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May 29, 2023 - Viva & Barnes

01:39:01

Interview with Gad Saad - from Parasitic Minds to Happiness - Viva Frei Live!

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	Buc-ee's hiring.
	Buc-ee's gas station.
	If you've never heard of Buc-ee's, it's an amusement park of a gas station.
	There are more pumps than you can imagine.
	And as you go into the store, they sell barbecues, smokers.
	Wait until you see this.
	Wait until you see this.
	look at this Everything is bigger in Texas, people.
	They've got cow hides.
	If you ever go to a gas station, you want to get a cow hide.
	Toys.
	Stuff.
	This is a chain.
	This is a chain in America.
	Okay.
	Food.
	You know what?
	I'll grab some watermelon.
	Watermelon was good.
	This is an experience.
	Burritos, tacos.
	I'm just going to get some watermelon.
	That's it.
	This is Bucky's, people.
	Outrageous.
	You on Mr. Bucky right here?
	You have to stop if you see a Bucky.
	I didn't get the food though.
	All right, come on, get with it here.
	Okay.
	There's a funny ending to this.
	Sorry.
	Jesus.
	Okay, let's go Everywhere.
	And they buy up advertising on the highway.
	It's ridiculous.
	This is not a place where you come if you have social anxiety.
	Holy cow.
	Gotta get up.
	Gotta get up.
	Alright.
	It's a while.
	This is quick.
	You wanna be in the video?
	What's up?
	How do you find Buc-ee's?
	Have you ever been to a Buc-ee's?
	Yeah, yeah.
	I'm from here.
	Okay, well this is good.
	We're having an experience.
	It's crazy.
	Alright, first of all, it's in Florida.
	That was on the border of Florida and Georgia.
	If you don't know what Bucky's is, it's, I said, David Langford says, get the roast beef.
	We actually had a bit of a problem.
	They wouldn't let us in with the dogs.
	So I had to find an alternative solution just so I can get some gum so I couldn't fall asleep while I was driving and water for the dogs.
	All right, people.
	That was the intro.
	I was going to start with a Justin Trudeau clip, but I think we're going to talk about so much today that's going to make you want to puke that we didn't have to start with something that would make you want to puke.
	This is installment number two with the Gadfather, Gad Sad.
	Now, I remember the last time, and I think it was the first time, well, Gad was on my channel.
	I was on his.
	I remember when he was on my channel.
	I was in quarantine because this was back in the time when science was prevailing.
	And if a kid came in contact, même en passant, with someone who tested positive for COVID, You had to take that kid and put that kid in quarantine for, I think it was 10 days or 5 to 10 days at the time.
	Science people.
	And I was like, I'm not putting any kid in quarantine anywhere, ever, full stop.
	I don't care if the government says lock up your 10-year-old in a room solitary for 5 days.
	So I took the kid and my wife and we went up to the cottage and we were fortunate enough to be able to escape the tyranny at my parents' cottage.
	And that's where I remember doing the podcast with Gad Sad.
	Constantin, I can see your comments.
	So I have not shadow banned anybody.
	The dogs are going to bother me.
	Okay, that's the intro, people.
	I want to let everyone trickle in.
	Share the link around, because Gad is going to come on.
	We're going to go from a parasitic mind to happiness, if such a thing can be found in this world.
	And full disclosure, I have not read Gad's book.
	Not a question of shade or laziness.
	I can't read.
	I can't read.
	Until the audio comes out, I'm not going to be...
	So I have a synopsis of sorts.
	All right, Gad, enough with the intro.
	I think we've done enough here.
	Let me just make sure we are live on Rumble.
	Are we live on Rumble?
	We're live on Rumble.
	Good.
	And we're live on Locals, and hopefully the internet keeps up.
	I got a text?
	Okay.
	I'm in a hotel room with my kid.
	He's being very good and letting me stream extensive periods of time after spending all day in a car driving.
	Okay, we'll talk about it today.
	Okay, Gad.
	I'm bringing you in.
	Everyone share the link.
	This is going to be awesome.
	Gad, sir, let me see.
	Do I want to do it like this?
	Yeah, this is good.
	Viva!
	Sir, how goes the battle?
	The battle of living in Quebec, Canada?
	The battle of being so good-looking in a world of ugly people?
	What is it?
	The battle of being so good-looking while living in Quebec and Canada, while working at your university, which...
	Back 20 years ago was politically difficult.
	I don't want to get you in trouble.
	What are you up to these days?
	Well, still a professor at Concordia.
	I can't believe it, but it's 29 years.
	I joined Concordia University straight out of my PhD.
	In 1994, we're 2023, so I just completed.
	So on June 1st, I will be starting my 30th year.
	I can't believe that's possible.
	I had a few little visiting professorships at Dartmouth, at Cornell, at UC Irvine, but I'm still at Concordia.
	As you kindly mentioned in your intro, I have a...
	A book that's coming out.
	This one right here.
	No, other side.
	I have this book coming out in nearly two months from now, on July 25th.
	So I've been busy.
	I was wrapping that up, going through the galley proofs, clearing the cover and so on.
	And just trying to live a good life, man.
	How you been?
	Well, I've been living in exile.
	I'm in Florida now.
	I've been here for...
	We're finishing one year already.
	And one year on a three-year visa, and then we'll see where the world is at the end of the three years.
	But again, I think everybody knows who you are.
	They should.
	But for those who might be meeting you for the first time, the 30,000-foot overview, and then we're going to get into the thick of things.
	Sure.
	Well, first, I should mention, thank you so much for having me on again.
	I loved so much our first...
	I mean, as you said, you've come on my show, I've come on yours, so thank you for having me again.
	So I'm an...
	Evolutionary slash consumer psychologist.
	So what does that mean?
	My background is in psychology of decision-making.
	I mean, my academic background, my scientific background.
	So way back in my doctoral dissertation, I studied how much information do people look at before they stop acquiring additional information and commit to a choice.
	That's called a stopping decision because it's literally how do you stop and say...
	I'm ready to move to Florida.
	I'm ready to vote for Hillary Clinton.
	I'm ready to marry this person, right?
	There's an information search process.
	And then at some point you say, I'm ready to choose.
	I don't need to look at more information.
	So my original training was in what's called behavioral decision theory, psychology of decision making.
	And very early in my academic career, I had become exposed to evolutionary psychology, which is the application of...
	The theory of evolution to the most important organ in our body, which is our mind.
	So how did the human mind evolve to have the cognitive, behavioral, emotional systems that it does?
	And so what I ended up doing for the past nearly three decades in my scientific career is apply evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology to study human behavior in general and consumer behavior in So that's the big story of my academic background.
	Do you want to interject or do you want me to go on?
	No, go on, actually.
	Well, I'm going to take notes, but yeah, go on.
	So my scientific career is at the intersection of, you know, biology, psychology, and, you know, behavioral sciences.
	I'm housed in a business school precisely because I try to apply many of these cognitive Cognite disciplines in studying economic decision-making, consumer decision-making, and so on.
	So that's why I'm housed in a business school.
	Now, in addition to that, I'm someone who has never felt...
	You know, the compunction to just be a stay-in-your-lane professor.
	Many professors, they know their research area very well, so they keep pumping out many papers within this area, and they never stray out of their lanes.
	Whereas for me, both in my academic career, I've been very interdisciplinary.
	I like to navigate through many intellectual landscapes.
	Actually, something that I talk about in the happiness book, variety seeking is an important pursuit in seeking happiness.
	But also, I've been a get-out-of-your-lane professor in that I like to speak to Viva Frey, and I like to speak to guys who are not necessarily in academia.
	Anybody with whom I could have an interesting conversation, I'm perfectly happy to hold such a conversation, which, regrettably, most academics are certainly not rewarded for doing so, and in many cases...
	Universities have traditionally condemned you, have not looked upon that with glee because, you know, you should only be speaking to fellow highbrow people, to highfalutin people, people who are smart like you in the ivory towers.
	Don't speak to the rubes and the plebs and the great unwashed.
	And that's never been my style.
	The game that I play is I create knowledge and I want to disseminate it to as many people as possible.
	So I write books for the masses.
	I appear on popular shows.
	I'm willing to do whatever I need to do to hopefully spread good ideas.
	So that's generally what's been keeping me busy for the past 30 years.
	You wrote Parasitic Mind in 2016, give or take?
	I started writing it around 2017, but it came out in 2020.
	And that was your...
	I don't want to ask a stupid question.
	No, no, no.
	The first book...
	Let me see if I can pull them out here for you.
	Let's do a massive...
	The first book is this one.
	Yeah, so let's see this.
	They go from academic to political of sorts.
	This is a hardcore academic book.
	This is a technical book that seeks to demonstrate how you could apply evolutionary thinking and studying consumer behavior.
	So that's number one.
	Then I did this book, which was an edited book.
	Let me go this way.
	Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Scientist.
	Sounds fascinating.
	Are you being sarcastic?
	I was trying to be sarcastic, but it actually does sound extremely interesting.
	If I can say it, it's actually really fun because what you're basically doing in this book is Demonstrating how you could apply the evolutionary lens in many business disciplines.
	How do you apply evolutionary psychology in entrepreneurship, in retailing, in behavioral economics, in behavioral finance, in my field, consumer psychology, and so on.
	So it's basically Darwinizing the business school.
	So that was the second book.
	The third one, this is the one where I...
	No, let me go this way.
	The Consuming Instinct, What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift-Giving Reveal About Human Nature.
	This was written for the masses.
	The Parasitic Mind, which I'm going to come to in a second, is another one that, in a sense, I've been collecting the information for that book for 30 years, because what The Parasitic Mind is about is the idea pathogens that have been proliferating on university campuses, causing us to...
	Hold these insane ideas.
	So this one was the first trade book, sorry, trade book that I wrote.
	By trade book, it means it's not written for academics, it's written for the masses.
	This one, which, you know, I completed, it came out in 2020.
	Now this one, though, is about negative mindsets, right?
	How bad ideas can parasitize your mind.
	And so the current one, which is this one.
	The final one.
	Thank you for giving me the forum to plug all these.
	This one is about, okay, well, how do we adopt positive mindsets?
	How do we...
	Bring it back up.
	Bring it back up for a second, Gad.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Because you want to know how dense I can be sometimes.
	It's called The Sad Truth About Happiness.
	And I didn't even get the pun until I was listening to you on Dr. Drew.
	Because when I look at your last name, I don't see the word sad as in sadness.
	I only see it as in the last name.
	I never even...
	Made the connection.
	Until I'm driving up here listening to the podcast of you on Dr. Drew, I was like, oh my goodness, the sad guide to happiness.
	Now I get, and I feel like an idiot.
	Okay, so, and now this book is, well, The Parasitic Mind, for those who don't know, is...
	Basically about how we are not cannibalizing, but rather destroying society, destroying ourselves through grotesque ideas of tolerance, which leads to intolerance.
	Relativism, which leads to...
	I don't know what...
	Well, the acceptance of...
	Cultural and religious practices that are antithetical to human dignity.
	That would be one example.
	We need to contextualize all of this.
	One chapter in Parasitic Mind dealt with a critique of Islam, which for the university at which you are a professor, that's like walking down a trans parade with a big banner that says...
	Boys have penises, girls have vaginas.
	I mean, that's how provocative it would be.
	So people need to understand, contextualize, writing the parasitic mind while working at Concordia.
	Concordia has been politically active, I would say politically toxic since I was in university, which is 20 plus years ago.
	You've been there for longer.
	Has it always been the way it is now, politically?
	It has, in the sense that it's always been very leftist, very...
	Very much of student activism.
	Quite a strong bent of anti-Semitism.
	You may remember that in 2002...
	Benjamin Netanyahu was blocked from speaking.
	Thank you very much.
	Now, at the time, I was a professor for two years at University of California, Irvine.
	I had taken a visiting professorship, so I wasn't at Concordia.
	But he was completely shut down.
	So yes, there has been a tradition at Concordia of having these kind of...
	Ultra-woke activists before the term woke existed, right?
	So, for example, you know, the Communications Studies Department and all these, you know, Simone de Beauvoir Institute, radical feminism, postmodernism.
	So many of the idea pathogens that I discuss in The Parasitic Mind would certainly have found a happy home at Concordia.
	But, you know...
	This is certainly not unique to Concordia, right?
	You can go to Brown University or Oberlin College or Wellesley College or Harvard University and you will find maybe slightly more staunch parasitic ideas or slightly less, but it's not a unique phenomenon to Concordia where there are professors and intellectuals.
	Regrettably, they are profoundly stupid ideas because, as I always remind people, it takes intellectuals to come up with some of the dumbest bullshit.
	Good way of putting it.
	Yeah, but it really is true.
	And I don't say it to be facetious or to be bombastic.
	It really is the case that it's academics that come up with some of the nonsense that we see.
	I mean, George Orwell had sort of intimated a similar sentiment many, many years ago.
	And usually, Viva, it happens in departments where the professors can pontificate the nonsense.
	Perfectly decoupled from reality.
	There is no feedback loop that tests their ideas.
	And this is, by the way, one of the reasons why it's taken longer for these parasitic ideas to, let's say, enter the engineering school or the business school.
	Because those schools are wedded to reality.
	Right.
	I mean, you can't build an economic model of consumer choice using postmodernist mathematics.
	There is no such thing.
	You can't build a bridge using postmodernist physics.
	So, they're not fully inoculated from this bullshit, but at least the nature of what we study in those schools makes it a bit more difficult for the nonsense to spread.
	So, and people have to appreciate this.
	We didn't have the term woke, but I distinctly remember, because I was in McGill in 98 to 2002.
	And I remember them blocking Benjamin Netanyahu because I think it was the second intifada.
	Something was going on in Israel.
	And they said, we're not having this purveyor of hate and destruction speak at Concordia.
	And I remember at the time thinking, okay, this is antithetical to university life.
	And I was happy to be at McGill to judge Concordia.
	So we had this.
	It just seems like it's gotten jacked up with steroids in the last 10 years.
	But you've seen an evolution where it's just gotten more and more.
	Toxic over the decades.
	It's just today I posted a satirical typical day at the university.
	I think I might have sent it.
	Do you want me to read some of it?
	Read it and...
	Oh, hold on.
	Actually, before you read it, we're going to read it over at Rumble because we're going to go over to Rumble now and we'll do this entirely on Rumble and I'll post this to YouTube tomorrow.
	So everyone, come over to Rumble.
	And before we do that, actually, I'll just read these two superchats.
	One says, I can only watch and not comment on Rumble, so here's a token of my gratitude to you both before we switch over.
	Maureen, thank you very much.
	And Gad, what strategies should the right implement to battle the leftists take over institutions?
	Okay, we're going to keep this question for the end.
	But everyone head over to Rumble because we're going to end on YouTube in 3, 2, 1. Yeah, Gad, I mean, first of all, before you read it, where did you post it?
	So I posted this first on Twitter and then on all my other social media.
	I take a screenshot, post it on Instagram, on my public Facebook page and so on.
	But the original place where I posted it was on Twitter.
	And so people you work with, your colleagues, people who study.
	This is for the public to see.
	So when you post something like this, and it's hilarious.
	The people you work with, the people that study at your university.
	I had a question about this.
	Should we also specify that you're tenured at the university so you can be more provocative than someone who hasn't attained that level because you have stability?
	Well, I mean, yes, it is true that tenure precisely exists for people like me, right?
	I mean, there wouldn't be a single...
	I mean, first of all, there are very few professors, if any, that are remotely as outspoken as I am, if I may say so.
	Even the other ones who have taken any sort of steps in trying to fight against this nonsense, we would all have been eliminated were it not for tenure.
	But I should mention, and as I explained in The Parasitic Mind, tenure does not protect you from the death threats that I receive.
	Tenure does not protect me from all of the professorships that I know I would have gotten elsewhere and that I didn't because there was a revolt for not.
	You know, not letting the dangerous guy who supports freedom of speech and the scientific method from coming, you know, amongst us.
	Tenure does not protect me when I didn't get my chair professorship renewed when it would have been a no-brainer for it to be renewed.
	And I've now not had it for four years.
	And there's a real cost to that because the chair comes with, I can't remember the exact metric, but something like $15,000 or $20,000 of yearly.
	Research funds, plus $10,000 or $15,000 of increased income to your salary.
	So when you put it all together, a five-year chaired professorship is in the order of $150,000, $200,000.
	I'm never, ever, ever going to get that renewed.
	So yes, you can say that I'm protected by tenure, but believe me, I bear endless other costs for being so outspoken.
	No question.
	It's only to say that they can't...
	Terminate you or, you know, get you out quite as easily but maybe sort of constructed so that it becomes so unbearable for you that you decide to leave or they don't do anything to protect you from an onslaught that they would have undoubtedly protected others from had they been...
	You know, differently politically aligned.
	Exactly right.
	I mean, for example, I now have a higher teaching load than I had earlier.
	So usually in a professor's career, as you become more notable, as your research career progresses, not that you don't want to be teaching.
	But you don't want to be teaching, you know, huge undergraduate sections and so on because your time would be better spent, you know, directing a research lab or supervising doctoral students.
	Well, in my case, my teaching load has increased 30 years into my career.
	So they're certainly not doing anything to try to protect me or make me feel happy.
	They haven't, for example, covered any of my accomplishments.
	I think the last time they covered anything of mine might have been, I don't know, seven, eight years ago.
	And in terms of, for example, media attention, and I say this in my usual GAD style, I probably get more media attention on a given Tuesday than the rest of the faculty combined in a given year, but somehow the communications department at Concordia doesn't seem to ever see where my stuff is, right?
	I'll give you an example.
	Two years ago, in early 2022, And I say this not to brag because it's relevant to the story.
	Two years ago, Prime Minister Navidra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, he usually picks for Republic Day, Independence Day of India.
	He picks a few notable people from around the world.
	It could be an author, a professor, a cricketer, a soccer player, an actor.
	And he chooses them as whatever.
	To kind of bestow an honor on them.
	So I was chosen by the leader of a country of 1.2 billion people, the largest democracy in the world, as one of those notable people.
	So I knew that Concordia would probably not promote that, but I wanted to troll them.
	So I wrote to Concordia, everybody that you can think of.
	I said, hey, you know...
	Prime Minister Navindra Modi just nominated me.
	Here's the letter.
	So please feel free to share.
	You would think they'd want to.
	This is a huge honor.
	And after much discussion and internal conversations, they decided that they couldn't share it because it was a...
	I said, but it's not personal.
	It's posted all over the internet.
	I've actually gotten permission from the Prime Minister's office to post the letter on my social media.
	So by definition, it's not a private letter at this point.
	And they said, sorry, we can't share it.
	So they can't fire me, but they could certainly not celebrate me.
	So they don't go out of my way to screw me.
	Or at least not very directly.
	But you'd like to be appreciated, right?
	I mean, you'd like somebody to say, attaboy, you're great, we love what you're doing.
	They certainly don't do that.
	Maybe this is a stupid question before I ask.
	Is the parasitic mind for sale at the Concordia University Library?
	Well, no.
	I'll tell you why.
	Because the courses that I teach, I've never assigned that.
	So, because I usually teach, let's say, evolutionary consumer psychology or psychology of decision-making.
	You know, I'm very, very disciplined, Viva, in not, you know, overlapping some of my positions that I, like, if some position that I discuss in the parasitic mind is relevant to a course I'm teaching, I will certainly discuss it.
	But I don't, so I won't walk into class and start railing against Justin Trudeau because, I think he's not a good politician.
	Because in that course on psychology of decision-making, it's not necessarily a relevant topic.
	And I think because I have that professorial discipline, because I know how to delineate what I should or should not be talking about from a professorial obligation perspective, I've never really gotten into trouble.
	If anything, my students...
	I have always been unbelievably, like I've seldom had trouble from sort of like the blue-haired folks in any of my courses.
	And I guess that was a stupid question because unless it's part of a curriculum for a course, it won't be available at the university library.
	Okay.
	Now, so we were saying all that was a prelude to your most recent post, which was a day in the life.
	Oh, let's do it.
	You ready?
	I was trying to find the screen grab to bring it up.
	I got it right here for you.
	Do you want me to read it or do you want to read it?
	Oh, no.
	Do you see a thing that says share screen on the bottom of your...
	Or it says present?
	Oh, present.
	Yes, I see that.
	Okay, just make sure there's nothing embarrassing on your computer that you might not want to accidentally share.
	So, no.
	So, gay Turkish sauna.
	I should remove that, right?
	There would be nothing wrong with that, Gad.
	Okay, I had a joke that I was going to follow that up with.
	Okay, so present, and then what do I do?
	Well, then I think I see it in the backdrop, and then I can bring it up.
	Did I do it?
	No.
	Slides?
	So I did present?
	Oh, and then it says share screen.
	Share screen?
	Share screen?
	Yep.
	And then I think I should see it in the backdrop.
	Do you?
	Not yet.
	Or cut the link and share the link with me in the private chat.
	Oh, I had it as a screen grab.
	Just read it.
	It's a screen grab anyhow.
	It's the day in the life and it goes through the 8 o 'clock.
	Here we go.
	You ready?
	Okay, so typical university schedule.
	Number one, from 8 to 9 a.m., Dean of Diversity will address the faculty about the daily genocide taking place on campus.
	Number two, from 9 to 10 a.m., communal self-flagellation whilst reaffirming noble land acknowledgements.
	Number three, from 10 to 11 a.m., mandatory hashtag MeToo seminar to explain the importance of iterative consent.
	Do you know what iterative consent is, by the way?
	Iterative.
	If you don't, it clearly shows that you could potentially be a rapist.
	Iterative.
	Oh, well, then it means, I guess, you have to consistently ask for permission throughout the course of something.
	So, for example, when my wife and I engage in sexy time, this is how it usually goes.
	Here's how it goes.
	You ready?
	Yep.
	I am about to play some very white music.
	That might get you in the mood.
	Do you consent to that?
	And then she says, yes, I do.
	Then I will say, I am about to take off my shirt.
	Demonstrating my ridiculously svelte upper body.
	Do you consent to that?
	So you see, by my constantly engaging and iterative consent, throughout the whole steps of sexy time, I am keeping the dialogue open to make sure that if she ever wishes to withdraw her consent, she can.
	By the way, I said when she, I should fix that because I recently, you may or may not have known this, I recently came out.
	As a gay man, because my biological female wife told me that he identifies as male, and we know that based on trans logic, there is no question to be asked, that means I am gay.
	So not only am I an Arabic Jew of color, but I'm also a gay man.
	So sorry, you lose them.
	This would be one of those examples of something that only a professor could think up of.
	If my wife decides that she's trans and I have to say that she's a he, does that make me gay?
	But hold on a second.
	So iterative consent, however, again, if I may ask the stupid male chauvinist cisgender white male privilege question, do both people have to do this?
	Like the sexy time just consists of saying, are you good?
	Are you good?
	Are you good?
	I'm good.
	You're good.
	Like, do they both have to do it?
	In an ideal utopian world that is genderless, then you would think that.
	But right now, given that we can all agree that heterosexual sex is by its very nature a form of rape because it is penetrative, then it is...
	By the way, what I just said is...
	Andre Dworkin.
	Thank you very much.
	It is literally part of second wave radical feminism, right?
	So one wonders if they understand how it works for a sexually reproducing species.
	But in any case, let's not get bogged down with those biological details.
	So yes, you would want for both of us to engage in iterative consent, but for now the onus is more on me.
	As by the way I learned, and I'm not being sarcastic, I was forced to take...
	Not just me.
	Everybody in the university was forced to take mandatory sex training.
	So it is not at all insulting for a 58-year-old man who's been with his wife for 23 years to be forced.
	Otherwise, I cannot remain a professor to be taught by my noble...
	Benevolent employer how to engage in sexy time with my own wife.
	So that at least made me feel better.
	Sorry, Gad.
	I have a joke that I have to say to that, but now I just got to get...
	My kid seems to have...
	Oh no, is your kid hearing all this?
	He's hearing none of it, but I'll tell you what he is hearing.
	He's watching Spider-Man on my phone.
	Okay, get out of here.
	Sorry, this is how I...
	I'm not a bad...
	I've got to distract him.
	He's watching Spider-Man.
	It's the old one, 2002, the good one.
	No, I was going to say again, I had a joke, and I was going to say, well, I'm very fortunate because I barely have enough time in sexy time to iterate anything, so it would consist of one question, and then it would be done.
	But then, does the brevity...
	Of the sexual intercourse cause for retroactive revocation of one's consent if it was not all that they were expecting, can it then retroactively turn into some form of...
	See, earlier you said I was speaking like a professor.
	Now you're speaking like...
	Hold on.
	Hold on.
	What's going on here?
	Stop that.
	Okay, sorry.
	Say that again.
	I couldn't hear you.
	I was just going to say, earlier you were saying that I was speaking like a professor.
	Your question right now was that of a brilliant legal mind.
	I'm not sure that I've got the mental acuity to answer all that retroactive contract stuff.
	I'll leave it for brilliant legal minds like yourself to deal with those details.
	So you actually have to take a, what is it, sexual sensitivity?
	Yeah, yeah.
	It's like, I don't know what, I can't remember what it's called, but it's like a mandatory sex.
	At university again, at Concordia.
	At university, 58 years old, chaired professor, holding the highest professorship at the university for 10 years, from 2008 to 2018, married with my wife for 23 years, multiple children.
	I had to learn how to interact with, you know.
	And you do not have the option of saying, I am absolutely not attending this class.
	No.
	That would be just cause for...
	I don't want to misspeak, so I don't know if the repercussions would be you're fired, but I know that they keep sending reminders that you have until such and such a day to fill it out.
	It's September 12th.
	You have until October 5th to complete this and get your certification.
	And by the way, it's not just...
	You also have to take a seminar on systems of oppression.
	And so I have to take that.
	Because someone who went through the Lebanese Civil War, where I had to run really, really fast so that I'm not decapitated by friendly purveyors of the noble, peaceful religion, I need Concordia to teach me about systems of oppression.
	So everybody who doesn't know this, I mean, we went over it thoroughly in our first stream.
	Escapee of the Lebanese Civil War.
	One story that you had was when the shit was hitting the fan and one of your neighbors or a family acquaintance who you'd known very well came by late at night.
	Not family acquaintance.
	Let me just correct you.
	The guy who used to change the...
	We had these kind of towels.
	That were cloth towels.
	In a loop.
	In a loop.
	Okay.
	So he would come, take the dirty one, and put the new one up.
	So, you know, that's it.
	That's our connection to this guy.
	He knocks at the door with a few of his friends to give us pomegranates.
	He had just returned from the mountain while there is massive, massive street-to-street fighting.
	I mean, just go and do a Google search on Beirut Lebanese Civil War to see what it was like.
	And, yeah, so I was telling that story because had I been dumb enough to open the door, I think it would have ended up in a very different place.
	And then a cop says, luckily, I think a cop did come and say, what are you doing here?
	And he says, I'm bringing them pomegranates.
	And he says, bringing them pomegranates late at night in the middle of a street-to-street conflict.
	Don't ever come back.
	And he looked at you with an eye and said, I'll see you soon.
	I'll be back for you.
	And then we left Lebanon before he...
	Kindly return to visit us again.
	So the reason why I tell that story, because believe me, in that first year of the Civil War that we were in Lebanon, it started, by the way, in 1975, there was endless, I mean, horrifying incidents that I experienced.
	That one, I specifically chose it because it still haunts me as of writing the book.
	Because it demonstrated sort of the, you know, you remember the sliding door thing, right?
	Like if the doors close, you miss getting on the subway and you never get to meet your wife, right?
	So the sliding door thing was, had I been dumb enough to open that door, our lives would have been very different.
	So the existential darkness and eeriness of that reality of what would have happened to us that evening.
	Looms very large in my mind.
	And for many, many years, as I explained the parasitic mind, I had horrible dreams where I would wake up in complete terror.
	Now, luckily, those have very much subsided.
	So I would say in the last...
	Ten years, I probably don't remember having any such dreams, but for the first maybe 25, 30 years, this was a recurring thing that I would have.
	And so that pomegranate story really captures the horror of war.
	But of course, I knew nothing about oppression until Concordia explained to me what oppression was.
	And so they make you take these classes.
	And again, it's like you don't have the option.
	The members of the law societies, at least in Ontario, they were compelling them to basically make these D.I.E.
	or D.E.I.
	Declarations that you're going to hire based on, you know, inclusivity, equity, and all this other crap.
	There was a bit of an uproar, and I think the Bar Society of Ontario abandoned that requirement.
	But even I, I signed up for something, and I won't give too many details, but one of, you know, they basically said, you have to recognize your implicit bias.
	I said, I'm not, I was not going to make a stink of this because it would make a problem for somebody else.
	But like, cripe, if I had a job that required that, I wouldn't have that job for very long.
	So they don't, in all fairness, they don't do that in the seminars that I took.
	But for example, I'll give you some of the details.
	I might be slightly misspeaking, but the general gist applies.
	So what they do is they share with you different vignettes, and then you have to answer.
	Now, I know what they want me to answer.
	I know what the real answer should be, but I know that if I give the real answer, then I can't get through to the next screen.
	So example, you're walking on campus and you see a young guy complimenting a woman about how sexy she is.
	Is this a form of sexual violence?
	And so I write, no.
	And then a thing comes up.
	Well, no, that's wrong.
	Unwanted compliments are a form of compliment rape or whatever.
	I'm being facetious now.
	And so then you say, ah, okay, I understand now.
	So if a guy says, my goodness, you look hot in those pants, that is a form of sexual violence and we should intervene to stop the...
	Compliment rapists from walking on campus complimenting women.
	I get it now.
	Now I learned.
	I didn't know until I was 58, but now I know that a misplaced compliment is a form of sexual rape.
	I got it.
	So it's that kind of stuff.
	And again, by the way, I'm the last one to equivocate, but this is not something specific to my university, right?
	I mean, every single...
	This is not a Concordia problem.
	This is a problem in every university and now in every organization.
	And there's no...
	I do not make public stories that I'm not authorized to make public or disclose other people's stories that are not my own.
	But all I have to say, there's no but.
	It exists everywhere.
	In research, in academia, in law firms, in engineering, everywhere.
	I don't know when it became this pervasive litmus test of insanity as far as I'm concerned.
	You have to apologize for things that...
	Don't require apologizing.
	But again, you don't get to step two unless you get past step one, and it's literally the proverbial, I guess not literal, two plus two equals five, or I love Big Brother.
	So you write The Parasitic Mind.
	Yes, sir.
	It's not that it's a dark book.
	It's that it's highlighting the decline of Western society.
	How familiar are you with the decline of the Roman Empire?
	I mean, reasonably so.
	I just finished reading, where is it?
	Oh, it's actually...
	It's holding up the computer.
	Let me see if I can.
	And while you do that, I'll get my dog who's driving me crazy.
	I just read...
	Oh no, this way.
	I'm giving him some free publicity.
	How to Think Like a Roman Empire.
	It's a book by a guest who came on my show recently, Donald Robertson.
	It's a book talking about the application of principles from stoicism to modern life.
	And so...
	I'm reasonably familiar, but I'm guessing are you going to draw a parallel between...
	Oh, no, I'm going to ask you, because I am not reasonably familiar.
	I think I understand conceptually what led to the fall of the Roman Empire, and I understand the metaphors now, but you understand it better than I do, undoubtedly.
	Are there concrete analogies to be drawn between the fall of the Roman Empire...
	And the direction of Western society today.
	Because people always say a society in decline tends to obsess and focus on sexuality and these types of things, as did the Roman Empire.
	And I just don't understand the fall of the Roman Empire enough to understand that analogy.
	So I'm not willing to make that speculative link.
	I mean, there are certain historical similarities that we can make, but I'm someone who is very epistemically humble in that what I know, I know, and what I don't know, I don't know.
	I'm not...
	Not that I don't know about that parallel, but I'm not confident that there is a direct one-to-one parallel in terms of the general phenomenon.
	What I can tell you, though, if that's what you're looking for in a historical context, is that the capacity for human minds to be parasitized by bad ideologies is certainly not unique to the current zeitgeist, right?
	So that has been something that I can point to endless other In the parasitic mind, for example, I talk about Lysenkoism.
	Lysenko was a Soviet Union geneticist who thought that the laws of heredity, the fundamental laws of genetics, were incorrect because they did not adhere to certain Marxist doctrines.
	And so he proposed an alternative theory called Lysenkoism.
	We don't have to get into the details, but that is so incorrect in terms of scientifically that it led, in terms of the downstream effects, to the death of 20-30 million people from famine, right?
	So there are an endless number of examples throughout history where we can see the capacity for human minds to deviate from reason, from logic, from common sense, right?
	Salem witch hunts.
	There's a million.
	We could talk even examples within the Roman Empire.
	What is unique about the current period are the specific idea pathogens that are parasitizing our minds.
	You see what I'm saying?
	Absolutely.
	It's the Mark Twainian history doesn't repeat, but it tends to rhyme.
	So you have the similar manifestation, but it just manifests in different concrete ways.
	Beautiful.
	Exactly right.
	And what makes this current period so unique, hence why...
	I ended up writing The Parasitic Mind, having been a professor for almost three decades, is that any one of those idea pathogens might not have been sufficient to bring down the edifices of reason.
	But once you put them all together in a melange of epistemological destruction, then we do end up with what we have.
	Now, some people might be saying, well, what are these idea pathogens?
	Well, postmodernism, cultural relativism, militant feminism, social constructivism.
	Biophobia, the fear of using biology to explain human affairs.
	You know, all of these different things.
	On their own, they just cause a little fissure within the edifices of reason.
	Once we weaponize all of them, then everything crumbles.
	So we talk a lot about postmodernism and people...
	It's the big issue, or at least one of the contributing factors.
	What's the history of postmodernism?
	When did it become a philosophical idea?
	Yes, yes.
	Great question.
	Thank you.
	So the top, I mean, there are many different postmodernists, but the top three, sort of the holy trinity of bullshitters of postmodernism are all French.
	Because, you know, the French are simply more profound than the rest of us.
	So Jacques Derrida, which is deconstruction.
	Deconstructionism, language creates reality.
	There is nothing outside that which you label, right?
	So that's Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan.
	Now, there are many others then that came in, but those are some of the foundational ones.
	The fundamental tenet of postmodernism is that there are no objective truths other than, of course, the one truth that there are no objective truths.
	But this is my fundamental problem, which I think is...
	It invalidates the philosophy.
	There's no objective truths except for the fact that there are no objective truths.
	It means that there are objective truths.
	So the philosophy itself is fundamentally paradoxical, contradictory, and therefore invalid, illegitimate.
	There are objective truths.
	Absolutely.
	Period.
	100%.
	But I can't remember if...
	Did we...
	The last time that I was on your show, did I discuss the example with the lady who was the date of my...
	Oh, jeez.
	I don't think you did, because I think you mentioned that to Dr. Drew, and I remember thinking, that's damn funny, and if I had heard that...
	Either way, even if you did, it was close to two years ago that you did this.
	Tell us the story.
	You go out for a dinner with a post-modernist, feminist...
	Cultural anthropology student.
	Student, no less.
	So basically, the story goes like this.
	And apologies to those who have already heard it, but I'm sure many haven't.
	And even if you've heard it, it's fun to hear it again.
	So one of my doctoral students had just defended his dissertation, his PhD.
	And so we were going out for a celebratory dinner.
	Him, his date.
	Myself and my wife.
	We didn't have children.
	This was 2002.
	So this is 21 years ago.
	So this predates all the trans stuff by a mile.
	And so he calls me up a few hours before our dinner to give me kind of a heads up to say, oh, I just want to let you know that the lady I'm bringing to the date tonight, you already gave the spoiler.
	She is a student of postmodernism, women's studies, and cultural anthropology.
	To which I answered, ah, aha, the holy trinity of bullshit.
	But I said, oh, I understand.
	You want me to be on my best behavior?
	Don't worry about it.
	I'm going to be good.
	We're going to have a nice evening.
	Which, of course, as I always explain to people, was a complete and utter lie.
	I had no intention on staying true to that promise.
	But I did it politely.
	I turned to her about halfway through the dinner and I said, oh, I hear you're a...
	Student of postmodern.
	She goes, yes.
	I said, oh, well, you know, I kind of wake up every day thinking that there are some universal truths, you know, science and all.
	And as an evolutionary psychologist, I also think that there are human universals.
	As a matter of fact, there's a book by a Darwinian anthropologist called Human Universals.
	I didn't say this to her.
	I'm saying now to you, right?
	So we know that there is an invariant human nature.
	So do you mind?
	Now this is me speaking to her.
	Do you mind if I...
	Maybe share with you what I think is a universal, and then we could discuss it.
	You could tell me how I'm wrong.
	She goes, yeah, sure, go for it.
	I said, is it not true, is it not a universal that only women can bear children within Homo sapiens, within humans?
	Is that not true?
	So she looks at me, can't believe that someone could be such an imbecile, such a simpleton.
	And she said, no, it's not true.
	It's not a universal.
	I said, it's not a universal that only women can bear children.
	She said, no.
	I said, how is that?
	So then she says that there is some Japanese tribe off some Japanese island where within their cultural, their mythological realm, their folkloric mythological realm, it is the men who bear children.
	So by me restricting the conversation to the biological realm, that's how I keep women barefoot and pregnant.
	So then, as I tell people, after I recovered from the mini-stroke I had at having to listen to such gibberish, I said, okay, well, maybe it was a bit too controversial, too corrosive to mention something as, you know, as laden with a minefield as only women bear children.
	So maybe I come up with a less triggering example.
	Is it not true that since time immemorial...
	From the vantage point of anywhere on Earth, sailors have relied on the premise that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
	Is that not true?
	So there she used Jacques Derrida's deconstructionism.
	She said, well, what do you mean by east and west?
	And what do you mean by the sun?
	It's Zanonian-level...
	Pontification.
	Like, okay, fine.
	When you break it all down, yes, language means nothing except for that which we ascribe to it, which are concepts that you give words to describe.
	And so long as we understand what we're talking about, that's how knowledge is communicated.
	Exactly.
	Otherwise, how would you and I right now have this conversation if we don't have shared meaning?
	What, right?
	Like, we would just be making gibberish sounds, right?
	So anyway, so when she said, that which you call the sun, I might call...
	Or I call dancing hyena.
	I mean, that's literally the case.
	Dancing hyena.
	To which I answered, well, okay, fine.
	The dancing hyena rises in the East and sets in the West.
	And then she said, I don't play those label games.
	Now, why do I always repeat that story?
	And why has it become such a viral story?
	Because it...
	Perfectly captures the lunacy of postmodernism.
	This person was not some escapee from a psychiatric institute, right?
	Or she might be soon to be joining one because she doesn't have to be an escapee.
	Fair enough.
	Point well taken.
	So if you have a graduate student who can sit down with me and we can't agree.
	On fundamental principles or fundamental realities such as women bear children and there is such a thing as East and West and there is such a thing as called the Sun, then where does postmodernism take you, right?
	And that's why in the parasitic mind I refer to it as intellectual terrorism because it serves no other value.
	There's no question.
	I had a discussion with someone who is a good faith person.
	She's going to be releasing the podcast tomorrow.
	And I understand, you know, I understand the intellectual game behind it where we try to confuse the issues based on the grey zones where people refuse to even acknowledge the black and the white.
	Women have babies.
	We'll say, well, what's a woman?
	What's having a baby?
	And Gad, trigger warning for anybody who's going to see this.
	There's no blood or there's no grossness.
	There is something hilarious.
	Gad, I don't know if you saw this, but I'm going to show it anyhow and then play a few seconds of the rap song.
	Because I'm in love with this guy now.
	Samson.
	This is real, by the way.
	So the person breastfeeding is a man.
	The person delivering the baby is a woman, but you wouldn't necessarily know based on, you know, what they've done to their bodies.
	Look at this.
	The baby has been able to latch.
	Oh, I had to put it over here.
	This is a woman on the left who gave birth.
	This is a man.
	Who's trying to rescue the baby.
	I've not been able to produce any milk.
	Hasn't been able to produce milk.
	Because we're going to supplement the feeding with formula so that my baby is still getting the nutrients that they need.
	And if anybody has a note, Samson.
	Gad, you're going to love this guy.
	I'm trying to get him on for, I'll play 30 seconds of the rap song.
	Is this satirical or real?
	That was real.
	This is the rap, the raps, you know, making fun of it now.
	This guy's name is Samson.
	Hit it, hit it, hit it goes a little something like this.
	That's fucked up.
	And if that makes me a bigot, well then what's up?
	I'm going to have to send you.
	I went down that guy's YouTube rabbit hole.
	That sounds really gross.
	The guy's name is Samson.
	He makes rap about, or at least did nine months ago and plus, about contemporary issues.
	The video that you saw when people say, no, women aren't the only ones that can give birth.
	Look, this trans male gave birth because...
	She's a woman, had her breasts mastectomized, or whatever you want to call it, and then gave birth to a baby, but looked like a man.
	And then you got this man who has some female attributes, trying to breastfeed a baby, talking about how the baby's latching, but not getting milk.
	It feels like Sodom and Gomorrah or the fall of Rome, but I don't know what either of those actually are.
	By the way, it's postmodernism that offers...
	The quote epistemological trajectory that allows you to do that, right?
	If there are no objective truths, that also applies to the fact that there is no such thing as a truth of male or female, right?
	You just have to, you know, wave the magic trans wand and anything is possible.
	This is why, by the way, in the parasitic mind, I talk about...
	What is the commonality across all those idea pathogens?
	They're really completely different, you know, mind pathogens.
	But what is common to all of them is that they free us from the pesky shackles of reality, right?
	So, for example, let me just give you one other example.
	Social constructivism frees us from the pesky shackles of my parental reality.
	What do I mean by that?
	Social constructivism presumes that we are all born with equal potentiality, and it is only the schedule of reinforcement in your life that causes you to become Lionel Messi or Michael Jordan.
	So if I hug my child enough...
	Or I don't hug them enough.
	Or I give them enough Big Macs.
	Or I don't give them Big Macs.
	That might be the trajectory by which they could be the next Einstein.
	We're all born with equal potentiality.
	Now, that's a very hopeful message.
	I would love to think that all of my children have an equal potentiality of becoming the next Newton, Einstein, or Lionel Messi.
	But of course, it's perfectly rooted in bullshit.
	You and I did not have an equal likelihood of becoming NBA stars.
	First, we don't have enough vertical height jump.
	Number two, we're not very tall.
	So we certainly started off on lower footing, right?
	But that doesn't feel as hopeful as social constructivism, which says that we are born with empty minds, with equal potentiality, and it's only socialization that makes us what we become.
	So all of these idea pathogens start off with this noble quest to free us from reality.
	And in doing so, we end up murdering truth.
	Hold on one second.
	I'm going to send the link to everybody so they can hear that rap song.
	But it is...
	Again, it's like the iteration of...
	I'm thinking communism, again, is not equal opportunity but equal outcome.
	And it seems that that is applied mutandus mutandus to gender sexual stuff where it has to be equal outcome.
	And if it isn't, well, we've got to make sure that it is equal outcome and not just equal opportunity.
	But again, I guess...
	So the parasitic mind was sort of...
	Not cynical, but I guess it left a bad taste in your mouth, and you had to come and write another book about finding happiness.
	So what is the sadness of happiness about?
	And it is interesting.
	I'm putting it all together now.
	This is your own healing, your psychological healing.
	You have to find a path to happiness, and not just a path to observing the abject insanity of our times.
	What is the book about?
	Thank you so much for asking.
	Well, in a sense, they are linked in several ways.
	And actually, in chapter one of my forthcoming book, I do talk about that.
	Look, even when I was mired in the endless culture war fights, I always...
	Do it with a twinkle in my eye.
	There's always humor.
	There's always sarcasm.
	There's always satire.
	So that even when I'm dealing with very serious subjects, subjects of civilizational importance that are attacking the edifices of reason, I still find the capacity to be playful, right?
	To be jovial, to be happy.
	And so what led me to write...
	So I didn't have sort of this a priori...
	Oh, I'll write the parasitic mind and then the next one will be the happy book.
	But what ended up happening through happenstance, through the serendipity and magic of life, is that a lot of people would write to me and say things like, how do you maintain your happiness?
	How come you always seem to be joking around and you seem like a kid and playful, even though you're obviously a serious professor?
	What's your secret, professor?
	And when I would post...
	On my social media, some sort of prescription.
	Oh, here's the way that I've lost so much weight.
	That would be some of the most shared content.
	Of anything, right?
	I mean, I share all sorts of very serious content.
	None of it seemed to appeal to people as much as if I share some sort of prescriptive action or some secret to how I live my life, to how I have a successful marriage and so on.
	And so I thought, well, wait a minute.
	Why don't I...
	Many people are asking me to give them the secrets.
	Why don't I write a book about the sad truth about happiness?
	So that's kind of the background to the book.
	So what I basically do in the book is I discuss a few decisions that you can make that either increase greatly your likelihood of being happy or miserable.
	So in one of the chapters, I talk about choosing the right spouse and choosing the right profession.
	Now, that might sound obvious, but let's stop and analyze it for a second.
	You know, when you wake up in the morning next to the person that you're married to, if that person is someone that you like, well, you're getting off on the right side of the bed.
	Then you go off to your work.
	If what you do at work is something that brings you great purpose and meaning and joy and happiness and excitement and glee, well, that's great.
	If you return home to the person that you really like, well, then, you know, it's looking pretty good for you.
	I don't have the arrogance or hubris to say, read the book, I guarantee you happiness.
	What I can tell you, though, is that if you implement those prescriptions, it increases your likelihood of being happy, right?
	So example, how can we make sure that we marry the right person?
	Well, there is no absolute guarantee, but we do have a lot of scientific evidence that can help us know if we're making the right decision.
	Example.
	There are two maxims when it comes to mate choice.
	There is birds of a feather flock together, or there is opposites attract.
	Do you care to guess which is the one that is by far the more likely one to guarantee it?
	When it comes to a marriage, I'd have to say birds of a feather flock together.
	Boom, you got it.
	There's a lot of expressions of the English language that have totally mutually incompatible meanings, like he who hesitates is lost.
	Look before you leap.
	And I can't think of the other good ones now.
	But to your point, forgive me for interrupting you.
	It's not that opposites attract is never operative in the mating market.
	It might be very exhilarating and optimal for a short-term mate.
	If I am sexually introverted and the partner that I'm having a little...
	Dalliance with is sexually extroverted, whatever that means, or experimental, whatever.
	That difference that opposites attract might actually make for a very pleasant and enjoyable evening.
	But when it comes to long-term stability, birds of a feather do flock together, as you correctly pointed out.
	Now, the next question might be, well, on which attributes?
	Is it that we should have both colored eyes?
	Is it that we should both have similar...
	I can tell you, having been, I think, relatively successfully married now, it's going to be 16 or 17 years.
	It has to be ideologically and not physically, because physicality, first of all, evaporates into the wind for some.
	But that's not what's important.
	That's not what allows you to sleep next to someone.
	Shared beliefs, shared attitudes, shared life goals.
	Those are the things that we need to be assorting on.
	And if we do engage in assortative mating on those beliefs, it increases the likelihood of us getting married.
	I mean, being successful in our marriage by a long shot.
	So that would be one.
	Go ahead.
	Oh, the other one was out of sight, out of mind, and absence makes the heart grow fonder.
	Two mutually incompatible maxims of life.
	Sorry.
	Beautiful.
	Now, when it comes, for example, to jobs, there are many ways by which we can either increase or decrease our happiness.
	I argue in the book that one of the most direct ways to ensure that you have purpose and meaning in your job is if you instantiate your creative impulse.
	Now, instantiating your creative impulse can come in many forms.
	I can be a chef.
	I create.
	Culinary art.
	I could be Viva Frey.
	I create content that people consume and love.
	You used to be a successful lawyer and you said, I don't want this.
	I want to create content.
	I want to play there.
	And I'm going to come to play in a second because it's also in the book.
	In my case, I create by writing books.
	I create by writing academic papers.
	I create by also creating online content.
	So I'm constantly in creative mode.
	I can be an architect and create a bridge or a beautiful building.
	So all other things considered, if you are creating, whether it be a movie or a dish or content online or a book, you are certainly increasing the likelihood of you having that existential glee when you wake up in the morning and say, I'm excited.
	What am I going to create today?
	Okay, so that would be an example.
	So choose the right mate, choose the right job.
	And then throughout the chapters, I have different mindsets that you can adopt, each of which greatly increase your chances of being happy or, if you don't adopt them, of being miserable.
	So earlier I used the word play.
	So I've got a whole chapter titled Life as a Playground.
	Right?
	So the idea of immersing yourself, I mean, literally in existential play.
	So if you see my wife and I, we're constantly joking with each other.
	I'm constantly joking with my children.
	As you see, if you follow my content online, I've got a whole bunch of skits that I've now become very famous for that are all...
	Rooted in satire and playfulness, right?
	Now, that doesn't stop me from being a very serious professor when I have to go give a talk at Stanford or USC.
	One does not negate the other, but I'm playful.
	By the way, in the book, I talk about that even in the most dire of circumstances, I mean, there's nothing more dire than the Holocaust.
	People were engaging in play.
	The movie Life is Beautiful, Oscar-winning movie from 1997, was about a father protecting his son from the horrors of the Holocaust by making it seem as though the whole thing that was happening was just a game, playful.
	There's a whole book written by, I think, a German historian, if I'm not mistaken, I can't remember who it was, about how the Jews were engaging in various play activities.
	In the concentration camps, I engaged in play behavior in the Lebanese Civil War.
	As a matter of fact, my parents told me, don't cross this line when you're playing outside because then that puts you within the eyesight, the visual sight of the snipers who would blow off our heads.
	So I literally was playing, making sure that I don't cross a particular invisible line, and yet I still needed to...
	Engage and play.
	As a matter of fact, you probably can't see it.
	I've got a...
	Can you see there's like a scar on this finger?
	I'm going to say that...
	Oh, well, I do see two wrinkles, but I think I see a scar above the head.
	That scar was...
	I was playing with a cousin of mine with a knife and a slingshot.
	I'm outside Lebanese Civil War and I cut myself really badly and I still have.
	But that came from my desire to engage in play as a little boy, a 10, 11-year-old boy.
	So science is a form of play, right?
	You could think of nothing is more austere than science.
	It's a serious endeavor.
	No, it's the highest form of intellectual play, right?
	What are scientists doing?
	They are solving a puzzle.
	Instead of the puzzle being a thousand pieces that you put together, a jigsaw puzzle, there's a whole bunch of variables floating in the world.
	I'd like to connect some of these to solve a puzzle.
	Which variable predicts which other variable?
	So if you approach life with a playful mindset, my goodness, you're going to be happier.
	Now, I then discuss a whole bunch of other things.
	Seek variety, try to avoid regret, all kinds of stuff.
	This is advice that you're giving, which I love these types of books, which are chapter by chapter, anecdotal, but also backed up with your area of expertise, which is development.
	What do we call it?
	Evolutionary psychology.
	Evolutionary psychology.
	Exactly.
	So it's exactly what you said.
	It's taking my personal anecdotes, combining them with ancient wisdoms and contemporary science to hopefully offer you some cool prescriptions.
	So it's not self-helpy.
	I mean, it's really rooted in...
	Well, in my, I hate to say lived experience, it sounds postmodernist, but it's in my, you know, I'm 58 years old, I have a lot of experience.
	So it's sharing my, so there's a lot of God stories.
	People love God stories.
	There's tons of, and there are some God stories that I've never shared ever in public.
	I won't share one right now, but it involves the Mossad.
	You want to hear that story.
	I'm telling you, it's a big one.
	I'm not going to share it.
	Wait for the rumors of Gad being a member of Mossad.
	We might get there.
	Well, we might get there.
	But the bottom line is, on any given page, you might have me telling a story, linking it to Epictetus and Seneca, and then here comes the neuroscience on the next paragraph.
	And so it's that marriage.
	If I've done a good job, then hopefully you'll appreciate that marriage.
	Okay, now the kid is getting restless, but he's going to have to wait a bit because I love what I'm listening to.
	But again, this is not my struggle.
	I don't think I'll ever lose my sense of humor, but I don't think I'll ever lose my frustration at the world either.
	Some people are going to have the guilt of happiness, which I think is part of the root of the problem of all of what we're seeing today is you have people who don't know how to...
	Deal with their own, not privilege, because I loathe that word.
	It's an inaccurate word, but their good fortune.
	And they don't understand how to deal with their good fortune.
	And so they feel, on the one hand, incapable of just appreciating it without internalizing it for the purposes of, on the one hand, trying to find unhappiness or misfortune within themselves that might not exist.
	Or, if they can't do that, to find it in other people so they can heal it in other people.
	How can people not feel guilty about...
	Feeling their own happiness, if I can ask you a very psychologically profound question.
	Well, I mean, in a sense, you're almost describing, in a much more dire context, what people experience when they experience survival guilt, right?
	The plane crashes.
	I was seated in 16D.
	I survived, but the poor guy next to me died.
	And then you're overcome with this feeling of survival.
	What's so special about me that the cosmos would allow me to survive?
	So in a sense, that's what you're talking about, which is why should I be happy while there's so much misery in the world?
	Look, the reality is we can all do our part to make the world a better place.
	So the fact that I am swimming in my happiness doesn't mean that I don't care about other people's suffering.
	As a matter of fact, I spend half my time on social media fighting all kinds of injustices precisely because I'd like to...
	Weigh in in however small way I can to make the world a better place.
	But that doesn't mean that I need to feel guilty about me being happy, right?
	I mean, why should it imply that I don't deserve to be happy?
	By the way, here's some maybe good or bad news, depending on how you look at it, depending if you have half full, glass half full or half empty type of guy.
	About 50% of our happiness is inscribed in our genes.
	Right?
	Now that you might say, well, that's bad news because that means some of us have a sunny disposition, whereas others have a gloomy disposition.
	There's nothing I can change about that.
	Well, no, because that implies that there is another 50% that is up for grabs, that is open to you willfully altering your trajectory of happiness, of being the architect and the orchestrator of your own happiness.
	So, yes.
	You and I, I think we've got to know each other well.
	We both seem to be sort of very jovial, happy people.
	And so we already are leading on, you know, climbing mouth happiness because we have a sunny disposition.
	But I bet you that if we think about some of the decisions that we make, some of the mindsets that we adopt, we probably are also increasing our happiness by adopting a good mental hygiene of happiness.
	Okay, if what you mean is it's genetic or in the genes as in you're born with it, but it could also be trained like exercise and healthy living, that's one thing.
	But I think people always tend to value the innate skill over the learned habits because if you don't keep working on the habits, you'll lose them.
	And then people can sort of train themselves to be grateful and be happy.
	But then if they stop practicing, they're going to lose it.
	Whereas those who are genetically predisposed to having the sense of humor even in the darkest of circumstances, they'll never lose that even if they don't practice it.
	I guess it's a question of making the best of what you have.
	So the question's going to be, you're living in Canada.
	Through what we're currently living...
	A path of unhappiness.
	Go ahead.
	Is there a chat that said, Gad, I appreciate your work immensely and your sense of humor.
	Even more, thank you.
	That's Chechism.
	And then Fleet Lord Avatar says, When you escaping Canada, Mr. Sad?
	Now the question is this.
	When are you escaping Canada?
	What's your life plan so far?
	Yes, yes, yes.
	Look, probably the thing that makes me most...
	I mean, knock on wood, I have health.
	My children are healthy.
	My wife is healthy.
	All of that is good.
	So the thing that makes me stay up at night most is that I don't wish to remain in Canada.
	Look, Montreal is a beautiful city.
	You're a Montrealer.
	There are incredible things about Montreal.
	I'll be forever grateful to Canada and to Quebec for having welcomed us in when we would have otherwise been killed on the street.
	I could never take that away, so I will never not be infinitely grateful for the welcoming nature of Canadian society.
	But I think I've paid my dues after 40-plus years in Canada.
	There are places that I'd rather be, one of which really Canada can't control, and that is the weather.
	I'm someone who is...
	You know, from the Mediterranean area, of course.
	I'm from Lebanon.
	Look how my skin gets when the summer comes.
	You can basically tell which month I'm doing a YouTube clip by the glow of my skin.
	I'm either a bronze god or I'm sickly green monster.
	In February, I look sickly.
	In June, I look good.
	Well, I want to be in a place where I always look good, if I can put it that way.
	So that may be Florida.
	Historically, my promised land has been Southern California, but I understand that it's extremely woke.
	I understand that the taxes are almost as bad as Quebec.
	So, Inshallah, as we say, may I soon be joining you in Florida.
	Hold on.
	Someone once said that to me in a park.
	What does that mean again?
	Inshallah, God willing.
	Okay.
	But as far as the wokeness, the finding happiness in as much as you can, You're now living in Canada, going through what's going on there with Bill C-11, politically.
	What does it take?
	Or can there be a point of no return for a society at large?
	When people say, and I've said it, I really feel as though the government of Canada has made me hate the place that I've called home, but not the people, not the geography, not the rivers, not the lakes, not the history, the political presence.
	And what I was finding very, very depressing and very disappointing is the amount of Canadians who don't seem to have a problem with it, who seem to be drinking this Kool-Aid.
	We always talk about what can we do and where does it go?
	How can you cause people to realize the wrong or do you think you're approaching a point or we are approaching a point in Canada that's past the point of no return?
	Yeah, so I think for me, I'll speak specifically for me and then we can...
	You know, generalize it to the greater community.
	I think there are two things, I mean, forgetting about the weather, there are two ideological classes of problems that I can identify.
	There's all the parasitic idea pathogens, and then there is the parasitic taxation.
	Now, these, one can argue, are related to each other.
	So, in my view, no society can...
	Over the long run, withstand the type of parasitic taxation that we have.
	I mean, in Canada in general and Quebec, it's even worse, right?
	Because what ends up happening?
	Someone like me, someone like you says, wait a second.
	I mean, how much can I be paying taxes for the privilege and luxury of living here, right?
	And by the way, I just wanted to clarify, you are mean literal taxes, not spiritual taxes.
	No, no, no.
	Parasitic taxes.
	So think about it for a second.
	1917, if I'm not mistaken.
	Income tax comes in as a temporary measure.
	It's only going to be temporary.
	It was 15% at the time, give or take, 10 or 15?
	And it wasn't levied on everyone.
	Now, fast forward temporary measure 108 years later, when you add up all of the taxes that I paid when this book came out, The Parasitic Mind, where is it?
	How can I point to it?
	No, this way, this way.
	You know, it got up to almost 60%.
	So think about it for a second.
	I write a book from the neuronal firings of my mind, from what I experienced in Lebanon, from what I lived as a professor for 30 years.
	It's my ideas, my words, my humor, my satire, my stories.
	And there is some amorphous agent, some mafia, but it's a legal mafia, right?
	The illegal mafia extorts from me 3% to 6% for protection.
	But the legal mafia says, 60%, 58% of what you make belongs to me.
	Give it up.
	That's the right thing to do.
	And if you don't do it, I'm coming for you.
	So what would then constitute me being a slave?
	Now imagine, and I'm using these words not hyperbolically, but literally.
	0% tax would be, let's call it complete freedom.
	The libertarian utopia.
	100% tax would be I am a complete slave.
	So if I'm paying 58% tax, I'm much closer to being a complete slave.
	Let's put it...
	Yeah, yeah.
	Sorry, go for it.
	One more thing.
	Forgive me.
	Thank you so much for giving me so much time to speak.
	Let's put it this way.
	If we use the timescale, some of you may have seen it.
	When is it that you first start earning your money if we use the January 1st as the time clock?
	Well, does it make sense that it's end of August, September, that the government allows me to start making money?
	So from January 1st till end of August, I work for free?
	That can't be right.
	So for me, that's the thing, frankly, that makes me want to leave Canada.
	It's because Canada is the place, I hate to say it, for those who wish to benefit from the parasitic system.
	And it takes suckers like me to fund everybody else's parasitism that allows the system to flourish.
	I'll say it had to do with the amount of taxes.
	Oh, no, I was going to say, when you say 0% libertarian, totally free, 100% total slave.
	58%, you're closer to the 100%.
	The government will say, well, or people say, you don't have to work.
	If you don't want to do it and they don't understand, that's the very problem is that it deters people from wanting to work.
	And I know everybody out there is going to say, well, the streets don't pay for themselves.
	Your shitty healthcare system doesn't pay for itself.
	The problem is that you're paying in advance for something that you might not use and that even when you decide to use it or need to use it, it sucks for everyone.
	Even those who don't pay into it.
	And, and forgive me for interrupting you, if I have a ruptured Achilles tendon and you have a ruptured Achilles tendon and we both go to get it fixed using our healthcare system, why did I have to pay $300,000 of taxes while you paid $3,000 of taxes for that same free healthcare, right?
	What's the moral framework that causes two people to pay radically different amounts for the same service?
	Let's suppose we all say we're all going to pay $10,000.
	Fine.
	We can debate whether $10,000 is enough or not.
	But when you go buy a car, the car dealer doesn't say, well, wait a minute.
	Tell me how much money you make.
	And as a result of that, I'll tell you what is the price that you pay.
	Why should I pay 50 times more taxes for the right to live in Canada?
	Well, and some would say it's the price you pay for a free civil society where the poor are not literally eating the rich.
	The problem is, if what you got was commensurate or even proportionate, if not on a personal level, at least on a social level for what's being paid into it, then you could say, okay, fine, you pay a lot.
	but you get good stuff.
	The problem, the ultimate problem is you pay a lot and you get shit.
	And the reason why you get shit is because of government corruption, government bloat, government waste, pockets and then you say like i if i would pay for i'd sooner give it to charity and know that the charity is using it properly then give it to these corrupt government officials who i know are squandering it and 100 percent And the idea that people say, well, what are you going to do?
	Sit on your cash and sit on your pile of money?
	No, that's the other point.
	It's not like if you don't pay it in taxes, you're not going to spend it.
	Quite the opposite.
	And so it's just like giving money to the house.
	It's very frustrating.
	Someone said, by the way, hold on.
	I think I can feel this one better than Gad.
	Fleet Lord Avatar says, Mr. Sad, car home insurance and property taxes are higher in Florida than 47 other states.
	That may be true.
	And that's not to say that Florida is perfect.
	Florida, I think.
	Accounts for like 40%.
	I think it's something like car accident fraud.
	40% of it comes from Florida.
	Something along those lines.
	There's some outrageous problem that results for car insurance being outrageously high in Florida.
	Home insurance, yeah, you got hurricanes and you got a bunch of problems.
	But I can tell you now, having done the private healthcare system in the States, you know, you pay a lot for premiums versus pay a lot in taxes for healthcare in Canada.
	You might be paying the same amount at the end of the day, but at least you pay for it when you need it.
	And when you need it, you don't end up dying in an ER like you do in Nova Scotia and across Canada.
	And it's like, if people don't think you end up voting with your dollar and you have a socialist dream turn into a failed state nightmare, look at Venezuela.
	Well, I was thinking, by the way, and I started, I've probably written about 5,000 words of potentially my next book.
	I don't know if that's going to be the next book.
	I started it immediately after last year's taxation season.
	Because I was just so existentially raped.
	I mean, I couldn't make sense of the world after what had happened.
	And you and I, I think, had talked about it privately.
	But in any case, one of the things that I argue in this working draft of potentially a future book is the idea that socialism and communism are truly antithetical to human nature, right?
	I mean, E.O. Wilson, the famous evolutionary biologist, famously said, Regarding socialism slash communism, great idea, wrong species.
	Now, why did he say that?
	Because he is an entomologist who studies social ants.
	Social ants have a communist system.
	All of the worker ants are equal in rank.
	They are indistinguishable from each other.
	And there's one reproductive queen that is different from everybody else.
	A communist system could make sense for some species, not for humans.
	It is antithetical to the human condition.
	Now, the other thing I would say that is contrary to science and reality when it comes to communism, we know from B.F. Skinner and behaviorists in general that humans and animals in general do operate along cause and effect mechanisms, stimulus response.
	Rewards and punishment.
	So imagine when you have a taxation system like the government that can always come to me with a gun to my head, metaphorically speaking, but it's almost literal, and say, pay up.
	What we do with the money is none of your business, asshole.
	Now you go ahead and write more books so that we can take more money from you.
	How we decide to squander it is not your business.
	So there are no consequences to your squander.
	There's no consequences to your waste.
	We don't line you up in a street corner and execute you if you are corrupt.
	You just...
	Run for another election and then we reward you again, Justin Trudeau.
	How can such a system perpetuate itself?
	Well, it can perpetuate itself because when 95% of Canadians benefit from the parasitic system, then it is left for me to stand on top of the mountain, quote, whining about being wealthy while everybody else looks at me and says, stop whining.
	Why don't you pay your fair share, asshole?
	Well, guess what?
	At the end of the day, when I do all my calculations, I always wonder, How come I don't seem to have any money left in the bank?
	How could it be that I wrote such an international bestseller and I'm not swimming in money because all my money was taken from me?
	People really say the people who don't pay the taxes, and this is not a hierarchical thing, the people who don't pay taxes or who don't make enough to pay certain taxes don't necessarily appreciate there's a deterrent effect where like...
	Why make $100,000 literally when $48,000 goes to the government on, say, $44,000, $45,000 on direct income tax?
	Then you got your 15% sales tax off everything that you buy.
	Then you got your home mutation tax, your welcome tax.
	And they tax you on debt.
	And people don't appreciate it.
	It should not be viewed as a luxury to be remunerated and rewarded for the fruits of your labors.
	It should just be called human nature.
	And then when you fully appreciate that in Canada, I think it's something like 20% of the population pays 80% of the taxes.
	It creates an entitlement in a different group of people where it's not hard work anymore.
	It is...
	You owe it to us, and if you don't do it, then you become morally culpable for not doing it, as if there are not options in the world that will ultimately let these things play out.
	And there's a word for it.
	It's called parasitic.
	So I thought, actually, of my next book being called The Parasitic Government, or something to that effect.
	Because, I mean, it literally is that, right?
	And I see it when I would post angry tweets about how...
	Parasitic, the taxation.
	I mean, just how brutally unfair it is.
	It literally drives you almost to financial ruin.
	You'd get all sorts of Canadians saying, stop whining, you asshole.
	At least you made money.
	But I don't owe you that money.
	I wrote that book.
	And it's as though it's a luxury to pay the tax to the government.
	It's a luxury that, first of all...
	People can go out there and work and then see what it feels like and then they make a decision and say, well, Jesus, I'm just going to work under the table and then publicly work under the table, pay lesser taxes and then take under the table black market cash or what's it called?
	Is it called black market?
	It's not called black market.
	Which is what invariably happens because human nature is what it is for a great many people.
	Why pay tax when you don't have to and why declare when you don't have to?
	And by the way, so everybody appreciates the difference between parasitism and symbiotic relationships is the parasite ends up killing the host, the symbiotic relationship, which is, you know, the remora on the shark.
	Well, the remora doesn't kill the shark.
	They actually help each other.
	And that has never been, as far as I can tell from the history of humanity, the relationship between citizens and the government.
	It's certainly been more parasitic than symbiotic.
	Meanwhile, you learned so much from your first book, you're doing it again with the second one.
	Or rather, fourth and fifth.
	I'm sorry, the second...
	What did you call it?
	Trade book.
	It's your third trade book.
	Third trade book, exactly.
	Is it as bad as...
	I remember what it was like a year ago, and every time I go back into Canada, it feels like stepping back into the asylum.
	It's getting worse in Quebec and Canada, right?
	And you see it in...
	Well, small ways.
	For example, there is no street that I can go on that hasn't been in perpetual construction for the past, you know, 10 years, right?
	I mean, how could it be that a particular area has been under never-ending construction for years, right?
	It's like 2027, it will be over.
	Gad, I'll field that one.
	Those cones, those orange cones, Montreal is known as the orange cone city.
	Well, they pay $1.50 per cone per day.
	Something along those lines.
	You know who has the contract for that?
	Two entities that do not care who they pay and two entities that do not care who they charge.
	And why?
	Because it's not their money.
	And nobody spends somebody else's money more wisely than they would spend their own.
	And you have the government spending other people's money.
	I can't hear you.
	You're dead.
	Son of a gun.
	What part did you not hear?
	Nobody spends their money or something like that.
	Nobody spends other people's money more wisely than they spend their own.
	The old Yiddish expression, everyone's a fool until it comes to their own affairs.
	That's the government.
	We don't need life plans.
	Okay, fine.
	What else is going on in your life these days?
	Oh, you're very sweet.
	Well, we are...
	On a personal note, we're going to Portugal in a few weeks for a little vacation before this guy.
	I better see everybody going out, some shameless promotion.
	Go out, pre-order it.
	Before I say more about Portugal, it's incredibly important to pre-order books.
	Let me give you the appeal for why it is so.
	The first day that a book is released, all of the pre-orders get...
	They get counted as part of the sales of that first day.
	So let's suppose there are 8,000 pre-orders that have been instantiated.
	Now the book is released on July 25th.
	Those 8,000 sales become officials or pre-orders become sales on day one.
	So that means that if many, many people pre-order the book so that off the gates you get all of these massive, you know, huge sales.
	Then it increases your chances of hitting the bestsellers list.
	Once you hit the bestseller list, it becomes an avalanche.
	It becomes a domino effect.
	So that once the book is on the bestseller list, it increases the chances that more people see it, blah, blah, blah.
	So if you support my work, if you don't fund me in some other way and you'd like to read my work...
	Please consider pre-ordering it because it really matters once the book is released.
	I'm sending out the...
	It's an Amazon affiliate link, so I'm going to get like one penny for every sale that goes through.
	The Amazon affiliate link is out there.
	It's on Amazon.
	Yeah, the pre-orders also lets people know.
	It lets the publisher know the level of interest and it becomes itself sort of a marketable...
	Exactly.
	Okay.
	Exactly.
	So going back to Portugal, we're leaving for two weeks.
	We're going to just hopefully turn off all the phones, not check any emails, because once I return, the book will then be released two weeks later.
	And I don't know if you know, Viva, but when you write these sort of high-profile trade books, it is literally written in the contract the number of media that you have to do, because obviously the publisher wants to make sure that you're available for all of these high-profile media.
	So once...
	The book is about to be released.
	The insanity that happens is just completely unbelievable.
	So already now, just the first week of the book's release, if you saw my travel schedule, it's just mind-blowing.
	So I am doing all of the high-profile shows that you can think of, Joe Rogan and Greg Gutfeld and Megyn Kelly and all the rest of them.
	And unlike when The Parasitic Mind came out, which was under COVID, so I just had to turn on the...
	The computer was all under Zoom.
	You've got to actually travel.
	You have to travel everywhere.
	And so I pretty much spend half my day just trying to coordinate and schedule with the assistance of my wife who helps out and the publicist, just the schedule, all of the moving parts.
	So it's very, very exciting.
	And I hope it will be successful because it's really, truly a positive, fun book.
	I hope people will enjoy it.
	Now, I'm going to bring up one last question.
	Again, would you have 15 minutes?
	I have as much time as you need because there's an expression in Arabic, which I'm going to first say in Arabic, and then I'm going to translate it.
	Whenever you're going to say goodbye to someone, you say in Arabic...
	It is impossible to be satiated of you.
	And so, therefore, you can keep me as long as you want.
	I'm all yours.
	Go.
	For the TMI for everyone out there, I got one kid who's starting to lose it but has been very good and dog poop.
	I won't say what hotel I'm staying at, but it's a dog-friendly hotel.
	No carpet, so it's easy to clean up.
	I said I would get back to this one.
	Gad, what strategies should the right implement to battle the leftist takeover institutions, i.e.
	conquest's second law of politics?
	I don't know what conquest's second law of politics.
	What does that mean?
	I don't know, actually, either.
	I guess the question is, practically speaking, what can people do?
	Let me see if I'm going to read your mind, Gad.
	Cue your inner honey badger.
	Yes!
	I call it activate your inner honey badger.
	Basically what that says is be ideologically fierce in defending these first principles, these ideological principles.
	Don't cede the floor and the trenches to the left.
	They've taken over all of the key institutions and everybody says, well, I'm too busy.
	I've got my daughter's graduation today.
	I've got to buy the tomatoes tomorrow.
	I've got this.
	I've got that.
	God's sad.
	No, don't defuse responsibility onto others.
	I understand that not everybody has the same sphere of influence that is available to them, but within your sphere of influence, you can affect change.
	So if you're a rich person and you're on the right...
	Call the president of your alma mater and say, hey, you know that $10 million that I was going to give you?
	If a single person gets deplatformed for the next year, there goes the $10 million.
	Guess what?
	The president will listen to you.
	And on and on and on.
	So all I'm asking for people, as you said, activate your inner honey badger, defend these principles, and we will redress the departure from reason.
	Alright, now I'm sending the link to our locals community.
	I hear some serious noise.
	I'm going to send the link to our locals community and I'll add to that answer because I think I might have something to add.
	I was listening to Riley Gaines on Tulsi Gabbard today.
	And Riley Gaines is the NCAA...
	Swimmer.
	Yeah, the swimmer who got booted off the platform by Leah Thomas.
	And she said, that being Riley Gaines, she was too shy to say anything.
	She was too quiet.
	She was waiting for the coach to say something for her.
	And the coach never came.
	And then it's only when she gets her trophy, she gets booted off the third place podium because the photo op needed to be the trans athlete who took her spot.
	She's like, well, that's it.
	Now I have nothing holding me back.
	And she came out.
	She dealt with what I think is online blowback, which is...
	Virtually not real at all.
	And then she found that as she did it, more people came out and she started something of a movement of the women in women's sports saying, look, in as much as we'd love to have someone fight for us, we have no choice but to do it ourselves.
	And I think that's what everyone has to come to the realization that at the end of the day, nobody's going to take care of your own stuff except for yourself.
	And so you have to do it.
	And in so doing it, you might just see that the courage is contagious and other people start coming up and saying it.
	And when you see 14 year old kids coming up and saying it, you know, the 14 year old girl who Got in trouble at her school for saying, I'm not going into a locker room with a boy.
	When you have Josh Alexander out of Canada taking Flack, a 16-year-old kid, for fighting the battle of adults, that's the inspiration.
	And people should feel somewhat ashamed, although understandably not everybody can risk losing their job.
	But like the old saying goes, they can't get all of us.
	And if people just start doing it, yeah, go for it.
	But if I can, and I'm not, this is not...
	Taking any credit away from Riley Gaines, and I think she's courageous, she's wonderful, and as you said, she started a movement.
	But when you say what compelled her to speak out is when she was personally affected, I don't mean to be unforgiving and a purist, but that to me is not good enough.
	Because not everyone who needs to speak out will otherwise be personally affected by the nonsense.
	So if we wait until people are...
	Personally damaged by a particular idea pathogen, then we're not going to solve the problem.
	So instead, you need to be compelled by violations of deontological principles, right?
	So I could say, well, I left the Middle East.
	There are no ways by which Islam can affect me.
	I'm in Canada now.
	I don't need to speak out against some of the tenets that are problematic.
	No.
	I get pissed off whenever deontological principles are violated, and therefore I wait in on things that really have no personal connection to me.
	So I would implore people to not wait until their child is affected or they are affected before they suddenly find their testicles and find their spines.
	Instead, what you should be saying is, are there fundamental principles on which Western Martin Luther King, Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
	The poem from the Holocaust, at first they came for the trades unions or whatever it was called, but I didn't say anything because I wasn't one of them.
	I think the lesson from the Riley games, it's true.
	Most people only...
	Not feel compelled, but are compelled to act when the injustice hits them.
	The learning lesson from Riley Gaines is it will come.
	It's just a matter of time.
	So you might as well be preemptive about it.
	Beautiful.
	I agree.
	All right.
	Now we're going to end this here.
	Gad, you will start a Locals community one of these days, but I'm going to show you the beauty of the Locals community.
	Everybody, come on over to Locals.
	I'll take some exclusive questions there, and I'm going to let my kid run wild because Locals community knows.
	Go ahead.
	I'm going to end it on Rumble.
	We'll do 5 or 10, maybe 15 minutes.
	Take some questions on Locals.
	Gad, do you want to have a last word?
	I just want to say that I should give you credit.
	You have been by far one of the staunchest guys who has been trying to get me to join Locals.
	I hope to do it soon.
	In the meantime, in support of Elon Musk...
	Being the guy who's trying to protect freedom of speech and so on, I did start a subscribers-only option on Twitter for very, very little, the equivalent of a latte per month.
	You get exclusive content.
	Please consider going on my Twitter bio, signing up for a monthly subscription.
	It's very, very little money, and hopefully we can have fun together.
	So the book is coming out.
	It's called A Sad Truth.
	About happiness.
	Eight secrets for leading the good life.
	July 25th.
	But please pre-order ASAP.
	I'm going to blast that Amazon link around this afterwards.
	Rumble, thank you all very much.
	Tomorrow I might take the day off and drive 12 and a half hours to get back to Montreal in one day.
	We'll hang out when you come, right?
	Dude, a thousand percent, Gad.
	We'll go to one of your favorite coffee shops.
	By the way, my daughter and wife.
	And my daughter.
	Our daughter.
	Your daughter earlier today.
	So everybody knows.
	Oh, they were together today.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Okay.
	I don't know if everybody knows, our daughters are actually friends.
	They are.
	Okay, so I'm going to end it on Rumble.
	I'm going to go over to Locals.
	We're going to take some questions there, and Gad, stick around.
	Rumble, thank you all.
	See you soon.
	Locals, I'll see you in 30 seconds now.
	All right, Ethan, now you can run wild.
	We're still live.
	We're still live, so make sure that he's presentable.
	Can I just tape something for my exclusive folks?
	Oh, please, yes.
	Now you are, Gad, we're still live to Locals.

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