Why Empathy Can Become Dangerous: Dr. Gad Saad Explains | DSH #1638

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Speaker 4 All good things in moderation. it has to happen to the right people in the right situation in the right amount.

Speaker 4 Suicidal empathy is the dysregulated application of an otherwise noble virtue, like empathy. What makes us human is that we transcend our biology.

Speaker 4 Biology matters for your dog, biology matters for the giraffe, it matters for the mosquito, but surely it can't apply to human beings. Life is about navigating through statistical minefields.

Speaker 4 And so, statistically speaking, this is what is most likely to increase your chances of having a successful marriage.

Speaker 4 It's better to live five minutes tall and proud than to live 500 years on your knees as a me coward.

Speaker 5 Okay, guys, special guest for you all today, Dr. Gad Saad, scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi.

Speaker 5 Also, author of many books, including Parasitic... Parasitic Mind and his forthcoming book, Suicidal Empathy.
Thanks for your time today, Doctor.

Speaker 4 Great to be with you. Thank you.

Speaker 5 Did the book come out yet, the new release?

Speaker 4 No, it hasn't come out yet.

Speaker 4 We're aiming, hopefully, with the publisher for release in April. Only a single person has read it so far, and the response was, this book, as promised, is terrific.
So I'm feeling good.

Speaker 5 What was the inspiration for making this book? What compelled you to write it?

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 let me step back a bit and sort of give people a a thirty thousand feet overview.

Speaker 4 I've been a professor now for thirty-two years, and my main area of scientific research is to apply evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology to study human behavior.

Speaker 4 And I do so within the business school. So I study consumer psychology, economic psychology, and so on.

Speaker 4 And I was amazed very early in my career to see how people could be completely resistant to what seems to me completely obvious and banal truths, which is that human beings are shaped by biological forces.

Speaker 4 For most of my social science colleagues, what makes us human is that we transcend our biology.

Speaker 4 Biology matters for your dog, biology matters for the giraffe, it matters for the mosquito, but surely it can't apply to human beings.

Speaker 4 And so that was my original idea of saying, you know what, even very intelligent people that have professor before their name could be complete morons.

Speaker 4 And so that led me to write The Parasitic Mind, which came out, this book right here, the yellow one, it came out about five and a half years ago now, almost

Speaker 4 it was in 2020 it came out. That book looks at what happens to your brain when it is hijacked by ideological capture.

Speaker 4 The next book, Suicidal Empathy, looks at what happens to your emotional system when it is hijacked.

Speaker 4 So if I can hijack and parasitize both your thinking ability and your emotional ability, then I have you completely zombified. And so that's the full story.

Speaker 5 Interesting. And do you feel like a lot of people right now have their emotional system hijacked?

Speaker 4 Yes. And most of them, regrettably, come from largely one side of the political aisle.
And that's not because I'm trying to make a political statement. That's just

Speaker 4 the sheer reality. Most of the, well, all of the parasitic ideas that I talk about in the parasitic mind, postmodernism,

Speaker 4 cultural relativism, radical feminism, identity politics, they all were spawned on university campuses by leftist professors because the academia is overwhelmingly dominated by leftist professors.

Speaker 4 Then these dreadful ideas eventually seeped their way into culture, into Hollywood, into journalism, into

Speaker 4 everything, into business, into politics. And so what ended up happening is in the pursuit of these parasitic ideas,

Speaker 4 people's empathy began to misfire, right? So it's not nice to, you know, give a felon who's only been convicted 83 previous times

Speaker 4 not to give him another chance. By other chance, it means the 84th time.
It's really not nice, and it's mean to stop homeless people who are defecating, fornicating, and shooting up acid

Speaker 4 where your children play

Speaker 4 to round them up and move them elsewhere. That lacks empathy.
It lacks empathy when you don't allow every single person from around the world to just come through the borders.

Speaker 4 And if we are truly empathetic, then we should be giving them free health care. And who cares about American vets who've lost their limbs, if not their lives, in defending the West?

Speaker 4 And so what happens with suicidal empathy is that it takes a noble virtue. It's perfectly fine to be an empathetic person, right?

Speaker 4 This is not an attack on empathy, but it's, as we know from Aristotle 2,000 years ago, all good things in moderation, it has to happen to the right people in the right situation in the right amounts.

Speaker 4 Suicidal empathy is the dysregulated application of an otherwise noble virtue like empathy.

Speaker 5 That makes sense. Do you see these, the pendulum swinging when it comes to college campuses? Do you see it ever going more center or more towards the right?

Speaker 4 I mean, from your lips to God's ear, I mean, I'd like to think there is some autocorrection taking place.

Speaker 4 So, for example, when Donald Trump came to power, by the way, just for your listeners who may not know who I am, I'm Canadian. So it's not as though I voted in the American election.

Speaker 4 So if I say something that is positive of Donald Trump, it's not because I have posters of Donald Trump in my bedroom, right?

Speaker 4 I don't have a dog in this fight other than the pursuit of reason, logic, and

Speaker 4 common sense. So

Speaker 4 when Donald Trump came along with just one stroke of an executive order, he can immediately reverse all of the insanity regarding Title IX. You know, you know, when six foot three,

Speaker 4 you know, women with nine-inch penises, yesterday they were called Bubba, but today they're called Linda.

Speaker 4 And therefore, when they transition to becoming Linda, they absolutely, the science has settled, have become a girl.

Speaker 4 And therefore, we have to be empathetic to the trans community and allow them to destroy the dreams of every biological female athlete in the world.

Speaker 4 Well, he came along and said, okay, no more of of this nonsense. So that's nice.
That's good because there is a return to some form of normalcy.

Speaker 4 But the parasitic ideas and the suicidal empathy that originally began festering on university campuses took 50 to 100 years to take a real foothold within the culture.

Speaker 4 So it's not because Donald Trump comes along or because there is some sort of autocorrection in the university campuses that suddenly we're going to eradicate these bad ideas.

Speaker 4 It'll take many generations of assiduous fighting, but God willing, we'll get rid of this stuff.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I wonder if they'll ever all be fully eradicated because there'll always be bad ideas, parasitic ideas, and

Speaker 5 social media is amplifying these. So, at what point does it become accountability, right?

Speaker 4 Indeed. But, I mean, one of the reasons why I love to do shows like I'm doing today with you is because

Speaker 4 you typically have a lot more of the left that, you know, are the the loud boisterous folks and certainly if they're professors right most professors would never be caught dead saying something positive about republicans

Speaker 4 because republicans are indistinguishable from hitler literally they're hitler right and so i'd like to think that what i contribute i mean i'd like to think i contribute many things to the public discourse but one of the things that i do is that it emboldens people it emboldens people who might be saying but all of my professors are you know, leftist folks.

Speaker 4 Well, not everybody.

Speaker 4 There are good ideas on the left. There are good ideas on the right.
If you're a student, you would certainly be enriched in hearing from the full panel of ideas.

Speaker 4 And so that's my way of coming on social media and hopefully correcting some of the lopsidedness.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I feel like being from Canada actually gives you an advantage because you could be pretty objective, right?

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 4 Although I sometimes look at you with great envy, because in the US, at least you have several mechanisms that allow you to have an easier autocorrection.

Speaker 4 In Canada, when Justin Trudeau first came to power, I mean, I had been warning about Justin Trudeau for years and nobody would listen to me. Then he came along and he was a disaster.

Speaker 4 And then Canadians said, here's a great idea. Why don't we re-elect him again the second time? He was a disaster.
Then they said, well, here's a great idea. Why don't we elect him a third time?

Speaker 4 He was a disaster.

Speaker 4 So then they said, well, why don't we elect another guy who doesn't look quite as sexy as Justin Trudeau, but is just as nefarious in his progressive parasitic stuff called Mark Carney, and hopefully things will work out.

Speaker 4 Whereas in the United States, just because of the way the system is set up, you can implement autocorrections much more quickly, as you see with Trump.

Speaker 5 Right. We got the midterms coming up, right?

Speaker 4 Yeah, indeed, you do. You do.
How do you feel about him?

Speaker 5 It looks like the right's going to lose, to be honest. And I'm slightly to the right.
I'd label myself, but it's not looking good, right?

Speaker 4 Yeah. Well, I mean, you often have this sort of incumbent,

Speaker 4 you know, there's a blowback against the incumbent party, especially when they now control everything. Uh, what do you think?

Speaker 4 I mean, it's not, it shouldn't be me who's interviewing you, but I'd like to think

Speaker 4 about Mamdani.

Speaker 5 Oh, God. Yeah, I just did a podcast in New York and I was getting people's opinion on him out there, but it looks like he's going to win.

Speaker 1 So we'll see what happens.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's a great idea when New York City has been the center of capitalism, the center of one can argue, liberty, the center of Jewish life outside of Israel, to then elect an Islamist, avowed communist 24 years after 9-11, probably nothing could go wrong.

Speaker 4 Good luck, man. You had a good run.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, hate him or love him, his marketing is definitely effective, right?

Speaker 4 Yes, yes. He has such a beautiful smile.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, it's captivating.

Speaker 5 How did you think he did on the debates? Did you watch the debates?

Speaker 4 I didn't. I tried.
I need to control my blood pressure. And so

Speaker 4 seeing the degenerate, you know, spewing his bullshit is not really good for my health.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Well, I love your stuff, man. I saw your podcast with Charlie Kirk, actually, where you talked about Islam.
Is it compatible with the West? And that was a very good episode.

Speaker 4 Oh, I'm glad you enjoyed it. And actually, that was probably...

Speaker 4 I'm guessing about maybe a month, a bit more than a month before the tragedy. So, yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it was one of his last episodes, I believe. Yeah, it was.
It's crazy what happened there. But just to reiterate your stance, you don't think it's

Speaker 5 compatible, right?

Speaker 2 No. So, look,

Speaker 4 I hate to do this preface, but for all the lobotomized idiots, I need to.

Speaker 4 Individual Muslims come in all forms, just like individual Jews, Christians, Seventh-day Adventists, Buddhists, and Hindus, right? This is not an attack on individuals.

Speaker 4 Islam is a set of codified ideas. You can find them in three sources.

Speaker 4 It's called the Quran, it's called the Hadith, the sayings and deeds of Muhammad, and it's in the seera, which is the biography of Muhammad.

Speaker 4 So we can go to those primary sources and see what is stated as the fundamental principles of Islam.

Speaker 4 And if that's your question, then the foundational principles of Islam could not be any more incongruent with the foundational principles of Western societies.

Speaker 5 Yeah. And what do you think about the Christian nationalism movement that I guess people associate Charlie Kirk with?

Speaker 5 How there's a rising, growing Christian movement in America?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I don't stay up at night worrying that

Speaker 4 Christian nationalists are going to eradicate the rights of all other people. Look, there are good and bad in every people.

Speaker 4 There are Orthodox Jews. I mean, not that they are violent, but they hold positions that I know as an evolutionist are perfectly inconsistent with scientific knowledge, right?

Speaker 4 So the capacity for religious dogma to spew nonsense exists across all religions. But

Speaker 4 the United States is founded on certain Judeo-Christian principles, and its founding fathers were called Christians.

Speaker 4 And therefore, I don't stay up at night worrying that there'll be an uprising of Southern Baptists or Seventh-day Adventists who are going to kill the rest of us.

Speaker 4 Islam, though, we have 1,400 years of history that tells us very clearly what happens in a society if Islam becomes majority. You don't need to guess, you don't have to question, you don't have to

Speaker 4 put on your optimistic hat. We have tons of data.
So, for example, currently

Speaker 4 there are 56 countries that are part of the OIC, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Each of those countries, once upon a time, had 0% Islam.
Zero, none.

Speaker 4 And then one day you close your eyes and you open your eyes and they become 100% Islamic. How does that happen? Is it by magic? Is it by Socratic dialogue? Is it by spreading sweets to everybody?

Speaker 4 Or could it be something that might be nefarious in how Islam is spread? And so...

Speaker 4 Islam is incompatible for several reasons. I'll give you just one example, but I can keep you here for the next six hours.

Speaker 4 In American jurisprudence,

Speaker 4 Lady Justice has a blindfold on her. She's supposed to be blind, blind to what? Blind to the identity of the perpetrator and the victim, right?

Speaker 4 I don't give you a higher penalty if the perpetrator is white and the victim is black or vice versa. At least in spirit, it's supposed to be that.

Speaker 4 In Islam, under Sharia law, it is literally codified in Sharia

Speaker 4 that depending on the identity of the perpetrator and the victim, the punishment is completely different.

Speaker 4 So, if, for example, a Jewish man kills a Muslim man, that is a very different penalty than it's the other way around. And so, just that tells you whether it's compatible with American jurisprudence.

Speaker 5 I didn't know that. Is a majority of Islam in the West, are they on the left or the right? Have there been any studies on that?

Speaker 4 So, I can't tell you empirically what it is, but to your point, paradoxically, and you raise a good point, oftentimes, you know, when you say sometimes these

Speaker 4 shifting alliances make for strange bedfellows. So, for example, when it comes to trans issues and when it comes to, you know,

Speaker 4 twerking drag queen teaching your five-year-old children how to read, because we all know that children best learn how to read if you have dragging, uh, twerking drag queens teaching you during happy hour right and so there what you'll see is you'll see a cacophony of Jewish conservatives Christian conservatives and Muslim conservatives standing in unison against their children being taught all this nonsense so depending on the issue you have shifting alliances yeah which ideology has done the most damage to the West in your opinion

Speaker 4 throughout all of history?

Speaker 5 I would say recently, like right now, I know that anti-Semitism

Speaker 5 pretty prevalent, but what do you think right now is doing the most damage?

Speaker 4 Well, I mean, certainly I think the the parasitic ideas that I talk about in the in the parasitic mind are the ones that have caused the most trouble.

Speaker 4 And maybe just because it it might sound too abstract to just say parasitic idea, let me give you an a specific exemplar of that.

Speaker 4 So postmodernism is a philosophical movement that started about maybe 50 years ago with a bunch of French bullshitters.

Speaker 4 Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, are some of the fathers of postmodernism. And what the framework purports is that there are no objective truths.
You're always shackled by your biases.

Speaker 4 You're always shackled by the idiosyncrasies of the moment.

Speaker 4 You're always shackled by your relativistic biases. So there is no objective truth to speak of.

Speaker 4 Now you could see how if you start with that framework, then there is no objective truth that men are physically stronger than women innately.

Speaker 4 There is no objective truth that my chromosomes and my genitalia determine my sex, hence transgenderism.

Speaker 4 And so, I think there is a set of these parasitic ideas that have been so detrimental to the edifices of reason in the West that if I had to pick in the current moment the ones that have caused the most harm, I would say the cocktail of parasitic ideas with suicidal empathy will bring down the West.

Speaker 5 And what do you think the breeding ground is for these parasitic ideas? Do you think it's the college campuses? You think it's the news outlets? Where do you think it starts?

Speaker 4 It's 100% the university campuses.

Speaker 4 Every single dreadful, moronic, imbecilic idea was spawned on university campuses because as I hate to remind people, it uniquely takes professors to come up with the truly dumbest ideas. Now,

Speaker 4 why is that? Is that because I think academia is nonsense? Of course not, right? I've spent my entire life in academia. I'm an academic through and through.
It's in my DNA.

Speaker 4 But here's the problem, Sean.

Speaker 4 When academics sit on top of the ivory tower

Speaker 4 and with a progressive lisp, they and a highfalutin affectation, they can espouse all kinds of things while 20-year-olds sit like this and go, oh, professor, this is so brilliant.

Speaker 4 Fully decoupled from reality, right? There is no autocorrective mechanism that slaps them in the face and says, What are you sprouting, moron? Right?

Speaker 4 So, and so, what that does then is it allows for the big, mean, pathogenic virus, mind virus, to then spread because there is no doorstop to challenge it, right?

Speaker 4 The 21-year-old is not going to tell their professor, what are you talking about, professor, that men can menstruate? What kind of idiocy is it to say something as ridiculous as this?

Speaker 4 Until 15 minutes ago, the 117 billion people that had lived on Earth, that's a real number, a real estimate, they seem to perfectly know how to navigate through the very difficult conundrum of identifying what is male or female.

Speaker 4 But 15 minutes ago, when we took women's studies courses at Oberlin College,

Speaker 4 we stopped knowing what male or female was. And so that's the problem.
You have university university professors completely devoid of any link to reality, spouting nonsense.

Speaker 4 Now, but now here's the interesting point.

Speaker 4 Across disciplines, you see a greater likelihood of parasitic ideas or a lesser likelihood. So for example, I'm housed in the business school.
There's a lot less parasitic ideas.

Speaker 4 If you're in an engineering school, there's a lot less parasitic ideas. Why?

Speaker 4 Because those disciplines are wedded to this thing called reality you can't build bridges using postmodernist physics the bridge collapses you can't develop an economic model to predict consumer choice using postmodernist feminist mathematics then you won't predict anything so because those disciplines are applied disciplines rooted in reality

Speaker 4 they are in a sense they have a built-in inoculation against this kind of imbecility.

Speaker 4 But if I'm in sociology and ethnic studies and Africana studies and lesbian dance therapy studies, then there is no link to those things.

Speaker 4 And therefore, the lunacy can flourish unencumbered by reality.

Speaker 5 And do you think this is American universities, Western universities, worldwide? Do you think this is a worldwide issue?

Speaker 4 Oh, it's a worldwide issue. It's everywhere.
I mean,

Speaker 4 Canada, by the way, Canada. Well,

Speaker 4 let me correct myself. It's a worldwide

Speaker 4 Western issue. So, for example, if I'm at an Ethiopian university, I don't have the luxury to

Speaker 4 espouse the position that men too can menstruate. Because as Rob Henderson calls them, luxury beliefs, right?

Speaker 4 I don't have the luxury to espouse parasitic nonsense when I'm worried whether by the end of the day my children are going to have their caloric needs met.

Speaker 4 But when when i live in a society of plenty it becomes a form of intellectual or giastic nonsense right where i can demonstrate the amount of leisure i have by espousing things that are perfectly decoupled from reality it's interesting right how the most affluent nations struggle with more mental issues indeed indeed the human uh humans will always find a something to annoy them or piss them off seems like huh but but to your earlier point when you said oh i don't know exactly what you had asked, but like, oh, there's always the capacity to have parasitic ideas or something to that effect.

Speaker 4 Your point is well taken because it's not as though the current reality,

Speaker 4 previous generations of human beings were not parasitized. What's unique about the current moment are the specific parasitic ideas that have infected our brains today.

Speaker 4 So 300 years ago in Salem, Massachusetts, I looked at my female neighbor. I thought that she was very likely a witch.

Speaker 4 And therefore, I and the rest of the community thought that it was a great idea to throw her in water. And if she swam, then that proved that she was a witch.

Speaker 4 And if she sank, then, oops, I guess she wasn't a witch. Now, that was a form of parasitic thinking, right?

Speaker 4 When people in Europe thought that the...

Speaker 4 the

Speaker 4 black death, the black plague, was really due to Jews, well, that was a form of parasitic thinking. So

Speaker 4 the capacity for the human mind to be parasitized, it's an indelible part of the architecture of the human mind. What is unique to this current period are the specific mind viruses.

Speaker 5 And when you say specific, you mean like hijacked or

Speaker 4 exactly. So, I mean postmodernism.
That this is a recent thing, 50 years ago. Cultural relativism is another parasitic idea.

Speaker 4 It basically purports: who are we to judge the cultural beliefs or religious beliefs of another society?

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Speaker 4 Don't be a racist. Don't be a cultural imperialist.
It's not for you to judge. Well, guess what? That's nonsense.

Speaker 4 I stand before you judging cultures that think that cutting off the clitorises of five-year-old girls is within their purview of their religion, right?

Speaker 4 So once you relativize everything, there is no objective truth. There are no objective standards of universal aesthetics, there is no objective morality, then you descend into nihilism, into lunacy.

Speaker 4 And so these are the specific parasitic ideas that I'm talking about.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 5 And do you think we're heading that way right now?

Speaker 4 Well, certainly. I mean, let me give you an example from art, okay?

Speaker 4 Because now I've been so far talking about... you know, ideas that parasitize the mind.
But when you go to a museum, you're trying to get your sense of aesthetics to be titillated, right?

Speaker 4 I want to see a beautiful painting that makes me go, wow, how could such a person create such art?

Speaker 4 Well, and I talk about this, by the way, in this book right here, in the yellow book, The Parasitic Mind. So in, I think it was 1996, this was, I had only been a professor for a couple of years.

Speaker 4 I was going to visit one of my colleagues who had done his PhD with me at Cornell. He was a young assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
So I had gone to visit him. And

Speaker 4 he was teaching a class or whatever. He was busy.
So I said, you know what? I'll go to the Carnegie Museum while waiting for you to finish your class. And then we'll hook up when you're done.

Speaker 4 We'll go for dinner, whatever. So I walk into the Carnegie Museum and I'm looking at the art.
And at one point, there was an empty canvas. That was the art piece.
Wow, bravo. So beautiful.

Speaker 4 So, so daring.

Speaker 4 And so, of course, I understand what the reflex there was, which is who are you to judge what art is the blank canvas is itself a form of art so i got pissed off i demanded i demanded to see the museum curator they sent some other hack how can i help you sir i said i paid money to come into this museum yes yes sir

Speaker 4 Why am I looking at an empty canvas? Now, I could have already predicted for you what the answer is going to be. Well, isn't it beautiful, sir, that this piece is allowing us to now have a dialogue?

Speaker 4 No, I want my money back. I didn't ask for my money back.
But that gives you a sense of what happens when everything is relativized, right? You've probably seen the famous banana

Speaker 4 on the wall.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 4 Wow, how gorgeous is that? I mean, Leonardo da Vinci, move aside.

Speaker 4 We now have a real artist before us. So you see it in all sorts of, you see it in philosophy where everything is postmodernist.
You see it, you know, queer architecture,

Speaker 4 queer mathematics. What the hell does that mean? Look, I studied mathematics, right? I have several mathematics degrees.
My PhD minor was in statistics.

Speaker 4 My undergraduate was in mathematics and computer science. What does it mean to queer mathematics?

Speaker 4 If there ever was a field by definition that cannot be under the influence of your identity, it would be mathematics. Why? Because it's axiomatic.

Speaker 4 It's the distribution of prime numbers exists in exactly its form, whether I am a queer transgender Latinx or whether I'm Lebanese Jewish Gatsad.

Speaker 4 It doesn't matter, but yet now we are queering mathematics. We're queering physics.
We're queering architecture. So yes, you see it everywhere.

Speaker 5 That is scary. So we're heading towards a society where there's no right or wrong.

Speaker 4 There is, exactly. I mean, of course, there is blowback.

Speaker 4 Some of the blowback is called gatsad.

Speaker 4 But regrettably, not enough professors who are otherwise the first line of defense against this nonsense.

Speaker 4 They're all completely castrated. So, and

Speaker 4 today, I don't know why. I'm even more fiery than usual.

Speaker 4 Maybe your calm demeanor brings out my fiery sense.

Speaker 4 I refer to academics as a new biological species. I call them the invertebrate castrati.
Invertebrate means they have no spine. Castrati means they have no balls.

Speaker 4 Because there is no greater cowardly bunch of people than academics, right? I mean,

Speaker 4 when you think about, say, Navy SEALs, right? What do you think about? You think of brawny guys that can, you know, withstand. all physical ailments.

Speaker 4 I mean, until, of course, Joe Biden created a more inclusive military that was more based on, you know, trans rights and so on. But until Joe Biden,

Speaker 4 when we think about the Navy SEAL, we think of someone who has incredible athleticism, courage, and so on. That's what we want in our Navy SEALs.

Speaker 4 Well, our intellectual Navy SEALs, meaning our academics, should be exhibiting that kind of boldness, that kind of ferocity, that kind of intellectual courage. They're exactly the opposite of that.

Speaker 4 They're the most sheepish folks because they're so afraid to ever be ostracized from the cool kids' party, right?

Speaker 4 You know, I don't want to speak out because I'm going up now for a promotion to associate professor. Okay, now I become associate professor.

Speaker 4 Well, I don't want to speak out because now I'm going up for a full professorship. Okay, well, now I don't want to speak up because I'm going up for a chaird professorship.

Speaker 4 Well, now I don't want to speak out because if I speak up, then I won't get my National

Speaker 4 Science Foundation grant. So there is always a reason why it is justified for me not to speak out.

Speaker 4 It's okay, Gat Sad will have the courage to speak on my behalf while I go to class and say, Yeah, yeah, of course, men too can menstruate. Of course,

Speaker 4 biological men should be competing with women. This is completely natural because there are no sex differences between men and women, which otherwise a three-day-old pigeon knows to be false.

Speaker 4 But I certainly am not going to stand up.

Speaker 4 And so, what I've had over the past 30-plus years, Sean, is I've had thousands and thousands of emails sent to me from professors that have the following structure. You ready? Dear Professor Saad,

Speaker 4 several paragraphs of beautiful compliments. And then there is a final sentence.
Can you guess what that final sentence is?

Speaker 5 What is it?

Speaker 4 If you decide to read my email on your show, please don't mention my name.

Speaker 5 Oh, wow.

Speaker 4 So then I write back, dear Professor So-and-so, thank you for the lovely

Speaker 4 words. I really appreciate them.
Do you think that maybe the last sentence in your email is exactly why we are in the problem that we're currently

Speaker 4 seeing ourselves in? So, and again, that usually slaps them because they realize how cowardly they are, right? So, they don't even have the courage.

Speaker 4 So, never mind that they don't have the courage to fight these bad ideas. They don't have the courage to stand next to the guy who fights the bad ideas.

Speaker 4 So I'll give you a great example. Very, very famous scientist.
I won't mention his name out of courtesy, but maybe he doesn't deserve it. A guy that I highly admire.

Speaker 4 He's about 20-something years older than me. Incredible scientist, incredible writer.
I invited him on my show.

Speaker 4 where it would be a no-brainer for us to have a conversation because we share so many scientific interests.

Speaker 4 He decided not to come on my show because some third-party colleagues told him that I had said some, you ready? This is really dark secret.

Speaker 4 It turns out that some of my tweets exhibited a

Speaker 4 possible favorable disposition towards Donald Trump.

Speaker 4 And so he didn't want to be tarred in speaking to me on my show, even though 99% of things we agree on. And by the way, we wouldn't have to talk about politics on the show.

Speaker 4 Like if he told me, if I come on your show, we only talk about our scientific interests, I would say, absolutely, you got it.

Speaker 4 But the mere fact that he would be seen publicly speaking to me would be very problematic in the cool kids party.

Speaker 5 I can relate to that. I've invited a lot of professors and academics on the show, and they've turned it down because I'm too political or I've had controversial guests.

Speaker 4 There you go. So imagine how cowardly you are, right? I mean, look, I always tell people, it's better to live five minutes tall and proud than to live 500 years on your knees as a meek coward, right?

Speaker 4 And that's the problem. I mean, by the way, that's, I mean, I'd like to think that there are several reasons why I've been able to build such a big platform.
And certainly as an academic, right?

Speaker 4 I'm not an actor. I'm not a comedian, right? For me to be able to build such a gigantic platform is because I'm resonating with the general public, right?

Speaker 4 Because the general public hears the people that don't come on your show and they say they sound fraudulent. They sound inauthentic.
They sound too measured. But Gad Saad,

Speaker 4 of course, he could hang with all the fancy professors, right? I could be one day invited to speak at Stanford and the next day joke around with Joe Rogan.

Speaker 4 And it's that multiplicity of my personality that then allows me to connect with a broad range of people.

Speaker 4 The people who are not accepting to come on your show are really shooting themselves in the foot.

Speaker 4 Because when I first received the thing, when my team told me, okay, this gentleman is inviting you, I didn't know who you were. But then I see how big your platform is.
And right away, I say, oh.

Speaker 4 this seems like an interesting place to go to. Why? Because I'm in the business of doing two things.
I'm in the business of creating knowledge and disseminating knowledge.

Speaker 4 Well, if coming on Sean's show, I now introduce these ideas to a million new people that otherwise would have never heard of these ideas, I'm winning.

Speaker 4 So I've got the humility to say, I speak to anybody. I don't just speak to the, you know, the anointed ones, as Thomas Sowell says.
I speak to anybody who's intelligent, who has a...

Speaker 4 nice platform to engage me. Let's have at it.

Speaker 5 I'm the same way. Yeah, I'm pretty against cancel culture.
In fact, a lot of my guests have been canceled. I know you have as well.
So I love giving people the opportunity.

Speaker 4 Beautiful. Beautiful.
God bless you.

Speaker 5 When do you think academics started getting scared to speak out? Do you think this was something in our lifetime or way before?

Speaker 4 No, I mean, again, this... Speaking out against the specific parasitic ideas of today is a more recent thing.

Speaker 4 But the fact that academics are very tepid, very meek, meek, very cowardly is regrettably a feature of becoming an academic, right? I mean, one of the things that I love about,

Speaker 4 take for example, do you know who Marcus Aurelius is? Yes? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 4 So Marcus Aurelius is my guy. Why? Because this guy is emperor of Rome.
I mean, he's doing shit. He's busy.
He's the most powerful man in the world.

Speaker 4 Meanwhile, he also wants to have time to read his books and to engage in philosophy. So he's both brawn and brain.
Yes? Yeah.

Speaker 4 What I love about, say, Victor Davis Hansen, I mean, not to compare Victor Davis Hansen to Marcus Aurelius, but Victor Davis Hansen is a classicist.

Speaker 4 He's at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He is a great historian.
He's also a farmer, meaning that he is wedded to reality.

Speaker 4 So if he talks about the aqueducts of ancient Rome, he can also connect them to his farming practice. And so I'll give you one more example and then I'll link it back to me.

Speaker 4 Socrates, not the philosopher, Socrates, the captain of the 1982 Brazilian national team and soccer. I mean, this is the Brazilian national team.
He's the captain of that team.

Speaker 4 He was also a physician and a philosopher while he's playing soccer on the Brazilian national team.

Speaker 4 And so I think one of the reasons why, again, I resonate, and maybe some of the other academics haven't been able to build these platforms, is because they don't know how to modulate their public interventions in a way that maximizes the exposure.

Speaker 4 Right, if I'm always going to speak in the very

Speaker 4 limited way of how academics speak, then I'm going to reach four people.

Speaker 4 If I know how to go on Joe Rogan and make the research come alive, suddenly I've opened up evolutionary psychology to 20 million people, and that's a good thing.

Speaker 5 Yeah, you've done a great job with that, going on big platforms and kind of dumbing it down so the average person can understand what you're talking about, right?

Speaker 5 Because some of these academics, it's like another language the way they speak.

Speaker 4 Indeed. And by the way, and I say this truly

Speaker 4 with complete honesty, I get a lot more,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 4 visceral pleasure and satisfaction when I receive a fan letter from a trucker or a corrections officer or a military guy than I do when I receive it from a fellow colleague at Harvard and Cornell and Stanford.

Speaker 4 Not that I don't love receiving those lovely things from my colleagues. It's always beautiful for your colleagues to say, hey, we love your work.
So don't, don't, I love that.

Speaker 4 But when when the trucker writes to me and says you know i i do the route from uh whatever from oregon to kansas three times a month and what allows me to enjoy my drive is i just sit and listen to you and learn so much i mean imagine the sense of satisfaction i get i'm reaching the trucker who's you know drop that's beautiful.

Speaker 4 That's incredible.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Perfect segue into my next question about happiness because I know you wrote a book on on happiness.

Speaker 5 It's called The Sad Truth About Happiness, right?

Speaker 4 Yes, sir.

Speaker 5 And do you think these days, it's hard to measure, I guess, what previous civilizations were in terms of happiness levels, but these days it seems like our happiness levels are really low, right?

Speaker 1 Compared to the past.

Speaker 4 Great question. Before I answer it, maybe I can just give you a quick

Speaker 4 background to why I wrote that book, because it seems like that book comes.

Speaker 4 So, I mean, there's a bunch of books that I wrote before on sort of evolutionary psychology and consumer psychology and so on then parasitic mind then there's a happiness book then there's suicidal empathy where did the happiness book come from and that really came and then I'll answer your question that came from receiving a lot of emails from people saying what's your secret to always appearing so joyful and happy and you even when you're dealing with very difficult subjects you're you're always joking around around and so on what's your secrets tell us your secret and so at one point I thought why don't I write a book on those secrets at first I was a bit hesitant because if there is one topic that even the ancient Greeks going back to the ancient Greeks have written the most about is how to live the good life how to live a meaningful life so i thought could i could i write something that is unique and fresh and distinct and i'd like to think that i did so now to answer your question there is some research that is looked at over, say, the past 40 years.

Speaker 4 So,

Speaker 4 I can't give you data from 2,000 years ago in ancient Greece, but over the past 40 years, men's happiness hasn't decreased,

Speaker 4 women's happiness has decreased a lot.

Speaker 4 And one of the arguments that I make in the happiness book that you kindly mentioned is that that stems from women having been parasitized by a lot of dreadful parasitic ideas.

Speaker 4 So, let me give you an example. When second-wave feminism came along and said, Hey, ladies, anything that a man can do,

Speaker 4 you can do, and you should do, burn your bras, both literally and metaphorically, a lot of women took that call to action seriously and did it. So, here's what they did:

Speaker 4 I want to have as accomplished as a career as any man.

Speaker 4 I don't want to start having children at all. I want to have a lot of meaningless one-night stands.

Speaker 4 If men can desire doing it, so why shouldn't I? Well, then they

Speaker 4 wake up at 48.

Speaker 4 By the way, none in what I'm saying implies that women shouldn't have fully accomplished careers or that women don't have a desire for sexual variety, but they certainly don't have it to the same extent as men, right?

Speaker 4 There's actually very clear evolutionary evidence that suggests that women too have not evolved to be monogamous. So that's clear.

Speaker 4 But studies around the world conducted in an astoundingly different number of cultures have found the exact same principle.

Speaker 4 When it comes to the desire for short-term mating and sexual variety, men desire that a lot more than women for very clear evolutionary reasons.

Speaker 4 So now when a woman says, hey, if a guy goes to a bar every night and has meaningless sex, why can't I as well?

Speaker 4 then it shouldn't take a fancy psychologist to tell you she will wake up when she's 47 feeling unhappy at having to internalize those principles.

Speaker 4 Because there are many things that men and women are identical on, but there are many things that men and women are perfectly different on.

Speaker 4 And what explains those differences is evolutionary psychology. And so, in my view, what explains

Speaker 4 the rather rather sharp decline in women's happiness, at least in a Western context, in the United States context, stems from having internalized those idiotic ideas.

Speaker 5 Very interesting. Wow.
I got to tell my wife about that one. That is so fascinating.

Speaker 5 Any link with happiness levels and income levels?

Speaker 4 Very good question. So, the classic study shows that up to a certain point, happiness and income are linked.

Speaker 4 beyond that point it adds nothing to your happiness okay

Speaker 4 which makes sense right if if every day i'm not sure whether i'll be able to put enough calories in my in my children's bodies then it's kind of difficult to pursue self-actualization through reading and going to museums but once i've reached a certain level

Speaker 4 and as a matter of fact i tested this theory with

Speaker 4 the richest person who's ever existed on earth. His name is Elon Musk,

Speaker 4 who happens to be a friend of mine. And we had a chat on my show, it was in X Spaces, where I asked him exactly that question.
And not surprisingly, he answered, I mean,

Speaker 4 that Elon Musk is worth $400 billion

Speaker 4 does not make him several hundred billion times happier than someone else who may have a great marriage, a great wife, wonderful kids, and a wealthy person might not have those things.

Speaker 4 So up to a point, it's fine. After that, it gives you zero weight.
What gives you a lot more happiness, if I can answer that?

Speaker 4 Well, there are several things that I discussed in the book, but let me mention a few.

Speaker 4 Overwhelmingly, and you mentioned your wife, overwhelmingly the singular decision that you'll make that will either impart great happiness to you or great misery, depending on whether you made the right choice or not, is the choice of mate that you make.

Speaker 4 Now, there is no foolproof method, right? Life is about navigating through

Speaker 4 statistical minefields, right? And so, statistically speaking, this is what is most likely to increase your chances of having a successful marriage. You ready?

Speaker 4 So, in evolutionary psychology, we have two principles. One is called assortative mating, or birds of a feather flock together.
The other one is called opposites attract.

Speaker 4 For short-term mating, opposites attract works well. I might be a very introverted person that is very sexually restrained.

Speaker 4 The person that I am connecting with might be the exact opposite, and that creates a complementarity that ends up leading us to have a nice trice behind the bushes.

Speaker 4 But for long-term success, for long-term mating, a marriage, birds of a feather overwhelmingly predict success now birds of a feather flocking on which feathers here we're talking about whether you share the same foundational values so if i for example i'm a outspoken atheist and you

Speaker 4 you know organize your entire life around your religion well we it's nice to think that love conquers all but you really are starting on the wrong statistical foot right

Speaker 4 because

Speaker 4 my atheism is so important to me. Your religiosity is so important to you.
We're going to have problem down the line.

Speaker 4 And so birds of a feather flock together is incredibly predictive of future success. May I add one more or am I speaking to you?

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 4 The other thing that I, this hasn't been tested. I first actually

Speaker 4 proposed it on Joe Rogan and then I worried that somebody would steal the idea before I tested did it.

Speaker 4 So, I argue that there's a second component that can really predict the happiness of your marriage. So,

Speaker 4 when we first mate,

Speaker 4 we are assorting on our overall mate value. So, for example, on a scale of zero to 100, the totality of how attractive of a mate I am might place me at an 80.
Okay, whatever that means.

Speaker 4 So, I'm charming and I'm educated and I make good money, but I'm not tall.

Speaker 4 This is true.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 4 in a dream world, I would be even

Speaker 4 more attractive if I were six foot two, but I'm not. But I can compensate for those by being very good at other things.
Luckily, otherwise, I would have never found a mate. Yes?

Speaker 4 But so that overall, my score might be whatever it is. It's an 80 on 100.
Well,

Speaker 4 typically we end up assorting with people that have roughly similar mating value. So, an 80 ends up going with an 80.

Speaker 4 Now, here's where the problem comes in. Let's suppose we met when we were both high school sweethearts.

Speaker 4 I was the star quarterback, you were the cheerleader, gorgeous girl, and at that point, we both had the same mating value. So, it made sense for us to hook up and get married young.

Speaker 4 Later on, I lose my hair, I don't make it to the NFL. I become a guy who plays video games all day.
I get fat.

Speaker 4 Whereas my cheerleader girlfriend, who was really hot in high school, went on to become a neurosurgeon, and now she is surrounded by a lot of male neurosurgeons.

Speaker 4 So, what's happened is that our original mating values, which were both at 80, suddenly her mating value is now at 93, while my mating value is at 42.

Speaker 4 That divergence in our mating value is going to put great stressors on our marriage. So make sure that you evolve together in your mating values.
Otherwise, I'm predicting a divorce.

Speaker 5 Yeah, that's a very relatable. I feel like that happens to a lot of people.
And do you think if that were to happen to you,

Speaker 5 I don't know if you're in the wrong if you were to leave that relationship, you know what I mean? Because you're still growing so fast and they're not keeping up with you.

Speaker 4 Exactly. And I mean, that's why, I mean, you often hear that, oh, marriage takes work.
I mean, you'd like to think that it doesn't take too much work and that you found your soulmate.

Speaker 4 But this is part of work.

Speaker 4 If I see my wife making all sorts of moves to improve herself, to improve the lot of my family, and I'm sitting all day long playing video games, I mean, it doesn't take a fancy evolutionary psychologist and professor to tell you you're not doing your part.

Speaker 4 And when that gorgeous, tall, accomplished neurosurgeon that she works with every day starts paying her attention, well, she's human. You're a loser at home getting fat.

Speaker 4 She's hanging around with fancy, accomplished guys. It's going to put a stressor.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Do you think the mating scores for males and different and males and females have different things when it comes to creating the score?

Speaker 4 Oh, great question. So a few things they're the same, and many things they're very different.
So for example, kindness and intelligence are universally preferred by both men and women.

Speaker 4 Okay, so those are called necessities

Speaker 4 in the evolutionary psychology literature.

Speaker 4 Other ones are different depending on whether you're male or female.

Speaker 4 So, for example, the premium on physical beauty and youth, there is no culture that's ever been studied or discovered where men don't place a greater premium on those two traits.

Speaker 4 And there is no culture that's ever been discovered, nor will ever be discovered, where women don't place a greater premium on men's social status.

Speaker 4 Now, social status can be measured differently in different cultures. Yes? If I am in the Hatza tribe in Central Africa, maybe it's the number of cattleheads that I own that makes me the cool guy.

Speaker 4 In other cultures, it might be if I have the Ivy League degrees. In other cultures, it might be the number of zeros in the the bank or whatever.

Speaker 4 By the way, I could be an aspiring artist as a man who doesn't yet have any money, and yet I can still attract a lot of desirable women because they're banking on my future trajectory, right?

Speaker 4 I exhibit a

Speaker 4 hardworking ethic, hard work ethic. I clearly have a talent as a rock star musician.
Sure, I haven't been discovered yet, but she's banking on the fact that I will become become the next big thing.

Speaker 4 But here is what no woman has ever said in any culture. You ready?

Speaker 4 Find me the man who is whiny-voiced,

Speaker 4 pear-shaped,

Speaker 4 cries all day watching Bridget Jones' diary, exhibits no assertiveness, social dominance, or ambition. That drives me into a sexual frenzy.
Ravish me, unemployed loser. Ravish me now.

Speaker 4 That doesn't exist. That's why there are no song lyrics that say, I'm looking for a loser that plays video games all day.

Speaker 4 But we have many songs where women, for example, are denigrating a guy who's not doing his end of the bargain. No scrubs by TLC.
I don't want a guy who lives with his mom, who doesn't own his car.

Speaker 4 I don't want a guy who doesn't shower me with investments and gifts. Well, I could show you that exact same song in Arabic.
I can show you that exact same song in French.

Speaker 4 I could show you that song in Urdu, the language they speak in Pakistan. The reason why every single culture has the exact same song lyrics is because the

Speaker 4 biological imperatives that shape women and men's desires don't suddenly change as a function of cultural contingencies. Those are called universals.

Speaker 4 So, to answer your question and to summarize the answer, yes, there are many things that men and women's mating scores are the same across the two sexes, but there are many that are perfectly different.

Speaker 5 Makes sense. Doctor, this was a really fun episode.
Thanks for your time today. Where can people pre-order your book and get your other books and everything?

Speaker 4 Thank you.

Speaker 4 Well, it's not yet, suicidal empathy is not yet available for pre-order, but I know that the publisher, given how viral and how much buzz there is around it, is trying to get the book out hopefully by next April.

Speaker 4 So I suspect in the next two, three months, it should be available for pre-order. The book is titled Suicidal Empathy.

Speaker 4 Please do pre-order it as soon as it's available to do so.

Speaker 4 Because what ends up happening, if let's say tons of people pre-order it, the first day that the book is released, all of the pre-orders then count as sales, right?

Speaker 4 So what happens is you could enter on day one.

Speaker 4 of the book's release into the best sellers list and then that creates the avalanche so please pre-order it as soon as it becomes available awesome thanks for your time doctor thank you sir cheers all right See you guys.

Speaker 5 I hope you guys are enjoying the show. Please don't forget to like and subscribe.
It helps the show a lot with the algorithm.

Speaker 6 Thank you.