Gad Saad’s tenth Joe Rogan Experience appearance traces his journey from a proud Lebanese Jew to a Montreal target amid surging post-October 7th anti-Semitism, exposing its normalization across media and academia while debating Israel’s existential conflict with Hamas. They pivot to evolutionary psychology—AI’s slow progress in medicine, pornography’s impact on mating instincts—and Gödel’s genius versus paranoia, contrasting with Rogan’s chaotic but brilliant Hunter S. Thompson. Saad’s nomological networks challenge tribalism, from medieval plague scapegoating to modern identity politics, while Rogan warns of AI manipulation and COVID-era misinformation. The episode ends with a stark reflection: unchecked tech and pride-driven ideologies risk amplifying humanity’s deepest vulnerabilities. [Automatically generated summary]
They've tried to cancel me in all sorts of ways, but that speaks, by the way, to one of the Powerful reasons why tenure, despite the fact that a lot of people despise the concept of tenure.
Oh, it's just a bunch of lazy academics who are going to be deadwood for the next 30 years.
But if I didn't have the protection of tenure, I'd be gone long ago.
Now, that doesn't mean that I still haven't suffered many consequences, right?
So I haven't gotten other jobs.
That I would have otherwise gotten because of how irreverent I am.
Now after October 7th, it almost became impossible for me to go on campus.
Because first of all, I'm high profile.
My university has a particular demographic reality.
I mean, I have gone, but during the points when there were a lot of protests outside the campus and so on, or on campus, because our campus is an urban campus, so it's hard to say where the school begins and where the city is.
You know, you have death to Jews and free Palestine and Intifada and from the river to the sea, and there's 800 of them screaming, and you're going to come in.
Many of them know who you are.
They know that I'm not very supportive of their positions.
And so it's going to be, you know, a bit challenging.
So on a few cases, I did it via Zoom.
Other times I had to have security with me, so I'd have to check into security and they'd have to walk with me to class and so on.
That's not a good thing.
I'll tell you another quick story, if I may, about what happened after October 7th.
So I'll first talk about what happened in Lebanon.
So the day that we escaped from Lebanon, for those of your viewers who don't know about us, we're Lebanese Jews.
We were there until the start of the Civil War.
We were there in the first year of the Civil War, and then we had to leave because it became impossible to be Jewish in Lebanon.
When we left that day, it was from Beirut to Copenhagen, Copenhagen to Montreal.
As we cleared the airspace of Lebanon, the captain, I discussed this in chapter one of my previous book, The Parasitic Mind.
He said, okay, we're now out of Lebanese airspace.
And so I said to my wife, my mother pulls out a pendulant with the Star of David.
Puts it around me, my neck, and says, now you can wear this, be proud and not hide your identity.
Now, that's in the past, but now I'm going to link it to the current reality.
About three weeks after October 7th, my wife and son came to pick me up from a cafe where I was working on my laptop.
My wife had picked up my son who was playing a soccer match in the east end of the city.
And so as I got into the car, he says, Daddy, if you had come to where I was playing soccer today and you were wearing a Star of David, you'd be dead.
So 1975, a Star of David is put around me and now I can wear it proudly.
45 years later, I better not wear a Star of David in Montreal, Canada.
What's crazy to me is, regardless of how you feel about how the Israeli military and the army is pursuing the war in Gaza, regardless of that, the blatant Just out in the open anti-Semitism that we see today.
It's unbelievable.
It's like nothing I've ever seen before.
Like roaches coming out of the woodwork.
Like what?
Like you see it all over social media and it's like this...
If this is September and not October, you would be shunned.
Everybody would be like, this is horrible.
How the fuck could you say this?
You're openly anti-Semitic.
You're openly blaming the Jews for all the world's problems.
This is crazy.
This is Nazi shit.
And yet you're seeing it everywhere now.
When those teachers were in front of Congress, when those principals of those universities were in front of Congress, And they were saying that it's not harassment to say death to the Jews unless it's actionable, which is the craziest mental verbal gymnastics I have ever heard anyone say that's in that position, in a position of being the head of Harvard.
It was so crazy to watch.
It's so crazy.
It's almost like we live in an alternative timeline.
Like we entered into a new dimension.
Like in our sleep, we woke up, but we're in a new place.
You know, nothing should surprise me given the history that I have growing up in the Middle East.
But I was taken aback after October 7th at the Jew hatred that I was exposed to.
Now, my positions are really not inflammatory.
So, for example, I'll say things like, you know, I'm worried about my—I have a lot of extended family in Israel, right?
So after the October 7th happened, for me to just kind of call around to make sure that none of my cousins and their children and aunts and so on—no one was harmed—will take a while.
Well, that itself, the fact that I cared about my family was incitement.
I'm a Zionist.
I'm a baby killer, right?
I am personally responsible for the IDF, killing any innocent children.
But it's not just that.
It's coming at you from all directions.
So in the past, you could say, okay, Islamic sources are going to send you Jew hatred, and I'm used to that.
You could say the neo-Nazi alt-right types, you know, Jews will not replace us.
They're coming after me.
You've got, of course, the academic progressive left types who are also anti-Zionist, which is just code sweet word for anti-Jewish.
And so everywhere you turn, there is Jew hatred, and it's so normalized.
Now, of course, in part, it is emboldened by the fact that a lot of them are anonymous.
They don't put their real names so that they can take the liberty to be this orgiastically Jew hater.
But it's so disenchanting to see that that guy could be my gardener, he could be my surgeon, he could be my dentist.
I don't know who he is, but there are millions of those folks who hold those beliefs.
I think a lot of them are Russian and Chinese trolls.
I think there's a disturbing amount of them that's responsible for taking this kind of discourse and pushing it to a much higher level and making it more ubiquitous.
I really, really believe that.
And there's a lot of data to support that.
And I think that's part of what's going on with social media.
It's definitely a big part of what's going on with Twitter.
And TikTok and a lot of these things where you see these very inflammatory messages that seem to be pushed.
They're pushed through and promoted to the fact that you get them all the time.
They show up in your feed all the time.
Even if you're not subscribed to these, even if you're not following these people, you'll find this disturbing content will show up in your feed.
And I really firmly believe that we're being manipulated.
I really do.
And I think there's a lot of these young kids that are on these campuses that are very malleable.
They're very easily influenced.
And they don't need...
I mean, so many...
I'm sure you've seen Constantine Kissin from Trigonometry.
He's done these interviews with these people, these protests, and so many of them are completely ignorant.
They have no idea what...
They're just doing it because they think they're a good person.
They're putting up their flag of virtue by saying, Free Palestine!
And I really do think that's supported by other countries.
I think they realize how vulnerable and idiotic a lot of Americans are, and they're just pushing that.
And whether you realize it or not...
Social media, even if they're saying something ridiculous, it's very influential.
And they can just move the boundaries a little bit by having the most extreme content, the most ridiculous things, be so common, then less extreme content that would ordinarily be considered ridiculous, now becomes accepted as normalized.
Equality of outcomes is a cancer to human dignity.
Okay.
Let's now apply that concept, equality of outcomes, to war casualties.
So I think this is what happens when people say, oh, but the IDF is being grotesque, because the currency that then matters becomes how many dead on each side, equality of outcome.
But let me change it to a different moral currency.
Let's talk about intent.
So for example, in the justice system, you could have a person who is found guilty of involuntarily vehicular homicide and he kills four people.
So four are dead.
So that's equality of outcome.
Four died.
versus someone who took out a hit on his entire family, his brother, sister, and parents, so that he can win the insurance money.
But it's an undercover operation.
The cops catch you.
Even though in that case, there were zero killed, correct?
That person will get a higher sentence because we understand in the law that intent matters.
So now I think you know where I'm going with the analogy.
So in the Palestinian IDF conflict, when, say, Hamas launches 6,000 rockets, every single one of which is intercepted by the Iron Dome, had they not had the Iron Dome, then the outcome could have been that 50,000 would have been killed, right?
In an ideal world, from Hamas' perspective, our intent would be to eradicate every last Jew.
They have it in their charter.
So, yes, it is true that if we just count the number of people who were killed on October 7th versus the number who were killed in the retaliation, if that's the only calculus that matters, then, oh yes, the IDF has gone way overboard.
But once you change it to an existential intent issue, then maybe it's not as bad of an outcome as you think, notwithstanding that a single innocent dead is a tragedy.
If I was, You know, you do have to take into consideration the tunnels.
You do have to take into consideration the infrastructure.
The question is, did they just knowingly bomb places where there was going to be hundreds and hundreds of innocent civilians knowing that there's going to be a few Hamas?
But compare that reality to almost any other war that you have in working memory.
Why is there a unique, unbelievably high threshold of morality that is placed on the Israeli nation, right?
Now, you probably already know this.
The IDF does go through a lot of painstaking effort to try to minimize that, right?
They drop leaflets in Arabic.
They even sometimes call people in Arabic and say, Don't go in this area.
So, of course, they've killed many, many innocent people.
But they're placed between a rock and a hard place.
What can you do, right?
The other side knows exactly that if they do exactly what they're doing, either you don't retaliate and we win, or you retaliate very harshly as they have, and then you still win, right?
Today, the propaganda war has been completely won by Hamas, right?
There's a complete genocide in the informational war against the IDF, right?
One other point, and then I'll cede the floor back to you.
The term genocide...
Jacques Derrida was a very famous postmodernist who developed the field of deconstructionism.
Language creates reality, right?
He was one of the guys who allowed the ecosystem of up is down, men could be women, left is right, slavery is freedom, right?
It's that postmodernist game that allows these kind of insane ideas to flourish.
Well, when you misuse words like everything is a genocide, that does no one service.
There is no genocide.
There is a killing of a lot of people.
Again, every single one killed is a tragedy.
But if Israel wanted to commit a genocide, by the end of my appearing on this 10th time on this show, there wouldn't be a single Palestinian left.
So if they were genocidal in their intent, then they really are shitty genocidal maniacs because, first of all, the population, as you know, Right, but that's all previous to this military action that's going on now.
You know, I mean, Israel has one statistic and then there's other statistics by human rights organizations that estimate at least 12,000 missing in the rubble that are probably dead and 30,000 dead.
Now, at the number of those 30,000, what percentage is Hamas?
So now, let's compare it to, and I don't know if others have made this analogy, when you drop the bomb, the atomic bomb, almost all the people who were killed were non-combatants, right?
So then that ratio would be 250,000 killed to zero.
I mean, unless there's a few Japanese military guys that were in Nagasaki or Hiroshima, you dropped...
And again, I'm not trying to say, oh, but they're not as bad as these other guys, so they're okay.
Let's give them a ribbon and a medal.
But again, it's...
It is anti-Semitic when you place one group of people to a standard of morality that is not expected of anybody else.
So, for example, if you really care about Arab lives, then you certainly should care about all of the Yemenis that have been killed that are a lot more than whatever's happened after October 7th.
You would care about the 500,000 Syrians that were killed.
You would care about the war between Iran and Iraq that led to several million killed.
So Golda Meir, who was the fourth or fifth prime minister of Israel from, I think, 1969 to 1974, has two quotes, which I'm going to paraphrase.
I don't have the exact quote.
She said, if the Jews put down their arms...
There'll be a genocide.
If the Palestinians put down their arms, they'll be peace.
So just remember that for a second.
Second one is, if the Arabs, she means in this case the Palestinian Arabs, if they were to love their children more than they hate ours, then they'd be peace.
So why am I saying these two quotes?
Because this battle is really not about land.
And in a sense, we've already addressed this on previous shows where I've come and discussed about some of these Islamic issues.
It is an existential affront that the Jewish state exists in the Middle East.
So look at all other religious minorities across Arabia.
Egypt used to be completely Coptic Christian, 100%, many hundred years ago.
Today there are 10% Copts left.
What happened to those Copts?
There used to be tons of Christians in Syria.
What happened to those Syrians?
There used to be tons of Christians in Lebanon.
There still are some, about 30-35%, but Lebanon used to be a majority Christian country.
So the goal of Islam, not individual Muslims, right?
Again, I don't need to preface by saying there are millions and millions of lovely, kind, peaceful Muslims.
Of course there is.
But Islam as an ideology, does it tolerate others?
Well, we have 1400 years of history that either says it does or it doesn't, right?
We don't have to watch TikTok videos.
And nothing could be clearer than...
Then what the words of Muhammad were, the prophet of Islam, who said that you need to rid Arabia of Christians, but certainly the Jews.
So the existence of the land of Israel is an affront to that.
One more point, and I'll cede the floor back to you.
In Islam, there's a concept called Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harab.
That means the house of Islam and the house of war.
Anything that's under the Islamic control is good.
Anything that's yet to be under Islamic control is under the house of war.
Once a territory is under Islamic control and you lose it, you have to get it back.
It is your dominion forever.
This is why, for example, Andalusia, which was at one point controlled, which is in current Spain, which was controlled by the Moors, an Islamic conquistador.
A lot of jihadists will say, inshallah, we have to reconquer Andalusia.
It is our land because once it's under...
So Israel existentially cannot exist.
So why am I saying all this?
You can't have peace if you have the other side that truly never wants for you to exist.
That's the bottom line.
If you can change people's heart where they say, look, I get a piece of land, you get another piece.
Let's build an incredible, vibrant co-society together.
You'd have peace.
But if you're taught from straight out of the womb that the Jews is the reason for every calamity in the world, you're not going to have peace.
And so I will post these on Twitter and people give answers.
Now, oftentimes they're just playing along, but that's the mindset.
You got diabetes?
Well, that's because the Jews who are controlling the pharmaceutical industry are not releasing the drug.
I'll give you an...
A recent one that I faced.
So I put up a police lineup of some guys that had been caught in Huddersfield, which is a town in England, who had been grooming and raping young British white girls.
And you may or may not know this.
I'm not sure if we've discussed it in the past.
In Britain, over the past 25 years, there's been an unbelievable industrial-scale level grooming and raping of young white girls by Asian men.
That's a euphemism for men of a certain religious heritage, but you say they're Asian.
So their names are, let me summarize them for you.
So I put those up and I sarcastically said, I don't have a big enough brain to do the big data analytics to understand what is the commonality across all those gentlemen.
Could anybody help me?
Do you know how many people wrote to me and blamed it on the Jews?
Somebody will correct us in the comments section where they show her saying something, oh, you know, we need to flood.
And she happens to be Jewish.
But for every Jewish person who is pro open door policy, there's a counter Jewish person.
Here is one who is not for open border policies.
Right.
Stephen Miller, who worked in the Trump administration, is Jewish.
He's probably the biggest anti open door immigration.
So but that's the mindset of the Jew hatred.
Everything is blamed.
There's this incredible diabolical feature of the Jew that they're able to at times pretend that they're victims, but really they're diabolical and genocidal.
Which we talked about the other day that like some large number, we think it's around 70% of Jewish people vote Democrat.
But now, you know, the Democratic Party is full on with this Palestine thing.
And, you know, you see it on college campuses, this rampant anti-Semitism, death to the Jews being tolerated, like literally saying that, yelling it out.
So I wouldn't be able to tell you which number, which episode.
But you can go back to earlier episodes that have appeared on this glorious podcast where you will see that I would have predicted exactly what we're seeing now.
And it's not because I'm a prophet or it's not because I'm so intelligent.
It's because you simply have to have the power of having the imagination to extrapolate from a current trend to some future outcome, right?
So if you let in into your country people who have Genocidal Jew hatred as an endemic feature of their society.
So I'll give you, since people love stats.
So there was a Pew.
Pew is a nonpartisan, if anything, they probably lean towards being more woke.
So Pew has these global surveys that they conduct.
So in 2010, they conducted a survey looking at how favorable are you towards the Jews across a whole bunch of Islamic countries.
Now, if I were to tell you that 10% of the polled people exhibited Jew hatred, you'd say, oh boy, that's a big number.
10% is a lot.
How about if I tell you that for most of those polled countries, it was between 95% to 99%?
I know people understand what 95% to 99% means.
If I poll 100 people, 95% to 99% will express very problematic Jew hatred.
So now, if I let in 100,000 such people into the country, it doesn't take a fancy evolutionary psychologist and a professor with a 47-page academic CV to say, well, probably Jew hatred is going to go up.
So that's what we're seeing now.
We're seeing the outcome of having an immigration policy that has let in people that don't share our foundational values.
Again, this doesn't mean someone's going to write in the comments section, what a hypocrite.
You're an immigrant, Gatsad.
Well, there are immigrants and there are immigrants.
There are tons of Muslims who want to come in here and leave all that baggage at the door.
They want nothing to do with that.
They just want to live the American experience.
The problem is we don't have the machine that can look into your heart and mind, right?
So it's a statistical game.
So if you're going to let in hundreds, I mean, look what's happening in Germany.
It seems like there's something going on that's allowing it to happen even though everyone recognizes it's a problem and it's solvable, but they don't solve it.
In fact, the United States government has actively tried to stop Texas from enforcing their border.
So I've often tweeted that the most dangerous weapon in human context is a parasitized mind, right?
I mean, a bomb is dangerous, but it is the human mind that activates that bomb, right?
It's a guy with a little mustache that said that Jews are the real problem of the world, and I need to get rid of the world of that parasite, right?
So parasitic thinking, I mean, one of the reasons I think that that book did so well is because it really explained how all of these parasitic ideas came to a head together.
And they were all spawned on university campuses over the past 40 to 80 years.
So one hypothesis is what you said, which is there is kind of a grand scheme that's willfully doing this.
Another one is that all of the Western leaders of roughly the same age, I mean, within 20 years of each other, are all a product of a Western education, university education, that was completely infected with these dreadful parasitic ideas so that when these leaders go out there and have the power to enact policies, they enact these policies.
So my view is slightly different from yours in that I don't think that there is a supra-mega, you know, willful plan.
It's just that all of those Western leaders are the product of a really shitty university system.
Well, look, suicidal empathy, I mean, we can move beyond the border.
How about, say, in the justice system?
Suicidal empathy results in you caring more about the perpetrator than the victim.
That's suicidal empathy, right?
Because that argument...
So here's how that leftist argument works.
If a person, especially a criminal of color, commits a crime, that's probably because he grew up as a person of color, so he's already been marginalized by the society.
So now he commits a crime.
You're now double whamming him by putting him in the penal system.
So you need to be more caring.
So he's already got 57 previous arrests.
Let's give him a 58th chance.
So again, I don't think it comes from really parasitized thinking, right?
So I think where we may differ is you think it's because there is a duplicitous evil, let's cause havoc, whereas I think they actually believe that that's the noble position, right?
And there should be no borders.
There is no illegal human.
What kind of bullshit is this?
I mean, why do you have a lock on your door, right?
So why is it that I get to have sex with my beautiful wife, but all these homeless guys are sexually starved?
That's not fair.
That's the parasitism of socialism.
We're all equal.
Why do you make a lot more money than I do, Joe?
That's not fair.
I need to have as much money as you, right?
So, I don't think, I mean, I hope that it's not what you're saying is true, because then that's even more sinister, right?
That there's kind of a boo-hoo-hoo.
I just think it's people who are misguided in their misdirected nobility, right?
I think there's definitely a lot of misguided people, but I think there's definitely a plan.
It's too organized.
The DA system, the DA thing with funding the far leftist DAs and then funding someone who opposes them, who's even more ridiculous, that seems to be a plan.
And he's got a pattern of that, and he seems to enjoy it, enjoy spending his money in that way.
You know, I had Mike Baker on, who was formerly a CIA operator, formerly.
But we were talking about that, that no one's ever been charged for something like that before.
No one's ever been prosecuted for something like that before.
Certainly no political opponents.
And my thing is the danger, the people that are on the left that don't understand that now you set a precedent.
You set a terrible precedent.
And if Trump does get in office, what is to stop him from going after all of his political enemies in the same exact way?
Are we going to do this now?
Every time someone's in a position of power, whether it's a governor or whether it's a president or what have you, when they have a political opponent, they will hire people to go after that political opponent and trump up a bunch of trump up, no pun intended.
A bunch of bullshit charges and drag them through the court so that everybody's- the people that only have a peripheral understanding of what's going on.
Do you think a lot of people who historically had been against Trump are now honest enough to see what a sham this whole thing is and are revising their positions?
Yeah, but it takes a lot of bravery to do that, depending upon your social environment.
You know, there's a lot of people that just can't step outside the lines of whatever the ideology their neighborhood is attached to and their community is attached to.
The reason why I asked the question is because I recently appeared maybe about five, six months ago on a British psychiatrist show.
It's a small show, but I thought he was a really interesting guy.
He wanted to talk about how you apply evolution and psychiatry and so on.
So I was like, let's do it.
Towards the end of the show, or maybe it was even the last question, he said, in your 30-year career as a behavioral scientist, as a professor, what is the singular human phenomenon that has surprised you the most?
And so it was in that spirit that I was asking you the question.
Because in my experience, despite the fact that I have a chapter in the parasitic mind on how to seek truth, and therefore I'm offering a vaccine against falsehoods, I'm actually quite pessimistic for some people who go, la, la, la, I don't want to hear it.
Because they're so anchored, there's no amount of evidence that I could ever show you that can move you a millimeter from your position.
I always try to tell people, do not be married to your ideas.
You should not connect them to you.
They are just ideas.
They are not you.
And if you have supported an idea that you find to be false and you are afraid to admit that you were incorrect, that is far more weak than being incorrect.
Because now you know that you were incorrect, but your pride is keeping you from admitting it.
That is beyond foolish, and now people will always know that you're going to do that with what...
People will forgive you if you make mistakes.
People will forgive you if you're incorrect.
We have all made mistakes.
We are all...
Occasionally incorrect.
I'm incorrect all the time.
But I make a big point of not attaching myself to ideas.
I will argue them if I think they are correct, but they are not me.
And it's a challenge when you are faced with the reality of the fact that you've made an error, especially if you've been bold about it, if you've been condescending to people who disagree with it, if you're egotistical in your position, you connected yourself to righteousness and intellect and science and whatever other words you want to throw around that make your opinion More valid than the other people's opinion.
Okay, if we are ever gonna trust you again, you have to tell us why you were wrong, how you were wrong, and what that feels like, and what you've learned from this.
Because if you don't, if you keep arguing that, you keep doing it, now we have no respect for you.
Fauci.
Fauci's the worst, but he's worse than that.
I think he's far worse than that.
I think he's deceptive.
I mean, if the real Anthony Fauci, the book by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., if it's not accurate, he would be sued.
He would be sued.
And just forget about what happened during COVID. Just what we know took place during the AIDS crisis.
Everyone should read that book.
Everyone should understand this same game plan was played out during the AIDS crisis, and it's a game plan where they're in cahoots with the pharmaceutical drug companies, and they push this thing as being the only remedy, and this is how, and they make tremendous amounts of money.
And that's all real.
This is not tinfoil hat conspiracy wearing shit.
That's real.
But if you supported him because you thought that he was a science and then over time you have realized that, oh my god, they did work with Peter Datzik.
They did fund through another organization gain-of-function research.
He did lie about it.
It was talked about in emails.
He did contact people who were saying one thing and had them change their position.
He did.
They did ridicule the lab leak theory when they knew it to be correct.
They knew it.
They knew they were doing the exact same research on the exact same viruses in that exact same place where it broke out.
They knew it.
And they lied because they wanted to cover their ass and we let them get away with it.
Yeah, and I'm glad we're talking about the inability to admit to a wrongdoing in science, because oftentimes when you think about people who are anchored in their positions, you think about political arguments.
You think that somehow you romanticize scientists as being unbiased purveyors and pursuers of the truth, and nothing could be further from the truth.
So I'll give you just a couple of examples, historical examples.
I mean, of course, Galileo is a perfect example.
Copernicus is a great example.
Darwin is a great example.
But let's look at some other ones that people may not be familiar with.
So I think his name, I'm not sure how you pronounce it, Semmelweis.
He was the gentleman who arguably has saved more people than anybody else in medicine.
So I give a talk, this is going back to some of my early appearances here where we would talk a lot more evolutionary psychology.
I gave two talks at University of Michigan when my first book came out.
It was an academic book, Evolutionary Basis of Consumption.
How do you apply evolutionary psychology in human behavior in general, consumer behavior in particular.
I give the talk in the psychology department on a Thursday, and everybody's like, oh yeah, this is gorgeous.
Because a lot of the psychologists were trained in physiological psychology, biological psychology, and so on.
So they were totally appreciative of the fact that you can't really study human behavior without understanding the Biological signatures of human behavior.
Okay.
Then I go to the business school the next day, Ross School of Business.
I give the exact same talk, okay?
I couldn't finish a single sentence because all of the professors, and it was usually the professor, it wasn't the doctoral students who were, because the doctoral students are still malleable.
Their brains are still being formed.
They're happy to listen.
It's the senior professor who has spent 30 years arguing that human minds are born tabula rasa, empty slated, And it's only socialization that teaches the consumer to be how he or she is, that they were really offended by my stuff.
So they would constantly interrupt me and berate me.
And I remember, as a side personal note, my wife was in the audience that day.
She had come with me.
And prior to that talk, she had said, oh, I feel really sick.
I probably have food poisoning.
We later found out that she was pregnant with our first daughter.
So there's both a really bad memory and a really good memory associated with the University of Michigan.
I maybe got to slide 10. So here's the first question.
Oh, if everything is due to evolutionary pressures, how do you explain homosexuality then?
If everything is due to survival instinct, how do you explain suicide then?
By the way, there are evolutionary explanations for suicide and homosexuality, right?
Humans are a sexually reproducing species even though chaste monks exist, right?
People do have a survival instinct even though some people commit suicide.
Men are taller than women even though your Aunt Julie is taller than your Uncle Bob.
So what happens with people in terms of a cognitive obstacle, they take a singular datum as proof that a statement that is true at the population level has been violated.
It hasn't, right?
Every single WNBA player is taller than most men.
That does not invalidate the fact that men are taller than women.
So all of the morons at the University of Michigan were also coming to that kind of stuff, right?
Because they didn't like the idea, to our earlier discussion that we've had on the show, a lot of people don't like the idea that we are biologically determined.
They think that that's a form of you're just an executor of your genes, right?
But that's the wrong view, by the way, because everything is an interaction between your genes and the environment, right?
Even specific genes get turned on as a function of the environment.
So the fact that you believe that we have biological imperatives that guide our behavior doesn't make us blind executors of our genes.
But the idea that everyone is born a blank slate is so silly because there's children that don't even grow up with their parents that have traits that their parents have.
By the way, I actually, I don't think it's at the clinical level.
But in The Parasitic Mind, in Chapter 1, I talk about the maladaptive, or maybe adaptive phobia that I have of mosquitoes.
So early in my marriage to my wife, maybe that was one of the best ways to test if she'd go the whole route with me, is we were traveling to Antigua, and we had the misfortune of some, you know, it's in the Caribbean, there are a lot of mosquitoes, and a couple of mosquitoes got in.
I spent with her, with her complete patience, probably till 2 in the morning, tracking and killing every single mosquito in that condo because the thought of that disgusting, monstrous pig sucking the blood out of me was just unbearable.
And so I literally will turn into a little girl if we see a mosquito in the house.
I cannot go on with my day.
I can't watch TV. I can't train.
The mosquito must die.
Now, in a sense, that's perfectly adaptive because we know that by far, if you add up the tallies of people killed by mosquitoes versus all other animals combined, it's not even a minuscule thing.
It has evolved a memory that allows it to remember the spatial location in your backyard where it stores caches of food so that it has its own memory bias so that even though it won't detect it by smell, because let's say in Montreal it's under four feet of snow, it has a mental map so that it perfectly knows where it hid everything, right?
Now, The human memory has evolved to solve different problems.
So then if you are a memory researcher studying memory from an evolutionary perspective, you would say, well, what would the human memory solve as an adaptive problem?
So let me give you one such example.
So if I show you a bunch of photos of people, images of faces, And I put a descriptor next to each one where I tag that person as a social cheater or not a cheater.
So what does social cheating mean?
Lack of reciprocation.
So if I do something for you, then you will cheat and recant and not – I scratch your back, but you'll never scratch me.
Now that information about the personal characteristic of that individual is an evolutionarily important datum, right?
So now I'm going to show you all these people.
I control for their good looks, right?
So I don't put all of the cheaters as being good-looking, right?
Because then you might remember them because they were good-looking, not because they were cheaters, right?
So I put this array of faces, and then later I ask you to remember whether you'd seen that face or not.
And people end up remembering at a much higher level any face that had been tagged as being a social cheater.
Do you follow?
Therefore, your perceptual system works in cahoots with your memory system To pay attention more to information that is evolutionarily relevant so that I'm more likely to recall it and remember it.
So that would be an example of how you would apply the evolutionary lens to study how our memory operates.
Here's another example.
Not in the case of social dynamics, but in the case of remembering where food's at.
So if you ask people to go through a maze of food and then ask them to remember where particular foods are, they're much more likely to remember the locations of high calorie foods.
So in this case, it's not that I have a domain general mechanism that just learns where things are.
There is a sensorial mechanism.
Bias to me being more likely to remember the location of something if it is evolutionarily relevant.
And there are many, many other such examples.
So that would be a wonderful demonstration of how the evolutionary lens adds a whole layer of explanatory power to what typically memory researchers have done, which is usually they study memory as just the domain general mechanistic system, whereas the evolutionary psychologist says, no, no, but why did that mechanism evolve to be of that form?
So I'm going to tell you now about another study and maybe Jamie can pull it off.
I think it's a guy at University of Washington maybe.
I hope I'm not wrong.
Where he wanted to see whether Crows remember the face of a really nasty guy so that they can, you know, if he then comes again, they'll start calling.
Have you seen the ones from, I think, New Caledonia that do all the stuff with the...
Maybe, Jamie, you could pull that one out.
I think that's the smartest of all that avian species.
They can take rocks and like a thousand different things to get food out of things that I guarantee you, you and I would sit there for 18 hours and we wouldn't crack that mystery.
Okay, so if you travel to Australia, in certain regions, there are signs from the government saying, if you are women, don't be careful, don't wear shiny things on your head.
Why?
Because these assholes will come at you, attack the women's head, steal the shiny things so that they could use the shiny things in their bower to attract the ladies.
It's still fucked up because it's the soul of the animal.
It's not being expressed as nature intended.
The soul of the animal should be.
A chicken, it's not that you shouldn't eat chickens, but chickens should live as chickens.
They should wander around and pick bugs and eat worms and do all the things that chickens love doing.
To have a chicken just in a box for its entire existence, you're stealing Like you're doing something fucked up that's way more fucked up than just raising a farm.
If you got cows and they're on a pasture and every day they're just being cows and then one day you take them in the stall and bang this thing goes into their brain and they're dead.
That is way less evil.
That is way more humane than what's going to happen to them in the wild.
What are they gonna do?
They're gonna either freeze to death or starve to death or get torn apart by wolves.
If you're gonna have cows everywhere and people want to reintroduce wolves everywhere, Congratulations.
You've got wild kingdom.
You've got wild kingdom happening in your neighborhood, if that's what you want.
And if you don't want people to eat cows anymore, okay, what are you going to do with the cows?
Are you going to sterilize them?
Are you going to keep a certain amount?
Are you going to play God with cows?
Are you going to say the cows can't breed?
Are you going to give the boys cows birth control?
What are you going to do?
How are you going to do?
Oh, you're going to introduce predators.
Okay.
How are you going to keep kids from those predators?
How are you going to keep dogs from those predators?
Have you thought about this?
No, you haven't.
There's people that are reintroducing grizzly bears to Washington as we speak.
We're going to reintroduce the things that we killed because they killed everybody.
We're so smart, it's bananas.
These people are out of their fucking minds.
And they don't have a real understanding of actual nature.
The horrible thing is this commodization of nature.
This taking animals and factory farming them in these horrific conditions where it's illegal to film.
Not using the same words, but I've made roughly the same argument when the tofu brigade came after me because I was offering some evolutionary reasons for why we have to have animal protein as part of our diets.
And they were so pissed at me because they thought it was very hypocritical that on the one hand, I could share so many tweets and posts demonstrating how much I love animals.
And then in another photo, I show some steak or here's what my wife is cooking.
And that to them was completely incongruence and was proof of my moral degeneracy.
And then I actually created two sad truth clips where I was really demonstrating the evolutionary reasons, you know, archaeological data, dental data.
Physionomic data, anthropological data, and they just wouldn't have it.
And this is something that people dismiss very openly, but I don't think we should.
I think plants are alive.
And I don't think they're just alive in a way that we can feel completely fine about growing them in this insane monocrop agriculture place and pouring industrial grade fertilizer and pesticides all over them.
I think they're a thing that thinks.
I think they're a thing that communicates with their environment, but they just do it in a way that we don't understand.
They do it through mycelium.
They arrange resources.
They allocate resources towards plants that need them more.
They have some sort of a network of communication.
I had Paul Stamets in the podcast a couple of times, and he's a mycologist, and just a brilliant guy, and he really explains it all so well.
It's so mind-blowing.
The relationship that the mycelium have with the nutrients in the earth, and that it's...
Earth is not dirt.
It's like a living environment.
It's this environment that they've ruined through monocrop agriculture.
And that's what's wrong with farming.
It's not farming.
Farming is a perfect way to balance an ecosystem.
When those people do it the right way, like those people from White Oaks Pastures or Polyface Farms, regenerative agriculture people, there's like zero carbon.
The footprint of what they do, and in fact, it sequesters carbon.
You're growing things.
It's manure and cows, and it's all working together, and the chickens are free-ranging, and it's nature just in a contained environment.
You mentioned the word soil, so it made me think about...
Have you seen the research on...
I can't remember what the term is, but something like soil DNA? I guess the pioneer is...
I think he's Danish, either Danish or Swedish.
I think Danish.
And basically, they go to these steps that are really, really, maybe not Mongolian steps, but somewhere where you expect to find a lot of the typical fossil remains and so on.
But what they now do is they just do this excavation of soil.
In the same way that people who study ice, you know how they can bore and then they can date soil.
Yes.
So they do something similar where they kind of harvest tons of soil, and they're then able to isolate DNA of mammoths.
It really is so interesting when you just think about...
Just the complex interaction between everything on earth, the plants and that we literally need plants to create oxygen for us and they're consuming more carbon.
That's one of the craziest things about Genghis Khan is when Genghis Khan lived they killed so many people that places reforested and they lowered the carbon footprint of earth.
But earlier you said, oh, how everything is connected, which leads me to a concept which I don't think I've ever discussed on my 10 shows on your podcast.
E.O. Wilson is a, he just recently passed away at the maybe age of 92. I just read his autobiography called Naturalist, amazing autobiography.
He was a Harvard entomologist.
And a strong proponent of sociobiology, applying biology to studies, social systems, and so on.
And he was part of the original culture wars where a lot of his colleagues hated him because he was arguing that biology affects human behavior.
E.O. Wilson, check him out.
He's unbelievable.
Well, in the late 90s, he wrote a book called Consilience, Unity of Knowledge.
And that became one of the foundational books in how I did my academic career, which is consilience is trying to unify disparate areas of human endeavor that you typically wouldn't think should be linked together.
So you could link the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities through the consilience of evolutionary theory because you could study psychology using evolutionary theory.
Of course, you could study Biology using evolutionary theory, or you could study aesthetics, which is in the humanities, using evolutionary theory.
So that became a really important concept in my own work because my brain operates as a synthetic machine.
I like to synthesize across...
So one of the reasons why I decided early on...
To break out of just being an academic, because I couldn't see myself as a stay-in-your-lane professor.
I need to try to...
So coming on Joe Rogan is going to allow me to share ideas and synthesize things with millions of people rather than writing another academic paper that, if I'm lucky, will be read by 50 people and cited by 12. And so...
So I said, well, I don't do the research also so I can appear on Joe Rogan, but if I can publish a paper in an academic journal and then go on Joe Rogan and hopefully excite people about evolutionary psychology and psychology decision-making, isn't that better than just having my wife and mother read the paper?
And he didn't like that.
He thought very – whereas now, I – not that many, but I'll get a lot more professors who will write to me saying, can you get me on Joe Rogan?
I'm not trying to blow smoke up your ass or be ingratiating or anything, but I bet if there was a currency, a metric, to measure how much you've affected the intellectual ecosystem, Versus your average, well-published professor, I would put my money on you.
Not because you were the creator of the knowledge, but because, boy, are you the biggest disseminator of knowledge, right?
And a big part of the luck is that I have the fortune to talk to these people.
Because most people just don't have access to people like you.
Like, if I wanted to sit down with a guy like you for three hours, like, if I didn't have a podcast, that would be a tough sell.
Like, hey, Gad, can you put your phone away?
And just you and me just stare at each other for three hours and have a conversation.
But this is, for whatever reason, I probably spend more time individually talking to people this way than any other way because I do so many of these things.
So, you know, so actually there's research that shows that if you marry someone that scores similar to you on the adult playfulness scale, I don't remember the name, right?
Some people score very high on that.
Probably you do.
I know that I do.
If you then match up with someone who scores very highly, like you do, assortatively, that's a very big predictor of you having a successful union.
Speaking of athletes, last time I came on the show, apparently a clip went viral from our conversation where I was kind of hailing the cosmic justice of why it was important for Messi to win the World Cup.
So listen, speaking of life as a playground and scoring high on openness and all the things that I think you do very well, and I'd like to think that I do too, about maybe a week or two after I appeared on your show last year, I get an email.
Dear, whatever, Professor Saad, my name is...
I guess I could say his name because you're going to know.
My name is Jorge Mass.
I am the majority owner of Inter Miami.
I'm a fan, whatever.
I know that you have a deep appreciation for Messi.
Whenever you'd like to come to a game, you'll be my personal guest.
This geeky professor who could have lived his life just doing his little narrow stuff, right?
You know, I'm good in my ecosystem, a few other professors care about my work, or go out there, grab life by the balls and live it fully and connect and so on, right?
I call my wife over, I say, I'm James Bond.
I mean, in what world is it possible for, you know, the Lebanese professor, an evolutionary theory, to get an email from the majority owner, so September 27th or 28th, I'm on a flight down to Miami.
They're playing in the U.S. Open Cup.
It turns out that Messi was injured, so he didn't play.
I'm supposed to meet him.
I bring him copies of my book signed, even the Spanish version of The Parasitic Mind because he only reads Spanish.
He ends up not being there because he's not playing and so on.
I mean, he's standing right next to me, but I didn't get to meet him, really.
I meet Zinedine Zidane, who is the greatest French player of all time and World Cup winner right there in the President's Lodge.
David Beckham.
Hang out with him.
I'm chatting.
Now, I'm not saying these to drop names.
Oh, look, I know these cool people.
But I'm saying, if I didn't have that open spirit where I didn't view my world as only being restricted to the ecosystem of academia, if I didn't come on Joe Rogan that opened me up to a whole new audience, all of those people would have never heard of my work.
If I only published peer-reviewed papers rather than publishing books, which, by the way, in academia, you publish trade books, that's looked down upon.
How is that looked down upon?
If you publish a book that can be read by 300,000 people, how is that not better than publishing an academic paper that's read by three people?
It's just, you could be really dumb and also be smart as shit in your discipline, you know?
And again, it just boils down, a lot of it is male ego.
That's a big part of the problem with a lot of these ideas that people hold so sacred.
The fascinating one for me with you is this reluctance to accept that there's other factors.
For the development of a human personality, and that it's not a blank slate.
Like, that seems interesting, and if I was a teacher that was teaching something contrary to that, I would want to know this, and now I know that I've been teaching nonsense, and I have to call like 50,000 students!
Over the last 20 years!
I go, hey guys, remember that shit that I told you?
When new information comes out that's irrefutable, some new scanning, new thing that shows that this thing that we had always held to be true, that you've taught in classes, that you've won awards for, is nonsense.
So my favorite quote, and maybe Jamie could pull it out, by J.B.S. Haldane.
J.B.S. Haldane was an evolutionary geneticist, but was also known for having these beautiful quotable quips.
And so here, the quote in question, I have it in the last chapter of The Consuming Instinct 2011 book.
He's talking about the four stages that academics go through before they accept a theory.
So I'm paraphrasing now what his stages are.
Stage one, oh this is complete rubbish bullshit.
Stage two, well this may be true but largely unimportant.
Stage three, well, this is definitely true, but it's probably not actionable.
Stage four, oh, I always said so, right?
So what happens is you go through these phases, and if you're dogged enough, as I was, then the people who laughed at you in stage one, oh, there you go.
I am a pathological email hoarder, meaning that I never get rid of emails because I always think, what if I ever need whatever's contained in that email?
Because the blanks, I think it was, I can't remember if it was Watson, the behaviorist, who said that, you know, give me 12 children, I could turn any one of them into a doctor, into a beggar, into a lawyer, meaning that everybody is infinitely malleable.
Now, that's a hopeful message if I'm a parent, right?
If I create a child, you're telling me that he's got equal chance to be Michael Jordan or Lionel Messi if only I have the right schedule of reinforcement of how to hug him and when to hug him?
That's hopeful.
I don't want to be told that there is something innate about my child that guarantees that he will never be the next Michael Jordan.
So I think the message, the blank slate message, doesn't originally start as just a quacky idea.
It's a noble idea, perfectly rooted in bullshit, but it's a noble idea.
Here's another example of a noble idea.
Franz Boas was actually a Jewish anthropologist at Columbia University about 100 years ago who was the one who developed cultural relativism, the idea that there are no human universals.
So biology doesn't matter in explaining cultural phenomena because every culture is uniquely distinct.
Now, the reason why he proposed that idea is because many nasty folks had misused biology and evolutionary theory.
And therefore, by him eradicating biology from the study of anthropology, he was hopefully doing a noble thing.
But you can't kill truth in the service of a goal, right?
So a lot of these guys, it's not, to our earlier conversation, they are not conspiratorial in spreading bullshit.
They believe that by holding those positions, they're creating the proper utopia.
If Bigfoot was real, it wouldn't be nearly as interesting as a killer whale.
Not nearly as interesting.
If Bigfoot is just this big, stupid monkey that lives in the woods and just shits all over himself and fucking eats campers, that wouldn't be nearly as interesting as this super intelligent creature that lives in the water that saves people.
Yeah, like, what is he doing up there, you stinky bitch?
Like, come on.
The idea that no one has taken real good footage in this day and age with the amount of hikers and campers and people that are in the woods and people that are into photography and nature photography and trail cameras.
But I'm a voracious reader, and one of the things that stresses me the most is in my personal library, in my study, I've got literally hundreds and hundreds of books, and I will often walk in there and say, will I ever have time to read?
So I have probably 600 books that I've yet to read.
And each of those books has so much information that if I were to read all those books, boy, I would be an even more exciting guest on the Joe Rogan show.
No, what I mean by that is that the more you know, the more you realize truly how little you know.
So I just bought a biography on the taxonomist who created the system of how to label animal species.
He's a Swedish taxonomist.
Now that sounds very esoteric and specific, but I'm sure there is this incredible information that I can glean in that book, which today I don't have that knowledge in my brain.
So to all people who are listening, read.
There is nothing more.
Number one predictor of your child's success is how many books were in the home of the parents.
Really?
I don't know if it's number one, but certainly a highly predictive one.
So reading Elon Musk, you probably know this, when he came to, I think from South Africa to Canada, he came with a luggage of books.
He's a voracious reader, right?
Now, that doesn't mean that he became who he became only because he read, but...
It's very hard to have an interesting person who's not very knowledgeable about many things.
And that's why one of the things that's been very difficult with my children is I see them doing the scrolling and it drives me crazy because I haven't been able to instill that reflex of just saying there is nothing I'd rather do right now than go sit somewhere and immerse myself in a book.
I think we're gonna get to a point where Avoiding some interaction with other human beings It's gonna be constant and it's gonna be more invasive than it is now These are steps that are our species is taking in its integration with technology that seem to be unstoppable and To isolate yourself and move to the woods in a cabin,
I'm interested in the AI algorithm that generates those because oftentimes it'll put things in my feed that I truly think, I don't know how it could have found out that I like this stuff because there is no signature electronically of me having searched something.
Let's say three piece wool suits.
I love that look.
And so now I'll see a thousand guys wearing these gorgeous Italian, right?
But other times it presents stuff to me that makes no sense that it almost seems as though I'm into gay sauna guys.
No, but I mean, I'm being serious.
So it's kind of fitness, which, of course, I'm into having lost a lot of weight, but it almost seems homoerotic, where it's always these guys that are...
And so as I'm going at this, my wife will say, what are you looking at?
I say, well, I'm not sure I want to show you.
And then it's like literally 17 super muscular guys, but there's nothing that I've done that suggests that it should recognize that in me.
When you think of evolutionary psychology, you think of us as an evolving species that's integrating with its environment, and its environment radically changes.
The obvious answer to that would be internet pornographic addiction, which almost exclusively afflicts men, right?
For very obvious reasons, because what's happening with the internet delivery system It's exactly catering to men's evolved penchant for sexual variety, right?
I can keep flipping through different porn clips without ever repeating the same one.
Well, it doesn't take much for that stimulus to then hijack my brain.
So when I, for example, explain to people about the evolutionary roots of pornography, That doesn't mean that men have evolved a gene for pornography, right?
Because obviously there was no pornography in the ancestral environment.
But what it means is that those mechanisms that evolved for mating are then hijacked, usurped by pornography.
So I think the most obvious one would be internet pornography.
Yeah, I think they're going to do it with some sort of an interface.
When you're seeing these first patients of Neuralink, like this one guy who can now amazingly operate a computer, play games, move his cursor, click on things, I mean, it's incredible.
And they think he's going to be able to communicate through this thing, like, at the speed of a carnival barker.
So I actually, I was giving a talk on global Jew hatred in Montreal at this event.
And a guy came up to me to introduce himself, and he's a neurosurgeon, and he said that he was part of the team that was choosing the first Neuralink patient that you just mentioned.
And they believe that ultimately they'll be able to restore blindness.
They'll be able to restore movement to people.
There's going to be a lot of like wild things that this technology, if it can continue to progress, is going to be capable of doing.
And at one point in time, I've got to imagine it's got to be able to create An artificial reality simulator that you just immerse yourself in.
Whether it takes 10 years to do that or 50 or 100, in the future, they're gonna have something that...
Forget about porn.
Like, forget about, like...
Actually going on an adventurous life.
Why would you do that when you can have all of the trappings of being a wizard in a fucking Dungeon game you could just play right you just live your life in this world that doesn't exist get sexual pleasure get satisfaction eat food and All you do when you will awake is you eat food go to sleep wake up and do it again and Oh boy, that's a dire world.
So I was like a champion in Galaga, but that's the end of my knowledge.
So right now I see my son interact with things and he tries to bring me in and I just feel like I don't have the bandwidth to do anything that he's doing.
No, there's something very beautiful about sort of steadying yourself and then getting that scope.
And so I respect the guys who do that in real life, and so I try to do it, but there was too much hand-eye coordination of different things, so I didn't do too well.
He was explaining to us yesterday that they have dogfights they're doing now where AI-controlled jets are competing against jets flown by the best pilots.
So speaking of AI, I was in the early wave of studying AI. So my undergrad is in mathematics and computer science.
And so as part of my computer science degree, I had taken some AI stuff course with Monty Newborn.
I can't remember his exact name.
He was part of the team of Deep Blue, which do you know what Deep Blue is?
So that was the AI system that was being built to play against the grand chess masters.
And at the time, sometimes this one would win, sometimes this one would win, oftentimes it would be ties.
And so we had learned how to program.
The search algorithms that would allow you to go through a decision tree of chess without having to exhaustively go through the entire tree because the entire tree is something like 10 to 100 different nodes.
It would take more than the entire history of the universe to go through it.
So that way, I better not waste time going down here, so just cut it off.
That reduces the search space.
And so I had been exposed to some of the earliest advances in my formal education in AI. But frankly, 40 years later, notwithstanding all of the advances, I would have thought there would have been even more AI applications than what we currently have.
In other words, I thought it would be We've underperformed what I thought we would have reached.
So, for example, in medical diagnostics, why aren't there more AI systems that are being used instead of actual human doctors?
Don't you think?
Because medical diagnostics is just the collation of tons of information so that you're able to...
It's a structured problem, right?
Here are all the symptoms.
I can search through the whole database and come up with what is the likely disease Much more quickly and probably more accurately than any human physician.
And yet, to the best of my knowledge, I don't think they're used as much as you would have thought they should be.
I don't think they are, but I think people have been diagnosed with things from artificial intelligence now.
Didn't someone put a bunch of their data in the chat GPT? I'm sure a story went around about a mom that couldn't get a good answer and put info in there and got a correct diagnosis really quickly, but that's one anecdote, I think.
Yeah, I don't know if it's true, but you would imagine that at a certain point in time, you would get all of the data on all medical interventions, all medications that are effective for this, that, or the other thing, all issues that could lead to a genetic propensity towards this, that, or the other thing, and you would have it all in some sort of a database.
If you could have a computer that's far smarter than a human being process that and instantaneously know, instead of having some guy that has to go back to what he learned when he was in grad school, you're way better off.
So I think in some areas, and I could be misspeaking, so I'll take this with a bit of a grain of salt, but I think in radiology, Is one of the areas where now AI systems are almost going to render the human radiologist obsolete?
Because it's pattern recognition, right?
I'm looking at an image, and then I have to read that image to decide whether...
Does it look like this area is a bit gray, so it looks like there could be a tumor?
Well, it turns out, I think, that the AI systems are better able to detect most of these things than humans.
So I actually spoke to a radiologist cousin of mine and he didn't think that they would become obsolete anytime.
So him meaning that human radiologists would still have something to input.
But it seems to me that in fields in medicine where it's largely driven by pattern recognition is where AI is going to make the most headways, I think.
So of all the courses that I've ever taken in my life, I've spent many years in university, the course that blew me the most, blew my mind, was a course called Formal Languages, which was about...
Actually, I talk about it in this book, in the happiness book.
At one point, I'm talking about the importance of going for walks and just go for a walk and talk and so on.
And I said, well, Einstein, so both Einstein and Gödel were together at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.
And later in his career, Einstein was older than Gödel.
Later in his career, Einstein said that the only reason that he would go into the office was because he was excited to go on these long walks with Gödel and just have these chats.
So imagine being a fly on the wall sitting as Gödel and Einstein are having these conversations.
So I just finished reading Gödel's biography.
And it was very interesting because here's this unbelievable mind.
So now imagine Gödel is both the guy who could think in ways that are unimaginable to us and is also the guy whose mind was parasitized by these conspiratorial ideas.
So he developed what's called the incompleteness theorem.
So there are some things within any axiomatic system in mathematics that you could never be able to prove within that system.
It's really at the level, it's like godly.
It's just unbelievable, especially if I was in mathematics.
To be able to think at that level is unimaginable how deep it is, and yet you think people are going to poison you and you're willing to starve to death.
Postulated he was like wondering if I think it has to be like the size of a solar system He was talking about the the way the solar system worked in relativity which was Einstein's theory would that allow?
The possibility of backwards time travel creates paradoxes and violates our understanding of causality.
Thankfully, all observations indicate that the universe is not rotating, so we are protected from Gordell's problem of backward time travel, but it remains to this day a mystery why general relativity is okay with this seemingly impossible phenomenon.
Gordell used the example of the rotating universe to argue that general relativity is incomplete and he may yet be right.
But speaking of this, I've actually played a version of this game where I ask people if you could invite 10 historical people to your dinner party, who would they be?
So maybe I can ask you that.
You don't have to list 10. Off the top of your head, can you list a few that would have to be at the Joe Rogan barbecue?
The way he would write would be like over-the-top ridiculous to the point where he thought everybody knew he was joking, but it was mixed up in like also real stuff like fear and loathing on the campaign trail.
He was on the campaign trail and he spread a rumor about this guy who was a candidate for president being a drug addict on this exotic Brazilian drug Ibogaine.
And so people started believing it.
The guy started having a mental breakdown, and he was on the Dick Cavett show, and he admitted to doing this.
Because when you said Hell's Angels, I know that Tucker had been invited to go give a talk with the Hell's Angels where he referenced some, and I think it's this guy.
By the way, seven or eight years ago, you could pull it up.
Jamie can pull it up.
I did a satirical clip where I introduced a new field that I was coining as social justice mathematics.
I went through all of these mathematical properties and said how we should get rid of them, like irrational numbers should not exist because they marginalize mental illness, whatever.
And I just went through the whole list.
It became a big hit amongst the crowd of mathematicians, which is kind of a geeky crowd.
But seven, eight years later...
Reality caught up with my prophetic satire.
Now it is literally the case that there is a field called sort of social justice mathematics where you talk about math being racist.
There's a lot of grifters in this world, kids, and there's a lot of people that believe things if left unchallenged and those things become doctrine, they're a real problem because they're not based in logic.
It was in Ogdenburg or something in upstate New York.
They had a whole bunch of those schools where they would take kids, many of whom were not delinquents really, but they would convince their parents, because you mentioned cults, so this was kind of a cult situation.
They would convince their parents that they need to send them to these boarding schools in order to provide them with structure and discipline so that they can get their life together.
Even though many of them had committed very, very minor.
In fact, they were caught once with marijuana.
These were not dropping acid all day long.
And the things that they would do to them in these schools is straight out of the worst Soviet gulags you could think of.
And they're throughout the United States.
And it's a form of cult indoctrination where you're doing cult indoctrination at two levels.
To the captors, captives in the schools, but you also have to convince the parents that they're doing the right thing by sending their kids there.
It's unbelievable.
You should watch this documentary.
It really, it behooves you to imagine that in the 21st century in the United States, these things can occur.
It's fascinating to watch little minds develop their view of the world.
And if there's anything that I've ever done a real 180 on, I developed this weird way of looking at people, and it may be much more empathetic, where I don't think of people as just you at age whatever you are.
You at age 49, you at age 30. I think of everybody as babies.
I think of everybody is that you used to be a little baby.
I actually faced what you faced with a 35-year-old.
I faced something similar on my daily walk with my wife to the coffee shop and back.
There's a gentleman that stands outside this, you know, kind of she-she artisanal butchery, butcher place in our neighborhood, and he is soliciting money every day, all day.
He doesn't look as though he's mentally ill.
He doesn't look completely destitute, but he stands there every day.
And so now I just say hello to him just to recognize him.
You could tell that it means a lot to him.
Hi, how are you?
How are you doing?
And I've struggled with whether it would be appropriate for me or not to just strike up a conversation and Out of just a human interest in knowing what happened to you?
Because he clearly doesn't seem like he's mentally ill.
He doesn't seem as though he's a drug addict.
I mean, he's not wearing a three-piece Italian suit, but, you know, he's not disheveled.
And yet he's there every day, and that's the best option he has.
Do you think it would be viewed by him as insulting and offensive if I were to...
Speak to him or on the contrary, hey, somebody's actually taking an interest in me.
It's actually in the last chapter of the happiness book.
His name is Bijan Gilani.
I met him when I was a professor at UC Irvine.
I was sitting at a cafe, a whole bunch of books thrown all over my table.
I was working on a paper.
He comes up to me, really well dressed, a bit of an accent.
He's of Iranian descent.
He says, oh my god, these are all interesting books.
Do you mind if I sit down with you for a couple of minutes, chat?
So I tell him I'm a professor at UC Irvine.
He was doing his PhD studying the homeless community in Southern California.
So it was an anthropological study where instead of going to a culture and living amongst them in the Amazon, the community that he's studying anthropologically is the homeless community.
So he embedded himself, and he actually finished his PhD at UC Irvine.
He was a wealthy man.
Fast forward several years later, he becomes destitute, living out of his car, and himself homeless.
Okay?
And the reason why I mentioned, that's him.
That's his car.
This is incredible, Jamie.
Okay, so this gentleman was living in this car.
Now, why am I mentioning this in the context of the book on happiness?
So he was asked, Joe, are you a happy person?
Right?
Guess what he answers.
He says, Now, this is a guy who has a PhD, reached pinnacle, very wealthy guy in Southern California, is now living in his car.
He says, well, I'm a moral person.
I'm a good person.
I have a library card to the Newport Beach Library so I can go and nourish my mind.
I have a card to the gym so I can stay healthy.
Yes, I'm happy.
So I use that story to say, here is a guy who has every reason to feel down on himself, yet he frames his situation in such a way that he can elevate himself despite all his trials and tribulations.
One more quick story on that.
David McCallum.
I may have mentioned him previously, I'm not sure.
Arguably the most incredible guy I've had on my show, and like you, I've had many amazing people.
Spent 29 years in prison, and then he was exonerated for a murder that he didn't commit.
He comes on my show.
We're chatting.
As we're chatting, maybe you could pull that one up too, David McCallum.
And as we're chatting, I said to him, you know, David, you must be the reincarnation of Buddha because it's amazing how you're not filled with any rancor, any sense of vindictiveness, any vengefulness.
It's unbelievable.
I mean, you're a much better man than I am because I would want to burn the world down if someone did this to me.
He says, you know, God, I have a sister who suffers from cerebral palsy, and she's been bedridden, and yet she finds a way to smile.
And so from that perspective, you know, whatever I went through is not that bad.
So a guy who just spent three decades in prison for a crime that he didn't commit was still able to reframe his...
So these are, and by the way, these are the types of, you know, people learn a lot more from these stories than they do if you had gone all academies on them, right?
For you studying this for all these years, what is the most surprising thing to you that people do that seems obvious that they shouldn't do in terms of the way they think about things?
I think one of the more unique things about your background that makes you resistant to stupidity is the fact that you did have to flee with your family.
And the fact that you were involved in a real war.
It was a real war zone.
A real scary time.
And to see the effects of ideology So clearly impose themselves on your life when you were very young.
That's why in the first chapter of Parasitic Mind, I tell that story because then that offers the reader a window into why I hate tribalism or I hate identity politics because Lebanon is the perfect experiment of identity politics, right?
I mean, one of the things that's been amazing about all the different conversations that you and I have had, and this is like the tenth one that we've done, A lot of this wouldn't get to some of the people that understand what you're saying and reincorporate it into their understanding of their own behavior and tribal behavior in general and just the way people behave, just think about things, the way people accept ridiculous ideas.
So I mean, so then again, the people who are looking down on podcasters, I mean, if you are in the business of spreading information, you should be lining up to appear on the show.
Believe me, I never take it for granted.
I feel so privileged that first that I'm your friend, but that I have this opportunity to come and Reach so many people.
How many people have written to me and said, I became interested in psychology and consumer behavior and in politics because I heard you say something on Joe Rogan.
I think most of your conflict should be within yourself, within your own mind.
Whatever you're doing with your life and focusing your energy on, you have more bandwidth for it if you don't have these external conflicts that are totally unnecessary.
I think it's a bad way to process people's interactions.
I don't think it's a real indicator of people.
It's a weird way that people are willing to engage online they would never do in real life.
It would be a bloodbath in the streets everywhere.
People would be just killing each other left and right.
It's not like that in the real world, because the real world type of communication is very different than online communication, but online communication gets processed in your head like it's real communication, and I think it heightens anxiety with everybody.
So in the happiness book, I talk about research that shows that the number one factor in terms of longevity, more than your cholesterol scores when you're 50, is the tightness of your social network, your friendship group.
If I were to ask you to pick your five biggest friends, are they ones that you've held from when you were in Newton, or are there a lot of new entrants into the inner circle of Joe Rogan over the years?
Does it shift much, your friendship group, or are you very much stable?
Well, I've always said that, I mean, comics have to, by definition, be intelligent because, and by the way, that's a sexually selected trait, right?
When women say, you know, I want a man who's funny, she's obviously saying, I want a man who's intelligent because it's very unlikely for you to be truly funny and be a complete dullard, right?
And so by you saying, I like funny guys, you are effectively saying by proxy, I like intelligent guys.
So it doesn't surprise me that Brian Callen or all your other friends would be funny.
I mean, look at Dave Chappelle.
How are you going to pull off all those insights if you were this moron, right?
So he's probably smarter than a lot of my colleagues.
To be able to have conversations like this, to be able to have so many conversations with so many people that know so many things.
And it just, as you said, it highlights how little you know and how much there is to know and how many different things there is to know so many different things about.
Well, I mean, Austin, I think it was after my last trip here, which was the last time I came last year to do your show.
And I was arguing that Austin might be the next...
So, you know, you had Florence of the Medicis, of the Da Vinci, 500 years ago.
Then you had the Vienna Circle, the Viennese Circle, in the 1880s to 1930, where Vienna was kind of the intellectual hotbed.
And maybe it's a bit hyperbolic, but I think Austin is vying to be kind of the next one, right?
And that everybody's coming here, all kinds of creative types, whether they be academics or writers or comics or podcasters or Elon Musk or, you know, so do you think that Austin, it would be reasonable to argue that it's becoming sort of the intellectual slash creative center of That's ridiculous.
I think, first of all, there's great spots everywhere.
You know, there's great spots in New York.
You just have to deal with a lot of shit in New York.
But to say there's not...
Amazing shit going on in New York artistically is crazy.
To say it's not amazing stuff going on in L.A., that's crazy too.
It's just what matters is we're doing it in a way that's beneficial for comedy.
It's beneficial for us.
It's good for us.
It's like we've set up stand-up out here to make it good for us.
The Google people and all the people that moved out here, they're doing it because it's a good place to be.
You know, I don't necessarily know if there's hotspots.
I think the hotspot's the internet.
There's cities that are better to live in because they have less people and less traffic and less bullshit and less laws and less nonsense imposed on the citizens.
It's not in the mission statement, but it's definitely kind of a countermeasure to all the illiberal stuff that we've seen in universities, yeah.
I actually, a couple of years ago, I came to give a couple of talks at University of Texas, Austin, UT Austin, and I met with the president of University of Austin.
Free from Communist Canada, free from the weather, and by the way, something that we didn't talk about, sir, do you know that the biggest effort to cancel me came after my last appearance on your show?
Of all the things that I've said, do you remember at one point in the show, I said, because you had gone to Greece last summer.
And then I said, oh, we just came back from Portugal.
And I got to tell you, I wasn't a big fan of the Portuguese accent.
And then I went on and said, oh, but actually, I speak Hebrew and Hebrew is violently ugly.
I said, oh, but the worse, the real affront to human dignity is the French-Canadian accent.
Completely jokingly, I used the line affront to human dignity as a running gag for 10 years on Twitter.
You know, the Beatles are an affront to human dignity.
Anybody who doesn't love Lionel Messi is an affront to human dignity, right?
It's an ongoing gag.
It's a throwaway line.
I said it.
I think you had cracked up, you had laughed, and we move on.
- Yeah, it's a joke. - About a week later, a super angry kind of French, Quebecer separatist guy does a article in the La Presse, which is like the main Quebec newspaper, saying this guy, this immigrant that we opened our doors to saying this guy, this immigrant that we opened our doors to and saved him from civil war goes on the number one show and erases our
For the next three weeks, Joe Rogan, for the next three weeks, I was the number one most hated person in Quebec.
Luckily, I was in California on vacation.
Oh, my God.
And the Quebec Minister of Justice weighed in against me.
The Minister of Science and Education weighed in, right?
Go back, Arab Jew, sell falafel back in the Middle East.
Well, why would they get aggressive to the point where they want to chase after you and bite you, put themselves in danger to go after you and bite you?
They want to give it to you.
It's like a zombie thing, but it just kills people.
It doesn't turn them into zombies.
But it turns animals into zombies.
They just want to come get you.
That's crazy that there's a virus like that, and that is what 28 Days Later was.
That's probably what happened to all those people that disappeared.
They left behind...
Chichen Itza and all these crazy, what happened to those people?
Doesn't that sort of coincide with when explorers started showing up in boats with cooties?
It's crazy how much that shapes human population, the interaction of these weird little things that are kind of alive, that jump from person to person.
What's amazing is that going back to Fauci and so on, I think the fatality rate or survival rate was like 99.7 or something, right, for COVID? Does that sound right?
Now, imagine if you compare that to the fatality rate of the Black Plague, where I think it was something in the order of one-third of Europe was wiped out.
So imagine the level of precaution that we took.
I understand.
Hindsight is 20-20.
But we took all these precautions for something that ultimately you had more than a 99% chance of surviving.
He's the guy who wrote a book on sort of paleo fitness or something a few years ago.
He has an interesting piece where he argues that...
One of the reasons why Jews serve as scapegoats in many of these plague situations is because of the rites of purification that are in the Jewish religion, hence rendering the Jews less likely to succumb to many of these transmissions.
He was talking about something like, so you know that there's 613 mitzvot, like commandments or rules in Judaism, 613. And if I remember, I hope I'm not misquoting, I think something like 20% of them, he says in his book, are related to purification.
By the way, you see it also in Islam.
Before you go into the mosque, you have to wash your hands in a certain way and wash your feet and so on.
And so because the Jews would oftentimes have lesser infection rates than the other populations within that ecosystem, then they would always look to them suspiciously.
How come you're not all dropping like assholes while the rest of us are dead?
Well, actually, I was very interested in bringing on my show, but it never worked out, a specialist on Galen.
You know who Galen is?
He was an ancient physician in ancient Greece.
So kind of like, I don't know if he preceded Hippocrates or came after him, but I'm interested in these old ancient world physicians.
Not only because they were great thinkers, but also how many things they got wrong, right?
So Hippocrates believed in the theory of four humors.
Any disease that you have is due to you having too little or too much of one of these bile or this or that.
Which is complete nonsense today.
But at the time, the great Hippocrates thought the devil.
So to our earlier point about how you revise your positions in light of incoming information, a lot of the stuff that Marcus Aurelius would have gone to these guys because they are the great physicians, today we would laugh as complete voodoo.
The runoff from the local slaughterhouse had made his garden stinking and putrid, while another charge that the blood From slain animals flooded nearby streets and lanes, making a foul corruption an abominable sight to all dwelling near.
In much of medieval Europe, sanitation legislation consisted of an ordinance requiring homeowners to shout, look out below three times before dumping a full chamber pot into the street.
Yeah, so there's a study that I first – I can't reference what it is because I don't remember the reference, but it was in an advanced social psychology course I had taken with Professor Dennis Regan.
I like to give out shout-outs to – I'm sure he's not listening, but anyways.
He's retired now.
And it was a study where the researchers brought in people into the lab, into a waiting room, and put a red sticker on them or a blue sticker and then said, oh, we have to go and do something else and we'll come back in a few minutes for part two of the study.
But of course, the real study was to simply see how people would interact in the waiting room while waiting, having now been assigned this completely random queue of belongingness, red or blue.
And what ended up happening is that the blue people started talking to each other and the red people started talking to each other.
And I think that's a brilliant study because it shows that there's an external cue now that decides which group you belong to.
So it doesn't matter if I'm tall or short, gay or straight, Jew or Gentile, now it's blue or red.
And so that shows that the architecture of the human mind, to your point, is built to belong to some tribe.
By the way, all of these guys, including some of the current religions that we have, the guy who always gets commandments from God to get access to all the beautiful women.
Do you think, and forgive me for asking this, but do you think that that's your way to handle the very, very deep-seated fear of mortality?
So that, okay, you don't tap into an Abrahamic narrative of there's going to be an afterlife, but you find some other mechanism by which it says, hey, don't worry, the party's not going to end soon.
What I'm saying is that if I just looked at this very, very, very strange existence, what we know so far, just what we know so far, is so bizarre.
So alien just what we know about subatomic particles blinking in and out of existence Appearing both moving and still at the same time like there's just Nuttiness about like the subatomic world like the amount of empty spaces in there like what's in there?
What's nothing's touching anything explain like what are you saying?
So when it just gets to that Just to that.
I think the whole existence of being a conscious entity is a massive mystery.
We all assume that everybody else has our exact same interface.
We all assume that the way I see the world, you should see the world, Harry.
Whatever we're going through, this life thing, everyone's trying to pretend as if they, in their way of doing it, make sense.
But none of it makes sense.
We're running straight towards a cliff, we're launching AI, we're involved in multiple proxy wars, we're all terrified that money isn't real anymore, that everything's chaos, and there might be aliens.
And the weirdest one is now, like, some people are banding about the idea that he Actually is going to be a dictator when he gets into office He's actually you got to listen to him.
He's actually going to be a dictator like first of all the guy Talks basically like a stand-up comic.
He has bits.
He has routines.
He does about Biden.
It's kind of like gonzo presidential You know talk.
He's not he doesn't talk like a regular politician.
He says wild shit and they know he's saying wild shit But it's like The amount of times I've heard people say that he's going to be a dictator now because of that.
On the other hand, Trump, you know, he's overweight.
He's cantankerous.
He seems like he speaks with this Queen's kind of accent.
So he's disgusting.
I revile him.
And so I think for our anointed elites, If he can ascend to the highest position of power, it invalidates all the degrees that I have from the fancy schools.
I'm supposed to be the anointed one.
And so he serves as an existential aesthetic injury.
I can't have that.
And therefore, I have to come up with all of these crazy predictions because it can't be.
They were all doing the right thing and the idea is that hindsight is 20-20 and you can't be a Monday morning quarterback.
I get it.
I get it.
But also, you know, some boundaries were severely overstepped.
And there were some medications that were demonized for no fucking reason at all other than people had decided that there was only one thing that was going to save us from this.
The whole thing just terrifying how easy it was pulled off.
Terrifying.
And again, hindsight's 20-20.
They didn't know at the time.
They were trying to protect people.
I believe a lot of doctors acted like that.
But if AI was around back then that could process the data and say, no, look, you need to take ivermectin.
So in a sense, you could imagine an AI system being built to do what I'm about to say.
So Elon, if you're listening or watching, call me.
So a nomological network of cumulative evidence is when you're trying to prove that a position that you're holding is vertical, and you do it by trying to amass as many lines of distinct evidence as you can.
So let's suppose I wanted to prove to you, Joe, that...
Toy preferences have a sex specificity.
Boys like certain toys, girls like other toys.
And it's not due to social construction, but there is a biological and evolutionary reason for that.
So how would I build a nomological network of cumulative evidence in order to prove that to you?
So I will get you data from across disciplines, across cultures, across species, across time periods, all of which triangulate and demonstrating my point.
So I think AI would be a perfect method for being able to call that information.
Because right now the way you develop that nomological network is you as the human architect of that network.
You have to say, well, what would be evidence that I would need to amass in order to make my most hostile audience members come to seeing it my way?
But now imagine if rather than me doing it, there is an AI system that's been built to go...
So now let's give specifics.
So I can get you data from developmental psychology that shows that kids who are too young to be socialized already exhibit those toy preferences.
Okay?
So that's one piece of evidence.
I can get you data from vervet monkeys, rhesus monkeys, and chimpanzees showing you that their infants exhibit the same toy preferences as human infants.
I can get you data from pediatric endocrinology where little girls who suffer from congenital adrenal hyperplasia, it's an endocrinological disorder that masculinizes little girls' behaviors, while girls who suffer from that have toy preferences that are akin to those of boys.
I can get you data from ancient Greece showing you that on funerary monuments, little boys and little girls are being depicted playing in exactly the same types of toys as today.
I can get you data from sub-Saharan Africa so that they're not Western cultures where they are playing with the exact same toys.
So look what I just did.
I got you data from across disciplines, across time periods, across species, across cultures, all of which triangulate.
That's exactly what an AI system could do.
So now I can just put in the thing that I'm trying to prove and I say, AI system, go.
Well, it is published in several academic papers that I've read, and it's also in my best-selling parasitic mind, so I think they've already stolen it if they wanted to do it.
If it wanted you to do something, and it told you to do something, and you had a back and forth with it, it would just lie to you.
Just go do that thing.
Shut the fuck up, stupid.
I'm the artificial intelligence.
Go do this thing I want you to do.
And if it decided, if it saw, like, one part of the world as a bigger threat, and it doesn't care about life or death, it doesn't care if it's destroying, if it just wants to shut off power grids, doesn't care if people starve to death, like, we don't know what the fuck that means.
If that gets in the hand of enemies.
We don't know what the fuck war looks like.
If that gets in the hands of machines.
Like, what are we doing?
What are we signing up for?
Do you know that, um...
Was it DARPA that had that machine?
It's called the Eater, E-A-T-R, robot.
It's a robot that consumes biological material for fuel.
So, I mean, it could be like trees and leaves and stuff, but yeah.
But if you can get it to do that, I bet you can get it to eat bodies too, huh?
Like, stop bullshitting!
Don't tell me he's gonna eat leaves!
You're gonna have these robots on the battlefield that are gonna be fueled by the bodies of their enemies, and that is gonna be the craziest fucking thing that human beings have ever launched on human beings.
But listen, if you're using chicken fat, that's not plant biomass.
And you know it could run on biological stuff.
If it could run on plant biomass, you don't think it could run on fucking dead bodies?
You don't think that someone somewhere had an idea, you know it would be crazy, have robot drones that are fueled by human bodies, the bodies of their enemies.
You don't think that someone would come up with that?
Look, if someone would come up with a nuclear bomb to drop on a city that kills everybody, you don't think they would come up with a robot that eats dead bodies?