TRIGGERnometry - How Do We Stop Bad Ideas Destroying the West? Gad Saad

Episode Date: October 25, 2021

In addition to his scientific work, Gad Saad is a leading public intellectual who often writes and speaks about idea pathogens that are destroying logic, science, reason, and common sense. Gad's fourth book The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense is available now. Get TICKETS to TRIGGERnometry Live with Ayishat Akanbi here: https://leicestersquaretheatre.ticketsolve.com/shows/873621622 Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ 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 (@francisjfoster) 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

Believe me, we will wake up in 50 or 100 years and say, how did this happen? And if people have a copy of this conversation, they will know how it happened. It's because of cowardice. It's because of apathy. It's because of diffusion of responsibility onto others that these idea pathogens proliferate. If we all talk against them, we will solve the problem by next weekend. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

I'm Constantine Kishin. And this is a show for you. want honest conversations with fascinating people. It does not get any more fascinating than the brilliant returning guest we have for you today. He's an evolutionary psychologist, YouTuber, all sorts of great things, and of course the author of the parasitic mind. Gadsad, welcome back. Oh, so good to be with you guys. Thank you. They call you the Godfather. It's so great to have you back on the show and blessing us with your presence. Tell us last time we spoke about your book, The Parasitic Mind, which is about how bad ideas, idea pathogens, as you call them, are destroying the West.

It's been about 18 months since we last had our conversation. Have things got better or worse? Worse in that Justin Trudeau got re-elected. So the walking manifestation of every idea of pathogen covered in the parasitic mind is still Prime Minister of Canada. You can't keep a good black man down, got. Thank you for you, Blackland, that exactly. For those of you who don't know the genesis of that joke, basically Justin Trudeau gets caught in blackface roughly every 15 minutes.

And then, of course, we have Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who are now the folks in power in the United States. So I'm kind of conflicted. On the one hand, I'm upset that these realities exist. On the other hand, it's only more good business for my book because the more you have insane politicians who are leading the way, the more my book is evergreen. Well, we're sort of talking about it in a lighthearted way, but for people who are maybe coming to some of your ideas for the first time, just give everybody a bit of an overview, God. When you talk about idea pathogens, you talk about the election of Joe Biden over Donald Trump, the electing of Justin Trudeau, re-election of Justin Trudeau over his opponents. You know, what are you talking about when you say idea of pathogens?

What do you mean? Right. So first, maybe it's worthwhile repeating why I use the metaphor of parasitic mind, right? So as an evolutionist, one of the things that I do is that I oftentimes when I'm trying to study a human phenomenon, I then try to look for homologous phenomena in the animal kingdom. And so in this case, I wanted to find a way to root the concepts that I was discussing in the book, which I'll talk about in a second, in an animal context. So in the animal kingdom, you have many cases of parasites, of course, that will infect a host.

The subbranch called neuroparasatology is when the parasite will end up in a host's brain, altering its circuitry and behavior to suit the benefits of the parasite. So toxoplasma Gandhi, the mouse that is infected with it will lose its innate fear of cats. As a matter of fact, it will become attracted to the cat's urine, which is not a really good thing for a mouse to be attracted to. So there are many, many examples in the animal kingdom where a host will engage in irrational, maladaptive behavior. So I had found the framework that I would use, to then argue, well, human beings can be parasitized by actual brainworms like toxoplasma Gandhi, but there's another class of pathogens that can parasitize our minds. And I call those

idea pathogen. But they ultimately end up with the same outcome, which is if you're parasitized by these bad ideas, you no longer can think clearly, you no longer engage in common sense, in reality. You engage in irrational behaviors in the service of the proliferation of those idea pathogens. Now, what are examples of these idea pathogens? There are many that I discuss in the book. Let's start with probably the granddaddy of them all. Postmodernism is a dreadful idea pathogen because it is intellectual terrorism. It is a rejection of the epistemology of truth. It basically says there are no objective truths. We are shackled by our personal biases. we are shackled by subjectivity,

to therefore talk about some truth is silly because there is no such truth. Well, that's perfectly anti-scientific, right? Because scientists do wake up every day thinking that there are natural truths to be discovered. Of course, in science, we have provisional truths, meaning what was true 300 years ago may no longer be true today,

but we do operate under the epistemological premise that there are truths to be discovered. Postmodernism says there is no such thing. Maybe I could give you one or two other pathogens. Yeah, go for it. So that intellectually terroristic framework then allows for a whole subset of other idea pathogens to proliferate. Take, for example, the idea pathogen of social constructivism, which basically says that

there are no innate biological blueprints. There are no instinctual imperatives. Everything that we are stems from tabula rasa. we're born empty slates and it's only our unique socialization that makes us who we are. So if Bubba can bench press more weights than Linda, it's not because there might be any morphological, anatomical, physiological, hormonal differences between men and women. It must be because he was socialized to play rough and tumble when he was a kid and Linda wasn't, right?

So we root everything in social construction. Well, that's a lovely message because it presumes that we are all born. with equal potentiality, but it's also a perfectly nonsensical message. So I basically, in the book, go through all of these idea pathogens. I demonstrate how they've all been, they've all started. They were all spawned within the university ecosystem. And then towards the end of the book, I offer a vaccine against these dreadful ideas. Gad, let me ask you something.

I love the way you talked about equal potentiality, because I think this is a lot of where this may come from, which is these. ideas, first as you said, you eradicate the idea that there's a truth to be found via postmodernism, and then you furnish people with ideas that make them feel good, because the truth is often unpleasant, we're not all equal, we're not born with equal potentiality, but if you want to feel good about the world, if you want to feel that, you know, you are where you are, not because of some inherent failings or disadvantages that you were simply born with, but rather because society is evil and oppressive and whatever, then these ideas all make sense. So how much of this

is simply about creating a framework where you can get ideas in that just sound and make us feel really good about ourselves? So it's partly that. And it's also, so let me back up and answer your question in a much broader way. When I was trying to look for commonalities across these idea pathogens, I thought, okay, well, each of these pathogens has, a different structure to it, but is there any commonality? So then I again went to analogize with cancer in this case. If you look at cancer, each manifestation of cancer takes on a different trajectory. Leukemia is different than liver cancer, which is different than melanoma. But they do have one thing in common. They all have unchecked cell division. So notwithstanding all the differences

of various manifestations of cancers, we could find something that is common across all of them. The same principle applies with these idea pathogens. While they manifest themselves in different ways, what is common to them, and hence this will answer your question, what is common to them is that they start with some noble cause, which then metamorphicizes into nonsense

in the service of that noble cause, right? So, for example, if I am a militant feminist, I start off with the cause, there should be equality of the sexes, which makes perfect sense in terms of equality under the law. But then I say, in the pursuit of that noble goal, I must create a worldview that says that men and women are indistinguishable from each other. Because in promulgating that message, it will hopefully allow me to better fight the sexist patriarchal status quo. So it's a form of consequentialist ethics, which basically says it's okay to distort

and murder the truth in the service, in the consequences of a noble goal. So whether the noble goal is to make a group feel better, make an individual feel better, it's okay to rape and murder truth in the pursuit of that noble lie. And of course, I argue that I could chew gum and walk at the same time, I could be totally supportive of noble social justice goals while never ceding a millimeter in the truth. But Gad, surely, we're talking about the truth, but doesn't morality also come into play and how the fact that what we perceive to be good in one society might not be perceived to be good in another? Is there such a thing as universal truth, maybe with science, but with other things, maybe not?

Well, I think it's a universal truth that it's not a good idea to cut off the clitorises of little girls. That's a universal truth. Regrettably, if you've been parasitized by the idea pathogen of cultural and moral relativism, the statement that I just said becomes a contentious one. Because who are you to judge the unique and exotic moral framework of other cultures you're disgusting cultural imperialists, right? So look, for most things in life, there are certain global phenomena that are true across the world, and there are local phenomena that are contingent on culture-specific contingencies. So let me give you an example from my evolutionary word.

it is a universal truth that humans have evolved the taste buds, the custodry preferences, to prefer high caloric foods over raw celery. So most humans prefer a juicy steak or a chocolate mousse to raw celery. That's a universal truth. On the other hand, how much spices we use in different cuisines is locally determined. And as a matter of fact, it is locally determined based on an evolutionary principle. The more hot weather a culture is in, the more spice use you have in that culture, because cuisine turns out to be a cultural adaptation to a biological problem. The biological problem is cultures that are in hotter climates are more likely to have foodborne pathogens and that proliferate more quickly.

Therefore, the use of spice becomes an adaptive evolutionary solution to a local environment. So yes, there are moral edicts that might be more or less specific to a cultural setting, but to argue that there are no universal principles that transcend all cultures is the height of indecility. For example, incest avoidance is a universal taboo, right? There are no cultures that say, hey, mommies, please, when as soon as your son becomes of a sexually mature age, start having massive carnal sex with him. That's a wonderful way to organize society. So the idea that everything is culturally relative is just nonsensical.

I was going to say you've clearly never been to Wales, Gad. But we've lost all our Welsh viewers, all three of them now. Excellent. So that being the case. why is it these pathogens are so attractive? Why is it that you have so many people, not only digesting them or ingesting them, I should say, but also regurgitating, and why are they so virulent?

Well, because most people are cognitive misers, meaning that they don't put in the hard work to think, and therefore it becomes a lot more alluring to succumb to my emotional system. So one of the things that I talk about in chapter two of the parasitic mind is the distinction between thinking versus feeling. Now, I make a very important distinction here, namely that the dichotomy is actually a false one. It's not that we are a reasoning animal or a thinking animal. We are both.

The challenge is to know when to activate which system. So when, for example, I am taking a shortcut down a dark alley to get home more quickly, and I see four young men loitering around. Yes, and I said men, because I recognize that there's a statistical regularity for young men to be more dangerous than elderly female nuns. And that's not agist or sexist. It's called having a brain. It's nunnest is what it is. It's nunnest, exactly. So in that case, when I'm taking the shortcut and I see those young, sinister-looking young men, I will have a fear-based response. My heart rate will start going up. My blood pressure will go up. It's a emotional response, but that's perfectly adaptive. On the other hand, if I'm trying to solve a calculus problem

and I activate my emotional system rather than my cognitive system, I'm probably not going to do very well on that calculus exam. So the challenge is to make sure that you activate the right system at the right time. Therein lies the problem. So to answer your question, Francis, the reason why those people are succumbing to those idea pathogens is because those idea pathogens take over our emotional system, right? So, for example, it is really empathetic and truly John Lennon imagined Kumbaya to say, isn't it racist to have closed borders?

Shouldn't the lovely 100,000 Honduras who are looking for a better world be allowed to come in and benefit from the magic of a Western First World developed economy? Well, I mean, yes. Also, it's bad that some children are starving in Rwanda, but I've also evolved the discriminatory mechanism that says, I have to invest in my children more so than random children

around the world, right? So therefore, I am logical. I recognize that while it is tragic that other children are suffering, it makes perfect adaptive sense that I spend my efforts investing in my own children, right? Well, progressives don't have that nuanced thinking. It is empathetic to allow all people. Open borders is empathy. closed border is Himmler. So it's a form of kindergarten thinking. Evan Syatt wrote a book on how liberals are engaging in a form of kindergarten logic. Why? Because young children go through cognitive developmental stages where early in their development, they're unable to engage in nuanced thinking. And then they grow up and they see the world in the shades of gray that the world exist in.

the feel-good platitudes of the idea pathogens and why they are alluring, as you asked Francis, is because it feels good. I like the idea that my son could be the next Leonel Messi or the next Albert Einstein. I don't like the idea that Michael Jordan might have been born with an a priori advantage over my kids. So social constructivism is hopeful. It triggers my emotional system as a parent. Therefore, I will buy into that rather than the shackles of reality, which is a form of Nazism. Gad, you talk about the shackles of reality. I think we unshackled ourselves extensively over the past 18 months since we last spoke to you, pre the pandemic, pre the death of George Floyd,

pre the BLM protests that happened, et cetera. So now that we've recapped some of your key themes of the book. Talk to us about the real world. What have you seen over the last 18 months that has really made you pause? Have you seen improvements? Have you seen deterioration? Just give us a kind of overall view of things. Sure. Look, generally speaking, the idea pathogens continue to proliferate at an alarmingly fast rate. So in that sense, it's not good. The news is that it's not, I don't, I'm not here to be the purveyor of good news. But let me be optimistic by then stating that there is a slow fight back against some of this nonsense.

So if you look, for example, at what's happening in the United States with a lot of the parents who are showing righteous indignation against all of the nonsense that their kids are being taught, six months ago, eight months ago, this wasn't happening.

So someone like Christopher Rufo, I'm not sure if you guys, do you know who that is? We've had him on the show recently. Oh, wonderful. Great guy. He's also been on my show. you know, it fell into his lap, right?

He hadn't planned on being the, you know, the anti-CRT crusader that he's become, but some people sent him some, you know, confidential information, and then he was off and running, and now he's doing great work, trying to empower people to fight back. So I think that, you know, while the, while certainly at the institutional levels, the idea of pathogens have not yet been extinguished, I think it'll take a while for that to happen.

you are starting to see organized, you know, fighting back against some of these idea pathogens. So I think while we are still in the throes of a deep, you know, culture war, deep, you know, ideological divide, deep battle of ideas, as I always say, and as I, you know, mentioned in chapter eight of the parasitic mind, people have to activate their inner honey badger. They have to be ideologically fierce. You know, they have to stand their ground when they're fighting for their rights, when they're fighting for truth. And if they do that, I truly think that if you have me on again in a few months, then hopefully we'll have even more optimism to share.

But, Gad, why was it? So when, to me, the turning point came when George Floyd was murdered, that video was sent around the world. Now, obviously, it's a shocking video, and it's vile, and it's awful, and the policeman's actions were completely indefensible. But why is it that had such an enormous impact, not just in America, which is understandable, but in Canada, in the UK, all around the world. We had it in our country where our police aren't even armed, the vast majority of whom anyway. Look, humans are prone to episodic memory, right? So, for example, if I were to ask you, where were you when you heard of 9-11, pretty much everyone who was old enough to actually remember a memory would be able to exactly tell you. And that's known as an

episodic memory, right? It really becomes, so of course, people could say, where were you when you heard that JFK was assassinated? Well, none of us in this room was born at that point. But someone who's old enough could say, oh, I remember exactly where I was. And I could tell you where I was with 9-11 happened, exactly. I mean, almost to the T. In some cases, you might remember episodic memory of when you first heard a song that has become your all-time favorite song or how you met your spouse. Well, the George Floyd video is so grotesque. It is, it becomes an episodic memory that all of us can exactly remember what we were thinking, what we were doing when we saw it. The problem, though, comes in when, again, the emotional system hijacks our capacity to think.

Yes, it's a very powerful image. Yes, it's one that will become part of the indelible nature of my long-term memory to think back of this protest, snuffing out of a human life in front of your eyes. But then I'm not a kindergartener. I'm able to say, is this an endemic story? Is this what's happening across the United States every day, right? Well, if I have a functioning brain, if I can look at this. I could separate the horrors of that imagery from the eventual narrative that happens.

Most people, being cognitive misers, can't. Therefore, when LeBron James says, I am afraid to leave my house in Malibu to go to staple centers, to play with the L.A. Lakers, because the police are hunting me down. And it's, you know, I always feel ashamed at the horrors of what I went through in the Lebanese civil war when I escaped execution in comparison to the horrors that LeBron James is facing. He's got to take his own life in his hands to take that incredibly dangerous road from Malibu to Staples. Imagine what a winy pig I am to complain about what we went through in Lebanon compared to the genocide that LeBron is facing every day. So that's why the George Floyd becomes so

powerful because you take a truly grotesque episodic memory and you then, in an incredibly silly way, generalize it to a existential zeitgeist. Well, it isn't true. There is no genocide that's happening in the United States of, I hate the term, people of color. That's simply not true. But yet, it triggers my emotional system. I get enrage. Hashtag BLM, down, down, white police. And, Gad, another area where you talked about, you know, the erosion of truth and the replacement with things that make us feel good and an area of specialization for you personally is gender and toys. And there was a law recently in California sticking very much with California, you know, on this very subject. Tell us more about that, please. Well, yeah, thank you for asking.

One of the things in my scientific career is, well, the main goal in my scientific career has. has been to try to Darwinize the business school. The idea being that you can't study organizational behavior and economic behavior and consumer behavior, which is my main area of interest, without understanding the biological drivers of what makes us consumers and employers and employees. We don't suddenly stop being biological beings

when we put on those hats. We are what we are because of our biology. Well, so one of the things that long ago, perhaps prophetically, I had decided to do, was to build what I call a nomological network of cumulative evidence. And I discussed this indeed. The whole chapter seven of the parasitic mind is dedicated to this epistemological tool. A nomological network of cumulative evidence is a means by which you build distinct lines of evidence that point to a position that you're trying to defend. And one of the examples that I have used in my scientific work and that I discuss in that chapter is the sex

specificity of toy preferences. The idea that contrary to what social constructivists say, it's not true that little Johnny is simply taught to prefer the blue truck while little Linda is taught to prefer the pink doll because of the patriarchy. But rather, there are indelible reasons why these sex-specific toy preferences exist. Now, let me give you, I won't give you the full nomological network, but I'll give you a few lines of evidence that demonstrate how incontestable the evidence is, and then I'll link it to the law that brainless Gavin Newsom has come out with. Okay. So I can show you data from developmental psychology, whereby you take children who are too young to be socialized. So by definition, you're ruling out the socialization argument.

And I could show you that they already exhibit the sex-specific toy preferences. Little boys will tend to point to or try to reach or look at longer because you can't ask them through words, right? They're not yet. They don't have the capacity for language yet. So developmental psychology has already demonstrated the, has ruled out the socialization argument. So, If I had only shown you that data, that already destroys the social constructivist argument. But when I'm building a nomological network of cumulative evidence, I won't stop there. I'm going to drown you in a tsunami of evidence. So let's look at a second line of evidence.

I'll do a few. I won't do the whole network. But hopefully it will become evident how powerful the methodology is. I could show you data across animals. So I can bring you data from vervet monkeys, from recess monkeys, from chimpanzees, to show you that they exhibit the same sex specificity of toy preferences. So now I've gotten you data from developmental psychology. I've gotten you data from comparative psychology,

comparative in the sense that you're comparing across species. I can now get you data from pediatric endocrinology. So I can get your data from, in medicine, you have a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia. This is when little girls who suffer from this condition have masculinized behaviors. Well, little girls who suffer from this order, what do you think happens to their toy preferences? They're perfectly reversed. They become like those of boys.

Okay, so now I've given you data from developmental psychology, from comparative psychology, from pediatric endocrinology. I'll do one more, although I could have spent another 30 minutes giving you more data. I can bring you data from across cultures in cultures that are radically different than Western cultures and show you that they exhibit the same patterns. I could get you data from 2,500 years ago in ancient Greece showing you that in funerary monuments, little boys and little girls are depicted playing with the same sex-specific toys as we have today. So I'm getting you cross-cultural data, cross-temporal data, cross-discipline data, all of which point to the same ultimate fact.

Boys and girls have different toy preferences. So now that I've done all that, here comes the woke-coctrine. crusader who says, screw human nature, screw science. Remember, the Democrats are the science party. While I just gave you irrefutable 2,500 years worth of science across every imaginable discipline that boys and girls have different toy preferences, Gavin Newsom says, no, social constructivism is de rigue. Therefore, there shouldn't be sex differences when it comes to toy preferences. Therefore, I will mandate into law that which is inscribed in human nature. Hey, retailers, you better not adhere to science and you better have gender neutral toys.

Let me give you another example of folks who denied human nature. They're called communists. E.O. Wilson, the famous evolutionary biologist, who is a. entomologist who studies social ants, here's what he said regarding communism. He said, wonderful idea, wrong species, meaning communism is a wonderful idea for social ants, because social ants, it is an indelible part of their nature

to be non-hierarchical. Every worker ant is the same except one reproductive queen. Therefore, communism works wonders for social ants. ants. It doesn't work for a species called humans because we are not worker ants. Some of us work harder. Some of us are dumber. Some of us are taller. Some of us are Leonel Messi. Therefore, when you impose a sociopolitical economic system that is contrary to human nature, you will have a hundred different instantiations of trying the experiment of communism, and it fails because it is contrary to human nature. So woke laws like that of Gavin Newsom is a perfect manifestation.

of what happens when you deny human nature. God, I'm on fire today. And modest as well as you. I'm falling in love with myself as I hear myself speaking. And those who don't get it, this is called faux-egotism. I am joking. Anyways, go ahead. It's fine, God.

They get that from me every day, so they recognize it instantly. Don't worry. But it seems to me a lot of these people what they want is a utopia. They want to be able to achieve this promised land where if you have communism, you're going to eradicate poverty, you're going to eradicate a whole multitude of sins that we have in the West. If we follow BLM, we're going to eradicate racism.

That to me is the core of it, that they want this utopia, but unfortunately, like all utopias, we're never going to get there. Right. Well, that's exactly right because, again, I remember I mentioned earlier, I said, you know, each of these idea pathogens free us from the pesky shackles of reality, right? Utopian aspirations are exactly that. I don't like the pesky, cruel world. Therefore, I will erect edifices of bullshit that ultimately feel good. It's a form of, it's a form of, it's a form of, it's a form of, ideological dopamine, right? It feels good to think that there is a way that we can reorganize societies where we all walk with fig leaves around our genitalia. There is no sexual violence.

There is no racism. There is no poverty. There is no inequality. And I think I've got the magic pill for that. It's called communism. It's called socialism. It's called BLM. But of course, each of these ideological movements are not grounded in reality, right? Lysenko as I explained briefly in the parasitic mind, Lysenko was a geneticist who disagreed with this pesky thing called Mendelian inheritance, one of the fundamental laws of genetics, right? Because those laws were somehow, in his twisted mind, not consistent with Marxism. Therefore, he argued that true genetics should be more in line with whatever, Lamarckian inheritance, which is a discredit form of, genetic hereditary mechanisms. Therefore, science be damned, it has to be consistent with my

ideological foundational building blocks. So if Marxism is it, and if 20, 30 million people have to subsequently succumb into Soviet unions because of my quack theories of genetics, so be it, but at least I have maintained the integrity of my Marxist doctrines. So you would think that scientists are somehow inoculated from these idea pathogens and these parasitic ideas. But the reality is they're the ones who spawn those idea pathogens, right? And that's why I am, you know, while I am a very affable guy in my day-to-day life, you also see me when I intervene publicly oftentimes, I'm indignant because I genuinely feel epistemologically aggrieved when I see colleagues of mine who should be.

be the Navy SEALs of reason being the ones who promulgate all this bullshit, which basically shows you you can have all the fancy degrees on your walls. That doesn't mean that you'll be inoculated against all the bullshit. And how much of this is people responding to an incentive structure, Gad, whereby, you know, if you say the right things, you'll be, you'll be seen to be moral, you'll have more opportunities to progress, you'll have more opportunities to write books. How much of that is just an incentive structure that people are given. And really, can you blame people for responding to an incentive structure? Yes. I can blame them, although I understand that not all people will be driven by the same pure life ideals that I have. In chapter one of the

parasitic mind, I basically argue that my two driving ideals that shape my life are freedom and truth. And I use these concepts, not just for the standard or scientific truths, although, of course, I do mean it in that sense. And I don't just mean freedom in the sense of freedom of speech and academic freedom. I give the example that when I was a soccer player, a competitive soccer player, I played the number 10 position where I float around as a playmaker. That freedom to create was very important to me. When a coach would tell me, today you're playing more on the left side of midfield, and you've got to track back to cover this guy. It's not because I'm a diva who doesn't want to take instructions,

but the fact that you are now restricting my movements on the field, it was like decapitating me because I needed the freedom to create, right? So my ideals are freedom and truth. Those are the fundamental drivers of my life. Therefore, I will never see, I mean, to a fault. I even talk in the book about the fact how my exacting personal conduct to always adhere to this punishing code of purity sometimes has gotten me into trouble. Had I been more of a careerist, had I been more of a, you know, play along to get along kind of guy,

I would have been invited more to the cool kids party. But then I wouldn't have been true to myself, meaning the harshest judge of Gad Saad is not the blue-haired person on Twitter. the harshest critic of God's sad is God sad. So when I put my head on the pillow at night to sleep, the only way I can fight insomnia is to know that I have done everything that I can to be an authentic person, to be a real person. And therefore, I never modulate an ounce of my dignity, of my integrity for consequentialist reasons. Now, I understand that that may be a rare quality,

but I'm probably not the first to say that the one who leads an honest life is the one who truly leads a happy life, which by the way is what I'm talking about in my next book. So, no, I do blame them. I do look at those people with disdain. I understand that there are careerist pragmatic realities, but then you're an asshole. You're a false person. You're a fake, right? There is nothing more beautiful than to be authentic because you are authentic to yourself.

and to others. I don't have to modulate any lies because everything that I say comes from a place of authenticity. Now, that doesn't mean that I'm always right. Sometimes you might prove me wrong, but because I'm authentic, I would say, hey, you know what, Francis? You know what, Constantine? You were right. I was an asshole. I was wrong. And thank you for correcting me. So I always present an authentic self and all those people who are modulating themselves are fraudsters. with a small F, sometimes with a big F, be authentic, be truthful. That's the way to live life. Well, it's a great message, Gannon.

We were chatting before we started the show about our journey from comedians to doing this. And we've certainly found the same thing when you do things that you genuinely believe in and when you don't self-sensor and when you say what you feel, you may be wrong, but you will be rewarded, first of all. And also you will be rewarded with joy and fulfillment internally as well. And it's a great message. but I want to take you back to what you were talking about with communism and Neil Wilson, one of my favorite quotes as well.

So given that all of that is true then, what is a structure of society that is most optimized for human beings, in your opinion? Well, it is one that allows for the flourishing of personal autonomy and individual rights and individual dignity, right? Anything that denies fundamental precepts of human nature will fail. So let me again take one of my tangents to then bring it back home. So oftentimes in my courses, let's say I'm teaching an MBA course in consumer behavior. At first, students are like, this guy's talking evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology.

What does this have to do with the consumer behavior course? And then I always bring it back home and say, well, look, a good marketer is one who, understands human nature. If you create products that are antithetical to some fundamental precept of human nature, that product will eventually fail on the market. So, for example, if I am a creator of romance novels, well, we know that romance novels are almost exclusively read by women all around the world. There is no culture where that pattern is reversed, almost exclusively read by women. And they read those books because it is a form of fantasy escapism, right? And so typically, if you want to study the content of romance novels, one of the things that you could do is study

what is the typical archetype of the male hero in a romance novel. And he's always the same guy. He is tall. He is a prince. He's a neurosurgeon. He tackled alligators on his six-pack and, you know, causes the alligator to submit. And he could only be tamed by the love of this one woman, this lion of a man can ultimately be reigned in by this woman. I just explain every single romance novel that has ever been written since the Pleistocene era. Okay. That exists because romance novel writers are targeting women, right? Marketing is segmentation and targeting. They're targeting women. They understand the needs of women when it comes to purchasing that product and they adhere to it. Now, a company that's progressive comes along and says, we want to free ourselves from the shackles of the archetype of the male hero.

We want to create a new genre of romance novels where the male protagonist is pear-shaped. He's got a nasal voice. He plays video games all day in mom's basement. He sucks his thumb in a fetal position. He watches Bridget Jones' diaries while crying because he put on three pounds. Yeah, that's right. I'm the king of comedy. So therefore, therefore, we're going to create a new genre of romance novel that adheres to this more gentle, non-toxic, masculine male.

Well, what happens to that jar? It fails in the marketplace because women say, sorry, progressive company, we're not interested in fantasizing over this guy. We're not buying your product. So then I tell my MBAA students, so do you understand why we have to be grounded in human nature? So now you can see how I'm coming back to your question. A good society is one that has certain features. You need to make sure that there is a police force, a military. There needs to be a mechanism to ensure that people can't come into my home and take what they covet from my home.

But a good society is not one where Gavin Newsom tells free retailers how to organize the merchandise layout in their stores. That's not how you should organize society. A good society is not one where you put the collective as being more important than the individual. That's communism. I am first got sad before I'm a member of a tribe. So judge me for all my qualities and faults as an individual. So the reason why the West was such a miraculous, anomaly is because classical liberalism recognized that. It said everything should be rooted in the ethos of individual dignity. And now progressives are saying, no, no, no, the great experiment of the Western tradition has proven to be faulty. Let's return to a collectivist ethos that will

ensure that we will have a society, a flourishing, blossoming society like Lebanon, where everything is defined according to identity politics. So I hope that I've answered your question. You have, but I have a challenge for you because we just interviewed, well, we've interviewed a number of people who've made this point, but among them is Tim Stanley, a historian here in the UK, who's written a book about tradition. And one of the things we were sort of teasing out of him is a conversation about whether the pursuit of freedom can become self-destructive when it's taken to the extreme, to the point where we are now, where I think, particularly among people of our generation, Francis and I and younger, there's a feeling, and you know, your fellow Canadian

Jordan Peterson, I think, has become the superstar that he has because that feeling is widely shared, that there's a crisis of meaning and that freedom in and of itself and personal autonomy in and of itself and classical liberalism, dare I say, in and of itself, does not provide for some of the other things that give people meaning. Now, I know what you're going to say, you're going to say, well, I pursue truth and all of that. And you do, and I really respect you for that, and I try to do the same. But the other things that give your life meaning

are your children, your family, your social relations, your community, etc. And those are not necessarily benefiting from the exclusive pursuit of freedom. Would you not agree with that? Actually, it might surprise you. I fully agree with you, right? It's not that the ethos of individual dignity

as promised by the state is inconsistent with the recognition that humans are a social species, that humans exhibit traits that are communal in nature, right? So the fact that I have an innate mechanism to love my children, to love my spouse, to love my non-kin, you know, I'm sitting with you guys and I appreciate greatly what you guys are doing, and I might feel a great kinship towards you, right? The term kinship implies as though we were biologically linked, even though we're not. So it's not as though evolutionists say, oh, it's a brutish world, each man for himself, pursue selfish interests. No, as a matter of fact, reciprocal altruism, the mechanism of reciprocal altruism is at the root of understanding the evolutionary mechanisms that create cooperation.

So it's not as though an evolutionist is unconstitutional. unaware that even though we pursue individual interests, these are ultimately also rooted in the recognition that we are social species. But these are not contradictory. So I see what you're saying, God, sorry to interrupt. So what you're actually against, you're not against sort of encouraging altruism. You're against compelled altruism, essentially, right? Compeled altruism? I mean, look, what you mentioned earlier, my buddy Jordan, right? He's not saying don't be nice to transgender people. He's saying, don't force me to say what gender pronoun to use.

So to use your word compelled, don't compel me to say something. I'm going to be kind and sensitive simply because I'm kind and sensitive. So that if students were to come to me and say, you know, here's my situation. Here's how I say, of course, thank you for telling me. And I'd be happy to address you in any way that makes you feel good. But I don't want the government telling me, right? Why, God, why? Why? Why don't you want the government? Because there'll be people, not many, admittedly, with our audience, but there will be some people watching this who are going, look, Gad, what, you know, the government tells you for your own sake and for the benefit of society to wear a mask or to take a vaccine or to do this or to do that. Isn't that, you know, isn't that about safety? And that is putting the interest of society. Yes, it's putting it ahead of yours, but that's how we advance the society. What's wrong with the government telling you what? Well, you know, I hate to use a apparently tired cliche, but it exists because it has meaning. It's a classic

slipish soap argument. Where does that end? So let me give you an example. When I am, so I have a nine-year-old son, you know, who, you know, I'm sometimes amazed at the types of conversations that we have with one another, which by the way, here's a life lesson. Don't, don't infantilize your children. Speak to them as though they have brains, right? I hate people who say, ooh, you know, they speak to you as if you're a little puppy. I speak to my son. as if he's a functioning, that doesn't mean I don't love him as a young child, but I engage his brain, right? He's not some little schmuck who doesn't have the capacity to think. Why am I saying all this? We were walking back from a cafe that we had gone together, and I was telling him about

libertarianism, nine-year-old. And so I said, look, now, we're about to cross the street. And again, I'm going to come to your question. I haven't forgotten what you asked. God, we have faith in you. You don't need all the apologies in a, advance, just go for it. We believe in you and so does our audience. Go for it. So when I'm crossing the street, it's a one-way street. There is nobody there. There is a sign that says, don't cross. There is a sign that says you've got 10 seconds to cross. We were stopped at one point, not during that time, another time with my wife, where there was a cop standing at the corner saying that I'm not going to give you a ticket this time, but next time I will because you

crossed when the sign wasn't yet at zero, right? So what is that cop saying? And to speak to your point of, but what's wrong? It's safety. It's the government telling you. When the government decides that the 56-year-old got sad is incapable of engaging his faculties in deciding in looking the one-way street that there is clearly no car coming

and therefore he can cross. but a 22-year-old police woman will issue him a ticket for not having waited, even though there are no cars coming, that's not libertarianism. That's overstepping the government boundaries. So no one is questioning the fact that we grant the government certain rights to compel us to do certain things that are good for the collective. The question is, where do you draw the line, right? That's where the debate happens.

I argue that it's not for the government, what Bloomberg did say when he was mayor of New York, it's not for the government to mandate whether you should have sugary drinks or not. Yes, it's a stupid health choice to drink yourself to diabetes by drinking 75 cans of Coca-Cola a day, but it's not for the government to say, if you do it, I will punish you. Because then you don't live in a free society. Then I am not an autonomous agent who is in control of my personal trajectory. There is a better entity out there that knows better for me. Does that make sense?

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Watch remarkably bright creatures with your remarkable moms this Mother's Day weekend. Only on Netflix May 8th. God, it seems to me when we're talking, we have a form of privilege. And I'll see if you're going to push back on this. We don't have Western privilege because we've seen the other side. I saw it in Venezuela. Actually, I have family from Lebanon, so I've seen it over there as well. You've seen it in Lebanon.

Constantin has seen it in Russia. We've seen the other side. What happens when society breaks down, when socialism gets introduced into a society? Do you not have a certain sympathy and an understanding for people who haven't seen the other side of it? Because if you haven't experienced this,

then are you ever truly, really going to understand it? Yeah. Well, to those people, I would say, crack a book, all right? But you're exactly right, because I've often argued that some of the stanchest defenders of the Western tradition are immigrants, precisely because they have sampled from the wide buffet of possible societies. And they know that the miracle of the Western tradition is exactly that. It's a miracle. It's an anomaly. The history of humanity is not littered.

with free societies, individual dignity. That's not the default structure of the human condition. So it takes people who have existed in the default societies that are not congruent with the Western tradition, who then come to the West, see the traditions that we have, and say, what the hell are you morons doing? How are you giving all this up away without anybody having even conquered you at the gaze.

You're saying that you will self-sabotage, right? That's why I am existentially angered all the time because I simply can't believe what's happening, right? So I think your instinct, Francis, is exactly right. If you've seen Venezuela, if you've seen the former Soviet Union, if you've seen Lebanon, then you know how beautiful Canada or Britain

or the U.S. historically have. been and therefore you want to fight for those values. If you were born into them and never knew anything else, you think that it is as natural as the sun rising tomorrow. It isn't. You truly have to fight for those freedoms, as Ronald Reagan famously said, that every generation you have to re-fight against those who are trying to eradicate freedoms. Gad, it's been an absolute pleasure as always. It's such a joy to speak with you. We always end our interviews with the final question,

which is what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be. We should be talking more about why had I not had the career-ending injury that I had when I was a soccer player, how I would have been up there with Messi. That's the thing that I think we should be spending a lot more time. No, seriously, I think it's not so much that we're not talking about all these woke

idea pathogens. I think what we're not doing is more of us are not getting engaged in the battle of ideas. I think what upsets me the most on a day-to-day basis is to see the apathy of people, right? You know, yeah, I mean, Jordan Peterson is talking about this. God's sad is talking about this. I'm busy with my daily life. I'm busy purchasing my groceries tonight. I'm busy preparing for my upcoming wedding. I don't have time to get into this battle of ideas. Let some other folks with bigger platforms and more of a spine handle it for me. And that reflex is one that we have to be talking more about so that we can compel people to activate their inner honey badgers, so that we can compel people to say, yes, you may not have the platform of Joe Rogan, but your voice truly

does matter. Even within your small sphere of influence, you can affect change. If your professor says something that is insanely contrary to reality, challenge them politely. If your Facebook friends says something that's offensive, don't feel threatened that they might unfriend you if you challenge them. Challenge them. So I think that's what we need to be talking more about. How can we get people to feel empowered to speak out against this nonsense? Believe me, we will wake up in 50 or 100 years and say, how did this happen? And if people have a copy of this conversation, they will know how it happened. It's because of cowardice. It's because of apathy. It's because of diffusion of responsibility onto others that these idea pathogens proliferate. If we all talk

against them, we will solve the problem by next weekend. Gad, thanks so much for coming back. We are going to do a couple of questions for our local supporters. But in the meantime, thank you for your time. And thank you all for watching. listening at home, make sure to get the parasitic mind if most of you will have it already. But if you haven't, it's a wonderful book. And we'll be back very soon with another brilliant interview like this one or Raw Show. All of them go out at 7pm UK time. And if you want your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. We hope you've enjoyed this incredible interview. Remember to subscribe and hit the bell

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