Piers Morgan Uncensored - Gad Saad: On Don Lemon, Israel-Hamas and Sydney Sweeney

Episode Date: March 21, 2024

Piers Morgan is joined by Jewish evolutionary behavioural scientist Gad Saad, to give his reaction to Don Lemon's recent disastrous interview with Elon Musk. Saad also explains why he thinks it's "perfectly fair" to criticise Israeli policy following Jonathan Glazer's Oscars speech. And Piers forces Saad to choose between Dylan Mulvaney and Sydney Sweeney.... YouTube: @PiersMorganUncensored X: @PiersUncensored TikTok: @piersmorganuncensored Insta: @piersmorganuncensored Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The woke mind virus is arguably the greatest existential threat that humanity faces. If you have the chance to sit down with arguably one of the most sought-after people in the world, then maybe you should approach it with a bit of pragmatism. If AI does become sentient, it really could be Armageddon, couldn't it? I think Elon and I see eye to eye when we say that much bigger than the COVID virus are the mind viruses that are burrowing in our brains. Dad's Ad is a professor, a best-selling author, an expert in evolutionary psychology, probably best known for his scathing and sardonic rebukes of contemporary cultural insanity.

Men now who have nine-inch penises can be women. They simply have to declare themselves women, and voila, they become women. Millions enjoy his sarcastic diatribes on X. Elon Musk counts himself as a fan, and amid the fallout from Musk's disastrous interview with Don Lemon. Do you believe that X and you have some responsibility to moderate hate speech on the platform. I don't have to answer questions from a reporters. Don, the only reason I've doing this interview is because you're on the X platform and you asked for it. The Hollywood backlash to Jonathan Glazer renouncing his Jewishness and a cultural dispute

about Sydney Sweeney, author of the parasitic mind, how infectious ideas are killing common sense, returns to uncensored. Gag, great to have you back. How are you? Thank you. I'm doing well, Pierce. I'm still waiting for those invitations to go watch an Arsenal game together. I'm sure they're coming anytime. You know what? We're going to win the Premier League and you must come. I will definitely keep my word on that. Okay, let's start with this. I want to start with Jonathan Glazer. So this was a moment at the Oscars, probably the only political moment actually that happened all night. So you've got this guy who's an Oscar winning director. And in his acceptance speech, he says this. All our choices were made to reflect and confront

us in the present, not to say, look what they did then, rather look what we do now. our film shows where dehumanisation leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October... So it's interesting, there was an outbreak of applause

but not by everyone by any means and there's now been an open letter response. I think over a thousand people have now signed this and it says we are Jewish creative. executives and Hollywood professionals. We refute our Jewishness being hijacked for the purpose of drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people

and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination. So you've got a lot of backlash there to what Jonathan Glazer said. First of all, your reaction to that speech he made. So let me contextualize it by giving a few similar situations that have taken place. Several years ago, a doctoral student at Hebrew University, a Jewish doctoral student by name of Tal-Nizan, was trying to demonstrate through her research that the IDF engages in rampant rape of Palestinian women. She did the research, and to her dismay, she found out that there wasn't a single documented case of an IDF soldier raping a Palestinian woman. You know what she concluded, Pierce?

she concluded that the IDF soldiers are so grotesque in their dehumanization that they're not even willing to rape a Palestinian woman. So if they had raped the women, they're evil. And if they don't rape any women, they're evil. That's what parasitic self-loathing is. Here's one more example. There's a gentleman in Norway that had been raped by a Somali immigrant in 2011, a man who had been sodomized by a Somali immigrant. When that Somali immigrant was going to be deported, the Norwegian man felt very, very guilty

that he would now have a bad life in Somalia. So this is what Jonathan Glazer is doing. He's basically saying, please believe me that I am a virtuous, progressive person, and in doing so, I'm rejecting my Jewish identity. You could be empathetic towards the innocent killing of any people without rejecting your identity. He's grotesque.

I mean, his movie was about the Holocaust. He says he's been misrepresented as to what he was saying. And I guess the overview in defense of him is, have we now reached a point where you can't, as a Jewish person, criticize Israel and its government and its actions in response to October the 7th without effectively looking like you're being disloyal to Jewish people? No, I think it's perfectly fair to criticize endless Israeli policies. That's what makes it a vibrant democracy. But to say that I reject my Jewishness, listen, the people who wanted to kill us when I grew up in Lebanon wouldn't have cared about beheading me whether I rejected my Jewishness or not, right? If he had been at that music festival and said, hey, guys, Hamas, don't kill me. I reject my Jewishness.

They wouldn't have listened and been sympathetic to him. So you could both chew gum and walk at the same time. You could criticize Israeli policies all you want without comparing what's happening. now in Israel and Gaza to the Holocaust, which is an offensive comparison, or in rejecting your own identity, which you should be proud of. What is your view of where we are with this war right now? Look, it's tragic. People think that, oh, I am pro-genocide and all this kind of stuff. I've got more Muslim friends than most people will ever meet. Any innocent person that is ever

killed unnecessarily is a grotesque injustice cosmically. But the reality is we have to look at what started all this, right? People have what I call amnesia of causality. They no longer remember that October 7th happened, right? Had we been today where we were on October 6th, none of this would have ever happened. And so, listen, you mess around, you find out what happened. It's regrettable that people are dying, but if the Palestinians were to existentially be willing to accept the fact that they're going to have Jewish neighbors, I think this problem would be solved in the future. But that suggests that most Palestinians would be supportive of a two-state solution or living side-by-side peacefully alongside Jewish people. There's not much evidence that that is actually the case.

I mean, Hamas still maintains huge support in all the polling from the majority of Palestinians. Listen, there is a Pew survey that came out several years ago that looked at the rate of Jew hatred from many of these countries, Egypt. my homeland of Lebanon, Palestinian territories, Syria, and so on. And you have rates of endemic Jew hatred that vary from 95 to 99%. So we're not talking about an anomalous group of three out of 100 that hate the Jews. The great majority express hatred of the Jews, not Zionists of Jews. And so as long as you have that ideological reality, you will never have peace. Once you get rid of that hatred, there is such rich.

in that region so that it will truly flourish. Can you bomb, bomb, bomb a very small area like Gaza, where 50% of the population are under 18, killing thousands of thousands of children and not expect there to be ongoing massive problems in terms of an ideological hatred of those who've done this? I agree. It's almost an intractable problem. If they were to do nothing, that would be a problem.

if they respond in the rather ferocious way that they have, they're going to lose the court of public opinion. So really, they truly are behind the proverbial rock, you know, a rock and a hard place in that if they were to mitigate their response, that wouldn't be optimal. And if they respond maximally, the way they are endless, innocent people are going to die. So I don't have a clear solution for that.

I mean, do you have any better solution than anything that Israel is doing? Well, this has been my refrain from the very start of this, which is I don't know what is proportionate for a response. If you are wedded to the idea of eliminating Hamas, a terror group of about 30 to 35,000 terrorists, if you're wedded to doing that and you have the vast support as Netanyahu and his government do from Israeli people to do that,

and Hamas are embedded amongst civilian population in the way that they clearly are, I don't know how you achieve that mission endgame without what they're doing and the inevitable casualties that come with it with civilians. The question is, is that going to be the right way to gain peace and security after all this? And that's where I have a real issue with what Israel's doing because they're losing international support very quickly, even the support of the Americans, right to the highest level of the president.

And by flattening most of Gaza and killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians as well as Hamas terrorists and now pushing them all into a refugee camp where you're now planning to attack that as well, I just don't know how this doesn't all just end very, very badly an almighty social and political mess. And I see no prospective peace any time soon in my lifetime.

regrettably, and I hate to say it because I'm a very optimistic guy, a very jovial guy, a guy who wrote a book on happiness, I share your pessimism. And I'm very, very regretful to say so, but I think I share your view. It's very sad. Let's move on to something which is more kind of entertaining, I think, than something we should take too seriously. But Don Lemon, who, full disclosure, I worked at CNN with him when I worked there. In fact, he got my old office when I left.

But I've always got on fine with Don. He got fired by CNN. Elon Musk rides to the rescue like the cavalry. He says, I'll give you a show on X, pays him a few million dollars to do this. And I know some of the team Don has. They used to work with me. All seemed very, very positive for Don and a great comeback story for him. And then he decided to do Elon Musk, the owner, obviously, of X as his first guest.

Elon agrees. And it all goes horribly wrong. And this is one of the many awkward moments in the interview. Hate speech on the platform is up. You believe that X and you have some responsibility to moderate hate speech on the platform, that you wouldn't have to answer these questions from reporters about the great replacement theory as it relates to Democrats? I don't have to answer these questions. The great replacement theory as it relates to Jewish people.

Do you think that? I don't have to answer questions from reporters. Don, the only reason I'm doing this interview is because you're on the X platform and you ask for it. Otherwise, I would not do interview with this interview. So you don't think, do you think that you wouldn't get in trouble or you wouldn't be criticized for these things? I'm criticised possibly. I could care less. You know, what was interesting to me, Gab, was I had an interview with Elon lined up in early January, which he cancelled at the last minute when he discovered, from a random tweet actually by somebody who tweeted this.

It was a clip from an interview I'd done a month before with a guy called Zubi. And we were debating whether Elon should have let Alex Jones back onto the platform. the guy who, of course, defamed all the Sandy Hook parents. Now, I covered that story in America at the time. I was very personally invested in it. We'd had a similar thing in Britain with 16 children killed in Dunblane in Scotland. I was a newspaper editor at the time.

I led a campaign to have a lot of guns banned in Britain, which happened. And we've not had a mass shooting pretty much since then. I think there's been one mass shooting in the next 30 or so years. And I'm very proud of that. So this was personal to me, albeit in a country. where the culture is very different when he comes to guns. But I then cut forward to Alex Jones and what he said about the Sandy Hook families, pouring misery onto their grief and ending up with a billion-dollar defamation

finding against him. And I felt for all those reasons, Elon's original instinct, which was to not let him back on X when he was first asked about it, was correct. And his decision to reverse that was wrong. Now, I didn't think that was particularly contentious, nor would it be remotely surprising to anybody who'd followed me reporting on this story before or Alex Jones. Alex Jones had a petition to have me deported from America,

literally wanted me cancelled from the entire country. So I felt all was fair in love and war. But Elon said, no, I'm going to, I've lost respect for you. I'm canceling our interview, despite never having met me. And I only tell that story again, because it kind of puts into context what went down with Don Lemon. I think Elon is a genius. I think he's one of the smartest people in the world.

He's certainly one of the richest and most successful. I think generally he's a force for good. I think if you look at Tesla, SpaceX, and the way he's trying to go about making X a genuine platform of free speech, I'm completely supportive of him in these missions. But he clearly does have a very thin skin. And when I watched large suez of that interview with Don Lemon, Don Lemon did that interview exactly how I expected Don Lemon to do it.

I'm just surprised that Elon was taken by a surprise. Well, so I don't presume to speak for Elon, although we have, I'm happy to report become good friends, very friendly, he shouted recently and so on. Look, I'm not sure that Elon has a thick skin. I think he's got a huge bullseye on him. He gets attacked more times than a human mind could fathom. And he proceeds to be a very productive and, as you said, a historically important person.

Now, from my perspective, if you have the chance to sit down with arguably one of the most sought-after people in the world, then maybe you should approach it with a bit of pragmatism, right? There is a smugness. There is an entitlement. There is an obnoxiousness. There is a oozing chutzpah. And you don't have to be a fancy evolutionary psychologist to pick that up in Don Lemon. So if I were sitting, and I'm also someone who's not particularly thin skin, but I do have honor, I would be pissed if I'm giving you my very valuable time and you don't use it in a more appropriate manner, right? When I sat down with Elon, we were joking around, but we also discussed some very interesting things. But the reason why he was relaxed is because he knew that there was not going to be a gotcha moment. I just want to explore your brilliant mind. Let's have a fun, instructive conversation. And I, and I, From that perspective, I think that Don blew it.

You know, the irony is that's exactly the kind of interview I wanted to have with Elon. And I've messaged him saying, look, can we have another go at this? Because I genuinely have always been very supportive of him. It was only the Alex Jones thing. I mean, out of interest, what was your view of Alex Jones? I mean, do you think there should be a limit on the kind of people that are allowed on X?

No, I'm actually very much, Pierce, a free speech absolutist. And the example that I like to give is, despite my personal history in the Middle East, despite being Jewish, I support the right of Holocaust deniers to spew their endless nonsense. And so you can't be a free speech absolutist and say, no, but not for this case. I'm a free speech absolutist, but not for Donald Trump. I believe in journalistic integrity, but not when it comes to Hunter Biden's laptop, in which case we should have all colluded to suppress it. That's what a consequentialist ethic is.

That's wrong, right? There are certain principles that have to be deontological, meaning they're absolute foundational positions that you never violate, short of the regular caveats. You can't defame, you can't directly incite the violence, right? You could criticize Judaism all you want till pigs fly, but you can't say, let's go to the corner of Sixth and Broadway and kill the Jews when they come out of the synagogue.

Short of that, all bets are off. Anything is allowed to be said and let better ideas defeat idiotic. What if you've spewed lies about the families of people who had their children murdered in school? I mean, Elon's initial position on that was he wouldn't let people who stand on the graves of dead children on the platform who made money on. So I'm not a lawyer, so I hope I'm not misspeaking, but then wouldn't the mechanism of a lawsuit on defamation be something that would resolve that? Well, that's the point. My point was they did sue the families, and they won a billion dollars in defamation. case, one of the biggest awards in history. Alex Jones to date, I don't think, has paid a dollar

to the families. And just to remind people who may not be familiar with what he did, he deliberately lied about the event being staged by actors, and it was all a fake, the government had been behind it and so on. He actually exposed some of the family members to abuse in the streets, to threats. In one case, people turned up at the graveside of one of the poor children who got blown to pieces at school and urinated on the tombstone because they believed the whole thing was a fake. And I just felt that in totality that that made somebody who should not be given a platform actually like X. And I agree with Elon's first view about it. That's why I found his kind of what I perceived to be an overreaction to canceling our interview on that one thing

a little bit surprising because to me there are some limits. I mean if Adolf Hitler was on X right now, spewing his hateful views of Jewish people, I would assume that Elon Musk would have him removed. It's going to shock you what I'm going to say. By the way, there are endless on any given day, incredible anti-Semites that come after me. And yet I would never presume to call Elon and say, hey, Elon, you should see the stuff that they're saying about me. Please take them off. And so I walk to walk and I talk to talk. Part of being in a free society is to be able to withstand cretance, falsehood spreaders,

liars, racists, Jew haters. Again, as long as you don't defame, as long as you don't directly incite the violence, all bets are off. I want to play a little clip from your interview with Elon. This is about where he talks about optimism v. pessimism. All of these parasitic ideas originated from, you know, the university ecosystem.

So do we, can we be our... optimistic that we could turn this thing around, Elon, or is it, are we just screaming in the wind? Well, I think we have to be optimistic. I agree with, my general philosophy is that it's better to be or on the side of being optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right. It was also another bit I like on fame, happiness and money. And you put to him the thesis of your new book, the happiness and money are only linked up to a point below $100,000. And he actually agree with you, which given his worth about $250 billion was quite funny. Let's take a listen.

In fact, I'd say there's a decrease in happiness that occurs when the fame level exceeds that which is useful. So, like, there's a certain, you know, modicum of fame where you can now

get, it's easy to get a reservation at a restaurant. Right. That's like that's like they, you want that level fame and not anything beyond it. I kind of know what he means. It's like having been anonymous and famous, never as famous as him, obviously, but having experienced both, there's a lot to be said for anonymity.

And once you lose it, you never really get it back, however hard you try. And Elon Musk is impossibly famous now, staggeringly rich, the victim of a lot of hate, as you say, and death threats. And I do think he's trying to be a force for good in the world. I think that's his driving, motivating, motivating. factor. You got an amazing response to a tweet, which Elon retweeted this week. It's had 30 million views. And you just said that illegal immigrants, better than legal citizens, criminals better than victims, squatters, better than homeowners, transgender women better than women, twerking drag queens,

better than children. And you made the point that if you, if you subscribe to this, then we really are going to hell in the handker. Were you taken by surprise by the response? I mean, in the sense that it always amazes me that today you can put out a tweet and 30 million people can view it. I mean, let's contextualize that in comparison to the velocity at which things move in scientific knowledge. If I publish a peer-reviewed paper and it is successful, it means typically peers that five years after it's published, it might be cited by a hundred other scholars. So I need to work three to five years. years on a project and go through a very, very rigorous peer review process to hope that a hundred of my scientific colleagues pay attention to my work. I put up a tweet and it gets shown by 30

million people, which, by the way, creates a conundrum for academics like me because while I remain very much committed to the idea of publishing scientific papers, it's tough to walk away from the influence that you can wield by using social media platforms today. So I try to thread that needle as best as I can. There was one other bit from the interview you did with Elon this week, which I liked. It was about the doomsday scenario

if AI is allowed to continue being obviously transparently woke. Take a listen to this. It's going to be leading to some pretty dangerous and bizarre outcomes. And it could actually, like if it's been taught,

like that misgendering is worse than nuclear war, it may decide that To avoid misgendering, it should start a nuclear war. The surefire way to stop any future misgandering is to kill all humans. Right, exactly. Problem, problem solves. No more misgendering.

I mean, he's kind of joking, but he's kind of not. I think if AI does become sentient and it's being guided by very woke minds, human minds, to think a certain way, then it really could be Armageddon, couldn't it? Absolutely. And I mean, I think one of the reasons, why, you know, my 2020 book, The Parasitic Mind resonated so much with people is because I basically argue, and I think that's one of the ways that Elon and I first connected. He also argues that the woke mind virus is arguably the greatest existential threat that humanity faces. Because,

you know, all of the tragedies that we typically think of originally start off in the mind of some deranged lunatic, right? Whether it be Hitler or whether it be the super progressive academics that have been poisoning the minds of our children, it results in a departure from reason. So I think Elon and I see eye to eye when we say that much bigger than the COVID virus are the mind viruses that are burrowing in our brains. Talking of mind viruses, we've got this big debate at the moment raging about Sidney Sweeney, who's this breakout star, particularly since the recent appearance on Saturday Night Live, and Dylan Mulvaney, who's a breakout star for slightly different reasons.

And a meme went viral showing a picture of Sidney next to Dilmaulvaney and asking which way Western man, to which you responded on X by saying, Sidney Sweeney is breathtaking. So I'll be right in thinking you've taken sides there, Gad. Well, of course, I have since learned that for me to have picked a woman that had a vagina rather than a penis made me transphobic,

I still couldn't help but allow my biological, imperative to find Sweeney slightly more attractive than the equally beautiful other woman with a penis. How did your wife respond to your obvious overwhelming admiration of Sidney Sweeney? We are in negotiations right now to see if I am allowed a hall pass worse, Sidney's Sweeney to become available. I think it might be quite a long queue of men trying to get that hall pass. It's interesting the Dillon Malvaney thing because I'm pretty cynical about it. I have to say, you got someone who was a...

and openly self-declared gay man to their mid-20s, suddenly decides they want to identify as a woman, and then spends the next two years apparently mocking womanhood and making it sound very imbecilic and pathetic, frankly, including a ladies' pop video, reaffirming that that's Dylan Marvaney's view. What do you think of this? I mean, should we just, as a society, be compelled to go along with this and say, well, obviously, if Dylan Marvaney says that,

they're a woman, we should call them she and say they're a woman, or do we as a society say, actually, if you're going to mock women like this and you were a gay man until your mid-20s, we're just not having it? No, as a matter of fact, I appeared, both Jordan Peterson and I appeared in 2017 in front of the Canadian Senate, where we exactly warned about the slippery slope that was coming, right? I can be fully empathetic to the rights of people to live free of bigotry, as I do, right? I mean, if you want to be transgender, go for it. that doesn't mean that you take me on a ride to celebrate your unique personhood, right?

You don't get to remove from my passport, my marker as a biological male because you might be upset because you're a non-binary person that doesn't subscribe to the typical antiquated binary norms, right? So again, I can walk and chew gum at the same time. I can be empathetic to the fact that you should live free of bigotry, but that doesn't mean that I have to orgeastically celebrate your delusion. Yeah, I think I'm with you. As a very female perspective has gone viral on Sydney Sweeney. This is about what women should do to men like yourself, Gad, who may have a slight obsession with Sydney.

Aw, your boyfriend has a crush on Sydney Sweeney. You should break up with him so he can go date her. Oh, he doesn't have a chance with her. Oh, that's not. Okay, he doesn't have a chance with her, but he's obsessing over her, even though he has a real-life relationship with you. What a weirdo that he's obsessing over women

that he has no chance with. at the expense of his relationship with you. You should break up. Gad, are you concerned that Mrs. Sad may have seen that clip and got some ideas? Well, I actually, just so that I could be in the clear when I made the proclamation of my admiration for Sweeney, I retweeted that and I tagged my wife. I don't know if you saw it.

That way, if she were to now attack me, I say, but Sweeney, I was completely open with you. Well, you can't last in a 24-year marriage if you don't know how to be a bit Middle Eastern in your way. So I've got to handle it. A bit Middle Eastern. Funny enough, I had my DNA tested a few years ago, and I have got a tiny bit of Middle Eastern in me.

And so I may... That's why you're good-looking. I might try that with my wife and just say, I'm just using a bit of Middle Eastern. See how that goes down. Let's see. Let me know. Dad, it's great to catch up with you. Please come back again soon.

I really enjoyed it. Thank you. That was great. Thank you, Pierce. All the best.