Gad Saad | The Death Of Truth And How To Revive It | Modern Wisdom Podcast 217

Probably the granddaddy of all of these idea pathogens would be post-modernism, because post-modernism, if you'd like, is the negation of the scientific method. It's the negation that there is a truth with a capital T that is out there to be discovered. Post-modernism says that there's only subjective truth, everybody is bound by their biases, by their subjectivity. There are no objective truths, everything is subjective.

It has been very long time coming but I'm finally joined here by the man behind The Sad Truth, the godfather himself. So good to have you here.

Thank you so much for having me, Chris. Good to be with you.

Pleasure. Burning question that obviously everyone has come here to work out, is Adele's hairstyle problematic?

(laughs) Deeply problematic. I, I didn't know that she was, uh, a mixture of Himmler and Hitler, but, uh, apparently, she is. By the way, for those of you who don't know this, about a few years ago, I did a couple of Sad Truths. The one sad truth was where I gave temporary clearance to anyone who wanted to eat Lebanese food. I gave them a 24-hour period. Because I'm Lebanese, I'm entitled to speak on behalf of all Lebanese, and so I gave a culinary clearance for 24 hours. And then I asked for everyone to take a photo of their, uh, passports so that they can give me clearance in whatever they want to give me clearance in. So, for example, a Portuguese person would write and say, "My name is, uh, Jose," whatever, "Rodriguez, and I give you clearance to eat Portuguese ch- spicy chicken." So you should go check it out because it shows you that most people are still sane and make fun of this stupidity.

So that's like a, an IOU reciprocal altruism thing that you've got going on here.

(laughs)

I eat your food, you eat my food, but you can only eat it once. And then it's like a ... You've got a track and trace thing going on as well, which-

Exactly.

... COVID. Uh, so we're gonna talk about your new book, Parasitic Mind. But before we do, could you give us a bit of an overview of your background as an academic? Like, why, why do you have license-

Sure.

... to talk about this subject?

Sure. Uh, so I have been a professor for 26 years. Uh, my main area of scientific research, although I'm someone who's a true polymath, I'm all over the place, uh, I truly believe in interdisciplinarity. But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption, which is basically applying evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology to study our consummatory nature. So just to give you one quick example would be, uh, here's one, uh, how do our hormones affect our behaviors as consumers? For example, when men engage in conspicuous consumption, what happens to their testosterone levels? When women are going through the various stages of their menstrual cycles, how, what kinds of foods do they eat? How do they dress? Does that vary across the menstrual cycle? So I look at the biological underpinnings of, uh, our consuming instinct, if you'd like. And as part of being an evolutionary/consumer psychologist, I've always been interested in, uh, interspecies comparisons. This is a field called comparative psychology. So oftentimes if you wanna make the argument that some behavior is an evolutionary behavior within the human context, you will study cognition in other species to make the link because they are our evolutionary cousins. And so as a result of my, if you like, my openness to studying other animals, I noticed that there was a field called neuro-parasitology which is the study of how parasites can infect the brains of a whole host of hosts. So for example, Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite that affects the brains of, uh, mice. And when they are infected with this brain worm, they lose their innate fear of cats. They become sexually attracted to the urine of the cat, which is not a good thing for a mouse to, to be attracted to. And so I took this principle from animal, uh, context, and I argued that humans suffer not only from actual brain worms in the same way that the mouse does, but we suffer from another class of idea pathogens, and those are actual ideas that are parasitic. And, of course, your original question is what allows me to make those, you know, arguments. Well, having lived in the ecosystem of academia for the past 26 years, I can promise you that all of the most idiotic ideas all stem from academia.