Things That Are Pissing Me Off (Part II) - Academic Cowardice (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_657)
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Summary
In this episode, my son joins me to talk about the things that are pissing me off in academia, and how we should all be kinder to each other, and to the people who are trying to do the most they can to be kind.
Transcript
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Today, I have a guest with me. I have my young son who said, hey, I'll come and hang out with
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you. Do you want to say hello, son? Hello. Hi, everyone. Hey, everyone. Hey, look, you're hearing
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my son. Hey, son, why don't you tell who's the greatest dad who's ever existed? Who is that?
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You. There you go. There you go. This was not at all planned. He was not answering this under any
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duress. He's answering truthfully. All right. He may later ask me a question. He just wants to
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hang out to see how these things are done. Maybe one day he will become an even bigger professor
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and even more famous. Who knows? Maybe. But any good parent only wishes for their children to
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surpass them. Otherwise, they're malignant narcissists. So there you go. Okay. So today,
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what I wanted to talk about last week, I did a things that are pissing me off. And at the time,
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I've now posted it also on my YouTube channel and posted it on my podcast, but it's also still
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available on, you know, on X. If you go to the highlights, you could see it's still there. The
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recording is up. I talked about three things that pissed me off last week in case you had missed it.
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So this whole idea of misinformation versus disinformation and how there should be a czar,
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a governmental czar that tells us what is right and what is wrong and what is veridical and what
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is not and what I think of such idiocy. Then I talked about the game Six Degrees of Jew, whereby
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the Moscow attack in this case was, you know, really the Mossad and the Jews who did it.
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And then number three that pissed me off is the basic, they're Ebola, basically the three late
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night hosts, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, and Stephen Colbert, and just how painfully unfunny they
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are. And then number four, I talked about the upcoming election between Trump and Biden and things
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that are pissing me off there. And again, I remind you that I'm Canadian, so I don't have a dog in
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that fight. And so if I weigh in, it's because I'm doing so from 30,000 feet up. I really,
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as I said, I have no bones to pick with either parties. I just call it as I see it. Today,
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what I want to talk about things that are pissing me off. Well, obviously, it's something that's been
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pissing me off for 30 years, because I've been a professor for 30 years. Actually, this June,
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I will be celebrating my 30th year. As a matter of fact, June 21st, 1994. So in a few months,
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it'll be 30 years that I defended my doctoral dissertation at Cornell. And so of course,
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I saw all kinds of craziness in academia, which of course, I've been warning about for decades,
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resulting in my writing The Parasitic Mind. But of course, the mind viruses that I thought I had
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offered a vaccine for have not been completely eradicated. We're not yet at the level of polio
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eradication or smallpox eradication. So we still need to do a lot of work. So today, I want to talk
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about things that are pissing me off in academia, with a bit of a twist. The idea of sort of this
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orgiastic calculus of niceness, right? I'm okay, you're okay. How are your feelings? Let's all be
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nice. Let's all be kind. Let's all be tolerant. Let's all be compassionate. Which of course, in no way
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am I arguing that people should not be kind as a default value. In no way am I arguing that people
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should be mean as a way of being. But when it comes to academia, the fundamental thing that
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you're trying to optimize, as I explained in The Parasitic Mind, is the pursuit of truth,
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the discovery of knowledge, the dissemination of knowledge. To the extent that some of that
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might hurt someone's feelings, so be it. So let me first begin, because I want to first begin with
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some of this weakness that I'm seeing in academia. So I'll give you an example. So first, I'll talk
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about some of the weakness in terms of how we're training students, and then I'll discuss it in a
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broader sense. So as you probably know, any university has an office of disabilities, that
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you know, if students have real disabilities, of course, they should be accommodated, and that's
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perfectly fine, and that makes perfect sense. Now, it turns out very much like how until 15 minutes ago,
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you know, there had been one out of 10,000 people who were transgender, and suddenly there was a social
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contagion. By the way, the person who published a paper in Plus One from Brown University, if you
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remember, she got into a lot, she's a pediatrician, I think, by training, if I'm not mistaken, and she
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got into a lot of trouble because she argued that the transgender craze was a social contagion. That
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doesn't mean that transgender people don't exist. That doesn't mean that transgender people don't
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have a right to live free of bigotry. But when you go from one out of 10,000 people who are
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transgender to every second person in my kid's classroom is transgender, then we've got a problem
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Houston. It's a bunch of bullshit, okay? And so the Office of Disability, my first 20-some years as a
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professor, I almost had no student who registered with the Office of Disability, right? Which made sense
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because it should be a very small number. And then over the past four or five years, probably around 10% of
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my students have special accommodations under the Office of Disability. So something happened in the last
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five, six years, whereby everyone is now disabled. That's the default value. So for example, I suffer from
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exam anxiety. Therefore, I am disabled. Therefore, I need 17 times more time than someone who doesn't
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have exam anxiety. Oh, exam anxiety? It's called life. Everyone who goes into an exam, I studied in
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university for 10 years. I knew my stuff. I was a top student. I got butterflies before some exams because
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you're worried. Am I going to do well? Am I not going to do well? But you overcome it. But now, for example,
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when we went back after COVID finished and we went back to our first departmental meeting
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and, you know, we were going around the faculty, here are some of the things that professors were
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saying. Well, the students since COVID are simply too stressed to be able to sit through an entire
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lecture. You see that? So some of us went through the Lebanese Civil War where we didn't know every
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every second of every day whether this was going to be our last. And other students have an equal
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difficulty, which is they simply can't sit still because COVID. So let's find a way to accommodate them
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by maybe lecturing less or maybe we should do jumping jacks while lecturing. That way, they can, you know,
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they could be entertained. Then we also had students who had lost the ability to take notes. So they had
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taking notes anxiety. So we had to, you know, maybe accommodate that. Then there was, you know,
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taking exam anxiety and so on and so forth. And instead of saying, hey, toughen up a bit.
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It's part of life. No, it's try to find ways to coddle, to nurture, to love and be kindful. So what I
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want to do is read you a long section. This is from page, it starts on page 154 of the, my latest book,
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the book on happiness. So I have a chapter where I talk about resilience and the anti-fragility to
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failure. You have to be anti-fragile when it comes to failure, right? I mean, most of the successful
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people that you know have at some point failed, right? And them being champion is the fact that they
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overcome the failures and then they end up coming on top. And so I have a section titled
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baptism by fire as a form of anti-fragility. And it's very relevant to our conversation here because
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I'm going to, I mean, bear with me. It's going to be a while. I'm going to read it. Maybe it'll take
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about five, 10 minutes. But towards the end, I recount a story that happened to me when I was a doctoral
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student at Cornell and how my professors treated me. And by today's standards, I should be filing,
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you know, an abuse case against them because they were so mean and tough to me. All right,
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so here we go. So I'm reading now verbatim till the end of the section. So this is from page 154
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of the sad truth about happiness, which I truly hope that you'd get it. It really is a very
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uplifting, positive, fun book. It's a combination of ancient wisdoms regarding good life coupled,
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backed up with contemporary science, and then backed up, or if you'd like, peppered with my
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personal stories, my personal trajectory of happiness. So it's a really, really fun book.
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Let me ask my son how I'm doing so far. How am I doing, son?
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Yeah, he seems he's got that sort of preteen, you're boring, dad. Am I getting that? What's
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Most worthy endeavors in life, be it completing medical school, running a marathon, or starting a
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new business, require persistence and focus. The late basketball great Kobe Bryant coined the term
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mumba mentality, which he explained as follows. Hard work outweighs talent every time. Mumba
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mentality is about 4 a.m. workouts, doing more than the next guy, and then trusting in the work you've
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put in when it's time to perform. Without studying preparation and practice, you're leaving the
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outcome to fate. I don't do fate, close quote. So that's Kobe Bryant with his mumba mentality. Let's
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go on. Psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth has pioneered the study of the grit trait, which captures this
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form of stick-to-itiveness. While grit is correlated with various achievement outcomes, such as academic
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performance, it has a more general positive effect on happiness and well-being, and this holds true
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across wildly disparate cultures. Part of possessing grit is the capacity to be resilient in overcoming
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obstacles as you seek to achieve your goals. While resilience is in part shaped by an individual's
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personality, some forms of childhood adversity foster resilience, which may result in beneficial
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outcomes. In the same way that one's immune system needs to be challenged during childhood for optimal
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functioning, overcoming psychological stressors is a key feature of peak functioning. You cannot lead a
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maximally enriching life if you are never challenged. Developing a proper response to life stressors is a
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central feature of resilience. I have experienced some of the worst imaginable childhood adversity growing up
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during the Lebanese Civil War, but those negative experiences have allowed me to develop great
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resilience in tackling the more mundane challenges of my life in Canada and the United States. Let's keep going.
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Rigorous training in specific skills and in how to respond to challenging situations under stress
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is part of many jobs, especially in the military. Pilots go through demanding flight training.
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Those who want to be army rangers or navy seals are compelled to push their minds and bodies to the
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limit. But there are other occupations and professions that metaphorically have grown flabby and weak.
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That would include, I'm afraid, higher education and my academic colleagues. All those tepid hyper-specialists
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who are too afraid to utter one word that might offend academic superiors, militant feminism,
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feminists, the pronoun Taliban, or the woke mafia. Knowledge be damned. In the last few years,
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I have noticed that this weak mindset permeates all layers of academia, but especially when interviewing
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prospective hires for assistant professorships. When I was a doctoral student at Cornell University,
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young academics had their first big baptism by fire moment when they were invited
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as part of a departmental speaker series to give a lecture from their developing doctoral dissertation.
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This was a very intimidating platform from which to share one's research because the audience
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did not suffer fools gladly and professors prepared senior doctoral students for the eventual grilling they
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would face when seeking assistant professorships at elite universities.
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I faced additional anti-fragility obstacles as I made my way through my PhD.
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Doctoral students at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell had to pass the A exam,
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which was made up of two parts. One, professors serving on a student's PhD dissertation committee could
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ask questions about his specific area of expertise. While many doctoral students had a supervisor and two
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additional committee members, my doctoral committee was composed of four outstanding scholars.
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Drs. J. Edward Russo, who's a cognitive psychologist, Douglas Stamen, who's an advertising researcher,
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Ali Hadi, who's a world-renowned statistician, and Alberto Segre, who is a computer scientist.
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So, number two, once the doctoral student presented his dissertation proposal, the committee members would
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ask pointed questions about the prospective research. No question was out of bounds as the student had to
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demonstrate complete mastery of his subject and his proposed dissertation research. As I presented my
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dissertation proposal on that fateful day, I noticed that my committee members were not exuding an aura of
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self-friendliness. The tone was set by my doctoral supervisor, who began the barrage of tough questions.
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As I fielded his first question, he took an indignant deep breath and retorted, quote,
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I'm going to ask the question a second time, hoping that maybe this time you'll understand it, close quote.
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And we're off. When it came time for Professor Hadi, a world-renowned statistician, to ask his
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questions, he started off by saying, I know that I told you that I would not ask you detailed technical
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statistical questions. Well, I lied, close quote. He then proceeded to ask me a very detailed technical
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question, which, because I was well prepared, I managed to answer. Once the professors had gone through
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several rounds of very probing and difficult questions, I was asked to step outside the room
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as they deliberated my fate. I asked my supervisor, should I stand by the door outside the room? He
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stared at me coldly and responded, stand far enough that you cannot hear us. As I stood outside the room,
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I felt somewhat frazzled. I thought I had answered all the questions properly, and I certainly knew my material.
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But based on the harsh tone of some of the questions, I felt quite nervous. After what seemed like an
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interminable wait, the door swung wide open, and my doctoral supervisor walked toward me with a full
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smile. I was puzzled and a little unhappy, and asked him what was going on. So he answers, quote,
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Oh, this was some good old-fashioned Ivy League butt-kicking, he said. It will make a man out of you.
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We are trying to make sure that you can handle yourself when you go out on the campus visits,
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close quote. As I made my way back into the examination room, the other committee members
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were all smiling and congratulatory. The tense environment had dissipated into the usual warmth
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of their supportive mentorship. Let me just go on. I'm almost done. Two more paragraphs. Once doctoral
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students defend their dissertation proposals, they send application packets to universities,
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hoping to land a job. The first round of interviews is usually held at the annual academic
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conference of their discipline. In my case, as previously mentioned, I had around 25 scheduled
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interviews. The interviewers required that one present one's dissertation work in a cogent and
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succinct manner. In preparation for that eventuality, my doctoral supervisor had me prepare a one-page
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summary of my dissertation, which I excitedly agreed to do. He had me rewrite it several times,
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and in one instance, he feigned falling asleep before telling me, quote, Now go back and rewrite this
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so I don't fall asleep reading the first sentence, close quote. Throughout this process I became deeply
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indebted to my great mentors for testing my resilience and mental toughness. They did not
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coddle me. They were not concerned with sparing my feelings. They did not give me a participation
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trophy for showing up. They expected great things of me, and accordingly they made sure to test my
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anti-fragility. For that I am eternally grateful to them. Incidentally, I recently found out
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that my doctoral supervisor is retiring from Cornell. He has since retired. Several of his former
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doctoral students, including yours truly, joined him for a commemorative get-together. Expressing
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gratitude is not only polite, but also another component of a good and happy life. And by the way,
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I'm going next week back to Cornell, where I'll be giving two talks at my alma mater, and I think
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my former doctoral supervisor and several of my former professors will be there, so it'll be great.
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Now, why do I tell that story? Because I'm contextualizing the kind of training I had in my PhD,
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incredibly rigorous and, you know, hardcore PhD at Cornell, with some of the stuff that I see today
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with students, where, you know, I've had administrator call me asking, you know, why my grades and my
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graduate course were the way they were? Because, you know, it's expected that everybody receives an A.
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Well, no. There is this little thing called a bell curve. The bell curve means some people do extremely
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well, most people are in the middle, and some people do poorly. That's why it's called the bell curve,
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the normal distribution. So again, by the way, in the parasitic mind, I talk about how 30, 40 years ago,
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the average grade in university was a C, as you would expect it. In many universities today,
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the average grade is an A. Think about it for a second. Let me repeat. This is, by the way,
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a Duke professor who did that analysis. The average grade is an A. What does that mean then? Nothing.
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Incredible scamming of great inflation, but at least you're being kind, you're being empathetic,
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you're being compassionate, you're being sweet, you're being loving. You're not being mean like
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Professor Saad and his former mentors. All right, so now having said that, I'm done with reading
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from the first, from the sad truth about happiness. So I wanted to now talk a bit about
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some of the cowardice. As I mentioned in the alert regarding this X spaces, I said that zoologists
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have discovered a new species. It's called academicus invertebrus castrati, which means what? Academics
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are largely invertebrates, and they're castrated, right? You know the expression, grow a spine.
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You know the expression, grow a pair. It means what? Have dignity, have fortitude, defend the truth,
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say things that might be hurtful to someone. That's what an intellectual should do, right? I've talked
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about cowardice as the eighth deadly sin, right? You all have heard the seven deadly sin, the cardinal sins,
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of which, by the way, pride is the supra-sin, because pride, in this sense meaning self-love,
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is the sin from which all other sins flow out of. Well, I have always argued that there should be
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an eighth sin called cowardice. Now, some people might argue that cowardice can fit within sloth,
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being a sloth, or in the old term was avarice. But in any case, cowardice is why we are where we are
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in the West, right? Until 15 minutes ago, history was defined as follows. There is one tribe called A.
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There is a river separating that tribe from tribe B. Tribe B has its site on some resources that tribe A
00:22:18.720
has, and vice versa. They either peacefully coexist, not infringing on each other, or at some point,
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one of the two tribes says, hey, I think I'd like to have access to your water, to your animal protein,
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to your beautiful women. Let's go to war. And then we fight. But the understanding is that the members of
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both tribes are willing to fight to protect what's theirs. Yes? That's called history. Every single
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thing in history is defined by that universal law. The West has decided that it no longer abides by that
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historical and evolutionary imperative. It's basically said, no, we open the door to you,
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you do what you want to us, you destroy our society, you do anything to any of us. And that demonstrates
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that we are virtuous, that we are compassionate, that we are tolerant, that we are kind, that we are
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empathetic, right? And that orgiastic faux empathy trickles down to academia, where the key
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way to act as an academic... By the way, it's not as though I go to academic settings and I start swearing
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and getting drunk and throwing up all over the place. I'm very professorial. I speak with probably a lexicon
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that is more than 10 professors combined. So it's not as though I can't be professorial. But that also doesn't
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mean that I always play nice when it comes to speaking the truth. But it turns out, for example,
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that at my university, that's very frowned upon. Because there are complaints that are consistently
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lodged against me. Because, you know, I say very dangerous and mean things like men can't menstruate.
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That makes me transphobic. I might say things like, well, maybe Islam might be more prone to violence
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than, say, Jainism. The Jains, when they're walking, they're such pacifists that they walk with a broom
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sweeping the floor because lest they might step on an ant inadvertently. So the tenets of their religion,
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the Jains, is such that you can genuinely say that the canonical content of their religion
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is one of pacifism. Now, if I say, well, Islam is not quite so. And here is 1400 years of data
00:25:00.180
that supports that, as I explained in chapter 7 of the Parasitic Mind, well, then there are complaints
00:25:06.860
filed against me at my university. And I am so mean and bigoted. If I say that when it comes
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to human beings, Charles Darwin was right in saying that sexual selection presumes that there are two
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phenotypes called male and female, well, that's very mean. That's very anti-scientific of me. Because
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we now know that there are 873 genders and maybe 376 biological sexes, right? So therefore, why don't
00:25:38.380
you shut your mouth, Gad Saad, and just play nice? And I explain to people at my university that I don't
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go out of my way to be mean to anybody. I'm actually very measured in my tone. What I do do is never
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modulate the positions I take in the pursuit of sparing someone's feelings. My main job as an
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intellectual as a professor is to create knowledge, disseminate knowledge, and defend the truth.
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That's why my message has resonated with millions of people. So it pisses me off to no end that I can
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be getting chastised by people, by academics, because, you know, why can't you just play nice? By the way,
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several years ago, and my son is sitting here with me because he was with me, we were walking and we
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were accosted by a person who threatened me in front of my son. When I went to the police to report
00:26:45.120
the case, you know what the police said to me? Well, maybe you shouldn't be speaking on these difficult
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subjects, and then you wouldn't get threatened, which, by the way, that's what I was told at my
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university. Imagine how devastatingly chilling that is. And I analogized it as follows recently in a
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conversation with an administrator. We would all be very angry if a judge said to a woman who had been
00:27:17.440
raped, hey, maybe you should consider not wearing such sexy clothes, and then you wouldn't get the
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attention of men. We would find that repulsive, correctly so, yes? That would be called victim
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blaming. But imagine now, if I speak out, for example, I spoke out about the horrors of the Hamas
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attack, because, you know, I have tons of family in Israel, that triggered a lot of complaints against
00:27:46.520
me at Concordia, because it doesn't make sense for the Jewish guy who escaped the Middle East, who has
00:27:52.700
tons of family in Israel, which he has to call to make sure they weren't killed and raped, for him to
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be upset about what happened on October 7th. That's simply too Islamophobic. I should only be concerned
00:28:06.840
about what the IDF is doing to the noble, peaceful Palestinians. That's not the kind of world we want to
00:28:16.380
be living in, right? You want to criticize Judaism? Go at it. All you want. You want to say that
00:28:24.560
circumcision is a bunch of crock, and that Judaism prescribes this, and it's nonsense? Go for it. It's
00:28:31.120
called a free country. You want to deny the Holocaust, which is the most insulting thing in the world?
00:28:37.300
Go for it. The only thing you can't do is engage in direct incitement to violence. So why is it that I can
00:28:44.780
withstand the fact that people could attack me in endless ways? But apparently, I have to field a
00:28:52.160
thousand different complaints, because boo-hoo-hoo, I demonstrated... Oh, by the way, here's another one
00:28:57.880
that led to a lot of complaints against me. I shared a histogram from the Nobel Foundation,
00:29:07.780
the Nobel Prize Foundation. So this is... I took a screenshot from the Nobel Foundation that was
00:29:15.540
showing the breakdown of who's won Nobel Prizes, you know, men versus women, different countries,
00:29:21.140
so on. One of the figures was Jews make up 0.2% of the world, and they have won a quarter of Nobel
00:29:29.760
Nobel Prizes, and that was contrasted to the noble faith, where they constitute about one-fourth of
00:29:39.040
humanity, and they've won four Nobel Prizes. So the fact that I shared the histogram as posted
00:29:50.820
by the Nobel Prizes, my university didn't say, we stand unequivocally with Professor Saad. We are proud
00:30:05.620
of what Professor Saad does. It's more, why are you such a troublemaker? That's not what you want
00:30:13.720
from academia. Okay, that's... And by the way, I'm only speaking about my university, because that's
00:30:19.720
where I work, but believe me, this is happening at every single university. And of course, most
00:30:25.340
colleagues don't have my personality, don't have my personhood. Therefore, they say, yeah, okay,
00:30:33.960
I'll keep quiet. Of course, they'll write me letters saying, oh my god, I wish I could speak. I can't
00:30:39.820
take it. I'm leaving academia. I just finished my PhD. I'm not going to go into academia. But then I
00:30:45.780
get the administrators telling me, hey, can you just be quiet and stop this stuff? Not, you're a hero.
00:30:54.260
That's not what they're saying. So now let me mention a few other little stories.
00:31:00.700
There was a Harvard professor who reached out to me, or his publicist reached out to me.
00:31:05.980
He's a Turing Award winner. Turing, Alan Turing, is a brilliant, one of the most brilliant
00:31:15.600
mathematicians you could ever come across. I, as you know, I studied mathematics and computer science.
00:31:22.580
I took a course in formal languages where we learned about Turing machines and formal languages.
00:31:27.380
It's mind-blowing. It's almost impossible to imagine that a human mind can think at such a level. It
00:31:35.340
almost borders on the religious, how brilliant he is. Well, Turing, by the way,
00:31:40.940
faced incredible homophobia in Britain in the last century, in the 40s. In any case,
00:31:50.920
the Turing Award is granted, is akin to winning the Nobel Prize. It's granted in, you know,
00:31:56.400
applied mathematics, computer science, and so on. So the gentleman who was coming on my show,
00:32:00.720
who asked to come on my show because he had a book coming out, is a Turing Award winner who's a senior
00:32:08.760
tenured professor at Harvard. So if you were concerned, oh, but you know, some professors don't
00:32:14.780
speak because they don't have tenure and so on, which by the way, should never be a reason, because
00:32:19.080
it's better to live as a dignified person for one minute than to live as a coward for 500 years.
00:32:24.880
Okay. Have dignity. Okay. But in any case, this professor is a tenured folk professor. He's a
00:32:32.080
senior professor. He's a Turing Award winner. His agent writes to me, he'd love to come on your show
00:32:38.780
to discuss the book. I was like excited. Oh, great. Please send me a copy of the book. I'll read the
00:32:43.880
book and let's, let's do it. So we went back and forth many, many times. It was hard to organize it.
00:32:48.980
Finally, we did. Then I got another email. Well, the professor in question, by the way, I'm
00:32:54.960
until recently, I hadn't mentioned who he was. And many people wrote to me, even pretty
00:33:01.580
high profile people saying, well, you should name the person because, you know, it's if they're doing
00:33:07.560
this, they should be held accountable. I'm going to refrain from naming them. Just like I didn't
00:33:13.040
mention who the administrators were and so on. Maybe one day I will mention it, but it's a senior
00:33:17.900
professor at Harvard in computer science who's a Turing Award winner. Let's leave it at that.
00:33:22.400
So I got an email saying, well, he wants to make sure that you don't discuss anything political
00:33:27.860
and that you only focus on his book. I said, oh, no problem. Absolutely. I understand.
00:33:32.820
You know, I've, I've had hundreds of conversations with other academics on my show. No problem.
00:33:38.340
And by the way, I told the person, I have a computer science and math background. There's all kinds of
00:33:43.640
really cool stuff that I can talk to him about. No problem. We'll focus on the book. Okay.
00:33:47.880
Great. So now we go back and forth a few more times. So I probably wasted between me and my
00:33:53.040
assistant who helps me with the scheduling, probably wasted about four hours in total of
00:33:57.960
going back and forth and so on and so forth. Finally, I get an email. Well, I'm very sorry
00:34:03.640
to, to tell you that, uh, professor so-and-so has decided he doesn't want to come on your show
00:34:09.740
because, you know, it's, uh, God is, he's mean, he's dangerous. God is so scary. He's so scary.
00:34:18.080
God is so scary. He does things like defend freedom of speech. He does things like defend
00:34:23.920
the rights of gay people to live in dignity in the Middle East. He defends the right of women to
00:34:29.980
have clitorises. I hope my son didn't hear that. You know, he defends these really controversial
00:34:34.340
things. He defends things like freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry, very dangerous things. He says
00:34:40.820
that there is no such thing as indigenous science. There's only science. Very, very dangerous things,
00:34:46.220
right? So dangerous that he's invited to speak at Stanford. So dangerous that he's going to give
00:34:51.040
two talks at Cornell, but boo hoo hoo. I'm so controversial at my university. Why did I just shut up?
00:34:56.520
No, I'm not going to shut up because I escaped the society where I had to shut up. So I come to Canada
00:35:05.740
and I'm warning people, don't let happen here from which many of us immigrants escaped. It will creep
00:35:13.320
up on you faster than you can say, boo hoo, I'm scared of God's side. Okay. So number one, that's an
00:35:21.140
example of what an invertebrate castrati is. By the way, I wrote to him, oh boy, you don't want to
00:35:28.060
have been the recipient of that email. Let me tell you, he got third degree burn with that one. By the
00:35:34.600
way, it's very polite. It's very professorial, but there's no mincing of words. It's direct. It's to the
00:35:40.160
point. Let me tell you another quick story. 2016, I was very close to being hired for the third time
00:35:51.040
at a university in Southern California. And again, I'm being way too sweet here by not mentioning the
00:35:59.240
name of the university, which by the way, I should name it Shane. And that university, and by the way,
00:36:03.780
as you know, I love Southern California. I've been meaning to move my family to Southern California.
00:36:09.680
I was a professor at UC Irvine for a few years. We have family there. We go back every year. It truly is
00:36:15.940
our home, away from home. And so I was very excited for this position. And as I met one of the senior
00:36:24.660
people in this one particular department that was interested in me, we went for lunch at this very
00:36:31.380
beautiful place in Newport Beach. And then she said, well, I have a concern, Gat. Oh, what is it?
00:36:40.360
She goes, well, I was going through your YouTube channel. This, by the way, is, I tracked it for
00:36:48.860
you. It's the sad truth number 233. I released it on August 4th, 2016. So this is almost eight years
00:36:58.680
ago. She said, well, so I was, I was looking at your clip and I'm very concerned by that clip.
00:37:06.340
Now, let me tell you about the clip in question. My family and I, my wife, my children and I,
00:37:13.860
this is, they were much younger, eight years ago. We're sitting in this beautiful area called
00:37:18.760
the Balboa Peninsula, which is an area on, in Newport Beach, you know, close to where we used to live
00:37:26.520
and where we go every summer. It's a beautiful, pristine beach. This is an area where, for those of
00:37:32.020
you who are from the, from the area, you know, there's the wedge, which is an area where you have
00:37:36.640
these huge waves that can crash. It's, it's actually quite intimidating to swim there. You really need
00:37:42.040
to know what you're doing. There are rip currents and so on. So it's a beautiful, pristine beach. This
00:37:47.220
woman is sitting there with a, you know, those plastic containers that have, let's say, eight
00:37:55.600
muffins, cupcakes, right? So these multicolored cupcakes, she's sitting there and she's eating
00:38:03.840
them. She eats a few of them, leaves the rest, leaves the, the, the massive plastic bag, I mean,
00:38:11.980
plastic container and all of the, you know, remaining cupcakes, which now the, the, the birds are going to
00:38:20.020
come and they're going to get instantaneous diabetes since it's all sugar. And so I say to her, you know,
00:38:26.000
and I'm hardly, you know, I'm not the one who says, uh, you know, please don't use the internet
00:38:31.820
and use homing pigeons because, you know, mother earth, please. So I'm hardly, you know, I'm, I am
00:38:38.820
green conscious and that I've taught my children very young. Let's walk around the beach. Let's clean
00:38:43.880
the beach. Let's make sure we leave the beach better than we, you know, leave it off better than when we
00:38:48.080
came. So I do things like that. Uh, and so I turned to the lady and I said, excuse me, ma'am, can you,
00:38:55.000
you think you could maybe just pick up, you know, the massive plastic container containing 43 tons of
00:39:03.380
cupcakes. And by the way, as she's walking off from the beach, there are tons of garbage containers.
00:39:11.260
So it's not as though she has to trek through the Sahara to get to the garbage can. If she were,
00:39:18.080
you know, sufficiently, uh, uh, lazy that she didn't want to do it. So she looks at me and
00:39:26.160
very aggressively, like mind your own business asshole. And then, you know, calls me some fat
00:39:34.260
name because at the time I did not have the ridiculous Adonis self body that I have today.
00:39:40.620
My son is laughing, hearing this. So then she calls me some fat pig and then looks at my son
00:39:47.480
and my son still to today has long hair. So at the time he was much younger and starts like
00:39:54.600
kind of, uh, you know, what, uh, you call this a boy with this lit was hair. He's like a girly girl
00:40:02.240
and so on. So I said to her, uh, ma'am, you genuinely are a human pig. And that's where
00:40:12.220
it ended. So the title, why am I telling you this whole story? Because the person who was
00:40:20.120
going to hire me at this major university, forgive me, it's not, I'm not trying to be arrogant
00:40:27.000
here. It's, it's my colorful way of speaking. It's the Gad way. My 44 page academic CV was
00:40:34.880
no longer at play. What really concerned her is that I had used the words human pig and
00:40:45.640
that is hurtful. That concerned her. So it's only when I explained the context and then explained
00:40:52.160
to her that it was actually a compliment to call her human pig because she was a lot worse
00:40:59.460
than that because she had done all the littering. She had been very insulting. She had fat shamed
00:41:05.160
me. She had insulted my very young, insulted my very young son. And so to call her human pig
00:41:11.060
was the least of the worries, but look at the reflex. What might determine whether I get
00:41:19.260
this full professorship at a major university in California was, why did I use such mean language
00:41:29.600
like human pig? That's hurtful. So that's story two. Let's go on to story three. An administrator
00:41:38.360
at my university stopped following me on social media because the person thought that I used language
00:41:49.240
language that was very hurtful. I said, oh, can you give me an example of the language
00:41:55.780
that hurt you so much? She said, well, you will often use the word imbecile in describing
00:42:03.540
some general story or something. And I don't think a professor should ever use the word imbecile.
00:42:11.340
Now, why am I telling you these stories? Because again, it shows that the ethos in academia
00:42:19.340
is more than anything is let's play nice. Let's be nice to our students first and foremost. Now,
00:42:28.020
by the way, this doesn't mean that I'm not nice to my students. I've won teaching awards, right? It's
00:42:34.040
not that I'm not suggesting you should be mean, you should be rude, you should be impolite. But
00:42:39.800
my main job as a professor, when you come into my class, is to train you how to think.
00:42:46.640
If you do, if you submit something that's below par, I'll give you that feedback. I won't say,
00:42:54.840
you're okay, I'm okay, let's hug it out. I don't mind failing students. I tell students when they come
00:43:02.620
into my course, don't ever come to me to negotiate a grade. When I go to see my physician and he gives
00:43:09.860
me my cholesterol score, I don't say, come on, let's negotiate a better cholesterol score. My
00:43:17.340
cholesterol score is my cholesterol score. I want to improve it. There are steps I can take
00:43:22.340
to try to improve it. I don't negotiate for a better score. By the same token, I'll give you your
00:43:28.140
grade down to two decimal points. If I've made a mistake, I'm happy to listen. Otherwise,
00:43:35.100
get out of my office. But that's mean. That's so not nice. That's so mean. And then students start
00:43:41.980
saying, don't take GATSAD scores because everybody doesn't get any. All right, let me mention one last
00:43:48.640
thing and I'll end it for today. I posted a tweet. Oh, hold on a second. I got a message here from
00:43:56.960
someone. Okay, someone from X just sent me a message. I don't know who it is. Anyways. Oh, I don't have the
00:44:07.280
tweet anymore. I posted a tweet a few days ago, which was retweeted by Elon Musk. And it got something
00:44:18.600
like 32, 33 million views. And I posted several other tweets subsequent to that, which I think
00:44:24.080
collectively, it's probably now up to about 70 million. And there I was talking about suicidal
00:44:31.100
empathy, how the misfiring of empathy as an emotion causes many of the problems that we see in the
00:44:40.100
West today. Now, I had posted this, you know, a few days ago, and I ended up getting the executive
00:44:49.360
editor of one of the major publishers write to me and say, there is your next book. And I suppose that
00:44:58.240
60 million views later, maybe he's right. And so now, why am I mentioning this? Because it speaks
00:45:04.620
to what I've been talking about so far, right? Empathy, kindness, compassion. Don't be mean to the
00:45:12.320
Guatemalan and Honduran immigrants. They also deserve a better life. Therefore, let them in. Empathy wins.
00:45:19.880
Don't be mean to the bank robbers and to the guys who already have 23 arrests.
00:45:27.040
If you punish them harshly, then you're double punishing them. Because society has already
00:45:34.340
punished them by virtue of them becoming criminals. And now you're double punishing them. Therefore,
00:45:39.800
they have the rights. So criminal greater than victim. Illegal migrant greater than veteran who
00:45:49.140
served the country. You come in. By the way, here's a little story for you.
00:45:53.140
Two months ago, I went to the Steamboat Institute, which is an amazing think tank out of, well,
00:46:02.360
Steamboat, Colorado. And I was speaking on, you know, American values, Western values, how global
00:46:10.740
Jew hatred is growing and what we can do about it and so on and so forth. One of the other speakers was
00:46:15.820
the former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Why am I saying this? It's because, you know, here's a
00:46:22.100
Canadian professor who has studied in the U.S., who's been a professor at three universities in the U.S.
00:46:28.500
I've been a professor at Dartmouth College, at Cornell University, and at UC Irvine. I'm going to speak
00:46:34.980
with Mike Pompeo at a conference in support of Western values. Guess what the border security did?
00:46:44.200
They had to really rough me up. They had to, I don't mean rough me up physically, but they took me
00:46:50.640
aside. I almost missed my plane. They gave me the third degree. Because, you know, why not?
00:46:57.540
But had I come in as an MS-13 gang member with a rap sheet the size of New York, then I would have
00:47:08.580
been let in as a noble migrant, and I would have been given pocket money and an iPhone and a hotel
00:47:16.960
and so on and so forth. So the Canadian professor who's going to speak at a major event with the
00:47:25.020
former secretary of state is going to be harshly treated at the border, but we let in millions of
00:47:31.660
people because empathy and compassion. And so my next book, and by the way, all of that empathy
00:47:38.540
has its roots in academia, where it's I'm okay, you're okay. All this to say, it's very, very frustrating
00:47:49.820
because, oh, my son just wrote to me, I'm going to go outside. Did you have fun, son?
00:47:58.360
All right. He's had enough of my blabbing. He's going outside to play, which, by the way,
00:48:04.280
is another chapter in the happiness book, Life as a Playground. Play is not just reserved for
00:48:09.360
children. Play is, what we're doing right now is play. It's intellectual play, right? Science is the
00:48:14.700
highest form of play. It's a puzzle. It's making puzzles, right? Which variable correlates or causes
00:48:20.960
the other variable? So anyway, so all this to say, what we should be doing in academia when we're
00:48:27.060
choosing academics is not just choosing people who are smart, who are educated. It's, you know how,
00:48:34.740
when you go to the, you become a Navy SEAL, there is a set of attributes. You have to be brave.
00:48:40.460
You can't be cowardly. You have to be physically fit. So it's not a uni variable that determines
00:48:47.700
whether you entered the Navy. As in most things in life, it's multifactorial. There are several
00:48:52.780
attributes on which we need to judge you before we decide, yes, you're worthy of being called the
00:48:59.660
Navy SEAL. In academia, no, you don't have to be an intellectual Navy SEAL. As a matter of fact,
00:49:06.880
as I've explained, we frown upon the one who is an academic Navy SEAL. If you are, if you speak
00:49:14.880
directly, if you speak the truth, if you don't mince words, again, very professorial, you know,
00:49:21.340
I'm hardly not professorial, but I don't mince my words for careerist purposes. Now, the good news is
00:49:30.140
the greater world appreciates that. I wouldn't have built the size of platform that I have if
00:49:36.380
real people didn't appreciate that. That's why I always say I get a lot more pleasure and I feel a
00:49:43.840
lot more proud when a trucker writes to me, a corrections officer writes to me, a police officer
00:49:52.220
writes to me, a soldier writes to me and says, hey, guess what? I went for a jog today. I was on my
00:49:58.400
truck route from Topeka to whatever, to Kansas, and I was listening to your stuff religiously. Thank
00:50:06.080
you. That to me says my voice is resonating with real people. The problem is that most academics
00:50:14.920
live in a make-believe ivory tower. And by the way, this is not, being an academic is in my DNA.
00:50:22.740
It's coded in my DNA. So it's not as though I don't, you know, love academia, but I want academia
00:50:29.600
to meet its true potential. I want academia to go back to being solely concerned about
00:50:36.540
intellectual pursuits, about defending the truth, about seeking the truth. I don't want academia to
00:50:43.240
be a place for kindergartens. I don't want academia to be a place for coddling. I don't want academia to
00:50:49.400
be a place to play nice. Academia is not to be empathetic. It's not to elevate the voices of the
00:50:56.280
marginalized people. Academia is there to elevate your cerebral hedonism, right? In the same way that
00:51:05.340
you can take drugs to elevate your hedonic state, academia is the highest form of higher order
00:51:12.600
cognitive pursuits. It's beautiful. There's nothing more beautiful than the cerebral life. And so all
00:51:19.520
that I do is in order to make sure that we return to that reality, where academics can speak freely,
00:51:28.340
where academics are not being harassed, fired, threatened, have a million, you know,
00:51:39.420
frivolous complaints filed against them, and on and on. I'll be talking about some of this stuff next
00:51:46.860
week at Cornell. Wish me luck as I go into arguably, and I say this as someone who adores Cornell and that
00:51:55.920
I, you know, you can't imagine. I did my MS, my Master's of Science and my PhD at Cornell. It is,
00:52:02.900
I absolutely wanted to go to Cornell. There were two schools that I really, that were my talk to when I
00:52:08.460
was applying for PhDs. It was Cornell and Stanford. And Cornell, you know, being the kind of the Ivy League
00:52:14.400
school, Cornell, it was the place that I wanted to be. I have great love for Cornell. But I can tell you,
00:52:22.140
having gone recently, actually, when my doctoral supervisor retired, this was in June 2022,
00:52:29.420
there is no place more woke than Ithaca. And I have, by the way, a clip that I did where I was
00:52:37.500
wearing a purple wig to demonstrate my ideological fierceness, right? That's what I call hair
00:52:45.180
aposomatic coloring, right? It demonstrates that you don't want to mess with me because I'm wearing,
00:52:51.620
well, aposomatic coloring is, for example, what you see when, let's say, an Amazonian frog has
00:53:00.680
very, very vivid colors. Well, that goes against the idea of the evolution of camouflage, right? Because
00:53:07.220
usually you would think in a dangerous neighborhood where there are many predators, you want to be
00:53:11.900
inconspicuous. So if you're, if you evolve to be very conspicuous, that means it's because you're
00:53:18.500
saying, if you can see me, you better stay away. And so I use that principle precisely because I'm
00:53:23.760
an evolutionist. And I argued in the parasitic mind that all of the endless hair coloring that you see
00:53:30.820
from the super progressive woke people at Oberlin and Wellesley and Cornell and Harvard, the reason why
00:53:38.080
they have red and blue hair is because they're ideologically fierce. Don't mess with my woke venom,
00:53:43.400
right? And so I look forward as I make my way to Ithaca to see every single house, every single car,
00:53:53.640
every single hall at Cornell have the following sign. Love is love. No human is illegal.
00:54:04.260
Black lives mattered. Transgender people of color are facing a genocide. You know, the six people that
00:54:12.920
are transgender people of color are being eradicated. So I am looking forward to it because
00:54:24.540
there are some incredible people that I'll be meeting at Cornell. I mean, I'll be meeting a rabbi
00:54:31.380
at Cornell, Eli Silberstein, who used to be the rabbi when I was there. He's still there with his
00:54:37.520
lovely wife, Hannah Silberstein, who, by the way, was also a PhD student. I took a course with her.
00:54:46.440
So I'll be having dinner with them. I'll be meeting several other professors. I don't know if they want
00:54:51.800
me to mention my name, so I won't mention anybody, but some amazing professors there. Not everyone is
00:54:58.280
completely lobotomized there. There are still people who believe in science and in rational thought and
00:55:03.260
logic and in common sense and in freedom of speech. So I'll be giving two talks. One talk will be on
00:55:09.040
the parasitic mind. The other talk will be on Jew hatred. You know, the Jew hatred that I was told
00:55:16.100
by someone at my university administrator that there is no Jew hatred at your university, other than the
00:55:22.060
fact that a lawsuit has been filed by Jewish professors and Jewish students about the massive
00:55:29.360
Jew hatred that there is there. There is no Jew hatred. What are you talking about? There's no such
00:55:33.700
thing. It doesn't exist. So, for example, when there was police in riot gear outside the university to
00:55:41.220
protect Jewish students, what Jew hatred? There is no such Jew hatred. So I'll be talking about the
00:55:48.620
normalization of Jew hatred that's taking place in the West. Of course, it's not only at my university.
00:55:52.740
It's everywhere. It's at Cornell. It's at Columbia. It's at Harvard. It's everywhere.
00:55:57.440
Uh, it's only going to get worse unless people say we will not tolerate this kind of nonsense
00:56:05.140
in our free and secular societies. That's it, people. There are many ways you could contribute
00:56:11.260
to the battle. You can speak out. If you are a donor who is thinking of donating to your university,
00:56:18.840
make sure that you link your money to specific outcomes at the university. Here's the thing.
00:56:25.520
You are going to give $10,000 to your alma mater. If you hear that one single speaker is deplatformed,
00:56:34.300
there goes my $10,000. Now, $10,000 might not be much, but when Bill Ackman, billionaire Bill Ackman,
00:56:41.500
says, I might take out my money from Harvard, guess what? Harvard suddenly decides, oh, let's put in a
00:56:47.480
task force. To study a task force that will consist of a committee that will meet to strike a task force
00:56:55.080
to study the possibility of whether there is Jew hatred on campus. But at least you've gotten their
00:57:00.380
attention. So there are many, many ways you could contribute. Don't think that your voice doesn't
00:57:03.940
matter. Don't think that you don't have the capacity to affect change. All of the things that you think
00:57:10.200
are cliches actually are true. It starts with one small step and then you build a community. There are
00:57:16.960
some people that I know that have built huge audiences. They're not famous professors. They're
00:57:21.400
not politicians. They just had the courage to start speaking out and now they've got huge audiences
00:57:28.420
that listen to them. Some of them have even quit their regular jobs to then pursue this. So
00:57:35.000
I'm not suggesting that everybody has the set of skills to, you know, build a huge platform,
00:57:41.360
but you don't have to build a huge platform. You can just, your professor says something insane in
00:57:46.220
class, challenge him or her politely. Your friend says something insane in the pub when you're chatting,
00:57:52.220
challenge him or her politely. Don't just sit and say, I'm okay, you're okay, let's hug it out,
00:57:59.100
because if I disagree with you, that's not nice. You know what's the nicest thing? You know what's
00:58:05.700
the most empathetic thing? You know what's the kindest thing? It's to protect the truth. There
00:58:11.820
is nothing more noble than to protect the truth. When you decide that you're going to walk away
00:58:17.920
and allow truth to be raped because you otherwise want to be nice, you're a coward. You're a castrated
00:58:25.900
invertebrate, and I don't want any part of you. So I will continue to speak out. I hope that you will
00:58:31.800
support me in any way that you can. Guys, for the price of a latte, you can join my exclusive content.
00:58:41.740
So it's, I think, I can't remember how much it is, maybe six bucks a month. I post book recommendations.
00:58:47.080
I answer Q&A there. I post extra clips with my guests there. There's all kinds of stuff. Certainly more
00:58:55.140
than whatever I'm charging. By the way, the six bucks a month, 50% of it goes away to Apple and to
00:59:03.080
all the other intermediaries. So if you're paying me six bucks, I actually get to see three, and then
00:59:08.480
Justin Trudeau comes along and says, oh, Jew boy, way to go. Can I have 58% of that, please? Do you mind
00:59:17.600
sharing 58% of that? Because I'm empathetic, and I know what to do with the money that you generate.
00:59:24.040
Thank you very much, Jew boy, for your money. There you have it, folks. Please contribute in any way that
00:59:31.940
you can to the battle of ideas. You can make a change. Have a great day, everybody. Thank you
00:59:37.780
for joining me, and I'll talk to you soon. Cheers, everybody.