The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Spreading Reason and Common Sense in Woke Iceland (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_860)

00:00:00.000 It's my honor to welcome Dr. Gadsad here to Iceland in collaboration with great people

00:00:06.500 that have made this possible and everybody here in the audience. Some people tried to cancel us

00:00:12.380 and to the credit of Harpa, they were able to resist those attempts. And so here we are,

00:00:24.180 we're sold out, and it's a success, and we'll see later whether the event is a success. We'll see

00:00:33.960 the lecture you've all come to see. And I've seen it, I know it's good. So it's already here.

00:00:43.300 So Dr. Gadsad is the nicest, warmest person you could meet. So it was quite strange to see

00:00:54.100 these very harsh words about him on the internet in certain groups. But of course, you shouldn't

00:01:00.860 take them seriously. But the problem is that these certain groups, they have a disproportionate

00:01:07.400 influence in our society, and it's very important to stand against it. Dr. Gadsad has, he tries to

00:01:19.720 speak the truth. He's not a truth-haver. He corrects himself if he finds him to be wrong.

00:01:27.640 But he is a truth-seeker, and that's what we're trying to do here. We're trying to seek the truth,

00:01:33.100 we're trying to discuss. And we should try to do more of that and be open to new ones, open to views

00:01:42.340 of other people. I know it's easy to say, and I know I'm not the best one always. But I'm trying my best.

00:01:51.460 So Dr. Gadsad, he has a PhD from Cornell University. He is a professor at Concordia and a visiting

00:02:03.780 professor at Northwood University. His field is behavioral science and evolutionary biology

00:02:12.900 applied to behavioral science. And there's so much interesting in that, which many of us have found

00:02:21.640 on the internet, but will now see him face to face. And through that, because he knows things, he bases

00:02:30.600 things on science, he has noticed some strange things in academia first, but then also in the mainstream

00:02:40.280 discussion, which he has opposed. And of course, these certain people being the way they are, they

00:02:46.440 cannot imagine someone disagreeing with him ever. He's great fun, and a lot of people have invited

00:02:55.240 him in their podcasts. He has his own podcast, The Sad Truth. Sad with two A's is his name. 0.86

00:03:03.960 Sad means happy. So that's interesting. And he's written a few books like The Sad Truth About Happiness. He

00:03:23.800 wrote The Parasitic Mind. That's his last book that was recommended a lot by Elon Musk, for example.

00:03:33.640 It has been recommended by Jordan Peterson. And he's now working on a book called Suicidal Empathy.

00:03:39.720 And he will touch on these different themes here. And so we will see the academic, his fundamental

00:03:48.360 academic work and how that translates into his work on The Parasitic Mind and Suicidal Empathy.

00:03:57.480 We will have a Q&A. And after the lecture, so think about any questions that you might have.

00:04:07.000 After the lecture, we'll have a QR code on screen. And you can scan that code and go to Slido, where you

00:04:15.160 can type in questions. I will then pick some of those questions. If there are too many, I have to pick some.

00:04:23.880 And we'll have a fluid conversation based on those questions, or at least we'll try.

00:04:31.000 So let me welcome the social media beast, the self-described honey badger, and the academic Dr. Gatsat to the stage.

00:04:45.960 Hi, everybody. It's wonderful to see such a beautiful crowd after, as Guli said, I was going to be cancelled in Iceland.

00:05:09.800 So thank you, Harper, for not cancelling this evil monster who supports freedom of speech,

00:05:15.640 freedom of inquiry, scientific truths, and so on. So today, what I'd like to do is give you a sample

00:05:22.360 of many of the things that have kept me busy over the past 31 years. I can't believe that I've been

00:05:27.640 a professor for 31 years. I still think of myself as a 12-year-old boy. So I'll talk a bit about my

00:05:35.320 background in Lebanon, because that actually animates many of the eventual parasitic ideas that 0.73

00:05:42.760 I was first exposed to as a young child in Lebanon. Then I'll talk a bit about my work in evolutionary

00:05:49.100 psychology, because that's also where I first saw how academics could be completely decoupled from

00:05:55.800 reality. And then I will discuss, of course, concepts from the parasitic mind, a few teasers from

00:06:03.260 suicidal empathy, and then I'll wrap it up. So hopefully about 60 to 70 minutes, and then I look

00:06:08.140 forward to your fantastic questions. So here we go. So I was born in Lebanon. We were part of the

00:06:14.860 last remaining Jewish community in Lebanon. There were very few by the time I was still in Lebanon.

00:06:22.480 I was a 10-year-old boy when the civil war broke out in Lebanon. So the photo that you see

00:06:28.100 to my left, the nice one, is the one that was very close to my house. Lebanon used to be called,

00:06:34.980 or Beirut used to be called, the Paris of the Middle East. It was, quote, tolerant. But as you'll see,

00:06:41.460 tolerant by the standards of the Middle East is different than tolerance in how you might assume

00:06:46.980 tolerances. And then, of course, the picture on the right is exactly what I grew up with the last year

00:06:54.840 of my life in Lebanon, where we experienced the Lebanese civil war, where I couldn't imagine,

00:07:01.160 I couldn't explain to you the level of butchery. Usually most civil wars are judged against the

00:07:09.000 brutality of the Lebanese civil war, precisely because it had a lot of the dynamics that make

00:07:14.860 people go insane with hatred. And so I'll talk a bit about that in the next couple of minutes.

00:07:20.080 So this clip, I put the slide because it represents the first time that I remember as a young child

00:07:29.940 being exposed to Jew hatred, which is now what you see on every Western campus, unfortunately.

00:07:37.120 So the gentleman on the left, on my left at least, is Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was the Egyptian

00:07:43.340 president. He was a very popular guy in the Arab world because he was a pan-Arabist. He was trying to

00:07:50.020 unite all of the Arabs, whether you're Algerian or you're Yemeni or you're Egyptian. Let's all band 0.89

00:07:55.720 as one people, of course, to fight the evil Jews. Now, when he died in 1970, I wasn't yet six years 0.98

00:08:03.520 old, the people in Lebanon started going on the street, as they often do in the Middle East, to

00:08:09.400 start protesting and screaming. And they were screaming as they were going down in the thousands

00:08:14.000 by my house, death to Jews, death to Jews. And so I turned to my mother and said, what? Mom, why are they 1.00

00:08:21.820 screaming death to Jews? What does this guy dying have to do with us? And she says, shut up, don't show 0.71

00:08:28.120 your face. And that was the first time that I saw what the irrationality of hatred, how it could look 0.97

00:08:34.460 like, at least as I remember it as a five-year-old boy. Now, the picture that I have on the right is one that's

00:08:40.040 become a famous meme. He says, death to all Jews. And I always tell people, if you're going to 1.00

00:08:47.860 commit a genocide against us, at least have the courtesy to properly spell us. You know, put in 0.69

00:08:54.180 that extra effort. This is an actual photo from my class. This is, I think, the year before the Civil

00:09:04.680 War started. So this would be 1974. I am in the bottom row, second guy from my left, if you see

00:09:12.640 slightly longish hair. In that photo, there's a guy. So the teacher tells us, please stand up and tell

00:09:21.100 us what you want to be when you grow up. I want to be a soccer player. I want to be a nurse. I want to

00:09:27.060 be a soldier. I want to be a doctor. One of the kids, who of course knows that I'm Jewish, there was

00:09:31.920 actually another Jewish kid in the, in this photo, says, teacher, when I grow up, I want to be a Jew 0.98

00:09:38.540 killer. And then everybody laughs and claps. Now, this is intolerant, progressive, modern Lebanon. That's 1.00

00:09:46.140 how acceptable it was to express your Jew hatred. And so what you're seeing in the West now is exactly

00:09:53.040 what I ran away from in the mid-1970s. This is an actual newspaper clipping from the top Lebanese 1.00

00:10:04.260 newspaper. My brother had been Lebanese champion of Judo for many years in a row. But because he

00:10:12.120 suffered from a terrible disease known as being Jewish, he, the Lebanese Federation didn't allow 1.00

00:10:19.820 him to represent Lebanon in international competitions. He was visited by some men who

00:10:26.600 explained to him that it was time for him to retire because otherwise there, you know, there might be

00:10:31.740 an unfortunate accident that happens to him. He ended up moving to France to pursue his career. This is

00:10:36.620 before the civil war. The irony is that in 1976, when the Olympics took place in Montreal, where we had

00:10:45.420 moved to from the civil war, then they were willing to forgive the fact that he was Jewish and he ended 0.93

00:10:51.640 up representing Lebanon in the 1976 Montreal Olympics. So this is, again, the kind of reality that you face

00:10:59.000 when you're a religious minority in the lands of perpetual peace. This is a photo of my actual parents

00:11:06.880 married in 1950. They're still both, thank God, alive. My father is 90. He just turned 95. And my mother

00:11:17.420 is 91. This is their photo in 1950. I put up this photo, number one, to honor them, but number two,

00:11:25.020 to tell you that they were kidnapped by Fatah on one of their return trips to Lebanon in 1980.

00:11:31.440 And some really, really bad things happened to them. But luckily, they were able to be freed.

00:11:37.320 And so many of the things that you see happening today is called my childhood growing up.

00:11:43.620 And this is one of the last slides I'll talk about in terms of my Lebanese history.

00:11:50.320 As we were leaving Lebanon on that fateful day in 1975, and we cleared the airspace of Lebanon,

00:12:00.080 Lebanon, the captain said, we are now out of Lebanese airspace. So my mother takes out a Star of David

00:12:08.280 in the plane, puts it around my neck, and says, now you can wear this, not hide your identity and be

00:12:14.740 proud of who you are. Now hold that thought. Move fast forward to a couple of weeks after October 7th,

00:12:23.080 when my son was almost hauntingly the exact same age as I was when that story happened.

00:12:32.400 But now this is in Montreal, Canada. This is not in Yemen. This is not in Raqqa, Syria.

00:12:38.660 This is in Montreal, Canada. My son, who had just played a soccer match in the east end of Montreal,

00:12:45.220 where there's a particular demographic group that's common there. And he came to pick me up

00:12:52.440 with my wife. I was working on my laptop at a cafe. And as I got into the car, and this is the actual

00:12:58.600 tweet that I had put out that day, he said to me, you know, Daddy, if you had come to watch me play

00:13:05.480 soccer where I was today, and you were wearing a Star of David, you'd be dead.

00:13:09.880 So in 1975, I can wear the Star of David. In 2023, in the west, I can't wear a Star of David.

00:13:19.780 Trust me when I tell you, you may want to fall asleep, but it will come and find you if you

00:13:25.600 don't solve these problems. This is my reality at Concordia. Gulli was kind enough in his introduction

00:13:32.740 to mention the fact that my home university is Concordia, but I've taken a leave from Concordia

00:13:38.720 because it became too dangerous for me to be at Concordia. In the 21st century, a professor in

00:13:45.860 Canada can't walk into campus to teach his classes. And my classes, I'm teaching psychology of decision

00:13:52.940 making. I'm teaching evolutionary psychology. I'm teaching consumer psychology. There's nothing

00:13:59.640 controversial in what I'm talking about. Even if it were controversial, so what? But I'm not talking

00:14:04.260 anything controversial, but I am a Zionist pig, and therefore it's dangerous for me to walk on campus. 0.92

00:14:11.140 And this photo that you see with the SWAT team is the actual photo of fully armed police in SWAT gear 0.96

00:14:20.200 to protect the Jewish students and Jewish professors. But in my case, I could no longer walk there

00:14:26.300 because I would need a whole team just to go lecture the class. That's probably not a good idea.

00:14:33.340 So one war that I have faced in my life is the War of Lebanon. The second war, which eventually led to

00:14:40.440 me writing The Parasitic Mind, is the war on reason, the war on logic, the war on common sense,

00:14:48.480 on truth-seeking, on epistemology. And it's in that spirit that I want to tell you a bit about my

00:14:55.720 scientific journey. So very early in my career, I decided to apply evolutionary psychology, which is

00:15:02.940 founded in evolutionary biological principles, and I'll give you some examples in case you don't know

00:15:07.740 what that means, to human behavior. The idea being that you can't fully understand human behavior if you

00:15:14.620 don't know the biological forces that have shaped our human mind. But very quickly, I found out that

00:15:22.200 while my natural science colleagues said, yeah, of course, that makes sense. We study every other

00:15:27.360 animal using evolution. Why shouldn't you use it for Homo sapiens? But my social science colleagues

00:15:35.360 thought that it was crazy talk. Of course, they said, what makes us human is that we transcend our

00:15:42.200 biology. Biology is relevant for the mosquito. Biology is relevant for the zebra, maybe for your

00:15:48.220 dog. But surely, Professor Saad, you're not saying that biology matters for human beings. Yes, I am

00:15:54.340 saying that. But again, for almost all my colleagues in the social sciences, certainly in the humanities,

00:16:00.880 certainly most of them in the business school, they were like, this is crazy talk. And so that's when I

00:16:06.300 started thinking, how could these sophisticated people, these educated people negate things that

00:16:12.560 the average three-day-old pigeon would know is true? But apparently to them, it was too much to swallow.

00:16:18.980 So The Parasitic Mind is a book that I've been writing in my mind for almost 30 plus years.

00:16:26.500 But let me give you an explanation a bit, a few minutes, on what evolutionary psychology is.

00:16:31.760 So it all started, excuse me if I can just drink a bit of water. It all started in 1990 when I

00:16:40.180 went to Cornell to pursue my PhD. And my doctoral supervisor, who was a very well-known cognitive

00:16:50.060 psychologist, asked me to take a course with Professor Dennis Regan. It was an advanced social

00:16:55.920 psychology course. About halfway through the semester, Professor Regan, and that's why I always

00:17:01.620 mention him because had he not assigned this book, maybe my trajectory would have been different.

00:17:08.180 He assigned a book called Homicide by two of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology.

00:17:14.680 Homicide is a book that was written by a husband and wife team, Martin Daly and Margot Wilson,

00:17:19.860 where they demonstrated that many patterns of criminality happen in exactly the same way,

00:17:28.240 for exactly the same reasons, across cultures and across time periods. And therefore, there must be

00:17:35.940 some universal biological mechanisms that explain these phenomena. So let me give you two examples.

00:17:42.760 Number one, if you look at what is the biggest predictor of there being child abuse in a home.

00:17:51.540 So if I were to ask, let's say you are now in one of my classes and I ask you to answer,

00:17:56.580 people will come up with all sorts of answers. Oh, if the parent was abused, then they'll be abused.

00:18:01.620 If the parent is an alcoholic, if the parent lives on the wrong side of the track. And these are all

00:18:07.900 reasonable answers. But the number one predictor that is unbelievably greater than the second biggest

00:18:14.300 predictor is if there is a step-parent in the house. And this became known in the literature as the

00:18:20.600 Cinderella effect. Why is it known as the Cinderella effect? Because Cinderella, which is a universal

00:18:25.940 fable, is about the evil stepmother who is uniquely evil to her stepdaughter. She's not dispositionally

00:18:34.780 evil. She's not evil to everyone. She's strategically evil to the stepdaughter, but very kind and nurturing 1.00

00:18:41.920 to her biological daughters. And of course, there are very clear evolutionary reasons. You could see it

00:18:47.900 many other animals where typically an organism is not very keen in investing in offspring that are

00:18:55.220 not theirs. In lion society, when new dominant males come into a tribe, the first thing that they do,

00:19:01.740 first thing, is they kill every single cub that couldn't have been sired by them. Because it's going to

00:19:08.640 take a lot of investment for those lions to protect and procure resources. And therefore, evolution has

00:19:16.720 dictated that this is a solution. Second example from that book is domestic violence. So if you look at

00:19:26.280 the most dangerous person in a woman's life, it's not the rapist who is lurking in the trees,

00:19:33.560 it's her husband. In every society that's ever been studied. And I promise you that if we study the books

00:19:39.980 in Iceland, you will get the exact same finding. I guarantee it. And the number one cause that drives

00:19:47.440 men to commit great violence on their women is for either suspected or realized infidelity.

00:19:56.820 And why is that? Because we are a bi-parental species. We are both parties are heavily vested in

00:20:03.960 their children. Although, of course, the mothers more. Therefore, human males who are super dads,

00:20:10.520 it wouldn't make evolutionary sense for me to invest 18, 20 years into a child that turns out to look 0.97

00:20:17.660 like the sexy gardener that comes and does our garden. Yes? Therefore, we've evolved the cognitive,

00:20:26.000 the emotional, the behavioral system to try to thwart that threat. We didn't have paternity DNA tests

00:20:32.980 in the African savanna. Okay? Now, a lot of people think that when you try to explain scientifically

00:20:39.220 a phenomenon that is a very ugly one, they think that you're justifying it scientifically.

00:20:47.740 That's one of the reasons why people don't like evolutionary psychology. But of course,

00:20:51.440 you're not justifying it. You're just trying to offer what is the best possible explanation for

00:20:56.080 the phenomenon in question. If you're an oncologist who studies cancer, nobody comes to you and says,

00:21:01.120 why are you studying cancer? Are you justifying cancer? Right? But somehow, if you study rape, 0.79

00:21:07.020 or you study violence, or you study domestic violence, or child abuse, or you're just coming

00:21:12.020 up with scientific justifications for this phenomenon. No, you're not. We study both romantic love

00:21:17.360 and we study hate because both of these things are part of the panoply of the human repertoire of

00:21:24.420 realities. Yes? So when I read that book, I had my epiphany. I had my eureka moment. I said, okay,

00:21:32.820 I'm going to take exactly this framework and apply it to the areas that interest me. Consumer psychology,

00:21:39.520 psychology of decision making, economic decision making, and so on. And I thought, that makes total

00:21:45.820 sense. But you should have seen the kind of academic rejection I was getting early in my career.

00:21:54.780 So let me give you some examples of some of the studies that I've done. Again, just to

00:21:58.660 kind of hopefully interest you about evolutionary psychology. So this is probably one of the

00:22:03.940 scientific studies that has received the most attention in the media. This was a study that I did

00:22:11.180 with one of my former graduate students, John Vungas, who's currently himself a professor at

00:22:16.240 Ithaca College. So we wanted to study peacocking behavior. And the term peacocking comes from the

00:22:23.740 actual peacock. The peacock has evolved this very ostentatious, costly tail, despite the fact that it

00:22:30.500 reduces its survivability because of sexual selection, right? Because there are two mechanisms of

00:22:36.320 evolution. There is the adaptations that confer survival advantage. And then there are the

00:22:41.980 adaptations that confer mating advantage. And so this is a morphological trait that evolved because

00:22:50.640 it is signaling to the peahens, the female in the species, hey, look at me. Despite the fact that

00:22:57.480 I'm carrying this very burdensome tail, despite the fact that it's very costly, despite the fact that

00:23:03.760 it's likely to reduce my survivability, I'm still standing. This is a perfect advertising

00:23:09.960 to tell you how good my phenotype is to choose me as a mate. So when I was reading that literature,

00:23:15.980 I said, ah, I know exactly how I'm going to use this in consumer behavior. Human beings use

00:23:22.440 peacocking, but of course they use sex-specific peacocking. Women and men both engage in sexual 0.95

00:23:29.660 signaling in the mating market, but they'll use different products. And so one of the obvious

00:23:34.240 products that we first decided to study was fancy cars. It turns out, not surprisingly, around the

00:23:43.020 world, 99% of Ferrari owners, although we use the Porsche, 99% of Ferrari owners are male. Even though

00:23:50.960 there are many, many millionaire and billionaire women who could certainly afford all those cars, 1.00

00:23:56.180 yet they don't line up to purchase cars. You know why? Because there isn't yet a culture that

00:24:01.700 we've uncovered where a man uttered the following words. You ready? I'm not going to have sex with you 0.93

00:24:07.720 because you don't have enough social status. Those words have never been uttered. 0.98

00:24:15.360 But the opposite words, you're a gorgeous guy. You look really sexy. You open your mouth and you're

00:24:23.420 a complete imbecile who's going nowhere in life. Suddenly you become a lot less attractive. 1.00

00:24:28.500 And so not surprisingly, we use products as sexual signals. So in this study, what we did is we brought

00:24:34.760 people into the university and we actually had them. This wasn't a study in the laboratory, imagine you

00:24:43.520 were driving a Porsche. This is a field experiment, meaning we actually take it to the field. We rented

00:24:49.540 an actual Porsche. And I always tell people, imagine how impressive it is to convince a scientific

00:24:56.440 granting agency to release money so you could buy a Porsche over the weekend. But we did it.

00:25:03.580 And so they either drove the Porsche or a beaten up old car, high status, low status. And the dependent

00:25:10.340 measure was salivary assays to measure your testosterone levels. The idea being, of course, that when you

00:25:18.120 infuse men with a social win, in this case, by putting them in a fancy car and having them

00:25:24.640 literally drive around downtown Montreal, where everybody can see I'm a winner or, forgive me

00:25:30.080 if you have one of those cars, a loser, my testosterone, my endocrinological system should

00:25:37.900 adjust accordingly, should be triggered accordingly. And that's exactly what we found. So that's 0.84

00:25:44.120 one example of a study. Staying with the car theme story, this is a study that unfortunately,

00:25:54.480 and I say with great regret, we haven't yet published, but it's such a good study. I just,

00:25:59.400 sometimes you run out of time to work on a project. So this is a study that we ran with one of my former

00:26:04.500 doctoral students, Tripad Gill, who himself is now a chaired professor, where we took two personal ads.

00:26:13.480 Okay. The only difference between the one on the left and the right is it says, this is my favorite

00:26:19.440 possession. And on one photo, it's a sexy red car, Porsche. On the other one, forgive me for Kia owners,

00:26:28.740 it's a beaten up. I mean, the Kia's have become a lot sexier recently, but this was 12 years ago.

00:26:36.640 And then we asked people, tell us about, what do you think of this guy? But we asked them on a whole

00:26:42.860 bunch of measures that you shouldn't think should be related to it. So for example, we asked people,

00:26:49.720 how tall do you think this guy is? Now here's where understanding evolutionary psychology really

00:26:57.520 shows you its power. When women saw the guy in the Porsche, guess what happened to his height?

00:27:07.420 He became taller. This is why I always explain to my wife, I need to buy a Porsche to add a few extra

00:27:14.020 inches. I'm only Messi's height. I'm not like the Icelandic guy, six foot four. On the other hand, 0.96

00:27:21.660 what did men do when they saw the guy in the Porsche? He became shorter. So how could it be

00:27:29.940 that two sets of people can look at the same stimulus and arrive at exactly different sensorial

00:27:37.340 realities? It's called evolutionary psychology. And then another example, just so that you don't

00:27:44.040 think we don't study women behavior. So in many, many species, women, females go into estrus, 1.00

00:27:52.100 which means that they are now sexually receptive. In the human context, you don't have quite the same

00:27:56.760 mechanism, but you certainly have across the menstrual cycle, an ovulatory phase where women 1.00

00:28:02.280 are, for example, more likely to be receptive to, you know, sexual intimacy and so on. So what we

00:28:08.720 wanted to study was whether women's, well, we looked at several things, but I'll talk about one

00:28:14.880 thing here, whether their signaling behavior, how they dress, how they beautify themselves, whether it

00:28:21.920 would vary across the menstrual cycle. And so we collect the data on women every day for 35 days 0.81

00:28:28.860 because the average menstrual cycle is about 28 days. So by doing 35 days, we're covering the natural

00:28:34.700 variations across women. And we wanted to show whether during the ovulatory phase, this is when

00:28:41.300 women are maximally fertile. And so they would dress most provocatively. They would wear the stiletto 1.00

00:28:48.440 heels. They're not wearing the sweatpants. They are wearing the miniskirt. They are letting the hair

00:28:53.220 down. They are wearing more makeup. And that's exactly what we found, which is exactly what you find

00:28:58.300 in countless other mammalian species. They use different types of signaling, but it's the same

00:29:03.720 phenomenon. And so this shows you the power of applying evolutionary biological principles to

00:29:09.720 study human behavior. Yet everybody in this room, I don't care what you've studied, you could have

00:29:14.920 studied political science or economics, or you went to the business school or law or entrepreneurship or

00:29:20.340 anthropology or sociology. I bet you none of you have ever seen the word, the B word, biology, mentioned

00:29:27.380 once in your coursework. How is that possible? How could you study anthropology and sociology and

00:29:33.420 psychology without ever invoking the word biology? For any other species, that would be impossible.

00:29:39.560 But for the human species, it's totally okay. So that was when I first said something is wrong.

00:29:45.900 This makes no sense that academics could be so idiotic. And so that's how I then started writing 0.99

00:29:51.080 The Parasitic Mind. So now I'm going to get into some of the sort of the parasitic stuff, the woke stuff,

00:29:57.860 and we'll get to the journey. So this is, by the way, the reason why I put this one up front

00:30:04.520 is because a lot of people, when I was warning about this for the past several decades, people

00:30:11.300 would say, yeah, but professor, come on, this only happens in some esoteric department in the

00:30:16.220 humanities. It's never going to matter. I said, no, no, no, it's going to come everywhere because

00:30:21.300 these bad ideas, just like viruses escape from the lab, they don't stay in the humanities.

00:30:27.540 They're going to be everywhere in every nook and cranny. Well, you would think medicine would

00:30:32.360 be inoculated against parasitic ideas. No, you'd be thinking wrong. This is the oath that students

00:30:39.860 at the University of Minnesota have to take. It's not the Hippocratic Oath. Hippocratic Oath comes

00:30:45.720 from Hippocrates, right? The founder of medicine from ancient Greece. Then there was Gallen, but the

00:30:51.740 original guy is Hippocrates, where you take the Hippocratic Oath, first do no harm, and so on.

00:30:57.120 Well, now what they take, I will root out white supremacy from medicine. I will not rely on white 0.73

00:31:04.300 science. I am sitting on indigenous land, and I apologize. The most serious disease known to mankind, 1.00

00:31:11.800 this systemic racism. This is the physicians you want to be treating your pancreatic cancer?

00:31:17.580 Probably not. But again, the reason why I put this slide is because people had the arrogance to say,

00:31:24.940 yeah, yeah, it happens in these silly fields, but not in the natural sciences. No, there is a field

00:31:31.240 called queer mathematics. If there ever was a field that by definition, axiomatically, should not be 0.65

00:31:42.820 parasitized by your irrelevant identity, it would be mathematics. But no, it's queer mathematics. 1.00

00:31:52.120 Of course, some of you have probably heard the story. This is the last person who was confirmed as

00:31:57.120 a member of the U.S. Supreme Court.

00:32:05.220 When she was asked by this senator, she knew what she was doing, obviously. She said,

00:32:11.080 could you define what is a woman? This is in the 21st century. I can't answer such a question. I'm not

00:32:18.280 a biologist. So until 15 minutes ago, as I wrote here, the estimate is there have been about 170

00:32:26.900 billion people that have existed as homo sapiens. So until 15 minutes ago, every one of our ancestors,

00:32:33.700 all 117 billion, used to be able to very, very clearly navigate through this very difficult decision

00:32:39.760 of knowing what's male or female. But once I study lesbian dance theory at Wellesley College,

00:32:46.000 I no longer know what male or female is. So you could keep doing your progressive utopia nonsense, 1.00

00:32:52.820 but it has real consequences. Because this person who is on a nine-member board of justices

00:32:59.440 didn't have the epistemological assuredness to say, are you an idiot? Of course I know what a woman is, 1.00

00:33:06.760 and here's what it is. She had to equivocate. I don't know what it is, right? So parasitic ideas 0.98

00:33:12.760 don't stay in the humanities. They become the former prime minister of Canada named Justin Trudeau.

00:33:18.660 Sticking with medicine, this is an actual photo of the person that I was interacting with.

00:33:26.820 She's an anesthesiologist, but of course she's an anesthesiologist of color, because it matters

00:33:33.940 what your skin hue is when you are administering anesthesia during a surgery. I started interacting

00:33:41.520 with her on X, where she was chastising me for saying that men cannot menstruate. And she said,

00:33:51.900 you didn't go to medical school, I did, and I confirmed that men do menstruate.

00:33:59.480 So I said, but I've published top scientific papers on the menstrual cycle. She then said that

00:34:05.260 I was engaging in mansplaining. Now, do you feel comfortable with this person administering

00:34:14.120 anesthesia to you? Probably not. This is last year at my home university. They had a one-day

00:34:23.520 scientific symposium on menstrual equity. Because it turns out that in Canada, for all of these years,

00:34:34.120 Canada became a federation in 1867, if my history is correct, apparently in Canada, women didn't have 1.00

00:34:41.560 the intrinsic right to menstruate. So we needed to have a one-day menstrual equity symposium,

00:34:47.760 because what it really means is that you should put feminine pads in men's locker rooms. And if you 0.99

00:34:54.760 don't do that, then you're not creating menstrual equity. This is at a leading Canadian university

00:35:01.520 in the 21st century. But I am the bigoted one. I am the dangerous guy. Right. This is at the leading

00:35:11.660 anthropology meetings, the American Anthropological Society and the Canadian Anthropological Society.

00:35:19.000 They were holding a session, a special session, where there was going to be six female anthropologists, 0.77

00:35:26.340 so that we make sure we don't engage in mansplaining, six female anthropologists were saying that it is 1.00

00:35:33.520 absolutely insane that the fields of anthropology and archaeology are removing biological sex as a key

00:35:42.840 variable in anthropology and in archaeology. That session was cancelled because of the implicit

00:35:51.560 transphobia. Not unlike the reason why many people in beautiful Iceland were trying to cancel me,

00:36:00.480 because apparently I'm transphobic for thinking that only women bear children. 1.00

00:36:07.660 This, some of you may or may not know, Dylan Mulvaney is a woman with a penis and testicles, 1.00

00:36:14.200 because all you need to do is dress like a woman, and then you become a woman, 1.00

00:36:17.980 and then Budweiser, when they chose her as the endorser, their market value tanked to nothing,

00:36:31.900 because 99.9% of the people who consume Budweiser were not really interested in being force-fed

00:36:40.200 transgender activism. And Marketing 101 says you better understand your segmentation and your target

00:36:47.280 markets. And apparently Budweiser was above that reality, and there was a price to be paid for

00:36:53.480 being so woke. And then, by the way, on the bottom ones, these are different tweets that I took

00:36:59.380 screenshots of, not only by physicians, by obstetricians and gynecologists who confirmed

00:37:07.440 that Dylan Mulvaney was a full-fledged woman. These are obstetricians and gynecologists. Okay.

00:37:18.880 So now we come sort of to the big framework of what is the parasitic mind. So very early in the book,

00:37:24.440 I explained that there are two classes of pathogens that bring great devastation to humans.

00:37:33.040 One is the biological pathogens that you've all heard of, the parasites, the actual parasites,

00:37:40.700 the physical parasites, the viruses, the bacteria, the fungi. And then I argue that there is a second

00:37:47.280 class of ideological parasites, idea pathogens, that can also wreak havoc, as we've been seeing in the West.

00:37:56.240 And so that was the original entry of using the neuroparasitological framework in studying these

00:38:04.320 bad ideas. And you'll see in a second why I use that framework rather than, say, a memetic framework.

00:38:11.920 So these are some examples. But by the way, the literature here is incredible. It's like straight

00:38:17.580 out of science fiction. So parasitology is simply the study of the interaction between parasites and hosts.

00:38:24.700 But many parasites don't end up in your brain. So for example, a tapeworm parasitizes your intestinal

00:38:31.820 tract. Yes. But a neuroparasite is one that needs to get to the host's brain, altering its circuitry

00:38:40.120 to suit its interest. It's typically its reproductive interest. So the top ones, the spider wasp sting.

00:38:48.400 So the spider wasp will sting the much bigger spider, rendering it zombified. It then pulls it to its 0.99

00:38:59.260 burrow. It's completely alive, but zombified. And then it lays its eggs on it. And as the eggs hatch,

00:39:07.040 they eat the spider in vivo. Guess what? Political correctness is the spider wasp's sting. It leads 0.98

00:39:18.140 you to the abyss of infinite lunacy. Yes, men too can menstruate. Yes, men too can menstruate. Yes, 0.77

00:39:24.540 yes, men can bear children. Yes, of course, everybody knows this. Toxoplasma Gandhi is one that you may

00:39:32.240 have heard of. It can infect human minds. It does. But the most classic manifestation of Toxoplasma

00:39:38.440 Gandhi is when a mouse that is infected by this parasite, instead of becoming fearful of the cat,

00:39:45.740 which you would expect from an evolutionary perspective, it actually becomes sexually

00:39:49.860 attracted to the cat's urine, which is not a good attraction to have if you're a mouse. But it

00:39:56.500 serves the purpose of Toxoplasma Gandhi. This other brain worm with ungulates, ungulates are deer, 0.96

00:40:04.560 moose, elk. So when they are parasitized by a particular brain worm, they start engaging in 0.55

00:40:11.000 what's called circling behavior. So usually there's the mechanism, if the predator comes, you flee,

00:40:15.700 right? There's the fight or flight, fight or flight. Well, in this case, they're a prey animal,

00:40:20.920 so they would flee. But even when the predators are coming, they just keep going in a circle,

00:40:25.860 bobbing their head. They can't extricate themselves out of that pattern, and that's why they are

00:40:31.720 parasitized. And then the one that I like the best because it really captures both the parasitic mind

00:40:38.800 and, in some sense, the suicidal part of suicidal empathy, my forthcoming book, is the wood cricket,

00:40:45.580 the last one. So the wood cricket detests water. It wants nothing to do with water. But when it is

00:40:52.980 parasitized by a hair worm, the fancy scientific term, I'm not going to try to read it, is below,

00:40:59.140 but the colloquial term is hair worm. The hair worm needs the wood cricket to jump in water in order to

00:41:07.660 complete its reproductive cycle. So once that wood cricket is parasitized, it commits suicide in the

00:41:14.100 service of the hair worm that has parasitized it. Now you can start seeing the framework for

00:41:20.260 suicidal empathy, what's happening in the West. And I'll give a few examples in a minute.

00:41:26.240 What are some examples of human forms of wood crickets? Well, queers for Palestine are wood crickets. 1.00

00:41:35.580 Why? Because in Palestine, they have found a 100% conversion effective practice. They convert you

00:41:46.360 out of your queerness. It's called gravity. They throw you headfirst off buildings and that cures

00:41:54.160 you of your queerness. So if you are very wedded to your queer identity, which is perfectly fine, 0.98

00:42:01.100 more power to you. Great. But if you are wedded to your queer identity and you have one of two 1.00

00:42:07.640 modes of society that you should put your energies behind, you could put it behind Tel Aviv,

00:42:14.060 which is one of the most queer-friendly cities in the world. There is New York, there is San Francisco,

00:42:20.420 there is Montreal, and probably number four is Tel Aviv. Or you could put it behind Gaza, 0.87

00:42:26.360 where they're going to solve your queerness very quickly. So as I think Ghouli mentioned it yesterday,

00:42:31.940 this is like chickens for Kentucky fried chicken. This is like fish for sushi. It's also like,

00:42:39.740 because I'm a fancy guy and I speak French. It's geese for foie gras.

00:42:48.100 Yes. Hamas. 0.62

00:42:52.700 Anna Epstein, Jewish Anna Epstein, is also a beautiful wood cricket because she was caught at Boston

00:43:01.200 University, where she attends university, tearing down the posters of the infants who were taken hostage,

00:43:14.500 the six months old and the four months old and the 12 months old. Now, wood cricket Anna Epstein,

00:43:20.200 had she been at the Nova Film Festival, she would have ended up at exactly the same place that the 0.67

00:43:25.500 1,200 other people would have ended up after having been gang raped. But she is more progressive. 0.74

00:43:32.120 She's more tolerant. She's more empathetic. She's not like this really mean guy. And therefore,

00:43:37.720 she tore down the posters of those disgusting Jewish babies. And then, just because I wanted you 1.00

00:43:45.140 to feel comfortable, I know you're not Scandinavian, but you're close to Scandinavia. We've got the ultimate

00:43:50.480 Scandinavian wood cricket, Karsten Nordahl-Hawken, who in 2000, I think it was 2013, had been raped, 0.92

00:44:01.180 sodomized by a Somali immigrant. Now, the Somali immigrant was given a very light sentence, 1.00

00:44:07.780 I think a couple of years, two, three, four, whatever it was, because the Norwegians are very

00:44:12.060 kind and tolerant. They don't believe in punishing people. It's better to rehabilitate them. But then when

00:44:18.240 he finished his very short sentence, he was going to be deported back to Somalia. And the victim of the

00:44:25.500 rape went on record saying that he felt so guilty and wrong about the fact that this noble Somali

00:44:33.860 beautiful person was going to be deported because he couldn't then fully flourish. If any of you know

00:44:41.540 Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs with self-actualization at the top apex, well, the Somali 0.99

00:44:48.760 sodomizer will never be able to self-actualize if he goes back to Somalia. And so it's better that we 1.00

00:44:54.700 keep him in Norway. He's very kind. This is another example. I'm not going, this is the actual quote from

00:45:03.660 my book, but I'll just explain it. Tal Nitzan, who's Jewish, was a doctoral student at Hebrew

00:45:11.660 University, one of the most prestigious universities in Israel and Jerusalem. And she was doing her

00:45:17.560 doctoral work studying the extent to which, this is way before October 7th, the extent to which the IDF 0.59

00:45:27.080 soldiers, the Israel Defense Forces, that they raped the Palestinian women. So she went out,

00:45:35.300 tried to collect the data. She wasn't able to document a single case, even when speaking to

00:45:41.760 Palestinian authorities, she wasn't able to document a single verifiable case of a rape by an IDF soldier

00:45:48.440 on Palestinian women. Now, if you were an honest scientist, you would say, okay, I had this hypothesis 0.54

00:45:55.400 and, okay, it was falsified. No. She then doubled down and concluded, aha, this actually proves how evil

00:46:06.340 the IDF soldiers are. Why? Because they so dehumanize the Palestinian women that they don't even see them 0.85

00:46:16.520 as worthy of being raped. This is not a joke. You can go look it up. So if she had found that the IDF 0.99

00:46:27.820 soldiers were raping Palestinian women, this would have proven that the Jews are evil. When she found 1.00

00:46:33.960 out that the IDF soldiers did not rape women, this proved that the Jews were evil. And this is from a 0.99

00:46:40.460 Jewish person. No society can withstand that level of parasitic degeneracy. So what is the death of 1.00

00:46:49.680 the West by a thousand cuts? So I talk about many parasitic ideas in the book. Radical feminism,

00:46:56.120 social constructivism, cultural relativism. But the granddaddy is the one in the middle top.

00:47:02.040 It's postmodernism because postmodernism purports that there are no objective truths other than the one

00:47:09.500 objective truth. But there are no objective truths, right? So you already see an epistemological

00:47:14.860 problem there. So let me give you some examples of these parasitic ideas. So this is just recently

00:47:22.360 at University of Waterloo. University of Waterloo, for those of you who don't know,

00:47:28.120 is kind of like the Caltech of Canada or the MIT. It's very much of an engineering and computer science

00:47:36.240 school. It's where the first compiler for Fortran was created. Fortran is an old computer language

00:47:46.260 from, say, the 1960s. Okay? So the top chaired professorship that you could receive in Canada

00:47:53.560 is a chaired professorship that is endowed by the government. Those are called Canada research

00:47:59.680 chairs. And so this is the highest, most prestigious chaired professorship in computer science, right?

00:48:06.200 Remember earlier I said many people thought that these bad ideas would never find their way in,

00:48:11.140 you know, serious fields like medicine or computer science or mathematics. Let me, this is a screenshot

00:48:16.760 of their website. This is not my satire. This is not me joking around. This is verbatim what is written.

00:48:23.860 The first position for a chaired, endowed by the Canadian government. All areas of artificial

00:48:32.680 intelligence, the call is only open to qualified individuals who self-identify as women, transgender,

00:48:42.040 gender fluid, non-binary, or two-spirit. I am the hateful, bigoted one. Not the degenerates who write 0.98

00:48:52.300 things like this. This is at my own university.

00:49:00.980 The one on the right is a project that was funded with taxpayer money, a lot of money, to decolonize

00:49:10.520 the physics of light. So light has physical properties. Many physicists have won Nobel Prizes

00:49:19.960 for their work in studying light. But that's based on white physicists. So you have to understand 0.71

00:49:28.340 that it's a bit suspect. So if we now decolonize the study of physics, then we can really get

00:49:35.100 at the essence of what physics is. So that's why my university, the one that I'm not have taken

00:49:42.560 a two-year leave from, launched its key focus during its five-year strategic plan, two parts,

00:49:52.980 to decolonize and to indigenize the entire curriculum at the university. So you teach number theory,

00:50:02.200 which is the purest field in mathematics, you better include indigenous stuff. You teach neuroscience, 0.99

00:50:09.420 where's the indigenous? And so being who I am, I wrote to all the idiots in my university and I said, 1.00

00:50:16.800 can you help me out with understanding how I indigenize psychology of decision-making? 0.99

00:50:23.200 Because I really want to do this, but I'm at a loss because I'm not progressive enough.

00:50:29.300 Of course, they don't respond. And by the way, when I started my emails to ask for the leave of

00:50:38.540 absence, before I had finished the email, they had already written to me, yes, yes, please go.

00:50:46.760 Goodbye, Jew. Good luck. But I'm the bigoted one. I'm the extremist. 1.00

00:50:53.680 This story, some of you may have seen it. Anybody knows the story? How many know it? A few. Oh,

00:51:03.480 quite a few. Do you mind if I share it again? So some of you don't know it, so hopefully it won't

00:51:09.960 be too repetitive. But it's such a powerful story that I always try to mention because it really

00:51:15.900 captures the zeitgeist of lunacy, of what parasitic ideas do. And you'll see in a second why I've got

00:51:21.960 those two slides. So in 2002, my doctoral student, Tripad Gill, anyways, a doctoral student of mine,

00:51:31.160 had just finished his PhD. And we were going out to celebrate his finishing his PhD. And so it was

00:51:40.560 going to be myself, my wife, we didn't have children yet. And by the way, I was so fortunate that when I

00:51:48.000 was trying to find a family that I correctly picked a woman to have a family with, because otherwise it 1.00

00:51:55.820 would have been completely random. I could have been trying with John to have kids, because I know

00:51:59.120 that progressive fertility tells me otherwise. But luckily, we were able to have children.

00:52:05.620 And he calls me, the PhD student, and says, we were going out to dinner. And he says, oh, I hope you

00:52:12.620 don't mind. I'm bringing a date along tonight. I said, oh, sure, no problem. Great. He goes, oh, I just

00:52:18.920 want to tell you that she's a graduate student in postmodernism, women's studies, and cultural

00:52:27.420 anthropology. To which I answered, ah, the holy trinity of bullshit. I said, oh, no, no, I understand. I 1.00

00:52:40.100 stand. This is your night. We have to celebrate you. I'm going to be on my best behavior. Not a

00:52:44.780 word out of me. Which, of course, was a complete lie. About halfway through the evening, I turned to

00:52:51.320 this lady, and I say, you're a postmodernist. She goes, yes. There are no universal truths. No. I said,

00:53:00.260 do you mind if I share some what I think are universal truths? Now, this is 2002. This is before we

00:53:05.960 learned through transgenderism that men do menstruate and so on. So this is 23 years ago. 0.95

00:53:12.400 I said, is it not true for homo sapiens that only women bear children? Is that not true? No. I said,

00:53:21.820 it's not true. She goes, no. I said, how? She goes, well, because there is a Japanese tribe off a Japanese 0.96

00:53:28.020 island where within their folkloric mythological realm, it is the men who bear children. So by you

00:53:35.920 keeping the discussion to the biological material realm, that's how, you know, you keep us barefoot

00:53:40.960 and pregnant in the kitchen. So after I recovered from the mini stroke I had at listening to such

00:53:48.460 stupidity, or maybe it wasn't stupid. Maybe it's just me being an extremist thinking that only women 1.00

00:53:53.580 bear children. I said, okay, maybe that was too poisonous of an example. Maybe can I offer you

00:54:00.060 another example? So the one on the left is Arnold Schwarzenegger pregnant, right? The man is pregnant. 0.93

00:54:05.420 Now, you might be wondering what's the one on the right. Here it goes. I said, is it not true

00:54:11.620 since time immemorial? I mean, we're from Phoenician descent in the Middle East from Lebanon. Big

00:54:17.880 sailors traveled, sailed around the many areas. Sailors have always relied on the cosmological

00:54:24.500 fact that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Is that not a universal? So there she used

00:54:31.880 the variant of postmodernism called deconstructionism, Jacques Derrida, which is language

00:54:38.680 creates reality. There is no reality that is not bound by how you name things. So she goes, what do

00:54:44.560 you mean by east and west? And what do you mean by the sun? That which you call the sun, I might call

00:54:50.900 dancing hyena. I said, fine, the dancing hyena rises in the east and sets in the west. She said, I don't

00:55:00.340 play those label games. Remember, Icelandic people wanted to cancel me, not her. Because in 2002,

00:55:12.600 a graduate student at one of the leading universities in the world could not find a shared semantic

00:55:21.280 meaning place where we could agree on two facts, that the sun exists and that women bear children 0.85

00:55:28.540 within Homo sapiens. So you could see why I've been warning about these things, which now have become

00:55:34.460 part of our everyday life. You could be very socially liberal, as by the way, I am, without murdering and

00:55:44.280 raping truth in the service of that goal. So I can support transgender rights without saying, yeah, yeah, men 0.57

00:55:51.140 too can menstruate. I can chew gum and walk at the same time. I don't have to destroy truth in the service of

00:55:58.900 celebrating your personhood. Here's some other parasitic ideas. Social constructivism. Biophobia is 0.77

00:56:08.640 simply the fear of using biology to explain human behavior. What's social constructivism? Social

00:56:14.480 constructivism basically says that we are born tabula rasa, hence the top slide, empty slate. And it's only

00:56:21.580 the forces of socialization that teach us who we are. Why do women prefer certain types of men? It's because 1.00

00:56:28.320 they learned it from Hollywood. Why do men prefer certain types of women? It's because they saw 1.00

00:56:34.120 Beyonce videos. Because if I had not been taught to prefer to mate with women that have the hourglass 1.00

00:56:41.540 figure of Beyonce, I would have been trying to mate with the tree in my backyard. But it's only socialization

00:56:48.820 that trained me to think this way. Remember, I'm the extremist. Now, this is going to get a bit

00:56:58.560 technical, so bear with me. In chapter seven of The Parasitic Mind, I basically have the chapters titled

00:57:06.440 How to Seek Truth, which is something that we certainly want to do here. And it's what I call the

00:57:12.140 ultimate mind vaccine. How can you build an argument to demonstrate that the position that you're holding

00:57:18.280 is the vertical one? And so here what I've done, and I hope I think you can read it, what I've done is

00:57:24.360 this is called the nomological network of cumulative evidence. It's a mouthful, but I'm going to explain

00:57:29.280 how it works. So let's suppose I wanted to prove to you that the center statement that toy preferences

00:57:37.340 have a sex specificity, not because of social construction, but because of certain evolutionary

00:57:43.820 reasons, biological reasons, universal reasons. How would I go about proving that to you? Well, what I'm going to do

00:57:52.320 is I'm going to show you evidence from across time periods, from across species, from across cultures, from

00:58:00.900 across methodologies, all of which triangulate to demonstrate my position is correct. So let me show you

00:58:06.880 how we do it. So I can get you data from developmental psychology showing you that infants who by

00:58:14.800 definition are too young to be socialized, in other words, they haven't yet reached the cognitive

00:58:20.980 developmental stage to be socialized, already exhibit a preference for either boy toys or girl toys.

00:58:29.000 Okay? So that already refutes the idea that it's due to social construction, because I'm specifically

00:58:36.240 picking participants who are too young to be socialized. I can get you data from other species,

00:58:43.720 from vervet monkeys, from rhesus monkeys, from chimpanzees, showing you that their infants exhibit

00:58:51.140 the exact same sex specific toy preferences as human infants. So unless you want to argue that vervet

00:58:58.820 monkeys are also prone to vervet monkey patriarchy, then you're going to have a tough time explaining

00:59:04.920 that. Okay? But I'm not going to stop there. Some of you might say, oh, but Dr. Saad, those are 0.95

00:59:11.180 Western constructs. Well, I can get you data from sub-Saharan Africa and from North Africa and other

00:59:18.380 cultures that are not Western showing you that they exhibit the exact same toy preferences. Yes, but Dr. Saad,

00:59:24.360 those are all contemporary. Well, I can get you data from 2,500 years ago in ancient Greece and

00:59:31.160 ancient Rome showing you that on funerary monuments, children are being depicted playing

00:59:37.660 with exactly the same types of toys as we see today. So bit by bit, I'm putting the noose around

00:59:42.820 your neck, metaphorically speaking, and therefore I don't have to scream louder than you. I don't have

00:59:48.060 to go into hysteria. I just build the nomological network and watch you concede defeat. Okay? And that's

00:59:55.020 one of the reasons, as I've explained to people, that it's actually quite difficult to cancel me

01:00:00.280 because once I have built my nomological network, I'm willing to debate anyone on the topic because I

01:00:07.800 promise you I'm going to be more prepared than you are. And so if possible, if you are in your personal

01:00:13.980 lives ever engaging in these types of debates, I understand that it's effortful to build these

01:00:18.300 networks. But believe me, you become a formidable debater if you can do that. And so that's the

01:00:24.440 ultimate if you want vaccine for truth. Let's keep going. In chapter six of the parasitic mind,

01:00:32.140 I coined a new malady, collective malady, called ostrich parasitic syndrome. The reason why I call it

01:00:39.800 ostrich parasitic syndrome, while the ostrich doesn't actually bury its head in the sand,

01:00:45.480 it's become a metaphor for someone that wishes to avoid reality. Yes? And so the classic example

01:00:53.320 that I'm going to use, but there's an endless number of ostrich parasitic syndrome in the West.

01:00:58.620 Since 9-11 alone, there have been this, I took this latest screenshot a few days ago. So every day

01:01:11.260 it increases by quite a bit. There have been 47,506 Islamic-based terror attacks in 70 countries.

01:01:23.240 Each one of those attacks is documented. There are different global databases, including academic

01:01:32.300 databases, including academic databases that are not on the right side of things, where those things

01:01:39.360 have been documented. So again, the facts are inviolable. For those 47,506 terror attacks,

01:01:47.960 the terrorists tell you why they're doing it. And they justify it using certain canons within

01:01:57.180 their faith. But in the West, we're a lot more empathetic and kind and compassionate because we

01:02:06.580 don't want to marginalize any people. Yes? So here is a list on the left-hand side of my screen of some

01:02:14.400 some of the reasons that professors have come up with for why those 47,000 terror attacks have taken

01:02:21.680 place. The real reason, not the reason that Muhammad gave you. The real reason that the professor of

01:02:28.940 gender studies gave you when he's at Oberlin College, because he understands the dynamics better.

01:02:34.880 Yes? Did you know that if you don't have enough exposure to art in your teenage years,

01:02:42.460 that can cause you to become a terrorist? I didn't know that. This is why, by the way,

01:02:48.900 I make sure to take my children to a museum at least once a week, because I don't want them to

01:02:54.820 go and join ISIS if they don't see enough Chagall, Modigliani, and Klimt. It's a way to protect against 0.93

01:03:01.620 them being radicalized. Did you also know that Bill Nye, the science guy, he has a bow tie,

01:03:08.660 so he probably is truthful. He explained to us that when the Bataclan attack in Paris happened,

01:03:16.760 where, you know, you mowed down, I think it was 189 people at the concert, while screaming

01:03:22.380 some things that make it quite clear why you're doing what you're doing, he said, the real reason

01:03:28.860 is due to climate change, of course. There is a very, very direct causal link between not having

01:03:40.560 enough solar panels in Raqqa, Syria, and going to Paris, screaming Allahu Akbar, while mowing down

01:03:47.140 189 people. It's the ozone layer, man. That's why we all have to go behind Greta Thunberg and support

01:03:55.480 her laudable pursuits. We want to reduce extremism. That's the real reason. Did you know that beard

01:04:00.960 bullying can cause an attack? Like the San Bernardino attack about 10 years ago in the United

01:04:07.140 States, they said that he was beard bullied. That's why, by the way, I keep my beard very nice and neat,

01:04:13.400 because I don't want to be prone to falling trapped to extremism. When you end up as an academic

01:04:21.340 promulgating such nonsense, your society is on a very short leash. You could fully recognize what

01:04:30.320 the reality is, while also recognizing that most people of that faith might be perfectly nice and

01:04:36.080 kind. I know more people of that faith who are friends and fans of mine than all of you combined,

01:04:42.420 because I come from that region. That doesn't mean, though, that I put my head in the sand and I say

01:04:47.880 that it's due to carbon emissions. But that's what you see every day, everywhere, in the media,

01:04:56.240 in politics, in journalism, and certainly in academia. Ignoring the problem is not going to

01:05:01.960 solve it. Speaking about it truthfully will. So now I'm going to segue slightly to suicidal empathy,

01:05:10.660 and then I'll come back and wrap it up. So we condemn freedom of speech that hurts other people's

01:05:15.280 feelings, yes? Sure, we believe in freedom of speech, but it's a consequentialist ethic. If it

01:05:20.900 hurts someone, don't do research that shows that group A is much more likely to commit murder than

01:05:27.200 group B, because that's racist. No. The truth is the truth, whether you like it or not. It's a

01:05:33.000 deontological principle. It's an absolute statement. Freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry are

01:05:39.480 deontological principles, which leads me very quickly to suicidal empathy. I won't get into it too much,

01:05:45.280 but let me explain what the framework for my forthcoming book is, and then I'll wrap up with

01:05:50.760 some final remarks. Empathy is a beautiful virtue. Empathy is one of the mechanisms that oils our

01:06:01.000 sociality. Empathy allows me to put myself in your mind so that I can have a meaningful interaction

01:06:07.180 with you. That's called theory of mind, which is part of the cognitive element of empathy. For

01:06:12.680 example, autistic children will often fail a theory of mind test. That's how you diagnose them as being 1.00

01:06:20.840 autistic. There is no blood test that can show that you are autistic. So you give people or young 0.94

01:06:27.300 children this theory of mind test, which measures empathy, to show that they lack it. So empathy is a

01:06:33.700 wonderful thing. But Aristotle explained to us several thousand years ago, all good things

01:06:40.680 in proper moderation, right? At the right amount, in the right place, to the right targets. So when

01:06:47.180 empathy becomes hyperactive, when it targets the wrong targets, when it's miscalibrated, it becomes

01:06:55.120 truly suicidal. And here let me draw an analogy. Scanning the environment for environmental threats

01:07:03.240 makes perfect evolutionary sense. So I think I was at dinner yesterday, I was explaining this to some

01:07:08.040 folks. If I see you sneezing in your hand and then you come to shake my hand, I might quietly go to the

01:07:15.580 bathroom and wash my hands because I don't want to catch your cold. That makes sense. But if I spend

01:07:21.040 eight hours a day washing my hands to the point that the skin is falling off my hands because I

01:07:27.860 suffer from OCD, germ contamination fear, then that becomes a dysregulated mechanism of an otherwise

01:07:34.840 adaptive process. What started off as an adaptive process becomes dysfunctional. Same thing happens

01:07:40.860 with empathy. Empathy is great when it is within certain regulated ranges. Once you care more about

01:07:48.200 El Salvador MS-13 gang members and they deserve more empathy when they come in illegally than your 1.00

01:07:55.800 American vets who lost their legs fighting to defend the United States, that's suicidal empathy.

01:08:02.260 Once you believe that all immigrants are equally likely to integrate into your society,

01:08:09.060 that's suicidal empathy. They're not. Nobody is saying that there aren't beautiful people and mean

01:08:15.440 people in every group of people. That's of course true. But that doesn't mean that people from Yemen

01:08:21.260 are as likely to integrate in Icelandic society than are Danish people. And you'd have to be an utter 1.00

01:08:31.160 imbecile to not recognize that. Notwithstanding the fact that most Yemeni people are lovely people, 1.00

01:08:38.320 but cultures have certain values. Some of the values we share, some of the values are perfectly

01:08:46.140 diametrically opposed to yours. So recognizing that makes you a sane human being. And so the next book,

01:08:53.220 what I do is I demonstrate that many domestic policies and many foreign policies that have been

01:08:59.300 disastrous to the West stem from this dysregulated, misguided empathy. So stay tuned.

01:09:06.540 So how do we save our universities? I have maybe about four or five slides left, so

01:09:12.300 should roughly finish on time. How to save our universities? Number one, pursue knowledge

01:09:17.660 unencumbered by ideological activism. No knowledge is forbidden if gathered objectively using the

01:09:23.220 scientific method. There is no forbidden knowledge in science. Because we should maybe stop studying

01:09:30.080 physics because physics led to the dropping of two atomic bombs. So it's mean. Physics

01:09:36.520 is mean. No. My job as a scientist is to pursue truth in as objective and honest a way as possible.

01:09:45.880 There might be an endless number of downstream effects that are positive or negative. I certainly

01:09:50.780 can't use that calculus in deciding what is true or not. Things are true irrespective of what the

01:09:57.040 downstream effects of those truths are. Number two, freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry, and the

01:10:01.820 pursuit of truth are, as I mentioned earlier, deontological principles. Number three, no more

01:10:07.280 identity politics. Instead, promote the dignity of the individual. That's what made the West great.

01:10:14.480 Individual trumps collectivism and tribalism. The reason why I started with my story from Lebanon 0.89

01:10:20.060 is because Lebanon is the perfect final stopping point of a society that is built on tribalism. 0.99

01:10:28.220 Neighbors who lived next to each other for a hundred years were willing to cut off each other's heads. 0.93

01:10:34.560 Why? Because everything in Lebanon is viewed through the prism of which religion you belong to.

01:10:39.400 On your internal ID card, which is like a passport that the police can stop you and ask you for your

01:10:44.480 papers, the number one thing there is not your height or your eye color or your weight. It's what religion

01:10:50.740 you are from. Because everything is viewed through the prism of your religious identity. No, before I'm

01:10:58.000 Jewish, I'm Gadsad. Before I'm Lebanese, I'm Gadsad. Part of being Gadsad is Lebanese and Jewish, but I present

01:11:05.700 myself to the world as Gadsad with all my merits and all my faults. Number four, no more coddling of the

01:11:13.060 culture of offense and the ethos of perpetual victimhood. No microaggressions, no trigger warnings,

01:11:19.080 no safe spaces, and so on. And here I want to show you something. Very, very powerful idea. I wish I had

01:11:27.680 come up with it, but the original idea came up from a neuropsychiatrist in a different context, but then I

01:11:34.700 applied it to the context of parasitic ideas. So there's something in evolutionary medicine called

01:11:41.400 the hygiene hypothesis. The hygiene hypothesis is the idea that in order for your immune system

01:11:49.960 to maximally operate, it needs to face certain stressors. So for example, there's a lot of research

01:11:58.420 that now shows that children who are raised in allergen-rich environments, pet dander, dust on a farm,

01:12:07.600 are less likely to suffer from autoimmune diseases like asthma than children who are raised in very

01:12:15.100 sterile environments. So now you can see how you could apply this idea to the university setting.

01:12:20.720 Opposing ideas are like the allergen. They teach me how to better think. If I create an environment

01:12:27.080 that is perfectly sterile, where really mean professors like Gadsad should be canceled from

01:12:32.640 HARPA, I think so far the talk is almost finished. You're all still alive. You're all still okay.

01:12:39.020 I haven't killed anybody with my extremism, but the people who wanted to cancel us didn't understand

01:12:44.980 the hygiene hypothesis. They didn't understand that maybe being here, they might have benefited from

01:12:50.220 hearing an opposing viewpoint. So let's go back. A just society is rooted in the ethos of meritocracy.

01:12:58.140 We are not social ants. Why did I say social ants? Because E.O. Wilson, the Harvard entomologist,

01:13:04.660 he was a specialist on social ants. When he was asked, Professor Wilson, what are your views on

01:13:11.220 communism? He said, great idea, wrong species. Why? Because there is this thing called evolution.

01:13:20.800 And in evolution, we know that species have different phylogenetic trajectories.

01:13:28.100 Ants have evolved to be communistic. There is a reproductive queen, and then there is a worker

01:13:34.640 caste and a soldier caste, and they are completely indistinguishable. Well, that's what communism 0.91

01:13:40.320 tells us to be, but we're not. Some of us are smarter, dumber, harder working, less harder working, 0.99

01:13:45.520 taller, shorter, funnier, less funnier, more ambitious, less ambitious. So when you're trying 0.99

01:13:51.280 to create a sociopolitical economic system that is perfectly incongruent with human nature,

01:13:56.500 it's not surprising that it's been tried for the past hundred years, and it always ends up with the

01:14:00.300 same result, failure, because it is contrary to human nature. Number six, promote an ethos of

01:14:07.260 political and intellectual diversity. And here I want to show you a slide. This is a study that was

01:14:12.420 done by Langberg in 2018, looking at the ratio of Democrat to Republican professors on top universities

01:14:24.040 in the United States, broken down by discipline. Now, just to give you a sense, engineering,

01:14:31.720 which is the least lopsided, is 1.6 to 1. Now, meaning 1.6 Democrats to 1 Republican. Now,

01:14:41.480 that seems like, oh, that's almost, it's not lopsided. To contextualize it for you, in science,

01:14:48.140 if you typically get a 1.2 to 1 odds ratio, it's a very big effect. So, for example, if I give you

01:14:56.300 a drug for your diabetes, and then I give you a placebo for your diabetes, and the diabetes drug,

01:15:03.440 the real one, has a 1.2 odds ratio, wow, we would be celebrating. It's a big effect.

01:15:08.760 Now, let's look at the effect sizes. So, 1.6 to 1 is actually very big, but then 5.2 to 1, 5.1 to 1.

01:15:17.320 Now, as we go down, look at the numbers, 29.5 to 1, 43 to 1, 133 to 1, 108 to 0. So, you have more

01:15:29.960 chances of having a Republican, you have more chances of having a horse with wings on our campus

01:15:37.580 than you are to have a Republican professor. That's probably not a good idea.

01:15:45.480 All ideas, beliefs, and ideologies are open to criticism, debate, mocking, ridicule. There is no

01:15:51.520 such thing as a sacred cow in a free society. You want to criticize Judaism and think it's a bunch of

01:15:57.660 bullshit? Go for it. I'm strong enough to withstand it, okay? If you say, let's go to the local synagogue 1.00

01:16:05.060 at 4 o'clock and kill all the Jews, that you're not allowed to do because you are directly, 0.98

01:16:09.900 specifically inciting violence. But if you want to criticize all day long and night anything that 1.00

01:16:15.320 Israel does, anything that Jews believe, go for it. That's the price you pay in a free society. 1.00

01:16:20.300 I support the right of Holocaust deniers to deny the Holocaust. What could be more a proof of my 0.60

01:16:28.800 free speech absolutism? Nothing could be more offensive than denying the historical reality

01:16:34.080 of something as grotesque as the Holocaust. But that's the price you pay in a free society. 0.84

01:16:38.300 So, if I want to criticize some other religion, you shouldn't be saying, but come on, don't be mean.

01:16:43.600 No, there is no meanness when it comes to speaking freely. Number eight, promote an ethos of

01:16:52.360 interdisciplinarity, consilience. Consilience means unity of knowledge. Regrettably, too often in

01:16:57.440 academia and universities, people become hyper-specialists. You need broad thinkers. You

01:17:02.640 need to teach general thinking, synthetic thinking, okay? Encourage bold thinking. Academia should be about

01:17:10.320 the forming of intellectual Navy SEALs and not being counted. Navy SEALs are, you know, one of the elite

01:17:15.760 warriors in the U.S. military. There is no species that is more cowardly than professors. It doesn't 0.96

01:17:26.180 exist. As a matter of fact, I announced to the world that I had discovered a new species called

01:17:33.300 professors and they're defined as the invertebrate castrati. Invertebrate because they have no spine

01:17:42.040 and castrati for they have no testicles. And this is not hyperbole. You have never seen as fearful 0.99

01:17:51.180 people as academics, which, by the way, they're supposed to be fully protected by tenure. Yet,

01:17:57.680 if I go boo, they all run away. Number 10, I mentioned this earlier, strike the right balance

01:18:05.900 between specialization and generalization. Remove the stifling bureaucracy in academia and science

01:18:11.840 reason logic trumps all of this fashionable anti-science nonsense. How to save the West?

01:18:19.060 Take a screenshot. Memorize it. Learn it. Internalize it. Number one, proudly and unequivocally defend

01:18:30.480 Western values. You're not progressive and enlightened if you think that all other cultures

01:18:36.320 are great except the West. I come from those other cultures. I can promise you that the West is a unique

01:18:43.700 experiment in the human spirit. You should be proud of that rather than self-flagellating all day long

01:18:48.860 about how racist you are. Number two, reject cultural relativism and the unicornia vision

01:18:54.780 of multiculturalism. Cultural relativism basically says, who are you to judge what other cultures do?

01:19:01.160 If other cultures want to cut off the clitorises of five-year-old girls, shut up, racist. Don't judge 1.00

01:19:05.600 that. No, I judge. There are deontological moral truths. Number three, recommit to individual dignity

01:19:13.820 over the celebration of collective identity politics. Recognize that all cultures are not 0.97

01:19:19.080 equal. That doesn't make you racist. That makes you a person with a functioning brain.

01:19:25.240 Number five, recognize that all religious beliefs are not equally consistent with Western values.

01:19:31.600 Nothing could be clearer. Every single person in this room knows this to be true in the deep recesses

01:19:38.380 of their mind. But oops, I don't want to be criticized by my progressive friends. So I walk

01:19:43.660 around and say, no, no, all religions have positive and negative. No. If you are a Jain, you know what 1.00

01:19:51.280 Jains do when they're walking on the street? They have a broom that they use to sweep because they are 1.00

01:19:57.760 so pacifist that they don't want to inadvertently step on an ant. So if you are a fundamentalist Jain,

01:20:04.400 you're less likely to be a terrorist. Ideas matter. The content of religions matter.

01:20:10.680 Learn them. Stop saying stupid stuff. Recognize that all immigrants are not equally likely to 1.00

01:20:16.840 assimilate and adopt Western values. There are between 300,000 to 400,000 Icelanders here in this

01:20:23.940 beautiful island. Start doing the Angela Merkel open door policy and I'll come back and visit you in 10

01:20:31.320 years and you'll tell me how it went for you. Okay? Invite me in 10 years, Guli. I look forward to

01:20:35.900 coming back. Number seven, recognize that immigrants who espouse intolerable values that seek to destroy 1.00

01:20:42.260 our civilization should be deported en masse. You don't get the right to come here when people have 1.00

01:20:48.760 opened their door to you, their society to you, and then spend all day saying, we hate your values, 0.99

01:20:55.040 we hate your religion, we hate your heritage, we hate your women, we hate your children. 1.00

01:20:58.820 And then we have to say, oh yeah, that's all good. This is all part of cultural rich tapestry. 0.99

01:21:04.740 No, I am an immigrant, but I came to the West and I defend the West more than Westerners because I

01:21:11.840 come from another society. So I recognize what you have in the West. Number eight, implement a rational

01:21:17.900 immigration policy that recognizes the importance of cultural homophily. Homophily is meaning similar

01:21:23.620 things attract. Swedes are much more likely to assimilate in Denmark than Japanese are likely to

01:21:32.200 assimilate in Yemen. Okay? Number nine, exhibit zero tolerance for seditious values, belief systems. Such 0.97

01:21:41.640 systems can be criminalized if they... Just because you're saying horrible things under the pretext of

01:21:47.300 your religion doesn't make it okay for you to say it. I can show you endless number of clips from 0.99

01:21:53.980 certain houses of worship where all day long, all you do is explain how there has to be death of the 0.97

01:22:01.920 Jews. And some of those places are about one or two kilometers from my house. This is not happening 1.00

01:22:08.320 in Yemen. This is happening in Montreal, Canada. And it's happening in Malmo. And it's happening in

01:22:13.340 Paris. And it's happening in Toulouse. And it's happening in London. And in Birmingham. And in

01:22:18.220 Pisa. But it's all tolerant. It's all beautiful. It isn't. It will come back to haunt you. Almost 0.96

01:22:25.320 done. The reason I put this up is because oftentimes people tell me, you know, but doesn't some of your

01:22:31.920 satire and humor hurt people's feelings? Well, no. Number one, humor is a very powerful mechanism

01:22:39.240 to get at the truth. That's why dictators, when they want to get rid of people, they don't get rid

01:22:45.620 of the people who have big muscles. They get rid of the satirist, the one with the sharp tongue,

01:22:50.420 the one with the venomous pen. Because those are the guys who can pose a threat to my dictatorship.

01:22:57.160 Right? And so two quick quotes for you from the parasitic mind. Wherever there is objective truth, 0.98

01:23:02.620 there is satire. But the next quote is one of the most beautiful quotes I've ever seen because it's

01:23:07.220 so beautifully apropos. How much truth is contained in something can best be determined by making it

01:23:14.060 thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it it can take. For truth is a

01:23:19.820 matter that can stand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot

01:23:25.420 stand satire is false. There is no Islamophobia. There is no Judaophobia. I'm allowed to criticize and

01:23:33.900 mock anything I want in a free society. The truth is anti-fragile. This is a beautiful quote

01:23:39.600 by Seneca. Let me read it for you. Seneca, the Stoic Roman philosopher.

01:23:45.820 No tree which the wind does not often blow against is firm and strong, for it is stiffened

01:23:51.160 by the very act of being shaken and plants its roots more securely. Those which grow in a sheltered

01:23:57.620 valley are brittle. It's beautiful. That's exactly the same point as the hygiene hypothesis that I

01:24:02.520 mentioned earlier. For your immune system to maximally operate it has to face stressor. Well

01:24:07.880 Seneca already explained this to us 2,000 plus years ago and that's exactly what the term anti-fragile

01:24:13.740 means. So truth has to be anti-fragile. It is tested. It is punched and then if it still stands

01:24:19.720 then it's likely to be true. That's why Popper's falsification principle is exactly what science is

01:24:26.040 about. If I can't shoot at something and falsify it it's not within the realm of science. But in the West

01:24:31.720 we're very kind. We're very empathetic. Therefore we don't criticize certain religions or ideologies

01:24:37.320 or cultures because it would hurt their feelings. And finally we come to the last call. Many of you

01:24:45.880 already know it. I say in chapter 8 of the parasitic mind activate your inner honey badger. I'm going to 0.94

01:24:51.880 read this entire quote. But the reason why I mention this is because the honey badger, the guy that you

01:24:57.880 see there next to a bunch of adult lions, is the size of a small dog, yet the lions will avoid it.

01:25:06.140 How is that possible? Because it has been ranked as the most ferocious animal in the animal kingdom.

01:25:12.200 And that says a lot. There are a lot of ferocious animals because it stands tall, because it fights,

01:25:19.100 because it really intimidates its adversaries. So when I tell people activate your inner honey badger,

01:25:24.800 I'm not saying be violent. But I'm saying stand tall. Defend your values. Defend truth. Defend science.

01:25:31.300 Defend your religious heritage. Defend foundational principles. Don't be a wimp. So let me read to you 0.81

01:25:37.700 this quote and then I will close it. I think I'll be able to see it here. So to criticize Islam does not

01:25:45.160 make you an Islamophobe. This is a nonsensical term. It does not make you someone who is hateful of

01:25:52.400 Muslims. To scrutinize radical feminism does not make you a misogynist. To question open borders

01:25:58.540 does not make you a racist. You can have open heart filled with empathy and compassion and yet

01:26:05.100 reject open borders. To assert that trans women, who are of course biological males, should not be

01:26:11.100 competing in athletic competitions with biological females does not make you a transphobe. Many

01:26:16.160 situations in life involve a calculus of competing rights. With that in mind, the right of your eight-year-old

01:26:23.480 daughter to feel comfortable and safe in a public bathroom supersedes that of a 230-pound, six-foot-two 0.87

01:26:30.860 trans woman. To reject the idea that so-called other forms of knowing, whether it is indigenous ways of

01:26:37.480 knowing or postmodernism, are as valid as the scientific method does not make you a close-minded

01:26:42.520 bigot. To reject the hysterical demonization of white men as exemplars of toxic masculinity and

01:26:49.280 white supremacy does not make you Adolf Hitler. The name-calling accusations are locked and loaded 0.96

01:26:56.700 threats ready to be deployed against you should you dare to question the relevant progressive tenets.

01:27:02.920 Most people are too afraid to be accused of being racist or misogynist and so they cower in silence.

01:27:09.340 Keep your mouth shut and nod in agreement or else prepare to be tarred and feathered. Don't fall

01:27:15.660 prey to this silencing strategy. Be assured in your principles and stand ready to defend them

01:27:20.600 with the ferocity of a honey badger. Thank you very much.

01:27:29.700 Maybe I'll just start.

01:27:31.300 What's the difference between suicidal empathy and sort of heroic sacrifice where you sacrifice

01:27:45.880 yourself for people, of course, the main, in Western culture, the death of Christ is, of course,

01:27:54.580 the archetypal example of that. But there are many other examples. People sacrifice themselves

01:28:02.240 for their society, for anyone in need. How can you explain that?

01:28:10.320 So there is an evolutionary explanation for certain forms of sacrificial behavior and those make sense.

01:28:16.740 And then there is the form that I'm talking about here which is a pathological form.

01:28:20.180 So if I were to jump into the river to save three of my children and in the service of that

01:28:29.260 sacrifice I end up dying, evolution can perfectly explain this because I share on average 50% of

01:28:39.060 my genes with my children. So if I jump into the river and I save these three children and in that

01:28:44.040 service I end up dying, it is completely theoretically acceptable that this is how evolution would

01:28:51.340 work because it operates at the level of the gene. If I jump into the river and sacrifice myself to

01:28:56.640 save a friend or a random stranger, there's even an evolutionary explanation for that. It's called

01:29:01.780 reciprocal altruism, which is the idea tit for tat. I scratch your back, you scratch mine.

01:29:07.060 And the idea of how that evolved is in the African savannah when we were running around

01:29:12.520 avoiding predators and trying to get enough food to survive till tomorrow, we faced endemic caloric

01:29:19.560 scarcity and caloric uncertainty. So now when I bring down the big meat, the big game, I can't eat all of

01:29:25.920 it. So even if Gully is not in my family, I might share some of my food with you with the expectation

01:29:31.980 that at some future date you will reciprocate. So the idea of why I might do something for a stranger

01:29:37.880 or for a friend is usually built into the mechanism of expectation of reciprocity. Or, as I think I

01:29:44.680 discussed with you privately, heroism is a sexually selected trait in that men engage in heroic acts as a

01:29:53.000 form of sexual signaling because it usually raises their reputational advantage, right? I mean, very few women 1.00

01:29:59.960 say, when I fantasize about the ultimate man, I want someone who's very cowardly, who's pear-shaped, 0.95

01:30:06.860 who's afraid of his shadow. They typically fantasize about, we have the fireman fantasy.

01:30:13.820 This is why my wife and I, I wear a fireman suit on every Tuesday. That's not true. Take that away

01:30:19.940 from the camera. Not true. No, but seriously, right? It's women are attracted to men in uniform because 0.89

01:30:26.100 usually those men are exhibiting a profession where they have to be heroic. The cop, the fireman,

01:30:33.840 the air force pilot, the navy seal, right? They're not usually attracted to the guy with the logarithmic

01:30:40.960 table in his pocket. Yes? Not to imply that nerds cannot be sexy, but okay. So there is a, there are

01:30:49.080 many evolutionary pathways by which sacrificial behavior and heroism could be selected, but this is

01:30:55.140 the dysregulated version of that. This is me demonstrating that I am so progressive and so

01:31:01.360 committed to that ideology that I'm willing to commit, as I explain in the book, civilizational

01:31:07.060 seppuku, right? Seppuku is a ritualistic honor suicide in ancient Japan, where in the samurai society,

01:31:17.980 where there is this great premium on honor, if I dishonor my feudal lord, the only way I can regulate

01:31:26.140 that is by committing an honorable seppuku. I kill myself in a very dignified, honorable way. 0.96

01:31:32.940 There's nothing dignified about saying, my society sucks, rape my women, destroy my culture, 1.00

01:31:39.120 break down the statues of my heritage, and take over. Isn't this suicidal in a broader sense? 1.00

01:31:44.320 So it's suicidal for other people. Exactly. If it was only you, it wouldn't be that bad. But it's

01:31:50.240 your society, it's the people that you're looking after. And the thing is, we have a saying here,

01:31:58.480 you are closest to yourself, meaning that you can best take responsibility for yourself, and then you

01:32:06.120 can best take responsibility for your family and people you know, et cetera, and then your society,

01:32:11.780 et cetera. So it makes sense that the responsibility is targeted on people that you actually can help.

01:32:18.580 And while the people, well, if you're very empathetic about people that are far away on the

01:32:24.160 other side of the world, what does that tell you about a person? Have you seen this meme online where

01:32:29.940 certain people, well, people on the left, they're more compassionate about things that are far away

01:32:37.740 from them, even, you know, to the degree of space dust? Yeah, exactly. And while people on the right

01:32:44.760 are more empathetic towards people that are closer to them, what does it tell you if someone is more

01:32:50.100 empathetic towards space dust? Yeah. If I were to ask every single person in this room, are you more

01:32:58.580 likely if you have children? There are two scenarios. There is a bus hurling towards your biological

01:33:05.520 children. And by the way, there are in moral philosophy, these types of experiments, it's called

01:33:11.220 the trolley problem, right? So if I were to ask you, are you more likely to save your biological children 0.89

01:33:18.600 and jump in front of the bus to save them or save random children in Africa? How many of you here

01:33:27.260 would say every time I would choose the random strangers in Africa over my own biological 0.74

01:33:32.640 children? Wow, nobody here, eh? You're clearly driven by racism, right? Well, no, I would love to save

01:33:42.460 every child in the world, but if given the choice between saving my own children or random children

01:33:49.320 that live in Namibia, then the decision is very clear. And you would literally be an anti-evolution

01:33:56.160 anomaly if you chose the random children in some faraway stardust land, right? And so, yes, it's

01:34:03.160 nice to expand the moral circle, as Peter Singer said, but that calculus has to be rooted in biological

01:34:11.000 principles. Suicidal empathy gets rid of all that. Well, there are people that have that

01:34:16.520 responsibility and are in a much better position to help the people in other parts of the world.

01:34:21.980 But isn't empathy, you know, even if it's not very well explained by biology, isn't it still

01:34:30.840 a beautiful thing in itself? If it's properly regulated, as I mentioned earlier. So, empathy

01:34:36.700 is a fundamental lubricant of human sociality. So, it is essential, but it has to be regulated

01:34:45.260 within functional regions. Many psychiatric disorders, by the way, at the individual level

01:34:50.280 are the dysregulated version of an otherwise adaptive process. You understand what I'm saying?

01:34:56.620 So, in the same way that I mentioned earlier, OCD is a dysregulated manifestation of a mechanism

01:35:04.160 that is evolutionarily adaptive. So, empathy is great. Pathological suicidal empathy is not.

01:35:10.640 Before I go to your questions, I have one more, sorry. So, when you were speaking earlier, what

01:35:21.840 is the, I was thinking, what is the transfer mechanism for the idea pathogen in a person? What is it that

01:35:30.640 makes this idea, you know, spread from that person? So, because that's always a part of the model.

01:35:41.920 So, yeah, that's a great question. So, I, early in the parasitic mind, I addressed this question. I said,

01:35:47.680 why is it that these parasitic ideas are so alluring? Why is it that some people, excuse me, can fall prey to

01:35:54.960 them? And I think I have a reasonable expectation. So, I argue that all of these parasitic ideas start off

01:36:03.020 from a noble place. But then, in the service of pursuing that noble objective, they metamorphosize into

01:36:11.040 lunacy. So, for example, equity feminism is a very nice idea. It basically says that men and women should be

01:36:18.360 treated equally under the law. So, probably all of us here are equity feminists. But then radical feminists come 1.00

01:36:23.560 along and they say, well, that's not enough. In order for us to squash the sexist, misogynistic 0.85

01:36:29.320 patriarchy, we now have to promulgate the idea that men and women are indistinguishable from each other.

01:36:35.580 There are no evolved sex differences. All sex differences are socially constructed. If we spread

01:36:42.800 that message, then we can fight against the status quo. So, in the service of fighting sexism, if we rape and 0.96

01:36:49.740 murder reality, so be it. It's okay. No, it's not okay. By the way, that's one of the reasons why 0.64

01:36:55.820 communism appeals much more so to young people. And then they grow up, reality slaps them in the face,

01:37:03.500 and they're less likely to be communists. But when you're young, it's a beautiful message. Sharing is

01:37:08.540 caring. Let's hold hands, sing John Lennon songs, and we can all end up at the same place. It's not fair

01:37:15.020 that Elon Musk makes more money than me. Shouldn't we all be equal? But then reality wakes up and hits

01:37:20.800 you when you start making money, and then the beautiful, empathetic government takes 60% of

01:37:26.000 your income to give it to somewhere else. Suddenly, I'm not so open to communism. So, a lot of these

01:37:31.020 ideas are really beautiful when I'm a moron, but then I wake up. 0.95

01:37:43.080 But don't these ideas also spread through, like, because they give the zombie a status of a victim? 0.96

01:37:53.240 They give the zombie a status of a savior, a heroic savior, social justice warrior.

01:37:58.880 Exactly right. So, they're after that. But still, they're zombies in the sense that they're useless,

01:38:04.780 you know, in anything that's practical or helpful. It's a form of narcissism. And there's a term, 0.97

01:38:10.200 this is not my term. I can't remember the gentleman. I think it's Voyegli. His name is

01:38:14.780 William Voyegli. He talks about pious preening. You know what preening means? When you kind of walk,

01:38:20.900 kind of like the peacock. So, I can peacock by showing my Maserati, or I can peacock by adopting some of

01:38:27.800 these parasitic ideas that demonstrate how unbelievably enlightened I am. But of course,

01:38:32.480 you're not. You're just denying reality. So, first question here. It's at the top. You can vote on

01:38:41.620 these questions. I'm going to use first names. It's a very practical question. How can a science-minded

01:38:49.660 parent or leader push back on woke ideology in schools or companies without social or professional

01:38:57.880 backlash? So, I've gotten this question for decades now. And let me answer it first by giving you a

01:39:07.220 reality that I have often faced. Here is the exact same email that I've received maybe 50,000 times so

01:39:16.120 far. Dear Professor Saad, tons and tons of beautiful words. The last sentence, if you decide to read this

01:39:23.880 letter on your show, please don't mention my name. Then I write back and I say, dear so-and-so, thank you

01:39:31.260 for your lovely words. Don't you think that the last sentence in your email is precisely why we are in

01:39:36.620 the current problems, right? Everyone always has a justification why it shouldn't be them that

01:39:43.400 incurs the risks and the costs. But do you remember in Normandy when many, sorry to say, young men,

01:39:52.060 they were men. They weren't trans, they weren't women, they were men. The men, maybe they were women, 0.90

01:39:58.660 true. When they landed on Normandy, most of them knew that they stood a very small chance not to be

01:40:07.160 defriended on Facebook, not to be scolded by their woke boss. They were going to be mowed down like 0.66

01:40:13.640 little mosquitoes. And yet they said, I'll go. So you have to contextualize risk. Nobody is saying

01:40:19.920 that you'll be a reckless martyr, right? You can modulate which, how much risk you can take. But what

01:40:25.960 you can't do is say, I can't assume any risks. You, everybody has to share some of the risks,

01:40:33.820 right? There are many things that are very difficult in my life. We have to always have

01:40:40.520 security. I mean, it's crazy that someone who's saying the things that I'm saying has to be

01:40:44.920 protected. I mean, I went to Beverly Hills recently to, it was very nice. I received this beautiful

01:40:50.180 award. If you saw the amount of U.S. Marshals around me, you would think I'm, you know, the leader of the

01:40:57.800 Nazi party coming. There's this professor, five foot seven, the height of Lionel Messi with a smiley 0.55

01:41:05.460 face who's going to talk about science, freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry. And I need all this

01:41:10.900 protection. Why didn't I say I can't afford to have those costs? You know why? Because at the end of the

01:41:17.800 night, when I put my head on the pillow and I want to sleep well, if I feel that I was in the least bit

01:41:24.520 cowardly, I would have insomnia. So I would ask each of you to abide by this code of conduct. There's

01:41:31.280 always some justification for why I shouldn't do. By the way, in academia, Professor Saad, I would speak,

01:41:37.460 but I don't have tenure yet. Okay, now you get tenure. Professor Saad, I can't speak because I'm

01:41:43.300 going for full professor. Now you have full professor. But Professor Saad, I can't speak

01:41:47.380 because I'm going for a chair professorship. Now I have chair professor. Professor Saad, I can't speak

01:41:51.860 because I'm applying for a government grant. Now you have the grant. Now you retire. You never

01:41:55.540 spoke. Some of them speak when they retire. Exactly. That's cowardly. So speak. I understand

01:42:02.840 there are costs to bear. Just don't be completely quiet.

01:42:06.420 Yeah, we have another very similar question here. I'll skip that. A top question here is from Dr.

01:42:23.880 Mahdi. Why are young women so much susceptible to parasitic ideas? Yes, I actually talk about this

01:42:33.240 in my forthcoming book. So women on average score higher on empathy than men. I mean, as in under 1.00

01:42:41.920 regulate under the good version of empathy. And so it makes sense that they will be more susceptible

01:42:48.500 to have their empathy module gained because they already are naturally and they are evolutionary

01:42:54.860 reasons why we might expect women to be slightly more empathetic than men. And so evolution has

01:43:01.100 already endowed a sexual dimorphism when it comes to empathy. And because of that, they're simply more

01:43:07.320 likely to be gamed by parasitic empathetic ideas. Simple. It's not bad about women in general. It's just 0.93

01:43:15.280 the parasite is more likely to hack them because it works that way. 0.78

01:43:23.280 Although many of my male colleagues, maybe they're also women, but they are as parasitized. 0.98

01:43:35.280 So, um, okay. Um, okay. Many of the questions are similar. Um, yeah. Why do educated elites, journalists,

01:43:56.560 teachers, HR often fall first for ideological nonsense? Is it status fear or something deeper?

01:44:04.420 I mean, it's a bit of all, uh, usually, so I can answer it from the original cause, which is in

01:44:11.280 academia. Why is it that every single one of those parasitic ideas, they all originate from academia.

01:44:18.100 I always remind people because it takes intellectuals to come up with some of the dumbest ideas, 0.90

01:44:23.680 but, but in all seriousness, there is a, there is a more fundamental reason for that, which is 1.00

01:44:28.680 once you, once your ideas are not auto-corrected by reality, then you can spew your bullshit, right? 0.98

01:44:37.580 So for example, the business school and the engineering school were, are some of the disciplines 0.99

01:44:44.320 that are least parasitized, not, not fully inoculated, but a lot less parasitized.

01:44:50.200 And I argue that's because there is a very quick auto-correction from reality. If you're an engineer

01:44:56.920 and you build a bridge using post-modernist indigenous physics, there's going to be a consequence to that.

01:45:04.300 If you build a mathematical model to study something in economics or in consumer choice

01:45:10.740 that's based on post-modernist indigenous ancestral knowledge, it's not going, you're going to lose a lot

01:45:17.200 of money. And so because of that, you're inoculated against bullshit, but most professors that operate 0.95

01:45:24.700 in the ethereal world of nonsense can spew this stuff and 21 year olds go, oh my professor, that sounds 0.98

01:45:32.760 so good because they're never slapped by reality. Speaking of academia, because you had this slide

01:45:39.000 of the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in different fields where the lowest was 1.6 and it was up to

01:45:50.460 what? 108 to zero and 133 to one. Okay. What would you think about a country that had the ratio of

01:46:00.520 something like 50? Meaning Iceland? Yes. Because according to a poll, I think it was 98%. I might be

01:46:11.540 wrong. It could be 95%. 98% would have voted for the Democrat last time. So what do you think is going

01:46:18.260 on there? And I'm saying this is going to sound humorous, but it isn't. You face a much greater

01:46:24.300 existential threat from that ratio than you do from any eruption of a volcano. And I mean that literally

01:46:31.280 because the volcano might come in a thousand years. But for example, if you have an open door

01:46:39.900 immigration policy, Iceland will cease to exist much faster than any flowing lava.

01:46:46.080 I think, I think I should run for prime minister of Iceland.

01:46:58.000 You're going to have to become an immigrant first. See if we let you in. That one, I might, 1.00

01:47:03.760 I might be able to, I thought you were going to say you have to be taller first. That one,

01:47:08.060 I can't change. Well, people will only see you on camera. Oh, good. Control the angle.

01:47:13.960 So, um, so, um, what do you think about the attempts to cancel this event?

01:47:26.800 Well, number one, I don't know if the Harpa people are listening. Thank you so much for not 1.00

01:47:31.980 caving in. I hereby bestow upon, upon Harpa the title of honey badgers. So well done. Uh, I mean,

01:47:40.480 it both shocked me and didn't shock me in that I didn't think that Icelandic people were quite as

01:47:48.020 woke. I mean, I, I had a sense. It's a loud minority, I think. Yeah. Yes. But a lot of people

01:47:54.600 are sort of, they, they just go with it because, uh, it, it seems to me and now correct me that,

01:48:00.920 um, many people, they don't make the, make up their own mind. They make up their mind socially.

01:48:07.160 They, they do not use logic and, and empiricism. They just, uh, go with what's socially acceptable

01:48:15.160 and safe. So that is sort of this middle that you can sway sort of, and the activists, they're so loud

01:48:24.020 in order for those people to think that they, that, uh, the majority opinion is, is, uh, is woke.

01:48:34.640 And therefore it's a self fulfilling prophecy. Exactly. And that's why, you know, you have to

01:48:40.440 be a honey badger. So there, there is, by the way, this idea of, uh, you know, going with the crowd,

01:48:44.980 the herd mentality in, in psychology and in marketing, there is the concept of social proofing.

01:48:50.340 When a company says 6 billion served and satisfied, what they're saying is here are 6 billion data points

01:48:57.660 that say that this hamburger is good. Shouldn't you think that it's good? This is called a social

01:49:01.680 proofing appeal. And so what often people do is exactly what you're saying, which is if everybody

01:49:06.040 says Islam is peace, Islam is peace. That's it. Shut up. Right. And we don't have to do the difficult 0.99

01:49:11.880 thing of what's that called thinking, thinking, uh, right? Because that's too effortful, right?

01:49:17.460 So if Barack Obama, peace be upon him, says that Islam is peace, Islam is peace. That's it.

01:49:22.020 So, um, one question about AI, modern, uh, LLMs are trained on the whole internet and surely infected

01:49:32.460 with the mind virus. Well, I've tested that myself. You probably have, uh, how can we inoculate

01:49:37.960 ourselves if our AI advisors are already infected? Well, that's a good one. Well, if you remember,

01:49:44.220 I think it was Gemini, did anybody see when Gem, uh, so who, who, who run, I'm looking at you because

01:49:51.800 your computer science, who, who was behind Gemini? Was it Google? Yeah. So Gemini, when it first came

01:49:59.000 out and it, you would ask it, please show me examples of the founders of America. They were all black.

01:50:09.480 Um, so George Washington was black. James Madison was black. Thomas Jefferson was black. I mean, 0.96

01:50:17.000 literally. And so there was, there were all these tests that were done that it almost seems satirical.

01:50:21.860 Uh, so that's it. I'll leave it to the computer scientists to inoculate AI, but obviously it 0.84

01:50:27.500 could be gamed. So yes, that's a serious concern. Um, from Steiner, uh, Karl Popper's open society

01:50:36.280 seems to be the dominant worldview of which, uh, wokeism springs. Um, will this view collapse

01:50:44.580 soon and will it be replaced by something else? Well, I hope that it collapsed. Look again,

01:50:52.540 my message is not an anti-immigration message. I often get, frankly, imbeciles who write to me and say, 1.00

01:51:02.020 but you're an immigrant and your buddy Elon Musk is an immigrant. So aren't you being hypocritical 1.00

01:51:08.420 when you rail against immigration? That is as smart as the following. You ready? The domestic cat 1.00

01:51:17.000 is a feline. The wild lion is a feline. They're both called feline. That's why I'm equally likely to

01:51:26.980 cuddle with my house cat as I am with a lion in the wild because they're both called feline. It's

01:51:33.080 the same word feline, right? It's that level of stupidity. So the fact that he's called an immigrant 1.00

01:51:39.120 and he's called an immigrant doesn't mean that they are equally likely to assimilate. So a rational

01:51:44.060 immigration policy says, yes, of course we are enriched by immigrants as long as they are congruent

01:51:51.200 with the values of the host society. If yes, come in, my brother. If no, get your ass back to

01:51:57.240 wherever you came from. But what do you do? Do you exclude certain groups or do you try to do it at 1.00

01:52:03.300 an individual level where people actually have to be asked questions about their fundamental beliefs?

01:52:10.380 I'm not a fan of this one because it doesn't take a terribly smart person to know what the right

01:52:15.800 answers are for me to be vetted, right? Do you believe in equality between men and women? Yes,

01:52:21.700 sir. Yes. Do you believe that it's wrong to have child brides? Yes, sir. Yes. Do you believe that 0.87

01:52:27.620 it's wrong to have female genital mutilation? Yes, of course, sir. Do you love homosexual? Are you okay 1.00

01:52:33.340 with homosexuality? Yes, sir. It's not difficult for me to know what you expect me to answer, but then I 1.00

01:52:38.340 come in. Now, if two of us come in, it doesn't matter. If six million of us come in, let's take an

01:52:44.460 example. We have, is it 300 in Iceland or 400? How much is it? Closer to 400 now. We have 400,000

01:52:51.540 people in Iceland. And I want you to really answer this as comfortably as you can. Do you think that

01:52:58.200 if tomorrow by, I am prime minister of Iceland and I decree that 200,000 Danes should come into Iceland

01:53:08.420 or 200,000 people from Waziristan in the tribal territories of Pakistan should come? Do you think that

01:53:16.880 there is an equal likelihood that Icelandic values will be retained under both scenarios? And if you do,

01:53:23.420 please raise your hand and teach us something. No, because you're all very progressive.

01:53:28.920 So 200,000 from Waziristan, 200,000 from Denmark. They're not equal? Okay. So maybe you're not all

01:53:38.400 lost. Okay. There is a reality to immigrants. They come in with a cultural and religious baggage. 1.00

01:53:45.380 Some of that baggage is beautiful, right? I benefit from other culinary traditions and other languages.

01:53:53.380 Those are the beautiful parts of multiculturalism. But if you believe that homosexuals should be thrown 1.00

01:54:00.120 off rooftops, probably this is not consistent with queer identity in Reykjavik. But what should the 0.96

01:54:08.600 rules there then be? You know, should there be just an immigration ban on Muslims or Muslims from

01:54:18.580 particular countries? How can you work this? I wouldn't be comfortable, and not because I want

01:54:25.320 to be politically correct. I wouldn't be comfortable saying Muslims because I may have more in common 1.00

01:54:32.800 with a Muslim secularist than an Orthodox Jew. And so if I'm going to be abiding to my principles,

01:54:41.640 I can't. So it is your values that matter to me. And so if there is a machine...

01:54:46.580 But you can lie about your values. You can. So, but certainly what you can do is play the

01:54:50.960 statistical game, which is to say, maybe don't let in millions of people from that society.

01:54:59.240 To quote us, perhaps. Exactly. I mean, but that, I mean, I know that people might shift in their seats

01:55:04.560 feeling uncomfortable because they're so kind and... It's not a clean solution.

01:55:08.540 But life is not so clean. Yes? So for example, okay, let me draw an analogy. How many here

01:55:16.060 would have a 17-year-old young teenage girl serve as a babysitter to your kids versus a 37-year-old 0.97

01:55:29.860 male serve as babysitter to your kids? Can I have a show of hands? Because you're all so kind and

01:55:37.520 empathetic in Iceland, not like me, who's this really monster guy from Middle East. How many of you 1.00

01:55:44.100 would be just as likely to have the 37-year-old babysit your 12-year-old daughter than the 17-year-old?

01:55:52.860 Can I have a show of hands of... You would have the boy, the men... Can you explain to me what's the

01:55:59.680 rationale so I could be more empathetic? Because the other idea would be very stereotypical.

01:56:05.280 Okay. It depends on the individual. It depends on the situation. And I wouldn't just jump into a

01:56:11.720 conclusion regarding the person I would ask to look after my children.

01:56:15.700 What would be the test that you would have to do to ensure that the integrity and safety of the body

01:56:22.140 of your children could never be violated by the test that you use?

01:56:26.460 You could never be sure.

01:56:27.140 But it's more important for you to be tolerant and empathetic and not stereotypical than protect

01:56:33.520 your daughter from being sexually molested. Yes?

01:56:36.160 The likelihood of my daughter being sexually molested by a 37-year-old person I knew or

01:56:41.980 female, whatever? 1.00

01:56:46.000 Is small?

01:56:46.940 Yes. 1.00

01:56:48.300 So if she has to take that small negligible risk, fuck her. Who cares? 1.00

01:56:51.900 In a situation where I'm scared of all and everyone, I use likelihood to select people

01:57:00.960 instead of just knowing them. For example, I am a psychologist myself.

01:57:05.300 Yes.

01:57:05.680 So I have some knowledge of people, and I would never use such crude methods.

01:57:11.700 You're a lot more compassionate than I am.

01:57:15.000 But in my case, I am a teacher. I'm a preschool teacher, so I'm 32.

01:57:19.340 I'm reaching 37 in some years, and I have also co-workers who are also older than me, men.

01:57:28.400 Of course, the teaching profession is mostly dominated by women, but there are men, and I

01:57:34.400 think we are doing a good job. We are honest, and we are not there all of us to do it, but

01:57:39.400 of course, we have to show up. We have to be interviewed, so we are persons, and I think,

01:57:44.400 yeah, of course, I understand your point. Maybe it's not smart to take it too far to the extreme

01:57:52.160 point that, yeah, it's not good if a man is just a little child, because it's just maybe

01:57:56.460 going backwards. I don't know. And then, yeah, that's, and also statistically, as you know,

01:58:03.460 for example, the children who are murdered, and that's worldwide, statistically, they are

01:58:09.640 murdered mostly by women, for example. Of course, there are many, eventually, murdered kids,

01:58:14.580 but it's mostly women for, well, several reasons, because they are perhaps more often at home 0.95

01:58:21.320 with them and other reasons, but this, for example, these statistics also, they provide

01:58:25.700 some nuances.

01:58:27.380 Yes.

01:58:27.840 Yeah, that's...

01:58:28.640 I think congratulations, because you both are probably going to make it in my next book

01:58:32.880 on suicidal empathy.

01:58:35.740 Yeah.

01:58:38.700 So let me, let me address this, because I often hear this kind of stuff, but I do thank you for,

01:58:44.480 for mentioning it. Uh, is it true that men are taller than women? Is that a scientific fact?

01:58:53.660 Yes. Does anybody, okay. My aunt Linda is taller than my uncle Roscoe. Oh, shit, that proves that 0.86

01:59:01.740 the first statement is false. No. The statement that is true as a statistical fact is different 1.00

01:59:10.120 than a violation of that statement at the individual datum. So the fact that you are a 32-year-old

01:59:17.060 man, and you're a very good person, and you're unlikely to engage in child molestation, doesn't

01:59:24.440 negate the fact that child molesters are called... What's the name for child molesters? Oh, they're

01:59:31.500 called men, right? Therefore, they're called women at a rate of one to a hundred thousand

01:59:39.880 men. There is some truth to that, but... There's some truth to that? No, there is a truth

01:59:45.780 called reality. Now, there is also research that some of the molestation perpetrated by

01:59:51.980 women has been killed, as is, you know, many other crimes perpetrated by women. 1.00

01:59:58.500 But I think the question isn't about situation in which you know the people very well. You

02:00:05.500 know, I would trust my 37-year-old brother very well because I know him very well. I would

02:00:10.880 trust him rather than a 17-year-old girl that I don't know at all, of course. So it's always

02:00:16.480 a calculation of odds. But knowing nothing else about two people, I would, of course,

02:00:22.840 choose the 17-year-old girl to babysit. It's obvious because I don't have more information.

02:00:29.440 Totally true. But I think your point, I understand your point, which is, look, not all men are going

02:00:35.140 to be molesters. Therefore, I don't like that feeling of using the precautionary principle

02:00:40.020 as a blanket statement on all men. But the difference is, so in operations research, for

02:00:45.400 any of you who are mathematically inclined, you're trying to maximize an objective function, okay?

02:00:51.980 The challenge is to know what is the metric that you're trying to maximize. When I am a parent and a

02:00:58.420 dad, the objective function that I'm trying to maximize is called the bodily integrity of my

02:01:05.020 children. Therefore, that objective function supersedes the objective function of not putting

02:01:11.960 a blanket statement on all men. I don't give a shit about putting that blanket statement. I need 0.98

02:01:16.840 to make sure that under my watch, while I am the parent, my children go through their childhood

02:01:22.280 completely protected in their bodily autonomy. Therefore, if somebody's man's feelings are going

02:01:27.540 to be hurt, that's part of the price you have to pay.

02:01:36.700 I have a question from Ohtar. Do you agree that the success of capitalism can be the source

02:01:43.540 of its downfall?

02:01:47.180 How do you define success in this case?

02:01:49.100 Economic success, I would suppose. I suppose the point is similar to the professors being

02:01:57.260 shielded from the consequences of their ideas. Within capitalism, we have more and more people

02:02:04.340 that don't have to produce as much. They're not at risk with their lives because of all this wealth.

02:02:09.680 And therefore, we are shielded by capitalism from our bad ideas.

02:02:14.460 So I would say that any system that violates the laws of cause and effect are going to lead to

02:02:23.020 problems, right? So when the bankers, excuse me, prior to the 2008 collapse, engaged in behaviors

02:02:31.580 where subsequently, how many of them went to prison? Oh, let me think. Oh, it's zero.

02:02:38.460 So how is it? No, no. A few of them went to prison here.

02:02:42.480 In Iceland? Yes.

02:02:43.660 Okay, I'm thinking. But they were wrongly convicted.

02:02:46.060 They were wrongly convicted. Fair enough. Exactly. I see that Icelandic people have some humor.

02:02:55.560 No, but yeah, but that's my point. So which is that capitalism as an idea of maximal flourishing,

02:03:02.340 the data is very clear. You're much more likely to flourish at the individual level

02:03:07.640 for the greatest number of people under capitalism than any other system. But of course, there has to

02:03:13.180 be stop blocks, right? There has to be consequences to actually take. If it becomes orgiastic and a

02:03:18.800 debauchery, then it can lead to problems. So within reasons, capitalism is the best model. Just like

02:03:25.140 I think Churchill's, I think it was Churchill who said, you know, democracy is a horrible system,

02:03:30.340 except it's the best one that we have. Same thing with capitalism.

02:03:40.780 I'm going through the questions here. Some of them are not good.

02:03:47.600 He'll email me the names of the bad questions later.

02:03:50.180 Okay. They don't, the bad ones, they don't put in their names.

02:03:52.900 They don't put in their names. Okay.

02:03:53.940 Yeah. Yeah. Um, yes.

02:03:59.500 Um, okay.

02:04:02.480 Sorry.

02:04:04.920 But there's a lot of questions. How many questions are there?

02:04:07.040 There's a lot of questions. Yes. So, so we have plenty to, to choose from, from Christine

02:04:12.760 in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

02:04:16.000 Uh-oh.

02:04:16.320 Oh, yes. Here we go.

02:04:17.920 How do you assess the psychological mechanism, mechanisms that allow false narratives and

02:04:25.200 misinformation to spread so widely?

02:04:27.700 Well, first I should mention that I wasn't aware that Iceland was so much shaped by the

02:04:37.460 history of Gaza. Because when I was walking around in Reykjavik, I was so enlightened by the

02:04:46.300 love and similarity. Because I, I, I know that Iceland is really Gaza. It's the same, it's the 0.93

02:04:53.740 same peoples. So I loved when I saw the big, you saw the big mural, Free Palestine, Israel,

02:05:00.580 go to hell. But not only that, I went into a restaurant, I mentioned this yesterday, where 0.95

02:05:04.660 they had murals drawn by apparently a famous Icelandic painter. So for example, there's a mural

02:05:11.440 that depicts the history of feminism in Iceland. And the women are wearing beautiful Palestinian

02:05:20.780 keffiyeh. And so I asked the restauranteur, I said, I wasn't aware that some of the leaders

02:05:27.360 of the Icelandic feminist movements were Palestinians from Gaza. And he was completely lost. He didn't get

02:05:34.660 the sarcasm. But maybe somebody in the audience can explain to me why there has been such a

02:05:42.660 zombified rapture in Iceland that Israel are the new incarnations of Nazism, and the noble people of

02:05:53.200 Gaza are these beautiful, peaceful people of color. Because that's literally what I see everywhere.

02:05:59.340 So it's maybe it should be a next book. Gaza and Reykjavik.

02:06:06.580 Yes.

02:06:10.640 By the way, if there is anybody in this audience who is very much

02:06:15.760 Allahu Akbar Hamas, because you're so kind and empathetic.

02:06:22.000 Do you think that if 10,000 Israelis were to move to Iceland, they would assimilate more within

02:06:32.680 Icelandic values versus 10,000 Gazan people? Again, using statistical probabilities, do you think

02:06:41.340 there is equal statistical probability? Or do you think that it's reasonably clear which of these two

02:06:47.340 societies has more in common with Israel? Because a lot of times people ask me, oh, but your positions

02:06:54.040 are due to the fact that you're Jewish? Absolutely not. My positions are due to the fact that one model 0.93

02:07:02.820 of society in the Middle East is the closest to Western values, and the other one couldn't be any 0.99

02:07:11.700 more different than Western values. And yet beautiful people from Reykjavik decided that

02:07:18.420 the Gazans are worthy of their empathy a lot more than the mean Israelis. And by the way, October 7th 1.00

02:07:25.140 never happened. On October 8th, really mean Israelis decided to commit a genocide on the beautiful people 1.00

02:07:33.380 of Palestine.

02:07:40.660 So, we are getting close to the end because we're running out of time. A question from Christian.

02:07:49.580 How can you argue with people that don't even recognize data? Icelandic dialogue continues to be non-data-driven.

02:07:57.920 Yes. So, that's the ostrich parasitic syndrome. That's the la-la-la effect.

02:08:01.880 I always tell people, I am going to flip you as long as you are honest enough to listen to my position.

02:08:12.980 If you don't show up to the mind vaccine center for your mind vaccine, then there's no way I can inoculate you.

02:08:19.680 So, that is a problem. And unfortunately, it's an intractable problem, right? Because if there's no way that I can

02:08:25.460 have a meaningful dialogue with you, I stand no chance to correct you. By the way, even if I give you

02:08:31.880 an insurmountable amount of evidence, most people don't switch their position, they only become more

02:08:39.900 emboldened in their original position. So, I mean, let me repeat that, right? So, you say, A.

02:08:46.260 I then give you a tsunami of evidence that your position is incorrect, as per the nomological network

02:08:53.120 of cumulative evidence. Then I ask you, so are you now feeling stronger about A or less strong?

02:08:59.640 Unfortunately, for many people, all the evidence that I showed them emboldened them more about their

02:09:04.760 position. This is why, by the way, I was recently invited on a show hosted by a British psychiatrist.

02:09:11.200 And at the end of the show, he asked me, what is the singular phenomenon that has most surprised you

02:09:18.320 or disappointed you about the human condition? And so, I thought for a second. And I said,

02:09:24.200 the inability of people to change their opinion, irrespective of how much evidence they see.

02:09:30.680 And so, that's a difficult problem. I haven't solved it yet. But that's why I do what I do,

02:09:35.080 which is I'm always optimistic that with enough persuasion, I can hopefully convince you.

02:09:39.860 I want to tell you that there's a lot of good questions that we're not going to be able to

02:09:45.820 answer. So, they're not all bad.

02:09:50.620 So,

02:09:51.140 You still haven't asked the top-rated question?

02:09:54.640 Haven't I? Okay, there's a new top-rated question.

02:09:57.040 I'm assuming that's coming from you?

02:09:58.560 Oh, yes.

02:09:59.980 Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a new top-rated question. Sorry. Okay.

02:10:03.400 Um, I had to scroll to the, it's by SDG, isn't it? Yes.

02:10:11.240 The media will only discuss Middle East immigration on an individual or family basis.

02:10:18.520 How can we get them to look at the big picture and the long-term effects?

02:10:23.300 Yeah, so, in a sense, that speaks to the question we were discussing, which is,

02:10:26.580 at the individual level. So, I'll give you an example. If I criticize the views of Islam on 1.00

02:10:34.800 homosexuality. So, some imbecile on Twitter will come to me and say, but my friend Ahmad is gay, 1.00

02:10:41.780 and he eats pork, and he's very sweet, and he loves the Jews. Oh, shit. Okay, you proved me wrong, 1.00

02:10:47.060 right? So, what people do is they use a singular exemplar as the manifestation of the bigger statement,

02:10:55.760 right? I am 37 years old, and I've never molested children, so it's not fair to me.

02:11:01.280 Statistically speaking, 37-year-old men are more likely to molest children than 17-year-old girls.

02:11:07.960 That's an incontrovertible fact. If you don't think that, I will find you a psychiatrist to go see.

02:11:14.040 Even though most 37-year-old men don't molest children, both of those statements are true. 1.00

02:11:19.920 And so, that's a cognitive obstacle that, again, steps from suicidal empathy. Because when I explain

02:11:26.620 something at the big picture level, someone will always find a singular exemplar that seems to

02:11:34.240 violate the statement that holds true, right? But Dr. Saad, my parents are Muslim, and they never said

02:11:40.960 one bad word about Jews. Oh, shit. Okay, that means Islam loves the Jews. That means all of the Jews that 1.00

02:11:46.800 have been killed throughout all of Islamic history, that didn't happen. Because your parents never said

02:11:52.000 anything against the Jews. But that's a reflex of people whereby they don't use statistical reasoning

02:11:58.420 to come to conclusion. They use their personal experiences, because those are vivid in my mind.

02:12:05.020 Yes. But you also used the argument before to look at your first katsat before you're a Lebanese. 0.50

02:12:13.140 Yes. And before you're a Jew or anything else. So, you also, there is a role for individual,

02:12:22.300 looking at the individual on this. So, it's a tough decision to make. How do you actually make

02:12:30.820 the policy? Is it going to be quotas, or are you going to try to pinpoint the individuals likely?

02:12:36.800 How about this? We could start with this. Any imams that on Friday sermons, we videotape them 1.00

02:12:47.800 saying things that are perfectly antithetical to our values, how about we start with them and

02:12:54.300 deport them? Then we can worry about the rest. Or if someone comes swinging a machete down the street.

02:13:00.580 Exactly. Yes. We had that first example in Iceland just recently. Yes, I heard. Last week. Yes. Yes.

02:13:09.620 So, I'm sure that many people cried because the Islamist was going to be mistreated. Yeah. Yeah.

02:13:15.200 We were all worried that it would create more Islamophobia. Exactly. Exactly. By the way,

02:13:20.020 just for you guys to know, in suicidal empathy, this is, this is, I'm being truthful now. I'm not,

02:13:23.900 I'm not joking. I have a section where I talk about how MIT hosted a talk, MIT, Massachusetts

02:13:31.300 of Technology, one of the most prestigious universities in the United States, hosted a talk

02:13:35.920 explaining how Islamophobia causes climate change.

02:13:41.660 So, there are two more questions. One, the top rated remaining question from Brynja. How can we explain

02:13:55.420 the increase in transgenderism in the world? And how can we explain why the human species turn 1.00

02:14:02.220 transgender? Are there other examples in nature? So, there was a paper that was published,

02:14:09.560 and I cited in the parasitic mind, by a physician who was a, I think she was a professor at Brown

02:14:16.360 University, one of the Ivy Leagues. And she was, I believe, the first one to show very clear

02:14:22.940 epidemiological data that transgender, in terms of its prevalence, was a social contagion, right? 1.00

02:14:28.740 I mean, there was literally a time when in our daughter's class, this was probably, she was in

02:14:37.300 grade seven, maybe. So, she's 12, 13 at the time. I think something like over 50% of the kids

02:14:47.080 were transgender. That's simply statistically not true, right? But it's a social contagion. 1.00

02:14:54.320 But before this became a social contagion, there were cases of this.

02:15:00.380 One in 10,000. Much, much fewer. One in 10,000. What is the reason for them? Why does it exist?

02:15:06.200 What is it? Oh, so it's a, it's a sex typing. I mean, there are several theories. The one that

02:15:13.360 is most accepted, but it's not one of those that is absolutely definitive, like some of the things

02:15:17.360 I talk about, is that during the developmental stage, where the brain, the body, our sexual preferences,

02:15:24.000 our sexual orientations are being sex type, there are developmental things that can go awry. Now,

02:15:31.900 people don't like to hear those words because if you say they can go awry, oh, are you saying that

02:15:36.920 transgender people are not normal? Well, in the grand evolutionary sense of there are two 1.00

02:15:43.060 phenotypes called male and female, and you should expect there, if you're a sexually reproducing

02:15:48.940 species, for sexual attraction to happen a certain way, in that sense, they've gone awry.

02:15:53.480 So, I'll give you a very quick example that relates to this kind of sex typing, and now I'm

02:16:00.160 going to lose you all because you're going to all start looking at your fingers. Watch. So, there is

02:16:04.080 something called the 2D-4D ratio, which is if you look at the length of your index finger and your ring

02:16:11.840 finger, that's a sexually dimorphic trait, meaning in men, the ring finger is much longer than the

02:16:19.080 index finger. In women, the two fingers are almost the same length, okay? Now, you might say, why am 0.68

02:16:25.760 I talking about this in this context? It turns out that what determines this trait is the amount

02:16:31.620 of androgens, testosterone, you've been exposed to in utero. But sometimes you could have males that have

02:16:39.220 more feminized digit ratios, and sometimes you could have women that have more masculinized digit 0.99

02:16:45.000 ratios, and that digit ratio has been linked to sexual orientation. So, sex typing in the

02:16:53.200 developmental phase is a very complex process, and things can go awry. You're exposed to too much of

02:16:59.480 this, too little of that, things can happen. So, one argument is that transgenderism, there are

02:17:05.740 different forms, is a result of these types of mechanisms that go awry.

02:17:11.780 Last question. It is, how can you cure someone, a host of parasitic ideas?

02:17:23.860 Read The Parasitic Mind, and read Suicidal Empathy, and consume all of my lectures, and do it twice a

02:17:31.420 day, and you'll be cured.

02:17:40.680 So, thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. I'm going to give you a gift here.

02:17:45.300 Thank you.

02:17:45.700 So, wow.

02:17:58.720 A few things we're really proud of. It's the sagas of the Icelanders in Icelandic. I know you

02:18:07.000 have a stack of 20 books on your nightstand. And about a thousand that I haven't read.

02:18:12.200 Yes, exactly, which you've put away further, and then you put new and new on the nightstand. So,

02:18:16.460 this is, I do the same. So, this is the sagas of the Icelanders that will show you a lot of

02:18:22.860 examples of what you've been talking about. This is Independent People by Haldur Laxnes, the Icelandic

02:18:29.100 Nobel laureate in literature. And this is The Good Shepherd by Gunnar Gunnarsson. It's a book that

02:18:35.420 is supposed to have inspired The Old Man and the Sea by Ernst Hemingway.

02:18:40.680 Oh, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you all for coming. Thank you.

02:18:52.360 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you all. Ciao.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - August 22, 2025

Spreading Reason and Common Sense in Woke Iceland (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_860)

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