#2148 - Gad Saad

You basically, in academia, you'll start with your education, all your degrees, all of your positions that you've held. I was assistant professor here from here. Then, all of your journal publications, all of your books, all of your conference art, and so on. So, it can end up being a pretty beefy CV. I think mine is about 47 pages long.

How did you do that? Oh, you got a new book.

. People have gotten annoyed at you, but you've somehow or another avoided a full-scale cancellation. With your positions, it's kind of amazing.

So, I haven't gotten other jobs that I would have otherwise gotten because of how irreverent I am. You know, the death threats... Now, after October 7th, it almost became impossible for me to go on campus, because, first of all, I'm high-profile. My university has a particular demographic reality. And so, there are consequences to speaking out.

You know, you have the Jews and the Free Palestine and Intifada, and From the River to the Sea, and there's 800 of them screaming, and you're going to come in. Many of them know who you are. They know that I'm not very supportive of their positions, and so it's going to be a bit challenging. So, on a few cases, I did it via Zoom. Other times, I had to have security with me, so I'd have to check into security, and they'd have to walk with me to class, and so on.

That's not a good thing. I'll tell you another quick story, if I may, about what happened after October 7th. So, I'll first talk about what happened in Lebanon. So, the day that we escaped from Lebanon, for those of your viewers who don't know about us, we're Lebanese Jews. We were there until the start of the Civil War.

We were there in the first year of the Civil War, and then we had to leave because it became impossible to be Jewish in Lebanon. When we left that day, it was from Beirut to Copenhagen, Copenhagen to Montreal. As we cleared the airspace of Lebanon, the captain —I discussed this in chapter one of my previous book, The Parasitic Mind— he said, okay, we're now out of Lebanese airspace. I said to my wife, my mother pulls out a pendant with the Star of David, puts it around my neck, and says, now you can wear this, be proud, and not hide your identity. Now, that's in the past, but now I'm going to link it to the current reality.

About three weeks after October 7th, my wife and son came to pick me up from a cafe where I was working on my laptop. My wife had picked up my son, who was playing a soccer match in the east end of the city. As I got into the car, he says, Daddy, if you had come to where I was playing soccer today, and you were wearing a Star of David, you'd be dead. So, 1975, a Star of David is put around me, and now I can wear it proudly. Forty-five years later, I better not wear a Star of David in Montreal, Canada.

That doesn't bode too well.

How the fuck could you say this? You're openly anti-Semitic? You're openly blaming the Jews for all the world's problems? This is crazy. This is Nazi shit.

And yet you're seeing it everywhere now. When those teachers were in front of Congress, when those principals of those universities were in front of Congress, and they were saying that it's not harassment to say death to the Jews, unless it's actionable. Which is the craziest mental, verbal gymnastics I have ever heard anyone say that's in that position, in a position of being the head of Harvard. It was so crazy to watch. It's so crazy.

See, it's almost like we live in an alternative timeline. Like, we entered into a new dimension. Like, in our sleep, we woke up, but we're in a new place.

Well, that itself, the fact that I cared about my family, was incitement. I'm a Zionist. I'm a baby killer, right? I am personally responsible for the IDF killing any innocent children. But it's not just that.

It's coming at you from all directions. So, in the past, you could say, okay, Islamic sources are going to send you Jew hatred, and I'm used to that. You could say the neo-Nazi, alt-right types, you know, Jews will not replace us. They're coming after me. You've got, of course, the academic progressive left types, who are also anti-Zionist, which is just a cold, sweet word for anti-Jewish.

And so, everywhere you turn, there is Jew hatred and it's so normalized. Now, of course, in part, it is emboldened by the fact that a lot of them are anonymous. They don't put their real names, so they can take the liberty to be this orgiastically Jew hater. But it's so disenchanting to see that that guy could be my gardener, he could be my surgeon, he could be my dentist. I don't know who he is, but there are millions of those folks who hold those beliefs.

It's unbelievable.

And I think that's part of what's going on with social media. It's definitely a big part of what's going on with Twitter and TikTok and a lot of these things where you see these very inflammatory messages that seem to be pushed. They're pushed through and promoted to the fact that you get them all the time. They show up in your feed all the time. Even if you're not subscribed to these, even if you're not following these people, you'll find this disturbing content will show up in your feed.

And I really firmly believe that we're being manipulated. I really do. And I think there's a lot of these young kids that are on these campuses that are very malleable. They're very easily influenced. And they don't need...

I mean, so many.

. I'm sure you've seen Konstantin Kisin from Trigonometry. He's done these interviews with these people, these protests, and so many of them are completely ignorant. They have no idea what... They're just doing it because they think they're a good person.

They're putting up their flag of virtue by saying, free Palestine from the river to the sea. And they don't even know what that means. Do you know what you're saying? You're saying wipe out Israel?

And now you decide, okay, let me see, should I be supporting Tel Aviv, which is one of the most queer-friendly places? I mean, short of Montreal, New York, San Francisco, Tel Aviv is right up there. So you would think that if my key identity, my definitional identity, is my queerness, that I'm certainly putting all my chips with Tel Aviv. No, it's with queers for Palestine. So that's exactly what parasitic thinking is,

So you know this notion of equality of opportunities versus equality of outcomes? Typically we link it to all of the woke stuff, right? So equality of opportunities is great, equality of outcomes is a cancer to human dignity. Let's now apply that concept, equality of outcomes, to war casualties. So I think this is what happens when people say, oh, but the IDF is being grotesque.

Because the currency that then matters becomes how many dead on each side. Equality of outcome. But let me change it to a different moral currency. Let's talk about intent. So, for example, in the justice system, you could have a person who is found guilty of involuntarily vehicular homicide, and he kills four people.

So four are dead. So that's equality of outcome. Four died. Versus someone who took out a hit on his entire family, his brother, sister, and parents, so that he can win the insurance money. But it's an undercover operation.

The cops catch you, even though in that case there were zero killed, correct? That person will get a higher sentence, because we understand in the law that intent matters. So now, I think you know where I'm going with the analogy. So in the Palestinian IDF conflict, when, say, Hamas launches 6,000 rockets, every single one of which is intercepted by the Iron Dome, had they not had the Iron Dome, then the outcome could have been that 50,000 would have been killed, right? In an ideal world, from Hamas' perspective, our intent would be to eradicate every last Jew.

They have it in their charter. So, yes, it is true that if we just count the number of people who were killed on October 7th versus the number who were killed in the retaliation, if that's the only calculus that matters, then, oh, yes, the IDF has gone way overboard. But once you change it to an existential intent issue, then maybe it's not as bad of an outcome as you think, notwithstanding that a single innocent dead is a tragedy.

They're just a small person. Even if they hit me, it wouldn't really hurt me. You know what I'm saying? Defensively, I'm not worried about a real small person who doesn't know how to fight, who throws a punch at me.

you know, you do have to take into consideration the tunnels. You do have to take into consideration the infrastructure. The question is, did they just knowingly bomb places where there was going to be hundreds and hundreds of innocent civilians, knowing that there's going to be a few Hamas? Yeah. And that's what scares people.

What scares people is that someone is willing to kill women and children just to get at bad guys, and they just say that's just part of the game. That seems horrific in the 2024 understanding of human life and morality and just the horrors of war. That, you know, they're blowing up mosques, they're blowing up schools, they're blowing up apartment buildings, everything. Anything where they think Hamas is. So again,

The IDF does go through a lot of painstaking effort to try to minimize that, right? They drop leaflets in Arabic, they even sometimes call people in Arabic and say, don't go in this area, they hold... So, of course, they've killed many, many innocent people. But they're placed between a rock and a hard place. What can you do, right?

The other side knows exactly that. if they do exactly what they're doing, either you don't retaliate and we win, or you retaliate very harshly, as they have, and then you still win, right? Today, the propaganda war has been completely won by Hamas, right? There's a complete genocide in the informational war against the IDF, right? One other point, and then I'll cede the floor back to you.

The term genocide.

. Jacques Derrida was a very famous post-modernist who developed the field of deconstructionism. Language creates reality, right? He was one of the guys who allowed the ecosystem of up is down, men could be women, left is right, slavery is freedom, right? It's that post-modernist game that allows these kind of insane ideas to flourish.

Well, when you misuse words, like everything is a genocide, that does no one a service. There is no genocide. There is a killing of a lot of people. Again, every single one killed is a tragedy. But if Israel wanted to commit a genocide, by the end of my appearing on this tenth time on this show, there wouldn't be a single Palestinian left.

So if they were genocidal in their intent, then they really are shitty genocidal maniacs, because, first of all, the population, as you know, of the Palestinian territories has gone up fivefold, right? So that's really sucky genocide. And they've killed, depending.

. Right, but that's all previous to this military action that's going on now.

So if they killed.

A 1 to 1.

. 1 to 1.. But half.

Let's give them a ribbon and a medal. But again, it's... It is anti-Semitic when you place one group of people to a standard of morality that is not expected of anybody else. So, for example, if you really care about Arab lives, then you certainly should care about all of the Yemenis that have been killed. that are a lot more than whatever's happened after October 7th.

You would care about the 500,000 Syrians that were killed. You would care about the war between Iran and Iraq that led to several million killed. And on... How about a Lebanese civil war? 150,000 died.

. Right, but that's not happening currently, so people aren't totally aware of that. Like, just those statistics that you brought up, the Lebanese deaths, just... Most people are not aware of that. Most people that are discussing, especially college kids, are not aware of that.

That's why I'm here. Yeah, I mean, it's all ugly. It's all awful. It's all... There's nothing that you could say that is in any way, shape, or form, positive about any of this.

The question is, is there another way to do it other than just bombing these areas where you know Hamas is, and civilians?

She said, if the Jews put down their arms, there'll be a genocide. If the Palestinians put down their arms, there'll be peace. So, just remember that for a second. Second one is, if the Arabs, and she means, in this case, the Palestinian Arabs, if they were to love their children more than they hate ours, then there'd be peace. So, why am I saying these two quotes?

Because this battle is really not about land. In a sense, we've already addressed this on previous shows where I've come and discussed about some of these Islamic issues. It is an existential affront that the Jewish state exists in the Middle East. So, look at all other religious minorities across Arabia. Egypt used to be completely Coptic Christian, 100%, many hundred years ago.

Today, they are 10% Copts left. What happened to those Copts? There used to be tons of Christians in Syria. What happened to those Syrians? There used to be tons of Christians in Lebanon.

There still are some, about 30-35%, but Lebanon used to be a majority Christian country. So, the goal of Islam, not individual Muslims, right? Again, I don't need to preface by saying there are millions and millions of lovely, kind, peaceful Muslims. Of course, there is. But Islam as an ideology, does it tolerate others?

Well, we have 1400 years of history that either says it does or it doesn't. We don't have to watch TikTok videos. And nothing could be clearer than what the words of Muhammad were, the prophet of Islam, who said that you need to rid Arabia of Christians, but certainly the Jews. So, the existence of the land of Israel is an affront to that. One more point, and I'll see if I can go back to it.

In Islam, there's a concept called Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harab. That means the house of Islam and the house of war. Anything that's under the Islamic control is good. Anything that's yet to be under Islamic control is under the house of war. Once a territory is under Islamic control and you lose it, you have to get it back.

It is your dominion forever. This is why, for example, Andalusia, which was at one point controlled, which is in current Spain, which was controlled by the Moors, an Islamic conquistador.

A lot of jihadists will say, Inshallah, we have to reconquer Andalusia. It is our land. Because once it's under... So Israel existentially cannot exist. So why am I saying all this?

You can't have peace if you have the other side that truly never wants for you to exist. That's the bottom line. If you can change people's heart where they say, look, I get a piece of land, you get another piece, let's build an incredible, vibrant, co-society. together, you'd have peace. But if you're taught from straight out of the womb that the Jews is the reason for every calamity in the world, you're not going to have peace.

But.

So I can see that. Of course, there are Jews that are not very keen on having Palestinian neighbors. But as someone who grew up in the two worlds, I'm an Arabic-speaking Jew. I hang around with tons of Muslims. I hang around with tons of Jews.

Have I ever heard somebody in my Jewish family say, oh God, I can't wait for us to eradicate the 1.

52 billion Muslims in the world? I've never heard that. Have I heard incessantly all the time about, inshallah, we'll get rid of the Jews? Every second. You just have to say hi, Ahmad.

The next line is, god dammit, we've got to get rid of the Jews. Now, it's become a lot... Is it really that common?

Exactly. So, I give you a calamity in the world, and you've got up to six causal steps to blame the Jew. So an Amazonian frog just died in the Amazon. Go. And so I will post these on Twitter and people give answers.

Now, oftentimes they're just playing along, but that's the mindset. You got diabetes? Well, that's because the Jews, who are controlling the pharmaceutical industry, are not releasing the drug. I'll give you a recent one that I faced. So I put up a.

police lineup of some guys that had been caught in Huddersfield, which is a town in England, who had been grooming and raping young British white girls. And you may or may not know this. I'm not sure if we've discussed it in the past. In Britain, over the past 25 years, there's been an unbelievable industrial scale level grooming and raping of young white girls by Asian men. That's a euphemism for men of a certain religious heritage.

But you say it. They're Asian. So their names are... Let me summarize them for you. Mohamed, Ahmed, Mohamed, Mohamed, Mohamed, Mohamed, Mohamed, Mohamed, Mohamed, Mohamed, Mohamed, Mohamed, Mohamed, Mohamed.

Okay? So I put those up and I sarcastically said, I don't have a big enough brain to do the big data analytics to understand what is the commonality across all those gentlemen. Could anybody help me? Do you know how many people wrote to me and blamed it on the Jews? Not facetiously.

So now I'm going to ask you, Joe. How? I was just going to ask you that. How is it when three Mohamed's rape your 12-year-old British girl, you blame it on Mordechai? Three Mohamed's lead to Mordechai.

And she happens to be Jewish. But for every Jewish person who is pro open-door policy, there's a counter-Jewish person. Here is one who is not for open-border policies. Stephen Miller, who worked in the Trump administration, is Jewish. He's probably the biggest anti-open-door immigration.

But that's the mindset of the Jew hater. Everything is blamed. There's this incredible, diabolical feature of the Jew that they're able to at times pretend that they're victims, but really they're diabolical and genocidal. It's grotesque, man.

They've lost all their faith in the money behind politics and the influence behind politics. The more this stuff just gets brought up, the more chaos there is, the more hatred there is, the more divide there is. Even amongst the Democratic Party, which we talked about the other day, some large number, we think it's around 70% of Jewish people vote Democrat. But now, the Democratic Party is full on with this Palestine thing. You see it on college campuses, this rampant anti-Semitism, death to the Jews being tolerated, literally saying that, yelling it out.

Pew is a non-partisan. if anything, they probably lean towards being more woke. Pew has these global surveys that they conduct. In 2010, they conducted a survey looking at how favorable are you towards the Jews across a whole bunch of Islamic countries. If I were to tell you that 10% of the polled people exhibited Jew hatred, you'd say, oh boy, that's a big number.

10% is a lot. How about if I tell you that for most of those polled countries, it was between 95% to 99%. I know people understand what 95% to 99% means. If I poll 100 people, 95% to 99% will express very problematic Jew hatred. If I let in 100,000 such people into the country, it doesn't take a fancy evolutionary psychologist and a professor with a 47-page academic CV to say, well, probably, Jew hatred is going to go up.

So that's what we're seeing now. We're seeing the outcome of having an immigration policy that has let in people that don't share our foundational values. Again, this doesn't mean, someone's going to write in the comments section, what a hypocrite. You're an immigrant, Gadsad. Well, there are immigrants, and there are immigrants.

There are tons of Muslims who want to come in here and leave all that baggage at the door. They want nothing to do with that. They just want to live the American experience. The problem is, we don't have the machine that can look into your heart and mind. It's a statistical game.

If you're going to let in hundreds.

. I mean, look what's happening in Germany. Look what's happening in France. Look what's happening in Denmark.

I see that Joe's doing well, keeping up with the Joneses. Maybe it'll get me off my fat ass so I can work harder. So, there are very clear evolutionary reasons why empathy exists. But the problem is, when empathy misfires, it either becomes hyperactive or it misfires in directing the empathy to the wrong person. So, for example,

illegal immigrants are more important than American vets, right? And I can show you many public policies where you have these insane policies, all of which are due to suicidal empathy. So, to answer your question, I think that the Western mind is, we are a kind, tolerant, compassionate, empathetic people. There are people out there, they're Guatemalan, they're Honduran, they're Yemeni who don't have it as well as we do. Wouldn't it be nice if we open up our doors?

So, the reflex is a noble one, it's a nice one, but it exists in unicornia. The real world doesn't operate that way. If you let in people that have a huge hatred of homosexuality, are you going to have an increase in homophobia in your country or a decrease, right? So, I think that's the answer. The answer is misdirected empathy across the West.

Because it seems like there's a plan to flood the country.

. So, I've often tweeted that the most dangerous weapon in human context is a parasitized mind, right? I mean, a bomb is dangerous, but it is the human mind that activates that bomb, right? It's a guy with a little mustache that said that Jews are the real problem of the world and I need to get rid of the world of that parasite, right? So, parasitic thinking...

I mean, one of the reasons I think that that book did so well is because it really explained how all of these parasitic ideas came to a head together. And they were all spawned on university campuses over the past 40 to 80 years. So, one hypothesis is what you said, which is there is kind of a grand scheme that's willfully doing this. Another one is that all of the Western leaders of roughly the same age, I mean, within 20 years of each other, are all a product of a Western education, university education, that was completely infected with these dreadful parasitic ideas, so that when these leaders go out there and have the power to enact policies, they enact these policies. So, my view is slightly different from yours, in that I don't think that there is a supra, mega, you know, willful plan.

It's just that all of those Western leaders are the product of a really shitty university system.

Right, but there's obviously two schools of thought, right? There's the left wing school of thought and the right wing school of thought. in regards to this. The right wing school of thought wants to seal our borders, wants to secure the borders, wants to stop illegal immigration. The left wing wants, I mean, I don't know what they want because they start talking about border policies being a problem as well.

And they start talking about the issue at the border and they try to blame Trump for the issues at the border, which is always hilarious. But they're just so. with that kind of stuff, with blaming, like when Biden blames Trump for things that he clearly did, it's just gaslighting, right? It just shows you how little respect they have for people's ability to understand what's actually.

Suicidal empathy results in you caring more about the perpetrator than the victim. That's suicidal empathy, right? Because that argument, so here's how that leftist argument works. If a person, especially a criminal of color, commits a crime, that's probably because he grew up as a person of color, so he's already been marginalized by the society. So now he commits a crime.

You're now double-whamming him by putting him in the penal system. So you need to be more caring. So he's already got 57 previous arrests. Let's give him a 58th chance. So, again, I don't think it comes from really parasitized.

I mean, why do you have a lock on your door, right? So why is it that I get to have sex with my beautiful wife, but all these homeless guys are sexually starved? That's not fair. That's the parasitism of socialism. We're all equal.

Why do you make a lot more money than I do, Joe? That's not fair. I need to have as much money as you, right? So I don't think, I mean, I hope that it's not what you're saying is true, because then that's even more sinister, right? That there's kind of a boo-hoo-hoo.

I just think it's people who are misguided in their misdirected nobility, right? I think it's both. You think it's both, yeah? Yeah, I think it's both. Maybe it's both, yeah.

I think he enjoys it. I think it's like this crazy game. Right.

No one's ever been prosecuted for something like that before. Certainly no political opponents. And my thing is the danger, the people that are on the left that don't understand that. now you've set a precedent. You've set a terrible precedent.

And if Trump does get in office, what is to stop him from going after all of his political enemies in the same exact way? Are we going to do this now? Every time someone's in a position of power, whether it's a governor or whether it's a president, or what have you, when they have a political opponent, they will hire people to go after that political opponent and trump up a bunch, trump up, no pun intended, a bunch of bullshit charges and drag them through the court so that everybody's, the people that only have a peripheral understanding of what's going on. Oh, my God, he's a criminal. Keep that criminal out of the White House.

Towards the end of the show, or maybe it was even the last question, he said, in your 30-year career as a behavioral scientist, as a professor, what is the singular human phenomenon that has surprised you the most? Which I thought was an amazing question. I had never been asked before. Good question. Yeah, it's an amazing one, because, you know, I've seen tons of stuff.

And so I paused for a moment and then I said, I think it's the inability of people to change their opinions once they are anchored in a position. Yes. And so it was in that spirit that I was asking you the question. Because in my experience, despite the fact that I have a chapter in the parasitic mind on how to seek truth and therefore I'm offering a vaccine against falsehoods, I'm actually quite pessimistic for some people who go, la, la la, I don't want to hear it. Because they're so anchored.

There's no amount of evidence that I could ever show you that can move you a millimeter from your position. That's very.

They are just ideas. They are not you. And if you have supported an idea that you find to be false and you are afraid to admit that you are incorrect, that is far more weak than being incorrect. Because now you know that you are incorrect, but your pride is keeping you from admitting it. That is beyond foolish.

And now people will always know that you're going to do that. with what... People will forgive you if you make mistakes. People will forgive you if you're incorrect. We have all made mistakes.

We are all occasionally incorrect. I'm incorrect all the time, but I make a big point of not attaching myself to ideas. I will argue them if I think they are correct, but they are not me. You know, Patrice O'Neill had a great quote and he said, you could hold your opinions, but don't let your opinions hold you. Beautiful, yeah.

You just have to know that you're not ideas. You're a human being, and it's a challenge when you are faced with the reality of the fact that you've made an error, especially if you've been bold about it, if you've been condescending to people who disagree with it, if you're egotistical in your position, you connected yourself to righteousness and intellect and science and whatever other words you want to throw around that make your opinion more valid than the other people's opinion. And then you find out you were wrong. Okay, if we are ever going to trust you again, you have to tell us why you were wrong, how you were wrong, and what that feels like, and what you've learned from this. Because if you don't, if you keep arguing that, you keep doing it, now, we have no respect for you.

Fauci's the worst, but he's worse than that. I think he's far worse than that. I think he's deceptive. If the real Anthony Fauci, the book by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

is not, if it's not accurate, he would be sued. He would be sued. And just forget about what happened during COVID. Just what we know took place during the AIDS crisis. Everyone should read that book.

Everyone should understand this same game plan was played out during the AIDS crisis. And it's a game plan where they're in cahoots with the pharmaceutical and drug companies, and they push this thing as being the only remedy, and this is how, and they make tremendous amounts of money. And that's all real. This is not tinfoil hat, conspiracy-wearing shit. That's real.

But if you supported him because you thought that he was the science, and then over time, you have realized that, oh my god, they did work with Peter Datzig. They did fund, through another organization, gain-of-function research. He did lie about it. It was talked about in emails. He did contact people who were saying one thing and had them change their position.

He did. They did ridicule the lab leak theory when they knew it to be correct. They knew it. They knew they were doing the exact same research on the exact same viruses in that exact same place where it broke out. They knew it, and they lied because they wanted to cover their ass, and we let.

Copernicus is a great example. Darwin is a great example, but let's look at some other ones that people may not be familiar with. So, I think his name, I'm not sure how you pronounce it, Semmelweis. He was the gentleman who arguably has saved more people than anybody else in medicine. Do you have any idea who it is?

physician, if I'm not mistaken. No, this guy is the gentleman who told other physicians.

. Oh, wash their hands.

So, the physician has just worked on a cadaver and then goes and does the obstetrics. So, when he said, wash your hands, he died, I think, penniless, destitute, in a mental asylum or something, right? And then, later, people said, oops, he was right.

. Yeah, that guy. Semmelweis, exactly.

unvalidated. I mean, it was only post hoc that he... There. you go, nervous.

He ended up winning the Nobel Prize. And so I often joke with my students, I say, if people laugh at your ideas and fight them, it's either for one or two reasons. It's a really shitty idea, and it's worthy of that derision, or prepare to go to Stockholm to win the Nobel Prize.

Because, I mean, literally.

. Right, it's one or the other. It's one or the other, because the Nobel Prize is nothing but a history of people saying, what a quack, this moron is. No way. Oops, here's your Nobel Prize, doctor.

And isn't that? because?

How do you apply evolutionary psychology in human behavior in general, consumer behavior in particular. I give the talk in the psychology department on a Thursday, and everybody's like, oh yeah, this is gorgeous. Because a lot of the psychologists were trained in physiological psychology, biological psychology, and so on. So they were totally appreciative of the fact that you can't really study human behavior without understanding the biological signatures of human behavior. Okay.

Then I go to the business school the next day, Ross School of Business. I give the exact same talk. Okay? I couldn't finish a single sentence. Because all of the professors, and it was usually the professors, it wasn't the doctoral students who were, because the doctoral students are still malleable, their brains are still being formed, they're happy to listen.

It's the senior professor who has spent 30 years arguing that human minds are born tabula rasa, empty slated, and it's only socialization that teaches the consumer to be how he or she is that they were really offended by my stuff. So they would constantly interrupt me and berate me. And I remember, as a side personal note, my wife was in the audience that day. She had come with me, and prior to that talk, she had said, oh, I feel really sick. I probably have food poisoning.

We later found out that she was pregnant with our first daughter. So there's both a really bad memory and a really good memory associated with the.

Because, so, here's first question. Oh, if everything is due to evolutionary pressures, how do you explain homosexuality then? If everything is due to survival, how do you explain suicide then? By the way, there are evolutionary explanations for suicide and homosexuality. Humans are a sexually reproducing species, even though chaste monks exist.

People do have a survival instinct, even though some people commit suicide. Men are taller than women, even though your Aunt Julie is taller than your Uncle Bob. So what happens with people, in terms of a cognitive obstacle, they take a singular datum as proof that a statement that is true at the population level has been violated. It hasn't, right? Every single WNBA player is taller than most men.

That does not invalidate the fact that men are taller than women. So all of the morons in the University of Michigan were also coming to that kind of stuff, right? Because they didn't like the idea to our earlier discussion that we've had on the show. A lot of people don't like the idea that we are biologically determined. They think that that's a form of, you're just an executor of your genes.

But that's a wrong view, by the way, because everything is an interaction between your genes and the environment, right? Even specific genes get turned on as a function of the environment. So the fact that you believe that we have biological imperatives that guide our behavior doesn't make us blind executors of our genes.

And call.

We learn things somehow or another through some under.

. I guess it's explored but not quite understood process. And this process even encourages things like racism. There's even detrimental ideas that are inherited through children that have been proven. But they don't know exactly the mechanism, right?

If you either got bit and survived or you saw someone get bit, or you, you know, and you see a spider and you're like, oh shit. But that's why.

They can't keep their hands. still. It's crazy, man. It's not like, you know, I see a dog looks like a scary dog. Whoa.

Keep away from that dog. It's not like that. It's like your whole body. By the way,

I can't watch TV. I can't train. The mosquito must die. Now, in a sense, that's perfectly adaptive, because we know that by far, if you add up the tallies of people killed by mosquitoes versus all other animals combined, it's not even.

It has evolved a memory that allows it to remember the spatial location in your backyard where it stores caches of food, so that it has its own memory bias, so that, even though it won't detect it by smell, because, let's say, in Montreal it's under four feet of snow, it has a mental map, so that it perfectly knows where it hid everything, right? Now, the human memory has evolved to solve different problems. So then, if you are a memory researcher studying memory from an evolutionary perspective, you would say, well, what would the human memory solve as an adaptive problem? So let me give you one such example. So if I show you a bunch of photos of people, okay, images of faces, and I put a descriptor next to each one where I tag that person as a social cheater or not a cheater.

So what does social cheating mean? Lack of reciprocation. So if I do something for you, then you will cheat and recant and not, I scratch your back, but you'll never scratch my back. Now that information about the personal characteristic of that individual is an evolutionarily important datum, right? So now I'm going to show you all these people.

I control for their good looks, right? So I don't put all of the cheaters as being good looking, right? Because then you might remember them because they were good looking, not because they were cheaters, right? So I put this array of faces and then later I ask you to remember whether you'd seen that face or not. And people end up remembering at a much higher level any face that had been tagged as being a social cheater.

Do you follow? Therefore, your perceptual system works in cahoots with your memory system to pay attention more to information that is evolutionarily relevant, so that I'm more likely to recall it and remember it. So that would be an example of how you would apply the evolutionary lens to study how our memory operates. Here's another example. Not in the case of social dynamics, but in the case of remembering where food's at.

So if you ask people to go through a maze of food and then ask them to remember where particular foods are, they're much more likely to remember the locations of high-calorie foods. So in this case, it's not that I have a domain general mechanism that just learns where things are. There is a sensorial bias to me being more likely to remember the location of something if it is evolutionarily relevant. There are many, many other such examples. So that would be a wonderful demonstration of how the evolutionary lens adds a whole layer of explanatory power to what typically memory researchers have done, which is usually they study memory as just the domain general mechanistic system, whereas the evolutionary psychologist says, no, no, but why did that mechanism evolve to be of that form?

How do they know to go after certain animals? Like? I have a golden retriever. He loves all dogs, like little dogs, like the size of.

Okay, you.

. What's a group of crows called? A murder. A murder. I'm going to tell you now about another study, and maybe Jamie can pull it off.

I think it's a guy at University of Washington, maybe. I hope I'm not wrong. Where he wanted to see whether crows remember the face of a really nasty guy, so that they can, you know, if he then comes again, they'll start calling. Right, right, right. He kind of took an image of the face, and then he would either wear it or not, and then he would...

I don't remember what the dependent measure was, but it was something to the effect of then. he's studying... There you go. I mean, I love it. I love having.

. So this guy had a mean face, and he did mean things, and the crows recognized him.

They can take rocks and a thousand different things to get food out of, things that I guarantee you, you and I would sit there for 18 hours, and we wouldn't crack that.

They have immense memories. Their memories are nuts. Like, they get reunited with their calves, like, 20 years later, and they run and embrace each other, and it's just joyous. When elephants die, they mourn. They mourn the death.

They have huge brains. But it's also a huge animal. But it doesn't manipulate its environment, so we don't respect it. It's sort of like the reason why dolphins are in SeaWorld. It's because that's literal slavery.

It's slavery of probably a parallel, or, if not more, intellectual species. Yeah. Something with a cerebral cortex 40% larger than a human being's. Something that communicates in a language that we can't decipher. Something that has different dialects.

Something that operates in these very tight social.

There you go. I mean, but that's how you live. when there's no doors. You're in the ocean, there's no doors.

Sorry, I keep going. How do you spell it? B-O-W-E-R. So the bowerbird creates a bower, which is a structure that serves no purpose other than demonstrating my artistic... There you go.

. It's one of the only species other than humans that uses artistic ability as a mating cue. Right? So... Picasso, short, little guy, bald, ugly.

He's got a huge lineup of hot women who want to have sex with him because he's Picasso. That's what the bowerbird is doing. He's saying, look at how architecturally savvy I am. Look how symmetric my bowerbird is. Not only that, by the way...

Oh, there you go. Okay, she said you're good enough. Let's do this. Let's do this.

. But you saw all those other blue things? Yes. So if you travel to Australia, in certain regions, there are signs from the government saying if you are women, don't... Be careful.

Don't wear shiny things on your head. Why? Because these assholes will come at you, attack the women's head, steal the shiny things so that they could use the shiny things in their bower to attract the ladies. That's smart. That's smarter than most men.

It's got like a bachelor pad, with flowers out in front, like ladies. Don't you like flowers? No, that's the girl. That was the girl.

Straight around you. If you got flamingos, man, you're a baller. That's a move, right? Have a flamingo in your yard? Just walk around?

. I'm thinking a peacock. You only have a dog? I'm thinking a peacock.

. I'm saying flamingo. Yeah, I only have a dog. I have chickens too.

. I'm scared to ask this. They become pets, you don't eat them, right?

They're little dinosaurs. When one of them was younger,

this is my old group of chickens that I had when my youngest daughter was a baby, they were pecking her feet. And there's this one cunty chicken that we had. And my wife was like... I feel like this is going to be a Christine Noll moment. No, no, no.

Nobody died. My wife... Unfortunately, they all did. Coyotes got them. And dogs.

Long story. Anyway, point is, I go, no, she's trying to eat the baby's feet. Like, you've got to understand, this is not like she thinks that's a worm. She thinks she can get away with eating... They eat each other.

They fucking peck at each other. They'll murder a mouse. Have you never seen a chicken and a mouse together?

We had a fence. And this is very unfortunate, but we had a fence that was glass. And one of the side effects of this glass fence was hawks. And hawks would be swooping down to try to get a rat or some other rodent or something. And they'd BAM!

Nosedive into this glass. And we lost three hawks. We're like, this is fucked up. I was like, maybe we should go back to the other fence. My wife was like, fuck you.

I like this fence. It was one of those conversations where we were like, this seems like it's our fault that these hawks died. So one of them made it. One of them lived. And they took the hawk and they put it in a big washing machine box and contacted this wildlife rescue thing.

And they said, okay, if you're going to have it, because we're not open until Monday, you've got to feed it this thing. So what do you feed it? So you have to go to the pet store. They get these things called pinkies. And pinkies are just baby mice.

They're baby mice that have, they're not going to live. They're separated from their mother. You feed them to reptiles. It's gross. Right?

And so the hawk ate most of them. But he didn't eat one. So they were like, we're going to raise it. I go, listen, you can't just do that. You can't just feed a bunch of these little things to this giant raptor and then say, now we're going to take this one that survived and raise it.

First of all, the nightmares that little fucker would have. But second of all, it's not viable. It's not going to live. I go, let's just give it to the chickens. So I brought it outside and I put it in the chicken's cage.

One chicken grabs it as fast as I've ever seen. a chicken move. And then every other chicken runs after that chicken and tries to get it away.

They should wander around and pick bugs and eat worms and do all the things that chickens love doing. To have a chicken just in a box for its entire existence, you're stealing souls. You're doing something fucked up. that's way more fucked up than just raising a farm. If you got cows and they're out of pasture and every day they're just being cows, and then one day you take them in a stall and bang, this thing goes into their brain and they're dead.

That is way less evil. That is way more humane than what's going to happen to them in the wild. What are they going to do? They're going to either freeze to death or starve to death or get torn apart by wolves. If you're going to have cows everywhere and people want to reintroduce wolves everywhere, congratulations.

You've got wild kingdom. You've got wild kingdom happening in your neighborhood, if that's what you want. If you don't want people to eat cows anymore, okay. What are you going to do with the cows? Are you going to sterilize them?

Are you going to keep a certain?

camp breed? Are you going to give the boys cows birth control? What are you going to do? Are you going to introduce predators? Okay.

How are you going to keep kids from those predators? How are you going to keep dogs from those predators? Have you thought about this? No, you haven't. They're reintroducing grizzly bears to Washington as we speak.

We're going to reintroduce the things that we killed because they killed everybody. We're so smart. It's bananas. These people are out of their fucking minds.

They don't have a real understanding of actual nature. The horrible thing is this commoditization of nature. This taking animals and factory farming them in these horrific conditions where it's illegal to film. It's illegal if they have ag-gag.

Then I actually created two sad truth clips where I was really demonstrating the evolutionary reasons. Archaeological data, dental data, physiognomic data, anthropological data. They just wouldn't have it. You're a hypocrite. You can't love an animal and eat an animal.

I'm glad that you.

I think they're a thing that communicates with their environment, but they just do it in a way that we don't understand. They do it through mycelium. They arrange resources. They allocate resources towards plants that need them more. They have some sort of a.

It's like a living environment. It's this environment that they've ruined through monocrop agriculture. That's what's wrong with farming. It's not farming. Farming is a perfect way to balance an ecosystem.

When those people do it the right way, like those people from White Oaks, Pastures or Polyface Farms, regenerative agriculture people, there's zero carbon footprint of what they do. In fact, it sequesters carbon. You're growing things. It's manure and cows, and it's all working together, and the chickens are free-ranging. and it's nature.

just in a contained environment. That's normal.

. Have you seen the research on... I can't remember what the term is, but something like soil DNA. I guess the pioneer is... I think he's Danish.

Either Danish or Swedish. I think Danish. Basically, they go to these steps that are really, really... Maybe not Mongolian steps, but somewhere where you expect to find a lot of the typical fossil remains, and so on. What they now do is they just do this excavation of soil in the same way that people who study ice, you know how they can bore and then they can date the various ice.

They do something similar where they kind of harvest tons of soil and they're then able to isolate DNA of mammoths. Have you seen some of this stuff? Yes, I have. That's mind-blowing. Mind-blowing.

It's unbelievable. I actually thought about inviting that guy on my show. Maybe you should have him on your show.

That's one of the craziest things about Genghis Khan. When Genghis Khan lived, they killed so many people that places reforested and they lowered the carbon footprint of Earth. That's a real.

It's like a dollar an episode or something, and it's fucking amazing. It's amazing. I think it's a three-piece thing. Is it a three-piece series?

Genghis Khan is the correct way to say it. Temujin was his real name. And what he did and like the rise.

Do you know who E.

O. Wilson is? I've heard the name. E.O. Wilson is a he just recently passed away at the maybe age of 90..

I just read his autobiography called Naturalist. Amazing autobiography. He was a Harvard entomologist and a strong proponent of social biology. Applying biology to studies. Social systems and so on.

And he was part of the original culture wars, where a lot of his colleagues hated him because he was arguing that biology affects human behavior. E.O. Wilson, check him out. He's unbelievable. Well, in the late 90s he wrote a book called Conciliance, Unity of Knowledge.

And that became one of the foundational books in how I did my academic career. Which is conciliance is trying to unify disparate areas of human endeavor that you typically wouldn't think should be linked together. So you could link the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities through the conciliance of evolutionary theory. Because you could study psychology using evolutionary theory. Of course you could study biology using evolutionary theory.

Or you could study aesthetics, which is in the humanities, using evolutionary theory. So that became a really important concept of my own work, because my brain operates as a synthetic machine. I like to synthesize across. So one of the reasons why I decided early on to break out of just being an academic because I couldn't see myself as a stay-in-your-lane professor. I need to try to.

So, coming on, Joe Rogan is going to allow me to share ideas and synthesize things with millions of people, rather than writing another academic paper that, if I'm lucky, will be read by 50 people and cited by 12.

A very academic scientific talk on how to apply evolutionary theory. So my host, who's a fellow, he's a consumer psychologist, invited me out to dinner the night before and I think after I was going there, I might. I think I was flying down to at the time. we were in Southern California, still. 2017.

you were in Southern California. And I was going to do your show, I think. So at night during dinner, he said, I hear you go off on Joe Rogan's show. I said, oh yeah, yeah. He goes, we don't condone that at Stanford.

Very kind of haughty. I said, you don't condone what? He goes, well, we don't do our research so that it could be sexy enough for it to appear so I could talk about it on Joe Rogan. So I said, well, I don't do the research also, so I can appear on Joe Rogan, but if I can publish a paper in an academic journal and then go on, Joe Rogan and hopefully excite people about evolutionary psychology and psychology of decision making, isn't that better than just having my wife and mother read the paper? And he didn't like that.

He thought very, whereas now I, not that many, but I'll get a lot more professors who will write to me saying, can you get me on?

But this is, for whatever reason, I probably spend more time individually talking to people this way than any other way, because I do so many of these things.

Yeah. So it's a form of puzzle making. Right. So, you know, actually, there's research that shows that if you marry someone that scores similar to you on the adult playfulness scale, I don't remember the number, some people score very high on that. Probably you do.

I know that I do. If you then match up with someone who scores very highly, like you do, assortatively, that's a very big predictor of you having a successful union.

I don't need, you know.

. A wife. My wife, doesn't have to have the same taste as me, even in me. I don't care. I don't care if you like different...

They listen to music that I think is garbage. And I'm like,

They play some Taylor Swift, so I'm like, this. one's not bad. But the point is, it's like, you don't have to like the same things as I like. That's stupid. That's stupid.

You know? She likes football. I don't even know the rules. I don't know what's going on.

Aaron Rodgers is my friend.

I don't know.

I'm a fan, whatever. I know that you have a deep appreciation for Messi. Whenever you'd like to come to a game, you'll be my personal guest. Oh, shit! Think about this.

This geeky professor who could have lived his life just doing his little narrow stuff, right? You know, I'm good. in my ecosystem, a few other professors care about my work, or go out there, grab life by the balls, and live it fully and connect, and so on, right? So, I call my wife over. I say, I'm James Bond.

I mean, in what world.

. In what world is it possible for, you know, the Lebanese professor and evolutionary theory to get an email from the majority owner... So, September 27th or 28th, I'm on a flight down to Miami. They're playing in the U.S. Open Cup.

It turns out that Messi was injured, so he didn't play. I'm supposed to meet him. I bring him copies of my book signed, even the Spanish version of The Parasitic Mind, because he only reads Spanish. He ends up not being there because he's not playing, and so on. I don't...

I mean, he's standing right next to me, but I didn't get to meet him, really. I meet Zinedine Zidane, who is the greatest French player of all time and World Cup winner, right there in the President's Lodge. David Beckham, hang out with him, and I'm chatting. Now, I'm not saying these to drop names. Oh, look, I know these cool people, but I'm saying, if I didn't have that open spirit, where I didn't view my world as only being restricted to the ecosystem of academia, if I didn't come on Joe Rogan, that opened me up to a whole new audience, all of those people would have never heard of my work.

If I only publish peer-reviewed papers rather than publishing books, which, by the way, in academia, you publish trade books, that's looked down upon. How is that looked down upon? If you publish a book that can be read by 300,000 people, how is that not better than publishing an academic paper that's read by three people? But that one is pure. It's academic.

That other one is vulgar and popularizer. Yeah. It's grotesque. It's stupid. It is stupid.

You know, and again, it just boils down to a lot of it is male ego. That's a big part of the problem with a lot of these ideas that people hold so sacred. The fascinating one for me with you is this reluctance to accept that there's other factors for the development of a human personality, and that it's not a blank slate. Like, that seems interesting, and if I was a teacher that was teaching something contrary to that, I would want to know this, and now I know that I've been teaching nonsense and I have to call, like, 50,000 students over the last 20 years. Hey, guys, remember that shit that I told you?

Yeah. Turns out, I thought it was true. What would you do? That's gotta be horrible for them. When new information comes out, that's irrefutable, some new scanning, new thing that shows that this thing that we had always held to be true, that you've taught in classes, that you've won awards for, is nonsense.

Yeah, so there's.

. So my favorite quote, and maybe Jamie could pull it out, by J.B.S. Haldane. J.B.S. Haldane was an evolutionary geneticist, but was also known for having these beautiful, quotable quips.

And so, here, the quote in question, I have it in the last chapter of The Consuming Instinct, 2011 book. He's talking about the four stages that academics go through before they accept a theory. So, I'm paraphrasing now what his stages are. Stage 1, oh, this is complete rubbish, bullshit. Stage 2, well, this may be true, but largely unimportant.

Stage 3, well, this is definitely true, but it's probably not actionable. Stage 4, oh, I always said so. Right? So, what happens is, you go through these phases, and if you're dogged enough, as I was, then the people who laughed at you in stage... Oh, there you go.

This is worthless nonsense. This is worthless nonsense. This is an interesting, but perverse point of view. This is true, but quite unimportant. I always said so.

Perfect. And I've always said that... That's the government's.

I have that email. It's 2001.. And I have the email from 2019, when you say, Dear God, we would be honored if you would be the plenary speaker. I'm like, oh, but what happened to? I was a bullshitter in 2001?.

. But here's my position as an outsider. How could you know? Why would you say it's a blank slate? How could you know?

And why would you ignore all this interesting information that we now know about the role that your parents play?

if I'm a parent. Right? If I create a child, you're telling me that he's got equal chance to be Michael Jordan or Lionel Messi, if only I have the right schedule of reinforcement of how to hug him and when to hug him? That's hopeful. I don't want to be told that there is something innate about my child that guarantees that he will never be the next Michael Jordan.

So, I think the message, the blank slate message, doesn't originally start as just a quacky idea. It's a noble idea, perfectly rooted in bullshit, but it's a noble idea. Here's another example of a noble idea. Franz Boas was actually a Jewish anthropologist at Columbia University about 100 years ago, who was the one who developed cultural relativism, the idea that there are no human universals. So, biology doesn't matter in explaining cultural phenomena, because every culture is uniquely distinct.

Now, the reason why he proposed that idea is because many nasty folks had misused biology and evolutionary theory. And therefore, by him eradicating biology from the study of anthropology, he was hopefully doing a noble thing. But you can't kill truth in the service of a goal, right? So, a lot of these guys, it's not to our earlier conversation, they are not conspiratorial in spreading bullshit. They believe that by holding those positions, they're creating the proper utopia.

But it's rude and bullshit.

You're more likely to find Bigfoot than you are black people looking for Bigfoot. It's all a bunch of unfuckable white dudes. Unfuckable white dudes out camping. And there's a mystery. There's a thing that they want to believe.

And there's almost no evidence. Almost no evidence. There's some weird stuff like footprints with dermal ridges, but you could fake that.

They know the guy who took it. They know how he did it. He used a cardboard cutout or something like that. Or some cutout. Put it in the water and then took a photo.

It was bullshit. It could be a sturgeon. It could be some large fish. I think there's a lot of theories on it. But they've done scans of the Loch.

They've never found anything. It's certainly not a population of them. Right. They can stay alive for this long. They have to be breeding.

What are they eating? How big is this? What are you talking about? The Bigfoot thing, I think, was real. And I think it was real in the human imagination, and it was real in terms of modern.

human beings encountered these things. And it's a real animal called Gigantopithecus. And it really did exist in Asia. And if human beings were coming across the Bering Land Bridge, it's very likely that they were there too. They all existed in the same environment.

And in the same time period. And this fucking thing is in Native American history. They have a large number of names for this. They don't have dragons. They don't have crazy shit that doesn't exist.

They have a myth of this gigantic, hairy ape that lives in the woods. And I think it did. I think it did probably until who knows how many thousands and thousands of years ago. But the idea of one being around today? almost no evidence.

Almost nothing. Just visual bullshit. Blurry bullshit. Footprints that maybe I don't know. You could fake that.

You could fake a footprint. It's not a fucking fake Ferrari. It's not like complicated to fake a footprint. Oh, you don't understand about the amount of weight that has to be put. Says who?

Says? who? Says you? Says you? A guy who wants to believe in Bigfoot.

so bad. They want to believe, so bad. It is a religion.

I said, oh, it's exactly the opposite of that. And so to that point I wouldn't have ever, I didn't have in my bingo card the defecation of Bigfoot.

They're over water holes. They're everywhere.

. Gigantopithecus. Exactly. Yeah. So you obviously have a lot of these tidbit information.

Are you a voracious reader, or how do you get your sources of information?

I can do that when I'm in the car. Okay. So that to me is like that's a couple of hours of taking in information. Beautiful. Where I would just ordinarily just like lifting weights.

But you don't.

It's too easy to gloss over.

I'm a pathological book hoarder.

So I'll write it and then I'll, but if I'm writing a book, it's always on the computer. There's no written anymore. And I've noticed that my penmanship has really gotten worse. I don't know if... Oh, mine's dog shit.

Yeah, exactly. Me too. It's like chicken shit. Terrible. But I'm a voracious reader and one of the things that stresses me the most is in my personal library, in my study, I've got literally hundreds and hundreds of books.

I will often walk in there and say, will I ever have time to read? So I have probably 600 books that I've yet to read. And each of those books has so much information that if I were to read all those books, boy, I would be an even more exciting guest on the Joe Rogan show. No, what I mean by that is that there's so much... The more you know, the more you realize truly how little you know.

Yeah, absolutely. And so I say, oh, my God, here's a biography on... So I just bought a biography on the taxonomist who created the system of how to label animal species. He's a Swedish taxonomist. Now that sounds very esoteric and specific, but I'm sure there is this incredible information that I can glean in that book, which today I don't have that knowledge in my brain.

So to all people who are listening, read. There is nothing more... Number one predictor of your child's success is how many books were in the home of the parents. Okay, I mean, I don't know if it's number one, but certainly a highly predictive one. So, reading...

Elon Musk, you probably know this, when he came to, I think, from South Africa to Canada, he came with a luggage of books. He's a voracious reader. Right? Now, that doesn't mean that he became who he became only because he read, but it's very hard to have an interesting person who's not very knowledgeable about many things. And that's why one of the things that's been very difficult with my children is I see them doing the scrolling, and it drives me crazy because I haven't been able to instill that reflex of just saying, there is nothing I'd rather do right now than go sit somewhere and immerse myself in a book.

They don't have that reflex.