TRIGGERnometry - Gad Saad：＂Bad Ideas Are Destroying the West＂

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantin Kissin.

00:00:09.220 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:00:14.280 Our brilliant guest today is an evolutionary psychologist. He's an author,

00:00:18.560 YouTuber, and many other things. Gadside, they call you the Godfather. Welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:23.340 Oh, so nice to be with you guys. I heard a lot about your show, so thank you for inviting me.

00:00:27.100 It's fantastic to have you on. Most of our fans will know exactly who you are. But for anyone who doesn't, just give us a little insight into who are you, how are you, where you are, and what has been your journey through life that leads you inexorably here?

00:00:40.400 So I was born in Beirut, Lebanon, grew up there till the age of 11.

00:00:46.800 We were part of the last group of remaining Jews in Lebanon.

00:00:51.880 At one point, there was a larger community of Lebanese Jews.

00:00:55.340 I mean, still a very small community, but larger than when we were there.

00:00:58.720 And through the 20th century, there would be sort of various exoduses of Jews because

00:01:04.960 it would become more precarious to be Jewish in Arab lands.

00:01:08.860 But we hung in there until 1975 when the civil war broke out. It was a very, very brutal civil war. All civil wars are judged against the standards of the Lebanese civil war. And there were many, many militia that were fighting. The problem for Jews is that they didn't have too many friends.

00:01:28.160 there were some amongst the Christian militia that were warmer towards the Jews, but it became

00:01:34.760 clear that we had to find a way to regrettably leave Lebanon. So I spent the last year of my

00:01:42.240 life in Lebanon experiencing the brutality of the civil war, but luckily we all escaped.

00:01:47.160 Came to Canada, grew up in Montreal from the age of 11, did my undergrad in mathematics and

00:01:54.080 computer science at McGill University, also known as the Harvard of the North, and then did an MBA

00:02:00.800 with a specialization in operations research, at least a mini-thesis in operations research,

00:02:06.340 which is an applied mathematics field. Then I went on to Cornell, where I did a master's of

00:02:12.260 science and a PhD. My PhD was in psychology of decision-making, really. I specifically looked at

00:02:19.040 when is it that we've acquired enough information to make a choice so that this is called the

00:02:24.880 stopping decision so for example if i'm choosing between two cars to purchase or two political

00:02:30.380 candidates to choose from or two girls to marry when is it that i have acquired enough information

00:02:38.080 to say okay i'm ready to stop acquiring information i'm ready to buy car a i'm ready to vote for

00:02:44.160 candidate be. So contrary to classical economic theory, which argues that we should look at all

00:02:49.840 of the available information before we make an optimal choice, we don't do that, right? There

00:02:55.240 might be 100 attributes that we can look at, but we only look at 12 before we stop and make a

00:03:01.500 decision. So I looked at the cognitive processes that drive that stopping decision. Then I obtained

00:03:07.860 a professorship at Concordia University. Now, in my PhD, I had been bitten by the evolutionary

00:03:14.600 bug, the evolutionary psychology bug, which at the time was a nascent discipline. I had read a book

00:03:21.000 that had been assigned my first semester as a doctoral student by a professor named Dennis

00:03:26.360 Regan, where he assigned a book called Homicide, written by two evolutionary psychologists,

00:03:31.460 husband and wife team, where they looked at patterns of criminality from an evolutionary

00:03:35.380 perspective. And I had my epiphany right there that I would be doing exactly the same thing,

00:03:40.640 but instead of applying evolutionary psychology to study criminal behavior, I would use it to

00:03:45.220 study consumer behavior. And so then I went on and had so far, I'd like to think, a successful

00:03:51.880 career as an academic, as a scientist at the intersection of, as I said, evolutionary biology,

00:03:56.980 evolutionary psychology, and consumer psychology. And then I increasingly became more engaged

00:04:02.880 uh in the public sphere where at times i would be weighing in on scientific issues but more broadly

00:04:08.700 i would weigh in on all kinds of nonsense uh that is that has infected uh the you know the academic

00:04:16.580 world you became problematic gad is what is what happened you became toxic and problematic

00:04:21.300 i and so to to use your the start of your podcast term trigger uh i'm basically the granddaddy of

00:04:30.100 triggering.

00:04:33.760 Makes you sound like a rapper, Gad.

00:04:36.680 Well, by the way, incidentally, for those of you who don't know how I got my name, The

00:04:41.660 Godfather, it actually, there's a rap story behind that.

00:04:44.920 So I had been approached by a rapper, a Canadian rapper who's, you know, become reasonably

00:04:51.720 known for a particular niche.

00:04:54.380 He basically raps about science.

00:04:56.780 He raps about evolution precisely because he wants to have a medium to attract young

00:05:02.820 kids to science, to evolutionary theory and so on.

00:05:05.840 And so he was apparently a fan and he reached out to me and said, hey, would you like to

00:05:09.840 be in my next rap video?

00:05:12.060 It's called I am a African.

00:05:15.080 And so then I put out a call on social media.

00:05:17.160 I said, hey, guys, I'm going to have a separate career now as a rap star.

00:05:20.480 Could you give me some street cred names that I can go by?

00:05:24.980 You know, I don't want to go by Dr. Sad, Professor Sad, and so on.

00:05:28.080 I need some street cred.

00:05:29.420 So people propose all sorts of names.

00:05:31.160 None of them, I mean, there were many great ones, but none of them stuck.

00:05:34.180 And then one day I was sitting at my local cafe talking to the owner of that cafe, telling

00:05:39.020 him that story.

00:05:39.620 And he stopped and he said, oh, that's easy.

00:05:41.800 You're the godfather.

00:05:43.440 And that's how I became the one who's the godfather.

00:05:46.360 So contrary to some of the idiots out there who think that it's a manifestation of my

00:05:52.240 grandiose narcissism that I'm calling myself the godfather.

00:05:54.980 it's not me who came up with it it was that gentleman question right and and so we we started

00:06:00.860 with you being toxic and problematic we want to get to your research which is fascinating and

00:06:05.660 you know particularly the stuff you're talking about how people reach that decision threshold

00:06:09.820 a lot of our fans will know francis has yet to propose to his girlfriend after 10 years

00:06:14.160 so hasn't reached that threshold so we'll find out what's going on there from you but before we do

00:06:20.220 that you've got an upcoming book which obviously we're drawn to it's called the parasitic mind

00:06:24.780 and how infectious ideas are killing common sense.

00:06:27.920 And the question I have for you is, with the coronavirus and the lockdown, are you hopeful

00:06:32.500 that your book will no longer be necessary?

00:06:36.860 It's more necessary than ever, because I've now resorted to calling the idea pathogens

00:06:44.240 that I talk about in my book as the coronavirus of the human mind, right?

00:06:49.400 So the basic idea of, would you like me to summarize a bit?

00:06:52.940 Of course, go for it.

00:06:54.780 So let's start from the beginning with a quick story about neuroparasitology.

00:07:03.240 So parasitology is the study of parasites.

00:07:06.700 Now, parasites can infect an organism in many places, right?

00:07:10.600 There are some parasites that go in your gut.

00:07:13.020 Now, neuroparasitology is parasites that go to an organism, to a host's brain.

00:07:18.340 And there are all sorts of incredibly macabre and fascinating examples of these neuroparasites

00:07:25.020 that can hijack the behavior of an animal.

00:07:29.120 Some you may have heard of, I'll mention one or two.

00:07:31.520 So the classic example that some of your viewers would have heard of is Toxoplasma gondii.

00:07:37.160 So this is a parasite that will infect the brains of mice such that they will lose their

00:07:42.580 innate fear of cats.

00:07:43.880 they'll actually become sexually attracted by the smell of the cat's urine.

00:07:48.820 That's not a good thing if you're a mouse, right?

00:07:51.080 But it's a good thing for the parasite.

00:07:53.360 There's another type of parasite that parasitizes the brain of ungulates, deer, moose, elk.

00:08:00.460 And so once they are infected, they'll start engaging in circling behavior.

00:08:05.140 Their heads are kind of listless and they go around and circle,

00:08:08.240 unable to extricate themselves from this motion,

00:08:10.840 even though the looming predators might be coming at them.

00:08:13.260 they can't extricate themselves from that behavior. So then I take these examples from

00:08:18.920 the animal kingdom, as any good evolutionary theorist should do, because we could learn a lot

00:08:24.260 from our animal cousins. And then I argue that humans can, of course, be parasitized by actual

00:08:29.520 brain parasites, like the ones I've just described. But there's a second class of parasites that they

00:08:34.180 can be regrettably parasitized by, and that is bad ideas. So I call these idea pathogens.

00:08:40.140 and they are just as devastating

00:08:43.180 in the same way that the deer

00:08:45.680 that doesn't run away from the looming predator

00:08:47.440 is going to end up with a bad consequence.

00:08:50.000 These idea pathogens,

00:08:51.880 even a singular one can be devastating,

00:08:54.000 but once you put them all together,

00:08:55.840 they become truly devastating

00:08:57.600 to our ability to think,

00:08:59.320 to be reasonable,

00:09:01.500 to have rationality,

00:09:03.140 to have common sense.

00:09:04.700 And so then as any good epidemiologist would do,

00:09:07.400 hence that's why the coronavirus

00:09:08.580 is so apropos here,

00:09:10.140 you need to start looking at where did this virus originate from? And unlike the castrati who tell

00:09:16.700 us that viruses have no origin, no, they do have an origin. It's called epidemiology. You try to

00:09:23.200 find out where a virus starts from. So in the same way that this virus started in Wuhan, China,

00:09:29.160 I look at where do these idea pathogens start from? And regrettably, I say this as a professor,

00:09:34.860 they all start from academia. They start from the university. So the original place of infection,

00:09:41.820 so in other words, the place where the really idiotic ideas come from is from fellow professors.

00:09:48.060 So the next question is, what are some of these ideas? So postmodernism is the granddaddy of

00:09:54.540 idea pathogens because it is perfectly anti-science, anti-logic, anti-reason. It's intellectual

00:10:01.100 terrorism, there are no truths. It's only my truth that matters. The scientific method is not

00:10:06.600 the only way to seek truth. It's only one of many ways. It's white science, right? So once you start

00:10:13.180 with this type of idea pathogen, you literally are putting dynamite in all of the edifices of

00:10:19.000 reason, all of the ways by which we try to understand the natural world. So other examples

00:10:24.680 of idea pathogens uh social constructivism we're all born with empty minds and it's only

00:10:30.320 our socialization that makes us who we are biophobia the rejection that biology has an

00:10:37.040 effect on human behavior uh cultural relativism who are you to judge whether cutting off the

00:10:43.700 clitorisism of little girls is a bad idea don't be a racist you bigot uh identity politics right

00:10:50.380 inclusion, diversity, it's what I call the die religion, diversity, inclusion, and equity has

00:10:56.740 now infected all of the areas of excellence and including academia, whereby we no longer give

00:11:03.680 lofty professorships to people who are deserving. But if I'm a transgender woman of color who is

00:11:10.180 into indigenous studies, then I'm much more likely to receive it. This is insane. It's nonsense. And

00:11:17.440 And so this is what the book does, is it traces the disease, and then it offers some inoculation,

00:11:22.620 some vaccines against these bad ideas.

00:11:25.180 And Gad, you're talking about postmodernism.

00:11:28.740 And I mean, by the way, what you said all sounded incredibly problematic.

00:11:31.420 We might have to cut that from the interview.

00:11:33.260 But anyway, surely in the age of a coronavirus, where we're seeing tens of thousands of people

00:11:39.880 die, isn't that the perfect inoculation against some of this nonsense?

00:11:44.520 Because there is objective reality.

00:11:46.340 It's people dying.

00:11:47.440 You know, it's amazing that you say this because that would be the naive, intuitive, optimistic hypothesis, which is with such a, you know, dreadful reality that we're all facing, it kind of washes out all the stupidity.

00:12:03.260 The reality, though, is that an animal is most dangerous just before it is about to die.

00:12:08.660 So as these ideas are dying, that's when a lot of these morons are doubling down, right?

00:12:13.700 So now we have an investigation of how the coronavirus affects women more, even though men die more, right? So in the same way that Hillary Clinton said, well, the fact that it is always men who overwhelmingly die in war, that the real victims are the women that are left behind, right?

00:12:34.000 So, we're seeing the transgender activists are linking coronavirus to transgenderism. The race peddlers are linking it to race issues. So, yes, I'd like to believe that what you're saying is true, but I think the animal is wounded. By animal, I mean the idiots who espouse these ideas. And so, I think there'll be a doubling down before we're eventually able to call out these ideas from our public consciousness.

00:13:01.080 Yeah. And why are you so concerned? This is a question that interests us specifically, because, you know, I'm from Russia originally, as our fans will know, France's mother is from Venezuela. You escaped from Lebanon. A lot of the people who seem to be incapable of tolerating this stuff and just shutting up about it seem to be people who've come from a background where, you know, the freedoms and the prosperity that we enjoy in the West couldn't be taken for granted.

00:13:27.440 do you think there is there is something that that of having an experience outside of the

00:13:33.460 comfortable west that makes you more reluctant to just you know you have an accomplished career

00:13:38.020 you could just be doing your studies and not getting involved in any of this do you think

00:13:41.560 that's part of why you feel so strongly about it yeah no great question so here i'll turn back to

00:13:47.020 evolutionary theory actually so any of us is a product an inextricable mix of our genes and

00:13:54.260 our environment. So contrary to what a lot of folks say, the tractors of evolutionary psychology

00:13:59.220 who argue that evolutionary psychologists don't think that the environment matters,

00:14:04.000 nothing could be further from the truth. But so you and I are, as I said, an inextricable

00:14:10.120 melange of our genes and environment. So to answer your question, I'll first address the genes part,

00:14:16.540 then the environment part. The environment part meaning that you grew up in Russia and

00:14:20.200 venezuela and lebanon the genes part is that the unique combination of genes that constitute the

00:14:27.600 personhood that is gatsad is such for better or worse that i cannot tolerate bullshit i am

00:14:34.460 physically ill by hypocrisy by intellectual dishonesty by intellectual arrogance that

00:14:43.620 masquerade money that you this is called the dunn and kruger effect right i pretend i think that i

00:14:48.760 know so much, but in reality, I'm only overconfident in my stupidity. So all of these

00:14:53.580 things are really personally injurious to me so that when I go to bed at night, if I feel that

00:14:59.440 I haven't done all that I could in whatever small or whatever big way that I can to contribute to

00:15:04.820 eradicate the stupidity, then I feel that I have failed in my own personal conduct. So that's the

00:15:10.460 individual element of why I do what I do to answer your question. But I exactly agree with you that

00:15:16.900 we are also a product of our unique life trajectories. And so having grown up and

00:15:21.480 actually chapter one of my forthcoming book is exactly answering your question, which is when

00:15:28.160 you grow up in Lebanon, where you see what blind tribalism does, what you see, what identity

00:15:35.240 politics does. But here identity politics is that when I stop you at a militia roadblock and you are

00:15:41.960 of the wrong religion, we put a bullet through your head, right? We don't just e-mob you on

00:15:47.620 Twitter, right? So when you see what lack of freedom is, what blind zealotry is, where a

00:15:53.520 departure from reason is, then you come to the West and for many years you feel as though

00:15:59.520 you're now going to be in a steady state of reason. And then suddenly you have a second

00:16:05.320 war that starts. The first war I faced was in Lebanon. The second war is the war against reason

00:16:10.200 in our universities, then I say, wait a second, I don't want to return to Lebanon. Now, that doesn't

00:16:14.920 mean that tomorrow we will sink to Lebanon. But give it enough times, 10 years, 50 years, 100 years,

00:16:20.520 500 years, if we are not committed to all of the things that made the West great, that allowed us

00:16:26.260 to come to the West, then we will be the next Lebanon. And so I completely agree with you.

00:16:31.600 My life trajectory makes me that much more committed to fight against that nonsense.

00:16:36.860 And Gad, you say that we could end up like Lebanon.

00:16:41.360 Why is it, why can't we just let people have bad ideas?

00:16:44.200 Why do we have to consistently challenge them?

00:16:46.800 After all, this is a free society.

00:16:48.740 Some people are entitled to believe what they think, aren't they?

00:16:51.440 Oh, you can, I'm a true free speech absolutist

00:16:56.260 in that I believe that the idea of shutting down people

00:16:59.940 because even objectively wrong ideas.

00:17:03.020 So let's take the most extreme position that supports my position. I am Jewish, having escaped Lebanon as a Jew. So few people could have my Judaism as ingrained in my identity as I am, even though I'm, by the way, an atheist, but culturally and so on, I'm very, in my identity, I'm very Jewish.

00:17:23.240 yet i support the right of holocaust deniers to appear on campus and say that the holocaust

00:17:30.260 didn't happen so there couldn't be any more of a commitment to free speech absolutism than that

00:17:36.120 example right there's nothing more grotesque there's nothing more of an affront to truth

00:17:40.380 than to say the holocaust didn't happen or it wasn't six million jews it was six thousand jews

00:17:45.360 right uh and yet i support their right so it's not that i don't support the right of people to

00:17:49.900 have bad ideas. On the contrary, bring out your bad ideas and let me smash you as the apostle of

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00:18:28.460 That was delivered like a rapper.

00:18:32.440 I was not for poetry.

00:18:35.800 So you genuinely

00:18:37.200 basically what you believe is bad

00:18:39.240 ideas should be discussed, but I guess what you're

00:18:41.260 pushing back against and probably

00:18:42.680 the reason you feel so strongly about it

00:18:45.100 We now live in a society where if you are perceived to have the wrong ideas by the establishment, then you must not speak.

00:18:53.140 You know, if you believe that there's male and female, you must not speak because that's transphobic or insulting to minorities.

00:18:59.880 Well, exactly. I mean, listen, I appeared and some of you may know this or not, but I appeared in front of the Canadian Senate when Bill C-16 in Canada was being discussed.

00:19:10.700 BLC-16 is the bill that incorporates gender identity and gender expression within the rubric of hate crimes.

00:19:18.600 And of course, my position was not that transgender people should not be free of bigotry, right?

00:19:24.000 So that's nonsense.

00:19:26.380 I mean, of course I support that, right?

00:19:28.620 But what I was saying is that in the service of trying to protect people from bigotry, we don't murder the truth, right?

00:19:37.340 So the fact that in the 21st century, an evolutionary psychologist has to appear in front of the Canadian Senate and say, no, no, really, believe me, there is such a thing as male and female. No, no, there is this thing that Darwin talked about called sexual selection, which is one of the main drivers of how traits, morphological features and behaviors evolve.

00:19:57.220 and he based it on the fact that, bruh, there is male and female, that shouldn't be something that

00:20:03.100 I have to do in front of the Canadian Senate. But the reality is, because of the position I took

00:20:07.640 there, which is literally laughably obvious, right, the average two-year-old knows that that's

00:20:12.600 true. As a matter of fact, that's one of the first markers that you use to identify yourself, if not

00:20:17.260 others, is your biological sex. The fact that I did that, I already saw how universities in

00:20:25.140 general in some cases my own university started distancing themselves from me right so it's great

00:20:30.860 that i have this huge platform and that millions of people know me but my god why must the jew be

00:20:37.620 such a problematic guy right but the reality is that you know you give an inch to to these

00:20:44.800 intellectual terrorists today tomorrow it's another inch the next day it's another interest

00:20:48.500 Right. So when we are discussing things like whether there are two sexes and that's a viable conversation, we've already gone down the slippery slope pretty far.

00:20:59.080 And so this is why I fight it. And the reality is that's that's my occupation, right, is to seek truth.

00:21:05.860 So in the same way that when you see someone in an alley being mugged, you can be one of two people.

00:21:11.160 You could either pretend that you didn't hear their screams and go about your way or you could jump in and try to intervene.

00:21:17.180 well I am the cop of truth or one of many cops of truth if I pretend that I'm not hearing all

00:21:24.420 of the killing of truth all around me then I'm not a very good cop of truth and how did we get

00:21:30.580 into this mess because it just seems that it's beyond parody now like for instance in comedy

00:21:35.660 like a good friend of ours and you probably know him as well Andrew Doyle said that at one point

00:21:41.400 talking about men and women in comedy was the hackiest subject in the world people would roll

00:21:46.260 their eyes boring. Now you do it, you can feel the tension in the room. Where is he going to go with

00:21:51.360 this? Why have we come and why have we arrived at this absolute nonsense? Yeah. But by the way,

00:21:58.300 Andrew Doyle has been on my show. Great guy. So yeah. So we'll say hello. We'll say hello.

00:22:03.520 Please do. Look, I think it's a combination of many things, but it goes back to what I talked

00:22:08.280 about earlier that in my book, I try to identify where the virus set of viruses or idea pathogens

00:22:14.860 began at the university. It's a really, it's a confluence of several ideas that each of which

00:22:22.340 tried to remove reality. They wanted to be unshackled by reality, right? So I don't want

00:22:28.880 to have this thing called male or female tied to me. Wouldn't it be better if I could simply add

00:22:35.240 the prefix trans and suddenly I could become anything? I don't like the idea of being a

00:22:40.800 Lebanese Jew with olive skin? Can't I just put transracial and I could become a black man or an

00:22:47.500 Asian man because I self-identify? I don't like this thing called scientific truth. Can't I develop

00:22:53.600 a field called postmodernism whereby there is no objective truth? Rather, all that matters is

00:22:58.740 my truth. So one of the things that I talk about in the book is that all of these idea pathogens

00:23:03.540 share an equal commitment to being unburdened by the shackles of reality, right? They do it using

00:23:11.500 different strains of viruses, but they're all committed to being freed, right? For example,

00:23:17.460 social constructivism, the idea that we are all born with empty brains, right? Tabula rasa,

00:23:23.620 and we have equal potentiality is a very freeing idea, right? So you mean I could have been the

00:23:29.580 next Michael Jordan if it weren't only because mommy didn't hug me enough? You mean there isn't

00:23:34.440 some innate biological reason why Michael Jordan at six foot six and a vertical leap of 48 inches

00:23:41.260 might have had a better start to his trajectory in the NBA? Well, that feels a lot more freeing

00:23:47.640 to me to know that my son could be the next Michael Jordan or the next Lionel Messi or the

00:23:52.500 next Einstein. I don't want to be tied down by this racist thing called reality. So you take

00:23:58.760 all of these confluence of idea pathogens that tries to free us from reality and 40 years later

00:24:05.940 you end up exactly where we are and since you're using the metaphor of a virus gad let me run with

00:24:11.960 it a little bit more and i asked this question of david starkey who we had on our show uh well

00:24:16.320 it feels like about three years ago but it was just before the lockdown came in um so for a virus to

00:24:22.260 be effective in infecting people yes you need a virus and you talk passionately and eloquently

00:24:28.040 about how that virus was created, but what you also need is an organism that is susceptible

00:24:33.520 and vulnerable to the virus. So what is it about Western society at this point in time and perhaps

00:24:40.780 over the last couple of decades that we have been so utterly open to this infection? So I think

00:24:47.760 depending on which idea pathogen you're speaking of will necessitate a different answer, but let's

00:24:54.660 take, for example, the cultural relativism idea. Who are we to judge the cutting off of clitorises

00:25:01.300 of little girls, right? It's racist to us to do that. It's phobic, right? Well, that comes from

00:25:08.080 a ethos of self-flagellation, right? And I actually talk about this in the book,

00:25:15.900 that it's in many religious rituals, right? For example, in Shia Islam, in some Catholic

00:25:24.340 strains or catholic sex you had a tradition of self-flagellation right if you if you remember

00:25:31.020 the uh the name of the rose the the famous uh movie well originally book but then a movie with

00:25:36.820 sean connery there's a famous scene where one of the monks is self-flagellating because through

00:25:40.740 self-flagellation i can sort of uh extricate my sins right that's a form of piety right well i

00:25:48.560 think for a wide range of reasons, the West has been infected with a self-loathing perspective,

00:25:56.920 right? All ills come from the West. And therefore, anything that you see, there is a way to link it

00:26:04.300 back to evil white man, to white colonialism, to white science, right? And therefore, cultural

00:26:10.060 relativism then becomes a consequence of that, right? The noble brown people can't be doing

00:26:16.760 something wrong because they are noble brown people. So how could you be criticizing their

00:26:23.800 religious imperative to engage in clitoris cutting when reality is it's the white man that is at the

00:26:30.940 source of all evil? Now, you might think that I'm being hyperbolic. I'm not. There is a movement

00:26:35.120 called Anthropologists of Peace. I think I first heard that term in Steven Pinker's book, The Blank

00:26:43.280 Slate, I think it was in 2002, where there is a whole group of anthropologists who genuinely

00:26:49.360 believe that war and all of the violence is really a product, a recent product of sort

00:26:56.920 of Western colonialism.

00:27:00.240 Because we don't have any data whatsoever that prior to British colonialism, since you

00:27:06.940 are in England, that men engage in any kind of violence.

00:27:11.500 they just kind of had fig leaves in their genitalia. They walked hand in hand in shingles.

00:27:16.320 They sang Imagine by John Lennon. But it is really white man that has introduced this

00:27:21.540 brutish, right? You have to return to the era of the noble savage, Jean-Jacques Rousseau,

00:27:26.200 right? Noble savage. Well, today, the noble brown people is the instantiation of the noble

00:27:31.920 savage. Again, savage, I don't mean it in a derogatory sense. This is the Jean-Jacques

00:27:38.200 Rousseau term. So I just gave you one analysis of how cultural relativism is the byproduct of

00:27:47.020 progressive self-loathing, which by the way, is very interesting because when I talk about this

00:27:51.180 in the book, at the individual level, to engage in self-loathing is a marker of you having poor

00:27:59.420 mental health, right? If I go see a clinical psychologist and I exhibit endless manifestations

00:28:04.760 of self-loathing, well, we found something to work on during the next 10 therapy sessions.

00:28:09.900 On the other hand, at the cultural level, if I engage in self-loathing of my culture,

00:28:15.940 then I am progressive. So to self-flagellate at the altar of self-loathing is a progressive

00:28:22.760 virtue. So it's insane. But Gad, have you not heard that Genghis Khan was woke?

00:28:29.820 Actually, he was quite progressive in terms of religious tolerance and a bunch of other stuff.

00:28:34.280 he was pretty progressive not when it came to the ladies though mate no it wasn't there a study

00:28:40.260 that showed that i can't remember within which area but something like one eighth of people

00:28:44.960 have some descendant of genghis khan and his marauding gang yeah i'm sure he was a very very

00:28:50.860 handsome and popular guy and he was just a very he was a good feminist and that's why the ladies

00:28:55.100 loved him i'm sure and a tender lover and by the way i hope you do know that islam is a feminist

00:29:00.480 religion. Of course it is. How specifically is it feminist, Gad? Well, there are many ways by which

00:29:07.620 it's feminist. The one that I love the most, so speaking about idea pathogens, radical feminism,

00:29:12.860 which really spawned in many of the academic centers, argues. Now, again, this is not because

00:29:20.360 I'm also known for being very satirical and sarcastic. I'm not being sarcastic. I'm being

00:29:24.200 literal here. The burqa, the niqab, and to some extent, the hijab are liberating. The bikini

00:29:33.720 is shackling. Now, why is that? Because the bikini is a tool of the patriarchy that tries to

00:29:41.640 objectify women. And then you get visually raped by men, right? The male gaze. On the other hand,

00:29:48.820 What better way to avert the visual rape of women to stop male gaze than by putting women in black tents? That's very liberating. This is not hyperbolic. This is literally what many feminists, Western feminists argue.

00:30:07.680 Now, they didn't run for their lives in Lebanon because they were of the wrong religion.

00:30:12.960 So they could sit in their bullshit offices at Wellesley College and pontificate about this kind of stupidity.

00:30:19.300 But to go back to your earlier question, when you come from the Middle East and you listen to this stuff, you're like, I can't believe these people are insane.

00:30:26.540 And you talk, again, using the virus metaphor, that there are vaccines against these type of ridiculous ideas.

00:30:34.000 Can you explain what these vaccines are?

00:30:36.480 Yes, thank you for that question. So in chapter seven of my forthcoming book, I have a chapter looks at something that I call nomological networks of cumulative evidence. So bear with me because I'm going to go through a bit of a...

00:30:54.200 You're vastly overestimating how intelligent either of us is, God, I promise you.

00:30:59.580 so nomological networks of cumulative evidence is basically the it's an epistemological tool

00:31:07.200 whereby you try to collect as much evidence from as many separate lines of evidence that you can

00:31:16.620 find in order to construct an argument it's not a literature review so in science usually when

00:31:21.680 you're doing a paper you then you start off by providing a literature review so let's say you

00:31:25.980 want to see, is there a link between asthma and caffeine consumption? And I'm going to do a study

00:31:32.020 on that. Well, first, I would like to contextualize my study in relation to all of the previous

00:31:36.900 studies that have looked at this link. So that's a literature review. Nomological networks of

00:31:40.940 cumulative evidence is a very, very different beast. The original guy that you could think of

00:31:45.780 who was really the granddaddy of such thinking would have been Charles Darwin, because although

00:31:51.480 he didn't call it nomological networks of cumulative evidence. So Charles Darwin, in trying

00:31:55.940 to prove his theory of natural selection, he didn't conduct a single study with 40 undergraduates. He

00:32:03.740 didn't run one observational study. Instead, what he did assiduously over several decades is he

00:32:10.160 collected data from an incredibly broad range of sources, from geology, from paleontology,

00:32:17.300 from animal husbandry, and so on, so that when you put all of this evidence together,

00:32:24.940 it becomes an impenetrable wall of evidence. It's very difficult to try to argue against it

00:32:30.660 because I am drowning you in evidence. So now let's take this idea and give you an example of

00:32:38.020 that. And I'm going to come to your question of what is the inoculation. It's actually to learn

00:32:42.640 how to think this way. So if I want to prove to you that men have an evolved preference for the

00:32:51.820 hourglass figure, the female hourglass figure, how would I go about to try to prove that to you?

00:32:57.580 Well, I could then start thinking, what would be the distinct lines of evidence from many,

00:33:03.440 many different disciplines, different time periods, different cultures, different methodologies,

00:33:09.580 all of which prove my point. So let me give you a few examples. So we know for example that women

00:33:15.960 who have a particular hourglass figure are likely to be more healthy, more fertile. So there is a

00:33:22.560 link between that particular morphological feature and the ultimate currency of evolution which is

00:33:29.240 can you reproduce. So already that is a lot of compelling evidence. Then I can go to many

00:33:34.040 different cultures. Cultures that are not only Western. I could go to the Yanomomo tribe in

00:33:39.380 the Amazon who have not been exposed to media images, right? For those who might say, oh,

00:33:43.880 it's media images that teach you that preference. And I could show that those men have the exact

00:33:49.160 same preference. In other words, I can replicate it universally across 50 different cultures.

00:33:53.980 I could use brain imaging studies whereby I could show men either the hourglass figure or not,

00:33:59.720 and I could show that their pleasure centers will light up when they see the woman in the

00:34:04.940 hourglass figure. I did a study, this is my own study, where I did a content analysis of the

00:34:12.100 advertised hourglass figures of online female escorts, meaning prostitutes that advertise

00:34:18.780 their services online. So I had a research assistant go to 48 different countries where

00:34:26.060 these women are advertising their profiles. And of course, it turns out that the hourglass figure,

00:34:32.860 By the way, the hourglass figure is a waist-to-hip ratio between 0.68 to 0.72.

00:34:37.560 Now, so as you can see, I'm now offering you medical data, fertility data, neuroimaging data, contemporary, modern, online, internet data.

00:34:49.340 Now, here's the kicker.

00:34:50.340 And by the way, I didn't give you the full nomological network.

00:34:52.460 You could take congenitally blind men, meaning men who have never had the gift of sight, make them go through a, so elicit from them their preferences. Now you might say, well, how would you do that? You do it haptically by having them touch mannequins with different waist to hip ratios and guess which mannequin they choose as their preferred one, that one.

00:35:15.360 So what have I done here? I have said to myself, what would be the data that I would need to amass together? As I said, from different disciplines, different time periods, different cultures. Oh, you could take art history data, so data from ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, Africa, India, and do a content analysis of their figurines, and that's the hourglass figure you get.

00:35:41.860 So I could now go in front of 400 rabid, radical, angry feminists, as I have, and I walk in with all the swagger that I'm known for, and I present the data, and I'm not afraid of the pushback.

00:36:00.280 And then I usually will talk and say, I can't hear anybody attacking me. What's going on? Why the silence? Why? Because I've built you a nomological network that's impenetrable. I didn't get emotional. I didn't get lunatic. I didn't get hysterical. I simply put on the epistemological hat that says, what would I need to convince my most intransigent audience member?

00:36:24.360 So the grand inoculation against these bad ideas is to start learning how to think,

00:36:30.000 not so much only like a scientist, because most scientists don't know about this tool that I'm

00:36:34.800 talking about, is to think like a well-trained evolutionary scientist, precisely because

00:36:40.800 evolutionary psychologists are so often the butt of hostile detractors, all of whom collectively

00:36:48.000 have the IQ of my shoe. But nonetheless, those detractors are viscerally hateful of evolutionary

00:36:55.100 psychology because they don't like the idea that the same processes that defines your dog's Roscoe's

00:37:01.140 behavior can also explain why I prefer this mate versus that mate. Humans are somehow above their

00:37:06.600 biology. So precisely because I have been so much at the receiving end of within my colleagues of

00:37:14.640 a lot of hostile reactions, I had to learn how to diffuse their rabbit attacks by convincing

00:37:21.840 them calmly through science. So to answer your question in a very long-winded way, but I think

00:37:26.900 I needed to do it this way, is you have to learn how to think like a dispassionate collector of

00:37:33.620 information. And the fundamental name for that is nomological networks of cumulative evidence.

00:37:40.200 well I like if you went all that way just to show basically that men are pigs

00:37:45.740 exactly what we are but again it's fascinating talking to you and we've got probably about 25

00:37:53.220 minutes left one of the frustrations for us whenever we talk to someone like you who's got

00:37:58.260 so many interesting things that we could talk to about is that you know like we get you or

00:38:03.460 Jeffrey Miller or Diana Fleischman on the show and then we spend half an hour talking about

00:38:07.900 so gad please prove to us that men are actually different from women and please you know like

00:38:12.780 these very basic things that everybody actually knows right so um i i mean i i've i'm very

00:38:18.840 interested to read your book nonetheless but i i let's move on to talking about some of the other

00:38:22.880 work that you do and some of the research that you do um first of all tell us a little bit just

00:38:28.680 as a with you clearly have expertise in in a number of fields when you look at the coronavirus

00:38:35.620 response and people's behaviors and the government response in Western countries particularly,

00:38:43.040 what do you see from your mindset and your kind of perceptual filter that we've done right,

00:38:48.540 that we've done wrong? What stands out for you? So what I, I'm not sure if this is going to

00:38:53.600 exactly answer your question, but one of the things that I've done since the shutdown is I

00:38:58.520 wrote several articles on my psychology today column that are all in some form or other

00:39:05.580 coronavirus related and so maybe i could kind of answer it that way right uh and so i thought okay

00:39:12.260 well what you know what are some things either in my personal life or in my knowledge base as an

00:39:18.480 evolutionist that i can write about that somehow links my personal life or my evolutionary background

00:39:24.920 to the coronavirus. And so let me give you a few of these examples. So one of the things, well,

00:39:29.960 I think maybe the first article that I wrote of the series was one where I argued, so there's a

00:39:36.080 study by some fantastic evolutionary behavioral scientists where they looked at the distribution

00:39:43.120 of scores on collectivism and individualism around the world. So China, collectivist, right?

00:39:51.000 Far East collectivists, Arabic countries collectivists, Britain, England, Canada, individualists, right?

00:39:57.480 Individualist societies is I'm first an individual, then I'm a member of a group.

00:40:01.160 Collectivists, who cares about the individual?

00:40:03.100 The group is what matters most.

00:40:04.520 You're just an incidental part of the larger group, right?

00:40:08.960 And so what they showed is that the distribution of countries in terms of how they score on individualism or collectivism

00:40:16.460 is correlated to the pathogenic density in those cultures, meaning cultures who have higher

00:40:25.120 pathogenic load in those cultures are more likely to be collectivist. Now, you might say, well,

00:40:31.200 why? What's the link? So, what they argue is that collectivist societies are able to institute,

00:40:39.400 for example, rituals that protect against pathogens more easily, precisely because

00:40:45.960 they're collectivists, norm following becomes easier to do. When you're in a collectivist

00:40:50.680 society, you're more likely to have a clearer demarcation between the in-group and out-group.

00:40:56.200 Therefore, that also creates a barrier against pathogenic transfer. So then I took that idea,

00:41:02.520 and then I then linked it to a personal reality. So being Jewish, there was a guy who wrote a book

00:41:09.440 called I think the Paleo Manifesto, John Durant, where in the book he talks about how Jews

00:41:16.200 historically have actually fared quite well in these types of pandemics, which basically causes

00:41:21.680 the anti-Semites to argue that that demonstrates that they are the devil, because how come the rest

00:41:26.540 of us are all dying, whereas these bastard Jews are still alive and faring well? Well, it turns

00:41:31.220 out that of the mitzvot, the mitzvot are the 613 commandments, not the 10 major commandments,

00:41:37.060 But the commandments of daily life, so these are called in Hebrew mitzvot, good deeds. So of the 613 mitzvot, roughly 15 to 20%, according to John Durant, relate to purification rituals, right?

00:41:52.000 So there is this cultural religious mechanism that has transcended several millennia that has caused Jews to find a way to protect themselves against a lot of these pathogenic transfers.

00:42:07.060 Now, I took this idea and then applied it, not to my culture and religious heritage,

00:42:12.100 but personally, I'm someone who, pre-coronavirus, is morbidly terrified.

00:42:18.460 I'm a germaphobe, right?

00:42:19.680 So if we travel, there are two things that I fear, mosquitoes and contamination.

00:42:26.640 And I always joke that I'm actually perfectly adaptive from an evolutionary perspective

00:42:32.480 because it makes a lot more sense to be afraid of mosquitoes than great white sharks or grizzly

00:42:37.920 bears, because by far the animal that has killed most more humans by many orders of magnitude than

00:42:43.680 the next biggest animal that has killed us are the mosquitoes. So I see a mosquito in the house,

00:42:48.460 I turn into a little girl, but I can go to New Mexico and hang out in an enclave with adult

00:42:54.660 wolves and I don't bat an eye. I'm not at all scared, but a mosquito turns me into a little

00:42:59.000 girl, right? Fear of being contaminated by things causes me to, pre-corona, never touch things. I

00:43:07.000 don't touch the handle at Starbucks. When I travel at a hotel, my wife goes through a whole

00:43:12.640 defumigation process to make sure that everything is clean. Because if you know what, I don't know

00:43:17.520 if you've ever seen those studies about what happens in hotel rooms and the stuff that there

00:43:21.140 is there. I mean, it's coronavirus on steroids. And so one of the things that I've been doing

00:43:26.880 is trying to write articles

00:43:30.600 that link my interest in evolutionary theory

00:43:33.820 with coronavirus.

00:43:35.600 But I can't really answer in terms of the,

00:43:38.600 you know, what are we doing right?

00:43:39.580 What are we doing wrong?

00:43:40.300 Because, you know, bring in three rabbis

00:43:42.720 and you'll get five opinions.

00:43:44.480 I think it's the same thing.

00:43:45.920 Bring in three epidemiologists

00:43:47.280 and you'll get 37 opinions.

00:43:50.240 They did the shutdown too early,

00:43:52.320 not early enough.

00:43:53.140 We should open, we should not.

00:43:54.300 I could bring you big experts in epidemiology that will say the perfectly opposite thing.

00:44:00.260 So I'm not really sure I can comment on that.

00:44:02.840 You made a comment, actually, in one of your articles, which I really enjoy, by the way,

00:44:07.020 which and the comment and I wrote it down and says those who engage in political mud singing are the tribal hacks and or ignorant fools.

00:44:15.100 And that really struck a note with me. Could you explain a little bit of why you believe in that?

00:44:20.480 Because it's something I believe very deeply in as well.

00:44:22.880 As specifically relating to the coronavirus issue, because I wrote it in that article,

00:44:26.980 or do you mean it more generally?

00:44:28.020 Yeah, corona, but more generally as well, because I think that's very important for our times.

00:44:33.720 Please explain.

00:44:34.940 So in the context of the coronavirus, I was basically arguing that the people who,

00:44:39.400 I know a lot of people don't like the term Trump derangement syndrome, but it truly is that.

00:44:43.080 I actually use a different mechanism.

00:44:45.100 I call it a form of collective Munchausen.

00:44:48.180 So I don't know, do you know what Munchausen is?

00:44:50.940 Yes. So the Munchausen syndrome, it's where you believe that you are ill and therefore you go

00:44:57.000 into hospital. Not necessarily you believe you're ill, you fake that you're ill so that you can

00:45:01.200 garner sympathy and empathy, right? Okay, right. That's Munchausen syndrome. Munchausen syndrome

00:45:07.840 by proxy is where you take someone who is under your care, usually your biological child, but it

00:45:13.380 could be your elderly parent, it could be your pet, and then you harm them so that you can garner

00:45:18.340 the sympathy and empathy. Oh, look, poor Suzanne, she has a ill kid. So her psychiatrically diluted

00:45:25.200 need of getting that empathy and sympathy causes her to harm her own biological child. So in 2010,

00:45:31.920 I had written a paper in a medical journal where I was trying to explain Munchausen syndrome by

00:45:37.740 proxy from an evolutionary perspective. And then that germ of an idea then turned into what many

00:45:45.040 people now know me for as related to Munchhausen, where I talk about my theory of collective

00:45:49.260 Munchhausen, the I'm a victim, therefore I am ethos, right? So the idea is that it is wonderful

00:45:56.060 to link everything to some bad villain, and therefore I'm a victim. So Trump is the bad

00:46:02.420 villain. So in that article, where you quoted that quote of mine, I was talking about to politicize

00:46:08.880 the coronavirus so that if I hate Trump, anything he does is a manifestation of how evil he is.

00:46:15.520 If he shuts down the border, if he's racist, if he doesn't shut down the border, it's because

00:46:20.360 he doesn't care about American lives, right? I mean, I can construct any state of the world

00:46:26.900 as a manifestation of how diabolical he is. And what I was arguing is that try to rise above that

00:46:32.700 and see that our common enemy today is the coronavirus. It's not Trump. Obama wouldn't

00:46:37.160 have done it differently or any measurably different way so but now more generally to

00:46:42.600 answer your question more generally for that quote i always say belong to the tribe of truth

00:46:47.920 in other words so when people ask me so what are you are you a libertarian are you republican or

00:46:53.100 even though i'm canadian so republican and democrat don't apply to me and i say i'm neither of these

00:46:58.540 things i'm a man of each idea on its own merits so when it comes to the death penalty i'm actually

00:47:04.440 for it. So that would make me a Republican. When it comes to socially liberal issues,

00:47:10.280 that would make me a Democrat because I don't give a damn who you sleep with in your bed or

00:47:14.160 whether you're transgender or not. So I would be supra-liberal there. When it comes to immigration,

00:47:19.120 I would be considered supra-right-wing, right? So you can't pin me to any pigeonhole label

00:47:26.560 because I have this thing called a brain that allows me to think on each issue based on its

00:47:33.300 merit. I don't care about belonging to the IDW or the group of Canadians or the group. I am

00:47:42.720 gatsad with my merits and flaws. And as Luther said, here I stand, right? I stand on the merits

00:47:50.660 of my arguments. So to go back to the quote that you quoted so kindly, forget about political

00:47:57.080 tribalism. Follow the truth. In some cases, Republicans say super stupid things, call them

00:48:03.700 out on it. In some cases, they say the right thing. But the problem is that our innate psychology,

00:48:11.460 regrettably, is tribal, right? One of the features, the architecture of the human mind,

00:48:17.120 is that it views the world as us versus them. There's blue team and red team. I mean,

00:48:21.880 literally, in this case, red, blue, right? There's a great study, and I don't remember

00:48:26.420 the reference and I've for many years tried to find out because I had heard it in a class when

00:48:30.240 I was a graduate student you bring in people into the lab and you put them into a waiting area and

00:48:38.720 you give them you literally put like a red dot on them or a blue dot and you say oh I'm going to

00:48:44.180 come back in a few minutes to administer some tests but ostensibly what you're doing is you

00:48:48.080 want to see their behavior once you've given them this random cue and what happens the red people

00:48:53.080 start banding together and the blue people start banding together. So at this point, it doesn't

00:48:56.900 matter if I'm gay or straight, Jew or not, tall or short, fat or thin. It's this irrelevant cue

00:49:02.960 has become the way by which I assort the world for that micro moment, right? And so this is what

00:49:09.580 ends up happening in our political discourse. I am a Democrat. Therefore, Joe Biden could not

00:49:15.380 have done something wrong. Even though I see him molesting little girls on camera for the past 40

00:49:21.040 years, he can't be because he's a noble Democrat. Brett Kavanaugh is an evil Republican. Therefore,

00:49:28.660 even though the woman who came out after him, Christine Blasey Ford, 36 years after the fact,

00:49:34.880 she can't remember where, when, how, what, nobody can corroborate, but he must be guilty. Now,

00:49:41.260 this is not some idiots who are succumbing to this type of thinking. Some of the, by close,

00:49:47.100 or maybe not close. Some of the people who run in the same intellectual circles as me,

00:49:51.440 who are very famous, who you would know, exactly succumb to this idiocy. Why? Because they're not

00:49:58.640 driven by the same personal conduct as me. And again, I'm not trying to sound haughty,

00:50:04.380 but as I said, when I go to bed at night and I put my head on the pillow, what drives me is,

00:50:09.200 did I do everything that I can to try to protect truth to the best of my ability? If yes,

00:50:15.140 i sleep well at night if not then i'm a fraud so i am only belonging to the tribe of truth

00:50:22.160 whatever that truth might be at that moment political tribalism is not that political

00:50:28.180 tribalism is i belong to a group first damn the truth there you go god i just had a piece actually

00:50:35.460 about that very thing it published in quillette talking about the the kavanaugh the the biden

00:50:40.920 all of that. Do you think, I mean, one of the things that strikes me is that it's inescapably

00:50:46.920 obvious now that some of the traps that are being set by one side for the other are now

00:50:53.600 turning out to be traps that anyone can be trapped by. This thing of, for example,

00:50:58.140 believe all women, right? Once you introduce that, you are absolutely fucked because at some point,

00:51:03.900 someone on your side is going to come along and it's going to turn out that they've been doing

00:51:07.020 anything's wrong it's just the way of the world right so do you think maybe some people are going

00:51:11.700 to start to wake up now and go some of this stuff that we've been doing in the last few years

00:51:15.980 uh or is it just my naive optimism talking no no i think listen if if if if your optimism

00:51:23.460 weren't something that we can all aspire to have in the future then there's no point for me to get

00:51:28.220 out of bed right because listen i navigate in the ecosystem that is most infested by this bullshit

00:51:34.420 right academia is the coronavirus of the human mind center right this is where the bullshit is

00:51:42.840 right by the way this is one of the reasons why when people say to me well how come you don't

00:51:47.520 criticize republicans more or the right more and as i explain in my book and i'll explain i've

00:51:53.720 explained a million times before let me explain again that's be that's like asking a dermatologist

00:51:59.580 but bruh, what about diabetes, right? Okay. If I'm a dermatologist, I deal with skin related

00:52:07.440 issues. That doesn't mean that diabetes is not important, but I'm not an endocrinologist. I am

00:52:12.260 a dermatologist. In my daily life, I operate in an ecosystem that is completely dominated

00:52:19.940 by the left, right? Most of the idea pathogens that I speak of in the book are completely the

00:52:27.220 product of insane leftist progressive stupidity, right? Therefore, I attack that not because that

00:52:34.740 is my secret attempt to communicate to the world that I am a right-wing guy, but that's because

00:52:41.320 those are the diseases of the human mind that I'm exposed to, right? So as a parasitologist of the

00:52:47.060 human mind, I deal with parasites of the left. Now, if a Republican senator comes out and says

00:52:52.700 evolution is a hoax and we should be teaching intelligent design, then I will also go after

00:52:57.920 him. But the reality of my daily life is I am attacking leftist ideas because that's what I

00:53:02.960 see all day. But so to answer your question, I do believe that we can win the idea. I do believe

00:53:09.240 that people can turn around, but I think it's a generational fight, right? You have to have

00:53:15.560 all of the original spreaders right just like a coronavirus can spread the spreaders of the

00:53:23.000 bullshit are the professors who for the post past 30 or 40 years have been spewing this nonsense to

00:53:29.060 their students once you have enough people uh come and attack these ideas or once these guys die out

00:53:37.040 or retire then we will start seeing changes but this is why by the way i tell people you don't

00:53:42.960 have to be a famous professor with a huge following and so on to affect change. If you

00:53:50.240 see in your classroom your professor spewing something that you disagree with, challenge

00:53:56.140 them politely. If you see someone post something on Facebook or if you're at a bar and somebody

00:54:00.940 says something idiotic, challenge them. The problem is that most people are cowardly.

00:54:05.860 So what they do is they subcontract this fight to a few public people. But you know what?

00:54:11.600 my shoulders are only so big, right? Now, it just so happens that I have the type of personhood

00:54:16.460 that I'm very combative. I mean, I'm very nice and very warm and very sweet, but you come after

00:54:21.280 me, I come after you 10 times harder, right? That's why sometimes people say, oh, but on Twitter,

00:54:26.360 why are you sometimes mean? Well, when you've insulted me for the past 600 days and I've kept

00:54:31.120 quiet, then I say, okay, let me bring out Middle Eastern boy. Let me roll up. And I'm going to be

00:54:37.420 relentless in going after you. And usually they shut down their accounts, by the way.

00:54:41.800 Once I decide that I'm coming after you, it is endless how much I come after you, right?

00:54:47.440 So people have to, and it's a term that I've used before, grow a pair. You have to have

00:54:52.400 testicular fortitude to say, I have a say in this battle of ideas. I should also contribute. It

00:54:59.060 shouldn't be just Gadsad and Joe Blow and John Smith who fight on our behalf. And by the way,

00:55:04.900 this is one of the things I talk about in the last chapter of my book called the chapters called

00:55:09.560 call to action don't diffuse the responsibility onto others trigger your honey badger your inner

00:55:17.200 honey badger if you don't know the honey badger is a astonishingly ferocious animal it's my favorite

00:55:24.160 animal gad thank you so much I'm a massive honey badger fan I've never seen him this excited for

00:55:29.240 weeks can i love them they're incredible sorry carry on couldn't help myself the honey badger

00:55:35.360 is you know the size of a small dog you can just go on google if you're watching this whenever

00:55:41.200 you're watching it and see a honey badger face down six lions and the night lions look and say

00:55:49.360 what the fuck and they're like this is too much right so when people see me 99.9 percent of the

00:55:56.880 time. I'm extremely mellow. I'm extremely sweet. I'm a very affable guy. But if you attack me in

00:56:03.200 an alley, I'm not sweet and affable. Then I will fight. And that's different than when I am tucking

00:56:09.580 my children to bed. This is called the fundamental attribution error, right? You attribute things

00:56:14.300 dispositionally when you should be attributing things to the situation, right? So on Twitter,

00:56:20.000 I use that medium to usually smack down someone, not so much because I'm smacking them. They might

00:56:26.740 have only 12 followers, but because I can use that opportunity for the audience to watch

00:56:32.100 how you never back down from a bunch of lions if you're a honey badger.

00:56:36.900 And so to go back to your original question, Konstantin, I am optimistic, but big caveat,

00:56:44.520 if the silent majority chooses to rise up and then fight in the battle of ideas, if it

00:56:51.320 remains on four, five, 10 people to do so, we will lose the battle.

00:56:54.960 and you say that but isn't evolutionarily a reason for people not to get involved in this fight in

00:57:01.740 that they're terrified of being ostracized by their group like for instance myself and constantin

00:57:06.500 there are look we're in we're in the world of comedy i think it's safe to say a lot of comedians

00:57:11.040 don't like us now i don't mind that because we don't like them either yeah because i like pissing

00:57:17.380 people off yeah and you know i have that arabics left in america well you're gonna fuck with me

00:57:22.740 well, let's go then. But I think most people want a quiet life, don't they? And they want to be part

00:57:29.200 of the in-group. So, yeah. So look, what happens is that at any given point, there are multiple

00:57:36.560 Darwinian pulls pulling me in different directions, right? I have made a monogamous

00:57:42.240 commitment to my wife. And now that's triggering my innate moral compass. That doesn't mean that

00:57:49.020 I may not have temptations to stray. So I could go and stray or I could stay monogamous. Those

00:57:55.520 are pulling me in different directions. I have an evolved preference, my gustatory preference to

00:58:00.720 eat a lot of fatty foods, but then I receive my cholesterol score that pulls me in a different

00:58:05.440 direction. So to answer your question, yes, there is a part of me that's pulling me towards wanting

00:58:11.100 to lead a quiet life, but to those who take the great risks come the great rewards, right?

00:58:17.200 emperors who go to war then have a harem of 800 gorgeous girls the little schmuck who's plowing

00:58:25.500 his field can't get one wife hit through history right so i'm the emperor who is willing to take

00:58:32.660 all of the great risks so that that but now again i don't mean to imply that i take those risks

00:58:37.360 because i want the adulation or so on but what i'm saying basically is no you want the 800

00:58:42.160 takes a go, so we get it. I want you to make that exactly my point. I want 800 goals.

00:58:47.060 You need to propose to one man, just one. By the way, I should mention that I have a study

00:58:54.260 published in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine that looks at, so remember when I mentioned that

00:58:59.320 in my doctoral dissertation, I looked at how much information do we need to look at before we commit

00:59:03.780 to a choice? Let me just put this into gallery view so everyone can see Francis' face as you

00:59:07.920 Oh, here we go. Go for it, guys.

00:59:10.280 So I applied that framework.

00:59:12.440 So my doctoral dissertation was in 1994.

00:59:14.760 And this is a paper that I published in 2009, if memory serves me right.

00:59:18.980 So many years later, I applied that framework specifically to make choice.

00:59:23.280 The idea being, I applied that, what's called the sequential stopping model.

00:59:28.600 So sequential in that you acquire information and then you decide,

00:59:32.500 do I have enough information to make a choice?

00:59:34.700 If yes, I stop. If no, I acquire more information.

00:59:37.020 And so I applied this model specifically to mate choice. And let me just give you the quick kind of punchline. When it comes to rejecting prospective suitors, in other words, how much information do you need to look at before you decide that a pair of suitors are losers?

00:59:54.040 women reject suitors much more quickly right in other words they need less information to decide

01:00:01.460 that they are disassociating from those prospective suitors when it comes to choosing a final mate

01:00:07.500 then women acquire more information before they make that final choice now the fact that in

01:00:14.280 rejection mode they acquire less information but that they when they choose mode they acquire

01:00:20.460 more information is actually perfectly explained by an evolutionary theory called parental

01:00:26.560 investment theory. The guy who proposed it is Robert Trivers, who is still alive. Some have said

01:00:32.480 arguably the biggest evolutionary biologist since Darwin that's saying a lot. He's come up with some

01:00:37.740 unbelievable theories that have been influential over the past 40 years. Parental investment theory

01:00:41.700 basically says that across species, right? And now here, please don't be triggered. It assumes that

01:00:48.320 there is such a thing as male and female in each of those species, sexually reproducing

01:00:53.020 species, incredibly transphobic.

01:00:55.100 But if you want to know sex differences within a species, you need to look at the minimal

01:01:03.180 parental obligatory investment that each sex provides within that species.

01:01:08.980 For most species, males only provide a copulatory act and then they leave, right?

01:01:15.360 All of the minimal obligatory parental investment is carried by the females. Therefore, because of that, they have to be more judicious in their mate choice. They have to be more careful because the costs of making a suboptimal mate choice loom much larger for females.

01:01:30.800 Now, by the way, there are species that are called sexual reversal species where it's the exact opposite. It is the males who are smaller. The males have less testosterone. The females build harems of males.

01:01:43.600 Yeah, in England, we call that area Islington.

01:01:47.800 I'm supposing that's what, a super liberal progressive area?

01:01:51.060 Yes, well done, you got the joke.

01:01:54.120 And I call them sneaky fucker syndrome.

01:01:58.820 But anyways, so in those species, you have the exact opposite pattern of sex differences.

01:02:05.880 So imagine how unbelievably powerful that theory is.

01:02:10.580 It can, in one swoop, explain the pattern of sex differences across two million sexually reproducing species without a falsifiable data point, right?

01:02:24.540 So to the incredible imbeciles who argue that evolutionary theory is nothing but just so storytelling, unfalsifiable nonsense, they couldn't be further from the truth.

01:02:39.780 Because the reality is evolutionary theory is unbelievably falsifiable epistemologically.

01:02:46.380 The fact that you can't falsify it speaks to its veracity, to it being veridical.

01:02:52.900 It's not because epistemologically you can't falsify it. It's because it's true, right? If a hundred people jump off a building and a hundred of them crash, it's not because gravity is unfalsifiable. It's because gravity exists and it's recurrently the same pattern that will happen.

01:03:09.880 So that's one of the things, by the way, that caused me to develop this nomological networks of cumulative evidence, you know, chapter seven, right?

01:03:18.860 Because I have to fight against this idea that, so you basically sit around, professor, and just come up with bullshit post hoc explanations, but you couch it as evolutionary psychology.

01:03:30.740 but isn't evolutionary psychology pseudoscience? Nothing could be further from the truth. Before

01:03:36.500 an evolutionary psychologist can claim that something is an evolutionary trait, he sets

01:03:43.240 the threshold, speaking of threshold, he sets the cumulative threshold incredibly higher than all

01:03:49.960 the other sciences. So that which we are attacked is actually the opposite of what the truth is,

01:03:56.300 And that's why I find it so galling. And by the way, it's usually fellow academics who levy that accusation, which upsets me that much more. If it were just a Twitter moron, then it's fine. He's sitting in his basement playing gamer stuff. But if it's a fellow academic who says, oh, it's too bad, Dr. Saad, that you wasted your career on a pseudoscience like evolutionary psychology. Well, once you say stuff like that, then I'm going to roll up the sleeves and I'm coming after you.

01:04:24.280 God, you've got to be careful with the incels, my friend, because for the last five weeks, we've all been sitting in our basements playing computer games.

01:04:30.700 So you've got to be careful in this brave new world of ours.

01:04:33.460 But listen, it's been an absolute pleasure chatting with you.

01:04:36.340 I wish we had more time.

01:04:38.040 And once all this stuff is over, either when you're in London or we're in Canada, we'd love to talk to you face to face because I feel like there's so much other stuff we could discuss.

01:04:46.260 But now that we've got to let you go, before we do that, we've got one more question for you.

01:04:50.400 and that's uh the way we finish every interview which is what is the one thing we're not talking

01:04:55.360 about as a society that we really should be facetious answer or real answer because i

01:05:01.520 haven't prepared a real answer so let's do a facetious one whatever you want go for it facetious

01:05:06.320 answer uh there's a lot of pressure on him now isn't there why why is it why are we not talking

01:05:14.760 about why Ariana Grande has more followers than the 100 top, I guess that's not a facetious

01:05:23.000 answer, more than the 100 other top brains in the world.

01:05:29.780 In other words, why is it, and I'm thinking about this from a parasitic perspective, right?

01:05:35.280 More people are willing to listen to the pontification of Ariana Grande or Billie Eilish

01:05:41.900 because of the platform that they have

01:05:43.960 than if I stood on my platform and screamed all day.

01:05:47.820 And I wish there was a way for us to talk about

01:05:50.120 how we can devalue,

01:05:52.240 and I guess some people are doing that,

01:05:54.280 how we can devalue the social capital worth

01:05:58.120 of celebrities and other naturally lobotomized fools.

01:06:01.740 And maybe we can have the philosophers

01:06:05.660 and the intellectuals and the academics

01:06:07.440 be the celebrities of our world.

01:06:09.180 Not because I am one,

01:06:10.320 But because as someone who pursues truth, I'd like more kids to have as their heroes intellectual giants rather than people who gyrate and twerk and sin.

01:06:22.480 Yeah, but as we know from an evolutionary point of view, God, that doesn't get you laid.

01:06:26.460 And that's the problem, isn't it?

01:06:28.480 I'm fighting an evolutionary dead end.

01:06:31.480 Exactly, exactly.

01:06:33.060 Listen, thank you so much for coming on.

01:06:34.680 I cannot wait to read your book.

01:06:36.600 It's coming out in October.

01:06:38.320 Exactly.

01:06:38.720 Exactly. And it's called The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense.

01:06:44.220 We're going to look forward very much to reading it. We look forward to speaking with you again.

01:06:48.000 Make sure you go and follow Gad on Twitter and all other social media.

01:06:51.340 And we'll see you very soon with a live stream or another interview.

01:07:08.720 Thank you.

TRIGGERnometry - May 10, 2020

Gad Saad：＂Bad Ideas Are Destroying the West＂

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