Evolution, Religion, and Happiness ｜ Dr. Gad Saad ｜ EP 377 (PTq6CYfikbg)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=PTq6CYfikbg

Even the most serious pursuits, for example, the pursuit of science, is a form of play. It’s the highest form of play, right? Because in the same way that you try to solve a 1,000-piece puzzle by putting the pieces together, well, what is science? It’s drawing links between a whole bunch of variables that heretofore you didn’t know were linked together. So the whole endeavor of science is a form of orgiastic higher-order play, right? Hello everyone watching and listening. Today I’m speaking with my friend Dr. Gad Sad, professor at Concordia University, researcher, podcaster, and author of the new book, The Sad Truth About Happiness, Eight Secrets for Leading the Good Life. I’m here with my friend today, Dr. Gad Sad. We’ve met a number of times. I’ve got to say, Dr. Sad was one of the first, and really one of the few, academics who supported me right at the beginning when I was embroiled in the first round of controversy that enveloped me or that I stirred up, you know, or that our idiot government stirred up, which is a more accurate description of the whole event. Gad was one of the first people who had the courage or the chuchhuchpa, I guess that’s the word, to interview me and to discuss my situation with me. And you know, he played that very, very straight. And I don’t think it was obvious to him at all at that point when he took that risk. You know, he didn’t know anything about me really. He could have easily decided, like so many people did, that I was just fundamentally reprehensible and, you know, stayed on the safe side of the fence. But I don’t really think that’s the sort of person he is. And I think that’s become more and more evident over the ensuing months and years. And so I want to thank you again for that. You know, it was a brave move, man. Thank you, my pleasure. One of the things I learned, you know, in the last six or seven years is that courage is a very, very rare virtue, much rarer than I even thought. You know, I’d studied totalitarian states for a long time, and I knew that people were easily led into a state of pathological silence. But I didn’t understand how rapidly that could occur and how few people, even in a free society with a long history of freedom, would be loath to speak and how rapidly that could occur. You know, and then you do see people who stand up and say things that might get them in trouble. And some of them are just people who are unwise, right, and who are willing to impulsively say what comes to mind. And then there are other people, and they’re much rare, who are thoughtful and who’ve carefully considered what they have to say and are willing to say it anyways. And you fell into that camp right away. And you’ve been pursuing that for a good long time. And, you know, also with a sense of humor, which is, I think, a sign of mastery, by the way, you know, you just wrote a book called The Sad Truth About Happiness that’s coming out July 25th, I believe. And, you know, it is the case that I think you’re a credible observer on that front, because you have this playful aspect that doesn’t disappear even when you’re dealing with serious topics at some risk to yourself. And so I think that makes you a credible observer on that front. And anyways, I’m done complimenting you. So, You could say one or two comments about how good my tan looks after spending two weeks in Portugal. It is. It is very impressive, I must say. You’re positively glowing, sir. And so now anything else? Is there anything else I need to add? No, I’m just, it’s been a delight. We’ll finish with the reciprocal compliments, but it’s been a delight forging a friendship with you. As you said, I think we got to know each other about seven years ago. And, you know, of the ecosystem that we both navigate in, regrettably, many people turn out to be cowards. And you’re certainly not one who exhibits any cowardice. And so in that sense, we are truly simpatico. And it’s a pleasure and honor to be your friend. Yeah, well, and we have areas of mutual interest as well. You know, I’ve been interested in the psychology of entrepreneurship and of managerial and administrative ability, for that matter. I spent a lot of time studying that and also very interested in evolutionary psychology and biology. And so we have those overlaps, which is quite interesting professionally. And so I thought that’s part of where we can go today as well as talking about your book. Let’s start with your last book, The Parasitic Mind. When was that published, Gad? So it came out right in the midst of COVID. October 2020 was the hard cover. And then a year later in October 2021, the paperback came out. Yeah. And how did it do and how is it doing? Well, it’s always difficult to be excited about how well it’s done when you’re speaking to someone who sold 12 million copies of his last book. So if we don’t use you as a benchmark, then I think it did remarkably well. So I’m very happy with it. But as I often tell my wife, it’s done incredibly well, but not enough to give me an exit strategy out of communist Quebec. So it’s done well, but maybe I’m saying this in front of guys behind the line who are all proud to be Quebecers. I love Quebec, but I’m not very happy about, as you might agree with the sort of socialist communist ethos here. I’m not a fan of the cold weather. So hopefully the next book will offer me at least the option of having an exit strategy if I choose to implement it. Yeah. Well, the university that you happen to inhabit also has a very pronounced left-wing tilt, to put it mildly. They do. Yes, that’s for sure. It’s amazing that you’ve been able to survive there at all. So do you want to just familiarize people with the thesis of the parasitic mind? Sure. And then we’ll turn to your new book and then we’ll talk a little bit more about evolutionary biology and psychology, I think. That sounds like a great plan. So my last book, what I was trying to do is argue that in the same way that all sorts of animals can be parasitized by neuroparasites, actual parasites that can go into an animal’s brain, altering its behavior to suit its reproductive interests, I argue that human beings can be parasitized by another class of pathogens called idea pathogens. And so these ideological parasites can then cause us to take positions that are truly maladaptive. And so what I do in the book is I first describe many of these idea pathogens, postmodernism, social constructivism, biophobia, cultural relativism, and a slew of other such parasites, all of which were regrettably spawned in the university ecosystem. Because to sort of borrow from George Orwell, it takes intellectuals to come up with some of the dumbest ideas. And so then what I do is I trace the spawning of these brain parasites and then I offer hopefully an effective mind vaccine against these parasitic ideas. So that’s the general thesis. Okay, okay. So let me delve into that a little bit. There’s a few things that I’d like to clarify on that front and get your opinion about. So the first is that you could imagine something approximating a Darwinian race between sets of ideas for memorability and communicability, right? So for an idea to spread, it obviously has to be memorable, which means it has to be adapted to the structure of human memory, and there’s a biological element to that. But it also has to be charismatic enough so that the people who remember it will also communicate it. And so stories seem to fit into that category quite well. We seem to be very fond of stories. So you could imagine that there’s a competition between sets of ideas, and it’s sort of a detached competition. In some ways, it’s the free Darwinian play of ideas that could occupy our cognitive space, both in terms of memory and on the communicative front. And so you could think about those ideas that come to the top of that as either having some practical function or as actually serving as, in some ways, as genuine parasites in the cognitive space. But then there’s another element to this too, and I want to know what you think about this. So, you know, I’ve been delving into the, since about 2016, psychologists have finally, in their wisdom, determined that there is such a thing as left-wing authoritarianism. And so that would be a web of ideas that are correlated in that if you have one, you’re likely to have the others. You can identify that set. I did some of the work on that, early work on that with one of my students, Christine Brophy. We found a set of progressive ideas, and then a set of totalitarian leftist ideas that combine the progressive ethos with the willingness to use fear and compulsion and force to implement them. Okay. And so we found the following predictors, because we were curious, is does this system of ideas exist, or is it just a right-wing conspiracy delusion? And the answer is there’s clearly a set of coherent, statistically coherent left-wing ideas that are allied with the willingness to use compulsion and force. And we found four major predictors of the proclivity to have that idea set. And the first predictor, and it was a walloping predictor, negative 0.45, if I remember correctly, verbal intelligence and left-wing authoritarianism, correlated more highly than verbal intelligence and academic performance. A stunning correlation. So when you ask yourself, how can people be daft enough to accept this relatively reductionistic and simple-minded view of the world, everything is about power, one of the answers to that is, well, they’re not very verbally sophisticated. Okay. The second best predictor was being female. The third best predictor was having a feminine temperament, independent of being female, right? And the fourth best predictor was having ever taken even one explicitly politically correct higher education course. So now, since then, other people have developed analogous models of left-wing authoritarianism and look for other predictors. And one of the most interesting predictors that has emerged is there’s a very powerful relationship between the dark tetrad personality characteristics, including malignant narcissism, and the proclivity to hold left-wing authoritarian views. In fact, the correlation between malignant narcissism and left-wing authoritarianism is 0.6, which is so high that you could make the case, because the scales are somewhat unreliable, you could make the case that they’re not distinguishable on the measurement front. Okay. I know this is a long-winded question, but I want to specify it exactly. All right. So the dark tetrad personality types, they show subclinical characteristics of psychopaths. And psychopaths are predatory parasites. And so we could imagine there’s two forms of parasitism going on here. There’s the Darwinian competition between idea sets for memorability and communicability, but then there’s the proclivity for people who occupy the parasitical niche in the human ecosystem, and that would essentially be psychopaths, to utilize ideas like the parasitical idea sets that you described for their own truly parasitical purposes. And then I want to decorate that with one more thing. So you correct me if you’re wrong here. I think this is actually, especially because of the emerging virtualization of the world, I actually think that there’s an existential threat here, because parasitism is an unbelievably deep problem, right? Sex itself evolved to foil parasites. And there’s always been parasitical people, criminals and the like, and the most parasitical of those are the psychopaths, and we’ve evolved mechanisms to keep the parasitical predators under control. A lot of them involve physical force, and all of our evolved mechanisms for dampening down the parasite, the predatory parasites, none of them work online. And so I think our whole culture is enabling the predatory psychopaths on the criminal front and on the subcriminal front, right? 35% of net traffic is pornographic. Online crime is rampant. And then you have all the demon troll types, you know, who are polluting the political discourse, and there’s data on them too. So if you’re an online troll, you’re much more likely to show all the dark tetrad traits, narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and to top it all off, sadism. So please have at that set of ideas. There’s a lot of good stuff that you put in there, so I’ll try to take a couple of threads. Number one, your first point about the battle between the Iranian ideas, there’s actually a whole field called evolutionary epistemology that exactly speaks to what you’re saying. That idea, so think back of Richard Dawkins when he introduced the concept of the meme in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. So there was a whole field that unfortunately hasn’t lived up to its promise called mimetic theory that exactly tries to model what you said, which is there’s a bunch of ideas floating around, and what is the Darwinian mechanism that allows some ideas to be selected versus others that fail? Now, in my book, and then I’ll come in a second to some of the predictors that you spoke about in terms of left-wing authoritarianism. In my book, I basically argue that what is common to all of these parasitic ideas is they wish to be free from the pesky shackles of reality, right? So postmodernism, as we’ve both commented on, is the ultimate grand daddy of all parasitic ideas because it basically frees us from the pesky shackles of objective reality because it purports that there is no objective truth. Transgenderism frees me from the pesky reality of my genitalia. Social constructivism frees me from the idea that there might be innate biological differences between people. So it really stems originally from the noble notion of seeking to maximize empathy, right? So the idea starts off as a noble idea, but then it metamorphosizes into complete garbage in the pursuit of that empathy to the detriment of truth, right? So that’s number one. Number two, regarding your predictors, I actually am familiar with the study that you mentioned. I think it was a thesis that you supervised, correct? Yeah, that’s right. Right. So we actually looked, so I’m actually working right now with a graduate student myself where we’re looking, and we’ve actually looked at the thesis that you supervised with your student. We’re looking at another set of predictors that might interest you, Jordan, and specifically we’re looking at morphological predictors of ideological positions that people take. Now that’s uniquely interesting because you might otherwise not think that your morphology might be linked to the ideological positions that you take, but it turns out, and I discussed this in the parasitic mind, that for example, your likelihood of supporting military interventionism is correlated to your upper body strength. Not surprisingly, so now I’m talking about male subjects. Male subjects who are stronger are more likely to support military interventionism. Stronger men are more likely to be against egalitarianism, I mean enforced egalitarianism, right? Yeah. Taking from one, and so that to me is uniquely interesting because- You can look at symmetry. Exactly. So there’s a paper, I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s a paper that was published two months ago, something like that, looking at, they used facial averaging of activist types on the left and then conservative types. You saw that. Well, I was upset that I saw that paper because they’re kind of, they’re stealing some of our thunder. Now you might remember in the parasitic mind, although I remember, I think I first proposed this theory to you in our first conversation when you came on my show. Remember I talked about male social justice warriors as sneaky fuckers? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s an actual term, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, sneaky fuckers is actually not a term that I came up with to be profane. It’s actually a zoological term that captures in nature the idea of kleptogamy, where you’re trying to steal mating opportunities. So for example, let’s say you have a type of fish where there are two phenotypes of a male, you know, of a male. There’s the dominant, physically imposing male, and then there’s a whole bunch of other males that actually pretend to be females so that they can sneak by the dominant males and then have a surreptitious coupling opportunity with the females. And that became known as the sneaky fucker mating strategy. And so in the parasitic mind, I argue that male social justice warriors are instantiating a form of sneaky fucker strategy, right? Look, I’m very sensitive, I hug trees, I cry when I watch Bridget Jones’ diary. See, you don’t have anything to be afraid of, and then hopefully that can allow me to have access to some willing and available females. So do you know their literature on orangutans? So you know, there’s two forms of male orangutan in any given eco, like what would you say, roughly tribal local ecology. So there’s one form of male develops, he’s like the quarterback orangutan, he gets so big he can’t even really be arboreal. He has the huge fat pads around his face that make him round, makes his face round. He’s very physically powerful. And the females come to him to mate. But then there are other male orangutans in the same area that for a long time anthropologists, primatologists thought were juveniles. But it turns out they’re not juveniles, they’re males who don’t undergo the complete transformation into the non-arboreal male. And they use exactly the mating strategy that you described. Right? So there’s exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s why I was so, I’m always amazed that people get so triggered by your lobster analogy, because the whole field of comparative psychology operates on the premise that we could learn a lot about human cognition by studying our animal cousins. I mean, right? I mean, that’s the whole premise behind the tree of life. So I don’t really see why someone would be so triggered by the fact that you use the dominance hierarchies of lobsters to then make certain points about human society. There’s a whole field called comparative psychology that does that. So to me, the people who are coming after you for those kinds of analogies between us and other animals are simply displaying their ignorance, right? Yeah. Well, they’re mad at me because if lobsters have hierarchies, it’s pretty hard to blame hierarchy on capitalism, you know, because we haven’t discovered a subgenus of capitalist lobster yet. And it strikes me as highly unlikely that we will. But let me ask you this. I mean, we’re going off sort of our, but I mean, conversations are organic. So this might be a good opportunity to talk about this. Why do you think that you trigger a lot more animus than I do? Because one could argue that I actually on any given Tuesday morning will tweet as many, if not more things that are quite quote controversial. And yet somehow I, now obviously your platform is larger than mine, but even if we correct for that, even if we do it per capita, there seems to be something. And by the way, I’ve been asked that many times when I appear on shows, because people know that we’re friends and they’ll ask me, you know, how come you don’t get, so let me turn it to you since we’re now chatting. Do you have a theory as to why you are such a polarizing figure? Whereas you know, I might, one can argue I take positions, you know, I mean, I’ll criticize Islam a lot more forcefully than you do. And yet somehow I don’t trigger as much animus. What do you think is the driving force? Maybe I annoyed people on more fronts simultaneously than you did, partly. Well, so what happened? This is a possible explanation. You know, when things first blew up around me in 2016, I already had 200 hours of lectures on YouTube. And so, you know, I was pilloried as a right wing demon, essentially, by the sorts of people that we’re discussing who like to do that sort of thing to hide their own character, let’s say. And then people look me up online and went to my YouTube channel and then found, you know, this extra hundreds of hours of content, which demonstrated rather incontrovertibly that I wasn’t the sort of person that I was being accused of being, but also touched on all sorts of other topics that people might not have expected, like in the religious and mythological domain, the psychoanalytic domain. And so I think the fact that I had that storehouse of lectures already stored up when the trouble emerged expanded out my reach in a very dramatic manner. And that’s probably, you know, as the first occupier of that position in some ways, because I was an early adopter of YouTube, I know you were too, but, you know, I think I got there a little faster than you did and a little broader. And so I think that’s probably a fair bit of it, you know. I wonder also if, so like in my latest book now, which I guess we’ll talk about in a second, I also engage in prescriptive remedies. You know, here are some steps by which you can increase your happiness. But historically, I’ve been much more of a descriptive psychologist. I describe how things are. Now, in your case, by virtue of you also being, having been a clinician, by definition, you engage in the ecosystem of prescriptions a lot more. And that, I think, triggers people’s ire because you’re telling them how to behave. And by doing that, you’re obviously going to alienate people. Whereas I come along and I say, here are the evolutionary reasons why there are differences between men and women. And I stop, I stop there. Whereas by you taking the prescriptive jump, that probably augments the amount of animus that you receive. What do you think of that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, I think that’s a reasonable proposition as well. I also think that, I think we could develop that line of hypothesis a little further too. I think that many of the people who have an animus against me, and almost all those people are anonymous online trolls, by the way, because I never encountered that, or virtually never in my actual life. Quite the contrary. I think they’re very, very irritated that my simple minded prescriptions, like, take some responsibility for yourself and don’t play the victim because it’s not good for you or for anyone else. I think they’re very, very annoyed that, first of all, I’m calling them out on their hypothetically empathic virtue signaling attempts to escape from all possible responsibility, which is exactly what they’re doing. And second, they’re very annoyed that the simple ideas that I’ve been putting forward and the simple, somewhat conservative ideas in that they’re traditional, they’re very annoyed that those work. And then they’re also annoyed because I have this very deep interest in religious issues that also, you know, grates on people to some degree. And this is something you and I are going to talk about because it overlaps with our interest in mimetic ideas, because religious ideas are mimetic ideas, for better or worse, you know, and we can talk about that. So, you know, and then I’m also, I think I’m also probably enabling, to the degree that I’m enabling young men and speaking to them about the virtues of their ambition instead of dismissing them as pathological, you know, patriarchal oppressors. That’s also very annoying, especially to the types of men that you’re describing, who want to sneak about in the background and pretend to be virtuous and harmless, which is a pretty damn pathetic way of comporting yourself, in my estimation. Like I’ve watched those kind of men operate in the protests against me, you know, and so I can be surrounded by a mob of pretty decent screaming harpies. And, you know, they’re annoying as can possibly be imagined. But when I look at the men that are with them, they just make my blood run cold. Like those are, and that’s with my clinical eye, those are not good people. You know, they’re hanging around those women who are doing the harpy thing, and they’re there as exactly the kind of parasitical predator that you’re describing. And I can see that, and they are not, they’re not the sort of person that you would want anyone you cared for to come to, to have any association with whatsoever. Plus, because they have to be sneaky fuckers in your terminology, you know, they’re bitter and resentful, and they’re very likely to want to tear down anything that approximates true accomplishment, because all those who have true accomplishment are their genuine competitors. And that’s partly why I think the radical left-wing authoritarians go after merit so assiduously, is that, you know, they operate on a completely non-meritorious basis, and it’s in their best interest to present merit itself as a falsehood to take out their sexual competitors. What do you think is the main predictor of folks like you and I who are willing to speak our minds unencumbered by any shackles of political correctness? And maybe I’ll start by answering it for myself. I absolutely think it’s an indelible part of your personhood, but if I were to give a more vivid account of that, I always tell people when they ask me, you know, why do you take on these risks and speak your mind, then as you know, Jordan, last year I received some pretty serious death threats and many years, and you were very kind to right away contact me and see that. Well, you get more flak on the Jewish front, eh? So like, I’ve got more flak, but I would say I haven’t got flak as serious as some of what’s been levied against you. Like, I’ve been fortunate enough to escape that. Now, because I’m associating with all the evil Jews at the Daily Wire, I get some anti-Semitic blowback, you know, but it hasn’t, and I’ve watched a lot of that online, and it’s bloody vicious. The anti-Semitic parasitical psychopaths are in a demonic class of their own. They’re so- They are. Yes, yes. And so you’ve, so I have been targeted more frequently, but I think you’ve been targeted more terrifyingly. That is true, but to make the point about my unique situation in terms of why I take the risk, I always argue that at the end of the night when I put my head on the pillow, it is important for me in order to be able to sleep well at night to know that I did not modulate my speech in any way and walk away from defending the truth. If I feel that I have done that, then I would feel fraudulent and I would feel inauthentic. And one of the probably the highest ideals that I hold to, you know, close to my heart are freedom and truth. And so I speak not because I’m, you know, trying to signal that I’m courageous. It’s because I don’t know how to be anything else. So for example, it took me a lot of effort while I was on my Portugal vacation to not jump in, whenever I’d go on Twitter and see some idiot saying something, my first instinct is to always come in, you know, with some correction. It’s just an indelible part of my personhood to speak the truth. And of course, in my forthcoming book, as you know, we might talk about, I talk about authenticity and realness as a important pathway to happiness, right? I mean, even, you know, the ancient Greeks, as you know, the Delphic maxim, know thyself. And so I know myself and I know that I can’t modulate my speech. So that’s my answer for why I can’t hold back and I always speak the truth. Is it the same for you? Would that exact answer apply to you? What drives you to take the difficult positions that you take? Well, I think, you know, they say the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. And I think that what happened to me in the course of my studies is at least an analog of that. You know, Gad, I started studying totalitarian atrocity when I was 13. You know, it’s really been an obsession of mine, and it was really a psychological obsession rather than a political one. So I was always curious about the psychology of the perpetrator, right? What sort of person would you have to be to do those sorts of things? Or what spirit would have to inhabit you? You know, and one of the things I learned, I learned a lot of things. I learned that it’s easier to be that way than you think, that you could enjoy it more than you might possibly imagine and that people do. And that the true grip of the totalitarian state isn’t top-down tyranny. It’s everyone’s willingness to abide by the principles of the lie. And so the more totalitarian the state, the more every single person in that state is gripped by the lie. And for me, that’s indistinguishable from hell. And I think I mean that practically and also metaphysically. And I learned that the willingness of people to utilize their speech instrumentally was literally the pathway to hell. And so once I actually understood that and understood it in a manner that made it an incontrovertible truth for me, everything else became less frightening by contrast. It’s like, so when I spoke out against this idiot Bill C-16 back in 2016, which was the forerunner of much of the trouble we’re seeing now, especially on the gender insanity front, you know, on the one hand, there was the threat of me putting my job on the line and as it turned out, my clinical practice. And of course, making myself unpopular with the government. And I thought that’s nowhere near as frightening to me as the prospect of losing control of my tongue, because I know where that leads. That leads to the worst place you can possibly imagine. And I know that. Like, I wouldn’t even think for me that it’s an axiom of faith. It’s like, no, I know how totalitarian states develop. They develop when people who have something to say don’t speak. And I don’t want to go there. I think I’ve lived that reality, having grown up. I mean, some of your viewers may not know my personal history. Having grown up in the Middle East, having gone through the early parts of the Lebanese Civil War, I always contextualize any threats that I might face in my job, which of course are serious, to what I faced when I grew up in Lebanon. And it’s no surprise then that many of the staunchest defenders of Western values end up being immigrants like myself, because we have sampled from the wide buffet of possible societies. And we know that the Western experiment is not, right? It’s an anomaly. And therefore, it typically takes people who did not grow up in a Western tradition, who’ve escaped the hellholes from which they’ve escaped, to then be able to say, hey, Westerners, don’t take for granted the freedoms that you have. And so if you look at many of the, you know, think of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, right? She can speak, you know, with a lot of clarity and authority about some of these issues, precisely because she too has come from a similar background to mine. And so… Iyanmi Park. I want… Iyanmi Park is another fantastic example. We’ve both had wonderful chats with her. And, you know, I don’t know if you know Yasmin Mohammed, who didn’t grow up. Do you know Yasmin Mohammed? No, no. She wrote a book. I think she grew up in Canada, but she had a very tough upbringing where she was married to an Islamic extremist who forced her to wear the niqab and so on. And so I wonder also if the fact that we come, we meaning myself and Ayaan and so on, we come from these societies, affords us a bit more leeway when we speak than someone like you, because, you know, you’re the, you know, evil Western white male, whereas, you know, we’re quote, you know, brown people and so on. And so we do have high victimology scores. So when we then play the oppression Olympics against those who might be coming after us, we can always cash in our chips because as I’ve often joked, but I’m being serious, that my victimology poker card is going to be higher than most people, as will Iyanmi Park’s, as will Iyanmi Ali. Whereas the fact that you don’t have that currency puts you at a distinct disadvantage in the victimology poker game, right? Right, right, right. Well, yeah, so that might be one level of defense that I don’t have automatically. You don’t have it, yeah. So, okay, so I want to delve a little bit more deeply into your observations about your conscience. And I want to tie that into our discussion of memes and parasitic ideas, okay? Sure. And I want you to, and I think for those of you who are watching and listening, Gad and I have had some exchanges in the past with regards to our somewhat differing opinions about the utility of Jungian ideas about archetypes. And I want to segue into that, given this particular issue. I think it’s a good entry point. So, Gad, I’ve been reading the biblical corpus in great detail in the last months, and of course, previous to that, because I’m writing a new book called We Who Wrestle with God. And one of the things that I discovered in the analysis of that sequence of stories was that there was a transformation at the time of Elijah, which is what makes him a canonical prophet. There was a transformation in the conceptualization of what constituted the highest animating principle, the ultimate deity, let’s say, Yahuwah in this particular case. And this occurred when Elijah stood up against the prophets of Baal. And the prophets of Baal, Baal was a nature god. And so, you could imagine among primordial people, and there’s certainly echoes of this still within our own psyches, that extraordinarily awe-inspiring natural events would produce a kind of religious apprehension. So that could be earthquakes or typhoons or tornadoes or thunderstorms. You know, these manifestations of quasi-cosmic force that can in some ways, they definitely inspire awe and can bring you to your knees. Now, Baal was a nature god, plain and simple. And so, what that meant at that time was that the highest authority to which people owed fealty was the authority that made itself manifest in the storm and in the earthquake and in the thunder. Now, Elijah had an intuition. He was, what would you say, a uniquely isolated follower of Yahuwah at that time because the Israelites, the Israelite king had married this woman named Jezebel, and she brought Baal worship into the Israelite society and attempted to obliterate the worship of Yahuwah as an enterprise and really reduce the ranks of the Yahuwah supporters to almost nothing. To Elijah, you might even say. Now, Elijah defeated the priests of Baal in a head-to-head competition, which I suppose was the archaic equivalent of a debate. But then he had to run off because Jezebel got wind of his victory and was going to kill him. And then he spent some time in a cave. And when he was in the cave, he experienced an earthquake and he experienced a thunderstorm and some of these magnificent displays of nature. But he had this intuition that whatever the ultimate voice was, was a voice that spoke within and not externally. And so, it’s Elijah, it’s in the book of Elijah that you first find the phrase, the still small voice within, essentially. And so, what happened was there was a transformation of the notion of the highest deity to something that was external and a manifestation of the grand, what would you, the grandiosity of nature to this idea that no, it was something akin to the voice of conscience within. And so, the reason I’m bringing that up is because it’s a radical psychological transformation and a subtle one. But I also think, I want to know what you think. You said that there are two things that you have abiding faith in. And one is the power of the word, right? You’re a professor, you’re a writer, you’re a communicator, you’re a podcaster, and you are very careful in your selection of words. And not only do you have faith in the word, let’s say, but you also believe that you have your highest moral obligation is to be guided by your conscience in the formulation of your words. Okay, so, now you could think of that, and this is where I want to know your opinion. As far as I can tell, one of the meme-like qualities of the biblical corpus is the increasingly sophisticated insistence as the stories unfold that the highest animating principle is to be understood not as a manifestation of the awe-inspiring power of nature, but in terms of something that is relational, that’s associated with the conscience, and that’s tied to something like adherence to the spoken and communicated truth. And so, and that that’s become a very powerful meme in the West, right? The dominant meme, you might say. And so, I’m wondering what you think about that, especially given your admission, let’s say, that the principle that does animate your behavior, for better or worse, is this fidelity to the accuracy of the word. Right, so I guess, I mean, there are several ways that I can answer this, one of which is that I don’t need to situate my pathological and obsessive defense of the truth in a supernatural cause. Having said that, though, or in a supernatural reason, right? Having said that, though, as an evolutionist, I’m fully aware that the default value of human beings is precisely to be moved by religion. In other words, being a non-believer is certainly not the default value of humans. That often surprises people because they often think that, given that I’m not particularly religious, that somehow I have a built-in animus towards religion. To the contrary, I fully understand the functional value of religion, but I can concede that point without necessarily believing that the specific supernatural elements are true. I can see that there is great value in the moral stories and the parables and the allegories that are taught. And so, a lot of the stuff that you might talk about, or a lot of the stuff that the Jungian archetypes, I could completely situate them within an evolutionary paradigm and fully agree with them. I think the main place where I might disagree with some of the more religiously oriented folks is that I stop at simply recognizing their functional value without necessarily believing in their veracity. Okay, so let me ask you about that. Let’s take that apart very carefully, okay? Because you said that you can take the stance that you’ve taken with no reference to the supernatural. All right, so let me delve into that, and you can help me clarify my thinking in this regard. So, okay, so the first, I’m going to offer some propositions. The first is that you’re strangely, and I don’t just mean you, I mean human beings in general, but also particularly you, you’re strangely beholden to your conscience. And in some ways, it operates as an autonomous entity, right? Because you know this, your conscience will call you on things, and you could say, well, my conscience is me, but then I would say, well, if it’s you, why the hell don’t you get the pesky little thing under control and bend it to your will instead of subordinating yourself to its claims? And then I would say its claims, because I think that you can make a credible case that the voice of conscience within you is very much analogous to the voice of conscience within me, let’s say, but also within all people, and that in that manner, the person who does determine to abide by their conscience is conducting themselves in accordance with something that, if not supernatural, at least has to be given status as something transcendent. Let me decorate that a little bit. You know perfectly well that when you’re thinking something through, right, when you have a pressing question on your mind, that you’ll get flashes of intuition. And I don’t really think there’s a hell of a lot of difference between intuition and revelation, technically speaking, right? And it isn’t obvious at all where those flashes of intuition come from. And I think that if you’re a genuine scientist, the voice of revelation within isn’t really distinguishable from that willingness to pursue the truth and the willingness to attend to the voice of conscience, right? Because you’re supposed to be pursuing the truth as a scientist and you lay yourself open to… So can we separate transcendent and supernatural in some manner that’s productive? I’m not sure that I’m able to answer the precise question, but what I can say is that our conscience, our morality, is exactly what you would predict of a social species in a very material way, right? And as a matter of fact, many ethologists and evolutionary scientists have already made these arguments, that there is a very compelling scientific argument that can explain the evolution of morality without situating it within some transcendent religious framework. Because many of the religious folks will say, yeah, sure, evolution can explain why we have opposable thumbs, evolution can explain why there are sex differences, but it can never explain morality. And of course, many evolutionists, some of whom are incredibly accomplished thinkers, have argued that there is nothing uniquely magical about the construct of morality. When you have a social species, the most dangerous thing that humans have faced in our evolutionary history other than predators is our conspecifics, is other people. We’re walking through the savanna and here comes another group of folks that are unrelated to us. We don’t know if they are friend or foe, and that’s why one of the reasons we’ve evolved coalitional thinking, right? Blue team versus red team. And so it makes perfect sense when you have a non-solitary animal to evolve things like a conscience, things like the emotions of anger, retribution, vengefulness, right? So all of these mechanisms, whether it be morality or our emotional system, can be completely couched in an evolutionary adaptive framework. But again, that said, I think that it makes perfect sense for an animal like us who’s developed this big prefrontal cortex, who is regrettably aware of their mortality, to be uniquely intoxicated by religion. Because religion offers us the ultimate pill for the most fundamental problem which we face, which is the recognition of our mortality, right? If I have high cholesterol level, and if we agree that, let’s say, having bad cholesterol is bad for you, although of course that’s debated, then I can go see my physician, he can give me a statin, and my cholesterol scores will drop. Unfortunately, there is no pill for my mortality fear other than the religious solution, right? And so to me, as a functional analysis, it makes perfect sense for us to be susceptible to believe in religion. Now, I don’t think, and here I’m going to link up to, I saw that you’ve recently been having some spicy exchanges with Richard Dawkins. I don’t exhibit as much animus towards religion as does, let’s say, Richard Dawkins. Again, I think because I’m coming from the perspective that there are very clear evolutionary reasons why we evolved to be believers. And oftentimes this assuages some of the anger that the religious folks might feel towards me because they actually see that I don’t have a built-in hatred towards religion. As a matter of fact, just as a side note, it might interest you to know that there are two fundamental ways by which evolutionists can study religion. There is what’s called the adaptation approach and the exaptation approach. So maybe I could take a minute or two to address them. The adaptation approach is why would religion have ever evolved? What survival or mating advantage would be conferred on those who are religious as opposed to those who are not religious? And the top argument that’s been proposed is one by David Sloan Wilson, the evolutionary biologist who actually he wrote a great book called Darwin’s Cathedral, which if you haven’t read it, Jordan, I think you’d enjoy it. He uses a group selectionist argument to argue that religious group as compared to non-religious groups are going to have greater likelihood of surviving because religion affords you greater cohesion, communality, cooperation. And so that would be one approach to situating an evolutionary understanding of religion. The exaptation approach, many of your viewers may not be familiar with that term, and exaptation is a byproduct of evolution. So for example, if I say, why do humans have the color of the skeleton that they have? That itself was not adaptive, it’s a byproduct of evolution. Now the top guy for the exaptation approach of religion is an evolutionary anthropologist named Pascal Boyer who basically argued that religion piggybacks on neural systems that evolved for other reasons, and hence it’s a byproduct. So even if you are someone who is not very religious, but you are grounded in evolutionary theory, you can fully understand why it is so easy for most people to be religious rather than non-religious, if that makes any sense. This is real and happening now. With the abortion bill accounting for over half of the abortions committed in the country, more than 1,000 preborn children die at the hand of this poison every day. Preborn is the organization providing the solution to this devastating situation. Women are being fed the abortion pill and led to believe it’s an easy out to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, but they are not being told the truth about the harmful side effects and the emotional trauma left behind. This is a heartbreaking reality that needs to be addressed. Preborn Network Clinics are there for these women, offering love, hope, and an abortion reversal pill which can save their baby if taken soon enough, but they cannot do this without our help as all of their services are free. For just $28, you can help hurting women and at-risk babies. Dial pound 250 and say the keyword baby or visit preborn.com slash jordan. All gifts are tax deductible. You will never regret saving a child’s life. That’s pound 250 baby or visit preborn.com slash jordan. Okay, okay, so let me address a number of the things that you just said. The first comment I might want to make, and you tell me what you think about this, Gad, you know, I don’t think that it’s unreasonable from a narrative perspective to frame you as someone possessed by the same spirit that made itself manifest in the prophetic tradition. Now, and this makes sense to me, partly because of your cultural heritage and the way that you approach ideas, but I also think that it’s true in a more than merely passing sense, you know, because one of the things that you see that constantly characterizes the prophetic tradition in the Old Testament is that people like Jonah. So I just took the story of Jonah apart for this book that I’m writing, and so it’s very cool, Gad. So this is the proposition in Jonah, right? Jonah is just minding his own business, and God makes himself manifest to Jonah in the form of a call from conscience. That’s the simplest way to think about it, and he tells Jonah, there’s this city up near you called Nineveh, which is full of foreigners that hate you and that are your enemy, but they’re deviating from the desirable path, and I’m thinking about wiping them out. But I think you should go up there and say what you have to say on the off chance they’ll listen so that they tap themselves back onto the straight and narrow and don’t reap divine retribution. And Jonah, being a very sensible person, says, yeah, I don’t think I’ll do that. It doesn’t sound like a great deal for me. It’s me who’s a foreign Jew against 120,000 of my enemies. Why the hell do you think they’ll listen to me? I don’t really care if they’re saved anyways. How about I just go in the other direction? So he rejects this call to speak right now. He’s on a boat getting the hell out of there, and the sailors, the storms come and the waves rise, and now the ship is in danger. That’s the first hint in the story that by refusing to speak when you’re called upon, you put the ship itself in danger. That could be the ship of state, right? Now the sailors are kind of superstitious, and they think someone on this boat is on outs with God or with their gods. We better find out who it is so we can rectify this situation. So they go interrogate all the passengers, and Jonah admits that he has defied a direct order. And so he basically tells the sailors, who were somewhat loath to do this, by the way, to throw him into the ocean where he’s going to drown. And you might think, okay, so what does that mean? Well, this is what it means to me, is that if you’re called upon to speak and you stay silent, then you’re going to put the ship in danger and at the great peril of your own life. So now they throw him in the ocean. You think, well, that’s about the worst thing that could happen to poor Jonah because now he’s way the hell away from shore and he’s going to drown. That isn’t the worst thing that happens because the next thing that happens is that some horrible demon from the abyss itself rises up from the bottom of reality and takes him in its jaws and pulls him down to hell. And I say hell because that’s how Jonah describes it. And it’s also a type of the harrowing of hell that is laid out in the gospel stories much, much later. And so this is my sense of what that story means, you know, and I think this is something particularly relevant to the experience of the Jews, let’s say in the 20th century, is that if you’re called upon to speak and you reject that call, not only do you put the ship in danger and your life, but then you’re going to be like, what would you say? The jaws of hell itself are going to close around you and take you to the bottom, the very, very bottom of things. And I do think that’s what happens to states when the people in the states don’t speak. So Jonah is down in hell for three days in the belly of this whale, this dragon whale. And, you know, he has a chance to think and he decides, well, you know, maybe I should have said something when I was called upon to say something. And he repents and the whale spits him out. And then he goes to Nineveh and he talks to all the foreigners who are his enemies and they actually listen and God decides not to destroy them. Now, you know, in that story, the spirit of your ancestors and mine is portrayed as the voice that calls from within to stand up and say what you have to say, even to those who would want to destroy you, even to those who have habitually been your enemies. And that if you don’t do that, you bring the forces of death and hell against yourself and everyone else. And so, well, see, that’s not exactly a, what would you say, a testament to the existence of the supernatural, but it is definitely the testament to the existence of something transcendent that you have moral obligation to. And so, well, so. Yes. Yeah, no, I buy all of that. That’s precisely why when people ask me, well, how can you be so attached to your religious identity and not be much of a believer? It’s precisely for the reasons that you said, which is I come from a very long line of thinkers. There are cultural values that come with being Jewish that I’m very proud of. I don’t know if you saw it, just on a slightly note of levity. Have you seen, Jordan, the Dutch AI group that put together their best rendition of what Jesus would look like? Have you seen that image? No, no, I haven’t. Where would I find that? Well, that image, it turns out, looks hauntingly like the guy that you’re speaking to right now, right? And I mean, it’s literally shocking. So if you take that image that the AI Dutch researchers came up with and you take it, now, I’m not engaging in a delusion of grandeur saying that I’m Jesus, but what I’m saying is, there is a lot to be proud of in the heritage that I come from. I’ll tell you a quick story, personal story that speaks to that kind of Jewish ethos that I discussed in my last book, In the Parasitic Mind, when I was talking about the differences between values of one culture and another, which, by the way, speaks to your point about personal responsibility and so on. So after I had finished, so I did an undergrad in mathematics and computer science and then an MBA at McGill. I’m saying this not to flaunt my CV because it’s relevant to the story. And so after I finished my MBA, my goal was always to continue, you know, do a PhD, behavioral science and so on. But one of the places I had been accepted to for my PhD was University of California Irvine, and my brother at the time lived in Southern California. He was a very, very successful entrepreneur, and he was trying to convince me, having just finished my MBA, to take a couple of years, put on the proverbial suit, work with him a few years, get some experience, and then, of course, go back and, you know, pursue my PhD. But I was really not interested in that. I always knew that I wanted to be an academic. Well, when I returned home to Montreal and my mother had caught wind of the fact that my brother was trying to convince me to stop my studies for a few years, she takes me to a side room. She says, come, I want to speak to you. It seemed like an ominous thing that she wants to talk to me. I said, what’s up, mom? She said, well, I hear that you’re thinking of not continuing with your PhD. And before I could even assuage her fears, she said, well, do you want people to know you as somebody who dropped out of school? So for her, for the standards of excellence of my family, having a degree in mathematics and computer science and an MBA, and then not going on and doing your PhD would bring shame to the family, would be a manifestation of having dropped out of school. Now, of course, I didn’t do my PhD to please my mother, but it gives you a sense of… That’s what you say. Right. You’re speaking as the clinician that you are. Right, right. Exactly. And so, right. And so, that gives you a sense of the importance that learning has. It’s really a pathological desire that is instilled within you from the youngest of age to be a learned person. And so, I can be incredibly proud of that heritage because it is a real material heritage. It’s a real sociological reality, cultural reality to be from that long tradition of Jews. Again, without necessarily buying into every single element of the supernatural. So for example, even if I were to concede that God exists, I can’t imagine that the ruler of the universe cares about whether you light the Shabbat candles at 821 or 822. But I can promise you that if you go to some of the Hasidic neighborhoods in Montreal where there are very orthodox Jews, they would argue that, no, no, God absolutely cares at the exact minute. So in that sense, I could be very, very much tied to my religious heritage without necessarily caring about some of the ritualistic elements. Okay. So I want to tell you about a study that someone brought to my attention about six months ago. It’s not a very old study and it’s a really remarkable study. And in fact, I think it’s revolutionary. So it turns out, you know, that when DNA molecules are damaged, they can repair themselves and they generally do that with spectacular accuracy, but the accuracy varies. Okay. So imagine this, imagine that there’s a hierarchy of genes and that some genes are so fundamental that if they vary even a trifle, the organism that they produce will be non-viable. And then imagine that there are other genes, like the ones that code for eye color, where there can be tremendous variability with virtually no consequence. Now there might be minor consequences, like maybe blue-eyed blondes have a sexual advantage over those who aren’t blue-eyed and blonde, you know, because of attractiveness. But having brown eyes or darker hair doesn’t make you unviable. Right. Now it turns out that there is a relationship between the accuracy of DNA repair mechanisms and the canonical status of the genes that are being repaired. Is the more fundamental the gene is to the morphology upon which existence itself depends, the closer to 100% accuracy the repair mechanisms manage. Okay. So that means there’s a core set of genetic axioms, you might say, that don’t vary with mutation. And there’s a peripheral set that are allowed to vary, you might say, as experimental variations on the adaptational landscape. Now, I think there’s an analog between that and conceptualizations, let’s say, means, is that there are some axioms, some conceptual axioms, that have to remain utterly unchanged across time. And then there is a host of more peripheral propositions that can vary substantively with no disadvantage and maybe some advantage because of the variability. And I think also that we regard the canonical axioms as deep and profound and were affected if they move, where we’re willing to abide, to allow and even to enjoy variation on fringe. And so I’m wondering, you tell me what you think about this with regard to what you claimed is that, you know, you said that you’re unwilling to adhere to the more gayune distinctions that are made on the religious front. And some of those might involve, right, the propositions of the existence of something supernatural and inexplicable in its fundamental nature. But it also seems to me that for you, that’s allied with an unshakable faith in certain axiomatic presuppositions, some of which we already discussed, which is like, is it incorrect for me to say that your attachment to the communicated truth is most appropriately conceptualized as adherence to an unshakable axiomatic faith? Like, I don’t understand how it isn’t. So if you don’t think it is, then help me understand. Right. So for example, now let’s bring in, say, my math background. In mathematics, there are axiomatic truths, right? So take, for example, the transitivity axiom. If I prefer car A to car B and I prefer car B to car C, it must be that I prefer car A to car C. If I don’t, then that’s called an intransitive preference, and therefore I’m committing a violation of rationality. Those are axiomatic mathematical truths. But there are also empirical truths, right? If I throw a person off a 100-story building, 100 times out of 100, I’ll know exactly what will happen because there’s a thing called gravity. So in other words, I can pursue truth without, and as you said, universal truth that is invariant to time or place, and those truths, while we may couch them in a supernatural cause, I can completely adhere to them without them being, you know, co-opted with a supernatural element. So for example, in The Parasitic Mind, I hope we’ll have a chance to talk about my forthcoming book soon. We can actually talk about it in the context of religiosity and happiness, if you’d like. That could be a good segue. But in my last book, in chapter seven, I talk about how to seek truth, and I offer the epistemological approach called normological networks of cumulative evidence, and I think we had discussed that previously, right? So the idea there is that if I want to demonstrate to you, Jordan, that there is an unshakable universal truth, what would be the data that I would need to amass and present to you for you to start coming around to me? And the way that you do that, if you’re building a normological network of cumulative evidence, is you come up with data that is across cultures, across eras, across species, across methodologies, across theoretical frameworks, and if all of these triangulate to demonstrate that your phenomenon is universal, then you’re well on your way to having built a rather unassailable argument. And so notice that I’ve been able to do that without ever requiring some higher supernatural authority to contextualize that truth. And so again, I’m very, very open to the idea that people need religion. I think religion, in most cases, serves more benefits than costs, although I wouldn’t have left Lebanon were it not for religion, right? Because it is specifically religious hatred that caused me to leave Lebanon, right? It wasn’t feasible in the mid-70s when the Lebanese Civil War broke out to be Jewish in Lebanon, because Lebanon is exactly what happens to a society that is completely organized along identity politics lines. So it’s particularly dismaying that the progressives in the West wish to model that from which I escaped in Lebanon. But in that case, the reason why we had to leave Lebanon is exactly due to religion, because somehow our religious heritage was no longer possible to hold, to practice in Lebanon, and we left. So I kind of have an ambivalent relationship with religion. Okay, so let me ask you a couple things about that. So the first question might be, and this is something that we both grappled with as academics, you know, the universities have become very corrupt. Now you could argue, on the one hand, that that corruption is just an extension of the intellectual enterprise as such. Or you could argue that the corruption that’s made itself manifest in the universities is a parasitical excrescence on the core enterprise, the intellectual enterprise of the universities. Okay, now on the religious front, the same issue emerges, right? The question is, is that when, you know, you already pointed out earlier that the parasitical predator types can utilize strategies of empathy, let’s say, to amplify their attractiveness on the sexual front, right? So they can co-opt something that emerged for other reasons and bend it to their own purposes. So what do you think is more reasonable? Like, do you think that on the religious front that the danger you’re exposed to in Lebanon is merely a consequence of the fact that the religious enterprise itself is flawed and will produce this multiplicity of competing and often murderously competing claims? Or is it reasonable to assume that something analogous happens on the religious front and that the fundamental conflict is a consequence of the predatory parasites twisting fundamentally axiomatic and necessary religious claims to their own devices and sowing discord as a consequence? Well, I can’t be so charitable as to give religion a free pass because many of the religious narratives, certainly in the Abrahamic faiths, are precisely us versus them, right? So there is no way to misinterpret some of the teachings in many of these books, whether it be Deuteronomy, so the Old Testament, whether it be in certain Christian doctrines, and certainly when it comes to Islamic doctrines, it is very difficult to quote misread or mistranslate. And it’s certainly difficult to tell someone who Arabic is their mother tongue that I’m misunderstanding what is being communicated, let’s say, in some elements of the Islamic faith. My point here is not to uniquely bash Islam because, as I said, all Abrahamic faiths have an us versus them mentality. So I think what happened in Lebanon is not some human co-opting of otherwise benign and loving religious narratives. Let’s put it another way, and again, this you may not like because I’m borrowing from Richard Dawkins, and I know that you’ve been having a little tiff with him. Richard Dawkins famously said that the difference between an atheist and a very staunch believer is really very minimal. If we assume that there are 10,000 gods, the very religious person is an atheist on 9,999 gods, but is very fervently a believer in one, whereas the non-believer atheist is a non-believer on 10,000. So there’s only a difference of 9,999 to 10,000. That strikes me as a pretty compelling argument. Let me put it another way. In The Consuming Instinct, which was one of my earlier books in 2011, I had a whole chapter where I was talking about the thought experiment of what might happen if an extraterrestrial being came to earth shopping for the one good faith. And what I did there, I mean, some people might think that I was being facetious, but actually I was being deadly serious. I said, take every single issue that you could think of from the most consequential to the most banal, and I can find you two religions that purport the exact opposite prescription. Does God want you to eat prosciutto? Yes, if you’re Catholic, absolutely no. If you’re Jewish or Muslim, what’s God’s view on homosexuality? I can give you some that are totally okay with it, some that are not. I mean, literally I give a million. So how can you then argue for a specific religion when on any given point I can find two religions that are perfectly contradictory? Okay, okay, okay. So I think I have an answer to that that you might find at least interesting. So I forgot that in your book you laid out the rationale for nomological networks. Let me just develop that a little bit, and this is in your new book. Okay, so the idea of a nomological network is akin to the idea of sensory quintangulation, let’s call it that. And so everyone knows that we have five senses. Now, each of those senses uses a qualitatively different strategy of measurement, right? Somewhat independently evolved. And so our proposition as embodied biological organisms is that if something manifests itself simultaneously in the domains covered by the five dimensions of our senses, it’s real, right? So what’s real? You can taste it, you can touch it, you can see it, you can hear it, you can feel it. If you can do all five of those, then there’s a pretty damn good chance that it’s real. Now, actually, that turned out not to be real enough. And that’s partly why the development of language had some adaptive utility, because you and I can communicate. I can use your five senses transmitted to me through the linguistic domain to calibrate my five senses, and then we can do that en masse, and to a large degree, that’s what science does. All right, so you take multiple independent sources of measurement, and if they converge, then you assume that there’s something there. Fair enough so far? Yeah, I’m with you. Okay, okay. I would say, from what I’ve been able to understand, that that’s what the Jungians did in their archetypal analysis. Now, you can debate, as the postmodernists have, about whether or not what they found was spurious. But in my Maps of Meaning book, what I tried to do was to take what the Jungians had discovered by constructing a nomological network of cross-cultural mythological analysis, and I tried to beat that against the measurement techniques of behavioral psychology and neuroscience. And I found, at least I claimed in that book, to have found a substantive, non-trivial, and surprising degree of overlap. And I think this is relevant to your book on happiness. Now, you tell me what you think about this, because happiness doesn’t just mean transitory hedonic joy. And you certainly don’t think that, because that isn’t how you live. So, the core element of the hero archetype is the injunction that you should advance courageously in the face of threat, if said threat stands as an obstacle between you and a valid goal. Yes. Right, right. And so that’s different than rabbit mythology, which would be when you see a wolf freeze. The human myth is, no, no, when you encounter a threat, you explore it until you master it. Okay, and as far as I can tell, all the variants of hero mythology are basically that, right? It’s the dragon fight, is that you find the terrible predator, and that’s what a dragon is. It’s an emblem of the predator. And you encounter that voluntarily, and as a consequence, you get the virgin, so that’s on the sexual front, and you get the gold, and that’s on the material front. And so, and the Jungians, to their credit, and I really do think to their credit, pointed out that that underlying narrative structure makes itself manifest cross-culturally in a multitude of forms. Now, unfortunately, to understand that, you have to throw yourself pretty deeply into that body of research, right? And it’s pretty arcane, and Jung thought symbolically, and so he’s not a particularly, he’s not a thinker who’s particularly amenable to people whose primary mode of thought is rational rather than pattern recognition, right? Right, right. So, but, like, I do think the Jungians used a nomological network, and I think that the core religious doctrine that they converged on was something like the universal validity of the hero myth, and the redemptive quality of that courageous advancement in the face of the unknown. And so, that’s a place where you could, because your question was, well, there’s all these competing religious claims, right? And I’d say, well, there’s no way I can offer a contrary perspective to that viewpoint given the multitude of contradictory religious claims. But then I would say there’s a hierarchy of claims, and some of them are more central, and there is a convergence at the level of what claims are most central. And I think the convergence is analogous to your proposition that you should abide by the truth in your communicative, in your exploration and your communicative enterprise. And I think that’s associated with the kind of happiness that you’re writing about in your new book, right? A kind of deep happiness. Right. I mean, I agree largely with all that you’ve said about the universal myths that Jungians talk about. And again, there have been many studies from an evolutionary perspective that look, for example, that if I want to study female sexuality, the best way to study it is to do an archetypal analysis of the male hero in romance novels. And it turns out that the male hero in romance novels is the exact same guy in every single romance novel that has ever been written. I mean, to the point that you would think it’s been plagiarized. He is tall, to my detriment, since I’m not tall. He wrestles alligators on his six pack and wins. He is a surgeon and a prince. He’s reckless in his behavior, but he could only be tamed by the love of one woman. Right. And so I just described every single beauty in the beast. Yeah, it’s beautiful. And so these archetypal narratives are universal precisely because they are an indelible part of human nature. And that manifestation exists independently of whether you believe in the supernatural origin of those stories or not. But if I can just quickly segue into my forthcoming book. So I do talk about religiosity and happiness in my forthcoming book. And you and many other folks who are very pro-religion will be happy to know that the research shows, and I know that you probably know this, that there is a moderate correlation between religiosity and happiness, meaning that on average, people who are more religious tend to manifest higher happiness scores. But we can discuss why that is. Now, I argue that that doesn’t mean, though, that if you’re not religious, you can’t find your way to mount happiness. And I can couch it in a divine language. So you and I are right now engaging in an intoxicating conversation that is truly divine, right? Friendships are divine, as Aristotle said and as I describe in my book. The love that you have for your children and your wife is a form of divine love. Having purpose and meaning in your chosen profession, I talk about that in the book. I basically argue that the two most important decisions that either make you happy or incredibly miserable is choosing the right spouse and choosing the right profession. If you make those two choices correctly, you’re well on your way to being a happy person. That was Freud’s observation, right? Work and love. That was his prescription for a meaningful existence. And look, and he said it a hundred years ago, and I’ve said it today, precisely because they are universal truths to our earlier point. One of the things that I did in this book is really delve into the ancient Greeks, Epictetus and Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. And here I want to point to a quip that my fellow Lebanese friend Nassim Taleb once told me, which turns out to be hauntingly true. He once was teasing me that he said, I don’t know what you study in psychology, Gad, because everything that there is to know about human nature, the ancient Greeks have already said. And now he was quipping me, he was teasing me. But as I started delving into that literature, I said, I think Nassim might be right, because I would get some insight, for example, about the link between cognitive behavior therapy and some other mechanism of happiness and so on. And then I find out that Epictetus had made that exact point over 2,000 years ago. So I think that there are these universal truths that exist, whether it is in how we seek happiness or in any other domain of human import that are universal precisely because they are an indelible part of our human nature. I mean, that’s why I love evolutionary psychology so much, because it is very difficult to have powerful explanations of human behavior void of an evolutionary understanding of our species. And so it always amazes me that people exhibit an animus to evolutionary psychology. What else could it be? Where did your brain come from if you take it outside of the purview of evolutionary theory? So one of the things that I talk about in the book that speaks to your very kind introduction at the start where you talked about me having a sense of humor, I have a whole chapter on, I call it Life as a Playground. And I basically argue that even the most serious pursuits, for example, the pursuit of science, is a form of play. It’s the highest form of play, right? Because in the same way that you try to solve a 1,000 piece puzzle by putting the pieces together, well, what is science? It’s drawing links between a whole bunch of variables that heretofore you didn’t know were linked together. So the whole endeavor of science is a form of orgiastic higher order play, right? Yeah. If it’s done right. If it’s done right. And so that’s, by the way, one of the reasons why I have the sense of humor that I have is because I think it’s a very, very powerful way to communicate very serious things. Some people will say, oh, but aren’t you abasing yourself as a serious professor by donning that pink wig or by self-flagellating because you’re mocking that you’re friends with Jordan Peterson? No, because mockery is actually an astronomically powerful way to demonstrate certain forms of lunacy, right? That’s why dictators will usually try to eradicate the satirists first. They don’t go after the guys with the big muscles. They go after the guys with the sharp tongues and the stinging pen, because those are the ones that are the biggest threat. And so, yeah, go ahead. So, Gant, you might be interested in this. So I spent a lot of time studying Jaak Panksepp’s work on play, and he detailed out the neurophysiology of play to a greater degree than any other scientist that I know. And Panksepp conceptualized play in really, I would say, as the highest, as the state of highest possible neural integration, because play only emerges when all competing, motivating and emotional systems have been satiated and put aside. So if you’re able to enter into a state of play, that’s actually an indication that you’ve mastered the domain in which you’re exploring so thoroughly that no other competing motivations whatsoever can emerge to disrupt that. You know, and laughter, laughter eradicates muscular tension. When I used to work out with my friends, we used to make jokes when people were bench pressing. And as soon as they laugh, they couldn’t hold the weight anymore, which was a good part of the joke. But, you know, I’ve spent a lot of time in my last tour laying out the idea to my audiences that the antithesis of tyranny is play. Like if you had to, tyranny is a spirit of sorts, right? It’s a malevolent spirit. And you might say, well, what the hell’s the opposite of that? And I don’t think it’s joy. And I don’t think it’s like the absence of fear or pain. I think it’s literally play. And so I think you’re dead on in that, in the allying of the spirit of play with the highest form of happiness. It’s really something to aim for. You’re exactly right. And actually, so to link play with our earlier discussion about, you know, choosing the right spouse. So as you know, Jordan, you know, one of the fundamental rules, universal rules for a happy marriage is the birds of a feather flock together maxim. So there are sort of two competing ideas, opposites attract versus birds of a feather flock together. Now, if you’re interested in a short-term sexual dalliance, then opposites attracts might perfectly, might work perfectly well. I may be introvert, you’re extrovert, you might bring me out of my, you know, sexual shyness, but that’s for a short-term, you know, dalliance. But for short, for long-term relationships, it is birds of a feather flock together, at least on things like life goals, values, belief systems. It’s not at all opposites attract. Now that principle of birds of a feather flock together applies specifically to playfulness. And there’s very, very interesting research, which if you’re not familiar with, I’d be happy to send you some links that looks at how people who assort on their adult playfulness scores tend to have happier marriages. And I give several examples. Oh, I’d like to see that. Yeah, I’d like to see that. Yeah, I’ll be happy to send you that. Okay. And so for example, one of the things that makes, I mean, I know you’ve met my wife a few times and you know that we have a very strong relationship. We’ve been together for 23 years, is that we’re constantly in play mode, right? She can rib on me. And so, you know, for example, I’ll walk into the room, you know, I’ll, you know, engage in some kind of faux grandiosity showing off my muscles. And then she’ll say something like, oh, we might need to fortify the base of this house because I don’t think your ego fits in this house anymore, right? So that’s a very fun, right? And we’re constantly engaging in this kind of play. We’re very, very good friends with each other. Now, of course, you can’t always predict a priori when you’re choosing to marry someone, whether you score perfectly compatibly on all of these things, but trying to find someone who shares your life mindsets is certainly a prescription for leading a happy marriage. And I’m willing to bet- Right, so that you can play together. Maybe that’s why Eve was made out of Adam’s rib. Perhaps. There you go. Bring in the religious narrative. Wonderful. Some of the other things that I talk about is I talk about, so I argue that the most fundamental, universal law that is most ubiquitous is something that Aristotle had already talked about in his Nicomachean ethics book, the golden mean, right? Too little of something is not good. Too much of something is not good. And the sweet spot lies somewhere in the middle, right? Which mathematically is referred to as the inverted U, right? Somewhere in the middle is the top. And I demonstrate in one of the chapters that whether it be at the neuronal level, the individual level, the economic level, the societal level, the same pattern of the inverted U manifests itself across countless domains. So for example, how much alcohol should you consume? That follows an inverted U. How much fish should you consume? That follows an inverted U. How intense your exercise should be? That follows an inverted U, and on and on and on. So the challenge is to try to find where your sweet spot is, and if you can find that, you’re well on your way to happiness. Another thing that I talk about in the book is how to assuage the threats of regret at the end of your life. And here I talk about my former professor of psychology at Cornell, Thomas Gilovich, who’s a pioneer of regret theory. He argued that there are two sources of regret. Regret due to actions, and regret due to inactions. So I regret that I cheated on my wife and now my marriage is over. That’s a regret due to action. Versus regret due to inaction is I always wanted to be a artist, but I became a pediatrician because my dad was a pediatrician. And it turns out that people’s most looming regret are those of inaction, right? The what if. I wish I would have done. And so I basically are- Do you think that’s the same thing that befalls people when they hold their tongue, when they have something to say? Because that’s a form of inaction that could easily result in regret. Isn’t that the same thing? That’s exactly right. Exactly right. And that’s why, by the way, to use my earlier argument about when I put my head on the pillow and I need to feel that I didn’t walk away from defending the truth, I would be regretful if I did that. If I held my tongue and did not weigh in on Twitter to some inane BS that someone- that I would be very regretful, and therefore I live a life, some might argue, of obsessive authenticity. And I say obsessive because sometimes I’m authentic to a fault. I can’t hold my tongue if it means that I’m doing it for careerist reasons, because then I feel as though I’m being inauthentic, right? But that makes me happy because then my personhood has no fissures. I don’t feel like a fraud. I feel real. And for better or worse, then I present myself to the world with full confidence and happiness. We are just days away from the Durban Accords, the greatest threat to the US dollar’s global dominance in the past 80 years. On August 22nd, BRICS nations, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa are expected to announce the launch of a new international super currency, fully backed by gold or other commodities. You can protect your IRA or 401k from the fallout of this landmark announcement by diversifying with gold from birch gold. Historically, gold has been a safe haven in times of high uncertainty, which is right now. How much more time does the dollar have? Protect your savings with gold. Birch gold has an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau and thousands of happy customers. Text Jordan to 989898 and get your free info kit on gold. Again, text Jordan to 989898. Gad, how do you, you know, how do you, Twitter’s a good example, you know, because you’re very active on Twitter. I don’t know if you’re as active as I am on Twitter, but we have a pretty, it’s a close battle. And I think our style of interaction on Twitter is analogous. So I have a couple of questions for you there. It’s like, how do you protect yourself against using your, what would you say, your charismatic forthrightness? That’s a good way of thinking about it. How do you protect yourself against using that egotistically and for instrumental gain? I mean, you have a wife that pokes fun at you and that’s helpful, but, and how do you know you’re doing that? And how do you know when you’re poking and prodding to be authentic that you’re not, you know, you’re not mouthing off and going too far and showing off and, and, and, you know, engaging in an ego display on that front. How, how do you, do you think you always keep yourself in check and how do you do it if you do it successfully? That’s, that’s an amazing question because I’ve struggled with that conundrum when two important values within me conflict with one another. So on the one, so let me give you an example. I may have a good friend who’s spouting nonsense on Twitter. Okay. And because of my values, maybe my middle Eastern values, you know, you don’t go after a friend. So I’ll hold my tongue for a while, but then I start, there’s that voice in my head that says, but wait a minute, if you hold your voice and don’t correct that person, if you think that they are uttering gibberish, then you’re being inauthentic. That’s exactly what happened. Not that I wish to bring him back to the forefront, but that’s what happened between Sam Harris and me, because we were on very friendly terms. We got along very, very well. We, we’ve gone out to dinner. I’d been on his show. And for about four or five years, I kept completely quiet about his, you know, Trump hysteria because I felt that I, I owed him because I knew him, I had to have kind of a higher standard of restraint but then at one point I felt that my being restraining in my interactions with him, I was being inauthentic to the truth and therefore I went after him and, and I thought was a playful way, but he didn’t take well to it. And regrettably, I guess I presume that we’re no longer friends now, which is a real shame. And so I struggle with that exact issue, but I think the fact that I struggle with it is itself a form of ultimate humility, right? Because if I didn’t struggle with it, if I was always self-assured in everything that I did without having the back voice in my head telling me, are you doing the right thing? Then I would never engage in these autocorrective behaviors. So I don’t have a definitive answer. I do struggle with that issue. Is it always best to tell the truth or should you hold your tongue once in a while? It’s a tough one to navigate. Well, how much do you think, how much of a role do you think the social connections that you have play in helping regulate your behavior? Like you have a good relationship with your wife, like are there, are the people in your family, the people that you’re close to, are they keeping an eye on you and giving you a whack when they think that you’ve stepped out of line? Well, certainly my wife is very good at doing that because in her case, she sees the fact that I might get angry at some insane thing that’s being said on Twitter. And then she’ll kind of come in because she’ll see me like having, you know, kind of shaking my head on my laptop. She says, okay, what are you upset at now? Who said what? And then she’ll try to kind of come in and say, why don’t we go out for a walk or why don’t we play with our children? And so that’s another thing that makes choosing the right spouse so important because they recognize your behavioral traps, they recognize where you might falter, and they make you a better person. And I hope I also offer that to her. And so it turns out to be a beautiful symbiotic relationship. And I see from how you interact with your wife, you share a similar love of your wife. Yeah, you know, and I think we used to play together as kids, like we were childhood friends. That’s true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, what’s really been interesting, Gad, and this is really a form of miracle as far as I’m concerned. And I think it’s because both of us passed so close to death in the last few years. I mean, Tammy almost died every day for about eight months. It was really quite awful. And I was out of commission for two and a half years. You know, when we came back together, we were pretty alienated from one another because I really hadn’t been around for two years. And she had been recovering from her terrible illness and to some degree in isolation. And, you know, our pathways had diverged to some degree. And I was still quite sick when I came back home. And what saved us was the habit of play that we had established over decades. And we came together again in the field of play. And that reunited us very quickly. And the thing that’s been so miraculous about this, and it really has been a staggering revelation to me, is that that spirit of play has magnified itself now to such a degree that when I’m with her and we’re in a playful mood, I can see her across in some ways. I can perceive her across the whole span of the time that we spent together right from, you know, 1969 to now. And it’s like I’m playing with that person that I’ve always known, you know, and that’s actually deepened as we’ve got to know each other over the decades. That’s got more and more profound and also more and more like a return to the state of mind that we had when we were young kids, eight years old, you know, playing together as friends. And that’s really, it’s an amazing thing. It’s certainly one of the best things that’s ever happened to me in my whole life. So, you know, and Eve, the word Eve, I learned this from Ben Shapiro, the word Eve means beneficial adversary, right? It means something like optimal partner in play. That’s, oh, I didn’t know that either. Yeah, isn’t that cool? That’s so cool. That is very, very cool. Yeah, so, you know, one of the things, one of the reasons why I wrote this book, I never thought that I would write a happiness book. I thought that Jordan Peterson had already occupied that niche. But the reason why I wrote the book is because a lot of people would write to me and say, how is it that you always are able to present yourself to the world as happy? And, and of course, about 50% of your happiness comes from your genes that can’t be controlled. Some of us have a sunny disposition. Some of us have a more gloomy disposition, and that’s fine. But the good news is that there’s still 50% up for grabs, right? So even if 50% of your genes is coming, of your happiness is coming from your genes, there is another 50% that the choices that you make, the, the mindsets that you adopt that could either increase the likelihood of happiness or decrease it. And so I thought, you know what, I’d never thought about the idea of writing a book of happiness, but tons of people are approaching me with, you know, asking soliciting advice. Why don’t I take a shot at it? And that’s what led to my latest book. Well, you know, maybe to, to, to tie this back to the way that we opened our conversation, you know, maybe one of the reasons too, that has protected you to some degree against being pilloried too extensively, except in those serious cases that we discussed, is the fact that you’ve been markedly good at maintaining that playful mien through all of your interactions, right? And that you are willing to put yourself forward, you know, on, on a fairly, on a fairly regular basis, even in absurdist guise with your fright wig and your self-flagellation whip. And, and so, you know, I think that good humor has also been a really good, it’s not a defensive shield, you know, because that, that, that’s like something you’re hiding behind, you’re not hiding. And it takes humility, right? And it takes supreme self-confidence, right? Because someone could look at that and say, my God, this guy’s looking like a buffoon. And so it takes a lot of courage to your earlier point to be able to put yourself in that position, right? I remember the, one of the first times that I, I know we’ve both been on on Joe Rogan’s show many times, one of the nicest compliments that he gave me, he said, you know, you’re, you’re really cool because you’re not like many other professors who take themselves too seriously, right? So, so I can be austere and professorial when I need to be when I’m speaking at Stanford, and I can be a complete joker when the occasion demands it. And so, and, and one doesn’t diminish from the other, you can both be a serious person and an incredibly playful person. That’s certainly a path to happiness. Oh, yeah, yeah, you bet that that’s an optimized path to happiness, right? Look, that’s a really good place to stop. And so your book is coming out in late July. That’s the sad truth about happiness. You said it comes out on July 25th. And so those of you out there who are pouting way miserably and wretchedly might want to go pick up that book and see if you can pick up a tip or two. And also, you know, as we discussed, Gad wrote The Parasitic Mind, and that’s definitely a book worth picking up if you haven’t done that already. So you could, you know, buy both, what the hell, you know, and then you can free him from the terrible shackles of the communists at Contordia University, and that’d be an additional cost. From your lips to God’s ear. No kidding. So look, thank you very much for talking to me today. It’s always a pleasure to talk with you. I hope we see each other in Montreal in person at some not too distant point in the future. That seems highly probable. For those of you watching and listening on YouTube, thank you very much for your time and attention. I hope you appreciated the conversation as I did. To the Daily Wire Plus folks for facilitating this conversation. That’s much appreciated. The film crew here in Toronto, that’s appreciated as well. I’m going to take Gad over to the dark side, the Daily Wire Plus side, behind the paywall. And we’re going to talk about more autobiographical and personal issues, I would say. That’s generally the tenor there. And so if you want to join us there, please feel welcome and invited. We certainly appreciate your patronage. And otherwise, Gad, thank you very much for talking to me today. Thank you, sir. Cheers. Yeah, and good luck with the launch of your book, man. I hope that you rip up the bestseller charts and that the New York Times is forced to put you in its list. Thank you so much, Jordan. Such a pleasure to talk to you. And please stay in touch. I might be coming down to Florida at some point soon. Are you going to be in Florida anytime soon? Are you coming down to do some lectures for Peterson Academy? I am. The only decision is whether it’s going to be in Toronto or Florida. I’m discussing it with your people. So that’s on the roster, I think, for August. Excellent. So I’ll reach out to you. What are you going to lecture on? Well, so that’s the thing. Of course, it could be the Happiness Book or Evolutionary Psychology or The Perseidic Mind. My penchant is to go with the happiness stuff, if only to time it with the current book. But we’ll see. I’m open to all possibilities. Well, you could do three sets of lectures and then you wouldn’t have to choose. Yeah, that would be good. Okay, well, look, hopefully we’ll see you there or we’ll see you in Montreal or we’ll see you in Toronto. Thank you, Jordan. Take care. You bet, man. You bet. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. you