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
Harmful content
Misogyny
17
sentences flagged
Toxicity
38
sentences flagged
Hate speech
43
sentences flagged
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
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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
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by hate speech. How do we determine? I feel like a lot of people have differences of opinion on what
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is hate speech and what is free speech. Anything short of a very direct incitement to violence is okay.
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We have to err on the side of caution. Well, on the side of freedom. Yeah, yeah. Okay, on freedom of speech.
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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
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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
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most offensive speech that is imaginable. And maybe you've heard me mention this example before.
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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?
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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,
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right? So I think most people don't have that reflex, because most people want to be kind,
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decent, empathetic people, which is the topic of my next book, Suicidal Empathy. And therefore,
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in the service of being infinitely empathetic, if we murder these foundational principles,
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so be it. At least I could die being an empathetic person.
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Right. But it's, yeah, I mean, nice guys finish last. It's really, there's really a piece to that I was,
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you know, as I, um, by the way, everyone, you should follow, uh, Dr. Saad's Twitter of the
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greatest feeds to date. And the most amazing thing you should know that I realized is that there are
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people who don't pick up on your satire. You want to hear something? Because that's how crazy the
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world is. And you want to hear something? Someone once wrote one of, one of the most profound tweets
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from someone that I've ever seen. He, he said, uh, Dr. Saad has found the singularity point. They
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could never cancel him because they never know what, when he's being straight and when he's being
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satirical. By the way, that's exactly the power of satire. That's why dictators, when they want to
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get rid of the most dangerous people in their society, they don't go after the guys with the big
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muscles, because those are very easy to kill. They go after the guys with the sharp tongues,
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the guys with the spicy pen, because it is those guys that have the true intellectual muscle.
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It's the satirist who can bring me down. It's not the guy who is tall and has big muscles,
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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,
1.00
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
1.00
00:23:50.980
killing people. But there is one particular religion. Not talking about Judaism, right?
0.96
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
1.00
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
0.56
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
1.00
00:29:46.440
single parasitic idea in my book, he is a walking manifestation of it, right? He doesn't say
0.99
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.
0.98
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,
0.92
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
0.94
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...
0.72
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,
1.00
00:34:48.760
into water. And if they swim and don't drown, then this proves that they are witches. But if
0.89
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,
0.66
00:39:11.360
which is any valid criticism of Israel becomes a form of anti-Semitism. And they do us a disservice
0.96
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,
0.97
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.
0.89
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
1.00
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.
1.00
00:43:36.140
So since 9-11, there have been over 45,000 terror attacks committed by Islamic terrorists in nearly
0.90
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
0.99
00:44:28.140
blow people up in Brussels or, see, because the reality is who amongst us, if it weren't for being
0.98
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
1.00
00:44:41.280
straight, direct line from me not seeing Chagall and Picasso and becoming a jihadist, right? But this is not
0.61
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
0.53
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
1.00
00:45:26.760
face, because nothing is more important than to be empathetic to the noble faith, that's ostrich
0.70
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
1.00
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
1.00
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
0.94
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.
1.00
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
1.00
00:54:11.400
irrespective of which religion, right? Orthodox Jews teach their women to be chased, and Catholic
1.00
00:54:20.120
girls are taught to be chased, and Muslim girls are taught to be chased, if we only speak about
1.00
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,
0.99
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
1.00
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
0.87
01:03:00.320
look for in men and what men look for in women. And perhaps not surprising, there are unbelievable
0.85
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
0.79
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
0.87
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
0.99
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?
0.94
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
0.64
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
0.95
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
1.00
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
1.00
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
0.83
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
0.99
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
0.79
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
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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
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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.
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Right? So you're bearing false witness. And even if those guys didn't go to prison, which
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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.
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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.
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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,
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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
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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
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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.