The Professor Bringing Sanity Back To Elite Campuses | KMP Ep.55

21:38Katie Miller:But clearly it's a problem though if you see the transgenderness in America spikes over the last five years and now it's suddenly coming down. That's a result of societal influence. Why does Cynthia Nixon have like four transgender children? It's societal influence, right? Why is it that Hollywood actors and actresses have largely more transgender children than the rest of society? It's societal influence. So if you want to say go maximally to protect your children, it's like stay away from the humanities. Stay with whom you are. I feel bad saying that because I know a lot of people who are scholars in the humanities who don't fit the mold of the woke person.

22:12But you're right. It's much easier to be parasitized in the humanities than it is in engineering.

22:18Katie Miller:What's the most dangerous idea that has infected America? That Islam is peace and it's Islamism that's the problem. It's radical. You mentioned earlier radical Islam. I was too polite to correct you. There is no such thing as radical Islam. There's only Islam The canons of Islam Are codified in three books The Quran The Hadith The Sayings and the Deeds of Muhammad And then the Sirah The Biography of Muhammad Individual Muslims Could be Cafeteria Muslims Meaning that they just pick and choose The parts that they wish to adhere to And the parts that they don't wish to adhere to But Islam itself doesn't change Erdogan explained this to us He said Islam is Islam There is no moderate, there is no extreme Islam.

23:03The problem with the West is that it recognizes that it feels gauche to criticize a religion. Therefore, by putting all sorts of qualifiers and isms, then it feels a bit more appropriate to criticize that which is not Islam. No, it's Islam. So, maybe I could tell you a bit about my personal history, at least my reality with living in Islamic realities. So we escaped Lebanon because of our Jewish heritage. My wife's family also escaped Lebanon. My parents were kidnapped by Fatah. My grandparents escaped from Syria because of the same realities earlier. My brother-in-law's family escaped Alexandria, Egypt.

23:47They're Egyptian Jews. The ancestors of my parents, my wife, escaped the Armenian genocide. So within a 100-year period, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and now we escape Montreal for one fundamental reason, because there was an ideology that became a bit less tolerant of our existence. And so millions and millions of Muslims, like any other grouping, are perfectly lovely and peaceful. Islam contains certain tenets that are not fully congruent with Western values. And so you have to then make those kind of immigration decisions accordingly.

24:27Katie Miller:Why do you think more kids than ever in the United States and of the Western world have identified as transgender and non-binary than previous decades? So there is... What happened that suddenly caused a rise? So there is a paper that was published, I think, in 2018 by a pediatrician where she argued that transgenderism is akin to a social contagion. And then I don't know if you remember, I think she was an instructor or something at Brown University. And at first they hailed the paper. Then there was a big blowback. Are you calling transgenderism a disease that spreads? I remember this. Remember this?

25:03And then they kind of sort of retracted it. It is a fad, right? So many people wish to stroke their luxuriant hair in the mirror of moral preening. Look how beautiful I am. Look how good person I am. And so transgenderism becomes a pathway to demonstrate how enlightened and accepting and compassionate and kind and empathetic I am. And when I am a Hollywood superstar, as you said earlier, I mean the stats on having one transgender child are abysmally low. having two, three, or four is non-existent. And so it just becomes a pathway for me to demonstrate that I'm deserving of empathy. And by the way, there's a term here that you may have heard.

25:47Munchausen syndrome. I had written a paper in a medical journal in 2010 on this, which I then picked up in Parasitic Mind. It's a form of Munchausen, right? Because what's happening with Munchausen? So Munchausen syndrome is when I feign an illness to garner sympathy and empathy. Munchausen syndrome by proxy is when I cause injury to someone that I care for, my biological child, my pet, my elderly parents, because I'm going to get the empathy and sympathy by proxy through harming them. Look, I've got an ailing child. And so the transgender parent that you see with the Hollywood stars, they're engaging in Munchausen by proxy.

26:29Katie Miller:So when I was growing up and in middle school and high school, a lot of it was anorexia, bulimia. That was the trend, right? And now those rates have driven, if you actually look at the stats, those rates have gone down as transgenderism has gone up. And then transgenderism is now going down. What pops up next? I don't know. If I knew that, I would be making a lot of money in the stock market and I would be getting the Nobel Prize. So I can't pretend to know that. But what is true is that both of those manifestations only happen in cultures of plentitude, meaning they don't happen in cultures where you have endemic scarcity.

27:06So, for example, anorexia nervosa never manifests itself in Ethiopia, where you have an ecological reality, where you have endemic famine. So it is really psychiatric disorders of cultures of non-scarcity where you find these kinds of thought processes.

27:25Katie Miller:Diseases of civilization. Exactly. There's a crisis among young men. Fewer are going to college. Many aren't dating or marrying, and some are withdrawing from the workforce. What happened to our men? You know, one of the most frequent emails that I receive from women is in line with what you just asked, which is, I got dressed up. I went to a place to meet. No man approaches me. Professor Saad, help me. Well, if you teach men that anything that they do is pathological, they're toxic men. if they compliment you on how you look, it's a form of compliment rape, then it's not difficult to imagine that most men are going to become reticent to engage in the natural dynamics that men and women expect of each other.

28:09And so I see this frustration very often from women who write to me and say, where have all the good men gone? Well, because they've bought into all of the radical feminism.

28:20Katie Miller:Do you think that's how young men are being raised or do you think it's the societal influence? Maybe a bit of both, but certainly on campuses, when you go to campus, you really are receiving the message that men are not welcomed here, right? I mean, even when I was now at Ole Miss, I don't know what the numbers are, but you see a lot more women than you see men. They've decided to check out, and that's not a good thing for a sexually reproducing species. Do you think gentle parenting is a good thing? Like all things, it's about finding that sweet spot. There has to be a link between your behavior and consequences, right?

29:01If you forgive everything, you're being too soft. If it's very erratic, if the child doesn't know when you're going to be angry at them or when you're going to stroke them and compliment them, that's also not a good environment. Just be consistent, be tough, tell them to do the right thing and things will work out.

29:18Katie Miller:So who's a strict parent, you or your wife? Well, she's here. So if I were to otherwise lie to you, she's going to correct me later. I mean, I think on a day-to-day basis, she does more of the discipline. When I do the discipline, it's one nuclear bomb and then I become the teddy bear for the next month. Sometimes the most loving thing a parent can say is no. have we started confusing protecting children from discomfort with good parenting? I suppose so, right? I mean, and that manifests itself in many ways, right? The fact that there can't be any losers in athletic competitions, we're all winners, we all get a trophy, is a manifestation of being too soft.

30:00Seneca said, Seneca, the Roman Stoic, said that the strongest trees are those, meaning that they have the biggest trunks and the deepest fixed roots, are the ones that have experienced a lot of wind stressors, meaning that they are anti-fragile. So parenting has to be anti-fragile. You have to impose some stressors on your children, otherwise they'll be too soft.

30:27Katie Miller:What part of human behavior do you still not understand? Well, I think I understand it, but I can't but be surprised by it. It's the following. So I was once on a British show hosted by a British psychiatrist. And the last question he asked me, this was maybe two years ago, he said, of all your years as a behavioral scientist, what's the number one phenomenon that most surprised you about the human condition? And I had to sort of think on my feet. I said, the inability of people to change their opinions once it is anchored. I can give you a tsunami of evidence and you're going to go la, la, la.

31:04Now, I understand the reasons for that, but it doesn't cease to surprise me because I'd like to think that people are rational and are open to hearing opinions. But for some people, it's absolutely impossible to do so.

31:17Katie Miller:Do you think more people, though, have been red-pilled than they were before, that they're waking up to what is the devastation of the West? I think so, but maybe not quickly enough. So I'll give you an example. My first entree into this is I read The Death of the West, and I was like, you see what's happening, but actually have it articulated for you. It's a different conversation. Yes. Which is why I think your books are so important, because so many people can experience what is the subjugation of the white male, the rise of trans judges in classrooms, the pushing of woke ideology on our children, and still not have what is happening at the global scale.

31:58Katie Miller:you can see X and write it off as crazy people on the right. When you see data pointed to you and saying, these are the actual borne out facts, sometimes I think those are things that are more eye-opening than others. Yeah, so I agree. The problem is that many people, it takes them a very long time to being red pill. I'll give you a great personal anecdote. In 2010, a Jewish woman whom I knew from my university in Montreal wrote to me and said, hey, can you tell me what are your thoughts about what Islam thinks of the Jews? So I didn't, I just sent her a montage of imams from around the world and what they were saying about Jews.

32:42I didn't editorialize, I didn't add anything. She writes back to me very angrily and says, well, in you sharing that clip, you're no different in your extremism than they are. So then I got frustrated. Our friendship didn't go very far after that. 14 years later, in 2024, she sends me an email and says, I was going back through some of my past things, and I'm horrified today at how I responded to you back then. So she came around, but it took her 14 years. The monster is coming at you much quicker than 14 years for you to catch up.

33:21Katie Miller:The world watched as Lindsay Clancy recently went through a trial. I find it very interesting as the parallels as I think her trial started when I was two months postpartum. I'm now three months postpartum. And you're hearing about what it is to be a sleepless new mother, the stresses of multiple children, the husband going back to work, though she had a lot more help. She had, you know, her husband was home for three months or four months. She had a nanny. she had a lot of help as well. Why do you think so many women, specifically the ones who are chronically online, took to Lindsay's side instead of understanding and taking the empathy of three young children who are brutally murdered by the person that should have been their anchor in their safe space?

34:07So remember when I first defined suicidal empathy at the start of our conversation, I said suicidal empathy is the hyperactivation of empathy in the wrong situations towards the wrong targets and so your example is the third manifestation rather than channeling all of your empathy to the three dead children you channel it fully to the one who killed the three children and hence suicidal empathy it it really is grotesque i can't believe this i mean i don't know if you've seen many of the cases where they show the man who killed the children and then it's he's on a death penalty but when it comes to the woman it was her hormones it was so this is not unlike, for example, how we treat criminality, right?

34:47So in suicidal empathy, I talk about blank slate felons. And let me explain what that term is. The blank slate view of the human mind is the idea that we are born tabula rasa, meaning empty mind, and it's only socialization that makes us who we are. So if you're a felon of color who is born in a white supremacist society like the United States, you've already been existentially punished. So if you now go out and commit crime, is it not lacking in empathy to expect that this felon has personal agency, shouldn't you be kinder and give him another chance? And by other chance, I mean 197th other chance.

35:22And so it's the same kind of manifestation. That woman did not have personal agency. It was her hormones that did it. It was her postpartum. We have to be kind and accepting of what happened.

35:34Katie Miller:Have you looked at the data, which I'd be very curious, I have not, of the number of men who are then sentenced to higher rates of jail prison for the murder of young children versus women? I have not, but I would suspect that it'll exactly bear that reality. But I mean, everyone talks about the problems of short form media, right? How bad TikTok is and Instagram is for your brains. To me, there's a correlation there between this rise of suicidal empathy, where immediately everyone is taking Lindsay Clancy's side inside of these three very young children. Do you think it is the bastardization of the mind via these short form videos?

36:17Look, social media in general has positives and negatives. I would have never been able to have the reach that I have had it not been social media. But I also receive a thousand death threats a day. And so there are pros and cons to that particular medium. It does lead to the proliferation of very bad ideas, but then it also permits guys like me who, had I stayed in my academic lane, I would have reached 10 people through my peer-reviewed articles. By going on X, I can post something and 60 million people can view it.

36:50Katie Miller:Do you think more professors should follow what you've done in terms of your model of expanding your reach, reaching more people with critical messages? Or do you think some professors are just too stuck in their lane? I would love for all of them to be able to do what you said, but most of them are stuck in their lane for very, and I hate to say, and I don't want to sound derogatory to my colleagues, because it takes a unique set of skills to be able to communicate beyond the very sterile environment of your peer-reviewed articles, right? It's tough to go on Katie Miller's show or Joe Rogan's show.

37:24You have to have a bit of a personality. You have to have a bit of charisma. You have to be a broad thinker. Most academics know one thing really well. Ask them to step out of that lane, they become babbling buffoons.

37:38Katie Miller:So should many professors even be professors? Well, if all we expect them is to teach the very narrow specialization, then yes. My perspective is that the greatest thinkers are synthetic thinkers. They're consilient thinkers, right? My biggest, if you ask me who would I want to have dinner with throughout all of history, which figure would be Leonardo da Vinci, because he was an anatomist and a sculptor and a painter and a futurist and an engineer. And that's how I've lived my life. So when I first started my academic career, they told me only publish in consumer behavior and consumer psychology and those are your fields.

38:14I said, no, if I have something interesting to say about Munchhausen syndrome, I'm going to publish in a medical journal. But you're in a business school. Why are you publishing in a medical journal? And then when people said, don't write books, you should only publish peer-reviewed articles. I said no. Then when they said don't go on podcasts, that professors don't do that. You're above that. I said no. And so just because of the strength of my personhood, I didn't listen to the advice. I think it worked out well.

38:40Katie Miller:What do you think large universities, specifically Ivy Leagues and all the criticisms therein of Harvard, that they should do differently in hiring and retention of professors in order to create more diversity of thought. A hundred percent, I agree. I don't know if you've seen the stats, and I've cited many of those. I've seen them. Yeah. Let me contextualize for your listeners and viewers. In a scientific study, let's suppose I have an experimental group, I'm going to give them a drug, and then another group, I'm going to give them a placebo. If you get what's called a 1.2 to 1 odds ratio, that means that the experimental group had 20 % more efficacy, 1 to 1.2.

39:18Now, in academia, when you talk about the lopsidedness of Democrats versus Republicans amongst the professors, it's not 1 to 1.2. It's 1 to 130. It's crazy. So let me put it another way. The statistical significance of the effect of the lopsidedness is greater than any study that's ever been published in any field in science. So that can't be a good thing. And let me explain when it matters and when it doesn't. If I'm teaching the theory of evolution, whether I am a Republican or Democrat doesn't matter because the theory of evolution as espoused by Charles Darwin is what it is. But if I'm talking about topics like what should be the optimal immigration policy, what is the optimal fiscal policy, there are reasonable arguments to be made on both sides of the aisle.

40:10We cheat our students if 95%, 98%, 99 % are of one bent.

40:17Katie Miller:So wouldn't that be the reason to have more kids go into engineering than it is into humanities? You're pushing the engineering angle. I'm just saying, if you have a child, right, and societal influence is so strong, you look at the rates of transgenderism today. Yes. And then you say, well, how do I most protect my child, maximally protect my child from this radical thought that's pervading society without moving? Yeah. The answer is to get them out of the humanities. Yeah, so to build on your point, when I was thinking about what to do for my undergrad, I mean, there wasn't really as much woke as them back in 1984, but I picked the toughest possible undergrad, mathematics and computer science, not because I thought that I would necessarily go on to become a mathematician, but I wanted to pick that trajectory that would best train my brain.

41:05Katie Miller:What do you think my major is? Communication studies? No. No. uh give me give me three choices no because it'll it'll narrow you in just like go create like political science no history no math no engineering no okay we're gonna be here for a while yeah we are let's go uh lesbian dance theory it's agriculture agriculture look at you where are your overalls i did one summer at a farm and i said i'm out of here but you you finished your degree. Yeah, agricultural economics. Oh, you know, Cornell has a top agricultural economics school. I went to a land grant institution and I said, what else am I doing here except agriculture?

41:44Katie Miller:I took a few classes in political science and I thought this was way too easy and I jumped out. Look at you. But no, I agree with you. You're going to play a quick game of would you rather. Go. Would you rather be permanently banned from every university campus or be permanently banned from social media? Wow. I'm going to go with ban from campuses because my platform now is too big to be banned from that. Would you rather attend a DEI seminar or a three-hour HOA meeting? The second. Would you rather your children major in gender studies or TikTok content creation? TikTok content creation. Would you rather permanently eliminate cancel culture or identity politics?

42:29Identity politics.

42:30Katie Miller:Would you rather give up red meat forever or never do another podcast again? Whoa. Never do another podcast again. I'm a carnivore. What's your daily routine? Wake up, tell my wife how much I love her and how lucky I am that she's waking up next to me. Does he really do that? That's actually so nice. 26 years. Then usually head off to some cafe to work on my laptop for a few hours. Then panic about the fact that if I don't go exercise, I'm not going to reach my 12 to 15 ,000 steps for that day. So I exercise, do another hit of work. Then the kids come from school, family time, then just chill, maybe read.

43:14Katie Miller:What do you eat in a typical day? When I'm in dietary mode or when I'm in fat guy mode? Well, why did you look at my waist when I said that? Well, because, you know, we talk a lot about the sauerkraut diet on the show. So when I'm being careful, my wife is sort of the food Nazi. She will track my calories down to the last calorie. So if she sees me itching to go to the kitchen, she goes, you know, you're at 1632 now. So usually I try to stay between 15 to 1700 calories. You know, not too much carbs, a lot of protein, stuff like that. I ate like a whole loaf of bread. And I had a box of cookies last night.

43:59Katie Miller:It's okay. There you go. What's a conspiracy theory that you believe in? A conspiracy, well, wow, you got me here. A conspiracy theory that I believe in? I can't think of any. There's got to be one. But my mind is so rational that if there isn't evidence that, oh, here's one. Maybe that there is intelligent life aliens out there. Okay. See, there's always one. Where do you get your news? X and Fox. What's the first app you open in the morning? X. How many hours a day do you spend on X? Every hour. I hear your wife laughing in the background. I do it for work, so I have to be on, I don't know, maybe an hour or two.

44:46Katie Miller:When was the last time you changed your mind about something important? I thought I loved my wife infinitely. I changed my mind today because I love her infinitely more today. So nice. What's your most liberal take? I don't care what people do in the privacy of their bedrooms. I don't think the government should interfere in which guy or girl I'm turned on by. Do you think a man, an adult man, can be transgender? I mean, in the sense that they might have gender dysphoria in the old sense of the term. Yes. But no, I don't think that that then makes you a full-fledged woman. What's the last book you read?

45:35I haven't read in nearly three months, which is making me insane because we had to prepare for our move. I had the book launch. I was reading a biography on Conrad Lawrence. Do you want me to tell you who he is? No. No. It's okay.

45:49Katie Miller:It's okay. We'll put it up. We're going to put it up on the screen for all the viewers. Conrad Lawrence was a famous ethologist. Are you a tough grader in your classroom? Astoundingly so. What's your syllabus look like? Very detailed so that when you get 79.27, you'll know exactly why you got down to two decimals. So I'll explain every single assignment, how it's going to be graded, what scale I'm going to use. So it's rich with information so that I can avoid you coming and whining at me during office hours. Do you have a lot more papers or are you doing a lot of tests? So usually in all of my courses, whether it be undergrad, master's, PhD, I always have a research project where students have to identify a research question, posit hypotheses, develop the data collection procedure, collect the data, analyze it.

46:42Basically, you go through the whole scientific method. So that's probably...

46:46Katie Miller:Do you let them use AI to gather the data now? No. I do let them use online data collection portals, right? So instead of you having to physically come to the lab to do an experiment, many of these experiments can be done online. Wouldn't you be concerned that someone could just go and have AI collate the data for them? I mean, that's always a thing. Are you using Panagram to ensure that they're not using AI? No. No, but just to be clear, it's been now nearly three years I haven't done much teaching because I've taken a leave from Concordia because of some of the threats I was facing there. And then, you know, and then I had a sabbatical.

47:24So the AI flourishing has happened during the time that I haven't taught.

47:30Katie Miller:So have you graded any papers now that you're at Ole Miss yet? No, I'm only teaching next semester. Okay. I'd be very excited for when you grade a paper and the data is collated by AI. Yeah, yeah. It's going to be a challenge. Do you use AI? I only use it to ask very detailed questions. Here are the three different health plans that Ole Miss is offering. I don't understand 90 % of the acronyms. I enter into Grok, and then Grok says to us, pick option one, given your reality. it's a good use of it all right so here's the last question of the podcast you kind of answered this earlier if you could host a dinner party with three people dead or alive who's at the table and what are you eating uh ribeye steak medium rare with leonardo da vinci okay uh two more they're going to be obvious ones for me given my what i do charles darwin because i'm an evolutionary scientist.

48:33And let's go with King Solomon.

48:36Katie Miller:Why? He was a very wise man. He comes from the same heritage as I do. He was very successful with the ladies, all traits that are admirable. Thank you so much for watching this episode of the Katie Miller Podcast. Don't forget to find us every Tuesday night, 6 p.m. See you then.

49:02weMONG Stormcast is a productor podcast. Thank you.