The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Wokeness is a Mind Disease but it Can be Beaten-Full Comment with Brian Lilley (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_712)

00:00:00.000 If you look around our society today and you think things just aren't right, well, you're

00:00:09.020 not alone. Western societies around the world are changing dramatically and often not for

00:00:14.080 the better. We are becoming less tolerant in the name of tolerance. We are adopting

00:00:18.760 and accepting ideas that actually eat away at the foundations of a Western liberal democracy.

00:00:25.240 Hello and welcome to the Full Comment Podcast. My name is Brian Lilly, your host, and today

00:00:29.500 our guest is Gad Saad, an academic and intellectual in the best sense of those words and someone

00:00:36.240 who many of us have seen document the very issues and concerns that we're going to talk

00:00:40.940 about today on his popular YouTube channel, on Joe Rogan Podcast and elsewhere, as well

00:00:46.860 as in his bestselling books. Dr. Gad Saad is a visiting professor and global ambassador

00:00:51.760 for Northwood University, and he joins me today. Gad, thanks for the time.

00:00:57.160 Oh, I'm so glad to be with you, Brian. Thanks for having me.

00:01:00.740 I want to open with a quote that I grabbed off the back of your bestselling book and recently

00:01:07.820 became a bestseller again, and we'll talk about that. But I grabbed this off the back

00:01:13.400 dust cover, and I want to read it to you and have you react. And tell me if you still feel

00:01:19.220 the same way. The back of the book, and I don't think this was you writing it, this is the

00:01:23.520 publisher's promotional bit, but it's kind of summarized a lot of what you wrote about

00:01:27.600 in the book. It said, the West's commitment to freedom, reason, and true liberalism has

00:01:34.840 never been more seriously threatened than it is today by the stifling forces of political

00:01:41.260 correctness. Now, that's from a book in 2020. In 2020, you said we had never been under more

00:01:48.180 threat. Yes.

00:01:49.720 Do you still feel that way, or has it gotten worse? Could you have imagined how bad it would

00:01:55.100 be in 2024?

00:01:56.560 I was trying to think where you were, I was trying to predict where you were going with

00:02:00.080 this. No, it's, I guess one of the ways I could answer your question is saying that

00:02:05.600 the book is still selling like hotcakes, which suggests that what I hoped would be the final

00:02:14.700 mind vaccine and inoculation against all this nonsense has apparently not sufficiently worked

00:02:20.600 because we are still facing the same issues, if not those issues having been exacerbated.

00:02:27.360 So the book remains timely precisely because the phoenix of woke parasitic ideas keeps rising

00:02:35.120 from the ashes, despite the fact that I keep hitting it.

00:02:38.620 Well, over the summer, as I said, it came out 2020. I think the paperback early 2021.

00:02:50.380 But this summer, you got a big endorsement. And I don't think you'd seen it yet. Elon Musk goes on

00:02:57.720 X and, and says, you must read this book. And I sent you a message. And I said, I just said,

00:03:05.560 how are sales going? And you hadn't seen it. I'm guessing they took off just after that.

00:03:11.220 They did. Now that just to, if I may correct you, it's, it wasn't the first time that he had

00:03:16.620 endorsed my book. He's been a fan of my work and of the, of the parasitic mind for a long time,

00:03:22.000 but that specific post, I shouldn't say tweet that particular post. You are correct that you were

00:03:30.080 the first one to bring it to my attention. I said, Oh, let me go check. And, uh, you are indeed

00:03:35.720 correct that there is, I mean, more importantly than the Oprah bump, I think we need to revise our

00:03:40.840 lexicon to the Musk bump because the book then entered two weeks in a row. I, I think it was the

00:03:48.480 Toronto star, uh, Canadian bestseller list. So you're exactly right. A book that was a bestseller

00:03:54.760 four years ago, returned to the bestsellers list four years later. Well, very well done. Walk us

00:04:00.740 through, uh, the parasitic mind because there's been a lot of talk about that. I know that Musk has been

00:04:07.180 a fan of your work and of the book, and he talks about the woke mind virus, and that can sound like 0.84

00:04:14.000 it's, you know, sloganeering, it's jingoistic, a parasitic mind. Oh, but what is that? Yeah.

00:04:21.880 So that's a great question. So let me give you sort of the background of how I developed the idea

00:04:28.320 and then link it to the neuro parasitological framework. So the first time that I had sort

00:04:34.480 of a Houston, we have a problem, uh, moment was in my scientific work. So for those listeners and

00:04:42.240 viewers that are not familiar with my work, I apply evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology

00:04:47.720 to study consumer behavior, economic. And you've written books on this. I've written many books.

00:04:54.800 So yes, the consuming instinct right here, the evolutionary basis of consumption. This is an

00:04:59.860 edited book. You've looked at how we react and interact with goods and why we purchase certain

00:05:06.020 brands. And you've looked at that before that that's where you came out of before you got as

00:05:11.840 politically as you are now. Right. But I was looking at the biological and Darwinian underpinnings

00:05:18.560 of our consuming instinct, right? So for example, how do our hormones affect our food behavior? How do

00:05:24.760 our hormones, you know, does a man's testosterone increase if he is using a, you know, driving a Porsche?

00:05:33.200 I've literally done those studies. How does a woman's men's... It does. As a matter of fact, 1.00

00:05:38.320 well, so I did a study with one of my former graduate students and I'll, I'll come back to

00:05:42.520 the parasitic mind in a second. Uh, in 2009, I published a paper with, uh, John Vungas, who was

00:05:48.220 one of my former graduate students, where we actually got men to not imagine driving a Porsche.

00:05:57.040 We actually rented, try to get a scientific granting agency to give you money to rent a Porsche for science.

00:06:04.520 So we rented a Porsche and we had a beaten up old car. So one is a high status product. One is a low

00:06:10.700 status product. And we had young men drive these two cars, uh, either in downtown Montreal, where,

00:06:18.120 where everybody can see you and on a semi deserted highway where few people could see you. And the

00:06:24.720 dependent measure was we took salivary assays so that we could measure the fluctuation, the fluctuating

00:06:32.360 levels of their testosterone, because, and actually that's a good segue to eventually answering your 0.67

00:06:38.120 parasitic mind question. So one of the things that I do as an evolutionary psychologist is I

00:06:42.620 look at the behavior of other animals to draw homologies and analogies with human behavior.

00:06:49.380 So for example, the peacock, right, has evolved this big, beautiful tail that's otherwise very

00:06:55.160 cumbersome and costly, right? It's from a survival perspective, that peacock's tail is costly.

00:07:00.920 It increases your chances of predation, but the reason why it evolves, it does so through sexual

00:07:06.120 selection, meaning that it confers a reproductive advantage to the peacock in exhibiting that signal.

00:07:12.720 So I took that idea and I said, well, surely human beings engage in sexual signaling and I'm going to

00:07:18.800 study it in the context of consumer behavior. And that's how I came up with the idea of studying it

00:07:23.920 using Porsche. So the Porsche is the human equivalent of the peacock's tail. So coming back now to the

00:07:31.460 parasitic mind, so I realized early in my career that what seemed profoundly obvious to me, which is

00:07:38.820 that human beings are biological beings. And therefore, if we want to study consumer behavior

00:07:44.120 perfectly and completely, we need to study the biological forces that compel us to be the consumers

00:07:50.180 that we are. Well, that was complete crazy quackery. It was neo-Nazism, according to many of my social

00:07:57.060 scientist colleagues and business school professor colleagues. And so right there, I said, well,

00:08:02.240 this is strange. How could otherwise supposedly sophisticated, intelligent, intellectual professors

00:08:08.320 be such imbeciles? So that was my first exposure to how ideology can cause you to have completely 1.00

00:08:18.340 irrational thoughts. So that was nearly 30 years ago. And then as my academic career progressed,

00:08:24.720 I saw the infiltration, the proliferation of these, what I call parasitic idea pathogens. But why do I use

00:08:33.180 the framework to your very specific question? Why do I use the framework of parasitology? So in the animal

00:08:39.940 kingdom, including humans, there is the field of parasitology, which studies how parasites interact

00:08:46.700 with holes. So for example, the tapeworm goes into your intestinal tract, but a neuroparasite ends up in

00:08:59.760 your brain, altering your circuitry to suit its reproductive interest. And therefore, I had my aha moment.

00:09:08.080 I would then argue in the parasitic mind that not only can human beings be parasitized by actual physical

00:09:15.040 brain worms, like toxoplasma gondii, but they could be parasitized by ideological brain worms,

00:09:22.700 and hence my neuroparasithological framework. And what are some examples of these parasitic ideas?

00:09:29.820 Postmodernism, cultural relativism, social constructivism, radical feminism. Each of these

00:09:36.460 parasitic ideas destroy the capacity of the infected person to think rationally. And so I go through all of

00:09:44.500 these parasitic ideas, and then I offer a mind vaccine at the end of the book.

00:09:49.840 You know, as I'm thinking about, you know, cultural relativism, I was just trying to look up her name,

00:09:55.280 the Iranian dissident who lives in New York. She's had her life threatened. I'm sure you've seen her

00:10:01.200 work. It just reminds escaping me now. And she's talked about that recently, about how we've got

00:10:07.340 people in the Western world declaring themselves feminists. But they won't speak up for the women 0.86

00:10:14.020 of Iran, who are being oppressed. They are fully on board with Hamas and Gaza and denouncing Israel,

00:10:22.960 which is a state that actually puts these things forward. I said off the top, we have become

00:10:29.660 less tolerant in the name of tolerance. Is that one of the parasitic ideas that you deal with?

00:10:35.960 Oh, absolutely. Look, so cultural relativism was an idea that was first espoused by an anthropologist

00:10:45.920 by the name of Franz Boas. And he wanted to create a new worldview of human behavior that abdicated

00:10:57.540 biology as being relevant to the study of human behavior. In other words, because a whole bunch of

00:11:05.180 bad folks had misused Darwinian theory. So for example, British class elitists argued that, well,

00:11:14.140 it's a natural struggle between the classes. We're the upper class. If the lower class has to die from

00:11:20.080 a pandemic of tuberculosis, and if they live in squalor and they all die out, well, that's just

00:11:29.040 Darwinian. It's just the natural struggle between classes. The Nazis came along and said, hey, it's a

00:11:34.960 natural struggle between the races. We are the Aryans. Sorry, gypsies. Sorry, homosexuals. Sorry, Jews. 1.00

00:11:41.260 It's time for you to go. Hey, that's just Darwinian. Now, of course, it had nothing to do with Darwinian 0.98

00:11:46.220 theory. But because all sorts of political cretins were misappropriating evolutionary theory, some 0.68

00:11:54.160 idiotic professors, as often happens the case, said, hey, why don't we create a new worldview of 0.98

00:12:00.820 humanity that completely abdicates biology and evolutionary theory being relevant to human beings? 0.98

00:12:08.160 Therefore, cultural relativism does exactly that because it says that there is no universal human

00:12:15.100 nature. There are no universal objective moral truths. Every culture has to be judged based on the

00:12:24.440 idiosyncrasies of its own cultural trajectory. Therefore, who are you, Brian, white guy, Canadian

00:12:32.800 imperialist racist, to tell us that the cutting off of clitorises of five-year-old girls is a bad idea? 1.00

00:12:41.540 That's cultural imperialism. And that's, by the way, exactly what, since this is a Canadian show, 0.98

00:12:46.840 so let's link it to Justin Trudeau. If you remember, when Justin Trudeau was a parliamentarian,

00:12:52.960 before he became prime minister, Stephen Harper's government had released a sort of an edict or a

00:12:59.900 pamphlet saying, look, we do not condone barbaric practices like female genital mutilation,

00:13:07.380 child brides, honor killings in Canada. And if you remember, in a very theatrical and obnoxious,

00:13:14.060 bombastic way, Justin Trudeau got on TV and kind of huffed and puffed and moved his hair and said,

00:13:20.100 you know, I will not tolerate that these things be called barbaric.

00:13:24.600 Yeah, he was upset at the use of barbaric, not the barbaric practices.

00:13:29.380 Exactly. Well, what allowed him to have the goal to do that is precisely cultural relativism. Who are

00:13:37.580 you to judge what others do? No, no, no. I will judge. There is no context under which cutting off

00:13:43.180 the clitorises of little girls so that they could never experience fully the joys of intimacy is ever 0.99

00:13:49.600 a good thing. So each of those parasitic ideas, Brian, started off in a university setting for a 0.99

00:13:58.840 noble cause, right? So in a sense, I'm being charitable here. It's not as though the people

00:14:05.000 who espouse and spawn these ideas say, let's just destroy the edifices of reason just for fun. They

00:14:11.520 usually start off with a noble reflex, but then in the service of that noble reflex, if we have to

00:14:18.640 murder and rape truth, so be it. I remember a colleague going back years ago, I was in radio

00:14:28.840 in Ottawa, and he made a comment that there was objective truth. And there were a pile of other

00:14:37.220 people in the newsroom that couldn't believe that he said that. And they said, no, there is no truth.

00:14:42.420 There's only your truth and my truth. And he said, well, no, but there has to be a truth that we can

00:14:47.840 have our views, we can have our opinions. But there, I mean, beyond cultural relativism,

00:14:52.540 there is a desire to say there is no truth anymore. And right, that's beautiful. That's a

00:14:58.740 beautiful setup for my next anecdote. Maybe some of the viewers and listeners have heard it, but even

00:15:04.500 if they have, it's worth hearing it again. And for those who've never heard it, fasten your seatbelts.

00:15:09.460 So the reason why I call postmodernism the granddaddy of all idea pathogens is precisely because that's the

00:15:19.880 root parasitic ideas from which all of the other parasitic ideas can flourish. If we can espouse the

00:15:27.880 idea that there are absolutely no objective truths, then you're not constrained by your genitalia when it

00:15:34.520 comes to your biological sex. Who are you to say what constitutes male or female? As the most recent

00:15:40.340 addition to the Supreme Court, when she was being confirmed and asked, what is a woman? She said, 0.92

00:15:46.240 well, I'm not a biologist. Well, until 15 minutes ago, until 15 minutes ago, the 117 billion people

00:15:53.480 that had existed on earth were perfectly able to navigate through the very complex conundrum of what

00:16:00.080 constitutes male or female. But she wasn't able to say it. Did you see the the head of the

00:16:05.740 International Olympic Committee? Yes. He was at a news conference. And of course, there was all the

00:16:13.340 debate about the women's boxing and where their biological males in it wasn't, you know, they did 0.98

00:16:21.000 not handle it well. They could have settled all the debate by being upfront and honest. So one of the

00:16:27.900 journalists just asked a very relevant question, will you handle this better next time? Will you find

00:16:38.240 ways of talking to the public and and and being upfront with them so that there isn't this controversy

00:16:44.700 around sex? And he said, there is no scientific way to determine what is a man and what is a woman.

00:16:53.680 Absolutely. This is the head of one of our biggest global bodies.

00:16:58.520 Well, I was fortunate enough when I chose what I thought was a woman to start my family. And then 0.99

00:17:06.080 we ended up having children. It's by the complete, complete vagaries of stochastic life that I ended

00:17:13.300 up because I could have easily chosen a woman with a nine inch penis to have children with. 1.00

00:17:18.820 But luckily, I came out on the right side. But just so that I don't leave your viewers and 0.99

00:17:23.980 listeners hanging, can I go back to telling? Yeah, go back to your story. Yeah. So the best way to

00:17:30.500 describe what a cancerous form of intellectual terrorism, postmodernism is, to your point about

00:17:38.960 your colleagues who were saying, what is this? There is no objective truth. In 2002, one of my

00:17:44.680 doctoral students had just defended his dissertation. So we were going out to celebrate. And have you

00:17:53.640 heard this story before? No. Okay. So I'm glad because it's always exciting when someone hears it

00:17:58.580 for the first time. So we were going out for a celebratory dinner, myself, my wife, my doctoral

00:18:06.640 student, and he was bringing a date with him. So a few hours before the date, before the dinner,

00:18:13.880 he calls me up and he says, oh, I just wanted to give you a heads up that the lady that I'm bringing 1.00

00:18:19.140 for the dinner is a graduate student in anthropology, postmodernism, and women's studies. And I said,

00:18:28.420 ah, okay, so the holy trinity of bullshit. And so, but of course, the reason why he was calling me to 0.99

00:18:34.600 say this is like, let, you know, please, can we not get into this big, you know, I said, oh, no, no,

00:18:40.220 I got you. I'm going to be on my best behavior. Mom's the word. I'm going to be good, which of course

00:18:46.100 was a complete and utter lie, because about halfway through the evening, I turned to the lady and I say,

00:18:52.940 oh, I, I hear that, you know, you're, you're a graduate student in postmodernism. Yes. Oh, so there are

00:19:02.000 no objective truths, of course, other than the one objective truth that there are no objective

00:19:07.240 truths, but nevermind that internal cognitive inconsistency. Do you mind if I propose what I

00:19:14.540 think are universal truths and then we can discuss it and you can tell me how I'm, I'm wrong. She

00:19:20.440 says, yes, go for it. Now this is 2002. So this is way before the transgender stuff. This is 22 years 1.00

00:19:26.140 ago. I said, is it not true that within Homo sapiens, humans, that only women bear children?

00:19:36.140 She looks at me, can't believe at what a simpleton I am and says, that's absolutely not true. I said,

00:19:41.360 oh, what do you mean? How is that? How is that? She goes, oh, because there is some Japanese tribe

00:19:47.900 on some Japanese island whereby within their folkloric mythological realm, it is the men who bear the

00:19:55.660 children. So by you restricting the conversation to the biological realm, that's how you keep us,

00:20:00.800 you know, whatever, barefoot and pregnant. So after I recovered from the mini stroke I had at

00:20:05.840 listening to such gibberish, I then said, okay, well, you know what? Maybe it was too controversial,

00:20:10.960 too incendiary for me to mention something as controversial as only women bear children. So 0.94

00:20:16.660 let me give you another example. And then let's see if we can agree on this one. She goes, yeah,

00:20:20.420 go for it. I said, is it not true since time immemorial that sailors have relied on the premise

00:20:27.100 that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west? And there she used a variant, Brian, of

00:20:35.260 postmodernism. It's called deconstructionism. It's Jacques Derrida. Language creates reality.

00:20:41.300 So she said, what do you mean by east and west? And what do you mean by the sun? That which you call

00:20:48.040 the sun, I might call dancing hyena. Exact words. I said, well, fine. The dancing hyena rises in the

00:20:54.980 east and sets in the west. She goes, I don't play those label games. Now that became known. It's not

00:21:00.020 part of the lore of the internet, the dancing hyena story. Why do I always recount that story

00:21:06.980 is because it perfectly captures what happens to a graduate student at a leading, arguably the leading

00:21:16.700 Canadian university who is parasitized by postmodernism. If she can't sit at a dinner 0.87

00:21:23.540 and agree on the fact that women bear children and that there is such a thing as east and west

00:21:29.420 and the sun. And the sun. What can we do? Like, where can we go from there? It's a Darwinian

00:21:36.020 epistemological dead end. There is no value to postmodernism, right? So that gives you a

00:21:43.120 sense of why I wrote the parasitic mind, because yes, universities can be wonderful places, but they

00:21:49.780 can also be where reason goes to die. But OK, so these ideas start in the university. Yes, sir. They

00:21:57.880 don't stay there. It's not like a, you know, a bad weekend in Vegas. It doesn't stay in Vegas. It comes

00:22:04.780 back with you like a venereal disease from Vegas and it infects everybody. This talk about how that has an

00:22:13.360 impact on on the wider society, because Western liberal democracies, I think we're going pretty well. We, you

00:22:22.000 know, we had elevated society. Um, and now we seem to be going backwards. And so how do these ideas that

00:22:31.700 infect the minds of just academics at the start undermine our entire society? I love that you set

00:22:40.760 up the question that way, because one of the most frequent blowback that I would receive early in my

00:22:49.380 career as I was standing on top of the mountain warning people is, oh, come on, Dr. Saad, why are you

00:22:56.360 exaggerating? So there is some esoteric department in the humanities that is promulgating these ideas.

00:23:03.540 So what? It's not going to make it to medicine. It's not going to make it to mathematics. It's not

00:23:08.960 going to make it to the business school. I said, no, exactly to your point. I said, the virus

00:23:14.560 eventually breaks free from the lab, as we think we know with the lab leak theory of COVID. So yes,

00:23:22.400 you're right that the dreadful parasitic idea starts off in some nonsensical department in the,

00:23:29.160 in the humanities, but it doesn't stay there. You know what it becomes eventually? It becomes the

00:23:34.580 prime minister of Canada, right? So you're exactly right. Bad ideas don't have a geographical

00:23:42.540 limitation. That's what makes them so dangerous. That's why I repeatedly say in my social media

00:23:48.060 engagement, and earlier you mentioned Elon Musk, he completely agrees with me. We've had

00:23:52.440 private conversations where we've confirmed this to each other, where there is nothing more dangerous

00:23:58.380 in, on earth than a parasitized mind. Yes, a tsunami can cause great devastation, but that's a quote,

00:24:06.740 act of God. But most of the tragedies that are imparted throughout human history start off with a bad

00:24:16.140 idea, right? There is a little Austrian guy with a small mustache who said, Hey, you know what the 0.98

00:24:20.980 big problem in, in our culture is? It's the cancerous parasitic Jew. And if we only excise that 1.00

00:24:28.020 from our society, then we will all live in a utopia. And a bunch of people said, yeah, that sounds like

00:24:32.820 a great idea, Adolf. So, so, so to your point, that's why I stood up and kept screaming and screaming,

00:24:41.820 because I knew that those ideas were going to eventually escape and become our journalists,

00:24:47.540 our pop culture, our actors, our prime ministers. And so, yeah, that's, that's what happens when bad

00:24:53.820 ideas infect entire societies. Gad, before we jump back into the conversation about parasitic ideas and

00:25:01.680 how they don't just stay in the sociology department somewhere, you've got a new title,

00:25:06.740 you're visiting professor and global ambassador at Northwoods University. I don't know Northwoods

00:25:14.560 University. Give me a, give me your elevator sales pitch on this. What are you doing there? What, what,

00:25:19.780 tell me about this change? Yeah. So, uh, I was approached by the president of Northwood

00:25:25.520 University there in a, apparently I, I haven't yet gone in person. I will be going soon in person to,

00:25:30.980 to meet the folks, uh, there in Midland, uh, Michigan. He approached me and said, look, we're,

00:25:37.380 we're big fans of your scientific work. And of course you're free thinking. Uh, we are known as

00:25:42.800 the free enterprise university. So their entire, you know, ethos is rooted in freedom and we would

00:25:50.160 love to see if we can, uh, work together. And so in, in all frankness, I had never heard of,

00:25:56.980 uh, Northwood either, but boy, am I glad that I now have, because, uh, you know, it's, it's really,

00:26:02.940 we're all human beings. And so we'd like to say that, you know, Hey, I, nothing phases me and so

00:26:09.320 on, but you also want to be at a place that shares your, uh, general sense of how a university should

00:26:18.160 be run that is not infested with parasitic ideas. And so it's been very, very refreshing for me in the,

00:26:25.160 in the few weeks that since I've joined them to be able to interact with people, you know, who I

00:26:31.600 don't have to discuss whether the sun exists or not, or whether it's called dancing hyena or not,

00:26:37.020 or I don't have to do land acknowledgements before saying hello. And I don't have to submit a diversity

00:26:43.220 inclusion and equity statement before I apply for a grant. So it's been very, very liberating. And I

00:26:48.860 really look forward to my visiting professorship there. Well, let me know how, uh, Midland,

00:26:54.880 Michigan is, um, beautiful part of the, uh, the, I haven't stopped in Midland, but I love that the

00:27:00.200 area of that, um, part of the state that it's in. So I'm sure you'll enjoy it. Uh, and go in the fall

00:27:05.580 because, you know, campus is in the fall. There's just something picturesque about it.

00:27:10.640 That's exactly what the president told me, by the way, he said, we want to get you here before

00:27:14.360 winter breaks precisely for the reasons that you said. So we were talking about parasitic ideas.

00:27:21.580 We were talking about how, uh, they don't just stay in the sociology department. And I want to

00:27:28.520 give you one glaring example. Uh, and then, you know, we can move from there into what happened to,

00:27:34.400 uh, Jordan Peterson and the college of psychologists a little while ago, but this is, this is actually

00:27:40.900 from, uh, one of the organizations that determines, uh, uh, how doctors are trained in this country.

00:27:48.800 The Royal college of physicians and surgeons of Canada put out a notice a little while ago that

00:27:54.800 they want to change how medicine is taught and practiced. And it said, quote, a new model of

00:28:01.720 can meds would seek to center values such as anti-oppression, anti-racism and social justice

00:28:09.480 rather than medical expertise. I don't give a flying, you know, what about my doctor's political

00:28:17.080 views. I want to know, are they competent? My, my GP, I happen to be friends with, and we share

00:28:23.040 political views, but I really don't care when I'm being treated medically, how they view, uh, you know,

00:28:29.580 the state of Canadian politics or what have you, I want to know, are they competent? And these guys

00:28:34.120 want to put everything else ahead of competence. Yeah, that's, uh, I've, I've actually weighed in on

00:28:39.480 that exact new training of Canadian physicians. Look, there, there are certain professions and

00:28:46.420 certain bodies, the FBI judicial system, the medical associations that should transcend politics,

00:28:57.360 right? I mean, that's right. The Hippocratic oath should be first do no harm. Now, of course,

00:29:04.220 the woke physicians will say, but no, we are doing no harm by teaching you about anti-oppression. No

00:29:10.320 nonsense, right? If anti-oppression comes before your ability as a physician to perform an operation,

00:29:19.760 you're doing harm. You're exactly right. All right. So look, uh, I mean, that issue arises not only

00:29:27.320 in, you know, at that, you know, with physicians, it starts at the first point where, for example,

00:29:34.800 they're now arguing that the grading of physicians when they're in medical school creates undue

00:29:43.460 pressures and stress on physicians. And therefore we should move to a more empathetic pass fail system

00:29:53.660 so that people are not competing against each other and worried. Guess what? I want my emergency

00:29:59.880 room physician who by definition is facing some of the most stressful moments where this, the decision

00:30:07.460 tree that he or she follows over the next five minutes will cause that child to either die or not.

00:30:13.900 I want them to have been exposed to stressors, right? Seneca and in my, in the happiness book,

00:30:20.700 I talk about anti-fragility, which is a term that was coined by a fellow Lebanese Nassim Talib,

00:30:26.640 right? Seneca, the ancient, uh, philosopher Stoic said, I'm paraphrasing that the strongest trees

00:30:34.680 are those that have been exposed to a lot of wind stressor. Therefore their bark and their roots

00:30:42.040 are stronger. The trees that haven't been exposed to wind stressors end up being brittle and they

00:30:47.420 break and they, they, right? So let's apply that, the concept of the wind stressor to your physician.

00:30:54.100 Do you not want them to have faced stressors so that they can be trained to deal with stress?

00:30:59.420 So not only are you infusing to your, to your original question, all of this woke nonsense in the

00:31:06.420 practice of medicine, but just in the original training of physicians, you're incorporating this

00:31:12.500 very loving, I love you. You love me. We all win trophies. No, we don't. I want the physician to have

00:31:20.600 suffered during medical school because that makes them anti-fragile.

00:31:27.140 At the medical school level, here's just a couple of things. This is from, uh, uh, my colleague, uh,

00:31:33.060 uh, uh, Jamie, uh, Sarkinak at a national post. She writes about the university of Calgary created

00:31:39.120 a special admissions pathway for black students, entitling applicants to have their admission

00:31:44.140 essays evaluated by non-white assessors. McGill, the university of, uh, Alberta and Dalhousie 0.75

00:31:50.680 have all done the same, uh, and similar routes are being opened up for indigenous students.

00:31:55.880 Uh, I'm all for having diversity in terms of who's getting into medical school,

00:32:01.640 but it is an insult to indigenous and black students to say, well, you should be held to a 0.78

00:32:08.620 lower standard. Indeed. I mean, it's, it's, it's simply, isn't it, do you wake up in the morning,

00:32:15.220 Brian, and say, I simply, I mean, I wrote the parasitic mind and I don't cease to be amazed every

00:32:21.680 day at the level of collective lunacy that we are seeing. It's really breathtaking, right? Because

00:32:27.980 you'd like to think that there's, there are certain ideas that were defeated. Let's say

00:32:32.880 judging people based on immutable traits. We call that racism. We call that bigotry. And we did a

00:32:39.900 great job over the past 100 years to remove those systematic barriers, right? And of course that speaks

00:32:46.400 to, I know you know this, but maybe some of your listeners and viewers don't, the distinction between

00:32:51.760 equality of opportunities and equality of outcomes, which of course the current contender for the

00:32:57.280 presidency of the United States, Kamala Harris doesn't seem to understand that difference, right?

00:33:01.220 She believes that to the extent that there is any differences across people in terms of the,

00:33:08.640 in terms of outcomes, it must be a nefarious cause that created that difference. And therefore we need

00:33:16.580 to fix that so that we all end up at the same final place. I mean, those are literally almost her

00:33:21.940 identical words. You know, what creates equality of outcomes, socialism and communism, right?

00:33:28.120 But yeah, we all end up poorer and more. We all end up poor. We all end up at the same breadline.

00:33:33.720 We all end up as, as hungry as each other. We all end up dying of famine together, equally dead from

00:33:41.040 the famine as Lysenkoism showed during the Soviet union era, right? Because the argument there is,

00:33:48.240 there are fewer women who are professors of mathematics at Brown university. Aha. That's 1.00

00:33:55.960 where the part that the patriarchy is demonstrating its machinations, but it never goes the other way.

00:34:03.580 When I was a kid, there were a lot more men as teachers. Elementary schools are 85 to 90% women as

00:34:13.880 teachers. Um, you always found more men in high school teaching positions, but even that is

00:34:19.200 shrinking. Uh, there were fewer men in nursing. Uh, nobody says we've got to get more men into

00:34:24.480 these professions. Yeah. Well, not only that, Brian, once the patterns of the, of the narrative

00:34:33.220 of oppression is no longer present, people don't adjust their prior. So let me explain that. That

00:34:39.680 sounded like a lot of fancy talk. So let me break it down into a concrete example. There used to be a

00:34:44.820 time where women were discriminated from entering veterinarian school and from entering medical 0.98

00:34:51.600 school and entering. When my mother came here in 1968, she had been working on computers in the UK.

00:34:58.000 She got to Canada and was told only ladies can't do that job. I'm not, uh, you know, I'll never say

00:35:03.400 there was not discrimination and oppression and things to change, but we've got a weird view of it.

00:35:08.540 So now let's fast forward to today. So I would, I would receive at my university, endless emails.

00:35:15.140 You know, how are you going to be an ally to women? What's your contribution to allyship to women?

00:35:20.620 As if the email was happening while we all lived in Waziristan and the tribal territories of Pakistan.

00:35:27.940 Now let me draw the line of what the current data shows. So this is from U.S. data, U.S. government

00:35:36.520 data, looking at four levels of educational attainment. So in the U.S. you have what's

00:35:42.560 called an associate's degree, which is like half a bachelor's, imagine like community college.

00:35:47.840 So there's associate's degree, bachelor's degree, master's degree, and doctoral degree. So there are

00:35:53.600 four levels of educational attainment across five racial groups, whatever, uh, Hispanic, white,

00:36:00.940 black, and whatever. So there are five. So, so the matrix is a four by five matrix. Okay. In each of

00:36:08.280 those cells, the government has provided the ratio of male to female, right? So let's assume we were

00:36:18.460 the time when your mother came, or let's go further back to make, to go back to when there was real

00:36:24.360 full on orgiastic discrimination. 20 out of the 20 cells would have shown that men outnumber women in 0.96

00:36:32.660 each of the 20 cells. Yeah. Guess what the current data was? Go give it to me, Brian. Oh, it's all women. 1.00

00:36:38.900 20 out of 20 cells, women outnumbered men. So let, let me, I get, I'm not trying to talk down to your

00:36:47.720 audience, but it's important to, to explain. Meaning that I couldn't make up data that were,

00:36:55.420 that was more of a falsification of the narrative that women are being held back in universities. 1.00

00:37:02.860 Therefore it offends me as a professor of 30 years to receive an email of how are you going to be a

00:37:10.980 better ally to women? My Dean is a woman. This is at my home university. My chair is a woman. The 0.99

00:37:17.420 associate Dean of research is a woman, but yet I'm being sent emails as if I lived in Waziristan,

00:37:23.200 Pakistan. That's the dishonesty of the woke narrative, which is it is impervious to incoming new data that 1.00

00:37:31.660 the victimhood narrative must persist. La, la, la. I don't want to hear of any progress.

00:37:38.420 What's the anecdote. Is there an anecdote? I mean, I know you've got anecdotes in your,

00:37:45.260 or antidotes, sorry, I'm saying anecdotes. What's the antidote. I'll learn to speak one day.

00:37:50.720 English is my second language, I guess, after Glaswegian. The, you know, how do we cure this?

00:37:56.920 You put the book out four years ago. It hasn't worked, God. Well, I'd like to say. Give me some

00:38:02.820 little work. I mean, it has worked in the sense that I receive, I mean, literally receive

00:38:10.720 thousands of emails from people saying I was the biggest blue haired wokester possible. Then I

00:38:19.580 read your book. I started consuming your content. Thank you so much. So, so in the grand scheme of

00:38:26.620 things, I haven't been able to administer the vaccine and all stupidity has ceased to exist. 0.99

00:38:32.420 And I don't think any mind vaccine could ever do that because regrettably, I think the architecture 0.99

00:38:37.940 of the human mind is built to be parasitized. The only thing that's unique about the current period

00:38:44.180 are the specific idea pathogens that we are now seeing, right? Cultural relativism was not an idea

00:38:51.620 pathogen 500 years ago, but there were other idea pathogens then, right?

00:38:56.660 You look, look back to the 1930s. They thought eugenics was great. Even, even Tommy Douglas did his,

00:39:03.340 um, his thesis on, you know, sainted Tommy Douglas did his thesis on eugenics in favor of it.

00:39:11.020 Exactly.

00:39:11.420 So yeah, bad ideas have been around a long time.

00:39:13.300 So bad ideas are around. Regrettably, there's always an allure to these bad ideas so that they

00:39:20.540 can quickly infect and parasitize many human minds. There was a time where we threw women into the 1.00

00:39:26.540 water and if they swam, they were witches. And if they didn't and drowned, then oops, I guess they 0.97

00:39:32.560 weren't witches. And people thought that that was a great test to do. That was a diagnostic test to

00:39:38.420 determine whether my neighbor, Angela was a witch or not. Right. So we've done that to Dr. Jordan

00:39:45.200 Peterson. By the way, in the water, he swam. So we must be a witch and he's got to go to a

00:39:51.460 reeducation camp. Have you seen the clip, the satirical clip that I released where I feigned

00:39:58.720 that the Ontario college of psychologists has had declared me as his reeducation mentor. Have you seen

00:40:06.080 that clip? I mean, that that's now I think my second or third most viewed clip of all of my

00:40:12.400 clips. So this demonstrates to you, by the way, the power of satire, sarcasm and humor, right? Because

00:40:19.440 the dictators don't usually eliminate the guys with the big muscles because we can handle those

00:40:27.900 because we own all the guns. I'm speaking not if I were the dictator, the guys that really are

00:40:32.640 dangerous to me as a dictator are the guys with the sharp tongues, the guys with the sharp pen. Those

00:40:38.720 are the bastards that I have to eliminate. So the satirist is the biggest danger to the dictator. We 1.00

00:40:44.700 have, he goes first to the chopping blocks. So oftentimes I will get some smarmy, obnoxious

00:40:50.600 professor that I'm talking to who tells me, oh, but you know, aren't you demeaning your professorial,

00:40:56.560 you know, image when you do all of that satirical stuff? I say absolutely not because I'm in the game

00:41:04.380 of trying to persuade people to better think. I will use any weaponry within my arsenal of weapons

00:41:11.260 to try to achieve that goal. Sometimes I will be professorial. Sometimes I will be scientific.

00:41:17.080 Sometimes I will be satirical. All bets are off when it comes to trying to change human minds.

00:41:23.120 Well, we're seeing in the United Kingdom what we're worried about here. And this is something

00:41:29.600 that Elon Musk is fighting back against. He has definitely turned Twitter now X around in terms of

00:41:37.320 being a place for free speech. We just had Mark Zuckerberg admit that, yeah, he had downplayed the

00:41:43.720 Hunter Biden laptop story and he was smothering true things that were being said about COVID at the

00:41:51.040 behest of the government, the Biden administration, because it went against their views. But in the

00:41:56.580 UK, we're seeing people being arrested for memes posted on Facebook. I'm worried about that coming

00:42:03.160 here if we don't have a change in government. That sort of thing, you know, if you had told me 20 years

00:42:10.420 ago, in Britain, they'll be arresting you for jokes, I would have laughed. I mean, the cradle of

00:42:16.440 the best of Western civilization comes from the UK, the Americans, Canada, the Australians,

00:42:24.840 New Zealand, we all draw inspiration from there. And they are now once great Britain.

00:42:31.480 Yeah, I mean, life comes at you fast to your point about how quickly things change. 0.66

00:42:35.560 I have a quote in the parasitic mind. I don't have it in front of me. So I don't I'm going to sort of

00:42:39.440 paraphrase it. Ronald Reagan famously said, and I'm sure you probably know which passage I'm talking

00:42:44.120 about where he basically said, Look, every generation, there has to be an assiduous fight

00:42:49.680 for freedom and freedom of speech, because the bad folks are always coming to bring down those,

00:42:55.800 those majestic, you know, foundational values that define the greatness of the West. And so

00:43:02.280 in the past, we had a stronger sense of our identity so that we were able to push back against

00:43:09.080 intrusions against freedom. But because of all this cocktail of parasitic ideas, there's no longer

00:43:14.660 any defense against it. So that a place, as you said, a cradle, the bastion of the Western tradition,

00:43:20.220 Britain, is now looking more like Orwell's worst nightmare. And if I may, I don't think I've ever

00:43:27.020 mentioned this to you. I didn't mention this in our last conversation. There is a distinction in ethics

00:43:34.120 between deontological ethics and consequentialist ethics. And I'll link it back to, you know,

00:43:39.640 the 11 year old that's being arrested in Britain. So bear with me. Deontological ethics refers to

00:43:46.920 absolute statements of ethical conduct. So for example, if I say it is never okay to lie,

00:43:53.700 that would be a deontological statement. Consequentialism, on the other hand, is another

00:43:58.500 ethical statement that says that you judge the morality of an action based on its consequences. So

00:44:03.960 then if you say, it's okay to lie if you're trying to spare someone's feelings. And so I often joke

00:44:09.420 that if you want to have a long, happy marriage, if you ever hear the following question, do I look

00:44:14.260 fat in those jeans? Put on your consequentialist hat very quickly. Okay. Now for many, many things in

00:44:21.320 life, we are all consequentialists and that's perfectly fine. But, so now I'm going to tie it back

00:44:26.740 to your original question. When it comes to foundational values that define the Western tradition,

00:44:33.340 those by definition have to be deontological. If you say something like, I believe in freedom

00:44:40.020 of speech, but, the second you say, but, you're a degenerate asshole. Because what's going to come 1.00

00:44:46.260 after the but is going to be exactly some consequentialist ethos. Yes, you should be able

00:44:52.060 to criticize religions, but you should maintain group cohesion or community cohesion. That's what

00:44:58.820 causes people to then argue that Islamophobia should be a hate crime. No, no, no. In a free

00:45:04.140 society, as long as it's not defamation, libelous, you know, incitement for child pornography, direct

00:45:11.800 incitement for violence, screaming fire in a theater, there are, all bets are off. I am Jewish with a very,

00:45:19.300 very tragic childhood in Lebanon. And yet I support the right, Brian, of Holocaust deniers to spew the most

00:45:27.160 offensive and insulting stuff humanly possible, which is the rejection of a historically documented reality

00:45:34.960 where an entire people were extinguished. I support their right to exhibit such offensive language. So,

00:45:43.980 that's the problem of what's happening now in Britain. They've put on a consequentialist hat when it should be

00:45:51.260 the deontological framework that originally made Britain great.

00:45:57.540 Well, you and I will continue to be out there on the good fight pushing back against bad ideas. We could talk for

00:46:03.940 another hour, but I know you've got another appearance to make. So, Gad, thanks so much for your time. Keep up the good

00:46:09.200 fight, and let's keep in contact.

00:46:10.940 That's wonderful. Thank you so much for having me, Brian.

00:46:13.540 Full Comment is a post-media podcast. My name is Brian Lilly, your host. This episode was produced

00:46:18.820 by Andre Pru. Theme music by Bryce Hall. Kevin Libin is the executive producer. Remember to hit the

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00:46:30.700 Make sure you leave us a review, share it on social media, tell your friends about us. Thanks for

00:46:35.320 listening. Until next time, I'm Brian Lilly.

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The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - September 16, 2024

Wokeness is a Mind Disease but it Can be Beaten-Full Comment with Brian Lilley (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_712)

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