The Parasitic Mind & Evolutionary Psychology - the Mislaibeled Podcast (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_774)
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 17 minutes
Words per Minute
175.77884
Summary
Dr. Gad Saad is author of multiple books, including, The Parasitic Mind, The Sad Truth About Happiness, and 8 Secrets for Leading the Good Life. He is a professor at the University of Concordia, host of The Saad Truth, and Global Ambassador at Northwood University in Michigan. Dr. Saad has a PhD in evolutionary behavioral science from Cornell University and a post-doctorate in evolutionary psychology from Harvard University. He has been a visiting professor and global ambassador at the Center for the Study of Evolutionary Psychology and Decision-Making, and he is a regular contributor to the New York Times and the Huffington Post.
Transcript
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We are here with one of the famed intellects of our generation, Dr. Gad Saad, author of multiple
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books, including national bestseller, The Parasitic Mind. Professor at Concordia University,
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researcher, podcaster, and author of the new book, The Sad Truth About Happiness,
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Eight Secrets for Leading the Good Life. The reason why I always speak out is because I
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wouldn't be able to fall asleep on that pillow if I thought I saw a merger of truth in the corner
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and I walked by ignoring it. I would be inauthentic. I am allergic to BS. You've somehow
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or another avoided a full-scale cancellation. Nothing sticks. They've tried to cancel me in
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all sorts of ways. If I didn't have the protection of tenure, I'd be gone long ago. After October 7th,
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it almost became impossible for me to go on campus. I very quickly noticed that some of the supposedly
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brightest people on earth can come up with some of the dumbest and most insane ideas. Neil deGrasse
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Tyson has an obligation. He's a public intellectual who has a large platform. If you're going to go
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and use your scientific imprimatur to say, it is settled, gender is on a spectrum, I'm coming after
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you. All of those parasitic ideas, post-modernism, cultural relativism, radical feminism, social
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constructivism, were all spawned on university campuses. Each of these idea pathogens starts off
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originally with a noble goal. Then in the service of that goal, if you have to destroy the edifices of
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reason, so be it. This thing's saying to me like a canary. Anytime I get into a debate moving forward,
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All right, everybody, welcome to another episode of Mislabeled. If you are watching this,
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you can please like, subscribe, and comment. That would mean the world, specifically a subscription,
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really, really helps the algorithm. We are working very, very hard. We right now are in Montreal,
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Canada. We are here with one of the famed intellects and evolutionary behavioral scientists
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of our generation, Dr. Gad Saad. Some of his quick accomplishments include, first of all,
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he's a professor at the University of Concordia. He has his own podcast, currently is the host of
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Okay. He's a visiting professor and global ambassador at Northwood in Michigan.
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You like that. I remember that. I know you just told me that.
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And he has his PhD in evolutionary behavioral science from Cornell University. Okay.
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Slight correction, psychology and decision making, but yes.
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By the way, I was never sure what's the difference between evolutionary behavioral scientists and
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evolutionary psychologists. It's a broader term. So evolutionary psychologist is a subset of all of
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the different ways by which you can use evolution to study human behavior. So evolutionary behavioral
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scientists might be an evolutionary anthropologist. It might be an evolutionary psychologist. It might be
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Understood. Okay. I'm first of all, very, very excited to be here. Like really, there are certain
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guests specifically that I really, really look forward to. As I told you before, and this is not
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the main thing that I do, but I always tell people that there are similarities between,
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you know, podcasting and the real estate business and kind of like the dopamine rush you get when
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you close a deal and the dopamine rush you get when you close a great guest. So this was ranked
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But the dopamine rush of this one was greater though, right?
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Yes, absolutely. No, like this is, you're one of the guests.
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I did a $230 million deal. So you're above $230 million.
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Absolutely. Okay, fine. One of the coolest things is obviously that you're Jewish, especially
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with everything going on in Lebanon. You were born in Lebanon. Could you just talk a little
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bit to how, you know, I know you speak about it a lot in your book. I just want to mention,
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by the way, one other thing, probably the most important thing I forgot to mention in my
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intro was that Dr. Saad is a author of multiple books, including a national bestseller, The
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Parasitic Mind. This book is gold. This thing sang to me like a canary. Okay. I'm not even
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kidding. Like you summed up everything that like I've thought and just gave great explanations.
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Like anytime I get into a debate moving forward, by the way, I'm just gonna like be quoting
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I'm gonna take all your years of work and just steal it and just start spitting facts.
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So we were part of the last remaining group of Jews in Lebanon, most of the Jewish community
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in Lebanon, which was never a big one. But at one point, it was several thousand Jews
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had already left by the time we were there. Even most of my extended family had left most
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to Israel, a few to France, one maternal aunt to Montreal. That's one of the reasons why we
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ended up moving to Montreal. But my parents were very well entrenched in Lebanese society.
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They were politically connected. They were successful business people. And so despite the
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fact that the writing was on the wall, you know, it always takes that final push for people
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to wake up. And so we were all, I have three older siblings, much older than me. They had
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already all left Lebanon because it was two brothers and a sister, two brothers and sister.
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Yes. You've done your homework. One is about 14 years older, one sister, 12 years older,
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and then another brother, 10 years older. And so there was really only me still a kid when
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the civil war broke out in 1975. I was 10. And then when the war broke out, it became really
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impossible to be Jewish. And so eventually, during that first year of the civil war, we got our act
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together and got out of there very, very quickly. Were you only able to get out because of the
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political connections of your family? I mean, in a sense, yes, because, and I tell this story
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in the book, the only way that we can actually escape is if we were driven to the airport by PLO
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militia, PLO is Palestinian Liberation Organization, is because a lot of the roadblocks that were set
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up around the Beirut International Airport were manned by PLO militia. And so if you were not
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friendly to that, to those militia, you weren't going to get through to make your flight. And so
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my parents, undoubtedly, I don't know the exact details, but I know that they paid some money
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to receive protection from these people. I mean, imagine the images that you see from the safety
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of your Long Island house of ISIS and those guys. Well, those are the guys who picked us up.
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It's amazing to me that they would even be willing to help you for, I mean, kind of any sum of money.
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Well, they could have taken the money and they could have put a bullet in our head in a ditch,
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right? And I have often thought about that, that how the vagaries of life, right? If one of them
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had thought of being less than kind at that moment and not honor their deal, I wouldn't be sitting
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here next to you. Yeah, that's unbelievable. So I'm sure you've answered the following question a
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million times, but just for the audience, I'm going to set some basic, you know, understandings.
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So what is the study of a evolutionary behavioral scientist? So imagine you want to study why humans
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have opposable thumbs or why our respiratory system is the way that it is. You could apply evolutionary
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theory to study why it is that evolution would have endowed us with that ability, right?
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Evolutionary psychology and evolutionary behavioral science is simply applying that
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to the study of the human mind. Why do we experience jealousy the way that we do? Why do we prefer the
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types of mates that we prefer? So it's, you're applying the evolutionary lens to the most important
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Got it. This book, The Parasitic Mind, obviously speaks a lot, you know, regarding the woke agenda that's
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kind of progressivism that's really taken over Westernism over the last, you know, 10, 15
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years. How does, how would you say that evolutionary behavioral science or evolutionary psychology
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intersects specifically with this? Yeah, that's a great question. So the idea of using the neuro
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parasitological framework, which I'll explain in a second, came very much from the fact that as an
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evolutionary psychologist, I often will look at animal behavior in other species to make some
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statement about the human condition, right? So for example, if you want to study toy preferences,
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and you want to show that little boys and little girls have certain innate toy preferences, you could
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study that behavior in other species to show that they exhibit the exact same toy preferences. And those
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studies have been done with rhesus monkeys, with vervet monkeys, with chimpanzees. They have the exact same
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toy preferences as human infants do. And so as I was trying to find a way to explain what is it that
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can cause people to be so ideologically captured, I started looking at the animal literature. So first,
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I fell on the parasitology literature. Parasitology simply is the study of the interaction between a host
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and a parasite. So for example, a tapeworm can parasitize your intestinal tract. A neuroparasite
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has to find its way to your brain, altering your behavior to suit its interest. So for example,
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a wood cricket, an actual cricket, when it detests water, it abhors water, it wants nothing to do with
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water. When it is parasitized by a particular type of brain worm called a hair worm, the hair worm needs the
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wood cricket to jump in water in order for it to complete its reproductive cycle. So it zombifies the wood
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cricket's brain, causing it to merrily jump and commit suicide in the service of the parasite. And so that was my
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So I had that epiphany. I said, aha, well, I'm now going to argue in this book that human beings
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could be parasitized by actual brain worms. For example, Toxoplasma gandhi is an actual brain worm.
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But human beings, regrettably, can be parasitized by ideological brain worms. I call these idea pathogens.
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What do you think the drive is in the Western world to argue with the reason on such a, you know,
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Yeah. So I try to actually explain why it is that these idea pathogens are so alluring. Why is it
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that people believe this nonsense? And maybe before I answer your question of why that is,
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it's worth maybe giving an example of a few parasitic ideas. So for example, postmodernism,
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I call it the granddaddy of all idea pathogens, because it purports that there are no objective
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truths, other than the one objective truth, that there are no objective truths, right? So up is down,
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left is right, women can have penises, freedom is slavery, war is peace, men can have kids,
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men can menstruate. So it affords the epistemological liberty for anything to be possible, okay? So that
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would be one example of an idea pathogen, okay? And so what I wanted to do in the book was argue,
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well, so why do people get parasitized this way? And what I propose is that each of these idea
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pathogens starts off originally with a noble goal, noble objective, which then in the service of that
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goal, if you have to destroy the edifices of reason, so be it. So let me give you a concrete
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example. Equity feminism is a good idea. It basically says that men and women should be treated equally under
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the law. And based on that definition, most of us would say, yeah, sign me up, I'm an equity feminist.
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Radical feminists argue, if we wish to eradicate toxic masculinity and the patriarchy and so on,
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we need to argue that men and women are indistinguishable from each other, that there are no
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biological-based differences between men and women, because that will allow us to fight sexism
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and misogyny more easily. Right. So in the service of what started off as a noble pursuit,
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if we murder and rape truth, so be it. And so I argue that each of these parasitic ideas
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starts off that way. Noble goal, which then metamorphosizes into nonsense, you know,
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once it evolves into a parasitic. So effectively, the people that are starting it start off,
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you know, with a noble goal, and there are people that take it to just a further extreme,
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just allow their feelings effectively to control, you know, the outcome of what they want.
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Exactly. So I'll give you one other example. So cultural relativism is another idea pathogen,
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which argues that there are no human universals. There's not a single thing that is common to all
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humans. Every culture has to be judged according to its own idiosyncratic trajectory. That theory,
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by the way, was originally developed about 100 years ago by a Jewish cultural anthropologist by
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name of Franz Boas from Columbia University. Now, why did they originally propose such nonsense? Because,
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I mean, there are human universals. It's as obvious, I mean, a three-day-old pigeon would know that,
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right? For example, if I do this frown, there is no culture where this means that I'm happy. And if I
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smile, there is no culture where people don't understand that that's a positive, affective
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state, right? But they wanted to argue that, no, everything is socially constructed. Why did they
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do that? Well, because they thought, these cultural anthropologists thought, that in the wrong hands,
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the use of biology can result in terrible consequences. So, for example, British class
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elitist argued something that they called social Darwinism. They argued, look, we're the upper
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class. And if the lower class, they die in their squalor and from tuberculosis, hey, who cares?
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That's just natural selection. It's just evolution taking place. The Nazis came along and said, hey,
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there's a natural struggle between races. And we are the Aryan race. We won. So, if we eliminate the
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Jews and the gypsies and the homosexuals, hey, that's just natural selection. That's just evolution.
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Which, of course, it wasn't. But they were misusing evolutionary theory. They were misusing biology
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to advance their political goals. So, these anthropologists came along and said, well,
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what if we erect edifices of lack of reason that could hopefully protect us against these misuses of
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biology? But that's ridiculous because that's like arguing, well, let's not study physics properly
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because it could result in weapons being developed, right? So, you can't murder truth in the service of
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a goal. That's why I argue, sorry for the mouthful, that the pursuit of truth is a
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deontological principle. It's perfect. That actually leads me exactly to what I wanted to ask. So, you
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talk about in the second chapter about the deontological principle versus the consequential
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principle. Yes. Okay. And you talk about how there are certain times, in fairness, I'll just be
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honest, you actually didn't spell it out very clearly. You didn't spell it out very clearly when
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consequentialist should be used in the book. It kind of seemed that you felt in the book,
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I believe it's like page 30-ish around, it shouldn't be there. There's never a time for
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a consequentialist. And then I watched a podcast where you actually explained that no, there are
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times. Yes. So, when are the times, just to clarify where, you know, a consequentialist
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So, I, I, actually, this is an example that I did give in the book. I recently celebrated 25 years
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with my wife. Okay. So, here is a life tip. If your spouse asks you, what?
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If your wife asks you, do I look fat in those jeans, put on your consequentialist hat and say,
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absolutely not. In this case, you are potentially lying, but you're lying to protect the feelings of
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someone you love. So, there are many, many cases in life, most cases, where there are reasonable
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ethical arguments to be made that you could put on a consequentialist hat. But there is a set of
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principles that by definition have to be deontological. So, for example, the pursuit of truth
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has to be deontological. It can't be follow truth, but once you put but. So, for example,
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if we find that, since we're both of the same tribe, if we find tomorrow that Orthodox Jews
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are more likely to commit a certain type of crime, for whatever reason, should we not...
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Tax embezzlement. You're succumbing to Jewish stereotypes.
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But let's suppose that whatever it was, right? And I wanted to study that. Are there cultural reasons?
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Are there genetic reasons why Orthodox Jews are much more likely than anyone else to commit such
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a crime? Well, if I were a consequentialist, I would say, don't publish that, because then that
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might marginalize Orthodox Jews. That might be viewed as anti-Semitic. If I'm a deontological
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bent in pursuing truth, then I say it doesn't matter whether Orthodox Jews will be... their feelings
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will be hurt by that. It's part of the pursuit of truth, right? So, that would be one example. Let me
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give you one or two others. Freedom of speech has to be deontological. Once you say, I believe
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in freedom of speech, but that means you don't believe that it's a deontological principle. Now,
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there are asterisks that are associated with freedom of speech. You can't defame me. You can't
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engage in direct incitement to violence, right? So, for example, you could say Judaism is a crock
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of nonsense. It's pure BS. And you should be allowed to say that. On the other hand, if you
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say, at the corner of Notre Dame and 7th Street, when the Jews come out of the synagogue, let's go
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and kill them, that's not protected by freedom of speech, by the First Amendment in the U.S. So,
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for most things, it has to be deontological. So, that's what I talk about in the book.
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Well, so my only question is, obviously, that for sure makes sense. And I love the fact that truth and
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freedom is your motto of defending those things, and that's what drives you, and authenticity,
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right? I think we have to add authenticity into one of those words, because you write truth and
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freedom in the beginning of the book, but the more I... In the next book, in the happiness book,
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I talk about authenticity a lot more. Okay. In fairness, I'll be honest, I didn't
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manage to cover the happiness book, even though we're going to get to some of those principles I
00:18:32.400
know you discussed there. All right, everybody, I want to take a quick second to give a big shout-out to
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at C-U-B-X dot com. You can also check them out at cubx.com. That's C-U-B-X dot com. Now back to our
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episode. Specifically regarding hate speech versus free speech. Obviously, you said there's an asterisk
00:20:03.020
by hate speech. How do we determine? I feel like a lot of people have differences of opinion on what
00:20:09.360
is hate speech and what is free speech. Anything short of a very direct incitement to violence is okay.
00:20:17.420
We have to err on the side of caution. Well, on the side of freedom. Yeah, yeah. Okay, on freedom of speech.
00:20:22.480
It's so difficult because you'll have the consequentialists or the postmodernists who will, you know, sit there
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and say that, you know, saying that Judaism is, you know, a crock of nonsense, they'll say that that
00:20:33.420
is hate speech. I mean, we have that going. I don't, though. So I'll give you the word, I'll give you the
00:20:37.560
most offensive speech that is imaginable. And maybe you've heard me mention this example before.
00:20:43.840
There is nothing worse than to deny a historical reality whereby an entire people was being exterminated
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at industrial scale level called the Holocaust. So there's nothing more offensive than for someone
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to stand up at a university and say it never happened. Actually, it wasn't six million Jews.
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It was six Jews. It's just the Jews like to lie. That's very offensive. That's very hurtful, right?
00:21:07.260
But in a free society, I have to tolerate racists, bigots, falsehood spreaders, idiots, imbeciles.
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That's what freedom of speech is meant to protect. It's not meant to protect that you tell me I look
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really good in my velvet suit, right? Because then you don't need freedom of speech for that,
00:21:24.400
right? So I think most people don't have that reflex, because most people want to be kind,
00:21:31.120
decent, empathetic people, which is the topic of my next book, Suicidal Empathy. And therefore,
00:21:36.420
in the service of being infinitely empathetic, if we murder these foundational principles,
00:21:42.060
so be it. At least I could die being an empathetic person.
00:21:44.680
Right. But it's, yeah, I mean, nice guys finish last. It's really, there's really a piece to that I was,
00:21:49.040
you know, as I, um, by the way, everyone, you should follow, uh, Dr. Saad's Twitter of the
00:21:53.980
greatest feeds to date. And the most amazing thing you should know that I realized is that there are
00:21:58.900
people who don't pick up on your satire. You want to hear something? Because that's how crazy the
00:22:02.880
world is. And you want to hear something? Someone once wrote one of, one of the most profound tweets
00:22:08.720
from someone that I've ever seen. He, he said, uh, Dr. Saad has found the singularity point. They
00:22:15.520
could never cancel him because they never know what, when he's being straight and when he's being
00:22:22.920
satirical. By the way, that's exactly the power of satire. That's why dictators, when they want to
00:22:30.460
get rid of the most dangerous people in their society, they don't go after the guys with the big
00:22:35.180
muscles, because those are very easy to kill. They go after the guys with the sharp tongues,
00:22:40.100
the guys with the spicy pen, because it is those guys that have the true intellectual muscle.
00:22:47.140
It's the satirist who can bring me down. It's not the guy who is tall and has big muscles,
00:22:52.260
one arrow and I get rid of him. But ideas are a lot more dangerous. And therefore,
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usually the first thing that the dictators will get rid of is humor, satire, mockery,
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because I can't stand that. So think about some religions today, today that are very intolerant
00:23:09.800
of comedy or satire. Can you think of anyone? Um, I'm, I could think of some. Yeah. Okay. Well,
00:23:16.880
so there is, when there, when there's the book of Mormons that becomes a bestselling play where one
00:23:24.080
could argue the play is not very, uh, complimentary to Mormons, there were no terrorist attacks,
00:23:30.760
right? You can do all sorts of blasphemous thing to Christianity under the auspices of its art,
00:23:38.180
right? You can take literally a crucifix of Christ. I don't know if you know this example.
00:23:44.120
And this artist put it in a jar of urine and called it art. And yet no Catholics went around
00:23:50.980
killing people. But there is one particular religion. Not talking about Judaism, right?
00:23:55.800
Right. Where you can't do that precisely because that religion recognizes that once you open it up
00:24:02.360
to mockery, then it's on shaky grounds. And so satire is very powerful. How have you,
00:24:08.480
I was going to ask this towards the end, but hell with it. Sure. How have you been able to fight,
00:24:14.700
you don't mince words when it comes to Islam, you know, you know, at all and in an amazing way,
00:24:19.980
the way it should be done. How do you have a, that courage and how are you still standing?
00:24:26.200
I'm being honest. Well, God willing for many, many more years. Um, I mean, standing. Yeah. Also
00:24:31.800
the questions at a physical way, but I wasn't referring to it in a literal way. I was also
00:24:34.760
figuratively like, yeah, like being canceled. Yeah. You haven't gotten, I mean, you're still
00:24:38.260
a professor of marketing in Concordia and they, they're also very left-leaning, uh, probably the
00:24:44.380
most left-leaning. How was this happening? So I think there are a couple of, uh, reasons why,
00:24:50.880
uh, that's taking place. One is because I'm very, very disciplined in my, what I call epistemological
00:24:59.620
humility. And so let me explain what I mean by that. I know what I know and I know what I don't
00:25:05.060
know. So you could ask me right here a thousand questions. I won't try to wing it if I don't know,
00:25:10.320
right? Because I don't pretend to be the professor who knows everything. There's a million questions
00:25:14.300
you can ask me. Oh, well, that's a great question. Unfortunately, I really don't know enough about
00:25:18.180
this to tell. And by the way, that builds trust because when the audience say my undergraduate
00:25:22.560
students see the, you know, the, they come into first day of class, wow, I'm in Katzad's
00:25:27.500
class. And then they ask me some great question. I go, you know what? Send me an email. I'm going
00:25:31.580
to look into it. Then they know that I'm never going to BS them, right? So how is this related
00:25:36.540
to the question of canceling that you're talking about? If I take a position on Islam, I could
00:25:42.300
back it up with a tsunami of evidence. So good luck to you if you want to debate me because
00:25:47.920
I've already done my homework. For sure. You're, no one's going to argue that you're
00:25:51.580
wrong, but from the consequentialist line of thinking, they could just get rid of you and
00:25:55.720
cancel you. It's, you know, they can't, but that's the beauty of tenure. So for the, for
00:26:01.000
the people who, so that they, I mean, there is some truth to the argument that tenure, which
00:26:07.440
for those of you who don't know is the protection, protective mechanism that causes professors
00:26:12.020
not to be able to be fired for things that they say. Some will argue, but that creates
00:26:17.560
deadwood. After people get tenure, they don't have any reason to keep producing and being
00:26:23.600
productive. The reality is most professors will keep producing no matter what, because
00:26:27.820
they are driven to, you know, to pursue science and so on. But someone like me, if I didn't have
00:26:34.620
tenure, I would have been canceled 25 years ago. This is my 31st year as a professor and
00:26:40.620
I've never modulated my, my speech. I've always told it like it is. And I would have never gotten
00:26:48.020
Do you have sympathy for the people that, you know, are careful about what they say?
00:26:55.880
I'll tell you why. So here is an email that I've received from 50,000 people. You ready?
00:27:03.340
Dear Professor Saad, a bunch of compliments. And here's the last sentence.
00:27:09.240
In case you decide that you want to read this email on your show, please do not mention my name.
00:27:16.080
And then I respond and I say, Dear so-and-so, thank you very much for your kind words. Don't
00:27:21.320
you think that the last sentence is exactly why we are in the position that we're in? And then
00:27:25.880
oftentimes that will kind of slap them into reality. Now, it seems as though I'm being sort of
00:27:30.720
smug about it or I'm not taking their concerns seriously. There's always a reason why it
00:27:37.420
shouldn't be you who speaks out. I can't speak out because I'm only a postdoc. I can't speak out
00:27:42.940
because I don't have tenure yet. I can't speak out. I have tenure, but I'm applying for a full
00:27:47.600
professor. I can't speak out. I do have full professor, but I'm applying for chair professor.
00:27:52.280
I can't speak out because I won't get the grant. I can't speak out because I'm in the running for the
00:27:57.040
Nobel Prize. And if I speak out, so there's always a reason that I can find for why it shouldn't be me
00:28:02.460
who speaks out. You know who didn't care about that? The thousands of men who lined up, put up
00:28:08.020
their hand in Normandy and said, we will land on Normandy where we're going to be mowed down like
00:28:14.580
little mosquitoes by Nazi machine guns. They seem to have lost a lot more than your reputation or not
00:28:22.920
being accepted to the cool parties in Manhattan or not getting tenure. And yet they did it. So
00:28:27.440
I don't mean to be flippant or smug about everybody's concern. Of course, don't be a reckless
00:28:33.740
martyr, right? You can modulate how you take your risks. But the idea that you are unique in the risks
00:28:42.580
you face is not true, right? One of the reasons why I never show my family in any photos is precisely
00:28:50.040
because I incur a lot of costs that have nothing to do with tenure, right? So when someone says,
00:28:56.320
here are the 17 ways we're going to kill you, that's not a pleasant email to receive. But I
00:29:00.680
can't not speak because I know what happens to societies where you can't speak. I come from those
00:29:06.220
societies and I don't want the West to repeat those mistakes. It's interesting because I was going
00:29:11.500
to say when I started this, first of all, this might be or I might have caught you on potentially
00:29:15.140
the best day of your life. I mean, Trudeau. Oh, he drops right now. In my mind, I was like,
00:29:20.880
I should bring that up first. But I got started. Yes, yes. I mean, I'm hoping that Trudeau. But you
00:29:26.820
know, can I tell you something? It's going to surprise you. Even if he were to step down today,
00:29:31.460
it wouldn't remove the existential injury that I feel that no matter what, he was prime minister for
00:29:39.840
nine years. The fact that that degenerate, lobotomized, cretin, who, by the way, every
00:29:46.440
single parasitic idea in my book, he is a walking manifestation of it, right? He doesn't say
00:29:52.640
recession. He says sh-cession because he's a feminist guy. He's, yeah. I mean, he's a caricature,
00:30:01.800
right? He pursues a feminist foreign policy, right? He believes in, you know, that his cabinet
00:30:09.440
has to have the right number of transgender people and, you know, women with penises and so on.
00:30:14.860
So, by the way, I can't apply for grants as a scientist if I don't fill out a diversity,
00:30:21.980
inclusion, equity statement, which, so now it's been about seven years since I've last had a research
00:30:28.500
grant because I'm unwilling to play that charade, right? You would never know if I filled that out,
00:30:33.180
right? It could be completely enormous, right? But I wouldn't feel authentic if from this side of my
00:30:38.780
mouth. I'm arguing against how ridiculous it is to fill out these forms. But then when nobody is
00:30:44.960
looking because I need money, I play along. And therefore, I've been completely without any
00:30:51.000
research funds for seven years because of your boyfriend, Justin Trudeau.
00:30:54.980
Yeah, no, he's on a whole different level, that guy. You know, talking about that,
00:31:01.480
in America, especially with the, you know, Trump's win, which I think you'd be proud of me,
00:31:07.460
I put down a big bet on Trump winning the popular vote.
00:31:14.900
I was following, what is that betting site that became famous?
00:31:20.520
Polly, that's the one. I was looking at it feverishly the day of the thing and as it was
00:31:25.280
So, I'll tell you, part of what I realized that was just straight, I was getting it with
00:31:28.680
one to four odds. So, already on the popular vote, it was one to four odds. And on the
00:31:32.540
most left-leaning outlets, only had her up one percent on the popular vote. And just in
00:31:37.160
general, when there's any poll, I just did plus three Trump, just like, and the most accurate
00:31:42.720
polls of the last three elections had Trump winning by two points. I just felt, based on
00:31:47.540
independence, there was a whole host of reasons, actually. And I announced this publicly
00:31:51.260
before. I really put my money where my mouth is. I announced it publicly before. I said,
00:31:55.440
I guarantee you this is happening. And I put down, you know, money on it. I wrote it on
00:31:58.460
Twitter or whatever, the whole money on it. Anyways, what made sense, the reason what
00:32:02.500
just was simple and straightforward in this case was that, at the very least, that should
00:32:05.460
have been a 50-50 line. It was 22-78. So, I knew that it was at least going to go up
00:32:11.280
to 50-50, just on a given, because it's not going to be 22-78, you know. So, anyways,
00:32:16.820
that was, but obviously with the Trump win, getting back to, you know, what I was saying,
00:32:20.080
the Trump win has changed things dramatically, or at least we're headed in a
00:32:25.420
much, much better direction. I honestly don't even want to think about what would
00:32:27.980
have happened if she would have won. It was that bad, that bad of a candidate.
00:32:31.540
My question specifically is, how can you reverse what is happening? And the reason why I asked
00:32:37.780
that, just to elaborate a little bit, you know, further, is that we're, like, this is
00:32:43.840
an indoctrination, right? It's a pathogen that's, you know, a parasitic pathogen, as,
00:32:47.520
you know, discussed, that's taken over the mind. It's also coming from universities.
00:32:50.800
It's being indoctrinated into kids in universities, and that's your biggest...
00:32:56.520
Even younger? Great. Okay, true. And my question is, how do you...
00:33:00.080
There's a clear, stark contrast in the country. Yeah, we, you know, Trump won.
00:33:03.780
That was 50% of the country, but the other 50% undoubtedly still hold the same parasitic...
00:33:07.580
That's why, by the way, so to your question, this is why I implore people to not become
00:33:15.160
complacent in the battle against all of these parasitic ideas, because a lot of people have
00:33:19.420
gotten that reflex, now that Trump and his gang has come in, that's it, the nightmare
00:33:24.380
is over. I mean, yes, he's going to create a bit of an auto-correction, but it took 50 to
00:33:30.560
100 years for many of these parasitic ideas to originally flourish in the academic ecosystem
00:33:36.640
and then, you know, to be promulgated everywhere in society. Hopefully, it won't take 50 to 100
00:33:42.280
years to eradicate all the parasitic ideas, but it won't all end magically by the time
00:33:48.560
of, you know, Trump's, you know, stepping down from his second term. It's going to be
00:33:53.920
a much longer battle. To your point, it's an ideological slash cultural battle. And so
00:33:59.520
for me, so for example, for my next book, when I was thinking about, you know, which of the
00:34:05.380
two wins, if Kamala wins or if Trump win would be better for my book. Now, in a small way,
00:34:13.900
you would argue, well, if Kamala had won, of course, it would be a disaster, but it would
00:34:18.160
be even better for my book because it would, it would, you know, just accelerate all the
00:34:22.480
nonsense. But the reality is, even if Trump won, which he did, it's not, these things are
00:34:28.760
not going to go away overnight. It's still going to be a generational battle.
00:34:32.620
So what's the reason to believe it will ever go away? Is it just because the same way it
00:34:37.760
Well, listen, let me give you an example. There used to be a time in Salem, Massachusetts,
00:34:42.340
where it was thought to be a good idea to throw women, if you thought that they were witches,
00:34:48.760
into water. And if they swim and don't drown, then this proves that they are witches. But if
00:34:56.040
they drown, oops, I guess they weren't witches. And many, many people thought that that was a
00:35:00.500
great idea. Well, today, several hundred years later, we no longer think that. So the human mind
00:35:06.480
has always had the capacity to be parasitized. It's not, because people ask me, is what you write
00:35:12.540
in the parasitic mind, is it related to the current time? It's yes and no. It's no in the sense that
00:35:20.140
throughout human history, we've been parasitized. What is unique to the current period are the specific
00:35:26.380
idea pathogens that are parasitizing us. While we don't worry about Salem witch hunts,
00:35:31.940
we do think that men can menstruate, right? So the parasitic ideas take new forms, but our capacity
00:35:38.260
to be parasitized is eternal. That actually makes a lot of sense.
00:35:42.160
There you go. If you go backwards. That's why I wear the velvet suit.
00:35:45.360
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00:37:01.100
back to our episode. There's something very interesting that I wanted to ask you. Of course,
00:37:06.360
part of the parasitic syndrome is this idea that everyone is racist, bigoted, et cetera,
00:37:10.540
no matter what the facts show, profiled, you name it, all those things. We have a current
00:37:16.700
situation going on. I do want to talk a little bit more about the parasitic mind and the book,
00:37:21.840
but there's one thing I really wanted to get to. We do have something going on right now,
00:37:25.340
especially with Israel and Jewish people. We're very, very much in the spotlight right now.
00:37:29.320
And the same way me and you would really hate, and I presume we're on the same page about this,
00:37:33.740
of saying something and then being called a racist immediately, there seems to be a common
00:37:39.660
sentiment from, a lot of times it's anti-Semites actually, but sometimes it's not, that they
00:37:45.540
feel that any single time there's any criticism towards Israel, the word you're an anti-Semite
00:37:50.200
is thrown out, and that there's no ability for them to have an opinion on the Jews or Israel,
00:37:53.860
because if there is, they're just immediately character assassinated. Do you think there's
00:37:58.440
validity to that? And if so, what would we do? Yeah, I think you could absolutely criticize
00:38:03.660
specific Israeli policies, just like you can criticize Cameroonian policies and you wouldn't
00:38:10.040
be called racist, or you can criticize Japanese policies without being called an anti-Japanese
00:38:16.280
bigot. So there is absolutely room for people, reasonable people to say, you know, this particular
00:38:22.980
policy by the Israeli government is wrong for reasons X, Y, Z. The reality, though, is that most
00:38:30.220
people who, quote, attack Israeli policies or Zionism but not Jews, if I scratch a bit, they
00:38:38.560
usually are anti-Semitic. But in the abstract, is it possible to criticize Israel without being
00:38:44.940
anti-Semitic? 100% yes. Do you think we're doing ourselves a disservice at all by just throwing out
00:38:49.660
the word very flippantly? Of anti-Semite? Yeah, I mean, this is, I would say on Twitter, you know,
00:38:54.640
Twitter's a real cesspool, you know, freedom of speech, you know, obviously, but at the end of the day,
00:38:59.400
it is a, you know, the cool thing. Again, it's a case by case basis, right? I think that there are
00:39:04.560
some Jews that are so thin-skinned, or maybe they're Israelis who fall prey to what you're saying,
00:39:11.360
which is any valid criticism of Israel becomes a form of anti-Semitism. And they do us a disservice
00:39:17.920
because then people say, you know what, here comes a Jew crying anti-Semitism. But if you see the kind
00:39:23.120
of the stuff that I receive, I'm not Israeli, I'm not involved with the IDF, I didn't shoot anybody.
00:39:30.540
But if you see the orgiastic hate that I receive, that's not anti-Zionism, that's anti-Jew.
00:39:37.500
Honestly, I don't even, not that I don't care to, but I don't even need to see that. If you go on
00:39:40.940
Twitter, you know, on X right now, I don't think, X formerly known as Twitter, which I think it will,
00:39:46.000
the formerly known as Twitter will always be there. Right? If you go there, I mean, like you said,
00:39:51.260
I love that word, the orgiastic flood of anti-Semitism, like direct, clear, there is no
00:39:57.940
from, say, likes like Dan Bilzerian. And, you know, what are your thoughts, let's say, on Candace Owens?
00:40:03.580
It's funny. I just put up a post about her today where I was satirically...
00:40:10.280
Yes, but I want to hear, meaning I want to hear your full thoughts.
00:40:12.840
So look, I don't know what happened to her. She became parasitized by some strain of anti-Jew,
00:40:19.460
you know, hatred. Because I know Candace, she came on my show. And at the time,
00:40:25.360
so this is probably four or five years ago, you know, she was very reasonable. She was kind of,
00:40:31.100
she took up the place of the conservative, pretty black girl, right? So she's not, you know,
00:40:39.680
she was demonstrating that you can't presume that if someone is of a particular group,
00:40:44.840
everybody follows suit. Not all Jews vote Democrats. Some actually love Trump.
00:40:50.360
And so she was representing that. Not all black Americans are, you know, Democrats and so on.
00:40:57.300
And so she held a particular, you know, appealing niche. And then I don't know what happened to her.
00:41:04.680
She went wild. Something went bonkers there. I don't know what happened.
00:41:08.220
And frankly, not that I wish to get personal on this, but I'm very, I'd like to think that I'm very
00:41:15.780
adept at picking up certain character flaws in people. So here's a character flaw that I picked
00:41:22.460
up in her that has nothing to do with her anti-Jew stuff. I mean, literally, probably within a day or
00:41:29.180
two of Kanye West tweeting something like, I like how you think, Candace, that so got to her head
00:41:38.320
that the next day she unfollowed every single person that she had been following. So she,
00:41:44.440
she went from being a fangirl of, let's say, Jordan Peterson or Gatsad to suddenly no longer
00:41:51.560
needing to be associated with us because she had transcended to the real intellectual and the real,
00:41:59.340
you know, cerebral powerhouse of Kanye. Somebody who can let go of, right. I mean,
00:42:05.500
I literally have people that I had followed back eight, 10 years ago on Twitter that I can't stand
00:42:12.380
the positions that they take, but I've never unfollowed them out of just a sign of respect that
00:42:18.200
day. Right. Well, but Candace, after the Kanye thing, decided that she was too good for the rest
00:42:23.820
of us. And so that to me suggests that she didn't process her growing fame really well. And so never
00:42:31.960
mind the anti-Jew stuff. Yeah. Let me ask you, I wanted to just go back a little bit to, you know,
00:42:38.280
the ostrich parasitic syndrome for a simpleton like myself. Yes. And everyone else in the world that
00:42:45.080
doesn't have, honestly, your intellect, sorry, not trying to gas you up, just being honest.
00:42:48.620
How do you differentiate between, you know, doctrines that will lead you towards that versus
00:42:54.580
the truth? Right. So just for people to explain the syndrome. So the, this is a metaphor. The
00:43:02.640
ostrich doesn't actually do this, but burying your head in the sand has become the metaphor for
00:43:10.160
ignoring reality, right? So, or doing la, la, la, that's the same thing. Now, ostrich parasitic
00:43:15.580
syndrome is a, is a malady that I coined that suggests that it doesn't matter how much evidence
00:43:22.220
I can show you, I can never get you to change your position on something honestly. So example,
00:43:29.120
earlier we spoke about Islam and I have a whole section on this in the parasitic mind.
00:43:36.140
So since 9-11, there have been over 45,000 terror attacks committed by Islamic terrorists in nearly
00:43:48.440
70 countries since 9-11 alone. It's unbelievable. They will go up in front of a television and then
00:43:55.660
this will be publicly, you know, advertised, aired that we are about to do the thing that we are about
00:44:02.380
to do. And they quote the exact verses from the Quran that justifies why they should do it.
00:44:12.420
the good, the politically correct thinkers will have us believe. You ready? That's,
00:44:19.180
that's going to be ostrich parasitic syndrome. It's lack of art exposure that causes Muhammad to go and
00:44:28.140
blow people up in Brussels or, see, because the reality is who amongst us, if it weren't for being
00:44:34.720
exposed to Picasso, we would head off to Raqqa in Syria and throw the gays off the rooftops. It's a
00:44:41.280
straight, direct line from me not seeing Chagall and Picasso and becoming a jihadist, right? But this is not
00:44:47.860
said satirically, but because at all costs, I have to protect the noble faith from Islamophobia,
00:44:54.820
right? Bill Nye, the science guy, explained to all of us simpletons that the Bataclan terror attack
00:45:04.120
in Paris was due to climate change, because those guys in Syria said, you know what, there's just
00:45:13.260
too much carbon emissions, not enough solar panels. We're really raping Mother Earth. It's time to go
00:45:19.360
to Paris and kill the kuffar, right? So when you're able to generate such nonsense with a straight
00:45:26.760
face, because nothing is more important than to be empathetic to the noble faith, that's ostrich
00:45:33.260
parasitic syndrome. So how do you know what's right or wrong? Believe your lying eyes.
00:45:40.200
The information could be confusing. There's so much, you know, what tactics, if you're someone who's
00:45:45.060
growing up, let's say under the age of 30, you're formulating your thoughts. I mean, you could have
00:45:48.500
people, you know, you get so much information, some of it, even though maybe in your gut seems like
00:45:53.520
it doesn't feel right, right? And your instinct feels like, no, this is off. But then it's sold
00:45:58.800
to you in a, you know, in a package that like, oh, I can't really argue with this. It makes sense.
00:46:03.340
So one of the things that I've learned in my many years of public engagement and academic debates and so
00:46:09.180
on is to know when I should no longer waste time on you, because I know that no amount of evidence
00:46:17.660
that I could ever present you will ever get you to that. By the way, that's one of the reasons why I
00:46:22.140
refuse to debate many people, even in very, very prestigious forms, because I know that that person,
00:46:30.720
because I know their history, is never going to come to a debate with an honest spirit, where they're
00:46:37.020
at least open to the idea of changing their minds. By the way, I was recently asked on a show, it was
00:46:42.780
hosted by a British psychiatrist. This was about a year ago. He asked me, and funnily enough, I don't
00:46:48.980
think anyone has ever asked me that question on any other show. At the end of the show, he said,
00:46:54.080
of all your years as a behavioral scientist, as a psychologist and so on, what is the singular
00:47:00.620
phenomenon that has most surprised you about humans? And so I had to think for a second. I said,
00:47:07.020
probably the inability of most people to ever change their opinions on anything. So in chapter
00:47:14.580
seven of The Parasitic Mind, which is a chapter where I'm talking about how to seek truth, I start
00:47:21.180
off at first, where I give a whole bunch of quotes by very well-known psychologists, including Leon
00:47:28.620
Festinger, who is the pioneer of cognitive dissonance theory, where he basically gives the very pessimistic
00:47:35.200
view that almost no person, irrespective of how much evidence you give them, are you ever able to
00:47:42.860
get them to move away from their anchored position. But that notwithstanding, I think I did offer what
00:47:50.060
I call a mind vaccine, which I can share with you if you'd like. But it's slightly technical. So can
00:47:55.880
we take like five or 10 minutes to explain it? Absolutely. Yeah, okay. I mean, I'm ready to
00:47:59.340
go for as long. I know you have the... Yeah, I have a problem. I have a bunch to get to, but yeah,
00:48:03.060
sure. Go ahead, please. So I think we mentioned it off air when I was testing you on how well you
00:48:07.420
had read the book. Did I pass or not? You did, you did. You did, 100%. So nomological networks of
00:48:15.460
cumulative evidence is a mind vaccine for seeking truth. So it's a mouthful. So let me try to explain what
00:48:23.100
that means. Let's suppose earlier I mentioned very briefly toy preferences. Let's suppose I wanted
00:48:29.340
to prove to you. So let's say you are a social constructivist. Social constructivist means you
00:48:34.360
believe that nothing's due to biology. Everything is due to social construction. So when it comes to
00:48:39.260
toy preferences, you would say the reason why little boys are much more likely to play with guns and balls
00:48:45.700
and hammers, whereas little girls are more likely to play with dolls, is because they are nurtured
00:48:52.640
into those toy preferences. So let's suppose I wanted to demonstrate that that's a false position,
00:48:58.220
that there are biological evolutionary reasons why these sex-specific toy preferences exist.
00:49:04.620
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to build you a nomological network of cumulative evidence
00:49:10.040
that hopefully drowns you in the tsunami of evidence that's going to come your way. So what am I going
00:49:15.920
to do? And I'll give examples in a second. I'm going to show you that across cultures,
00:49:21.860
those toy preferences exist, across very, very different cultures. I'm going to show you that
00:49:27.260
across time periods, those preferences have been exactly the same. I'm going to show you that across
00:49:32.940
species, those preferences are the same. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to what's called,
00:49:39.520
I'm going to triangulate. I'm going to bring distinct line of evidence from a bewildering number
00:49:46.180
of sources so that hopefully it becomes unassailable and unequivocal that the position I hold is the
00:49:52.480
correct one. Now, the good news is that when I have done that with many people, I have been able to flip
00:49:58.380
many people. That speaks actually to your earlier question of why I don't get canceled. Because I walk
00:50:05.500
into rooms where there are hundreds of people who are unbelievably hostile, then I present my evidence
00:50:12.620
and I go, how come I'm not hearing any rebuttals? That chirping slows down. Be quiet and sit down.
00:50:20.400
Right? Well, that's because I've done my homework, because I've already triangulated all the possible
00:50:27.040
and let me give you examples of those specific lines of evidence for toy preferences. Okay. So for
00:50:33.420
example, I can get you data from pediatric endocrinology, where this is in medicine,
00:50:39.700
pediatrics, where little girls who suffer from a disorder called congenital adrenal hyperplasia,
00:50:47.300
it's a disorder that masculinizes their morphology. It masculinizes their behaviors.
00:50:54.640
So little girls who suffer from this endocrinological disorder, guess what their toy
00:51:00.140
preferences look like? They look like those of little boys. So that demonstrates that there is
00:51:05.840
an endocrinological hormonal reason for those preferences. Interesting. I can get you data
00:51:12.940
from 2,500 years ago in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, in Roman times, where in funerary monuments,
00:51:24.860
in mausoleums, little boys and little girls are depicted playing with the exact same toys as
00:51:31.580
they are today. I can take you to cultures that have nothing to do with the West, sub-Saharan
00:51:36.600
nomadic tribes in Africa, where they play with the exact same types of toys. I can bring you other
00:51:43.280
animals like rhesus monkeys and vervet monkeys and show you. So look what I'm doing. I am cornering you.
00:51:51.200
I am putting the epistemological noose, metaphorically speaking, around your neck
00:51:55.600
so that hopefully you will kind of throw up your arms and go, all right, I'm convinced. And so I'm
00:52:01.580
able to do that. Now, there are, for some people, no way for me to do that because they literally are
00:52:07.220
going, la, la, la. So how can I give you the vaccine against polio if you never show up to the
00:52:12.740
station to take the vaccine, right? But for many people, as long as they're intellectually honest to
00:52:18.620
at least hear my evidence, I can flip you. What would be the response, let's just say,
00:52:22.960
as I was listening to this, that, okay, you're arguing there's a biological, you know, reason,
00:52:27.980
let's say, for this. And, you know, social constructivists will obviously say that's
00:52:32.240
a social component. What would be the answer if one of them said, well, yeah, it's in our biology
00:52:36.580
because originally, let's say millions of years ago or whenever you believe the world was created,
00:52:41.620
you know, when the world started, really it was a social component. Now it became a biological one
00:52:48.480
because socially they kept on doing it. It's actually the exact opposite. That's very, it's very good.
00:52:52.680
How do you know? Maybe now, maybe they'd argue that now if everyone, you know, if we could change
00:52:57.500
our biology. So the same way evolution has created a biology, right, we got here, we could
00:53:03.100
unevolutionize it. Well, so there are many ways that we could know, but let me just answer it in a
00:53:08.300
broad way. So when my students asked me about nature versus nurture, which very much relates to what
00:53:16.340
you're saying, biology versus social construction. Biology is nature, social construction is nurture.
00:53:22.120
How do we know the difference? Well, first of all, nurture exists in its form because of biology,
00:53:29.140
not in lieu of biology. So for example, there is no culture where girls are taught to engage in
00:53:36.120
indiscriminate sex with as many men as possible. It doesn't exist. The reason why, you know,
00:53:41.840
it hasn't existed is because men and women have deferring costs in making a poor mate choice.
00:53:50.860
And that exists 18,000 years ago, and it will exist 18,000 years from now. And it exists in the
00:53:57.500
Yanomomo tribe in Amazon, and it exists here in Montreal. These are biological realities. Therefore,
00:54:04.440
socialization builds on those biological imperatives. So religion teaches women to be chased
00:54:11.400
irrespective of which religion, right? Orthodox Jews teach their women to be chased, and Catholic
00:54:20.120
girls are taught to be chased, and Muslim girls are taught to be chased, if we only speak about
00:54:25.580
Abrahamic faiths, right? So nurture exists because of biology. But let me give you one other important
00:54:33.500
metaphor. This is called the cake metaphor. If I am baking a cake, before I start baking the cake,
00:54:43.180
hang, bear with me, I'm going to come, yeah. Each of the ingredients are separate, right? Here are the
00:54:48.460
eggs, here's the butter, here's the flour, here's the sugar. Once I bake the cake, and it becomes an
00:54:55.520
inextricable mix. If I told you, please point to the eggs, you wouldn't be able to. That's exactly
00:55:02.260
nature-nurture. We are an inextricable melange of our genes and our environment, but nothing in
00:55:10.400
our nurture exists outside of our biology. It exists because of biology. This is what Matt Ridley,
00:55:18.040
the famous evolutionary biologist, said, nurture by nature, right? Got it. Or E.O. Wilson, who
00:55:26.300
recently passed away, he was a Harvard biologist, said that biology holds culture on a leash. The
00:55:33.340
leash could be long, meaning that different cultural traditions can manifest themselves in different
00:55:38.380
ways, but no culture could ever exist that violates biological imperatives. Yeah, you're saying
00:55:44.580
there's a foundation across certain things that just can't be fought. How would you say that the
00:55:50.380
upcoming book, Suicidal Empathy, is going to differ from The Parasitic Mind? That's a great question.
00:55:56.220
So The Parasitic Mind is a narration of what happens to our cognitive system when it is parasitized.
00:56:07.380
So human beings are both a thinking and a feeling animal, right? It's not one or the other, right?
00:56:13.020
So we've evolved a cognitive system, and we've also evolved an emotional system. So I can tell you
00:56:19.280
the reasons why men and women have evolved romantic jealousy, for example. There is an evolutionary
00:56:25.620
biological reason why that toxic response exists, and we can talk about it if you'd like.
00:56:33.180
So in The Parasitic Mind, I'm talking about what happens to human brains, their cognition,
00:56:39.980
when it is parasitized by idea pathogens. I complete the story with Suicidal Empathy by now explaining
00:56:48.300
what happens to your emotional system when it is hijacked by idea parasites.
00:56:54.620
It's very, very interesting. I mean, I know, you know, the Suicidal Empathy, the words speak for
00:56:59.300
itself. I mean, we have people, the most basic things. It's unbelievable.
00:57:02.780
By the way, forgive me for interrupting you. I can't believe how viral it's gone. It almost
00:57:10.040
has me worried that it's gone viral too early before the book comes out, because now I could
00:57:16.640
literally go on social media, and I will see Suicidal Empathy in like 60 languages. It's
00:57:24.600
in the Philippines. It's in Germany. It's in France.
00:57:26.660
So officially in 2026, but I'm trying to best, but if guys like you keep inviting me on these
00:57:36.920
shows, I can't be writing the book, you see? No, no, but seriously, I'm trying to speed it up.
00:57:43.540
One of the reasons why, frankly, I'm very excited this year to be at Northwood University, and I'm
00:57:48.180
not saying this to plug them, is because they've really given me the freedom. They haven't tied me
00:57:53.900
down with a million other responsibilities, and so I'm able to accelerate the pace at which I'm
00:58:00.480
You know, it's fascinating. I mean, the words speak for themselves. It's, you know, at the end of the
00:58:05.100
day, I mean, you could explain it to people just on a very simple level, the concept of suicidal
00:58:11.820
So empathy is a perfectly noble and rational emotion to hold, right? I mean, we are a social
00:58:20.720
species. Therefore, we have to manage these relationships. One of the ways that we manage
00:58:26.080
these relationships is through the mechanism of empathy, right? So if you're hurting, I can empathize
00:58:32.140
with you. I have theory of mind. I could put myself in your shoes and feel what you're feeling,
00:58:38.340
and it is a fundamentally important part of human sociality to have empathy. So the book is not an
00:58:44.560
attack on empathy in all of its form. It's an attack on the misfiring of empathy. When empathy is
00:58:53.000
targeted to the wrong individuals or empathy is hyperactive, then we have problems. And so let me here
00:59:01.160
draw a theoretical analogy. OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, is a psychiatric disorder. But actually,
00:59:12.300
its foundation is perfectly adaptive. Let me explain. The idea of scanning the environment for threats
00:59:20.100
makes evolutionary sense. So for example, if you, when I came here, if you had sneezed in your hand,
00:59:25.900
and I see that you have a cold, and then you shake my hand, I might decide to very quietly go to the
00:59:32.620
bathroom and wash my hands because I don't want to catch your cold. So at that point, that germ
00:59:37.000
contamination fear makes perfect evolutionary and adaptive sense. If on the other hand, that instinct
00:59:44.040
misfires in the way that I spend every day, seven hours washing my hands and scalding hot water,
00:59:52.660
I can't get to work because I'm stuck in this infinite loop, my skin is falling off because I'm
00:59:58.800
stuck in this infinite loop and scalding hot water, then it becomes a dysregulated dysfunction,
01:00:04.560
right? So I take that principle, and I argue that our emotional system can exactly exhibit those
01:00:11.720
misfirings. Empathy is great. It's not so great when we care about the illegal Guatemalan immigrants
01:00:19.720
more than the American vets who lost their legs fighting in this war.
01:00:25.020
In psychology, I mean, there's like the concept of boundaries. It's like you speak to some people
01:00:28.540
and they're like, oh, I want to be so nice to this person, but that person's abusing them. It's like,
01:00:31.600
stop trying to, you know, that's suicidal empathy effectively. You know, like stop sacrificing
01:00:35.900
yourself, you know, at the expense of some, you know, for someone else. I know you discussed it in
01:00:40.540
your previous book, a lot about mating. And specifically in the seventh chapter,
01:00:44.680
you talk a lot about how biology has influenced mating. I recently did a podcast where I basically
01:00:52.220
said, you know, there's obviously a lot of discussion in the Orthodox community where
01:00:55.260
there's a big push for people to get married young. And when people aren't married, you know,
01:01:00.980
naturally there are going to be some people that aren't married. It's a whole big deal.
01:01:03.540
And it became this whole, they refer to it as a crisis, which I've pushed back on personally.
01:01:07.040
I'm like, no, some people don't get married. Sorry. Like not right away. Not sure. Some people don't
01:01:11.340
get married ever actually, but just because someone's not married by 26, it doesn't mean
01:01:15.080
we're in a crisis. It just, anyways. So I was saying, I think one of the reasons why people
01:01:19.840
don't get married is because people don't look at dating as a negotiation. They don't know where
01:01:24.080
they stand on what I refer to as the chessboard, you know? And I was reading in chapter seven
01:01:28.640
and you spoke about this, I believe it was seven or eight.
01:01:31.720
Now, which book are you referring to? Because I've spoken about it in the last book.
01:01:35.640
Consuming Instinct? Consuming Instinct? Yes, I believe.
01:01:38.360
Or the evolution. So I'm trying to think. I mean, in several books I've talked about
01:01:41.960
it. Yes. So what's the exact question so I could focus on it?
01:01:45.680
No, I just, I want to, from your perspective, I'm an evolutionary perspective.
01:01:50.080
Yes, psychological perspective. How do you see, like if you're looking for someone, right?
01:01:56.900
Based on the laws of nature and evolution, how would you see the best way to find someone?
01:02:00.880
So probably the singular topic that's been most studied by evolutionary psychologists are human
01:02:07.840
mating preferences. And the pioneer of that area is someone who wrote, who's a good friend of mine,
01:02:15.840
who wrote the foreword to one of my earlier books. That's why I was wondering if that's
01:02:20.580
what you're referring to. So my 2011 book titled The Consuming Instinct, What Juicy Burgers,
01:02:27.780
Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift-Giving Reveal About Human Nature. So the foreword to that book was
01:02:33.320
written by David Buss, B-U-S-S, who's a professor of psychology at University of Texas, Austin.
01:02:39.160
And so he conducted the seminal studies, and many have conducted more studies since, in the late 80s,
01:02:46.540
where he went, he collected data from around the world, radically different societies, different
01:02:53.420
cultures, to see if there were certain attributes that are exactly the same in terms of what women
01:03:00.320
look for in men and what men look for in women. And perhaps not surprising, there are unbelievable
01:03:07.920
similarities across grossly different cultures. So it's not culture specific. What are some of these?
01:03:16.500
Men are much more likely to place a greater premium on a mate's youth and beauty. And women are much
01:03:26.500
more likely to place a much greater premium on a man's status. Now, status could be judged differently
01:03:36.720
as a function of which culture I'm from. So if I'm in the Hadza tribe in Africa, it might be the number
01:03:43.340
of cattle head I have. If I am in North America, it might be the number of Ivy League degrees I have,
01:03:51.420
or the number of zeros in my back and forth. So the means by which a culture defines status might
01:03:57.980
change. But there is no culture where women have said the following sentence. You ready?
01:04:03.760
I'm looking for a pear-shaped, nasal-voiced, effeminate man who plays video games all day and
01:04:13.540
shows zero ambition. That drives me into a sexual frenzy. That statement has never been uttered in the
01:04:23.600
That's fascinating. That's a great way of putting it. Your humor is awesome. A couple of quick
01:04:29.800
Well, this is unfortunately I need to ask this because of this pod. Your parents are religious?
01:04:35.340
So we come from an Orthodox community, but not Orthodox in the sense that we have the whole
01:04:41.540
Lubavitch thing, but our synagogue growing up in Lebanon was an Orthodox community. Here it's called
01:04:47.880
the Spanish-Portuguese. So technically we're Orthodox. But am I today? No. Is that what you're
01:04:56.420
Yeah. No. I mean, specifically, I know you talk about God. You're not sure. You're officially
01:05:01.200
atheist. I don't know exactly what your current position is.
01:05:03.420
So it depends how we define God. If we define God that He really cares whether I eat prosciutto,
01:05:10.680
then that is a demeaning image in my mind of what God should be. The God of the universe
01:05:16.940
should really not care too much whether I have a prosciutto sandwich. It really minimizes how
01:05:22.380
important He is if He cares about prosciutto. So then by that measure, then I'm godless.
01:05:28.160
If we redefine what God means in more sort of esoteric, vague terms, then I can sign up
01:05:35.040
for it. Am I very Jewish in my identity? I was almost executed for being Jewish. So
01:05:42.920
I'm probably more Jewish than most people alive. So I can be very Jewish without necessarily
01:05:48.860
worrying that if I don't light the Shabbat candles at 422, not 423, because then that's
01:05:55.140
You should come to my house for Shabbat because you'll see me light those at 422. I specifically
01:05:58.960
wanted to ask you though, what's your relationship like with your parents' family based on your
01:06:05.440
direction? You're obviously extremely accomplished, as it goes without saying. So I ask that partially
01:06:11.160
because of my own world. And you also mentioned in the book that some of the dogmatic approaches
01:06:16.220
in your family as, I don't know if you're referring to immediate or extended.
01:06:21.100
Yeah. You're talking as the dogma is relating to religion.
01:06:24.920
Yeah. You talked about, I believe in the beginning of the book, you referred to this.
01:06:28.620
Exactly. So what you're talking about there is, I tell the story of, you know, going to
01:06:33.900
the synagogue in Beirut, what's called Magan Abraham. So we would go to synagogue and I'm
01:06:39.740
an inquisitive kid as I am today. And so I would ask my dad, you know, why are we standing
01:06:46.460
up? Why are we sitting down? Why are we doing the Macarena dance to the left and to the right?
01:06:50.400
And the answer is, shut up and do. And that offended me. That upset me. I was a honey badger
01:06:56.180
back then also as a five-year-old and combative and so on. And so that made me get turned off
01:07:01.900
by this kind of zombified, parasitized, ritualistic thing, right? Now, I can sit down with a rabbi
01:07:10.200
as I have when I was, say, a doctoral student at Cornell. I became very good friends with a
01:07:14.440
hardcore Orthodox rabbi called Rabbi Eli Silberstein. We're still friends today, where we can have
01:07:20.360
really wonderful philosophical conversations. He's engaging my mind, right?
01:07:24.700
I was going to ask you, do you ever learn Talmud in like a real deep way?
01:07:28.340
Not in a deep way, in a very, very shallow way.
01:07:33.520
Sorry for like, I'm just thinking about it. Especially with the way your mind works.
01:07:37.220
I have friends, by the way, that went straight to Harvard, got their BTL, went straight to
01:07:41.460
Harvard and these guys sit and learn Talmud all day. It's a bachelor's in Talmudic law.
01:07:45.600
And these guys are the top guys in their class.
01:07:47.960
Their brains are, they're analytical skills. I grew up very much in this world.
01:07:51.680
It's, if it doesn't go a straight line, there's no making things up. It has to equal out. If it
01:07:56.480
Just for you, I mean, to sort of support what you're saying. In my first book ever, in 2007,
01:08:03.300
I wrote a book. It's a very technical book called The Evolutionary Basis of Consumption.
01:08:08.040
And I quote Maimonides, who, I mean, probably your audience knows who that is, but he was
01:08:17.880
a physician. He was the physician to the sultan at the time. He was a rabbi. He's a philosopher.
01:08:24.620
And he had proposed that there are eight levels of tzedakah, right? Like pious giving and so
01:08:35.220
on. And so he basically, and what I wanted to demonstrate is that even though he wasn't
01:08:41.000
officially by title an evolutionary psychologist, he was an evolutionary psychologist.
01:08:48.260
Yeah. Why? Because he argued that there are eight levels of piety in giving, the highest
01:08:55.860
of which, which is almost never attained, is when the recipient of the altruistic act
01:09:03.040
and the altruist don't know of each other's identity. Because there, there is no social
01:09:09.820
capital to be gained. If I'm doing the act for no other reason than the purity of the act,
01:09:16.140
and I, I stand to not benefit any social capital from anyone because it's completely anonymous
01:09:22.100
both ways, that's really pure. And so I had taken that to demonstrate that even though
01:09:27.280
you may not be a Darwinist by training, we are all Darwinian beings. And here is Maimonides
01:09:32.560
to your point, who was an evolutionary psychologist.
01:09:35.280
So interesting. It's, that's fascinating. Okay. Last thing. Debating between my last question
01:09:42.400
I appreciate the hell out of it. As a scientist, what are your thoughts on, you know, Fauci and
01:09:49.840
his handling of COVID? And I ask this because I know that you talk about the stupidity of
01:09:56.880
Yes. So this idea of settled science is the epitome of a non-scientist. There is no such
01:10:07.140
thing as settled science in science. There are provisional truths, right? So today,
01:10:12.280
we may hold something to be true until someone comes along and they may or may not topple it
01:10:19.480
and falsify it. That's what Karl Popper referred to as the falsification principle. We set up
01:10:24.900
a theory and then everybody comes with their weaponry trying to shoot it down. And if it's
01:10:29.180
still standing, then it looks like it is true. But it is always provisionally true. So there
01:10:34.360
are many intelligent people who propose things that were true 300 years ago that today we know
01:10:39.600
are not true. So what I regret in Fauci's position and all those sort of COVID guys is that they
01:10:46.960
created a world that was no different than the Dark Ages. Don't say that or we will burn you at the
01:10:52.640
stake. Don't say that the sun doesn't revolve around the earth, so to speak. That's what happened
01:10:58.760
with Galileo, right? The church put him under house arrest because he was proposing a cosmic theory
01:11:04.900
where the earth wasn't at the center of the universe, right? Well, that was against the church
01:11:09.900
doctrines and we can't have that. So we're going to either put you under house arrest because you're
01:11:13.920
Galileo. But if you weren't Galileo, we're going to burn you at the stake. Well, Fauci did the exact
01:11:18.380
same reflex, right? So I'll give you a great example. I mentioned earlier Matt Ridley, the evolutionary
01:11:23.700
biologist. His people had written to me. By the way, he was in the House of Lords. He was the Lord in the
01:11:29.880
British Parliament. His people had written to me to tell me that his latest book arguing about the
01:11:38.320
likelihood that the COVID virus had escaped from a Chinese lab, that book was coming out. And it was
01:11:45.560
at the time when you weren't allowed to say that. So I wrote back to them and I said, look, you know
01:11:50.800
that I'm a honey badger and there is nothing that I won't be willing to say, but we need to be
01:11:55.720
non-reckless in our martyr behavior. If we have that conversation and I post it on YouTube,
01:12:03.540
within three seconds of me posting it, it will be removed and likely my channel closed. So it'll
01:12:10.860
serve us zero purpose. And that decision, and they understood it, but that decision always sat
01:12:16.860
bad with me. But it's not because you wouldn't, nothing would, you wouldn't waste the time.
01:12:20.820
Exactly. I'm jumping just to get killed, just to prove that I'm a hero. But so,
01:12:25.720
to answer your question, what I hate about Fauci and all his gangs is that they didn't allow all
01:12:31.540
ideas to be, you know, adjudicated in the arena of, you know, ideas. Now, here is the great cosmic
01:12:40.200
justice and the great irony. Jay Bhattacharia, do you know who that is?
01:12:45.820
He is one of the guys, he's a physician by training and a health economist at Stanford.
01:12:51.880
With two other guys, he wrote the, I think it was called the Barrington Declaration. I can't
01:12:58.200
remember what it was, where he was arguing that many of the positions that we've taken as relating
01:13:02.820
to COVID were ill thought. And, you know, they wanted to fire him from Stanford. He was just
01:13:13.860
But also, I know, but also there's, what just came out is the clear emails of Fauci literally
01:13:19.520
saying, like, shut this guy down, like, without even a look.
01:13:23.060
That guy should be, I mean, I know he probably doesn't have, he should be in prison for the
01:13:26.760
It's crazy. It's unbelievable. And I just saw another story of, you know, the woman who accused
01:13:35.860
What should be the punishment for someone like?
01:13:37.260
So whatever the punishment would have been for them, had they been found guilty, that's
01:13:42.980
what she should get. So if it's 30 years, you go 30 years. What's one of the Ten Commandments?
01:13:49.100
Do not, do not, no, and do not bear false witness.
01:13:52.740
Right? So you're bearing false witness. And even if those guys didn't go to prison, which
01:14:03.640
Trevor Bauer from, I don't know if you're familiar with that story.
01:14:06.200
Same thing. He was accused of, I believe, of sexual assault on the Astros. Big time pitching
01:14:13.160
career ahead of him. He was like the ace. He was like one of the big guys.
01:14:16.900
And his girlfriend's wife accused him. Story totally false.
01:14:22.980
And then it was found out. Total lie. But his career's over. It's just insane.
01:14:28.680
Who's the most, I know you're close with Dr. Jordan Peterson.
01:14:33.260
I want your thoughts on him as well as who's been the most inspirational thinker in my life
01:14:40.200
Well, I love Jordan. He's a great guy. I don't share some of his reverence for Carl Jung. You know,
01:14:48.900
he does all the Jungian stuff. It's a bit of hocus pocus for me. That's one. I don't, I'm not as
01:14:55.280
religiously inclined as he is. But otherwise, he's a lovely human being, very sharp guy. So I have only
01:15:03.800
good things to say about him. Who is the greatest thinker that's influenced me the most? I'll answer
01:15:09.380
that in two ways. At the most fundamental level, it has to be Charles Darwin, because I'm taking
01:15:14.920
the theory of evolution and applying it to the study of the human mind. In a more temporarily
01:15:20.480
close thing, it's a book that launched my career as an evolutionary behavioral scientist. It was my
01:15:28.060
first semester as a doctoral student where I was taking an advanced social psychology course. And the
01:15:35.220
professor, his name is Dennis Regan, about halfway through the semester assigned the book by actually
01:15:41.160
two Canadian-based evolutionary psychologists, husband and wife team called Margot Wilson and
01:15:47.760
Martin Daly. The book was titled Homicide. And it explored patterns of criminality via an evolutionary
01:15:57.500
lens. And in a very, very elegant way with great theoretical parsimony, they were able to explain a
01:16:06.640
bewildering number of universal patterns of crimes. That was my aha moment. I said, okay, well, I'm going
01:16:13.080
to take that evolutionary framework and apply it to study human behavior in general and consumer and
01:16:19.540
economic behavior in particular. Unbelievable. I love this book. I'm so excited. Guys, I mean,
01:16:26.060
it's coming out. I thought it was going to be coming out in like the next six months. I'm working on it.
01:16:29.220
First of all, I'm not joking. Anyone who's watching this, I know they're part of my, from my ilk type of
01:16:32.860
thing. Like, um, parasitic mind, you're not going to be disappointed. This is a great Shabbat read. If you're
01:16:37.560
sitting around and you just ate a whole bunch of chulant and you're hungry, you know, by the way, I went on the
01:16:43.340
lion diet. That's a whole different discussion. You familiar with that? The meat diet? No. The meat diet? Yeah, it's the
01:16:47.940
carnivore diet. Yeah, yeah. Jordan talks about it. I have an autoimmune disease, so I went on it,
01:16:52.260
whatever. And it's helping you? So far, I feel great. Oh, good for you. I haven't been on for that, that long, but
01:16:56.000
so far, I feel great. Um, either way, maybe you'll hear me scream from New York soon, but
01:17:01.200
you'll know it's not so great. Anyways, guys, this is a must buy. First of all, uh, Gadsad on
01:17:06.280
X. X at G-A-D-S-A-A-D. You hit the million follower mark a little bit ago. And if you want to just
01:17:15.760
crack up consistently, the best Twitter feed, uh, suicidal empathy coming out shortly. Elon Musk is
01:17:22.000
busy retweeting you every single day. I mean- Elon Musk is my biggest fan. He loves you. He really
01:17:28.000
does. No, because- And I love him back. Because you're able to pinpoint with absolute
01:17:32.520
perfect accuracy all the things that drive him insane. I mean, obviously, he has his own
01:17:36.340
personal, you know, situations. Anyways, uh, Dr. Saad, thank you so, so much. I'm so honored
01:17:41.960
to be here. Absolutely. I'm, uh, on my way back in a couple hours. Uh, guys, another amazing
01:17:48.320
episode coming next week. I hope you all enjoyed this one. Peace.