In honor of his new book, "The Power of the Mind," Dr. Ghasri Saad joins me to talk about how the anti-Zionism on campuses in the West is a symptom of a larger problem.
00:00:00.000Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Western Spirit. Today, I'm very honored to have this guest. It's someone who I've read and admired his stuff and listened to him for so long, a number of years now, at least.
00:00:11.820So we have today Dr. God Saad. He's a professor, evolutionary behavioral scientist, and the best-selling author. In 2004-2025, he is serving as visiting professor and global ambassador at Northwood University.
00:00:29.500And we're talking also in honor of your book, and I have it here, the Hebrew edition of the book, The Power of the Mind.
00:00:37.580Yes, I've been reading it the last week since it came out. And so, first of all, congratulations.
00:00:45.060Thank you very much. Good to be with you.
00:00:46.720And it's been all over the place here. I was on TV and Israel's most watched channels.
00:00:51.980So it's been getting a lot of attention here. And I think one of the reasons why, maybe we'll start with this, is that as Israelis,
00:00:59.500we've been looking at what's happening in campuses all over the West since October 7th.
00:01:05.780And I remember after October 7th, it seemed like all the sympathy of the West was with us because we were being killed.
00:01:11.980But once we stood up and did something, and even maybe a little bit before, because my dad lives in Times Square, in New York, and in Times Square, October 8th, they were already protesting.
00:01:21.640How does your book, The Parasitic Mind, relate to what we've been seeing the past year plus?
00:01:29.500As relating to the October 7th reaction?
00:01:33.100So one way that you can draw a direct link between the book and the October 7th issues is the narrative of victimology, right?
00:01:43.200Which is something that I discuss quite a bit in the book.
00:01:46.000And so to the extent that most Westerners, and certainly Westerners who attend North American universities, have been parasitized into believing that when it comes to the colonial versus oppressed or, you know, oppressor versus victim narrative,
00:02:04.340the Jews are inherently the oppressors because they're powerful, they're strong.
00:02:11.180Look at the Zionist tank, look at the poor Palestinian who only has a slingshot and he can only throw a rock, right?
00:02:18.620These kinds of images are very evocative.
00:02:23.540And since most people don't like to take the effort of, you know, doing this thing called thinking, it's much easier to just activate my emotional system.
00:02:33.880And so they are led to believe that when it comes to this dynamic between Israelis and Palestinians, the jury is out.
00:02:43.220It's clear the Jews are the bad guys here.
00:02:46.580And so it doesn't surprise me in the least bit that you would have the kinds of reactions that you do post-October 7th.
00:02:54.620But Gad, one of the things that I think is interesting relating to your book and maybe connecting to it is that when I was in New York not too long ago, I grew up in an ultra-Orthodox community in Brooklyn.
00:03:04.500And I went to visit and people around me, Brooklynites who are working class, let's say, no one thinks like that.
00:03:15.420Everyone was understanding of what was happening.
00:03:17.740And then you go to where my aunt lives near NYU, and you see these crazy children protesting with their professors, putting up encampments like they're in like World War II somewhere, fighting in the Warsaw Ghetto or something in the middle of Manhattan.
00:03:32.380And then they go out to eat and ask for humanitarian aid like we saw.
00:03:36.080So what is it with, I guess, Western English-speaking, I think it's very English-speaking campuses, where the mindset has become so irrational?
00:03:47.740Well, I mean, that's the whole point of the parasitic mind, right?
00:03:51.080Which is that it takes intellectuals to come up with some of the dumbest ideas.
00:03:56.980Because intellectuals exist in a rarefied world that is fully decoupled from the feedback of reality, right?
00:04:06.320And so I can sit in my ivory tower in the Ivy League, literally in many cases in the Ivy League, Columbia University, my alma mater, Cornell at Harvard.
00:04:22.780I can pontificate about all sorts of things.
00:04:25.860And there isn't the slap of reality that corrects me.
00:04:30.060Whereas the working class blue collar folks that you mentioned earlier, they are wedded to reality, right?
00:04:36.760You can't be a plumber applying postmodernist plumbing, right?
00:04:42.800You can't build bridges using postmodernist physics.
00:04:47.540And therefore, you don't see as much of these parasitic ideas in engineering school or in business school because they are wedded to reality.
00:04:54.920There is a feedback loop that says, does this idea work in the real world or not?
00:04:59.260But if you're coming from the humanities, if you're coming from the more activist fields in the social sciences, then you end up with the kinds of parasitic stuff that I talk about in the book.
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00:05:49.780And Gad, when did you, because you didn't come from, your background is behavioral, just give me the exact wording.
00:05:58.020I said it in the, I read it from what you sent.
00:05:59.720But what I mean is that you didn't start off looking at the woke mind virus, like Elon Musk calls it.
00:06:06.200And when did you run the academy and the, when did you realize that this was an extreme problem?
00:07:40.660And so that was my first exposure to these parasitic ideas.
00:07:45.540But then the longer I was in academia, it's now, it's 31 years that I'm a professor now, the more I saw these attacks on the edifices of reason.
00:07:56.040But to your question, to summarize, day one, as I was trying to Darwinize the business school, I saw that we had a problem.
00:08:03.140Yeah, and one thing that I think that you also spoke about in the book, but I heard you speak about this with Roy in one of your podcasts that you did in Israel last year was the problem of getting to the truth in academia, especially in the humanities.
00:08:19.040So you said, for example, when a study can get to a result that we don't want or that we feel endangers our opinion, people will be scared to study that subject.
00:08:31.440Even though, like you said, if the results are this, the results are this, and if they're that, that, when did you realize also how prevalent is it that, for example, professors will stay away from certain subjects because they're scared of the outcomes?
00:08:45.280Extremely prevalent, especially on topics that are very, quote, corrosive.
00:08:55.720If you conduct research on sex differences and you show that women are superior to men on something, then go ahead and publish it.
00:09:04.760You'll be hailed as a great scientist.
00:09:06.880If God forbid, Baruch Atta Adonai Elohim, look, I'm praying in Hebrew for you, right?
00:09:13.120So if you find that men are superior on a task, make sure to file that study in your drawer to never be seen again because then you are promulgating the sexist patriarchy.
00:09:27.060That's not how science operates, right?
00:09:29.400Science doesn't care about your feelings.
00:09:35.620Unlike religion, where you have revealed truths that are inerrant, what we thought was true in science 300 years ago, we have updated.
00:09:45.540So we're not saying that it's true and it will never change, but we do believe that the unbiased pursuit of truth is something worth doing.
00:09:55.360Once you incorporate the idea of forbidden knowledge, that's an attack on that principle because, hey, what if you study racial differences?
00:10:05.200And you find, let's suppose I did a study to see whether there is a particular race that's more likely to win the 100 meters in the Olympics.
00:10:17.960But if you showed in some other type of ability that, say, blacks didn't do as well, never publish that, then you would be a racist KKK member.
00:10:28.720But also another aspect of that is, for example, when we say that there's a disproportionate number of African-Americans in prison, they'll say that the reason is, without even researching it, the automatic response is, that's because of racism.
00:10:44.700So whenever there's a discrepancy, you don't need, not only do you not need to, if you try to check if that's true, you yourself are doing a racist act.
00:10:55.240Exactly. Look, so in the parasitic mind, I talk about these things, and I continue that story in my forthcoming book, Suicidal Empathy, because, and I'm going to come to your point in a second.
00:11:07.480So in the parasitic mind, I talk about what happens to our cognitive system when it is parasitized by idea pathogens.
00:11:15.640I complete the story by then arguing in the Suicidal Empathy, what happens to our emotional system when it is hijacked by parasitic ideas and idea pathogens.
00:11:26.460So to that point, in the Suicidal Empathy, I'm talking about studies that point to, say, the number of rapes that are committed in Europe from people who are noble immigrants, right?
00:11:43.300Well, that's just very, very racist and, in this case, Islamophobic, right?
00:11:49.200And so Western media will come up with endless euphemisms to hide who the perpetrators are.
00:11:56.640So in France, if it's Mohammed and Ahmed and Hussain Akbar al-Kibir who committed the gang rape, you call them les jeunes.
00:12:07.480Les jeunes in French means the youths.
00:12:09.300Well, but the youths came from a particular, right?
00:12:12.660If they were Hasidic Jews, you wouldn't say the youths.
00:12:16.220You would say three Hasidic Jews, Mordechai, Shlomo, and Moshe did it, right?
00:12:21.220But if it's Mohammed and Ahmed, we hide it.
00:12:23.780In Britain, we don't call them Muslims.
00:12:26.580We call them Asians because a lot of them are from Pakistani.
00:12:50.980And I'll give you just another example because it's so obvious.
00:12:53.200When I was young in New York, when a murder happened and the suspect was at large, they would say, we're looking for a black male or a white male, 6'5", wearing this and that.
00:13:18.900As a matter of fact, it's funny that you're saying this.
00:13:21.040Earlier this morning, I was at the cafe working on my latest book, and I was working on a section where I was citing a study that was done that looked at how likely is it that you report the race of a murderer as a function of what the race is.
00:13:39.060And exactly to your point, if it's white, you are much more likely to advertise it than if it's black.
00:13:47.820But one last question about maybe not last, but one that's like first question, what started the virus, meaning every pathogen, every virus starts from something.
00:13:59.480So I have an illness that's that's a mitochondrial illness.
00:14:12.300So let me first, if I so I'm going to answer that question, but first, just for your readers and viewers, let me explain why I used the neuroparasitic framework to explain how these idea pathogens develop.
00:14:24.220So as an evolutionary scientist, I often will look at animal behavior to draw parallels to humans.
00:14:31.880Right. So if I want to study why toy preferences of little boys and little girls are the way that they are.
00:14:37.720You can show that other, you can show that other, our primate cousins, vervet monkeys and rhesus monkeys will exhibit the exact same toy preferences because you're trying to draw an evolutionary parallel between other animals and us.
00:14:49.740Okay. So in my case, I wanted to look at, is there a framework in nature that could explain why animals could become zombified?
00:15:00.660Right. And that's where I fell on the field of parasitology.
00:15:04.940Parasitology is the study of parasites and hosts, but parasitology could be in your intestinal tract, right?
00:15:12.280If you have a tapeworm, then it goes to your intestinal tract.
00:15:16.620Neuroparasitology is when a parasite seeks to end up in the host's brain, altering its circuitry to serve its interest.
00:15:26.720So for example, a wood cricket that tests water, but when it is parasitized by a particular type of hairworm, the hairworm needs the wood cricket to jump in water because for it to complete the reproductive cycle, it needs to do so in water.
00:15:43.400So once the wood cricket is parasitized by this hairworm, it is willing to merrily jump into water, commit suicide in the service of the parasite.
00:15:54.020And that was my epiphany. Aha! I am now going to argue that human beings could be neuroparasitized by ideological brain worms.
00:16:03.700So that's the big biological metaphor.
00:16:06.380Now, to your question, where does it originate?
00:16:10.480I argue in the parasitic mind that each of these parasitic ideas, and let me just mention a few so that your viewers and listeners know what I mean by parasitic.
00:16:19.600Post-modernism is the granddaddy of parasitic ideas.
00:16:23.060It basically purports that there are no objective truths other than the one objective truth that there are no objective truths, okay?
00:16:29.820So that is a parasitic idea because up is down, left is right, women are men, freedom is peace, and so on.
00:16:38.220Freedom is slavery, war is peace, and so on, okay?
00:16:42.900That's what I call intellectual terrorism.
00:16:45.300So I argue that each of these parasitic ideas originated, to your question, from a very noble place.
00:16:53.040So, for example, equity feminism is a great idea.
00:16:57.600It basically says that men and women should be treated equally under the law.
00:17:01.540There shouldn't be official discrimination against one sex or the other.
00:17:06.220So based on that definition, most of us would say, yeah, okay, I'm an equity feminist.
00:17:10.160Radical feminists came along and then said, if we wish to eradicate the current sexist status quo, if we wish to crush the patriarchy, we actually have to argue that men and women are indistinguishable from each other.
00:17:25.860That it is only social construction that makes men be physically stronger than women.
00:17:31.860Because by purporting that position, it allows us to fight sexist injustice better.
00:17:37.780So it started off from a noble place, and then it metamorphosized into nonsense.
00:17:44.300So if we have to murder and rape truth in the service of that noble goal, so be it.
00:17:49.700So I argue that each of these parasitic ideas started exactly there.
00:17:54.900A good noble cause, which then leads to the destruction of truth.
00:17:59.240Yeah, so, but where, is there any time frame?
00:18:02.880So I just spoke with one of the professors that studies vocology.
00:18:07.780That's his, he wrote a few books on it.
00:18:10.000I found, I asked him, where did it start?
00:18:12.160That the American psyche, because I come from America, so it's, because I can't believe what happened to the place I grew up in.
00:18:18.780And he said that around 2010, there was a sort of shift in the way the culture looked at, in middle of Obama's term.
00:18:26.180Would you recognize, was that something that you also saw in?
00:22:48.960First of all, they seem to be always denigrating their own culture.
00:22:52.280And secondly, they seem to always think that any problems in other cultures are caused by them.
00:23:00.400So if you would say that the Palestinians, after October 7th, you had the UN Secretary General said,
00:23:06.920it's horrible what they did, but they didn't do it in a void.
00:23:11.320They didn't do it just out of nowhere and implying that Israel's, quote unquote, occupation brought them to do this mass rape and slaughter.
00:23:20.400Or you'll have people saying, history didn't start on October 7th, meaning that the fact that you have perceived notions about what Israel did to the Palestinians
00:23:31.080makes it that Israel was responsible for the murders and the West, obviously America, who enables it and all this settler colonialism and all these other things.
00:23:42.140But I think the main gist is that they can never be proud of their own culture.
00:23:46.460And any problems that are in other cultures are never the other cultures fault.
00:23:52.740And the perfect, I mean, given that I'm speaking here to a Jewish audience, I'm going to pick Jewish examples,
00:24:00.680albeit it applies to many other Westerners.
00:24:03.460And I think you might remember those two examples because they're proudly displayed in the parasitic mind as examples of parasitized Jews.
00:24:13.240So you might remember the example of Tal Nitsan, a doctoral student at Hebrew University who wanted to conduct a study to show that the IDF is,
00:24:23.600that the IDF soldiers, the male soldiers, are these disgusting brutes who commit, you know, mass industrial scale rapes of noble and honorable and beautiful Palestinian women.
00:24:36.880When she went out to conduct her research and to her utter dismay, when she found out that she couldn't identify a single case of such rapes,
00:24:44.760do you think that she decided that, oh, I guess my hypothesis was wrong?
00:27:44.840Well, I think that there's like the university are sort of incubators, so to speak, of the virus.
00:27:50.640So it's like, you know, you're going in, you're sending your children, your kids, especially to these Ivy League schools where we've seen Columbia, Harvard, Yale.
00:28:00.800And they come in from normal backgrounds, homes, and then they go back home and they're mashuganes, using a Jewish phrase.
00:28:09.340So let me just ask you about, we just had the election in the U.S., the presidential election.
00:28:14.860And I think one of the things that really resonated with people, and we saw this in the New York Times, that article about what was the ad that changed the most minds during the presidential election.
00:28:26.760And they found that Trump's ad that said that she cares about they, them.
00:28:34.400And I think this really goes to about what you said, where you have a class of people that are infected with this parasite.
00:28:41.320And on the other hand, people who are not from these incubators, who don't speak this language, who don't think this way, who live in the real world, and don't want their children being propagandized and they themmed.
00:28:57.080And people on the Harris campaign, I think, in retrospect, could not believe that most of America doesn't think like they do.
00:29:09.180Is this like a rejection of this whole woke mind virus?
00:29:13.020I mean, it is, although I right away say immediately after the celebration's end of Donald Trump having won, don't be complacent.
00:29:23.000Because to our earlier discussion, it took 50 to 100 years for these idea pathogen shingle virus to fester in the collective body, to then escape from the university campus, to then fill every nook and cranny of society.
00:29:43.700Now, he certainly is a much better reality than had Kamala Harris won, but it doesn't mean that magically all of these parasitic ideas cease to exist once Donald Trump comes in.
00:29:56.500So I'd like to think that it won't take 50 to 100 years to eradicate all the ideas, but it will take a lot longer than four years.
00:30:04.820Because if the next president that comes is one who is supportive of some of these woke ideas, then we're back to square one, right?
00:30:12.980So it's really a long-term ideological war that we're involved in, where, you know, people should not feel comfortable saying things like, of course men too can menstruate.
00:30:27.440The fact that we got to a place, so I'll give you two very quick stories.
00:30:30.560Story one, I was summoned to the Canadian Senate in 2017 to actually give expert testimony that, no, no, you know, as an evolutionary scientist, I can confirm that there really is two phenotypes called male and female.
00:30:49.480Because you needed in the 21st century a professor of evolutionary behavioral science to confirm that there is male or female.
00:30:56.400Until 15 minutes ago, the 117 billion people that had existed on Earth seemed to navigate this very difficult problem very easily.
00:31:06.280All of our ancestors seemed to be able to find what's male or female, but now we have much more difficulty.
00:31:12.880So example two, the last addition to the Supreme Court was so uncomfortable in her epistemological confidence in stating what is a woman, that when she was asked in the confirmation, please tell us what a woman.
00:31:29.300I can't say, I'm not a biologist, right?
00:31:32.620So the fact that you are so far removed from reality suggests that the problem is not going to go away just because Donald Trump came in for four years.
00:31:42.480And my next question is exactly that you're the whole premise of the book is that you can basically say that this is a pathology.
00:31:50.280It's like a virus. And so I guess as someone who studies this virus, when this virus is confronted with a roadblock, meaning something that comes in like like a Donald Trump, like, I don't know, Margaret Thatcher from the old days or Ronald Reagan or whomever.
00:32:08.340And they realize that these people who are with this mind virus, they realize that they have a hurdle to do.
00:32:15.720So one of the things that we've been reading since the election is, will the Democrats learn the right lessons?
00:32:22.000So you've had people on the on the more leftist side of the Democrats like, no, the right lesson is that we need to double down on, you know, woke ideas and identity politics because Donald Trump does identity politics from a male and a white and a this and a that.
00:32:38.080Even though it's like weird because he got more shares of the minority vote and whatever.
00:32:42.340And then there's other people saying, like, calm down. What is this?
00:32:45.460And there was a guy in Massachusetts, a congressman who said, you know, I'm a Democrat, but I don't want my daughter to be on the swimming team with a boy.
00:32:52.160And they started protesting outside of his house.
00:32:55.160So I guess as someone who studies this and who's written about this, do these pathogens usually adapt or do they continue on their crazy path?
00:33:06.140That's that's a great question. So what is eternal and universal is the capacity for the human mind to be parasitized, meaning that the fact that you are seeing the parasitic infections that you're seeing today or infestations.
00:33:22.140The only thing that is specific to this time period are the specific idea pathogens, meaning postmodernism, cultural relativism, social constructivism.
00:33:34.520These are the current pathogens. But I can take you back.
00:33:37.540You mentioned Massachusetts. I can take you back to Salem, Massachusetts, several hundred years ago, where there was another parasitic pathogen.
00:33:45.760It was called, how do we find who are the witches? And the way we do that is we throw them into water.
00:33:52.360And if they sink and die, then we know that, oops, they weren't witches.
00:33:57.360But if they swim, then aha, this proves that they are witches. Right.
00:34:02.360But then that virus was extinguished in the same way that John Assault came up with the polio vaccine.
00:34:10.060And we've luckily pretty much eradicated polio. We get rid of that virus.
00:34:16.940But don't worry, there'll be another one coming.
00:34:19.680So to your question, some of the viruses will mutate in new forms.
00:34:24.880Others will be completely eradicated, but new stupidity will come along.
00:34:29.540The capacity for the human mind to generate endless stupidity is infinite.
00:34:34.740Yes. So now I want to ask you also about Israel.
00:34:37.040Do you think one of the things that I guess we all struggle is how to inoculate yourself from this type of stuff?
00:34:43.860So one of the things that I when I since I've been in Israel as a teenager, I've been here since I'm 14.
00:34:50.140I came here by myself from the U.S. is that Israelis are not affected so much by the woke ideology.
00:34:57.200So you mentioned the trans issue. It's really non-existent in Israel.
00:35:01.320You mentioned, I don't know, all this postmodern anti like people who hate their own country and their own culture.
00:35:08.020We have other lots of arguments here. We hate each other, but we don't hate each other for the reasons that other countries in the West do hate each other.
00:35:16.120For example, even in the protests against Netanyahu this whole year before October 7th about judicial reform,
00:35:22.880the protesters all went to the streets with Israeli flags and I cannot even imagine Black Lives Matter protesters going with American flags for just just to show the the the disconnect here.
00:35:35.820So leftist protesters in Israel are very patriotic.
00:35:39.860That is totally against the welcome the what you speak about in the book.
00:35:43.980So what do you think makes Israel different?
00:35:46.340Yeah, so it's interesting that you say this because I was asked almost the same question by someone who's actually living in in Israel now.
00:35:56.820She's the former Canadian ambassador to Israel, and I did her show last week.
00:36:01.720I think she it's going to come out soon where she asked me exactly that.
00:36:04.920What's unique about the Israeli ecosystem?
00:36:07.420And my answer is, is the following Israeli academics are just as likely to be parasitized by all the nonsense, right?
00:36:17.180So if I'm at Tel Aviv University or Bar-Ilan or Hebrew University, I'm going to fall prey to the same stupidity.
00:36:23.840But the Israeli average citizen is similar to the earlier example you gave with the blue collar worker versus the guys who are at Columbia University.
00:36:33.980The blue collar worker is wedded to reality.
00:36:36.940The Columbia University is studying, you know, queer lesbian dance at Columbia University, right?
00:36:45.020So the average Israeli is too busy ensuring that they are not going to be eradicated by their very friendly neighbors to worry about all of this nonsense, right?
00:36:57.340Reality has a way of slapping you, as I said earlier.
00:37:00.300And therefore, Israelis have a natural inoculation because of where they exist in a very, very tough neighborhood.
00:37:32.840Once you are in a very tough neighborhood, you don't have the luxury to fall prey to this kind of nonsense.
00:37:38.900Also, one other question is that is there these types of pathogens in people that we wouldn't usually associate on the woke left, meaning one of the things that I also saw you tweet about and other people.
00:37:50.800We had this, for example, people like Candace Owens, who started off in a place where she was with the Daily Wire.
00:37:59.440It's just an example of someone who is considered on the right politically, but says things that are totally virus-like in the book.
00:38:09.920So about the Jews and about Israel and about, you know, different conspiracy theories that Israel was made by pedophiles to escape justice and that actually the Nazis were killing the people.
00:38:23.360Different, like really weird, and just to justify this type of warped.
00:38:30.780So let me just, is there such a thing as the virus being on the other side politically?
00:38:38.660I discuss it briefly in, very early in the parasitic mind, where I state that the capacity for the human mind to be parasitized is not inherently a leftist problem.
00:38:53.660And I'll give a specific example in a second.
00:38:55.820But the parasitic ideas that I cover in the parasitic mind are leftist because they were all spawned on university campuses and the great majority of professors are orgiastically leftist.
00:39:12.580So, but, so now let me give you a specific example.
00:39:16.560Hating the theory of evolution is much more likely to come from people on the right.
00:39:23.220Because if they are, for example, either religious Jews or religious Christians, then they don't like the theory of evolution because, you know, are you saying that it's not God who created the beetles?
00:39:44.980So theory of evolution is much more likely to be detested by people on the right.
00:39:51.280On the other hand, evolutionary psychology, the application of evolution to the study of the human mind is much more likely to be hated by people on the left.
00:40:03.680Because they'd like to think that it's tabula rasa.
00:40:06.380We're all born with equal empty minds and it's only social construction that makes us who we are.
00:40:12.200So the only reason why your son, Ariel, is not going to become the next Michael Jordan is because you didn't hug him enough or maybe you hugged him too much, right?
00:40:33.220So that example demonstrates that in the abstract, all people of all political orientations could be parasitized.
00:40:42.320But the ones that I discuss in the parasitic mind is strictly a leftist problem.
00:40:46.180Because they're in the ecosystem of the academia.
00:40:50.200I want to ask you two and a half more questions before I finish.
00:40:53.440Number one is the question is, if you can, we are a business paper.
00:40:59.680So although I do write about this kind of stuff, regardless of business, but I want to do ask, is the parasitic mind, people who are affected by it, they tend to be less capitalistic, it seems to me.
00:41:12.600So if we have like a person who's with this parasitic mind virus, he'll automatically want the government to be more involved in pursuing social justice.
00:41:23.140And social justice automatically means that the government will control large portions of the economy and try to be against meritocracy, the whole DEI movement.
00:41:34.640So maybe you can just speak about, very shortly, about how this trickles down, using the phrase that the left doesn't like, how this trickles down, economically speaking, in policy.
00:41:46.680No, that's a great, I mean, in a sense, you already covered the answer.
00:41:51.000No, because look, all of these idea pathogens naturally lead to socialism, right?
00:41:58.480In socialism, or socialism slash communism, the individual is much less important than the collective, right?
00:42:09.320E.O. Wilson was a famous Harvard entomologist.
00:42:12.640He studied insects, specifically social ants.
00:42:16.100In social ant species, there is a reproductive queen, then there is an indistinguishable cast of soldier and worker ants, right?
00:42:25.600All of whom exist simply for the benefit of the ant colony.
00:42:31.020So when he was asked, Professor Wilson, what are your views on communism slash socialism?
00:42:36.680In one of the greatest responses of all time, he said, great idea, wrong species, meaning that socialism doesn't work with human beings because some people work harder.
00:42:50.820Some people are taller, shorter, more ambitious, less ambitious.
00:42:54.740Therefore, to create a system, a socioeconomic political system that is contrary to human nature, it's going to fail.
00:43:02.140Now, capitalism is more in line with our innate human nature, socialism is not.
00:43:09.100So for all of these reasons, it's exactly correct to your question that it's much more likely that it is socialist people who are going to be parasitized by these kinds of stupidities.
00:43:19.940Which is why also in the academic world, I think it's safe to say, like you said in the beginning, that the more you are in humanities, the less likely you are to support free markets.
00:43:31.000So if you're someone who's studying, I don't know, architecture or engineering or that kind of stuff, you're usually probably going to be more easier with free markets, with deregulation, with the new administration, just for example, their policies.
00:43:46.360And if you're like in Harvard psychology, you'll be, oh, my God, how can we let people decide for themselves on this stuff?
00:43:58.420I mean, you're talking about which discipline you come from affects the likelihood of you being inoculated or not against these idea pathogens.
00:44:06.760I'm going to tell you something that's even more mind-blowing because it's not something that you might have thought of.
00:44:12.520And I briefly discussed it in the parasitic mind.
00:44:15.280Your physical stature affects your political orientation.
00:44:20.660So all other things equal, the more physically formidable I am, the less likely I am to support economic egalitarianism, right?
00:44:33.820The more wimpy I am, the more I think kumbaya, let's all share.
00:44:39.040Well, yeah, let's all share because I'm going to be the recipient of the fruits of someone else.
00:44:44.420But if I'm the one who goes out and wins the stuff, I'm less likely to want to share that stuff.
00:44:50.740So there's actually a whole set of really brilliant studies that have looked at this link between physical strength and physical formidability and political orientation.
00:45:01.740I want to ask you about another book that you wrote, just because we're talking also about economics.
00:45:08.860In 2007, you published a book called The Evolutionary Base of Consumption, which applies Darwinian principles in understanding our consumption patterns and the products of popular culture that most appeal to individuals.
00:45:29.520And I also read, at least at the time, it was the first and only scholarly work to do that type of work.
00:45:36.740So maybe just in general, explain why, what exactly, just in short, you checked and what did you find?
00:45:45.680Sure. Yeah. Well, thank you for asking that question.
00:45:47.500It's always exciting to talk about some of my scientific work from many years ago.
00:45:51.600Yes. So I actually pioneered a new discipline, which I called evolutionary consumption, which basically applies Darwinian principles and evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology to study our consuming instinct.
00:46:05.820The idea being, very simply, that contrary to what we are taught in economics classes and in organizational behavior and in personnel psychology and in entrepreneurship and in leadership, you can't study all these phenomena completely decoupled from the biological forces that shape these phenomena.
00:46:25.540So let's suppose there are 2 million species on Earth. If I were a scientist studying 1,999,999 other species, I would never study those species without ever invoking the biological heritage of that species.
00:46:42.360Right. It's an inherent part of studying that species. Only one species is able to be studied completely decoupled from biology.
00:46:50.940They're called human beings. And so I take that insight. And then I say, well, how can we study consumer behavior without ever looking at the biological forces that shape our consumption?
00:47:01.180Surely the reason why every human being on Earth prefers some sort of fatty food more than raw celery must be rooted in our biological heritage.
00:47:11.880Surely the fact that we all have certain universal mating preferences. Right.
00:47:16.260For example, there are hundreds of thousands of strip clubs catering to either heterosexual males or to homosexual males.
00:47:29.100But there doesn't seem to be many strip clubs catering to either heterosexual females or homosexual females.
00:47:37.600Why is that? Well, from a strict marketing perspective, hey, there is a real market opening here.
00:47:44.440There aren't enough of these let's hope. Well, no. If you realize that women don't have the same arousal mechanisms when it comes to sexual arousal, they're not as easily titillated by visual stimuli.
00:47:58.280And there are very clear biological based reasons why that is. Then you understand why there aren't many strip clubs catering to heterosexual women.
00:48:07.860And so what I do in that book and more generally in my scientific research in evolutionary consumption is I try to apply the principles of evolution to study the biological basis of what makes us consumers.
00:48:20.640And finally, because we're really out of time and I want to I wanted to get ask a personal question.
00:48:28.300So in the past two, three months, we've been seeing here right north from where I'm sitting in Lebanon and now in Syria, basically the country's being torn apart.
00:48:41.680For it's not new for them. Syria for the past decade plus has been basically torn apart and tearing apart all over all the time.
00:48:49.480I've been in touch with Druze and Kurds there. They're very scared. They're going to be a little bit massacred pretty soon.
00:48:55.200So it's a very scary situation. But you yourself and you mentioned this in the book, too.
00:49:00.520You came from Lebanon and your family basically fled the country during after the civil war started in Lebanon.
00:49:08.040And so when you look at what's happening in your place of birth, in your country of origin, so to speak, what do you what do you see when you see what's happening there now?
00:49:18.960What how do you feel about everything? Look, in a more general sense, I regret the fact I deeply regret the fact that I don't think my children will ever get to see that place.
00:49:30.000I regret the fact that my my kids don't speak Arabic now that they don't need to be in Lebanon to speak Arabic.
00:49:36.000But imagine if every year I could have returned to do a short visiting professorship at American University of Beirut.
00:49:43.720Well, in five minutes, I could throw them in as kids and they're going to come out speaking perfect Arabic.
00:49:49.100Right. In the same way that today I can go and maybe do a sabbatical in Hebrew University and and our our kids will learn Hebrew in probably six months.
00:49:56.840It hurts me that they'll never experience that heritage.
00:50:00.860It hurts me that I can't go back to where I was born.
00:50:04.400It almost feels like there is a decoupling.
00:50:07.900It's like a movie that existed in my past.
00:50:10.500But that's that happened to someone else.
00:50:12.820Right. Because I left when I was 11 and I never even imagined that I would ever go back, even though, as you probably know from reading the book,
00:50:20.740my parents did keep going back after we moved to Montreal, my parents kept returning until 1980 when they were kidnapped by Fatah.
00:50:29.920So at least they got to go back a few times.
00:50:32.660For me, it's something in the deep recesses of my of my mind that I could never go back to.