The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Why Israel Resists Woke Madness and the West Fails To Do So (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_784)

00:00:00.000 Hello, 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.

00:00:11.820 So 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.

00:00:29.500 And 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.

00:00:37.580 Yes, I've been reading it the last week since it came out. And so, first of all, congratulations.

00:00:45.060 Thank you very much. Good to be with you.

00:00:46.720 And it's been all over the place here. I was on TV and Israel's most watched channels.

00:00:51.980 So 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,

00:00:59.500 we've been looking at what's happening in campuses all over the West since October 7th.

00:01:05.780 And I remember after October 7th, it seemed like all the sympathy of the West was with us because we were being killed.

00:01:11.980 But 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.

00:01:21.640 How does your book, The Parasitic Mind, relate to what we've been seeing the past year plus?

00:01:29.500 As relating to the October 7th reaction?

00:01:32.020 Yes, yes.

00:01:33.100 So one way that you can draw a direct link between the book and the October 7th issues is the narrative of victimology, right?

00:01:43.200 Which is something that I discuss quite a bit in the book.

00:01:46.000 And 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,

00:02:04.340 the Jews are inherently the oppressors because they're powerful, they're strong.

00:02:11.180 Look at the Zionist tank, look at the poor Palestinian who only has a slingshot and he can only throw a rock, right? 0.98

00:02:18.620 These kinds of images are very evocative.

00:02:21.220 They trigger our emotional system.

00:02:23.540 And 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.

00:02:33.880 And so they are led to believe that when it comes to this dynamic between Israelis and Palestinians, the jury is out. 0.97

00:02:43.220 It's clear the Jews are the bad guys here. 1.00

00:02:46.580 And so it doesn't surprise me in the least bit that you would have the kinds of reactions that you do post-October 7th. 0.84

00:02:54.620 But 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.

00:03:04.500 And I went to visit and people around me, Brooklynites who are working class, let's say, no one thinks like that.

00:03:13.380 Everybody was supportive of Israel.

00:03:15.420 Everyone was understanding of what was happening.

00:03:17.740 And 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.

00:03:32.380 And then they go out to eat and ask for humanitarian aid like we saw.

00:03:36.080 So what is it with, I guess, Western English-speaking, I think it's very English-speaking campuses, where the mindset has become so irrational?

00:03:47.740 Well, I mean, that's the whole point of the parasitic mind, right? 0.97

00:03:51.080 Which is that it takes intellectuals to come up with some of the dumbest ideas. 0.97

00:03:56.980 Because intellectuals exist in a rarefied world that is fully decoupled from the feedback of reality, right? 0.89

00:04:06.320 And 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.

00:04:16.860 And I can pontificate.

00:04:18.860 I don't mean me, Gatsad. 1.00

00:04:20.500 I mean, idiotic professor. 1.00

00:04:22.780 I can pontificate about all sorts of things. 1.00

00:04:25.860 And there isn't the slap of reality that corrects me.

00:04:30.060 Whereas the working class blue collar folks that you mentioned earlier, they are wedded to reality, right? 1.00

00:04:36.760 You can't be a plumber applying postmodernist plumbing, right?

00:04:42.800 You can't build bridges using postmodernist physics.

00:04:47.540 And therefore, you don't see as much of these parasitic ideas in engineering school or in business school because they are wedded to reality.

00:04:54.920 There is a feedback loop that says, does this idea work in the real world or not?

00:04:59.260 But 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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00:05:49.780 And Gad, when did you, because you didn't come from, your background is behavioral, just give me the exact wording.

00:05:58.020 I said it in the, I read it from what you sent.

00:05:59.720 But what I mean is that you didn't start off looking at the woke mind virus, like Elon Musk calls it.

00:06:06.200 And when did you run the academy and the, when did you realize that this was an extreme problem?

00:06:12.880 Day one as a professor.

00:06:15.020 So let me tell you why.

00:06:16.040 So my scientific research is, as you, when you introduced me, evolutionary behavioral science.

00:06:23.040 What that basically means is I study human behavior using an evolutionary lens.

00:06:29.140 So I ask the question, if we experience romantic jealousy, why would this emotion have evolved from an evolutionary perspective?

00:06:38.360 So in the same way that I can explain through evolution why we have opposable thumbs or why our eyes are designed the way they are,

00:06:45.960 I could apply the evolutionary lens to the most important organ in my body, which is my brain, my mind, right?

00:06:52.120 Well, to most social scientists, that was basically crazy talk, right?

00:06:57.700 Because to most social scientists, what makes us humans is that we transcend our biology, right?

00:07:04.060 So biology is okay to explain the behavior of your dog, of the mosquito, of the zebra.

00:07:09.400 But don't you dare, Professor Saad, use biology to explain human behavior.

00:07:14.040 We are cultural animals.

00:07:15.780 No, we're not.

00:07:16.540 We are biological and cultural animals.

00:07:18.600 And so early on in my scientific work, when I saw the kind of resistance I was facing, I was like, this is strange.

00:07:29.240 How could these people be educated people and debate things like whether hormones affect our behavior?

00:07:35.560 Of course they affect our behavior.

00:07:37.060 What else could it be, right?

00:07:38.420 Why do hormones exist? 1.00

00:07:40.660 And so that was my first exposure to these parasitic ideas.

00:07:45.540 But 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.

00:07:56.040 But to your question, to summarize, day one, as I was trying to Darwinize the business school, I saw that we had a problem.

00:08:03.140 Yeah, 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.

00:08:19.040 So 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.

00:08:31.440 Even 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?

00:08:45.280 Extremely prevalent, especially on topics that are very, quote, corrosive.

00:08:53.200 So, for example, sex differences.

00:08:55.720 If you conduct research on sex differences and you show that women are superior to men on something, then go ahead and publish it. 1.00

00:09:04.760 You'll be hailed as a great scientist.

00:09:06.880 If God forbid, Baruch Atta Adonai Elohim, look, I'm praying in Hebrew for you, right?

00:09:13.120 So 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. 0.53

00:09:27.060 That's not how science operates, right?

00:09:29.400 Science doesn't care about your feelings.

00:09:31.840 Science is the pursuit of truth.

00:09:34.040 Now, truth changes, right?

00:09:35.620 Unlike religion, where you have revealed truths that are inerrant, what we thought was true in science 300 years ago, we have updated.

00:09:45.540 So 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.

00:09:55.360 Once you incorporate the idea of forbidden knowledge, that's an attack on that principle because, hey, what if you study racial differences?

00:10:04.960 Yes.

00:10:05.200 And 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.

00:10:14.220 Well, we know that that's true.

00:10:16.020 Nobody will accuse you of racism.

00:10:17.960 But 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. 0.69

00:10:28.720 But 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.

00:10:44.700 So 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.

00:10:55.240 Exactly. 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.

00:11:07.480 So in the parasitic mind, I talk about what happens to our cognitive system when it is parasitized by idea pathogens.

00:11:15.640 I 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.

00:11:26.460 So 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? 0.77

00:11:43.300 Well, that's just very, very racist and, in this case, Islamophobic, right?

00:11:49.200 And so Western media will come up with endless euphemisms to hide who the perpetrators are.

00:11:56.640 So in France, if it's Mohammed and Ahmed and Hussain Akbar al-Kibir who committed the gang rape, you call them les jeunes.

00:12:07.480 Les jeunes in French means the youths.

00:12:09.300 Well, but the youths came from a particular, right?

00:12:12.660 If they were Hasidic Jews, you wouldn't say the youths.

00:12:16.220 You would say three Hasidic Jews, Mordechai, Shlomo, and Moshe did it, right? 0.93

00:12:21.220 But if it's Mohammed and Ahmed, we hide it. 0.98

00:12:23.780 In Britain, we don't call them Muslims.

00:12:26.580 We call them Asians because a lot of them are from Pakistani.

00:12:31.360 They're Muslims from Pakistan.

00:12:33.200 We don't want to say Muslim. 1.00

00:12:34.680 Well, I'm Asian, and it turns out that I didn't commit any gang rapes of young British girls.

00:12:41.340 But by saying Asian, you're being kind.

00:12:44.340 You're being empathetic.

00:12:45.680 You're not.

00:12:46.460 No.

00:12:47.260 Truth doesn't care about your feelings.

00:12:49.340 Report things properly.

00:12:50.980 And I'll give you just another example because it's so obvious.

00:12:53.200 When 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.

00:13:05.040 Now they don't give out the race.

00:13:06.500 They literally do not give out the race.

00:13:08.500 So it could be a white person.

00:13:10.040 And even if they know it's a white person, well, maybe white person, they will say.

00:13:13.360 But if it's a black or Hispanic, they'll say it's a male.

00:13:17.380 And then it could be anyone.

00:13:18.900 As a matter of fact, it's funny that you're saying this.

00:13:21.040 Earlier 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.

00:13:39.060 And exactly to your point, if it's white, you are much more likely to advertise it than if it's black.

00:13:45.460 That's not journalistic integrity.

00:13:47.820 But 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.

00:13:59.480 So I have an illness that's that's a mitochondrial illness.

00:14:04.300 I got it from my mom.

00:14:05.840 She got it from her mom.

00:14:06.860 But at some point it started.

00:14:09.060 When do you think this started?

00:14:11.600 Beautiful.

00:14:12.300 So 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.

00:14:24.220 So as an evolutionary scientist, I often will look at animal behavior to draw parallels to humans.

00:14:31.880 Right. So if I want to study why toy preferences of little boys and little girls are the way that they are.

00:14:37.720 You 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.

00:14:49.740 Okay. So in my case, I wanted to look at, is there a framework in nature that could explain why animals could become zombified?

00:15:00.660 Right. And that's where I fell on the field of parasitology.

00:15:04.940 Parasitology is the study of parasites and hosts, but parasitology could be in your intestinal tract, right?

00:15:12.280 If you have a tapeworm, then it goes to your intestinal tract.

00:15:16.620 Neuroparasitology is when a parasite seeks to end up in the host's brain, altering its circuitry to serve its interest.

00:15:26.720 So 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.

00:15:43.400 So 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.

00:15:54.020 And that was my epiphany. Aha! I am now going to argue that human beings could be neuroparasitized by ideological brain worms.

00:16:03.700 So that's the big biological metaphor.

00:16:06.380 Now, to your question, where does it originate?

00:16:10.480 I 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.

00:16:19.600 Post-modernism is the granddaddy of parasitic ideas.

00:16:23.060 It basically purports that there are no objective truths other than the one objective truth that there are no objective truths, okay?

00:16:29.820 So that is a parasitic idea because up is down, left is right, women are men, freedom is peace, and so on. 0.70

00:16:38.220 Freedom is slavery, war is peace, and so on, okay? 0.86

00:16:40.860 So it's complete nihilistic.

00:16:42.900 That's what I call intellectual terrorism.

00:16:45.300 So I argue that each of these parasitic ideas originated, to your question, from a very noble place.

00:16:53.040 So, for example, equity feminism is a great idea. 0.98

00:16:57.600 It basically says that men and women should be treated equally under the law.

00:17:01.540 There shouldn't be official discrimination against one sex or the other.

00:17:06.220 So based on that definition, most of us would say, yeah, okay, I'm an equity feminist. 0.99

00:17:10.160 Radical 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. 0.86

00:17:25.860 That it is only social construction that makes men be physically stronger than women.

00:17:31.860 Because by purporting that position, it allows us to fight sexist injustice better.

00:17:37.780 So it started off from a noble place, and then it metamorphosized into nonsense.

00:17:44.300 So if we have to murder and rape truth in the service of that noble goal, so be it. 0.61

00:17:49.700 So I argue that each of these parasitic ideas started exactly there.

00:17:54.900 A good noble cause, which then leads to the destruction of truth.

00:17:59.240 Yeah, so, but where, is there any time frame?

00:18:02.880 So I just spoke with one of the professors that studies vocology.

00:18:07.780 That's his, he wrote a few books on it.

00:18:10.000 I found, I asked him, where did it start?

00:18:12.160 That 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.

00:18:18.780 And he said that around 2010, there was a sort of shift in the way the culture looked at, in middle of Obama's term.

00:18:26.180 Would you recognize, was that something that you also saw in?

00:18:29.160 No, it's not that simplistic.

00:18:31.580 So depending on which idea pathogen you're talking about, I could give you a different timing for it.

00:18:41.040 So for example, cultural relativism is a idea pathogen.

00:18:46.540 Cultural relativism basically says there are no human universals.

00:18:49.500 There is no innate biological heritage that's shared by all humans around the world.

00:18:55.860 Every culture is relativistic.

00:18:58.000 It depends on its own idiosyncrasy.

00:19:00.580 Now, in a small sense, that's true, right?

00:19:03.300 There are reasons why this culture views the color green this way, and this culture views the color green that way.

00:19:09.460 But it is completely, laughably false to think that there are no human universals that define a shared biological heritage.

00:19:17.340 There is no culture where women wake up in the morning and say, 1.00

00:19:21.180 I'm really looking for a non-assertive, really whiny, really beta male who stands no chance of ever ascending the social hierarchy. 0.99

00:19:30.980 That turns me into a sexual monster. 0.99

00:19:33.000 I'm really excited by such a guy. 0.97

00:19:34.920 No culture has ever been found, nor will it ever be found.

00:19:37.840 Because there are evolutionary reasons why women are attracted to high-status men.

00:19:42.620 No culture has ever been found where men say, recurrently,

00:19:46.960 I prefer to mate with post-menopausal 80-year-old women, much more so than 22-year-old gorgeous women. 1.00

00:19:54.120 That culture has never been found, and it will never be found.

00:19:57.320 And it doesn't take a fancy evolutionary behavioral scientist to understand why we would hold those preferences, right?

00:20:02.440 But cultural relativists, by the way, unfortunately started by a Jewish cultural anthropologist,

00:20:09.960 Franz Boas at Columbia University about 100 years ago,

00:20:13.440 thought that if we remove biology as being relevant in explaining human affairs,

00:20:20.800 it could help protect us from really mean guys.

00:20:24.000 Think about, say, later when the Nazis said, 0.96

00:20:26.520 hey, there is a natural struggle between the races, we're the Aryans, sorry Jews, you're inferior. 0.99

00:20:33.680 There's nothing wrong with exterminating you, that's just Darwinian, that's okay. 0.99

00:20:37.900 British class, British social class elitists said, 0.98

00:20:42.100 hey, we're the upper class, you're the lower class, 1.00

00:20:44.680 if you all die of tuberculosis in your disgusting neighborhoods, 0.99

00:20:48.060 that's just natural selection, that's just nature. 0.88

00:20:51.040 Of course, that has nothing to do with evolutionary theory,

00:20:53.260 but all sorts of really nasty folks took biology to justify their political motives.

00:20:59.700 So here comes Franz Boas on his horse of saving the world,

00:21:03.640 who says, what if we now create new social sciences in anthropology, in economics, in sociology,

00:21:09.540 where we remove biology as relevant in explaining human affairs?

00:21:14.820 Hopefully that can protect us from all these nasty guys.

00:21:17.620 And again, to my earlier point, you don't murder truth in the service of a noble goal.

00:21:23.320 The truth is the truth, whether you like it or not.

00:21:26.160 So to your original question, you can't time it as it's 2010. 0.95

00:21:32.540 Postmodernism is about 50 years ago, with all of the French bullshitters. 1.00

00:21:37.580 Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan,

00:21:41.100 they were the original heavy hitters of postmodernism.

00:21:44.620 So in the past 50 to 100 years, these bad ideas have been festering on university campuses.

00:21:52.980 Then they break out.

00:21:54.660 Now, of course, there is a catalyst.

00:21:56.720 So we can debate whether it was 2010 or not.

00:22:00.020 But it didn't somehow magically start with Obama, right?

00:22:03.780 There needs to be a confluence of forces that causes this to happen.

00:22:08.260 It's exactly like the shingles virus, right?

00:22:10.760 So that's why they say people should take the vaccine after they're 50.

00:22:15.980 Even though you have the shingles virus in you, it could stay dormant or something can trigger it.

00:22:21.960 So we can debate what triggered it.

00:22:24.020 But the virus has been around for much longer than 2010.

00:22:27.000 Yeah, one thing that I do want to ask you about is that after October 7th, I suddenly had, like you said, an epiphany.

00:22:35.640 But I don't know if it's really an epiphany.

00:22:37.700 But I suddenly realized that in a lot of these elite people who have this pathogen, like you call it,

00:22:45.600 they seem to not be willing to.

00:22:48.960 First of all, they seem to be always denigrating their own culture.

00:22:52.280 And secondly, they seem to always think that any problems in other cultures are caused by them.

00:23:00.400 So if you would say that the Palestinians, after October 7th, you had the UN Secretary General said,

00:23:06.920 it's horrible what they did, but they didn't do it in a void.

00:23:11.320 They 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.

00:23:20.400 Or 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

00:23:31.080 makes 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. 0.64

00:23:42.140 But I think the main gist is that they can never be proud of their own culture.

00:23:46.460 And any problems that are in other cultures are never the other cultures fault.

00:23:51.780 Exactly.

00:23:52.740 And the perfect, I mean, given that I'm speaking here to a Jewish audience, I'm going to pick Jewish examples,

00:24:00.680 albeit it applies to many other Westerners. 0.92

00:24:03.460 And I think you might remember those two examples because they're proudly displayed in the parasitic mind as examples of parasitized Jews. 1.00

00:24:13.240 So 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, 0.98

00:24:23.600 that 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.

00:24:36.880 When 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, 0.96

00:24:44.760 do you think that she decided that, oh, I guess my hypothesis was wrong?

00:24:48.600 No, no, no. 0.93

00:24:50.040 It only further demonstrated how disgusting the IDF male soldiers were.

00:24:55.240 Now, your audience is going to say, how is that possible? 0.97

00:24:57.480 How is it possible that not finding a single case of rape still proves that they are disgusting? 0.94

00:25:03.900 Well, it turns out that in parasitized Jew Tal Nitsan's mind, she thought that look how much they are othering, the Palestinian women, 0.99

00:25:14.300 that they're not even worthy of being raped. 0.99

00:25:17.700 They're such subhuman animals that the soldiers don't even think of raping them. 1.00

00:25:23.160 So if you did rape the Palestinian women, you are a disgusting pig. 1.00

00:25:27.140 And if you didn't rape the Palestinian women, you're a racist, disgusting pig. 1.00

00:25:32.120 So all roads lead to the definitive conclusion that the IDF is just a diseased bunch of pigs. 1.00

00:25:38.100 So that's story one. 0.99

00:25:39.340 Story two, from a Canadian Jewish woman who was formerly my friend,

00:25:44.300 and anyone who will hear the story will understand why it's former, reached out to me once and said,

00:25:50.960 hey, I know, you know, Gad, you come from the Middle East.

00:25:54.740 Arabic is your mother tongue.

00:25:56.000 You know all these things about Islam.

00:25:58.020 I'm hearing, I want to know what's the definitive.

00:26:01.320 Does Islam love the Jews or not?

00:26:03.440 Because I'm friends with this doctoral student who's doing her PhD in Islamic studies.

00:26:08.240 And she says that, no, no, no, you're misunderstanding Islam.

00:26:11.500 Islam loves the Jews and so on. 0.74

00:26:13.300 So I wrote back to her and I said, well, rather than give you a long answer,

00:26:18.240 I'm going to share with you a clip which consists of a montage of many, many, many Islamic imams and so on,

00:26:30.040 what they're saying in the mosques about the Jews.

00:26:34.080 But not just imams. 0.83

00:26:35.580 It could be journalists.

00:26:37.540 It could be authors.

00:26:38.980 It could be television shows.

00:26:40.920 So it's about, I think it was about maybe 20 or 22 minute montage.

00:26:45.680 Stuff that would make Hitler and Himmler feel a bit uncomfortable. 0.94

00:26:52.960 Like Hitler and Himmler would listen to those clips and say, guys, don't get us wrong. 0.93

00:26:57.220 I mean, we really hate the Jews, but this seems a bit too much. 1.00

00:27:00.700 Even for me, Adolf Hitler, it seems too much. 0.85

00:27:04.560 When I shared with her this clip, she wrote back to me,

00:27:08.600 Well, Gad, it seems like you are no different than the extremists themselves in your own extremism.

00:27:16.420 So she asks me for evidence.

00:27:19.160 I share with her evidence in their own words.

00:27:22.460 And that shows how much I am marginalizing the noble, peaceful ones.

00:27:28.460 There you go, right?

00:27:29.720 So the parasitic mind is not reserved to one category of people, one group of religious people.

00:27:38.040 But what is clear is that the more education you have, the more likely you are to be parasitized.

00:27:44.200 Yes.

00:27:44.840 Well, I think that there's like the university are sort of incubators, so to speak, of the virus.

00:27:50.640 So 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.

00:28:00.800 And they come in from normal backgrounds, homes, and then they go back home and they're mashuganes, using a Jewish phrase. 0.98

00:28:08.440 I understand.

00:28:09.340 So let me just ask you about, we just had the election in the U.S., the presidential election.

00:28:14.860 And 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.

00:28:26.760 And they found that Trump's ad that said that she cares about they, them.

00:28:32.480 Donald Trump cares about you. 0.94

00:28:34.400 And I think this really goes to about what you said, where you have a class of people that are infected with this parasite.

00:28:41.320 And 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.

00:28:57.080 And people on the Harris campaign, I think, in retrospect, could not believe that most of America doesn't think like they do.

00:29:05.640 And so do you really see it that way?

00:29:09.180 Is this like a rejection of this whole woke mind virus?

00:29:13.020 I mean, it is, although I right away say immediately after the celebration's end of Donald Trump having won, don't be complacent.

00:29:23.000 Because 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.

00:29:41.360 So Donald Trump will come and go.

00:29:43.700 Now, 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.

00:29:56.500 So 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.

00:30:04.820 Because 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?

00:30:12.980 So 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.

00:30:25.460 Of course men can bear children.

00:30:27.440 The fact that we got to a place, so I'll give you two very quick stories.

00:30:30.560 Story 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.

00:30:49.480 Because you needed in the 21st century a professor of evolutionary behavioral science to confirm that there is male or female.

00:30:56.400 Until 15 minutes ago, the 117 billion people that had existed on Earth seemed to navigate this very difficult problem very easily.

00:31:06.280 All of our ancestors seemed to be able to find what's male or female, but now we have much more difficulty.

00:31:12.880 So 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. 0.90

00:31:29.300 I can't say, I'm not a biologist, right?

00:31:32.620 So 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.

00:31:42.480 And 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.

00:31:50.280 It'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.

00:32:08.340 And they realize that these people who are with this mind virus, they realize that they have a hurdle to do.

00:32:15.720 So one of the things that we've been reading since the election is, will the Democrats learn the right lessons?

00:32:22.000 So 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.

00:32:38.080 Even though it's like weird because he got more shares of the minority vote and whatever.

00:32:42.340 And then there's other people saying, like, calm down. What is this?

00:32:45.460 And 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.

00:32:52.160 And they started protesting outside of his house.

00:32:55.160 So 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?

00:33:06.140 That'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.

00:33:22.140 The only thing that is specific to this time period are the specific idea pathogens, meaning postmodernism, cultural relativism, social constructivism.

00:33:34.520 These are the current pathogens. But I can take you back.

00:33:37.540 You mentioned Massachusetts. I can take you back to Salem, Massachusetts, several hundred years ago, where there was another parasitic pathogen.

00:33:45.760 It was called, how do we find who are the witches? And the way we do that is we throw them into water.

00:33:52.360 And if they sink and die, then we know that, oops, they weren't witches. 0.69

00:33:57.360 But if they swim, then aha, this proves that they are witches. Right.

00:34:02.360 But then that virus was extinguished in the same way that John Assault came up with the polio vaccine.

00:34:10.060 And we've luckily pretty much eradicated polio. We get rid of that virus.

00:34:16.940 But don't worry, there'll be another one coming.

00:34:19.680 So to your question, some of the viruses will mutate in new forms. 1.00

00:34:24.880 Others will be completely eradicated, but new stupidity will come along. 1.00

00:34:29.540 The capacity for the human mind to generate endless stupidity is infinite. 1.00

00:34:34.740 Yes. So now I want to ask you also about Israel. 1.00

00:34:37.040 Do you think one of the things that I guess we all struggle is how to inoculate yourself from this type of stuff?

00:34:43.860 So 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.

00:34:50.140 I came here by myself from the U.S. is that Israelis are not affected so much by the woke ideology.

00:34:57.200 So you mentioned the trans issue. It's really non-existent in Israel.

00:35:01.320 You mentioned, I don't know, all this postmodern anti like people who hate their own country and their own culture.

00:35:08.020 We 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.

00:35:16.120 For example, even in the protests against Netanyahu this whole year before October 7th about judicial reform,

00:35:22.880 the 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. 0.75

00:35:35.820 So leftist protesters in Israel are very patriotic.

00:35:39.860 That is totally against the welcome the what you speak about in the book.

00:35:43.980 So what do you think makes Israel different?

00:35:46.340 Yeah, 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.

00:35:56.820 She's the former Canadian ambassador to Israel, and I did her show last week.

00:36:01.720 I think she it's going to come out soon where she asked me exactly that.

00:36:04.920 What's unique about the Israeli ecosystem?

00:36:07.420 And my answer is, is the following Israeli academics are just as likely to be parasitized by all the nonsense, right? 1.00

00:36:17.180 So if I'm at Tel Aviv University or Bar-Ilan or Hebrew University, I'm going to fall prey to the same stupidity. 0.96

00:36:23.840 But 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. 0.98

00:36:33.980 The blue collar worker is wedded to reality. 0.99

00:36:36.940 The Columbia University is studying, you know, queer lesbian dance at Columbia University, right? 0.63

00:36:45.020 So 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? 0.83

00:36:57.340 Reality has a way of slapping you, as I said earlier.

00:37:00.300 And therefore, Israelis have a natural inoculation because of where they exist in a very, very tough neighborhood. 1.00

00:37:09.760 So I think that's the key reason.

00:37:11.840 It's not unlike, if I can draw an analogy, eating disorders, for example, anorexia nervosa, only exists in cultures of plentitude.

00:37:24.540 You don't find anorexia nervosa in Ethiopia.

00:37:29.260 Yes.

00:37:29.580 Right.

00:37:30.240 So it's the exact same mechanism.

00:37:32.840 Once you are in a very tough neighborhood, you don't have the luxury to fall prey to this kind of nonsense.

00:37:38.900 Also, 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.

00:37:50.800 We had this, for example, people like Candace Owens, who started off in a place where she was with the Daily Wire. 1.00

00:37:58.120 And it doesn't even matter.

00:37:59.440 It's just an example of someone who is considered on the right politically, but says things that are totally virus-like in the book.

00:38:09.920 So 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.

00:38:23.360 Different, like really weird, and just to justify this type of warped.

00:38:30.780 So let me just, is there such a thing as the virus being on the other side politically?

00:38:36.020 So that's a great question.

00:38:38.660 I 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.

00:38:53.660 And I'll give a specific example in a second.

00:38:55.820 But 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.

00:39:12.580 So, but, so now let me give you a specific example.

00:39:16.560 Hating the theory of evolution is much more likely to come from people on the right.

00:39:23.220 Because 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? 0.51

00:39:36.660 I mean, the beetles, the insect.

00:39:38.320 Are you saying that it's not God who created the long neck of the giraffe?

00:39:42.440 You're being mean to God.

00:39:43.980 Where is God in all this?

00:39:44.980 So theory of evolution is much more likely to be detested by people on the right.

00:39:51.280 On 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.

00:40:03.680 Because they'd like to think that it's tabula rasa.

00:40:06.380 We're all born with equal empty minds and it's only social construction that makes us who we are.

00:40:12.200 So 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?

00:40:22.640 That's the only reason.

00:40:23.480 There can't be any biological-based innate reasons why your son could never amount to being Michael Jordan, right?

00:40:31.200 That makes me feel good as a leftist.

00:40:33.220 So that example demonstrates that in the abstract, all people of all political orientations could be parasitized.

00:40:42.320 But the ones that I discuss in the parasitic mind is strictly a leftist problem.

00:40:46.180 Because they're in the ecosystem of the academia.

00:40:50.200 I want to ask you two and a half more questions before I finish.

00:40:53.440 Number one is the question is, if you can, we are a business paper.

00:40:59.680 So 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.

00:41:12.600 So 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.

00:41:23.140 And social justice automatically means that the government will control large portions of the economy and try to be against meritocracy, the whole DEI movement.

00:41:34.640 So 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.

00:41:46.680 No, that's a great, I mean, in a sense, you already covered the answer.

00:41:51.000 No, because look, all of these idea pathogens naturally lead to socialism, right?

00:41:58.480 In socialism, or socialism slash communism, the individual is much less important than the collective, right?

00:42:06.260 So here I love to quote E.O. Wilson.

00:42:09.320 E.O. Wilson was a famous Harvard entomologist.

00:42:12.640 He studied insects, specifically social ants.

00:42:16.100 In social ant species, there is a reproductive queen, then there is an indistinguishable cast of soldier and worker ants, right?

00:42:25.600 All of whom exist simply for the benefit of the ant colony.

00:42:31.020 So when he was asked, Professor Wilson, what are your views on communism slash socialism?

00:42:36.680 In 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.

00:42:50.820 Some people are taller, shorter, more ambitious, less ambitious.

00:42:54.740 Therefore, to create a system, a socioeconomic political system that is contrary to human nature, it's going to fail.

00:43:02.140 Now, capitalism is more in line with our innate human nature, socialism is not. 0.99

00:43:09.100 So 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.

00:43:19.940 Which 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.

00:43:31.000 So 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.

00:43:46.360 And if you're like in Harvard psychology, you'll be, oh, my God, how can we let people decide for themselves on this stuff?

00:43:53.240 We're smarter than them.

00:43:54.340 So I think that's basically the gist.

00:43:56.940 I'll add another part.

00:43:58.420 I mean, you're talking about which discipline you come from affects the likelihood of you being inoculated or not against these idea pathogens.

00:44:06.760 I'm going to tell you something that's even more mind-blowing because it's not something that you might have thought of.

00:44:12.520 And I briefly discussed it in the parasitic mind.

00:44:15.280 Your physical stature affects your political orientation.

00:44:20.660 So all other things equal, the more physically formidable I am, the less likely I am to support economic egalitarianism, right?

00:44:33.820 The more wimpy I am, the more I think kumbaya, let's all share.

00:44:39.040 Well, yeah, let's all share because I'm going to be the recipient of the fruits of someone else.

00:44:44.420 But if I'm the one who goes out and wins the stuff, I'm less likely to want to share that stuff.

00:44:50.740 So 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.

00:45:01.740 I want to ask you about another book that you wrote, just because we're talking also about economics.

00:45:08.860 In 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.

00:45:29.520 And I also read, at least at the time, it was the first and only scholarly work to do that type of work.

00:45:36.740 So maybe just in general, explain why, what exactly, just in short, you checked and what did you find?

00:45:45.680 Sure. Yeah. Well, thank you for asking that question.

00:45:47.500 It's always exciting to talk about some of my scientific work from many years ago.

00:45:51.600 Yes. 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.

00:46:05.820 The 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.

00:46:25.540 So 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.

00:46:42.360 Right. It's an inherent part of studying that species. Only one species is able to be studied completely decoupled from biology.

00:46:50.940 They'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?

00:47:01.180 Surely 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.

00:47:11.880 Surely the fact that we all have certain universal mating preferences. Right.

00:47:16.260 For example, there are hundreds of thousands of strip clubs catering to either heterosexual males or to homosexual males.

00:47:29.100 But there doesn't seem to be many strip clubs catering to either heterosexual females or homosexual females.

00:47:37.600 Why is that? Well, from a strict marketing perspective, hey, there is a real market opening here.

00:47:44.440 There 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. 1.00

00:47:58.280 And there are very clear biological based reasons why that is. Then you understand why there aren't many strip clubs catering to heterosexual women.

00:48:07.860 And 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.

00:48:20.640 And finally, because we're really out of time and I want to I wanted to get ask a personal question.

00:48:28.300 So 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.

00:48:39.920 Lebanon's been torn apart.

00:48:41.680 For 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. 0.97

00:48:49.480 I've been in touch with Druze and Kurds there. They're very scared. They're going to be a little bit massacred pretty soon.

00:48:55.200 So it's a very scary situation. But you yourself and you mentioned this in the book, too.

00:49:00.520 You came from Lebanon and your family basically fled the country during after the civil war started in Lebanon.

00:49:08.040 And 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?

00:49:18.960 What 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.

00:49:30.000 I regret the fact that my my kids don't speak Arabic now that they don't need to be in Lebanon to speak Arabic. 0.91

00:49:36.000 But imagine if every year I could have returned to do a short visiting professorship at American University of Beirut.

00:49:43.720 Well, in five minutes, I could throw them in as kids and they're going to come out speaking perfect Arabic.

00:49:49.100 Right. 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.

00:49:56.840 It hurts me that they'll never experience that heritage.

00:50:00.860 It hurts me that I can't go back to where I was born.

00:50:04.400 It almost feels like there is a decoupling.

00:50:07.900 It's like a movie that existed in my past.

00:50:10.500 But that's that happened to someone else.

00:50:12.820 Right. 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,

00:50:20.740 my parents did keep going back after we moved to Montreal, my parents kept returning until 1980 when they were kidnapped by Fatah.

00:50:29.920 So at least they got to go back a few times.

00:50:32.660 For me, it's something in the deep recesses of my of my mind that I could never go back to.

00:50:38.340 That that hurts me.

00:50:40.000 But in terms of what is my prediction of the long term viability of Lebanon,

00:50:46.020 I hate to say it, but I think Lebanon is a failed state, not only because of all this religious stuff, all of the endemic corruption. 1.00

00:50:53.020 It's as if you need to kind of wipe out the whole thing and start fresh.

00:50:58.020 I don't think it will happen in my lifetime.

00:50:59.720 And I deeply regret that that's true.

00:51:02.320 Well, that I think was one of the reasons why there's such a big Lebanese community over the West.

00:51:06.040 They all left, especially the Christians, the Jews. 1.00

00:51:08.880 We don't need it. 0.76

00:51:09.980 There's no Jews left there. 0.99

00:51:11.080 But even the Christians, they're all over and even a lot of them fled to Israel in 2000 when Israel left. 1.00

00:51:16.520 So we have a big community up north of Sadalnikim, what they're called, from the Christian army that was with Israel.

00:51:22.640 And they all ran away when Israel ran away itself. 0.91

00:51:25.360 So maybe we can also learn our lesson from the way we treated our our friends.

00:51:30.640 I think that's one of the things you learn.

00:51:32.840 Your friends are most important to not to abandon.

00:51:35.440 And I think also in Syria, we should help the Kurds.

00:51:38.200 But that's a different story.

00:51:39.280 God said it was a pleasure.

00:51:42.400 Thank you, sir.

00:51:43.160 I have to say that even though I knew most of the stuff that we were going to talk about, I learned some new stuff.

00:51:49.440 So I appreciate it.

00:51:50.820 And it's it's really a pleasure.

00:51:52.540 I can't even believe that I'm talking to you.

00:51:54.420 So thank you so much.

00:51:55.820 Thank you so much, Ariel.

00:51:57.000 Thank you.

00:51:57.500 Cheers.

00:51:57.760 Thank you.

00:51:58.860 Thanks for tuning in to the Western Spirit podcast.

00:52:01.640 Don't forget to like, subscribe and share and hit that notification bell so you never miss an episode.

00:52:08.060 See you next time.

00:52:09.280 Bye.

00:52:10.120 Bye.

00:52:10.540 Bye.

00:52:11.220 Bye.

00:52:11.280 Bye.

00:52:11.360 Bye.

00:52:11.920 Bye.

00:52:12.080 Bye.

00:52:12.400 Bye.

00:52:13.220 Bye.

00:52:13.540 Bye.

00:52:14.280 Bye.

00:52:14.900 Bye.

00:52:15.600 Bye.

00:52:16.760 Bye.

00:52:35.740 Bye.

00:52:36.620 Bye.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - January 13, 2025

Why Israel Resists Woke Madness and the West Fails To Do So (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_784)

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