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Okay, God, thank you so much for coming on the show. Just to open up, because we may have some listeners and viewers that aren't familiar with you or your work. Would you mind going into your professional background a little bit, your education, just so people know where you're coming from? Right, so I have a long educational track. I started in mathematics and computer science. Then I did an MBA with a mini thesis and operations research, which is an applied mathematics field. Then I went and did an MS, a Masters of Science and a PhD at Cornell. I studied psychology of decision-making, specifically I studied information search. How is it, when do we know that we've collected enough information to stop and make a choice? So if I'm choosing between two prospective women to marry or two candidates to vote for or two cars to purchase, when have I seen enough to say, I no longer need to look for information, I'm ready to stop? So that was my original doctoral work. But during my PhD, I had become enamored with the field of evolutionary psychology, which at the time was a nascent field. Evolutionary psychology is basically the application of evolutionary principles to the study of the human mind. So in the same way that we can use evolution to study why we have opposable thumbs, we can use evolutionary theory to study why we experience romantic jealousy, why we experience romantic love, what are the types of men and women that we prefer? So when I saw the explanatory power of evolutionary psychology, I had found my scientific calling, I would then develop a field, a pioneer field called, which I coined evolutionary consumption, which is the application of evolutionary psychology to study consumer behavior. And that's what I've been doing for the past nearly three decades. Excellent. So what you're doing kind of talks, or at least alludes to or actually directly, explains biology that drives us or drives some of our decisions and our actions and our behaviors. Now these days, and we've known for a long time in the scientific fields that there's a combination of nature and nurture that kind of molds us into who we are. But it seems like today, trying to explain how nature or our biology affects our behaviors, it's almost like a bad word. It's almost like it's all nurture and we're like these blank slates and it's all about societal constructs and whatnot. Is it hard to do what you do right now with the current climate? I mean, it is. And that's how I originally got into this whole culture wars because before I took the show out to the public, I used to have these battles within my scientific disciplines because I really straddle both the natural sciences and the social sciences, right? And that I'm trying to apply biology to study human behavior while housed in a business school. And to most of my colleagues, what is this biology that you're applying? Surely you can't be serious, Dr. Satt. I mean, biology matters to explain the behavior of the mosquito and the zebra and your dog but surely consumers are not driven by their biology. Somehow we exist in the supra plane where we transcend our biology. So most social scientists have historically been very, very reticent to accept biological-based thinking in whether it be in sociology or economics or political science or consumer behavior. And so I first saw this departure from reason within the confines of academia and then eventually a lot of these dreadful ideas break out of the lab, so to speak. So the stupidity begins within academia but then it begins to infect every nook and cranny of society. So this is why one of the idea pathogens that I discuss in my book, in my latest book, The Parasitic Mind, I call it biophobia. Biophobia is the innate fear of using biology to explain human behavior and no one suffers from this dreadful disease more than social scientists. Wow, that's interesting. So what are some of the, I guess, consequences of that? So essentially what you're saying is, if I try to explain a cultural behavior or things that men do or women do or what we do in relationships and I say, you know, there's some biological roots to this that contribute to some of this. That's like, I'm saying the wrong thing I could get. Like, don't say that, that's wrong. It's all society, it's all culture. What are the potential consequences of ignoring some of the biological drivers of our behaviors? So it depends which constituent group you're speaking to. Take, for example, parents, right? It's parents love to be parasitized by the concept of social constructivism. Social constructivism is everything is due to social construction, right? We're all born as you alluded to in your first question. We're born Tabula Raza, empty states with equal potentiality. And it's, so whether your son becomes the next Michael Jordan or the next Albert Einstein is only a function of whether you offer them the right environmental conditions for them to flourish maximally, right? Well, that's a very hopeful message, right? It's a beautiful message. I love the idea that my son can be the next Lionel Messi, the greatest soccer player or he could be the next Albert Einstein. I like the idea that we are all born with equal potentiality except that that idea is rooted in a really massive pile of bullshit. But it is hopeful, it is nice, it feels good and therefore I'd like to sign up for it. So depending on which group you speak, look, rooting any intervention in a wrong erroneous view of human nature is never a good idea. So I'll just give you one other example to speak to your question. So, often times when I'm teaching my MBA students at first they're sort of intimidated. They think they've sort of mistakenly entered a biology class or a bio psych class because they're wondering how do we apply this to marketing professor. And I tell them, look, a good marketer is ultimately one who understands human nature, right? It's very, very difficult to come up with products that violate central tenets of human nature and have them succeed in the marketplace. So let me give you an example. So if you do a content analysis of the male archetype in a romance novel, romance novels are almost exclusively read by women around the world. There is no culture where men read romance novels more than women. Irrespective of which culture you're speaking about. Well, if you wanna understand the types of men that women fantasize about, well, then do a content analysis of the types of exemplars that are depicted in romance novels. And it's always the exact same guy. Whether the romance novel is read in Bolivia, in China or in Jordan. He is tall. He is a prince. He's also a neurosurgeon. He fights alligators on his six pack and defeats them and bites their head off, but he could only be tamed by the love of this one good woman. I just explained to you every single romance novel that's ever been written in the history of humanity. Well, if a company comes along, as actually happened, I don't remember the name of the company, and they wanted to come up with a new more progressive definition of masculinity, right? Cause they wanted to move away from the stereotypical toxic masculine guy. So they wanted a guy who sucks his tongue, who cries in a corner, who's pear shaped, who's got a nasal voice, who watches Bridges Jones Diary movies. Guess what happened to that product line? These consumers called women said, yeah, we don't give a shit about your progressivism. We want the types of guys that we fantasize about. So not understanding human nature has profound implications at the individual level, how I live my life at the economic level, at the marketing level, at the socioeconomic level, at all levels, you can't live life living a reality that is detached from an understanding of human nature. Yeah, God, is this why, I mean, historically, when we compare successful societies to societies that have failed, the attempts at, in the word that people use today is equity, right? The attempts at making people equal with the outcome, right? Everybody has the same stuff. Everybody makes the same money. Everybody's exactly the same versus, I dare I say the American ideal, which was equality of the opportunity. We all have equal opportunities or close to, but then we can choose to live how we want. One of them results in a great deal of equality and prosperity. The other one historically has resulted in just terrible death and destruction and depression. Is it because we're forcing something on us that is so completely counter to our nature that as it continues to not work, we add more and more to it to try to make it work and it just cause more problems? Is this because, go ahead. I'm sorry, sorry, finish your point. No, no, I was gonna say, is this why? Because it's so counter to just how we are in terms of our nature. That's exactly right. So I'll hear, I'll quote the brilliant and fantastic who's still alive, by the way. I think he's not over nine years old. E.O. Wilson is a famous evolutionary biologist at Harvard who I highly suggest all your listeners and viewers get into his work. By trade, I mean by scientific specialization, he's an entomologist. He studies social ants. And he has a wonderful quote, which I think, if I remember correctly, I quoted in The Parasitic Mind. So he says, socialism slash communism, great idea, wrong species. Now, what does he mean by that? Social ants are perfectly suited for socialism slash communism because by definition, the way that societies are structured amongst ant colonies, every single member of the ant colony is interchangeable. They're all equal except this one reproductive queen. So there's this one entity that is above everyone else, but then otherwise everybody is on the exact same plane. No hierarchy. We're all the same. We all have a job. We're all interchangeable. So when you're creating, in this case, a socioeconomic political system like communism or socialism, and it fails in every single place that it's been tried, it's precisely because we are not social ants. We are hierarchical beings. Now, that doesn't mean that we're not equal under the law, but some of us are taller. Some of us are shorter. Some of us work harder. Some of us are more handsome. Some of us have greater drive. And so as you said, equality of opportunities is great. Equality of outcomes is a cancer on the human spirit. How much of our biology drives our culture? In other words, sometimes I think we look at cultural things and behaviors and we think, oh, we just created that, or that's just an old way of thinking. But I think sometimes it seems obvious that, well, I think it might be our biology that drove that. So we created cultural structures around kind of preferences or how we are driven biologically. Is that like a big driver of our culture? Yeah, another great question. So I'll answer it in several ways. So first, the nature versus nurture dichotomy is really a false one. And it's false for the following reasons. So let me, I'm gonna use here what I call the cake metaphor. So if you take all of the ingredients of a cake before you bake the cake, there's the sugar, there's the eggs, there's the butter, there's the baking flour, the flour, whatever, I could point to each of those things and I could say here are the eggs, here's the sugar, here's the butter. Now once I bake the cake and it becomes an inextricable mix of all of those original ingredients, if I were to tell you, please point to the eggs, you wouldn't be able to. That's really how nature and nurture is. On some things, yes, it's a bit more driven by nature, on some things it's driven more by nurture, but we really are an inextricable melange of our nature and nurture. And as you correctly alluded, to say that some things due to nurture really explains nothing because nurture occurs in its forms because of nature, right? So it's not that socialization, for example, is irrelevant. Of course we are socialized, but the important question to ask is why do socialization forms take that particular instantiation, right? So it's no coincidence that all certainly Abrahamic religions socialized girls to be more chased in their sexuality than they do boys. So irrespective of which religion you're talking about, God really, really, really cares about female sexuality much more than he does about male. So if I am an evolutionary psychologist, I come along and say, I'm not negating the fact that the environment is important, that learning is important, that socialization is important, but ultimately I have to explain the Darwinian causes for those socialization forms. So everything is nature, even nurture is due to nature. Oh, so okay, so along those lines, you know, I'm a man obviously and I know how driven men can be by sexual novelty and wanting to be with different people. And yet the most successful societies today push for and advocate for monogamy in some way, shape or form. Like getting married, staying with one person, raising a family, it seems like it would be counter to our nature, at least on its surface. Like how would you explain something like that? Yeah, wow, great questions, I love it. So usually what you have across societies is the following numbers. About 85% of societies, documented societies have allowed for what's called polygyny. Polygyny, so to use the word polygyny is actually wrong in that case. Usually people use wrongly the word polygyny simply means one with many. But polygyny can take two forms. It could be polygyny, one man, multiple women, or it could be polyandry. One woman, multiple men. So about 85% of documented cultures have allowed affordances for polygyny. Most of the rest are, as you said, when you refer to monogamous societies and very, very rarely do you have polyandrous societies. The most famous case is called a fraternal Tibetan polyandry. So it's where you have multiple brothers who share sexual access to a woman. And evolutionary theory actually provides a framework to explain under which conditions humans will channel their mating arrangements to one of these forms. So kind of the default, as you alluded to, is for us to be polygynous. But by the way, this doesn't imply, so it is true that men have a greater desire or greater penchant for sexual variety that doesn't mean that women also don't have it, right? It just means that on average men have it more. So there's fantastic data that looks at the extent to which women are also desirous to go around the bushes with someone else. Would you like me to talk about some of that? Yeah, please. So for example, there's a gentleman by the name of, a scientist by the name of Robin Baker who in the 90s wrote a book called Sperm Wars where he argued and had done some research, although others have contested some of his findings, but he argued that there are really three types of spermatozoa, three phenotypes of spermatozoa. There is the one that you're familiar with. There is kind of a head with a tail that's vigorously looking for the egg to inseminate. That's, but that's only one form. Then there are the killer sperm that actually have no interest in looking for an egg. Rather they're looking for other men's sperm in the reproductive tract of women. And then there's a third type of sperm called blockers that really try to block entry at the women's reproductive tract so that no new sperm can come in. And the idea is that if men have evolved the chemical weaponry to engage in these types of realities, when we know that sperm can only be viable in the reproductive tract of a woman for 72 hours, that means that evolutionarily speaking, it would have been very high probability that your ancestors and mine might have made it with more than one male partner within 72 hours. So that's one line of evidence. A second line of evidence is if you plot, for example, the size, so across primates, including humans, you plot the size of the species, the animal, the male, to the size of their testicles. Here's what you find, for example, mountain gorillas, the males are gigantic, 400 pounds, they have the weight of, I mean, they have the strength of 10 men, human men, human males. They have very, very small testicles. Why? Because they live in polygenous societies where the singular male controls access to all the females. So there isn't much sperm competition. On the other hand, chimpanzees are basically walking testicles, right? Everything in their body is there to support these massive testicles because they're having sex left, right, and center. So sperm competition is incredibly intense. Well, if you're wondering where human males fall, we fall a lot closer towards the chimps than we do towards the mountain gorilla. That serves as a second line of evidence that females were actually quite promiscuous. So to answer your question in this very, very broad, although I hope interesting way, the reality is that there are very compelling reasons why we should have monogamy as a legal structure, but our innate instinct is one that is consistently pulling us to stray from that union, both men and women. So it's a really tough act of balance. Yeah, it's probably one of the, I would imagine one of the reasons why we tend to be serially monogamous, right? We end with one person, we break up, and we end up with another person. Well, what are the benefits then of monogamy? Any, like, why would so many societies put that together in a legal way, or at least culturally, why does that tend to be encouraged? So there are several arguments. One is that you certainly don't want societies where because of hierarchical realities, irrespective of these hierarchies come about, it's good to be because there is despotic rule, right? You know, I am the emperor, and therefore I get access to 800 of the most gorgeous women and all you other losers males sit around, twiddle your thumbs. Well, that doesn't create very stable society. So the best way to create incredibly unstable societies is to have a bunch of unmated males running around sexually frustrated. So one argument for monogamy is that it actually leads to a lot more stable societies because at least the most fundamental driver of our existence, which is first to survive and then to mate, we're instantiating that. You really don't want to have tons of males mated out. When you have polygenous societies where one male controls or has exclusive, monopolizes sexual access to many women, the only way that I could keep those other males in check is usually because I am so powerful that I can kill them, right? I can get rid of them. I can, by the way, harems, what did you typically used to do if you were the emperor? You would get these very strong, powerful guys to protect the girls, but what would you do to them? You'd castrate them, right? Because I don't want when I'm an aging emperor that really loves to have, you know, varied sex with all these beautiful girls to think that there are these strapping young guys who are 20, 30 years younger than me who are guarding these women. But if I chop off their testicles, then everything is good. So everything in history, everything in reality is rooted in evolutionary theory. And this is why, I mean, I love when I start a new class, I can literally see the epiphany in students' eyes or faces when they are exposed to evolutionary thinking because it suddenly is able to explain to them behaviors that heretofore they were unable to explain. So it's really, it's a beautiful thing. Professor, where do you see the greatest pushback when you talk about this? So yeah, another great question. It really comes from completely different sources. So before I give you examples of those sources, what they all have in common is that evolutionary theory attacks their pet belief system, right? So if I am very religious and I rightly or wrongly think that evolution in general and evolutionary psychology conflicts with my religious worldview, then I hate that framework because, you know, if evolution is correct, then where is God? Or if evolutionary psychology is correct, you know, so on. So you've got the religious that hate it. You've got the militant feminists who hate it because in fighting the status quo, the sexist patriarchal status quo, they have to espouse a position that argues that there are no innate sex differences, that men and women are genuinely indistinguishable from one another, less the socialization forces. And then once you come in and say, come on, you can't, surely you can't be serious. Of course there are innate sex differences. Well, then you must be a rabid sexist Nazi. So then that's the reason why militant feminists hate you. Postmodernists hate you because they believe that there are absolutely no universal truth. There are no objective truths. We are completely epistemologically shackled by subjectivity, by relativity. And therefore when evolutionary psychologists talk about human universals, things that are the same around the world across all cultures, surely that can be right because there are no objective truths according to postmodernist. So each of these camps are vehement detractors of evolutionary psychology, albeit for different reasons. And that's in a sense, that's what makes it so exciting to be in the field because you really are doing things that triggers people. Not because you're trying to be contrarian but because people are involved. People are, whether they like it or not, they're engaged in it. But it's frustrating in that with each new generation of evolutionary psychologists, they have to fight the same canards, the same idiotic positions, the same embecilic points. So maybe I could give you the one that calls me the most. Yes, yes, please. Is that okay? And please forgive me if I'm speaking too long feel free to interrupt me. No, you're good. So the one that I hate the most of all of the tractors of EP, which is EP is evolution psychology is the ones that say evolutionary psychology is nothing more than fanciful, just so storytelling. So an evolutionary psychologist, basically sits around in a velvet suit with a pipe and a cognac and just pontificates bullshit out of his head. Because after all, we weren't there when evolution happened. I mean, how could we know what happened? You're just, it's just, just so stories. Which by the way is some of the most baffling, baffling idiocy, because if that were true, then we better quickly tell the physicists who are winning the Nobel prizes that what they do when they try to explain the big bang is a bunch of just so storytelling because they weren't around 16 billion years ago. So it's just speculative, just so storytelling, right? And geologists, you weren't there when the rocks were formed four billion years ago. So what do you know? So I mean, it's a level of stupidity that is really quite galling. But so the reason why they think it's all just so storytelling is because they think that you could come up with an adaptive story for anything where you're actually doing the exact opposite of what they are accusing you of. And here I'm gonna give a very detailed explanation. So in chapter seven of the parasitic bind, I explain this incredibly powerful epistemological tool which I call Nomological Networks of Cumulative Evidence. So bear with me as I explain it. If I wanna prove to you that toy preferences are sex specific for biological reasons. In other words, it's not that little boys learn to play with trucks and little girls play with dolls only because mommy and daddy are sexist pigs. There are actually universal biological reasons why those toy preferences manifest themselves. How could I convince you guys of that? I will build a Nomological Network. What does that mean? I'm gonna come up with lines of distinct lines of evidence across culture, across time periods, across disciplines, across methodologies, all of which are going to triangulate and proving to you my point. Therefore what I'm doing is the exact opposite of just so storytelling. I am setting the evidentiary threshold for me to support my theory at a much higher level than other sciences, precisely because I am very careful that when I'm making an argument that is evolutionary based that I set the bar very highly. And can I just give you a few examples of those distinct lines of evidence? Yes. So I could get you data from children who are too young to be socialized, meaning by definition, they haven't yet reached the cognitive developmental stage to be socialized. So it couldn't have been mommy and daddy that taught them to prefer the truck and the doll. I could show you that those pre-socialization children already exhibit those toy preferences. Already that finding in itself has laid the death nail on that coffin, but I'm not gonna stop there. That's only one line of evidence from developmental psychology. I can get you data from comparative psychology, meaning across species. I can get you data from vervet monkeys, from rhesus monkeys, from chimps, showing you that those species exhibit those sex-specific preferences. Now that's really starting to look bad for the social constructivist bullshithers, but I'm not gonna stop there. I'm gonna get you data from pediatric medicine. So I can get you data from little girls who suffer from congenital adrenal hyperplasia. This is an endocrinological disorder whereby little girls who suffer from it have masculinized behaviors. Well, little girls who have that disorder exhibit toy preferences that are reversed, that are like those of boys. I can get you data from 2,500 years ago in ancient Greece where you do an analysis of funerary monuments where little children are depicted and they're depicted playing with the same toys as we are playing with today. So look how bit by bit I am tightening the epistemological noose around you. So I don't have to scream. I don't have to get all hyper. I just build this tsunami of evidence that eventually drowns you and makes you shut your mouth, right? So that's why I get so angry because you get not just people on social media, you get fellow scientists who say, oh, come on, that evolution, that's unphosphiable bullshit. Well, it isn't. It's the exact opposite to that. So that's why, so to answer your question in a very long-winded way, there is a whole panoply of the tractors and they all share one commonality, they're all babbling buffoons. Well, along those lines, how closely connected is our biological sex with our gender? This seems like it's become over the last maybe 20 years a bit of an issue or I guess a hot topic with people saying gender is a social construct and other side saying, no, it's not. It's totally based on your sex. From your perspective and what you know, like how closely related are there, is there truth in either side? It's extraordinarily correlated. It's not a perfect correlation, right? You have, you have, you do have people, for example, who suffer from gender dysphoria and they might be biologically one sex and completely identify with the other. Those things are real. You have men who are more feminine in certain traits and vice versa and so on. So, but what is clear is that the correlation is very high. Now, so in other words, if I were to put both variables into a model, so when you're doing a regression analysis, a regression analysis is you have a variable, a dependent variable that you're trying to predict by a bunch of other variables, right? So Y equals X1 plus X2 plus X3, X1, X2 and X3 are the predictor variables and Y is the thing that I'm trying to predict. Well, when you're building such a regression model, you often wanna make sure, well, you always wanna make sure that the predictor variables don't suffer from what's called multicoloniality. In other words, you don't want that those two variables are highly correlated because then in that case, you don't need those two predictors. One of them already captures. So the reality is that biology and gender while they are distinct constructs. So when some person writes to me and says, yeah, but professor gender is different than biology. I mean, I obviously know that, but they're highly correlated. So for most people, they exactly move the same way. Okay, so I wanna take a bit of a left term because you talked about your experience in terms of your education, your profession, what you do professionally, but also you mentioned marketing. Now, right now as of the recording of this interview, we're seeing this whistleblower come out, talk about Facebook and how they know the damage that they're doing, but they continue to do what they're doing. We've now heard over the last 10 years how damaging social media is from both sides of the political aisle here in the US. You have the left saying, oh my God, because of social media, we had the people storming the Capitol, although the reason why Donald Trump got elected. And the other side you hear them saying, they're totally restricting our information and their bias against conservatives and other people saying social media is the death of society. And oh my gosh, kids aren't playing with each other anymore. Like from your perspective, what does social media look like for us? Is this something we need to watch out for? Is this a new form of marketing that's so powerful that we probably should regulate it? Well, I mean, social media has both diabolical aspects and the enriching aspects, right? We wouldn't be holding this conversation today. Your world and mine would have never intersected and we're at not for these unbelievable tools that we now have at our disposal, right? Someone like me, like me, meaning a professor could have never imagined having the type of soapbox that I'm able to have precisely because I've got all, whether it be my Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or going on Joe Rogan or coming on your show or having my own YouTube channel and podcast. So those are wonderful things, right? I am in the business of creating knowledge and then disseminating knowledge to the extent that I've got all of these incredible vehicles that 15 years ago, I couldn't have imagined were possible. Then of course, I'm celebrating that. On the other hand, of course, just like most things in life, there are dark aspects to social media. So for example, as I mean, I think you alluded to the whistleblower from Facebook, Instagram is not really very good to young women. I mean, and here we're focusing on young women because a lot of the images end up affecting young girls psychologically because we are a hierarchical species, we engage in social comparisons. I wanna look as good as she does. She seems to have a happier life than I do, a better looking boyfriend than I do. And so we end up feeling really badly of ourselves. So now in terms of the regulation, if you mean in terms of the monopolies that the kind of influence that these companies wield, it's difficult. The libertarian side of me is gonna say, no, no, no, let just build a better one. But there are really pragmatic realities that we're facing right now that make some of these libertarian recommendations rather infeasible. So it seems to me that those folks need to be reined in because they're never going to stop until someone comes along and says, you guys are behaving in a diabolical way and it needs to stop. I mean, I could just tell you the number of times I've had things demonetized on my YouTube channel or on LinkedIn or on Facebook, it's just unbelievable. And there's really very little recourse you can do. And I think in a free society with a free exchange of ideas, that shouldn't be tolerated. They really are publishers. Yeah, so let's talk about cancel culture a little bit. Like this is very different from in the past where, I mean, I'm old enough to remember, you don't like a product, you just didn't buy it. Now, if they don't like what you say or they don't like your product, they want you gone and they'll get enough people together to get loud enough to make that happen. Is this a dangerous thing that we should look out for? I mean, look, I come from a culture where you had canceled culture, but the way you canceled people is you decapitated them. I come from the Middle East. So the reflex to stop people with whom you disagree from speaking is one that defines human reality. What made the West such a beautiful anomaly is that we had built a system where we had all of these checks and measures to truly allow people to flourish with individual dignity, with true freedom of speech, with true freedom of conscious. But all it takes is a small reverberation and then we go back to our instinctive desire to shut down anybody with whom we disagree. When I say shut with whom we disagree, we meaning the people in power. And so it astonishes me the type of stuff that I see on university campuses where, the most banal folks that are, I mean, not banal in the sense that they're not saying something interesting, but they're really not controversial will be shut down because it's going to trigger someone. I mean, I'll give you personal, I'll give you a few personal experiences. So in 2017, Jordan Peterson and I were supposed to speak at Ryerson University in Ontario, Canada and Toronto. And the title of the event was the Stifling of Free Speech on University Campus. Well, that event was shut down, how ironic. So we then had to wait a few months later and the organizer regrouped and set up another event where we held it outside the university. Now, what was amazing from that experience other than the fact that we were canceled? Well, one, there were flyers that were sent everywhere all over the place. You know, we don't want neo-Nazi white supremacists here. I'm a Lebanese Jew and apparently I'm a white supremacist neo-Nazi, right? So details don't matter to these cretins, right? But the second thing that was amazing to me is that when we spoke at the rescheduled events a few months later, the amount of security that we had around us, not only did we have the Toronto police security, but apparently there was private security. I think it was the company that had also done private security for Coldplay, the group or something. And so I'm walking into this gigantic place where I'm gonna give a talk about the importance of freedom of speech and so on. And I'm like surrounded by a thousand guards. I'm thinking, what world do I live in? Like there's not a single word that I'm going to say that is even remotely controversial and yet I need this much protection. And by the way, as a result of that thing that happened where the first event was canceled and then the second one was rescheduled, one of the members who was originally supposed to speak at the first event was not invited to the second event. I had nothing to do with it other than the event organizer asking us whether we thought that that person should be invited or not. We gave her our opinion, but it wasn't for us to decide. Now that person apparently had a lot of fans amongst some actual supremacist type, white supremacists. So I started receiving for about a month or two an endless number of death threats. This is how we're going to boil you Jew. This is how we're gonna skin you. This is how we're gonna do this to you. Here's when we're gonna get to this. And so I put together this whole montage of death threats and I went to my university. They were of course very concerned. So then I had to go on campus whenever I would lecture with security and then they would lock the door to my university class so that the student could leave freely. But then if they have to come back, I'd have to open the door. And then once I would kind of be whisked away to, I'd go back to the car, my wife would be waiting. I would literally have something akin to like an anxiety thing because I lived for another week because I didn't know when they're coming at me, like where my last minute was gonna come from. We even had to go to the Montreal police and file a report with the, not campus police, the Montreal, the actual, the full police. And so you think this is all stemming from this cancel reflex, right? If I don't like you, I will either kill you. If I can't kill you, I will try to fire you. If I can't fire you, I will try to ruin your reputation. It is the most ugly, basal reflex and it's terribly serious. And if we don't fight back against it, we're only gonna keep sinking into the abyss of infinite darkness. Yeah, go ahead, Justin. Oh, now does this all tie back to, you brought up post-modernism. I'm curious as to where that ideology even stems from. And how did that come about to be so popular amongst the academic community? Yeah, yeah, great question. I mean, it originates from the Frankfurt school, but the last 40 or so years, so post the Frankfurt school goes back a bit before that, you had a bunch of French post-modernists, I call them the holy trinity of bullshithers. It's Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who, and there are others of course, who basically argued that, as I mentioned earlier, that there is no objective truth. We are completely shackled by our personal biases, by subjectivity, there is no truth T to speak of. Language creates reality. So that was Jacques Derrida's position. So deconstructionism is the idea that we can deconstruct language so that we can understand reality, okay? And here I'll give you a wonderful, powerful story, which I discuss in the parasitic mind, but I think it's worth repeating, even if some of your viewers have heard it. So in 2002, one of my doctoral students, and I'm answering your question here, where does post-modernism come from and what type of nonsense does it lead to? So in 2002, one of my doctoral students have defended his dissertation. So we were going out on a celebratory dinner. It was myself, my wife, him and his date for the evening. And so he called me prior to us going out that night and he said, oh, I just wanted to give you heads up that the date that I'm bringing is a graduate student in post-modernism, feminism, women's studies, and cultural anthropology. I said, oh boy, really kind of the intersection of bullshit. And he said, yeah, so I understood what he meant, like let's just have a nice evening, let's not go wild. I said, oh, don't worry, mom's the word, I got you. I'm gonna be on my best behavior, don't worry about it. Of course that was a lie. And so about halfway through the evening, I said, oh, I'm looking now at the lady. I said, oh, I hear you're a post-modernist, you study post-modernism, she was, yes. I said, post-modernism, there are no universal truths, which of course, by the way, is quite a ridiculous position because it starts off with a violation of logic. There are no universal truths other than the one universal truth that there are no universal truths, okay? So anyways, so I said, well, Jim, I mean, I'm an evolutionist, so I do think that there are universal principles, universal truths. Do you mind if I throw at you what I consider to be universal and then you can tell me how I'm wrong? She says, yeah, go for it. I said, is it not true? By the way, this precedes by quite a while the transgender activism craze that boys can have, that men can have children and men can menstruate and so on. So I was already documenting that in 2002. So I said, is it not true that within Homo sapiens, only women bear children? So she looked at me with disgust. She couldn't believe at what a simpleton mind I had. She was absolutely not, it's not true. I said, it's not true that only women bear children? She said, no. So please explain, I'm intrigued. She was, well, there is some Japanese tribe of some island in Japan where in their folkloric mythology, it is the men who bear children. So therefore, by you restricting the conversation to the material biological realm, that's how you keep us pregnant and barefoot and pregnant and so on. So after I recovered from my mini stroke at that level of stupidity, I then said, okay, well, let me then not hit you with such a controversial example like only women bear children. Let's give a less divisive example. Is it not true that from any vantage point on earth, tailors since time immemorial have relied on the following premise. The sun rises in the East and it sets in the West. So here she pulled out of her bag of nonsense the deconstructionism language creates reality. So she said, what do you mean by East and West? And what do you mean by the sun? That which you call the sun, I might call dancing hyena. I said, well, fine, the dancing hyena rises in the East and sets in the West. She said, well, I don't play those label games. So when I couldn't get this graduate student to agree with me that women bear children and that there is such a thing as East and West and there is such a thing called the sun, that's what postmodernism is. Now why is it so alluring? Well, it's alluring because it frees us from the pesky shackles of reality, right? There is no truth, capital T. There's only my truth. There's only my lived experience. My genitalia doesn't determine my sex, right? Because I could be whatever. I put the trans brief and voila, I could be what I could be trans racial. I could be an elderly Korean woman, right? I could be as I explained in the person of mine trans gravity. So for example, at the time when I wrote The Parasitic Mind, I was over 200 pounds. I wanted to participate in the under eight year old judo competition. Number one, because I self identified as under eight, that's trans ageism, but I also was trans gravity in that I self identified as being 40 pounds. It sounds satirical, but that's the beauty of postmodernism. Anything goes. It's a form of intellectual terrorism. So why are people so attracted to it? Because there is something attractive about the liberating epistemology of freeing yourself from the shackles of reality. It's as simple as that. Yeah, you know, I personally, I remember experiencing something like this recently when here in the US, obviously we're all going through the pandemic and we were told don't go around crowds. Don't be around people. You'll transmit the virus. Please don't get together. And then there were the George Floyd protests where there were like tens of thousands of people together. And by the way, I'm very pro, I think people should be free to protest. I have no problem with that. But what shocked me was watching the media and the news and seeing these news anchors say, literally say, there was no, yeah, there's no real main transmission happening right now with the virus or this isn't really impacting how many people are getting COVID during these protests. And I remember thinking, this is crazy. I feel like when I read stories of the Soviet Union and they would just say things that were so counter that people just put their hands up and said, just tell me what to think. It was quite frightening. And science in my, I mean, from my understanding, one of the goals of science is to at least is to be objective, to look at data. And regardless of how you feel, sorry, the data says this, it feels like post-modernism has totally, or the way you explained it, totally permeated all the sciences and now has become even politicized. You've been doing this for a long time. Is it worse now than it was 20 years ago? Is it just getting worse and worse? So post-modernism as a framework in academia, I think is slightly on the way down, but offshoots of post-modernism or some of the offshoots that originally had their genesis within a post-modernist framework have now been, you know, weaponized. So for example, what I call the dye religion, right? Diversity, inclusion and equity. And I like to organize the acronym that way because it truly is the death of science, the death of meritocracy, right? So the dye principle on universities right now is basically permeates everything. So if you wanna apply for a science grant, right? So let's say I'm applying, I wanna do a study on, I wanna develop a research program on how pathogenic infestation, actually I am working on such a project right now, the density of pathogens across cultures, how that affects certain consumer behaviors. For example, are you more likely to engage in conspicuous consumption in cultures that have high pathogenic load, okay? So if I were to apply for a research grant through one of the granting agencies in Canada, but the same applies in the US by the way. Now the most fundamental thing that I first have to do is I have to write a whole dye thing where I say, what are all the things that I have done in my life to support dye causes, diversity, inclusion, equity? How will my research program support those things? So I will be hiring transgender people of color. I will be, right? In the lab, I will certainly refrain from hiring disgusting white heterosexual males. That's a given. I'm absolutely not going to that. If you can rest assured granting agency, there'll be no white guys in my lab. That's for sure, no way. That's disgusting. That's white science, okay? So I say this with venomous satire, but it literally is that, right? So I have a colleague of mine who is a person of color. And truly visibly, he's from I think India originally. He used to be very liberal now. He's completely, you know, as they say, red pilled. He's a physical chemist at one of the sister universities here in Montreal, very prestigious university. His grant was refuted, rejected, without even looking at the substance of his scientific grant. He failed at the dye level. So I mean, think about what that does to science, right? I mean, right? You are no longer, what makes the scientific method so beautiful, so liberating. Is it that it forces us to leave the shackles of our personal identities at the door, right? There is no Lebanese Jewish way of doing evolutionary psychology. The distribution of prime numbers does not change as a function of whether I am a transgender Muslima or I am an orthodox Jewish guy, right? That's what makes science so beautiful. And yet we are, you know, very quickly reverting back to the dark ages. And we're doing that while cloaking ourselves in the robe of progressivism. It's detestable, it's grotesque, and that's why I fight and that's why I do all these public appearances because I truly think that we have this wonderful system that we are giving it away for reasons that are truly baffling. Are we just seeing the inevitability of having a very successful society to where there's just not like obvious problems to glom on to anymore, but now we're just sort of creating these problems to approach and attack and, you know, it just seems like it over time, different empires have gone through this and we've seen the inevitable downfall, but do you think that we're going through that right now? I think you're exactly right. If you look at throughout history, oftentimes the collapse of a civilization implodes from within, right? You just have this kind of orgiastic, Caligula-like mechanisms. Look, people in Ethiopia who are worried about tomorrow's caloric intake are not concerned that you address them by the right gender pronouns, right? Because there is a hierarchy in terms of what humans try to achieve in a given day, right? If my hair is on fire, literally, then I don't worry about my cholesterol level until I have made sure that my hair is no longer on fire. I first have to make sure that that's solved before I worry that, you know, my cholesterol should be lowered. And by the same token, to your point, I think that we've had it so well in the West for so long that we think that this is just the default reality, right? But as Ronald Reagan explained, and I don't remember the exact quote, but it's in the book, you know, every generation has to engage in a re-defense of those fundamental principles. You can't take things for granted. But incidentally, it's precisely why some of the most dogged defenders of Western values are typically people who were not born in the West. You know, whether it be myself or other people who are, you know, high profile, that's because we've sampled at the buffet of societies. We know what's out there, and therefore when we are, you know, welcomed into the West and we see the freedoms that are afforded to people in the West and the beautiful societies that have been created by these foundational tenants, we're amazed that the Westerners are so apathetic, so cowardly, so laissez-faire in terms of throwing it all away. So it's no coincidence that some of the most vociferous fighters for the West were not born in the West. Yeah, well, before somebody says, well, that's just God's white privilege talking right now, you have a very interesting story. You've kind of referred to your Lebanese Jew, but it wasn't like you just came over, wasn't that big of a deal? Can you tell us a little bit about how you got here? Right, so by the way, according to the woke nomenclature, I'm a person of color, so I don't have white privilege because I'm from the Middle East. I'm an Arab Jew who's a child war refugee who escaped execution at the hands of all sorts of people who wanted to detach my head from the rest of my body because we were one of the last remaining Jews in Lebanon. There was in the Middle East and all of the Arabic-speaking countries, historically, at various points, there were Jews that lived there. We are endemic to that region, but depending on the historical context, on a drop of a dime, you go from being tolerated. You're not accepted as an equal. You're never accepted as an equal. You are tolerated until you're no longer tolerated. And when you're no longer tolerated, you really better put on your best sneakers and hopefully you're really good shape because it's time to go for a sprint time and get out of there really quickly. So that's why it also is kind of difficult to try to cancel me because when it comes to the metrics that the blue-haired people care about, which is, you know, how do you score on victimology poker? Well, I hold the top hand. So I can get all sorts of incredibly obnoxious, you know, people of color coming at me. And I say, be very careful. If you play the victimology game, I'm gonna outrank you within five seconds, right? You're boo-hoo-hoo. You grew up in a rough neighborhood in Detroit. You can f off with that sob story. Let me tell you my Tuesday in my childhood in Beirut and then they run away very quickly. So in a sense, my tragic upbringing in Lebanon regrettably has empowered me against all these freedoms because rather than them listening to the strength of my arguments to try to convince them, I simply have to pull out my victimology cards and then they run away. Isn't it tragic that that's how I defeat you by the strength of my victim story being more powerful than yours rather than just me having better arguments than you? It's just horrible. Yeah, it's terrible. You know, a lot of these bad ideas and stuff, you keep talking about coming from academia. I've heard that from other people. What makes academia so vulnerable to this? Because I mean, you figure these are supposedly the smartest people in society. Yeah, why is it so alluring to them? Yeah, they're learning, they're studying, you know, why is that, why is that where some of these terrible ideas start from and flourish? Like what makes them so vulnerable? Yeah, I mean, honestly, you guys have come up with unbelievable questions. I'm not trying to blow smoke up your asses, but really great preparation guys. Fantastic. Look, it really stems from a decoupling of the ideas that you espouse and pontificate and these being tested by reality. So what do I mean by that? So I'm housed in a business school. It's no surprise that there aren't too many of these idea pathogens in the business school because that's a real thing, right? If you're building a mathematical model to understand consumer choice or big data using AI so that you can understand Facebook behavior, it can't, you can't build a mathematical model, you know, in the business school using post-modernist mathematics. You can't build a bridge as an engineer using post-modernist physics, right? So some of these disciplines are somewhat more inoculated against the BS because they are coupled to reality. There's a feedback loop whereby the ideas that you espouse are going to be tested in a real world. And if you're not doing a good job, you're gonna get metaphorically slapped. The problem in academia, so to answer your question is that many of these disciplines are perfectly decoupled from reality. So I can espouse anything within the confines of my tenured position in the ivory tower and there are no repercussions to the bullshit, right? So if I say that East is West and West West and Dancing Hyena, so what? I can publish that in an academic journal that's period, by the way, you guys probably heard of the story with the grievance studies where they faked all those papers, right? Yeah, that was great. Well, those guys, the original came from Alan Sokal who was a physicist at New York University if memory serves me right, and he wanted to demonstrate how nonsensical all this post-modernist stuff was. So he wrote a paper, a fake paper on the hermeneutics of the social construction of gravity, I mean really just unbelievable. And it was accepted as a breakthrough, amazing piece. And then he said, oops, I've got an admission to tell you. Now you would think that if they were epistemologically humble, they would have said, oh, God, we've been exposed as the charlatans that we are. They doubled down, they said, aha, this actually proves that we're right because meaning is relative. So even though you may have generated this paper in a semi-random gibberish way, our reviewers extracted meaning from it. So it's all good, buddy. So to answer your question, that's why this orgiastic nonsense happens because it's a form of mental masturbation that's fully decoupled from reality. Yes, it's probably why. I mean, I've been an entrepreneur since I was 22 and I've hired people who've come out of business school and oftentimes their ideas don't match what we see in the business world. And then they learn through practice. Earlier what you said, you guys were talking about how we need to create problems because things are too good. It reminds me of a scene from the movie The Matrix where they're trapped in The Matrix and Agent Smith says to him, we created a perfect world for humans but it crashed because your minds couldn't comprehend a perfect world so we had to make it so that it was challenging and whatnot. What are the biological evolutionary roots of that? Why is it that we can't be okay with things, I guess, getting easier and better? Why do we need to figure out ways to make things so hard or at least go backwards? All the things that we move from, why do we gotta go backwards? Well, I don't think the people who are espousing or generating or beginning all these idea pathogens, I don't think they do it with the willful intent of, as you said, go backwards. I think they all start. When I was trying to find a common cause to all of these idea pathogens in the book, so again, to give you a sense of some of these idea pathogens, postmodernism is one, social constructivism is another, identity politics is another, biophobia is another, right? So cultural relativism, who are we to judge other cultures? So each of these idea pathogens is a different manifestation of a departure from reality, a departure from reason. But I wanted to look if there was something common to all of these. So to kind of answer your question, why do people come up with this nonsense? And so here I will analogize with cancer. So if you think of cancer, different cancers behave very differently. The trajectory of leukemia is different than liver cancer, is different than a melanoma. But what they share fundamentally as a common mechanism is the unchecked cell division. So at the very least we can agree that all cancers have that mechanism that has gone haywire. Okay, so now I wanna use a similar principle to say, okay, yes, these idea pathogens are all very different, but what is common to them? And I think what's common to them is they all start with a noble cause, but and in the pursuit of that noble cause, then you put on what's called a consequentialist ethic, which is you lie in the service of that noble cause. So example, if radical feminists think that by espousing the idea that men and women are indistinguishable, it is more likely for them to fight the sexist status quo, then so be it. But I argue that when it comes to the truth, you have to be de-intellogical. De-intellogical means there is an absolute reality, right? So for example, when it comes to lying, a de-intellogical statement would be, it is never okay to lie. That would be de-intellogical. Consequentialist would be, well, it's okay to lie if you're trying to spare someone's feelings. Well, for many things, it's perfectly natural to be consequentialist. So if you wanna have a happy marriage, you better know how to answer the following question. Sweetie, do I look fat in those jeans? Okay? Put on your consequentialist hat really quickly and say, are you kidding? You've never looked more beautiful, right? There I might have lied, but for consequentialist reasons. When it comes to the truth though, I only have my de-intellogical hat on. There is nothing that I will, I won't sacrifice a millimeter of the truth in the service of a laudable goal. So I think, so to answer your question in this, you know, circuitous way, it's not that they start off apriary with the goal of setting us back to the dark ages, but because they're so empathetic, because they're so progressive, because they want to make the world of a better place, if in the pursuit of those goals, we end up raping science, murdering truth. So be it, those are just casualties for a better Kumbaya world. So it's good roots or good motivators, but bad results. I would even argue, I mean, along those lines, you use the example of the radical feminist. I feel like it's terrible because it also moves us away from understanding each other really, because we ignore, you know, the hard science and we just say, no, ignore all that. We're all the same. And it devalues the value that we all bring to each other because we're, you know, we're so different. Exactly. And by the way, that's what, I mean, that's what makes life so beautiful. The fact that so often times in my evolution psychology courses, I ask students, why do you think personality traits have not evolved towards a singular optimal personality? In other words, just like now, everybody in this Zoom meeting, we all have fixed traits. We all have two eyes. We all have 10 fingers, unless we have a congenital problem, right? Those are fixed traits. In other words, they're not any longer, you know, under the influence of selection pressures. They're fixed within our genome. Yet our personality is not fixed, right? Some of us, as I've had the number one thing that differentiates us other than the fact that we look different from one another is our individual differences due to personality differences. Well, but that's what makes life so enriching, right? Is that there's such heterogeneity of personality type. So I completely agree with you that, you know, variety is the spice of life. Heterogeneity is the spice of life. Creating echo chambers of intellectual conformity is an affront to what makes life beautiful. Yeah, you know, a lot of these beliefs seem to take on a religious fervor where it's almost like people worship them. And it seems like oftentimes they definitely is true religion. So a lot of them are atheists or at least they don't follow religion, but then they end up worshiping this ideal. Are there any evolutionary roots to religion? It's obviously something practiced worldwide has been for thousands of years. It seems like when we throw that away, we tend to go in a different direction. And oftentimes it turns worse. Like what are the roots behind that? Do we need to believe in something that's metaphysical? So there are two ways I can answer. I can answer it from a functional perspective, meaning, you know, are there benefits to being religious? So let me answer in several ways. So the evolutionary approaches to understanding religion can take one of several forms. There is what's called the adaptation perspective. The adaptation perspective would be that you'd have to answer the question, what is the adaptive benefits of being religious? Or religiosity? Does it confer a survival advantage? Does it confer a mating advantage? In other words, what would have been selection pressures that would have caused the religious imperative to be selected for as part of the human repertoire? And so the one who has the best argument along those lines, along the adaptation line is a gentleman by the name of David Sloan Wilson who used to be a close friend of mine until he was parasitized by wokeness and was very, very unhappy that I criticized Lord Pelosi and noble prophet Obama. So I went from being a scientific hero of his and a great guy to being a disgusting, vile creature because I violated his religious impulse of praying at the altar of Obama and Pelosi. That's literally the case. We had a falling out because he thought it was disgusting that I would criticize Pelosi because she's just beyond criticism. She's above that. So, but kudos to him and scientifically he's a very, very accomplished evolutionary biologist and I admire his work greatly. He argued that actually people should read his book. It's called Darwin's Cathedral. I think it came out in 2002. He argued that groups that have greater religiosity will outlive groups that have lesser religiosity because religiosity confers greater communality, greater cohesion, greater deliritation of in-group and out-group members. So it creates greater cooperation with in-group members and lesser cooperation with out-group members. So for all of these earthly reasons being religious confers an adaptive advantage to groups that are religious. Now, his work is controversial because here he is using what's called a group selectionist argument. He's basically arguing that group A out survives group B whereas almost all evolutionary theorists today argue that evolution actually occurs at the individual level, not at the group level. But anyways, that's a technical difference. So that would be answering your question about what are the evolutionary roots of religion using an adaptation argument. You're with me so far? Yes. It's adaptive to be religious. Got it. There is another approach, very different. And here I'm gonna introduce a word that probably very few of your listeners have ever heard. It's called an exaptation, not an adaptation. An exaptation is an evolutionary byproduct. In other words, it just came about but it has no adaptive value. So for example, the color of our skeletal system is that color, not because that color confers greater survival to us, it's path dependent. Because of other evolutionary pathways, that's the color we ended up with. It's a byproduct. It's a path dependency. Got it. So if I were now studying religion as an exaptation, what I would then do, and the guy who developed that is a evolutionary anthropologist by the name of Pascal Boyer, both of whom, both these guys, by the way, have been on my show, I mean, really, truly brilliant scientists. So he argued in his book that religion piggybacks on neural circuits that evolved for other purposes. So in a sense, it is parasitizing mechanisms that evolve for other, it's a byproduct. So for example, we have in our brain a coalitional psychology architecture, right? And I'm meaning that we view the world as us versus them, blue team, red team. We're already born with that tension. Well, here comes religion and certainly Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and much of their preaching is built around that coalitional psychology. So it is piggybacking on neural systems that are already in me, and therefore it's easy for me to succumb to the religious impulse because those systems are already built in me. Do you follow what I'm saying? But I would argue that the most fundamental reason why we're never gonna get rid of religion so that atheism is actually at the non-default value is because we are the only animal that I think we're aware of that is aware of their mortality, right? So if I have high cholesterol, I go see my physician, he hits me with some statins, cholesterol goes down, everybody's happy. But I don't have a pill for immortality. I know that I'm on a death sentence. That's not really a good thing. I don't wanna know that the party's ever gonna end. I wanna come back on my pump when I'm 130 and talk some more stuff. Well, there is a pill I can take. It's called religion because that pill will offer me a wonderful infinite future, right? So very few religions say, oh, believe in us and we guarantee you it's gonna end soon the party. No, come into our camp and we'll grant, you're gonna see Roscoe, the dead dog that you missed in your childhood again. Just come to Jesus. Everybody, your uncle Joe, you're gonna meet him. That's a really nice message. And so until we solve the mortality problem, I'm afraid we're stuck with religion. Well, besides that, it feels like when people don't have, I guess, a religion to follow or whatnot, it seems like they're more likely to worship like post-modernism or their government. Money, money, power, sex. Yeah, so I mean, are there any roots to that or is there any value to that? You know, actually in the next book that I'm working on now, I actually talk about that because the book is really about how to live a good life. But I'm not, it's not very preachy. It's not very self-help-y. I kind of take personal and it goes backed up with science to say, here's my recipe to a good life. I hope it helps you. And at one point I talk about the relationship between happiness and religiosity, right? And actually I was just working on that section two days ago. And so I'm conflicted because on the one hand, I truly see that there are great benefits that come with being religious. It provides you with structure. It allows you to understand certain things that are otherwise too cruel for you to understand. Why did this young child die from leukemia? Well, because God calls his angels to be close to him. Well, that feels like a satisfying answer because otherwise I can't make sense of the randomness, the cruelty in the world. So on the one hand, I truly understand that there are wonderful benefits of being religious. But as a purist, I say, in a sense, it devalues life if I need religion to be so spiritually engaged in the beauty of life. In other words, I don't need some supernatural force to make me see how magisterial life is. Having this conversation with you guys an hour and 15 minutes ago, I hadn't met you where you're challenging me with all these questions. That is a spiritual experience. Going to the Grand Canyon and seeing the beauty of nature, that is a beautiful experience. Seeing my children learning stuff through hanging out with me and hopefully I'm giving them a good education. Seeing how their minds are developing. So in a sense, I find that while I can understand why people have a functional need of religion, I think that there's so much magic in the world that you could seek that spiritual connection with the majesty of the world without necessarily rooting it in a supernatural cause. Taking this full circle, I just wanted to see if you could identify. So if I were to take some antibiotic pills to sort of help with these parasitic ideas, what would those pills consist of? Right, so one of the pills would be, or the vaccine, if you'd like, to be a bad idea. So one I already alluded to when I talked about nomological networks of cumulative evidence, where I was telling you about how to build these networks so that you could arrive at truth. The best way to inoculate yourselves against bullshit is to understand the most powerful epistemology. Epistemology is philosophy of knowledge, right? So what is the best epistemology to garner truth, to pursue truth? Well, the scientific method is certainly that. The nomological networks that I'm speaking about is that. So the way that you try to protect yourself from being parasitized is to have this epistemological armament that allows you to navigate through this mind-feel of information filled with bullshit, right? So now, by the way, this allows me to also have epistemic humility so that if you were to ask me right now, for whatever reason you said, hey, you live in Canada, Justin Trudeau, your prime minister was the one who legalized marijuana, one of the first countries to do so. So what are the pros and cons? That my answer would be, I simply haven't built the required nomological network for me to offer you a complete answer. So I'm just gonna pass on it because I don't know enough about it. So in other words, I know what I know, and when I know it, I walk with all the swagger of someone who knows it. And when I don't know, I walk with the humility of someone who simply doesn't know. So I think by understanding how you get at truth, the epistemology of getting to truth, that's how you really inoculate yourself against these bad ideas. The other thing that I would say more of a behavioral thing, I always implore people, number one, to not diffuse the responsibility onto others to fight in the battle of ideas. Number two, I always tell them, activate your inner honey badger. And the reason why I do that is because the honey badger is a wonderful metaphor for ferocity and fierceness. The honey badger is the size of a small dog. And yet it is so fierce, so intimidating that it can keep six adult lions at bay. How does it do that? It's intimidating as hell, right? And so what I argue is, you have to have that ideological reflex. If your professor says something that is insane in class, I'm not asking you. Being a honey badger doesn't mean you have to be impolite or insulting or obnoxious, but you have to be committed in defending the truth. Be a honey badger. If someone says something on Facebook that you disagree with, speak your mind. So oftentimes people say, oh, you know, when I meet you in person, you seem so much nicer and warmer than when I see you sometimes taking down people on social media. It's not because suddenly I become violent on social media. It's because, depending on the situation, I could be loving and sweet. When I talk my children to bed, I'm sweet. If you mug me in an alley, I'm violent, right? I haven't changed this positionally. The situation has changed. So when you come at me on social media with your bullshit, it activates my honey badger-ness, right? I get personally offended by your nonsense. And so to answer your question, I think that people have to have the personal reflex to not diffuse this battle to others. I get tons, I get, you know, thousands of messages. Sometimes I can't read all of them where someone says, you know, thank you for existing. I couldn't have gone through my education if it weren't for you. Oh, if you're going to read my message on your show, please don't mention my name. That's not a honey badger. If I can't even get you to side with me publicly, to publicly say I support you, Professor Sad, then you're part of the problem. The guys who landed on the beaches in Normandy, you know, most of them who knew they were going to be mowed down by Nazi machine guns within the next 10 seconds didn't have assured safety passage, right? They knew they were going to be killed. Yet they said, hey, I'll do it. So I get it. I get that you don't want to be a martyr. I get that people are going to de-friend you on Facebook. I get that you might lose your job, but we all have a cross to bear. Stand up. Don't be an inverted rate. Have some testicular fortitude and speak your mind. Beautiful, that's a great way to wrap it. Yeah, this is a great, great talk with you, Professor Sad. This has been a lot of fun. We really appreciate you coming on the show.