberlin College about the evil Jews and so on, maybe challenge him.
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In other words, don't let any opportunity bypass you to at least challenge bad ideas.
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I mean, I remember clear as day the very first time I was in high school and had an original
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I said, oh, that's what education is going up and challenging your teacher, challenging
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And and for the past few years, it has been completely forbidden to have to be an outlier.
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And by and by the way, you don't know how thrilled I am to be speaking to you because,
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you know, it's unbelievable how much Canadian media has ignored me.
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I mean, I can go to Belgium and people will know me.
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But I in my own backyard, nearly everyone has ignored me.
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As they say, you know, profits are not appreciated in their homeland.
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And so I'm so glad to see that the tide is changing.
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And boy, I'm so glad to be able to be speaking to you because, you know, Canada, when it comes
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to woke metrics, is certainly suffering from a fatal disease.
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We are we are behind the times as that pendulum is swinging.
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I said, I said that this is this is what culture is going to is going to find a still find a
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home here in Canada and certainly in cities like Toronto.
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Well, although if I may, I know that there's always a rivalry between Montreal and Toronto.
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So you should come and walk around in my home university to really see what parasitized
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Well, it is so terrible that regrettably, I've had to take a leave.
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Where, you know, they truly believe in freedom, freedom of inquiry, economic freedom, freedom
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I mean, those are the bedrock of Western civilization.
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But apparently, if you now espouse those positions, you are an extremist.
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So it's going to take years, you're saying, before we before we peel away the nonsense and
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And that's why I keep reminding people, Ben, that, yes, you may be happy that Donald Trump
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won, but Donald Trump is just the doorstop for this craziness.
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Yes, it's good that he's going to, you know, autocorrect some lunacy, but it's a much longer
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So I'd like to think that it won't take 50 to 100 years to autocorrect, but it certainly
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Dr. Gad Saad, it has been a pleasure having you in conversation.
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Thank you so much for joining us on the Ben Mulroney Show.