Ep 85 | The Science Behind Why People Love Biden & Hate Trump | Gad Saad | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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Have you found yourself yourself saying,

is it just me?

Wait, we're all supposed to say, what now?

What's that word mean?

Wait, wait, hold it.

We're all supposed to accept that men can get pregnant now

and you feel alone?

I know I've had that experience a lot of times.

And that's what we're going to talk about today.

We're going to talk about the parasitic parasitic mind, this parasite that has been intentionally injected into us and whether or not the West will stand or not.

And we are becoming dangerously close to losing what made the West the West and indeed losing the freedoms of the West.

The guest I have for you today is one of my favorite people.

I love the way he thinks.

His name is Gad Saad.

He's an evolutionary evolutionary behavioral scientist.

He's also the host of The Sad Truth, that's with two A's, and the author of the new book, The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense.

He is a guy who, and he'll explain this, is

a guy really that

a behavioral scientist, but he is a professor

of marketing.

So,

how does our

animalistic side,

the root of who we all are, affect our choices?

And how has that been used against us?

And what can we do to deprogram and come back to a place to where the truth actually matters?

Fascinating, and

perhaps someday a historic conversation with Gadsad.

Gad Father, how are you?

How are you, sir?

So good to be back.

Yeah,

good to talk to you again.

Thank you.

Listen, before we start,

last time you shook me to the bones because you taught the professor of marketing something, which is always don't say my forthcoming book, but say the parasitic mind, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Let me show you who's the marketing guru.

Edible cookies.

That's fantastic.

And the jack.

And the book in the background.

Who's the marketing guru now?

So, Gad, I want to talk to you because you are a marketing guy that's

an evolutionary biologist.

So you look at marketing

and why it works and

why things sell, why things are accepted, right?

Can you explain that just a little bit?

I'm evolutionary psychologist, not evolutionary biologist.

I apply

biology.

Yeah, go ahead.

Okay, so can you explain that?

What does that job entail usually?

So most people who study consumer behavior scientifically don't look at the biological underpinnings that drive our consumatory nature.

So they assume that everything is due to socialization, to our parents, to advertising, to our peers.

Now, all these things are, of course,

important in shaping our consumption.

But of course, our biology also affects our consumption.

Why we prefer fatty foods to celery,

why men are more likely to consume hardcore pornography than women.

why women are more likely to consume romance novels.

A lot of the things that we do as consumers is really a vestige of of our evolutionary history.

And so, what I do is I look at these evolutionary underpinnings and I study them in a modern arena.

So, there have been several people that have done this.

And in my opinion, they use their power for evil as opposed to good.

Bernays is one of those guys that I think

has, I mean, he changed everything.

Everything.

We eat breakfast, you know, eggs, bacon, and toast because of him.

When you are looking at this,

would you use this to help marketers market?

Is that...

Right.

So it's a good question.

Look,

studying physics can land us on the moon.

But studying physics can also result in us dropping bombs on Japan, right?

Correct.

So it's just a tool which can be channeled either for good or evil.

So the study of marketing is really the study of persuasion.

So I could use marketing techniques to hopefully convince you to not lead a sedentary lifestyle, or I could use marketing to sell you BS.

In my case, I'm not really so much interested in the application of the work more than actually understanding what makes people tick.

The way that subsequently other people use it, it's for them to decide.

So

I wanted to set set this up because we are in a place now where

people who study

behavioral science and study marketing have really shaped

many things that are going on right now.

They are actively, Cass Sunstein is one of them, actively engaged in moving us towards

an illusion of freedom of choice or free will.

Would you agree with that?

Yeah, but by the way, Sunstein and his colleague Richard Thaler in their book Nudge, Richard Thaler was my professor at Cornell.

He subsequently won the Nobel Prize, so I'm very familiar with their word.

Look, again, it's the same thing, right?

You can either use these behavioral principles for good or for evil.

But you're right that in today's political realities, and given the fact that most people are cognitive misers, then they become very easy to manipulate, right?

Right.

And especially now with social media,

I mean, just the algorithms are smarter than the average bear, smarter than all of us, really.

And they know us better than us.

And all of the stuff that you research, a lot of that stuff is used to make those algorithms, correct?

Absolutely.

So let's look how, for example, we would use evolutionary theory to study political choices, right?

okay so i wrote an article i think it was in 2003 a scientific article where i argued that contrary to what we might think when people choose a candidate let's say a presidential candidate they don't sit there and you know uh navigate through all of the issues rather they use simplifying heuristics to make a decision who's taller who looks more presidential who has a more brawny face and the reason for that again is because most people are cognitive misers By the way, this is exactly what explains why so many people have

a repulsion or what I call an aesthetic injury against Donald Trump.

It's not because they don't agree with his policies necessarily, it's because he repulses them.

So they use these emotional-based shortcuts to form an opinion when, in reality, they should be looking at what each of these two platforms represent and who do I align with best.

They don't do that.

So when you're looking at

Joe Biden, what do people see?

He's a nice guy.

He is a sweet man.

He's going to bring back class to the presidential office.

He's not going to be as cantankerous and brazen as Donald Trump.

And I don't know if you and I have discussed this in the past.

Many of my

good friends who are otherwise very sophisticated thinkers, they wouldn't be able to enunciate to you a very specific policy policy that they disagree with Trump.

It's just that he hits them in the stomach.

He disgusts me.

Whereas Barack Obama, my God, he is so magisterial, right?

This is what I call.

Assume for a second, this is the cork of a wine bottle, okay?

There's an expression in Arabic that says, getting drunk at simply smelling the cork of the wine bottle.

I don't need to actually drink the wine.

I just get drunk on this.

That's what people are doing.

My God, he is so magisterial.

He's majestic.

He is tall.

He's lanky.

He has a radiant smile.

Trump, on the other hand, is vulgar.

He's brazen.

He's combative.

That's how people make decisions, which is quite regrettable because you would think they would spend a lot more cognitive effort to make decisions, but they don't.

So

let me read something.

Let me read something to you I found just the other day.

I think you'll find it really interesting, especially when you know who wrote it.

I found this the other day, and I think it couldn't, what we're going through right now couldn't be expressed any better than this.

At the beginning, they knew, the people

who are taking our country apart and our Western way of life, At the beginning, they knew they could never raise their treason to any respectable magnitude by any name which implies violation of law.

They knew their people possessed as much moral sense, as much devotion to law and order, as much pride in and reverence for the history and government of their common country as any other civilized and patriotic people.

They knew they could make no advancement directly into the teeth of these strong and noble sentiments.

Accordingly, they commenced by an insidious debauching of the public mind.

They invented an ingenious sophism which, if conceded, was followed by perfectly logical steps through all the incidents to complete the destruction of the Republic.

With the rebellion thus sugar-coated, they have been drugging the public mind for their

goals for more than 30 years.

And until at length they have brought many good men and a willingness to take up now arms against the government.

That was who said this?

Abraham Lincoln.

Okay, wow.

Quite a prescient fellow.

Yeah.

And I think

many people feel the same way.

And it's weird because I think each side feels that way about the other.

That somehow or another we've all been hypnotized.

But I contend that

those who have now

fallen in line with Marxism and

the fact that America and the the West is systematically racist and you're born a racist, all of this stuff.

I believe that's the insidious

lie,

but it seems to be working.

Can you tell me why it works?

Well, that's, I mean, in a sense, that's the, you're describing my book really well, The Parasitic Mind.

Is that the parasitic mind right behind you?

Wow.

Because look, what I basically say in the parasitic mind is that in the same way that all sorts of animals can be parasitized by actual brainworms,

you know, a mouse can be parasitized by toxoplasma Gandhi, causing it to no longer be afraid of a cat, but rather being sexually attracted to the cat's urine.

Well, I argue that there are a set of idea pathogens that parasitize our minds, leading us to the abyss of infinite lunacy.

Now, where do these idea pathogens come from?

They all all stem from, regrettably, I say because I'm a professor, they all stem from the university ecosystem.

It takes intellectuals to come up with really dumb ideas.

And so for 40, 50 years now, we have seen a constant and pervasive attack on our reasons, on our edifices of reason, which have resulted in the downstream effects that we are seeing today in our public discourse.

If you'd like, I can discuss some of these idea pathogens.

Yeah, I want to because that's what, I mean, that is what the parasitic mind is about.

And I really want to understand it.

And then I want to know

how do you talk to people about truth and common sense when it's all gone?

So

let's start with the problem and the concept.

Yeah, okay.

So here,

let me start with the granddaddy of all idea pathogens.

So postmodernism is

really the epitome of intellectual terrorism because what it basically says is that there are no objective truths.

Everything is shackled by our

subjectivity, by our personal biases.

You can imagine how anti-scientific that is because scientists wake up in the morning thinking that they're going to go to work to try to uncover truths.

Now, truths can change, right?

What we thought was true in science 300 years ago may no longer be true today, but we do operate under the premise that there is a truth to be discovered.

Postmodernism destroys that.

There is no truth.

There's only my truth.

There's only my lived experience.

So it's a form of intellectual nihilism.

I call it intellectual terrorism.

So imagine if you teach students for 30, 40, 50 years this kind of nonsense.

You're not really teaching them critical thinking too well, right?

The scientific method is exactly what liberated us from these types of shackles.

It's what liberated us from our personal identities.

There is no Lebanese Jewish way of knowing.

There is no Arkansas way of knowing.

There is no indigenous way of knowing.

There's only the scientific method.

We all meet at the scientific method on equal footing.

So you eradicate the scientific method.

You introduce postmodernism.

You have toxic masculinity.

You have white supremacy.

You have cultural relativism.

You have militant feminism.

This is why I call it death of the West by a thousand cuts.

No single idea pathogen is enough to destroy our society.

But put them all together and you start having complete lunacy.

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When you're looking at things, let's just take critical race theory.

Sure.

Gad,

you're telling me that white people

haven't benefited from this society, that there's not, you walk in for a job, a black man walks in for a job.

You don't think that there's been bias with that guy's going to get the job.

Whether they know it or not, they may all claim they're not racist, but please, Gad.

What you're enunciating there is exactly the allure of many of these idea pathogens, because they start off with a kernel of truth.

They start off with the noble cause, but then when taken to extreme, they become idea pathogens, right?

So, let's so we could talk about critical race here, but let me just let me just shift to say militant feminism.

Equity feminism is the idea that men and women should be equal under the law.

Well, any reasonable person would say, yeah, of course I support that.

I'm an equity feminist.

The problem with militant feminism is it pushes it further.

It then says, in order to remove the sexist status quo, we need to eradicate the possibility that there are innate sex differences, right?

Everything is due to a social construction.

So, in the pursuit of the noble goal of seeking equality under the law, we murder and rape truth.

The same thing happens with critical race theory.

Yes, of course, there has been at times systemic racism, but to argue that today LeBron James is afraid to leave his house to go to the play the game because he is being hunted by racist cops is a slight exaggeration.

So we could pursue noble goals while always adhering to truth.

I can chew gum and walk at the same time.

But all these idea pathages don't draw that distinction.

They argue from a consequentialist perspective, if we murder truth in the service of our social justice, screw truth.

So have all did all of these start, for instance, political correctness?

I have a daughter who has cerebral palsy.

I remember when they were like, handy capable.

And I thought that was the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

Because

if you call handy capable, in a generation, that word is going to mean the same thing as handicapped.

You know what I mean?

You just need different help to do different things.

So it's just, it's such a ridiculous concept to me.

But what sold me,

not to become a politically correct person, but to go, you know what, I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings

is

if it does make the difference with somebody, I don't want to hurt somebody's feelings.

And I'm not going to, you know, I'm not going to stand there and preach to a special Olympian, no, you're very different.

That's ridiculous.

You know what I mean?

So is it, though, they always start

with the kernel of truth and compassion?

You got it, right?

So, of course, we should all work to be kind and respectful to each other.

And to the extent that language is dynamic and organic and changes, and a word that was acceptable 40 years ago is no longer acceptable, then we adjust accordingly.

Again, the problem is the overreach.

So, the thought police then comes up every two seconds with new rules of linguistic engagement, right?

Because it's a form of power play, right?

It keeps me unstable.

I don't know which word I should use.

For example, example, the word Oriental to describe someone who came from the Orient was perfectly okay a couple of generations ago.

Now you don't say Oriental, you say Asian.

Well, wait a second, I'm Asian.

Lebanon is from the continent of Asia.

Why has Asian been served by people from the Far East?

So you see that there is a vagary, a haphazardness to a lot of these politically correct terms.

By the way, I analogize political correctness to the sting of the spider wasp.

So the spider wasp stings a spider, rendering it zombified.

It then, you know, carries it to the burrow and it lays an egg on the alive spider so that as the egg hatches, it eats the spider in vivo.

Well, political correctness is the spider's sting.

It stolifies us, it leads us to the abyss of infinite lunacy quietly and in a docile manner.

It's the exact same mechanism.

So

I am amazed at how the left, I think what the left has done to the West,

I believe, is evil.

And I don't use that word lightly.

I think anything that is destroying man's freedom and man's ability to clearly think is pretty evil.

But it is also in the same regard

unbelievably beautiful.

They have put this thing together to destroy the West where I think in a hundred years from now,

when it all is exposed and we really know how it was done, it will be studied for a long time on how to cripple half of the world.

Well, but that's why, so when I analogize between, you know, parasites and idea pathogens, or when I talk about these idea pathogens as mind viruses I'm not just sort of being you know poetically flowery in my language it's precisely for what you just said right a virus an actual virus is a beautiful thing right it has the circuitry the machinery to be able to find a way to enter your cell so that it could then use your machinery to replicate itself.

It's gorgeous.

I mean, in terms of the creation of a virus, it is beautiful.

So you're exactly right.

These idea pathages are wonderful because they could, as I said, lead me quietly to the abyss of infinite lunacy while I'm feeling proud about my progressive nature.

It's gorgeous, but it is tragic.

I talked to a woman who she was 16 years old when she first started saving Jews in Poland.

I took my family over to Auschwitz probably about 10 years ago, and I said, I believe these days are coming back, and have to know who we are as a family and what we stand for as a family.

And at the end of the day, we met with one of the righteous among the nations.

And she was 16 years old.

Now she was in her, I think, her 90s when we spoke to her.

She was so sweet, so kind.

And I said to her at the end, how do you water the tree of righteousness?

And she said something that I'm only really now fully understanding.

She looked at me and she said, you misunderstand.

The righteous didn't suddenly become righteous.

We just refused to go over the cliff with the rest of humanity.

Okay.

So my abyss is kind of an apt metaphor.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah.

So

how do we get...

Is this any different than what happened in

the Soviet Union, what happened in

Nazi Germany?

Is this more elegant?

Or is this what happened to...

Because I've always wondered, how do you get Germans to do that?

How do you get people to believe that?

Now I think I understand.

Yeah, I mean, your question is, are human minds

ready to be parasitized by bad ideas?

And this is certainly not something that is new to today's era.

As you said, look,

in the Soviet Union, Lysenkoism was, are you familiar with that term?

Do you know what that is?

No, Lysenko.

So Lysenkoism, Lysenko was a geneticist who actually argued against

the law of genetics, the established Mendelian laws of genetics, because he thought that his framework for how genes are passed on and so on were...

had to be more in line with Marxism.

And so he adjusted science to fit his ideology, which resulted in the great famines that led to 20, 30 million people dying.

Right.

So it's not that today the parasitic ideas that we're seeing is something novel in the fact that humans can have minds that are parasitized.

What is unique about today's zeitgeist is that we thought we had developed the right weaponry to no longer succumb to these.

We thought that the scientific method, the scientific

Renaissance, the Enlightenment had resolved these things.

And so that's why today we live in this anomalous society called the West.

But regrettably, no, you always have to defend this beautiful thing that we've created in the West because our capacity to be parasitized is kind of the default value.

There's always the next charlatan who's going to come along to try to play around with my circuitry.

So,

Gad,

what are the conditions that are required to

get people ready?

For instance, you know, you just said we thought we had this, we had the scientific method.

And I immediately thought there was no one more scientific than Germany in the late 1800s, you know, up until the 1940s.

They had that as, I mean, they were teaching the world.

So it was, is that arrogance?

Is it a reliance on science without balancing something else?

What is the...

So each era will have a different set of factors that result in these parasitic ideas flourishing.

If we're talking about today's era, you have basically 40, 50 years of leftist professors who were

slowly erasing human nature.

Slowly, right?

So, for example, the idea that biology, so this is my area of research, the idea that we should use evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology to study human nature is actually quite heretical in the social sciences.

Because most social scientists, yeah, exactly, I like your reaction.

Most social scientists who are social constructivists, meaning everything is due to a social construction, believe that, sure, biology explains the behavior of the mosquito and the zebra and your dog.

But don't you dare say, Dr.

Saad, that consumers are driven by biology.

That's vulgar.

What do you mean?

I transcend my biology, right?

So, but now again, now you might say, well, how could they be this idiotic?

Aren't they supposed to be professors?

Again, it starts from a noble place.

And let me explain how.

Because evolutionary theory has been misused by a whole bunch of nefarious folks throughout the years.

The Nazis used it to argue, hey, there's a struggle between the races.

It's a Darwinian struggle.

We won.

So who cares if we kill the Jews?

Eugenesists said, hey, you know, we don't want to have gays around.

So if we sterilize them, we get rid of the gay gene.

What's wrong with that?

Now, of course, that has nothing to do with evolutionary theory.

But because all of these folks misappropriated evolutionary theory, these social scientists, these progressive noble social scientists said, well, let's create a new understanding of the human condition where we remove biology.

So which goes back to my earlier point.

In the pursuit of noble causes, you should never murder and rape truth.

Your first goal as an academic is to stay true to truth.

And then you worry about activism and social goals.

But that's the problem with the humanities and the social sciences.

They're first ideological activists, second pursuers of truth.

That should never be the case.

When Nietzsche said God is dead, that wasn't a celebratory statement.

That was a warning.

Isn't he warning in a way about biological

evolution?

I mean,

we need,

as a people,

we need something bigger than us.

And if it's not that, it'll be something else.

And isn't that a biological need in us?

Right.

So you're right that I think

the default value of humans is to believe in a higher power.

And I say this, as you know, I'm Jewish, but I'm also an atheist.

I recognize as an evolutionist that

you are never going to eradicate the religious impulse from us.

It is part of us.

Now, we can argue whether man created God or whether God exists outside of man, but the religious impulse is something that is within us.

And there are several reasons.

And by the way, evolutionary scientists study why religion evolved.

In other words, you could study why religion exists as an evolutionary phenomenon.

So I mean,

I am a deeply religious person.

I deeply believe in God.

But I have to tell you, if I wake up in the coffin and there's nothing but dirt for all eternity and darkness, it made me a better person.

I know the switches that it throws in me.

And that's fine.

You know what I mean?

Either way, it's fine.

That's a common

position that people take where they say, look, if all you get are benefits in believing and being a religious believer, then why not do it?

But I mean, that goes back really to Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher who really provided Pascal's wager, right?

Where he basically said, look, God could exist or God could not exist.

I could believe or I could not believe.

So it's a two by two matrix.

And in every single one of those cells, it makes more sense to believe than not believe.

So just believe.

So I buy that argument.

It's a nice game theoretic argument.

But here's the the thing.

If you are a truth purist, then you're not convinced by that.

Because then in my case, I'm going to say, even if religion offers me a functionally beneficial value, I'm not going to believe it unless you can prove to me that it's true.

In other words, I'm not going to be consequentialist about my belief in religion.

You follow what I mean?

So yeah, so I will tell you that when I started searching whether God exists or not, I did prove enough of it to me, but I can't prove anything.

You know what I mean?

You You can't prove that he doesn't exist.

You can't prove that it does exist.

So

it's a personal thing.

I'm not like, I don't really buy into any of this crap, but I'm going to believe.

I don't think that works.

But I was just using that as an example of,

for instance, why fear sells, why every election you have to be afraid.

Because fear is much more powerful because

we coalesce around something that protects us from from that, right?

Exactly.

And by the way, that's one of the reasons, that's one of the evolutionary arguments for religion.

So, in one of my earlier books, The Consuming Instinct, I offer an evolutionary analysis for kosher laws, for specific kosher laws, right?

So, one possibility would be to say, well, you're not allowed to eat certain types of shellfish and stuff because God dictated it.

Another way, if you look at it biologically,

there is a pathogen that can be found in some of these foods whereby you can't even tell if if the food has that pathogen or not.

All you know is that one day Moshe is walking around in the desert and he either drops dead or not because of the food.

Well, short of me understanding germ theory and so on, what other way can I attribute causality than to say it must be a divine, you know,

an edict that says, don't eat this food.

But there are very clear biological reasons why people would have succumbed to these particular food consumptions.

but 4,000 years ago they didn't know that.

Therefore, they put it on the broad shoulders of God.

So that brings me to,

you know, I believe that if there is a God, he's got to be the greatest mathematician ever.

Because everything is precise.

The entire universe falls apart if you're playing math over here one way and math over here another way.

He's a scientist.

If he exists, he's the ultimate scientist because it all has to work.

But

if you're

looking at that,

your

theory here with kosher,

I accept that that could be the way that it all happened, but that just goes to universal truths, that there are things that are true.

Whether you put a

sports car cover over that engine or you put a bus cover over that engine it the engine still is working the same

so which speaks i'm sorry that's your point so so this is the problem is we've erased the big truths we've erased that the that the universe is mathematical and it works the same way for everyone

Not only have we erased specific truths,

we've erased what I call the epistemology of truth, right?

The scientific method is what what allows me to adjudicate between competing hypotheses, right?

There's a clear way for if I want to know whether men on average are taller than women, there is a way that I can collect data to absolutely confirm this one way or the other, right?

I don't have to rub crystals.

I don't have to sit under a pyramid.

I don't have to look at revealed truth.

There is a way for me to understand the statistical regularities of the world.

Well, what postmodernism does, to go back to that earlier point, is it removes that epistemology.

It says that, why are you bothering looking for universal truths?

There are no universal truths.

Everything is subjective.

So again, you could imagine how intellectually terroristic that is, right?

Because what's the point of getting out of bed in the morning for me if there are no universal truths for me to study, right?

Everything is random, then, right?

So

that's precisely why I use the terms idea pathogens.

So take, for example, transgender activism.

You and I can probably agree, I'm sure if I put the words in your your mouth, that, you know,

we're very kind, loving people.

We don't want to see any bigotry towards transgender people.

None.

But I don't want my child to be taught in school that sometimes boys menstruate and sometimes girls menstruate.

Now, that again speaks to my earlier point, which is in the pursuit of protecting transgender people from bigotry, I don't have to sell bullshit.

I don't have to murder truth in the service of that earlier laudable goal.

That's the problem with all of these idea pathogens.

Does that happen,

Gad, though?

Was that happening 20 years ago where they were murdering truth?

Or is it a slow creep to where you need to get the public to a certain place before you can then just say?

It has been a slow creep.

First, it began in academia.

You refined the mind virus for several generations.

You inculcated it in many generations of students so that these students then become the leaders of our HR departments.

They become our prime ministers in Canada.

They become the Democratic Party in the U.S.

They become the diversity officers in every organization.

You know, that didn't happen by magic.

It's a very slow burn.

It's sort of the old parable of the boiling frog, right?

If you put the frog in the pot and you slowly raise the heat below a just noticeable difference, the frog is frolicking all along, right?

That's what's happening with the West.

Death by a thousand cuts slowly, slowly chipping at the edifice of reason, and then one day we end up in complete nihilism.

So that someone like, was it Julian Castro when he was talking about, well, we want to give abortions to both men and women and so on.

I mean, is it possible that in the 21st century, a leading presidential candidate of the Democratic Party is uttering such nonsense?

Could we not support the right of transgender people without uttering such garbage?

Can we?

Well, if people read my book and get the vaccine, the parasitic mind is going to drive me straight to Stockholm for the Nobel Prize.

So

we're looking at all of these crazy things.

And I think people

hear things like that and they blow it off because that's crazy.

And

they can't possibly mean that or, you know, it's just so crazy, nobody's going to believe it.

And then all of a sudden you wake up in a world where you're looking around going,

am I the only one that doesn't believe that?

Glenn, just for you to know, over the past, I don't know, five to 10 years since I've become a lot more vocal on many of these issues because of social media and so on.

I've always been fighting these idea pathages, but now social media offers me a much bigger platform to do it.

I've received innumerable emails exactly speaking to your point, which is some student, some professor,

some parent of a student writes to me, unable to make sense of the world, right?

They don't know which is, and basically I'm sort of the anchor for them, right?

Thank you so much, Dr.

Saad.

By listening to you, I still feel as if I am grasping reality.

Well, why is it that we're here?

Like, why is it that you need me to tell you, as I did with the Canadian Senate when I appeared in front of them to testify about the transgender stuff, that hey, Canadian senators, no, really trust me, I'm an evolutionary psychologist.

There is such a thing as male and female.

In the 21st century, you need a fancy, smancy professor to come to you to tell you that a sexually reproducing species has this thing called male and female.

And then one of the senators, upon hearing my testimony, points to me.

You could all watch it.

The testimony is available.

And he says, You are pro-genocide, sir.

You are pro-genocide.

And then I say to him, Well, you better be careful because it might not be a good look to be telling someone who escaped execution in Lebanon that he is pro-genocide.

But that's the lunacy that we've reached.

Can you tell me,

do these people that are preaching this,

let's say just militant feminism,

I see them hanging out with really hardcore

Islamists,

not a Muslim, an Islamist.

And I'm like, you are the first

person to be killed or contained,

you know, if the Islamist gets their way.

How does that work in people's brains?

Look, you may or may not know the name Leon Festinger.

He was the pioneer of the theory of cognitive dissonance.

These folks have completely fractured diseased minds of cognitive dissonance mush, right?

I mean, think about there's a group called Queers for Palestine.

What the hell are you talking about?

Do you know what happens to LGBTQ people in Palestine?

If you really want to be queers for something, be queers for Tel Aviv because Tel Aviv has one of the most vibrant LGBTQ communities.

But that's the kind of fractured minds they have because they have bought into the idea pathogen that the poor Palestinians are the oppressed and the evil Zionist Jews are the oppressors.

It's part of the currency of victimology poker.

But doesn't the

your people are throwing gays off of the roof of a building building in Iran mean anything?

No, those people, so I'm now answering on their behalf.

They would say, No, but they're not practicing true Islam.

They are, it's just some grotesque, uh, you know, uh, cancerous version of Islam, just like socialism, right?

If you show people 100 places where socialism has been tried and it has failed, what do they always come back with?

But, bruh, that wasn't true socialism.

If only now AOC institutes true socialism, then we will live happily forevermore, making love on the streets and holding hands.

And so what stops us from what?

Why is it, Gad, I don't believe in any of that crap?

Somebody else my age.

I have a functioning brain.

But what makes me different than somebody else my age?

that has a relatively same kind of life experience.

They're completely, what is it that the parasite didn't get into me?

Right.

Well,

that's the $1,000 question.

I think it really boils down to whether you are, when it comes to truth, a deontological person or a consequentialist.

Let me explain these two systems.

A deontological ethical system is, there's an absolute truth.

It is never okay to lie.

That's a deontological statement.

A consequentialist statement would be, it is okay to lie if, for example, I'm I'm trying to spare someone's feelings.

So if you want to have a long-standing marriage and your spouse says, do I look fat in those jeans, maybe lie to him or her because you want to protect their, right?

The reality is

we're all at times consequentialist, at times,

right?

But when it comes to the truth with a capital T, I propose that you should always be deontological, right?

I never sacrifice a millimeter of truth in the pursuit of some downstream consequence.

So to answer your question, my feeling is that you versus the other guy who is your age who is parasitized, is that you are probably deontological when it comes to the capital T truth, and he's not.

One of my mottos is from Immanuel Kant, who I we can get into talking later some other time.

But he said, I will, there are many things that I believe that I shall never say, but I shall never say the things that I do not believe.

Boom, that's exactly it.

Yeah, so that's that's where I'm at.

Here we are sitting now at a time where I'm looking at the polls.

And

I can't, knowing what I know about America,

you have a group of people who will not decry or call to stop the violence on the street.

They're still calling it peaceful protests while cars are burning behind them.

One step after another,

America, all the police are racist and we should take your guns

and defund the police.

And have open borders.

Right.

And have open borders.

Attack the Second Amendment.

Correct.

That war cover.

So all of the things that are being said are so

not un-American in the way it usually is used, but just that's not

how America traditionally thinks or what they embrace.

And yet I see these poll numbers, and I have come to a place to where either the poll numbers are absolutely wrong,

or I am absolutely wrong.

And I am now completely out of step with a new reality in America.

Which is it?

Yeah, I mean, I wish I knew.

If you would have told me, I mean, certainly before COVID hit, I would have said it's a cinch that Trump is going to be re-elected.

If you told me before the last, I mean, the first debate, the presidential debate, not the VP debates, I thought that

he didn't come across as

well as he should have.

Because regrettably, most people will use, as I mentioned earlier, right?

They smell the cork of the wine bottle.

And so they will simply say, oh, he looked so bullying.

Whereas the other guy looks affable and somewhat confused.

And he's Uncle Joe.

And so I think that might have shifted some of the few remaining undecided towards Uncle Joey.

So, if I were to predict today,

I'm tilting it slightly towards, I call him avocado brain.

I'm tilting it to avocado brain a bit more than to bullying Trump.

So, we'll see.

I mean, do you have a sense?

What's your prediction?

Oh, I

have no idea.

I have absolutely no idea.

But I wonder, for instance, I saw the,

I see Joe Biden, and

I don't say this with any malice.

I don't mean to be mean at all.

He reminds me of my grandfather when we had to take the keys of the car away.

He's usually there, but there are times when he's not, and he's just slowing down enough to where, grandpa, you shouldn't be driving.

Right?

And so I think people have seen that in their own family.

He's not the man he was even in the primary debates.

He is declining quickly.

Then I see a man who

has COVID, is flown to the hospital, comes out two days later, and he is virile

and not 75.

How do those two

work

in the mind?

Well, that amazes me.

I was just telling my wife, we'd gone for a coffee earlier this morning.

I said, you know, when I look at Trump, I'm exhausted just seeing how much energy he has.

I'm 20 plus years younger than him.

I'm 55.

He's what, 74, 75.

So he's about 20 years on me.

And I just can't believe the kind of energy he has.

Just think about all the things that he's done in his career.

Now, some will say he's been a scammer, this, that, but he's a doer.

He's done done a million things, right?

Hey, sometimes he succeeded, sometimes he's failed, but he's tried many different things in many different arenas.

So he's a doer.

It's as if he's on Adderall.

He can't, he can't stop.

He probably sleeps two, three hours a day.

He does.

I respect that.

Then you look at someone like Biden, basically a political parasite, 47 years.

What can you put on your CV that's concrete?

If you look at my CV, I can list for you all the papers I've written, all the books I've published, all the talks I've given.

There's something very concrete on my CV.

What is his CV?

Nothing.

He's just someone who never said something sufficiently ugly that he was kicked out of politics, and so he was a parasite.

And so, if only that, I can respect Trump and not Biden.

But for many of my highfalutin Ivory Tower friends, the mere fact that Trump is an aesthetic injury disqualifies him.

So, but

there's nothing in the average person that sees an

and again, I don't mean this to be mean, but a man who is clearly in decline and say, I want one of these two to keep me safe.

I'll pick the guy who reminds me of my grandfather when we had to take the keys away.

I'm going to be hyperbolic and even push it further.

To those people who would still prefer Biden, Biden could be in an induced coma where he could only flip his eyelids, they would still think that is a much better option than brazen, vulgar, orange man bad.

And I know this for a fact because I've tried to engage some of these people, some of whom are otherwise really intelligent people, but there's a complete wall of emotional hysteria that is simply impossible to penetrate.

And by the way, I don't mean to imply, a lot of times people think, oh, you know, I must have posters of Trump in my bedroom that my wife and I use as foreplay.

No.

You don't?

I mean, am I the only one?

Exactly.

So it's not that I'm such a Trump lover.

It's that I think I'm sufficiently non-partisan, especially as a Canadian, to say, wait a minute.

There are very compelling reasons why someone might like Trump.

It can't be that 60 plus million people in the last round voted for a complete racist monster.

They can't even grant you that.

No, he is a monster and only monsters could vote for such a monster.

It's all about his monster qualities.

It's grotesque.

It's idiotic.

It's imbecilic.

Let me let me take you here.

I remember in 2004 I saw a poll that said six or seven percent of America believes that we never went to the moon.

And at the time, I said, you watch that number that number is going to be in the teens before you can blink

it's now about 16 percent

okay

and we have I've been trying to explain the difference between a conspiracy theory

which is not bad.

It's just been made to sound bad.

It's a theory of these people are colluding to do this.

But it's a theory

and conspiracy fact.

Both sides now are

in the role of conspirators.

You know what I mean?

They both have their theories.

Donald Trump, you know what?

He's in bed with Russia and he's done all these things.

And the other side is saying, well, no,

here's the proof in their own handwriting that it was the other way around.

Right.

How do you cut through

the immediate call that something's a conspiracy theory and so therefore must be discredited and

get to people and say, look,

I'm not, I don't want you to believe me.

I don't want you to believe me.

Here it is in their own handwriting.

How do you bridge that?

Yeah, so it's tough because, so in chapter seven of the parasitic mind, I propose a way to get at the truth but to get to that truth you can't have someone going la la la la la i don't want to listen to you right if they start with that position then no amount of evidence that i can present to you is ever going to penetrate you because you've already built up the wall now let's assume for a minute that they don't do that that they actually are open to hearing my evidence can i describe the procedure please do yes yes yes

so so there's a thing that i call nomological networks of cumulative evidence.

It's a lot of fancy words, but let me explain it.

So when you think about Charles Darwin, when he tried to

develop his theory of evolution,

he didn't prove his theory by running a study with 30 undergraduates at Ohio State, right?

What he did instead is over two, three decades, he assiduously collected data from many, many different fields, from paleontology, from ecology, from animal husbandry, from geology so that when you put all the data together it became incontrovertible that he was correct and for 150 years people have been trying to falsify him to no avail so i argue for a similar process and that's what i call nomological networks of cumulative evidence which means what in in in common language i'm going to drown you in evidence coming from so many different directions that it becomes impossible for you to argue my position away and let me give a tangible example.

If I want to prove to you that toy preferences are biologically based, the fact that little Johnny likes trucks and guns and little Linda prefers dolls, that's not due to your parents being sexist.

It's due to real biological reasons.

How would I go about proving that to you?

Well, I would put on my hat of the guy who's trying to come up with many lines of evidence and I would present these to you.

So let me give you a couple of lines.

I could bring you data from different animals, so vervet monkeys, rhesus monkeys, chimpanzees, all of whom exhibit the same sex-specific toy preferences in their infants.

In other words, an infant vervet monkey boy and an infant vervet monkey girl has the same preferences as human infants.

Well, that seems pretty compelling evidence.

I could give you data of children, human children, who are in the pre-socialization stage of their cognitive development.

In other words, they're too young to have been socialized and they already exhibit those toy preferences.

I could, I'll just give you one more just because you'll get the point.

I could look at little girls who suffer from congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which is an endocrinological disorder that masculinizes the behavior of little girls.

Well, little girls who suffer from this disorder have toy preferences that are like that of boys.

So bit by bit, I can build this suffocating network of cumulative evidence around you.

I don't need need to use hysteria.

I don't need to scream above you.

I don't need to get all

emotionally labile.

I just have to present to you the data.

And now, the problem with that is, is it takes a lot of discipline to build that network, right?

And

it also takes something else.

It takes epistemic humility.

If you were to ask me, hey, Professor Saad, what's your position on the legalization of marijuana?

My answer would be, you know what, Glenn?

I haven't built the nomological network to be able to satisfactorily answer you that question.

So, in other words, when I know something, I speak with the full swagger of someone who knows something.

When I don't know something, I say, you know what?

I don't know enough about this.

In other words, I don't let hysteria, I don't let my affective system drive my positions.

I just let the evidence speak.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, it makes total sense.

Now,

how do you do that in

two months?

I feel like the West, if America falls, the world is in real trouble.

The West will fall.

And the West

is a,

there's a great book.

Somebody tried to finish

Winston Churchill's book on the English-speaking peoples.

And I read it, I don't know, 15 years ago.

And it ended with,

it foretold the ending of the West, that it was under attack and it was being subverted from within.

And it said, only

after

it falls

will the world realize how benevolent, how good, how caring, and

how charitable

that

system

really was, and the world will mourn.

And

let me, if I may just add to what you just said.

And if

go to an immigrant who who has seen what the rest of the world has to offer,

to exactly speak to your point, right?

Yes.

The Westerners who live in the West think that this is the default value, right?

That the world is replete with these types of societies.

No, the West is a

little bleep of an anomaly, right?

The trajectory of human history is not peppered with West.

It's peppered with tribal politics, with hatred, with superstition, with collectivism over individual dignity.

And so, for someone like me, Glenn, who escaped all that garbage, to come to the West, in the book I talk about

two great wars that I faced.

The first war was the Lebanese civil war from which we escaped.

The second war is the war on reason that I've been seeing on university campuses as a professor.

And it breaks my heart because we are self-imploding.

There was no reason for us to do this, but we are committing self-suicide.

I mean, suicide.

So,

if,

well, you do have a platform to where you can speak to people and

people

who understand

and know that there is truth.

And even knows that they are not the final arbiter of that truth, but they can see, they still have some common sense.

They still remember remember what truths were self-evident

and they want to wake people up, but they've tried everything.

They don't know what to do.

What do you do?

How do you reverse this?

How do you make an impact so we don't lose?

I mean, I know it's going to take decades, but

how do we hang on to what we have?

So

in the last chapter of the Parasite Mind, it's a call to action chapter.

One of the calls to action is activate your inner honey badger.

Now, let me explain that term.

A honey badger, for your viewers, those who don't know, is an extraordinarily ferocious animal.

It is the size of a small dog, but it can withstand an attack from six adult lions.

The lions will approach it trying to investigate, and it starts acting completely berserk that they're actually intimidated and they retreat.

Well, I argue that we have to be ideological honey badgers, meaning what?

If you have a set set of principles that you can truly reason, you can explain those first principles, be a honey badger.

And that's if, I mean, you follow me on social media.

We've known each other for a few years.

I never back down.

If you come after me, I come after you 10 times harder.

I'm relentless.

If you

isn't that Donald Trump, though?

Isn't that Donald Trump?

That's exactly it.

And by the way, that's why I respect him, right?

So it's not that I love everything about him, but I respect a leader who says, hey, listen, if you come after me, you better come correct.

I respect that a lot more than a castrato, right?

I respect that a lot more because the world is shaped by brazen people, by courageous people.

In the same way that we choose Navy SEALs because of their physical bravery and courage, we should be choosing academics who have intellectual Navy SEAL qualities.

Instead, most academics and thinkers are cowardly, are meek, are politically correct, and it's only a few few of us who have the temerity to speak out.

So, to answer your question, each of us, however big or small our platform is, should be engaged in the battle.

If someone posts something on Facebook that is insane, challenge them politely.

If you're at a pub and someone says something that you find objectionable, engage a debate.

But what they do instead is they say, I don't want to lose their friendship.

I don't want them to judge me.

So, there's always an excuse for why they subcontract the battle of ideas to others.

Let Gatsad worry about that.

I've got to be friends with this guy.

No, no, no.

Don't subcontract it to me.

You have a voice.

Use it before you lose it.

How do you...

I've said courage is contagious.

When you see someone else stand up and risk,

and I'm seeing people, you are one.

You're standing up.

You've taken the hits.

You've hurt yourself financially and every other way.

But you've done it.

And when people see that, they say, well,

maybe I can do more.

Maybe I can.

Is that the only way to encourage

courage?

I mean, yeah, I mean, you're leading by example.

Just yesterday, I received an email from a professor, I think it was in Southern California, who said, I've been following you for a while, Professor Saad, and you finally got to me.

I decided to do XYZ.

And And you can't imagine the sense of fulfillment that I get from that.

I mean, not from narcissistic reasons, but because I see the tangible benefits that my engagement offers people, right?

So it might start off by you watching me and then you get the courage, but then don't stop.

Keep speaking, keep talking.

Think about the, look, I'm friends with

the wife of Raif Badawi.

I don't know if you know who that is.

This is the Saudi blogger who has now been languishing in a Saudi prison for six, seven seven years because he dared say some rather innocuous things about the Saudi government.

But now imagine how much courage he had.

He was criticizing the Saudi government while living in Saudi Arabia.

Right?

So then imagine when someone exhibits that kind of courage and then I receive an email from someone who's at Wellesley College, but they're boo-hoo-hoo-so afraid to speak out.

I mean, imagine the level of cowardice you might have when you are so pampered at Wellesley College that you're afraid to speak, while they are heroes in the Middle East, knowing that if they speak, they're going to be killed, and yet they speak.

So, follow those honey badgers.

Gad, it is always great to talk to you.

You're one of my favorite people and favorite thinkers.

Thank you so much.

The name of the book is The Parasitic Mind.

The author is Gad Saad.

Thanks, Gad.

Thank you, Glenn.

So good to be with you.

Cheers.

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