Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where free thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself, associate editor Toby Young,

and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay.

You can support our podcast by

visiting Patreon.com forward slash quillet and becoming a monthly patron. By

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Welcome to the Colette Podcast.

I'm Jonathan Kay hosting from Toronto.

I've never met today's guest in person,

despite the fact we both spent most of our lives in Montreal, where

he's been teaching marketing at Concordia University for many years, and more recently we've

both found ourselves on the same side of the culture wars over free speech and intellectual pluralism.

Yet despite the fact we've never met, I feel like Professor Gad Sad has been a constant presence in my life,

thanks in part to his irrepressible daily presence on Twitter, where he's got more than 300,000 followers, which is a lot for a Canadian. That's like 3 million in American numbers. In his academic mode, Professor Sad pioneered the use of

evolutionary psychology to model human behavior, but he also likes to mix it up with lay people.

A few months ago, for instance, he authored a viral thread slopping down Hollywood actor turned progressive quasi-activists Seth Roggan, whom Saad accused of, quote, platitiveness virtue signaling.

I should say that this was shortly before Rogan went after me on Twitter

and I slightly suspect that it was Rogan's wounded pride over Suds treatment of

him that motivated the actor's attack on me though I can't prove as much. Anyway, Sad's new book is called

The Parasitic Mind, how infectious ideas are killing common sense. And as readers will see from

his fiery language, this is a guy who seems more interested in winning the culture war than in brokering an armstice.

...