00:00:00.580Professor Gad Saad is a visiting professor and global ambassador at Northwood University.
00:00:05.520He's also the author of both The Parasitic Mind and the upcoming book, Suicidal Empathy.
00:00:10.800And he's the host of The Sad Truth with Dr. Saad.
00:00:14.140What's up, Gad, if I may be so familiar?
00:00:17.700Oh, please. I'm doing great. Congratulations on your continued success.
00:00:23.720I am very happy to see your voice growing, and I look forward to our chat.
00:00:30.000We had a great chat just a few days ago on The Will Kane Show, and I intend to continue to be a place where we have not only debates with people who disagree,
00:00:40.040but deeper dives and fascinating conversations with people that help us with greater understandings on things we might already agree, like you, Dr. Saad.
00:00:47.080I don't normally look to turn to you on a story like the one that is dominating the news over the last 48 hours,
00:00:53.540only because it is both hyper-partisan, very political, and in the minutiae and the details of operations within Washington, D.C.
00:01:02.000But if you've been keeping up, I am curious your reaction to the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg's release today of the quote-unquote war plans.
00:01:12.840Look, the best way I can describe it is to refer to a wonderful book, and it seems as though recently I've been referencing this book often.
00:01:21.820I'm not their publicist. I'm not getting royalties on their book.
00:01:24.660There is a book called The Enigma of Reason by two French psychologists, whereby they argue that our ability to reason did not evolve to seek truth, but rather to win arguments.
00:01:39.780In other words, truth doesn't matter if I can win an argument against Will Cain.
00:01:46.020And so, regrettably, what you're seeing with this Atlantic editor is that he's not beholden to some deontological principle of journalistic integrity.
00:01:55.160He goes at the truth, whether it is the left side or the right side that engages in a behavior.
00:02:01.880Clearly, what he cares about is to make the Republicans look bad.
00:02:05.340And in that sense, your earlier point about hyper-partisanship is exactly that, right?
00:02:33.080I'm sure you're aware, Dr. Satt, of the Hegelian dialect.
00:02:37.180And I was practiced, almost trained in the Hegelian dialect in a way by spending, you know, five years on ESPN's first take, where you're presented with a debate.
00:03:32.900And so in Chapter 7 of The Parasitic Mind, I actually have a whole chapter titled How to Seek Truth.
00:03:40.480And I argue that one very powerful epistemological tool that we can use in seeking truth is to build what I call nomological networks of cumulative evidence.
00:03:50.880Now, that's a mouthful, so let me break it down for you.
00:03:53.240So let's suppose I wanted to demonstrate to you that toy preferences are not socially constructed, as most social scientists argue.
00:04:00.800But rather that there is a universal evolutionary and biological reason why boys prefer certain toys and girls prefer other toys.
00:04:09.300How would I go about doing that, Will?
00:04:10.940Well, I can get you data from other species showing you that vervet monkeys, rhesus monkeys, and chimpanzees exhibit the same sex-specific toy preferences.
00:04:20.300I can get you data from 2,500 years ago, where young children are shown on funerary monuments playing with the exact same toys that your children and mine play with today.
00:04:40.180So what I'm doing here is I offer you distinct lines of evidence, all of which triangulate to making my position apparently a vertical one.
00:04:52.280And so I don't need to engage in emotional incontinence.
00:05:02.340Just to deliver for the audience as well, then you and I will move on to what I think are some interesting conversations off of what you just shared.
00:05:08.140What we learned this morning is that in the signal group chat, as released this morning by Jeffrey Goldberg, is a minute-to-minute sort of gameplay of what would happen in Yemen, strikes on Houthis, as shared by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to basically all top cabinet members.
00:05:34.780And then presumably, inadvertently as well, Jeffrey Goldberg.
00:05:39.560It does say which planes will be used, and it does say what time this will happen.
00:05:43.900It doesn't say who will be struck, and it doesn't say where there will be a strike.
00:05:51.740And I'm in the process of researching this and understanding this, but the bottom line appears to be this.
00:05:57.100Signal is not officially a government-sanctioned channel for highly classified information.
00:06:03.720And then you say, well, was this highly classified information?
00:06:07.600But signal is also used by everyone in government, and that's the reality of the truth because it's a better technology, more portable.
00:06:14.500All the things they have, which we've talked about, like there's one called Sipper, these are not on phones.
00:06:20.100They're not portable, and the ones that are portable are no more encrypted than signal.
00:06:23.540And signal, even according to Jeffrey Goldberg, and you can put this up two-a-days, is considered the gold standard.
00:06:28.120This is what Goldberg wrote some time past.
00:06:30.880He said, signal the gold standard of encrypted messaging.
00:06:34.940So what we're talking about is reality.
00:06:37.100This is how it's treated, and whether or not it's officially the place where it should be used.
00:06:42.840The question is like, could the Russians or Houthis hack it?
00:06:45.320And I see no evidence yet that that's the truth, that they could.
00:06:48.700And then there's the perishable nature of the information.
00:06:51.360I don't know that anything there is actionable.
00:06:52.780If the Russians got it, could they understand what was about to happen, share it with the relevant parties, and somehow, as Congressman Jim Himes, who I got in this debate with, said, we could lose an American fighter.
00:07:20.620And then, finally, is it a mistake that amounts to the type of thing we're seeing today from Capitol Hill and splashed across CNN and the New York Times?
00:07:31.740It's the first time in two months Democrats have been on the front foot and had an issue where they could play offense, and they're taking their opportunity to do so.
00:07:38.220I'll give you a response, and we'll move on, Dr. Saad.
00:07:40.920Well, but I mean, your last statement exactly speaks to what I mentioned earlier about the enigma of reason, right?
00:07:47.620What was the purpose of this editor in sharing this information?
00:07:53.260If it was because there is some deontological pursuit of truth, then more power to him.
00:07:58.900But we know that that's not true, because if he was so concerned about the safety of Americans, then he would have been the first one writing editorial pieces when you had a corpse who was president of the United States for four years, right?
00:08:11.180But that's not what he's concerned about.
00:08:13.080So you know for a fact that the reason why he shared this story is because he knew that it would make his political enemies look bad.
00:08:21.660That's not how a journalist should behave, and that's about it.
00:08:25.820Or not just the incapacity of Joe Biden, if he had shown the same level of outrage over the 13 Marines killed over a mistake in Afghanistan, or if he showed the same level of outrage over General Mark Milley intentionally sharing information with the CCP, or if he showed the same level of outrage over a member of Congress.
00:08:43.400Excuse me for interrupting, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to speak over you, or having open borders where 15, 20 million people have come into the country, right?
00:08:52.500So if your concern is a objective pursuit of safety, then all of those stories should have been covered by him.
00:09:01.460But if you're selective and you're outraged, then we know that you are a charlatan.
00:09:05.120Right. And as I said yesterday, I don't want to hear from Jeffrey Toobin, who is well-known to abuse internet communication channels and abuse himself.
00:09:15.760Or I don't want to hear from Eric Swalwell, who slept with a Chinese spy.
00:09:19.920So spare me your selective and overhyped outrage.
00:09:24.180Okay, let's go back to that thing you were just using as an example, men's and women's toys.
00:09:29.320So I find there's increasing evidence coming out about this that I think is fascinating.
00:09:34.100First of all, about a week ago, there was polling that showed where we stand as a society in support of Donald Trump versus Democrats.
00:09:40.800And there is one demographic group that stands out and stands alone, and that is educated white women.
00:09:47.840Educated white women are over-indexed hugely to anti-Trump, pro-Democrat, and now what we're seeing as well is very accepting or endorsement of wokeism.
00:10:00.540And I think it's fascinating, Dr. Saad.
00:10:06.180I mean, I want to talk about it through the lens of gender, and I think it primarily is gender, but there is the education factor and also the marital status factor and the race factor.
00:10:17.100Like, it is single-educated white women that index the most apart from the rest of society.
00:10:24.320Yes, and I mentioned this to your producer prior to coming on the show when he shared with me what we were likely to talk about.
00:10:33.080I said, well, coincidentally, the story that you're just raising now, sex differences and, you know, woke susceptibility, is something that I was exactly writing about yesterday in my forthcoming book on suicidal empathy.
00:10:45.880Because I'm trying to explain what is it that drives, for example, women in Europe to stand as, you know, invaders come in from foreign cultures with a placard that says, refugees, welcome.
00:10:59.160You never see guys that look like Pete Hegseth or that look like Will Kane holding those placards.
00:11:05.060You usually see completely clueless, lobotomized, ultra-liberal white women saying, refugees, welcome.
00:11:12.060Now, there are several reasons for that sex difference, and from an evolutionary perspective, since I'm an evolutionary behavioral scientist, look, the research is unequivocal that women score higher on empathy throughout the life cycle trajectory of a human being.
00:11:29.800So, from a very young age, you see little girls exhibiting, and there are various forms of empathy.
00:11:34.840There's cognitive empathy, there's cognitive empathy, there's affective empathy, and women do show greater empathy, and we could talk about the evolutionary reason for that, but that makes them more prone to then be parasitized by the misfiring of the empathy module, hence suicidal empathy, right?
00:11:52.260And so, it makes perfect sense that not only would women be more likely to succumb to parasitic ideas, hence wokeism, but then to succumb to an orgiastic, you know, miscalibrated form of empathy, which I call suicidal empathy.
00:12:11.180You know, this ties into something I've been thinking about since over the weekend.
00:12:14.820Actually, it's been going on in my mind for more than a weekend, but I spent a lot of time this weekend reading, and I want the audience and you to understand that when I describe what I'm about to describe, I'm actually not passing judgment.
00:12:26.700I'm not giving moral endorsement nor moral condemnation.
00:12:29.860I'm simply noticing, and noticing is nothing more than having eyes, ears, and a critical mind.
00:12:36.080What has happened in modern society, and you're the perfect guy to talk about this with, because you think of, through evolutionary psychology in broad terms, what's happened over the last, let's call it 200 years.
00:12:54.560In civilizational evolution is nothing short of revolutionary, and it requires us to understand that there's a long history of humanity, thousands and thousands of years of organizing societies.
00:13:06.080And, of course, I think we are at the apex, so there is no doubt we have progressed in a positive manner, but it is still no less revolutionary.
00:13:14.780And I could put that, Dr. Satt, on a number of levels, the creation of the nation state, the revolutionary era of the late 1700s into the early 1800s, all the way through the beginning of the 1900s, actually, where you had the move towards ideology.
00:13:29.900We created nations now not under kings but under ideologies of people believing we should organize it in certain ways, and there was different experiments in that, French Revolution, Soviet Revolution, American Revolution.
00:13:41.660Even, like, women voting, which is now a little over 100 years old, is a revolutionary concept in the scope of humanity, meaning we've been doing it for 100 years, but we've been on this planet for thousands and thousands of years.
00:14:16.240And where this all goes, I mean, we're kind of like in the it's balls in the air moment.
00:14:22.620You know, like, if you and I were alive in 1650, we would have a reasonable expectation that society was going to look relatively similar to the way it looked in, you know, 1050.
00:14:35.060There are more similarities between that 500-year span than in the 100-year span that we have just been experiencing.
00:15:02.720Well, to your point, I often argue and remind people that some of the staunchest defenders of the Western tradition turn out to be immigrants who don't come from the Western tradition.
00:15:17.360Because to your point, we've sampled from the full buffet of possible societies.
00:15:24.080And the society that the United States has built is exactly, as you said, an anomalous one.
00:15:31.140It's a little bleep within the greater context of human history.
00:15:35.140And so most Westerners, most Americans come to the world thinking that this is the default value.
00:15:41.800This is what – this is what every – how it is everywhere.
00:15:44.520But then it takes people like me, it takes people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali to say, hey, guys, don't think that this is the default value.
00:15:53.220As a matter of fact, it takes very little for the human reflex to erase what you have in the West.
00:16:00.640And this is exactly why, you know, I don't have the exact quote in front of me when Ronald Reagan said, you know, every generation, you know, there are new enemies of freedom that are coming to take your freedoms away and you have to be vigilant.
00:16:12.420That exactly speaks to that reflex, which is the default value of the organization of human societies is for someone telling the rest of us what to do and feel.
00:16:25.060This is why it was so easy for everybody to become sheep during COVID because we were returning to the literal state of things.
00:16:43.420It's, you know, I am fascinated also as well right now with the concept of frame, which I think this whole signal story is about as well, how it was framed.
00:16:51.780It was framed for us originally as war plans were leaked to me two hours ahead of time.
00:18:09.260And by the way, the fact that you said the existing society that's been built in the United States is inherently superior to other societies is a terrible no-no in the context of academia, right?
00:18:26.360Cultural relativism, which is one of the dreadful parasitic ideas that I discuss in The Parasitic Mind, says that no, Will Cain, who are you to judge other societies using your standards?
00:18:39.160You're engaging in cultural imperialism.
00:18:41.920If other societies wish to organize themselves –
00:19:00.360Thank God he's no longer prime minister, although the new prime minister is maybe not much better.
00:19:06.160But when Justin Trudeau was a member of parliament, so he hadn't yet become prime minister, the former conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, had put out a statement saying that in Canada we will not tolerate barbaric practices such as honor killings, child brides, and female genital mutilation.
00:19:28.140And then Justin Trudeau, in his substitute drama teacher, absurd way, got on television.
00:19:34.800He wasn't angry by the barbaric practices.
00:19:38.540He was angry that Stephen Harper referred to them as barbaric practices, right?
00:19:44.360So what he was doing there is he was intimating the reflex of cultural relativism.
00:19:50.800Who are you to judge the practices of noble Muslims if they decide that they want to cut off the clitoris as a five-year-old girl?
00:20:33.660Here in Texas, not 20 miles from where I am sitting today, in a suburb of Dallas, north of Dallas, there's a proposal for a Muslim community development.
00:20:45.320I think it's like – I don't know if it's 1,000 acres or 1,000 homes, but it's a development like any other.
00:20:51.340Like how you – a planned development.
00:20:52.980But the planned development will be centered around a mosque, and it will be marketed towards and catered towards in their community development Muslims.
00:21:00.680Now, the governor of Texas, the attorney general of Texas are highly concerned that this is going to be a circumvent, a runaround around civil law, that they will, within their community, be using Sharia law, which is not cool, not good, and so forth.
00:21:21.540This, though, runs – and by the way, I think you and I should talk about the fact that we've seen these experiments play out to some extent in places like outside of London and outside of Paris.
00:21:29.860And the really negative consequences for Western civilization in those places.
00:21:36.380But on the other hand, I do feel like in America we endorse the idea of – what is it?
00:21:44.700Self – you know, self-determination, picking your community, organizing around.
00:21:51.080Like if Mennonites want to create a community in Pennsylvania, okay, create a community of Mennonites.
00:21:56.780Well, same thing of any other minority group.
00:22:01.300So why should this one, even if we know the practical real-world outcomes of it, be treated differently than any other self-selecting group?
00:22:34.560The wild lion in this African savannah is a feline, but I will lay down and cuddle with Fido the cat, but I won't lay down and cuddle with the wild lion, even though they're both called felines.
00:22:49.220So the Mennonites are a religion, the Amish are a religion, Orthodox Jews are a religion, Jains are a religion, and Islam is a religion.
00:23:00.420They are not equal in their capacity to assimilate in a host society, right?
00:23:07.100The fact that they are all called religions doesn't mean that they have equal likelihood of, say, committing terror acts.
00:23:14.600The Jains are such pacifists that when they walk on the street, they actually walk with a broom and they sweep the floor, lest they might inadvertently, you know, squash an ant.
00:23:28.680Therefore, an extremist Jain is an extremist in his pacifism.
00:23:34.440That's not quite the same thing for Islam.
00:23:37.100Islam has certain edicts that are perfectly antithetical to Western principles.
00:23:45.000Now, that doesn't mean that every Muslim is a mean person.
00:23:48.540There are nice Muslims and mean Muslims, just like there are nice Jews and mean Jews.
00:23:52.440But does Islam contain tenets that are perfectly seditious to the founding principles of the United States?
00:24:01.580And so, to your point, we've seen what happens when you build slowly Sharia no-go zones in Sweden, in Italy, in France, in Britain, right?
00:24:13.740But you have to do it slowly, you know, so that the greater society doesn't go up in arms, right?
00:24:21.020So, let me give you an example from marketing.
00:24:22.760There is something in marketing called the just noticeable difference.
00:24:26.480So, let's say you are a chocolate-making company and you want to increase the price of your candy bar.
00:24:33.300Well, you can't increase the price because people are attuned to the price.
00:24:36.900So, what you will do is you'll reduce the weight of the candy bar and you'll reduce it such that it falls below the just noticeable difference, right?
00:24:47.140So, most people can't tell the difference between a 100-gram candy bar and a 95-gram candy bar.
00:24:52.740So, I can slip the fact that I've reduced it from 100 to 95 grams without most consumers noticing.
00:24:59.780That's how Islam operates when it is in the minority.
00:25:27.100And even if we submit that the tenets of Islam separate it from other religions, if we submit that, okay, what does that – but still in America, what does that – look, I know you're Canadian.
00:25:41.000I mean we have a constitution that protects freedom of religion, freedom of association.
00:25:46.760I mean I don't know what that does for us.
00:25:50.080I mean what that does at the front end is I think it opens up a really real conversation about migration and immigration and who you open your country to.
00:25:59.000We've always had quotas and we've always been careful about assimilation.
00:29:13.420If at the mosque that you're saying they're allowed to congregate, a lot of the prayers are in an extraordinarily direct manner inciting violence against the kuffar,
00:29:28.620which is a derogatory term for the non-Muslim.
00:29:31.060Is that protected because it's happening in a mosque and it's the free expression of my religion?
00:29:37.320Or it is not permitted because it is a direct incitement against those dirty Jews?
00:29:46.060I don't think religion would preclude you from a direct incitement of violence.
00:29:48.940I will send you clips of what is being prayed at at a whole bunch of mosques, including some that are not too far from where I'm speaking to you right now in Montreal.
00:29:59.040And the reflex is precisely to your point, Will, that we can't really do anything because that's happening in a mosque.