Ask Dr. Drew - College Students vs. Free Speech: Gad Saad on "Woke" Hostility In University Lectures – Ask Dr. Drew – Episode 197

Episode Date: March 25, 2023

What’s happening to our universities? Crucial hubs of education are abandoning the free exchange of ideas & replacing debate with vitriol & intolerance. Gad Saad, who faced hostility at a recent USC lecture, discusses on Ask Dr. Drew. Gad Saad is a professor, evolutionary behavioral scientist, and author of “The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense” and the forthcoming book “The Saad Truth About Happiness: 8 Secrets for Leading the Good Life” which is now available for preorder. Dr. Gad Saad is Professor of Marketing at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada), and former holder of the Concordia University Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption (2008-2018). He has held Visiting Associate Professorships at Cornell University, Dartmouth College, and the University of California–Irvine. Dr. Saad received the Faculty of Commerce’s Distinguished Teaching Award in June 2000, and was listed as one of the ‘hot’ professors of Concordia University in both the 2001 and 2002 Maclean’s reports on Canadian universities. Saad was appointed Newsmaker of the Week of Concordia University in five consecutive years (2011-2015), and is the co-recipient of the 2015 President’s Media Outreach Award-Research Communicator of the Year (International), which goes to the professor at Concordia University whose research receives the greatest amount of global media coverage. More about Gad Saad: https://www.gadsaad.com/ Follow Gad Saad at https://twitter.com/GadSaad 「 SPONSORED BY 」 • BIRCH GOLD - Don’t let your savings lose value. You can own physical gold and silver in a tax-sheltered retirement account, and Birch Gold will help you do it. Claim your free, no obligation info kit from Birch Gold at https://birchgold.com/drew • GENUCEL - Using a proprietary base formulated by a pharmacist, Genucel has created skincare that can dramatically improve the appearance of facial redness and under-eye puffiness. Genucel uses clinical levels of botanical extracts in their cruelty-free, natural, made-in-the-USA line of products. Get 10% off with promo code DREW at https://genucel.com/drew 「 MEDICAL NOTE 」 The CDC states that COVID-19 vaccines are safe, effective, and reduce your risk of severe illness. Hundreds of millions of people have received a COVID-19 vaccine, and serious adverse reactions are uncommon. Dr. Drew is a board-certified physician and Dr. Kelly Victory is a board-certified emergency specialist. Portions of this program will examine countervailing views on important medical issues. You should always consult your personal physician before making any decisions about your health.  「 ABOUT the SHOW 」 Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation (https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/firstladyoflove). This show is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only, and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. 「 WITH DR. KELLY VICTORY 」 Dr. Kelly Victory MD is a board-certified trauma and emergency specialist with over 30 years of clinical experience. She served as CMO for Whole Health Management, delivering on-site healthcare services for Fortune 500 companies. She holds a BS from Duke University and her MD from the University of North Carolina. Follow her at https://earlycovidcare.org and https://twitter.com/DrKellyVictory. 「 GEAR PROVIDED BY 」 • BLUE MICS - Find your best sound at https://drdrew.com/blue • ELGATO - See how Elgato's lights transformed Dr. Drew's set: https://drdrew.com/sponsors/elgato/ 「 ABOUT DR. DREW 」 For over 30 years, Dr. Drew has answered questions and offered guidance to millions through popular shows like Celebrity Rehab (VH1), Dr. Drew On Call (HLN), Teen Mom OG (MTV), and the iconic radio show Loveline. Now, Dr. Drew is opening his phone lines to the world by streaming LIVE from his home studio. Watch all of Dr. Drew's latest shows at https://drdrew.tv Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome, everybody. We're going to get right to it. My guest today is Professor Gad Saad, Professor of Revolutionary Biology, author of The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, as well as his new book, which I recommend most highly, The Sad Truth. I believe you can reorder. There it is. The Sad Truth About Happiness, Eight Secrets for Leaving the Good Life. And I recommend it most, most, most highly. Dr. Saad had some interesting experiences recently around the expression of free speech. And we're going to get into a little bit of the relationship between deontological realism and consequentialism and the different types of consequentialism. Sounds like a lot. It's what we're dealing with today. So without any further

delay, I want to get right to it. Our laws as it pertained to substances are draconian and bizarre. A psychopath started this. He was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction, fentanyl and heroin. Ridiculous. I'm a doctor. Where the hell do you think I learned that? I'm just saying, you go to treatment before you kill people.

I am a clinician. I observe things about these chemicals. Let's just deal with what's real. We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time. Educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat. If you have trouble, you can't stop and you want to help stop it, I can help. I got a lot to say. I got a lot more to say. We'll be right back. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style,

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you need business insurance that can keep up with your evolving needs. With flexible coverage options from TD Insurance, you only pay for what you need. TD. Ready for you. And as always, we will be out on the restream watching your guys comments and of course

the rumble rants and we're lining up over on twitter spaces we may have some time hopefully have some time for calls today so do raise your hand for that while i see here that uh oh there's andrew ashkazvili is in there well the other andrews is throwing uh shade at me saying i look a little rough susan is that uh am i do i need some makeup or something? So I have been a little tired. Jetlag is getting a little bit, and I think it wears on me quite, quite easily. New York water. What? Blame it on the New York water.

Maybe, maybe that. I think there'll be a little bit optimistic just to blame it on that. No, Susan's examining the camera. It must be the camera. That's the problem. As I said, Dr. Saad is an evolutionary behavioral scientist and evolutionary biologist. The parasitic mind is what we were talking about last time he was here. His upcoming book is The Sad Truth About Happiness, Eight Secrets for Leaving the Good Life. And I think they're pretty sensible

ideas. Available now on pre-order. You can follow Dr. Saad on Twitter, which is at GAD, G-A-D, Saad, S-A-A-D. Let's get Dr. Saad on in here. Oh, so good to be with you. How are you? Thank you for having me again.

You as well. I realize that when I, your name is so alliterative. I always fear like when I've used your first name, I feel like your last name came out of my mouth and I have to check myself. But, and somebody is calling you already on our restream, they call you the Gadfather. So I thought that was kind of cool too. Do you want to hear the story of how that moniker came to be?

Please. So about 10 years ago, a Canadian rapper by the name of Bubba Brinkman, who his claim to fame is he does these rap videos to try to excite, you know, young people about science in general and evolution in particular. And so he was cutting a song called I Am African and he was doing a video of that rap song. And he asked me if I was willing to be in the video. And so I put out on social media a call stating that if this whole academic thing doesn't work out and I become a rap star, I need another name, so please give me suggest some names. And people gave all sorts of names, but none of them were sticking.

So one day I was at our local cafe telling the owner of the cafe the story, and he pauses and he goes, oh, that's easy. I've got the perfect name for you. You are the Godfather. And that's how the name came to be. Speaking of that local cafe, that's hysterical, by the way. You and I have become friends now,

and I know you want to talk a bit about that. But every time we meet or talk or I hear you tell a story, something about that cafe comes into the story, including when I call you. I think that must be the cafe you're at. So I don't know if your family lives nearby because your wife seems to be there a lot of the time when you tell these stories. What's going on there? You know, it's funny you say this because in my forthcoming book, which I think it's okay for me to say that you were kind enough to agree to blurb it so you are intimately familiar with it because you read it, I tell the

story of how my family, not my nuclear family, meaning my parents and my siblings, when they would hear, oh, I'm going to work at the cafe, they could never take that seriously because to them, work has to be, right? You're a physician, Drew. So, you know, there is a medical clinic you go to. That's a place of work. You know, maybe you go to a manufacturing plant. But how could it be that you go work at a cafe? What kind of, you know, vagabond are you that you would be doing any serious work at a cafe?

So there was always this kind of antipathy, not antipathy, but this kind of wink, wink. Sure, you're going to work at the cafe so there was always this kind of antipathy not antipathy but this kind of wink wink sure you're going to work at the cafe but the reality is a lot of my books uh were written in part at various cafes not the same cafe i have a sequence of cafes i like to visit and i maintain some variety seeking by never going to the same place too many times in a week okay all right so when we say cafe it's just one of the many where you might find yeah you might run into gads that you know it's sort of like uh you know i feel like it's to lose the track or something and at the you might run into about one of the the can you know one of the the moulins so exactly so um so you've had some interesting experiences lately. Um, and I want to get into some of that, but, but as, as I was hearing you today, talk about what happened to you, I started thinking, I kind of feel like we're running a giant

Milgram experiment on, on people. And in a weird way, the Milgram experiment was a way of trying to focus in what happened during the Second World War because no one could believe what had happened. And I feel like now we've sort of pulled back and it's happening on some sort of weird, almost international level. What am I getting at? What is that? Right. Well, I like the fact that you linked it to the Milgram experiment. Whenever I begin one of my behavioral science classes, I always describe the three, arguably the three most famous experiments in the behavioral sciences, the Milgram experiment, the Zimbardo experiment, Stanford, and then the Solomon-Ash conformity experiment, all of which have a lot to do with

conformity to something, right? Obedience to authority, obedience to roles, obedience to group pressures, and so on. But before I mention that, so I did recently return from Southern California. There were three highlights. The first highlight was meeting the lovely Dr. Drew and his wife at Hotel Laguna. By the way, someone wrote in one of the comments on my YouTube channel that they saw us sitting together. They were the photographer or something at a wedding that was happening there, but they didn't want, they felt too shy to come up and say hello. So there is documented. Oh, I wish they had.

So cute. I know. So lovely. So it was so lovely. I mean, we've communicated for a while now, for a couple of years, but it was the first time that we met in person and you're both even more delightful in person than you are in e-communication. So a real pleasure to meet you. What's amazing is I can categorically say the same thing about that and your entire

family. Just remarkable. Your kids, your wife. And I don't want to pull the curtain back too far, but that all figures in very significantly into the happiness book. And I like that a lot. Thank you. That's very kind of you to say.

The second thing I did is I did two PragerU clips on the forthcoming book. I won't give away much of it, but it was just amazing how professional their production is. Have you done any clips with them drew no because i i the guys i was talking to i had trouble getting them to get their head around what i was talking about so it kind of gave up i'll be interested to see how yours goes okay sounds good the so the third thing the third highlight of the trip was I was invited to speak at a one-day event at USC, at a specific center at USC. The center is called the Center for Economic and Social Research. So the acronym is CESAR. And it was about the enlightenment. And so you would think, you know, people are going to be,

you know, quite receptive to the message that I might be bringing to the event. My talk was basically, and I guess we're going to get into that, was on the tension between deontological ethics and consequentialist ethics. And I was arguing that when it comes to certain principles like freedom of speech, presumption of innocence, freedom of inquiry, you have to be deontological in your pursuits. And again, we can drill down as to what these terms mean. And it was really just remarkable, the level of hostility that I faced in many different ways, right? Some of it was very overt and other forms of it were quite more subtle. But it really, it shocks you to think that someone who is giving a talk that should be incredibly

non-controversial can face the kind of uh hostility as i did so we can drill down if you want as to what these two ethical systems are we can take it wherever you want to go well let's um let's talk about what post-structuralism is because i i i and you live in canada and when i've heard french philosophers speak about modern philosophy they at least from those from france i don't know how the canadian sort of system works but those from france laugh at our preoccupation with post post-structuralist as irrelevant philosophers that we let from 75 years ago that we let go of 50 years ago and how you could be sort of preoccupied with these these post-structuralists which they consider i don't think i'm overstating it because i i'm no expert in this but I've heard a number of them speak about this,

almost a joke, like Chausseur was some sort of gag. And they sort of didn't feel it was useful at all. And yet we've now decided this is the best way to conduct ourselves by hanging our hat on a philosophy that refuses to acknowledge basic realities, which is sort of laughable. But that's what it's at the core. Subjectivism rather than objectivism. Exactly right. So in the parasitic mind, I discuss a wide range of what I call idea pathogens. So parasitic ideas that really take a hold

of your neuronal circuitry, causing you to not be able to think rationally, leading you to the abyss of infinite lunacy. And I argue that of all the idea pathogens, the most dangerous one is postmodernism. And of course, there are variants of that. Poststructuralism, deconstructionism would be variants. But postmodernism is precisely the idea, as you correctly said, Drew, that there are no objective truths other than the one objective truth that there are no objective truths. And we are shackled by personal biases, by subjectivity. And so at its core, it is anti-scientific because while, of course, scientists recognize that in science,

we only talk about provisional truths, that which we thought was true 300 years ago, we may no longer think to be true today. But we do operate under the epistemological assumption that there is a truth to be discovered. Otherwise, there's no point getting up in the morning to do academic research. And I feel it needs, I've got to stop you because I am science and these kinds of things that people have been saying lately. People get confused. Science is a technique. It's an instrument with which to query reality, to approximate the truth. It's not a, it's not a philosophy. There is a philosophy of science. It exists, but at its core, the scientific method is an instrument, not a

thing, you know, not a state of being. Exactly. It is the most important epistemological insight that human minds have ever created. That's without question. So postmodernism is perfectly antithetical to that, right? And I don't know if I've mentioned this story the last time I was on your show, but even if I did, it's worth repeating. So to give your audience members a sense

of how destructive postmodernism is, we are a storytelling animal, right? So it's good to explain these concepts via actual personal stories. So in 2002, one of my former doctoral students had just defended his PhD. And so we were heading out for a celebratory dinner, myself, my wife, we didn't have children then in 2002. So myself, my wife, we didn't have children then in 2002. So myself, my wife, my doctoral student, and he was bringing a date along. And so he called me before that fateful evening to just kind of give me a heads up that the date that he was bringing along was a graduate student in postmodernism, women's study and cultural anthropology, which I, you know, jocularly refer to as the

holy trinity of bullshit. So of course, the reason why he was calling me to warn me about this is, let's have a good evening, Gad. Let's not get into big, fierce debates. And I said to him, oh, I got you. I understand. Mom's the word. I'm going to be on my best behavior, which of course was a complete abject lie. About halfway through the evening, I turned to to be on my best behavior, which of course was a complete abject lie. About halfway through the evening, I turned to the lady in question, remember, who was a graduate student in postmodernism. And I said to her, well, you know, I'm an evolutionary psychologist. I study, you know, human universals. So I do think that there are some universals that we can, you know, hang our hats on. Do you mind if I propose some universals to you and then you could tell me how I'm wrong? She said, absolutely, go for it. Now, again, remember, Drew, this is 2002,

way before the transgender craze of men can bear children too and men can menstruate. So I looked at her and I said, is it not true that within homo sapiens, only women bear children. Is that not a true fact? So she looked at me, scoffed at my imbecility, could not believe what a simpleton I was. And she said, absolutely not true. I said, it's not true that only women bear children in Homo sapiens? How is that? She said, well, because there is some Japanese tribe off some Japanese island whereby within the mythological folkloric realm, it is the men who bear children. So by you restricting it to the biological realm, that's how you keep us barefoot and pregnant. So after I recovered from the mini stroke that I suffered from when I heard such stupidity, I then said, okay, well, let me pick

for you a less dangerous, less corrosive, less controversial example than only women can bear children. Is it not true since time immemorial that sailors have relied on the fact that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west? And here, Drew, she used Jacques Derrida's deconstructionism, right? Language creates reality. She said, what do you mean by East and West? And what do you mean by the sun? That which you call the sun, I might call dancing hyena, literally her words.

I said, well, fine. The dancing hyena rises in the East and sets in the West. She said, well, I don't play those label games. Why am I always so quick to read? Why am I so quick to repeat? Why am I so- Exactly. Why- Exactly.

So why do I repeat the story? Because it is so powerful in demonstrating the lunacy of postmodernism. If I can't sit with an adult who is a graduate student at a leading Canadian university, if not a leading world university, who's a graduate student, and we can't agree, we can't have a Venn diagram of me, you know, an intersection that we can agree what

constitutes female, what constitutes bearing children, what constitutes eats and west and the sun, then this is why I call postmodernism a Darwinian cul-de-sac. It's intellectual terrorism. It's nihilism. So it's complete stupidity it's a waste of everybody's time and money i think i was first exposed to that when bill clinton said it depends what is is which sounded at the time like an attorney speak but i think it's more a little uh little derrida speak yeah it's it's frustrating for me because I am on the record willing to play the word games. I'm willing to go there. Whatever we need to go to have our conversations, adjust the language and proceed.

But it's so slippery for the very reasons you're bringing out. Because it feels like it's designed to create disharmony, right? It's to kind of create conflict. And that's sad for me if we can't find even a language upon which to have our conversations. Do you think that part of what you get pushed back is the very fact that you were an evolutionary biologist. I noticed David Buss getting a lot of grief just for being an evolutionary psychologist. And I know, I think you sort of embed more in biology. I was trained as a biologist and the word biology and evolution in formal biological training were identical. Evolution, much like scientific method being an instrument,

evolution as a biologist was just an instrument to help me understand what I was observing, what was likely to be true, and how we got there. It was just it. It was just biology. It's how biology operated, which was through evolution. It feels like there's a pushback even on that. And it used to come from the right. It used to come from the religious folks. It's weird.

Well, it's interesting that you bring in the political prism to the story, because I always tell people that there isn't a monopoly on imbecility, right? The right are much more likely to be staunch deniers of evolution, whereas the left are much more likely to be staunch deniers of evolution, whereas the left are much more likely to be staunch deniers of evolutionary psychology, right? So the left is perfectly willing to accept that evolution operates as long as you end the operative influence of evolution at the neck, right? In other words, as long as you don't apply

evolutionary biology to study the evolution of this important organ called the human mind, right? If you use it to explain opposable thumbs, great. If you explain why our pancreas have evolved to be that way, great. Just don't use it to explain human behavior. So originally, when I first, if you like, entered these great wars, the battle of ideas, to your point, it was very much in my scientific career trying to Darwinize. Now, I'm housed in a business school because I apply evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology in studying economic

decision-making, consumer decision-making. And so most of my colleagues in the social sciences and in the business schools were, what the hell are you talking about? I mean, biology applies for the zebra, for the mosquito, for salamanders. But surely you're not saying that consumers are animals, Professor Saad, under the purview of evolutionary mechanisms. And I'm like, yes, I'm exactly saying that. So that's when I first saw that very, very intelligent academics could be completely parasitized by their ideological dogma, unwilling to concede that the same

evolutionary mechanisms that explain the behavior of every other living organism should somehow not apply to consumers or to how we make choice decisions as per David Buss. And so that's when I first saw, okay, Houston, we have a problem. And then subsequently, I started realizing that the capacity to be parasitized by dogma was not restricted strictly to my academic discipline, but was running rampant in the academic world. And that's how eventually I collected enough evidence

that led to the book the parasitic mind because i saw the attack on reason was coming from every direction it's absolutely insane yeah it comes it has all it just one group tends to prevail at a given time uh and a lot of the time you know when i was on the radio regularly was spent fighting off the right, both for vaccines like HPV and for discussing evolution, discussing psychology and repetitive patterns in human behavior. And at the core, well, this is interesting. You tell me if this is a new thought I'm having.

You tell me if this this is a new thought i'm having you tell me if it feels accurate at the time the the right was very invested in human exceptionalism it feels like now the left is invested in individual exceptionalism which is a far more problematic principle i think human exceptionalism been around for a long time individual exceptionalism well that's king baby time that's when you know you know your everything is is is everything and that's you can't have a society based on individual exceptionalism not not individual worth that every being is exceptional in its own, operates by its own fundamental laws. Yeah, it's just, that seems crazy to me. And paradoxically, in addition to the individual exceptionalism

that you are alluding to, the left is also driven by, you know, orgiastic identity politics, where the individual is subsumed under their collective identity, right? So Gad Saad is not Gad Saad. He is a Lebanese Jew first, right? Well, no, I don't present myself to the world as a member of a group. I present myself as Gad Saad with all of my qualities and all of my faults.

So in a sense, the left has some paradoxical inconsistencies that they have to kind of sort out before we can take them seriously. Interesting, so you're at once defined by your group and individually accepted. It's all very confusing to me. You asked some very interesting questions when you were at SC, right? You sort of have some sort of interrogatories

around deontological principles. Why don't you scroll through some of that? Well, please, yes, absolutely. Thank you for asking, Drew. So deontological ethics would be as follows. It's an absolute statement. So if I say, for example, it is never okay to lie. That's a deontological statement.

If I say, on the other hand, well, it is okay to lie under certain circumstances, say if I want to spare someone's feelings. So if your spouse, I often joke that if you want to have a long and successful marriage, you better put on your consequentialist hat when you hear the following question. Do I look fat in those jeans? Well, put on your consequentialist hat. And even if the answer is yes, answer no, you've never looked more beautiful, right? So for many things in life, we navigate through the world

with a consequentialist bent, and that's perfectly fine. But when it comes to foundational principles that define the uniqueness of the West, presumption of innocence, freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry, those pursuits, those principles have to be deontological by definition. So for example, here are examples of faulty consequentialism statements that I've recently heard from several supposed intellectuals, many of whom are certainly household names within intellectual circles. So this is exactly what I mean by faulty consequentialism. I believe in freedom of speech, but not for Donald Trump. It made perfect sense that social media companies would boot him out because his speech is simply too dangerous to allow him to spew his

nonsense. That's a consequentialist statement that is grotesque. Here's another one. Oh, I believe in journalistic integrity, but it was perfectly okay to suppress the Hunter Biden story because had journalists not suppressed the story, then Donald Trump could have had a fair chance of winning the election, and we couldn't allow that asteroid to hit Earth again. Here's another example. Oh, I believe in presumption of innocence, but not for that gang rapist Brett Kavanaugh. We have to err on the side of caution, and even if there isn't any concrete evidence in support of the fact that he violated that woman, let's err on that side. So as you can see, in those cases,

the person always starts off with, yes, yes, of course I believe in that deontological principle, but let me give you the examples where it shouldn't apply. Now, let me contextualize that with the following example uh the mossad was hunting uh all sorts of nazi criminals uh right after world war ii and in 1960 they found adolf eichmann in hiding in argentina now they faced one of two one. They could very surreptitiously put a bullet in his head and no one would know what happened, or they could adhere to their deontological ethic, in this case, that every person deserves their day in court, including someone as grotesque as Adolf Eichmann. And so at great personal risk and great diplomatic risk, they decided to whisk Adolf Eichmann out of Argentina back to Israel, where he was tried and then hung. So if we grant

deontological ethical courtesy to Adolf Eichmann, then all of the super smart progressive professors that I know should maybe not be saying, oh yes, I believe in freedom of speech, but not for Brett Kavanaugh or Donald Trump. Yeah, it's sort of, I don't know how to frame it as the exceptionalism that's sort of underway these days. Let's say, let's say that somebody like Donald Trump is tremendously dangerous to society or to the American fabric. Let's just posit that. Let's, let's say, because let me, let me back up from that statement first and just say, it's interesting to me when you were talking about what happened at USC and the kind of over-the-top emotion that some of these people have. It sounded as though when they were continuing to engage in discussion with you, underneath all of it was sort of a Trump derangement syndrome.

Like, your system will allow for a guy like that. And that's when they just go berserk. Was I reading that correctly? I mean, it is true that some of the unhinged lunatics were due to Trump derangement syndrome. But I had two separate people who were very, very disturbed by my incredibly dangerous talk about, you know, that men can't bear children and that men can't menstruate. Two separate people. One was a younger person. The other one was, I think, a researcher at that center who was actually arguing. And I can't wait. I hope that USC releases the recording of that event so that people can actually see it. So imagine this, Drew, I'm sitting at an

event on the values of the enlightenment, where I'm talking about these deontological inviolable positions. And this gentleman is saying that he was absolutely for governmental regulation of language like the one that I was espousing. When I asked, well, what do you mean? Give me an example of like the really dangerous stuff that I'm espousing. He said, well, like, for example, when you talk about men can't bear children, that will put some of us in my community in grave danger.

So hence exactly my argument about the slippery slope. So if someone could be so insane as to argue that in a sexually reproducing species with two phenotypes, male and female, with clear gametes, that the average three-year-old child understands that binary distinction, for me to state that men cannot bear children should be regulated as dangerous speech it shows you what is happening in our universities today it's absolutely outlandish but when i hear stuff like that i i always feel like that's got to be the derrida stuff again that we're we are playing playing

games with the words and and and again i i am trying to navigate these waters and saying please tell me then what i should have said and i'm guessing what they would have wanted you to say again i'm not for compelled speech but what they would have want you to say is that an xy male is not capable of delivering a full-term child uh and so okay you know uh so you you want bad on me we got to get this language right but what i'd like to see is you know some randomized controlled trials on i feel the same way about the trump derangement syndrome can we use some sort of instrument to show the harm i mean if you can demonstrate the harm of me misspeaking and not using the speech that you're compelling me to use, show me the harm, that would be very helpful.

That would be very helpful. But I don't know that you can do that because I don't know, I'm sure it doesn't feel good if I misspeak or misidentify or whatever, but harm. It reminds me of, it reminds me of the Stanford law school class yelling at the judge. I don't know if you heard what was going on in the background, but some kid yells out, why don't you just take my penis?

And I thought, oh, you can't tell the difference between a judge rendering an opinion at the bench and somebody coming at you with a knife. You can't tell the difference between a judge rendering an opinion at the bench and somebody coming at you with a knife. You can't tell the difference. I don't, I don't, I, it's, we, we can't, I don't know, but go ahead. I'm trying to be a good citizen. I'm trying. Yeah. Well, I was going to say when you said, oh, uh, you know, if there was an instrument to

measure harm, so let me contextualize, you know, what should be tolerated in a free society. And by the way, I mentioned this in my talk at USC. You know, one of the things that makes me difficult to handle by a lot of these, you know, blue-haired Taliban is that the examples that I give are so compelling, not only because of how poignant they are, but given my own personal history, right? For those of you who don't know, we are Lebanese Jews who escaped execution in Lebanon. We come from the Middle East where, you know, people are not typically, you know, very loving and cuddly with the Jews. And so, you know, having grown up with that kind of

existential threat to our lives, my parents were kidnapped by Fatah in 1980, they were tortured and so on. So this is all discussed, or some of it is discussed in the parasitic mind. So I do have a personal history of victimhood, of real victimhood, the worst kind of victimhood as a child. But here's the example that I give

to counter your issue, Drew, of how do we measure harm and so on. There is nothing, Drew, that is more offensive than a Holocaust denier. So you're taking a historically, it's not up for debate, it's the most documented historical reality you could imagine that is truly grotesque at a diabolical level that most human minds cannot conceive. It's the systematic extinguishing of an entire people in a large-scale mass industrial process. And yet here I stand before you, Drew, saying that I support the right

of Holocaust deniers to spew their grotesque nonsense. That's what deontological ethics means. It means that even for something as profoundly hurtful, as profoundly false, as profoundly insulting as Holocaust deniers to someone with my personal history, that's the price that I have to pay to adhere to deontological ethics in a free society. That's why all those idiots at USC can't really come after me other than huff and puff. Because if you take my personal history coupled with my absolute defense of these principles,

right? I'm not the guy who says, oh, no, no, I believe in absolute freedom of speech, but I don't tolerate Holocaust deniers. No, I walk the walk and I talk the talk. And that's why they end up hyperventilating, because they realize that I'm a real danger to their complete woke, parasitized nonsense. Let us take a quick break. We hopefully will get some calls in there over on the twitter spaces if you raise your hand you are agreeing to go scream on multiple platforms if you come up to ask your question but the question should be for dr sad and i will contemplate the blue hair taliban while i am while i'm taking this little break we'll be back with dr gad sad twitter

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and to claim eligibility for your free home safe by March 31st on qualifying purchases. Again, visit birchgold.com. And we are back. R-C-H gold, birchgold.com slash D-R-E-W. And we are back. Just a reminder, upcoming guests, if you want to put that up there maybe, Caleb. We have Robert Kennedy coming back next week. We have Lepitova, Latipova tomorrow, or actually Wednesday. Ed Dowd on Friday. We'll be back in Pasadena for that show.

And William Mackus, we got him rescheduled. And Astrid Leffringhausen, who is a, if I remember correctly, an Australian researcher whose data runs very contrary to what I was hearing from the UK researcher last week. I'm blanking on her name. Help me, Susan, who we talked to last week. The researcher, male, vicky mail vicky mail uh so uh well again i actually and and by the way speaking of um the ontological principles i thought

the back and forth on twitter was rather healthy and i think you all should be kind to her because she takes a very you can disagree actively i'm all for that but she took some takes a very even i didn't see one ad hominem thing come out of her mouth and i applaud her for that so my whole thing with uh gad this is a woman that um is a uk researcher in pregnancy and vaccines and presented some interesting data and people were wildly exercised about because it wasn't a condemnation. In fact, it was an overly rosy, enthusiastic endorsement of vaccines. And there were two things that bothered me. One was that it was really on alpha and delta material, the alpha and delta data. And so the outcomes of pregnancy, of course, were much worse with alpha and delta.

Now, I did see she put out some Omicron data, did not pass the sniff test for me it still looked too bad and her data on vaccine is too good i mean so rosy nobody had any vaccine injuries that's not the vaccine i've been using so there's something going on so we're gonna have to try to figure this all out but that's not what we're talking about today uh we were talking about consequentialism and we've been talking about deontological principles talk a little more about the two kinds of consequentialism well i mean i'm not sure that you could i mean for our for the relevance of our conversation that you need to uh you know parse them any further consequentialism right the main idea of consequentialism is that the the ethical uh uh value of a particular course of action is judged by the consequences of that action right so in the case of the the trump example well sure i believe in freedom of speech but it I can't support that deontological principle for Donald

Trump because the consequences of giving him that right are simply too nefarious, right? And as I've explained, no, right? When you pursue truth, you have to pursue it unencumbered by any consequentialist calculus. So example, I also talked at USC about the concept of forbidden knowledge. The concept of forbidden knowledge has had a long history in human thought for all sorts of reasons. All sorts of people thought you can't do this research, right? Think about the Galileo trials. Think of Socrates' trial. Think about the movie Name of the Rose, for those of you who may remember it, where the whole premise of the movie is that there is a forbidden library in this monastery that

has a book by Aristotle that explains comedy, the aesthetics of comedy. And the monks that were running that monastery thought that comedy is the aesthetics of comedy. And the monks that were running that monastery thought that comedy is the work of the devil and that monks should not be reading that book. So what they did is they laced the bottom pages of the book so that when you went like this to flip the books, you would then be poisoned and killed if you dared go and read that forbidden book in the forbidden library. So the instinct to suppress that which is considered dangerous and forbidden, it has existed throughout human history. Now, regrettably, despite the fact that we've had the scientific revolution, the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, in many of our universities today,

there is kind of a relaunching of the idea of forbidden knowledge, that there are many situations where you shouldn't apparently be pursuing research because the downstream effects are simply too dangerous. And that came up during my USC talk, where some of the people in the audience could not believe that I was deontological when it came to the pursuit of truth. So let me give you an example. When you do research for sex differences, as any evolutionary psychologist would do, right?

I mean, we are a sexually dimorphic species. We're a sexually reproducing species. So it is only to be expected that there might be many innate evolved differences between the two sexes. Well, I would often get my papers desk rejected in journals. In other words, they didn't even go through the review process because the editor would get back to me and say, what is the point of highlighting these sex differences? You're only perpetuating the sexist status quo. And hence, that person is effectively engaging in forbidden knowledge creation, right? Don't do research on sex differences. Clearly, Drew, I think you would

agree this is not what we wish to have in our institutions of higher learning. Well, my biggest pushback on that is if you want equity and equality you have to get very real about what the forces are affecting people you know what what is it that's influencing human motivation and behavior and if you're not very clear about that you can't just deliver to people and they don't change the cognition is one piece of the story everybody there's a lot more going on unless you less people understand what's going on inside them, they have grave difficulty changing. Change is hard. And it's not just about societal pressures. It's not just that. But by the way, one of the other idea pathogens that I discuss in the

book called social constructivism is the idea that we are all born tabula rasa with equal potentiality, right? So my son or yours could be the next Lionel Messi, the next Michael Jordan, the next Albert Einstein. And the only thing that makes him not become that is because there was a unique idiosyncratic socialization process or unique life trajectories that didn't allow him to reach his full potential. Now, that's a perfectly hopeful message because every parent would love to think that their child is the next Lionel Messi or Michael Jordan, but of course, it's perfectly rooted in bullshit.

It's hopeful and it's nice, but it's not true. We're all equal under the law, but we're not all born with equal potentiality. But believe me, in many of the social sciences, many social scientists and social constructivists argue that even for something as basic as upper body strength, the fact that men on average can bench press much more than women, that itself is due to social construction. It's not due to any morphological, anatomical, behavioral, hormonal differences that might be under the purview of evolutionary mechanisms. No, no, no. It's because little Johnny was encouraged to play rough and tumble. So he developed the penchant to,

you know, bench press and have strength. Whereas little Linda was taught to be nurturing and kind and play passively. That's why Bubba ends up bench pressing more when he plays center for University of Alabama. It is so laughable, it is so grotesque, and that's why I call it a parasitic idea. And they would say the ends justifies the means, and that's of course never,

that is opposite of deontologicalism. Exactly. But it, I watched a movie on the way to new york uh called the um something about what is it the the gentle art or something they are not giving a fuck or something and and it's going at this guy goes at the issue of raising people with this idea you're talking about and how destructive it was for his generation, that everyone's equipotential, everyone is special, everyone is whatever. And his point was, he, he,

it's an hour and a half documentary where he goes at this thing that this, this, as you say, this pathogen that his generation was exposed to was the notion that how, how do you strengthen muscles? do you strengthen your your soul except by coming up against thing and resistance and overcoming and you know building and and overcoming adversity as you as you mentioned earlier he really takes that on very aggressively and he's angry and he should be he should be exactly life was a mess called the subtle art of not giving an f yeah that's what it was yeah oh yes i think the

book the book was a gigantic he sold several millions of that book didn't he i think so i think that's true yeah yeah but just to link it was really well done was it okay i'll have to check it out but uh to to link to link the issue of you know deontological systems to consequential systems in the in the, Drew, I'll give you two examples from medicine. So the body, the fat acceptance movement or body positivity is we can exactly, you know, anchor it within that tension between deontological versus consequential, right? Because deontological ethic, if you're a physician, would be, I need to tell you the truth no matter what.

I will never equivocate, right? So being overweight, as far as I know, and you'll correct me, you're the physician here, Drew, but being overweight does not have very good downstream effects. There aren't too many people who are 300 pounds overweight who live to be 100. Blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, so on.

Okay, well, some consequentialists argue, no, we need to create a new narrative that says that you could be healthy at any weight because what's most important is that we protect people's feelings. So you have 500-pound people, you know, gyrating about how beautiful their bodies are who are then astonished to find out that there isn't an orderly lineup of people who wish to mate with them because, you know, it's the patriarchy that taught men that you shouldn't mate with 500 pound women, right? Well, of course, again, that's rooted in consequentialism rather than deontological ethics of I never lie to my patients. Here's a second example. Do you remember, Drew, the, I can't remember how many there were, 1,200 public health officials who said, well, yes consequences of not fighting against systemic racism outweigh

the fact that that might be a super spreader. So in this case, those public health officials did not have their deontological hat. They had a consequentialist hat. So consequentialism in areas that should be deontological is a real cancer to truth. Back in the interest of deontology and physicians, there's something called the obesity paradox, which was documented before the current kind of obesity we get in this country. But there was a obesity paradox,

which was that people who are overweight live longer. But I think the kind of obesity we're getting now, it's involved with a lot of other metabolic problems associated with seed oils and certain kinds of, you know, processed foods and things. There's much more going on than just body weight per se. So there's, there's a lot happening now. And, and you're right that people aren't allowed to kind of talk about it out loud, which makes, you know, puts certain people in danger, let's go uh how how are things in canada is it a lot different up there is it the same i would think it'd be worse it is worse uh so you know if you kind of put

you know countries if you map them western countries on the the woke continuum then you know at one point i used to joke, although I guess I was being serious, that one of the most parasitized countries used to be Sweden, certainly because of their social engineering experiment with creating a gender neutral society and all that woke nonsense. But I would probably say, and I don't take much pride in saying this, that probably Canada might be the most woke country in the world that is most parasitized by this stuff. And it's not very difficult to explain why that is, because our prime minister is a walking manifestation of every single idea pathogen that I enumerate in my book. And it's not because he is diabolical

and evil. It's because he's a product of the environment that he was raised in, right? He was raised in an environment where all of those super progressive leftist ideas were de rigueur, as we say in French. And therefore, every public policy intervention that he has is laden with this woke nonsense. So you are correct, Drew. Your intuition is right. Canada is quite bad. So let me give you a concrete example of that. So in Canada, we have a university-wide,

at the national level, we have a program now for truth and reconciliation for what happened to the indigenous communities in the past, whereby we are seeking to indigenize Canadian universities. Now, some elements of that indigenization process are quite innocuous, although in my view, wrong. So for example, the idea that every single second you have to engage in self-flagellation, I'm sitting on stolen land, I'm an earth rapist and so on. That to me is grotesque.

For example, when you're going to a graduation ceremony where you're honoring your students who it's now their moment to shine, I don't think you should be starting it by tarring that event that they have nothing to do with. These are historical grievances from 300 years ago by saying, you know, we're sitting on stolen land and, you know, we are pigs and we're colonial monsters and so on. OK, but let's say I accept that it's a small little land acknowledgment. Why not? Here is a much more nefarious thing because it attacks the epistome

as epistemology of truth. Now, you know, now there is pressure on us to indigenize our research and our curriculum. Well, how do I indigenize evolutionary psychology? I didn't know that there was a Lebanese Jewish evolutionary psychology, just like I didn't know that there was an indigenous way of knowing.

But the idea is that the scientific method, Drew, is only one of many ways of knowing, and the indigenous way of knowing. But the idea is that the scientific method, Drew, is only one of many ways of knowing and the indigenous way of knowing is just as valid as the scientific method. No it isn't. Let me give you an example where I would concede the point. Let's suppose you want to study some environmental issue where the indigenous people have lived for thousands of years. Well, clearly they have unique knowledge about the flora and the fauna in that ecosystem. I will concede that. But if we are adjudicating scientific hypotheses as relating to that ecosystem, there is no alternative to the

scientific method as being the adjudicating process for testing those hypotheses. There is no indigenous way of doing science, but now we're under pressure to indigenize our curriculum. That is grotesque and it's wrong and it has to stop. It gets complicated. You know, I was, I'm really trying to be a good citizen and I'm trying to be aware of where I can adjust my language so it doesn't hurt anybody i'm being reading a lot of history about this country and reconstruction and things and i was reading

and and indeed i i had a eurocentric kind of naive view of things and i'm happy to have some scales fall from my eyes as it pertains to all you know the reality of our our world uh but i was reading this to point out the complexities of some of these things i'm reading booker t washington's biography up from slavery and he makes quite an issue of how many indian nations own slaves and how many thousands and thousands of slave they own and And I thought, whoa, I had no idea. That's never been brought up. And there's Booker T. Washington making an issue of it. And humbly, by the way, he's humbly sort of talking about the complexities

of how this horrible thing was spread out through the land. But there's that. So let's take a couple of calls here, why don't we? This is Martin, it looks like. And let's see if we can get some calls here for Dr. Saad. Martin, there you are. You know, we have this thing where, wait, Martin, I don't hear you. Is there something going on here, Susan?

Hang on one second, Martin. I don't think we are hooked in. My mic is on. There you are. Go ahead. I was listening to you speak of Booker T. Washington and then my mic got on. I'll skip ahead to where... I'm in Ottawa, Dr. Saad, and I'm actually a French-Canadian. So I had a lot of thoughts going around listening to you speak, and I'm going to try to hone in on one thing.

So I actually work at the Montfort Hospital, which is a landmark hospital that wants settlements to continue existing because of its French-Canadian history. And so I bring this up because I'm actually this first time I state this out publicly. BLM has has entered the chat. Let's say it this way. So BLM has and they this started off when the riots were going on in 2021. And they stated based off of George Floyd, there's systemic racism even in the Montfort Hospital. And so I want to bring this up because I want you to know this, that, you know, given the fact that I'm French-Canadian, meaning that I'm somehow a minority within Canada, my minority status is being trumped within the actual minority hospital

in which I work. So I don't know. I just wanted to throw this out there, let this just roll around in your brain, maybe feed me back so yeah I just did I just think to myself your your French Canadian people would just say say come saw they saw they come saw let's just say come saw yeah right right say come saw and and let's see what that said has to say about that. But it kills me. It literally bothers me that the excesses are causing people to think things like Martin is having to deal with.

It's not the principle. It's the excess that he's reacting to. So go ahead, Dr. Sa. Well, I was just going to say, I mean, the way that I would answer to this is that, you know, to, to, to, to harp back to my earlier comment about my actual tragedy of my childhood. It is part of my personal history that, you know, we suffered in Lebanon and then had to leave under very dire circumstances. But what defines me is that I have overcome that tragic start to my life, right? So I could internalize this as something that is part of my life. And no therapist was worth their salt would say, ignore whatever's happened to you.

You have to deal with whatever trauma you've experienced. But then what makes you strong is you overcome it. You don't wallow in it, right? So let me contextualize this. I'm going to talk about, nevermind my family's history. So my wife is Lebanese Armenian. So her parents too had to leave Lebanon under immediate difficulties and threats. Maybe not as much as us, but fine. Now, they came to Lebanon, their parents, the parents of my wife's parents, because they were escaping the Armenian genocide in 1915, right? So within our lifetime, we've had,

so this is not 300 years ago, you know, in some territorial dispute, and I'm not minimizing that. Of course, people have historical grievances. But I'm talking within my lifetime, within my wife's lifetime and her parents. And my grandparents left Syria to move to Lebanon because of antisemitism and so on. So we don't wallow in that.

We move on. If you keep engaging in endless wallowing in victimology to do forensic accounting of who owns what and which land. You know, every country that exists today was at some point owned by somebody else. When does the forensic accounting stop? Right. So what's happened today in society is that the metric by which you ascend the social hierarchy is not based on merit. It's based on how great your victimhood narrative is. And if you don't have a victimhood narrative, then make it up as per Jussie Smollett, right? All that matters is that I be the

biggest victim. And that's another reason, by the way, why it's very hard to cancel me. Because when these cretins come after me with their victimology story, I usually hold the highest hand in victimology poker. And so you will quickly shut up once I show you my hands. But isn't it grotesque that I can win my argument against you, not by the merits of my arguments, but by the fact that I'm a bigger victim than you. So that has to stop. Yes, recognize that you were a victim, but overcome it and move on. Suddenly, I've turned orange. I look like Donald Trump here. I don't know what you've done, but I am orange man bad.

I'm trying to adjust your light. Susan opened up the windows behind me, so I'm gonna adjust you. I'll fix it. Yes, I see that. So yeah, so it's interesting to me that, that my family ran away from, or escaped the holodomor right so these are ukrainian refugees that i'm a part of um there was a massive diaspora of ukrainian and belarusian jews at that time and interestingly the way that population looked at it, they just didn't look back.

It was just weird. I don't know if there's something has changed psychologically in terms of how we deal with these things, but there was, I didn't learn about my history until into adulthood. It was just, we were Russian and we had to go. That was all they told us. And then we got here in time for the depression. And that was worse. It was sort of how things went.

Then we didn't know where we were going to eat. We didn't know how we were going to live. And it's just a different mentality, I guess, about those. I don't know what to make of it exactly, but there was a huge, you know, a diaspora of humans into this country, people running away from a horrible, horrible things throughout our history. I guess the difference is we got here and we were we were granted the opportunity that other people don't feel they were granted. And that does make it somewhat different. But, you know, look, Drew, we came here. We came to Montreal in 1975.

We were in the civil war the first year. And then my parents kept returning to Lebanon until 1980, when they were kidnapped by Fatah. And then once they left, then they never returned. We came to Canada with very, very little money, but we never became social welfare recipients because my parents are very proud. Again, it could be just because of their personhood,

but also because in the Middle East, you're very much driven by a calculus of honor and shame, right? These are cultures of honor, right? And you don't want to experience shame. So the idea of sitting around and whining and having the government take care of you was completely antithetical to every fiber of our being. In Arabic, there's an expression that says,

, right? To have a personhood, a strong personhood. And the idea that we would always be whining about what's happened to us would be to be a loser. So it's incredible that what we view as completely grotesque and ugly and whiny, the West has now internalized as something by which you ascend the social

hierarchy it's not the way that you wish to organize society i'm trying to take some calls here uh i'm sorry here let's i'm looking at the statue of liberty right now yeah behind you there you go let's get kian I guess it is he's hooking up he's connecting anybody else we're on the twitter spaces obviously I don't know if you were I suppose they were hearing me they were I didn't know that was it looked like our mics were off

well the phone usually isn't on. But sometimes there's a little lag or they don't realize that they are called up. So try somebody else. All right. We're going to try old Josh, see if Josh wants to talk to GADSAD. Josh. Hey, Dr. Drew.

Josh. hey dr drew yeah um so uh i have a question about post post-modernism or post-structuralism i mean and um i really like reading that stuff and i understand the the point that dr sod is making. My thing is that I think feeling sometimes matters. And we know this from, say, psychoanalysis. And the interaction between people matters and how I feel about you and how you feel about me. And I feel like both need to occur. Because if you look at something like antisemitism, is antisemitism a subjective experience, or is it, in your word, ontological? Because the thing is, is we need that other piece to know what it feels like to be, say, hated by someone else, or to hate someone else, and to reflect on our hatred. I just had wonder if you have any comments on that. Yeah. And I, and I'm going to jump on a little bit. I mean, his, the,

the fact of our, our interpersonal dependence on our very self and experience, I think Josh is pointing out that sort of can't be overstated. And to be fair, Hegel pointed that out some time ago, that these diastases exist in relation to one another. But I'll let Dr. Saad comment. I mean, of course, I can see that we all experience subjective reality and to the point of feelings. Feelings are not something that is contra to objectivism, right? I mean, our emotional system has evolved through the exact same evolutionary

process that led to our cognitive system. So when people, for example, ask me, you know, are we a thinking animal or a feeling animal? I always say that that's such a false and ridiculous dichotomy. We are both a thinking and feeling animal. The key challenge to the caller, to Josh, is to know when to activate which system. So for example, if I'm taking a shortcut to get home and I'm cutting through a dark alley and I see four young men loitering suspiciously, I will have an affective-based response that is perfectly adaptive, that is evolutionarily rational, right?

My heart rate will go up. My blood pressure will go up. I might start hyperventilating a bit because I'm scared of what might happen if these four guys accost me. On the other hand, if I activate my emotional system, my feeling system, when I'm trying to do well on the calculus exam, that's not going to serve me well. So I'm not rejecting the fact that subjectivity matters in some cases or that our emotional

lives matter. Of course, I can see that. There's a whole field in evolutionary psychology that studies the evolutionary roots of our affective system. So I'm perfectly with you. But it is still rooted in the fact that there is truth to studying feelings. They're not so subjective that they are completely mired in personal biases, right? Evolutionary psychologists do study the evolutionary roots of emotions using the scientific method. Postmodernism removes that possibility. It basically argues there is no capital T truth to follow. We are completely restricted by my own personal lived experiences, and that's complete nonsense. I can't

agree with that. And it's crazy that we limit that interpretation to human,o sapiens and not polar bears and uh we should remind ourselves that uh it was i i know his book was largely criticized but it was darwin himself who embedded the affect system in uh our related primate species and and there's you know and now you know a biological anthropology is just all about that now and i don't know what happened to that field that field seemed to have gotten kind of pushed down. It evolved during the nineties and two thousands and all of a sudden disappeared because it ran afoul of some of this stuff. Let's let's try to end on a positive note.

What, what are the, what, how do we, you know, what could the, as with any sort of excess, I mean,

you can bring things back to the middle and pull some good things out of what happened. How do we get to a place that's better in spite of all this i would say i mean there are several ways i can answer this let me answer it in in one of my you know most uh arguably famous calls to action which is when i tell people activate your inner honey badger and let me set the you know set explain what i mean by that the honey badger has been uh ranked as the fiercest most ferocious animal in the animal kingdom it's the size of a small dog and yet it could intimidate several adult lions from approaching it why because it is truly fierce

right these big predators these apex predators look at it and say, I don't want any part of this. Well, I argue that I'm not suggesting that you should be physically a honey badger, but when it comes to defending certain principles that are worth defending, like some of the deontological principles that we've been talking about, I need for everybody to search for their inner honey badger. Now, what does that mean? I understand that not everybody has Dr. Drew's credentials or his platform, or they're not Joe Rogan, right? But you can all have enough of a voice that you can affect a change within your sphere of influence. If your professor says something that to you strikes you as ridiculous, challenge them politely. If one of your friends posts something on Facebook that you disagree with, don't walk

away from an opportunity to engage them because you don't want to lose their friendship. So all I'm saying is don't diffuse responsibility onto others. Get engaged in the battle of ideas and then let the best ideas win. The problem is that most people are driven by fear, apathy, and cowardice. So even though they might write to me privately in the thousands saying, oh my God, I support you. Thank you for your courage. Then they always end the email with, but if you read my email on your show, Professor Saad, please don't mention my name. That's the kind of apathy and cowardice that has allowed these idea pathogens to proliferate. And so all I would ask for people to end it on a positive, actionable note is don't diffuse responsibility.

You have a voice. Use it. And hopefully the best ideas will win. Yeah, I think we all just need to stop with the ad hominem arguments. As soon as somebody attacks a person for an idea, you know that there's that's not an argument. That is, you know, people for an idea you know that there's that's not an argument that isn't you know the people want to un you know the liberal democracy did not live up to its potential but that doesn't mean we should eliminate liberal democracy we should get it to

live up to its potential and the same thing is true of people who are making certain arguments the arguments may be bad the person that's the fundamental attribution error to put the purse make the i mean that's nothing more primitive than that make the person bad for some idea that's just not how it works address the ideas always address the ideas not the person what's that susan she's talking out loud there were personal attacks like you're a right-wing loon how could you say that that is not me it's for sure but uh i i want to make the place a better a better world and i would add one more thing to dr sad's uh suggestion which is that you that you go ahead and and maintain courage and then find your way to happiness with his new book because his book

has lots of and it's not just but by the way because the book does correlate exactly because it's also about leading a good life and leading a good life is about living your, you know, consistent with your values, uh, and not caving to, you know, the, the vagaries of circumstances it's, uh, be who you are, speak up, live, live. And if you don't have your values sort of lined up, he has some ideas on, on how you can get there and, uh, not just live a certain kind of life but a happy life and and surround yourself by gems dr drew and i i don't can i can i say this i won't

say it because it's too it gives away too much from the book but susan will be delighted to hear and so will annie that that who your spouse is figs very very prominently in his book. He features who your spouses are as an important feature. So thank you for that. Does that mean I'm nice? No, it means I have to end our marriage and find somebody else. Ta-ta.

No, it means that you are a major piece of my happiness. So thank you for that. And I agreed with that principle that Dr. Saad puts in there wholeheartedly. So hang out for a minute afterwards, if you don't mind. I want to stay connected with you after we get off the air here. Thank you for being here. Gadsad on Twitter, at Gadsad. Two A's in the Saad.

And, sir, I will talk to you in just a minute and for the rest of you let's put up the uh the ideas the uh schedule again if you don't mind uh it's a lot of pov not let it pova yeah let it pova coming in here on wednesday i i always think in terms of latipo and how much i want to talk to him again ed doubt on friday which i checked somebody said something nice yes bob on youtubeezy Bob on YouTube. Thank you, Weezy Bob. What an amazing show today. This one's a keeper. I look forward to sharing this book with some of my younger family members. Thank you.

And by the way, not just, yeah, the younger, yes, the happiness book would be good for the, but the idea of having them too. The parasite. Who's not happy? The younger ones. Oh, they have trouble figuring out happiness because they're told that they are special and it's wah-wah-wubsy and everything is whatever you do it's great you don't have to even don't even try because you're perfect and you're cool and it's good everyone's going to know that yeah

and check out that movie the subtle art of not giving a yeah yeah i think that's it really goes at that self-esteem movement very aggressively i liked it yeah it's quite good it was quite good it was i didn't like it because as so much as i liked seeing somebody from his generation examining that and being angry with it i dug that there was a message at the end that i always gave my kids which was life's a bitch and then you die well that's sort of what he's saying is that that we're ultimately all going to the same place so uh you and i are going to go to dinner or anything rather than any place else. Yeah.

Because we're too old to not have fun. And we'll see you. Hmm. That's an interesting construct. We'll see everybody on Wednesday at three o'clock Pacific time. Are we going early on Wednesday? Do you know specifically? No, we're on the regular schedule.

Regular schedule on Wednesday. And Friday as well. Friday also at three o'clock. I will be on. It just won't be Thursday. We have to fly. Tomorrow you have Gutfeld. If anybody likes Gutfeld, he will be on Gutfeld tomorrow night, Tuesday.

Correct. And we'll see everybody on Wednesday, 3 o'clock Pacific. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation and Susan Pinsky. As a reminder, the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care, diagnosis, or treatment. This show is intended for educational and informational purposes only. I am a licensed physician, but I am not a replacement for your personal doctor, and I am not practicing medicine here.

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