00:13:32.140Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, of course.
00:13:34.420There are, again, several possible explanations. I'll give one from my neuro-parasetological
00:13:40.780framework. You may have heard me mention this before, maybe not, but certainly your viewers
00:13:45.880may not have. Neuroparasitology is a field that seeks to understand the interaction between
00:13:52.460parasites and hosts, which happen in countless ways in the animal kingdom. A neuroparasite
00:13:59.740is different from just a regular parasite in that it seeks to, as its final destination,
00:14:05.520go to the host's brain, altering its circuitry to suit the interest, typically the reproductive
00:14:12.160interest of the parasite. So a tapeworm is a parasite, but it goes into your intestinal
00:14:18.540tract. A neuroparasite wants to go to your mind. Hence, that's why I use that framework to
00:14:24.600explain idea pathogens. Now, I'm going to come to the Jewish parasitized people in a second.
00:14:30.440The wood cricket is one type of animal that is parasitized. It hates water. The wood cricket
00:14:37.420doesn't want to do anything with water. But when it is parasitized by a hairworm, the hairworm needs
00:14:44.280the wood cricket to jump into water in order to complete its reproductive cycle. So once the
00:14:50.080hapless, zombified wood cricket is parasitized, it happily and merrily jumps into the water, commits
00:14:58.420suicide in the service of the parasite. So many parasitized Jews are just two-legged versions of
00:15:09.040wood crickets because they think they are, and again, there are several reasons for that. So for
00:15:14.200example, if you are Jewish from a land where Islam ruled, hence you're a dimmi, a dimmi is a not even
00:15:23.440second class, third class, fourth class citizen under Islamic law whereby you are tolerated until
00:15:29.960you're not tolerated. Well, if I'm a dimmi, I develop the psychology of servitude, right? I want to
00:15:37.180demonstrate respect, great respect and reverence to my overlords because they know, I know that at any
00:15:43.320minute if any one of them notices that my daughter is really pretty, then I'm in trouble, right? And
00:15:48.840therefore, there is an appeasement strategy of wood cricket Jews under Islamic lands that causes them
00:15:55.960to say, no, Islam is beautiful, it's gorgeous. Now, what about Western Jews? Well, Western Jews
00:16:00.920have also had to be at the forefront of fighting for civil rights and so on, right? So for example,
00:16:08.740many of the leading civil rights activists in the civil rights movements in the United States
00:16:15.780were, of course, either black or many of them were Jewish because Jews come from a history of bigotry
00:16:22.180and so what better way to demonstrate that you're against all forms of bigotry? So take that idea and
00:16:29.120now apply it to Islam. It feels wrong for me if I am a Harvard Jew to say that Islam is bad because I
00:16:40.200have a lot of friends, Ahmad, Mahmoud, Muhammad, who've never killed anybody, who are perfectly
00:16:45.760lovely and I sat at the dinner table at my home in Boston with my super progressive Jewish wood
00:16:52.860cricket family members who always said that all Muslims are lovely and kind, so it feels gauche,
00:16:58.900it feels wrong for me to criticize it. So there are different reasons why wood cricket Jews would be
00:17:05.560in love with Islam, but of course they are all fools because none of them would have been saved
00:17:10.680had they found their way at the Nova Film Festival. They would have gotten the exact same bullet whether
00:17:16.920they were Gabor Mate who really loves Palestinians or not, they would have ended up in the exact same
00:17:22.880place. Yes, would it be fair to say that today you are a Jewish observant, like you have a strong
00:17:30.920Jewish identity, you don't eat pork for example, but you're not religious by any means? So it depends
00:17:38.700how you define the term religious, right? If you mean am I wedded to my Jewish identity, then short of
00:17:49.100Maimonides there's nobody more Jewish than me. If it means I better head home on Friday and light the
00:17:57.080candle at 421 because the Chabad rabbi said it's 421, but 422 is a really big problem to Adonai,
00:18:06.540then no, I'm not very religious. So remember that Judaism is a multifaceted construct. It is a shared
00:18:14.420people, it's a shared lineage, it's a shared history. So from that perspective, I'm incredibly Jewish.
00:18:21.380from the everyday rituals. Do I think it is a mortal sin to eat shrimp soup? No, I don't.
00:18:32.940Well, not everyday practice, but from the perspective, I think that a lot of observant Jews would say
00:18:38.360today if I can ask them if you practice Judaism. So it's like one person, he believes in God,
00:18:46.320he prays, maybe. Look, two weeks ago, it was my son's bar mitzvah. We had the bar mitzvah in a very
00:18:55.000serious way. He had to read from the Torah. I put on my tefillin. So, you know, am I Rabbi Schneerson?
00:19:03.600No. Look, I lived my duty more than most Jews will ever live because I had to wear some really good
00:19:13.320running shoes and outrun those who were going to behead me, right? That's it. Mic drop. I've done
00:19:20.700my part. And what I do every day for Judaism makes me a lot more Jewish than whether I eat shrimp or
00:19:27.500not. Yeah, no, I ask just because when I hear your talks and I hear you about speaking about religion,
00:19:33.520so you speak a little bit like a neo-atheist, like it's like listening to Sam Harris a little bit.
00:19:40.100You know, you can't understand me? Except that I'm not, I don't like the term new atheist. It's a silly
00:19:48.480term, but I'm not hostile to religion and certainly not to Judaism as long as it doesn't infringe on
00:19:59.240scientific truths. In other words, as an evolutionary psychologist, I actually have written about the
00:20:07.380evolutionary roots of belief and of religion. In other words, it makes a lot more evolutionary sense
00:20:14.860to be a believer than to be an atheist because to be a believer allows me to get through some very,
00:20:22.500very dark realities in my existence, right? If your four-year-old son, God forbid, is stricken with
00:20:29.680leukemia, it's a lot more comforting to wed that reality to a religious narrative than it is to say,
00:20:38.260you know, bad stuff happens. Sorry, Timmy, I guess you got leukemia. It's comforting, but it doesn't say
00:20:45.540that there is really a God that you pray and he can, you know, hear you listening to your prayers and
00:20:51.080you know what I mean? Yes, exactly. Well, Blaise Pascal said this, the philosopher, when he offered
00:20:59.580his explanation for why people should believe. I mean, he didn't use the term utilitarian and so on,
00:21:05.340but he basically created a game theoretic model. You know, you can believe in God or not and he could
00:21:11.360exist or not. So it's a two-by-two matrix. And now the idea is that under all scenarios, it makes more
00:21:17.700sense to believe in God. So I understand the reflex to believe. But for example, if a rabbi were to say
00:21:25.780to me, as many have, you know, how could you believe in evolution? We know that that's not the thing.
00:21:33.900Now I have a problem because you are pitting a religious narrative against an incontrovertible
00:21:43.120theory that has about 150 years of incontrovertible evidence. We build drugs, medicine, based on
00:21:52.100evolutionary theory, not by looking at a particular code in the Torah, right? So religion is wonderful
00:22:00.700because it weds us to a shared narrative. And there are, as I said, many functional values to religion.
00:22:07.760My only problem with religion is once it becomes arrogant enough to offer a narrative that contradicts
00:22:16.900science. So Stephen Jay Gould, for example, although I don't agree with his position, was what's called
00:22:22.720a proponent of the NOMA principle. NOMA stands for non-overlapping magisteria, meaning that he was
00:22:32.700saying, look, religion can exist in this space and science can exist in this space. And as long as
00:22:39.620they don't infringe on each other, they don't overlap, then I think there is room for both. And
00:22:44.740to that extent, I agree with him. The problem is, if I am a young earth creationist, I absolutely and
00:22:52.580literally believe that the earth is a couple of several thousand years old. And the average three-day
00:22:59.440old squirrel who studied geology knows that to not be true. So that's my only problem. So I'm not a new
00:23:06.420atheist. I'm not hostile to religion. I just wish that religion would worry about our moral and spiritual
00:23:15.120value and leave the science for others. Of course. I think that the one who wrote a better book than
00:23:21.840Stephen Jay Gould was actually the Rabbi and the Lord Jonathan Zaks, the big partnership.
00:23:27.620He actually wrote something similar to Jay Gould, but I think in a maybe a better way.
00:23:34.600So thank you for telling me that, because I don't think I've read that. So I'll have to read that.
00:23:38.180Yeah, it's a great book, great book. I think it was his best, best book by Rabbi Zaks.
00:23:42.640So you talked briefly, you explained briefly about the parasites and how it connects to bad ideas. Can you
00:23:51.160explain more about how they are destroying the West common sense today?
00:23:56.840Right. So let me go back to the start of how
00:24:01.120I first realized that there were these flourishing parasites on university campuses.
00:24:07.720So my area of scientific research is largely at the intersection of evolutionary biology and
00:24:17.880evolutionary psychology and applying it to human behavior in general and economic behavior and
00:24:24.360consumer behavior in particular. So I study the biological fundamental underpinnings of why we do the
00:24:31.060things that we do. Okay. Now, to me, that seems obvious, right? It can't be that you
00:24:37.700study every single species on Earth while invoking that species' biological heritage, but there is
00:24:45.520only one species called Homo sapiens that somehow exists outside the realm of biology. Or if biology
00:24:53.940applies to Homo sapiens, it applies, but as long as it stops at the neck. So evolution can explain why we
00:25:01.040have opposable thumbs. That's okay. Evolution explains why our liver works the way that it does. That's okay.
00:25:06.700But surely, Professor Saad, you're not one of those Nazi professors who thinks that the human mind might have evolved through a process that is akin to every other species that has ever existed on Earth.
00:25:24.640So that's when I first saw how could my colleagues be such imbeciles? How could it be controversial for the colleagues that I have? Very smart people, economists and organizational psychologists and consumer psychologists and psychologists of decision-making and operations researchers and behavioral finance folks.
00:25:49.300All of these guys with huge degrees and super smart, all of these guys with huge degrees and super smart suddenly were unwilling to accept the fact that biology matters in explaining human behavior.
00:26:01.000So that was my first exposure 30 plus years ago to the fact that very intelligent people could be fully parasitized by imbecility.
00:26:11.300And then subsequently, and then subsequently, over the next 30 years of my career, I experienced that with increasing frequency.
00:26:19.900And so I tell very early at the start of the parasitic mind that I have faced two great wars in my life.
00:26:26.500First, the Lebanese Civil War, and two, the war on reason, science, logic, common sense, reality on university campuses.
00:26:34.400So what the book does is it basically traces many of these parasitic ideas, and I'll explain a few in a second.
00:26:43.280And then towards the end of the book, I offer a vaccine, an inoculation against these bad ideas.
00:26:50.240So let me start with, as I call it, the granddaddy of all parasitic ideas, postmodernism.
00:26:56.360Postmodernism purports that there are no universal truths other than the one universal truth that there are no universal truths.
00:27:07.840So already it completely crumbles, but let's not let logic get in the way of our stupidity.
00:27:13.920And so postmodernism becomes a form of intellectual terrorism, as I call it, or nihilism,
00:27:21.320because up could be down, left is right, men are women, slavery is freedom, peace is war.
00:27:28.900There are no objective truths to speak of.
00:27:31.600So it is that framework that then allows a lot of the other nonsense to flourish.
00:27:37.660So transgender activism could not have flourished were it not that I am afforded that ability through postmodernism.
00:27:45.800Because postmodernism says, it is not true that there are only two sexes in a sexually reproducing species made up of the male and female phenotype.
00:29:08.860So if I just start slamming and make noise, who are you to argue that that's not its own form of brilliant music?
00:29:17.180Who are you to say that an empty canvas that is sitting at the Carnegie Museum is itself not a form of beautiful art?
00:29:25.880By the way, I tell that story in the book where I had gone to visit a friend at Carnegie Mellon University in 1996 and I visited the Carnegie Museum.
00:29:35.140I paid money to see art and then I am witnessing an empty canvas.
00:29:40.720And so I demanded to see the curator of the museum.
00:29:44.540They ended up sending someone else to see me, asked me, how can she help me?
00:29:50.240And I said, well, why is there an empty canvas here?
00:29:52.620And then, of course, she answered, well, you see, it is causing us to have a wonderful conversation.
00:30:43.620So the question is, your book, when you wrote it, you tried to convince the other side, like the woke students who are going to open it?
00:30:53.400Or are you saying, okay, if someone is on the woke side, it's over?
00:30:57.920Look, the regrettable part is that the people who most should be reading the book are precisely those like your wood cricket friend, who say, no, no, no, la, la, la, I don't want to hear it, right?
00:31:14.080But I don't think she even read all the book, you know?
00:31:23.840I believe that most people are reachable.
00:31:26.240Now, there are some that are absolutely unreachable, no matter what I might present to them.
00:31:31.320And so one of the skills that you have to develop if you are in the business of trying to change people's minds is to know how to allocate your time strategically.
00:31:42.120That's one of the reasons why, by the way, I refuse many, many invitations to debate people.
00:31:47.520Not because I, you know, boo-hoo-hoo, I'm scared to debate them.
00:31:51.780I could have debated them when I was six years old.
00:31:54.300The problem is I know that there is nothing that I could ever say that could cause them to even have a modicum of intellectual humility to say, hmm, that's interesting.
00:36:52.440Those are not the words that she used, but it's roughly that.
00:36:56.300So, even for someone who was as lost as her, I was able to get through to her.
00:37:02.600And I've had millions of those stories.
00:37:04.920So, notwithstanding your friend who wasn't willing to read the book properly, I think that if you approach people with the right persuasion strategies, most are willing to listen to you.
00:37:18.620So, as you said a couple of times in our short conversation, you grew up in Lebanon.
00:37:24.240And believe it or not, Israelis from my generation don't know a Jew could actually grow up in Lebanon.
00:37:31.040Can you share a little bit what it was like growing up as a Jew there?
00:37:37.340So, we were, we meaning my immediate family, my nuclear family.
00:37:43.520This is my father, my mother, and we are four brothers and sisters.
00:37:48.660I have two brothers and a sister and myself.
00:37:51.020So, we were part of the last remaining group of Jews in Lebanon.
00:37:56.380Most Jews who had been in Lebanon in the 20th century had already left by the time of the start of the Lebanese Civil War in 75.
00:38:06.360So, my extended family, meaning my aunts, my uncles, my cousins, my grandparents, had all left Lebanon way before.
00:38:18.220Most went to Israel, but some went to France, some came to Canada, and so on.
00:38:23.540So, it's very rare, actually, to find in Israel Jews from Lebanon.
00:38:28.280It is rare because there aren't too many.
00:38:31.200But, you know, at the maximum point of Jewish life in Lebanon, you had several thousands.
00:38:39.300As a matter of fact, the parliament in Lebanon, it's called the confessional parliament, meaning that you assign seats in parliament as a function of the number of, you know, people you have of that faith.
00:38:52.420The parliament had one seat for Jews in Lebanon.
00:39:00.080And so, there has, of course, been Jewish presence in all that region since forever.
00:39:06.300So, we were, now, some of my most immediate ancestors are Syrian Jews who left Syria to Lebanon because of some of the difficulties they faced.
00:39:17.420But my own family had decided to stay in Lebanon, even though my siblings had left Lebanon.
00:39:24.820So, my siblings are much older than me.
00:39:28.520The youngest one after me is 10 years older, 12 years older, and 14 years older.
00:39:33.440And they had moved to, my brother had moved to France.
00:39:40.800One of my brothers, my youngest brother, who's 10 years, I mean, the next youngest, who's 10 years older than me, was a judo champion of Lebanon for many years in a row.
00:39:51.380And he had been approached, this is before the civil war.
00:39:54.400This is when Lebanon was super peaceful and progressive and tolerant.
00:39:59.180Barrett was called, I think, Paris of the Middle East, right?
00:40:02.480But you should put kind of quotes around that because tolerant in the Middle East has a different meaning than tolerant in the rest of the world, or certainly in the West.
00:40:12.280So, and now I'm going to give you an example of what tolerance looks like in Lebanon.
00:40:17.240So, my brother was approached by some men who explained to him that it was time for him to retire because it's a bit shameful for a Jew to be winning these kinds of tournaments all the time.
00:40:28.140And so, because he wasn't willing to retire, he ended up moving to France.
00:40:32.280And he did so before the start of the civil war.
00:40:35.040My oldest brother decided to leave Lebanon in 1974, so one year before the civil war, because it was also becoming very dangerous for him and his wife.
00:40:46.840He had married a Palestinian woman, which didn't go too well either with his family or with my family, Palestinian Christian woman.
00:40:55.740And he had some difficulties with the PLO and so on, and so he also left.
00:41:01.020And my sister had also moved to Montreal prior to the civil war.
00:43:23.220And so, everything in the Middle East is viewed through the prism of the diabolical puppeteering Jew.
00:43:30.800So, yes, it's the Paris of the Middle East in that, yes, on a daily basis, people are not getting killed all over the street before the war.
00:43:39.780But then something happens and then it's no longer okay to be Jewish.
00:43:45.040This is the story for the past 1,400 years.
00:43:47.480So, that's my story growing up in Lebanon.
00:43:50.020When you see today what's happening in Lebanon, how it makes you feel?
00:43:53.920Well, I mean, there are several ways to answer this.
00:43:58.220One thing is it makes me feel so regretful that I've never been able to share that heritage with my children, right?
00:44:09.080I greatly regret that I can't go back to Lebanon and see the school where, you know, it's as if this is something that happened to someone else.
00:44:19.020It's in the back of my mind from 50 years ago.
00:44:22.640But I would like to go back to where I used to go and buy the cake, where I used to go play soccer.
00:47:40.960They were mature, they were poised, they were well-informed.
00:47:45.080So I think it's a two-pronged approach.
00:47:47.860I think we can create new institutions from the ground up that have the correct values, but we can also hopefully vaccinate the current universities against the nonsense and reclaim reasons.
00:48:51.140Well, first, yes, the previous book was what happens to minds when they are negatively affected.
00:48:56.600So it's nice to write a positive book.
00:48:58.180But it really came from hearing so many people write to me saying, how is it that you can maintain your humor and you're always smiling and you're playful with all of the difficult stuff that you've gone through in your life and all the difficult topics that you deal with?
00:49:18.120Why don't I write a book that explains those secrets?
00:49:20.780Hence, eight secrets for leading the good life.
00:49:23.300But I was a bit hesitant at first because if you do a cursory overview of probably the topic that has been most written about by ancient philosophers till today, certainly the ancient Greeks, they've already written a lot of stuff about how to live the good life.
00:49:42.000And so my concern was, can I come up with a book that is truly unique?
00:49:47.420And I'd like to think I have because I'm taking my unique insights coupled with ancient wisdoms and contemporary science, putting them together to hopefully come up with something fresh and novel.
00:49:59.140What are some secrets and regarding your question about meaning?
00:50:02.840So one of the things that I talk about in the book early in the book are the two decisions that you make that can either impart the most amount of happiness or regrettably the most amount of misery to your life.
00:50:14.920And that is choosing the right spouse and choosing the right profession.
00:50:19.420And the meaning part comes from the profession.
00:50:23.540So I argue that all other things equal to the extent that it's possible to do so.
00:50:28.640Anything that allows you to instantiate your creative impulse will give you purpose and meaning and hence will lead to, if you like, existential happiness.
00:50:40.220Because now, what does it mean to instantiate your creative impulse?
00:50:43.620A stand-up comic is being creative because he's creating a unique set of jokes that didn't exist until he created them that hopefully are going to make members of the audience happy.
00:50:59.420An architect is creating something new.
00:51:01.800An author and professor is creating something new.
00:51:04.060So there are many, many ways by which I can satisfy my creative instinct.
00:51:09.660But doing so immediately immerses me in meaning and purpose, right?
00:51:15.520Now, that doesn't mean that we don't need bus drivers and that their lives are not valuable.
00:51:21.080And it doesn't mean that insurance adjusters are also not important and accountants.
00:51:26.000But very few people wake up in the morning and say, I am existentially happy and satisfied because I am an accountant and an insurance adjuster.
00:51:37.780That just becomes a job that I have to do to pursue other interests.
00:51:41.760But if your job itself can be a form of play, can be a creative lab of creation and innovation, then you've really hit the jackpot.
00:51:52.580And so one of the reasons why I'm happy every day, other than, by the way, I should mention, and I mentioned this early in the book, about 50% of individual differences in happiness stem from our genes.
00:52:29.940But then I could make all the wrong decisions and adopt all the wrong mindsets and you do the opposite and suddenly you get to the top of Mount Happiness much quicker than I do.
00:52:42.360I think it's actually a message of empowerment.
00:52:44.980And so I mentioned earlier, I mean, I can go through all of the prescriptions, but maybe I'll mention one or two.
00:52:52.880Live life as though it's a playground.
00:52:55.800It sounds like a cliche and banal, but it really isn't because I'm constantly in a playful mood.
00:53:03.660That's, by the way, I get more people coming up to me in the street who recognize me, who refer to something humorous that I've done more than all of my fancy professorial stuff.
00:53:22.380That's why I explain always that dictators, they don't get rid of guys who are tall with big muscles first, because those are easy to get rid of.
00:53:33.500They get rid of the ones who have sharp tongues, the ones who write with poisonous pens, the humorous, the satirists, because they're the ones who serve as an existential threat to my power.
00:53:47.160I need to, and hence, that's why you say the pen is mightier than the sword.
00:53:51.040So using satire, using sarcasm, using humor.
00:53:56.780By the way, I was recently, I'm often told by people, don't you think, though, that your humor takes away from sort of your professorial authority?
00:54:10.820As a matter of fact, it's precisely because I am so self-confident about my personhood that I could wear the pink wig and make fun of the idiots.
00:54:21.800If I were insecure, that's when I would have to put on the air of the fancy professor smoking a pipe and looking into the air and looking down on people.
00:54:33.560But it's precisely because notwithstanding all of my fancy degrees, I'm just a regular guy who's a professor of the people.
00:54:50.760And if we started with the biggest question of them all, you know, how has Professor Gadsar dodged cancel culture after openly mocking wokeness in postmodernism?