Suicidal Empathy & Post-Election Liberal Meltdown! Livestream with Viva Frei (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_751)
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 26 minutes
Words per Minute
173.89407
Summary
In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Gad Said to discuss the new title of his new book, "My Own Donald Trump: An Orgastic Dear Diary Entry of Full Fear." Dr. Said is a behavioral scientist and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He's been a behavioral psychologist for 30+ years and has been involved in the field of consumer behavior psychology for the past 30 years. He has a Bachelor's degree in psychology and a Master's in Operations Research, an MBA and an MS in Management Science, and a PhD in Decision Making with one of the leading cognitive psychologists in the world.
Transcript
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The newest title of The Dr. Gad Said, who's sitting there.
00:00:04.980
If you saw what I see right now, what you're going to see,
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I'm looking at a statue of a Greek hero chiseled out of rock.
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I look bigger than you on screen, but you're a good six inches taller than me
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In the upper six inches or where it really counts, in the pan six inches?
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All that I know is that mine worked well enough for three kids,
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Gad, you're stuck behind the maple gulag up in Canada
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You know, the full fear that all of my colleagues are exhibiting.
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Oh, go to the private chat, and then you can send me the link.
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It's pretty, it's pretty, it's very early in my feed,
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It's, it's, it's called, it's my own Donald Trump orgiastic
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I'll bring it up when you read it, and I'll bring it up in two seconds.
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Now, I was going to splash like, you know, fake tears on me
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Today, I stand before you as a fearful Jew of color.
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Now that Trump has won, I realize that my days as a free man are numbered.
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is fearful that he will be sent to a trans gulag.
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this implies that we are in a same-sex gay marriage.
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I know that Trump is going to commit a genocide on gay people.
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So I worry that if we were to ever go to the U.S.,
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we will be rounded up into extermination camps.
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Finally, as a behavioral scientist and professor of 30 plus years,
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Hence, I'm likely going to be fired from an academic job
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I'm looking at the possibility of starting a falafel food truck with my friend Ahmed,
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but I worry that Trump is going to round up all Muslims.
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Finally, my husband, meaning my biological female wife who identifies the man,
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And I fear that he won't be able to do that anymore.
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it's really surprising that Trump won on Tuesday.
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I would not necessarily be a thousand percent certain that that is satire and parody.
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People call mass formation psychosis a conspiracy theory
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What are your credentials for those who may not know you?
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Well, I have a bachelor's of science and mathematics, computer science.
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I have an MBA with a thesis in operations research.
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with one of the leading cognitive psychologists in the world.
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I've been a behavioral scientist for 30 plus years.
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I pioneered the field of evolutionary consumer behavior.
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So I know one or two things about human behavior.
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which we're told doesn't exist as a conspiracy theory.
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the authorities that fact checkers use to debunk it
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or they're so-called behavioral group psychologists,
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group behavior is mass formation psychosis by another name.
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that the manifestation of this kind of unhinged collective irrationality
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it's not as though viruses didn't exist prior to COVID,
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all of which were spawned on university campuses,
00:16:35.660
of the parasitic mind, I basically state that the two fundamental ideals that drive and guide my
00:16:42.580
life trajectory are truth and freedom. So, you know, I'm perfectly happy if I do something wrong
00:16:50.840
to stand up and say, hey, I'm really sorry, Viva. I know I showed up 20 minutes late and please
00:16:56.260
forgive me, right? It takes humility, right? But that's what you need if you're going to function
00:17:01.800
properly in society. You admit when you're wrong, you stand proudly when you think you're right,
00:17:07.080
but you regulate your behavior so that you always exhibit epistemological humility.
00:17:12.160
Those folks simply could never do so, right? It doesn't matter how much evidence I show you
00:17:17.760
that Donald Trump's tent is the most inclusive tent that one could have ever imagined. It's still only
00:17:25.240
uneducated, hick, white people who are voting for him.
00:17:29.860
Look, you're going to love this. Now, in fairness to this, I don't know if it was from 2016 or 2024,
00:17:36.820
but it doesn't matter. With the imagery that you see here, look at this. I'm going to turn the volume
00:17:41.880
down so I don't get copy-claimed on this. This is European politicians, from what I understand,
00:17:47.960
sitting there with their arms crossed. Like, this has to be, there has to be some human evolution
00:17:52.240
thing about this particular stance that makes it repulsive. But you've got foreigners standing
00:18:00.280
like scorned housewives or angry mothers looking at their kids, and that is the attitude that they
00:18:06.640
have to people who voted en masse against them. And what blows my mind, now I've been breaking down
00:18:12.800
some of the stats. Set aside, it's a popular vote victory. The number may come down a little bit
00:18:18.200
because they're still counting California. 45% of Latinos voted for Trump. Record numbers with
00:18:25.800
black men. Record numbers with black women, but still, you know, 20%. And what they're basically
00:18:31.960
saying, I try not to draw these hyperbolic comparisons and call them, you know, like,
00:18:36.260
this is what slave owners used to do back in the day. But the treatment is that of a slave owner,
00:18:40.360
where it's like the minorities don't know what's good for them. They need the woman standing there
00:18:45.320
with her arms crossed, telling them how to think, how to vote and what to do. And when they deviate
00:18:49.640
and when they veer too far from the plantation, then they say, you better come back because we're
00:18:53.940
the ones telling you what to do. You don't get to think for yourself. But this, is there an
00:18:58.360
evolutionary reason for why that gives you? I mean, not, I don't know if I can make an intelligent
00:19:04.700
comment about specifically the scornful nonverbal stance. But I think in terms of an existential
00:19:11.420
stance, it basically is saying, you either believe as I do, or there is something morally
00:19:19.020
diseased about you. And therefore, that's why I must look at you with such scorn, right? Because
00:19:24.720
I am part as Thomas Sowell. Oh, Thomas Sowell, who's another uneducated white man, right? For those of
00:19:32.200
you who don't understand the satire, he's a black man, arguably one of our, the best intellectuals that
00:19:38.120
the United States has ever had. He's an economist. But apparently, he's a white, uneducated man,
00:19:43.800
he certainly would not be supporting Kamala and her degenerates. But that's, that's the reality,
00:19:50.620
certainly in academia. I mean, that kind of stance is exactly the world that I have inhabited for well
00:19:57.040
over three decades. I'll give you a great story. I mean, people learn a lot from storytelling. I mean,
00:20:03.080
I could give you all of the fancy academic stuff. But what sticks is when you back it up with actual
00:20:08.940
vivid narratives. Okay. So in 2023, I was invited to be one of the plenary speakers at a one day
00:20:17.680
conference at USC, you know, a prestigious university in Southern California. It was in celebration of,
00:20:25.880
I think, the 10 year anniversary of a particular center at USC. And it was a day on, you know,
00:20:31.320
are enlightenment values still, you know, de rigueur? Are they still valid? And so on. So I gave a talk
00:20:39.080
at that conference, and you can watch my talk on my channel, on deontological versus consequentialist
00:20:47.060
ethics. And if you want, just as a small tangential parenthesis, let me just explain what that is.
00:20:52.520
So deontological ethics are absolute statements of ethical positions. It is never okay to lie,
00:20:58.820
would be a deontological statement. Consequentialism would be judging the moral and ethical standards
00:21:06.880
of a particular action based on its consequences. So if I say, well, it's okay to lie, to spare my wife's
00:21:14.460
feelings, if she asks me, do I look good in that dress or not? Well, then that would be consequentialist.
00:21:19.500
And as I tried to explain in a very professorial manner at the talk, it's a very serious talk,
00:21:24.820
you know, no, no gad humor, very sober. I said, look, for many, many things, it makes perfect sense
00:21:31.160
for us to put on a consequentialist hat. But for certain foundational principles, by definition,
00:21:37.000
they are deontological. So if you say things like, I believe in freedom of speech, but, and the but is
00:21:43.800
just a bunch of consequentialist calculations, then you are an imbecile who doesn't believe in freedom
00:21:50.000
of speech. And I gave many examples to highlight this point, only one of which was the Trump example
00:21:57.440
when he was booted out of what was then Twitter. And I said, it can't make sense that you believe
00:22:04.300
in freedom of speech, but not for Donald Trump. Uniquely, there is an asterisk in this deontological
00:22:10.940
principle that says Donald Trump is not afforded that deontological right. That was my only contribution
00:22:17.080
contribution to Trump in that bigger lecture that I can remember. If you saw the Q&A period after,
00:22:24.880
which by the way, even though they promised that they would send me, they decided not to send it
00:22:29.740
because they realized that once I would advertise it on my large platform, it would make them look
00:22:36.100
really bad. They said, oh, well, we can't send it because we didn't get signed clearance from all
00:22:41.420
the audience members that the clip could be released. It was a public event. It didn't follow
00:22:46.480
any secrecy laws. But people started getting up and they were unhinged in their hysteria. By the way,
00:22:54.540
my wife and kids were with me in that room. And my children, who are still very young, came up to me
00:23:00.140
and said, Daddy, why are people screaming like that at you? It's insane. One of them, by the way,
00:23:05.840
so to our point about mass psychosis, said to me, it makes perfect sense that the government
00:23:12.320
would regulate some of your speech if it is dangerous and corrosive. Speaking specifically
00:23:18.360
to me, I said, can you give me an example of something that I said in today's event that you
00:23:24.760
would consider to be, that would require the government to step in and stop? He said, well,
00:23:31.480
for example, by the way, when he first began his Q&A, he had to say what his identity is.
00:23:37.500
I'm a Latino. I like when they put the extra T. I'm a Latino. I'm a gay Latino man who studies sex,
00:23:45.760
whatever. He said to me, when you said that men do not, cannot bear children and that men
00:23:52.060
don't menstruate, that should be regulated. So then I paused and in my inimitable God style,
00:23:59.660
I said, let me just repeat this to see if I understood. You think that when it comes to the
00:24:04.460
issue of whether men menstruate and can bear children, I'm on the wrong side of that issue?
00:24:11.700
And then you can sort of hear uncomfortable murmur. That happened not at a psychiatric ward,
00:24:17.860
it happened at USC. That's University of Southern California. Yes, sir.
00:24:23.600
It's officially crazy. The thing is, though, I think it's officially crazy. The idea was that by
00:24:35.000
denying a biological fact that that qualifies as the requisite degree of real life violence,
00:24:40.160
that it would warrant censorship online. Exactly. And it's all of those parasitic ideas. So
00:24:49.240
in the parasitic mind, I was trying to come up with a universal explanation for why each of those
00:24:56.720
parasitic ideas are so catchy. Like, what is it that could make someone actually believe this nonsense?
00:25:03.480
So in the same way, and let me draw an analogy. Different cancers have different trajectories,
00:25:09.560
but the singular thing that they have in common is unchecked cell division. So at least we can agree
00:25:14.920
that that that is a commonality across the different cancers. Okay. So what is common across all of these
00:25:21.320
parasitic ideas, postmodernism, cultural relativism, social constructivism, radical feminism,
00:25:27.180
it's that they all start off with a noble objective. And then in the service of that noble objective,
00:25:35.140
if you have to rape and murder truth in the service of that objective, so be it. So it's a
00:25:41.300
consequentialist argument, right? So I'm a really super empathetic and kind person. I really love
00:25:48.520
trans people, and I really don't want them to ever have their feelings hurt. So in the service of that
00:25:54.780
goal, well, the reality is most of us don't care that you're trans and want you to live a life that's
00:26:01.440
fully dignified and void of bigotry. But in the service of that goal, I'm not going to nod my head and
00:26:07.720
say, oh, yeah, yeah, men too can menstruate. Oh, yeah, yeah, men too can bear children, because I want
00:26:13.220
to protect your unique personhood, right? That's what I tried to explain to the degenerates in the
00:26:19.760
Canadian Senate in 2017, when I went up as a as an expert witness to say that there are dangers in
00:26:28.100
denying reality. It starts off with a noble empathetic reflex, but then it metamorphosizes
00:26:35.640
into pure bullshit. So that's what's common across all that lunacy.
00:26:40.080
In the context of your studies, have you done any breakdown as to like what the
00:26:44.300
proportion of true believers are, what the proportion of fake believers are, but who love the power that
00:26:50.000
it gets them, and what the proportion of actually mentally ill individuals who are legally not able to
00:26:56.120
consent among this calculation? Yeah, that's a fantastic question. So I don't have the empirical
00:27:01.220
evidence to answer that question. But I've often questioned it myself in terms of in the deep
00:27:08.960
recesses of their minds, when they go to bed at night and lay their heads on the pillow, do they
00:27:14.060
genuinely believe that? And I suspect that many of them do, because it is a way to protect their
00:27:22.980
their, it's an ego protective mechanism, that I am a truly orgiastically empathetic and kind person,
00:27:31.980
which by the way, not to engage in promotional plugging, but that's exactly the point of my next
00:27:37.520
book, right? Suicidal Empathy. Because what parasitic mind did is it said, here is what happens
00:27:45.220
when your cognitive system is parasitized, right? But we also have an emotional system, right? We are both
00:27:52.360
a thinking and feeling animal. So the parasitic mind is about how parasitic ideas distort your ability
00:28:01.420
to think clearly and to navigate reality clearly. And then in the follow-up with Suicidal Empathy,
00:28:08.320
well, here is what happens once your emotional system is hijacked. And so now you have, if you like,
00:28:17.060
I'm going to play you, have you seen, you saw Jimmy Kimmel's tearful, tearful statement.
00:28:22.280
Oh, I actually retweeted it. He was so empathetic.
00:28:25.180
Here, let me bring this up. Because this is where, like, I think there's, there's people who exploit this
00:28:29.680
for ego and clout. There's others who exploit it for actual malice. Like, within the online, you know,
00:28:36.560
you must admit that men can shower with, with, with girls, et cetera. There are those who are
00:28:41.920
genuinely mentally unwell, like DSM-5 clinically diagnosable. There are other sociopaths who want
00:28:48.220
to do it because they are deep misogynist and want to abuse women. And then there's others who just
00:28:52.180
want to do it because it's a lever for control and influence. Watch Jimmy Kimmel because a lot of
00:28:56.480
people were observing. He's not crying out of any form of sincere empathy. He's crying because on the
00:29:01.520
one hand, maybe he doesn't feel that he has any influence anymore because nobody listened to his wise
00:29:05.560
advice. Where's it? Where's the audio here? Hold on a second. Getsky spouses. Did I put the,
00:29:09.860
oh yeah, there we go. Put it down there. Listen to Jimmy Kimmel's crocodile tears.
00:29:13.140
Let's be honest. It was a terrible night last night. It was a terrible night for women,
00:29:17.360
for children, for the hundreds of thousands of, of hardworking immigrants who make this country go.
00:29:23.620
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, for science, for journalism, for justice, for free speech. It was a terrible
00:29:35.260
night for poor people, for the middle class, for seniors, for our allies. Who overwhelmingly voted
00:29:39.560
for Trump. For our allies in Ukraine. For NATO. Go fight, Jimmy. For the truth. And democracy and decency.
00:29:50.260
And it was a terrible night for everyone who voted against him. And guess what? It was a bad night for
00:29:54.500
everyone who voted for him too. You just don't realize. You had a little too much to think there,
00:29:58.760
middle class who voted overwhelmingly for Trump. What do you, like, do you think that they're
00:30:03.820
finally losing whatever control they had over directing narratives and controlling public
00:30:09.760
influence? They are. I mean, certainly they are. But by the way, to your earlier question about
00:30:14.000
which camp, let's say, would Jimmy fall in? I don't think he genuinely believes that stuff. I mean,
00:30:19.660
I think it's a combination of other factors. In the deep recesses of his mind, he does know that it's
00:30:26.160
full of shit. There's no, there's no conceivable way. And think of it this way. Or it's a way for him
00:30:31.920
to atone for some of the public stuff that he had done in the past. His, the black face, the coming
00:30:38.420
from behind the woman. Remember like he's doing as if he's, he's mounting someone. I can't remember
00:30:43.020
what it was. And so one of the ways that I can atone for all of that vulgar stuff that I did in my
00:30:49.860
youthful transgression is to now demonstrate that I truly am, as Thomas Sowell said,
00:30:56.160
part of the anointed ones. Go ahead. No, that's, that's, that's an amazing observation because
00:31:01.640
it's, that's the similar pattern that I've noticed with Howard Stern, with all of those who were the
00:31:06.680
biggest degenerates who are now trying to buy their, their way into the good graces of the
00:31:10.480
political elite. It's Angela Merkel, whose grant, I think it was the grandparents who were Nazis.
00:31:16.920
What better way to demonstrate that I repudiate all of my grandparents' behaviors by now letting
00:31:26.140
in with suicidal empathy, millions of people from Muslim countries. Surely I couldn't be
00:31:32.540
a racist and bigot if I open up Germany to all of those folks. By the way, your grandparents
00:31:40.240
eradicated Jews from Germany by you letting in millions of people who come from cultures that are
00:31:49.220
defined by their Jew hatred. Tell me how Jewish life is going to, uh, play out in Germany, uh, dear
00:31:57.660
Dr. Merkel. Well, that, that was the ultimate irony for those who don't recall the, the, the Syrian
00:32:02.840
refugee crisis in 2015. And Merkel basically opened up the borders of all of Europe because there's
00:32:08.100
free travel within the countries in Europe to Syrian refugees who typically are, uh, for whatever the
00:32:13.460
reason people might think it's, there's good reason, but hostile to Jews. And I, my remark at the time
00:32:19.120
was a lot of people were saying it's the making up for her, uh, Nazi history that she's overcompensating.
00:32:24.360
And I made the joke, like, how the hell do you know? Like if, if, if the, if the one thing you
00:32:27.700
want to do is get rid of the Jewry of Europe, what other means would you do it while trying to look
00:32:32.100
benevolent while you do it? And then lo and behold, it was such a great exercise in assimilation and,
00:32:37.140
uh, immigration policies that you have to offer money to these Syrians to go back home and the
00:32:42.080
refugees to go back home. Um, again, it will on that subject. And we're going to come back and
00:32:48.640
forth. First of all, you don't, don't feel bad to plug the book. The, the, the new book is called
00:32:53.220
suicidal empathy or that's going to be within the title. Do you have a title?
00:32:56.320
Yeah. So that's, that's the tentative title. So it's a, it's a term, uh, that I coined to explain
00:33:02.840
this orgiastic emotional malady. And, uh, actually I'll even tell you the background of how the book came to
00:33:10.940
be. So I had written, I had been using, and I've coined that term and I've been using it on all my
00:33:16.400
social media. And at one point I wrote a long, uh, post where I demonstrated the various public
00:33:23.700
policy decisions that are exemplars of suicidal empathy. And then I get an email from one of the
00:33:32.360
really big publishers, the executive editor. And he basically just said, he, he, he puts my tweet
00:33:38.820
and he goes, looks like we found your next book or something like that. And so that's how it started.
00:33:45.600
Uh, and so we, we first, uh, communicated last April and I've been feverishly working on it since
00:33:53.380
because, uh, you know, it's, it, in a sense, I'm having a hard time putting a, an upper bound on how
00:34:01.900
long the book's going to be because every day I get sent 9,000 new cases of suicidal empathy.
00:34:09.420
So at some point I'm going to have to apply a stopping rule and say, okay, no more. The book
00:34:13.440
can't be more than 43,000 pages long. Um, no, I don't remember when the first time you used it was
00:34:20.320
that I heard it, but I, I, I loved it and have been using it ever since. And it's an amazing idea.
00:34:25.440
The idea is there in my mind, if you have a better example, you'll let me know that New York lady,
00:34:30.920
the activist whose boyfriend gets stabbed to death on the streets at four in the morning in New York
00:34:36.800
by a black guy who's having a mental health crisis. And she literally shows more concern for the dude
00:34:42.480
who just stabbed her boyfriend to death than for her boyfriend who is lying there bleeding to death
00:34:47.300
on the ground because she wants to be understanding and sympathetic to the violent, mentally ill murderer
00:34:52.340
who just killed her boyfriend. And like, this is insanity. This is activism gone to the point of
00:34:57.160
where you must kill me in order for me to show you how virtuous I am. Exactly. Uh, so that is a great
00:35:03.040
example. I've got a million of those in the book. I'll just give you one or two others that are well in
00:35:08.720
line with the one that you just gave. Uh, in 2013, a Norwegian man was sodomized, raped by a Somali
00:35:20.240
migrant. The guy was caught. He served a very minimal prison sentence because in Norway, it's all
00:35:29.460
about, you know, doing ceramics classes. It's not nice to punish people. And then when he finished his
00:35:36.740
sentence, he was going to be deported back to Somalia. The guy who was raped by him went public
00:35:45.520
saying how awful he felt because now the Somali sodomizer was going to have a much less promising
00:35:55.340
future in Somalia than he did, than he would have in Norway. Because if I am sodomized by a guy, the thing
00:36:04.280
that I'm most concerned about is to ensure that he has a enriching future in the country where he sodomized
00:36:12.720
me. Now I can, can I offer the psychological, the, the, the framework for why the suicidal empathy
00:36:20.600
happens? Oh, please. Let me just ask you one question about that story. Are we sure that the
00:36:25.740
man was not wrongly convicted and that they were involved in an amorous relationship? Because
00:36:29.200
that, that, and I'm not even trying to be funny. It just, it sounds, there's no world in which one
00:36:34.780
would fear that their rapist, uh, being deported to their country of origin who raped them, uh, would be
00:36:40.600
treated badly after, after rape and let alone that type of rape. So we know that it is a rape. And we
00:36:46.660
also know that the guy who was raped, uh, I mean, presents himself to the world as a staunch feminist
00:36:54.880
and anti-racism ally. Uh, and so, so no, we, we know exactly that he holds those beliefs. Let me, let me
00:37:02.940
offer, I mean, I, I want people to go out and buy the book. So don't think that by me offering you the
00:37:07.940
theoretical framework, you you've gotten the full cow. You're doing the audio book this time,
00:37:13.020
correct? Gad? Oh, it's so funny. You said this. I was just, I was just, uh, going through, uh,
00:37:19.380
some details of the contract. It's taken way longer for me to sign the contract. They, they approached
00:37:24.840
me, as I said, I think it was like last April. And one of the clauses that I put, I mean, you're the
00:37:30.360
lawyer, but you appreciate what happens when you're looking through a contract and you're put, I said,
00:37:34.520
uh, you know, Hey guys, the main criticism I received for my last two books, which is a pretty
00:37:44.200
good thing. If that, those are the only recurring criticism you're getting is that people were super
00:37:48.840
pissed off that the parasitic mind and the sad truth about happiness were not narrated in my own
00:37:54.040
voice. Can we at least put a clause that that is an option? And so they, I just got back twice
00:38:01.200
manuscript and they added that in. It's, it should be obligatory because you have a, it's not that
00:38:06.160
you have a good voice, you have a good voice as well, but a distinctive good voice. It's sort of
00:38:09.360
like, you know, listening to Alex Jones's book. I don't think it was someone who had a sufficiently
00:38:13.480
similar voice that it wasn't shocking or glaring, but you, you listened to your book was, nobody has
00:38:18.140
a voice like you. So, sorry, good, good clause, good addition. Um, and now what you were just about
00:38:23.060
to say, I was going to tell you about the, the, the, uh, a summary of the theoretical framework
00:38:28.000
of what, what drives suicidal empathy. So let me step back a second and offer an analogy.
00:38:34.960
Take for example, by the way, when you started, you said he's not a clinician in a technical sense.
00:38:39.920
That's true, but I'm now known the moniker is I'm the global therapist to the world. So while I don't
00:38:47.080
hold a clinical license, effectively speaking, I am the head parasitologist of the world because I'm
00:38:53.680
trying to resolve a psychiatric malady at the group level. What, what, what more can you want as a
00:39:01.120
clinician? But in any case, so joking aside, uh, OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder is a condition,
00:39:09.980
but by the way, I've written several, uh, academic papers on various psychiatric afflictions from an
00:39:15.580
evolutionary perspective. So I've done, uh, Munchhausen syndrome by proxy. That's where I then develop
00:39:22.240
the theory in parasitic mind for the malady of collective Munchhausen and collective Munchhausen
00:39:27.980
by proxy and transgenderism, uh, Munchhausen by proxy and so on. And actually, let me stop you on
00:39:34.120
that. That wasn't very important for people to appreciate that. The idea of this whole trans thing
00:39:37.900
that parents impose on their children is a Munchhausen Munchhausen syndrome by proxy is when
00:39:43.200
a mother who wants the attention, the social adulation would make her kids sick. And it was like,
00:39:47.020
Oh, poor baby, you know, we'll get, you'll get all that social credit score and whatever,
00:39:50.440
because your kid is sick. And so when it's real, people feel it. And when it's, when they don't,
00:39:55.080
when it's not real, they get their kids sick so they can then feel it. That is apply it mutanus
00:39:59.180
mutanus to parents who say, Oh, my four-year-old is trans and I'm empowering his existence. And
00:40:03.500
everyone's like, Oh, good for you. Take to social media and put out videos. The, the, the transgender
00:40:07.400
Munchhausen syndrome by proxy is an amazing, uh, insight connection to make. Sorry. I want to
00:40:13.060
highlight that. Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that. Uh, if anybody who's interested in the
00:40:17.140
original scientific paper that I wrote, it's, it's in, I think 2010 in medical hypotheses,
00:40:23.340
it's a medical journal. So I've also written paper. I'm only saying this, not, not to give
00:40:27.980
you my CV, but because it's relevant to my OCD explanation. I've also written, uh, papers,
00:40:33.340
psychiatric papers on an evolutionary explanation of suicide, which you might imagine is a difficult
00:40:39.620
concept to explain evolutionarily speaking, you're ending your life. And I've also written a
00:40:44.920
evolutionary based paper on sex differences in the symptom mythology of OCD. In other words,
00:40:52.660
men and women are likely to exhibit sex differences in terms of the O's and the C's that they succumb
00:41:00.740
to. And I argue that there's an evolutionary reason for that. Okay. Having said all that,
00:41:04.940
so that gives you a sense of where my scientific, if you like credentials come from to then be able
00:41:12.600
to diagnose this. Okay. So OCD actually has an evolutionary explanation and here, here, here's
00:41:20.640
how it goes. And then I'll link it to suicidal empathy. The idea that we should scan the world
00:41:26.180
for environmental threats makes perfect evolutionary sense. So for example, if you and I are going out
00:41:32.280
for a pizza and I noticed that your nose is running and then you sneeze into your hand and you shake my
00:41:37.980
hand, then it makes perfect evolutionary sense that I would have the reflex to say, Hey, I'm going to go
00:41:42.980
wash my hands before we have the pizza, because it makes sense for me to have that repulsion at the
00:41:49.720
possibility of having germ contamination. If I go to the back door and check that it is locked before we
00:41:56.140
all turn in to bed, that makes perfect evolutionary sense. The problem with OCD arises when that
00:42:03.680
adaptive mechanism misfires by being hyperactive, right? So the, the, the flag usually goes up.
00:42:11.620
I tend to it. The flag goes down and then I go on with my day. But if I spend eight hours in an
00:42:18.060
infinite loop, washing my hands and scolding hot water so that I don't make it to work and my skin is
00:42:24.520
falling off, then that becomes a dysfunction. It's a dysregulation of an otherwise adaptive process.
00:42:31.080
So having written a lot about this dysregulation, evolutionary dysregulation in my scientific work,
00:42:39.240
that's how I had the insight. Aha, that's what suicidal empathy is. Empathy, when it is directed at the
00:42:48.040
right people and in the right amounts, perfect, makes perfect evolutionary sense because we are a
00:42:54.060
social species. We have evolved certain positive emotions that allow us to, if you like, lubricate
00:43:01.760
our social bonds. It makes sense for me to have theory of mind, to put myself in your shoes when
00:43:08.100
you are feeling pain. That's a good empathetic reflex for me to have. The problem arises when empathy is
00:43:15.680
dysregulated. And in this case, I mean, there are several ways that it misfires. One of which
00:43:22.000
is it misfires to the wrong target. So being empathetic to my Salvadorian neighbors down south
00:43:32.960
because they have a right to live the American dream, so much so that it supersedes the empathy
00:43:39.980
that I should have for American veterans who lost their limbs defending my right to be an asshole
00:43:47.360
doesn't make sense. That's dysregulated empathy. So what I do in the book is I take many, many public
00:43:53.620
policy decisions that have resulted in the full decay of the West, and I argue that at the root of
00:44:00.040
each of these public policy mistakes is suicidal empathy. God damn, that's going to be an international
00:44:06.380
bestseller. Again, as you say it, and I don't know if this is going to be already in your thought process,
00:44:11.260
but not speaking from any personal experience with OCD, that you have, I've always found like
00:44:16.860
there's ways in which it manifests. And one is normal fear, like you say, like I was biking
00:44:22.400
yesterday and I forgot it was daylight savings. And so biking at six is a lot darker than biking at
00:44:26.880
seven. And I'm on a path, I'm not worried about people now. I'm worried about gators and panthers
00:44:30.620
at sunset. And then there's, so you have the rational fear, then you have the irrational fear applied to
00:44:37.000
the rational fear, which is just an over-exaggeration, over-emphasis of it. You have the misfiring of it
00:44:43.220
being on things that are not existential threats or the over-application of it from like, wash your
00:44:48.040
hands. But then if you also approach someone sneezing across the street as an existential threat,
00:44:52.940
you're over-adapting, so to speak. Or you're wearing a mask alone in your car in 2024.
00:45:00.740
It is, it's so beautiful an analogy. Hold on, I was taking notes in the email. No, that was it.
00:45:06.600
The over-emphasis on actual threats or applying it to non-threats and the suicidal empathy. Have you
00:45:12.740
thought about this yet at some point? And I'm not trying to be funny because I think it's almost
00:45:16.500
scary. The suicidal empathy goes from suicidal empathy to homicidal empathy, that they will
00:45:22.040
actually start killing you for your own good? Well, okay. So, and we can answer that either
00:45:26.960
literally or figuratively. Let's go figuratively, then literally. Right. Figuratively, it already
00:45:34.000
happens all the time, right? I'm going to kill your career. I'm going to kill your reputation.
00:45:41.280
I'm going to kill your prospects of ever being invited to the cool kids party. So, the homicide
00:45:47.280
has already happened. It hasn't happened though, literally. Now, in other countries, I could
00:45:54.600
literally kill you because I have the power. Oh, are you willing to accept Islam? We're giving you
00:46:01.880
the choice. So, you're freely able to decide no. Now, of course, because there are consequences
00:46:08.280
in life, if you make the wrong choice by not accepting Islam, we're going to have to mercifully
00:46:14.780
detach your head from the rest of your body. But that's done after we've given you the courtesy
00:46:20.340
of choosing for yourself. So, I don't think we're at the point today in the West where you can
00:46:26.300
orgiastically, literally engage in the homicide that you're talking about. But boy, can we certainly
00:46:31.860
do it figuratively in very painful ways. And I don't know if you know of any historical
00:46:36.800
analog. What is the social, the threshold, like the percentage of social acceptance threshold?
00:46:42.100
When did it become, you know, when 5%, let's just go to the easy example that no one takes
00:46:46.640
offense with, which is Nazi Germany. 5% of Germany is Nazis. And they say, we've got these crazy ideas.
00:46:51.640
And it was like, okay, well, too bad. We're not buying into it. It's offensive. There's a threshold
00:46:56.660
at which not only do people start to give it some sort of credibility, but also at which they start
00:47:02.460
to become fearful of it, where it starts taking hold. Like, what percentage do you actually...
00:47:07.200
That's actually, it's even, I mean, I'm not trying to sound patronizing, but it's even a more
00:47:12.940
intelligent question that you already stating it, even though... Exactly. That's how smart you are.
00:47:21.640
That's what Laval University trained lawyers... Well, no, I did my philosophy degree was in,
00:47:28.780
my thesis was called deontological consequentialism. What?
00:47:32.640
Again, I'm trying to find... I knew that there was somewhat of a semblance of a brain in you.
00:47:37.640
I did four years of philosophy, honors degree at McGill. Then I went to Laval for my law degree.
00:47:42.860
And I did one year exchange in Paris, which is why I did an extra year of McGill, because I wanted to
00:47:47.160
get my honors degree, which required a cumulative GPA of above 3.0. But my year in Paris was pass-fail,
00:47:53.360
so it didn't count. So I did another year of philosophy. And I'm still... I'm trying to track
00:47:57.160
down my thesis, because when you talk about consequentialism versus deontology, Kantian
00:48:02.780
categorical imperatives. And I sit there saying, whenever I hear someone say, it's okay to kill
00:48:08.140
a baby if it means saving 10. And I'm saying, my reaction was always, it's never okay. What you're
00:48:13.380
basically just saying is, I want to minimize the evil, because I think that the evil to be minimized
00:48:17.440
is the killing. So I'm going to kill one to prevent somebody else from killing 10. And my theory has
00:48:21.440
always been, you haven't minimized anything. You've actually just maximized the aggregate evil,
00:48:25.460
because the other evil still exists. But no, the question is like, yeah, socially, what is this?
00:48:31.460
Yeah. Let me answer that in a technical way. I mean, vulgarize to the masses. By the way,
00:48:37.040
a lot of people don't understand the word to vulgarize, which in French, as you know, is...
00:48:46.100
Vulgariser. And the reason why it came up to my... Well, first, I'm a lover of words. And I remember,
00:48:53.680
I think it was my 2011 book, The Consuming Instinct, this, the red book here, where is it? No.
00:48:59.620
Hold on, let me zoom out, and then I'll see it. Oh, yeah, right over your shoulder here.
00:49:02.860
Yeah, on the... This, not next to the... No, the other way, this one.
00:49:06.980
Yeah, that's a water. No, that's your microphone. I'm joking. I think it might be covered up by your
00:49:11.520
mic. Okay, it doesn't matter. It's the red one. It's called The Consuming Instinct,
00:49:15.740
What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornographies, and Gift-Giving Reveal About Human Nature. It was a book,
00:49:22.400
it was a trade book meant to demonstrate how you could apply evolutionary psychology and evolutionary
00:49:27.620
biology to study our consuming instinct. What does a trade book mean?
00:49:30.960
Oh, that's a great question. So there are different classes of books. So let's take the
00:49:38.440
one that most of your viewers and listeners would know, a textbook. A textbook is a book that's
00:49:44.640
written as a pedagogic exercise to be sold to university students. So let's say you were taking
00:49:53.340
a course in Philosophy 101. I'll write a textbook that hopefully professors that are teaching this
00:50:00.640
course will adopt throughout Canada and North America. So that's called a textbook. An academic
00:50:05.880
book, which is very different from a textbook, is a very technical book that's written for other
00:50:14.220
academics and graduate students and so on. It's a scientific, so it's not meant for Philosophy 101.
00:50:20.760
One, it's meant for practicing philosophers, okay? Now, academic books, if they sell a thousand copies,
00:50:29.980
that would be considered a hugely successful book because they have very, very limited market. It'll be
00:50:36.000
university libraries that will purchase them, you know, specialists in the field and so on. So my first
00:50:43.620
couple of books were academic books because I was trying to lay my flag on the, on, you know, having
00:50:50.120
pioneered the field of evolutionary consumer psychology and so on. Okay. So this, which book is
00:50:55.200
it? I think it's, if it's the, okay, there you go. This book right here, that's called the evolutionary
00:51:03.540
basis of consumption. That was my first book and it's very, very technical. I mean, it could still be read
00:51:10.700
by non-professionals, but it's a very scientific academic book. Okay. So that's the evolutionary
00:51:16.160
basis of consumption. Then here I have an, oh, no, this way. Here I've got an edited book, which I'll
00:51:25.320
also explain what that is. That's called evolutionary psychology in the business sciences. It's an academic
00:51:29.860
book, but it's edited in that different chapters are written by different specialists and I serve as the
00:51:39.120
editor of the entire compendium. And I usually will write an intro and an opening chapter and so on.
00:51:44.740
So these two books are academic books. Okay. So they will have a much smaller distribution, even though,
00:51:53.280
I mean, these were actually very successful by any standard. Okay. Then the next one, this one,
00:52:00.560
it's, so to answer your question, this, this one was my first trade book, the consuming instinct.
00:52:06.700
Now what I was trying to do there. So to answer your question, what is a trade book? A trade book
00:52:12.320
is meant for the masses. It's meant to be read by as many people as possible. It's what you will see
00:52:19.800
at Barnes and Noble and at Indigo and so on. It's not for the specialist. It's not for students. It's for
00:52:26.480
the general reader. And so as you might imagine, many professors can be very successful as academic
00:52:34.640
writers, but dreadfully bad as trade authors. Why? Because they don't know how to speak in a voice
00:52:43.980
that would be appealing to the general masses. Okay. So now coming back to, thank you for asking
00:52:50.480
that. I think this is the first time that I've ever on a show explained the difference between
00:52:56.820
Well, and I love the fact that you describe it as appealing to the masses, as opposed to what I
00:53:00.360
suspect most would describe it as, as dumbing it down for the masses. Exactly. Yes. Don't,
00:53:05.820
don't talk down to people. You know, I recently had a chat with Rob Schneider, the actor, who's just
00:53:11.020
delightful. He's, he's amazing. He's amazing. I mean, just like you want to hug this guy. Okay.
00:53:15.860
And to, I think it was maybe towards the end of the show, he said some really sweet things to me.
00:53:21.080
He goes, you know, there's a lot of us in Hollywood, whatever, that are huge fans of yours.
00:53:25.660
And what one always walks away when they hear you speak or read your stuff is you're never talking
00:53:31.520
down to us. And that really touched me because I think that that's one of the, I know it's gauche
00:53:38.340
to speak about oneself, but one of the things that I most appreciate about my engagement with the
00:53:43.060
public is that I really take pleasure in having the corrections officer and the trucker write me a
00:53:50.180
fan email. Because if he is res, if my voice is resonating with him, that I'm doing something
00:53:56.420
right. It, it, it's a no brainer that the Stanford professor might write to me and say, Hey, I love
00:54:00.880
your last paper on whatever. That's my job. That's what I do. But the fact that the trucker says, Oh my
00:54:06.480
God, I was listening to you and Viva. And I decided that I'm going to go back to school because you,
00:54:10.860
you motivated me to study psychology. Well, now I think I've done a really good thing.
00:54:15.580
And you, when you say it out loud like that, it's the exact problem with not with academia in and of
00:54:20.840
itself, but with experts in general is people generally want to make their own decisions.
00:54:24.980
So give me the info and then let me decide. Whereas most look down and say, no, I'm going to
00:54:29.160
tell you what to do. And don't even ask me when it came to like COVID, for example, was the prime
00:54:33.840
example. We're not explaining it to you. You're not able to understand and shut up and do what we say
00:54:38.520
versus here's here are the pros and cons, the risks, and you make your own decision. It's, it's a form of
00:54:43.160
control and not a form of education. Exactly. Right. Uh, so coming back to the term vulgarization.
00:54:49.860
So when I was, uh, uh, communicating with my editor for the consuming instinct, which was going to be
00:54:57.880
my first trade book, I use the term, I think it was maybe during when we were coming up with sort of
00:55:04.940
the taglines for my media, whatever I said, well, you know, the book is an attempt to vulgarize
00:55:10.920
evolutionary psychology. And she said, Oh, don't, don't, don't use the word vulgarize with the
00:55:15.020
American audience. Why not? It's, it's a beautiful fan. It's a nice one. She goes, no, say popularize
00:55:20.440
and so on. And that always, uh, was annoying to me because it's, it's exactly what the word is meant
00:55:27.280
to say, which is to make something accessible to the masses. Anyways, I don't know why I was,
00:55:33.300
why I said that. What was the, what was the, the, uh, trade book you were talking about your first
00:55:37.000
trade book. And I think you were getting into the latest trade book. So the first trade book
00:55:45.920
was the consuming instinct. The next trade book was the parasitic mind. The next trade book was
00:55:54.460
the sad truth about happiness. Yeah. That's what that one is right over your shoulder there. If we
00:55:58.340
can see that right there. And then the next one is suicidal empathy. Uh, now to our earlier point
00:56:06.260
about, you know, don't tell people what to do when you, you said that a minute or two ago,
00:56:11.100
actually, that was one of my biggest challenges when I was working on the happiness book. And let
00:56:18.660
me explain, I mean, that, that story in of itself is, is really fascinating. So in, when you study
00:56:24.320
decision-making, there are different ways that you could study psychology of decision-making. You could
00:56:30.000
study it from a normative perspective and bear with me. I know it's tech. Is it okay if we get tiny
00:56:35.880
bit? No, please go. So normative decision-making is, for example, the classical economic, the classical
00:56:45.240
school of economics, say at University of Chicago, where many of the Nobel Prizes come from, they
00:56:50.840
adhere to a view of decision-making that's called homo economicus. Homo economicus is this ultra rational
00:56:59.200
being that adheres to axioms of rational choice. Example, if I prefer car A to car B, and I prefer
00:57:07.580
car B to car C, it must be that I prefer car A to car C. It's an axi, it's called the transitivity
00:57:15.800
axiom. It's transitive. If A is bigger than B and B is bigger than C, then A must be greater than C.
00:57:21.000
So they take those axioms of rational choice, and they say that anyone who violates those is
00:57:27.540
behaving irrationally. Now that's called normative decision-making because you're saying that you
00:57:33.240
have to adhere to a norm, a norm of rationality. Holy shit, I'm doing a full academic lecture here.
00:57:40.040
I should be charging all the assholes watching. I'm writing down questions.
00:57:43.580
Exactly. Yeah. And to everybody who's watching, yes, this will be on the final exam.
00:57:49.940
All right, let's go on. So that's normative decision-making.
00:57:55.060
Descriptive decision-making is studying decision-making to solve optimization problems.
00:58:03.900
And hence, you're prescribing an optimal path of decision-making. This is actually like, I literally
00:58:10.020
have thought about creating these lectures and charging people money. And one of the-
00:58:14.740
Yeah, they're masterclasses. There's no reason why you shouldn't be doing it.
00:58:18.960
Well, there's only so much time in the day, but-
00:58:21.440
Exactly. But, by the way, one of the bifurcations in the road that I'm currently facing is,
00:58:29.320
I am an academic through and through. It's in my DNA. But if I now have to, you know,
00:58:35.580
poll people about their gender pronouns in the morning, which of course I don't do,
00:58:39.160
there's an element of academia that's becoming very, very costly to me, so that the thought
00:58:44.920
has crossed my mind, is it time for me to step aside? Now, if that were to happen, then it would
00:58:50.240
allow me to set up those masterclasses. And you've been one of the ones who's been most
00:58:54.140
strongly and feverishly telling me, sign up for this, set up, paywall. You're probably the one
00:59:00.820
who's most been doing that. And to my great shame, because I'm a moron, I still haven't done a lot of
00:59:06.620
that stuff. Well, I mean, not to say it hasn't gotten bad enough for you in- I don't want to
00:59:10.860
besmirch where you work, because I don't want to get you into trouble through association, but
00:59:14.240
not to say it hasn't gotten bad enough, because I think it's gotten way worse than anybody even
00:59:18.060
knows as to how bad it is where you can't safely go on the campus where you teach, and you have to
00:59:22.280
teach remotely, and you have to worry about security. I think it's gotten bad enough where
00:59:25.620
you will see the writing on the wall, but it takes some time to catch up.
00:59:31.080
And that's one of the reasons why it was a godsend, frankly, that I got this position at
00:59:35.300
Northwood University. They're very much into freedom of inquiry, freedom of speech, free
00:59:39.780
enterprise, economic freedom. And so their president reached out to me and said, look, we're big fans of
00:59:44.400
yours. We're ready to make you a permanent offer. I was a bit tentative about that only because at the
00:59:49.460
time I was in California with my family for five weeks. So I wasn't ready to change my life without at
00:59:55.520
least trying it. So we decided we agreed to do a one-year leave. My university was kind enough
01:00:01.140
to grant me the one-year leave. And so for the, at least for the next, yeah, I say, look, I'll say
01:00:07.020
also what I think they want you out. And if they can get you out without a fight, Hey dad, don't take
01:00:11.880
a vacation. Yeah. You can come back to your job. As I said, as I said, kindly, I also had a little smirk
01:00:18.520
because I realized that boy, why is God sad being so diplomatic? But yes, there you go. That's my
01:00:25.180
if anybody doesn't appreciate the dynamic. Gad takes a lot of flack for his writings and
01:00:30.460
statements on Islam. He teaches at Concordia university, which has been historically one
01:00:34.400
of the most radical universities, uh, in, in, back when I was in 2000, like they were, they
01:00:39.900
were protesting. Yeah. I can only imagine. Hold on. This dog's got to get out of here. You
01:00:44.700
know, go, go, go. Oh, yeah. Speaking of, uh, evolutionary biology, how many paralyzed dogs would have
01:00:53.940
survived in the nature? I look at that dog every day. It's like, my goodness. Oh, if
01:00:58.620
only you struggle. There is though, an evolutionary explanation for why we are so bonded to our
01:01:04.780
pets. And I actually discussed it briefly in the consuming instinct in the, in the red
01:01:08.880
book that I showed up. I have a theory that they're wonderful. They keep us, they keep
01:01:12.180
us, you know, company. And if things get really bad, you can kill them and eat them. So it's
01:01:16.020
bada bing, bada boom. I'm joking, everybody. Yeah. As you mentioned something, the, the, the,
01:01:19.940
the, the, a is greater than B or sorry. A is, uh, B is greater than C is greater than
01:01:25.240
B. B is greater than C. Therefore, A is greater than C. That works on an objective level where
01:01:29.760
like that's logic one-on-one. I said, everybody should always take a philosophy one-on-one
01:01:33.640
logic because they teach you that. Then I realized, as you say it, it doesn't apply to things that
01:01:37.220
are subjective. Like I like Billy Madison is better than happy Gilmore. Uh, dumb and dumber
01:01:41.520
is better than Billy Madison, but I don't necessarily like dumb and dumber more than happy Gilmore.
01:01:45.060
Okay. Well, you just described, uh, a Nobel prize winning studies. So, so let me, so, okay. So hold
01:01:53.420
on. So, uh, I just described normative decision-making and I was on my way to describing prescriptive,
01:01:59.300
but let's pause prescriptive for a second. So I can answer what you just said. So the two,
01:02:03.980
so my, my doctoral training, my, I mean, my official PhD is in psychology of decision-making
01:02:10.120
specifically. My doctoral dissertation was on looking at the following problem.
01:02:15.340
When is it that we have acquired enough information about competing alternatives for us to stop
01:02:21.540
acquiring additional information and make a choice? So for example, if I'm choosing between two cars,
01:02:26.720
I may be, I may choose, I could look up 50 attributes on the two cars, but most of us don't
01:02:31.680
do that. Instead, we look at enough information that at some point my brain says, I've now seen enough
01:02:38.940
to buy car A. So what I was trying to do in my, uh, doctoral dissertation is study the stopping
01:02:45.980
decisions of information search, which could then be applied to anything. So when people write to me
01:02:50.540
and say, Oh, but you know, you study marketing. I mean, there's almost never a mention of the word
01:02:54.660
marketing in my doctoral dissertation. It just so happened that I can then apply it to consumer
01:03:00.500
behavior, hence marketing. But the fundamental doctorate, the fundamental problem that I was
01:03:05.520
studying applies to mate choice. It applies to employee selection. It applies to, should I stay
01:03:10.840
in a marriage or leave the marriage? So it applies to any process that involves the iterative acquisition
01:03:16.460
of information. And when do I stop? Are you with me? Holy shit. This is a good conversation.
01:03:23.580
Speaking of killing the dog, now the dog wants to come back in the room. Hold on.
01:03:26.800
From an evolutionary perspective, I'm probably the stupid one for just not leaving the door
01:03:35.020
open at a given point in time. I'm leaving the door open now, people. I know my wife and
01:03:38.060
kid are not here, so I'll have some quiet. Okay. All right. Let's go on. So, uh, so my doctoral
01:03:44.380
work was in the area of behavioral decision-making and the gurus of that field are two, no Jews.
01:03:54.620
Oh, they're Jews. Jews. Uh, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, two Israeli psychologists who then,
01:04:05.680
you know, moved to North America. They were lifelong friends and colleagues. And what they did to your
01:04:11.900
point about, I prefer Gilmore, but whatever violation you said, the first paper that Tversky
01:04:18.440
published in 1969 was with my doctoral supervisor, Jay Russo, uh, who did his PhD in psychology and
01:04:27.980
cognitive psychology at University of Michigan. Uh, now Tversky and Kahneman demonstrated that many
01:04:34.740
of the axioms of rational choice that classical economists tell us we should adhere to, we don't.
01:04:41.560
And so they won the Nobel prize in economics for demonstrating that economists are full of shit.
01:04:49.480
Okay. And that idea being, they've already made up their mind as to what they want to get. And so
01:04:53.340
they will fit into the preferences, the way to get there. No, no. It's that the, the, the economist
01:05:00.140
has a very restrained axiomatic view of how human cognition should operate. It should be hypercomputational,
01:05:10.260
hyper-rational, but human minds don't work that way. They don't adhere to this orgiastic form of
01:05:18.820
hyper-rationality. So what Kahneman and Tversky did is go through all of those axioms of rationality
01:05:26.740
and demonstrate that we violate them all the time. And so they designed many astoundingly clever
01:05:32.840
experiments to show to your Gilmore story that we don't do all the things that these economists tell
01:05:40.100
us in La La Land that we should be doing. Okay. Now I say they won the Nobel prize. That's technically
01:05:45.360
incorrect because Kahneman won it for work that he did with Tversky. Tversky didn't win it because he
01:05:53.020
had unfortunately passed away and you can't win it posthumously. So officially it's only Kahneman who
01:05:59.520
won it, but it's really Kahneman and Tversky. Okay. Now, so that, that's the normative decision-making.
01:06:06.460
Okay. Prescriptive decision-making, as I mentioned earlier, is prescribing how you ought to optimize
01:06:15.040
something. And I know that, that sounds like fancy. Give me a concrete example. Take for example,
01:06:20.460
a classic problem known as the traveling salesman problem. You have a salesman who has to visit 10
01:06:26.800
cities. He's going to start in city A. He has to return to city A and he has to visit each city once
01:06:35.460
in what order should the path be as to minimize the cost of travel. That turns out to be an easy
01:06:45.380
problem. If you've only got three cities, you could manually try all three and then calculate,
01:06:50.260
which is the optimal one. When I give you 13 cities, you're going to be spending until the next
01:06:56.440
4 billion years to calculate all the permutations and combinations. So the field,
01:07:02.520
the mathematics field that solves those problems algorithmically is called operations research.
01:07:11.400
And so in my, in one of my, I have two masters. In my first masters, I did a mini thesis in operations
01:07:18.440
research, which is this optimization field. Now, why is it called prescriptive decision-making?
01:07:22.940
Because you're trying to prescribe some optimal behavior. If you wish to reduce the travel costs,
01:07:31.820
this is the order in which you should visit those cities. Are you with me?
01:07:36.340
So first approach to decision-making normative, second approach, prescriptive, third approach,
01:07:43.920
descriptive. Descriptive simply says, describe how people actually make decisions. I'm not trying to
01:07:51.100
find some normative way of behaving. I'm not trying to prescribe some optimal way of behaving. When
01:07:58.360
you decide you want to buy a car, let's study the cognitive processes by which you arrive at choosing
01:08:04.120
the car or marrying that girl or voting for Trump or Kamala and so on. And so for much of my career
01:08:10.860
as a psychologist, as a behavioral scientist, I existed in descriptive world. I'm trying to develop
01:08:19.020
theories that describe actual decision-making behavior. Okay. Why am I talking about all this?
01:08:26.120
Because I'm going to link it back now to the challenge that I had when I was writing the happiness book.
01:08:31.720
Now, when you're writing a happiness book, by definition, this is going to involve some
01:08:38.140
prescription. Here is what you ought to do to lead a happy life. And I had always been very
01:08:45.040
epistemologically suspicious of the people who stand as gurus and lecture to the rest of us what
01:08:53.320
to do. And being the very, very careful professor and scientist that I am, I wanted to make sure to
01:09:01.920
tell my readers that I am not offering you the incontrovertible recipe for happiness. Rather,
01:09:10.520
spoken like a real academic, life is a game of managing statistical probabilities, I'm going to give
01:09:21.220
you some prescriptions, which if you apply them, increase the probability of you summiting Mount
01:09:30.380
Happiness. So look at the difference between how carefully I just positioned that book to how,
01:09:38.480
to your point, everybody who was much smarter than you told you, shut up, you don't walk your dog
01:09:44.680
after eight out after eight o'clock, because that's settled science. Shut up, pleb. So those were exactly
01:09:51.180
who the fascists were. And it turns out that they weren't part of the Republicans. Many of them are
01:09:56.600
super progressive professors, leftist professors. The correlation between progressivism and fat and
01:10:03.820
fascism or tyranny or at least, I don't know what the proper word is for it, but like
01:10:07.240
Karenism, like progressivism and Karenism, people who just tell you what to do and shame you when
01:10:14.400
you disagree with them. I find it's almost a direct overlay. It's a one circle Venn diagram,
01:10:20.520
progressives and Karenists who... By the way, I have a student who regrettably has disappeared. Often
01:10:28.820
what happens when you have MSc students who are doing theses with you or PhD students,
01:10:33.980
it's the first time in their lives where they're now tasked with creating knowledge rather than
01:10:41.320
just absorbing knowledge from a classroom. And so oftentimes, regrettably, even though students
01:10:48.060
might be very bright, they get sucked into a black hole and they never resurface from. And so I've had
01:10:53.740
very, very bright students who wanted to work with me under my tutelage that never ended up finishing
01:10:59.440
their degrees. And I'm not the one who will call you every day, say, what are you doing today? I mean,
01:11:04.260
you're an adult. You also have to have the personal agency to get your work done. In any case,
01:11:11.360
that one particular student, I had proposed the following thesis topic to him, and he was very keen to
01:11:18.660
do it. It very much related to your working hypothesis, which is, for example, can we identify
01:11:27.800
morphological signatures of people's political orientations? So this is not quite Karenism,
01:11:35.860
although it is, in a sense, because there is a morphological exemplar of the woman that looks like
01:11:43.220
a Karen. You follow what I'm saying? Oh, yeah. I'm just, I'm just trademarking Karenism right now
01:11:47.720
here. Boom. Karenism is trademarked, peeps. I'm joking. Actually, it is the first time that I've
01:11:53.600
heard it used with the ism part. So... Because it sounds like, it sounds like communism, but it's
01:11:58.400
Karenism. It's Karenism, exactly. So anyways, I hope that that particular student resurfaces because
01:12:03.960
we had already started to collect the data and it's, it's very, very powerful data because it's taking a lot
01:12:10.360
of, a lot of the elements that I discuss in the parasitic mind and it's testing some really cool
01:12:17.540
empirical hypotheses. So hopefully, if, if that student is watching, call me. I don't know where
01:12:25.280
you've disappeared to, but it's time to come home. But why was I mentioning that? It was about the
01:12:32.380
decision-making process. Yeah, that's right. That's right. So yeah, so I think I finished that story. So all I was
01:12:36.800
saying is that the challenge for me when writing Happiness Book was that I was now entering into
01:12:43.820
a world that I heretofore had not entered, which was prescriptive world, right? All of my other work
01:12:50.660
is, let me explain to you the evolutionary reasons for why we do X, Y, Z. I'm describing behavior
01:12:58.660
under some parsimonious theoretical framework. Happiness was a completely different endeavor.
01:13:03.940
Yes, I'm going to use ancient wisdoms. I'm going to use contemporary science. I'm going to use my
01:13:10.660
personal life trajectory to offer you some prescriptions of how to live a happy life.
01:13:17.260
But at first I was very hesitant to do so because I thought, you know, I don't want anybody to think
01:13:22.900
that it is a, it is an assured guarantee recipe. Well, it's, it's, it's, um, I don't know. I can
01:13:29.260
analogize it to golf where a professional might never get a hole in one, but the better you
01:13:33.880
swing, the more likely it is you get your ball within a certain vicinity. You don't cheat on your
01:13:38.940
wife. You might still get divorced, but cheat on your wife and you are increasing the odds of getting
01:13:42.760
divorced and murdered and not necessarily in that order. Uh, so no, the, so, I mean, I don't want to
01:13:48.520
get to the punchline of what a suicidal empathy is going to be. I kind of want to know how it ends.
01:13:52.280
Where do you see, I mean, America's a good litmus test for the world right now. I think it might've
01:13:56.800
gone singularly crazy, but then I sort of look to Europe and Europe has gone crazy as well in terms
01:14:02.380
of a same type of Karen ism in terms of speech, in terms of government overreach, there's a bit
01:14:07.840
of a pushback, but whether or not the government's gotten already too far along to be pushed back,
01:14:12.800
where do you see things going? And then I actually want to talk a bit about Canada while we're sure.
01:14:16.940
Uh, I mean, right now I'm not feeling great. I'm certainly feeling better than I did Tuesday
01:14:23.240
morning, right? Because at least by Trump winning, you are going to have some auto-corrective
01:14:31.020
mechanisms that will swing things in the right direction. But I keep warning people I've already
01:14:35.780
done since Tuesday, several shows, and I keep repeating the following point, which I'm happy
01:14:41.980
to repeat here. Don't now be complacent, sit back and say the problem is solved. Trump is here because
01:14:48.260
Trump will come in and Trump will leave. And someone else might come along who is also a
01:14:53.100
Trump guy, JD Vance. But if you don't eradicate the parasitic ideas and the suicidal empathy that
01:15:00.920
has taken 50 to a hundred years to flourish and proliferate, then you, it's just in French,
01:15:07.100
you say, right? It's, it'll come back even maybe stronger than ever before. Right? Remember when you
01:15:13.880
take an antibiotic, if you don't kill all of the bacteria, the ones that remain, it's a form of
01:15:20.840
evolutionary selection will be even that that's how you develop the evolution of the superbug.
01:15:25.600
So if you don't eradicate this nonsense, it'll come back even more orgiastically nasty in some
01:15:32.640
future iteration. So yes, celebrate that Trump won, but then don't sit back on your couch and eat
01:15:38.320
potato chips all day. There's still a lot of work to be done. That, that analogy actually of like
01:15:42.820
why the doctors say, take the antibiotics, even if you feel better, because if you don't,
01:15:47.620
it comes back stronger and more resistant to antibiotics. Is that, that's an amazing idea,
01:15:52.480
but you know, the superbug to the parasitic mind. It's called in mind, it's, I'm giving you a lot
01:15:57.340
of stuff from suicidal empathy. It's actually, it's, it's, it's, it's genius gab, but you know that
01:16:03.220
already. And, and, and I'm, my personal dilemma is yeah, Trump won and everybody can celebrate,
01:16:09.060
but I don't think that I'm done yet mocking into oblivion everyone and publicly shaming those who
01:16:14.840
were the most arrogant, pompous pricks on earth. The Michael Cohens of the world, the, the Cardi B's
01:16:20.740
of the, the ones who thought they could brow people to submission because they need to be mocked and
01:16:24.840
humiliated and basically not disavowed, but, um, I shunned into irrelevance. Yeah. I had on a guy
01:16:32.860
named Richard Barris yesterday, who's the best pollster out there. And, you know, I said like with Trump's
01:16:37.820
victory, is it unique to Trump or is it sort of party wide? It was a stupid question as I started
01:16:42.540
asking. And he's like, no, it's, it's Trump. It's the character. It's the person that people love
01:16:46.980
and Trumpism, which could be, you know, when Trump comes and goes in four years, it could be someone
01:16:52.160
else who has to fill in that Trumpism, whether or not it's JD Vance, we'll find out as things evolve,
01:16:57.000
but it's true. Like if, if Trump comes and goes and it's a flash in the pan, um, then it's a,
01:17:03.260
it's a short, it's a big victory, but short lived. So 100%. And so if I can draw an analogy,
01:17:09.340
I was recently approached by someone, I won't, I won't give the details. I don't give them away
01:17:13.900
who said, and this has happened to me many times in the past, but someone says, you know, I'm such a
01:17:20.400
fan and all kinds of compliments. And then there's a, but, so I'm waiting for the, but, but do you not
01:17:27.300
think that when you do the pink wig, it affects your, uh, you know, legitimacy as a professor or
01:17:37.420
when you hide on it? And I look at them, I say, you exactly don't get it. I mean, it, it, it couldn't
01:17:46.200
be any clearer that you need to consume more of my content. It is precisely because of the unique
01:17:54.340
set of skills that I have that I'm able to be this effective. Uh, I just spent quite a bit of time
01:18:01.340
being about as professorial as you can get, right? So no one is going to outrank me on professorial
01:18:07.520
status. That doesn't remove the fact that I can act like a buffoon in the service of trying to
01:18:16.440
persuade you precisely because I have enough authenticity and self-confidence to know
01:18:24.060
that it doesn't diminish me by putting on the, the, the wig. It's precisely because I am 18 feet
01:18:31.900
tall, metaphorically speaking, that I can wear the wig. Now to draw an analogy with Trump, it's the exact
01:18:37.460
same thing. If he were more stately, a la, uh, Romney, and if he were more kind, a la pick your other
01:18:46.700
presidential guy, his voice would have never resonated. You need him to be exactly who he,
01:18:53.620
he has to show up in the garbage truck for, for it to work and for him to win on Tuesday.
01:18:59.180
It's God. I like we're, we're lit. We don't even know this, but our thoughts must've been the same
01:19:03.100
at a given point in time, like just recently, cause I have the discussion with my father who
01:19:06.980
said that he follows me on Twitter. He's like, David, do you have to swear so much? I was like that.
01:19:10.900
First of all, part, there's an element of getting, not getting attention, but getting people to focus
01:19:16.580
on something and you could be polite as you want and have a great message. And a, no one's going to
01:19:21.780
hear it and good for having a good message that no one hears. And B, you'll still get demonized.
01:19:26.280
You could be, you could never wear the pink wig. You could never do the satire. You'll still get,
01:19:30.260
you'll still get derision because of what you say. So on the, strategically, there's no reason not to.
01:19:34.900
And on the other hand, it is the level of honesty where, you know, like I was thinking Trump's in power.
01:19:39.700
If I ever got the call, Viva, would you be the press secretary? And for a second, I'm thinking,
01:19:43.420
ah, my tweets are too much of a liability. And then I, and I really, I'm thinking like, no,
01:19:47.900
my tweets are an indication that you'll get respect. But if you pull a Jim Acosta,
01:19:51.840
I will berate you and tell you to stop being an idiot and sit down and get, give the mic up to the
01:19:55.840
next real journalist. You've justified all of my bad conduct yet. I hope you should feel proud of
01:20:02.080
yourself. Listen, authenticity is the whole ball game, right? I mean, I actually in the,
01:20:08.080
in the happiness book, I have a whole section on authenticity. Now they are,
01:20:12.240
there are two layers of authenticity. There is, there's personal authenticity, you know,
01:20:16.800
is Trump authentic? Is God sad? Is Viva authentic? But there's also existential authenticity, meaning,
01:20:23.080
so in this, I was talking about this in the context of living your life so that hopefully at the end of
01:20:27.760
your life, you have as few regrets as possible. And there I was arguing, if you live a life of
01:20:32.960
existential authenticity, then you are protecting yourself against that. And by the way, and I'm
01:20:38.960
not saying this just because I'm on your show, you perfectly exemplify that which I tell people to do,
01:20:44.860
which is you did become a lawyer and you, I think you were the editor of the law review. So it's not
01:20:51.860
like, so you had all of the credentials and all the things, and you went to a top law firm. And then
01:20:57.620
you looked at one point in the proverbial mirror and you said, that's not what I want to do. And
01:21:02.520
very few people are going to say, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go to philosophy degree
01:21:07.980
at McGill. I'm going to do law school. I'm going to become the law review guy. I'm going to go to a
01:21:12.780
law top firm. And then I'm going to drop all that so I can do balloons with ice. What is that thing you
01:21:17.900
did? The impimba effect. Amazing. Right. And that's what I'm going to do. I'm sure your parents
01:21:24.080
came very close to disowning the good Jewish boy, but guess what? Who won at the end? By you living
01:21:31.640
an authentic life, an existential authentic life, I'm sure you've been able to flourish in ways that
01:21:37.780
you could have never imagined had you continued. So don't become a pediatrician because your dad
01:21:43.200
and your mom are pediatricians and they expect that of you because you will wake up at 60 and say,
01:21:48.300
I always wanted to be an architect and now my life is gone and it's too late. So authentic. And by the
01:21:54.880
way, the ancient Greeks and the Delphic maxim of know thyself, it's just two words, know thyself
01:22:04.000
has stood the test of time because it is universal and since time immemorial.
01:22:09.500
Amazing. Again, so what is your, uh, if I may ask the situation with Northwood, Northwood
01:22:14.840
University? Yes. So North, thank you so much for asking. So Northwood reached out to me, uh,
01:22:20.060
by the way, the president of, I don't know what it is. Their entire, not their entire, but quite a few
01:22:26.840
of their senior staff are Canadians. So the president, this, so Northwood university is a
01:22:32.700
university in Midland, Michigan. Midland is, I'd never heard of it. It is gorgeous.
01:22:38.980
Now there is a reason why it's so gorgeous. It's because this is where the headquarters,
01:22:44.300
the global headquarters of Dow chemicals is in Midland. And so they've poured in billions of
01:22:50.800
dollars to this town precisely because if you're going to bring a top chemist from Zurich to, you
01:22:57.400
know, rural Michigan, you, you need to have culture. You need to have a, uh, you know, a sushi place
01:23:04.480
and you need to have cafes. So when I first went there, my inaugural visit, uh, earlier this semester,
01:23:10.300
I, and my wife came with me, I was concerned, like, is it, is it going to be like, uh, you know,
01:23:14.760
crystal meth labs everywhere. And it is gorgeous, beautiful downtown, uh, cafes and restaurants and,
01:23:23.600
you know, cool. It's just, it's beautiful. The campus is beautiful. Northwood university is
01:23:29.040
interestingly, it follows the European model of les grandes écoles. Les grandes écoles is,
01:23:35.740
these are the schools that are focused on only one thing. So for example, Sciences Po for the future
01:23:41.840
political leaders, uh, all the business schools are usually separate schools. They're just business
01:23:48.320
schools. So Northwood university is really a big gigantic business school. That's completely rooted
01:23:55.700
in all of the freedom ethos that you could think of. So the president reached out to me in, uh, uh,
01:24:04.220
the summer when I had put out, out of office for five weeks, I'm not answering anybody. And he knew
01:24:11.420
of some of my difficulties at Concordia. They were all big fans of my work. And luckily I violated
01:24:17.940
my edict to not check my emails. And so I had this long email from this guy that I'd never heard of,
01:24:23.980
who had been the president of San, uh, San Francis Xavier, uh, in Canada. And he reached out, he said,
01:24:31.220
Hey, can we talk? We'd love to have you join our, our family. And since then it has been one of the
01:24:37.240
most, it's not like I'm being paid to say this, right? I mean, I wouldn't have said it. I'm very
01:24:42.280
authentic. He's a gem. I mean, if all academic presidents were like Kent McDonald, there would
01:24:49.520
be no problem in academia. Okay. Uh, his whole team is unbelievable. They've given me complete
01:24:55.680
freedom to do things as, as I please. I'm teaching two courses in, in, uh, spring. Uh, but otherwise,
01:25:03.140
so that my title is visiting professor and global ambassador. The global ambassador part
01:25:07.580
is to promote the school, right? Is to use my platform. Look, there are 4,000 universities in
01:25:14.560
the United States. So a classic marketing problem is how do you differentiate yourself? How do you
01:25:20.540
break out of the clutter? And so hopefully I could contribute to, you know, breaking them out of the
01:25:27.040
clutter. And I think so far it's been very, very fruitful. A lot of people have gotten to know
01:25:32.020
Northwood, uh, via my intervention. So I've got nothing but unbelievable things to say about that
01:25:38.460
place. That's it's amazing. And the best marketing on earth is to have someone who people trust love,
01:25:43.720
who is what they call woke or based as we not woke, sorry, anti-woke and base or whatever the words are
01:25:49.860
people, you know, who it's, it's a university that would bring on a Gadsad and not suppress a Gadsad
01:25:56.040
is a university where I, as a parent would want to send my kids without a question. And I've got
01:26:00.920
nothing to do with the university. So it's, it's, it's, it's fantastic.
01:26:10.380
No, no, I do it. And I got questions. I don't want to neglect. So everyone on YouTube,
01:26:13.360
come over to rumble and I'm going to get to some questions and low and local stuff in a second.
01:26:17.280
I'm just going to end it on YouTube. It changes nothing from our end, but it's the Q and a after party.