Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Gad Saad: The Parasitic Mind – the cure for mental pathogens! (#082)

Episode Date: October 21, 2020

Why are politics and society becoming more polarized? How does misinformation, disinformation, bigotry, and hatred spread? How are decisions really made? Dr. Gad Saad has answers and we get to many of them in this fast-moving discussion. We also discuss his personal philosophy, religion, and his roles as both an accomplished academic and a renowned public communicator. 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. Subscribe to his YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/c/GadSaad/ and follow him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/GadSaad. Professor Saad has pioneered the use of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behavior. His works include The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature (translated into Korean and Turkish); The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption; Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Sciences, along with 75+ scientific papers, many at the intersection of evolutionary psychology and a broad range of disciplines including consumer behavior, marketing, advertising, psychology, medicine, and economics (Google Scholar). His Psychology Today blog (Homo Consumericus) and YouTube channel (THE SAAD TRUTH) have garnered 6.4+ million and 19.7+ million total views respectively. He recently started a podcast titled The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad, which is available on all leading podcast platforms. In addition to his scientific work, Dr. Saad is a leading public intellectual who often writes and speaks about idea pathogens that are destroying logic, science, reason, and common sense. His fourth book The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense was released on October 6, 2020. Brian Keating’s most popular Youtube Videos: Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/YjsPb3kBGnk?sub_confirmation=1 Jim Simons: https://youtu.be/6fr8XOtbPqM?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM Host Brian Keating: ‍♂️ Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, everyone. Today I had a great pleasure of talking to none other than Dr. Professor God Saad of Concordia University, where he is the Concordia University Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption. He is at the John Moulson School of Business at Concordia University. We talked about dozens of things today. It was quite interesting. He gave me a couple of exclusives, just exclusive to the the Impossible podcast. I hope you'll enjoy that. We talked about the different kinds of ideas, idea pathogens that he calls them. He talked about different ways that academia is being influenced. The sciences are being afflicted by these various mind viruses, for lack of a better word. He's a master of the neologism coining new words like ostrich paracitic syndrome, collective munchism syndrome by proxy, nomological networks of cumulative evidence and how they're involved in the quest for truth. We talked about other things that he's involved with.

He's very prolific on Twitter, on YouTube. You probably have found me only through him, but he's quite a fascinating person, mesmerizing to talk to similar in some of the other ways to different ideas that I've had on the show from people ranging from Dave Rubin and Michael Sherman. and beyond. And I think what's what sets him apart is that he is he's really a true scientist in the sense that he's actively conducting research into ways to alleviate these kind of itches that he has, intellectual itches, I call them, that he cannot scratch other than to do the research himself. So I found him incredibly interesting. We even got into God, G-O-D, not G-A-D,

and you'll hear more about that. I hope you enjoy this wide-ranging interview with none other than Dr. Gadsad. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Oh, and welcome, everybody. I've had on many different types of guests. I've been very blessed and fortunate to have on

Nobel Prize winners, MacArthur Geniuses, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and even a fool, even an abject moron. That was when I did a solo episode, featuring just myself. But today this is my first God. I've got God here. And yes, it is none other than the God's only truth. I'm going to read this gentleman's, this gentleman's biography, and I'll tell you a little bit about his book. And then I'm going to, hopefully, if he's game for it, do some fun, provocative things around his very, very interesting new book called The Parasitic Mind,

and that's Dr. God Sod. He is a professor of marketing and the Concordia University Research chair in evolutionary behavioral sciences and Darwinian consumption. I want to learn more about that. I didn't know Darwin had tuberculosis. But that actually he held for a decade until 2018. He's at the John Moulson School of Business. Is that related to Moulson beer? We've got to figure that. It is. Okay. That makes sense. I went to Anheuser-Busch University once at SeaWorld, and I got rejected for my Ph.D. quest there. Today we're going to talk about his new book, which is called the parasitic mind. And I want to just say a few more words about him. He's incredibly prolific. He's written for hundreds, literally hundreds of academic, rigorous,

academic journal articles. He's written for psychology today. He's the proprietor of the sad truth YouTube channel and podcast on iTunes and elsewhere. And we only have 30 minutes for the interview. So now we're done, God. Unfortunately, your effusiveness that is required to introduce you has taken up all of our time. No, God, welcome to the Into the Impossible podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Brian. It's a real pleasure to be with you. I'm so glad we got connected through our mutual friend, Michael Shermer, who's also been on the show and whose book is somewhere behind me over there as yours will join. I want to start off with the book. And if you're indulge me, I'm going to do two things. I'm going to read some

blurbs that you've received. I'm going to read some five-star blurbs that you've received. And I'm going to read your lowest star blurb that you've received on Amazon. I've never done this before on the podcast. And these are only, by the way, these are only verified reviews. I don't believe in reading unverified loser reviews. People don't read the book and give it either a good or a bad review. But the first review I'm going to read for God comes from none other than God himself, GOD. And that's as said the following. God said of God, blessed be he who enlarges God. So you can put on weight. God crouches like a lion. He tears off arm and scalp. He chose the best of the land for himself. For there, a commander's portion was reserved. And he came with the heads of the people.

With Israel, he executed the justice of the Lord and his judgments for Israel. I thought this was kind of interesting because a lot of what you do is the satire done with a surgeon scalpel. But the way that God is describing the tribe of Gad in the Torah as the Old Testament, as we would say, is that you're using a scalp, you're tearing off limbs and arms. Which is the real God's side? Do you cut with a scalpel or do you cut with a cleaver? You know, if I can speak of myself in the third person, God is multifaceted. I can tuck my children to bed with all of the love that one might imagine, and I can be viciously violent if you attack me in an alley and try to rape my wife.

Nothing changes in who I am. It's the situation that changes, right? And this is, by the way, something in psychology we refer to as the fundamental attribution error, whereby should you attribute a phenomenon to a dispositional trait or to a situational trait? And oftentimes, the fundamental attribution error is exactly that. So if you see me say something spicy to someone on Twitter, rather than saying, well, maybe the situation demanded it, because this person has been insulting me nonstop for a week with me being restrained. You say, oh my God, God's sad seems so elegant when he spoke at Stanford,

but he's such a nasty buffoon on Twitter. No, I'm not. It's different types of engagement. So sometimes I use satire when it requires it, and sometimes I can be as elitist and academic as you need me to be. You had gotten a lot of derision from the stayed confines of the faculty clubs around the world, including perhaps Concordia, maybe elsewhere. And that was for going on Joe Rogan and being one of his most successful top guests.

And, you know, I always, I never know how to really confront those people because people say things, oh, Joe Rogan's a clown. He's just a fear factor guy. And why is a serious chair, named chair professor like that? Or, you know, I've never been on Joe's show. But, you know, I wouldn't turn it down. It would be a step down from some of the podcasts that I've been up. I'm willing to lower myself.

But then I pointed out last week that he's had on a Nobel Prize winner in physics, Sir Roger Penrose, for hours talking about the deepest, most meaningful subjects you can imagine, as well as people like our friends, Eric Weinstein, Sean Carroll, Lawrence Krause, you know, brilliant scientist, controversial in the case of some of them. But nonetheless, I don't think you can say that anymore, that, you know, Joe Rogan is a venue for the Pure Isle clown set anymore. And so I want to commend you for being somebody who reaches out. Actually, let's get into that quickly before we get through the blurbs. Do you feel like it's an obligation for scientists in particular to learn how to communicate the wonders, the majesty of what we do in a professional way? In the same way, we learn how to teach quantum mechanics, should we not be taught how to communicate effectively as you so do? I do think it should be part of the one of many hats that scientists should wear. Now, I recognize that not every academic is as naturally talented in being able to traverse the different media, right?

Most academics learn how to communicate within the rarefied world of their templates, the academic journal, which is perfectly fine. We're supposed to do original peer-reviewed research, and that's fine. The problem comes when you're unable to take this wonderful work that you do and excite the masses. I can't tell you the number of people who've written to me subsequent to appearing on some Joe Rogan episode saying, look, I decided to go and study evolutionary psychology, consumer psychology, psychology of decision making, because I saw you on Joe Rogan and I saw the passion with which you described your field and that, you know, light lit up a passion in me. And so I always tell people, look, we are in the currency of creating knowledge and spreading

knowledge, right? It's not just creating knowledge and only having three of our colleagues and their mom read it, right? It's about spreading it to as many people as possible. So the person at Stanford, the story that you referred to earlier, was a story that took place when I was invited to the Stanford Business School to speak. And the person who had taken me out to dinner the night before my top the next day was, you know, looked at with great derision at my appearing on Joe Rogan, right? He said something to the effect of, well, you know, at Stanford, we don't do research. so that we can discuss it on Joe Rogan. To which I had literally answered.

So you think that having your research covered in front of 20 million people is not as impressive as a paper that will be read by you, the reviewers, the editor, and your mom. And that pretty much set the whole tone of the rest of the evening. I mean, he was a nice guy. But that, again, speaks to that elitism that is so common within the ivory tower. And I despise it. I hate it. Yeah, especially since, you know, a book like you've written or you know I've been you know fortunate to have a book that I've

written that I shamelessly plug in every scene in every part of my office that I'm currently in losing the Nobel Prize get yours and paperback wherever books are sold but but the fact is for on one hand we can write a scientific paper and you've written many of them that will be read by yeah a dozen people maybe and maybe each sentence will take a month to write or a chart or some data or some analysis or we can write a book which you know We can write maybe in a year, maybe less. I'm curious about your writing process. We'll get into that later.

But how do you gauge the return on impact? In other words, why shouldn't you write these books, which are full of research and actually extensively well document? I was relieved. I have to say, I listened to it. I bought the audiobook, the Kind Bill version, and your publisher sent me the printed book. And I was relieved when I got it because I'm reading like three books a week now amidst, you know, teaching graduate students and homeschooling kids here.

But I was relieved to see it in one sense because there was like 20 pages of footnotes, citations, and references. So why not just write books all day? Because, you know, let's be honest. It's not like a book that's written for the popular audience, the way that you write with citations and footnotes. It's not academically research. So why not just do that? Well, because in a sense, my contract both to myself and to my profession is to hopefully do all of these different things, right? But I have to tell you that the older I get and the more that I advance in my career,

it is becoming increasingly more difficult to spend three years working on a peer-reviewed paper that if it is incredibly successful, will be cited by 100 people. Yes. When I could literally open up my YouTube channel, speak in front of the camera, about something really important, not when I'm just joking around, right? But even, incidentally, my humor usually has a serious bent to it. And then it will be watched by 65,000 people. So I think in a world of, you know, tradeoffs, I can certainly see as I progress in my career,

having to make these tough choices. I don't think I'll ever quit writing peer-reviewed papers because I remain excited in the same way that I was when I just came out of my PhD to actually collect data, analyze it. Sometimes you're disappointed because it didn't work out. Sometimes you're excited because your hypothesis looks like it's going to work out. But you're right. Writing books for the masses is intoxicating because it's true. I mean, I don't know if you saw me on my social media.

I've been doing this thing where people post where they are opening their my book from in Bolivia and in Chile and in Palestinian territory. Germany. And in Germany and in Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic. Well, you know, I'd like to see how many academics have their peer reviews. reviewed papers read in some little village in Puerto Rico. So from that perspective, yes, it's very intoxicated. Yeah, I always enjoy getting emails from fans that I'll never meet, you know, from Pakistan. And here's a devout Muslim woman, and she's reading a book by this New York Jew about the Nobel Prize, you know, and it's saying that it's had a tremendous impact on her,

and, you know, I hope I could meet her someday, but it's the leverage of the written word. And we'll get into that in the end, what I call the final five questions, which will take up the remaining 80 minutes of the conversation that you've allotted to me. I have as much time as you need. Okay. Well, you might regret that, got it. So I do want to talk about the book. And I always say I ignore the advice to not judge books by their cover. I always judge all books by their cover.

You've got your copy above your left shoulder over there in your office. We can see it. I'll flash up. I'll make a bigger version of it on the screen when we publish this. Tell me, what is the meaning of it? of the design of the parasitic minds cover? How'd you come up with the title and the subtitle? So the actual design is from the art director.

It basically refers to someone who is manipulating your brain. The idea being that these parasitic, these idea pathogens, cause you to behave in maladaptive ways. So that's the general. The color at first I was concerned about. And so my only feedback when I saw the first installment of this design was,

do we really want this kind of neon color, should it not be a bit more austere? And then they insisted that, no, the image that they had, I think it's a stock image with the color and so on, was exactly right. And so I acquiesced. And it looks like people like it. Do you like the cover? Yeah, it's very striking. You know, a lot of books are very bland and you don't really pick them off. But I have a couple of comments, maybe a mild critique about the meaning of the title.

because to me the title is not 100% reflective of what the book is about. The book is about not the mind as sort of a parasite, but ideas. So I was wondering, why is it not entitled the parasitic meme or the parasitic idea? You spend an awful lot of time talking about Dawkins' concept of memetic activity, etc. So, I mean, I could I call it the parasitized mind. Parasitic sounds a bit easier. And it simply refers to the fact that minds can be the purveyors of nonsense and can also be the ones that are the receptacles of the nonsense.

How infectious ideas are killing common sense, well, what I'm arguing, just so that you can get a sense of what I mean by parasites. So as an evolutionary psychologist, I often look to homologies and analogies and other species when I'm trying to make a statement about human cognition. So for example, if I'm studying the sex specificity of toy preferences, there are studies that have looked at how vervet monkeys, recess monkeys, and chimpanzees exhibit the same sex-specific toy preferences that humans do. So one of the tools that evolutionists use when making statements about human cognition is to engage in what's called comparative psychology. You compare human psychology to other animals. So because of that, and since I was thinking about writing a book

about these parasitic ideas, I delved into the literature of neuroparasotology. Do you know what that is? Well, I've learned it from your book, yeah. Exactly. So neuroparasotology is basically the study of parasitology, but where the parasite, instead of, let's say, going to your intestine, which would be, say, a tapeworm, it looks for the host's brain to reside in. And I give a few examples, but there are many, many others,

of how a brain worm or a brain parasite can cause the infected animal to engage in deeply maladaptive ways. So it could be, for example, an ungolid, a moose, a deer, that when it's parasite by a particular brainworm, it starts engaging in circling behavior. So it kind of bobs its head. It can't extricate itself from this motor behavior. And even if the looming predators are coming, it is stuck in this pattern. Or toxoplasma Gandhi. The mouse that is infected with this parasite loses its innate fear of cats and it becomes attracted to the cat's urine, not a good outcome. And so I take these principles from

neuropericotology and I argue that humans can be parasitized by another agent of neural destruction. In this case, I call these idea pathogens. But instead of leading us to the proverbial cat, it leads us to the abyss of infinite lunacy. So that's where the parasite in the title comes from. I see. And so now going back to some of the reviews, we've had God's review. But now I want to do a verified five-star review. This is from Amazon customer. I don't know if you know him or her, Amazon customer. I was going to name one of my kids Amazon customer. But this is a verified three-star review, and that was the lowest I could find. So Mazel Tov on that, that is...

Well, you know that if they're giving me three stars, they're naturally lobotomized. Nothing else can make that. That's right. Well, you know, I always love the like one star, you know, that's unverified, that just, you know, says, this book is terrible, and that's it. And they obviously haven't read it. But this person, assuming they're correct, that the Amazon verification button is right, He says, or she says, I was so excited to receive my copy of The Parasitic Mind by Godside. I had long been supportive of efforts to push back in ideas, the likes of postmodernism, social justice, political correctness, identity politics, etc. These ideas have translated into policy could be corrosive to our Western culture and the cohesion of our societies, plural. So upon opening the book, I was primed to sympathize with the discussion of the ideas and issues and solution.

My cognitive reasoning faculties were tuned up and ready to process what I thought would be some logical, evidence-based, common sense making. It didn't take long to shatter my enthusiasm. Starting on page 25, God said starting the stage for his arguments by talking about two main ways people process messages. He contends that the central processing route is cognitive, logical, in nature, while the peripheral method is effective, emotional. I'm not sure where the prioritization comes from. Maybe it's a scientific background. But I believe that most people, non-scientists, are indeed logical, but that logic is tempered, if not completely dominated by our emotional faculties.

So we could go on. I don't want to. But it seems thoughtful. It seems a person, you know, is willing to engage. It wasn't a hater, one of these Stanford professors that you were talking about earlier. So I guess they're contending against the dichotomy that you're laying out. And the supposition that this reviewer is making is that most people, people are logical, even if they're not scientists.

What say you? Yeah, I mean, I haven't read this review and I haven't seen the rest of it, so I'm basing on whatever you just read. Yeah. I'm actually not contending that they are only binary systems. As a matter of fact, I have a term, which I refer to in the book as epistemological dichotomayne, which is kind of putting everything into nice pigeonholed dichotomies, nature versus nurture, reasoning versus feeling and so on.

What I'm arguing there with the central versus peripheral is I'm not saying that scientists use central and the non-scientists use peripheral. This person completely missed the point. When you're engaging in persuasion attempt, you could either trigger people's cognitive mindset, and that's called the central root of persuasion. Here are the 17 reasons why you should purchase my mutual fund. That would be called central processing. Peripheral processing would be what you would typically see in a commercial for a perfume, right? You are trying to sell me a hedonic product, and so you don't usually say, here are the 17 biochemical reasons why Harvard professors think you should buy this perfume,

because that wouldn't work very well, right? Because it has to sell mystery, sex, and so on, right? And therefore, in this case, you activate the peripheral root of persuasion. you show a beautiful girl with her hair flowing on a horse, and then you just say, mister, right? So it's not that one is superior to the other. It's that depending on the context, will determine which of the two systems you should use. But that is part of a bigger point that I'm making in that chapter, which is to argue that

the dichotomy between thinking versus feeling is an incorrect one. Humans are not thinking animals or humans are emotional animals. We are both. What matters is that you trigger the right system at the right time. So when I am going down a dark alley to take a shortcut home and I see four young men loitering around and my heart starts to race and I get nervous, that fear response, that emotional response makes perfect adaptive sense. If I'm trying to solve one of Professor Keating's physics exams, all of the emotions in the world

is not going to get me to do well on that exam. So it's not that we are one or the other. other, it's that just make sure to trigger the right system at the right time. Now, why am I talking about all this in that chapter? Because what I then argue is that, of course, people do misapply this system in the wrong time. So when I'm trying to decide whether to choose Donald Trump or not, it should be based on the totality of his positions. And then if I were to do that, maybe I would think that Donald Trump is my guy.

But what most of my highfalutin, super nuanced, progressive thinker friends think is that he disgusts me. He repulses me. He's grotesque. So every one of those descriptors is triggering their affective system, right? So I could do an experiment where I take what Donald Trump said versus what Barack Obama said. I won't tell them which one said what. So I remove the specific person. And the reality is that Obama has probably never uttered a single word that is anything other than platitudinous, vacuous bullshit.

But my God, he says it with such cadence, with such a melifluous voice, he must be a brilliant guy. This is what I call. Let me assume for a second, this is the cork of the wine bottle. There's an expression in Arabic that says that you get drunk by simply smelling the cork of the wine bottle. What does this mean? Arabic is a very flowery metaphor. language, it means that you're so weak-minded that I can get you to get drunk not by actually drinking the wine, by simply drinking by smelling the cork. And this is what happens with a lot of

the discussion about politics. It has nothing to do with policies. So you could have one of my friends who has been railing against Islam for his entire career, but then when it comes to choosing between Trump and another candidate, on which Trump would score much better in terms of Islam, he loses that logic. He discussed, he, Trump discusses him. You follow what I'm saying? Yeah, I see a lot of cognitive dissonances that your book discusses. And in my mind, the one, you know, in minor criticism, I should say that the next lowest rating of your book, God,

and I aspire to this in my next book, you know, which will be, I don't know, losing the Pulitzer Prize. Who knows? You didn't spit out your vodka, so I think that was good. You didn't think it was a complete joke. complete joke, but my, but the next lowest rating book calls you the savior of the West. So if we could all get such, you know, halivai, we could all get such poor reviews. But I want to push. He's understating my importance, but I appreciate that.

Yeah, there's, you know, modesty is the better part of valor, right? So I want to push back a little bit on the dichotomy that both the previous reviewer kind of hinted to, but also this notion that I found in the book that the veneration of, science and scientists. And I almost think that that previous reviewer who's sort of saying that scientists are logical and the rest of us are normally thought of as emotional, but we're actually logical. I actually push back on the scientific side. We hear a lot of things in the United States now, trust scientists, you know, trust science, trust scientists. I should say, and you're a scientist too, I don't know a scientist who trusts another scientist. First of all, oftentimes trust science,

Trust scientists means obey scientists, at least in the way that they're trying to categorize it. I don't obey anybody. I think for myself. I reason for myself. I have immense amounts of education and interest, and where I'm not educated, I always say, I gave a speech on Tuesday night, and somebody asked me, well, what do you think about global warming? And you're a physicist, and you know, you've obviously thought about it. I had Ben Shapiro on my show. He talked about global warming. What do you think about? I said, I hope someday when you invite a climate scientist to give a lecture, and then someone in the question and answer period asks him or her about the origin of the universe in a big bang and the probability of the multiverse, they don't just say,

well, here's my opinion. They say consult a cosmologist. You know, Professor Keating is a cheap date, so give him a call. But instead, you know, it's almost felt like because we have the letters PhD after our name or in front of my Twitter handle, as the case may be, that were somehow, you know, these walking wikipedias. And I always say science means knowledge. It does not mean wisdom. So in your book, you talk a lot about trusting the scientific method, Carl Popper, etc. First, tell me what is your viewpoint? Do you really believe that scientists inherently have sort of an upper, a natural inoculation against parasitic mind viruses? Absolutely not. As a matter of fact, every single idea pathogen that I discuss in the book stems from academics.

So in other words, it takes... But scientists or... No, that's why I didn't say scientists, because I said academics, which is a more general term, because oftentimes they're from the social sciences, oftentimes they're from there. But this is not to denigrate them. It's not to say there's a hierarchy where the professor of... philosophy somehow ranks lower than the physicists but what I'm saying is I'm using the broader term because usually these ideas did not originate with

chemists right or with ecologists they originated from academics because it takes intellectuals to come up with some of the dumbest ideas right so so so it is absolutely not the case that just because you're an academic or a scientist you are inoculated and the problem the reason why that's what I just said is is vertical is because The brilliance of many of these idea pathogens is that it can penetrate all of your education and knowledge in insidious ways. So in the same way that an actual virus is brilliant in its machinery so that it can find a way into your cell so that it can use your own machinery to replicate itself. That's what these idea pathogens do.

Now, how do they do it? So maybe we can get into some of the idea pathogens if you'd like. Is this something? Yeah. Yeah, let's do it. So I discussed many idea pathogens. I'll maybe discuss one or two here, and if we have time, we can do some more. So for example, postmodernism is the grand daddy of all idea pathogens because it is a form

of intellectual terrorism. It negates the possibility that there is objective truth. Everything is shackled by subjectivity. Everything is shackled by my personal biases. So there's no need for me to get out of bed in the morning because you and I do wake up in the morning thinking that there are certain regularities in the world. that we are trying to uncover. If not, there'd be no point doing anything. Now, of course, science is provisional and that what we thought was true 300 years ago

might get updated. Science is auto-corrective, so it's not a revealed truth and we're done, mic-drop, but it is that we do think that there are things to be discovered. So postmodernism is the grand daddy of idea pathogens for that reason. But then there are many other idea pathogens that are specific to certain fields. So for example, militant feminism is an idea pathogen that starts off with a noble objective. Equity feminism is a great idea. Men and women should be equal under the law. There is no reason why we should ever tolerate institutional, you know, sexism. The problem then becomes that we push it further. You say in the furtherance of that social goal, we should murder and rape

truth. How do we do that? We reject the possibility that men and women might be different. We We reject the possibility that there are biological differences between men and willing. We reject the possibility that there are evolutionary reasons why men and women might evolve certain differences. We must promulgate the idea that they are indistinguishable. So in the service of an original noble goal, we end up murdering truth. And each of the idea pathogens that I discuss in the book has that same signature. It starts off with a kernel of truth.

It starts off with a noble cause. in the pursuit of that noble cause, well, if we kill truth, so be it. That's a consequence of the higher objective of pursuing social justice. No, I could chew gum and walk at the same time. I could protect transgender rights while also not being comfortable in teaching children that boys too menstruate. So when we think about the notion of taking the scientific method as sort of sort of this auto-corrective process, then they're, by presumption, is something it's correcting against. And I'm sitting here at University of California, San Diego, you're at UC Irvine for many years. You might know, maybe you don't, that there was a covenant here in La Jolla that precluded Jews,

blacks, and Mexicans from owning real estate, and that it was impossible for a Jew or black or a Mexican. So actually, the house that I own, you know, would not have been possible for me to own way back when. And the university actually worked against that. But many other universities didn't work so well. In fact, against women, against Jews, people always point out, well, do you think the Nobel Prize committee has had this conversation with Heather McDonald not too long ago? And she said, well, do you think scientists would really suppress somebody just because they're black? And I said, well, you know, the Nobel Prize had a committee on Aryan science that actively worked to deny Albert Einstein the rightfully deserved Nobel Prize that he would later win only 17 years after the invention of relativity. but he would win it for another subject that wasn't related to relativity,

specifically because Hitler's chief of Aryan physics, a man by the name of Philip Leonard, basically had an unwritten rule that Einstein could not win a Nobel Prize. And because previous winners of the Nobel Prize are eligible to nominate future winners, there's the Matthew effect that takes over, and so no Jews would really win it for many, many decades. So I said, do you think that science is time translation invariant, not. In other words, are scientists not the same? Are there not prejudices? No black has ever won the Nobel

Prize in physics or chemistry. And I wonder, we venerate these institutions, but there is some legitimacy to pass injustices against Jewish people, against blacks, Mexicans, women. You couldn't get a job. Maria Mayer, who's over my shoulder over here. She's a first American woman to win a Nobel Prize. She couldn't get a job as a professor for decades until UC San Diego, where I am now hired her. So what do you make of that? There must have been an origin of it. And why do you think that was only in the 1960s? It wasn't 100 years ago. Do you think it's sure that Envidias, racism, sexism has truly been eliminated from the sciences? So I think this speaks to probably a dichotomy in this case. We were earlier talking about epistemological dichotomia, but here's an important dichotomy between equality of opportunities and equality of outcomes, right?

A lot of the examples that you've discussed is where you had a lack of equality of opportunities. There was institutional mechanisms that did not allow certain people because of certain traits that they have, in many cases immutable traits, from being able to be equal participants, in whichever human endeavor we're talking about. And of course, that's wrong, and we've tried as best as we can. It doesn't mean it's been fully eradicated, but to get rid of that. Of course, the problem, though, is that in today's zeitgeist, today's reality, we're not talking about equality of opportunities.

We're talking about equality of outcomes. So Princeton University does not have a full professor in their math department who is black. Aha, racism. You follow what I mean? No, there could be 63,000 other reasons why that empirical reality holds. So we need to be careful in differentiating between these two. The examples that you gave were historical grievances, historical wrongdoings based on a lack of equality of opportunities. Today's die religion, which is the acronym that I use for describing diversity, inclusion, and equity, has nothing to do with equality.

equality of opportunities and everything to do with equality of outcomes. That's grotesque. That is antithetical to an ethos of a meritocracy, right? Shared professorships right now are no longer granted as a function of how impressive one's CV is. They are literally granted in the grant, in the call for that professorship in terms of whether you hold a particular immutable marker or not. Surely we don't support that.

So in the service of getting rid of past historical grievances, we don't create a new reality based on new grievances, right? Yeah. So, I mean, just to gently push back on that, I've never been in a committee where I've been told you have to hire a black lesbian. It's just has never, it's never come up that that has to be. Now, there are diversity goals. We have it. You have it, I'm sure. I don't know whether it's more strongly, you know, kind of impressed upon faculty in Canada or in America. But in fact, I've never been told I have to hire a woman for the, and I've been the sheriff's many searches. I've been involved with it. And I've gone out of my way to actually try to recruit people from, it's

very difficult, especially at younger universities like the University of California, San Diego. We started in 1960. We don't have alumni like even Berkeley or UCLA do where we had African Americans that were graduating in the 1800s. We just don't have that legacy yet. So we work really hard. And by the way, many of the people that we try to hire, it's not like they don't get a job. We try or hire African Americans all the time. It's incredibly important. And it's not that they don't get hired or they go to Harvard or they go, you know, and we're always competing against, you know, very, very well-funded, especially private institutions

that have a lot of resources to devote to this. So it's frustrating. But I do want to push back in the sense that currently the first black PhD from Harvard, from MIT's theoretical physics is a good friend of mine. He's been on the podcast. His name is Sylvester James Gates. He's the Ford Foundation professor at Brown University, my alma mater. And he's brilliant. Now, he is, he pushes back and he's, you know, he has had episodes, you know, frequently throughout his history of racist behavior against him as suppression. I mean, he graduated for MIT in 1978 as the first African-American PhD in theoretical physics. He's the father of string,

of supersymmetry. Why does it take so long? And why are these eminent institutions like MIT, Harvard, et cetera, which had a long history of anti-Semitism and quota system and still does as a quota system allegedly? Why do these things persist amidst this meritocratic aspect of science, which should be, these are brilliant scientists. They should not be persecuted.

What do we do? Do we have blind submission in terms of like author names or even male-female distinctions? How would you cure this in the... I just care about science right now because the worst thing I think for societies, if scientists are undermined by becoming too political. And I always say my show is a political because there's no Republican Comet. There's no democratic asteroid out there. So how do we do it?

And if you are in charge of, say, the journal, the academic science side of things, How could you make it equitable for these people who have, like we've both described, suffered in the past? So, but just to make sure that I understand, are you saying that today there is still endemic bigotry going on in all sorts of contexts in the university? I don't mean in the cafeteria between two individuals. When we're hiring postdocs and professors, there's endemic racism. Is that your contention? No, I don't think so. Actually, I push back on that. I have a podcast coming out soon with Professor Gentry Patrick,

who happens to be African-American neurobiologist at UC San Diego. And, you know, I said, look, when they say that the system is racist, but then they say that they're not racist. I don't know a single person that will say that they're racist. But I have had, you know, just teeth gnashingly frustrating discussions with colleagues where they'll characterize African-American contributions in ways that are, you know, that I have not heard them characterize. So you're right. Maybe it's not the department chair, he or she is not going to get up and say, well, this, African-American, obviously, that doesn't happen. So, but I have witnessed it, and not even in hiring, just other academics, talking in a negative way, and I always correct them, especially when it's about friends of mine are people that I know. And I've told the thing that I do as an advocate, you know, as I try to be, I tell the black, I tell my African-American colleagues.

I say, this is what people are saying about you, and I want you to know, this person's an enemy or this person. Not to like, because I'm using their own words. So, but getting back, yeah. So would you say that there isn't, there is no systemic racism within, say, the academic scientific journal system or what have you as Nature magazine this summer testified that there was invidious racism within all of academia or science? No, I don't think. Look, I think that the current university is some of the least racist place that one can find. everybody is afraid to utter a word that might sound phonetically as though it were a racial slur. As we know from the guy, I think at USC, who said a word in Chinese that sounded like it was a racial slur.

And then he was put on leave. So I think that generally speaking, universities are a bastion of sterile non-racism because everybody is afraid of their shadow. Does that mean that in the past there hasn't been systemic racism or sexism or whatever? Of course not. There has been that. But again, in the quest to create an equitable playing field, we don't institute mechanisms that perpetuate that which we're trying to solve. So, for example, when you have granting agencies now, and surely it has to be that you know this because you apply for grants,

you now have to, as part of your grant, put what have you, done in the past to adhere to die principles? And if you win this grant, what will you do to pursue die principles? And I receive a million of these examples from all sorts of anonymous sources as emails. One of my friends who is a physical chemist at a fellow sister university in Montreal, a very accomplished physical chemist, had his, so the equivalent of your NSF, the National Science Foundation. So had his grant stopped at the die statement. In other words, they didn't go past that into the actual content of the grant because they didn't feel that his die statement was sufficiently progressive.

This is not some esoteric thing that I'm making up. These are real people. So is there individual racism when people are speaking at the lunchroom? Undoubtedly, because the human heart is dark and racism is not going to be eradicated from the possible behavioral repertoire of the human condition. But is Is there systemic racism and sexism at the university today? No. Let me give you an example. A few years ago, I reported on data from the US government showing that across four levels

of education. So the associate's degree, bachelor's degree, master's degree, and doctorate. So four levels of education across five racial groups. So the table is a four by five. There are 20 cells. every single one of those cells, so please listen carefully, Brian and fellow listeners, every single one of those cells, women outnumbered men. In 20 out of 20 cells, all racial groups, all educational levels, women outnumbered men. Does that not imply that the data is suggesting that we don't

now need more help for women in the university? 40 years ago, that would have been true, right? Today, it is no longer true. So if you are an epistemologically honest person who is a truth teller, then you would adjust your victimhood narrative. It was true that women were kept out of academia. It is no longer true today. But yet we hang on to that victimology currency. I just retweeted a other data set that shows that 92% of sex-specific grants in the U.S. are granted to women, 8% to men. Is that correct? Do you support that? asking you generally, is that good? Well, no.

I mean, obviously, as a meritocratic process, we should be supporting the best science in a blind way. But actually, now I'm noticing that, and people are telling me that even things that were held, like blind auditions, those are now being claimed are not acceptable anymore. And the thing that really spoke to me in your book is you think, like a scientist, your role in kind of

trying to find optimization problems, you know, kind of finding where is the MinMax kind of tradeoff in So I want to get into this because, you know, the thing I always hated about when I was on a book tour and your book is, you know, in a different order of magnitude in terms of, you know, popularity, sales, et cetera. So you don't need, you need my help like, you know, I need to pitch for the San Diego Padres. But the point is, you know, that I don't like it when I was asked, well, like, explain your entire book, every single chapter of your book. And so that basically my readers can save, you know, 1299. So, you know, you've talked a lot about the book. on the sad truth. I want to get into like your brain because I don't get too often a chance to chat with folks like you. And I want to ask you in particular, if you were running a university and this is a goal of yours, you're a war refugee, you're from the Middle East, you're from a minority within a majority country. Now you're living, you know, in a foreign country from your homeland and for many years, even now, you couldn't go back to Lebanon. It's no secret that

you speak about the childhood trauma that you endured as a child refugee. it's almost unimaginable, the things that you describe, I was thinking my young kids going through it, very reminiscent of some of the Holocaust material that I've had on some Holocaust survivors, Roe Schindler, who wrote a book about her experiences in Auschwitz, her husband's experiences in the death camps as well. They both survived, obviously. But the kind of idyllic nature that their lives were like before the Holocaust,

in her case growing up in Mumcotch, which is sort of halfway between Hungary, Hungary, Eastern Europe, before she was deported to the death camps and luckily survived. She talks about as idyllic. And I want to say, what was childhood like before you were fled Lebanon? I have a lot of Lebanese friends, and there's some of the most warm, I mean, engaging, a life-affirming people. So there must be something wonderful about Lebanon. What was it like for you as a kid before?

Thank you for that personal question. Look, it is absolutely true that, you know, we lived a wonderful life in Lebanon until we didn't, right? So it's kind of like the guy's walking around thinking that he's been eating well and exercising. Then he drops dead of a heart attack. Well, you don't say, but how could it be he died of a heart attack? Ten minutes earlier he was jogging. Well, that's how heart attacks happened, right? So yes, we were walking around jogging and eating good food until we had to run really quick.

because our heads were going to be detached from the rest of our bodies. Now, the fact that we lived a good life in Lebanon, this doesn't imply that there wasn't always an asterisk. So I always knew that we were different in Lebanon. I always knew that I shouldn't be advertising loudly that we're Jewish. It's not as though it was a secret. People can just go to the synagogue to see who's showing up on Saturday. So it's not like it was truly hidden.

But you have to know, your place to you don't cause too much trouble right I tell a story of when we were in school and the teacher says what okay students stand up each of you and tell us what you want to be when you grow up and one person gets up says I want to be a policeman I want to be a soccer player I want to be a doctor I want to be a Jew killer and everybody laughs and claps that wasn't during the Civil War that was part of my idyllic pre-civil war in the Paris of the Middle East And the Paris of the Middle East.

So even in the context of beautiful, tolerant, progressive Paris of the Middle East, there was Jew hatred that was lurking in every corner. If people didn't know you were Jewish, they might approach you and say, oh my God, it's raining today. F in Jews. I got diabetes. F in Jews. My wife cheated on me.

F in Jews. There's always a plot by which the Jews are behind each of the maladies and illes. that is happening in our society. That's happening not in Yemen or Saudi Arabia. It's happening in progressive Lebanon. So yes, it was idyllic in that we came from a prominent family. We were very well connected. Lebanon, as you said, is made up of, in French,

you say, bon vivant, people who know how to live. We party hard, we play hard, we have a sense of humor, we're hospitable, we're warm. And so I do have fun memories of Lebanon, but I also know that I was always considered different. So one of the stories that I tell in chapter one is when we clear the airspace of Lebanon, my mother and the captain says, you know where I'm going with this, and the captain says that we've cleared it, she puts the Jewish symbol Star of David O'Hai,

and then says, now you can wear this and not hide your identity. Now, that didn't come from the fact that I only hid my identity during the Civil War. It comes from the fact that we always knew that we had to have the luggage ready in case something went wrong. So there was a tension. My parents loved Lebanon. And that's why we were part of the last remaining Jews in Lebanon because we did have a good life there. All of the Jews had left Lebanon in the 20th century. We were part of the last small group of Jews. And as a matter of fact, my parents loved Lebanon so much that even went back, right? Exactly. They went back from so we came to a bunch of people. in 1975, in 1980, on one of their return trips, middle of massive butchery civil war,

they were kidnapped by Fatah. Well, that's a testament to the fact that it's as if they preferred the butchery of the Middle East than the snow of Montreal. I didn't tell the story in the book, but let me share it here with me. Exclusive. Exclusive to the Impossible podcast. Exactly. When we moved to Montreal, my father had gotten some ticket, like a parking ticket or whatever, for parking somewhere.

And so his first response was, okay, so who is the cop that I have to grease so that I stopped receiving tickets? To which someone, I don't know who it was, one of my siblings, my siblings are much older than me, had said, well, you know, this is not how it happens here, Dad, they don't do that here this way. to which he answered, what kind of barbaric country is this? So from his perspective, the fact that there was no way by which you can use your bachshish and so on to grease this person and that person was outlandish. Who follows the rules like this? This is a grotesque, disgusting country. So that shows you the difficulty of having to acculturate to a new land.

Yeah, I thought you were going to tell me that he went back because he forgot his belt. You describe... Oh, my God, you really remember all the stories. The book is very vivid. And, you know, I want to talk more about the book and books in general because, you know, as Carl Sagan, who I've had his wife and his daughter on my show, on my podcast, he said a book is proof that human beings can work magic in that, you know, I can have not your voice literally in the audiobook, although it was read by a wonderful narrator.

But actually, the printed word could have been written hundreds of years ago. still communicate to me across the centuries. That's what Carl Sagan said is proof that books are magic, or the human mind can work magic. I now have co-opted that and say a podcast is proof that human beings can work magic because, you know, this will be saved for, you know, for the 20 listeners of my show. But I want to talk about the book and especially being a Jew. And I always thought, you know, Seinfeld was not Jewish enough. And so I want to talk about Judaism. I know that you're either an extreme, you know, militant agnostic or you're, or more atheistic in your leanings. Can we talk a little bit about that for a bit?

Sure. Okay. So I want to say, because Judaism looms large in your story and who you are is deeply, endemically Jewish. And of course, you know, Judaism, you can never leave. It's like the mafia. You know, you can never get pulled out of it. But there's a difference in kind of the affirmative Judaism where you take part in some.

rituals for cultural reasons, even if only cultural reasons. But then if you completely shun it, which I don't see you doing, you're very proud of being Jewish. But I want to ask you, why don't you practice? I'm not speaking from a place like my friend Ben Shapiro, who's, you know, ultra-Orthodox in a sense. But I consider myself scientifically. I consider myself to, you know, there's a scientific method, and I call it the Semitic method. And it's sort of, I like to explore things. If I call myself an agnostic, which I do, I call myself a devout agnostic, meaning that I go to temple. I teach my children about the commandments. I do observe kosher, you know, the technical laws of kosher, not every single thing, I'll lead out. But the bottom line is,

I view that Judaism is not just like makes you feel like an outsider and so you kind of got this in-group bias, but it's a deeply wisdom-filled way to live one's life. I don't want to ask you, what level of observance do you have? And maybe we can get into some of your thoughts about the real GOD God, and why or why not you have maintained the views that you hold. So first of all, yeah, can you talk about your relationship to Judaism and then to God or lack of? Yeah, great questions, of course. So I'm not very observant, although I have waxed and waned in my observance, but usually for very earthly reasons. Let me give you one story, which I think might also be another exclusive. My God, are you...

Yeah, I'm getting a lot today. Oops. I should have turned down the recording. I wish I turned down the recording. Now, go ahead, guys. That's okay. I'm taping it. Okay, okay. Well, when I went to the only Ivy League school that matters,

Cornell University, you mentioned earlier Carl Sagan, who was Cornell. My father was a teacher there. My father was a professor there. Where? At Cornell. He's in the math department. No, no, I mean, which department? He was in the math department.

He was the youngest full professor ever at Cornell, 27 years old math department. Oh, my good. So when did he leave Cornell? He left in 1969 to co-starred the math department at SUNYStonybrook. Ah, okay, well. So you guys missed each other. Yeah, yeah, much younger by a couple of decades. So, no, so at Cornell, I became friends with the Khabad rabbi,

Ellie Silberstein, a lovely gentleman, whose wife actually was, pursuing her PhD in psychology, and so we, developmental psychology, if I'm correctly, so we ended up taking many courses together and so on. Her name was Hannah. And so Ellie, who had this program to try to bring in all the Jewish students to Shabbat dinners and so on, would invite me to their house and so on. And we became friends and we'd have great conversation over Shabbat dinner. And one time he asked me, you know, God, could you do me a favor?

Which I knew, okay, I'm in trouble now. circumcision second search up a touch up covered there but could you could you do me a favor and put on feline every day and so i'm a man of my word so when i said yes i ended up doing it from so probably around the early 90s to about maybe you know 10 years ago now i did it in part to honor him in part as a ritual to remembrance of my belonging to this group. But it is truly done without any sort of cosmic theological things. I don't believe that there is a guy in the sky who prescribed that. It's a way for me to say, I belong to this fan club.

I don't mean to vulgarize it. No, I know. It really is that, right? We are, humans are tribal, whether we like it or not, as much as I might rail against identity politics. We are a coalitional creature. We do view the world as blue versus red team. So I am very Jewish in that, I mean, no one has lived their Judaism more than someone who has escaped execution in Lebanon.

It's not Ben Shapiro and it's not Dennis Prig. It's Gatsad who's lived Judaism, right? So I can be very Jewish in that I belong to a group that's very old, that has maintained its traditions, that has wonderful accomplishments, again, as a group. So I could be proud of that belongingness without ascribing all the, forgive me for saying it, not to be belittled all the bugabuga stuff. Because once you go down the bugabuga stuff, it's endless, right? Because Brian Keating decides that he decides where he's going to stop his Kashrut story. But in a sense, forgive me for saying, you're being a hypocrite.

You're engaging in cafeteria Judaism, right? No, that's true. You decide which part you like, which part. Well, I'm in a sense too pure for that. If I'm going to eat shrimp, I'm going to have pork. I'm not going to create a new form of kishrut that allows me to eat pork but not shrimp or vice versa. So I don't buy all that stuff. So I'm extremely Jewish in my identity in a very earthly way.

I'm very, very minimally Jewish when it comes to all the religious rituals. Does that answer the question? Yeah, it does. And I want to just follow up a tiny bit to say that when I think about Judaism and it could go for any religion, Catholicism, Islam. etc. The notion that there is this well of truth or this well of resources. I view Judaism in terms of resources. So like any other resource, like some resources I need, I need to drive on public roads, but I don't necessarily need social security or welfare or something like that. But when I see the vast repository of wisdom, of tradition, and I say, well, this is, this is a value to me.

I used to think, ah, the Ten Commandments, who needs it? But now I look at it. I'm like, you know, I'm not tempted to worship idols. I'm a sophisticated man. I'm a New York, you know, libertarian-minded Jew. I'm very open. I'm educated PhD from Ivy League, another Ivy League institution. Maybe not as great as Cornell, okay. But I'm not going to bow down and worship ball or some golden calf.

And the more I went into it, and especially in writing my book, I discovered that there is a little, here's one, there's a golden idol that I was worshipping. And actually, you mentioned the word Nobel Prize, you know, about 10. 10% as I do in my book about the Nobel Prize. I mean, you mentioned it in terms of the Jewish winners of it. You mentioned it in terms of its prestige and how certain Nobel Prize winners were taken down because of their canceled because of their odious views. Anyway, I'm not talking about that just now, but that I was worshipping idols.

And I do think, even, even I know you're joking or I know that you're saying it in a funny way, but we do worship college education, to be at Concordia, to be at McGill. You mentioned McGill many, many times. as one of the best universities in the world. I think, and I wonder if you agree, we have as many idols nowadays as the ancient worshippers of Baal and Ra, et cetera. It's just that we feel like ours are more sophisticated because they come from the king of Sweden

rather than from some guy who goes to the bathroom in the Nile. So what do you make of the idol worship of our age? I see Judaism as the ultimate FU to that, that there is one God, at most one God, and if that's true, you don't have to worry about your dean or your chancellor or the Nobel committee in my case. I don't give an F about that because I know that there may not be a God, but at least I'm not worshipping all these ancillary supplements to him in that way.

So the way I would answer it, and I hope that it will be satisfied to you, is I can instantiate that commandment without couching it in religious language. If you remember in chapter one of the Perselect mind, I talk about the two life ideals by which I live. In a sense, if I can now use religious language, I pray at the altar of truth and freedom. And therefore, I don't pray at the altar of false gods. What do I mean by that is there is nothing to me that's more important than the pure pursuit of truth and freedom. As a matter of fact, earlier today, I was walking with my wife. I said, you know, I'm not trying to blow smoke up your proverbial behind.

I said, you know, I'm really excited to talk later to Brian because I love long format chats, and I'm sure we're going to have a great time. So, right, there is a magisterial quality to life if you pursue it in a pure way. If you truly are committed to the cerebral life, if you are committed to truth, the reason why I'm so indignant often in my public engagements, because I'm really angry when people attack truth. I'm really angry when there are intrusions against freedom. So I could pray at the altar of truth and freedom. And so I'm instantiating that commandment without couching it in bugabuga. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. It does. I just want to, I just, you know,

because you're so open-minded about so many different topics, I can't resist. Like if I look at, you look, you're in Canada, you know, the 51st state, our great state to the north, You look at the U.S. Constitution, it's pretty good. It's not perfect. It had some flaws in it. If you look at it, you know, and you say, could this be a model for how to start a new nation? Somewhere, I don't know, you know, Eric Weinstein wants to move to St. Helena or someplace in the middle of the Caribbean where he thinks we're going to get a whole bunch of Jews down there or something. I don't know what he's thinking about. But I look at it and then say the Fifth Commandment, honor thy mother and their father so that thy days may be long on the earth. You exemplify the honor that you attribute.

I don't know if your parents are still with us or not, but they are. Thank God. So you look at that and you look at the honor that the reverence that you speak about them in the book. Then you talk about how you children are and how protective and how do. And you see that because you honored your parents, I believe you will be honored by your children. Your children will not only honor you because of who raised them, but they will see you as a role model to your child. Now, what's the second part of that commandment? You know, it's interesting. It's the only commandment in the Ten Commandments that has a reward.

You know, most people think of God as the celestial butler, as Dennis Prager puts it, you know, it's just, I'll pray and then he'll suspend the laws of physics. But actually, the end of the Fifth Commandment says, so that your days may be long on the earth. Now, it clearly doesn't mean that you're going to live forever, you know, or that you're going to be protected from all sorts of harm. But what will it mean? In my interpretation, it means that your days will have more meaning because your biological children, and if you're lucky enough to have them, as you and I do, and your ideological children, as we are both lucky through our PhD students. And we'll talk about

the genealogy of physics. I can trace mine back to the 1600s, 1500s. And it's sort of been passed on, and that's very meaningful to me. But I want to say, now you see there's two commandments. You know, then there's laws against coveting. And we covet so much in society. I coveted, you know, as I said, you know, my neighbor's Nobel Prize, not his ass, or his wife's ass. But, nevertheless, you know, so I guess I'm asking, at what point would you start to consider, again, I actually, I would not have asked you to do to Filman. I would have asked you to study Talmud because you have that mind. You have a, so what is, why do you like this conversation? Because it's two minds together connected across wonderful technology. And we're able to have this

conversation, connecting our minds, piecing out, arguing where necessary, but doing so in an honest, intellectual, empathetic manner. That's what the Talmud's about. The Talmud is an adversarial, but also provisional kind of learning scheme. It never says, this is the final law. It says, this guy said this. Rabbi Hillel said this. Rabbi Shammai said this. They fought about it, and they and blah, blah, blah. So I think I would recommend you do that. Prayer is very difficult for me. I find it very woo-woo, and as you're saying, kind of, and I almost feel like it has been co-opted by other institutions, such as the one where the most Jews adhere to, which is Buddhism. And I want to ask you, in any other realm of your life, do you meditate, for example? I'm curious.

So I don't meditate, but I do exercise a lot, although my body doesn't seem to suggest. Well, remember, GAD is supposed to be expanded. So according to God, you're supposed to get, you've got permission, a hetter, from the Almighty. Now, that is something you have in common with another bearded intellectual Jew who is not practicing that you do not meditate with Noam Chomsky. And I want to talk a little bit about your feelings on Noam Chomsky. I talked to Ben about this a little bit. He didn't spend too much time talking about it when we had a chat. But I know that you've had great difficulties with him. Is that primarily because of views that he has politically? Again, I'm not a political

I'm not like you. But what is it or is it? Yeah, go ahead. Let me tease it free. I mean, tease it apart for you. So I, one of the sections in the book is called six degrees of focusality, right? Where I can give you some phenomenon and I ask you in six or fewer illusory causal links to explain why the Amazonian frog died and it's due to Orange Man bad.

Okay. Well, one instantiation of six degrees of of focusality is six degrees of Noam Chomsky. So I give you a malady around the world and you have to link it to the U.S. military industrial complex in six or fewer steps. There you go. That's why I despise Noam Chomsky because he's a buffoon. He did something great with his universal grammar.

He should have stuck to that. But then when you become the proverbial to every, and I have these quotes in the book, you know, I'm paraphrasing now, to the one who's holding the hammer, the world looks like it's made of nails. That's exactly what Norm Chomsky's been doing for 40 years. Every single thing is associated to the U.S. He's never met a dictator that he hasn't loved. So he suffers from regrettably a lack of epistemic humility.

You mentioned earlier when you went to give a talk and someone asked you about global warming and you said, well, you know, I don't know enough about global. Well, guess what? I'm exactly like you. If you ask me about global warming, say, you know what, I just don't know enough about it. If you ask me about the pros and cons of legalization of marijuana, I just don't know enough about it. But if you ask me about things that, as I explained in Chapter 7, I've already built the nomological network of cumulative evidence for it, then I'm coming at you with all of the swagger that my tsunami of evidence allows me to walk with. In other words, I know what I know and I know what I don't know.

Noam Chomsky doesn't know what he doesn't know. He knows about everything, and it's always due to the U.S. military industrial complex and the rest of his bullshit. So that's why I have an aversion to him, because he doesn't exude for me the type of, in other words, I could be completely wrong, but I have a sense when I see someone, whether they are somebody that I would like to hang out with, whether they're cool, and he doesn't strike me like he's that guy, because he's the type of guy who's going to be pontificating over me all evening. And I don't like these kinds of fellows. When you think about establishing your dream utopian university, sad university, I want to ask you, first of all, what courses would you make mandatory for a purely intellectual broadening of the human mind, of a young person's mind? What would you make on the core curriculum of sad university? Great question. Probably how to think.

And so maybe I can go to that section in the book in answering your question. So in Chapter 7, I discuss how to seek truth. And I argue that one of the most powerful tools that I can think of epistemologically in establishing the veracity of a position is to build what I call nomological networks of cumulative evidence. And so let me draw a parallel with the original granddaddy of such a process. So Charles Darwin, you know, that white supremacist, Charles Darwin had, in developing his theory of, you know, his theory of evolution, natural selection, he didn't collect data from 30 undergrads in Ohio State University and then say, good night, everybody, I've proven my theory. Over almost three decades, he assiduously collected data from an extraordinarily different distinct lines of evidence, from geology, from paleontology, from ecology, from biodiversity, from animal husbandry, from comparative morphology, which when you put it all together, it completed the puzzle, right? And so put that now in a modern context, I argue that what Charles Darwin did 150 years ago is how we need to address.

questions about the veracity of a position. And let me draw an example, which I discuss in the book. So if I'm trying to convince you, Brian, that toy preferences are not socially constructed. In other words, it's not mommy and daddy who are sexist pigs who tell little Johnny to play with a blue truck and little Linda to play with the pink doll. It's not about that. There are some biological reasons why there is a sex specificity of toys. What are the types of distinct lines of evidence I can get in proving my point to you. So this is not a literature review. Literature review is actually a lot more restrained in its epistemological power. It's not a meta-analysis. It's much bigger than that. It is saying what is all of the possible universal data from every

imaginable source across time periods, across cultures, across disciplines, across frameworks, that would prove my position. So I won't build you the whole nomological network, but I'll give you a few so that you can get a sense. Well, I could take children who are in the pre-socialization stage of their cognitive development, meaning that they're too young to have been socialized, and I can show you that they already exhibit that sex specificity of toy preferences. That's already putting a death blow to the social construction. Yeah, lower limit on it, right?

Exactly. But I'm going to keep going. I could go to comparative psychology and look at other animals, as I mentioned earlier, vervent monkeys, recess monkeys, and chimpanzees, and show you that their infants exhibit that sex specificity. Well, now I've shown you from developmental psychology, from comparative psychology, but I'm not done yet. I could get you data from pediatric endocrinology. What does that mean?

So little girls who suffer from congenital adrenal hyperplasia. This is an endocrinological disorder that masculinizes the behavior and morphology of little girls. I could take these little girls and show you that if they suffer from this disorder, their toy preferences are reversed. They become like those of boys. I could look at data from several thousand years ago, funerary monuments from ancient Greece, where they have depictions of boys and girls,

and I could show you that they depict them playing with the same types of toys that we're playing with today. So bit by bit, through history, through time periods, through culture, I could dismantle the possibility of your position. So what I would do to answer your original question is before teaching people content,

what is the capital? of France, I would teach them how to think. Because then that universal epistemological key, I could use it in any landscape you want me to use it. Would you teach Chomsky? Would you teach Zen? How would you, even as a cautionary example? Yeah. I mean, it's for the same reason, by the way, that I would teach religion. So even though I might not be a very religious person, there are as a historical document, as a literary document, as a moral document, document and at times immoral document, I can teach these manuscripts as part of my greater knowledge. So I don't have, a lot of people think that oftentimes when I critique some of the idea

pathogens that come out of the humanities and the social sciences, I'm denigrating those, not at all. You can study Chaucer and Shakespeare in a very serious way. You could study philosophy of aesthetics in a very beautiful so it's not as though oh you're a physicist or you're a real thinker or you're a sociologist

you must have failed in physics class not at all I don't have a natural hierarchy but what I'm saying though is always be committed to reason to logic not necessarily always the scientific method because you can't necessarily study Chaucer using the scientific method but you can't

be decoupled from our reasoning faculties that's all I'm saying you have a few more minute, Scott? Sure. Okay, great. So you're very prolific on social media, especially Twitter and YouTube, where you've had hundreds of thousands of followers, subscribers, et cetera.

I want to ask you, there's a quote from George Orwell, from Animal Farm, where the pig is talking to Benjamin the donkey. And the pig says, I've got this short tail. It's useless. And you have such a luxurious long tail, Benjamin, the donkey. And the donkey says, yes, the lowered. me a long tail to swat away the flies, but I'd rather not have the tail because I don't need the tail. In other words, I'd rather not have the flies and not need the tail. You've got a lot of

flies on you, more than Mike Pence did at the vice presidential debate last week. Would you trade it? I mean, are you happy that you've achieved this level of really renown in terms of your presence on social media? It must come at great consequence. I mean, you need security when you travel. Do you regret it, is I guess what I'm asking? I don't regret it because I am so thrilled when I see how people respond positively to my efforts. And it's not because I'm narcissistic or arrogant, but when somebody sends me a message saying, you know, I was going to quit university or I was going to kill myself or I was going to whatever. And it was watching your stuff that got me out of it. Well, it's kind of hard not to be touched by it and not to be

invigorated by that love. But you are right that it comes at a great cost. You're right that there's been some security issues. Listen, a few years ago. So as you might imagine, when I walk down the street, I often will get stopped by tons of people. It's always been luckily, not once has it been negative out of thousands of times. But you don't know when that next negative one will be, right? Who the person who truly did give you that definitely, threat will act on it. I think it was maybe two years ago I was walking out of my house and I was in the driveway and I heard someone say excuse me and usually I kind of know what's going to come next. It's going to be, you know, are you got sad, right? And so I turned and I was just with my wife.

My kids were already at school and I say yes. And he goes, are you got sad? I said yes. He goes, oh, do you mind if I come over and shake your hands? And I said, sure. So then he leaves. then the rest of the day I was in a complete panic. Why? Because now someone knows exactly where I live, right? Like that guy could sure be a fan, but maybe tomorrow I'll say something that he doesn't like and he's no longer a fan and he could go on the internet and say, this is where it got sad. You should have said I'm Nomschomsky. Exactly. So 99% of the notoriety and, you know, accolades and love and so is great. But it does come at a cost. And also, because you're now, you know, I'm recognized a lot more and so on. Oftentimes I'm very defensive about what I'm with my family or my children.

If you notice on my social media, I never put photos of them. My wife, if I take a picture of it, it's always over ahead. My children, because I'm, you know, the world is a very ugly place. And the ones who hate you won't stop at only attacking you. They'll start attacking your young children, your wife, and so on. So that's the part that I don't like because they didn't choose that life. So sometimes when someone says, oh, can I take a picture with you or a selfie or something? I always ask them very nicely, please don't take a picture of my family.

So that would probably be the only part that I dislike. The rest of it, I receive so much love and kindness that who would not want that? I see it as sort of a manifestation of entropy and network theory. You of course know about this, that the number of pairwise connections in a network of N elements, grows as n squared. So in other words, if you have, you know, a family that's twice as big as another family, you have potentially, you know, four times the happiness. But then conflicts arise between single individual pairs. So that kind of grows as N, not N squared. So the ratio of... You're bringing me back to graph theory and analysis of algorithms in my math and computer

science days. I love it. I love it. So my theory is that that's why we should all have big families. We should have, you know, big friend networks. That's probably why these networks are so successful. But as with evolution, the number of, you know, in a quaternary base pair system like DNA, that can grow much faster even than, you know, to, then, you know, geometric functions. And I wonder if, you know, things like Twitter are evolving according to these same laws, where eventually it won't grow, like the cost will grow almost as the benefits. And then at a certain point, we'll have diminishing returns. And I want to ask you, obviously Ben Shapiro takes a Sabbath every week for 25 hours. Dave Rubin takes a Sabbath for a month every, every year. Can you

do that? Can you stop the, put the rapier wit back in the sheath? You know, are you able to turn it on and turn it off? I've tried with intermittent success. So, for example, I try to institute a Shapiro model or a Ruben model with not nearly as discipline. the success as they do. But I think I need to aspire to that because I think for my mental health, it would really be good because what ends up happening is that, and I haven't tested this endocrinologically, but I suspect that it can't be good for my cortisol levels. Because what ends up happening is you're constantly, as kind of the, forgive me for putting it this way, it sounds grand, but as sort of the apostle of truth, I'm always looking for the next,

imbecile to slay, right? So I'm kind of the guy at the bar looking who's saying, all right, who wants, who wants next at me? That's your dopamine. That's your, yeah, it's your fight. You have no flight. Yeah, you have no flight, Gene, but you have all fight. Yeah, exactly. And that is exhausting because for all of the love that I receive, I'm not looking for the love on social media. I'm looking to slay the idiots. And so I'm constantly in, as you said, fight mode, even if it's politely, even if it's, you know, jocular way. And that, I think, can gna at you, it could be exhausting. So if I'm able to institute something akin to Shapiro or Rubin, I think I would be much healthier for it.

All right. Great. If you'll indulge me, I've got three final questions that I ask all my guests, and I want to take this opportunity. When is the next time I'll get to chat with a god? So the first question is a simple one. Can you provide a geometric quantization of space time that unifies? all four forces of nature into one theory of everything. I'll give you five seconds, okay?

No. No. Is there a theory of everything in behavioral economics? Is there kind of a master, you know, in this consumption, Darwinian Darwinian consumption? Is there a catechism that I can use to sound smart at the next time I ever get together for a cocktail party? Beautiful question.

So I would say that evolutionary theory is the overriding meta framework to understand human behavior. So let me explain what I mean by that. Whether you are a biologist at the cellular level or the ecological level or the organism level or the population level, irrespective of the unit of analysis you work under, there are no pro-darwinists versus anti-darwinists, right? There are no chemists who are pro-periodic table and anti-periodic table. So there is some level of conciliance, a term that I love that was reintroduced with the lexicon by E.O. Wilson. So in my own work, in trying to introduce evolutionary psychology into the behavioral sciences in general and consumer behavior in particular, I argue that you could never have a conciliant science of human behavior that is bereft of evolutionary thinking.

And so to answer your question, while there isn't a law that explains all behavior, there is a meta framework under which all human phenomena are subsumed, and that's called evolutionary theory. Okay, good. So that is a wonderful thing for me to keep in my back pocket. The next thing I want to ask you, I do ask this of all my guess, that it revolves around a concept in Hebrew. It's known as a Zava-a. It's a document that translates roughly to ethical will, not material will, which undoubtedly you'll give most of your great wealth to me. You know, from this, you know, the Concordia chair salary is going to go.

The Molson legacy is going to come. I just want the beer. I really do. I'm aching for some Molson, and I would never do that, Labats. I don't know. Does Moulson own Labats? Maybe they do. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. Oh, you call yourself a Canadian? I bet you don't even know what a, what is it called, the penalty boxes in hockey. I don't know. I do know what that is. You talk a lot about soccer and a football in the book, and I thought that was great. But anyway, let's get back to the.

Yes. The ethical will. So what wisdom, what kind of knowledge, not material thing, would you most want to bequeath not only to your biological children, but to ideological children that you influence in your career? What sorts of wisdom would you most want to provide for their future? Wisdom in general, or it has to be ethical wisdom? It could be either. It could be either, actually.

Wisdom, I would probably say live, it's going to sound clichéish because I'm not the first one to say this, but I truly do mean it. Live a meaningful and purposeful life. So I don't wake up ever in the morning and I say, life sucks. There's nothing for me to do. There is all, I'm like a kid that's on a sugar rush, right? There's always a million cool thing.

If I've done nothing, but I'll write a psychology today article. If I don't feel like doing that, I'll work on a peer review paper. If I don't want to do that, I'll work on the book perspective. Yeah. perspective for my next book. If not, I'll talk to Brian Keating on a show. If not that. So there is always something that's compelling me forward that's exciting me. There's always something around the corner. Now, life is very short and it's tragic if we don't live life in the way that I just describe it. Now, of course, the regrettable part is not everyone will find that passion. In other

I was fortunate enough to have found a way to, you know, instantiate that purposeful and meaningful life. But what I would say to people is, you know, don't go into accounting because your dad said that it should be, it's a good career that's a safe. But then you wake up at 57 and say, I hated my life as I really wanted to be a dancer. Because you only really get one crack at this, unless you believe you're a religious person, you're going to be reincarnated or you're going to go to heaven. But short of that, in the earthly realm, you're going to get one crack at it, every second count.

So please live your life with passion, with honesty, and with purpose and meaning. Yeah, and with gusto. And I was just thinking, as you said that, like, if I told you when you were getting your, you know, your degree at McGill that, you know, somehow was going to let down your mother if you only got an MBA, yeah, that's a real Jewish mother. I mean, I thought mine was pretty tough. But yours... Do you want me to tell that story very quickly?

Yeah, let's do it. So I was talking about that story in the context of juxtaposing it against juicy Smollett with his victimology. narrative. And I was saying that, look, depending on the environment that you come from, the bar of how you achieve excellence is set in very different ways. And so the story that I tell is that after I finished my MBA. So at that point, I'd had a math and computer science degree and an MBA with a mini thesis and operations research. This is pretty fancy mathematics stuff. Yeah, slacker. Slacker. Exactly. And so I was then going on to pursue my PhD. I knew I wanted

to go into academia. But one of the places I had been accepted from my PhD, what UC Irvine, My brother at the time lived in Southern California, where he lived for much of the past 35 years since about 1984. And he had a very successful business in the software industry. And he was trying to convince me, well, you know, why don't you put on the proverbial suit for a couple of years? You know, you just got your MBA. If you want to go back and do your Ph.D. later, that's great. But, you know, get out there and get some, excuse me, life, you know, work experience. And so I entertained his suggestion, and I spent a day hanging.

out with him at his office. Now, when I returned home to Montreal, my mother had caught wind that my brother was trying to convince me to maybe, you know, put a hole on my PhD. So she takes me to another room to kind of speak to me privately and says, you know, I heard that story. Do you want people to remember you as somebody who dropped out of school? And so from her perspective, it would have brought great, great shame and I would have been a total loser and a dropout if I had stopped after my MBA. Now, of course, it's not as though I went and did my PhD. to please her, but it's that it gives you a sense of the type of expectations that we can either instill in our children or not. So that's where that's...

And actually, I found some harmonious resonance with what you said just a minute ago. And the answer, you're basically saying take advantage of all the opportunities that you have. Never be bored because life is too interesting to be boring. And the third thing is, like, you don't know what the future is going to bring. As you said, in the 90s, if I told you, actually, you're going to be basically a basically, not on a TV star, but you're going to be a screen star with literally millions and tens of millions of people. And by the way, you're going to get paid from YouTube. You're going to get paid for some of your videos and they don't get demonetized.

You're going to get paid by some service that hosts your videos for free. And then you're going to be world-renowned on this platform that goes in a phone that fits in a pocket that has... What the hell are you talking about? It's unbelievable. So that's my advice to my... We don't know where this is going to go. The hockey stick of exponential technology, as Peter Diamandas and others have talked about, is too difficult to predict.

You know, if you're going to lose in a year and you do so 1% a day, you won't lose that final five pounds until the last like month or two months of a year. Imagine it's going to take five months to lose two pounds. You're going to be, oh, forget it. I'm never going to do it. But then those last couple of the last exponential doubling period, that's where the hockey stick hits you. And we're living through that now.

So now is not the time to do. be bored. I want to talk the last two questions involve technology. One is going deep into the future and one is going to go back to the past. Going into the future, if you've seen the movie 2001 a space odyssey, Stanley Kubrick? I have not. Oh, you should see it. Okay. Well,

then maybe I'll skip this question. It's really about but maybe I can ask it a different way. What material object would you put on a time capsule or a book or something if you knew it had to last for, it was going to last for a billion years? So could it be that a cell phone that allows us to connect to all of the accumulated knowledge in the world?

Could that be it? It could, but I don't know. Are they going to use like Google in the year, you know, $1 billion 2020? I don't know. It could be language. They'll understand language. They'll understand music. They'll have senses and so forth.

But they won't be able to plug in that USB cork that you showed me earlier. So I guess I would answer whatever device or. mechanism that allows us to retain as much of the collective wisdom that we have so far, that's the equipment I would use. I see it was an optimist. Is that true? I am an optimist. I do worry about things in the sense that, but usually the worries are introspective, right? So for example, I always tell the story that when I go to bed at night, the way that I decide whether I can sleep or not is because of my very exact

code of personal conduct, did I do everything I can, however big or small, to make the world a better place today? That I shy away from an opportunity to correct someone when they uttered some nonsense. And if I say that I did walk away, then I feel like a fraud and I'll be an insomnia. And that's why I always take on any battle that comes my way in the defense of truth. So usually my worries are introspective. I have great moral scrupulosity. I'm always making sure that I talk about this in chapter one of the book, right? About my purity bubble. And, you know, my mother telling me, you know, the world doesn't abide according to your purity bubble God. So I think that my worries are of that form, but otherwise I'm a very optimistic, bon vivant, very effusive.

So I hate to tell you, but that's like another concept from Judaism that you've, you've, I can't escape my Judaism. No, no, no, but you've delightfully, I would say evolved it. I was going to say perverted it, but I'm not going to say evolved it, because that's the inventory that you must make an accounting on your nashima, on your soul. You're supposed to do that every day before you go to sleep. The shema relates to it.

You just gave me goosebumps. It's true. It's true. It's very interesting that you're divine these, drive these, however you like on your own. But I do think it's deeply rooted

in your memetic composition. Maybe Rabbi Silverstein of Cornell when he was saying you are a very special soul. Maybe he wasn't blowing smoke up my behind. I think so. Last thing is, revolves not going into the future

a billion years. Let's go backwards in time. Arthur C. Clark's third law states, and this is how I got the name for the pod. So his first law is any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, which Michael Schumer perverted into saying any sufficiently advanced

technology is indistinguishable from God. Not God, but God. And then his second law, Arthur C. Clark's, is for every expert. There's an equal and opposite expert. I like that one. But his third law says that the only way to discover the limits of the possible is to venture a little bit past them into the impossible. That's the name of this podcast at the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human

Imagination here in UC San Diego. I want to ask you, what thing or something, maybe an event or a prospect for your future, what seemed impossible to a 20-year-old Godside that because you did it, because I think you have this rare quality called courage. And I wish you great strength in that. And next time, maybe if you'll indulge me a future conversation, I want to talk about individual versus collective. Like your book is mostly about the individual. I want to figure out tactics, strategies, and tips for building a community of like-minded parasite-free minds. But before we do that, let's just close by asking you, what things seemed impossible to your 20-year-old self, 30-year-old self? But because you had the courage to go into the impossible,

now seems like you want to shake that person and say, it's going to be okay. What did you do that seemed impossible. I never thought, as you kind of alluded to earlier, that I would have the opportunities afforded by the tools that we have today to have as much influence, memetic influence as I ended up having. So going into academia, I knew that I could affect change, but I thought that that change would be within very not narrow silos, right? Even though I've always been someone who's very interdisciplinary, right? As I discussed in the book, don't tell me which position to play in soccer. Don't tell me only publish in these journals. That just doesn't jive with my brain, right? I want to go everywhere. I want to visit every

intellectual landscape. But I always thought that the nature of academia was that you can't be Lady Gaga, sort of speak, in terms of the influence. But what I found out today, as you alluded to earlier, is that you can achieve the impossible if you have the courage to tackle all ideas. So there are no sacred cows that I'm afraid to talk. So a lot of the few other people who Someone might mention as other professors who are in the same space as me if I can Forgive the immodesty they they are usually known for tackling one idea pathogen two idea pathogens there is no idea pathogen. There is no stupidity. There is no imbecilic idea that is sacrosanctomy you bring on the next

conveyor belt of stupidity and I would slay it with equal alacrity. And so today, what I'm able to do 20 years ago, I would have said, it's impossible. I will never have such influence. And so I'm thankful that I have the opportunity to do what I do. Yeah. Well, Gatsad, it's been such a pleasure to have you on the End of the Impossible podcast, giving us so many different things to think about, to learn from. And I do believe that you do have this very vanishingly rare trade of courage. you'll inspire other people. Tell our listeners where can they find you in what I call the spin zone. Where can we find GADSAD? So if you want to follow me on Twitter, it's at GAD, GAD, S-A-A-A-D. If you want to connect with me through my YouTube channel, it's called, well, it's just G-S-S-A-Sad,

but the show is called The Sad Truth, S-A-A-D. About four months ago, I started a podcast because some people were complaining that they don't want to just see the streaming on YouTube. They wanted to get the audio. So then you can catch me on all of the possible platforms that you could think of. It's called The Sad Truth with Dr. Sat. The only reason why I added with Dr. Sat is because some a-hole stole the sad truth. And I've written to him several times saying, look, buddy, I don't want to get nasty. Would you take it down? He hasn't.

And so I had to add that extra part. You could have a public Facebook page. And of course, please consider purchasing the parasitic mind how infectious ideas are killing common sense. and thank you for being such a delightful host. Thank you, God. It's been a pleasure for me. Enjoy the rest of your day. And thank you for spending time

on the Into the Impossible podcast. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating, please subscribe, comment, share, and review. Watch on YouTube, listen on iTunes, Spotify, Google Player, Stitcher.

We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes. For more information, and to sign up for Professor Keating's mailing list, go to Dr. Brian Keating.com. That's DR. Brian Keating.com. Follow Professor Keating on Medium and Twitter at Dr. Brian Keating, D.R. Brian Keating. For more information on the Clark Center, go to, imagination.ucsd.edu. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination

at the University of California, San Diego, in the Division of Physical Sciences. Eric Vary, Director, Ryan Keating, co-director. Produced by Ryan Keating and Stuart Volko.