Dr. Gad Saad is a scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi. He is also author of many books, including Parasitic Mind and his forthcoming book, Suicidal Empathy.
00:00:00.000Okay, guys, special guest for you all today, Dr. Gad Saad, scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi, also author of many books, including Parasitic Mind and his forthcoming book, Suicidal Empathy. Thanks for your time today, doctor.
00:00:18.240Did the book come out yet, the new release?
00:00:20.220No, it hasn't come out yet. We're aiming, hopefully, with the publisher for a release in April. Only a single person has read it so far. And the response was, this book, as promised, is terrific. So I'm feeling it.
00:00:36.840What was the inspiration for making this book? What compelled you to write it?
00:00:39.660So, let me step back a bit and sort of give people a 30,000 feet overview. I've been a professor now for 32 years, and my main area of scientific research is to apply evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology to study human behavior. And I do so within the business school.
00:01:02.740So I study consumer psychology, economic psychology, and so on. And I was amazed very early in my career to see how people could be completely resistant to what seems to me completely obvious and banal truths, which is that human beings are shaped by biological forces.
00:01:20.220For most of my social science colleagues, what makes us human is that we transcend our biology. Biology matters for your dog. Biology matters for the giraffe. It matters for the mosquito.
00:01:29.960But surely, but surely it can't apply to human beings. And so that was my original idea of saying, you know what, even very intelligent people that have professor before their name could be complete morons.
00:01:41.080And so that led me to write The Parasitic Mind, which came out, this book right here, the other one. It came out about five and a half years ago now. Almost, it was in 2020 it came out.
00:01:52.440So that book looks at what happens to your brain when it is hijacked by ideological capture. The next book, Suicidal Empathy, looks at what happens to your emotional system when it is hijacked.
00:02:06.380So if I can hijack and parasitize both your thinking ability and your emotional ability, then I have you completely zombified. And so that's the full story.
00:02:16.160Interesting. And do you feel like a lot of people right now have their emotional system hijacked?
00:02:21.420Yes. And most of them, regrettably, come from largely one side of the political aisle. And that's not because I'm trying to make a political statement. That's just the sheer reality.
00:02:33.100Most of the, well, all of the parasitic ideas that I talk about in The Parasitic Mind, postmodernism, cultural relativism, radical feminism, identity politics, they all were spawned on university campuses by leftist professors because the academia is overwhelmingly dominated by leftist professors.
00:02:54.480Then these dreadful ideas, then these dreadful ideas eventually seep their way into culture, into Hollywood, into journalism, into, you know, everything, into business, into politics.
00:03:06.160And so what ended up happening is in the pursuit of these parasitic ideas, people's empathy began to misfire, right?
00:03:16.380So it's not nice to, you know, give a felon who's only been convicted 83 previous times, not to give him another chance.
00:03:26.760By other chance, it means the 84th time.
00:03:28.940It's really not nice, and it's mean to stop homeless people who are defecating, fornicating, and shooting up acid where your children play, to round them up and move them elsewhere.
00:04:32.520Do you see the pendulum swing when it comes to college campuses?
00:04:36.360Do you see it ever going more center or more towards the right?
00:04:39.280I mean, from your lips to God's ear, I mean, I'd like to think there is some auto-correction taking place.
00:04:45.660So, for example, when Donald Trump came to power, by the way, just for your listeners who may not know who I am, I'm Canadian.
00:04:52.900So it's not as though I voted in the American election.
00:04:56.120So if I say something that is positive of Donald Trump, it's not because I have posters of Donald Trump in my bed.
00:05:03.080I don't have a dog in this fight other than the pursuit of reason, logic, and common sense.
00:05:10.180So when Donald Trump came along with just one stroke of an executive order, he can immediately reverse all of the insanity regarding Title IX.
00:05:20.820You know, when six foot three, you know, women with nine inch penises, yesterday they were called Bubba, but today they're called Linda.
00:05:29.800And therefore, when they transitioned to becoming Linda, they absolutely, the science is settled, have become a girl.
00:05:36.840And therefore, we have to be empathetic to the trans community and allow them to destroy the dreams of every biological female athlete in the world.
00:05:45.660Well, he came along and said, OK, no more of this nonsense.
00:05:49.700That's good, because there is a return to some form of normalcy.
00:05:53.400But the parasitic ideas and the suicidal empathy that originally began festering on university campuses took 50 to 100 years to take a real foothold within the culture.
00:06:08.040So it's not because Donald Trump comes along or because there is some sort of auto correction in the university campuses that suddenly we're going to eradicate these bad ideas.
00:06:17.540It'll take many generations of assiduous fighting, but God willing, we'll get rid of this stuff.
00:06:23.400Yeah, I wonder if they'll ever all be fully eradicated because there'll always be bad ideas, parasitic ideas, and social media is amplifying these.
00:06:31.580So at what point does it become accountability, right?
00:06:35.900But I mean, one of the reasons why I love to do shows like I'm doing today with you is because you typically have a lot more of the left that, you know, are the loud, boisterous folks.
00:06:49.580And certainly if they're professors, right, most professors would never be caught dead saying something positive about Republicans because Republicans are indistinguishable from Hitler.
00:07:39.460Well, although I sometimes look at you with great envy because in the U.S., at least, you have several mechanisms that allow you to have an easier auto correction.
00:07:52.080In Canada, when Justin Trudeau first came to power, I mean, I had been warning about Justin Trudeau for years and nobody would listen to me.
00:08:00.480Then he came along and he was a disaster.
00:08:04.320And then Canadians said, here's a great idea.
00:08:06.000Why don't we reelect him again the second time?
00:08:14.240So then they said, well, why don't we elect another guy who doesn't look quite as sexy as Justin Trudeau, but is just as nefarious in his progressive parasitic stuff called Mark Carney.
00:08:26.580Whereas in the United States, just because of the way the system is set up, you can implement auto corrections much more quickly, as you see with Trump.
00:08:45.720Well, I mean, you often have this sort of incumbent, you know, there's a blowback against the incumbent party, especially when they now control everything.
00:09:09.720Yeah, it's a great idea when New York City has been the center of capitalism, the center of, one can argue, liberty, the center of Jewish life outside of Israel, to then elect an Islamist, avowed communist, 24 years after 9-11, probably nothing could go wrong.
00:10:49.540It's called the Hadith, the sayings and deeds of Muhammad.
00:10:53.880And it's in the Seerah, which is the biography of Muhammad.
00:10:57.040So, we can go to those primary sources and see what is stated as the fundamental principles of Islam.
00:11:05.000And if that's your question, then the foundational principles of Islam could not be any more incongruent with the foundational principles of Western societies.
00:11:17.980And what do you think about the Christian nationalism movement that I guess people associate Charlie Kirk with, how there's a rising, growing Christian movement in America?
00:11:26.260Yeah, I don't stay up at night worrying that, you know, Christian nationalists are going to eradicate the rights of all other people.
00:11:35.740Look, they are good and bad in every people.
00:11:39.820I mean, not that they are violent, but they hold positions that I know, as an evolutionist, are perfectly inconsistent with scientific knowledge, right?
00:11:49.420So, the capacity for religious dogma to spew nonsense exists across all religions.
00:11:56.760But the United States is founded on certain Judeo-Christian principles, and its founding fathers were called Christians.
00:12:07.120And therefore, I don't stay up at night worrying that there'll be an uprising of Southern Baptists or Seventh-day Adventists who are going to kill the rest of us.
00:12:17.740Because Islam, though, we have 1,400 years of history that tells us very clearly what happens in a society if Islam becomes majority.
00:13:29.260Blind to the identity of the perpetrator and the victim, right?
00:13:34.800I don't give you a higher penalty if the perpetrator is white and the victim is black or vice versa.
00:13:41.920At least in spirit, it's supposed to be that.
00:13:45.140In Islam, under Sharia law, it is literally codified in Sharia law that depending on the identity of the perpetrator and the victim, the punishment is completely different.
00:13:58.300So, if, for example, a Jewish man kills a Muslim man, that is a very different penalty than it's the other way around.
00:14:05.760And so, just that tells you whether it's compatible with American jurisprudence.
00:14:15.500So, I can't tell you empirically what it is, but to your point, paradoxically, and you raise a good point, oftentimes, you know, when you say sometimes these shifting alliances make for strange bedfellows.
00:14:28.560So, for example, when it comes to trans issues and when it comes to, you know, twerking drag queens teaching your five-year-old children how to read, because we all know that children best learn how to read if you have twerking drag queens teaching you bring happy hour, right?
00:14:49.400And so, there what you'll see is you'll see a cacophony of Jewish conservatives, Christian conservatives, and Muslim conservatives standing in unison against their children being taught all this nonsense.
00:15:03.480So, depending on the issue, you have shifting alliances.
00:15:15.800Like, right now, I know that anti-Semitism's pretty prevalent.
00:15:19.140But what do you think right now is doing the most damage?
00:15:21.800Well, I mean, certainly, I think the parasitic ideas that I talk about in the parasitic mind are the ones that have caused the most trouble.
00:15:31.440And maybe, just because it might sound too abstract to just say parasitic idea, let me give you a specific exemplar of that.
00:15:39.140So, post-modernism is a philosophical movement that started about maybe 50 years ago with a bunch of French bullshitters.
00:15:49.140Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault are some of the fathers of post-modernism.
00:15:56.080And what the framework purports is that there are no objective truths.
00:16:01.240You're always shackled by your biases.
00:16:04.640You're always shackled by the idiosyncrasies of the moment.
00:16:07.960You're always shackled by your relativistic biases.
00:16:11.040So, there is no objective truth to speak of.
00:16:13.940Now, you could see how, if you start with that framework, then there is no objective truth that men are physically stronger than women, innately.
00:16:22.980There is no objective truth that my chromosomes and my genitalia determine my sex, hence transgenderism.
00:16:29.920And so, I think there is a set of these parasitic ideas that have been so detrimental to the edifices of reason in the West that if I had to pick in the current moment the ones that have caused the most harm, I would say the cocktail of parasitic ideas with suicidal empathy will bring down the West.
00:16:52.080And what do you think the breeding ground is for these parasitic ideas?
00:16:55.180Do you think it's the college campuses?
00:17:02.100Every single dreadful, moronic, imbecilic idea was spawned on university campuses because, as I hate to remind people, it uniquely takes professors to come up with the truly dumbest ideas.
00:17:30.000When academics sit on top of the ivory tower and with a progressive lisp and a highfalutin affectation, they can espouse all kinds of things while 20-year-olds sit like this and go,
00:17:46.340oh, professor, this is so brilliant, fully decoupled from reality, right?
00:17:51.260There is no autocorrective mechanism that slaps them in the face and says, what are you sprouting, moron, right?
00:17:58.240And so what that does then is it allows for the big mean pathogenic virus, mind virus, to then spread because there is no doorstop to challenge it, right?
00:18:10.100The 21-year-old is not going to tell their professor, what are you talking about, professor, that men can menstruate?
00:18:16.300What kind of idiocy is it to say something as ridiculous as this?
00:18:20.720Until 15 minutes ago, the 117 billion people that had lived on Earth, that's a real number, a real estimate, they seem to perfectly know how to navigate through the very difficult conundrum of identifying what is male or female.
00:18:36.720But 15 minutes ago, when we took women's studies courses at Oberlin College, we stopped knowing what male or female was.
00:19:37.400So because those disciplines are applied disciplines rooted in reality, they are, in a sense, they have a built-in inoculation against this kind of imbecility.
00:19:48.260But if I'm in sociology and ethnic studies and Africana studies and lesbian dance therapy studies, then there is no link to those things.
00:19:59.320And therefore, the lunacy can flourish unencumbered by reality.
00:20:04.400And do you think this is American universities, Western universities worldwide?
00:20:07.980Do you think this is a worldwide issue?
00:20:20.960So, for example, if I'm at an Ethiopian university, I don't have the luxury to espouse the position that men, too, can menstruate.
00:20:32.220Because as Rob Henderson calls them, luxury beliefs, right, I don't have the luxury to espouse parasitic nonsense when I'm worried whether, by the end of the day, my children are going to have their caloric needs met.
00:20:47.060But when I live in a society of plenty, it becomes a form of intellectual orgiastic nonsense, right, where I can demonstrate the amount of leisure I have by espousing things that are perfectly decoupled from reality.
00:21:00.940It's interesting, right, how the most affluent nations struggle with more mental issues.
00:21:08.280The human, humans will always find something to annoy them or piss them off, seems like, huh?
00:21:13.660But to your earlier point when you said, oh, I don't know exactly what you had asked, but like, oh, there's always the capacity to have parasitic ideas or something to that.
00:21:22.460Your point is well taken because it's not as though the current reality, previous generations of human beings were not parasitized.
00:21:35.100What's unique about the current moment are the specific parasitic ideas that have infected our brains today.
00:21:42.360So 300 years ago in Salem, Massachusetts, I looked at my female neighbor.
00:21:48.840I thought that she was very likely a witch, and therefore I and the rest of the community thought that it was a great idea to throw her in water.
00:21:56.620And if she swam, then that proved that she was a witch.
00:21:59.780And if she sank, then, oops, I guess she wasn't a witch.
00:22:03.140Now, that was a form of parasitic thinking, right?
00:22:05.600When people in Europe thought that the Black Death, the Black Plague, was really due to Jews, well, that was a form of parasitic thinking.
00:22:17.180So the capacity for the human mind to be parasitized, it's an indelible part of the architecture of the human mind.
00:22:24.460What is unique to this current period are the specific mind viruses.
00:22:29.360And when you say specific, you mean like hijacked?
00:22:56.520I stand before you judging cultures that think that cutting off the clitorises of five-year-old girls is within their purview of their religion, right?
00:23:06.060So once you relativize everything, there is no objective truth, there are no objective standards of universal aesthetics, there is no objective morality, then you descend into nihilism, into lunacy.
00:23:21.660And so these are the specific parasitic ideas that I'm talking about.
00:47:12.640I become a guy who plays video games all day.
00:47:15.760I get fat, whereas my cheerleader girlfriend, who was really hot in high school, went on to
00:47:22.700become a neurosurgeon, and now she is surrounded by a lot of male neurosurgeons.
00:47:27.960So what's happened is that our original mating values, which were both at 80, suddenly her mating value is now at 93, while my mating value is at 42.
00:47:39.980That divergence in our mating value is going to put great stressors on our marriage.
00:47:46.340So make sure that you evolve together in your mating values.
00:47:55.900I feel like that happens to a lot of people.
00:47:57.720And do you think if that were to happen to you, I don't know if you're in the wrong if you were to leave that relationship, you know what I mean?
00:48:04.220Because you're still growing so fast and they're not keeping up with you.
00:48:07.880And I mean, that's why, I mean, you often hear that, oh, marriage takes work.
00:48:12.760I mean, you'd like to think that it doesn't take too much work and that you found your soulmate, but this is part of work.
00:48:20.000If I see my wife making all sorts of moves to improve herself, to improve the lot of my family, and I'm sitting all day long playing video games, I mean, it doesn't take a fancy evolutionary psychologist and professor to tell you you're not doing your part.
00:48:38.160And when that gorgeous, tall, accomplished neurosurgeon that she works with every day starts paying her attention, well, she's human.
00:49:15.360So those are called necessities in the evolutionary psychology literature.
00:49:21.480Other ones are different depending on whether you're male or female.
00:49:26.380So for example, the premium on physical beauty and youth, there is no culture that's ever been studied or discovered where men don't place a greater premium on those two traits.
00:49:38.920And there is no culture that's ever been discovered nor will ever be discovered where women don't place a greater premium on men's social status.
00:49:51.820Now, social status can be measured differently in different cultures.
00:51:31.180I don't want a guy who lives with his mom who doesn't own his car.
00:51:35.200I don't want a guy who doesn't shower me with investments and gifts.
00:51:38.900Well, I could show you that exact same song in Arabic.
00:51:42.940I can show you that exact same song in French.
00:51:45.540I could show you that song in Urdu, the language they speak in Pakistan.
00:51:49.300The reason why every single culture has the exact same song lyrics is because the biological imperatives that shape women and men's desires don't suddenly change as a function of cultural contingencies.
00:52:06.140So to answer your question and to summarize the answer, yes, there are many things that men and women's mating scores are the same across the two sexes, but there are many that are perfectly different.
00:52:25.480Suicidal Empathy is not yet available for pre-order, but I know that the publisher, given how viral and how much buzz there is around it, is trying to get the book out hopefully by next April.
00:52:36.840So I suspect in the next two, three months, it should be available for pre-order.
00:52:44.540Please do pre-order it as soon as it's available to do so.
00:52:47.560Because what ends up happening, if let's say tons of people pre-order it, the first day that the book is released, all of the pre-orders then count as sales, right?
00:52:57.860So what happens is you could enter on day one of the book's release into the bestsellers list, and then that creates the avalanche.
00:53:06.220So please pre-order it as soon as it becomes available.