The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense by Gad Saad

Episode Date: February 2, 2022

The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense by Gad Saad "Read this book, strengthen your resolve, and help us all return to reason." —JORDAN PETERSON *USA TODAY NATIONAL BESTSELLER* There's a war against truth... and if we don't win it, intellectual freedom will be a casualty. The West’s commitment to freedom, reason, and true liberalism has never been more seriously threatened than it is today by the stifling forces of political correctness. Dr. Gad Saad, the host of the enormously popular YouTube show THE SAAD TRUTH, exposes the bad ideas—what he calls “idea pathogens”—that are killing common sense and rational debate. Incubated in our universities and spread through the tyranny of political correctness, these ideas are endangering our most basic freedoms—including freedom of thought and speech. The danger is grave, but as Dr. Saad shows, politically correct dogma is riddled with logical fallacies. We have powerful weapons to fight back with—if we have the courage to use them. A provocative guide to defending reason and intellectual freedom and a battle cry for the preservation of our fundamental rights, The Parasitic Mind will be the most controversial and talked-about book of the year.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Remember, be part of the full The Chris Voss.com. Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Remember, be part of the full The Chris Voss Show family because the beautiful part about this family is we don't judge you. Isn't that wonderful? We're probably better than, I don't know, half your family. I mean, you know most of your family judges you. I don't know.

Maybe that's just a you thing, but for me it is. Anyway, moving on. Go see all the books we read and review on Goodreads.com for it says Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification. You want to see this great interview. We have a brilliant mind, Dr. Godson, on the show with us today. He's talked about his new book. And he has a huge YouTube channel.

So you definitely want to see me on YouTube with him and subscribe to his channel as well. That's probably a good thing for you. And you're going to want to check out his book. Also go to all of our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, all the different places we are. We have a huge LinkedIn newsletter. The LinkedIn group that is there on the Chris Voss show, Dr. Godson, he is the professor of marketing at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. He is a former holder of the Concordia University Research Chair in the Evolutionary Behavior Sciences and Darwinian Consumption.

He has held visiting associate professorships at Cornell University, Dartmouth College, and the University of California, Irvine. He received the Faculty of Commerce's Distinguished Teaching Award in June 2000 and was listed as one of the hot professors. Boy, he's a good-looking guy, evidently. Hot professors of Concordia University in both the 2001 and 2002 McLean Reports on Canadian Universities. He was appointed Newsmaker of the Week of Concordia University in five consecutive years and is a co-recipient of the 2015 President's Media Outreach Award Research Communicator of the Year, which goes to the professor at Concordia University, whose research receives the greatest amount of global media coverage. He has written the new book, The Parasitic Mind,

How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. Welcome to the show, Dr. Gadsad. How are you? I'm doing very well. Thank you so much for having me. It's wonderful to have you. Congratulations on the new book. Give us your plugs so we can find you on the interwebs. Well, I have a personal website, Gadsad.com. You can go check me out there. I have a YouTube channel under my name. The shows are called The Sad Truth, S-A-A-D. I also have a podcast called The Sad Truth with Dr. Sad. You can follow me on Twitter at Gadsad, S-A-A-D. I have a public Facebook page. I have an Instagram page. I'm everywhere. I'm not hard to find. And you've got, I think you've got a layout of your books on YouTube here.

You've got several books that you've written as well. Yes, yes. I'm currently on my, I'm working. I think we were talking offline that I'm currently trying to wrap up my fifth book. The other four are here behind me. My book children, so to speak. My family and I always joke in that I'm running out of family members to dedicate my books to. My first book, which is this one. Which one is it?

No, the other way. The Consuming Insight? No, the other way. Why can't I point this way? Oh, the... This way, this one. The Evolutionary Basis of Consumption was dedicated to my wife. Then the one next to it with a picture of Darwin was dedicated to my wife. Then the one next to it with a picture

of Darwin was dedicated to my two Belgian shepherds who are, you know, these beautiful military dogs. And then the books, Consuming Instinct and Parasitic Mind were dedicated to each of our human children. And so now my fifth book, different people are vying for that dedication. So if you'd like to be the one who receives the dedication, send me in 100 words or less why it should be you, dear family members. There you go. There you go. I like how you gave your dogs a dedication. I have two Huskies.

So maybe when I do my third book, I'll put that on there as well. Listen, I love my dogs more than I love the great, more people, the great majority of people. They have all of the noble qualities that we hope to aspire to have and none of our faults. So isn't that true? I mean, they have loyalty and dedication. That's just, they say that women and children and I don't know, pets get unconditional love, but man doesn't, we have to show up and perform. But, but the one thing man has, you know, is his dog is man's best friend. There's a reason they call it that. But yeah, the more I know people, the more I love my dogs. So what motivated you to want to write this book? Great War was growing up in Lebanon. We were part of the last group of Lebanese Jews that had

steadfastly refused to leave Lebanon. And then in 1975, when the civil war broke out in Lebanon, it became impossible to be Jewish in Lebanon and we had to escape. Now you might say, why did that force you 45 years later to write the book? It's because Lebanon is the perfect society that you wish to have if you want to organize everything along identity politics lines. Everything in Lebanon is viewed through the prism of your religious heritage. Who gets to be president? Who gets to be prime minister? How many people sit in parliament is determined by which religion you come from. And so it dismayed me to see that the West was trying to replicate the type of tribalism and collectivism that I had escaped from 45 years ago. So that's the first

reason that drove me to write the book, because I see that identity politics is now everywhere. And of course, it's particularly so in academia. The second more broad reason why I wanted to write the book is the second great war that I faced in my life, which was the great war on reason, on science, on logic, on common sense that I saw in university settings. I've been a professor for almost 30 years. And before we had the current, you know, craziness about, you know, men too can menstruate and men too can bear children and so on. I was warning about these realities, you know, 25 years ago. And so put all of those things together, I thought, you know what, I better write a book that explains

how human brains can be parasitized by all of these dreadful idea pathogens. And I think that gives us a good overall arcing of the topics that are in the book. Do we have it in the can for that? Yeah, exactly. So maybe I can give you a... Sure. So one of the things that I do as an evolutionist, as an evolutionary psychologist, is that you look at other animals so that you can draw some inferences about human behavior, right? So for example, if I want to understand why human children have certain sex-specific toy preferences, I could look to vervet monkeys and rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees and show that they exhibit the same type of toy preferences that human children do. And so therefore, by showing this evolutionary contiguity,

you're showing what's called a homologous trait. You're showing that there is similarity in our behavior with that of our animal cousin. Now, why am I saying all this? It's because as I was trying to think about what type of framework should I use to try to understand these idea pathogens, these brain worms that parasitize our minds into thinking so irrationally. I looked to the animal world and I discovered the field, not that I discovered the field, I discovered the field that already existed called neuroparasitology. So parasitology is the study of how parasites interact with their hosts. A tapeworm can go into your intestinal tract and cause havoc. A neuroparasite looks to go in the whole brain,

altering its behavior to suit its purpose. And so that was my aha moment. I would use the neuroparasitological model to argue that humans can not only be parasitized by actual biological brain worms, they could be parasitized by another class brain worms, they could be parasitized by another class of biological agents, if you'd like. But they're not biological, they're idea pathogens. So they're parasites, but that alter your ability to think clearly. And I guess the next thing I

could do, if you'd like, is give you examples of idea pathogens. Please do. So first I'll list a few and then I'll discuss some of them. So postmodernism, cultural relativism, militant feminism, biophobia, the fear of using biology to explain human behavior, social constructivism. Those are some of the classic idea pathogens that I discuss in the book. Maybe I'll discuss a few of them in greater detail. Let's begin with postmodernism. Postmodernism, in my view, is the biggest of all idea pathogens because it is an attack on the means by which we can seek truth. Because postmodernism argues that there are no objective truths. We are completely shackled by subjectivity. We are completely shackled by subject, you know, by personal biases, by relativism.

Therefore, to speak of a universal truth is silly according to postmodernism. Now, you could imagine how anti-scientific that stance is because scientists do wake up every day thinking that there is a natural order, natural laws to be discovered. Now, our truths in science can change. We're humble about truth. What was provisionally true 300 years ago might be updated, but we do operate under the premise that there are truths to be discovered, while postmodernism shatters that, quote, illusion. Social constructivism is another dreadful idea pathogen.

It basically says that we are born empty slates, tabula rasa, and it's only socialization that makes us who we are. So if little Linda can't bench press as much as the center for the San Francisco 49ers, Bubba, it's not because he has any innate sex differences that cause him to be stronger. It's only because little Linda was taught to play in a soft and nurturing way with her toys, whereas Bubba was taught to play aggressively. And that's what led to the cascade of differences that we see 25 years later. Now, it's a very hopeful message because it's very nice to think that we are all born empty slates with equal potentiality, but it's perfectly rooted in BS. So it's hopeful, but it's wrong.

So each of these idea pathogens shares one commonality. They start off with a noble goal, but then in the pursuit of that goal, they completely murder and rape truth in the service of that goal. Yeah. I mean, we're born differently. And I think one of the things that has come out of the feminism era and toxic feminism I should say I mean there's there's a good part to it I mean if yeah hey everyone can have jobs and stuff my mom fought ERA when she was when when you know I was a child we would go to the the anti-ERA equal rights thing because my mom recognized that she liked being a mom and she wasn't really into the whole thing and she's like I don't want that extra work but you know some wasn't really into the whole thing. And she's like, I don't want that extra work.

But, you know, some people do. But the whole thing that it's really come down to that I see a lot on social media now is that we're all equal and we can all do the same thing. We're not. We're very biologically different from beyond the time. There's a reason a man has upper body strength and can outdo whatever if he competes, whether he's trans or whether he's a man. He still biologically is a man. And you talk about some of this in your book right so and in a sense before i got into the broader culture wars i faced these kinds of issues in my scientific career because my my academic career is in trying to marry evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology in the study of human behavior in general and consumer behavior in particular. And so as I try to Darwinize,

if you'd like, the business school, I am, of course, starting with the premise that there are biological differences between men and women. It's not that one sex is superior. It's that there are many things on which men and women are indistinguishable from each other. There are some things that men are superior on. There are some things that women are superior on. And those differences can be explained via the lens of evolutionary theory. So for example, when it comes to human mating preferences, it turns out that there are some things that men and women desire equally in their prospective mates. For example, kindness and intelligence is a universal set of traits that both men and women desire equally. But when it comes, for example, to physical beauty and youth, men procure and defend resources and ascend the hierarchy, then it is always women that place much greater premium on that. And this is not something that's

Western. It's not something that is restricted to today's world. You could study this through thousands of years of data. You could study this in the Yanomamo tribe and the Amazon that has never seen an Oprah show or read Cosmopolitan magazine or seen Hollywood images, and you'll get the exact same data. And the reason you get this data is because there are certain evolutionary problems that men and women have faced that are different from each other. The evolutionary interests of women when it comes to the mating market are different than those from men. And therefore, since we are a sexually reproducing species, we should expect to find sex differences. Well, here comes militant feminism that tells you, no, that can't be. You must be a Nazi if you say that, right? And why do they have that

insane departure from reality? Because they think, as I mentioned earlier, when I said in the pursuit of a noble goal, they're willing to murder truth. So militant feminists wish to eradicate, quote, the status quo, the patriarchal status quo. And from their viewpoint, the best way to do that is to have a narrative that says that men and women are indistinguishable from each other. Well, that's simply incorrect. We can all strive to eradicate all institutional forms of misogyny or sexism, as we have, I think, in the West, without presuming that men and women are indistinguishable from each other. So again, that speaks to my point of all of these idea pathogens, all of these parasitic ideas start with a noble goal, and then they metamorphosize into garbage.

Yeah, and they can get really out of control. You know, I've dated all my life. I've been engaged twice and I, I pulled back and I said, I just think this is a really bad idea. I don't see this lasting five years. Uh, I've, I've dated all my life. I've dated a lot of women. I've power dated at times. And so I've seen the arc of dating, mating strategies over, I'm 54 now. And it's been a really interesting thing that I've experienced. And seeing, you know, nowadays where, you know, from what you said earlier, men and women are designed to complement each other from a genetic or biological or just the eons of time that we've been things. They're designed to compliment each other. There's a reason a man has upper arm strength because he can defend a woman while she's nine months in having a baby and she doesn't really have the chance to fend off the lions

and all that sort of stuff. No, it comes down to that sort of thing. A father brings a certain thing to raising children that he delivers. A mother delivers something opposite to that. And those are all designed to be compliments. And erasing that or thinking that it can be overridden. You know, one of the things I see in dating now is I see women thinking by acting like men, being like men, achieving social status like men, or acquiring assets or income like men, that that is appealing to men. And so I see all these people in my dating pool who, you know, are on match.com

or Bumble, wherever I am. And they're going, why don't, why don't guys like me? Why don't they like me? I have all this stuff. And I'm like, cause you're acting like a man. Like men are not attracted to that. And then they're angry at us because we're not attracted to that. And it's like, and I, I've actually been told you should, you know, in dating forums and Clemenceau stuff, well, you should just override that. You should just accept us for who we are. No, that's like me saying, you know, I'm 500 pounds and ugly and I fart every five seconds. You should accept me for who I am and fall in love with me just like you'd fall in love with Lenny Kravitz.

You know, it's ludicrous and it's insane. Yeah. So just to draw the opposite side of that coin. Well, before I give the example, let me speak academically to what you just said. There's a concept of theory of mind in psychology. Theory of mind refers to the ability of humans, and it's a fundamental part of human sociality to when I'm interacting with you, I oftentimes have to put myself in your mind frame to be able to understand what I should tell you or whether to be empathetic with you or not, whether to

sync my emotions with you or not. So for example, one of the best ways that you can diagnose autism in young children is you can give them tests that demonstrate that they fail a theory of mind test. Now, why am I talking about this in the context of what we're talking about now? Oftentimes, men and women speak over each other because they don't have good theory of mind about the opposite sex. So in the same way that women say, why aren't men so attracted to me? I'm a diplomat and a neurosurgeon, and I walk and talk with all the confidence of the most alpha male. That's like, so let me now draw the analogy. This is like when men are surprised, am I allowed to give a bit of a, it's not a swear word, but it's a direct term. When men send women dick pics and are then surprised that women don't respond to it

favorably, they're also succumbing to theory of mind violations. Why? Because they're presuming that given that men are visually aroused by sexual stimuli, visual sexual stimuli, well, then it would be reasonable to presume that women should be equally attracted when I share with them a sexual stimuli, you know, from my morphology, whereas women are not nearly as attracted by that visual stimulus as men are. So that's one of the beauties of evolutionary psychology, because it allows us to understand those things on which men and women are perfectly synchronized and all those things on which we are different. So that's why when I come into a first day's class with my students, undergrad, master's, PhD, I tell them that the framework that I'm going to teach them by them understanding evolutionary psychology is a universal

explanatory mechanism that they could use throughout their life, not just to understand employee behavior and employer behavior and consumer behavior. They'll understand in five years when they get married, why they got jealous at that party because their spouse spoke too long to that person. You're right. So that's the power of an evolutionary lens to human behavior. It truly allows us to understand both the things that make men and women identical to each other and the things that differentiate us from one another. Yeah. And we've got to, we've got to realize that, that we're, we're different as men and women. You talk a lot. I've got a cram here for the show for time. There's some questions I have for you. You've, you've, the book is a beautiful book. The first part of the book, reading about your childhood growing up in, you know, war-torn

Lebanon, just, it just kind of crushed me and gave me a good stab in the heart. I can't imagine from an empathetic view growing up that way, even when you came to, I believe it was Canada, and your parents went back. So a beautiful story, definitely touching. One of the things you have made me think about in the book is free speech. And I do have a couple of questions for you. But do you want to expand on what you write about, talking about free speech and why it matters? Right. Look, just yesterday, I posted a clip on the Joe Rogan, Neil Young, Spotify issue. It's an issue very much defined by two lifelong ideals. I basically say there

are two ideals that I adhere by, truth and freedom. And they bounce off each other. You need freedom to pursue truth. And you can't have truth without having freedom. I mean, they really, it's a causal feedback loop. And so, so many of my, never mind just people, you know, lay people, even in academia, the incorrect view that people have on what freedom of inquiry and freedom of speech is, it baffles me. So for example, many of my colleagues always succumb to the, of course, I believe in freedom of speech,

but the second that you say, but, and then fill in the blank, you don't believe in freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is something that is deontological, meaning it's not consequentialist. It is an absolute pursuit. The only cases that are not protected by freedom of speech are the classic ones that we know. You can't engage in direct incitement of violence against a particular person or group. You can't engage in defamation or libel. You can't scream the proverbial fire in a theater. Short of that, there is no restriction on freedom of speech. And let me give you a very concrete example that speaks very poignantly to my past, right?

We are Lebanese Jews who escaped imminent execution on countless occasions. So I'm very much rooted in my Jewish identity. Yet I stand here before you telling you that I support the right of Holocaust deniers to spew their nonsense. There is no greater commitment to absolute freedom of speech than to state that. There is nothing more offensive that anyone can do than to deny the historically documented reality of the wholesale eradication of a whole people's. And yet in a free society, you support the right of racist, idiots, false promulgators to spew their nonsense.

The only protection against that is for other people to shut them down through the debate of ideas. No canceling, no rejection, no boycotting. Let my ideas clobber yours and yours will be placed in the dustbin of history. And so I truly am the definition of an absolutist freedom of speech guy. I thought that was really interesting. Especially the Anti-Defamation League is really concerned about stuff. I saw the previous director, who was the director in your book, but he calls it reels for feels, where people are more concerned about suspending reality so they don't get their feelings hurt. And you talk about how some of that is, well, a lot of that is going on in your college campus and stuff. Yeah. So in chapter two of my book, I have, I mean, the entire book is about the tension between feelings versus thinking.

And I actually argue, you know, in a very, you know, using a psychological framework, that it is actually a false dichotomy. Humans are not either feeling animals or thinking animals. We're both, obviously. But here is the challenge, is to know when to activate the right system. When should you activate the affective system versus when you should activate the right system. When should you activate the affective system versus when you should activate the cognitive system. So I am taking a shortcut in a dark alley because I want to get home more quickly. And I see four young men loitering around suspiciously,

then my heart rate will go up, my blood pressure will go up, I'll start maybe breathing more quickly. That fear response is an affective response. It's an emotional response that is perfectly adaptive from an evolutionary sense. It makes sense that I would have that emotional response to that potential danger. On the other hand, if I'm trying to solve a calculus problem on an exam, triggering my affective system is not going to help me to do better on that exam. I need to trigger my cognitive system. Now let's apply that to an important political situation. So if I'm trying to decide between voting for Donald Trump or Joe Biden or Donald Trump or

Hillary Clinton, or if I'm trying to decide who do I love more, Donald Trump or Barack Obama, now I'm going to show you how activating the wrong system results in poor decision making. So if I ask all of my super highfalutin progressive smart friends in academia, why do you hate Donald Trump? The answer will be, he disgusts me. I revile him. He's grotesque. I can't stand the way he speaks. That's an aesthetic injury. It's an emotional response. He disgusts me. I revile him. He's grotesque. I can't stand the way he speaks.

That's an aesthetic injury. It's an emotional response. He disgusts me. Why do you love Barack Obama so much, dear progressive professor? Because he has a mellifluous voice. He has a radiant smile. He speaks with the cadence of a Baptist minister. All of these answers as to why I hate Donald Trump and why I love noble prophet Barack Obama, peace be upon him. The reason why I'm

saying that is all based on peripheral cues, emotional cues. I didn't say I love or hate Barack Obama or Donald Trump because of their monetary policies, because of their tax policy, because of their immigration policy. So this is where you are activating the wrong system at the wrong time. When it comes to choosing your president, you shouldn't be using whether he looks cute or has nice hair, as tons of women chose Justin Trudeau for that and have admitted to me that that's how they did it. Well, when you're choosing the guy who is going to have the power to put you under lockdown and curfew for two straight years, you might want to look beyond how sexy his hair is. But regrettably, for most people, we succumb to the emotional appeal rather than the rational one.

And you really hit on something. You really hit on something. I think this is one of your fans coming on the show. You really hit on something. You know, this was something that started in, well, with the advent of TV, with Nixon and John F. Kennedy, where for the very first time, the debate showed up on TV, and everyone who listened on the radio thought Nixon won. Exactly. And everybody who watched saw, saw you know the fairly charming and

good looking he certainly was better looking than nixon you know he thought he won the tv debate and that's when for the very first time and this is true from politics they're out here in america is the person who is the most charismatic the most fairly better looking i think pretty much when you look across the things i mean they're they're not the best looking, but if you compare the two side by side, you go, well, that one's definitely better looking than this one. And that has been the thing. And people do make their politics based on feels over reels. And they really need to make it from a different standpoint of what's out there.

And so if we take the two items we just covered, the free speech element and the reels versus feels, you know, it combines in this whole essence of like this victimhood that you talk about in your book. Growing up in America, I, I grew up, I'm from basically a lot of the Trump voter generation. You know, we saw colored and white on the fountains and we, we saw this, this sixties racism and all the experience that was there. And I had an alpha father. I had a father who was in my home till I graduated. And I really am thankful to my parents for sticking out because they really did not like each other and they did it for us and God bless them. And I'm that last generation of Gen X that was raised with an alpha father in the home. After that, the next two generations are pretty much beta ties.

We've got the participant generation. You know, we're now seeing the highest amount of virgins of males ever, which I don't get at all. But I understand it, but I get it. But somewhere around that time, and I had an alpha grandfather, I'll credit him. Somewhere around that time, this victimization mentality started in America. And I don't know if it really came from feminism or just that we had way too many attorneys. And it started this whole movement where we had to put signs on bridges that says, don't jump. It will kill you. We had to put – and it was a – we became this liability society where – and part of it, I think, actually, no, I know

what part of it is. Part of it was the decline of the middle class because we came under attack with Reaganomics, trickle down things, the Ivan Bioski area in the Wall Street era where everything went from, hey, having that job that you do for 40 years and get a watch at the thing. Yeah, that's out. You're gone. Oh, we want the stock price to go up? It was dissolving a Main Street to Wall Street

and less about employees and unions and more about shareholder equity for investors. And that's when the real turning point of America, and I started really seeing the unraveling of the middle class go on. And it reached a point to where the desperation was, there are three ways you're going to get rich in this world. If you ask most people now, there's three ways you're going to get rich in this world. You're either going to sue somebody and make a bunch of money, welcome to America, or you're going to get an inheritance or you're

going to win the lottery. That's most people's wealth sort of gear that isn't technically reeducated like Bitcoin or some sort of other self-employment issue in this country. It's very sad. And this victimization came out. Don't let your baby near the plastic because the plastic will eat it and choke it. This sort of stupid shit that everyone should know a kind of a form of

dogmatism that you're just like, if you can't figure that out, maybe you shouldn't be here. And it really evolved. And one of the things you talk about in your book, and the question I'm setting up here kind of long-wise, is you talk about how at the college level, there should be a place where it's learning and there's not this feels for reels and there's not all this political correctness. And there should be more free speech. There should be open to stuff.

And there used to be these bastions of universities that were that way. You could go there and learn stuff that maybe you were, you were prejudiced with your, your training like I was as a child. And, and you can go there and open your mind and learn some stuff and not be afraid of, of knowledge and accepting.

But one of the things you talk about in your book is creating that, trying to get that design back but the question i have for you is from a society like ours that really lives in victimhood i mean it's just gotten worse like there's a there's a warning label on everything and then feminism lives on victimhood it's it's always victimhood when you set up a victimhood thing you're making an excuse for why you won't succeed because you know you're not going to apply yourself and succeed. So you're setting up basically a fail of sabotage. So when we grow up in this victimhood society, you want us to be able to come to the college thing and flip that model during those years.

Is there a way to do that or is there a way to fix that? Because it seems to me like I'm trying to figure out how to make that work. Yeah. So, I mean, there are a couple of do that or is there a way to fix that or because it seems to me like i'm trying to figure out how to make that work yeah so i mean there's a couple of things that i can answer there let me take at least three different tracks in terms of what you've put together number one one of my good friends nassim talib has a book on anti-fragility but of course the idea is not specific to nassim talib for example the saying, squeaky doors don't break, is exactly what anti-fragility is, which is basically that in order to grow up to be a strong individual, you have to face certain ordeals.

Those ordeals will allow you to develop strength. Now, on that point, and I'll come to the victimhood mentality in a second. In the book, I talk about something called the hygiene hypothesis from evolutionary medicine. So in evolutionary medicine, one of the wonderful findings or really insightful findings talks about how if you compare children who grew up in very sterile environments, meaning no pollutants, no allergens, no pet dander, they didn't grow up on a farm. So it's as if they grew up in a surgical room in a hospital. Those children are much more likely to develop autoimmune diseases, like for example, respiratory ailments like asthma, because the immune system expects to be triggered by these allergens to be able to function maximally.

So now if you apply that principle to the university setting, and there's a neuropsychiatrist from Australia who's written a wonderful, which I cite in the Parasitic Mind on this topic. So then you take that principle from evolutionary medicine as applied to whether you get asthma or not, but apply it to the most important organ that defines your personhood, your mind, right? Your mind expects to be exposed to allergens. In this case, the allergens are competing ideas, right? The way that I hone my skills as a debater, if I want to try to convince you that the death penalty is a good idea, should I not be exposed to the opposing set of ideas that say that it's a bad idea? That allows me to better hone my skills as a debater.

My critical thinking expects me to be exposed to ideological allergens, meaning other people's opinions. So the ecosystem of the university should be defined by all of these competing ideas that enter the battle of ideas. And then using critical thinking, using evidence-based thinking, using the scientific method, we can adjudicate which of these is better than the others. So now we come to victimology. When you now define a competing idea that is opposite to mine as a form of violence that victimizes me, then it's the death of the scientific method, right? Because think about it this way. When I submit a paper to a journal that is going to go through peer review, what the reviewers do is basically they try to break down every single syllable of your paper

to put it through the rigor so that whatever is finally published has gone through the anti-fragility hurdles. And it's only when it comes out of that washing cycle that we now know that hopefully we can trust this. Now, imagine if I said, hey, you should never be allowed to peer review my papers. That's a form of epistemological violence against Jewish people. It offends me. It's antisemitism for you to ever judge my ideas. It's a form of violence.

Well, then how can we ever adjudicate ideas? Now, let me explain very briefly why the victimology ethos is so intoxicating and alluring. Well, it turns out that in 2010, I had written a paper, which I published in a medical journal, where I was talking about some evolutionary reasons why Munchausen syndrome exists. Now, Munchausen syndrome, for your guests who don't know what it is, Munchausen syndrome is when someone feigns a medical illness in order to garner empathy and sympathy. Munchausen syndrome by proxy is even more diabolical. This is when you take someone who's under your care, your biological child, your pet, your elderly parent, and you harm them so that you can garner

the empathy and sympathy by proxy. Oh, poor you, you have an ailing child. So it's a truly diabolical psychiatric disorder because my desire to feel that people are granting me empathy and sympathy is so great that I'm willing to harm my biological child. So having written that paper in a completely different context back in 2010, when I started seeing the orgiastic runaway form of competition where everybody was trying to outdo each other as to who's the greatest victim, then I said, aha, I found the final coinage of what we are suffering from. And I called it collective Munchhausen and collective Munchhausen by proxy. That's what causes, you know, woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, who is whiter than Snow White, to be able to say, I'm a first woman of color,

because she then piggybacks on the tragic history of the indigenous people from the United States, or what causes, as Dave Chappelle says, the French actor, Jussie Smollett, also known as Jussie Smollett, to not be happy at making a huge salary for being a C-level actor, but rather for him to truly get his Bonafide street creds, he has to have a victimhood narrative. If he doesn't have a victimhood narrative, so damn it, I will construct one because I know that the only way that I can ascend the social hierarchy is to be a victim. Now, imagine how grotesque that is to someone who is a true victim, right? I had to grow up in Lebanon knowing that every single second might be my last second on earth. I spent the next 25 years waking up from nightmares.

And I discussed this briefly in the parasitic mind where I would wake up usually with one of two forms of nightmares. The bad guys are coming in to kill us. And then my gun jams or the bad guys are coming in to kill us. And we've run out of ammunition. And then I found out through some of my military friends that this is called the warrior dream, that they have many of these, you know, people who've gone into battle will suffer from this nightmare. Now, imagine though, I wasn't a Navy SEAL. I was a sitting duck. I was an 11-year-old child who, it was fate who decided whether I lived till tomorrow or the next day.

For someone to have gone through my personal history, to then see Elizabeth Warren and Jussie Smoyet construct fake accounts of victimhood, it's an attack on human decency. It's grotesque. A healthy society is organized around meritocracy, not around victimology poker. Yeah. And like I say, I was the last generation to really be born with alpha fathers in the home. When I grew up, the single mother or the divorced mother, and I'm not putting the blame for all this on single mothers and stuff, was like an anomaly on the street. All the married women would talk about that woman, woman. Now it's flipped on our streets. The, the, the people who are still married after 10, 20 years, they're like,

what kind of weirdos are those guys? That's a joke I tell. But, but that's kind of where we flipped the U S the United States has the largest single parent thing going on here. And I've watched over, this is the reason I never got married. I've watched over this 40 years and between dating and seeing what the mentality is in the field. And of course that is evolved and seeing pretty much the, the attack on fathers, on manhood, you know, we're dismissed as like just a bunch of bumbling idiots. My father and what fathers usually bring to the table, if you study genetics and what we contribute, is fathers teach children how to go through life.

When you fall down and scream your knee, your father doesn't hug you. He goes, yeah, just cry it off and get up and walk it off, buddy. That's life. Welcome to life. Life's not fair. That's just what your dad teaches you. My dad kicked my butt so many times, but I'm so endeared to him and my grandfather too as an alpha because he taught me things and he taught me life

skills. I've never sent a dick pic to a woman in my life because I just know that's stupid because I was raised by alpha males. And I think a lot of like beta males that are raised in this world that are actually pretty, they're pretty messed up and subjugated or what's the word I'm looking for? They're, they're, they're, they're, they're sabotaged in, in their raising of life over these last two generations. And so they don't even know that sending dick pics is like a dumb thing to do. They don't even know how to really date. And we're kind of starting to see that we're seeing our birth rates fall, our marriage rates fall. This is the beginning of the end of an empire, if you're familiar with those histories.

We're starting to see people that can't date, people that can't meet. We have the highest amount of, like I said, male virgins ever, the incel generation. I'm sure you've heard about and seen. I think you're familiar with one of the doctors we had on our show who wrote a book where he studied all of our school shooters and found that the number one narrative in them is not having a father in the home all the time. And we have the largest growth of single mothers. Now, I'm not bashing single mothers or anything like that, but there is a continuum of why we have this generation of the participation generation of reels versus feels. Parents now are really actively involved in what they do, you know, helicopter parents and stuff like that. And I think all of this tied in without fathers,

because we really became the society over 40 years where it's like, Hey, can I, can I sue somebody for this? Can I get money? Oh, I got hot coffee spilled on me from McDonald's. Can I get money? Can I get, you know, there's really this mentality, especially in America, where people are like trying to figure it out. And I think that's what's evolved out of this victimization thing, or at least that's my theory. I'm going to put what you just said, and again, in an evolutionary framework, humans are defined as a biparental species, biologically, evolutionarily speaking.

Now, what does that mean? That means that if you look, let's just look at mammalian species. We are quite rare in that few, if any, mammalian species have fathers that are as vested in their children as human fathers are. Now, that doesn't mean that human fathers are as vested mothers, because for example, we know from something called parental investment theory, parental investment theory is a brilliant evolutionary theory that basically argues that if you want to understand sex differences within a species, look at the minimal obligatory parental investment that each sex has to give. Well, women, by virtue of the

fact that they have roughly 400 ova from the onset of their menses to menopause, so 400 gametes, whereas men in a single ejaculation have 250 million spermatozoa. So just economic theory would say that that which is scarce is more costly. So therefore, by virtue of the reality of biology, women are more vested in their children. There is such a thing as paternity uncertainty. There is no such thing as maternity uncertainty. So even though within the human species, women invest more in their children than men, men do invest greatly in their children. We are a bi-parental species. Therefore, it doesn't take Charles Darwin to understand that for optimal functioning of a child that you're rearing, it really is best to have two children. Now, that doesn't mean that you should hammer away at a single father or a single mother.

Of course, you should support them. But to argue that anything short of biparental reality is anything that that's not the optimal reality is simply wrong. Let me just mention one other point. It turns out that, so in biology, we have the term menarche. Menarche refers to the onset of the menses. In French, you say menarche. So it's the opposite of menopause. Menopause is the end of your reproductive window. Menarche is the start. What is the first age at which a girl has her menses? Well, it turns out that when a girl has her first menses is correlated to father absence. Now, imagine how profound that is. This is demonstrating to you how the environment interacts with something as basal as the physiology of the reproductive cycle of a young girl, right? Now, you might say, in what direction does it go? Well, if you don't have a

father in the home, then the little girl enters her reproductive window earlier. In other words, menarche starts earlier than later, depending on whether there is a father or not. And there are evolutionary reasons of why that would be the case. So whether it be how it affects young boys or how it affects even something as basal as the physiology of little girls, having a father is important, just like having a daughter. And so whenever you see these ideological arguments that try to negate human nature and basic biological mechanisms, you know that someone is parasitized because you can't run away from human nature. Yeah, that nails it right on the head. I love how I put it in stupid terms and you make it sound so scholarly and brilliant. It's like we're like a team here. We're the odd couple.

One of us is a lot better looking than the other. I'll leave the other. That's you. Of course, that's you. You're picking up way more chicks than I am. I got to lose some more weight. Plus, you're like a team here. We're the odd couple. And one of us is a lot better looking than the other. I'll leave the audience. That's you. Of course, that's you. You're picking up way more chicks than I am. I got to lose some more weight. Plus, you're smart. You can talk all that stuff.

And the girl's like, he's really smart. But I'm married. You're not. Well, I mean, that sounds like a you problem. Just kidding. And I know we're approaching the top of the hour. I know we may have a hard hour. I'm going to let you call it.

So do you think we have a few extra minutes? We can go a few extra minutes if you'd like. I'm going to let you call it. So do you think we have a few extra minutes? A few extra minutes, if you'd like. I'm going to let you call it. So I have a lot of questions. I'd love to have you on back again. The book was great. And you made me think about a lot of different things and process them. But yeah, I see that right now on social media.

I see a lot of women who are single mothers who are, and they get a lot of support from the community. They're like, you go girl. You don't need a man. You don't need a raised man. And then on top of that, we see in social social media this thing where we're all the good men and we see women that are acting like men and very in their masculine and they kind of do have to be in their masculine to be in the working place the working format and we see a lot of women this is all statistical data that people can look

up we see a lot of women that are on antidepressants that aren't happy at all because they're kind of out of their ecological, is that the right word, biological sort of format. They love raising kids. They love that sort of thing. Doing that work and everything else, you can't have everything. That's the most insane thing when I see it on social media. You can have everything, girl. You go. They talk about raising strong powerful women and then they're sabotaged the men i've actually had women tell me that they're sabotaging their sons they're teaching their sons to be subservient to women and to whatever they want you do for them you serve them and then powerful girls you go girls and the problem is like right now i i saw

a huge different dating spread right now i what i see at 54 in my dating pool are women who bought the feminist narrative that you can wait till 30 or 32 to have kids and family and settle down, which is way beyond what most men find them attractive at, which is a real biological problem and why they're screaming on social media, where are the good men? And so I'm seeing people that are in their fifties who have five-year-old children who have nine-year-old children and a lot of, a lot of it. And I'm looking at it from a dating perspective going, I I'm 54. I don't want to cuckold a family that, you know, I've got nine to five-year-olds that I'm, they're not going to graduate high school till 70. And I don't find that attractive. And that's not because I'm a jerk or because men are bad. That's my genetics.

And so we're in a really weird place in our society. Let me give you, again, one of those broad academic but hopefully practical answers to your question. I explain not just to my students, to anybody who wishes to listen, that there are very clear practical lessons to either understanding or rejecting human nature, right? So for example, let me give you an example from the business school. If you design a product that violates a central tenet of human nature, all other things equal, you can bet that that product will fail in the marketplace. A good marketer is ultimately someone who all other things equal understands human nature. So example, and I'm going to,

don't worry, I'm going to tie it back to your question. I start from the broad and then I bring it into the specific. So for example, there was a company that was, had decided that they wanted to come up with a new line of romance novels. If you want to understand female desires and female fantasies, studying the archetype of the male hero in a romance novel is a great place to start because romance novels are almost exclusively read by women around the world. There is no culture where it is men who are more likely to read romance novels. It's almost never the case that men read romance novels. And the archetype of the male hero is so much the exact same guy across 25,000 different romance novels that you would think

that they've all engaged in an act of plagiarism. He is usually a prince and a neurosurgeon. He is tall. He wrestles alligators on his six packs and subdues the alligator. He is reckless in his risk-taking, but he could only be subdued by the love of this one good woman. I just explained to you every single romance novel that's ever been written. Now, why are romance novels written that way? Because they cater to a group of consumers called women, and those women have some universal mating preferences. Most women do not fantasize about pear-shaped, nasal-voiced, whiny-voiced guys who sit in a corner, sucking their thumb in a fetal position and screaming. They fantasize about the archetype called Gadsad, right? That's a little

joke for you, because they're attracted to strong men. Even the feminist who tells you otherwise in the privacy of her thoughts is exactly fantasizing about Gad Saad. So therefore, when we create products, they're either consistent with human nature, or if they violate human nature, we know that they will fail. So this particular progressive company wanted to come up with a line of romance novels where, you know, the male is not suffering from toxic masculinity. He was more sensitive. He spends his day crying while watching Bridget Jones' diary. Well, it turned out that the market said, sorry, not interested.

That's not what I'm interested in reading about. That's not what I fantasize about as a woman, right? So creating products that are contrary to human nature will ultimately fail. If my students learn nothing else in my courses than that, although they learn a lot more, then already that's a very valuable lesson. So now let's apply it to your question. Creating a narrative, whether it be a political narrative, an activist narrative that is contrary

to human nature will ultimately lead to misery. Nobody is saying that women should not be as accomplished as men or more accomplished. Nobody is saying you shouldn't become neurosurgeons and diplomats, but life is about trade-offs. You have trade-offs to make. So if you wait till you're 44 to take your dating life seriously, then don't go boo-hoo-hoo, where are all the good men, right? We have to cater to competing interests. And I'll give you a great example of the inability of some people to not fall prey to parasitic ideas in the personal domain. I don't know her, I can't pronounce her last name, Polina Porshkakova or something. She was a supermodel from the 1980s.

Frankly, I didn't find her that attractive back then, and I still don't find her that attractive, but our paths recently crossed because she went on all these different shows, and she was in some magazine or whatever where she was lamenting that here she is now, a single woman. Her husband passed away. He was the lead singer of the group, The Cars, right? Rick Okasik. And she was lamenting the fact that here she is, she's all dolled up, she's all ready to mingle, she goes to these parties, and all of these men, boo-hoo-hoo, are more likely to look at the 23-year-old than look at her. She's roughly my age, 57. Now, a 57-year-old woman can be very accomplished and very beautiful, but to lament the fact that these disgusting sexist men are hurting her feelings because they're not interested as much in her as a 23-year-old is the height of not only narcissism,

idiocy, parasitic thinking, because when she was the target of all of men's attention until she began to age, then she certainly did not think that it was a bad idea. When she was the one who had a lineup of a thousand men each day coming up to her and she would reject each of them, she didn't think that that was a bad idea. But now that the dynamics of the mating market have changed, because there's this thing in life called, you're ready? The word is aging, right? And so since we all age, the refractory period of a man when he's 18, refractory period is a fancy term for if I've had sex and have had an orgasm, how long does it take before I can have sex again? Well, when I'm 18, it's eight nanoseconds. When I'm 78, it's maybe 80 days.

That's not because the evil matriarchy has altered my potency. It's because it's called aging. This is why we don't have octogenarian world heavyweight champions in boxing. So the fact that she has lost some of her luster is not due to a conspiracy of evil men. Rather, you should age gracefully. You should recognize that we all have these dynamical changes through as we go through our life stages and accept it. And this is what I talk about in my next book, the one that I'm currently working on, where I explain that one of the ways by which you can reach what's called the state of ataraxia, it's a Greek term that refers

to tranquility of mind, is to understand the natural flow of our lives. But she's so angry, she's so embittered that she doesn't see that reality. That look, it's perfectly normal that most men are going to prefer to mate with a 25-year than a 57 year old and you shouldn't be angry about it but no she thought i was a sexist pig i was mansplaining her and so on and so forth well guess what that interaction didn't go too well with me because i'm not someone who usually shies away because you say that i'm mansplaining if i ran away from islamic militia in lebanon it it's not Pauline Porizkova who's going to scare me into canceling my Twitter account. But all this to say that a rejection of human nature as we navigate through life can only lead to misery. Yes, it's ugly to get older. Yes, I wish that I had the same speed as I did when I was a competitive soccer

player when I was 20. Look, last year, I was asked by my young son's soccer team to play against them. It wasn't very good for my ego to know that most of the 10-year-olds were now blowing by me. When I was 20, there were incredibly athletic guys that I could blow by six of them simply with a very, very quick acceleration. Whereas today, 10-year-olds were all outrunning me. I didn't blame it on the patriarchy of children who was putting me down. I recognized that I've gotten old. So Paulina should have learned that lesson, but unfortunately she's parasitized by militant feminism. I do that with Call of Duty

when I play video games. I blame the patriarchy of children, those 10-year-olds who can out-game me and beat me and they- Exactly. They got faster fingers and faster eyeballs. But no, it's interesting. A role of Tomasi designs this

and he sits down and breaks down the peaks and valleys of women in their sexual or dating value as opposed to how men and women look at each other and how men are. You know, we evolve very slowly and differently. We really don't grow up until, I don't know, about 30. We kind of hit our peaks of making money in our 40s and 50s because we have to build a career. We're designed to be providers. Women are designed to be nurturers, raise a family. They hit their peaks very early. And one of the lies of feminism has caused this delusion and this entitlement. One of our other problems I want to mention to you is Americanism. We have

a real entitlement problem. The asshole American, we trademark that. We're really great at entitlement because we're the greatest country on the earth. The shining seed on the hill bullshit. So we love entitlement. That's, that's, that's kind of where a lot of feminists comes out of. It comes out of American entitlement to feminist entitlement. And I give that data to you. Maybe, maybe you can figure out why we have all the problems we have from that. I don't know if it's true or not. That's my theory. But you know,

women were taught with feminism and especially even commercialism that they are evergreen, their youth even commercialism, that they are evergreen. Their youth, their sexuality, their desire for mates is evergreen. It's no longer up until, like you say, about 22, 23, and then in their 30s, it tends to fall off. It's designed that way for a reason, genetically or biologically, and men are tracked down. I experienced this when I was going to high school. All the girls didn't want to date me. They wanted to date the senior. They wanted to date the guy who was out with the car. Men date down. I tend to date down 10, 15 years. Women date up. They're

seeking for resources. So you never had sexual fantasies about Betty White, I'm assuming? Betty White was pretty hot though. I got to tell you. Jane Fonda kind of had some things there. Yeah, sure, sure I did. But I wouldn't marry them. I wouldn't marry them up. I mean, I don't know. Jane Fonda's kind of cool. Or she used to be.

I don't know. I still think she's kind of cool. There's something classic about her. I don't know. A lot of my girlfriends, if you see them, they're a bit Jane Fonda-ish. The cut of the jib or face or jaw or whatever line. I don't know. It's a thing.

I can't fight genetics. But what's interesting to me is they were taught that, hey, you can go, girl. You're evergreen. You can wait till you're 30. You can wait till you're 35 to have kids. And now we see, I literally call it, if you go on TikTok, the where's all the good man generation. And they're really angry at all of us because we're not sexually attractive. And I've had, I had a giant room one time on the clubhouse app. I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but I had me and the CEO of, of the ex CEO of, of, of T-Mobile on. And we literally had a room full of women that were asking us what a high value men want, what a rich men that have money want. And, you know, we were talking and it's really femininity, someone who we can take care of, and someone who is sexually appealing to us.

And literally, we had hundreds of people having a discussion with us that we should just make a different choice that overrides our sexual attraction, which is really weird dualistic strategy because you're like, well, you don't do that. Of course they do at a certain point realize that as the evergreen has died, that, you know, they need to get resources to, for retirement and someone to take care of them. They, they realize, you know, that, that, that has ended. So it's, it's really interesting. And I don't want to belabor too much time if we need to wrap up for you, but I'd love to have you back. I'll just answer this and then maybe we can wrap it up for today. I very much enjoyed our conversation. Look, there's a principle in evolutionary psychology known as assortative mating. Assortative mating means that birds of a feather flock together versus the other adage, the competing adage of opposites attract. When it comes to the long-term

success of a union, of a marriage, it's much more birds of a feather flock together. Now you might say, but birds of a feather flock on which feathers? What are you trying to assort on? So for example, height is an assortative cue. It's very, very rare to have women want to date guys who are shorter than them. So it's not so much that the guy has, I mean, yes, taller is nicer, but it's not so much that you have to be over a certain height. It's just that you have to be taller than me if I'm a woman. As a matter of fact, there was a study that was done looking at naturally occurring actual couples.

And I think it was something like one out of 720 couples was the woman taller than the guy. So that's an example of an assortative cue where we are assorting on a particular cue. Now, probably the most fundamental assortative cue is the mating value of the two partners, meaning that let's kind of vulgarize it to a net score. Let's say Chris Voss scores an eight out of 10 on the mating market so that if I added up all of your traits, that's what you are. Well, all other things equal,

you're likely to attract a mate who is roughly of equal mating value than you. So several years ago, I proposed the theory on the Joe Rogan show, and then I received a million emails from scientists, postdocs wanting to do the research with me. I hypothesized, and then I received a million emails from scientists, postdocs wanting to do the research with me. I hypothesized, and I discussed this in my next book, I hypothesized that one of the best predictors of the long-term success of a marriage is whether the mating value

of the two partners stays in sync. If there is a great divergence, so that like, let's say when we get married in high school, I am the high school quarterback and you are the homecoming queen cheerleader. We both are the hot couple. So we married, we both had equal mating value. Then I got fat. I, the male, I lost all my job. I play video games all day. You went ahead and you became a neurosurgeon and now you're meeting all sorts of fellow neurosurgeons in the hospital while you come home to the loser husband that 15 years ago was the hot guy. That discrepancy now in our mating value is going to put great stressors on our union. So the bottom line is that as you navigate through the mating world,

you have to truly understand what are the mechanisms that drive the mating market. So in the case of Paulina, to go back to her, she wasn't willing to understand that. She wasn't willing to understand that she could still be an incredibly lovely woman with all sorts of things to offer, but yet she should also have the humility to understand that when it specifically comes to her sexual potency, she's not going to be attractive to most men when she's 57 as when she was 27. That's not because the patriarchy is evil. That's because there's this little thing called biology and reality that's putting constraint on us. So I think if we all understand these things,

it will only lead us to live happier lives. But that hurts my feelings. Exactly. And as I said on Joe Rogan, when he said that, F your feelings. Fuck your feelings. We didn't get a chance to talk about a few different things, but people should read your book. You know, one of the challenges that we have, and you kind of touched on it, hypergamy of women, and that has built great societies in this world. But now we're kind of the snake eating its own tail. And one of the issues you talk about in your book about colleges, we're seeing a flood of more and more women going to colleges. There's more women than ever. In fact, I think recent studies came out. So, you know, I thought about that when I read your book,

and I'm like, God, how do you square this? And what's the origins? So it'll be interesting. And I'd love to have you back to talk about some of this other stuff. But go read his book. Thank you very much for being on the show, Dr. Sattler. Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.

Beautiful conversation. To my audience, go pick up his book, The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. And this book came out, I think I quoted earlier that it just came out October 6th, 2020 and make that narrative because people watch our videos like 20 years from now on Facebook or on YouTube. Thanks for tuning. Give us your plugs one more time as we go out,

Dr. You can follow my website, got sad.com. You can go to my YouTube channel, got sad. Also the sad truth. I also have a podcast called The Sad Truth with Dr. Gadsad, or you could follow me on Twitter at Gadsad. Thank you so much, sir.

Pleasure talking to you. There you go. Thanks for tuning in, guys. Go to YouTube to see our videos. Go to Goodreads.com for us as Chris Voss and all of our groups across social media. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time. Cheers.