Aug. 8, 2015 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
27:02
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Hey guys, Dave Rubin here. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I'm still Dave Rubin. | ||
| This is Rubin Report. | ||
| As you guys know, we are making the move to Aura TV. | ||
| They are building me an unbelievable set right now. | ||
| So Larry King was nice enough to let me use his studio today. | ||
| And the reason we wanted to do Some stuff with you guys today is because I have Dr. Gad Saad here. | ||
| He is Professor of Marketing at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, and he's the Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption. | ||
| I normally don't use a teleprompter, but I needed it for that. | ||
| Gad, how are you? | ||
| Very good. | ||
| Yourself? | ||
| Good, good. | ||
| First off, Gad Saad. | ||
| How is my pronunciation of your last name? | ||
| It's Arabic, am I... It is Arabic. | ||
| Well, Gad is a Hebrew name, and Saad is an Arabic name. | ||
| But most people can't say the guttural sound, and so it just gets an extended A, so it becomes Saad. | ||
| Well, I've heard you do it on your own videos on YouTube, and you don't even do it with the guttural sound. | ||
| Because I don't want to intimidate the viewers with that sound. | ||
| So a Hebrew first name, Arabic last name. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So you must be very conflicted. | ||
| I'm not. | ||
| I'm not. | ||
| I'm from Lebanon, but of the Jewish faith. | ||
| Okay, so the reason that I wanted to bring you in, and the timing of this really is just perfect, is because we connected sort of in the last year and a half or so on Twitter. | ||
| We find ourselves often in the same Twitter wars with people. | ||
| The atheists, and the new atheists, and the far left, and the people on the right, and everyone that's always battling on Twitter. | ||
| And we're usually on the same side of things. | ||
| And really what started this whole thing was when Sam Harris was on Real Time with Bill Maher and he and Ben Affleck and Bill got into a big fracas. | ||
| So let's take a look at the clip and then we'll go from there. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So the other thing we want to talk about of course is that you and I have been trying to make the case, I think, I have anyway, that liberals need to stand up for liberal principles. | ||
| This is what I said on last week's show. | ||
| Obviously I got a lot of hate. | ||
| But all I'm saying is that liberal principles like freedom of speech, freedom to practice any religion you want without fear of violence, freedom to leave a religion, equality for women, equality for minorities, including homosexuals. | ||
| These are liberal principles that liberals applaud for. | ||
| But then when you say, in the Muslim world, this is what's lacking, then they get upset. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, liberals have really failed on the topic of theocracy. | ||
| They'll criticize white theocracy, they'll criticize Christians, they'll... | ||
| Still get agitated over the abortion clinic bombing that happened in 1984. | ||
| But when you want to talk about the treatment of women and homosexuals and free thinkers and public intellectuals in the Muslim world, I would argue that liberals have failed us. | ||
| And the crucial point of confusion... Thank God you're here! | ||
| Well, I mean, the crucial point of confusion is that we have been sold this meme of Islamophobia, where every criticism of the doctrine of Islam gets conflated with bigotry toward Muslims as people. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And that is intellectually ridiculous. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hold on. | |
| Are you the person who understands the officially codified doctrine of Islam? | ||
| I'm actually well educated on this topic. | ||
|
unidentified
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You're saying that Islamophobia is not a real thing? | |
| Well it's not a real thing when we do it. | ||
| I'm not denying that certain people are bigoted against Muslims as people and that's a problem. | ||
| Why are you so hostile about this? | ||
|
unidentified
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Because it's gross. | |
| It's racist. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| But it's so not. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's like saying those statements. | |
| You're a shifty Jew. | ||
| You're not listening to what we are saying. | ||
|
unidentified
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You guys are saying, if you want to be liberals, believe in liberal principles, like freedom of speech, like we are endowed by our forefathers with an inalienable life, like all men are created equal. | |
| Ben, we have to be able to criticize bad ideas. | ||
| Okay, so that clip goes on for about ten minutes, and I showed you about two minutes right there, and I think Sam hit the point right at the end that we have to be able to criticize bad ideas. | ||
| And to me, this—I've seen a real schism in people on the left. | ||
| Now, I'm obviously on the left. | ||
| I stand for liberal principles. | ||
| But this schism and this idea that you can't criticize ideas without somehow condemning a whole group of people—I know this is a big point of contention for you, so can you walk us through that a little bit? | ||
| I don't think that people have difficulty criticizing ideas. | ||
| I think it's a specific idea, right? | ||
| So, I see it every day in my exchanges on Facebook. | ||
| If I criticize some Jewish practice, I get many, many likes on Facebook. | ||
| If I criticize some hick Republican senator about his position on evolution, I get tons of likes. | ||
| But if I dare criticize something about Islam, I'll give you a very quick example. | ||
| I put up a clip of an Iraqi scientist, an astronomer, who was arguing that the Earth is flat, as it says so in the Quran. | ||
| So I received, of course many of my Facebook friends are academics, I received from a white, sort of guilt-ridden academic from California, a note saying, Why are you ganging up on these folks? | ||
| So she wasn't offended by the fact that this Iraqi scientist was holding an astonishingly outrageous view. | ||
| She was annoyed that I would actually point to that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So why do you think people have trouble making this distinction? | ||
| It's very obvious to me. | ||
| As an outsider of this, I look at... I'm Jewish, but I look at the book. | ||
| You could say whatever you want about the book and all the awful things that are in the Old Testament and the New Testament and the Qur'an. | ||
| Frankly, I haven't really read any of them. | ||
| So, they're books, they're ideas. | ||
| Why do people seem unable to detach those two things? | ||
| Because I think the misinformation associated with the idea that if you criticize Islam in particular, you're bigoted. | ||
| Because Islam is a religion of brown people. | ||
| And so, therefore, they're simply unable to decouple the criticism of a set of tenets from the people who may practice those tenets. | ||
| Right, so to me, Bill Maher sort of hit maybe the bigger point here, which is that for people on the left, for liberals, we have to stand up consistently for liberal principles, which is certainly what I try to do. | ||
| I stand up for women's rights. | ||
| And gay rights and freedom of religion and economic equality and all of those things. | ||
| So is this where liberals have really failed? | ||
| And the way they fail is by invoking cultural and moral relativism, right? | ||
| So, who are we to judge that women in some faraway land, their clitorises are being cut, right? | ||
| Who are we to impose our cultural hegemony on other folks? | ||
| And so this is how they're able to still be liberal, and yet not criticize these one particular sets of beliefs | ||
| by invoking cultural relativism. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So there's a real disconnect in reality there, because in a weird way, liberals should be | ||
| the most for helping these people, right, because these are the principles they believe | ||
| in. | ||
| So how much of this actually – I really haven't thought of this until just now, | ||
| but I guess a lot of this we could sort of blame the footsteps of George W. Bush for | ||
| going into the wrong war, where now there's this feeling in America like we shouldn't | ||
| there's this feeling in America like we shouldn't do anything ever, because we did the | ||
| do anything ever, because we did the wrong thing clearly in Iraq, and now it's a far | ||
| wrong thing clearly in Iraq, and now it's a far worse mess than even before. | ||
| worse mess than even before. | ||
| So some of the blame is on us, right? | ||
| So some of the blame is on us, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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But I mean, how far do you go back, unfolding history, George W. Bush for going into the wrong war, where now | |
| But I mean, how far do you go back unfolding history until you find the villain of your | ||
| choice, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, for example, when we talk about the Israel-Palestine issue, people are always able to unfold history | ||
| until the starting point that they feel happy about, and then that's the point where we | ||
| start the clock, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So where should we start the clock on that one? | ||
| On the Islam issue? | ||
| No, on Israel-Palestine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's a whole other thing. | ||
| It's a whole other thing. | ||
| We could get into it if you want. | ||
| I think the problem there is that you've got two Abrahamic religions that hold very, very | ||
| rigid positions, and as long as it's going to be laden with religion, it's never going | ||
| So in a weird way, what you're saying is that liberals don't want to criticize Islam because there's this idea that a lot of Islamic people have brown skin, but there are plenty of Moroccan Jews. | ||
| You're a Lebanese Jew, right? | ||
| There are plenty of Christians that are Iraqi. | ||
| There's not that many anymore. | ||
| So even that, in a weird way, you could say that that's actually bigoted, that that concept is bigoted. | ||
| How do you, as a dark-skinned Jew, how do you feel about that? | ||
| Well, I usually am able to get away with a lot more stuff precisely because I invoke the fact that I have dark skin, the fact that I'm from the Middle East. | ||
| And I use this victimology game against the social justice warriors Yeah. | ||
| By basically saying, hey, be careful. | ||
| Don't you criticize me. | ||
| Because then you'd be engaging in araphobia, fatism. | ||
| How many? | ||
| How many? | ||
| I actually did the privilege score and I scored off the charts in my non-privilege. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So I'm untouchable. | ||
| You're completely untouchable. | ||
| So the next part of this that I think is particularly interesting, and this is really where we met because of the Twitter thing that I referenced earlier, is there has been sort of an endless onslaught on Sam Harris since this. | ||
| Now Sam is a philosopher, I think he's a neuroscientist, I've read some of his books. | ||
| He's not a political He writes a little bit about politics, but not really. | ||
| But there has been this endless onslaught, and I think slandering and smearing him, coming from the left, from people that in some cases I admire partly, some people that I've worked with. | ||
| I'm talking about from Glenn Greenwald, who obviously has done great stuff with the NSA, and Reza Aslan, my former boss, Cenk Uygur, people that are really distorting his views. | ||
| And I wanted to show a tweet that I got last night that I think kind of sums up the whole thing. | ||
| So let's take a look at the tweet. | ||
| OK, so this had nothing—I wasn't tweeting about this. | ||
| This has nothing to do with anything. | ||
| And someone tweeted this at me. | ||
| Question for Rubin Report. | ||
| How exactly are we better than ISIS if we nuke the Middle East, killing millions of civilians like Sam Harris suggests? | ||
| And then Sam Harris later wrote back to the person and said, you really believe that I've actually suggested that? | ||
| Okay, so that tweet right there, the reason I wanted to use it is because I feel like it's a perfect example of how this discussion that we're talking about has been so far derailed. | ||
| Now, of course, Sam Harris doesn't want to nuke the Middle East. | ||
| He had one page in his book that's mostly about philosophy and religion where he's talking about how in the Cold War we had, you know, mutual assurances basically with Russia because you had rational actors, basically, that wouldn't nuke each other because then they were afraid they were going to get nuked. | ||
| Now, this is nothing—he never said nuke the Middle East or any of this stuff, but these people keep implying it. | ||
| They keep retweeting memes of, you know, selective quotes. | ||
| What do you make of that? | ||
| I mean, these are pretty respected people, some that I know personally, which is why I struggle with this so much. | ||
| You know, in the battle of ideologies, the people that you want to go after are not the people who've got big muscles, but the people who have big brains. | ||
| Those are so totalitarian ideologies always go after the intellectuals first. | ||
| They want to purge them because they don't want anybody to counter their narrative. | ||
| And so this is exactly what happens to guys like Sam Harris. | ||
| He has a huge following that he can't be literally beheaded because we don't live in the Middle East. | ||
| But I could certainly try my darndest to behead his reputation. | ||
| And I'm going to do that. | ||
| By engaging in endless misinformation so that people can distance themselves from him. | ||
| And he's just a quack. | ||
| He's a warmonger. | ||
| He's a Nazi. | ||
| He's part of a Zionist conspiracy. | ||
| Neocon! | ||
| Don't forget Neocon, right? | ||
| He's a Neocon. | ||
| He's part of Halliburton. | ||
| And so on. | ||
| And the way I behead him, the way I silence him, is by smearing him. | ||
| Right, so isn't that really the crazy part of this? | ||
| When they're saying, well, you know, Sam Harris is in the same neocon group, or Bill Maher is in the same neocon group as Dick Cheney. | ||
| Bill Maher talks about it all the time. | ||
| He wants our, we have 30,000 troops or something in Germany. | ||
| What the hell are they doing there? | ||
| This is literally the reverse of a neocon. | ||
| But these slurs, these are slanders. | ||
| Well, these false equivalences are everywhere within this discourse. | ||
| So, for example, if you take some feminists, they'll argue that the bikini is a patriarchal tool of oppression, whereas the burqa is a liberating thing, because it removes the male gaze from the picture, right? | ||
| So while the bikini-clad woman is being visually raped by men, Once you don the burka, she is liberated. | ||
| So these types of equivalences are astonishing, but they're everywhere. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now, as backwards as I may think that is, I would say, you know what, you can believe | ||
| that if you want, but it should be up to the woman to decide. | ||
| Where in most of those countries where women are wearing burkas, they don't really have | ||
| the choice not to wear the burka. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Now, I'm more critical at this point in where I'm at of the left because I'm part of the | ||
| left and I want the left to be better. | ||
| I've long given up on trying to fix the right, right? | ||
| I'm not going to fix the Tea Party, but I can at least, I think, try to change for the better the part that I'm with. | ||
| So that's why this is so disappointing. | ||
| What do you make of this idea that the far left is attacking atheists of all groups of people? | ||
| It's astonishing. | ||
| I guess one of the reasons why they attack the atheists is because they might be some of the most vociferous group of people that are critical of religion in general, but Islam in particular. | ||
| And so to the extent that the progressives don't like criticisms of Islam, and to the extent that many of the most famous atheists are quite vociferous in their criticism of Islam, then we have to go after them. | ||
| And I guess this goes back to what you were saying earlier, but they don't seem to be able to make the distinction. | ||
| When Bill Maher relentlessly attacks Christianity, nobody calls him a Christianophobe, right? | ||
| I mean, he made a documentary where he attacked the big three religions relentlessly. | ||
| Nobody had a problem. | ||
| Selective processing of information is a big cognitive bias, right? | ||
| So I will only pay attention to information that supports my position. | ||
| And that's exactly what the progressives are doing. | ||
| They're ignoring the endless times that Bill Maher attacks other religions, but they only tune in when he criticizes Islam. | ||
| I would bet, and someone can check this for us, but I would bet that Bill Maher has spent far more time attacking Christianity because he attacks things in this country far more than attacking Islam or Judaism or whatever. | ||
| What do you make of how much hatred there seems to be towards atheists at the moment? | ||
| Because I see all these polls, and on the show many times we've done, how atheists are the most underrepresented group in everything. | ||
| Barney Frank, who was in Congress for 30-something years, was able to come out as gay in the 80s, but not as an atheist until he retired. | ||
| From Congress, right? | ||
| What do you make of this? | ||
| Because atheists hold no power, are atheists killing people that I don't know about? | ||
| Right. | ||
| My feeling is that there is a coupling of atheism and immorality in the minds of most people. | ||
| So most people believe that it doesn't matter which religion you follow, as long as you are religious, then you somehow have a moral compass by which you live your life by. | ||
| However, atheists go around beheading puppies and then raping them in the minds of those | ||
| folks. | ||
| And so an atheist is not to be trusted because how else, where can he get his morality if | ||
| it's not from some Bronze Age book? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I think what you just told me is that it's complete nonsense. | ||
| It is complete nonsense. | ||
| I mean, could it be anything other than that, right? | ||
| I mean, because atheists simply aren't doing any of those things. | ||
| No, it's complete lunacy. | ||
| Political correctness, which I think is completely running rampant across America right now. | ||
| And I live within it as an academic. | ||
| As an academic. | ||
| I swim in it. | ||
| Alright, so let's start there then. | ||
| So to the college part of this. | ||
| You know, Jerry Seinfeld about a month ago. | ||
| Jerry Seinfeld, who's the most apolitical comic. | ||
| I know everything about Jerry Seinfeld. | ||
| I don't know any of his political beliefs. | ||
| I have no idea if he's for abortion, for the death penalty. | ||
| Nobody has any idea what he thinks. | ||
| He now is saying that college campuses have gone too politically correct. | ||
| Chris Rock has backed him on this. | ||
| You know, a whole bunch of comedians have said this. | ||
| What is going on on college campuses? | ||
| I'll give you a powerful personal anecdote. | ||
| Last year I gave a talk at Wellesley College, an all-women's college, about the Thought Police and how it regulates the free exchange of ideas. | ||
| After my lecture, a student came up to me and said, I don't think there's anything wrong with the idea of a professor at the start of class polling a hundred students about how you should address them. | ||
| So even though, for example, Dave Rubin is my student, I clearly see you as a male, at the start of every lecture, I should say, do you gender identify as male or female? | ||
| Because that will determine... So I looked at her in true astonishment. | ||
| I said, do you really see this as a viable way by which society would be organized, where every single time we interact, we should first preempt any greeting with, what do you self-identify as? | ||
| And she said, absolutely, because that way you wouldn't be hurting anybody by Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay, so what's the most dangerous part of that? | |
| Because to me it seems like, let's say you went ahead and did that. | ||
| You taught this class exactly as sort of the social justice warriors would want you to teach it. | ||
| Well, the world doesn't operate like that, right? | ||
| So then aren't you actually then setting up these kids, these college kids, for a huge awakening the day they graduate college? | ||
| But they're not well trained to face that real world, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| I mean, if you look at intellectual diversity on campuses, which is very much related to what we're talking about, it's breathtaking, right? | ||
| Look, I'm Canadian, so I don't care Republican or Democrat. | ||
| I don't have a dog in that fight, right? | ||
| But there are studies— Wait, I've got to get this straight. | ||
| Jew, Arab, Canadian. | ||
| And atheist. | ||
| And atheist. | ||
| And brown skin. | ||
| Oh my, you've got a lot. | ||
| You really do have a lot. | ||
| All right, sorry. | ||
| So there were studies that were done looking at the political affiliations of professors at major American universities, whether they're Republican or Democrats, and the numbers are just astonishing. | ||
| And they get worse and worse in terms of the ratio as a function of the softness of the field. | ||
| So in the humanities and sociology and gender studies, It's something like 44 to 1, the ratio. | ||
| Now, for some issues, political lens doesn't matter. | ||
| But for others, is the death penalty appropriate? | ||
| What should be our fiscal policy? | ||
| Should we be foreign policy interventionists? | ||
| Well, your political lens affects these discussions. | ||
|
unidentified
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Of course. | |
| And to have all academia being represented by one side of the political spectrum is horrifying. | ||
| So what do we do about that? | ||
| I mean, even though I may in most cases agree with that end of academia, certainly not the political correct side, but I might agree with them philosophically on a lot of the points, how do you balance that out? | ||
| So Thomas Sowell, who's a very famous conservative economist, He said, and I'm going to botch the exact quote, he said, intellectual diversity is—diversity on campuses is great as long as it's sexual orientation diversity, ethnic diversity, racial diversity, but the one diversity that should really matter, intellectual diversity, we condemn it. | ||
| Well, what we need to do is find— Which is thought. | ||
| Which is thought, exactly. | ||
| And what we need to—is to find ways to create greater diversity on campuses, to allow both sides of any position to speak. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think a lot of this has to do with the way our culture has changed in the last couple years, like where you can't bully a kid? | ||
| Now, I'm not for bullying, of course, but this concept where we keep making everything that no one can ever be offended by anything. | ||
| You know, they took after the shooting in Charleston, now they took Duke's Hazard off television. | ||
| Those guys were not, they were not somehow southern, white supremacists, you know what I mean? | ||
| But they took that off television. | ||
| I'm not gonna defend Cosby, who was one of my comedy heroes growing up, but they took the Cosby Show off the air. | ||
| Like, we're starting to censor ourselves, I think, in a way that's gonna lead to everything. | ||
| You know, every time I watch Seinfeld now, every episode, I think, in 10 years, they're gonna say this was racist and misogyny, literally every single episode. | ||
| Salon did a piece a couple weeks ago about troublesome episodes of Seinfeld. | ||
| What do we do to combat that? | ||
| Well, progressives pray at the altar. | ||
| They self-flagellate at the altar of non-offense. | ||
| I mean, that's their motto. | ||
| We need to find a way to break through this thought police. | ||
| I'll give you an example. | ||
| I used to be a very competitive soccer player. | ||
| If I were to today look at the trash-talking that went on the soccer field between players, which is part of the ritual, then everybody would be arrested today. | ||
| Everybody would be sent to a hate speech tribunal. | ||
| Right, because you mean because of racist stuff and homophobic stuff and everything under the sun. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Guess what? | ||
| I heard camel jockey growing up playing soccer and I live to love again. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I mean, it's called life. | ||
| Grow a pair. | ||
| So how do we, what do we do about that? | ||
| Because I really like, what do we do to grow a pair for the country? | ||
| Or for Canada? | ||
| I mean, there are many different ways. | ||
| For example, the culture of narcissism is certainly not helping the kids. | ||
| The culture of entitlement, right? | ||
| Everybody should get an A+, everybody should get a medal, everybody should get a trophy. | ||
| So there's several different movements that have, for lack of a better word, pussified the West. | ||
| Yeah, they're not going to be happy with you for that. | ||
| That's okay, bring it on. | ||
| All right, let's talk a little bit about some of the machinations, I suppose, of things that are going on on college. | ||
| Trigger warnings and some of these other things. | ||
| So you sort of talked about this a little bit earlier. | ||
| Safe spaces. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What are safe spaces? | ||
| Safe spaces is a place where I can go so that I'm protected from things that might make me go into a fetal position and suck my thumb. | ||
| So give me one for example. | ||
| Why would someone in college go to a safe space? | ||
| Maybe there's going to be a speaker who's going to talk something about pro-Israel. | ||
| And I might be a student who is very much against Israel, and so that makes me feel very threatened. | ||
| At University of Michigan, they wanted to simply show—was it called Sniper? | ||
| What was the movie called? | ||
| American Sniper. | ||
| American Sniper, yeah. | ||
| And that made a lot of the students feel very unsafe, simply because that movie was going | ||
| to be shown on campus. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's astonishing. | ||
| Do you remember when Bill Maher was being asked to give the commencement speech at Berkeley? | ||
| Berkeley, which is the bastion, the home of free speech in America. | ||
| And some of the kids there didn't want him to do it. | ||
| He ended up doing it. | ||
| But he had a guest, I forget her name, I was actually in the audience that episode, he had a guest who said that he shouldn't do it because he's against free speech. | ||
| Meanwhile, she's on her, she's on his show using her right to free speech. | ||
| So there really is like a cognitive disconnect. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I wrote an article at Huffington Post where I talked about trigger warnings and I listed all of the different concepts that necessitate trigger warnings. | ||
| Pretty much everything under the sun. | ||
| I mean literally life requires a trigger warning. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is this why everyone's medicated? | ||
| Pretty much, right? | ||
| I think you're onto something. | ||
| You know, I do think there is a connection between, you know, if you do all this stuff, right, and you give everyone, everyone has the trigger warnings, you give them safe spaces, you don't let them hear from contrarian views and all this stuff, then you throw them out in the world where none of this stuff is real, because you get out to the world and it's pretty shitty and, you know, you're gonna have a boss that might be sexist or a neighbor that might be homophobic. | ||
| That is why then everyone medicates. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Because then they're not given the tools to deal in reality. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| How's that for behavioral science? | ||
| That's a very nice fop psychology. | ||
| Very nice. | ||
| I thought that was pretty good. | ||
| Do you think the internet is helping or hurting? | ||
| I think a bit of both. | ||
| I mean, I think to the extent that the internet serves as a vehicle for meme propagation, people can get their message out. | ||
| Otherwise they might have difficulty doing so. | ||
| So in that sense it's great. | ||
| The problem is that some of the ones who hurled the greatest amount of venom are the people | ||
| who really are against the free exchange of ideas. | ||
| So the social justice warriors that come after guys, luckily I've actually been free of most | ||
| of these guys. | ||
| Maybe because I'm quite reasoned in my positions. | ||
| Maybe, hopefully. | ||
| But... | ||
| I'll make sure they come after you after this. | ||
| I'll send some of my people to you, don't worry. | ||
| Very good. | ||
| So I think that on average it's a bit of both. | ||
| Good in that you allow people to express themselves. | ||
| Bad in that there is one camp of folks that is a lot more vested in shutting down free exchange. | ||
| So is that the challenge then of the atheist community or the secular community or the rational community is that we don't yell as loud, right? | ||
| So how do we then line up in a way versus the trolls, versus the angry mob? | ||
| How do you get sane people to band together? | ||
| Well, at the very least, and I often admonish my academic colleagues for this, who don't participate in this great public discourse. | ||
| They're very interested in doing their very narrow research, but yet they're shy away from talking about these bigger issues, even though they're professors. | ||
| I mean, you're all about meme propagation if you're a professor. | ||
| And so what I would do, at least what I do in my limited sphere of influence, is to try to get my colleagues to weigh in on these issues so that we could have academics weighing in and not just the trolls. | ||
| Does that work? | ||
| Not very well. | ||
| I haven't been very successful because most are terrified of their shadows. | ||
| Yeah, so what does that say then that it's not just, I guess it's coming from every angle, right? | ||
| It's coming from politicians and it's coming from the media people and it's coming from the professors, not just the Well, I would add cowardice as part of the seven deadly sins. | ||
| I would make it eight deadly sins, and I would add cowardice. | ||
| I'm astonished at how cowardly most people are. | ||
| And I even get people who come to me and say, you know, I mean, you do great science, you're a known scientist. | ||
| Why do you weigh in on these issues? | ||
| Because I can't help it. | ||
| Because I feel that it's my job to weigh in on issues that are nonsensical, like the ones we discussed earlier. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's part of my job description. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I feel the same way actually. | ||
| Sometimes I think when I'm tweeting about this stuff or when I'm writing about it or whatever it is, I think, I wish I didn't have to talk about this stuff in a weird way because it's so obvious to me, you know, that the atheists and the seculars, we're on the right side of letting everyone, I want to treat everyone as shitty as everyone else. | ||
| They don't even have to be treated as well as everyone else, you know what I mean? | ||
| I don't want to be treated better than anyone or worse. | ||
| Just treat me the same shitty way you treat everybody else. | ||
| A lot of times when I'm in New York City, that's what I think. | ||
| Like, everyone, there's every race there, there's every color, there's every ethnicity, everything. | ||
| And it's like, everyone hates each other, but no one's killing anybody. | ||
| Pretty much. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Any final thoughts? | ||
| I mean, I could talk to you all day. | ||
| Well, hopefully I'll be back again soon. | ||
| I wanted to congratulate you on your move to this network. | ||
| Oh, thanks. | ||
| Great to meet you in person. | ||
| It's weird how Twitter works, right? | ||
| We've done this, we've never spoken more than 140 characters. | ||
| And yet I feel like I know you very well. | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| All right, well, you guys can check out Gad's YouTube page. | ||
| We'll annotate to it, so there should be something. | ||
| If you're watching on YouTube, right over here, and I thank you very much. | ||
| And yeah, this is just the beginning of the types of stuff we're gonna be doing now that we're on OraTV. | ||
| The new set is coming, and the show will officially launch, I think it's the second week in September, but I'll have to check with my lawyers. |
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