Dr. Gad Saad on How Parasitic Ideas are Entering and Ruining Your Mind | Conversations with Tom

Hey, everybody. Today's episode is brought to you by our very own Impact Theory University. Enjoy the episode. Everybody, welcome to another episode of Conversations with Tom. I'm here with Gad Saad. Gad, welcome to the show, man. So good to be with you, Tom. Thank you for inviting me. Absolutely. So, I love your area of expertise. This is something that as certainly as a business person and as somebody who now creates content for a living, I think a lot about which is psychology through the lens of evolution. And I would love to dive into what I call the physics of being human. So, there are just sort of basic things that have somehow become somewhat controversial that I would say are baked into us. Now, I I used to really want to believe is probably the right way of like we are a total blank slate that there's nothing hardwired. Um and then I read The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker and realized, "Okay, this isn't quite accurate." Um and so I sort of come down to just repeating what I hear science say which is we're about 50% hardwired and 50% malleable. Um and one, I'd love to know if you agree with that and if you do, what are the parts that are hardwired? Right. So, this is the old nature nurture debate. And in a sense, it's a false dichotomy. And the the the analogy I like to use here, Tom, is if I took a bunch of ingredients that constitute baking a cake. So, the baking soda, the flour, the butter, the eggs. Before I bake the cake, you can identify each of the ingredients separately. Once I bake the cake, it becomes an inextricable melange. So, if I now told you, "Please point to the eggs. Please point to the sugar." you couldn't. And so, the reality is for most phenomena, we are an inextricable mix of both. Some more one or the other. So, my height is less likely due to socialization. But in this it's also a false dichotomy for a second reason, because it pits nature versus nurture as though they're sort of opposing forces, whereas the reality is that nurture exists in its form because of nature. So, if you see a socialization pattern, for example, how we teach little girls and little boys to behave, that could certainly be within the purview of socialization, but to the extent that the exact same socialization patterns happen across time periods, across cultures, it's because they are supporting biological imperatives. So, the nature-nurture dichotomy is really a false one. I heard you throw out a quote one time. I think you were quoting somebody else, but they said that genes have culture on a leash, or human nature has culture on a leash, something like that. beautiful. That's E.O. Wilson. And so, he's basically arguing exactly that, right? So, yes, there is malleability, to use the term that you you used at the start of your first question, we we have evolved behavioral plasticity plasticity, right? So, for example, the field of behavioral ecology, which is an evolutionary-based field, actually looks at cross-cultural differences through an evolutionary lens. So, for example, how much spices we use in a particular culinary tradition is a manifestation of behavioral ecological approaches. If I live in a climate that's very hot, where there is greater proliferation of food pathogens, then I will use a greater amount of spices as an antimicrobial solution. Therefore, we've both evolved similarities across cultures, but also evolved the capacity to change in adaptive ways. So, this is why, for example, the old canard of evolutionary psychologists only look at human universals is grotesquely false. We recognize that some things are exactly the same whether I'm Peruvian, Nigerian, or Japanese, but there are many things that make us dissimilar from one another also for evolutionary reasons. Yeah, that to me the the malleability is the area that I'm I'm super focused on as a human being. Like when I think about um and I think everything ends up becoming an echo of your beliefs. So, when asked what the meaning of life is, I will very rapidly say, "To me the meaning of life is how much of your potential can you translate into usable skill set? And then can you use that skill set doing something that matters to you and matters to the world ideally?" Um which is itself an echo around my belief that the sort of core fundamental driver for humans is to hit a state of neurological pleasure is probably the wrong word, but I'll round it to fulfillment, right? You want to be living a life where you feel fulfilled, you feel alive. And so, when you take all of that, then I start saying, "Okay, well, regardless of what is sort of hardwired into me as a person, I want to know about the part that I can change." One of my favorite quotes is, "You can't make a racehorse out of a pig, but you can make a really fast pig." And so, I'm always trying to become the really fast pig in the areas that I care about. But when I think of myself as a marketer, which is I know where you and I have a lot of overlap in terms of your focus on consumer behavior being driven through an evolutionary lens. Um I start thinking about the parts that are hardwired, and that's where [ __ ] gets super [ __ ] weird. And have you have you read a book called A Billion Wicked Thoughts? Uh no, I I know of it, but I've never read it. god, dude, I think you're going to love it. It is It is so fascinating in terms of the parts of us that are hardwired. I mean, just they're talking largely between men and women. Um and And I'm curious as somebody who's focused at that intersection of consumer behavior and evolutionary psychology, what are some of the the universal drivers that you see? And I'm curious to see how you'll answer that given the whole egg and a cake analogy. Um but I'm super curious how you think about that. I can answer it in 5 minutes or I can answer it in 5 hours. So, let's shoot for about 5 to 10 minutes. Uh so, one of the ways that I address this is I argue that uh So, if you look at for example Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which is sort of the the the the archetypical theory that we see when we're teaching consumer behavior, let's say at the MBA level. So, if it's a theory of motivation, right? Uh you know, I first have to uh satisfy the most basic uh needs and then I go up the hierarchy. Well, Maslow's hierarchy of needs is very nice, but it's actually not rooted in in necessarily in in a clear understanding of evolutionary theory because the reality is we don't always go systematically through the hierarchy. Someone could be living in the ghetto and they're very very poor and they don't have enough caloric certainty for their next meal, yet they are willing to dish out $250 uh for their you know, for their the the coolest uh sneakers today, right? Uh and also the idea that the apex of our sort of motivational trajectory is self-actualization is a wonderful idea, but it was rooted in Abraham Maslow's humanist philosophy, right? This is what I ought to aspire to be. So, I should take a vacation and study the anthropology of the Inuits. That would be I'd be self-actualized. The reality though is that we need to root motivational theory in an evolutionary understanding of what makes humans tick. And so, I argue in my books, at least the the evolutionary evolutionary psychology consumer psychology books, that there are four fundamental drivers that drive our purposeful behavior as as humans in general and as consumers in particular. And so, maybe I'll I'll discuss each and then we can take whichever route you want to go. So the first one is the reproductive module. So this is the idea that many of our behaviors is linked of course to sex. So when I purchase a a Maserati, I am literally engaging in a homologous behavior to the peacocking of the peacock's tail, right? It's not a coincidence that 99% of Ferrari owners are men men even though there are millions of women who are millionaires if not billionaires who can certainly afford the Maserati and the Lamborghini and yet they don't engage in that particular purchase. So how for example women beautify themselves as a function of where they are in their ovulatory cycle This [ __ ] is crazy. The fact that strippers get more tips when they're ovulating is insane. How the [ __ ] are we picking up on that? So let me actually tell you a story about that exact study. So that study was conducted by a good friend of mine Jeffrey Miller who's also an evolution psychologist and we were sitting at a conference, the human behavior and evolution conference. This is the premier conference for evolutionary psychologist. And he starts telling me oh god cuz he knew I was working on some menstrual cycle work and he says, oh god I I want to tell you about a project we're working on and then he tells me about that that you know, tipping with the the strippers. For those of you who don't know by the way, let me just give you the final finding. When women are in their ovulatory their fertile phase of their menstrual cycle, this is when they receive the greatest amount of tips. So either they are dancing in a more lascivious manner enticing the men and or men are picking up those fertile cues and are asking those particular women to dance for them. So it could be either mechanisms. But in any case, I had been planning on doing that exact study with one with my doctoral student who I ended up doing a lot of this menstrual work, but Jeffrey beat me to that study. Now the reality is we were perfectly suited or well situated to do the study because Montreal is known as a city where there is a strip bar on every second, you know, street corner. You know, we don't Yeah, oh yeah, yeah. I mean, it's gone down a bit now, but certainly certainly when I was growing up, you know, you went downtown, you know, every fifth one, every fifth store was a strip bar. And so anyways, so so to to go back to my original thing with the four modules, so there's the reproductive module, which speaks to things that we do that are ultimately fundamentally related to the sex drive. So, this would be sexual selection in evolutionary theory. Then there is the survival module, so that would be related to natural selection. Those are things that we do because they confer an adaptive survival advantage. So, for example, so let's link it to consumer behavior. So, for example, that you and I have a gustatory preference, we've evolved taste buds for fatty foods would be a manifestation of the survival module. Now, I may prefer a juicy steak, you may prefer chocolate mousse. So, the specific instantiation of that drive might be different across you and you and I, but we both prefer chocolate mousse or steak than raw celery, right? Yes, we do. the survival. We do, exactly. And and and I think I'm a bit or maybe a lot chunkier than you, so some of us even prefer more than others. So, then the So, that's So, that's survival, that's reproductive. Let's do the last two. Kin selection is the mechanism that explains why I would jump into a river to save three of my brothers. If If evolution operated at the individual level, meaning that the whole individual, then there should never be an evolutionary advantage for doing that. But once we recognize that evolution operates on at the gene level, then to the extent that my brothers on average share half of my genes with me, if I jump into the river and I die and I save three brothers, the evolutionary calculus checks out. So, then how do we apply this in, say, consumer behavior? Well, there are all sorts of uh types of investments, parental investments, for example, that you to your children, or gift giving to your kin, that would be very well explained via kin selection. So, it turns out, another study that I've done, that the the size of the gift that I give to people, let's say at the Christmas season, is perfectly modulated by my genetic relatedness with those people. I give a larger gift to my brother than I do to my first cousin than I do to my second cousin. That mechanism, even though if it's subconscious, I'm not aware of it, it's already driving the allocation of my gift giving budget. And then the first the fourth mechanism is called reciprocal altruism. This is the mechanism that explains why I would jump into the river to save Tom. Tom is not my kin. Tom is not biologically linked to me. Well, the idea is that a lot of these behaviors stem from a tit-for-tat strategy, right? And so again here, there's all sorts of behaviors that we engage in as as consumers that are based on that. So, when I invite you on your birthday to a fancy restaurant, I do expect, even though I might not enunciate it, that you will reciprocate when it's my turn. And if you don't, then that's a violation of our social bond. Now, from a classic economic perspective, why don't we just skip this whole ritual? I'm going to pay 100 bucks on you, you're going to pay 100 bucks on me, we're going to end up at the same place, so skip the whole thing and let's not invite each other. Well, we do it because reciprocal altruism rituals is the mechanism that oils is is the lubricant of our social bonds. So, to answer you in a I guess 5-10 minute version, I argue that much of what we do can be mapped onto these four Darwinian modules. All right, that's super interesting, especially in the context of your new book, which is part of the reason that I wanted to go through that. So, the parasitic mind, your new book, [ __ ] fascinating. And um as somebody who, dude, when I say that I had zero interest in getting into the culture wars, for years I avoided it, um and then was looking off my balcony one night and was literally watching LA burn and you could hear the sirens and obviously what's going on now is is really really crazy. And you've talked about the If only I knew of an evolutionary psychologist who's been warning us for two plus decades about this. If only, if only Gad, that that would have been wonderful. Yeah, it's it's funny now how the reason that I started talking about this is precisely for that reason that nobody is speaking up about it. This has started to actually scare me for the first time in my life. I'm like, "Whoa, hey, civil war may not be inevitable." And I certainly hope that it's not, but it's on the table of options and that's the part that is very distressing. Um, you've said that the eighth deadly sin is cowardice uh, and that people need to have the testicular fortitude. Uh, I love that. Um, somebody's been reading my work. Oh, dude, for sure. And and very compelled by it. So, given what you just walked us through, like what the [ __ ] is going on with idea pathogens? How are people getting in the grips of what from somebody standing on the outside, it just seems it seems self-defeating. So, there are several ways I can go here. The The first natural way to jump from evolutionary theory to the idea pathogens story is as an evolutionist, one of the tools that I have in my toolbox or arsenal is this the field called comparative psychology. So, comparative psychology is the field that looks across species for certain homologous behaviors. So, for example, when I discussed earlier me purchasing the Maserati is akin to the peacock showing off his tail, that was a manifestation of comparative psychology. The idea being that we're ultimately all connected in the evolutionary tree of life. Uh, you know, the the bonobo is literally my animal cousin. We share a common ancestor if we go back enough in the tree of life, and so by studying certain behaviors or phenomena or morphological feature in other species, it can say something about us. So, that's the field of comparative psychology. So, because I want to give you kind of the background of how I developed this idea of parasitology. So, as I was seeing the lunacy unfolding within the ecosystem of the, you know, I started thinking, well, you know, what can cause other animals to engage in perfectly maladaptive ways? So, now you see the link of how I'm going from evolution to idea of pathogens. Well, there is a field called neuroparasitology. So, parasitology is the study of parasites, right? Now, some parasites go into your gut, the tapeworm. Neuroparasitology are specifically the parasites that go into your brain, right? And there are endless incredible examples in the animal kingdom of such, you know, phenomena. The one that I always say because some people seem somewhat familiar with it is Toxoplasma gondii. It's a parasite that attacks the brains of mice, who should be afraid of cats, but when they are parasitized by this particular brainworm, they lose their innate fear of cats, and they actually become sexually attracted to the cat's urine. They approach the cat. That's not a very good outcome for a mouse, right? Another example of a parasite is one that attacks ungulates, deer, moose, elk. When they are parasitized by this by this particular brainworm, they start One of the behavioral manifestations is they start engaging in circling behavior. So, they kind of bob their head, and they go around in a circle, unable to extricate themselves from this motor pattern. So, even if the looming predators are coming, it's not instantiating their flee mechanism. They're stuck in this mechanism. And so, that's that was my epiphany. I thought, okay, aha. Well, humans can certainly be parasitized by by actual brainworms, but regrettably for us, because of our big brains, we can be parasitized by a second class of brain worms, and I call them idea pathogens, meaning that they could literally be dreadful ideas that can proverbially get us to go around in the circle or approach the cat when we should be running away from the cat. All right, one thing I think it it will behoove us. So, the part of um the toxo parasite is the worm itself can only sexually reproduce in the gut of a cat. So, that worm has a a reason to want to instantiate that behavior, right? So, it's it's terrifyingly brilliant in why it's doing that. Now, it can reproduce asexually, but for whatever reason, I certainly don't understand, it prefers to reproduce sexually, so it wants to get into the gut of a cat. So, my question is, what is that Why the hell are people grabbing onto ideas where they are trying to detach themselves from reality? So, and this this You just answered the question. I answered it. Tell me how. Yeah, I know, without knowing. So, I argue Forgive me, did you finish your question? please go. Go, go, go. So, uh I argue that each of these idea pathogens, and and we can of course get into the specifics of these because people might be saying, "Well, what do you mean by an idea pathogen?" So, we'll talk about that. But, each of these idea pathogens share one thing in common. So, in the same way that, for example, cancer could be very different, but it shares the mechanism of unchecked cell division. So, that's the common thing. Now, the different instantiations of cancers might be very different beasts, but they certainly do share that commonality. Well, the idea pathogens share one commonality, and that is the their their desperate desire to free themselves from the shackles of reality. Why? What purpose does it serve? So, so, it depends if you want to answer it at the literally at the level of the idea pathogen or of the the vehicle that is espousing that [ __ ] which is the human being. So, that So, we can we can do it either way. So, but let's let's the cover some specific idea pathogens, okay? So, the the the the top the granddaddy of all idea pathogens is postmodernism, right? Because postmodernism basically frees us from the shackles of reality at the most fundamental epistemological level. There is no truth. By design or by accident? You mean that that pathogen evolved? whoever named postmodernism, like was it a philosopher that said, "Hey, I've got this new idea, it's postmodernism and it breaks us." Literally saying the words, "It breaks us from our connection to reality and or truth." Or I forget what you just said, but like the why? At some point this has to like you buy the Ferrari because it gets you laid. I'm trying to like make the like why the [ __ ] would you ever want to be on that. I my theory Now, here I'm entering the domain of uh I'm I'm I'm surmising. I love it the most. I'll I'll take speculation all day. Now, it is speculative, but I have pitched it to a few people and they said that they think I'm onto something. So, the the holy trinity of bullshitters, postmodernist bullshitters, are three French postmodernists. Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, right? They're three French French from France. I I I I make that distinction because Montreal is also French, but that's Quebec French. So, these three French bullshitters, I argue that what drove them to develop this field is exactly the getting laid thing, right? And let me explain. Now, at first it's going to sound as though I'm being sort of hyperbolic, but I really am not. I'm walking on campus. So, now I'm Jacques Lacan or Jacques Derrida. And those guys in chemistry and the neurosciences and in physics, they seem to be getting a lot of prestige. They're the hot quarterbacks on campus. This sucks. I too can engage in impenetrable prose. Just like in mathematics, by the way, my background is in mathematics. In mathematics, if you don't understand the language of mathematics, the first line of a paper, you're already out, right? They say that in physics, it takes maybe one page before you're lost. In mathematics, the first line and you're gone, right? Well, I want to also be a cool hot quarterback. So, I'm going to start developing verbiage, prose that is as impenetrable as those haughty mathematicians because through my full profundity, I could fool all the morons at Princeton and all the pretty girls looking at me from the first row into thinking I'm a deep thinker. So, we try it out. I engage in an endless verbiage of [ __ ] that has absolutely no meaning, literally zero semantic meaning, and guess what? People are fawning over me. Now, how do I have proof of this theory? Well, and I actually cite this in The Parasitic Mind, which you I I guess you have a copy of, so you can go back and check it. So, John Searle was a is I'm not sure if he's still alive, he's a famous American philosopher who was chatting at one point with one of the holy trinity of bullshitters, Michel Foucault. And he said to him, "How come Michel, when I sit down and talk to you in private, you seem to kind of make sense, but when I read your stuff, I don't understand much." And I mean, John Searle is not exactly a dummy, right? And he says, "Oh, well, I'm paraphrasing what he said. Well, you know, if in France, if you don't confuse them, then they can't take you seriously." Aha, my theory is right. So, it's peacocking through [ __ ] right? It's full profundity. So in the parasitic mind, I give another example. fMRI is a methodology that is used for brain imaging, right? Functional magnetic resonance imaging. Well, you could take the exact same paper that that this study has been done, by the way. I could take the exact same paper and I either put somewhere in the paper just a random gibberish image of of the brain activation patterns or not, and then I ask people, which one is more serious science? Oh, the the one with the with the multi-color image, see? Right? It's full profundity. It's what's called the illusion of explanatory profundity. It sounds sciency. So postmodernism sounds impressive. By the way, even my wife, when she hears me talk about it, she said, "You know, I feel so much better having heard this from you because when I was a student and I learned postmodernist philosophy, I used to always attribute my non-understanding to me being too dumb." Guess what? That's exactly what the charlatans do. Get up in front of the crowd, wow them with obscure [ __ ] and when they don't understand, most people are charitable, so they attribute the non-understanding to them being too dumb, not to the guy selling you [ __ ] Yeah, if you Does that give you a Very much so. If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, bamboozle them with [ __ ] So Boom. Now, what's interesting to me though is that I get that from a guy's perspective, you want to get prestige, it really does get you laid. Um but from a female perspective, like when you look at what's going on now with the social justice warrior and how much prestige you can get from being a victim or for calling out a victim or for calling out a perpetrator, what what's the game there? How how does prestige function in women? I get it in men, but not necessarily in women. So different possible ways. So one of the ways to stick with the theme of freedom from reality, well, radical feminism frees me from reality in that it removes the shackles of this annoying thing called biology, right? So, it is not true I'm speaking now as a radical feminist. Uh it is not true that there is such a thing as innate biological differences. Only Nazi KKK members who sleep with their sisters and have a dog named Rosco would say such a horrible thing. Every single sex difference is due to social construction. The only reason why Ariana Grande at 100 lb can't bench press as much as Baba who plays center for uh the Nebraska Cornhuskers is because the parents of Baba taught him through socialization to play rough and tumble, whereas they told Ariana Grande to be sweet and gentle. That's the only thing that led to their different trajectories so that one can bench press 800 lb and the other one can't lift a feather. So, that frees me from the shackles of reality by negating something called biology. The trans suffix does the same thing, right? Sure, I have a 9-in penis, but guess what? Magic, trans, I'm now a woman. You don't call me a woman, you're a transphobe bigot, right? So, it frees me from this thing called my genitalia. By the way, me saying this does not imply and I hate that I always have to remind people this. Me saying this does not imply that I'm not massively for transgender rights, right? Transgender people do exist and it's a very difficult existence. Me saying that does not negate their experience, nor does it condone any bigotry against them, but it says that in the pursuit of true social justice, we don't murder truth. I can support a world free of sexism whilst recognizing that there are differences between men and women. I could support transgender rights whilst recognizing that a 280 lb guy that used to be called John should not be competing with a 100 lb girl because bro, I'm now a woman. Okay? So, you see you see the tension? Yeah, here's the part that I don't understand and this is when I think about what are ideas that I want to get across before I die. Here is God maybe the most important to me. Skills have utility. What do I mean by that? They let you do things. So, you close your eyes, you imagine a world that's better than this one, you open your eyes and you have to actually be able to go out and make that world come true. So, I used to big brother for this little kid and he was really small and he wanted to be in the NBA. So, what do you want to be when you grow up? I want to play in the NBA. And I was like, okay, are you practicing? Because if you're not practicing basketball, like you're you're it's already stacked against you because I don't see huge height in your future. And then on top of that, if you're not playing, you're not going to be getting better. So, there are people that have been short that have gotten into the NBA, but exactly 0% of those people got into the NBA without an absurd amount of practice and training and getting better. And by getting better, you can go and compete and you can actually beat people at things. Um one of the most controversial posts that I've done in recent memory was me saying this is a competition, meaning life. Life is a competition. People flipped the [ __ ] out. And the reason they flipped out is not immediately apparent to me, uh but if I were going to surmise, it would be that there is so much emotional conflict in having to face that they they have a fixed mindset. So, when I say I'm not good enough yet, they just would have to face in their own mind that they're not good enough full stop. And when I think about hey, if you go develop a skill set, you can actually shape some piece of the world. You can have an insight. You can have a breakthrough in physics. You can solve a theorem in math. You can Like when I think about what physics has done to our modern world and technology and GPS, I mean being like Einstein's relativity theory gave us the ability to track people with GPS. And so you can drive to your friend's house without getting lost. It's like that that has real utility. It wasn't like just some theoretical thing that never plays out in the real world. So why do people want to break the bond? Like I'm legitimately confused. I actually don't understand. So I think I mean again, I think at the start of your question you you hit on the answer. So social constructivism is another idea pathogen, right? It's the one that says that we're born with empty minds. Earlier you mentioned the blank slate, right? So the tabula rasa view, not just of the human mind, but there is kind of a a a larger tabula rasa, which is that we are all born with equal potentiality. And it is only the mishaps of our environments that didn't make me come out to be a top NBA player, right? Well, there's something very hopeful in me thinking that my child has as much of a chance as any other child to be the next Lionel Messi or the next Albert Einstein. I want to hang on to that hope. Therefore, again, breaking free from reality in this case is a great ego defense strategy, right? I don't want you to tell me that look, based on these morphological features of your child at 11, the likelihood of him becoming the next Lionel Messi, given that he doesn't have coordination to catch a ball the size of his head, is probably not going to happen. No. By the way, this is what causes by the way the anti-vaxers to believe in the you know, all the anti-vaxer with the autism stuff, right? Because it makes a lot more sense for me as a as a parent of an autistic child child to think that there was something nefarious in the environment that caused my child. My child could not have been born spoiled. He was born perfect just like any other child. So, again, in many cases, I fully understand that these idea pathogens stem from a hopeful place, from a noble place. So, for example, cultural relativism is another idea pathogen. It basically says, "Who are you to judge the the the rituals of another culture? Bigot, shut up, right?" So, why do you cut off the clitorises of 5-year-old girls? Or why do you judge that? Who are you to judge, right? Well, again, that whole cultural relativism came from the idea 100 years ago from Franz Boas, who was the originator of He's an anthropologist. And then he trained the next many generations of bullshitters to argue that there are no such things as human universals. There is no such such thing as biology. Why? Because biology in the wrong hand could be misused, right? That's why people hate evolutionary theory, right? Because you geneticists used evolutionary theory. They didn't, right? All they said is, "Let's purify the the the gene pool by, you know, by uh stopping people from reproducing." I mean, that's not really evolutionary theory. Uh the Nazis said, "Hey, it's a struggle between the races. It's a Darwinian struggle. And hey, the Jews have lost, so who cares if we kill them? That's just Darwinian." The British social class elitists said, "Hey, we're the upper class. You guys are in the lower class. If you die out without health care, who cares? That's Darwinian." That's that became known as social Darwinism. So, because a whole bunch of people a whole bunch of cretins, miscreants, misused evolutionary theory, a whole bunch of academics came up with a new worldview that says, "Hey, let's not discuss biology. Let's build a new understanding of human beings and so that hopefully we don't have these but you again in the pursuit of noble causes you can't murder truth. It'll come back to bite you. So what do we have now? We have a hundred years of social sciences social scientists are not morons but if they are inculcated with the abdication of biology in explaining economics, consumer behavior, sociology, anthropology, you end up with edifices that are at best incomplete knowledge at worst [ __ ] knowledge. And so one of the things that I do in my scientific work is say, "Hey look, you can't understand managers and employees and employers and consumers without ever activating their biology, right? The how I behave in the marketplace doesn't exist outside my biology. It exists because of my biology. So I don't know if I was too long-winded but at all but this so we we as I try to cobble this together and and I'm just going to think out loud and so bear with me and I'll see if I can connect some of these dots. So one of the most fascinating things when I think about the physics of being human and whatever the the universal I will say the universal drivers of a human one of them to me seems self-evidently the need to feel good about yourself. And I know there was a study that showed the more delusional somebody is the more likely they are to be happy. And when you think about the ability to delude yourself and you think about the natural tendency towards a fixed mindset which using Carol Dweck's definition a fixed mindset is somebody who believes their talent and intelligence are fixed traits. I don't know why but there was another study that showed people gravitate towards natural talent. They find it just sexier just more appealing. And so they took a piece of music same piece of music same recording but they told people different stories about it. Either this was a a prodigy or this was somebody who trained for 10 years. And people, when you tell them it's a prodigy, they rate the same performance better than when you tell them it's somebody that trained. So, you've got this weird thing where people have they find natural talent sexy. They believe that their own talents are fixed and they're we have we all have this tendency towards self-delusion and that self-delusion has a survival basis because you're less likely to slide towards depression. So, now it's like you've got this terrifying [ __ ] cocktail of people who have every evolutionary reason to buy into ideas that break the bond to reality. And then the the way that if people are really gaining status by and I'm not sure that I understand well enough that it's mating seems one of the ways, but when you were going through that I felt like, "Whoa, this is the example of the cake and now we're trying to point to an egg." Because when I think about and we we have to talk about Lebanon and you living through a real civil war because when I when I there was just a dude executed on the streets of Portland. Now, we don't know all the details and so maybe it ends up not being what it looks like, which it looks like to me that he was executed for ideological reasons, that it was one side versus the other. And my thing is I think both sides are [ __ ] terrifying. I don't want people going to a side. But evolutionarily, you also have an us versus them. You walked us through that with the whole notion of you're more likely to give a big gift to your family, you're more likely to jump in the river to save your brother. Like there's But and you also mentioned that my value system cowardice, right? I'm doing all of I'm putting my whole [ __ ] company at risk because I'm suddenly talking about things people are not used to me talking about. And but I do it because I have a value system that says you can't be a coward under any [ __ ] circumstance. And so, now I find like myself being leased, you know, the the nature of humans have a value system that value system drives our behavior. I happen to have decided to value not being a coward. And so, you get this crazy mix which feels like it is pushing us inextricably towards conflict because I don't I don't know what the brakes are other than the horrors of war. That will back people to [ __ ] off. But at what cost? Right. Uh so many different things that I I'd like to say here. Thinking out loud here. But luckily, I guess we have enough time. So, we'll we'll we'll do the stream of consciousness, no problem. For your first point, uh which I want to just add a bit, when you said that uh our capacity for self-delusion and how that is linked to depression. So, let me add uh a fantastic uh finding to that story because I think your viewers would appreciate it. So, in in psychology, there's something called the fundamental attribution error. Do I attribute things internally, dispositionally, it's due to me being intelligent, or externally, it's due to the exam being easy. Okay? So, for the general pattern is that people attribute successes internally and failures externally. So, I did really well on the exam, well, because I'm very smart. If I do poorly, I did very poorly on the test because Dr. Sad is an [ __ ] right? So, that turns out to be the healthy way of viewing life, the delusional way. The only group of people who don't suffer from that attributional style are depressives. And therefore, that speaks to the chicken or egg question. And I unfortunately I don't have the answer to this because the the debate is still ongoing. Is it that people who start off in the world being more accurate about their attribution styles are more likely to become depressed or is it that when I'm in the throws of a clinical depression I become better self-modulated about the reality of the world and and it could be maybe a mixable. So there is you're exactly right that there is an evolutionary advantage to walking around with some self-delusion, right? I mean I shouldn't be thinking some of these self-delusions that come with the idea packages. Those are just departures from your reason. But what we're talking about is in a sense adaptive self-delusion. So for example, there is actually research that shows that overconfidence has adaptive value, right? I mean I wouldn't get out of bed to try things that I need to try if I don't come with a larger-than-life sense of what I can do, right? The world is actually shaped by people Are you are you talking about a sort of alpha versus beta the sort of sneaky [ __ ] thing where it's there are two paths to take? Cuz you said there's an an advantage to being overly confident, but if there's There is an advantage of being overly confident in that for example, entrepreneurial pursuits and you're certainly someone who has done well as an entrepreneur. Uh There's research actually that shows that entrepreneurship is linked to basal testosterone levels, right? The higher your testosterone level, the more the higher you score on an entrepreneurial proclivity scale. Well, why is that? Because testosterone if you like tracks risk-taking. So to the extent that entrepreneurship is a manifestation of risk-taking, I better think that I can conquer the world. If I walk around the world sucking my thumb and hiding in a fetal position in the corner watching Bridget Jones's Diary while eating ice cream, I'm unlikely to come up with Twitter and whatever other great entrepreneurial things, right? So there is a some value in being overconfident in your ability. But I want to talk about a second adaptive reason why we engage in self-deception. So, this is not quite self-delusion, but self-deception. And this comes from Robert Trivers, who is a phenomenal evolutionary biologist, who is the guy who came up with the theory of reciprocal altruism, the one where I explained the four Darwinian modules. Now, I apply it in consumer psychology, but the original theory of reciprocal altruism comes from Robert Trivers. Well, he came up with many other amazing theories, one of which is the evolution of self-deception. Why are we so incredibly adept at bullshitting ourselves? And here, the the evolutionary argument is just brilliant in its simplicity. You ready? I'm ready. You're strapped I am. Let's do it. here we go. So, when you and I are engaging in an interaction, there is oftentimes Machiavellian intent. I'd like to persuade you. I'd like to manipulate you. And you And you have to It's It's a host-parasite dynamic. As I evolve better strategies to be duplicitous with you, and when I say me, I don't mean Gantz side, I mean two humans, right? Uh As I'm trying to manipulate you through Machiavellian intelligence, you have to evolve the weaponry to detect my possible duplicity. One possible set of ways by which you can detect my duplicity is that there are these micro signatures when I lie. So, for example, Paul Ekman, the psychologist at University of California, San Francisco, had a brilliant career as a psychologist, where he studied all of these universal facial grimaces, right? And then the the police forces and the military forces would consult with him to see if they can study, well, when I'm interviewing a terrorist or a prospective terrorist, can I dep- depict those micro signatures? Well, when I'm lying to you, hopefully, I can hide those micro signatures, so that when you're looking at me to pick up those signatures, you don't see them. Well, what's the best way for me to make sure that I don't emit those signals? If I believe the [ __ ] right? So, Jerry Seinfeld had a great episode where George Costanza, this I discussed this in my first book, The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption. So, Jerry Seinfeld is trying to learn how to be duplicitos like George Costanza, and at one point George Costanza looks at Jerry and says to him, "Remember, Jerry, if you believe it, it's not a lie." And I said, "Aha, that's the theory of Robert Trivers." Which, by the way, speaks to the fact that one of the reasons why we love products of popular culture is precisely because they say profoundly important things, if you know how to look for them, about our evolved human nature. Boy, that was a mouthful. What do you think? Uh that is so interesting and terrifying. And while you were talking, I thought, I don't understand I mean, look, I I do understand the reasons that I I walked us through, but it what you were saying gives me power because I'm able to understand humans better. And the more that I can understand them, the more that I can effectively navigate the world. And so, this comes back to another idea that I really want to get across to people, which is what is your goal? Because once you have a goal, and if your goal is exciting and honorable, now you've got something that you can really give yourself over to. And if it's obviously honorable, it's hopefully lifting people up. You have a way to judge whether what you're doing makes sense or not. And when I look at what you refer to as the lunacy of academia, or some people would call the lunacy of the left, what I'm trying to figure out is do they, in their own minds, have a clear goal? And my guess is some do, and some don't. And some, most, I would say probably the vast majority steer by emotions. So, something makes them feel some kind of way. So, let's go back to um status, right? So, um you have this ideology that lets you jump on a victim rung somewhere or even your idea of sort of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, um leveraging the victimhood of others and by pointing that out and standing up for them, you're able to sort of get on you're able to get that feeling of being noble, of being honorable, and so it makes you feel the way that you want to feel. So, I really do believe that to maximize it's I have a hard time putting it into words cuz if I say pleasure, people are not going to get the right idea. To to get a neurological state that you would want to stay in, um I people really should follow their emotions in that way. Okay? So, I follow my emotions. I'm trying to move towards pleasure. I'm trying to move away from pain. But, what I have found is that what gives you pleasure and what gives you pain is malleable. Now, it I really believe what you say that nature holds the leash over culture and so all this stuff that I'm talking that's malleable, it has to be in alignment with the true nature of a human, the physics of being a human. Okay. Yes. How you feel about yourself when you're by yourself to me is the ultimate neurochemical cocktail of importance. So, if like how many billionaires have to commit suicide before people realize it's not money, it's not status. It it is truly Do you think you're an [ __ ] Do you think you're a piece of [ __ ] I've heard you talk about this a thousand times. You judge every day by I put my head down on the pillow and I was just going to give that story. I didn't know you knew about it. people because I think it's it's super important. Uh so, people often ask me because obviously I have a big platform and people write to me, you know, you seem so happy despite all the stuff you get. And I always tell them what guides me, if I bring it down to the most fundamental level, I'm I'm I'm driven by almost a maladaptive purity ethos that's shaped by two ideals, truth and freedom. And in the book, if you remember, I actually give examples from my life of how I've instantiated those two ideals in very different ways. So, for example, when I was a soccer player, the way that I instantiated my drive for freedom is that I played my my best performances was when I played as the playmaker, the number 10 position, where I get to roam around looking for spaces to take advantage of. When a coach would put me with some positional restrictions, "You're playing more on the left side of midfield. You have to track back Tom, number eight of the other team." It's not because I was a primadonna and a diva and you shouldn't tell me what to do, is that once you put restrictions on my movements, my brain exploded and I couldn't play anymore because my biggest talent was to be free and roam around looking for those spaces, those opportunities. And so So, to come back, so this purity bubble, which causes me to set a very high bar of personal conduct, makes it such that at the end of the day, so to to take what you kind of gave part of the punchline away, when I put my head on my pillow and I need to feel fully comfortable within myself, I need to feel as though I did whatever I could, however big it is or however small it is, to fighting for those ideals. If I did, I sleep well at night. If I didn't, I'm a fraud who's an insomniac. And therefore, in a sense, it's a very punishing and exacting standard because this is what causes me to then be so hyperactive in everything that I do because I'm seeing the [ __ ] and the murder of truth and the rape of truth coming at me from every direction, and if I don't intervene, then I'm akin to the guy who sees the woman being raped in the alley and she's screaming, but then I pretend, "Oh, I didn't hear her, officer. I I didn't hear her. If only I would have heard her, I would have intervened." That speaks to that eighth sin, cowardice. The problem, I think, and maybe you could help me here, is that I can explain the whole phenomenon. I can get people to understand it. I'm not sure that you can get people to change the spots of their leopard, right? So, some people on the curve are incredibly courageous. Some people are cowardly, and it doesn't matter how many times I give you the battle cry of march on, soldiers of freedom. If you don't have the testicular fortitude, I'm not sure I can reach you. So, what do you think? Do you think that everybody is redeemable or there's just a few that are going to carry it for everybody? Yeah, not not everybody is redeemable, but if you um in the sense that there are some people just truly their brain is broken or their brain doesn't meet minimum requirements. I don't think a lot about that, so I'll set that aside and I'll say everybody that meets minimum requirements, all of them are {quote} {unquote} redeemable. So, now the question I I like to play a game, uh no [ __ ] what would it take? And I will try to bring this all back to um what I was saying before, sort of how this um cocktail of things ends up becoming a problem in that if people define their goals and had the kind of self-awareness that you have that we, you know, we might be able to work our way out of this. But, if the no [ __ ] answer to somebody who has a broken value system and is therefore a coward, let's just take that one since you and I share that. I think it's it's tremendously important, matters to me a lot, and if I if I were to die in service of being brave in the face of here cuz I feel fear like a [ __ ] but I act despite that fear. So, if I were to die in service of that, I would go out being like, "Cool, I feel good about myself." If I live to 130, but think I'm a a dirtbag that won't help when I I somebody crying, that that is just not a life that I want to live. Now, how do I know that? Because I have been a coward too many times and I know how it makes me feel, right? So, this is not somebody who had purity. This is somebody who went through exactly what I'm going to say is the punchline for somebody that has a broken value system. If you said, "Tom, this person you have to save them." I'd say, "Cool. You're going to drop us off on a desert island with me and like 10 [ __ ] die hard Navy SEAL type [ __ ] and we're going to have our value system and we're going to be hardcore." And that person is going to have nowhere to turn. So, if they want to get that social interaction, if they want the respect of their peers, they have to become a hardcore person. They have to be the type of person that will be courageous. Because we all, physics of being a human, one of the innate things that is [ __ ] universal, we all want the respect of our peers. Yes. And when you get put, which is exactly what happened to me, getting into [ __ ] business and marrying a woman who was not for play, that put me in this like, "Hey, you better [ __ ] act in a way that's onspiring, that's cool, and quite frankly, it better work." And that's the cool thing about business and where I'm going with this whole notion of Okay, you have a value system. You have clearly defined it. Now you can figure out if it works or not. Meaning, I have a goal, I know what it is, I can write it in a single [ __ ] sentence. If you can't write it in a sentence and it can't be vague like, "I want to help people." That's some seriously vague [ __ ] It has to be hyper specific. Hyper specific in a single sentence what you want to do with your life. Now you can run experiments, right? Literally the scientific method. What I call the physics of progress. I have an obsession with getting to the root level of things. Like, where where it is no longer reducible. So, I have a goal, I know what it is, I have the self-awareness to be asking myself questions about what I want, to be able to write this down. And then I say, "Hey, I did this thing. Did it actually move me towards it?" And this is why the whole notion of #shutdownstem or #um end science, I forget what the And they're so [ __ ] terrifying to me. Science must fall. Science must fall. Thank you, that's beyond terrifying. Um is now if we know that we should be steering towards the things that make us feel good, we should be moving away from the things that make us feel bad. Now we have to be very careful about what value system we take on because our value system will shape, just as it that person on the desert island who, you know, 10 months before may have been absolutely fine being a coward, will now feel like [ __ ] being a coward because they want the respect of those people. And when they get it and they're celebrated, that begins to shape what their neurochemistry will respond to. And I'm convinced you could fMRI them before they went on the island and after. And over here, if they if they get reinforced by being a coward, then they will continue to be that way. And if over here they're getting celebrated for being um hardcore brave, then now, if you re-transpose them over here, they would at least temporarily not feel good about being a coward. Okay, so now if we believe that, that it's natural that the the mind will respond to what you were punished for and what you were celebrated for, most importantly though in your own mind, but that will be shaped by the group that you're in, now it's like, what the [ __ ] have you chosen to value? Because that ultimately will shape what you feel good about, which will ultimately shape your behavior because we move towards what makes us feel good and move away from what makes us what makes us feel bad. And now that's where I feel like we are right now, where people get status because it has been presented, which is the area you understand far better than I, but it has been presented that postmodernism is good, um equal outcome is what we should strive for, you're a bigot if you want anything else that if you try to even bifurcate the world into male and female with But all of that to me seems absurd because I have a different goal which is the how much of your potential can you turn into real skill set that has value for not only you but for society at large. And that that value for me is defined by that feeling good but moving towards goals that are both exciting to you and honorable to the world at large. So, it's like once you get the sort of cake baked of how I think, now I become very predictable. And so, when I try to work backwards to what would the cake need to be that would make the way people are behaving predictable now, it is a it is a weird [ __ ] cake. And that's sort of where I'm left. Yeah. So, I I I can build on what you're saying. So, uh first earlier you said something like uh you know, understanding those fundamental rules of behavior or something just allows me to navigate through the world better. Uh I that really resonates with me because when whenever I come into class, whether I'm So, I teach at the undergraduate level, I teach at the MBA level, Masters of Science level, PhD level, I always say the same thing. In this course, I'm I'm not going to be teaching you how to be a better marketer or a better manager. I'm going to give you the universal key of human behavior, which you could then go apply it to understand consumers, to understand your spouses, to understand your your employees or employers. And I always tell them I I look at them and I say, "There will be several of you in this room who in the next 5 years will write me an email and say the following." The exact same thing that I'm about to say. "I just had a fight with my husband or wife and I now know exactly why because of lecture seven where you talked about the evolution of romantic jealousy, right? So, in other words, uh understanding that knowledge is truly about as actionable as you can get because I'm not teaching you what Procter and Gamble should do in case study number seven. I'm giving you the universal key, MFE, okay? So, thank me, right? So, that's that's the first thing I was going to say. Then, the second thing I I loved your story about the the the guy who goes from the island with the Navy SEALs and and the the cowards, right? So, in a sense, these are two echo chambers, right? If you only exist in the echo chamber of the cowardly bunch, then you never even understand that there is such a thing as bravery of the Navy SEALs. Now, what is the universal principle that applies to these two groups? So, and this is I don't know how far you I hope you read the whole book, but if you didn't, here's part of it. You You You read the whole You finished the whole book? Oh, great. That's wonderful. Uh so, at one point, I talk about virtue signaling versus costly signaling, right? And and here I am using a fundamental principle from evolutionary biology. It is astonishingly profound. So, now, it's going to apply to those two groups that you're talking about. So, let's do it. When I do #JeSuisCharlie or #FreeTheGirls, you know, for the Boko Haram that Michelle Obama, the great prophet, gives us, right? She puts a sign where she's sad and pouting, Je Suis the Girls, right? It makes me feel good, but in an incredibly cowardly echo chamber of the castrati, right? Because I don't even know the idea that for a signal to truly be honest, it has to be costly. So, let's step back for a second and explain the evolutionary underpinning of that story. The peacock evolves its tail despite the fact that having that tail reduces its survivability. In other words, if if if it were due to natural selection, which remember, natural selection is it evolves because it gives me a survival advantage, well, the peacock could not have evolved that tail because it reduces its survivability. It makes him more visible to predators. It makes it more easy easy for predators to catch you because you can't take flight when you have such a massive tail. But, if you recognize that there is a dual process of sexual selection, which basically says that I need to first survive, but then I need to find a mate who's willing to extend their genes with me. It's a the life is a two-stage game. So, I can survive all you want if I don't mate, it's all over, right? So, the second step is that tail evolves because of recurring female mate choice that chooses tails that are ostentatiously big, that have iridescent coloring, that have these big patterns, and so on. Therefore, now, why would that evolve? Well, because the female, the peahen, has to choose between a bunch of suitors. Each of these suitors is going to say to her, "Hey, hey, choose me. Have sex with me. I'm the real deal." So, she faces a problem now, a conundrum. How do I know the fakers from the real guys, the imitators from the true guys? Well, the signal that they emit has to be so costly that it handicaps them. Meaning that by me having that signal, I'm saying, "Hey, look, sweetie, despite the fact that I've got the signal that's very costly, I'm still standing here. I must be the guy that you should be mating with." Now, how do I apply this in the in the human in the human context? Well, if you take rites of passage around the world, let's say boy specific passages, it's never if you do 10 push-ups, you're now a warrior and you can mate with all the hot girls. Because, guess what? Almost everybody in that tribe could emit that signal. We could all do the 10 push-ups. But, if, as happens in the in the Vanuatu tribe in the South Pacific, I have to go up an 80 to 100-ft platform, you have to tie vine ropes to my feet, and I have to jump off headfirst, and it stops my brain splattering a few inches from the floor, that's a costly signal. Only the guys with real big ones can actually do that. So, we're quickly going to assort the riffraff from the guys that I should be having sex with if I'm if I'm a hot woman in that tribe. Therefore, for the signal to be honest, it has to be handicapping, therefore it must be costly. Now, how do we apply this to all the social justice stuff? Making my hair red and putting a mouth What is it called? The fish mouth? Fish mouth and putting duck face. Thank you. I'm I'm mixing up the animals. Putting a duck face with the cool glasses, the rim glasses, and going just be Charlie. You know how much costly signaling it has? Zero. But, if you're Raif Badawi, who is the guy who is currently in prison in Saudi Arabia, who was flogged, who is in prison for 10 years because he criticized the Saudi regime while living as a blogger in Saudi Arabia, whoa. That's big balls, right? By the way, I'm good friends with his whole family. They live close here to Montreal. So, when I tell people activate your inner honey badger, that's exactly what I'm saying. If you truly want to go at the end of the night feeling good about yourself, putting hashtag and changing the flag to the France, you're just a fraud, and all the Navy SEALs know that you're a fraud. Maybe your big-haired friends think you're impressive, but the greater world knows that you're a fraud. Why don't you join the true brave and actually speak out against female genital mutilation mutilation in the Middle East? That's a costly signal. I used to I'll tell you just one quick other story, Tom, about costly signaling. About 3 years ago, I had received a gigantic amount of death threats. It was just completely out of control. And I'd always been someone Sorry. That's a good times. Yeah, good times. And so I had to walk into university and check in with security. They would walk with me to my class. And then And then the door would be locked in such a way that students could leave whenever they wanted, but if they wanted to come back in, it was locked. I would have to let them in, right? And that lasted for, you know, that one semester. The university came with me, they sent an HR person with me, and we went to the Montreal police, not the campus police, the Montreal the police, to file a report. And I started developing symptoms I had never experienced this of not I'm anxious like real, I mean, clinical anxiety because I would walk into campus, I would say goodbye to my wife, and I wouldn't know who's going to come at me from which direction and if I'm going to make it back into the car that afternoon. And then when I would get back to the car, I would literally have this incredible weight off my shoulder. I live for another week to the next week's lecture. Now, thankfully, eventually nothing happened and those Why were you getting death threats? Uh for all sorts of reasons, but in that I mean, there was there are many things. First of all, I had criticized Islam. I criticized you know, every single sacred cow that you could think of that can get people to be riled up against you, I criticized. That's costly signaling, right? When you take a guy who's very mellow, who becomes, you know, I used to have like a uh I used to think about, you know, if I go into the elevator and there are four guys in there, how can I protect myself? These were all my thought I'm I'm a professor in the 21st century in Montreal, Canada, but I don't know who's coming at me. When they and and a lot of it was the the death threats were like Jew stuff. So, we you know, we were going to boil you last Jew. We're going to kill you this way, Jew. This way, Jew. Jew. Jew. All kinds of stuff. So, I didn't even know if they were some of them were they were neo-Nazis, whether they were Islamists, whether but it was coming at me fast and furious. Some of it was due to the fact that uh at one point Jordan Peterson and I were going to speak at an event which was shut down. One of the people who was going to be at that event was a woman who was somewhat contentious and the organizer of the event when they reorganized the event decided to not invite her because it was a private event and she didn't want to take on all and so all the neo-Nazis sympathizers that liked that particular journalist argued that it's the diabolical Jew who had uh stopped her from coming to the event which was absolutely not the case, right? I was just one of the speakers. I had nothing to do with whether she came or not. Uh the organizer asked me if she should be invited. I offered her my opinion. I gave her the pros and cons and that was it. But a lot of people were very, very upset by it. So, anyways, all this to say is that that's costly signaling. Now, it's not as costly signaling as Raif Badawi who's doing it from Saudi Arabia, right? Uh So, so I was asked at that event when it was rescheduled, you know, who would I consider to be my heroes and I said, "Every single person in the Middle East who's speaking out in the way that I do, that's my hero." Because at worst, I can be canceled. I mean, as long as they don't kill me. They They cancel what? They're going to come after me on Twitter? Come after me. But these people are putting their lives on the line. And so, I hope I've given you a good sense between the difference between those two ecosystems that you were talking about earlier, right? You have and and I want to get back to um rituals. Coming of age rituals are are really important to me. But first, I think right now um putting you in context. I didn't know this about you until I started um reading your book and researching you that you actually lived through a civil war and um I think part of why people are so like they're downplaying the violence is that that's happening here in the US is because it's it's been so long since we had violence on our own streets. And out outside of obviously um sort of high crime area. So the average person is not experienced that kind of violence. Um you hear Rogan say a lot, people don't understand, they've never seen real violence up close and they don't know how terrifying it is. Um walk me through that cuz what what is Here Here's what's Here's what I would love for you to focus on is every human in my estimation, every human is capable of the kind of like cruelty and dehumanization of other people to the point where they would kill them um that you lived through. And growing up things like that were a Middle Eastern problem. They were not a an American problem. And so even I, not realizing I had sort of all these uh just sort of base assumptions running in the background of my mind that I'd never happen in the West. And so to see like where we're going is like it's it's very unnerving. So how in Lebanon do people end up deciding they want to kill each other? Right. Uh so in chapter one of the parasitic mind, precisely because I wanted to give people the personal narrative of what led me to become the parasitologist of the human mind that I am, part of it comes from a personal narrative, right? I mean, part of it is yes, I'm a professor of 26 years, I see the ecosystem of the lunacy every day, but as I explained in that chapter, I faced two great wars, as you so aptly summarized. There's the the great war on reason at the universities, but there is the civil war in Lebanon, which shaped my childhood. So I grew up for the viewers who don't know uh as part of the last wave of Lebanese Jews. Not Druze. Druze is different. Jews, J E W S, Jewish. So, we were part of the last group of Lebanese Jews who had doggedly remained in our homeland. Yes, Lebanon is our homeland, not Israel, Lebanon, right? Jews were in Lebanon way before they were anything else in that region. But anyways, so we were very well enmeshed in the society, but it was always clear that we were Jews. Don't Don't wear the Star of David too big. Shh. Be quiet, okay? So, we will tolerate you until the day that we won't tolerate you. That's sort of the history of Jews in all those areas, right? There were Iraqi Jews, there were Syrian Jews, there were Yemeni Jews, there were Egyptian Jews. And now, there are no such Jews. And so, when people say things like But, why do you say it was bad? I mean, you lived there, right? And I always answer, "The guy was walking perfectly until he had the heart attack, right?" So, we were all perfectly fine until we had to really sprint hard so that our heads were not cut off. sudden is that? Because that that's what I'm I'm trying to bring that into a context. I'm not an alarmist. I'm actually a wildly optimistic person. So, it's it's even been unnerving to me how much this has gone like, "Ooh, I can actually see this becoming something truly problematic." And I worry that people are lulled into I think Bret Weinstein said, "Because it is rare, people confuse it with impossible." And how how fast did it spill over? Yeah. There's an Arabic expression that says, "Don't Don't ask the doctor, ask the one who's been through it." So, with all due respect to Bret Weinstein, he's speaking in platonic ideals. No, he I think he's saying the same thing you're saying, which is that people get confused. You don't see it very often, so you think it'll never happen. And he's saying it really could happen. Well, I I have been predicting and people thought that I was being hyperbolic, right? I mean, I'm kind of exaggerating, I'm embellishing for for you know, for effect. I've been saying, "Look, there will be civil war in the West in exactly the same way that it happened in Lebanon, but you have to have a longer-term view. It's not 12 years, it's not 15, it's 12 years, it's 50 years, it's 100 years, it's 500 years. But if you get rid of the universal first principles that inoculate you against the natural inclination of tribalism, you will have Lebanon. I can't tell you what's the date. It could be in 327 years, it could be in 33 years, but it will happen. Because what you're effectively doing is you are eradicating this unique protective belt that we were able to create in the West. What what is that protective? What are those first principles? Well, so for example, the idea of individual dignity, individual freedom that comes enshrined within classical liberalism is is one of the great virtues of the Enlightenment and of the West, right? It basically says, "I am Gad Saad before I am a Lebanese Jew." Lebanese Jew is one attribute within my personhood, but when I present myself to you, I am Gad Saad, number one, full stop. I'm not Lebanese Jew, I am Gad Saad, right? Well, so when we all are individual elements of a greater whole, then I'm no longer Asian-American, I'm no longer Muslim-American. I am American. So for example, I am Canadian, right? I love Canada. Canada gave me the opportunity to free a [ __ ] uh free myself or escape a [ __ ] and come and live my life here in dignity. Therefore, I support Canada even more than being Jewish. Why? Because Canada is the place that gave. So, in other words, that already that, when you don't do the hyphenation [ __ ] that is one layer of protection, right? It basically says, "I'm American. I'm Canadian." Now, what does it mean to be American? It means that you should support certain fundamental ideals. Blind justice. So, like uh Lady Justice being blind. Also, for example, I argue in and I'll come back to my Lebanese experience cuz it's it's worth explaining the whole story. But, I have drawn an analogy, but it's not even an analogy, it's a direct comparison between Sharia law and progressive logic. How? Sharia law, one of the fundamental tenets of Islamic law, Islamic jurisprudence, is that the crime that happens, the punishment that is meted out is a function of the identity of the perpetrator and the victim. As a matter of fact, it is enshrined in Sharia law where you give like a sliding scale table. It's a Muslim man who kills a Jewish man, that's the penalty. If it's a Muslim this, right? Okay. Well, what does It's relative? It's right. So, for example, Oh. I mean, literally 1/3, 1/5, this penalty is what It's completely based on your identity. Gee, I wonder if there's a thing called identity politics that is completely that, right? So, what does the progressive stock say? You are transgender person of color? To the front of the line you go, please, sir or madam. You're a white male heterosexual? Shut the hell up, you stupid piece of [ __ ] You are an oppressor, right? So, again, it enshrines within the ethos of our society that we're all equal but to varying degrees of equal. Guess what? I escaped that [ __ ] It's called the Middle East. And now, under the cloak under the robe of progressive mindset, I am replicating that idiocy. So, identity politics is a cancer to human dignity. It is grotesque, right? So, now let's go back to Lebanon. So, I grew up in Lebanon. I was born in 1964. I always knew that we are different in that, you know, we're Jewish, be quiet. There would always be little scrimmage like not not big things but well, actually pretty big things. I I describe a story where I'm sitting in class in elementary school and the teacher says, this is before the war. Are you Do you know which story I'm going with here? crazy. Well, this by the way is called Tuesday as a Lebanese Jew, okay? So, I'm sitting in class and the teacher says, this is before the civil war. The civil war did not break out. So, this is pre-heart attack. Nothing's happening, right? But that's how you normalize hate. That's or to use the term of the bullshitters of today, that's how you other. This is othering on hyper steroid, right? So, the teacher says, please stand up kids each at a one at a time and tell us what you want to be when you grow up. Oh, I want to be a soccer player, teacher, I want to be a police officer and so on. And one kid gets up. I still have his photo in in my class photo. I know exactly which kid it is. And he says, oh, when I grow up, I want to be a Jew killer. And everybody laughs and smiles, right? That's a lot more than misgendering someone, right? But by the way, that was everywhere even in tolerant, modern, pluralistic Lebanon where we weren't being decapitated every day, you always knew that the anti-Semitism was going to break out somewhere. The politician would say how evil the Jews are. Oh, my aunt just had diabetes, the [ __ ] Jews. The It's sunny outside, the Jews. It's raining outside, the Jews. Not Israelis, the Jews, the diabolical Jews. So the So the reason why I said we were part of the last group of Jews is because the writing becomes on the wall. Like you see what's happening. So there's an exodus There's a slow exodus of Jews and we were part of the last few that had remained doggedly because my parents, you know, were from a prominent family. We were well entrenched. We had a lot of connections and Lebanon is a beautiful country until it no longer is. And when it no longer is, you better high-tail your ass out of there quickly because there's a whole lineup of people who are willing to decapitate your head. Now, people will write to me sometimes and they will say, "Well, you know, you're not the only one who suffered violence." Of course not, but there is something unique about being Jewish in the Middle East in an Arabic country. So for example, I discuss a phenomenon in Lebanon where your In Arabic you say Hawiya. Your your There's an internal passport that you Let's say if the policeman stops you and says, "Show me your ID." It's kind of like a passport but internally. And on that internal ID card, it's written your religion because everything in the Middle East is through the prism of your tribal allegiance. Your religion explained like why? So, hey, here's why we put everybody's religion on the document. It That's just the way society is It's unquestioned. It's just unquestioned. As a matter of fact, within the constitution of I don't know if it has changed since my days in Lebanon, but you know, the president has to be of this religion, the prime minister has to be of that religion, there has to be a certain number of seats in parliament to each religion. So again, imagine how to the typical Western mind that sounds insane, but that's exactly what we are enshrining now in our identity politics. We celebrate someone because they're the first Muslim American in Congress. I don't give a [ __ ] that they're Muslim. I I've never thought about oh, Adam Schiff, I don't know, is is he Jewish? I don't know. Do you know if he's Okay, let's let's let's let's go with he's Jewish. Oh my god, I am so excited that Adam Schiff uh Schiff is a Jew. I don't give a [ __ ] I despise Adam Schiff because he's a [ __ ] and that he is Jewish or not is completely immaterial to my thinking. But if you are peresitized by identity politics, then you would say, "Oh my god, I'm so excited that they are, you know, Bernie Sanders, he could be president and he's a Jew." How exciting is that cuz I'm also a Jew. Jew and Jew. No, Bernie Sanders to me is an execrable [ __ ] who's a [ __ ] and the fact that he is Jewish is completely immaterial to my calculus. So, the best advice I can offer Westerners is don't succumb to identity politics. You think it's inclusive and so on. It is a cancer that will metastasize into replicating Beirut, Lebanon. All right, so there's a few things in there that I want to go down a little bit further. So, first of all, did you said in the book that and I couldn't tell if you were saying it had actually been put into law or if there was just a form or something that had it, but that people have to put what their pronouns are. Is that You mean Lebanon? no, in Canada. No. Oh, no, so in no, so I was just So, I don't know which specific part you're talking about, but uh I'll give you the background to how I first came across the gender the gendering stuff. It was at a talk that I gave in like a real hotbed of [ __ ] Uh Wellesley College. I mean, you want to talk about, you know, hyper steroid of red-haired social justice warriors, it's Wellesley College, right? Ultra super privileged kids paying $10 million a semester in a super posh school outside of Boston, but complaining about the ills of the West, okay? So, I went there surprisingly because actually the guy who invited me was kind of open to, you know, my positions. And I think it was called the Freedom Project, and I was invited to speak about, you know, how the thought police is limiting freedom of expression on campuses. This is many years ago, so I was way before it was cool to do this. And uh So, I give my whole lecture, and after students and faculty stayed back for an extended, you know, Q&A period. And one student came up to me and said, "Okay, thank you, Professor Saad. This was great. But don't you think that it makes perfect sense that professors should be polling students at the start of every class about their gender pronouns?" And so, I then answered So, we we went back and forth, and usually one of the ways that you can test someone's ideas is to take what's called a boundary condition. Push their logic to the extreme to see if it makes So, I said, "Okay. So, let me ask you this. If I were a receptionist at a uh uh OB/GYN, a gynecologist office, and the patients come in, should I be, as good practice, be asking them what their gender pronouns are or gender identity, or should I presume that if they walk into that No, no, but that's an extreme example. But I said, "No, no, no. If you have to have universal principles. Is the principle that every interaction throughout society should be predicated on me asking you what your gender identity is, or has it served us well through our evolutionary history to presume that based on certain morphological features, I can quickly categorize you as male or female, knowing that there's a minuscule minority of people who do have transgender issues, and if you're a sensitive person, you will accommodate them. But should we have a machine gun strategy where we ask everybody would we not be wasting a lot of time in doing so? Of course she couldn't answer me. A few years later, I appear in front of the Canadian Senate along with Jordan Peterson on separate days to speak about Bill C-16, which was the uh bill that was trying to incorporate gender identity and gender expression within the rubric of hate crimes. And again, I was saying, of course I'm against bigotry, but let's be careful about the tyranny of the minority, and let's be careful about the proverbial slippery slope. And I quoted Harvard University that specifically had stated that warning, your gender identity can change on a daily basis. They weren't being facetious, they weren't being satirical, they weren't being hyperbolic. They were saying that your gender So then I said, well, how would you how would we manage that? I mean, literally I would take a poll so that Tom Monday is xie, Tuesday is he, Wednesday, right? But that's the kind of lunacy that has taken grip. So, I don't know if I've answered your question, so I'm not saying that you have to fill a form, but this is the background of how I got involved in the gender pronoun. have misread something in your book, but you were talking about um Bill C-16, and you and Jordan Peterson both warned, look, this this thing becomes problematic because you're compelling speech. Like it it isn't and Jordan has obviously spoken famously to this. It isn't even that I'm unwilling to um grant somebody's request if it's a sincere request and they're not trying to weaponize it or whatever. It's it's that you're telling me how I have to be. And so when you were talking about the fact that your ID says your religion in Lebanon, flash forward and that's going to be used at a checkpoint to kill you, it's like that's where I go, "Oh, guys, like I I it really pains me it really pains me. That truly profound wisdom gets repeated so often it becomes cliche. But like slippery slope, that's one of those like really really take that in um and be able to extrapolate. We're here today and maybe that doesn't scare anybody, but like you said, take it to the boundary condition. And somewhere along that way often times things get really scary. And people's either unwillingness to do that or they have a program that's running that tells them that it won't escalate to that or that yes, they they are legitimately they understand baby steps, baby steps at the back of the bus. And that's exactly how they're going to sort of slowly walk you down that garden path. Um so yeah, just when you were telling the story like real life civil war breaking out as an American kid of the '80s, it just seemed fake. It seemed like it was happening to uh another thing. Like that it it wasn't it was so the Middle East and the notion of terrorism and the notion of civil wars, it was either the past or it was some so distant place it might as well have been a different planet. And so I never had to like really wrap my mind around that escalation where it leads to killing. So there there are just Going back to the reason I'm so fascinated by evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, behaviorism, all of it is it helps you navigate the world more effectively. And one, just like putting it on yourself. So, my particular bent, which until as far as I can tell, like 6 months a year ago, was just non-controversial, but has now become like crazy controversial, is just own it yourself. Entirely you, think about you, control you, worry about you. You can't control anybody else. I would have handed anybody the book Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. Dude's in a concentration camp and is like, "Hey, you still get to control how you react, think, feel, all of that." So, it's like, "If that guy in that situation is telling you you still have some agency, trust me when I say you have agency." So, it's like I've always come at it from that perspective of you get to control you, you get to control how you think, react. You take ownership of your own life. And now, it's like, "If you take ownership for your own life and you're trying to navigate this world well, you need to really understand what you are like, you need to understand what other people are like. And by looking at that and going, "Oh, cool. Humans are susceptible to idea viruses. Okay, calm, you better [ __ ] pay really close attention to whether you've gotten an idea virus." So, when I look at the other side and I say, "They have entrenched themselves in in a vacuum. Like they only an echo chamber. They only hear what they want to hear. So, [ __ ] don't let yourself do that, right? Don't pick a side. Try to always judge everything by its merits. You know what your goal is? Is it moving you towards your goal or away from your goal? Cool, judge things by that." And so, when you are looking at how people behave so that you can look at yourself and make sure that you don't fall prey to things that aren't useful, that becomes, I would say, very advantageous. So, when I extrapolate where we are today out to Lebanon and people actually being killed at checkpoints, and you've said that, you know, all civil wars are judged by the brutality of the Lebanese Civil War. And you go, "Don't That's That's today." Like when I tell people Mao's [ __ ] China was in the '60s, man. Like that that was not some far removed thing that happened in the 1600s. That [ __ ] happened basically now. It happened in my parents' lifetime. I missed it by 10 years. So, it's like the the human that we all are today is susceptible to all of this like really scary [ __ ] And how we begin to recognize it in ourselves is the key to me. And recognizing that putting your religion on your ID is problematic seems very important, but it it requires people to see themselves as a potential perpetrator, which I don't know that people do. They they just see the the justice of their stance. Of their of their All right. But, by the way, the again, to look for sort of universal phenomena that explain manifestations of things in different ways, the way that you dehumanize Jews in the Middle East is the way you dehumanize Republicans within the ecosystem of academia. Now, the end outcome is not the same. In one case, we take you to the ditch and we shoot you. In the other case, maybe we e-mob you or we don't give you a job as a professor cuz you apparently said something nice about Trump. But, the mechanisms are the same. Those others are disgusting. They're immoral. They're diabolical. So, now, when people see me commenting, again, I think being Canadian gives me a layer of protection because I can always remind people that I don't have literally a dog in the in the fight because I don't care, really. I mean, yes, Canada is linked to the US, but I'm not What I am indignant about are those more universal phenomena that I see. And what I see, because I am in the ecosystem of academia. And since academia is 95% leftist bullshitters, what ends up happening is I criticize the left because that's the disease that I see. That doesn't mean that the right doesn't say stupid [ __ ] right? It doesn't mean that The example I always give is if a hick republican to take a stereotypical archetype, if a hick Republican senator says that evolution is a hoax, then I would also be saying what an idiot. But the reality is that the idea pathogens that I speak of are wholly due to academic left. So this is like saying, "If I am a diabetes physician, someone comes to me and says, 'But bruh, what about melanoma? Why are you such an [ __ ] Why don't you talk about melanoma?' Well, because I'm not a dermatologist. I am a endocrinologist, right? So what the diseases that I see are wholly due to the left. The dehumanization of the other that I see are strictly due to from the left. Why? Because I live in academia. So I see my highfalutin, cognac-sipping, pipe-smoking, ivory-tower dwelling friends look at those disgusting people, all 60 million of them, all of whom voted for Donald Trump, not one of whom had any valuable reason to vote for for Trump. They were all just race rabid racist. Now this is not some idiot who's saying this. These are people that if I said their names to you now, you would say, "Yeah, that's true. He did say that." That makes me indignant. How could you be so intelligent on so many other things, but yet you become exactly the person who is parasitized by the same [ __ ] tribalism that I ran away from in Lebanon. So, when people see me quote defending Trump, I'm not at all defending Trump. I'm defending a higher ideal. People in a democracy are going to have varying opinions. Very reasonable people. There are very compelling reasons why you might like Biden, and I see them. But, there are also very compelling reasons why you might like Trump, and I also see them. Be a bit nuanced, more on. Stop being such a partisan hack, right? So, again, that's where I'm coming from. But, because most of my interventions then seem to be I'm trying to modulate the left, that makes people think that I am a surrogate for Trump. I'm getting paid by Trump in my home in Montreal. I'm not. I don't care about Trump either way. But, I can tell you, I don't know if you want to go there. I can list you 12 reasons, 20 reasons why perfectly rational people would prefer Trump over Clinton or over Biden. So, you see what I mean? I do. And And here's Here's how To your point about being nuanced, here's how I think about this stuff. So, I am I have my entire life I've been apolitical. And um partly because of the expertise thing, it's like I You can only be an expert in so many things, and I just had a passion that was leading me in a direction, and I've chased that, and it's been absolutely thrilling, and sort of the joy ride of my life. And now, only because I sense danger, like I won't say existential, we'll get to the other side of it. I And maybe that's me being a fool, but I don't see it as an existential risk to humanity, maybe to the West on a long enough timeline, like you said. But, I'm more just like the the game we're playing has an outcome that I don't that doesn't match with my goals, right? So, I have clearly defined goals, and so I just weigh everything against whether it actually moves us towards that goal. I have the purview of business, so it's like there are cut-and-dry answers as to whether something's moving you towards your goal or not. Like you If you're specific enough in where you're going and you're able to look at the data, you can just say yes, I'm making progress or no, I'm not making progress. And so, when I run the thought experiment, which I think is very important for people to get good at, so you don't have to do really unlikely experiments to be successful in that they will um almost certainly not move you towards your goal in a meaningful way. So, just sort of thinking through that, when I think through this hardcore division of right versus left, just to keep an American context, um it it doesn't make sense. Like it it won't lead you to what I'll say is a better world. If anything, first it leads you to violence. But the reason that people do it is because one, us and other, so we have that innate biology to want to be on a team, to get tremendous emotional reinforcement from being on a team, and just to bring this back to what I was saying earlier, I think that's it's good and right to follow the things that make you feel good if you're very, very, very careful about what you have constructed to make you feel good. And but now that's been hijacked, parasitized, to use your words, and but you have this biology that's pushing you to be on a team. And then, if you identify something as an existential risk, which is what freaks me out on the left and the right, they both think the other side is this existential risk and that they have to be stopped. And so, it's like, yo, I see how this becomes violent really fast. And what people have to do is is talk themselves off that ledge and say, I have to find love for the people on the opposite side of the aisle. Like you you need to. As a and and this is where I guess we we just I don't share a goal with other people. And so, my goal would be something that uplifts everybody. Now, Thomas Sowell I think understands this better than anybody. There are tradeoffs. Nothing is a utopia. It's it's all a trade-off. And so, yes, what I would present is is a pretty traditional capitalistic view, which I don't think will surprise anybody given my life trajectory. Um but because because I didn't start with money, my parents weren't wealthy people, they didn't teach me to be an entrepreneur, they didn't give me a leg up in that way in my sort of early to middle late-ish 20s, I was at one point I was on unemployment cuz I had gotten fired and I wasn't able to pay rent. And then for a long time even after that I would have to juggle bills, pay one bill this month and another another month. And then by learning certain skills, I was able to completely change my life. It is a gift that I want to give to other people in the Victor Frankl way of you control a some of your destiny. You can't completely bend the world to your will. And I trust me when I say I lament that I don't have a level of intelligence that I deem unspiring. But I've got enough that I can sort of function in and and you know, do things in the world. Um so, as I go through and and think about Okay, this is my goal. I know that we have to meet in the middle, otherwise it does move towards hatred certainly. We're already at hatred and could lead to violence because of people's inclination towards villainizing the other side and then intentionally or unintentionally dehumanizing the other side and then feeling the other side represents an existential risk and all of this in context were I don't know, maybe 7 days out from the guy that was shot um in in Portland, just literally [ __ ] gunned down. And look, we we will find out what is true and we don't yet know what is true. But on the tape you hear them say, here he is or here's one of them or or something come get him or something. It was all around we have found the other team. And then bang bang and he's dead. I mean, it's just like, "Whoa, this is where we're at in you know, like you said, a a pluralistic, Western, advanced, modern society, and yet we're seeing the beginnings of this. And I don't know if you have an insight into the what what is true about human nature that will allow us to help people find love for the other side. Wow, that's if if if I can solve this one, I need to book my ticket to Stockholm real quickly for the Nobel Prize. I would have really earned it instead of Nobel prophet Barack Obama, who flashed his brilliant smile to win that Nobel Prize. But anyways, uh I'm going to actually try to answer that question using the language that you've been using. Sort of there's a goal, and how can I meet it, and is there a trajectory for me to get to it? Am I going away from it or towards it? Let's suppose I start with a universal principle. Presumption of innocence is a non-negotiable. Right? Now I see the Brett Kavanaugh story, where he is a gang rapist going up and down the Eastern Seaboard, stopping at every neighborhood, gang raping tons of women with his uh marauding gang of uh you know, uh lapel-wearing guys. Many of my highfalutin, very very smart colleagues said, "It just feels like it's true. It's got to be true. And if there is enough of it there, this is not a courtroom. This is just a job interview. Then should we not" So, what you're saying, [ __ ] is that presumption of innocence is a malleable objective. Sometimes it applies, other times it doesn't, as a function of my tribal quest. Right? This is what I talk about in the book. Very briefly, I talk about the tension between deontological ethics and consequentialist ethics. Again, my purity bubble says, "No." define those? I don't know that everybody will know the difference. Sure. So, deontological statement would be, "It is always wrong to lie." Deontological, absolute. Consequentialist would be, "If your wife asks you, 'Do I look fat in those jeans?'" You want to have a long marriage, you say, "Absolutely not, sweetie. I've never seen you look as good as this." That's a consequentialist ethics, at least when it comes to this. The reality is that you can't be you can't have the disposition of deontological ethics for everything, and you can't be a consequentialist for everything. If you're a consequentialist for everything, you are postmodernist. If you are deontological for everything, you're the Taliban. The reality is we are a mix of those. What matters is where you activate which of those two orientations. Well, when it comes to Earlier I talked about the protective belt of the West, and you said, "Give me an example of that." And I said, "You know, don't succumb to identity politics." Well, blind justice is one. Presumption of innocence is one. It serves a society well to absolutely have a deontological perspective on these. It's non-negotiable. It's not maybe, it's not gray, it's not Brett Kavanaugh, it's not if the the court tips towards Republicans, then we need to get rid of him. Then you're an [ __ ] You're just a Taliban in training. You're not a true classical liberal. You follow? So, all of my highfalutin friends are just the Taliban. They're ideological Taliban. With, again, this is coming from a Canadian. I don't care about Brett Kavanaugh. I have no dog in the makeup of the US Supreme Court. I literally couldn't care less about any of that, except I really care about the universal principle. And when I see some [ __ ] who I know personally go on Twitter and violate all that, he disgusts me. He repulses me. He's no different than the child at 8 years old or 9 who said, "When I grow up, I want to kill the Jews." You're the same [ __ ] except you don't kill the Jews, you killed the truth. God damn, I should be emperor of the world, man. [ __ ] It's unbelievable. Yeah, it's it's obviously I take that as tongue-in-cheek, but that's that becomes the problem, right? Like everybody thinks, "No, no, no, man, I got this. Like communism would be amazing if it wasn't for Stalin." And in s- If it's practiced right, communism is beautiful. Right. So, that that's where it's like, "Woo, man, you've got to you need to build mechanisms or my what I do in my own life is this, I build mechanisms to protect against me. Because I view myself at all times as a potential problem. And so, it's like because of I don't think that our human wiring it's the blind watchmaker, right? So, you get the you get Oh, god, I forget the name of the nerve that like runs [ __ ] all the way down and then back up around your esophagus and it's like absolute madness because of evolutionarily that made sense cuz it's sort of these really small incremental changes, but you would never design it that way. And so, when I think about, "Okay, I have all of these sort of matrix-like beliefs running in my mind, many of them are unquestioned. I don't even realize they're there, but they're allowing me to move through the world." And so, because I know that I have all this evolutionary pressure making me pursue certain things and not others, um I'm like, "Ooh, I'm a potential problem." Were I to meaning that that my own movements will move me away from my own stated goals. So, it's like, "Okay, cool. I need to check myself at all times against that." But that takes great humility, right? I mean it's it's incredibly laudable that you do that, but I I think you'll probably agree that it's terribly rare, right? Because it takes humility first epistemic humility. I don't know everything. I need to always check within myself. But it also takes humility in terms of your ability to engage in introspection. So, that which you are saying is uh sort of a natural state, regrettably most people don't have that humility. So, I don't know if you're saying that we can foster it in everybody. Can we foster it in everybody? Can we foster it? I am not talented enough yet to foster it in everybody, but I will say if if people can recognize I do that purely out of selfishness, then my hope is that people will embrace it because so, I've had an email address for a very long time that is basically the notion of um attaining power. And when I would tell people that, they would get grossed out. And it never occurred to me that power was a an ugly word. So, I was like, well, let me define power. Power is the ability to close your eyes, imagine a world better than this one, open your eyes, gain the skill set to actually make that world come true. And that to me is is the human experience. You're you're hopefully doing something honorable. Like you're doing something that's awesome. And I will define awesome as it uplifts everybody as much as possible. Everything is a trade-off. Not everybody will be able to be uplifted. There's no such thing as a utopia, but you're creating a playing field where equal opportunity is how I would round it. So, it's like you're giving everybody a shot. Now, some people Elon Musk is more successful than I am and almost certainly always will be because he's a lot [ __ ] smarter than I am. And it's like that that's just the reality, right? And so, again, you can't make a race horse out of a pig. I'm perfectly happy being a pig. And so, the reason that all of this is is selfish is because by recognizing I'm a potential problem, meaning I stop myself from achieving my own goals, and that but I can manage that by being honest about what it is and saying, "Okay, cool. Here are all the sort of limitations and difficulties." Take gravity. I never try to pretend like it's not real, which has stopped me from falling off of things, which is amazing. I'm very excited about that. And so, but there is is sort of cheeky as that is, there are all these sort of other truths about the human condition that I recognize as equally as I recognize that. So, by doing that, I have lived a life that is is not devoid of pain by any stretch of the imagination, but it is manageable. Like, I'm able to manage stress. I'm able to manage anxiety. I'm able to avoid depression. I was able to change the financial lot in my life. I've been able to help family members. And so, it's like all of these things that we I would think would want for anybody, the ability to manage your own internal state. If we If we never went farther than that, all of the things that I do has allowed me to manage my own sort of emotional internal state, and that truly, if people realize, "Oh, [ __ ] Like, I don't have to feel like I'm in this fragile position," which I think a lot of people live in a place where they're [ __ ] terrified, and part of that reason is all of their positions are fragile instead of Nassim Taleb's notion of antifragile, where they can get stronger. And again, I came to these conclusions because I lived in a really gnarly emotional place for a very long time, where I was sliding towards depression. I hated my life and I had no idea how to make it any better, and it was only reading about the brain, learning about evolution. Those were the things that ended up beginning to pull me out because they were real, and they made the world more predictable. You know, it's fantastic you say this because I often get the emails from you in your chaotic state, and that's exactly what I tell people. I mean, learn I mean, it sounds so clichéish, right? Knowledge is power. But then I tell them the whole evolutionary spiel story. Or people write to me and say, "Since I've discovered you and your evolutionary work, it has given given me a window to life. And so, it's so wonderful that you you put it in the way that you did because this because I off my my wife jokes with me sometimes, she goes, "Could you stop writing books that just educate people about all the fancy science and write a how-to self-help book so that we could live in a fancy house in Southern California?" And in a sense, I always think to myself, "But I thought that I'm already doing that." But in a sense, I don't package it in the how-to, "Here are the seven steps to" I mean, right? Jordan Peterson's book, I mean, fine, it's a great book, whatever, but 12 rules for life. What do you mean? You've got the recipe? There is 12 of them? And right? So, in a sense, I'm often uh amazed that people require sort of that level of specificity of a call to action for them to view it as valuable, right? To me, it's I'm giving you the universal explanatory key to life. What more do you need for self-help? No, you got to break it down in the way you're saying. So, I I truly do appreciate your position. It's interesting. So, here here's a glimpse into my self-delusion. So, because I'm not as smart as I want to be, I I've really had to grapple with that. And I spent a lot of years like that was one of the primary drivers of my sort of slide to depression was, "Man, I'm I'm just smart enough to realize that I'm not that smart." And so, I always felt like I'm sort of clinging onto this bottom rung of a level of usable intelligence cuz I'm not stupid. I I recognize that. But I always felt like I was clinging onto sort of this bottom rung where I could see how much like smarter people were than me and that I desired it intensely. And the way that I I the self-soothing mechanism that I developed for this was, "This is amazing. You're just dumb enough to be able to explain the self-help angle to people and just smart enough to learn the things you need to learn to improve your own life. And so I've always said instruction manuals should be written by people who struggled to assemble that thing or to do that thing because they know where the pitfalls are. And so I've really struggled to get control of my emotions, to build a life where I felt good about myself when I'm by myself. And because I struggled with those things, I feel like I can go back and sort of self-help. Um and so because of that I have the my whole life is about self-help. Like everything I think about either to help myself or to help other people. Um so but I need people that are doing what you're doing because I'm not able to discover those things on my own and certainly not in I don't think any of us can discover enough sort of broadly arrayed topics. So the fact that there are people like you that, you know, are probably a little bit higher than me on the intellectual level can can put those things together in a digestible way and then I'm that sort of the next rung down and I can, you know, hopefully map it out for people in a way that's usable. Can I give you a few IQ points and you send me some of your money into my bank account like a fair reciprocal sounds like a very fair trade. Uh man, if if you really could buy IQ points, I would do it in a heartbeat. You know, I and you can't see it right now but I'm I'm in my study and it there's I have a huge personal library. I I've told the story before. And in this huge personal library, there are still at least I don't I I lost count but I it's probably 200 books right now in this room that I'm in that I haven't read. And I will often walk into the room and kind of almost be hit with a bout I mean not of clinical anxiety but of this kind of dread that there's all this knowledge in this room that I don't know. And And again, this shows you what epistemic humility is. Yes, when I know something, I walk with the with the swagger of someone who knows it but the reality is I also know how little I know, because I look around this room and there are if I read the 200 books in this room that I still haven't read, my god, I'm going to be more knowledgeable. So, in a sense, beyond IQ, there's one of the things that when graduate students come and say, "Well, you know, I I really want to work with you. What what are the traits you're looking for?" I always tell them it's going to sound like [ __ ] but it's still perfectly true, intellectual curiosity, right? I mean, I get up every morning and I'm a kid in a candy store. Why? Because later I'm going to talk to Tom and that's going to be exciting, then later I'm going to write a paper here, that's going to be exciting. So, I literally live my life as like an intellectual playground, right? And that allows me to wake up every day with with no dread. And even though of course there's a lot of pressures and so on, but I'm always playing. I'm playing in the landscape of cerebral pursuit. What could be more beautiful, right? I'm with you there, man. Dude, I I'm going to have to have you back on the show. I have enjoyed this profoundly. The researching was amazing. Everybody should definitely read your book, The Parasitic Mind. Um I know that pre-ordering matters, so I'm not sure when this comes out. I think the book may already be out. Oh, no, we still have a while. No, October 6th, so I don't know if there's a way for you to maybe, yeah, push that because pre-orders really matter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, hopefully we can help make this a number one New York Times bestseller if that matters to you. Um but dude, thank you for doing what you do. It is amazing. I very much look forward to having you back on. Um where can people find you? Where can they buy the book? Do you want them to go to Amazon? Thank you, Tom. Yeah, they could go to Amazon. It's it's on many different links in the UK, in Canada, and they could go straight to the publisher. It's Regnery, r e g n e r y, Regnery. If they want to follow me on Twitter, it's @GadSaad. I also host the show on both YouTube and on podcast. It's called The Saad Truth, s a a d. And so, there are many ways we can connect. I hope that you will come and say hello on social media. Nice, I love it. Um and as almost as a reminder to myself, I will say the next time we get together I definitely want to talk about rituals, coming of age rituals that that is powerful and I'm sad that it is missing from today's world. All right, everybody, this man is amazing. You don't have to agree with everything that he says, but the fact that he has the cojones to say it is inspiring enough. Um, and I also think he has some tremendous insights. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. Until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. What's up, Impactors? As you guys know, my mission in life is to provide the no-BS instruction manual for success. And to that end, we've launched our platform Impact Theory University. Our goal with ITU is to provide you with curriculum that will help you take your career, business, or personal development to the next level. 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I don't want any of us to get paid unless we're delivering disproportionate value. So, trust that the refund process will be absolutely hassle-free. And if this sounds like something that would help you move forward in your life, but you can't afford it, we do have a scholarship program that you can apply for that provides free access to those in need. All right, everybody. If you want to take advantage of this and make a dramatically important in your life, sign up today. The link is in the description, or you can go directly to university.impacttheory.com. I look forward to seeing you on the inside, my friends, and until then, be legendary. Take care. We're putting the world in jeopardy here. So, putting the world in jeopardy, the process seems to be moving incredibly rapidly such that we can have a discussion about whether or not there's going to be something to salvage in 2024 or not. Um this is an amazing level of danger that we are putting ourselves and the world in.