The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - UATX Lecture - Evolutionary Psychology, The Parasitic Mind, & Suicidal Empathy (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad

00:00:00.000 in a few minutes i'll be delivering a lecture at uatx it is part evolutionary psychology part

00:00:07.300 the parasitic mind and part my next book my forthcoming book on suicidal empathy

00:00:12.700 thank you for heating the call uh from the soapbox and for being here nice and prompt

00:00:19.240 for another fantastic wednesday speaker series although i really shouldn't say another

00:00:25.720 because uh this is in fact a marquee event um our fantastic board of trustees uh brent i can see

00:00:37.020 you here in the audience tonight um have asked us as a staff and a faculty to redouble our efforts

00:00:44.800 in getting the leading public intellectuals not just in the united states but in the world

00:00:50.720 uh to come here to campus to enrich the intellectual lives of our students

00:00:56.800 uh and to hopefully form more permanent relationships with the polity here at uatx

00:01:04.480 now what is a public intellectual uh is something that should become clear in dean morgan marietta's

00:01:11.580 introduction of our guest gad sad this evening uh but gad on behalf of the trustees the management

00:01:19.160 the faculty the faculty the staff and students here at the university of austin a very warm welcome

00:01:23.420 to you and i'll hand over to the dean to make your introductions

00:01:26.280 good afternoon everyone i will be brief uh which shows that people can actually grow and change

00:01:39.680 um because i want professor sad to have as much time as possible to talk to you about his ideas and for

00:01:48.520 you to ask him questions because gad sad might be the most important public intellectual working

00:01:59.720 today and what he is going to say is far more important than anything that i would say

00:02:07.240 but just by way of introduction allow me to say this one thing

00:02:11.000 at a school like uatx which claims to be in favor of open inquiry which is to say that students and faculty

00:02:23.880 can ask any question they find compelling and claims to believe and promote creatives empiricism

00:02:32.840 which means that students and faculty can look at any evidence that they want to

00:02:38.200 especially the evidence that people don't want them to look at such a university i argue should notice a

00:02:48.600 distinction between what you could call a tame lion a domesticated lion and a real lion

00:03:00.440 a tame lion might look like a lion might roar a bit but isn't so dangerous

00:03:12.600 a domesticated lion might ask an important question but then not ask other ones because they're impolite

00:03:21.000 a tame lion might look at some evidence but not really at other ones a tame lion asks himself should i really

00:03:34.280 offend should i really be impolite do i have to be that lion every day the domesticated lion asks

00:03:44.040 should i really kill that warthog in front of the children but the real lion the real lion thinks

00:03:54.040 the warthog had it coming because lions after all eat herd animals and herd animals tend to tell the lies

00:04:08.120 of their herd and lions don't like that so in a culture that has hunted most of its lions to extinction

00:04:23.640 and the lions that remain face deep incentives to domesticate themselves

00:04:29.240 it is a great pleasure to me at this university to introduce a real lion

00:04:43.400 facade thank you sir

00:04:44.840 uh i've received many lovely introductions i've never been uh compared to a majestic line i'm adding

00:05:03.400 majestic just to make me even more impressive uh so thank you for that beautiful introduction thank

00:05:08.360 you ben thank you everybody who's here all the people who made me feel so appreciated and welcome here

00:05:13.320 um so today what i'm going to do is just give you a bit of an overview you know 45 50 minutes i can't

00:05:21.240 really get into too many things in great details but i will touch briefly on evolutionary psychology

00:05:26.360 which is my main area of academic research and then i'll talk about the parasitic mind many of you

00:05:32.200 might know that book and then the the continuing of that story which is the forthcoming book suicidal

00:05:38.760 empathy and so hopefully you'll get a bit of a gist of some of the things that i do i'm going to start

00:05:44.920 my uh try to stay to the 45 minutes here we go most evolutionists will tell you and certainly

00:05:51.400 evolutionist psychologists will tell you the exact moment that they had their evolutionary epiphany that

00:05:57.240 they said oh this is something that i need to be paying attention to and you know perhaps use in my work

00:06:03.320 so in my case it was the first semester as a doctoral student at cornell i was taking a advanced

00:06:11.240 social psychology course with professor dennis reagan and about halfway through the semester

00:06:16.040 he assigned a book that truly changed certainly my professional life the book is titled homicide

00:06:22.760 which i highly recommend you all read it it's by two of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology husband

00:06:28.120 and wife team margo wilson and martin daly and what they did is they looked at patterns of criminality

00:06:36.440 via an evolutionary lens and they showed that there is unbelievably similar causation to many

00:06:43.400 patterns of criminality across time and across space so for example who do what do you think is the

00:06:51.160 biggest predictor of child abuse in a home i'll just take one or two possible answers because i i

00:06:57.960 i have to move on yes because you've read my work you're cheating well usually no one ever gives

00:07:07.080 that answer but you're exactly correct if there is a step parent in the house it's a 100 greater predictor

00:07:16.680 100 times greater predictor than the next predictor in terms of having child abuse now you could read

00:07:22.920 the social science literature and they've come up with 16 000 different explanations none of which

00:07:29.240 are all of which combined don't add up to the explanatory power of that singular phenomenon so when

00:07:35.960 i saw the explanatory power and the parsimony of the evolutionary lens i thought okay well i will now take

00:07:42.760 this evolutionary lens and apply it in the areas that i'm interested in and so i want to give you a few

00:07:48.760 examples of studies that i've done using the evolutionary lens because if hopefully i do end

00:07:54.520 up coming to uatx one of the courses that i hope to teach is a course on you know evolutionary theory

00:08:00.120 evolution in society so i want to give this certainly the students a flavor of what are the types of

00:08:05.160 things that i would study so this is a a paper that uh actually received a lot of attention with one of my

00:08:11.000 former graduate students so this is peacocking right the the peacock evolves this trait precisely because

00:08:18.920 it is an honest signal of his phenotypic you know his his quality of course human beings also engage

00:08:27.080 in peacocking and so we took this idea and we brought in male participants and had them drive an actual

00:08:35.240 porsche that we rented try to get a scientific granting agency to give you money for renting a

00:08:42.760 porsche for a weekend and convince them that it's truly for science well we did it and then they also

00:08:50.280 drove a you know beaten up old sedan and the key dependent measure was salivary assays because we then

00:08:57.880 wanted to measure their testosterone levels what would happen if you drive the fancy porsche or the

00:09:04.840 beaten up car in one of two environments either in downtown montreal where everyone can see you

00:09:10.440 driving the low status car high status car and or you're driving it in a semi-deserted highway

00:09:16.840 not surprising to anybody in this room when you put young men in the porsche their endocrinological

00:09:23.000 system blows up and so that would be an example of using a hormonal marker to study a phenomenon that

00:09:31.640 happens in in the animal literature but in the context of a consumer behavior

00:09:37.480 this is a study that we unfortunately have yet to publish but we started it many years ago

00:09:43.000 it also uses a car so these are imagine these are two dating profiles the only thing that's different

00:09:49.640 across the two dating profiles is what is my favorite possession in one version it's a fancy red porsche

00:09:56.760 and the other one sorry to anybody who owns a old kia it's an it's an old kia and then we ask the people

00:10:06.600 a whole bunch of things about this guy who of course doesn't change across the two conditions

00:10:13.160 i'm only going to talk about one of the dependent measures his height now if you want to see why

00:10:19.080 evolutionary psychology is so powerful guess what happens to this guy's height as a function of

00:10:26.760 whether it is women judging him or men judging him in the porsche condition so we call this actually the

00:10:34.520 status elongation effect and the status contraction effect when women see this guy in the porsche

00:10:44.360 he magically becomes taller this is why i have i'm trying to convince my wife that we need to buy a porsche

00:10:51.640 because i need a few more inches

00:10:55.560 on the other hand what do you think happens to men's perceptions of his height when they see him in this

00:11:03.000 thing he becomes shorter why because i am threatened not by another man who has

00:11:10.920 nicer shoulders than me but i'm threatened by a man who has higher status than me and so what do i do

00:11:18.040 i will then engage in intrasexual derogation when that happens so when i see a guy in a porsche

00:11:25.560 oh you know what he must be some little short guy he's trying to compensate so the exact same stimulus

00:11:32.360 results in completely perceptual bias in opposite directions depending on whether i'm male or female

00:11:40.680 you could have never hypothesized this stuff if you didn't understand the evolutionary dynamics

00:11:46.520 one more quick example uh this is a study we did also with hormones but in this case

00:11:53.080 with women's behavior and here what you're seeing this is called the homology meaning that the same

00:11:59.240 phenomenon has evolved across many species because of shared lineage so when female chimpanzees go into

00:12:06.280 estrus the way that they signal that they are sexually receptive is that they have an engorgement

00:12:11.240 and enlargement of their genitalia perhaps thankfully that's not how human females do it

00:12:17.320 but they do do it in other ways how do they do it as we found out in this really elaborate study that

00:12:23.480 we did where we tracked women's behavior across 35 days why 35 because the average length of a menstrual

00:12:29.720 cycle is 28 days so by covering 35 you're pretty much covering all the variants across women and we

00:12:35.800 found out that women will engage in much more vigorous sexual signaling when they are in the ovulatory phase

00:12:44.520 of their menstrual cycles okay so again you're taking an insight that you know from evolutionary biology

00:12:50.600 that you know from other animals and then you're applying it to the human context in modern settings and

00:12:56.280 so that's a lot of the academic research that i do is that one or two more quick things about

00:13:04.920 evolutionary psychology and then i'll move on to the parasitic mind this is a incredibly important slide

00:13:10.840 because it actually completely alters the way you've you you understand science much of science operates at the

00:13:20.280 proximate level proximate means understanding the how and the what of a phenomenon so most nobel

00:13:28.520 prizes that have ever been won have been won at the proximate level and i'll you'll see in a second

00:13:34.120 i'm going to give a concrete example the ultimate explanation of a phenomenon doesn't mean ultimate in

00:13:39.880 a superior sense it means ultimate in the darwinian why sense why did the phenomenon evolve to be of that

00:13:47.000 form so for any phenomenon involving biological agents if you only focus on the proximate causation

00:13:57.080 you only have part of the explanation if you explain both the proximate and ultimate you've given the

00:14:02.840 full explanation so take for example pregnancy sickness pregnancy sickness is something that is

00:14:09.800 universally true i mean different women will experience it to different extents there are a million

00:14:15.240 proximate questions i could ask about pregnancy sickness does a particular smell cause greater

00:14:21.960 severity of the symptoms in pregnancy sickness that's a how and what question the darwinian why why have

00:14:31.240 women evolved pregnancy sickness that turns out to be an unbelievable answer pregnancy sickness is so

00:14:38.200 predictable that you can set your watch to it it happens at a very specific time during organogenesis during

00:14:45.080 the first trimester of gestation and because organogenesis is such an important period where

00:14:53.240 the organs are forming in utero it's important that the mother not be exposed to food pathogens

00:15:01.160 teratogens that might wreak havoc to the organ formation therefore women are attracted to certain foods that reduce

00:15:12.040 pathogenic load pickles women are unattracted and become repulsed to other foods that might

00:15:19.560 might have high pathogenic load and then as the ultimate insurance policy in case you ingested something

00:15:26.280 that's not good for the baby you have the symptoms of nausea and throwing up right and then very

00:15:32.360 very magically once organogenesis ends boom pregnancy sickness finishes now you might say okay that sounds

00:15:40.280 great explanation but who cares well there's actually big who cares when you go see your obgyn and you

00:15:46.840 say i'm experiencing pregnancy sickness symptoms what he or she will do is the perfectly incorrect thing from an

00:15:54.840 evolutionary perspective why because since those symptoms evolved because they are adaptive you want

00:16:03.000 to experience those symptoms whereas when you take the pill it shuts that off well it turns out that the

00:16:09.480 more pregnancy sickness a woman experiences the better the trajectory of the gestation the less likely of a

00:16:16.680 a miscarriage so i've lectured about this in front of not only physicians but in front of obgyns and then

00:16:24.280 they'll come up to me and say professor sarva we never learned this in medical school well you didn't

00:16:29.640 because even in your medical school curriculum you were stuck in proximate world so imagine if now

00:16:35.480 we study many many phenomenon it could be politics it could be uh you know psychiatry it could be whatever you

00:16:41.720 want at both levels it opens up a complete new realm of epistemological discovery

00:16:52.920 one of the things that i often talk about is the consilience that is afforded via evolutionary

00:17:00.200 psychology uh consilience refers to unity of knowledge so i won't go through all of these here

00:17:05.160 but these are all different disciplines that have been darwinized many of which you wouldn't have thought

00:17:11.240 could be darwinized so i've mentioned a few of these today to several people here is an example of

00:17:16.600 one that you wouldn't have known literary darwinism is the application of darwinian theory to study

00:17:23.560 literature so this is now a joining of the natural sciences evolutionary biology with the humanities

00:17:30.280 literature the idea being that the reason why literature tickles our fancy the reason why we want to

00:17:36.600 read a beautiful story from 2000 years ago is because it is catering to a few basic universally

00:17:44.120 templates paternity uncertainty sibling rivalry parent offspring conflict romantic infidelity and so

00:17:51.960 on and so that's the stuff of literature so rather than studying literature via a marxist lens or a

00:17:59.000 feminist lens and so on study it through an evolutionary lens and you'll get completely

00:18:03.160 better and more accurate insights i'll just discuss one more just because it's kind of a cool one i don't

00:18:10.040 know where it is evolutionary architecture is a discipline that very few people know about most

00:18:16.760 architects are trained to minimize or maximize one of two metrics minimize the cost uh well in this case

00:18:23.800 also minimize say the time of delivery whereas evolutionary architecture uses different optimization metrics it says

00:18:31.720 how can we create architectural designs that cater to our biophilic instinct biophilia is love of nature

00:18:39.160 so you end up with completely different designs once you understand what is it that tickles our biophilic

00:18:46.840 fancy so i won't go through all of these but the reason i put it up is to say there really is an endless

00:18:54.760 number of disciplines that are waiting and begging to be enriched by the evolutionary lens all right

00:19:04.600 uh here i'm all i'm going to say about this is so the first time that i sort of had the idea of

00:19:12.360 writing the parasitic mind was very early in my career when i was trying to darwinize the social sciences in

00:19:20.520 general but the business school in particular and i thought it's very obvious how could you study

00:19:25.720 leadership or entrepreneurship or consumer psychology or economic behavior without ever invoking our

00:19:31.960 biological heritage don't our hormones affect our behavior when we're making decisions i mean how could

00:19:37.560 that be how could you go through an entire business curriculum without ever uttering the dreaded b word

00:19:43.560 word biology and so but i noticed that most of my academic colleagues thought that it was complete

00:19:51.640 nonsense that i'm doing all this biology and evolutionary psychology stuff and that's when i first had this

00:19:57.400 idea that how could these very sophisticated intelligent people be so parasitized by ideology that they

00:20:06.440 they they can't accept that the same mechanism that explains the behavior of every other species on

00:20:13.800 earth somehow doesn't explain the behavior of one species called homo sapiens and if they can afford

00:20:21.080 the possibility that it could explain human phenomena the human phenomena have to stop at the neck meaning

00:20:27.720 that yes use evolution to explain opposable thumbs but don't you dare use evolutionary theory to explain the

00:20:35.080 human mind that's crazy talk you must be a jewish nazi so that was originally when i had the idea that

00:20:44.680 things can go wrong in academia and then the next 30 years kind of amplified that which led to the

00:20:52.200 writing of the parasitic mind but before i do that since i was talking about uh uh ovulatory cycle and

00:21:00.600 menstruation earlier this is an actual symposium scientific symposium that was held at my home

00:21:09.720 university i'm currently at a michigan university but my home university is in montreal it was a one-day

00:21:16.360 symposium pushing for menstrual equity because menstruation is a human right what the hell does that mean

00:21:24.760 i mean i didn't know that until we held that symposium women were shackled with an inability to

00:21:31.720 menstruate but apparently we had to hold a symposium to promulgate the idea of menstrual rights and menstrual

00:21:39.560 equity of course you all know this one uh

00:21:46.360 until 15 minutes ago the 117 billion people that have ever existed on earth that's an actual estimate

00:21:54.360 we're able to fully navigate through the very tricky conundrum of who is male and who is female

00:22:01.480 but 15 minutes ago we lost that ability as a sexually reproducing species so much so that

00:22:08.520 our good friend here the latest addition to the u.s supreme court did not have the epistemological

00:22:15.880 confidence to clearly state what is a woman that's what a parasitized mind looks like which we'll get

00:22:23.480 into in a second this is an actual anesthesiologist with whom i had several interactions on twitter if you

00:22:33.320 want to have fun go follow me on twitter i take no prisoners

00:22:37.400 so this degenerate argued that she has a medical degree and she's a woman and there is a man

00:22:54.840 mansplaining her what menstruation is because i was arguing are you insane to argue that men can

00:23:03.560 menstruate you're a physician you're an anesthesiologist when you determine the doses of

00:23:10.520 anesthesia do you recognize this thing called male or female and if you just read her stuff it's it's

00:23:16.920 absolutely unbelievable this is a physician do you want her as your physician that's what happens with

00:23:22.040 parasitized minds now the reason i put up this specific example is because for many many years

00:23:28.040 when i would stand on top of the mountain screaming we have a problem people would say to me sure

00:23:33.960 professor saad this might happen in some esoteric humanities department but it's not going to go

00:23:39.400 further i go no no no it's coming for everyone because it escapes from the humanities department you

00:23:45.560 know what happens it becomes the prime minister of canada called justin trudeau

00:23:51.320 because he is a walking manifestation of every parasitic idea that i discuss in the parasitic mind

00:24:02.280 this is a the top anthropology society in the united states and canada canceled a session

00:24:12.760 by five female anthropologists and archaeologists who were arguing that it is insane when you

00:24:21.240 you're doing anthropological and archaeological work to get rid of the fixed binary called male or

00:24:28.760 female that was so contentious and it drew such ire in the 21st century that it was canceled that's

00:24:38.520 what parasitic minds look like so now let me really kind of drill down with some of the the stuff from

00:24:46.120 the parasitic mind how did i develop this idea of using the neuro parasitic framework to explain my

00:24:53.960 stuff well there are many types of pathogens that kill us that's been our biggest bane throughout our

00:25:00.120 evolutionary history there are some bacterium there are viruses there are fungi there are parasites but

00:25:05.480 of course i argue that there are ideological neuro parasites that serve the same purpose so in the

00:25:13.080 same way that i could be zombified by an actual brain worm i could be zombified by idea pathogens post-modernism

00:25:21.480 cultural relativism and so on i'll talk about that in a sec here's some examples of these parasitic stuff

00:25:27.960 and i'll i'll do one more on the other this is a parasitic wasp which when it stings the

00:25:34.760 uh spider it renders the spider zombified but fully alive it then carries it pulls it drags it into its burrow

00:25:47.240 it lays eggs on it and then as the eggs hatch they eat the in vivo uh spider uh alive well think of

00:25:59.960 political correctness akin to the spider wasp sting quietly and merrily you walk into the abyss of

00:26:07.800 infinite lunacy saying yeah of course men too can menstruate absolutely right here's another one

00:26:14.040 toxoplasma gandhi which can by the way infect human beings but the classic example is when toxoplasma gandhi

00:26:20.680 uh parasitizes the mind of a mouse the mouse loses loses its very adaptive fear of cats and it actually

00:26:30.360 becomes attracted to the sexually attracted to the cats uh to the cat's urine that's not a very good

00:26:37.160 attraction to have if you're a mouse but it serves the purpose of the parasite here is a parasite that

00:26:44.280 afflicts ungulates elk moose deer when they're parasitized by it they start going around and circle

00:26:50.600 kind of bobbing their heads even when the looming predators come they can't extricate themselves

00:26:56.200 from that repetitive behavior they don't invoke their flight mechanism let's move on to one more

00:27:02.360 example this is a wood cricket it hates water and here we've got a hair worm that when it parasitizes

00:27:12.360 the wood cricket the wood cricket merrily jumps into water committing suicide in the service of the

00:27:19.560 parasite why because the parasite needs it to go into water so it can complete its reproductive cycle

00:27:26.840 so what are human forms of parasites queers for palestine

00:27:36.280 they are the beautiful wood cricket jumping into that water right if if i present myself to the world

00:27:45.800 through my queer identity as the first presentation of who i am do i prefer to be in tel aviv which is one of

00:27:54.600 the most queer friendly cities in the world or do i want to put my support behind gaza which has a very

00:28:04.440 effective 100 effective gravity-based conversion therapy program we throw you head first off a building and then

00:28:13.560 that cures you of your queerness that's what a wood cricket looks like and then in this case we've got

00:28:21.960 jewish anna epstein at boston university who is so much more progressive than all of you degenerates

00:28:29.560 that she was caught on camera taking off the posters of the uh kidnapped israeli children

00:28:41.720 because she transcends that kind of tribal stuff she's on the side of the good guys hamas who had

00:28:47.480 she been at that nova film festival it would have turned out badly for anna epstein but she's progressive

00:28:54.280 she knows better this is straight this is an actual quote from the parasitic mind i mean you could read

00:29:04.040 it but i'll just instead say it tal nitsan jewish tal nitsan was a doctoral student at hebrew university

00:29:12.600 who was working on a project to identify the rampant rape of palestinian women by israeli idf

00:29:23.880 soldiers she conducted her research and she found out that there wasn't a single documented case of

00:29:31.480 rape by the idf on palestinian women so if you're a honest academic then incoming information came in

00:29:40.040 my hypothesis seems to have been refuted okay well no it didn't refute her hypothesis

00:29:46.360 it turns out that the fact that the idf soldiers did not rape a single palestinian woman

00:29:56.440 demonstrate the extents the extent to which they other the palestinian women that the palestinian

00:30:04.120 women are not sufficiently human that they are worthy of rape so had the idf soldiers raped the

00:30:12.360 women they would have been pigs but if the idf soldiers don't rape any women they're also pigs so

00:30:20.280 all roads lead to my hypothesis being supported which is the idf are evil zionist pigs and and she's

00:30:29.000 parasitized of course because it's the same idf soldiers who don't rape the palestinian women

00:30:34.920 that are protecting her so that she can publish this

00:30:42.040 this guy is super progressive and empathetic

00:30:46.760 he's very touching let me tell you why he's norwegian guy who presents himself to the world as a

00:30:53.080 male feminist and anti-racist ally that's the quote right here he was raped and sodomized by a noble

00:31:01.320 somali immigrant as as it goes in norway you don't get much of a sentence uh for rape you know very

00:31:10.280 very light sentence i think maybe he got a year something whatever it was when he came out of

00:31:16.840 detention this guy was racked with existential guilt because his sodomizer was now going to be

00:31:27.000 potentially deported to somalia where he wouldn't be able to maximally flourish and so he was guilty

00:31:37.160 that his rapist was now going to have a bad life in somalia that's not an emotional system that we

00:31:43.640 have evolved this is what happens when you have suicidal empathy and i'll come to that in a sec

00:31:49.640 so these are some of the idea pathogens that i discuss in uh the parasitic mind i will spend a bit

00:31:55.800 of time talking about a few of these i'll talk about post-modernism and a few others

00:32:02.440 so here you there's one of them is uh identity politics right now yes donald trump is coming to

00:32:12.360 office here he's eradicating all the die stuff i call it die rather than dei because die is where

00:32:20.200 everything goes to die uh and circ is the top it's the national science and engineering research

00:32:29.000 council think of it as like the nsf of canada university of waterloo is akin to let's say caltech

00:32:37.640 or mit it's very well known in canada for its engineering and computer science departments

00:32:43.480 so the school of computer science at a top computer science and engineering school in canada

00:32:52.040 puts out a call for two chaired professorship but these are the highest chaired professors professors

00:32:59.000 because they are endowed by the government this is verbatim this is not me using my satire so this

00:33:06.120 is verbatim position one in all areas of artificial intelligence and we know how big artificial

00:33:12.920 intelligence is is getting but now watch the types of uh qualities that i'm looking in my professor of

00:33:21.480 artificial intelligence the call is open only to qualified individuals who self-identify as women

00:33:28.760 transgender gender fluid non-binary or two-spirit i have a mathematics and computer science degree

00:33:37.240 and i feel so ashamed that when i learned analysis of algorithms and computational theory

00:33:43.320 that i didn't incorporate the unique knowledge of nine non-binary computer scientists and the second

00:33:50.520 one it's based on race you have to be either racialized or you have to identify as being racialized

00:33:56.360 and so on this is at a top canadian university so maybe you dodged the bullet in the u.s with

00:34:02.680 having donald trump we're still heavily mired in it this is at my home university the number one item

00:34:14.360 on the five-year strategic plan is to indigenize and decolonize the entire curriculum you're teaching

00:34:24.200 shakespeare decolonize indigenize you're teaching neuroscience decolonize indigenize that's at a major

00:34:33.160 45 000 student research university here is an example of a project that received a lot of funding

00:34:41.800 to study optics and light but to study it by decolonizing it because all those physicists who were not

00:34:52.360 informed by indigenous knowledge didn't really make a breakthrough this is happening at every canadian

00:34:58.040 university you could think of this example is one that maybe a few of you have heard me mention

00:35:06.760 and if so apologies but it's still worth hearing it in person and for the rest of you buckle up it's a fun one

00:35:12.440 in 2002 one of my doctoral students had just defended his doctoral dissertation and so we were heading

00:35:22.360 out for a celebratory dinner myself my wife him and he was bringing a date so a few hours before we were

00:35:31.480 meeting at the restaurant he calls me and i kind of pick up he's maybe being a bit nervous on the phone he

00:35:37.880 was oh i just wanted to give you a heads up that the the lady that i'm bringing to the to the dinner

00:35:43.480 as a graduate student in post-modernism women's studies and cultural anthropology to which i answered

00:35:50.200 ah the holy trinity of bullshit

00:35:56.280 i said oh no no i got you i'm going to be on my best behavior this is your night mom's the word you don't

00:36:03.560 get a peep out of me complete bullshit because i'm definitely going to not speak so at one point i

00:36:09.960 turned to the lady in question but very politely very jovially i said oh i i hear you're a post-modernist

00:36:16.600 there are no universal truths other than the one universal truth that there are no universal truths

00:36:21.800 he said yes no universal truth i said do you mind if i offer what i think is a universal truth and then

00:36:27.720 we can discuss it how i might be airing she said yes and you'll see in a second why i've picked

00:36:33.000 these two photos i said is it not true that for homo sapiens since time immemorial women bear

00:36:42.600 children this is way before trans craze this is 2002 she looks at me scoffs at my imbecility and

00:36:51.400 simple mind says no that's not true said it's not true that only women bear children how is that

00:36:56.840 she goes well there is a japanese tribe of some japanese island whereby within their mythological

00:37:04.280 folkloric men it is the men who bear children so by you restricting it to the materialistic band

00:37:11.240 that's how you know you keep us barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen so after i recovered from the

00:37:17.960 mini stroke i had listening to that stuff i said maybe it's too contentious for me to

00:37:25.880 say that only women bear children can i give another example that might be a bit less poisonous

00:37:30.440 uh what if i tell you that since time immemorial sailors have relied on the cosmological premise that

00:37:38.440 the sun rises in the east and sets in the west and here she used a variant of postmodernism called

00:37:45.160 deconstructionism jacques derrida language creates reality she said well what do you mean by east and west

00:37:51.800 and what do you mean by the sun that which you call the sun i might call dancing hyena

00:37:59.320 i said well fine the dancing hyena rises in the east and sets in the west she said i don't play those

00:38:04.680 label games why why did i why do i repeatedly give this example because it perfectly captures

00:38:12.680 that ethos if we can call it that if a grown adult who's doing a graduate degree at one of the leading

00:38:20.760 universities and that university is it was in montreal you can guess which one it is it's it's called the

00:38:27.160 harvard of the north and we can't agree on shared meaning of women bear children there is east and

00:38:34.920 west and the sun rises and sets it's intellectual terrorism it serves no purpose it's a dead end

00:38:44.440 this is another uh idea pathogen it social constructivism is everything is a social

00:38:50.600 construction there are no evolutionary imperatives and biophobia is the fear of using biology to

00:38:55.880 explain human affairs as i alluded to earlier this is what leads to actual campaigns where because

00:39:03.640 the company is so progressive they show little boys playing with dolls and little girls playing with

00:39:09.400 guns and so what i'm going to do next it's actually a really important slide i'm going to show you how

00:39:14.360 you dismantle that kind of nonsense this is something that i discussed in chapter seven of the parasitic mind

00:39:20.040 where i'm discussing how to seek truth how can i build an argument that makes it unassailable

00:39:27.720 against all detractors so i'm trying to demonstrate this that there is a sex-specific

00:39:34.760 biological route to toy preferences how can i convince you of that well what i'm going to do

00:39:40.680 is i'm going to drown you in so much converging evidence from many different distinct lines of evidence

00:39:48.920 so that it becomes unassailable so i can get you data and from developmental psychology

00:39:56.040 where children by definition are too young to yet be socialized they already exhibit those

00:40:01.960 sex-specific toy preferences if i stopped right there i've already destroyed the social constructivist

00:40:08.440 argument but i'm not going to stop there then i can get you data from other species vervet monkeys

00:40:14.360 rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees showing you that they exhibit the same sex-specific toy preferences

00:40:20.280 i can get you data from pediatric endocrinology where little girls who suffer from congenital adrenal

00:40:27.960 hyperplasia which is a endocrinological disorder that max masculinizes the behavior of little girls

00:40:36.760 those little girls have the reversal of their toy preferences they have toy preferences that are

00:40:41.640 akin to those of boys i can get you data from ancient greece and ancient rome where you look at

00:40:49.560 funerary monuments where little children are shown depicted in the exact same sex specific toys that

00:40:56.040 we play with today i can get you data from non-western cultures sub-saharan africa where they play with the

00:41:03.160 exact same sex specific toys so you see what i'm doing across species across time periods across methodology and

00:41:10.600 so on i am triangulating to demonstrate that this is a veridical statement so for the students who are

00:41:17.480 here and even the professors who are here this is an epistemological tool that's like a nuclear bomb

00:41:24.520 that that's what allows me to go into very hostile environments but i am equipped and armed with the

00:41:31.720 requisite nomological networks well good luck to you if you want to debate me but on the other hand if i don't

00:41:38.680 know what i'm talking about if i haven't built the requisite nomological network and you ask me a

00:41:43.560 question i won't wing it i'll tell you that's a great question i don't know enough about it right

00:41:47.800 so that's what allows me to never be caught notwithstanding the number of appearances that i do and so on

00:41:56.360 ostrich parasitic syndrome is something that i discuss in chapter six of the parasitic mind it refers to a

00:42:04.040 orgiastic need to deny reality irrespective of the amount of evidence that i've offered you

00:42:11.560 so here so now by the way the ostrich doesn't literally do that but it has become a metaphor for

00:42:17.880 wishing to deny reality yes so this number here

00:42:24.760 almost 47 000 there have been nearly 47 000 islamic terror attacks in nearly 70 countries since 9 11 alone

00:42:41.160 yes and when they commit that terror act they tell you exactly why they're doing it but the western

00:42:49.960 bien pensant the good thinkers the politically correct folks told us no no no don't believe

00:42:56.920 when the terrorists tell you why they committed the 47 000 here are some of the other causes it turns out

00:43:05.640 that if you play video games that can turn you into a islamic terrorist which is making me a bit worried

00:43:13.320 because my son now is playing a lot of video games he just had his bar mitzvah but i'm thinking that he's

00:43:19.240 very close to joining isis it turns out also as the super smart bowtied bill nye explained to us that

00:43:30.200 the bataklan attack in paris where they screamed allahu akbar and gave incantations of the specific

00:43:36.520 quranic verses that lead to them butchering everybody was very conceivably due to climate change

00:43:42.600 okay it turns out also that the guys who did the attack in san bernardino a few years ago it was due to

00:43:51.080 beard bullying that's why i keep my beard very trim because i don't want to be beard bullied because then

00:43:57.960 that could send me to rakka to throw the gays off rooftops and it goes on and on and on here's another one

00:44:05.720 lack of adequate exposure to art so some of the uh belgian terrorists the argument was i mean look if

00:44:13.240 you're not exposed to enough klimt and chagall would it most of us go out and kill random people

00:44:19.720 so imagine the level of intellectual degeneracy but these are professors mostly not bill nye but a lot of

00:44:26.760 other ones that the the willingness that you're willing to go through and your suicidal empathy to not

00:44:34.120 say things as they are don't be that guy

00:44:39.720 let me just briefly mention i won't get into all this because i want to

00:44:43.000 try to stick to the 45 minutes my next book let me briefly tell you kind of the background to it

00:44:50.600 we are both as i explained to the students earlier in our meeting we are both of course

00:44:54.440 a thinking and a feeling animal it's not that we're one or the other that the challenge is to know when

00:44:59.560 to invoke the right system at the right time right so the parasitic mind was what was a treatise on

00:45:06.920 what happens to our cognitive system when it is parasitized suicidal empathy which is my next book is

00:45:14.280 what happens to our emotional system when it is parasitized so once you've explained both of these things

00:45:21.240 then you've fully explained the zombification phenomenon and so what i get into in the book

00:45:27.240 which i'm currently writing uh feverishly because uh actually i'm only supposed to remit the first draft

00:45:36.360 in march 2026 so i had plenty of time but when elon musk keeps writing you saying we need this book asap

00:45:47.400 you kind of increase the speed at which you're writing so hopefully i can uh deliver it in your

00:45:53.880 beautiful hands sooner than then and so what i basically do in this in this book is i argue that

00:45:59.640 look empathy is a perfectly adaptive emotion that's fine we are a social species and we've evolved

00:46:07.000 positive emotions because they contribute to our sociality so it's not as though this is a treatise

00:46:13.240 against empathy but like anything in life like aristotle explained to us at the right place to

00:46:20.120 the right people at the right amount so suicidal empathy is what happens when the empathy module

00:46:28.360 misfires it becomes misguided it targets the wrong people it becomes hyperactive and so on guatemalan

00:46:36.360 illegal immigrants are more important than american vets nobody is saying that guatemalan

00:46:42.040 people should not have a right to live lives uh you know flourishing lives but that doesn't mean that

00:46:48.040 we've evolved the emotional calculus to care more about them than our children right i've evolved the

00:46:55.240 emotional calculus that i'm much more likely to jump to save my biological children if there's a truck

00:47:02.120 hurling at them than i am to save a random person that doesn't make me callous i'd like to also save

00:47:07.320 the random children but that's not how evolution works and so what suicidal empathy does is it goes

00:47:13.080 through all of the craziness that we're seeing in the west and argue that the great majority of it is

00:47:20.520 due to this hyper activation activation of of empathy and so stay tuned for that one and and i'm i'm actually

00:47:28.760 astonished because the the kind of viral that i've gotten from like now i can literally go on social

00:47:36.520 media and i will see the term suicidal empathy and my explanations in like 40 languages and the book

00:47:42.520 nobody's ever read the book yet so it's it looks promising so i'm almost done and i think i'm going to

00:47:50.680 stay true to the 45 minutes so how do we

00:47:57.320 save our universities i have 12 items here number one pursue knowledge unencumbered by ideological

00:48:08.040 activism no knowledge is forbidden if gathered objectively using the scientific method forbidden

00:48:13.400 knowledge is a very very dangerous thing because the pursuit of truth should be deontological not

00:48:19.560 consequentialist right so it shouldn't be i will pursue knowledge as long as it doesn't hurt someone's

00:48:26.040 feeling no if i pursue it in an unbiased manner if i am a honest adherent to the scientific method

00:48:33.880 so be it right freedom of speech freedom of inquiry and the pursuit of truth are deontological

00:48:40.040 principles for those of you who don't know the term deontological is an absolute statement right it is

00:48:45.560 never okay to lie would be deontological statement a consequentialist statement would be it is okay to

00:48:51.960 lie if i wish to spare someone's feelings right and so i often tell people if you wish to have a

00:48:58.680 successful long-standing marriage if you hear the following question put on your consequentialist hat

00:49:05.880 do i look fat in those jeans this is an example where using a consequentialist ethic makes perfect

00:49:13.960 sense for many things we will put on a consequentialist hat and it perfectly makes sense but not for freedom

00:49:20.600 of speech not for freedom of inquiry not for the pursuit of truth you don't modulate on that

00:49:28.440 of course no more identity politics and victimology and so on now now to some extent you guys are kind of

00:49:34.920 getting out of getting out of that nightmare but uh those those parasites are still there those ideological

00:49:41.400 parasites no more coddling of the culture of offense and perpetual victimhood and so on

00:49:49.320 just to show you here as relating to this point this is from evolutionary medicine so in evolutionary

00:49:57.400 medicine there is the principle of the hygiene hypothesis the hygiene hypothesis is what explains

00:50:04.840 why kids who grow up in allergen rich environments end up having fewer autoimmune disorders like let's

00:50:15.400 say asthma why because your immune system requires exposure to those allergens in order to maximally

00:50:24.600 trigger it so that it can respond optimally so if you have parents who are both obsessive compulsive

00:50:33.080 who sterilize everything that increases your chances for asthma why am i saying this because apply this

00:50:40.040 mechanism now instead of clearing all allergens clearing this university from opposing ideas well then you're

00:50:47.880 doing a disservice to my mind because my mind evolved to be exposed to allergens in this case opposing

00:50:55.240 ideas that makes me a better debater to hear your stuff so i can hone my arguments now of course i don't need

00:51:00.600 to tell this to the people in this room the existence of the university is based on the recognition of what

00:51:06.040 i'm saying here but of course not at the 99.9 percent of other universities

00:51:13.000 a just society is rooted in the ethos of a meritocracy we are not social ants i mentioned this earlier in

00:51:19.080 one of my meetings uh eo wilson who is a uh entomologist at harvard recently passed away uh ants

00:51:29.640 are communistic right there is a reproductive queen and then all the other ants are indistinguishable

00:51:35.400 worker ants or warrior ants so it makes sense for communism to exist an equality of outcomes to exist for

00:51:41.640 ants when he was asked professor wilson what do you think about uh communism socialism his answer

00:51:49.320 was one of the most beautiful i've ever heard great idea wrong species meaning that human nature

00:51:56.280 does not afford the possibility for flourishing under communism because we are not social ants

00:52:03.560 we need meritocracy promote an ethos of intellectual and political diversity of course we all know this

00:52:09.880 here's a slide i don't know if some of you have seen this i discussed this in the parasitic mind

00:52:15.240 this is the ratio of democrat to republican professors as a function of the discipline now even the best

00:52:25.000 least lopsided field is 1.6 to 1. now in other areas of science that would be a huge effect right

00:52:34.120 because if you have for example an odds ratio of 1.2 to 1 that means it's 20 percent more that

00:52:39.720 the efficacy of that drug is high so the least lopsided would be astoundingly high statistically

00:52:47.880 significant effect but now look as we get into the activist field 133 to 1 89 to 0 whatever it is

00:52:56.920 now you are really cheating the students in this case because there are some things where your

00:53:01.880 political orientation doesn't matter the theory of evolution is the theory of evolution whether you're

00:53:06.040 democrat or republican but if we want to discuss the pros and cons of the death penalty there are

00:53:11.880 really compelling arguments on both sides of the aisle and i as a student want to hear about it and so

00:53:17.240 by having this kind of lopsidedness you are literally cheating the minds of all of those students

00:53:24.120 all ideas beliefs ideologies are open to criticism debate mocking yes mocking ridicule satire nothing is

00:53:35.960 sacrosanct

00:53:41.080 this is the last slide number eight promote an ethos of interdisciplinarity consilience and

00:53:46.360 methodological pluralism i hinted at that earlier of course this this university is very much

00:53:52.840 founded on an ethos of interdisciplinary consilience as i mentioned earlier is about unity of knowledge

00:53:57.880 all of the big breakthroughs in science always happen at the intersection of disciplines because

00:54:04.760 typically the problem is so big and otherwise intractable that if you don't have expertise in

00:54:09.800 many areas you won't be able to crack it so yes teach people to be specialists but also teach them to be

00:54:16.040 big synthetic thinkers that's also very important encourage bold thinking academia should be about

00:54:23.880 the forming of intellectual navy seals and not bean counters uh i'm sorry to say i know that there are

00:54:32.040 colleagues here but which of course it doesn't apply to you i i often joke that i have discovered a new

00:54:37.400 subspecies of human they're called the invertebrate castrati and they're also called professors because they

00:54:44.600 have no spine and they have no testicular fortitude that's and i i apply that to the women too because

00:54:51.720 as we know some women do have testicles so so you want intellectual navy seals that doesn't mean you're

00:55:02.360 impolite that doesn't mean you're acerbic that you're cantankerous it but it means that let's get

00:55:09.720 into the ring and let's debate ideas that's what i'm here for that's what i signed up for i'm an

00:55:13.880 intellectual i want to discuss ideas and that's what we should be teaching our students strike

00:55:19.080 the right balance between specialization and generalization now these are not related to

00:55:24.360 parasitic stuff but i thought they were really relevant uh remove the stifling bureaucracies in

00:55:29.640 academia implement something akin to doge within institutions when i now teach courses where i do

00:55:36.360 do research projects in classrooms we have to go through ethical clearance as if we were

00:55:43.720 you know splitting the atom that doesn't make sense you don't need that kind of i will teach you the

00:55:49.960 ethical requirements in the course and i'll clear them but now apparently there needs to be a third

00:55:54.840 party to clear that and so it only gets more burdensome innovation is uh universities is where

00:56:01.480 innovation typically goes to die and then finally science reason logic and a commitment to evidence

00:56:07.800 based thinking trump ideology hurt feelings and fashionable anti-science full intellectual gibberish

00:56:15.160 thank you very much morgan how about

00:56:30.040 okay here we go thank you very much for the presentation the biggest example of a mind being

00:56:39.080 parasitized live that i've seen over the past several years um has been sam harris uh don't don't get me

00:56:47.000 going on i remember following him years ago and and being kind of i had a high respect for him uh my

00:56:56.280 family was was pretty entranced by his ideas and what he said um and over the past couple of years has kind

00:57:01.080 of fallen off a cliff yeah how do you prevent yourself from becoming like sam harris uh so just for for

00:57:11.160 those of you who don't know sam harris was one of the four horsemen of atheism along with christopher

00:57:19.160 hitchens who's a you know big intellectual uh richard dawkins uh daniel dennett who's an evolutionary

00:57:25.560 philosopher and sam because sam had written some books that were sort of anti-religion so on

00:57:30.920 and uh in the past 99 of what sam would have said i would have agreed with and i actually faced a

00:57:38.840 a bit of i'm sharing some personal stuff here i shared i i faced a bit of a personal conundrum

00:57:44.920 because as he became truly the exemplar of trump derangement syndrome but at a level that's almost

00:57:50.840 impossible to emulate i was torn because i know sam you know he invited me on a show we've had dinner

00:57:58.200 together i know i would say he's a friend but i know him and my middle eastern heritage required

00:58:05.240 me to be a bit more gentle in in you know in in dealing with his nonsense because i knew him and so

00:58:12.920 on but then i started feeling that if i gave him a full pass i would be inauthentic to truth and so after

00:58:22.040 biting my tongue for about four years i decided to come after him in a jocular manner he didn't like

00:58:28.440 it he blocked me whatever and then i said okay all bets are off and then i went after him i don't know

00:58:34.360 if there's a singular way to not become sam harris but elon musk said in a tweet he goes you know sam there is

00:58:43.160 too much meditation that can happen so maybe the lesson i'm being a bit facetious is uh it's an

00:58:52.280 inverted u-shape of meditation too little is not good maybe too much is not good find the sweet spot

00:58:58.280 as aristotle told us thank you one quick follow-up should we invade canada and buy greenland

00:59:03.720 so i put out a tweet where i tagged donald trump and i said dear uh donald trump uh please can you

00:59:12.040 invade canada you won't need more than four to six soldiers hold on a hundred people wrote stuff to

00:59:21.800 my university that i be fired because i had engaged in sedition and treason imagine being so humorless

00:59:33.160 as to use that as the launching pad to get me fired always maintain humor thank you very much

00:59:41.640 thank you cheers all right um thank you for the talk you talked a lot about how a parasite will

00:59:49.080 take some aspect of its host and then use that to derive some benefit you talked a lot about how

00:59:54.360 the bad parts of that like the the intellectual parasites that take rationality but not necessarily

00:59:59.640 about what they gain in return or what the person who has this parasite um robin hansen thinks of

01:00:05.000 this as sort of like a luxury belief that provides some sort of selection uh and then there's also

01:00:11.240 what's it uh okay i blanked on it or oh no uh mark andreason thinks of it as sort of like a religious

01:00:16.840 impulse that gets fulfilled how do you think of the evolutionary benefit a parasite gets so i'm not

01:00:22.920 sure that i can offer an evolutionary explanation for these ideological parasites although if if pressed

01:00:29.080 i probably could but i'll offer maybe approximate explanation so i argue that these ideological parasites

01:00:37.160 uh achieve two things number one they free us from the pesky shackles of reality right and that could

01:00:45.560 be very liberating so for example i don't know if i mentioned to somebody in this meeting social

01:00:50.280 constructivism is very liberating because it basically says we are all born tabula rasa and it's only the

01:00:56.840 specific schedule of reinforcement of socialization that makes me become leonel mussy or michael jordan or

01:01:03.080 albert einstein well if i'm a parent i want to sign up for that ideological parasite because i don't

01:01:08.760 want to believe that my son might be height constrained that he may not be the next nba star

01:01:16.200 so maybe if i hug him enough or maybe not hug him too much he could be the next michael jordan so

01:01:21.560 that's a very compelling parasite for me to hold right so that's one the second thing is that all of

01:01:29.240 these ideological parasites start off with a noble cause which then metamorphosizes into nonsense into

01:01:37.480 the in the service of that cause so for example equity feminism is a great idea it says that men and

01:01:43.400 women should be treated equally under the law but then radical feminists come along and say that's

01:01:47.320 not enough we now have to promulgate the idea that men and women are indistinguishable from each other

01:01:52.520 in order to squash the patriarchy so it starts off as a noble goal that then sinks into the abyss of

01:01:59.640 infinite lunacy so those would be the two arguments in terms of the benefits that are derived from these

01:02:04.600 ideological parasites hi professor saad hi there so it seems that our current era were overtaken by

01:02:11.080 parasites and it seems unimaginable that there could be an era in which this was not the case are there

01:02:17.400 examples of times when people are more resistant to parasites and if so how does that happen so i think

01:02:25.080 i mentioned in our in our student meeting that the capacity for the human mind to be parasitized

01:02:33.720 is an indelible part of the architecture of the human mind so so as i mentioned the example and i'll just

01:02:40.120 repeat it here there was a time 300 years ago where in salem massachusetts it was a very very good idea

01:02:47.800 if you thought that your neighbor was a witch to throw her in water and if she swam she was a witch

01:02:52.280 and if she drowned she wasn't a witch and people genuinely believe that and organize their lives around

01:02:57.560 that parasitic idea but then we grew out of that one so i don't think on a theoretical level i could think

01:03:06.440 of a time period or an ecosystem where all inhabitants within that ecosystem were magically free of

01:03:14.680 parasitic ideas no that is an indelible part of the human mind what is unique to this period are the

01:03:21.800 specific idea parasites post-modernism did not exist in the salem witch hunts cultural relativism didn't so

01:03:29.160 what's unique is the specific cocktail of these parasitic ideas that have destroyed our edifices of reason

01:03:36.440 thank you thank you first why wasn't your car study in 2012 published or finished and second what does

01:03:45.320 owning the liberals actually accomplish

01:03:50.200 but you you think that i'm pursuing the owning the liberals based on your twitter account yes yeah

01:03:56.440 you need to read it more carefully uh i own the truth i defend the truth to the extent that liberals are

01:04:09.080 espousing and promulgating ideas that are nonsensical i go after them i live in the university ecosystem

01:04:16.520 each of these parasitic ideas stem from academia academia is almost exclusively run by liberals and

01:04:24.520 progressives hence i go after them so i don't own the liberals i attack stupid ideas which in my case

01:04:33.480 involve attacking leftist ideas that doesn't mean that people on the right can't be parasitized so for

01:04:40.760 example when it comes to evolution just the theory of evolution it is the right that usually gets angry

01:04:49.080 about evolution but when it comes to the application of evolution to the human mind it is the left that

01:04:55.960 doesn't like that idea so there is nothing inherent about why leftists or people on the right are more

01:05:04.120 or less likely but the specific parasites that i'm talking about are all leftist nonsense okay thank you

01:05:10.920 thank you thank you for your remarks um i hope ben crocker doesn't get mad at me for this question

01:05:17.480 i've heard you speak elsewhere about the evolutionary concept of a sneaky fucker yes um can you tell us

01:05:23.080 what this is how they might be identified and how they might be dealt with yes in a small community of 87

01:05:28.840 students right so so the the the theory of the sneaky fucker is a zoological theory that comes out of

01:05:39.880 uh 1970s zoology the formal term although literally sneaky fucker is used the formal term is kleptogamy

01:05:52.200 which is the stealing of mating opportunities so this is what what happens is for example you have a

01:05:58.920 species of fish where there are two phenotypes of males there is a typical male that looks like a

01:06:06.360 male fish there is another male fish that actually mimics female morphology so by by tricking the male

01:06:18.120 guardian into thinking that this one is a female he lets him go through and then he sneakily copulates

01:06:27.320 with all the females so that theory existed in the 1970s so what i did my contribution to that literature

01:06:35.640 is i argued that male feminists are pursuing a sneaky fucker strategy right i am very kind i wear a

01:06:45.640 i cry when the tree gets oh sorry right i'm i'm very empathetic when i get into my car and i turn on the

01:06:54.920 thing i start crying because i'm raping mother earth with the evil juice of gas right so so all of those

01:07:02.680 things makes me really empathetic less threatening maybe i can get close to linda over here so that

01:07:08.040 she could think i'm not threatening and then hopefully good things happen and so that's the theory thank

01:07:13.480 you thank you

01:07:21.320 when you talk about the 117 billion people who have all held that a man is one thing a woman is something

01:07:28.280 else and give that as a reason why it's sort of absurd for us to question that idea doesn't that

01:07:33.480 seem kind of conforming and anti-free thought to say that just because something has been considered

01:07:39.000 true that it can't now be considered otherwise i mean if your standard for questioning things

01:07:46.760 is whether male female reality exists in a sexually reproducing species maybe you're questioning a bit too

01:07:53.640 much right so in other words no one is saying question whatever you want but 117 billion people

01:08:01.560 have been able to navigate through that conundrum very successfully so for example when i chose to

01:08:07.720 start a family with my wife did i guess that she's a woman and it just turned out good things happen and we

01:08:14.760 had children what about your parents what about the hundred say so that we need to question no you don't

01:08:19.560 question that you don't question that any more than jumping off the empire state building would be

01:08:26.120 something that an open-minded person would do to question gravity so this would be different than

01:08:32.920 say when we used to think that the earth was the center of the universe and then they criticized

01:08:37.880 galileo for claiming that because that's something that they guessed yes whereas we have empirical evidence

01:08:42.680 uh so to your point it is true that in science all truths are provisional meaning that it is true

01:08:51.560 that you have to have the epistemic humility to say what is true today if incoming evidence comes in

01:08:57.960 that falsifies it so be it so you're absolutely right it's not revealed truths as you would have

01:09:03.080 in religion so yes be epistemologically humble but i don't think that that would apply to questioning

01:09:10.760 whether it's a it's we're being too conservative in thinking we know what male or female is it

01:09:17.320 literally is the definitional characteristic of a sexually reproducing species so we need to quickly

01:09:23.720 go tell charles darwin that he was a buffoon and that his sexual selection theory was completely

01:09:29.080 wrong-headed because we need to question what's male or female thank you thank you sir

01:09:35.960 thank you for your wonderful insights i really appreciate you coming here

01:09:38.600 my mom's a mcgill grad so i'm very familiar with canada ah i'm curious how does parenting fit

01:09:46.120 into this whole situation which situation you mean in terms of what you do with your children to try

01:09:51.960 to inoculate them and so on how does parenting stem into the parasitic mind so i don't know if what

01:09:58.760 i'm going to answer speaks to what you're asking i would say you have to be a present parent so for

01:10:04.840 example having me as their father has served as a good mind vaccine for my children right

01:10:12.600 but not only that when my daughter or son would come home from elementary school and there was some

01:10:19.240 insane thing that was said in their class i would write an email politely like i wasn't being a root but

01:10:26.360 very polite email i wasn't pulling rank or anything i'd say please explain this right and so i think

01:10:32.360 you just have to be present and make you know speak to your children and and then good things happen

01:10:37.640 i mean my i truly believe that my children are impervious to all this nonsense now yes it's because

01:10:45.080 they're my children but uh because i i engage them i'm constant i don't like to i've never baby talked my

01:10:52.520 children i'm very very loving to them i'm very uh nurturing but i never do the cootsie cootsie i mean i i've

01:11:00.760 walked with my nine-year-old child then he's 13 now and we talk about libertarianism and actually i

01:11:08.520 remember the exact conversation uh i was crossing a street and there was a young cop cadet that was

01:11:15.480 standing there giving out tickets for people who crossed other than when it's the thing says that you're

01:11:24.600 allowed to cross so at the time so this would be three four years ago so then i would be 57 years old

01:11:30.440 so i was 57 years old i had gone through the lebanese civil war but i didn't have the cognitive acuity

01:11:37.720 to look in a residential neighborhood on a one-way street oh are there any cars coming no i've got the

01:11:45.320 freedom to be able to cross the street so i had because otherwise i would get a 90 ticket for jaywalking

01:11:51.800 and that launched me into a 20-minute lecture on intrusion of government he was nine so i think

01:11:58.600 that the way you handle that those issues is you engage your children don't treat them like little

01:12:03.480 idiots they're they're they're hungry to have knowledge thank you cheers hello thank you for your

01:12:12.120 time and a big fan of your work thank you sir um i was wondering you sort of pointed out some of the

01:12:18.120 negative things not to do in creating university if you were to create a university based on your

01:12:23.400 experience and your research both in academia and on evolution how do you create systems to draw out

01:12:29.800 excellence and to really create an environment conducive to producing great work it's a big

01:12:35.960 question that would require i mean off the top of my head i would say encourage bold thinking a lot of

01:12:42.680 uh academic so i'm going to answer it from the academic perspective but i can also answer it from

01:12:48.520 a student perspective uh a lot of academics play the game of publication right so it's i learn a

01:12:56.840 methodology i'm very good at it i develop economies of scale within that literature that allows me to pump

01:13:04.920 out 74 papers that no one will read that no one will care about that no one will cite but i will have

01:13:12.200 a good cv that will get me tenure and then full professor and so on that doesn't promote bold

01:13:20.040 risk intellectual risk a lot intellectual navy so i think what i would like to see more in academia

01:13:26.840 is the rewarding of you know big broad synthetic thinking rather than small minutiae plus delta

01:13:33.560 epsilon now that's still necessary that you do need hyper specialists but uh you know i love i mean

01:13:40.520 what what i've seen today of university of austin is there definitely is an ethos of interdisciplinarity

01:13:46.360 that excites me i i spoke to people that you would think in other universities i would never sit down

01:13:52.600 with because we would be siloed architecturally in completely different buildings i'd never talk about

01:13:58.520 their interest in plato and so on so i would love to be immersed in an environment that's fertile with

01:14:05.480 ideas bold thinking and hopefully good things happen thank you very much thank you sir hey there thank you

01:14:12.360 for being here um you brought up identity politics a lot throughout your lecture and uh citing it as like

01:14:18.200 a negative thing which uh sort of a symptom of a lot of our cultural decay and institutional decay

01:14:24.520 uh but then you also uh criticized um i think her name was anna epstein for uh

01:14:32.280 opposing israel and supporting palestine supporting hamas i believe the phrase you used

01:14:37.800 was attempting to transcend her tribalism which does seem like uh i just have like a hard time

01:14:44.760 reconciling those two positions so i'm not sure what you're asking but let me address it in a general way

01:14:50.440 uh it is it is a feature of the human mind to succumb to coalitional psychology so that is true so in

01:14:59.640 other words there is an innate pension for us to be tribal right so if you you look at the abrahamic

01:15:06.280 religions they're all structured on an us versus them blue team red team so it is true that we do view

01:15:14.920 the world through the lens of us versus them the problem with identity politics it then it then says

01:15:21.480 we're going to adjudicate different decisions based on your identity so i am lebanese jew i talk about that

01:15:29.320 in chapter one because i went through some horrific periods that is part of my identity so i am invoking

01:15:35.080 my identity but i didn't come here and say hey university of austin you must give me the job that i want

01:15:42.840 because of my identity right i present myself to the world as ghat sad part of ghat sad is that i

01:15:49.000 happen to have that heritage but i'm not owed anything for that heritage that's the problem

01:15:53.720 identity politics so yes view the world through coalitional eyes right we either love the detroit

01:15:59.640 lions or we hate the detroit lions there are two types of people in the world so it's okay to be

01:16:03.960 coalitional just don't expect that we're going to met out rewards based on your identity okay thank you

01:16:12.840 first of all thank you for your time this has been extremely fascinating my my question is short but

01:16:19.160 it may be a long answer is we've talked so much about the parasitic mind is there a cure if so what

01:16:25.560 is it well there are several several mind vaccines and i i go through them in the book one of which is

01:16:32.120 that remember the nomological network that i put up right so the nomological network is an effortful cure

01:16:40.840 because it requires a lot of effort to build that network but it then protects you against nonsense

01:16:47.320 right so imagine hundreds of thousands of generations of students have gone through psychology departments

01:16:56.600 where they were taught that all these sex differences are socially constructed i challenge any social

01:17:03.240 constructivist to watch that uh nomological network and stick to that position so uh the the mind vaccine

01:17:11.800 is not just a quick prick and it's gone it's effortful but there are absolute ways for you to uh be inoculated

01:17:19.640 awesome thank you sir thank you hi there hello um i my question is we were discussing a little bit earlier

01:17:26.840 there's a variance of people in personalities and one of your examples specifically that stuck out to

01:17:32.760 me about the children's toy preferences is something to do with personality and so there is some amount

01:17:39.960 of variation of sure toy preferences and also i think this question can be more broad is there any harm to

01:17:47.400 having a typical toy preference no harm whatever no absolutely uh so this is not saying it's not a

01:17:57.000 normative statement boys should prefer deep boys girls should prefer that it's simply questioning the

01:18:04.520 position that says that to the extent that there are very predictable sex specific patterns and toy

01:18:12.200 preferences are those due to social construction or is there a inerrant universal biological based reason

01:18:20.120 for those without casting any judgment to the millions of boys who have sex role reversals of toy

01:18:26.840 preferences and girls so there's no normative judgment but there is a judgment as to the veracity of the

01:18:32.360 position are they due to social construction or biology and that nomological network says it's absolutely

01:18:38.200 biology thank you thank you hello thank you for your time super super super interesting um yeah three

01:18:46.280 supers suit three supers wow yeah so uh my question i feel like many people on the right kind of look at

01:18:54.520 the crazy five percent of the left and kind of believe that's like the entire 50 of the left including the

01:19:05.000 moderate left what do you have to say about that i'll maybe i'll give an analogy how many uh terrorists

01:19:12.120 did it take to alter the new york city skyline not a lot it wasn't 190 million it wasn't 190 000 it wasn't

01:19:22.360 19 000 it was 19 so it doesn't take too many people to take us to the abyss of infinite lunacy right so i don't

01:19:31.160 care if the number is five percent or twelve percent they are the ones who control for much of the

01:19:37.640 past 80 years all of the institutions of the intelligentsia and so it is absolutely true that

01:19:45.400 most students at any university even at the most woke university don't walk around with blue hair

01:19:51.160 you know crying because a tree was cut that's fine but the ones who do keep the rest of us in check

01:19:58.440 right i mean not me but in general right so so so i'm not very sympathetic to the idea that come

01:20:06.200 on but it's only five percent that five percent can cause a lot of damage that five percent becomes

01:20:10.600 our prime minister so okay thank you thank you sir yep my question is do you think that this sort of

01:20:17.240 crybaby parasite is going to inevitably continue because we're reading rousseau right now and he's

01:20:23.080 talked a lot about how science and learning softens us and like technology softens us and so you know

01:20:29.080 with automation and with academia the two a's when they come together is there any way that you know

01:20:35.880 this softening can really so that by when you say the crybaby parasite you mean like the victimology

01:20:41.000 narrative yeah like very soft yeah i mean i don't know if i can link that to technology i mean what i can

01:20:47.960 i do have several theories some of which i discuss in the parasitic mind so i talk about the homeostasis

01:20:55.880 of victimology do you know what a homeostatic system is so like your your uh temperature gauge in your

01:21:03.000 their thermostat in your hotel room is a homeostatic system right i set it at 72 if it gets too hot it cools

01:21:09.960 it if it gets too cold it heats it right many things in our bodies are homeostatic systems if my blood

01:21:16.120 sugar goes down i will engage to get food to then re-equilibrate right so i argue that what's

01:21:23.240 happened regrettably in the west is a form of homeostasis of victimology which is there is a

01:21:29.000 set threshold of victimology that i must adhere to and if i can't find it i will then create full

01:21:37.880 victimhood so jussie smollett was a perfect manifestation of that phenomenon do you know who that is

01:21:44.520 that just anybody know who yes so he's the actor who was making i don't know a million dollars uh an

01:21:52.280 episode i mean maybe a b or c level actor but he had succeeded he had everything he's living in the

01:21:57.960 freest country in the history of the world but that wasn't enough because he didn't have the most

01:22:03.240 important metric which was a compelling story of victimhood and therefore no problem i manufacture one

01:22:09.880 so i don't know if i could link it to victimology but uh to to technology but it's a dreadful way to

01:22:16.360 organize society because if anybody has a right to claim that they have been victimized it is the one

01:22:24.040 that you're speaking to right now if you saw the childhood that i had in lebanon and yet one of the

01:22:29.800 things that i'm most proud of is that i have overcome my victim narrative i'm standing here in front

01:22:35.720 of you so yes my past is part of who i am but i don't dwell on it as a matter of fact i want to

01:22:41.800 seek revenge on it by having a successful fruitful life yeah just to add something really quick like

01:22:48.600 i just wonder if it's sort of an inevitable stage of a democracy like or a place where there's a lot

01:22:54.760 of liberty and freedom because like people just lose that certainty of things of themselves yes so there

01:23:01.320 is a similar argument when it comes to for example anorexia nervosa anorexia nervosa you'll never find

01:23:08.920 it in countries of scarcity because people are too concerned about actually getting food to then have the

01:23:18.040 luxury of succumbing because you understand what i'm saying so it happens in cultures of plentitude

01:23:25.080 that you get anorexia and so to your point i think it's something similar victimology narratives is

01:23:32.120 not something that happens to ethiopians during their endemic famines but it happens in the west

01:23:38.200 where we've become flabby and fat thank you thank you i just want to thank you for the speech this is

01:23:46.280 definitely one of the most interesting ones one of if not the most interesting one we've had at uatx

01:23:53.320 um my question pertains to like this list of items on the screen um on the previous slide the first

01:23:59.480 one you mentioned um you want me to go to it um sure we can

01:24:07.080 that the pursuit of knowledge um it's the first one yeah no knowledge pursue knowledge unencumbered by

01:24:12.760 ideological activism no knowledge is forbidden if gathered objectively using the scientific method yes

01:24:17.800 so regarding the objectively and scientific method part do you believe it is possible to gather information

01:24:23.000 objectively and two is the only information that um is not off limits is that that we can gather

01:24:29.880 through the scientific method the scientific method is the only game in town epistemologically

01:24:34.680 speaking there are no other ways of knowing uh and can you do it objectively yes i i've made a career

01:24:41.720 doing it i'm sure many other people have here that doesn't mean that you don't have personal biases in

01:24:47.720 the types of research problems you might be interested in or something but can i actually design an

01:24:54.440 experiment to test the hypothesis fully devoid of any biases yes i've done it for 31 years okay so for

01:25:02.680 example when it comes to the study with testosterone right i mean we take the salivary assays we send them

01:25:09.560 to a lab they measure it where did my bias get in there is no bias so absolutely there's a way the problem

01:25:16.200 arises where certain fields become more about the activism than the pursuit of truth so sociology is

01:25:25.800 not inherently a non-scientific discipline right there are there are very good academics who can pursue

01:25:33.160 really important sociological problems the problem with sociology is that it views its main reason

01:25:39.160 death as activism that's what not what it should be the pursuit of truth is not about activism it's about

01:25:45.640 uncovering the truth thank you very much thank you oh i know this guy thank you professor sad i just

01:25:51.160 want to second what many of the students have said this has been great talk i really appreciate you

01:25:54.680 coming here um i have a sarcastic but still serious question uh you mentioned was it in a published paper

01:26:01.640 that someone made the argument that the idf's hesitancy to rape palestinians was a sign of their

01:26:08.200 inclination to other it was so i don't know if she ended up publishing it i think it might have been part of

01:26:13.080 her doctoral dissertation but it's easy to track her her name is talen itzaim she was a doctoral student

01:26:18.600 at hebrew university i'm just curious whether anybody has argued the opposite thing that for

01:26:22.760 example all of the rapes that took place on october 7th and surely since then to all the hostages

01:26:28.760 uh is uh evidence of the gazans solidarity with um the israeli people i see the sarcasm no i haven't

01:26:37.000 heard that one but let's i mean it logically would follow from the same kind of premise right i mean

01:26:41.640 that makes sense yes uh i haven't heard it but uh it's only a matter of time i like how you're

01:26:45.880 thinking yes thank you thank you for your very enjoyable talk thank you uh what you're wearing

01:26:51.240 right there would get you into a big trouble at my university i would refrain from wearing that if

01:26:56.520 you come to gaza university i'll be careful my question is so you showed us a lot of studies

01:27:02.760 and obviously we can see where humans think fallibly and we have we misconstrue things in our head how

01:27:10.040 effective is that if you told everybody how effective would that be in making them think

01:27:15.160 more rationally or more toward i hate to pat myself on the back very effective so it depends

01:27:21.240 how you measure effectiveness if it's a hundred people have listened to my message and it needs

01:27:27.720 to be that i flip 95 of them then it hasn't been effective but if have i had thousands of people

01:27:37.080 write to me and say you freed me from my nonsense yes so it depends how you measure success in my

01:27:44.680 view even if i'm able to flip one person from the uh constraints of parasitic thinking i've done a

01:27:50.840 good job and i can assure you there's been probably many hundreds of thousands thank you thank you thank

01:27:56.920 you for your time that you've given us thank you give this wonderful talk my question is that um

01:28:02.840 um the president recently signed an executive order saying that there are legally now only two

01:28:07.880 genders so what do you think of the uh practicality of that on passports for people born intersex and

01:28:14.520 for men who transition to women and you know have breasts and a feminine face and a feminine waist but i

01:28:20.840 mean literally in the context of the passport or well for passports but also for other things do you

01:28:26.680 do you think that's practical for like i get yeah now no longer says x on a passport that makes sense

01:28:32.280 to me or the uh new pronouns like or whatever but yeah for specifically for transgenders and intersex

01:28:40.120 people do you think that's practical so maybe i'll answer in this way a lot of people misconstrued

01:28:45.880 so that do you guys know who jordan peterson is yes so jordan is a good good friend of mine and of

01:28:51.640 course he got caught up in the gender pronoun stuff and when we both appeared in front of the

01:28:57.320 canadian senate to talk about these things a lot of people wrongly thought that somehow we're these

01:29:02.520 like monsters who are non-empathetic who are going to misgender someone that's not at all what we're

01:29:09.240 arguing right so i do want to do everything i can to make someone feel comfortable and if i can do it

01:29:16.120 i'll i'm happy to do it that can't come at the cost of the rights of others so for example

01:29:24.360 no we shouldn't have the removal of the binary male or female because there might be someone who's

01:29:30.520 non-binary because they may constitute one out of ten thousand no i'm not called a cis male i'm male

01:29:38.120 and my wife is female and my daughter is female and my son is male i don't need to put new

01:29:44.760 uh prefixes to in order to be gentle to you so i can be a kind person without murdering and raping

01:29:52.440 truth so that gives you a general framework under which i look at all these things so if there is a

01:29:57.240 way to resolve the passport issue to make those people feel comfortable fine but it can't come at

01:30:03.240 the detriment of my biological marker which is i am male thank you thank you how do you think that zionism

01:30:10.760 is not a form of identity politics when it's like one of the most binding factors on the right

01:30:16.040 especially right now the fact that you hold to an identity doesn't mean that you're supporting identity

01:30:22.440 politics if i said people who live in israel and if they come to mit should have preferential treatment

01:30:31.640 in admissions that's identity politics if you say you're wearing a cross right that cross is advertising

01:30:40.440 your identity but and that's perfectly fine but you're not then saying because i'm wearing that cross

01:30:47.560 give me unique preference over the other people in this room who are not wearing that cross so no one

01:30:53.560 is questioning the fact as i mentioned to one of the earlier people that identity formation is part of

01:31:00.120 who we are so i am lebanese jew and i'm happy with that but i don't deserve any accolades or any

01:31:08.520 punishments for that identity if i lived in lebanon my head goes out if i at that identity so that's all i'm

01:31:15.320 saying so zionism of course it is identity based but the argument is that there are 56 islamic countries that

01:31:23.160 exist around the world precisely because they are organized around the islamic faith surely a people

01:31:30.120 that have had a right to that land for thousands of years could have a region the size of new jersey

01:31:36.920 that they call their own that's all it is that doesn't mean that in my supporting the right of

01:31:41.560 israel to exist i am being uh contradictory because i rail against identity politics does that make sense

01:31:49.000 yeah but wouldn't that be converging like identity politics and dei because there's a difference for

01:31:53.960 sure you're like claiming that you get something because because of your identity compared to binding

01:31:59.400 together with other people like let's say on the right wing if you're not a zionist that would still be

01:32:03.960 like people would push you away from their groups because you're not a part of their identity so the

01:32:08.360 question is what so wouldn't that be identity politics like if you're a white right winger and someone

01:32:13.720 isn't a zionist you push them away which happens yeah identity politics as i uh rail against is the use

01:32:22.040 of your identity in adjudicating limited resources there there are 17 places to get into mit we should

01:32:31.720 pick the best students it shouldn't be because you are this or that that's identity politics that doesn't

01:32:39.560 mean that the 17 people that we pick don't have identities that define them right so railing

01:32:46.920 against identity politics doesn't mean that personal identity cease to exist all that it means is don't

01:32:54.120 use that identity to either punish others or reward others that's all thank you sir thank you yeah it's an

01:33:01.640 honor to meet you and have you here at our university sir um i with my question i kind of wanted to bring

01:33:07.560 it back to a little bit to you and your your personal story um aside from the islamic component of the

01:33:15.080 lebanese civil war which you grew up in do you have any are there any lessons or takeaways from that that

01:33:21.160 you yes it actually ties in with the previous gentleman on identity politics the reason why i

01:33:29.560 in chapter one i spent so much time discussing my background in lebanon is because i'm using it as

01:33:36.200 the perfect exemplar of what happens to a society that is wholly organized along identity politics how

01:33:45.640 in lebanon you have an internal id akin to like a passport that if the cops stop you they say show me

01:33:53.480 your in arabic you say how we okay that card they don't care about your height or your eye color or your

01:34:01.960 weight you know what's the number the number one most conspicuous thing on that card what do you

01:34:06.840 think it is religion yes and if you are jewish it wasn't written jewish it was so in arabic jewish is

01:34:17.320 yahudi and it was written israeli israeli means israelite so even though i'm fully lebanese i've got

01:34:27.240 nothing to do with israel you're already creating animus against me because i'm an israelite i'm not lebanese

01:34:33.880 the the parliament is organized it's called the confessional parliament it's organized along

01:34:41.160 religious lines the prime minister has to be of a given religion always the president is of another religion

01:34:49.400 always the speaker of the house is of another religion always and then the other seats in the parliament

01:34:55.880 parliament are allocated depending on the importance of that religion so jews had one seat

01:35:02.680 in lebanese parliament when there were enough jews so everything in lebanon is viewed through the lens of

01:35:10.680 identity politics that only leads to bad things at the extreme that leads to rwanda that leads to iraq

01:35:18.520 that leads to syria that leads to the balkans that leads to lebanon so the reason why i discuss my

01:35:25.160 identity in that book is because then i want to rail against identity politics and i want to use my

01:35:31.800 cautionary tale of what lebanon looked like under identity politics shukram uh he said thank you i said

01:35:40.840 you're welcome well thank you very much guys

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - February 03, 2025

UATX Lecture - Evolutionary Psychology, The Parasitic Mind, & Suicidal Empathy (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_790)

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