TRIGGERnometry - Gad Saad: "Bad Ideas Are Destroying the West"

Episode Date: May 10, 2020

Gad Saad is an evolutionary psychologist and author of the forthcoming The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@failinghuman) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisson. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is an evolutionary psychologist. He's an author, YouTube and many other things. Gadsad, they call you The Guardfather. Welcome to Trigonometry. Oh, so nice to be with you guys. I heard a lot about your show, so thank you for inviting me. It's fantastic to have you on. Most of our fans will know exactly who you are. But for anyone who doesn't, just give us a little insight into who are you, how are you where you are and what has been your journey through life that lead you inexorably here? So I was born in Beirut, Lebanon,

grew up there till the age of 11. We were part of the last group of remaining Jews in Lebanon. At one point, there was a larger community of Lebanese Jews. I mean, still a very small community, but larger than when we were there. And through the 20th century, they would be sort of various exodus of Jews because it would become more precarious to be Jewish in Arab lands. But we hung in there until 1975 when the Civil War broke out. It was a very, very brutal civil war. All civil wars are judged against the standards of the Lebanese Civil War. And there were many, many militia that were fighting.

The problem for Jews is that they didn't have too many friends. there were some amongst the Christian militia that were warmer towards the Jews, but it became clear that we had to find a way to regrettably leave Lebanon. So I spent the last year of my life in Lebanon experiencing the brutality of the civil war, but luckily we all escaped, came to Canada, grew up in Montreal from the age of 11, did my undergrad in mathematics and computer science at McGill University, also known as the Harvard of the North, and then did an MBA with a specialization in operations research,

at least the mini thesis in operations research, which is an applied mathematics field. Then I went on to Cornell where I did a Master's of Science and a PhD. My PhD was in psychology of decision making, really. I specifically looked at when is it that we've acquired enough information to make a choice? So this is called the stopping decision. for example, if I'm choosing between two cars to purchase or two political candidates to choose from or two girls to marry, when is it that I have acquired enough information to say,

okay, I'm ready to stop acquiring information, I'm ready to buy car A, I'm ready to vote for candidate B. So contrary to classical economic theory, which argues that we should look at all of the available information before we make an optimal choice, we don't do that, right? There might be 100 attributes that we can look at, but we only look at 12 before we stop and make a decision. So I looked at the cognitive processes that drive that stopping decision. Then I obtained a professorship at Concorda University. Now, in my PhD, I had been bitten by the evolutionary bug, the evolutionary psychology bug, which at the time was a nascent discipline.

I had read a book that had been assigned my first semester as a doctoral student by a professor named Dennis Regan, where he assigned a book called Homicide, written by two evolutionary psychologist, husband and wife team, where they looked at patterns of criminality from an evolutionary perspective. And I had my epiphany right there that I would be doing exactly the same thing, but instead of applying evolutionary psychology to study criminal behavior, I would use it to study consumer behavior. And so then I went on and had so far, I'd like to think, a successful career as an academic, as a scientist, at the intersection of, as I said, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology and consumer psychology.

And then I increasingly became more engaged in the public sphere, where at times I would be weighing in on scientific issues, but more broadly I would weigh in on all kinds of nonsense that has infected the academic world. You became problematic, Gad, is what happened. You became toxic and problematic. And so to use the start of your podcast term, trigger, I'm basically the granddaddy of triggering. Makes you sound like a rapper, gad. By the way, incidentally, for those of you who don't know how I got my name the godfather,

there's a rap story behind that. So I had been approached by a rapper, a Canadian rapper, who's become reasonably long, known for a particular niche, he basically raps about science. He raps about evolution, precisely because he wants to have a medium to attract young kids to science, to evolutionary theory and so on. And so he was apparently a fan, and he reached out to me and said, hey, would you like to be in my next rap video? It's called I Am A African. And so then I put out a call on social media. I said, hey, guys, I'm going to have a separate career now as a rap star. could you give me some street cred names that I can go by?

You know, I don't want to go by Dr. Sad, Professor Sadd, and so on. I need some street cred. So people propose all sorts of names. None of them, I mean, there were many great ones, but none of them stuck. And then one day I was sitting at my local cafe talking to the owner of that cafe, telling him that story. And he stopped and he said, oh, that's easy. You're the godfather.

And that's how I became the one as the godfather. So contrary to some of the idiots out there who think that it's a, manifestation of my grandiose narcissism that I'm calling myself the grandfather. It's not me who came up with it. It was that gentleman in question. Right. And so we started with you being toxic and problematic. We want to get to your research, which is fascinating. You know, particularly the stuff you're talking about, how people reach that decision threshold. A lot of our fans will know Francis has yet to propose to his girlfriend after 10 years. So we'll reach that threshold. So we'll find out what's going on there from you. But before.

we do that, you've got an upcoming book, which obviously we're drawn to, it's called the parasitic mind, how infections ideas are killing common sense. And the question I have for you is, with the coronavirus and the lockdown, are you hopeful that your book will no longer be necessary? It's more necessary than ever, because the corona, I've now resorted to calling the idea of pathogens that I talk about in my book as the coronavirus of the human mind, right? So the basic idea of, would you like me to summarize a bit? Of course, go for it. So let's start back with a start from the beginning with a quick story about neuroparasotology. So parasitology is the study of parasites. Now parasites can infect an organism in many places, right? There are some parasites that

go in your gut. Now, neuroparasotology is parasites that go to an organism to a host's brain. And there are all sorts of incredibly macabre and fascinating examples of these neuroparasites that can hijack the behavior of an animal. Some you may have heard of. I'll mention one or two. So the classic example that some of your viewers would have heard of is toxoplasma Gandhi. So this is a parasite that will infect the brains of mice such that they will lose their innate fear of cats. They will actually become sexually attracted by the smell of the cat's urine. That's not a good thing if you're a mouse, right? But it's a good thing for the parasite. There's another type of parasite that parasitizes the brain of ungulates, deer, moose, elk. And so they'll start

engage, once they are infected, they'll start engaging in circling behavior. Their heads are kind of listless and they go around and circle, unable to extricate themselves from this motion, even though the looming predators might be coming at them, they can't extricate themselves from that behavior. So then I take these examples from the animal kingdom, as any good evolutionary theorists should do, because we can learn a lot from our animal cousins. And then I argue that humans can, of course, be parasitized by actual brain parasites, like the ones I've just described. But there's a second class of parasites that they can be regrettably parasitized by, and that is bad ideas. So I call these idea pathogens. And they are just as devastating in the same way that the deer that doesn't run away

from the looming predator is going to end up with a bad consequence, these idea pathogens, even a singular one can be devastating. But once you put them all together, they become truly devastating to our ability to think, to have to be reasonable, to have rationality, to have common sense. And so then as any good epidemiologist would do, hence that's why the coronavirus is so apropos here, you need to start looking at where did this virus originate from. And unlike the castrati who tell us that, you know, viruses have no origin. No, they do have an origin.

It's called epidemiology. You try to find out where a virus starts from. So in the same way that this virus started in Wuhan, China, I look at where do these idea pathogens start from? And regrettably, I say this as a professor, they all start from academia. They start from the university. So the original place of infection, so in other words, the place where they're really, idiotic ideas come from, is from fellow professors. So the next question is, what are some of these ideas?

So postmodernism is the granddaddy of idea pathogens, because it is perfectly anti-science, anti-logic, anti-reason. It's intellectual terrorism. There are no truths. It's only my truth that matters. The scientific method is not the only way to seek truth. It's only one of many ways. It's white science, right?

So once you start with this type of idea pathogen, you literally are putting dynamite in all of the edifices of reason, all of the ways by which we try to understand the natural world. So other examples of idea pathogens, social constructivism. We're all born with empty minds and it's only our socialization that makes us who we are. Biophobia, the rejection that biology has an effect on human behavior. cultural relativism. Who are you to judge whether cutting off the clitorisism of little girls is a bad idea? Don't be a racist, you bigot. Identity politics, right? Inclusion, diversity is what I call the die religion.

Diversity, inclusion, and equity has now infected all of the areas of excellence and including academia, whereby we no longer give lofty professorships to people who are deserving. but if I'm a transgender woman of color who is into indigenous studies, then I'm much more likely to receive it. This is insane. It's nonsense. And so this is what the book does, is it traces the disease, and then it offers some inoculation, some vaccines against these bad ideas. And, and Gad, you're talking about postmodernism. And I mean, by the way, what you said all sounded incredibly problematic. We might have to cut that from the interview. But anyway, But surely in the age of a coronavirus where we're seeing tens of thousands of people die,

isn't that the perfect inoculation against some of this nonsense? Because there is objective reality. It's people dying. You know, it's amazing that you say this because that would be the naive, intuitive, optimistic hypothesis, which is with such a dreadful reality that we're all facing, it kind of washes out all the stupidity. The reality, though, is that an animal is most dangerous just before it is about to die. So as these ideas are dying, that's when a lot of these morons are doubling down, right?

So now we have an investigation of how the coronavirus affects women more, even though men die more, right? So in the same way that Hillary Clinton said, well, the fact that it is always men who overwhelmingly die in war, that the real victims are the women that are left behind, right? So we're seeing that transgender activists are linking coronavirus to transgenderism. The race peddlers are linking it to race issues. So yes, I'd like to believe that what you're saying is true, but I think the animal is wounded. By animal, I mean the idiots who espouse these ideas. And so I think there'll be a doubling down before we're eventually able to call out these ideas from our public consciousness. Yeah, and why are you so concerned?

This is a question that interests us specifically, because, you know, I'm from Russia originally, as our fans will know, Francis' mother is from Venezuela. You escaped from Lebanon. A lot of the people who seem to be incapable of tolerating this stuff and just shutting up about it seem to be people who've come from a background where, you know, the freedoms and the prosperity that we enjoy in the West

couldn't be taken for granted. Do you think there is something of having an experience outside of the comfortable West that makes you more reluctant to just, you know, you have an accomplished career. You could just be doing your studies and not getting involved in any of this. Do you think that's part of why you feel so strongly about it? Yeah, no, great question. So here I'll turn back to evolutionary theory, actually. So any of us is a product, an inextricable mix of our genes and our environment.

So contrary to what a lot of folks say, say the tractors of evolutionary psychology who argue that the environment psychologists don't think that the environment matters. Nothing could be further from the truth. But so, so you and I are a, as I said, an inextricable melange of our genes and environment.

So to answer you a question, I'll first address the genes part, then the environment part, the environment part being that you grew up in Russia and Venezuela and Lebanon. The genes part is that the unique combination of genes that constitute the personhood that is God's had, is such for better or worse, that I cannot tolerate bullshit.

I am physically ill by hypocrisy, by intellectual dishonesty, by intellectual arrogance that masquerade money, that you, this is called the Dun & Krueger effect, right? I pretend, I think that I know so much,

but in reality, I'm only overconfident in my stupidity. So all of these things are really personally injurious to me, so that when I go to, bed at night, if I feel that I haven't done all that I could in whatever small or whatever big way that I can to contribute to eradicate the stupidity, then I feel that I have failed in my own personal conduct. So that's the individual element of why I do what I do to answer your question. But I exactly agree with you that we are also a product of our unique life trajectories. And so having grown up in love, actually chapter one of my forthcoming book is exactly

answering your question, which is when you grow up in Lebanon, where you see what blind tribalism does, what you see what identity politics does. But here, identity politics is that when I stop you at a militia roadblock and you are of the wrong religion, we put a bullet through your head, right? We don't just e-mob you on Twitter, right? So when you see what lack of freedom is, what blind zealotry is, where a departure from reason is, then you come to the West and for many years you feel as though you're now going to be in a steady state of reason, and then suddenly you have a second war that starts. The first war I faced was in Lebanon. The second war is the war against reason in our universities. Then I say, wait a second, I don't want to return to Lebanon. Now, that doesn't mean

that tomorrow we will sink to Lebanon, but give it enough times, 10 years, 50 years, 100 years, 500 years, are not committed to all of the things that made the West great, that allowed us to come to the West, then we will be the next Lebanon. And so I completely agree with you. My life trajectory makes me that much more committed to fight against that nonsense. And, Gad, you say that we could end up like Lebanon. Why is it, why can't we just let people have bad ideas? Why do we have to consistently challenge them? After all, this is a free society. Some people are entitled to believe what they think, aren't they? Oh, you can, I'm a true free speech absolutist in that I believe that the idea of shutting down people because even objectively wrong ideas. So let's take

the most extreme position that supports my position. I am Jewish, having escaped Lebanon as a Jew. So few people could have my Judaism as ingrained in my identity as I am, even though I'm, by the way, but culturally and so on. In my identity, I'm very Jewish. Yet, I support the right of Holocaust deniers to appear on campus and say that the Holocaust didn't happen. So there couldn't be any more of a commitment to free speech absolutism than that example, right?

There's nothing more grotesque. There's nothing more of an affront to truth than to say the Holocaust didn't happen. Or it wasn't six million Jews. It was 6,000 Jews, right? And yet I support their right. So it's not that I don't support the right of people to have bad ideas. On the contrary, bring out your bad ideas and let me smash you as the apostle of truth into oblivion. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world.

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So you genuinely, basically, what you believe is bad ideas should be discussed. But I guess what you're pushing back against and probably the reason you feel so strongly about it, we now live in a society where if you are perceived to have the wrong ideas by the establishment, then you must not speak. If you believe that there's male and female, you must not speak because that's transphobic or insulting to minorities. Well, exactly.

I mean, listen, I appeared, and some of you may know this or not, but I appeared in front of the Canadian Senate when Bill C-16 in Canada was being discussed. Bill C-16 is the bill that incorporates gender identity and gender expression within the rubric of hate crimes. And of course, my position was not, that transgender people should not be free of bigotry, right? So that's that's a nonsense. I mean,

of course I support that, right? But what I was saying is that in this in the service of trying to protect people from bigotry, we don't murder the truth, right? So the fact that in the 21st century an evolutionary psychologist has to appear in front of the Canadian Senate and say, no, no, really, believe me, there is such a thing as male and female. No, no, there is this thing that Darwin talked about called sexual selection, which is one of the main drivers of how traits, morphological features, and behaviors evolve. And he based it on the fact that, bruh, there is male and female, that shouldn't be something that I have to do in front of the Canadian Senate. But the reality is, because of the position I took there, which is literally laughably obvious, right? The average

two-year-old knows that that's true. As a matter of fact, that's one of the first markers that you use to identify yourself, if not others, is your biological sex. the fact that I did that, I already saw how universities in general, in some cases my own university, started distancing themselves from me, right? So it's great that I have this huge platform and that millions of people know me, but my God, why must the Jew be such a problematic guy, right? But the reality is that, you know, you give an inch to these intellectual terrorists today. Tomorrow it's another inch. The next day, it's another inch, right? So, when we are discussing things like whether there are two sexes and that's a viable conversation,

we've already gone down the slippery slope pretty far. And so this is why I find it. And the reality is that's my occupation, right, is to seek truth. So in the same way that when you see someone in an alley being mugged, you can be one of two people. You could either pretend that you didn't hear their screams and go about your way or you could jump in and try to intervene. Well, I am the cop of truth or one of many cops of truth. If I pretend that I'm not hearing all of the killing of truth all around me, then I'm not a very good cop of truth. And how did we get into this mess? Because it just seems that it's beyond parody now. Like for instance, in comedy, like a good friend of ours, you probably know him as well, Andrew Doyle, said that at one point, talking about

men and women in comedy was the hackest subject in the world. People would roll their eyes boring. Now you do it, you can feel the tension in the room, where is he going to go with this? Why have we come and why have we arrived at this absolute nonsense? Yeah, but by the way, Andrew Doyle has been on my show, great guys, so yeah, so shout out. We'll say hello. We'll say hello. Please do. Look, I think it's a combination of many things, but it goes back to what I talked about earlier that in my book, I try to identify where the virus set of viruses or idea pathogens began at the university. It's a really it's a confluence of several ideas that each of which try to remove reality. They want it to be unshackled by reality, right? So I don't want to have this thing called male or female tied to me.

Wouldn't it be better if I could simply add the prefix trans and suddenly I could become anything? I don't like the idea of being Lebanese Jew with olive skin. Can't I just put transracial and I could become a black man or an Asian man because I self-identify. I don't like this thing called scientific truth. Can't I develop a field called postmodernism whereby there is no objective truth? Rather, all that matters is my truth. So one of the things that I talk about in the book is that all of these idea pathogens share an equal commitment to being unburdened by the shackles of reality, right? They do it using different strains of viruses, but they're all committed to being freed, right? For example, social constructivism, the idea that we are all born with empty brains,

right? Tabula Raza, and we have equal potentiality is a very freeing idea, right? So you mean, I could have been the next Michael Jordan if it weren't only because Mommy didn't hug me enough? You mean, there isn't some innate biological reason why Michael Jordan at six foot six and a vertical leap of 48 inches might have had a better start to his trajectory in the NBA? Well, that feels a lot more freeing to me to know that my son could be the next Michael Jordan or the next Lionel Messi or the next Einstein. I don't want to be tied down by this racist thing called reality. So you take all of these confluence of idea pathogens that tries to free us from reality and 40 years later, you end up exactly where we are. And since you're you,

Using the metaphor of a virus, God, let me run with it a little bit more. And I asked this question of David Starkey, who we had on our show, well, it feels like about three years ago, but it was just before the lockdown came in. So for a virus to be effective in infecting people, yes, you need a virus, and you talk passionately and eloquently about how that virus was created. But what you also need is an organism that is susceptible and vulnerable to the virus. So what is it about Western society at this point in time and perhaps over the last couple of decades, that we have been so utterly open to this infection? So I think depending on which idea of pathogen you're speaking of will necessitate a different answer. But let's take, for example, the cultural relativism

idea. Who are we to judge the cutting off of clitoris of little girls, right? It's racist the must have to do that, it's phobic, right? Well, that comes from a ethos of self-flagellation, right? And I actually talk about this in the book, that it's in many religious rituals, right? For example, in Shiaa Islam, in some Catholic strains or Catholic sex, you had a tradition of self-flagellation, right? If you remember the name of the rose, the famous movie, well, originally a book, but then a movie with Sean Connery, there's a famous scene where one of the monks is self-flagellating. Because through self-flagellation, I can sort of extricate my sins, right? That's a form of piety, right? Well, I think for a wide range of reasons, the West has been infected with a self-loving perspective, right?

All ills come from the West. And therefore, anything that you see, there is a way to link it back to evil white man, to white colonialism, to white science, right? And therefore, cultural relativism then becomes a consequence of that, right? The noble brown people can't be doing something wrong because they are noble brown people. So how could you be criticizing their religious imperative to engage in clitoris cutting when reality is it's the white man that is at the source of all evil. Now, you might think that I'm being hyperbolic.

I'm not. There is a movement called anthropologists of peace. I think I first heard that term in Stephen Pinker's book, The Blank Slate, I think it was in 2002, where there is a whole group of anthropologists who genuinely believe that war and all of the violence is really a product, a recent product of sort of Western colonialism. Because we don't have any data whatsoever that prior to British colonialism, since you are in England, that men engage in any kind of violence.

They just kind of had fig leaves in their genitalia. They walked hand in hand in shingles. They sang imagined by John Lennon. But it is really white man that has introduced this brutish, right? You have to return to the era of the noble savage. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, right? Noble Savage. Well, today, the noble brown people is the instantiation of the noble savage. Again, savage, I don't mean it in a derogatory sense.

This is the Jean-Jacques Rousseau term. So I just gave you one analysis of how cultural relativism is the byproduct of progressive self-loathing, which, by the way, it's very interesting because when I talk about this in the book, at the individual level, to engage in self-loathing is a marker of you having poor mental health, right? If I go see a clinical psychologist and I exhibit endless manifestations of self-loathing, well, we found something to work on during the next 10 therapy sessions. On the other hand, at the cultural level, if I engage in self-loathing of my culture, then I am progressive.

So to self-flagealate at the altar of self-loathing is a progressive virtue. So it's insane. But, Gad, have you not heard that Genghis Khan was woke? Actually, he was quite progressive in terms of religious tolerance and a bunch of other stuff. He was pretty progressive. Not when it came to the ladies, though, mate. No. It wasn't there a study that showed that I can't remember within which area,

but something like one-eighth of people have some descendant of. of Genghis Khan and his marauding gang. Yeah, I'm sure he was a very, very handsome and popular guy, and he was just a very, he was a good feminist and that's why the ladies loved him, I'm sure. And a tender lover. And by the way, I hope you do know that Islam is a feminist religion. Of course, and how specifically is it feminist guy?

Well, there are many ways by which is feminist. The one that I love the most, so speaking about idea pathogens, radical feminism, which really spawned in many of the academic centers, argues. Now, this is, again, this is not, because I'm also known for being very satirical and sarcastic. I'm not being sarcastic. I'm being literal here. The burqa, the nikab, and to some extent, the hijab, are liberating. The bikini is shackling. Now, why is that? Because the bikini is a tool of the patriarchy that tries to objectify women and then you get visually raped by men, right? The male

gaze. On the other hand, what better way to avert the visual rape of women to stop male gays than by putting women in black tense? That's very liberating. This is not hyperbolic. This is literally what many feminists, Western feminists argue. Now, they didn't run for their lives in Lebanon because they were of the wrong religion. So they could sit in their bullshit offices at Wellesley College and pontificate about this kind of stupidity. But to go back to your earlier question, when you come from the Middle East and you listen to this stuff,

you're like, I can't believe. These people are insane. And you talk, again, using the virus metaphor, that there are vaccines against these type of ridiculous ideas. Can you explain what these vaccines are? Yes, thank you for that question. So in chapter seven of my forthcoming book, I have a, the chapter looks at something that I call,

nomological networks of cumulative evidence. So bear with me, because I'm going to go through a bit of a... You're vastly overestimating how intelligence either of us is, God, I promise you. Nomological networks of cumulative evidence is basically the... It's an epistemological tool whereby you try to collect as much evidence from as many separate lines of evidence that you can find. in order to construct an argument. It's not a literature review.

So in science, usually when you're doing a paper, you then start off by providing a literature review. So let's say you want to see, is there a link between asthma and caffeine consumption? And I'm going to do a study on that. Well, first, I would like to contextualize my study in relation to all of the previous studies that have looked at this link.

So that's a literature review. Nomological networks of cumulative evidence is a very, very different beast. The original guide that you could think of, who was really the granddaddy of such thinking, would have been Charles Darwin, because although he didn't call it nomological networks of cumulative evidence.

So Charles Darwin, in trying to prove his theory of natural selection, he didn't conduct a single study with 40 undergraduates. He didn't run one observational study. Instead, what he did assiduously over several decades is he collected data from an incredibly broad range of sources, from geology, from paleontology, from animal husbandry, and so on, so that when you put all of this evidence together, it becomes an impenetrable wall of evidence.

It's very difficult to try to argue against it because I am drowning you in evidence. So now let's take this idea and give you an example of that. And I'm going to come to your question of what is the inoculation. It's actually to learn how to think this way. So if I want to prove to you that men have a evolved preference for the hour glass figure, the female hour glass figure, how would I go about to try to prove that to you? Well, I could then start thinking what would be the distinct lines of evidence from many, many different disciplines, different time periods, different cultures, different methodologies, all of which prove my point. So let me give you a few examples.

So we know, for example, that women who have a particular hourglass figure are likely to be more healthy, more fertile. So there is a link between that particular morphological feature and the ultimate currency of evolution, which is can you reproduce. So already that is a lot of compelling evidence. Then I can go to many different cultures, cultures that are not only Western. I could go to the Yanomomo tribe and the Amazon who have not been exposed to me. media images, right? For those who might say, oh, it's media images that teach you that preference. And I could show that those men have the exact same preference. In other words, I could replicate it universally across 50 different cultures. I could use brain imaging studies whereby I could

show men either the hourglass figure or not, and I could show that their pleasure centers will light up when they see the woman in the hourglass figure. I did a study, this is my own study where I did a content analysis of the advertised hourglass figures of online female escorts, meaning prostitutes that advertise their services online. So I had a research assistant go to 48 different countries where these women are advertising their profiles. And of course, it turns out that the hourglass figure, by the way, the hourglass figure is a waste of hip ratio between 0.68 to 0.7 and 2. Now, so as you can see, I'm now offering you medical data, fertility data, neuroimaging data, contemporary, modern, online internet data.

Now, here's the kicker. And by the way, I didn't give you the full nomological network. You could take congenitally blind men, meaning men who have never had the gift of sight, make them go through a, so elicit from them their preferences. Now you might say, well, how would you do that? You do it haptically by having them touch mannequins with different waist to hip ratios and guess which mannequin they choose as their preferred one, that one. So what have I done here? I have said to myself, what would be the data that I would need to amass together, as I said from different disciplines, different time periods, different cultures?

Oh, you could take art history dates, so data from ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, African, Africa, India and do a content analysis of their figurines, and that's the hourglass figure you get. So I could now go in front of 400 rabid, radical, angry feminists, as I have. And I walk in with all the swagger that I'm known for, and I present the data, and I'm not afraid of the pushback. And then I usually will talk and say, I can't hear anybody attacking me. What's going on? Why the silence? Why? Because I've built you a nomological network that's impenetrable. I didn't get

emotional. I didn't get lunatic. I didn't get hysterical. I simply put on the epistemological hat that says, what would I need to convince my most intransigent audience member? So the grand inoculation against these bad ideas is to start learning how to think not so much only like a scientist, because most scientists don't know about this tool that I'm talking about, is to think like a well-trained evolutionary scientist. Precisely because evolutionary psychologists are so often the butt of hostile detractors, all of whom collectively have the IQ of my shoe, but nonetheless, those detractors are viscerally hateful of evolutionary psychology,

because they don't like the idea that the same processes that defines your dog's Rosco's behavior can also explain why I prefer this mate versus that mate. Humans are somehow above their biology. So precisely because I have been so much at the receiving end within my colleagues of a lot of hostile reactions, I had to learn how to diffuse their rabbit attacks by convincing them calmly through science. So to answer your question in a very long-winded way,

but I think I needed to do it this way, is you have to learn how to think like a despise passionate collector of information. And the fundamental name for that is nomological networks of cumulative evidence. Well, I like if you went all that way just to show basically that men are pigs. Exactly, what we are.

But again, it's fascinating talking to you, and we've got probably about 25 minutes left. One of the frustrations for us, whenever we talk to someone like you, who's got so many interesting things that we could talk to about, is that, you know, like we get you or Jeffrey Miller or Diana Flashman on the show, and then we spend half an hour talking about, so, Gad, please prove to us that men are actually different from women.

And please, you know, like these very basic things that everybody actually knows, right? So, I mean, I'm very interested to read your book, nonetheless, but I let's move on to talking about some of the other work that you do and some of the research that you do. First of all, tell us a little bit just as a, with, you clearly have expertise in a number of fields. When you look at the coronavirus response and people's behaviors and the government response in Western countries, particularly, what do you see from your mindset and your kind of perceptual filter that we've done right, that we've done wrong? What stands out for you? So what I, I'm not sure if this is going to exactly answer your question, but one of the things that I've, done since the shutdown is I wrote several articles on my psychology today column that are all

in some form or other coronavirus related. And so maybe I could kind of answer it that way, right? And so I thought, okay, well, what, you know, what are some things, either in my personal life or in my knowledge base as an evolutionist that I can write about that somehow links my personal life or my evolutionary background to the coronavirus. And so let me give you a few of these examples. So one of the things, I think maybe the first article that I wrote of this series was one where I argued, so there was a study by some fantastic evolutionary behavioral scientists where they looked at the distribution of scores on collectivism and individualism around

the world. So China collectivist, right? Far East collectivists, Arabic countries collectivist, Britain, England, Canada, individualists, right? Individualist societies is, I'm first an individual, then I'm a member of a group, collectivist, who cares about the individual, the group is what matters most. You're just a incidental part of the larger group, right? And so what they showed is that the distribution of countries, in terms of how they score on individualism or collectivism, is correlated to pathogenic density.

those cultures, meaning cultures who have higher pathogenic load in those cultures are more likely to be collectivist. Now, you might say, well, why? What's the limit? So what they argue is that collectivist societies are able to institute, for example, rituals that protect against pathogens more easily, precisely because they're collectivist, norm following becomes easier to do. When you're in a collectivist society, you're more likely to have a clearer demarcation between the in-group and out-group.

Therefore, that also creates a barrier against pathogenic transfer. So then I took that idea, and then I then linked it to a personal reality. So being Jewish, there was a guy who wrote a book called, I think, the paleo manifesto, John Durant, where in the book he talks about how Jews historically have actually fared quite well in these times. types of pandemics, which basically causes the anti-Semites to argue that that that demonstrates that they are the devil, because how come the rest of us are all dying, whereas these bastard Jews are still alive and fairing well? Well, it turns out that of the Mitzvot, the Mitzvot are the 613 commandments, not the 10 major

commandments, but the commandments of daily life. So these are called in Hebrew Mitzvot, good deeds. So of the 613 Mitzvot, roughly 15 to 20%, according to John Durant, relate to purification rituals. Right? So there is this cultural religious mechanism that has transcended several millennia that has caused Jews to find a way

to protect themselves against a lot of these pathogenic transfers. Now, I took this idea and then applied it not to my religious heritage, but personally, I'm someone who free coronavirus is morbidly terrified. I'm a germaphole, right? So if we travel, there are two things that I fear, mosquitoes and contamination. And I always joke that I'm actually perfectly adaptive from an evolutionary perspective

because it makes a lot more sense to be afraid of mosquitoes than great white sharks or grizzly bears because by far the animal that is killed more humans by many orders of magnitude than the next biggest animal that has killed us are the mosquitoes. So I see a mosquito in the house, I turn into a little girl, but I can go to New Mexico and hang out in an enclave with adult wolves and I don't bat an eye. I'm not at all scared, but a mosquito turns me into a little girl, right? Fear of being contaminated by things causes me to pre-Corona never touch things. I don't touch the handle at Starbucks. When I travel at a hotel, my wife goes through a whole defumigation process to make sure that everything is clean.

because if you know what, I don't know if you've ever seen those studies about what happens in hotel rooms and the stuff that there is there. I mean, it's coronavirus on steroid. And so one of the things that I've been doing is trying to write articles that link my interest in evolutionary theory with coronavirus. But I can't really answer in terms of the, you know, what are we doing right? What are we doing wrong? Because, you know, bring in three rabbis and you'll get five opinions. I think it's the same thing. Bring in three epidemiologists and you'll get 37 opinions.

They did the shutdown too early, not early enough. We should open, we should not. I could bring you big experts in epidemiology that will say the perfectly opposite thing. So I'm not really sure I can comment on that. You made a comment actually in one of your articles, which I really enjoy, by the way, and the comment, and I wrote it down and says,

those who engage in political mud singing are either tribal hacks and or ignorance. ignorant fools. And that really struck a note with me. Could you explain a little bit of why you believe in that? Because it's something I believe very deeply in as well. As specifically relating to the coronavirus issue, because I wrote it in that article or did you mean it more generally? Yeah, Corona, but more generally as well, because I think that's very important for our times. Please explain. Yeah. So in the context of the coronavirus, I was basically arguing that the people who, I know a lot of people don't like the term Trump derangement syndrome, but it truly is that. I actually

use a different mechanism. I call it a form of collective munchausen. So I don't know, do you know what Munchausen is? Yes, it's, yeah, yeah, it's, yeah. So the Munchausen syndrome, it's where you believe that you were ill and therefore you go into hospital. Not necessarily you believe you're ill. You fake that you're ill so that you can garner sympathy and empathy, right? Oh, okay, right. That's Munchausen syndrome. Munchausen syndrome by proxy is where you take someone who is under your care, usually you're a biological child, but it could be. your elderly parent, it could be your pet, and then you harm them so that you can garner the sympathy and empathy. Oh, look, poor Suzanne, she has a ill kid. So her psychiatrically

diluted need of getting that empathy and sympathy causes her to harm her own biological child. So in 2010, I had written a paper in a medical journal where I was trying to explain Munchausen syndrome by proxy from an evolutionary perspective. And then that germ of an idea then turned into what many people now know me for as related to Munchhausen, where I talk about my theory of collective Munchausen, I'm a victim, therefore I am ethos, right? So the idea is that it is wonderful to link everything to some bad villain and therefore I'm a victim. So Trump is the bad villain. So in that article where you quoted that quote of mine, I was talking about to politicize the coronavirus so that if I hate Trump, anything he does is a manifestation of how evil he is.

If he shuts down the border, if he's racist. If he doesn't shut down the border, it's because he doesn't care about American lives, right? I mean, I can construct any state of the world as a manifestation of how diabolical he is. And what I was arguing is that try to rise above that and see that our common enemy today is the coronavirus. It's not Trump. Obama wouldn't have done it differently or any measurably different way. But now more generally, to answer your question more generally for that quote, I always say belong to the tribe of truth. In other words, so when people ask me, so what are you? Are you libertarian? Are you Republican? Are you Republican? Are you Republican? And I'm, I'm neither of these things. I'm a man of each idea on its own merits. So when it comes

to the death penalty, I'm actually for it. So that would make me a Republican. When it's case when it comes to socially liberal issues, that would make me a Democrat because I don't give a damn who you sleep within your bed or whether you're transgender or not. So I would be super liberal there. When it comes to immigration, I would be considered supra right wing, right? So you can't pin me to any pigeonhole label because I have this thing called a brain that allows me to think on each issue based on its merit. I don't care about belonging to the IDW. you or the group of Canadians or the group, I am Gatzad with my merits and flaws. And as Luther said, here I stand, right.

I stand on the merits of my arguments. So to go back to the quote that you quoted so kindly, forget about political tribalism. Follow the truth. In some cases, Republicans say super stupid things. Call them out on it. In some cases, they say the right thing. But the problem is that our innate psychology, regrettably, is tribal, right? One of the features, the architecture of the human mind,

is that it views the world as us versus them. There's blue team and red team. I mean, literally in this case, red, blue is, right? There's a great study, and I don't remember the reference, and I've for many years tried to find out, because I had heard it in a class when I was a graduate student, you bring in people into the lab, and you put them into a waiting area,

and you literally put like a red dot on them or a blue dot, and you say, oh, I'm going to come back in a few minutes to administer some test. But ostensibly what you're doing is you want to see their behavior once you've given them this random cue. And what happens, the red people start banding together and the blue people start banding together. So at this point, it doesn't matter if I'm gay or straight, Jew or not, tall or short, fat or thin.

This irrelevant queue has become the way by which I assort the world for that micro moment, right? And so this is what ends up happening in our political discourse. I am a Democrat. Therefore, Joe Biden could not have done something wrong. Even though I see him molesting little girls on camera for the past 40 years, he can be because he's a noble Democrat. Brett Kavanaugh is an evil Republican. Therefore, even though the woman who came out after him, Christine Blazy Ford, 36 years after the fact, she can't remember where, when, how, what, nobody can corroborate, but he must be guilty.

Now, this is not some idiots who are succumbing to this type of thinking. Some of the, by close, or maybe not close, some of my, some of the people who run in the same intellectual circles as me who are very famous, who you would know, exactly succumb to this idiocy. Why? Because they're not driven by the same personal conduct as me. And again, I'm not trying to sound, you know, haughty. But as I said, when I go to bed at night and I put my head on the pillow, what drives me is, did I do everything that I can to try to protect truth to the best of my ability? If yes, I sleep well at night. If not, then I'm a fraud.

So I am only belonging to the tribe of truth. Whatever that truth might be at that moment. political tribalism is not that. Political tribalism is, I belong to a group first. Damn the truth. There you go. I just had a piece actually about that very thing published in Quillette talking about the Kavanaugh, the Biden, all of that.

Do you think, I mean, one of the things that strikes me is that it's inescapably obvious now that some of the traps that are being set by one side for the other are now turning out to be traps that anyone can be trapped by. You know, this thing of, for example, believe all women, right? Once you introduce that, you are absolutely fucked because at some point, someone on your side is going to come along and it's going to turn out that they've been doing things wrong. It's just the way of the world, right?

So do you think maybe some people are going to start to wake up now and go some of this stuff that we've been doing in the last few years? Or is it just my naive optimism talking? No, no, I think, listen, if your optimism, weren't something that we can all aspire to have in the future, then there's no point for me to get out of bed, right? Because listen, I navigate in the ecosystem that is most infested by this bullshit, right? Academia is the coronavirus of the human mind center. This is where the bullshit is, right? By the way, this is one of the reasons why when people say to me, well, how come you don't

criticize Republicans more or the right more? And as I explained in my book, and I'll explain, and I've explained a million times before. Let me explain again. That's like asking a dermatologist, but bruh, what about diabetes? Right? Okay. If I'm a dermatologist, I deal with skin-related issues. That doesn't mean that diabetes is not important, but I'm not an endocrinologist.

I am a dermatologist. In my daily life, I operate in an ecosystem that is completely dominated by the left, right? Most of the idea pathogens that I speak of in the book are completely the product of insane leftist progressive stupidity, right? Therefore, I attack that, not because that is my secret attempt to communicate to the world that I am a right-wing guy, but that's because those are the diseases of the human mind that I'm exposed to, right? So as a parasitologist of the human mind, I deal with parasites of the left. Now, if a Republican senator comes out and says evolution is a hoax and we should be teaching intelligent design, then I will also go after him. But the reality of my daily life is I am attacking leftist ideas because that's what I see all day.

But so to answer your question, I do believe that we can win the idea. I do believe that people can turn around. But I think it's a generational fight, right? you have to have all of the original spreaders, right? Just like a coronavirus can spread. The spreaders of the bullshit are the professors who for the past 30 or 40 years have been spewing this nonsense to their students. Once you have enough people come and attack these ideas or once these guys die out or retire,

then we will start seeing changes. But this is why, by the way, I tell people, you don't have to be a famous, professor with a huge following and so on to affect change. If you see in your classroom, your professor spewing something that you are, you disagree with, challenge them politely. If you see someone post something on Facebook or if you're at a bar and somebody says something idiotic, challenge them. The problem is that most people are cowardly. So what they do is they subcontract this fight to a few public people. But you know what? My shoulders are only so big, right? Now, it just so happens that I have the type of personhood that I'm very combative.

I mean, I'm very nice and very warm and very sweet. But you come after me. I come after you 10 times harder, right? That's why sometimes people say, oh, but on Twitter, why are you sometimes mean? Well, when you've insulted me for the past 600 days and I've kept quiet, then I say, okay, let me bring out Middle Eastern boy. Let me roll up my... And I'm going to be relentless in going after you.

And usually they shut down their accounts, by the way. Once I decide that I'm coming after you, It is endless how much I come after you, right? So people have to, and it's a term that I've used before, grow a pair. You have to have testicular fortitude to say, I have a say in this battle of ideas. I should also contribute. It shouldn't be just Godside and Joe Blow and John Smith who fight on our behalf. And by the way, this is one of the things I talk about in the last chapter of my book,

the chapter is called Call to Action. don't diffuse the responsibility onto others. Trigger your honey badger, your inner honey badger. If you don't know, the honey badger is an astonishingly ferocious animal. It's my favorite animal, Gad. Thank you so much. I'm a massive honey badger friend. I've never seen them this excited for weeks, Gann.

I love them. They're incredible. Sorry, carry on. Couldn't help myself. The honey badger is the size of a small dog. You can just go on Google, if you're, watching this, whenever you're watching it, and see a honey badger face down six lions. And the lions look and say, what the fuck? And they're like, this is too much, right? So when people see

me, 99.9% of the time, I'm extremely mellow. I'm extremely sweet. I'm a very affable guy. But if you attack me in an alley, I'm not sweet and affable, then I will fight. And that's different than when I am tucking my children to bed. This is called the fundamental attribution error, right? You attribute things dispositionally when you should be attributing things to the situation, right? So on Twitter, I use that medium to usually smack down someone, not so much because I'm smacking.

They might have only 12 followers, but because I can use that opportunity for the audience to watch how you never back down from a bunch of lions if you're a honey badger. And so to go back to your original question, Constantine, I am optimistic, but big caveat, if the silent majority chooses to rise up and then fight in the battle of ideas. If it remains on four, five, ten people to do so, we will lose the battle. And you say that, but isn't evolutionarily a reason for people not to get involved in this fight in that they're terrified of being ostracized by their group?

Like for instance, myself and Constantine, we're in the world of comedy. I think it's safe to say a lot of comedians don't like us. Now, I don't mind that because I quite like them either. Yeah, because I like pissing people off. And I have that Arabic, Latin America. Well, you're going to fuck with me? Well, you know, let's go then. But I think most people want a quiet life, don't they?

And they want to be part of the in-group. So, yeah, so look, what happens is that, any given point, there are multiple Darwinian pulls pulling me in different directions, right? I have made a monogamous commitment to my wife. And now that's triggering my innate moral compass. That doesn't mean that I may not have temptations to stray. So I could go on straight or I could stay monogamous. Those are pulling me in different directions. I have an evolved preference, my gustatory preference to eat a lot of fatty foods, but then I receive my cholesterol score that pulls me in a different direction.

So to answer your question, yes, there is a part of me that's pulling me towards wanting to lead a quiet life, but to those who take the great risks come the great rewards, right? Emperors who go to war then have a harem of 800 gorgeous girls. The little schmuck who's plowing his field can't get one wife hit through history, right? So I'm the emperor who is willing to take all of the great risks So that that, now again, I don't mean to imply that I take those risks because I want the adulation or so on. But what I'm saying basically is, no, you want 800, six to go.

I want 800, you get that exactly my foot. I want 800 goals. You need to propose to one man, just one. By the way, I should mention that I have a study published in the journal Behavioral Medicine that looks at. So remember what I mentioned that in my doctoral dissertation, I looked at how much information do we need to look at before we commit. to a choice. Let me just put this into gallery view so everyone can see Francis' face as you talk. Here we go. Go for a guy. So I applied that framework. So my doctoral dissertation was in 1994, and this is a paper that I published in 2009, if memory serves me right. So many years later,

I applied that framework specifically to make choice. The idea being, I applied that, what's called a sequential stopping model. So sequential in that, you acquire information and then you decide, do I have enough information to make a choice? If yes, I stop. If no, I acquire more information. And so I applied this model specifically to mate choice. And let me just give you the quick kind of punchline. When it comes to rejecting prospective suitors, in other words, how much information do you need to look at before you decide that a pair of suitors are losers? women reject suitors much more quickly, right? In other words, they need less information to decide that they are disassociating from those

prospective suitors. When it comes to choosing a final mate, then women acquire more information before they make that final choice. Now, the fact that in rejection mode, they acquire less information, but that when they choose mode, they acquire more information is actually perfectly explained by an evolutionary theory called parental investment theory. The guy who proposed it is Robert Trivers, who was still alive. Some have said arguably the biggest evolutionary biologist since Darwin, that's saying a lot. He's come up with some unbelievable theories that have been influential over the past

40 years. Parental investment theory basically says that across species, right, and now here, please don't be triggered. It assumes that there is such a thing as male and female in each of those species, sexually reproducing species. Incredibly transphobic. But if you want to know sex differences within a species, you need to look at the minimal parental obligatory investment that each sex provides within that species. For most species, males only provide a copulatory act, and then they leave, right? All of the minimal obligatory parental investment is carried by the females.

therefore, because of that, they have to be more judicious in their mate choice. They have to be more careful because the cost of making a suboptimal mate choice loom much larger for females. Now, by the way, there are species that are called sexual reversal species, where it's the exact opposite. It is the males who are smaller. The males have less testosterone. The females build harems of males.

Yeah, in England, we call that era Islington. I'm supposing that's what, essentially. super liberal, progressive. Yes. Yes. Well done. You got the joke. And I call them sneaky fucker syndrome.

Yeah. But anyways, so in those species, you have the exact opposite pattern of sex differences. So imagine how unbelievably powerful that theory is. It can in one swoop explain the pattern of sex differences across 2 million sex differences. sexually reproducing species without a falsifiable data point, right? So to the incredible imbeciles who argue that evolutionary theory is nothing but just so storytelling, unfalsifiable nonsense, they couldn't be further from the truth because the reality is evolutionary theory is unbelievably falsifiable epistemologically.

The fact that you can't falsify it speaks to its veracity, to it being veritical. It's not because epistemologically you can't falsify it. It's because it's true, right? If 100 people jump off a building and 100 of them crash, it's not because gravity, brough is unfalsifiable. It's because gravity exists and it's recurrently the same pattern that will happen. So that's one of the things, by the way, that caused me to develop this nomological networks of cumulative evidence in chapter 7, right?

Because I have to fight against this idea that, so you basically sit around professor and just come up with bullshit post hoc explanations, but you couch it as evolutionary psychology. But isn't evolutionary psychology pseudoscience? Nothing could be further from the truth. Before an evolutionary psychologist can claim that something is an evolutionary trait, he sets the threshold, speaking of threshold,

He sets the cumulative threshold incredibly higher than all the other sciences. So that which we are attacked is actually the opposite of what the truth is. And that's why I find it so galling. And by the way, it's usually fellow academics who levy that accusation, which upsets me that much more. If it were just a Twitter moron, then it's fine. He's sitting in his basement playing gamer stuff. But if it's a fellow academic who says, oh, it's too bad, Dr. Sadd, that, you know, you wasted your career. on, you know, a pseudo-science like evolutionary psychology.

Well, once you say stuff like that, then my, I'm going to roll up the sleeves and I'm coming after you. God, you've got to be careful with the insults, my friend, because for the last five weeks, we've all been sitting in our basements playing computer games. So you've got to be careful in this brave new world of us. But listen, it's been absolute pleasure chatting with you. I wish we had more time. And once all this stuff is over, either when you're in London or we're in Canada, we'd love to

talk to you face to face because I feel like there's so much other stuff we could discuss. But now that we've got to let you go, before we do that, we've got one more question for you. And that's the way we finish every interview, which is what is the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? Facetious answer or real answer? Because I haven't prepared a real answer. So let's do a facetious one. Whatever you want, go for it.

Facetious answer. There's a lot of pressure on him now, isn't there? Why is it? Why are we not talking about why Ariana Grande has more followers than the 100 top, I guess that's not a physician's answer, more than the 100 other top brains in the world? In other words, why is it? And I'm thinking about this from a parasitic perspective, right? more people are willing to listen to listen to the pontification of Ariana Grande or Billy Ilish because of the platform that they have than if I stood on my platform and screamed all day and I wish there was a way for us to talk about how we can devalue and I guess some people are doing that how we can devalue the social capital worth of celebrities and other naturally lobotomized fools and maybe we can have the

philosophers and the intellectuals and the academics be the celebrities of our world. Not because I am one, but because as someone who pursues truth, I'd like more kids to have as their heroes, intellectual giants, rather than people who gyrate and twerk and sin. Yeah, but as we know from an evolutionary point, of view, that doesn't get you laid. And that's the problem, isn't it? I'm fighting an evolutionary dead end. Exactly, exactly. Listen, thank you so much for coming on. I, cannot wait to read your book. It's coming out in October. Exactly. Thank you. And it's called the parasitic mind, how infectious ideas are killing common sense. We're going to look forward very much to reading it. We look forward to speaking with you again.

Make sure you go and follow Gad on Twitter and all the other social media. And we'll see you very soon with a live stream or another interview.