Psychologist Gad Saad dissects Islam’s "supremacist" core, citing Sharia’s incompatibility with Western justice and the shahada’s ease of conversion compared to Judaism’s resistance. He critiques academic rejection of evolutionary psychology—like Harvard’s LGBTQ office labeling biological sex discussions as "transphobic"—and the Khadr case’s $10.5M settlement despite public outrage. False rape accusations, he argues, are a form of societal "rape," with critics misinterpreting scientific explanations (e.g., Thornhill/Palmer’s 2000s research) as justification. The episode reveals how tribalism and ideological groupthink distort discourse, from political correctness to identity politics, leaving truth vulnerable to backlash. [Automatically generated summary]
Around puberty, it often subsides, especially if you're quite athletic, which I was.
And then it completely went away by about 13 and only came back by about 25. But now I'm not full-blown asthmatic.
Only when I get sick, if I, let's say, get a cold, it will migrate to my chest, turn into bronchitis, and what will take you four days to fight might take me a month of whooping cough.
Well, that's why when I came out of the bathroom, my instinct was to tell Jamie as I was shaking his hand, I washed my hands, because I'm always careful about shaking other people's hands, so I'd like to extend them the same courtesy.
Yeah, man, I shake some people's hands, and it's like they just dunked it in the pool.
Some people, like, they get so sweaty, and you shake their hand, you go, whoa, okay, but what's going on with this hand?
Like, what kind of weird bacteria?
I read this article that was saying that water bottles, when you reuse a water bottle, they've tested them, and they say that there's less bacteria on dog toys.
I mean, there is actually research on this, right?
From evolutionary medicine, kids who grow up in very sterile environments end up suffering from greater respiratory ailments precisely because their system hasn't been kicked up.
Yeah, so basically I argue that in the same way that there are all sorts of animals that once they are infected with this brain worm, and there are different instantiations of it, They become zombified, right?
Just to give you another example, the spider wasp will sting the spider, which is much bigger than it, rendering it zombified.
It then carries it into its burrow, lays its eggs.
On the in vivo spider.
And then when the eggs hatch, they eat it in vivo.
And I argue that the political correctness is akin to the spider wasp's sting because it zombifies us into walking quietly to the abyss of infinite darkness while horrible things are happening around us.
And it's really taken on a life of its own at this point.
I'm actually thinking of studying this scientifically, not just as something that I talk about in my public engagement.
What is it that causes some people to be more likely to be parasitized by the types of mindsets that would cause you to suffer from Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome?
So a classic example would be, which I guess we'll get into...
How much evidence do you need to see around the world that there might be some religious ideology that is somewhat problematic and antithetical to secular, liberal, modern values?
How much information or what is the type of information that you would need to see before you're able to arrive to such a conclusion?
And so one of the things I'm thinking of doing is to formally Quantify a score of OPS, how much somebody suffers from OPS, as a type of mindset, and what are some predictors that could help us understand who is more or less likely to be afflicted by this mindset?
Well, there's certain people that just never want to hurt anyone's feelings, except when they think that it is within their rights to attack that person, because that person is somehow or another victimizing someone else, and then they'll be far more egregious than the original offense.
Did you know about that guy in Canada that's getting sued?
Well, the Human Rights Council fined him $12,000 because he walked into an apartment that he owned with shoes on because there was a Muslim family living there.
Their lease was up, and he was looking to rent the apartment.
They stopped responding to his texts.
And so he opened up the apartment to show this apartment that he owns, and because he walked into a building that he owns with his shoes on, he has to pay them $12,000 for failing to accommodate their religious practices while showing their apartment to prospective tenants.
I'm sorry to interrupt you, but the Human Rights Count Tribunal of Ontario also found that he harassed them and created a poisoned housing environment.
One is that they're just afraid to criticize Muslims because there are greater repercussions to do so than to criticize Seventh-day Adventists.
So just from a very basic sort of survival instinct.
But I think secondly, which is kind of part of the ostrich parasitic syndrome I'm speaking of, there are all sort of erroneous ideas that people have been infected with.
You know, the The Muslim religion is a religion for the downtrodden, the brown people, the exotic others.
And so to criticize them when they are a hapless, exotic minority is simply racist and sexist.
And people believe that.
Even though most of the countries that these people are coming from, when they come to the West, not only are they the majority, they're almost the exclusive majority.
So they are out of, I think, 56 countries that constitute the...
OIC, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, something like 29 or 30 countries, they're exclusively Islamic.
There are no longer any religious minorities.
It's in the order of 99.9 something.
So to argue that people who come from these countries are, you know, religious minorities.
Well, I mean, they're religious minorities when they come to the West, but they're all coming from countries where, never mind that they're the majority, they've never interacted with someone who did not share their faith.
I don't think people understand that if that happens here, like, you can't turn back from that without violence.
I mean, I'm not saying that it would happen in the United States, but the fact that it can happen anywhere means it can happen everywhere.
I mean, it really can.
I mean, it's a big reach on my part to say that, because there's no evidence whatsoever that it's going to happen here.
But if you really look at some of the countries that are suffering under There's these really oppressive religious ideologies where women aren't allowed to drive where they have to wear Covering all over their body that signifies that they're a part of this religious sect Like if that if someone tried to do that today Like if you had some blonde haired blue-eyed guy that made all women wear a certain outfit and they weren't allowed to drive and they weren't allowed to have the same rights How many people would be standing up for them?
It's incredible Especially if it was a new thing there's something about old things like old ideology is them legitimacy So strange.
If he doesn't cloak it under the robe of religion, you commit him to a psychiatric institution.
If he says, no, no, no, but this belief...
As part of my religion, suddenly you get a free pass.
It's grotesque.
But to speak to your point about, well, that you were stretching about it happening in the United States, you're not stretching it at all.
all.
As a matter of fact, I've argued, for example, when Trump won, that if you look at a long-term view of the issue of Islamic immigration, if what you focus on is, do we have the proper vetting processes to stop ISIS terrorists from coming in?
That's a very short-term view of the problem.
But if you recognize that societies will take often very, very long time before they become Islamized, it's not as though every single country that today is Islamic became instantaneously overnight Islamic.
In some cases, it was a very, very quick invasion.
In other cases, it took 500 years before the demographic reality shifted.
And so, yes, if you look at it from the perspective of 10, 20, 50, 100 years, the U.S. stands no threat.
But take a long-term view.
I love this quote from, I think it was the Taliban who said it, that the United States have all the clocks and watches.
We have all the time in the world.
In other words, inshallah, eventually, God willing, we will conquer you.
So this is the right way to look at this issue.
Do you wish to have a society become more Islamized or less?
Let me draw another analogy.
At the end of every day, you can weigh yourself and one of three things is going to happen.
You've either lost weight that day, your weight did not change a single ounce, or you've put on weight.
So let's analogize this with Islam.
When Islam comes into a place, either the society gets better, nothing changes, or it gets worse.
Do we have enough data at this point after 1400 years to suggest that we can try to bet what will happen to a society?
The answer, regrettably, is yes.
Again, I hate to have to preface, of course, most Muslims are lovely and peaceful and wish to simply raise their children.
But Islam as an ideology when it comes into a new society, is it a good thing?
If yes, let's all turn Islamic.
If no, then maybe we should have an honest conversation about this.
An honest conversation is what's really important because these things get so emotionally charged, like the infamous Ben Affleck-Sam Harris debacle on Bill Maher's show.
But that to me is a perfect example because Sam speaks in such a measured way.
Tone and he's so educated about it.
He's not making these big gigantic leaps, but people love to jump on him and call racism.
He sent me some video that I just watched the other day where a bunch of people are just Taking complete out-of-context statements Attributing him to him as being like this is what he believes on things when if you listen to the full Extent of the conversation.
He's literally saying like that.
I'm gonna say something here that could be taken out of context But what I'm saying is like imagine if someone was saying this, right?
How do you respond to that and they use that as a statement?
I mean, there's there's so much of that going on There's so much so dishonest Well, there's this weird not-me thing that they're doing.
It's like, I'm not the racist.
He's the racist.
And they get very, you're racist!
Like, the Ben Affleck thing.
Like, he was like, that is so gross.
That is so racist.
Like, instead of just...
I'm discussing this conversation.
I'm discussing this, especially on the Bill Maher show, because that shows all those shows.
It's not to criticize that show, but all those shows, we have a panel of six people.
What you see is a bunch of people waiting to say something and they have to jump in.
And it's almost like they have to be salacious or they have to be outrageous just to get heard.
You know, like everyone, it's, it's, it, those kind of shows promote this sort of disingenuous communication.
Because you have to, you can't be polite.
Like, you and I can be polite.
It's just you and I. We can talk and we can have these long-form conversations.
But on that show, you don't have the time to unpack what's wrong with anything.
All ideologies, all things that tell you how to think.
Forget about whether or not you think it came from Jesus or the prophet Muhammad or Joseph Smith.
Anytime there's a doctrine that tells you how to think because of some mystical presence, some god or deity or prophet who has gotten the wisdom of the universe, and you must not question it, and women have to wear veils and dress up like beekeepers.
I mean, all that stuff is very, very problematic because people are prone For whatever reason, I mean, I guess it's something that goes back to tribalism and alpha male chimpanzee behavior.
And actually, I just looked at one of the Golden Girls that was rerunning.
And you see, I think it's Susan Harris or something.
But anyways, someone like me who comes from the Middle East who escaped that reality, someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
I've had many people on my show.
I don't know how much you followed, but a lot of people who've all escaped from this world, either they still consider themselves Muslim, but not Muslim-lite, or ex-Muslims in many cases.
They will be attacked.
So imagine, you know, so there is some woman who went to Wellesley College who doesn't know anything about Islam short of whatever she learned in her bullshit progressive course.
I mean, anytime someone goes so far overboard that objective reasoning is out the window and you're...
You know, you're so committed to whatever position that you're in that you can't look at both sides of it.
I mean, I could see why a lot of religious traditions would be comforting to people, remind them of where they came from, give them pride of their homeland, give them a personal good feeling that they're connected to some sort of an ancient tradition, as long as it's not oppressing other human beings.
And there's got to be some, I mean, actually cultural patterns of behavior that people do, like celebrations, like Oktoberfest or something like that.
Those things, you know, promote some sort of a pride, like I guess a pride in Germany and their beer making and all that stuff, without oppressing people, you know?
A good segue to what you're talking about is something that is upsetting me these days, increasingly so.
So some people are now trying to draw a distinction between Islam and Islamism.
The reason why I mention this is because Islam has two elements.
There's the spiritual part, which is kind of like your Oktoberfest, pray this way, believe in a monotheistic God and so on.
But then within Islam is a much larger component of politics, political Islam.
So when you say something like, well, you know, we should be attacking Islamism, as if it's something that is outside of Islam.
That's simply false.
Islamism is Islam, right?
Erdogan, the Prime Minister of Turkey, and I can quote many other Islamic experts, said, Islam is Islam.
The term moderate Islam, Islamism, and all these other qualifiers are nonsensical.
Now, the reason why that upsets me is because it grants people a false sense of security and hope.
You know, Islam is wonderful, but we need to attack this separate thing called Islamism.
Well, from day one, 1400 years ago, Islam was Islamism.
Now, that doesn't mean that there isn't a spiritual element.
That doesn't mean that most Muslims just want to practice the spiritual part.
But there is no set of doctrines in a separate book called Radicalized Islamism.
It all comes from the same text.
It comes from the Quran, it comes from the Hadith, and it comes from the Sirah, the biography of Muhammad.
So this kind of false narrative that people are promulgating so that they seem as though they're not frontally attacking a religion, while laudable, while nice, I get that reflex, it's false.
And so again, to go back to our point of talking honestly, We need to talk honestly.
In the same way that you might identify as coming from Boston, and there's a shared history from all people who grew up around the time that you grew up in Boston...
And there is a sense of affiliation and tribalism with that reality.
Being Jewish, as far as I'm concerned, and for most Jews, is exactly that.
We don't necessarily take the religious elements very seriously.
Now, that doesn't mean that we are practicing a light Judaism or non-radical Judaism.
We're simply ignoring those parts of Judaism that we choose to ignore.
So there is no such thing as radical Islam.
There are no books called radical Islam.
There is a set of doctrines called Islam, and then I could do what's called cafeteria Islam, which is I pick and choose the parts that I wish to adhere to.
So again, the discourse is a false narrative.
I understand the reason for it, because people find it rather gauche to attack frontally a religion, or at least to attack Islam.
So they have to, I call this the ism magic heuristic, right?
For you, I would like to defend you, if there's a lot of people that are listening right now, or offer up some, not even defend you, but offer up some information.
You grew up in a place where being Jewish was lethal.
So a dimmi is a third-class citizen, comes out of Quranic edicts that basically said that when Islam comes into a society, you basically have three choices if you're not a Muslim.
You could either convert, you could either get killed, or if you are people of the book, meaning Christians and Jews, meaning people of the book that you're also monotheistic, you're also from an Abrahamic faith, Then you could live as a dimmi.
A dimmi is a protected class, protected in quotes.
We tolerate you.
And in order to tolerate you, we're going to remind you repeatedly of your subservient position.
Now, at different points across the last 1400 years, that mechanism was either instituted very forcefully or more lightly.
So in the context of Lebanon, which was a very progressive and modern country in the Middle Eastern context, There wasn't somebody knocking on our door and levying the jizya.
Pay us or else we're going to rape your daughters.
But you didn't wear a big star of David because that might be construed as inflammatory, just like the example that you started off the show.
You're hurting our sensibilities by pushing your Judaism on us, right?
So your status did not always have been threatened in that my head is going to come off at any minute, right?
My parents grew up and lived there.
They didn't die.
But once the Civil War broke out, then it became lethally dangerous to be Jewish.
I mean, we're going to be executed.
We left.
So you never know when we're going to go from tolerating you to off with the heads.
And that's been the history for the past 1400 years.
And so, again, when people think, but Islam is not that bad.
Look, in Andalusia, Jews and Christians and Muslims used to walk around hand in hand in Spain around the 15th, 16th century.
Baloney.
Yes, people were not being beheaded every day, but you knew your place.
And it's kind of interesting when you talk about this idea about how people are reluctant to criticize Islam because they're worried about the repercussions of this.
It kind of speaks to how rare it is that people do violate those principles in those countries.
Because if you do have a culture that's 99% Islamic, Especially if they go by the book, like, every step of the way.
Like, there's not going to be a lot of people that are stepping on the line for fear of the horrific repercussions.
Now, psychologically in this country, you're seeing that for some strange reason emerging from the left and emerging from a lot of like really progressive colleges and universities where they want to be almost the first ones to step up and say, don't criticize this you're seeing that for some strange reason emerging from the left and emerging from a lot of like really progressive colleges and universities It's unbelievable.
It's a really strange position to be a progressive who's reinforcing the ideologies of a regressive culture that's very ancient.
But what's incredible is that they'll come up with ways to defend this cognitive inconsistency.
And hence, that's part of the ostrich parasitic syndrome that I was mentioning earlier.
What are some ways that they defend it?
Let me just give you a few manifestations of ostrich logic.
My friend Mohammed is a very nice guy and he drinks and he fornicates and he's very liberal.
So the idea then becomes that as long as I can identify a single exemplar of an Islamic person who does not otherwise adhere to what Islam dictates, then it's not true that Islam is bad.
Now, this is a manifestation of a more general cognitive bias, which goes like this.
If I walk into class and I say, look, homo sapiens are sexually dimorphic.
There are innate sex differences between the two sexes.
Men are bigger than women.
Someone will put up their hand and say, but my Aunt Linda is taller than my Uncle Joe.
Oh, gee, Darwin is dead, right?
So they identify a singular exemplar that is supposed to falsify a statement that is only true at the population level.
So that's one example.
Muhammad is nice, therefore Islam is nice.
Here's a second example.
They point to a particular historical context where Jews lived in Islamic countries and weren't killed.
Hey, but God said, you lived in Lebanon and you still have your head.
And the retort that I usually give is, well, until they were going to cut off my head.
But secondly, Jeffrey Dahmer, if you take, I think he was guilty of 17 murders.
If you take the number of days that he lived as an adult, So, what you have to basically do is take each of these ostrich logic arguments and analogize how idiotic they are.
But it's very exhausting because the bent, as you said, of all these progressives is to do whatever they can to protect the ideology.
It's exhausting to consistently have to try to fight through all their clutter.
It's not something that is structured with objective reasoning.
It's something that's structured with their own particular ideology that does not want to criticize this one segment of the human population that they think is being persecuted.
And meanwhile, if you think about throughout currently in the world, which ideology persecutes the most number of other people?
So if you talk about bloody borders, right?
Islam has fought with Buddhists.
Islam fights with animists.
Islam fights with Jews.
Islam fights with Christians.
Islam fights with Tibetan monks, right?
So in other words, Islam doesn't necessarily make for very good neighbors.
Why?
Because, again, notwithstanding the fact that most Muslims are lovely and just want to raise their kids, Islam is a supremacist ideology.
It basically says that the world is meant to all be united under the flag of Allah.
Now, some people take that seriously.
Others don't.
But the doctrines of Islam are very clear.
We should all submit to Islam.
So even if 95% of Muslims don't adhere to that tenet, if only 5% do, that means we're always going to have friction.
In some cases, it'll be like Lebanon.
By the way, I've predicted that in Europe...
This is on record, we can probably find it, that in Europe, within 15, 20, 25, 50 years, we're going to have Lebanon all over the place.
And now it's starting to happen, right?
At one point, we were having daily attacks all over Europe.
So again, if you're going to increase Islamic immigration to the West, Of course, most people are nice and just want to escape to a better world.
But are you willing to take the risks for what's about to happen?
Are you willing to accept people whose cultural and religious values are perfectly antithetical to yours?
If you do Pew surveys from around the Middle East or Islamic countries about your views on Jews, well, you'll get things like 95 to 99 percent Jew hatred.
So if I am a Canadian Jew, right, and I see that 50,000 Syrians are going to come in, Is it that I'm filled with hatred towards Syrians or am I simply someone who calculates statistical regularities and basically says that out of 50,000 people, if 95% have endemic Jew hatred as part of their identity, do I have a right to be concerned about this?
I'm not worried about Haitians.
They're black people.
I'm not racist.
I'm not worried about the Vietnamese.
I'm worried about the cultural and religious baggage that you bring in.
What about your views towards clitorises or homosexuality or religious minorities or black dogs?
Darwin forbid if you're a black dog.
A black dog?
I mean, Muhammad hated dogs, but he particularly hated black dogs.
Has concern for our fellow human beings sees these people fleeing and sees the horrific conditions that they're confronted with in their own country and they really don't have a lot of options and they're trying to escape to the West.
If the dad is with the wife and the children, you can't just have the father stay back behind the tent and you let the mom go to Toronto with the kids.
I mean, or at the very least, it's prejudiced, right?
I mean, you're singling people out because of their ideology or because of what religion they're from, not because of their past behavior or any predictors whatsoever about their future behavior.
Right, but wouldn't that, in a way, I mean, just to play devil's advocate, wouldn't that, in a way, kind of put the Muslims in Toronto, who do immigrate, whatever, pick that city, who try to immigrate to Canada, in the same sort of a position that your family was in, in Lebanon, where you were hiding the fact that you were Jews?
No one has an inalienable right to immigrate anywhere, correct?
So if you wish to immigrate to the West, then leave every single syllable that constitutes a belief, attitude, position, value that is contrary to ours at the door and then welcome in my brother.
Man, isn't that a crazy thing to say to someone whose entire life and their ideology is a big part of their identity and who they are, like how they view the world.
That's the structure for which they interface with other human beings.
I agree with you overall when I talk about the entire human population that it would be wonderful if we did that.
But from individual to individual, we know about the trials and tribulations that people go through in a day-to-day life and religious freedom and a religious ideology in many cases helps people get through the pains of life.
It helps them get through the struggles.
I'm not saying that it's rational, but I am saying that in many ways it's a scaffolding for their own personal behavior.
You would have to then ensure that your religious practice is exclusively practiced privately.
Never should there ever be an intrusion into the public sphere.
No asking for prayer rooms at the university.
The example that you gave is the slight creeping jihad, right?
So my next book is called, tentatively, it might change, Death of the West by a Thousand Cuts, right?
It's the idea that when you take, again, a parable of the frog, when you put it in boiling water and you do it very slowly, the frog, if you do it very, very slowly, if it falls below a just noticeable difference, it doesn't notice that the temperature is rising until it's too late and it boils to death, right?
So this idea of just noticeable difference is something that's very important in this conversation.
We're not going to get Islamized overnight, but Egypt, before it became Islamic, used to be non-Islamic once upon a time.
Today it's about 10% Coptic Christians.
Turkey is now 99% Islamic.
One day it wasn't.
Iran, the great Persian empires were non-Islamic.
Today it's almost exclusively Islamic.
So the United States and Canada are not going to become Islamic in the next 10 years.
But give it enough time, have a long enough view of history, and I worry about your grandchildren and mine.
And so that's how you have an honest conversation.
And I'm not sure what the answer is.
One possibility, which I've discussed with folks on my show who are trained lawyers, is that There are provisions in the law, at least in the United States, to declare an ideology as being seditious, right?
So in the same way that you could say that Nazism is seditious to our values or communism, there are elements of Islam, the non-spiritual parts, that it doesn't take Einstein to recognize that they are perfectly antithetical to every single value that you and I would hold dear as Westerners.
I agree with you in theory, but I think the problem is as soon as you tell someone to not follow certain aspects of their ideology, those aspects become even more attractive.
And especially if they consider the West to be decadent and filled with sin and fornicating and drinking and all the things that they think are disgusting.
And then these people...
Other ones are telling you that you can't follow the word of God as brought down by the prophet from up on high.
It would be wonderful if we could do that, but people are so terrified of death, and they're so terrified of the unknown, and they're so terrified of not having structure.
People love having ideological structure that they can govern their life by.
Real, clear, established rules.
Man, people get mad at me when I wear a fanny pack.
And I'm not joking.
One of the reasons why I wear it is because people think it's disgusting.
Like, you think it's disgusting that I have a bag around my waist that I can keep my keys and phone in.
But we have structure, you know?
Men aren't supposed to wear sandals.
You know, if you're a man and you're wearing high-heeled, open-toed shoes, you will get ridiculed.
Because when we think about it, let's not talk about Islam for a second.
If you're going down a dark alley and you see four young men, forget about hoodies and pants down, just four young men.
So all you've described is the fact that they're young and they're men.
If you see four young men versus four elderly women, just because of your statistical regularity that you'd calculate which group is more likely to impart violence on you, then you might avoid the alley with the four young men, even though not all young men.
Right.
Even though the probability that a young man is going to jump you and gang rape you and mug you and stab you is a small one.
But your brain has evolved to calculate those statistical regularities and to then...
Be very careful, be very risk aversive in putting yourself in harm's way.
So again, even though most Muslims are very nice and very lovely, I think we have enough data right now if we look at the last, since 2011. In 2001, 9-11, there's been over 30,000 terror attacks committed in the name of Islam, right?
I challenge anybody in your comments section to list me another ideology that comes remotely close.
If you added up every single other ideology since 2001, you wouldn't come up to 100. So what is the statistical numbers that you need to see before you're able to simply say, look, let's have an honest conversation, notwithstanding that not all Muslims and most are nice.
Is there a problem with Islam?
Yes.
It's not radical Islam.
It's not Islamism.
It's not militant, violent extremism.
Let's stop with the bullshit euphobisms.
There are inherent elements, contents within Islam that are problematic.
It's not my job to find a way to get rid of them.
But if you wish to be part of our Western societies, then you need to find a way to expunge that stuff.
If you do it, welcome my brother, we're all brothers.
If you don't, then I should show preference to people who share similar cultural values to me.
That's called Now, what about people that would say that there's inherent problems with the Jewish religion?
There's inherent problems with subscribing to that ideology, that they have been persecuting Islamic people in Palestine, that they've been prosecuting and treating Islamic people as inferior to Jewish people?
I think I first saw it in, he'll be happy that I'm giving a shout out, I think a guy on YouTube who goes by the name of T and Kraut, or Kraut and T, he's a German YouTuber.
But when you're saying you're Jewish, and I support you saying this 100%, especially considering of all people, you should be in some ways proud of who you are, considering that you come from a line of oppressed people that escaped a horrible situation.
In the same way, by the way, I recently put up a clip on my channel where I talked about academic lineage.
So in the same way that you could build a genealogy of your family tree or of a people's, you could do what's called an academic genealogy.
So for example, my doctoral supervisor is my academic father, and then I could look to see who was his academic supervisor and who was his academic supervisor.
So I could be Muslim in that I come from a shared lineage of people, and I could be very proud of that.
But I can also have the moral compass and the moral fortitude to say, but there is stuff in my book that is truly grotesque.
And no amount of obfuscation and reinterpretive dancing could alter that ugliness, right?
There's no way to take kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, take an espresso break, resume killing.
There's no way to take that and reinterpret it using modern sensibilities to mean killing with caresses, right?
Let's not play this reform game.
So be proud of your cultural identity, and if that incorporates an Islamic identity, great, but reject all the bullshit, right?
And so I think that's where Judaism and Christianity at this point is somewhat different from Islam.
For most people who are Islamic, even if they don't necessarily believe it, They'll feel very reticent to openly admit it, that they despise a lot of the ugliness.
They'll say it's not true, it doesn't exist, you didn't understand it, you misinterpreted it.
Actually, what happens with a lot of the guests that I bring in on my show who are Arabic, we always start off the start of our show speaking only in Arabic.
I'm not trying to infer or imply that he's diabolical or duplicitous.
I think he probably truly believes that he's doing something worthwhile.
The problem is that it's not as though until Majid Nawaz came along...
No one had ever thought about this idea of reforming Islam.
Geez, really?
We never thought of that in the last 1400 years.
But the reality is that there are elements within the doctrines of Islam that simply don't permit for this reformation to take place.
And even if it could take place, we don't necessarily have the time to wait another 400 years while we deliberate how each syllable in each of the problematic passages should be reinterpreted while people's bodies are being stacked up all over the world.
And so therefore, I think that there needs to be a much more direct intervention.
And what I mean by direct intervention, no, there doesn't need to be reformed, doesn't need to be interpreted, it needs to be expunged.
These types of ideas, if Judaism has certain ideas that are belligerent to women's clitorises, then I want those ideas in Judaism out.
In the way that he did it, as you said, it's a very assiduous process.
It takes a long time before, and as a matter of fact, the rabbis are supposed to try to dissuade you from converting to Judaism because that, in a sense, tests your faith, your desire to change.
In Islam, do you know what you have to do to convert?
I wonder what it is about people that makes us so susceptible to ideological thinking.
And still.
And whether or not it's ever expungible.
You know?
Whether or not it's ever something that we can eradicate from the thought process.
It just seems inherent to being a person.
So much so that I recognize it in myself.
Like, here's a perfect example.
I ran into a guy just a few days ago, and he said hello to me, and then he explained to me that he trains jujitsu with the Machados, and immediately we were like brothers, because that's my lineage.
Because the reason that's a good segue is because I actually raised it with him on the plane.
I used to live in an area in Montreal called Outremont, for the Montrealists out there who don't know where it is, where there are a lot of Hasidic Jews.
So now you would think that Within this very small group of people called Jews, within an even smaller group of people called Hasidic Orthodox Jews, once you're an Orthodox Jew, you're an Orthodox Jew.
No.
On this side of the street are the Polish Orthodox Jews.
On this side of the street are the Hungarian Orthodox Jews.
And I wouldn't be caught dead marrying my daughter to those heathen pigs from the other side of the street.
So I was very interested in asking him things that I actually thought about studying scientifically as part of my research.
So one of the things that I study, as you know, is, well, I apply evolutionary psychology to all sorts of things, one of which is mating preferences.
You know, are there certain mating preferences that are universally true, irrespective of culture, right?
And the answer, of course, is yes.
So whether you go to the Yanomomo tribe in Brazil, a closed society, or you go walk around in LA, there are certain things that men will look for in women and other things that women will look for in men that tend to be universal for clear evolutionary reasons.
So I was interested at one point in studying the mating preferences of the Hasidic community.
Again, the idea being that here you're taking a community that culturally and religiously is very close, where the cultural and religious brainwashing is very, very strong.
The idea is that when a Hasidic couple has sex, they have a sheet between them where they make a hole where the genitalia goes, and that's how you get it on.
And so my idea was, at one point, is to see if I can get access to the Hasidic community, which would probably not be easy to get into the Hasidic community and ask them about their mating preferences.
And so it was a small idea I had over, you know, an afternoon and then kind of dropped it and moved on to other things.
But here I was sitting with a couple, a Hasidic couple, and I thought, okay, I can't do a scientific study, but at least I could come up with some anecdotes to discuss.
And so I actually asked them things like, you know, can we talk about some mating preferences that take place within the Hasidic community?
And there were some really incredible insights that came out.
So for example, the wife said that one of the attributes that she absolutely was looking for in a prospective mate was that he be taller than her.
And it turns out that this is called assortative mating, birds of a feather flock together.
So if you look at naturally occurring couples, it is almost never the case that the woman is taller than the man.
There was actually a study done with 720 couples.
A single couple, the woman was taller than the man.
Physical desire, in this case, I just need the man, not to be tall, just taller than me, right?
That was replicating in a completely different context in the Hasidic community.
I even asked them about things like, well, will a Hasidic woman ever look at a non-Hasidic guy that's walking down the street, a bad boy, that has tattoos and greased back hair?
and you know the swimmer's body and desire him or has the cultural and religious brainwashing been so great that her eyes are shut off to these possibilities and she actually said that no I mean bottom line As E.O. Wilson said, the genes hold culture on a leash.
In other words, no matter how much cultural and religious brainwashing you have, if you scratch far enough, you'll get the same human nature.
And that's what I basically got from my conversation with them.
She felt like she was getting bored and she had to take care of the kids while I was having this...
As a matter of fact, I thought later, wouldn't it have been wonderful if we could have taped it and I could have released this conversation on my show?
So God of the gaps is basically, at one point when we didn't know much in science, God could be found explaining everything, right?
Why does thunder happen?
Well, God does it, right?
Now we find out that there is a very clear material explanation for lightning.
So now that's off.
So now God goes and hides somewhere else.
And now he constantly finds the small gaps where science hasn't yet been able to uncover an explanation and he hides there.
That's called the God of the Gaps argument.
And so he used the granddaddy of God of the Gaps.
He goes, if you take me back to the Big Bang and you show me that there was no God at that point, Then I'm willing to renounce my faith.
To which I answered, even if I were able to do that, you would still find a way to finagle your way into justifying your belief.
In other words, there is no amount of evidence that I could ever provide you.
That would shake your foundation.
So we really got into some heavy stuff.
By the way, that's one of the differences between, I think, in his case, he's an extremist Jew in the sense that he is the most practicing of Jews.
Well, how come we could have this very, very difficult conversation and leave at the end shaking hands, both richer for it, and no one's heads come off?
My point is that I think part of Jewish tradition, even when you, for example, go to the yeshiva to study, say, the Talmud, is that there is this mechanism of we constantly argue about everything.
I mean, Thomas Aquinas is the guy who always argued, I think, in the 12th century about the first mover, that you could always go back and say, at time zero, what started that?
What started that?
I don't think you could ever really ultimately shake somebody's foundations, right?
It is odd that we're all willing to believe the most insane version of the creation of the universe ever, without a doubt.
Like every person of science, people that believe in genes and atoms and subatomic particles and quarks and gluons, they believe that at one point in time there was something that was smaller than the head of a pen that became The infinite space that we see in front of us that's constantly expanding.
And so infinite that one of the things that Lawrence Krauss really, really fucked my mind up when he was here.
He was explaining to me that when we're seeing the universe, we're talking about 13.7 billion years or whatever it is.
Well, yes, not just seeing as it was, but he said you're only seeing the observable universe because the universe itself is moving faster than the light that you see from it.
So it's entirely possible that it goes back far further than that.
But he talks about middle world, the idea being that our brains evolved to understand phenomena at a level that our brain interacts with, right?
He calls that middle world.
So that which is at the cosmological level, right, at the Lawrence Krauss level of cosmology, or at the nano level...
Quantum physics.
It's so esoteric that our brains haven't evolved to understand phenomena at that level, right?
So in a sense, it's counterintuitive for us to even do science.
I mean, think about it.
When you and I, or actually most physicists, when they study things at those levels, they will tell you that the stuff is so esoteric, right?
Richard Feynman, the very famous physicist, right?
Said, you know, if you think you understand quantum physics, you don't understand quantum physics or something to that effect, right?
That it is so esoteric and difficult for human brains to understand things at that level, small or very big.
But that notwithstanding, that doesn't mean that scientists succumb to belief just like religious people do.
Because scientists have epistemic humility, which basically means what?
I'm always willing to see data.
if Joe Rogan tomorrow comes to me with data showing that the mechanisms of evolution as enunciated starting with Darwin are wrong then I would be a dishonest scientist to not revise my beliefs in light of Joe Rogan's evidence so in other words scientists are always open It's always provisional knowledge.
It's only the best that we have now.
Whereas in religion, it's revealed truth.
It is true because it is true, because it's in my book, because it's true.
So in a sense, religious people are epistemologically haughty.
They're arrogant because nothing could change their opinions, whereas scientists change their opinions every day.
So in that sense, I don't think we're both succumbing to belief systems.
I mean, I probably, just as a layperson in physics, probably 1% of what I see in a National Geographic on physics, I can even remotely understand, right?
Because it just seems so...
And it's not as though I'm not capable of complex thought, but it's just so difficult for human minds...
What does it mean 16 billion light years away?
For the light to travel for 16 billion light years, that's the envelope?
And then the concept of life and death is also like our physical limitations.
Because we know that we live and die and we know that the Sun is going to burn out and we know that life on Earth lives and dies and things change.
So we impose these physical restrictions on the very universe itself when in fact it might be some constant process of expanding and contracting.
That's one of the most disturbing ideas is that the universe is going to expand infinitely and then contract infinitely and then do it all over again.
So that, I mean, I don't know if this is even a correct theory.
I don't know if maybe it's been disputed, but I had read once that there is a theory that the universe contracts to some insanely infinite position and then retracts down to the head of a pin again.
Well, it is fascinating to think of how much the universe, how many possibilities exist in the universe, right?
I mean, how many different solar systems exist?
Hundreds of billions just in this galaxy, one of hundreds of billions of galaxies.
It's almost like for our little tiny worlds, like when we try to look at it in terms of the big picture, we're not capable.
We don't have enough processing power.
We don't have enough hard drive space.
We can't Take all of these points of data and bring them into our head and consider them.
But it's entirely possible that everything you see in the ant world in terms of competition, everything you see in the human world in terms of competition, natural selection, and the constant and never-ending desire for innovation.
For novelty, for new things.
We have this constant desire to improve upon every single thing that we've ever done.
No one ever looks at a car and says, this is the best car ever.
It will not be improved upon.
We're done.
We don't need to make cars anymore.
They always want to come up with something that has better airbags, faster zero to 60, more protection for the passenger, automated controls.
You can sit back and sleep while your car drives you to work.
There's all these things that we just take for granted, but they're always moving in the direction of improvement.
And you could do that with life on Earth.
You go back to single-celled organisms, which become multi-celled organisms, and we always look at it like, oh, that's just a coincidence.
And it's dinosaurs, and then it becomes mammals, and then it becomes humans, and then it becomes animals.
Airplane riding, cell phone using, video having, you know, I mean, it just gets more and more complex, but we just, oh, that's just coincidence.
But is it?
Or is it moving in this constant state of improvement until we create an artificial being that can accelerate things far faster than our biological limitations are capable of doing?
So I'm not sure if this is where you want to go, but as you were describing this sort of quest for improvement, one of the threats of that reflex, or one of the dangers of that reflex, is precisely how totalitarian ideologies develop, where they argue that our current state of the world is faulty.
And if only you implement our ideology de jour, it could be communism, it could be Islam.
So there is a way by which we could reach that utopia if only you adhere to our ideology.
So there's a real danger in sort of succumbing to that.
And by the way, I'm reading right now a book by William Gairdner, who might come on my show.
He's, I think, a political scientist.
His book is called The Great Divide, where he actually lays out some of the sort of fundamental foundational differences between liberals and conservatives in terms of their worldviews and how because of these starting positions being so different, having no overlap between them, the Venn diagrams don't where he actually lays out some of the sort of fundamental That's why you end up speaking over each other without being able to find common grounds.
So one of these differences is that and I describe something similar using different terms.
A lot of the quote liberals and progressives view our brain as being blank slate, right?
It's infinitely malleable.
And so if you see differences between people, it can't be because there was a starting point difference.
Michael Jordan was not innately different.
There were some environmental conditions that led Michael Jordan to become who he is and not Gat Saad to be the best NBA player ever.
And if only we can find the appropriate social intervention strategies, then we could all have equality of outcomes.
And so that is a faulty understanding of human nature, because human nature, as of course you know, is really an interaction of our biology and our society.
But so much of the welfare state is based on this idea that, no, we need more of your tax money so that we could implement a social engineering program so that we could reach that utopia where we are all equal outcome.
And frankly, I think that that's complete nonsense.
It is fascinating that people seek comfort in communism and socialism for that very reason, like they almost are trying to slow down the competition that they can't win.
So Canada is a very sort of social welfare state, and Quebec, the province where I live, is sort of socialist on steroids.
And so in the context of the universities, all of the metrics of reward are removed so that we can have equality of outcomes.
And the way that you instantiate that is through The unions, right?
So there's a very powerful union that ensures that all professors are roughly treated equally because we're all social ants.
There's a queen bee, and then the rest of us are all equal.
But of course, humans are not equal.
Some are smarter.
Some work harder.
Some are more apathetic.
Some are honest.
Some are cheaters.
And so this idea of constantly having to have some external agent manage the process so that we could all be equal, to me, is grotesque.
And it goes back to, I think...
Probably our first conversation you and I had when I was saying that, you know, I would love to eventually come to Southern California, because at least in the United States, the society has been less parasitized by the social welfare idea.
Of course, the Democrats are more so than the Republicans, but as a general rule...
Canada is basically pure social welfare.
We're all equal.
And of course, Justin Trudeau is certainly trying to push that idea even more.
Actually, a few people tweeted, oh, please talk to Joe Rogan about this.
So Omar Khadr is a Muslim guy whose family had become Canadian citizens, but the father had taken them away, I think, to Pakistan at one point and to Afghanistan at another.
And at one point they were living in Taliban territory.
This is 2002, I think.
And the U.S. military had engaged in some firefight.
At one point, they even lived in the compound of Bin Laden.
So these were really real apple pie Canadian folks.
And Omar Khader, who was 15 years old, apparently threw a grenade, engaged in a firefight, killed one U.S. soldier, and I think blinded a second one.
He was taken to Guantanamo Bay as a 15-year-old, spent many years there.
He was a military tribunal, U.S. Guantanamo Tribunal, gave him a symbolic sentence of 40 years, but it was symbolic in that I think it was only going to be eight years.
They agreed on a plea deal of eight years.
Then he was extradited to Canada.
Very quickly after that, he was released because he already served quite a few years in Guantanamo.
And then he filed a lawsuit against the Canadian government for not having protected his Canadian charter rights because he was a child soldier and so on.
And he just settled on a $10.5 million settlement and an official apology by the Canadian government.
Most people were outraged.
Most Canadians are outraged.
But then you should see the comments on my YouTube channel.
You know, what kind of pig are you talking to me that I would not understand that this was an innocent child soldier who...
Yeah, because most of us are usually hanging around when we're 15 in the compound of bin Laden and lobbing bombs at incoming Marines.
You know, that's a very Canadian apple pie thing to do.
So again, the reflex is not to be outraged that my taxpayers are funding this guy now in a $10.5 million settlement.
I'm a pig.
I'm a racist pig for not understanding this was just an innocent...
Child soldier at the wrong place at the wrong time.
One, the amount of money they gave him, yeah, it's kind of crazy that your tax dollars go to that, but let's look at the 15-year-old kid.
What do you expect and what could possibly be done to dissuade him from following this path?
I mean, he's living in Bin Laden's compound.
You're talking about someone who's vulnerable to ideology.
50-year-old men are vulnerable to ideology.
What about a 15-year-old child?
I don't know how much blame you can put on a kid now when it comes to throwing a bomb at someone and taking the life of another human being Well, there's got to be a lot of circumstances involved in that, and I would like to know what they are before I think about any judgment whatsoever, because I don't know, were they shooting at him?
Were they shooting at someone he knew?
Did someone he knew get murdered by a U.S. soldier?
Was he actively engaged in some sort of military training and considering becoming a militant?
Your frontal cortex isn't even formed until you're 25. When you're 15 years old, you're not capable of making, especially living in a war zone, you're not capable of making moral and ethical judgments above and beyond the ideology that you're being raised in.
I agree that most of us in that situation may not have been able to extricate ourselves from that.
And what I'm going to say next doesn't necessarily support the outrage, but it gives it greater context.
He does come from a family.
Later, if you check when we get off the air, sort of the cues of this family, they don't seem as though they are assimilating very nicely within Canadian value system.
In other words...
For most Canadians, the reflex of taking this guy who seems to be quite resistant to liberty and modernity and freedoms and rewarding him with $10.5 million.
By the way, this is $10.5 Canadian, so it's probably $30 American.
The worst that I've ever seen it was when we lived in California in 2001 to 2003. At one point it was 0.64 or 65. Now it's at about 0.75.
So it's not the worst that it's ever been, but we're heading in that direction.
But since we're talking about Canada, maybe you'd like to talk about, and I know that you've had Jordan Peterson on, did you follow both of our respective testimonies in front of the Canadian Senate regarding Bill C-16?
Well, what's amazing is that I've been fighting this battle in academia precisely because of what I do, which is introduce evolutionary psychology in the social sciences.
So these types of conversations, these ludicrous conversations, I've been experiencing them for much of my scientific career.
What's extraordinary at this point is that some of this nonsense is now becoming law in Canada.
So to kind of give you the background to what happened, so I was invited both to speak in front of the Canadian Senate and also to give a talk on Parliament Hill.
The Canadian Senate part was Bill C-16, which is a bill that seeks to incorporate gender identity and gender expression under the rubric of hate crimes.
So in the same way that I can't discriminate against you for your religion or your race or your ethnicity, I can't discriminate against you because of your gender identity or gender expression because then that would be a hate crime.
And so I appeared in front of the Canadian Senate to simply say that, while of course everybody's personhood should be respected and we're all equal under the law, the manner by which the bill was tabled, the way it was written, it was so vague as for it to be dangerous.
And so I gave examples.
So let me just mention a few here for your viewers.
So I said, look...
Harvard University, their LGBTQ office, came out with a pamphlet that said that the idea of promulgating, and I'm going to quote, fixed binaries and biological essentialism, close quote.
Fixed binaries means male-female.
Biological essentialism is to argue that anything is biological.
So the idea of promulgating fixed binaries and biological essentialism is a form of transphobic, systemic violence.
This is not...
Violence.
Violence.
And it's not metaphorical.
It's not allegorical.
It's not that they mean violence in quotes.
It is a form of transphobia, but specifically systemic, violent transphobia.
In the general sense, I think it's the desire to come up with ever-broadening definitions of violence so that any transgression that you commit could fit under that rubric.
So then my response, which you could see, I'm paraphrasing, he said, well, I'm not sure that given the fact that I escaped execution in Lebanon because of my Jewish heritage, that I need to be lectured about genocide.
And that sort of took him aback.
Now, apparently later, and I didn't see this, apparently later he wanted to retract some of these comments and apologize for them.
How is it okay to study all of these behavior patterns in ants and monkeys and dogs and what have you, but you can't with human beings?
Because if you do with human beings somehow or another...
Anything that you find about generalized behavior patterns or specific sexual preferences that somehow or another marginalizes or in some way diminishes how another person is living their life to the point where it becomes violence.
So there's actually a term for what you just asked.
It's called the human reticence effect.
And simply put, A lot of people are perfectly happy to use evolutionary arguments to explain the behavior of the salamander, the hyena, the mosquito, the dog.
But if you use the exact same evolutionary principle to explain human phenomena, then suddenly it's no-go.
I think it's because people succumb to, wrongly so, to the idea of biological determinism.
They think that if you call up in explaining a phenomenon a biological principle, that means you're doomed to your biology.
It's a fatalistic thing, which of course is nonsense because there's no such thing as biological determinism because most of the things So, the idea of biological determinism is a false worry.
Much of what we do, it's called the interactionist viewpoint, much of who we are is an interaction of our genes and our environments.
But for most people, there is something vulgar about reducing the richness of the human condition to our biology.
It just feels wrong.
This explains the behavior of the hyena.
But we are above that.
We are cultural animals.
We are prone to conditioning and socialization and higher-order cognition.
So you could even take evolutionary biologists.
So these are people who are trained in evolutionary biology.
They will commit this error.
I mean, that's breathtaking, right?
The classic example is a guy who is otherwise an utter buffoon.
His claim to fame is he's got a very, and hats off to him, he's got an incredibly popular scientific blog called Faringula, which gets 100 million views or something.
So he's done very well for himself.
But he's the guy who is perfectly happy to use evolutionary principles to explain the mating behavior of the salamander.
But if I come along as an evolutionary psychologist and use the exact same principle, the exact same logical structure to explain human behavior, well, what's this Gatsad doing with this bullshit evolutionary psychology stuff?
That's nonsense.
That's pseudoscience, right?
And the reflex he has that is because...
To somehow explain it for the salamander makes sense.
It's National Geographic.
But humans, they're not prone to biology.
And I'll just give you two other examples.
Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewington, who were very, very famous Harvard evolutionists, also despised evolutionary psychology, but for other reasons.
They were avowed Marxists.
They came sort of from the hippie generations of the Marxists.
They're probably about 20 years older than me.
Well, one of them now has passed away.
Stephen Jay Gould is dead.
But they were guys who thought that if evolutionary psychology is right, then their Marxist bullshit ideologies would be wrong.
So they were strong anti-evolutionary psychology folks, even though all of their training suggested that they should be for it.
So they are the guys, by the way, who used to...
E.O. Wilson, I mentioned earlier...
So E.O. Wilson, the social ants guy, wrote a book called Sociobiology in 1975, where he explained how evolutionary theory could explain behavior across all sorts of animals.
Everybody was happy with the book.
In one of the last chapters, he applies all these principles to the human condition, He became persona non grata.
He became a Nazi.
He couldn't go anywhere to give a talk without being shouted down.
Not unlike how you're seeing Milo today being shouted down.
Well, E.O. Wilson went through those culture wars 30 years ago because evolutionary psychology was attacking the pet political ideologies of his colleagues at Harvard.
I think Jordan Peterson would probably be a better comparison.
Because Milo is obviously a provocateur and he did it on purpose.
But instead of pointing the finger at individuals, I would like to try to figure out, obviously we're not going to, but let's discuss it.
What is the motivation?
Why do people resist these ideas of looking at the data of human interaction and genetics and sexual preference?
Why do they resist Examining these factors like what is it about and what is it about people that like that guy that you're talking about that wants to point at you for examining these factors and call you horrific names and just for looking at Actual provable data data that you can mean you could show it you could do a minutes reviewed you can What's the motivation?
So in the case of those Harvard folks, they are committed Marxists.
And if evolutionary psychology is right, therefore my pet political ideology is wrong, therefore I have to shoot it.
That's one example.
Let's do a few more.
Suppose I am an overweight woman.
Okay?
And I don't get much action on the mating market.
One of two things can happen.
I could either believe that there is an evolved preference that men have for certain universal standards of beauty, or...
I could go for the much more comforting message, which is that these beauty standards are arbitrary sexist patriarchal standards.
And if only men would stop being shallow and buying into these Hollywood images, then...
Myself, this beautiful 800-pound woman, would be getting all the action in the world.
So it's nothing wrong with me.
It's that there are outside forces that are causing these arbitrary preferences to arise, right?
Naomi Wolf wrote a book in the early 90s, The Beauty Myth, that sold millions of copies, where she argued that there is no such thing as universal standards of beauty.
It's all a beauty myth.
It's the patriarchy that imposes these beauty myths on women to attack their sense of self.
Well, if I'm a woman who doesn't score well, even if I'm a man, for example, and we know that women prefer men of high status, well, I could do one of two things.
I could get out there and shake my butt and get the status, right?
Joe Rogan, nobody gave him all the stuff that you have.
You had to work hard for all your success so that you could then hopefully do well on the mating market.
Or I could say, you know what, these are all arbitrary standards.
I mean, in a just world, my being a lazy, apathetic beta male would just be as worthy of love.
And so I think ultimately there is an element to biological-based explanations Unhopeful to most people, right?
The idea that we could all be anything is a lot more hopeful.
And the idea that we could all be anything unconstrained by biology only exists in the recesses of ideologues.
The world is not made up like that.
Beautiful people are more symmetric.
Now, that doesn't mean that if you're not symmetric, you're doomed to a life of celibacy.
But know the fact that Brad Pitt is considered handsome because he exhibits certain cues that women all around the world agree are beautiful.
So to answer your question, there is something very non-hopeful about blackness.
Buying the idea that we are biological beings.
It's a lot more comforting to know we are infinitely malleable, infinitely socializable, because then any of us could be anything.
Given the right conditions, I could be the next Lionel Messi.
That's hopeful, and therefore I'd like to subscribe to that.
I think there's absolutely something to what you're saying, but I think there is also this very strange and vague possibility that we are aspiring to a higher standard because we recognize that human beings are evolving and that we're moving into some strange place where we're no longer just creatures of the flesh.
And that this need to put people on this even playing field is a part of this aspiration.
I definitely think there's these influences and I definitely think there are these...
There's a lot of people that look at beautiful people and they get upset.
I mean, there's a way that they do it where they feel that they're justified in being prejudiced.
Like, they can see a guy like The Rock, for example, who's a...
Big, handsome man.
Big, burly man.
And they think, that guy's a fucking idiot.
Immediately.
Meanwhile, that guy probably reads a lot.
He's probably smart as hell, right?
He's obviously very ambitious, so he can control his mind.
He controls his mind far better than a lot of overweight people that would criticize him and call him a fool.
But meanwhile, they let their body rot to this state of decay, which is not an intellectual thing to do.
If you're looking at your body in a Like, as a finite resource, and how do you manage that resource?
Well, very poorly if you're eating ringdings, drinking fucking soda, and smoking cigarettes, and then talking about The Rock being an idiot, right?
I mean, these are obviously straw man examples.
But I wonder if...
What we're doing with what's going on in Canada and this liberal social justice warrior approach to everybody being equal and if they're not, let's try to make them equal and if there's anybody that's superior, let's try to push them down and bring the brown people up and I wonder if we're trying to achieve some sort of equilibrium, some sort of balance, some sort of Some sort of state where we're no longer just monkeys.
We're no longer just creatures of, you know, I want to fuck her because she's got big tits.
You know, these are base ideas.
These are base instincts that it's fine if we observe them in bonobos, but we don't want to see them in Harvard-educated kids, right?
So the male gaze becomes problematic, right?
A man staring at a woman becomes a microaggression.
Meanwhile, she's wearing almost nothing.
She's got a short skirt on and painted toes, and you want to...
You can't help yourself.
The genes come firing up.
You must suppress those, because we're eventually moving past the flesh.
And you are of the new generation, the new generation that will someday be neutered, and there will be some non-binary expression of your humanity that, you know, exists as an avatar in some virtual reality world that you'll be forced to subscribe to when you join Yale.
But by the way, when you talked about the male gaze, I'm not sure if we've discussed this on this show before, but it's precisely this type of thinking that causes the Western feminists to view the burqa as liberating and the bikini as patriarchal oppression.
It's exactly that, right?
To the extent that the male gaze is a form of visual rape, right?
And that should be condemned, that should be stopped because it is a type of assault, in quotes, right?
The burqa, by removing that male gaze, becomes liberating.
On the other hand, when a woman wears the Brazilian thong and you and I look at her and have the exact same predictable response that most men would have because it's an evolved response, well, that's bad because we are part of the patriarchy and we are succumbing to this rape urge, that's bad because we are part of the patriarchy and we So when I talk about ostrich parasitic syndrome, I don't just use it as a metaphor.
It's genuinely the case that people's minds are becoming infected with such garbage that they're incapable to rationalize, to think with reason.
And that's what I end up doing most of the time.
That's what Jordan Peterson ends up doing most of the time, which is we are committed to truth, unencumbered by political correctness.
Earlier you were saying, what would be some, you know, how can we get ourselves out of You know, succumbing to this tribalism and so on.
I think the only way you could do it, and I'm not saying that anybody can reach that level, is to simply be dedicated to the pursuit of truth.
When I was on Sam Harris' show, you know, earlier this year, about six, seven months ago, he asked me, is there any research question that you would not tackle in your scientific career that is too taboo?
And my answer is no, right?
As long as you address the question honestly and objectively, there is nothing that should be off limits, right?
Because then it becomes very easy to say, well, sex differences, we shouldn't study that because then it will marginalize one sex or the other.
Race differences, we shouldn't study them for the same reason and so on.
That becomes forbidden knowledge.
No.
The highest ideal that any honest person should pursue is the pursuit of truth, and certainly an intellectual.
So don't be encumbered by political correctness.
Just pursue the truth.
And I think one of the reasons that Jordan Peterson's message and my message has resonated now with a lot of people is because at least they see that we are ascribing to that ideal to the best of our abilities.
I think it's a bunch of different things going on all at once.
And there's obviously some tribalism going on even amongst these Social justice warriors he's a virtue signaling people who are trying to Get as much credit much, you know social justice warrior street cred as they can like what?
Happened with Brett Weinstein up in evergreen college and when I had him on I just read some recent thing where they're doubling down on their hate of him and you know me they They're accusing him of all of this by simply going on the Tucker Carlson show.
Now, here's what's fascinating.
Huffington Post, which is a really left-leaning establishment, right?
I mean, if any website is left-leaning, it's Huffington Post.
I think they have some great articles.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm not critical of all their stuff, but it's very left-leaning, like openly regarded.
They had a piece breaking down how preposterous these students are, and the faculty, and the president, and what they have done to Brett Weinstein, and criticized each step of it by showing a transcription of his conversation on the Tucker Carlson show, which lasted like five minutes, I think.
And, you know, they called Tucker Carlson alt-right.
And, I mean, I guess I call them a progressive, but a progressive in the idea that he wants progress.
I mean, the real broad term of progressive.
Progress meaning equality for all, but honest.
Honest about the approach.
But I would consider him probably more in a libertarian bent, if you wanted to get, like, political.
I guess I'm sort of in this sort of progressive slash libertarian left-leaning thing, but I also believe in a lot of right things as well.
I think that competition is probably ultimately good.
Right.
Blaming other people for your lack of success is really easy and it's something that people do all the time but when you do that if you look at things in that way then you're diminishing the struggles that downtrodden people and minorities and the oppressed and all these different you know Small groups that have been somehow or another marginalized.
You're diminishing their struggle, which is absolutely not the case.
But there have been people that have emerged from those groups and done amazing things.
But, oh, those are outliers, and you can't hold people up to the standards of those outliers.
And, you know, the real problem is that the competition is stacked in the favor of these white men who experience white privilege.
And what we really need to do is squash white men.
Munchausen syndrome by proxy is a different situation where...
You try to get your ego strokes by harming someone else and then getting the reward.
So what does that mean?
You're, for example, a biological mother who has this condition.
You will harm your child, your biological child.
So that then you could take him to the hospital and people say, oh, poor you.
You've got a sick, ailing child and so on.
And then you get your orgiastic, orgasmic strokes by getting that attention and that empathy, right?
Or you could do it if you have a pet or sometimes with elderly parents.
But usually it's your biological child.
So I was writing a paper trying to explain this from an evolutionary perspective, how this pathology could arise.
And so that's how...
The psychiatric syndrome wasn't my radar.
And then as I started seeing all these social justice warriors Navigating the world through a game of Oppression Olympics, where the highest goal you could achieve is to be declared the winner of the Oppression Olympics game, right?
It's not the pursuit of truth.
It's not making the most money.
It's, can I be anointed as the guy with the greatest?
And I call this collective Munchhausen because it becomes a form of Munchhausen, but at the collective level, right?
Let me give you another example as relating to Donald Trump.
When Donald Trump won the election, just on my Facebook page, private personal Facebook page, I would see people outdoing each other almost as if it were satirical in terms of their collective munchausen.
I am a brown woman who's attending this university.
Now that Donald Trump has won, I'm afraid to go to classes.
Just think about how outrageous that sounds.
You may like or dislike Donald Trump.
Do you genuinely believe that your ability to take classes in your bullshit college in Maine is going to be affected?
You're going to experience personal safety because Donald Trump is setting up Roadblocks so that he could create internment camps for all women of color so that they get gang raped.
What is the fear that you have that you're literally right?
But they're testifying, right?
They're testifying.
And so it becomes this collective psychosis where the way that I win is by demonstrating that I am the biggest victim.
And so that's what social justice warriors do, is that they have to win that game.
And so the Brett Weinstein example is those guys seeking to win those Olympics.
How dare you say that you could come on campus?
Don't you know what kind of victims we are and so on?
It's weird how prevalent it is, though, and how it's almost one of those things that you, as a professor, are not really allowed to discuss with the people that are exhibiting that behavior because then you're diminishing their fear.
Because I always can pull out my victimology card, which usually outranks all of them because they're screaming while sitting at Wellesley paying $60,000 that they are marginalized.
Whereas I say, I'm not sure if I could be sympathetic because let me tell you my personal history.
And so now, by the way, the only way I can improve my score, as I have jokingly said, is if I self-identify as a woman, hence I'm transgendered, Would you shave, though?
Now, by you restricting your preference to this old antiquated term of women, meaning that they have vaginas, you're actually engaging in a form of cis-sexism because there are women who have nine-inch penises who should also be privy to your attention.
So by you saying, yes, I'm attracted to women, But only the women that are cisgendered that have female genitalia, that's a form of cis-sexism.
This idea is not being promulgated.
So you even saying that you have a heterosexual orientation towards biological women is a form of transphobia.
Not unlike, by the way, here's another example, transracialism.
And I think that's one of the reasons why Donald Trump got into office, is people were so upset with political correctness, they went with the exact opposite, which is buffoonery.
Outrageous, braggadocious male buffoonery.
I mean, that's really what it is.
I mean, he's a braggadocious buffoon in a lot of respects, especially the way he talks about his ratings and, you know, talks about himself in the third person, you know, like he was describing Kanye West, that Kanye loves Trump.
I mean, could you imagine saying that about yourself, like describing yourself in the third person, but a famous person loving you?
Well, you know, a lot of people who follow me think that, I joke that, That, you know, they think that I have these Trump posters in my room and, you know, he's my big hero, which of course he's not.
And by the way, I'm Canadian, so I truly don't have a dog in this fight.
The reason why they think that is because I offered, prior to the election...
Being done, I offered some compelling reasons, psychological reasons, why people might vote for Donald Trump.
So most famously, perhaps, in my chat with Sam Harris, I explained the psychological mechanisms that could lead to otherwise perfectly reasonable people to vote for Trump.
Simply proposing these was complete I'm sure you're aware of what's going on with Scott Adams.
I mean, Scott Adams has lost millions of dollars for simply stating that he believes that Donald Trump is a very persuasive person and correctly predicting that that power of persuasion would allow him to win the presidency.
So just to kind of repeat what I had told Sam, so there are different decision rules that one can use when they're making a choice between competing alternatives.
So, for example, if you're choosing between cars, each car is defined by many attributes, right?
It's gas efficiency, it's the power of its engine, its price, and so on.
And so there are different ways that I could apply a decision rule in choosing between car A and car B. So here's one rule.
I could take all the attributes, put them together, multiply them by the importance rate of each attribute, and pick the best product.
So using that decision rule, maybe Hillary Clinton would have won.
Because maybe if you put all the attributes together, she ends up scoring higher than Donald Trump.
But here's another decision rule.
It's called the lexicographic rule.
The lexicographic rule basically says, I simply look at my most important What's the attribute that I care most when I'm making the choice within this category?
And I simply choose the alternative that scores higher on that most important attribute.
So for example, if it were cars, I only care about the power of the engine, so I choose car A because it has a stronger power engine, right?
In the case of Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton, suppose that my lexicographic rule is, I care only about the position on immigration.
That's my decision.
That's the only thing I look at.
Well, it's very reasonable for people to think that Donald Trump had a more conservative, tough view on immigration than Hillary Clinton.
So if I use that decision rule, that psychological rule, I would choose Donald Trump.
It wouldn't make me a guy who is sleeping with my sister and I'm a toothless guy in Arkansas and a hick.
It simply means that I'm using a particular decision rule that causes me to choose Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.
So again, all I did, not unlike what Scott Adams did in his own way, is offer the different psychological processes by which a very reasonable person can end up choosing Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton.
We need a three-hour podcast just to name them all.
I get a lot of facts wrong.
A lot of things I remember incorrectly.
Because a lot of, like, these free-form conversations like we're having, it's not planned out.
The subjects aren't planned out.
In particular, like...
The divergent paths that we take, sometimes we'll go down a path and I'll go, what was that story about that thing?
And I'll get that shit wrong all the time.
Because as good as my memory is, and it's pretty good, there's just a certain amount of data that you could...
Instantaneously call up to the...
I mean, if you ask me questions about certain things that are in my constant day-to-day existence, like maybe perhaps stand-up comedy or martial arts, I can give you a staggering amount of information off the top of my head.
But there's a lot of stuff that we talk about in these podcasts.
It's just people say, well, you should have prepared for it.
Well, I didn't know we were going to talk about it.
It's one of the things that makes the conversation so interesting.
So in that sense, I'm giving myself a get-out-of-jail-free pass.
I don't know.
I mean, getting things wrong is probably the big one.
Talking over people, being a meathead, all those things I'm guilty of.
But it doesn't matter, because by saying that, they could diminish you.
Oh, you're a racist.
Oh, you're a sexist.
One of the craziest ones is if someone gets unfairly or unjustly or inaccurately accused of rape, immediately that person's a rapist, and they did it.
And it is incredibly difficult to exonerate yourself from that.
And people that have been accused of rape, I mean, not people like Bill Cosby when he gets accused of it 50 fucking times or something crazy, but I've known people that were accused of rape and it was all a lie.
And it was done by an ex and it was just someone who was a scorned lover and was angry and they wanted to cast the worst possible light on this person in order to give them some taste of the pain that they feel from rejection or from whatever reason.
And this is not uncommon.
I mean, I don't know what the statistics are as far as false rape accusations versus actual rape versus people who are raped who don't talk about it.
But either one does not invalidate the other.
By saying that a lot of women actually have been raped, which neither you nor I would ever argue with, of course.
And it's a horrible crime, and it's a terrible fucking thing to do to a person to take away their humanity in that way.
That does not...
That does not somehow or another make it okay that people have false rape accusations.
No, that's a horrific thing, too.
I mean, we can quantify what's worse or what's better, you know, and I think we would all agree that it's probably worse to be physically raped than it is to be accused of rape when you didn't do it.
I think false rape accusations, especially if you like really chase it down and try to get this person locked up, I mean there's so much wrong with that.
It might be like 70% of rape.
I mean 70% meaning like 70% is bad.
I shouldn't say a number.
I don't think it's as bad as physically raping someone.
But I mean, think of it this way, not to get too philosophical.
Every day that a guy spends in prison as a falsely accused rapist, while you, the woman who falsely accused him, is sitting in your house, I mean, you are, quote, Committing the crime every day of his life, right?
unidentified
Every day that you don't step forward, you're punishing, right?
I mean, again, not to diminish that one act of rape, but you are raping this guy, metaphorically, if not literally, because he probably is going to be raped in prison for having...
So, in a sense, you're almost as diabolical as a true rapist because you are living with that false information and every day you're going to buy your tomatoes and groceries unencumbered by the fact that there is a guy sitting in prison who's probably passing some very ugly moments because you're unwilling to correct the wrong that you've done.
So, I think it's a pretty diabolical person who does that.
The problem is whenever you bring up this diabolical person, you automatically get lumped in with someone who is some sort of an enabler, some cisgendered, white male, privileged piece of shit who doesn't care about actual rape victims because you're more concerned with men who get falsely accused of rape.
It's not diminishing the actual crime of rape, which is one of the worst things in the world next to murder.
It's just a horrific, terrifying aspect of human beings that we're even capable of doing that.
But it doesn't mean that false rape accusations aren't also a horrific aspect of being a person.
There's just a lot of shitty behavior that people exhibit.
And as soon as we lock ourselves into these These little groups that will always blindly support.
Like, I have this bit I've been doing lately about a bumper sticker I saw on a girl's car that said, Girls Kick Ass.
I'm like, can you imagine if a guy had a bumper sticker that said, Boys Kick Ass?
You're signing off on 160 million people?
That's so crazy!
But it's one of those things where we'll allow that because we All agree that women have a harder go of it in this country in particular and other countries far more so, right?
And we could go back to ideology for the reason for that, what we were talking about earlier.
By the way, speaking of rape, I don't think we've mentioned this ever on this show.
Two of my colleagues, one of whom I know well, the other one not so much, if at all, wrote a book around 2000 or 2002 offering an adaptive evolutionary explanation for rape.
So Randy Thornhill, who's a very, very serious scientist, and Craig Palmer, they wrote a book, I think it was in 2000. Now, they weren't, of course, justifying rape.
They weren't condoning it.
They were saying, look, if you wish to understand rape, Then you better have a good scientific basis for why it happens.
And therefore, they offered an adaptive argument.
Which, by the way, that's one of the main things that people who hate evolutionary psychology commit as a fallacy.
They think that when you explain a phenomenon, you are justifying it.
So if you explain why men and women might cheat on one another in monogamous unions, or you're offering a scientific justification for cheating, of course you're not.
Usually my rebuttal is...
The guy who studies cancer, an oncologist, does that mean he is for pancreatic cancer?
He's justifying?
No, he's just trying to explain why pancreatic cancer happens.
So the book that got me into evolutionary psychology, I've mentioned this story before, maybe not on the show.
It was my first semester as a doctoral student at Cornell.
And the professor, this was an advanced social psychology course, and the professor assigned a book called Homicide.
By two pioneers of evolutionary psychology, husband and wife team, Margo Wilson and Martin Daly, where the book is about understanding patterns of criminality via an evolutionary lens.
And one of the things in the book that had struck me as so powerful was looking at child abuse in a home and then Demonstrating that there's a very clear evolutionary reason why that happens.
As a matter of fact, that one factor is a hundredfold greater than that.
So in other words, typically when you say what's called an odds likelihood ratio, 1.2, so you have a 20% greater chance of getting cancer if you smoke.
So just having 1.2 greater odds is considered a big number.
Here I'm telling you a hundredfold greater.
So it's something that's almost never seen in science.
What happens to the females, the lionesses, When they kill them, they go into an estrus.
So I mean, instead of playing Barry White music and the violin to get them in the mood, kill their children and they get in the mood, right?
Nature is brutal, right?
Well, in the context of humans, when you have a step-parent who...
Is not biologically linked to the child, it simply increases the likelihood of there being abuse, right?
Now, usually when you explain this, what is the first thing that people say?
Oh, well, I grew up with a stepfather and he didn't do this to me.
You're an asshole.
Or, but what are you saying?
That means it's okay to do it because you're explaining it?
So look how they conflate explaining a phenomenon with justifying the phenomenon.
So I think rape, child abuse, and probably marital infidelity are the three evolutionary phenomena that when you explain using an evolutionary lens, people go completely wacko.
And as soon as you think of people that are liberal and progressive, you think these are nonviolent folks that just want peace and happiness and love.
But look what happened in Evergreen.
I mean, this is what Brett Weinstein talked about.
The threats, and then all of a sudden you've got vigilante patrols with tasers and baseball bats, and these are kids.
because someone doesn't agree with their thoughts.
The whole idea of it was a day of absence, a day of inclusion, a day of presence, right?
That was the idea, was that white people should stay home.
And Brett Weinstein was like, that's fucking racist.
Like, you can't do that.
And he, as he self-describes, is a deeply progressive person.
And all my conversations with him indicate that in a huge way.
I mean, he's just a really open-minded, progressive guy who, he doesn't, but he doesn't want racism against white people to exist any more than he wants it against black people.
I mean, to think that, hey, man, we should all be the same, regardless if you have dreadlocks or a shaved head or if you're white or black.
It's a weird thing.
Like, sexual preference, we were talking about this before, like, if a man is only sexually attracted, if he says, I am sexually attractive, I prefer white women, you are a fucking racist.
But if you say, I prefer black women, like, ooh, spicy.
But imagine if it were the other way around, right?
If she had written him a letter saying, hey, dear Tupac, I would have loved to continue this relationship, but given that you're a black guy, her career would be over.
But him saying it to her...
He actually said, he said, if you date me, it appears as though you're an exciting, cool woman.
But if I continue to date you, a lot of the people that made me who I am, I would lose credit with them.
Alright, so we'll do this, and it won't be on YouTube, so the people listening right now on YouTube are not going to hear shit, but this is what we'll do.
We will synchronize.
Jamie will tell you what this is, and you can synchronize it.
I mean, there's a lot of influences that they had from old blues songs that they added to some of their songs, which is more forgivable, almost akin to what they do today with rap music, with sampling.
Sampling, yeah.
Which I don't have any problem with at all.
I mean, I think it kind of enhances it and makes you think about the old song.
Is there a place that you would be invited for a very large sum of money that you would refuse because you disagree politically or ideologically with whatever that person who's inviting you stands for?
Well, it's a little bit different what they do because they would go over there and I guess they would know what their material would be.
If they went over there to perform 99 Problems, Jay-Z's lyrics are out there.
They say, hey, we would like you, we're going to give you six million bucks, we want you to sing 99 Problems and all these different songs.
The lyrics are clearly established.
But if someone like me went over there and did comedy, who was it?
One of the guests I had in the past, Hal Sparks, I think it was Hal Sparks, that went over to Dubai, and he did a bit, and he was told by one of the people in the audience that he was going to be arrested, because he referred to one of the royal family by the wrong name.
But then some other member of the royal family stepped in and stopped it because they said, no, he was respectful and he just didn't understand the tradition.
Look, man, there's a real problem with Canada right now.
I know you know what happened in Vancouver, where a comic was heckled by these lesbians, and he shit all over them, and then they sued him and won, because he had done something to violate their human rights, because they were heckling not just him, but people before him.
When I talk to people, I want to talk to someone who has had affairs, love affairs, and has had jobs and been fired, has had education.
I want someone with life experience.
Not that there's anything wrong with being 18. Or whatever, 19. But I want someone who's got some living under their belt so they know what the fuck I'm talking about.
I don't want to have to explain everything.
I did a concert once.
Not concert.
I did a show once at a university and I was talking about something sexual.
And I saw this bewildered looks in the audience.
I go, how many of you people are virgins?
I go, don't even raise your hand because I don't incriminate you.
I go, just blink real fast.
And they started laughing, but it got real uncomfortable.
I go, would you again?
I go, I'm not going to even look at you.
I go, I'm going to look at the sky.
Would you say that I would be out of line if I said 10% of you were virgins?
And the place went, they went, no, no, that's probably about right.
People are like yelling.
I'm like, that's crazy!
10% of you are virgins?
That's like, if there's 200 people, 20 of you are fucking virgins?
Really?
That's a lot of people!
And it's probably more than that.
They're probably being modest or not being honest about it.
I just...
It's nothing wrong with being in college, obviously.
But as far as like where I want to perform, I don't have a lot of...
If I have a day, there's 24 hours in that day.
I don't have a lot of hours to perform at night.
If I'm performing at night, I get a couple hours.
I like doing actual comedy.
I like doing what I do.
And then one of the things about comedy is...
It's different than any other art form in that, like, say if you go to see music, like, you know what you're going to go see.
You don't usually just say, oh, live music.
Like, oh, let's hope that it's something I'm interested in.
You know, we're going to see Jay-Z, followed by Johnny Cash, followed by Loretta Lynn.
No, it's not going to be that way.
You're going to go to a rock and roll club.
You go to the Viper Room, most likely you're going to hear some rock and roll.
You go to a country western bar, you know, you're going to see that.
I think with stand-up comedy, people get upset if you're not doing, like, what Appeals to them and their sensibilities.
I like to go to nightclubs.
That's why I don't even do corporate gigs I get a lot of offers to do these corporate gigs and they'll they'll pay you a lot of money because they'll be to tame the audience they won't know it's just like it's not a it's not a real comedy show It's like you guys are paid.
It's like you're Gadsad paying 50 grand to have these guys sing in your backyard some weird ego thing right I saw my friend Dana White who was the He's the head of the UFC. He had a birthday party years back, and Stone Temple Pilots played before that dude died of an overdose.
I remember something that you said, I think, in our first chat several years ago, which has resonated and stuck with me.
You were...
Comparing your career as a stand-up comic or in fighting to the truth that comes in science, and you were comparing that to acting, which is very ephemeral and fuzzy, and you were saying basically, look, when you're a scientist, you have to present stuff, and it's either right or wrong, and people are going to judge you, and you analogized it to comedy.
You get up in front of a crowd.
You either know you're, I mean, you're either funny or you're going to bomb.
You get up to fight.
You either are ready or you're going to get pummeled.
And I thought that was a really good analogy because there's truth and honesty in that, right?
In terms of actionable feedback, do you look for it from other professional comics because you trust their opinions more, or are you looking for the civilians in the audience to give you that feedback?
Which one is more actionable from your perspective as you're trying to improve your craft?
It's very problematic to play for the comedians, because comedians like weird shit.
Like, we might like something completely obscure that we don't see coming, you know, but an audience might not be laughing, and you might hear one comic in the back of the room going, BAH! That's fucking ridiculous!
And the audience doesn't think it's funny.
And then there's a trap that the comedians will fall into where they start playing for their peers specifically.
There's a bunch of guys that have...
I don't want to call anybody out, but there's people that have ruined their career because they essentially became the comical place at the back of the room.
And the audience didn't think they were funny.
And essentially they're making fun of people who try to be funny.
And instead, exonerating themselves from any real pressure to be funny.
He's got the full package where there's a lot of comics that bomb in front of the audience, but you'll have like 20 guys in the back of the room that think it's cool to chuckle at obscure references and very bizarre words that get used in some sort of strange way.
In my classes, students will oftentimes ask me a question that has me stumped, and I will usually answer, you know what, I actually don't know the answer to that.
I mean, you've accumulated a massive amount of knowledge from seeking this knowledge and studying very hard.
So it's something that you should be proud of.
But it's not something that you look at, like, when you're proud of it, you're not diminishing other people that don't have that information.
You're saying, like, this is what I know to be true, and this is a fact.
This is undeniable.
But that's a beautiful thing that you could also say, I don't know about something that you don't know.
That will give the people that are listening, that will give them so much more of a sense of respect for you than horse shitting around and pretending.
And by the way, in the media, oftentimes they want you to weigh in on things as a scientist which you don't feel that your area of expertise would allow you to.
And they get frustrated because then they feel as though you're equivocating.
Look, I'm sorry, but I'm not willing to make that statement with that level of certainty.
But they want it because that's what the headline has to say.
And then they get frustrated that you're tippy-toeing.
But I'm just being humble about what is true and what I don't think I'm knowledgeable enough to say is true.
Yeah, I've had people get upset at me about talking about upcoming martial arts fights because I don't give predictions.
I very, very, very rarely give predictions unless there's some gross mismatch that really shouldn't be happening in the first place.
Because you really have no idea what's going to happen.
There's a high likelihood that something might happen.
If I look at the way one guy moves versus another guy moves and I go into my database of experiences of seeing a lot of live competition and knowing what one person is capable of, I can make I can make a statement with reasonable certainty, but I don't know if they were injured in training.
I don't know if they come into the fight sick.
I don't know if they're breaking up with their girlfriend.
I don't know if they got staph infection two weeks before the fight and they're on antibiotics.
There's so many variables.
I don't know if they might get headbutted, like we talked about earlier, or they might have an injury, like in the middle of the fight, like something goes wrong and their knee blows out.
Because this guy is so good at getting people riled up and talking shit.
That's half the fun.
I was too young to appreciate the Muhammad Ali days, but I would imagine that when Muhammad Ali was challenging Sonny Liston, half of the fun was Muhammad Ali talking shit.
And that you would muster such animus towards a person that you haven't met, right?
I mean, I'm fortunate enough to not have too many of these haters and trolls, but there is one or two guys that have come to my attention that it seems as though they spend 90% of their day Doing trash stuff about me.
And you think, what could it be that I could so trigger in them that they would construe it as a valuable use of their time to take on someone whom they've never even met, but somehow they're pissed at you and they think it's a worthwhile cause to trash talk you all day.
Like, even if they have a valid point, there becomes some sort of weird symbiotic slash parasitic relationship with the person that you're criticizing.
Like, you are inexorably connected to them.
They are your enemy.
You think about them all the time, and by virtue of that, you become part of them.
Or they become part of you.
Like, that's the weird thing about thinking, right?
Like, when you're on stage and you are giving a lecture...
One of the more amazing things that happens when someone is on stage talking about something is you allow them to kind of think for you in the sense that when you are and it's one of the reasons why it's so important to be articulate and so important to be very aware of What you're going to say in advance, the point where it comes out smoothly and there's good entertainment value to it, is that it's pleasing to listen to.
You're aware of how annoying certain speech patterns can be and you avoid those.
You're aware of how compelling other speech patterns can be and you embrace those.
And so it makes it pleasing for the person to listen to.
So they can just sit back and listen to you talk about evolutionary psychology.
Whereas when a person sucks at it, it's like grading, it's Painful it gets in your head.
You're not connected with them.
You're not allowing them to think about for you, right?
There's there's that happens with comedy to like when someone's really good like you see like a great comic like a Louis CK or someone like that when he's on stage and he's he's really in the groove You're kind of allowing him to think for you, right?
You're like letting him take the reins of your imagination and your mind and your visualization and But boy, it must be a tough job because I always think, what if you just had a fight with your wife?
Right, so if you want to follow me on Twitter, at GAD, G-A-D, S-A-A-D. If you want to follow me on my YouTube channel, just enter GADSAD or the SAD S-A-A-D truth.