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Episode: Gad Saad Survived War in Lebanon. He’s Warning About One in the West.
Author: The Free Press
Duration: 01:38:26
Episode Shownotes
Gad Saad was born in Beirut in 1964 into one of the last Jewish families to remain in Lebanon. But the country that was once called “the Paris of the Middle East” began to turn. Saad remembers one day at school when a fellow student told his class that he
wanted to be a “Jew-killer” when he grew up. The rest of the kids laughed. By 1975, Lebanon descended into a brutal civil war and Saad said death awaited him at every millisecond of the day. Even through the danger and turmoil, his family thought, This will pass over. We will be fine. Until someone showed up to their home in Lebanon to kill them, at which point his family fled the country and rebuilt their life in Canada. In 2024, many of us in Western democracies find ourselves saying the exact same things: This will pass over. We will be fine. Even as Hamas flags and “I love Hezbollah” posters wave in cosmopolitan capitals across the West. How worried should we be? And, is there a way to roll back admiration for anti-civilizational groups? Those are just some of the questions we were eager to put to Saad in today’s conversation. Saad said that witnessing the Lebanese Civil War gave him a crash course in the extremes of identity politics, tribalism, and illiberalism. He argues that immigrants like himself, who have lived without the virtues of the West—freedom of speech and thought, reason, and true liberalism—uniquely understand what’s at stake right now in Western cultural and political life. It’s no coincidence, Saad said, that the most prominent defenders of Western ideals are immigrants, people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salman Rushdie, and Masih Alinejad. Saad is a professor of marketing and evolutionary behavioral sciences, and if you’re on X, we suspect you know his name. Unlike most professors, he has a million followers, and a knack for satire—so much so that Elon Musk seems to be one of his biggest fans. Outside of his X personality, he’s been teaching at Concordia University in Montreal for the past 30 years. But he’s now having second thoughts. Concordia is today widely regarded as the most antisemitic university in North America. Saad is now a visiting professor and global ambassador at Northwood University in Michigan. He said he can’t bear the possibility of returning to Concordia given the antisemitism on campus. All of this, he argued, constitutes another war: a campaign against logic, science, common sense, and reality here in the West, which he explains in his book: The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. Today, Bari Weiss asks one of the most insightful and provocative thinkers about the risks of mob rule and extremism on the left, where these “parasitic ideas” came from and why they’re encouraged in the West, if progressive illiberalism is waxing or waning, and if these trends are reversible. And if you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Transcript
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From the Free Press, this is Honestly, and I'm Barry Weiss. In the 1940s, it's hard to believe now, there were around 20,000 Jews still living in Lebanon. Just 20 years later, the span of one generation, that number dropped to around 3,000.
00:00:49 Speaker_02
Our guest today, Dr. Gad Saad, is one of those statistics. Gad was born in Lebanon in 1964, into one of the last Jewish families to remain in Lebanon.
00:01:01 Speaker_02
But the country that had once been called the Paris of the Middle East began to turn when he was a child. He remembers being at school one day when a fellow student told the class that he wanted to be a Jew killer when he grew up.
00:01:16 Speaker_02
The rest of the kids laughed. By 1975, Lebanon had descended into a brutal civil war, and God remembers death awaiting him every millisecond of the day.
00:01:27 Speaker_02
He spent his childhood years being mindful of which streets had snipers and which didn't when he went outside to play. But even then, even during that situation, his family thought, this will pass. Ultimately, we're going to be fine.
00:01:43 Speaker_02
That is until someone showed up at their home to kill them, at which point the Saad family fled the country to rebuild their life in Canada. In 2024, many of us in Western democracies find ourselves saying the exact same things. This will pass over.
00:02:00 Speaker_02
We'll be fine. We say that even as Hamas flags and I love Hezbollah posters fly in cosmopolitan capitals across the West. I've been asking myself a lot over the past year, how worried should we be? Am I being hysterical?
00:02:17 Speaker_02
And is there a way to roll back this anti-civilizational impulse that has been let loose? Those are just some of the questions I was eager to put to God Saad himself in today's conversation.
00:02:33 Speaker_02
God says that witnessing the Lebanese Civil War gave him a crash course in the extremes of identity politics, tribalism, and illiberalism.
00:02:44 Speaker_02
And he says that immigrants like himself, who have lived without the virtues of the West, virtues like freedom of speech and thought, reason, and liberalism, uniquely understand what is at stake right now in Western cultural and political life.
00:03:02 Speaker_02
He says it's no coincidence that the most prominent defenders of Western ideals are immigrants like himself, people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salman Rushdie, and Masih Ali Najad. If you're on Twitter, I suspect you know God's name.
00:03:18 Speaker_02
Unlike most professors, he has a million Twitter followers and a knack for satire, so much so that Elon Musk seems to be one of his biggest fans.
00:03:27 Speaker_02
He has become one of the most insightful and provocative thinkers on the risks of mob rule and extremism on the left.
00:03:36 Speaker_02
But outside of his Twitter personality, he is a professor of marketing and evolutionary behavioral sciences at Concordia University in Montreal. That's been his home base for the past 30 years.
00:03:48 Speaker_02
But he's now having second thoughts about his university, because Concordia is now widely regarded as one of the most anti-Semitic universities in North America.
00:03:58 Speaker_02
God is now a visiting professor and global ambassador at Northwood University in Michigan. He says he can't bear the possibility of returning to Concordia, and maybe even Canada, given the anti-Semitism that's run rampant there.
00:04:12 Speaker_02
All of this, he argues, constitutes another war. one different but related to the one he witnessed in Lebanon as a child.
00:04:20 Speaker_02
This one is a war on logic, science, common sense, and reality here in the West, ideas that he explains in his important book, The Parasitic Mind, how infectious ideas are killing common sense.
00:04:38 Speaker_02
In today's wide-ranging conversation, I ask God where these parasitic ideas came from and how they're being encouraged in the West. I ask how the culture of perpetual offense, victimhood, and self-flagellation have become progressive virtues.
00:04:55 Speaker_02
I ask why the rise of antisemitism is larger than just a Jewish issue. And I ask if progressive liberalism is waxing or waning, and importantly, if these trends are reversible. Stay with us. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.
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00:07:16 Speaker_02
I am really happy to say, Dr. God Saad, welcome to Honestly.
00:07:20 Speaker_04
Oh, I'm so excited to be with you, Barry. Thank you for having me.
00:07:23 Speaker_02
Really happy you're here. I want to start by playing two clips to you that have emerged in the last few days. The first one is by this pretty famous American rapper. Maybe you've never heard of him. His name is Macklemore.
00:07:36 Speaker_02
And he said this when he was playing in front of a huge concert in Seattle.
00:07:42 Speaker_03
Straight up, say it. I'm not going to stop you.
00:07:47 Speaker_00
I'm not going to stop you. Yeah, fuck America.
00:07:53 Speaker_02
And the second clip comes from Tucker Carlson speaking in front of a huge crowd with Turning Point's founder, Charlie Kirk, in Kansas.
00:08:02 Speaker_03
I've never seen any population treated the way Americans are being treated by their leaders now. And I'm very worried that at some point people will be like, I'm not putting up with this. I don't know why anybody pays taxes in this country.
00:08:13 Speaker_03
For the record, I'm not counseling not pay your taxes because I don't want to get arrested.
00:08:17 Speaker_02
God, I want to start by asking you to respond to those clips, obviously being expressed from people on very different sides of the political spectrum, but echoing each other, I think, in pretty profound ways.
00:08:31 Speaker_02
What are we hearing when you hear those things?
00:08:34 Speaker_04
Well, I guess the first gentleman, I vaguely know who he is, but look, it's part of the noble penchant of being self-loathing and that becomes a street creds for being a progressive.
00:08:46 Speaker_04
You know, if at the individual level, you were to go see a clinical psychologist and say to him or her, I have ruminative thinking about, you know, self-loathing, then that would be something that you should intervene so that we can stop those ruminative thoughts.
00:09:01 Speaker_04
You know, you are worthy, you're valuable, we wanna increase your self-confidence. But that self-loathing reflex, when it is not applied to the individual, but to the collective, We hate ourselves. We're imperialists. We're colonizers. America sucks.
00:09:16 Speaker_04
Suck the United States. It's sad, but that's become part and parcel of the parlance of the progressives. Now, in the Tucker case, what was he saying?
00:09:25 Speaker_02
He was saying that he was saying that America treats its citizens worse than any other country in the world.
00:09:31 Speaker_04
Yeah, you know, one of the things that I've made this point on many shows, and I think you know Ayaan Hirsi Ali, it's often immigrants such as myself and Ayaan who end up defending most staunchly the Western tradition, the United States, even though I'm Canadian, precisely because we have sampled from the full buffet of societies so that we actually know that the United States
00:09:57 Speaker_04
is a miracle, it's a bleep, it's an outlier, it's anomalous.
00:10:01 Speaker_04
And so it always upsets me and bothers me whenever anyone who grew up taking for granted the magic of the United States or the West in general doesn't appreciate as much as some of us immigrants do.
00:10:14 Speaker_02
The phenomenon, though, of sort of the—I don't want to even call it the far right because I think it's increasingly mainstream—but essentially the turn against America from very different political directions that we're seeing, has that always been there or is there something particular, God, that's going on in this moment?
00:10:34 Speaker_04
Right, so I mean, I'm more typically focused on leftist self-loathing, not because I'm a person of the right, but because I inhabit the university ecosystem, and the university ecosystem is one that is largely dominated by leftist thought, by leftist professors, and so I'm,
00:10:52 Speaker_04
certainly a bit more comfortable in speaking about leftist self-loathing. Look, if you teach generations of students that the United States is irrevocably damaged, it's a racist, Islamophobic,
00:11:08 Speaker_04
transphobic, hateful society that was built on the sweat and blood of others, then it's not surprising that people grow up thinking that it is a noble reflex to hate your society, right? And so I see that all the time.
00:11:21 Speaker_04
I mean, I've sat on research grant committees. To your point about the first gentleman, is it, what was his name? Macklemore. Macklemore. You know, you have, Tons of doctoral dissertations and master's theses where it's always that reflex.
00:11:37 Speaker_04
There's something innately bad about the Western tradition in general, the United States in particular, and we need to remedy that. I'll give you a quick example from my own university.
00:11:48 Speaker_04
I'm currently a visiting professor in the United States, but my home university is in Canada, Concordia University. Well, they put out recently the five-year strategic plan
00:11:58 Speaker_04
And the number one mission of the five-year strategic plan, and this, I'm not being hyperbolic, I'm being literal, it's to decolonize and indigenize the entire curriculum. and pedagogy, right? That's the number one item.
00:12:15 Speaker_04
So imagine someone like me who's trying to navigate through that ecosystem. So I do research in psychology of decision-making, consumer psychology, evolutionary psychology. What does it mean to indigenize those fields?
00:12:26 Speaker_04
I mean, isn't science precisely that that transcends my personal identity? So I think that whole orgiastic self-loathing regrettably started in universities and continues to flow unabated.
00:12:39 Speaker_02
My friend Constantine Kissin, who I'm sure you know and follow, I thought had just a really concise take on this. He said, the woke left claim that America, one of the most racially tolerant countries in the world, was the most racist country ever.
00:12:53 Speaker_02
The woke right, and here he was describing that Tucker Carlson clip, claims that America, one of the best governed countries in the world, treats its citizens worse than any other.
00:13:03 Speaker_02
It's true that there are racists in America, and it's true that America has problems when it comes to living up to its ideals on things like free speech. But all of this is just victimhood for cliques, and it's pathetic, unpatriotic, and silly.
00:13:15 Speaker_02
And I think that that is a really nice way of segueing into the thing that you referenced earlier, which is the fact that it's not by chance that some of the most
00:13:27 Speaker_02
clear eyed appreciators of what we have in America and the West are people that experienced backgrounds in places that did not have all of the things that we take here for granted.
00:13:38 Speaker_02
So you grew up in Lebanon in the 1960s, a country many will be shocked to hear, given what's going on there now, that was once thought of as the Paris of the Middle East.
00:13:49 Speaker_02
And you watched as your country descended into brutal civil war in the 1970s, a war that
00:13:55 Speaker_02
ruined Lebanon, which is basically, I think we would agree, a failed state with a corrupt government, a government or people that is terrorized by the militant group Hezbollah, which Israel is currently at war with.
00:14:07 Speaker_02
And part of the reason that I'm interested in talking to you today is because you witnessed firsthand a wealthy, thriving country, okay, not exactly America, but a wealthy, thriving country collapse. you know, in very short order.
00:14:24 Speaker_02
And I think a lot of us who are paying attention are wondering if something like that could happen in America and in the West.
00:14:31 Speaker_02
So in order to sort of back us into that conversation, I wonder if you could take us back in time to the 1960s, to Lebanon before the war. You're one of the last of a very small Jewish community living in Lebanon.
00:14:47 Speaker_02
Take us back to the world you were born into.
00:14:49 Speaker_04
So I was born in 1964.
00:14:51 Speaker_04
We were steadfastly, doggedly refusing to leave Lebanon, despite the fact that, yes, you're right, that there was a time when Lebanon was considered progressive by, certainly by Middle Eastern standards, the Paris of the Middle East, as you said.
00:15:06 Speaker_04
But much of my extended family had read the writing on the wall and had left earlier, prior to the Civil War, many of whom left to Israel and one maternal aunt that left to Montreal, Canada.
00:15:18 Speaker_04
That's one of the reasons why we ended up emigrating to Canada. But my family, my immediate family, my nuclear family had stayed in Lebanon. I'm 10 years younger than the next oldest child.
00:15:30 Speaker_04
So the other siblings are 10, 11, and almost 14 years older than me. And so I think my parents had realized that there was no future for them in Lebanon. And so bit by bit, each of my siblings had left Lebanon. But I remained because I was a young kid.
00:15:45 Speaker_04
When the civil war broke out, I was 10. And notwithstanding the fact that it was supposedly a tolerant place, I describe in one of my books that there was still endemic Jew hatred in progressive Paris of the Middle East, Lebanon.
00:16:00 Speaker_04
And so just to give your audience a feel of what it was like growing up Jewish in Lebanon, When I was five years old, the president of Syria, who was a pan-Arabist, Gamal Abdel Nasser, passed away, and he was a hero to the Arab people.
00:16:17 Speaker_04
And whenever something like that happens in the Middle East, people go out into the street with a lot of fervor, and they start sort of publicly engaging in lamentations. oftentimes sort of religious-inclined lamentations.
00:16:32 Speaker_04
And as these people were proceeding down my street, I couldn't help but hear, this is, I'm five years old, death to Jews, death to Jews. And I was wondering, why are they saying death to Jews because they're Egyptian?
00:16:45 Speaker_04
So I turned to my mother to get an explanation, but of course she couldn't offer me to a five-year-old a satisfactory explanation. A few years later, but also prior to the start of the Lebanese Civil War,
00:16:56 Speaker_04
I was in a class where the teacher asked us to get up and tell what we'd like to be when we grow up. And so you get the typical professions. I'd like to be a doctor. I'd like to be a police officer. I'd like to be a soccer player.
00:17:07 Speaker_04
And one kid who is a kid that knew that I was Jewish got up and said, when I grow up, I want to be a Jew killer to raucous applause and laughter.
00:17:16 Speaker_02
Oh my God.
00:17:17 Speaker_04
And that's just the typical thing that you would see in the Middle East.
00:17:21 Speaker_02
one thing I'm just always interested in is people that go versus people that stay, right? Like, you guys were really one of the last holdouts.
00:17:31 Speaker_02
And was that because your parents so strongly believed that, you know, the situation could turn itself around? Was it inertia? Why had your family not left by 1975 when the war breaks out?
00:17:44 Speaker_04
Right, so I'm speaking from the perspective of someone who never asked that specific question to my parents, but I can surmise what it might've been. My parents were very well entrenched in Lebanese society. They were successful business people.
00:17:59 Speaker_04
So I think from their perspective, it was, you know, we're Lebanese, we're well entrenched here. This hopefully will blow over. There's always friction in the Middle East.
00:18:08 Speaker_04
but then you realize that they're coming for you and you're about to die, at which point, you know, there's nothing to think about anymore. So I think that was probably the penchant, hopefully this will blow over and we can continue our lives here.
00:18:20 Speaker_04
By the way, that's one of the reasons why even after we emigrated to Montreal, they kept returning. So we came to Montreal at the end of 1975. They kept returning to Lebanon in the most brutal civil war that you could imagine until 1980.
00:18:37 Speaker_04
when they were kidnapped. So that speaks to your question, which is, we still had business interests, their lives had always been there, and so it was very hard for them to acclimatize to a completely new way of living in Montreal, Canada.
00:18:51 Speaker_02
So you're 10 or 11 years old, the war breaks out, and of course your family is forced to flee. Was there a particular moment that you remember knowing that we were gonna have to get out of here to save our lives?
00:19:05 Speaker_04
There are many, many such moments because death awaited you at every millisecond of the day.
00:19:12 Speaker_04
If it wasn't the sniper, so for example, my parents would tell me, you can go out and play outside, but don't pass this particular line because that would open you up. to the eyesight of the snipers that are on this building.
00:19:26 Speaker_04
I'm actually getting goosebumps saying this. So that's the reality we grew up with, whether we jumped to sort of hide ourselves or not, depended on the whistle signature that you heard of the bomb coming in.
00:19:38 Speaker_04
So you learn very quickly, oh, this bomb is probably gonna drop two streets away. We don't need to hide under the bed. And so death awaited you every second. But to your question, the iconic moment that at least
00:19:51 Speaker_04
I experienced the greatest fear in a truly horrifying childhood. During full-on, massive, brutal, or drastically violent civil war, we get a knock at the door in early evening. I can't remember the exact time, maybe seven, eight o'clock.
00:20:10 Speaker_04
And usually if there's a knock at your door at that point, it's usually not going to be a good thing. And so I go to the door, and I ask, you know, who is it?
00:20:20 Speaker_04
And the other side of the door, the guy says, oh, I'm the guy who comes and brings you the hand towels. We had this roll of cloth that you would use to dry your hands when you're in the kitchen. And he would change those rolls.
00:20:31 Speaker_04
He would come every couple of weeks and change the rolls. And he says, open the door. I've got a gift for you guys. I'm with some friends. Now, luckily for me, I had the, intellectual acuity to be hesitant to open the door.
00:20:44 Speaker_04
I went to get my mother, and then she's starting to engage the guy. He says, oh, open the door. I've got gifts for you, and he's being more insistent. Well, we ended up calling, so in Arabic, it's called satash.
00:20:56 Speaker_04
Satash literally means 16, which is the number of the division of the police that you would call for problems. And to our great fortune, in the middle of civil war, they answered the call, they came over,
00:21:09 Speaker_04
And when we opened the door, he brought some pomegranates for us. And the police officer says to him, wait a minute, you're the guy who changes the towels for these people.
00:21:19 Speaker_04
You're coming with some of your friends in the middle of massive war to give them pomegranates. If I see you again here, you'll have problems. And then the guy looks at us and in a very chilling tone says, I'll be back for you.
00:21:36 Speaker_04
Well, we ended up leaving before he came back for us. Now, had I opened the door, I think my life trajectory would have been very different and I probably wouldn't have had the pleasure of sitting with Barry.
00:21:46 Speaker_04
So that really captures the banality of what happens in war where the sliding door, if you go right or left, your life takes a big turn. So that's probably the most diabolically iconic moment of my childhood.
00:22:00 Speaker_02
God, for the listener who is only paying attention to Lebanon now because it's in the news, can you briefly explain to us the nature of the civil war so that people don't have to go running to Wikipedia, which is now overtaken by propagandists?
00:22:14 Speaker_04
Sure. So the Lebanese civil war was from 1975 to 1990 officially. And during that time, there are different estimates, but the most common estimate that I've seen is that roughly 150,000 people were killed.
00:22:30 Speaker_04
Now, in a country of, say, 3 million people, that gives you a sense that it's pretty sizable. Now, different people will argue that, no, it was a political war. It wasn't. But the reality is that it was very much, it had a clear
00:22:43 Speaker_04
religious timber to it, right? There were several Christian militias that were fighting several Muslim militias.
00:22:50 Speaker_04
Now the Muslim militias themselves could, when they're not fighting against the Christians, could turn the guns against each other and fight one another. So it was complete chaos in that, you know, literally it was house to house.
00:23:02 Speaker_04
Some, as I said earlier, will argue that it was politically motivated, but the reality is that everything in Lebanon is viewed through the prism of religion.
00:23:10 Speaker_04
Even your parliament is established based on your religious appartenance, your belongingness. So who could be prime minister or who could be president, how many seats you get in the parliament is all based on your religion.
00:23:23 Speaker_04
Now, historically, Lebanon had been a Christian majority country, and then it very quickly shifted to an Islamic-majority country.
00:23:32 Speaker_04
And so the Lebanese Civil War, notwithstanding that many people say that it wasn't religious-based, it was very much religious-based.
00:23:39 Speaker_02
In your book, The Parasitic Mind, you have this pretty unforgettable scene where you're essentially smuggled out of the country.
00:23:47 Speaker_02
I want you to tell listeners about your escape and then tell them about what happened when the plane that you were on left Lebanese airspace.
00:23:59 Speaker_04
So first, how did we leave?
00:24:01 Speaker_04
So to my earlier point about having connections and being politically connected, there is no way that you could have escaped Beirut without the PLO being on your side, because around the Beirut International Airport were a lot of Palestinian refugee camps that were controlled by the PLO militia.
00:24:22 Speaker_04
And so what they would do is set up barricades to ask you for your ID card. And in Lebanon, the Arabic term is Hawiya. That refers to an internal ID. Imagine an internal passport that say the cops can ask you for.
00:24:37 Speaker_04
And what is most conspicuously present on that ID card is your religion. And Jews had Israeli, not Yahudi. Israeli means Israelite.
00:24:48 Speaker_04
Now, in any case, the point of the story is that there was no way that we would have ever gotten to the international airport if we didn't have militia that would allow us to clear those stops, those barricades.
00:25:01 Speaker_04
And so we had contracted some PLO militia who came over to our house in the full garb. So everything that you see with ISIS and Fatah and Hamas is my childhood. So they came over and I remember they were very gracious. They were very polite, very nice.
00:25:18 Speaker_04
Undoubtedly, they were paid. And I remember the head guy of the militia that was going to escort us looked at me sort of looking at his machine gun. He said, oh, do you want to hold it? And as a then 11 year old boy, I had already turned 11.
00:25:33 Speaker_04
I was so excited to be holding the machine gun. By the way, our house was very close to the green line, which separated East and West Beirut, which was kind of a no man's land because it separated the Christians from the Muslim militia.
00:25:46 Speaker_04
Anyways, my father remembered, oh, I forgot my money belt back in the house, to which the PLO guy said, well, it's too late, we have to keep going. Undoubtedly, he went back and took the money for himself.
00:25:57 Speaker_04
Now, the interesting thing is I have no recollection of anything until the story that you asked me next about, which is what happened when we got on the plane and we're already flying.
00:26:09 Speaker_04
But I did find out what happened because many years later, I asked my parents, how come I don't remember anything that happened while we were being driven? Because I have a very good memory.
00:26:19 Speaker_04
I can tell you very, very specific details about my childhood in Lebanon, yet I've got a complete memory hole.
00:26:26 Speaker_04
And my parents explained to me that as we were going through various neighborhoods in Beirut, you would come across neighborhoods that would be hostile to the PLO, right? And therefore they were engaging in fire, as you would imagine in a Rambo movie,
00:26:44 Speaker_04
in these neighborhoods to get to where we needed to get and we had our suitcases and they had us protected and I've completely repressed this memory.
00:26:54 Speaker_04
So I always tell people, you know, Muslims were going to kill us and it was Muslims who also saved us, right? So when I criticize the ideology, I'm not criticizing the individuals. So now fast forward to we're on the plane and the captain
00:27:12 Speaker_04
announces that we are now outside of Lebanese airspace, at which point my mother takes out a pendant, puts it around my neck.
00:27:22 Speaker_04
It had also, I couldn't remember, but I'm almost certain it was either a Star of David or a high Hebrew symbol for life, but I'm almost certain it was a Star of David.
00:27:32 Speaker_04
She puts it around my neck and says, now you can wear this proudly and not have to hide your identity.
00:27:38 Speaker_02
The moment that your mom put that necklace, that pendant around your neck, what do you think that meant to her?
00:27:47 Speaker_04
Well, I'm sure it meant a lot because, look, people knew that you were Jewish in Lebanon, right? So, I mean, it wasn't such a cryptic secret. But what happens in the Middle East is you have to understand the psychology of the dhimmi.
00:28:03 Speaker_04
Dhimmi is an Arabic word which refers to when you're living in an Islamic majority country and you are one of the religious minorities. We can tolerate you as long as you don't advertise yourself too much. So don't wear a big Star of David.
00:28:18 Speaker_04
and demonstrate that you are Jewish. Be quiet Jew, right? So we're going to tolerate you. You're a good guy. You're one of the good Jews, but just don't shove it in our faces.
00:28:28 Speaker_04
And so I think what that story represents for my parents is that we no longer have to be navigating gingerly across the neighborhoods, lest someone who doesn't like Jews finds out and pelts us or shoots us.
00:28:43 Speaker_04
And so I think it was a form of existential freeing. I could now be Jewish and not have to hide it anywhere at any time. Now, fast forward to about two, three weeks after October 7th.
00:28:55 Speaker_04
My son had just returned from a soccer match and he was almost the exact age that I was when my Star of David story happened. So he looks at me and he says, daddy, if you were
00:29:10 Speaker_04
wearing a Star of David where I was playing soccer match today, you'd be dead. So I call this the full circle of life of the Star of David story. In Lebanon, at the age of 11, I leave and my mother says, wear the Star of David.
00:29:25 Speaker_04
45 plus years later, I could no longer wear a Star of David in Montreal, Canada.
00:29:35 Speaker_02
After the break, God tells us how the war on college campuses is reminiscent of the civil war in Lebanon. Stay with us. You've written that your experience living through the Lebanese Civil War was your first encounter with identity politics.
00:30:04 Speaker_02
Now, most people that use that phrase in the West don't use it to mean snipers literally shooting at your home.
00:30:11 Speaker_02
But I want you to explain the connection between the ideology that you began to encounter in the mid-1970s in Lebanon and the identity politics that has subsumed so much of our culture here in the West.
00:30:25 Speaker_04
Well, Lebanon is the perfect exemplar of what happens when identity politics are taken to their nefarious limits, right? Everything is viewed through the lens of which religion you belong to.
00:30:39 Speaker_04
And so when I see certain political movements, whether it be in the United States or in Canada or in the West in general, that are very much wedded to that idea, right?
00:30:49 Speaker_04
You are this, you are the Jew of color, you are transgender of this, you're Muslim of that, you're black.
00:30:56 Speaker_04
Watch out because if you want that perfect instantiation of what identity politics is in terms of how you organize society, Lebanon is the place, Syria is the place, Iraq is the place. Rwanda is the place.
00:31:08 Speaker_04
So it's never a good idea when people who live under a supposedly unified nations are more tied to whatever identity marker first defines them more so than the country, right? What made the United States great is that I could be anything
00:31:25 Speaker_04
but nothing was superseded by my commitment to American values. Once you erase that, once you eradicate that foundational value, you're going to run into problems. Now, when I tell people you're going to have the
00:31:40 Speaker_04
the Lebanese reality on your streets, I don't mean by next Tuesday, but there is a natural trajectory that I can exactly predict in the same way that a physician who specializes in diabetes can exactly tell you what is the progression of diabetes if you don't handle it.
00:31:58 Speaker_04
Well, if you maintain many of these reflexes, including a commitment to identity politics over the celebration of individual dignity, you will have Lebanon.
00:32:08 Speaker_04
It might take a hundred years, it might take 500 years, but you will get the exact same final outcome.
00:32:14 Speaker_02
OK, so you have this early, really, really formative childhood experience of the logical conclusion of identity politics. That's what a civil war is. And then you eventually get to Canada.
00:32:29 Speaker_02
To sort of summarize your academic background, you get a PhD at Cornell, where you decide to study marketing. And eventually, you decide to study how evolution and how our biology impacts our consumer behavior.
00:32:43 Speaker_02
And to maybe understate the point, you describe sort of the response that you got from your fellow academics reminded you of what you witnessed in Lebanon.
00:32:54 Speaker_02
And I want you to sort of draw out the conclusion for us because a brutal civil war in the Middle East and contrarianism, if you can call it that, in an academic institution aren't exactly analogous to most people. So explain
00:33:07 Speaker_02
What you mean by that, and the other aspect that I'm really interested in, and sorry to lard this with a few questions, is where your ability to be comfortable in disagreement comes from.
00:33:21 Speaker_04
I think it is innate. Of course, most phenomena that involve human beings involve an inextricable mix or melange of your environment and your genes.
00:33:33 Speaker_04
And so therefore, yes, of course my background, the Lebanese civil war might have affected my ability to be combative, but there are many other people who went through the Lebanese civil war and they're not sitting where I'm sitting, right?
00:33:44 Speaker_04
They're not quite as honey badgers as I am. I think it's just- What do you mean honey badger?
00:33:49 Speaker_04
So the honey badger, the reason why I use that particular expression has consistently been ranked as the most fierce and ferocious animal in the animal kingdom, which says a lot. It's the size of a small to medium dog.
00:34:01 Speaker_04
And yet, you know, it can be approached by six adult lions and yet they'll walk away because it is just so outlandishly fierce and ferocious. It might be small, but it walks as though it is a T-Rex, to use a dinosaur term.
00:34:16 Speaker_02
This is the meme of honey badger don't give a fuck.
00:34:19 Speaker_04
Honey badgers don't give a fuck, exactly.
00:34:20 Speaker_04
Now, when I tell people in the last chapter of the parasitic mind, activate your inner honey badger, I'm not imploring them to be physically violent, but I'm saying, look, if there is a set of foundational principles that you believe in, be a honey badger, defend them, right?
00:34:35 Speaker_04
Be galled at the murder and rape of truth, right? I can support trans rights without saying that men can bear children and can menstruate, right? I can walk and chew gum at the same time.
00:34:47 Speaker_04
Pursuing noble goals such as freeing the world of bigotry doesn't have to come at the end of negating reality, right? And so that's what I mean by honey badger.
00:34:58 Speaker_04
But to your earlier point, in my time, I mean, yes, I mean, I was housed in a marketing department, but really my work was in cognitive psychology and psychology of decision-making.
00:35:09 Speaker_04
I was looking at studying why is it that people make the types of decisions that they do? And I felt quite
00:35:16 Speaker_04
surprised to find out that most of the cognitive psychologists who study this field never invoke biology in studying why the human mind has evolved to be the way that it is.
00:35:27 Speaker_04
And so I can get into the story of how I discovered evolutionary psychology, but I had found the exact niche that I wanted to spend the rest of my scientific career pursuing, which is applying evolutionary biology to study economic and consumer behavior.
00:35:42 Speaker_04
Now, to me, it seems quite banal to make the statement that, of course, human beings in general and consumers in particular are biological beings. Surely our hormones affect the types of food decisions that we make. Who doesn't think that that's true?
00:35:57 Speaker_04
Who's lived four seconds in the real world? But yet for my academic colleagues, That was pure quackery. I mean, I'm speaking as them now. Sure, biology matters for the zebra, for the mosquito, and for the dog.
00:36:12 Speaker_04
But what makes us human, Barry, is that we transcend our biology. We are cultural animals, not biological animals.
00:36:20 Speaker_04
And so when I talk about the two great wars that I have faced in my life, there's the Lebanese Civil War, but the war on reason that I regrettably encountered for 30 plus years in academia.
00:36:32 Speaker_02
What's at stake in the division between, let's say, the camp of your fellow colleagues who say, it's all nurture. Socialization is sort of the key way to understanding human behavior.
00:36:43 Speaker_02
And broadly, your camp, which is more the nature camp, who says, you know, despite this blazer that I'm wearing, I'm an animal. And evolution impacts everything about the way that we are in the world.
00:36:55 Speaker_02
Like, why is it so dangerous to them to admit that nature is powerful?
00:37:01 Speaker_04
Great question. So in the best case scenario, if you ignore biology, you end up with incomplete explanations of human phenomena. In many cases that can result in dire, for example, public policy decisions.
00:37:16 Speaker_04
But in the worst case scenario, you end up with incorrect views of a phenomenon. So it's either an incomplete in the best case and a grossly incorrect. Let me give you a very,
00:37:26 Speaker_04
specific example, not from my own research, but that's how I first got turned into an evolutionary psychologist. If you want to study what is the number one predictor of child abuse in a home,
00:37:39 Speaker_04
There are a million possible explanations that have been espoused by social scientists. Because there's alcohol in the home, because you're born on the wrong side of the tracks, because if your parents had been abused, you repeat that pattern.
00:37:54 Speaker_04
And all of these may have some explicative element to them. But it turns out, Barry, that the number one factor that is most predictive of having childhood abuse in a home, by a factor of 100, so let me explain this to your viewers.
00:38:14 Speaker_04
Usually in science, if let's say you say you're checking the efficacy of a drug and it has a 1.2 odds ratio, that means if you compare it to a placebo, one to 1.2 means there's 20% more efficacy of taking the drug.
00:38:29 Speaker_04
This is not one to 1.2, which would be considered a big effect. This is one to 100. So it is multiple orders of magnitude greater than anything you'd ever typically see in a published scientific paper.
00:38:43 Speaker_04
Well, the number one factor is if there is a step parent in the home. Wow. And actually this is now known in the evolutionary literature as the Cinderella effect, right? The evil stepmother was not indiscriminately evil.
00:38:58 Speaker_04
She was very kind to her biological daughters, but was uniquely nasty to her stepdaughter. Now there is an evolutionary reason for why people may not be as kind to their stepchildren as they might be to their biological children.
00:39:13 Speaker_04
Now that doesn't mean, by the way, that when you offer an evolutionary explanation for something that you are justifying it or condoning it any more than an oncologist who's explaining pancreatic cancer is for pancreatic cancer, thinks pancreatic cancer is great, right?
00:39:28 Speaker_04
You're just explaining the phenomenon. So now imagine if you are a social scientist that has toiled in studying the causes of childhood abuse.
00:39:38 Speaker_04
And in your entire career, you've never come across the fundamentally most powerful explanation of what causes child abuse by a factor of 100. So to your earlier question, to kind of summarize everything,
00:39:52 Speaker_04
having an incorrect view of human nature is devastating.
00:39:56 Speaker_04
In the purest of sense, you're offering incorrect explanations of human phenomena, but in a very practical sense, you end up implementing public policy that are likely to be perfectly incorrect.
00:40:09 Speaker_02
To me, the things that are obviously dangerous about admitting the power that nature has over us is, you know, there's a few things that come to mind. One, it forces you to admit that there are differences between
00:40:24 Speaker_02
individuals certainly, and groups secondarily, which at its outermost limits can lead to very dangerous and scary ideas like eugenics. The second thing is that it's very anti-utopian.
00:40:36 Speaker_02
Like, if it's all systems, well, then we just haven't tried the right system. Like, let's go to communist, you know, it's very,
00:40:43 Speaker_02
easy to see how a belief in nature allows you to try all kinds of utopian systems because if it's all the system, well, we just need to try a better one.
00:40:54 Speaker_02
And I think it also is scary because it forces people to consider how much control they have over their lives or the trajectory of their lives. And so to me, that combination sort of conspires people to ignore what I view as just reality.
00:41:14 Speaker_04
That's perfectly stated. And if I can add to what you just said, so you just said that you have a two-year-old daughter. Is that what you said? Yes. Right. Okay. Well, isn't it wonderful to think that when you become a new parent,
00:41:26 Speaker_04
your child is born as a complete tabula rasa, blank slate, and I could now, through the proper schedule of reinforcement, I could ensure that my child will be the next Isaac Newton, or the next Lionel Messi, or the next Michael Jordan.
00:41:43 Speaker_04
My child has just as much equal potentiality as any other child, and it's only my own interventions that will hopefully lead to him becoming Michael Jordan. To argue that my child may not have the physical ability that would allow him to jump as high
00:42:01 Speaker_04
as Michael Jordan, feels wrong to me as a parent. Therefore, because I prefer to live in unicornia rather than in reality, then of course I'm going to jump on the bandwagon of social constructivism.
00:42:14 Speaker_04
And by the way, one of the founders of what's called the behaviorist school of psychology, which is that everything is due to schedules of reinforcement, exactly argued that. Give me any 12 children and I could make any one of them into anything.
00:42:29 Speaker_04
That speaks to that reflex that every child is born equal. We're equal under the law. We're not equal in our potentiality. I wish I could have been six foot two, but I am not.
00:42:41 Speaker_04
And there is nothing that my parents could have intervened that would have caused me to end up being six foot two. So that's one. On a grander level, I love to use this quote by E.O. Wilson.
00:42:51 Speaker_04
He recently passed away, a well-known Harvard biologist who studied social ants. Now, the reason why I say this, Barry, is because social ants have a unique social structure.
00:43:01 Speaker_04
There is the reproductive queen, and then all of the other ants are perfectly equal and indistinguishable from each other. So he was once asked, Professor Wilson, what are your views on communism and socialism?
00:43:13 Speaker_04
And he paused and said, great idea, wrong species, right? So it's beautiful for ants to be communistic because they've evolved the social structure to exactly follow that socioeconomic political system.
00:43:28 Speaker_04
But when you try to impose that system on a species called humans, that are not communistic, it's not surprising that everywhere that that system has been tried, it ultimately fails because it is incongruent with human nature.
00:43:43 Speaker_04
So to your original question, if you create any policies, if you create any products, any political systems that are incongruent with human nature, they will fail.
00:43:53 Speaker_02
So if we were having this conversation, let's say 50 years ago, God, there are a lot of things that we could say that would have been completely benign to anyone's ears at that time living in North America, right?
00:44:07 Speaker_02
The idea that men and women are different, the idea that capitalism is better than communism, the idea that demanding equality of outcome will lead to tyranny, and I could list 10 other things.
00:44:19 Speaker_02
All of those commonsensical statements have now become, if not dangerous to talk about, you know, absolutely provocative. And I think the question a lot of people have is, how did that happen?
00:44:35 Speaker_02
And your answer is captured in your book from 2020 that continues to sell out enormous copies thanks to your number one publicist, Elon Musk.
00:44:46 Speaker_02
Anyway, you summarize a lot of the argument of sort of how we got to that point in this book, The Parasitic Mind, how infectious ideas are killing common sense.
00:44:57 Speaker_02
I really recommend people go and read the book, but for the sake of this conversation, can you explain what the parasitic mind is, what you're describing?
00:45:08 Speaker_02
Because it is the thing, these infectious ideas, that have disallowed us from noticing reality and talking about it in a fearless way.
00:45:19 Speaker_04
Right, so in the animal kingdom, there is the study of parasitology. Parasitology is the interaction between a host and a parasite in many different ways. So for example, a tapeworm is a parasite that goes into your intestinal tract.
00:45:33 Speaker_04
A neuroparasite wants to get to your brain.
00:45:37 Speaker_02
So literally a brain worm.
00:45:38 Speaker_04
Literally a brain worm, Barry, and it is trying to alter your behavior to suit typically its reproductive interest. So let's take a concrete example. The wood cricket abhors water. It wants nothing to do with water.
00:45:54 Speaker_04
When it is parasitized by a particular type of brain parasite called a hairworm, the hairworm needs to get the wood cricket to jump into water so that it can complete its reproductive cycle. It does it in water.
00:46:09 Speaker_04
Therefore, the hairworm is going to zombify. It's going to literally alter the neuronal circuitry of the wood cricket so that it merrily jumps to its demise in the service of the hairworm. brain parasite.
00:46:26 Speaker_04
When I read that framework in neuroparasitology, and as I've lectured this a million times, I'm getting goosebumps because I think it really is so powerful as a explanation of what's happening. I said, aha, I found my framework.
00:46:40 Speaker_04
I'm going to now argue in this book that Human beings can also be parasitized by actual physical brain worms. For example, Toxoplasma gondii is one such example. But human beings, regrettably, can also be parasitized by a second class of brain worms.
00:46:57 Speaker_04
Those are called ideological brain worms. I call them parasitic ideas or idea pathogens. And so what I then do for the rest of the book is I discuss many of these ideological brain worms
00:47:11 Speaker_04
I explain what they are, and then toward the end of the book, I offer a mind vaccine to hopefully inoculate you against that imbecility.
00:47:20 Speaker_02
What is the difference, Gad, between just a plain old bad idea and a parasitic idea?
00:47:25 Speaker_04
Well, the parasitic idea connotes that the one who is parasitized is something nefarious to them is going to happen as a result of being infected by that brain worm, right?
00:47:40 Speaker_04
A bad idea could be, you know, I actually think that having indiscriminate sex will bring me happiness. Whereas in reality, I might be a lot happier if I were to find the loving arms of one good woman, right?
00:47:53 Speaker_04
So there are many ways by which bad ideas might manifest themselves. Parasitic is a lot worse, right? So it's me slowly walking to the abyss of infinite lunacy, fully zombified.
00:48:06 Speaker_04
And as I walk off the cliff, I am proud of whatever ideological position I'm holding. It's Anna Epstein,
00:48:15 Speaker_04
Jewish Anna Epstein proudly walking on campus, I think it was in Boston University or Boston College, where she is tearing down the photos, the posters of Jewish infants that have been taken as hostages, right?
00:48:31 Speaker_04
Because she's simply more progressive and enlightened than, you know, nasty Middle Eastern Jews like me that don't understand the nuance of how progressive she is.
00:48:41 Speaker_04
So there's something quite unique about a parasitically bad idea versus the vanilla bad idea.
00:48:48 Speaker_02
So there are several parasitic ideas that you describe in the book, among them the culture of perpetual offense and victimhood, the idea that criticizing the West is a progressive virtue, radical feminism, you know, the kind of radical feminism that I began to encounter in college that said, you know, genital mutilation is just cultural difference.
00:49:07 Speaker_02
That was sort of one of my original waking up moments. But you argue, I think very convincingly, that the root of all of these parasitic ideas, sort of the trunk of the tree, is postmodernism. What do you mean when you say postmodernism?
00:49:22 Speaker_02
And how has postmodern theory or postmodern ideas so conquered American or let's just say the West today? Why was it such a sticky idea? So first, what is postmodernism? And second, why is it so sticky to people?
00:49:39 Speaker_04
Yes. So postmodernism at its root simply says that there are no objective truths. other than the one objective truth that there are no objective truths, which already the facade is blowing up.
00:49:51 Speaker_04
So originally, when you applied the framework of postmodernism to certain aesthetic movements, okay, people can buy it.
00:49:59 Speaker_04
You know, improvisational jazz, where there isn't an exact mathematical algorithm to explain why we like a particular music is a form, if you'd like, of postmodernism.
00:50:09 Speaker_04
you have a exhibition of invisible art where you just walk in and you just literally infuse into the empty canvas whatever you want. Because who are we to judge what is beautiful? And why do we simply say that Rembrandt and Chagall are beautiful?
00:50:27 Speaker_04
Art is in the eye of the beholder. There are no objective aesthetic truths. Now there, I do think it's nonsensical, but at least it doesn't have catastrophic consequences.
00:50:38 Speaker_04
When you apply postmodernism to epistemology, I don't mean to use jargon, but it is important to use that term, which is philosophy of knowledge, right? What does science purport? Science purports that there is- There's a truth and we can get to it.
00:50:53 Speaker_04
We can get to it now.
00:50:54 Speaker_02
Through the scientific method.
00:50:55 Speaker_04
Exactly. Now, it's provisionally true. What we thought was true 300 years ago or three days ago might auto-correct in light of incoming new evidence, right? That's why we say that science is epistemologically humble.
00:51:10 Speaker_04
But we do wake up in the morning thinking that there is a truth to be discovered.
00:51:14 Speaker_04
Well, now imagine if I tell you that there is no such truth, up is down, left is right, male is female, then what's the point of getting out of bed as an academic, right? Because there is absolutely no truth.
00:51:26 Speaker_04
By the way, the postmodernists who go to a postmodernist academic conference get on a plane that is based on actual physical laws, right? So they're already violating their tenets by getting on a plane, right?
00:51:41 Speaker_04
Now, the reason why I call it the granddaddy of all idea pathogens, because that's the framework, as you correctly set up in your question, from which all of the other nihilistic intellectual terrorism can flourish, right?
00:51:55 Speaker_04
If there's no objective truth, who are you to say that cutting off the clitorises of little girls is a bad thing? And so it becomes complete free for all. Now, why is it so sticky as you said? Why is it something so alluring?
00:52:10 Speaker_04
Because remember earlier I said that all of these idea pathogens free us from the pesky shackles of reality. There you go. Postmodernism frees me from this really shackling and constraining thing called capital T. I'm not defined by my genitalia.
00:52:28 Speaker_04
I could be anything. I could be a woman that happens to have a nine inch penis. I'm not going to be bound by reality, right? How freeing is that?
00:52:38 Speaker_04
So I think that's the reason why it became so sticky because boy, it's so great to be able to navigate the world completely unencumbered by any constraints of reality.
00:52:50 Speaker_02
So just to sort of summarize it, you know, these ideas that began among sort of fringe academics going back, let's say, to the 60s, although I'm sure there's examples from before that, leap beyond the quad over the past half a century and now have led to a very alarming reality where people are marching down Fifth Avenue
00:53:17 Speaker_02
It's sort of exploiting American open mindedness, tolerance and liberalism to say, you know, death to America, long live Hamas.
00:53:27 Speaker_04
Exactly right. And I love that you said. It started off with the fringe and then it jumped through the quad because, you know, I've been standing on top of the mountain screaming like into the wind for nearly three decades.
00:53:38 Speaker_04
Usually the response that I would get, Barry, I mean, sure, Professor Saad, there are some esoteric, silly ideas, but they're restricted to some small department in the humanities. Who cares, right? There's no actionable consequences.
00:53:52 Speaker_04
No, I said that in the same way that an actual physical virus will eventually escape from the lab, yes, it starts off in the humanities department, but eventually it becomes the walking prime minister of Canada, right?
00:54:07 Speaker_04
So ideas have consequences, and so you're exactly right. So in terms of the death to US and so on, exactly, right? Who are you to judge whether Hamas has a perfectly effective
00:54:21 Speaker_04
gravity-based conversion therapy for LGBTQ people, gravity-based because we throw them off buildings, right? Who are you to impose your imperialistic sensibilities on how they decide to convert noble LGBTQ people, right?
00:54:38 Speaker_04
So that's what allows all of this stupidity to happen. It starts with those parasitic ideas.
00:54:43 Speaker_02
And just to kind of take a step back for a second, there's sort of a good rule of thumb in general. The more highly educated you are, the more the better chance that your mind has been subsumed, you know, parasitized by these kinds of ideas.
00:54:57 Speaker_02
And yet then you take a step back and you think, hold on, the difference between being, you know, a gay mom in L.A. and a gay mom in
00:55:06 Speaker_02
Beirut or Tehran or Gaza, you know, obviously those are very different contexts, is like a universe apart and 100% of the time everyone would choose America. Why is that not enough to defeat the parasite?
00:55:22 Speaker_04
Because I think the currency that they're seeking to optimize is the incorrect one, right? Imagine if I now tell you that there is no singular worse thing than to be judgmental against another culture. There is nothing worse.
00:55:40 Speaker_04
A pedophile is not as bad as a moral crime, let alone an actual crime, than to be quote, bigoted against another.
00:55:50 Speaker_04
If I use that as the currency of how I optimize my personhood, then that answers your question, which is the idea that I would pass a value-laden judgment on another people especially if I define them as being brown people.
00:56:09 Speaker_04
By the way, not all Muslims are brown. Albanian Muslims are a lot whiter than you are, right? But somehow it has been co-opted into, for example, Islam is a religion of brown people.
00:56:22 Speaker_04
Then there is nothing worse than I can do if I'm speaking as a progressive. than to cast judgment on them. So yes, in the deep recesses of my mind, when I'm alone on my pillow late at night, I know that it is cognitively inconsistent what I'm saying.
00:56:38 Speaker_04
I know that as a gay woman, I would have a much different trajectory in my life if I'm in Yemen than if I am in New York, but it just feels icky. It feels gauche to me to criticize the cultural values and religious values in Yemen
00:56:55 Speaker_04
And therefore, since there's nothing worse than to me being judgmental in a bigoted way, then that's the hill that I'm going to die on.
00:57:03 Speaker_02
Right, it successfully put forward, and I think won the argument, that it's somehow racist to say that not all cultures are created equal.
00:57:13 Speaker_04
Exactly right, by the way, and that comes from an idea pathogen called cultural relativism. Earlier, you said many of these idea pathogens might have started in the 60s, but some earlier.
00:57:24 Speaker_04
Well, cultural relativism would be an example of an idea pathogen that started with Franz Boas, who was a Columbia University anthropologist who didn't like the idea that there could be
00:57:37 Speaker_04
human universals, because then to use biology to explain human phenomena might end up leading us down to, for example, eugenics.
00:57:45 Speaker_04
So he erected a complete new discipline, cultural anthropology, that negated the possibility that humans are biological beings, and that Ideopathogen goes back about a hundred years ago.
00:57:57 Speaker_04
So you're exactly right that if we were to date the ideological parasites, the earliest ones would be about 40, 50 years ago, and the furthest ones would be about a hundred years ago.
00:58:08 Speaker_02
Part of the reason that campuses, I think, became such hotbeds for these parasitic ideas is because universities, which is really strange when you objectively think about it, are the most homogenous of any culture that I can think of in the West.
00:58:27 Speaker_02
You know, right now, and I think that this is understating it, there are five self-identified liberal professors for every one conservative professor. That's according to one survey. I think it's like, 20 to 1, maybe 100 to 1.
00:58:38 Speaker_04
That's a gross underestimate.
00:58:40 Speaker_02
I think it's a gross underestimate. But briefly, how did that happen? Right?
00:58:45 Speaker_02
Because if you think about universities as sort of being in the pursuit of truth, you would think that an essential ingredient for that would be people that are coming from really diverse perspectives, which help you sharpen your own perspective to get to the truth.
00:58:59 Speaker_02
But they become sort of like breeding grounds for sheep. How did that happen?
00:59:05 Speaker_04
I mean, there are several mechanisms that led to that. I mean, in the most mundane way, it happens when you have hiring committees that only wish to have lunch with people who share their values, right?
00:59:20 Speaker_04
If I am a Trump hater, I simply can't stomach the possibility that a rational human being
00:59:28 Speaker_04
might have very compelling reasons why they wish to vote for Donald Trump, because I attribute that difference in political orientation to that person being irrational, being bigoted, and so there are several mechanisms that result in the echo chamber, but at the most fundamental, earthly manner, it's that you just end up closing the doors to anyone who is not exactly like me.
00:59:55 Speaker_04
The heartbreaking stories that I receive from people. Dear Professor Saad, my supervisor found out that I said something kind or complimentary about Donald Trump and he's now taken off my name
01:00:11 Speaker_04
from a paper that I've worked on for the past year, I don't think I've got a future in that lab. Are you taking on any doctoral students?" What I just said didn't happen in North Korea. It didn't happen in the struggle sessions of Mao Zedong.
01:00:26 Speaker_04
It happened on a North American campus. So that's what ends up happening. Liberal people are kind, they're empathetic, they're enlightened, they have the progressive lisp. I am one such academic. I only want people that are similar to me around me.
01:00:42 Speaker_04
And therefore, if nothing else, I will never hire anybody that is different from me.
01:00:48 Speaker_02
Your book came out at the end of 2020. We're now four years since then. And since that time period, two things have happened. One is that there has been an explosion of antisemitism. everywhere, but most intensely on college campuses.
01:01:09 Speaker_02
Just to choose the past three weeks, and I could spend the next hour talking about different incidents, but I'll just choose a few. At Harvard, a mezuzah was ripped from a dorm room. At the University of Michigan, several
01:01:22 Speaker_02
Jewish students were physically assaulted at the University of Pittsburgh, which is where I grew up. Jewish students were assaulted with a glass bottle. Hamas flags were paraded in New York City days after the execution of the American citizen.
01:01:36 Speaker_02
Hirsch Goldberg pulled in in Gaza. So that's one thing that has happened. To my question earlier, where we were talking about your upbringing in Lebanon, A lot of people then said, this will just blow over.
01:01:48 Speaker_02
And the major conversation happening in the American Jewish community right now is, how bad has it gotten? Is it coming more from the right or the left? Is America not uniquely immune to the maybe oldest mind virus, which is that of antisemitism?
01:02:05 Speaker_02
You've experienced a culture where this started to bubble up and then came into sort of a full boil, which forced your family to leave.
01:02:14 Speaker_02
From your vantage point, given that experience, and I think given your particular instinct for danger, one that maybe many Americans and certainly many American Jews who do not have a background like you have in Lebanon, how do you see where we are right now?
01:02:30 Speaker_02
How do you diagnose it?
01:02:32 Speaker_04
It's very dark, and I'm not being hyperbolic. Look, people don't have the capacity to have the imagination to extrapolate, right? One of the reasons why I often joke, although I'm being literal in a sense, that my satire is prophetic.
01:02:51 Speaker_04
It's because I take an insane idea or reality and I push it to its boundary condition. I then satirize it and I cross my hands and I wait for reality to catch up to my hyperbolic satire.
01:03:05 Speaker_04
For most people, they're busy in the myopia of their daily lives, right? I mean, yes, there seems to be some growing problems over there, but I'm busy. I have to buy the tomatoes tonight.
01:03:15 Speaker_04
tomorrow it's my daughter's wedding, let somebody else worry about it, right? And hence, that's why in the parasitic mind, I talk about ostrich parasitic syndrome, right?
01:03:23 Speaker_04
The ostrich doesn't literally bury its head in the sand, but it's become a metaphor of ignoring reality. So to your question, I think the writing on the wall is not a good one. Now, there are several reasons for that. One of them is ideological.
01:03:37 Speaker_04
The other one is demographic. The ideological one is very much what we've been talking about so far, right? These parasitic ideas that are allowed to flourish on campuses.
01:03:47 Speaker_04
The Jews are white colonialists engaging in the daily genocide of noble brown people. And this is what I learned in my Near East Political Science degree at Columbia. And that's why I start to ape it when I go on the Hamas marches.
01:04:00 Speaker_04
So there's an ideological component to the dark clouds that have engulfed us, but there's also a demographic one. The adage, demography is destiny, couldn't be more apt, right? A society is not some magical culture.
01:04:15 Speaker_04
It is the encapsulation of what are the foundational values in that society. Well, in the United States, in Canada, historically, certainly in the last 40, 50, 60 years, it was viewed as inappropriate in polite society to openly and brazenly
01:04:34 Speaker_04
engage in Jew hatred. Things have changed now. I've seen it. The current university I'm at is Northwood University. I'm a visiting professor there.
01:04:42 Speaker_04
The reason, by the way, I'm a visiting professor there is because I couldn't bear the possibility after my sabbatical leave to return to my home university, which is Concordia University, which makes all of the American schools that are facing antisemitism seem like
01:04:59 Speaker_04
child's play. Concordia University has been referred to colloquially as Gaza University for over 20 years. You can't begin to imagine what it's like for the typical Jewish student or faculty to go to Concordia. Now,
01:05:14 Speaker_04
Most students, you don't see it on their face that they're Jewish, they're anonymous, and they're feeling afraid to go to campus.
01:05:21 Speaker_04
So now imagine someone with my profile walking into campus, and so I decided that it was time for me to take a leave of absence. Well, what could be more of a canary in the coal mine? Well, I just wanna pause on this. Sure.
01:05:35 Speaker_02
You're saying that you're leaving Montreal, or leaving your campus, Concordia in Montreal, because of antisemitism.
01:05:42 Speaker_04
100%. Now, there are other reasons why. Look, it's invigorating to go somewhere else. Even if there wasn't any of that antisemitism, it's nice to try a new trajectory. It invigorates you.
01:05:54 Speaker_04
So I've taken leaves of absence in the past, but overwhelmingly, the main reason why I did not go back is because I don't really like the idea of being potentially knifed. My wife, who's five foot three, hardly the most ominous looking person,
01:06:11 Speaker_04
after October 7th, while I was still at Concordia, I was still teaching then before my sabbatical, would refuse to not come to campus with me because she at least wanted to be walking behind me lest someone might come and knife me.
01:06:27 Speaker_04
Now, if that's happening in the 21st century in Montreal, Canada, I think the Canaries are singing really loudly and it takes an imbecile to ignore those signs.
01:06:37 Speaker_04
So the typical American Jew to your earlier question that says, oh, but you know, it's not going to get so bad. Look, Bill Aukman, I've gotten to know him now.
01:06:46 Speaker_04
He's now very active, but it took for the problem to personally affect him for him to speak, right? It came to his beloved Harvard. It was a Jew or Jihastic Jew hating scenario that led him to wake up. But how come he didn't wake up?
01:07:04 Speaker_04
three months earlier.
01:07:05 Speaker_02
Well, this is like a psychological question that I have been thinking about for at least the past 10 years, but probably 20, which is why are human beings not able to extrapolate when they watch the consequences of an idea or a set of ideologies until it's literally at their doorstep and sometimes not even then?
01:07:29 Speaker_02
What is it about our species that prevents us from doing that?
01:07:33 Speaker_04
Yeah, that's beautiful. I've actually exactly argued that, that the architecture of the human mind is regrettably structured, that there is no such thing as diabetes until diabetes enters my home. Until then, there is no such thing as diabetes.
01:07:48 Speaker_04
Well, why? It's because it allows us to navigate through a otherwise very scary world, right? I mean, why is it that religion is such a infectious concept, right?
01:08:00 Speaker_04
Because if you have high cholesterol and if you think that cholesterol harms you, well, then I can go to my physician, he or she can give me a pill that reduces my LDL scores, my bad cholesterol.
01:08:12 Speaker_04
But my fear of mortality, there is no pill for that, right? We're all on a death sentence and there is one pill that I can take. What I can choose different religious narratives, but all of them promise me that the party will go on forever.
01:08:26 Speaker_04
And that's why for most people, it is a lot more comforting to be a believer than to be an atheist. To be an atheist,
01:08:33 Speaker_04
you're a glutton for punishment because it allows me much letter ability to navigate through the ugly vagaries and stochastic vagaries of the world. So it's tough for me to imagine that all of these looming dangers exist.
01:08:49 Speaker_04
It's better for me to go la la la and only worry about it when it comes to bite my behind. And so that's just part of the architecture of cowardice of the human brain.
01:08:59 Speaker_02
Explain to me how antisemitism, a topic I've thought a lot about, is often the expression of these parasitic ideas. In other words, why is it that it's coming first or maybe primarily for Jews. Right.
01:09:18 Speaker_02
Because most people who aren't Jewish, either these incidences that our community is understandably so alarmed by, they either don't rate for them, like they literally aren't even coming on their radar because they're not making news, or they hear about them and say, ah, it's a pity, but it's not affecting me.
01:09:37 Speaker_02
Like, explain two things. One, why is it relevant to everyone that this is happening? to people like you and happening in cities like Montreal? And two, how does antisemitism and these parasitic ideologies, how do they intersect or connect?
01:09:56 Speaker_04
So there are several mechanisms, some of which you're right are due to parasitic ideas. But let me start with a different explanation for why antisemitism is so alluring to so many people.
01:10:09 Speaker_04
So in psychology, there is something called the fundamental attribution error. So for example, do you attribute successes or self-serving bias? Do you attribute successes or failures internally or externally?
01:10:22 Speaker_04
Now for most people, they attribute successes internally. I did well on the exam because I'm very smart. and they attribute failures externally. I did poorly on the exam because Professor Saad is a Jew asshole and he's unfair, right?
01:10:37 Speaker_04
And for most people, that's a very comforting way to navigate through the world because it's an ego defensive strategy. It protects my ego. Now, imagine if I can find an external culprit for all of my failures and it is the diabolical Jew.
01:10:54 Speaker_04
You just got diabetes, it's because Jews are holding on to the cure for diabetes, but because they're greedy for whatever reason, they're not distributing it.
01:11:04 Speaker_04
Your wife just cheated on you, who created pornography and hence infused her with these lascivious ideas? It was the Jew because she probably consumed porn. And so that's why, by the way, I created, Barry, this game I call Six Degree of Jew.
01:11:18 Speaker_04
For any calamity around the world, I will challenge you to find six causal degrees by which you then ultimately arrive to how do we blame the Jew for it? So I think beyond these parasitic ideas that we've been talking about,
01:11:33 Speaker_04
It's something that is innately part of the architecture of the human mind. I need to protect my ego. What better way to attribute all of my failures to some cause? And in this case, it's the Jew. Now, your next question could be, but why the Jew?
01:11:49 Speaker_04
Why do we use the Jew? And so here I'm going to borrow a term from Professor Amy Chua, who's a professor of law at Yale, who was the mentor of J.D. Vance.
01:12:00 Speaker_02
Otherwise known as Tiger Mom.
01:12:02 Speaker_04
otherwise known as Tiger Mom, who basically argued that market dominant minorities is a phenomenon that you see in many cultures, where you go to Malaysia or Indonesia, where there is a very, very small minority that controls 60% of the commerce in that society.
01:12:23 Speaker_04
Well, for better or worse, the history of the Jews is that they are defined by being a market-dominant minority.
01:12:31 Speaker_04
By the way, that's one of the reasons why you want to have the land of Israel, because that's one place where they're not market-dominant minorities.
01:12:39 Speaker_04
And for better or worse, Jews end up dominating in many places, in philosophy, in music, in academia, in medicine, in law.
01:12:49 Speaker_04
So imagine from the perspective of the non-Jew in those societies, there are these few assholes that every time I go to my lawyer, he's a Jew, and the physician is a Jew, and the professor in the classroom is a Jew. I'm not successful.
01:13:03 Speaker_04
There must be some grand machination that causes these people to lead. Frankly, I think that's arguably, I mean, yes, we could talk theological reasons why Islam hates the Jews and why Christians hate the Jews, but from a deep psychological level,
01:13:18 Speaker_04
I think that that's the primary reason.
01:13:20 Speaker_02
Would you agree, though, that the thing that we sort of sometimes sloppily call wokeness, for lack of a better term, is fundamentally anti-Semitic?
01:13:29 Speaker_04
Not every manifestation of a parasitic idea that falls under wokeism is related to antisemitism, but it's easy for it to lead there, right?
01:13:39 Speaker_04
So for example, if you view the world through the lens of the binary of colonial settler and victim, and if, wrongly so, you attribute
01:13:51 Speaker_04
the Jew to being the aggressive settler who's the white guy who comes from Vienna because Jews have absolutely no historical ancestral connection to Israel. They truly are colonial monsters of genocide.
01:14:07 Speaker_04
If that's what you're taught in university as a parasitic idea, then it's not difficult to imagine why Greta Thunberg walks around with her keffiyeh.
01:14:15 Speaker_04
So there is an element of Jew hatred that is tied to wokeism, but Jew hatred has existed way before anybody had ever uttered the word wokeism. It's the ugliest and oldest form of existential bigotry that one can imagine.
01:14:32 Speaker_02
I want to entertain two reactions that I'm hearing a lot recently. One is this. Wokeness has peaked. The SAT is coming back. Companies are rolling back their DEI policies.
01:14:46 Speaker_02
University professors and some of these university presidents who embarrass themselves so unbelievably in Washington are being forced to step down. Notable alumni, including people like Bill Ackman, are pulling their donation money
01:14:58 Speaker_02
Jamal Bowman and Cori Bush lost their races, the pendulum swinging back to the center. So that's one argument that I hear.
01:15:06 Speaker_02
The other argument that I hear is we're in a pre-war period and something like what happened in Lebanon in our American context, like the stage has been set for that. So on the one hand, I'm hearing things are going back to normal.
01:15:22 Speaker_02
On the other hand, I'm hearing we're in a pre-Civil War period. Engage with both of those arguments for me, God, and tell me where you fall.
01:15:30 Speaker_04
So to the first one, it's better. Yes, there is some auto-correction that is happening so that the pendulum is slightly auto-correcting, but at a very slow rate.
01:15:40 Speaker_04
So for example, I decided for many years now to no longer apply for research grants because the research grants require you to fill out a, what I call a die statement. put the acronyms in their right order, diversity, inclusion, equity.
01:15:57 Speaker_04
So I would think it is grotesquely inauthentic for me to write the parasitic mind where I rail against this kind of reality. But then when nobody is watching to play along for careerist purposes.
01:16:10 Speaker_04
So I have literally, I have no research funds right now to conduct my research because I'm unwilling to play the game. So yes, there are small microscopic auto-corrections that we can all feel good about.
01:16:23 Speaker_04
But I hate to say it, and I never wanna be pessimistic. I think that depending on what happens in the United States in a few weeks, we could be facing the second darker scenario, right?
01:16:35 Speaker_04
Because, and I don't know if you want me to get political on your show or not, and I'm Canadian, so I don't have a direct dog in that fight. But in my view, Kamala Harris represents all of the possible
01:16:49 Speaker_04
violations of the deontological principles that made the United States.
01:16:54 Speaker_02
So God, I think a lot of listeners who will have been nodding along up until this point are going to hear you say, wait, wait, hold on. This guy's telling me he prefers that Donald Trump wins. So let's slow down for a second.
01:17:06 Speaker_00
Sure.
01:17:06 Speaker_02
I want to explain how someone like you who's committed their life as you write about to reason and the pursuit of truth prefers Donald Trump, someone
01:17:16 Speaker_02
with such a history of lying and such a compromised character, if I can put it diplomatically, why you prefer him to Kamala Harris.
01:17:24 Speaker_02
I want you to make the case for that to the listener who probably finds themselves somewhat shocked that that's where you've landed.
01:17:31 Speaker_04
Sure, so my doctoral dissertation was in psychology of decision making. One of the things that we do as behavioral decision theorists is we study the cognitive processes that people use to arrive at a decision.
01:17:45 Speaker_04
And so let me give you an example of such a cognitive rule.
01:17:48 Speaker_04
There is something called the lexicographic rule, forgive the jargon, that basically says when you're making a decision, you only look at your most important attribute and you choose the alternative that scores higher on that important attribute.
01:18:03 Speaker_04
Or if you are using the language of say politics, it's a one issue voter, right? So for example, if I'm buying toothpaste, if all I care about is the price of the toothpaste, I will choose the brand that is most on sale today.
01:18:17 Speaker_04
And so for many decisions, people end up using these simplifying heuristics when they're making decisions. Now let's apply that to Donald Trump. Let's suppose that I'm a one issue voter. I singularly care most about immigration.
01:18:32 Speaker_04
Now, rightly or wrongly, but I think it is rightly so, I believe that Donald Trump would have a better handle on open border policies than Kamala. So if I'm a lexicographic rule user, then it'd be perfectly rational for me to choose Donald Trump.
01:18:51 Speaker_04
I mean, literally, that's the definition of rationality using that psychology of decision-making process. But let me give you more examples. Earlier, we talked about E.O. Wilson saying, great idea, wrong species when it came to communism.
01:19:07 Speaker_04
When Kamala Harris proposes price controls as an economic policy, I won't bore your listeners in telling how Astoundingly wrong, that is. Remember, I'm a professor at a business school, so I know one or two things about what price controls do.
01:19:23 Speaker_04
So when I hear her say that, I am seeing a foundational violation of capitalistic principles. That's number two. When Kamala Harris is part of a political party where the nominee to the Supreme Court, the last justice,
01:19:43 Speaker_04
doesn't have the epistemological confidence to answer the question, what is a woman? Then who is on the right side of truth? Donald Trump, who could answer this very difficult question.
01:19:56 Speaker_04
Until 15 minutes ago, we had 117 billion people who've ever existed on earth, who knew exactly how to define men and women. But in the last 15 minutes, we no longer are able to navigate through this very difficult minefield. And that's why
01:20:11 Speaker_04
She wasn't able to offer it because she's not a biologist. So it would be grossly, grotesquely incorrect to think that voting for Donald Trump is a vote against truth and rationality and voting for Kamala is the opposite. That's simply not true.
01:20:27 Speaker_04
Now, I could give you many more examples, but I hope that I've offered somewhat of a convincing argument. What is your singular issue? I'm not a singular issue voter. So for me, what would be most important would be.
01:20:39 Speaker_02
But in the decision making framework.
01:20:41 Speaker_04
Yeah. It would be immigration policy. It would be economic policies that are consistent with capitalism.
01:20:49 Speaker_04
And another one that I didn't mention earlier, you referred to equality of outcomes, which of course Kamala is into, which is the antithesis of a meritocracy, which is the opposite of individual dignity. Well,
01:21:02 Speaker_04
I believe that the ethos of meritocracy is foundational to the United States. The ethos of equality of outcomes is a cancer to individual dignity. So it'd probably be those three things.
01:21:14 Speaker_04
So there is almost nothing that comes out of Kamala Harris's mouth that I would support in a deontological sense.
01:21:22 Speaker_02
You're so committed to truth in your work and reality. Trump denying that he lost the 2020 election seems like a kind of big lapse in commitment to reality and the truth.
01:21:35 Speaker_04
So it depends what your standard here is. In chapter one, I talk about me living in a purity bubble, right?
01:21:42 Speaker_04
And actually my mother telling me, hey, Gad, the quicker you realize that the world doesn't abide to your purity bubble, the better you'll be able to navigate the world. So in that sense, then any lie would be a fatal flaw in a candidate.
01:21:57 Speaker_04
But I also live in the real world where I know that the way that you know that a politician is lying is if their lips move. So there is almost no politician that I could ever think of
01:22:09 Speaker_04
where I couldn't find an endless number of spewed lies from that person. So yes, it is true that Donald Trump lies. By the way, he lies about things typically that are ego defensive, which by the way, Kamala Harris was able to pick at him, right?
01:22:26 Speaker_04
I have the biggest penis, that's subtle science. There is the biggest number of people who come to my, to my gatherings, right? Right. Because his ego is fragile. So does he fib? Does he lie? Absolutely. Is he narcissistic? Absolutely.
01:22:41 Speaker_04
And in your view, how does she lie differently? What does she lie about? She actually rejects the possibility that there is an epistemology of truth. There is no truth. She is part of the camp that espouses postmodernism. So what's better?
01:22:57 Speaker_02
Just to steel man that, God. Sure. Give us examples. Where do you see her doing that?
01:23:01 Speaker_04
when I am such a rejecter of reality, if I can put it that way, in arguing that it is absolutely necessary to say that men too can menstruate and that men too can bear children. That's why her running mate, that's why they call him Tampon Tim, right?
01:23:18 Speaker_04
That's why it's a great public policy idea to mandate that there should be tampons in boys' restroom. That's what I mean by a rejection of truth. Because there is no truth. There is no biological truth. There is no such thing as chromosomes.
01:23:33 Speaker_04
Your gender, even in some cases they argue your biological sex, is pliable, it's malleable, it's not fixed. That's called an antiquated binary form of thinking.
01:23:44 Speaker_02
Well, Donald Trump has survived two assassination attempts in the past two months. You've said this. This is what happens when people in power engage in such unhinged hysteria about Trump. A society cannot survive such unmodulated irrationality.
01:24:02 Speaker_02
You've also said this recently. For many years now, I've warned that the path that the West is taking will result in civil war. It might take five years, 50 years or 100 years, but it is inevitable.
01:24:15 Speaker_02
Have you become more concerned about that since July 13th, which was the first assassination attempt on Trump? I have to say I've been pretty shocked by how quickly it sort of faded from the news.
01:24:30 Speaker_02
And the one that happened the other day on the golf course almost didn't seem to last a single day. Are we numb to it? Are we Americans sort of sleepwalking?
01:24:39 Speaker_02
Are we doing the thing that our species does, which is to sort of deny the danger and be able to ignore it until it's right at our doorstep with the knock? Like, what's going on here?
01:24:50 Speaker_04
Yeah, so here, forgive me, I'm going to use a few technical terms, but I'll explain them. So in ethics, there is a distinction between two types of ethical systems, and I've used the term in our conversation often, but I haven't explained it.
01:25:03 Speaker_04
Deontological ethics is when you have an absolute truth. So for example, if I say, it is never okay to lie, that's a deontological statement.
01:25:12 Speaker_04
That's to be contrasted with consequentialism, which says it's okay to lie if you wish to spare someone's feelings.
01:25:19 Speaker_04
So I often joke that if you want to have a long lasting marriage, if you hear the question, do I look fat in those jeans, put the consequentialist hat on because you want to modulate your answers so that you don't hurt your spouse's feelings.
01:25:32 Speaker_04
Now for many things, we're all consequentialist and that makes perfect sense. But there is a set of foundational principles that by definition have to be deontological. I'm setting up that conversation to answer your question.
01:25:45 Speaker_04
So for example, when people say, of course, I believe in freedom of speech, but not for existential threat, Donald Trump, you're engaging in consequentialism when it should have been a deontological principle, right?
01:25:57 Speaker_04
I am Jewish with my own personal history. Yet I support the right of Holocaust deniers to spew the most offensive, insulting speech humanly possible, which is the rejection of a basic historical reality called the Holocaust.
01:26:12 Speaker_04
That's the price you pay to live in a free society. So now I'm going to answer your question. I think many people push aside what happened to Trump because they have their consequentialist hat on.
01:26:23 Speaker_04
In the grand scheme of things, if that bullet had actually been successful, then we could have averted the existential threat. I mean, there is no distinguishable difference between Donald Trump
01:26:37 Speaker_04
and Himmler, Goebbels, and Hitler in the minds of some of those people. So from that perspective, why should I worry so much about whether there's an assassination attempt on him? He's literally Hitler.
01:26:49 Speaker_04
No, protecting our political leaders, even if we despise them, is such a fundamental deontological principle for a well-functioning democracy that even if you are the most ardent
01:27:05 Speaker_04
fan of the Democratic Party, you should be deeply concerned, but people are not because they have consequentialist hat on, not the anthological.
01:27:15 Speaker_02
Professor Saad, are you ready for a lightning round?
01:27:18 Speaker_04
I'm never nervous, but I'm a bit nervous, but go. Let's see if I can pull it off.
01:27:22 Speaker_02
Don't be nervous. You wrote a whole book about leading a happy life, and you say it all boils down to your choice of spouse and your choice of career. I know I made a good choice with Nelly. Did I make a good choice in journalism?
01:27:35 Speaker_04
You did, because you navigate in the world of ideas. There's nothing more beautiful than the creative process. You're creating content right now. Every time you do a show, you're creating something that people consume that enriches people.
01:27:47 Speaker_04
So yes, Dr. Saad has granted you his imprimatur of having chosen the right profession.
01:27:53 Speaker_02
Thank you so much. Is happiness something that we should actually aspire to?
01:27:58 Speaker_04
No, it should be a consequence of hopefully making right decisions and adopting proper mindset.
01:28:04 Speaker_04
So I use at the end of the happiness book, I rework a quote from Viktor Frankl, who said that you don't seek success, it comes to you if you make sort of, I'm paraphrasing, if you make the right decision.
01:28:15 Speaker_04
So I don't wake up in the morning and say, what are the four steps I need to do today to be happy? But rather, if I have adopted a set of fundamental mindsets creative impulse, choosing the right wife.
01:28:27 Speaker_04
If the person that I wake up next to is someone that I go, yes, then I'm well on my way to being happy.
01:28:32 Speaker_02
So go for meaning and purpose and happiness will follow.
01:28:36 Speaker_04
Absolutely.
01:28:37 Speaker_02
Okay. What is the best parenting advice you can offer as an evolutionary psychologist?
01:28:42 Speaker_04
Oh, that's such a good question. Treat your children with the full dignity of them being little persons, right? They have full personhood. I'm very, very loving. I'm very much of a doting father. but I don't do Gucci Gucci, I abhor that, right?
01:28:58 Speaker_04
So I can literally sit with my son and talk about governmental intrusion and the power of libertarianism using the language that is appropriate for a six, seven, eight-year-old.
01:29:10 Speaker_04
And so I think that has led, I'd like to think, to a very enriching intellectual life in the Saad household.
01:29:18 Speaker_02
Okay, best dating advice as an evolutionary psychologist.
01:29:22 Speaker_04
The physical attraction is very, very important. Of course, that's what draws us in. But try to find those little cues that suggest that this person is worth investing a second, third, fourth, fifth date or not, right?
01:29:36 Speaker_04
Don't get mired in how tall they are if they're a man or how beautiful they are. Those are nice. But those fade. What's important are those cues that suggest that they are kind, they are caring, they listen, they're compassionate.
01:29:51 Speaker_04
So look for those cues. I mean, unless you're looking for short-term mating, in which case, look at their physicality. But if you're looking for long-term, those things fade.
01:30:01 Speaker_02
Best marriage advice.
01:30:02 Speaker_04
This, I'm going to borrow a quote from, I think it was Charles Murray who came on my show, the political scientist who said, the secret to a good marriage is to marry your best friend who you also happen to be sexually attracted to.
01:30:18 Speaker_04
I don't think you could say it better than that.
01:30:20 Speaker_02
What advice would you give someone listening to this in Gen Z who feels lonely right now?
01:30:26 Speaker_04
Just get out there and open yourself to the world.
01:30:29 Speaker_04
Every single day, I have these impromptu random meetings with people, not necessarily fans coming up, just I'm sitting at a cafe, I see someone reading a book, I go, oh, I read that book, what do you think of it?
01:30:42 Speaker_04
So find those little snippets in your daily lives to hopefully have a meaningful exchange with another human being. That's the right cure for loneliness.
01:30:53 Speaker_02
Can AI companions cure loneliness? And would you let your kids have an AI friend?
01:30:59 Speaker_04
Wow, what an amazing question. First time I've ever been asked that question ever. No, I think there is something quite unique about interacting with a flesh and blood human being. Yes.
01:31:10 Speaker_04
I think there are many ways by which we can have our brains kept entertained by interacting with all sorts of technology, but that special bond that you get with interacting with another person, there's nothing like it.
01:31:23 Speaker_04
By the way, towards the end of the happiness book, I quote some research that shows that even more so than what your cholesterol score is when you're 50,
01:31:33 Speaker_04
Quality of the social relationships that you have is a better protector for your heart than the things that you typically would think of. So just establish meaningful contacts with other human beings.
01:31:45 Speaker_02
You mentioned cafes. What's the best cafe in Montreal?
01:31:48 Speaker_04
Oh, the best cafe in Montreal is probably Demercanti. Coffee or tea? Oh my goodness. Tea is something that I only ever think about if I have a cold, a cough, or bronchitis. Otherwise, you have to be an animal to drink tea.
01:32:05 Speaker_02
You recently lost a lot of weight. How did you do it?
01:32:09 Speaker_04
Actually, it was during COVID. I wanted to flip a negative into a positive. I made sure to eat no more than about 1500 calories a day.
01:32:18 Speaker_04
And because I have a wonderful wife who is pretty much a culinary Nazi, she keeps track of every single calorie that goes into this gluttonous mouth. So at the end of the day, she could tell me, okay, you're at 1,462, don't have popcorn.
01:32:32 Speaker_04
So keeping track of my calories and making sure to do 15 to 20,000 steps a day. One day you get on the scale and you go, oh my God, I lost 86 pounds.
01:32:43 Speaker_02
Is that how much you lost?
01:32:45 Speaker_04
From my heaviest weight to my lightest, I'm about eight pounds heavier now than my lightest, but that difference was 86 pounds, Mary.
01:32:54 Speaker_02
What book has had the biggest impact on your life?
01:32:56 Speaker_04
Oh, by far the number one book, because it traced the trajectory of my academic career, was a book that I read by two of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology, Margot Wilson and Martin Daly.
01:33:09 Speaker_04
The book is titled Homicide, where they study patterns of criminality using an evolutionary lens. That's the epiphany I had to then apply evolutionary psychology to consumer behavior.
01:33:19 Speaker_02
You tweet a lot. Is there something you've publicly said or tweeted that you regret and wish you could take back?
01:33:24 Speaker_04
So sometimes I have tweeted something and then later found out that it was a false information or whatever. Usually I never delete it because I want there to be a public record of me having made that mistake.
01:33:38 Speaker_04
So I will usually issue an edit where I say, Oh, it has now come to my attention that that week. So. The only thing I regret is when I was too quick in sharing something that turns out to be false.
01:33:50 Speaker_04
But in terms of positions that I've taken, absolutely not. Precisely because the values that I espouse are deontological ones, so I don't regret any of the principles that I defend.
01:34:01 Speaker_02
You write a lot about sex and mating, something we can cover in another conversation. Was the sexual revolution a net positive or a net negative?
01:34:09 Speaker_04
It depends if you ask men or women. And I talk about that in the happiness book. At telling women, burn your proverbial bras and anything that a man wants is exactly what you want.
01:34:21 Speaker_04
It then turns out that when you do a longitudinal study of women's happiness over the past 40 years, there's been a precipitous drop. Well, why? Because that which makes men happy in the sexual arena need not be exactly the same as women.
01:34:36 Speaker_04
So from a male perspective, having women that want to have unencumbered one-time sex is a great idea. I'm not sure it's as good an idea for women.
01:34:44 Speaker_02
Who do you think is going to win in the 2024 presidential election?
01:34:47 Speaker_04
I'm starting to think that Kamala has a real chance, but I'm still going to go out on a limb and say Trump will pull it off.
01:34:56 Speaker_02
You're a marketing professor, among other things. How can I get more subscribers at the Free Press?
01:35:00 Speaker_04
I should be asking you this question. You're the marketing expert who has a lot bigger platform. Hopefully by having guests, continuing to have guests that people say, oh my God, I love these conversations. I love the content. You're doing well.
01:35:15 Speaker_04
You don't need my advice.
01:35:16 Speaker_02
Well, maybe I do. Anyway, Dr. Ghodsad, thank you so much for making the time and coming on. Honestly, I really appreciate it.
01:35:23 Speaker_04
Such a delight talking to you. Thank you for having me.
01:35:30 Speaker_02
Thanks for listening.
01:35:31 Speaker_02
If you like this episode, if it made you think differently about the ideas that we discussed or about which presidential candidate is better to preserve liberalism, and I suspect lots of people disagree with God, that's the point.
01:35:43 Speaker_02
Share this episode with your friends and family and use it to have an honest conversation of your own. Last but not least, if you want to support Honestly, there's just one way to do it.
01:35:53 Speaker_02
It's by going to the Free Press' website at thefp.com and becoming a subscriber today. We'll see you next time.