Gad Saad, evolutionary psychologist and "Gadfather," dissects how innate sex differences shape mate signaling in hip-hop (men flaunting wealth, women emphasizing beauty) and why ancient texts endure while modern works fade. At Wellesley, he clashes with political correctness, calling it a "parasite" that rewires logic to avoid offense, citing cases like David Reimer’s tragic suicide to underscore biology’s role. Saad exposes academic bias—humanities professors skew 44:1 Democrat—while debating the death penalty for violent repeat offenders as humane. They critique trophy hunting’s exploitation and contrast ethical meat acquisition with status-driven consumption, like luxury cars or "green signaling." Humor, fame, and self-deception tie into evolutionary psychology, with Rogan linking Hollywood’s instability to childhood trauma. Saad warns that ideological censorship—like suppressing criticism of Islam—stifles truth, arguing science must prevail over political correctness. [Automatically generated summary]
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If you date Terrell Swift, you're a fucking idiot.
Because that chick will write songs about you for the end of time.
She's got whole books about John Mayer.
Is that his name?
Mayer or Mayer?
I always say it wrong.
John Mayer.
That chick's got books on that guy.
That's unfair.
Imagine that?
So your thing would be more along the lines of studying why people find it appealing, like the rap type song, why they find it appealing like the Taylor Swift song.
So for example, if you take an ancient Greek poem, right?
We still study it at university today, 3,000 years later, precisely because that poem is going to speak to certain Sibling rivalry, status competition, parental conflicts with their offspring, paternal uncertainty.
All of these factors is what makes literature interesting.
So we could study those.
Ancient Greek poems today and still it resonates with us precisely because they are speaking about some universal truths.
I am absolutely fascinated by what was going on thousands and thousands of years ago and, like, what was the mindset and communication with those people.
And you can kind of pull a little bit of it out of their writing.
But, man, if I could go back in time to some – I mean, it would have to be a culture, obviously, that speaks English where I could understand what they're saying.
I think that would be incredibly fascinating to go back three or four thousand years ago and communicate with people and just try to figure out how they see the world.
You know, a lot of people are very stuck on identifying cultural differences, right?
So the French eat this type of food, the Malaysians do this type of dance.
But what they miss is that underneath all of these important cross-cultural differences is this bedrock of human universals that make us a lot more similar than different from one another.
And especially in the social sciences where people are really focused on just identifying differences, differences, differences.
But of course, there are also things that are so common.
So that, for example, beauty markers.
There are certain beauty markers that if I went to the Yanomomo tribe in the Amazon, they're going to find exactly the same things attractive in the beautiful girls in rap videos as you and I would.
And that's because those beauty markers are evolutionary markers.
And so, yes, culture matters.
Nobody denies the fact that culture is important.
But underneath these cultural differences is a biological heritage that makes you and I very similar to one another.
This thing called the Freedom Project, which tries to promote sort of iconoclastic ideas that kind of break the shackles of political correctness.
And it was just amazing the kind of stuff that was happening there.
I mean, I'll just give you one or two examples.
Apparently, it was a form of oppression for a professor to assume that when he meets students, he right away categorizes them as either being male or female.
So, for example, if I see you in my class and I say, hey, sir, blah, blah, blah, well, that would be a form of oppression because I'm assuming based on your Outer markers that you are male.
Rather, what I should do is sort of do a quick polling of each person in terms of how they'd like to be addressed.
So you may be biologically male, but you are transgender.
And so now you have at universities a discussion as to whether you should have not male and female bathrooms, but you should have gender-neutral bathrooms, and so on and so forth.
And so in academia and the world that I reside in, it's there.
I have an issue with it, that most people who practice this in the extreme form, they say that they should not offend.
But you know who they offend?
They offend anyone who does not agree with their notion that you should not offend.
They will be violent and angry and fucking incredibly insulting to people who do not agree with their terms of what is offensive and what's not offensive.
I have been Some of the meanest, nastiest things have been said to me by people who claim to be in this sort of ultra-sensitive, super open-minded category, which is quite fascinating to me.
I think it's Thomas Sowell, an economist, who basically was criticizing so-called diversity.
So at American universities or in Western universities, everybody talks about diversity, but the only form of diversity that's not allowed is intellectual and political diversity, right?
So we want diversity in terms of skin color, we want diversity in terms of sexual orientation, we want diversity in terms of genders, right?
So all forms of diversity are welcome, but don't you dare step out of line with the accepted politically correct positions.
I mean, eventually, I guess we'll come back to my work.
I face it very much in my work because I rile up all sorts of different people out of the woodwork.
So, for example, radical feminists hate my work because how dare you say that we are biological beings?
How dare you say that there are innate sex differences?
Postmodernists will hate my work because truth is all relative.
There's no such thing as scientific truth.
It's all relative.
The religious folks will hate my work because if Darwinian theory is correct, it is, then where is God in all this?
So there's this long queue of people Who will come out of the woodworks to criticize you, not for any valid scientific reasons, but because it shakes their ideological beliefs.
If there are not differences, any differences in the sexes, what do they use, these radical feminists, what do they use to define the reason why humans have such varying behavior between the male and female genders?
Everything short of genitalia is a social construction, right?
So even, for example, the fact that Bubba grew up to be a block center for the University of Oklahoma and hence he could bunch print 500 pounds.
That's not due to, for example, any physiological reasons that he is so strong.
It's because what happened is his parents aggressively nurtured rough tumble play, whereas for girls, they told them, listen, Linda, you should not be playing so rough.
And that then either gives the green light or the red light to express your physicality.
Well, there are some feminists, and again, I'm paraphrasing their quote.
They'll say, there is no such thing as a male or female brain as there is no such thing as a male or female pancreas or liver.
So the organ that defines your personhood is actually gender neutral.
Now that is astonishing because we are a sexually reproducing species.
So one of the foundational tenets on which biological understanding happens is that we have two types of personalities.
Polymorphisms, if you like, two types.
We have a male and a female so that we could sexually reproduce.
So the idea that much of this is social construction is just laughable.
I think it comes, though, I mean, just to be fair to them, I think it originally comes from a desire to fight institutionalized sexism.
But what happens is that they mix...
Equality under the law as being indistinguishable beings, right?
We could be different beings, yet we should be equal under the law.
But they argue that if you admit to the fact that we are different, then that makes it easier for the status quo sexist patriarchy to maintain its privileged position.
And so they create this edifice of the past 50 to 100 years of social science research that is completely laughable, but that they hang on to like religious belief.
There was a woman that has a video online on YouTube where she claims that there is no difference in the physical strength of men and women, and it's just that men have been encouraged to engage in weightlifting and all these different things, and if women did the same thing, they'd be just as strong.
Well, it's also insane because women who are athletes, women who are elite, world-class athletes, if they compare their hand strength to men who don't even exercise, men are stronger.
Like, you don't understand there's a difference in the male frame.
There's a difference in the shape of the hips, the mechanics of the shoulder, like everything.
The whole body's built different.
And not only that, the fact that it takes 30 years, like your 30 years of being a man with full testosterone, and then it takes like 10 years before your bone density even starts decreasing.
But they wanted to make it so it's completely indistinguishable.
And they also have support from transgender surgeons, which is quite fascinating and completely biased.
These transgender surgeons who want to, or reassignment doctors, and they want to pretend that they're exact equals physiologically.
So in my first book, I talk about John Money, who was a very famous psychologist at Johns Hopkins, really around maybe the 50s to 70s.
He was a big gender theorist who basically argued that everything is due to socialization so that when surgeons would go see him, Because they had to do gender reassignment, either, for example, let's say at a circumcision, in the rare case where you botch the circumcision, and now you have a problem in terms of having a functioning penis, or if you have, for example, a condition micro-penis, where you're unlikely to be a functioning male when you grow up, well, he would say, don't worry about it.
Just have the surgery, put a dress on the kid, and raise them as a girl, and there'd be absolutely no problem.
And, of course, the reality is that that's not how biological sex is determined.
And the most famous case is David Reimer, who was one of his patients, who, after having gone through the treatment, committed suicide.
The reality of What you said, one of the more fascinating aspects of it is the difference between us all being equal as human beings and being the same.
Because we are not equal.
We are very different.
But we all should be equal as far as our rights.
You know, as far as, like, how we're treated by each other and the law and what a person can get away with, you know, what keeps our society civil and kind.
Yeah, we should all have equality, including children and old people and everyone.
Everyone should have equality in that aspect.
That's what makes a civilized, caring society.
The idea that there's no differences as far as the other...
I mean, that we are equal as far as, like, physical strength or as equal as far as, like, our wants and desires and needs, that's denying hundreds of years of literature of the struggle, the struggle in all cultures between the male trying to understand the female, the female trying to understand the male.
We're completely alien to each other.
We exist amongst each other and we gather information over...
A long period of time.
But then we say ridiculous things like, here's one of the things that people love to say.
You can't just be what you want to be and do what you want to do because that's going to drive her fucking crazy because you want to have sex with 100 women, you want to drive 50,000 miles an hour, you want to...
By the way, speaking of sexual variety, which is kind of a central issue in evolutionary psychology, you should see some of the hate mail I get when I state something as banal as, you know, men would have evolved a greater penchant for sexual variety for terribly trivial reasons to explain, right?
I mean, women have a thing called greater parental investment, right?
Women, on average, have from when the menses start to when they have menopause, 400 eggs.
Right?
400 eggs.
So it's a scarce, rare resource.
Men, in one ejaculation, have 250 spermatozoa.
So our gametes are very cheap and abundant.
And then, of course, you add the cost of gestation, right?
The likelihood of having mortality when you're giving birth.
So for all these reasons, women have much greater minimal parental obligations.
Therefore, evolutionary theory would predict that they would be much more judicious when they're making a mate choice.
Because if they make a poor mate choice, it looms much larger for them.
That, on the other hand, for men, the costs of making a poor maid choice are not as great, but the benefits of having multiple mating opportunities are quite beneficial.
And therefore, that's why, on average, you expect men to have a much greater penchant for sexual variety.
Now, that's been documented in 17 trillion different ways, and yet you still have people that will send you hate mail saying, my God, are you a sexist pig?
Well, I think when you're looking at human beings and you're talking about these variables, you're looking at it as objectively and scientifically as possible.
When people want that concrete world that we've discussed, this politically correct, they have this resistance To looking at it in any way other than the way that they have.
And that's actually one of the criticisms that you often get about evolution psychology.
People think that you are trying to justify behaviors.
For example, if you explain why people are likely to cheat on their monogamous unions, then they say, oh, well, you're offering father why people should do it.
And of course, my rebuttal is, I'm certainly doing no such thing similar to how an oncologist studies cancer.
He's not justifying cancer.
He's not for cancer.
He just explains, he or she explains, cancer.
And so I don't have a moral position, right?
I don't come to the table when I'm doing my scientific research hoping for one thing or another.
The data speaks for itself.
But again, the ideologues will say, no, but if this forbidden knowledge gets out, it makes it easier for people to justify this behavior or that behavior.
It's absolutely fascinating to me how human beings react and act, and so this subject is quite near and dear to my heart.
I love it.
I'm fascinated by the chaos of it all.
I love watching people flail and scream and get angry about, whether it's religious anger, people who are legitimately Christian.
I love the God Hates Fags people, the Westboro Baptist people.
I don't love them.
I love everybody in one way.
I would like everybody to be nice.
But I love the fact that they exist because I'm absolutely fascinated by their folly.
I'm absolutely fascinated by this idea that they have in their head that's so concrete that they believe that soldiers are dying because men are being allowed to marry other men.
It's unbelievably weird, but compelling to me.
And in an equal way, the idea that you saying that there is some sort of an invested commitment that a woman has that a man does not have, objectively, just looking at us as a biological reproducing species, that you would experience hate because of that.
As a scientist, as a person just analyzing data, I'm amazed and I'm fascinated and I'm just drawn into it.
And so we escaped Lebanon actually during the civil war.
My parents in 1980 were kidnapped by Fatah, the very peaceful of Fatah because, you know, it's all peaceful.
And then after that, we've never gone back to Lebanon.
And so I, from a very young age, I think I already had sort of the innate penchant to question religious belief, which certainly created friction within my family, because you should just believe and shut up.
But then when I saw the hatred that religion engenders firsthand, I mean, facing execution as we're trying to escape Lebanon...
And then coming to the West, I think I became that much more forceful in my convictions to try to combat religious dogma.
And of course, some of the biggest hate mail that you get is when you do that.
I've even had real professional situations where I've lost professionally because of my position.
Actually, here in California, I've had several schools who otherwise were very, very interested in making me very, very lucrative offers who, after maybe doing a bit of due diligence on me and seeing that I'd written stuff that was critical of religion, suddenly I became persona non grata.
There's another school three years ago who was going to make me a huge, huge offer in Orange County that didn't work out.
Now, to the person who wanted me to appear in front of the God Squad, this was several years ago when I was at UC Irvine, I told him, you do realize that I am an atheist Lebanese Jew evolutionist, so it's going to be a while before I accept Jesus in my heart.
And his answer was, well, no, no, but don't worry, we'll coach you as to what to say.
There's the same ultra-progressives that, you know, would give you a million different ways to address someone based on whatever gender they identify with or, you know, whatever the fuck else weird, ultra-supersensitive thing.
I find that completely fascinating, this Islamophobia thing.
There's several websites that I frequent just to freak myself out.
And the super sensitive ones on a regular basis will go over this Islamophobia.
You may or may not know, it started with the Muslim Brotherhood, a very smart strategy, where they knew that the West is very open to being tolerant and so on, and so they kind of piggybacked on that.
And so in academia, you just never criticize that one idea.
Now that's very dangerous, because in a sane world, All beliefs should be open to criticism.
Well, I was raised a Catholic for a very short amount of time, and I had a very tumultuous childhood.
And when I was in first grade, my parents put me in Catholic school.
And up until then, I was...
Obviously, I don't remember much of this, but I was very religious.
And it was because my parents were divorcing...
And there was a lot of violence in the household and I had this idea in my head that like somehow or another God was the right way and everybody else was wrong.
Going to Catholic school cured me of that entirely.
The nun that I had, Sister Mary Josephine, I don't remember much about being six years old, but I remember that bitch.
She was very important to me.
She really straightened me out because I realized that she has no connection whatsoever to anything holy or majestic.
She represented and she showed all of the horrors of humanity.
Meanness, evilness, being nasty to children, fear-mongering, and this idea.
You know, I'm fascinated by it, but I understand that people need the- they have this desire to believe in things.
I understand that.
But I don't understand how you can be a rational, intelligent, objective person who looks at some shit that people wrote thousands of years ago and say, no, this is- This is immobile.
So I do, in one of my latest books, I have a chapter which I think got me in trouble with one of the Southern California schools that I was getting an offer from because I'd given them a signed copy of the book.
And then they probably got to that chapter.
That chapter is called Marketing Hope by Selling Lies.
And so what I do in that chapter is I go through different hope peddlers, of which religion is the greatest, but others would be medical quackery, self-help gurus, and so on.
So different agents that peddle hope, and I argue, again, from an evolutionary perspective, because they're very successful because they cater to these very basal Darwinian insecurities.
None greater than the very obvious one of existential angst, right?
We're the only animal that we're aware of that actually is aware that we are on a death sentence, right?
I mean, I know that I've got another, luckily, maybe 40 years, right?
Well, if I have high cholesterol, I go to my physician, he gives me Lipitor, boom, LDL goes down, everybody's happy.
But what pill do I take to solve this really looming problem that's at the end of the road called my death?
Well, different religions will give you different dances, but they all certainly promise you some form of eternity.
It could be in the form of reincarnation.
It could be I'll be with Jesus.
It could be, you know, with the virgins.
But there are all sorts of ways by which I can secure my eternity.
And I think for most people, it's very difficult to not drink that Kool-Aid.
I think it takes almost a pathological and dysfunctional honesty to say, I'm not going to buy that.
I realize that I've got 80 years, and I'm going to really do the best that I can during those 80 years.
I think it's a lot more comforting to say, no, this party's going to go on forever.
It's also, there's something about human beings where we realize somewhere along the line that there's no one alive that has any more answers about what lies beyond the great beyond, you know, after death, what lies beyond the yawning grave.
There's no immortality unless there's some sort of a fractal nature to the universe where life and death is this completely ongoing cycle where the deeper you go, it starts again.
I remember when I was a kid, I used to think of space like a neighborhood.
I really did.
I remember very succinctly that I would like look at like Buck Rogers and all these different space.
I'm like, oh, they're going to go over to this town and they're going to come back and this is our neighborhood.
They're going to go to that neighborhood and come back.
And then as I got older and I started studying astronomy and I started studying the, and as I got older, also the knowledge that they had about the amount of stars changed.
And they started talking about how there's more stars in our galaxy than there are grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth.
And then I remember just thinking, well, this is a motherfucker of a neighborhood.
This is starting to get really strange.
And then...
As you get older still, you realize that there's no way they know how big it all is.
They have a general sense of 14 plus billion light years.
But then there's the fractal nature of black holes, the possibility that inside every galaxy is a black hole that contains an entirely new universe.
And this is something that's being thrown about, not by freaks, but by real serious legitimate scientists.
So that alone is so bizarre.
The idea that you live and die seems like very trivial.
They come back again or reincarnation.
I mean, why not?
If a supernova can exist, you know, why is it so crazy that a person lives for eternity and just continues to reincarnate?
Well, and in light of all that vastness that you said, isn't it incredible that all the monotheistic Abrahamic religions would argue that on some small speck of sand, in some Bronze Age point, God spoke to some prophet and told him, you really better not eat.
Well, what they argue is that what makes us human is that we transcend our biology.
So don't use the evolutionary mechanisms that explain the behavior of the zebra and the dog and the mosquito.
To explain our behaviors.
What makes us human is precisely that we're able to transcend these biological imperatives.
And so the field of anthropology, not bio-anthropology, which is a subset of anthropology that recognizes biology, but for example cultural anthropology is all about going to all of these exotic cultures and demonstrating how each culture is unique and different and hence there are no such thing as human universals.
Social psychology is pretty much operated without any understanding of biology.
So what I did in my work I came along and I founded this field, which I coined evolutionary consumption, where I apply evolutionary theory and biology to study consumer behavior.
But more generally, my real goal is to what I call, maybe it's a grand goal, to Darwinize the business school.
The idea is that you can't study anything.
You can't study investment psychology or personnel psychology or organizational behavior or consumer behavior.
Without recognizing that all of these players are biological beings, right?
The decision that you make if your blood sugar is low and you're hungry is very different than the decision you make if you're satiated, right?
I mean, that's a trivial example, but a very obvious one.
So the idea that economists have spent, you know, 100 years developing all these fanciful mathematical models without ever recognizing that there are these biological forces that compel us to be the...
Decision-makers that we are.
It's astounding to me.
So the greatest blowback has been from social scientists who typically have been very reticent to accept what this biology boy is saying about consumer behavior and so on.
There's a guy called J.B.S. Haldane, who was a very famous evolutionary geneticist who was very quotable, had all these great quips.
So he said that there are four stages that scientists go through before they accept a theory.
And I'll start you paraphrasing.
So stage one, this is bullshit.
This is garbage.
Stage two, well, this might be true, but it's rather perverse.
Stage three, well, this is true, but largely unimportant.
And stage four, oh, I always said so.
Now, the reason why that quote captures, I mean, if I ever did an autobiography of my scientific career, that quote is basically my book, because I've seen people go through these four stages in their responses to my work.
At first, I couldn't get an invitation to get 20 minutes at a conference to speak, because what does biology have to do with anything?
And now, of course, science is an autocorrective process.
The evidence is coming in my way, and I don't mean to gloat about it.
I hope I'm not getting it wrong, but maybe 300,000 species of...
Beetles.
And so in his quote, he basically says, you know, if God exists, he must have a particular penchant for beetles for having spent so much effort in coming up with all of these different species variations.
So that means basically when you send your paper to a scientific journal, usually the editor will look at your paper and say, okay, well, here are three reviewers that I think would be appropriate for this paper.
And then he sends it off, and then the process starts, and it goes back and forth for probably several years.
When he desk rejects this, he's basically saying that this paper is not worthy of even going out for review.
And so, you know, I would send all of these papers to these top journals, and the editor would write back to me, sorry, I'm not even sending it through the review process.
Well, probably the first one was one where I was introducing the theoretical framework of how to apply evolutionary psychology in understanding marketing.
And usually the argument that I would receive, which is breathtakingly inane in its stupidity, is, well, evolutionary theory is just a bunch of just-so storytelling, right?
You just come up with these fanciful post-hoc stories, since obviously you're not conducting...
An experiment in a lab to demonstrate evolution.
And of course, that is so laughable because if that were true, how is it that astrophysicists study the origin of the universe that's 14 billion years ago, right?
They certainly don't conduct an experiment in the lab.
But again, if you're very paradigmatically bound to manipulating something in the lab, Then somehow evolutionary theory seems epistemologically, in terms of the philosophy of science, it seems as though you're just waving your hand and telling stories, post-hoc stories.
Now the reality is that that's exactly the opposite of what we do.
If anything, there is no intellectual idea that has received as much empirical support as evolution.
I mean, it is as clear as gravity.
Yet people somehow can't get around to understanding how you could explain something that happened hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years ago.
And so the original rejections were always, oh, but come on, we don't take things at faith here.
No, because I, and that's a great question, because I think I was fortunate enough to have the personality for this endeavor.
In other words, it's not just that you had to have the brains to do what I was doing.
If I would suck my thumb, go into a fetal position and start crying every time somebody rejected me, rejected my work, then it wouldn't.
But because I was a fighter, because I was a high testosterone guy, then that only compelled me to come back and say, I'm going to prove these guys wrong.
But it delayed the process because I was kept out of many of the leading consumer behavior and marketing journals.
So I kind of went around them.
I published books that became bestsellers.
I published in medicine and economics and psychology.
And only recently have I tried to come back to the folks that I'm most trying to convince, and those are the consumer psychologists.
Now, luckily, I'm their friend, but for years I was really sort of at the periphery.
It's fascinating as well that the attitudes about these subjects have evolved and changed within science and within modern academia.
It's really interesting to see this sort of evolution of these ideas and this acceptance of ideas that didn't exist before, but along with The new craziness.
The new fat acceptance and all this other nonsense.
These new politically correct terms and this parasitic thinking that you so described so well.
This is the new threat to unbiased objective thinking.
As a matter of fact, in my Wellesley talk that I mentioned earlier, I put up a list of suggested topics that these trigger warning folks were saying require trigger warnings.
It was literally everything.
The discussion of pregnancy, of sex, of disease, of war, of criminality, of mating, all of these things could potentially cause some distress to somebody And should therefore come with a trigger warning.
Now, for somebody who escaped Lebanon under immediate threat of execution, I look at that and I say, this is a decadent society in that if that's the things that worry people, they should really go spend a day in the neighborhoods where I grew up, and then maybe they'd have a different perspective as to what they should be picketing against.
My thought is that people are just so used to this soft life of everything being really easy to achieve that they have never developed this understanding of, first of all, how fortunate we are to be living in this time and age, to experience this easy life that we live in, but that we're really lucky.
We're really lucky.
To focus on a bunch of nonsense and to get carried away thinking about all these ultra-supersensitive notions and to dwell on them as if in some way you're going to make the world a better place by doing that.
But in doing it with very little cost to me, it takes a lot more guts to stand up against Islam than to stand up against some hick, evolution-denying senator who's Republican.
So, for example, if I look at my Facebook friends, if I put up a post that is critical of the senator who is a redneck Republican...
I'll get from my academic colleagues 80 likes.
And it's some inane, silly thing.
But if I put some horrifying reality about 200,000 Syrians being butchered, they are so loud in their silence.
Because that's scary, right?
And so, for example, the Western feminists are very, very quick to chastise David Letterman if he makes a sexist joke or whatever it was to his intern.
That shows great courage.
But to speak against genital mutilation in the Islamic world or other parts of the world or all kinds of other injustices that women face, well, we should be quiet about that.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a woman who was born into Islam, who escaped an arranged marriage, moved to Netherlands, became a Dutch parliamentarian, and then was part of a documentary that was offensive to some Muslims, and then she had to have protection for the rest of her life, now has moved to the United States.
And has spent pretty much her entire career fighting for the rights of women, not just Muslim women, women in general, but of course many Muslim women in those areas are mistreated.
So Brandeis University decides to bestow her, this is very recently, a couple of months ago, bestow her a, I think, maybe honorary doctorate or speech convocation, to speak at the convocation.
And then all of the professors Oh, God.
So, you know, I mean, we're pretty much lost as a society if we can't identify who the heroes are and who is on the right side of each issue.
Not just that, but the educators are the ones that are having this issue.
The educators are the ones that are having a hard time recognizing who's on the right side of things.
I think there's one very important thing that you brought up, and that's the social aspect, the social gratification, the social reward aspect of supporting things that we all agree upon, like that these Hick senators are bad, and then the scariness of Islam, the scariness of criticizing the Muslim world, and then this concept of Islamophobia.
gotten into people's minds.
But that thing that people do where they seek out what I call socially progressive brownie points.
Like men who declare themselves openly feminists, male feminists.
Like, look, I'm a humanist.
I believe that we are all just brothers and sisters on this planet, all of us, including people in other cultures and countries.
And I'm not a nationalist.
I think it's all nonsense.
I really do.
I mean, I would love it if we could all understand each other.
I think it would make a lot more sense if we spoke one language so I could understand people in China.
But I don't feel about them any differently than I feel about a guy who lives down the street.
I try very hard to work on that.
So when I get this thing where people start identifying with one gender and one gender specifically, And there's another thing that men are doing where they're not only proclaiming themselves as a male feminist, but they're also saying that if they are unjustly accused of something, that they would happily be unjustly accused of something if it could somehow or another prevent women from being persecuted.
At my university, right now in Montreal, at one point I sat, precisely because people had a sense of some of the positions I held, they asked me to come in and sit on a Religious Accommodation Committee.
We're a secular university in a secular society, officially, as the official law.
So what does it mean to say that we're going to now enact A religious accommodation policy.
I mean, that's like saying, I am a virgin, but I'm pregnant.
I mean, the term can't make sense, right?
So my position was, I am equally non-pliant to anybody's religious beliefs.
If Jews come to my class and say, we want to do Yom Kippur, blah, blah, blah, well, I'm Jewish, and I'm still going to come to the lecture.
But now, if Muslims come and say, we want to take Hajj for three weeks at Mecca, so we won't be showing up to your class for three weeks, Well, I'm equally unreceptive to that idea.
Well, it seemed like most people were pretty happy with my general position as long as it didn't apply to this one particular group.
Now, that's suicidal, right?
That can't be because that's already institutionalizing the fact that people are not all equal.
Some people deserve more accommodations than others.
That's dangerous, right?
So in the US, freedom of religion also includes, as you know, I mean, it's a cliche, freedom from religion.
Be religious.
Just don't put it in my face.
But I think in our desperate desire to constantly accommodate people, we're going down the wrong path.
And by the way, Brandeis University, as you may know, was founded by a liberal, well, by Brandeis, who was trying to kind of found an institution that That would be open to all, that would be pluralistic precisely because of some of the anti-Semitism that Jewish students would have faced at some of the sort of Northeastern schools.
And so the school is founded on these principles and then at first opportunity you violate everything that you stand for.
Well, if I can be modest, I think it's guys like me who are really in the wilderness who try to come out of the woodworks and have the courage and the big...
I have testicles to try to do that, but I think most people have herd instincts.
I remember at one point I played in a league called the Black League, where there were only two non-black guys.
I was one of them.
If somebody would tackle me, say, stop whining, get up, white bitch.
Usually the way I fought that is I'd say, I'm not going to...
Get by this guy next time around, and I'm going to score a goal.
I didn't kind of curl into a fetal position and start crying.
Well, today, they are, I mean, facetiously, they are commissars standing around the field making sure that nobody utters any of these slur words because then you could be taken to a hate speech code tribunal, right?
I mean, in Canada, we have hate speech laws.
I mean, how could that be?
Now, of course, I'm not suggesting that we should all be Insulting one another.
And of course we should all be kind and gentle to each other.
But the idea that if you tell me, white bitch, I could actually impose upon you to go to a hate speech tribunal is astounding.
I mean, what's freedom of speech?
I mean, freedom of speech is the right to also be an asshole, correct?
Well, freedom of speech is the right to be an asshole, but in other terms, freedom of speech, on the other hand, in response to your being an asshole, is the right to ostracize you.
It's the right to just get you out of social groups, and that's how you recognize assholes.
Sanitize the world and remove half the language and put trigger warnings out for everything that everybody says, it's very difficult to get to the heart of what someone's trying to communicate.
When we're making mouth noises, trying to express our thoughts, and we're limited in such an amazing way by so many different forms of expression.
Here's a great example that's happening all over the West and certainly in Canada and the US. Try to give a lecture or invite somebody either that has a pro-Israel position or an anti-Islam position and see what happens.
Go to UC Irvine and see what happens.
The former ambassador of Israel tried to come and give a lecture.
It wasn't an incendiary thing.
He wasn't going to be saying some horribly controversial things.
And yet they tried to shut him down.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the current prime minister of Israel, was shut down at my university.
At Concordia University in Montreal, the prime minister of a democratically elected government Our only supposed true ally in the Middle East was unable to speak because there was great threat of danger.
Now that's astonishingly dangerous.
If that guy can't speak, probably you and I are not going to have much of a voice.
I forget which one but there was a speech by a guy who was considered to be a men's rights advocate with the insult as they call them MRAs and he had written a book and he was giving the speech And these feminists were protesting.
I wrote an article on my Psychology Today blog maybe about two years ago where this wasn't my study.
I was simply summarizing somebody else's work.
What he had basically done, or I think there were several researchers, they had looked at the political leanings of professors at American universities, whether they're Democrat or Republican, and they actually then broke it down by departments.
So, for example, what would be the Democrat versus Republican ratio in sociology versus in physics?
What they found is that I think if I'm going on memory, I think that the ratio is about 5 to 1 Democrat to Republican.
And in some departments, most notably, for example, in the humanities and sociology and so on, it was 44 to 1. Now, I didn't present this as this is good or this is bad, but I certainly was trying to make the point that on some issues, that's not a good idea.
For example, what should be fiscal policy?
What should be our position regarding immigration?
What is the position regarding the death penalty?
These are not clear sort of scientifically, right?
I mean, it depends.
And to have a sanitized vehicle The only thing that protects me in such situations is that being Canadian, I could say these things without appearing as though I have a dog in the fight.
Hey, I'm not Democrat.
I'm not Republican.
I'm Canadian.
So I must be unbiased.
And so in a sense, they'll give me a bit of a get out of jail card because it doesn't appear as though I'm fighting for one or the other.
But still, the blowback was astonishing because how dare I point to this as though it were a bad thing?
I mean, everybody knows that every Democrat is perfect on everything.
And every Republican is an idiot, you know, toothless, evolution-denying buffoon.
And that strikes me as astonishing from otherwise intelligent people.
The world is more nuanced, right?
There are many issues on which I agree with Democrats as a Canadian.
There are a few issues on which I actually agree more with Republicans.
Well, in their defense, though, the points that are taken by the Republicans so often are, they're really, if you had to choose, like, one side that's paying attention to science and one side that's paying attention to religion, it's pretty clear.
Well, listen, and I'm an evolutionist, so obviously when it's going to come on that issue, I'm going to be a lot more with the Democrats than all the, but, for example, my position, you may disagree, I hope you don't kick me out of here.
I think that if you are caught having raped and killed 10 children and we've got the DNA of you in the 10 children, it's incontrovertible that you are guilty.
I don't see it as a terrible moral issue that we could potentially discuss the possibility of executing you.
As a matter of fact, I think that in some cases, the amount of rights that we give to otherwise homeless Horrifying monsters, that itself is barbaric.
So on that dimension, I'm likely to be much more, quote, And I am as well.
Yeah, and I think that that's also a mark of someone who doesn't have a dog in the fight, as you said before.
I think when you look at the world, there's a lot of variables that must be taken into consideration.
As soon as you deny those variables because you have a specific stance, it's a predetermined...
Pattern of thinking that you've aligned yourself with I'm on the left and as a Democrat like I was having a conversation with someone the other day and they were talking about Upcoming elections and they said if we lose the house if we lose like he's a fucking comedian He's a comedian that I'm talking to and he's talking about the Democrats and he's on team we and I'm like wow I'm a hundred percent for the death penalty in term in like a Ted Bundy type character some monster and But my problem with it,
my number one problem with it, is that I don't believe that the system is a good system.
I don't believe it's infallible.
I think there's a lot of issues when it comes to people who are prosecutors who deny evidence, withhold evidence.
They know that they're wrong and they still arrest people.
They still prosecute people.
There's been so many instances of that.
I can't trust their judgment.
I can't trust.
There was a video the other day of a man who was a police officer pulling some woman.
She was trying to resist.
He threw her to the ground and he's beating her, punching her in the face in Los Angeles.
And as long as that is a part of our legal system, this guy...
I mean, she wasn't fighting back.
He wasn't fighting for his life.
She was resisting...
I don't know what the circumstances were, but whatever I know is if that is the only way you can handle that woman, you shouldn't be a police officer.
And that's ridiculous.
As long as that exists, that's part of our legal system.
That's just a human flaw.
That exists on all levels.
That'll exist as far as a police officer who's on the street.
That'll exist as far as a prosecutor, as a judge, a person running a prison.
There's going to be human flaws in the entire system.
And that's the only reason why I hesitate as far as...
I tell you a story about sort of police misconduct.
Many years ago, I had met a guy who had served as a public defender in the L.A. County system.
And as we were chatting, I was very interested in all the stuff that he had to say.
He said to me, one advice I could give you is don't ever do anything in California that would have you end up in L.A. County jail.
I said, oh, why is that?
I said, give me an example of why would somebody like me?
He goes, let's suppose you're a recidivist, drink-and-drive kind of guy, and the cops are pissed off at you.
They'll take you to the jail, they'll throw you with all the gangbangers, and they'll simply scream out, fresh fish out of water.
That's exactly the term that he used, which basically is the code word for, have at him, boys, and we won't hear his screams.
And I remember, this was in the late 80s, And subsequently, I actually met the son of this guy, coincidentally, and later found out that that was his father.
He was an academic also.
But anyway, so that's an example of misconduct where, you know, if you piss off these cops, they could do all sorts of things to you that can have some profound consequences on your body.
Yeah, I just want to state for the record, I'm a big supporter of law enforcement.
Always have been.
One bad cop does not.
Cops make bad.
Make all cops bad.
It's humans.
We're flawed.
You know, not every doctor is a good person.
I mean, I have a friend who used to work when he was younger.
He worked at a resort.
And he said he would overhear these doctors, very specifically remember, overhearing these doctors bragging about talking this guy into a surgery department.
And about how he's going to buy a car now.
You know, like, that's a new whatever it was, you know, Porsche, whatever.
For me, you know, he was bragging about talking to this guy into surgery.
I don't know if you've seen the stat, and I can't cite who came up with it, but apparently when you catch a pedophile, he's on average committed 100 transgressions prior to you catching him for the first time.
So why does this guy benefit from all of our legals?
I mean, if you've done this stuff so many times, why do we have to be so humane?
I would actually argue it's inhumane to be so humane to this guy.
And I wrote an article on Psychology Today where I was talking about...
I don't know if you remember the case with these two guys in Connecticut who did a home invasion.
And they raped the girls and the mother and set the house on fire, beat the father, but he survived and so on.
And so it was coming up to their death penalty.
And so as a tribute to that case, I wrote an article on my Psychology Today blog, which I think I titled, Is the Death Penalty Barbaric?
And I was arguing that for these kinds of guys, no, it's not.
Well, you should have seen my progressive, enlightened, cafe-sipping academic colleagues Scoff at my barbarism, right?
I mean, what kind of hick must I be to actually even hold those sentiments?
If it comes between putting me in jail for the rest of my life in some cage where I have to be constantly in fear of men raping me and stabbing me with toothbrushes that they've sharpened in knives, I'll take death.
If there's no possible, reasonable hope for parole, the idea of keeping someone in a jail to rot for the rest of their life is probably more suffering.
I mean, everyone that I know that has these horrible relationships with either boyfriends and girlfriends or with their parents or with their job, they seem to carry those on all the time.
It becomes almost a part of the norm of relationships.
But the people that I know that have Healthy relationships with their boyfriends and girlfriends or wives and husbands.
Healthy relationships with their children.
Healthy relationships with their friends.
Those are the happiest people I know.
You can foster that and you can somehow or another generate this sort of beautiful environment around the closest people to you.
Well, there's this thing, speaking of guys who are in the business of doing heroic acts, you've heard of the fireman fantasy.
I mean, the fact that women find guys, well, firemen, to be very attractive.
And it actually turns out that there was a study that was done that actually shows this to be the case.
And I discussed this in one of my articles on Psychology Today.
If you have a guy approach women either wearing a fireman's suit or not, his chances of getting her phone number increases quite substantially if he is wearing a fireman.
In one version, you approach women at a cafe wearing the stuff, and in another version, you don't.
The guy who actually did that research is a French psychologist.
His name is Nicolas Guéguin, and I've actually covered a few of his studies on my website.
My most read article ever, over maybe three, four hundred thousand readers, It's one of his studies where I was simply, because we're going to talk about the blowback issue now and here again.
It was a study where he looked at the likelihood of women being picked up as hitchhikers as a function of their breast size.
So he actually had the same woman And they, you know, artificially manipulated her breast size, and on different days she would stand there, and of course it turned out that men were much more likely to pick up the woman if she had, the same woman, if she had bigger breast size.
So I just summarized that study, put it up, and then I remember I'd gone on vacation, came back from vacation, found out that it had completely gone viral, but I had a million hate mail Not just from readers, but from fellow Psychology Today bloggers who were arguing that I was peddling pornography.
Because I had a picture as the teaser image for that article.
I had a photo of a woman sitting in a passenger seat with large breasts.
Well, it seemed appropriate for the topic given that that's what the topic of the study was.
But by putting that image, I was objectifying women.
I was treating them as mere sex objects.
And so even though I had nothing to do with the study and I was simply summarizing somebody else's work, I was a horrifying pornographic peddler.
You know, it's funny you talk about these Hollywood types.
I wrote an article, which one of those really popular ones on Psychology Today, where I was talking about the narcissism and grandiosity of celebrities.
Madonna, because of her Kabbalah juice...
She says that the radiation problem in some lake in Ukraine could be resolved by putting some Kabbalah juice on it.
No, but seriously, and what I argue there is that You know, if you're walking all day with yes-men catering to each of your whims, you actually live in a world where you truly start thinking that you're a deity.
I mean, you really did save the world.
I'm Tom Cruise and I saved the world in Mission Impossible, whatever.
And therefore, it is perfectly reasonable that I have something profound to say about everything.
Right?
Therefore, Tom Cruise says that there is no such thing as psychiatric illnesses.
You just have to do exercise and vitamins.
And that we don't take that seriously is really an affront to him.
And so I had written an article where I was saying that it's really astounding the type of narcissism that these folks...
And I argued that in part it comes from a form of guilt.
That deep in the recesses of their bedrooms when they turn off the lights, many of them actually know that they are frauds that are not really deserving of all of the perks that they've received.
And so one of the ways that maybe I could fix that is by demonstrating that I'm much more than a mere actor.
I'm really helping in Darfur.
I'm really helping solve the radiation problem in the Ukraine and so on and so forth.
Because then I seem as though maybe I am more worthy of all the accolades that are being bestowed upon me.
That's a very fascinating way of looking at it, and I think you probably are onto something there.
I think the knowledge and the understanding that they're frauds, the deep-seated knowledge, whether they avoid it and deny it or not, there's a lot of people that are horrible people that are involved in charitable organizations.
And one of the reasons being is to sort of show that they...
Exactly.
There's a guy who's a pretty blatant plagiarist who's involved in some pretty interesting charities.
Good charities.
Very good charities.
But I had a conversation with someone about it, and they were talking about, hey, you know what?
He does so much good for this organization, I don't care.
I go, do you understand that that's probably why he does that?
He's fucked over his friends, he's stolen their work, and passed it off as his own, yet he supports firefighters.
Do you not understand that that's what's going on there?
I mean, he's pretty obvious.
If you listen to him talk for any long period of time, there's something wrong.
There's like some connections inside the mind that are not being made, and he's had a strategy.
And the strategy to avoid criticism is to show charitable work.
Like Lance Armstrong, whenever he was confronted about his drug use, he'd always talk about how much he's doing for cancer.
For cancer research.
That was his whole thing.
Despite the fact that he'd sued people that had claimed that their lives had been affected by his drug use, that people that they love had been drug tested, and that they lost their entire career, and that they were aligned with Lance Armstrong, did drugs with Lance Armstrong.
Lance Armstrong would sue these people.
And then finally came out and told the truth and passed off his organization to other people.
Now he's a fucking broken man.
Rightly so.
Because he's a goddamn sociopath.
But this instance, or this insistence rather, of being a part of a charitable organization and being the figurehead.
Not just silently.
I'm a big fan of not talking about charities that I contribute to.
I don't like to.
Because I think there's something sneaky about...
It's almost like it...
Like, if you give $1,000 to a charity, but then you let everybody know, hey, I just gave $1,000 to a charity.
Because everybody in their circle can also buy a Maserati.
So they actually drive pretty, oftentimes pretty, you know, cheapish cars because that's not going to be a very honest signal of my true value because everybody in my social group can imitate it.
But if I can give a hundred million dollars to the so-and-so cancer or buy a hundred million dollar painting that a two-year-old could have otherwise painted, boy, that's an honest signal of my quality, right?
And so I actually talk about this exact idea of not advertising your generosity.
Yeah, it's a fascinating, fascinating aspect of human beings, this need to be considered altruistic, this need to be considered benevolent.
You know, to advertise it instead of just being, you know, that you can't exist in the silence of the personal satisfaction of contributing and giving out love and generosity, that you have to be rewarded for it.
Well, I have a section in my first book which I titled Philanthropy as a Costly Signal.
The costly signaling in biology, so the peacock's tail is a costly signal because it actually serves as a really honest signal of my worth.
For me to carry this burdensome tail and avoid predators, then you really should take me seriously, all you female hens, because I am here and I've survived.
So that's called an honest signal or a costly signal.
Well, philanthropy, I argue, in many cases, is that honest signal precisely for the reasons that we're talking about.
I can't speak to why one culture decides to use one particular form of status.
If you're the Maasai tribe in Africa, it might be the number of cattle heads that you have that is the peacocking, right?
So what we do know is that different cultures will use different forms of peacocking, but in all cultures it is going to be the males in that culture who engage in the act.
So I'll tell you three scientific studies, one of which is mine, and then a personal story of my brother who lives in Southern California.
So Nicolas Gauguin, the guy who did the breast and...
French guy.
Did a study, very much similar in spirit, where instead of manipulating the fireman suit, he had the same guy approach different women as a function of, and manipulated which car he was driving.
I can't remember the exact details, but something like, there's a three-time increase in the likelihood of a woman giving you her phone number if you are driving a high-status car versus a low-status car.
And the same guy, by the way, Did another study where the guy who was approaching the women was either with a baby or not and in another version with a dog or not.
Having a dog increases digits of attention.
And interacting with a baby also increases it.
So I joke that you should be driving a Lamborghini while having a dog next to you and a baby while wearing a fireman suit.
You're going to get all the ladies in Orange County and Newport Beach.
So that's one.
Another study, and then I'm going to come to my study in a second.
In another study, not by this guy, they took the same man, put him either in a Bentley or in a Ford Fiesta, and did the same thing with a woman.
And then it was opposite sex ratings.
So the women would rate the two guys.
and the same guy when he is in the Bentley was viewed as astonishingly more handsome, which of course objectively can't be.
I mean, your physical traits don't change, but there was a glow effect from the car that he's driving.
He's handsome.
He's Brad Pitt in this car.
He's a loser in this other car.
But the same manipulation on women, men didn't care.
In other words, their evaluations of how attractive the woman was did not depend on which car she was seated in.
So, yeah, I would say the physical attraction wouldn't change, but I would say that the desire to approach that person or the willingness to approach that person...
We brought people into the lab and then we rented a Porsche.
This wasn't imagine you're driving a Porsche.
We actually rented a Porsche.
As I tell in one of my TED talks, try to get a granting agency to release money to do research where you're saying basically, I'm going to rent a Porsche for the weekend as part of my research.
So we rented a Porsche and then we had some other beaten up car.
We had the same men drive both cars either in downtown Montreal on a Friday evening where everybody could see you driving the car or on a semi-deserted highway where nobody could see you.
And at the end of each of the driving conditions, we collected salivary assays to then measure their fluctuating levels of testosterone.
And the idea being that when you put them in the Porsche, it's going to explode.
And that's exactly what we found.
Now, one of the reviewers had written, he said, but how do you know that's just not because they're driving fast?
And so that's causing a rise in testosterone.
And the way we could control for that is on downtown Montreal, On a Friday evening, it's bumper to bumper traffic.
I mean, it's like being in a parking lot.
So it's certainly not because you were driving fast.
It's because everybody could see that I am sitting in a Porsche.
So your endocrinological system exploded simply because of this imbuing of social status to you.
And we know this from other animals where if you and I fight, if we're two males, we fight.
If you win, your testosterone goes up.
If I lose, my testosterone goes down.
And so here we were applying this exact idea to the consumer setting.
Well, I have a study that's not yet published, speaking of...
The car you drive and some morphological feature.
You're going to like this one.
So this is not published yet with one of my former doctoral students.
We actually created online dating profiles of a man where everything is the same except that in one version his prized favorite position is a fancy red Porsche or some shitty Kia or whatever it is.
And then we asked men and women who were looking at this profile to evaluate the guy's height.
Watch what happened.
Men, when they evaluate the guy with the Porsche, denigrate his height.
He's shorter.
Women increase his height.
This is exactly what you would expect from an evolutionary perspective, right?
So I have a brother who's lived in California for 30 years, who, by the way, I think I'd sent you this by email, was a fighter, was an Olympian judo fighter who competed in the 1976 Olympics.
And he used to always say, by the way, before there was ever an MMA, I would always ask him, if you were in a fight at a bar against some boxer or some karate guy, who would win?
Which was kind of what started the whole MMA thing.
And he used to always tell me...
Oh, I will destroy them because they might get one hit on me, but once I get them, and once we go down on the ground, they're done.
So anyways, he made a lot of money in the software industry in Southern California.
And so he was the classic kind of peacocking guy.
He owned three Ferraris, an Aston Martin Lagunda, and so on.
And so we would play this game.
To my chagrin, he liked to play this game.
We'd go to a nightclub.
This is before I was married, in case my wife was listening.
No, but this was before we were married.
We would walk into a bar, these fancy schmancy clubs, and he'd say, take your time and look around and find the most stunning, unattainable woman in this place.
Now, take your time.
So I'd go around, look around, I'd pick the girl who's not only the most beautiful, but the one who is clearly accompanied by a guy who looks like a brute, and they seem to be very intensely in love.
So now I've really raised the bar of him not being able to get her.
Now, my brother is about 5'3", so he's not tall and so on.
But boys, he's carrying the big testicles of owning all those Ferraris.
And so he'd say, okay, that's the girl you want me to approach?
Okay.
So he'd wait like a shark, and then the guy would go to the bathroom.
He'd approach the girl.
He'd come up to about here on her.
I mean, it was just incredible to watch.
He'd come back to me and say, she'll call me tomorrow.
I've tried being a vegetarian once when I was competing, back when I was fighting, and I didn't perform as well.
I didn't have as much energy.
I didn't feel as good.
Granted, in all fairness, my knowledge of nutrition was Far less than than it is now, and I didn't have the best diet in the world, and I was also very young.
But, you know, animals, like humans, live a finite life, and I think that they eat each other.
The world that they live in is unbelievably cruel, and if it wasn't for getting killed by a hunter, it's not like they're gonna live forever and become magic, okay?
They get killed by coyotes and mountain lions and I like going into that world and acquiring meat.
My goal is, at the end of 2014, all the meat I eat at home to only be from my hunting.
Great guy and really fascinating and beautiful documentarian.
He's just really wonderful documentaries.
And he had this one where he went to this African hunting camp for several weeks and stayed there and tried to really understand what it was all about and interviewed all these people and a lot of them were just despicable.
They're just these real hickey people like, yeah, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna try to get the big five.
I'm gonna get a rhino, I'm gonna get an elephant.
All they want to do is like spend money and bring home tusks and horns and all this different shit.
It's pretty gross because it's just they're killing to acquire trophies.
And what they're doing is they're killing inside these high fences where these animals, it's not like you're out there.
You're going to...
And it's not to say that I'm opposed to high fence hunting because I think if you're hunting like deer or an animal that you're just going to eat...
It's essentially not that much different than going to a lake that's been stocked.
If you're going to a lake and they stock the lake with trout to ensure that there's fish deficient, those fish are not going to get out of that lake and fly to Nebraska.
That's where they live.
They're stuck there.
And I don't think there's any difference between that and these high-fence hunting operations in Texas, which I don't have any problem with at all.
They have these...
1,000 acres, and one of them I know of is 14,000 acres, and they keep deer on it.
And why do they have the fences up?
Well, to keep poachers out.
And they also make a living off of guiding people to hunt these animals.
And for them, it's like the ethical acquiring of your own meat.
And it's venison.
It's very delicious.
It tastes good.
It's good for you.
It's very healthy meat.
I don't have a problem with that.
The African thing is so confusing because...
There was a woman recently that was on the news this past week.
She was 19 years old.
She went to Africa and took all these photos with her with a lion that she killed.
And I think that's where I have an issue with this Africa thing.
But where it gets weird is that those animals, many of them were on the verge of extinction, but now they're in very high numbers.
The reason being is that they're in these high fence operations, so it's such a catch-22.
On one hand, they were on the verge of extinction, and on another hand, Now they have these high populations, and they're super healthy, but they only exist as a commodity to be hunted down.
I mean, and the way they're doing it is like there's a waterhole, and there's like a hundred animals in front of the waterhole, and these people just sit there, and they just shoot one.
Those animals, they're never going to leave and go 100 miles away to a different place and then go across a river.
Mule deer, they discovered that mule deer in America, this is a really recent discovery, they had no idea how far they migrate, but they migrate as much as 150 miles in a year.
150 miles is a lot of walking, man, for a deer.
That's like here to fucking San Diego for a deer.
And they're just starting to understand their migratory patterns.
But that's a wild animal.
Now, that's what I consider fair chase.
You go out hunting, you find a mule deer that's walking 150 miles, you figure out where they're going to be and stalk them and get into a good position and shoot them and eat them.
It's about as fair and ethical a way as you can acquire your own meat.
If you're going all the way to Africa and you're not even going to eat that animal, and you're just going to stuff it and stick it on your wall to let everybody know how Billy Badass you are...
That's weird, man.
I hear you.
It's a weird aspect of human beings that we would even consider that to be a form of recreation.
And people go, well, hey, it's totally legal.
And well, hey, there's nothing.
The money goes to conservation.
And I guess it does, in a way.
I guess it does.
It does go to keep these animals alive so they can keep killing them.
I don't like that term, paleo, because the term has been debunked by science.
When you talked about what people did or did not eat, I think that natural foods are more easily digestible.
I try to stay away from bread as much as possible.
Although I have started eating more sprouted bread recently, like Ezekiel-type bread, I feel like my body digests that more easily.
I think it's a little healthier.
I keep away from white flour and pastas and things along those lines, and I try to avoid processed foods as much as possible and sugar as much as possible.
So in that sense, yeah, I eat a lot of vegetables.
I eat a lot of protein, animal protein, fish and things along those lines, but...
I just think that I'm just real...
I noticed because I work out so much and because I do athletics where you sort of measure your progress, you know, whether it's my workout routines like strength and conditioning routines or martial arts, I can kind of see when I'm on and when I'm off.
And I can anecdotally or directly correlate that to my diet.
And I find that when I take supplements and I make sure that I have plenty of vitamins and plenty of green, leafy vegetables, that's one of the most important ones, I think, and healthy proteins.
So in that sense, I eat along the lines that a lot of those paleo guys eat.
Speaking of comedians, because it's very organic what's going on, I just hired a postdoc whose claim to fame so far, until he gets into my research program, was he was studying the evolutionary roots of humor.
And so what he basically looked at is humor as a sexually selected trait as a proxy for intelligence.
And so with his former doctoral supervisor, who's a well-known evolutionary psychologist, They would go into comedy clubs and rate people's impressions of how funny the comedian is and then would administer IQ tests to them.
And it turns out that funnier people are actually smarter people.
And so when women say, you know, I love, you know, they always say, I want a guy with a sense of humor.
I want a guy who makes me laugh.
What they're effectively saying as a proxy measure is, I want a guy who's intelligent.
You know, there's a study that was done with CEOs, and the number one thing that they all had in common, other than, on average, being taller than the norm.
So, I've often wondered whether they believe the hype that they say.
In other words, when somebody is posing in this way, do they truly kind of internalize this or not?
There's a fantastic evolutionary theory that looks at the evolutionary roots of self-deception.
In other words, why is it that we are so good at self-deceiving ourselves?
This is by a guy by the name of Robert Trivers, a phenomenal evolutionary biologist.
And he proposed a theory that I think is brilliant in its simplicity.
And then what I usually do is to demonstrate the phenomenon, I go to a television show like Seinfeld to find a manifestation of that phenomenon, which I'll talk about in a sec.
So he says that...
One of the biggest dangers that we face as humans is to navigate all of these social threats in our environment.
So I'm trying to manipulate you while you're trying to read me to see my manipulative intent.
That's called Machiavellian intelligence or social intelligence.
So one of the ways that I could fool you without you picking up that I am fooling you is if any visual cue in my face that would signal that I am lying, I would shut it off.
Because then you can't read that.
And the way you do that is by deceiving yourself.
In other words, you understand what I'm saying?
So I want to lie to you.
I want to deceive you.
I want to make you do A. But you're going to be looking at me to see whether there is any visual signals that shows that I'm lying.
If I could suppress those by first lying to myself, then you can't pick up that I'm lying.
So there's a show on Seinfeld.
So I said, you know, how can I demonstrate this to make it sort of more sexy in my book?
So there's a show on Seinfeld where George Costanza, who was kind of a duplicitous, devious guy...
He's trying to teach Jerry how to be a better liar.
And one day as he's about to leave his apartment, he looks at him and says, remember Jerry, it's not a lie if you believe it.
And I said, that's it.
That's exactly the evolutionary roots of self-deception, right?
So, you see, evolutionary theory is everywhere, man.
I certainly think you're correct in that, and I think there's definitely something there.
But I can also offer some unique insight to the celebrity thing and what it is, because I've been a part of it, and I've also experienced it myself.
I've experienced my own self-deception or my own ego swelling in an unnatural way.
It's because of the environment that you're constantly in and the data that you're getting.
The data that you're getting if you're a star.
Like I've seen, now I'm a nice person, but I've seen people get shows and become these fucking ruthless dictators.
Like people that have sitcoms or shows that revolve entirely around them.
Like, you know, not Seinfeld.
He's supposedly a very nice guy.
But like there's this famous story of Brett Butler who's from that show Grace Under Fire about what a ruthless monster she became when she was on the show.
Granted, substance abuse was in there as well.
Which I think may also, you know, not just because of the fact that she probably had addictive tendencies to begin with.
A lot of comedians tend to be impulsive and a lot of them tend to have addiction issues as well.
I'm sure that played into it as well.
But also this the pressure of being the one.
The pressure of being this one person where when Brett Butler shows up on the set, everyone has a coffee for her.
There's a script.
Can we get anything Brett?
They're all treading lightly.
They're all worried constantly that she's going to be upset at them.
So their data, the data that a person like Brett Butler or some star has, is that they are special.
That's all the data they're getting.
The data that someone who has, you know, someone who's not attractive, the only data, like a lot of data that comes from a person who is not physically attractive is like, well, I found out that I can get people to like me if I make them laugh.
So I'm going to develop a good sense of humor because my nose isn't getting any smaller.
My ears aren't getting any littler.
I'm not getting any taller.
I'm fucking not losing any weight.
So let me just become funny.
And then you see a lot of funny guys that are my friends that are not good looking at all but have beautiful girlfriends.
Like, what is that from?
Well, they figured out the one thing that they do have that they can find that's attractive.
The data that these actors and these people that get that are famous, they're constantly getting love.
And they're getting love from people that don't know them.
They only know their work.
They only know this thing that they've pretended to be in a movie where they were a superhero or in this thing where they were a doctor or in that show where they were...
They always had the right answer and they were on top of things.
How many people that we've seen in movies that we thought were really smart, intelligent people, then you see them in an interview and you go, oh, he's a fucking idiot.
He's an idiot who's playing a role.
Their data that they get is completely unnatural.
That environment where you...
For whatever reason, they decide that you're going to be the guy.
They put you in this thing.
They project you on a screen that's 60 feet wide.
Every time you talk, the words that come out of your mouth were carefully constructed by a team of writers that labored over those words for weeks and weeks.
There's music playing.
I mean, it's amazing.
So that environment is so completely unnatural.
The data that they get because of that is so unnatural.
When Brad Pitt shows up at an...
Some awards party or something like that and he goes down the red carpet and people fucking go bananas and scream.
He handles it remarkably well for someone who's in that scenario because that is a completely unnatural scenario and must be insanely difficult to maintain objectivity in that situation.
So that has to be taken into account.
Just the data that those people get is so different from the data That a guy who is working at a camera shop gets.
A guy who is a normal person in a normal life.
The data that they get is, when they interact with people, people judge them based on their appearance, how they talk, what their background is.
They start communicating.
They gather up data.
When you see Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt, you automatically like him.
I mean, I remember when my kid was born, Joe Rogan, I know Joe Rogan.
And so I think what ends up happening is that since we obviously didn't evolve in an environment where there were televisions, but I now feel so intimately connected to you, that barrier is removed.
I don't know the exact story, but I think apparently the company that...
did some massaging with the data.
I had a group of undergraduate students do a similar project in one of my courses.
What they found is that if you put, let's say, buy Crush or buy Big Mac, it's not specifically the desire to buy that product that increased, but rather your hunger and your thirst increased.
You see what I mean?
So it didn't increase your likelihood of saying, yes, I'd like to buy a Big Mac.
But when they were asked post the subliminal thing, are you hungry?
Then the subliminal cue would affect their hunger and their thirst, but not to the specific product.
I don't think they have them anymore, but they used to be CDs or audio tapes, and you would hear like the sound of the ocean or something like that, but then behind it was supposedly a message.
There was a piece of property that he wanted to buy, and I found out he was a Scientologist because of this conversation.
He wanted to buy this piece of property, and I said, yeah, this is right next to his house.
I said, would you build on it?
He was like, well, you know what, I can't even buy it right now because my wife is about to go clear.
And I go, what does that mean?
You know, I didn't know what it meant.
And he goes, well, you know, we're Scientologists.
And then so, you know, I tried to just be as objective as possible and kind and started asking him, like, what does that mean?
He was telling me that she will no longer be influenced by any outside stimuli Any outside influence, any outside suggestions, and that she will be able to go through this world without being affected by negative anything.
Anybody yelling at her, anybody insulting her, they will no longer get in there.
I've only met a few legit Scientologists, and one thing that they radiate is this weird sort of positive energy, this alien, artificial, positive energy that's very difficult to put your finger on.
Hey, Gad.
Nice to meet you, man.
That's amazing.
So you're doing evolutionary psychology as it applies to marketing.
Amazing stuff.
I like it a lot.
It's not like a genuine enthusiasm.
It's this weird extra level.
But it's almost like you want to follow.
I want to see how long you can keep this up.
I want to follow you all day.
I want to know when the crash is coming.
You know, I'm pretty sure that if I followed you around, I'm just guessing, but based on our two-hour-and-a-half conversation, that if I followed you around, you're pretty much like this all the time.
This is you.
But when you're talking to a Scientologist, you fucking know that this is going to end.
You can't keep this up, man.
It's like if a guy's putting on a fake English accent.
I'm talking all day like this.
It's a so important time where you're going to know that I can't do this forever.
You know, and this is something that they're doing when they've got this amazing stuff, Gad.
I love it.
Love what you're doing.
Like, man, you're going to hit the rocks, bro.
You're going to crash.
Something's going to go wrong.
But their centers that they have in L.A., one of the most interesting ones is they have this anti-psychiatry.
Anti-psychiatry center.
Psychiatry kills.
And they have this big billboard where a guy's got like shock, electric shock therapy shit on his head.
He's screaming in agony.
And what you don't realize when you go to that is that it's a Scientology front.
I mean, you go in there and they get you hooked on Dianetics.
As you go, like, down the list of people that are actual Scientologists, it's pretty extensive.
I think what it provides them is a scaffolding for...
I think Hollywood and the idea of being, and most notably actors, because acting itself is one of the most unstable professions.
You have to be chosen.
What you do is based entirely on the merits of your work.
What you do is based entirely on your education, Your qualifications and the data that you've provided and the writing that you've done based on that data.
It's all really rock-solid stuff.
It's all right in front of you, despite the fact that the ideologues attack you and the fucking politically correct knuckleheads will go after you.
What you're doing is, it's all based on the merits of your work.
What an actor is doing is trying so desperately to get other people to accept them and choose them.
It's so weird that they don't have their own opinions.
It's very rare that you talk to actors and they have their own opinions.
It's like what they have is this sort of conglomeration of opinions that they've sort of subscribed to because they believe that this is going to ingratiate them with the overlords of Hollywood.
So everyone is goddamn politically correct.
Everyone's driving a fucking Prius.
Everyone's voting Democrat.
You know, everyone is wearing pink ribbons when it's the appropriate time because it's breast cancer awareness.
If you don't know how to fight, you're going to get your ass kicked.
You know what I mean?
Even if you don't know jiu-jitsu, someone's going to strangle you.
These are all rock-solid worlds.
There's no getting around them.
Where things get weird and airy-fairy is when you're pretending to be a superhero.
I just think it's an unnatural position to be in.
And for human beings, as you were saying, we have this evolutionary trait where we look at successful behavior and we want to emulate it.
Well, if you find the guy who's the head of the tribe, He's got the scars and the wisdom.
That's the guy that you want to pay attention to because you can learn from other people's mistakes.
He shows wisdom.
You can emulate his behavior and you can become successful.
Well, when someone is on TV or in a movie theater and their head's 60 feet tall and everything they're saying is perfect, you want to be them.
You want to follow them.
You want to worship them.
Because they seem to be exhibiting this evolutionary thing.
And I also think that the media itself, whether it's music or whether it's movies and television, there's an inescapable quality to being on film that is unavoidable in some very strange way.
And that your body's not designed to absorb it.
Your body is not designed to absorb movies.
Your body is designed to absorb the wisdom of the natural world.
Like the wisdom of, you know, that guy got bitten by a tiger.
Stay out of the tall grass.
You know, it's real fucking simple.
You know, like, oh, he went in the river and he drowned.
Don't go in the river.
You know, all these lessons we learn from the natural world, all these things that we see that exist in the material, you know, world that's in front of us.
But when this world has all of a sudden been changed and now you're looking at dragons and you're looking at, you know, spaceships and fucking lightning bolts and all these things that are taking place on a screen that aren't real, the whole thing gets very squirrely in our minds.
And so I met, who's become now a very good friend, a FBI special agent whose job it is to tailgate all of these Muslim extremists around the UC Irvine area.
The Muslim extremists that he's documented, that he has put on his blog, like, he had this thing where he was saying, like, There's a video of this guy who's speaking.
I forget what country he's in, but he's speaking in English to this group of Islamic people.
And he's talking about the differences between what people think of him as radical Islam and what is just Islam.
And he starts talking about it.
He goes, how many of you...
Believe in the works of the Quran, in the word of the Quran, and how many of you follow it?
And they all raise their hand.
How many of you believe that the word of God is the best way to deal with homosexuals and that whatever the Quran says...
Whether it says they should be stoned to death, that this is the word of God, and they all raise their hand.
And he goes into this thing about how many of you think that women should be silent and that they should listen to their man because this is what God has said, and they all raise their hand.
And he's like, see, this is not radical Islam.
This is just Islam.
So all these people that say, oh, they're so radical, they're radical Islam.
And he doesn't even realize that he's demonstrating radical Islam.
Because that's even more extreme than political correctness.
It's denial of reality based on your own ideology.
And that's what it is.
It's just this crazy sickness that people who consider themselves intelligent, intellectual, progressive, open-minded, these are the people that exhibit this ridiculous trait.
I almost have more disdain for the people that are progressive that have an issue with someone criticizing this than I do the people that were brainwashed and ingrained with this religion.
Because...
The people that are supposedly intellectuals or supposedly responsible for guiding the thought of the young people, the people that are supposed to be the folks that are the ones that are the curators of these ideas, the ones that are the ones who are teaching children in school, these are the wise ones who are professionally intelligent.
You're supposed to be professionally objective, professionally wise.
And you have this ridiculous notion because of the environment that we live in where this politically correct, whatever you want to call it, ideology has gotten so infected.
The idea that, for whatever reason, this one religion is the one that you're not supposed to criticize.
I don't understand how that happened.
I wonder if it's connected in some way to the suppression of the people that live in these places where their natural resources are being stolen by the war machine, which is undeniable.
Undeniable what's going on in Iraq or in Afghanistan, how much of the hustle has to do with the natural resources, whether it be the poppy fields, whether it be the minerals in Afghanistan, whether it's the oil in Iraq.
Undeniable that these people are being, for sure, they're subject to the war machine that's coming in to steal the resources.
Right.
That's something that people are aware of, and you see these images of these people in these Islamic countries that are dying, that are getting bombed on, and also the dehumanism that they're subjected to by a lot of people that are trying to justify these wars.
That is the only thing that makes sense to me.
And also the fact that this has happened over the course of, since 2001, this is when this anti, this Islamophobia notion has been really, really pushed harder and harder.
Well, I think it's also because that's the way that I demonstrate how tolerant and progressive I am by showing that I am not going to lump everybody with those crazy 9-11 people.
And so again, it's part of that progressive posing.
No ideology, no belief system is free from mockery, from criticism.
And the quicker we find that out and the quicker we kind of fix this problem, the better we'll be off.
One of the ways that you suppress it is by creating an ethos of self-censorship.
So if I open up my laptop and I can write on my Psychology Today blog to 3 million people, I have a real clear choice to make that day.
Am I going to write something that can bring heat to my young children?
And then I have to decide whether I'm willing to do that or not.
Now, the fact that I've already engaged in that calculus and that calculation suggests that we are...
I mean, the canary is singing in the cold mine.
And so I think we have to be in an environment where we don't engage in this type of self-censorship.
So I think we're definitely down the wrong road.
I think many academics privately...
We'll speak about these issues very openly with me, but we'll never even as so far as go as to like something on Facebook, lest they will be found out.
And actually, I wrote an article on my Psychology's Day blog where I was talking about the necessity for tenure, but also its potential for misuse, right?
Because you do get an incredible amount of deadwood with tenure, right?
And actually, I try to hook up with these guys called Coursera that organizes a portal for this, but they don't have a contract with Concordia, and it has to be between a university and the organization for it to fly.
So I do see a potential eventually for sort of a more democratization of knowledge, but I don't suspect that we're going to lose the university anytime soon.
It's very interesting, because I've studied both in the U.S. and in Canada as part of my study.
And so this Greek system, going away to college, not being close to your parents, the drinking games, that's very much, much more so of an American culture.
Right of passage than it is a Canadian.
Most Canadian students end up going to the school that is physically closest to them.
Like, what was the one that someone got in trouble for during one of the elections for taking support from and that they wouldn't allow interracial couples?
Well, July is pretty awesome, though, and everybody's very festive.
One of the things that I love about any place like Canada or a lot of parts of Canada is that they really appreciate the summertime because of the fact the winter is so brutal.
Well, I remember when we lived here, when I was at UC Irvine, one time we were driving on the highway and there was a Warning weather advisory because there was going to be 10 minutes of rain.
And when it rains, the roads apparently become a bit more slippery because of the oil stay.
I don't know exactly what it was.
And so I'm thinking, you know, we drive in minus 30 degrees in snowstorms.
They have warning advisories when it rains for 10 minutes.