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

Even the most serious pursuits, for example, the pursuit of science, is a form of play. It's the highest form of play, right? Because in the same way that you try to solve a 1,000-piece puzzle by putting the pieces together, well, what is science? It's drawing links between a whole bunch of variables that heretofore you didn't know were linked together. So the whole endeavor of science is a form of or geostic higher-order play.

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Hello everyone watching and listening! Today, I'm speaking with my friend Dr. Gad Saad, professor at Concordia University, researcher, podcaster, and author of the new book, The Sad Truth About Happiness: Eight Secrets for Leading the Good Life. I'm here with my friend today, Dr. Saad. We've met a number of times. I gotta say, Dr. Saad was one of the first and really one of the few academics who supported me right at the beginning when I was embroiled in the first round of controversy that enveloped me, or that I stirred up, you know, or that our idiot government stirred up, which is a more accurate description of the whole event. Gad was one of the first people who had the courage or the, or the, hutzpah, I guess that's the word, to interview me and to discuss my situation with me. He played that very, very straight, and I don't think it was obvious to him at all at that point when he took that risk. You know, he didn't know anything about me really. He could have easily decided, like so many people did, that I was just fundamentally reprehensible and stayed on the safe side of the fence.

But I don't really think that's the sort of person he is, and I think that's become more and more evident over the ensuing months and years. So I want to thank you again for that. You know, it was a brave moment. One of the things I learned, you know, in the last six or seven years is that courage is a very, very rare virtue—much rarer than I even thought. You know, I'd studied totalitarian states for a long time, and I knew that people were easily led into a state of pathological silence, but I didn't understand how rapidly that could occur and how few people, even in a free society with a long history of freedom, would be loath to speak. And how rapidly that could occur, you know. Then you do see people who stand up and say things that might get them in trouble.

Some of them are just people who are unwise, right, and who are willing to impulsively say what comes to mind. Then there are other people, and they're much rarer, who are thoughtful and who carefully consider what they have to say and are willing to say it anyway. You fell into that camp right away, and you've been pursuing that for a good long time and, you know, also with a sense of humor which is, I think, a sign of mastery, by the way. You just wrote a book called The Sad Truth About Happiness that's coming out July 25th, I believe.

It is the case that I think you're a credible observer on that front because you have this playful aspect that it doesn't disappear even when you're dealing with serious topics at some risk to yourself. I think that makes you a credible observer on that front. Anyway, I'm done complimenting you so you could say one or two comments about how good my tan looks after spending two weeks in Portugal.

It is very impressive, I must say. You're positively glowing, sir.

So now, anything else? Is there anything else I need to add to that?

No, I'm just, it's been a delight. We'll finish with the reciprocal compliments. But it's been a delight forging a friendship with you. As you said, I think we got to know each other about seven years ago. Of the ecosystem that we both navigate, regrettably, many people turn out to be cowards, and you're certainly not one who exhibits any cowardice. In that sense, we are truly sympatico, and it's a pleasure and honor to be your friend.

Yeah, well, we have areas of mutual interest as well. You know, I've been interested in the psychology of entrepreneurship and of managerial and administrative ability for that matter. I spent a lot of time studying that and also very interested in evolutionary psychology and biology. So we have those overlaps, which is quite interesting professionally.

I thought that's part of where we can go today as well as talking about your book. Let's start with your last book, The Parasitic Mind. When was that published, Gad?

So it came out right in the midst of COVID, October 2020 was the hardcover, and then a year later, in October 2021, the paperback came out.

Yeah, and how did it do? And how is it doing?

Well, it's always difficult to be excited about how well it's done when you're speaking to someone who sold 12 million copies of his last book. So if we don't use you as a benchmark, then I think it did remarkably well. So I'm very happy with it. But as I often tell my wife, it's done incredibly well but not enough to give me an exit strategy out of communist Quebec. So it's done well, but maybe I'm saying this in front of a guys behind the line who are all proud to be Quebecers. I love Quebec, but I'm not very happy about, as you might agree, the sort of socialist-communist ethos here. I'm not a fan of the cold weather, so hopefully, the next book will offer me the least the option of having an exit strategy if I choose to implement it.

Yeah, well, the university that you happen to inhabit also has a very pronounced left-wing tilt, to put it mildly.

They do, yes, that's for sure. It's amazing that you've been able to survive there at all. So do you want to just familiarize people with the thesis of The Parasitic Mind?

Sure, and then we'll turn to your new book, and then we'll talk a little bit more about evolutionary biology and psychology. I think that sounds like a great plan. So my last book, what I was trying to do is argue that in the same way that all sorts of animals can be parasitized by neuroparasites, actual parasites that can go into an animal's brain altering its behavior to suit its reproductive interests, I argue that human beings can be parasitized by another class of pathogens called idea pathogens. These ideological parasites can then cause us to take positions that are truly maladaptive.

What I do in the book is I first describe many of these idea pathogens: postmodernism, social constructivism, biophobia, cultural relativism, and a slew of other such parasites, all of which were regrettably spawned in the university ecosystem, because, as I to sort of borrow from George Orwell, it takes intellectuals to come up with some of the dumbest ideas. Then what I do is I trace the spawning of these brain parasites, and then I offer hopefully an effective mind vaccine against these parasitic ideas, so that's the general thesis.

Okay, okay, so let me delve into that a little bit. There are a few things that I'd like to clarify on that front, get your opinion about. So the first is that you could imagine something approximating a Darwinian race between sets of ideas for memorability and communicability, right? So for an idea to spread, it obviously has to be memorable, which means it has to be adapted to the structure of human memory, and there’s a biological element to that. But it also has to be charismatic enough so that the people who remember it will also communicate it. So stories seem to fit into that category quite well. We seem to be very fond of stories.

So you could imagine that there's a competition between sets of ideas, and it's sort of a detached competition in some ways. It's the free Darwinian play of ideas that could occupy our cognitive space, both in terms of memory and on the communicative front. You could think about those ideas that come to the top of that as either having some practical function or as actually serving as genuine parasites in the cognitive space.

But then there's another element to this too, and I want to know what you think about this. So, you know, I've been delving into the—the since about 2016 psychologists have finally in their wisdom determined that there is such a thing as left-wing authoritarianism. So that would be a web of ideas that are correlated in that if you have one, you're likely to have the others, you can identify that said.

I did some of the early work on that with one of my students, Christine Brophy, we found a set of progressive ideas and then a set of totalitarian leftist ideas that combined the progressive ethos with the willingness to use fear, compulsion, and force to implement them.

Okay, and so we found the following predictors because we were curious: does this system of ideas exist or is it just a right-wing conspiracy delusion? The answer is there's clearly a set of coherent statistically coherent left-wing ideas that are allied with the willingness to use compulsion and force. We found four major predictors of the proclivity to have that idea set and the first predictor—and it was a walloping predictor—negative 0.45, if I remember correctly, verbal intelligence and left-wing authoritarianism correlated more highly than verbal intelligence and academic performance. Right, a stunning correlation.

So when you ask yourself, you know, how can people be daft enough to accept this relatively reductionistic and simple-minded view of the world, everything is about power. One of the answers to that is, well, they're not very verbally sophisticated.

The second best predictor was being female. The third best predictor was having a feminine temperament, independent of being female. Right? And the fourth best predictor was having ever taken even one explicitly politically correct higher education course.

Now, since then, other people have developed analogous models of left-wing authoritarianism and looked for other predictors, and one of the most interesting predictors that has emerged is there’s a very powerful relationship between the dark tetrad personality characteristics, including malignant narcissism, and the proclivity to hold left-wing authoritarian views.

In fact, the correlation between malignant narcissism and left-wing authoritarianism is 0.6, which is so high that you could make the case—because the scales are somewhat unreliable—you could make the case that they're not distinguishable on the measurement front.

Okay, I know this is a long-winded question, but I want to specify it exactly. Alright, so the dark tetrad personality types show subclinical characteristics of psychopaths, and psychopaths are predatory parasites. And so we could imagine there are two forms of parasitism going on here. There's the Darwinian competition between idea sets for memorability and communicability, but then there's the proclivity for people who occupy the parasitical niche in the human ecosystem, and that would essentially be psychopaths to utilize ideas like the parasitical idea sets that you described for their own truly parasitical purposes.

And then I want to decorate that with one more thing. So you correct me if I'm wrong here. I think this is actually especially because of the emerging virtualization of the world. I actually think that there’s an existential threat here because parasitism is an unbelievably deep problem. Right? Sex itself evolved to foil parasites, and there's always been parasitical people, criminals, and the like, and the most parasitical of those are the psychopaths. We've evolved mechanisms to keep the parasitical predators under control.

A lot of them involve physical force and all of our evolved mechanisms for dampening down the parasite—the predatory parasites—none of them work online. And so I think our whole culture is enabling the predatory psychopath on the criminal front and on the sub-criminal front. Right? Thirty-five percent of net traffic is pornographic. Online crime is rampant, and then you have all the demon troll types, you know, who are polluting the political discourse, and there's data on them too. So if you're an online troll, you're much more likely to show all the dark tetrad traits: narcissism, and Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and to top it all off, sadism.

So please help me out with that set of ideas.

There's a lot of good stuff that you put in there, so I'll try to take a couple of threads. Number one, your first point about the battle between the arena of ideas—there's actually a whole field called evolutionary epistemology that exactly speaks to what you’re saying. Think back to Richard Dawkins when he introduced the concept of the meme in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene.

So there was a whole field that unfortunately hasn't lived up to its promise called memetic theory that exactly tries to model what you said, which is there are a bunch of ideas floating around, and what is the Darwinian mechanism that allows some ideas to be selected versus others that fail?

Now, in my book—and then I'll come in a second to some of the predictors that you spoke about in terms of left-wing authoritarianism—in my book, I basically argue that what is common to all of these parasitic ideas is they wish to be free from the pesky shackles of reality. Right? So postmodernism, as we've both commented on, is the ultimate granddaddy of all parasitic ideas because it basically frees us from, you know, the pesky shackles of objective reality because it purports that there is no objective truth.

Transgenderism, uh, frees me from the pesky reality of my genitalia. Social constructivism frees me from the idea that there might be innate biological differences between people. So it really stems originally from the noble notion of seeking to maximize empathy.

So the ideas start off as noble ideas, but then it metamorphosizes into complete garbage in the pursuit of that empathy to the detriment of truth. Right? So that's number one.

Number two, regarding your predictors, I actually am familiar with the study that you mentioned. I think it was a thesis that you supervised, correct?

Yeah, that's right.

Right, yeah, so we actually looked, so I'm actually working right now with a graduate student myself where we're looking, and we've actually looked at the thesis that you supervised with your student. We're looking at another set of predictors that might interest you, Jordan. Specifically, we're looking at morphological predictors of ideological positions that people take.

Now, that's uniquely interesting because you might otherwise not think that your morphology might be linked to the ideological positions that you take, but it turns out—and I discuss this in The Parasitic Mind—that, for example, your likelihood of supporting military interventionism is correlated to your upper body strength, not surprisingly. So now I'm talking about male subjects. Male subjects who are stronger are more likely to support military interventionism.

Stronger men are more likely to be against egalitarianism, I mean enforced egalitarianism. Right?

Yeah.

Taking from one. And so that, to me, is uniquely interesting because you can look at symmetry. So there's exactly—I don't know if you guys know this—but there's a paper that was published two months ago, something like that, looking at—they used facial averaging of activist types on the left and then conservative types you saw that.

So the conservatives—I was obsession—I saw that paper because they're kind of stealing some of our thunder, right? You might remember in The Parasitic Mind, although I remember I think I first proposed this theory to you in our first conversation when you came on my show, remember I talked about male social justice warriors as sneaky [ __ ] actual term, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Well, sneaky [ __ ] is actually not a term that I came up with to be profane. It’s actually a zoological term that captures, in nature, the idea of kleptogamy, where you're trying to steal mating opportunities.

So for example, let’s say you have a type of fish where there are two phenotypes of a male. You know, of a male, there’s the dominant physically imposing male, and then there’s a whole bunch of other males that actually pretend to be females so that they can sneak by the dominant males and then have a surreptitious coupling opportunity with the females.

That became known as the sneaky [ __ ] mating strategy. And so in The Parasitic Mind, I argue that male social justice warriors are instantiating a form of a sneaky [ __ ] strategy, right? Look, look, I’m you know, I'm very sensitive. I hug trees. I cry when I watch Bridget Jones's Diary. See? I’m not—you don’t have anything to be afraid of. And then hopefully that can allow me to have access to some willing and available females.

So do you know their literature on orangutans? So you know there are two types of male—well, there are two forms of male orangutan in any given, what would you say, roughly tribal, local ecology.

So there's one form of male who develops—he's like the quarterback orangutan. He gets so big he can't even really be arboreal. He has the huge fat pads around his face that make him round. It makes his face round. He's very physically powerful and the females come to him to mate.

But then there are other male orangutans in the same area that for a long time anthropologists, primatologists thought were juveniles. But it turns out they're not juveniles. They're males who don't undergo the complete transformation into the non-arboreal male, and they use exactly the mating strategy that you described, right?

So there's exactly—.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, that's why I was so—I’m always amazed that people get so triggered by your lobster analogy because the whole field of comparative psychology operates on the premise that we could learn a lot about human cognition by studying our animal cousins. I mean, right? I mean, that's the whole premise behind the tree of life.

So I don't really see why someone would be so triggered by the fact that you use the dominance hierarchies of lobsters to then make certain points about human society. There's a whole field called comparative psychology that does that.

So to me, the people who are coming after you for those kinds of analogies between us and other animals are simply displaying their ignorance.

Yeah, well, they're mad at me because if lobsters have hierarchies, it's pretty hard to blame hierarchy on capitalism, you know, because we haven't discovered a sub-genus of capitalist lobster yet.

It strikes me as highly unlikely that we will.

But let me ask you this. I mean, we're going off sort of our—. But I mean, conversations are organic. So this might be a good opportunity to talk about this. Why do you think that you trigger a lot more animus than I do?

Because one could argue that I actually, on any given Tuesday morning will tweet as many if not more things that are quite, quote, controversial.

And yet somehow—I now, obviously, your platform is larger than mine, but even if we correct for that—even if we do it per capita, there seems to be something. And by the way, I've been asked that many times when I appear on shows because people know that we're friends, and they'll ask me, you know, how come you don’t get so—let me turn it to you since we’re now chatting.

Do you have a theory as to why you are such a polarizing figure, whereas, you know, I might one can argue I take positions, you know—I mean, I’ll criticize Islam a lot more forcefully.

And yet somehow I don't trigger as much animus—what do you think?

Maybe I annoyed people on more fronts simultaneously than you did.

Partly. Well, can—so what happened? This is a possible explanation. You know, when things first blew up around me in 2016, I already had 200 hours of lectures on YouTube. And so, you know, I was pilloried as a right-wing demon, essentially, by the sorts of people that we're discussing who like to do that sort of thing to hide their own character, let's say.

And then people looked me up online and went to my YouTube channel and then found, you know, this extra—hundreds of hours of content which demonstrated rather incontrovertibly that I wasn't the sort of person that I was being accused of being, but also touched on all sorts of other topics that people might not have expected, like in the religious and mythological domain, the psychoanalytic domain.

And so I think the fact that I had that storehouse of lectures already stored up when the trouble emerged expanded out my reach in a very dramatic manner. And that's probably, you know, as the first occupier of that position in some ways because I was an early adopter of YouTube. I know you were too, but, you know, I think I got there a little faster than you did and a little broader.

And so I think that's probably a fair bit of it. You know, I wonder also if, so like in my latest book now, which I guess we'll talk about in a second, I also engage in prescriptive remedies. You know, here are some steps by which you can increase your happiness.

But historically, I’ve been much more of a descriptive—that's right.

I describe how things are. Now, in your case, by virtue of you also being a clinician, by definition, you engage in the ecosystem of prescriptions a lot more, and that, I think, triggers people's ire because you're telling them how to behave.

And by doing that, you’re obviously going to alienate people, whereas I come along and I say, “Here are the evolutionary reasons why there are differences between men and women,” and I stop there. Whereas by you taking the prescriptive jump, that probably augments the amount of animus that you receive. What do you think about it?

Yeah, I think that's a reasonable proposition as well. I also think that I think we could develop that line of hypothesis a little further too. I think that many of the people who have an animus against me—and almost all those people are anonymous online trolls, by the way, because I never encountered that, or virtually never in my actual life. Quite the contrary, I think they’re very, very irritated that my simple-minded prescriptions, like take some responsibility for yourself and don't play the victim because it's not good for you or for anyone else.

I think they're very, very annoyed that, first of all, I’m calling them out on their hypothetically empathic virtue-signaling attempts to escape from all possible responsibility, which is exactly what they're doing.

And secondly, they're very annoyed that the simple ideas that I've been putting forward, and the simple somewhat conservative ideas in the end, that they're traditional, they're very annoyed that those work. And then they’re also annoyed because I have this very deep interest in religious issues that also, you know, grates on people to some degree.

And this is something you and I are going to talk about because it overlaps with our interest in nomadic ideas, because religious ideas are mimetic ideas for better or worse, you know, and we can talk about that. So, you know, and then I'm also, I think I'm also probably enabling to the degree that I'm enabling young men and speaking to them about the virtues of their ambition instead of dismissing them as pathological, you know, patriarchal oppressors.

That's also very annoying, especially to the types of men that you’re describing who want to sneak about in the background and pretend to be virtuous and harmless, which is a pretty damn pathetic way of comporting yourself in my estimation.

Like I've watched those kind of men operate in the protests against me, you know, and so I can be surrounded by a mob of pretty decent screaming harpies, and you know they’re annoying as can possibly be imagined. But when I look at the men that are with them, they just make my blood run cold. Like those are—and that's with my clinical eye—those are not good people, you know?

They're hanging around those women who are doing the harpy thing, and they're there as exactly the kind of parasitical predator that you're describing, and I can see that.

And they are not the sort of person that you would want anyone you cared for to come to have any association with whatsoever, plus because they have to be sneaky [ __ ] in your terminology, you know? They’re bitter and resentful and they're very likely to want to tear down anything that approximates true accomplishment because all those who have true accomplishment are their genuine competitors.

And that's partly why I think the radical left-wing authoritarians go after merit so assiduously is that, you know, they operate on a completely non-meritorious basis and it's in their best interest to present merit itself as a falsehood to take out their sexual competitors.

What do you think is the main predictor of folks like you and I who are willing to speak our minds unencumbered by any shackles of political correctness?

And maybe I'll start by answering it for myself. I absolutely think it's an indelible part of your personhood. But if I were to give a more vivid account of that, I always tell people when they ask me, you know, why do you take on these risks and speak your mind?

Then, as you know, Jordan, last year, I received some pretty serious death threats, and yeah, right, right. Many years, and you were very kind to right away contact names. Well, you get more flack on the Jewish front, hey?

So like I've got more flack, but I would say I haven't gotten flack as serious as some of what's been levied against you. Like I've been fortunate enough to escape that now, because I'm associating with all the evil Jews at The Daily Wire. I get some anti-Semitic blowback, you know, but it hasn't—and I've watched a lot of that online, and it's bloody vicious. The anti-Semitic parasitical psychopaths are in a demonic class of their own. They're so—

They are, yes, yes.

And so you've—you know, I have been targeted more frequently, but I think you've been targeted more terrifyingly. That is true.

But to make the point about my unique situation in terms of why I take the risks, I always argue that at the end of the night, when I put my head on the pillow, it is important for me in order to be able to sleep well at night to know that I did not modulate my speech in any way and walked away from defending the truth.

If I feel that I have done that, then I would feel fraudulent, and I would feel inauthentic, and one of the probably the highest ideals that I hold close to my heart are freedom and truth. And so I speak not because I'm, you know, trying to signal that I'm courageous. It's because I don't know how to be anything else.

So for example, it took me a lot of effort while I was on my Portugal vacation to not jump in. You know, whenever I'd go on Twitter and see some idiot saying something, my first instinct is to always come in and, you know, with some correction. It's just an indelible part of my personhood to speak the truth.

And by then, of course, in my forthcoming book, as you know, I talk about authenticity and realness as an important pathway to happiness. Right? I mean, even, you know, the ancient Greeks, as you know, the Delphic maxim, know thyself.

And so I know myself and I know that I can't modulate my speech. So that's my answer for why I can't hold back and I always speak the truth. Is it the same for you? Would that exact answer apply to you? What drives you to take the difficult positions that you take?

Well, I think, I think, you know, they say the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. And I think that what happened to me in the course of my studies is at least an analog of that. You know, I started studying totalitarian atrocity when I was 13. You know, it's really been an obsession of mine, and it was really a psychological obsession rather than a political one.

So I was always curious about the psychology of the perpetrator, right? What sort of person would you have to be to do those sorts of things or what spirit would have to inhabit you? You know, and one of the things I learned, I learned a lot of things. I learned that it's easier to be that way than you think, that you could enjoy it more than you might possibly imagine, and that people do.

And that the true grip of the totalitarian state isn't top-down tyranny; it's everyone's willingness to abide by the principles of the lie. So, the more totalitarian the state, the more every single person in that state is gripped by the lie.

For me, that’s indistinguishable from hell, and I think I mean that practically and also metaphysically. I learned that, you know, the willingness of people to utilize their speech instrumentally was literally the pathway to hell.

And so once I actually understood that, and understood it in a manner that made it an incontrovertible truth for me, everything else became less frightening by contrast. It's like, so when I spoke out against this idiot Bill C-16 back in 2016, which was the forerunner of much of the trouble we're seeing now, especially on the gender insanity front, you know, on one hand, there was the threat of me putting my job on the line and, as it turned out, my clinical practice, and of course making myself unpopular with the government.

And I thought that's nowhere near as frightening to me as the prospect of losing control of my tongue, because I know where that leads. That leads to the worst place you can possibly imagine. And I know that. Like, I wouldn't even think, for me, that it's an axiom of faith. It's like, no, I know how totalitarian states develop—they develop when people who have something to say don't speak.

I don't want to go there. I think I've lived that reality, having grown up—I mean, some of your viewers may not know my personal history, having grown up in the Middle East, having gone through the early parts of the Lebanese Civil War. I always contextualize any threats that I might face in my job, which of course are serious, to what I faced when I grew up in Lebanon.

And it's no surprise then that many of the staunchest defenders of Western values end up being immigrants like myself because we have sampled from the wide buffet of possible societies, and we know that the Western experiment is not—it’s an outlier, right? It’s an anomaly.

And therefore, it typically takes people who did not grow up in a Western tradition, who've escaped the hellholes from which they’ve come, to then be able to say, "Hey, Westerners, don’t take for granted the freedoms that you have.”

And so if you look at many of the—you know, think of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, right? She can speak with a lot of clarity and authority about some of these issues precisely because she too has come from a similar background to mine.

And so beyond me, part of me wants Ian Me Pak, who is another fantastic example. We've both had wonderful chats with her, and you know, I don't know if you know Yasmine Muhammad, who didn't grow up—do you know Yasmine Muhammad?

No, no, she wrote a book. She—I think she grew up in Canada but she had a very tough upbringing where she was married to an Islamic extremist who forced her to wear the niqab and so on.

And I wonder also if the fact that we come—we meaning myself and Ayaan and so on—we come from these societies affords us a bit more leeway when we speak than someone like you. Because you know, you're the, you know, evil Western white male, whereas, you know, we're quote, you know, brown people and so on.

And so we do have high victimology scores, so when and play the oppression Olympics against those who might be coming after us, we can always cash in our chips. Because, as I've often joked, but I'm being serious, that my victimology poker card is going to be higher than most people, as will Ayaan's as well.

Whereas the fact that you don't have that currency puts you at a distinct disadvantage in the victimology poker game.

Right.

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Right, right.

Well, yeah, so that might be one level of defense that I don't have. I don't have it.

Yeah, so, okay. So I want to delve a little bit more deeply into your observations about your conscience and I want to tie that into our discussion of memes and parasitic ideas.

And sure, I want you to—and I think for those of you who are watching and listening, Gad and I have had some exchanges in the past with regards to our somewhat differing opinions about the utility of Jungian ideas about archetypes, and I want to segue into that, given this particular issue. I think it's a good entry point.

So, Gad, I've been reading the biblical corpus in great detail in the last months, and of course, previous to that because I'm writing a new book called We Who Wrestle with God. One of the things that I discovered in the analysis of that sequence of stories was that there was a transformation at the time of Elijah, which is what makes him a canonical prophet.

There was a con—there was a transformation in the conceptualization of what constituted the highest animating principle, that the ultimate deity, let's say. Well, in this particular case, this occurred when Elijah stood up against the prophets of Baal, and the prophets of Baal was a nature god.

You could imagine among primordial people, and there's certainly echoes of this still within our own psyches, that extraordinarily awe-inspiring natural events would produce a kind of religious apprehension.

So that could be earthquakes, or typhoons, or tornadoes, or thunderstorms. You know, these manifestations of quasi-cosmic force that can in some ways—they definitely inspire awe and can bring you to your knees.

Now Baal was a nature god, plain and simple. What that meant at that time was that the highest authority to which people owed fealty was the authority that made itself manifest in the storm and in the earthquake and in the thunder.

Now Elijah had an intuition. He was a, what would you say, uniquely isolated follower of Yahweh at that time because the Israelites, the Israelite king had married this woman named Jezebel, and she brought Baal worship into the Israelite society and attempted to obliterate the worship of Yahweh as an enterprise and really reduce the ranks of the Yahweh supporters to almost nothing to Elijah, you might even say.

Now Elijah defeated the priests of Baal in a head-to-head competition, which I suppose was the archaic equivalent of a debate. But then he had to run off because Jezebel got wind of his victory and was going to kill him.

He spent some time in a cave. When he was in the cave, he experienced an earthquake, and he experienced a thunderstorm and some of these magnificent displays of nature. But he had this intuition that whatever the ultimate voice was was a voice that spoke within and not externally.

So it's Elijah—it’s in the book of Elijah that you first find the phrase, “The still small voice within,” essentially. And so what happened was there was a transformation of the notion of the highest deity to something that was external and a manifestation of the grandiosity of nature to this idea that no, it was something akin to the voice of conscience within.

The reason I'm bringing that up is because it's a radical psychological transformation, and a subtle one. But I also think—I want to know what you think—you said that there are two things that give you abiding that you have. Abiding faith in, and one is the power of the word, right?

You're a professor, you're a writer, you're a communicator, you're a podcaster, and you are very careful in your selection of words.

And not only so, not only do you have faith in the word, let's say, but you also believe that your highest moral obligation is to be guided by your conscience in the formulation of your words.

Okay, so now you could think of that—and this is where I want to know your opinion—as far as I can tell, one of the meme-like qualities of the biblical corpus is the increasingly sophisticated insistence as the stories unfold that the highest animating principle is to be understood not as a manifestation of the awe-inspiring power of nature but in terms of something that is relational that's associated with the conscience and that's tied to something like adherence to this spoken and communicated truth.

And that's become a very powerful meme in the West, right? The dominant meme, you might say. And so I'm wondering what you think about that.

Like especially given your admission, let's say, that the principle that does animate your behavior, for better or worse, is this fidelity to the accuracy of the word, right? So I guess— I mean, there are several ways that I can answer this. One of which is that I don't need to situate my pathological and obsessive defense of the truth in a supernatural cause.

Having said that, though, or in a supernatural, you know, reason; right? Having said that, though, as an evolutionist, I'm fully aware that the default value of human beings is precisely to be moved by religion. In other words, being a non-believer is certainly not the default value of humans.

That often surprises people because they often think that given that I'm not particularly religious, that somehow I have a built-in animus towards religion. To the contrary, I fully understand the functional value of religion.

But I can concede that point without necessarily believing that, you know, the specific supernatural elements are true. I can see that there is great value in the moral stories and the parables and the allegories that are taught.

And so a lot of the stuff that you might talk about or a lot of the stuff that, you know, the Jungian archetypes, I could completely situate them within an evolutionary paradigm and fully agree with them.

I think the main place where I might disagree with some of the more religiously oriented folks is that I stop at simply recognizing their functional value without necessarily believing in their veracity.

The action—I don't know, this is a good point—a good point to make. So, okay, so the first—I'm going to make some—I’m going to offer some propositions. The first is, is that you're strangely—and I don’t just mean you, I mean human beings in general, but also particularly you—you're strangely beholden to your conscience, and in some ways it operates as an autonomous entity.

Right? Because you know this—your conscience will call you on things, and you could say, “Well, my conscience is me,” but then I would say, “Well, if it's you, why the hell don't you get the pesky little thing under control and bend it to your will instead of subordinating yourself to its claims?”

And then I would say it’s claims because I think that you can make a credible case that the voice of conscience within you is very much analogous to the voice of conscience within me, let's say, but also within all people.

And that in that manner, the person who does determine to abide by their conscience is conducting themselves in accordance with something that, if not supernatural, at least has to be given status as something transcendent.

Like let me decorate that a little bit. You know perfectly well that when you're thinking something through, right, when you have a pressing question on your mind that you'll get flashes of intuition.

And I don't really think there's a hell of a lot of difference between intuition and revelation, technically speaking, right? And it isn't obvious at all where those flashes of intuition come from.

I think that if you're a genuine scientist, the voice of revelation within isn't really distinguishable from that willingness to pursue the truth and the willingness to attend to the voice of conscience, right? Because you're supposed to be pursuing the truth as a scientist.

And you lay yourself open to—you know, so can we separate transcendent and supernatural in some manner that's productive? I'm not sure that I'm able to answer the precise question, but what I can say is that our conscience, our morality is exactly what you would predict of a social species in a very material way.

And I'm willing—and as a matter of fact, many ethologists and evolutionary scientists have already made these arguments—that there is a very compelling scientific argument that can explain the evolution of morality without situating it within some transcendent, you know, religious framework.

Because many of the religious folks will say, “Yeah, sure, evolution can explain why we have opposable thumbs; evolution can explain why there are sex differences, but it can never explain morality.”

Of course, many evolutionists, some of whom are incredibly accomplished thinkers, have argued that there's nothing uniquely magical about the construct of morality. When you have a social species, the most dangerous thing that, you know, humans have faced in our evolutionary history, other than predators, is our conspecifics—other people.

We’re walking through the savannah and here comes another group of folks that are unrelated to us. We don’t know if they are friend or foe. And that’s why one of the reasons we've evolved coalitional thinking: blue team versus red team.

And so it makes perfect sense when you have a non-solitary animal to evolve things like a conscience, things like the emotions of anger, retribution, vengefulness. Right?

So all of these mechanisms, whether it be morality or our emotional system, can be completely couched in an evolutionary adaptive framework.

But again, that said, I think that it makes perfect sense for an animal like us, who has developed this big prefrontal cortex and who is regrettably aware of their mortality, to be uniquely intoxicated by religion.

Because religion offers us the ultimate pill for the most fundamental problem which we face, which is the recognition of our mortality.

If I have high cholesterol level and if we agree that, let's say, having bad cholesterol is bad for you—although of course that's debated—then I can go see my physician. He can give me a statin, and my cholesterol scores will drop.

Unfortunately, there is no pill for my mortality fear other than the religious solution. Right? And so to me, as a, you know, as a functional analysis, it makes perfect sense for us to be susceptible to believe in religion.

Now, I don't think—and here I'm going to link up to—I saw that you've recently been having some spicy exchanges with Richard Dawkins. I don't think I'm nearly as—I don't exhibit as much animus towards religion as does, let's say, Richard Dawkins.

Again, I think because I'm coming from the perspective that there are very clear evolutionary reasons why we evolved to be believers. And so oftentimes this assuages some of the anger that the religious folks might feel towards me because they actually see that I don’t have a built-in hatred towards religion.

As a matter of fact, just as a side note, it might interest you to know that there are two fundamental ways by which evolutionists can study religion. There is what's called the adaptation approach and the exactation approach.

So maybe I could take a minute or two to address them. The adaptation approach is why would religion have ever evolved? What survival or mating advantage would be conferred on those who are religious as opposed to those who are not religious?

And the top argument that's been proposed is one by David Sloan Wilson, the evolutionary biologist, who actually wrote a great book called Darwin's Cathedral, which if you haven't read it, Jordan, I think you'd enjoy it. He uses a group selectionist argument to argue that religious groups, as compared to non-religious groups, are going to have a greater likelihood of surviving because religion affords you greater cohesion, communality, cooperation.

And so that's—that would be one approach to situating an evolutionary understanding of religion. The exactation approach—many of your viewers may not be familiar with that term—an exactation is a byproduct of evolution.

So for example, if I say, “Why do humans have the color of the skeleton that they have?” that itself was not adaptive. It's a byproduct of evolution.

Now, the top guy for the exactation approach of religion is an evolutionary anthropologist named Pascal Boyer, who basically argued that religion piggybacks on neural systems that evolved for other reasons, and hence it's a byproduct.

So even if you are someone who is not very religious, but you are grounded in evolutionary theory, you can fully understand why it is so easy for most people to be religious rather than not religious, if that makes any sense.

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Okay, okay, so let me address a number of the things that you just said. The first comment I might want to make—and you tell me what you think about this, Gad—you know, I don’t think that it’s unreasonable from a narrative perspective to frame you as someone possessed by the same spirit that made itself manifest in the prophetic tradition.

Now, this makes sense to me partly because of your cultural heritage and the way that you approach ideas. But I also think that it's true in a more than merely passing sense. You know, because one of the things that you see that constantly characterizes the prophetic tradition in the Old Testament is that people like Jonah—so I just took the story of Jonah apart for this book that I'm writing.

And so it’s very cool, Gad. So this is the proposition in Jonah, right? Jonah is just minding his own business and God makes himself manifest to Jonah in the form of a call from conscience. That’s the simplest way to think about it. And he tells Jonah, “There’s this city up near you called Nineveh which is full of foreigners that hate you and that are your enemy, but they’re deviating from the desirable path and I’m thinking about wiping them out.

But, um, I think you should go up there and say what you have to say on the off chance they’ll listen so that they tap themselves back onto the straight and narrow and don’t reap divine retribution.”

And Jonah, being a very sensible person, says, “Yeah, I don’t think I’ll do that. It doesn’t sound like a great deal for me. It’s me who’s a foreign Jew against 120,000 of my enemies. Why the hell do you think they’ll listen to me? I don’t really care if they’re saved anyways. How about I just go in the other direction?”

So he rejects this call to speak. Right? Now he’s on a boat getting the hell out of there, eh? And the sailors—the storms come and the waves rise, and now the ship is in danger. That’s the first hint in the story that by refusing to speak when you’re called upon, you put the ship itself in danger.

That could be the ship of state, right? Now, the sailors are kind of superstitious and they think someone on this boat is on outs with God or with their gods. We better find out who it is so we can rectify this situation. So they go interrogate all the passengers, and Jonah admits that he has defied a direct order.

And so he basically tells the sailors, who were somewhat loath to do this, by the way, to throw him into the ocean where he’s going to drown. You might think, “Okay, so what does that mean?”

Well, this is what it means to me, is that if you’re called upon to speak and you stay silent, then you're going to put the ship in danger and at par, at the great peril of your own life. So now they throw him in the ocean. You think, “Well, that’s about the worst thing that could happen to poor Jonah because now he’s way the hell away from shore and he’s going to drown.”

That isn’t the worst thing that happens because the next thing that happens is that some horrible demon from the abyss itself rises up from the bottom of reality and takes him in its jaws and pulls him down to hell.

And I say hell because that’s how Jonah describes it, and it’s also a type of the harrowing of hell that is laid out in the gospel stories much, much later. And so this is my sense of what that story means, you know?

And I think this is something particularly relevant to the experience of the Jews, let's say in the 20th century, is that if you’re called upon to speak and you reject that call, not only do you put the ship in danger and your life, but then you’re going to be, like, what would you say? The jaws of hell itself are going to close around you and take you to the bottom, the very, very bottom of things.

And I do think that’s what happens to states when the people in the states don’t speak. So Jonah is down in hell for three days in the belly of this whale, this dragon whale, and you know, he has a chance to think and he decides, “Well, you know, maybe I should have said something when I was called upon to say something.”

And he repents, and the whale spits him out, and then he goes to Nineveh and he talks to all the foreigners who are his enemies, and they actually listen, and God decides not to destroy them.

Now, you know that in that story, the spirit of your ancestors and mine is portrayed as the voice that calls from within to stand up and say what you have to say even to those who would want to destroy you, even to those who have habitually been your enemies.

And that if you don’t do that, well, you bring the forces of death and hell against yourself and everyone else. And so, well, that’s not exactly a, what would you say, a testament to the existence of the supernatural, but it is definitely the testament to the existence of something transcendent that you have a moral obligation to.

And so, well, see, that’s not exactly a, what would you say, a testament to the existence of the supernatural. But it is definitely the testament to the existence of something transcendent that you have a moral obligation to.

And so, well, I buy all of that, and that’s precisely why when people ask me, “Well, how can you be so attached to your religious identity and not be much of a believer?” It’s precisely for the reasons that you said, which is I come from a very long line of thinkers.

There are cultural values that come with being Jewish that I'm very proud of. I don't know if you saw, just on a slightly note of levity, have you seen, Jordan, the Dutch AI group that put together their best rendition of what Jesus would look like? Have you seen that image?

No, I haven't. Where would I find that?

Well that image, it turns out, looks hauntingly like the guy that you're speaking to right now, right? And I mean, it’s literally shocking.

So if you take that image that the AI Dutch researchers came up with and you take it—now I'm not engaging in a delusion of grandeur, saying that I'm Jesus, but what I'm saying is that there is a lot to be proud of in the heritage that I come from.

I'll tell you a quick story, personal story, that speaks to that kind of Jewish ethos that I discussed in my last book, The Parasitic Mind. When I was talking about, you know, the differences between values of one culture and another—that, which by the way, speaks to your point about personal responsibility and so on—so after I had finished, I did a undergrad in mathematics and computer science and then an MBA at McGill.

I’m saying this not to flaunt my CV because it's relevant to the story. And so after I had finished my MBA, my goal was always to continue, you know, do a PhD in behavioral science and so on.

But one of the places I've been accepted to from my PhD was the University of California, Irvine. And my brother at the time lived in Southern California. He was a very, very successful entrepreneur, and he was trying to convince me, having just finished my MBA, to take a couple of years, put on the proverbial suit, work with him a few years, get some experience, and then of course go back and pursue my PhD.

But I was really not interested in that. I always knew that I wanted to be an academic. Well, when I returned home to Montreal and my mother had caught wind of the fact that my brother was trying to convince me to stop my studies for a few years, she takes me to a side room.

She says, “Come, I want to speak to you.” It seemed like an ominous thing, that she wants to talk to me. I said, “What’s up, Mom?”

She said, “Well, I hear that you're thinking of not continuing with your PhD.” And before I could even assuage her fears, she said, “Well, do you want people to know you as somebody who dropped out of school?”

So for her, for the standards of excellence of my family, having a degree in mathematics and computer science and an MBA and then not going on and doing your PhD would bring shame to the family. It would be a manifestation of having dropped out of school.

Now, of course, I didn't do my PhD to please my mother, but it gives you that—a sense of the importance that, you know, learning has.

It’s really a pathological desire for that is instilled within you from the youngest of age to be a learned person.

And so I can be incredibly proud of that heritage because it is a real material heritage. It's a real sociological reality, cultural reality to be from that long tradition of Jews, again, without necessarily buying into every single element of the supernatural.

So for example, even if I were to concede that God exists, I can't imagine that the ruler of the universe cares about whether you light the Shabbat candles at 8:21 or 8:22. But I can promise you that if you go to some of the Hasidic neighborhoods in Montreal where they are very Orthodox Jews, they would argue that, no, no, God absolutely cares at the exact minute when you—.

So in that sense, I could be very, very much tied to my religious heritage without necessarily caring about some of the ritualistic elements.

Okay, so I want to tell you about a study that someone brought to my attention about six months ago. It's not a very old study, and it’s a really remarkable study.

And in fact, I think it's revolutionary. So it turns out, you know, that when DNA molecules are damaged, they can repair themselves, and they generally do that with spectacular accuracy, but the accuracy varies.

Okay, so imagine this: imagine that there’s a hierarchy of genes and that some genes are so fundamental that if they vary even a trifle, the organism that they produce will be non-viable.

And then imagine that there are other genes, like the ones that code for eye color, where there can be tremendous variability with virtually no consequence.

Now, there might be minor consequences, like maybe blue-eyed blondes have a sexual advantage over those who aren't blue-eyed and blonde, you know, because of attractiveness. But having brown eyes or darker hair, doesn't make you unviable, right?

Now it turns out that there is a relationship between the accuracy of DNA repair mechanisms and the canonical status of the genes that are being repaired. The more fundamental the gene is to the morphology upon which existence itself depends, the closer to 100 percent accuracy the repair mechanisms manage.

Okay, so that means there is a core set of genetic axioms, you might say, that don't vary with mutation. And there's a peripheral set that are allowed to vary substantively with no disadvantage and maybe some advantage because of the variability.

And I think also that we regard the canonical axioms as deep and profound and we’re willing to abide or to allow and even to enjoy variation on the fringe.

And so I'm wondering, tell me what you think about this with regard to what you claimed is that, you know you said that you're unwilling to adhere to the more picayune distinctions that are made on the religious front.

And some of those might involve, right, the propositions of the existence of something supernatural and inexplicable in its fundamental nature, but, but it also seems to me that for you, that’s allied with an unshakable faith in certain axiomatic presuppositions, some of which we already discussed, which is like, is it incorrect for me to say that your attachment to the communicated truth is most appropriately conceptualized as adherence to an unshakable axiomatic faith?

Like I don't understand how it isn’t so. If you don't think it is, then help me understand.

Right.

So for example, I—now let’s bring in, say, my math background in mathematics. There are axiomatic truths, right? So take, for example, the transitivity axiom.

If I prefer car A to car B and I prefer car B to car C, it must be that I prefer car A to car C. If I don’t, then that’s called an intransitive preference and therefore I’m committing a violation of rationality.

Those are actually dramatic mathematical truths, but they are also empirical truths, right? If I throw a person off a 100-story building, 100 times out of 100, I'll know exactly what will happen because there’s a thing called gravity.

So in other words, I can pursue truth without—and as you said—universal truth that is invariant to time or place.

And those truths, while we may couch them in a supernatural cause, I can completely adhere to them without them being co-opted with a supernatural element.

So for example, in The Parasitic Mind, I hope we'll have a chance to talk about my forthcoming book soon. We can actually talk about this in the context of religiosity and happiness, if you'd like.

That could be a good segue.

But in my last book, in chapter seven, I talk about how to seek truth, and I offer the epistemological approach called nomological networks of cumulative evidence.

And I think we have discussed that previously, right? So the idea there is that if I want to demonstrate to you, Jordan, that there is a unshakable universal truth, what would be the data that I would need to amass and present to you for you to start coming around to me?

And the way that you do that if you're building a normal logical network of cumulative evidence is you come up with data that is across cultures, across eras, across species, across methodologies, across theoretical frameworks.

And if all of these triangulate to demonstrate that your phenomenon is universal, then you're well on your way to having built a rather unassailable argument.

So notice that I've been able to do that without ever requiring some higher supernatural authority to contextualize that truth.

And so again, I'm very, very open to the idea that people need religion. I think religion, in most cases, serves more benefits than costs.

Although I wouldn't have left Lebanon were it not for religion, right? Because it is specifically religious hatred that caused me to leave Lebanon, right?

It wasn't feasible in the mid-70s when the Lebanese Civil War broke out to be Jewish in Lebanon because Lebanon is exactly what happens to a society that is completely organized along identity politics lines.

So it's particularly dismaying that the progressives in the West wish to model that from which I escaped in Lebanon. But in that case, the reason why we had to leave Lebanon is exactly due to religion because somehow our religious heritage was no longer possible to hold and practice in Lebanon, and we left.

So I have an ambivalent relationship with religion.

Alright, so let me ask you, okay. Let me ask you a couple of things about that. So the first question might be, and this is something that we both grappled with as academics. You know the universities have become very corrupt.

Now you could argue on the one hand that that corruption is just an extension of the intellectual enterprise as such, or you could argue that the corruption that’s made itself manifest in the universities is a parasitical excess on the core enterprise, the intellectual enterprise of the universities.

Okay, now on the religious front, the same issue emerges, right? The question is, is that when you—you already pointed out earlier that the parasitical predator types can utilize strategies of empathy, let's say, to amplify their attractiveness on the sexual front, right? So they can co-opt something that emerged for other reasons and bend it to their own purposes.

So is it really—so what do you think is more reasonable? Like do you think that on the religious front, that the danger you're exposed to in Lebanon is merely a consequence of the fact that the religious enterprise itself is flawed and will produce this multiplicity of competing and often murderously competing claims?

Or is it reasonable to assume that something analogous happens on the religious front and that the fundamental conflict is a consequence of the predatory parasites twisting fundamentally axiomatic and necessary religious claims to their own devices and sewing discord as a consequence?

Well, I can't be so charitable as to give religion a free pass because many of the religious narratives, certainly in the Abrahamic faiths, are precisely us versus them. Right?

So there is no way to misinterpret some of the teachings in many of these books, whether it be Deuteronomy, so the Old Testament, whether it be in certain Christian doctrines and certainly when it comes to Islamic doctrines, it is very difficult to quote misread or mistranslate.

And it’s certainly difficult to tell someone whose Arabic is their mother tongue that I’m misunderstanding what is being communicated, let’s say, in some elements of, you know, the Islamic faith.

My point here is not to uniquely bash Islam because, as I said, all Abrahamic faiths have a us versus them mentality.

So I think what happened in Lebanon is not some human co-opting of otherwise benign and loving religious narratives.

Let’s put it another way. And again, this, you may not like because I'm boring from Richard Dawkins, and I know that you've been having a little tiff with him.

Richard Dawkins famously said that the difference between an atheist and a very staunch believer is really very minimal. If we assume that there are 10,000 gods, the very religious person is an atheist on 999 gods but is very fervently a believer in one, whereas the non-believer atheist is a non-believer on 10,000.

So there’s only a difference of 999 to 10,000. That strikes me as a pretty compelling argument.

Let me put it another way. In The Consuming Instinct, which was one of my earlier books in 2011, I had a whole chapter where I was talking about the thought experiment of what might happen if an extraterrestrial being came to Earth shopping for the one good faith.

And what I did there, I mean, some people might think that I was, you know, being facetious, but actually I was being deadly serious. I said, take every single issue that you could think of from the most consequential to the most banal, and I can find you two religions that purport the exact opposite prescription.

Does God want you to eat prosciutto? Yes, if you're Catholic. Absolutely not if you're Jewish or Muslim. What’s God's view on homosexuality? I can give you some that are totally okay with it, some that are not. I mean literally, I give a million.

So how can you then argue for a specific religion when on any given point I can find two religions that are perfectly contradictory?

Okay, okay, okay, so I think I have an answer to that that you might find at least interesting. So I forgot that in your book, you laid out the rationale for normal logical networks.

Let me just develop that a little bit, and so this is from your new book, okay?

So the idea of a normal logical network is akin to the idea of sensory quintangulation, let’s call it that.

And so everyone knows that we have five senses. Now, each of those senses uses a qualitatively different strategy of measurement, right? Somewhat independently evolved.

And so our proposition as embodied biological organisms is that if something manifests itself simultaneously in the domains covered by the five dimensions of our senses, it’s real.

Right? So what’s real? You can taste it, you can touch it, you can see it, you can hear it, you can feel it. If you can do all five of those, then there’s a pretty damn good chance that it’s real.

Now, actually that turned out not to be real enough, and that’s partly why the development of language had some adaptive utility.

Because you and I can communicate; I can use your five senses transmitted to me through the linguistic domain to calibrate my five senses, and then we can do that en masse.

And to a large degree, that’s what science does. Alright? So you take multiple independent sources of measurement, and if they converge, then you assume that there’s something there. Fair enough so far?

Yeah, I’m with you.

Okay, I would say, from what I've been able to understand, that that's what the Jungians did in their archetypal analysis.

Now, you can debate, as the postmodernists have, about whether or not what they found was spurious, but in my Maps of Meaning book, what I tried to do was to take what the Jungians had discovered by constructing a normal logical network of cross-cultural mythological analysis, and I tried to beat that against the measurement techniques of behavioral psychology and neuroscience.

And I found, at least—I claimed in that book—to have found a substantive, non-trivial, and surprising degree of overlap.

So let me—and I think this is relevant to your book on happiness now— you tell me what you think about this because happiness doesn't just mean transitory hedonic joy, and you certainly don't think that because that isn't how you live.

So the core element of the hero archetype is the injunction that you should advance courageously in the face of threat if said threat stands as an obstacle between you and a valid goal. Yes?

Right, right.

And so that's different than rabbit mythology, which would be when you see a wolf freeze. The human myth is no, no, when you encounter a threat, you explore it until you master it.

Okay, and as far as I can tell, all the variants of hero mythology are basically that, right? It’s the dragon fight, is that you find the terrible predator, and that’s what a dragon is—it’s an emblem of the predator.

And you encounter that voluntarily, and as a consequence, you get the virgin, and that’s on the sexual front, and you get the gold, and that’s on the material front.

And you know, the Jungians, to their credit—and I really do think to their credit pointed out that that underlying narrative structure makes itself manifest cross-culturally in a multitude of forms.

Now, unfortunately, to understand that, you have to throw yourself pretty deeply into that body of research, right?

And it's pretty arcane, and Young thoughts symbolically, and so he’s not a particularly—he’s not a thinker who’s particularly amenable to people whose primary mode of thought is rational rather than pattern recognition.

Right, right, right.

So, but I do think the Jungians used a normal logical network, and I think that the core religious doctrine that they converged on was something like the universal validity of the hero myth and the redemptive quality of that courageous advancement in the face of the unknown.

And so that’s a place where you could—because your question was, “Well, there are all these competing religious claims,” right?

And I’d say, “Well, there’s no way I can offer a contrary perspective to that viewpoint, given the multitude of contradictory religious claims.”

But then I would say there’s a hierarchy of claims, and some of them are more central, and there is a convergence at the level of what claims are most central.

And I think the convergence is analogous to your proposition that you should abide by the truth in your communicative exploration and your communicative enterprise, and I think that’s associated with the kind of happiness that you're writing about in your new book, right? A kind of deep happiness.

Right, I mean I agree largely with all that you’ve said about the universal myths that the Jungians talk about and again, there have been many studies from an evolutionary perspective that look—for example, if I want to study female sexuality, the best way to study it is to do an archetypal analysis of the male hero in romance novels.

And it turns out that the male hero in romance novels is the exact same guy in every single romance novel that has ever been written.

I mean to the point that you would think it’s been plagiarized. He is tall to my detriment since I'm not tall. He wrestles alligators on his six-pack and wins.

He is a surgeon and a prince. He’s reckless in his behavior, but he can only be tamed by the love of one woman.

Right? And so I just described everything—Beauty and the Beast.

So these archetypal narratives are universal precisely because they are an indelible part of human nature, and that manifestation exists independently of whether you believe in the supernatural origin of those stories or not.

But if I can just quickly segue into my forthcoming book. So I do talk about religiosity and happiness in my forthcoming book, and you and many other folks who are pro-religion will be happy to know that the research shows—and I know that you probably know this—that there is a moderate correlation between religiosity and happiness.

Meaning that on average, people who are more religious tend to manifest higher happiness scores.

But we can discuss why that is. Now, I argue that that doesn’t mean though that if you’re not religious, you can’t find your way to mount happiness.

And I can couch it in a divine language. So you and I are right now engaging in an intoxicating conversation that is truly divine, right?

Friendships are divine, as Aristotle said. And as I described in my book, the love that you have for your children and your wife is a form of divine love.

Having purpose and meaning in your chosen profession. I talk about that in the book.

I basically argue that the two most important decisions that either make you happy or incredibly miserable are choosing the right spouse and choosing the right profession.

If you make those two choices correctly, you’re well on your way to being happy. That was Freud's observation, right?

Work and love. That was his, and he said it a hundred years ago, and I’ve said it today precisely because they are universal truths to our earlier point.

You know, one of the things that I did in this book is really delve into the, you know, the ancient Greeks, you know, Epictetus and Seneca and Marcus Aurelius.

And here I want to point to a quip that my fellow Lebanese friend, Nassim Taleb, once told me, which turns out to be hauntingly true. He once was teasing me, and he said, “I don’t know what you study in psychology, Gad, because everything that there is to know about human nature, the ancient Greeks have already said.”

And now he was quipping me; he was teasing me. But as I started delving into that literature, I said, “I think Nassim might be right.”

Because I would get some—I would get some insight, for example, about the link between cognitive behavioral therapy and some other, you know, mechanism of happiness and so on.

And then I find out that Epictetus had made that exact point over 2,000 years ago. So I think that there are these universal truths that exist, whether it is in how we seek happiness or in any other domain of human import, that are universal precisely because they are an indelible part of our human nature.

I mean that’s why I love evolutionary psychology so much because it is very difficult to have powerful explanations of human behavior devoid of an evolutionary understanding of our species.

And so it always amazes me that people exhibit an animus to evolutionary psychology: what else could it be like? Where did your brain come from if you take it outside of the purview of evolutionary theory?

So one of the things that I talk about in the book that speaks to your very kind introduction at the start where you talked about me having a sense of humor is I have a whole chapter on—I call it life as a playground.

And I basically argue that even the most serious pursuits, for example the pursuit of science, is a form of play. It’s the highest form of play, right? Because in the same way that you try to solve a 1,000-piece puzzle by putting the pieces together, well what is science?

It’s drawing links between a whole bunch of variables that heretofore you didn’t know were linked together. So the whole endeavor of science is a form of or geostic higher-order play, right?

And so if it's done right, if it's done right—and so that's, by the way, one of the reasons why I have the sense of humor that I have is because I think it’s a very, very powerful way to communicate very serious things.

Some people will say, “Oh, but aren’t you abasing yourself as a serious professor by donning that pink wig or by self-flagellating because you’re mocking that you’re friends with Jordan Peterson?”

No, because mockery is actually a astronomically powerful way to demonstrate certain forms of lunacy, right? That’s why dictators will usually try to eradicate the satirists first. They don’t go after the guys with the big muscles; they go after the guys with the sharp tongues and the stinging pen because those are the ones that are the biggest threat.

And so you might be interested in this. So I spent a lot of time studying Jacques Vancap's work on play, and he detailed out the neurophysiology of play to a greater degree than any other scientist that I know.

And Vancap conceptualized play in really, I would say, is the highest as the state of highest possible neural integration because play only emerges when all competing motivating and emotional systems have been satiated.

And put aside, so if you’re able to enter into a state of play, that’s actually an indication that you’ve mastered the domain in which you’re exploring so thoroughly that no other competing motivations whatsoever can emerge to disrupt that, you know?

And laughter eradicates muscular tension. When I used to work out with my friends, we used to make jokes