Welcome to Season four, Episode six of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast, I'm Mikhaila Peterson. This is an episode featuring Gad Saad, called Infectious Ideas, recorded January 18th twenty twenty one. Gad Saad and Jordan. Discuss, among other things, ideas as parasites, postmodernism, social constructivism applying evolutionary thinking to understand humans, consummatory nature, epistemic humility, nomological networks. The Degrees of assault on truth and more. Gad Saad is a Canadian Lebanese evolutionary psychologist, professor and author.

He's best known for his work applying evolutionary psychology to marketing and consumer behavior. His most popular book is The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. He's currently a professor at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

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Hello, everybody. Today, I have the distinct pleasure of speaking with Dr. Gad Saad. A friend of mine, a colleague, an early supporter of mine, when those were few and those were few and far between. When when all the publicity emerged. Initially surrounding me and the videos I made regarding bill C-16, in Canada. Gad was one of the first people to interview me and he took, I would say, a substantial risk in doing so.

We stayed in contact since then, doing some podcasts together. We've done each other's podcasts and we spoke together at a free speech rally in Toronto.

And that's a couple of years ago now, three years ago, I think. Three tumultuous years, to say the least. Gad has recently written the parasitic mind.

How infectious ideas are killing common sense and a number of other books as well, which you can see arrayed behind him, the consuming instinct, a contributor to the evolutionary basis of consumption, if I remember correctly,

the sole author of that one, but the other one is the edited book.

Right now, it's evolutionary psychology in the business sciences. Yeah, yeah, so we're going to talk about Gad's book today, but a variety of other things, too.

So I think the conversation will naturally tend towards the topics that are outlined in the book and in any case.

So let's start with that.

You talk about infectious ideas. Anyways, I should say it's very nice to see you Gad and thank you very much for coming on to this podcast.

It's it's so nice to have you back in the public sphere. I can speak for millions of fans. We've missed you and I'm delighted to be with you.

Well, I tell you, for me, it's a life saver, man, to be able to come back after being sick for so long and and to be able to jump back into doing this. I'm certainly not at my peak by any stretch of the imagination, but it's such a relief that I still have a life waiting to be picked up and that I can ask people to come and talk to me and they will and I can start communicating with people again.

It's literally a life saver and I mean that most sincerely. So I really do appreciate you coming to talk to me and I hope we get along ways today. There's lots of things I want to talk to you about.

You talk about infectious ideas and let's talk about that a little bit.

Your book, so, I'm going to I'm going to take a bit of a critical stance to begin with, I think your book concentrates a lot on infectious ideas on the left. And of course, that's been a particular preoccupation of mine in recent years, although I was I spent a lot of my career dissecting infectious ideas on the right because I was very appalled as any reasonable person would be about what happened. I mean, it's ridiculous to even have to say it, but I was preoccupied in some sense what by what happened in Germany in the 1930s, in the 1940s, and the infectious ideas that possessed that entire community, that entire country and the devastating consequences of that.

And so it's obviously the case that infectious ideas can emerge across the political spectrum, maybe even in the moderate center, but certainly on the right. But your book concentrates almost solely on the excesses, the ideological excesses of the left.

And I'm wondering what you think of that as a scientist.

Sure. It's a great point that you raise. And I actually address it very early in the book where I argue that it is absolutely not the case, that it's only one side of the political aisle that could be parasitized by bad ideas, an idea pathogens. The reason why I specifically focus on ideas stemming from the left is not because this is a political book, but rather because I operatend, and you've operated your entire life within an ecosystem called the, you know, academia and within the context of academia, the idea of pathogens that are most likely to proliferate are those that are stemming that are being spawned by leftist professors.

This certainly does not apply that the right could not itself be parasitized by countless other idea pathogens. So it's not because I was trying to take a political position, but rather as any epidemiologist would do, or or I call myself a parasitologist of the human mind. I happen to be focusing on idea of pathogens that are the ones that define my daily reality.

OK, I can I can sympathize with that because I would say as well that as an academic, I haven't felt the pressure of right wing conspiratorial theories in relationship to my work.

But I would say this is this is something that has happened.

Is that. I started to talk about political ideas because of the consequences of left wing ideological thinking in the academy and what happened as a consequence of that was that I was branded, as you have been, as a right wing thinker, an alt-right thinker, maybe even a Nazi, because I was called that on more than one occasion.

And I think that might be true of you, too, although you make a more a less believable Nazi than me, I would say, given your background and less plausible Nazi, let's say.

So I found that when I objected to the to the excesses of the left, the people who sprang to my defense tended logically enough to come from the right.

And and there were tendrils, feelers out from even the more radical right to see if because I was opposed to the radical left, that I might be a supporter, say, of the radical right.

And what was interesting about that to me watching that is that. You tend to think better of people when they come to your defense, and so. I noticed. What would I say? It's it's hard to keep your centrist bearings when you go after one side of the political equation and you're befriended at least in part by the other or that or the feelers are there.

And so I'm wondering what you think about that. Do you think that have you shifted more towards the right as a consequence of.

Of opposing the radical left, I don't think so, because oftentimes people ask me, you know, you never espouse a particular position about your political tribe, and I answer them not to be coy or to be evasive. I tell them that's because I truly don't believe in sort of an all encompassing label that defines my political positions. There are many positions on which you would think, oh, this is a conservative position. So, for example, when it comes to open door policy or immigration policy, then you would think I'm quote, conservative when it comes to capital punishment for predatory serial pedophiles.

I have absolutely no moral restraint in the idea of executing someone who was raped, five children. That would be considered a conservative idea when it comes to social issues. Then you would think of me as extremely socially liberal and progressive. So so really, my own personal tribe is one that is defined by examining each individual issue and then proposing a position based on sort of universal foundational principles. So the fact, again, that I criticize largely the left says nothing about my ability to have most of my friends be leftist by me believing in many of their positions.

It's simply that, you know, the way I like to compare it is if I were an endocrinologist who specializes in treating diabetes, it would be silly for someone to come to me and say, But wait a second, Doctor Saad, how come you're never exploring melanoma? Don't you know that melanoma is a deadly disease? Well, of course it is. I just happen to be someone who is studying diabetes that doesn't state anything about the dangers of the endless other panoply of diseases that might afflict human beings.

And so I think it's really very much in that spirit that I wrote this book. It's not at all that the right cannot be parasitized. Take, for example, anti scientific reasoning. Oftentimes my leftist colleagues will pretend as though it is the right who engages in anti science rhetoric. Now, let's take a discipline that I'm in evolutionary psychology. Well, when it comes to the rejection of evolution, it is much more likely to be people on the right who reject evolution when it comes to evolutionary psychology.

In particular, though, it's a lot more likely to be people on the left who reject evolutionary arguments for it to explain, for example, sex differences. So it's not that one party is anti science. More than the other is that each party has its own anti scientific lenses and myopia.

OK, so I guess these questions are particularly germane given what happened in Washington in the last two weeks and what still might happen in the next few days. We'll see.

There's I've noticed. Recently among friends and family members, as well as more broadly in the culture, that there is a pronounced. Increase in the degree to which conspiratorial theories in particular and paranoid theories are propagating on the right, I think now I don't know much about QAnon. I've been out of the loop and I should be more on top of that, but I'm not.

But I do know that that it's popular and pervasive. And I do know that Trump's claims to have won the election are supported by a network of conspiratorial thinking.

I was speaking with Douglas Murray about that. And you tell me what you think about this. This is sort of the conclusion of our discussion, was that so Trump claims that he lost it or that he won the election and and actually won by a substantial margin.

That's the claims as far as I've been able to understand them. And then to believe that this is what you have to believe.

You have to believe that the electoral system in the United States is broken to the degree that fraud is widespread and pervasive and of sufficient magnitude to move an election. You have to believe that people as close to Trump as Mike Pence have become part of a conspiratorial network or have been shut down by people who are able to put sufficient pressure on him. You have to believe that the judiciary in the United States, which I believe has ruled something like 60 times against his claims in one time in favor, you have to believe that it's become uncontrollably corrupt, even on the Republican side, even when those Republicans were nominated by Trump or Trump's people.

And you have to believe that the only person standing on moral high ground through all of this has been Trump.

And each of those propositions seems to me to be have a low probability of truth and their combined probability is infinitesimally small.

So but there is widespread support for Trump's claims that he or that he won the election and was robbed of it. And so so someone who is looking at your book, especially from a leftist perspective, would say, well, not only are you concentrating on the wrong side of the equation with regards to clear and present danger, but.

The omission of analysis of conspiratorial thinking on the right shows a blind spot that is of sufficient magnitude to threaten the stability of society. Now, not to say that you're personally responsible for that by any stretch of the imagination. But, see, I've really been thinking about this because I have felt as an academic that the greatest threat to my scientific inquiry into my free inquiry and to my students, for that matter, has clearly come from the left.

But. Well, but. There's no doubt that conspiratorial thinking is on the increase.

On the right, I mean, I knew that was going to happen five years ago, and that's partly the sorts of warnings that I was trying to put out with enough cage rattling. The right was going to wake up and but. Well, I'll let you comment on that.

So to go back, I guess, to to to reiterate what I said earlier about in a slightly different way, I think what you're the argument that you're making is that the susceptibility to believe BS, there's actually now a a psychometrics scale, which perhaps you're aware of, that actually measures susceptibility to BS. It's actually published, I think, in the journal called Judgment and Decision Making. And there's been several follow ups of that work. So really looking at that, our ability to believe nonsense using a psychometric scale, all all I think that you are demonstrating and the question that you're posing is that the capacity for people to think in non-critical ways is not restricted to a political aisle.

The left can be anti scientific, the right can be anti scientific. The left can succumb to idea pathogen's, the right can succumb to idea pathogens. In Chapter six of my book, I talk about a particular cognitive malady which I've coined as ostrich parasitic syndrome. I think ostrich parasitic syndrome is something that all people can succumb to. By the way, not only the left and the right can succumb to ostrich parasitic syndrome. Being highly educated and otherwise intelligent does not inoculate you from many of these cognitive distortions and irrational ways of thinking.

So you would typically think, oh, well, you know, well, professors who are in the business of, you know, critically thinking would be the ones who might be immune from this. And meanwhile, as I describe in the book, the ones who spawn all of this nonsense are typically professors. So, again, to reiterate, I truly don't think that it is a political statement to argue that people can think irrationally. I simply chose to focus on the left because, as you said, that's the world that I inhabit.

That's those are the dangers come from those folks. Not that doesn't mean that listen, in twenty seventeen when you and I finally appeared at that event and in Toronto. I had received because of what had happened with that journalist where she wasn't invited and so on, and do you remember all that stuff? Sure. Faith Goldi, Faith Goldi.

I can remember were we made the extraordinarily difficult decision to not include her on the free speech panel.

Right. And more than that, I mean, we sort of advised the organizer what our thinking was and then ultimately it was up to her since she was the one who was organizing. Well, by simply stating that the the number of death threats that I had received and I and without being able to absolutely know for sure, I would predict that based on the demographic profile of many of the people who were sending me death threats, they would have been much more on the right.

Right. So, again, it's not as though I am negating the possibility that the people on the right could be absolutely insane and their own unique and flowery ways. All I'm doing, though, in the book is I am focusing on diabetes without rejecting the fact that melanoma could also be important. So again, it's really I hope that people don't read the book as though it is a political treatise. It just so happens that that's the ecosystem that I reside in.

So what do you think the metaphor buys you? I mean, you're a biologically oriented thinker. You talk about ideas in some sense as if they're analogous to life forms. And and so let's explore that metaphor a little bit.

What do you think that buys you in terms of explanatory power?

Well, what it does is it contextualizes. The the fact that many people slowly walk into the abyss of infinite lunacy and complete complicity. So let me let me give you a couple of analogies, because, again, in part, it's just prose that allows me to draw a powerful analogy. But I actually do think that they are literal comparisons and using those biological metaphors. So take, for example, the spider wasp. The spider wasp looks for a spider to sting, rendering it zombified.

It's still alive and then carries this much larger spider into its burrow. And then it while the spider is fully alive but zombified, it lays an egg and then the offspring will eat the spider, the spider invivo. Well, I argue that political correctness is akin to the spider wasps sting right in zombified us into being complicit in our silence, leading us slowly into the burrow of infinite lunacy. So you could view it as just powerful writing rhetoric or literally the equivalent of a memetic form equivalent of what happens in biological systems.

Now, when I talk, for example, about specific ideas, well. In Neural parasitology, what you typically study is how a particular parasite will end up making its way to the brain of its host, altering its neural circuitry so that then the host will engage in behaviors that are maladaptive to it, but adaptive for the parasite. And so when I was trying to come up with a powerful way of explaining why do people hold on and get infected by these alluring parasitic ideas, I thought, ah ha, the neural parasitological framework is the ideal framework to try to explain why otherwise supposedly rational people could completely become parasitizes by insanity, like why it would be that the LGBTQ community could suddenly become in favor of Queers for Palestine as that this is an actual group.

So it's Queers for Palestine, for Palestine, but down. Down Zionist pigs. So. Tel Aviv is one of the most welcoming spots for the LGBTQ community. And so if I'm a member of that community, it would make rational sense for me to be supporting a system, a political system, a country where I could live in safety and freedom. But instead I walk around saying Queers for Palestine. That sounds parasitic. It sounds like the idea, the framework that would cause me to say Queers for Palestine rather than to live is not a good position to hold.

Because as someone who comes from the Middle East, I could tell you that the LGBT community in Gaza or the West Bank are not usually embraced with infinite warmth. So this is why I thought that using a neural parasitological, model would be really apt and describing why we become so intoxicated with these bad ideas.

OK, so. A parasite takes over a host so that the parasite can replicate, so it has an interest in the outcome, so to speak, or it acts like it has an interest in the outcome that might be more accurate way of of thinking about it.

So in order for that parasite metaphor to hold true, the ideas, the ideas which are acting as parasites would have to have an interest in the outcome.

So are you presupposing that? Ideas, I guess you're presupposing, like Dawkins, that ideas compete in a Darwinian fashion and those that are the best at taking over their host's.

Are the ones that propagate. The difference between and I, of course, I cite Dawkins work as memetics stuff, the difference between, say, a memetic approach and the approach that I take in the book is, I guess, twofold. One memes can be negatively valence. They could be neutral and they can be positively valence. Right. So memes a jingle. If I start humming a jingle and you happen to hear me humming that jingle, Jordan, then you might comment as well.

And so my memetic jingle has now infected your brain. So that could be a completely neutral meme or it could be a positive name. So first, the the valence of memes can be, you know, all possible options, whereas the parasitic idea pathogens I'm speaking of implicitly, if not explicitly stating that they are negative, that's one.

Number two.

The memetic framework operates as though they're viral, whereas there's a unique element to it being parasitic. Right. So pathogens can be viruses, they could be bacteria, they could be parasites, they could be fungi. And so I am the reason why I call them idea pathogens is because pathogen is a broader term that can incorporate viral infection or parasitic infestation. So there are a few of these types of nuances between the approach that I'm taking and the one that Dawkins took so many years ago.

So a parasite tends to make a host act in ways that. That aren't that good for the host. Exactly. And it seems to me that that's potentially where the metaphor breaks down here because.

It also seems to me that people who are pushing these ideas forward or who are allowing themselves to become possessed by them, which is a metaphor I've used actually gain as a consequence. So they're working. They're working for the same purposes as the parasite. And so then you have to wonder if that actually constitutes a parasite.

I mean, the people who are pushing a given ideological position or even a given theoretical position hypothetically benefit from pushing that position as a consequence of the effect it has on their success within their broad community.

Sorry if I may interrupt. No, I think I would look at it as does the parasitizing of your mind result in the proliferation of the idea pathogen? The idea pathogen doesn't care about your reproductive fitness. So, for example, take Islamophobia if I can. If now I'm speaking as an Islamic supremacist, if I want my society to become more Islamic or not, my society, the West, to be more Islamic. Spreading Islamophobia as a narrative is certainly very good.

So if I could convince a lot of people, intelligentsia in the humanities and the social sciences that it is Islamophobic to ever criticize anything about Islam. So if the Islamophobia, memoplex, to use Dawkins term, or I would call it more of an idea pathogen, if I can parasitize enough minds to repeat this, then that is Islamophobia memoplex by it spreading from brain to brain, has an ultimate goal of creating greater Islamization of the West.

I don't care about the reproductive fitness of the humanities professor who is spreading that Islam Islamophobia idea pathogen. Do you follow what I mean?

So yeah, but it might be to your benefit if you actually did enhance the function of your host.

If by being parasitized by the idea pathogen, it improves the reproductive fitness of the host.

Yes.

Or or in this situation maybe the the ideological or the academic status of the host, because then the ideas could be spread more rapidly.

That it certainly does. Right. So if we can create an echo chamber where we could then spread that idea pathogen more readily, as happens in the academic ecosystem, that's perfect. But the reality is, the reason why I like the term parasitic rather than memetic is because by having to go back to the example of Queers for Palestine, by having someone from the LGBT community fighting hard against Islamophobia and fighting hard against the Zionist pigs and so on, it is actually detrimental to my reproductive fitness.

I mean, never mind my reproductive fitness, my survival. Right. Being someone who is a member of the LGBT community and standing up for a system that would be brutal and repressing me is not exactly a good, rational strategy to pursue. And yet I pursue it precisely because I have been infected by a parasitic idea pathogen. You follow what I'm saying?

All right.

Well, I follow it, but it doesn't it doesn't explain to me exactly the motivation for putting the idea forward, you know, because the idea the idea isn't literally hijacking the nervous system of its host in the same way that the parasitic wasp that you described hijacks the nervous system of the spider. Like there's no direct. There's no direct.

Well, there is

A connection between the ideas and the motivations of the host.

And so I guess that's partly why I'm striving to understand that. Yeah.

So I mean, in the sense that the parasitic wasp is actually causing a neuronal alteration, a direct neuronal alteration that causes the spider to become zombified. You're right. But ultimately, you know, not to to be too reductionist. Ultimately, everything that we do, including our ideas, can be translated to neuronal firings. Right. Right.

But you have to hopefully be able to specify the mechanism. So. So that leads to.

Well, I mean, I'm not suggesting that you should have pushed your research to the point where you could specify the neural mechanisms, but it does open up a problem.

I would say maybe the problem would be. What do you see in some sense in the continual debate between right and left might be construed in the terms that you're using as a constant battle between proponents of the claim that. One set of ideas is parasitical, well, the other set isn't. And so, for example, people who object to a biological definition of sex or gender would claim that the reason that that the person who puts that claim forward has been parasitized by an idea in your parlance, and I think this is actually quite close to the claim that is made, but that the true reason for the claim.

So the true the true motivation for the claim is, is something operating behind the scenes, is that the person who's making the claims is bolstering their position of power or maintaining their position in the status quo or attempting to put down another group, but mostly for the purposes of maintaining the status quo within which they have an interest.

So they're actually not putting forth an idea that has any objective validity, but. But being possessed in some sense by an idea that has a function similar to the function that you're describing.

So how do you using this metaphor, how do you protect yourself or protect even the entire critical game where ideas are assessed from degenerating into something like claim and counterclaim, that all the ideas that are arguing are nothing but or that are competing or nothing but parasites?

So first, I'm going to hear, maybe surprisingly, be more charitable in attributing a cause to the people who originally espoused and spawned all those idea pathogens. And so when I was looking at all those pathogens and by the way, let me just mention them very quickly for your viewers who. Yes. Have yet read the book. So postmodernism would be the granddaddy of all idea pathogens, cultural relativism, identity politics, bio phobia, the fear of using biology to explain human affairs, militant feminism, critical race theory.

Each of these is an idea pathogen. So as I was trying to think of some common thread that runs through all these ideas, very much like if I were an oncologist, I may be someone specializing in pancreatic cancer, which is very different than melanoma. And yet, of course, all cancers at least share the one mechanism of unchecked cell division. Right. So even though they might manifest themselves and project through different trajectories, there is some conciliant commonality across all cancers.

And so I was trying to look for a similar synthetic explanation for what do all these pathogens have in common. And here's where I'm going to be charitable. I think that this idea of pathogens start off from a noble place and they start off from a desire to pursue a noble cause. But regrettably, in the pursuit of that noble cause, then they end up then they, meaning the the proponents of those idea pathogens, end up willing to murder truth in the service of pursuing that otherwise noble goal.

Right. So, for example, if we take equity feminism, most people who are going to be watching this show are probably equity feminists. I'm an equity feminist, and if I can speak for you, I bet you are an equity feminist, which means basically what we you know, men and women should be equal under law. Under the law, there should not be any institutional sexism or misogyny against one sex or the other. So the Christina Hoff summer position, so we can start off with that being a great idea.

All right.

Well, we could even push that a little bit further and say that if we had any sense, we'd want the the sexes to be open up to equal exploitation, so to speak, because everybody has something to offer and that only a fool would want to restrict half the population from offering what they have to offer, even if he was driven by nothing but self-interest.

Fair enough. Great. And so the problem then arises when militant feminism comes in. They argue that in the service of that original goal and the desire to squash the patriarchy and the status quo and so on, we must now espouse a position that rejects the possibility that men and women are distinguishable from one another. Not better, not worse. But there are evolutionary trajectory that would have resulted in recurring sex differences that are fully explained by biology and by evolution.

Well, militant feminists will reject that, and hence they suffer from bio phobia. Another idea, pathogen in the service of that original noble goal. So I think I'll just do one more, if I may. Cultural relativism, the idea that there are no human universals, each culture has to be identified based on its own merits and so on. Again, it starts off with a kernel of truth that seems to make sense. The gentleman who first espoused this, Franz Boas, the anthropologist out of Columbia, was trying to stop the possibility that people might use biology in explaining differences between cultures and so on and therefore justify them that way.

Exactly right.

That the biologists would say this is how it is and therefore that's how it should be.

Exactly. So in the service of that original noble goal, they then end up building edifices of evidence for the next 100 years where the word biology is never uttered. But I mean, and that's been my whole career, right. Which is I go into a business school and I look at organizational behavior and consumer behavior and personal psychology and all of the other panoply of ways that we manifest our human nature in a business context. And never do we ever mentioned the word biology.

Well, how could you study all of these? Purposive, important. Behaviors without recognizing that humans might be privy to their hormonal fluctuations. To me, it seems like a trivial, trivially obvious statement. To most economists. This is hearsay. What does what the hormones have to do with the economy? So, again, you start off with Franz Boas having a noble cause, but then it metamorphosis rises into complete lunacy in the service of that original noble goal.

So I think if I were to look for a conciliate explanation as to why all these idiot pathogens arise, it's because they start off with a kernel of truth with a noble cause, but then they metamorphosis into bullshit. All right, so here's another way that they might be conceptualized as parasites to. Imagine that the academy has built up a reputation which is like a reputation, is like a storehouse of value in some sense. So you get a good reputation if you trade equitably with people and then your ability to trade equitably is relatively assured in the future.

Right. You'll be invited to trade.

And so reputation is like a storehouse in some sense. Now, academia, at least in principle or the intellectual exercise, has built up a certain reservoir of goodwill, which is indicated by the fact that people will pay to go to universities to be educated.

And the hypothesis there is that the universities have something to offer that's a practical utility of sufficient magnitude so that the cost is justifiable. You go to university and you come out more productive. And the reason you come out more productive is because the intellectual enterprise that the university has been engaged in has had actual practical relevance.

And you might justify that claim by pointing to the fact that the technological improvements that have been generated in no small part by raw research have radically improved the standard of living of people everywhere in the world. And some of that's a consequence of pure academic research, a fair bit of it, pure scientific research.

Now, what happens is that other ideas come along that don't have the same functional utility but have the same appearance. And so they're not so much Paris. They don't so much parasitize individuals, let's say, as they they they parasitized the entire system whose system has has built up a reputation because it was offering solutions of pragmatic utility, even training students to think clearly and to assess arguments clearly and to communicate properly has tremendous economic value if you do it appropriately, because that means they can operate more efficiently when they're solving problems now.

But once that system is in place with its academic divisions and its modes of proof and all of that, it can be mimicked by BAE Systems that that perform the same functions punitively but don't have the same pragmatic. They don't have the same history of demonstrating practical utility.

Well, let me give you an example. The idea of peer review. Peer review works in the sciences because there's a scientific method and because you can.

Bring scientists together and you can ask them to adjudicate how stringently the scientific method was adhered to in a given research program, but then you can take the idea of peer review and you can translate it into a field like, let's say, sociology, and you can mimic the academic writing style that's characteristic of the sciences.

And you can make claims that look on the surface of them to have been generated using the same technologies that the sciences use.

But all it is, is a facade. Yeah. And so that's where it's that it's at that level where they're parasitic metaphor seems to me to be most appropriate.

And so let me let me let you raise a great point. So a couple of things to mention here. Number one. I reside in a business school. And if I were residing in an engineering school, I would probably say the exact same thing that I'm about to say, which is the idea pathogen's that I discuss in the parasitic mind have simply not proliferated in the business school and the engineering school for exactly the reasons that you began annunciating at the start of your of your of the current comment.

Because those disciplines are coupled with reality. I cannot build a good economic model using postmodernist economics. I cannot build a econometric model of consumer choice that literally that predicts, well, you know, how that develops and a model that learns what I should prefer on Amazon using feminised glaciology so I cannot build a bridge using post-modernist physics. So because those disciplines are intimately coupled with reality, it becomes a lot more difficult for their epistemology to be parasitized by idea.

OK, ok. OK, so.

So now. This brings up some questions about exactly what constitutes a claim to truth, and I think engineering is actually a really good place to start because. Scientists often claim I've had discussions with Sam Harris about this a lot, and we never did get to the bottom of it, partly because it's too damn complicated. But, you know, I tend to adopt a pragmatic theory of truth, even in the scientific domain.

And what that essentially means is that your theory predicts the consequences of a set of actions in the world. And if you undertake those set of actions and that consequence emerges, then your theory is true enough. So what it's done is it's just demonstrated its validity within that set of predictions. Now, whether it can predict outside, that's a different question. Hopefully it could it would be generalizable, but at least it's true enough to have predicted that outcome. And so in engineering and I would say also in business, maybe not in business schools, but certainly in business, in engineering.

And you build when you build a bridge, there's a simple question, which is, does the bridge stand up to the load that it needs to it needs to be resistant to? And if the answer to that is yes, then your theory was good enough to build that bridge. Now, maybe you could have built it more efficiently and maybe there's a more you could have got more strength for less use of materials and time.

That's certainly possible. But there is that there's the bottom line there. That's that's very, very close. And in business, it's the same thing, which is part of the advantage of a market economy is that your idea can be killed very rapidly. And that's actually an advantage because it helps you determine what a valid idea is in that domain and what a valid idea isn't. And it does seem like the closer that disciplines in the universities have adhered to the scientific methodology, the more resistant they have been to these parasitic ideas.

In your terminology, we should go over again exactly what those ideas are. Right.

Just just so that everybody's clear about going to start with postmodernism, since this is one that you've tackled also many times. Yeah.

You want to define it. Do you want to say, let's let everybody know exactly what we're talking about?

At its most basic level, postmodernism begins with the tenet that there is no objective truth, that we are completely shackled by subjectivity. We're chocolate by a wide range of biases. And so to argue about absolute truth is silly. And so maybe I'm so, so sorry.

Let me add a bit to that and so we can flesh it out.

So the postmodernists also seem to claim and I'm going to be as charitable as I possibly can in this description because I don't want to build up a straw man.

They're very, very concerned with the effect that language has on defining reality. Yes. And the French postmodernist thinkers in particular seem to have come to the conclusion that. Reality is defined in totality by language, there's no getting outside of the language game, there isn't anything outside of language.

So that's where they differ. That would be exactly that I deconstructionism language creates reality is exactly what you just described. Right.

And it's a weak theory in some sense because it doesn't abide by its own principles. So, for example, and this is one of its fundamental weaknesses, as far as I'm concerned, is that Derrida says that. But then he acts as if and also explicitly claims that power exists.

Right. Right, right. And so that language. So if you're building realities with language, the question arises of why you would do that. And the answer seems to be for the postmodernists is that it's power.

And that's a quasi Marxism.

Right? Right. OK, so you think that seems fair, don't you think? What is that when someone who was a post-modernist agree with that definition, I mean, yes, that is the problem, though, is that postmodernism allows for a complete breakdown of reality, as understood by a three year old. It is a form of this is why, by the way, in the book I refer to it as intellectual terrorism. And I don't use these terms just to kind of come up with poetic prose.

I genuinely mean, I compare postmodernism to the 9/11 hijackers who flew planes onto buildings. I, I argue that the postmodernists fly buildings of bullshit and to our edifices of reason and maybe if I could share a couple of personal interactions that I've had with postmodernists that captured the extent to which they depart from reality. Now, I do that. Sure.

And then we'll get back to elucidating the list of ideas that you've you've defined as parasitic fantasy. So in 2002 and I think this story might be particularly relevant to you, Jordan, because, of course, you know, you broke through the public conscience because of the gender pronoun stuff while you'll see that this 2002 story was prophetic and predicting what would eventually happen. So in 2002, one of my doctoral students had just defended his dissertation and we were going out for a celebratory dinner.

I was myself, my wife, him and his date for the evening. And so he contacted me before the date we would go out for the dinner and he kind of gives me a heads up and he says, well, you know, my date as a graduate student and cultural anthropology, radical feminism and postmodernism, kind of the holy trinity of bullshit. And so basically the reason why he was telling me this is he's basically saying, hopefully, please be on your best behavior.

Let's not recount this in the book. OK, so.

Yeah, go ahead. I'm just letting everybody know. Yes, exactly.

And so I said, oh, yeah, don't don't worry. I'm you know, I get it. I get you. This is your night. I'm going to be on my best behavior. Of course, that wasn't completely true because I couldn't resist trying to at least get a sense what this woman what her positions were. At one point I said, oh, I hear that you are a postmodernists. Yes. Do you mind? So I'm an evolutionary psychologist.

I do believe that there are certain human universals that serve as kind of a bedrock of similarities that we share, whether we are Peruvian, Nigerian or or Japanese. Do you mind if I maybe propose what I consider to be human universal that you could tell me how that you don't think that that's the case? She was absolutely Bulford. Is it not the case that within Homo sapiens, only women bear children? Is that not a human universal? So then she she scoffs at my stupidity, at my narrow mindedness, at my misogyny says absolutely not.

No, it's not true that women bear children. She said no, because in some Japanese tribe and their mythical folklore, it is the men who bear children. And so by you restricting the conversation to the biological realm, that's how you keep us barefoot and pregnant. So once I kind of recovered from such a position, I then said, OK, well, let me take a less maybe less controversial or contentious example. Is it not true from any vantage point on Earth?

Saylor's since time immemorial have relied on the premise that the seiner sun rises in the east and sets in the West. And here Jordan should use the kind of language creates reality that dennie that position she was. Well, what do you mean by East and West? Those are arbitrary labels. And what did you mean by the sun that what you call the sun I might call dancing hyaena? Exact words. I said, OK, well, the dancing hyena rises in the east, assets in the West.

And she said, well, I don't play those little games. So the reason why this is a powerful story that I continuously recount and has included in the book is because she wasn't some psychiatric patient who escaped from the psychiatric institute. She was exactly aping what postmodernists espouse on a daily basis to their thousands of adoring students when we can't agree that only women bear children and that there is such a thing as East and West and that there is such a thing as the sun, then it's intellectual terrorism.

All right, so back back to the parasite idea, soldier, OK, no, no, let's not do that. Let's finish listing the ideas that you describe in your book as far as having this commonality.

So there's post-modernism, and we already defined that as the hypothesis that reality is constituted by language. Right.

Which, by the way, is as close as a close ally. So another idea, pathogen's social constructivism, or if you want social constructivism on steroids, which basically and the reason why I add the on steroids because, yes. Social constructivism, the idea that we are prone to socialization, no serious behavioral scientist would disagree with that. And no avowed evolutionary behavioral scientist would disagree with the idea that socialization is an important force in shaping who we are.

No and no serious intellectual would deny that language shapes our conceptions of reality. Exactly right. So the issue is degree, exactly the problem. And hence the steroid part is where you argue that everything that we are is a social construct is right.

It's the collapse of a multivariate scenario into a univariate scenario, appropriate collapse.

And that's by the way, I remember your brilliant chat with the woman from the British woman that I don't remember her name, that the lobster stuff where you and Kathy knew and thank you. Where you made exactly that point about multifactorial right where you are. She was arguing everything related to the gender gap must be due to misogyny when the reality is that, of course, there might be 17 other factors with greater explanatory power. That explains why we're there.

But she can't see the world in a in a multifactorial way.

She only sees it as do look with this might that might have some bearing on on the attractiveness of of certain sets of ideas. We might even see if it's the attractiveness of the so-called parasitic ideas.

I think it was Einstein who said that it probably wasn't I probably got the source wrong, but doesn't matter that a scientific explanation should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. Right. Right. And so and that's an Occam's Razor example with a bit of a modification there.

And you want to a good theory buys you a lot and and you want your theory to buy you as much as possible because it means you only have to learn a limited number of principles and you can explain a very large number of phenomena.

So but there's there's the attraction of the inappropriate collapse of the complex landscape into its simplified counterpart, whereby you you rid yourself of complexity that's actually necessary and inevitable.

What that means is that you couldn't make progress employing your theory in a pragmatic way. But if you don't ever test it in a way that it could be killed, you'll never find that out. Right. And so it's very easy. In my new book, which is called Beyond Order, I wrote a chapter called Abandon Ideology.

And I'm making the point in there that you it's very tempting to collapse the world into to collapse the world such that one explanatory mechanism can account for everything and that it's a game that intellectuals are particularly good at because their intellectual function enables them to generate plausible causal hypotheses.

And so you can take something like power or sexuality or relative economic status or economics for that matter, or love or hate or resentment. And you can generate a theory that accounts for virtually everything, relying on only one of those factors.

And that's because virtually everything that human beings do are is affected by those factors. And so.

That that that that's that. Is it it's that it's the attractiveness of that simplification that accounts for the attractiveness of these. Is it the attractiveness of that simplification that accounts for the attractiveness of these parasitic ideas?

So I would say the idea of the process of finding a simple explanation for an otherwise more complex phenomenon maybe could be linked to. I don't know if you're familiar with the word you know. Are you familiar with Gerd Gigerenzer? Yes. So so if you remember in his work, which, by the way, I love the fact that he roots it in an evolutionary framework, unless I like his work a lot. Well, great.

I actually had done many years ago, his group had invited me to spend some time at the Max Planck Institute. And so he's got the idea of fast and frugal heuristics, right? Yes, right.

It's a pragmatic theory, essentially. Exactly. Because it basically he says, look, you know, economists think that before we choose a given car, we engage in these elaborate, laborious calculations because we're seeking to maximize our utility because otherwise we won't pick the optimal car if we don't engage in utility maximization. Of course, while that's a beautiful normative theory and doesn't describe what consumers actually do, because you and I, when we chose our last car, we didn't look at all available options on all available attributes before we make a choice.

Rather, we couldn't.

We couldn't. We use too many? Exactly. We use a simplifying strategy and the balance of Gigerenzer. It would be a fast and frugal juristic because we've evolved. I mean, if I sit there and calculate all of the distribution functions of what happens if I hear a wrestling behind me, the tiger will eat me before I finish all of the distribution. So I did the calculations, all distributions. Therefore, in many cases, when I deploy a fast and frugal juristic, it makes perfect adaptive sense.

But the downside of that so to go back to your point, is that oftentimes I will apply a fast and frugal juristic when I shouldn't have done so. Right. So for certain complex phenomena, my innate tension to want to seek that one causal mechanism is actually, in this case, some optimal soul. Knowing when I should deploy the faster folkloristic and when I should rely on more complex, multifactorial reasoning is the real challenge here. OK, so so let's say that a robust discipline.

Offers a set of simplifications that are pragmatically useful, OK, and then being a. Developing mastery in the application of those heuristics. Boosts you up the hierarchy that is built around their utilization. OK, so you have a theory that allows you to get a grip on the world and to do things in the world like build bridges. And then if you're good at applying that theory, you become good at building bridges and that. And because people value that, that gives you a certain amount of status and and authority and maybe even power.

But we'll go for status and authority. So you have the simultaneous construction of a system that allows you to act in the world and in a manner that is productive, but also organizes a social organizes society. Now, it seems to me the postmodernists, get rid of the application to the world side of things. So they really have constructed a language game that actually operates according to their principles of reality.

It isn't it isn't hemmed in by the constraints of the actual world, except in so far as that world consists of a struggle for academic power and endless definitions of reality within the confines of a of a language game. I've actually argued exactly for what you just said and speculatively trying to explain why otherwise intelligent people like Michelle Froogle and Chocolate Call and the reader would have espoused all the nonsense that they did. And I argue and I think there is some evidence to support my otherwise speculative hypothesis.

So let me let me put it in colloquial terms. So I am one of those postmodernists. I'm just like or just Jack that. And I'm looking with envy at the physicist and the biologist. Yeah. The neuroscientists and the mathematicians getting all the glory there, the hot quarterbacks on campus, getting all the pretty women right. Why aren't we getting any attention? Well, you know what? If I create a world of full profundity where I appear as though I'm saying something deeply profound and meaningful, whereas in reality I'm utter and complete gibberish, then maybe my prose can be as impenetrable as those Hoddy mathematicians.

Right?

There are physicists. Yeah, exactly. I happen to be generally, if you do IQ ranking among the disciplines, the physicists are the smartest.

Surprise, surprise. And so so we have physics envy. Exactly. So the physicists envy, economists have physics envy. And that's why they've created now some disciplines of economics that are completely mathematical but fully devoid from any real world applications. And all stem originally from wanting to be accepted in the the at the table of serious scientists. Right.

You're making two arguments now, I think. I think one is that in the example you just gave, it's actually the thinker. That's the parasite. Right, because the thinker wants to ratchet him or herself up the hierarchy and the teams, the thinker as adjuncts.

Exactly like. Yes, exactly. Exactly.

The originators of these of these theories in your in your example, they want to accrue to themselves the meritorious status that a true scientist or engineer would have generated. Yes, OK.

And so and they do that by setting up a false system that looks like the true system, but doesn't have any of the real world practicality.

And they justify that by eliminating the notion of the real world. Yes.

So in that case, going back to our earlier conversation, in that case, the originator of the parasite is actually getting, I mean, literally reproductive fitness. Right.

Well, but is also acting as a parasite on a system that's functional. But then you could say on top of that, now he's allowing ideas to enter his consciousness and some of those will. Some of those will fulfill the function of producing this full reality in which he can rise. And so it's it's it's a parasitical set of ideas within a parasitical strategy.

Yes. Yes, I like it. And by the way, for it for this particular parasitic sleight of hand to work, it relies actually on a principle that you and I probably teach and sort of the introductory psychology course. So fundamental attribution error, the idea of that, that that people sometimes attribute this dispositional traits to otherwise, for example, situational variables or vice versa. Right. I did well on the exam because I'm smart rather than because the exam was easy.

Right? Well, they Jacquou Davidar being the brilliant parasite that he was, he was relying on exactly that. And let me explain how. If I get up in front of an audience, Sanam Jacques Derrida or Carre and I espouse a never ending concatenation of of syllables that are completely void of semantic meaning, but that sound extraordinarily profound. Two things can happen. The audience member can either say, I don't understand what I call Asain because I'm too dumb and he's very profound or I don't understand what Jack is saying because he's a charlatan who's engaging in a full profundity.

Well, guess what? Most people in the audience go for the former, right? When I when I explained this to my wife, by the way, she said, you know what? You just liberated me from a sense of feeling that I was inadequate in college when it's really a complicated problem.

Like my assumption generally is that if I don't, it's not always this that I can't read physics papers in physics journals. I'm not mathematically gifted. And so there are all sorts of scientific and mathematical claims that I can't. Evaluate, yeah, but most of the time when I read a book. If I don't understand it. I believe that the author hasn't made it clear, and I've read some difficult people, I've read Young who's unbelievably difficult.

Nicha. And neuroscience texts, yock panksepp, Geoffrey Gray, Gray's book, Neuropsychology of Anxiety, that bloody book took me six months to read. It's a tough book, 1500 references, something like that, and an idea pretty much in every sentence. Very, very carefully written, but a very complicated book.

But I hit the I read Fuyuko and I could understand him, but I thought most of what he said was trivial. Of course, power plays a role in human behavior, but it doesn't play the only role. Of course, mental illness definitions are socially constructed.

In part, every psychiatrist worth his salt knows that it's hardly a radical claim.

When I hit Lacau and Derrida was like, no, sorry, what you guys are saying. It's not that I'm stupid, it's that you're playing a game.

You had enough self-confidence in your cognitive abilities that you didn't succumb to their fundamental attribution sleight of hand. Right. So you you're one of those rare animals that said, wait a minute, he's saying bullshit because I know that I can think and I'm not getting him. The problem is that most people that are sitting passively in the audience didn't come with your confidence.

Well, maybe that's it. Maybe it's that they also didn't have a good alternative. Like I was fortunate because by the time I started reading that sort of thing, I'd always already established something approximating a career path. And in psychology and clinical psychology with it, with a heavy biological basis. And so but if I was a student who had encountered nothing but that kind of theorizing and I, I was interested in and having an academic career, I might well believe that learning how to play that particular language game was valid.

And also the only route to success. I mean, one of the things that really staggers me about the post-modernist types that I read and encountered is that they they have absolutely no exposure to biology as a science whatsoever.

They don't know anything about evolutionary theory, by the way, not just postmodernists.

Most social scientists. Yeah, someone's walking around in the business school things that biology is some nasty vulgar. Oh, it's the same.

It's the same in psychology to some degree. And but my my sense has been that psychology has managed to steer clear of the worst excesses of let's call it this. This degeneration into. This this abandonment of pragmatic necessity, they've managed to steer clear to that to the degree that that the subdisciplines have been rooted in biology, it's actually been a corrective.

It's interesting you say this because I discussed this briefly in the book I gave once when my first book was released. This this one right here, evolution, basically the consumption. This is a book where I try to explain how you could apply evolutionary thinking to understand our conciliatory nature. I had given to talks at the University of Michigan the first day. I think it was a Thursday. I gave the exact same thought. And so I was giving the exact same thought in two different buildings to different audiences.

On one day it was in the psychology department. And as for your viewers who don't know, University of Michigan has consistently always ranked in the top three to five psychology departments in the United States. My former doctoral supervisor got his Ph.D. in psychology and University of Michigan. He actually overlap with diversity, by the way, just a little bit of a historical parenthesis.

So I give the talk on Thursday in front of the psychology department. And because, as you said, many of them are neuroscientists, biological psychologists. And so they're listening to it and they're like, oh, yeah, this is gorgeous. Good stuff. God love it. The exact same talk the next day at the business school, which again, you would think based on what we said earlier, they should be very pragmatic in their theoretical orientations. And if something explains behavior, then I should accept it.

But because they were so bereft of biological based thinking, Jordan, I couldn't get through a single sentence. It was as if I was metaphorically dodging tomatoes being thrown at me. I couldn't get through maybe five or six slides of my talk because they were so aghast and I felt such disdain for my arguing that consumers are driven by biological mechanisms.

And so it's business schools can drift away from the real world, I think, more effectively than the engineering schools can or the biologists.

And you'd hope that the necessity of contending with free market realities would protect the business school to some degree. But my experience with business schools, well, often positive, has often been that the theorizes couldn't necessarily produce a business.

Right? Well, that's interesting because I found that when I give a talk in front of business practitioners, then it's always very well received when I give that same talk in front of business school professors, depending on how vested they are and their Creary paradigms, and either goes well or not. So if they are hard core social constructivists, then I am a Nazi. I am a biological vulgarized there. It's Ghatak. What are you talking about with all this hormone business?

So the practitioners are not vested in a paradigm. If I can offer them some guidelines for how to design advertising messages that are maximally effective using an evolutionary lens, they go, sure, sign me up.

I don't write very because there's there's a practical problem to be. So everybody has two practical problems, we might say, broadly speaking, one is contending with the actual world. So because you have to get enough to eat that, that's the world of biological necessity.

And then there's the world of sociological necessity, which is which is produced by the fact that you have to be with others while you solve your biological problems and you can solve your biological problems by adapting extraordinarily well to the sociological world. As long as the sociological world has its tendrils out in the world and is solving problems. So you can be a post-modernist and believe that there's nothing in the world except language.

As long as the university is nested in a system that's dealing with the world well enough to feed you, and that isn't your immediate problem. So you lose the corrective.

OK, so let's continue with the list of let me give you another one that I think you're particularly, I think, sensitive to it. You've probably also opined on. So the DI religion, which stems from identity politics and the idea of a DI as the acronym for diversity, inclusion and equity, that is such a dreadfully bad parasitic idea because it really removes. So let's again speak in the context of academia, but it could apply to other topics that apply to H.R. departments, human resources department.

Yes, I think before I start, are you you're out of your position at University of Toronto now. Jordan, are you or on leave? You're on leave. OK, well, maybe that's a good thing, because since you were last of the university environment, the DI religion has only proliferated with much greater alacrity. So that now when you apply to. Grants for grants, you know, with all of the major grants, the equivalent for our American viewers, the equivalent of, say, an NSF grant, the National Science Foundation, we have similar grants for people in engineering or social sciences or natural sciences in Canada.

You have to have a Eddi statement that basically says, you know, what have you done in the past to to advance the causes? What will you do if you get this grant? If you if this grant were granted to you, how would you uphold the principles?

And there is a colleague of mine, a physicist, that's for sure, can answer and say, oh, my God. Exactly. So, yeah, that's unbelievable. And physical chemist at one of our mutual alma maters, McGill University, maybe I've given too much information here, was denied a grant because it didn't pass the dye threshold. But in other words, it didn't matter what was what was the substantive content of his.

Grant application, the scientific content, he just wasn't sufficiently, by the way, Rachel, so that's an indication that's a situation where the elevation of that particular ideological game. That's been elevated over the game of science, it's offered now that would be fine if they were both games, but science isn't a game. Right, it's a technique for solving, it's a technique for solving genuine problems. Science is what allows you and I are friends that haven't otherwise seen each other physically for many years to reconnect today.

And I have a fantastic conversation, as if we were sitting next to each other at science, that that is not postmodernism. It's not booga booga. It's not indigenous knowledge. Now, again, people think let me mention what I just said, that indigenous knowledge, people will think, oh, well, that's racist. That's that's that's hateful. If I want to study something about the flora or fauna of an indigenous territory where indigenous people have lived there for thousands of years, I can defer to their domain specific knowledge because they've lived within that ecosystem.

So specific knowledge about a particular phenomenon could be attributed to a group, a noisier more than group. That's what ethnobotanist do exactly. But the epistemology of how I study the flora or fauna, how I adjudicate scientific issues within that ecosystem, there isn't a competition between the scientific method and indigenous way of knowing there is only one game in town. It's called the scientific method.

Yeah, well, that's what knowing is. That's the thing. That's why there's only one game is because there's. As soon as we use the word knowing and we apply it in the domain that would pertain to indigenous knowledge and a domain that would pertain to science, as soon as we use the uniting word knowledge, we're presupposing that knowledge is one thing. And knowledge is knowledge has to be something like the use of abstractions to predict and control. The use of abstractions to predict and control, it's as simple as that, and you could be predicting and controlling all sorts of things, but you act in a way, you act in a manner that is intended to produce the outcome that you desire.

And the better you are without, the more knowledge you have. But so imagine if now in the university, you're the die principals are not only being used to determine who gets a chair professorship, who gets a grant. Who do we hire as an assistant professor? But it's also used to make the point that there isn't a singular epistemology for seeking truth, which, by the way, I would love later to talk about Chapter seven in my book, where I talk about how to seek truth, which is maybe relevant to the many conversations that you and Sam have had, because I introduce, I think, a a a very powerful way of adjudicating different claims of truth.

And we can talk about that. That's the normal logical network. Exactly. Thank you. So we can talk about that if you want later. But I mean, imagine how grotesque it is to teach students that. I mean, is there a Lebanese Jewish way of knowing? Is there a green eyed people way of knowing? Is there an indigenous? The distribution of prime numbers is the distribution of prime numbers, irrespective of the identity of the person who has studying the distribution of prime numbers.

Isn't that what liberates us from the shackles of our personal identity?

No. What you can say that and you can still say that people use knowledge to obtain power. So that's a primary. That's a primary postmodernist claim. People use knowledge to obtain power. Now, that gets exaggerated into the statement that people only use knowledge to obtain power.

And that's all that's worth obtaining. And then, of course, that becomes wrong because both of those claims are too extreme. But even in science, you can criticize science and the manner in which science is practiced by saying, well, scientists are biased, just and self-interested, just like all other people. And they're going to use their theories to advance themselves in the sociological world.

And and then you can be skeptical of their theories for exactly that reason. But then you also have to point out that while scientists have recognized this and just like the wise founders of the American state put in a system of checks and balances, scientists have done the same thing and said, well, because we're likely to be blinded. Even when making the most objective claims about reality that we can, we're likely to be blinded by our self-interest, so we'll put scientists into verbal competition with one another to help determine who's playing a straight game.

And so the checks are already there.

And and. Which which is to say that you can adopt much of the criticism that the postmodernists leveled against the scientific game without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You still say, well, despite all that, despite the human nature, despite the primate nature of the scientific endeavor and the jockeying for position that goes along with it, there's still a residual that constitutes progressive what progressive expansion of the domain of knowledge?

Well, so you're talking about the checks and balances. That replication is something that is central to the scientific method. That is second nature in physics or chemistry and biology, but not in the social sciences is where the social sciences failed. Now, obviously, you know about the reproducibility crisis and so on.

I mean, I yeah, I was always less pessimistic about that than everyone else, because not everyone, but most people, because I always assumed that ninety five percent of what I was reading wasn't reproducible and that we were bloody fortunate. If we ever got five percent of our research findings right. It's still five percent, five percent improvement in knowledge. If that's an annual rate, let's say that's an unbelievably rapid rate of knowledge accrual.

And if 95 percent of it is noise, well, say Levy, it's not 100 percent.

But but by the way, that's one of the things that I love so much about evolutionary psychology, which might allow us to segregate eventually into normal, logical networks as many of the phenomena that evolution, a study by the very nature of, for example, that there being human universals, it forces you to either engage in a conceptual replication or rather a direct replication of that phenomenon. So, for example, if you want to demonstrate that facial symmetry is one of the markers that are used when deciding that someone is beautiful, I can demonstrate that.

And 73 different cultures. Right. Right.

We could talk about the normal logical networks a little bit. So this is this is a way to establish. Let me let me introduce it a bit, because I think this is a simple way of introducing it. What you want to do to demonstrate that something is real, you sort of triangulate, except you use more than three positions of reference.

So, for example, we've evolved. Our senses are a normal, logical network system. So we say that something is real. If we can see it, taste it, smell it, touch it and hear it. Now, each of those senses relies on a different set of physical phenomena, so they're unlikely to be correlated randomly. And we've evolved five senses because it's been our experience evolutionarily that unless you can identify something with certainty across five independent dimensions, it's not necessarily real.

But we go even farther than that in our attempts to define what's real outside of our conceptions.

Once we've established the reality of something using our five senses, then we consult with other people to see if we can find agreement on the phenomenon. And then we assume that if my five senses and your five senses report the same thing, especially if there's 50 of us and not just two and that and across repeated occasions, then probably that thing is real.

And a normal, logical network is sort of the formalization of that idea across measurement techniques in the sciences.

I love the way you use the senses to introduce this, because there is a term that I didn't I didn't describe this phenomenon in the Pacific mind, but this test in another context, I call it sensorial convergence. So, for example, there's a classic study in evolutionary psychology by two folks that I know, one of whom is a friend of mine, Randy Thornhill, where they asked women to rate the pleasantness of t shirts worn by men. And it turns out that the one that they judge as most pleasing of of olfactory speaking is the one that is also identifying the guy who is the most symmetric.

Yes. So in other words, there's sensorial convergence so that two independent senses are arriving at the same final product, in this case, the product being the optimal male for me to choose. And it would make perfect evolutionary sense for there to be that censorial convergence. So. Right.

And in in the book, you introduce the normal logical network, which isn't discussed very frequently in books that are that are written popularly. Right. That's an idea that that hasn't been discussed much outside of specialty courses, say in methodology, in psychology.

I actually think the psychologists came up with the idea of normal logical knepper.

So I'm going to describe what you just said and tell you how my approach of the logical answers is. It is grander if you'd like. So the folks who came up with the terminological networks and psychology were coming up with a normal, logical network of triangulated evidence when establishing the validity of a psychological construct. Right. Establishing convergent validity and discriminant validity. Right. The Cambell and Fiske's stuff, which, by the way, if there are any graduate students in psychology, what never mind graduates in psychology and any student should read the 1959 paper, the multitracked multi method matrix by Cambell.

In fact, it's one of the most writing.

There's an earlier one as well by Chron back in Mial in nineteen fifty five. The validity and psychological tests. Exactly right. And it was part of the American Psychological Associations efforts to develop standards for psychological testing. So it is in fact a method of defining what's real.

How do you know that something's real and that's what a normal.

So each of these validity constructs points to taking off this this concept as being valid, then I've now, in a normal, logical network sense, established the veracity of that construct, the validity of that concept.

Right. And that's actually something a bit different then. Maybe then a pragmatic proof of truth, because from the pragmatic perspective, the the theory is evaluated with regards to its utility as a tool. This is more more like an analogy to sensory reality. Exactly. If something registers across multiple different methods of detecting it, it's probably real detecting it across cultures, across space, across time, across methodologies, across paradigms. So it's really the granddaddy of normal, logical networks.

If Krombach and Campbell and Fisk were talking in a more limited sense of how do you validate a psychological contre construct, this is saying how do you validate the veracity of a phenomena? How do I establish that toy preferences are not singularly socially constructed? How can I establish that?

So maybe and you do that by studying primates, for example, you study. So here I'm doing across species now. I'm going to do across cultures now. I'm going to do across time periods.

And then you might look at androgenic versus non Americanized children and you can look across variation in hormonal status.

I am so delighted by how closely you've read the book. I am honored, my man, that you're exactly right. And so if one box within my entomological network did not convince you, oftentimes the data and that one box is sufficient to convince you. But if it isn't, then by assiduously building that entire network, I'm going to drown you in a tsunami of evidence. And so I. I consider this an incredibly powerful way to adjudicate between complaints.

By the way, this is what in the book I demonstrate that it is not only used for scientific phenomena or evolutionary phenomena by building and the logical network for the question of is Islam a peaceful religion or not? In other words, I could use this this grand epistemological tool to tackle important phenomena, even if they are outside the realm of science. Does that make sense? Yes, definitely, well, it's a matter of it, so to put it simply, it's a matter of collecting, OK?

If you study if you approach a phenomenon from one perspective, you might see a pattern there, but then the question is, are you seeing that pattern because of your method or are you seeing that pattern like are you reading into the data or the data revealing the pattern? And the answer to that is with one methodology, you don't know.

So what you want to do is use multiple methodologies and and the more separate they are in their approach, the better. And so when I wrote when I wrote Maps of Meaning, which was my first book I wanted, I was looking for patterns and but I was skeptical of it. I wanted to ensure that the patterns I was looking at sociologically and in literature and were also manifest in psychology and in neuroscience.

And I thought that that was Ford that gave me the ability to use four dimensions. Of triangulation, so to speak, right, and the claim was, well, if the pattern emerges across these disparate modes of approach, it's probably there's more there's a higher probability that it's real.

And so a psychology that's biologically informed is going to be richer than one that isn't because your theory has to not only account for behavior, let's say, in the instance, but it also has to be in accord with what's currently known about the function of the brain. Exactly. And that's the approach that you're taking to analysis of business problems. Exactly.

And by the way, if it is truly a liberating way to view the world, because it allows you in a sense to do so, if you have epistemic humility, you're able to say, you know, if now you joder, you were to ask me, hey, you know, in Canada, the Justin Trudeau passed the laws legalizing cannabis. What do you think of those laws? Well, then I would say, you know what? I have epistemic humility.

I simply don't know enough. I haven't built the requisite logical network to pronounce a definitive position on this. On the other hand, if you ask me a question on a phenomenon for which I have built my numerological network, then I could enter that debate and that conversation with all the epistemic swagger that I'm afforded by the protection of having built that no logical network. So it's a really wonderful way to view the world, because it allows me to exactly know when I can engage an issue with wood, with well-deserved self assuredness and work, and when I should say, you know, I really just don't know enough about this topic.

And by the way, someone like you, who is, of course, also been a professor for many years, if you establish that epistemic honesty with your students, it's actually quite powerful because if an undergraduate student asks me a question and in front of everyone, I say, wow, you're really stumped me with that question. You know what? Why don't you send me an email and let me look into it. What that does is it builds trust with those students because it's saying this guy is not standing up in front of us pretending to know everything.

As a matter of fact, he was willing to admit that he was stumped by the student of a 20 year old.

OK, so let's look let me ask you something about that epistemic humility and relate, because we want to tie this back. You defined a number of intellectual subfields as. Included in this parasitic network, let's say, under the parasitic rubric and. Would it be reasonable to say that one of the. Then you're left with a question, which is, how do you identify valid theories of knowledge from invalid theories of knowledge? It seems to me that postmodernism has to deny biological science because biological science keeps producing facts claims keeps making claims that are incommensurate with the postmodernists.

Now, it seems to me that a reasonable approach would be to say, well, the claim can't be real unless it meets the tenants of the postmodernist theory, but also manifests itself in the biological sciences. It has to do both. It can't just do one or the other.

Now, maybe that wouldn't work for the biologists, but the fact that the postmodernists tend to throw biology out is one of the facts that.

Sheds disrepute on their intellectual endeavor as far as I'm concerned, because.

If they were honest theorists, they'd look for what was solid in biology and ensure that the theories that they were constructing were in accordance with that, rather than having to throw the entire science out the window, either by omission, not knowing anything about it, or by defining it as politically suspect.

And so I'll introduce here another term. I didn't discuss this much in this book and the person in mind, but I certainly have discussed in so many other words. So the the notion of conciliators, which so let me let me introduce this term for for your viewers who don't know it, that the term was reintroduced into the vernacular by E.O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist who wrote a book in the late 1990s of that title, Concilio Unity of Knowledge. So Conciliators, it is very much related to the idea of neurological networks because Concealments is basically saying that can you put a bunch of things under one explanatory rubric?

So physics is more consistent than sociology? Not necessarily. Although notwithstanding what you said earlier about the IQ of physicists, it's not because physicists are smart and sociologists are dumb. It's because physicists operate using a conciliatory of knowledge, which by the evolutionary theorists also. Do you start with a meta theory that then goes into mid-level theories, which then goes into a universal phenomena, which then generates hypotheses so that the field becomes very organized? The problem with postmodernists is that they exist in a leaf load of bullshit.

It is perfectly unrelated to any conciliated tree of knowledge. Therefore, they can never advance anything because as you said earlier, they exist within an ecosystem where they reward one another, but they can never build coherence. Right. That's why physics and biology and the neurosciences and chemistry are prestigious. It's not because they are necessarily more scientific than sociology is because they take conciliations at heart. Does that make sense? Yes, it I mean, I think to some degree to that, you know, you also have to note that the phenomena that physicists deal with are in some sense simpler than the phenomena that sociologists deal with.

Right. So the physicists and the chemists and even the biologists to some degree have pluck the low hanging fruit.

That's cold. By the way, we set this right against cold, created a hierarchy of the sciences. And perhaps because he was a sociologist inclined, he he placed sociology at the apex of the sciences. Precisely. Are doing what you just said, which is it's a lot easier to study the crystallography of a bayamon than it is to study the rich complexity of humans within a social system.

Right. Although that doesn't make it simple, it's still really complicated. So so, you know, it still requires a tremendous amount of intelligence to be a physicist and to manage the mathematics, because although the theories have tremendous explanatory power, they're still very sophisticated.

So, OK, so. I've been trying to think about this from the perspective of a post-modernist say, well, we're making the claim that biology and chemistry and physics, all these this multitude of pragmatic disciplines, engineering. To some degree, psychology and business. They're valid enterprises and they need to take each other's findings into account, so the postmodernist might say, well, these various various disciplines don't take our findings into account. And so they're being just as exclusionary as we are right now.

Is that a valid argument? No. Does a little useful findings that they've come up with. And if you haven't already, please tell me about them.

I actually challenged are they useful in restructuring society so that it's fairer? No. Why not? That's the claim, right? No, no, no, no, it's not that straightforward because. It's not like so let's let's make the presumption for a moment that these are essentially left wing theories, it's it's the case that it's not the case that the left wing politically has had nothing to offer the improvement of society.

You see all sorts of ideas that are generated initially by the left that move into the mainstream, that have have made society a more civil place. I mean, maybe that's the introduction of the eight hour workday or the 40 hour work week or universal pension or at least in Canada and most other countries apart from the United States, universal health care. And I mean, almost everybody now presumes that those things are.

That they've improved the quality of life for everyone, rich and poor alike, and I think I think that that's a reasonable claim. Is the is the. Is the are the claims of the postmodernists justified by the political effects of their actions? Can you give me an example of a postmodernists nugget that had it not been espoused specifically by a postmodernists, the world would be a poor place, whether it be practically, theoretically, epistemologically? Can you think of one off the top of your head?

I can only do it generally, like in the manner that I just did to say that. Well, it's part of it's part of the the the domain of left wing thought.

And it's not reasonable to assume that nothing of any benefit has come out of the domain of left wing thought. I mean, that's a very general it's a very general analysis. I'm not pointing to a particular theorem, for example.

Right. But take, for example, in your field of clinical psychology, we can say, OK, cognitive behavioral therapy by studying that process and then by testing it, using the scientific method in terms of its efficacy in reducing anxiety symptoms in patients. If I say nothing more, I've just offered a single example of a valuable insight coming from clinical psychology, whether it be theoretical or in the practice of therapy, and of course, there are many more than that singular CBT example that I just gave.

It would not be hyperbolic for me to say, and maybe I don't know enough about postmodernism, but I think I do. You can't even come up with one. I don't mean you. I mean in general. No one can come up with a single example as simple as me just enunciating the value of cognitive behavioral therapy at that level. You can't come up with one postmodernist insight. The only insight that we have is that we are shackled by subjectivity.

We are shackled by our personal biases and that is true. And any human being with a functioning brain could have told you that. So do we need to build on that?

Kind of criticism has been leveled within fields by the practitioners in those fields many times. Including by the postmodernists to their film. I would hesitate to say I would say, you know, reflexively, I would say no, because if everything's a language game, then why play the post-modernist game? You know, why does it why does it obtain privileged status in the hierarchy of truth claims if if, if, if there's nothing more than the world that's produced by language?

Well, I think I mean, because some of your viewers might be saying, well, why are they spending so much time on postmodernism? And there are other ideologies. The reason why actually it's important to talk about postmodernism, because it's it's a fundamental attack on the epistemological truth. That's right. And that is something we need to point out. That's right. Exactly right. So so I had a very good friend of mine who actually happens to be a clinical psychologist, also just a lovely guy who once asked me very politely said, you know, God, would you mind if I ask you a personal question?

I like to go ahead. He said, how come you are such a truth defender and so on, and you're perfectly happy to criticize all these leftist idea pathogens very much along the lines of how you started our conversation today, Jared. And yet you're not as critical of Donald Trump's attacks on truth. And so let me answer that question here, because in a good month.

Right, so Trump attacks specific truth statements. I have the biggest penis. All women have told me that I'm the greatest lover ever. There's never been a president who is as great as me. I have the biggest audiences at my rallies. Each of these might be demonstrably false and lies and therefore their attacks on a particular truth statement. That to me is a lot less problematic. While it is reprehensible, I disagree with any form of lying that is a lot less concerning to me than a group of folks that are devoted to attacking the epistemology of truth.

OK, define that and define the epistemology of truth so that we can get myself.

The bottom is a way of. Tackling truth, the normal logical networks that we spoke about earlier is a way of adjudicating between competing statements as to what is true or not. Those are so the scientific method and and all of its offshoots in other ways by which we've agreed that that's the epistemology by which we create core knowledge and then build that.

Right. OK, so so let's let's outline that a little bit. So so that's that's a really good point. So there are there are degrees, there are degrees of assault on truth. And the more fundamental the axiom that you're assaulting, the more dangerous you are. Assault, Bengoa. OK, so so the non postmodernist claim. So maybe this is the Enlightenment claim perhaps is that there is a reality.

I think it's deeper than that because I think it's that's actually grounded in Judeo-Christian Christianity and even and grounded far beyond that, probably grounded in biology itself.

But doesn't matter for the sake of this discussion. There is an objective world.

There is a knowable reality. Yes, OK.

There's a no knowable reality that multiple people can have access to. And there's a knowable reality. But our biases and and limitations intellectually and and physiologically make it difficult for us to to know it. It's complex and we're limited. There's a method by which we can overcome that.

The method is the normal logical method which you just described, essentially, which is the the use of multiple lines of evidence.

Yes.

Lines of evidence derived from multiple sources, multiple people, multiple places across time.

That enables us to determine with some certainty what that objective reality is, that enables us to predict and control things for our benefit. OK, and the post the postmodernists. The postmodern attack is on all of that, everything that's and that's why now I hope you might agree that it's not too harsh for me to say they are intellectual terrorists because they put these little bombs of beast that blow up the a logical network that blows up the epistemology of truth. Right.

And so you're making a claim even beyond that, though, in the book, which is and this is the claim that I want to get right to, which is that. They put forward that theory in order to benefit from being theorist's. That that benefit accrues to them personally as they ratchet themselves up their respective intellectual hierarchies and gain the status and power that goes along with that, and the fact that it does damage to the entire system of knowledge itself is irrelevant.

That's that's that's that's.

What do you call that damage that you don't mean when you bomb something?

Collateral damage. Collateral damage. Right. So they're willing to sacrifice the entire game of truth seeking to the promotion of their own individual careers within this. Within the language hierarchy that that that they've built and by the way, that you hit on a wonderful Segway to another, I think, important point in the book, and that is the distinction between deep theological ethics and consequentialist ethics, like the into logical ethics for the viewers who don't know if I say it is always wrong to lie.

That's an absolute statement, right? If I say it is OK to lie, if I'm trying to spare my spouse's feelings, that's a consequentialist statement. Well, it turns out in many cases, the ones who espouse those parasitic idea pathogens are engaging their consequentialist ethical system. Right. Because what they're saying is, if I murder truth in the service of this more important noble social justice goal, so be it. Right. Whereas if you are an absolutist at the end, it's logical that you're positing an objective reality, even though of ethics.

Well, that's another place where the the the post-modern. Effort fails is that it can't help but refer to things that are outside of the language game, so by relying on consequentialist ethics and I'd have to I haven't been able to think it through, just figure out whether I agree with your claim that the postmodernists tend to be consequentialist. It makes sense to me. And I think that their emphasis on hurt feelings is an indication of that right now because there's no objective reality.

You can't sacrifice people's feelings or lived experience to any claim about objective reality. But by doing that, they elevate the subjective to the position of ultimate authority.

And, you know, maybe that's maybe that's part of the driving motivation, is the the the desire to elevate the subjective to omniscience.

And this is why. And so I know you're not mathematically minded, but if I can just divert into my background in mathematics, in the book, I talk about the field of operations research, which is the field where you try to act, sanitize if you'd like to put an axiomatic form, the objective function that you're trying to maximize or minimize. Right. So, for example, when I was a research assistant, when I was an undergrad undergraduate student, I worked on a problem called the two dimensional cutting stock problem.

So if you have, for example, rectangles of metal and you get an order to produce 20 X by Y subba sheets within that broader metal, how should I do the cut as to minimize the waste of metal? So operations research is a field that is commonly applied, for example, in business problems where you're trying to minimize the cube time that consumers weigh or maximize profits. Right. So it's a very, very complicated mathematical field, applied mathematics field to solve real world problems.

So now let's apply it to this consequentialist story. In the old days, the objective function of a university was maximize, maximize intellectual growth, maximize human knowledge. Today, it is predicated on the idea that there was knowledge that was that was genuine. There was a difference between forms of knowledge. Some were better than others. Some were more valid than others. Right. So that's part of the claim that you can have knowledge at all. Exactly.

What is now the objective function is minimize hurt feelings or it might be maximize learning whilst minimizing hurt feelings.

Well, you know, I wouldn't mind that so much if if the claim that feelings were ultimately real was made. Tangible because then at least we'd have an ultimate reality that was outside of words, but you can't say that the world is a construct of words and then say at the same time, but there's nothing more real than my subjective feelings. Like I have some sympathy for that because I'm not sure that there is anything more real than pain. All things considered, like pain seems really real to me and it's fundamentally subjective.

And I think that a lot of what we consider ethical behavior is an attempt to minimize pain given its fundamental reality. So it's not like I don't believe that subjective feelings are real and important, but I'm willing to claim that there is such a thing as real and important and true. And so it's so it's logically coherent for me to to to to make that claim. It's the incoherence of the claims that bothers me.

While it's part of what bothers me is we should we should probably sum up to some degree because we've been going for a while while the five hours.

I know. I know. I but I'm starting to get I'm starting to get tired and I'm starting to lose my train of concentration. And so I don't I don't want to do anything but a top rate job on this. Let me summarize for a second what we've discussed. And then if you have other things to add that we haven't talked about, then we can go there.

So we talked about ideas as parasites and and then we spent some time unraveling what parasite might meant, might mean.

And the conversation moved so that we kind of built a two dimensional or two strata model of parasites of a parasitical idea. There'd be the parasitical behavior of the theorist who puts forth a theory that mimics a practically useful theory in a in the attempt to accrue to himself or herself goods that have been produced by theories that actually have broad practical utility. So there's that. And then there's the parasitical idea that serves that function for the person who's using it in a parasitical way.

OK, so and then we talked about post-modern ideas in particular as examples of that and.

I guess the one one of the things we haven't tied together there is exactly how the. Why is it necessary or why has it happened that the ontological and epistemological claims of the postmodernists? Aid and abet the parasitical. Function, that's that's a tough one. Why did they take the shape they actually took? Yeah, that's actually I, I make an attempt to explain that and let me know if you buy it. So remember earlier I was talking about what are some of the commonalities across the idea pathogen's.

Yeah. And I said that they kind of start off with a kernel of truth and they start off with some noble original goal. The other thing that I would say, which I think answers the question that you just posed, is that each of those idea pathogen's frees us from the pesky shackles of reality. Right. So in a sense, they are liberating, right. So postmodernism. Yes. Liberates me from capital T truth. There is my truth.

There is my lived experience. The Transat prefix liberates me from the shackles of my biology and my genitals.

So it's the attractiveness of that liberation that that provides the it provides the motive, at least in part, allure of the parasite.

Exactly right.

If biology is useless, I don't need to know anything about it. And people do that a lot. People do that a lot.

Look, social constructivism, another one of those idea pathogens frees me from the shackles of realizing that I will never be, nor will my son be the next Michael Jordan because social constructivism, as espoused originally by behaviourism. Right. The famous quote, which I cite in the book, Give me 12 children and I can make anyone a beggar or a surgeon or whatever that is basically saying that it's only the unique socialization forces that constrain you in life that don't turn you into the next Michael Jordan.

There is nothing apriori that didn't start us all with equal potentiality. Well, that's a lovely message.

Well, it's to now you got two messages. There is my subjective reality is the only reality. That's the first thing. And the second thing is socialization can produce any outcome. So that's a huge that's a huge that's a huge expansion of my potential power. I'm right. By dint of my existence and my ability to modify the nature of reality is without without restriction.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And therefore, it is hopeful because it frees me from the shackles of the constraints of reality. Right. I want to believe that any child that I could have produced could have genuinely had an equal probability of being the next Albert Einstein or Michael Jordan. That's hopeful. That's wonderful. It's also rooted in bullshit. Right. So I think all of these idea pathogen's share the the common desire for people to believe hopeful messages that are rooted in nonsense.

Well, that's probably a good place to stop a. So nice to see you. We've been discussing the parasitic mind by Gatsas and. When was it published, October six of this past year, so it's just a bit more than three months. How is it doing its if do if you're comparing it to all possible books, it's a mass, a smashing success. If we compare it to Jordan Peterson's last book, then it's not doing very well.

So it's life.

I don't want to compare my next book to that book. So but it's been doing well. It's doing very well. Oh, good. I'm glad to hear it.

I'm glad to hear it. So do you think we did we miss anything in our discussion?

Well, I thought we did, but it was the discussion sufficiently complete so that you're satisfied with.

I am more than anything. I'm just satisfied that you're feeling better, that your family is doing well, that you're back into this on the saddle, and that hopefully you will have your voice. And I've been trying to hold the fort, but having someone like you missing makes it that much tougher. I'm so glad you're back. Big help to you. And thank you so much for inviting me. Ah, thank you.

Thank you very much for for talking with me. I found it very enjoyable and I felt that I got I know something more than I did when I started the conversation, which is always the hallmark of a good conversation.

And I mean, we can dig into these things, the things we discussed today endlessly. We never get to the bottom of them fully, but but maybe a little bit farther with each genuine conversation.

And at maybe maybe the next when your book comes out, you'll be sure to come on my show so that we can discuss. Yes.

Well, if I if I have the wherewithal and the energy, I'd be happy to do that. And maybe we can discuss some of the things that where we haven't established any concordance. I know that. I'll just I noticed that you would talk admiringly about role theory in the parasitic mind. And I kind of and I've noticed before that you're not very fond of the idea of archetypes. And I thought that's something we could talk about at some point because I think archetypes are biologically instantiated roles.

And so it seems to me that we could probably come to some agreement on that front.

I actually agree with you, if we leave it within the biological realm, that an analysis of archetypes works well for me when we start introducing a bit of the kind of mythological occult stuff that, regrettably, one of your heroes engages in. That's when I start.

Yeah, well, that's something that we could profitably discuss because I. I think there's a much stronger biological. Well, look at it this way, God, if you imagine, imagine a culture, imagine an ideal. And then imagine that approximations to that ideal. People who approximated that ideal were more biologically fit as a consequence, they were more attractive, which you would be if you embodied a true ideal.

Well, so what that would mean is that over time, the society would come to evolve towards its imagined ideal.

Yes.

So that makes a biologically instantiated archetype a very complicated thing because it starts in imagination, but it ends instantiated in biology. And no one's ever come up with a real mechanism for that, right? It doesn't. But but that works. You you posit an ideal. Then if you manifest it, you're more attractive. Then the ideal starts to become something that evolution tilts toward. So I'm in agreement with everything you said, so maybe we won't have much to disagree about.

Yeah, well well, we should be able to clear things up anyways, and sometimes that's a good way of resolving disagreements. I look forward to it. OK.

OK, thanks very much. My pleasure. All right. Bye bye. Bye bye. Thank you.