Gad Saad

So at my own university that I'm going to be leaving this summer,

uh one of the key uh objectives in the strategic mission was to indigenize and decolonize the entire curriculum i mean you have to stop back and imagine what that means every single discipline that is being taught you should try to incorporate indigenous and decolonization lens to it well i teach things like consumer psychology evolutionary psychology and psychology of decision making

I didn't know that there was a decolonized way to study that.

So that would be one example.

And it manifests itself across all of academic excellence.

University of Waterloo recently was looking for top professors in AI.

And one of the positions said that you had to be two-spirit, non-binary, gender fluid, or transgender.

That's probably not a good way to organize science.

Well, it actually started, if you can believe it, straight out of my PhD, where my goal in my scientific work was to try to incorporate evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology in the study of human behavior in general and consumer behavior in particular.

And I started noticing many of my social science colleagues and colleagues in the business school

were very adamantly against the idea that human beings are biological beings, right?

Biology mattered for the horse, for the mosquito, for the zebra, but surely, Professor Saad, you don't think that biology matters for human beings.

So that was my original exposure to the idea that

very bright people could be parasitized by idea pathogens.

So that led to my writing The Parasitic Mind a few years ago.

But then I realized that in order for somebody to completely hijack your capacity to engage in critical thinking, they have to do two things.

They have to hijack your cognitive system, your thought processes, and they have to hijack your affective system, your emotional system.

That's what then led me to write Suicidal Empathy.

Right, that's a great question.

So in the parasitic mind, I basically argue that all of the parasitic ideas, all of which were spawned on university campuses, because it takes intellectuals to come up with some of the dumbest ideas, all of those parasitic ideas free us from the pesky shackles of reality, right?